Introduction

Letter from the Editor And Heres the Good News Garfield Comic

The Rathouse Criticism in a Mass Society (Pg 20)

The Regime at Home

The Progressive Why They Hate Us (Pg 26)

Podcasters Way
Frontline Merchants of Cool Alternative Radio Capital Punishment Capital Crime Taking Aim The Case for Mumia Class War Battlefield Quick Comments 3 & 4

A Break with History

Political Research Associates The Hunt for the Red Menace (Pg 29)

The Blog Spot

Unknown Blog Title The Thing That Couldnt Die (Pg 39) The Brain Eaters (Pg 40) The Beast from 20,000 Fathons (Pg 41) Eyes Without a Face (Pg 42)

The Activists Desk

Melting Pot Spiritual Humanist Manifesto (Pg 6)

Hot of the Presses

Truth Dig Troy Davis and the Politics of Death (Pg 8)

The Exchange
This Cant Be Happening Just Business: Capitalism is an Anti-Social Disease (Pg 45)

The Dig
Consortium News Obama on the Backs of the Poor (Pg 10)

Curious Proposals
History News Network U.S Child Labor Laws are Child Abuse (Pg 47)

Within the Echo Chamber

Rolling Stone The GOP War on Voting (Pg13)

Real Money
Daily Capitalist Inflation: Where Cronyism Meets Poverty (Pg 17)

Institutional Minds
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Dear Readers, I welcome you to the first edition of The Revolutionarys Voice which because the magazine was titled The Ten, makes this particular edition the 20th in its series! For each issue I will include a quick comment like the one below explaining why I chose to include a specific or group of specifics articles or podcasts or an individual theme. Often I am motivated to include certain items not because I find them individually interesting but because the information I gathered from them led me to a greater understanding of some small truth that, when combined with what I already knew, gave me greater insight into the actual state of our society. Unfortunately even before I knew the name Troy David, I had started to see a major problem with the legal system, hence the following comment; The seemingly overnight recognition that there is a problem within the American death row judicial process presents an issue for those veterans of this struggle, how to educate a group of people who may not be involved in the struggle for more than a few weeks. The answer is present the material needed to understand the state of the process in a media form that they can quickly digest. I have done just that, in our Podcasters Way Section Id like you to pay close attention to two of our podcasts this week; the first is an Alternative Radio Podcast from Steve Bright named, Capital Punishment Capital Crimes and the second is a Taking Aim Podcast entitled The Case for Mumia. Both of these podcasts give some much needed context to a conversation that is sorry to say often discussed within two cultural vacuums, black people talk with other black people about judicial inequality but rarely do we talk with white people about it and the same is true for white people. For a greater sense of context, especially where Mumia is concerned, you should seek out and read the Church Committees Cointel Report (I should have a copy on my Scribd page, if not Ill post one) and a brilliant documentary called All Power to the People. I hope you enjoy this edition and pass it along to your friends. Currently I have 80 followers on Scribd; by next June I want to have 300, with your help I know I can do it! Thank you again for your patronage. Sincerely, Creative Editor Ephraim J. Davis For comments and concerns please email me at the new address therevolutionarysvoice@yahoo.com

And Here-s The Good News

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URLs Frontline http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5109415725027567998# Alternative Radio http://jumbofiles.com/nw9ojniul2er Taking Aim http://takingaimradio.com/shows/audio.html Due to Technical Problems The Class War Podcast for this week was not uploaded. I hope to have the problems resolved by the uploading of the next edition.

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A Brea

Spiritual Humanist Manifesto

by Robert Bruce Demers http://meltingpot.fortunecity.com/togo/239/SpiritualHumanistManifesto.htm
FIRST: Spiritual humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created, but it is a space of great wonder and spirituality. SECOND: Humanism believes that man is a part and equal with nature, and that he has emerged as a result of a continuous process. THIRD: Holding an organic view of life, spiritual humanists believe that all living things are created equal and have an equal value in the universe. FOURTH: Spiritual humanism recognizes that man's religious culture and civilization, as clearly depicted by anthropology and history, are the product of a gradual development due to his interaction with his natural environment and with his social heritage. The individual born into a particular culture is largely molded by that culture. FIFTH: Spiritual humanism asserts that the nature of the universe depicted by modern science makes questionable any supernatural or cosmic guarantees of human values. Obviously humanism does not deny the possibility of realities as yet undiscovered, but it does think that one way to determine the existence and value of any and all realities is by means of intelligent inquiry and by the assessment of their relations to human needs. Religion should consider formulating its hopes and plans in the light of the scientific spirit and method. SIXTH: We believe that the time has passed for theism, deism, modernism, and the several varieties of "new thought", including secular humanism. SEVENTH: Religion consists of those actions, purposes, and experiences which are humanly significant. Nothing human is alien to the religious. It includes labor, art, science, philosophy, love, friendship, recreation -- all that is in its degree expressive of intelligently satisfying human living. The distinction between the sacred and humanity can no longer be maintained. EIGHTH: Spiritual Humanism considers the complete realization of human personality to be the main part of man's life and seeks its development and fulfillment in the here and now. This is the explanation of the humanist's social passion. NINTH: In the place of the old attitudes involved in worship and prayer the spiritual humanist finds his religious emotions expressed in a heightened sense of personal life and in a cooperative effort to promote social well-being and of course spread love where ever he can. TENTH: Everybody has a right to their own phylosophies and beliefs. A person's beliefs, or lack of, are equally as important to them as yours are to you. ELEVENTH: Man will learn to face the crises of life in terms of his knowledge of their naturalness and probability. Reasonable and manly attitudes will be fostered by education and supported by custom. We assume that spiritual humanism will take the path of social and mental hygiene along with the power of love. TWELFTH: Believing that religion must work increasingly for joy in living, spiritual humanists aim to foster the creative in man and to encourage achievements that add to the satisfactions of life. THIRTEENTH: Spiritual humanism maintains that all associations and institutions exist for the fulfillment of human life. The intelligent evaluation, transformation, control, and direction of

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such associations and institutions with a view to the enhancement of human life is the purpose and program of humanism. Certainly religious institutions, their ritualistic forms, ecclesiastical methods, and communal activities should be reconstituted as experience allows, in order to function effectively in the modern world. FOURTEENTH: The humanists are firmly convinced that existing acquisitive and profit-motivated society has shown itself to be inadequate and that a radical change in methods, controls, and motives must be instituted. A socialized and cooperative economic order must be established to the end that the equitable distri- bution of the means of life be possible. The goal of humanism is a free and universal society in which people

voluntarily and intelligently cooperate for the common good. Humanists demand a shared life in a shared world. FIFTEENTH: Spiritual Humanism believes that love is the greatest and most import thing in life. They believe that love can heal all things and bring piece to a troubled world. Love is the greatest and most important spirituality there is. SIXTEENTH AND LAST: We assert that humanism will: 1. 2. affirm life rather than deny it; seek to elicit the possibilities of life, not flee from them;

3.

endeavor to establish the conditions of a satisfactory life for all, not merely for the few.

By this positive morale and intention humanism will be guided, and from this perspective and alignment the techniques and efforts of humanism will flow. So stand the theses of spiritual humanism. Though we consider the religious forms and ideas of our fathers no longer adequate, the quest for the good life is still the central task for mankind. Man is at last becoming aware that he alone is responsible for the realization of the world of his dreams, that he has within himself the power for its achievement. He must set intelligence and will to the task, and he must love all others that share this great universe with him.

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Troy Davis and the Politics of Death

By Amy Goodman Posted on Sep 13, 2011 Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column. Amy Goodman is the host of Democracy Now!, a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of Breaking the Sound Barrier, recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller. http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/troy_davis_and_the_politics_of_death_20110914/
Death brings cheers these days in America. In the most recent Republican presidential debate in Tampa, Fla., when CNNs Wolf Blitzer asked, hypothetically, if a man who chose to carry no medical insurance, then was stricken with a grave illness, should be left to die, cheers of Yeah! filled the hall. When, in the prior debate, Gov. Rick Perry was asked about his enthusiastic use of the death penalty in Texas, the crowd erupted into sustained applause and cheers. The reaction from the audience prompted debate moderator Brian Williams of NBC News to follow up with the question, What do you make of that dynamic that just happened here, the mention of the execution of 234 people drew applause? That dynamic is why challenging the death sentence to be carried out against Troy Davis by the state of Georgia on Sept. 21 is so important. Davis has been on Georgias death row for close to 20 years after being convicted of killing off-duty police officer Mark MacPhail in Savannah. Since his conviction, seven of the nine nonpolice witnesses have recanted their testimony, alleging police coercion and intimidation in obtaining the testimony. There is no physical evidence linking Davis to the murder. Last March, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Davis should receive an evidentiary hearing, to make his case for innocence. Several witnesses have identified one of the remaining witnesses who has not recanted, Sylvester Redd Coles, as the shooter. U.S. District Judge William T. Moore Jr. refused, on a technicality, to allow the testimony of witnesses who claimed that, after Davis had been convicted, Coles admitted to shooting MacPhail. In his August court order, Moore summarized, Mr. Davis is not innocent. One of the jurors, Brenda Forrest, disagrees. She told CNN in 2009, recalling the trial of Davis, All of the witnesses they were able to ID him as the person who actually did it. Since the seven witnesses recanted, she says: If I knew then what I know now, Troy Davis would not be on death row. The verdict would be not guilty. Troy Davis has three major strikes against him. First, he is an African-American man. Second, he was charged with killing a white police officer. And third, he is in Georgia. More than a century ago, the legendary muckraking journalist Ida B. Wells risked her life when she began reporting on the epidemic of lynchings in the Deep South. She published Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases in 1892 and followed up with The Red Record in 1895, detailing hundreds of lynchings. She wrote: In Brooks County, Ga., Dec. 23, while this Christian country was preparing for Christmas celebration, seven Negroes were lynched in twenty-four hours because they refused, or were unable to tell the whereabouts of a colored man named Pike, who killed a white man ... Georgia heads the list of lynching states. The planned execution of Davis will not be at the hands of an unruly mob, but in the sterile, fluorescently lit confines of Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Butts County, near the town of Jackson.

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The state doesnt intend to hang Troy Davis from a tree with a rope or a chain, to hang, as Billie Holiday sang, like a strange fruit: Southern trees bear a strange fruit/Blood on the leaves and blood at the root/Black body swinging in the Southern breeze/Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees. The state of Georgia, unless its Board of Pardons and Paroles intervenes, will administer a lethal dose of pentobarbital. Georgia is using this new execution drug because the federal Drug Enforcement Administration seized its supply of sodium thiopental last March, accusing the state of illegally importing the poison.

This is our justice system at its very worst, said Ben Jealous, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Amnesty International has called on the State Board of Pardons and Paroles to commute Davis sentence. The Board stayed Davis execution in 2007, stating that capital punishment was not an option when doubts about guilt remained, said Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International USA. Since then two more execution dates have come and gone, and there is still little clarity, much less proof, that Davis committed any crime. Amnesty International respectfully asks the Board to commute Davis sentence to life and

prevent Georgia from making a catastrophic mistake. But its not just the human rights groups the parole board should listen to. Pope Benedict XVI and Nobel Peace Prize laureates President Jimmy Carter and South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, among others, also have called for clemency. Or the board can listen to mobs who cheer for death.

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Obama on the Backs of the Poor

By Ray McGovern August 3, 2011 Exclusive: The painful resolution of the debt-ceiling crisis shows that Republicans and the Right know how to play hardball and that the Democrats and President Barack Obama know how to get rolled. Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern is thinking about other options. Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an Army Infantry/Intelligence officer in the early Sixties and then served as a CIA analyst for 27 years. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). http://consortiumnews.com/2011/08/03/obama-on-the-backs-of-the-poor/
What are we to make of the Obamabrokered deal on debt and spending? It was certainly what the Germans call eine schwere Geburt (a difficult birth); it was one of the few times I would have favored abortion. I am reminded of a sermon that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave during the turbulent 1950s, in which he peered into the future and issued a prescient warning: A nation or a civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on an installment plan. In promoting and then signing the socalled deficit reduction legislation, President Barack Obama has definitively confirmed that he stands in the ranks of those spiritual-death-dealing, softminded men about whom Dr. King warned so ominously. In my view, even dyed-in-the-wool Obama supporters will now have to let the scales fall from their eyes. The new one-sided compromise so clearly promotes the interests of the wealthy over those of the poor that, in Biblical terms, it can readily be seen as a Goddamned deal. I want to share some thoughts with those among us believers and non-believers alike who shudder at the prospect of our children and childrens children inheriting a country far different from the one promised by the American Dream, a nation approaching spiritual death. If you are not greatly concerned with the growing disparity between the rich and poor in this country, take another minute to ponder another warning from Dr. King in the same sermon: Passively to accept an unjust system is to cooperate with that system, and thereby to become a participant in its evil. It is a bitter pill and a great disappointment that the President has turned his back on those about whom the Hebrew and Christian scriptures express the deepest concern, the anawim. This frequently used Biblical word denotes not just those on the margins, but the despised, hated, poor, often said in Scripture to include the widows, the orphans, the strangers. My atheist friends regularly remind me to widen my perspective. The scriptural mandate to care for the widows, the orphans and the strangers springs from the highest of human instincts, and neither

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requires nor presupposes a faith perspective. In modern American history, it also has been shown that having a vibrant middle class is good for business, while a society of a few rich and many poor is prone to destructive boom-and-bust cycles. A huge majority of economists concede that America has been sliding into a land of haves and have-nots for the past several decades and that the deal Obama signed into law on Tuesday will do little, if anything, to improve the lives of our fellow citizens deprived of work, shelter, medical care and other necessities. In sum, Obama again put in a corner by Republicans who appeared ready to force the United States into default if they didnt get their way reneged on a promise not to let the burden for coping with the economic/fiscal mess fall primarily on the backs of the poor. The immediate deficit-cutting plan excludes any additional tax revenues from the rich, a line in the sand drawn by Republicans who were determined to protect even an extravagant tax loophole for corporate jet owners and special tax breaks for oil companies recording record profits. And Republican leaders have made clear that they will be equally adamant against any new tax revenue from the recommendations of a special congressional committee, meaning that the United States will soon face another budget crisis in which the Republicans will demand even deeper spending cuts. Demons and Scripture Scripture contains a lot of stories about demons. These texts were always a stretch for me, until I found myself investigating my countrys use of kidnapping, torture and black-site prisons not to mention targeted assassinations. No longer could I make light of the demonic. Lessons from the various indignities visited on many of my friends in inner-city Washington have served as confirmation. Ex-offenders are especially prominent among the anawim of our nations capital.

If we are to follow Dr. Kings mandate to avoid participation in unjust systems and practices inevitably exacerbated by the legislation signed by the President on Tuesday, we need to decide how to react. Ideally, we will choose to move forward in a wide, justice-and-peace oriented community. From what is known of Jeremiah Wright, Obamas pastor in Chicago, and the United Church of Christs reputation for faithfulness to Hebrew as well as Christian scripture, it is a safe bet that the social gospel was preached again and again in the hearing of an attentive Obama. There is no way he could have escaped the insight that the ancient Hebrew concept of social justice was something that many in the U.S. power elite today would decry as an un-American activity. This Hebrew concept of justice, which Jesus strongly embraced, challenges modern America and its economic inequality at almost every turn. Take, for example, the Biblical concept of the Jubilee Year, which mandated widespread redistribution of wealth every 50 years. (See what I mean about unAmerican?) I think we can assume that, if Obama were paying attention, he would have assimilated the starkly countercultural Hebrew concept of the Jubilee Year an inspiration that rejected the idea of accumulated wealth and the outsized power that goes with it. The Bible was dead serious about the redistribution of wealth. The Jewish sense was that, over time, the community would inevitably see immoderate wealth and immoderate poverty co-existing. In other words, it was a given for a whole bunch of very human reasons that there would be mal-distribution of wealth, and the concept of Jubilee was to squash it all back down, essentially requiring everyone to return to the same starting point every 50 years as a matter of law. Granted, it was a primitive idea for a simple economy, but the Jubilee spirit was

the spirit of the God of the Hebrews who insisted time and again through the Biblical writers and prophets there shall be no poor among you. And for that to happen, there had to be periodic sharing of wealth. It would be perhaps too much to expect that President Obama would have broached something along these lines to House Speaker John Boehner. Still, would it have been too much a stretch to expect some mutual concern from Republicans and Democrats alike over the growing disparity between rich and poor in this country? Boehner is fond of advertising that he is a Catholic. Me too. The House speaker is a little younger than I am, but I would be surprised if he had not learned that the first thing Jesus of Nazareth said in his inaugural speech was that he had come to bring good news to the poor. There was only bad news for the poor from the debt-limit compromise. Chastened by the Right In Obamas public appearances, there have been a few times when he showed some sensitivity to the problem of an extreme accumulation of wealth at the top. Remember campaigner Obamas brief chat with Joe (the Plumber) Wurzelbacher in Toledo, Ohio, on Oct. 12, 2008. My attitude is that if the economys good for folks from the bottom up, its gonna be good for everybody, Obama said. I think when you spread the wealth around, its good for everybody. The Republicans and the right-wing news media pounced on the comment, accusing Obama of running for redistributionist in chief. Fox News played up the following snide statement from a spokesman for John McCain: If Barack Obamas goal as President is to spread the wealth around, perhaps his unconditional meetings with Hugo Chavez, Raul Castro, and Kim JongIl arent so crazy if nothing else, they

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can advise an Obama administration on economic policy. A chastened Obama quickly learned his lesson. Since the Joe the Plumber incident, Obama has avoided any clear suggestion that he sees a benefit in a more equitable sharing of wealth. On Feb. 7, 2011, the President volunteered to undergo a TV grilling by Foxs Bill OReilly prior to the Super Bowl and was prepared for OReillys when-did-youstop-beating-your-wife-type question on the topic: Do you deny that youre a man who wants to redistribute wealth? asked OReilly. Absolutely. Absolutely, Obama responded. OReilly himself is an interesting case study. A graduate of Catholic grammar and high schools on Long Island, he in 1971 earned a B.A. in history from Marist College, which was founded by the Catholic order of Marist Brothers in Poughkeepsie, New York. He then taught briefly in a Catholic high school. There is no indication that anywhere along the line anyone told him of the Jubilee Year concept, or even that Jesus of Nazareth said he would be, and his followers should be, good news for the poor. Fox has been very good news for OReilly; Wikipedia records his annual salary at $20,000,000. Given how Obama facilitated resolving the manufactured crisis over raising the debt ceiling and other fiscal measures, he seems determined to prove his declaration to OReilly. Backs of the Poor At a Town Hall meeting at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, California, on April 20, the President inadvertently (and ironically) gave a hint regarding how easy it would be to do what he actually ended

up doing even while criticizing Republican attitude of neglect of the poor. Heres what Obama said to applause from the well-heeled folks at Facebook: Nothing is easier than solving a problem on the backs of people who are poor, for people who are powerless and dont have lobbyists or dont have clout. Then, to avoid an unprecedented default on the payment of U.S. debts, Obama ultimately opted for this easier course of action, exempting the wealthy and corporations from pitching in to solve the debt problem and bowing to Republican demands that everything come from spending cuts. The outcome of the debt-ceiling battle has left many disillusioned Democrats and progressives now certain that its foolhardy to expect Obama to behave any differently, even though he continues to promise a vigorous debate on the proper role of government in American society but then never delivers. That means the next course of action for Americans who want a different outcome may be to knock on the doors of rectories, synagogues and mosques to see if theres anyone home and if anyone cares about what is happening to those on the margins. Ask if these religious leaders are aware of what happened in Germany during the Thirties, when Catholic and Lutheran church leaders could not find their voice, and ended up acting as a force of stability for a fascist regime. See if its possible to wake anyone up in the religious institutions tied to the Establishment. Inform other citizens that 58 cents of every dollar in federal discretionary spending now go to the Pentagon. It might be worth noting that the Soviet Union Americas great enemy imploded 20 years ago. Despite the lack of a threat from a major power, the U.S. military spending equals that of all the other countries of the world put together. Its also worth recalling President Dwight Eisenhowers famous warning about the

military-industrial complex and the words of Gen. Douglas MacArthur ten years earlier. (Neither of these military men was exactly a dove.) On May 15, 1951, MacArthur said: It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear. Since the Obama administration and Congress cannot be counted on to pursue traditional American justice (not to mention Biblical Jubilee justice) toward the poor and since American religious institutions mostly are riding shotgun for this inequitable system we might do well to heed the admonitions of popular theologian Annie Dillard; Cesar Chavez, co-founder of the United Farm Workers; and Mario Savio of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the 60s: Dillard: There is only us; there never has been any other. Chavez: There are already enough of us. But without action, nothing is going to happen. Savio: There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you cant take part, you cant even passively take part; and youve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus, and youve got to make it stop. Some Americans plan to express their repudiation of the dysfunctional political system with a U.S. version of Tahrir Square beginning Oct. 6, the tenth anniversary of the U.S. attack on Afghanistan. (See: http://october2011.org/statement.)

