RED EYE 10/05/11

U.S. imperialism: wide, getting thin

Otherworld.org, 8/20 — …On this Fourth of July…. We’ve turned the tables on the world. We’re now occupying Afghanistan, fighting insurgents in Colombia, bombing Libya, encircling Russia, refueling in Kyrgyzstan, assassinating in Yemen, preparing an emergency air base in Paraguay, building a naval base in Korea, stationing soldiers in Honduras, flying bombing missions from Diego Garcia, parking missile cruisers in Romania, creating launch pads in Poland, and attacking parts of Pakistan every second day.

And this of course is just a partial list. The U.S. military admits to actually owning land in 46 countries and territories….More than one empire has collapsed for want of the wherewithal to maintain the upkeep. The Soviets were the latest. Now we’re getting close….

Nearly 1 in 6 live in poverty

AM-NY, 9/14 — The U.S. poverty rate hit its highest level since 1993 last year with a record 46 million…living below the poverty line…. The U.S. Census Bureau said the poverty rate rose for a third consecutive year to hit 15.1% in 2010….

In New York state, the poverty rate climbed to 16% — up from 15.8% a year earlier….The U.S. has the highest poverty rate among developed countries….

In a sign of decline for middle-income [workers], the figures showed a continued decrease in the number of [people] with employer-provided health insurance, while the ranks of the uninsured hovered just below the 50 million mark.

Underlying the Census data was a rate of economic growth too meager to compensate for a loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs from 2009 to 2010,…the jobless rate shot up from 9.3% to 9.6%....

Billionaire buys control of college

Otherwords.org — ….Then there are megalomaniacal mega-billionaires like the Koch brothers….To advance their plutocratic cause, Charles Koch has gone on a shopping spree for an invaluable bauble that most of us didn’t even know was for sale: academic freedom. And it’s surprisingly cheap. For only $1.5 million, this Koch brother bought a big chunk of the economics department of Florida State University. His donation gives him control of a new “academic program at this public institution to indoctrinate students in his self-serving political theories.

The billionaire gets to screen all [job] applicants, veto any he deems insufficiently ideological, and sign off on all hires. Also….he evaluates the faculty based on “objectives” that he sets.

Charles has made similar purchases of academic freedom at other schools, including West Virginia University….

U.S. ran Nazi-style live med. Tests

NYT, 9/14 — The highest medical and legal officials of the American government and experts at Harvard and other top medical schools approved venereal disease experiments on people in the 1940s, which led to the deliberate infection of Guatemalan prisoners and mental patients with syphilis to test penicillin, a White House bioethics panel reported Tuesday.

The experiments were “gross violations of ethics”….The ethical errors were made by a startling array of public health luminaries….World War II fervor and the excitement over penicillin, then a scarce, new drug, contributed to the rush to test this promising medicine against venereal diseases that commonly afflicted soldiers….It was decided to keep the work secret…Dr. John C. Cutler…was put in charge….Later in his career, Cutler would help run the infamous Tuskegee study, in which black syphilis were left untreated for decades to study how the disease progressed.

Military women sexually assaulted

NYT — Women in the military who are sexually assaulted or harassed face obstacles not seen in the civilian workplace. They can’t decide to take time off or quit, often have no way to avoid a predatory colleague or supervisor, and certainly in combat zones, no way to visit the human resources department. They often work in a culture that has long tolerated misogynistic behavior. And they can be further traumatized by the indifference or hostility of the bureaucracy that is supposed to help them.

Service women and veterans say they often struggle unsuccessfully to obtain health care and benefits related to sexual violence they endured while in uniform. The Service Women’s Action Network…says the V.A.’s own data bears out the charge of unfair treatment….

¾ million Somali deaths trace to U.S. wars

GW, 9/16 — In the past three months, 150,000 people have arrived in the Dadaab refugee camp in northern Kenya…This is all we can see of Somali’s famine — the ones who manage to get out….This is a catastrophe the world is finding it easy to forget. Last week, the predicted figures climbed to a staggering 750,000 who could die in Somalia before the end of the year….

After the famine in Ethiopia in the mid-1980s, there were plenty of declarations that it must never happen again…the lesson of Ethiopia was that it is not natural disasters, such as drought, that cause famine but human aggravation of them by conflict.

