Discontented Soul

Giuliana Sgrena Shooting: 'Payment' for Ransom?
by Ritt Goldstein
Published on Friday, March 25, 2005 by CommonDreams.org

...In effect, speculation has it that a US ’command decision’ may have led to March 4th's bloodshed.
Zanini told me it was a "strong possibility" that the Bush administration sought to teach Italy "a lesson, and it turned out to be bloody". In more conservative terms, a week earlier Zanini had first mentioned to me the idea that a ”difference” between the US and Italian approaches to hostages may have led to what Sgrena has termed the "ambush".
While most pundits almost reflexively dismissed the idea of a deliberate strike against Sgrena, her alleged ransom has been variously estimated by the Italian media as between $6 million and $13 million. The Iraqi insurgency's programs could do a lot with those funds, and it isn't the first ransom Italy is alleged to have paid...

The God Racket, From DeMille to DeLay
by Frank Rich
Published on Friday, March 25, 2005 by the New York Times

Cecil B. DeMille's epic is known for the parting of its Technicolor Red Sea, for the religiosity of its dialogue (Anne Baxter's Nefretiri to Charlton Heston's Moses: "You can worship any God you like as long as I can worship you.") and for a Golden Calf scene that DeMille himself described as "an orgy Sunday-school children can watch." But this year the lovable old war horse has a relevance that transcends camp. At a time when government, culture, science, medicine and the rule of law are all under threat from an emboldened religious minority out to remake America according to its dogma, the half-forgotten show business history of "The Ten Commandments" provides a telling back story...
Cornelia Dean of The New York Times broke the story last weekend that some Imax theaters, even those in science centers, are now refusing to show documentaries like "Galápagos" or "Volcanoes of the Deep Sea" because their references to Darwin and the Big Bang theory might antagonize some audiences. Soon such films will disappear along with biology textbooks that don't give equal time to creationism.
James Cameron, producer of "Volcanoes" (and, more famously, the director of "Titanic"), called this development "obviously symptomatic of our shift away from empiricism in science to faith-based science." Faith-based science has in turn begat faith-based medicine that impedes stem-cell research, not to mention faith-based abstinence-only health policy that impedes the prevention of unwanted pregnancies and diseases like AIDS.
Faith-based news is not far behind.

From Terry Schiavo to Iraq
by Rahul Mahajan
Published on Wednesday, March 23, 2005 by CommonDreams.org

The mass mobilization and media circus surrounding the case of the unfortunate Terri Schiavo offer a rare view of current American culture and, in particular, of the "culture of life" that George W. Bush and the evangelical right wing are so fond of talking about. Right-wing Christians on the ground and right-wing Republicans in Congress have literally moved heaven and earth to save the life of a woman who has spent 15 years in a vegetative state and whose cerebral cortex is almost entirely gone. So far did this effort go that George W. Bush actually cut short a vacation at Crawford.

Before an extraordinary vote in Congress asserting the authority of the state over trifling private decisions like medical care, life, and death (and severely breaking legislative precedent, which suggests strongly that legislation is about general principles, not individual cases, which are to be left to the courts), Tom Delay said, in impassioned tones, "If we do not act, she will die of thirst. However helpless, Mr. Speaker, she is alive. She is one of us, and this cannot stand." Exactly what quality of life Ms. Schiavo actually has is one under much debate, but there is no doubt that it is little to none compared to that of even a normal severely disabled person. This outpouring of compassion comes from the same man who, believe it or not, when called on to speak at a prayer breakfast for the tsunami victims, quoted Matthew 7:21-27 -- the verse about the foolish man who built his house on sand and the wise man who built his house on a rock.

This unspeakably vile Bible-thumper, who could actually suggest in public that the tsunami victims deserved, suddenly discovers that he has a heart when it comes to saving the life of a women who has not exhibited anything beyond brain stem activity in 15 years.

These same people who believe so much in this culture of life and care so deeply about Ms. Schiavo and about every fetus seem completely untroubled by the fact that current Republican policies are consigning thousands of additional children in the United States to death every year. Not only has the infant mortality rate increased in the last couple of years, it is more than 10% higher than that of Cuba, a country that disposes of only a fraction of the resources this country can. According to Nicholas Kristof, if we had the infant mortality rate Cuba does, over 2200 American babies would be saved each year.

