|
P
I C T U R E O F T H E D
A Y
The
Great Depression
Signs Economic Commentary |
Donald Hunt
May 16, 2005 |
In the U.S. stock market,
the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 10,140.12 on
Friday, down 2% from the previous Friday’s close
of 10,345.40. The NASDAQ closed at 1976.80, up 0.48% from
the previous week’s 1967.35. The yield on the ten-year
U.S. Treasury bond closed at 4.13% down from the previous
week’s 4.26%. The dollar closed at .7933 euros,
up 1.8% compared to the previous Friday’s close
of .7791. That put a euro at 1.2606 dollars compared to
last week’s 1.2824. Oil fell last week, closing
at $48.67 a barrel, down 4.7% from $50.96 a week earlier.
In euros, the price of oil closed at 38.61 euros a barrel,
down 2.9% from the previous Friday’s close of 39.74.
Gold closed at $420.60 an ounce on Friday, down 1.5% from
$426.80 the previous Friday. Gold in euros would be 333.66
an ounce, down just 0.26% from last Friday’s 332.81.
Gold did better against oil last week. At Friday’s
close an ounce of gold would buy 8.64 barrels of oil,
up 2.5% from the previous week’s 8.43.
The announcement recently by IBM that it was cutting
thousands of jobs in western Europe, brought into relief
the fact that, while lagging a bit behind the United States
in this, the more advanced economies of Europe are seeing
the outsourcing and offshoring wave begin to crest. (Note,
while we often lump both under the term ‘outsourcing’,
it is worth keeping in mind the difference: ‘outsourcing’
refers to firms contracting out various business processes
to other companies, while ‘offshoring’ refers
to companies moving jobs to low wage countries, whether
or not those jobs remain within the firm in question):
Major
Job Losses At Computer Giant IBM
Computer giant IBM has announced plans to shed thousands
of workers. Up to 13,000 jobs are expected to go - most
of them from its struggling European operations. The
company signalled the job cuts were part of efforts
to reinvent itself after it ditched its personal computer
unit.
It said it foresaw reducing its 329,000-strong workforce
through "voluntary and involuntary" cuts by
10,000 to 13,000 employees worldwide.
"The majority of the overall workforce reductions
are planned for Europe, and the company has initiated
discussions of these changes with local consultation
bodies," a statement said.
IBM said the success of the revamp depended "on
reducing bureaucracy and infrastructure in lower-growth
countries and creating teams that can work across country
borders."
"This eliminates the need for a traditional
pan-European management layer to co-ordinate activity.
"As a result, IBM will create a number of smaller,
more flexible local operating units in Europe to increase
direct client contact."
This process will put considerable pressure on the
social safety net of which Europeans are so justly proud.
Here’s
Business Week:
May 23, 2005
EUROPEAN BUSINESS
U.S. multinationals are scaling back their presence
in Western Europe in favor of more promising venues
David N. Farr, chairman and chief executive of St.
Louis industrial group Emerson Electric Co., keeps a
close eye on Europe. That makes sense. The region accounts
for about one-fourth of Emerson's $15.6 billion revenues
and 16% of its worldwide assets. But more and more,
Farr is discouraged by what he sees. Western European
sales have been flat for months, as corporate customers
delay purchasing the power networks, air-conditioning
systems, and other big-ticket capital goods Emerson
sells. Come to think of it, there hasn't been much life
in these markets for years. "The European economies
have continued to weaken and weaken," Farr laments.
Even worse, a strong euro and stringent anti-layoff
laws make it tough to trim costs.
Now, Emerson has had enough. It has halted new investment
in Western Europe, while pouring money into faster-growing,
more lightly regulated economies in the old Soviet bloc.
Vacant jobs in Western Europe are not being filled.
"As we need more capacity, we're putting it in
Eastern and Central Europe," says Edward L. Monser,
Emerson's chief operating officer.
It's hardly news that Western Europe is a tough place
to do business these days. Growth for the euro zone
economy is forecast to be below 1.5% this year, less
than half the rate in the U.S. and Asia. Unemployment
averages 8.9%, retail sales are sagging, and euro zone
manufacturing production shrank in April. High oil
prices only add to the gloom. U.S. multinationals from
McDonald's to Caterpillar to Wal-Mart complain that
their European operations, particularly in Germany,
are dragging down companywide sales and profits.
TROUBLING CONTRAST
But as Europe heads into a fifth year of economic anemia,
some U.S. multinationals are finally concluding that
a robust recovery won't arrive soon -- if ever. Like
Emerson, they're scaling back longstanding operations
and diverting investment to more promising venues. Until
now, many U.S. companies have hesitated to reduce European
payrolls because of local laws requiring cumbersome,
expensive layoff procedures. But more and more are concluding
that it's worth the trouble. IBM says that the bulk
of the 10,000 to 13,000 worldwide job cuts it announced
on May 5 will be in Western Europe, while the company
is hiring in Hungary and Slovakia. General Motors
Corp. plans to eliminate up to 12,000 Western European
jobs by 2006, even as it expands manufacturing in Poland.
The big numbers tell the story most clearly. Foreign
direct investment in the European Union's 15 longstanding
member countries fell almost 50% in 2004, to $165 billion,
with every one of the EU's major economies except Britain
posting a decline. By contrast, in the eight Central
and Eastern European countries that joined the EU last
year, foreign investment rose by one-third, to $36 billion.
Foreign direct investment in the U.S. also rose sharply
last year.
Of course, the U.S. is losing manufacturing and service
jobs to lower-wage countries, too. And European companies
are doing plenty of offshoring themselves. A survey
by Woodlands (Texas)-based consulting firm TPI found
that European companies accounted for 49% of all major
outsourcing contracts last year, ahead of U.S. companies,
which had 44%.
There are two trends at work here, neither of which
bode well for western Europeans. First, the neoliberal
corporate project to use transnational bodies like the
WTO to undermine national sovereignty in the area of economic
and social policy proceeds apace. The project is to punish
Europe for showing that you can have an advanced, dynamic
economy with many elements of socialism in place. That
will not be allowed to continue if the capitalist globalisers
have anything to say about it. Second, we can also see
the development of economic spheres of influence, with
much of the western European offshoring going to eastern
Europe, rather than Latin America or India as is the case
in the United States (which is not to say that many European
jobs will not be lost to India or China).
For readers of these pages it is old news, but there are
increasing signs that mainstream commentators are thinking
in apocalyptic terms, especially when it comes to the
economy. We would like to welcome The New York Times
to the doomsday club!
The
Perfect Storm That Could Drown the Economy
By DANIEL GROSS
We seem to be living in apocalyptic times. On NBC's
"Revelations," Bill Pullman and Natascha McElhone
seek signs of the End of Days. In the Senate, gray-haired
eminences speak of the "nuclear option."
The doomsday theme is seeping into the normally circumspect
world of economics. In April, Arjun Murti, a veteran
analyst at the investment bank Goldman Sachs, warned
that oil could "super-spike" to $105 a barrel.
And increasingly, economists are prophesying that the
American economy as a whole may be sailing into choppy
waters.
Just look at the many obvious and worrisome portents.
The government each year spends much more than it brings
in, and so the nation has a large budget deficit ($412
billion in fiscal 2004, and growing). Americans also
import far more goods than they export, and so the nation
has record trade and current account deficits.
As consumers, Americans personally spend significantly
more than they earn. Worse, some imbalances are eerily
reminiscent of conditions that helped touch off recent
economic crises: Mexico in 1994, Asia in 1997, Russia
in 1998 and Argentina in 2002. Throw in rising interest
rates, warnings of a housing bubble and the potential
for higher inflation and slower growth (a k a stagflation)
- and you can understand why some economic analysts
may be plumbing the New Testament for inspiration.
The forces propelling and buffeting the economy are
like a series of interrelated and interconnected weather
systems. Could they be setting the conditions for a
perfect storm - a swift series of disturbances that
causes lasting damage? If so, what would it look like?
"There's a pattern that is familiar from so
many other countries that have gotten into debt problems,"
said Jeffrey A. Frankel, an economist at Harvard's Kennedy
School of Government. "A simultaneous rise in interest
rates, fall in securities prices and depreciation of
the currency."
Of course, economists, always armed with bandoliers
of caveats, are quick to warn that the economy is relatively
healthy. Job growth numbers released on Friday were
strong, with 274,00 new jobs created in April.
And they warn against drawing parallels too sharply
between the mighty United States and emerging markets.
The dollar remains the world's reserve currency, and
the United States is a global military and political
hegemon. And the nation has been able to borrow huge
amounts for years without suffering a crisis.
That said, how might a perfect storm be created?
It would likely gather overseas, and wouldn't necessarily
take the form of a terrorist strike or oil shock. The
United States finances its spendthrift ways by selling
dollars and dollar-denominated securities (like Treasury
bills) to foreign creditors, mostly to central banks
in Asia. To sustain growth, the United States needs
foreign creditors to continue to add to their piles
every day.
Any signs to the contrary are worrisome. In February,
when the Korean government suggested that the Bank of
Korea might diversify its foreign exchange holdings,
"this seemingly innocuous statement set off a small
panic in our stocks and bond markets," said James
Grant, editor of Grant's Interest Rate Observer.
If the Bank of China, which has been accumulating
dollars at the rate of $200 billion a year, decides
to cut back on new purchases, either to diversify or
to let its currency appreciate, the United States would
quickly have to offer sharply higher interest rates
to retain existing investors and entice new ones. Nouriel
Roubini, an economics professor at New York University's
Stern School of Business, estimates that if China cut
its rate of accumulation by half, long-term interest
rates in the United States could rise by 200 basis points
over a few months and the value of the dollar would
fall.
Such a rising tide - the yield on the 10-year bond
shooting from 4.25 to 6.25, the average 30-year mortgage
rising from 6 percent to 8 percent - would mean instantly
higher borrowing costs for the government, businesses
and consumers. It would drench Wall Street, soaking
the stocks of giant interest-rate-sensitive blue chips
like Citigroup and making life difficult for speculative,
debt-ridden companies. Some highly leveraged hedge funds
or investment banks caught on the wrong side of trades
would incur significant losses.
The United States weathered a sharp decline in the
stock market just a few years ago, in large part because
of the housing market's strength. But a sharp rise in
interest rates would literally hit home. For new
home buyers, or for people with adjustable rate mortgages,
200 extra basis points of interest on a $400,000 mortgage
would represent $8,000 a year in extra payments.
If mortgage rates were to rise sharply, housing prices
would level off and perhaps do the unthinkable: fall.
Suddenly, the mechanisms that have allowed consumers
to keep the economy afloat - the ability to realize
profits from selling homes, to refinance mortgages at
lower rates and to borrow cheaply against home equity
- would be broken. In the absence of sharply rising
wages, that $8,000 in extra interest would be $8,000
less to spend at Home Depot, or at the Cheesecake Factory,
or at Disney World.
"Personal expenditures in the past 15 months
have been largely financed by borrowing," said
Wynne Godley, a Cambridge University economist who is
affiliated with the Levy Institute at Bard College.
"And even a reduction in the pace of debt creation
will force people to start spending less, on a big scale."
If the dollar weakens and consumption falls, the
trade and current account deficits would start to narrow.
But the United States economy would slow and, perhaps,
even shrink.
"The result would not be a full-blown financial
crisis most likely, but it would still be a major recession,"
said Barry Eichengreen, a professor of economics and
political science at the University of California at
Berkeley.
What would create the full-blown crisis? When the
slowdown starts to radiate across the globe, said Catherine
L. Mann, senior fellow at the Washington-based Institute
for International Economics.
For years, the American consumer has been the engine
of global growth, by gobbling up the output of oil wells
in Saudi Arabia and factories from Mexico to China.
"The slowdown in consumer spending is going to
have a negative influence on the global economy through
reduced international trade," Ms. Mann said.
What's more, a recovery would be comparatively slow
in coming. When the global economy came to a screeching,
synchronous halt in 2001, the United States led much
of the world back to growth because the federal government
went on a stimulus binge for several years: Congress
significantly increased government spending while cutting
taxes, and the Federal Reserve slashed interest rates
to historic lows, and held them there.
But in the perfect economic storm, none of these
three powerful levers would be readily available. Today's
deep budget deficits make both significant tax cuts
and spending increases unlikely. And rising interest
rates would make it difficult, if not impossible, for
the Federal Reserve to reduce the cost of borrowing.
It sure sounds alarming. But as the clouds gather
and the wind stiffens, we sail onward, with no apparent
adjustment in course, full steam ahead.
We are seeing now a blitzkrieg, a shock and awe attack
on those who work for a living. Medicaid
is being cut. Corporations are slipping out of their
commitments to retired workers. One wonders how much the
ballyhooed financial problems of General Motors are smokescreens
for their attempt to break their promises on pay and healthcare
to their retired workers. A reader wrote in with the following:
Many more worthless promises will be exposed before
this cycle of economic chaos ends.
Other companies are waiting in the wings to unload
their pension promises to workers as part of the effort
to make American business more "competitive".
GM and Ford, Delta, and many others will now see this
ruling as a green light to declare bankruptcy and rid
themselves of the obligations and promises they made
to their employees over the years.
And I'll wager that executive pension plans will
be unaffected by this ruling.
But something even more insidious is at work here
than just a pension plan scam.
This is just another step in the ruination of the
American middle class. While the corporation gets to
slide out of its pension obligations by declaring bankruptcy,
under the new personal bankruptcy law just passed, the
individual won't be able to escape their debt obligations
as easily as this. The personal bankruptcy revision
has made it harder and more complicated to do so.
Step 1: Lure people into taking on
greater and greater loads of debt. Place ads for EZ
loans everywhere, on computers, in the mail, on TV,
in newspapers, everywhere.
Encourage everyone to buy overpriced homes and to
refinance those loans as often as possible to keep people
spending.
Promote adjustable rate mortgages and interest only
home loans so everyone can participate.
Status of this step: in place
Step 2: Change the personal bankruptcy
laws to make it harder for individuals to have debt
excused.
Status of this step: in place, due to be fully implemented
around Sept-Oct 2005.
Step 3: Allow corporate pension liabilities
to be erased or modified as part of keeping America
competitive.
Pretend that the government will see to it that pensions
will never be allowed to fully default.
Get people used to making sacrifices for the good
of the economy.
Status of this step: in progress right now.
Systematically, all the exits are being sealed for the
middle class American and any hope of financial independence.
When the time is right, the trap door will open and
down the hatch they'll go, probably expressing shock
and awe that something like this could ever happen in
the greatest nation in the world.
The next step will be for them to crawl on their
hands and knees to the government seeking "help".
I suspect that the Sept-Oct 2005 time frame is ripe
for the trap door to be opened. That's when the new
personal bankruptcy law will be in place and binding.
The scandal of the pensions is compounded by what these
corporations did with the pension profits in the 1990s.
Then, when the stock market was soaring, corporations
counted the paper gains of their pension funds as revenue.
Companies like General Motors probably were not making
much money selling cars, but they could count the increases
of their pension fund as revenue and, adding to that the
profits of their financial arm, GMAC, they could appear
to be a healthy company and enjoy stock price increases
as a result. Now, with the stock market stalled, they
are trying to get out of their commitments to their retired
workers.
United
Airlines pension default sign of growing pressures
The 6.6 billion dollar pension plan default by United
Airlines may have been the largest in US history. But
it won't be the last, analysts say.
And it is likely that many Americans who get company-sponsored
pensions will end up with significantly smaller retirement
incomes than they had been counting on.
Company-funded defined benefit pension plans,
which cover 44 million Americans, are underfunded to
the tune of 450 billion dollars, according to data from
the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., the government insurer
of private pensions.
The US government insurance program, designed
to protect workers from pension plan defaults, is also
in trouble.
At the same time, President George W. Bush's proposal
to create private accounts within the Social Security
system could pose additional risks for retirees.
"It's a ticking time bomb waiting to go off
and the longer we wait the larger the blast will be,"
said Randall Krozner, an economics professor at the
University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business
who has advised Bush on pension reform.
The crisis with the defined benefit pension system
could cost taxpayers as much as the 125-billion-dollar
bailout of the savings and loan industry in the 1980s,
Krozner said.
United's default could easily force other airlines
to take similar actions in order to remain competitive.
The nation's top two automakers, Ford and General Motors,
may also be at risk of defaulting on their massive pension
plans if there are unable to revitalize weak sales and
recover from recent credit downgrades to junk status,
Krozner added.
The trouble began when the stock market started
sliding in March of 2000. Pension funds took a massive
hit and companies already struggling with weak economic
performance cut back their contributions.
Then the bankruptcies started. By the end of 2004,
the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp. had a 23.3 billion
dollar deficit.
While future stock market growth will help many
underfunded pension plans recover their losses, reform
of the insurance program is needed to help prop up the
system, said Cary Burnell, a researcher with the United
Steelworkers of America.
"Defined benefit plans are one of the pillars
that have built the American middle class and brought
seniors out of poverty," said Burnell, who
worked on the 3.7-billion-dollar Bethlehem Steel pension
plan default.
