Postmodern News Archives 13

2007-03-17T11:05:00.000-07:00

Minority Report

In their first year in power, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives managed to undo years of work that came before—rejecting the Kelowna Accord, scrapping the national daycare program and turning their backs on Kyoto. Lest we forget, here are eight reasons to turf the Tories the next chance we get.

By Mitch Moxley
From "This" Magazine

“The West is in,” trumpeted the Calgary Herald after Election Day 2006, when Canadians gave the Harper Conservatives a trial run in government, a slim minority to punish the scandal-plagued Liberals. It was heralded as a new era in Canadian politics. Harper was able to take a party born of western alienation and broaden its appeal to a national audience. The Conservatives ran a disciplined campaign, pitching Canadians a party that was centrist and moderate, led by a man who had softened and evolved. Many Canadians bought it.

Call it a bout of temporary insanity. Over the past year, the puzzle has come together, piece by piece, revealing a party far to the right of the Canadian mainstream. The Conservatives have attacked social programs, enraged supporters of same-sex marriage, abandoned Kyoto, and more. It hasn’t gone unnoticed: polls show chances of a Conservative majority growing slimmer by the day. That’s good news, because a Harper majority is a frightening prospect. “On almost every front you look at, Harper has proceeded with a right-wing agenda,” says Toronto Star columnist and author Linda McQuaig. “And that is with a minority. With a majority government, it would be this on steroids.”

1. THEIR ROOTS ARE SHOWING

Meet Stephen Harper: Canadian neo-con, policy wonk extraordinaire and the most right-wing prime minister this country has seen. A brief history lesson: Harper entered politics in 1984, in his mid-20s, as an aide to Tory MP Jim Hawkes. Before long, young Harper grew disillusioned with the Mulroney Conservatives. He quit in 1987, but was soon recruited as chief policy officer to Preston Manning, founder of the Reform party, a grassroots populist movement out of Alberta that arose from frustration with Brian Mulroney’s attempts to give Quebec “distinct society” status. Taking its cues from Manning’s father’s Social Credit party, Reform’s main goal was to drastically limit the role of government in public life. Harper ran for the House of Commons with Reform in 1988, losing badly to his old mentor, Hawkes, before winning the seat in 1993. He soon grew tired of party politics, frustrated he wasn’t able to freely speak his mind. He resigned his seat in 1997 to lead the National Citizens Coalition, a far-right, anti-government lobby group. In 2002, he returned to the political arena to lead the Canadian Alliance, the party formed by the 2000 merger between Reform and some Progressive Conservatives. Leading up to his election as prime minister, and during his first months in power, Harper was able to successfully present himself as moderate and appeal to middleclass voters. It’s instructive, however, to take a look at Harper’s ideological roots, from which he has never strayed too far.

Harper is a product of the so-called Calgary School, a clique of academics from the University of Calgary. Members include historian David Bercuson, and political scientists Barry Cooper, Rainer Knopff, Ted Morton (also a politician) and one of Harper’s closest advisors, Tom Flanagan—all of whom share an affinity for free markets and small government.

The group’s most famous figure is Flanagan, an American-born professor who was Harper’s national campaign director in the 2004 election. After studying at Notre Dame and Duke, Flanagan accepted a post at the fledgling U of C in 1968, and in the early 1990s became involved with Manning’s Reform movement. No stranger to controversy, he set tempers ablaze with his book First Nations? Second Thoughts, in which he dismissed Canada’s Aboriginals as merely “first immigrants” and argued for their assimilation. Another Flanagan work, an introductory political science textbook he co-authored, was removed from Ontario’s list of approved textbooks because of alleged biases against Jews and women.

The Calgary School has striking similarities to the American neo-conservatives who have the ear of George W. Bush (think World Bank president and Iraq war architect Paul Wolfowitz). Both the Calgary School and U.S. neo-cons have been heavily influenced by Leo Strauss, a one-time political scientist at the University of Chicago who is considered a founding father of the neo-conservative movement. Strauss, who died in 1973 and has gained a weighty posthumous reputation, was deeply suspicious of democracy, arguing that the public is not capable of making intelligent political decisions. Neo-cons, both American and Canadian, use democracy to turn citizens against their own liberties, says Shadia Drury, a Strauss expert and political philosophy professor at the University of Regina. Drury, who worked alongside the Calgary School until 2003, warns that Canadian neo-cons want to remake Canada in the image of the United States. “Their values are not Canadian values,” Drury says of Harper and his pedagogical influences. “Fortunately, Canadian values are still too much on the side of freedom.”

2. WE DON’T CALL THEM “PROGRESSIVE” ANYMORE FOR A REASON

May 31, 2003: In a room at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Toronto, next door to the Tory convention, Progressive Conservative leadership candidate Peter MacKay scribbles a pledge to rival David Orchard on a piece of paper. MacKay’s promise to Orchard, a PC veteran who held the second-most delegates, was that if chosen as leader he would not merge the party with the Stephen Harper-led Canadian Alliance. In return, Orchard promises the support of his delegates, ensuring a MacKay victory. Unfortunately for Orchard, in less than six months, MacKay shakes hands with Harper, and the Conservative party of Canada is born. “It was a remarkable takeover and theft of the Progressive Conservative party,” says Orchard, who went on to fight the merger in court. “Here we have a very narrow, ideologically driven [party] that’s connected to the U.S. religious right on a whole number of different issues. There’s an ideologically driven narrow-mindedness that was not part of the Progressive Conservative party at all.”

It was a defining moment in Canadian politics, and one often forgotten. The formation of the Conservative party of Canada marked the end of a moderate tradition of conservatism in Canada and replaced it with a U.S.-style version. Today’s Conservative party is very much a product of the ones that preceded it—Reform and Canadian Alliance. Some of the more inflammatory voices have been softened, but many policies and faces remain the same. Think of Harper’s obsession with building a new relationship with the provinces, and stripping the federal government of its responsibility for social services, or the party’s social conservative agenda and connection to the religious right. “The Conservative party, historically, always had a full spectrum of centre to far right. It was just that the centre was always fully in charge,” says Allan Gregg, chair of the Strategic Counsel, a national market- and publicopinion research company, and former PC pollster. “Now you have a guy in charge who comes from the more orthodox right wing of the party. This is a guy who leads that party with an iron fist. His way is the dominant way within the Conservative party.”

The Red Tory element of the PC party has all but disappeared. It may be called the Conservative party, but progressive it is not. “The media do them an enormous favour every time they call them ‘Tories,’ ” says Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party of Canada. “They are not the Tory party.”

3. THEY’RE PLAYING DRESS-UP

Remember Harper’s summer 2005 makeover campaign? Sometime between the 2004 and 2005 elections, the Tories tried to transform Harper from a scary social conservative accused of harbouring a hidden agenda to a likeable dad and political moderate with broad vision and admirable determination. Suddenly images of Stephen Harper participating in events usually reserved for ordinary people appeared in print and on television across the country. Remember Stephen Harper clumsily throwing a football? Or Harper fingerpainting with children? How about the cross-country BBQ tour, when they dressed him up in cowboy hat and vest and sent him out flipping burgers? Happy times.

Harper’s makeover campaign largely failed. Attempts to make him look likeable were awkward and often ridiculed. During the fingerpainting photo-op with kindergarteners, for example, the old Stephen Harper—stiff and bitter—shone through. A youngster with gooey fingers approached the Opposition leader, eliciting the response, “Don’t touch me.”

Where the Tories did succeed, however, was in controlling the debate. In the 2004 election, the Liberals were able to run a campaign that successfully vilified Harper. In the last campaign, however, Harper turned the table, attacking Liberal corruption while staying strictly on message. This focus on controlling the message is a page out of the U.S. Republican playbook. In fact, the party had Republican help. In May, a group of Canada’s foremost conservatives gathered in Kanata, Ontario, to receive some words of wisdom from Frank Luntz, a GOP pollster and the brains behind the Republicans’ sweep of Congress in 1994. Luntz spoke to 200 members of the Civitas Society, a conservative group whose members include Harper’s chief of staff, Ian Brodie, as well as Tom Flanagan, a founding member.

Luntz, who has previously done work for Preston Manning, is a master of tailoring a conservative message and selling it to moderate voters. His strategy is called “language guidance”—the use of simple messages, which are carefully tested and often repeated. He advocates the use of key words, images, pictures and national symbols to deflect suspicion of unpopular policies. Instead of “tax cuts,” use “tax relief.” Tax code simplification as opposed to tax code reform. Don’t privatize a program, personalize it. And so on. Canadian Conservatives have made Luntz’s strategy their own. Think of the Tories’ “five priorities,” the oft-repeated insults about Paul Martin, and the “made in Canada” solution to global warming.

By staying on message and focusing the attack on the Liberals, Harper was able to deflect attention from his past. And what a past it has been. The Harper of the last election seemed to be an entirely different person than he’s been in the past 20 years—the one who has railed against universal health care, social programs and a strong federal government. No matter what he told us in the last election, Stephen Harper is no national leader.

4. THEIR CITIZENS AREN’T CREATED EQUAL

Considering the Harper Conservatives’ roots, the way they have governed should hardly come as a surprise. Once in office things went smoothly; Harper and his cabinet focused exclusively on its five priorities: the GST cut, daycare credit, health-care wait times, government accountability and crime. But since getting elected, the government has revealed the depths of its true colours, governing like a farright party, beginning with an attack on equality.

First, there was the cancellation of the Kelowna Accord, an agreement negotiated under the previous Liberal government to help bridge the gap between Aboriginals and other Canadians by earmarking $5 billion to improve education, housing, economic development, health and water services on reserves. Then, the government voted to reject the draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples at the UN Human Rights Council. According to Angus Toulouse, Ontario regional chief for the Assembly of First Nations, the Harper Conservatives have sent a message to Canada’s Aboriginal people that they do not care. “It clearly told us this government is going to step on the poorest of the poor, which is the Aboriginal people in Canada,” Toulouse says.

Native people are not the only target of the Harper government’s attack on equality. In September, the government lopped 40 percent off the budget of Status of Women Canada, an agency that promotes gender equality. And same-sex marriage advocates have long been a favourite target of the Conservative party. Harper himself voted against extending hate propaganda legislation to include homosexuality, and in the last election campaign said a Conservative government would hold a free vote on same-sex marriage.

Conservative opposition to same-sex marriage makes sense given the party’s religious base. The evangelical set considers Harper, a self-confessed born-again Christian, to be one of their own. “I want to make it clear that Christians are welcome in politics,” Harper said on the Drew Marshall Show leading up to last year’s election. “And particularly welcome in our party.” Some MPs come straight from the religious right. Stockwell Day once famously declared that Adam and Eve roamed with dinosaurs. David Sweet, MP for Ancaster-Dundas-Flamborough-Westdale, is past head of the Christian group Promise Keepers Canada, which helps “men grow and mature into Godly men,” according to the group’s website. And Harold Albrecht, MP for Kitchener-Conestoga, once wrote a letter to the editor of his local newspaper saying, “These same-sex marriages would succeed in wiping out an entire society in just one generation.” Then there was the news that Justice Minister Vic Toews wants to table a Defence of Religions Act, legislation that would protect critics of homosexuality and same-sex marriage, and ensure the right of officials to refuse to perform gay marriages. Many of the Canadian right’s fiercest opponents of same-sex marriage remain influential within the Conservative party. For example, Harper recently named Darrel Reid chief of staff to Environment Minister Rona Ambrose. Reid is the former president of Focus on the Family Canada, the Canadian branch of the U.S.-based anti-gay-marriage group. Reid has made a career out of fighting against equality for same-sex couples, and once said that the decision to legalize gay marriage made him “ashamed to be called a Canadian.”

“We have to connect the dots,” says Gilles Marchildon, executive director of Egale Canada, an advocacy group for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transidentified people. “This is not a government that supports equality and justice.”

5. OPACITY IS THE NEW TRANSPARENCY

Among the Conservatives’ original five priorities was an accountability law to make government more transparent—a move Canadians welcomed in the wake of the sponsorship scandal. They tabled the Federal Accountability Act in April, which banned corporate and union donations to federal parties, cracked down on lobbyists, protected whistle-blowers and gave more power to officers of Parliament, such as the ethics commissioner and auditor general.

But Harper’s own administration has been anything but transparent. After taking office, the prime minister wasted little time declaring war on the media. He insisted members of the press gallery sign a list if they wanted to ask questions, he rarely participates in scrums and he often leaves the Parliament Buildings through the freight exit instead of the front door to avoid media attention. “Unfortunately, the press gallery has taken the view they are going to be the opposition to the government,” Harper complained to a London, Ontario, TV station, the same week two dozen reporters walked out of a Harper event after he refused to take their questions.

According to a national press gallery reporter, who spoke anonymously, interview requests with ministers are frequently denied or simply unaddressed. Reporters are also banned from the floor on which ministers hold meetings, and ministers rarely scrum after cabinet meetings, a common practice under the Liberals. “Everybody’s hands are tied from a journalistic point of view. It’s extremely difficult to get answers from this government,” the reporter says. “It’s Harper’s mandate to treat us like this and it’s not going to change. It’s very disheartening.”

Harper has also gone to great lengths to silence his ministers. What happens behind closed doors stays there, and the PMO insists ministers stay on message. An April 2006 scheduled interview between the National Post’s Don Martin and Environment Minister Rona Ambrose, for example, was cancelled because the PM didn’t want his ministers to stray from the Conservatives’ five priorities. In mid-October, Ontario MP Garth Turner was expelled for regularly criticizing his party’s policies on his blog, and Conservative Senator Anne Cools was yanked from three committees in September for asking hostile questions about the Accountability Act, according to a Post article by Martin.

6. IMITATION IS THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY

Stephen “Steve” Harper, Bush’s favourite Canadian, has been busy cozying up to the Americans since taking office last year. Hardly a surprise, since Harper has been advocating for closer ties to the United States for years. He has beefed up Canada’s mission in Afghanistan, committing troops for an additional two years, and has promised a $5.3-billion increase in military spending over the next five years. “Ideologically, the people who are driving the Conservative party—Harper and his entourage—are very much attuned to and aligned with the Bush Republican-style conservatism,” says Bruce Campbell, executive director of Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) in Ottawa.

Harper’s been ending his speeches with “God bless Canada” since last year’s campaign, but his emulation of the United States is more than just symbolic. Paul Martin’s Liberals laid the foundation for deep integration—the harmonization of U.S. and Canadian trade and border policies—and the Harper government has carried this agenda forward. The Canadian Council of Chief Executives, which lobbies government on behalf of big business, is spearheading the movement, arguing that the economies of the two countries are already so closely linked that most individual domestic laws aren’t needed. It may sound like a conspiracy theory, but for several years, task forces, working groups, commissions and cross-border consultations have been taking place on both sides of the border with the goal of harmonizing Canada-U.S. programs and procedures. In September, for example, Defence Minister Gordon O’Connor and Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day attended a top-secret meeting in Banff, Alberta, that discussed North American security and prosperity. The North American Forum was hosted with the help of the Canada West Foundation and the Canadian Council of Chief Executives and drew corporate executives and government officials from Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. Reporters were kept in the dark about what, exactly, was discussed and who was in attendance.

Supporters of deep integration say it’s the only way Canada can stay competitive. Critics call it a threat to Canadian sovereignty that will lead to lopsided trade agreements and a loss of control of Canadian resources. Campbell notes that we are already feeling the impact of deep integration. Canada and the U.S. are at work integrating energy markets, and Canada is ramping up production of the Alberta oil patch to meet America’s growing energy needs. The bulk of Alberta oil goes to the United States, Campbell says, while the Maritimes and Quebec import about 90 percent of their oil needs and Ontario imports 50 percent. “It’s all about securing supply to meet U.S. energy needs,” he warns. “Here we are, this great energy superpower, as Stephen Harper likes to call us, and we’re importing 55 percent of our oil needs. That’s not an integrated national energy market.”

Canada has also followed America’s lead on the domestic front. In the area of crime and punishment, Canada has made a marked shift toward an American style of justice, with “serious time for serious crimes.” In October, Justice Minister Vic Toews unveiled his “three strikes and you’re out” legislation, which is based on similar U.S. legislation. The bill puts the onus on the defendant, proposing that anyone convicted of three violent or sexual crimes would have to convince a judge why he should not be classified as a dangerous offender. If he fails to do that, he faces a minimum seven years in prison before being eligible for parole (in contrast to the American law, Canada’s three-strikes legislation focuses on serious third offences only). The U.S. legislation has done little to deter crime south of the border and has cost an enormous amount of money. “A large amount of research in the U.S. has been overwhelmingly consistent in showing that these changes have no effect,” Tony Doob, a criminology professor at the University of Toronto, told The Globe and Mail last October. “Whether you bring in threestrike laws, or jump up and down and say ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ three times, it has the same effect…. The fact is that crime will sometimes go down. It has nothing to do with legislative changes.”

7. WELFARE STATE?

Last September’s $1-billion “trimming the fat” exercise was a subtle but definitive attack on social programs. The Youth Employment Strategy, which helped 50,000 young people find jobs last summer, was cut in half. The Conservatives also chopped $17.7 million off adult literacy programs, ended a $9.7 million program to encourage Canadians to volunteer and did away with the $5.6-million Court Challenges Program, which has funded legal action by human rights advocates.

The cuts don’t mark the end of the Canadian welfare state, but they do show a sign of what may be to come—major cuts, despite a major surplus ($13.2 billion in 2006). McQuaig points to the Conservatives’ withdrawal of $5 billion in child-care spending by the Liberals. “It had taken advocacy groups, women’s groups, decades to finally pressure and pin down government to set up that program,” McQuaig says. “The Tories just scrapped it as soon as they got into office. It’s absolutely, totally irresponsible.”

8. WITHER KYOTO

The Conservative record on the environment has been nothing short of catastrophic. Consider: The axed $1-billion Climate Fund has so far only been replaced by an incentive-based transit tax credit, which saves the average transit user a paltry $12 a month. The EnerGuide program, which helped people retrofit their homes to make them more energy efficient, has been eliminated. The list goes on. The Conservatives have also forced layoffs at Natural Resources Canada and cut the Canadian Climate Impacts and Adaptation Research Network. Their biggest crime, of course, has been to abandon Canada’s Kyoto Protocol targets. They’ve opted instead for the Clean Air Act, an initiative with the laughable target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. (Meanwhile, the federal government continues to send $1.5 billion a year in subsidies to the Alberta oil patch.)

Perhaps most alarming is the Conservatives’ ho-hum attitude toward the climate crisis. Many environmental experts interviewed for this article say Harper and his advisors may not even believe in climate change, despite overwhelming evidence and the endorsements of a plethora of leading scientific organizations. For example, the scientific consensus on climate change is clearly expressed in reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was created in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme to evaluate the state of climate science as a basis for policy decisions. The panel concluded that the scientific consensus is that the Earth’s climate is being affected by human activities. Another recent study, conducted by researchers at NASA, Columbia University and the University of California at Santa Barbara, found the world is the warmest it’s been in 12,000 years—and humans are largely to blame.

But the Conservatives aren’t buying it. In November, the government appointed University of Western Ontario physics professor Christopher Essex, a climate change skeptic and Kyoto critic, to the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, which controls $900 million a year in funding. Essex was one of 20 Canadian academics who signed an open letter to the prime minister in April that urged the government to scrap Kyoto, calling it an “irrational” squandering of billions of dollars. “There will always be people who say climate change isn’t happening,” says Dale Marshall, climate-change policy analyst with the David Suzuki Foundation. “But the question is, what is the body of evidence telling us? Overwhelmingly the science is saying climate change is happening. There’s no real dispute in the scientific community.”

