Global Vistas

TOP 10 REASONS TO SUPPORT H.R. 676, THE U.S. NATIONAL INSURANCE ACT prepared by Physicians for a National Health Plan

Gene Mason — Wed, 27 May 2009 17:58:00 GMT

Our best chance of getting a single-payer universal health care system is now. The top 10 reasons to support
H.R. 676 are provided here.

Everybody In, Nobody Out. Universal means access to health care for everyone, period.

Portability. If you are unemployed, or lose or change jobs, your health coverage stays
with you.

Uniform Benefits. No Cadillac plans for the wealthy and Pinto plans for everyone else,
with high deductibles, limited services, caps on payments for care, and no protection
in the event of a catastrophe. One level of comprehensive care for everyone, regardless
of the size of your wallet.

Prevention. By removing financial roadblocks, a universal health system encourages
preventive care that lowers an individual's ultimate cost and pain and suffering
when problems are neglected and societal cost in the over-utilization of emergency
rooms or the spread of communicable diseases.

Choice. Most private insurance restricts your choice of providers and hospitals.
Under the U.S. National Health Insurance Act, patients have a choice, and the provider
is assured a fair payment.

No Interference with Care. Caregivers and patients regain their autonomy to decide
what's best for a patient's health, not what's dictated by the billing department.
No denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions or cancellation of policies for
"unreported" minor health problems.

Reducing Waste. One third of every private health insurance dollar goes for paperwork
and profits, compared to about 3% under Medicare, the federal government's universal
system for senior citizen healthcare.

Cost Savings. A guaranteed health care system can produce the cost savings needed to
cover everyone, largely by using existing resources without the waste. Taiwan, shifting
from a U.S. private health care model, adopted a similar system in 1995, boosting health
coverage from 57% to 97% with little increase in overall health care spending.

Common Sense Budgeting. The public system sets fair reimbursements applied equally to all
providers, private and public, while assuring that appropriate health care is delivered,
and uses its clout to negotiate volume discounts for prescription drugs and medical
equipment.

Public Oversight. The public sets the policies and administers the system, not high
priced CEOs meeting in private and making decisions based on their company's stock
performance needs.

Fear of Flight by Snowy Woodbine

Gene Mason — Thu, 07 May 2009 02:58:00 GMT

Allow me to share my recent experience on a major airline carrier, (Jetblue) which resulted in my being
expelled from my flight. First let me preface this tale by saying that I have had a life long terror
of airplane travel. This despite the fact that I have traversed the globe since I was two years old.
However as age and dementia have started their vicious crawl, it has only worsened. One of the
manifestations of this horrific and paralyzing fear, is I always feel compelled to stop at the
cockpit as I am boarding and check my drivers. I have done this for well over thirty years and
never had an issue. I smile as I enter and ask is everyone okay today? Everyone sober and no hangovers?
Ready to fly? The answers to this oft repeated query of mine, from the many pilots and co-pilots
has always been very friendly and good humored, as they reassure me all is well and we expect smooth flying.
This makes me feel better, enough so I am able to take my seat and endure the event in its entirety.

All of that took a frightening turn last Friday April the 30th at JFK, as I was preparing to leave NY
and come home to the Bahamas.

I walked onto the plane and stopped at the cockpit and asked my questions. No sooner had the words
left my mouth, than the pilot was shrieking that I was ruining his career! What? I don't even know
you mister, how can I do that? He is escalating wildly, screaming this is his career and not some joke!
He grabs the microphone and calls for security. I am apologizing profusely, trying to explain I meant
no harm and it is just because I am frightened! He orders me off the plane to wait on the bridge for
security to come! I am stunned.

Then, barreling down the ramp comes 'Tim' from Corporate Security, who also comes at me like gang
busters, screaming about this mans career! The career thing again! I am still mystified as to exactly
why I am being taken off the plane? Big bad Tim, clearly an Irishman with an NYPD background, could
not have been any nastier to me as he explained that now, because of my 'joke', the entire crew would
have to be tested before they could pull out! Okay. I now am beginning to comprehend. Sort of.

So what exactly was my crime I still want to know? Was it asking a stupid question because I was afraid?
Or, was it putting the pilot at risk of giving a dirty urine? If he is clean, how can that ruin his career?
Furthermore, do I not have the right as a paying customer to know the fitness of my driver? I would with
someone driving me in a car right? Now all of this is not to say that he appeared under the influence to me,
because that is not why I asked the question.

Post 9/11 hyper-vigilance has taken a dangerous turn. I feel my rights slowly seeping away like the tides.
I am an educated and attractive middle aged woman. I was not giving them any trouble. Other than a few tears
of powerlessness. Never mind the cheap prices and fancy new terminal folks, this airline will behave badly
and have no remorse. I got my 'sorry' letter and a copy of the Customers Bill of Rights. Which I read and
still cannot identify exactly what this most heinous crime was?

It took me an additional 12 hours and $500 dollars to finally get home on other airlines.

Where did the laughter go? Where is the humanity? There were 20 other crisis resolutions they could've
employed quite effectively, sparing me the public embarrassment and humiliation. They over-reacted and
to what end? What purpose was served? Is this what we have to look forward to as citizens of the
supposed land of liberties? Perhaps (Jetblue) ought to put a disclaimer on all tickets: No jokes,
no questions and whatever you do, don't smile or try and comfort anyone.

Students Experiencing Homelessness by John H. Wong, Ph.D.

Gene Mason — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 18:45:00 GMT

A teacher candidate needs to learn the fundamental tenets of family involvement. These basic premises are essential for building a productive experience with parents to enhance student learning and support family life. To be successful in parent involvement, a teacher must:

1. understand the cultural and socio-economic challenges, strengths, and aspirations of families;
2. recognize the primacy of the home as an authentic and potential place of learning; and,
3. cultivate a collaborative, enriching, and respectful relationship with the student’s parents.

Beliefs in these principles, however, are put to a severe test when a teacher works with students and parents caught in homeless situations. Homelessness for children is a traumatic and confusing time. A complex set of circumstances beyond their control and often their understanding has rendered them without a home. They worry about situations unimaginable to many people—a spot to sleep; a place to live; and a dire future for themselves, their siblings, and their parents. They also are insecure about food and health, as well as separation from family members and an abrupt end to friendships. They may feel shameful, and perhaps even guilty, regarding their plight.

Parents who are homeless often are extremely stressed. They may be anxious, responding to many requirements, such as working, attending school/ training, looking for permanent housing, and building a future of their families. Some are escaping from domestic violence. They struggle to achieve these objectives with the stigma of homelessness weighing upon them.

A teacher’s sensitivity and support should be the cornerstones of any relationship with these families. In the midst of chaos, a teacher can be a source of hope, encouragement, and positive reinforcement in relationships with the family. A homeless life is fraught with risk and uncertainty. The loss of the nurturing environment that a home provides undermines the development of children. A teacher can make the school a place where a student who is homeless can find security, solace, joy, and acceptance — a safe haven (Wong, Peace, Wang, Feeley, and Carlson. 2005).

This article presents the main principles that underpin quality parental involvement for students experiencing homelessness. These elements lay the foundation for a successful approach to parental involvement.

1. A teacher that understands the cultural and socio-economic challenges, strengths, and aspirations of families is needed.

Addressing the needs of children experiencing homelessness is a new challenge for many school districts. Typically educators are unfamiliar with the extraordinary hardships of students and parents who experience homelessness, and they find it difficult to respond to the multiple and complex needs of this growing population.

The face of homelessness has changed significantly over the past few decades. The public has generally associated homelessness with men asking for spare change or “bag ladies” living on streets. These weathered and life-hardened adult facades are now joined by distressed countenances of unemployed or underemployed fathers and mothers and by the innocent mien of infants, children, and youths.

Estimates of the number of people who are homeless vary, depending on the methodology used to identify and count them (Drever 1999). People in homeless situations, especially families, are difficult to count due to their transient nature. Moreover, people experiencing homelessness are reluctant to identify themselves and to be counted as such because of its stigma.

A recent study estimated that 744,313 people experienced homelessness across the country during January 2005. Fifty-nine (59) percent were single adults. In addition, 303,411 (41%) were parents and children, comprising 98,452 homeless families (National Alliance to End Homelessness 2007, 12). This count, however, ignored the doubled-up population. Families who lose their homes due to economic hardships are likely to move into the homes of relatives and friends before seeking help at public shelters. Families living in a double-situation are considered under law as homeless (Indiana Department of Education Division of Educational Options, 2007). Moreover, this particular research was done during a single point in time, January 2005. It did not include those who become homeless over the course of the year. Other studies with a broader definition of homelessness and measuring occurrence over an entire year have identified higher estimates than this study. One report stated that between 2.3 million and 3.5 million people experience homelessness over one year in the United States (Satcher 2004, 6) . Families with children comprise 42% of the total homeless population, according to another analysis (USA Today, 10/11/2005). Two hundred thousand (200,000) children are estimated to be homeless each day (Satcher 2004, 6) .

1.1 A teacher that empathizes with the daily social, economic, personal, and psychological stresses in families.

While there is disagreement on the size of the homeless population, there is consensus that families are the fastest growing sub-group of the homeless. Since the 1980s, family homelessness has emerged with the rise of housing costs and the fall of real wages (Tull 1992). The primary causes of family homelessness are the lack of safe, affordable housing, declining real wages, cuts in social welfare programs and federal assistance, and eroding work opportunities for many workers (National Coalition for the Homeless, 1999a; Parrot 2005; United States Conference of Mayors 2000). Twenty percent of adults who are homeless work (National Coalition for the Homeless 1999b), but they work in low-wage jobs that do not make ends meet (Wolf 1999).

Residential instability is common for families experiencing homelessness:
• One study found that the average school age child experiencing homelessness moved 3.6 times in the past year (Rosenheck, et. al. undated).
• Of those students experiencing homelessness who are enrolled, only 77% attend school regularly (National Center on Family Homelessness, undated).
• According to one study, 41% of students experiencing homelessness attended two different schools over a given year and 28% attended three or more different schools (National Center on Family Homelessness 1999).
The experience of being homeless has a devastating impact on children and youth and can result in:
• Higher rates of acute and chronic illnesses including ear infection, stomach problems, asthma, and speech problems (National Center on Family Homelessness, undated).
• Higher rates of developmental delays (Molnar et al.,1990) and learning disabilities (National Center on Family Homelessness, undated).
• Higher incidents of emotional problems: 47% of children and youth experiencing homelessness suffer from anxiety, depression, or withdrawal compared to 18% of housed children. (National Center on Family Homelessness, undated).

1.2 A teacher that is willing to adjust perceptions about the range of dispositions, backgrounds, degree of education, and experiences of parents/guardians.

When families are forced to leave their own housing, they often move to other towns to live in doubled-up situations, escape domestic violence, find shelter, and otherwise seek help. Unfortunately, some school personnel do not welcome these families into the new district. They feel resentment toward families who do not pay taxes in the town but add to the burden of education and other social services, particularly in cases where resources are already stretched thin. Moreover, some school officials may feel the inclusion of homeless children will lower proficiency test scores in an era with a heightened emphasis on school accountability.

