Conservatives Fight Back!

[Originally posted on goofyblog 3.27.07]

WASHINGTON– An alliance of prominent national conservatives today announced the formation of the American Freedom Agenda (AFA).

The AFA’s mission is to reign in abuses of executive power … that have the greatest likelihood of adversely affecting personal liberties without appropriate checks and balances: the judicial and criminal justice system; national security; and the proper role of congressional oversight.

The launch of the AFA, and its mission to restore executive accountability, Tuesday coincided on the same day that the Justice Department’s Inspector General testified before Congress on his findings regarding DOJ’s misuse of its power to use warrantless searches to secretly go through people’s financial, Internet and other records.

AFA Chairman Bruce Fein said: “As fellow conservatives, we believe we have a greater responsibility than most to stand up to this particular Administration and demand that it respect the checks and balances established by the Founding Fathers. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, regardless of party affiliation, and we can no more remain silent to the abuses occurring under President Bush than we could if a President Clinton were in office.”

The AFA outlined a legislative package that would bind the current and all future occupants of the White House, irrespective of party affiliation, to restore congressional oversight, personal civil liberties, and governmental checks and balances through the following:

• Restore habeas corpus to prevent the illegal imprisonment of American citizens;
• Prohibit torture and extraordinary rendition;
• Prohibit unconstitutional wiretaps, email and mail openings via warrantless searches;
• Protect journalists from prosecution under the Espionage Act for reporting on stories on national significance that do not reveal troop locations;
• Prohibit Presidential Signing Statements that allow the President to sign into law legislation passed by Congress while rejecting line-item aspects of that same law;
• Reform the ability of the federal government to win dismissal of constitutional grievances by private parties by claiming state secrets;
• Reform executive privilege by creating legislative-executive committees to arbitrate disputes.

“We do not favor a crippled Executive,” said Congressman Barr, who will work with his former colleagues to seek passage of the AFA’s legislative package. “Rather, it is our belief that in times of danger, checks and balances will make for a stronger – not weaker – government because the people will more readily accept a muscular Executive if barriers against abuses are strong. We want to ensure that no man is above the law.”

Goofy facts: M & M

[Originally posted on goofyblog 3.26.07]

• A new study published last week in the Lancet proposes that drugs should be classified by the amount of harm that they do … The new [way of] ranking [by harm] places alcohol and tobacco [as] … more harmful than cannabis, and substantially more dangerous than the Class A drugs LSD, 4-methylthioamphetamine and ecstasy.


• “Unlike many other drugs, morphine has a very wide safety margin,” wrote Dr Rob George, Consultant in Palliative Medicine, from the University College London, in his commentary about the research. “Evidence over the last 20 years has repeatedly shown that, used correctly, morphine is well tolerated, does not cloud the mind, does not shorten life, and its sedating effects wear off quickly. This is obviously good for patients in pain.” –from Science Daily.
  

Thousands of angry Iraqis pillage billion-dollar U.S. Embassy in Baghdad

[Originally posted on goofyblog 3.26.07]

Congress has appropriated nearly $1 billion to build the largest embassy in the world. A significant portion of that money is for security infrastructure. This future “fortress” is housed in Saddam Hussein’s former palace — providing more bad symbolism to the Iraqis.

The embassy complex is on 104 acres, with 21 buildings and facilities. It will eventually house a U.S. staff of 5,000. According to a recent report in the Washington Post, it has more than twice the staff and 20 times the budget of our Beijing embassy. The embassy will surpass all others in terms of size and staffing. from Alternet

The embassy is set to open this summer…

Happy Anniversary, Schafer Commission

[Originally posted on goofyblog 3.24.07]

Did you hear the news? The Shafer Commission released their report on drug policy and dropped this bombshell:

[T]he criminal law is too harsh a tool to apply to personal possession [of marijuana] even in the effort to discourage use. It implies an overwhelming indictment of the behavior, which we believe is not appropriate. The actual and potential harm of [marijuana] use … is not great enough to justify intrusion by the criminal law into private behavior, a step which our society takes only with the greatest reluctance.

… Therefore, the commission recommends … [that the] possession of marihuana for personal use no longer be an offense, [and that the] casual distribution of small amounts of marihuana for no remuneration, or insignificant remuneration, no longer be an offense.

What Commission was it? In 1971, President Nixon commissioned the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse — chaired by ex-Gov. Shafer (PA). In March ’72, they stated the above excerpt and more.

Since the Commission issued it’s report, 35 years ago:

• Approximately 16.5 million Americans have been arrested for marijuana violations — more than 80 percent of them on minor possession charges.
  

• U.S. taxpayers have spent well over $20 billion enforcing criminal marijuana laws, yet marijuana availability and use among the public remains virtually unchanged.
  

• Nearly one-quarter of a million Americans have been denied federal financial aid for secondary education because of anti-drug provisions to the Higher Education Act. Most of these applicants were convicted of minor marijuana possession offenses.
  

• Total U.S. marijuana arrests increased 165 percent during the 1990s, from 287,850 in 1991 to well over 700,000 in 2000, before reaching an all-time high of nearly 800,000 in 2005. However, according to the government’s own data, this dramatic increase in the number of persons arrested for pot was not associated with any reduction in the number of new users, any reduction in marijuana potency, or any increases in the black market price of marijuana.
  

• Currently, one in eight inmates incarcerated for drug crimes is behind bars for pot, at a cost to taxpayers of more than $1 billion per year.
  

From AlterNet.

Hometown Baghdad

[Originally posted on goofyblog 3.23.07]

The first 3 webisodes of the new series detailing life amongst the vanishing educated peoples of Baghdad are up and running.

My favorite is “Forbidden Salad,” the new notion that eating a mixed salad is punishable by death narrated and starring 23-year-old Adel (pictured below).

Check it out!

A Conservative Believes. . .

[Originally posted on goofyblog 3.22.07]

In a recent post (here), Robert Borosage lists the 2 major problems for a democratic republic when Conservatives rule the Executive Branch (at least in the past 40 years):

• Conservative presidents–from Nixon to Reagan to Bush–believe in the imperial presidency. They assume that in the area of the national security, the president operates above the law, or as Nixon put it, “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” They operate routinely behind the shield of secrecy and executive privilege, with utter disdain for the law. So Reagan spurned the Congress when it cut off funds for his loony covert war on tiny Nicaragua. And Bush trampled the laws to set up the torture camps in Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and elsewhere. Each would seek to keep their lawlessness secret; and that would foster lies, obstruction of justice and ultimately disgrace.