"Pension plan termination is a terrible thing,"
he said.
Further complicating matters is the fact that US
corporations have been moving away from defined benefit
pension plans and have instead offered defined contribution
plans, known as 401k plans, which are tax-sheltered
savings accounts.
While these easily transferable plans are popular
with the nation's highly mobile workforce, they are
not insured and shift all of the risk onto individual
workers.
The Bush administration is also promoting a system
that would shift Social Security contributions to personal
accounts.
Even the Catholic Church is doing this. Pension fund
abandonment has even reached the Catholic Church!
The Boston Archdiocese, under the corporate-style leadership
of Archbishop O’Malley, has seen plant closings
(closing of parish churches) and now we hear them saying
that the Archdiocesan pension fund is “underfunded.”
They want to cut back on health benefits for retired priests!
Retirement
changes eyed for priests
By Michael Paulson, Globe Staff | May
12, 2005
The cash-strapped Catholic Archdiocese of Boston
is considering significant changes in its expectations
of senior priests that would encourage clergy to continue
to work after they retire and require priests with financial
assets to help pay for nursing-home or assisted-living
care.
The archdiocese says that it remains committed to
taking care of its clergy and that it will guarantee
that no retired priests are without
shelter, healthcare, or income. But the archdiocese
says it must change benefits or risk running out of
money in its pension fund.
The adjustments, which were circulated in a draft
policy to all priests and are being discussed at meetings
with clergy around the archdiocese, are being proposed
as many private companies are eliminating or reducing
pension benefits.
The archdiocese says it faces a $55 million unfunded
liability in its pension fund for priests. Actuaries
say that is the amount the archdiocese has promised
to retirees, an amount that it does not have in the
bank. The archdiocese attributes the problem to poor
investment performance and longer average life span
and says the shortfall is unrelated to the costs of
settling abuse cases or closing parishes.
Given the pattern we have been noticing wherein some
bogus good economic news is released on Friday afternoon
of a week with a lot of bad news, there was some reason
to doubt the reliability of the “strong” U.S.
jobs report that came out the previous Friday. Sure enough,
sceptics have shown that when you look beneath the surface
of the report, the picture does not look so good. Here
is Paul Craig Roberts:
America
is Losing
More Phony Jobs Hype
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Careless journalists and commentators are hyping
the 274,000 new April payroll jobs as evidence of the
health of the US economy. An examination of the details
of the new jobs puts a different view on the matter.
April's job growth is consistent with the depressing
pattern of US employment growth in the 21st century:
The outsourced US economy can create jobs only in domestic
nontradable services.
Of the 274,000 April jobs, 256,000 were in the private
or nongovernment sector, and 211,000 of these were in
the service sector as follows: 58,000 in leisure and
hospitality (primarily restaurants and bars), 47,000
in construction, 29,200 in wholesale and retail trade,
28,000 in health care and social assistance, 17,300
in administrative and support services (primarily temps),
11,700 in transportation and warehousing, 8,800 in real
estate. A few scattered jobs in other service categories
completes the picture.
Americans regard themselves
as “the world's only superpower,” but the
pattern of American job growth in the 21st century is
that of a third world economy. The US economy
has ceased to create jobs in high tech sectors and in
export and import-competitive sectors. Offshore outsourcing
of manufacturing and of engineering and professional
services is dismantling the ladders of upward mobility
that made the American Dream possible.
Related to the pattern of exporting high paying jobs
while keeping low paying ones, wages fell in the United
States at the sharpest rate since 1991, at the end of
another Bush’s run at power, according to the Financial
Times:
Wages
in US show steepest fall in rate since 1991
By Christopher Swann in Washington
May 11 2005
Real wages in the US are falling at their fastest
rate in 14 years, according to data surveyed by the
Financial Times.
Inflation rose 3.1 per cent in the year to March
but salaries climbed just 2.4 per cent, according to
the Employment Cost Index. In the final three months
of 2004, real wages fell by 0.9 per cent.
The last time salaries fell this steeply was at the
start of 1991, when real wages declined by 1.1 per cent.
Stingy pay rises mean many Americans will have to
work longer hours to keep up with the cost of living,
and they could ultimately undermine consumer spending
and economic growth.
Many economists believe that in spite of the unexpectedly
large rise in job creation of 274,000 in April, the
uneven revival in the labour market since the 2001 recession
has made it hard for workers to negotiate real improvements
in living standards.
Even after last month's bumper gain in employment,
there are 22,000 fewer private sector jobs than when
the recession began in March 2001, a 0.02 per cent fall.
At the same point in the recovery from the recession
of the early 1990s, private sector employment was up
4.7 per cent.
“There is still little evidence that workers
are gaining much traction in their negotiations,”
said Paul Ashworth, US analyst at Capital Economics,
the consultancy. “If this does not pick up, it
raises the prospect of a sharper slowdown in consumer
spending than we have been expecting.”
The amazing thing is that in the United States there
are many analysts who keep saying that offshoring is good
for the economy. Common sense, on the one hand, or sophisticated,
non-linear analysis on the other will tell you that that
can’t be true, but neo-classical economics has neither
common sense nor the understanding of non-linear dynamics.
Furthermore, neo-classical economics feeds into the dangerous
tendency in the United States to believe in American Exceptionalism,
the notion that the normal workings of cause and effect
do not apply to the United States. The idea that “things
are different here” is not much different than the
belief that drove the stock bubble of the internet era:
“things are different now.”
We may be reaching the end of the line for American
Exceptionalism. Empires fall by overreaching. At some
point the money spent on the military goes to protect
old gains rather than bringing new wealth in. Often, the
leaders choose to bet everything in order to avoid collapse,
a “double or nothing” strategy of desperation.
Watching the money go down the Iraq sinkhole, one can’t
help but wonder if the United States is poised for a complete
collapse, not just an economic one. According to Willam
S. Lind:
When people ask me what to read to find an historical
parallel with America's situation today, I usually recommend
J.H. Elliott's splendid history of Spain in the first
half of the 17th century, The
Count-Duke of Olivares: A Statesman in an Age of Decline.
One of the features of the Spanish court in that period
was its increasing disconnection with reality. At one
point, Spain was trying to establish a Baltic fleet
while the Dutch navy controlled the Straits of Gibraltar.
A similar reality gap leapt out at me from a story
in the May 3 Washington Post, “Wars Strain
U.S. Military Capability, Pentagon Reports.” Were
that the Pentagon's message, it would be a salutary
one. But the real message was the opposite: no matter
what happens, no one can defeat the American military.
According to the Post,
The Defense Department acknowledged yesterday
that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have stressed
the U.S. military to a point where it is at higher
risk of less swiftly and easily defeating potential
foes, though officials maintained that U.S. forces
could handle any military threat that presents itself
. . .
The officials said the United States would win any
projected conflict across the globe, but the path
to victory could be more complicated.
“There is no doubt of what the outcome is going
to be,” a top defense official said. “Risk
to accomplish the task isn't even part of the discussion.”
It isn't, but it certainly should be. The idea
that the U.S. military cannot be defeated is disconnected
from reality.
Let me put it plainly: the U.S. military can be beaten.
Any military in history could be beaten, including the
Spanish army of Olivares's day, which had not lost a
battle in a century until it met the French at Rocroi.
Sooner or later, we will march to our Rocroi, and probably
sooner the way things are going.
Why do our senior military leaders put out this "we
can't be beaten" bilge? Because they are chosen
for their willingness to tell the politicians whatever
they want to hear. A larger question is, why do the
American press and public buy it? The answer, I fear,
is "American exceptionalism" the belief
that history's laws do not apply to America. Unfortunately,
American exceptionalism follows Spanish exceptionalism,
French exceptionalism, Austrian exceptionalism, German
exceptionalism and Soviet exceptionalism.
Reality tells us that the same rules apply to all.
When a country adopts a wildly adventuristic military
policy, as we have done since the Cold War ended, it
gets beaten. The U.S. military will eventually get beaten,
too. If, as seems more and more likely, we expand the
war in Iraq by attacking Iran, our Rocroi may be found
somewhere between the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers.
If the United States invades one more country, things
like the monthly jobs numbers will have little to do with
what happens to the world economy. |
Last week Standard
and Poor's, a bond rating agency, downgraded both Ford
and General Motors bonds to junk status. That is, it sees
a significant risk that the companies won't be able to
pay their debts.
Don't cry for the bondholders, but do cry for the workers.
Standard and Poor's downgraded GM and Ford sooner rather
than later because it believes that the public is losing
interest in S.U.V.'s. But the companies
were vulnerable because they still pay decent wages and
offer good benefits, in an age when taking care of employees
has gone out of style. In particular, they are weighed
down by health care costs for current and retired workers,
which run to about $1,500 per vehicle at G.M.
So the downgrade was a reminder of how
far we have come from the days when hard-working Americans
could count on a reasonable degree of economic security.
In 1968, when General Motors was a widely
emulated icon of American business, many of its workers
were lifetime employees. On average, they earned about
$29,000 a year in today's dollars, a solidly middle-class
income at the time. They also had generous health and
retirement benefits.
Since then, America has grown much richer,
but American workers have become far less secure.
Today, Wal-Mart is America's largest
corporation. Like G.M. in its prime, it has become a widely
emulated business icon. But there the resemblance ends.
The average full-time Wal-Mart employee
is paid only about $17,000 a year. The company's health
care plan covers fewer than half of its workers.
True, not everyone is badly paid. In 1968, the head of
General Motors received about $4 million in today's dollars
- and that was considered extravagant. But
last year Scott Lee Jr., Wal-Mart's chief executive, was
paid $17.5 million. That is, every two weeks Mr. Lee was
paid about as much as his average employee will earn in
a lifetime.
Not that many of them will actually spend a lifetime
at Wal-Mart: more than 40 percent of the company's workers
leave every year.
I'm not trying either to romanticize the General Motors
of yore or to portray Wal-Mart as the root of all evil.
GM was, and Wal-Mart is, a product of its time. And there's
no easy way to reverse the changes.
What should be clear, however, is that the public safety
net F.D.R. and L.B.J. created is more important than ever,
now that workers in the world's richest nation can no
longer count on the private sector to provide them with
economic security.
When they reach 65, most Wal-Mart employees will rely
heavily on Social Security - if the privatizers don't
kill it. And many Wal-Mart employees already rely on Medicaid
to pay for health care, especially for their children.
Indeed, a growing number of working
Americans have turned to Medicaid. As the Kaiser Family
Foundation points out, that's why children have for the
most part have retained health coverage, despite a sharp
decline in employer-based health insurance since 2000.
Yet our current political leaders are
trying to privatize Social Security and reduce benefits.
And they are slashing funds for Medicaid even as they
give big tax cuts to people like Mr. Lee.
The attack on the safety net is motivated by ideology,
not popular demand. The public isn't
taken with the vision of an "ownership society";
it seems to want more, not less, social insurance. According
to a poll cited in a recent Business Week article titled
"Safety Net Nation," 67 percent of Americans
think we should guarantee health care to all citizens;
just 27 percent disagree.
The question is whether the public's desire for a stronger
safety net will finally be seconded by corporations that
haven't yet adopted the Wal-Mart model of minimal benefits
and always low wages.
Last year Richard Wagoner Jr., G.M.'s chief executive,
gave a speech about the costs of America's "Kafkaesque"
health care system that sounded a lot like my recent columns.
And his company has made it clear that it likes Canada's
system: in 2002 the president of General Motors of Canada
and the head of the Canadian Auto Workers signed a joint
letter declaring that "it is vitally important that
the publicly funded health care system be preserved and
renewed."
But according to The Journal Register News Service,
which covered Mr. Wagoner's speech, he "stressed
later to reporters that he was not proposing a national
health care plan." Why not? |
Say goodbye to
your suburban house, yoke up that horse, and stand by
to repel pirates! Author James Howard Kunstler talks about
the dire world of his new book, "The Long Emergency."
May 14, 2005 | Suburbs will collapse
into slums. Farmhand will be a more viable career choice
than public relations executive. And avoiding starvation
will replace avoiding boredom as the national pastime.
Those are just a few of the predictions that James Howard
Kunstler makes in his new book. "The Long Emergency"
paints a dystopic view of the United States in the wake
of what Kunstler dubs the "cheap oil fiesta."
It's a future the author insists is not apocalyptic. Calling
it the end of the world would be too easy.
No, Kunstler believes the human race
will survive as we slip down the other side of Hubbert's
Oil Peak. But the high standard of living we've built
by gorging on cheap oil will not. America, as a political
entity, will be history too.
When will the doom begin? It already has. "There
have been no significant discoveries of new oil since
2002," Kunstler says. And the Saudis have screwed
up their super-giant Ghawar oil field, long a fossil-fuel
font for the U.S. "They have damaged it by pumping
enormous amounts of salt water into it; in fact, the field
itself may be entering depletion," he says.
A former journalist turned novelist turned social critic,
Kunstler is best known for his book excoriating the suburbs,
"Geography of Nowhere." Now he foresees the
end of the entire artifice of American life, from the
suburbs to the interstate highway to Wal-Mart and the
global supply chain that supports it.
In Kunstler's world, a teenager will
be better off learning how to yoke up a horse-drawn buggy
than how to change the oil in a car. Woodshop will be
more important than computer literacy. Among Kunstler's
predictions: The South will devolve into agricultural
feudalism and the Pacific Northwest will be beset by a
plague of pirates from Asia. Forget about sleek hydrogen-powered
cars coming to the rescue. For that matter, quit tilting
your hopes toward wind power.
Kunstler displays a kind of macabre wit about the unpleasantness
and strife that await us all. Talking to him is like trying
to argue with a prophet. His assertions have a neat way
of doubling back to anticipate your critiques. If you
express doubt about his views, then you may well be among
the deluded masses too addicted to your McSUV and McSuburb
to accept the reality that lies ahead.
Salon spoke to Kunstler at his home in upstate New York,
mindful that in the future such an hour-long, cross-country
telephone call, undertaken so casually, could be a remote
luxury, a quaint remnant of a bygone era rich in the splendors
of oil.
Plenty of analysts are confident that in coming decades
we'll switch from oil to another form of energy, like
Europeans switching from burning wood to burning coal
when forests became scarce. Why aren't you?
That's been a pattern in the last several hundred years,
but it has followed a supply of mineral resources that
we've exploited to their logical end. When a society is
stressed, when it comes up against things that are hard
to understand, you get a lot of delusional thinking.
There are at least two major mental disturbances
in the collective American mind these days that can be
described with some precision. One is the Jiminy Cricket
syndrome -- the idea that when you wish upon a star your
dreams come true. This is largely a product of the technological
achievements of the last century, which were themselves
a product of cheap energy: namely, things like our trip
to the moon, combined with the effects of advertising,
Hollywood and pop culture.
We have now become a people who believe
that wishing for things makes them happen. Unfortunately,
the world just doesn't work that way. The truth is that
no combination of alternative fuels or so-called renewables
will allow us to run the U.S.A. -- or even a substantial
fraction of it -- the way that we're running it now.
There's another mental disturbance that
Americans are suffering from. It's the idea that it's
possible to get something for nothing -- unearned riches,
free energy, perpetual motion -- and it's exemplified
by Las Vegas. Combine the Jiminy Cricket syndrome and
the idea that it's possible to get something for nothing
and you end up with a population that's thoroughly deluded
and unable to deal with reality. That's precisely where
we're at.
You point out that there are all sorts of ways that
we're dependent on oil that we don't think about.
We have evolved a cheese-doodle agriculture system run
by large corporations like Cargill and Archer Daniels
Midland, which grow immense amounts of corn by using fossil
fuels to produce immense amounts of corn-based junk food.
The prospects are poor that we will continue living this
way. The implications are enormous. We will have to grow
much more of our food closer to home.
Also, our national retail chain system -- otherwise known
as Wal-Mart and Co., Wal-Mart and wannabes, Wal-Mart and
imitators -- is unlikely to survive both the rising costs
of oil and far more volatile price fluctuations. Their
economic equation requires them to predict the cost of
transport because their margins are so razor thin. And
they won't be able to anymore.
Remember: These immensely hypertrophic
organisms like Wal-Mart are products of the special economic
growth of the late 20th century, namely an unusually long
period of relative world peace and extraordinarily cheap
energy. If you remove those two elements, all large-scale
enterprises --corporate farming, big-box shopping, big
government, professional sports -- are going to be in
trouble.
So, the collapse of the cheap oil fiesta is going
to...
I wouldn't call it "collapse." That's the cause
of a lot of misunderstanding. What
we're talking about is the process of heading down the
arch of depletion, not the catastrophic cutoff of oil.
Heading down the arch implies that we will not
have the normal growth of industrial economies anymore.
And that has tremendous implications for capital-finance
instruments to produce wealth, namely securities and bonds.
All the financial paper in the world is essentially based
on the increasing accumulation of wealth.