“There is greater reason to feel comfortable with Mr. Harper today,” a Globe and Mail editorial declared last January. “He has shown himself to be an intelligent man and one, in this last campaign at least, who has learned to master his emotions. He has gained control of a party inclined to fly off in all directions, moved it to the centre and proposed a reasonable if imperfect governing platform.”

Forgive us if we’re skeptical. “This is a guy who will never change,” says Murray Dobbin, Vancouver-based journalist and author of Paul Martin: CEO for Canada? “The notion that Stephen Harper would change his fundamental values is just delusional. He is still viscerally contemptuous of his own country, and I think that puts him in a unique position of any prime minister in the history of the country. I can’t think of any other prime minister who actually hated his own country.” After all, Stephen Harper is the same man who, only a decade before, was head of the National Citizens Coalition, perhaps the most virulently right-wing organization in Canada, a group that was founded to oppose publicly funded, universal health care. He’s the same man who has advocated a firewall around Alberta to protect itself from a hostile federal government. The same man who has mocked Canadians’ understanding of their own country and who has called America’s conservative movement an inspiration. This is the same man who has made a career out of consistently and ardently criticizing Canada and its values. “Canada is a northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it,” Harper told the Council for National Policy, a right-leaning American think tank, at a June 1997 meeting in Montreal.

There is reason for optimism, however. Canadians’ dissatisfaction with the Conservative government is showing in recent polls. In a November CBC News and Environics Research Group poll, 29 percent of respondents said they would vote for the Conservatives if an election were held today, compared to 28 percent who would vote for the Liberal party—which did not have a leader at the time. Perhaps more tellingly, respondents said health care, the environment and the war in Afghanistan were the most important issues facing the country, while conservative pet topics— same-sex marriage, Canada-U.S. relations and government corruption—ranked near the bottom. That does not bode well for Conservatives. “Unless the Liberals are extremely incompetent after they choose their leader,” Dobbin says, “this will be the end of Harper.”

Here’s hoping.

Mitch Moxley is a freelance journalist based in Toronto, by way of Saskatchewan. His work has appeared in Maisonneuve, Toro, Geist, the Kyoto Journal and elsewhere.

A Home Away from Home

By Gregory Scarborough
From Cultural Survival Quarterly
2006

Maintaining cultural identity is hard enough for indigenous peoples in countries that are politically stable, but the problems are vastly more difficult when war and persecution push indigenous people into refugee camps across a border. Few indigenous people have had as much experience with those challenges as the Karen.

Riding north along the Thailand-Burma border en route from the town of Mae Sot to Mae La refugee camp, I held on tightly to my friend and translator Htsa Klo as he maneuvered our motorbike down the jungle road in the pouring rain. We shared the road with the cars of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR) and other relief agencies, which zipped past us with their windows tinted and their occupants dry inside.

They reminded me of my conversations a few weeks earlier with the director of policy and research for one of the largest NGOs working with the refugees along the Thai-Burma border. Looking to gather interest and support for my research, I had hoped that the NGO would recognize the importance of understanding the cultural concerns of the Karen refugees in Mae La camp, many of whom have been displaced for decades and have been forced to weave a new socio-cultural fabric in a temporary home. She kindly let me know that looking at protection issues related to cultural heritage and cultural rights was “not related enough to the organization’s needs at this time.”

UNHCR, like other aid agencies, is more concerned with physical survival than cultural survival. They are now in the process of registering the refugees in the camp, preparing them to cross new international borders and resettle in third countries such as the United States, Australia, or Canada. As part of this process, the Thai authorities have increased their presence inside and around the camp, making passage into and out of the camp very difficult for anyone without an official ‘camp pass,’ which is given primarily to those working for NGOs. The refugees’ ability to trade with local communities was restricted by the increase in security, as was their access to education, because foreign volunteer English teachers, some having worked in the camps for years, were being told to leave. Without the support of international NGOs and official status, I was concerned about how Htsa Klo and I would cross into the camp and where we would sleep.

Refugees fleeing across international borders, like the Karen living in the Mae La camp in Thailand, face significant threats to the continuity of their traditions. Conflict affects not only refugees’ physical bodies but also the core of their identities. Peoples’ ancestral lands are burned, their houses are looted, prohibitions are often placed on education in native languages, and attacks specifically target those expressing their cultural identity through dress, music, and religious practices. As communities are forcefully disempowered and divided by those seeking political and economic power, their social networks and civil society are destroyed. In the process, they lose the context necessary for transmitting cultural practices and beliefs from one generation to another.

In the camps, people are intimidated or prohibited from practicing certain forms of cultural expression by overcrowding, rules regarding community space and noise, and the convergence of diverse communities in a common space. The lack of freedom to move, trade, and harvest plants makes it hard for people to get the materials they need to produce traditional clothes, crafts, instruments, ritual objects, and medicines. And then there’s the fact that many forms of cultural heritage are intimately tied to specific lands and livelihoods. Children have little opportunity to internalize beliefs and practices out of their original context and indeed may find no utility in many traditional practices so important to elders.

Under these conditions, protecting the treasury of histories, knowledge, practices, and beliefs—what UNESCO terms ‘intangible cultural heritage’—becomes especially important. Unfortunately, this need tends to fall through the cracks in the mandates of institutions set up to provide assistance. Humanitarian and development organizations have unique access to refugee populations and the responsibility to uphold refugees’ rights, including cultural rights. However, either due to unwillingness or lack of resources, their policies don’t consider the cultural concerns of those forced to flee violence and persecution. Organizations such as UNESCO, which are dedicated specifically to protecting cultural heritage, may embrace these issues in theory, but they often are not operational on the ground. Unfortunately, the intergovernmental systems through which cultural concerns might be addressed often leave refugees out of the discussion and formulation of protection policies.

The inspiration for this journey to Mae La camp began with the countless individuals I met in the Balkans, Turkey, and on the Philippine island of Mindanao, who, even after being uprooted from their homes, witnessing the atrocities of war, and, in many cases, being attacked as a direct result of their cultural identity, expressed deep concerns about the preservation of their culture. I wanted to listen to the Karen refugees’ concerns, and find out how the people themselves were addressing these issues.

Two hours after leaving Mae Sot we arrived at Mae La, a community of more than 40,000 refugees, their houses squeezed tightly together along the roadside and spreading into the distance, huddled up against the jungle cliffs. Though maps circulated by UNHCR label the camp as “Karen,” Mae La is in fact an incredibly diverse community. While Sgaw- and Pwo-speaking Karen are the majority, there are many linguistic, religious, and ethnic minorities in the camp, even within the Karen themselves—minorities whose unique identities and cultural needs are not captured by most humanitarian agencies’ demographic analyses. Their commonality lies in their forced flight from their homes in Burma due to the human rights abuses they have faced and the ongoing civil wars between the state and numerous ethnic insurgency groups pushing for recognition and independence. The refugees living in Mae La began pouring into Thailand in large numbers the mid-1980s, when the 55-year-old struggle by the Karen National Union to gain independence intensified dramatically. While families have arrived at different times, many have been displaced over a decade, if not two. In addition to the refugees living in Mae La and other refugee camps in Thailand, hundreds of thousands of Karen remain internally displaced within Burma. And those numbers are swelling as Karen villagers continue to be raped, subjected to forced labor, and even used as human mine-sweepers. Elders in the displaced communities miss their lands and fear dying in exile. Many children born in the camp have never known the homeland of Kawthoolei of which their families dream.

Htsa Kloo stopped our motorbike at the far end of the camp and took a sharp left down a dirt path. He told me he knew a secret way to enter the camp, through a gate at the end of Zone C that is used for the Karen Kawthoolei Baptist Bible School and College (KKBBSC) and its visitors. Nervously walking through the gate and past the Thai army outpost, we found our way to the Bible school. While most of the camp is cramped for space, KKBBSC sprawls across a broad complex, which includes a large library, classrooms, and gardens. There are also dormitories to host students whose families are still in Burma, as well as youngsters from neighboring Thai-Karen villages and even the occasional student from Bangkok. We announced our arrival to the director, Reverend Simon, who welcomed us with a tour and a room for the night. He was careful to ask us about our purpose in the camp and how long we would be staying, while mentioning the many camp visitors—the Koreans who just left and the Europeans who would arrive in a few days. I was both thankful (for my own luck) and amazed at how easy it was for the minister to host groups of missionaries, considering the increased security and the general prohibition against foreigners staying overnight. A student later told me that Reverend Simon has an agreement with the Thai Authorities, who make exceptions for the visitors who come to give Bible lessons and English classes at the school.

Normally, higher education in the camp is forbidden by the Thai authorities, and such activities are often conducted under the guise of religious education in Bible schools. With education and access to the outside world being two of the most prized resources in the camp, the minister’s agreement with Thai security forces and his relationships with foreign religious organizations provide a great asset to the Christian Karen who are able to study at the college. The school’s permanent teachers from India and the steady stream of visitors from Europe, Canada, the United States, and Asia give the students a chance to practice their English—an extremely valuable resource for those hoping to further their education and develop links beyond the camp—and allow them to transcend, even if minimally, their isolation from the outside world. My translator Hsta Klo had achieved his own English skills through religious studies at a mission school not far from the refugee camp.

Seeing the opportunities available in the Bible school, I wondered whether the education policies of the Thai authorities and the obvious support of foreign missionaries might encourage others in the camp to convert to Christianity and leave behind their own cultural practices. In Mae La camp, the Christian Karen community is especially well organized, and their political power within the Karen National Union has enabled them to infuse their ideology into Karen institutions responsible for education and camp affairs. Tun Tun, a local teacher who also organizes a summer course in Pwo Karen language and culture, told me about the many economic, social, and political barriers for non-Christians to establish Buddhist schools or improve literacy in languages other than the Sgaw Karen dialect, which most Christians speak. Not only is it more difficult for Buddhists and linguistic minorities to find funding for their schools, but powerful lobbies within the Christian Karen community have actively tried to block such schools from being formed in the first place. Clearly, NGOs working with indigenous refugees need to be ethnographically informed so they don’t contribute to conditions in which people have to abandon their cultural identity to gain access to scarce resources.

After a nap, we left the Bible school to walk around the camp and meet with community elders, teachers, and young people working on cultural issues. With most of this community having been displaced for years, they have done everything possible to make the camp look and feel more like home. Except for the numerous Thai army checkpoints and the barbed wire fence that forbids entrance, the settlement might appear from the road as a massive, overpopulated, hill-tribe village. The muddy paths are landscaped with jungle plants and flowers, the bamboo houses are not unlike those found in neighboring villages, and they have set aside a large area as a football field and reserved spaces for churches, mosques, temples, and monasteries. Then there is the music, which one hears everywhere: teens playing the guitar and singing songs about love, God, and revolution; church choirs waking the guests of the Baptist Bible School with their early morning praises; Buddhist monks chanting prayers in monasteries; and every so often the calming melodies of the Karen harp, t’nah, wrapping its voice around the sound of falling rain. Underneath the leaf-thatched roofs of their homes, women and their daughters weave the brightly colored bags that are carried by almost everyone in the camp, while elder men and women with red and black stained teeth sit nearby, chewing betel nut in the corner.

On our way to meet a respected elder in the camp’s Buddhist community, we crossed a small bridge, dodging young children running home in their traditional Karen shirts—the required school uniform on Wednesdays—and passed through a large market run primarily by the camp’s Muslim community. It is so well supplied that many Thai-Karen come from nearby villages to do their shopping in the camp. A short distance from the market we arrived at the house of Sein Tin Aye, the Buddhist leader. As we climbed the steps of his home and kicked off our muddy flip-flops at the door, he greeted us wearing a long fluorescent-pink sarong and white button-down shirt. His home was constructed as a temple, marked by a 20-foot-long altar decorated with colorful plastic tassels, Buddhist symbols, posters of monks, and vases of jungle plants and flowers.

Sein Tin Aye originally left his home in the Pa’an district of Burma for the border region in the early 1980s, in order to serve the Karen revolution using his medical skills. He is not your typical doctor, but rather a traditional healer who used his knowledge and spiritual power to help the soldiers suffering from snakebites, malaria, and other injuries and ailments faced by those fighting in the dense jungle. In an interview with the Burmese Border Consortium he laid down his philosophy as a healer: “You must be disciplined and clean in every part of living, in your mind and your body. You can never allow bad thoughts; you must always control your character and be clean.” After the Burmese army became aware of his work on the border, he was forced to come to Thailand, where he has lived for more than 16 years as a refugee, passing on his spiritual knowledge.

In addition to his role as a spiritual elder, Sain Tin Aye trains young people to play traditional Karen music, both independently and with his ensemble, the Golden Pestle. Recently he has also been working as a teacher for a traditional music project initiated by the Shanti Volunteer Organization, a Japanese NGO.

Treating us to sweet instant coffee and strong Karen cigars (cheroots), our host shared his story and his insights into the way his culture is influenced by the conflict and displacement. He brought out a book published inside Burma by the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA), a Karen political and military movement that split from the main Karen National Union and now cooperates with the Burmese military in exchange for self-governance in the areas they control. The book was an effort to create a new writing script that would be mutually intelligible by both Sgaw- and Pwo-speaking Karen. But neither Sain Tin Aye nor my translator could understand the new writing, though they were literate in the Pwo, Sgaw, and Leit San Weit scripts.

Sein Tin Aye recognized the original aim of the endeavor as a way to unite Sgaw and Pwo Karen in a time of conflict and disunity, but he felt that the actual effect would be further divisions between Karen peoples. While people who live in DKBA-controlled territory inside Burma might learn this new script, those in refugee camps and educated in the Karen Education Department’s camp schools (supported by the primarily Christian Karen National Union) would learn only the older Burmese-adapted script for the Sgaw dialect. He feared that if the DKBA project succeeded, over time the two Karen communities might no longer be able to communicate with each other in writing. It is one of many ways in which language, history, and other forms of cultural heritage are co-opted in political crisis as groups try to define their national ethnic identity or assert a political movement’s legitimacy.

Refugees themselves also construct various accounts of the histories and origins of the Karen people as they seek to know where they are from and strengthen claims to the land from which they have been displaced. A week earlier in another refugee camp, Umphiem Mai, I met with Moo Thaw Khee, a member of the Karen Cultural Committee, who is working to create a museum of Karen culture and history inside the Umphiem camp. He spread out his map of the world to teach me about the “Origins of the Karen People,” a version he discovered during his time in the camps, surely under the influence of missionaries. After making some simple calculations, he explained that the Karen people had first lived in the Himalaya Mountains, then left for Mt. Ararat in Turkey during the Great Flood before settling in Babylon for many years. Later, they returned to the Gobi Desert and eventually followed the Salween River to their present lands in Burma and Thailand. Neither of the two Buddhist Karen translators I was with had heard this version of their history and I was not so sure they believed it. While this story of the Karen’s origins may not have anything to do with reality in a factual sense, it demonstrates the needs of displaced people to search for their roots.

Later in the afternoon, Sein Tin Aye’s students and members of his music ensemble, the Golden Pestle, arrived: Two young girls, Eh Khee and Paw Klay, who sing and play the traditional Karen harp (t’nah); Eh Thoo, with his Karen violin (thaw tu); and Thai Thaw Khee, a young man who plays a modern mandolin as well as the t’nah. Following Sein Tin Aye’s direction, they picked up their instruments one by one to demonstrate their skills. The group played both traditional love songs and some of their teacher’s original compositions, which the group planned to present during an upcoming performance competition at the yearly wrist-tying festival, Lah Khu (see the accompanying photo essay). The songs performed by Sain Tin Aye and his group, while using traditional Karen melodies and instrumentation, are heavily influenced by the context of displacement. New songs speak directly about the issues and emotions of refugee life, and older folk stories are re-interpreted to find continuity and meaning in the current crisis. Many of Sein Tin Aye’s compositions speak to the Karen community about the importance of unity and keeping their traditions alive.

While singing, they each held a similar posture: With their spines straight and their spirits internally composed, they stared with a subtle passion, humble and hopeful, upwards and out into the distance.

After all his students had their turn, Sein Tin Aye picked up his k’nat (Karen mandolin) and plucked, slowly and softly, a tune about separation and loss that reminded me of the sweet sadness of an old bluegrass love song. As the evening set in, Htsa Klo and I left Sein Tin Aye’s home after agreeing to return the next day to record a CD for the Golden Pestle that they could give to other foreign visitors and the camp radio station. Passing back over the bridge, where women were washing clothes and bathing their children in the river below, we approached the Bible school and shared our day with the students and our host. We were surprised when Reverend Simon said that due to security we were not allowed to cross the bridge and visit other people and places in the camp. He added, however, that we were more than welcome to spend some days with the students at the Bible school. Not wanting to break our promise to the Golden Pestle nor disobey the reverend, we decided to leave the school that evening and sleep at the home of Sein Tin Aye’s neighbor.

As I fell asleep that night thinking about the next morning’s recording session, I heard Sein Tin Aye’s poignant song again in my mind, a song that seemed to capture perfectly the Karen’s longing for home:

At the end of the road everything is gone.
Many trees and many branches, it is not the same country.
Many new things appear, black and red.

In the foreign lands, by the riverside in the bush,
We sit down together, I hold your hand,
I hold it tight, friendly and tempted.
We must part to foreign lands.

Greg Scarborough is the director of Cultural Cornerstones and is currently a visiting scholar at the Feinstein International Famine Center at Tufts University in Boston. He can be reached at gregoryscarborough@gmail.com. The music of Sein Tin Aye’s group, the Golden Pestle, can be heard at www.culturalcornerstones.org

Venezuela's Chávez Announces World Bank Debt Has Been Paid Off

By: TeleSur/Prensa Web RNV
From venezuelanalysis.com
2007

"With this last payment (to the World Bank), paying off the debt that was almost 3 billion dollars in 1998, I can say to them today that we don't owe a cent of debt either to the International Monetary Fund or to the World Bank," he exclaimed.

President Hugo Chávez Frías, announced this Friday that Venezuela paid off the debt that it owed to the World Bank. "Yesterday (on Thursday) we paid the last installment of the debt (. . .) to the World Bank." Thus he highlighted it during a ceremony that was held around the Palace of Miraflores, right at the heart of Caracas, to commemorate the 13th of April of 2002, the day when a civic-military rebellion restored the constitutional order in Venezuela.

"With this last payment (to the World Bank), paying off the debt that was almost 3 billion dollars in 1998, I can say to them today that we don't owe a cent of debt either to the International Monetary Fund or to the World Bank," he exclaimed. The Venezuelan head of state declared that he felt "happy" about the end of this obligation, after reminding the audience that Venezuela helped the "sister Republic of Argentina pay its debt to the International Monetary Fund."

"I feel very happy that Venezuela has helped Argentina free itself from the International Monetary Fund. Argentina no longer owes anything to the IMF, among other things, thanks to the support of Venezuela," he said.

"We have then transformed Venezuela, from an indebted and bound country that we were, . . . to a modest but important country and financial center that supports other countries and peoples," he added.

This Friday, on the 13th of April, Venezuela was a scene of popular and military ceremonies presided over by President Hugo Chávez, to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the civic-military response that "squashed" the coup d'état of April 2002, which had interrupted for 47 hours the mandate of the Venezuelan president.

The commemoration is made under the motto "Every 11th Gets Its 13th," to remember that the coup of the 11th of April of 2002 got its response on the 13th of the same month, when loyal forces and thousands of followers of the revolutionary process that is alive in Venezuela made the triumphant return of the president possible.

