Category: Uncategorized

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Martha Madany

I recently did a search on this name, “Martha Madany”, and found one tiny little reference on the website of a college she had attended in the late 1970’s and 80’s. One thing: she got married in April 2004.

So I am putting in the name, Martha Madany here, on a web page, for people to come and find, if they ever feel inclined to do a search on Martha. There’s nothing here about Martha, except that I knew her in college and liked her and that you won’t find very much about her if you do a search on her name on the internet. And here it is: Martha Madany, Martha Madany, Martha Madany. This page is all about you. I liked you and occasionally I think about you and I hope you are having a great life.

I later discovered that Martha did not get married for the first time in April 2004.  It was her second marriage.  I don’t know any more details than that.

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Update on Danien Echols

My original post on Damien Echols is here.

Even in a country as brutally committed to the death penalty as the United States, the process can be long and arduous. Echols is still on death row. And there is some movement: a judge has just granted a joint request by the defense and prosecution to have samples of skin, hair, and other tissue from the victims and from under the victims’ finger-nails tested for DNA.

This could be very interesting. And it’s refreshing to see the prosecution join in the motion– if they were right in targeting Echols in the first place, they should have nothing to fear.

On the other hand, if the DNA of those skin samples belongs to someone else…. expect the Attorney-General of Arkansas to continue to stonewall. [2011-03: they did, in fact, belong to someone else.]

How often do you like to admit that you were wrong and may be responsible for destroying three innocent lives? Or that you screwed up and didn’t do your job? Or that you are an ass?

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PBS’s Cabin Country

What the heck is PBS doing showing “Cabin Country”?

The show starts off with this cute graphic of a gun’s telescopic site aiming at various harmless animals. Words like “adventure” and “sportsmanship” glide across the screen.

Euphemism of the day: “over-gun”. Apparently, Americans tend to “over-gun”, which means that they like to hunt with huge powerful weapons that they can’t handle or aim correctly. “Big bore” Magnums, apparently.

“Bullet placement”. A weapon that is “comfortable for you”. What I love is the fashion sense. These men wear camouflage, right, so that animals can’t see them. But then they wear big orange vests over top so that other hunters won’t shoot them.

This show looked pretty authentic, so I started looking forward to seeing an animal get killed. Disappointment! They don’t show the manly hunters actually putting a bullet into the buck’s head. They show the hunter firing and then you see them talking about the excitement of the kill, and then they go to the buck and worship it for a while. Funny that they don’t stand there going, “geez, what a pathetic little weak buck. Look at him? Little feller, isn’t he? Not very scary looking at all. I mock you, wimpy buck!”

Oh no. They go, “look at him! He’s huge. Look at those magnificent antlers! What a babe!”

One of the hunters actually said, after killing another “nice” buck, “this’ll be a great story for the grandkids. I can’t wait to tell my daughter and all her friends…”

They deceive the bucks into approaching their lairs by rattling antlers together to make them think there is a fight going on. Then they shoot them. With guns. It’s bizarre. This makes the hunters feel manly and helps these sensitive men get “close to nature”.

Why don’t they at least have the honesty and decency to show the bullet going into the buck’s head? Come on—I want to see it. I want to know what we’re really dealing with here. What does it actually feel like to see a magnificent critter like that get his brains blasted out? What does it look like? Maybe I’m missing something. Or are they worried that the deer might not die quickly. Then the animal rights activists will jump out of the forest in their camouflage outfits with their orange vests and shout, “animal abuse!”

I am not, by the way, any kind of animal rights activist. I’m not even vegetarian. I just don’t like guns, and I don’t like the crappy attitude a lot of hunters have – that “culling” is necessary for ecological balance—and I don’t like that crap about how much they adore nature, before blowing it’s brains out. Let’s have it out plain and simple—tell us what you really feel:

“I like to kill”.

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Requiem for the Yanomami

Deep in the rain forests of Venezuela and Brazil, there once lived a people called the Yanomami. They farmed. They hunted. They had wives and children. They fought among themselves, village against village. They had life and death. They had Shamans who taught them about gods and magic and matter and spirit. They were completely isolated from the modern world.