These people, and, it must be said, their opponents across the aisle, cared nothing about the over half a million children under the age of five who died as a result of the sanctions on Iraq, held on the country beyond all reason by U.S. pressure.

It is these very same people who care so much about the sanctity of life who held ecstatic religious rites before the destruction of Fallujah in November, and one of whom said, "The enemy has got a face - he's called Satan, he's in Falluja, and we're going to destroy him." Terry Schiavo apparently still has humanity even without meaningful brain activity, but the 300,000 residents of Fallujah, most of whom have yet to return to their ruined city, have none to these adherents of the culture of life.

These are the very people who, in unguarded moments on talk radio and even TV can be found suggesting that we really need to exterminate the vile Arabs because apparently they don't venerate the same God that we supposedly do.And, in the right context, these same people, or at least George W. Bush, are just fine with having the state terminate care to a patient against the guardian's will, as happened just a few days ago with a poor black baby in Houston, Texas - killed under the auspices of the Texas Futile Care Law, signed by Bush when he was governor of Texas.

This right wing apparently has a belief in preserving life only where that life is almost devoid of meaning - and where the HMO industry doesn't interfere. It's not a culture of life; it's a culture of living death.

And the absurdity and deep offensiveness of this new culture goes well beyond even such fundamental questions. This group of authoritarian statists who don't believe in freedom of speech, don't believe in international law or indeed in any restraint on the power of their Christian nation, who want to repudiate the Enlightenment and go back to the harsh world of the Middle Ages, dominated by a stern father in the sky who has made life a torment to us all and the world a vale of tears, somehow keep on telling us that they're on a crusade for freedom and democracy in the world.Life is not the only term they have drained of meaning. Democracy is defended only after it has been redefined to mean American hegemony plain and simple; I doubt that Bush, his advisers, and his evangelical dittoheads even understand that the two concepts are distinct in principle. "Freedom" is now redefined to mean not submission to Rousseau 's idealized "general will" but submission to the conservative, militaristic state - and the ability to participate in carefully scripted "political discussions" with the president, if your views exactly accord with his and you are roughly as fulsome in your praise of him as say a Russian under Stalin (in his later years).

In 1976, Paddy Chayefsky's movie Network made famous the phrase, "We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it any more." For the last 30 years, unfortunately, it has been the bigots, the crusaders, and the so inaptly named "right-to-lifers" who have been mad as hell and the rest of us have had to take it. Well, enough is enough. Let's get mad as hell too.

J Stalin, Esq., once asked, partially in reference to the Vatican’s propaganda machine, “How many divisions does the Pope have?” I would like to know how many divisions, apart from [name withheld] does the State of Israel have?
Yes, I read The Odessa File and Schindler’s Ark and was sick with revulsion. I read Exodus and cheered as plucky little Israel fought for its existence. I have also read more serious histories of Judaism and the Jews than the average goy [sic]. What I would like to know is how long I and my descendants must offer unconditional support for the STATE of Israel in expiation of the sin of my ancestors in failing to stop the Holocaust.
I will stand steadfast with Jews around the world in proclaiming “Never Again.” However Israel is no longer an embattled island, but a mini-imperialist power in the Middle East — it has a military force apable of taking over Syria, and probably every other Arab country, within three days; at least 200 nuclear warheads as compared to 0 in Iraq, Iran or North Korea (remember the “Axis of Evil”?); the unconditional support of the USA, the world’s only superpower, and its craziest bully; and, apparently the stated intention of ghettoizing the West Bank and Gaza, or, if the religious parties in the Knesset have their way, expelling every Arab within the borders of Ancient Israel.
Tell me, J Halgren, how long can such a state continue claiming the coveted title of “victim.”

In America's right-to-die controversy the facts were not allowed to get in the way of evangelical populism
by Tristram Hunt
Published on Tuesday, March 22, 2005 by the Guardian (UK)

The interference by the White House in the case of Terri Schiavo - the woman at the center of America's latest right-to-die controversy - marks another milestone in President Bush's campaign for faith over fact. More concerned with the wonder of miracles than Schiavo's 15-year irreversible vegetative state, Bush and his allies have blithely overturned multiple court decisions to maintain artificial feeding and let evangelical populism triumph over medical opinion.
Thanks to the policies and prejudices of the Bush administration, science has become a dirty word...

