How our vegan diet made us ill

Lots of recovering vegans I know tell me that they have mad cravings that lead them to binge on meat and whole-fat dairy for months or even years, as they make up for all the nutrients they lost out on. Like the woman in this story, taking all the right supplements didn’t help them stay in optimal health either.

Children often crave high-fat food like butter, because they need fat to develop properly. It’s alarming to see the resurgence of rickets in the last twenty years, as people are told to shun high-fat dairy and the sun. Tooth decay is often a sign that the body lacks nutrients, which all the brushing and cleaning in the world won’t prevent. In fact, it’s possible to have an excellent diet and teeth absent any dental hygiene, as Weston Price documented in Nutrition and Physical Degeneration.

Source: Natasha Mann, The Independent.

Holly Paige thought her family’s food regime would boost their health – but stick-thin legs and rotten teeth made her think again

One morning over breakfast, Holly Paige looked at her daughter and realised things weren’t right. Lizzie should have been flourishing. Instead, her cheeks were pinched, she was small for her age, and although she had skinny arms and legs, her belly was big and swollen. When Lizzie smiled, Paige suddenly noticed her upper front teeth were pitted with holes.

“I was absolutely horrified,” recalls Paige.

At the time, Paige was feeding them what she thought was the most nutritious diet possible. They had been raw vegans for three years, and ate plenty of fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds, grains, soya and pulses, but no meat, fish or dairy. According to the raw-food doctrine, Lizzie and Bertie, then three and four-and-a-half, should have been brimming with good health. But Paige’s mothering instinct was on the alert.

“I knew something was wrong, but I couldn’t put a finger on it,” says Paige, 45. “They were two sizes behind in clothes. Of course, children come in all different shapes and sizes, but their growth seemed to be slowing further. I have two older children so I had their development to measure Lizzie and Bertie’s against.”

There were other oddities: “I remember going to the supermarket and buying butter for my older children. Lizzie, who had never had butter in her life, would grab the packet and gnaw into it,” says Paige. “It was really disconcerting. I would be thinking, ‘What is going on? Here is this purely fed child – why would she need to do this?’ I was so brainwashed into thinking dairy products are bad for you.”

When she took Lizzie and Bertie to her health visitor, she didn’t seem too concerned. “She said they were in the low percentile, but thought they were OK,” says Paige. “Yet I knew the children weren’t growing. I could sense that there was something wrong. It felt wrong.”

Finally, Paige stumbled across the answer in an old vitamin book. Although she has no medical confirmation, she believes the family had symptoms of vitamin D- and protein-deficiency. “I felt like such an idiot. I got the information from a book I’d had sitting around on my shelf for 20 years.”

The discovery brought a swift end to her experience of veganism. In Totnes, where she lives, Paige knows many other raw vegans who have a nature-loving lifestyle. But despite taking a daily supplement that included vitamin D and B12, she and the children were suffering. Today, the family still mainly has a raw diet, but Paigeincludes butter, cheese, eggs and occasionally fish. “I had let malnutrition in through the back door in the name of health,” says Paige. “It was ridiculous.”

There is a significant difference between being vegan (and eating cooked foods) and raw vegan. Vegans benefit from fortified cereals, baked goods and a wider variety of grains and pulses; what’s more, cooking aids the absorption of some micronutrients. But Lisa Miles, from the British Nutrition Foundation, says: “The most dramatic change to the diet is being vegan rather than the raw element, because you are cutting out two huge food groups. This affects vitamin D and protein.”

Last week, strict diets for children were questioned after a 12-year-old vegan girl was admitted to a Scottish hospital with rickets. Her spine was said to resemble that of an 80-year-old woman.

Rickets is a degenerative bone condition that can lead to curvature of the spine and bone fractures. It is caused by a lack of vitamin D, usually found in oily fish, eggs, butter and made by our bodies from sunshine – although in the UK the sun is only strong enough to do this between April and September. It’s a disease you might more commonly associate with the Dickensian character, Tiny Tim.

Many dieticians believe it is possible to bring up a healthy vegan child. “You can do it, but you do have to make sure you know what you are doing, especially in regards to weight,” says Jackie Lowdon from the British Dietician Association. “As with any self-restricting diet, you need to get proper professional advice.”

The Vegan Society, unsurprisingly, claim that the diet is suitable for all stages of life, and have an army of strapping, healthy adults brought up as vegans from birth who are happy to talk to the media. They also publish a book with dietary advice on feeding vegan children, written by dietician Sandra Hood. A spokeswoman, however, says they would not recommend a raw vegan diet for children.