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The GOP War on Voting

In a campaign supported by the Koch brothers, Republicans are working to prevent millions of Democrats from voting next year
By Ari Berman August 30, 2011 7:40 PM ET
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-gop-war-on-voting-20110830?page=3
As the nation gears up for the 2012 presidential election, Republican officials have launched an unprecedented, centrally coordinated campaign to suppress the elements of the Democratic vote that elected Barack Obama in 2008. Just as Dixiecrats once used poll taxes and literacy tests to bar black Southerners from voting, a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators has passed a series of seemingly disconnected measures that could prevent millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts and the elderly from casting ballots. "What has happened this year is the most significant setback to voting rights in this country in a century," says Judith Browne-Dianis, who monitors barriers to voting as co-director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization based in Washington, D.C. Republicans have long tried to drive Democratic voters away from the polls. "I don't want everybody to vote," the influential conservative activist Paul Weyrich told a gathering of evangelical leaders in 1980. "As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down." But since the 2010 election, thanks to a conservative advocacy group founded by Weyrich, the GOP's effort to disrupt voting rights has been more widespread and effective than ever. In a systematic campaign orchestrated by the American Legislative Exchange Council and funded in part by David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers who bankrolled the Tea Party 38 states introduced legislation this year designed to impede voters at every step of the electoral process. All told, a dozen states have approved new obstacles to voting. Kansas and Alabama now require would-be voters to provide proof of citizenship before registering. Florida and Texas made it harder for groups like the League of Women Voters to register new voters. Maine repealed Election Day voter registration, which had been on the books since 1973. Five states Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia cut short their early voting periods. Florida and Iowa barred all exfelons from the polls, disenfranchising thousands of previously eligible voters. And six states controlled by Republican governors and legislatures Alabama, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin will require voters to produce a government-issued ID before casting ballots. More than 10 percent of U.S. citizens lack such identification, and the numbers are even higher among constituencies that traditionally lean Democratic including 18 percent of young voters and 25 percent of AfricanAmericans. Taken together, such measures could significantly dampen the Democratic turnout next year perhaps enough to shift the outcome in favor of the GOP. "One of the most pervasive political movements going on outside Washington today is the disciplined, passionate, determined effort of Republican governors and legislators to keep most of you from voting next time," Bill Clinton told a group of student activists in July. "Why is all of this going on? This is not rocket science. They are

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trying to make the 2012 electorate look more like the 2010 electorate than the 2008 electorate" a reference to the dominance of the Tea Party last year, compared to the millions of students and minorities who turned out for Obama. "There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today." To hear Republicans tell it, they are waging a virtuous campaign to crack down on rampant voter fraud a curious position for a party that managed to seize control of the White House in 2000 despite having lost the popular vote. After taking power, the Bush administration declared war on voter fraud, making it a "top priority" for federal prosecutors. In 2006, the Justice Department fired two U.S. attorneys who refused to pursue trumpedup cases of voter fraud in New Mexico and Washington, and Karl Rove called illegal voting "an enormous and growing problem." In parts of America, he told the Republican National Lawyers Association, "we are beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where the guys in charge are colonels in mirrored sunglasses." According to the GOP, community organizers like ACORN were actively recruiting armies of fake voters to misrepresent themselves at the polls and cast illegal ballots for the Democrats. Even at the time, there was no evidence to back up such outlandish claims. A major probe by the Justice Department between 2002 and 2007 failed to prosecute a single person for going to the polls and impersonating an eligible voter, which the anti-fraud laws are supposedly designed to stop. Out of the 300 million votes cast in that period, federal prosecutors convicted only 86 people for voter fraud and many of the cases involved immigrants and former felons who were simply unaware of their ineligibility. A much-hyped investigation in Wisconsin, meanwhile, led to the prosecution of only .0007 percent of the local electorate for alleged voter fraud. "Our democracy is under siege from an enemy so small it could be hiding anywhere," joked Stephen Colbert. A 2007 report by the Brennan Center for Justice, a leading advocate for voting rights at the New York University School of Law, quantified the problem in stark terms. "It is

more likely that an individual will be struck by lightning," the report calculated, "than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls." GOP outcries over the phantom menace of voter fraud escalated after 2008, when Obama's candidacy attracted historic numbers of first-time voters. In the 29 states that record party affiliation, roughly two-thirds of new voters registered as Democrats in 2007 and 2008 and Obama won nearly 70 percent of their votes. In Florida alone, Democrats added more than 600,000 new voters in the run-up to the 2008 election, and those who went to the polls favored Obama over John McCain by 19 points. "This latest flood of attacks on voting rights is a direct shot at the communities that came out in historic numbers for the first time in 2008 and put Obama over the top," says Tova Wang, an elections-reform expert at Demos, a progressive think tank. No one has done more to stir up fears about the manufactured threat of voter fraud than Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a top adviser in the Bush Justice Department who has become a rising star in the GOP. "We need a Kris Kobach in every state," declared Michelle Malkin, the conservative pundit. This year, Kobach successfully fought for a law requiring every Kansan to show proof of citizenship in order to vote even though the state prosecuted only one case of voter fraud in the past five years. The new restriction fused anti-immigrant hysteria with voterfraud paranoia. "In Kansas, the illegal registration of alien voters has become pervasive," Kobach claimed, offering no substantiating evidence. Kobach also asserted that dead people were casting ballots, singling out a deceased Kansan named Alfred K. Brewer as one such zombie voter. There was only one problem: Brewer was still very much alive. The Wichita Eagle found him working in his front yard. "I don't think this is heaven," Brewer told the paper. "Not when I'm raking leaves." Kobach might be the gop's most outspoken crusader working to prevent citizens from voting, but he's far from the only one. "Voting rights are under attack in America," Rep. John Lewis, who was

brutally beaten in Alabama while marching during the civil rights movement in the 1960s, observed during an impassioned speech on the House floor in July. "There's a deliberate and systematic attempt to prevent millions of elderly voters, young voters, students, minority and low-income voters from exercising their constitutional right to engage in the democratic process." The Republican effort, coordinated and funded at the national level, has focused on disenfranchising voters in four key areas: Barriers to Registration Since January, six states have introduced legislation to impose new restrictions on voter registration drives run by groups like Rock the Vote and the League of Women Voters. In May, the GOP-controlled legislature in Florida passed a law requiring anyone who signs up new voters to hand in registration forms to the state board of elections within 48 hours of collecting them, and to comply with a barrage of onerous, bureaucratic requirements. Those found to have submitted late forms would face a $1,000 fine, as well as possible felony prosecution. As a result, the law threatens to turn civicminded volunteers into inadvertent criminals. Denouncing the legislation as "good old-fashioned voter suppression," the League of Women Voters announced that it was ending its registration efforts in Florida, where it has been signing up new voters for the past 70 years. Rock the Vote, which helped 2.5 million voters to register in 2008, could soon follow suit. "We're hoping not to shut down," says Heather Smith, president of Rock the Vote, "but I can't say with any certainty that we'll be able to continue the work we're doing." The registration law took effect one day after it passed, under an emergency statute designed for "an immediate danger to the public health, safety or welfare." In reality, though, there's no evidence that registering fake voters is a significant problem in the state. Over the past three years, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement has received just 31 cases of suspected voter fraud, resulting in only three arrests

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statewide. "No one could give me an example of all this fraud they speak about," said Mike Fasano, a Republican state senator who bucked his party and voted against the registration law. What's more, the law serves no useful purpose: Under the Help America Vote Act passed by Congress in 2002, all new voters must show identity before registering to vote. Cuts to Early Voting After the recount debacle in Florida in 2000, allowing voters to cast their ballots early emerged as a popular bipartisan reform. Early voting not only meant shorter lines on Election Day, it has helped boost turnout in a number of states the true measure of a successful democracy. "I think it's great," Jeb Bush said in 2004. "It's another reform we added that has helped provide access to the polls and provide a convenience. And we're going to have a high voter turnout here, and I think that's wonderful." But Republican support for early voting vanished after Obama utilized it as a key part of his strategy in 2008. Nearly 30 percent of the electorate voted early that year, and they favored Obama over McCain by 10 points. The strategy proved especially effective in Florida, where blacks outnumbered whites by two to one among early voters, and in Ohio, where Obama received fewer votes than McCain on Election Day but ended up winning by 263,000 ballots, thanks to his advantage among early voters in urban areas like Cleveland and Columbus. That may explain why both Florida and Ohio which now have conservative Republican governors have dramatically curtailed early voting for 2012. Next year, early voting will be cut from 14 to eight days in Florida and from 35 to 11 days in Ohio, with limited hours on weekends. In addition, both states banned voting on the Sunday before the election a day when black churches historically mobilize their constituents. Once again, there appears to be nothing to justify the changes other than pure politics. "There is no evidence that any form of convenience voting has led to higher levels of fraud," reports the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College. Photo IDs By far the biggest change in election rules for 2012 is the number of

states requiring a government-issued photo ID, the most important tactic in the Republican war on voting. In April 2008, the Supreme Court upheld a photo-ID law in Indiana, even though state GOP officials couldn't provide a single instance of a voter committing the type of fraud the new ID law was supposed to stop. Emboldened by the ruling, Republicans launched a nationwide effort to implement similar barriers to voting in dozens of states. The campaign was coordinated by the American Legislative Exchange Council, which provided GOP legislators with draft legislation based on Indiana's ID requirement. In five states that passed such laws in the past year Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin the measures were sponsored by legislators who are members of ALEC. "We're seeing the same legislation being proposed state by state by state," says Smith of Rock the Vote. "And they're not being shy in any of these places about clearly and blatantly targeting specific demographic groups, including students." In Texas, under "emergency" legislation passed by the GOP-dominated legislature and signed by Gov. Rick Perry, a concealed-weapon permit is considered an acceptable ID but a student ID is not. Republicans in Wisconsin, meanwhile, mandated that students can only vote if their IDs include a current address, birth date, signature and two-year expiration date requirements that no college or university ID in the state currently meets. As a result, 242,000 students in Wisconsin may lack the documentation required to vote next year. "It's like creating a second class of citizens in terms of who gets to vote," says Analiese Eicher, a Dane County board supervisor. The barriers erected in Texas and Wisconsin go beyond what the Supreme Court upheld in Indiana, where 99 percent of state voters possess the requisite IDs and can turn to full-time DMVs in every county to obtain the proper documentation. By contrast, roughly half of all black and Hispanic residents in Wisconsin do not have a driver's license, and the state staffs barely half as many DMVs as Indiana a quarter of which are open less than one day a month. To make matters worse, Gov. Scott Walker tried to shut down 16 more

DMVs many of them located in Democratic-leaning areas. In one case, Walker planned to close a DMV in Fort Atkinson, a liberal stronghold, while opening a new office 30 minutes away in the conservative district of Watertown. Although new ID laws have been approved in seven states, the battle over such barriers to voting has been far more widespread. Since January, Democratic governors in Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire and North Carolina have all vetoed ID laws. Voters in Mississippi and Missouri are slated to consider ballot initiatives requiring voter IDs, and legislation is currently pending in Pennsylvania. One of the most restrictive laws requiring voter IDs was passed in South Carolina. To obtain the free state ID now required to vote, the 178,000 South Carolinians who currently lack one must pay for a passport or a birth certificate. "It's the stepsister of the poll tax," says Browne-Dianis of the Advancement Project. Under the new law, many elderly black residents who were born at home in the segregated South and never had a birth certificate must now go to family court to prove their identity. Given that obtaining fake birth certificates is one of the country's biggest sources of fraud, the new law may actually prompt some voters to illegally procure a birth certificate in order to legally vote all in the name of combating voter fraud. For those voters who manage to get a legitimate birth certificate, obtaining a voter ID from the DMV is likely to be hellishly time-consuming. A reporter for the Tri-State Defender in Memphis, Tennessee another state now mandating voter IDs recently waited for four hours on a sweltering July day just to see a DMV clerk. The paper found that the longest lines occur in urban precincts, a clear violation of the Voting Rights Act, which bars states from erecting hurdles to voting in minority jurisdictions. Disenfranchising Ex-Felons The most sweeping tactic in the GOP campaign against voting is simply to make it illegal for certain voters to cast ballots in any election. As the Republican governor of Florida, Charlie Crist restored the voting rights of 154,000 former prisoners who

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had been convicted of nonviolent crimes. But in March, after only 30 minutes of public debate, Gov. Rick Scott overturned his predecessor's decision, instantly disenfranchising 97,491 ex-felons and prohibiting another 1.1 million prisoners from being allowed to vote after serving their time. "Why should we disenfranchise people forever once they've paid their price?" Bill Clinton asked during his speech in July. "Because most of them in Florida were African-Americans and Hispanics and would tend to vote for Democrats that's why." A similar reversal by a Republican governor recently took place in Iowa, where Gov. Terry Branstad overturned his predecessor's decision to restore voting rights to 100,000 ex-felons. The move threatens to return Iowa to the recent past, when more than five percent of all residents were denied the right to vote including a third of the state's black residents. In addition, Florida and Iowa

join Kentucky and Virginia as the only states that require all former felons to apply for the right to vote after finishing their prison sentences. In response to the GOP campaign, votingrights advocates are scrambling to blunt the impact of the new barriers to voting. The ACLU and other groups are challenging the new laws in court, and congressional Democrats have asked the Justice Department to use its authority to block or modify any of the measures that discriminate against minority voters. "The Justice Department should be much more aggressive in areas covered by the Voting Rights Act," says Rep. Lewis. But beyond waging battles at the state and federal level, voting-rights advocates must figure out how to reframe the broader debate. The real problem in American elections is not the myth of voter fraud, but how few people actually participate. Even in 2008, which saw the highest voter turnout in four decades, fewer than twothirds of eligible voters went to the polls.

And according to a study by MIT, 9 million voters were denied an opportunity to cast ballots that year because of problems with their voter registration (13 percent), long lines at the polls (11 percent), uncertainty about the location of their polling place (nine percent) or lack of proper ID (seven percent). Come Election Day 2012, such problems will only be exacerbated by the flood of new laws implemented by Republicans. Instead of a single fiasco in Florida, experts warn, there could be chaos in a dozen states as voters find themselves barred from the polls. "Our democracy is supposed to be a government by, of and for the people," says Browne-Dianis. "It doesn't matter how much money you have, what race you are or where you live in the country we all get to have the same amount of power by going into the voting booth on Election Day. But those who passed these laws believe that only some people should participate. The restrictions undermine democracy by cutting off the voices of the people."

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Inflation: Where Cronyism Meets Poverty

By Robin Koerner August 13th, 2011 http://dailycapitalist.com/2011/08/13/inflation-where-cronyism-meets-poverty/
Inflation is built into a monetary system that is designed, so it seems, to help political and financial classes exercise power over ordinary citizens, and to make us pay for the privilege. As Sir Josiah Stamp, Director of Bank of England (1928 1941), said, If you want to continue to be slaves of the banks and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit. A while ago, I wrote the following. This creation of money by bankers, including central bankers, is inflation. The steady erosion of the value of money transfers wealth to those that create it, impoverishing those who do not hold significant assets. Those asset-poor people are the lower 90% of our nation. Over time, the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer, and those in the middle tend to join the latter group. The skilled American householder today earns less than he earned in 1973. And whereas it used to take one income to raise a family, it now takes two. To keep the system running without riots in the street, the same government officials who license the banks to print money pass welfare laws, which keep the disenfranchised at the bottom, but off the streets. Therefore, there is no welfarism, beloved of the old Left, without crony capitalism (which pays for it). And there is no crony capitalism, beloved of the old Right, without welfarism (which maintains the political stability that protects it). In response to the article in which this appeared, one reader asked, Is the middle class really so helpless in all of this? As a member of that group, I feel we can extricate ourselves from the leftright power games, and we can pursue our lives in a way that makes the powermongers far less relevant. This article focused on the state and the banks manipulation of money-but do we have to play that game? If we refuse to go into debt, if we live within our means-then doesnt that undermine the power of the banks? This is an excellent point, but the odds are stacked infinitely against us. As any supporter of Ron Paul will tell you, Federal Reserve Notes (a.k.a. dollars) represent no physical thing of value. Before Nixon took the USA off the gold standard in 1971, a dollar bill could theoretically be redeemed for a chunk of silver from the Treasury. In other words, a dollar had actual value as an entitlement to receive a certain amount of some physical asset. Nowadays, the federal reserve note has no intrinsic value. Its only value is practical in that the government decrees that it shall be used to settle all debts, public and private. In other words, if you refuse to take it in an economic transaction, you can be put in prison. That is the meaning of fiat currency. Ultimately, the demand for

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these notes is created by the requirement to pay taxes in these notes. The government that decrees the use of this money licenses banks to create it. The only other way money is created is when it is spent into the private sector directly by government. On the first mechanism rests the systematic transfer of wealth from productive participants in a free market (workers and entrepreneurs) to financiers, and on the second rests the ability of the government to spend what it has not raised in revenue. The economist John Kenneth Galbraith provided the best introduction to the creation of money by banks when he said, The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled. It works like this. A man walks into a bank. He asks to borrow money. Lets call the amount requested P (for principal.) The bank creates the money by typing some numbers into a computer to add the funds to the bank account. The money has now been created out of nothing. At the same time, however, a legal obligation is created: the man must pay the bank back an amount P plus some interest. Well call that amount I. So P dollars have been created by the bank and P plus I dollars are owed to it. The interest, I, will of course be profit to the bank. For this profit, the bank had to produce nothing. The borrower, though, will have to work to earn the amount P plus I to pay the bank back. In other words, the wage earned by the borrower as he works to create some tangible product or service of value will be transferred to the bank that has produced nothing. Bad enough, but heres the catch: when the bank lends the money to the borrower, only money in the amount of the principal is created. The interest on that principal is not. Therefore, in aggregate, people owe banks more money than has yet been created! It is only the time lag between the taking out of a loan and the interest payments that allows time for the money to cover the

interest to be created by someone elses taking out a loan with a bank somewhere else. In other words, the inflation is built into the system. If everyone stopped borrowing from banks, the creation of money would stop. If everyone then tried to paid back their bank-loans, all the money in the economy would go back to the banks but people would not be able to pay back their interest because the money would not yet exist to pay it. To put it another way, money is debt and the only thing that stops the economy from collapsing over night is peoples choosing to go into debt. The next time you look at a dollar bill, know that youre probably holding in your hand a bit of your neighbors debt. Put yet another way, practically all money belongs to the banks. Of this situation, Robert Hemphill, former credit manager of the Federal Reserve Bank in Georgia, said simply, When ones gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless situation is almost incredible, but there it is. Indeed. The banks are allowed to do this only because the government gives them a special license to do so. When you or I create money, we have committed a crime. When the banks do exactly the same thing, they have not committed a crime. Not only that: they get to make a profit off the money that they create. It is the ultimate risk-free business. As money is created without the production of goods, prices rise, and so we can all buy less with the same number of dollars. What about when the government creates money to purchase goods and services of the private sector? As the creator of the dollars, it gets to spend them at todays prices, but once the money gets into the economy, prices go up and everyone else has to pay more for everything. In this way, the government gets to spend money without taxing us. In so doing, the government leaves untouched the bank balances of the citizenry, but transfers away their buying power to itself. We

dont notice the effect until its too late, so we dont riot. In each case, inflation is governmentsponsored, and makes poorer those at the bottom of the economic scale who have no assets. Not only do the poor not realize that the government and monetary/banking system are causing the problem by making their earnings worth less (on the one hand) and transferring wealth systematically to the creators of money (on the other), but worse than that, the beneficiaries of these transfers actually think the government is helping them through welfare programs etc. and vote for the politicians who promise to maintain them. All the while, they dont realize that the same politicians who are helping them in their poverty are contributing to the poverty by this system of debt-money and inflation. For this reason, the fact that JP Morgan has a profitable business administering food stamp debit cards is the perfect metaphor for the entire American economy, which depends on simultaneous distribution from the middle to both the top and the bottom. To make this a little less abstract and a little more specific, I ran some numbers. Consider a worker who started his career in 1971, when Nixon took us off the gold standard, and the inflationary regime described above was freed of any real constraints. That worker, earning $40,000 in todays money, would have been paying an average of about 17% in taxes out of his paycheck (including income tax and Social Security, etc.). If he is being conscientious, like the person imagined by the questioner who responded to my previous article rightly suggests we should all be, and if he therefore tries to minimize his participation in the money-debt system, say, by taking on no debt but saving 15% of his after-tax paycheck every month, then the loss of value of his savings over forty years due to government-sponsored inflation alone would be equivalent to an extra income tax of 9.1% or more than half the tax he was paying on his income! (Note that this number is much higher than inflation, because of the effects of compounding over time.)

