"Taxi to the Dark Side": How Did America Become a Country That Tortures?

By Cynthia Fuchs
PopMatters
Wednesday 20 February 2008

Alex Gibney's Oscar winning film documents the Bush Administration's reckless disregard for human rights and the rule of law. They're a very frail people and I was surprised it had taken that long for one of 'em to die in our custody.
- Pfc. Damien Corsetti, Military Intelligence, Bagram If the FBI had felt that there was a case to answer for, they wouldn't have taken me into Bagram where I was held, heard the sounds of a woman screaming next door, had me hogtied and threatened to send me to Egypt in order to get me to sign this.
- Moazzam Begg, Now 2006 July 28

In December 2002, a 22-year-old Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar was picked up and delivered to the Bagram Air Force Base prison. Five days later, he was dead. Sgt. Thomas Curtis, one of the Military Police at Bagram, remembers, "There was definitely a sense of concern because he was the second one. You wonder, was it something we did?"

As detailed in Alex Gibney's devastating documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side, Dilawar's demise was officially termed a homicide, like the first detainee to die at Bagram, Habibullah. Captured by a warlord and handed over to the U.S. just days before Dilawar, Habibullah as deemed "an important prisoner," hooded, shackled, and isolated, periodically beaten for "noncompliance." Autopsies showed that Dilawar and Habibullah suffered similar abuses, including deep bruises all over their bodies; according to the Army coroner, Dilawar suffered "massive tissue damage to his legs ... his legs had been pulpified." And yet, despite initial concerns among the guards and interrogators at Bagram over an investigation, instead, the officer in charge of interrogation at the prison, Captain Carolyn Wood, was awarded a Bronze Star for Valor and, following the Iraq invasion in 2003, she and her unit were sent to Abu Ghraib.

Methodically, relentlessly, Gibney's Oscar-nominated film assembles stories, evidence, and testimony from witnesses and experts (its deliberate structure recalls that of Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight, both films suggesting that, if the Bush Administration had not already put in place legal protections, more than one member might be subject to criminal charges). The many decisions and oversights that produced the "enhanced interrogation techniques" that would be used at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, and other sites have several points of departure, each chilling in its own way. Not least among these is the pronouncement by Dick Cheney that motivates Taxi's title, made during an appearance on Meet the Press during the week after 9/11. Describing imminent changes in interrogation policies, the vice president asserted,

We have to work sort of the dark side, if you will, spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods available to our intelligence agencies, if we're going to be successful. That's the world these folks operate in. It'll be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.

This working of the "dark side" would be both notorious and secret, planned and haphazard, illegal and, in some instances, calculated to toe a seeming legal line. Above all, the film argues, the work was instigated and often overseen by military officers and administration officials, who created a "fog of ambiguity, coupled with great pressure to bring results," such that young, untrained soldiers were following orders that were not spelled out. Chief among these sources of confusion is the January 2002 torture memo" written by John Yoo, then deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel, advising the suspension of the Geneva Conventions in cases deemed appropriate by the president. Taxi describes the memo as giving "legal cover for the CIA and Special Forces to embark on a secret program of previously forbidden interrogation techniques," including the use of dogs, nudity, stress positions, sleep deprivation and waterboarding. This even as military lawyers disputed such methods, especially as the use of such "extreme acts" left soldiers vulnerable to criminal charges - though, as it has turned out, those who directed them have not been subject to prosecutions.

Working the "dark side" demands such hierarchy, so that the U.S. can continue to put on a show of "justice" and fairness; as Donald Rumsfeld declared following the exposure of photos from Abu Ghraib, "The world will see how a democratic system a free system functions and operates, transparently, with no cover-ups." The trials that resulted, however, have covered up all kinds of responsibility, what with Pfc. Lynndie England sentenced to three years imprisonment (paroled after 521 days) and Spc. Charles Graner to 10 years. As the film notes in one of its resonant section titles, England and Graner were not only "bad apples." As Spc. Tony Lagouranis, of Military Intelligence in Iraq, puts it, "Obviously what they were doing in those pictures was not sanctioned by the military rules of engagement, and they weren't interrogators. So yes, I did think that they were bad apples. However, I also think that they were taking cues from intel."

While most charges associated with the Dilawar and Habibullah cases were dropped, several soldiers pled guilty or were convicted, including Pfc. Willie Brand, Spc. Brian Cammack, and Sgt, Anthony Morden (who notes in the film that this process allowed the Army "to get a public opinion that they were policing their soldiers"). But such cases, the movie submits, are only covering up broader policy. At Bagram, Abu Ghraib, and Guantánamo, the "chain of command" has not subverted by the use of torture; rather, it has been reasserted. (here it's worth noting that, even as some experts and even some politicians are calling for Guantánamo's closing, Bagram is expanding.)

As Rear Admiral John Hutson describes it, "What starts at the top of the chain of command drops like a rock down the chain of command, and that's why Lynndie England knew what Donald Rumsfeld was thinking without actually talking to Donald Rumsfeld." All interviewees in Taxi assert that torture does not produce useful intelligence (the most egregious case noted here is that of Abi Faraj al-Libbi, whose coerced and inaccurate "confession" of ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda found its way into Colin Powell's infamous speech at the United Nations in 2003). The film suggests that its pervasiveness in popular culture (exemplified by scenes from 24) has led to what Alfred McCoy (A Question of Torture) calls "a constituency for torture that allows the Bush White House to get away with the way it twists laws and treaties." Such twisting is denounced in the film by lawyers for detainees and former detainee Moazzam Begg, who recalls "one of the strangest requests" made to him during his two years detained, namely, that he identify soldiers who abused Dilawar and agree to testify against them in court (this while he was unable to get access to a lawyer or court proceedings for himself; he was released in 2005, under pressure by the British government).

The film includes examples of other, frankly astounding twists, including the designation of detainees as NEC (Not Enemy Combatants) or later, NLEC (No Longer Enemy Combatants), patently senseless labels that turn time and logic inside out. As Begg's lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, says, NLEC means "We want to say they were guilty to begin with, but now we've had a change of heart, so they're not guilty anymore, but we were right in the first place." Detention hinges on lack of information: according to Rear Admiral James McGarrah, of the Office of Administrative Review for Detained Enemy Combatants, "[Detainees] may not ever know [the evidence against them], but that doesn't eliminate the opportunity they have to make a case for why if they were returned in the future, why they would not continue to pose a threat."

All this twisting lays ground for future problems. According to Jack Cloonan, FBI Special Agent from 1977-2002, "We don't know what revenge is coming down the road." Indeed, he says, the most effective way to "incite the faithful" would be to show the photo of England holding the dog leash, "and just point to that, and look at the young brothers and say you're duty-bound now to get revenge." While Cloonan here casts blame on the "extreme interrogators," he also alludes to what he later calls "a certain level of prejudice, that this religion and the people who have hijacked it have such a disregard for life that we turn around and say if they think so little of life - and clearly, 9/11 exemplified that - screw them. Anything goes."

Taxi to the Dark Side insists on an accounting for this "anything." And for all its brilliant dissecting of U.S. policy, practice, and cover-up, it closes with an effort to make Dilawar visible once again. Effaced from the trials in which some of his torturers were named, he is represented here by his family, embodiments of the "human dignity" and commitment to "inalienable rights" lost during this long, slow, ongoing journey to the dark side.

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Congress Should Act to Preserve Net Neutrality

From San Jose Mercury News, February 22, 2008

The Internet has spawned tremendous choice and innovation for consumers and businesses.

But that would change if the phone and cable giants played favorites in who uses their broadband networks, and how they’re used.

