Sensing pocketbook threat, AMA Seeks To Outlaw Home Births

In some states midwifery is illegal. The way to get around that is to have an unassisted or free birth at home. Laura Shanley’s BornFree site has more information and some amazing UC videos.

Source: Amie Newman, RHRealityCheck.

Update, 2:45pm, EDT: Wanted – Ricki Lake! Apparently the AMA has issued Resolution 205 partially in response to none other than Ricki Lake and her campaign to promote midwifery and natural childbirth as a safe option for healthy women via her documentary, The Business of Being Born. Safe Birth Ohio notes that, in Britain, mainstream medical associations like the Royal College of Gynecologists have come to very different conclusions about the safety of home birth as an option for healthy, laboring women. And, yet, the AMA has swung the pendulum in the opposite direction deciding homebirth should be outlawed and that Ricki Lake is dangerous to mamas everywhere.

In an unmistakably insecure and aggressive move, the American Medical Association (AMA) adopted a resolution at its annual meeting last weekend to introduce legislation outlawing home birth – according to The Big Push for Midwives.

According to the hard-working women of The Big Push for Midwives campaign, faced with the sisyphean task of convincing the American mainstream medical establishment that midwifery is a viable option for birthing women:

“It’s unclear what penalties the AMA will seek to impose on women who choose to give birth at home, either for religious, cultural or financial reasons-or just because they didn’t make it to the hospital in time,” said Susan Jenkins, Legal Counsel for The Big Push for Midwives 2008 campaign. “What we do know, however, is that any state that enacts such a law will immediately find itself in court, since a law dictating where a woman must give birth would be a clear violation of fundamental rights to privacy and other freedoms currently protected by the U.S. Constitution.”

In other words, advocating for legislation of this kind has the eery ring of familiarity. Legislative attempts at “criminalizing motherhood” have at their core coercive control over pregnancy and childbirth. Regina McKnight was recently released from jail after a judge overturned her homicide conviction for giving birth to a stillborn baby.

Likewise, Colorado’s ballot initiative in support of a “personhood amendment” would have untold consequences for pregnant women who accidentally or otherwise miscarry a pregnancy. If a fertilized egg is conferred “personhood” status why would a miscarriage not be investigated as potential murder?

The legal issues surrounding “fundamental rights to privacy” also, of course, reverberate throughout the discussions around Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to have an abortion in this country. Those who fight rigorously to strip away womens’ legal right to an abortion somehow seem to skirt the issue of what might happen to a woman if she does choose to access an illegal abortion.

What the AMA’s resolution and these other kinds of potential and actual legislation do is to open the door to penalizing motherhood, in effect. Because most of these legislative attempts do not directly address the issue, they leave the door dangerously open to criminalizing women for making the decisions they feel are best for themselves, their fetuses and their families.

Proposing this kind of legislation would also force women to birth in government-approved settings, a scenario that seems almost unbelievable. According to the Big Push for MIdwives:

Until the AMA proposed ‘Resolution 205 on Home Deliveries,’ no state had considered legislation forcing women to deliver their babies in the hospital or limiting the choice of birth setting. Instead, states have regulated the types of midwives that may legally provide care. Currently, 22 states already license and regulate CPMs, who specialize in out-of-hospital maternity care and have received extensive training to qualify as experts in the types of risk assessment and preventive care necessary for safe and high-quality care for women who choose give birth at home. Certified Nurse Midwives (CNMs), who are trained primarily as hospital-based providers, are licensed in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

The resolution did not offer any science-based information for the AMA’s anti-midwife or anti-home birth position.

Steff Hedenkamp, Communications Coordinator for The Big Push for Midwives says, “Maternity care is a multi-billion dollar industry in the United States. So it’s no surprise to see the AMA join the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in its ongoing fight to corner the market and ensure that the only midwives able to practice legally are hospital-based midwives forced to practice under physician control. I will say, though, that I’m shocked to learn that the AMA is taking this turf battle to the next level by setting the stage for outlawing home birth itself-a direct attack on those families who choose home birth, who could be subject to criminal prosecution if the AMA has its way.”

If you’d like to help The Big Push for Midwives fight this please visit their web site and push back against attempts to “deny American families access to safe and legal midwifery care.”

Wikileaks Gets Hold of U.S. Counterinsurgency Manual

Source: JULIAN ASSANGE, Wikileaks.

How to train death squads and quash revolutions from San Salvador to Iraq

Wikileaks has released a sensitive 219 page US military counterinsurgency manual. The manual, Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces (1994, 2004), may be critically described as “what we learned about running death squads and propping up corrupt government in Latin America and how to apply it to other places“. Its contents are both history defining for Latin America and, given the continued role of US Special Forces in the suppression of insurgencies, including in Iraq and Afghanistan, history making.

The leaked manual, which has been verified with military sources, is the official US Special Forces doctrine for Foreign Internal Defense or FID.

FID operations are designed to prop up “friendly” governments facing popular revolution or guerilla insurgency. FID interventions are often covert or quasi-covert due to the unpopular nature of the governments being supported (“In formulating a realistic policy for the use of advisors, the commander must carefully gauge the psychological climate of the HN [Host Nation] and the United States.”)

