HYANNIS - U.S. Senator Edward M. Kennedy was rushed by ambulance to Cape Cod Hospital this morning after falling ill at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport.

Hyannis fire responded to the compound after a call was made around 8:30 a.m. It’s unclear what Kennedy’s medical condition is, but after he spent almost two hours in the emergency room a decision was made to transfer him to Mass General Hospital in Boston.

Kennedy, 76, was placed on a stretcher and wheeled out to the MedFlight helicopter around 10:15 a.m. where it took off from Barnstable Municipal Airport.

The Kennedy family is preparing to host the annual Best Buddies Challenge event in Hyannisport this afternoon, which is a fund-raiser for the organization. Best Buddies was founded by Anthony Kennedy Shriver and helps people with intellectual disabilities.

Hundreds are expected to participate in the event, which kicked off this morning with a 100-mile bicycle ride from the Kennedy Library in Boston to Hyannisport.

A concert at the Kennedy compound is scheduled for tonight.

Kennedy has represented Massachusetts in the United States Senate since 1962..

He was elected in 1962 to finish the final two years of the Senate term of his brother, Senator John F. Kennedy, who was elected president in 1960.

Since then, Kennedy has been re-elected to seven full terms, and is now the second most senior member of the Senate.

Copyright © 2008 Cape Cod Media Group

WASHINGTON - Antiwar veterans of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan took their case to Capitol Hill Thursday, baring their souls with stories of killings of innocent civilians, torture, and wrongful detentions.

“On several occasions our convoys came upon bodies that had been lying on the road, sometimes for weeks,” said Marine Corps veteran Vincent Emanuele, who served in al-Qaim near the Syrian border in 2004 and 2005.

“When encountering these bodies standard procedure was to run over the corpses, sometimes even stopping and taking pictures, which was also standard practice when encountering the dead in Iraq,” he told the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which organized the hearing.

Emanuele also said that U.S. military personnel often took “pot shots” at cars passing by.

“Our rules of engagement stated that we should first fire warning shots into the ground in front of the car, then the engine block, and the windshield. That is if the car was even moving in the first place,” he said. “Many times cars that actually had pulled off to the side of the road were also shot at.”

Thursday’s hearing was an outgrowth of an event in Maryland earlier this year called “Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan - Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations.” For four days in March, dozens of veterans of the two wars testified about atrocities they personally committed or witnessed while deployed overseas.

At the time, many of the veterans expressed a desire to take their case to Capitol Hill. Thursday they got their wish.

Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, addressed a panel of veterans at the start of the hearing.

“We now have an opportunity to hear not from the military’s top brass but directly from you,” she said, “the very soldiers who put your lives on the line to carry out this president’s failed policies.”

Nine veterans of the Iraq war told their stories before members of Congress and a packed gallery. One of the veterans had also served in Afghanistan. About 40 veterans were in the audience.

The veterans spoke about extremely lax rules of engagement handed down by commanding officers, which they said virtually guaranteed atrocities would be committed, and which in turn created a violent backlash among Iraqi people and a continued cycle of violence.

Former U.S. Army Capt. Luis Carlos Montalvan served directly under Gen. David Petraeus in 2005 and 2006.

“We have beaten our drum to try to raise the issue of the dereliction of duty committed by a number of generals who have been promoted and promoted again and continue to perpetuate the lies [that] paint a rosy picture of the situation in Iraq,” he said.

Montalvan said he personally witnessed U.S. military personnel carrying out waterboarding, the mock-drowning interrogation technique that has long been considered torture by U.S. courts.

Former Srgt. Adam Kokesh presented a picture of himself standing, smiling, in front of a dead Iraqi civilian that another marine had shot.

“This is a picture that I’m very ashamed of, having posed with this dead Iraqi as a trophy picture,” he said. “But what felt awkward to me at the time was not so much that I was taking the picture, but the fact that I had not killed this man and I was taking a trophy from somebody else’s kill.”

Kokesh said the person in the trophy photo was an innocent civilian whose car was accidentally “lit up” by marines.

Kokesh referenced similar photos that surfaced during and after the Vietnam war — some of which were presented at a “Winter Soldier” gathering organized by Vietnam veterans 37 years ago.

“At the first Winter Soldier investigation in 1971, one of the Vietnam veterans held up a similar photograph and said ‘Don’t ever let your government do this to you. Don’t ever let your government put you in a position where this attitude towards death and disregard for human life is acceptable or common.’ And we are still doing this to service members every day as long as these occupations continue,” he added.

Kokesh said his Marine Corps Civil Affairs team, including a major, was present when the trophy photo was taken. Numerous other marines also snapped their picture with the corpse, he said.

Members of Iraq Veterans Against the War hope this week’s hearing will spark an investigation by a full Congressional committee and speed the end of the wars.

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) praised the veterans who spoke Thursday. “I want to thank you for having more courage than many members of Congress have — for coming here in defiance of what you have been instructed and taught to do,” she said. “They attempted to tell you that you should be satisfied by everything that you saw and everything that you did and everything you witnessed, but you’re not. I praise and honor you for that.”

The veterans’ testimony, however, may be overshadowed by an unrelated legislative maneuver that occurred just steps away from their hearing room Thursday: the House of Representatives defeated a $162.5 billion proposal to continue funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

While many antiwar activists were elated by the news from the House floor, their victory will likely be only symbolic, and short-lived.

President George W. Bush had threatened to veto the spending bill anyway, citing the time line it would have imposed for withdrawing troops, and what he described as unnecessary domestic spending. Knowing that, and angered over the way Democratic leaders handled the bill, 131 Republicans abstained from the vote. That left those who opposed the new funding with a surprising plurality of the vote.

© 2008 One World

Juneau, the capital of Alaska and a popular cruise-ship stop, has had little to celebrate since an avalanche wiped out the lines supplying it with hydroelectricity. But four weeks later it has become a model for energy conservation, with its citizens doing everything from unplugging tumble-driers to regulating airport runway lights.

It is a crisis no American metropolis would wish for itself. On 16 April, a roaring snow-slide in the Coastal Range made matchsticks of pylons linking the city to the hydroelectric dam about 40 miles to the south that supplied 80 per cent of its power.