That’s why U.S. policy-makers must protect the principle of an open and free Internet. Under this idea of “network neutrality” that has long prevailed, any Internet user has unrestricted access to all Web sites, content and services without interference from network providers.

Last week, Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., introduced legislation to enshrine this principle in law and prevent network operators from discriminating against certain types of Internet traffic. The “Internet Freedom Preservation Act” deserves passage.

The Net neutrality debate has taken on new significance with the explosion in Internet video, which chews up huge amounts of bandwidth. A video surge recently prompted Comcast to block or delay some video traffic from file-sharing networks like BitTorrent, actions Comcast says are needed to prevent bandwidth hogs from crowding out other users.

The video boom also is prompting broadband providers to consider pricing plans based on amount of use, a step toward tiered service that undermines Net neutrality.

The Markey bill would update federal communications law to protect against “discrimination” and “degradation” of content by network operators. It would give the Federal Communications Commission a clearer mandate to protect neutrality. It would also require the agency to conduct public broadband “summits” and to assess whether broadband services are ensuring an open Internet.

Like the telegraph and telephone before it, the Internet is a public medium that should be free of undue interference from network operators. This principle has made the Internet an unrivaled platform for innovation, allowing anyone with new ideas, opinions or businesses to access the Web on equal footing. That’s what gave rise to Amazon, eBay, Google, Internet phone calling, file-sharing and now Internet video.

Keeping the Internet neutral is key to U.S. leadership in the digital economy. We should not take this bedrock principle for granted.

Lights at Night Are Linked to Breast Cancer

By Rick Weiss
The Washington Post
Wednesday 20 February 2008

To view original click here

Study bolsters theory about interference with production of key hormone.

Women who live in neighborhoods with large amounts of nighttime illumination are more likely to get breast cancer than those who live in areas where nocturnal darkness prevails, according to an unusual study that overlaid satellite images of Earth onto cancer registries.

The finding adds credence to the hypothesis that exposure to too much light at night can raise the risk of breast cancer by interfering with the brain's production of a tumor-suppressing hormone.

"By no means are we saying that light at night is the only or the major risk factor for breast cancer," said Itai Kloog, of the University of Haifa in Israel, who led the new work. "But we found a clear and strong correlation that should be taken into consideration."

Scientists have known for years that rats raised in cages where lights are left on for much of the night have higher cancer rates than those allowed to sleep in darkness. And epidemiological studies of nurses, flight attendants and others who work at night have found breast cancer rates 60 percent above normal, even when other factors such as differences in diet are accounted for.

On the basis of such studies, an arm of the World Health Organization announced in December its decision to classify shift work as a "probable carcinogen." That put the night shift in the same health-risk category as exposure to such toxic chemicals as trichloroethylene, vinyl chloride and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).

The mechanism of such a link, if real, remains mysterious, but many scientists suspect that melatonin is key. Secreted by the pineal gland in the brain, the hormone helps prevent tumor formation. The body produces melatonin primarily at night, and levels drop precipitously in the presence of light, especially light in the blue part of the spectrum produced in quantity by computer screens and fluorescent bulbs.

In keeping with the melatonin hypothesis, mice in cages with night lighting have normal cancer rates if they get shots of the hormone. And blind women, whose eyes cannot detect light and so have robust production of melatonin, have lower-than-average breast cancer rates.

Kloog and his colleagues took a previously untried approach to testing the link. They obtained satellite data from NASA that showed in great detail how much light was emitted spaceward from neighborhoods throughout Israel.

Although the light levels that reached the satellite were about one-tenth their intensity on Earth, the approach provides an accurate measure of which areas are brighter or darker than others and by how much.

The team then overlaid that map with local statistics on cases of breast cancer and, for comparison, lung cancer, which is caused mostly by smoking and so would not be expected to be linked to light.

After using neighborhood data to correct for other factors that can affect cancer rates, including wealth, ethnicity and the average number of children in families living in those localities, the researchers found no link between night lighting and lung cancer, they report in this week's online issue of the journal Chronobiology International.

But the researchers found the breast cancer rate in localities with average night lighting to be 37 percent higher than in communities with the lowest amount of light; and they noted that the rate was higher by an additional 27 percent in areas with the highest amount of light.

Abraham Haim, a University of Haifa chronobiologist involved in the study, said the findings raise questions about the recent push to switch to energy-efficient fluorescent bulbs, which suppress melatonin production more than conventional incandescent bulbs. "This may be a disaster in another 20 years," Haim said, "and you won't be able to reverse what we did by mistake." He called for more research before policies favoring fluorescent lights are implemented, and for more emphasis on using less light at night.

Jim Burch, a University of South Carolina epidemiologist and biostatistician familiar with the study, called the approach and findings "fascinating."

"The study has limitations," including not measuring levels of indoor lighting, "but it supports the overall idea," Burch said. "I think there is enough evidence to suggest we ought to be thinking about this more carefully."

Election Madness

By Howard Zinn
The Progressive
March 2008 Issue

To view original click here

There's a man in Florida who has been writing to me for years (ten pages, handwritten) though I've never met him. He tells me the kinds of jobs he has held-security guard, repairman, etc. He has worked all kinds of shifts, night and day, to barely keep his family going. His letters to me have always been angry, railing against our capitalist system for its failure to assure "life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness" for working people.

Just today, a letter came. To my relief it was not handwritten because he is now using e-mail: "Well, I'm writing to you today because there is a wretched situation in this country that I cannot abide and must say something about. I am so enraged about this mortgage crisis. That the majority of Americans must live their lives in perpetual debt, and so many are sinking beneath the load, has me so steamed. Damn, that makes me so mad, I can't tell you. . . . I did a security guard job today that involved watching over a house that had been foreclosed on and was up for auction. They held an open house, and I was there to watch over the place during this event. There were three of the guards doing the same thing in three other homes in this same community. I was sitting there during the quiet moments and wondering about who those people were who had been evicted and where they were now."

On the same day I received this letter, there was a front-page story in the Boston Globe, with the headline "Thousands in Mass. Foreclosed on in '07."

The subhead was "7,563 homes were seized, nearly 3 times the '06 rate."

A few nights before, CBS television reported that 750,000 people with disabilities have been waiting for years for their Social Security benefits because the system is underfunded and there are not enough personnel to handle all the requests, even desperate ones.

Stories like these may be reported in the media, but they are gone in a flash. What's not gone, what occupies the press day after day, impossible to ignore, is the election frenzy.

This seizes the country every four years because we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls and choose one of the two mediocrities who have already been chosen for us. It is a multiple choice test so narrow, so specious, that no self-respecting teacher would give it to students.

And sad to say, the Presidential contest has mesmerized liberals and radicals alike. We are all vulnerable.

Is it possible to get together with friends these days and avoid the subject of the Presidential elections?

The very people who should know better, having criticized the hold of the media on the national mind, find themselves transfixed by the press, glued to the television set, as the candidates preen and smile and bring forth a shower of clichés with a solemnity appropriate for epic poetry.

Even in the so-called left periodicals, we must admit there is an exorbitant amount of attention given to minutely examining the major candidates. An occasional bone is thrown to the minor candidates, though everyone knows our marvelous democratic political system won't allow them in.

No, I'm not taking some ultra-left position that elections are totally insignificant, and that we should refuse to vote to preserve our moral purity. Yes, there are candidates who are somewhat better than others, and at certain times of national crisis (the Thirties, for instance, or right now) where even a slight difference between the two parties may be a matter of life and death.

I'm talking about a sense of proportion that gets lost in the election madness. Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes-the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth.

But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice.

