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Stills from Union Maids. Images from escholarship.org. Vicky Starr (Stella Nowicki) is on right.
Vicky Starr dies at 93:
Socialist, labor organizer, feminist, film star

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / January 13, 2009

I read recently that Vicky Starr died on Thanksgiving Day, November 26, 2009. She was 93 years old. Thinking about Vicky Starr (or for fans of the film Union Maids, Stella Nowicki) reminded me about how her life, which many of us learned of through the film, was so inspirational.

As a teenager, Vicky Starr left the family farm in Michigan and arrived on the south side of Chicago in 1933. She stayed in the home of Herb and Jane March, Communist activists who had come to Chicago to organize the packing house workers in the huge Stockyards. Under March’s tutelage she sought employment in the Yards and almost immediately began to network with workers to build a union of workers in the days leading up to the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).

The processing of meat from the 1880s until the late 1950s was centered in Chicago. The Stockyards, housing the Big Four packers (Armour, Cudahy, Swift, and Wilson), employed thousands of workers. Because the work was so dangerous and unpleasant, it was largely carried out by the most marginalized sectors of the working class.

In the era of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle workers were primarily immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. After World War 1 and the “the Great Migration,” African Americans secured the lowest paid and most dangerous jobs in the Yards. Historic union organizing drives in 1904, and 1921 faltered because of racism and ethnic conflict among workers. Communist and socialist organizers in the Yards, such as March, realized that combating racism was central to organizing industrial unionism in the meat packing industry.

Still from Union Maids. Image from Documentary Starts Here.
And it was rank-and-file activists like Vicky Starr who tirelessly met with workers, helped write leaflets and newsletters, interacted with the radical students from the University of Chicago who had offered their assistance to union organizing drives, and communicated with sympathetic members of the influential Catholic Church in the city.

As a member of the Young Communist League, Starr and her comrades would read classic Marxist and Leninist texts. Since Starr would be identified with organizing campaigns by her bosses she often lost her job in the yards. When that occurred she would apply for work at another packing house company using a different name.

She told Alice and Staughton Lynd (Rank and File, 1973) many years later: “When I look back now, I really think we had a lot of guts. But I didn’t even stop to think about it at the time. It was something that had to be done. We had a goal. That’s what we felt had to be done and we did it.”

In 1937, workers established the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee (PWOC). Despite resistance by the major meat packers, state violence, red-baiting against union organizers by the state and the American Federation of Labor’s Amalgamated Meat Cutters (AMC), the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA-CIO) was constituted in 1943.

Until its merger with other unions, it remained a militant trade union that fought racism and red-baiting and publicly opposed United States foreign policies such as participation in the Korean War. And during its formative years in the mid-1940s Vicky Starr served for a time as Education Director for District 1 of UPWA.

Central to Starr’s contribution to the working class from the time she was a member of the Young Communist League, to the budding labor movement, the formation of the UPWA, and later as an organizer of clerical workers at the University of Chicago, was her constant struggle against racism and sexism.

After the formation of UPWA Starr said “We tried to make sure that there were both Negroes and whites as officers, stewards… in all the locals.” She fought residential segregation and participated in building the Back of the Yards Council on Chicago’s south side, and worked to end the exclusion of African Americans from professional sports. And in the end she recalled that the most militant trade unionists on the shop floor, the beef kill, were African Americans.

As an organizer in the 30s and a UPWA staffer in the 40s she combated sexism as well. “Women had an awfully tough time in the union because the men brought their prejudices there.” Women often had the most demeaning jobs in the Yards, wage rates discriminated against them, their special needs such as child care received no attention, and they often were fearful of demanding their rights on the shop floor and in the union.

As a socialist, Starr reflected on those halcyon days of UPWA-CIO organizing. She said that there was a sense that workers were ready to come together. There was a growing feeling of working class solidarity. Union organizers would show up at the Stockyards with literature and speeches. And at the grassroots she and others were on the shop floor spreading the word informally about the union.

And socialism needed to be addressed in terms of the concrete benefits of people’s lives. “You had to talk about it in terms of what it would mean for that person. We learned that you can’t manipulate people but that you really had to be concerned with the interests and needs of the people. However, you also had to have a platform — a projection of where you were going.”

Starr left the Yards in 1945, was forced underground for a time in the McCarthy period, raised four children and returned to work as a secretary at the prestigious University of Chicago. She still had “a platform” at the university, organizing all non-professional staff. Despite predictable resistance from the bastion of liberalism in higher education she applied the grassroots organizing skills she learned as a teenager in the stockyards to achieve victory for clerical workers. Teamsters Local 743 was recognized in 1978. Vicky Starr became the first shop steward of the new local.

Vicky Starr in 1992. Photo from Chicago DSA.
But Starr’s contribution to the American working class, Black and white, male and female, did not remain unnoticed beyond the shop/office. Alice and Staughton Lynd captured her remembrances of CIO organizing in the 1973 book Rank and File and the clerical workers struggle in the 2000 book New Rank and File. And especially, “Stella Nowicki” was one of three stars (the others were Sylvia Woods and Kate Hyndman) in the wonderful documentary (Union Maids, 1977) about women organizing in the CIO in the 1930s.

This last project made Vicky Starr a major celebrity. It brought to the attention of new generations of activists the fighting spirit of the 1930s, the central role Communists played in the battles, and the absolute centrality to organizing the working class of fighting racism and sexism.

Still relevant today, Union Maids (and the Lynds’ collections of interviews), can help inspire, educate, and inform activists about tactics, strategy, and basic principles of organizing.

Vicky Starr concluded her 1973 interview saying: “It was a privilege and a wonderful experience to participate in the excitement of those times.”

It is important to remember Vicky Starr for what she did for the working class, particularly industrial and clerical workers. And reflections on her life and work can still inform activists as they struggle for economic justice today.

[A memorial celebration of Vicky Starr’s life will be held January 23, 2010 at 4 pm at the North Shore Retirement Hotel, 1611 Chicago Avenue, Evanston, Illinois.]

[Harry Tarq is a professor in American Studies who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical, where this article also appears.]

The Rag Blog

Carmenza Gómez Romero of Soacha, Colombia, shows a picture of her son Victor, one of two sons she has lost in “false positive” operations in the Ocaña area. Photo from El Espectador.
Grotesque staged civilian murders:
Colombia’s ‘false positive’ operations

By Marion Delgado / The Rag Blog / January 12, 2010

CARTAGENA DE INDIES, Colombia — On the eve of 2010, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez accused Colombia and the U.S. of plotting to set up a fake rebel camp on Venezuelan soil to discredit his government.

Chavez accused Colombia of preparing what he called a “false positive” operation, saying “today it’s feasible for the neighboring country to build a makeshift camp in a remote location, then plant corpses and guns to make it seem that a rebel camp had been discovered.”

Colombian officials have said that leftist rebels from their country take refuge as needed in Venezuela. Chavez says the officials are trying to portray him, falsely, as being in cahoots with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which Colombia has been battling for decades.

“We have evidence that the Colombian government, instructed and supported, or rather directed by the United States, is preparing a “false positive,” Chavez said.

He said Colombian forces could bring bodies to “Venezuelan territory, build some huts, an improvised camp, put some rifles there… and say, ‘There it is, the guerrilla camp in Venezuela.’”

Is this guy really crazy like they say on U.S. TV during the obligatory hate minutes every half hour or so? As far as I know, a “false positive” is what you claim when you get nicked on a drug-war piss test. Is the narco-paraco government of Colombia going to give Hugo a piss test? This sounded strange and a little bit “funny”; I needed to find out what is going on.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, shown inspecting troops December 28, 2009, has accused Colombia of staging “false positive” operations in Venezuela territory. Photo by Juan Carlos Solorzano/ Miraflores Press Office / AP.
It turns out that the macabre story of false positives, while strange, is not funny at all. It’s a new chapter in the story of human rights abuses perpetrated by the Colombian army, in cahoots with their usual partners, the right wing paramilitaries that plague Colombian society.