The good news was that the local provider had back-up diesel generators waiting to be cranked up in just such a situation. Less good is the expense. Residents, who already have to contend with a cost of living higher than almost anywhere in the US because of Juneau’s remoteness, were told to expect their power bills to quintuple during the three or four months that it would take to repair the lines.

Most homeowners will get their first glimpse of those new bills this week. But the pain may not be quite so bad as anticipated, thanks to an effort by citizens to cut back on energy consumption. It has been an unlikely go-green campaign that is already being seen as a lesson to the rest of America at a time when conservation, in times of rising oil prices, is touted for all.

Everyone has been doing their bit, including the city authorities, which took steps that included closing the municipal sauna, mothballing one of the two lifts in the main library and turning off the airport’s runway lights when planes are not landing or taking off. The hope is that some of the initiatives will endure after the avalanche damage is repaired, which may not be until early July.

Businesses have responded too. Televisions in display windows have gone dark. Department stores, hotels and offices have replaced some bulbs with energy-saving models and simply removed others.

At the convention centre, the thermostats have been notched down eight degrees to a not-so-toasty 60F. “Turn off, turn down, unplug,” Sarah Lewis, chairwoman of the Juneau Commission on Sustainability, said recently. “That’s what everyone is doing and being vigilant about and commenting when others are not.”

In all, the city, unreachable by road and with a population of 30,000, has managed to cut consumption by 30 per cent in less than a month, a margin some experts had thought impossible.

But the greatest contribution may have come from homeowners themselves, who have done everything from lighting paraffin lamps to rigging up clotheslines - tumble-driers being one of the greediest of household appliances - and forgetting the ironing. It seems that even in energy-guzzling America people can change their ways when the incentive is there.

“We sold all of our clothes pins the first day,” said Doug White, general manager at Don Abel Building Supplies. “I don’t think kids even knew what they were for, but they’re learning now.”

It is a phenomenon that was seen before in Brazil, when a drought starved the power grid of hydro-electric power in 2001. On that occasion, consumers were ordered to cut their use of power by 20 per cent or face fines.

It worked. “In two months, the whole country cut their demand by 20 per cent, and they never really returned to the same level of consumption after that,” said Alan Meier, of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

©independent.co.uk

SULAYMANIYAH - A dark pool of dried blood and a fallen red scarf mark the place where Ronak, who had fled to a woman’s shelter in the Kurdish city of Sulaymaniyah when she was accused of adultery by her husband, was shot three times by a man hiding on the roof of a nearby building.

Ronak was wounded by bullets in the neck, side and leg and only survived after a four-hour operation. She was the latest victim of a huge increase across Iraq in the number of “honor” killings of women for alleged immorality by their own families.

Many are burnt to death by having petrol or paraffin poured over them and set ablaze. Others are shot or strangled. The United Nations estimates that at least 255 women died in honor-related killings in Kurdistan, home to one fifth of Iraqis, in the first six months of 2007 alone.

The murder of women who are deemed to have disobeyed traditional codes of morality is even more common in the rest of Iraq where government authority has broken down since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

A surprising reason explaining the massive increase in the number of honor killings is the availability of cheap mobile phones able to take pictures. Men photograph themselves making love to their girlfriends and pass the pictures to their friends. This often turns out to be a lethal act of bravado in a society where premarital or extra-marital sex justifies killing.

The first known case of sex recorded on a mobile leading to murder was in 2004. Film of a boy making love with a 17-year-old girl circulated in the Kurdish capital, Arbil. Two days later she was killed by her family and a week later he was murdered by his.

Since then there has been a sharp increase in the number of women suffering violence - it is almost always the women rather than the men who suffer retribution - as a result of some aspect of their love life being pictured on mobile phones.

In 2007, at least 350 women, double the figure for the previous year, suffered violence as a result of mobile phone “evidence”, according to Amanj Khalil of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, citing figures compiled by women’s organizations and the police directorate in Sulaymaniyah.

The true figure is probably much higher. Bodies are buried in the mountains. Violence is concealed. Whole extended families and clans feel a genuine sense of shame because of some supposed act of immorality.

Often retribution is carefully planned. In the case of Ronak, whose real name has to be concealed, her would-be killer carefully chose his firing point in an empty office building beside the shelter and may have waited for her for a long time. Ronak, who has three children, came from the ramshackle town of Chamchamal on the road between Sulaymaniyah and Kirkuk. Accused of adultery by her husband and fearing an honour killing, she fled her house and took refuge first with the police who passed her on in March this year to the Asuda shelter in Sulaymaniyah, one of six shelters in Kurdistan for women who are victims of violence or threatened with honor killing.

She must have thought herself safe. Along with four other women, she was living on the first floor which can only be reached by a narrow staircase closed off by a locked inner door. The police gave a measure of protection. But members of her husband’s family may have pursued her from Chamchamal. “When we went to court [with Ronak, who was seeking a divorce] we thought we were being followed,” says Khanum Raheem Lateef, the manager of Asuda.

The windows in the shelter are mostly masked by curtains, but the one in the kitchen area leading to the bathroom had been taken down. At 11pm last Sunday Ronak went to the bathroom and as she came back into the kitchen a gunman lying on a roof 20ft away shot her three times.

The position of women in Iraqi society has deteriorated dramatically since the start of the occupation. Despite the horrific number of honour killings, their status may be improving only in Kurdistan, where the government is secular, in contrast to Baghdad where the religious parties hold power. The Kurdish police and courts are also more sympathetic than elsewhere in Iraq to women whose lives have been threatened. There are no shelters for women in Baghdad or Basra.

Vulnerability to violence is not the only area in which the equal status of women in Iraq has been eroded. A woman can only get a new passport if she is accompanied by a male relative. One woman, whose father was too ill to attend the passport office, had to take her 14-year-old brother with her to vouch for her before officials would give her a new passport.

Many women escape from miserable marriages, often arranged by their families, not by flight but by suicide. In 2007, some 600 women and girls in Kurdistan killed themselves, mostly by burning themselves, or by drowning or shooting themselves, according to the Health Ministry of the Kurdistan Regional Government.