… “It’s a catastrophic breakdown in the world”…the prediction system worked: it warned of the imminent famine a year ago….Attention was focused on the 10^th anniversary of 9/11. What is almost routinely over-looked is that Somalia’s plight is bound up with 9/11 and the way the war on terror shaped U.S. foreign policy. When historians reflect on the early decades of the 21^st century, Somalia, with Afghanistan and Iraq, will be seen as having paid a colossal price in human life as a result of the U.S. war on terror. The deaths in Iraq were by bombs, those in Somalia are from hunger: both are direct consequence of the violent extremism triggered by U.S. aggression.

UN brought illness to Haiti

GW, 9/16 — The overwhelming evidence is that the UN force in Haiti caused the cholera that has killed thousands….

Vietnam pushed Dr. King leftward

NYT, 9/3 — To the editor:…we have constructed a third grader’s simplification as our national narrative about Dr. King: love one another, nonviolence, had a dream.

When my high school students listen to Dr. King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech, they were shocked and amazed to hear him say: “We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must begin rapidly begin…the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When…profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

….It is no hard to understand why...national leaders and myth makers exclude this.

U.S. backed Guatemala’s killer gov’t

NYT, 9/4 — …Ms. Yate’s original film was one of the first and only documentary records of the Guatemalan civil war between peasant revolutionaries and the genocidal military junta backed by the United States….

The horrors of Guatemala’s civil war defy rationalization; death-count estimates numbering at least 200,000….

Ms. Yates systematically avoids difficult issues…[She] offers a simple moral conflict between dictators and freedom-loving peasants.

Hollywood edited out the racism

NYT — ….I had ducked into a movie theater to escape the maddening debt-limit debacle. I chose “Captain America: The First Avenger.”

But as I watched the scenes of a fictitious integrated U.S. Army fighting in Europe at the end of World War II, I became unsettled. Yes, I know that racial revisionism has become so common in film that it’s almost customary, so much so that moviegoers rarely balk or even blink….

[But] the only black fighting force on the ground in Europe during World War II was the 92^nd Infantry Division: the now famous segregated “Buffalo Soldiers.” My grandfather, Fred D. Rhodes, was one of those soldiers….

…The soldiers were placed under the command of a known racist who questioned their “moral altitude toward battle,” “mental toughness,” and “trustworthiness”…Yet they did show great toughness and character, including my grandfather. His 1944 Silver Star citation recounts his bravery.

Astonishingly, his and others’ efforts were not fully recognized.

My grandfather’s actions were the first among the Buffalo Soldiers to be recommended for a Distinguished Service Cross, according to surviving records. The recommendation was declined. In fact, only four enlisted soldiers from the 92^nd were recommended for the service cross. They were all denied….

…It wasn’t until after he died that I learned of his contributions. My mother came across his discharge papers while sorting through his things and sent me a copy. On a whim, I Googled his name and division, and there he was, staring out at me from a picture I’d never seen and being extolled in books I’ve never read. My heart swelled, and my skin went cold. I want to tell hi how proud I was, but that window had closed.

….The racial theory of this country is not a thing to be toyed with by Hollywood. There are too many bodies at the bottom of that swamp to skim across it with such indifference…

So as “Captain America” ended and the credits began to roll, I…smiled not for what I’d seen, but for what had not been shown.

Gov’t after 9/11: ‘capitalise on it!’

GW, 9/9 — In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks the then national security adviser, Condolezza Rice, called in her senior staff and asked them to think seriously about “how [to] capitalize on these opportunities.”….The [resulting] combination of repression at home and military aggression abroad kept no one safe, and endangered the lives of many.

Rich Europe can’t block mental ills

GW, 9/9 — More than a third of the population of Europe suffer from some sort of mental disorder each year, says a study that calls attention to the scale of the problem and the lack of treatment. Research from the European College of Neuropsychoparhmacology found that more than 164 million in the EU — more than 38% of the population — have a mental disorder in any year. Included are not only psychological problems such as depression, anxiety, and insomnia, but also neurological illnesses.

Seem U.S. wanted 9/11 to happen

NYT, 9/12 — WASHINGTON — In a new memoir, a former FBI agent who tracked Al Qaeda before and after Sept. 11 attacks paints a devastating picture…The government’s counterterrorism agencies. The book describes missed opportunities to defuse the 2001 plot, and argues that other attacks overseas might have been prevented….Mr. Soufan accuses C.I.A. officials of deliberately withholding photographs of Qaeda operatives…. A few hours after the attacks on New York and Washington, a CIA official finally turned over the materials….

