That sobering news hasn’t stopped the organisers of Carbon Expo in Barcelona from promising a celebration when the annual event is held for the tenth time at the end of this month. Ardent defenders of the polar ice caps like Shell and Statoil will spend the day gazing at mathematical models about the ideal price of pollution. After all those cerebral chinwags, they will surely have worked up an appetite for tapas and sangria.

On second thoughts, maybe it is apt for the oil industry and its chums in the world of finance to kick up the high life as the climate breaks down. For they have been dexterous enough both to cause that breakdown and to present themselves as the cure to it.

The big “green” story here in Brussels lately hasn’t been the perilous state of the planet but the problems befalling the EU’s emissions trading scheme. Although the scheme has proven to be disastrous in terms of mitigating climate change, it has helped entrench the idea that heat-trapping gases should be considered as a tradable commodity. Because there are people out there who stand to make millions from carbon transactions, it’s not surprising that they want to salvage the Union’s scheme.

The International Emissions Trading Association (IETA) is arguing that the scheme “should remain the EU’s central climate policy instrument.” In fact, it’s so gung-ho in its support for this market-based mechanism that it is advocating that similar systems should be established as a result of global talks.

Among IETA’s members are Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Shell, BP and Total. I seem to recall that the first two villains helped to cause a global financial crisis and that the latter three sell fossil fuels, the principal source of carbon dioxide in our skies. Are they really in a strong position to decide what should be the “central” policies on climate change?

Unfortunately, they are. The prototype of the EU’s emissions trading scheme, as it happens, was developed by BP. While he was still chairman of that firm, Peter Sutherland, was hired as an adviser on climate on energy to the European Commission’s chief José Manuel Barroso during the early stages of the scheme’s implementation. It is an “instrument” both designed by fat-cats and played with the intention of pleasing them.

The agenda for the Carbon Expo boasts a session titled “learning from the legends.” The “legends” referred to here are emissions trading and the international Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) that it supports.

Is this supposed to be a joke?

One of the most disgusting aspects of the EU’s climate change policies is that they rely largely on “offsetting.” Under this dubious concept, it is fine for power plants on this continent to belch out as much pollution as they want, provided some money is given to environmentally-friendly projects in poorer countries. This is akin to buying a nice present for your friend who has given up smoking instead of you.

Rules applying to the EU’s scheme allow for up to half of all emission “cuts” financed by it to be achieved via the CDM. Newly published data from the European Commission indicates that this form of offsetting is on the increase. In 2012, offsets accounted for one-third of the “compliance commitments” made by firms taking part in the trading scheme, compared to 13% the previous year.

Many of the projects being funded are anything but clean. A “high-level panel” overseeing the CDM – which includes a European Commission representative, as well as ministers from Japan and South Africa – published an assessment on its performance last year. The report warned that the CDM could lead to a “net increase” in global emissions of greenhouse gases. It suggested that the mechanism is being widely used to support coal-fired projects, particularly in India and China. Energy efficiency has been “almost entirely left out” of the CDM, the report added.

In a few weeks time, members of the European Parliament will decide whether or not they should endorse the continuation of the emissions trading scheme. The best thing our elected representatives could do is to bury the scheme. Trying to revive it would be irresponsible.

There is a salutary lesson here. Saving the planet requires what Americans call “big government,” not a dodgy market mechanism.

There is an urgent need to go back to the drawing board, not to tinker with a system fashioned by BP.

Fortunately, there are sensible policies being followed in parts of Europe. Germany has increased the share of renewables in its energy mix from 6% to 25% over a decade. A law guaranteeing priority to the grid for renewable energy has provided the incentive for this rise. Local communities have been able to break free from relying on oil giants.

This breakthrough means that emission cuts can be achieved on European soil, rather than exporting our pollution control problems to somewhere else. It is telling that this breakthrough has had nothing to do with emissions trading.

If the EU keeps doing the same thing, it will keep getting the same results. This approach might prove fruitful for Goldman Sachs and BP. But it won’t stop the earth burning.

David Cronin’s book Corporate Europe: How Big Business Sets Policies on Food, Climate and War will be published by Pluto Press in August (www.plutobooks.com).

A version of this article was first published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu).        

Not very.

Laura Gottesdiener has written a remarkable book that hits hard against the big Wall Street banks.

It’s called –A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the Fight for a Place to Call Home (Occupied Media Pamphlet Series, August 2013).

At base, it’s a book about corporate crime.

Remember redlining?

Thirty years ago, banks were drawing imaginary red lines around inner city neighborhoods.

The banks refused to give mortgages to people living in those neighborhoods.

“For decades, the federal government and banks refused to lend in these communities,” Gottesdiener told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last week. “Finally, when these communities were completely starved for mortgages, they broke it open and pushed the most ridiculous and predatory mortgages they could come up with. And of course, people bought them because it was the first time that mortgages were ever being guaranteed by the government and by big mainstream banks in those communities.”

When did that switch over – from redlining to reverse redlining?

“In the early to mid 1990s,” Gottesdiener said. “And later that was really pushed aggressively by the Bush administration. President Bush gave this nice speech at the 2002 Minority Council on Homeownership. He was saying that banks and the federal government were going to start aggressively lending to minorities.”

“The mortgage market for white Americans was flush. There was no more money to be made from issuing mortgages to white Americans. I think the mortgage rate for white Americans hit 70 to 80 percent in the early 1990s. You started to see that almost any American who could have a mortgage and wanted to have a mortgage would have a mortgage. There was no market there.”

“The banks needed new consumers. So, they moved into the minority market. But they weren’t selling the conventional loans. They were selling these incredibly exploitative predatory loans.”

“When you had redlined neighborhoods, there were mortgages. But you had loan sharks pushing them. They would buy mortgages and peddle them in minority neighborhoods with these terribly marked up fees — crazy late fees, ballooning payments. If you miss one payment, your house gets repossessed. They were these incredibly onerous contracts.”

“You see pretty clear parallels between the predatory mortgages that were issued in the late 1990s and early 2000s by the major banks — by the Wall Street top banks — and what you were seeing the loan sharks pushing in these neighborhoods the 1960s and 1970s. They are very similar contracts.”

So the big banks became the loan sharks. But they were never criminally prosecuted?

“Exactly,” Gottesdiener said. “And that became the new normal.”

“My book is about African Americans in the foreclosure crisis. But more white Americans have been foreclosed on. You start to see the types of contracts that would never have been imposed on white Americans, did go mainstream. And you started to see them being pushed in nice white suburban communities as well.”

What’s one of the most egregious mortgages you came across?

“There are loans called interest only negative amortizing adjustable rate loans,” Gottesdiener says.

“If you break it down it means you are only paying the interest on your loan. You are never paying your loan off. Negative amortization means that instead of getting smaller, it gets larger. And adjustable rate means the amount of interest can rise and fall.”

“What that means in a practical sense is that you could be paying your mortgage for 20 or 30 years and one day realize that at the end of that time you owe more on your mortgage than the original loan amount.”

Gottesdiener says there have been 4.8 million completed foreclosures since the crisis began in 2007.

“Those are homeowners and families who have been evicted from their homes,” she said. “There is not a good count on how many people are involved.”

“No government agency feels the responsibility to track that information. The statistics on that are incredibly spotty.”

“They often rent. Sometimes they will look for a new house to take out a mortgage on. Sometimes they become homeless. A lot of times, they will have a transition where they will live with family or friends, or temporarily live in a homeless shelter. And then they might get on their feet and start renting.”

Out of the 4.8 million, a handful fight back and refuse to leave.

“There might be hundreds, maybe thousands,” Gottesdiener says. “The success rate varies.”

“There is a group called City Life Via Urbana. They are an anti-foreclosure group in Boston. They have an incredible success rate. They have staged more than 30 foreclosure blockades. They have been successful at almost every single one of them.”

“That’s an example of an established community organization that has been in the community for over 30 years. It has a large support network. And they ask members to sit in the homes, but also to bring out neighbors and others. City Life brings out its people. And they have a mass of people that creates a blockade.”
And the bank just turns over the house?

“Not always,” she says. “You will often see a back and forth.”

“One example in my book is that of Bertha Garrett. She did this at her home and ultimately won her house back.”

“When there is a blockade, the media comes into play. If the media starts to pick up on the story, it starts to become a local phenomenon. And pressure builds on the bank at a national level. And the bank is forced to deal with the situation to get the bank out of the news and out of the limelight.”

“Wells Fargo and Bank of America or these other big banks, they don’t want the negative media attention.

After one blockade or a few blockades, the banks will usually just leave the house alone.”

“When there is a well established housing organization coordinating the blockade, you will usually see a specific demand attached. You will see — this family needs a loan modification for this amount, then they can pay. And we can help them pay.”

“Bertha Garrett’s house had been sold at the sheriff’s sale for $10,000. Her ask was — I actually just want to buy my house back. That felt fair to her. It was what the bank had just paid to buy it back.”

“She was in Detroit, because housing prices had tanked.”

“In a place like Boston, you will often get a loan modification. In a place like Detroit or the South Side of Chicago, usually they will renegotiate the sale of the home, or sometimes just leave it in foreclosed status.”

“If just one person wants to stay in their house and they are not necessarily connected to the broader community or a housing organization, or a demand that feels intelligible to the bank — if they just barricade themselves in their homes, the situation can and has ended up quite violently.”

“And people have been shot and died. These are not necessarily incalcitrant people sitting in their homes waiting to see what will happen. It’s part of an overall strategy to make it apparent that the banks contracts are not immutable, that there is a possibility that homeowners and everyday people can renegotiate their contracts in the same way that banks, and major financial institutions and governments do all the time.”

“The big banks were pushing a bigger scheme. On one hand they were pushing predatory loans that many people knew were never going to be paid back. And it didn’t matter to the big banks, because of securitization process.”

“The banks, under the securitization process, could sell the loan off and receive the money pretty much immediately. It didn’t matter to the big banks if that loan ever got repaid.”

“There is clear cut fraudster behavior. And then there is broad collective fraudster behavior of the big banks. The broad collective fraudster behavior of the big banks was that they knew housing prices couldn’t go up forever. And yet they created a system and perpetuated it and sold it into infinity. And in that system, housing prices would have to go up forever. They knew it was a house of cards.”

(For complete q/a format Interview with Laura Gottesdiener, see 27 Corporate Crime Reporter 20(12), May 21, 2013, print edition only.)

Russell Mokhiber edits the Corporate Crime Reporter.

The Air Force removed 17 of Minot’s 150 missile launch officers in April, over what commander Lt. Col. Jay Folds called “such rot” that, according to The AP on May 8, “even the willful violation of safety rules — including a possible compromise of launch codes — was tolerated.”

Air Force commanders told The AP they were concerned about an “attitude problem” among the ultimate bomb scare command. The Air Forces’ two-person crews work three-day shifts in underground Launch Control Centers and are supposed to be constantly at-the-ready to fire the 10 Minuteman IIIs under their control. Minot AFB is in charge of 150 ICBMs, 15 “flights” of 10 missiles each, with one launch control center for each flight.

Another 150 are on alert in Wyoming and 150 more out in Montana. All 450 of the relics are armed with a 300 kiloton “W-87” warhead. Three-hundred kilotons is a magnitude equal to 18 times the destruction that incinerated Hiroshima in 1945 killing 140,000 people.

The Air Force put on its dress uniform in the face of the scandal. In May it announced it would retrain the incompetent nuclear triggermen and the commanders asserted to Congress that its H-bombs were secure.

Gen. Mark Welsh, the service’s top general, told the Washington Post — with deliberate irony one hopes — that Air Force officers sense that the land-based missile system “is a dying field.” And it’s a fact that everyone from President Obama to the War Resisters League has called for the Bomb’s abolition.

Gen. Welsh admitted to the press that there are “a limited command positions to which missile launch officers can aspire.” Being stuck in dead-ended Air Force careers and posted in the wilderness of central North Dakota, Minot’s Cold War throw-backs — who call themselves “Roughriders” and “Vulgar Vultures” on their website — are trained to fire Minuteman III ballistic missiles at the sea (they can be re-programmed but are targeted on the oceans for “safety”) and, day after wind-swept prairie day, have absolutely no military function or purpose whatsoever.

It’s hardly surprising that their minds drift. Since they’re prepared to commit the bloodiest, most nightmarish crime in human history or imagination, the missileer’s principle pre-occupation must be to think about something else, anything else. Many work on graduate degrees. One launch control center I visited in December 1987 was decorated with Christmas lights.

The inevitable if not impending elimination of their useless rockets has to depress what’s left of the launch teams’ esprit de corps. Even their civilian commander, Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel, has signed onto a call by the group Global Zero to eliminate all the ICBMs and to eventually discard all nuclear weapons.

Of course Minot AFB has been demoralized by more than the nuclear war flunky scandal. In August 2007, three of its Colonels, a Lt. Colonel and dozens of low-level personnel were demoted or sacked after they allowed the fantastically dangerous loading and cross-country air transport of six nuclear-armed Cruise missiles from Minot to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana. Even if that astonishing action was covertly orchestrated by Vice President Dick Cheney for an attack on Iran that never materialized, the highly implausible but official cover story of mismanagement, rule breaking and recklessness was an international humiliation for Minot.

That same year, Cold War super-hawks Sam Nunn, Geo. Shultz, Wm. Perry and H. Kissinger publicly declared their support of a “world free of nuclear weapons.” These life-long nuclear arsenal defenders had finally joined Reagan Administration advisor Paul Nitze and Strategic Air Command leader Gen. Geo. Lee Butler in calling the arsenal worse than useless.

Even Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich. — who last week defended the Pentagon’s usurpation of authority to attack anywhere on Earth for the next 20 years — said about the nuclear arsenal last June, “The more weapons that exist out there, the less secure we are rather than the more secure we are.” (“Senator Urges Bigger Cuts to Nuclear Arsenal,” New York Times, June 15, 2012)

No wonder the Air Force missileers are lackadaisical about the apocalypse. There’s just no future in it.

John LaForge works for Nukewatch, a peace and environmental justice group in Wisconsin.

When the Bolshevik Party came to power its leaders tried -without much success- to reduce alcohol consumption in the Soviet Union. Joseph Stalin, however, reestablished state monopoly to generate revenue. Mikhail Gorbachev, in 1985, increased controls on alcohol consumption and imposed a partial prohibition through a massive anti-alcohol campaign.

That campaign, which included severe penalties against public drunkenness and alcohol consumption, as well as restrictions on liquor sales, was temporarily successful. It reduced per capita consumption and improved quality of life measures such as life expectancy and reduced hospital admissions. However, the population disliked this policy and ultimately had to be abandoned, its consequences felt again soon afterwards.

Periodically, reports surface on the great number of people who die as a result of consuming fake vodka and other alcohol substitutes. It is estimated that more than 40,000 Russians die every year after drinking such toxic liquids which include medical disinfectants, after-shave lotions and other dangerous substances.

Today, the average Russian drinks 4.75 gal. (18 liters) of pure alcohol a year, mostly as vodka and other black market moonshine called samogon. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), this consumption is far above what is considered safe to drink, and higher also than in any other nation in the world.

Russia has now one of the highest rates of alcohol-related illness, which on a long term include neurological, cardiovascular, psychiatric and liver problems, among many others. In the short term, however, and generally as a result of binge drinking, it provokes several kinds of injuries: violence, risky sexual behavior (including unprotected sex,) alcohol poisoning, and miscarriage and stillbirth in pregnant women.

The connection between excessive drinking and interpersonal violence cannot be overstated. However, due to social tolerance of violent behavior and incomplete or inaccurate information, official statistics only record a small percentage of violence. Some, however, are worrying. Among male perpetrators of spousal homicide, 60-75% of offenders had been drinking heavily prior to the incident.

Among young men, the risk of suicide is five times higher for heavy drinkers and nine times higher for alcoholics. Although men drink more than women, excessive alcohol consumption during pregnancy can result in the child developing fetal alcohol syndrome or show fetal alcohol effects which are associated with delinquent and violent behavior later in life.

Russians poor health status has translated in a short life expectancy. According to a United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) Population Division, life expectancy for males in Russia is 61.56 and for females it is 74.03. These figures are 17 years lower than in the western European population. By contrast, these figures in Japan are 79.29 and 86.96 respectively.

In June of 2009, the Public Chamber of Russia estimated in 500,000 the number of alcohol related deaths in the country. This figure highlights a very serious situation particularly taking into consideration that the country is going through a severe demographic crisis –it is estimated that its population will drop by 20 percent by 2050.

Although no precise figures are available, the direct and indirect costs of alcohol abuse in Russia can be considerable. Unless stronger measures are taken soon, Vladimir Putin’s dreams of a greater Russia will not be realized. The situation was aptly described by Oliver Bullough in his book The Last Man in Russia, “One man’s alcoholism is his own tragedy. A whole nation’s alcoholism is a tragedy too, but also a symptom of something far larger, of a collective breakdown.”

Cesar Chelala, M.D., Ph.D., is an international public health consultant and the author of “Environmental Impact on Child Health,” a publication of the Pan American Health Organization.

Many property owners in the area are elderly women, living on small pensions and social security. Their property taxes finance the schools, and as these rise, the tax burden can be considerable. This encumbrance is made subjectively worse by the fact that these older taxpayers no longer have children in school.

For the local school board, rising costs—including those for the ever growing number of administrators—and a limited and potentially rebellious tax base have created a budget crisis. The current budget shows a deficit of five million dollars. However, the board has come up with an ingenious way to deal with its revenue shortfall.

To help pay its bills, the school board is courting (or being courted by) two energy companies, with an eye toward leasing public property for natural gas hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as “fracking.” According to the school district’s solicitor, the two “frackers,” which are owned by members of the same family, are “offering” to acquire leasing rights on tracts of land near the two schools. “We’re trying to do what we can to bring some money in,” said Board president Joe Close. “Superintendent Stan Chapp said the district projects it could earn up to $1.5 million on it during the next 15 to 20 years.”

