Category: Best

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Lies and Damn Lies

I had always thought that the reason advertisers target mostly young adult viewers is because they have the most disposable income. I don’t think that’s really true. I think people in their 40’s actually have more money to spend. The real reason is because young adults still have a sliver of a smidgeon of a tiny little particle of belief that what advertisers are telling them is true. I know the feeling, just as sometimes I can remember what it was like to be an adolescent boy and to have fantasies of power or great suffering or genius. After a while you grow up, but not everybody grows up, and not everybody thinks the same thing makes you grown up.

You know that most ads lie or exaggerate but it just might be possible, you think, that this one product or service or whatever will gratify some desire or another. Sometimes you even ignore advice that you know is good. You just need it. You just need to try it. You buy it and, inevitably, it disappoints. You store up that information. By the time you are about 40, you are inured. You are immune to the scam. And advertising no longer works.

We’re the only culture in the world that has grown up bombarded incessantly by millions and millions of lies. We allow it. We are shameless. And I am pretty sure that most people, as with most things, tend to think it could never be otherwise. This is our system, our culture, our economy. There are a lot of things we like about our lifestyles– we wouldn’t want to throw it all away by trying something radical. So we abide the lies.

So I sat there one day and tried to imagine a world in which most advertisers had some kind of moral feeling about truth and decided that they would try to make their ads as reasonably accurate as possible. In a world like this, really lousy products would not survive because no one would agree to advertise them. But most of the products we see around us would probably still be around us. We just wouldn’t be under great illusions about what they can do for us.

So, again, imagine a world in which most of what you hear and see is generally true.

It will blow you mind. It’s a freaking wild concept. The biggest difference is that it would matter. You would care about stuff you hear. You might react. You might take it to heart. You might be moved occasionally.

When something really important came along, it would sound really important, and you would believe it was really important.

We might find out that there are a lot of things we’d like to change about our lives, because we know the truth about our chances of eventually winning the lottery or looking like Katie Holmes or Brad Pitt. We would know that this is what we are and we have to live with.

Truth

A TV production company approaches your airline company. Imagine you are the president of this company. The TV Production company wants to tape your staff in action, your pilots, your stewardesses, your customer service representatives. Nothing is out of bounds. They want to record what it is like to travel on your airplanes.

Your first question is, can we control what you show on TV? We can cut whatever we don’t like, right?

The answer is no.

You say no way, right?

That’s what most U.S. airlines did. They probably thought to themselves, are you crazy? They could show anything! They should customers complaining and saying that they will never fly your airline again!

But Southwest Airlines in the U.S. said yes. And they really had no control over the content. They were not pleased, for example, when the program showed that they charge fat passengers for two seats. They would have preferred that that little episode stayed on the cutting room floor.

But some smart people in the pr department of Southwest Airlines prevailed and the program was made. They gambled on the idea that people are not children, that they can understand reality, and that they will have more respect for an airline that is “transparent” than for one that tries to hide all of their faults.

I think they’re right. I hope they’re right. The jury is still out, but I’m betting that their sales increase and pretty soon all the big airlines will want a piece of the action.

Note: the program was based on a similar program that has been airing in Britain for 6 years.

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Conspiracy Theory

“The whole point is to disrupt terrorism at an early stage instead of letting the conspiracy fully hatch,” said Viet Dinh, a former top Justice Department official under Attorney General John Ashcroft who now teaches law at Georgetown University. “We cannot take the risk of the conspiracy taking place. What you get is shorter sentences but greater prevention.” NY Times, December 7, 2003

My question is, why is our government so modest? Where are the visionaries? Why are they so humble? Where is that “can do” spirit?

We have a government department, under John Ashcroft, that seeks to prevent conspiracies before they happen. But why aren’t they out there preventing murders and larcenies and drug deals and marijuana smoking before they happen? Lack of vision, that’s all. Lack of spirit. If they only applied the kind of exciting focus and determination that they show in the pursuit of terrorist conspiracies!

Think about it. If we could catch some of those teenagers reading books or watching movies about drug use, and give them more frequent but lighter sentences, why we could put the entire drug problem to rest in less than one generation.

How about kids playing with guns? It’s clear they’re thinking of growing up to become hit men. Bust ’em.

Two men in Oregon were sentenced to 18 years in prison for planning to go to Afghanistan to train for jihad. A jihad is a holy war against the infidels.

I don’t think the U.S. government means to say that it is illegal to believe that the west wants to destroy Islam and, therefore, conscientious young Moslems ought to be trained to be ready to fight the west. Well, wait, I think they do. It’s a new approach to war: it is now illegal.

It wasn’t illegal ten years ago. If a young Arab in the U.S. decided to go join the Muhajadeen, the U.S. did not interfere.