Nigel Denby, a dietician and author of Nutrition for Dummies, says: “It can be hard enough bringing a child up to eat healthily, but with a vegan diet you are really making a difficult job for yourself. It is absolutely not something that should be tried without support from a dietician.”

Several factors, says Denby, make a vegan diet for small children more difficult. With a restricted range of foods, if children turn their nose up at one particular food, you could be stuck for choice. “With smaller appetites and portion sizes, children under five have higher nutrient requirements than adults. Therefore, every mealtime has to be an opportunity to feed them high-nutrient-based foods.”

Care must be taken with certain nutrients. “Haem iron, found in meat, is easier for the body to absorb,” explains Denby. “Non-haem iron, which is just as good, is found in leafy vegetables and fortified cereals, but you have to eat a greater amount to get the same amount of iron.”

Paige now believes that her children were craving dairy products. “It was confusing because for the first year I felt good, calm and content, and had plenty of energy. The children didn’t have childhood sicknesses. But something seemed to be missing. We were always picking between meals, always obsessed by food.”

Paige believes long-term breastfeeding helped sustain Lizzie and Bertie, but the toll of veganism on her own health was dramatic: “It was the third year when my body started disintegrating, frighteningly fast. I was getting thin, losing muscle and I was going to bed at half nine.” She would also have “mad” binges, and eat nothing but rice cakes and butter.

The last straw came when Paige’s eldest son Bruce came to stay. He asked her to buy chicken, and Paige ended up eating half of it. After that, she couldn’t stop. “I just went wild. Typically, in a day I would eat half a chicken, two litres of milk, half a pound of cheese and three eggs. I just had to do it. It went on for weeks. The children were having lots of boiled eggs and cheese.”

Paige, who now runs an online magazine and raw food shop, says her biggest lesson is never to be too restrictive again. “For a lot of people, there is something about these various nutrients in the animal form that we can assimilate. I don’t know why, but experience shows a lot of us can’t get enough protein on a vegan diet.”

Now when Paige looks at her two youngest, now seven and eight she is certain they are thriving. “There was a moment when I was worried damage had been done for life,” she says. “Now, I’m confident they are doing well. Even though they eat as much fruit and dried fruit as before, their teeth haven’t had one bit more decay.”

And nowadays, it’s their growth that’s the big talking point. “The first thing anyone says when they visit is: ‘My, haven’t they grown?’”

Nutrients that everyone needs

B12

Because this vitamin is mainly found in meat, dairy products and eggs, vegans must get it from other sources such as supplements, fortified breakfast cereals and Marmite. Deficiency can lead to irreversible nervous system damage.

Vitamin D

Our skins make vitamin D when exposed to the sun’s ultraviolet rays. But with desk-bound jobs, long winters and unpredictable weather, it is not always possible to get enough. Vitamin D is crucial for bone growth in children, and deficiency can result in rickets. Oily fish is one of the best dietary sources, but vegans can obtain it from fortified breakfast cereals and margarine. People living in Scotland may need to take greater care over vitamin D, as may people from cultures that require them to cover up.

Calcium

Found in dairy products, this is essential for strong bones. It is often lacking in a vegan diet unless taken as supplement.

Iron

Without sufficient iron, vegans and vegetarians can become anaemic. Deficiency can also delay growth in toddlers. Iron is commonly found in meat, but vegetarians can source iron from pulses and leafy green vegetables.

Calories

Although childhood obesity is an issue today, not enough calories can mean children don’t grow properly. This can be a problem in high-fibre diets.

Protein

High-biological-value protein is found in meat, fish, eggs and dairy products. Low-biological-value protein is found in nuts, pulses and wholegrains. Separately, the latter don’t contain all the essential amino acids, but do when combined correctly. Knowledge of which foods to mix together is therefore crucial.

The Sick U.S. Health Care System: Paying More, Getting Less

Source: Joel A. Harrison, Dollars & Sense Magazine.

By any measure, the United States spends an enormous amount of money on health care. Here are a few of those measures. In 2006, U.S. health care spending exceeded 16% of the nation’s GDP. To put U.S. spending into perspective: the United States spent 15.3% of GDP on health care in 2004, while Canada spent 9.9%, France 10.7%, Germany 10.9%, Sweden 9.1%, and the United Kingdom 8.7%. Or consider per capita spending: the United States spent $6,037 per person in 2004, compared to Canada at $3,161, France at $3,191, Germany at $3,169, and the U.K. at $2,560.