The manual directly advocates training paramilitaries, pervasive surveillance, censorship, press control and restrictions on labor unions & political parties. It directly advocates warrantless searches, detainment without charge and (under varying circumstances) the suspension of habeas corpus. It directly advocates employing terrorists or prosecuting individuals for terrorism who are not terrorists, running false flag operations and concealing human rights abuses from journalists. And it repeatedly advocates the use of subterfuge and “psychological operations” (propaganda) to make these and other “population & resource control” measures more palatable.

The content has been particularly informed by the long United States involvement in El Salvador.

In 2005 a number of credible media reports suggested the Pentagon was intensely debating “the Salvador option” for Iraq.^[1]. According to the New York Times Magazine:

The template for Iraq today is not Vietnam, with which it has often been compared, but El Salvador, where a right-wing government backed by the United States fought a leftist insurgency in a 12-year war beginning in 1980. The cost was high — more than 70,000 people were killed, most of them civilians, in a country with a population of just six million. Most of the killing and torturing was done by the army and the right-wing death squads affiliated with it. According to an Amnesty International report in 2001, violations committed by the army and associated groups included ‘‘extrajudicial executions, other unlawful killings, ‘disappearances’ and torture. . . . Whole villages were targeted by the armed forces and their inhabitants massacred.’’ As part of President Reagan’s policy of supporting anti-Communist forces, hundreds of millions of dollars in United States aid was funneled to the Salvadoran Army, and a team of 55 Special Forces advisers, led for several years by Jim Steele, trained front-line battalions that were accused of significant human rights abuses.

The same article states James Steele and many other former Central American Special Forces “military advisors” have now been appointed at a high level to Iraq.

In 1993 a United Nations truth commission on El Salvador, which examined 22,000 atrocities that occurred during the twelve-year civil war, attributed 85 percent of the abuses to the US-backed El Salvador military and its paramilitary death squads.

It is worth noting what the US Ambassador to El Salvador, Robert E. White (now the president for the Center for International Policy) had to say as early as 1980, in State Department documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act:

The major, immediate threat to the existence of this government is the right-wing violence. In the city of San Salvador, the hired thugs of the extreme right, some of them well-trained Cuban and Nicaraguan terrorists, kill moderate left leaders and blow up government buildings. In the countryside, elements of the security forces torture and kill the campesinos, shoot up their houses and burn their crops. At least two hundred refugees from the countryside arrive daily in the capital city. This campaign of terror is radicalizing the rural areas just as surely as Somoza’s National Guard did in Nicaragua. Unfortunately, the command structure of the army and the security forces either tolerates or encourages this activity. These senior officers believe or pretend to believe that they are eliminating the guerillas.^[2]

Selected extracts follow. Note that the manual is 219 pages long and contains substantial material throughout. These extracts should merely be considered representative. Emphasis has been added for further selectivity. The full manual can be found at US Special Forces counter-insurgency manual FM 31-20-3.

Texas Republican vows to fight D.C.’s “shocking” nude statue problem!

Hilarious comment about this story from WhatReallyHappened:

Can’t do a thing about the economy.

Can’t do a thing about the war.

Can’t bring the jobs back.

Can’t revive the dead or heal the crippled soldiers.

But by golly the GOP stands opposed to all the naked titties in the capitol city, getting them out of the public eye and back in the congressional private offices and back rooms where they belong!

Source: Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts, Washington Post.

Washington is a town filled with boobs.

They’re everywhere, from the bare-breasted ladies who decorate the fountain at Dupont Circle to the peekaboo statue in the Justice Department’s Great Hall to the countless nudes in our museums. But while those of us who live here hardly blink at the public nudity, it can shock some of our visitors. Such was the case for Robert Hurt, who last week tried to add the issue of artistic indecency in the nation’s capital to the platform of the Texas GOP.

“You don’t have nude art on your front porch,” the Dallas Morning News quoted the delegate as telling the platform committee at the state party convention. “So why is it important to have that in the common places of Washington, D.C.?”

Hurt, 54, a Kerrville, Tex., rancher and father of 14, told us in a phone interview he first came to Washington a decade ago for a gathering of the evangelical Promise Keepers on the Mall. “It was probably not much different than ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’ going to Beverly Hills,” he joked. At the National Gallery, he was appalled to see statues of unclothed people. “I found it very inappropriate,” he said. Returning a few years later, he discovered Arlington Memorial Bridge, flanked by the bare-chested figures of Valor and Sacrifice.

“The Lady Godiva thing — that’s what it conjured up, and that’s not what our country’s about,” he said.

Hurt notified his elected officials of his concerns but believes nothing was done. While he said he respects free speech, “I believe art affects a country indirectly. I have been studying the decline of morals in this country. It’s sending the wrong message to children that nudity is fine, that nakedness is fine. . . . There are degrees of vulgarity, and it opens up the door for the other stuff.”

The platform committee did not adopt Hurt’s recommendation on Washington nudity (nor his proposal to extend the 22nd Amendment — presidential term limits — to spouses). But Hurt said he’ll pursue the issue, possibly with another trip here to videotape the evidence. “I’m not going to stop until I succeed. I’m prepared for a long fight.”

Reverse Henry-Fordism

Source: Ernest Partridge, OpEd News.

