"The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend." - Henri Bergson, French Philosopher and Educator.
"Education
would be much more effective if its purpose was to ensure that by the
time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they do
not know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it." - William Haley, British Editor
"The important thing is not to stop questioning." - Albert Einstein
Saddam's Physician, Iceland's Peaceful Revolution, Israel Violated Ceasefire
Delete Facebook
Hagel Confirmed as Defense Secretary...Barely
Exxon Hates Your Children
Published on Feb 26, 2013
Corporations are people, my friends,
and the sooner we recognize that simple fact, the sooner we'll
acknowledge that corporate personhood is the greatest civil rights issue
facing the nation.
Posted: 27 Feb 2013 12:23 AM PST
27 February 2013
Nobel Prize for Medicine winner
Richard J Roberts recently denounced the pharmaceutical industry for
orienting its research not to curing illnesses, but to developing
medicine for chronic ailments, which is much more economically
profitable.
Roberts suggested the illnesses that are particular to poorer
countries, because of their low profitability, are simply not
researched, with 90% of the research budget aimed at illnesses suffered
by 10% of the world’s population.
Cuba’s public medicine industry is guided by radically different principles.
In the first place, its research is aimed at developing vaccines that
prevent illnesses and as a consequence, reduce the population’s
spending on medicine.
There is an absence, in the
Cuban model, of commercial pressures and encouragement by pharmaceutical
companies, and a successful strategy of educating the population about
preventative healthcare.
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Christopher
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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34101.htm
repost 2008
In 10 easy steps
Tuesday April 24, 2007
The Guardian
Last
autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup
took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping
list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been
closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers
into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued
restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took
certain activists into custody.
They were not figuring
these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see
that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a
dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and
less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective.
It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but
history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to
be willing to take the 10 steps.
As
difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to
look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in
the United States by the Bush administration. Because Americans
like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that
it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other
nations.
Because we no longer learn
much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being
aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership
to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors
- we scarcely recognize the checks and balances that the founders put
in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we
don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department
of "homeland" security - remember who else was keen on the word
"homeland" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might have.
It
is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his
administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open
society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as
the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can
happen here. And that we are further along than we realize.
Conason
eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am
arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other
kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events
we see unfolding in the US.
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
After
we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock.
Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was
passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that
they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a "war
footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate"
intending to "wipe out civilization". There have been other times of
crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as
during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second
world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned.
But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes,
is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum
was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended
in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is
the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no defined end."
Creating
a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It
can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's
security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced
calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the
alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was
swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which
replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or
the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist
evocation of the "global conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth.
It
is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course
it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature
of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also
suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish
citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as
American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the
end of civilization as we know it. Of course, this makes us more
willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.
2. Create a gulag
Once
you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison
system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American
detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer
space") - where torture takes place.
At first, the
people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders:
troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially,
citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel
safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough,
civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and
journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.
This
process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns
ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin
American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for
closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.
With
its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba,
where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and
without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its
gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would
issue no information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons
throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been
seized off the street.
Gulags in history tend to
metastasize, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly
and formalized. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos
and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been
tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't
investigate adequately.
But Americans still assume this
system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom
they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit
William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had
been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews."
Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of
law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.
By
the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners
due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and
Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up
the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners
were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being
charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually,
the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the
regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favor of Nazi ideology when
making decisions.
3. Develop a thug caste
When
leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an
open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to
terrorize citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside
beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout
Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a
democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs
who are free from prosecution.
The years following
9/11 have proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the
Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to
the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions
of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and
abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of
involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on
Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq
by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these
contractors are immune from prosecution.
Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however,
after
Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and
deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The
investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard
who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a
natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration's
endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect
privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management
at home in US cities.
Thugs in America? Groups
of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers,
menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are
reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for "public
order" on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on
the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a
private security firm at a polling station "to restore public order".
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
In
Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in
communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on
ordinary people and encourage neighbors to spy on neighbors. The Stasi
needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to
convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.
In
2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New
York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones,
read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it
became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state
scrutiny.
In closed
societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security";
the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism
and dissent.
5. Harass citizens' groups
The
fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass
citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose
minister preached that Jesus was in favor of peace, found itself being
investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got
Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have
been left alone.