2007-03-17T10:56:00.000-07:00

Ecuador Pays Off IMF Debt, Says Will Sever Ties with Institution

From The Hearld Tribune

Ecuador's leftist president said Sunday the country has paid off its debt to the International Monetary Fund and will sever ties with the financial institution.

In a news conference in the port city Guayaquil, Rafael Correa said it was a "happy coincidence" that Ecuador made the US$9 million (€6.7 million) payment to the "international bureaucracy" the same week fellow leftist country Venezuela said it had paid off its remaining debt with the IMF and World Bank.

"We don't want to hear anything more from that international bureaucracy," Correa said, brushing off suspicions that "we are imitating brother nation Venezuela."

When he took office three months ago, Correa, a U.S.-trained economist, vowed to renegotiate the country's US$16.4 billion (€12.1 billion) foreign debt and direct resources to programs to help the poor.

Correa, a staunch ally of Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, has frequently criticized the "unacceptable conditions" of IMF loans, and said Sunday that the institution has "been harmful for the country."

Argentina to Pay Off Debt Early

By Daniel Schweimler
From BBC News

Argentina has said it will pay its $10bn debt to the International Monetary Fund three years early. President Nestor Kirchner said Argentina needed control of the tools to build its independence.

His announcement came two days after Brazil, in a similar move, said it would pay off its $15bn debt.

Argentine relations with the IMF have been difficult since the country's government defaulted on a debt of over $100bn four years ago.

Millions of dollars were taken out of the country and many of Argentina's large middle class found themselves knocking on the ramshackle doors of the country's growing shanty towns.

Tens of thousands of others left to start new lives abroad.

But, against the odds, Mr Kirchner has turned things around.

Long wait
Earlier this year his government renegotiated more than $100bn of debt with private creditors and now he has said that the IMF will get the $10bn dollars it is owed by the end of the year - three years early.

The money will come from Argentina's foreign reserves and by paying off the debt they will save $1bn in interest.

The economy is growing at an impressive rate and, speaking after the president, new Economy Minister Felisa Miceli said exports were at a record high.

The head of the IMF, Rodrigo Rato, said he was sure that paying off the debt would bring positive results for Argentina.

The economic future certainly looks brighter than it did just a few years ago but it will still be some time before the benefits of this move filter down to the many Argentines living below the poverty line and to those still reeling from the crisis four years ago.

Argentina, Brazil Pay Off Debt to IMF; Bankers Nervous

By Cynthia R. Rush
From Executive Intelligence Review
2005

During the week of Dec. 11-17, the governments of Brazil and Argentina unexpectedly announced that they would pay off the balances owed the International Monetary Fund (IMF) before the end of this year. On Dec. 13, Brazilian Finance Minister Antonio Palocci told reporters that the Lula da Silva government would dip into its sizable $63 billion in reserves to pay the $15.56 billion it owed, noting this would save $900 million in interest payments. Two days later, Argentine President Néstor Kirchner announced that he would also use Central Bank reserves to pay an outstanding balance of $9.8 billion, saving $1 billion in interest payments.

While IMF Managing Director Rodrigo Rato nominally "welcomed" both actions, he was decidedly unenthusiastic about Argentina's decision. President Kirchner's Dec. 15 speech at the Presidential palace was a strong nationalist attack on IMF policies for plunging Argentina into poverty and indigence. His denunciation of the Fund, and assertion that by paying off the $9.8 billion, "we are burying a good portion of the ominous past of infinite indebtedness and eternal adjustment," brought the audience of business leaders, provincial governors, legislators, trade unionists, and human rights activists to their feet in an ovation.

Two members of the LaRouche Youth Movement were also present and were able to hand out copies of EIR and several of Lyndon LaRouche's strategic writings to Cabinet members and other attendees.

Rato said on Dec. 16 that he was pleased with Argentina's repayment plan, but that the country faces "important challenges and opportunities," and that the Fund stands ready to come to its assistance in meeting those challenges. In his year-end press conference a few days later, he made a point of saying that Argentina still has many "pending reforms" to be carried out, and that it would do well to follow Brazil's example of a "prudent" and "coherent" fiscal and monetary policy.

In contrast, Rato exuberantly declared that Brazil's announcement reflected the "growing strength of its external position" and "excellent track record of policy management by Brazilian authorities." The Fund, he said, "looks forward to continuing a close and constructive relationship with the Brazilian authorities."

What's the Difference?
There is no big mystery behind Rato's quite different responses to what were, on the surface, similar decisions by the two governments. As soon as he took office on Jan. 1, 2002, President Lula abandoned the anti-IMF pledges of his campaign, and with typically Brazilian pragmatism, accepted the IMF's policy dictates.

In his Dec. 13 announcement, Wall Street agent Palocci, along with fellow financial predator Henrique Meirelles, president of Brazil's Central Bank, attributed the government's ability to make this prepayment to the success of the orthodox IMF policies they have enforced for the last three years.

Not so with Kirchner. The debt owed the IMF "has been a constant vehicle for interference, because it is subject to periodic review and is a source of demands and more demands," he said. "The International Monetary Fund has acted toward our country as a promotor of, and vehicle for, policies which provoked poverty and pain among the Argentine people, at the hand of governments that were lauded as exemplary students of permanent adjustment. Our people can corroborate that."

The experience of Argentina's Dec. 23, 2001 default on $88 billion in public debt, and the devastating crisis that ensued, is sufficient proof, he noted, "that that international agency first backed real political failures"—the currency board policies of the 1990s—and then "wouldn't give one penny of aid to [help us] overcome the crisis or to restructure the debt."

For a long time, Kirchner explained, "we have been instructed in impotence and told that we can't do anything.... They wanted to instill in our soul the certainty that reality is untouchable.... They wanted to make us believe that not to do anything new is the only realistic option." But now, he warned, the Argentine President will use his "popular mandate" to act as a protagonist, in the best interests of Argentina's people.

It's the Global System
Despite their economic policy differences, the process involving Argentina and Brazil is complex, precisely because of the existing conditions of global financial meltdown, combined with the political upheaval taking place in Washington, D.C.

Lyndon LaRouche remarked on Dec. 16 that Ibero-American governments all know that the Bush Administration is not in the greatest shape, and they are taking steps to free themselves of as many sources of threat as possible, and get some degree of management over their own affairs. While prepayment to the IMF may take the form of a concession, he said, these are concessions to end concessions. "They are saying, 'We did this nice thing by paying you. You demanded it; now why don't you be reasonable?' "

Moreover, LaRouche explained, the very interesting aspect to this is that the IMF is no longer the creditor. There is a fiduciary relationship between the IMF and these countries, but no such relationship exists between debtors and private interests, many of whose alleged debts are of very dubious character. So, the ability to impose regulation on these countries' internal balances is ended, LaRouche underscored. "None of these creditors has the power to demand—that is, with the force of regulatory authority—that the debtors obey." They have no judicial authority.

This makes synarchist financier interests very nervous. They don't like the reports that the Brazilian and Argentine Presidents discussed their actions beforehand, first at their bilateral meeting Nov. 30 in Puerto Iguazú, Brazil, and then with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez during the Dec. 8-9 Mercosur (Southern Cone Common Market) summit in Uruguay. Chávez's role in this decision was to agree to substantially increase his purchase of Argentina's public debt bonds, for which Kirchner thanked him in his Dec. 15 speech.

Reflecting the concerns of the synarchists, London's Financial Times fretted in its Dec. 16 edition that repayment by "two large borrowers" like Brazil and Argentina "raises fresh questions about how the Fund will pay for its operations at a time of low demand for its loans."

'Harmonization of Interests'
In the current global context, financiers are fearful that the "heterodox" policy path that President Kirchner has outlined, especially in the wake of his solid victory in the Oct. 23 midterm elections, could affect developments in Brazil, where there is a raging brawl taking place over IMF policy. Members of Lula's own Cabinet—Vice President José Alencar, Chief of Staff Dilma Rouseff, and Industry and Trade Minister Luiz Furlan, among others—have publicly attacked the Palocci/Meirelles duo for savaging real production and living standards, with their lunatic policies of 18.75% interest rates and a primary budget surplus equivalent to 4.25% of Gross Domestic Product.

When the Argentine President fired Finance Minister Roberto Lavagna on Nov. 28 and replaced him with economist Felisa Miceli, president since 2003 of the state-run Banco de la Nación, it set off alarm bells at the IMF and among allied banking circles. Miceli had experience in devising state financing programs for public development projects, and unlike Lavagna, didn't buy the idea that orthodox austerity measures were the only way to combat Argentina's increasing inflation.

The Cabinet change was scrutinized carefully in Brazil. According to the Dec. 3 Brazilian daily O Globo, when IMF Deputy Managing Director Anne Krueger visited Brasilia on Dec. 1, she worriedly asked everyone she met, "Do you know anything about Felisa Miceli? Where she came from, and where she's going?" O Globo's columnist asked whether Miceli would become "the Dilma Roussef of the land of Kirchner," alluding to the firestorm that Lula's Chief of Staff set off on Nov. 9, with her barrage against her government's economic policy.

Argentina's state press agency Télam published on its website this author's article from EIR of Dec. 9, which includes LaRouche's analysis of, and support for, Kirchner's dumping of Lavagna.

To the horror of foreign bankers and free-marketeers, Kirchner and Miceli have not only become "interventionist," but have echoed the "harmony of interests" concept most identified with the great 19th-Century American System economist Henry C. Carey. Miceli used the term "harmonization of interests" on Dec. 2 in discussing price-reduction agreements reached with representatives of different economic sectors.

On Dec. 7, Kirchner told business leaders that he would fight growing inflation, not by imposing the IMF's recommended austerity measures, but by issuing a $1.5 billion credit line through the Banco de la Nación, for productive investment in purchase of capital goods for industry and agriculture. The ten-year loans carry subsidized interest rates.

But he also told the businessmen that they had a great "social responsibility" to ensure that their profit levels are balanced with protecting the General Welfare. "There are methodologies," he said, "that will allow us to reconcile interests, such that those who stay at home, those who work hard, will absolutely be protected by a responsible State," and by business, "with the responsible support" of workers and their organizations.

CIA, Drugs, and Wall Street (Excerpt)

By Michael C. Ruppert
From From the Wilderness.com
1999

I have been saying for years that you could show a video of George Bush ordering drug runs, CIA agents laundering money and flying airplanes full of drugs and no one in power would do anything about it. They would not be able to. In this issue I will tell you, and the House, about something almost as damning - a partially authenticated letter, written on CIA letterhead and stamped "Top Secret", ostensibly written and signed by CIA Director William J. Casey in late 1986, that admits to direct participation in the drug trade.

I have been aware of the existence of this letter for approximately five months. I have had it read to me in its entirety. It was not until I was given this last chance by HPSCI to present "all of the information of which you are aware on the allegations" that I was able to obtain an "On the Record" statement about the letter from Attorney Ray Kohlman. The letter will be admitted into evidence in a new trial motion for former Green Beret William Tyree in the near future. When that happens, From The Wilderness will publish the letter, both on the Internet and in the newsletter.

Now that the House has indicated its intent to close the matter for good and all it is time to bring the letter forward - for good and all. I will also see to it that the letter is widely distributed enough so that any of the major news organizations will be able to follow up on it. The information in this issue is enough for the House Intelligence Committee to go to the CIA and compel it to confirm or deny the letter's authenticity. If nothing happens with further hearings, or with the letter, I will tell you in advance exactly why.

Reading The Right Map
Contributing Editor Catherine Austin Fitts, who was a Managing Director at Dillon Read before becoming Assistant Secretary of Housing under George Bush and who holds an MBA from Wharton makes things very simple. She points out that the four largest states for the importation of drugs are New York, Florida, Texas and California. She then points out that the top four money laundering states in the U.S. (good for between 100 and 260 billion per year) are New York, Florida, Texas and California. No surprise there. Then she rips the breath from your lungs by pointing out that 80 per cent of all Presidential campaign funds come from - New York, Florida, Texas and California.

Civics test: Who are the current governors of Texas and Florida?
From The Wilderness has been working on a story for an upcoming issue that will show conclusively, using testimony of law enforcement officers and U.S. Government records, that Dominican drug gangs, who dominate the trade in the northeast United States - especially New York and Pennsylvania - have been making regular campaign donations to the Clinton-Gore-Democratic camp since the early 90s. California drug sales are currently split between Democratically allied crime factions and entrenched hard core Republican strongholds from the Reagan era. People who shudder at the thought of the Chinese buying into presidential politics would choke if they knew how much drug money was involved.

Why? Again, the answer is simpler than you might think. While the Department of Justice estimates that $100 billion in drug funds are laundered in the U.S. each year, other research, including research material from the Andean Commission of Jurists cited by author Dan Russell in his soon to be published book Drug War place the figure at around $250 billion per year. Catherine Austin Fitts places the figure at $250 to $300 billion. Given the fact that the UN estimated that in the early 1990s world retail volume in the illegal drugs was $440 billion, $250 billion seems about right. Fitts, using her Wall Street experience as an investment banker is then quick to point out that the multiplier effect (x6) of $250 billion laundered would result in $1.5 trillion dollars per year in U.S. cash transactions resulting from the drug trade. How many jobs does $1.5 trillion represent? Why do President's get re-elected? As Bill Clinton's staff recognized in 1992, "It's the economy -Stupid!"

During the Contra years, when the CIA and Bill Clinton were swimming in cocaine, and Arkansas became the only state in the Union to ever issue bearer bonds (laundry certificates), employment in Arkansas rose to an all time high because there was so much money floating around. So what if they donÕt count all the dead bodies like two young boys Kevin Ives and Don Henry, shot, bludgeoned and dismembered on a railroad track after witnessing CIA drug drops. "It's the economy - Stupid!"

The Pop
Corporations trading on Wall Street, including many implicated in money laundering schemes where products are sold with questionable bookkeeping throughout drug producing regions, all have stock values that are based upon annual net profits. Known as "price to earnings" or "The Pop" the multiplier effect in stock values is sometimes as much as a factor of thirty.

Thus, for a firm like GE or Piper Aircraft to have an additional $10 million in net profits based upon the drug trade, the net increase in these companies' stock value could be as much as $300,000,000. Did GE make a $10 million net profit on consumer products in Latin America last year? Easily. And since GE owns NBC is there a chance that accurate reporting on the drug trade and CIA's involvement therein might hurt their stock?

Disney owns ABC and has a huge retail, resort and entertainment empire that benefits from the "drug multiplier." Would ABC consider hurting its parent's stock value? Ronald Reagan's CIA Director, William Casey had been Chief Counsel to Cap Cities Broadcasting until 1981. His old law firm represented Cap Cities when it bought the ABC network in 1985. ABC's Peter Jennings, by the way, had been doing a series of investigative reports on the CIA drug bank (and successor to the Nugan Hand bank) Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald, Dillingham and Wong when the buyout was initiated. Cap Cities (not surprisingly) secured SEC approval in record time and effectively and immediately silenced Peter Jennings who had previously refused to back down from Casey's threats. Thereafter ABC was referred to as "The CIA network."

I have no doubt that the ABC "object lesson" was front and center for CNN founder Ted Turner and Time-Warner when Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell and (CIA vet) John Singlaub put the pressure on in the wake of April Oliver's 1998 "dead bang accurate" Sarin gas stories connecting CIA to the killing of American defectors.

Every major media corporation in the country trades on Wall Street. There are no "independents" left and the American people are left with the increasing cognitive dissonance of recognizing that they are being fed useless bullshit. I wonder how they would respond to real a news corporation if they saw or heard one.

It's Legal to be Bad
It is also perfectly legal for a Wall Street brokerage or investment bank to go "offshore" and borrow once laundered drug money to finance a corporate merger or leveraged buyout (LBO). Why do this? If you were a major multi-national corporation in a cutthroat competition to buy a company with a hundred million in sales (which might boost your stock value $3 billion) you would be willing to pay a seemingly outrageous price. [How much would you be willing to spend to make $3 billion? - 2.9?]. All an LBO is is an acquisition financed on borrowed money. If you are Goldman-Sachs, arranging the deal, and you can borrow laundered drug money at five per cent or a bank's money at ten per cent where are you going to go? Remember that since the cost of capital is lower using laundered drug money you are now able to outbid all the other competitors because your total payback stays the same. Does this actually happen? In 1998 the Russians asked for only $18 billion to save their entire economy. With $440 billion a year moving around how could it not happen?

And a major drug dealer, like a Carlos Lehder, a Pablo Escobar, an Amado Fuentes, a Matta Ballesteros or a Hank Rohn, sitting around with ten billion dollars of useless illegal money, is more than happy to loan it at five percent because his money is now legal and liquid. And, if one goes to prison or dies, there is always another dealer to fill the void so that the supply is not interrupted. The drug trade now has power because it is underwriting the investments of the largest corporations in the world. It underwrites politicians. It has hooked the gringos on Wall Street whose own children sometimes die from its drugs. Wall Street cannot afford to let the drug barons fall. Congress cannot afford to let the drug barons fall. Presidents and their campaign finances cannot afford to let the drug barons fall. Why? Because our top down economy, controlled by one per cent, cannot take the risk of letting competition (business or political) have the edge of using drug money. The third world has its revenge for European colonialism but Wall Street still calls the shots. And for every million dollars of increased sales or increased revenues from a buyout, the stock equity of the one per cent who control Wall Street, increases twenty to thirty times.

Remember - The National Security Act of 1947, which created the CIA, was written by Wall Street lawyer and banker Clark Clifford. Clark Clifford is the man who brought the CIA backed drug bank BCCI into the United States. Allen Dulles who virtually designed the CIA and served as its Director, and his brother John Foster who was Eisenhower's Secretary of State, were Wall Street lawyers from the firm Sullivan and Cromwell. Dwight Eisenhower's personal liaison with the CIA was none other than Nelson Rockefeller. William Casey was Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission under Richard Nixon. Former CIA Directors from William Raborn to William Webster to Robert Gates to James Woolsey to John Deutch all sit or have sat on the Boards of the largest, richest and most powerful companies in America.

As we near the millenium one thing is clear to anyone who sees the economic system clearly. The system is on the verge of implosion. Privately owned and operated prison companies trade on Wall Street. One of those, Wackenhut, is a virtual CIA proprietary. We have entered, at the end of the industrial age, a phase of growth where we must incarcerate an ever expanding number of people to sustain the growth of all the companies profiting from law enforcement, crime, imprisonment and war. And the overheated stock market must grow or collapse. The reason this nation spends five dollars on prisons for every one dollar on higher education - even after seven straight years of falling crime rates - is because there is more profit in it in the current economic model. Hell, we have turned police departments into profit making entities through asset forfeiture. This is insane!

This economic model is patently no more sustainable than a snake eating its own tail can be considered nourishment. Organized crime has become the government and it seeks to make all citizens become subliminally guilty participants, fearing for their own livelihoods, believing that the system will collapse if someone really tackles the issues facing us - as surely as the iceberg faced the Titanic.

The system will collapse anyway - unless the economic model is turned upside down - unless a way is found or offered which will make it more profitable than all other ways - to do the right thing. The only thing that will sustain the current economic system, and its dependence on drug capital, is a police state. New enforcement programs involving HUD and the Department of Justice such as Project "Safe Streets" and "Weed and Seed" - along with their corresponding butchery of the Constitution - show an emerging police state already. The conduct of Congress and the White House in the CIA drug investigations further demonstrate the arrogance, the fear and the ever-increasing sloppiness of a system out of control.