“Women may feel there is genuinely no hope for them to escape subjection,” says Sherizaan Minwalla, a lawyer with the Heartland Alliance in Sulaymaniyah, who represents many victims of domestic violence. “Suicide may seem a rational choice and even a form of protest.”

©independent.co.uk

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon is moving forward with plans to build a new, 40-acre detention complex on the main American military base in Afghanistan, officials said, in a stark acknowledgment that the United States is likely to continue to hold prisoners overseas for years to come.

The proposed detention center would replace the cavernous, makeshift American prison on the Bagram military base north of Kabul, which is now typically packed with about 630 prisoners, compared with the 270 held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Until now, the Bush administration had signaled that it intended to scale back American involvement in detention operations in Afghanistan. It had planned to transfer a large majority of the prisoners to Afghan custody, in an American-financed, high-security prison outside Kabul to be guarded by Afghan soldiers.

But American officials now concede that the new Afghan-run prison cannot absorb all the Afghans now detained by the United States, much less the waves of new prisoners from the escalating fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

The proposal for a new American prison at Bagram underscores the daunting scope and persistence of the United States military’s detention problem, at a time when Bush administration officials continue to say they want to close down the facility at Guantánamo Bay.

Military officials have long been aware of serious problems with the existing detention center in Afghanistan, the Bagram Theater Internment Facility. After the prison was set up in early 2002, it became a primary site for screening prisoners captured in the fighting. Harsh interrogation methods and sleep deprivation were used widely, and two Afghan detainees died there in December 2002, after being repeatedly struck by American soldiers.

Conditions and treatment have improved markedly since then, but hundreds of Afghans and other men are still held in wire-mesh pens surrounded by coils of razor wire. There are only minimal areas for the prisoners to exercise, and kitchen, shower and bathroom space is also inadequate.

Faced with that, American officials said they wanted to replace the Bagram prison, a converted aircraft hangar that still holds some of the decrepit aircraft-repair machinery left by the Soviet troops who occupied the country in the 1980s. In its place the United States will build what officials described as a more modern and humane detention center that would usually accommodate about 600 detainees - or as many as 1,100 in a surge - and cost more than $60 million.

“Our existing theater internment facility is deteriorating,” said Sandra L. Hodgkinson, the senior Pentagon official for detention policy, in a telephone interview. “It was renovated to do a temporary mission. There is a sense that this is the right time to build a new facility.”

American officials also acknowledged that there are serious health risks to detainees and American military personnel who work at the Bagram prison, because of their exposure to heavy metals from the aircraft-repair machinery and asbestos.

“It’s just not suitable,” another Pentagon official said. “At some point, you have to say, ‘That’s it. This place was not made to keep people there indefinitely.’ ”

That point came about six months ago. It became clear to Pentagon officials that the original plan of releasing some Afghan prisoners outright and transferring other detainees to Afghan custody would not come close to emptying the existing detention center.

Although a special Afghan court has been established to prosecute detainees formerly held at Bagram and Guantánamo, American officials have been hesitant to turn over those prisoners they consider most dangerous. In late February the head of detainee operations in Iraq, Maj. Gen. Douglas M. Stone, traveled to Bagram to assess conditions there.

In Iraq, General Stone has encouraged prison officials to build ties to tribal leaders, families and communities, said a Congressional official who has been briefed on the general’s work. As a result, American officials are giving Iraqi detainees job training and engaging them in religious discussions to help prepare them to re-enter Iraqi society.

About 8,000 detainees have been released in Iraq since last September. Fewer than 1 percent of them have been returned to the prison, said Lt. Cmdr. K. C. Marshall, General Stone’s spokesman.

The new detention center at Bagram will incorporate some of the lessons learned by the United States in Iraq. Classrooms will be built for vocational training and religious discussion, and there will be more space for recreation and family visits, officials said. After years of entreaties by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the United States recently began to allow relatives to speak with prisoners at Bagram through video hookups.

“The driving factor behind this is to ensure that in all instances we are giving the highest standards of treatment and care,” said Ms. Hodgkinson, who has briefed Senate and House officials on the construction plans.

The Pentagon is planning to use $60 million in emergency construction funds this fiscal year to build a complex of 6 to 10 semi-permanent structures resembling Quonset huts, each the size of a football field, a Defense Department official said. The structures will have more natural light, and each will have its own recreation area. There will be a half-dozen other buildings for administration, medical care and other purposes, the official said.

The new Bagram compound is expected to be built away from the existing center of operations on the base, on the other side of a long airfield from the headquarters building that now sits almost directly adjacent to the detention center, one military official said.

It will have its own perimeter security wall, and its own perimeter security guards, a change that will increase the number of soldiers required to operate the detention center.

The military plans to request $24 million in fiscal year 2009 and $7.4 million in fiscal year 2010 to pay for educational programs, job training and other parts of what American officials call a reintegration plan. After that, the Pentagon plans to pay about $7 million a year in training and operational costs.

There has been mixed support for the project on Capitol Hill. Two prominent Senate Democrats, Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia and Tim Johnson of South Dakota, have been briefed on the new American-run prison, and have praised the decision to make conditions there more humane.

But the senators, in a May 15 letter to the deputy defense secretary, Gordon England, demanded that the Pentagon explain its long-term plans for detention in Afghanistan and consult the Afghan government on the project.

The population at Bagram began to swell after administration officials halted the flow of prisoners to Guantánamo in September 2004, a cutoff that largely remains in effect. At the same time, the population of detainees at Bagram also began to rise with the resurgence of the Taliban.

Military personnel who know both Bagram and Guantánamo describe the Afghan site, 40 miles north of Kabul, as far more spartan. Bagram prisoners have fewer privileges, less ability to contest their detention and no access to lawyers.

Some detainees have been held without charge for more than five years, officials said. As of April, about 10 juveniles were being held at Bagram, according to a recent American report to a United Nations committee.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

AUSTIN - Like many other young couples, Aimee and Jeff Harris spent the first years of their marriage eagerly accumulating stuff: cars, furniture, clothes, appliances and, after a son and a daughter came along, toys, toys, toys.