“For about a minute, I stared at the pictures and the report, not quite believing what I had in my hands.” Mr. Sourfan writes…He believed the material…might be helped unravel the airliner plot.

RED EYE 9/21/11

Oil imperialism devastates villagers

GW, 8/12 — Oil giant Shell faces a bill of hundreds of millions of dollars after accepting full liability for two massive oil spills that devastated a Nigerian community of 69,000 people and may take at least 20 years to clean up.

….Many other impoverished communities in the delta are now expected to seek damages for oil pollution against Shell in the British courts. On average, there are three oil spills a day by Shell and other companies…

On the ground the damage is obvious. The air stinks, the water stinks, and even the fish and crabs caught in Bodo creek smell of…light crude oil. The oil has found its way deep into the village wells….Nearly 80% of people here are fishermen or they depend on the water. They have lost their livelihoods.

In 2006, armed groups began sabotaging pipelines and kidnapping oil company staff…

Voting can’t solve capitalist crisis

NYT, 8/24 — ….What’s happening in America today: We’re having an economic crisis and the politicians are having an election — and there is almost no overlap between the two….

With no healthcare, he chose jail

Otherwords.org, 8/8 — …Our president and Congress not only support waging wars of conquest abroad but also shredding our safety net at home….

This helps explain why James Verone recently got into the news. He’s the guy from North Carolina who passed a bank teller a note demanding one dollar…He sat down to await the police. Duly carted away, he explained that he badly needed health care and had to go to jail to get it.

Legal murder of Joe Hill is shown

NYT, 8/27 — Joe Hill, the itinerant miner, songwriter and union activist…was executed by a Utah firing squad in 1915….

…A new biography makes the strongest case yet that Hill was wrongfully convicted…

The book’s author, William M. Adler, argues that Hill was a victim of authorities and a jury eager to deal a blow to his radical labor union…

A Salt Lake City jury convicted Hill largely because of one piece of circumstantial evidence: he had suffered a gunshot wound to the chest on the same night — Jan. 10,1914 — that the grocer and his son were killed….

[Author] Adler uncovered a long-forgotten letter from Hill’s sweetheart that said that he had been shot by a rival for her affections, undermining the prosecution’s key assertion….

Hill, who bounced around the West as a miner, longshoreman and union organizer, was the leading songwriter for the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies, a prominent union that was widely feared and deplored for its militant tactics. He penned dozens of songs that excoriated bosses and capitalism and wrote the well known lyric “You’ll get pie in the sky when you die, “Don’t waste time mourning, organize!”….

Brit wants RAF out of U.S. oil war

GW, 8/26 — To the editor: Growing up in London in the 1940s, I vividly remember my admiration for the youthful members of the RAF [Royal Air Force] in their fight and, against all odds, their victory against the overwhelming might of the German war machine…

For the life of me I cannot equate that courage with the behavior of today’s RAF fighting under the banner of Nato in its one-sided war against the Libyan people, a war that has nothing to do with justice or morality but everything to do with U.S. strategic interests and the need for oil.

Profit System Makes Mockery of Medical Care

NYT, 9/2 — ….After an Atlanta’s public hospital’s negotiations failed with the world’s largest dialysis provider, a dozen immigrants suffering from renal failure were refused treatment...and advised to wait until their conditions deteriorated enough to justify life-saving care in an emergency room...

 Rape case wrongly dropped

NYT, 8/31 — To the editor:…I cannot disagree more with his [Scott Turow] opinion that the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., did the right thing in the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case.

Mr. Turow accepted Mr. Vance’s standard that he did not believe the hotel maid, Nafissatou Diallo, beyond a reasonable doubt. Mr. Turow and Mr. Vance used the wrong standard. The standard for bringing a criminal case to trial is whether there is a reason to believe that a crime was committed and that the defendant committed the crime….

The prosecutor and Mr. Turow are troubled by the fact that Ms. Diallo has been found to have lied in the past. Both of my grandmothers lied and broke immigration laws to get impoverished and persecuted relatives into this country.

They may have been liars, but I consider them heroes…Even liars can be raped…

1991 rebellion didn’t help Russians

GW, 8/19 — …In recent [Russian] polls,…few people said they viewed the events of 1991 as a victory…

….We really believed the magical beautiful word democracy. But a lot of things turned out not exactly the way we expected. We began to ask ourselves what we spilled our blood for.”