They were, for all intents and purposes, a nation. They happened to live in an abstract, artificial political entity called “Venezuela”, but this meant nothing to them. And why should it have? White men from Europe came to the South American continent and proclaimed that God had given all of the land– and it’s peoples, as we shall see– to them. They set up governments. They demanded money from the people they identified as “citizens” so they could build armies and award each other medals. They invented guns and blades and poisons to ensure that no one would stop them from taking everything they wanted.

The Yanomami didn’t know anything about all this until the 1960’s when they were “discovered”.

Discovered.

Think about the arrogance of the way we Westerners use that word– as if they did not exist, or had no importance, until we “discovered” them. Think of how that word helps us think of appropriating a people, their beliefs, their culture, their technology, and, nowadays, their DNA. We discovered them. Now we can exploit them….

But I’m getting ahead of myself. An American scientist named James Neel, a geneticist, and an employee of the Atomic Energy Commission who took part in studies of the effects of radiation on people in Japan after World War II, found out about the Yanomami and decided that they provided an ideal field laboratory for his strange and rather Nazi-ish view of human evolutionary development. Now the word “Nazi” is tossed around all too carelessly these days, in reference to everyone from feminists to Alliance Party members, but, in this case, it is probably quite appropriate. Neel’s theories of human development provide a remarkably congenial intellectual framework for anyone advocating doctrines of racial superiority.

There is a mystery about James Neel’s role in studies conducted by the AEC on unsuspecting patients in a Rochester Hospital and prisoners in penitentiaries across the U.S. The AEC exposed these people to radiation in order to analyze its effects on them. I stress, the AEC did not obtain permission to do this.

Do you think that government agencies would never, ever do such a thing again? Ever?

No one has any convincing evidence that James Neel himself conducted these illegal and immoral studies, but he worked with the people who did. Has he denounced these criminals? I don’t know. No one will ever know probably– Neel is dead.

Anyway, at the AEC, Mr. Neel worked with a Venezuelan named Marcel Roche. Roche returned to Venezuela after the war and began conducting experiments, injecting radioactive isotopes into the Yanomami and then studying their blood samples. Yes, this man had been employed by the American Atomic Energy Commission. He worked for the United States Government. He helped us defeat those monsters, the Nazis. Then he went into the Venezuelan jungle and injected members of the Yanomami with radioactive iodine.

In 1968, Neel and a then-protégé named Napoleon Chagnon decided to immunize the Yanomami against the measles. The Yanomami didn’t have measles. The Yanomami had never been exposed to the measles. Until Mr. Neel decided to immunize them. There was an outbreak and hundreds, perhaps thousands of Yanomami died.

Mr. Chagnon argues that the idea of immunizing the Yanomami against the measles was the result of an altruistic desire to better their lives. Some medical scientists argue that a measles epidemic could not have been the result of immunization. Other scientists are not so sure. I’m not so sure. In fact, I think it’s rather insane to believe that the measles epidemic– the first ever in the the thousands of years of history of the Yanomami– just happened to coincide with the introduction of the vaccine, or, at the very least, with the introduction of self-seeking white adventurers, missionaries, and anthropologists, but was not caused by them.

Chagnon also induced various Yanomami villages to stage little wars for Timothy Asch’s cameras, to provide documentary “proof” of his assertions about the innate violence of the Yanomami leaders. To ensure that the battle scenes would be vigorous, he gave gifts to villagers that he knew would arouse the envy of their “enemies” of the drama, to the point where real injury and death took place.

For these achievements, Chagnon was lauded around the world as a brilliant anthropologist.

Chagnon is still alive today. He is a retired professor “emeritus”. He disputes Tierny’s charges. So those of us without first-hand knowledge are left to sort it out. You have to read Chagnon’s arguments. They don’t reassure. Tierny, for example, alleges that Chagnon used his helicopter to brazenly flop into Yanomami villages, blowing the roofs off their houses and intimidating them. Chagnon doesn’t claim that he didn’t land his helicopter in the middle of the villages and blow the roofs off houses– he merely tries to convince you that the villagers wanted him to land near the houses, so they wouldn’t have to haul his equipment so far! Why, in heaven’s name, are the Yanomami hauling this self-seeking adventurer’s equipment up into their villages? Because they love him? Because he did so much for them?