The phenomenon is well known. A victim is lured under false pretenses to a remote location. He is killed soon after arrival, by members of the military. The scene is manipulated to make it appear as if the victim was legitimately killed in combat. He is commonly photographed wearing a guerrilla uniform, and holding a gun or grenade. Victims are often buried anonymously in communal graves, and their killers rewarded for the “results” they’ve achieved in the fight against drugs and/or rebels.

I started to get a leg up on the false positives talk from recently declassified cables and documents in National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 266, under the title: Documents Describe History of Abuses by Colombian Army.

CIA and senior U.S. diplomats were aware as early as 1994 that U.S.-backed Colombian security forces engaged in “death squad tactics,” cooperated with drug-running paramilitary groups, and encouraged a “body count syndrome,” according to the declassified documents.

These records shed light on a policy — recently examined in a still-undisclosed Colombian Army (COLAR) report — that influenced Colombian military officers for years, leading to extrajudicial executions and collaboration with paramilitary drug traffickers. The secret report has led to the dismissal of 30 Army officers and the resignation of Gen. Mario Montoya Uribe, (no relation to El Presidente), a Colombian Army Commander who long promoted using body counts to measure progress against guerrillas.

The Los Angeles Times reported in 2007 on a classified CIA report linking Gen. Montoya Uribe to joint military-paramilitary operations in Medellín while he served as brigade commander in 2002. His replacement as Army commander, General Oscar Gonzalez, also commanded the 4th Brigade, as well as other units in the conflict-prone area around Medellín. The 4th Brigade, a traditional launching point for officers seeking to move up the military chain-of-command, has long been accused of collusion with local paramilitary groups.

The NSA documents raise important questions about the historical and legal responsibilities COLAR has to come clean about, and what appear to be longstanding institutional incentives to commit murder. They include:

• A 1994 report from U.S. Ambassador Myles Frechette that decries “body count mentalities” among Colombian Army officers seeking to advance through the ranks. “Field officers who cannot show track records of aggressive anti-guerrilla activity (wherein the majority of the military’s human rights abuses occur) disadvantage themselves at promotion time.”
• A CIA intelligence report from 1994 finds that Colombian security forces “employ death squad tactics in their counterinsurgency campaign” and had “a history of assassinating leftwing civilians in guerrilla areas, cooperating with narcotics-related paramilitary groups in attacks against suspected guerrilla sympathizers, and killing captured combatants.”
• A Colombian Army colonel’s comments in 1997 that there was a “body count syndrome” in COLAR that “fuel[ed] human rights abuses by well-meaning soldiers trying to get their quota to impress superiors,” and a “cavalier, or at least passive, approach when it comes to allowing the paramilitaries to serve as proxies… for the COLAR in contributing to the guerrilla body count.” The same colonel also asserts that military collaboration with illegal paramilitary groups “had gotten much worse” under Gen. Rito Alejo Del Río Rojas, now under investigation for a murder during the same era.
• A declassified U.S. Embassy cable describing a February 2000 false positives operation in which both the United Self-Defense Forces of Córdoba and Urabá (ACCU) paramilitaries and COLAR almost simultaneously claimed credit for having killed two long-demobilized guerrillas near Medellín. Ambassador Curtis Kamman called it “a clear case of Army-paramilitary complicity,” adding that it was “difficult to conclude anything other than that the paramilitary and Army members simply failed to get their stories straight in advance.”

  The ACCU (which witnesses say kidnapped the two) claims its forces executed them, while the Army’s 4th Brigade (which released the bodies the next day) presented the dead as Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional (ELN — the National Liberation Army) guerrillas killed in combat with the Army. After these competing claims sparked local fears and confusion, armed men stole the cadavers from the morgue.

Obviously, the U.S. has known about these atrocities for years, yet both Bush and Obama have continued to feed billions of tax dollars to the very people who are committing them.

The earliest record in the Archive’s collection referring specifically to the phenomenon of “false positives” is dated 1990. That document, a cable approved by then-U.S. Ambassador Thomas McNamara, reported a disturbing increase in abuses attributed to COLAR. McNamara disputed the military’s claim that it killed nine guerrillas in El Ramal, Santander state, on June 7 of that year: ‘The investigation by Instruccion Criminal (COLAR CID) and the Procuraduría (Inspector-General’s Office) strongly suggests… that the nine were executed by the Army and then dressed in military fatigues. A military judge… on the scene apparently realized that there were no bullet holes in the military uniforms to match the wounds in the victims’ bodies…”

Hence the oxymoron, “Military Intelligence.”

While Colombian Army officials scramble to get their “stories straight,” “body counts” and “false positives” have an institutional history in COLAR going back many years.

The U.S. Embassy’s Defense Attaché Office (DAO) in Colombia reported in 1994 that the claim by then-Minister of Defense Fernando Botero that there was “a growing awareness that committing human rights abuses will block an officer’s path to promotion” reflected “wishful thinking.” These are the people that thousands of our troops will join up with and learn from. U.S. “drug war” money pays for every death and there were and still are thousands of them.

The latest “false positives” story revealed that the Army has murdered perhaps thousands of civilians, who were then dressed in rebel uniforms or had guns placed in their hands. They were then presented to the media as guerrillas or paramilitaries killed in combat. This allowed Army units to fabricate results and officers to gain promotion. The number of victims is believed to be in the thousands.

The story broke last October when it was found that poor young men had been recruited from the slums of Bogotá, promised well-paying jobs in the province of Norte de Santander, then murdered in cold blood and presented by the army as having been killed in combat.

The Fiscalia (Attorney General’s office) has evidence that 30 young men were murdered in such circumstances; so far 17 soldiers have been arrested in connection with the extrajudicial killings.

In Antioquia state, where the most cases have been reported, the AG is investigating COLAR Battalion Bombon, of the COLAR 14th brigade. It is alleged that soldiers were sent to the city of Medellin to round up homeless people, who were later presented as rebels killed in combat. Investigators have identified six cases, and 46 reported operations by the battalion are being scrutinized amid fears that more were simply staged, using murdered civilians.

Former Defense Minister Santos, who is likely to run for the presidency in 2010, has stated that the problems have been resolved and that the human rights abuses will be stopped.

However, last week he admitted that a student, Arnobis Negrete Villadiego, had been snatched off the streets of Monteria, Córdoba, on Christmas day. The corpse of the 18-year-old appeared a day later, presented as a member of a drug-trafficking gang killed in combat.

El Espectador, a Bogota daily newspaper, reported in August 2009 that the Colombia Prosecutor General’s Office was investigating 312 new complaints of people who say members of the armed forces killed civilians to present them as guerrillas killed in combat. Then in late September, 19 bodies were found in common graves in Ocaña, Norte de Santander. Some were identified as missing youths from Soacha. Over 100 bodies have been found in Ocaña so far this year.

Exhumation of bodies has shed light on the alleged atrocities in Colombia. Photo from BBC.
Relatives of the Soacha victims said that before they disappeared, they were offered high-paying work on farms elsewhere in the country by strangers. The youths were killed just a day or two after disappearing, making it unlikely that they would have had time to join and train with an armed rebel movement. An Army investigation was launched in October.

“The cases of Soacha [the most infamous case of so-called 'false positives'] are just the tip of the iceberg,” UN special rapporteur for extrajudicial killings Philip Alston said when he presented his report on Colombia.

Nearly 1,300 Colombians have been killed for political reasons since Álvaro Uribe became President in 2002, mostly by security forces, according to a new report by the International Observation Mission, a group representing around 100 non-governmental human rights organizations. The report notes a “considerable increase in the number of extrajudicial executions” in a time period that “coincides” with an Uribe security crackdown. A part of that crackdown was a policy of rewarding soldiers for combat casualties to demonstrate progress in the war on Colombia’s guerrillas.

Although the government has said several times there have been no new “false positives” after an Army purge in November 2008, a recent report of the Human Rights Unit of the Procuraduría indicates the opposite. Of 1160 cases of extrajudicial killings, with 1881 victims, that are currently under investigation, 312 were opened this year January and July 2009.