But today, it is illegal.

Yesterday, it wasn’t. Yesterday, the same young men were going over to Afghanistan to fight against the Russians. That was okay. These young men became the Taliban and oppressed and brutalized their own people. That was okay.

Then they turned on us.

It’s Legal When I Say It’s Legal!

For people who think, however, we have achieved the unthinkable, the unimaginable, the absurd: the United States of America now imprisons people for thinking about doing things that probably shouldn’t be illegal in the first place. The U.S. has sponsored terrorism in Afghanistan when the Soviets were the occupying force. We gave them bazookas and grenades and told them to take back their country. But now that we have taken their country, similar
actions are deemed terrorist.

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Diebold

Here’s another one I didn’t make up. Not kidding. This is true.

You are Walden W. O’Dell, a business executive. You make scads of money, so, of course, you support George W. Bush, because never has any president of any country ever produced so much money for the rich and asked so little in return as George W. Bush has, with his tax cuts, deregulation, and pro-industry policies.

So, if you’re Walden, you actually help raise money for George W., knowing that the hard work involved in a small price to pay for ensuring that Medicare is emasculated.

Mr. O’Dell is one of the “Rangers and Pioneers”, which is Boy Scout First Class, if you’re not already a Bush acolyte. That means, he not only gives lots of money, but he twists other peoples’ arms.

And Mr. O’Dell is president of Diebold. If you are a state government looking for state of the art voting machines– well, you’d probably look elsewhere. But most state governments are pretty stupid, so a lot of them bought Diebold voting machines. In fact, 8 million of the next votes for president will be counted on Diebold machines– that’s about 8% of the total presidential vote. Thank about that. How many of those votes would it have taken to alter the outcome of the 2000 presidential election?

If you were a Democratic candidate you might be forgiven for wondering to yourself— what the hell is going on here? How can the owner of the system that counts our votes also be a die-hard Republican fund-raiser? Wouldn’t it be more “seemly”, at least, if the owners and makers of these devices were a little non-partisan?

Not in this crazy world.

You don’t get too upset. You think, well, somebody’s obviously going to check these devices fairly regularly to make sure that there is nothing suspicious going on, right? There is a way, right, to take a random sample of voters and check to see that their actual votes matched up with the stored results?

Wrong. The only people allowed to check these devices are employees of the Diebold company. And they can’t check to see if the results match up because there is no paper record of the actual vote. Only the electronic record, which might or might not be accurate.

You should find that almost impossible to believe. I do. It sounds like a joke so bad, you don’t even pass it on to anybody. Parody is funniest when it is almost believable. The scene of a suspicious Democratic candidate checking into the results and finding out that Mr. O’Dell was not available for comment because he was busy attending a George W. Bush fundraiser… it’s too crazy.

A judge in Boca Raton, Florida, ruled that Diebold’s proprietary interest in its “trade secrets” (as if there was some work of genius in these relatively dumb machines) are more important than the voter’s right to know whether or not his vote has actually been counted correctly. You think a few hanging chads might have gone the wrong way? At least, we had ways of checking into those hanging chads. 50,000 votes on a Diebold machine could be switched to a different candidate and no-one would ever know.

At our last election in Ontario, Canada, a bunch of volunteers, including representatives from all of the political parties, sat in a gym waiting for my vote. I filled in the paper ballot in pencil and dropped it into the box. No machines. No computers. No software. No punch cards. No hanging chads. Couldn’t be simpler.

The results were known by midnight.

And couldn’t be less likely to result in the election of a George W. Bush.

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“He didn’t act like someone who was unjustly accused.”

“He didn’t act like someone who was unjustly accused.”

Robert Lazzaro, one of two prosecutors of Kirk Bloodsworth, who was convicted of raping and murdering a 9-year-old girl, Dawn Hamilton, July 25, 1984.

Kirk Bloodsworth was convicted twice of the 1984 rape and strangulation death of 9-year-old Dawn Hamilton outside of Baltimore. He was sentenced to death. His appeals were denied. The justice system works.

A lot of people were confident in Bloodsworth’s guilt, including the prosecutors who, even after DNA evidence had cleared Bloodsworth, asserted that he must have done it. He still must have done it. Well, he could have done it. Case closed.

The DNA was extracted from Dawn’s underwear.  Bloodsworth’s DNA was not found.  Someone else’s DNA was found.  That would lead most rational people to the conclusion that Mr. Bloodworth did not rape Dawn Hamilton.

Now every prosecutor will tell you that suspects will concoct remarkably preposterous stories to try to escape responsibility for their crimes. How is this for preposterous? Dawn must have left her panties in a clothes hamper where they came into contact with her father’s underwear, which might have had semen stains on them, which explains the wrong DNA, and then she might have put them on again without waiting for them to be washed.