You argue that we won't know we've hit the global
oil peak until a few years after it's happened. There
will be hangover.
The rearview-mirror effect.
What will be the first signs of the long emergency?
We're already seeing them. The two clearest signs are
serious geopolitical friction and the volatility in the
oil markets. A third one, which hasn't quite gotten traction,
will be disruptions in the financial markets. But that
could happen at any moment.
And the real estate bubble?
Absolutely. The housing bubble
is a perverse form of financial behavior. It's a consequence
of capital desperately seeking a way to increase in an
industrial economy that has ceased to grow. America is
no longer producing wealth in the conventional sense.
And so the housing bubble is a way for residual capital
to produce wealth. But like all bubbles, it's a delusional
thing that will probably end in tears.
You write that even the educated minority in the
U.S. is clueless about its role in geopolitical problems,
like the family in your neighborhood that had a sign in
their yard that said, "War Is Not the Answer,"
and two SUVs in the garage.
Or all my politically progressive friends who drove their
SUVs to the peace rallies of 2003.
Why do you think that there's such a disconnect?
Because we haven't been challenged for such a long time.
The last challenge we experienced was the OPEC oil disturbances
of the 1970s, which thundered through our economy and
caused a lot of problems. But they were short-lived and
the cheap oil fiesta was able to continue because the
final great discoveries of the oil age came online in
the 1980s, namely the North Sea and the Alaska North Slope.
And that allowed us to go back to sleep for another two
decades.
Does the Iraq war presage the kind of resource wars
that you see in the future?
The Iraq war is not hard to understand. It wasn't an
attempt to steal Iraq's oil. If that was the case, it
would have been a stupid venture because we've spent hundreds
of billions of dollars occupying the place, not to mention
the lives lost. It was not a matter of stealing the oil;
it was a matter of retaining access to it. It was an attempt
to stabilize the region of the world that holds two-thirds
of the remaining oil, namely, the Middle East.
We opened a police station in the Middle East, and Iraq
just happened to be the best candidate for it. They had
a troublesome dictator. They were geographically located
between Iran and Saudi Arabia. So we went to Iraq to moderate
and influence the behavior of the two countries --Iran
and Saudi Arabia -- that are so important to us. We desperately
wanted the oil supplies to continue coming out of them
in a reliable way. So the Iraq venture was all about stabilizing
the Middle East. It raises the obvious question: How long
can the U.S. hope to occupy unfriendly nations? The answer
is, not forever.
Why do you skewer Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain
Institute, who promotes the idea of a futuristic hypercar,
which would get 100 miles per gallon?
I regard Lovins hypercar venture as a stupid distraction,
if for no other reason that it tends to promote the idea
that we can continue being a car-dependent society. Clearly
we can't, no matter how good the gas mileage is. I wrote
three other books about the fiasco of suburbia before
I even got a bug up my ass about the energy issues.
What's wrong with trying to make a more efficient
car?
I'm not against efficient cars. I'm against the idea
that somebody in Amory's position would focus on cars
at the expense of something else like promoting walkable
communities. The New Urbanist movement, for example, was
campaigning for a much more intelligent response to suburbia
at around the same time. And the solutions that they were
promoting made a lot more sense than underwriting the
continuation of the suburban fiasco. I think that this
was perhaps an unintended consequence of Lovins' venture.
It shows the limits of our imagination.
Is your basic critique of renewable energy that wind,
solar and biomass all depend, to some extent, on fossil
fuels?
That's one critique. I'm not trying to militate against
them. We are going to use them. But
we're not going to run the interstate highways and Disney
World on them. Suburbia is not going to run on biodiesel.
The easy-motoring tourist industry is not going to run
on biodiesel, wind power and solar fuel. The point I would
repeat is this: We don't know whether we can fabricate
the components for these things absent a fossil-fuel economy.
My beef with the alt-fuel people is not the renewable
or alt-fuel ideas themselves. Sooner or later, there's
no question we're going to have to rely on them. For me,
it's an issue of scale. As far as I can tell, we're much
more likely to use these things on a very small neighborhood
or town basis.
We're going to have to make tremendous readjustments
in every aspect of how we live. Let me give you an example.
One of the main characteristics of the suburbs is that
everyone can lead an urban life in a rural setting. But
land is simply not going to be available for suburban
development anymore. So what we're
going to see in the years ahead is the return of a much
firmer distinction between what is urban and what is rural,
between what's the town and what's the country. Because
we're going to have to grow so much more of our food close
to home, we're going to have to value rural land differently
than we have for the past half century.
How will this affect our livelihoods?
We will no longer be a nation of public relations executives
living 38 miles away from town. The
future that I see tells me that the larger cities will
be in big trouble and the action will be in the smaller
cities and smaller towns. They will have resilience. It
will be very important to live close to places that have
viable agriculture, and the places where this is not possible
are going to be in trouble.
The huge suburban metroplexes like New
York and Chicago are not going to function very well.
They're products of the oil age. They are oversupplied
with skyscrapers and mega-structures that have poor prospects
in a society with scarce energy. We will see a painful
contraction in these places.
The Southwest is going to be real trouble.
And the problem of contracting big cities will be real.
I would also hasten to point out that many of them have
already entered an advanced state of contraction: Detroit,
St. Louis, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Des Moines, Louisville
and Cincinnati. The list is very long of cities that have
been in contraction for quite a bit of time. The difference,
of course, is that they have been enjoying hyper-mega-growth
in their suburbs, and that's going to stop.
What kind of reaction have you been getting when
you say we're better off learning how to operate a horse-drawn
plow than becoming a P.R. executive?
To put it mildly, a lot of people have
trouble processing these ideas.
What if you put it not so mildly?
It tends to conflict with their picture
of reality.
Do they take you seriously?
There is a good term for this and I
hasten to point out that I did not invent it, although
I couldn't tell you who did. It's really what's called
"an outside context problem." It's so far from
our normal realm of experience that we are collectively
having a hard time processing it. In fact, we can't process
it. Talking about these things tends to induce waves of
denial, fear, ridicule.
But a great philosopher said new ideas are often greeted
in three stages. First, they're ridiculed. Second, they're
violently opposed. And finally they're accepted as self-evident.
What stage do you think that you're in?
I think we're in the ridicule stage, for sure. One thing
that I'm predicting is that there will be a vigorous and
futile defense of suburbia and all its entitlements, no
matter what reality is telling us to do. And this will
translate into a lot of political mischief. You
can quote me: Americans will vote for cornpone Nazis before
they will give up their entitlements to a McHouse and
a McCar.
If there is such a massive threat to the American
way of life, why are our government and civic institutions
unable to foresee it and make any changes to address it?
You will now be enlightened: The
dirty secret of the American economy for more than a decade
now is that it is largely based on the continued creation
of suburban sprawl and all its accessories and furnishings.
And if you remove that from our economy there isn't a
whole lot left besides hair cutting, Colonel Sanders'
chicken, and open-heart surgery.
So it would take down the American economy?
If we had to actually reform the way that we live, or
let go of some of it, the losses would be politically
untenable. No politician, whether it is the gallant John
Kerry or George W. Bush, will go near the issue. They
know that if the suburban-sprawl economy is challenged
there isn't a whole lot left behind it.
But we're going to have to let those things go, whether
we like it or not. Just don't expect to be led through
this in an orderly way. The key to understanding what
we face is turbulence. We're going through big changes
attended by a lot of turbulence, disorder and hardship.
The reason that I called this book "The
Long Emergency" is precisely because it describes
an interval of trouble. I'm not saying that the world
is coming to an end. I'm saying we're going to pass through
a period of history that's going to be very difficult.
There's a distinction between calling something the apocalypse
and calling something an epochal discontinuity.
But won't the political landscape change in reaction?
If the lights aren't coming on because natural gas is
scarce, don't you think that a lot of the barriers to,
say, nuclear power, will drop pretty quickly?
They will shift the political landscape,
and the shift will include a great deal of turbulence
and mischief. That's precisely why the quixotic attempt
to defend suburbia will probably produce a lot of political
trouble. Politically, we will try to save it. We will
try to take measures, whether that means engaging in more
overseas adventures.
What I don't understand is why you're so confident
that any political change will be futile.
I think that we've overshot our window of opportunity
to have an orderly transition.
It's too late to invest heavily in nuclear energy?
No, we may do that. If we want to keep the lights on
after 2020, we may have to seriously consider building
more nuclear power plants. But even under the best circumstances,
it would take five or 10 years to get them built.
Here is my talk show question: What do you think
people should do?
People have to ask themselves about where they're living,
whether that place has a viable future. If I was living
in the Atlanta suburbs, I would give serious consideration
to relocating, ditto Las Vegas or Tucson. If I was a young
person, I would rethink my expectations to make public
relations my career, or indeed have a corporate future
at all. If I was a local politician, I would think very
seriously about stopping the sprawl-approval system in
my town. And I would turn my attention to local self-sufficiency.
The bottom line is this: All these things point to the
fact that we're going to have to live a lot more locally
and profoundly in the years ahead.
The end of the cheap oil fiesta is going to destroy
the suburbs and create a simpler, community-based future?
Let me draw a parallel for you. A
lot of people point out that the kind of predictions I've
made about the post-oil world seem to resemble the Pentecostal
Christian scenario about apocalypse. It happens that I'm
not a born-again Christian. My view of the future is no
more a matter of anti-suburban religion than it is a matter
of being a Christian. It was simply self-evident that
the American way of life was moving into a kind of terminal
stage, whether you liked it or not. And I think that there
will be a lot of benefits for us.
What are the benefits?
I think that we will return to many social
relations and social enactments that we lost and that
were of great value to us, such as working closely with
other people on things that really matter to us.
Like farming, so we can eat?
I'm not saying everybody is going to be a farmer. In
the book, I think that I went to great pains to say that
we were going to have to reconstruct
whole networks of local economic relations and interdependences.
As opposed to the globalized situation
we have now?
Yeah. People are working for large entities
that they don't care about and that don't care about them.
I think that people will be working on things that will
tend to be more meaningful, that will tend to have meaning
for their neighbors and the places that they live.
One of the great tragedies of the Wal-Mart
fiasco has been the destruction of the social and economic
roles of businesses in communities. Those roles were pretty
complex and created deep webs of culture that we've allowed
to be systematically dismantled and destroyed. We're going
to get some of them back.
I also think we will cease to be a nation
of TV zombies who are merely entertaining ourselves to
avoid being bored.
So, much as we may resist, there will be upsides?
Yes. It's possible to boil them down to the idea that
we will not be living in the kind of narcissistic isolation
that was so pervasive in recent decades. Geopolitically,
the world is going to be a larger place. But our individual
worlds may become smaller places. American life will be
much more about staying where you are than about ceaseless
and endless and pointless mobility.
And that will resonate. We're afflicted by so many places
that are simply not worth caring about anymore. This is
having a tremendous effect on us. It's corroding our spirits.
And, if pressed, I would have to say that it's led directly
to the idea that it's possible to get something for nothing
and if you wish upon a star your dreams come true.
Americans are suffering so much from
being in unrewarding environments that it has made us
very cynical. I think that American suburbia has become
a powerful generator of anxiety and depression. If we
happen to let it go, we won't miss it that much. Very
few people are going to feel nostalgic about the parking
lot between the Chuck E. Cheeses and the Kmart.
Why do you think we resist this transition?
I think the notion behind your question is that we've
become so accustomed to leisure and comfort that we're
afraid to let them go and enter a world of less comfort
and greater toil. I myself am a fairly cheerful person.
I made certain choices years ago that have led me to lead
a rewarding and purposeful life. At 56 years old, I've
already outlived Babe Ruth and Mozart. I've enjoyed the
cheap oil fiesta. I barely made a living until I was over
40 years old as a professional writer. I've experienced
a moderate amount of hardship myself. And I'm not afraid
of it. But I also feel fortunate.
Fortunate for what?
I feel fortunate that I enjoyed the blandishments of
modernity. I had hip replacement and root canal. I was
able to travel on airplanes. I was able to take cheap
food for granted. I went to the movies. I enjoyed rock
'n' roll. And now I'm ready to move on. |
- Before
the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable
exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the
people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face
on the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian
army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides,
the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced
fear and anger automatically. He was an object of hatred
more constant than either Eurasia or Eastasia, since
when Oceania was at war with one of these Powers it
was generally at peace with the other. But what was
strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised
by everybody, although every day and a thousand times
a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers,
in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed,
held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish
that they were in spite of all this, his influence never
seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting
to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies
and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked
by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast
shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators
dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The Brotherhood,
its name was supposed to be. There were also whispered
stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the
heresies, of which Goldstein was the author and which
circulated clandestinely here and there. It was a book
without a title. People referred to it, if at all, simply
as the book. But one knew of such things only through
vague rumours. Neither the Brotherhood nor the book
was a subject that any ordinary Party member would mention
if there was a way of avoiding it.
In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People
were leaping up and down in their places and shouting
at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the
maddening bleating voice that came from the screen.
The little sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink,
and her mouth was opening and shutting like that of
a landed fish. Even O'Brien's heavy face was flushed.
He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful
chest swelling and quivering as though he were standing
up to the assault of a wave. The dark-haired girl behind
Winston had begun crying out 'Swine! Swine! Swine!'
and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary
and flung it at the screen. It struck Goldstein's nose
and bounced off; the voice continued inexorably. In
a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with
the others and kicking his heel violently against the
rung of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two
Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part,
but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid
joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always
unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness,
a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with
a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group
of people like an electric current, turning one even
against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.
-- George Orwell, 1984, (Chapter
1)
Totalitarianism
is always a two-part dynamic: there are the totalitarian
leaders, and there are their followers.
The success or failure of any kind of totalitarianism always
comes down to the symbiotic relationship between them, that
is, how skilled the would-be leaders are at gathering and
maintaining a flock of True Believers. This depends not
only on the leaders' skills, but on how many people are
willing to become followers, and the conditions that affect
their willingness.
When coming to terms with totalitarian trends like the
rise of pseudo-fascism, it's reasonable and necessary
to focus on the leaders, political and civic, who promulgate
them. But in the process we often overlook the role played
by the other half of the dynamic: the members of the public
who not only participate in it, but ardently embrace it.
These followers are totalists, and recent events
make clear that American society is increasingly awash in
them.
The most notorious case that recently made national headlines
involved the congregation
in North Carolina where Democrats were chased out:
- Nine
members of a local church had their membership revoked
and 40 others left in protest after tension over political
views recently came to a head, church members say.
Some members of East Waynesville Baptist Church voted
the nine members out at a recent scheduled deacon meeting,
which turned into an impromptu business meeting, according
to congregants.
Chan Chandler, pastor of East Waynesville, had been
exhorting his congregation since October to support
his political views or leave the church, said Selma
Morris, a 30-year member of the church.
"He preached a sermon on abortion and homosexuality,
then said if anyone there was planning on voting for
John Kerry, they should leave," she said. "That's the
first time I've ever heard something like that. Ministers
are supposed to bring people in."
The
case caught a lot of people's attention because it was one
of the first really public examples of the embrace of totalitarian
exclusionism and eliminationism. But it represents, I think,
the tip of the iceberg.
I've been hearing from a broad range of readers, mostly
through e-mail, about similar incidents in which bosses,
pastors, school officials, and other low-level but everyday
figures of authority used tactics of intimidation and pressure
to not only promote but enforce the conservative movement's
agenda in general, and support for George W. Bush in particular.
One of those readers described an interesting case of Big
Brotherism:
- I
had another experience last night that I felt was worth
sharing. On a liberal chatboard I was suprised to find
a conservative taking information from chatter's profiles.
He claimed that whenever someone spoke against the United
States occupation of Iraq, or President Bush in general
he'd contact his local Homeland Security and FBI offices
to report terrorist activities on the part of the democrats.
Though I wasnt there with him, he told me this in a
private chatroom. I had been posing as a conservative
when he contacted me. It reminded me a great deal of
the children in 1984 who reported their families for
thoughtcrimes. It would likely be funny, if part of
me didn't have the suspicion that his reports may one
day be acted upon. Luckily my fears were removed after
he mentioned 1,244 (i have no clue how he got that number)
American "Liberal Traitors" have been tried for sedition
in 2004. He felt proud to take credit for one of the
"sedition arrests," a chatter whom I had interviewed
personally only days before.
This
shouldn't be surprising, considering how widely the notion
that Democrats by nature are traitors has been repeated
by movement conservatives, most notably Sean Hannity and
Ann Coulter. Of course, mainstream conservatives like to
dismiss figures like Coulter as being unrepresentative of
their movement, someone "no one takes seriously" -- an easy
way of eluding the reality of the depth and breadth of her
actual influence among the ordinary footsoldiers who comprise
their ranks.