• Second, conservatives are acutely aware that they represent a minority, not a majority, position in America. From Nixon to Lee Atwater to Karl Rove, they play politics and exploit America’s divides with back-alley brass knuckles–from Reagan’s welfare queen to Bush’s impugning the patriotism of Georgia Senator Max Cleland, a Vietnam War hero who literally sacrificed his limbs in the service of his country. They excel in the politics of personal destruction, as Democratic presidential candidates Michael Dukakis and John Kerry discovered. And in the grand tradition of the establishment in American politics, they are relentless is seeking to suppress the vote, particularly of the poor and minorities who would vote against them in large numbers.
  

10D -- The Core of the Universe

[Originally posted on goofyblog 3.21.07]

The cosmic energy released in the Big Bang that started the Universe 13 billion years ago has been mapped by satellites and can now be used by mathematicians to test “string theory,” the proposition that everything in the universe, from subatomic particles to entire galaxies, is made of tiny strings of energy.

The mathematics of string theory suggests that the world we know is not complete. In addition to our four familiar dimensions - three-dimensional space and time - string theory predicts the existence of six extra spatial dimensions, “hidden” dimensions curled in tiny geometric shapes at every single point in our universe.

Though currently the front-runner to explain the framework of the cosmos, the theory remains, to date, untested.

So scientists are starting to test the theory with the satellite map of cosmic energy, looking for clues to the 6 other dimensions (represented by the theoretical picture above). The European Space Agenc’s Planck satellite (launching 2008)will provide more detailed maps of cosmic energy and bring mathematicians closer to proving string theory and determing what geometric model was chosen at the moment of the big bang.

The implications of such a possibility are profound, says Henry Tye, a physicist at Cornell University. “If this shape can be measured, it would also tell us that string theory is correct.”

And if string theory is correct? Maybe warp speed, travel great distances in little time, unlimited energy sources. It took 100 years for the mathematical theory of algebra to be physically morphed into rudimentary computers (George Boole published his tome in 1849). But things have accelerated since. We may be on the brink of something truly revolutionary here.

From neatorama and Science Daily.

Slavery Lives in the US

[Originally posted on goofyblog 3.21.07]

When you’re in a restaurant, ever wonder what’s going on in the kitchen? Here’s one possibility:

In a restaurant somewhere in New Orleans, black women were working in the kitchen being paid $10/hour.

They were all fired and replaced by undocumented workers who were paid $8 an hour.
Later, they were all fired and replaced by Brazilian H-2b visa holders at $6/hr. Those workers had paid $10,000 to get the necessary papers to come to the United States.

–Saket Soni, spokesman for the Alliance of Guest Workers for Dignity on Democracy Now March 15.

The vast influx of illegal immigrants, which the Bush plan to allow “guest” workers will only exacerbate, drives wages down and steals jobs from American citizens so that businesses can stay “competitive”(?)

Does that mean keeping the price of a dish of bacon & eggs as low as the next restaurant that is hiring illegals or other “guest/slave” labor? Who knows what the term competitive means in this context.

So what would happen if employers had to hire the workforce what was available and pay them a fair rate? And what would happen if those workers on the lower rungs of the work ladder were not under the constant threat of being replaced by the latest desperate Latin who just got out of the coyote van?
Would your bacon & egg dish go from $6 to $8? or $10? It’s just not right to take advantage of people this way. Bush’s plan would make for rampant exploitation of immigrants while simultaneously driving down wages and curtailing opportunity for the present workforce.

Foreign citizens who come to the United States as guest workers are routinely cheated out of wages, forced to live in squalid conditions, and denied medical care for workplace injuries, a report released Monday by a civil rights group found.

The report — “Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States” — comes as Congress is poised to debate a major bill that would create a large temporary worker program and offer a path to citizenship to millions of illegal immigrants.

- Cox News Service, March 13.

Future Changes II: Regime Change

[Originally posted on goofyblog 3.16.07]

The Shawnee chief Tecumseh (Panther Passing Across) was born in 1768 in central Ohio. Tall, muscular, intelligent and highly charismatic, Tecumseh proved to be a master tactician and an exceptional orator.

In battle, Tecumseh demonstrated his strength, skill and leadership ability; while in council, he demonstrated his firm opposition to any concessions to the whites. He soon developed a circle of equally militant followers, including his younger brother, Tenskwatawa.

Tecumseh and his followers went to Deer Creek in western Ohio and in 1795 founded a village made up of Native American warriors linked by their militancy, not by their tribal affiliation.
By 1805 military and legal means against the whites had failed the Shawnee. Tecumseh began to instigate a revolution.

An Indian Insurgency

He believed that no treaty, border or land agreement would protect the land and the native peoples against the whites. The only way was for all Indian tribes to unite - not in a loose temporary confederation with each tribe under their own governance, but in a single political body with unified leadership.

This way the whites would not be able to play one tribe against the other as they had in the past. If the whites wished to make war, they would have to face an enormous army comprising all the warriors of all the Indian tribes.

On October 5, 1813, Tecumseh and his forces met Americans under the command of future-President William Henry Harrison. The Native Americans fought doggedly, but were forced to retreat, leaving their casualties on the battlefield.

Among those casualties - as he had predicted the night before to his followers - was the 44-year-old Tecumseh. With the great Shawnee chief gone, the dream of a grand alliance was shattered.

A Prediction

But nearly a year before his final battle, Tecumseh told his brother, Tenskwatawa, the following:

Brother, be of good cheer. Before one winter shall pass, the chance will yet come to build our nation and drive the Americans from our land. If this should fail, then a curse shall be upon the Great Chief of the Americans, if they shall ever pick Harrison to lead them.

His days in power shall be cut short. And for every twenty winters following, the days in power of the Great Chief which they shall select shall be cut short.

Our people shall not be the instrument to shorten their time. Either the Great Spirit shall shorten their days or their own people shall shoot them. This is not all.

Each contest to select their Great Chief shall be marked by sharp divisions within their nation. Within seven winters of each contest, there shall be a war among their people, either within their nation or with other nations, I know not which. Our people shall prosper only if they can avoid these wars.

The Record Since

In 1840, former General William H. Harrison was elected President winning with only a narrow margin of the popular vote. Harrison delivered a very long inaugural address on a cold, windy day. Then he was caught in a rainstorm. He caught a cold which turned for the worse and led to his death. He was president for 30 days.The Mexican War broke out in 1846.

In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president with a small plurality. The country divided and the War Between the States broke out within months. Lincoln was shot and died April 15, 1865.






In 1880, James A. Garfield was elected president with a margin of less than 7,100 popular votes. He took office on March 4, 1881 and was shot in July, dying on September 19, 1881.


In 1900, William McKinley was elected to a second term. The election was hard fought and marked the merger of the Democrat and Populist parties. McKinley was shot and died in September 1901.

In 1920, Warren G. Harding was elected president after a contentious campaign, the main issue being U.S. membership in the League of Nations. He died in office August 2, 1923.








In 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt was urged not to break tradition and seek a third term. America entered World War II on December 7, 1941. FDR died in office April 12, 1945.