Teachers must not be judgmental about parents who are homeless. They must learn about the plight of these families and the challenges to parenting while homeless. For parents, the inability to provide a nurturing home environment for their children can lead to debilitating sense of guilt, stress, and loss of self-esteem. They feel misunderstood and isolated. Homelessness is a stigma that is hard to shed.

2. A teacher that recognizes the primacy of the home as an authentic and potential place of learning.

Family life in shelters, publicly funded motels, and other temporary living space is life lived in public or shared space -- there is little privacy, child rearing spaces, or area for doing homework and learning. A family living in a motel find themselves squeezed into a single room without even a small corner for homework. Children living in a domestic violence shelter will be restricted from going to libraries for security reasons. Few families have access to computers and the Internet to foster learning. Substandard housing, cars, temporary campsites, and other places do not come equipped with study rooms, bookshelves, computer terminals, educational toys, and other materials that constitute the learning environment many people take for granted.

2.1. The teacher acknowledges that the parent remains the child’s first teacher throughout the school years.

In this restrictive environment, parents who are homeless must meet the needs of the whole child, so that child is in a social, physical, emotional, and mental position to learn and achieve educational success . However, they may feel distraught, powerless, and isolated. The teacher must play a central and active role to support the parent as the child’s first teacher.

In this role, the teacher must first understand that no one person can respond alone to help the parent address the complex, interrelated problems of a student in a homeless situation. Meeting the whole needs of a child experiencing homelessness is not merely a parental and teacher duty, but also a school and community challenge. As one educator who has assisted many homeless families in her school district says, “Collaboration and cooperation are the only ways to produce an effective program and to meet the educational needs of students experiencing homelessness” (Wong, Peace, Wang, Feeley, and Carlson, 2005, 9). While acknowledging the necessity of a broad comprehensive effort, the teacher understands that parental involvement must be at the center of this collaborative effort.

2.2. The teacher has knowledge of community resources, recognition of the risk factors brought on by poverty, and a willingness to refer families to the appropriate agencies.

There are four types of resources that a teacher can draw upon: the McKinney-Vento Homeless Education Act, the district’s homeless liaison, school and community programs for the child, and community programs for the parents.

1. The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, was reauthorized in 2001 (National Law Center on Poverty and Homelessness, undated). Responding to learning gaps and lagging achievement of students in homeless situations, the Act states that schools must provide to students who are homeless an equitable level and quality of services provided to other students, including transportation, educational services, and nutritional and health services (Wong, Salomon, Thistle Elliott, Tallarita, and Reed, 2004) . McKinney-Vento states that “it is the policy of Congress that homeless children and youths should have access to the education and other services they need to ensure that they have an opportunity to meet the same challenging State student academic achievement standards to which all students are held.’’ The Act establishes clear mandates that can be used to leverage services and programs for students who are homeless.

2. The McKinney-Vento Act requires that school districts appoint a Homeless Liaison. Liaisons serve a pivotal role in coordinating and providing services to students experiencing homelessness. A liaison knows the requirements of the McKinney-Vento Act to ensure that homeless students reach high standards, understands the legal rights of families who are homeless, is cognizant of school services that are available to assist students, and is familiar of public and private programs in the community available to both children and parents. A liaison tries to build a formal referral and collaborative network in the school district and the community. As the central contact for services and programs for families that are homeless, a district’s homeless liaison is a key support for teachers and parents in homeless situations.

3. The McKinney-Vento Act establishes the expectation that schools will provide quality education to students experiencing homelessness so that they can meet the same high academic standards expected of all students. The Act recognizes that this often requires educators to go beyond the classroom and school to find what the child needs. School and community resources for the child often include: Title I, Talented and Gifted Programs, guidance and counseling, case management, shelter-based tutorial, homework clubs, Saturday enrichment programs, library reading programs, and after-school technology centers.

4. Parents experiencing homelessness typically have a paramount agenda: to find permanent housing for their families. They may be so distraught about their plight that they cannot fully engage in collaborating with their children’s teachers. The parent also may still be dealing with domestic violence issues. A child's welfare is directly related to the well being of their parents. Therefore, teacher and the homeless liaison may want to help to obtain resources for parents. These can include: housing subsidies and vouchers, domestic violence protection, legal aid, job training and career development courses, GED preparation and other educational services, life skills training, ESL classes and language training, counseling, substance abuse prevention, and mental health services.

3. The teacher cultivates a collaborative, enriching, and respectful relationship with the student’s parents.

In identifying students as homeless, a teacher risks focusing on their differences from other children and further isolating and stigmatizing them. These children want and deserve recognition of their individual strengths as well as needs. Parents who are homeless have the same goals for their children as other parents, but they also must overcome difficult barriers. As a teacher finds out about the unique situation and challenges of each family, he or she must be sensitive to the dignity and self-esteem of families who are homeless, as they do all families.

3.1 A teacher that believes in the strength of families and the ultimate resiliency of the family unit.

People in homeless situations are often viewed as members of a fixed population who are unable to pull themselves out of their own predicament. The fact is that this population is diverse in how long it remains homeless. Research has identified 23% of this population as chronically homeless, approximately 150,000 to 200,000 people (National Alliance to End Homelessness 2007, 12). The chronically homeless are unaccompanied adults who remain without a home for more than a year or have repeated episodes of homelessness. The other segment of the population – approximately 80% -- is temporarily homeless (Satcher 2004, 10). They regain housing within a few months to a year. Families are among the temporarily homeless, manifesting their strength and resiliency.

Conclusion

A common problem for students who are homeless is that quiet study space is limited or not available at “home,” be it a shelter, motel, campground, or friend’s couch. To overcome this barrier, officials in one school allowed students to stay in school until parents could pick them up or the shelter opened at 6 pm; the teachers volunteered to stay late on a rotating basis to make this possible. Another school allowed students who are homeless access to technology such as Internet and word processing after regular school hours. Teachers in still another school understand that students in homeless situations are weary and find it challenging to do homework in the evenings; they allow for extra time and make-up work. One shelter has hired two teachers from the district to do tutoring in evenings and weekends.

These accommodations made to students experiencing homelessness were the result of collaboration between parents, teachers, shelter officials, and homeless liaisons. Rather than lowering expectations or standards for students experiencing homelessness, these strategies aim at maintaining high expectations and providing whatever is needed to meet these expectations. Parental involvement, school and community cooperation, and teacher empathy are key factors in achieving high student performance.

References

Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta, 2004. Homelessness and Health: Wicked Problem Small Wins. Atlanta: Author.

Drever, Anita, 1999. Homeless Count Methodologies: An Annotated Bibliography. Los Angeles: UCLA Weingart Center.

Indiana Department of Education Division of Educational Options. 2007. “Frequently Asked Questions: McKinney-Vento—Education For Homeless Children And Youths” http://www.doe.state.in.us/alted/mckinney_vento_faq.html (last visited January 29, 2007)

Kasindorf, Martin, 2005. “Nation Taking A New Look At Homelessness, Solutions”
USA Today, 10/11.

Molnar, J. et al., 1990. “Constantly Compromised: The Impact of Homelessness on Children,” 46 Journal of Social Issues 113, 113-14.

National Alliance to End Homelessness, 2007. Homeless Counts. Washington, DC: Author.

National Center on Family Homelessness. America’s Homeless Children, Undated. Newton, MA: author. www.familyhomelessness.org/pdf/fact_children.pdf

National Center on Family Homelessness, 1999. Homeless Children: America’s New Outcasts. Newton, MA: author.

National Coalition for the Homeless, 1999a. “NCH Fact Sheet #1: Why Are People Homeless” www.nationalhomeless.org/causes.html (last visited Apr. 12, 2004)

National Coalition for the Homeless, 1999b. “NCH Fact Sheet # 4: Employment and Homelessness.” http://nch.ari.net/jobs.html (last visited Feb. 23, 2004).

National Law Center on Poverty and Homelessness, Undated. McKinney-Vento 2001 Reauthorization - At a Glance. http://www.nlchp.org/FA_Education/mckinneyGlance.cfm (last visited Apr. 6, 2004).

Parrot, S, 1995. How Much Do We Spend on ‘Welfare’? Washington, DC: Center On Budget and Policy Priorities.

Rosenheck, Robert, Ellen Bassuk, and Amy Salomon, undated. Special Populations of Homeless Americans. Washington, DC: Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation in the Department of Health and Human Services. http://aspe.hhs.gov/progsys/homeless/symposium/2-Spclpop.htm (last visited January 29, 2007)

Satcher, David, 2004. “Health Disparities and the Homeless.” Atlanta Foundation Forum. Atlanta: Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta.

Tull, Jim, 1992. “Homelessness: An Overview.” 8 New England Journal of Public Policy 29, 29-32

United States Conference of Mayors, 2000. A Status Report on Hunger and Homelessness in America’s Cities 2000: A 25-City Survey, http://www.usmayors.org/uscm/hungersurvey/2000/hunger2000.pdf (last visited Apr. 12, 2004).

Wolf, Richard, 1999. “Survey Blames High Costs, Low Wages for Hunger, Housing Crisis,” U.S.A. Today, Dec. 16, A4.

Wong, John, Amy Salomon, Lynda Thistle Elliott, Louis Tallarita, and Shelley Reed, 2004. "McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act Subtitle B--Education for Homeless Children and Youths Program: Turning Good Law into Effective Education," Georgetown Journal for Poverty Law and Policy, Vol. 11.2.