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And so, as I suggested in my original article, wealth is concentrated in the hands of the financiers and power is concentrated in the hands of their political sponsors, at the expense of the working middle. Lest you think that this edifice is anything other than an insidious evil, hear the repentant words of the very president who was more responsible than any for setting up this system, Woodrow Wilson:

I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. But heed the words of a philosopher: None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. Johann W. von Goethe

(If you are interested in these ideas and others Ive written about , and can get to the University of Colorado in Boulder, visit the Blue Republican page on Facebook for updates about upcoming seminars there.)

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Criticism in a Mass Society

By: W H Auden Published in 1941 in a book of essays titled The Intent of the Critic, ed D A Stauffer, Princeton University Press. http://www.the-rathouse.com/popAudenOpenClosedSociety.html
We are frequently and correctly told that one of the most precious privileges of a democratic state is the right to free selfcriticism. If we care, then, about the preservation of that democracy, our first duty is to discover how this right is, in fact, exercised. It will not take us long to discover that in a modern society, whatever its political form, the great majority prefer opinion to knowledge, and passively allow the former to be imposed upon them by a centralized fewI need only mention as in example the influence of the Sunday book supplements of the newspapers upon our public libraries. If we are concerned, as I think we should be, at this trend, we shall accomplish nothing by cries of lamentation or superior sneers; we cannot hope to effect any reform unless we can discover, firstly, what it is in the structure of our society that makes for this state of affairs, secondly; how far the molding of the opinions of the few by the many is inevitable, and then what steps it is possible to take within the inevitable to minimize its dangers and take advantage of its possibilities. 1. There are two types of society: closed societies and open. 2. All human societies begin by being of the closed type, but, except when they have stagnated or died, they have always evolved toward an ever more and more open type. Up until the industrial revolution this evolution was so gradual as hardly to be perceptible within the lifespan of an individual, but since then the rate of development has ever increasingly accelerated. 3. The evolutionary process is complicated by the fact that different sections of the community progress toward the open society at different speeds. At any given point in history there are classes for whom economic, political, and cultural advantages make society relatively open, and, vice versa, those for whom similar disadvantages make it relatively closed, but in comparing one historical epoch with its preceding one, all classes are seen to have made some evolution in the same direction. 4. When we use the word democracy we do not or should not mean any particular form of political structure; such matters are secondary. What we mean or ought to mean is the completely open society. 5. The technical obstacles to this have been overcome. What is holding us back is the failure of totalitarians and democrats alike to realize how open society has already physically become, so that we continue to apply habits of mind which were more or less adequate to the relatively closed society of the eighteenth century to an open society which demands completely new ones. The failure of the human race to acquire the habits that an open society demands if it is to function properly, is leading an increasing number of people to the conclusion that an open society is impossible, and that, therefore, the only escape from economic and spiritual disaster is to return as quickly as possible to a closed type of society. But social evolution, fortunately or unfortunately, is irreversible. A mechanized and differentiated closed society is a self-contradiction. We have in fact no choice at all; we have to adapt ourselves to an open society or perish. No human community of course has ever been completely closed, and none probably will ever be completely open, but from the researches of anthropologists and historians, we can construct a Platonic idea of both.

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Ideally, a closed society is physically segregated, economically autonomous and without cultural contact with other communities. Occupationally it is undifferentiated; everyone does the same kind of work, agriculture, fishing, hunting, etc.; such differences as exist are based on biological differences of sex and age. In the education of the young there is no distinction between vocational or technical and cultural or moral training; all activities are governed by tradition; the right thing to do is inseparable from the right way of doing it (an identity found today only in compulsion neurosis). Education ends with puberty; to be mature means to be socially normal. In contrast to its primitive economy, the character type imposed on all its members is extremely specialized and may vary fantastically from one closed society to another; the Arapesh type, for example, is cooperative and pacific, the Dobu type is a paranoiac. Aberrant individuals who fail to be conditioned must become either hermits or saboteurs. Art as a means to satisfy internal psychic needs and science as a means to satisfy external material needs, are included in an undifferentiated complex of communal activities; it is not realized that an incantatory curse is intrinsically different from a stab with a knife. The religion by which it lives is polytheistic: little or no distinction is drawn between the particular and the universal, the sign and its signification. In its taboos and regulations it has not learned to distinguish between propositions or statements which can be proved true or false by immediate experiment, and presuppositions or professions of faith. Since the individual is scarcely differentiated from the whole and technique is primitive, freedom consists largely in a consciousness of causal necessity either in the form of the forces of nature or of the social pressures of tradition, and to only a very slight degree in a consciousness of logical necessity. The motto of such a society is that of the trolls in Peer Gyntto thyself be enough. The ideal open society on the other hand would know no physical, economic or cultural frontiers. Conscious both of what it possessed and what it lacked, it would exchange freely with all others. Occupationally specialized, the range of occupations to choose from would be so

wide that there would be no one, however exceptional his nature, who could not find his genuine vocation. Such a community would be tolerant because it found every kind of person useful, and its members socially responsible because conscious of being needed. Mechanized, it would have conquered nature but would recognize that conquest for what it isnot the abolition of necessity, but the transformation of much of the external causal necessity of matter into the internal logical necessity of moral decision. The concept of normality would have disappeared, for, since an open society requires open individuals, maturity would be regarded as an ideal goal that is never reached. The aim of education would be to assist the child who is born as a closed system of reflex responses to grow up into an adult who is open to the degree to which he ceases to be merely accessory to his position and becomes aware of who he is and what he really wants. For we do not essentially change as we grow up; the difference between the child and the adult is that the former is not conscious of his destiny and the latter is. His motto is that of the human beings in Peer Gyntto thyself be true. Far as we are and perhaps always must be from realizing this in our social life, in our cultural and intellectual life we have moved a long way toward it. Instead of working within, the limits of one regional or national esthetic tradition, the modern artist works with a consciousness of all the cultural productions, not only of the whole world of his day, but also of the whole historical past. Thus one sculptor may be influenced by the forms of electrical machinery, another by African masks, another by Donatello and so on. The three greatest influences on my own work have been, I think, Dante, Langland, and Pope. If we talk of tradition today, we no longer mean what the eighteenth century meant, a way of working handed down from one generation to the next; we mean a consciousness of the whole of the past in the present. Originality no longer means a slight personal modification of ones immediate predecessors, as for example the music of Haydn or Schubert differs from that of Mozart; it means the capacity

to find in any other work of any date or locality clues for the treatment of ones own personal subject matter. Stravinsky and Picasso are good example of artists who at different times have made personal modifications of entirely different techniques. Over against this cultural unity of time and space, however, stands the increasing uniqueness in modern life of the individuals social position. When I hear critics talk of an American art, I am at a loss to know which America they mean; the America of a Negro janitor in the Bronx is almost as different from the America of a prosperous white farmer in Wisconsin as France is from China. The importance that criticism and belleslettres take today can be understood only if we recognize these two characteristics of our society: the tendency toward individuation of experience, and the change in the meaning of the word tradition. The contemporary critic has two primary tasks. Firstly he must show the individual that though he is unique he has also much in common with all other individuals, that each life is, to use a chemical metaphor, an isomorph of a general human life and then must teach him how to see the relevance to his own experience of works of art which deal with experiences apparently strange to him; so that, for example, the coal miner in Pennsylvania can learn to see himself in terms of the world of Ronald Firbank, and an Anglican bishop find in The Grapes of Wrath a parable of his diocesan problems. And secondly the critic must attempt to spread a knowledge of past cultures so that his audience may be as aware of them as the artist himself, not only simply in order to appreciate the latter, but because the situation of all individuals, artist and audience alike, in an open society is such that the only check on authoritarian control by the few, whether in matters of esthetic taste or political choice, is the knowledge of the many. We cannot of course all be experts in everything; we are always governed, and I hope willingly, by those whom we believe to be expert; but our society has already reached a point in its development where the expert can be recognized only by an educated judgment. The standard demanded of the man in the

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street (and outside our own special field, we are all men in the street) rises with every generation. This cannot be emphasized too strongly. In earlier phases of social development a man could be a member of a group (i.e., not, in our sense, an individual), and yet be a person; he could be accessory to his position because the latter was a real necessity, and by virtue of being a necessity, could make him free. Today a man has only two choices: he can be consciously passive or consciously active. He can accept deliberately or reject deliberately, but he must decide because his position in life is no longer a real necessity; he could be different if he chose. The necessity that can make him free is no longer his position as such, but the necessity of choosing to accept or reject it. To be unconscious is to be neither an individual nor a person, but a mathematical integer in something called the Public which has no real existence. This is, alas, what only too often happens. We have heard much in the last twenty years of the separation of the modern artist from the crowd, of how modern art is unintelligible to the average man, and it is commonly but falsely supposed that this is because the artist is a special case. In my opinion, on the contrary, the lack of communication between artist and audience proves the lack of communication between all men; a work of art only unmasks the lack which is common to us all, but which we normally manage to gloss over with every trick and convention of conversation; men are now only individuals who can form collective masses but not communities. One common reaction to this is to place responsibility for our defects upon fate, by saying that we are living in an age of transition, implying that if only we are patiently passive Pour faults will disappear of themselves when the new order has stabilized itself. This is a false and dangerous way of stating a valuable truth; perhaps the only decisive advantage we possess over our ancestors is a historical knowledge which enables us to see that all ages are ages of transition. This realization robs us of false hopes, of believing, if we are fortunate, that the Absolute Idea has been at last historically realized, or of expecting, if we are

unfortunate, a millennium around the corner. At the same time it should keep us from despair; no error is final. Whatever our nationality, occupation, or beliefs, we are all agreed on one thing; that the times through which we are now living mark the end of a period which, for convenience, we can say began with the Renaissance. We are all consciously or unconsciously seeking some form of catholic unity to correct the moral, artistic, and political chaos that has resulted from an over-development of protestant diversity (using these terms in their widest sense). Our differences, and they are vital, are as to the essential nature of that unity and the form which it should take. The cohesion of a society is secured by a mixture of three factors, community of actions, community of faith and beliefs, and coercion by those who possess the means of exercising it. In a differentiated society like our own, the first factor has in large measure disappeared. If we are agreed that the third should be as small an influence as possible, we must examine the second very carefully. I have used two words, faith and belief, to describe two different forms of assent: assent to presuppositions which cannot be immediately proved true or false, as, for example, science presupposes that the world of nature exists; and assent to propositions that can be experimentally tested, e.g., the proposition that water boils at one hundred degrees centigrade. In proportion as a society is closed and traditional it tends to regard all propositions as presuppositions and so to discourage initiative and research because it fears the destruction of its fundamental assumptions. Conversely, in proportion as a society becomes open and experimental it is in danger of denying the necessity of making any presuppositions at all. Further, in any society where there is a struggle for the power of control, the Ins will tend to preach a static monism which identifies the absolute and universal with their own concrete and particular, while the Outs, in exposing this ideological pretension, will tend toward a relative dualism which denies or ignores absolutes altogether. This is dangerous. The statement, Man is a fallen creature with a natural bias to do evil, and the statement, Men are good by nature and made bad by society, are both presuppositions, but it is not an academic

question to which one we give assent. If, as I do, you assent to the first, your art and politics will be very different from what they will be if you assent, like Rousseau or Whitman, to the second. The history of art and esthetic criticism is an excellent field for the study of these difficulties. In the first place, since the breakdown of patronage in the eighteenth century, the artist has been the extreme case of the free individual, the one for whom, more than for any other, society has become open and untraditional; and in the second place, since art by its nature is a shared, a catholic, activity, he is the first to feel the consequences of a lack of common beliefs, and the first to seek a common basis for human unity. The Renaissance broke the subordination of all other intellectual fields to that of theology, and assumed the autonomy of each. The artists of the Renaissance sought canons of esthetic judgment which should be independent and self-supporting, and believed that they had found them in the classics, forgetting that the esthetics of the Greeks were inseparable from social habits and religious beliefs which they themselves did not share. The attempt to make esthetics an autonomous province resulted in academic esthetics, the substitution of the pedant for the priest. The romantic reaction defied the pedant in the name of liberty for the imaginative original genius, but thereby only accentuated the two great esthetic problems, the problem of communication and the problem of value. For the absolutely unique would be absolutely incommunicable; and unless, in some respects, all men are alike, that is, unoriginal, all taste is purely personal. Thus even the most romantic artists have attempted to justify their art by correspondence to a Nature which all can recognize. Some assumed that the only point of agreement between individuals lay in the similarity of their sense perceptions and became realists, i.e., they attempted to give an exact description of phenomenal facts. Unfortunately, since the facts are infinite in number and their selection is not performed by the sense organs themselves, unless we assume more than this, such art must logically end in manufacturing nature

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herself; it will not be enough to paint a lake, one will have to make one. Others turned to the unconscious and instinctive as a basis of unity and became surrealists. Unfortunately again, since one cannot create without becoming conscious of so doing, unless we assume more than this, such art must end in silent, unconscious telepathy. Esthetics since the last war has therefore been forced to take seriously the problem of belief in art. Some, like Dr. I. A. Richards, have subordinated esthetics to psychology. A poem organizes our emotional attitudes; it is the efficiency of this organization, not the truth or falsehood of the belief expressed, that determines the esthetic value of the poem. In admitting that there is such a thing as a good poem or a bad poem, it demands an impersonal objective standard for judging the quality of the organization achieved. If I understand Dr. Richards rightly, this standard is to be found not in ethics or metaphysics or religion but in psychology. Now psychology, considered in isolation from other fields, is either a descriptive account of the result of introspection, or a practical science whose values are pragmatic; i.e., that is valuable which achieves most successfully a predetermined end. What is the end that Dr. Richards psychology assumes is given? I suspect that it is truth, righteousness and peace; I hope so. But suppose it is not? Then the psychological approach must end, as the Freudian psychology does, in making local, social, and historical conditions the criteria of normality against which every deviation is neurotic; art then becomes only a circuitous route to Honor, power, glory and the love of women. This either denies any esthetic values at all, or makes the latter in direct proportion to popular appeal, and the appreciation of any art of another period impossible. This is to subordinate esthetics to politics and, though it may be the real view of the militant marxist, it is certainly not what Dr. Richards intends. In seeking to account for the experience of all readers of poetry, that the metaphysical beliefs expressed in a poem are not solely decisive in our assessment of its value, he denies them any role at all. This is going too far. What he really establishes is the

interdependence of belief and expression of belief, the Word and the Flesh, Faith and Works, that what we think cannot be isolated from what we say and do. False beliefs in fact lead to bad poetry, and bad poetry leads to a falsification of belief. Thus in his poem Trees, a false esthetic has caused Joyce Kilmer to make statements which even from his own Catholic standpoint are heretical, while a false conception of human nature led Thomas Wolfe to write the grandiose rubbish he mistook for great prose. Dr. Richards once said that The Waste Land marked the severance of poetry from all beliefs. This seems to me an inaccurate description. The poem is about the absence of belief and its very unpleasant consequences; it implies throughout a passionate belief in damnation: that to be without belief is to be lost. I cannot see how those who do not share this belief, those who think that truth is relative or pragmatic, can regard the poem as anything but an interesting case history of Mr. Eliots neurotic state of mind. The combination of this acceptance of all values as relative with the social conditions of a modern industrial society makes confusion worse confounded. The machine has destroyed tradition in the old sense and the refusal to replace it by absolute presuppositions deliberately chosen and consciously held is leading us to disaster. In the first place when tradition disappears so does popular taste; in saying that he can sell anything, the advertiser is admitting that there is no such thing as the taste of the man in the street: and in the second, the centralization of an industrial society places the dictatorship of taste in the hands of a very small group of people. If we are ever to achieve anything remotely resembling a democratic culture, we must all begin by admitting the fact of this dictatorship, and the critics themselves must accept their responsibility and not mislead the public. Let me take as an illustration of irresponsibility a review by a distinguished American critic. I choose this example because the critic who wrote it is more fortunate than most in not having to be a publishers lackey and because though I have not read the novel I think that I should probably agree with his verdict.

As one whose heart is coated, I fear, with a thick daubing of common clay, I see in The Voyage a beguiling romance and not a piece of profound symbolism. Though far less oracular and pretentious than Mr. Morgans other novels, it is still fairly fancy for gross tastes like my own. Why does he really find Mr. Morgan pretentious? Because his sensibility is too trained to be deceived. But this is not the reason he gives. He pretends he is just a plain man who can see through all that; in other words it is the untrained intellect and sensibility that alone can make sound critical judgments. This is irresponsible, for he knows as well as anyone that it is precisely the hearts daubed with clay and the gross taste that fall for the genteel and the bogusly spiritual. Certainly we are all common clay and should admit the fact but with shame, not pride. What the critic ought to say is: Remember that like you and everyone else I am a weak fallible creature who will often make false judgments; and therefore you must not take everything I say as gospel. I as a reviewer promise to do my best to overcome my natural laziness and woolymindedness, and you who read me must try to do the same. This would be a beginning, but a great deal more should be expected. Not only should the critic realize the necessity of coordinating his esthetic values with values in all other spheres of life, but he has a duty in a democracy to tell the public what they are. If I am to trust a reviewers judgment upon a book I have not read, I want to know among other things his philosophical beliefs. If I find, for instance, that he believes in automatic progress I shall no more trust him than I would trust a philosopher who liked Brahms or Shelley. I do not, of course, mean to suggest that the State or anyone else should decree an orthodoxy to which all critics must conform or forever hold their peace, but only that, since life does not exist in a series of autonomous departments, esthetic values do not nourish themselves, and that the critic who does not realize this will be a bad critic who misleads the public and at best can only be right on occasions by luck.