One recent case involved Paez indigenous leader Reynal Dagua. Soldiers took Dagua from his home on July 26, killed him, and presented him as a guerrilla killed in combat, the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC) says. Indigenous representative Aida Quilcue brought this case to prosecutors. “I am concerned that it will not be considered as an extrajudicial killing. So far no soldiers were arrested; I don’t see that anything has changed,”

One case which investigators describe in detail is that of Aycardo Antonio Ortiz, 67, a farmer who lived in a humble wooden house in a neighborhood of Yondó, Antioquia. On July 8, 2009, troops from the Calibío Battalion of the 14th Brigade reported his as a guerrilla combat death. According to the Army, he had a 38-caliber revolver, a hand grenade, a radio, two meters of fuse, and camouflage pants. Those are elements that appear in almost all of the false positives cases. Some cynically call those items the “legalization kit.”

The version given by the then-commander of the battalion, Lt. Col. Wilson Ramirez Cedeño, is that a demobilized person had given them information that Ortiz was a member of the FARC, who used the alias “Murciélago” (“Bat”), and that when they attempted to surround his house his men were attacked from inside with gunfire, and responded. They installed a machine gun and initiated combat in which the suspected guerrilla died. Ramirez additionally said that in the same area they had found a guerrilla camp and a minefield.

The commission, after reviewing documents and technical evidence obtained on the ground, was able to prove that the victim was a known farmer from the area, that the demobilized man mentioned by the military never existed, that the operation order was signed the same day in which the murder took place — possibly after its occurrence — and that there never were intelligence reports on any “Murciélago.” Furthermore, there never was machine gun fire from the house, nor minefields, nor guerrilla camps.

Another scandalous episode involves the same Bomboná Battalion mentioned above, in the Magdalena Medio region of Antioquia. A young informant from that battalion, stationed in Puerto Berrio, says that in January 2008 fellow soldier Amílkar Hernandez requested that they look for a friend of his, and they went on this “mission” to the municipality of Vegachí.

The informant says the group went to the home of his friend, Johny Alexander Barbosa, who everyone called the “Tortuga” (“Tortoise”) because he was slow and somewhat lazy. Barbosa really didn’t want to leave his house, but in the end accepted the invitation and everyone went on motorcycles to Vegachi. Hernandez and the young informant slept that night back with the battalion, but “Tortuga” never returned home. According to the informant, now a witness for legal authorities, Hernandez brought street people from Medellín to assassinate them and make them look like combat casualties.

In each of six identical episodes an N.N. (“No-Name”) combat death was reported from whom a revolver or pistol was seized, while the soldiers involved are said to have spent exactly 650 bullets, eight hand grenades, and four mortar grenades. Military investigators question whether those incidents ever occurred, and believe they were used to “legalize” (steal) ammunition that some soldiers sell on the black market to guerrillas and criminal gangs.

The investigating commission examined documents supporting operations in which 11 young men died. Despite the fact that almost all of them were reported as members of criminal gangs, investigators were surprised to find that intelligence sections of the brigades involved had no specific information about these gangs, only generally-known facts. Intelligence officials could not give the name or alias of any gang members, or their location, or modus operandi.

In addition to crimes against humanity, there is evidence that corruption exists at many levels. For example, in the report it is clear that an internal “leaky faucet” of “lost” ammunition feeds the black market that, ironically, benefits the armed groups the Army is fighting.

The U.S handed over $750 million in mostly military aid to Colombia in 2007 that paid for the murder of at least 1,900 innocent civilians and bought ammo that was later sold on the black market. The contribution of U.S. taxpayers’ money to fund the killing of innocent people will almost certainly raise eyebrows among human rights activists and others who have long criticized the Colombian government’s actions in its phony war against cocaine and insurgents.

In a preliminary report, the UN’s rapporteur for extra-judicial executions, Philip Alston, stated that the term “false positives” is in its self false, because it suggests that soldiers committing these killings are doing it accidentally. They aren’t.

All of this raises the question of how the U.S. should proceed with its long-standing policy of supporting the Uribe government in its fight against FARC rebels.

U.S. financial aid to Colombia’s internecine war has spiked from around $86 million per year in 1997 to more than $750 million in 2008, with much of the increase coming during the Bush era. Colombia got $810 million in U.S. blood money in 2009 and will get another $510 million, already passed by Congress, in 2010. That will buy a lot of false positives.

This is the same congress that couldn’t find the money for a measly 3% cost of living increase in my Social Security check.

A free-trade agreement between the U.S. and Colombia, agreed to by the Bush administration in 2006, has had little luck getting passed in Congress. The Obama administration is currently studying “outstanding issues” relating to the deal. It is, however, a sure bet that Congress will pass it and Obama will sign it.

Which brings us back to President Chavez’s claim of a “false positive” guerrilla camp. A little paranoia is suitable when dealing with Colombia’s narco-paraco false positive army. Our troops are not only dealing with them, they are living with them, training with them, and learning from them.

On a more positive note, “false positives” may be the answer to the constant dilemma of trying to keep track of the many columns and fronts of the FARC army. From time to time, COLAR announces the dismantling of various columns or fronts, only to have the same ones reappear months later. Perhaps COLAR is rounding up civilians, killing them, and claiming they were from this or that column! A column is about 100 fighters. Killing 50 or so civilians in an area could be construed as “dismantling” a FARC Column.

Just saying!

The Rag Blog

Cutting the health care deal:
Bargaining behind closed doors

By Dr. Stephen R. Keister / The Rag Blog / January 11, 2009

“The country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.” — Will Rogers

Congress has returned to Washington and is set to resolve the differences in the House of Representatives’ tentative health care legislation and the Senate’s “Health Insurance Enrichment Act” in a series of secret meetings.

The idea of secret gatherings, in an elected democratic form of government, becomes not only disturbing but frightening, especially in view of the fact that MSNBC on two occasions has reported that President Obama, who has made a Faustian bargain with the health insurance cartels and PhARMA, has urged the secret conclave to adopt the essence of the Senate legislation which was written by a retired member of the health insurance company, WellPoint.

One can find such undemocratic shenanigans distasteful, and indeed terrifying, but the mainstream media, with its selective reporting, has not told the whole story. It now appears that another crises is looming. We who are retired and recipients of Medicare have watched the whole thing with a certain detachment considering the fact that we receive the benefits of an excellent system of socialized medicine under the Medicare Act. We are happy; we are provided for. Or are we?

On December 31, Bloomberg News reported the Mayo Clinic, at one of its Arizona primary care clinics, has stopped treating Medicare patients saying that the government pays too little. More than 3,000 patients eligible for Medicare will be forced to pay cash if they want to continue seeing their doctors at a Mayo Clinic in Glendale.

The Mayo organization had 3,700 staff physicians and scientists and treated 526,000 patients in 2008. It lost $840 million last year on Medicare. Nationwide, doctors made about 20% less for treating Medicare patients than they did for caring for privately insured patients in 2007. Congress last week postponed for two months a 21.5% cut in Medicare reimbursements for doctors.

A story published in the Boston Globe presents an even more disturbing picture. The independent Medicare Payment Advisory Commission reported that 29% of Medicare beneficiaries — more than one in four — have trouble finding a primary care doctor willing to treat them. A survey by the Texas Medical Association found that only 38% of the state’s primary care physicians were accepting new Medicare patients.

But if you think that that sounds grim, wait until Congress enacts the President’s health care overhaul. A central element of the House and Senate versions of ObamaCare is that Medicare reimbursements to hospitals and doctors — already so low that many providers lose money each time they treat a Medicare patient — will be forced lower still.

As we have pointed out in previous articles on The Rag Blog, it is essential to INCREASE Medicare payments to primary care physicians, i.e. general practitioners, internists and internal medicine specialties, or the entire health care system will collapse, even without “ObamaCare” as embodied in the farcical Senate bill. Each year Medicare loses billions of dollars to fraud and abuse. The program’s long-term deficit is a staggering $38 trillion, yet its reimbursement of physicians is so meager that more and more cannot afford to treat Medicare patients.