There are no sellers without buyers.

That’s the first law of practical economics. Everyone knows this to be true, whether or not one has ever taken a course in Economics. Everyone except, apparently, a few Ph.D economists who seem to forget this rule when they are hired by the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, etc., from which they migrate, back and forth, between offices in Republican administrations and these right-wing think tanks.

For these worthies, the “first law” is replaced by the dogmas of deregulation, “trickle-down” and market fundamentalism: impoverish the masses, throw money at the rich who will then invest it, and then “the invisible hand” of the unregulated free market will bring forth a cornucopia of goods and services.

Never mind that there will be few if any buyers for these consumer goodies.

Henry Ford saw the fallacy of such a policy when he raised the wages of his workers. His competitors in the auto industry were aghast. “Why did you do that?,” they asked. Ford is said to have replied, “If I don’t pay them more, who will buy my cars?”

It took awhile, but Henry Ford was eventually proved to be right. In 1935, in the depths of the great depression, Congress passed the Wagner Act which greatly enhanced the power of labor unions to bargain collectively on behalf of their members. And after World War II, the G.I. Bill allowed millions of returning war veterans to go to college and then to enter the work force as trained professionals. The ranks of the middle class swelled, and as a result of this gain in disposable income, so did the nation’s economy. In an ongoing and sustainable economic symbiosis, the investments of the capitalists “trickled down” to increase the worker’s productivity, income and purchasing power, which in turn “percolated up” to provide generous returns on these investments. Like the fabled golden goose, this economic arrangement promised a perpetual production of “golden eggs” of shared prosperity.

Then came Reaganomics, which allowed the ruling oligarchs with their insatiable appetites for “more, still more,” to dismantle the unions, to cut back workers’ salaries and benefits, to ship manufacturing and management jobs overseas, to starve the tax base through loopholes, regressive tax rates, and off-shore incorporations, and to strip the government of its Constitutionally stipulated function of regulating commerce. (Article One, Section Eight). As most citizens have consequently drifted toward poverty and serfdom, and the government has been taken “to the bathtub” to be drowned, the upward “percolation” has been drying up. Rather than protect and perpetuate the economic system that produced their wealth, the privileged class is cooking and devouring the golden goose.

Senator Bernie Sanders reports the resulting plight of the American middle class:

The economy is doing great, except for 90% of the people in the economy. The reality is that we have the hollowing out of the American economy. Median family income declined by $2500 in the last seven years. 8 million people lost their health insurance. 3 million people lost their pensions. This is a strong economy? You’ve gotta be insane to believe that. Meanwhile, the richest one percent of the population possesses more wealth than the bottom ninety percent. (See also G. William Domhoff: “Wealth, Income and Power”).

This is how a once-flourishing economy shrivels up and dies: the few who own and control the nation’s wealth refuse to share that wealth with the many who produce that wealth.

Ahead lies ruin for rich and poor alike.

For those with eyes to see, and a willingness to see, the consequences of this unconstrained and unregulated greed are apparent and irrefutable: a constriction of the economy which, unless met immediately with decisive and painful countermeasures, must lead to economic collapse. We can expect no such countermeasures from the Bush (“the fundamentals are sound”) administration. With the bursting of “the housing bubble,” consumer debt has reached its limit: the national credit card is maxed out. Under Bush, the cost of food has doubled, and of gas has tripled. (Neither food nor fuel are counted in Bush’s phony Consumer Price Index, which consequently understates the gravity of current inflation). As the average family spends more on necessities such as food, medical care, home heating and transportation to and from work, “luxuries” simply must drop out. No more vacations. Fewer trips to the movies and to restaurants. Fewer purchases of new cars (the old one will have to do for a few more years). Businesses fail, workers are fired, stocks plunge, unemployment rises, the dollar falls, the cost of imported goods (which means, due to outsourcing, most consumer goods) rise. Still less disposable income to pay for higher priced goods and services. More businesses fail, more workers are fired, etc. Down, down, down, goes the spiral.

“No sellers without buyers.” It’s so obvious, so indisputable, even tautological. How can anyone doubt this fundamental rule of practical economics, much less promote policies that defy it? Answer: because just as history is written by the victors, political/economic dogma is written and taught by those with great wealth and power. And anti-government, trickle-down, market absolutism are the dogmas of those who own and control the nation’s wealth: dogmas that Friedrich Nietzsche called “a master morality,” and that John Kenneth Galbraith characterized as a “moral justification for selfishness.”

History provides numerous examples of such “justifications” by those privileged with wealth and power. Out of the middle ages came the doctrine of “the Divine right” of royalty to rule in luxury. This was supplanted by the Protestant claim that personal wealth was the sign of Divine grace. In the gilded age of the late nineteenth century, the Robber Barons embraced the theory of “social Darwinism;” their wealth proved their superior “fitness” to survive. And now we have the regressive dogmas of Reaganism, of Bushism, and, let’s admit it, to some degree at least, of Clintonism: “trickle down,” unconstrained capitalism, the wealth of the few as the key to the wealth of all others. “The rising tide” that lifts all yachts, the regressives assure us, lifts the dingys as well.