Let's remember that even when there is a "better" candidate (yes, better Roosevelt than Hoover, better anyone than George Bush), that difference will not mean anything unless the power of the people asserts itself in ways that the occupant of the White House will find it dangerous to ignore.

The unprecedented policies of the New Deal-Social Security, unemployment insurance, job creation, minimum wage, subsidized housing-were not simply the result of FDR's progressivism. The Roosevelt Administration, coming into office, faced a nation in turmoil. The last year of the Hoover Administration had experienced the rebellion of the Bonus Army-thousands of veterans of the First World War descending on Washington to demand help from Congress as their families were going hungry. There were disturbances of the unemployed in Detroit, Chicago, Boston, New York, Seattle.

In 1934, early in the Roosevelt Presidency, strikes broke out all over the country, including a general strike in Minneapolis, a general strike in San Francisco, hundreds of thousands on strike in the textile mills of the South. Unemployed councils formed all over the country. Desperate people were taking action on their own, defying the police to put back the furniture of evicted tenants, and creating self-help organizations with hundreds of thousands of members.

Without a national crisis-economic destitution and rebellion-it is not likely the Roosevelt Administration would have instituted the bold reforms that it did.

Today, we can be sure that the Democratic Party, unless it faces a popular upsurge, will not move off center. The two leading Presidential candidates have made it clear that if elected, they will not bring an immediate end to the Iraq War, or institute a system of free health care for all.

They offer no radical change from the status quo.

They do not propose what the present desperation of people cries out for: a government guarantee of jobs to everyone who needs one, a minimum income for every household, housing relief to everyone who faces eviction or foreclosure.

They do not suggest the deep cuts in the military budget or the radical changes in the tax system that would free billions, even trillions, for social programs to transform the way we live.

None of this should surprise us. The Democratic Party has broken with its historic conservatism, its pandering to the rich, its predilection for war, only when it has encountered rebellion from below, as in the Thirties and the Sixties. We should not expect that a victory at the ballot box in November will even begin to budge the nation from its twin fundamental illnesses: capitalist greed and militarism.

So we need to free ourselves from the election madness engulfing the entire society, including the left.

Yes, two minutes. Before that, and after that, we should be taking direct action against the obstacles to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

For instance, the mortgage foreclosures that are driving millions from their homes-they should remind us of a similar situation after the Revolutionary War, when small farmers, many of them war veterans (like so many of our homeless today), could not afford to pay their taxes and were threatened with the loss of the land, their homes. They gathered by the thousands around courthouses and refused to allow the auctions to take place.

The evictions today of people who cannot pay their rents should remind us of what people did in the Thirties when they organized and put the belongings of the evicted families back in their apartments, in defiance of the authorities.

Historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop a war. Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.

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Howard Zinn is the author of "A People's History of the United States," "Voices of a People's History" (with Anthony Arnove), and most recently, "A Power Governments Cannot Suppress."

Insurance a Prime Weapon Against Cancer

By Gayle White
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Monday 18 February 2008

Cancer patients with private insurance are much more likely to be diagnosed early, giving them a greater chance of long-term survival, a sweeping study by the Atlanta-based American Cancer Society shows.

Conversely, uninsured Americans and those with Medicaid are much more likely to have advanced forms of the most common cancers by the time they seek treatment.

For the patients, the disparity can result in decades of lost life. For the health care system, it costs millions of dollars of added medical care, physicians say.

Researchers examined the records of more than 3.5 million American adult patients with 12 types of cancer diagnosed between 1998 and 2004 for a study to be published today in the British journal The Lancet Oncology. The records were collected by the National Cancer Database, a registry with information from about 1,430 hospitals.

The correlation between insurance status and stage of cancer was especially noticeable in colon, breast and prostate cancer, which frequently can be diagnosed early by routine screening, and in diseases such as lung and bladder cancer, which are often caught when patients seek treatment for early symptoms.

The reason seems simple, said Elizabeth Ward, director of surveillance research for the Cancer Society. Patients with insurance are much more likely to have regular screening and physical examinations.

"If you're uninsured, you're about half as likely to get mammography and colonoscopy as if you're insured," she said.

Disparities in diagnosis by insurance status were less pronounced in pancreatic and ovarian cancer, which are rarely diagnosed in anyone until the later stages.

The results tell researchers "that the health care safety net is fairly thin," said Ward. "If you don't have health insurance, it's pretty difficult in some instances to find a source of medical care."

But the study also found that, regardless of insurance coverage, African-American patients were more likely to be diagnosed with some cancers at late stages than white Americans.

That, said Ward, indicates that "health insurance and access to care is not the only barrier" to diagnosis and treatment.

Even when a safety net is in place - - such as the Grady Health System for indigent patients in Fulton and DeKalb counties - - poorer patients are less likely to seek treatment early, said Dr. Mitchell Berger, interim director of the Georgia Cancer Center for Excellence at Grady.

"A lot of our patients don't have access to health information," Berger said. "If they're working, they have jobs that don't allow them to take time off for a mammogram or colonoscopy. They may have cultural issues that keep them from seeking health care."

Dr. Otis Brawley, Berger's predecessor as head of the center, agrees.

"Insurance versus non-insurance is a great marker for people who are socially deprived or poor," said Brawley, now chief medical officer of the Cancer Society. "While giving people insurance would improve things, it will not improve everything."

Education and information can increase early diagnosis, even in a patient population like the Grady cancer center with only 10 percent private insurance coverage, said Brawley.

From 2001 until 2007, with funds from the state, Emory University and the Avon Foundation, Grady was able to establish a program of community education and mammography screening that shifted the pattern of diagnosis, Brawley said.

The percentage of women diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer was halved; the rate of early diagnosis was doubled.

The result, he said, was that more women had less extensive treatment and lived longer.

Dr. Bruce Feinberg, author of the "Cancer Answers" book series and CEO of Georgia Cancer Specialists, said he saw three late-stage cancer patients with no insurance in his private practice last week. One had colon cancer that had spread to her liver, one had a rare form of skin cancer that would require extensive surgery and chemotherapy, and one had breast cancer that had gone into her bones.

In all three cases, he said, early diagnosis through screening or a physical examination could have saved tens of thousands of dollars and possibly added years to their lives.

Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?

By Patricia Cohen
The New York Times
Thursday 14 February 2008

To view original click here

A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the adorable platinum blonde from "American Idol," appearing on the Fox game show "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?" during celebrity week. Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked: "Budapest is the capital of what European country?"

Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. "I thought Europe was a country," she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth graders: Hungary. "Hungry?" she said, eyes widening in disbelief. "That's a country? I've heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I've never heard of it."

Such, uh, lack of global awareness is the kind of thing that drives Susan Jacoby, author of "The Age of American Unreason," up a wall. Ms. Jacoby is one of a number of writers with new books that bemoan the state of American culture.

Joining the circle of curmudgeons this season is Eric G. Wilson, whose "Against Happiness" warns that the "American obsession with happiness" could "well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse, that could result in an extermination as horrible as those foreshadowed by global warming and environmental crisis and nuclear proliferation."

Then there is Lee Siegel's "Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob," which inveighs against the Internet for encouraging solipsism, debased discourse and arrant commercialization. Mr. Siegel, one might remember, was suspended by The New Republic for using a fake online persona in order to trash critics of his blog ("you couldn't tie Siegel's shoelaces") and to praise himself ("brave, brilliant").

Ms. Jacoby, whose book came out on Tuesday, doesn't zero in on a particular technology or emotion, but rather on what she feels is a generalized hostility to knowledge. She is well aware that some may tag her a crank. "I expect to get bashed," said Ms. Jacoby, 62, either as an older person who upbraids the young for plummeting standards and values, or as a secularist whose defense of scientific rationalism is a way to disparage religion.