Congress must provide more inspectors to look into Medicare fraud. When I look at the burgeoning number of medical supply companies and watch their ads on TV for such things as motorized scooters, I wonder: Where is the oversight? When I see nursing homes, now called “rehabilitation facilities,” being built with the appearance of imperial palaces I wonder: Is this necessary?

And we must initiate immediate and forceful action to do away with payments to the insurance companies through the “Medicare Advantage Plans,” as well as the multi-billion dollar pay-outs of Medicare funds to the health insurance cartel and PhARMA to administer the Medicare Part D plan — from which they are making an outstanding profit without taxpayer subsidies.

We should also take a realistic look at the billions of dollars spent on “end of life care,” which frequently amounts to torturing the dying in an intensive care unit by inserting tubes, airways, and needles into their frail bodies rather than allowing them to die with dignity and in comfort in their own homes, in their own beds, supported by compassionate Hospice Care.

The depletion of the Medicare trust fund is mostly the legacy of those in the Bush Administration, continuing into the Obama administration — the work of the neoliberals

Neoliberal economics is the antithesis of liberal or progressive political theory. These are the followers of Milton Friedman who introduced his economic concepts through The Chicago School, into Chile under Pinochet, and subsequently into Argentina — causing their financial collapse in 1999-2002.

The Bush administration had a go at this when they tried unsuccessfully to privatize Social Security. This approach is based on

1. Deregulation
2. Privatization
3. Doing away with government-sponsored social programs like social security, health care, education, and child welfare
4. Encouraging free trade (shipping our jobs overseas)

These folks are still about, helping to write counterproductive health care legislation and studiously avoiding correcting the hemorrhaging of the Medicare Trust Fund.

One begins to wonder exactly who is in charge in Washington, and to whom our elected representatives are answerable. In the Senate we do have a few folks of good will, like Maria Cantwell, Bernie Sanders, Russ Feingold, Sherrod Brown, Al Franken, and Byron Dorgan. In the House of Representatives the 81-member Progressive Caucus functions under the leadership of such folks as Dennis Kucinich, Alan Grayson, Peter DeFazio, James McGovern, and other trustworthy colleagues. Our health care future depends on the honor and the tenacity of these few people.

The President has now sided with the Senate approach to paying for health care — taxing the working man’s health insurance. Why not increase taxes on the very wealthy as provided for in the House bill? Why are our elected representatives afraid to ask those whose incomes are in the top one percent to pay their fair share. And not just when it comes to health care; why are they procrastinating about renewing the inheritance tax and undoing the Bush tax cuts? To provide decent health care for all, and to provide the peace of mind that comes with knowing that such care is available, we will need additional taxation; however, let us make it fair and equitable.

At the present time the Senate bill, a completely inadequate bill, takes $500 billion of taxpayer money and hands it over to the private insurance industry, according to Dr. Steffie Woolhandler of Physicians for A National Health Program in an interview with Amy Goodman on “Democracy Now!” The Senate bill was written by Elizabeth Fowler who is a former vice president of WellPoint, the nation’s largest health insurance company. And this is the legislation that President Obama is arm-twisting the people’s representatives to adopt!

Dr. Woolhander also points out that the deal the President made with the drug companies required the industry to give up very little. They said that for Medicare recipients who are in the “doughnut hole,” they would make lower priced (brand name) drugs available. That is a very small share of the population. For others, who may be unable to afford expensive drugs, we got nothing from the pharmaceutical industry. It should be noted, once again, that the Senate voted down a bill sponsored by Senator Dorgan to allow the importation of lower priced drugs from Canada or Europe.

Ms. Goodman pointed out that the Massachusetts plan is being considered as a model for national legislation — which includes a mandate to buy private health insurance, with a fine of up to $1,068 for failing to do so. Yet much of the Massachusetts plan has been wildly expensive (in view of the fact that it is run by private health insurance companies).

According to the state’s report to the bond holders, it has cost $1.3 billion this year. The state has opted to pay for that by stealing money from safety net clinics and hospitals, so that safety net providers that care for the mentally ill and people with substance abuse, and provide primary care, have received decreased funding. Massachusetts now has the highest health care costs in the history of the world.

Bob Herbert pointed out in The New York Times that middle class families in 2008 actually earned less, adjusted for inflation, than they did in 1999. One out of eight Americans, and one out of four children, are on food stamps. There has been no net job creation between December 1999 and now.

The President and his economic advisers gratuitously provide the big banks with taxpayer funds, but only give lip service to the unemployed and underemployed. We find money for endless futile wars that accomplish little as far as national security is concerned and drive our nation deeper and deeper into debt. We can afford to subsidize the defense industries but can find little or no funding for decent health care, while our health care system ranks 37th worldwide according to the WHO.

One final thought, not related to health care, but pertinent to those of us who are still angry about the administration’s subservience to the big banks, and their immoral payment of bonuses with taxpayer money. Arianna Huffington, on The Huffington Post, suggested that we, the citizens, show our displeasure with the banking industry by transferring our savings to community banks, thus stimulating the local economies. The response has been remarkable.

The nation faces a critical week with the secret negotiations progress. We have reached, I fear, a point where all we can do is hope that some honorable elected representatives will stand up for the people of this nation, using such parliamentary maneuvers that are available, and stop the present rush to destruction that appears to be playing out in Washington.

The Rag Blog

“The people were afraid. There was no shouting there. No screaming.” Families look for their relatives after a massacre in the Gaza Strip in 1956. Illustration from Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco.
Times’ review of graphic novel suggests
shifting attitude towards Isreal

By David McReynolds / The Rag Blog / January 11, 2010

Sometimes the most important news comes between the lines. The New York Times Book Review of December 27, 2009, carried a remarkable full page piece on page 13. “They Planted Hatred in Our Hearts” was the banner heading of a book review by Patrick Cockburn, of Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza: A Graphic Novel, an illustrated history, 418 pages.

This is not a story about recent events in Gaza, not the “Cast Lead” offensive which so shocked the world. No, it is a book about two mass killings of Palestinians, by the Israeli military in 1956 — so long ago they have been forgotten.

Briefly — because I want to discuss the importance of the “fact” of the review, not the content of Sacco’s book — in 1956, when Israel launched its attack on Egypt, there were 275 Palestinians killed in the town of Khan Younis and 111 in Rafah, a town a few miles away. This was in the course of a November 12 military operation by Israel. The killings were mass murders of non-combatants. The story Sacco tells has been well-documented by Palestinian and Israeli eyewittnesses, and by UN accounts.

What makes the review important is less the account itself — every war has such actions. Both the Palestinians and Israelis have engaged in targeting noncombatants. The U.S. certainly did so in Indochina, the Soviets did it in Afghanistan. It is by now so routine that one asks why Joe Sacco took the trouble of turning back in time, to 1956, and documenting these particular events.

It was because Sacco felt these mass murders laid the basis for the violence of the second Palestinian intifada.

What I found important is the fact this book review was placed so prominently in The New York Times Book Review, or that it appeared there at all. Twenty years ago such a book would not have been reviewed in any major New York publication or, if reviewed, would have been “balanced,” suggesting perhaps the massacres had not taken place, or were provoked. But that Cockburn’s review is carried, that these ancient massacres are brought back to life, and perhaps most important, the fact the review included a quote from the Israeli chief of staff, Moishe Dayan, that is remarkable.

Six months before the Israeli offensive against Egypt, Dayan made a famous speech at the funeral of an Israeli commander who had been killed on the Gaza border. Dayan wondered aloud what explained the Palestinians’ “terrible hatred of us” and then gave this answer to his own question:

For eight years now they have watched how, before their very eyes, we have turned their lands and villages, where they and their forefathers previously dwelled, into our homes.

The killings of 50 years ago were never punished. The Israeli army inquiry into the events at Rafah and Khan Younis can no longer be found in the Israeli military archives.

Those of us who have, over the years, grown more critical of Israel, leading, in my case, to a call for a total end of all economic and military aid to Israeli, have been dismissed as anti-Semitic, or as “obsessed” with Israel, when there are so many other horror stories elsewhere on the planet. (And there are — any issue of the New York Times reminds us of terrible violence and crimes across the globe).