The fundamental error of “trickle down” economics is not that it is false, but that it is a pernicious half-truth. As noted above, in a healthy economy, investments do in fact yield results that “trickle down” to the benefit of the workers and the public at large. But as Abraham Lincoln correctly noted in his first inaugural address, “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed.” Thus “trickled-down” benefits of investment presuppose the “percolated-up” wealth that is produced by labor. An economic theory that touts “trickle-down” benefits of investment to the neglect of the production of labor and the well-being of the workers, is a theory that must fail in its application.

The doctrines of regressive economics – “trickle down,” market absolutism, minimalist government – are dogmas in the literal sense of that word: like creationism and dialectical materialism (Marxism-Leninism), they are believed and promulgated independently of evidence and practical experience. If they are applied and fail, there is always an excuse at hand that does not allow a suspicion that the dogma itself may be flawed. In contrast, progressive economics is empirical, experimental and pragmatic: constant in ends, and adaptable in means. As with numerous schemes in FDR’s New Deal, the progressive policy is tried and, if it fails, it is discarded and a new approach is attempted, and so on until policy is found that “works.” (For an expansion of this point, see my “Beautiful Theory vs. Baffling Reality.”).

The public must reject these false dogmas of regressive economics, and the sooner the better; better for both the public in general and for the oligarchs. The longer that these dogmas dictate public economic policy, the greater will be the fall and the greater will be the retaliation of the people against their oppressors.

No untried utopian schemes need to be invented to replace the current kleptocracy. Only a restoration of a system that has proven itself in the past: a regulated capitalism combined with a social democracy dedicated to the welfare of all citizens and founded on the consent of an informed public as manifested in honest, accurate and verifiable elections. And that latter condition presupposes the existence of a free, independent and diverse media, along with a public education system staffed with well-paid, competent and dedicated teachers.

In short, what is required is a return to the liberalism – “the New Deal,” “The Fair Deal,” “The New Frontier,” “The Great Society” – that Ronald Reagan and the regressives have abolished in the past twenty-seven years. The programs and policies of Reagan’s liberal predecessors were all imperfect, as are all human endeavors, but unlike the regressive politics of today, these earlier administrations had within themselves the means of adaptation, correction and improvement.

We the people know the way out of the political and economic morass in which we find ourselves. But if we are to escape, we must do so ourselves. We can expect no help from the corporate media or from the politicians of both political parties that have led us into the present crisis.

(Note: These ideas are presented and defended at greater length in “Remedial Economics for Regressives;” Chapter 9 of my book in progress, Conscience of a Progressive).

U.S. hid Guantanamo detainees from Red Cross

Further proof that they knew they were doing something wrong.

Source: Warren P. Strobel, McClatchy Newspapers.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. military hid the locations of suspected terrorist detainees and concealed harsh treatment to avoid the scrutiny of the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to documents that a Senate committee released Tuesday.

“We may need to curb the harsher operations while ICRC is around. It is better not to expose them to any controversial techniques,” Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, a military lawyer who’s since retired, said during an October 2002 meeting at the Guantanamo Bay prison to discuss employing interrogation techniques that some have equated with torture. Her comments were recorded in minutes of the meeting that were made public Tuesday. At that same meeting, Beaver also appeared to confirm that U.S. officials at another detention facility — Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan — were using sleep deprivation to “break” detainees well before then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved that technique. “True, but officially it is not happening,” she is quoted as having said.

A third person at the meeting, Jonathan Fredman, the chief counsel for the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, disclosed that detainees were moved routinely to avoid the scrutiny of the ICRC, which keeps tabs on prisoners in conflicts around the world.

“In the past when the ICRC has made a big deal about certain detainees, the DOD (Defense Department) has ‘moved’ them away from the attention of the ICRC,” Fredman said, according to the minutes.

The document, along with two dozen others, shows that top administration officials pushed relentlessly for tougher interrogation methods in the belief that terrorism suspects were resisting interrogation.

It’s unclear from the documents whether the Pentagon moved the detainees from one place to another or merely told the ICRC they were no longer present at a facility.

Fredman of the CIA also appeared to be advocating the use of techniques harsher than those authorized by military field guides “If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong,” the minutes report Fredman saying at one point.

Beaver testified that she didn’t recall making the comment about avoiding “harsher operations” while ICRC representatives were around, but she said she probably was referring to the need to conduct extended periods of interrogations of detainees without disruption.

The minutes of the Guantanamo meeting were among 25 documents released Tuesday by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee and is leading a probe of the origins of cruel treatment of detainees in President Bush’s “war on terrorism.”

The administration overrode or ignored objections from all four military services and from criminal investigators, who warned that the practices would imperil their ability to prosecute the suspects. In one prophetic e-mail on Oct. 28, 2002, Mark Fallon, then the deputy commander of the Pentagon’s Criminal Investigation Task Force, wrote a colleague: “This looks like the kind of stuff Congressional hearings are made of. … Someone needs to be considering how history will look back at this.” The objections from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines prompted Navy Capt. Jane Dalton, legal adviser to the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, to begin a review of the proposed techniques.

But Dalton, who’s now retired, told the hearing Tuesday that the review was aborted quickly. Myers, she said, took her aside and told her that then-Defense Department general counsel William Haynes “does not want this … to proceed.” Haynes testified that he didn’t recall the objections of the four uniformed services.