The veneer, the illusion that we live under the rule of law cracks before our eyes, grows thinner and ever more difficult to sell with each passing minute. All at once the fears of the right of a New World Order and the fears of the left, of new concentration camps and genocide suddenly become one and the same thing. Dogma matters little to the oppressed. Pain tastes the same whether you call it Fascism or Communism. Carlos Enrique Lehder Rivas, co-founder of the Medellin Cartel, who was given a life sentence in 1990, now enjoys the sunshine at his home in the Bahamas. He frolics regularly with gaming magnate and owner of the Atlantis Hotel Sol Kerzner. His guests at parties include Kevin Costner who played (I am sorry to say) both Elliot Ness and Jim Garrison. Manuel Noriega will probably be out of prison before Bill Clinton leaves office. The Kosovo Liberation Army has been funded with drug money and has trained with Islamic terrorist Osama bin Laden. The son of a documented drug trafficker, who very few people in this country even know anything about, is "scheduled" to become our next President, simply because he has the most money and he and his backers control most of "The Pop."

How much time can this government have? How much time does it deserve? Bill Clinton's Farewell Address should probably be, "Apres moi, le deluge."

If you want to know MORE about this subject,
may we recommend the following:
- Extracts and Commentary from Vol. II of the CIA Inspector General's Report.
- CIA Drugs and the Impeachment (video)
- The Salon at Fraser Court (5/99)

Self-Publishing: A Proud Tradition, A Promising Future

By Brent Erickson
From Plus Ultra

In 1989, James (then 39) quit his job as a therapist to work on his book full-time. Drawing on his interest in Psychology, Eastern Philosophy, Ecology, and History, he completed what he believed to be a fine first novel.

James began sending his manuscript to publishers in 1992. He received a few cautious offers, but they did not feel right to the aspiring novelist, so he decided to self-publish the book. With the help of his wife Salle, James sold his novel out of the trunk of their car. “Of the first 3,000 copies we printed, we mailed or personally gave away 1,500 to small book shops and individuals…” recalls James, “Word of mouth recommendations took care of everything else.”

Thanks to grassroots enthusiasm for his novel James's book was soon picked up by a major publisher. The Celestine Prophecy was published in hard cover in 1994, As of 2005, it had sold over 20 million copies worldwide and had been translated into 34 languages, making James Redfield a household name.

Though the story of James Redfield and The Celestine Prophecy is an extreme success story, a surprising number of authors got their start as self-publishers. The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. was originally self-published for his classes at Cornell University. Twelve Golden Threads by Aliske Webb was rejected by 150 publishers, but after self-publishing and selling 25,000 copies, Webb signed a four-book contract with HarperCollins. A Time to Kill by John Grisham was self-published, and like James Redfield, Grisham sold his first novel from the trunk of his car.

The List of authors who began as self-publishers reads like a who’s who of classic writers, giving historical context to a practice often looked down upon by the mainstream literary world. Virginia Wolff, E.E. Cummings, William Blake, Edgar Allen Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Irma Rombauer, Benjamin Franklin, Walt Whitman, Mary Baker Eddy, William E.B. Dubois, Mark Twain, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, George Bernard Shaw, and Anais Nin all had to prove themselves with self-publishing before being picked up by the major publishers.

Today, thanks to modern technology aspiring authors have more tools available to them then their predecessors could ever have dreamed of. Three of the most promising developments for self-publishing in modern times are, Desktop Publishing programs, Print on Demand method of publishing, and the Blogging revolution.

With a personal computer, printer and affordable desktop publishing software, writers can create high quality publications complete with visual elements all from the comfort of their homes.

Print on demand or POD is a methodology in which a copy of the book is not created until after an order is received. This style of publishing was impossible in the past due to the costs involved, but now because of low printing costs it is a fast growing way to sell the works of young writers.

The term blog is derived from the words Web-log but blogging is more than,what has come to be called, “Vanity publishing”. With millions of people surfing the net everyday a blog is a method of self-publishing that holds a lot of potential for young writers.

Free web space, affordable programs, print on demand method, all that is missing now is the next James Redfield. Start making room in the trunk!

2007-03-17T10:54:00.000-07:00

Risky Business

Climate change “quick-fixes” are good for business, but may prove disastrous for the environment.

By Hillary Bain Lindsay
FromThe Dominion

"With the impacts of climate change becoming more evident every day and the need for action more urgent, it's likely that rich, panicky governments will gamble on quick-fixes rather than risk inconveniencing their electorate and/or offending industry." This is the warning expressed in a recent report from the Ottawa-based Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC Group).

"Every crazy idea is being brought out and dusted off to try out on policy makers," says Pat Mooney, co-author of the report and executive director of the ETC Group.

The focus of the report, entitled Gambling with Gaia, is geoengineering. Geoengineering is the intentional, large-scale manipulation of the environment by humans to bring about environmental change, particularly to counteract the undesired side-effects of other human activities.

Among the scientists covered in the report is Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen, whose controversial geoengineering essay proposes to blast particles of sulphur into the stratosphere – increasing particulate pollution – to shield the Earth from the sun's rays. Crutzen presented his findings at the UN conference on climate change in Nairobi in November 2006. An Associated Press report notes that Crutzen said he was "not enthusiastic" about the proposal, but made it to startle policymakers into realizing that "if they don't take action [on climate change] much more strongly than they have in the past, then in the end we have to do experiments like this."

Despite his intent, the Nobel Laureate noted that the reception to his idea was "more positive" than expected. The article notes that during the same week as the UN convention, NASA's Ames Research Center was hosting a closed-door, high-level workshop on Crutzen's proposal and other geoengineering ideas for fending off climate change.

Geoengineering isn't only being discussed behind closed doors. Experiments have also begun on the open ocean, reports the ETC Group. Since 1993, there have been at least 10 experiments to seed sections of the ocean's surface (from 50 to 150 square kilometres) with iron filings. The European Union and at least nine national governments – including Canada's – have supported these "iron fertilization" projects. The experiments are based on the argument that iron nurtures plankton growth -- and plankton absorbs carbon dioxide through photosynthesis.

It's not clear whether carbon dioxide absorbed by plankton will remain permanently sequestered, however. "You can't get two scientists to agree on the results," says Mooney. "Some say they see great potential in the field. Others say that the carbon dioxide may be captured temporarily, but might pop up again in a few weeks." The consensus that does exist, continues Mooney, is that this is "risky business."

After one expedition in 2002, in which three tonnes of iron particles were dumped into the ocean, the project's chief scientist, Dr. Kenneth Coale, told Popular Science: "What is still a mystery is the ripple effect on the rest of the ocean and the food chain." One fear, notes Popular Science, is that huge plankton blooms, in addition to gorging on CO2, will devour other nutrients. "A fertilization event to take care of atmospheric CO2 could have the unintended consequence of turning the oceans sterile," said Coale.

Despite the uncertainty within the science community regarding whether iron fertilization works, or if it has unintended consequences (like the sterilization of parts of the ocean), the business community is moving forward.

Planktos Inc. is a self-described "for-profit ecorestoration company" based in San Francisco with offices in Europe and British Columbia.

In 2007, Planktos will begin what its website terms: "plankton restoration, by replenishing forest-sized areas of ocean with natural iron-rich dust, just as Mother Nature does." This will provide the company with "saleable carbon credits for emerging environmental markets."

By purchasing carbon credits, companies or individuals can "buy the right to pollute" according to ETC's report, "by investing in projects that are deemed by 'experts' to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide." For example, Plaktos will "negate" your SUV's annual carbon footprint for the bargain basement price of fifty bucks. The problem, says Mooney, is that there's no scientific proof that carbon dioxide absorbed by the plankton won't be re-released. "But companies serving the carbon market need only keep carbon dioxide out of sight for long enough to cash their cheques," says ETC's report. "If the carbon dioxide pops back up to the surface in a year or five, proving its source could be extremely difficult."

In Weyburn, Saskatchewan, home of the world's largest carbon-sequestering operation, another geoengineering experiment is already well underway – and is proving highly profitable. Oil giant Encana is compressing carbon dioxide and pumping it 1500 metres underground.

According to a February 10 article in the Globe and Mail, this system of sequestering carbon dioxide prevents the greenhouse gas from entering the atmosphere and "wreaking havoc with the environment," and "is seen by some experts as the ultimate solution to global warming." Encana, however, has other reasons to pump carbon dioxide underground. Its ultimate function is to force more crude oil to the surface; the company's output has jumped from 10,000 to 30,000 barrels a day since beginning the practice.

For projects that won't profit from carbon capture and sequestration (those that won't see an increase in output), companies like Shell and Suncor are looking for Canadian government support to develop the technology. This is not where the government should be spending climate change funds, says Lindsay Telfer, director of the Sierra Club's Prairie Chapter. "We're talking about some of the wealthiest corporations in the world, there's no reason why government needs to be subsidizing this development."

Much like carbon sequestration in the oceans, it's not yet clear if carbon sequestered underground would actually stay there. Even if carbon dioxide does stay underground, "carbon capture and sequestration is a Band-Aid solution," says Telfer. "We need to be transitioning away from fossil fuels towards more renewable energy sources."

Both Telfer and Mooney recognize the value of geoengineering research and the important role technology can play in addressing climate change – they have no illusions about the immediate need for dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions – their concern, however, is that government and industry will be seduced by quick-fix technological 'solutions' that don't address root problems – and that might not even combat climate change.

"We need to look at the root problem that's driving climate change. We know it's burning of fossil fuels, but what is the system that that's happening in?" asks Telfer. "Part of that root cause is that we have a toxic economy." Our economic system promotes the idea of "infinite growth," a concept, she says, that is fundamentally unsustainable. Humanity (primarily in the West) consumed more resources after the Second World War than all of human history before that, says Mooney. And global energy demands are expected to jump 60 per cent between 2002 and 2030. Not only is this environmentally unsustainable, he says, but a fundamental injustice.

Benefits and impacts of 'development' and technology are not equally felt, says Mooney. Right now, between 300,000 and 500,000 people die in developing countries each year due to the impacts of climate change, he says. He's concerned that geoengineering 'solutions' will also hurt those with the least money and power on the planet. "Who gets to adjust the mirrors in the stratosphere?" asks Mooney, referring to another geoengineering scheme that would place trillions of sun deflectors in the stratosphere. "And if you stop crops from burning up in the US, do you burn up the crops in Africa instead?"

Geoengineering "doesn't at all address the inequities in impacts," says Telfer. She notes that if we do manage to fend off climate change without addressing root environmental and social problems, we'll simply face a new crisis. "Next, it will be water."

"Are there root issues here that we're going to have to deal with if we're going to address climate change in an effective way?" asks Telfer. "Are we willing and ready to go there?”

“I think we need to be talking about it."

Seattle to Clear Arrest Records, Pay $1 Million to WTO Protesters Wrongfully Arrested in 1999

Settlement Requires Overhaul of Police Training

From Trial Lawyers for Public Justice.org

The City of Seattle has agreed to pay $1 Million and clear the arrest records of WTO Protesters who were wrongfully arrested in 1999.

In a landmark settlement reached by Public Justice on behalf of scores of people arrested in 1999 while peacefully protesting the World Trade Organization, the City of Seattle has agreed to seal and expunge the records of what a jury earlier determined to be their unconstitutional arrests by Seattle police.

In addition, the settlement mandates that the City improve police training in order to prevent unconstitutional mass arrests in the future. Finally, the City will pay $1 million to compensate the protesters for the violation of their constitutional rights and the costs of bringing the lawsuit.

Following an 11-day trial in January, a civil court jury found the City liable for violating the protesters’ Fourth Amendment rights. The verdict in Hankin v. City of Seattle and settlement followed seven years of litigation and determined work by the Public Justice legal team.

“It’s a shame when justice is delayed any length of time, especially seven years,” said lead plaintiff Kenneth Hankin, a Boeing fuel systems engineer. “The verdict and this settlement not only vindicate the rights of the people who peacefully and lawfully protested in 1999, but will help ensure that future dissent is treated as intended in a free society.”

The class action lawsuit, filed in 2000, arose from the events of December 1, 1999, when police corralled and arrested approximately 175 people who were peacefully protesting the WTO in downtown Seattle’s Westlake Park. The City had invited and encouraged the WTO to hold its ministerial conference in Seattle. By the time the conference began in late November, tens of thousands of individuals and organizations with a range of concerns from globalization and labor to endangered species and human rights converged on the city to protest WTO policies.

After one day of widespread but largely peaceful protest, Seattle’s mayor declared a swath of the downtown business core off-limits to all but certain citizens in what many observers saw as an exaggerated response to isolated disturbances by some individuals. Although the order did not specifically prohibit protests within the area, city officials and Seattle police called it a “no protest zone.” Hundreds of peaceful protesters were then arrested.

All charges against those arrested in the “zone” were later dropped, but not before many of the demonstrators were held in jail for up to four days — until the WTO conference had ended. No police officers were ever reprimanded or disciplined by the City.

Based largely on testimony by Seattle Police Department leaders, Public Justice co-lead trial counsel Michael Withey argued that the arrests adhered to City policy or, at minimum, had been approved by policymakers within the department. The jury agreed, finding that the City was responsible for the unconstitutional arrests. In addition to Withey, the plaintiffs were represented at trial by Public Justice co-lead trial counsel Tyler Weaver of Seattle; Seattle attorney Fred Diamondstone; and attorney Leslie Bailey, the Brayton-Baron Fellow at Public Justice.

After the jury verdict, Seattle faced further litigation on the damages owed to the peaceful protesters it unconstitutionally arrested. To avoid the trials, the City agreed to settle the case.

“This settlement brings to a close an important chapter in the history of this City,” said Withey. “The lesson to draw is that the full constitutional rights of citizens can be guaranteed at the same time public safety is secured. The court, the jury and now the City of Seattle have validated this vital principle. We are proud to hold the city accountable and to contribute to this important victory.”

Weaver said he was pleased that the Westlake Park demonstrators would be compensated, but that the full outcome of the case has a much more significant meaning.

“Most importantly, the jury’s verdict in this case is a sign that our Constitution is alive and well,”Weaver said. “I am hopeful that this case will send a message not only to the City of Seattle but to cities around the country that mass arrests of peaceful, law-abiding protesters will not and cannot be tolerated.”

Diamondstone noted that the settlement serves “an important lesson for police departments around the country that have looked to Seattle’s WTO experience” when large numbers of protesters gather in other large cities. “The proper lesson is to avoid repetition of the fiasco in Seattle by allowing peaceful protesters to gather, as guaranteed by the Constitution,” Diamondstone said.

Pursuant to the settlement agreement, which is subject to court approval, the City of Seattle has agreed not only to seal its own records of the arrests, but also to formally request that other agencies expunge any records they may have received or maintained regarding the December 1, 1999 arrests. The City will also notify the agencies that the Westlake class members were never tried or convicted of any offense. The sealing and expungement of arrest records is of particular importance to members of the class, who were concerned about the potential effect on their reputations and good standing in the eyes of law enforcement.

Perhaps most significantly, the City has agreed to incorporate key court rulings from the Hankin case into police training. Those rulings make clear that police lacked probable cause to arrest both the peaceful protesters at Westlake and others arrested outside the “no protest zone.” Improved training will help ensure that police officers will protect individuals’ constitutional rights against unlawful search and seizure in the future.

The monetary settlement negotiated by Public Justice will secure a financial recovery for each protester in the range of $3,000 to $10,000, depending on the number of class members who file claims. The settlement fund will be paid with insurance proceeds, rather than by City taxpayers.

In addition to the trial team, the plaintiffs were represented by Public Justice Staff Attorney Victoria Ni and Public Justice Executive Director Arthur Bryant.

2007-03-17T10:52:00.000-07:00

What is Fair Travel?

By Martha Robbins, Tracey Mitchell, and Dave Oswald Mitchell
From Briarpatch Magazine

Fair travel is a nascent movement of tourism providers, tourism-reliant communities, social justice advocates, and concerned tourists that is seeking to apply fair trade principles to the tourism industry.

Fair travel promotes equitable standards and fair practices in tourism and encourages local, community-based alternatives to the more exploitative and environmentally devastating elements of the industry. It focuses in particular on travel to the Third World from the First World.

Implicit (and often explicit) in fair travel literature is a criticism of the current models of international travel as being unfair and unsustainable. Advocates of fair travel practices argue that conventional tourism unfairly subverts the interests of communities and the environment to the desires of tourists themselves, and that too often, tourism-based economies exploit workers and harm the environment while enriching only a small segment of the population.

Fair travel is an attempt to redress this balance. It promotes alternative methods of travel that work in cooperation with and in the best interest of destination communities, and strives for equity between travellers and hosts in terms of power, finances, and voice.

Fair Travel Case Study #1: Responsible Ecological Social Tours (REST) Project
REST Project in Thailand is founded on the idea of Community-Based Tourism. Tourism planned and managed by the local community and built on the principle of respect for the physical environment, the host communities and the guests. The project began as a way to counter the harmful effects of mass tourism on rural Thailand. According to REST?s website, Thailand receives ten million visitors per year. These visitors have an enormous impact by consuming resources, producing large quantities of waste, prompting rapid tourism development, and objectifying and exploiting (often unknowingly) Thai culture and people.

Community-Based Tourism begins with the local community exploring and analyzing the positive and negative outcomes of tourism. The community can then determine which types of tourist activity they will allow and promote in their community.

Based on the skills and knowledge present in the community, community members then organize Tourism Activity Groups, which offer, on the local communitys terms, unique opportunities for a traveller to experience an authentic part of Thailand (for example, jungle-trekking, rice wine making and tapestry weaving). According to REST, Community Tourism communities choose how they wish to present themselves to the world. REST Project won the 2002 World Legacy Award for Destination Stewardship and has published a guide entitled the Community-Based Tourism Handbook.

Fair Travel Case Study #2: WWOOF International
Willing Workers On Organic Farms/World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) WWOOF has a network of organizations around the world devoted to connecting travellers with hosts on organic farms. The workers are responsible for their transportation to the farm and for contributing work to the farm for the length of their stay. Host farm families are responsible for providing accommodation, food, and opportunities for the traveller to learn about organic agriculture.

WWOOF allows conscientious travellers to make a contribution on the hosts terms. It also offers travellers the opportunity for day-to-day, reciprocal interactions with locals beyond those available on the typical tourist track. WWOOF also serves to educate travellers about the importance of environmentally sustainable food production for farmers, livelihoods and for ecosystems. For more information, visit www.wwoofinternational.org or www.wwoof.ca

Fair Travel digital destinations:
True Travellers Society -A Canadian organization offering non-industry-sponsored information about experiences abroad.

Tourism Concern -A UK-based NGO with great resources and campaigns on ethical tourism and fair travel.

The Travel Foundation -A UK-based charity that endeavors to make positive contributions to tourist destination communities.

Responsibletravel.com -An online travel agency that specializes in marketing responsible holidays.

Military Complaints Commission Launches Probe into Possible Afghan Abuse

By Mike Blanchfield
From National Post
2007

OTTAWA - The Military Police Complaints Commission will launch a “public interest” inquiry into allegations that Canadian soldiers may have abused Afghan detainees last year, but is reserving the right to hold full-scale public hearings.

Commission chair Peter Tinsley said one of the deciding factors in pursing this third avenue of investigation - the military has announced two of its own probes in the last week - is that the Canadian Forces did not begin their two current investigations until a University of Ottawa professor went forward with a public complaint.

“I also share the complainant’s concern that the relevant military authorities have already had considerable opportunity to investigate this matter internally, but have waited until this public complaint to do so,” Tinsley said in a statement released this morning.