Similarly, another reader from a "red state" describes her
local milieu:
- My
child goes to an excellent private school and I am very
pleased with the education they offer. However, the
majority of parents are very wealthy, powerful (at least
in our small "fishpond") and conservative. Anyone, even
children, who dare to voice a dissenting opinion about
our "glorious leader, George Bush" are immediately labeled
as trouble makers and the kids are subtly ostracized
by not being invited to birthday parties etc. Most of
the teachers aren't right-wing radicals but the administration
is and they dare not disagree with anything that the
headmaster says for fear of losing their jobs. I know
this because I taught in the preschool there for 2 years
and finally quit because I couldn't stand the "zip your
lip" culture that the teachers have to follow. The principal
even set up a celebration rally for the kids when Bush
"won." They were allowed to skip wearing their school
uniforms for a day as long as they wore red, white and
blue street clothes. They had cake and ice cream for
lunch to celebrate his election. My daughter, who was
7 at the time, knows that we don't like Bush but she
was afraid to say anything to her little friends because
she knew that she would be an outcast.
Our local public school system is very, very bad and
there aren't many choices in private education in our
area. Our area is home to a massive military base and
it's rare to see a car without a "W" sticker on the
bumper. I don't dare to put any Democratic stickers
on my car because I've heard of other cars that have
been vandalized for having pro-Kerry stickers. I've
been tolerating this Republican-glorification for the
sake of my daughter's education and at home we teach
her about what our family sees as the trampling of civil
rights in both her school and the country in general.
I am so, so sad to see how Bush is dismantling our great
land from top to bottom.
The
reader's anger at Bush is not misdirected. There's little
doubt that the Republicans both in the White House and in
Congress have done their level best to encourage and inflame
this kind of ground-level totalitarianism -- most often
leading by example. All you have to do, really, is look
at their public appearances.
Though it showed up throughout his first term, especially
in the form of "First
Amendment Zones," it really manifested itself during
the 2004 campaign, when it became routine for the Bush campaign
to exclude, often with a real viciousness, anyone
deemed a non-supporter. The nadir of this behavior came
when some schoolteachers in Oregon wearing T-shirts proclaiming
"Protect Our Civil Liberties" were unceremoniously
removed and threatened with arrest. For that matter,
even
soldiers returned from Iraq were prevented from entering
if they were deemed insufficiently supportive. Towards the
end, there was the bizarre phenomenon of the
"Bush Pledge", which Billmon
acutely described as "truly sinister."
Rather than ending with the election, this behavior has
seemingly only escalated since. The most noteworthy example
was the incident
in Denver in which two people attending a Bush "town
hall" forum were ejected and threatened with arrest because
they had arrived with Kerry bumper stickers on their car.
Unsurprisingly, it
later turned out it that it was, in fact, a Republican
operative posing as official security who had engaged in
this faux-official thuggery.
But then, we've known all along that Bush's roadshows are
not real exercises in town-hall democracy, but are completely
phonied-up propaganda events, Potemkin
gatherings for Potemkin
audiences.
At the same time, anyone who dares dissent, especially in
any kind of noticeable way, is likely to invite a visit
from the Secret Service, as Matthew
Rothschild at The Progessive (via Jillian
at Slyblog) recently reported.
The most striking feature of this cauldron of totalism is
its distinctly religious cast, which makes it innately alloyed
with likeminded followers inclined to join in line. This
has become especially evident in recent manifestations of
the trend, especially the Terri
Schiavo dustup and the campaign
against the judiciary, embodied by the recent "Justice
Sunday" event (or, as Nancy
Goldstein called it, "the Passion of the Frist").
Mainstream conservatives pooh-pooh such talk, but I think
the Rev. Carlton W. Veazy had it exactly right, after "Justice
Sunday," in describing the nation as being on the
"brink of theocracy":
- There
is a right way and a wrong way to engage religious voices
in the public square. I believe "Justice Sunday" reflects
the latter and highlights several disturbing trends.
I agree with the Rev. Dr. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite,
president of the Chicago Theological Seminary, who called
"Justice Sunday" sacrilegious and said, "The radical
religious right turned a sanctuary into a political
platform." As a Baptist minister for more than 40 years
with a profound respect for religious freedom and pluralism,
I fear it will get worse. In fact, I think we are teetering
on the brink of theocracy and the Christian Right could
conceivably use the battle over the judiciary and weakening
support for reproductive rights to push us over the
edge. Unfortunately, although Frist has been vigorously,
and appropriately, criticized for his poor judgment
and political opportunism in taking part in the telethon,
the greater problem of sectarian religious manipulation
of public policy debates has been minimized. President
George W. Bush brushed off a question about the role
of faith in politics at his April 28th press conference
with the innocuous response that "people in political
office should not say to somebody you're not equally
American if you don't agree with my view of religion."
Rather than give a high school civics lesson, he should
have had the courage to disavow the religious arrogance
and extremism of "Justice Sunday."
There
is also a media component to this right-wing evangelical
takeover. As Mariah
Blake recently reported for Columbia Journalism Review,
the religious right is clearly succeeding in its long-term
plan to construct its own media counter-universe of "Christian"
media. The heavyweight in this is the National Religious
Broadcasters organization, where in recent years politics
has become the name of the game, and anyone dissenting from
that direction, unsurprisingly, gets the usual treatment:
- In
the sixty-one years since its founding, the NRB has
grown to represent 1,600 broadcasters with billions
of dollars in media holdings and staggering political
clout. Its aggressive political maneuverings have helped
shape federal policy, further easing the evangelical
networks’ rapid growth. In 2000, for instance, the Federal
Communications Commission issued guidelines that would
have barred religious broadcasters from taking over
frequencies designated for educational programming.
The NRB lobbied Congress to intervene, at one point
delivering a petition signed by nearly half a million
people. Legislators, in turn, bore down on the FCC,
and the agency relented.
At least one mainstream media mogul has taken note of
religious broadcasters’ political might. In 2002, Rupert
Murdoch met with NRB leaders and urged them to oppose
a proposed Echostar-DirecTV merger, which they did.
After the FCC nixed the deal, Murdoch’s News Corporation
bought DirecTV and gave the NRB a channel on it.
The NRB has taken a number of steps to ensure it remains
a political player. The most dramatic came in 2002,
after Wayne Pederson was tapped to replace the network’s
longtime president, Brandt Gustavson. He quickly ignited
internal controversy by telling a Minneapolis Star Tribune
reporter that he intended to shift the organization's
focus away from politics. "We get associated with the
far Christian right and marginalized," Pederson lamented.
"To me the important thing is to keep the focus on what’s
important to us spiritually." That didn’t sit well.
Soon members of the executive committee were clamoring
for his ouster. Within weeks, he was forced to step
down.
Frank Wright was eventually chosen to replace Pederson.
He had spent the previous eight years serving as the
executive director of the Center for Christian Statesmanship,
a Capitol Hill ministry that conducts training for politicians
on how to "think biblically about their role in government."
Wright acknowledges that he was chosen for his deep
political connections. "I came here to re-engage the
political culture on issues relating to broadcasting,"
he says. "The rest is up to individual broadcasters."
Amy
Goodman recently had a fascinating interview
with Chris Hedges, author of War is a Force That
Gives Us Meaning, who discussed the potency and significance
of the religious right as a political force:
- CHRIS
HEDGES: Well, this is the annual gathering of the most
powerful religious broadcasters in the country. Over
the last few decades these radical religious broadcasters,
who have essentially taken control of the airwaves,
have built a parallel information and entertainment
service that is piped into tens of millions of American
homes as a way of essentially indoctrinating listeners
and viewers with this very frightening ideology. I would
second most of what your previous guest said, except
that I don't believe, and -- I just, you know, for your
listeners and viewers, will reiterate that I grew up
in the Church. My father was a Presbyterian minister.
I have a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School,
which is what you get if you are going to be a minister,
although I was not ordained. For me, this is not
a religious movement. It's a political movement.
If you look at the ideology that pervades this movement,
and the term we use for it is dominionism, it comes
from Genesis, where the sort of founders of this movement,
Rousas Rushdoony and others, talk about how God gave
man -- this is a very patriarchal movement -- dominion
over the land. And dominionists believe that they have
been tasked by God to create the Christian society through
violence, I would add. Violence, the aesthetic of violence
is a very powerful component within this movement. The
ideology, when you parse it down and look what it's
made up of, is essentially an ideology of exclusion
and of hatred. It is a totalitarian ideology. It is
not religious in any way. These people quote, as they
did at this convention, selectively and with gross distortions
from the Gospels. You cannot read the four Gospels and
walk away and tell me that Jesus was not a pacifist.
I'm not a pacifist, but Jesus clearly was. They draw
from the Book of Revelations the only time in the Bible,
and that's a very questionable book, as Biblical scholars
have pointed out for centuries, the only time when you
can argue that Jesus endorsed violence and the apocalyptic
visions of Paul. And they do this to create an avenging
Christ.
They have built a vision of America that is radically
-- and a vision of this -- and latched onto a religious
movement or awakening that is radically different from
previous awakenings, and there have been several throughout
American history. In all religious revivals, Christian
religious revivals in American history, the pull was
to get believers to remove themselves from the contaminants
of secular society. This one is very, very different.
It is about taking control of secular society. And,
of course, I think, as you and others have done such
a good job of pointing out, they have built this dangerous
alliance with the neoconservatives to essentially create
across denominational lines. And we saw this at the
convention with the, you know, radical Catholics with
-- even there were even people from the Salvation Army;
they have recently begun reaching out to the Mormons
-- a kind of united front. Those doctrinal differences
are still there and still stock, but a front to create
what they term a "Christian America."
And this is an America where people like you and
me have no place. And you don't have to take my
word for it, turn on Christian broadcasting, listen
to Christian radio. Listen to what they say about people
like us. It's not a matter that we have an opinion they
disagree with. It's not a matter of them de-legitimizing
us, which they are. It's a matter of them demonizing
us, of talking us -- describing us as militant secular
humanists, moral relativists, both of which terms I
would not use to describe myself, as a kind of counter-militant
ideology that is anti-Christian and that essentially
propelled by Satan that they must destroy. Listen to
their own language. You know, when in "Justice Sunday,"
listen -- you know, I urge everyone to go back and look
closely at what James Dobson, head of Focus on the Family,
said. He talked about Roe v. Wade causing the biggest
holocaust in the 20th century. There is a frightening
kind of revisionism and a kind of moral equation of
a magnitude that, you know, having lived through disintegrating
states in Yugoslavia and other places, essentially divides
-- destroys the center, divides the American public,
and creates a very dangerous and frightening culture
war. And that's what these people are about.
The
popular conception of totalitarianism, however, has often
tended to view it as something almost extrinsic to the society
on which it is imposed, usually through brainwashing or
propaganda. But in reality, totalitarian systems are almost
invariably empowered by people who ardently seek and support
authoritarian social rule, for a variety of reasons, many
of them directly related to psychological needs: that is,
totalists.
The most significant work on totalism was pioneered by Erik
Erikson, whose work I've discussed
previously in a similar context. One of Erikson's chief
disciples and descendants is Robert
Jay Lifton, who has done some of the most thorough work
examing the totalist mindset. Lifton describes it as consisting
of eight key themes, notably:
- Milieu
control
The most basic feature of the thought reform environment,
the psychological current upon which all else depends,
is the control of human communication. Through this
milieu control the totalist environment seeks to establish
domain over not only the individual's communication
with the outside (all that he sees and hears, reads
or writes, experiences, and expresses), but also --
in its penetration of his inner life -- over what we
may speak of as his communication with himself. It creates
an atmosphere uncomfortably reminiscent of George Orwell's
1984.
Such milieu control never succeeds in becoming absolute,
and its own human apparatus can -- when permeated by
outside information -- become subject to discordant
"noise" beyond that of any mechanical apparatus. To
totalist administrators, however, such occurrences are
no more than evidences of "incorrect" use of the apparatus.
For they look upon milieu control as a just and necessary
policy, one which need not be kept secret: thought reform
participants may be in doubt as to who is telling what
to whom, but the fact that extensive information about
everyone is being conveyed to the authorities is always
known. At the center of this self-justification is their
assumption of omniscience, their conviction that reality
is their exclusive possession. Having experienced the
impact of what they consider to be an ultimate truth
(and having the need to dispel any possible inner doubts
of their own), they consider it their duty to create
an environment containing no more and no less than this
"truth." In order to be the engineers of the human soul,
they must first bring it under full observational control.
Perhaps
the trait that progressives seem to be observing on the
ground a great deal is the Demand for Purity:
- In
the thought reform milieu, as in all situations of ideological
totalism, the experiential world is sharply divided
into the pure and the impure, into the absolutely good
and the absolutely evil. The good and the pure are of
course those ideas, feelings, and actions which are
consistent with the totalist ideology and policy; anything
else is apt to be relegated to the bad and the impure.
Nothing human is immune from the flood of stern moral
judgments. All "taints" and "poisons" which contribute
to the existing state of impurity must be searched out
and eliminated.
The philosophical assumption underlying this demand
is that absolute purity is attainable, and that anything
done to anyone in the name of this purity is ultimately
moral. In actual practice, however, no one is really
expected to achieve such perfection. Nor can this paradox
be dismissed as merely a means of establishing a high
standard to which all can aspire. Thought reform bears
witness to its more malignant consequences: for by defining
and manipulating the criteria of purity, and then by
conducting an all-out war upon impurity, the ideological
totalists create a narrow world of guilt and shame.
This is perpetuated by an ethos of continuous reform,
a demand that one strive permanently and painfully for
something which not only does not exist but is in fact
alien to the human condition.
At the level of the relationship between individual
and environment, the demand for purity creates what
we may term a guilty milieu and a shaming milieu. Since
each man's impurities are deemed sinful and potentially
harmful to himself and to others, he is, so to speak,
expected to expect punishment -- which results in a
relationship of guilt and his environment. Similarly,
when he fails to meet the prevailing standards in casting
out such impurities, he is expected to expect humiliation
and ostracism -- thus establishing a relationship of
shame with his milieu. Moreover, the sense of guilt
and the sense of shame become highly-valued: they are
preferred forms of communication, objects of public
competition, and the basis for eventual bonds between
the individual and his totalist accusers. One may attempt
to simulate them for a while, but the subterfuge is
likely to be detected, and it is safer to experience
them genuinely.
People vary greatly in their susceptibilities to guilt
and shame, depending upon patterns developed early in
life. But since guilt and shame are basic to human existence,
this variation can be no more than a matter of degree.
Each person is made vulnerable through his profound
inner sensitivities to his own limitations and to his
unfulfilled potential; in other words, each is made
vulnerable through his existential guilt. Since ideological
totalists become the ultimate judges of good and evil
within their world, they are able to use these universal
tendencies toward guilt and shame as emotional levers
for their controlling and manipulative influences. They
become the arbiters of existential guilt, authorities
without limit in dealing with others' limitations. And
their power is nowhere more evident than in their capacity
to "forgive."
The individual thus comes to apply the same totalist
polarization of good and evil to his judgments of his
own character: he tends to imbue certain aspects of
himself with excessive virtue, and condemn even more
excessively other personal qualities - all according
to their ideological standing. He must also look upon
his impurities as originating from outside influences
-- that is, from the ever-threatening world beyond the
closed, totalist ken. Therefore, one of his best ways
to relieve himself of some of his burden of guilt is
to denounce, continuously and hostilely, these same
outside influences. The more guilty he feels, the greater
his hatred, and the more threatening they seem. In this
manner, the universal psychological tendency toward
"projection" is nourished and institutionalized, leading
to mass hatreds, purges of heretics, and to political
and religious holy wars. Moreover, once an individual
person has experienced the totalist polarization of
good and evil, he has great difficulty in regaining
a more balanced inner sensitivity to the complexities
of human morality. For these is no emotional bondage
greater than that of the man whose entire guilt potential
-- neurotic and existential -- has become the property
of ideological totalists.
Lifton,
notably, emphasizes that totalists are only too ordinary,
and in many regards reflect long-honored human traits:
- Behind
ideological totalism lies the ever-present human quest
for the omnipotent guide -- for the supernatural force,
political party, philosophical ideas, great leader,
or precise science -- that will bring ultimate solidarity
to all men and eliminate the terror of death and nothingness.
This quest is evident in the mythologies, religions,
and histories of all nations, as well as in every individual
life. The degree of individual totalism involved depends
greatly upon factors in one's personal history: early
lack of trust, extreme environmental chaos, total domination
by a parent or parent-representative, intolerable burdens
of guilt, and severe crises of identity. Thus an early
sense of confusion and dislocation, or an early experience
of unusually intense family milieu control, can produce
later a complete intolerance for confusion and dislocation,
and a longing for the reinstatement of milieu control.
But these things are in some measure part of every childhood
experience; and therefore the potential for totalism
is a continuum from which no one entirely escapes, and
in relationship to which no two people are exactly the
same.
It
does not take much reflection, however, to recognize that
totalism is not a healthy phenomenon -- especially not in
a democracy. Combating it requires understanding it, but
understanding does not mean succumbing. |
Recently, Bob Edgar,
general secretary of the National Council of Churches
and former Pennsylvania Democratic congressman, warned
a conference of People for the American Way and 500 other
secular liberals the religious right was hell-bent on
imposing a "theocracy" on America.