Wong, John, Jennifer Peace, Anne Wang, Caitlin Feeley, and Carlson, 2005. Safe Havens: School, Community, and the Education of Children and Youth Experiencing Homelessness. Newton, MA: Education Development Center. http://eec.edc.org/PDF/safehavens.org

This article is also published in part in Grant, Kathy and Julie Ray, 2009. Home, School, and Community Collaboration:
Culturally Responsive Family Involvement, Sage Publication, available at: http://www.sagepub.com/textbooksProdDesc.nav?prodId=Book231623&

Robert Kennedy & Barack Obama by Gene Mason

Gene Mason — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 13:02:00 GMT

     1968 was a seminal year in my life and the lives of many others. It was the year I tried hardest to change the political priorities of my country. With the support of my wife, I joined the campaign of Robert F. Kennedy for President. Without invitation I had designed a plan for RFK to capture the delegates of the states that selected its delegates through the convention system. There were 17 of them at that time. Everyone else was working on the primary states. I sent the plan to the RFK Think Tank in DC. I didn’t have a name to send it to; I just sent it to the Think Tank office.
    To my surprise I got a phone call from Mary Jo Kopechne, who worked at the Think Tank. She said that there was a great deal of interest in my plan. She said that John Siegenthaler wants to fly out to Kentucky (where I was a young Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University) and discuss it with me. She added, “Can you meet with him?” I was shaking in my boots. The Deputy Attorney General in charge of Civil Rights in the JFK administration was coming to get my advice? When he walked into my office he had the plan in his hand.
     Mr. Siegenthaler said, “Your plan is excellent.” We didn’t discuss it again. Instead he asked if I would attend the campaign meeting in Indianapolis at which RFK would speak to people he hoped would work for him. I started shaking in my boots again, but I managed to blurt out that I would be there.
     I was getting carried away by my sense of self-importance.
     I attended, along with 500 others. Bobby was so humble. He said he didn’t have much support—not from labor, not from business, not from much of anyone else—except us. So if we wanted to work for him there wasn’t much competition. He then invited us to stay and talk with each other and with a few staff members. These were the elite supporters, and we all wanted to be among them. I talked with writer David Halberstam, a Pulitzer Prize winning author who had written The Best and the Brightest, a book about the origins of the Vietnam War. I had not read it, but I had read about it and thought it was an important book. David listened more than he spoke. It was like he was writing a book on the RFK campaign workers.
    Then I met Dick Goodwin, a speechwriter and advisor to both JFK and RFK. He had designed the concept of the Peace Corp under the JFK administration. He was a Harvard Law School graduate and had been a law clerk for Justice Felix Frankfurter. I knew him to be a bold creature of creativity and social justice. He was a man who got into a lot of trouble and got out of it all. He and I hit it off pretty good and maintained a connection for the next 35 years.
     Next I met Susan Sontag, who ended up writing some great articles on Robert Kennedy and the campaign.
     These men and this woman were most impressive to me then and remain so to this day. They exuded excellence.
    There may have been other supporters of equal stature in the room, but this was enough to capture me. I told Mr. Siegenthaler that I wanted to join the campaign in whatever capacity I was needed. He asked me to work in the upcoming Indiana primary—that was where I was needed now. My job was to recruit students from Kentucky to work in Indiana. He told me to report to the campaign office in New Albany, Indiana, and tell them what I was going to do.
    New Albany is across the Ohio River from Louisville, KY. I traveled to college campuses throughout Kentucky during the week, talked with students, and produced three busloads of students for weekends in New Albany. I was so passionate about the campaign that I paid for the buses out of pocket even though I didn't have the money to spare. I was too busy to bill the campaign for the expense. (Ethel Kennedy later reimbursed me after Bobby was killed.)
     We won the primary and moved on to California. John Siegenthaler was in charge of Northern California. The headquarters were in San Francisco, so that is where I went. I was given a room in a nearby hotel. Students were coming in daily from all over the country. Many of these students used my room as temporary quarters until they were settled in rooms of their own. There was no real training program for us. We just tried what was suggested at the weekly staff meetings.
    My job stayed the same. I was organizing students in San Francisco and in the five surrounding counties for the get-out-the-vote drive on Election Day. The technique was simple. I carried a bag of Robert Kennedy buttons and offered one to everyone I met. If they took one, I pursued a conversation, solicited their help, and took their name and number to relay to the local organization. I convinced other workers from headquarters to go with me on these trips.
     There were many celebrities who helped with special events, but I was not involved in organizing their contributions. However, there was one special series of events I was blessed to be a part of: I traveled with Caesar Chavez, farm worker, labor leader and civil rights activist, as he spoke on the campaign trail. He was on a hunger strike and was weak, but what he said was powerful to the listeners. And it was powerful to me.
     The process on the campuses was repeated for six weeks. Of course, we won the California primary. We were celebrating at a large party when it happened... I was standing next to Ted Kennedy watching the LA victory party on television. When Bobby was shot, Teddy was gone in a flash. I was so stunned I couldn’t even move. Finally I made it back to my hotel room and stared in shock at the television...
     My mother had died a couple of weeks before Bobby Kennedy was killed. I had gone back to Texas and arranged her funeral. Now I went back to Texas to deal with issues of her death that I had put off. There was the house, getting rid of possessions, etc. But persistent in my mind was the question of how I could best carry on the mission that had drawn us all to Bobby’s campaign. Bobby’s commitment made me see that we could get out of Vietnam and concentrate on empowerment of the impoverished.
     I then returned to Kentucky and thought about what I should do. I did not want to let this new mission of mine die. I decided to run for Congress. I had learned the value of broad participation by a large number of people in a campaign. So I started recruiting folks one by one. Many of the folks I recruited did the same. I asked for support--their work, and their money. I asked them to contribute $20 a month for 18 months. I don’t remember anyone turning me down. Many just wrote a check for the whole amount. I was astounded by how many people were ready to join the effort.
     We had 18 months to work on the challenge. We worked, but did not win.
     The Robert Kennedy campaign of 1968 was one of the most important experiences in my life. I found the right place for my passion. I learned something about what Aristotle called the ‘art of the possible.’ I learned how possibilities can quickly appear and just as quickly disappear.
I think that is what so many young people are learning in the Barack Obama campaign. Obama’s campaign is much better organized than the RFK campaign. He had an organization in place in every state before the first primary. The Pew Research Center Project for Excellence in Journalism finds that Obama was first to use the Web as a campaign tool. McCain tried to follow, probably too little too late.
     Obama’s online network of registered users is more than five times larger than McCain’s. Obama’s sites attract three times as many unique users each week as McCain’s. The internet and young people’s skills in using it are providing opportunities that we never dreamed of in 1968. In the RFK campaign we spoke one on one and used the media. Through the internet the Obama campaign speaks to millions simultaneously.
The websites of the Obama campaign are first rate. Pew has been analyzing the site traffic for the Obama sites and the McCain sites. Obama gets 72 percent of the total traffic.
     The Obama campaign has raised more money using the internet than anyone ever. Their follow-up email system to site visitors is professional and rapid. They designed a real role for those who offer to help. They recruit and train people to become Deputy Field Organizers. You can’t just take the training. You have to apply to be accepted. At the recent Camp Obama in Chicago they had 1200 applicants for 350 positions for the four-day intensive training.
     They broke the country into regions so that there was a training application process for everyone. Harvard’s Marshall Ganz, formerly an organizer for Caesar Chavez, leads many of these trainings at Camp Obama. Some states like California, New York, Ohio, Massachusettes, Illinois, to name a few, have their own Camp Obama.
Hans Reimer, national youth vote director for the Obama campaign describes it this way: “We are teaching them, teaching them how to be effective, showing them what their role is in our strategy to win the election… We’re taking people from raw enthusiasm to capable organizers.” Take a look at the Camp Obama site.
     The Obama campaign has not only raised the internet to new heights as a campaign tool, they have raised small donations to new heights as well. They built on the work of Edward Dean who made use of the power of the internet in his political campaign. Obama has made it easy to contribute small amounts. He is now raising five million every few days on the internet.
   I can only hope that participation in those programs and in this campaign brings to the participants what I enjoyed in the Kennedy campaign: learning experiences for these young and passionate individuals that will impact them as long as they live.

Sanders Op-Ed: Billions for Bailouts! Who Pays? by Senator Bernie Sanders

Gene Mason — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 14:09:00 GMT

Article Reprinted from Senator Sanders Website http://Sanders.Senate.Gov
Sanders Op-Ed: Billions for Bailouts! Who Pays? -- 09/19/2008

The current financial crisis facing our country has been caused by the extreme right-wing economic policies pursued by the Bush administration. These policies, which include huge tax breaks for the rich, unfettered free trade and the wholesale deregulation of commerce, have resulted in a massive redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the very wealthy.

The middle class has really been under assault. Since President Bush has been in office, nearly 6 million Americans have slipped into poverty, median family income for working Americans has declined by more than $2,000, more than 7 million Americans have lost their health insurance, over 4 million have lost their pensions, foreclosures are at an all time high, total consumer debt has more than doubled, and we have a national debt of over $9.7 trillion dollars.

While the middle class collapses, the richest people in this country have made out like bandits and have not had it so good since the 1920s. The top 0.1 percent now earn more money than the bottom 50 percent of Americans, and the top 1 percent own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. The wealthiest 400 people in our country saw their wealth increase by $670 billion while Bush has been president. In the midst of all of this, Bush lowered taxes on the very rich so that they are paying lower income tax rates than teachers, police officers or nurses.

Now, having mismanaged the economy for eight years as well as having lied about our situation by continually insisting, "The fundamentals of our economy are strong," the Bush administration, six weeks before an election, wants the middle class of this country to spend many hundreds of billions on a bailout. The wealthiest people, who have benefited from Bush's policies and are in the best position to pay, are being asked for no sacrifice at all. This is absurd. This is the most extreme example that I can recall of socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor.

In my view, we need to go forward in addressing this financial crisis by insisting on four basic principles:

(1) The people who can best afford to pay and the people who have benefited most from Bush's economic policies are the people who should provide the funds for the bailout. It would be immoral to ask the middle class, the people whose standard of living has declined under Bush, to pay for this bailout while the rich, once again, avoid their responsibilities. Further, if the government is going to save companies from bankruptcy, the taxpayers of this country should be rewarded for assuming the risk by sharing in the gains that result from this government bailout.

Specifically, to pay for the bailout, which is estimated to cost up to $1 trillion, the government should:

a) Impose a five-year, 10 percent surtax on income over $1 million a year for couples and
over $500,000 for single taxpayers. That would raise more than $300 billion in revenue;

b) Ensure that assets purchased from banks are realistically discounted so companies are
not rewarded for their risky behavior and taxpayers can recover the amount they paid for
them; and

c) Require that taxpayers receive equity stakes in the bailed-out companies so that the
assumption of risk is rewarded when companies' stock goes up.

(2) There must be a major economic recovery package which puts Americans to work at decent wages. Among many other areas, we can create millions of jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and moving our country from fossil fuels to energy efficiency and sustainable energy. Further, we must protect working families from the difficult times they are experiencing. We must ensure that every child has health insurance and that every American has access to quality health and dental care, that families can send their children to college, that seniors are not allowed to go without heat in the winter, and that no American goes to bed hungry.

(3) Legislation must be passed which undoes the damage caused by excessive de-regulation. That means reinstalling the regulatory fire walls that were ripped down in 1999. That means re-regulating the energy markets so that we never again see the rampant speculation in oil that helped drive up prices. That means regulating or abolishing various financial instruments that have created the enormous shadow banking system that is at the heart of the collapse of AIG and the financial services meltdown.

(4) We must end the danger posed by companies that are "too big too fail," that is, companies whose failure would cause systemic harm to the U.S. economy. If a company is too big to fail, it is too big to exist. We need to determine which companies fall in this category and then break them up. Right now, for example, the Bank of America, the nation's largest depository institution, has absorbed Countrywide, the nation's largest mortgage lender, and Merrill Lynch, the nation's largest brokerage house. We should not be trying to solve the current financial crisis by creating even larger, more powerful institutions. Their failure could cause even more harm to the entire economy.

Meltdown and Bailout: Why Our Economic System Is on the Verge of Collapse by Joshua Holland

Gene Mason — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 13:58:00 GMT

The immediate cause of our financial meltdown is unchecked, unbridled greed. Mainstream newspapers and the business press are doing a fairly good job of explaining how the lack of regulatory oversight led us into this nightmare.

But you have to dig down one layer to find the cause of that situation. Under cover of the ideological euphemism known as the "free market" and with enormous cash investments over the past four decades, business elites have captured the regulatory organs of powerful democratic states -- nowhere more so than the United States -- and promoted their own narrow economic agendas for short-term gain.