Now they are trying to get rid of it all, down to their fancy wedding bands. Chasing a utopian vision of a self-sustaining life on the land as partisans of a movement some call voluntary simplicity, they are donating virtually all their possessions to charity and hitting the road at the end of May.

“It’s amazing the amount of things a family can acquire,” said Mrs. Harris, 28, attributing their good life to “the ridiculous amount of money” her husband earned as a computer network engineer in this early Wi-Fi mecca.

The Harrises now hope to end up as organic homesteaders in Vermont.

“We’re not attached to any outcome,” said Mrs. Harris, a would-be doctor before dropping out of college, who grew up poverty-stricken in a family that traces its lineage back through the Delanos and President Franklin D. Roosevelt to a Mayflower settler, Isaac Allerton.

Mr. Harris, 30, who dropped out of high school and “rode the Internet wave,” agreed, saying they were “letting the universe take us for a ride.”

They are not alone.

Matt and Sara Janssen, who traded down from their house in Iowa to a studio apartment in Montana and finally an R.V. powered by vegetable oil, now crisscross the country with their 4-year-old daughter, highway nomads living on $1,500 a month.

Not that simplicity need be that spartan. Cindy Wallach and her husband, Doug Vibbert, of Annapolis, Md., moved out of their apartment with an “everything must go” party and, along with their 3-year-old son, now sail and make their home on a 44-by-24-foot catamaran.

“We never wanted four walls and beige carpet,” Ms. Wallach said.

Though it may not be the stuff of the typical American dream, the voluntary simplicity movement, which traces its inception to 1980s Seattle, is drawing a great deal of renewed interest, some experts say.

“If you think about some of the shifts we’re having economically - shifts in oil and energy - it may be the right time,” said Mary E. Grigsby, associate professor of rural sociology at the University of Missouri and the author of “Buying Time and Getting By: The Voluntary Simplicity Movement.”

“The idea in the movement was ‘everything you own owns you,’ ” said Dr. Grigsby, who sees roots of the philosophy in the lives of the Puritans. “You have to care for it, store it. It becomes an appendage, I think. If it enhances your life and helps you do the things you want to do, great. If you are burdened by these things and they become the center of what you have to do to live, is that really positive?”

Juliet B. Schor, a sociology professor at Boston College and author of “The Overspent American,” said the modern “downshifters,” as she called them, owed debts to the hippies and the travel romance of Jack Kerouac.

“Their previous lives have become too stressful,” Dr. Schor said. “They have a lack of meaning because their jobs are too demanding.”

Mrs. Harris, who with her husband home-schools their son, Quinn, 5, and plans to do the same with their 15-month-old daughter, Nichola, agreed that there was something of the hippies in their quest: “the ideals, the peace and love, the giving and freedom.”

But she said they had no tolerance for idleness or drugs. “Any state that can be induced by drugs, the mind and body are already capable of,” she said.

Mrs. Harris grew up in Wisconsin with her mother and sister. They were so poor, she says, that they nearly froze to death in the winter and had to cook their meals in the fireplace. She developed a weight problem, ballooning to 200 pounds - she has since shed half of it - and suffered for years from the chronic pain disorder fibromyalgia, which she overcame, she says, by improving her diet.

In April, the Harrises began detailing their story on a blog (www.cagefreefamily.com). They were taken aback by some of the hostile responses. “Some people seem to be threatened that they’re not making the same choice,” Mrs. Harris said.

The timing was right, she said. They had been feuding with their landlord over conditions in the simple house they rent in Austin for $1,650 a month, and felt they had to get out.

At first they intended to auction what they owned. But “we were unable to define the worth of something we didn’t want or need,” she said. They finally decided to donate much of it to a children’s home in the Texas Hill Country and the bulk of the rest to an agency for the homeless in Austin.

But, Mrs. Harris said, their calls for pickups have gone unreturned, and they are now rushing to find new recipients. “You wouldn’t think, O.K., I’m going to give away all my fine things, but at the end of the day they’re still in the house,” she said.

Their rings - his gold band and her one-carat diamond - may be “red-paper-clipped,” Mrs. Harris said: bartered for something better that could in turn be bartered for something better still, as in the Internet celebrity Kyle MacDonald’s tale of a paper clip that ultimately produced a house.

“They don’t fit us anymore,” Mr. Harris said. Sure enough, his band was loose on his finger, but that was not what he meant. “They don’t fit our lifestyle,” he explained.

They have already given away some property, Mrs. Harris said, including their big-screen television, presented to a neighbor. It had bad karma anyway, she said: her father had gotten it as an employee of the year just before he was fired.

Their goal, she said, is to retain one personal carton per family member, plus bedding and kitchen utensils. They hope to sell or barter their two vehicles - a new Honda Odyssey minivan and a 2004 Dodge Intrepid - for a school bus or a four-wheel drive.

They are exchanging e-mail with a woman who has a remote cabin available in central Vermont. There is no electricity, Mr. Harris said, just propane power and a wood stove.

“We want to be in clean country with like-minded people with access to clean food,” Mrs. Harris said.

Mr. Harris does have a concern, though. He now telecommutes from his job as a Web systems administrator and is hoping to stay employed through the move. “The question is, Do I have Internet access in the woods?” he said.

They plan to travel first to Wyoming for the Rainbow Gathering, a free-spirited annual outdoor convocation, then head to Vermont.

In her garage strewn with cartons to be given away, Mrs. Harris shook her head. “Stuff, stuff that a family has,” she said.

Then she noticed a box of Christmas decorations, and at least for the moment grew wistful.

“I won’t lie,” she said. “I’ll cry when that goes.”

“When what goes?” Quinn asked.

Mrs. Harris seemed to struggle. “The stuff of our lives,” she said.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

From the superdelegate process to the farm bill to the recent raid on immigrants in Postville, Iowa, elitism is rearing its nipped-and-tucked head all across America.