Another speaker, Joan Bokaer, founder of Theocracy Watch,
said the U.S. was "not yet a theocracy." Earlier,
Howard Dean, Democratic National Committee chairman, lamented:
"Are we going to live in a theocracy where the highest
powers tell us what to do?" He did not define "highest
powers."
The American Civil Liberties Union and
other secular left voices keep warning us that if Protestant
evangelicals got their way, America would become a theocratic
state. Nonsense. Their dire prediction is as plausible
as another giant meteorite crashing into Earth like the
one killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
The democratic West has long rejected theocracy, once
known as Caesaropapism, a state in which Caesar and the
pope are one. Two thousand years ago in a Roman outpost
when the issue of conflicting loyalties was raised, Jesus
of Nazareth said: "Render to Caesar the things that
are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's"
-- an eloquent forecast of the American Founders' "separation
of church and state."
The current film "Kingdom of Heaven" dramatically
portrays the arrogance and bloodshed of zealous Christian
medieval crusaders who attempted to impose their rule
over Jerusalem, then held by Muslims.
Today, no serious Christian or
Jewish leader in America advocates a theocratic state.
They recognize welding political and ecclesiastical power
would corrupt both religion and politics and lead to tyranny,
chaos, or both.
America's Founders were committed to a democratic and
pluralistic state where every citizen is free to believe
as he wishes. Whether Calvinists or Unitarians, they held
liberty was a gift from the Creator or Nature's God. "The
God who gave us life," said Thomas Jefferson, "gave
us liberty at the same time." As long as we are faithful
to the Founders' dream, America will not become a theocracy.
Further, Article I of the Constitution rejects the "establishment
of religion" and any act of Congress "prohibiting
the free exercise" of religion. All citizens are
free to worship in churches, synagogues or mosques and
to educate their children as they see fit as long as they
don't violate the law.
Early on, the Congress authorized the words "In
God We Trust" on our coins and currency. We have
government chaplains in the Congress and the armed forces.
The Lincoln Memorial, Library of Congress and Supreme
Court display numerous religious images and quotations.
And the Pledge of Alliance, recited in public schools,
carry the words, "one nation under God," that
reflect the spirit of the Mayflower Compact of 1620 that
began with: "In the name of God, amen."
These time-honored manifestation of religion in American
life have not curtailed freedom of belief or conscience,
nor pointed to a theocracy. Protestant, Catholic, Jewish,
Muslim, agnostic and atheist citizens have equal rights
and opportunities.
Some Americans erect symbols of their "faith"
in the public square, but others seek to banish the Ten
Commandments, Christian creches and the Menorah from public
spaces. If secular humanism became the established "religion"
perhaps the only thing liberals would have to fear is
liberalism itself.
Modest government grants to "faith based" social
service agencies, such as the Salvation Army, are hardly
breaches of the separation of church and state. After
all, since the republic's beginning, church property has
been tax-exempt.
In addition to the Founders' safeguards against a theocracy,
that dire outcome is made virtually impossible by America's
religious and cultural diversity and
the fact no religious leader wants his "church"
or any other religion to run the government. When
citizens of any faith support the phrase "under God"
in the Pledge or insist the Bible be taught as literature
in public schools they do not call for theocratic government.
On the other hand, when some Evangelicals insist "evolution"
should not be taught in public schools and "creationism"
should, they attempt to stifle diversity and debate. Some
literalists believe Earth was created 6,000 years ago,
but they should not insist public schools teach only their
views. They can freely teach their beliefs in their churches
and religious schools.
On reflection, religious citizens and secular humanists
may not be that far apart. They all are beneficiaries
of the Judeo-Christian moral tradition. Many secularists
drink from wells they did not dig and are refreshed by
water they are reluctant to acknowledge.
Ernest W. Lefever is a senior fellow at the Ethics
and Public Policy Center and author of "The Irony
of Virtue: Ethics and American Power." |
The report in Newsweek
that the US military desecrated the Koran as part of an
attempt to break the Muslim prisoners there with humiliation
techniques has provoked demonstrations, angry sermons, riots,
and over a dozen deaths in Afghanistan, with demonstrations
also in Gaza, Pakistan, Indonesia, and
now Yemen. Both the chief
Sunni Muslim cleric in Lebanon and its Shiite Grand Ayatollah,
Muhammad Husain Fadlallah have now condemned it. The
former threatened jihad or holy war. The latter said, "The
desecration of the holy Koran in the terrifying Guantanamo
detention center that America created under the title of
fighting terrorism against the Muslims who have been arbitrarily
rounded up there, is one of the American methods of torture
. . . This is not an isolated act carried out by an American
soldier but is part of an American program...of contempt
for Islam, to disfigure its image in the minds of American."
Shaikh
Muhammad Sayyid al-Tantawi, the rector of al-Azhar seminary
and the chief Sunni authority in Egypt, called the desecration
of the Koran "a great crime." But he dismissed it as the
work of "a bunch of kids, criminals . . ."
The Pentagon has claimed that the incident did not occur.
Although the corporate media are now reporting that Newsweek
had "backed off" the report, that isn't true.
Newsweek
explains that in response to Pentagon queries,
"On Saturday, Isikoff spoke to his original
source, the senior government official, who said that
he clearly recalled reading investigative reports about
mishandling the Qur'an, including a toilet incident. But
the official, still speaking anonymously, could no longer
be sure that these concerns had surfaced in the SouthCom
report."
Isikoff's source, in other words, stands by his report of
the incident, but is merely tracing it to other paperwork.
What difference does that make? Although Pentagon
spokesman Lawrence DiRita angrily denounced the source as
no longer credible, in the real world you can't just get
rid of a witness because the person made a minor mistake
with regard to a text citation. It is like saying that we
can't be sure someone has really read the Gospels because
he said he read about Caiaphas in the Gospel of Mark rather
than in the Gospel of John. Newsweek has,
in other words, confirmed that the source did read a US
government account of the desecration of the Koran.
Nor is this the first such indication of this sort of incident.
On August 18, 2004, ANSA, the Italian news agency, wrote
of the families of detainees from Bahrain at Guantanamo:
"The families' anxiety grew after the publication
of a report by the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights (BCHR),
which contained information about tortures and maltreatment
of prisoners. The report, based on testimony by three
former Guantanamo prisoners,
Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmad, defines as
brutal the methods of the U.S. jailers. According to the
report, prisoners were brutally beaten and compelled to
watch other prisoners sodomising each other by force.
The 150-page document says reptiles were taken to the
cells in an attempt to force prisoner confessions, while
the Koran was thrown into the toilets before the eyes
of the detained."
This
diary and discussion at Daily Kos gives a number of
other newspaper and other citations for the practice of
Koran desecration.
Of course, one can hardly take the word of jihadis reporting
on the United States, which they hate and would be happy
to defame. But Newsweek had an independent source for the
incident, a US government official, who continues to maintain
that he saw documentation of it.
Moreover, Guantanamo translator Erik Saar, in his co-authored
Inside the Wire indicates that techniques of religious
humiliation were used at Guantanamo. The
Christian Science Monitor reports:
'In his book, Saar describes a tumultuous atmosphere
made more intense than usual because of religious tensions.
US personnel, he wrote, routinely tempted detainees
to look at pornographic magazines and videos, which
Islam forbids. Female interrogators, sometimes dressed
provocatively, violated Islamic strictures by rubbing
against detainees and even leading one to believe he
was being wiped with menstrual blood. "Had someone come
to me before I left for Gitmo and told me we would use
women to sexually torment detainees to try to sever
their relationships with God, I probably would have
thought that sounded fine," writes Saar. "But I hated
myself when I walked out of that room.... We lost the
high road.... There wasn't enough hot water in all of
Cuba to make me feel clean." The Army, which cleared
Saar's book for publication, says the policy is to treat
detainees humanely, and an investigation into his allegations
is under way. '
As a professional historian, I would say we still do
not have enough to be sure that the Koran desecration
incident took place. We have enough to consider it plausible.
Anyway, the important thing politically is that some Muslims
have found it plausible, and their outrage cannot be effectively
dealt with by simple denial. That is why I say that Bush
should just come out and say we can't be sure that it
happened, but if it did it was an excess, and he apologizes
if it did happen, and will make sure it doesn't happen
again (if it did).
The controversy, however, seems to me to have focused
on all the wrong things. The question is why all those
prisoners are still being held at Guantanamo. Saar makes
clear that the majority of them just had the misfortune
to be dragooned onto the battlefield by the Taliban, and
aren't dangerous terrorists. There are very bad characters
among them, who should be tried and kept behind bars.
A reader with military experience in this area wrote me
his own experience, with the Bible being trashed
in a similar way. I was able to google this reader in
such a way as to compare autobiographical statements and
dates (stripped from the below) to the Web record, and
they all check out. Even the history of attitudes, as
revealed in letters to the editor, are confirmatory. So
I'm sure of the authenticity of these comments.
"I'm a former US [military officer], and had the 'pleasure'
of attending SERE school--Search, Evasion, Resistance,
and Escape.
The course I attended . . . [had] a mock POW camp, where
we had a chance to be prisoners for 2-3 days. The camp
is also used as a training tool for CI [counter-intelligence],
interrogators, etc for those running the camp.
One of the most memorable parts of the camp experience
was when one of the camp leaders trashed a Bible on
the ground, kicking it around, etc. It was a crushing
blow, even though this was just a school.
I have no doubt the stories about trashing the Koran
are true.
I'm sure you must also realize that Gitmo must be being
used as a "laboratory" for all these psychological manipulation
techniques by the CI guys. Absolutely sickening . .
.
1. My gut feeling tells me that the SERE camps were
'laboratories' and part of the training program for
military counter-intelligence and interrogator personnel.
I heard this anecdotally as far as the training goes,
but have not dug into it. This is pretty much common
sense.
2. Looking at Gitmo in the 'big picture', you have to
wonder why it is still in operation though they know
so many are innocent of major charges. A look through
history at the various 'experimentation' programs of
the DOD gives a ready answer. The camp provides a major
opportunity to expose a population to various psychological
control techniques. Look at some of the stuff that has
become public, and this becomes even more apparent.
Especially the sensory deprivation--not only sleep,
but there are the photos of inmates in gas masks or
sight/hearing/smell deprivation setups. There has already
been voluminous research into sensory deprivation, and
it seems this is another good opportunity for more.
One note is that sensory deprivation is used to some
degree in military basic training and to a greater sense
in the advanced training courses--Rangers, SEALS, etc.
All part of the 'breakdown' process before recruits
are 'remade'.
3. This incident with the bible trashing. Camp was [in
the late 1990s]. It was towards the end of the camp
experience, which was 2-3 days of captivity. We were
penned in concrete cell blocks about 4' x 4' x 4'--told
to kneel, but allowed to squat or sit. There was no
door, just a flap that could be let down if it was too
cold outside (which it was--actually light snow fell).
Each trainee was interrogated to some extent, all experienced
some physical interrogation such as pushing, shoving,
getting slammed against a wall (usually a large metal
sheet set up so that it would not seriously injure trainees)
with some actually water-boarded (not me).
The bible trashing was done by one of the top-ranked
leaders of the camp, who was always giving us speeches--sort
of 'making it real' so to speak, because it is a pretty
contrived environment. But by the end it almost seemed
real. Guards spoke English with a Russian accent, wore
Russian-looking uniforms. So the bible trashing happened
when this guy had us all in the courtyard sitting for
one of his speeches. They were tempting us with a big
pot of soup that was boiling--we were all starving from
a few days of chow deprivation. He brought out the bible
and started going off on it verbally--how it was worthless,
we were forsaken by this God, etc. Then he threw it
on the ground and kicked it around. It was definitely
the climax of his speech. Then he kicked over the soup
pot, and threw us back in the cells. Big climax. And
psychologically it was crushing and heartbreaking, and
then we were left isolated to contemplate this.
And all of these moods and thoughts were created in
this fake camp--just imagine how it is for these guys
at Gitmo.
So many have tried to commit suicide....by now they
all must have some serious psychological problems. This
is without a doubt torture. Premeditated, planned....a
fine lot of criminals we have in charge of the USA these
days. Gitmo is so Orwellian--so Room 101. They are playing
on the deepest feelings and fears."
This informed former officer has suggested the real reason
for which some in the Pentagon are so angry about the
Newsweek story. It may well so focus international outrage
on Guantanamo that Rumsfeld will lose his little psych
lab. |
WASHINGTON —
An al-Qaida figure killed last week by a missile from
a CIA-operated unmanned aerial drone had been under surveillance
for more than a week by U.S. intelligence and military
personnel working along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border,
a U.S. official and two counterterrorism experts said
yesterday.
The U.S. team was hoping Haitham al-Yemeni would lead
them to al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, said two counterterrorism
experts, both former senior U.S. intelligence officials
with knowledge of events surrounding the attack.
But after Pakistani authorities captured another al-Qaida
leader this month, Abu Faraj al-Libbi, CIA officials became
concerned that al-Yemeni would go into hiding and decided
to kill him instead, the counterterrorism experts said.
Al-Yemeni's importance in the al-Qaida organization could
not be learned yesterday. He is not listed by that name
in either the FBI or Pakistani "Most Wanted"
list.
The CIA declined comment. Pakistan denied the incident
happened. |
WASHINGTON, May 15
(Xinhuanet) -- The United States has warned Japan, India,
Germany and Brazil, the four nations seeking permanent
seats on the United Nations Security Council, that it
will not support their cause unless they agree not to
ask for veto power, the New York Times said in
a report on Sunday.
Officials in the administration of President George
W. Bush fear that giving the new members veto power might
paralyze the Security Council, the report said.
The four nations are unhappy with the US position. "The
Security Council is not like an aircraft, with first class,
business and economy seats," Ryozo Kato, Japan's
ambassador to the United States, was quoted by the report
as saying.
The United Nations Security Council currently has five
permanent Security Council members -- the United States,
Britain, France, China and Russia, and each has the veto
power in council decisions. This has been the format since
the creation of the United Nations in September 1945. |
BAGHDAD, May 16 (Xinhuanet)
-- Three Iraqis working for Kuwaiti television were killed
south of Baghdad, the Iraqi military said on Monday.
The victims were two journalists and their driver, the
military said, adding that the three were on their way
to Baghdad from the holy Shiite city of Karbala.
The incident took place in an area near the town of
Muhmudiya and Latifiya, a rebel area known as the "triangle
of death." [...] |
WASHINGTON - [...] a spike in insurgent
violence has placed the country on the precipice of
civil war.
More than 450 Iraqis have been slaughtered in the past
two weeks in a direct challenge to a new Iraqi government,
making those heady days of the January election seem
like something from the distant past. The
euphoria of the purple thumb, the symbol of the bravery
of voters, has given way to a river of blood-red in
some of the worst violence in the post-Saddam era.
"We are on the edge of civil
war," said Noah Feldman, a New York University
professor and chief U.S. adviser to Iraq on the writing
of the country's new constitution.
Yet, somehow this sharp surge in deadly bombings, assassinations
and kidnappings in Iraq has occurred largely under the
radar in the United States.
No public figures have risen this week to decry this
most recent carnage, no one is breaking into regular
programming on cable news shows.
Perhaps Americans have simply become numb to the background
hum of Iraqi violence. Perhaps the lack of graphic images
on television mean that medium doesn't know how to cover
the story. Perhaps, more cynically, Iraqis killing Iraqis
is not as compelling a story.
The left-leaning American Progress Action Fund said
in a statement
yesterday America's most important foreign policy venture
is teetering on the edge of civil war, but it is being
ignored by television networks.
"Television media - still the
primary source of news for most Americans - is failing
miserably," it said. "America is being kept
in the dark."
While American TV viewers turn to runaway brides, fast-food
fingers and the daily Michael Jackson aberration, they
are missing the story of an increasingly massive foreign
policy failure.
The number of car bomb attacks
in Iraq jumped from 64 in February to 135 in April,
a record, according to U.S. military statistics.
Insurgents are reported to have stockpiled car bombs
and the attacks are becoming more brazen as Sunni insurgents
and foreign fighters try to provoke civil war with the
Shiite majority.
"There is an apparent free flow of suicide bombers
into Iraq," a Western diplomat told the London-based
Guardian newspaper.
The U.S. death toll is at 1,611 and U.S. legislators
this week approved funding which pushes the cost of
the Iraq war beyond $250 billion (US).
The chairman of the U.S. Joint
Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, called again this
week for patience. [...]
While U.S. authorities say they believe most of the
jihadists are foreign fighters - and have launched a
major offensive near the Syria border to try to choke
off the influx - J. Patrick Lang, a former chief of
Middle East intelligence for the Defence Intelligence
Agency, told National Public Radio this week that he
believed the insurgents are 90 per cent home-grown.
He said they're a mix of former military, intelligence,
police personnel and Baath party functionaries taking
directions from a government-in-exile.