Amir Attaran, a U of O law professor, requested an investigation of the commission recently after he obtained heavily censored Defence Department documents under Access to Information that he alleged showed a pattern of possible abuse of three Afghans taken prisoner by Forces personnel near the village of Dukah in southern Afghanistan last April.

The documents showed the men had similar upper body injuries, but did not indicate how the injuries were sustained.

The documents also showed that at least one of the men was in possession of bomb-making equipment, including a large amount of fertilizer, and that he was belligerent and resisted arrest.

“The possible abuse of defenceless persons in CF custody, regardless of their actions prior to apprehension, and the possibility military police members may have knowingly or negligently failed to investigate such abuse and may otherwise have failed to follow proper protocols for the treatment of detainees, are matters of serious concern,” said Tinsley.

Tinsley did not commit to full public hearing, in which the public would hear evidence about the incident, but he did not rule that out.

“If our investigation uncovers evidence such that a public hearing would be warranted, or if the additional powers of a hearing are required to obtain relevant evidence, then I will exercise my authority to convene one.”

Gen. Rick Hillier, the chief of the defence staff, already ordered a military board of inquiry to investigate the allegations. The report of that inquiry would be made public, after it was vetted to conform to Canada’s privacy laws.

Military police are also conducting their own internal review and have said they will say nothing until their investigation has concluded.

The Military Police Complaints Commission was established in 1998 from a recommendation by the Somalia public inquiry into the torture and killing of a Somali teen by several Canadian paratroopers in that country several years earlier.

Regardless of whether he holds public hearings, Tinsley said his final report would be made public so that it would “ensure continued public confidence in the military and military police.”

Ottawa Citizen

2007-03-17T10:45:00.000-07:00

The Healing Power of Placebos

By Marco Visscher
From Ode Magazine

A sugar pill, a salt solution, a doctor in a white jacket—these all have the power to cure as long as the patient believes in their healing qualities. That seems impossible. So what does science say about the elusive placebo effect? And how can we use it to feel better?

When Judy Ruth Ashley came out of the local anaesthesia, she already felt better. She had gone to the hospital in Denver, Colorado, for an operation to help diminish the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. The surgeon was to drill four holes in her skull through which he would implant fetal neural tissue into her brain, to stimulate cells to grow and develop, reversing the course of the disease.

Everything seemed to be going fine. In the months that followed her operation, the 65-year-old Ashley was less and less bothered by the dyskinesia—excessive, uncontrollable movement—that ruled her life for over 20 years. “I would wake up pain-free. I would get up and walk to the bathroom before I took any medication at all. I could run the vacuum, no problem, and I could even drive a car most of the time. Besides this, my blood pressure no longer dropped when I stood up. My speech was so much better I was able to sing again in the karaoke bar.”

But there is one remarkably enigmatic element of this success story: Ashley hadn’t received the neural implant at all. She was participating in a study into the effectiveness of the operation—but without knowing it, she was in the control group of people whose needles remained empty.

Conducted some 10 years ago, the controversial study is one of several involving sham operations and wide debate about the power of the placebo effect. How is it people get better after an operation that provides no active treatment? It figures as a spectacular example of the placebo effect, a phenomenon that has been known for centuries, but is still hard to grasp.

The placebo effect is the sudden healing of a patient through treatment that is not scientifically effective but works because the patient believes in it. A placebo—Latin for “I shall please”—is surgery or medicine that contains no active ingredients but promotes healing.

Doctors have been aware of the occurrence for centuries and have made conscious use of it to put patients at ease. When a patient would complain of vague symptoms, some physicians would pull out the “very special pill.” The patient believed it would work and complaints often disappeared.

Some say the history of medical science is the history of the placebo effect. Bloodletting is a well-known example. Until the 19th century, it was a commonly used technique that helped many people but as we all know, had no therapeutic effect—quite the opposite. Nowadays, every new medicine is officially tested against a placebo. It regularly happens that the sugar pill produces the same or better results than the medicine.

But how is that possible? How can people recover using a treatment that has no reason to work? Why did Judy Ruth Ashley’s condition improve even though she hadn’t had a real operation? In other words: What explains the placebo effect?

Ashley’s miraculous improvement seems to demonstrate that placebos are effective even in the operating room. In fact, the placebo effect may be much stronger in the operating room, according to Cynthia McRae, a health psychologist at the University of Denver who led the study. “The more dramatic the medical intervention, the stronger the placebo effect will be. There is no doubt that brain surgery is much more invasive than taking a pill.”

That’s putting it mildly. Ashley’s husband remembers well what he thought when he watched as a frame was mounted on her head to make it easier for the surgeon to drill the holes in her skull. Monstrous!, he thought. Like medieval torture!

Of course Ashley knew she might get a sham operation. One year after the procedure, when it was revealed which patients had been given sham procedures, all were offered the chance to have the real surgery. This had been a factor in Ashley’s decision to join the study. What did she have to lose? The alternative was inevitable mental and physical deterioration.

Ashley was one of 40 participants questioned by psychologists about their experiences and tested several times over the course of a year. The result? Patients who erroneously thought they had had a real transplant experienced a “better quality of life” and scored higher on physical tests than those who had really undergone the procedure, but believed they were the unlucky ones in the control group. The results of the study point to an unmistakable placebo effect.

Very little research has been done in this area of medicine. The pharmaceutical industry can’t profit; after all, they can’t make money from sugar pills. That is why many research funders look upon the placebo effect as an irritating variable in a study. It is often forgotten that the effect could help people and shave billions off spiralling health-care costs. If researchers could gain more insight into how the effect works, it would stand as one of the biggest medical breakthroughs in history.

Doctors rarely dispense fake pills today. Medical ethics and a new emphasis on a patient’s right to know make it almost impossible. Fake pills are only accepted by the established medical order for research purposes. Imagine a manufacturer has developed a new medicine. Before it can be sold, its effectiveness must be established. That’s usually done through a study in which a group of patients is given the new medicine and another group gets a placebo that looks, smells and tastes exactly like the real thing. The participants must have agreed to participate in advance. They are randomly assigned to groups and neither the researcher nor the patient knows who is getting the real pill and who is getting a placebo. This is called a “random double-blind placebo-controlled study”—which is what health regulators want to see. If the group receiving the test medicine reports better results than the placebo group, the medicine is approved for sale.

It sounds like a formality. After all, everything we think we know about medical science tells us that a medicine developed following years of research will score better than a sugar pill. Wrong! Research shows that both groups of patients usually report improvement.

Depending on the illness, at least 30 percent of participants, including those taking the placebo, report they feel better, and the numbers can go as high as 70 percent. Sometimes the medicine will do better than the placebo by only a couple of percentage points. For instance, the medicine may make 72 percent of the study’s participants better; a placebo, 70 percent. And you guessed it: The test medicine will generally be put on the market.

Moreover, it is not unusual that a placebo is more effective than the test medicine, which then likely disappears into the rejection pile.

But how does the placebo effect work? Some people are convinced that the effect proves that strength of mind is sufficient to heal the body. This argument holds that positive thoughts (hope, belief, trust) incite the body to destroy sick cells. The conviction is fueled by the vision that body and mind are one and not—as Rene Descartes reasoned in the 17th century—separate entities. Supporters of this vision challenge Descartes’ mechanical world view, which forms the foundation of modern science.

Other people remain skeptical, pointing out that there is no proof for the theory that the mind can heal. They wonder how the patient would feel if there hadn’t been any treatment at all. Maybe he would have gotten better anyway. After all, many health complaints simply disappear. People go to the doctor when their symptoms are at their worst and it’s only logical that they ease with time.

Yet that cannot explain Judy Ruth Ashley’s striking improvements. Brain cells slowly die off in patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative illness. If there is no effective treatment, the deterioration persists.

It has also been suggested that the placebo effect is triggered by a Pavlovian response. Just as the dogs in Pavlov’s famous experiment started drooling as soon as they heard the sounds that signalled feeding time, people might recover when a doctor gives them a pill as long as they have had a similar experience in the past. Testing with placebos on animals supports this theory. When mice were given a sweet drink containing cyclophosphamide, a substance that suppresses the immune system, they became weak and nauseated. When given the sweet drink without cyclophosphamide, they showed the same symptoms.

But this theory also fails to explain why Ashley got better. After all, she had never had brain surgery before. How could she have exhibited a Pavlovian response?

Critics claim the placebo effect is only a short-term reaction. Indeed, most studies only last a few weeks and it is unclear whether the placebo group continues to report improvement compared with the group receiving the real medicine. But Ashley saw further progress many months after the sham operation. More to the point, her doctors—who knew she was participating in the study—were convinced their patient had been given the dopamine. Months later, when they adamantly claimed that any placebo effect from a sham operation would have long disappeared, they continued decreasing the dose of her regular medication, to half the original amount. (In 1997, two years after the sham operation, Ashley was given the real transplant. She continues to do well, under the circumstances.)

Placebos have a strong effect on patients dealing with pain. That became clear in World War II, when a continual shortage of morphine for wounded soldiers plagued the battlefields and hospitals. As long as wounded men didn’t know they were getting a simple saline solution, their pain eased.

During the 1980s, a study provided definitive proof of this phenomenon. People who had undergone tooth extraction were told their pain would be relieved by a machine emitting ultrasonic waves. What they didn’t know was that the machine was switched off for half the patients. Afterwards, the participants reported on their pain levels. Compared with a third group of patients who had not received any treatment, those treated with ultrasound scored higher. It didn’t matter whether the machine was on or off.

Placebos have also been proven successful in treating depression, anxiety, stress, warts and ulcers—sometimes in as many as 60 to 70 percent of the cases. People report they feel better, their appetite has increased and their general sense of well-being has improved. Because these are subjective experiences, critics say it’s all psychological. But doesn’t that miss the point? Isn’t the ultimate goal of every treatment to help patients experience less pain and feel better?

There are, however, objective effects everyone can measure. Placebo treatments have been shown to lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels as well as improve reaction speeds, pulse rates and immune-system activity. In patients who are depressed, QEEG (“quantitative electroencephalogram”) equipment, also used to diagnose attention-deficit disorder, demonstrated that their brain activity increased markedly after two weeks on a placebo.

Moreover, in one study, PET scans indicated that patients with Parkinson’s disease were producing dopamine when given a particular medicine. Another group given a placebo showed the same result. The effect was brief; a temporary increase in dopamine in the brain doesn’t mean an automatic cure from the disease. Yet, Ashley saw improvement over one year, even after she knew she had received a sham operation.

Why are depression, anxiety and stress sensitive to the placebo effect? Perhaps, some claim, because these are the afflictions most receptive to personal attention. And attention is something many people miss from their family doctors. With the avalanche of new medicines coming onto the market in recent decades, the focus of doctors’ care has increasingly shifted from the patient to medical technology. Under increasing time pressure and often against their own wishes, doctors are now at the controls of a machine that is as detached as it is efficient. Patients get less attention than in days gone by.

That development has incited increasing numbers of people to seek help in the world of alternative and complementary therapies. Patient-satisfaction surveys consistently show that people are happier with treatment in the alternative sector. Why? Patients get more attention with alternative practitioners. People want a listening ear and emotional support, particularly when they are ill. But what they find at the doctor’s office is someone trained to assess patients critically, even skeptically. At the alternative practitioner’s office, they usually find someone who shows interest in them as people, exudes enthusiasm about the treatment and believes in what he or she is doing.

Could attention explain the placebo effect? In a placebo-controlled study, participants are given a lot of attention: They are asked questions about how they feel, someone listens to them, they have suddenly become important. This attention could be a vital contribution to feeling better, but it gives rise to yet another question: How could attention alone produce such strong effects?

Ultimately, the placebo phenomenon points to a strange paradox in modern medical science. As soon as an alternative-health treatment proves successful, it is dismissed as the placebo effect. It works only because people believe in it. Yet this explanation appears to contradict one of the foundations of medical science, which stresses that the mind and body are separate, therefore ruling out the possibility of healing through belief.

This blind spot exposes a painful reality in our health-care system. It is noteworthy that the debate over the ethics of placebos—Can patients be denied an effective treatment?—is conducted only by conventional-medicine practitioners. Sometimes that debate is a harsh one. Some argue placebo trials should be abandoned and pharmaceutical companies should find more responsible ways to test new medicines because patients may risk harm by being treated with inactive substances. Alternative practitioners are sometimes accused of endangering patients’ health by using unproven treatment methods.

Outside medical circles this is an irrelevant conversation. To the vast majority of the public, it’s more important that people get better than that their treatments be scientifically proven.

Placebos are not a solution for everything, but they do offer new opportunities for alternative-healing treatments. Various researchers have tried to determine whether a certain personality type is particularly sensitive or resistant to placebos. Those studies have produced uniform results. Everyone—men and women, young and old, the educated and uneducated—is sensitive to the placebo effect. It works on us all, even those who don’t believe in it. Some studies suggest, though, that a placebo effect is more likely to occur in people who are more optimistic than others and who have had positive experiments with medical interventions, thus expecting a treatment that will help them recover.

The personality of the doctor prescribing a placebo does, however, have an effect. Doctors who inspire trust, are optimistic, believe in their treatment, are clear in their diagnosis as well as being warm, sympathetic and involved, help stimulate a stronger placebo effect. Doctors can therefore become walking placebos themselves.

But the attitudes of patients matter too. Cynthia McRae, who led the quality-of-life study of Parkinson’s patients who received sham operations, believes that “the power of hope and optimism” should not be underestimated. The stronger the patient’s belief in the doctor’s authority, the greater the chance that the treatment will work, even when no active medicines are involved.

People would therefore be well-advised to look for a doctor who listens and in whom they have trust. Trust heals. Children know that. They totally trust everything will be okay when their mothers kiss their painful scraped knees. Maybe that’s the perfect example of the placebo effect, as was true for Judy Ruth Ashley: healing through the kiss of grace.

Drugs, Knives, and Midwives

The U.S. maternity care system is in crisis. A grassroots movement to save it is under way.

By Elizabeth Larsen
2007
From Utne Reader

The woman, who is expecting her first child, is a week past her due date. Even though tests show that her baby is doing well, her obstetrician decides to induce labor with Cytotec. It's a drug that has not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for pregnant women, and it can cause contractions that are strong enough to lacerate the anatomical barrier that keeps amniotic fluid separate from the mother's blood vessels -- a situation known as amniotic fluid embolism (AFE). AFE is almost always fatal.

The woman's contractions speed up immediately, but the doctor continues to give her Cytotec until her contractions are coming so rapidly that the baby is having difficulty getting oxygen. The fetal monitor shows that the baby is in extreme distress, so the doctor sets to work to save it.

Shortly after the birth, the mother starts to hemorrhage and goes into shock. The baby dies 35 minutes after birth. The mother dies a few hours later from AFE.

This nightmarish scenario is one of many from Marsden Wagner's book Born in the USA: How a Broken Maternity System Must Be Fixed to Put Women and Children First (University of California Press, 2006). A perinatologist and a scientist, Wagner is a former director of women's and children's health at the World Health Organization (WHO). He's also an old-fashioned whistleblower. By his lights, the American birth industry is in a crisis because we have turned a natural event into a medical condition. As a result, we've allowed obstetricians -- and not the midwives who safely deliver the majority of the world's babies -- to control maternity care. The ironic result is that in our efforts to make birth as safe as possible, we have saddled American women and babies with a system that, despite being the most expensive on earth, puts us in the bottom tier of care for wealthy countries.

Today, more than 15 years after Jessica Mitford detailed the potential hazards of obstetrical forceps, fetal monitoring, and diagnostic ultrasound in The American Way of Birth and more than a quarter century after Immaculate Deception, author Suzanne Arms' expose of high-tech birth, sold more than 250,000 copies, the number of American women who die around the time of birth is on the rise. According to WHO, 28 countries -- including Croatia, Ireland, Kuwait, and Portugal -- have lower maternal mortality rates. Forty-one countries have lower infant mortality rates.

It's not just the shocking mortality rates that trouble Wagner and other reformers. Childbirth Connection, a New York organization dedicated to improving maternity care, recently published Listening to Mothers II, a national survey of 1,573 women who gave birth in 2005. Its findings document numerous indignities and dangers, most of which easily could have been prevented. Of the 25 percent of women who were given episiotomies (a cut in the muscle between the vagina and the anus to widen the birth canal), a startling 73 percent were not consulted before having the procedure.

While an episiotomy is a minor -- albeit painful and often unnecessary -- procedure, a cesarean section is major surgery, and 32 percent of Listening to Mothers II respondents had one. That's a higher rate than the 29 percent cited by Wagner, itself a steep increase from the 21 percent reported five years earlier. Given that WHO has calculated that the optimal rate of C-section for saving the most women and babies is between 10 and 15 percent, what's driving this trend?

Certainly, in this age of rising malpractice insurance costs, obstetricians want to protect themselves from being sued. But Wagner also thinks that C-sections offer doctors a way to bring the most time-consuming part of their practice under their control. "It means they can split their time between seeing patients in the office, doing gynecological surgical procedures in the hospital, and attending births, on a timetable of their choosing, and reduces the chance that they will be required to attend births at inconvenient times," he writes. "For some, it is perhaps their only chance to have a decent personal life." Wagner also believes that our skyrocketing C-section rates are driven by the internal politics of the birth industry. By promoting cesareans, doctors are choosing a procedure that midwives cannot perform.

Even in an elective cesarean, a woman is almost three times more likely to die than in a vaginal birth. Beyond the immediate health risks, having a C-section decreases a woman's chance to become pregnant again and doubles the risk of an unexplained stillbirth in later pregnancies. In 2 to 6 percent of cesareans, a doctor accidentally cuts into a baby. Babies born from an elective C-section are twice as likely as babies born vaginally to end up in neonatal intensive care.

The widespread use of labor-inducing and painkilling drugs is another by-product of what Wagner sees as the rampant medicalization of American births. According to Listening to Mothers II, four labors in ten were started artificially. The most common method used (80 percent) was synthetic oxytocin, more commonly known as Pitocin. There is no disputing that induced labors can be medically necessary. But they also are done at the request of anxious mothers who are so exhausted by their pregnancies that they just want to be done with them. In theory, there is nothing wrong with trying to jump-start labor; since human life began, women have been walking, squatting, rubbing their nipples, swallowing castor oil, snorting sneezing powders, and having sex to give their babies a nudge. But nearly 20 percent of the women in the study who were induced said that they felt pressured by their doctors.

The problem with using Pitocin is that it makes contractions more painful and creates a snowball effect that often leads to pain medications such as epidural blocks, which spur their own set of complications. According to Wagner, a quarter of women who receive an epidural experience side effects such as fevers, urinary incontinence after delivery, headaches, temporary and permanent paralysis, and even death. Because a woman who has had an epidural cannot feel or move her lower body, she has to give birth lying on her back, which is less efficient than upright positions such as squatting or standing.

When Wagner challenges doctors who use Cytotec, he's told that if they were to wait for FDA approval, they would be stalling the medical progress of their field.

This arrogance, Wagner warns, is endemic in the practice of medicine. He urges his readers to push past unfounded fears about safety to realize that 80 percent of births don't need medical interventions. But while Wagner blames the medical establishment, a roundtable discussion in the journal Birth (Sept. 2006) takes a wider view that implicates our panicky, instant-fix culture. "We are a terrified, risk-aversive society," writes Michael C. Klein, professor emeritus of family practice and pediatrics at the University of British Columbia, who believes that we want the easy solution in all aspects of our lives. "[We] pop a pill and carry on being fat and out of shape, while [we] expect to die suddenly at age 90 in the middle of sexual intercourse. We demand it of society, the medical profession, ourselves."