In 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected president by narrow margin, even through there were widespread reports of fraud. Kennedy was shot and died November 22, 1963.

In 1980, America was once again divided. Ronald Reagan was elected amidst the end of Iran hostage crisis. On March 30, 1981, Reagan was shot as he was boarding his presidential limousine.

• A few years ago, I watched a documentary on the assassination attempt. I was astonished to see the interview with Secret Service Agent Jerry Parr, the man who saved Reagan’s life


• Reagan was shot in the underarm and would have bled to death in minutes. Thinking quickly, Parr held Reagan’s arm down and ordered the driver to nearby George Washington Hospital.


• Though Reagan walked into the hospital in a show of Presidential “strength,” he collapsed in a pool of his own blood as soon as he got inside. Doctors said he had lost nearly half of his blood as they feverishly searched for the bullet, eventually finding it inches from his heart.

In 2000, George Bush got 50,456,002 votes versus 50,999,897 votes for Gore. In Florida, Bush won by just 537 votes. His election and consequent misguided rule bitterly divided the nation. Within the year, America had been attacked and was at war with Afghanistan, then Iraq, then. . . ?

The Scooter Libby conviction is the beginning of the end of the Bush Presidency. Within the year, we will see a new Vice President (my money is on Condie), but probably sooner. What more?

Tecumseh’s Legacy

Tecumseh’s warnings about the threat the whites posed proved truer than even he could imagine. His portrait hangs in many Shawnee homes today, not so much for his predictions as for his willingness to stand up to the whites and defend his culture, his land and his people.

Live your life that the fear of death
can never enter your heartTrouble no one about his religion…
Respect others in their views
and demand that they Respect yours…

Love your Life, Perfect your Life…
Beautify All things in your Life…
Seek to make your life long
and of service to your people…

Prepare a noble death song for the dayWhen you go over the great divide..
Always give a word or sign of salute when meeting
or passing a friend, or even a stranger, if in a lonely place
Show respect to all people, but grovel to no one…
When you rise in the morning, give thanks for the light,
for your Life, for your Strength
Give Thanks for your Food and for the joy of Living…
If you see no reason to give thanks…
The Fault Lies in……..Yourself.

– Parts of the above from the Shawnee Web Ring here, here and here, and from Martin Kelly here.

Future Changes I: We Will Be Overrun in Iraq

[Originally posted on goofyblog 3.15.07]

[Note: In response to Aaron, this the first of 3 or 4 articles about the changes we’ll experience in the near future–the next 24 months. Will I be proved right? Time will tell.]

Within the next 24 months, our campaign in Iraq will fail and our army will be defeated. Why will this happen?

• Reason I: The Army knows how an insurgency must be defeated. But, that’s not the way they are being directed to proceed.
  

Released in December 2006, the US Army’s Handbook on Counterinsurgency states unequivocally:

Unsuccessful Practices
Place priority on killing and capturing the enemy, not on engaging the population.
Conduct battalion-sized operations as the norm.
Concentrate military forces in large bases for protection.
Focus special operations forces primarily on raiding.

Our forces are doomed to failure.

• Reason II: Our military will be shortly or are right now being faced with overwhelming force. Robert Fisk, veteran war correspondent, one of the world’s most experienced journalists covering the Middle East for the past thirty years made the following comments:
  

There was a very interesting comment from the British Ministry of Defense about a month ago…They said British troops are now in the most violent combat they’ve experienced since the Korean War. And British defense correspondents sort of put this up as a great sign…And I thought, hang on a minute, that’s not the point.

What happened in Korea? The Gloucestershire Regiment were overwhelmed by millions of Chinese troops crossing the Yalu River. We couldn’t stand up to the vast numbers of soldiers that were coming in from the north in Korea. They were just overrunning us, totally.

And what was happening, I realized immediately, in Afghanistan is that soldiers were being so totally outnumbered, they were having to retreat out of villages. In one case, I understand, twelve British troops in a school in a village were facing 300 Taliban and had to call in US air strikes to destroy the rest of the village to save themselves.

…one story…I know it’s a fact, because I’ve investigated it fully in Iraq — is that in the first battle of Fallujah…, there were twelve US Marines guarding the mayor’s office at Ramadi,…and they were attacked by hundreds of Iraqi insurgents, and that twelve-man US Marine unit was liquidated. They were totally eliminated. They were killed, all of them. They were wiped out.

…So the dangers you see that we’re now facing, very much — I don’t mean to make too facile a comparison — very much the same dangers that the crusaders faced with overwhelming force from the Muslim armies of the 12th century, is that the local populations are now so full of fury and anger against us that they are attacking us in their hundreds, overwhelming force.

Where Do I Apply?

[Originally posted on goofyblog 3.13.07]

Coming soon to a workplace near you:

If they opt out of using these robots to keep an eye on employee activity, establishments such as banks, casinos, and stores can now monitor worker safety and / or misbehavior by slapping Third Eye SATS (Security Alert Tracking System) devices on their wrists.

The units use a bio-sensor chip with proprietary algorithms to track vitals like heart rate and oxygen saturation levels. The data is transmitted wirelessly to a central monitoring system that works with surveillance cameras to zoom in on an employee should their levels suddenly fluctuate; if a worker is threatened or engages in unsavory behavior, their unstable stress levels will alert the system to see exactly what the deal is.

from engadget.

The Brits Have it Down

[Originally posted on goofyblog 3.12.07]

This clip is a fantastic animated rendition of a surveillance society that implodes the idea we need more security at the cost of freedom.

“It is released under a Creative Commons sampling licence by David Scharf and you can download the short film in several formats.

“This is brilliant — some of the best work on the subject I’ve ever seen. Watch it NOW.”

found on Boing Boing. Clip is on youtube or here (not always working).

Idle Theory

[Originally posted on goofyblog 3.12.07]

When in school it seemed clear that the future of our country and the world was tilting toward a shorter work week, more leisure and play, more time to enjoy and to help others to enjoy the same. Some of that has happened but we are really still a long way away.

Happened onto Chris Davis’ site the other day–he has written a series of linked essays that form a cohesive philosophy. That every living organism naturally strives to be idle (or it will die) is compelling. His take on the genesis of religion and human society also.

On evolution: All life is seen as attempting primarily to stay alive with minimal effort. The first photosynthetic plants discovered how to capture the abundant radiant energy of the sun. The first herbivores discovered an easier life tapping the energy stored in plants. The first predators discovered an idler existence by capturing the energy stored in herbivores. Multicellular life was more idle than unicellular life. Human life is simply another variant form of life, that acts to minimize effort.

Human society, the division of labour, tools, ethical codes, laws, and trading systems have all acted to increase human idleness. The subjection of humans by other humans in slavery was, for millenia, the only way in which some people (the slaveowners) could lead an idle life at the expense of others.