Ms. Jacoby, however, is quick to point out that her indictment is not limited by age or ideology. Yes, she knows that eggheads, nerds, bookworms, longhairs, pointy heads, highbrows and know-it-alls have been mocked and dismissed throughout American history. And liberal and conservative writers, from Richard Hofstadter to Allan Bloom, have regularly analyzed the phenomenon and offered advice.

T. J. Jackson Lears, a cultural historian who edits the quarterly review Raritan, said, "The tendency to this sort of lamentation is perennial in American history," adding that in periods "when political problems seem intractable or somehow frozen, there is a turn toward cultural issues."

But now, Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that "too much learning can be a dangerous thing") and anti-rationalism ("the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion") have fused in a particularly insidious way.

Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don't think it matters.

She pointed to a 2006 National Geographic poll that found nearly half of 18- to 24-year-olds don't think it is necessary or important to know where countries in the news are located. So more than three years into the Iraq war, only 23 percent of those with some college could locate Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel on a map.

Ms. Jacoby, dressed in a bright red turtleneck with lipstick to match, was sitting, appropriately, in that temple of knowledge, the New York Public Library's majestic Beaux Arts building on Fifth Avenue. The author of seven other books, she was a fellow at the library when she first got the idea for this book back in 2001, on 9/11.

Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day's horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:

"This is just like Pearl Harbor," one of the men said.

The other asked, "What is Pearl Harbor?"

"That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War," the first man replied.

At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, "I decided to write this book."

Ms. Jacoby doesn't expect to revolutionize the nation's educational system or cause millions of Americans to switch off "American Idol" and pick up Schopenhauer. But she would like to start a conversation about why the United States seems particularly vulnerable to such a virulent strain of anti-intellectualism. After all, "the empire of infotainment doesn't stop at the American border," she said, yet students in many other countries consistently outperform American students in science, math and reading on comparative tests.

In part, she lays the blame on a failing educational system. "Although people are going to school more and more years, there's no evidence that they know more," she said.

Ms. Jacoby also blames religious fundamentalism's antipathy toward science, as she grieves over surveys that show that nearly two-thirds of Americans want creationism to be taught along with evolution.

Ms. Jacoby doesn't leave liberals out of her analysis, mentioning the New Left's attacks on universities in the 1960s, the decision to consign African-American and women's studies to an "academic ghetto" instead of integrating them into the core curriculum, ponderous musings on rock music and pop culture courses on everything from sitcoms to fat that trivialize college-level learning.

Avoiding the liberal or conservative label in this particular argument, she prefers to call herself a "cultural conservationist."

For all her scholarly interests, though, Ms. Jacoby said she recognized just how hard it is to tune out the 24/7 entertainment culture. A few years ago she participated in the annual campaign to turn off the television for a week. "I was stunned at how difficult it was for me," she said.

The surprise at her own dependency on electronic and visual media made her realize just how pervasive the culture of distraction is and how susceptible everyone is - even curmudgeons.

Ideology Makes for Bad Policy

By Dr. Wilmer J. Leon III
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Sunday 17 February 2008

Ideology is a closely held belief system that guides an individual, social movement or institution. It is a comprehensive view that society can be made better, and projects the vision of an individual or group's ideal concept of how to live in the world. When the abstractions of ideology are combined with practical and realistic applications, very positive things can happen. The Colonists believed in liberty, freedom and self-rule. They combined those ideologies and created an organized resistance to defeat the better armed and better financed British. It was people's commitment to freedom, equality and civil rights that gave them the strength to challenge the status quo and create the civil rights movement. The combination of an ideology and its realistic application defeated Jim Crow segregation and improved the quality of life for many people of color in America. Belief in a particular ideology is the glue that holds a group together.

The problem with ideologies is that by themselves they are not rational. They tend to focus on and confuse the imagery of the "should be" and "ought to be" with the practical "is." Without people who are able to inject pragmatism and tie logic and reason to an ideology, it can take an institution, group or country down some very perilous roads. This is why ideologues (people who profess ideologies) make terrible politicians and ideology can make for very bad public policy. Ideologues are so focused on the "should be" they fail to take into account the practical applications of the "how."

For the past seven years, fascist Republican ideologues have hijacked American politics and policy. The so-called Reagan Republicans or neo-conservatives have co-opted American domestic and foreign policy. At the same time, Christian social conservatives have controlled the parties' social agenda in an attempt to redefine American values.

Fascism can be defined as an authoritarian political ideology that considers the individual subordinate to the interests of the state. Some of the characteristics of fascism are nationalism, militarism, totalitarianism, corporatism, autocracy and religiosity. The following are a few practical examples of fascist tactics that have been implemented by the Bush administration and allowed to continue by the Democrats.

The fact oil/energy companies have had unchecked influence over American energy policy, while pharmaceutical and insurance companies are writing health care policy, is an example of corporatism. President Bush and Vice President Cheney's attempt to consolidate power within the executive branch through the implementation of the unitary executive theory is a clear example of autocracy. The invasion of sovereign nonthreatening nations and the use of unilateral foreign policy are good examples of militarism. This administration's ignoring the protections guaranteed by the Constitution through their attacks on civil rights and civil liberties, the suspension of habeas corpus, warrantless wiretapping, ignoring the FISA court, extraordinary renditions and torture are examples of totalitarianism.

After seven years of ideological babble such as "compassionate conservatism," "American internationalism," "ownership society" and "war on terror," Americans are beginning to focus on real issues such as home foreclosures, affordable health care, outsourcing American jobs, global warming and sky-rocketing energy costs.

The Christian social conservatives have been able to distract the public's attention away from real problems and focus their attention on politically irrelevant and divisive issues. Wedge issues such as gay marriage and abortion pale in comparison when you've lost your home, lost your job, can't afford to take your sick child to the hospital and can't afford to put gas in your car to get them there.

Paul Weyrich, head of the Free Congress Foundation, was quoted in the Christian Science Monitor as saying, "... Republicans traditionally stood for limited government, free enterprise, and a strong national defense. We added a fourth leg to that stool, which was traditional American values." What are these so-called "traditional American values" and who made people such as Weyrich, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, or any other self-proclaimed Christians the arbiter of such values?

When seeking clarity on American values and ideals, Americans should look to the documents upon which the country was founded. In the Declaration of Independence, ideology was combined with pragmatic application. The true ideological basis of the country is articulated as follows: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." The pragmatic manner to implement the ideology is stated as, "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed ... "

We can also look to the preamble of the Constitution of the United States: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States are where the real traditional ideals of America are articulated.

Currently, the Republican Party finds itself engaged in an internal battle. Does it stick to the divisive ideology and wedge politics of its so-called Christian base as articulated by individuals named above? Do the Republicans hide behind the guise of Christianity while practicing the mean-spirited and heavy-handed brand of politics implemented by individuals such as former House Speaker Tom DeLay and current House Minority Leader John Boehner or move back towards the center, more in line with mainstream America?

While seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 2000 and trying to amplify his support among independents and moderates, Arizona Senator and current Republican presidential hopeful John McCain said evangelists like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell were "corrupting influences on religion and politics," and said parts of the religious right were divisive and even un-American. Senator McCain also showed support for gay marriage by saying, "... I think that gay marriage should be allowed if there's a ceremony kind of thing, if you wanna call it that? I don't have any problem with that... " He also supported Roe v. Wade. In 1999, McCain told the San Francisco Chronicle, "I would not support repeal of Roe v. Wade, which would then force X number of women in America to [undergo] illegal and dangerous operations."