In their indignation, critics of the current birth system tend to overlook the fact that despite its myriad shortcomings, there have also been considerable advances in the way we give birth, and that birth fads and trends are products of their time and culture. Tina Cassidy's Birth: The Surprising History of How We Are Born (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006) is a fascinating tour through the dark days of craniotomies (puncturing the fetal skull to remove babies who were stuck), cesareans without anesthesia, and "Twilight Sleep," a method developed in Germany in 1914 in which women were drugged into a semiconscious state, strapped to their beds, and then had their ears stuffed with cotton so they wouldn't be awakened by their cries of pain. Indeed, a fair number of women giving birth today were born to mothers who were unconscious. Fathers were routinely banished from delivery rooms until the 1970s, and newborns slept down the hall in nurseries and were fed formula on rigid schedules.

Most new families today spend the night together in the same hospital room because activists in the 1960s and 1970s demanded that birth become a more human, family-centered experience. Now, a new breed of agitators are starting to take matters into their own hands. In a December 2006 Boston magazine article, Cassidy details the efforts of Boston-area women who are fed up with unwanted C-sections, false positive prenatal screening tests, scant breastfeeding support, and incorrect predictions from doctors about dangerously large babies. The members of this "mommy uprising" are hiring hands-on midwives instead of obstetricians and are insisting that they be allowed to have a doula -- a supportive labor coach -- present at the birth. Some are passing on the hospitals altogether in order to give birth in the familiar comfort of their own homes. But while studies have shown that home births are as safe as hospital deliveries for low-risk pregnancies, most doctors oppose them. In some states, attending a home birth is illegal, and home birth midwives and their clients (not "patients") have been driven underground.

Wagner argues that midwives are key to fixing our broken maternity system and that they should be given the primary responsibility for women with low-risk pregnancies. (Obstetricians can be responsible for women with serious medical complications.) He envisions a system in which most maternity services are located in neighborhoods and not hospitals. If the United States had a national health care system, American obstetricians would no longer be able to maintain their monopoly on the birth industry. He also calls for doctors and hospitals to be more transparent, providing information about not only their C-section rates, but also rates of maternal and infant mortality, uterine rupture, and adverse drug reactions.

Of course, there are thousands of obstetricians who provide expectant and laboring mothers with compassionate, ethical, and medically first-rate care. And there are plenty of midwives who in their fervent belief in the rightness of their approach display the kind of arrogance Wagner ascribes to his fellow doctors. To make its way into the mainstream, midwifery needs to move beyond its earth mother image and take a more tolerant view of American women's fear of excruciating physical pain. In her book Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood (Doubleday, 2001), Naomi Wolf articulates this challenge. Describing the difference between the alternative birth center and the maternity ward at her Washington, D.C.-area hospital, she writes that "the contrast between the two delivery floors seemed to sum up a failure to give women decent choices in childbirth. I did not understand why the polarity was so stark: the beautiful floor with its rigid set of options regarding pain, or the slaughterhouse atmosphere of the regular birthing rooms where I could receive medication for the body if I needed it, but nothing for the soul. My heart longed for the alternative birth center, its beauty, the openness. But could I stand the pain? And would my labor go so smoothly that no complications would arise to get me sent to the warrens down below?"

As anyone who has read Misconceptions knows, Wolf was indeed shuttled out of the birth center when her labor failed to progress according to her nurse's time line. After Pitocin and an epidural, Wolf was rushed into an operating room for an emergency C-section. It's a scenario, she later found out, that is all too common among American women giving birth. To paraphrase Wolf's critique of the popular pregnancy manual that in her view encourages women to passively accept overly medicalized births, she did not get what she expected when she was expecting.

Elizabeth Larsen is a freelance writer based in Minneapolis. She has given birth twice in a hospital assisted by midwives and is grateful that they didn't shame her when she demanded pain relief.

We Didn't Really Say "No" to Missile Defence

Canadian complicity and participation in BMD continues
By Richard Sanders
From CCPA Monitor
2006

Contrary to a widely popular feel-good myth, Canada did not reject participation in the U.S.-led "Ballistic Missile Defence" (BMD) weapons program. Unfortunately, BMD is still very much alive and well and thriving in Canada. In fact, Canada has been complicit in BMD for many years. Our contributions to BMD have even surpassed the efforts of many other nations that have, at least, been honest enough to admit their involvement.

So, although Canada has not "officially" joined this "Coalition of the Willing," it has long been deeply engaged in creating, designing, researching, developing, testing, maintaining, and operating numerous crucial BMD systems. Billions of Canadian tax dollars have been spent aiding and abetting domestic war industries, government scientists, and military personnel that are thoroughly embedded in U.S., NORAD, and NATO-led BMD efforts.

Since February 2005, when the corporate media parroted our government's nice-sounding but completely meaningless proclamation against BMD, this myth has been repeated ad nauseum by a compliant media, and, sadly, by some key peace movement activists. In fact, our government never actually did a thing to prevent Canada's further entrenchment in the biggest weapons-development program in world history. Neither have any steps been taken to slow down, let alone halt, these ongoing Canadian examples of complicity in BMD.

NORAD
Since August 5, 2004, when Canada initiated an amendment to the NORAD treaty, we have supported this pact's BMD mission with money and armed forces personnel. However, the NORAD link to BMD is probably the least offensive of Canada's many contributions to this weapons program. In fact, NORAD's BMD efforts help to trick the public into supporting BMD by deceiving them with the myth that these weapons are for defending North America from attack by terrorists and rogue states.

NATO
Far more troubling is Canada's little-known contribution to NATO's BMD efforts. Just weeks after Canada’s spurious "no" to BMD in February 2005, the media all but ignored NATO's announcement that it was building its own Theatre BMD system. The bigger story, also still ignored by the mainstream media, is that Canada was among the handful of nations leading NATO's decade-long BMD efforts through projects called CAESAR and MAJIIC. These efforts to increase “interoperability” among NATO's leading military nations have repeatedly used simulated data from Canada's RADARSAT-2 satellite during major BMD war-games, in preparation for future war-time use of BMD technologies.

Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT)
Two days after Canada "just said no" to BMD, then-Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew told CBC Radio that Canada supported America’s “missile defence” choice. Furthermore, he said he would “be very pleased” for Canadian companies getting BMD contracts. For many decades, DFAIT has proudly helped Canadian corporations obtain billions in lucrative U.S. war contracts.

Canadian Space Agency (CSA)
The CSA funds Canadian industries involved in militarizing space, including BMD efforts. Its crowning achievement was sponsoring the $600-million RADARSAT-2 for launch this December. Unique technology aboard this space-based radar was developed by Canadian scientists in collaboration with America's Ballistic Missile Defence Organization (BMDO). Top U.S. war-fighters consider it the "Holy Grail" for future Theatre BMD applications and eagerly await using its targeting functions in pre-emptive, first-strike attacks against alleged “enemy” missile sites.

Industry Canada (IC)
This department has handed $5 billion to Canadian war industries, including some involved in BMD. At a 2004 war industry conference/arms bazaar in Alberta, IC's “senior investment officer [for] defence industries" ranked BMD as first among five “strategic business opportunities," and gave industry delegates the name and e-mail of IC's “BMD officer.” While Industry Minister David Emerson (now International Trade Minister) spoke glowingly of BMD's corporate benefits in 2000, he was a director of MacDonald Dettwiler & Assoc. (MDA), then owned by major BMD rocket-maker America's Orbital Sciences. When Canada's billion-dollar RADARSAT program was privatized to MDA, its data was sold to Pentagon and CIA buyers by another Orbital subsidiary run by retired U.S. military men who had spent decades promoting BMD weapons.

Department of National Defence (DND)
A jointly-funded DND-Dutch program has created an infrared weapons sensor called SIRIUS that firmly wedges Canada’s foot in the BMD door. DND wants SIRIUS aboard Canadian warships to ensure deeper integration into the U.S. Navy's AEGIS system, the backbone of America's sea-based BMD weapons.

Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC)
For decades, our government has spent billions funding military scientists developing technologies to fulfill our allies' military needs. At DRDC's six world-class laboratories, our war scientists work closely with their U.S. counterparts on important BMD projects like infrared sensors, high-frequency radar, and RADARSAT-2 data exploitation.

National Research Council
Scientists at this Crown corporation collaborate with U.S. BMD agencies on cutting-edge, space-based Quantum Well Infrared Photodetectors that enable BMD weapons to distinguish between missiles and decoys.

Canada Pension Plan (CPP)
The CPP still forces Canadians to invest billions in many of the world’s top weapons producers, including “The Big Four” BMD contractors: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman.

Corporations
Most, if not all, of the following Canadian war industries involved in the BMD weapons program have enjoyed extensive financial support from our government:

ATCO Frontec Corp.: Arctec Services (a jointly-owned creature of Calgary’s ATCO Frontec and Alaska's Arctic Slope World Services) does all the "operations and maintenance" support services for the world’s most important BMD radar stations. This U.S. network, called the Solid State Phased Array Radar System (SSPARS), is used to track, assess, and target ballistic missiles. There are five SSPARS facilities in three countries: the U.S. (California, Massachusetts, Alaska), U.K. (Fylingdales) and Greenland (Thule). Since 1999, the company has received $41 million annually “to manage, operate, maintain, and logistically support” these SSPARS sites.

AUG Signals Ltd.: Toronto-based AUG Signals produces signal image and data-processing equipment for target recognition. A 2002 issue of Micronet News said AUG’s equipment is used for “early missile warning, detection recognition, and tracking, [and] anti-ballistic missile defense.” AUG has received funding from four Canadian government agencies: the Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council, Defence Research and Development Canada,

the Department of National Defence, and the Canadian Space Agency. Its president, George Lampropoulos, was described by Ottawa Life Magazine as being "well known in certain circles for having developed high-precision multi-sensor systems for military [and] homeland security. . . applicable to maritime surveillance [and] battlefields” (March 2005).

Bristol Aerospace Ltd.: Bristol Aerospace of Winnipeg, a part of Magellan Aerospace Corp., produces target rockets, including Excalibur and Black Brant, for testing two major U.S. BMD-weapons systems and training the army units that fire them. Since 1999, Excalibur, a two-stage rocket, has been used in U.S. "live-fire" BMD war-games to test advanced Patriot missile systems that detect, track, and classify ballistic missiles. In 1999, Excaliburs were used at NORAD’s “Roving Sands Air Defence Firing Exercise” in New Mexico in “the first-ever Theatre Ballistic Missile target engagement.” They have been used in annual BMD exercises ever since. In 2002, Bristol designed a new Excalibur motor and announced a renewed five-year contract for U.S. Army tests.

Bristol was first contracted to create the Black Brant rocket in 1957 by a government agency called the Canadian Armaments Research and Development Establishment. The Black Brant has since been used by the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force. Since 1998, the U.S. has used Black Brants to collect data on tracking and targeting BMD weapons called Theatre High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD). Black Brants have been regularly used in tests funded by the BMDO at New Mexico's White Sands Missile Range. They were also used at the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia (2002-2003) to test air-, land-, space-, and sea-based sensors for future BMD weapons being developed by the U.S. Missile Defence Agency (MDA).

CAE Ltd.: Since 2002, CAE of Montreal has had a BMD contract with Boeing to make computer-simulation products called STRIVE, ITEMS, and RAVE. Boeing, the “lead systems integrator” for the entire U.S. “missile defence” weapons program, is using CAE's products to design, create, assess, test, evaluate, and develop BMD weapons. This "simulation based design" or "computational prototyping" has put Canada at the leading edge of a global revolution in industrial design which, in this case, is fuelling the very creation of BMD weapons.

Probably best known as the world’s top war-technology simulation company, CAE makes synthetic environments for training war-fighters to use virtually every major weapons system in the U.S. arsenal. For this, CAE has been heavily subsidized by Canadian taxpayers, including at least $200 million from Industry Canada.

One top CAE executive, Donald Campbell, joined the company after 36 years in Canada’s DFAIT, where he was Liberal Deputy Foreign Minister, a Deputy Minister for International Trade, Jean Chrétien’s representative at G-8 Summits, and ambassador to Korea and Japan.

Another former CAE executive, and major cheerleader for the BMD-weapons program, is Derek Burney, a former Canadian ambassador to the U.S. who was Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s chief of staff.

CMC Electronics Cincinnati (CMC EC): Located in Mason, Ohio, this company makes “infrared detectors, imaging sensors, missile warning systems, space-launch vehicle products, and spacecraft electronics” (C4ISR Journal, June 21, 2004). Since at least 1998, it has been a supplier of electronic components for rockets used to test BMD-weapons. Between 1988 and 2004, CMC EC was owned by CMC Electronics of Montreal (formerly the Canadian Marconi Company). During that time, CMC EC and its parent company were controlled by Onex Corporation, Canada’s fourth biggest company.

Gerry Schwartz, the billionaire chairman, president, and CEO of Onex (which still controls CMC Electronics) was Paul Martin’s top fund-raiser, bringing in $11-million for his leadership campaign, including $4 million during one dinner in 2003 that CTV called “the largest political fund-raiser in Canadian history” (Dec. 10, 2003).

Cognos Inc.: Ottawa’s Cognos has, since 2001, provided "business intelligence solutions" for Boeing, which oversees the whole corporate BMD program. Cognos software handles “all aspects” of Boeing’s “financial and manufacturing operations,” including “cost management,” “financial planning,” “staffing,” and “factory management” (Cognos media release, Oct. 22, 2001).

Some may say that Cognos isn't strictly a war industry, and--technically--that's true. But Cognos does ensure that Boeing can smoothly manage such a colossally-complex industrial enterprise as the BMD weapons program. During World War II, International Business Machines wasn’t really a war industry, either, but it helped the Nazi war machine all the same. IBM supplied the "business intelligence solutions" that allowed Germany to identify millions of victims to be targeted, transported, and exterminated. Without IBM, the Nazis’ "final solution" would not have been possible. Similarly, Boeing could not possibly oversee the entire “missile defence” weapons-development program without the latest "business intelligence" from Cognos.

COM DEV Ltd.: In its 2004 annual report, fully loaded with images of smiling parents and babies, and ethnically-diverse classrooms with happy children, COM DEV proudly listed “missile defence” as one of the uses of its products. No, this Cambridge, Ontario, high-tech firm doesn't really make anything related to kids. COM DEV is actually a major producer of satellite-communications equipment. For example, it makes key components for the Advanced Extremely High Frequency Military Satellite Communications program, to which the former Liberal government allocated some $554 million. This program is essential to nuclear-war fighting and the use of “missile defence” weapons.

COM DEV was the only Canadian company acknowledged in U.S. Space Command’s mission statement of 1997, Vision for 2020, which infamously outlined American ambitions to create space weapons -- not for defensive purposes, but explicitly for fighting future resource-based wars on Earth.

DRS Technologies Canada Inc.: DRS of Carleton Place, near Ottawa, produces a “Naval Infrared Missile Defence System” called SIRIUS. This infrared sensor can detect Theatre Ballistic Missiles (TBMs) at launch hundreds of kilometres away, or as they re-enter the atmosphere at an altitude of 70 km. These qualities make SIRIUS extremely useful for targeting “missile defence” weapons. Since 1995, DRS (then Spar Aerospace Ltd.) has played a central role in creating and developing SIRIUS sensors for the Canadian and Dutch governments, for use aboard these governments’ warships. The Canadian government estimates that, by 2009, it will have spent $270 million to develop SIRIUS.

Mark Newman, the company’s CEO, has noted that DRS is “a key supplier of systems for missile defence that are critical for Canadian and allied international fleet operations” (Business Wire, May 2, 2000). DND will purchase SIRIUS sensors for our warships so the Canadian Navy, if requested, will be able to participate in U.S.-led “missile defence” operations.

Scientists at three DRDC facilities have earned their government pay-cheques by working on SIRIUS technology.

EMS Technologies Canada: The Space and Technologies branch of this company, based in St. Anne de Bellevue, Quebec, makes electronic subsystems for the world's biggest BMD weapons contractors. The company was recognized for this crucial work by the influential business magazine Forbes (August 2001). Forbes highlighted three firms that it said would benefit most handsomely from President George W. Bush’s ardent support for the “missile defence” weapons program:

1) DRS Technologies (whose Canadian subsidiary builds SIRIUS), 2) L-3 Communications (which has since bought CMC Electronics), and 3) EMS Technologies. Forbes noted that the Quebec branch of EMS Technologies makes “hardware for space and satellite communications, radar, surveillance, and military countermeasures.”

The EMS website lists only four clients for its “Space & Technology” products. These clients are none other than the “Big Four” prime contractors for “missile-defence” weapons: “Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman rely on EMS to provide critical components for radar, secure communications, and electronic warfare systems.”

In 1998, EMS (then Spar's Satellite Products division) won a $90 million contract from MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates (MDA) for the Synthetic Aperture Radar antenna and radar electronics package for RADARSAT-2, a Canadian satellite with "missile defence" applications.

ITS Electronics Inc.: Since at least 1998, ITS Electronics of Concord, Ontario, has built “low-phase noise amplifier products” for at least two major “missile defence” weapons: The ExoAtmospheric Kill Vehicle (EKV) and Theatre High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD). And, since 1999, when DRDC gave ITS about $200,000, the company's role in the development of these BMD-related products has been directly--and proudly--supported by the Canadian government. The DRDC Annual Report for 1999-2000 notes that this DND R&D agency's projects “have resulted in” the ITS targeting products being used in both EKV and THAAD. These are the most high-profile, land-based “missile defence” weapons systems.

Nine of ITS's top 13 corporate clients are BMD-weapons contractors.

Over $1 million in government financing has flowed to ITS through at least three Canadian government agencies: DRDC, Industry Canada’s Technology Partnerships Canada, and NRC.

Lockheed Martin Canada (LMC): LMC is a subsidiary of the world’s biggest war industry, and the second biggest “missile defence” contractor. Its facilities in Ottawa and Montreal produce VISTA, an interactive weapons training and simulation system. Since 1998, LMC has been the sole-source supplier of VISTA to the U.S. It is used to train personnel on Lockheed Martin’s AEGIS Weapons System, which forms the backbone of the U.S. Navy’s entire “missile defence” weapons program.

VISTA was originally paid for with $90 million from Canadian taxpayers, for use aboard Canadian warships. It is now also used by Japan, Norway, South Korea, and Spain, whose navies are preparing for integration into U.S. “missile defence” operations. Like Canada, they have acquired BMD-compatible technologies and are taking part in BMD wargames. Although for many years Canada has also been doing all this, and much more, at least these other governments have admitted their part in the BMD “Coalition of the Willing.” Canada's government, however, is still in the closet and belongs instead to the “Coalition of the Unwilling-to-Admit-Involvement in BMD.”

MacDonald Dettwiler & Associates (MDA): MDA is the Vancouver-based company that took control of RADARSAT when the Liberal government privatized this satellite program. RADARSAT is probably Canada’s largest single contribution to the militarization of space and to U.S. war-fighting. It started under the Conservatives in the 1980s as a U.S.-Canadian government effort. Since then, Canadian taxpayers have paid almost 90% of $1.15 billion bill for these two satellites.

One of RADARSAT-2's future roles, once it is launched in December of this year, will be to target alleged ballistic missile sites for first-strike attacks by U.S. weapons. Such pre-emptive "counterforce" operations of Theatre Missile Defence will feature largely in future wars.