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Earlier in this lecture I suggested that democracy and fascism are disagreed, not on the need for cultural unity, but on its nature and form. I would summarize these differences thus. Social Democracy 1. We cannot live without believing certain values to be absolute. These values exist, though our knowledge of them is imperfect, distorted by the limitations of our historical position and our personal character. However, if but only if we realize this, our knowledge can improve. 2. Because the existence of absolutes implies the unity of truth, the truths arrived at in different fields cannot ultimately conflict. All the arts and sciences must therefore be assumed to be of equal value, isomorphs of one common cooperative task, and no one of these must be subordinated to another. 3. Man is not, as the romantics imagine, good by nature. Men are equal not in their capacities and virtues but in their natural bias towards evil. No individual or class, therefore, however superior in intellect or character to the rest, can claim an absolute right to impose its view of the good upon them. Government must be democratic, the people must have a right to make their own mistakes and to suffer for them, because no one is free from error. 4. To deny to those who are in fact the elite of their age the right to impose their authority by force, does not deny their obligation to educate and persuade. Responsibility is in direct proportion to capacity. Fascism 1. The masses cannot live without believing certain values to be absolute. Such values, however, do not exist; therefore the state must coerce the masses into accepting as absolute what are in fact are myths. The choice of myth is dictated by its pragmatic value as conceived by the leaders of the state. 2. Because the nonexistence of absolutes implies the relativity of truth, the truths arrived at in different fields must

ultimately conflict. Unity and stability can therefore only be achieved under social pressure. Since it is the politician who commands the means of pressure, all the other arts and sciences must be subordinated to the political. 3. All men are not as the romantics imagined good by nature, nor are they equal. Further, since the political field is the determining one and the first element of political goodness is the capacity to exercise power, that capacity takes precedence over all others in defining the Good. The majority are bad, but a few are good and have therefore a right to direct the rest. Government must be authoritarian; the people must be protected from the consequences of their own mistakes by those who cannot err. 4. The power to exercise authority implies the obligation to do so. If we accept the democratic assumptions what consequences will follow in the field of criticism? 1. The critic who assumes that absolute values exist but that our knowledge of them is always imperfect will judge a work of art by the degree to which it transcends the artists personal and historical limitations, but he will not expect such transcendence ever to be complete, either in the artist or himself. He will equip himself with social and historical knowledge in order to overcome his own prejudices and to help the reader to see, through all the apparent differences in the technique and subject matter of great works, their underlying unity. He will be suspicious of all that is partisan, naturalistic, and personal, and of all such antitheses as Traditional versus Modern. 2. Assuming the unity of truth he will realize the interdependence of ethics, politics, science, esthetics, etc. and do his best to acquire as all-round a culture as possible. Assuming the equal value of these fields, he will in judging a book attempt to keep them all in mind without being dominated by any one of them. He will try to avoid, for example, both the puritanical attitude of the bourgeois censor of morals and the nihilist attitude of the bohemian who ignores or denies the effect of moral values upon works of art and the

moral influence which they do in fact exert. Slogans like Art for Arts Sake or Art for Politics Sake will be equally objectionable to him. 3. Admitting original sin, he will not believe in his own infallibility, or cause others to believe in it. He will be as chary of utterly condemning a book as of acclaiming it a masterpiece. He will flatter neither the masses by assuring them that what is popular must be good nor the highbrow by assuring them that what is avantgarde must be superior. Further he will conceive of art, like life, as being a self-discipline rather than a selfexpression. Like Henry James he will regard Clumsy life at her stupid work as something to be mastered and controlled. He will see artistic freedom and personality as dependent upon the voluntary acceptance of limitations, which alone are strong enough to test the genuine intensity of the original creative impulse; he will distrust the formless, the expansive, the unfinished, and the casual. 4. Accepting his responsibility, he will see his position of influence as an accident, an inheritance which he does not deserve and which he is incompetent to administer. For though it is absolutely required of a man that he should intend to help others, the power to do so is outside his control. No man can guarantee the effect upon others of the acts he does with the intention of helping them. Indeed all he knows for certain is that, since his actions are never perfect, he must always do others harm, so that the final aim of every critic and teacher must be to persuade others to do without him, to realize that the gifts of the spirit are never to be had at second hand. Thus no critic or teacher must deceive himself or others by pretending that he criticizes for their sake; he has no right either to criticize or teach unless he can say: I do this, whatever its effects, because I cannot help doing it. In the last analysis every act of critical judgment, like every other act in life, like life itself, rests on a decision, a wager which is irrevocable and in a sense absurd. But unless we have the courage and faith to take such decisions with full recognition of their arbitrary and conditional character, nothing can save us, individually or collectively, now or at any other time,

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from a dictatorship which we shall regret. Dictatorship has been defined as a state where everything that is not obligatory is forbidden, and in that sense man has

always lived under a dictatorship and always will. Our only choice lies between an external and false necessity passively accepted and an internal necessity

consciously decided, but that is the difference between slavery and freedom.

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(Why They Hate Us)

The Secret behind the Sanctions: How the U.S. Intentionally Destroyed Iraq's Water Supply
By Thomas J. Nagy Thomas J. Nagy teaches at the School of Business and Public Management at George Washington University. September 2001
Over the last two years, I've discovered documents of the Defense Intelligence Agency proving beyond a doubt that, contrary to the Geneva Convention, the U.S. government intentionally used sanctions against Iraq to degrade the country's water supply after the Gulf War. The United States knew the cost that civilian Iraqis, mostly children, would pay, and it went ahead anyway. Over the last two years, I've discovered documents of the Defense Intelligence Agency proving beyond a doubt that, contrary to the Geneva Convention, the U.S. government intentionally used sanctions against Iraq to degrade the country's water supply after the Gulf War. The United States knew the cost that civilian Iraqis, mostly children, would pay, and it went ahead anyway. The primary document, "Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities," is dated January 22, 1991. It spells out how sanctions will prevent Iraq from supplying clean water to its citizens. "Iraq depends on importing specialized equipment and some chemicals to purify its water supply, most of which is heavily mineralized and frequently brackish to saline," the document states. "With no domestic sources of both water treatment replacement parts and some essential chemicals, Iraq will continue attempts to circumvent United Nations Sanctions to import these vital commodities. Failing to secure supplies will result in a shortage of pure drinking water for much of the population. This could lead to increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease." The document goes into great technical detail about the sources and quality of Iraq's water supply. The quality of untreated water "generally is poor," and drinking such water "could result in diarrhea," the document says. It notes that Iraq's rivers "contain biological materials, pollutants, and are laden with bacteria. Unless the water is purified with chlorine, epidemics of such diseases as cholera, hepatitis, and typhoid could occur." The document notes that the importation of chlorine "has been embargoed" by sanctions. "Recent reports indicate the chlorine supply is critically low." Food and medicine will also be affected, the document states. "Food processing, electronic, and, particularly, pharmaceutical plants require extremely pure water that is free from biological contaminants," it says. The document addresses possible Iraqi countermeasures to obtain drinkable water despite sanctions. "Iraq conceivably could truck water from the mountain reservoirs to urban areas. But the capability to gain significant quantities is extremely limited," the document states. "The amount of pipe on hand and the lack of pumping stations would limit laying pipelines to these reservoirs. Moreover, without chlorine purification, the water still would contain biological pollutants. Some affluent Iraqis could obtain their own minimally adequate supply of good quality water from Northern Iraqi sources. If boiled, the water could be safely consumed. Poorer Iraqis and industries requiring large quantities of pure water would not be able to meet their needs." The document also discounted the possibility of Iraqis using rainwater. "Precipitation occurs in Iraq during the winter and spring, but it falls primarily in the northern mountains," it says. "Sporadic rains, sometimes heavy, fall over the lower plains. But Iraq could not rely on rain to provide adequate pure water." As an alternative, "Iraq could try convincing the United Nations or individual countries to exempt water treatment supplies from sanctions for

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humanitarian reasons," the document says. "It probably also is attempting to purchase supplies by using some sympathetic countries as fronts. If such attempts fail, Iraqi alternatives are not adequate for their national requirements." In cold language, the document spells out what is in store: "Iraq will suffer increasing shortages of purified water because of the lack of required chemicals and desalination membranes. Incidences of disease, including possible epidemics, will become probable unless the population were careful to boil water." The document gives a timetable for the destruction of Iraq's water supplies. "Iraq's overall water treatment capability will suffer a slow decline, rather than a precipitous halt," it says. "Although Iraq is already experiencing a loss of water treatment capability, it probably will take at least six months (to June 1991) before the system is fully degraded." This document, which was partially declassified but unpublicized in 1995, can be found on the Pentagon's web site at www.gulflink.osd.mil. (I disclosed this document last fall. But the news media showed little interest in it. The only reporters I know of who wrote lengthy stories on it were Felicity Arbuthnot in the Sunday Herald of Scotland, who broke the story, and Charlie Reese of the Orlando Sentinel , who did a follow-up.) Recently, I have come across other DIA documents that confirm the Pentagon's monitoring of the degradation of Iraq's water supply. These documents have not been publicized until now. The first one in this batch is called "Disease Information," and is also dated January 22, 1991. At the top, it says, "Subject: Effects of Bombing on Disease Occurrence in Baghdad." The analysis is blunt: "Increased incidence of diseases will be attributable to degradation of normal preventive medicine, waste disposal, water purification/distribution, electricity, and decreased ability to control disease outbreaks. Any urban area in Iraq that has received infrastructure damage will have similar problems." The document proceeds to itemize the likely outbreaks. It 'mentions "acute

diarrhea" brought on by bacteria such as E. coli, shigella, and salmonella, or by protozoa such as giardia, which will affect "particularly children," or by rotavirus, which will also affect "particularly children," a phrase it puts in parentheses. And it cites the possibilities of typhoid and cholera outbreaks. The document warns that the Iraqi government may "blame the United States for public health problems created by the military conflict." The second DIA document, "Disease Outbreaks in Iraq," is dated February 21, 1990, but the year is clearly a typo and should be 1991. It states: "Conditions are favorable for communicable disease outbreaks, particularly in major urban areas affected by coalition bombing." It adds: "Infectious disease prevalence in major Iraqi urban areas targeted by coalition bombing (Baghdad, Basrah) undoubtedly has increased since the beginning of Desert Storm ... Current public health problems are attributable to the reduction of normal preventive medicine, waste disposal, water purification and distribution, electricity, and the decreased ability to control disease outbreaks."T his document lists the "most likely diseases during next sixty-ninety, days (descending order): diarrheal diseases (particularly children); acute respiratory illnesses (colds and influenza); typhoid; hepatitis A (particularly children); measles, diphtheria, and pertussis (particularly children); meningitis, including meningococcal (particularly children); cholera (possible, but less likely)." Like the previous document, this one warns that the Iraqi government might "propagandize increases of endemic diseases." The third document in this series, "Medical Problems in Iraq," is dated March 15, 1991. It says: "Communicable diseases in Baghdad are more widespread than usually observed during this time of the year and are linked to the poor sanitary conditions (contaminated water supplies and improper sewage disposal) resulting from the war. According to a United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF)/World Health Organization report, the quantity of

potable water is less than 5 percent of the original supply, there are no operational water and sewage treatment plants, and the reported incidence of diarrhea is four times above normal levels. Additionally, respiratory infections are on the rise. Children particularly have been affected by these diseases." Perhaps to put a gloss on things, the document states, "There are indications that the situation is improving and that the population is coping with the degraded conditions." But it adds: "Conditions in Baghdad remain favorable for communicable disease outbreaks." The fourth document, "Status of Disease at Refugee Camps," is dated May 1991. The summary says, "Cholera and measles have emerged at refugee camps. Further infectious diseases will spread due to inadequate water treatment and poor sanitation." The reason for this outbreak is clearly stated again. "The main causes of infectious diseases, particularly diarrhea, dysentery, and upper respiratory problems, are poor sanitation and unclean water. These diseases primarily afflict the old and young children." The fifth document, "Health Conditions in Iraq, June 1991," is still heavily censored. All I can make out is that the DIA sent a source "to assess health conditions and determine the most critical medical needs of Iraq. Source observed that Iraqi medical system was in considerable disarray, medical facilities had been extensively looted, and almost all medicines were in critically short supply." In one refugee camp, the document says, "at least 80 percent of the population" has diarrhea. At this same camp, named Cukurca, "cholera, hepatitis type B, and measles have broken out." The protein deficiency disease kwashiorkor was observed in Iraq "for the first time," the document adds. "Gastroenteritis was killing children ... In the south, 80 percent of the deaths were children (with the exception of Al Amarah, where 60 percent of deaths were children)."

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The final document is "Iraq: Assessment of Current Health Threats and Capabilities," and it is dated November 15, 1991. This one has a distinct damagecontrol feel to it. Here is how it begins: "Restoration of Iraq's public health services and shortages of major medical materiel remain dominant international concerns. Both issues apparently are being exploited by Saddam Hussein in an effort to keep public opinion firmly against the U.S. and its Coalition allies and to direct blame away from the Iraqi government." It minimizes the extent of the damage. "Although current countrywide infectious disease incidence in Iraq is higher than it was before the Gulf War, it is not at the catastrophic levels that some groups predicted. The Iraqi regime will continue to exploit disease incidence data for its own political purposes." And it places the blame squarely on Saddam Hussein. "Iraq's medical supply shortages are the result of the central government's stockpiling, selective distribution, and exploitation of domestic and international relief medical resources." It adds: "Resumption of public health programs ... depends completely on the Iraqi government." As these documents illustrate, the United States knew sanctions had the capacity to devastate the water treatment system of Iraq. It knew what the consequences would be: increased outbreaks of disease and high rates of child mortality. And it was more concerned about the public relations nightmare for Washington than the actual nightmare that the sanctions created for innocent Iraqis. The Geneva Convention is absolutely clear. In a 1979 protocol relating to the "protection of victims of international armed conflicts," Article 54, it states: "It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove, or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies, and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the

civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive." But that is precisely what the U.S. government did, with malice aforethought. It "destroyed, removed, or rendered useless" Iraq's "drinking water installations and supplies." The sanctions, imposed for a decade largely at the insistence of the United States, constitute a violation of the Geneva Convention. They amount to a systematic effort to, in the DIAs own words, "fully degrade" Iraq's water sources. At a House hearing on June 7, Representative Cynthia McKinney, Democrat of Georgia, referred to the document "Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities" and said: "Attacking the Iraqi public drinking water supply flagrantly targets civilians and is a violation of the Geneva Convention and of the fundamental laws of civilized nations." Over the last decade, Washington extended the toll by continuing to withhold approval for Iraq to import the few chemicals and items of equipment it needed in order to clean up its water supply. Last summer, Representative Tony Hall, Democrat of Ohio, wrote to then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright "about the profound effects of the increasing deterioration of Iraq's water supply and sanitation systems on its children's health." Hall wrote, "The prime killer of children under five years of age-diarrheal diseaseshas reached epidemic proportions, and they now strike four times more often than they did in 1990 ... Holds on contracts for the water and sanitation sector are a prime reason for the increases in sickness and death. Of the eighteen contracts, all but one hold was placed by the U.S. government. The contracts are for purification chemicals, chlorinators, chemical dosing pumps, water tankers, and other equipment.

I urge you to weigh your decision against the disease and death that are the unavoidable result of not having safe drinking water and minimum levels of sanitation." For more than ten years, the United States has deliberately pursued a policy of destroying the water treatment system of Iraq, knowing full well the cost in Iraqi lives. The United Nations has estimated that more than 500,000 Iraqi children have died as a result of sanctions, and that 5,000 Iraqi children continue to die every month for this reason. No one can say that the United States didn't know what it was doing. See for Yourself All the DIA documents mentioned in this article were found at the Department of Defense's Gulflink site. To read or print documents: 1. go to www.gulflink.osd.mil 2. click on 'Declassified Documents' on the left side 0f the front page 3. the next page is entitled "Browse Recently Declassified Documents" 4. click on "search under "Declassified Documents" on the left side of that page 5. the next page is entitled "Search Recently Declassified Documents 6. enter search terms such as "disease information effects of bombing" 7. click on the search button 8. the next page is entitled "Data Sources 9. click on DIA 10. click on one of the titles It's not the easiest, best-organized site on the Internet, but I have found the folks at Gulflink to he helpful and responsive.

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The Hunt for the Red Menace:

How Government Intelligence Agencies and Private Right-wing Countersubversion Groups Forge Ad Hoc Covert Spy Networks that Target Dissidents as Outlaws
By Chip Berlet Current version: 2/2/93; (Original version 05/01/87) "Our First Amendment was a bold effort. . .to establish a country with no legal restrictions of any kind upon the subjects people could investigate, discuss, and deny. The Framers knew, better perhaps than we do today, the risks they were taking. They knew that free speech might be the friend of change and revolution. But they also knew that it is always the deadliest enemy of tyranny." --U. S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black http://www.publiceye.org/huntred/Hunt_For_Red_Menace.html
Preface While covering the January 26, 1991 Washington, D.C. demonstration against the Gulf War for the newspaper Human Events, reporter Cliff Kincaid contacted and quoted Sheila Louise Rees, who claimed the group coordinating the antiwar demonstration, the Campaign for Peace in the Middle East, was established "by the traditional hard-line peace activist organizations that have always worked with the Communist Party U.S.A...." including, according to Rees, the War Resisters League, American Friends Service Committee, Mobilization for Survival, and SANE/Freeze. The phrasing of the quote implied that the peace groups were really fronts for the Communist Party, U.S.A. The headline for Kincaid's February 9, 1991 article read, "Far Left Sparks Anti-War Protests: Effectively Supports Iraq," implying that in time of war, the peace activists in effect were guilty of being criminal traitors. The rhetoric, source, and outlet for the story are all familiar components of an institutionalized domestic countersubversion network. One arm of this network is comprised of private rightwing groups that spy on progressive dissidents and then publicize claims that the dissidents are engaged in potentiallyillegal activity. These biased claims are then used by the other arm of the network, counter-subversive units within government intelligence agencies, as a rationale to launch investigative probes which frequently interfere with legitimate protest acitivites of dissidents who are not engaged in criminal activity, but merely exercising their First Amendment rights. Human Events, is an ultra-conservative weekly newspaper that periodically carries articles claiming to have uncoverd subversive plots. And, as Human Events reporter Cliff Kincaid pointed out in his story on the Gulf War protest, Louise Rees is "publisher of Information Digest, the publication that monitors extremist groups." Starting in the late 1960's, S. Louise Rees and her long-time partner John Rees conducted political monitoring and surveillance operations on leftists for twenty-five years, circulating their reports in their Information Digest newsletter to a wide range of public and private groups. The Reeses supplied information to such private sector conservative groups as the Old Right John Birch Society, the Christian Right Church League of America, the New Right Heritage

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Foundation, and the Neo-conservative Anti- Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. The Reeses also provided information to government law enforcement and investigative agencies such as the FBI, congressional committees, and local police intelligence units. In addition, the Reeses supplied data to private sector industrial and corporate security departements. Allegations by the Reeses and other rightwing spies have been used by the FBI as a justification for launching massive investigative probes. These intrusive FBI investigations harassed, smeared, and disrupted groups that were not engaged in any criminal activity, but simply exercising their constitutional rights to dissent from offical government policies. For instance, articles by John Rees in Information Digest and a John Birch Society magazine, along with material from other right-wing sources, were used by the FBI as part of their justification to probe members and allies of the antiinterventionist group Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) as possible terrorists or foreign agents. In the suspicious world of countersubversion, information such as that printed in Human Events and Information Digest targets a liberal or leftist political movement as acting as a foreign agent for a hostile government, promoting communist revolution, or providing a cover for terrorism, all of which involve violations of criminal law. The view of treacherous subversion embraced by the ultra- conservative right was based on a paranoid conspiratorial world view with its historic roots in turnof-the-century xenophobic nativism. Some persons who share this paranoid worldview work in public government intelligence agencies and private rightwing groups, and they forge ad hoc covert spy networks to investigate dissidents and trade information and files on activists they suspect of subversion or other criminal activity. As government intelligence agencies came under public scrutiny in the 1970's, and some limited reforms were implemented, many functions of the government counter-subversion apparatus were privatized. When the Reagan Administration resuscitated the intelligence community, a parallel

public/private counter-subversion network emerged once again on the political scene. The loosely-knit domestic countersubversion network engages in an ongoing obsessive witch hunt against dissidents, surviving through different presidential administrations, working inside and outside of government agencies and congressional committees, and pursuing its goals in the public and private sectors with little regard for legislative or Constitutional safeguards. The network sees itself as composed of latter-day knights on a patriotic crusade, with all liberal or radical-left dissenters pictured as infidels. The existence of a public/private countersubversion network is not new. Paranoid nativism predates both the Cold War and the Red Menace. Even before the rise of Bolshevism there were periodic hysterias in the U.S. centered around imagined subversive plots by Papists, Freemasons, and the Bavarian Illuminati. The scapegoat is interchangeable, but the process remains constant. With the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the counter-subversion network quickly shifted its scapegoats from the minions of the Red Menace to the threat posed by other contemporary worldwide movements seen as threatening to U.S. national security interests. These perceived threats include narco-terrorism, Arab terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, spying by economic competitors, militant environmentalists, homosexuals, and other members of movements which are stereotyped and then presented as scapegoats. The civil liberties problems created by the excesses of this domestic countersubversive network remain unresolved, as was demonstrated by revelations in 1993 of an intelligence network that involved persons associated with the San Francisco Police Department, the CIA, and the AntiDefamation League of B'nai B'rith. In at least one instance, information collected by an ADL associate was provided to the foreign intelligence service of Israel, and one ADL contract agent, Roy Bullock, also sold information on anti-apartheid groups to the government intelligence service of South Africa. This incident was not an aberration, but another example of the unrestrained counter- subversion network in action.