There's an enormous amount of discussion about that in the independent media. But to drill down a layer deeper, to the bedrock of the crisis, you have to go to some deep thinkers who don't get much play in our mainstream economic discourse.

As foreign policy analyst Mark Engler notes in his new book, How to Rule the World, declining returns on traditional investments in manufacturing and industry since the 1970s go a long way toward explaining today's highly speculative economy -- pushing capital into developing countries and into bubble after speculative bubble in search of a better profit margin.

It's important to understand what's going on at all three levels, because we may have come to a fork in the road, a point at which the decisions made now may determine the future of the global economy.

We may or may not also be on the verge of another Great Depression.

The Bush Bailout: Privatizing Gains and Socializing Risk

On Saturday, hoping to stave off that dark possibility, the Bush administration proposed an unprecedented bailout for investors, a scheme that would authorize the Treasury Department to spend as much as $700 billion in tax dollars over the next two years to buy up bad securities, with little Congressional oversight save for a semiannual report on the process.

The move came after the federal government had already sunk a total of $900 billion into America's financial institutions this year, potentially bringing the total value of the Fed's tinkering to $1.6 trillion over three years.

The White House, Congressional leaders and Treasury officials are haggling over the details. Things are moving quickly, with a mammoth intervention that was unspeakable in economic circles a month ago now looking more and more inevitable.

The structure of the proposed bailout may change during those negotiations -- Democrats in Congress are pushing to save more homeowners and tie the package to some sort of limits on CEO pay for institutions that get a lifesaver -- but the deal outlined in the brief document released on Sept. 20 epitomizes the principle of privatizing gains while socializing risk. In other words, we're splitting an oil well with the Big Boys on Wall Street: They get the oil, we get the shaft.

It is, in short, a draft of what could be one of the greatest rip-offs in history. Bush, on the way out of power, is trying to create a publicly financed honeypot for the private sector on a scale never before imagined.

Those who played fast and loose with newer, ever shakier investment instruments in order to squeeze a few more bucks out of the markets' "irrational exuberance" about the housing sector would get a payday that would save their bacon. According to the New York Times, this huge pile of taxpayers' cash may even be available to foreign investors.

Home prices would continue to tank, though, as banks shed their bad loans at discounted prices to the government. Those subsidized assets would then be liquidated -- on the cheap because they're so overvalued -- to resuscitate the financial system. Rick Sharga, a senior officer with RealtyTrac, which monitors the housing market, told Reuters, "We've seen fewer and fewer properties go through the auction process because there's either little equity in them or even negative equity. So there's no incentive for people to buy them at the auctions."

Sharga added that "bank repossessions continue to grow at a pretty rapid clip," but an analyst told me recently that he knew of banks that simply weren't taking possession of foreclosed properties because they didn't want them on their balance sheets.

As those assets are disposed of, the value of all Americans' homes will continue to fall, because sales of comparable properties determine their worth. That would, in turn, leave a greater number of Americans with mortgages worth more than the amount of equity in their homes, and the cycle would continue. Things are already bleak on that front; the rate of U.S. foreclosures increased 75 percent in 2007 and 55 percent in the year ending this June. The Associated Press reported, "More than four million American homeowners with a mortgage, a record nine per cent, were either behind on their payments or in foreclosure at the end of June."

Many more will lose their homes, and all of us will get the tab: higher taxes, swelling deficits, higher interest rates and a moribund economy.

The plan doesn't specify what, if anything, U.S. taxpayers will get in return for their largesse. The government isn't spending more than a trillion dollars to nationalize failed institutions in order to protect stakeholders and liquidate those overvalued assets in an orderly manner. That might make a lot of sense, and it would essentially make Joe and Jane taxpayer owners of something that might rebound in value down the road.

Instead, Bush's proposal would take bad paper off the books of institutions that are ailing but haven't yet gone belly-up, and we wouldn't necessarily get a stake in those institutions; they'd only become "financial agents of the government," according to the draft released Saturday.

As Paul Krugman notes, "historically, financial system rescues have involved seizing the troubled institutions and guaranteeing their debts; only after that did the government try to repackage and sell their assets."

The feds took over S&Ls first, protecting their depositors, then transferred their bad assets to the (Resolution Trust Corporation, founded in the wake of that crisis). The Swedes took over troubled banks, again protecting their depositors, before transferring their assets to their equivalent institutions.

The Treasury plan, by contrast, looks like an attempt to restore confidence in the financial system -- that is, convince creditors of troubled institutions that everything's OK -- simply by buying assets off these institutions.

Making matters even worse is the fact that it's almost impossible to put a fair market value on this massive pile of bad debt. As Peter Goodman of the New York Times notes, "no one really knows what this cosmically complex web of finance will be worth, making the final price tag for the taxpayer unknowable. One may just as well try to predict the weather three years from Tuesday."

There will be a fight in Washington, and much debate, about which ideological direction the bailout should lean, and the version offered up by the Bush administration is -- no surprise here -- tilted heavily in favor of those at the top of the economic pile.

What's clear is that there is going to be a massive transfer of public wealth to the private sector, and at least the lion's share of that cash, if not all of it, will end up in the hands of an investor class whose recklessness got us into this mess in the first place.

Meltdown

This bailout is a desperate attempt to save the modern economic system from falling under the weight of its deep structural imbalances. As such, it's unlikely to work over the medium and long terms, even if it has the desired immediate effect of propping up creaky markets and restoring their (largely unjustified) sense of security.

The proximate cause of the financial system's meltdown is not all that hard to grasp. The decades-long supremacy of the ideology euphemistically called "free trade" resulted in capital being unmoored from national economies and freed to move around the world with few limitations (under the imperative of government not "intervening" in markets). Unconstrained by borders and investment rules, those dollars, yen, euros and what have you roamed the planet seeking a better rate of return. Investors moved in packs, rushing lemming-like to whatever hot up-and-coming market the Economist was writing about in a given month, and a series of bubbles resulted.

Those bubbles made some people incredibly rich, and hurt others badly.

Of late, real estate was the can't-miss investment, and as enormously overvalued housing bubbles sprang up, notably in the United States, Wall Street's financial whizzes started offering newer and more "creative" investment vehicles, bundling mortgages and selling them off to investors from around the globe.

That was driven by an era of relentless deregulation, both at home and abroad. Here in the United States, the trend of deregulation culminated in 1999 with the death of the Glass-Steagall Act, the New Deal-era legislation that had forced financial institutions to choose between investment banking and commercial lending. Meanwhile, international bodies like the WTO and the IMF were pressuring the governments of all countries to drop their controls on the flow of cash and goods.

Without fear of a regulatory backlash, the banks pushed their new investments hard, and investors gobbled them up with glee. Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, Dean Starkman cited reports from the business press about loan agents at Ameriquest being ordered to watch "Boiler Room," the film about sleazy financial brokers pushing bad investments on gullible retirees (Ameriquest was a predatory subprime lender that went down last year). Starkman quoted an executive with Morgan Stanley's mortgage unit as saying, "It was unbelievable. We almost couldn't produce enough to keep the appetite of the investors happy. More people wanted bonds than we could actually produce."

In the end, investors were basically buying up paper that had only a distant relationship with anything concrete. The link that had long existed between homeowners and lenders was broken, and debt -- in this case debt tied to housing, but also commercial and consumer debt -- became a hot investment vehicle.

Convinced that the market would continue to grow indefinitely -- or maybe that they'd get bailed out if things headed south -- investors leveraged their assets further and further, in effect buying on margin just like the bad old days before the Crash.

The banks and investment houses worked hard to find new ways to make their own pounds or rubles, creating not only new types of debt-based securities, but also coming up with new forms of insurance to (supposedly) shield investors against the risk those loans represented.

That was all well and good for them, if not for the rest of us, until the housing market started to tank. Despite assurances from the government earlier this year that the disaster had been "contained" to the subprime market, it began to spread. As the Associated Press reported, the tanking real estate market "shifted from subprime loans made to borrowers with poor credit to homeowners who had solid credit but took out exotic loans with ballooning monthly payments." Bloomberg reported that 3 million American homeowners are holding prime (or, actually, semi-prime) "alt-A" loans (don't ask) worth about $1 trillion, or $150 billion more than the entire outstanding subprime market.

As those loans -- many of which were taken on investment properties by people expecting a nice, quick turnover -- started to go belly-up, a panic ensued. As the rot spread, banks started going down and investors essentially began a stampede on an already weakened financial sector. It was the modern-day equivalent of a bank run, but on a global scale.

That posed a risk to the mammoth and wholly unregulated market in insurance on bad loans that had grown up around these new kinds of investments. The market in what are known as "credit default swaps" is of unknown size, but it's estimated to be worth as much as $60 trillion, most of it essentially paper backed by too little in the way of hard assets.

The government knew that if that market tanked, it could take down the global economy. That threat was, in large part, the thinking behind the $85 billion dollar bailout of AIG less than a week ago -- AIG was a key player in this huge but hazy market, and it did business with banks around the world.

At that point, a feeling of panic was spreading, and lawmakers in Washington felt that they had to do something, anything, to stop the meltdown. The banking sector's crisis threatens the entire economy, as the capital needed for new investment and expansion has begun to dry up. Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute told the New York Times that "Wall Street isn't this island to itself" and warned that if the finance sector "gets worse, we're going to be stuck in the doldrums for a very long time, because that directly blocks healthy economic activity."

Global Capitalism's Crises of Poverty and Overproduction

The financial meltdown in the United States is huge, but it isn't unique. Think of the Asian financial crisis, Mexico's "peso crisis" or the dot com crash. All had one thing in common: an investor class that at one time valued thrift, limited risk and steady growth plunged trillions with almost suicidal abandon into one bubble after the next.

All of which begs the question of what it is about our modern economic system that creates this cycle of inflating and bursting bubbles.

The answer, in large part, comes down to a decline in profitability in investments in concrete things, which has sent investors scurrying for abstract financial instruments in search of a fat return.

That shift, in turn, results from a simple aberration: a small fraction of the planet's population is tied to an economic system in which productivity is effectively an end unto itself. It makes tons and tons of widgets, always seeking new widget markets (and sucking up most of the planet's raw materials). At the same time, the powerhouses of the global economy -- the United States, Europe, Japan and the "Asian Tigers" -- have given woefully low priority to economic development in the rest of the world. They've essentially relegated it to NGOs and an underfunded United Nations, and in their own development funding they've prioritized geopolitics -- their "national interests" -- over poverty relief.

That's left much of the rest of the world's population (and this includes people in the wealthiest countries as well as the poorest) with barely enough money to feed their families, much less buy all those widgets. According to the UN, 80 percent of the people on the planet live on $10 dollars a day or less, and they're not going to take many flights on Boeing's shiny new airplane, buy GE's dishwashers or use Nortel's broadband. Over just the past two years, the number of people living on the "edge of emergency" -- in imminent danger of starvation or death from disease epidemics -- has doubled, zooming from 110 million people to 220 million, according to CARE International.