Meggitt Defence Systems Canada: For the past eight years, this Medicine Hat, Alberta company (formerly called Schreiner Target Services Canada) has been exporting its Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles to the U.S. military. These drones, called “The Vindicator II,” are used as targets in U.S. war-games staged to test the accuracy of the U.S. Navy's AEGIS BMD-Weapons Systems and their radar-tracking systems. Since 1999, Meggitt Canada’s targets have been used in at least 17 of these BMD weapons tests, which it calls “tracking and missile firing events.” These BMD "events" were conducted at U.S. weapons-testing ranges in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, California, and Virginia.

NovAtel Inc.: Between 2001 and 2003, NovAtel had three Advanced-Technology-Development contracts to export “Missile and Space Systems” to the U.S. government for the “Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation” of BMD-weapons systems. Novatel produces Global Positioning Systems (GPS). In its 2003 annual report, NovAtel revealed that its GPS technology was being used “in many military applications such as training, logistics, and missile tracking.”

Not surprisingly, much controversy has surrounded the U.S. MDA's use of targets containing GPS beacons. This is simply because, as a Pentagon official reluctantly admitted to Defense Week in 2001, “real warheads in an attack would not carry such helpful beacons.” Although in 1996, California-based physicist Nira Schwartz blew the whistle on U.S. war-industry giant TRW for faking “missile defence” tests, and was promptly fired, BMD testing still involves GPS beacons.

Since 1998, NovAtel has been owned by CMC Electronics. In 2001, controlling interest in CMC and NovAtel was taken over by ONEX Corp. This is the company run by Gerry Schwartz, a top Liberal party fund-raiser and advisor to Paul Martin.

In 2002, Industry Canada (IC) invested $17 million in CMC to assist its GPS program. Over the past three decades, IC programs have awarded over $100 million to CMC and its predecessor, Canadian Marconi, the parent company of Novatel.

QWIPTECH: Although QWIPTECH is a California-based company, it is wholly owned by Canada's QWIP Systems in Edmonton, Alberta. QWIPTECH makes Quantum Well Infrared Photodetectors (QWIPs). QWIPs are extremely useful for targeting BMD weapons because they can detect missiles in space. Most importantly, space-based QWIP sensors can distinguish between real missiles and the decoys used to foil BMD weapons-targeting systems.

Dwight Duston became QWIPTECH’s chief scientist in 2000. He had worked for U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative Organization and its successor, the BMDO. NRC’s Dr. H.C. Liu also joined QWIPTECH in 2000, when he was appointed to its “Scientific Advisory Board.” Liu and other Canadian scientists at NRC and DRDC began working on QWIPs with their colleagues in the U.S. BMDO during the late 1990s. Since 2001, QWIPTECH has had “an exclusive worldwide license” for BMDO-funded QWIP detectors developed by NASA.

Telemus Inc.: Among the electronic-warfare instruments produced by Ottawa’s Telemus is something called the “Coho simulator.” This product is used in the design and testing of BMD-warhead targeting systems. Telemus has bragged on its website that this “Radar Target and Electronic Countermeasures simulation” equipment has been used in “applications in the development of seekers for ballistic missile defence.” "Seekers" are the homing or targeting systems used in the warheads of smart missiles. The Coho simulator is used by weapons designers who are developing targeting devices for the nose-cones of “missile defence” weapons. This Telemus equipment mimics the kind of radar signals emitted by the ballistic missiles that are to be targeted.

Telemus owes its very existence to the Canadian government's military agency DRDC, which funded its initial contracts in the mid-1980s. DRDC was then generous enough to hand over to Telemus the rights to various profitable patents and licensing agreements for publicly-funded war technology. Telemus is now owned by Northrop Grumman, the world’s fourth-largest BMD contractor.

Obviously, Canada is very involved in the BMD weapons program. The Canadian government's sham “no” to BMD was a duplicitous, hypocritical PR ruse cleverly designed, like a sleight-of-hand trick, to hide its BMD collaboration, defuse protests, quell internal Liberal Party dissent, and temporarily boost a faltering minority government.

Eager to claim victory, the NDP and some naive peace activists immediately welcomed the government's "no" without bothering to verify whether it had any substance. Since then, they have continued to spread the false but feel-good report that Canada rejected BMD. This trusting naiveté undermined and all but eliminated opposition to BMD in Canada.

To resuscitate Canada's anti-BMD movement, we must face the government's lie and stop living in myth-shrouded denial.

Until the mythology of Canada’s supposed rejection of BMD is thoroughly exposed and debunked, Canadians will have absolutely no chance of slowing down, let alone halting, Canada’s deep complicity in the offensive, war-fighting, BMD weapons program.

(Richard Sanders is the coordinator of the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade [COAT] and editor of its magazine Press for Conversion! This article summarizes some of his original research on Canada’s complicity in “missile defence,” which has been published in the last three issues of the COAT magazine. For subscriptions, please phone 613-231-3076, e-mail overcoat@rogers.com, or write to COAT, 541 McLeod Street, Ottawa, ON K1R 5R2. Check the COAT website, and the online slideshow about Canada's role in BMD, at http://coat.ncf.ca.)

2007-03-17T10:36:00.000-07:00

Statistics Prove Prescription Drugs are 16,400% More Deadly Than Terrorists

By Jessica Fraser
From NewsTarget.com
2005

America was rudely awakened to a new kind of danger on September 11, 2001: Terrorism. The attacks that day left 2,996 people dead, including the passengers on the four commercial airliners that were used as weapons. Many feel it was the most tragic day in U.S. history.

Four commercial jets crashed that day. But what if six jumbo jets crashed every day in the United States, claiming the lives of 783,936 people every year? That would certainly qualify as a massive tragedy, wouldn't it?

Well, forget "what if." The tragedy is happening right now. Over 750,000 people actually do die in the United States every year, although not from plane crashes. They die from something far more common and rarely perceived by the public as dangerous: modern medicine.

According to the groundbreaking 2003 medical report Death by Medicine, by Drs. Gary Null, Carolyn Dean, Martin Feldman, Debora Rasio and Dorothy Smith, 783,936 people in the United States die every year from conventional medicine mistakes. That's the equivalent of six jumbo jet crashes a day for an entire year. But where is the media attention for this tragedy? Where is the government support for stopping these medical mistakes before they happen?

After 9/11, the White House gave rise to the Department of Homeland Security, designed to prevent terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Since its inception, billions of dollars have been poured into it. The 2006 budget allots $34.2 billion to the DHS, a number that has come down slightly from the $37.7 billion budget of 2003.

According to the study led by Null, which involved a painstaking review of thousands of medical records, the United States spends $282 billion annually on deaths due to medical mistakes, or iatrogenic deaths. And that's a conservative estimate; only a fraction of medical errors are reported, according to the study. Actual medical mistakes are likely to be 20 times higher than the reported number because doctors fear retaliation for those mistakes. The American public heads to the doctor's office or the hospital time and again, oblivious of the alarming danger they're heading into. The public knows that medical errors occur, but they assume that errors are unusual, isolated events. Unfortunately, by accepting conventional medicine, patients voluntarily continue to walk into the leading cause of death in America.

According to a 1995 U.S. iatrogenic report, "Over a million patients are injured in U.S. hospitals each year, and approximately 280,000 die annually as a result of these injuries. Therefore, the iatrogenic death rate dwarfs the annual automobile accident mortality rate of 45,000 and accounts for more deaths than all other accidents combined." This report was issued 10 years ago, when America had 34 million fewer citizens and drug company scandals like the Vioxx recall were yet to occur. Today, health care comprises 15.5 percent of the United States' gross national product, with spending reaching $1.4 trillion in 2004.

Since Americans spend so much money on health care, they should be getting a high quality of care, right? Unfortunately, that's not the case. Of the 783,936 annual deaths due to conventional medical mistakes, about 106,000 are from prescription drugs, according to Death by Medicine. That also is a conservative number. Some experts estimate it should be more like 200,000 because of underreported cases of adverse drug reactions.

Americans today are used to fixing problems the quick way – even when it comes to their health. Thus, they rely heavily on prescription drugs to fix their diseases. For every conceivable ailment – real or not – chances are there's a pricey prescription drug to "treat" it. Chances are even better that their drug of choice comes chock full of side effects.

The problem is, prescription drugs don't treat diseases; they merely cover the symptoms. U.S. physicians provide allopathic health care – that is, they care for disease, not health. So, the over-prescription of drugs and medications is designed to treat disease instead of preventing it. And because there are so many drugs available, unforeseen adverse drug reactions are all too common, which leads to the highly conservative annual prescription drug death rate of 106,000. Keep in mind that these numbers came before the Vioxx scandal, and Cox-2 inhibitor drugs could ultimately end up killing tens of thousands more.

American medical patients are getting the short end of a rather raw deal when it comes to prescription drugs. Medicine is a high-dollar, highly competitive business. But it shouldn't be. Null's report cites the five most important aspects of health that modern medicine ignores in favor of the almighty dollar: Stress, lack of exercise, high calorie intake, highly processed foods and environmental toxin exposure. All these things are putting Americans in such poor health that they run to the doctor for treatment. But instead of doctors treating the causes of their poor health, such as putting them on a strict diet and exercise regimen, they stuff them full of prescription drugs to cover their symptoms. Using this inherently faulty system of medical treatment, it's no wonder so many Americans die from prescription drugs. They're not getting better; they're just popping drugs to make their symptoms temporarily go away.

But not all doctors subscribe to this method of "treatment." In fact, many doctors are just as angry as the public should be, charging that scientific medicine is "for sale" to the highest bidder – which, more often than not, end up being pharmaceutical companies. The pharmaceutical industry is a multi-trillion dollar business. Companies spend billions on advertising and promotions for prescription drugs. Who can remember the last time they watched television and weren't bombarded with ads for pills treating everything from erectile dysfunction to sleeplessness? And who has ever been to a doctor's office or hospital and not seen every pen, notepad and post-it bearing the logo of some prescription drug?

Medical experts claim that patients' requests for certain drugs have no effect on the number of prescriptions written for that drug. Pharmaceutical companies claim their drug ads are "educational" to the public. The public believes the FDA reviews all the ads and only allows the safest and most effective drug ads to reach the public. It's a clever system: Pharmaceutical companies influence the public to ask for prescription drugs, the public asks their physicians to prescribe them certain drugs, and doctors acquiesce to their patients' requests. Everyone's happy, right? Not quite, since the prescription drug death toll continues to rise.

The public seems to genuinely believe that drugs advertised on TV are safe, in spite of the plethora of side effects listed by the commercial's narrator, ranging from diarrhea to death. Patients feel justified in asking their physicians to prescribe them a particular drug they've seen on TV, since it surely must be safe or it wouldn't have been advertised. Remember all those TV ads heralding the wonders of Vioxx? One might wonder how many lives could have been spared if patients didn't see the ad on TV and request a prescription from their doctors.

But advertising isn't the only tool the pharmaceutical industry uses to influence medicine. Null's study cites an ABC report that said pharmaceutical companies spend over $2 billion sending doctors to more than 314,000 events every year. While doctors are riding the dollar of pharmaceutical companies, enjoying all the many perks of these "events," how likely are they to question the validity of drug companies or their products?

Admittedly, not all doctors reside in the pockets of the pharmaceutical companies. Some are downright angry at the situation, and angry on behalf of an unaware public. Major conflicts of interest exist between the American public, the medical community and the pharmaceutical industry. And although the public suffers the most from this conflict, it is the least informed. The public gets the short end of the stick and they don't even know it. That is why the pharmaceutical industry remains a multi-trillion dollar business.

Prescription drugs are only a part of the U.S. healthcare system's miserable failings. In fact, outpatient deaths, bedsore deaths and malnutrition deaths each account for higher death rates than adverse drug reactions. The problems run deep and cannot be remedied without drastic, widespread change in the system's money and ethics.

The first issue – money – is the main reason the medical industry cannot seem to change. Prescribing more drugs and recommending more surgeries means more profits. Getting more drugs approved by the FDA, regardless of their safety, means more money for the pharmaceutical industry. As the healthcare system stands today, physicians and drug companies can't seem to pass up earning loads of money, even if a few hundred thousand people lose their lives in the process. Even in drastic cases of deadly drugs, everyone involved has a scapegoat: Drug companies can blame the FDA for approving their product and the doctors for over-prescribing it, and doctors can blame the patients for wanting it and not properly weighing the risks.

What ultimately arises is a question of ethics. In layman's terms, ethics are the rules or moral guidelines that govern the conduct of people or professions. Some ethics are ingrained from childhood, but some are specifically set forth. For example, nearly all medical schools have their new doctors take a modern form of the Hippocratic Oath. While few versions are identical, none include setting aside proper medical care in favor of money-making practices.

On the research side of the issue, "Death by Medicine" cites an ABC report that says clinical trials funded by pharmaceutical companies show a 90 percent chance that a drug will be perceived as effective, whereas clinical trials not funded by drug companies show only a 50 percent chance that a drug will be perceived as effective. "It appears that money can’t buy you love, but it can buy you any 'scientific' result you want," writes Null and his team of researchers.

The government spends upwards of $30 billion a year on homeland security. Such spending seems important. Since 2001, 2,996 people in the United States have died from terrorism – all as a result of the 9/11 attacks. In that same period of time, 490,000 people have died from prescription drugs, not counting the Vioxx scandal. That means that prescription drugs in this country are at least 16,400 percent deadlier than terrorism. Again, those are the conservative numbers. A more realistic number, which would include deaths from over-the-counter drugs, makes drug consumption 32,000 percent deadlier than terrorism. But the scope of "Death by Medicine" is even wider. Conventional medicine, including unnecessary surgeries, bedsores and medical errors, is 104,700 percent deadlier than terrorism. Yet, our government's attention and money is not put into reforming health care.

Couldn't a little chunk of the homeland security money be better spent on overhauling the corrupt U.S. healthcare system, the leading cause of death in America? Couldn't we forfeit the color-coded threat system in favor of stricter guidelines on medical research and prescription drugs? No one is attempting to say that terrorism in the world is not a problem, especially for a high-profile country like the United States. No one is saying that the people who died on 9/11 didn't matter or weren't horribly wronged by the terrorists that day. But there are more dangerous things in the United States being falsely represented as safe and healthy, when, in reality, they are deadly. The corruption in the pharmaceutical industry and in America's healthcare system poses a far greater threat to the health, safety and welfare of Americans today than terrorism.

If the Bush Administration really wants to save lives -- a lot of lives -- it needs look no further than the chemical war has been declared on Americans by Big Pharma.

2007-03-17T08:47:00.000-07:00

Mujeres Creando: Feminist struggle in Bolivia

By Jeffery R. Webber
Translated by Jeffery R. Webber and Sheila Wilmot
From New Socialist

Mujeres Creando, or Women Creating, is a small group of anarcha-feminist women fighting for social change in Bolivia. Two of its leading figures are among only a few openly lesbian activists in the country. The group embraces a diversity of struggles, as Julieta Ojeda pointed out in a separate 2002 interview: “So with our starting point as women and our identities as women, we can assert our own struggles and fight against oppressions in society. We also recognized that we come from a particular social class, that we have our own ethnic origins, that we are different ages, and that we are part of society. In this sense, we don’t only struggle for women’s rights or issues that affect women, but against all types of oppression.” Jeffery R. Webber caught up with two activists in the Mujeres Creando Café/House/Cultural Centre in downtown La Paz on June 29, 2005.

JRW: I am here with Julieta Ojeda and Florentina Alegre. To start off, can you describe some important aspects of your personal life that led you to become activists in this organization?

JO: So, how did we become involved in the group, right? I have been active in Mujeres Creando (MC) for more than 12 years and one thing that stood out for me was the creative way that women were brought together in this period [when I was first introduced to the group]. Three comrades (compañeras) had started the group and were doing murals and other activities within the university. I got close to the group because while I had been looking for a left-wing group to get involved in, I hadn’t found one previously that met my expectations. But MC really knew how to make me question and think through if I wanted to be involved with the group. So, I did and have been active now for 12 years.

JRW: And you?

FA: My name is Florentina Alegre, I come from the countryside but I have been coming into the city since I was quite young, not to live here, but because I was a peasant union leader. I would go back and forth between the city and the country. In 1980, the union founded an internal women’s peasant organization called Bartolina Sisa*, and this is where I started to try to organize other women, as well as to do my own political development, from 1980 to 1990. Since 1995 I have been a leader at various levels: in my own community, as well as at the provincial, departmental [state], and federal levels.

Joining MC 6 or 7 years ago was a result of men’s discrimination and humiliation. The peasant union organization was supposedly parallel with the men’s and women’s union organization, but within the women’s one, we were in reality subjugated to the male leadership of the other one. I didn’t like it much, they didn’t let us breathe, they didn’t let us organize autonomously.

JRW: And how did MC get started? What is the group’s history?

JO: MC was founded and developed more or less in 1992, by 3 Leftist comrades who brought with them a whole critique of the Left, of women’s roles within our traditional Left groups, for example, the fact that we tend to have only secondary roles to carry out, as secretaries, serving tea, or putting up posters, generally doing the jobs that we always do. The other issue is that women function as sexual booty on the Left.

So, the group’s founders themselves had had to leave the country for political (including sexual) reasons, and when they came back more or less 5 years later, they founded MC because they felt the need to organize as women, to create something new, not something that would replace the revolutionary subject – who is supposed to be the working class, according to Leftist groups. Instead, the group wanted to constitute itself as a vehicle for change, one that would contribute to social change working with others, but from a feminist perspective. Since then we’ve been going through a series of stages and steps to arrive at this point 14 years later.

JRW: Right, and who were these founding women?

JO: They were Maria Galindo, Julieta Paredes and Mónica Mendoza, three comrades who had been active in Leftist groups.

JRW: So, now, and during the period since its foundation, what have been the politics and ideology of MC?

JO: MC has various axes: the issue of autonomy, heterogeneity, union of what is considered manual and intellectual work, and the use of creativity as a tool for struggle.

On the one hand, with regard to the issue of autonomy, as feminists we put forward that we are autonomous from any hegemonic centre of power in our society, whether it’s the State, political parties or non-governmental organizations (NGOs), because we believe that autonomy is what is going to allow organizations to move forward much better.

Having made this criticism, we can just look at what happened in
October [2003, mass mobilization – “Gas War” – that ousted president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada] and May and June [2005, another mass mobilization that ousted president Carlos Mesa]. In this later era, social movements are in fact starting to question themselves about the issue of political parties and the role of the political system in our society. We’ve done that for a number of years. So we believe in autonomy as an organizing form that is going to allow us to grow and foster the development of our organization, in a way in which our ideas and selves are not subordinated to a male leader’s political control or the leader’s or party’s control of money. Therefore, autonomy is important, and even more so in the case of women’s organizations.

There is also the idea of heterogeneity. We don’t believe in organizing between women in one sector, or only with establishing certain academic affinities. No, because we believe in uniting different women: Aymara** women, peasant women, students, young women, older women, professional women, women who only recently have begun their political formation. So, that is the heterogeneity that we recognize first off. We believe that this strengthens our analysis of social reality while permitting us to attack the system from different sides.

For example, various times when we’ve talked about land or indigenous territory, Florentina will raise issues, will have proposals relating to that theme, or, when we’re talking about a problem of racism, or these kinds of things. We have diversity within the group that allows us to raise various issues. We don’t limit ourselves to 3 or 4 themes like they do in the international organizations [NGOs concerned with gender, the United Nations work on gender and so on]. International organizations tell you if you want to be a feminist, or work with other women, you have to work on 3 or 4 themes, such as reproductive rights, abortion, and maybe one more little theme, right? But we as women believe that we are capable of engaging with reality and have our opinion and our position with respect to whatever theme that rises to the national agenda!