Introduction Following the end of World War II, a coalition of conservative, ultraconservative, right-wing and liberal anticommunist political movements and groups organized support for high levels of military spending, promoted the use of covert action abroad, and cultivated the acceptance of obsessive governmental secrecy, surveillance and repression at home. In the domestic public sphere this coalition shaped an overwhelming willingness among citizens to trade real civil liberties for illusionary national security safeguards. Some observers of this phenomenon see it as having fueled Cold War antagonisms and resulted in what they term the "National Security State." Within the United States there developed a covert apparatus to suuport domestic anticommunism in the form of a loosely-knit infrastructure where both public and private intelligence agents and right-wing ideologues shared information both formally and informally. The result was an ad-hoc domestic counter-subversion network. Oliver North relied on elements of this institutionalized counter-subversion network to raise funds for the Contras and serve as a public lightning rod to hide his own government- backed covert operation. In fact, some of the same players North orchestrated in the off-the-shelf private foreign policy drama were also involved in an off-the-shelf private domestic intelligence network. The private domestic intelligence network is that sector of the counter-subversion network which conducts surveillance of progressive groups, and then feeds the information to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other public law enforcement and intelligence agencies, as well as other private right-wing groups, and in some cases corporate and industrial security. Some of the groups involved in the domestic intelligence network utilized by North were outgrowths of McCarthy Period witch hunts, others were projects of former agents who fled federal employ in the wake of civil-liberties reforms of intelligence agencies prompted by the intelligence agency scanndals of the 1970's, still others were new groups created by ideologues of the New Right.

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The counter-subversion network is comprised of many overlapping institutional and individual components: Individuals employed at government law enforcement and intelligence gathering agencies on the federal, state and local level. Staff of various congressional committees and executive agencies. Agents and officers of foreign intelligence services. Private associations made up primarily or exclusively of law enforcement personnel that share information, run computerized data exchanges, and conduct training seminars on suspected subversives and terrorists. Associations of former intelligence agents that facilitate the sharing of information on subversives and jobs. Private security firms with industrial and commePrivate spies who supply information to a variety of groups as part of a commercial enterprise. Corporate security specialists who utilize political intelligence operatives, hire private firms to supply political intelligence, or share intelligence information with their public and private counterparts. Groups specializing in workshops and seminars predicated on the supposition that demands for socialchange are frequently covers for foreign "active measures," disinformation, criminal subversion, or terrorism. Private right-wing intelligence gathering groups which frequently publish their allegations in small limited- circulation newsletters. Blacklisting publications that report on the activities of community, labor, antinuclear, civil-rights, peace and social justice activists. Ultra-conservative and far-right magazines and newspapers and other publicly-disseminated publications that target liberal and left dissidents. Havens within the U.S. government for members of the counter- subversion network include congressional committees such as the now-disbanded House Committee on Un-American Activities and the Senate Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (especially the counterterrorism section), military investigative units especially Naval Intelligence, certain sectors of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and many others. In pursuit of their goal of exposing and stopping alleged subversion, government intelligence agents periodically make tactical alliances with conservative, ultraconservative, and even anti-democratic far

right political groups and movements, both domestic and foreign. Working cooperatively, the public and private components of the domestic countersubversion network carry out legal, electoral, political, and extra- legal attacks on dissidents-primarily on the political left. Political surveillance, by private or public agencies, is designed to preserve and protect the status quo. Often, the tactic of infiltration or surveillance is used to gather real, imagined, or invented mud to sling at social change organizers in order to smear their public image and neutralize their organizing efforts. Even when the spying fails to turn up any illegal (or even faintly embarrassing) information, the reports are dutifully filed, and frequently traded back and forth between private and public intelligence-gathering agencies. Eventually the information percolates into conservative and right-wing publications. Among the scapegoats historically promoted by the counter-subversion network: the Soviet military threat, the international communist Red Menace, KGB spies, airplane hijackers, terrorists, drug lords, secrets about U.S. nuclear weapons, rioting by urban Blacks, persons organizing against the war in Vietnam, the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, political radicals, Palestinian rights activists, members of the Arab community in the U.S., protesters against U.S. policy in Central America, environmental activists, feminists, persons calling for equal rights based on sexual preference, and AIDS activists. Each of these targets have been portrayed as powerful sinister forces attacking the very foundations of America. Each, we have been told, could only be stopped by using law enforcement and intelligence agency techniques that required trading civil liberties for safety and security. Real terrorists, airplane hijackers, and others engaged in criminal activity can and should be prosecuted for their crimes-but for the most part, the persons spied on by the public and private components of the counter-subversion network are not criminals, but persons simply seeking to exercise their First Amendment rights to speech, association, religion, or petitioning to redress grievances.

The domestic counter-subversive network was built by persons who share a perception that the U.S. is constantly at peril from foreign attack or domestic subversion by those who wittingly or unwittingly serve the goals of radical politics, global communism, or terrorism. This is not a rational critique of communism, radical political theory, or actual terrorism, but a non-rational ideological construct which resembles the Manichean rightist worldview described in Professor Richard Hofstadter's classic work The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Despite its non-rational metaphysical nature, the views of these counter- subversion ideologues have consequences which are real and documentable. Many authors have discussed the recurring themes of political repression by government and private groups, and noted how the end result was a defense of the status quo that benefits powerful ecomomic and political interests. Historian Frank Donner's 500-page book The Age of Surveillance: The Aims & Methods of America's Political Intelligence System.<$F Donner, Frank. The Age of Surveillance: The Aims & Methods of America's Political Intelligence System. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1980.> is considered the definitive study of this phenomenon and its relationship to federal law enforcement probes of dissent. Donner followed with Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Political Repression in Urban America.<$F Donner, Frank. Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Political Repression in Urban America. Berkeley: University of California, 1991.> In Protectors of Privilege<M> Donner showed how local police intelligence units-often dubbed Red Squads-subverted the Constitution while justifying their actions as preserving democracy in the fight against subversion. Because they believed the country was on the brink of ruin due to internal subversion organized by communist agents, local police Red Squads not only conducted surveillance and built dossiers on a wide range of activists, but also worked with far-right vigilante groups to carry out break- ins and assaults, sometimes with an assist from the FBI.

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Political Repression in Modern America, 1870 to Present, by Robert J. Goldstein is another lengthy look at government and corporate attacks on dissident political groups through the years. <$F Goldstein, Robert J. Political Repression in Modern America, 1870 to Present, 2nd edition. Rochester VT: Schenkman Books, Inc., 1978.> Murray B. Levin examined the underlying social and political forces that create repressive periods such as the McCarthy Period and the Red Scare of the 1920's in Political Hysteria in America-the Democratic Capacity for Repression.<M>. <$F Levin, Murray B. Political Hysteria in America-the Democratic Capacity for Repression. New York: Basic Books, 1971.><M> In Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement, Ward Churchill & Jim Vander Wall wrote a chilling account of the murderous tactics used against non-white political activists during the FBI's COINTELPRO program and in the years that followed. <$F Churchill, Ward & Jim Vander Wall. Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement. Boston: South End Press, 1988.><M> When some academics challenged their thesis they wrote COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States, which uses numerous actual FBI documents to make a strong case for convincing skeptics that COINTELPRO-type activity continued after the name was shelved. <$F Churchill, Ward & Jim Vander Wall. COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States. Boston: South End Press, 1989.><M> Both books discuss the way in which political repression involves portraying the targeted group as essentially an outlaw formation. It Did Happen Here: Recollections of Political Repression in America by Bud Schultz and Ruth Schultz <$F Schultz, Bud and Ruth Schultz.It Did Happen Here: Recollections of Political Repression in America. , Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989> uses interviews with victims of political repression in the U.S. to construct a

powerful indictment of the myth of equal justice under law in the U.S. Perhaps the nadir of illegal government attacks on noncriminal dissidents occurred during the FBI's secret COINTELPRO operations in the 1950's, 1960's and early 1970's. "Racial Matters": The FBI's Secret File on Black America, 1960-1972 by Kenneth O'Reilly <$F O'Reilly, Kenneth. "Racial Matters": The FBI's Secret File on Black America, 1960-1972. New York: Free Press, 1988.>documents how under COINTELPRO the FBI undermined the civil rights movement while posing as its defender against violent attacks by the Klan and other white supremacists. Break-Ins, Death Threats and the FBI: The Covert War Against the Central America Movement<M> by Ross Gelbspan, a veteran Boston Globe<M> reporter, examines the pattern of robberies and attacks reported by persons and groups opposing Reagan Administration policies in Central America, especially CISPES. <$F Gelbspan, Ross. Break-Ins, Death Threats and the FBI: The Covert War Against the Central America Movement. Boston: South End Press, 1991><M>. Gelbspan reported that hundreds of offices, homes, and cars were broken into, files were ransacked or stolen, but valuable equipment was left untouched. Several years, hundreds of interviews and many thousands of pages of FBI files later, Gelbspan concluded the perpetrators of the robberies will probably remain a mystery, but reveals the FBI repeatedly lied to Congress about the extent and purpose of its investigations into the same network of Central America activists victimized by the robberies. Gelbspan documents how the FBI forged back-channel ties to farright anti-communist groups in the U.S. and a shadowy network of government agencies and death squads in El Salvador, and how the press was used in the campaign. The chart in the Gelbspan book (with the addition of ADL), is an accurate sketch of the dimensions of the countersubversion network. Brian Glick summarized many of the techniques of government intelligence abuse in War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It<M> and offered suggestions on how to fight back. <$F Glick, Brian. War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About

It.<M> Boston: South End Press, 1989.><M> He included an analysis of the relationship between U.S. political economy and domestic covert action. Eve Pell's The Big Chill looked at the erosion of civil liberties during the first years of the Reagan Administration, and the role played by right-wing and authoritarian ideology. In The Terrorism Industry: The Experts and Institutions That Shape View of Terror, authors Edward Herman & Gerry O'Sullivan <$F Herman, Edward & Gerry O'Sullivan. The Terrorism Industry: The Experts and Institutions That Shape View of Terror, New York: Pantheon, 1990>argue that our national security mania has even spawned a specialized industry of self-promoting experts who manipulate our fears by exaggerating the actual threat of terrorism, and then tell us if we give up more rights the problem could be solved. Another book detailing the high price we pay for our reliance on secret spying is The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity In The Global Drug Trade by Alfred W. McCoy<$F McCoy, Alfred W. The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity In The Global Drug Trade.Lawrence Hill Books, 1991.> McCoy, in this revised edition, unravels the CIA's long-standing links to drug-running networks used as allies during counter-insurgency operations. McCoy's first version of this book was published during the Vietnam War and dealt primarily with the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia. McCoy traces CIA drugtainted political operations from today back to post-war France where our government secretly funded anticommunist political parties and labor unions and a group of drug smugglers who helped break a dockworkers strike. When our national security interests are perceived as threatened, apparently the ends justify the means. This view was harshly criticized in The Secret Government: The Constitution In Crisis. by Bill Moyers. <$FMoyers, Bill, Maryland: Seven Locks Press, ]]]].> Moyer stepped back to examine the covert operations revealed in Iran-Contragate and concluded:

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=== "What is secret is often squalid as well. In the dark, men were able to act contrary to the values they proclaimed in public. Paying service to democratic ends, they made league with scoundrels whose interest is anything but the survival of democracy...today's New Right ideologues believe in the omnipotence of the goal and the irrelevance of the deed. So their tactics are those of the enemy they hate and fear, and they award America's franchises to con men, hustlers, terrorists, racketeers, murderers and other sleazy characters who for a fee sign up for the crusade. Historian Henry Steele Commanger, in his introduction to Moyer's book, noted that "Corruption of language is a special form of deception that recent administrations and the Pentagon have brought to a high degree of perfection....Along with the corruption of language goes, of course, the corruption of truth. If there were lies during the Vietnam years-and lies there were-nothing can compare with the corruption of truth of the Reagan administration." Washington's War on Nicaragua by Holly Sklar <$F Sklar, Holly. Washington's War on Nicaragua, Boston: South End Press, 1988>showed how the Reagan administration worked with far-right groups to use patriotic language to reframe the Contras, a CIA- spawned antiSandinista army, as "Freedom Fighters." It's not just Reagan and the Republicans, of course. Harry Truman, a Democrat, was the first President who relied on the rhetoric of freedom while secretly sending the CIA on anti-democratic (and frequently disastrous) foreign covert operations. How can this happen? According to William W. Keller in The Liberals and J. Edgar Hoover, <$F Keller, William W. The Liberals and J. Edgar Hoover. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989>the problem goes back to the issues raised by Moyers regarding balance of powers. Keller believed liberal congresspersons are uncomfortable having oversight over agencies of police power, and by default, they allow their more reactionary colleagues to craft agencies such as the FBI into tools of repression. Another structuralist view comes from Under Cover: Police Surveillance in

America. by Gary T. Marx, 1988, Twentieth Century Fund/University of California Press. <$FMarx, Gary T. Under Cover: Police Surveillance in America. California: Twentieth Century Fund/University of California Press, 1988> This thoughtful critical analysis of undercover police techniques warns of several serious Constitutional problems posed by the uncritical expansion of secretive undercover operations in recent years. Many of the authors cited above conclude that intelligence activities, whether domestic or foreign, almost inevitably turn toward undemocratic techniques without unequivocal guidelines, firm congressional oversight, and thoughtful judicial intervention. All of these constraints have failed to keep government surveillance abuse from recurring. The process is not just a historical oddity. Covert Cadre: Inside the Institute for Policy Studies by S. Steven Powell <$F Steven, Powell, S. Covert Cadre: Inside the Institute for Policy Studies. Green Hill Publishers, 1987> demonstrates that rightwing paranoid conspiracy theories continue to be treated seriously in some circles. Here a Washington-based leftleaning think tank, the Institute for Policy Studies, was portrayed as a den of communists subversives plotting with KGB agents to bring down the government. Intelligence Requirements for the 1990's: Collection, Analysis, Counterintelligence, and Covert Action edited by Roy Godson <$F Godson, Roy, ed. Intelligence Requirements for the 1990's: Collection, Analysis, Counterintelligence, and Covert Action. Lexington Books/D.C. Heath, ]] is a collection of hard-line recommendations which provides what academic Diana Reynolds calls a "blueprint for creating a virtual U.S. police state". This shopping list for the guardians of post-Constitutional America is a sequel to the equally-onerous Intelligence Requirements for the 1980's which was used as a guide by the Reagan administration. Godson authored a 1993 report Assessing Accusations That U.S. Journalists Worked For Moscow: Criteria for Testing "Agents of Influence" Charges. Godson, an associate professor at Georgetown University, coordinates the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence, a

group devoted to finding rationalizations for perpetuating the primary role of intelligence agencies in our country's foreign and domestic policy debates. The Consortium has spawned the Working Group on Intelligence Reform which publishes reports such as "The FBI's Changing Missions in the 1990's." The counter-subversion network of the political right was involved in the Palmer Raids, the McCarthy Period, the FBI's illegal COINTELPRO operations, and political repression during the Reagan years. Donner, especially, discusses the existence of a counter-subversion network that persistently survives through a variety of political and social conditions, and is a deeply- rooted institutional and ideological presence in American society. The network is seldom discussed publicly since it is secretive by nature, even paranoid, with some sectors constantly on the alert for penetration by subversives or foreign agents. It frequently cloaks its activities by invoking fears that its critics are breaching national security or assisting terrorism. The counter-subversion network should not be viewed as an exotic conspiracy, merely a loose coalition of groups and individuals, some of whom manipulate a conspiratorial view about subversion to justify maintaining the staus quo so they and their mentors can retain the perquisites of power and profit margins. Like any successful social movement, the countersubversion network has an informal yet frequently cooperative national infrastructure that provides educational and ideological resources. The paranoid and authoritarian views of the countersubversion network in the U.S. are circulated and perpetuated through nativist publications, institutions and events, adminstered by a core of persons who have made counter-subversion and counter-terrorism a profession. The key component of the countersubversion network is the various political intelligence specialists who actually conduct political spying and primary information gathering. John and S. Louise Rees and their Information Digest newsletter are perhaps the best known practitioners in this field. Other groups that have supplied information on political dissidents since the 1970's include the Council for Inter-American Security, the

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American Sentinel newsletter (renamed back to its original title Pink Sheet on the Left), Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church network, Young American's for Freedom and its spin-off Young America's Foundation, the Council for the Defense of Freedom, Students for a Better America, and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. The LaRouchians are publicly shunned by many on the political right, but their information regularly showed up in right wing (and a few left wing) publications. There are scores of right-wing magazines, newspapers, and newsletters that ply the reader with tales of progressive plots to plunder free enterprise in America. These include the weekly newspaper Human Events, newsletters from Beverly LaHaye's Concerned Women for America, Reed Irvine's Accuracy in Media, the Schlafly family's Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation, Fred Schwarz's Christian AntiCommunism Campaign, and Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum. There are hundreds of other periodicals, as well as publications such as books, pamphlets, and flyers. In the past, films, filmstrips, and slide shows were circulated. As they became more popular and relatively inexpensive, audiotapes and videotapes have been utilized, and a few computerized telecommunications networks and bulletin board systems have emerged. Radio talk shows and syndicated radio and television programs reach large audiences, with Rush Limbaugh, Pat Robertson, Chuck Harder and Tom Valentine among the major information sources attacking liberal conspiracies. Every week there are dozens of direct mail appeals with gossipy tidbits about leftist treachery and predicting doom if checks are not in the mail to help counter the subversion. A number of rightist think tanks, membership organizations, lobbying groups, trade and professional groups, internship centers, direct mail concerns, and a handful of academic institutions create a permanent institutional infrastructure to keep counter-subversive theories alive and fresh. A leading purveyor of counter-subversion theories during the Reagan Adminstration was the Heritage Foundation and its various publications including Policy Review. Others include the Hoover Institution at

Stanford, and the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FRPI) at the University of Pennsylvania. The FPRI journal Orbis was particularly of interest due to its glorification of authoritarian solutions to numerous problems. The Free Congress Foundation run by New Right strategist Paul Weyrich circulates many publications that reflect its ultra-conservative, reactionary and narrow fundamentalist views. The exclusive and secretive Council for National Policy serves as a network and resource for the nativist right. The Madison Foundation trains conservative campus activists in countersubversion, and funds a network of conservative campus publications. The word is spread through myriad events including speeches, conferences, investment seminars, conferences, and training workshops. For instance, the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation holds weekend workshops and an annual conference spreading the gospel of anticommunism. The educational effort includes slide shows at American Legion halls, speeches at Reserve Officers Association conventions, and workshops at the World Anti-Communist League annual convention. American Security Council films targeted at Republican audiences provided a forum where the public and private contra aid networks did their propaganda and fundraising. In one "documentary" film , dominoes topple up the isthmus of Central America toward downtown Houston. Reader's Digest, an occasional source of paranoid countersubversion, tolds us in the 1980's that antinuclear and pro-peace activists were unwitting dupes who spread KGB disinformation as part of a Soviet "activemeasures" campaign to weaken the West. One newsletter published by the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade even suggested the Soviets exploited abortion, pornography, homosexuality, and mass murder to demoralize the American spirit in preparation for invasion. To understand contemporary countersubversion operations it is necessary to study their lineage which traces back to Nativism, through the anti-radical antilabor manias of the 1920's and 1930's, and from there to McCarthy Period theories developed to serve the ideological needs of the Cold War-theories which have steered this country away from the Constitutional

guarantees of liberty and toward the authoritarianism implicit in the demands of the National Security State. The activities of the FBI provide a clear example of how this Nativist authoritarian phenomenon functions as the domestic component of the "National Security State". Drawing resources from both the public and private sector, the FBI has a long history of collaborating with rightwing groups to attack movements for peace and social justice. Other federal agencies also play a role, as do local and state law enforcement agencies. At the same time there is competition among the groups. The Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit was established in part to serve as a horizontal information sharing network among state and local intelligence units frustrated by the fact that the FBI expected information to flow up the ladder into their files, but seldom sent information down the ladder to the state and local units. While the revelations of Watergate and the Church Committee in the 1970's resulted in temporary restraints against the public side of the domestic intelligence apparatus, these gains were soon erased by the Reagan Administration which began a broad assualt on civil liberties under a variety of national security slogans. The FBI probe of the anti-interventionist group Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) reflected the cooperation of the public and private counter-subversion network, but was ahistorically dismissed by the Congress and the media as an abberation. The CISPES investigation involved almost every FBI Field Office and eventually involved the creation of file indices on 200 other organizations. When the CISPES probe was revealed in documents obtained under the federal Freedom of Information Act, the FBI contended it was an aberration. Yet even a cursory review of FBI history argues against that claim. Since its inception, the FBI has conducted endless surveillance and infiltration of U.S. dissident groups in a vain quest for the domestic incarnation of the "Red Menace". While certain aspects of the FBI surveillance of CISPES prompted media coverage, Congressional hearings and lawsuits, there has been almost no public