David Phillips of the non-partisan Council on Foreign
Relations and author of Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar
Reconstruction Fiasco, said the spike in the insurgency
can be blamed on three factors.
He said the delay of Iraqis in convening a new government
to validate the January elections, the preponderance
of Shiites and Kurds in the government plus the intensification
of the de-Baathification process simply backed the Sunni
view that there is no role for them in the new government.
But, Phillips also points to statements
from the White House that U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney
and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had intervened
to try to break the cabinet stalemate as another spark.
"It reinforced the view in Iraq that (Prime Minister
Ibrahim) Jaafari was merely a proxy for those people
in Washington," he said. [...]
Phillips is even more pessimistic. When asked about
the chances that the brakes could be put on the insurgency
in the short term, he answered: "None. This insurgency
will go on for years and years, regardless of what the
U.S. does."
The insurgency can never be defeated
by military force, he said. Instead, Iraqis have to
believe that their institutions are worth defending
and that defence has to come from Iraqi troops. |
At least 34 bodies have been discovered
in Iraq. All of the bodies show
signs of multiple gun shot wounds to the head. The
discovery also comes just one day after U.S. forces
wrapped up Operation Matador, which targeted militants
on Iraq's Eastern border.
According to reports, 13 of the 34 bodies were discovered
in the capital city of Baghdad. All
of the 13 were tied, blindfolded, and shot in the head.
The men were wearing only underwear and those that had
worn beards were shaven clean. Iraqi police officials
have stated that the wounds provide evidence that the
men were killed no later than Saturday evening.
On Saturday at least 10 Iraqi soldiers were found
in Ramadi, in western Iraq. According to Iraqi Defense
officials, the soldiers were all Iraqi and all had been
shot to death.
Another gruesome find was made just south of the capital
city in al-Huqoul. 11 more men
were found in nearly identical fashion as the 13 in
Baghdad. All but four of the men had their hands tied,
blindfolded, and shot at close range in the back of
the head. The other four were beheaded. All of
the 11 men were employees at a poultry farm in al-Huqoul.
Iraqi officials believe that the men are truck drivers
that were kidnapped over one month ago. Al-Huqoul is
in the center of the district of Latifiya, known to
be a militant stronghold. Two trucks were found near
the site, with multiple bullet holes. Iraqi police found
ID of at least two men, owners of the truck, who were
also among the dead.
According to one British newswire Iraq's alleged al-Qaíida
mastermind, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was wounded sometime
last week. The doctor that treated the terrorist leader
has been taken in for questioning by U.S. forces. According
to the doctor, Zarqawi was bleeding profusely. Men with
Zarqawi requested a prescription and names of medicine.
Zarqawi and his men have not been seen since. |
CANNES, France - For some Europeans,
George Lucas' latest "Star Wars" film is invoking
comparisons to today's political climate.
Audiences viewing "Episode Three -- Revenge of
the Sith" at the Cannes Film Festival are comparing
the story of Anakin Skywalker's fall to the dark side
and the rise of an emperor through warmongering to President
Bush's war on terrorism and the invasion of Iraq.
Among the lines they cite is when Anakin tells former
mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi "If you're not with me, then
you're my enemy." After the Nine-Eleven attacks,
Bush said, "Either you are with us, or you are
with the terrorists."
Lucas says he created the "Star
Wars" story long before the Iraq war. |
CANNES - The last episode of the
seminal sci-fi saga "Star Wars" screened at
the Cannes film festival Sunday, completing a six-part
series that remains a major part of popular culture
- and delivering a galactic jab to U.S. President George
W Bush.
"Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith"
was seen ahead of a celebrity- laden evening screening
to be attended by its creator and director, George Lucas,
and its cast, including Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen.
Reaction at advance screenings was effusive, with festival-goers,
critics and journalists at Cannes applauding at the
moment the infamous Darth Vader came into being.
But there were also murmurs at the
parallels being drawn between Bush's administration
and the birth of the space opera's evil Empire.
Baddies' dialogue about bloodshed and despicable acts
being needed to bring "peace and stability"
to the movie's universe, mainly through a fabricated
war, set the scene.
And then came the zinger, with the
protagonist, Anakin Skywalker, saying just before becoming
Darth Vader: "You are either with me - or you are
my enemy."
To the Cannes audience, often sympathetic to anti-Bush
messages in cinema as last year's triumph here of Michael
Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" attested, that immediately
recalled Bush's 2001 ultimatum, "You're either
with us or against us in the fight against terror."
Lucas, speaking to reporters, emphasised that the original
"Star Wars" was written at the end of the
Vietnam war, when Richard Nixon was U.S. president,
but that the issue being explored was still very much
alive today.
"The issue was, how does a democracy turn itself
into a dictatorship?" he said.
"When I wrote it, Iraq (the U.S.-led war) didn't
exist... but the parallels of what we did in Vietnam
and Iraq are unbelievable."
He acknowledged an uncomfortable feeling that the United
States was in danger of losing its democratic ideals,
like in the movie.
"I didn't think it was going
to get this close. I hope this doesn't come true in
our country."
Although he didn't mention Bush by name, Lucas took
what sounded like another dig while explaining the transformation
of the once-good Anakin Skywalker to the very bad Darth
Vader.
"Most bad people think they're
good people," he said.
The political message, though, was for the most part
subsumed by the action and heroics the series - set
"a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away"
- is known for.
And for fans hungry for a last look at "Star Wars"
elevated above the disappointing two other films that
preceded "Sith," it was satisfying closure.
"Whatever one thought of the previous two installments,
this dynamic picture irons out most of the problems,
and emerges as the best in the overall series since
'The Empire Strikes Back,'" the Hollywood trade
magazine Variety said.
The buzz meant the movie was the hottest ticket at
Cannes this year. It also signalled the end of a cinematic
era for a generation of filmgoers.
"Revenge of the Sith" is the last of three
prequels to the landmark trilogy that burst onto the
screens in 1977, 1980 and 1983.
It is in fact the middle episode of the epic story
arc, explaining the events that led young Luke Skywalker
to battle Darth Vader in order to save Princess Leia,
before going on to vanquish the Empire.
Its success could be measured in the claps and smiles
in the theatre, which were light years away from the
tepid response engendered by the first two prequels,
released in 1999 and 2002, widely panned for their boring
exposition and wooden dialogue. |
CANNES, France - A British documentary
arguing U.S. neo- conservatives have exaggerated the
terror threat is set to rock the Cannes Film Festival
on Saturday, the way "Fahrenheit 9/11" stirred
emotions here a year ago.
"The Power of Nightmares" re-injected politics
into the festival that seemed eager to steer clear of
controversy this year after American Michael Moore won
top honors in 2004 for his film deriding President Bush's
response to terror.
At a screening late on Friday ahead of its gala on
Saturday, "The Power of Nightmares" by filmmaker
and senior BBC producer Adam Curtis kept an audience
of journalists and film buyers glued to their seats
and taking notes for a full 2-1/2 hours.
The film, a non-competition entry, argues that the
fear of terrorism has come to pervade politics in the
United States and Britain even though much of that angst
is based on carefully nurtured illusions.
It says Bush and U.S. neo-conservatives, as well as
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, are exaggerating
the terror threat in a manner similar to the way earlier
generations of leaders inflated the danger of communism
and the Soviet Union.
It also draws especially controversial symmetries between
the history of the U.S. movement that led to the neo-cons
and the roots of the ideas that led to radical Islamism
-- two conservative movements that have shaped geopolitics
since 1945.
Curtis's film portrays neo-cons Paul Wolfowitz, Richard
Perle and Donald Rumsfeld as counterparts to Osama bin
Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri in the two respective
movements.
"During the Cold War conservatives exaggerated
the threat of the Soviet Union," the narrator says.
"In reality it was collapsing from within. Now
they're doing the same with Islamic extremists because
it fits the American vision of an epic battle."
ILLUSORY FEAR OF TERROR
In his film, Curtis argues that Bush
and Blair have used what he says is the largely illusory
fear of terror and hidden webs of organized evil following
the September 11, 2001, attacks to reinforce their authority
and rally their nations.
In Bush's government, those underlings who put forth
the darkest scenarios of the phantom threat have the
most influence, says Curtis, who also devotes segments
of his film to criticize unquestioning media and zealous
security agencies.
He says al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has a far less
powerful organization than feared. But he is careful
to avoid suggestions that terror attacks won't happen
again. Included are experts who dismiss fears of a "dirty
bomb" as exaggerated.
"It was an attempt at historical explanation for
September 11," Curtis said, describing his film
in the Guardian newspaper recently. "Up to this
point, nobody had done a proper history of the ideas
and groups that have created our modern world."
But Curtis said there were worlds of difference between
his film and Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," which
won the "Golden Palm" and gave the festival
a charged political atmosphere that prompted this year's
return to a more conservative program.
"Moore is a political agitprop
filmmaker," he said. "I am not. You'd be hard
pushed to tell my politics from watching it."
"The Power of Nightmares" was a three-part
documentary aired in Britain and won a British film
and television industry award (Bafta) this year. |
With embarassing new revelations
on WMDs emerging, and Bush poll numbers slipping, the
president's supporters in the press argue that he actually
sold the war to the public on the basis of freedom for
the Iraqis, not on a WMD threat to Americans. A look
at Bush's final messages to the public and to Congress
just before the war began prove otherwise.
Ever since it became apparent, almost two years ago,
that Saddam Hussein held no weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq--the most prominent reason offered by the Bush
administration for going to war against him--defenders
of the U.S. invasion and occupation in the media have
flailed away, attempting to uphold the president's honor.
First they claimed the weapons would still be found
in Iraq. Months later, bitterly disappointed, they reluctantly
admitted they had been proven wrong, but suggested that
the WMDs must have been spirited out of the country,
to Syria, or maybe in Michael Moore's backyard.
When that fantasy went nowhere, they claimed that,
well, that wasn't Bush's only, or even his main, declared
point in going to war--he had highlighted others, such
as getting rid of a brutal dictator and bringing freedom
to the Iraqi people. That's what he was really after.
He did not sell the war to the American people and the
press primarily on the chemical, biological and nuclear
WMD threat.
We've read this argument more and
more often in the press and among online pundits in
the wake of the Iraqi elections. Even so, the latest
Gallup polls find that 57% of Americans still feel the
war is "not worth it" and 50% believe the
president "deliberately misled" them on WMDs.
But what about the explanation that Bush's case for
the war really didn't rise and fall on WMD?
I haven't seen many editorials exploring this rationale,
or articles that actually went back and looked at what
Bush actually said in the days before going to war,
so I decided to do it.
To test the pro-warriors' argument that Bush, highlighted
other issues, particularly regime change, at least as
much as he was pushing the bogus WMD threat., I went
back and studied the president's address to the nation
on March 17, 2003, in which he famously gave Saddam
48 hours to get out of Dodge City, or else.
Doing this, I half-expected to find that Bush's defenders
would be proven correct. In my memory, just before the
war, the White House did indeed begin to de-emphasize
the WMD and mushroom cloud imagery, after United Nations'
inspectors in Iraq failed to find anything. Alas, this
was not the case at all.
Bush's key March 17 address, in printed form (available
at www.whitehouse.gov), runs 27 paragraphs. For
those keeping score at home, exactly 18 of those paragraphs
mention or emphasize the WMD threat. Five raise the
"freedom" issue.
And the WMD warnings receive much higher priority;
Bush does not "bury the lead." The
first four paragraphs discuss nothing but WMDs, in 10
separate sentences. Only after that, in one short paragraph,
does Bush mention that Saddam's regime "has a history
of reckless aggression in the Middle East" and
has "deep hatred" of America. He then linked
Saddam to al-Qaeda, another charge now widely discredited.
Then it was back to WMDs for eight more paragraphs,
before mentioning a "new Iraq that is prosperous
and free."
Walking down memory lane here, it is tempting to quote
Bush assertions, such as "Intelligence gathered
by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the
Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of
the most lethal weapons ever devised" and "Today,
no nation can possibly claim that Iraq has disarmed,"
but I will not stoop to that.
But surely the president mentioned
regime change and freedom for the Iraqis in his formal
letter to Congress the following day, outlining why
he was justified in going to war?
Well, no. All he listed
was the "continuing threat" posed to the U.S.
by Iraq, Saddam's failure to comply with U.N. resolutions
on WMD, and Iraq's links to international terrorists
"including those nations, organizations, or persons
who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist
attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001." Even
Vice Prresident Cheney has now given up on the 9/11
link.
Today, with the so-called "Downing Street Memo"--the
July 2002 British document which suggests that the U.S.
was determined to go to war and would "fix"
intelligence on WMD to support that goal--finally gaining
wide press attention, Bush's vulnerability on the argument
for war grows even greater. Is the press ready to join
that debate in earnest?
As someone intimately involved in this controversy
once said, "Bring it on." |
To the Editors of the NY Times:
On the front page of every issue of your publication
you proclaim that we will find "All the News That's
Fit to Print." Unfortunately you have not lived
up to that proclamation for quite some time.
I have a serious question for you people at the NY
Times. Where the hell have these headlines been? (See
below). Why have we had to cherry
pick our news? Why to we have to read buried stories
or international publications in order to know what
is going on in our own country?
Here are some of the news HEADLINES that have been
fit to print, only to be printed by the independent
journalist, the blogger and various international publications.
While on occasion these blockbuster stories end up buried
somewhere in your 5 pound Sunday edition, they should
be splattered all over the headlines until the issues
that face our nation get addressed.
* NOVAK HIDES WHITE HOUSE TREASON! - REFUSES TO EXPOSE
TRAITOR WHO OUTED US AGENT!
* CHALABI PAID MILLIONS FOR LIES ABOUT SADDAM! CIA
KNEW ABOUT QUESTIONABLE INTEL! ADMINISTRATION RUMSFELD'S
SPECIAL GROUP MASSAGED INTEL!
* RICE AND POWELL: "SADDAM IS NO THREAT!"
RICE AND POWELL: "SADDAM IS NO THREAT!" RICE
AND POWELL WERE BOTH FILMED DECLARING THAT IRAQ WAS
CONTAINED, WAS NOT A THREAT TO ITS NEIGHBORS AND DID
NOT HAVE A FUNCTIONING CONVENTIONAL ARMY. DID THEY THEN
OR ARE THEY LYING NOW?
* P.N.A.C. EXPOSE! A GROUP OF RADICALS COMPRISE THE
BUSH ADMINISTRATION. WHO ARE THESE MEN? WHAT IS THEIR
AGENDA? DID THEY SET UP THEIR "NEW PEARL HARBOR"
ON SEPTEMBER 11TH?
* SADDAM STATUE TOPPLING STAGED! BUSH/PENTAGON STEP
UP PROPAGANDA!
* DIEBOLD EXEC PROMISES TO DELIVER OHIO TO BUSH! CAN
WE TRUST THE VOTE COUNTERS?
* JESSICA LYNCH STORY A FAKE! BUSH/PENTAGON CONTINUE
PROPAGANDA!
* PHOTOS SHOW BOXES UNDER BUSH'S JACKETS! WAS BUSH
GETTING HELP DURING THE DEBATE?
* CHENEY HOLDS HIGHJACK DRILLS ON MORNING OF 9/11!
WHY WERE WE NOT TOLD!
* BUSH REFUSES TO INVESTIGATE CAUSES OF 9/11! IS HE
HIDING SOMETHING
* BUSH FAMILY HAS CLOSE TIES TO BIN LADEN CLAN! JUST
HOW CLOSE ARE THEY?
* DOZENS OF BIN LADEN KIN FLOWN OUT OF US AFTER 9/11
DESPITE BAN ON FLIGHTS! MICHAEL MOORE WAS RIGHT!
* TOWER 7 COLLAPSES WITHOUT BEING HIT! SILVERSTEIN
ADMITS BUILDING WAS ‘PULLED' WHAT DID HE MEAN?
* PENTAGON ATTACK FILMED – WHITE HOUSE WON'T
RELEASE TAPES!
* NO PLANE DEBRIS FOUND AT PENTAGON CRASH! OPENING
TOO SMALL FOR AIRLINER WINGS! FILMS FROM SECURITY CAMERAS
CONFISCATED!
* 9/11 CRIME SCENE EVIDENCE ELIMINATED! WHITE HOUSE
VIOLATES LAW BY DESTROYING EVIDENCE!
* BUSH APPOINTS FELONS – IRAN CONTRA CRIMINALS
FIND HOME IN BUSH WHITE HOUSE
* SMOKING GUN DOCUMENT! – BUSH FIXED INTEL TO
FORCE WAR
* IT'S OFFICIAL: BUSH LIED! SMOKING GUN! DOC PROVES
BUSH FIXED INTEL TO FORCE WAR ON IRAQ!
* NY TIMES APOLOGIZES TO RITTER AND BLIX & EL
BARADI! YOU WERE RIGHT!