The frackers have been busy in Pennsylvania and across the nation—buying and selling leases, greasing the palms of friendly politicians, convincing local residents to sell property rights to them, and ruining the landscape. As the Natural Resources Defense Council states:

Natural gas producers have been running roughshod over communities across the country with their extraction and production activities for too long, resulting in contaminated water supplies, dangerous air pollution, destroyed streams, and devastated landscapes. Weak safeguards and inadequate oversight fail to protect our communities from harm by the rapid expansion of fossil fuel production using hydraulic fracturing or “fracking.”

Fracking has also been implicated in earthquakes. In arid regions, it uses an inordinate share of the local water supply. And it releases methane, a major contributor to global warming. A group of scholars at Cornell University have argued that fracking might be environmentally “dirtier” than mining and burning coal.

Should the school board reach an agreement with the two energy companies, school kids and those living nearby will soon be hearing explosions, drinking contaminated water, suffering increased air pollution, and watching the woods turn into wastelands. Fires from the wells might light up the night sky. And it is not difficult to imagine that students will be fed large doses of propaganda extolling the virtues of gas drilling and all the jobs it generates. Perhaps, like McDonald’s, the energy corporations have prepared educational materials for the schools. The Vo-Tech already offers a program in “Natural Resources Technology”; among the “10 ‘Hot’ Career Opportunities” listed for this area of study is “Gas Exploration Manager.”

It would be nice to think that the citizens of the school district would protest this blatant intrusion of an extraordinarily environmentally destructive business into the public schools. But I doubt that they will. The poverty of the area and the lack of decent jobs have hardened people. They are for whatever saves them money or gets them some. The frackers are seen, not as parasites wreaking havoc on the earth, but as sources of jobs and windfall income. Some coal truck drivers have begun to haul water for the gas drillers, who use millions of gallons for each well. Homeowners, approached by company agents, have sold the right to use their land to the frackers, often for paltry sums of money. My sister took $600. And then put her house up for sale. As Louis XV said, “After me, the deluge.”

If put to a vote, I have no doubt that taxpayers would vote overwhelmingly in favor of the school district leasing the land to the two energy companies. The less they have to pay for education, the better. They won’t be much concerned with the environmental consequences of fracking. The Ford City region is already beset by severe pollution. Carcinogenic chemicals from the old Pittsburgh Plate Glass plant have been leaching into the nearby Allegheny River for years. Some of the highest levels of harmful airborne particulate matters in the nation plague residents. Strip coal mining and coal hauling despoil the land and spread dust and grime everywhere. Residents routinely burn trash in their backyards, delivering more pollutants into the atmosphere. And as a map published recently in the Scranton Times Tribune shows, Armstrong County’s water is already contaminated by fracking. Yet despite all this, there is no popular movement apparent; people seem to accept the poison and even get angry with anyone who points out the obvious. We once witnessed a man who, rather than paying someone to tear down an old house he owned and hauling the refuse away, was burning it, bit by bit, in a circular pit. No one but us seemed to notice or care.

As those at the top of the economic heap become fantastically wealthy, they use their money to create a society that will allow them to continue to add to their fortunes. Every institution and every facet of life must be controlled and, if possible, turned into an opportunity for making more money. Those without money find themselves in such perilous circumstances that they soon enough become willing to take whatever crumbs the plutocrats give them and to do whatever the rich want them to do. Turning a blind eye to the harm done by natural gas hydraulic fracturing  no doubt seems a small price to pay for lower taxes, some jobs, and a few hundred dollars for giving the frackers access to your land.

MICHAEL D. YATES is Associate Editor of Monthly review magazine.He is the author of Cheap Motels and Hot Plates: an Economist’s Travelogue and Naming the System: Inequality and Work in the Global Economy. He is the editor of Wisconsin Uprising: Labor Fights Back. Yates can be reached at mikedjyates@msn.com

It’s one thing to chronicle sparse details about these U.S. led NATO attacks. It’s quite another to sit across from Afghan men as they try, having broken down in tears, to regain sufficient composure to finish telling us their stories.  Last night, at a restaurant in Kabul, I and two friends from the Afghan Peace Volunteers met with five Pashtun men from Afghanistan’s northern and eastern provinces. The men had agreed to tell us about their experiences living in areas affected by regular drone attacks, aerial bombings and night raids.  Each of them noted that they also fear Taliban threats and attacks. “What can we do,” they asked, “when both sides are targeting us?”

THE FIRST RESPONDER’S TALE

Jamaludeen, an emergency medical responder from Jalalabad, is a large man, with a serious yet kindly demeanor. He began our conversation by saying that he simply doesn’t understand how one human being can inflict so much harm on another. Last winter, NATO forces fired on his cousin, Rafiqullah, age 30, who was studying to be a pediatrics specialist.

“A suicide bomber had apparently blown himself up near the airport.  My cousin and two other men were riding in a car on a road leading to the airport.  It was 6:15 AM.  When they’d realized that NATO helicopters and tanks were firing missiles, they had left their car and huddled on the roadside, but they were easily seen. A missile exploded near them, seriously wounding Rafiqullah and another passenger, while killing their driver, Hayatullah.”

Hayatullah, our friend told us, was an older man, about 45 years old, who left behind a wife, two boys and one daughter.

Although badly wounded, Rafiqullah and his fellow passenger could still speak. A U.S. tank arrived and they began pleading with the NATO soldiers to take them to the hospital.  “I am a doctor,” said Rafiqullah’s fellow passenger, a medical student named Siraj Ahmad.  “Please save me!”  But the soldiers handcuffed the two wounded young men and awaited a decision about what to do next.  Rafiqullah died there, by the side of the road. Still handcuffed, Siraj Ahmad was taken, not to a hospital, but to the airport, perhaps to await evacuation. That was where he died.   He was aged 35 and had four daughters. Rafiqullah, aged 30, leaves three small girls behind.

And Jamaludeen knows that those girls, in one sense are lucky.  Four years ago, he tried to bring first aid as an early responder to a wedding party attacked by NATO forces.  Only he couldn’t, because there were no survivors. 54 people were killed, all of them (except for the bridegroom) women and children.  “It was like hell,” said Dr. Jamaludeen.  “I saw little shoes, covered with blood, along with pieces of clothing and musical instruments.  It was very, very terrible to me. The NATO soldiers knew these people were not a threat.”

THE MANUAL LABORER’S TALE

Kocji, who makes a living doing manual laborer, is from a village of 400 families.  His story took place three weeks ago.  It started with a telephoned warning that Taliban forces had entered the Surkh Rod district of Jalalabad, which is where his village is located.  That day, at about 10:00 p.m., NATO forces entered his village en masse.  Some soldiers landed on rooftops and slid expertly to the ground on rope ladders.  When they entered homes, they would lock women and children in one room while they beat the men, shouting questions as the women and children screamed to be released.  On this raid, no one was killed, and no one was taken away.  It turned out that NATO troops had acted on a false report and discovered their error quickly.   False reports are a constant risk. - In any village some families will feud with each other, and NATO troops can be brought into those feuds, unwittingly and very easily, and sometimes with deadly consequences. Kocji objects to NATO forces ordering attacks without first asking more questions and trying to find out whether or not the report is valid.  He’d been warned of a threat from one direction, but the threats actually come from all sides.

THE STUDENT’S TALE

Rizwad, a student from the Pech district of the Kunar province, spoke next.

Twenty-five days ago, between 3 and 4 a.m., twelve children were collecting firewood in the mountains not far from his village.  The children were between 7 and 8 years old.  Rizwad actually saw the fighter plane flying overhead towards the mountains.  When it reached them, it fired on the twelve children, leaving no survivors.  Rizwad’s 8 year old cousin, Nasrullah, a schoolboy in the third grade, was among the dead that morning.

The twelve children belonged to eight families from the same village.  When the villagers found the bloodied and dismembered bodies of their children, they gathered together to demand from the provincial government some reason as to why NATO forces had killed them.  “It was a mistake,” they were told.

“It is impossible for the people to talk with the U.S. military,” says Rizwad.  “Our own government tries to calm us down by saying they will look into the matter.”

Twelve children killed in the Kunar province, April 2013. Photo credit:  Namatullah Karyab for The New York Times

THE FARMER’S TALE

Riazullah from Chapria Marnu spoke next.   Fifteen days previously, three famers in Riazullah’s area had been working to irrigate their wheat field.  It was early afternoon, about 3:30 p.m.  One of the men was only eighteen – he had been married for five months.  The other two farmers were in their mid-forties.  Their names were Shams Ulrahman, Khadeem and Miragah, and Miragah’s two little daughters were with them.

Eleven NATO tanks arrived.  One tank fired missiles which killed the three men and the two little girls. “What can we do?” asked Riazullah.  “We are caught between the Taliban and the internationals. Our local government does not help us.”

THE STORY OF U.S./NATO OCCUPATION

The world doesn’t seem to ask many questions about Afghan civilians whose lives are cut short by NATO or Taliban forces. Genuinely concerned U.S. friends say they can’t really make sense of our list – news stories merge into one large abstraction, into statistics, into “collateral damage,” in a way that comparable (if much smaller and less frequent) attacks on U.S. civilians do not.   People here in Afghanistan naturally don’t see themselves as a statistic; they wonder why the NATO soldiers treat civilians as battlefield foes at the slightest hint of opposition or danger; why the U.S. soldiers and drones kill unarmed suspects on anonymous tips when people around the world know suspects deserve safety and a trial, innocent until proven guilty.

“All of us keep asking why the internationals kill us,” said Jamaludeen.  “One reason seems to be that they don’t differentiate between people.  The soldiers fear any bearded Afghan who wears a turban and traditional clothes. But why would they kill children?  It seems they have a mission.  They are told to go and get the Taliban.  When they go out in their planes and their tanks and their helicopters, they need to be killing, and then they can report that they have completed their mission.”

These are the stories being told here.  NATO and its constituent nations may have other accounts to give of themselves, but they aren’t telling them very convincingly, or well.  The stories told by bomb blasts or by shouting home-invading soldiers drown out other competing sentiments and seem to represent all that the U.S./NATO occupiers ever came here to say.  We who live in countries that support NATO, that tolerate this occupation, bear responsibility to hear the tales told by Afghans who are trapped by our war of choice.  These tales are part of our history now, and this history isn’t popular in Afghanistan. It doesn’t play well when the U.S. and NATO forces state that we came here because of terrorism, because of a toll in lost civilian lives already exceeded in Afghanistan during just the first three months of a decade-long war – that we came in pious concern over precious stories that should not be cut short.

Kathy Kelly, (kathy@vcnv.org), co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence. She is living in Kabul for the month of May as a guest of the Afghan Peace Volunteers.

Photo caption:  Twelve children killed in the Kunar province, April 2013

Photo credit:  Namatullah Karyab for The New York Times

Certainly, Soros himself doesn’t believe it, as the 13-F release issued by the Securities and Exchange Commission on May 15 proves. George Soros has significantly increased his gold holding by purchasing $25.2 million of call options on the GDXJ Junior Gold Miners Index. 

In addition the Soros Fund maintains a $32 million stake in individual mines; added 1.1 million shares of GDX (a gold miners ETF) to its holdings which now stand at 2,666,000 shares valued at $70,400,000; has 1,100,000 shares in GDXJ valued at $11,506,000; and 530,000 shares in the GLD gold fund valued at $69,467,000. [values as of May 17]

The 13-F release shows the Soros Fund with $239,200,000 in gold investments. If this is bearish sentiment, what would it take to be bullish?

The misinformation that Soros had sold his gold holdings came from misinterpreting the reason Soros’ holdings in the GLD gold trust declined. Soros did not sell the shares; he redeemed the paper claims for physical gold. Watching the gold ETFs, such as GLD, being looted by banksters, Soros cashed in some of his own paper gold for the real stuff.

The giveaway that Soros is extremely bullish on gold comes not only from his extensive holdings, but also from his $25.2 million call option on junior gold stocks. This is a highly leveraged bet on the weakest gold mines. With high production costs and falling gold price from constant short selling in the paper market, Soros’ bet makes no sense unless he thinks gold is heading up as the short raids concentrate gold in elite possession.

In previous articles I have explained how heavy short-selling triggers stop-loss orders and margin calls on investors in gold ETFs. Scared out of their shares or forced out by margin calls, investors’ add to the downward price pressure caused by the shorts. Bullion banks and prominent investors such as Soros are the only ones who can redeem GLD shares for physical metal. They purchase the shares that are sold in response to the falling gold price, and present the shares for redemption in gold metal.

Insiders familiar with the process describe it as looting the ETFs of their gold basis.

In my last column I described how the orchestration of a falling gold price in the paper market protects the dollar’s value from the Federal Reserve’s policy of printing 1,000 billion new ones annually. The other beneficiary of the operation is the financial elite who buy up at low prices the ETF shares sold into a falling market and redeem them for gold. Like all other forms of wealth in the West, gold is being concentrated in fewer hands, while the elite shout “bear market, get out of gold.”

The orchestrated decline in gold and silver prices is apparent from the fact that the demand for bullion in the physical market has increased while short sales in the paper market imply a flight from bullion. As a hedge fund manager told me, it is a Wall Street axiom that volume follows price. Bull markets are characterized by rising prices on high volume. Conversely bear markets feature declining prices on low volume. The current bear market in gold consists of paper gold declining steadily while demand has escalated rapidly for physical metal. This strongly indicates that demand for physical gold continues to be in a bull market despite the savage attacks on paper gold.

If the orchestration is apparent to me, a person with no experience as a gold trader, it certainly must be apparent to federal regulators. But don’t expect any action from the Commodities Future Trading Corporation. It is headed by a former Goldman Sachs executive.

And don’t expect any investigation from the financial press. The financial press sees a bear market while supplies of bullion decline, premiums over spot rise, and even publicly declared bears such as George Soros make highly leveraged bets that will fail in the absence of a bull market in gold.

Paul Craig Roberts is a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. His latest book is  The Failure of Laissez-Faire Capitalism. Roberts’ How the Economy Was Lost is now available from CounterPunch in electronic format.

Before I went to work for Bob Edgar, the President of Common Cause, who passed away in April at the age of 69, all I really knew about him was that Ronald Reagan once called him “the most dangerous man in America.” Reagan said this in 1986 after members of both parties in Washington had spent many years watching in horror as Bob, then a Congressman from southeastern Pennsylvania, challenged some of Washington’s most corrupt practices, such as doling out billions for pet Congressional projects through pork-barrel spending.

Bob also challenged the status quo when it came to corporate influence over environmental policy, and it is ironic that Reagan would feel compelled to sign a bill which included the Community Right-To-Know provision, which Bob wrote to establish “reporting requirements for providing the public with important information on the hazardous chemicals in their communities.”

Bob once told me that his views on the environment were shaped by the fact that his father’s death at the age of 56 may have been the result of working in a factory where his hands were often submerged in chemicals. And beginning in 2007, when Bob came to Common Cause, it became clear that the intersection of these two issues on which he had worked for most of his career—corruption and the problem of environmental laws written by and for corporate America—would be key to exposing how the natural gas industry is convincing Congress and many state legislatures to ignore the dangers of fracking.

According to research by Common Cause, the natural gas industry has spent $8 million on campaign contributions in Pennsylvania and $15 million on lobbying there since 2001 to keep fracking legal in the state, to defeat a proposed severance tax on natural gas extraction, to defeat a moratorium on drilling in state-owned lands, to defeat or delay tougher environmental regulations, and to keep information about exactly what mixtures of chemicals are used in fracking secret.

A major challenge for people fighting back against the natural gas industry has been the fact that, long before there was fracking in many states, the industry was deep-drilling its talking points about fracking into the brains of elected officials while lavishing them with campaign contributions. One of the biggest promises made to elected officials was that the industry had found a “clean” source of energy; then, when the “clean” myth was debunked, that it had found “a bridge fuel” until cleaner energy could be developed. And now, in addition to three-quarters of a billion spent on lobbying Congress between 2001-2011, the SuperPAC’s spawned by Citizens United have given the fracking industry even greater power over elections and public policy, namely the ability to scare their opponents by giving or merely threatening to give millions to defeat candidates who threaten their interests.

The numbers on political spending—or the public’s inability to get the numbers, due to weak campaign finance and lobbying laws—for other fracked states are just as alarming. In Ohio, Common Cause found that some of the biggest recipients of the industry’s generosity in recent years were its biggest champions in Columbus, including Gov. John Kasich, House Speaker Bill Batchelder, and Senate President Tom Niehaus. (Niehaus has since left the Senate and recently joined a law firm whose clients include companies involved with fracking.) And in Illinois, a separate study estimated that the state is failing to capture more than 90% of all spending by lobbyists—including fracking lobbyists—because it does not require them to disclose how much compensation they receive from each of their clients.

The industry has also wielded enormous influence through ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC drafts model legislation on dozens of issues, including bills to strip unions of collective bargaining rights, bills to strip public schools of funding, and fracking “disclosure” bills that let corporations avoid disclosing fracking chemicals they deem to be trade secrets. Yet incredibly, ALEC denies that what it does is lobbying, does not comply with lobbyist registration laws, and continues to exist as a 501 (c)(3) corporation that can receive tax-deductible contributions from its members—including ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Koch Industries.

Oil and gas officials like to say that they have been “successfully” fracking since the 1950s. What they don’t say is that fracking has never been done on such a large scale, has never been done so close to so many people and the water they need to live, and has never been done so close to so many environmentally sensitive areas. And of course the difference between the vertical fracking done in the past and the far more environmentally-damaging high-pressure horizontal fracking happening now is a little like the difference . . . the difference is so great in terms of the potential impact on human health and the environment that it’s hard to capture in a metaphor.

As Bob says in Groundswell, a new documentary film about fracking by director Renard Cohen, “This is the most dangerous moment in American history for democracy. We are either going to be a nation that is of, by, and for the people, or a nation that is of, by, and for large corporations and the wealthy.”

James Browning is the Regional Director of State Operations for Common Cause and can be reached at jbrowning@commoncause.org.