The good ol' USA
Moonie
Tuesday, 22 March 2005

[Name withheld], I think you have been a little simplistic with your statement that the USA 'saved' the UK. [Name withheld, but definitely a pro-military correspondent] recently asked me to name a single UK victory before the US entered the war on 7 December 1941.There was one — quite significant — called 'the Battle for Britain' which took place over the skies of southern England, resulting in the Nazis abandoning their plans to invade the UK.
This battle took place in the summer of 1940-a year before the US was 'forced' into the war (until then they sat it out, making a fortune from weapon and materiel sales). The Nazis decided that the Balkans and Africa were easier than a seaborne invasion of England. So the UK 'saved' itself (with the assistance of airmen from many countries — including Australia, Canada, Poland, South Africa etc) I mention Poland for the benefit of [name withheld, but obviously a person of Polish origin] and as part of our discussion about the lack of allied support (principally US) to the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Forty percent of the casualties during the Battle for Britain were Polish pilots, according to the histories I have read.
I think you would have been on much safer ground to say that the US played the major role in the downfall of Nazism and the relief of Europe but even then you have to come to grips with the part the Red Army played in that victory.
In the Pacific the US again played the dominant role, with China, the UK, Australia, NZ and troops from other Asian nations playing supporting roles.
But even in the Pacific, the 'honour' of the first land victory over the Japanese went to Australia (Milne Bay), not the US.
Since then however the US has played its role as a super-power to the hilt. Interference in the internal affairs of other countries, political assassinations, covert operations in supposedly neutral countries (I still remember Nixon saying that there were NO US troops in Cambodia or Laos); and also US 'agentes provocateurs' in almost any country you could name — including Australia.
More recently, the US has been active in Georgia, the Ukraine, and Moldavia proclaiming the virtues of Democracy and Freedom — as long as it is white and/or protestant.
The current US doctrine of pre-emptive strikes, particularly when associated with faulty and/or misleading intelligence, allows the US to fabricate a provocation (WMD in the case of Iraq) and then launch an assault.
The Nazis did exactly the same thing in the period up to 1939. Perhaps that is where Bush and his non-elected circle of advisers learnt their roles.

A Nation Less Safe: Costs of Expensive Conflict Include Social Programs, Our Security, Thousands of Lives
by Barbara Lee
Published on Monday, March 21, 2005 by the San Jose Mercury News, California

As we observe the second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, it is clear that in addition to the human and financial costs, this unnecessary war has made our nation and the world less safe in ways we are only beginning to measure...
The war in Iraq is just one part of the Bush administration's doctrine of pre-emptive war, a policy whose long-term costs are truly frightening. This doctrine has violated international law, alienated our longtime allies and isolated our country. It has undermined the United States' ability to speak with authority or morality on human rights issues, and it has established a destabilizing and dangerous precedent that one nation can attack another just by claiming it poses a future threat...