In the decade that followed,…lurching attempts at reform gave democracy a bad name…Now, according to the polling agency, only 10 percent of respondents view those days as a victory for democracy. It said the number of people who called the events a tragedy had grown to 39 percent…

Chile: big strikes, violent protests

NYT, 8/25 — Protesters barricaded road and burned tires in parts of Santiago, Chile’s capital, on Wednesday as a two-day national strike demanding economic and other changes began…In several cities outside Santiago,…stone-throwing protesters clashed with police officers in riot gear who responded with water cannons and tear gas. The strike, called by the main umbrella labor union, comes on the heels of huge protests by students demanding education reforms. Many critics of the government have railed against President Sebastian Pinera, a conservative billionaire, and demanded a greater share of the wealth created by a copper price boom. Chile is the world’s top copper producer.

U.S. population makeup: a new era

NYT, 8/31 — The country’s largest cities are changing the fastest,…and provide snapshot of what the country might look like in the future. Hispanics were 20 percent of the population of large metropolitan areas — …. 11 percent in 1990. Blacks, the second-largest minority group, accounted for 14 percent of the population of large cities in 2010, unchanged from 2000. Asians totaled 6 percent.

…. “Where these large metro areas are now is where the rest of [U.S.] is headed…the old image of the white and black [U.S.] population is obsolete.”

RED EYE 9/07/11

Marx: when wages fall, profits rise

LAT, 7/22 — ….Profit margins (the share of a company’s revenue that goes to profits) of the Standard & Poor’s 500 companies are at their highest levels since the mid-1960s….The [50-year] decline in wages and benefits…is responsible for about 75 percent of the increase in our major corporations’ profit margins.

Or, to state this more simply, profits are up because wages are down…

British Youth explode, but lack plan

NYT, 8/10 — With 10,000 additional police officers deployed across London on Tuesday night, looting and arson dipped sharply…violence ticked up again in several other major cities, including Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool.

…Police action might fail to put more than a temporary curb on the disorder. Sudden flare-ups continued….The police force appeared to be stretched near its limit….One redeployed unit traveled from Manchester only hours before scores of youths stormed into that city’s center, setting fire to cars and buildings…in what local officials described as the worst mayhem to hit the city in modern memory.

…The pattern of the current disorder was similar to that of the last major racial rioting in London, which occurred in 1986. Now, as then,… “parts of the community seem to have been a tinderbox waiting to explode” because of joblessness and cuts in government services…

Both parties: all villains, no heroes

8/10, NYT — …Obama has spent a lifetime creating his persona — superior, wise, above all parties and interests, all-seeing, calm, unflappable.

But…the president never identifies the villains who cause our epic problems. It’s unclear whether that reflects his aversion to conflict or a fear of offending donors, or both….And it has led to Americans regarding the nation’s capital as a place of all villains and no heroes.

BP squeezes more out of Iraq oil

GW, 8/5 — BP has been accused of taking a “stranglehold” on the Iraqi economy after the Baghdad government agreed to pay the British company even when oil is not being produced….The original deal for operating Iraq’s largest field — half as big as the entire North Sea — has been rewritten so that BP will be immediately compensated for civil disruption or government decisions to cut production.

This potentially could influence…policy decisions made by Iraq…

The changes are likely to anger…those who saw the [U.S. and] UK’s involvement in toppling Saddam as part of a “war for oil”.

If $$ fails, U.S. will just kill

GW, 8/5 — Western security agencies were probably behind the killing of an Iranian scientist, analysts have said. Darioush Rezaeinejad, 35, was shot dead in Tehran, the third murder of a scientist in the city since 2009, “I suspect Rezaeinejad was assassinated because of his relationship to Iran’s nuclear programme,” said… a U.S.-based analyst.

New China: execs buying women

NYT, 8/10 — ….In…the metropolis…he…had acquired just about everything men of his socioeconomic ilk covet: a Mercedes-Benz, a sprawling antique jade collection and a lavishly appointed duplex for his wife and daughter.

It was only natural then, he said, that two years ago he took up another costly pastime:… “Keeping a mistress is just like playing golf,” he said. “Both are expensive hobbies.”

As China has shed its chaste “Communist” mores for the wealth and indulgences of a market-orientated economy, the boom has bred a generation of nouveau-riche lotharios yearning to rival the sexual conquests of their imperial ancestors….90 percent of the country’s most senior officials felled by corruption scandals in previous years had kept mistresses.

….Indeed, an entire industry has sprung up that lures young women with promises of sexually-oriented shortcuts to success…One such “college concubine agency”…claimed to connect university students with wealthy admirers for up to $100,000 annually.