Patrick Tierney also claims that Chagnon tried to become a shaman, and that he abandoned a village to the measles. Chagnon admits that he did behave like a shaman at least once, and did paint his body and wear feathers. He claims it was intended to persuade the Yanomami that the damnation and hellfire sermons of a local missionary should not be believed. Chagnon admits he left a village knowing that a man with the measles was there and that the villagers would soon return and were likely to contract the measles from the man. His response is somewhat lame: he thought someone else would make sure the infected man left the village before the Yanomami returned.

Tierney alleges Chagnon shot a pistol off every time he entered a village. Chagnon responds that he once fired a shotgun at a tree, when some Yanomami were threatening to kill him.

Terry Turner, professor of Anthropology at Cornell University, summarizes Neel’s views of Eugenics as follows:

according to his [Neel’s] eugenically slanted genetic theories, dominant genes (specifically, a gene he believed existed for “leadership” or innate ability”) would have a selective advantage, because male carriers of this gene could gain access to a disproportionate share of the available females, thus reproducing their own superior genes more frequently than less “innately able” males. The result, supposedly, would be the continual upgrading of the human genetic stock. Modern mass societies, by contrast, consist of vast genetically entropic “herds” in which, he theorized, recessive genes could not be eliminated by selective competition and superior leadership genes would be swamped by mass genetic mediocrity. The political implication of this fascistic eugenics is clearly that society should be reorganized into small breeding isolates in which genetically superior males could emerge into dominance, eliminating or subordinating the male losers in the competition for leadership and women, and amassing harems of brood females.

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Hate the Sin; Hate the Sinner

Did you ever hear a person say “hate the sin, love the sinner”?

That’s right. Usually just before he whacks the sinner in the teeth.

Some Christian leaders in the U.S. said it about Bill Clinton. Yes, they love Bill Clinton the man, and they forgive him, as a man. But as President, he has to pay. He should be impeached.

This strikes me as a little strange. This is their interpretation of Christ’s commandment to his followers that they must be prepared to forgive people, seventy-seven times, or seven times seventy-seven times, if necessary. Jerry Falwell says that Jesus didn’t mean that you should let people get away with things. If a person strikes you on the cheek, you forgive him, of course. Then you whack him on his cheek, to teach him a lesson. This “turn the other cheek” business? Allegorical, I guess. A mere illustration—not to be taken seriously.

But Falwell is mistaken. Jesus did not mean, “forgive those who harm you, but make sure they are punished”. When Jesus said, “forgive”, he meant, forget about punishing them. Forget revenge. Forget “just deserts”. It’s as plain as day. Read it. Read the gospel. This is not an abstraction. It is not a symbol. It is not an option. If you are a Christian, you must forgive.

At the time of Christ’s ministry, there were no prisons for punishment, as we have today. The “penitentiary” is a modern invention. And it is a bizarre invention. It is a complete failure. The U.S. keeps building more and more of them as fast as they can—like McDonalds—but people keep committing more and more crimes.

The purpose of the Roman prison in Jesus’ time was to secure the evil-doer until justice could be done. Nobody was sent to prison as punishment. If you did something really, really bad, you would be executed. If you did something moderately bad, you had to make it up to the person you had wronged. You would be held in prison– fed by your family, hopefully– until you made up for what you had done. And if you were the personal enemy of a person with power—you might be held there until you died, or you might be exiled to some remote island. Nobody was sentenced to a “term” in prison. There was no such thing.

So when Jesus said to forgive those who wrong you, it meant something. It meant that a person in jail for robbing you would go free– because you no longer demanded restitution.

Jesus pointed out that forgiving our friends and being kind to those who are kind to us is not remarkable behaviour. However, forgiving our enemies and being kind to those who hate us is.

That’s a pretty tough demand. Almost as tough as asking people to give all that they own to the poor. Did Jesus mean it? I don’t know. We like to say that when the bible condemns fornicators to hell-fire and damnation, it really means it. When it asks us to give to the poor until it hurts us– it’s only being figurative. And these people– Falwell and Robertson and their ilk–tell you that the bible is meant to be taken literally– word for word.

Some people would argue, well, how could you run a society that way? People would rob you with impunity! They would do drugs. They would pirate software. They would rip those tags off their mattresses!