So the DNA evidence is irrelevant. Bloodsworth is still guilty.

Amazing.

It must be very difficult for any person to admit responsibility for putting the wrong man behind bars for a heinous crime for 9 years. How nice for Kirk Bloodsworth to know that reputable justice officials continue to assert you might have done it, as you try to rebuild your life.

Bloodsworth is now a fisherman– he owns a boat and works hard for a living. His taxes help pay the salaries of the Baltimore district attorney.

So it must have been eating away at him for some time, until the police recently found the real killer. If DNA doesn’t match the suspect, of course, there is always a possibility that the real match can be found. It was found. Kimberly Shay Ruffner was a perfect match. Bloodsworth knew Ruffner– they had served some time together (Ruffner was in prison on other charges at the time). Bloodsworth was the librarian in prison and sometimes delivered books to Mr. Ruffner.

For the rest of us, a lesson to be learned. Study innocent men. Learn how they behave. Make sure, if you are ever charged with a crime, that you know how to put on the right act, so it cannot be said of you:

He didn’t act like he was unjustly accused.

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Snipers and Lynch

Sniper teams from the West Virginia State Police were positioned along the route of Private Lynch’s motorcade, and staff from the state’s Division of Natural Resources patrolled the Little Kanawha River, which flows beside the park where Private Lynch appeared. NY Times, July 22, 2003

This was for a personal appearance by Jessica Lynch, the hero of the mighty war against Saddam Hussein. Jessica Lynch single-handedly fought off an entire division of well-armed fanatic Iraqi Mujahideen before repairing her Hummer while it was being sabotaged by a Greenpeace activist and driving a wounded Shiite cleric to the hospital where she set up a foundation to care for his children.

I mean, Jessica Lynch, whose truck rolled over and who was injured and taken to a hospital where she was treated well until the marines were able to rescue her and take her to an American hospital where she could be treated even better.

I like Jessica Lynch. She is on my “Not Sold Out” list because she refused to cooperate with the fanatic capitalist media exploiters who wanted to embellish her story just a little.

But they didn’t need to embellish this part. Yes, there were police snipers positioned along the motorcade route because, I suppose, some absolutely idiotic administrator with the West Virginia State Police actually believed that Saddam Hussein might try to assassinate Jessica Lynch.

[Added December 2003:]

Have you gone to see Peter Pan yet? You ought to, really.

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Phony Terrorist Convictions

It is utterly conspicuous to me that John Ashcroft’s Department of Justice can’t actually find and arrest any terrorists. Ah ha, you say, but he’s obtained numerous convictions. No, he hasn’t. He has obtained numerous plea bargains. Plea bargains are obtained by threatening a person, innocent or not, with severe sentences until he or she agrees to plead guilty to a slightly less severe sentence.

To give a plea bargain even the slightest credibility you have to believe that an honest-to-god all American jury might actually look for evidence and fail to convict someone for whom there is none even if the government tells them he’s guilty.  It will not happen: all you have to do to an average American jury is say “boo” and they will convict.

Making your persecutor look good is always part of the deal. You will sign a confession and you will not contradict them.

The advantage to Ashcroft is obvious. He doesn’t have to actually catch anybody! He gets to go on TV and claim– surely, this is an outright lie– that another suspect has admitted terrorist activities. Ashcroft knows full well that these suspects are not making free and clear admissions of guilty. They are making deals after being threatened.

Well, what do you expect? Take the latest case– Iyman Faris. Here’s what Ashcroft lets you know about Iyman: he is a truck driver. He traveled to Afghanistan. Someone he knows thought he was kind of weird and finked on him to the authorities.

In our current political climate, he was doomed at that very instant.

The FBI, convinced that anyone who is suspected of being a terrorist must be a terrorist, arrested him. By the time you are arrested, in this day and age, you are already 99% guilty.

He was charged not with conspiracy or with any actual crime– that would require evidence, you see (strange world, isn’t it). Oh no. He was charged with the ever-useful generic “providing material support to a terrorist organization”.

It is important to notice– if you even care about injustice– that he was not arrested with a truck load of explosives, a basement full of bomb parts, a suitcase filled with guns, or anything of the sort. No no– again, that would constitute evidence and then we would have an actual trial, and it might even be public (Faris is a naturalized American citizen). No, no, no. He was charged with providing support to a terrorist organization, which, as we learned from other cases, means that he traveled to suspicious-sounding places like Pakistan and Afghanistan and talked to suspicious-looking people and looks suspiciously Arabic (he was born in Kashmir).