By now the high overall cost of health care in the United States is broadly recognized. And many Americans are acutely aware of how much they pay for their own care. Those without health insurance face sky-high doctor and hospital bills and ever more aggressive collection tactics – when they receive care at all. Those who are fortunate enough to have insurance experience steep annual premium hikes along with rising deductibles and co-pays, and, all too often, a well-founded fear of losing their coverage should they lose a job or have a serious illness in the family.

Still, Americans may well underestimate the degree to which they subsidize the current U.S. health care system out of their own pockets. And almost no one recognizes that even people without health insurance pay substantial sums into the system today. If more people understood the full size of the health care bill that they as individuals are already paying – and for a system that provides seriously inadequate care to millions of Americans – then the corporate opponents of a universal single-payer system might find it far more difficult to frighten the public about the costs of that system. In other words, to recognize the advantages of a single-payer system, we have to understand how the United States funds health care and health research and how much it actually costs us today.

Paying through the Taxman

The U.S. health care system is typically characterized as a largely private-sector system, so it may come as a surprise that more than 60% of the $2 trillion annual U.S. health care bill is paid through taxes, according to a 2002 analysis published in Health Affairs by Harvard Medical School associate professors Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein. Tax dollars pay for Medicare and Medicaid, for the Veterans Administration and the Indian Health Service. Tax dollars pay for health coverage for federal, state, and municipal government employees and their families, as well as for many employees of private companies working on government contracts. Less visible but no less important, the tax deduction for employer-paid health insurance, along with other health care-related tax deductions, also represents a form of government spending on health care. It makes little difference whether the government gives taxpayers (or their employers) a deduction for their health care spending, on the one hand, or collects their taxes then pays for their health care, either directly or via a voucher, on the other. Moreover, tax dollars also pay for critical elements of the health care system apart from direct care – Medicare funds much of the expensive equipment hospitals use, for instance, along with all medical residencies.

All told, then, tax dollars already pay for at least $1.2 trillion in annual U.S. health care expenses. Since federal, state, and local governments collected approximately $3.5 trillion in taxes of all kinds – income, sales, property, corporate – in 2006, that means that more than one third of the aggregate tax revenues collected in the United States that year went to pay for health care. (See Addendum below for information about how this estimate was calculated.)

Beyond their direct payments to health care providers and health insurance companies, then, Americans already make a sizeable annual payment into the health care system via taxes. How much does a typical household contribute to the country’s health care system altogether? Of course, households pay varying amounts in taxes depending on income and many other factors. Moreover, some households have no health insurance coverage; others do have coverage for which they may pay some or all of the premium cost. What I aim to do here is to estimate the average size of the health care cost burden for households at different income levels, both those with job-based health coverage and those with no coverage.

Note that the estimates in the table below do not include out-of-pocket expenses. For those with health insurance, these include co-pays, deductibles, and uncovered expenses (consider, for example, that even my high-end policy does not cover commonly used home medical equipment such as oxygen). For those without insurance, of course, out-of-pocket expenses include their full hospital, doctor, and pharmacy bills.

©Unknown

The first row (“Share and Amount of Income Going to Health Care via Taxes Alone”) shows how much of the total tax burden on households at three income levels goes into the nation’s health care system. In other words, a family with an annual income of $50,000 that has no health insurance nonetheless contributes nearly 10% of its income to health care merely by paying typical income, payroll, sales, excise, and other taxes. A person who earns about $25,000 a year and has no health coverage already contributes over $2,400 a year to the system – enough for a healthy young adult to purchase a year’s worth of health insurance.

The next two rows add in, for individuals and for families, the cost of employer-based health insurance. So, a household at the $50,000 income level with family health insurance coverage is paying over a quarter of its income into the health care system.

How were these figures derived? The tax component of the figures represents 34.4% of the total tax burden (federal, state, and local) on households at the three income levels. Of course, estimating average combined federal, state, and local taxes paid by households at different income levels is not a simple matter. The most comprehensive such estimates come from the Tax Foundation, a conservative think tank. Other analysts, however, including the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, view the Tax Foundation’s figures as overestimating the total tax burden. The center has published its own estimates, based on figures from the Congressional Budget Office and Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation. The figures in the table are based on the CBO’s numbers, which fall in between the Tax Foundation’s estimates and the JCT-based estimates. (Estimates based on the Tax Foundation and JCT figures, along with details of the analysis, can be found at http://www.dollarsandsense.org.) It is worth noting that using the Tax Foundation’s numbers, which show a larger share of income going to taxes at every income level, would have made the story even worse. For a family with health insurance earning $50,000 a year, for instance, the share of income going into health care would have been 28.7% rather than 26.4%.