Young People: The Key To Republican Single-Party Rule
by Thom Hartmann

...Young people are where the political hay is to be made: Republicans believe they are the necessary key to single party rule.
So the tacticians at the RNC developed an elaborate - and, so far, very successful - sleight of hand. They'd use a dubious Social Security "crisis" to convince young people that:
1. Republicans want young people to get the best "return" on their "Social Security tax dollar investment."
2. Democrats don't care about the interests of young people, but only want to pander to old people to get their votes.
3. Selfish old people, their "special interest" lobby the AARP, and the Democrats they "own" will prevent young people from getting the "benefits" of the "free market."
All of this, of course, ignores a series of realities:
1. Social Security is an anti-poverty insurance program, not an investment program. A third of its payments don't even go to retirees but, instead, are distributed to - literally - widows, orphans, and people so crippled or disabled that they can't work. (And people who outlive actuarial averages often get more back than they paid in.)
2. The "iceberg" Social Security will "hit" is based on very slow/low growth assumptions of the American economy (a continuation of the Bush recession for 75 years). But if the economy grows over the next 75 years at exactly the same rate it has for the past 75 - even including the years of the Great Depression - there will be no Social Security shortfall whatsoever.
3. The "high return" assumptions for private accounts assume the American economy will grow so fast that, if they're met, there would be no need for any Social Security reform whatsoever.
4. Even if Social Security does run low on cash in 2042 or 2052 (depending on which arm of Congress you're listening to), private accounts won't add a single penny to that cash-flow problem. In fact, the borrowing necessary to fund the first generation's private accounts will throw the system even further in the red.
But the real Republican agenda here has little to do with Social Security. (Energizing "free market conservatives" like Greenspan, who have always thought of Social Security as socialism, is a bonus freebie, as is any payback to Wall Street for campaign donations.) It's really all about capturing the only demographic that voted as a block against Bush in 2004, to establish a future fifty years of Republican single-party rule...
Republicans will say - over and over - that they valiantly tried to help young people get a better "return" on their taxes, but the Democrats and those terrible old people prevented them. They'll say they tried to solve a "crisis" and a "problem," and "reform" an "antiquated" Social Security system, but were outmaneuvered by evil Democrats, "liberals," and greedy old people. The Right Wing Noise Machine (so well documented by David Brock) will repeat this mantra so hard and so often that today's young people will be able to recite it from memory for the next fifty years...

Two Years On, The Occupiers Justify the War by Embracing the Irrelevant and Ignoring the Inconvenient
by Gary Younge
Published on Monday, March 21, 2005 by the Guardian (UK)

This is a tale of one war, two anniversaries, three different demonstrations - and inconsistencies, contradictions and civilian deaths that are too numerous to count...
"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side," George Orwell once wrote. "He has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."
So it is on the second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, where the occupying powers are still so desperate to create a moral framework to justify the war that embracing the irrelevant and ignoring the inconvenient has become the only viable strategy left to them.
We have entered a world where reality - like the photographs of torture or the absence of weapons of mass destruction - is just a minor blockage in a flood of official, upbeat declarations and statements. Each new dispatch from the departments of irony on both sides of the Atlantic suggests that truth can be created by assertion, principle can be established by deception and democracy can be imposed through aggression. These people would claim credit for the good weather and deny responsibility for their own signature if they thought they could get away with it.
Two years on, the death toll keeps rising, the size of the "coalition" keeps shrinking and global public support for this reckless occupation has maintained its downward spiral from a low base. Indeed, the only thing that changes is the rationale for starting the war, where the sophistry of the occupying powers keeps plumbing new depths and selective amnesia has attained new highs..

About that posturing in Congress on Palm Sunday, I’ve got just one thing to say: it’s not about Terri Schiavo.
Accidentally in uttering the words “she’s my life,” in her conversation with the media Terri Schiavo’s mother revealed what’s at the very heart of this whole dismal story. None of this is about poor brain-destroyed Terri Schiavo. It’s all about someone else’s life, or various someone-elses...
What do you think this is really about? Terri Schiavo? I don’t think so. I think it’s about distracting from lawlessness and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s about changing the subject from a cruel and killing budget, and just possibly, about obscuring the news that according to a new National Defense Strategy” the Pentagon has made “first strike” attacks like those used in Iraq a permanent piece of the nation’s military policy.
Talk about a culture of life. If the Bush crew really believed human life was sacred, they would never have okayed the loss of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives because of the off-chance that the future might bring another terror attack, somewhere, sometime, that might kill Americans. Forget the WMD threat which did not exist. Bush made the argument again this past week that it’s better to fight terrorism abroad (and kill innocent people there now,) than tolerate the possibility that more US lives might be lost here at some unspecified time in the future.
Bush’s criminal congress isn’t about a culture of life any more than Bush’s unilateral war against world majority opinion was about democracy or global security.
Besides, when was the last time you think that any one of Bush’s criminal congress took a moment to imagine what it would actually be like to be Terri Schiavo? We can all understand where Schiavo’s mother is coming from, but it’s not actually her mother’s suffering that's at stake here, or Tom Delay’s or the Congress’s. It’s Schiavo’s, and I’d say it was a long time since the people in this picture actually put themselves in Schiavo’s shoes because as far as I can see, this nation’s out of the habit of practicing empathy.
Plastic pathos, sure, and for-profit compassion – there’s plenty -- but, actual honest-to-your-god empathy? You tell me. I think “do unto others as you’d have others do unto you” is on life support in George W. Bush’s America. Don’t believe me? Ask the Afghans. Ask the Iraqis. And maybe I’m going out on a limb here, but if you could, I’d say you could ask Terri Schiavo.