Now that he has come under attack by the socially conservative, evangelical wing of his party for not being conservative enough, Senator McCain is trying to mend fences and "heal the party" by flip-flopping on these clearly articulated positions. In 2006, he "kissed Falwell's ring" and delivered the commencement address at Liberty University. McCain now also supports the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Sounds like the "maverick straight talker" fell off of the "straight talk express" and is being forced to support positions that are out of step with the independents and moderates that have supported him for so many years.

This has nothing to do with Sen. John McCain. He is certainly not the only politician that has flip-flopped under the pressure of ideologues. Senator McCain is just the most recent example of the impact ideologues are having on the American political landscape.

The future of American politics and American policy is at stake. America is at a political crossroads. Are Americans going to continue to allow the politics and policies of this country to be hijacked by fascist neo-conservatives and right-wing evangelical ideologues, or will we choose to put this vocal, well financed, but relatively small group of ideological thugs in their rightful place?

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Dr. Wilmer Leon is the producer/host of the nationally broadcast call-in talk radio program "On With Leon," producer/host of the television program "Inside The Issues With Wilmer Leon," a regular guest on CNN's Lou Dobb's Tonight, and a teaching associate in the Department of Political Science at Howard University in Washington, DC. Go to www.wilmerleon.com or email: wjl3us@yahoo.com.

Homeland Insecurity

By Marie Cocco

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WASHINGTON—Grim talk of terrorism is again making headlines. First came the announcement that the United States will try the masterminds of the 9/11 plot, through military commissions—contemporary kangaroo courts. Now comes Senate approval of a vast surveillance bill that gives sanction to the warrantless snooping on Americans that President Bush carried out secretly until the program was exposed in the press.

And by the way, the House’s refusal to go along with giving immunity to telecommunications companies who were complicit in the spying puts the nation’s security at risk, the White House warns.

These set pieces of political discourse in the Bush era inevitably lead to the conclusion that we remain imperiled by terrorism. On this point, there is an undeniable and ugly truth behind the raw rhetoric. But there is also truth in cold, hard numbers—and in them, the White House tells an altogether different tale.

Homeland security funding—for states to try to prevent or prepare for such a disaster, for firefighters who would have to respond, for radios that would actually allow emergency personnel to communicate with one another during a catastrophe, for rail and mass transit security, for inspections and security at ports—all are stepchildren in the latest White House budget.

Grants to states and local governments for homeland security and first responders were cut by half from current funding levels, according to an analysis by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Meanwhile, financing for a special urban security program that is intended to replace pork-barrel jockeying among states, with funds better targeted to those cities—New York, Los Angeles and Washington—known to be at greatest risk of attack, is held just about flat. A project meant to help detect a nuclear or radiological device in densely populated cities—was cut by 25 percent, according to Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. Another to train emergency workers to handle an attack involving weapons of mass destruction also was pared.

“The threat to our cities and towns from terrorist attacks and natural disasters has not diminished, and the federal government’s contribution to protecting states and localities should not diminish either,” says Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., who chairs the homeland security panel.

Seven years into the “war on terror,” with conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq still fought in its name, there should be legitimate anger about why, as Lieberman correctly notes, the terrorist threat has “not diminished.” But if this is so—and the administration most definitely agrees—then what plausible reason is there for cutting prevention and preparedness funding, and eliminating some programs altogether?

Since New York City and the Pentagon were struck on 9/11, homeland security funding has become a crude political game. The administration started from the premise that no new money was needed to meet the demand for extraordinary services that only government—state, local or federal—can provide. To admit otherwise would jeopardize the continuation of the Bush tax cuts, and cut the heart of the conservative argument that almost no government function is a valid one.

Congress soon produced a farce, divvying up pots of anti-terrorism money like so many highway projects to the point where a few years ago, Wyoming was getting more funds per capita than was New York. Some, but not all, of these shenanigans ceased when the White House and lawmakers agreed that urban areas facing the greatest risk should get more, and a separate program was set up for them.

Now a new shell game: The White House repeatedly cuts or eliminates homeland security grants, knowing Congress usually restores the money. “I’m sure you’ll find no shortage of politicians on the Hill or in state and local governments who will advocate more spending,” says Russ Knocke, spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security. “Ultimately there is a limited amount available.”

But there is a limit to patience, too. And a limit to the number of years we have to prepare before what we are told is the inevitable next attack. Homeland security budget fights shouldn’t have the tone of low comedy. But they do, and somewhere, maybe a terrorist is chuckling.

Marie Cocco’s e-mail address is mariecocco(at)washpost.com.

The War against Tolerance

By Chris Hedges

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Walid Shoebat, Kamal Saleem and Zachariah Anani are the three stooges of the Christian right. These self-described former Muslim terrorists are regularly trotted out at Christian colleges—a few days ago they were at the Air Force Academy—to spew racist filth about Islam on behalf of groups such as Focus on the Family. It is a clever tactic. Curly, Larry and Mo, who all say they are born-again Christians, engage in hate speech and assure us it comes from personal experience. They tell their audiences that the only way to deal with one-fifth of the world’s population is by converting or eradicating all Muslims. Their cant is broadcast regularly on Fox News, including the Bill O’Reilly and Neil Cavuto shows, as well as on numerous Christian radio and television programs. Shoebat, who has written a book called “Why We Want to Kill You,” promises in his lectures to explain the numerous similarities between radical Muslims and the Nazis, how “Muslim terrorists” invaded America 30 years ago and how “perseverance, recruitment and hate” have fueled attacks by Muslims.

These men are frauds, but this is not the point. They are part of a dark and frightening war by the Christian right against tolerance that, in the moment of another catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil, would make it acceptable to target and persecute all Muslims, including the some 6 million Muslims who live in the United States. These men stoke these irrational fears. They defend the perpetual war unleashed by the Bush administration and championed by Sen. John McCain. McCain frequently reminds listeners that “the greatest danger facing the world is Islamic terrorism,” as does Mike Huckabee, who says that “Islamofascism” is “the greatest threat this country [has] ever faced.” George W. Bush has, in the same vein, assured Americans that terrorists hate us for our freedoms, not, of course, for anything we have done. Bush described the “war on terror” as a war against totalitarian Islamofascism while the Israeli air force was dropping tens of thousands of pounds of iron fragmentation bombs up and down Lebanon, an air campaign that killed 1,300 Lebanese civilians.

The three men tell lurid tales of being recruited as children into Palestinian terrorist organizations, murdering hundreds of civilians and blowing up a bank in Israel. Saleem says that as a child he infiltrated Israel to plant bombs via a network of tunnels underneath the Golan Heights, although no incident of this type was ever reported in Israel. He claims he is descended from the “grand wazir” of Islam, a title and a position that do not exist in the Arab world. They assure audiences that the Palestinians are interested not in a peaceful two-state solution but rather the destruction of Israel, the murder of all Jews and the death of America. Shoebat claims he first came to the United States as part of an extremist “sleeper cell.”

“These three jokers are as much former Islamic terrorists as ‘Star Trek’s’ Capt. James T. Kirk was a real Starship captain,” said Mikey Weinstein, the head of the watchdog group The Military Religious Freedom Foundation. The group has challenged Christian proselytizing in the military and denounced the visit by the men to the Air Force Academy.

The speakers include in their talks the superior virtues of Christianity. Saleem, for example, says his world “turned upside down when he was seriously injured in an automobile accident.”

“A Christian man tended to Kamal at the accident scene, making sure he got the medical treatment he needed,” his Web site says. “Kamal’s orthopedic surgeon and physical therapist were also Christian men whom over a period of several months ministered the unconditional love of Jesus Christ to him as he recovered. The love and sacrificial giving of these men caused Kamal to cry out to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob acknowledging his need for the Savior. Kamal has since become a man on a new mission, as an ambassador for the one true and living God, the great I Am, Jehovah God of the Bible.”