The latter is particularly relevant to the Australian context.  Leaders like proclaiming the country as stable and untouched by the political fractiousness that tends to afflict other countries with similar pools of wealth.  These scions of plunder are attempting to give lessons to other countries in the game, which is much like a thief teaching other thieves how best to open a safe in a sustainable, green way.  This is the message at the Mining for Development Conference taking place in Sydney over May 20 and May 21.

The conference profile reads like a smooth document on dispute resolution and good governance, a manifesto of promise and environmental equilibrium.  Mining, in short, is praiseworthy.  It has had its problems, but the guests are keen to follow such standards as the EITI (Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative), the global standard for transparency of revenues from natural resources.  And it has the blessings of AusAid, thereby surreptitiously linking aid to developing countries with a noble mining sector.  If Coke would sponsor programs on nutrition, this is what it would look like.

A few comments from the International Mining for Development Centre’s director Ian Satchwell are worth noting.  “The history of mining in many developing countries has not been a good one, and countries have done less well than they should from mining and oil and gas extraction in the past” (ABC, May 20).  This may be the understatement of the week.

The next comment is also striking.  “Where many developing countries have fallen short is that they have not had good experience getting mining revenue from mining companies and then the useful application of that revenue into investment in community and infrastructure.”

Is Australia any different from those “developing” economies where mining and development tend to be less matters of accommodation rather than matters of exclusion?  The mining lobby has hardly been amenable to infrastructure projects that have any utility beyond the crude issue of getting more miners and finding more deposits.  Empty pockets need lining.  Local fat cats need feeding.  Even an imposed mining tax has not provided the rewards the government promised.

That does not stop the agitprop from circulating, something that the mining initiates tell each other constantly.  Indeed, leafing through such reports as those of Susan A. Joyce and Mark E. Smith in The Latin American Mining Report (Sep/Oct 2003), the fantastically misplaced praise for not only mining but its sustainable credentials is unmistakable.  For the authors, “mining’s track record is not bad, having been the foundation for some of the biggest sustainable economies on Earth.  This new challenge can in fact be our ally – mining’s belief in its contribution to economic development is a truth that shines well on the industry.”  No mention of local disputes, environmental carnage and political disruption.

History is picked upon at the authors’ convenience – California being one such example. “Mining created the economic engine which opened up a distant and isolated region with lots of other potential – and for which the US had just finished fighting a war with Mexico.”  Right out of manifest destiny’s top drawer.

Then come the benefits mining provides, the collateral benefits that make the authors thrilled that such an enterprise can be economically ennobling – the making of wheel barrows by Studebaker, or the pants by Levi Strauss for miners.  Digging is good for soul, country and economy.  But overall – and let’s scream out the word – it can be sustainable, an astonishing illusion that has assumed the form of holy mantra.

The speakers at the Mining For Development Conference have embraced the sentiment like cult followers of the next fashion.  Professor Paul Collier, fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, recalled the Ashanti Goldfields of Ghana, where the mining enterprise became a treatment enterprise for employees and residents suffering from malaria.  “Mining companies in developing countries often develop roles outside their core competence.”  Let’s just ignore those less savoury roles in mining’s blotted copy book.

The facts of the mining industry remain dark and disturbing.  Deposits are to be found in developing countries that curse them rather than benefit them.  Even the delegates admit that.  Goodness, even the World Bank, in an extensive investigation of over 200 regions, has reached the same, numbingly obvious conclusion.  And an easy point to forget is what developed countries tend to do to the unfortunates who find themselves sitting on unmined wealth. Instability is rarely a one-way street. Corporate complicity with brutal regimes tends to go hand in hand, a point skilfully evaded by the delegates.

The disastrous effects can also be felt in wealthier states, where the oxymoron of “sustainability” is demonstrated with disastrous import.  The Redbank Copper mine on the Northern Territory-Queensland border is one such an example, a mine that leached heavy copper sulphide for two decades that turned Hanrahan’s Creek to a deadly hue of green and blue.  Toxicity levels have killed the creek and potentially threaten pristine wetlands (Northern Territory News, Mar 15).

Michael L. Ross, himself a participant in the proceedings, should know what such wealth does. In 2012, his The Oil Curse: How Petroleum Wealth Shapes the Development of Nations examined the astonishing disparities that oil-rich countries have in terms of stability, the presence of autocracy and the chronic failures to distribute wealth, though he tends to ignore the insatiable appetites of countries all too keen to meddle in such areas as the Middle East. Then there is that gaping lacunae in the literature on what developing countries do with such reserves.

Hunger and insecurity regarding natural resources are terrible motivators, and that lesson should not be missed by those developed countries happy to gain their wealth by their remorseless and ultimately unsustainable digging.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He currently lectures in politics and law at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

We’re poised to make greater gains in the next two decades than we have in the previous 200 years. Because of new, transformational technologies and three powerful [social] forces we will soon have the ability to meet and exceed the basic needs for every man, woman and child on the planet. Abundance for all is actually within our grasp.

My book Any Way You Slice: The Past, Present, and Future of Rationing would appear to make a contrary argument. I see things this way:

Today, with the widening wealth gap, we divvy up resources all the time with no regard to fairness. Some of us are not even aware that anything’s wrong, while others see their consumption harshly limited by privation. It’s very true that fairer, explicit forms of rationing would not fit comfortably into today’s economy. But they’ll be essential if we are someday to enjoy the kind of ecologically robust society that is envisioned in Earth Day celebrations. That’s because creating such a society will mean cutting back deeply on our exploitation of fossil fuels and other resources. Otherwise, there will be an ecological cliff waiting not far ahead.

But these two visions of the future are not necessarily 100 percent contradictory. In a recent Forbes piece, Kotler observed,

Cox thinks we need to figure out how to divvy up the pie into thinner slices, our argument is that it’s time to learn how to bake more pies—but for this discussion that’s actually a little beside the point. My bigger point is that we both think the world needs big change and fast. The means are less important to me. Do I think rationing is a reasonable long-term solution? Absolutely not. Do I think rationing would be a kick ass driver for innovation? Absolutely.

He goes on, “What I really like here is how much rationing would tick people off. It would make ‘em nuts. Congressmen would lose their jobs. Politicians would get voted out of office. But it would drive innovation—which, at least to me, is the real point.”

So, coming from very different views of the future, Kotler and I both see the need for a thoroughgoing transformation of our economic system and a positive role for rationing. How is that possible?

While they stress that new technology is only one of four forces that will make the future better, Kotler’s and Diamandis’s vision would still depend on some remarkable technological advances being made. They believe that will happen; I have serious doubts that it will. But I don’t think either of us would argue that we should wait for a rising tide of innovation simply to sweep us all into utopia. We must accept only those innovations that will make it possible to live in the future with a smaller total ecological footprint—and a much fairer sharing of that footprint across the world’s population.

I believe it is entirely possible to pull our economy back within necessary ecological boundaries, fairly,  while still encouraging the kinds of innovation that would make abundance (properly defined) possible in the future.

Ecological economist Robert Costanza has put this idea in vivid terms. In 1999, Costanza wrote an essay that offered four visions of alternative futures. He argued that for civilization to endure intact through the coming century, we will be compelled to make the right choice between two divergent paths that the human economy might take. The choice of path, he wrote, was a choice between two worldviews: that of the “technological optimist” or of the “technological
skeptic.” To optimists, competition and self-interest drive progress, and technical innovation can deal with any challenge. To skeptics, cooperation and partnership drive progress; technology must not transgress ecological boundaries; and humans must work with nature rather than trying to control it. Because the world can exist in only one state at a time, either the optimists or the skeptics, but not both, can be right in their assumptions about the real state of the world. Depending on which worldview we let guide our actions—and, crucially, on which worldview turns out be the correct one—we will see, in Costanza’s view (and using nicknames he assigned), one and only one of these four scenarios come to pass:

* A “Star Trek” future, if we act in accordance with the technological optimists’ worldview (waiting for the market and technology to lead the way and then following) and the optimists turn out to have been right.

* A “Mad Max” future, if we act in accordance with the technological optimists’ worldview and they’re wrong.

* An “Ecotopia” future, if we act in accordance with the technological skeptics’ worldview (restraining resource consumption and economic activity within strict ecological boundaries) and they turn out to have been right.

* A “Big Government” future, if we act in accordance with the technological skeptics’ worldview but it turns out that the optimists, not the skeptics, were right all along.

The names that Costanza gave to these alternative futures tell the story. In his Star Trek world, seemingly miraculous climate-neutral energy technologies emerge to make a life of space exploration and leisure possible for twenty million human beings. In a Mad Max world, by contrast, gambling on the emergence of world-saving technologies will have turned out to be a big mistake. Such progress never happens. The world is run by greedy corporations rather than governments, and the few people lucky enough to get jobs slave away for ninety to a hundred hours a week, and everyone else scrambles for food and shelter in sprawling slums. (And, as in the film, you can get yourself killed over a gallon of gas.)

If, however, we plan not to be bailed out by technology (even if we think there’s a chance we will be), we would, says Costanza, come to live in Ecotopia, named with a nod to Ernest Callenbach’s 1975 novel. This world would feature largely self-sufficient small villages with resources allocated on a frugal, fair-shares basis, and equitable distribution, electronic rather than physical travel, high quality of life, and 20-hour work weeks. But if we follow the techno-skeptic’s quest for Ecotopia only to find that the technological optimists were right, it will be a world of Big Government that awaits, with ample resources and marvelous technologies available but with high resource taxes and economic stagnation.

In outlining these possibilities, Costanza was leading up to an argument for how to select a course of action through worst-case analysis. He wrote, “From the perspective of game theory, this problem has a fairly definitive answer. This is a game that can be played only once, and the relative possibilities of each outcome are completely unknown. In addition, we can assume that society as a whole should be risk-averse in this situation” (my emphasis). Costanza notes that of the four scenarios, only the Mad Max world would be intolerable. Big-Government world—the other scenario that would result if we base our actions on incorrect assumptions—would not be anyone’s first choice, but it would be a cakewalk compared with Mad Max (and unlike the Mad Max world, it would not be an irreversible condition.) Therefore, he argued, if the goal is to avoid risking the “worst worst case,” a wise society will act in accord with the technological skeptic’s worldview, whatever our actual degree of technological optimism or pessimism.

The skeptical approach, Costanza went on, has the added virtue of keeping all options open. In either the Ecotopia or Big Government world, we will have retained the capacity to take advantage (carefully) of any useful new technologies that do come along. In fact, as Kotler notes, restraint in resource exploitation could stimulate discovery of useful technologies that might not arise in a more profligate society.

We must encourage efficiency, but not depend on efficiency to solve our problems. The godfather of modern ecological economics, Herman Daly, has written that a “frugality-first” policy designed to limit economies’ “throughput”—the process that begins with depletion and ends with pollution—is always to be preferred over the “efficiency-first” approach recommended by most economists. That is because, he has written, “a policy of ‘frugality first’ induces efficiency as a secondary consequence; ‘efficiency first’ does not induce frugality–it makes frugality less necessary.” Or, he perhaps should have written, “it makes frugality seem less necessary.”

When it comes to resources and technology, and with the ecological cliff lying ahead, we’ll need to have high ambitions and low expectations, and act accordingly.

Stan Cox is a senior plant breeder at The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. His book Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present, and Future of Rationing was published by The New Press this month. Write to him at t.sta@cox.net. And hear Cox and Kotler discuss rationing and other issues on NPR’s On Point.

Allen’s original 700-pages magnum opus, already recognized as a “classic” by scholars such as Audrey Smedley, Wilson J. Moses, Nell Painter, and Gerald Horne, included extensive notes and appendices based on his twenty-plus years of primary source research. The November 2012 Verso edition adds new front and back matter, expanded indexes, and internal study guides for use by individuals, classes, and study groups. Invention is a major contribution to our historical understanding, it is meant to stand the test of time, and it can be expected to grow in importance in the 21^st century.

“When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no ‘white’ people there; nor, according to the colonial records, would there be for another sixty years.”

That arresting statement, printed on the back cover of the first (1994) volume, reflected the fact that, after poring through 885 county-years of Virginia’s colonial records, Allen found “no instance of the official use of the word ‘white’ as a token of social status” prior to its appearance in a 1691 law. As he explained, “Others living in the colony at that time were English; they had been English when they left England, and naturally they and their Virginia-born children were English, they were not ‘white.’” “White identity had to be carefully taught, and it would be only after the passage of some six crucial decades” that the word “would appear as a synonym for European-American.”

Allen was not merely speaking of word usage, however. His probing research led him to conclude – based on the commonality of experience and demonstrated solidarity between African-American and European-American laboring people, the lack of a substantial intermediate buffer social control stratum, and the “indeterminate” status of African-Americans – that the “white race” was not, and could not have been, functioning in early Virginia.

It is in the context of such findings that he offers his major thesis — the “white race” was invented as a ruling class social control formation in response to labor solidarity as manifested in the later, civil war stage of Bacon’s Rebellion (1676-77).  To this he adds two important corollaries: 1) the ruling elite, in its own class interest, deliberately instituted a system of racial privileges to define and maintain the “white race” and 2) the consequences were not only ruinous to the interests of African-Americans, they were also “disastrous” for European-American workers, whose class interests differed fundamentally from those of the ruling elite.

In Volume I Allen offers a critical examination of the two main lines of historiography on the slavery and racism debate: the psycho-cultural approach, which he strongly criticizes; and the socio-economic approach, which he seeks to free from certain apparent weaknesses. He then proceeds to develop a definition of racial oppression in terms of social control, a definition not based on “phenotype,” or classification by complexion. In the process, he offers compelling analogies between the oppression of the Irish in Ireland (under Anglo-Norman rule and under “Protestant Ascendancy”) and white supremacist oppression of African Americans and Indians.

Allen emphasizes that maximizing profit and maintaining social control are two priority tasks of the ruling class. He describes how racial oppression is one form of ruling class response to the problem of social control and national oppression is another.  The difference centers on whether the key component of the intermediate social control stratum are members of the oppressor group (racial oppression) or the oppressed group (national oppression).

With stunning international and domestic examples he shows how racial oppression (particularly in the form of religio-racial oppression) was developed and maintained by the phenotypically-similar British against the Irish Catholics in Ireland; how a phenotypically-similar Anglo bourgeoisie established national oppression in the Anglo-Caribbean and racial oppression in the continental Anglo-American plantation colonies; how racial oppression was transformed into national oppression due to ruling class social control needs in Ireland (while racial oppression was maintained in Ulster); how the same people who were victims of racial oppression in Ireland  became “white American” defenders of racial oppression in the United States; and how in America racial oppression took the form of racial slavery, yet when racial slavery ended racial oppression remained and was re-constituted in new form.

In Volume II, on The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America, Allen tells the story of the invention of the “white race” in the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Anglo-American plantation colonies. His primary focus is on the pattern-setting Virginia colony, and he pays special attention to the fact that England alone, of all the European colonizing powers, exported so many of its own surplus poor laboring population. He also pays particular attention to the process by which tenants and wage-laborers in the majority English labor force in Virginia were reduced to chattel bond-servants in the 1620s. In so doing, he emphasizes that this reduction was a qualitative break from the condition of laborers in England and from long established English labor law, that it was not a feudal carryover, that it was imposed under capitalism, and that it was an essential precondition of the emergence of the lifetime hereditary chattel bond-servitude imposed upon African-American laborers under the system of racial slavery.

Allen describes how, throughout much of the seventeenth century, the status of African-Americans was being fought out and he documents significant instances of labor solidarity and unrest, especially during the 1660s and 1670s. Most important is his analysis of the civil war stage of Bacon’s Rebellion when, in the final stages, “foure hundred English and Negroes in Arms” fought together demanding freedom from bondage.

It was in the period after Bacon’s Rebellion, in response to class struggle, that the “white race” was invented as a ruling-class social control formation. Allen describes systematic ruling-class policies, which conferred “white race” privileges on European-Americans while imposing harsher disabilities on African-Americans resulting in a system of racial slavery, a form of racial oppression that also imposed severe racial proscriptions on free African-Americans. He emphasizes that when African-Americans were deprived of their long-held right to vote in Virginia and Governor William Gooch explained in 1735 that the Virginia Assembly had decided upon this curtailment of the franchise in order “to fix a perpetual Brand upon Free Negros & Mulattos,” it was not an “unthinking decision.” Rather, it was a deliberate act by the plantation bourgeoisie and was a conscious decision in the process of establishing a system of racial oppression, even though it entailed repealing an electoral principle that had existed in Virginia for more than a century.

The key to understanding racial oppression, Allen argues, is in the formation of the intermediate social control buffer stratum, which serves the interests of the ruling class. In the case of racial oppression in Virginia, any persons of discernible non-European ancestry after Bacon’s Rebellion were denied a role in the social control buffer group, the bulk of which was made up of laboring-class “whites.” In the Anglo-Caribbean, by contrast, under a similar Anglo- ruling elite, “mulattos” were included in the social control stratum and were promoted into middle-class status. For Allen, this was the key to understanding the difference between Virginia’s ruling-class policy of  “fixing a perpetual brand” on African-Americans, and the policy of the West Indian planters of formally recognizing the middle-class status “colored” descendant and other Afro-Caribbeans who earned special merit by their service to the regime. This difference, between racial oppression and national oppression, was rooted in a number of social control-related factors, one of the most important of which was that in the West Indies there were “too few” poor and laboring-class Europeans to embody an adequate petit bourgeoisie, while in the continental colonies there were ‘’too many’’ to be accommodated in the ranks of that class.