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discussion of the underlying political assumptions and justifications which fuel most counter-subversive investigations by both public and private agencies in the U.S., leaving the door open for continuing FBI abuses against Constitutionallyprotected freedom of speech and association. The FBI investigation of CISPES was not an aberration, but the logical outcome of the long-standing consciously-implemented institutional policies of the counter-subversion network. The Bush Administration continued the domestic counter-subversive intelligence polices of the Reagan Administration, and there was little reason to believe the situation would change under the Clinton Administration. This study sets out to examine the assumptions behind the vain hunt for the Red Menace. It will argue that the views of the public/private counter-subversion network are based on a faulty (and frequently paranoid) analysis of how peace, justice and social change organizations function in our society, and erroneous assumptions regarding the acceptable limits of political discourse in a pluralistic democracy. The study will describe and analyze both the institutional and ideological framework of the domestic counter-subversive network, and will examine the incidents and linkages revealed during the various brief moments of public scrutiny from the Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920 to the immigration raids of today. From Nativism to McCarthyism Developing the Theories of Countersubversion The modern counter-subverion witchhunters are part of an authoritarian trend in the U.S. which has its roots in the Nativist anti-progressive movement. At the turn of the century this Nativist movement fought the growth of labor unions and the arrival of ethnically-diverse immigrants. It coalesced during the turmoil of the Bolshevik revolution and World War I and popularized the idea of the global Red Menace. Even before the FBI was established the Justice Department relied on private nativist groups to help smash dissent and ferret out alleged subversion. Frank

Donner traces the roots of this network in The Age of Surveillance: "Beginning in 1918, private intelligence forces emerged to combat radicalism, labor unionism, and opposition to the war," Donner observed. Louis F. Post, the Labor Department official who signed the deportation order for anarchist Emma Goldman after the Palmer Raids in 1919-1920, later wrote a book, The Deportations Delirium of Nineteen-Twenty where he argued that no evidence of a widespread subversive conspiracy among immigrants ever emerged: <$F Post, Louis F. The Deportations Delerium of NineteenTwenty. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1923. P. 209> === "The records seldom showed any cause whatever for deportation other than a purely technical one. It seemed to me at the time, and the impression has been deepened by subsequent developments, that if there were any alien conspirators in the United States who were at all dangerous to its institutions, its free institutions, the detectives of the Department of Justice did not "hit their trail." === "As a rule the hearings showed that the aliens arrested to be workingmen of good character, who had never been arrested before, who were not anarchists nor revolutionists nor obnoxious to the spirit of our laws in any other sense. Many of them were faithful fathers of Americanborn children. Nearly all had been subject to arbitrary arrest, to long detention in default of bail beyond the means of hardworking wage-earners to furnish, and for nothing more reprehensible, so far as intent counted, than affiliating with friends of their own race, country and language. Cases in which there was substantial proof of any unlawful act with sinister intent or guilty knowledge were exceptions-very rare exceptions.<$F The Deportations Delirium of Nineteen-Twenty> According to Donner, the nativist countersubversion movement became an institutional fixture in the American political scene and took on a metaphysical and crusading nature as part of its hunt for the Red Menace: === "The root anti-subversive impulse was fed by the Menace. Its power strengthened with the passage of time, by the late twenties its influence had become more pervasive and folkish. Bolshevism

came to be identified over wide areas of the country by God-fearing Americans as the Antichrist come to do eschatological battle with the children of light. A slightly secularized version, widely-shared in rural and small-town America, postulated a doomsday conflict between decent upright folk and radicalism-alien, satanic, immorality incarnate. The Nativist network eventually transformed into a network of right-wing ideologues who saw communist subversion behind every international movement for national liberation and every domestic movement for peace and social justice. This type of simple-minded conspiracy mentality was discussed by Professor Richard Hofstadter who traced its historic influence in American rightwing movements in, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. According to Hofstadter, paranoid movements rise and fall periodically, and appeal to people fearful about the world political and economic situation, and longing for simple solutions to complex problems. The use of scapegoats is common among these movements, said Hofstadter who laid out the three "basic elements of...right-wing thought" shared by many conservatives who succumbed to paranoid forms of conspiracy thinking in the 1950's and 1960's: === "First, there has been the now familiar sustained conspiracy, running over more than a generation, and reaching its climax in Roosevelt's New Deal, to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism. . . . === "The second contention is that top government officialdom has been so infiltrated by Communists that American policy, at least since the days leading up to Pearl Harbor, has been dominated by sinister men who were shrewdly and consistently selling out American national interests. === "The final contention is that the country is infused with a network of communist agents. . .so that the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media are engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans. One primary role of this right-wing network is the dissemination of

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propaganda on what Donner calls the fear centered twin myths of "an all-powerful internal subversive enemy and a permanently endangered national security." As Donner explains: === "A pattern of support and collaboration between government and private intelligence forces dominates the history of radical-hunting in this country. The values and priorities of American Nativism have decisively influenced both official and private intelligence activities. As a vital ideological resource of American capitalism, nativism has kept the counter-subversive tradition burning by continuing and enlarging its own private intelligence activities. There is a symbiotic relationship between right-wing hard-liners in law enforcement and the radical hunters in Congress and the private sector. Law enforcement has long relied on the political right-wing to fight subversion, and this has always been especially true when it comes to the FBI response to critics who point out the FBI's anti-democratic ideological mission. Yet whether or not a group or individual cooperated with government law enforcement agencies and congressional committees or choose to resist, the overall effect on society was to crush dissent and narrow the acceptable range of political discourse in the United States. The Global Red Menace The anti-communism of the domestic counter-subversion network was not a rationale critique of communism as a political theory, or communist repression of dissidents, or communist foreign intervention, but a zealous view of communism, real or perceived, as the Red Menace. The most extreme form of this view saw the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire and believed there was no compromise with godless Satanic communism. Premised on this obsessive paranoid phobia, the anti-communist countersubversive movement in the U.S. pursued through public and private channels the increased reliance on covert action as a major pillar of U.S. foreign policy, and secrecy and anti-subversive witch-hunts as a significant factor in domestic policy. Since this movement wanted to "Rollback" communism and believed in the

inevitability of war with nations that were communist (or were perceived as communist), it saw a need to maintain a high level of defense spending for military preparedness, and the need for constant domestic surveillance against internal subversion. Civil liberties are seen as always secondary to national security. Acheiving "Law and Order" is seen requiring the use of state power to force conformity. It is appropriate to refer to this movement as sharing an ideology that is paranoid and authoritarian and manifesting itself most concretely in terms of anti- communism and anti-liberalism with an undercurrent of reactionary anti-modernism, and, in a few instances, echoes of fascist theories of nationalism. Counter-subversion Theory & the Cold War The counter-subversive nativist views on subversion were adapted to the geopolitical realities of the post WWII period to form the basis of the Cold War, the political witch hunts culminating in the McCarthy Period, and a number of other events and movements which combined to create the National Security State. The Cold War consensus in the 1950's was forged primarily through a coalition of three disparate groups: Liberals, such as those in the State Department and analysis section of the CIA. Conservatives and reactionaries such as those in Congress and the operational section of CIA. Nativist xenophobes such as Sen. Joseph McCarthy and those who would later form the secretive John Birch Society. There was certainly contention among these groups. The liberals distrusted the reactionaries as authoritarian and militarist and distrusted the nativists as antiintellectual proto-fascists. The conservatives distrusted the liberals as naive dupes who flirted with socialism and distrusted the nativists as zealous and isolationist. The nativists distrusted the conservatives as rich elitists and interventionists and distrusted the liberals as either naive "one-world-government" dupes or witting communist agents. Remember that McCarthy, the quintessential nativist was seeking out communists and "fellow travellers" in the

State Department, which at the time was already actively fighting communism. But nativists were isolationist, and thought every attempt to involve the United States in global politics was part of an internationalist plot, even attempts to involve the country in fighting global communism. Still, there was agreement among the three main political tendencies that the spread of communism had to be stopped if their unique (often contradictory) vision of Western civilization was to survive. A seminal work in shaping the Cold War was William R. Kintner's 1950 book "The Front is Everywhere" in which Kintner lays out his analysis of the communist style of subversion through a "Communist Fifth Column" involved in otherwise legal "political activity." === "The Communist plan, as fashioned by Lenin, is always to `carry on work that is possible,' work that will finally end in `commencing and carrying out the national armed insurrection'. <$F Kintner, Front: p. 225. Emphasis in the original.> According to Kintner, since the ultimate goal of communist subversion is armed revolution and the destruction of the democratic state, it is a national security necessity to ferret out the presence of communists in organizations involved in non-criminal political activity. === "If American Communists wore the uniform of the Red Army, steps would be taken to safeguard the national security by preventing the operation of the Communist party's intelligence net and its fifth-column activity in behalf of a foreign power. <$F Kintner, Front: p. 246.> === "How can they be stopped? Are additional laws needed?. . .Is the American judicial system flexible enough to convict the professional revolutionaries of a quasi-military party, whose mode of operation is designed to make convictions on the accepted rules of evidence next to impossible? <$F Kintner, Front: p. 246> === "The passage of a law outlawing Communist conspiratorial practices would only be the first step. . . .A law- enforcing problem to overcome would be the procurement and training of a sufficient number of agents to infiltrate into every corner of the Communist

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conspiracy. <$F Kintner, Front: p. 250.> === "The practical problem involved is the development of a concise legal doctrine on the question of proof through association. Because of the very nature of the Communist party, the government may have to fall back on such proof. <$F Kintner, Front: p. 251.> === "The false accusation of `Communist' against citizens who desire some change in the existing order does much harm and no good. The best way to stop these malicious attacks is to distinquish accurately between loyal American liberals and radicals and those professional revolutionaries who take their orders from Moscow. <$F Kintner, Front: p. 251> The National Lawyers Guild One group that came under attack as a front group during the 1950's was the National Lawyers Guild (NLG). Red baiting of the NLG began soon after the organization was established in 1937, but for several years the public mood was such that the charges never gained wide circulation or prompted any concern. Articles in the "New York Times" from the period show a dramatic change in the situation during the late 1940's. Up until 1948, articles on the NLG cited in the "Times" index center on substantive activities and positions of the NLG on law and legislation. Starting in 1948, however, the Times coverage of the NLG through the next ten years centers on charges relating to subversion. Much of the "documentation" on the NLG as a communist front can be traced to Congressional hearings held during the McCarthy Period. This labelling was part of a coordinated campaign involving the Congressional committees, the FBI and right-wing groups. New York attorney Michael Krinsky, who represents the National Lawyers Guild in its lawsuit against 30 years of FBI surveillance, points to an incident during the McCarthy period when an FBI wiretap revealed that Yale Law School professor Thomas Emerson was discussing with the NLG the publication of a study criticizing as unconstitutional a variety of FBI investigative methods. The FBI passed the information to Richard Nixon, then a congressman on the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and

pursuaded him to hold a press conference announcing a HUAC probe of the NLG as a communist front. According to Krinsky, a partner in the law firm Rabinowitz, Boudin, Standard, Krinsky, Lieberman, the FBI then publicly launched an investigation of the NLG and privately fed inflammatory information to right-wing and anti-communist contacts. Certain leaders of the American Bar Association even worked with the FBI in a campaign to destroy the National Lawyers Guild. Fred Schlafly, Phyllis's husband, was a leader in early attempts at redbaiting the Guild. Hoover had the FBI write a report (which HUAC issued under the Committee's name) without hearings or an investigation. The report was titled "Report on the National Lawyers Guild: Legal Bulwark of the Communist Party." Krinsky said, "The FBI files reveal that HUAC's report on the NLG, which almost destroyed the Guild by labeling it the `legal bulwark of the Communist Party,' was not the product of HUAC's attempt to carry out any legislative function, but was issued by the Committee on the sole instigation of the FBI." The NLG fought back in court and eventually forced the government to remove it from a list of so-called "subversive" groups, but the power of the false accusation alone nearly destroyed the NLG, with membership dropping from over 4,000 to under 600. The Guild eventually recovered, and, unlike many political and legal organizations of the period, did so with its principles intact, having never conducted an internal purge of communists, socialists or other targeted groups. Pschological Warfare for Domestic Consumption In a 1958 "consultation" with the House Committee on Un- American Activities, three major architects of Cold War theory summarized their hard line views concerning the "Communist Strategy of Protracted Conflict". Dr. Robert StrauszHup, Alvin J. Cottrell, and James E. Dougherty, (all affiliated with the Foreign Policy Research Institute of the University of Pennsylvania) appeared before the Committee to answer critics of the Cold

War who urged a less confrontational posture toward the Soviet Union. Hup put it this way: === "The Communist strategy never has been, and is not now, a strategy of limited war such as that which has preoccupied many Western writers in recent years.... === "The strategy of protracted conflict prescribes the annihilation of the opponent by a long series of carefully calibrated operations, by feints and maneuvers, by psychological and economic warfare, and by diverse forms of violence.... === "It encompasses all known forms of violent and non-violent conflict techniques, and fuses them into a weapons spectrum which begins on the left with the seeminingly most innocuous political activities, such as the clandestine distribution of leaflets, and terminates on the right end of the spectrum with the megaton bomb. === "There is no difference between cold and hot war. There is no essential difference between military and political means. They are all instruments of conflict, leading to the same objective of power accumulation. Hup was describing his perception of the communist view of conflict, but the description also fits the ideology underpinning U.S. Cold War counterinsurgency methods against its political enemies, methods now artfully called "low-intensity conflict". At the same hearing, Cottrell argued that just like "in time of war the American people, generally, and their political parties abstain from partisan politics," that since the Communists were in fact waging an ongoing war through their theory of protracted conflict, that the Executive branch should be able to conduct its policies concerning Communists with wartime efficiency and support absent extended political debate. Cottrell observed, "The great debates which are sources of strength in the internal affairs of a democracy actually vitiate our foreign policy". Cottrell proposed the following as the solution: === "The United States should be able to wage psychological warfare more effectively than the Soviet Union. The fact that it has been unable to do so derives from certain features of its own democratic system, such as the sensationalism of the press, the irresponsibility of many

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journalists and politicians, and the rivalry of the armed services. The answer does not lie in any institutional modification of our democratic social structure. What is urgently needed is an advance to political maturity and responsibility on the part of American elites, who should be able to act as intelligent critics of American policy without depriving the Government of all freedom of choice in the conduct of American diplomacy. Despite the lofty-sounding rhetoric, Cottrell's position was essentially that when it came to fighting Communism, the democratic process should be shortcircuited. . .an argument reeosundingly similar to that made by Lt. Col Oliver North. In fact, this same mentality of giving government elites a free and covert hand in fighting the international Red Menace permeated the domestic side of the Cold War equation when it came to fighting the internal Red Menace. The Theory of a Subversive Infrastructure The underlying theory of subversion held by both the reactionary conservative and nativist authoritarian schools of anticommunism share a common belief in the concept of the political front, intentional or unwitting, as the most common form of political organization on the left. The most persistant theoretical underpining of the FBI's COINTELPROera activity was the notion of the naive front controlled by communist infiltration, or COMINFIL in Bureau jargon.

COMINFIL was described succinctly by author William W. Keller: === "...the theory behind Cominfil is that the Communist party members seek to infiltrate or join the ranks of legitimate organizations, rise to positions of leadership, establish effective control of the organization, and ultimately convert it into a vehicle for mass communist revolution.<$F Keller, William W. The Liberals and J. Edgar Hoover. Lawrenceville, N.J.: 1989, Princeton University Press, pp. 157-158.> In this theory, communists are thought to have developed a method of control using surrogates, both witting and unwitting, to actually hold the titular reins of power. Generally, for both conservatives and reactionaries, any movement that challenges the status quo, the assumptions of the state, and the control by its leading interest groups, can be perceived as part of what is today called a "Soviet Active Measures" campaign to undermine America. While this may appear overly simplistic and paranoid, one need only read the literature of the countersubversion empire to see the many variations on the theme. Orbis, West Watch, and Information Digest, all have detailed elaborations and fine tunings of these overall views. According to Keller, the conservatives and reactionaries effectively control countersubversion activities in the U.S. due to the unwillingness on the part of Congressional

liberals to actively pursue an oversight role over all counter-intelligence activity. Keller sees this unwillingness stemming from liberal ambivalence regarding the questionable security techniques employed, and their ultimate allegiance to the perceived security needs of the state. === "The cold war military buildup to deter future conflict is analogous to the domestic security intelligence buildup to prevent future subversion, sabotage, civil unrest, and even revolution. In both spheres, the liberal polity demonstrates its stateness.<$F Keller, Liberals, p. 193.> While courts have consistently ruled that passive monitoring of First Amendment activity is permissible, critics charge that passive monitoring and dossier-compiling often turns into disruption or attack, sometimes inadvertently, sometimes intentionally. As Donner explains: === "The listing of individuals, whether for ultimate detention in the event of war or for clues to the source of civil disorders, masked an underlying tension between passive monitoring and barely suppressed aggression. Why wait for the future showdown? What can be done to get at these people now? This tension found an outlet in special programs directed at `key figures' and `top functionaries,' singled out for close penetrative and continuous surveillance. <$FDonner, Age: p. 166.

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We Are the Monsters We've Been Waiting For

Thursday, September 01, 2011 Our civilized world is nothing but a great masquerade. You encounter knights, parsons, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, priests, philosophers and a thousand more: but they are not what they appear - they are merely masks.... Usually, as I say, there is nothing but industrialists, businessmen and speculators concealed behind all these masks. - Schopenhauer (Just four of the current posts)
http://rigint.blogspot.com/ The Thing That Couldn't Die
Light for some time to come will have to be called darkness. - Nietzsche They may be our Most Terrible Lizards, but they wouldn't be called the best and the brightest by even the hindmost fart-catcher in Abaddon's human centipede. They can turn blood into gold, playing Last Days' alchemists in the booming catastrophe and collapse sectors, but don't confuse the management of an habituated massacre with a meritocracy. They're the eschaton of open jaws at the close of the food chain, but for no other reason than a cold heart doesn't dwell upon the cruelty of its bite. We're the 99 and they're the One Percenters, and like the outlaw bikers who share the patch, they run the drugs and guns and kill for their club. They're the Killer Elite, but don't call them elite. No. Apparently, and with ironic perversity, that's me and my numerous tribe; over-educated beyond utility at the end of the Age of Useless Things. And I mean that: the end of things. Capital has exhausted its first fuels, and now it's the creation of poverty, not of wealth, that makes the world go 'round. And naturally, when it's down to your own body, setting it alight before it's taken from you to stoke the engines of the Great Machine becomes the final impudence. Depending upon whether your nation is an appetizer or an entree on the globalists' menu, and how well the kitchen prepares its living parts, such an act may lead to revolution or a passing LULZ.It can go either way. Over-educated, I mean that too. But it's not a sour boast after half a life being schooled for self-aware obsolescence. If you feel dumber for having watched Jersey Shore, then you too already know more than is good for you. America's public schools are made to fail on a budget comparable with the cost of air conditioning its imperial guard in Central Asia, with assets peeled off to private charters, and teachers discarded upon their broken unions. University, North America's new high school, is corporate funded and corporate branded and humanities' starved, with a deliberately crushing debt load upon students that corrals the choices of the less privileged towards machinery-sustaining, practical careers. The study of subjects that have not been sufficiently monetized and the accrual of empathetic knowledge are sniffed at as elitist pursuits, even as the student is financially wrecked by their mastery. Terrible lizards. I don't really mean that. Not literally. Not yet. They might,

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after all, not be alien lizards in masquerade, but their ecocidal reptilian brains just happen to be terraforming a post-mammalian world

best suited for the cold-blooded, and engineering a society denuded of human warmth, compassion and mindfulness. Lizards aren't what they

were; lizards are what they're to be. This could be the prophetic consummation of transhumanism: the metaphor become flesh.