This creeping Christian chauvinism has infected our political and social discourse. It was behind the rumor that Barack Obama was a Muslim. Obama reassured followers that he was a Christian. It apparently did not occur to him, or his questioners, that the proper answer is that there is nothing wrong with being a Muslim, that persons of great moral probity and courage arise in all cultures and all religions, including Islam. Christians have no exclusive lock on virtue. But this kind of understanding often provokes indignant rage.

The public denigration of Islam, and by implication all religious belief systems outside Christianity, is part of the triumphalism that has distorted the country since the 9/11 attacks. It makes dialogue with those outside our “Christian” culture impossible. It implicitly condemns all who do not think as we think and believe as we believe as, at best, inferior and usually morally depraved. It blinds us to our own failings. It makes self-reflection and self-criticism a form of treason. It reduces the world to a cartoonish vision of us and them, good and evil. It turns us into children with bombs.

These three con artists are not the problem. There is enough scum out there to take their place. Rather, they offer a window into a worldview that is destroying the United States. It has corrupted the Republican Party. It has colored the news media. It has entered into the everyday clichés we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. It is ignorant and racist, but it is also deadly. It grossly perverts the Christian religion. It asks us to kill to purify the Earth. It leaves us threatened not only by the terrorists who may come from abroad but the ones who are rising from within our midst.

REPORT: The Right Wing Domination Of Talk Radio And How To End It

From Think Progess

The Center for American Progress and Free Press today released the first-of-its-kind statistical analysis of the political make-up of talk radio in the United States. It confirms that talk radio, one of the most widely used media formats in America, is dominated almost exclusively by conservatives.

The new report — entitled “The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio” — raises serious questions about whether the companies licensed to broadcast over the public radio airwaves are serving the listening needs of all Americans.

While progressive talk is making inroads on commercial stations, right-wing talk reigns supreme on America’s airwaves. Some key findings:

– In the spring of 2007, of the 257 news/talk stations owned by the top five commercial station owners, 91 percent of the total weekday talk radio programming was conservative, and only 9 percent was progressive.

– Each weekday, 2,570 hours and 15 minutes of conservative talk are broadcast on these stations compared to 254 hours of progressive talk — 10 times as much conservative talk as progressive talk.

– 76 percent of the news/talk programming in the top 10 radio markets is conservative, while 24 percent is progressive.

Two common myths are frequently offered to explain the imbalance of talk radio: 1) the 1987 repeal of the Fairness Doctrine (which required broadcasters to devote airtime to contrasting views), and 2) simple consumer demand. Each of these fails to adequately explain the root cause of the problem. The report explains:

Our conclusion is that the gap between conservative and progressive talk radio is the result of multiple structural problems in the U.S. regulatory system, particularly the complete breakdown of the public trustee concept of broadcast, the elimination of clear public interest requirements for broadcasting, and the relaxation of ownership rules including the requirement of local participation in management. […]

Ultimately, these results suggest that increasing ownership diversity, both in terms of the race/ethnicity and gender of owners, as well as the number of independent local owners, will lead to more diverse programming, more choices for listeners, and more owners who are responsive to their local communities and serve the public interest.

Along with other ideas, the report recommends that national radio ownership not be allowed to exceed 5 percent of the total number of AM and FM broadcast stations, and local ownership should not exceed more than 10 percent of the total commercial radio stations in a given market.

Read the full report here.

Help defeat out-of-state interests and keep Kansas air clean

Action Alert!

Legislators in Topeka recently introduced legislation to overturn Governor Sebelius' courageous decision last year to reject the Sunflower coal-fired power plant -- a plant that would be the largest new source of global warming emissions in the United States.

Kansas does not need this plant; over 80 percent of its power would be sent to other states. We need your help to beat back this terrible legislation and keep Kansas on track to move beyond dirty coal power!

The proposed legislation (HB 2711/SB 515) is a sweetheart deal for Sunflower and the coal lobby. Crafted in secret with coal industry lobbyists, the bill would increase the state's total global warming emissions more than 10 percent, at a time the rest of the country and the world are working to reduce global warming pollution. Coal plants have been rejected in multiple other states including Florida, Oklahoma, California, Washington and Idaho.

Under the proposed legislation the developers of those rejected coal plants would actually be encouraged to build their coal plants in Kansas, opening up the state to become the coal capital of the nation.

Kansas has the third best wind resource potential in the country; that is our future. This legislation will take us in the wrong direction. It's time for our state to move forward, to embrace technical innovation, clean energy and family-supporting jobs.

Please contact your legislators by clicking here and tell them to reject this bill favoring coal plants, and instead move Kansas forward to join the other states that are developing clean, renewable wind power.

Additional Actions you can take:

Take action with GPACE this week and let your voice be heard. In this email there are 3 actions that you can take without even getting off your computer.

Action 1: Go to www.GPACE.org and sign our petition to the Kansas Legislaure and Governor Kathleen Sebelius that lets them know you support a clean, secure, and profitable Kansas energy policy.

Action 2: Forward this email onto your friends and co-workers letting them know how important it is to stand together and fight for an open, honest, discussion about our future, and a chance to form a comprehensive energy policy that would embrace the variety of potential energy solutions the state has.

We individuals opposed to HB2711 and SB515 to contact their legislators and senators today! You can do so by clicking here.

If you have any questions, please feel free to call at 785-200-8010. You may also email Stephanie Cole with the Sierra Club at stephaniercole@gmail.com.

For more information on energy policy in Kansas click here

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Immigrants Come Here Because Globalization Took Their Jobs Back There
By Jim Hightower, The Hightower Lowdown
Thursday 07 February 2008
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Seal-the-border hysteria is everywhere. Instead of blaming immigrants for America's problems, let's look at executives on both sides of the border.

The wailing in our country about the "invasion of immigrants" has been long and loud. As one complainant put it, "Few of their children in the country learn English ...The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages ... Unless the stream of the importation could be turned they will soon so outnumber us that all the advantages we have will not be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious."

That's not some diatribe from one of today's Republican presidential candidates. It's the anxious cry of none other than Ben Franklin, deploring the wave of Germans pouring into the colony of Pennsylvania in the 1750s. Thus, anti-immigrant eruptions are older than the United States itself, and they've flared up periodically throughout our history, targeting the Irish, French, Italians, Chinese, and others. Even George W's current project to wall off our border is not a new bit of nuttiness - around the time of the nation's founding, John Jay, who later became the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, proposed "a wall of brass around the country for the exclusion of Catholics."

Luckily for the development and enrichment of our country, these past public frenzies ultimately failed to exclude the teeming masses, and those uproars now appear through the telescope of time to have been some combination of ridiculous panic, political demagoguery and xenophobic ugliness. Still, this does not mean that the public's anxiety and simmering anger about today's massive influx of Mexicans coming illegally across our 2,000-mile shared border is illegitimate. However, most of what the politicians and pundits are saying about it is illegitimate.

Wedge Issue

There is way too much xenophobia, racism and demagoguery at play around illegal immigration, but such crude sentiments are not what is bringing this problem to a national political boil. Polls show - as do conversations at any Chat & Chew Cafe in the country - that there is a deep and genuine alarm about the issue among the nonxenophobic, nonracist American majority. In particular, workaday families are fearful about what an endless flow of low-wage workers portends for their economic future, and they're not getting good answers from Republicans, Democrats, corporate leaders or the media.