The references to an “unthinking decision” and “too few” poor and laboring class Europeans are consistent with Allen’s repeated efforts to challenge what he considered to be the two main arguments that undermine and disarm the struggle against white supremacy in the working class: (1) the argument that white supremacism is innate, and (2) the argument that European-American workers “benefit” from “white race” privileges and that it is in their interest not to oppose them and not to oppose white supremacy. These two arguments, opposed by Allen, are related to two master historical narratives rooted in writings on the colonial period. The first argument is associated with the “unthinking decision” explanation for the development of racial slavery offered by historian Winthrop D. Jordan in his influential, White Over Black. The second argument is associated with historian Edmund S. Morgan’s similarly influential, American Slavery, American Freedom, which maintains that, as racial slavery developed, “there were too few free poor [European-Americans] on hand to matter.” Allen’s work directly challenges both the “unthinking decision” contention of Jordan and the “too few free poor” contention of Morgan. Allen convincingly argues that the “white race” privileges conferred by the ruling class on European-Americans were not only ruinous to the interests of African-Americans; they were also against the class interest of European-American workers.

The Invention of the White Race is a compelling work that re-examines centuries of history. It also offers Allen’s glimpse of “the future in the distance.” When he completed Volume II sixteen years ago, the 78-years-old Allen, in words that resonate today, ended by describing “unmistakable signs of maturing social conflict” between “the common people” and “the Titans.” He suggested that “Perhaps, in the impending . . . struggle,” influenced by the “indelible stamp of the African-American civil rights struggle of the 1960s,” the “white-skin privileges may finally come to be seen and rejected by laboring-class European-Americans as the incubus that for three centuries has paralyzed their will in defense of their class interests vis-à-vis those of the ruling class.” It was with that prospect in mind, with its profound implications for radical social change, that the independent, working class intellectual/activist Theodore W. Allen (1919-2005) concluded The Invention of the White Race.

Apple – like hundreds of other high-tech and pharmaceutical companies that enjoy enormous profits from royalties or licensing agreements – is able to attribute these profits to offshore subsidiaries located in low-tax havens like Bermuda or the Cayman Islands even when sales revenue and profits are earned primarily in the U.S.

Under current law, these companies continue to owe taxes to the U.S. Treasury on these overseas earnings, as technically, the taxes have only been deferred. But the taxes don’t come due until the profits are repatriated – that is, brought back to the U.S. parent company. A territorial tax system would let these companies repatriate profits without paying the U.S. taxes they owe.

The argument in favor of allowing companies to repatriate offshore profits while paying no tax or a small tax in the U.S. is that corporations will put these funds to work here at home. The promised payoff is increased investment, increased employment and increased economic growth. There is good reason to be skeptical of this promise.

The U.S. tried just such a tax break in 2004, declaring a temporary tax holiday for offshore profits. According to a report by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service, approximately one-third of offshore profits were repatriated in the following year. Academic studies, however, found no evidence that companies used the repatriated profits to increase investment or employment and no evidence that they increased economic activity.

Instead, they freed up other funds that these companies used for stock buybacks and to pay dividends to corporate shareholders. Indeed, many of the companies that benefited from the tax holiday on offshore profits actually reduced employment in the U.S.

It is also a myth that these profits are languishing in offshore in low-tax jurisdictions. According to the Wall Street Journal, a lot of this cash is actually held in U.S. banks or invested in U.S. government and corporate securities. As long as these profits don’t come back to the parent company, they are not taxed in the U.S. But this cash is already at work in the U.S. economy – which undermines the argument that a territorial tax system would bring huge hoards of cash back for investment. The only thing companies can’t do with these funds is reward shareholders.

U.S. companies are supposed to account for offshore profits by setting aside funds to cover future tax liabilities when these profits are repatriated. Few companies actually do this. Most simply declare that the funds have been permanently invested overseas, which frees them from this obligation. Google, Oracle, Microsoft and numerous other companies have taken this route. As a result, these highly profitable companies owe very little in corporate income taxes.

Apple, which currently has $102.3 billion in offshore profits, has not taken advantage of this provision. Its accounts show that it has set aside billions of dollars to cover future tax liabilities on offshore profits. According to the Financial Times, Apple set aside $5.8 billion last year, 70 percent of its reported tax liability, for this purpose. This boosted Apple’s apparent corporate tax rate to 25.2 percent – far above Google, Microsoft and others – and spared the company the public outrage directed at highly profitable companies that pay little or no corporate income taxes. However, the $5.8 billion is an accounting entry that had no effect on the actual taxes Apple paid.

A territorial tax system would further increase incentives to locate jobs in low-tax countries, as profits earned in these countries could more easily flow back to U.S. shareholders. A better solution is to eliminate deferral of taxes on profits stashed offshore and, instead, to allocate taxes on profits based on its activity in various jurisdictions.

About half of U.S. states that have a corporate income tax use such a method for U.S. companies that operate in multiple states. Earlier this year, California adopted a sales-based corporate tax system that taxes companies that sell products or services in California, no matter where in the world they are located, based on the proportion of their total sales revenue generated in the state. This could serve as an example for tax reform that is both simple and fair.

Eileen Appelbaum is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

This article originally appeared on Economic Intelligence.

(1) abolishing the corruption by giant drug companies of mental health institutions, research, and practice; and

(2) exhuming buried truths about the relationship between a dehumanized society and emotional suffering.

Abolishing the Corruption by Big Pharma of Mental Health Institutions, Research, and Practice

In what has become a “psychiatric-pharmaceutical industrial complex,” giant drug companies have corrupted mental health institutions, research, and practice. Most major mental health organizations and institution from which the general public and doctors receive information are financially interconnected with Big Pharma. This practice needs to be abolished by law.

The official psychiatric diagnostic bible that is published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) is called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). DSM-5 was recently approved by the APA, and according to the journal PLOS Medicine, “69% of the DSM-5 task force members report having ties to the pharmaceutical industry.” The corruption of the APA by Big Pharma is nothing new. On July 12, 2008, the New York Times reported the following about APA “In 2006, the latest year for which numbers are available, the drug industry accounted for about 30 percent of the association’s $62.5 million in financing.” Congressional investigators in 2008 also discovered that then president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association (Alan Schatzberg of Stanford University) had $4.8 million stock holdings in a drug development company.

The APA’s recently approved DSM-5 is an embarrassment even for some psychiatrists who had taken seriously previous DSM editions. Psychiatrist Allen Frances, former chair of the DSM-4 taskforce and currently professor emeritus at Duke, wrote in “Last Plea To DSM-5: Save Grief From the Drug Companies, “Making grief a mental disorder will be a bonanza for drug companies, but a disaster for grievers. . . .Psychiatry should not be mislabeling the normal.”

Most mental health professional organizations that are not on the take from Big Pharma are opposing DSM-5. The Coalition for DSM-5 Reform is comprised of over 50 organizations including the Society for Humanistic Psychology (one of several divisions of the American Psychological Association that are in the coalition), the British Psychological Society, the Danish Psychological Association, the Association of Black Psychologists, the Association for Women in Psychology, Psychologists for Social Responsibility, and the International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry.

Within the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industrial complex, there is a government-industry revolving door of employment, a staple of industrial complexes. As I detailed in 2008 in “Psycho-Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex,” there has been a revolving-door of employment between giant pharmaceutical corporations and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), as well as with the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). This makes it easier for Big Pharma to create and corrupt psychiatry “thought leaders.”

Perhaps psychiatry’s most influential thought leader is Harvard psychiatrist Joseph Biederman, who “single-handedly put pediatric bipolar disorder on the map,” according to pediatrician and author Lawrence Diller. Biederman’s financial relationships with drug companies was discovered by the public in 2008, when the New York Times reported the following about him: “A world-renowned Harvard child psychiatrist whose work has helped fuel an explosion in the use of powerful antipsychotic medicines in children earned at least $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers from 2000 to 2007 but for years did not report much of this income to university officials.” As part of legal proceedings, Biederman was forced to provide documents about his interactions with Johnson & Johnson, the giant pharmaceutical company; the New York Times reported Biederman pitched Johnson & Johnson that his proposed research studies on its antipsychotic drug Risperdal would turn out favorably for Johnson & Johnson—and then Biederman delivered the goods.

Due in great part to Biederman’s influence, the number of American children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder increased 40-fold from 1994 to 2003. Bloomberg News reported in 2007, “The expanded use of bipolar as a pediatric diagnosis has made children the fastest-growing part of the $11.5 billion U.S. market for antipsychotic drugs,” and today this market has grown to $18 billion.

Biedeman is not alone among psychiatrists lining their pockets with drug company money. The New York Times (“Top Psychiatrist Didn’t Report Drug Makers’ Pay”) reported this about Charles Nemeroff: “One of the nation’s most influential psychiatrists earned more than $2.8 million in consulting arrangements with drug makers from 2000 to 2007, failed to report at least $1.2 million of that income to his university and violated federal research rules, according to documents provided to Congressional investigators.”

A 2008 Congressional investigation revealed a widespread financial interconnection between Big Pharma and psychiatric institutions and thought leaders. Unfortunately, the U.S. Congress has a history of occasionally exposing the corruption of a major industrial complex but then doing nothing about it; and this has been the case with Congress and the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industrial complex.

What needs to be done? Let’s start by throwing out everything that has been created by Big Pharma corrupted mental health institutions and thought leaders. And let’s begin a “Mental Health Enlightenment” based on genuine science, which would mean an admission of exactly what psychiatrists and psychologists do and do not know.

Exhuming Buried Truths about the Relationship between a Dehumanized Society and Emotional Suffering

Big Pharma corruption of mental health institutions has also meant an ever-increasing focus on our biochemistry. We are diverted from the reality that many emotional problems are not caused by biochemical or genetic defects but are often natural human reactions to powerlessness, hopelessness, and loss of community and autonomy that have been created by public policies. Mental health is hugely political, and it is very much connected to the sanity and humanity of a society and culture.

In the United States today, Native Americans have the highest suicide rate among all ethnic groups, and suicide is the second leading cause of death among Native American adolescents. As I document in Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic, prior to colonialism and their subjugation, suicide was virtually nonexistent among young Native Americans. Social and cultural upheaval has resulted not only in depression and suicide for Native Americans but also in alcohol abuse and other destructive behaviors. Psychologist Roland Chrisjohn in The Circle Game (1997) notes: “In truth, does not the history of Jewish suicide during the holocaust, like the histories of suicide in the Arawaks, the Home Children, and the Marshallese Islanders, and countless other oppressed groups, teach us that suicide is in part a normal human reaction to conditions of prolonged, ruthless domination.”

As I described on May 6, 2013 in “What’s Behind ‘Substantial Increases’ in Suicide Rate for Middle-Aged Americans? Bad Economy Is Likely Culprit,” the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported on May 3, 2013 that the suicide rate among Americans aged 35–64 years increased 28.4 percent between 1999-2010, and the Lancet estimates that the three-year recessionary period from 2008 thru 2010 was a source in the United States for “4,750 excess suicide deaths.”

An exclusive focus on giant coroporations’ profits comes at the expense of important components necessary for mental health. One such component is community—face-to-face contact with emotional and economic interdependence. Another component is autonomy—the experience of some control over one’s life.

Postpartum depression occurs in 10 to 20 percent of women in the the United States but is considered rare in Fiji and some African populations, according to a 2004 BMJ article “Learning from Low Income Countries: Mental Health.” Based on a review of the literature, the authors concluded, “Structured social supports after childbirth are described in groups of women with low rates of postpartum depression.” Because of politics and public policies, many American woman lack social support before and after childbirth.

Genuine community in America is increasingly obliterated as social isolation increases. A major study reported in the American Sociological Review in 2006, “Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks Over Two Decades,” examined Americans’ core network of confidants (those people in our lives we consider close enough to trust with personal information and whom we rely on as a sounding board). Authors reported that in 1985, 10 percent of Americans said that they had no confidants in their lives; but by 2004, 25 percent of Americans stated they had no confidants in their lives. This study confirmed the continuation of trends that came to public attention in sociologist Robert Putnam’s 2000 book Bowling Alone, which reported a decline in U.S. social capital (his term for social connectedness) in virtually every area people have historically found community.

Social isolation is related to depression and many other emotional problems. Increasing social isolation in America is not caused by genetics and biochemistry but by public policies that focus only on increasing the profits of giant corporations.

Large empires can enslave people, and large corporations can create standardized, assembly-line, robotic living. Until recently, it was common sense that all bigness was a threat to autonomy and freedom. Before the terms mental illness and depression entered our lexicon, it was basic common sense that if a few big guys had all the power, then the rest of us would have none, and if we had no autonomy or control over our lives, then we would more likely have emotional difficulties.

Because of corporate domination, Americans have increasingly lost community and autonomy, and have acquired instead the tyranny of institutionalization: domination by gigantic, impersonal, bureaucratic, standardized entities—visible in large corporations, the workplace, health care, schools, and much of our lives. This institutionalization has made many Americans feel small, isolated, helpless, scared, inattentive, bored, angry, alienated, and depressed

In a Mental Health Enlightenment based on genuine science, mental health researchers and practitioners would be uncorrupted by Big Pharma. They would acknowledge what, scientifically, they do and do not know, and they would make clear to Americans how public policies affect our mental health.

Bruce E. Levine,  a practicing clinical psychologist, writes and speaks about how society, culture, politics and psychology intersect.  He is the author of Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2011). His Web site is www.brucelevine.net

As in every election held in Kenya since Independence over half a century ago the ruling “la familia” stole the election “free, fair and square”. “La Familia” in Kenya means the same extended family of ethnic minority Kikuyu’s ruling Kenya from “Kenya’s Founder” Jomo Kenyatta to his son, Pax Americana’s man of the hour Uhuru Kenyatta, the head of “la Familia” that today owns upwards of 1 million hectares of Kenya’s prime land.

The USA and its western vassals have been running into stormy weather in the Horn of Africa with a shaky Ethiopia, Uganda starting to crack under the strain and the counter insurgency being waged by the AU in Somalia swallowing some 25,000 “peacekeepers” and counting.

Kenya has well over a division of its best troops waging war on the Somali people in southern Somali and increasingly against Kenyan Somalis. There could be no talk of withdrawal of these troops because of ethnic violence over the latest electoral fraud, and this the army made clear to the “opposition” headed by Raila Odinga who wept for all the world to see when he cried foul, once again, after the results were announced.

Kenya’s stability could not be trifled with over a mere election.

Of course everything was done on the up and up. The Electoral council overseeing the election were hand picked by “la familia” along with every member of the Kenya high courts and all of Kenya’s General Officers in the Army. So everything went according to plan, pretty much, and another vassal of Pax Americana was duly anointed “President” of another African fiefdom.

Africa remains overwhelmingly a tribal society and Kenya is particularly so. Tribalism is blamed for the regular outbreaks of mass murder that takes place between Kenyan ethnic groups. Yet Kenya’s tribes somehow overcome such powerful strictures and instead regularly cast their ballots for the ethnic minority Kikuyu tribe?

There are those in the western media who will tell you that Kenya is doing quite well with a growing economy and life is getting better for Kenya’s people.

Don’t believe them? Maybe one only needs to see what life is like for millions in the capital Nairobi’s disease and crime infested slums. Or the untold thousands who starve to death in Kenya every year, maybe tens of thousands amongst the victims of the Great Horn of Africa Drought that ravaged northern Kenya a year or two ago.

Since I last wrote about Kenya “la Familia” has outlawed the Independence Movement in Mombassa, driving popular leaders deep, deep underground or on the run in Tanzania one step ahead of Kenyan death squads. All this will succeed in doing in the long run is force Mombassa’s youth into the arms of the hard core “jihadists” who have been pointing out the inevitability of the armed struggle for national liberation, Islamic in this case.

Oppression breeds resistance, its a law of nature. The more Kenya’s “la Familia” oppress the people of Mombassa the hotter burns the fires of resistance. Such fires maybe tamped down for the time being but inevitably they will burst out anew with the only answer known to “la Familia” is more of the iron fist, a truly grim future to contemplate.

Kenya  is another Africa slave of the IMF, some how managing to stay one step out of bankruptcy thanks to yet another IMF “emergency loan”. Today the Kenyan government includes some 50 ministers who manage to consume half the governments budget while millions suffer from malnutrition, polluted drinking water and no health care.

While food prices continue to climb the IMF continues to demand food price subsidies by the government be slashed. International Misery Fund is what it should be called and Kenyans are just one of many African people suffering under IMF bondage.

But never fear, “Democracy Has Triumphed in Kenya”, this is all the peoples choice. Or isn’t it?

 Thomas C. Mountain is the most widely distributed independent journalist in Africa, living and reporting from Eritrea since 2006. He can be reached at thomascmountain_at_yahoo_dot_com.

“Truth is the first casualty of war.”

The well-worn aphorism could have served as a refrain for the Mussalaha International Peace Delegation to Syria, May 2-10, 2013. We were reminded constantly of the very different interpretations of events that were being portrayed in our home countries and Syria.

The team gathered in Lebanon with eighteen delegates from six nations, headed by Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire of Northern Ireland, but a delay in the visas resulted in only sixteen traveling to Syria.  Our host was Mussalaha (“Reconciliation”), a Syrian group dedicated to reconciling local conflicts throughout the country regardless of political, religious or ethnic affiliation.

The architect of the invitation was Mother Agnes-Mariam of the Cross, superior of the Melkite Greek Catholic monastery of St. James the Mutilated in Qara, near Homs.  Mother Agnes is a tough, charismatic nun and one of the leaders of Mussalaha, which has a strong Christian presence but includes nearly all Syrian faiths and ethnicities.

Mussalaha is ostensibly non-political, but there is no such thing in Syria today.  Everyone is compelled to take sides, like it or not. The virtue of Mussalaha is to be on speaking terms with, and trusted by, a very wide spectrum of factions, which is a remarkable accomplishment.  Nevertheless, it exists with the approval of the Assad regime, which means that there are inherent limits to its range of activity.

Most of the Peace Delegation had no illusions.  Our visit required visas from the Syrian government, so we assumed – correctly – that within Syria we would not get much chance to meet with insurgents or even nonviolent “Syrian spring” groups, the repression of whose demonstrations marked the beginning of the violence in March, 2011.

Nevertheless, several of us participated only on condition that there would be no government funding of our trip nor hosting by groups that explicitly support the regime.  Mussalaha is possibly the only group that fit that description.