* 9/11 REPORT DOES NOT ADD UP – CONTAINS HUNDREDS
OF DISTORTIONS & OMISSIONS!
* IT'S OFFICIAL: US MEDIA GUILTY BETRAY AMERICA -
DEMOCRACY THREATENED BY GREEDY LIARS!
Our nation is in deep trouble. Our democracy is being
decimated by the Bush administration. We are virtually
living under a coup. Evidence exists that supports the
allegation that the past 3 elections including the midterm
elections were tampered with. There is overwhelming
evidence that our President lied to Congress and to
the world for the purpose of starting a war. The Patriot
Act, or more accurately the Anti-Constitution act is
in essence transforming this nation into a police state,
and our news media, the NY Times
included, have not only shirked their responsibility
to preserve democracy, but have empowered the eradicators
of our democracy.
All this while we have as our leaders a group of individuals
who had planned this radical agenda years before 9/11/2001.
They had openly stated that their agenda would not be
accepted by the American people unless there was a "catastrophic
and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor!"
These men were responsible for
preventing such an event when one took place. As journalists,
do you not see the need to look into this? Do you not
understand that at the very least, if we take the official
story as truth, the events of 9/11 were very preventable.
VERY preventable! As journalists can you not identify
motive when you see it?
Your failure to act as our guardian
has resulted in the creation of a new breed of journalists.
Some are called bloggers, others consolidate news from
alternative sources. These people have had to assemble
the truth from multiple sources because our nation no
longer has a single reliable news organization that
is either capable or willing to carry the torch of the
journalist, our guardian of democracy. For over
5 years you have lied to the American public by intentionally
leaving a false impression with them. While you have
thrown us bits and pieces of information, we have had
to rely for truth on the international journalist and
the few dedicated independent journalists scattered
around the globe.
The rest of the world should take notice. The American
journalism cancer is now spreading to the UK. The BBC
has just had their budget slashed by the very people
whom they are supposed to hold to account. At the same
time, the mind melting FOX News brainwash machine is
moving in. Soon, there will be nobody to save us. Soon,
only the lone blogger, who has been wrongfully maligned
by the uninformed masses with the help of the deceptive
and betraying news media, will be the only hope for
our future.
And so, I am appealing to the editors of the NY Times
to remember Watergate, Daniel Ellsberg, Edward R. Murrow,
Walter Cronkite and the real journalists who protected
the freedoms and democracy that you are so willingly
helping to destroy.
You have the power. Look up the word
journalism, reach back to the reasons you became journalists
and start practicing journalism once again. Save the
world. It's your responsibility. |
Imagine, if you will, Teresa Heinz
Kerry or Hillary Clinton going on national television
and telling a joke about her husband masturbating a
horse.
And had that happened, imagine the reaction of some
of our more ardent moral preceptors such as Limbaugh,
Hannity, O'Reilly, Falwell, Dobson, Savage and Bennett.
The outpouring of pious flapdoodle would have been of
tsunami proportions.
But since it was Laura Bush who laid that shopworn
gag on the crowd at the White House Correspondents'
Association's annual dinner, it was acceptable, because,
well, because she and her husband go to church regularly,
and because Republicans are exemplars of moral values,
the odd off-color joke notwithstanding.
Laura didn't create the joke; it was put in by the
man who wrote her script; she just read the lines. Sure,
the whole thing was rehearsed and rehearsed again, but
so what? Mrs. Bush handled it splendidly. She even got
in a shot at her battleaxe mother-in-law. Given her
flawless performance, Karl Rove might want to consider
letting her handle the next presidential live press
conference. If there is one.
As good as Laura Bush was, the
event's funniest line wasn't delivered that night. It
came a couple of days later from Elisabeth Bumiller,
The New York Times' White House correspondent. Writing
of Mrs. Bush's performance, Bumiller said: "She
brought down a very tough house." Right.
The grandest collection of timorous toadies ever to
cover the White House.
That said, we owe those "tough"
journalists a single debt of gratitude. Their obsequious
treatment of Bush and Cheney since the day they took
office has done more to dispel the myth of a liberal
media elite than all the disclaimers in The Nation and
American Prospect combined.
As Robert Kennedy Jr. pointed out in a recent Vanity
Fair article, the far right not only has control of
the legislative and executive branches of government,
it has virtual control of most of the mass media. The
extreme right controls talk radio. Conservative corporations
control the purse strings of the major television news
operations, not just Fox News, which is an unabashed
organ of the Republican Party.
It was not by chance that Bob Schieffer was named moderator
of the final presidential debate last fall. As Kennedy
noted, Schieffer asked not a single question about the
environment, concentrating instead "on abortion,
gay marriage and the personal faith of the candidates,
an agenda that could have been dictated by Karl Rove."
And who's to say it wasn't?
Shortly after he was named interim anchor of the CBS
evening news, Schieffer told a late night interviewer
that if Bush can bring our troops home from Iraq by
Christmas he will go down in history as a great president.
Sure, forget what he and Cheney
have done to the economy, the environment, health care,
the treasury and thousands of American families mourning
the loss of their sons, daughters and spouses.
This disaster of a president is one step away from becoming
one with Lincoln, Washington and Jefferson. Just ask
Bob.
Kennedy quotes Bill Moyers, recently chased to the
margins of a newly Republican-dominated Public Broadcasting
System: "We have an ideological
press that's interested in the election of Republicans,
and a mainstream press that's interested in the bottom
line. Therefore we don't have a vigilant, independent
press whose interest is the American people."
Amen.
Rossie is associate editor of the Press & Sun-Bulletin. |
A few weeks ago the World Affairs
Council's Young Professionals met in the upstairs room
of a Portland brew pub to ponder the definition of "civil
society." The conversation wandered like a Bedouin,
touching on questions of health and elder care and personal
freedom vs. social order. But by the third microbrew
all had agreed on one thing: a civil society cannot
exist unless critical thought is promoted, from kindergarten
through the university level.
The subject came up again last weekend at PSU, where
a panel of academicians spoke calmly but urgently on
the matter of "Academic Freedom Under Siege."
Unbeknownst to most of us, the
neo-conservatives have been taking a mighty swipe at
academia, that last American bastion of critical thought.
They've targeted female, foreign and minority professors,
"outing" them as leftist liberal intellectuals.
[...]
Hostility toward intellectuals is nothing new among
power-hungry regimes. Take, for example, the Khmer Rouge,
who, emulating Stalin's model, murdered thousands of
doctors, lawyers, philosophers, writers and university
professors a mere 30 years ago. As for Stalin, the "intelligensia
class" was among the first groups targeted in his
Great Purges of the 1930s and 40s. Survivors (and those
with the foresight to flee) came, in large part, to
America, where they found thriving academic and scientific
communities. With the exception of the McCarthy era,
the US has always been a refuge for inventors, innovators
and progressive thinkers. Although the NEH, acting under
the influence of the current administration, cannot
be compared to the tyrannies of Stalin and Pol Pot,
we would be wise to watch this issue closely. Otherwise,
the result could be similar: a brain drain, or dumbing
down of American higher learning, which would leave
us struggling for generations to regain the civil society
we have lost. |
ANDIZHAN, Uzbekistan, May 15 (Reuters)
- Uzbek soldiers fired into a
crowd, including women, children and their own police
comrades begging them not to shoot, when they
crushed an uprising in the town of Andizhan, witnesses
said on Sunday.
Soldiers later moved in among
"literally hundreds" of bodies, finishing
off some of the wounded with a single bullet,
said one witness to Friday's killings outside School
No. 15.
The two independent eyewitness accounts to Reuters,
both by men who live nearby but who asked not to be
identified, could not be independently verified. President
Islam Karimov said on Saturday he had forbidden the
use of force against women, children and the elderly.
Two days after an uprising in the mostly Muslim Central
Asian state's Ferghana Valley, blood and body parts,
hastily sprinkled with soil, still lay on the pavements,
streets, and gutters in the centre of this leafy town
of 300,000 people.
A human rights campaigner from Andizhan,
Saidzhakhon Zaidabitdinov, has said up to 500 were killed,
including police and soldiers, in the Friday violence.
The first to die outside School No. 15, the witnesses
told Reuters, were a group of policemen who had been
seized by rebels. Some rebels seen in Andizhan on Friday
were carrying guns.
"About 10 policemen were pushed ahead of the
crowd as hostages," said one of the witnesses,
a 35-year-old businessman. He said an armoured personnel
carrier (APC) and troops took up position in front of
them.
"'Don't shoot! Don't shoot!'
they (the police) begged. But then the APC opened fire
from about 150 metres (yards) away."
It was not clear from witness accounts to what extent
those in the crowd were armed, or returned fire.
Panic broke out as troops continued firing from rooftops
and people fled down narrow alleyways, some pursued
by soldiers.
The rebels, whom Karimov says are Islamic militants,
had earlier taken 10 police officers hostage and seized
a state building in the central square. Protesters,
some calling for Karimov to resign, staged a demonstration
outside.
When troops opened fire in the square, the rebels
took their hostages and mingled with a large crowd,
including casual onlookers, that made its way 1,200
metres (less than a mile) down Cholpon Avenue, a broad
tree-lined street, to the school, the witnesses said.
School No. 15's facade was pockmarked
on Sunday with at least 20 bulletholes and there were
pools of blood in the blocked open drains.
"I COULD NOT COUNT ALL THE DEAD"
On Saturday, soldiers started
removing corpses and the wounded, but a handful who
tried to escape were shot dead, the witnesses
said.
"Those wounded who tried to get away were finished
with single shots from a Kalashnikov rifle," said
the businessman. "Three or four soldiers were assigned
to killing the wounded."
The second witness, a 42-year-old driver, said he
saw soldiers later loading corpses onto trucks and buses.
"At about 5:00 a.m. (on
Saturday) the dead women and children were the first
to be removed from the street," he said. "I
could not count all the dead, there were literally hundreds."
"There were many bodies
lying on top of each other, and smashed brains on the
pavement."
Karimov said on Saturday that no order had been given
to fire on the crowd.
"I categorically banned the use of physical force
against women, children and the elderly," he added.
"In Uzbekistan, no one fights against women, the
elderly and children."
He said 10 police and "many more" rebels
had been killed, but made no mention of civilian casualties.
A third witness, a man in his 20s who did not see
the shooting outside the school, said he helped remove
bodies to a makeshift morgue in the school building.
"When the soldiers left, we saw that around 30
dead people were left lying on the pavement and I was
among those who took them to School No. 15," he
said.
Faizula Shakirov, 67, said his 33-year-old son Said,
himself a father of three, had been killed in another
part of town on Friday.
"My son wanted to look at what was going on,"
he said after burying his son. "He walked out of
the courtyard, turned a corner into a neighbouring street
and was shot in the leg and stomach by a soldier."
"He lay wounded there until
(Saturday) morning," Shakirov said. "None
of the neighbours could help him because people were
afraid they would be shot if they left their homes."
|
Hundreds of refugees from the former
Soviet republic of Uzbekistan are now living in a camp
across the country's border after fleeing last week's
military crackdown.
News agencies say 900 people have crossed the border
into neighbouring Kyrgyzstan.
Health officials say many are injured.. some with
bullet wounds.
Thousands more are reportedly waiting to leave the
country.
On Friday, troops opened fire on a crowd of thousands
in the eastern city of Andijan.
The demonstrators were protesting against the trial
of a group of businessmen on charges of religious extremism.
Officials say about 30 people were killed.. but witnesses
say the death toll was much higher. |
SAN SEBASTIAN, Spain : Four small
explosions rocked the Spanish Basque region overnight
targeting businesses in the area and slightly wounding
three people, anti-terrorism officials said.
The blasts occurred between 3:00 am (0100 GMT) and
4:00 am (0200 GMT), in the Basque towns of Beasain,
Bergara, Elgoibar and Soraluze, they added.
Two regional police officers and a security guard
of the Felix Gabilondo company suffered breathing difficulties
after one of the blasts caused a spillage of corrosive
liquid.
The assessment of material damage was not completed,
but most damage was done to windows and company doors,
the officials said.
The Basque interior ministry said the armed Basque
separatist group ETA was to blame.
Anti-terrorist officials said the explosions came
without advance warning and involved bombs containing
1.5 kilogrammes (3.3 pounds) of chloratite, an explosive
similar to ammonium nitrate.
They added that the blasts were part of an ongoing
campaign of blackmail by ETA against regional businesses.
Firefighters said one blast hit a zinc concentrate
depot outside a building at the Felix Gabilondo plant,
triggering a spillage of 15,000 litres of toxic liquid.
Three other firms also sustained major damage, including
shattered windows and broken doors, Basque interior
ministry officials said.
ETA has been blamed for the deaths of more than 800
people in its four-decade armed campaign for an independent
homeland in northern Spain and southwestern France.
[...] |
(South Africa) - Durban police
are trying to establish the identity of a person who
was knocked down and run over by five cars near Westville's
Pavilion shopping centre last night. Rani John, a spokesperson
for the police, said: "They actually had to close
the road off to pick up the person's body parts. We're
still trying to identify if it was a man or a woman."
John said the person was knocked down while running
across the road around 10pm last night. About five other
cars are believed to have run over the body. Police
could not establish who the person was or where the
person lived. No missing person had been reported in
the area, John said. |
DHAKA : Six people died and more
than 100 were missing feared drowned on Sunday after
a ferry capsized in bad weather and strong tides on
a remote stretch of river in southern Bangladesh, police
said.
High winds were hampering rescue efforts on the Char
Kazal river near Badnatoli, about 250 kilometers (150
miles) south of Dhaka, said a police spokesman at the
scene, Shilamoni Chakma.
"More than 100 passengers were on board when
the ferry, named 'Prince of Patuakhali', capsized due
to strong winds and high tides," Chakma told AFP.
Emergency police and fire service teams with trained
divers, rushed to the town in the Bay of Bengal and
recovered six dead bodies from the river, including
two children, he said. [...] |
HANOI : Nineteen people were killed
when a bus they were travelling in collided with a motorcycle
and plunged 150 metres (about 500 feet) down a ravine
in northern Vietnam's Lai Chau province Sunday, state
television said.
The accident occurred around mid-morning in the mountainous
district of Tam Duong, about 500 kilometres (more than
300 miles) northwest of Hanoi, the report said. Two
people have been hospitalised with serious injuries
and police have launched an investigation, the television
report said.
The bus was carrying 21 people, it said, but made
no mention of the fate of the motorcycle driver.
Last week, 11 people, including two children, were
killed in central Vietnam when a truck carrying rocks
crashed into a passenger bus. Late last month, 32 Vietnamese
veterans of the Vietnam War were killed when their bus
fell into a 70-meter (230-feet) ravine in nearby Kon
Tum province.
Vietnam has an appalling road safety record mainly
due to widespread disregard for traffic regulations
and speed limits. [...] |
A Gwinnett sheriff's
deputy said he Taser-shocked already
restrained inmate Frederick Williams five times in 43
seconds because Williams was bucking in an effort
to get out of a restraint chair.
Yet two Gwinnett police officers who allowed themselves
to be shocked in a videotaped police re-enactment of
the May 25, 2004, altercation in the county jail reacted
almost exactly the same way as had Williams.
Melvin Johnson, an attorney representing Williams'
family, contends he was arching his back and trying
to push out of the chair that night because he was in
pain and not because he was trying to fight with deputies.
Williams lost consciousness minutes
after being shocked and died in a Gwinnett hospital
two days later.
"The pain was so intense that I would have done
anything to get away from it," said Taser-shocked
Gwinnett police Cpl. Damon Cavender in a statement to
investigators after the police re-enactment. "I
pulled my body away from it and it caused me to scream
involuntarily."
Cavender, like the second volunteer, Gwinnett Lt.
William Walsh, was stunned just twice with the stun
gun, which packs a 50,000-volt charge.
Walsh's statement was similar, saying he instinctively
tried to "get away from the Taser." [...] |
Liberal Justice Critic Bruce Miller
says he needs at least an explanation of why a Crown
prosecutor isn't recommending charges against a city
cop who repeatedly Tasered a teen.
"I need an explanation," he said yesterday.
"We deserve that much from the minister of justice."
Provincial court Judge Jack Easton halted Randy Fryingpan's
prosecution for breaching bail in February this year
after concluding Const. Mike Wasylyshen in October 2002
unnecessarily used his Taser
to awaken the 16-year-old after he was found sleeping
in a car near Abbotsfield Road.
Easton said Wasylyshen Tasered
the crying youth at least five times more as he hauled
him from the vehicle.
"That, in my conclusion, is abuse of force and
cruel and unusual treatment," he said in his written
judgment.
"If that was the opinion of the judge, why didn't
the Crown prosecutor proceed?" asked Miller, adding
he hopes to raise the issue in the legislature.
The file was reviewed by two senior Calgary Crown
prosecutors and chief Crown Gordon Wong.
Wong announced Tuesday there would be no criminal
prosecution against Wasylyshen because of inconsistencies
in testimony from several witnesses and proving the
case beyond a reasonable doubt would have been difficult.