On religion: God and the Devil were the personifications of perfect idleness and zero idleness respectively, and Heaven and Hell corresponded to their circumstances. Heaven represented a material abundance of the necessities of life, to be had with no effort, in which God lived in perfect freedom and ease. By contrast, Hell was a barren landscape in which the necessities of life were almost entirely absent, and survival required continual work.

Advocates of a Darwinian theory of evolution are often (e.g. Richard Dawkins) extremely hostile to religion. By contrast, Idle Theory could almost be said to breathe new meanings into some religious doctrines. But, in very important senses, Idle Theory also offers a quite new context and meanings to these doctrines. It supposes that the original rational meaning of these doctrines has become lost, perhaps because the language used to describe them became incomprehensible, and the meaning overlaid with superstition.

On the alienation of modern living: Laziness is a virtue, not a vice. A disinclination to work is not a disorder, but an indispensable survival trait that evolved with the earliest forms of life. If so, the modern attempt by governments, industrialists, economists, and the like, to keep people busy and “usefully employed” runs entirely contrary to the nature, not only of human beings, but of life itself. This may begin to explain the anomie of modern Western culture.

Modern human society is being organized to work against real human interests, and such cultural disintegration is inevitable. Instead of society being organized to minimize work, it has become organized to maximize work. The mismatch between what people are culturally required to do - to work -, and their natural inclination - to play -, results in deepening psychological conflict, breakdown, and disorder.

It is simply not possible for people to live happy lives in a society which is organized as a labour camp. It is no more possible for anyone to live a happy or fulfilled life in modern Western society than it was for the inmates of such camps.

On modern reactionaries: Contemporary human society is in transition from a medieval serf culture to an automated culture in which most work is performed by intelligent machine tools, and in which humans themselves will be largely idle.

Economically, exponentially multiplying technologies have resulted in an increase in production and trade unprecedented in human history, and equally unprecedented economic puzzles and problems, ranging from unemployment to boom and bust, inflation and stagnation. Socially, it has meant that, since fewer human hands are needed to drive industry, previously high human reproduction rates are unnecessary, and the human families that produced the human workforce redundant.

The scale of contemporary change in human society is so great, and disturbs so many aspects of traditional human life, that it has produced a conservative reaction which seeks to restore traditional life. Since the family has been the centre of human life for millennia, attempts are made to bolster the flagging institution.

Since work, from childhood to old age, has been the norm of human life since remotest antiquity, attempts are made to invent new forms of employment. Contemporary conservatism attempts to maintain and restore traditional values, and traditional ways of life, in the face of social, political, and economic forces which destroy all traditions.

On the future: Much of contemporary thought is still medieval in character, assuming the values and circumstances of a previous era. A master-slave mentality still permeates political thought and political structures. Human technology has far outstripped human political and ethical and economic thought.

This is a time when everything needs to be rethought, when imagination is at a premium, and when everyone can contribute. The impending world is one of a human freedom which has never been experienced in the entirety of human history.

Maybe Now We’ll Get Universal Healthcare

[Originally posted on goofyblog 3.6.07]

There’s an interview with Noam Chomsky on AlterNet this past weekend. Mostly it’s about Iraq and our foreign policy worldwide. Chomsky’s take is that the true constituency of the Bush Administration (and, mostly, the Dems, too) is not us, the people. Corporate profits are what runs our politics, polls be damned. Let’s see if he’s onto something. Here’s what he has to say about healthcare. Recently, Wal-mart and GM have stepped into the healthcare debate and more corps will follow. His analysis will be tested.

Chomsky: [O]n health insurance. Here’s an issue where, for the general population, it’s been the leading domestic issue, or close to it, for years. And there’s a consensus for a national healthcare system on the model of other industrial countries, maybe expanding Medicare to everyone or something like that. Well, that’s off the agenda, nobody can talk about that. The insurance companies don’t like it, the financial industry doesn’t like and so on.

Now there’s a change taking place. What’s happening is that manufacturing industries are beginning to turn to support for it because they’re being undermined by the hopelessly inefficient U.S. healthcare system. It’s the worst in the industrial world by far, and they have to pay for it. Since it’s employer-compensated, in part, their production costs are much higher than those competitors who have a national healthcare system.

Take GM. If it produces the same car in Detroit and in Windsor across the border in Canada, it saves, I forget the number, I think over $1000 with the Windsor production because there’s a national healthcare system, it’s much more efficient, it’s much cheaper, it’s much more effective.

So the manufacturing industry is starting to press for some kind of national healthcare. Now it’s beginning to put it on the agenda. It doesn’t matter if the population wants it. What 90% of the population wants would be kind of irrelevant. But if part of the concentration of corporate capital that basically runs the country — another thing we’re not allowed to say but it’s obvious — if part of that sector becomes in favor then the issue moves onto the political agenda.

Good Business Practices

[Originally posted on goofyblog 3.5.07]

	Sams Club	Costco
Generally…	Poor Labor Relations; High Turnover; Low or No Benefits	Strong Labor Relations; Very Low Turnover; Liberal Benefits
CEO Salary 2005	$17,543,739 (H. Lee Scott, Jr.)	$350,000 (co-founder Jim Sinegal)
Ratio to Average Employee Salary	871	10.5
Average Hourly Wage	$9.98	$16.00
Number of Employees	102,000	68,000
Total Sales 2004	$34 billion	$35 billion

Costco CEO Jim Senegal has said: “We pay much better than Wal-Mart. That’s not altruism. It’s good business.”

Visit Wake-Up Wal-mart for more details.

That’s what I’m talking about

[Originally posted on goofyblog 3.5.07]

My discovery of the wonderful world of podcasts keep expanding. First it was democracynow, broadcasting an hour per day from nyc on everything, I mean everything, it’s so great. Then I started getting into the BBC, 30 mins./day, some world news, but lots of UK news. I love the debates they have. No shouting and screaming like Faux News and other US news. Real debate.

Most recently, I’ve started grabbing past ‘casts of PBS’ Now, which Bill Moyers used to host.

Today I listened to one from late last year about what’s happening to people in the US middle-class, when a family member suffers a catastrophic medical emergency. Because of the change in the bankruptcy law done at the behest of our corporatocracy, coupled with the astonishing cost of hospital care here (another site I read regularly, described this in vivid economic detail–$38,000 for 1 week stay in a wounding hospital to heal a bed sore from care in the original hospital; $1.7 million total cost of care for the illness), these people can not get out from under these debts for years if ever, in effect pauperizing them as they are recovering.

So short-sighted and stupid to let this happen. It doesn’t have to be that way. Below, an excerpt from Bill Bonner:

In the United States, it costs about $1,650 to perform a cataract operation. You wouldn’t expect many such operations in a country such as India, where per capita income is probably less than $1000. But in India today, there are five hospitals that perform more than 180,000 eye operations each year. Each operation costs only about $110. Most of the patients pay nothing.