Dem speeches no help to workers

NYT, 8/9 — President Obama tried to restore the plunging confidence of investors, insisting the United States remains a triple-A country whatever Standard & Poor’s might think. It…did nothing to reassure the most important shareholders: ordinary Americans living from one paycheck to another, worried about their jobs or wondering how they will replace the one they lost.

Anyone hungering for a robust vision to invigorate the economy and increase employment is still hungry.

Capitalism’s riches debase our lives

GW, 8/5 — …Back to the wisdom of Karl Marx, who among other things wrote…about how our needs grow greater even as our wealth grows greater, about how money alienates us from our true being and how subservience to it leads to “inhuman, refined, unnatural and imaginary appetites.”

Wasting science on profit-pushing

NYT, 8/9 — Companies have always have hoodwinking our fickle senses. Panels help design just the right “mouth feel” for new yogurts, the right crunch for potato chips, the right degree of pucker for lemon sorbet. Used-car dealers spray “new car scent” in their vehicles. Malls [float] pizza [odor] around the heads of hungry shoppers…. “Aware of where our drives are driving us? Rarely….And that’s where the consumer research studies come in, their flagships flying.

Obama, Clinton: Liberals serve rich

Robert Scheer, Creators.com, 7/22 — ….Barack Obama, like Bill Clinton before him, ahs ended up betraying his humble origins by abjectly serving the most rapacious variant of Wall Street greed. They both talk a good progressive game, but when push comes to shove — meaning when the banking lobby weighs in — big money talks, and the best and the brightest fold.

…Both Democratic presidents had no difficult appointing top bankers and their acolytes to all of the key economic positions in their administrations, but drew the line at fully backing the rare member of their team who had a proven record of defending the public interest when it was being savaged.

Maoists show: Red ideas are alive

GW, 7/29 — ….The “return” of Marx…was much heralded in academic and journalistic circles after the financial crisis of 2008. And it is true that Marxist theorists…clearly anticipated the problems of excessive capital accumulation, and saw how eager and opportunistic investors cause wildly uneven development across regions and nations, enriching a few and impoverishing many others. But…practical Marxism, which includes a blueprint for armed rebellion, appears to speak more directly to many people in poor countries.

It is tempting to denounce…the Maoists of today as no less criminally deluded than Peru’s Shining Path guerrillas or the Khmer Rouge…But [other] political and economic modernisers elsewhere also exacted a terrible human cost from their allegedly backward peoples. In the last century alone, millions died due to political conflict or hunger and were brutally dispossessed and culturally deracinated in a huge area of Asian territory, from Turkey and Iran to Indonesia and Taiwan.

…So denunciations of Mao don’t go very far in explaining his enduring appeal inside and outside China…As Yu Hua writes in a forthcoming book, “what…what matters is that his ideas retain their vitality and, like seeds planted in receptive soil, ‘strike root, flower, and bear fruit’.”

Early in his career Mao identified a nexus between feudal elites in his hinterland and capitalists in the semicolonial coastal cities as the enemy, and then successfully mobilized a “people’s” army to break it….Far from being rendered irrelevant…he.. ha[s] become attractive again to many people who feel actively victimized rather than simply “left behind” by an expansionist capitalism.

…Indian Maoists…may appear to be pathetic dead-enders to those who imagine everyone will settle down to loving liberal democracy and the iPad. But the Maoists…have found a large constituency among millions of indigenous people (Adivasis),… “It is the circumstances of their lives rather than its ideology that push its followers into a desperate, last-ditch battle with the state in preference in dispossession.”…

….It seems certain that many corners of the world are likely to remain Maoists for a very long time.

RED EYE 8/17/11

Doing tough work, and keeping too quiet

NYT, 7/16 — ….I spent a few days...talking to everyday people, blue collar workers, trying to...survive the present.

They do hard jobs and odd jobs- any work they can find to keep the lights on and their children fed. No one mentioned the asinine argument the debt ceiling. No one. Life is pressing down on them so hard that they can barely breathe.

They are honest hard working people who do honest work- crack-the-bones work; lift-it, chop-it, empty-it, glide-it-in-smooth work; feel-the-flames-up-close work; crawl-down-in-there work- things that no one wants to do but that someone must.

They are women whose skins glisten from steam and sweat, whose hands stay damp from being dipped in buckets and dried on aprons. They are men who work in boots with steel toes....

 They are people whose bodies stiffen by sunrise, so much so that it takes pills for them to get out of bed without pain....