But as time has passed and the hopes of the young Zionist movement have been dashed by reality, more voices are being raised, many of them within the American Jewish community itself. There is an active group of Jews within Israel which I might call the “saving remnant,” which has broken the silence, has sought out the Palestinians, has made alliances, demonstrated, been arrested.

So today we have the unthinkable — American and Israeli Jews united against the actions of the Israeli State. And the most important newspaper in the U.S. carrying a painful account of mass murders of noncombatants by the Israeli Army more than 50 years ago. This is a case where it is less the fact the book was written, but where and how it was reviewed, which should give pause to the uncritical supporters of Israel. The days of the unquestioned U.S. alliance with Israel are ending.

[David McReynolds is a former chair of the War Resisters International, was the Socialist Party candidate for President in 1980 and 2000. He is retired and lives on the Lower East Side of New York with two cats. He can be reached at dmcreynolds@nyc.rr.com.]

• See ‘They Planted Hatred in Our Hearts’ by Patrick Cockburn / The New York Times Book Review / December 24, 2009
• Find Footnotes in Gaza: A Graphic Novel by Joe Sacco on Amazon.com

The Rag Blog

Presidential advisor and long-time Obama buddy Cass Sunstein.
Your government appointees at work:
Cass Sunstein seeks ‘cognitive’ provocateurs

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / January 11, 2010

Cass Sunstein is President Obama’s Harvard Law School friend, and recently appointed Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

In a recent scholarly article, he and coauthor Adrian Vermeule take up the question of “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures.” (J. Political Philosophy, 7 (2009), 202-227). This is a man with the president’s ear. This is a man who would process information and regulate things. What does he here propose?

[W]e suggest a distinctive tactic for breaking up the hard core of extremists who supply conspiracy theories: cognitive infiltration of extremist groups, whereby government agents or their allies (acting either virtually or in real space, and either openly or anonymously) will undermine the crippled epistemology of believers by planting doubts about the theories and stylized facts that circulate within such groups, thereby introducing beneficial cognitive diversity. (Page 219.)

Read this paragraph again. Unpack it. Work your way through the language and the intent. Imagine the application. What do we learn?

• It is “extremists” who “supply” “conspiracy theories.”
• Their “hard core” must be “broken up” with distinctive tactics. What tactics?
• “Infiltration” (“cognitive”) of groups with questions about official explanations or obfuscations or lies. Who is to infiltrate?
• “Government agents or their allies,” virtually (i.e. on-line) or in “real-space” (as at meetings), and “either openly or anonymously,” though “infiltration” would imply the latter. What will these agents do?
• Undermine “crippled epistemology” — one’s theory and technique of knowledge. How will they do this?
• By “planting doubts” which will “circulate.” Will these doubts be beneficial?
• Certainly. Because they will introduce “cognitive diversity.”

Put into English, what Sunstein is proposing is government infiltration of groups opposing prevailing policy. Palestinian Liberation? 9/11 Truth? Anti-nuclear power? Stop the wars? End the Fed? Support Nader? Eat the Rich?

It’s easy to destroy groups with “cognitive diversity.” You just take up meeting time with arguments to the point where people don’t come back. You make protest signs which alienate 90% of colleagues. You demand revolutionary violence from pacifist groups.

We expect such tactics from undercover cops, or FBI. There the agents are called “provocateurs” — even if only “cognitive.” One learns to smell or deal with them in a group, or recognize trolling online. But even suspicion or partial exposure can “sow uncertainty and distrust within conspiratorial groups [now conflated with conspiracy theory discussion groups] and among their members,” and “raise the costs of organization and communication” — which Sunstein applauds as “desirable.” “[N]ew recruits will be suspect and participants in the group’s virtual networks will doubt each other’s bona fides.” (p.225).

And are we now expected to applaud such tactics frankly proposed in a scholarly journal by a high-level presidential advisor?

The full text of a slightly earlier version of Sunstein’s article is available for download here.

Marc Estrin. The author gets in the last word.
[Marc Estrin is a writer and activist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

The Rag Blog

Tribal secrets:
Carrying the freight of being an Indian

Being outed as an American Indian changed my professional life, starting with an overnight 20 point drop in my IQ.

By Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / January 11, 2010

Steve Russell will be Thorne Dreyer’s guest on Rag Radio, Tuesday, January 12, 2-3 p.m. on KOOP 91.7 FM in Austin. They will discuss crime and punishment, the status of American Indians, the War in Afghanistan, and other issues facing progressives in 2010 America — as well as Steve’s experiences as a Sixties activist, a trial judge, an educator, and as a Cherokee Indian. For those outside the listening area, go here to stream the show.

What does it matter to be American Indian? I get that a lot from friends and faux friends.

Actually, when I got “outed” the reaction of my friends hurt more than the reaction of my enemies. I was an elected official, and all elected officials who do anything have enemies. Since I was an elected official to change the world rather than to have a job, I did quite a bit. So I had quite a few enemies.

I was outed when the Austin newspaper carried a story about some lobbying I had done for the Texas Indian Bar Association. Judges lobby all the time, although we seldom call it what it is. The ethical rubric is “efforts to improve the administration of justice.”

I had in the past lobbied for a probation option in petty misdemeanor theft cases, for the power to confiscate a car in subsequent offense DWI cases, against parental notification of abortions, and for any number of legislative efforts sponsored by the Texas Council on Family Violence.

In this case, I had been noticed lobbying for legislation to put dead Indians back in the ground when they get dug up, just like we do with dead white people. I fought that fight for 12 years, six legislative sessions, without success, in spite of the consistent support of then-Senator Gonzalo Barrientos.

It was a losing battle. Now, as then, there are more dead Indians on Texas campuses as “scientific data” than there are live Indians as students.

While the battle was lost, the effort did me no political harm. After all, the rap put on Indians who demand the respect other human beings take for granted is that we are anti-intellectuals. We have been explicitly called “book burners” because Indian bones, don’t you know, can be read by physical anthropologists to tell us about the human past. This is only the case with Indian bones because white people came to the Americas so recently. The fact that white people will not stand for having their dead disturbed is… coincidence.

Whatever the merits, most of our statewide officeholders are living proof that anti-intellectualism is not a political liability in Texas. Still, being outed as an American Indian changed my professional life, starting with an overnight 20 point drop in my IQ. Lawyers were suddenly explaining things to me in court you would not have to explain to a first year law student.

A truly bizarre incident stemming from that news story involved an elderly gentleman who tracked me down at the courthouse to object to the fact I held public office — because “Indians don’t pay taxes.” While I was finally able to convince him that this Indian has paid taxes since joining the military at age 17, he was still of the opinion that the only reason I did so was that I was too damn dumb to claim my “exemption.”

I had never hidden my tribal ties but never advertised them either. My wives and girlfriends knew, and I’m pretty sure most of the people who worked with me on The Rag knew because I was always interested in coverage of Indian issues.

After my outing, even people I had known for years reevaluated my intellect. My enemies decided that I had dredged up a fake past to play the affirmative action card. This in spite of the facts that I was born in raised in Oklahoma and that I never said a word about my ethnicity to any of the schools I attended except to request a graduation notice sent to the tribal newspaper.

The reason I never brought it up is that, while I support affirmative action as policy, I would not touch it with a 10 foot pole in my own life. I did not want the stigma, but it turns out I could not escape the stigma anyway.

In both of my academic appointments during my second career, I was admonished about publishing “Indian stuff.” It was really clear that I was wanted because I was a judge, not because I was Indian.

Now I’m retired in Sun City, Texas, and all that is behind me, right? Not exactly. In the gym I need to visit every day for my health, I find a goddam cigar store Indian. The first time I saw it, I got an immediate knot in my stomach, and it’s not gotten much better since. I wanted to retire but I’m going to have to make a stink.