This is thanks to Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy, who set up his first 12-bed Aravind eye hospital in his brother’s home in Madurai, in 1976. At the time, he was already 57 years old.

Dr. V set out to be an obstetrician. But he was crippled by rheumatoid arthritis at an early age. He spent two years recovering. Because he could no longer deliver babies, he turned to the study of ophthalmology, and designed special tools that suited his hands. He found that he could do eye operations simpler, faster and much cheaper than they had been done before.

The inspiration, he says, comes from McDonald’s. He first discovered the golden arches at the age of 55 and it changed his life.

“In America, there are powerful marketing devices to sell products like Coca-Cola and hamburgers,” he says. “All I want to sell is good eyesight, and there are millions of people who need it…If Coca-Cola can sell billions of sodas and McDonald’s can sell billions of burgers, why can’t Aravind sell millions of sight-restoring operations…? With sight, people could be freed from hunger, fear, and poverty.

“In the third world, a blind person is referred to as ‘a mouth without hands,’” says Dr. V. “He is detrimental to his family and to the whole village. But all he needs is a 10-minute operation. One week the bandages go on, the next week they go off. High bang for the buck. But people don’t realize that the surgery is available, or that they can afford it, because it’s free. We have to sell them first on the need.”

The hospital picks up the tab for those who can’t pay. Paying customers are charged 50 rupees (about $1) per consultation and have their choice of accommodations: “A-class” rooms ($3 per day), which are private; “B-class” rooms ($1.50 per day), in which a toilet is shared; or “C-class” rooms ($1 per day), essentially a mat on the floor. Paying customers choose between surgery with stitches ($110) and surgery without stitches ($120).

Since he began, his eye hospitals have restored the sight of more than one million people in India. Even with such tiny revenues per patient, Aravind makes a profit, with a gross margin of 40%. One operation is completed; another is begun right away. It is apparently a very efficient and productive enterprise.

Aravind now does more eye surgeries than any other provider in the world, though it accepts no government grants. The hospitals are totally self-supporting. Nor does Dr. V. try to hustle a profit from the enterprise for himself. He lives on a pension, taking no money out of Aravind.

Dr. V. is helping the poor in a big way. But he also helps them in a way very different from the typical world improver. He sees them as individuals.

“Consultants talk of ‘the poor,’” he says. “No one at Aravind does. ‘The poor’ is a vulgar term. Would you call Christ a poor man? To think of certain people as ‘the poor’ puts you in a superior position, blinds you to the ways in which you are poor - and in the West there are many such ways: emotionally and spiritually, for example. You have comforts in America, but you are afraid of each other.”

Dr. V set out only to do eye operations…quickly and cheaply. The world improvement came - as it always does - as a by-product of private action. In Tamil Nadu state, where his main hospital is located, the incidence of blindness is 20% below the rest of India.

This Past Week

[Originally posted on goofyblog 3.5.07]

Surfing has its benefits. So much to discover and learn. First, a few quotes recently discovered:

“We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

-Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

“Overgrown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.”

-George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796

“Of all the enemies to liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other…. (Delegating) such powers (to the president) would have struck, not only at the fabric of the Constitution, but at the foundation of all well organized and well checked governments.”

-James Madison

Next,

• While looking (again) for Busted, which I recommended last year, (it was created by flexyourrights and the ACLU–I discovered it had been withdrawn from youtube), I found this great video archive, jonhs.net, which has a treasure trove of videos including:
  

• Full-length feature films from all eras of the 20^th century (e.g., M, Buster Keaton, Chaplan, etc.)
  


• Documentaries (Oil, Smoke & Mirrors, Hitler’s Private World, Gangs in El Salvador, 911 Truth, Big Brother, Big Business)


• Animation, Music vids and performace docs,TV shows

• Thanks to the latest issue of Rolling Stone, I downloaded and watched the 10-minute Justin Timberlake video for What Goes Around Comes Around (available in .torrent form–check google for download links). Written and directed by Nick Cassevetes, it stars super-sensual Scarlett Johansson in dark club & mansion settings with a cast of 20-somethings. The car-crash at the end in a pre-dawn downtown L.A., is so great. Timberlake has chops!
  

• Again thanks to RS, I looked through the top press photos of 2006 on the World Press Photo web site, where you can view everything from portraits of Clint Eastwood to shots of war zones all over the world.
  

Then, there was the usual plethora of blog articles on the usual plethora of subjects of immediate importance:

• Rose Ann Demoro writes in Public Health Alert: Stage Red:
  

In the past 30 years, the number of public hospitals in America has fallen by 30%. Public hospitals and clinics could soon be as extinct as the woolly mammoth.

In that same period the combined debt of state and local governments has exploded, climbing by 852% to nearly $200 billion. The devastating consequences become more apparent every day.

While our public facilities are starved for resources, hospital profits the past 20 years totaled $310 billion. The 13 largest drug companies recorded $62 billion in profits in 2004. The 20 largest HMOs made $10.8 billion in 2005.

David Roberts writes in 24 Sucks about Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan’s meeting with the creators of 24 to tell them to cut it out: torture doesn’t work and the show’s continual use of it is nothing more than bullshit propaganda. He also details the rise of torture in movies and television and what it might mean:

There’s been an unsettling change in not only what heroes do, but what makes a hero at all. Any comic book reader knows that what separates heroes from evildoers is their unwillingness to kill, torture, or even personally punish the guilty. Restraint, in and of itself, is a heroic attribute. … You can’t transgress ever, or you blur that line separating you from your enemies (another treasured trope is the defeated villain taunting the hero to give in and kill him, the subtext being that if the evildoer can make the hero act the villain, he will have won even as he died).

[24’s Jack] Bauer, of course, is the antithesis of that attitude. His heroism stems from his brutality, his willingness to dissolve every ethical boundary in pursuit of higher ends. His is a heroism for a weak and scared nation, one that’s decided the old ways of restraint and ethical exceptionalism are insufficiently effective and is trying to convince itself that a loosening of those bonds could restore order and security. That’s a scary shift in the culture.

Finally, Amy Goodman of democracynow interviewed General Wesley Clark (our next Democratic President, for my money) last Tuesday, then podcast the entire interview on Friday. General Clark is honest, decisive and active, in a way completely unlike Obama, Hillary and even Gore, and he is someone to watch in the coming months and year ahead.

Gas Rationing Next

[Originally posted on goofyblog 3.2.07]

Writing for The Daily Reckoning Australia, Bill Bonner says it better than I ever could:

The worldwide media is speculating as to what the Bush administration will do next. The general tone of the guesswork is this: just how dumb are these people?

So widespread is the belief that the United States is run by idiots, we feel compelled to rush to their defence. They are morons, maybe… but not idiots.