For insurance premiums: in 2007, the average annual premiums for health insurance policies offered through employers were $4,479 for individuals and $12,106 for families, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s annual survey of health benefits. Of course, some employers pay all or a large share of that premium while others pay half or less, leaving much of the premium cost to the worker. Either way, however, the full premium cost represents a bite taken out of the worker’s total “wage packet” – the cost of wages plus benefits. This becomes evident when premiums go up: workers either see their own premium payments rise directly, or else face cuts or stagnation in their wages and non-health benefits. For that reason, economists typically view the entire premium as a cost imposed on the worker regardless of variations in employer contribution.

These figures are not meant to be exact, but do offer reasonable estimates of how much U.S. families are actually paying into the country’s health care system today. Again, they do not include out-of-pocket expenses, which averaged 13.2% of all health care expenditures in 2005. Moreover, they do not include the risk of bankruptcy that health care costs impose: 50% of consumer bankruptcies in the United States stem from medical bills, including a surprising number among households that do have some kind of health coverage. Nor do they include the approximately 20% of auto insurance premiums or the 40% of workers’ compensation premiums that pay for medical expenses.

Where Does All the Money Go?

After you’ve finished gasping in surprise at the share of your income that is already going into health care, you may wonder where all that money goes. One answer is that the United States has the most bureaucratic health care system in the world, including over 1,500 different companies, each offering multiple plans, each with its own marketing program and enrollment procedures, its own paperwork and policies, its CEO salaries, sales commissions, and other non-clinical costs – and, of course, if it is a for-profit company, its profits. Compared to the overhead costs of the single-payer approach, this fragmented system takes almost 25 cents more out of every health care dollar for expenses other than actually providing care.

Of the additional overhead in the current U.S. system, approximately half is borne by doctors’ offices and hospitals, which are forced to maintain large billing and negotiating staffs to deal with all the plans. By contrast, under Canada’s single-payer system (which is run by the provinces, not by the federal government), each medical specialty organization negotiates once a year with the nonprofit payer for each province to set fees, and doctors and hospitals need only bill that one payer.

Of course, the United States already has a universal, single-payer health care program: Medicare. Medicare, which serves the elderly and people with disabilities, operates with overhead costs equal to just 3% of total expenditures, compared to 15% to 25% overhead in private health programs. Since Medicare collects its revenue through the IRS, there is no need to collect from individuals, groups, or businesses. Some complexity remains – after all, Medicare must exist in the fragmented world that is American health care – but no matter how creative the opponents of single-payer get, there is no way they can show convincingly how the administrative costs of a single-payer system could come close to the current level.

Some opponents use current U.S. government expenditures for Medicare and Medicaid to arrive at frightening cost estimates for a universal single-payer health care system. They may use Medicare’s $8,568 per person, or $34,272 for a family of four (2006). But they fail to mention that Medicare covers a very atypical, high-cost slice of the U.S. population: senior citizens, regardless of pre-existing conditions, and people with disabilities, including diagnoses such as AIDS and end-stage renal disease. Or they use Medicaid costs – forgetting to mention that half of Medicaid dollars pay for nursing homes, while the other half of Medicaid provides basic health care coverage, primarily to children in low-income households, at a cost of only about $1,500 a year per child.

Getting What We’ve Already Paid For

Americans spend more than anyone else in the world on health care. Each health insurer adds its bureaucracy, profits, high corporate salaries, advertising, and sales commissions to the actual cost of providing care. Not only is this money lost to health care, but it pays for a system that often makes it more difficult and complicated to receive the care we’ve already paid for. Shareholders are the primary clients of for-profit insurance companies, not patients. Moreover, households’ actual costs as a percentage of their incomes are far higher today than most imagine. Even families with no health insurance contribute substantially to our health care system through taxes. Recognizing these hidden costs that U.S. households pay for health care today makes it far easier to see how a universal single-payer system – with all of its obvious advantages – can cost most Americans less than the one we have today.

Joel A. Harrison, PhD, MPH, lives in San Diego, where he does consulting in epidemiology and research design. He has worked in the areas of preventive medicine, infectious diseases, medical outcomes research, and evidence-based clinical practice guidelines. He has lived and studied in both Canada and Sweden.

Addendum

A Tax Foundation report states, “In 2004 Americans paid a total of $3 trillion in total taxes.” The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis under its National Economic Accounts section gives the following numbers for U.S. Gross Domestic Product in billions of dollars: 2004 – $11,685.9 and 2006 – $13,194.7. Using the Tax Foundation tax estimates, the estimated tax percentage of GDP for 2004 was 25.67% ($3 trillion/$11.6859 trillion). The “$3.5 trillion” is a ballpark rounding estimate for total taxes for 2006 from multiplying 0.26 by the 2006 GDP.