In other words, at the heart of the current crisis, like those that preceded it in recent years, is a massive imbalance inherent in the modern system of capitalism. It is caused by twin crises inherent in the structure of our global economy: a crisis of overproduction in the "core" states with advanced economies, and soul-crushing poverty in much of the "periphery."

In the booming years after World War II, the wealthy countries, led by the United States, did very well manufacturing goods for the entire planet. But as Europe and Japan rose from the ashes, and later, as production in countries like Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore increased, the industrial world simply started making more crap than there were consumers to purchase it.

Capitalism's tendency toward overproduction has been something with which thinkers dating back to Karl Marx have wrestled. If, as one definition holds, capitalism is all about maximizing efficiency, what happens when meaningful production becomes so efficient that the system ends up cranking out more goods than the population needs -- more than it can absorb?

The answer is simple. Since the middle of the last century, investors' returns on real production -- manufacturing -- has been in steady decline. Economist Robert Brenner described it as a "long downturn" in the world's most advanced economies. He noted that the seven leading industrial economies grew by a steady rate of 5 percent or more annually from the end of World War II through the 1960s, but in the 1970s that fell to 3.6 percent, and it has averaged around 3 percent since 1980.

The social critic Walden Bello has arguably been the clearest voice connecting the problem of overproduction to the rush of speculation that has led to today's financial crash. Bello noted that in the 1990s, the heyday of corporate globalization, the "U.S. computer industry's capacity was rising at 40 percent annually, far above projected increases in demand."

The world auto industry was selling just 74% of the 70.1 million cars it built each year. So much investment took place in global telecommunications infrastructure that traffic carried over fiber-optic networks was reported to be only 2.5 percent of capacity. Retailers suffered as well, with giants like K-Mart and Wal-Mart hit with a tremendous surfeit of floor capacity. There was, as economist Gary Shilling put it, an "oversupply of nearly everything."

A report in the Economist, cited by Bello, found that the world of Clinton's "New Economy" was "awash with excess capacity in computer chips, steel, cars, textiles and chemicals," and noted that "the gap between capacity and output was the largest since the Great Depression."

An inevitable result of that imbalance was a massive migration of capital from real, productive industry to the "speculative sector" run by financial giants like AIG and Lehman Brothers. As Bello noted:

So profitable was speculation that in addition to traditional activities like lending and dealing in equities and bonds, the '80s and '90s witnessed the development of ever more sophisticated financial instruments such as futures, swaps and options -- the so-called trade in derivatives, where profits came not from trading assets but from speculation on the expectations of the risk of underlying assets.

Exacerbated by a relentless assault on public interest regulation and economic nationalism under the guise of "free trade," the increasingly speculative tendencies of global investors created fertile ground for the growth of that pile of bad paper to which the Bush administration is reacting with its trademark brand of top-down reverse socialism.

In a nutshell, our modern economic system has become divorced from what an "economy" is supposed to do in human terms. It was anthropologist Karl Polanyi who argued that the term "economics" has both a formal meaning -- a system of exchange of goods and services designed to maximize efficiency -- and a "substantive" one: the survival strategy of humans in their natural environment. It's a concept that transcends conventional economic concepts of supply and demand, markets and states, and it's one that we've ignored for too long.

As the financial sector threatens to fall apart around us, it's important to understand the crisis on all of these levels, or we run the risk of losing sight of the forest for the trees. One has to keep in mind that this is all happening during the era of the $100-plus barrel of oil, with the global economy integrated more than ever before and during a period of deep environmental peril due to global climate change and related problems of drought and desertification.

With the Bush administration pumping more than a trillion dollars into the private sector, Jim Bunning, the junior senator from Kentucky, lamented that the "free market for all intents and purposes is dead in America." As more mainstream economists talk about the possibility of sliding into a full-blown depression, we may well be in the grip of a kind of economic "Grotian Moment." The term, named for the 17th century Dutch legal philosopher Hugo Grotius, describes an event that has such a great impact that it results in fundamental changes to the prevailing system.

Slavoj Zizek wrote that "One of the clearest lessons of the last few decades is that capitalism is indestructible. Marx compared it to a vampire, and one of the salient points of comparison now appears to be that vampires always rise up again after being stabbed to death." That's true; for a generation, we've been constrained from even discussing the fundamental structures of the prevailing system -- its excesses and shortfalls. This may be a moment in which we can do so, and should.

If we are at such a juncture, then we as a society have a serious question to answer: Will we bail out the speculator class so that it can regroup and move on to the next bubble, precipitating the next crisis of capitalism, or will we address the underlying problems of underdevelopment and overproduction in a way that's adequately sustainable in an era of serious environmental peril?

So far, Bush and the Congress appear to have the wrong answer.

Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer. Posted on September 22, 2008, Printed on September 23, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/99703/

Globalization and Democracy by Michael Parenti

Gene Mason — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 21:22:00 GMT

The goal of the transnational corporation is to become truly transnational, poised above the sovereign power of any particular nation, while being served by the sovereign powers of all nations. Cyril Siewert, chief financial officer of Colgate Palmolive Company, could have been speaking for all transnationals when he remarked, "The United States doesn't have an automatic call on our [corporation's] resources. There is no mindset that puts this country first."

With international “free trade” agreements such as NAFTA, GATT, and FTAA, the giant transnationals have been elevated above the sovereign powers of nation states. These agreements endow anonymous international trade committees with the authority to prevent, over¬rule, or dilute any laws of any nation deemed to burden the investment and market prerogatives of transnational corporations. These trade committees—-of which the World Trade Organization (WTO) is a prime example---set up panels composed of “trade specialists" who act as judges over economic issues, placing themselves above the rule and popular control of any nation, thereby insuring the supremacy of international finance capital. This process, called globalization, is treated as an inevitable natural “growth” development beneficial to all. It is in fact a global coup d’état by the giant business interests of the world.

Elected by no one and drawn from the corporate world, these panelists meet in secret and often have investment stakes in the very issues they adjudicate, being bound by no conflict-of-interest provisions. Not one of GATT's five hundred pages of rules and restrictions are directed against private corporations; all are against governments. Signatory governments must lower tariffs, end farm subsidies, treat foreign companies the same as domestic ones, honor all corporate patent claims, and obey the rulings of a permanent elite bureaucracy, the WTO. Should a country refuse to change its laws when a WTO panel so dictates, the WTO can impose fines or international trade sanctions, depriving the resistant country of needed markets and materials.

Acting as the supreme global adjudicator, the WTO has ruled against laws deemed “barriers to free trade.” It has forced Japan to accept greater pesticide residues in imported food. It has kept Guatemala from outlawing deceptive advertising of baby food. It has eliminated the ban in various countries on asbestos, and on fuel-economy and emission stan¬dards for motor vehicles. And it has ruled against marine-life protection laws and the ban on endangered-species products. The European Union’s prohibition on the importation of hormone-ridden U.S. beef had overwhelming popular support throughout Europe, but a three-member WTO panel decided the ban was an illegal restraint on trade. The decision on beef put in jeopardy a host of other food import regulations based on health concerns. The WTO overturned a portion of the U.S. Clean Air Act banning certain additives in gasoline because it interfered with imports from foreign refineries. And the WTO overturned that portion of the U.S. Endangered Species Act forbidding the import of shrimp caught with nets that failed to protect sea turtles.

Free trade is not fair trade; it benefits strong nations at the expense of weaker ones, and rich interests at the expense of the rest of us. Globalization means turning the clock back on many twentieth-century reforms: no freedom to boycott products, no prohibitions against child labor, no guaranteed living wage or benefits, no public services that might conceivably compete with private services, no health and safety protections that might cut into corporate profits.

GATT and subsequent free trade agreements allow multinationals to impose monopoly property rights on indigenous and communal agriculture. In this way agribusiness can better penetrate locally self-sufficient communities and monopolize their resources. Ralph Nader gives the example of the neem tree, whose extracts contain natural pesti¬cidal and medicinal properties. Cultivated for centuries in India, the tree attracted the attention of various pharmaceutical companies, who filed monopoly patents, causing mass protests by Indian farmers. As dictated by the WTO, the pharmaceuticals now have exclusive control over the marketing of neem tree products, a ruling that is being reluctantly enforced in India. Tens of thousands of erstwhile independent farmers must now work for the powerful pharmaceuticals on profit-gorging terms set by the companies.

A trade agreement between India and the United States, the Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture (KIA), backed by Monsanto and other transnational corporate giants, allows for the grab of India’s seed sector by Monsanto, its trade sector by Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill, and its retail sector by Wal-Mart. (Wal-Mart announced plans to open 500 stores in India, starting in August 2007.) This amounts to a war against India’s independent farmers and small businesses, and a threat to India’s food security. Farmers are organizing to protect themselves against this economic invasion by maintaining traditional seed-banks and setting up systems of communal agrarian support. One farmer says, “We do not buy seeds from the market because we suspect they may be contaminated with genetically engineered or terminator seeds.”

In a similar vein, the WTO ruled that the U.S. corporation RiceTec has the patent rights to all the many varieties of basmati rice, grown for centuries by India’s farmers. It also ruled that a Japanese corporation had exclusive rights in the world to grow and produce curry powder. As these instances demonstrate, what is called “free trade” amounts to international corporate monopoly control. Such developments caused Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad to observe:

We now have a situation where theft of genetic resources by western biotech TNCs [transnational corporations] enables them to make huge profits by producing patented genetic mutations of these same materials. What depths have we sunk to in the global marketplace when nature’s gifts to the poor may not be protected but their modifications by the rich become exclusive property?

If the current behavior of the rich countries is anything to go by, globalization simply means the breaking down of the borders of countries so that those with the capital and the goods will be free to dominate the markets.
Under free-trade agreements like General Agreements on Trade and Services (GATS) and Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), all public services are put at risk. A public service can be charged with causing “lost market opportunities” for business, or creating an unfair subsidy. To offer one in¬stance: the single-payer automobile insurance program proposed by the province of Ontario, Canada, was declared "unfair competition.” Ontario could have its public auto insurance only if it paid U.S. insurance companies what they estimated would be their present and future losses in Ontario auto insurance sales, a prohibitive cost for the province. Thus the citizens of Ontario were not allowed to exercise their democratic sovereign right to institute an alterna¬tive not-for-profit auto insurance system. In another case, United Parcel Service charged the Canadian Post Office for “lost market opportunities,” which means that under free trade accords, the Canadian Post Office would have to compensate UPS for all the business that UPS thinks it would have had if there were no public postal service. The Canadian postal workers union has challenged the case in court, arguing that the agreement violates the Canadian Constitution.

Under NAFTA, the U.S.-based Ethyl Corporation sued the Canadian government for $250 million in “lost business opportunities” and “interference with trade” because Canada banned MMT, an Ethyl-produced gasoline additive considered carcinogenic by Canadian officials. Fearing they would lose the case, Canadian officials caved in, agreeing to lift the ban on MMT, pay Ethyl $10 million compensation, and issue a public statement calling MMT “safe,” even though they had scientific findings showing otherwise. California also banned the unhealthy additive; this time a Canadian based Ethyl company sued California under NAFTA for placing an unfair burden on free trade.