I can play all the stuff I am in for like a jukebox: no offense is intended, it’s just an historical artifact (in a gym?), and, anyway, I’m part Indian (which part? Obviously, not the heart). I haven’t been here a month yet and I keep stalling the opening salvos in a battle that would not happen even for a black man. Can you imagine if it were a lawn jockey?

What does it matter to be an American Indian? It does not matter at all if you are willing to hide your ethnicity, something not difficult in the Southwest. But if you are outed or you out yourself, I’ve learned that it’s not easy to carry the freight of the least successful ethnicity in politics, in education, and in life expectancy, which I guess is another way of saying that few of us live to retire and therefore I should not be shocked to find little regard for our existence in a retirement community.

You can’t retire from being who you are.

[Steve Russell, Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is a Texas trial court judge by assignment. He recently retired as an associate professor of criminal justice at Indiana University. His writing has been published widely; he is a columnist for Indian Country Today and a contributor to The Rag Blog. Steve was an activist in Austin in the Sixties and Seventies, and wrote for Austin’s underground paper, The Rag. He lives in Sun City, Texas, near Austin.]

Also see:

• Steve Russell, Indian : Advice to Myself at 14 by Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / May 28, 2009
• Steve Russell on Native Hawaiians: Got Indigenous? by Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / June 30, 2009
• Steve Russell : Let Us Now Praise (Not) Famous Women by Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / October 14, 2009.

The Rag Blog

Bottlenose dolphin Delphin and her baby Dolly at a zoo in Duisburg, western Germany. Photo by AP.
Behavior studies:
Dolphins are second smartest animal

‘The neuroanatomy suggests psychological continuity between humans and dolphins and has profound implications for the ethics of human-dolphin interactions.’ — Lori Marino, zoologist

By Jonathan Leake / January 10, 2010

Dolphins have been declared the world’s second most intelligent creatures after humans, with scientists suggesting they are so bright that they should be treated as “non-human persons.”

Studies into dolphin behavior have highlighted how similar their communications are to those of humans and that they are brighter than chimpanzees. These have been backed up by anatomical research showing that dolphin brains have many key features associated with high intelligence.

The researchers argue that their work shows it is morally unacceptable to keep such intelligent animals in amusement parks or to kill them for food or by accident when fishing. Some 300,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises die in this way each year.

“Many dolphin brains are larger than our own and second in mass only to the human brain when corrected for body size,” said Lori Marino, a zoologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, who has used magnetic resonance imaging scans to map the brains of dolphin species and compare them with those of primates.

“The neuroanatomy suggests psychological continuity between humans and dolphins and has profound implications for the ethics of human-dolphin interactions,” she added.

Dolphins have long been recognized as among the most intelligent of animals but many researchers had placed them below chimps, which some studies have found can reach the intelligence levels of three-year-old children. Recently, however, a series of behavioral studies has suggested that dolphins, especially species such as the bottlenose, could be the brighter of the two. The studies show how dolphins have distinct personalities, a strong sense of self and can think about the future.

It has also become clear that they are “cultural” animals, meaning that new types of behaviour can quickly be picked up by one dolphin from another.

In one study, Diana Reiss, professor of psychology at Hunter College, City University of New York, showed that bottlenose dolphins could recognize themselves in a mirror and use it to inspect various parts of their bodies, an ability that had been thought limited to humans and great apes.

In another, she found that captive animals also had the ability to learn a rudimentary symbol-based language.

Other research has shown dolphins can solve difficult problems, while those living in the wild co-operate in ways that imply complex social structures and a high level of emotional sophistication.

In one recent case, a dolphin rescued from the wild was taught to tail-walk while recuperating for three weeks in a dolphinarium in Australia.

After she was released, scientists were astonished to see the trick spreading among wild dolphins who had learned it from the former captive.

There are many similar examples, such as the way dolphins living off Western Australia learnt to hold sponges over their snouts to protect themselves when searching for spiny fish on the ocean floor.

Such observations, along with others showing, for example, how dolphins could co-operate with military precision to round up shoals of fish to eat, have prompted questions about the brain structures that must underlie them.

Size is only one factor. Researchers have found that brain size varies hugely from around 7oz for smaller cetacean species such as the Ganges River dolphin to more than 19lb for sperm whales, whose brains are the largest on the planet. Human brains, by contrast, range from 2lb-4lb, while a chimp’s brain is about 12oz.

When it comes to intelligence, however, brain size is less important than its size relative to the body.

What Marino and her colleagues found was that the cerebral cortex and neocortex of bottlenose dolphins were so large that “the anatomical ratios that assess cognitive capacity place it second only to the human brain”. They also found that the brain cortex of dolphins such as the bottlenose had the same convoluted folds that are strongly linked with human intelligence.

Such folds increase the volume of the cortex and the ability of brain cells to interconnect with each other. “Despite evolving along a different neuroanatomical trajectory to humans, cetacean brains have several features that are correlated with complex intelligence,” Marino said.

Marino and Reiss will present their findings at a conference in San Diego, California, next month, concluding that the new evidence about dolphin intelligence makes it morally repugnant to mistreat them.

Thomas White, professor of ethics at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, who has written a series of academic studies suggesting dolphins should have rights, will speak at the same conference.

“The scientific research . . . suggests that dolphins are ‘non-human persons’ who qualify for moral standing as individuals,” he said.

[This article was first published in The Sunday Times of London, on January 3, 2110. Additional reporting by Helen Brooks.]

Source / Times Online

Thanks to Jim Baldauf / The Rag Blog

Republican assault on the truth:
A winning strategy for an off-year election

The Democrats appear to be clueless in the face of a relentless propaganda campaign that relies upon what were once psychological tools to be used against enemy populations.

By Sherman DeBrosse / The Rag Blog / January 10, 2010

Last weekend, the GOP attacked President Barack Obama as a poor leader in the war on terror. They have no information to support their claims, but the attack is well-planned, magnified by the media, and was almost unchallenged by the Democrats. So successful were the Republicans at ginning up outrage against President Obama that he had to go on television to bear full responsibility for the failure.

Initially, the Obama administration handled the Christmas bombing attempt above Detroit in a clueless manner, and this invited the concerted Republican attack.

This situation bears all the earmarks of the spin wars the Democrats lost hands down over health care and the economy.

Avuncular Former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean led off saying Obama’s plate was too full and that he was distracted with things like health care when he should have been “focused” upon improving the operations of the Transportation Safety Administration. Kean is the same fellow who deftly presided over the 911 Commission coverup.

Kean’s comment on Obama being distracted from his anti-terrorism duties became the leading sound bite for the rest of the news cycle. But what proof is there that Obama has not been “focused” and spending time on terrorism? Absolutely none! If fact, Obama was attacking Al Qaeda bases in Kuwait a month before the Christmas plane bombing attempt occurred.

Then Senator Jim DeMint attacked the president for not doing enough about terrorism. This is the same man who voted against increasing funding for TSA and Homeland Security. He also put a hold on the nomination of Erroll Southers’s nomination to head TSA. Hence, De Mint is responsible for making TSA leaderless at this critical time. He blocked Southers because he wants a pledge that the TSA workers will not be allowed to join a union. One interviewer gently reminded the South Carolina extremist about his funding vote.

Democrats have said little about the “hold” and have not mentioned all the other holds on Obama’s judicial nominees. No one mentioned that the Republicans had seven years to fine tune the air safety mechanism, and Republican writer Katherine Parker moved to head off that line of reasoning by writing that it is all Obama’s problem and fault now.

A third line of attack was led by Dick Cheney, who is actually growing in popularity. Somehow he thinks that rhetoric wins battles with terrorism. Because Obama will not use the term “war on terrorism,” Cheney says Obama was soft on terrorism. The implication was that if Cheney were still VP he would have sniffed out the Detroit jockey shorts bomb plot just as he pulled together the dots on 9/11.

A few commentators actually showed clips in which Obama used the term ”war.” The issue, of course, is that the Islamic world equates “war on terrorism” with “war on Islam.” Every time the term was used, the terrorists got more recruits. Cheney and his ilk do not care about this; they have an arguing point and they are determined to defend the Bush legacy and defame Obama even if it is by helping Al Qaeda recruit more killers and suicide bombers.