There are two major parts to the administration’s program: deficit spending and war. Either one would be ruinous in itself. But what is remarkable is that neither seems to take any notice of the other. Normally, in times of war, the whole budget is put toward winning it. Citizens see the necessity of sacrifice. They cinch up their own belts and resign themselves to living lean until the battles are over and the boys come home.

But this war breaks all the rules. Spending on non-war items continues to go up, even though the war itself is incredibly expensive. And even though the nation lacks the money to pay for it, no ‘war bonds’ are being offered. No collections for scrap tin or iron are taken up. No ration tickets are distributed.

Guns or butter, Lyndon Johnson was warned. You can have one or the other, but try to go for both and you will make a mess of things. Of course, Johnson did try for both. His Great Society was also the society that was trying to kick butt in Vietnam. As it turned out, it got its own butt kicked…and the economy went into the worst period of inflation in its history, followed by the worst recession since the Great Depression.

The Bush boys knew these facts as well as us. Even better known, since Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney have been Capitol Hill insiders since the Nixon Administration… and hardly a major blunder in Washington has been committed since the 1970s without their help.

No… the Bush administration is not just plain stupid. It is stupid in a more complex way. Will it now turn its stupidity on Iran? We don’t know. It would be a very stupid thing to do. But put that way, it sounds like a certainty.

¿Cómo te vale?

[Originally posted on goofyblog 2.27.07]

In many schools throughout the world, kids are routinely taught one or more languages. The last time I was in London, my UK friend recommended I go to Amsterdam partly because as she said the Dutch all speak English fluently as well as their own language. She was right and most also had fluency in German and French as well.

The same goes for the Germans and Africans I’ve met here in New York. They speak good English and usually know conversational French at the least, because language learning is mandatory and children learn 2^nd & 3^rd languages most easily before 12 years old.

We have the 5^th largest Spanish speaking population in the world (after, starting from the largest, Mexico, Spain, Argentina and Colombia). Why aren’t our kids being taught at least Spanish, that being the 2^nd most spoken language in the Western hemisphere?

A recent article by Philip Slater says in part:

A Spanish pilot last week foiled a hijacker by giving the Arabic and Spanish-speaking passengers instructions in French. It’s lucky the passengers weren’t Americans. They probably wouldn’t have had a clue what he was saying. Americans may be the most linguistically deficient people in the world. Even poor people in Third World countries often speak two or three languages, while we have ‘English only’ laws to protect us from being confronted with our own ignorance.

Suspicion of anything outside our borders is contributing to our economic and cultural decline. We used to be number one in education, technology, and science. But in just a few years, thanks to the xenophobia of the Bush administration and its supporters, we’ve fallen behind much of Europe and Asia. Twenty years ago the U.S. ranked first in the world in percentage of both college degrees and high school diplomas. Today we’ve slipped to 7th and 9th respectively. In 1970 more than half of the world’s science and engineering doctorates came from U.S. universities. By 2001 the European Union granted 40% more than the United States.

China now has four times as many engineers as the United States–it used to have one-sixth. The United States is down to 14th in science graduates–partly because fundamentalism has made the American South abysmally ignorant in geology, biology, and astronomy. Foreign student applications to study in the U.S. are half what they were, with the UK and Germany picking up the slack. We’re far behind Asians in math literacy. In 2000 we were number one in broadband Internet access. Now we’re 16th. In 2000 we produced 40% of the world’s telecom equipment, now only 21%. We now rank 42nd in the percentage of the population with cell phones. Once the world’s technological and educational leader, we’re becoming an also-ran.

For more about this, see Cynthia Tucker’s Foreign languages should be learned, not limited here.

War in Iran?

[Originally posted on goofyblog 2.26.07]

General Wesley Clark has partnered up with VoteVets, the site for veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars, to start a new web site built to collect signatures on a petition to be presented to El Presidente Decider that War with Iran is not the answer with the Axis of Evil country to the East.

You can go to stopIranWar to sign the petition and find other ways you might make a difference and do something about the future start of WWIII.

Will Work for Food

[Originally posted on goofyblog 2.26.07]

“A country with two great rivers should have been the biggest exporter in the world, but now we beg for food from those who participated in killing us.”

Iraq is rich in agricultural resources.

Barley, wheat, pulses and the famous Iraqi dates are staple diet. Common meals in Iraq include rice, lamb, chicken and locally grown vegetables like cucumbers, onions and tomatoes.

But, when Paul Bremer began governing Iraq after the invasion, he lowered tariffs on imported goods, including food, Iraq farmers could not compete and many went into bankruptcy.

And then the cost of imported food inflated dramatically, fueling stability-challenging inflation. The farmers who remained in business are hampered getting their produce to market by the scarcity of gas and the security situation in the country.

Initially, international aid helped provide food, but much of that was stopped after aids workers were kidnapped as the insurgency began. That left Australian and other US contractors to send in food stuffs. But there are problems:

Low quality – In July 2006, thousands of tons of contaminated food was destroyed that was past its expiry date and that had already caused wide-spread food poisoning. Distributions of Australian wheat were found to contain steel fragments.

Corruption – Sectarian favoritism or simple corruption in the distribution of food rations, which 60% of Iraqis use and which 6.5 million are “highly dependent” upon.

When something as basic eating is a big problem, people aren’t thinking about democracy or feeling any gratitude toward their “liberators.”

“The whole country has been stolen from us. If this goes on another six months, we will be just like any starving country.”

More here.

Britney, Brangelina, Lindsey, Paris, Ashlee, Jessica, Anna…wtf?

[Originally posted on goofyblog 2.23.07]

Matt Taibbi writes at alternet:

“Now, after she shaved her head in a bizarre episode that culminates a months-long saga of controversial behavior, it’s the question being asked by her fans, her foes and the general public: What was she thinking?”– Bald and Broken: Inside Britney’s Shaved Head, Sheila Marikar, ABC.com, Feb. 19

What was she thinking? How about nothing? How about who gives a shit?

I understand that we live in a demand-based economy and that there is far more demand for brainless celebrity bullshit than there is, say, for the fine print of the Health and Human Services budget.

But this week. I awoke this morning in New York City to find Britney Spears plastered all over the cover of two gigantic daily newspapers, simply because she cut her hair off over the weekend. Britney Spears cutting her hair off is the least-worthy front page news story in the history of humanity.

On the same day that Britney was shaving her head, a guy I know who works in the office of Senator Bernie Sanders sent me an email. He was trying very hard to get news organizations interested in some research his office had done about George Bush’s proposed 2008 budget, which was unveiled two weeks ago and received relatively little press, mainly because of the controversy over the Iraq war resolution. All the same, the Bush budget is an amazing document. It would be hard to imagine a document that more clearly articulates the priorities of our current political elite.