International free trade agreements like GATT and NAFTA have hastened the corporate acquisition of local markets, squeezing out smaller businesses and worker collectives. Under NAFTA better-paying U.S. jobs were lost as firms closed shop and contracted out to the cheaper Mexican labor market. At the same time thousands of Mexican small companies were forced out of business. Mexico was flooded with cheap, high-tech, mass produced corn and dairy products from giant U.S. agribusiness firms (themselves heavily subsidized by the U.S. government), driving small Mexican farmers and distributors into bankruptcy, displacing large numbers of poor peasants. The lately arrived U.S. companies in Mexico have offered extremely low-paying jobs, and unsafe work conditions. Generally free trade has brought a dramatic increase in poverty south of the border.

We North Americans are told that to remain competitive in the new era of globalization, we will have to increase our output while reducing our labor and production costs, in other words, work harder for less. This in fact is happening as the work-week has lengthened by as much as twenty percent (from forty hours to forty-six and even forty-eight hours) and real wages have flattened or declined during the reign of George W. Bush. Less is being spent on social services, and we are enduring more wage concessions, more restructuring, deregulation, and privatization. Only with such “adjustments,” one hears, can we hope to cope with the impersonal forces of globalization that are sweeping us along.

In fact, there is nothing impersonal about these forces. Free trade agreements, including new ones that have not yet been submitted to the U.S. Congress have been consciously planned by big business and its government minions over a period of years in pursuit of a deregulated world economy that undermines all democratic checks upon business practices. The people of any one province, state, or nation are now finding it increasingly difficult to get their govern¬ments to impose protective regulations or develop new forms of public sector production out of fear of being overruled by some self-appointed international free-trade panel.

Usually it is large nations demanding that poorer smaller ones relinquish the protections and subsidies they provide for their local producers. But occasionally things may take a different turn. Thus in late 2006 Canada launched a dispute at the World Trade Organization over the use of “trade-distorting” agricultural subsidies by the United States, specifically the enormous sums dished out by the federal government to U.S. agribusiness corn farmers. The case also challenged the entire multibillion-dollar structure of U.S. agricultural subsidies. It followed the landmark WTO ruling of 2005 which condemned ”trade-distorting” aid to U.S. cotton farmers. A report by Oxfam International revealed that at least thirty-eight developing countries were suffering severely as a result of trade distorting subsidies by both the United States and the European Union. Meanwhile, the U.S. government was maneuvering to insert a special clause into trade negotiations that would place its illegal use of farm subsidies above challenge by WTO member countries and make the subsidies immune from adjudication through the WTO dispute settlement process.

What is seldom remarked upon is that NAFTA and GATT are in violation of the U.S. Constitution, the preamble of which makes clear that sovereign power rests with the people: “We the People of the United States . . . do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution reads, “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.” Article I, Section 7 gives the president (not some trade council) the power to veto a law, subject to being overridden by a two-thirds vote in Congress. And Article III gives adjudication and review powers to a Supreme Court and other federal courts as ordained by Congress. The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” There is nothing in the entire Constitution that allows an international trade panel to preside as final arbiter exercising supreme review powers undermining the constitutionally mandated decisions of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches.

True, Article VII says that the Constitution, federal laws, and treaties “shall be the supreme Law of the land,” but certainly this was not intended to include treaties that overrode the laws themselves and the sovereign democratic power of the people and their representatives.

To exclude the Senate from deliberations, NAFTA and GATT were called “agreements” instead of treaties, a semantic ploy that enabled President Clinton to bypass the two-third treaty ratification vote in the Senate and avoid any treaty amendment process. The World Trade Organization was approved by a lame-duck session of Congress held after the 1994 elections. No one running in that election uttered a word to voters about putting the U.S. government under a perpetual obligation to insure that national laws do not conflict with international free trade rulings.

What is being undermined is not only a lot of good laws dealing with environment, public services, labor standards, and consumer protection, but also the very right to legislate such laws. Our democratic sovereignty itself is being surrendered to a secretive plutocratic trade organization that presumes to exercise a power greater than that of the people and their courts and legislatures. What we have is an international coup d’état by big capital over the nations of the world.

Globalization is a logical extension of imperialism, a victory of empire over republic, international finance capital over local productivity and nation-state democracy (such as it is). In recent times however, given popular protests, several multilateral trade agreements have been stalled or voted down. In 1999, militant protests against free trade took place in forty-one nations from Britain and France to Thailand and India. In 2000-01, there were demonstrations in Seattle, Washington, Sydney, Prague, Genoa, and various other locales. In 2003-04 we saw the poorer nations catching wise to the free trade scams and refusing to sign away what shreds of sovereignty they still had. Along with the popular resistance, more national leaders are thinking twice before signing on to new trade agreements.

The discussion of globalization by some Marxists (but not all) has focused on the question of whether the new “internationalization” of capital will undermine national sovereignty and the nation state. They dwell on this question while leaving unmentioned such things as free trade agreements and the WTO. Invariably these observers (for instance Ellen Wood and William Taab in Monthly Review, Ian Jasper in Nature, Society and Thought, Erwin Marquit in Political Affairs) conclude that the nation state still plays a key role in capitalist imperialism, that capital—while global in its scope--is not international but bound to particular nations, and that globalization is little more than another name for overseas monopoly capital investment.

They repeatedly remind us that Marx had described globalization, this process of international financial expansion, as early as 1848, when he and Engels in the Communist Manifesto wrote about how capitalism moves into all corners of the world, reshaping all things into its own image. Therefore, there is no cause for the present uproar. Globalization, these writers conclude, is not a new development but a longstanding one that Marxist theory uncovered long ago.

The problem with this position is that it misses the whole central point of the current struggle. It is not only national sovereignty that is at stake, it is democratic sovereignty. Millions, of people all over the world have taken to the streets to protest free trade agreements. Among them are farmers, workers, students and intellectuals (including many Marxists who see things more clearly than the aforementioned ones), all of whom are keenly aware that something new is afoot and they want no part of it. As used today, the term globalization refers to a new stage of international expropriation, designed not to put an end to the nation-state but to undermine whatever democratic right exists to protect the social wage and restrain the power of transnational corporations.

The free trade agreements, in effect, make unlawful all statutes and regulations that restrict private capital in any way. Carried to full realization, this means the end of whatever imperfect democratic protections the populace has been able to muster after generations of struggle in the realm of public policy. Under the free trade agreements any and all public services can be ruled out of existence because they cause “lost market opportunities” for private capital. So too public hospitals can be charged with taking away markets from private hospitals; and public water supply systems, public schools, public libraries, public housing and public transportation are guilty of depriving their private counterparts of market opportunities, likewise public health insurance, public mail delivery, and public auto insurance systems. Laws that try to protect the environment or labor standards or consumer health already have been overthrown for “creating barriers” to free trade.

What also is overthrown is the right to have such laws. This is the most important point of all and the one most frequently overlooked by persons from across the political spectrum. Under the free trade accords, property rights have been elevated to international supremacy, able to take precedent over all other rights, including the right to a clean livable environment, the right to affordable public services, and the right to any morsel of economic democracy. Instead a new right has been accorded absolutist status, the right to corporate private profit. It has been used to stifle the voice of working people and their ability to develop a public sector that serves their interests. Free speech itself is undermined as when “product disparagement” is treated as an interference with free trade. And nature itself is being monopolized and privatized by transnational corporations.

So the fight against free trade is a fight for the right to politico-economic democracy, public services, and a social wage, the right not to be completely at the mercy of big capital. It is a new and drastic phase of the class struggle that some Marxists--so immersed in classical theory and so ill-informed about present-day public policy--seem to have missed. As embodied in the free trade accords, globalization has little to do with trade and is anything but free. It benefits the rich nations over poor ones, and the rich classes within all nations at the expense of ordinary citizens. It is the new specter that haunts the same old world.

© copyright Michael Parenti, 2007
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Michael Parenti’s books include The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories); Democracy for the Few 8th ed. (Wadsworth/Thomson) and The Assassination of Julius Caesar (New Press).

Join Michael Parenti

Gene Mason — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 13:18:00 GMT

Outspoken author, historian and media critic Michael Parenti visits Sonoma State University August 28 to present the first of the Modern Media Censorship Lectures to be held Thursdays during the fall semester (7 PM in Darwin Hall 103).

Series host Mickey S. Huff will introduce the topic Can We Call it Censorship? followed by Mr. Parenti, who will discuss Orthodoxy and Diversity in the News Media.

An internationally known award-winning author and lecturer, Michael Parenti is considered one of the nations leading sociopolitical analysts. Author Cornell West calls him a towering prophetic voice in American
life. Mr. Parentis many informative and entertaining books include Inventing Reality, The Politics of News Media, The Terrorism Trap, September 11 and Beyond and most recently Contrary Notions: The Michael
Parenti Reader.

Outspoken author, historian and media critic Michael Parenti visits Sonoma

State University August 28 to present the first of the Modern Media

Censorship Lectures to be held Thursdays during the fall semester (7 PM in

Darwin Hall 103).

Series host Mickey S. Huff will introduce the topic Can We Call it

Censorship? followed by Mr. Parenti, who will discuss Orthodoxy and

Diversity in the News Media.

An internationally known award-winning author and lecturer, Michael

Parenti is considered one of the nations leading sociopolitical analysts.

Author Cornell West calls him a towering prophetic voice in American

life. Mr. Parentis many informative and entertaining books include

Inventing Reality, The Politics of News Media, The Terrorism Trap,

September 11 and Beyond and most recently Contrary Notions: The Michael

Parenti Reader.

Tickets are $10 atwww.projectcensored.org/lectures, $12 at the door (free

for students).

This event and the Modern Media Censorship Lectures are sponsored by

Project Censored, Associated Students Productions, Students for Media

Democracy, and the Media Freedom Foundation. For more information contact

Kate Sims atsimsk@sonoma.edu, 707-664-3160.

Barack Obama Overseas: Damned if He Does, Damned If He Doesn't by Fred Fleron

Gene Mason — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 23:34:00 GMT

Barack Obama Overseas: Damned if He Does, Damned If He Doesn't

by Fred Fleron, 29 July 2008

In recent weeks we have heard a number of folks say that they wonder if Barack Obama would actually do the good things he says he will do if he is elected President. Fair enough, but what=s the alternative? The danger that if John McCain is elected President he will do the things he says he will do. Of course, McCain might not do the things he says he will do. So where does that leave us? What should we, the voters, do in the face of this quandary? The first thing we should do is not judge candidates by whether they might deliver the goods promised during an election campaign. Why not? Because we can never know for sure. Despite fine rhetoric and charismatic appeal during their election campaigns, we did not know beforehand whether or not FDR or JFK would, or could, actually deliver the goods. Only with historical hindsight do we now know that they did deliver. And so it will be with every other candidate, both present and future.

Since we cannot role the tape of life [to quote the late Harvard biologist Stephen J. Gould] either backwards or forward, we should take a very different approach. We could judge candidates by the glimpses into character that are revealed by several factors during a campaign. Listen to the things they say and how they say them. Do they inspire confidence by their rhetoric and their presentation of it? Do they send positive or negative messages, both in terms of their substantive statements and how they treat their opponents? What is the quality of the issues they engage?