For the GOP candidates in this year's presidential run, the contest is coming down to who can be the most nativist knucklehead. They accuse each other of not wanting to punish immigrant children enough, of not being absolutists on "English-only" proposals, of having coddled illegal entrants in the past with amnesty proposals and sanctuaries, and of not being hawkish enough on sealing off and militarizing the border.

The leader of the anti-immigrant Republican pack is Tom Tancredo, a Colorado congress-critter who based his ill-fated presidential campaign on immigrant bashing. This goober is so nasty he'd scare small children. His website screeched that immigrants are "pushing drugs, raping kids, destroying lives," and his campaign slogan is a sledgehammer demand: "Deport those who don't belong. Make sure they never come back." As for illegal immigrants, Tom thinks that the term "illegal" is too soft, preferring to demonize immigrants as "aliens." Tancredo doesn't merely rant, he foams at the mouth, maniacally warning about waves of Mexican terrorists who are "coming to kill me and you and your children." Accused of trying to turn America into a gated community, he exulted, "You bet!"

At least he's taken a position, even if it's un-American and loopy. Democratic leaders, on the other hand, have mostly tried to do a squishy shuffle, wanting to beef up law enforcement against illegal immigrants while also mouthing soothing words about the good work ethic of our friends south of the border and offering a bureaucratic rigmarole to allow some of the younger ones to gain permanent residency in our country. Worse, such corporate Democrats as Rep. Rahm Emanuel urge the party's candidates either to adopt the Republican's punitive message or simply to try ducking the issue.

Which brings us to the wall, both figuratively and literally. The fact that we are resorting to the construction of an enormous fence between two friendly nations admits to an abject failure by policy makers, who are so bereft of ideas, honesty, courage and morality that all they can do is to try walling off the problem.

We've had experience here in Texas with the futility of tall border fences. Molly Ivins reported a beer-induced incident that took place in 1983. Walling off Mexico had been proposed back then by the Reaganauts, and a test fence had been built way down in the Big Bend outpost of Terlingua. This little town also happened to be the site of a renowned chili cookoff that Molly helped judge, and it attracted a big crowd of impish, beer-drinking chiliheads.

There stood the barrier, 17 feet tall and topped with barbwire. It didn't take many beers before the first-ever "Terlingua Memorial Over, Under, or Through the Mexican Fence Climbing Contest" was cooked up. Winning time: 30 seconds.

Yet here come the border sealers again. Bush & Co. (including Democrats who have allowed the funding) is putting up an initial $1.2 billion to start building this version of the wall, which is projected to cost up to $60 billion over the next 25 years to build and maintain. It's a monster wall - two or three 40-foot-high rows of reinforced fencing that take a swath of land 150 feet wide and stretch for 700 miles.

The Mexican government and people are insulted and appalled by the wall; ranchers, mayors and families living on either side of the border hate it; environmentalists are aghast at its destructive impact on the ecology of the area. Still, it's being built. Indeed, a 2005 federal act contained a little-noticed section authorizing Bush's Homeland Security czar to suspend any laws that stand in the way of building the wall. Current czar Michael Chertoff has already used this unprecedented authority to waive 19 statutes, including the Endangered Species, Clean Water and National Historic Preservation Acts.

All this for something that will not work. As Gov. Janet Napolitano of Arizona put it, "Show me a 50-foot wall and I'll show you a 51-foot ladder." People have literally been dying to cross into the United States, and it's not possible to build a wall tall enough to stop them. They will keep coming.

Why?

The question that policy makers have not faced honestly is this one: Why do these immigrants come? The answer is not that they are pulled by our jobs and government benefits, but that they are pushed by the abject poverty that their families face in Mexico. That might seem like a mere semantic difference, but it's huge if you're trying to develop a policy to stop the human flood across our border.

Although you never hear it mentioned in debates on the issue, you might start with this reality: Most Mexican people really would prefer to live in their own country. Can we all say, duh? Pedro Martin, who has seen most of the young men and women in his small village depart for El Norte, put it this way: "Up north, even though they pay more, you're not necessarily living as well. You feel out of place. Here you can walk around the whole town, and it's comfortable. Life is easier."

Their family, language, culture, identity and happiness is Mexican - yet sheer economic survival requires so many of them to abandon the place they love.

Again, why? Because in the last 15 years, Mexico's longstanding system of sustaining its huge population of poor citizens (including small self-sufficient farms, jobs in state-owned industries and subsidies for such essentials as tortillas) has been scuttled at the insistence of U.S. banks, corporations, government officials and "free market" ideologues. In the name of "modernizing" the Mexican economy, such giants as Citigroup, Wal-Mart, Tyson Foods and GE - in cahoots with the plutocrats and oligarchs of Mexico - have laid waste to that country's grass-roots economy, destroying the already-meager livelihoods of millions.

The 1994 imposition of NAFTA was particularly devastating. Just as Bill Clinton and the corporate elites did here, Mexico's ruling elites touted NAFTA as a magic elixir that would generate growth, create jobs, raise wages and eliminate the surge of Mexican migrants into the United States. They were horribly wrong:

• Economic growth in Mexico has been anemic since '94, and the benefits of any growth have gone overwhelmingly to the wealthiest families.
• Since NAFTA, Mexico has created less than a third of the millions of decent jobs it needs.
• Average factory wages in Mexico have dropped by more than 5 percent under NAFTA.
• Unemployment has jumped, and unskilled workers are paid only $5 a day.
• U.S. agribusiness corporations have more than doubled their shipment of subsidized crops into Mexico, busting the price that indigenous farmers got for their production and displacing some 2 million peasant farmers from their land.
• Huge agribusiness operations, many owned by U.S. investors, now control Mexican agricultural production and pay farmworkers under $2 an hour.
• Since NAFTA passed, there has been a flood of business bankruptcies and takeovers in Mexico as predatory U.S. chains have moved in. U.S. corporations now control 40 percent of the country's formal jobs, with Wal-Mart reigning as the No. 1 employer.
• Nineteen million more Mexicans live in poverty today than when NAFTA was passed.

So, here's the deal: Thanks to Mexico's newly corporatized economy, wage earners there get poverty pay of $5 a day (about $1,600 a year), while a few hundred miles north, they might draw that much in an hour. What would you do?

The Wrong Debate

In our national imbroglio over Mexican immigration (yes, some illegal migrants come from elsewhere, but more than three-fourths are from Mexico), our "leaders" have set us up to look down at impoverished working people forced to leave their homeland and risk death in order to help their families escape poverty.

Instead of coming down on them, why not start looking up - up at the executive suites on both sides of the border. Up is where the power is. The moneyed elites in those suites are the profiteering few who have rigged all of our trade and labor policies to knock down workers, farmers and small businesses, not merely in Mexico but in our country as well.

In the United States, the middle class feels imperiled because ... well, because it is imperiled. Politicians, economists and the richly paid pundits keep telling us that the American economy is robust and that people's financial pessimism and anxieties are irrational. At the kitchen table level, however, folks know the difference between chicken salad and chicken manure. Yes, these are boom times for the luxury class, but the middle class is imploding. In a recent letter to the editor, a working stiff in California put it this way:

"We've replaced steaks with corn flakes; we can't afford to get sick; our kids can't afford health insurance; we hope that our 10-year-old van keeps running because we can't afford a new one; our kids can't buy a home because housing prices are exorbitant; our purchasing power continually regresses; and worst of all, the poverty and near-poverty classes are growing."