Eradicate poverty? Not our job, sorry
Monday, 21 March 2005

THE WORLD Bank has such a soft and reassuring name. It conjures up images of smiling cashiers serving the people of India, perfumed personal bankers offering mortgages to Guatemala, and a water-cooler in the corner for sub-Saharan Africa.
Take a seat and do have a leaflet, sir - it's about "eradicating global poverty and promoting sustainable development". See the nice smiling pictures and our generous repayment schemes? Now, if you'll just sign here ...
Let me take you on a tour of the real World Bank. Picture scores of shut-down schools for poor kids in Zambia. Picture indigenous people being forced from their land to make way for an oil pipeline. Picture the peaks of Mount Kilimanjaro, which are now - thanks to climate change - free of snow for the first time in 11,000 years.
The nomination of Paul Wolfowitz last week to head the Bank will bring the largest sheaf of column-inches the institution has commanded in decades, but most of it will focus on the ball, not the pitch. The personality of the Bank's leader is pretty irrelevant. You could put the Archangel Gabriel in charge of the World Bank as it is currently constituted, and it would make little difference. (And Wolfie is no Gabriel.)
It seems counter-intuitive to condemn an institution founded out of the ashes of the Great Depression, Nazism and world war to eradicate poverty.
The Bank's original purpose - offering loans for the reconstruction of Europe - was certainly noble. But it turned out that the Marshall Plan did the Bank's work for it, so in the late 1950s, it shifted focus to the developing world. The problems set in when it began to offer ever-larger loans, and began to demand ever-more-extensive conditions.
By the 1980s, the Bank was - along with its twin, the International Monetary Fund - demanding that countries undergo "structural adjustment" in return for borrowed cash. And because they were accountable largely to US presidents and their proxies, the Bank's heads began to use their power to impose an unusual neoliberal ideology that has never been fully tried in a democratic country. So if poor countries wanted any help, or even wanted simply to be able to maintain the huge debts they had already racked up to the Bank, they faced a lachrymose choice.
They had to sell off their public sector, slash spending on schools and hospitals to the bone, and prioritise debt repayments to the Bank, or be declared an international pariah and receive no loans. It's as if - in order to keep up with your mortgage repayments - Westpac demanded you stop buying your children medicine, sent your spouse to work in a coal mine, and rented out your upstairs bedroom to a bloke of their choosing.
So what happened next? To give one example, in Zambia, the World Bank demanded that the state stop paying for health and education out of general taxation. As aid agencies had warned, infant mortality - a neat euphemism for the number of dead babies - piled ever upward. Average life expectancy fell from 54 to 40. Of course, there were other factors in this expanding Zambian graveyard, but few experts deny the Bank played a key role.
And, even though the Bank claims periodically to have learned from these deadly mistakes, the policies continue, barely altered, today. The Bank has shown time and again that it is more interested in debt repayment, neoliberal ideology and opportunities for transnational corporations than in ending poverty. This isn't because its executives are personally malicious; many of them honestly believe that short-term austerity leads to long-term gain. They continue to believe this because they are marinated in a hardline ideology that is impervious to evidence.
They are right to believe that markets must play an essential part of eradicating poverty - but they do not accept that markets have to be moderated by powerful states and democratic movements or they cause terrible harm.
Imposing raw markets without democratic consent - and without social democratic states or trade unions - can be almost as disastrous as the opposite extreme of having no markets at all. Markets are like yeast. Without yeast, your bread won't rise. But if you only have yeast - and no other ingredients - then you have nothing but an indigestible fungus. The World Bank has been force-feeding its yeasty market fundamentalism to the developing world for three decades, and ignoring the mass poisoning that so often mysteriously follows in its wake.
And, even worse, when it comes to the biggest issue in the world today - man-made climate change - the World Bank is one of the most powerful institutions pouring petrol onto the global cooker. Over the past year, 94 per cent of World Bank energy lending has been for oil and coal extraction, the fuels that are causing global warming, and just 6 per cent for renewable energy sources.
Don't take my word for it. Just look at the World Bank's own research. In 2000, after megatons of pressure from democratic movements in the developing world and their left-wing supporters in the West, the World Bank was finally forced to undertake a review of its energy policies.
It did its best to rig it, putting Emil Salim in charge. Salim was the former energy minister of the corporation-loving Indonesian dictator General Suharto, and he was even serving on the board of a coal company at the time he was appointed. But, to everyone's astonishment, Salim concluded that supporting oil and gas projects doesn't help poverty, damages the environment disastrously, and should be stopped altogether by 2008.
The Bank's response? It simply ignored its own report. Nadia Martinez, an expert on the World Bank with the Institute for Policy Studies, believes this scandal reveals the true nature of the Bank today. "The World Bank has repeatedly proved itself to be more concerned with the needs of oil companies than with the impoverished people it officially serves. It will not distinguish its goals and standards from the likes of Halliburton, ExxonMobil, Shell and other profit-driven institutions."
The Bank feebly responds by saying that developing countries need more energy, but it knows perfectly well that 82 per cent of the oil and gas being mined by its projects is going straight to the US and Europe.
The solution to this will obviously not come from Paul Wolfowitz as he emerges, petrol-scented, from the Bush-Halliburton White House. But nor will it come from any other top-down leader. It's pointless to fix our vision solely on the Wolfowitzes at the top and pine for a more benign leader. Governments and institutions will very rarely be spontaneously benign. They have to be constantly pressured and harried by democratic movements. Right now, the head of the World Bank is answerable primarily to George Bush, who in turn answers primarily to his corporate paymasters.
It's only when this chain is broken - and the head of the World Bank is answerable instead to the people over whom he exercises so much power - that less catastrophic policies will emerge.
But, hey, George Bush says Wolfowitz is a "good, compassionate man".
I'm sure that will be a great comfort to the people of the next "structurally adjusted" country as they close their schools, privatise their water supply, and feel the temperature slowly rise.