How else can you explain anointing a handful of Democratic party officials to have more power in the nominating process than millions of average American voters? According to CNN, each Democratic superdelegate has more power than 13,000 primary voters. So just like George Bush was able to ignore millions of people marching in the streets against the Iraq War, the superdelegates are free to replace the will of the voters with their own whims. The idea that, like father, superdelegates know best, is anti-democratic and elitist.

The farm bill passed by Congress last week is no different. The New York Times notes that Safia Ali, a 25-year-old mother of five in Somalia, can no longer afford rice or wheat or powdered milk. The price of food commodities has skyrocketed in recent months, setting off a global food crisis. Safi Ali has not eaten in a week and her family is starving. The response of the richest nation in the world? Pass a food bill that increases cash subsidies to the very same large, corporate-owned farms that are manipulating crop prices in the first place. Between 1998 and 2007, profits of the agribusiness giant Cargill increased nearly 1000% — from $280 million to a whopping $2.3 billion — extorting from rising crop prices on the one hand and from taxpayer-funded farm subsidies on the other. Small family farmers in the United States and poor people here and oversees like Safia Ali are the victim’s of our government policies, not the beneficiaries. Politicians in Washington side with big business elites.

Also last week, the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency raided a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, and arrested and detained at least 300 undocumented immigrants but as many as 700. Workers at the Agriprocessor meatpacking plant were slaving away under extremely oppressive conditions — in March 2008, the plant was cited with 39 violations of workplace health and safety laws. But rather than step in and twist the hand of the corporation to clean up its act, raise and enforce a minimum wage and provide good public schools and affordable healthcare — the kinds of things Agriprocessor’s workers and everyone in the struggling town of Postville really needs — government agents came with guns and handcuffs to terrorize the workers. (Any close-minded nativists who would argue that undocumented immigrants are the real criminals in Postville should kindly explain when pursuing the American dream became a crime.)

As a nation, we are more concerned with the few at the top than the many struggling at the bottom. It’s not just politicians who are guilty here. The majority of Americans are more concerned about Angelina Jolie’s shrinking waistline than Safia Ali starving in Somalia. Does Angelina Jolie matter more? Do the superdelegates? The corporate titans?

While donor-driven politics and celebrity-driven culture have always privileged the elite few over the many, it’s getting worse. It’s no longer simply that the rich and famous are worthier than everyone else. Increasingly, everyone else is worthless. The rise in reality television shows can be attributed to a growing sense, thank you Madison Avenue, that you only matter if you’re famous so now everyone wants to be. The staggering rise in CEO salaries, while real wages for most Americans have been stagnant or even decreased, is the direct result of the belief that the rich deserve to get richer at the expense of shared prosperity.

The plight of Safia Ali and the undocumented immigrants in Postville and even the discounted Democratic primary voters is not the result of a lack of hard work or personal responsibility, fingers we often point at those who are poor or disenfranchised in the United States. The plight of those at the bottom, a group growing bigger by the day as the economy tumbles and the middle class evaporates, comes because we think the people at the top are inherently superior — and that elitism is cemented in our culture and in our policies.

Elitism is anti-American. When the colonists revolted against England, they were revolting against the idea that one person — the King — mattered more than the rest of them. And while we have stumbled gravely in our pursuit of egalitarianism — from the very early mistreatment of American Indians to slavery to the examples above today — the idea that we are all equally valuable and should be treated as such is emblazoned in the American story, our entrepreneurial independence alongside our deep moral commitment to be our brothers and sisters’ keeper. In the America we aspire to be, everyone matters as much as everyone else. We are all equal, interdependent and interconnected.

Undocumented immigrants have every much of a right to be in the United States as I do. That I was born on one side of the border does not make me fundamentally more deserving of the opportunities of this nation than anyone else. (In fact, arguably the fact that many immigrants have been forced to flee their home countries because of the disastrous economic and foreign policies of the United States, may argue for an even stronger claim than mine; having only ever benefited from America, I should be giving back not benefiting more.) Safia Ali, who has nowhere to which to flee, is no less deserving of food and shelter than I am, nor for that matter less deserving of a good job, a college education, or even designer clothes. And the superdelegates votes shouldn’t count more than yours or mine.

Those who are on top are not more worthy of being on top. Those who are on the bottom are not more deserving of being on the bottom. But until we really embrace the idea of inherent and equal human worth, in our hearts and our souls — and not just among the people we know personally but for everyone, worldwide, no matter their situation — the community values that America represents will remain a good idea on paper but warped and elusive in practice.

Sally Kohn is the Director of the Movement Vision Lab at the Center for Community Change. On Sunday, May 18, 2008, there will be a rally in Postville, Iowa, for the immigrants detained in last week’s raid and events across the country showing support for the Postville community. For more information, visit http://fairimmigration.wordpress.com/.

The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature, which distinguishes man from animals.
— Harvey Cushing, Life of Sir William Osler

Health insurance companies are constantly looking for new ways to make money. Two of the major impediments to their quest are sick people and the drugs they need. Clever, as a good corporation should be, they have figured out how to overcome the second of these obstacles. Two techniques are employed. The first is practicing medicine just the way doctors do even though few, if any, insurance companies have attended medical school.

When a doctor prescribes a specific drug for a patient (whom it has never met) the insurance company may decide that the generic equivalent of that drug is just as good for the patient as the one that the physician prescribed and refuse to pay for the physician prescribed drug. In that event, if the patient wants to use the prescribed drug the patient must pay for the drug out of his or her own pocket. There is, however, a built in appeals process that patient and doctor can go through if they would like to prove that the trained doctor’s decision is more medically accurate than the corporation’s but it is a somewhat cumbersome process. Why the company insists on substituting its judgment for the doctor’s judgment is best known to the insurance company. As creative as this is on the part of the insurance company, it is not the most dramatic example of saving money through creative insuring.

A recent report in The New York Times discloses that some insurance companies have realized increased profits by reducing the amount of money they are willing to pay for certain prescription drugs taken by their insureds. It seems like such an obvious thing to do that the only remarkable thing is that the insurance companies have not thought of it before now.