The Brain Eaters

"You know, we got ourselves into this. No one made us chew Chew-Z." - Philip K Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch It occurred to me last year, when the Gulf of Mexico began coughing up its lungs courtesy of Deep Water Horizon, how it's one of the attenuated consolations of life in Evening's Empire that BP's sole, unmitigated success was to hold up a camera to the ocean's injury so we could all together view another viral FAIL video. I can haz desolation! Because you know, this is what we're good at. I mean, this is all we can do now. And from lackadaisical blogger to Spectator-inChief ("I want to know whose ass to kick"), gazing upon from afar with approbation, from the Mississippi Delta to Fukushima and the next sideshow horror, is about as good as we get. And even then, not for long. Gulf seafood is contaminated but officially safe. Japanese school children are passing radioactive piss but it's not a concern unless they continue to eat radioactive produce and drink irradiated water. Half-waking observation, and the dialing down of our expectations of "normal," are for the most part the extent of our response, and we seem to have lost the means and the imagination to do anything but. Perhaps that's what the mass, deranged mind of the Internet has taken from us, by taking us into itself. And perhaps that's even why it exists. In other words: if our wired brains are experiencing more read/write errors than the factory warranty led us to expect, I don't believe it's all down to depleted Serotonin and Aspartame. (Though, lest we forget, there is that, too.) We know well enough now, by study and experience, how the Web's interruption system impairs focus, and compounds the cognitive switching cost of our online distractions. It's the subject of Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains: When we adapt to a new cultural phenomenon, including the use of a new medium, we end up with a different brain.... That means our online habits continue to reverberate in the workings of our brain cells even when were not at a computer. Were exercising the neural circuits devoted to skimming and multitasking while ignoring those used for reading and thinking deeply. Whoa! Just a sec there, Joey Google. Maybe I can't live in your Cloud after all. Maybe we should rethink this entrainment of our brains towards trivia, while we can still meaningfully think. Maybe a Kindle isn't worth my kingdom of books. Maybe librarians aren't the enemy, and bookless libraries aren't actually good for children. Maybe literate adults should cease slow dancing with their tablets upon the grave of Johannes Gutenberg. But I don't see it happening. Anyway, Carr again: Last year, researchers at Stanford found signs that this shift may already be well under way. They gave a battery of cognitive tests to a group of heavy media multitaskers as well as a group of relatively light ones. They discovered that the heavy multitaskers were much more easily distracted, had significantly less control over their working memory, and were generally much less able to concentrate on a task. Intensive multitaskers are suckers for irrelevancy, says Clifford Nass, one professor who did the research. Everything distracts them. Merzenich offers an even bleaker assessment: As we multitask online, we are training our brains to pay attention to the crap. Or let's try on Jean Baudrillard's words, from his 1985 essay "The Year 2000 Has Already Happened," and see if they fit us in 2011: [E]ach cultural and factual set must be fragmented, disarticulated, in order to enter the circuits, each language must be resolved into 0/1, into binary terms, in order to circulate no longer in our memory, but in the memories, electronic and luminous, of computers. Our culture digitized is no longer our culture, but that of our machines. Our machine culture replaces our own, imperfectly remembers us, and tells us to forget ourselves. Paradise to some. The future to all. Steve Wozniak, a few weeks ago as I write this, said "we lost the battle to the machines long ago. We're going to become the pets, the dogs of the house." He said this optimistically. "Why are we going to need ourselves so much in the future? We're just going to have the easy life." Optimism and, if you can still stop and really think about it, a dash of madness. "Once we have machines doing our highlevel thinking," he continued, "there's so little need for ourselves and you can't ever undo it - you can never turn them off." There's so little need for ourselves. Chew on that crazy for a moment, and then try digesting We're just going to have the easy life. What order of nonsense is he talking about here? How many do you imagine are included in Wozniak's "we"? If a dumb machine - "dumb" like the nematode parasite that turns its host ant into a berrymimic to spread its kind in bird feces - if a parasitical technology could infect its host with thoughts to disarm its opposition, I imagine they would be thoughts like, "why are we going to need ourselves," "we're going to have the easy life," and "you can never turn them off." My rewired brain has its benefits. It's helped me to make associate leaps with greater confidence, even if some times that confidence has been unwarranted. But outsourcing my working memory has come at a high cost. There's the atrophied recall and attenuated attention span, and I don't believe that's entirely attributable to age and enviro-toxins. If it's true, and I think it is, that I learned more reading one book at a time than trying to read all books

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at once, then I'm just a chump in the idiot's kingdom called The Information Age. I can blame whoever first flipped the switch

on the unstoppable machines, but my mental decline by living better

electronically is really nobody's fault but mine.

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms

"It is sweet to draw the world down with you when you are perishing." - Seneca, Medea Anyway, what was I saying? Something about the Gulf. Obama's best advice to Americans during that particular obscenity was that they should shop, swim and pray: one of those crystalline moments that said, yes, this President too is a Celebrity Apprentice to the Criminals Without Borders. Such a stand-up effort won't be forgotten when he leaves his office - an internship, really and is initiated into Big Money, of which his presidency is merely a rite of passage: a pledge's gofer'ing for the inviolate fraternity of laundered capital. For Democratic presidents and Labour prime ministers, if they actually entered politics with even modest virtue and tepid vision for the public good, they have been richly rewarded for their abandonment. The sudden good fortunes of Clinton and Blair: this is what it profit a man. (By contrast, Jimmy Carter's post-presidency is perhaps an extended act of atonement to win back his soul.) Can there remain any doubt as to which career path Obama means to follow? Bill Clinton has earned more than $65 million dollars since leaving office for motivational "power within" speeches before business executives and similar peers who can afford him. Just imagine Obama's speeches. And his appearance fees. The American presidency is now just something that looks good on a resume, which can lead to a cash-for-life revenue stream. And BP? Corporations in America may be persons under the law, but they're never persons of colour. If they were, so many would have been shot, hung, gassed or given the chair years ago. There were many things Martin Luther had wrong. "Strong beer is the milk of the old" wasn't one of them. Another wasn't his revulsion at the Medieval Church's practice of selling indulgences: the tidy revenue stream of peddling Get out of Purgatory Free cards. A posthumous entitlement program for the wealthy dead, and an invitation to sin boldly for those who could afford it. (The poor, as ever, could pay only in the currency of their blood, sweat and souls.) Of course, this turned the teaching of Jesus of its head rich man, eye of a needle, and all that - but no matter: the Church has made a custom of perp-walking its Christs in a parade of upside-down clowns for two millenia. Luther's rejection of the selling of indulgences sparked the Reformation, but the practice hasn't stopped; it's merely been secularized. BP paid - or more accurately, promised to pay - an indulgence of $20 billion over four years to cover damages incurred by the sin of Deep Water Horizon. Not even enough to make 2010 a losing year for the company if the amount had been paid as a lump sum. In fact, its stock "surged" on the news that it had just bought its way out of purgatory on the cheap. "The fear was that the government was going to do something so drastic as to effectively push the company into bankruptcy," said oil and gas analyst Brian Gibbons. "Now they can come out of the meeting and say they have held BP accountable and hold up a $20 billion escrow account." That was last year. (Ancient history, and nobody studies history anymore.) This year, the company's bringing unabashed motherfucker back: BP now wants to stop payments based on future losses, saying "there is no basis to assume that claimants, with very limited exceptions, will incur a future loss related to the oil spill." BP points to returning tourists and the reopened federal fishing grounds, and points away from the fish so sickened by diseases and infections and environmental stresses that LSU Oceanographer Jim Cowan says, "I've never seen anything like this. At all. Ever." And here's where the Medieval Church had it over on us. The rich could only buy their way out of Purgatory, not Hell. Purgatory was the place of temporal punishment, even if it were to last a million years. Hell was forever. And Hell for BP - break it up, bankruptcy, nationalization - was never a serious threat in an era of Too Big to Damn. Unlike, or God help me so it seems, the whole bloody natural world and its profitless life. But what can you do, Mr President? You're only the titular head of a country that manufactures nothing anymore but weaponry, consent, and high fructose corn syrup. We'll miss our old world like we'll miss our old brains, but the longer it goes on, and the worse it gets, the more we'll become accustomed to it. Like the erasure of a hegemon's great cities to disasters natural and unnatural, its middle class, perhaps even its living memory of peacetime. That's the catastrophe of hope. And don't think the Sadean few for whom the system works aren't loving the masochistic spectacle of good Democratic foot soldiers debasing themselves as New Deal Sonderkommando, immolating their Social Security on finance capitalism's pyre of a trillion dead presidents before freshening up with a whore's bath of Enjoy President Bachmann ooga booga. (Somehow, moving the goal posts never interfere with their end zone dance.) Maybe, when you're given the choice of Satan, or Satan's Little Helper, it's past time to crash the parties. So it's the end of America, but it's not the end of the world. That's already happened. If by "world" we mean a viable, global civilization and hospitable biosphere, and if by "end" we mean the extinguishing of fruitful recourse, then we sped past that last resort way back in the Seventies. This may not yet be the final reel of Vanishing Point, but we're deep in the third act and going 90 miles an hour down a dead-end street. And our Dodge Challenger is nearly out of road. Some call this vanishing point, the "Singularity."

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Eyes Without a Face

"It makes me nervous," Emily whispered; she held a magazine on her lap but was unable to read. "It's so - unnatural." "Hell," Hnatt said vigorously, "that's what it's not; it's an acceleration of the natural evolutionary process that's going on all the time anyway, only usually it's so slow we don't perceive it. I mean, look at our ancestors in caves ... they evolved to meet the Ice Age; we have to evolve to meet the Fire Age, just the opposite. So we need that chitinous-type skin, that rind and the altered metabolism that lets us sleep in midday and also the improved ventilation...." - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch The tides of aborted dolphins. The acidification of our oceans and the jellification of its life. The neurotoxicants stunting our children's brains. The nanoparticles "unexpectedly" entering the food chain. The vanishing bees. The excellent chance we'll have pumped so much CO2 into the atmosphere by the end of this century that the planet will inexorably warm by 24 degrees, assuring a runaway greenhouse, and the recreation of conditions unseen here since the Hadean Era. Peak oil, peak soil, peak water, peak food. (And if these play on your mind as at least abstract terrors, then congratulations: you too enjoy more leisure and learning than can possibly profit you at this time, in this culture.) Fondest, most desperate hopes aside, the exigencies of collapse are not calling forth the best behavior from those accustomed to bleeding every stone white. On the contrary, environmental policy, even the most egregiously half-assed, is the first out the window when "shared sacrifices" demand that the vested interests of capital defenistrate the public good. So the ground is fracked and the tap waters flame, and rather than saving what remains of the Amazon, we burn it into becoming the world's greatest emitter of methane. Not a problem. If the Singularity is near enough, then the transhumanists may yet have their abiotic rapture. And I'll hand it to them, there's a dark logic to it: perhaps the only way to successfully adapt to a murdered planet is to kill yourself. "If you draw the timelines," said futurologist Ian Pearson, "realistically by 2050 we would expect to be able to download your mind into a machine, so when you die it's not a major career problem." Pearson is sometimes credited with the invention of that fouler of distinction between home and office, text messaging. And given how all the futurist fantasies of increased leisure time have panned out, no one should take comfort in the prospect that death itself need not encumber job performance. Even though pensionable age and benefits continue to be rolled back vindictively, there was always at least the promise of the peace of the grave. And the dying planet? Those who would destroy it in order to save it are readying its zombie makeover with one word, or rather, prefix: nano. "Emerging nanotechnology capabilities promise a profound impact on the environment," writes Ray Kurzweil in The Singularity Is Near. "This includes the creation of new manufacturing and processing technologies that will dramatically reduce undesirable emissions, as well as remediating the prior impact of industrial-age pollution." Kurzweil concedes there is the "downside" of introducing innumerable nano-particles, creating "new forms of toxins and other unanticipated interactions with the environment and life." But Singularitans embrace the risk because there's no other way forward. And they have to move forward, and not relinquish one victory of science over the natural world. After all, that's progress. But before we disappear into simulation, let's get real. Technology won't revitalize the world that it is destroying, in part because the technology is controlled by the same sociopaths who profit by perpetrating the ruin. (Kurzweil himself has served on the Army Science Advisory Group, ASAG, helping to steer priorities for military research.) In other part because technology's end users - that's us, in the over-developed world - are made too comfortable by its benefits to act meaningfully to arrest its progression until everything is too far gone. And in last part because, should our most mad predatory bastards succeed - and if that seems unlikely, just think of how well things have worked out for them so far - they'll escape into their mesmerizing and seemingly superior upgrade. Only nostalgists would want to recreate the real thing, and Singularitans are not particularly prone to nostalgia. They won't be deploying nanotech to repair our global Titanic; they'll be piloting the Elect's antilifeboats into post-organic existence while the rest of us go down in steerage class. And by 2050 they may not need to travel all the way to Saturn orbit to skipper their yachts on methane seas. That's a trip which bio-luddites - like the shaman cultivating plant wisdom; like toocomfortable me and, I suspect, virtually all my plugged-in peers - would never embark upon. Of course we needn't worry ourselves sick over how to decline the invitation: the greater, surviving bio-mass of our species will not be welcome on the voyage. (The other vanishing species? They can make their own ark.) But thats no insurance against the harvesting of some valuable, stubborn minds to adorn their Cold Heaven. If, say, Shakespeare and Beethoven could have been uploaded to a stable format, forestalling their careerending decomposition so they could remain contributing citizens of our culture, wouldnt it be a crime against posthumanity to let them simply molder in the ground like "dumb matter"? Some futurists think so, and argue for the moral imperative of rescuing genius from the grave. In which case, in the event of compulsory resurrection, the only cause worth dying for may be the right to truly die. And perhaps even Beethoven isn't safely dead yet. (Shakespeare, who can say?) Giulio Prisco, founder of the Order of Cosmic Engineers, which holds that the Singularity will offer credible substitutes for the promises of religion, writes, "I don't think resurrection is incompatible with our current knowledge of how the universe works": Many rationalists have knee-jerk reactions when the idea of technological resurrection of the dead is mentioned. Perhaps they made a big effort to free themselves from religious superstition and are afraid of falling back into religion. But

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here we are talking about science and technology, not religion. Sure we are. Sure we aren't. The Singularity may be science, but it's unmistakably also mythology, as is evident from the ecstatic visions of Kurzweil, its preeminent mythologist. (Certainly Kurzweil is more than a mere mythologist, as there's no such thing as a mere mythology.) The "freeing of our thinking from the severe limitations of its biological form" is, according to Kurzweil, "an essentially spiritual quest." The Singularitys chief apostle sees the universe "waking up" as it is saturated by our intelligence, expanding to fill it at a speed possibly exceeding that of light. ("It will achieve this by reorganizing matter and energy to provide an optimal level of computation to spread out from its origin on Earth.") Significantly, Kurzweil makes the same moral sidestep of the European conquerors before him who dreamt smaller dreams of coveting mere continents, and presumes an unintelligent void that beckons us to civilize it and turn it to our utility. And since, in Kurzweil's estimation, the universe is silent of the noise of other civilizations and that we have not be contacted by other intelligences, then "it is likely (although not certain) that there are no such other civilizations": In other words, we are in the lead. That's right, our humble civilization with its pickup trucks, fast food, and persistent conflicts (and computation!) is in the lead in terms of the creation of complexity and order in the universe. Or, in other words, we need to pick up the Earthman's burden, and develop the universe, reformatting it to maximize its computational potential, until the transhuman mind is imprinted upon every star and nebula. And however it ends, or even if it ever does, will be up to Kurzweil's godlings. "The fate of the universe is a decision yet to be made," he writes in The Age of Spiritual Machines, "one which we will intelligently consider when the time is right." But here we are talking about science and technology....

Even if Kurzweil has the future wrong, and the mysteries of consciousness continue to recede before the advance of technology, I'm afraid he has the present dangerously right. The Singularity Myth alarmingly justifies and sustains just about every wrong we are perpetrating upon the world right now, leading to its transcendent vision of a New Technopolis rising at the end of the Aeon of Biology. It's a promise bound to be held more desperately as the crises of biology deepens. And desperation for all, with opportunity for a privileged few, will mean a slaughterhouse for most. In his paper Religious Motifs in Technological Poshumanism, Michael E Zimmerman writes: For Singularity posthumans to be possible, many present and future humans might have to pay a very steep cost. In the name of a glorious posthuman future, one can imagine fanatical posthumanists justifying the extinction of mythic-Christian, postChristian, and humanistic ideals such as individual liberty, self-realization, and outmoded personal and public morality. If history is written by the victors, then the coming superhumans will surely find a way to justify the suffering involved in their origin, particularly given that those who suffered (that is, we humans) were not very evolved to begin with. Since transhumanists are capable of recognizing the grave risks inherent to their God project - Kurzweil's "downside" of new toxins and unforeseen consequences - Zimmerman asks why they rush towards its culmination. One answer, he writes, is that Earths biosphere is imperiled. Technological posthumans would not be biologically basedthereby saving self-conscious life from extinction. And that seems to be the answer to so many questions, including those implied by the just smile and blow me sureties of our insatiable overclass. The Singularity may be near, but the end of our hospitable Earth is nearer, and all life forms requiring a temperate clime and low-toxic environment must rapidly adapt or die to our new and endless emergency. Unfortunately for us, the multiple maniacs driving the extinction are still crazy-rich, and are daily securing still more crazy for

themselves. All we have are our overwhelming numbers, though as the crises inevitably crashes the population we may not even survive the century with that advantage. Our billions merely present the illusion of too big to fail. But the fact is, in the miserly new world, we're far too many to thrive. At the Foresight Institute's 2002 "Brainstorming-Planning-Actionfest & Nanoschmoozathon," Leon Fuerth, former National Security Advisor to Al Gore, contended that "The majority of Americans will not simply sit still while some elite strips off their personalities and uploads themselves into their cyberspace paradise. They will have something to say about that. There will be vehement debate about that in this country." First of all, has Fuerth paid attention to the state of vehement debate in his country? Norway's terror attacks notoriously reminded Glenn Beck of Hitler. Not because mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik acted like a Nazi, but because his young victims were. ("Who does a camp for kids that's all about politics? Disturbing.") A supposedly transformative president normalizes the criminal perversions of his predecessor and appears to have the fight in him only to beat the legacy of FDR into an unrecognizable pulp. Do Americans have nothing to say about that? I know Fuerth spoke nearly a decade ago, but I remember 2002, and that wasn't a stellar year for policy debate and the public square either. Though of course, like so much else, it's only gotten worse since. John Steinbeck accounted for the failure of socialism in America by the underclass regarding itself not as the exploited poor but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Silly beggars. But they didn't come by that idea all by themselves. That's the conditioning of decades of political animal husbandry, and the dulling engorgement of mass instruction masquerading as entertainment. The dimming of culture and diminution of the Western mind perpetuates society's preposterous illusions. If - oh, I dunno Ted Williams, the homeless "golden throat" pitch-perfect for selling useless shit can make it (whatever that means, and

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however fleeting), then maybe we can go viral too. The truly accomplished, the acutely gifted, the deeply wise only prick the insecurities of the idiot class, and that's no way to keep the idiots useful, mollified and self-medicated. Especially since there are so many of them, and more every graduating cohort. A good thing, not coincidentally, for the monied few, who mean to separate the fools from their nickels and dimes. ("I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid," explained John Stuart Mill. "I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.") Meantime, futurists are imagining escape pods for our top predators, and already delivering on their military applications. A reading from the Warrior-Prophet Kurzweil, from the scripture, The Singularity Is Near: Although [ASAG] briefings, deliberations, and recommendations are confidential, I can share some overall technological directions that are being pursued by the army and all of the US armed forces. Dr John A Parmentola, director for research and laboratory management for the US Army and liason to the ASAG...describes

the Future Combat System (FCS), now under development and scheduled to roll out during the second decade of this century, as "smaller, lighter, faster, more lethal, and smarter." Dramatic changes are planned for future war-fighting deployments and technology. Although details are likely to change, the army envisions deploying Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs) of about 2,500 soldiers, unmanned robotic systems, and FCS equipment. A single BCT would represent about 3,500 "platforms," each with its own intelligent computational capabilities The BCT would have a common operating picture (COP) of the battlefield, which would be appropriately translated for it, with each soldier receiving information through a variety of means, including retinal (and other forms of "heads up") displays and, in the future, direct neural connection. ... The US Joint Forces Command's Project Alpha (responsible for accelerating transformative ideas throughout the armed services) envisions a 2025 fighting force that "is largely robotic," incorporating tactical autonomous combatants (TACs) that "have some level of autonomy.... One innovative design being developed by NASA with military applications envisioned is in the form of a snake." One of the programs contributing to the

2020 concept of self-organizing swarms of small robots is the Autonomous Intelligent Network and Systems (AINS) program of the Office of Naval Research, which envisions a drone army of unmanned, autonomous robots in the water, on the ground, and in the air. The swarms will have human commanders with decentralized command and control and what project head Allen Moshfegh calls an "impregnable Internet in the sky." "In the final analysis," said John Kennedy in his American University commencement address, "our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal." So far. But Kennedy's final analysis may be invalidated sooner than we think. And what happens then, when asymmetrical warfare achieves its End State? Will it be everlasting peace, or endless conflict, when one combatant cannot be killed, or maybe even neither? The drone armies of Central Asia are a crude rendering of what's to come. The generals don't need the hollowed-out New Man of fascist steel. They just need the steel. And much worse is coming. Probably, worse is already here. The future didn't go anywhere. it isn't even the future.