Other harassment is more serious: the
American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary
American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated
by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen
peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in
its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret
Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of
Defense has been gathering information about domestic organizations
engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track
"potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen
activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as
animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist"
slowly expands to include the opposition.
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
This
scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof
and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes:
the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy
activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released
many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of
dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you
are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.
In
2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that
it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or
worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the
list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal
Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after
Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US
citizens.
Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of
Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars
in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy
is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially
politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding
pass at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list".
"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee.
"I
explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in
September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the
web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the
constitution."
"That'll do it," the man said.
Anti-war
marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential
terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people"
tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.
James Yee, a
US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of
mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military
before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and
released several times. He is still of interest.
Brandon
Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified
as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his
computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he
is still on the list.
It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off.
7. Target key individuals
Threaten
civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe
the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did
not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged
academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so
does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students
and professors.
Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so
those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with
professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term,
ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most
vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that
fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the
Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7
1933.
Bush supporters in state legislatures in several
states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalize or fire
academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil
servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one
military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an
administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that
represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major
corporate clients to boycott them.
Elsewhere, a CIA
contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is
torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to
do her job.
Most recently, the administration purged
eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty.
When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were
"coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal
laws to follow.
8. Control the press
Italy
in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s,
Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s,
China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators
target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more
open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and
worse in societies that have been closed already.
The
Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at
an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco,
has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an
anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint
against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical
infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of
Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical
of the Bush administration.
Other reporters and
writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush,
in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of
a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in
Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of
retaliation that ended her career.
Prosecution and job
loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating
journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way.
The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of
the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon
unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from
organizations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may
question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the
accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases
reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in
2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized
by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organizations
were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.
Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents.
Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his
claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The
yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.
You
won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible.
But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a
steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is
a White House directing a stream of false information that is so
relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth.
In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When
citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for
accountability bit by bit.
9. Dissent equals treason
Cast
dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing
society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly
criminalize certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy"
and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times,
ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of
classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress
called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators
and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as
Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating
the Espionage Act is execution.
Conason is right to
note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important
to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of
Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed.
And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage
Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids,
leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups,
kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated,
tortured and threatened with death", according to the historian Myra
MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.
In
Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people".
National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy
"November traitors".
And here is where the circle
closes: most Americans do not realize that since September of last year -
when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act
of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy
combatant". He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The
president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive
branch the right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and
then seize Americans accordingly.
Even if you or I are
American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of
what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as
we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock
on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in
isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged
isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise
mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation
cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest,
most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)
We
US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights
activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush
administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get
around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a
status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We
have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look
like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're
going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR.
Most
Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe,
even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point
there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders,
clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests,
there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a
civil society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom.
If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.
10. Suspend the rule of law
The
John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new
powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency -
which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send
Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared
in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.
Even
as Americans were focused on Britney Spear’s meltdown and the question
of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialized
about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that
laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in
the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now
use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural
disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other
condition'."
Critics see this as a clear violation of
the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal
government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The
Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to
declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the
founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen
citizens bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of
exactly this kind of concentration of militias' power over American
people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.
Of
course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total
closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or
Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too
resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind
of scenario like that.
Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.
It
is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile
of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal
on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria
in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931.
Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while
someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing:
"dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite
leisurely from the disaster."
As Americans turn away
quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol,
the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has
changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic
traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a
context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end,
on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the
president - without US citizens realizing it yet - the power over US
citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.
That
means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these
still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way
under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to
think about the "what ifs".
What if, in a year and a
half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The
executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any
leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after
the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and
balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a
President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce
his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process
of democratic negotiation and compromise.
What if the publisher
of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a
rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or
she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next
day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they
would suddenly be very polite.
Right now, only a
handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the
rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced
death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way
to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union;
and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws,
under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This
small, disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including
that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put
pressure on the administration because they can see what a US
unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the
world.
We need to look at history and face the "what
ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of America" could
come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of
us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and
think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now.
"The
accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in
the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison.
We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our
ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders
asked us to carry.
"Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind." - Virginia Woolf