The people who work these jobs are the backbone of this country, and will continue to be.

Months out of work? Goodbye…

NYT, 7/26 — ….Making it more difficult for 14 million jobless Americans to get back to work, job vacancy postings on popular sites...revealed hundreds that said employers would consider (or at least “strongly prefer”) only people currently employed or just recently laid off.

Unemployed workers have long suspected that...holes on their resumes left them less attractive to employers....

“I feel like I’m being shunned by our entire society.” A recruiter had told her that despite her skill set she would be a “hard sell” because she had been out of work for more than six months.

Law keeps immigrant workers poor

NYT, 7/18 — To the editor: “Better Lives  for Mexicans Cut Allure of Going North” (front page, July 16), about diminished Mexican emigration, suggests that changes in the H-2A visa have made it easier for farmers and immigrant workers to find one another. But while it works O.K for farmers, it does little to protect immigrant workers.

Guest workers’ restricted status deprives them of bargaining power, which encourages employers to prefer guest workers over United States citizens and keep their wages low...

The majority of our nation’s 2.5 million farmworkers are undocumented.

Economies prosper, but not people

NYT, 7/24 — …. South American countries — including Chile and Brazil, two of the region’s healthiest economies — are going through growing pains as the use of credit grows. The credit-fueled spending has driven extensive economic growth. But it has also opened the door to abuses, as credit issuers have used predatory techniques to lure customers particularly the young and less affluent.

“We have turned ourselves into modern slaves,” said Osvaldo Oyarce, a filmmaker who is trying to make a movie about Chilean consumerism. National economic success, he said has come at a cost: “A population that is highly indebted, with high levels of depression and frustration.”

It’s extremely expensive to be poor

NYT, 7/1 — “Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”

James Baldwin penned that line more than 50 years ago....

Baldwin was referring to the poor being consistently overcharged for inferior goods. But I’ve always considered that sentence in the context of the extreme psychological toll of poverty, for it is in that way that I, too, know well how expensive it is to be poor.

I know the feel of thick calluses on the bottom of shoeless feet. I know the bite of the cold breeze that slithers through a drafty house. I know the weight of constant worry over not having enough to fill a belly or fight an illness.

It is in that context that I am forced to assume if Washington politicians ever knew the sting of poverty then they have long since vanquished the memory.... Nearly half of all members of Congress are millionaires.

Political expert knew the $core

Vat 7/3—“There are two things that are important in politics,” political operative Mark Hanna famously said in 1895. “The first is money and I can’t remember what the second one is.”

How feds push false testimony

NYT 6/21—To the editor: ….The F.B.I. claims merely to want to find information by which it can squeeze citizens to cooperate in federal investigations. …. The average law abiding person probably engages in some act during the course of a typical day that an inventive agent or prosecutor can use as a basis for threatening prosecution in the absence of “cooperation.” And once the citizen’s decision is made to cooperate, the feds excel at teaching their cooperators to become witnesses who know not only how to sing but also know how to compose.

Crisis? Let’s profit from it!

NYT 7/21—Lawmakers in Washington are racing to reach a deal to save the country from defaulting on its debt, but on Wall Street, financial players are devising doomsday plans in case the clock runs out. These plans… angling for ways to make profit from any possible upheaval.

Capitalism’s new rule: ‘Shut up’

NYT, 7/15 — ....Wally St...had recently...cut the [bond] ratings of European countries to junk status...The fact that Greece might be allowed to default is a reasons to worry about other countries.

A reasonable political reaction would be to say that the negative opinions would be proved wrong, and then to take the actions needed to avoid defaults. Unfortunately, Europe has no real idea how to accomplish that.

Instead, Europe has chosen the strategy laid out 90 years ago in a novel by Ring Lardner, in which a father had a ready answer for a [son’s] unwanted question:

‘Shut up,’ he explained.

Classic novel detailed railroad greed

NYT, 7/17 — ... “The Octopus,” Frank Norris’s 1901 novel about the Southern Pacific [Railroad] is a classic....

The history of American capitalism is stuffed with tales of industries that overbuilt and overpromised and left bankruptcies and distressed ecosystems in their wake: gold and silver mining, oil drilling and nuclear power, to name a few. The railroad barons wielded more power than other businessmen in the Gilded Age. But their behavior revealed a trait they shared with many of their fellow citizens: too much was never enough.

Is biz greed really ‘astonishing’?