Did you know that the U.S. government itself has, on numerous occasions, provided support to terrorist organizations? You don’t have to be particularly finicky about the definition of “terrorist organization” to include the Taliban, which the U.S. sponsored when they were the muhajadeen and they were fighting the government of Soviet-occupied Afghanistan in the 1980’s, but you could also include anti-Castro Cuban paramilitary organizations and the Contras in Nicaragua. I would include Pinochet and his generals in Chile but, for argument’s sake, let’s just stick to the obvious.

Ashcroft admits that Faris appeared to be a hard-working truck driver. Tell me, do you think Al Qaeda, with their enormous resources, can’t afford to put their operatives up for a few months while they assemble their devices of international terror? They have to get real jobs?

Mr. Faris drove back and forth across the country delivering things. The level of intelligence of this government is such that you envision top officials going “ah ha!” when they learned that. Next is, “so you deny being a witch?!” (As you might recall, during the height of the Spanish Inquisition, it was a crime to be a heretic, but it was a worse crime to deny being a heretic. If you were merely a heretic, you were strangled and then burned at the stake. If you denied being a heretic, you were burned alive.)

Apparently some of the information used to implicate Faris came from captured Al Qaeda operative Khalid Sheik Mohammed. Hmm. Certainly a reliable source. Mr. Mohammed convinced the Department of Justice that Faris was planning to cut the supports of the Brooklyn Bridge with a torch, causing the bridge to collapse. This from one of the men responsible for planning 9/11? Do you think he’s serious? I’ll bet he also offered them information on plots to take Mickey Mouse hostage, blow up a McDonalds’ in Paris, and assassinate John Ashcroft.

A Palestinian friend of Faris’ said that he was surprised at the guilty plea because Faris didn’t seem interested in politics at all. I’m surprised this gentleman would even admit he had ever known Iyman Faris. This Palestinian friend will be John Ashcroft’s next suspect… unless he agrees to testify against someone else, so the FBI can run up the count.

It is a scandal that Faris was not tried in open court so we could all see and evaluate the evidence against him. It is unbelievable that the American people tolerate and accept secret trials of American citizens for nebulous crimes of association and insinuation, and it is an even greater crime that Ashcroft, after striking a plea bargain with almost all of his targets, still claims to have proven that there are terrorists active on U.S. soil.

What he has proven is that the government of the United States employs thuggery and intimidation and bullying in the pursuit of political bullshit.

Update July 2005: by the way, if you do a search on Iyman Faris you may find an article or two like this.

By golly, sounds like a regular high level Al Qaeda plotter, doesn’t he? Now please take note that almost all of that information was supplied to the FBI by Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who now admits that he was making all this stuff up.

And who is this guy anyway?

And do you care about the fact that millions of voters might be misinformed about a witness of whom the authorities claim such monumental significance?

Does it worry you that your government may never wish to put this guy on trial for the same reason it might never really want to hear, in a court room, from Osama Bin Laden?

Updated July 2005.

The most important point: do you honestly think that this government would negotiate a plea-bargain with known terrorists if they really had the goods on any of them?

Come on– be serious.

They would love a public trial where they can introduce impressive documentation, video, or material evidence to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that someone is actually plotting terrorist acts against the United States and that the mighty U.S. government is skillfully protecting you and me against their evil designs.

It is the duty of every American to assume that the unfortunate victims of Ashcroft’s jihad are innocent until proven guilty the old-fashioned way: in publicly accountable courtrooms.

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Homeland Security Theatre

Boy you’ve got to hand it to John Ashcroft and the boys! When it comes to keeping America safe from terrorists, those Department of Justice aces are relentless pit-bulls of righteous vigilance! Already, they’ve succeeded in rounding up hoards of terrifying suspects and locking them up securely to prevent them from destroying Disneyland, Las Vegas, and elementary schools in Orland Park, Illinois!

Okay. Not “hoards” exactly. Four or five, to be more precise. But boy, are those four or five scary! If you care about civil rights in this country.

Take the case of Abdel-Ilah Elmardoudi, Karim Koubriti, Ahmed Hannan, and Farouk Ali-Haimoud. These monsters were caught red-handed with travelogues, sketches of potential terrorist targets, and, and, and…. well, they were definitely thinking of acquiring deadly weapons like guns, except that would have been quite legal, and airplane tickets, and they almost could have been thinking about trying to buy some gas masks, which surely would have been extremely suspicious!

Elmardoudi was at least “found with a cache of identification documents” (New York Times, June 2, 2003) and a lot of cash. Ah ha! Of course, he has a history of committing credit card fraud, along with the only witness against him, Youssef Hmimssa. That proves he was up to no good! Unfortunately, he was arrested and imprisoned before federal investigators could actually find any evidence of any kind of terrorist activity. But don’t tell me that any Arab with a lot of cash isn’t obviously a terrorist!