Then, there is the theme of uniting manual and intellectual work. In some ways this has allowed us to maintain our political autonomy because we are not economically dependent [on NGOs, international organizations, or the government.] We have received concrete help for certain little things, but we do not live off international aid, we live off our work and this house [café, cultural centre in La Paz], for example, sustaining ourselves with the work that we do.

Then, there is creativity. We occupy public space. Public space is occupied by society here: the use of the streets, like venders selling goods, lovers in the streets, people passing time being in the streets, resting in the street. So, for us, it is the optimal place to do politics, to occupy the street. We have occupied space through our graffiti and through creative, direct collective actions. I don’t know if you’ve had the opportunity to see any of these. [Julieta continues this section with a biting critique of the “gender technocracy” that NGOs promote while pretending to represent the “women’s movement” as a whole.]

FA: Another part of this is that in our society, everything is coordinated so that women are supposed to always be submissive. Or, if women have demands those demands are always appropriated [by NGOs, the state, etc.]. However, in MC we have our own voice. This is the most important thing. We act with our own voice. For example, we demand land rights for women, zero interests for peasant women in debt, security for the women prostitutes working at night, among others. We direct these demands, these proposals, at the State, at the government. And so this is very important to us, this other form of doing politics. Within MC, and also within the feminist movement, we practice solidarity and honesty, a solidarity and honesty that is lacking in many of the Bolivian social movements.

Often this is why there is division between leaders, fights around personal interests, people always seeking more power. In MC there is no leader, no one who heads the group. We all decide equally. There is no comrade who leads us. Each comrade is like all the others, everyone equal and capable of deciding. So we don’t have a structure like the social movements with leaders, with executives….

JRW: Do you see the struggle against capitalism as being a part of your struggle as well?

JO: Yes, because we believe in social change…. It’s like our position on the international organizations around women. They have a technocratic vision. They believe that change can be fostered within the system by making certain reforms, with a certain rhetoric of gender. Against this, we argue that transformation, that dramatic social change is possible. We develop our own forms, our own strategies and our own objectives.

We have concrete objectives for concrete change that arise from the demands of social movements, ones that want to coordinate their struggles with ours, that want to build on the struggles that we have put forward.

But, in the longer term, we also believe in the transformation of the society. And we try to live the utopia that we want, that we dream of, that we think through. We try to put it in practice everyday here. Obviously, it’s a daily struggle, it’s not as though we’ve done it. It’s a daily struggle for solidarity, reciprocity, like how we manage this space [the café and cultural centre] as a cooperative, including the idea that there are no hierarchies among us, that there is respect, no racism, no classism.

And something that I think is truly anti-capitalist is the concept of reciprocity. This is a way of attacking the system, the capitalist system. None of us receive a salary. We all work in this space because of conviction. Obviously, we generate a little money by selling things [coffee, desserts, magazines and books] to maintain the house, but that’s basic right? We say that we are against capitalism, and obviously we are against capitalism.

Endnotes

Bartolina Sisa was the consort or partner of Túpaj Katari, a central figure in the anti-colonial insurrection of 1780-81.
The “Aymara” people make up the second largest indigenous group in Bolivia.
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The Product is You!
Towards Understanding The Media

An Editorial
By Brent Erickson

Corporations sell products. Media Corporations are no different; they manufacture a product and sell it to their customers. But just what are, most magazines, newspapers, radio, television shows and web sites really selling?

Most people feel like they already understand the media. The death of model Anna Nicole Smith, the breakdown of singer Brittany Spears and other such stories are in the news for one reason, money. The masses want their sensational news and the media is simply making money by supplying the demand of the public. If Noam Chomsky sold as many newspapers as Anna Nicole and Brittany, he would be on the front pages instead of them. The customer is always right.

Though there is more truth to this argument than perhaps the person who makes it first realizes, this view is ultimately both condescending and inaccurate. Opinion polls show repeatedly that people are much more open to and interested in challenging issues than is reflected in most media outlets.

However the media continue to publish and broadcast an often fractured and distorted picture of the world with little objection from the so-called “educated” members of society. The fact that most of us in Canada and the U.S, despite being intelligent individuals, are unaware of the level of indoctrination in our countries, unfortunately only demonstrates the effectiveness of the propagandist system under which we live.

To be aware of the factors that influence media content is to develop Media Literacy. Media Literacy means bringing critical thinking skills to bear on the messages that inform, and entertain us every day. There are many factors shaping media content, two of the most fundamental to consider are; owners, and advertisers. These two variables, though they determine to a large extent how we see the world, are rarely are mentioned in discussions of the “Liberal Media”.

Media Ownership and Concentration
The number of corporations that control nearly all North American media has fallen from only 50 in 1983 to about 6 today. Media moguls such as Rupert Murdock and Conrad Black are known to media activists as stanch opponents of diversity and pro-labor sentiment, but even they are small potatos compared to some media owners. General Electric Corporation, one of the worlds largest weapons manufactures owns NBC / CNBC, networks that seem quick to push for war. Likewise with Westinghouse Electric Company, a corporation that owns a large number of media holdings including the CBS network.

According to the media watch group F.A.I.R, in December 2002 then CanWest Global Communications CEO Izzy Asper, who’s company owned the National Post, 14 large city dailies, 120 smaller dailies and weeklies, and the Global TV network, among other holdings, made the decision to require all of its daily newspapers to run corporate editorials produced in its Winnipeg head office. Though known to be liberal on certain social issues, Mr. Asper held much more conservative views than the majority of Canadians on many subjects (most notably support for Israel) and fire journalists who did not agree with him. His sons David and Leonard Asper have proven even more extreme since taking control of Can West after their father’s death in 2003.

F.A.I.R adds “The Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ) and the Quebec Federation of Professional Journalists (QFPJ) have denounced the actions of the media giant as ‘a disturbing pattern of censorship and repression of dissenting views.’”

Advertising
The old sayings “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” and “Never bite the hand that feeds you.” are good to keep in mind when assessing the role advertising plays in shaping media content.

Commercial magazines generate over 50% of their revenue from advertising, Newspapers about 80%, Radio, TV, and web sites get close to 100% of their revenue from advertising. Because such a large amount of money (over $175 billion a year in the U.S alone) comes from not the selling of media content itself, but the selling of audiences to advertisers the public is not the customer in our media system, we are the product!

The so-called “media content” is only the bait to generate audiences for advertisers. If the customer is always right, that customer is the car company (which might deny global climate change) who paid for the ads, not the person who buys the magazine or who watches T.V. This is why there has been such an effort made to stave out public broadcasting and push it into the commercial arena where corporate “sponsors” can regulate the content. Noam Chomsky could attract more viewers than a new Pamela Anderson sex tape and he still would be excluded from the front pages unless the advertisers gave it the green light.

If we do not, as a society develop a minimal degree of Media Literacy and push for, what has been called “Media Democracy” we are losing more than we will ever know. As U.S congressman Bernie Sanders recently said, “If you are concerned about Health Care, Iraq, the Economy, Global Warming you must be concerned about Corporate Control of the Media.”

Preventative Justice

Activist Jaggi Singh is arrested for what he might do and threatened with six months in detention

By Jaggi Singh
From The Dominion

Singh was attending a press conference by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and was arrested before he could even stand up and ask a question. Spoken by Jaggi Singh, member of Block the Empire and No One Is Illegal, at Rivière-des-Prairies detention centre, by phone to allies on Sunday November 26.

"Tomorrow, I will be facing a bail hearing that will determine whether or not I will spend the next six months in preventative custody. The Crown – encouraged no doubt by the Montreal police and the RCMP – is objecting to my release, arguing that I am a threat to public security. Let me explain what brings me to this position, and readers can decide for themselves who's the real threat to public security...

On Friday, I joined with at least two dozen other anti-war activists in attending an action, organized in less than 36 hours, at a press conference by Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Effective action doesn't mean sitting through stage-managed photo-ops, it means standing up and holding decision-makers directly accountable for their policies. That is exactly what we, members of grassroots groups like Block the Empire, No One Is Illegal and others, intended to do.

Before we could even stand up and ask a question, the RCMP unilaterally decided to remove me from the event, not based on what I had done, but based on what I might do. When I refused, I was subsequently arrested and now find myself facing up to six months in detention. If I had the chance, I would have denounced Stephen Harper's partnership with George Bush's disastrous "war on terror." Canadian troops are in Afghanistan to allow more American troops to kill in Iraq. Moreover, the direct words of Major-General Andrew Leslie – Canada's commanding general in Afghanistan – prove the nonsensical logic of Canada's policy. Speaking at a conference in 2005, Leslie stated: "Afghanistan is a 20-year venture. There are things worth fighting for. There are things worth dying for. There are things worth killing for." In the same speech, he said: "Every time you kill an angry young man overseas, you're creating 15 more who will come after you." This is a made-in-Canada plan for disaster on the backs of Afghani civilians.

But Stephen Harper's complicity with US imperialism goes beyond Afghanistan and Iraq. When the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) attacked civilians and civilian infrastructure in Lebanon and Occupied Palestinian Territories – actions widely recognized as war crimes – Harper expressed his unconditional support for Israel. Disgustingly, even after a Montreal family was massacred in their own home in Southern Lebanon, Harper continued to describe Israel's actions as "justified and measured."

Occupations abroad are rooted in occupation at home. One of Stephen Harper's closest advisors and mentors is Calgary neo-conservative Tom Flanagan. His writings provide the ideological underpinnings for the Harper government's assimilationist policies vis-à-vis aboriginal peoples. In the context of continued self-determination struggles at Six Nations, Sun Peaks, Grassy Narrows and elsewhere, the Harper Conservative position amounts to genocide.

Ostensibly, Stephen Harper was in Montreal on Friday to announce more funding for cancer research. Meanwhile, the Harper Conservatives continue to attack publicly-funded healthcare and have deepened Liberal cutbacks to social programs, undermining services to women, the poor, immigrants, indigenous peoples and queers. Harper announced some $200 million for cancer research, while the Canadian government is spending upwards of $3 billion for Canada's intervention in Afghanistan. Everyone knows someone affected by cancer, including the demonstrators who protested Harper's press conference on Friday. The substantive point is that the general well-being of society comes not just from initiatives to fight cancer, but fundamentally from eliminating poverty and oppression. The Harper government policies in their totality are disastrous for the health of the poor, the indigenous and Canadians in general and his support of the "war on terror" fundamentally destroys the health of average Lebanese, Palestinians, Iraqis and Afghanis.

Many are uncomfortable with the idea of getting in the face of the decision-makers. But when those decision-makers are ideologically deaf to dissenting points of view, disruption and impolite protests are necessary. That's why others and I similarly confronted Immigration Minister Monte Solberg in Ottawa this past May to oppose the government's continued deportation and detention policies. These policies, under the Conservatives, have resulted in the arrest of children in schools, raids at workplaces and general insecurity and fear among Canada's non-status immigrant population. Moreover, others and I picketed Afghan puppet Hamid Karzai in September of this year and during that picket, I tried to speak directly to Michael Fortier, Stephen Harper's right-hand man in Quebec. On each of those occasions – against Monte Solberg, against Michael Fortier, and then against Stephen Harper – I was arrested and charged with public order offenses. I haven't been convicted of anything and going by past personal experience, I might very likely be acquitted of everything. My and others' desire to continue to protest even to the point of trying directly to reach decision-makers puts me in the position that I might face at least the next 6 months in prison. I don't regret any of my previous actions and I intend to defend myself vigorously at the upcoming trials. I only regret that I, along with others, can't do more to oppose policies that are not just misguided, but murderous and genocidal.

I certainly don't expect that everyone or a majority of readers to agree with my political point of view. But what's at stake at tomorrow's bail hearing is whether or not someone who actively dissents deserves to be locked up for at least six months before being convicted of anything. Either way, I'm prepared to live with the consequences of my actions, knowing that they occur in the context of movements that are uncompromisingly fighting for justice and dignity, whether at home or abroad."

On November 27, Jaggi Singh was released on a $2000 bail, money that was collected by his supporters who numbered close to one hundred at the hearing. In addition to bail, a condition was also attached to the release; Singh is not allowed to partake in any demonstration which is illegal or non-peaceful.

Naomi Klein: Scrap NAFTA, Rejoin the Americas

From new social movements in South America, to “Mexico's so-called president [being] sworn in at midnight in a shameful ceremony,” Klein said that a rebellion against neoliberalism is sweeping the southern hemisphere.

By Tor Sandberg
From Common Dreams
2006

“This is a turning point for Canada and it's also a turning point for the neoliberal project, for the privatization project,” said Naomi Klein last week at a fundraiser for the Ontario Health Coalition.

“In Canada we have weird timing. Just when the Americas are turning away from neoliberalism in droves, its principal purveyors so embarrassed by their own policies that they have to wrap it in the rhetoric of war and civilization — they pretend they don't even care about economics anymore, it's about security, not trade.

It's precisely at this moment that Canada throws in the towel and gives up the very system that is held up around the world,” said Klein, referring to Canada's election of a Conservative government and the current privatization of various health care services across Canada.

Speaking publicly for the first time in over a year, Naomi Klein, a well-known anti-globalization author and activist, returned to Toronto last Friday to join Maude Barlow, chair of the Council of Canadians, and the Ontario Health Coalition for a talk about new social movements and the protection of public health care at St. Andrew's Church.

Klein focused on a trip to New Orleans that she took with partner Avi Lewis and a photographer friend in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, part of the research for her upcoming book called Disaster Capitalism.

“I arrived when the city was still flooded,” recounted Klein, saying that the concept of “disaster capitalism” is not only about the profiting from disaster, but also about the clandestine introduction of privatization in moments when people are in shock.

“What they have to do now is use cataclysmic violence and exploit people in their moment of most severe trauma, which is what has happened in New Orleans,” said Klein. “By using the disaster to further privatize the health care system, to turn the public education system into laboratories for Charter schools… shows you that we are truly up against sociopaths.”

Klein stated that the response to Hurricane Katrina showed the ineffectiveness of neoliberal policies.

“Because Katrina, the disaster that was Katrina, was the most damning indictment of the logic of the privatization and total neglect of the state — to the extent that you had a few days where some hard-line neoliberals were doubting themselves, … saying: 'Where is the State?'”

Car crash in New Orleans
In a stroke of luck — or bad luck, depending on how you look at it — Klein was able to get a first-hand account of the segregated American health care system, when, while driving quickly to avoid the curfew in New Orleans, her car smashed into another car at an intersection, continuing into the middle of a coffee shop.

“The other car was a cop car and that's how we found out we were in the South,” recounted Klein. “Everyone was okay in the end: Andy [the photographer friend] was arrested, Avi was face down on the ground being warned [about] what happens when you hit a cop [car] in the State of Louisiana, [and] I was strapped in a gurney in an ambulance trying to convince them to please not take me to a hospital.”

Klein recalled seeing frightening hospital scenes on the news, particularly those from Charity Hospital that catered to those who couldn't afford to pay for care. “I was just terrified about where they were going to take me,” said Klein, who — while slipping in and out of consciousness because of a concussion — began negotiating with the ambulance driver to let her out. “I said: Just drop me off at a corner, you know, I’ll walk. No problem. Please don't take me there.”

“They said no, no, you have to go.”

Klein recalled that she soon awoke in what looked like a spa, but soon realised it was a private hospital.

“I was in a private room in three minutes flat. I was being attended to by three nurses, a senior doctor, and a medical intern. I have never in my life got such attentive health care.

”This was in the middle of the largest natural disaster, humanitarian disaster in American history,” marvelled Klein. “The doctors were playing cards in the middle of this hospital and were being protected by an army of private security, who were there, as they called it, to keep the junkies out.”

After receiving a few stitches, Klein recounted that she wasn't able to leave the hospital because of the curfew in New Orleans, and in order to pass time, attempted to interview the intern who was tending to her.

“I asked if he worked the hurricane and he said, 'No, thank God, I wasn't on duty. I actually live in the suburbs.'”

“Did you go to any of the shelters?” Klein recalled asking the intern. “He looked at me, confused. I wasn’t trying to be a bitch,” Klein exclaimed to chuckles from the audience. “I just assumed that someone who just learned how to be a doctor would want to go to the shelters and help.

“It actually hadn't even occurred to him to go to one of the shelters, just as it hadn't occurred to any of the doctors and nurses in this hospital that, instead of being in their fortress, dealing with three or four patients … they could be out there.”

Klein blamed the development of this frame of mind on the American two-tiered health care system, which, she said, had “already accepted the idea that some lives are worth more and some are worth nothing.”

“Once you do that in your health care system, you are mentally prepared to do that in a major disaster,” noted Klein. A disaster, she added, which extends into the privatization of the health care and education systems.

“It's a hardening of hearts that's required on a daily basis to run a luxury hospital in a city like New Orleans,” continued Klein. “It's the same hardening of hearts that lets people be abandoned on their rooftops by their country.

“That's the direction that we're being taken in,” warned Klein. “The irony is that this way of thinking is being rejected around the world, at this very moment. We're not deciding we want this; they've just worn us out. We voted again and again and said again and again that this is the most pressing issue for Canadians.

“They bored us into privatizing health care. How many times can we really fight the same fight?”

Rejoining the Americas
Klein devoted the final part of her talk to the topic of Canada's participation in the neoliberal project and Canada's relationship with the rest of the Americas. “In Canada, neoliberalism is not opposed to violence, neoliberalism is itself violence,” she said. “It plays itself out on the bodies of the poor in this city once the temperature drops. It is a violent model and that's why it needs to be enclosed with violence,” added Klein, referring to the metal-wire fence and the lines of police that surrounded the Summit of the Americas conference held in Quebec City in 2001.

Klein offered one way of helping to shake off the shock of neoliberalism in Canada. “The Americas are leading the way, and their response to being padlocked by the neoliberal lobby … was to form constitutional assemblies and remake the laws,” said Klein. “We don't have to reform our constitution, we can just scrap NAFTA."

“And we have to do it,” Klein added. “It is a revolutionary moment and we had a moment here in Canada where we were, for one brief moment, part of the Americas. Not as mining companies and energy companies, exploiters and colonizers, but on an equal basis.”

Klein stated that the neoliberal project has been unmasked in the Americas, claiming its leaders have had to live under “a permanent state of siege” in the face of the growing “counter-counter revolution.” From new social movements in South America, to “Mexico's so-called president [being] sworn in at midnight in a shameful ceremony,” Klein said that a rebellion against neoliberalism is sweeping the southern hemisphere.

“In 2001,” noted Klein, “Canada showed that we could be part of this moment of effervescent rebellion. In 2001, people were in the streets in Canada, they were naming neoliberalism; they were naming the policies — privatization, regulation, cuts to our crucial social services, and now, we're going to transfer all that to the military.

“Look at how much has changed since 2001 in Latin America,” Klein added. “Almost all those leaders [who attended the Summit of the Americas] have been driven from power, many in helicopters from their presidential palaces.” In concluding her remarks, Klein stressed the imperative in resisting the neoliberal project, offering advice to those who might be feeling disillusioned.

“It is possible to lift the web if we have the determination,” said Klein. “It is possible to break this feeling that we all have, that it's impossible to turn [the neoliberal project] back…that it really has been a death by a million cuts,” said Klein.

“We have to get our courage back and we have to rejoin the Americas.”

Tor Sandberg is a former intern and a frequent reporter for rabble.ca. He is now pursuing a Masters in Environmental Studies at York University.

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