NYT, 7/21 — More than 450,000 borrowers who were charged excessive fees by Countrywide Home Loans when they fell behind on their mortgages will finally begin receiving the $108 million the company agreed to pay in a settlement....

“It is astonishing that one single company could be responsible for overcharging more than 450,000 homeowners.”....

NYT just can’t name it: capitalism

NYT, 7/17 — There is no shortage of explanations for the economy’s maddening inability to leave behind the Great Recession and start adding large numbers of jobs:....But the real culprit — or at least the main one — has been...a fizzling of the great consumer bubble....

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently published a jarring report on what it calls discretionary service spending....In this slump, it is down...and still has not really begun to recover.

....The notion that the United States needs to begin moving away from its consumer economy — toward more of a...production ecnomy...has become so commonplace that it’s practically a cliche. It’s also true...The old consumer economy is gone, and it’s not coming back.

The choice, thenn, is between starting to make the transition to a different economy...enduring years fo stop-and-start economic malaise.

....Politics, of course, makes many...ideas. unlikely to happen....

Wars weren’t ‘forced’ on U.S.

GW, 7/22 — To the editor: ...[Your writer] misspoke when he said that Osama bin Laden “forced” on the U.S. a “decade of worldwide armed struggle.” Not so.

Yes, Bin Laden was behind the attacks of 9/11. But the U.S. had a choice about how to respond. They....used the attacks as an excuse to undertake something that had been on the agenda for some time, the overthrow fo Saddam Hussein. So it was not something “forced” on the U.S....The U.S. chose...a declaration of war.

RED EYE 7/20/11

Voters don’t decide national policy

NYT, 7/16 — To the editor: With regard to China’s slow move to copy western democracy, one has to look with the impartial eyes of the outsider as to exactly what this democracy has degenerated into. The Anglo-Saxon countries in particular have eroded the democratic concept of choice to create a Henry Ford system, where you can have any colour of governing party provided it is the same — the same monetarist economic policy, the same retreat from social welfare…the same two-speed systems of education, health and pension policies. We have no choice, but we have the right to vote.

Worker anger broad, aims narrow

NYT, 7/1 — Joining a growing wave of unrest in Europe over government austerity measures, tens of thousands of British teachers and public-sector workers walked off their jobs on Thursday to protest proposed changes to their pension plans.

More than 10,000 schools were affected by the strikes, as were universities, Social Security offices, courtrooms, airport customs desks and other government operations, Union officials warned that the strike could be the first of a series of walkouts here in the next few months, reflecting growing unhappiness over layoffs, salary freezes, tax increases...and a persistently sluggish economy.

….Around Europe, workers are feeling the same way....Irish and Portuguese governments have been voted out of office….Greece has been convulsed with riots as residents reacted with fury to its harsh austerity package….Britain’s….Labour [Party], aware that too close an association with unions has worked against it in the past, tried to walk a fine line on Thursday, sympathizing with the workers’ grievances while saying they should not have gone on strike.

U.S. blocks workers’ will in Haiti

GW, 7/8 — …In June 2009 the Haitian parliament unanimously passed a law that  would raise the minimum wage to $5 a day. Given Haiti’s endemic poverty and brittle democratic culture, the fact that an elected parliament could pass a law that would earn such popular support was encouraging.

The U.S. thought otherwise….[They] lobbied alongside the factory owners, including contractors for some of the priciest jeans and underwear in the west, to force the 60 cents an hour rate in the poorest nation in the western hemisphere even lower.

They pressured the former Haitian president, Rene Preval, to undermine the popular democratic will in the interests of greater profits for garment manufacturers until he created [a] two-tier minimum wage with workers in the textile industry getting just $3 a day.

Two years later, during presidential elections, the U.S. was back, interfering even as it preached democracy and good governance.…

Why vote if real power resides beyond democratic control?...Increasingly it is global economics that shapes the narrative.

Life extra tough if no medical Plan

NYT, 7/7 — When poor people are given medical insurance, they not only find regular doctors and see doctors more often but they also feel better, are less depressed and are better able to maintain financial stability, according to a new, large-scale study that provides the first rigorously controlled assessment....

While the findings may seem obvious, health economists….and other researchers said the study was historic and would be cited for years to come, shaping healthcare debates....

The study found that those with insurance…were 40 percent less likely to borrow money or fail to pay other bills because they had to pay medical bills…. “Being uninsured is incredibly stressful from a financial perspective, a psychological perspective, and a physical perspective.”….