Elmardoudi is alleged to be part of a “shadowy unidentified Muslim terrorist group” (New York Times). Think about that. A “shadowy unidentified” group of TERRORISTS! I bet I made you jump out of your chair. Do you think that you could belong to a “shadowy unidentified group”? What would make someone think that you belong to a “shadowy unidentified” group? Someone who really badly wants you to belong to a “shadowy unidentified” group because they caught you, and it’s very hard to actually catch someone who really belongs to a “shadowy unidentified” group. It’s much easier to attach a group to a suspect you already have than to actually find a “shadowy unidentified” group and arrest someone in it. But that’s the kind of Homeland Security provided to us by John Ashcroft. Arrest somebody, anybody, and make the right noises and then give speeches about how America is now safer thanks to you.

How did they prove Elmardoudi was a member of this shadowy unidentifiable group? Unfortunately, once again, there wasn’t actually any evidence (that’s how shadowy this group was) so we’ll just round up the usual shadowy unidentifiable witness (only one could be rounded up on short notice) to give vague evidence about thinking that he heard them once say something vaguely terroristy. And so Youssef Hmimssa, himself facing charges of visa and immigration fraud– could there be a deal in the works here?– gives his earnest suspicions.

Now as anybody who reads the news already knows, one of the hallmarks of a false conviction (as shown with subsequent DNA testing) is the ubiquitous jailhouse informant who invariably testifies as to something he heard but didn’t happen to record. These informants never seem to provide the government with evidence about, say, the location of the murder weapon, or bloodstains, or the names of real witnesses who might corroborate their stories or have independent evidence to offer. Oh no. They invariably provide only a first-hand account of something they heard but didn’t happen to record or remember until just recently when it was convenient for them, and the prosecutors, to remember it.

It is not even concealed from the public that Judge Gerald Rosen, who is hearing Hmimssa’s case, can lighten his sentence depending on how “forthcoming” he is about the terrorists suspects. Now come on– do you really think the Judge would consider it “forthcoming” of Hmimssa if he were to assert that they were just a bunch of Arabs trying to make a better life for themselves in America? Come on! Seriously?

Ah ha! But then there was the tape! Audio tapes found in their apartment, of someone Arabic that sounded vaguely Salafist and used words like terrorism and war and America! Except that the tape was actually critical of terrorism and Islamic extremism. But why would they have a tape that even mentioned extremism if they weren’t planning to blow something up!

Ah ha! But they had airport badges! Eureka– they must have been planning to hijack airplanes and crash them into Disneyland and Las Vegas! Except that, of course, two of the men worked at a catering company, SkyChef DTW, at the airport. Those insidious terrorists! How sneaky– actually taking jobs as dishwashers at the very location terrorists would be least welcome!

These unfortunate young men just happen to be Arabic and just happen to have been indulging in some shady immigration practices, and just happen to have been caught in a highly politicized witch hunt. They were held without bail for over a year.

The government has to show the public that they are actually doing something about terrorism, and seeing as they haven’t been able to even catch Saddam Hussein, and haven’t even come close to showing that he had anything to do with 9/11 in the first place, and still haven’t caught Osama Bin Laden…. well, these poor boys will have to do for now.

The story is that if the judge in the Zacarias Moussaoui trial actually has the audacity to require the prosecution to provide evidence, the Department of Justice will transfer the case to a military tribunal. (The government wants to deny the defense access to the only witness against Moussaoui on the basis– of course– of “national security”. The question is, what individual in the United States could be safe from prosecution and conviction under those terms? Not a soul. For a judge to allow this travesty to proceed would be more than a mockery of justice– it would be utterly repugnant to the idea of constitutional government.)

Abdel-Ilah Elmardoudi, 37, and Karim Koubriti, 24, both Moroccans, were convicted of providing material support or resources to terrorists and conspiracy to engage in fraud and misuse of visas, permits and other documents.” NY Times, June 2, 2003.

As you can see from the actual charges, there is no “smoking gun”. In other words, prosecutors did not have evidence that any of the men actually engaged in any “terrorist” activity.

Just a lot of smoke and mirrors, and national public hysteria.

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Bamiyan

A few years ago, the world watched in horror and disgust and contempt as the Taliban, those freaky arch-Victorians of the Islamic imperium of Afghanistan, destroyed the massive sandstone carvings of Buddha in the side of a mountain in Bamiyan.

The statues were not remarkable artistically, but they were deeply significant for historical and cultural reasons. (Sorry if you do think they’re beautiful– I don’t. They look like something a bunch of monks without great artistic talent would create.) In the seventh century AD, there were over 5,000 Buddhist monks living in the caves around the statues. Islamic Arab tribes drove the Buddhists out by the ninth century– they didn’t destroy the statues, though.

That would be barbaric.