The trip nevertheless permitted us to hear a narrative that is largely absent in the West, to gauge regime support, to speak to Syrians directly affected by the conflict and to demonstrate our solidarity with the Syrian people.  Our message of support for the Syrian people and for the right of Syrians to determine their own future without foreign interference was consistently articulated by Mairead Maguire and other members of the delegation in meetings with public officials and in media interviews during our visit.

The delay in our visas also afforded us an extended opportunity to visit religious leaders and refugee camps in Lebanon.  Tiny Lebanon has attracted more Syrian refugees ­– up to one million – than any other country, partly because Shiites and Christians tend to gravitate toward their co-religionists there. Lebanon is also the only border country where a substantial portion of the population is sympathetic to the Assad regime.

The result is that even though we were beyond the borders of Syria, many of the refugees were supportive of the regime, as was the case with the displaced persons that we met in Damascus. If we had visited camps in Turkey we would no doubt have heard a very different narrative.

The narrative that we heard, however, is one that is largely absent in the West. To read the Western press, there are no regime supporters, but only subjects cowering in fear of Assad goons.

This is nonsense.  A very substantial proportion of the population clearly supports the regime, which would not likely have survived for two years otherwise.  In fact, one of the chief complaints was that the regime had abandoned many of its supporters and failed to restore order in their communities, thus forcing them to become refugees when armed rebels and “foreigners” drove them out.

Refugees from Qusayr, on the Lebanese border, for example, said that the military had made no attempt to prevent a takeover by armed elements until most of the population had been driven out.  Only in the last few months had the army engaged the rebels in battle and begun to retake the town.  Similarly, a family from Idlib and a woman from Raqqa said that the military had been unable to control those cities or push back the rebels until recently.  This is not surprising, because both are near the Turkish border, where Patriot batteries prevent Syrian aircraft from interdicting cross-border incursions.

This is not to say that Syrians are in love with the Assad regime. Even regime supporters candidly admit that the regime is autocratic and abuses human rights.  Nevertheless, many believe that anything replacement will be worse.

According to this view, Syria is in danger of being overtaken by terrorists from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Libya, and other sources, and that they will tear the country apart.  Whatever the faults of the Assad regime, therefore, it is the only thing preventing the utter destruction of Syria.

And who is sponsoring the foreign terrorists and their arms? Western governments sell most of the arms to countries that then transfer them to the insurgents.  If the U.S. and other governments want to prevent such transfers, it would be a simple matter to do so through conditional end user agreements.  The Western countries themselves are therefore perpetuating the carnage.

Many also doubt that the West wants or would permit a democracy.  Certainly, the U.S. record is not encouraging.  There are many examples, but one of the most iconic is Nicaragua in the 1980s, where the US co-opted the open and free elections with its money and threats.  In other places and at other times, the U.S. simply overthrew the elected regime or prevented an election from occurring.

Sometimes the only choice is between an autocratic regime that is pro-Western and one that pursues an independent course. The U.S. will attempt to coerce or overthrow any independent-minded government, but an autocratic regime has a better chance of resisting because its repressive apparatus will crush dissidence before it has a chance to breathe.

If there are Syrians that despair of anything better than the Assad regime and who fear an extreme Islamist state and want to preserve certain qualities that they like (such as an egalitarian treatment of women and a secular state), their view – however cynical or fatalistic – deserves as much say in the future of Syria as there are Syrians who hold it or who defend the regime for other reasons, which might be idiosyncratic, geography-dependent or strategic.

This may be a depressing point of view.  Syrians are obviously entitled to struggle for something better, and they deserve our support for their right to do so.  Unfortunately, the U.S. will pursue what it perceives as its own interests, which are typically the interests of a roomful of powerful individuals and corporations that make vast profits from war and the projection of power.

However, they are not the only players.  The people of the U.S. and other Western societies have at times succeeded in promoting an antiwar, anti-militaristic agenda.  This is a difficult but not totally unrealistic goal.  Without exception, the message of every person to whom the Peace Delegation spoke in Lebanon and Syria was:

1) stop foreign intervention,

2) stop the fighting and

3) facilitate a national dialog of all Syrians to decide the future of Syria.

We in the West can begin with the first step by ending all aid to combatants and letting Syrians settle their differences amongst themselves.  Syrians do not need and mostly do not want Western interference in their affairs.

Paul Larudee is a writer and human rights advocate, and one of the co-founders of the movement to break the siege of Gaza by sea.

The presence of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s dead body triggered a vitriolic reaction in many Americans, that could be described as “patriolic”ism.  The media reported that angry crowds flocked to the funeral home, with dozens of protesters carrying American flags and signs that read, “Bury this terrorist on US soil and we will unbury him.” (“Man Accused of Lying Seeks Release as Cemeteries Reject Tsarnaev Family,” By Katharine Q. Seelye and Jess Bidgood, The New York Times, May 6, 2013) “Bury the Garbage in the Landfill.” (“Second autopsy set as conspiracists gravitate to cause,” By Wesley Lowery, David Filipov, and Lisa Wangsness, The Boston Globe, Msy 5. Z2013)  Other protesters shouted, “Send him back!”  “USA!”  “Just burn him and throw him in the sewer.” (“Funeral home searches for place to bury Tsarnaev,” By Wesley Lowery and Brian MacQuarrie, The Boston Globe, May 4, 2013)  “He should burn in hell.” (“No one wants to bury Tamerlan Tsarnaev,” by Richard Weir, O’ryan Johnson, and Erin Smith, bostonherald.com, May 4, 2013)

The intensity of this “patriolic” diatribe is seen in the report of family members “retrieving the ashes of” a loved one.  When they left the funeral home, “protesters, believing them to be from Tsarnaev’s family, unleashed a series of chants and expletives.” (“Family urged to settle on burial,” By Brian MacQuarrie, Milton J. Valencia, and Peter Schworm, The Boston Globe, May 7, 2013)

Political leaders helped to fuel this mindless “patriolic” display, which, in turn, evidently helped to fuel their cowardly responses.  Peter Stefan, the funeral director holding Tamerlan Tsarneav’s body, disclosed that “a handful of local cemeteries rejected requests to bury” his remains.  He then stated his belief that “Cambridge was legally obligated to bury Tsarneav at the municipal cemetery,” as he lived in Cambridge.  “But,” as reported, “City Manager Robert W. Healy issued a statement Sunday urging the family not to apply for a Cambridge burial permit.”  His reason: “The difficult and stressful efforts of the residents of the city of Cambridge to return to a peaceful life would be adversely impacted by the turmoil, protests, and widespread media presence at such an internment.” (“Cambridge won’t bury bomb suspect,” By Wesley Lowery, The Boston Globe, May 6, 2013)

As Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s body continued to languish in the Worcester funeral home, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino joined part of a soon-to-be growing political chorus.  A front page Boston Globe story announced his position: “Menino won’t allow burial.”  His press secretary spoke for him: “ ‘It would be disrespectful to our residents to accommodate this individual,’ said Dot Joyce.”  She continued, “Instead, the mayor wants Tsarnaev’s family to return the body to the suspect’s native Russia, instead of burdening American officials with trying to find a burial plot amid continuing protests and a string of rejections from cemeteries in multiple states.” (By Evan Allen, May 8, 2013)

Democratic Congressman Edward Markey, candidate for the US Senate seat vacated when John Kerry became Secretary of State, joined the chorus singing to the “Patriolic” beat.  Obviously mindful of potential voters, and well aware of the political climate created, he said, “The people of Massachusetts have a right of say that they do not want that terrorist to be buried on the soil of Massachusetts.”  As if the “patriolic” protesters represented all “the people of Massachusetts.”  Markey’s suggestion: “I think that the body should be controlled by the federal government, and that it should be returned to the family of the terrorist for disposal.”  And his Republican Senate opponent, Gabriel Gomez, “a former Navy SEAL,” evidently made sure he was on “the right side.”  He reportedly “said on Twitter that Tsarnaev’s body should be buried at sea, like Osama bin Laden.” (“Family urged to settle on burial,” Ibid)  Another way of saying, “Feed his body to the sharks.”

Governor Deval Patrick appeared to be the most disingenuous in distancing himself from Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s body.  His quoted position: “This isn’t a state or a federal issue; it’s the family’s issue . . . and the family has some options.  I assume they will make a decision soon,” he continued.  “I hope they do.” (Ibid)

“It’s the family’s issue.” What denial!  Cambridge, the city where Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his wife and three-year-old daughter lived, did not want his body.  Nor did Boston.  Nor Massachusetts.  Nor cemeteries in a number of other states.  Nor, as reported, did Russia.

“The family’s issue?”  The intense “patriolic” climate forced Katherine Russell Tsarnaev, the dead, alleged bomber’s wife, to seek refuge for herself and their child in her family’s Rhode Island home, away from the glaring intrusive eyes of cameras and potentially threatening citizens.

“It’s the family’s issue.”  Tell that to the protesters who threatened, “Bury this terrorist on US soil and we will unbury him.”  Tell that to the American flag wavers, who hurled expletives at  grieving relatives exiting the Worcester funeral parlor with a loved one’s ashes, believing they were the Tsarnaev family.

“It’s the family’s issue.”  Tell that to the Muslims living in Massachusetts and across America.  A young female doctor in Malden, MA, pushing her child down the street in a stroller was reported to be “punched hard in the shoulder and cursed by a man” who ran away after saying, “’[Expletive] you.  [Expletive] you Muslims, you are terrorists, you are the ones who made the Boston explosion.”  Another reported incident involved “a 30-year-old Bangladeshi man . . . attacked . . . in the Bronx by a man who made anti-Muslims statements.”  And a third incident involved “a pilot at Logan International Airport return[ing] an airplane to the gate because some passengers were upset that two men were speaking a foreign language on the plane, a state official said.” (“Embassies, Islamic groups fear attacks against Muslims,” By Maria Sacchetti, The Boston Globe, Apr. 19, 2013)

It’s the family’s issue.”  Tell that to the Muslims, whose reality is disclosed in a front page Boston Globe story subtitled, “For area Muslims, the feeling of being besieged by scrutiny hasn’t lifted.”  In the face of such a “patriolically” legitimized political climate, Muslim citizens have had to bend over backwards to try to convince other Americans that they are peace-loving.  An example is Imam Ibrahim Rahim of the Yusuf Mosque in Brighton, who is quoted as telling his congregation, “Today, we insist to our neighbors that we Muslims are people of peaceful covenant.  As our neighbors,” he stressed, “your blood is sacred, your lives are sacred.  No one has a right to kill anyone of us for any reason.”  The story was accompanied by a photograph that told a different, desperately needed story: of Rabbi Jeremy Morrison, Rev. Burns Stanfield, and Rabbi Ronnie Friedman, embracing Imam William Suhaib Webb at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center in Roxbury. (“Praying for peace—and understanding,” By Lisa Wangsness and Meghan E. Irons, Apr. 27, 2013)

If far more American religious leaders, and their congregations, had possessed the prophetic nerve to preach and live Imam Rabim’s words, forcefully and repeatedly, in response to the Bush administration’s pre-emptive war preparations to invade and occupy Afghanistan and Iraq, those two criminal wars may have been prevented—on ended sooner– and the related blowback violence against Americans on Boylston Street and elsewhere might not be occurring.  Sadly, “the handwriting was on the wall,” as many spiritual leaders, and their people, “were found wanting,” when the Bush administration used the horrific 9/11 attacks against America as a pretext for manufacturing an imperialistically motivated global “war on terrorism” for corporate profit and power—under the guise of protecting us from “terrorists.”

Sadly, many religious leaders betray their calling and their country by remaining silent in the face of US imperialism– and many continue to remain silent in the face of the “partiolic” desecration of a dead body, that serves to divert attention from how the United States’ war of terror destroys other people’s lives and creates so-called “terrorists.”  The Boston Marathon bombings reveal a chronic disease of many clergy: they are chaplains of the status quo.  Many were visible and vocal and caring of victims and the country in the media-welcoming spotlight right after the terrible bombings.   But they became silent and invisible when their role also called for speaking prophetic truth to power and “patriolic”ism.

It’s not “the family’s issue,” but a state and federal issue.  It is a political issue that prevents Americans from daring to exercise national soul-searching in response to younger brother, Dahokhar Tsarnaev’s hospital bedside statement: that he and his brother, Tamerlan were motivated to bomb the Boston Marathon because of the United States’ invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. (See Mel King and Alberts, “The Boston-Baghdad Connection: A Theological Taboo,” Counterpunch, May 2, 2013)

It is a “federal issue,” on display in Washington, at which Boston Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis testified about the Boston Marathon bombings before Congress’s House Homeland Security Committee.  A front page Boston Globe story featured photographs of the victims, with the caption, “A poster board at Thursday’s House Homeland Security Committee hearing memorialized those killed in the bombings and the aftermath: M.I.T. police officer Sean Collier, Martin Richard, Lu Lingzi, and Krystle Campbell.”  (“Lawmakers hear Davis, fault FBI on data sharing,” By Matt Viser, May 10, 2013)

What better diversionary tactic than for the federal government to keep the spotlight on the American victims of blowback violence, rather than also examine its own imperialistic foreign policy, and related drones-spearheaded global “war on terrorism,” triggering that violence.  Our government’s aim is to divert everyone’s attention from the alleged Marathon bombers’ stated motivation—repeated, again, by Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in his written note, found in the boat in which he was captured.  CBS News broke the story: “Basically, the note says . . . the bombings were retribution for the US crimes against Muslims in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and that the victims of the Boston bombing were ‘collateral damage,’ the same way innocent victims have been collateral damage in US wars around the world,’ said CBS News reporter, John Miller, who is a former spokesman for the FBI.” (“Dzhokhar Tsarnaev left note in boat explaining motives, CBS report says,” Reuters in Washington, guardian.co.uk, May 16, 2013 )  Miller also said, on “CBS This Morning,” “the note will be a significant piece of evidence in any trial—it is ‘certainly admissible’ and paints a clear picture of the brothers’ motive [italics added], ‘consistent with what he told investigators while he was in custody.’” (“Boston bombings suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev left note in boat he hid in, sources say,” www.cbsnews.com, May 16, 2013)

The greatest threat to American imperialism is empathy.  God—and human impulse—forbid that enough American citizens become aware of and empathize with individual victims among the countless number of people, in various countries, suffering  from violence inflicted by our own government, in our name.  Here is where America’s guardian mainstream media come in:  continuing daily doses of stories on the suffering of Boston Marathon bombing victims by The Boston Globe, for example, allow citizens to remain oblivious to the victims of America’s imperialistic foreign policy, and not respond with outrage at our government’s own complicity in putting our citizens at risk of blowback violence.

This commentary in no way is meant to demean or dismiss the terrible loss and injury suffered by the Boston Marathon bombing victims, nor the horrific act or accountability of the Tsarnaev brothers.  It is not about minimizing their horrible crime, but about also directing our anger and protest against our government for its murderous military, political and economic domination of other countries, that  creates millions of victims and the desire for revenge and the ensuing retaliatory blowback violence against us Americans.  Only forceful massive moral protest will change our government’s imperialistic policies.

“This is not a state or federal issue.  It’s the family’s issue.” Boston Globe columnist Derrick L. Jackson saw through the political cowardice created by the “patriolic”ism.  In a piece called, “The decency to bury a body,” he wrote, “Not one major political figure in Massachusetts had the guts to say the obvious as Tsarnaev lay in suspended non-animation at a funeral home in Worcester.”  Jackson included Governor Patrick in that list, stating, “No spine was spotted in higher offices.  Governor Deval Patrick verbally put up his index fingers in a cross to scare away curses, saying, ‘This isn’t a state or federal issue.’”  Jackson then made the point: “Rather than lead, our most powerful politicians catered to the hysteria of those who said they would leave Massachusetts if Tsarnaev was buried here; or they would dig up the body if it was buried anywhere in the United States . . . a hysteria,” he continued, “that was loud enough to paralyze politicians is a sobering reminder of how otherwise understandable post traumatic reaction can take a sour self-absorbed turn.  At that point we have to challenge our feelings.” (May 11, 2013)

After Tamerlan Tsarneav’s body was far removed from Massachusetts, a Boston Globe editorial lauded the Worcester funeral director, who, in the face of daily “patriolic” protests, continued to provide a human response: “I am burying a dead body.  Everyone who is dead deserves to be buried.” (“Funeral home searches for place to bury Tsarnaev,” Ibid)  In lauding Peter Stefan, the editorial stated, “. . . by resisting understandable but nonetheless small-minded pressure from politicians and protesters—some of them demanding that Tsarnaev’s body be ‘fed to the sharks’—Stefan upheld the decency of the Commonwealth.”  The editorial continued, “It’s a mark of civilized people to treat dead bodies, even outcasts and adversaries, with dignity.  At a time when others succumbed to hysteria, Stefan held firm. (“Stefan: Doing his job with decency,” May 10, 2013)  These editorial words spoke truth to the “patriolic”ism.  They would have been even more instructive if written while Tsarneav’s body lay in Worcester.

It took a funeral director, Peter Stefan, to provide moral leadership.  As did 40 members of a local interfaith group, who, as reported, showed up at the funeral home “to pray and ask for tolerance.”  Among them was Sister Rena Mae Gagnon, a 77-year-old Little Franciscans of Mary nun, who “held a sign that read, ‘Burying the dead is a work of mercy.’”  She was also quoted: “We’re Christians.  We’re not to act that way.” (“Menino won’t allow burial,” By Evan Allen and Brian MacQuarrie, The Boston Globe, May 8, 2013)

There was “mercy” in Virginia, where, after a private ceremony, Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s body was buried, in an unmarked grave in a small rural Muslim cemetery.  Bukhari Abdel-Alim, Vice president of Islamic Funeral Services of Virginia that owns the cemetery, was quoted,: “The bigger burden on us was putting the brother in the ground, regardless of his actions.”  Abdel Alim’s said, “The only regret that I would have is that he wasn’t buried sooner.  . . . Whether he was Christian, Muslim, Jewish, atheist, when you’re dead, you need to be buried.”  Also reported, “’I thank the Lord Allah, that I was part of the brother being buried there,’ said, Abdel-Alim, an African American who converted to Islam about 45 years ago.” (“An Islamic cemetery in rural Virginia accepts Tsarnaev’s body, but officials vow a review,” By Wesley Lowery and Matt Viser, The Boston Globe, May 11, 2013; “Burial divides Virginia residents,” By Brian MacQuarrie, The Boston Globe, May 12, 2013)

Back in Massachusetts, Bukhari Abdel-Alim’s words are echoed by a white funeral director: “’I don’t leave things undone,’ [Peter] Stefan said early Friday evening.  . . . I follow it to conclusion, and I’d do it again tomorrow if someone calls me.  Then he said, “For Christ’s sake (italics added), character has to be consistent.” (“An Islamic cemetery in rural  Virginia accepts Tsarnaev’s body, but officials vow a review,” Ibid)  Would that more Christian leaders swore like that to power about “beat[ing] their swords into plowshares.”