Before the companies became creative in reimbursing for drug costs, the insured was required to pay a fixed amout (known as a co-pay) for a prescribed drug that that went anywhere from approximately $5.00 to $50 the amount of the co-pay being determined by the company and on whether the drug was a Tier 1, 2 or 3 drug. The insurance company paid the difference between the drug’s co-pay and its actual cost to the insurance company. Then, a funny thing happened on the way to the pharmacy. The insurance companies invented Tier 4 into which they placed REALLY expensive drugs.

People taking Tier 4 are the beneficiaries of the new policy. Here is how three randomly selected insurers have made themselves its beneficiaries.

The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) requires patients taking Tier 4 drugs to pay 30 percent of the cost of the drugs with no limit on how much the insured ultimately has to pay. The drug Sprycel is a tier 4 drug that blocks the growth of cancer cells and eliminates the need for chemical infusions. It costs $13,500 for a 90-day supply. AARP requires the insured to pay $4,500 for each 90-day prescription and AARP pays the balance. First Health Life & Health also charges a flat 30 per cent for Tier 4 drugs without any limit on what the insured pays.

Kaiser Permanente, by contrast, tempers profitability with mercy. It requires its insureds to pay only 25 percent of the cost of Tier 4 drugs and places a $325 limit on how much the insured has to pay for each prescription.

Increasing the insurance companies’ profitability is not the only benefit from the new program. For Medicare beneficiaries who have to pay 5 percent of their drug costs after they’re through what’s known as the doughnut hole, the increased amount they are forced to spend gets them through the doughnut hole more quickly. (Not all Medicare beneficiaries will see the benefit in that.) Another benefit that will, however, be obvious to its beneficiary is the cost savings that inures to the benefit of employers who furnish health insurance to employees.

Karen Ignagni is president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, an organization that represents most of the health insurance industry. She pointed out in the New York Times story that lower outlay for prescription drugs means the insurance companies can charge employers lower premiums, thus providing a cost benefit to employers. Adding those benefits to those enjoyed by the insurers makes it obvious that the new policy is a win-win except, of course, for those who can no longer afford to take drugs.

In George Bush’s United States 47 million people have no health insurance. In George Bush’s United States 9 million children have no health insurance. Thanks to the creation of Tier 4, we will soon have a new class of citizen. It will comprise people who have insurance but are unable to pay for the drugs needed to keep them in or restore them to, good health. In a few years we will know how many people are members of their class. They will join the uninsureds as statistics.

Christopher Brauchli; brauchli.56@post.harvard.edu
For political commentary see his web page http://humanraceandothersports.com

Last week, a Congressional committee properly raked Big Pharma over the coals for misleading advertising of pharmaceuticals.

A hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s oversight subcommittee focused on advertising campaigns for three drugs, including the remarkable case of Robert Jarvik. Jarvik is featured in endlessly re-run ads for Pfizer’s blockbuster cholesterol drug Lipitor. Known as the inventor of the Jarvik artificial heart, he is not a cardiologist, not a licensed medical doctor and not authorized to prescribe pharmaceuticals. He’s shown in the ads engaged in vigorous rowing activity, but in fact he doesn’t row. Pfizer pulled the ads in February after controversy started brewing.

Among industrialized countries, only the United States and New Zealand permit drug companies to market directly to consumers. It’s a bad idea, it drives bad medicine, and it should be banned.

But although it has the highest profile, direct-to-consumer advertising is a small part of Pharma’s marketing machine. Researchers Marc-André Gagnon and Joel Lexchin conclude in a recent issue of the journal PLOS Medicine that direct-to-consumer ads make up less than a tenth of industry marketing expenditures ($4 billion of $57.5 billion in 2004). And Gagnon and Lexchin’s estimate of $57.5 billion on marketing excludes many industry expenditures that are really driven by marketing, including clinical trials conducted for marketing purposes.

The bulk of the industry marketing effort — more than 70 percent by Gagnon and Lexchin’s calculation — is directed at doctors.

Why?

Because it works.

The companies spend huge amounts paying firms that carefully track what doctors prescribe, and then they use the information to tailor messages to doctors, distribute samples and develop continuing medical education programs.

Gagnon and Lexchin report that Pharma spends more than $20 billion a year on “detailers” — the pharma reps that knock on doctor doors, ply the staff with free coffee and lunches, distribute samples ($16 billion worth), and prod docs to prescribe their drugs.

This is complemented by a host of tactics that in other circumstances might be called bribes.

“Virtually all physicians in America take cash or gifts from the drug companies,” says Melody Petersen, author of Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs, and a former New York Times reporter. “A recent survey said 94 percent of physicians took something of value from the drug companies. Some doctors take hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from these companies, and there’s no law that says they can’t.”

Petersen says she “had no idea this was so extensive until one day I was writing a story about Celebrex and Vioxx — this was before Vioxx was taken off the market. The story was about the marketing battle between these two pain drugs. I called one of the large societies of rheumatologists and asked for an expert on arthritis. I specifically said I needed an expert who was not being paid as a consultant to one of the manufacturers of these drugs. A staff person said, ‘We have lots of people you can talk to, but all of these doctors are consultants to one or both of the drug companies.’”

Drug companies hire doctors to give lectures, and they hire other doctors as “consultants” to go to fancy dinners and listen to the lectures. “There are more than 500,000 of these dinners or events in America every year,” Petersen says.

The drug companies weave these diverse strategems into an elaborate tapestry — not infrequently to push drugs for inappropriate purposes. One eye-opening case that Petersen details in Our Daily Meds concerns Neurontin, a mediocre drug for epilepsy that Warner-Lambert illegally peddled as an unapproved treatment for bipolar disorder, migraines, attention deficit disorder in children and other conditions. The drug does not work for most of these conditions. Many persons were injured by taking excessive doses of Neurontin, and many others wasted money and emotional energy on hopeless Neurontin treatment strategies. Warner-Lambert ultimately paid $430 million to settle criminal and civil charges related to Neurontin marketing, but Petersen says that, even so, the illegal marketing scheme was clearly profitable for Warner-Lambert (and Pfizer, which acquired Warner-Lambert in 2000).