Then, a few days later, Senator Jon Kyl said he feared for the nation’s safety while Janet Napolitano was Secretary of Homeland Security. John McCain stood at his side to add gravity to this pronuncimento. Somehow her misstatement after the event proved she was an inept administrator. Say it enough times and it makes perfect sense to the average bloke.

That evening CNN’s resident grouch Jack Cafferty invited viewers to answer whether she should be fired, and he received a flood of emotional rants, most of them were ad hominem in nature.

The Republicans are absolutely shameless, but also very effective. From January 20, 2009, on they focused on the 2010 off-year elections — an occasion when few vote. Their endless charges have heated up their base and converted many independents. In a few weeks, they convinced many that the Obama Administration was responsible for the near success of the Christmas underwear bombing at Newark. Obama had to shoulder all the blame himself.

There was a great deal of evidence that George W. Bush had plenty of warning about 9/11, but he was never required to bear any blame. There is a lesson here.

Most of us would agree that Republican policies under George W. Bush were neither successful nor good for ordinary folks. Yet, over the last12 months, the Gallup organization has found that the nation has moved to the right with a consistent 40% conservative, 36% moderate, and 21% liberal. Somehow, realities have not sunk in. Perception management has triumphed. Is it any wonder that, despite having a fairly good policy year, Obama’s “strongly approve” rating dropped from 43% to 26%

In 1981, Ronald Wilson Reagan began the practice of using psychological warfare techniques on or against the American people. At the time, this was called “public diplomacy.” Make no mistake about it, this amounts to pouring poison into the stream of democratic discourse.

He spent over $100 million doing this. Psychological warfare techniques were manipulations of information that targeted the populations of other countries. Typically, they were distortions of information to play upon people’s superstitions, ignorance, and fears. But Reagan directed these powerful tools against the American people to sell his illegal secret war in Central America. George W. Bush used the same tools and spent even more public money doing this.

Dr. Joseph Goebbels mastered the art of the Big Lie. Repeat it often enough and people will believe it. Since those dark days, cognitive science has made massive strides. The tools the Republicans now deploy make Goebbel’s artifices look like playthings; and today’s strategists match or exceed in skills those of the Nazi propagandist.

A key understanding is that most brain functions are dominated by emotions, not by logical reasoning. The trick is to reprogram people’s memories with what you want them to recall, doing it in a way that will engage their emotions. Once this is accomplished, they will believe what you want them to believe.

The GOP has learned this lesson as well as much about shaping collective mindsets. From the advertising world, they have come to excel at message control, with most of their people reading off the same page at the same time. They have so outdistanced the Democrats that cognitive scientists sometimes refer to their “cognitive Madisonianism.” The reference here is not to the great James Madison, who would deplore what they are doing to disrupt the marketplace of ideas and democracy itself. The reference is to the purveyors of illusions on Madison Avenue.

George Lakoff has written about how the Democrats must learn some of their lessons for the good of the Republic. Some think adopting these techniques damages our political process. But we are getting down to a choice between two evils. The lesser evil is a situation in which both parties use these unfair and dastardly tools. The greater evil is that one party ignores them while the party most attached to privilege, the corporate world, militarism, and right-wing populism excels in their use.

In addition to mastering cognitive science, the GOP strategists seem to understand more about political science than the Democrats. Many of us mistakenly think that independents are folks in the middle who carefully study and weigh issues. There are a few independents who are like that. But the vast majority of them are all over the spectrum, frequently changing postures.

They do not like politics, refuse to study issues, and are very impatient. These folks usually see things in simple terms and adhere to the conventional wisdom. Some studies show that they are a little more inclined to stereotypical thinking about Blacks than most Americans. It is likely that some of them sense at some level that the middle class is not likely to recover lost ground and need a target at which to vent their anger.

Realizing that, the GOP was easily able to quickly convince a majority of independents that Obama was responsible for our economic woes and that his health care plans were socialistic. Remember, thsee “independents” have short memories and are not at all analytical. Moreover, the independents will not blame the Republicans for obstructionism. They do not follow politics enough to recognize this.

It even appears that they have rewired their own memories and reversed long held convictions. Most in 2003 would never believe that the GOP would become the party that favors torture and denying enemies essential due process. When the first reports of torture broke in 2004, conservatives insisted that those who brought the news were lying liberals who hated America. In time, the vast majority of Republicans came to embrace torture. They are now enraged that KSM and the Christmas bomber will be sent to federal courts.

Their propaganda machine has been so effective that it has essentially wiped out decades of Republican commitment to civil liberties and human rights. Yes, a few like John McCain, have managed to straddle these questions, but the party has essentially abandoned a noble heritage.

The Democrats appear to be clueless in the face of a relentless propaganda campaign that relies upon what were once psychological tools to be used against enemy populations. If the Democrats think that, without a lot of help, the voters will see through the artful GOP propaganda campaigns, they are in for a rude awakening. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota and Chris Dodd have already headed toward the exit, and one southern Blue Dog has rushed to complete his transformation into a Republican.

Some very good scholars — two at Yale — have been worrying about what would happen if the present slow recovery evaporates, with unemployment getting worse and the prospects for the middle class looking even worse. Their fear is that there could be a lurch to the far left and even incidents of violence.

From what we know about the capabilities of Republican strategists; the opposite would occur. Indeed the masses could stampede into some kind of Tea Baggers’ Valhala, with a mild exclusionist movement that would result in the removal of many liberals from teaching, journalistic, and ecclesiastical positions and a rush toward prudent silence among Hollywood types and other entertainers. Look for more creationist literature in the book stalls at National Parks.

[Sherman DeBrosse is a retired history teacher. Sherm spent seven years writing an analytical chronicle of what the Republicans have been up to since the 1970s. The New Republican Coalition : Its Rise and Impact, The Seventies to Present (Publish America) can be acquired by calling 301-695-1707. On line, go here.]

Source /

The Rag Blog

Celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution in Mexico City. (Some went a little further in their observance: See story below.) Photo from La Jornada.
A real blast:
Bombs, resistance mark 100th
anniversary of Mexican Revolution

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / January 10, 2010

MEXICO CITY — Every hundred years on the tenth year of the century, Mexico seems to explode in social upheaval. In 1810, the war of liberation from the Spanish Crown unleashed a genocidal decade-long conflict. In 1910, the overthrow of dictator Porfirio Diaz triggered a fratricidal bloodbath. In recent months, dire expectations that 2010 would signal similar violence have been running high in this distant neighbor country, mired as it is in a grinding depression where 80% of Mexico’s 107,000,000 citizens subsist in and around the poverty line.

It is now the tenth of January 2010 and no new revolution has broken out — yet.

Nonetheless, the New Year was welcomed in here with a blast of revolutionary fireworks: bank bombings in Mexico City, surrounding Mexico state, and San Luis Potosi in the distant north, blew out a dozen ATM machines. Walls were scorched and windows shattered by firebombs at three auto showrooms in the greater metropolitan area and the government palace in the Mexico City delegation (borough) of Milpa Alta (an explosive device failed to ignite in Ixtapalapa, the capital’s most conflictive demarcation).

Incendiary attacks also struck a Telmex branch office, the Mexican phone monopoly owned by Carlos Slim, the richest tycoon in Latin America. A slaughterhouse and a police car were also firebombed. In Tijuana on the northern border, an anarchist group claimed to have machine-gunned three municipal police vehicles and a private security patrol car to welcome in 2010 in addition to “expropriations” at seven OXXO convenience stores during one of which a police officer (“placa”) was killed.

“It was either him or us,” lamented a communiqué from the purported perpetrators who signed off as “another anonymous anarchist action” in a document posted January 2 on “Conspiracy of Fire,” a direct action electronic clearing house.

The spate of bombings by anarchist cells was similar to a string of 15 such incidents in Mexico City and Guadalajara timed to coincide with Mexican Independence Day last September. A student activist at the National Autonomous University was jailed briefly by federal police for several of the fiery assaults in September and released.