It's this economic fragility that anti-immigrant forces play on. But even if there were no illegal workers in our country - none - the fragility would remain, for poor Mexican laborers are not the ones who:

• Downsized and offshored our middle-class jobs.
• Perverted our bankruptcy laws to let corporations abrogate their union contracts.
• Stopped enforcement of America's wage and hour laws.
• Perverted the National Labor Relations Board into an anti-worker tool for corporations.
• Illegally reclassified millions of employees as "independent contractors," leaving them with no benefits or labor rights.
• Subverted the right of workers to organize.
• Turned a blind eye to the re-emergence in America of sweatshops and child labor in everything from the clothing industry to Wal-Mart.
• Made good healthcare a luxury item.
• Let rich campaign donors take over both political parties.
• Passed by hook and crook a continuing series of global-trade scams to enrich the few and knock down the many.

Powerless immigrants didn't do these things to us. The richest, most-powerful, best-connected corporate interests did them. Judy Ancel, director of the Institute for Labor Studies at the University of Missouri, offers this example of Iowa Beef Processors (IBP), the largest meatpacker in the United States, now owned by the multibillion-dollar conglomerate Tyson Foods:

Until the late 1970s, meatpacking was a high-wage industry, with highly skilled workers in charge. Factories were in union cities, union contracts provided good wages and benefits, and unions set professional standards for everything from worker training to safety conditions. Then IBP's executives transformed this beneficial model into today's profiteering system. The factories moved to nonunion cities and rural areas, and lower-skilled workers were hired to do repetitive cuts on speeded-up assembly lines. With Reagan as president, meat-industry lobbyists were able to emasculate labor laws, and unions lost their influence over the workplace, which became much less rewarding and more dangerous. IBP began intensive recruiting of Mexican workers (legal or not) to do what had become very nasty work. In only 20 years, meatpacking wages dropped by roughly half, the union was ousted, and the rate of workplace injury became one of the highest of any industry (more than a fourth of meatpacking workers now suffer "accidents").

The Fix

Immigration reform cannot be separated from labor and trade reform. We can't fix the former without dealing with the other two. We must stop the exploitative NAFTAfication of such aspiring economies as Mexico and instead develop genuine grass-roots investment policies that give people there an ability to remain in their homeland. Then we must enforce our own labor laws - from wage and hour rules to the NLRB - so as to empower American workers to enforce their own rights.

Eliminating the need to migrate from Mexico and rebuilding the middle-class ladder, here is an "immigration policy" that will work. But it requires us to go right at the corporate kleptocracy that now owns Washington and controls the debate.

We must challenge Democrats, especially, to broaden the debate and to recognize that they must choose sides - to be for workers or for more trade imperialism. Right now, the Democratic leadership is siding with imperialism and exacerbating the economic causes of Latino migration. For example, just last month, Speaker Nancy Pelosi engineered a vote to extend NAFTA to Peru, a corporate favor that could be called the Tom-Rahm Bipartisan Axis of Immigration Stupidity, for it drew enthusiastic support from both Tom Tancredo and Rahm Emanuel.

America's immigration problem is not down on the border, it's in Washington and on Wall Street.

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From "The Hightower Lowdown," edited by Jim Hightower and Phillip Frazer, January 2008. Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker and author of the new book Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow. (Wiley, March 2008)

What is the war in Iraq costing? Your health care. Your future.

Bush Budget Forecasts Deficit Hike
By Andrew Taylor
The Associated Press

Saturday 02 February 2008

Washington - President Bush wants to cut funding for teaching hospitals and freeze medical research in a $3 trillion budget for 2009 that is still likely to generate a record deficit once war costs are tallied up.

The Bush budget to be submitted Monday would cut the budget for the Health and Human Services Department by $2 billion, or 3 percent. By contrast, the Pentagon would get a $35 billion increase to $515 billion for core programs, with war costs additional.

With tax revenues falling as the economy slows - and with the deficit-financed economic stimulus bill adding more than $150 billion in red ink to federal ledgers over 2008-2009 - the White House acknowledges that the budget deficit for this year and next is projected to reach $400 billion or more.

The largest-ever budget deficit, $413 billion, was recorded in 2004. Bush's budget will forecast a deficit for 2009 that's below that, an administration official said. But that assumes costs of $70 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, well below the almost $200 billion request for this year.

Even if a Democrat is elected president and begins troop withdrawals, tens of billions of dollars more will be needed, which would bring the deficit well above the $413 billion record.

And if the economy slides into recession, deficits would grow ever higher. The Bush budget predicts gross domestic product growth of 2.9 percent for 2008, an administration official said, much higher than private sector economists predict. If growth doesn't meet administration expectations, the deficit would spike higher as tax revenues fall even more.

Economists say the best way to measure the deficit is against the size of the economy, and at about 3 percent of gross domestic product, the 2008-2009 deficits aren't much higher than historical averages. To the average member of the public, however, the raw figures are eye-popping, and Bush's successor is likely to feel pressure to rein the deficit under control.

Bush has promised his budget will keep the government on track to run a surplus in 2012. But the steps required to do that - and keep his promise to extend tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 beyond their expiration at the end of 2010 - are hardly realistic.

For starters, his budget contains no war costs beyond 2009 and fails to address the huge cost of keeping more and more taxpayers from feeling the bite of the alternative minimum tax.

Bush's budget plan will also, on average, freeze most domestic programs funded by Congress each year. Since departments such as Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security will be getting increases, that means other agencies would bear difficult cuts.

The budget for the Health and Human Services Department, for example, would be reduced by almost 3 percent under the Bush budget plan to be released Monday. The $2 billion in HHS cuts are about double the size of the reductions Bush sought last year; Democrats controlling Congress rejected them.

Congress is ultimately likely to reject the cuts again, but the White House played a tough hand in last year's budget battle and the gulf between the two could mean gridlock that would tie up the agency's budget until Bush's successor takes office. The cuts would hit HHS programs funded by Congress each year.

These reductions would be in addition to almost $200 billion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid over the next five years that administration officials acknowledge are in Bush's budget. Much of the savings would come from freezing reimbursement rates for most health care providers for three years.

Congress rejected a smaller package of cuts last year, and there's no reason to think they would rise to the challenge in an election year. The proposed savings from Medicare and Medicaid are about three times the cuts proposed last year.

Within HHS programs, Bush would eliminate a $302 million program that gives grants to children's hospitals to subsidize medical education. A $300 million program for public health improvement projects would be eliminated, while grants to improve health care in rural areas would be cut by 87 percent.

The Centers for Disease Control's budget would face a 7 percent reduction of $433 million. The budget for a program to treat and monitor the health of first responders and others exposed to toxins at the World Trade Center after the Sept. 11 attacks would be cut by 77 percent, from $108 million this year to $25 million in 2009.

The National Institutes of Health, which funds health research grants, would see its budget frozen at $29.5 billion.

A program providing grants to help mental health and substance abuse providers update their treatment programs would be cut almost in half. Bush also would eliminate a new $49 million program to help states provide health insurance to people who are ailing and cannot obtain health insurance in the commercial market.

There are a few increases, however. The Food and Drug Administration would receive a 6 percent boost to $2.4 billion to ramp up food and drug safety efforts. Head Start would receive a 2 percent increase to $7 billion. Abstinence education programs popular with social conservatives would get a 25 percent increase to $137 million.

At the same time, a popular program that provides heating subsidies to the poor would be cut by $570 million, to $2 billion.

As expected, the budget would eliminate the $654 million Community Services Block Grant program, which provides seed money for community action agencies that help the poor. That cut was proposed last year, but Congress rejected it on a bipartisan basis.

Within the Education Department, Title I grants, the main source of federal funding for poor students, would get $14.3 billion, about a 3 percent increase from this year, under the administration's proposal. About half of the nation's schools, and two-thirds of elementary schools, receive Title I funding.

The administration proposes to spend about $11.3 billion for special education services for students with disabilities, an increase of roughly $330 million.