Sources:

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, The Debate Over Tax Levels: How Much Does a Typical Family Pay?, March 11, 1998;

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Tax Foundation Figures Do Not Represent Middle-Income Tax Burdens: Figures May Mislead Policymakers, Journalists, and the Public, April 13, 2006;

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Clearing Up Confusion on the Cost of Covering Uninsured Children Eligible for Medicaid or SCHIP, March 13, 2007;

Gary Claxton et al., “Health Benefits in 2007: Premium Increases Fall to an Eight-Year Low, While Offer Rates and Enrollment Remain Stable,” Health Affairs 26(5), 2007 [based on Employer Health Benefits 2007 Annual Survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation];

Congressional Research Service, U.S. Health Care Spending: Comparison with Other OECD Countries, September 17, 2007;

Andres de Francisco and Stephen Matlin, eds., Monitoring Financial Flows for Health Research 2006 (Global Forum for Health Research, 2006);

Tax Foundation, Who Pays America’s Tax Burden, and Who Gets the Most Government Spending?, March 2007;

Public Citizen Congress Watch, Rx R&D Myths: The Case Against the Drug Industry’s R&D ‘Scare Card’, July 2001;

Steffie Woolhandler et al., “Health Care Administration in the United States and Canada: Micromanagement, Macro Costs,” Int’l Journal of Health Services 34(1), 2004;

Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein, Paying for National Health Insurance – And Not Getting It, Health Affairs 21(4), July/August 2002.

BEST OF WEB: In Memory of George Carlin, American Radical

Source: John Nichols, The Nation.

I think it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.
– George Carlin.

The last vote that George Carlin said he cast in a presidential race was for George McGovern in 1972. When Richard Nixon, who Carlin described as a member of a sub-species of humanity, overwhelmingly defeated McGovern, the comedian gave up on the political process.

“Now, there’s one thing you might have noticed I don’t complain about: politicians,” he explained in a routine that challenged all the premises of today’s half-a-loaf reformers. “Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don’t fall out of the sky. They don’t pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It’s what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you’re going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain’t going to do any good; you’re just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it’s not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here… like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There’s a nice campaign slogan for somebody: ‘The Public Sucks. Fuck Hope.’”

Needless to say, George Carlin was not on message for 2008′s “change we can believe in” election season.

His was a darker and more serious take on the crisis – and the change of consciousness, sweeping in scope and revolutionary in character, that was required to address it.

Carlin may have stopped voting in 1972. But America’s most consistently savage social commentator for the best part of a half century, who has died at age 71, did not give up on politics.

In recent years, in front of audiences that were not always liberal, he tore apart the neo-conservative assault on liberty with a clarity rarely evidenced in the popular culture.

Recalling George Bush’s ranting about how the endless “war on terror” is a battle for freedom, Carlin echoed James Madison’s thinking with a simple question: “Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?”

Carlin gave the Christian right – and the Christian left – no quarter. “I’m completely in favor of the separation of Church and State,” Carlin said. “My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.”

Carlin’s take on the Ronald Reagan administration is the best antidote to the counterfactual romanticization of the former president – in which even Barack Obama has engaged – remains the single finest assessment of Reagan and his inner circle. While Carlin did not complain much about politicians, he made an exception with regard to the great communicator. Recorded in 1988 at the Park Theater in Union City, New Jersey, and later released as an album — What Am I Doing in New Jersey? – his savage recollection of the then-concluding Reagan-Bush years opened with the line: “I really haven’t seen this many people in one place since they took the group photograph of all the criminals and lawbreakers in the Ronald Reagan administration.”

But there was no nostalgia for past fights, no resting on laurels, for this topical comedian. He read the papers, he followed the news, he asked questions – the interviews I did with Carlin over the years were more conversations than traditional Q & A’s – and he turned it all into a running commentary that focused not so much on politics as on the ugly intersection of power and economics.

No one, not Obama, not Hillary Clinton and certainly not John McCain, caught the zeitgeist of the vanishing American dream so well as Carlin. “The owners of this country know the truth: It’s called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

Not just aware of but steeped in the traditions of American populism – more William Jennings Bryan and Eugene Victor Debs than Bill Clinton or John Kerry – Carlin preached against the consolidation of wealth and power with a fire-and-brimstone rage that betrayed a deep moral sense that could never quite be cloaked with four-letter words.