Not only does it make many of Bush’s tax cuts permanent, but it envisions a complete repeal of the Estate Tax, which mainly affects only those who are in the top two-tenths of the top one percent of the richest people in this country. The proposed savings from the cuts over the next decade are about $442 billion, or just slightly less than the amount of the annual defense budget (minus Iraq war expenses). But what’s interesting about these cuts are how Bush plans to pay for them.

Sanders’s office came up with some interesting numbers here. If the Estate Tax were to be repealed completely, the estimated savings to just one family — the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune — would be about $32.7 billion dollars over the next ten years.

The proposed reductions to Medicaid over the same time frame? $28 billion.

Tesla Down Under

[Originally posted on goofyblog 2.22.07]

The site has info on making your own Tesla coils, can crushers, lasers a potpourri of devices for the advanced nerd. Check it out!

Thx to neatorama.

Those Whacky Europeans

[Originally posted on goofyblog 2.21.07]

I’m not reading much of the New York Post as I used to. The Post is a Rupert Murdoch rag and it features regular editorials by such heavy thinkers as Michelle Malkin and Bill O’Reilly. The paper’s hard-news articles are either of the lock-’em-up-throw-away-the-key-true-crime variety of story or heavily-slanted-to-the-right national and international news. Throw in a dash of celebrity gossip (Page 6, Liz Smith and Cindy Adams), some sports news and media reviews, and there’s your 25-cent daily tabloid.

Nearly everyday I’d read through it, fascinated by all the crime stories and police-blotter news squibs. You realize: man, NYC is a violent city (well in some neighborhoods). You quickly come to the conclusion you should end your club going/bar hopping early. The shooting and fighting start about 4 AM, when the bars start closing.

That’s the stranger-on-stranger violence. The domestic-variety mayhem can happen anytime and there’s plenty of that too. Then there are the frequent stories of young women dumping their newborn babies. In dumpsters and other places. Some babies are found in time and are saved, some are not.

A woman would have to be really desperate to throw or give away the newborn that she had carried to term, but, in America, when a baby is discovered abandoned, even if it’s still alive, first thing is it becomes a police matter; great effort is expended to track and capture the mother, whereupon she is charged, tried and, if convicted, imprisoned. Our punitive way of looking at things.

In some places they do it differently though. I came upon the following story listening to BBC. I had no idea that the “foundling wheel” has been in existence for centuries. The concept is good: all emphasis is on the newborn and its survival. Check it out:

Dec. 15, 2006 — Italy has revived the medieval practice of establishing special depositories where parents can safely and anonymously abandon their unwanted newborn babies.

From the as far back as the 8th century, it was common for desperate mothers to lay an unwanted child on a wooden wheel, which was half inside the wall of a convent and half outside. This allowed mothers to leave their babies without been seen.

Today’s version of the so-called “foundling wheel,” follows the same concept, but has been updated. The new foundling wheel offers a heated cradle area and is located half inside the Casilino hospital in Rome.

In the old models, parents rang a bell once they had placed their baby in the wheel and turned it so the baby was wheeled inside. The new wheel is wired to automatically signal hospital employees when a baby has arrived.

Raffaela Milano, the Rome councilor for social affairs, said reviving the old tradition is an attempt to offer desperate mothers a “further option.”

“Under the Italian law any woman has the right to give birth anonymously in all hospitals. We created this wheel for those women who are not aware of this opportunity,” Milano said.

Located in a poor district with a high concentration of immigrants, the Casilino hospital has recorded the highest number of abandoned babies in Rome.

In the past three years, 26 babies were abandoned at birth in the hospital.

The first foundling wheel began functioning in Marseille, France in 1188. A decade later, Pope Innocent III, shocked by the number of dead babies found in the Tiber, founded Italy’s first revolving crib at the Hospital of Santo Spirito, on the Tiber embankment near the Vatican.The wheel concept spread, especially in the 13th and 14th centuries, and as late as the 19th century thousands of wheels were installed and thousands of babies were recovered across Europe.

[Photo by kind permission of http://www.babyklappe.info/ Walter Winckelmann - Metallarbeiten, Hamburg]

Young Undertakers

[Originally posted on goofyblog 2.21.07]

From neatorama:

Eri van den Biggelaar, 40, has just a few weeks to live after being diagnosed last year with an aggressive form of cervical cancer.

She asked the woodwork teacher, a friend, to build a coffin for her. “Why don’t you let the children make it?” replied Erik van Dijk.

Now pupils of the school in Someren, who normally plane wood for baskets and placemats, have been helping with the finishing touches. They have already sawed more than 100 narrow boards and glued them together. Only the lid needs to be completed.

Cruel and Usual

[Originally posted on goofyblog 2.20.07]

In the never-ending attempts to legislate morality, US & State representatives rush to pass complicated laws on all aspects of sexual behavior. Laws are passed with ever more draconian penalties attached. The Hang ‘Em High mentality that pervades the legal community (judges, DAs, legislators, governors, presidents), our adversarial form of jurisprudence, insures injustice. Two recent examples are:

A Connecticut court is siding with the school system in the case of substitute teacher Julie Amero, who has been convicted for four counts of “risking injury to a child.” Amero now faces up to 40 years of jail time for pornographic pop-ups that appeared on a computer she was using in a classroom—pop-ups that she and her lawyers argue were a result of spy and adware on the computer, out-of-date virus software, and an expired firewall license—the perfect storm for pornographic pop-ups, all on a Windows 98 machine running Internet Explorer 5.

Amero was substituting for a middle-school English class and asked the regular teacher permission to use the computer to e-mail her husband. Amero left the room to use the restroom, and upon her return says that she found several students gathered around the machine looking at a web site. A series of unfortunate events occurred from this point on, resulting in a slew of pornographic pop-ups appearing on the screen. The onslaught continued despite Amero’s attempts to close the windows. Amero ran to get help from the teacher’s lounge, where she told four teachers and the assistant principal about the problem, and where another teacher reportedly told her to ignore the pop-ups. At some point, students attested to Amero’s attempts to block the screen with her hands and push students away.

In court, school officials testified that the school’s firewall software had indeed expired, that the anti-virus software on the computer was long out of date, and that there were no anti-spyware tools on the machine. The prosecution’s computer “expert,” a local police officer who investigates computer crimes, testified that the computer’s logs showed that Amero had voluntarily accessed pornographic sites.

A former teacher at the same school told the Washington Post’s Security Fix blog that the school had very few restrictions on what the children themselves were able to freely access on the school’s computers, saying, “You could look at any history in any computer and chances are you would see the children had [visited] inappropriate sites.”

Amero faces sentencing on March 2 and plans to appeal the case.

And this:

Genarlow Wilson sits in prison despite being a good son, a good athlete and high school student with a 3.2 GPA. He never had any criminal trouble. On the day he was to sit for the SAT, at seventeen years old, his life changed forever. He was arrested. In Douglas County he was accused of inappropriate sexual acts at a News Year’s Eve party. A jury acquitted him of the allegation of Rape but convicted him of Aggravated Child Molestation for a voluntary act of oral sex with another teenager. He was 17, and she was 15.