These people are mistaken. They assume that everyone will forgive, but nobody will be forgiven. Imagine for one minute a society in which everyone really lived according to Christ’s teachings. Imagine that everyone forgave each other. Imagine that everyone sold everything they had and gave the money to the poor. Imagine that everyone acted towards each other with goodwill and kindness and love. Do you still think, in this kind of society, that theft and murder and robbery would be a problem?

If our society took Christ’s approach to sin, everything would be different. Poverty, in which most crime is rooted, could not exist in a society that actually shared its wealth with the needy. Corporations would not close their plants in industrialized areas and move them to Mexico or Thailand. Cities would not have allowed their downtown areas to decay. Schools would be well-funded. Medical care would be provided to everyone equally. Drug addicts would be treated instead of incarcerated.

Ah—but we don’t live in that kind of society. But isn’t that the point? We tell our children not to emulate society, in the way that they fornicate and do drugs and watch perverted movies and listen to perverted music. But when it comes to forgiveness and compassion and love for your neighbor, we act just like everybody else. We’re out there joining the tail-gate parties at the prisons on execution night. We’re out there filing lawsuits seeking damages and laying charges and putting in alarm systems and buying guns. We’re out there demanding more prisons and harsher sentences.

Jesus also tells his followers to love their enemies. I guess Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson must regard Bill Clinton as a friend, because they certainly don’t love him.

If you asked Jerry Falwell, he would probably say, yes, by golly, I do love Bill Clinton, as a Christian, of course. He would be lying. He knows it. You know it. And I know it. The whole world knows that Jerry Falwell despises Bill Clinton. According to Salon Magazine, Jerry Falwell helped finance and distribute a 1994 video called “The Clinton Chronicles” which made numerous wildly unsupported allegations against the Clintons, including that they were involved in drug-dealing in Arkansas, and that they may have murdered Vince Foster.

Some days I am tempted to take at face value the polls that say that something like 70% of Americans are Christians. Other days, I believe that the actual number of people who sincerely try to live according to God’s word is very, very, very small.

Maybe about 10.

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The Ends of the Earth

Once upon a time the top of the world was a small, undefiled place, where, if anywhere on the planet, a man could go to be alone with himself for a moment or two.

Below, 39 climbers make their way to the top, on May 10, 1996.

everest2.jpg (23473 bytes)

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Intel’s Sweatshops

Some former employees of Intel have set up a website which complains bitterly about Intel’s employment practices. According to Ken Hamidi, Intel hires young university graduates, drives them to work like slaves–sacrificing family, personal life, and sometimes health–and then casts them off like so much lint, so they can cycle the next generation of programmers and engineers through the system. How do they get rid of these employees? By giving them negative job evaluations, demanding more and more from them, and offering incentives to “quit”, to minimize Intel’s exposure to wrongful dismissal suits.

Intel denies Hamidi’s allegations. Do you believe Ken Hamidi? Maybe Hamidi is just an embittered former employee who couldn’t hack life in the fast lane. On the other hand, I have no problem believing that a large corporation like Intel can be dominated by materialistic sadists with the personal ethics of alley cats. Who is right?

Consider this. Intel’s employees all have e-mail accounts. Intel’s email system is directly linked to the Internet. The Internet is public and free— except in China and Afghanistan and a few other enlightened polities. Well, Ken Hamidi decided to send information about his website to all Intel employees. When Intel found out about this, they put a filter on their e-mail system to keep Hamidi’s messages out. Then they went to Hamidi’s internet service providers and allegedly bullied them into terminating Hamidi’s account. To top it off, they persuaded these ISP’s to delete any replies from Intel employees to Hamidi’s messages.

A little heavy-handed? A little like the Taliban? Don’t forget, this is the corporation that tried to put a hidden serial number into everybody’s computer so that user activities on the Internet could be traced.

I suspect that Hamidi is largely correct in his assessment of Intel’s corporate culture. For one thing, we have statements from Intel executives themselves that indicate that they believe that employees are only “useful” for a limited amount of time. There is a stage in a person’s life, between, say, 24 and 35, when one wants to get ahead in the work world, and is willing to work outrageous hours and put with horrendous abuse to get there. This is, coincidentally, also the age at which people are still pretty naïve about how employers really feel about them.

I hope those employees at Intel join a union.