Returning to Virginia, mental health counselor and theology degree holder Martha Mullen also showed mercy and humanity.  Upset by the morality play in Massachusetts, that “portrayed America at its worst,” she helped to facilitate the burial of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s body in that small cemetery in rural Virginia.  She is also quoted as saying that “what compelled her to assist in the burial” was Jesus’ words, “’Jesus says [to] love our enemies.  . . . So I was sitting in Starbucks and thought, ‘Maybe I’m the one person who needs to do something.’”  She did, by discovering the availability of the Muslim cemetery, and then providing that information to the Worcester police, who shared it with funeral director Peter Stefan. (“An Islamic cemetery in rural Virginia accepts Tsarnaev’s body, but officials vow a review,” Ibid)

“Maybe I’m the one person who needs to do something.”  What a powerful example Martha Muller provides for us Americans.  She was not a religious leader.  Nor was the Good Samaritan.  She reveals the power of individuals when, individually or collectively, they say No! to “patriolic”ism, and Yes! to Imam Rahim’s words, “No one has the right to kill anyone of us for any reason.”

Martha Mullen’s action was merciful.  However, the question faith leaders– and people of faith in general– need to raise goes a step beyond the challenge of loving our enemies.  The question is: why are they our enemies?

Dead men do tell tales.  About vitriolic patriotism, the cowardice of politicians, the silence of clergy and their congregations, and the liberals/progressives/rightists acceptance of the morally repugnant dehumanization of a dead body, that took center stage after the Boston Marathon bombings—or perhaps swept under the rug, to be repeated when the status-quo-guarding media spotlight focuses on the younger Tsarnaev brother in the future.

Retired United Methodist minister and poet Theodore Lockhart speaks to the “patriolic”ism, and answers the critical question, why are they our enemies?, in two related poems called  “A Dignified Burial” and “With Drones We Terrorize.”

“Everybody deserves a dignified burial service”

The funeral director said,

“No matter the circumstances of his or her death.”

Ah, but they would have none of it.

The protesters, now the righteous guardians of the homeland

burial grounds, waging war against burying a dead terrorist, not risking

Another untimely resurrection.

“In all of Massachusetts,” he lamented,

“My problem is to find a grave site.

A lot of people don’t want to do it.

They don’t want to be involved in this.

Some are even ticked off with my decision to even handle the service.

I keep bringing up the point of Lee Harvey Oswald,

Timothy McVeigh or Ted Bundy.

Somebody had to do those, too.”

Ah, but they would have none of it.

Those were red-blooded White American boys,

A little off here and there, but White American boys

Born and raised right here in the homeland.

They were not Muslim foreigners!

and we want no Muslim terrorist buried in American soil!

They do not deserve it.

We are the new American Exceptionalists

We do as we want here and around the world.

But in unhurried time, it came to pass

That a latter-day daughter of Joseph of Arimathea

Moved by the loud denials of dignity for burying the dead,

Now shrouded in fashionable clothing labeled terrorist,

Did the honorable, compassionate thing:

She asked the undertaker for the body,

To be buried in a secret, un-molesting place-

far removed

from the watching eyes of righteousness

gone wild. (tl, May 5-12, 2013)

With drones

Can we terrorize the world

Hoping to kill the enemy

His children, her husband, and the innocents standing by?

Can we do this

Hoping to avoid the boomer-rang blow of ugliness

Riding hard and relentless as evil in vengeful array?

(tl, May 4, 2013)

Appreciation is expressed to Rev. Theodore Lockhart for permission to cite his poems.  His recently published book, BEFORE BLACKNESS, LYING AFTER TRUTH, IN RABBITUDE & OTHER POEMS, is available on Amazon.com.

Rev. William E. Alberts, Ph.D., a former hospital chaplain at Boston Medical Center, is a diplomate in the College of Pastoral Supervision and Psychotherapy.  Both a Unitarian Universalist and United Methodist minister, he has written research reports, essays and articles on racism, war, politics religion and pastoral care. His Book, A Hospital Chaplain at the Crossroads of Humanity, is available on Amazon.com.  His email address is wm.alberts@gmail.com.

Sorry, this edifice exists only in my mind, thought up this morning when reading an editorial and background item in the New York Times (May 20), about the derivatives market and the failure, STILL, to bring it under control—although as fiction goes, this has more truth than the reality which the White House, Congress, and the media zealously try to hide: an oligarchic-despotic framework dressed in the garb of democracy.  Consider just on derivatives, a $700T (yes, “T” for trillion) derivatives market, opaque, yet perhaps not as much as Obama’s War Councils, in which just five banks, each worthy of respect enough so that their CEOs should constitute the honor guard at the Super Bowl, control over 90% of all derivatives contracts.

Yes, you guessed right: JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley.  They are the chief tenants and mortgage holders of my imaginary corporate retreat, but they are not snobs, even if their guests are primarily hedge fund operators and asset managers, for they freely, joyfully fraternize with industrialists (especially defense contractors) like GE and Boeing, construction companies, preferably Halliburton, and on occasion, admit the likes of the private contractors who supply mercenaries—all of these in addition to the special guests drawn from all sectors of the military brass and, the crème de la crème, the CIA and JSOC, quintessential units of the towering National Security State under Obama’s guiding hand.

Please come with me as we review the plaques signifying achievements in the Obama Era of Liberalized Fascism.  Pride of place goes to the Merit of Constitutional Fulfillment, a plaque larger than the others because the achievements have been so great.  Listed among other things is the itemization of the expansion of Executive Power, the plaque dwelling on how our beloved POTUS has surpassed Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II—no mean trick—in the commission of war crimes, the enlargement of the military establishment, the use of the Espionage Act both to reinforce opaqueness of government and enforce domestic conformity, and, negatively, pretend obstructionism, while working for deregulation and, internationally, so-called market freedom.  With that record of accomplishment, one would think that no further plaques would be necessary.

But, after all, in my mythical Temple of Big Business joined at the hip to the State, one expects commendations for the remaking of America itself, which only this partnership could bring about, notably, perhaps the widest disparities of wealth and power in American history, the upper stratum gaining a far greater share of national income than previously (a new social arithmetic of billionaire-ism) accompanied, not coincidentally—and really deserving a separate plaque–, the steady disassembling of the social safety net.  After all, cleaning the Lodge should be cost-effective: no unionization, a low minimum wage, the expected deference from inferiors.

I fear that one such cleaning operation is now in progress, so I’ll only mention in passing other plaques of distinction, testifying to Obama’s virtues: one for Guantanamo, awarded by Judges at The Hague and, in special session, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee; another, for the greatly expanded use of the armed drone for targeted assassination, assassination the proudly accepted improvement in modern warfare; and on capitalism’s side, the outsourcing of manufacturing operations as the adroit means of improving profit margins, while bestowing the blessings of America on our Third World neighbors and friends.  The “satanic mills” of 19^th century England have now been replicated by the philanthropy of 21^st century America.

There is still room on the mantlepiece to celebrate more mergers, further monopolization, more billionaires, and, not to be forgotten, global military and paramilitary operations for promoting American hegemony.

Norman Pollack is the author of “The Populist Response to Industrial America” (Harvard) and “The Just Polity” (Illinois), Guggenheim Fellow, and professor of history emeritus, Michigan State University.

‘I am not afraid of anything except for God and poison gas,” said an Iraqi officer who had fought in the Iran-Iraq war. “It’s like a ghost. You have no defence against it.” Though not a target of poison gas as a member of the army using it, he knew what it did to its victims.

The world, already sycophantic in its adoration of said celebrity who can do no wrong because of her looks, her hot husband, her high-profile movies, her brood of adopted children from various developing countries, and her “charity work” as a UN ambassador – like Nicholas Kristof, she will often be photographed surrounded by brown and black children gazing at her in a staged position of worship – falls gaga over this astounding news. Because of Angelina Jolie, we are told, women will no longer feel “ashamed” and “disgusted” by their bodies if they have to undergo mastectomies. Angelina Jolie has “normalized” this procedure. Angelina Jolie is brave and courageous to have come forward. Angelina Jolie has empowered other women to make this incredible and amazing decision.

Angelina Jolie’s doctor at the exclusive clinic she attended and mentioned by name in The NYT (now laughing all the way to the bank) writes about her incredible spirit and energy post-op. With tubes still dangling out of her body, Angelina was working on her next film project just days after the op! We are given the impression that Angelina is extraordinary, some kind of super woman. Perhaps a lesser human would have been lying in bed, reveling pathetically in her painful recovery, indulging in disgraceful self-pity – but not Angelina! It is subtly implied that regular women are simply not intelligent enough to have known about these screening tests, that their lack of courage, their fear, their vanity, has thus far been an impediment to them taking the courageous and valiant option – a screening test, and depending on the results, mastectomy. Only superwoman Angelina is brave enough to pay $3,000 to find out if she has inherited the cancer genes of her mother, and then excise them.

But now, thanks to Angelina’s bold and breathtaking honesty, normal, domesticated, ignorant women without Angelina’s resources of spiritual strength and tremendous bravery can find the courage to take the expensive genetic screening tests available at a cost, and submit without a whimper to the removal of their breasts, and their replacement with elaborately reconstructed surgery. Thanks to Angelina, women now have a glimmer of hope. It is not explicitly stated, but we get the impression Angelina might get a Nobel Peace Prize for writing about this act of selflessness. Fuck Barbara Ehrenreich. Cancer sufferers are old news. They should have gotten those screening tests! We must pretend, for the moment, that the 90% of women whose breast cancer is not due to a detectible ‘faulty’ gene can still benefit from Angelina’s story.

This is why Angelina deserves a press release in The New York Times, when lesser women do not.

This is the narrative that Angelina Jolie fed to the world with a poorly researched and poorly written press release posing as an Op-Ed. This is the narrative that the world was only too eager to perpetuate and propound. This is the narrative that, as a woman with a vested interest in this story – I, too, am a possessor of a pair of tits and a pair of ovaries – I took issue with as not only factually incorrect, but disgustingly offensive.

I entitled my article ‘Angelina Jolie: On Privilege, Tits and Being Dumb’, which I believe comprises the main essence of Angelina’s Op-Ed. If the word “tits” makes you squeamish, that’s your problem, not mine. If you’re a woman, you have tits. If you’re a man, you may have them too, in which case a trip to the gym might be in order. Privilege is certainly something which Angelina Jolie reeked of in this article – unconscious privilege, phrases such as “my doctors” and “my choice” and “empowering other women” indicating to me that Angelina simply had no idea that what she was writing about was not some huge act of self sacrifice to inspire lesser women in her wake, but was, simply a sensible decision – as well as being an extremely privileged, elite medical procedure which is unavailable to the vast majority of women in the United States, and in the world. Unless you are from one of the few countries in this world which have a decent healthcare system, you may never, ever have the option to access the kinds of procedures Angelina seems to think are not being sufficiently utilized because of general ignorance. And this is why I called Angelina ‘dumb’. A woman who has built a reputation on charity work and humanitarian missions does not get a free pass to waste an article published in an internationally read newspaper with a self-serving account of her own health problems without adequately comprehending their place in the wider world. A woman who has built a reputation on charity work and humanitarian missions and has the power to demand a NYT Op-Ed in lieu of a press release has an absolute, undeniable responsibility to use that space as best as possible to acknowledge both her own privilege, and the flaws in the US healthcare system, including the ability of corporations to patent human genes.

A woman who was not “dumb”, a woman who acknowledged both her own privilege and the flaws in the US healthcare system, would have made an important impact on the public consciousness – an impact which was greater than the sycophantic ‘Wow, isn’t she brave’. A woman who was not “dumb” might even have done a little more research and found out, for example, that the genetic screening test she enthusiastically credits with saving her life and suggests other women utilize, is hugely expensive and hence, available only to the economic elite, because a company called Myriad Genetics has patented the mutated BRAC1 and 2 gene which are responsible for causing one type of breast and ovarian cancer. Last year the company earned $500 million, with about 85% of their revenue coming from breast cancer screening tests. This company is being challenged by the ACLU for their deliberate use of this patent to drive up costs for screening tests, and render the mutated gene unavailable to cancer researchers, doctors and scientists searching for a cure.

Myriad Genetic’s patent makes them responsible for the deaths of millions of women worldwide. No, this is not Angelina’s fault, but I am angry both with Angelina for her blithe ignorance of this despite being allowed a major international news outlet to use as a platform, and I am angry with the media for allowing her this platform without sufficient preparation, and then feeding into the inane cult of celebrity for applauding Angelina for doing absolutely nothing brave except prolong her own life for as long as possible. That’s not bravery. That is simply good sense. Both you and I would do exactly the same thing. Bravery is putting one’s life at risk to save someone else. Bravery is speaking truth to power. Bravery is many things, but it is not, to my mind, opting for immediate discomfort with a painful operation performed by an expensive expert, over a protracted and painful death. That is called pragmatism. Whether one submits to the path of immediate discomfort with anger, with despair, with stoicism, or with quiet acceptance, none of these emotions are more or less “brave” than the other, and should not be lauded as such.

Let me be absolutely clear: if I was in Angelina’s position, I would probably have made the same decision. At the age of 34 and a freelancer, I am finally in a financial position to purchase health insurance for the first time in my seven years in America. I would be one of the few women in the US who is privileged enough to have healthcare should I have cancer (though I would not, I believe, be eligible to have Myriad’s genetic screening tests on my insurance). I believe Angelina, given all the information available to her, made the wisest decision. However, I do not respect and admire women who get regular pap smear tests, breast examinations and mammograms, or submit to expensive screening tests. There is nothing ‘admirable’ about this. It is simply sensible behavior. I grieve for those women who do not take preventive care of their health because they are denied access to education and healthcare. I certainly don’t ‘admire’ those of us who are in the privileged position of finding preventive care easy and accessible.

There are many, many women across the world campaigning for breast cancer awareness and advocating for more funds to be channeled into research for prevention and cures. The difference between them and Angelina, is that Angelina chose to write about her condition in the New York Times for the specific (ostensible) purpose of “raising awareness”. The act of “raising awareness” in itself is disturbing. It means nothing. It’s a vacuous phrase which replaces action and intent. “I’m not doing anything, but I’m talking about something, and that’s ‘raising awareness’.” No, I’m afraid that’s bullshit.

Action raises awareness, pundits just like the sound of their own voice. It is the conceit of Angelina’s attempt to “raise awareness” and its ultimate failure that I find both distressing, disturbing and infuriating. My issue is not, and has never been, with Angelina Jolie’s tits. My issue is with her privilege, her failure to see beyond her own tits, and her stupidity – what I call her “dumbness” – in failing to research and acknowledge the issues surrounding healthcare in this country, women’s healthcare in this country, and the specific controversies surrounding treatments she seems to think are available to all besides a contemptible minority, who, unlike the brown people draped around her in staged photo opportunities in developing countries, are not worthy of either her money or her time.

I’ve been around for a while, and I’m pretty used to the amount of “outrage” I provoke from furious people who are personally affronted that a woman can not only have an opinion, a forceful, sometimes profane and blunt way of expressing that opinion, but can do so without apology. Despite various “demands” from furious Angelina fans (or “sad starfuckers” as I prefer to call them) and paternalistic idiots like Sharon whatsit in The Socialist Worker who demands that CounterPunch apologize “to all women” for my views (hello? You’re asking MALE EDITORS to apologize to “all women” for the views of a FEMALE WRITER? Am I not a woman? Does my use of the word “tits” really offend you so much that you need to resort to paternalism?). Despite all these demands for apologies, despite reams of hate mail on my website and twitter informing me that I’m a disgraceful human being that deserves to die, despite all this – I’m not going to apologize. I’m not going to betray all the people who agree with me that Angelina Jolie had no right to waste the space allotted her in an international newspaper to “raise awareness” of the issues surrounding screening tests, genetic patenting, preventive treatments and breast cancer, only to talk about herself.

The only awareness I’ve raised is that Angelina Jolie is not particularly bright, and not particularly concerned with anyone or anything that doesn’t feed into the myth of St. Jolie. And that while women continue to die, she and other people consider a personal story about her tits and her suffering more important than the brutal reality of healthcare and economics.

Ruth Fowler is a journalist and screenwriter living in Los Angeles. She’s the author of Girl Undressed. She can be followed on Twitter at @fowlerruth.

Do a google search on the term “African-American” if you want to see how many black Americans feel about it. Check out the Facebook page “Don’t Call Me African-American,” or Charles Mosley’s guest column in in the February 12, 2013 edition of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “By using the term ‘African-American’ to refer to black people,” Mosley writes, “columnists, readers, TV hosts and commentators perpetuate and embrace Jim Crow racial stereotypes, segregation and historical distortions. … Africa is not a racial or ethnic identity. Africa is a geographical identity.”

In fact, you almost never hear blacks refer to themselves as “African-American,” unless it is to please a white audience, and there is a good reason for that: They do not think of themselves as African-American. They do not identify with Africa, at least not until we remind them, by referring to them as “African-American,” that they are supposed to.