In terms of these criteria the 2008 presidential campaigns of John McCain and Barack Obama tell us much about the candidates. As of this writing (27 July 2008), Senator Obama has just returned from an overseas trip to Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Germany, France, and Britain. For months Senator McCain and his camp have been sharply criticizing Obama for not visiting Iraq. It is not too much to say that McCain goaded Obama into taking his recent trip. Yet now McCain is criticizing Obama for how he took the trip. For example, he says that Obama should have visited wounded U.S. troops while he was in Germany. OK. But if Obama had visited our wounded troops, there is every reason to believe that McCain would have found something else to criticize about Obama's trip. And now it is being suggested that Obama=s overseas tour may have Aoff point@ with so many Americans concerned about the economyBmortgage foreclosures, the price of gasoline, pink slips, etc. Now you might say: well, that=s just the nature of political campaigning. Perhaps so. But I say that it also speaks to the quality of campaign issues.

On the question of rhetoric, can anyone truthfully say they are inspired either by the content of McCain=s rhetoric or his style of presentation? He strikes me as a tired old man who should be respected, indeed honored, for his military service to our country and the horrors inflicted on him as a POW for more than five years. But this is not a person who can inspire confidence as the leader of our country, either in the content of his message or in his public presentations of it. Where is his enthusiasm? Where is his energy? Where is his creativity when it comes to major policy issues?

Another thing we could do is to evaluate the knowledge of candidates. How conversant are they with the facts of life, both at home and abroad. On his return from his first overseas trip, Senator Obama hit the ground running by giving a number of impressive answers to questions posed by CNN correspondents at the Unity Journalism Conference in Chicago. This was aired on CNN following an interview of Senator McCain by Wolf Blitzer. The differences between the two presidential candidates were stunning. You had to see it to believe it.

Senator Obama's appearance in Chicago has raised another issue in the press. A few weeks ago we were told that Obama lacked a sense of humor and had not committed the kind of faux pas that the press and political opponents love to seize upon. It was suggested that he might pick a less skillful and more humorous vice presidential running mate who would provide the proper grist for the media mill. Now when he jokes with the press during a public interview, as in Chicago the other day, it is suggested that he might be arrogant. You just can=t win, can you?

And, yes, 200,000 people showed up to hear and see Barack Obama in Berlin, and the news media in this country made a bigger deal of that than they did the content of what he had to say on that occasion. Count me among those who say they haven=t heard such an inspiring speech from an American public figure since the days of JFK and MLK. No public utterance by John McCain has come even close to inspiring the degree of confidence in both the intelligence and grasp of international issues that Obama=s Berlin speech did for me, and as a student of politics for the past half century I am not easily impressed by campaign rhetoric.

So, if you have not done so already, read the text Senator Obama's Berlin speech and judge for yourself. Click here.

The Suicide Solution by Barbara Ehrenreich

Gene Mason — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 18:24:00 GMT

The Suicide Solution

by Barbara Ehrenreich

A few days before Congress passed its Housing Bill, Carlene Balderrama of Taunton MA found her own solution to the housing crisis. Just a little over two hours in advance of the time her mortgage company, PHH Mortgage Corporation -- may its name live in infamy -- was to auction off her home, Balderrama killed herself with her husband's rifle.

This is not the kind of response to hard times that James Grant had in mind when he wrote his July 19 Wall Street Journal essay entitled "Why No Outrage?" "One might infer from the lack of popular anger," the famed Wall Street contrarian wrote, "that the credit crisis was God's fault rather than the doing of the bankers and the rating agencies and the government's snoozing watchdogs." For contrast, he cites the spirited response to the depression of the 1890s, when lawyer/agitator Mary Lease stirred crowds with the message that "We want the accursed foreclosure system wiped out.... We will stand by our homes and stay by our firesides by force if necessary..."

Grant could have found even more bracing examples of resistance in the 1930s, when farmers and tenants used mob power -- and sometimes firearms -- to fight foreclosures and evictions. For more on that, I consulted Frances Fox Piven, co-author of the classic text Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, who told me that in the early 30s, a number of cities were so shaken by the resistance that they declared moratoriums on further evictions. A 1931 riot by Chicago tenants who had fallen behind on their rent, for example, had left three dead and three police officers injured.

According to Piven, these actions were often spontaneous. A group of unemployed men would get word of a scheduled eviction and march through the streets, gathering crowds as they went. Arriving at the site of the eviction, they would move the furniture back into the apartment and stay around to protect the threatened tenants. In one instance in Detroit, it took 100 cops to evict a single family. Also in Detroit, Piven said, "two families protected their apartments by shooting their landlord and were acquitted by a sympathetic jury."

What a difference 80 years makes. When the police and the auctioneers arrived at Balderrama's house, the family gun had already been used -- on the victim of foreclosure herself. I don't know how "worthy" a debtor she was -- the family had been through bankruptcies before, though probably not as a result of Caribbean vacations and closets full of designer clothes. It was an Adjustable Rate Mortgage that did them in, and Balderrama, who managed the family's finances, had apparently been unwilling to tell her husband that their ever-rising monthly mortgage payments were eating up his earnings as a plumber.

Suicide is becoming an increasingly popular response to debt. James Scurlock's brilliant documentary, Maxed Out, features the families of two college students who killed themselves after being overwhelmed by credit card debt. "All the people we talked to had considered suicide at least once," Scurlock told a gathering of the National Assocition of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys in 2007. According to the Los Angeles Times, lawyers in the audience backed him up, "describing clients who showed up at their offices with cyanide, or threatened, 'If you don't help me, I've got a gun in my car.'"

India may be the trend-setter here, with an estimated 150,000 debt-ridden farmers succumbing to suicide since 1997. With guns in short supply in rural India, the desperate farmers have taken to drinking the pesticides meant for their crops.

Dry your eyes, already: Death is an effective remedy for debt, along with anything else that may be bothering you too. And try to think of it too from a lofty, corner-office, perspective: If you can't pay your debts or afford to play your role as a consumer, and if, in addition -- like an ever-rising number of Americans -- you're no longer needed at the workplace, then there's no further point to your existence. I'm not saying that the creditors, the bankers and the mortgage companies actually want you dead, but in a culture where one's credit rating is routinely held up as a three-digit measure of personal self-worth, the correct response to insoluble debt is in fact, "Just shoot me!"

The alternative is to value yourself more than any amount of money and turn the guns, metaphorically speaking, in the other direction. It wasn't God, or some abstract economic climate change, that caused the credit crisis. Actual humans -- often masked as financial institutions -- did that, (and you can find a convenient list of names in Nomi Prins's article in the current issue of Mother Jones.) Most of them, except for a tiny few facing trials, are still high rollers, fattening themselves on the blood and tears of ordinary debtors. I know it's so 1930s, but may I suggest a march on Wall Street?

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of thirteen books, including the New York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed. A frequent contributor to the New York Times, Harpers, and the Progressive, she is a contributing writer to Time magazine. She lives in Florida. Global Vistas reads her work admiringly. We encourage you to read her blog: http://ehrenreich.blogs.com/.

Dubious Design by Michael Parenti

Gene Mason — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 17:02:00 GMT

First Published on Friday, April 11, 2008 by CommonDreams.org

Dubious Design

by Michael Parenti

What is called “creationism” is the belief that in six days the Judeo-Christian god created the universe and all the earthly species including humans in finished form much as they exist today. For centuries this view prevailed throughout the western world. Even after evolutionary science had emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the scenario sketched in Genesis remained the only one acceptable for most of Christendom. Not until the early twentieth century did Darwinian science enjoy a fully receptive hearing in the scientific and academic communities of the United States.

But today, rather than riding triumphant, evolutionary science seems to be barely hanging on in the arena of public opinion. A 2007 Gallup poll reported that only 49 percent of the US public accepted evolution and 48 percent did not. Another survey found 42 percent of Americans held strict creationist views. And various school districts throughout the country have experienced furious dust-ups over the teaching of evolution.

Of late there has emerged a more refined offshoot of creationism called intelligent design (ID). It argues that living organisms are so irreducibly complex they could not have evolved haphazardly over the eons from more primitive forms but were precisely created in one fell swoop by a higher intelligence.

In their assault on evolution the creationists and ID protagonists summon an urgent refrain. To quote from a statement by an anti-Darwinian school board in Dover, Pennsylvania: “Darwin’s Theory is [just] a theory. . . . The Theory is not a fact. Gaps exist in the Theory for which there is no evidence. . . . Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view. . . . Students are encouraged to keep an open mind.”

Critics of evolution almost have a point. There certainly are “gaps” in an evolutionary theory that is neither fixed nor final. But the same holds true of all scientific theories, be it nutritional science, meteorology, astronomy, biology, geology, or physics. Science frequently produces theories that contain unanswered questions and invite varying interpretations.

Truth be told, there are no fixed and final scientific laws. Many scientists do not even like the term scientific laws, preferring to speak of “scientific theories.” For it is in the nature of science–when practiced at its best–to keep everything accessible to further investigation and conceptualization. Seemingly triumphant scientific breakthroughs can open up additional areas of inquiry that lead to still more unanswered questions.

Be this as it may, an established body of science is not something to be dismissed out of hand just because it harbors unanswered questions. That a scientific theory is incomplete does not give us license to ignore all the evidence it has accumulated. The data provided by paleontology, geology, zoology, entomology, molecular biology, and other fields make a strong case for evolution and have yet to be explained away by the intelligent designers.

Scientists have been devising new ways of charting how life develops from simple to more complex forms, which is the essence of evolutionary theory. By reconstructing ancient genetic materials from long-extinct animals, they have been able to show how evolution created a new and more complicated component of molecular structure from existing parts.

By its very nature, life depends on adaptability. This means that change, complexity, and development are inevitable components of the natural world. Not all organisms reproduce with uniform success. Reproductive capacity arises directly from how well creatures (including human ones) are able to compete for resources, both against other species and against other members of the same species—and against problems presented by the natural elements themselves.

Not only competition but a highly evolved cooperation may advantage various species. Given this infinitude of interactive forces, it would seem improbable for evolution not to be happening.

Indeed evolution continues before our very eyes as demonstrated by the recently discovered ways that viruses and other microbes acquire new traits, adapt to new habitats, and move toward becoming new species in a matter of days. New pathogens such as SARS, HIV, and more virulent tuberculosis bacilli continue to evolve. Unfortunately it is their evolutionary capacity that is likely to make these microbes resistant to antibiotic drugs. Evolutionary theory explains their dramatic adaptability; the Bible does not, nor do the intelligent designers.

There is something else to be said about scientific theory. When intelligent designers insist that evolution is a theory and not a fact, they are juxtaposing theory and fact as two mutually exclusive and competitive concepts. This is a view commonly held by laypersons who know nothing about science, who assume that there are “hard facts” on the one hand, and airy theories facilely spun out of one’s head on the other.

So we are admonished to stop “theorizing,” stop devising abstract speculations that by definition are more fanciful than factual. Sometimes “theory” is even made to stand for something that is presumed by many to be ipso facto false, as in “conspiracy theory.”