Among the groupings that claimed responsibility for the actions that took place between December 31 and January 2 were the Propaganda Of The Deed Brigade which posted a declaration of war on the Conspiracy of Fire page that read in part,

With this document, we declare a war that will not end until all business people, the Bourgeois, militaries, governments, and all kinds of totalitarian power are exterminated.

What has happened today is just a small demonstration that we have lost our fear and our hatred of the system has grown. They can no longer kill or jail us with impunity. We are not afraid. Un Ojo por Un Ojo! (‘An Eye for an Eye’).”

The document and two other communiqués taking responsibility for the bombings made explicit reference to the exorbitant cost of government celebrations of both the centennial of the revolution and the bi-centennial of independence and noted that “although we do not believe in absolute dates, 2010 will be a year of struggle and a platform of preparation for what is to come…” — the 1910 uprising led by Francisco Madero was only the opening gong of a series of revolutions that finally fizzled out in 1919 with the assassination of the revolutionary martyr Emiliano Zapata.

Among the heroes lauded in the communiqués were historical anarchist leaders Praxides G. Guerrero and Ricardo Flores Magon, the Great Zapata, the Centaur of the North Francisco Villa, and Lucio Cabanas, the 1970s guerrillero leader of the Party of the Poor. Conspicuously absent from the list was Subcomandante Marcos who 16 years ago this January 1st gave voice to the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas in the very first hour of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Other participants in the New Year’s Eve Molotov cocktail party were the Simon Radowisky Brigade, named for a little-known Ukrainian-Argentinean anarchist who died in Mexico in 1956 while at work in a toy factory he was trying to organize, and the “May 25th 1910 Committee of Adjudication” which takes its name from the date that Praxides G. Guerrero fell in Janos, Chihuahua, the first anarchist to give up his life in the Mexican Revolution — the anarchist-led insurrection in Chihuahua preceded Madero’s revolution by six months.

Meanwhile, in Chiapas where mass psychosis that the Zapatistas would rise again January 1 has reigned for months, the Mayan rebels’ caracoles, or public centers, were shut down tight for the first time in 15 anniversary markings of that historic rebellion.

But the Zapatista Army of Liberation is hardly the only armed indigenous force for which rebellion in 2010 is an option. The Conspiracy of Fire page features an analysis of revolutionary prospects attributed to the TAGIN or National Indigenous Guerilla Triple Alliance that predicts “the calendar of conflict will spread throughout the country in the next 12 months,” claiming that 70 armed organizations have joined forces for concerted action in 2010. The article is illustrated by photos of armed guerilleros taken at a press conference held in Guerrero last summer by “Comandante Ramiro” (Omar Solis) of the ERPI (“Revolutionary Army of The Insurgent People”) — several months later, Ramiro’s body was recovered from a clandestine grave in the high sierra of that conflictive state.

While boasts of renewed revolution fly, President Felipe Calderon, now halfway through his calamitous six years in office, sought to put a happy face on the disasters his administration of Mexico has inflicted upon the country. Speaking from sunny Acapulco where the beaches were buckling under the weight of buxom bikini-clad tourists while the rest of the country shivered in the glacial cold, Calderon urged his compatriots to celebrate “this Year of the Patria (Fatherland) with happiness, working together in each home. This year we will write pages of glory and live the flame of our values that make us proud to be Mexicans (sic).”

In what could only have been an effusion of irony, the beaming president wished his bankrupt constituents a “Prosperous New Year.” Many observers (this writer was not alone) wondered what country Calderon thought he was addressing.

The COPAMEX, Mexico’s most influential business federation, was significantly more guarded in greeting the New Year, warning Mexicans to avoid violence in celebrating the duel centennials.

Despite veiled threats from the business sector, Mexico’s working class is in an uproar. A New Year’s Day zafarancho (riot) outside a power generating substation in Mexico state between displaced members of the Mexican Electricity Workers Union (SME) trying to prevent scabs from taking their jobs, and heavily armed federal police, left a dozen injured and the nearby pyramids of Teotihuacan, the City of the Gods, wreathed in tear gas fumes.

The confrontation marked the first violence in what has been largely a peaceful resistance movement ever since Calderon shut down the Luz y Fuerza power company last October putting 42,000 workers on the street, and suggests that an increasingly frustrated rank and file is prepared to raise the ante. On January 5 and again on the 6th, bands of SME workers stormed through the old quarter of Mexico City after the explosions of electrical transformers in the neighborhood brought out detachments of federal police.

Sabotage is rumored.

It is not mere coincidence that both the confrontation at Teotihuacan and many of the anarchist bombazos took place in Mexico state, which is governed by Enrique Pena Nieto, the presidential front-runner in 2012. Pena Nieto is a luminary of the resurgent Party of the Institutionalized Revolution (PRI) that ruled Mexico for seven decades until it was displaced from power in 2000 by Calderon’s rightist PAN party. The PRI won a landslide majority in the lower house of congress in 2009 mid-term elections and is expected to sweep all 12 governors’ races up for grabs in 2010.

In a remarkable reprise of the social unrest that detonated after runaway inflation excited hungry masses to rise up against the Diaz dictatorship 100 years ago, an abrupt jump in gasoline and diesel prices that kicked in on the final day of 2009 has set off a chain reaction of protests in Mexico City and the provinces.

On the first workday of 2010, 2000 truck drivers shut down key national highways for seven hours to protest the hikes — in Puebla, the drivers were joined by 500 electricistas from nearby Necaxa, the so-called “cradle” of Luz y Fuerza and the SME. The success of the blockade in Puebla, Hidalgo, and Veracruz states has inspired truckers’ association director Edmundo Morales to call for a national strike. Participation of the SME at the barricades may well be a precursor of increased worker solidarity in the coming year.

In Tepic, Nayarit, bus drivers protested the increase in fuel prices by parking their vehicles, paralyzing that provincial capital. Massive protests in Mexico City by independent unions and farmers’ organizations are expected later in the month.

The price surge viscerally wounds a popular economy that was grievously lacerated in 2009. The Calderon government’s annual daily minimum salary increase is less than 5% for 2010 and fails to match 6% inflation. The 2.60 peso a day “raise” does not even buy a ride on the Mexico City Metro that ferries millions of workers to their jobs each day.

On New Year’s morning, the leftist Mexico City government of Mayor Marcelo Ebrard raised the heavily subsidized Metro ticket price from two to three pesos a ride. The back of the ticket now reminds riders that the real cost is nine pesos.

A survey of public markets reported by the left daily La Jornada calculates a 30% rise in the basic food basket in the first week of 2010, largely due to fuel and electricity rate increases — tortillas, the essential nourishment for 26,000,000 Mexicans living in extreme poverty, leaped 10% a kilo throughout central Mexico.

Much like Obamaland, where the President crows about recovery in a jobless economy, Calderon pledged in a nationally-televised New Year’s message that 2010 will be a “year of recuperation” for Mexico although his predictions of 3% growth seems delusionally rosy — in 2009, the Gross National Product contracted 7% and growth was negative.

Unemployment, as measured by the government’s obfuscated system, is at a 15 year high of 6.8% — in the real world 6.8% translates to 40% of the work force not working, according to social economist Julio Boltvinik. 100,000 jobs are reportedly being lost each month (nearly 50,000 went down the tubes in October when Calderon fired the Luz y Fuerza workers.) But there is light at the end of the tunnel: according to the Wall Street Journal, a half million Mexican workers have found employment in the illicit drug industry.

The much-respected Economist Intelligence Unit’s yearly ratings of political instability take into account the socio-political dynamic in 165 countries. In 2010, Mexico places in the upper third of nations at risk of violent political upheaval. Whether this is an indicator of resurgent revolution here in 2010 is a story…

To Be Continued

[During the next three months, John Ross will travel the U.S. from sea to stinking sea with his new cult classic El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City which the New York Post (!) recently recommended as a "gritty, pulsating" read. For suggested venues (particularly in the Chicago and St. Louis areas) write johnross@igc.org.]

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