Officials in Rumsfeld’s office and at Guantanamo developed the techniques they sought by reverse-engineering a long-standing military program designed to train U.S. soldiers and aviators to resist interrogation if they’re captured.

The program, known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, was never meant to guide U.S. interrogation of foreign detainees.

An official in Haynes’ office sought information about SERE as early as July 2002, the documents show. Two months later, a delegation from Guantanamo attended SERE training at Fort Bragg, N.C. Levin said, “The truth is that senior officials in the United States government sought information on aggressive techniques, twisted the law to create the appearance of their legality and authorized their use against detainees.” The documents confirm that a delegation of senior administration lawyers visited Guantanamo in September 2002 for briefings on intelligence-gathering there. The delegation included David Addington, a top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney; Haynes; acting CIA counsel John Rizzo; and Michael Chertoff, then the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and now the homeland security secretary. Few of the Republicans at Tuesday’s hearing defended the Bush administration’s detainee programs. Guidance provided by administration lawyers “will go down in history as some of the most irresponsible and shortsighted legal analysis ever provided to our nation’s military intelligence communities,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C..

Regarding the ICRC, the United States long has complained that other countries such as China or the old Soviet Union prevented independent access to prisoners or made their conditions look better when outsiders were inspecting. The Bush administration appears to have engaged in similar practices, however.

Bernard Barrett, the ICRC’s Washington spokesman, said, “We knew that we did not always have full access to all detainees. It was a fairly serious issue.” “It’s been addressed,” he said. “We are confident we now have access to all detainees at Guantanamo.”

BEST OF WEB: The Wide Divide: You Are Being Ripped Off

Source: Steve Elliot, OpEdNews.com.

Here’s what’s wrong with corporate America, folks. You are being badly ripped off.

This “wide divide,” this economic disparity, is what happens when you rely on unbridled capitalism and “market forces” to set wages, and count on the fairness and generosity of our corporate masters.

©New York Times
Average worker pay compared to CEO pay

By 2004, the top 10 percent of executives earned at least 350 times the average worker’s pay, up from 122 times in 1990 and 74 times in 1950. Talk about trickle-down economics!

Next time someone tells you, “If the government would just leave business alone to do business, things would take care of themselves,” you can remember this chart and its message: The private sector has BEEN left alone by government, when it comes to “letting wages find their natural level.” That area is completely unregulated on the top end, with minimum wage laws being the only restraints on the bottom end.

Here’s the real-world result of those “market forces” of which conservatives (yes, even — hell, especially — the libertarian kind represented by Ron Paul) are so fond.

Reality check: The laissez faire approach to the economy has already been tried, people. See the history of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in America: Robber barons, greedy monopolists, exploitation of workers, child labor, sweat shops, environmental despoilation in the name of profits, economic suppression of the working class, all for the miserly profits of a few big tycoons.

Base an entire society and economic system on human greed and the acquisition of wealth and material goods, and this is what happens. The powerful exploit the weak. The rich buy political influence, and the working class gets an insulting pittance with a super-sized helping of condescension. Should anyone be surprised?

Here’s what you have in America today, as a result of trusting corporations to do the right thing: Working men and women are out of luck. If working class families have anything besides crushing debt, for the most part, it’s their houses, for the lucky ones. And holy hell, look what’s happening to the housing market. For the first time in two decades, real estate values are dropping like a stone, and the bottom’s not in sight yet.

Debt’s piling up. Under the Bush administration, credit card companies have been deregulated and unleashed to practice their particularly nasty brand of predatory lending and interest rate hiking, and it’s tougher than ever to declare bankruptcy.

There’s nothing in the bank for a rainy day, for a medical emergency, or worse, for retirement. And due to the Wal-Martization of jobs in corporate America, every year, more and more people don’t even have health insurance or a retirement plan.

What do I mean by Wal-Martization? Well, when a company increases its profits by underpaying its workers and by keeping most or all of them “part-time,” thus dodging requirements to provide bedrock benefits like insurance and retirement — and gets away with it! — you can damn well believe that other corporations are watching and learning. Welcome to the new America.

“A persistent slide in work-based health insurance is largely to blame for a 2.2 million rise in the number of uninsured in America,” according to policy experts.

United States Census Bureau figures released last year show that the number of people without coverage increased to 47 million from 2005 to 2006. The jump is “appalling,” said American Medical Association President-elect Nancy H. Nielsen, MD, PhD. “I was so disappointed, because we have had years of people talking about this problem.”

The corporate fat cats make billions of dollars cutting the international deals whose end result is making workers unemployed or underemployed and thanking their lucky stars for a $15 buck-an-hour job wearing an apron at Wal-Mart or flipping burgers at McDonalds. This, while the CEOs and upper management play golf, cultivate decadent habits and mistreat the illegal immigrant yard help at their palatial estates.

Meanwhile, the corporate bigwigs want you to continue to vote against your own economic interests by supporting the party that issues huge tax cuts for the rich while trickling pennies on the working class. “But who’d be stupid enough to vote that way?” you might ask.