“The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they’re an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They’ve got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying – lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else,” ranted the comedian whose routines were studied in graduate schools.

“But I’ll tell you what they don’t want,” Carlin continued. “They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. You know what they want? Obedient workers – people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they’re coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club.”

Carlin did not want Americans to get involved with the system.

He wanted citizens to get angry enough to remake the system.

Carlin was a leveler of the old, old school. And no one who had so public a platform – as the first host of NBC’s Saturday Night Live, a regular on broadcast and cable televisions shows, a best-selling author and a favorite character actor in films (he was even the narrator of the American version of the children’s show Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends) – did more to challenge accepted wisdom regarding our political economy.

“Let’s suppose we all just materialized on Earth and there was a bunch of potatoes on the ground, okay? There’s just six of us. Only six humans. We come into a clearing and there’s potatoes on the ground. Now, my instinct would be, let’s everybody get some potatoes. “Everybody got a potato? Joey didn’t get a potato! He’s small, he can’t hold as many potatoes. Give Joey some of your potatoes.” “No, these are my potatoes!” That’s the Republicans. “I collected more of them, I got a bigger pile of potatoes, they’re mine. If you want some of them, you’re going to have to give me something.” “But look at Joey, he’s only got a couple, they won’t last two days.” That’s the fuckin’ difference! And I’m more inclined to want to share and even out,” he explained in an interview several years ago with The Onion.

“I understand the marketplace, but government is supposed to be here to redress the inequities of the marketplace,” Carlin continued. “That’s one of its functions. Not just to protect the nation, secure our security and all that shit. And not just to take care of great problems that are trans-state problems, that are national, but also to make sure that the inequalities of the marketplace are redressed by the acts of government. That’s what welfare was about. There are people who really just don’t have the tools, for whatever reason. Yes, there are lazy people. Yes, there are slackers. Yes, there’s all of that. But there are also people who can’t cut it, for any given reason, whether it’s racism, or an educational opportunity, or poverty, or a fuckin’ horrible home life, or a history of a horrible family life going back three generations, or whatever it is. They’re crippled and they can’t make it, and they deserve to rest at the commonweal. That’s where my fuckin’ passion lies.”

Like the radicals of the early years of the 20th century, whose politics he knew and respected, Carlin understood that free-speech fights had to come first. And always pushed the limit – happily choosing an offensive word when a more polite one might have sufficed. By 1972, the year he won the first of four Grammys for best comedy album, he had developed his most famous routine: “Seven Words (You Can’t Say on Television).”

That summer, at a huge outdoor show in Milwaukee, he uttered all seven of them in public – and was promptly arrested for disturbing the peace.

When a version of the routine was aired in 1973 on WBAI, the Pacifica Foundation radio station in New York,. Pacifica received a citation from the FCC. Pacifica was ordered to pay a fine for violating federal regulations prohibiting the broadcast of “obscene” language. The ensuing free-speech fight made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled 5-4 against the First Amendment to the Constitution, Pacifica and Carlin.

Amusingly, especially to the comedian, a full transcript of the routine ended up in court documents associated with the case, F.C.C. v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 U.S. 726 (1978).

“So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I’m perversely kind of proud of,” recalled Carlin. Proud enough that you can find the court records on the comedian’s website.

There will, of course, be those who dismiss Carlin as a remnant of the sixties who introduced obscenity to the public discourse – just as there will be those who misread his critique of the American political and economic systems as little more than verbal nihilism. In fact, George Carlin was, like the radicals of an earlier age, an idealist – and a patriot –of a deeper sort than is encountered very often these days.

Carlin explained himself best in one of his last interviews. “There is a certain amount of righteous indignation I hold for this culture, because to get back to the real root of it, to get broader about it, my opinion that is my species–and my culture in America specifically–have let me down and betrayed me. I think this species had great, great promise, with this great upper brain that we have, and I think we squandered it on God and Mammon. And I think this culture of ours has such promise, with the promise of real, true freedom, and then everyone has been shackled by ownership and possessions and acquisition and status and power,” he said. “And perhaps it’s just a human weakness and an inevitable human story that these things happen. But there’s disillusionment and some discontent in me about it. I don’t consider myself a cynic. I think of myself as a skeptic and a realist. But I understand the word ‘cynic’ has more than one meaning, and I see how I could be seen as cynical. ‘George, you’re cynical.’ Well, you know, they say if you scratch a cynic you find a disappointed idealist. And perhaps the flame still flickers a little, you know?”

Martial Law: A License to Loot, a Permit to Plunder

Source: Pro Libertate Blog.