The destruction of them by the Taliban was an act of mindless, philistine thuggery that astounded the world. If one was not, until then, convinced of the barbarity of the Taliban, this one act did it.

The Taliban repressed women, of course, and was famously intolerant of freedom of expression, diversity, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, or any kind of fun whatsoever. But those statues were just sitting there, harmlessly, impressively (175 metres high). It takes a peculiarly vindictive and petty and malicious mindset to destroy something like that.

In 2003, the Americans invaded Iraq. The marines that arrived first in Baghdad immediately secured the oil ministry buildings and guarded them diligently during the first weeks of the occupation. Down the road, the Baghdad Museum featuring an absolutely priceless collection of some of the world’s most important antiquities sat there, unguarded.

The Americans stood by as Iraqis of unknown affiliation or devotion destroyed and looted the museum. The marines did nothing. They didn’t even seem to care.

It is not that the Americans were unaware of the significance of the collection. Well, maybe they were. But they certainly knew that cultured and educated people in the U.S. and elsewhere regarded the collection as invaluable and irreplaceable. Experts from around the world had made efforts to ensure that the Americans didn’t bomb it by mistake, and had taken measures to protect the collection once they occupied Baghdad. The Americans said, “yeah, yeah, fine, we’ll take care of it.” Then they didn’t.

The Washington Times uncovered a March 26 memo that showed that the Pentagon had communicated, to the coalition commanders, a list of important sites to be protected during the war. The Baghdad museum was number 2 on the list. Somebody in the Pentagon had a brain.

The world should never forget or forgive Donald Rumsveld for sloughing off the destruction of the Baghdad museum as just “so many vases”. It was a wonderful moment, if you think shocking revelations of the deep-seated idiocy are “wonderful”. He really didn’t care. He really didn’t grasp the significance of the collection. He really could not imagine why anyone would worry about the loss of these absolutely unique examples of the art and expression of mankind’s earliest civilizations.

That’s fine, really. Nobody cares if some asshole called Donald Rumsveld sits in his cave somewhere picking his teeth while contemplating the eternal symmetry and beauty of a plum pit.

But George Bush, during his election campaign, never once informed the voters that, given the opportunity, he’d appoint people who would happily stand by and do nothing while priceless antiquities are looted and destroyed. Donald Rumsveld surprised us.

Jack Valenti, the head of the Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA), goes around the world berating governments for supporting local film industries at the expense of Hollywood productions. He wonders why anyone would bother with indigenous film, when they can have as many copies of “Ernest Saves Christmas” and “Dumb and Dumber” as they want.

Bush should hire him. He belongs in this White House working with Mr. Rumsveld. They can both be put in charge of the world’s priceless antiquities.

Do you think any of these leaders of the free world care about the beauty of the rain forest, or a pristine wilderness area, or coastal wetlands, or a medieval cathedral, or a rare endangered species, or live theatre or the ballet, or opera, or Mozart’s birthplace, or humpbacked whales, or snowy owls, or Dostoevsky’s manuscripts, or Shakespeare’s original theatre, or a Scottish castle, or the Great Wall of China, or mummies, or cuneiform tablets, or anything at all, other than the stock market and McDonalds and Disneyland?

Think again. When they come to your neighborhood promising the delights of democracy and free enterprise, get ready for drive-thru’s and golden arches.

If you never knew it before, you know now that George Bush and Rumsveld and Perle and Cheney are to culture and history and civilization what McDonald’s is to gourmet cooking.

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“The room had erupted with laughter”

“The class began with a video address by Helge H. Wehmeier, who was then in charge of Bayer’s United States operations. Mr. Wehmeier said that Bayer executives were expected to obey ‘not only the letter of the law, but the spirit of the law as well.’ And he urged them to call his office if they learned of violations. Mr. Couto recalled how the room had erupted with laughter.” New York Times, April 15, 2003

Bayer negotiated a deal with a Kaiser Permanente, one of the largest health care organizations in the United States, whereby it falsified the price of Cipro in order to maintain an artificially high price to Medicare services, which, by law, must receive the lowest price on any pharmaceutical product.

The United States Attorney’s Office in Boston caught Bayer doing this because an honest employee named George J. Couto blew the whistle. He received $34 million in reward money. Except that he died of cancer, so his family got the money.

Bayer had to pay $257 million as a settlement. But the part of this story that I like is the laughter in the room when Mr. Wehmeier asked his employees to report any violations of the law to him, personally. The New York Times doesn’t tell us how Wehmeier reacted. Maybe he was astonished at the laughter. Maybe he laughed with them. Maybe he didn’t even know about the laughter because it was a “video address”.

Either way, you have to think about corporate ethics here, and about California’s “Three Strikes and You’re Out” law. There seem to be different rules of behavior in our society, depending on whether your are rich and powerful, like those Bayer executives, or poor and destitute like Leandro Andrade.