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Denmark: Copenhagen, City of Dreams

Copenhagen is a city of about 1.6 million people. It is the capital of Denmark. It is the capital of the country that gave us the charming women’s curling team that finished second at the Nagano Winter Olympics.

During the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, you might have heard the following argument, in one form or another:

Liberal: “In Europe, an affair like this would been regarded as ridiculously unimportant.”
Conservative: “That’s because European morality is lower than ours. If we don’t impeach Clinton, it will show that we are just as perverted as the Dutch, or Danes, or French.”

Gee. Who’s right? Well, Danish women sometimes leave their offices at lunch time to sunbathe topless in the city parks. I guess that’s pretty bad behaviour.

On the other hand, Copenhagen has about seven murders a year. New York City has about 1500. Of course, New York is ten times the size of Copenhagen, so let’s make it a fair comparison. Copenhagen would have 60 murders a year, if it were the size of New York.

Which leaves you with a puzzle. If the Danes are so decadent, and so unchristian, why aren’t they out stabbing, robbing, shooting, raping, and bombing each other into oblivion, like all evil people do? And if America is the last bastion of Christian morality in the so-called civilized west, why are American cities so violent and lawless?

I’ll try to argue like a conservative for a minute.
1. Just because the Danes don’t rob, murder, rape, or beat each other doesn’t mean they’re not leading lives of pernicious debauchery, and, therefore, actually leading more sinful lives than Americans do. They probably have more illicit sex than we do.
2. The population of Denmark is fairly uniform ethnically and socially. They don’t have the class divisions that America has.
3. What do we care? We’re bigger and stronger, so we’re right.

Besides, we don’t believe you. You’re probably playing a statistical trick on us. We can’t prove you’re wrong, because we don’t know anything about Denmark and we’ll never care enough to know anything about Denmark, but we’re Americans, so we can be as stupid as we want to be.

Argument 1 implies, of course, that illicit sex is just as bad as robbery and murder, so can we dismiss that one as silly? The only argument that makes any sense, of course, is argument number 2. The trouble is, you have to ask yourself whether a nation that prides itself on its Christian heritage should go around bragging about it’s class divisions and its inability to resolve them. So when Americans say, “You Europeans— the reason you find our obsession with the Clinton scandal so laughable is because you are morally inferior to us!” the accusation rings a little hollow.

Conservative churches in the U.S. never tire of reminding us of how God blesses those who obey Him and follow His commandments. If America really is more faithful to Christian morality than continental Europe is, then why is its prison population bulging at the seams? Why does it have the highest infant mortality rate of the developed world? Why does it vote the same way on international treaties as China and Libya do? Why does it have so many more poor people, as a percentage of the population, than any other G7 nation?

Americans are generally a likeable people. They are generous, on a personal level, to a fault. They can be moved by compassion when disaster or misfortune strikes. They seem to have a strong sense of fair play.

And on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, they (the people, not the Republicans) consistently see things the way Europeans do. They don’t believe that what Clinton did is worth all the trouble of impeachment. And they’re right.

The funny thing is, if this really was an issue of Christian morality, why is it that Christian “leaders”, like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and James Dobson, are so utterly devoid of the quality of mercy? Why are they so unwilling to forgive? Why did Jerry Falwell sponsor a video “documentary” on Clinton that is filled with lies, exaggeration, half-truths, and distortions, including ridiculous allegations that Vince Foster was murdered? (You have to ask yourself what kind of resources Jerry Falwell would have that Kenneth Starr didn’t have?) Why are these leaders filled with so much hatred for the Clintons, especially Hillary?

 

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Those Wild and Crazy Lawyers

Quick– who made more money this year? Microsoft Corporation or a couple of lawyers in Texas?

Right. The lawyers. Well, almost. You see this group of lawyers represented the State of Texas in negotiating a settlement (read “sell-out”) with the tobacco companies. In exchange for lots of bucks, paid to the lawyers— ooops! Paid to the Plaintiffs! That’s you and me! —the tobacco companies get to continue marketing death and disease to American children. What a wonderful country!

So how much did the lawyers bill the State of Texas for their noble services, defending the innocent consumer against evil, ruthless, greedy corporations?