Along with the label “child molester” which will require him throughout his life to be on a sexual offender registry, Genarlow received a sentence of eleven years — a mandatory 10 years in prison and 1 year on probation.

On July 1st, the new Romeo and Juliet law went into effect in Georgia for any other teen that engages in consensual sexual acts. That change in the law means that no teen prosecuted for consensual oral sex could receive more than a 12 months sentence or be required to register as a sex offender.

Had this law been in effect when Genarlow Wilson was arrested, or had been done after the Marcus Dixon case, Genarlow would not now be in jail.

Genarlow and his mother are overjoyed that no one else in Georgia will have to know their pain. In the meantime, however, the legal fight goes on for Genarlow Wilson.

Genarlow has been incarcerated since February 25, 2005.

Update: the act was initiated by the 15 year old. Genarlow didn’t say no; he is doing 10 years without possibility of parole. More here.

Update II: Senator Emanuel D. Jones, a Democrat, sponsored legislation that would make it possible for judges to reconsider the cases of hundreds of young adults, including Mr. Wilson, who are serving long mandatory minimum sentences in prison for having consensual sex with teenage minors. Mr. Jones said the bill was mysteriously left off the agenda of the Senate Judiciary Committee last week.

And on Monday, the Senate’s leader, Eric Johnson, a Republican, publicly denounced the bill and said that although Mr. Wilson, now 20, was serving a harsh sentence, he deserved no leniency.

Astonishing Photography

[Originally posted on goofyblog 2.19.07]

I don’t know what software for post-processing Trey Ratcliff uses for the shots he takes of his travels all over the world, but wow! His blog is Stuck in Customs.

Coloseum lit by candlelight.

Cowled Prayer

Icy Pit to Hell

Hell, no, we won’t Go!

[Originally posted on goofyblog 2.19.07]

In the Vietnam War era, there were many, many protests over a variety of things. University students “took over” some campuses in protest of university policies that limited free speech, and since there was a draft, there were many nationwide protests against the war and the draft.

Most of the protesters in these demonstrations were either affected directly (students at universities and draft-age men) or indirectly (the parents of draftable men). Back then, we always felt that the rest of the US was either apathetic or outright hostile to strikes and protests. Later, I was in several union strikes and it was the same story. Even in the 60s, it was curious how uninvolved most people were.

Near the end of the war more people started publicly protesting, people who had no personal stake in it, who weren’t going to be called on to go to war. The students had eventually led the rest of the country to reject the war. Finally, the war was over and many things suddenly began to change for the better. And what did everyone do?

They all disappeared. Life became about “Me” in the 70s and protests a quaint memory. Where’d they all go?

Well now comes an interesting piece by Zbignew Zhingh analyzing why we are so apathetic here in the Cradle of Democracy, democracy founded on violent protest and revolution.

A perplexed European asked me a question: Why, she asked, have there been no general strikes in America to end its aggression in the Middle East? Why, she asked, are Americans so unwilling to force their government do what must be done?

These are not new questions. Everyone with an inkling of history and a modest awareness of international news realizes that Americans, completely contrary to the foundation myth of the American Revolution, are incredibly docile. It stings, however, when someone from the outside points out an obvious weakness.

Citizens of other industrialized countries are able to organize national actions to achieve common goals. Americans at the university, labor, middle class and working class levels, however, seem to be utterly impotent and thoroughly disorganized in any long-term, coordinated endeavor that extends beyond electoral politics. We literally struggle to organize coordinated national events.

A general strike is one of the most powerful tools of non-violent civil disobedience. In a general strike all work stops, businesses shut down, consumers do not spend money, teachers and students stay away from school, employees call in sick, lawyers do not try cases, assembly line workers do not assemble, teamsters park their rigs, pilots do not fly, doctors practice only emergency medicine, and commerce grinds to a halt. General strikes are not violent, but they cause tremendous economic hurt. When properly coordinated and prepared, they are very persuasive. General strikes have toppled governments, such as in Argentina, and they have prevented the implementation of anti-labor legislation, most notably in France and in Italy.

Some argue that Americans are simply too economically comfortable to participate in any political action more strenuous that penciling an X on a ballot. That cannot be the answer. Indeed, the notion that Americans live better than everyone else is part of our national mythology. Although many Americans reside in spacious (and heavily mortgaged) houses and, by incurring massive debt, own lots of “stuff”, citizens of several European industrialized nations live, on average, healthier, more secure lives and work far fewer hours than most Americans. Certain Asian countries are not far behind. Notwithstanding their better living conditions, Germans, French, Italians and Spaniards, for example, are still more willing to take concerted political action than are Americans.

Zingh attributes this curious American defect to one thing: the legacy of slavery and the fear of unemployment. That is exactly why no one but those directly at risk was protesting in the 60s and why there is not much happening now.

In the nation’s first hundred years, slavery was a mechanism for controlling “free labor”. After emancipation, freed slaves (though hardly free in any real sense of the term) were used as a cheap labor reserve that both in the South and in the North was manipulated to hold back wages all across the industrial horizon, from Black to White. By inciting White workers to extreme racial animus against Black “competitors”, business interests succeeded in preventing the creation of a unified labor front that could have benefited everyone.

Subsequently, poor European immigrants, women and children have been exploited in the United States for the same reason and in the same way, just as were immigrant laborers imported from China and the Philippines during the industrial expansion of the late 19th Century. The entire American immigration policy of the 19th Century was an effort to control wages by bringing in cheap labor from overseas, much as “globalized” labor is used today.

Add to the mix the use of religion to shunt people away from protesting and striking for changes and benefits.

Religion holds the greatest sway over the least politically thoughtful peoples. This is not an accident. The particular flavor of religion that dominates in the United States generally preaches doctrines of pacifism, obedience to authority and a focus on rewards in a life after death. It promotes a culture of minimal secular resistance and maximal secular resignation.

We have so little job security here and our public benefits are so flimsy. If you lose your job you lose your health care, paid days off and all the other perks (if any) you receive only if you stay employed. Best to just shut up and get back to work. Oh, and make sure you go to Church and pray to God you don’t lose your job and miss the mortgage payment.

It’s a troubling perspective. Without more of a cohesive social safety net that is not punitive or over-bureaucratized, most people are too insecure to think politically. Thus, political action has been severely curtailed in this country. But, like other countries (Argentina, Bolivia, the US during the Depression), if things get so bad there is little left to lose, people will wake up.

[The pic for this article is a shot of protesters — in France — protesting a measure, due to go into effect in April, that will make it easier to hire and fire young people at a time when the youth unemployment rate averages 23 percent.]