By referring to black people as “African-American,” we are effectively reminding them that they should not feel too at home here because, really, they are only half American. Hyphenated designations may be fine to apply to people who strongly identify with another culture, but they are offensive and insulting when applied to people who do not and who actually have greater claim to being fully “American” than do most white Americans.

Most black Americans do not identify with Africans and most genuine African-Americans (i.e., people who recently emigrated from Africa to the U.S. or who divide their time between two continents) do not identify with black
Americans. The Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie made this point very movingly in a recent talk she gave at the Free Library in Philadelphia as part of a tour she is on to promote her new book Americanah.

“American,” Adichie explained in response to a question about what race she had in mind when someone was referred to simply as “American,” “is a mark that culture leaves, never a physical description.” She said that when she came to the U.S. she did not want to be identified with black Americans and even “recoiled” when a man in Brooklyn referred to her as “sister.” I’m not your sister, she thought to herself. I have three brothers and I know where they are, and you’re not one of them!

She said she did not identify with black Americans, that she did not understand their experiences. Her friends, she explained, when she first came to the U.S. as a university student, were other foreign students. She felt she had more in common with them than she had with black Americans and suspected this feeling was shared by most Africans on first coming to the U.S.

Adichie explained that she had come to have enormous respect for American blacks, for the “resilience and grace of a people who had weathered a terrible history.” She said that now, if she went back to Brooklyn and someone there called her “sister” she would be pleased, that she would think YES! It took “a journey,” she explained though, “race in America,” she said, “is something you have to learn.”

White Americans could learn something important about black Americans, or more correctly, about American culture, by listening to Adichie. Adichie said she thought James Baldwin was the best American writer of the last two hundred years. Not the best African-American writer, she emphasized, but the best American writer.

She has a point. Go Tell it on the Mountain is not simply, as Wikipedia states, a novel “that examines the role of the Christian Church in the lives of African-Americans, both as a source of repression and moral hypocrisy and as a source of inspiration and community.” It is a novel that examines the role of the Church in the lives of Americans more generally in that the Church has had those dual roles in the lives of Americans of all races.

Yes, Go Tell it on the Mountain is a novel about a black family, but it is also a novel about an American family, not a Nigerian family, or Kenyan family, or a Somali family. Until we acknowledge that we will continue to live a lie, a lie that diminishes not merely black Americans but all of American culture, a culture of which black Americans are an inexorable part and to which they have made an immeasurably positive contribution.

M.G. Piety teaches philosophy at Drexel University. She is the editor and translator of Soren Kierkegaard’s Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs. Her latest book is: Ways of Knowing: Kierkegaard’s Pluralist Epistemology. She can be reached at: mgpiety@drexel.edu 

Catching a glimpse of a Facebook discussion this weekend, I noticed that Sharon Smith had written a piece entitled, “Why CounterPunch Owes Women an Apology” in the online weekly SocialistWorker.org regarding Ruth Fowler’s 14 May CounterPunch piece, “Angelina Jolie Under the Knife: Of Privilege, Health Care and Tits”  It was clear from the Facebook discussion that some members of Smith’s Facebook friends and Smith herself took offense at the word “tits.”  Then the focus of ire shifted to the assumption that the editors changed the title from Fowler’s original article which does not even mention the word “tits” (“One can almost hear them howling with laughter at their own perceived cleverness”). Once it was established that the editors did not change the article’s title and that the title was that of Fowler’s creation, the criticism was then directed at CounterPunch Managing Editor Joshua Frank for not having edited out the word ‘tits’ in the title.  The word ‘sexist’ was thrown around quite a bit and by the end of the Facebook thread, I was hooked.

I recalled reading Fowler’s piece with total agreement as this article highlights the way in which celebrity such as Jolie seems to be performing the benefit of ‘public service’ while in truth these enunciations tend to be condescending and hurtful to many.  And for those who really sit down and think about the consequences of such an ‘announcement’ by a celebrity, as Fowler clearly did, this seemingly generous and confessional act is not one that will help other women and men with cancer deal with their illness–to the contrary:  it merely dangles a carrot at millions whose reach falls short financially.  So, I read Sharon Smith’s article and in turn I reread Fowler’s piece.

To be fair, I found Fowler’s piece quite tame for I would have been far harsher.   Jolie–someone who has bought a child from Ethiopia while paradoxically representing UNICEF an organization with which I have had dealings in their cover-up of child trafficking in Haiti– behaves as if the rest of the world really cares about her life to include her medical traumas and misinformation strangely pimped out to us by the The New York Times. And certainly while I would not dispute the existence of readers of People and Hello magazines who take every minute detail of Jolie’s life with incredible weight in their lives, those who actually face imminent mortality haven’t the time for such publications.  Even in the United States where we assume healthcare to be accessible to those with policy coverage, women and men who suffer with cancer must still spend weeks or months looking for the best specialist under their healthcare plan (if they even have one), with few options left to them they then end up googling and reading up on comparative strategies for dealing with their condition, and finally they must spend hundreds of hours in waiting rooms, doctor’s surgeries and hospitals hoping to survive the ravaging of their bodies and personal existences. And let us not even dare mention those who have no healthcare coverage and are at the mercy of systemic leftovers.

Indeed, when Fowler questions what Jolie has done to deserve praise, she is spot on to point out that cancer is in the vernacular of most everyone in the United States.  Simply put, Jolie brought critique on herself by mentioning that she wanted to “bring awareness” to breast cancer without acknowledging her privilege whilst elaborating a choice she made that most people could never afford.

However there is an poignant issue of sexism which Smith elides and which certainly is not to be found within Fowler’s piece.  Sexism is rife within Jolie’s op-ed piece as she equates “femininity” to womanhood.  Since when is being a woman about “femininity”?  As if women who cannot have reconstructive surgery are somehow less women? Clearly, if anyone made this matter about “tits,” it was Jolie who in her own words equates womanhood with femininity with the ability to recuperate the “lost breasts” through a reconstruction to which so many women can never have access for purely financial and/or somatic reasons.  It seems that Smith missed this glaringly obvious point in her misplaced rage over sexism.

In the Facebook discussion as in Smith’s article there seems to be some cultural sensitivity about the word “tit.”  Could it be because Fowler hails from the UK where the word “tit” is not a “dirty word” and where this word occupies various expressions aside from this literal reference to the body?  I recall when I first moved to London hearing a friend mentioning his business going “tits-up” and in response I burst out laughing in admiration of this wonderfully poetic phrase.  Of course, the fact that my friend’s business went under was of no laughing matter to him but he still chose to use an expression that expressed what he meant.  I also still giggle whenever I hear mention of the tube station, Cockfosters.  I come from a prudish country and this is the cultural baggage I brought with me from the USA. Might Smith’s aversion to the word “tit” also originate in a very base reading of the word?   Moreover, while I am aware of sexism in the world today having seen and experienced it in my own life, I do not think that the word “tit” in the title is inappropriate given that Jolie puts gift wrapping and a bow on her experience by discussing the reconstruction of her breasts.   This begs the question, of course, that in a piece addressing breast surgery and reconstruction, how is one to avoid the word “breast,” or any number of it’s synonyms?

In wanting to ensure that CounterPunch allows for other corporeal turns of phrase in its publication I conducted a search of its past articles.  Just for the record, there are plenty of CounterPunch titles with “dick,” “penis,” and “cock” in them, just in case Smith might be interested in developing further her accusations of sexism.   Here are a few of the titles:

“What I Learned About Being a Dickhead”

“Dick the System”

“Penis Envy”

“Penis Politics”

“Cock Chuggers and Cheese Curls”

“Facebook Cock Up” (ironically written by Michael Dickinson)

But let us return to the “tit” and an article written about a cultural icon who exposes her breasts in an ostensible goodwill gesture to our clueless collectivity.  Smith claims that Fowler misses the point that since Jolie’s op-ed piece was published that “the Internet has been abuzz with debate and discussion about this important subject, demonstrating that Jolie has indeed opened a much-needed conversation.”  Oh, I have read these conversations online and open up discussion it has, such as the various conjectures regarding Jolie’s medical  history (“I have not read Jolie’s entire medical history so I don’t know if she’s had not-A-OK mammograms…”) to those who reject claims of self-promotion (“Dude Angelina doesn’t have to “promote” herself”) to some attempting to figure in Jennifer Aniston (“She wanted the majority of women who are still pissed about Aniston to praise her for another reason.”)   This mediatic event has turned every person into Angelina’s BFF  and/or a medical expert with some calling for “biopies.” With such medical “expertise” chiming in on Salon.com and CNN.com message boards why not dismiss our own medical institutions and simply let us all diagnose each other while watching heavy doses of Gray’s Anatomy as we collectively melt into one mass of cyberchondria?  The hard questions about cancer need to be asked and Fowler unveiled Jolie’s performance of martyrdom for the masses because of what it fails to undertake and for the very privilege that it evidences.

What is it about Jolie’s op-ed that necessitates that we speak about cancer at all?  If it is stardom then we have had slews of celebrities in the past twenty years who have struggled with cancer from Audrey Hepburn to Farrah Fawcett.  Perhaps appendiceal and anal cancers are not as appealing to the public?  Regardless, what Jolie’s op-ed piece does signal is the need to question our ethos as a society if indeed our only motivation to speak about cancer is spurred when a Hollywood star tells us to, or when we discover that we have joined the ranks of millions of cancer patients.  For the real problem here is not Fowler’s mention of the word “tit”, but rather it is our inability as a society to embrace the reality of this and other body parts which remain categorically unprotected in a country whose class system decides who can and who cannot have proper screening, treatment and “preservation” of their femininity.

While critics are already questioning whether this was more a public relations stunt—giving lip service to a life-and-death problem—than the real thing, it’s too early to say. In any event, several American companies, including Walmart, Gap, Sears and J.C. Penney, have refused to sign on to the reforms, giving credence to the claim that this ambitious and binding safety agreement does, in fact, have teeth.

Because the accident is believed to be the result of shoddy construction and management negligence, these highly profitable companies faced a dilemma. Fearing consumer and investor backlash, do they pull out of Bangladesh all together and set up shop in a more expensive venue, demonstrating to their customers that human life means more to them than making a quick buck?

Or do they weather the storm and stay put, gambling that by signing on to a new “safety manifesto” they can simultaneously demonstrate their humanitarian side while maintaining their lucrative manufacturing base? Although pulling up stakes would be a splashy public relations move, it would prove costly. Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) is nothing if not a source of cheap, reliable labor.

Another fear was the threat of a consumer boycott, which has been discussed by various workers’ rights groups, including some labor unions. These groups believe that the only sure-fire way to get a company’s attention is by hitting them in the pocketbook. But the problem with boycotting a particular brand name or, as has been suggested, any item bearing a “Made in Bangladesh” label, is that you hurt the wrong people.

Bangladesh’s lifeblood is textiles. We’ve all heard of “company towns” (where citizens are so reliant upon one employer, if that employer were to leave, the town dies). Well, Bangladesh is a “company nation.” Without jobs in apparel factories, people’s lives would not only be damaged, they would, without exaggeration, be ruined. And if this proposed boycott were anywhere near successful, factories would be shut down and jobs lost.

During its 1978-79 contract negotiations, the AWPPW (Association of Western Pulp & Paper Workers) launched a West Coast boycott of Scott paper products, hoping to pry the company off its increasingly hard-line position at the bargaining table. Back in those days, Scott was viewed as an inordinately stubborn negotiator [Note: in the mid-1990s, Scott Paper was absorbed by the Kimberly-Clark Corporation]

Alas, the West Coast boycott worked too well. Scott’s sales soon declined to the point where they were forced to shut down two facilities, resulting in the lay-off of several hundred union members. Even though the plants were eventually reopened and manned-up to previous levels, the economic damage done to working people and their families couldn’t be undone.

Also, let’s be clear. It’s very hard to pull off a successful boycott. Unless, you can present a genuinely compelling narrative, one that has enormous drawing power and resonates with consumers across the board, it ain’t going to work. People simply don’t like to be told what not to buy. They either resent it or remain indifferent to it.

In the 1990s, we launched a boycott of Snapple beverages after learning that it was a major sponsor of Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. While the boycott was, admittedly, poorly conceived and hastily put together, we were nonetheless stunned when people defiantly announced they now intended to purchase Snapple products—even though they’d never bought them before. Why? Because we told them not to buy them. Go figure.

If the question is: How do we insure that Bangladesh textile factories are safe? then the answer is: You get yourself an incorruptible, on-site champion of industrial safety. Someone whose sole concern is the welfare of working men and women. In short, you get yourself a union. Bangladesh desperately needs labor unions. Simple as that.

David Macaray, an LA playwright and author (“It’s Never Been Easy:  Essays on Modern Labor” 2^nd edition), was a former union rep. Macaray’s article on the history of Major League Baseball’s powerful players’ union appears in the May issue of CounterPunch magazine.  dmacaray@earthlink.net

Quantitative Easing is the term given to the Federal Reserve’s policy of printing 1,000 billion new dollars annually in order to finance the US budget deficit by purchasing US Treasury bonds and to keep the prices high of debt-related derivatives on the “banks too big to fail” (BTBF) balance sheets by purchasing mortgage-backed derivatives. Without QE, interest rates would be much higher, and values on the banks’ balance sheets would be much lower.

Quantitative Easing has been underway since December 2008. During these 54 months, the Federal Reserve has created several trillion new dollars with which the Fed has monetized the same amount of debt.

One result of this policy is that most real US interest rates are negative. Another result is that the supply of dollars has outstripped the world’s demand for dollars.

These two results are the reason that the Federal Reserve’s policy of printing money with which to purchase Treasury bonds and mortgage backed derivatives threatens the dollar’s exchange value and, thus, the dollar’s role as world reserve currency.

To be the world reserve currency means that the dollar can be used to pay any and every country’s oil bills and trade deficit. The dollar is the medium of international payment.

This is very helpful to the US and is the main source of US power. Because the dollar is the reserve currency, the US can cover its import costs and pay for its cost of operation simply by creating its own paper money.

If the dollar were not the reserve currency, Washington would not be able to finance its wars or continue to run large trade and budget deficits. Therefore, protecting the exchange value of the dollar is Washington’s prime concern if it is to remain a superpower.

The threats to the dollar are alternative monies–currencies that are not being created in enormous quantities, gold and
silver, and Bitcoins, a digital currency.

The Bitcoin threat was eliminated on May 17 when the Gestapo Department of Homeland Security seized Bitcoin’s accounts. The excuse was that Bitcoin had failed to register in keeping with the US Treasury’s anti-money laundering requirements.

Washington has stifled the threat from other currencies by convincing other large currencies to out-print the dollar. Japan has complied, and the European Central Bank, though somewhat constrained by Germany, has entered the printing mode in order to bail out the private banks endangered by the “sovereign debt crisis.”

That leaves gold and silver. The enormous increase in the prices of gold and silver over the last decade convinced Washington that there are a number of miscreants who do not trust the dollar and whose numbers must not be permitted to increase.

The price of gold rose from $272 an ounce in December 2000 to $1,917.50 on August 23, 2011. The financial gangsters who own and run America panicked. With the price of the dollar collapsing in relation to historical real money, how could the dollar’s exchange rate to other currencies be valid? If the dollar’s exchange value came under attack, the Federal Reserve would have to stop printing and would lose control over interest rates.

The bond and stock market bubbles would pop, and the interest payments on the federal debt would explode, leaving Washington even more indebted and unable to finance its wars, police state, and bankster bailouts.

Something had to be done about the rising price of gold and silver.

There are two bullion markets. One is a paper market in New York, Comex, where paper claims to gold are traded. The other is the physical market where personal possession is taken of the metal–coin shops, bullion dealers, jewelry stores.

The way the banksters have it set up, the price of bullion is not set in the markets in which people actually take possession of the metals. The price is set in the paper market where speculators gamble.

This bifurcated market gave the Federal Reserve the ability to protect the dollar from its printing press.

On Friday, April 12, 2013, short sales of gold hit the New York market in an amount estimated to have been somewhere between 124 and 400 tons of gold. This enormous and unprecedented sale implies an illegal conspiracy of sellers intent on rigging the market or action by the Federal Reserve through its agents, the BTBF that are the bullion banks.

The enormous sales of naked shorts drove down the gold price, triggering stop-loss orders and margin calls. The attack continued on Monday, April 15, and has continued since.

Before going further, note that there are position limits imposed on the number of contracts that traders can sell at one time. The 124 tons figure would have required 14 traders with no open interest on the exchange to sell all together in the same few minutes 40,000 futures contracts. The likelihood of so many traders deciding to short at the same moment at the maximum permitted is not believable. This was an attack ordered by the Federal Reserve, which is why there is no investigation of the illegality.

Note also that no seller that wanted out of a position would give himself a low price by dumping an enormous amount all at once unless the goal was not profit but to smash the bullion price.

Since the April 12-15 attack on the gold price, subsequent attacks have occurred at 2pm Hong Kong time and 2 am New York time. At this time activity is light, waiting on London to begin operating. As William S.Kaye has observed, no entity concerned about profits would choose this time to sell 20,000 to 30,000 futures contracts, but this is what has been happening.

Who can be unconcerned with losing money in this way? Only a central bank that can print it.

Now we come to the physical market where people take possession of bullion instead of betting on paper instruments. Look at this chart from ZeroHedge.

The demand for physical possession is high, despite the assault on gold that began in 2011, but as the price is set in the non-real paper market, orchestrated short sales, as in the current quarter of 2013, can drive down the price regardless of the fact that the actual demand for gold and silver cannot be met.

While the corrupt Western financial press urges people to abandon bullion, everyone is trying to purchase more, and the premiums above the spot price have risen. Around the world there is a shortage of gold and silver in the forms, such as one-ounce coins and ten-ounce bars, that individuals demand.

That the decline in gold and silver prices is an orchestration is apparent from the fact that the demand for bullion in the physical market has increased while naked short sales in the paper market imply a flight from bullion.