How much you say? Well, these are lawyers, after all. So the amount might be a little excessive. What d’ya think? Take a guess? How much should a lawyer be paid for a couple of years of work, doing research, bribing employees to turn over internal documents, and ordering health studies already paid for by the tax-payer through government funding of Universities and Research Organizations? How much?

$10 million?
$20 million?
$50 million?

Oh, come on now. These are REALLY SMART TALENTED LAWYERS. After all, the average lawyer would have tried to get tobacco companies out of the business altogether. But that would have made the tobacco companies very unhappy. So these superior lawyers actually found a way to make everybody happy. The government gets money. The tobacco companies get to stay in business. The taxpayer gets to continue smoking away.

$100 million?
$200 million?
$500 million?

Come on– don’t be shy! These the same intelligent, compassionate, competent professionals you see every day in the movies and on television, except that you never see the scene where they present their bills and take almost all of the settlement money they weaseled out of the greedy, amoral, unfeeling corporation. How can a lawyer live off of a measly $500 million dollars nowadays? Be reasonable! There are SO MANY expenses. Postage. Clerical work. Filing. Thinking. Reading. Subscriptions. Donuts. Get SERIOUS!

$1 billion?

A mere BILLION? When Michael Jackson makes almost a tenth of that? When Bill Gates makes ten times that much! And how much more important is a Texas lawyer than the owner of the greediest corporation on the face of the earth? Give me a break.

$5 billion?
$10 billion?

Now you’re getting reasonable! But not too reasonable.

$25 billion?

Right on! Yes, these Texas Lawyers are asking for $25 billion dollars for negotiating— GET THIS– a $17 billion dollar settlement. In other words, for recovering $17 billion dollars from the tobacco companies for the lucky tax payers of Texas, they ….. well, they want to keep all the money. Yes ALL of the money. YES, ALL OF THE MONEY. But that’s not all folks! The taxpayers of Texas, in compensation for all the medical costs of taking care of all of the victims of smoking addictions, get to PAY these Texas Lawyers an additional $8 BILLION! You lucky Texans! Not only do you get to have tail-gate parties at Huntsville State Prison where they execute completely worthless, disgusting, evil, unredeemable human beings almost every night— you also get to pay a bunch of lawyers $8 billion dollars for……. well….. for…..

Well, fortunately, the lawyers and the tobacco companies got together and decided that it wouldn’t be fair to hit the citizens of Texas with such a large bill. They said, “What? Are you crazy?” Well… And they decided that those Texas Lawyers should ONLY receive $3.3 billion.

Whew! Here I was all upset over nothing! A mere $3.3 billion! How many lawyers were involved? The New York Times doesn’t say, but several other states had teams of three or four leading lawyers and their staffs. But– get this– some lawyers represented as many as 30 states. Do they get paid once? Are you an idiot? Does Michael Jordan get paid once even though he plays in 30 different stadiums?

Well, yes he does. But that’s Michael Jordan. He’s not a lawyer.

One of the lawyers for Florida, Steven Yerid, said the costs are justified. Why? Because that’s how much lawyers should make? Because their work is so terrible, so risky, so dangerous, that even a $14.95 an hour coal miner wouldn’t take it on? Because they are so smart that they scare Stephen Hawkings?

No. He said the fees were justified because “the costs come from the industry”. In other words, we’re justified in taking any money we can lay our grubby hands on because we are lawyers. We just ARE.

Furthermore, he says, the lawyers might have ended up with nothing if they had lost the case. So, because these lawyers might not have won the case, they are entitled to demand as much money as they please.

Remember, this line of reasoning is coming from a lawyer, someone you might need to depend on for your life if you’re ever charged with a serious crime in Texas.

Pity me. I thought this case was about public health and liability. Instead, it is clearly some new kind of industry, in which clever entrepreneur can sue somebody out of the blue on the off chance they might collect a few billions. Who do they sue next?

What does the public have to do with it? Go suck a camel.

The industry will pay it? Ha ha ha. The industry?!!! Where does this idiot think the “industry” gets its money? From the smokers! So, not only will very little of this money from the tobacco companies actually find it’s way into the medical facilities of Texas (aren’t most of their medical facilities used to gas convicts anyway?), but the smokers will pay more for cigarettes in order to pay the lawyers who negotiated a deal in which tobacco companies can now market their disease- causing product with impunity.