People who are scared can be convinced to do stupid things. If you can rig the system so that people are scared of each other, scared of terrorists, scared on the issues of race and gender and sexual orientation and ethnicity, it’s easy to control them. Teach people to fear and hate diversity rather than celebrating it, and you can get them to march lockstep right into their own economic doom.

Teach them that speaking out leads to consequences. Teach them that they should unquestioningly accept a government which spies on their phone conversations, email, and text messages, and you’ll have a populace too intimidated to stand up for themselves. Teach them that under the Patriot Act, any deviation from the plans your corporate masters have for you can be defined as “terrorism,” and you can be locked up indefinitely without knowing if or when you’ll be charged or tried.

Pass laws that make it easy to outsource their jobs to other countries should they demand decent benefits and living wages and safe work environments. Keep that threat hanging over their heads and they’ll remain compliant.

Teach the workforce that they should accept a corporate culture that is not only concerned with your productivity in the workplace, but which also makes it the business of the company what you choose to do in your off time. Teach them that they should accept the invasion of their privacy and the confiscation of the very fluids of their bodies as some kind of chemical loyalty oath, and that if they choose to indulge in substances that don’t bear the seal of corporate approval and corporate profits, they can lose their livelihood.

This is what happens when the market drives the economy. Things will be different come the Revolution.

Japanese Lawmaker takes 9/11 doubts global

Source: John Spiri, The Japan Times.

In a September 2003 article for The Guardian newspaper, Michael Meacher, who served as Tony Blair’s environment minister from May 1997 to June 2003, shocked the establishment by calling the global war on terrorism “bogus.” Even more controversially, he implied that the U.S. government either allowed 9/11 to happen, or played some role in the destruction wrought that day. Besides Meacher, few politicians have publicly questioned America’s official 9/11 narrative – until Diet member Yukihisa Fujita.

In January 2008 Fujita, a member of the Democratic Party of Japan, asked the Japanese Parliament and Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda to explain gaping holes in the official 9/11 story that various groups – including those who call themselves the “911 Truth Movement” – claim to have exposed.

Fujita, along with a growing number of individuals – including European and American politicians – are leading a charge to conduct a thorough, independent investigation of what happened on Sept. 11, 2001.

“Three or four years ago I saw some Internet videos like ‘Loose Change’ and ‘911 In Plane Site’ and I began to ask questions,” Fujita said in an interview, “but I still couldn’t believe this was done by anyone but al-Qaida.

“Last year I watched more videos and read books written by professor David Ray Griffin (a professor emeritus of philosophy of religion and theology at Claremont Graduate University who wrote the most famous Truth Movement book, ‘The New Pearl Harbor’) about things such as the collapse of World Trade Center No. 7. This building, which was never hit by an airplane, collapsed straight down. Between the videos showing the way it fell, and the numerous reports of explosions, many are convinced that this building was demolished.”

Fujita’s presentation to the Diet and Fukuda focused a great deal on yet another aspect of 9/11 that now quite a few around the world find extremely suspicious: the Pentagon crash.

“I don’t think (a) 767 could have hit the Pentagon,” Fujita reckons. “There is no evidence of the plane itself. Almost nothing identifiable was left on the lawn or inside. The official story says the entire plane disintegrated, but the jet engines in particular were very strong (two 6-ton titanium steel turbine engines). And the damage to the building is much smaller than the size of the supposed airplane. The official claims just don’t fit the facts.”

While some label that claim “wacky” and label critics of the official 9/11 story “conspiracy theorists,” Fujita has impressive company. For one, former Maj. Gen. Albert Stubblebine, who was commanding general of U.S. Army Intelligence and Security until 1984, is quoted on the “Patriots Question 911″ Web site as saying, “I look at the hole in the Pentagon and I look at the size of an airplane that was supposed to have hit the Pentagon. And I said, ‘The plane does not fit in that hole.’

“So what did hit the Pentagon? What hit it? Where is it? What’s going on?”

Fujita urges the Bush administration to put the issue to rest simply by showing videos that show the plane that hit the Pentagon. Instead, only a few grainy images have been released to the public. More disconcertingly, many videos taken by surrounding businesses were confiscated by the FBI immediately after the Pentagon explosion.

The Pennsylvania crash, like the Pentagon explosion, also yielded virtually no recognizable plane parts at the crash site. Rather, small pieces of debris were found up to 10 km away. The official story – that the plane “vaporized” when it hit the ground – is inconsistent with the evidence left by every other plane crash in the history of aviation.

Plane crashes always yield plane fragments, Fujita explained, which can be identified by the plane’s serial number, but that’s not the case for the four planes which crashed on 9/11. Strangely, the U.S. government managed to produce passports and DNA samples of individuals killed, but no identifiable plane parts. In an online article entitled “Physics 911,” 34-year U.S. Air Force veteran Col. George Nelson notes, “It seems . . . that all potential evidence was deliberately kept hidden from public view.“

Fujita has largely relied on the voluminous amount of video and written material published in books and on the Internet, including the “Patriots Question 911″ site, on which hundreds of allegations are leveled against the official story by senior officials from the military, intelligence services, law enforcement, and government, as well as pilots, engineers, architects, firefighters and others.