Petersen’s account of the Neurontin nightmare draws heavily on a whistleblower, David Franklin. She summarizes the central theme of the story Franklin revealed: “The company got doctors to prescribe the drug for all these experimental uses by paying them. They paid physicians to give speeches to other physicians at restaurants or hotels or resorts. The doctors not only enjoyed a nice meal or a weekend vacation, they often also received a $500 check for attending. The physicians giving lectures at these parties were often trained by the drug company’s ad firm to describe how Neurontin could work for conditions like bipolar. … The company tracked the doctors’ prescriptions before and after these dinners or weekend retreats. The executives saw how well it worked.”

Which raises an interesting question: How is that industry can so effectively manipulate highly trained doctors?

Answers Adriane Fugh-Berman, a doctor and Georgetown University professor who runs PharmedOut, a project that focuses on how pharmaceutical companies influence prescribing decisions and encourages physicians to educate themselves from non-industry sources: “Physicians are trained in medicine, not psychological manipulation. Every bit of flattery, friendship and information offered by reps is aimed at selling drugs.”

There is no simple solution to these problems, though ending patent-based marketing monopolies would transform pharmaceutical marketing practices and likely eliminate most abuses.

In the meantime, a ban on Pharma gifts to doctors would be a modest step forward. In the United States, notes Petersen, “radio disc jockeys can’t take cash from music companies. But when it comes to something like medicines — which mean life or death for people — doctors can take as much money as they want from the drug companies. We need a law to stop that.”

Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor, and managing director of Commercial Alert , which advocates for elimination of direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising.

(c) Robert Weissman

Gone are the days when vegetarians were served up a plate of iceberg lettuce and a dull-as-dishwater baked potato. With the growing variety of vegetarian faux meats like bacon and sausages — along with an ever-expanding variety of vegetarian cookbooks and restaurants — vegetarianism has taken the world by storm.

With World Vegetarian Week beginning on Monday, here without further ado are PETA’s picks for the top 10 reasons to give vegetarian eating a try.

1. Helping Animals Also Helps the Global Poor

While there is ample and justified moral indignation about the diversion of 100 million tons of grain for biofuels, more than seven times as much (760 million tons) is fed to farmed animals so that people can eat meat. Is the diversion of crops to our cars a moral issue? Yes, but it’s about one-eighth the issue that meat-eating is. Care about global poverty? Try vegetarianism.

2. Eating Meat Supports Cruelty to Animals

The green pastures and idyllic barnyard scenes of years past are now distant memories. On today’s factory farms, animals are crammed by the thousands into filthy windowless sheds, wire cages, gestation crates, and other confinement systems. These animals will never raise families, root in the soil, build nests, or do anything else that is natural and important to them. They won’t even get to feel the warmth of the sun on their backs or breathe fresh air until the day they are loaded onto trucks bound for slaughter.

3. Eating Meat Is Bad for the Environment

A recent United Nations report entitled Livestock’s Long Shadow concludes that eating meat is “one of the … most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” In just one example, eating meat causes almost 40 percent more greenhouse-gas emissions than all the cars, trucks, and planes in the world combined. The report concludes that the meat industry “should be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity.”

4. Avoid Bird Flu

The World Health Organization says that if the avian flu virus mutates, it could be caught simply by eating undercooked chicken flesh or eggs, eating food prepared on the same cutting board as infected meat or eggs, or even touching eggshells contaminated with the disease. Other problems with factory farming — from foot-and-mouth to SARS — can be avoided with a general shift to a vegetarian diet.

5. If You Wouldn’t Eat a Dog, You Shouldn’t Eat a Chicken

Several recent studies have shown that chickens are bright animals who are able to solve complex problems, demonstrate self-control, and worry about the future. Chickens are smarter than cats and dogs and even do some things that have not yet been seen in mammals other than primates. Dr. Chris Evans, who studies animal behavior and communication at Macquarie University in Australia, says, “As a trick at conferences, I sometimes list these attributes, without mentioning chickens and people think I’m talking about monkeys.”

6. Heart Disease: Our Number One Killer

Healthy vegetarian diets support a lifetime of good health and provide protection against numerous diseases, including the United States’ three biggest killers: heart disease, cancer, and strokes. Drs. Dean Ornish and Caldwell Esselstyn — two doctors with 100 percent success in preventing and reversing heart disease — have used a vegan diet to accomplish it, as chronicled most recently in Dr. Esselstyn’s Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease, which documents his 100 percent success rate for unclogging people’s arteries and reversing heart disease.

7. Cancer: Our Number Two Killer

Dr. T. Colin Campbell is one of the world’s foremost epidemiological scientists and the director of what The New York Times called “the most comprehensive large study ever undertaken of the relationship between diet and the risk of developing disease.” Dr. Campbell’s best-selling book, The China Study, is a must-read for anyone who is concerned about cancer. To summarize it, Dr. Campbell states, “No chemical carcinogen is nearly so important in causing human cancer as animal protein.”

8. Fitting Into That Itty-Bitty Bikini

Vegetarianism is also the ultimate weight-loss diet, since vegetarians are one-third as likely to be obese as meat-eaters are, and vegans are about one-tenth as likely to be obese. Of course, there are overweight vegans, just as there are skinny meat-eaters. But on average, vegans are 10 to 20 percent lighter than meat-eaters. A vegetarian diet is the only diet that has passed peer review and taken weight off and kept it off.

9. Global Peace

Leo Tolstoy claimed that “vegetarianism is the taproot of humanitarianism.” His point? For people who wish to sow the seeds of peace, we should be eating as peaceful a diet as possible. Eating meat supports killing animals, for no reason other than humans’ acquired taste for animals’ flesh. Great humanitarians from Leo Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi to Thich Nhat Hanh have argued that a vegetarian diet is the only diet for people who want to make the world a kinder place.

10. The Joy of Veggies

As the growing range of vegetarian cookbooks and restaurants shows, vegetarian foods rock. People report that when they adopt a vegetarian diet, their range of foods explodes from a center-of-the-plate meat item to a range of grains, legumes, fruits, and vegetables that they didn’t even know existed.

Sir Paul McCartney sums it all up, “If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just stop eating meat. That’s the single most important thing you could do. It’s staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty.”