Breaking and entering: Where does this fit under the heading “To protect and serve”? A paramilitary “strike team” commits a felonious break-in of a home in the flood-ravaged Midwest.

Digging up the planted axioms that litter our ordinary conversations can be a revealing exercise. We learn how deeply rooted our supposedly free society has become in collectivist and militarist assumptions.

For example: How often do we hear or read language that draws a distinction between “police” and “civilians”?

Our republican framework of government supposedly prohibits the use of the military in domestic law enforcement. Yet if a police officer isn’t a civilian, he of necessity must be considered some variety of soldier: He bears arms, belongs to a force organized in a military hierarchy, issues orders, and expects immediate obedience to his demands.

Police are supposedly civilian “peace officers,” distinguished from the rest of the citizenry (to paraphrase Robert Peel) only by the fact that they are specially charged to protect the rights and property of the innocent as a permanent assignment, rather than an occasional necessity.

Yet when non-professional police officers are given “law enforcement” duties by local governments — as in Gilbert, Arizona, where such people are part of a unit that can issue traffic citations and investigate accidents – they are referred to as “civilian auxiliaries” of police departments. Again we see the critical distinction: The regular police are something other than civilians.

Roughly a year ago, USA Today reported that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had created a shortage of ammunition, leaving police and “civilians” at the back of the line. Annual police awards ceremonies across the country routinely honor not only law enforcement officers but “civilians” for various distinguished acts.

Cultivating a new crop of “law enforcement” officers:
Teenagers participating in a summer police training program receive instructions from SWAT operators at a firing range.

And, significantly, it is very common for “civilians” to be charged with “disobeying an officer” even when no other alleged offense is involved. That charge makes little sense unless it is assumed not only that police exercise authority akin to military personnel, but that common civilians are at the bottom of the hierarchy. Were this actually a country in which governments and their enforcement agencies derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, wouldn’t it be possible to charge a police officer with “disobeying a citizen”?

As I mentioned above, these assumptions are usually buried and carefully ignored. But they are rudely exposed whenever crisis descends on a community and the familiar pretenses are blown away. Catastrophic natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina or this year’s Midwestern floods are eagerly embraced by law enforcement agencies as a pretext for overtly exercising the kind of power that many of them covertly lust to employ all the time — the power to regiment their communities at gunpoint under a form of martial law.

Think, once again, of the roots of that expression: “Martial” has its origin in the proper name Mars, referring to the pagan deity of — what activity?

The term unmistakably refers to a military posture, or a state of war. It is the suspension of normal life via force majeure, resulting in rule by unalloyed force. And the capacity for rule of this kind is embedded in every law enforcement body in every community across the country, simply waiting for an excuse to manifest itself.

Many who reside in our flood-ravaged Midwest are learning, as residents of New Orleans did before them, that our paramilitary “protectors” will eagerly exploit disasters in ways that compound the suffering inflicted by a natural disaster. Many citizens in such circumstances prefer to stay in their homes, running their own risks in order to protect what is theirs. But it is standard operating procedure for police — aided, at times, by National Guardsmen — to force such people out of their homes, and to use the force of arms to prevent those who have left from returning.

In the wake of the floodwaters in Iowa came all of the impedimentia of military occupation — armed guards, checkpoints, detention areas. These strictures were imposed on communities already reeling from a deadly caprice of nature. Rather than permitting people to inspect their own property, “strike teams” that included armed police broke into locked homes, including the occasional occupied dwelling.

One Cedar Rapids homeowner, understandably outraged that a “strike team” had broken into his otherwise undamaged home, confronted them and made his feelings known in forceful but measured terms. This prompted police officer Josh Bell to threaten the homeowner with arrest for “harassing” the “strike team.”

The business end of government “compassion”:
Armed “protectors” arrest Cedar Rapids homeowner Ricky Blazek at gunpoint (left, below).

That aggravated homeowner was relatively fortunate.

Fellow Cedar Rapids resident Ricky Blazek, one of several thousand flood victims reasonably infuriated by “checkpoints” preventing them from returning to their homes, tried to circumnavigate one such roadblock in his automobile. This resulted in Blazek being forced out of his car at gunpoint and arrested.

While the armed “strike teams” had unfettered access to homes of flood victims, and the media was given limited access in order to chronicle the supposed heroism of the government functionaries, homeowners basted in a seething broth of frustrated suspicion.

After all, would any thinking person feel secure knowing that government agents, freed by a natural disaster from the constraints of the pesky Fourth Amendment, had free rein to break into their homes and help themselves to anything they found therein?