Capitalist world keeps slavery alive

NYT, 7/2 — Anyone who thinks slavery ended with the 13th Amendment is not paying attention. According to the latest State Department statistics, as many as 100,000 people in the U.S. are in bondage and perhaps 27 million people worldwide. The numbers are staggering.

These victims of human trafficking are vulnerable men, women or children coerced into servitude for sex or labor. They might be transported form Russia to Europe, from the Philippines to Dubai, or held in their hometown.

Money IS root of many evils

NYT, 7/7 — Prodded by grieving parents, Spanish judges are investigating hundreds of charges that infants were abducted and sold for adoption over a 40-year period. What may have begun as political retaliation for leftist families during the dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco appears to have mutated into a trafficking business in which doctors, nurses and even nun colluded with criminal networks.

Mexico: System causes drug war

GW, 7/1 — Mexico’s drug war....is inextricable from everyday life....The only aim is to get access to the profits from the chemicals that get America and Europe high....But this is not just a war between narco-cartels...The cartels, acting like any corporation, have outsourced violence to gangs, who compete for...corrupt police officers. The army plays its own mercurial role.

“Cartel war” does not explain the story...the whole city is a criminal enterprise”.

Not by coincidence, Juarez is also a model for the capitalist economy. Recruits for the drug war come from the vast, sprawling maquiladora — assembly plants where, for rock-bottoms wages, workers make the goods that fill America’s supermarket shelves. Now, the corporations can do it cheaper in Asia, casually shedding their Mexican workers, and Juarez has become a teeming recruitment pool for the cartels and killers. It is a city that follows religiously the philosophy of a free market.

...Julian Cardona, a photographer who has chronicled the implosion...told me how many times he had been asked for his view on the Javier Sicilia peace march: “I replied: ‘How can you march against the market?”

Mexico’s war... belongs to the world of belligerent hyper-materialism, in which the only ideology left — which the leaders of “legitimate” politics, business and banking preach by eample — is greed....

Cartel bosses and street gangbangers cannot go around in trucks full of cash. They have to bank it — and politicans could throttle this river of money, as they have with actions against terrorist funding. But they choose not to, for obvious reasons: the evils of drugs.

So Mexico’s war...materialism...is the inevitable war of capitalism gone mad. In a recent book, Murder City, Charles Bowden ecplained: “Juarez is not a breakdown of the social order. Juarez is the new order.”

Free market, but little satisfaction

NYT, 7/3 — In “Economics of Good and Evil”....Mr. Sedlacek’s thoughts on modern work and affluence are particularly insightful. “In our constant desire to have more and more, we have sacrified the pleasantness of labor,” he says. “We want too mucha nd so we work too much.”....

“We are by far the richest civilization that has ever existed,” he continues, “but we are just as far from the word ‘enough’ or from satisfaction, if not further, than at any time in the distinct ‘primitive’ past.”

Big sex-tour ‘industry’ sells women

NYT, 7/9 — The Justive Department has been conducting a criminal investigation of sports fishing expeditions in the Amazon that may have been used as covers for Americans to have sex with underage girls....

The investigation...could provide a rare look at the business operations of the multibillion-dollar international sex tour industry....

A lawsuit was filed last month on behalf of four Brazillian women who claim that they were coerced as minors to serve as prostitutes for Americans on Amazon fishing expeditions...One of the women said that she was 12 years old at the time .

‘Paranoid,’ he really was FBI target

NYT, 7/2 — This man, Hemingway, who had stood his ground against charging water buffaloes, who had flown missions over Germany, who had refused to accept the prevailing style of writing but, enduring rejection and poverty, had insisted on writing in his own unique war, this man, my deepest friend, was afraid — afraid that the F.B.I. was after him, that his body wad disintegrating, that his friends had turned on him, that living was no longer an option

Decades later, in response to a Freedom of Information petition, the F.B.I released its Hemingway file. It revealed that beginning in the 1940s J. Edgar Hoover had placed Ernest under surveillance because he was suspicious of Ernest’s activities in Cuba. Over the following years, agents filed reports on him and tapped his phones. The surveillance continued all through his confinement at St. Mary’s Hospital. It is likely that the phone outside his room was tapped after all.

In the years since, I have tried to reconcile Ernest’s fear of the F.B.I, which I regretfully misjudged, with the reality of the F.B.I. file. I now believe he truly sensed the survellience, and that it substantially contributed to his anguish and his suicide....I recalled a favorite dictum of his: man can be destroyed, bu not defeated.