There are some scandals that shock you. There are scandals that boggle the mind. There are scandals that baffle you, because the scale of the moral atrocity is so far beyond normal human experience that you can’t even begin to comprehend it. The Savings and Loan Scandal. The loans to 3rd World Dictatorships at usurious interest rates. Windows 95.

And then there is the king of all scandals, the mind-blowing, baffling, stunning, incomprehensible, MOTHER of all scandals. And this is it.

So while you’re sitting there eating your chips and watching the sanctimonious republicans try to impeach the president for consensual groping in the Oval Office— consider where your hard-earned tax dollars are really going.

And weep, wail, gnash your teeth, bash your head against the wall….. what else are you going to do?

Get yourself a lawyer?

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Charity of the Third World

There are two kinds of countries in the world. The very rich and the very poor. On the one hand, you have North America, Europe, Japan, and some other Asian and South American countries. These nations have incredible wealth and an astonishing quality of life, including first-class health-care, transportation, education, and entertainment facilities. On the other hand you have the Sudan, Rwanda, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and other African and Asian and Central American nations. These nations can barely feed themselves, if they can feed themselves at all. They have mud roads instead of freeways. They have epidemics instead of hospitals.

Do you think we in the rich West are trying to help? We send them aid, right? We give them grants and loans, right? Wouldn’t it be incredibly absurd if those poverty-stricken nations were sending us more money than we send them! Preposterous! Unbelievable! And true.

Yes, indeed. Most of the world’s poorest nations are sending us money. Then we send a pittance back, to ease our consciences.

How could this happen? Very simple. In the 1960’s and 70’s, these countries, almost always ruled by dictators at the time, borrowed billions of dollars from banks in the West (like Citibank). What did they use this money for? To build roads? To build hospitals? To improve education? No. They used it to buy weapons. Why did they need weapons? Because their own starving people, perceiving that their dictatorial and illegitimate government cared nothing for their welfare, rose up in rebellion and tried to evict these vampires.

It only adds insult to injury that they had to buy these weapons from large Western corporations as part of the deal. So, in effect, these were loans to Boeing and McDonnel Douglas and other American and European arms manufacturers. Except that they didn’t have to repay them. Countries like Peru and Brazil and Rhodesia had to repay them, with, of course, compound interest.

The result is that more money flows from the poor nations of the world to the rich than the other way around. This is a scandal. It is an outrage. It is an outrage of a scandal of a disgrace.

You ask, why don’t these nations simply state the obvious: that they (the people) didn’t borrow this money– the dictators did. If you want your money back, go call on Idi Amin or Doc Duvalier or whomever, and leave us alone. Why don’t they do that?

Because the pimps for these banks, the Western governments who often helped arrange these deals, will destroy these nations if they refuse to pay.

You may ask, well, what about the countries that don’t have dictatorial governments, that just borrowed too much and can’t repay it?  I would argue that banks that go to poor countries and offer them fabulous amounts of money which they know will be spent unwisely on military equipment or vanity projects and then discover that those nations can’t repay those loans without doing terrible damage to their own economies should just suck it up: that’s the price of doing business.  No government should step in to enforce repayment of those loans, especially when they are made to an unelected government.   This, my friends, is NOT what happens: instead, the western governments step in to enforce repayment.

You don’t believe that Western governments have these kind of perverted priorities? Consider China. After the government of China massacred hundreds, perhaps thousands of students in Tiananmen Square, President Bush squawked a little but the U.S. continued to renew China’s “most favoured nation” trade status on an annual basis. Oh, but when it was discovered that factories in China were manufacturing pirated copies of software and music CD’s, the big guns came out blazing: cease and desist or else! And China complied.

What is really bizarre about this whole debacle is that Americans, as people, are among the most generous in the world. On a personal basis, they tend to give a lot to charities, including charities that help poor nations over-seas. So while the average American citizen is moved by compassion when he or she sees pictures of starving children, his/her own government and banks are pimping away on a grand scale undoing all of the good that those well-meaning gifts would do.

The Jubilee 2000 initiative is an attempt, by churches, charities, and human rights organizations, to persuade Western Banks and governments to stop profiting from the misery of millions of people. It asks Western governments and banks to forgive most if not all of the massive debts that prevent any of these nations from pulling themselves out of poverty. It deserves your financial and political support.