Last year, the small town of Greensburg, Kansas was all but obliterated by a tornado of a ferocity not seen in the region since Dorothy Gale’s house was rapted away to Oz and deposited rudely on top of Hillary Clinton’s long-forgotten sister.

That’s certainly more than enough for any town to suffer. However, the police establishment, displaying government’s infallible gift for compounding tragedy, made matters immeasurably worse by barring residents from their homes and then selectively looting them for firearms (and, in some cases, jewelry and other valuables).

Gun Week reports that these thefts were made possible because officers “from various agencies” — local and state police, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, FEMA, and the ATF — “allegedly claimed that martial law had been imposed when it had not, and ordered all residents to leave the town.”

Those residents who discovered the thefts and demanded the return of their firearms found them, in many cases, damaged to the point of being useless. A few opened gun cases only to discover that their firearms had been replaced with guns of inferior quality.

Bob Martin, an 83-year-old trap shooter, returned to his home the morning after the tornado to discover that several of his guns were missing. Like Ricky Blazek, Martin was originally barred access to his home by officers who claimed, falsely, that martial law had been declared by the municipal or state government. He was forced to take a circuitous route to his home; by the time he got there, his gun safe had been plundered.

After getting back several — but not all — of his guns (which had been damaged in police custody, Martin, along with his wife, moved out of Greensburg. He now regrets not shooting his way through the police barricade that kept him from defending his home and property.

“If I’d have known [that the martial law claim was a ruse, and the police were looting his gun collection], I had a gun of my own in the car, and I’d [have] loaded it and gone in,” Martin says. “Ain’t nobody going to keep me off my property.”

Whatever it is that prompts a man in his ninth decade to take such a commendably militant stance toward the looters in blue, I earnestly hope it’s contagious.

Provoked by the police crime wave that descended on tornado-ravaged Greenburg, the Kansas state legislature this year enacted HB 2280 (.pdf), a law that (per the official summary) “prohibits officials, during a declared state of emergency, from forcibly dispossessing an owner of any firearm not otherwise prohibited by law, or from requiring registration of firearms not required to be registered under state law.”

Now, that bill was pockmarked with troubling qualifications (for instance, no peaceful and law-abiding citizen can properly be “prohibited by law” from owning any weapon he has the means to purchase and the skill to operate, “laws” holding otherwise notwithstanding). But the fundamental point here is of the “Well, duh” variety: Police shouldn’t take advantage of natural disasters to steal firearms from citizens, any more than street crooks should capitalize on the opportunity to swipe consumer electronics from undefended retail stores.

Thus it is hugely significant that HB 2280, which only prohibits police from doing something they weren’t authorized to do in the first place, was opposed by the Pratt County (Kansas) Sheriff, the Kansas Association of Chiefs of Police, and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation.

From their point of view, it’s just not worth the trouble of having a natural disaster if the event can’t be exploited to regiment local civilians and confiscate their firearms.

UPDATE: Submit or die….
Justin Raimondo of AntiWar.com offers the following capsule summary of the unpunished massacre of dozens of Iraqi civilians by a U.S. Marine unit in Haditha:

“When an IED killed one of his Marines, [SSgt. Frank] Wuterich and company shot everyone in the vicinity – including five unarmed men who were getting out of a taxi. Wuterich claims that the Iraqis disobeyed orders to stop and raise their hands over their heads, but others on the scene testify that they were complying and were shot anyway. Yet, whatever happened, Wuterich’s working assumption – that the five harbored hostile intent toward him and his men – was and is undoubtedly correct. Because that’s what imperialism is all about: occupying countries where you’re hated by the locals, who are constantly trying to kill you. So naturally you get nervous and trigger-happy, and mistakes are made. That’s the sort of war we’re fighting and have to fight as long as we’re in Iraq.” (Emphasis added.)

Here we see how Iraqis living under an undisguised military occupation are expected — on pain of summary execution — to obey the orders of a foreign soldier. A variant of that mindset can be seen anytime an American citizen is arrested and charged with the supposed offense of “disobeying an officer’s orders.” And during periods of emergency rule, whether or not the condition is referred to as “martial law,” those referred to as “civilians” in post-Katrina America can expect that they’ll be treated with just a little bit more solicitude than Iraqis — but not much.

Martial law, after all, is merely a military occupation conducted within our borders, rather than outside them.

And we should entertain no illusions about the fact that police agencies are deliberately re-tooling themselves into overtly military bodies. This can be clearly seen in — among other things — recruitment pitches like this one (courtesy of Radley Balko) from a SWAT team in Rome, Georgia.