While not many other Japanese have taken an interest in this story, a few notable individuals besides Fujita have disputed the U.S. government’s version, including Akira Dojimaru, a Japanese writer living in Spain. In his book, written in Japanese, “The Anatomy of the WTC Collapses: Flaws in the U.S. Government’s Account,” he uses photos, drawings and blueprints of the WTC buildings to back up his claim that buildings one and two could not have fallen in the manner they fell due to the plane crashes and subsequent fires. “And even if it was conceivable that they could fall due to the damage that day,” Dojimaru wrote in an e-mail, “they never would have collapsed horizontally, and would have scattered steel beams and smashed concrete much farther than 100 meters.”

For Fujita, it was Dojimaru’s meticulous research, combined with the aforementioned Web sites, that convinced him the official story was nothing more than a house of cards.

One book that Fujita found unconvincing was the “9/11 Commission Report.”

“The head of the 9/11 Commission is close with (U.S. Secretary of State) Condoleezza Rice and (Vice President Dick) Cheney. One commission member (Sen. Max Cleland) resigned, saying the White House did not disclose enough information.“

On Democracy Now’s radio show in March 2004, Cleland even went as far as to say, “This White House wants to cover it (the facts of 9/11) up.”

More recently, a New York Times article in January quoted Thomas Kean, the chairman of the 9/11 Commission, as saying that “the CIA destroyed videotaped interrogations of Qaeda operatives,” and concluded that that “obstructed our investigation.”

Following the lead of Fujita, Karen Johnson, a conservative Republican senator from Arizona, has publicly voiced her doubts about 9/11 before the U.S. Senate. Inspired by Blair Gadsby – who on May 27 started a hunger strike to bring attention to the 911 Truth Movement – Johnson, like Fujita, is encouraging politicians to conduct a thorough, independent investigation.

Fujita, who worked for more than 20 years for the international conflict resolution NGO group MRA and the Japanese Association for Aid and Relief (AAR), has become something of a global cause celebre since his extraordinary questioning at the Diet. In February 2008, he participated in a conference at the European Parliament led by EMP Guilietto Chiesa calling for an independent commission of inquiry into 9/11. While in Europe, he met with NGOs from 11 European countries to discuss 9/11.

One month later Fujita spoke at the “Truth Now” conference in Sydney, Australia. One focus of these meetings was the Italian documentary “ZERO,” whose release will mark the first time the 9/11 movement’s message has moved from the “cyberworld” to public venues. Fujita has also spoken about his 9/11 doubts on two U.S. radio shows, one hosted by Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, and another by Alex Jones of infowars.com.

He is also making ripples in Japan. Fujita was featured in a March 2 article by well-known critic Takao Iwami on “How to deal with doubts about 9/11″ in the Sunday Mainichi weekly. He was also featured in a March 26 Spa! magazine piece headlined, “European conference discusses 9/11 doubts.”

However, not everyone is enthralled with Fujita’s bold line of questioning.

“One person showed strong anger towards me,” Fujita noted, “and another (Japanese person) threatened my life. A few others advised me to be extremely careful.”

Still, Fujita says, the vast majority – around 95 percent – have been positive.

“One man said, ‘You’re a true samurai.’ Another man came all the way from Okayama in western Japan to thank me personally. And among other Parliament members, I received only words of encouragement and support.”

While in Europe, Fujita met British former MP Meacher, who dared to question the official story when it was still considered gospel. Time, the Iraq war and well-sourced online videos are emboldening many people, including politicians, to step out of the cyberworld and voice their doubts in newspapers, magazines, theaters, and – most importantly – government chambers.

“Now Blair is gone, and Bush will soon be gone,” Meacher told Fujita. “Our time is coming.”

David Gumpert: When Propaganda Masquerades as Science: Is the Next Step for CDC to Seek Raw Milk “Undesirables”?

Source: The Complete Patient.

In the old Soviet Union, political dissidents were, with the backing of the medical establishment, routinely committed to psychiatric hospitals and injected with powerful mind-altering drugs that took much of the fight out of them.

I raise this example of the brute involvement of a country’s scientific establishment into the political process because I just finished a close reading of the Centers for Disease Control’s report about the illnesses affecting six California children in September 2006, which were supposedly caused by raw milk. While I wondered a few days ago about the timing of its publication—on the eve of hearings June 24 about SB 201 replacing AB 1735—now I have now doubt that this involves much more than timing. This is a political document, not a public health document. Indeed, it is really propaganda, because it is designed solely to mislead and to push a particular political agenda. Here’s how:

1. It rewrites history. Government propagandists love to distort history. The CDC paper starts by saying that six California kids became ill in Sept. 2006. “As a result of this and other outbreaks, California enacted legislation (AB 1735), which took effect January 1, 2008, setting a limit of 10 coliforms/mL for raw milk sold to consumers.” As I read this, I could almost imagine politicians in the California legislature debating and discussing the illnesses, and assessing whether a coliform limit might be the answer. Of course, as we all know, there was no debate, nothing even close to a debate. AB 1735 was enacted with barely a whisper—that coming from the California Department of Food and Agriculture. The state’s key legislators have openly acknowledged that they were duped by AB 1735.
2. It relies on a double standard. The paper argues that 25 states that allow the sale of raw milk “report more outbreaks of foodborne disease attributed to raw milk than those states that have stricter regulations.” It notes: “During 1973–1992, raw milk was implicated in 46 reported outbreaks. Nearly 90% of these outbreaks (40 out of 46) occurred in states that allow the sale of raw milk, suggesting that even the regulated sale of raw milk might not be adequate to prevent associated illnesses.” Now, even allowing for the likelihood that not all those outbreaks were really from raw milk, supposing we substituted the terms ground beef or salami or shellfish for raw milk. Wouldn’t there be more cases of foodborne illness in states that allowed the sale of ground beef, salami, or shellfish than those that didn’t?
3. It uses “science” to pursue a purely political agenda. In addition to rewriting history, the paper in two places blames the absence of a coliform standard for causing the illnesses. “At the time of this outbreak, California did not have a coliform standard for milk sold raw to consumers,” it states early in the paper. As part of its “Editorial note” at the end, it concludes: “These findings suggest that if raw milk had been subject to the same coliform standard as pasteurized milk in California, milk from dairy A might have been excluded from sale and this outbreak might have been averted.”

All this comes on top of dubious evidence—one child didn’t show E.coli 0157:H7, one “she” is a “he”, and one child says he/she didn’t consume raw milk. I wonder if maybe we need to send the child who refuses to admit drinking raw milk for “re-education” in a psychiatric ward. You think that’s a wild idea? Here’s how the paper concludes: “Because illnesses associated with raw milk continue to occur, additional efforts are needed to educate consumers and dairy farmers about illnesses associated with raw milk and raw colostrum.” Sure, brand all raw milk drinkers as troublemakers and send them off to a psychiatric ward.

***

New European chemical safety regulations reach around the world

Source: The Ethicurean.

The European Union is changing the rules for chemicals, requiring that industry demonstrate that a chemical is safe before using it in consumer products such as cosmetics, food packaging, water bottles, and durable goods. This approach, sometimes called “the precautionary principle,” is in stark contrast to the approach in the United States, where a chemical is considered “innocent until proven carcinogenic.”* (A detailed description of the history and implementation of the precautionary principle can be found in a newsletter from the Cornell University Program on Breast Cancer and Environmental Risk Factors in PDF format.)

Although the regulations apply to chemicals used within the E.U., the global economy means that they will have impact far beyond the E.U. borders. An article by Lyndsey Layton in the Washington Post last week explains some of the implications and the response of the U.S. chemical industry.

As part of the regulation’s implementation, the E.U. will create a list of “substances of very high concern” for chemicals that are suspected to cause cancer or other serious health problems. One of the chemicals expected to be on the list is perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), an ingredient in teflon that Elanor wrote about recently.

To further understand the situation, it is helpful to revisit the coverage of “Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What’s at Stake for American Power,” by Mark Schapiro of the Center for Investigative Reporting. In the span of a few weeks, Schapiro had a long article at Harper’s Magazine, was interviewed on Fresh Air, appeared on KQED’s Forum, answered five questions in the San Francisco Chronicle, and was interviewed by Michael Pollan in Berkeley. Although I haven’t read the book, I heard the radio programs and attended the Pollan event.

Some of Schapiro’s findings and arguments that I found most interesting:

• The government is not testing consumer products for safety. The government does not test the vast majority of chemicals used in consumer products, nor does it require industry to test them. The lipstick, shampoo, baby toys and other consumer products that you put on your body or that your child puts in his or her mouth contain numerous chemicals that have not been screened for safety. One reason is that an intentional loophole in the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1970 allowed tens of thousands of chemicals to be grandfathered onto the approved list. Schapiro stated that 90% of the chemicals in use today are on the grandfathered list.
• The world is looking to Europe for guidance. Consequently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency are becoming irrelevant on the global stage. China is adopting E.U. rules on electronics.
• U.S. companies are changing their formulas to comply with E.U. regulations. If those products are then sold in the U.S., this would be good news for U.S. consumers. In some cases, the companies are discontinuing the “U.S.” formulation.
• The U.S. is becoming a toxic dumping ground (compared to the E.U., at least — certainly not compared to the massive e-waste dumping in China and Africa). Chinese toy factories often have two assembly lines: one produces phthalate-free toys for the E.U., the other produces toys with pthalates for the United States (phthalates are a class of chemicals used to make plastics soft and pliable and have been linked to numerous health problems — enough to lead to a ban in the E.U.). Schapiro recounts cases of products that were rejected for import in the E.U. for overly high concentration of phthalates or some other chemical, and then shipped to the U.S., where there are no restrictions.
• Environmental safety regulations lead to innovation. European companies are becoming the leaders in ‘green chemistry,’ while American companies continue stubbornly to defend the same old chemistry, spending lots of money on lawyers and lobbyists instead of chemists and engineers.

In each of the links I provide above, Schapiro tells an important story about how little we know about the chemicals to which we are exposed every day and how global economic power is shifting to the European Union.

Also of note is the Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep cosmetic safety database, a huge collection of information about the mysterious ingredients in your personal care products and cosmetics.

* I first heard the “innocent until proven carcinogenic” phrase uttered by Michael Pollan during the interview with Mark Schapiro mentioned above.