That laughter wasn’t really directed at Wehemeier. It was directed at poor little Leandro Andrade— the poor schmuck who got 50 years in prison for stealing $150 worth of video tapes. [Each of the tapes was treated as a separate crime by prosecutors in order to meet the “three strikes” criteria. What if each Cipro tablet had been treated the same way? Would executives from Bayer be sent to prison for 50 years times several million pills?]

Leandro didn’t get a chance to pay a fine instead of going to prison. And he didn’t get the opportunity of having his employer provide him with a top-notch lawyer, and then pay the fine.

And he didn’t get a chance to sit in a room with any of the dozens of other miserable miscreants who are all serving life sentences for petty theft and laugh as a California policeman warned them all not to commit three felonies.

 

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Kurds and Whey

The debate about the war in Iraq was always really about this question: what happens now. The Americans sometimes act as if they have proven the world wrong by winning an easy victory. Nobody doubted the easy “victory”– Iraq has about 25 million people, the U.S., 300 million. But the Iraqis are not, as a rule, dancing in the streets waving American flags, Donald Rumsveld notwithstanding. They’re not. A lot of them are saying, “thank you very much, now get out.” The first large demonstrations against the American presence have already occurred.

These are the key elements of postwar Iraq.

1. The Kurds. There are about five million Kurds in Iraq. More importantly, there are about 20 million Kurds in Turkey. That’s right– that’s the number that is more important. The Kurds have been fighting Turkey and Iraq for about 30 years — well, actually, about 800 years– for a Kurdish homeland. There are two leaders among the Kurds in Northern Iraq right now: Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani. The Kurds have an army, the “peshmerga”.

2. Turkey: Turkey, as I mentioned, has about 20 million Kurds. Those Kurds are like Quebecois– they identify themselves strongly by their ethnicity and they want a homeland. From about 1985 to 2000, 36,000 people were killed in a brutal civil war in the area occupied by the Kurds in Southern Turkey, between Marxist separatists led by Abdullah Ocalan, and the Turkish government. I’ll bet you don’t remember that. Ocalan is now held in a prison on an island called Imrali. After his imprisonment, Ocalan called for a cease-fire but 5,000 of his fighters remain in Northern Iraq. Turkey has since generally “repressed” the Kurds, and imposed a “State of Emergency” on the city of Diyarbakir in Southern Turkey.

Turkey has two primary concerns. Firstly, it does not want another deluge of refugees like it experienced during the first Gulf War, when 500,000 Kurds fled Saddam’s forces (while Bush Sr. stood by and did nothing). Secondly, it does not want an independent Kurdish state to be established in Northern Iraq, and including the oil-rich area of Kirkuk. Turkey has strongly indicated that it would deploy it’s forces in Northern Iraq to prevent such an occurrence. The Americans have cut a deal here. They will stop the Kurds from taking control of Kirkuk or declaring a Kurdish state, and Turkey will keep its troops within it’s own borders.

About 90% of the population of Turkey– and this includes the Kurds– are against the American-led invasion of Iraq. The Kurds in Turkey are against it because they believe the Turkish government will impose new restrictions upon them for fear of incipient Kurdish nationalism coming to the fore in the post-war chaos.

It was reported in the New York Review of Books that after Turkey’s foreign minister Yashar Yakis, explained the complications of his situation to President Bush, Bush told him, “I understand. Now go back to Turkey and do the job.” Yakis thought about this for a moment and then said, “the man is ill.”

3. The Shiites and “The Surpreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq” (SCIRA). This organization is headquartered in Iran(!) and headed by Ayatollah Baqir al-Hakim. It has links to Iran’s radical Revolutionary Guard, which, of course, is an arch-foe of the U.S. About 60% of Iraq’s population is Shiite, as is the large majority in Iran. After the first Gulf War, SCIRA led an uprising of Shiites in the south of Iraq. The administration of Bush Sr., fearing that Iran would become too powerful if it had a toe-hold in Iraq, allowed and even encouraged Saddam to crush the revolt (General Schwarzkopf released seized helicopters and tanks to the Iraqi forces to be used in the action).

Iran is not stupid. Though it officially opposes U.S. intervention in Iraq, it is no friend of Saddam Hussein, who fought a bitter war against Iran in the 1970’s and 80’s, during which he employed chemical weapons, and was supported by the U.S.. Hussein was defeated only when Iran threw thousands of suicide fighters into the fray, whose fanatical efforts turned the tide. So Iran, apparently, is quietly encouraging Ayatollah Baqir al-Hakim to be nice to the Americans, to ensure that he will play a role in post-war Iraqi politics, and thereby be a conduit of Iranian influence.