Dontcha just love living in The New American Century?
You can’t legally assist your pain-wracked relative to die, or marry your gay partner, but, if Philip Ruddock gets his way on defamation laws, you WILL be able, as the CEO of a multi-million dollar fast-food chain, to sue Mr/Ms Average for saying that your product tastes foul, or for appropriating one of ‘your’ slogans.
Meanwhile if you’re a Muslim refugee who converts to Christianity in a detention camp, you can have an automatic ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ card from Amanda Vanstone. How quaint! How marvellously reminiscent of the European Middle Ages, where the ‘evil, Christ-killing’ Jews became miraculous children of God as soon as the holy water hit their faces!
Since Baby Jesus is a tad late for his millenial reappearance, I can only hope that the Go’auld from Stargate SG1 arrive soon to nuke us all into oblivion, or maybe to enslave us for our consummate stupidity. We certainly deserve no better!!!

California Ruling on Same-Sex Marriage Moves Us One Step Closer to Fairness
by Byron Williams
Published on Friday, March 18, 2005 by Working For Change

"The state's protracted denial of equal protection cannot be justified simply because such constitutional violation has been traditional -- same-sex marriage cannot be prohibited solely because California has always done so before." -- Superior Court Judge Richard Kramer
With those words, Judge Kramer moved the definition of equal, as it relates to American Democracy, one step closer to the Jeffersonian ideal.
By declaring the ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional, he has once again revived the conversation that is as old as the nation: What is our understanding of equality?
I have long believed that the same-sex marriage debate is more about constitutional rights than someone's privately held notion of morality. For this reason, anything short of supporting same-sex marriage would be, in my view, the un-American position.
This is not, nor has it ever been, a church issue. No church that I am aware of would be forced to perform wedding ceremonies for any couple if it was not inclined.
Unfortunately, for the churches that have taken up the battle in opposition, they are placed in the annals of history alongside those religious institutions that supported African-American slavery, the Holocaust and apartheid...
It is easy to forget, as conservatives frequently do, that slavery, Jim Crow laws and women not having the right to vote were also at one point traditions that were justified as "the will of the people." But tradition is tricky business; it tends to work for those already benefiting from the status quo...