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'Just Business': Capitalism is an Anti-Social Disease

by: Dave Lindorff Thu, 07/08/2010 http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/129
Looking at the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, where the results of the greed of corporate executives at BP, TransOcean and Halliburton, not to mention the greed of paid-off regulators in the Minerals Management Service and the members of the House and Senate who took dirty money to water down drilling regulations are on ready display, I was reminded of a prominent business leader in New York, recently deceased. Told by his sister of a young woman she knew who had posted a sign on her wall saying, Happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have, this executive, who had held a top position in the multinational media industry, sniffed, Ugh! Thats terrible. If people thought like that, no one would strive to do anything. Of course, hundreds of thousands of people--teachers, nurses, park rangers, musicians, writers, artists, small farmers and social workers--spend their lives working at low wages trying to make others happy and better educated, or to produce things that people need or that bring joy to others, content that their lives have meaning. Yet this same individual, who was worth perhaps a hundred million of dollars, spent his life simply amassing ever more wealth, which is what the rich and powerful do. He worked hard raking it in, riding roughshod over employees, competitors, and workers, all with the goal of obtaining more wealth, though he had no hope of ever spending what he had. When he died, he left behind a family squabbling over the spoils. And how different, really, was he from most wealthy, powerful people? To be sure, some give extravagantly to charity, especially when they die, but their bequests can never compensate for the harm they do in their lifetimes The corporate manager or owner is a sociopath Lets face it. Capitalism is a disease--a raging infection that causes its hosts to become sociopaths. When I lived in Hong Kong, where I worked as a correspondent for Business Week magazine back in the mid-1990s, my wife Joyce and I adopted a baby boy from a local Hong Kong orphanage. For the first six months, under the terms of the adoption process, we had Jed living with us in a foster-care arrangement, which required us to take him to regular visits to Queen Mary Hospitals toddler clinic. There we often met a British couple who at the same time as us had adopted two boys, both with physical disabilities--one affecting his walking, and the other his vision. The man was someone I knew professionally--a major figure in the international investment banking industry who worked for a large British bank. I knew he had been centrally involved in lucrative deals in Southeast Asia that had financed some poorly planned infrastructure projects that were displacing and destroying the lives of tens of thousands of poor people, and that he had actually been indicted in one country for having misled the government there about the risks involved in the loans. But here he was, with his two adopted kids, just a model father: loving, patient and kind. I was struck by this mans ability to segment his personality into two discrete halves--a caring human being, and a profit-maximizing monster. But over the years, Ive come to realize that he didnt realize he was a monster, for

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this is really the marvel of capitalism: its ability to treat as a virtue the ruthless pursuit of profit. Corporate tycoons and managers have for several centuries now wreaked havoc on workers, and on the environment, yet because they also control the government, the schools and the media, we have, especially here in America, come to celebrate their sociopathy. Its just business, we say, as millions of people are laid off when sales are down, or when some investment bank or leveraged buyout house arranges for a takeover of some enterprise and promptly tosses half the workforce out on the sidewalk. Its just business, we say, when a bank tosses thousands of people out of their homes because, laid off from their jobs, theyre late in making a few mortgage payments. (This, by the way, is where capitalism differs from communism or state capitalism. In countries where the state and economy are centrally run, few people speak glowingly of the maximum leaders of society as being virtuous or fulfilling their proper role. By and large they are resented or hated.) Now we have a well spewing toxic crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico in the biggest purely man-made environmental disaster in the history of the Gulf and of the United States. Thats just business too: the companys managers were paying over $1 million a day to rent the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig from TransOcean, and so they cut some corners to get the well finished so they could cap it, and get rid of the rig. Unfortunately, the corners they cut ended up causing a blowout that killed 11 men, sank the rig, and broke open the wellhead. Just business. The truth is that capitalism is but a blip in the history of mankind. Think about it. For almost all of history and prehistory,

humans and pre-humans alike lived in communal arrangements where the group, or tribe or clan worked towards a collective goal of survival. There were leaders who rose to the top through merit, which was fairly easy to establish: the leader was either smarter, or stronger, or had more friends and allies than the rest. But the leaders prime qualification was that he or she was deemed best able to protect and promote the survival of the whole group. Anthropologists have found endless variants on the organization of human societies in so-called primitive societies, some very top-down and hierarchical, and some very communal and cooperative, but the common thread seems to be that the general welfare of the social unit was a key objective, and the difference between ruler and ruled, in terms of wealth and well-being, was generally very narrow. A second feature of mankinds history until only the last few hundred years or so, has been that nature has been respected, and even revered. Capitalism has completely done away with this traditional reality of human existence. In capitalism, the welfare of a large proportion of society is simply ignored or openly put at risk. The capitalist views the low-wage worker and the unemployed person as just another resource to be subjugated and exploited, along with the rest of nature. Educated workers are sometimes treated slightly better, but only slightly, simply because they are deemed a bigger investment, worth hanging onto longer, until the investment has been amortized and they too can be trashed. In the final analysis, though, there is no concern for the society, for the well-being of the group. The only thing that matters, the only virtue, is profit maximization and increased share value, which means bigger

bonuses for management and bigger returns for the investor. For a while, mankind, and the earth, could tolerate this sociopathic ideology, but weve clearly reached the point where it has to be recognized as a fatal disease. Capitalism and the greed it engenders and elevates to a virtue now threatens to finish us all off. I want my life back, wails BP CEO Tony Hayward, whose push for ever greater profits at BP led directly to the decision to cut corners on the Deepwater Horizon drilling project. What an arrogant illustration of the selfishness of this narcissistic sociopathy. A huge swath of the earths precious ecology is put at grave risk from his actions, and Hayward is bemoaning his personal discomfort, when a mentally healthy person in this position would either be committing ritual hari kiri or would be atoning by donning sackcloth to devote his remaining years to cleaning oil-soaked birds and porpoises. Its time we recognized this capitalist disease for what it is. The young woman with her inspirational wall message had it right. We need to reject the capitalists siren call for more and more, and to start being happy with what we have. Then maybe we can all start caring for the wellbeing of those around us, instead of seeing them as competitors for the things we covet.

This Can't Be Happening

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U.S. Child Labor Laws are Child Abuse

Submitted by wmcelroy on Fri, 2008-07-25 12:52
http://hnn.us/node/52690
When I was sixteen, I ran away from home and lived on the streets for as short a period of time as I could manage. I did not turn to prostitution or to drugs; I was lucky. Not in avoiding paid sex and substances -- these were deliberate choices. I was lucky to be sixteen and, so, able to legally support myself. If I had been two months younger, child labor laws would have forced me to beg or do far worse in order to survive. People call me"an exception." They baldly state that most kids on the street would never choose low-paid honest jobs over well-paid criminal ones. How do they know? Government does not permit a comparison to exist. At sixteen, I decided that 'profits' are not all monetary -- but this was something I knew at fifteen and fourteen as well. I knew that prostitution and drugs were violent, disease-prone worlds in which I had no future. Even if only a minority of under-aged runaways would make the same choice, how can anyone in good conscience deny them that opportunity? Another common comment is that I should have sought the assistance of a governmental agency. There are at least two things wrong with this advice. First, runaways are on the streets because authority figures in their lives have betrayed them. Most of them will not willingly relinquish control to yet another authority. Second, there is an assumption that government protects children, yet this is the same government that denies them the right to their own labor. History frowns upon the belief that government protects children's rights. The History of Child Labor Laws Consider child labor in 19th century Victorian Britain -- the well spring from which modern child labor laws evolved. Immediately, hideous snapshots flash in the mind: five-year-olds being lowered into coal mines, wan children at textile mills, a Dickenesque Oliver asking for "more". These images are used to condemn the free market and the Industrial Revolution against whose evils a humanitarian government is said to have passed child labor laws. This analysis is badly mistaken. For one thing, it misses a key distinction. Early 19th century Britain had two forms of child labor: free; and, parish or 'pauper' children. Historians J.L. and Barbara Hammond, whose work on the British industrial revolution and child labor is considered definitive, clearly recognized this distinction. The free market economist Lawrence W. Reed, in his brilliant essay "Child Labor and the British Industrial Revolution," goes one step farther. He recognizes the importance of the distinction. Free labor children lived with their parents or guardians and worked during the day at wages agreeable to those adults. But parents often refused to send their children into unusually harsh or dangerous work situations. As Reed notes, "Private factory owners could not forcibly subjugate 'free labour' children; they could not compel them to work in conditions their parents found unacceptable." For example, the unacceptable position of 'scavenger' in textile factories. Typically, scavengers were young children -- about six-years-old -- who had to salvage loose cotton from under the machinery. Because the machinery was running, the job was dangerous and injury was common. Fortunately for businessmen willing to use the State to their advantage, government had no qualms about sending parish children to work under running machines. Reed explains, "These youngsters [parish children]...were under the direct authority and supervision not of their parents...but of government officials." Parish workhouses had existed for centuries, but Victorian society with its stern Protestant work ethic was unique in considering poverty to be a personal moral failure on the part of the poor. Sympathy for the downtrodden was also lessened by the fact that taxes for poor relief in 1832 were over five times higher than they had been in 1760. Gertrude Himmelfarb's book "The Idea of Poverty" chronicles this shift in attitude toward the poor from compassion to condemnation. In 1832, partly at the behest of laborhungry manufacturers, the Royal Poor Law Commission began an inquiry into

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the "the practical operation of the laws for the relief of the poor." Its report divided the poor into two basic categories: lazy paupers who received governmental aid; and, the industrious working poor who were self-supporting. The result was the Poor Law of 1834, which statesman Benjamin Disraeli called an announcement that "poverty is a crime." The Poor Law replaced outdoor relief (subsidies and handouts) with 'poor houses' in which pauper children were virtually imprisoned. There, the conditions were made purposely harsh to discourage people from applying. Virtually every parish in Britain had abandoned workhouse children who, being bought and sold to factories, experienced the deepest horrors of child labor. In this, the workhouses were merely continuing a practice common before the Poor Laws. It is no coincidence that the first industrial novel published in Britain was "Michael Armstrong: Factory Boy" by Frances Trollope. Michael was apprenticed to an agency for pauper children. Nor is it coincidence that"Oliver Twist" was not abused by his parents, but by brutal workhouse officials in comparison to whom Fagin was a humanitarian. And, remember, at the age of twelve with his family in debtor's prison, Dickens himself was a pauper child who slaved at the Blacking Factory. Reed observes,"[t]he first Act in Britain that applied to factory children was passed to protect these very parish apprentices, not 'free labour' children." The Act was explicit in doing so. Even workhouse children with solvent parents could not always escape the grasp of officials. The"Ashton Chronicle" (June 23, 1849) published an interview with pauper child Sarah Carpenter, who explained:"My father was a glass blower. When I was eight years old my father died and our family had to go to the Bristol Workhouse. My brother was sent from Bristol workhouse in the same way as many other children were - cart-loads at a time. My mother did not know where he was for two years. He was taken off in the dead of night without her knowledge, and the parish officers would never tell her where he was." Thus, in advocating the regulation of child labor, social reformers asked government to remedy abuses for which it was largely

responsible. Once more, government was"a disease masquerading as its own cure." To their credit, some reformers realized that regulations to help the poor did precisely the opposite. Thus, the classical liberal John Bright -- a leader of the Anti-Corn Law movement that championed the poor -- voted against the Factory Act of 1844 in the British House of Commons. The Act reduced the hours of work for children between eight and thirteen years old; it also reduced the ability of poor families to survive. But what of the other side of the equation - the businessmen willing to use pauper children as slave labor? Consider one example. To assuage labor shortages at his textile mills, Samuel Greg took children from workhouses. Indeed, children were offered to him. In February 1817, the Vicar of Biddulph wrote to him:"The thought has occurred to me that some of the younger branches of the poor of this parish might be useful to you as apprentices in your factory at Quarry Bank. If you are in want of any of the above, we could readily furnish you with 10 or more at from 9 to 12 years of age of both sexes." Usually, such children were apprenticed to an employer until the age of twenty-one. When the local parishes no longer provided sufficient labor, Greg went as far as Liverpool and London for children. Some parishes paid businessmen like Greg between two and four pounds to take a child off their hands. The children received their board and lodging from Greg, as well as a small salary. Greg saw himself as a humanitarian and, by contrast with workhouse officials, he probably was. In"The Philosophy of Manufactures" (1835), Andrew Ure wrote:"At...the great firm of Greg and Son....stands a handsome house, two stories high, built for the accommodation of the female apprentices. They are well fed, clothed and educated. The apprentices have milk-porridge for breakfast, potatoes and bacon for dinner, and meat on Sundays." But no amount of decent treatment can obscure the fact that the children were stripped of the one thing they possessed -their labor and the right to contract.

Nothing can convert the violation of their rights as laborers into an act of benevolence by Greg or by government officials. Contemporary Child Labor Government's victimization of children through denying them their rights as laborers is not merely a matter of history. In September 1990, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), already adopted by the UN General Assembly, came into force. The human rights violations involved in child labor began to receive unprecedented attention. There is no question: children around the globe are being coerced into slave labor situations that are appalling, and should be prohibited. No one -- not parents, employers, or governments -- should be able to coerce children into or prohibit them from entering work situations. Children old enough to be supporting themselves are old enough to make their own decisions. The foregoing statement seems heartless. The reverse is true. The only real protections children can enjoy are the family structure and their ability to be selfsufficient. In an ideal world -- a Western world -- families are prosperous and supportive: children are protected and educated. In Third World countries, parents often cannot provide the basics of life for their children, who must trade their labor for sustenance. The greatest act of benevolence is to recognize their right to contract and to work in the same manner as adult rights are respected. Anything that interferes with the self-sufficiency necessary for their survival is child abuse. This is what Third World governments, under pressure from the UN and the United States, are doing. They are denying children the right to their labor -- to selfsufficiency -- by prohibiting children under a certain age from working. In some countries, the minimum age is now eighteen. And the standards of abusive child labor are so broadenly defined as to prohibit the possibility of voluntary child labor. For example, Article 32 of the UNCRC affirms a child's right to be protected from economic exploitation and

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from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child's education, or to be harmful to the child's health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development." These standards would virtually eliminate all forms of child labor, whether coerced or voluntary, abusive or not. In an article within "Child Workers in Asia" (Vol. 15. No. 3, 1999), Sulaiman Zuhdi Manik describes a work situation in Indonesia. Namely, there are children "working on fishing platforms, called Jermal, in the middle of the sea" where conditions are brutal. The solution imposed,"An Indonesian Minister of Labour Circular Letter dated 1997 forbids child workers on Jermal and a 1998 Circular Letter from the Governor of North Sumatra forbids the Jermal owners to hire children under 18." Are the children who are seventeen there by choice? Did all Jermal owners coerce or abuse their child laborers? And what became of the suddenly unemployed children? Only the latter question is answered in the article:"They are still being hired and forced to work under terrible conditions." What forces them? A coercive individual, or the reality of poverty through which they must survive? The question of what happens to children by government decree is dealt with more candidly on the UNICEF web site. It describes garment factories in Bangladesh "following the introduction of the Child Labor Deterrence Act in 1992 by US Senator Tom Harkin. The Bill would have prohibited the importation into the US of goods made using child labour....[W]hen Senator Harkin reintroduced the Bill the following year...garment employers dismissed an estimated 50,000 children from their factories, approximately 75 per cent of all children in the industry."

UNICEF admitted to surprise at the consequences. The children "were trapped in a harsh environment with no skills, little or no education, and precious few alternatives." In follow-up visits to homes and villages, UNICEF discovered that the" children went looking for new sources of income, and found them in work such as stone-crushing, street hustling and prostitution - all of them more hazardous and exploitative than garment production. In several cases, the mothers of dismissed children had to leave their jobs in order to look after their children." UNICEF's proposed solution: increased governmental involvement and programs. Having forced children into more hazardous labor and causing poor families to lose the income of mothers, the real solution to child labor never seems to occur to such agencies. Namely, to call for the labor rights of all children to be respected. Instead, they promote the opposite: they call for the inability of children to contract their labor as free human beings. Some pieces of legislation seem to address the difference between voluntary and coerced child labor. For example, on June 12, 1999, the White House issued an Executive Order entitled "Prohibition of Acquisition of Products Produced by Forced or Indentured Child Labor." Moreover, the Order's definition seems adequate:"'Forced or indentured child labor' means all work or service (1) exacted from any person under the age of 18 under the menace of any penalty for its nonperformance and for which the worker does not offer himself voluntarily; or (2) performed by any person under the age of 18 pursuant to a contract the enforcement of which can be accomplished by process or penalties." Critics might and should decry the further intrusion of government into the sphere of business, how can the Order be criticized on the basis of harming voluntary child laborers?

It will do so in the same manner as the bill proposed by Senator Harkin. The Executive Order instructs the Department of Labor to "publish in the Federal Register a list of products, identified by their country of origin, that those Departments have a reasonable basis to believe *might* have been mined, produced, or manufactured by forced or indentured child labor."[Emphasis added] At the mere whiff of such a mention, any prudent American business will cease to deal with the suspected producer. At the mere possibility of being mentioned, foreign business -- like the garment industry in Bangladesh -- will dismiss child laborers, voluntary or not. Thus, "The Economist" (January 15-21, 2000) advises rich nations who wish to ease the pain of Third World child labor "to send the children aid rather than impose harmful trade sanctions. If exports made by child labour are banned, children often end up unemployed or in unregulated sectors such as prostitution." Conclusion The foregoing analysis will seem callous to many. This is especially true of the many good hearted people who support child labor measures in the belief that passing a piece of paper through a governmental body will change a complicated social situation. Such people sleep better at night because they have "done something."

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