What does this illegal manipulation of markets by the Federal Reserve tell us? It tells us that the Federal Reserve sees no way out of printing money in order to support the federal deficit and the insolvent banks. If the dollar came under attack and the Federal Reserve had to stop printing dollars, interest rates would rise. The bond and stock markets would collapse. The dollar would be abandoned as reserve currency. Washington would no longer be able to pay its bills and would lose its hegemony. The world of hubristic Washington would collapse.

It remains to be seen whether Washington can prevail over the world demand for gold and silver. Can the dollar remain supreme when offshoring has deprived the US of the ability to cover its imports with exports? Can the dollar remain supreme when the Federal reserve is creating 1,000 billion new ones each year, while the BRICS, China and Japan, China and Australia, and China and Russia are making deals to settle their trade balances without the use of the dollar?

If the consumption-based US economy deprived of consumer income by jobs offshoring takes a further dip down in the third or fourth quarter–a downturn that cannot be masked by phony statistical releases–the federal deficit will rise. What will be the effect on the dollar if the Federal Reserve has to increase its Quantitative Easing?

A perfect storm has been prepared for America. Real interest rates are negative, but debt and money are being created hand over foot. The dollar’s demise awaits the world’s decision how to get out of it. The Federal Reserve can print dollars with which to keep the bond and stock markets high, but the Federal Reserve cannot print foreign currencies with which to keep the dollar afloat.

When the dollar goes, Washington’s power goes, which is why the bullion market is rigged. Protect the power. That is the agenda. Is it another Washington over-reach?

In a recent  book Classified Woman, Sibel Edmonds, a former translator for the FBI, describes how the Pentagon, CIA and State Department maintained intimate ties to al-Qaeda militants as late as 2001. Her memoir, Classified Woman: The Sibel Edmonds Story, published last year, charged senior government officials with negligence, corruption and collaboration with al Qaeda in illegal arms smuggling and drugs trafficking in Central Asia.

In interviews with this author in early March, Edmonds claimed that Ayman al-Zawahiri, current head of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden’s deputy at the time, had innumerable, regular meetings at the U.S. embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, with U.S. military and intelligence officials between 1997 and 2001, as part of an operation known as ‘Gladio B’. Al-Zawahiri, she charged, as well as various members of the bin Laden family and other mujahideen, were transported on NATO planes to various parts of Central Asia and the Balkans to participate in Pentagon-backed destabilisation operations.

According to two Sunday Times journalists speaking on condition of anonymity, this and related revelations had been confirmed by senior Pentagon and MI6 officials as part of a four-part investigative series that were supposed to run in 2008. The Sunday Times journalists described how the story was inexplicably dropped under the pressure of undisclosed “interest groups”, which, they suggest, were associated with the U.S. State Department.

Shooting the Messenger

Described by the American Civil Liberties Union as the “most gagged person in the history of the United States of America,” Edmonds studied criminal justice, psychology and public policy at  George Washington and George Mason universities. Two weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, her fluency in Turkish, Farsi and Azerbaijani earned her an FBI contract at the Washington DC field office. She was tasked with translating highly classified intelligence from operations against terrorism suspects in and outside the U.S..

In the course of her work, Edmonds became privy to evidence that U.S. military and intelligence agencies were collaborating with Islamist militants affiliated with al-Qaeda, the very forces blamed for the 9/11 attacks – and that officials in the FBI were covering up the evidence. When Edmonds complained to her superiors, her family was threatened by one of the subjects of her complaint, and she was fired. Her accusations of espionage against her FBI colleagues were eventually investigated by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General, which did not give details about the allegations as they remained classified.

Although no final conclusions about the espionage allegations were reached, the Justice Department concluded that many of Edmonds’ accusations “were supported, that the FBI did not take them seriously enough and that her allegations were, in fact, the most significant factor in the FBI’s decision to terminate her services.”

When she attempted to go public with her story in 2002, and again in 2004, the U.S. government silenced Edmonds by invoking a legal precedent known as “state secrets privilege” – a near limitless power to quash a lawsuit based solely on the government’s claim that evidence or testimony could divulge information that might undermine “national security.” Under this doctrine, the government sought to retroactively classify basic information concerning Edmonds’s case already in the public record, including, according to the New York Times, “what languages Ms. Edmonds translated, what types of cases she handled, and what employees she worked with, officials said. Even routine and widely disseminated information — like where she worked — is now classified.”

Although certainly not the first invocation of “state secrets privilege”, since the Edmonds case the precedent has been used repeatedly in the post-9/11 era under both the Bush and Obama administrations to shield the U.S. government from court scrutiny of rendition, torture, warrantless wiretapping, as well as the President’s claimed war powers.

Other intelligence experts agree that Edmonds had stumbled upon a criminal conspiracy at the heart of the American judicial system. In her memoirs, she recounts that FBI Special Agent Gilbert Graham, who also worked in the Washington field office on counter-intelligence operations, told her over a coffee how he “ran background checks on federal judges” in the “early nineties for the bureau… If we came up with shit – skeletons in their closets – the Justice Department kept it in their pantry to be used against them in the future or to get them to do what they want in certain cases – cases like yours.”A redacted version of Graham’s classified protected disclosure to the Justice Department regarding these allegations, released in 2007, refers to the FBI’s “abuse of authority” by conducting illegal wiretapping to obtain information on U.S. public officials.

Incubating Terror

Five years ago, Edmonds revealed to the Sunday Times that an unidentified senior U.S. State Department official was on the payroll of Turkish agents in Washington, passing on nuclear and military secrets. “He was aiding foreign operatives against U.S. interests by passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives”, Edmonds told the paper. She reported coming across this informationwhen listening to suppressed phone calls recorded by FBI surveillance, marked by her colleague Melek Can Dickerson as “not pertinent”.

In the Sunday Times exposé, Edmonds described a parallel organisation in Israel cooperating with the Turks on illegal weapons sales and technology transfers. Between them, Israel and Turkey operated a range of front companies incorporated in the U.S. with active “moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions”, supported by U.S. officials, in order to sell secrets to the highest bidder. One of the  buyers was Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) – which often used its Turkish allies, according to the Times, “as a conduit… because they were less likely to attract suspicion.”

The Pakistani operation was, the paper reported,  “led by General Mahmoud Ahmad, then the ISI chief” from 1999 to 2001, when the agency helped train, supply and coordinate the Afghan Taliban and gave sanctuary to their Arab allies brought together in the coalition named al-Qaeda. Ahmad, as the Timesnoted, “was accused [by the FBI] of sanctioning a $100,000 wire payment to Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, immediately before the attacks.”

According to Indian intelligence officials, they had assisted the FBI in “tracing and establishing” the financial trail between the General and the chief hijacker. The discovery was, they allege, the real reason behind the General’s sudden retirement in October 2001. The Pakistani daily, The News, reported on 10th September 2001 that the ISI chief held several “mysterious meetings at the Pentagon and National Security Council” that week, including with CIA director George Tenet.

In an interview with this author in March, Edmonds raised the question of whether U.S. officials’ liaisons with an espionage network overseen by Ahmad, and the FBI’s suppression of related intelligence, played a role in facilitating the attacks.

“Following 9/11, a number of the foreign operatives were taken in for questioning by the FBI on suspicion that they knew about or somehow aided the attacks”, reported the Sunday Times. The paper related that according to Edmonds, the senior State Department official received a call from a foreign agent under FBI surveillance asking for help to “get them out of the U.S. because we can’t afford for them to spill the beans.” The official promised “he would ‘take care of it’.”

Edmonds told this author that high-level corruption compromised the ability of the U.S. intelligence community to pursue ongoing investigations of those planning the 9/11 attacks. “It was precisely those militants that were incubated by some of America’s key allies”, she said. Corruption helped  guarantee Congressional silence when that incubation strategy backfired in the form of 9/11. “Both Republican and Democratic representatives in the House and Senate came up in FBI counterintelligence investigations for taking bribes from foreign agents”, she said.

Al-Qaeda: Enemy or Asset?

In her interview, Edmonds  insisted that after its initial exposé, the Times‘ investigation had gone beyond such previous revelations, and was preparing to disclose her most startling accusations. Among these, Edmonds described how the CIA and the Pentagon had been running a series of covert operations supporting Islamist militant networks linked to Osama bin Laden right up to 9/11, in Central Asia, the Balkans and the Caucasus.

While it is widely recognised that the CIA sponsored bin Laden’s networks in Afghanistan during the Cold War, U.S. government officials deny any such ties existed. Others claim these ties were real, but were severed after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989.

But according to Edmonds, this narrative is false. “Not just bin Laden, but several senior ‘bin Ladens’ were transported by U.S. intelligence back and forth to the region in the late 1990s through to 2001″, she told this author, “including Ayman al-Zawahiri” – Osama bin Laden’s right-hand-man who has taken over as al-Qaeda’s top leader.

“In the late 1990s, all the way up to 9/11, al-Zawahiri and other mujahideen operatives were meeting regularly with senior U.S. officials in the U.S. embassy in Baku to plan the Pentagon’s Balkan operations with the mujahideen,” said Edmonds. “We had support for these operations from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, but the U.S. oversaw and directed them. They were being run from a secret section of the Pentagon with its own office”.

Edmonds clarified, “the FBI counterintelligence investigation which was tracking these targets, along with their links to U.S. officials, was known as ‘Gladio B’, and was kickstarted in 1997. It so happens that Major Douglas Dickerson” – the husband of her FBI co-worker Melek whom she accused of espionage – “specifically directed the Pentagon’s ‘Gladio’ operations in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan at this time.”

In testimony under oath, Edmonds has previously confirmed that Major Doug Dickerson worked for the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) under the weapons procurement logistics division on Turkey and Central Asia, and with the Office of Special Plans (OSP) overseeing policy in Central Asia.

Gladio B

Edmonds said that the Pentagon operations with Islamists were an “extension” of an original ‘Gladio’ programme uncovered in the 1970s in Italy, part of an EU-wide NATO covert operation that began as early as the 1940s. As Swiss historian Dr. Daniele Ganser records in his seminal book, NATO’s Secret Armies, an official Italian parliamentary inquiry confirmed that British MI6 and the CIA had established a network of secret “stay-behind” paramilitary armies, staffed by fascist and Nazi collaborators. The covert armies carried out terrorist attacks throughout Western Europe, officially blamed on Communists in what Italian military intelligence called the ‘strategy of tension’.

“You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game” explained Gladio operative Vincenzo Vinciguerra during his  trial in 1984. “The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people… to turn to the State to ask for greater security.”

While the reality of Gladio’s existence in Europe is a matter of historical record, Edmonds contended the same strategy was adopted by the Pentagon in the 1990s in a new theatre of operations, namely, Asia. “Instead of using neo-Nazis, they used mujahideen working under various bin Ladens, as well as al-Zawahiri”, she said.

The last publicly known Gladio meeting occurred in NATO’s Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) in Brussels in 1990. While Italy was a focal point for the older European operations, Edmonds said that Turkey and Azerbaijan served as the main conduits for a completely new, different set of operations in Asia using veterans of the anti-Soviet campaign in Afghanistan, the so-called “Afghan Arabs” that had been trained by al-Qaeda.

These new Pentagon-led operations were codenamed ‘Gladio B’ by FBI counterintelligence: “In 1997, NATO asked [Egyptian President] Hosni Mubarak to release from prison Islamist militants affiliated to Ayman al-Zawahiri [whose role in the assassination of Anwar Sadat led to Mubarak’s ascension]. They were flown under U.S. orders to Turkey for [training and use in] operations by the Pentagon”, she said.

Edmonds’ allegations find some independent corroboration in the public record. The Wall Street Journal refers to a nebulous agreement between Mubarak and “the operational wing of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which was then headed by Ayman al-Zawahiri…  Many of that group’s fighters embraced a cease-fire with the government of former President Hosni Mubarak in 1997.”

Youssef Bodansky, former Director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, cited U.S. intelligence sources in an article for Defense and Foreign Affairs: Strategic Policy, confirming “discussions between the Egyptian terrorist leader Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri and an Arab-American known to have been both an emissary of the CIA and the U.S. Government.” He referred to an “offer” made to al-Zawahiri in November 1997 on behalf of U.S. intelligence, granting his Islamists a free hand in Egypt as long as they lent support to U.S. forces in the Balkans. In 1998, Al Zawahiri’s brother, Muhammed, led an elite unit of the Kosovo Liberation Army against Serbs during the Kosovo conflict – he reportedly had direct contact with NATO leadership.

“This is why”, Edmonds continued in her interview, “even though the FBI routinely monitored the communications of the diplomatic arms of all countries, only four countries were exempt from this protocol – the UK, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Belgium – the seat of NATO. No other country – not even allies like Israel or Saudi Arabia, were exempt. This is because these four countries were integral to the Pentagon’s so-called Gladio B operations.”

Edmonds did not speculate on the objectives of the Pentagon’s ‘Gladio B’ operations, but highlighted the following possibilities: projecting U.S. power in the former Soviet sphere of influence to access previously untapped strategic energy and mineral reserves for U.S. and European companies; pushing back Russian and Chinese power; and expanding the scope of lucrative criminal activities, particularly illegal arms and drugs trafficking.

Terrorism finance expert Loretta Napoleoni estimates the total value of this criminal economy to be about $1.5 trillion annually, the bulk of which “flows into Western economies, where it gets recycled in the U.S. and in Europe” as a “vital element of the cash flow of these economies.”

It is no coincidence then that the opium trade, Edmonds told this author, has grown rapidly under the tutelage of NATO in Afghanistan: “I know for a fact that NATO planes routinely shipped heroin to Belgium, where they then made their way into Europe and to the UK. They also shipped heroin to distribution centres in Chicago and New Jersey. FBI counterintelligence and DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) operations had acquired evidence of this drug trafficking in its surveillance of a wide range of targets, including senior officials in the Pentagon, CIA and State Department. As part of this surveillance, the role of the Dickersons – with the support of these senior U.S. officials – in facilitating drug-trafficking, came up. It was clear from this evidence that the whole funnel of drugs, money and terror in Central Asia was directed by these officials.”

The evidence for this funnel, according to Edmonds, remains classified in the form of FBI counterintelligence surveillance records she was asked to translate. Although this alleged evidence has never made it to court due to the U.S. government’s exertion of ‘state secret privilege’, she was able to testify in detail concerning her allegations, including naming names, in 2009.

Censorship

In recent interviews, two Sunday Times journalists confirmed to this author that the newspaper’s investigation based on Sibel Edmonds’ revelations was to break much of the details into the open.

“We’d spoken to several current and active Pentagon officials confirming the existence of U.S. operations sponsoring mujahideen networks in Central Asia from the 1990s to 2001,” said oneSunday Times source. “Those mujahideen networks were intertwined with a whole range of criminal enterprises, including drugs and guns. The Pentagon officials corroborated Edmonds’ allegations against specific U.S. officials, and I’d also interviewed an MI6 officer who confirmed that the U.S. was running these operations sponsoring mujahideen in that period.”

But according to Edmonds, citing the investigative team at the paper, the last two articles in the series were spiked under U.S. State Department pressure. She recalled being told at the time by journalists leading the Sunday Times investigation that the newspaper’s editor had decided to squash the story after receiving calls from officials at the U.S. embassy in London.

A journalist with the Sunday Times‘ investigative unit told this author he had interviewed former Special Agent in Charge, Dennis Saccher, who had moved to the FBI’s Colorado office. Saccher reportedly confirmed the veracity of Edmonds’ allegations of espionage, telling him that Edmonds’ story “should have been front page news” because it was “a scandal bigger than Watergate.” The same journalist confirmed that after interviewing Saccher at his home, the newspaper was contacted by the U.S. State Department. “The U.S. embassy in London called the editor and tried to ward him off. We were told that we weren’t permitted to approach Saccher or any other active FBI agents directly, but could only go through the FBI’s press office – that if we tried to speak to Saccher or anyone else employed by the FBI directly, that would be illegal. Of course, it isn’t, but that’s what we were told. I think this was a veiled threat.”

Saccher’s comments to the journalist never made it to press.

A lead reporter on the series at the Sunday Times told this author that the investigation based on Edmonds’ information was supposed to have four parts, but was inexplicably dropped. “The story was pulled half-way, suddenly, without any warning”, the journalist said. “I wasn’t party to the editorial decision to drop the story, but there was a belief in the office amongst several journalists who were part of the Insight investigative unit that the decision was made under pressure from the U.S. State Department, because the story might cause a diplomatic incident.”

Although the journalist was unaware of where this belief came from – and was not informed of the U.S. embassy’s contact with the paper’s editor which the other journalist was privy to – he acknowledged that self-censorship influenced by unspecified “interest groups” was a possible explanation. “The way the story was dropped was unusual, but the belief amongst my colleagues this happened under political pressure is plausible.” He cryptically described an “editorial mechanism, linked to the paper but not formally part of it, which could however exert control on stories when necessary, linked to certain interests.” When asked which interests, the journalist said, “I can’t say. I can’t talk about that.”

Edmonds described how, due to the U.S. government’s efforts to silence her, she had no option left except to write her story down. The resultant book, Classified Woman, had to be submitted to an FBI panel for review. By law, the bureau was required to make a decision on what could be disclosed  or redacted within 30 days.

Instead, about a year later, Edmonds’ lawyer received a letter from the FBI informing them that the agency was still reviewing the book, and prohibiting her from publishing it: “The matters Ms. Edmonds writes about involve many equities, some of which may implicate information that is classified… Approval of the manuscripts by the FBI will include incorporation of all changes required by the FBI. Until then, Ms. Edmonds does not have approval to publish her manuscripts which includes showing them to editors, literary agents, publishers, reviewers, or anyone else. At this point, Ms. Edmonds remains obligated not to disclose or publish the manuscript in any manner.”

The block was another example, Edmonds said, “of the abuse of ‘national security’ to conceal evidence of criminality.” She said that this forced her to release the book herself in March 2012, as no publisher would risk taking it on.

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development and chief research officer at Unitas Communications Ltd, both in London; his latest book is A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It , Pluto Press, 2010, which inspired the award-winning documentary feature film The Crisis of Civilization, 2011.

Published in Ceasefire magazine, UK