[...] |
UNION TWP. - A 31-year-old man
died about an hour after an officer with Clermont County's
Union Township Police shot him with a Taser gun Friday.
Authorities are awaiting autopsy results to determine
how Vernon A. Young died.
While Young is the first person in Greater Cincinnati
to die shortly after being shot with the 50,000-volt
weapon, he is among a growing number of people nationally
who have died after being shot with a Taser.
His death comes amid mounting concern about the safety
of the weapon and increased calls for further study
into the effects of the weapon.
Taser International, of Scottsdale, Ariz., has maintained
the weapon is safe and markets it as a less-than-lethal
alternative to firearms.
Company officials say that underlying medical conditions
have caused the death of suspects shot with a Taser,
not the electrical jolt it administers.
In Friday's incident, police shot Young after a string
of violent events at the Maple Grove Apartments, at
895 Ohio Pike, where he lived, said police Lt. Mark
Griffith.
Police said Young had been hearing voices before he
fired a gun into his closet, ransacked the building
manager's apartment and threatened her with a knife.
Locked in her bathroom, the manager called 911 at
8:39 a.m.
Officer Greg Jasper confronted Young inside the apartment
and ordered him to the floor while he waited for help.
Jasper, a 12-year veteran, fired the Taser when Young
started to get up, Griffith said.
There were several knives on the floor near Young,
he said.
In the background of the 911 call, officers can be
heard telling Young to stay on the ground after he'd
been hit with the Taser's electrified barbs. Firefighters
took Young to Mercy Hospital Anderson, where he was
pronounced dead at 9:45 a.m. [...] |
Orlando: The world’s
1.3 billion smokers could eventually have a powerful new
way to kick the habit - a vaccine against nicotine.
Nearly 60 per cent of smokers who achieved high levels
of antibodies against nicotine after receiving the vaccine
stopped smoking for at least six months, according to
a study at the American Society of Clinical Oncology in
Orlando, Florida.
According to Dr Cornuz, who led the study, “The
data suggests that antibodies against nicotine are effective
in helping people quit smoking.’
About a third of those who received the vaccine achieved
the highest levels of antibodies.
But before the vaccine is put through larger clinical
trials, Cornuz said, it will have to find ways “to
intensify the immunisation scheme’ so that more
people achieve the necessary antibody levels.
That may mean more injections, or higher levels of the
immunising agent in each dose. He estimated it would be
as long as three years before new trials could begin.
Smoking is thought to be the cause of 30 per cent of
all cancer deaths and 87 per cent of deaths from lung
cancer.
At least four companies are testing nicotine vaccines:
Cytos Biotechnology (Zurich), whose vaccine Cornuz studied,
Xenova Group of Berkshire (England), Nabi Biopharmaceuticals
(Florida), and Prommune (Omaha).
The concept behind the vaccines is simple. Antibodies
to nicotine bind to it in the blood and remove it, preventing
the drug from reaching and stimulating the brain.
“We’re taking away the positive reinforcement,
which is the main reason people can’t stop smoking,’
said Dr Henrik S Rasmussen, a senior vice president of
Nabi.
In the current trial, the researchers enrolled 341 patients.
Two-thirds of them were given the experimental vaccine
in five doses over a four-month period. The rest were
given a placebo.
Of the 53 patients who developed the highest levels of
antibodies, 30 stopped smoking, and those who didn’t
, smoked fewer cigarettes, Cornuz said.
Researchers relied on subjects’ reports of smoking
and on measurements of carbon monoxide levels in the blood,
a conventional measure of smoking. |
Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have designed a new way
to make vaccines against drugs of abuse that could become
a valuable tool for treating addiction by helping the
body clear the drug from the bloodstream. The latest vaccine
they created using this approach induces the body to clear
nicotine.
"These new vaccines greatly suppress the reinforcing aspects of the drug,"
says principal investigator Kim D. Janda, Ph.D. "Blocking
it before it gets to the brain--that's the key."
[...] The new idea that they have developed is to take a chemical that resembles
nicotine and use it to induce an active immune response.
In this immune response, the body produces antibodies
against nicotine that can neutralize it in the bloodstream.
If a smoker later smokes a cigarette, the antibodies will
clear the nicotine from the system before it reaches the
brain... |
Remnants of a city
in the Hebei region of China have been discovered. The
city reportedly belonged to the time of the Song Dynasty,
between 960 and 1279.
Archeologists reported that the city is similar to Pompei,
which disappeared under lava from the Vezuv Volcano on
Italy's Sicily Island. The remnants of the city were found
by chance during random digs to build a highway. Archeologists
indicated that the city might have been destroyed either
by an earthquake or a flood. |
May 15 (Bloomberg) --
A magnitude 4.5 earthquake shook central Japan around
Tokyo at 3:55 p.m. local time, according to NHK television
news. There is no risk of a tsunami from the quake, which
was centered in Tochigi prefecture, about 100 kilometers
north of the capital, the state broadcaster said.
There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries
from the quake.
Japan, one of the world's most earthquake-prone countries,
is located in a zone where the Eurasian, Pacific, Philippine
and North American tectonic plates meet and occasionally
shift.
|
New Zealand - A strong
earthquake shook the sea floor north-east of New Zealand
on Monday, but was not expected to generate a tsunami,
officials said.
The quake had a preliminary magnitude of 6.6 and was
centred 425km south-west of the New Zealand territory
of Raoul Island in the Kermadec Islands - an uninhabited
Pacific island group 700km northeast of Auckland, New
Zealand's largest city.
It occurred 10km below the surface at 3:54pm and was
not felt in New Zealand. [...] |
TAIPEI - Torrential rain in Taiwan
has caused mass flooding and landslides that have claimed
the lives of four people and left another four missing,
fire agency and government officials said Sunday.
"The bodies of the four victims have been found,"
said an official from the National Fire Agency, which
coordinates rescue operations in Taiwan.
A 60-year-old man was drowned in northern Hsinchu
city.
Two agricultural officials were found dead after they
were washed away by rising floodwater outside the city
in Hsinchu county.
The fourth victim was working on a riverbed in southeastern
Taitung county when he was engulfed by floodwaters,
the agency said.
Hundreds of residents were evacuated from Hsinchu
county and central Nantou, where at least 500 millimeters
(20 inches) of rain had fallen in three days, it said. |
Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman declared
a state of emergency in Adams and Hall counties late
Thursday after touring hard-hit central Nebraska, which
is recovering from heavy rain and pounding storms.
Heineman also sent 20 soldiers from the Nebraska National
Guard to help with sandbagging in the Grand Island area,
as requested by city officials.
It may take days or even weeks before the state can
provide an estimate of damage to the region's buildings,
infrastructures and crops, Heineman said.
Heineman said officials would continue to assess damage,
which could lead to more disaster declarations in other
counties. |
The damage is done and now its
time to pick up the pieces. Thursday was a rough day
for residents across the South Plains. The storms produced
10 tornadoes across the area.
A tornado tore through a house just two miles west
of Ralls. Harley Reese, 77, wasn't home at the time.
The 2,500 square-foot house was ripped off its foundation
and contents were found a mile-and-a-half away. [...]
Softball sized hail broke several windows, sky lights
and car windshields. The most damage was done on the
south side of Lake Ransom Canyon and just to the east.
The storm damaged several roofs, but there were no reports
of damage to any homes. [...] |
Atlantic Ocean ripe for two
more decades of fostering strong storms
TAMPA, Fla. - With the onset of the 2005 hurricane season
little more than two weeks away, meteorologists on Friday
warned that conditions in the Atlantic Ocean again were
ripe for spawning tropical storms that could slam into
Florida or other parts of the Eastern U.S. or Gulf coast
with potentially devastating and deadly consequences.
Last season, Florida was hit by four hurricanes in
six weeks, an unprecedented succession of natural disasters
in the state that was blamed for 123 deaths and more
than $42 billion in property damage. Although predicting
where and when storms will make landfall is impossible,
forecasters attending Florida's 19th annual Governor's
Hurricane Conference agreed that the Atlantic Ocean
was in the throes of an active period that could last
another two decades or more.
"We're in a new era now, and we're going to see
a lot more major storms," said William Gray, a
professor in Colorado State University's department
of atmospheric science, who issues a much-awaited yearly
prediction of hurricane activity. [...] |
SINGAPORE, May 14 (Xinhuanet)
-- An earthquake measuring 6.9 on the Richter scale
off the northwestern coast of Indonesia's Sumatra island
on Saturday has triggered off tremors in several areas
in Singapore.
Affected areas included Toa Payoh, Balestier, the
Central Business District and Geylang, which are located
in southeastern Singapore, according Channel NewsAsia
report.
The report quoted the National Environment Agency
as saying that tremors were felt at 1:06 p.m. (0506
GMT). [...] |
COLIMA, Mexico -- Mexico's famous
Volcano of Fire has erupted again, sending up towering
plumes of smoke and ash and starting forest fires.
The volcano is located 280 miles west of Mexico City.
Since it began erupting in 1999, neighbors have been
keeping watch on the volcano day and night.
Tuesday's eruption was the most violent since March
2004, and sent ash into the nearby city of Jalisco.
Pieces of burning rock were sent flying more than
a mile away. Some reached forests and triggered fires
in nearby regions.
The Volcano of Fire is considered to be one of the
11 most active volcanoes in the world. |
WELLINGTON : A blackmailer's claim
to have released foot-and-mouth disease in New Zealand
appeared to be a hoax as agriculture officials said
the average incubation period had lapsed with no evidence
of the devastating livestock virus.
But despite growing scepticism over the threat, the
ministry of agriculture said it would continue to monitor
livestock on Auckland's Waiheke Island where the extortionist
claimed to have planted the disease.
"We have passed the average incubation date based
on UK foot-and-mouth disease studies, so, had the virus
been released, symptoms of the disease should have started
to appear," the ministry said in a statement.
The claim the virus had been released on the island
was contained in the letter to Prime Minister Helen
Clark last Tuesday. [...] |
HANOI: Doctors have confirmed a
case of the deadly avian flu in a man, the second human
case reported in the last two days in northern Vietnam,
hospital officials said yesterday.
Ngo Manh Thanh, 58, was admitted to the respiratory
ward of Hanoi's Bach Mai hospital early last week, and
was transferred to the infectious diseases ward on Friday
after three sets of tests showed that he was positive
for H5N1, said a doctor from the hospital.
“We received confirmation from the National
Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology late yesterday,”
said a doctor from Bach Mai who spoke on condition of
anonymity. “It is still not yet clear how he caught
the virus.” [...] |
JAKARTA, - Indonesian Minister
of Agriculture Anton Aprioyantono said that bird flu
had been transmitted to pigs in Indonesia, asking people
to be alert for the disease, local media said.
The minister did not name the location of the case,
but according to the press it was on Java island.
There has not yet been any confirmed case of human
infection in Indonesia. |
Revere's Wonderland dog track has been struck by
the deadly contagion.
Two more greyhounds died there Wednesday, bringing
the death toll to 18 in roughly a week. In Rhode Island,
13 dogs have died at Lincoln Park.
As vets battle the epidemic, state officials are
now scrambling to nail down exactly what is killing
the dogs - and to prove whether it is linked to the
flu-like killer that has affected an estimated 10,000
dogs nationwide. These include a few hundred domestic
dogs as well.
The flu-like killer sounds remarkably like the avian
influenza isolated from a fatal infection of a greyhound.
That isolate, A/canine/Florida/43/04(H3N8), was 96-99%
homologous in all 8 genes to recent H3N8 equine isolates
in the United Sates.
The spread of the virus to a few hundred domestic
dogs would be cause for concern. Although H3N8 is an
avian virus, it causes equine influenza. Last year was
the first reported isolation from dogs, but fatal greyhound
outbreaks have been reported in Florida earlier this
season. Now the fatal infections have spread nationwide.
The largest number of fatal cases appears to be in Massachusetts
and Rhode Island. [...] |
CHICAGO (AP) - Officials at the
Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago are trying to figure out
what killed three endangered monkeys this week.
The deaths as well as the passing of other animals
in the past month is leading some activists to call
for a criminal investigation into the zoo.
The facility still has one monkey which is under quarantine.
Zoo officials say the deaths may be linked to their
recent move to a new exhibit.
Since October two elephants, two gorillas and a camel
have died at the zoo. Another elephant perished while
it was being transferred from Chicago to Utah.
And a representative for the group People for the
Ethical Treatment of Animals says that many deaths so
close together is "unheard of." |
|
A
new study finds whale beachings coincide with
changes in solar activity. (Mavis Burgess) |
Surges of solar activity may cause whales to run aground,
possibly by disrupting the creatures' internal compasses,
according to German scientists.
University of Kiel researchers Klaus Vaneslow and
Klaus Ricklefs looked at sightings of sperm whales found
beached in the North Sea between 1712 and 2003.
They compared the record with another set of historical
data - astronomers' observations of sunspots, an indicator
of solar radiation.
They found that more whale strandings occurred when
the sun's activity was high.
The sun experiences cycles of activity which range
from eight to 17 years, with 11 years being the average.
Short cycles are linked with periods of high energy
output, while long cycles are believed to be low energy.
Changes in levels of solar radiation have a big effect
on earth's magnetic field.
The most notable events are solar flares that cause
shimmering lights, called aurorae, in the magnetic fields
in polar regions.
Big solar flares can also disrupt telecommunications
and power lines and knock out delicate electronic circuitry
on satellites.
The researchers found that of the 97 stranding events
reported around the coastal countries of the North Sea
over the 291 years, 90 per cent occurred when the sun
cycles were below average in duration. [...] |
SYDNEY : Australian researchers
are reviving a project to bring an extinct animal known
as the Tasmanian tiger back from the dead through cloning.
Three months after the Australian Museum shelved plans
to clone the tiger -- also known as a thylacine -- a
group of universities and a research institute are planning
to revive the project, the Sun-Herald newspaper reported.
Mike Archer, dean of science at the University of
New South Wales, was quoted as saying that researchers
from NSW and Victoria states were likely to join the
programme, which involves recovering DNA from a pup
preserved in 1866 to breed a living specimen.
"A group of institutions is involved in moving
ahead with creating new ways of getting the thylacine
project back on track," he was quoted as saying,
adding he would like his own university involved.
The Tasmanian tiger, a dog-like creature christened
for its striped pelt, was hunted into extinction because
it was seen as a threat to livestock. [...] |
Bigfoot could indeed be stomping
his way through Nelson River bush country, suggests
a team of experts who came to northern Manitoba earlier
this month in search of the legendary creature.
A Bigfoot expedition team assembled by American tabloid
news program A Current Affair discovered "physical
evidence" such as hair strands, abnormal sized
footprints and an alleged Bigfoot feeding ground.
The expedition included world-renowned Bigfoot expert
Dr. Franklin Ruehl, A Current Affair producer Brett
Hudson and musician Cheri Currie.
A portion of the hair samples will be forwarded to
the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization "for
a thorough DNA analysis," according to A Current
Affair news release.
The television program purchased murky video footage
purporting to show Bigfoot walking along the banks of
the Nelson River. It was shot by Norway House resident
Bobby Clarke, who runs the local ferry. |
Dr. Roger Leir scoffed when a
UFO researcher showed him an X-ray of a woman's foot,
claiming that the T-shaped spot was an object implanted
by aliens.
Leir, a podiatrist, had seen similar spots in numerous
X-rays. They invariably turned out to be screws or wires
from an old surgery, splinters or other foreign objects.
The UFO researcher insisted. So, to prove him wrong,
Leir offered to surgically remove the mysterious item.
"It was worth my time to show him this was a
bunch of nonsense," Leir said.
But when Leir bent over his patient, scalpel in hand,
he noticed that things were out of kilter. There was
no scar or visible sign that something had entered the
body. The patient was well anesthetized, yet she almost
leaped from the table in pain when he touched the object.
But the surrounding tissue showed no inflammation or
reaction, as if nothing unusual was going on.
And when Leir retrieved the object, it became even
more of a mystery: It appeared to be an unfamiliar metal-like
substance, and it was encased in a tough biological
membrane that resisted even the sharpest scalpel.
"I'd never seen anything like that come out of
a human," he said.
That was in 1995. He subsequently has done surgery
to remove 10 more objects which, despite analysis by
some of the most sophisticated scientists in the country,
continue to defy earthly explanation. At least one analyst
compared the composition of the object to that of a
meteorite; others have pointed out metallurgical anomalies.
[...] |
Martinsville, VA -- It was a busy
afternoon for safety officials in Henry County.
Officers from six different agencies responded to
a call in Henry County about a "suspicious object"
falling from the sky into a residential back yard.
The UFO, described as a small, orange-colored parachute
attached to an electronics device, first hit the roof
of a home on Augusta Street before coming to rest on
the ground.
The homeowner, concerned that the object might be
an explosive device, contacted police. [...]
Authorities at the scene were able to determine the
item was a device released by the National Weather Service,
used for transmitting weather information. |
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