Ahmed Chalabi is a protégé of the CIA, but is opposed by the U.S. State Department. In other words, Colin Powell, ever aware (and probably singularly aware) of long-term consequences, does not see him as an asset to post-war reconstruction in Iraq. He has been out of the country for 45 years and may well be perceived by Iraqis as a tool of the U.S. Chalabi keeps protesting that he has no interest in a political role in post-war Iraq. Well, why the hell shouldn’t he say that? Is anyone going to tell President Chalabi to step down because he once said he didn’t want to be President?

4. OPEC – Will a postwar Iraq administration join OPEC, which is, of course, an illegal oil cartel? If it doesn’t, won’t Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and other members have a fit– the price of oil, with Iraq’s huge reserves– could fall dramatically if Iraq competes with OPEC on the open market? Keep buying those SUVs.

 

Those are the key elements, aside from the remnants of Saddam’s regime, a constituency of unknown character and composition.

There are a few possible outcomes of this entire enterprise, and it is difficult to predict which one will prevail. The optimistic view is that all of these groups, the Kurds, the Shiites, the Sunnis, and the remnants of Saddam’s government and civil service, will come together to form some kind of federation with a constitutional government that respects minority rights while giving structure and coherence to a democratic federal government.

Questions have to be answered.

Thomas Friedman, in the New York Times (April 15, 2003) says this: If Lebanon, Iraq and a Palestinian state could all be made into functioning, decent, free-market, self-governing societies, it would be enough to tilt the entire Arab world onto a modernizing track.

Do you believe that? Doesn’t that sound like “pie-in-the-sky” nonsense? On what basis could you make a prediction like that? How much more believable is it than a prediction that the surrounding Arab states, terrified of possible U.S. intervention, simply accelerate their efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction and build up their armies, and crack down even more brutally on dissent? What if Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are taken over by Islamic fundamentalists and decide to curtail exports of oil to the west? The U.S. will invade, of course. But then you will get an intifada in Iraq, requiring more U.S. troops to suppress and maintain order. And you could have a hell of an intifada in Saudi Arabia, with all those oil wells to blow up. Then Pakistan tilts the wrong way, and India gets aggressive about Kashmir, and before you know it, you have a global disaster.

Or… you could have a democratic, federated Iraq, with a constitution that guarantees minority rights, equitable distribution of wealth, a free press, labour unions, and other intermediary institutions. Democracies, as a rule, don’t threaten their neighbors, so Iran, if it no longer feels threatened, could chill out and de-accelerate it’s drive to acquire nuclear weapons. Mahmoud Abbas leads a democratic Palestinian leadership into negotiations with Israel. Sharon, having proven his mojo with years of hard-line tactics, feels free to make a deal and stops Israeli settlements in the disputed territories and cedes back a good portion of the Golan Heights.

In short, peace breaks out. China and the U.S. cut a deal with North Korea. The stock market revives. The Democrats win the White House in 2004 and pass legislation providing health care insurance for every American. Life is great.

Crazier things have happened.

There was a recent meeting of Iraqi opposition leaders in the Kurdish-controlled town of Salahaddin. Americans, from the “Diplomatic Security Service”, were there in force to make sure nobody shot each other, especially Zalmay Khalilzad, whom President Bush calls a “special envoy” to the free Iraqis. Abdulaziz Hakim was a player, with the cooperation of the U.S., even though he is connected to the radical Islamist movement in Iran (his brother is the leader). Everyone at this meeting is holding their cards very close to their chests. No one wants to declare themselves as the provisional government of a new Iraq. No one wants to start disparaging the claims of rival ethnic or political groups because they fear that the Americans will freeze them out of the post-war reconstruction.

There are two large cities in the Kurdish-controlled areas of Northern Iraq: Mosul and Kirkuk. Both cities are located near vast deposits of oil. The Kurds will claim Kirkuk as their ancestral home, but not Mosul. After the first Gulf War, the Iraqis tried to “ethnically cleanse” Kirkuk by moving Arabic families into the homes of the Kurds and driving the Kurds further north, into the mountains. As the current war drew to a close, some Arabic families, who had been forcibly settled into the area in the first place, began to leave, voluntarily, and Kurds began to move back in. There is no doubt that many, many Kurds will immediately try to move back to Kirkuk at the first opportunity.

The Kurds entered Kirkuk with American forces, but were asked to leave once the city had been secured. They politely agreed, for the moment.

Why does Iraq have so many diverse ethnic groups? Because the nation of Iraq is an artificial construct of the area of occupation by British forces in the early 20th century. They gave it an administrative identity that has no relationship to the ethnicity of the inhabitants. The same problem exists in Africa and may be one of the main reasons nations like Rwanda, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe continue to writhe with civil disturbances, wars, and forced starvation.