In both the natural and social sciences, however, theory is something more than mere speculation. Theory is the generalizable distillation of empirical investigation, the payoff that comes from gathering and connecting a heap of pertinent facts. It takes facts to build a scientific theory but it takes a theory to organize and make sense of the facts.

Theories are valued for their explanatory power. A developed and confirmed theory is what science aims for. It is the gold standard of scientific inquiry. The theory of gravity and the theory of relativity are not lacking in facts just because they are theories. To dismiss something as just a theory and not a factual science does not make sense from a scientific point of view. Theory is not all that “soft” and, for that matter, facts are sometimes not all that “hard” or firmly fixed.

Since scientific theories in all fields contain some unanswered questions, why is evolution singled out by the intelligent designers as the one gap-ridden speculative theory? The answer is glaringly evident: evolution is in direct collision with Genesis. If evolution is true, then the Bible’s description of how God fashioned the world in six days and created humans in their present form seems much the fairy tale. And if Genesis is a fairy tale, then of what validity is the remainder of the divinely dictated tome that serves as the unerring fundament of Judaic-Christian belief?

The response offered by the scientific defenders of evolution is predictable and somewhat incomplete: “We have no way of testing and demonstrating the truth or falsity of non-natural spirit forces that are presumed to be acting in nature.” It would be nice if someday someone would add, “and neither do the intelligent designers.” That is the real problem. Of course, scientists cannot move outside their fundamental paradigm and demonstrate divine causation, but neither can the designing creationists.

This is a crucial point because the burden of proof for intelligent design is on the designers. Where is their field work, their laboratory experiments, their observational reports and accumulated evidence measuring the effects of ID vectors on various natural forces and entities, all the things we would expect from a scientific inquiry interested in “hard facts”?

This is the problem with teaching ID: what would you actually teach? How could you judge the reliability of what you teach? How do we determine what is or isn’t evidentiary if one can postulate a priori an unseen supreme designer lurking behind everything? In the two decades since ID has emerged, it has generated no important experiments or insights into biology, and looks less and less like a science and increasingly like a theological polemic.

Advocates of ID seem untroubled by their own scientific illiteracy. One of them asserts that there is no evidence of a protracted evolution because “all the vertebrate groups, from fish to mammals appear [in the fossil record] at one time.” Not true, George Monbiot responds; the first fish fossils and the first mammal fossils are separated from each other by some 300 million years.

ID proponents make much of the human eye. Given the intricacy and delicate precision that enables it to perform its marvelous function, and “the purposeful arrangement of parts,” the eye could never have developed from hit-and-miss mutation and natural selection, the argument goes. If evolution were true, there would be fossils of particular animals without vision and others with varying degrees of eye development strung out across the ages, but “such fossils do not exist,” the intelligent designers maintain. But such fossils do exist, Monbiot reminds us; the fossil record does indeed stretch across the ages with countless eyes “in all stages of development.”

As for the creationists, it is not that they have questions about particular aspects of evolution, as might we all. Rather they deny that it ever happened. They believe the book of Genesis is literally true. Possessed of the absolute truth as they see it, they are not prone to tolerate alternative perspectives. They are not interested in a pluralism of views. They do not want to supplement evolutionary theory but to replace it. , even as they call for more tolerance in secular schools and increasingly greater exposure for their own “explanation.”

Its proponents insist that ID is not religiously anchored; it requires neither miracles nor a creator. They avoid mention of the six-day jiffy creation and other biblical narratives. But if ID is not supernatural, then how does it act as a first and perfect universalistic template for all this imperfect unfinished world? How can it create the natural world in all its wondrous and presumably irreducible complexity if it is itself merely a component of that complexity? Here is a designer that is the source of all creation’s form and content but which itself cannot be subjected to any kind of scientific study, a designer that supposedly is fixed in nature yet transcends ordinary materiality.

The designers centered at the Discovery Institute, a conservative think tank in Seattle, revealed their religiously motivated hand in their now infamous and strikingly candid, in-house document, “The Wedge Strategy,” written in 1999 and leaked to the public some time later. According to “The Wedge Strategy,” the ultimate goal of intelligent design is “nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies” replacing scientific materialism “with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.”

The authors of this document blame evolutionary theory and materialistic science for most of the world’s evils. They write, “Thinking they could engineer the perfect society through the application of scientific knowledge, materialist reformers advocated coercive government programs that falsely promised to create heaven on earth.” In sum, ID is not a field of study; it is a refined fundamentalist preachment in service to a reactionary political agenda.

The creationists and ID designers appear to be championing free speech and diversity of ideas when they urge that students be taught more than just Darwinism. In fact they themselves are not interested in a pluralism of views. They do not favor the teaching of every theory of creation.

There are as many stories of how the world began and how it is held together as there are tribal mythologies and tales. The fundamentalist Jesus worshippers are concerned only about the Genesis narrative, the one they want accorded exclusive standing in the schools.

Thus in 1999, creationists on the Kansas state board of education removed nearly all references to evolution from the curriculum. Such references were restored only after Kansas voters ousted the creationist bloc in 2001. In short, the creationists do not want to supplement evolutionary theory but to replace it, which—as demonstrated in Kansas—is exactly what they do when afforded the opportunity.

Michael Parenti’s lastest books are Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader (2007), Democracy for the Few, 8thThe Culture Struggle (2006). The above is adapted from his forthcoming book God and His Demons. For further information, visit www.michaelparenti.org.

MCCAIN’S “ECONOMIC BRAIN” by Jim Hightower

Gene Mason — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 17:25:00 GMT

MCCAIN’S “ECONOMIC BRAIN”
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Posted by Jim Hightower

Hoo-boy, what a scream Phil Gramm is!

He’s the sour old former-Texas senator who, in 2002, leveraged his chairmanship of the banking committee into a sweetheart job as chief lobbyist for UBS, a giant investment bank on Wall Street. He’s also tight with John McCain, who made Phil his campaign co-chair and top economic advisor last year.

McCain, who has admitted that he doesn’t know much about economics, counts on his old senate buddy so much that Fortune magazine dubbed Gramm, “McCain’s econ brain.” The two say they confer every day, and McCain recently gushed: “I respect no one more in America on issue[s] of economics than I do Phil Gramm.”

Imagine the senator's surprise, then, when his econ brain recently began sputtering out elitist vitriol about the hoi polloi. Gramm said he has no patience with all these stories about people facing hard times, declaring that America has “sort of become a nation of whiners.” The economy is fine, pronounced the economic doctor, except that people have fallen into “a mental recession.”

Actually, McCain need not have been surprised by Gramm’s harsh, right-wing rant. We Texans have long known that anyone needing a heart transplant should try to get Phil’s, for it’s never been used. A laissez-faire extremist, he’s never had any appreciation for people’s real-life problems, instead seeing people themselves as the problem. And he’s always been quick to mock folks who are beneath him on the economic ladder. Consider, for example, this Gramm gem about American poverty: “We’re the only nation in the world where all our poor people are fat.”

I’m telling you, the guy’s a scream! Yet, despite Phil's recent political gaffe, McCain loves and respects him so much that Gramm is widely believed to be his choice for Treasury Secretary, which would make him America’s top economic official. Now wouldn’t that be a scream?

“Phil Gramm’s Greatest Hits: ‘Poor People Are Fat’ And ‘There Should Be No Minimum Wage’” www.thinkprogress.org, July 11, 2008.

“McCain Claims Gramm ‘Does Not Speak For Me’ On Same Day Gramm Speaks For McCain In Meeting With WSJ” www.thinkprogress.org, July 10, 2008.

Global Vistas encourages you to explore more of the insightful work of Jim Hightower at www.jimhightower.com.

Undocumented Aliens and Health Care by Jonathan Weishbuch

Gene Mason — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:48:00 GMT

The youtube video below shows a hospital adminsitrator expressing her frustration with the system. It was sent to me by a friend. My response to this video follows. Please watch and listen then return to my comment.

This is another outrageous example of our failure to address the morality to which our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution speak. "The unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" and "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, provide for the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution of the United States of America" How can one not read to provide for the health of individuals and communities into these two statements. And yet, with the exception of the Merchant Seaman's Act of 1798, the creation of St. Elizabeth's Hospital in DC in 1853, the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906, Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, we have assiduously avoided our responsibilities to our fellows for over 230 years. Quite a record.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLJxmJZXgNI

The number of illegal (or undocumented) aliens in the US at any given time does not exceed 12 million, or about 4% of the population. From data I have accumulated in LA and here in AZ (where I was the Medical Director of LA County and Maricopa County-Phoenix), the amount of health care these individuals request is about half of that of US citizens' request for the same ages and sex, with the exception of young females who have a slightly higher fertility rate than US citizens. In other words, the burden on the US health care system of undocumented immigrants is about 2% of the aggregate demand on our system. Because these individuals use emergency rooms for their care rather than primary services, their unit cost, however, far exceeds that of comparable Americans. So it may be 3% of the US Health care cost: about $65 billion out of a total health care budget of $2.3 Trillion (with a T). The inefficiency and overhead in our system is nearly ten times that cost, or about $500 billion.

Were everyone in the US--citizens, visitors, legal immigrants, undocumented, everyone (all 305 million of us)-- were covered under a universal health system like every other civilized country on the planet, adhering to the Who charter statement of human rights, that health is the right of all humans), our aggregated cost would be less than $1.5 trillion, and the problems described by the Florida testimonial would not even occur. No hospital would have to take a loss on serving anyone. No physician would have to care for a patient and not be reimbursed for the care provided. No immigrant and no uninsured citizen (of which there are now nearly 50 million -- one sixth of the population) would fear bankruptcy, destitution, disease, disability or death through fear of going to the health system. Today, we estimate that 18,000 Americans die annually because they are uninsured, and do not get to a care facility before it is too late for the progression of their illness. Were everyone covered, no one would die because they could not get to the doctor or the emergency room. And no provider would be left holding the bag like the Florida hospitals.

In Arizona, our hospitals (because of some quirk in our laws) actually do send patients back to their "home" country when they run out of money. A comatose patient, 19 years old with a legal work visa, was returned to a hospital in Mexico because he was uninsured. This is not medicine. It is cruelty. It is malpractice. And it happens in this state about twice a week.

The problem in Florida is not that American taxpayers are paying $100 million to care for illegal immigrants. The problem is that they are willing to pay over $500 billion to keep a corrupt, profit-driven insurance and medical treatment system in place because we do not have the moral integrity to demand that our legislators enact legislation that will grant every resident the God-given right to good health, access to the services required to keep them in good health, and the support system to assure that they know how to get the care they need from providers competent to provide it in a system designed to provide the quality they deserve (regardless of their age, sex, country of origin, citizenship, sexual orientation, employment status or political affiliation).

What the woman from Florida should have been demanding was not relief from doing her job of caring for those who seek help in her institution. She should have been demanding that the Florida legislature accept their moral responsibility to promote the general welfare, protect the security of their residents, and support the notion that health is a human right by passing legislation that would guarantee those rights. Finding the way to pay the costs is also trivial. But that is the subject for my next article.