So are you ready to give it a try? Check out VegCooking.com for recipes and meal plans and to take the World Vegetarian Week 7-Day Pledge.

Bruce Friedrich is vice president for campaigns at PETA. Before joining PETA in 1996, Bruce spent six years running a shelter for homeless families and the largest soup kitchen in Washington, D.C. He has been a progressive and animal activist for more than 20 years.

Americans are in a panic over rising gas and heating oil prices, and with reason. For months, the price of a barrel of crude oil has been rising steadily, hitting a record $127 yesterday.

Analysts keep getting trotted out on TV and in print, attributing the dramatic price rise to everything from “peak oil” — the idea that producing countries have reached their peak of productive capacity, and that the only direction for oil supplies looking forward is down, while demand continues to rise — to increasing demand in China and India, to supply bottlenecks, to specific news events, like a pipeline break in Nigeria, or a closed refinery in California.

Politicians, like Republican presidential candidate John McCain and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, have called for a two-month moratorium on federal gas taxes, but with taxes running at something on the order of 18 cents a gallon, this is not going to do much to bring prices down-in fact it might do nothing, since retailers would be free to just raise prices to match the tax break, and pocket the profits.

One analyst, economist Ismael Hussein-Zadeh, a professor of economics at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, has a different explanation for the price rise, and American motorists and homeowners should pay close attention.

“Oil prices have gone from the mid $20 range in the fall of 2002 to $127 yesterday — a rise of $100/barrel in just over five years,” he says. “And the bulk of that increase can be attributed to the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to the threats of war against Iran.”

Hussein-Zadeh’s analysis looks at a number of ways that the Bush/Cheney wars have contributed to rising oil prices. Chief among these are two factors: the threat to supplies, particularly from the Persian Gulf region from which 20 percent of the world’s oil supplies come, and a falling dollar, because oil is priced in dollars, and as it loses value, oil producing countries raise their prices to compensate.

In an article titled “Worried About the Price of Gas? End US Wars,” Hussein-Zadeh writes, “Soon after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq the price of oil began to escalate in tandem with the escalation of war and political turbulence in the Middle East.” Furthermore, he says, “Anytime there is a renewed US military threat against Iran, fuel prices move up several notches.” If the US were to actually make good on Bush’s and Cheney’s threats to attack Iran, in Hussein-Zadeh’s view “the sky would be the limit” to oil prices, with $200/barrel being a starting point.

The dollar’s fall, too, is significantly a result of the wars-particularly the Iraq War, he says. That war has been costing the US $200 billion a year, all in borrowed funds. That in itself is a huge hole that has to be funded by borrowing from China, Japan, Saudi Arabia and other nations. But as Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz has pointed out, the true cost of the Iraq War, when interest on debt, health costs of injured veterans and other long-term costs are factored in, is more like $3 trillion and rising. And when currency speculators and traders — the ones who really set the value of the dollar — make their bets, they’re looking at that bigger number, not the little one.

Moreover, it’s not just oil that has been driven up in price because of the war. As energy costs have gone up, so has the cost of food, in no small part because most fertilizer is oil-based, and because transportation costs are also largely a reflection of oil prices. As well, to the extent that American’s food is imported, they are paying in shrinking dollars, whose value is being driven down because of the war.

Hussein-Zadeh says the Bush/Cheney administration and its neoconservative war promoters have worked hard to offer other more benign explanations for the crippling rise in energy prices, and food prices. As he puts it:

Neoconservative forces in and around the Bush administration and beneficiaries of war dividends — wishing to deflect attention away from war as the main culprit for the skyrocketing energy prices — tend to blame secondary or marginally relevant factors: OPEC, China and India for their increased demand for energy, or supply-demand imbalances in global markets. Whatever the contributory role of these factors, the fact remains that the current oil price hikes started with the beginning of the Bush administration’s wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. Furthermore, a closer examination of these factors reveals that their roles in the current price inflation of oil have been negligible.

Common sense bears him out here. China’s and India’s economies have indeed been growing rapidly, and with them, demand for oil, but over the past five years, oil prices have risen 400%, and the same cannot be said for demand. Even if Chinese and Indian growth figures of 7-9 percent per year were accurate (and there is reason to believe they are grossly inflated), that at best would amount to perhaps a 50% increase in economic activity over five years. In fact, during this time more efficient energy use in the developed countries has largely offset much of the increasing demand for oil in China and India, and even in China and India, much of the energy growth has involved replacing inefficient vehicles and power plants with more efficient ones, so oil consumption isn’t rising in lock step with economic growth.

The answer then, to rising oil prices, is obvious then. It is not some silly two-month moratorium on federal taxes-what Sen. McCain referred to, in a candid moment, as a “little gift” to American vacationers. Nor is it opening up the Artic refuge to drilling — a move that would take years to lead to any significant new supply, and which in any case would have minimal impact on overall supply, or on prices. Nor is it opening up the Strategic Oil Reserve — another drop in the barrel. Nor is it hammering OPEC to boost production — something they have already done. No, it is much simpler. As Hussein-Zadeh puts it:

The political implications of this discussion are clear: to bring down the prices of fuel and food requires bringing home the troops. By lowering the energy costs of production and transportation this will help save our own and many other economies from the plagues of inflation and stagnation. It will bring relief to hundreds of millions worldwide who are burdened by crippling energy bills and the crushing costs of feeding their families.

Got that people? If you want to see gasoline drop back below $3.89/gal, get Congress to end the war!

It’s that simple.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

The following is an excerpt from Bill Moyers’ new book, “Moyers on Democracy“.

Democracy in America is a series of narrow escapes, and we may be running out of luck. The reigning presumption about the American experience, as the historian Lawrence Goodwyn has written, is grounded in the idea of progress, the conviction that the present is “better” than the past and the future will bring even more improvement. For all of its shortcomings, we keep telling ourselves, “The system works.”

Now all bets are off. We have fallen under the spell of money, faction, and fear, and the great American experience in creating a different future together has been subjugated to individual cunning in the pursuit of wealth and power -and to the claims of empire, with its ravenous demands and stuporous distractions. A sense of political impotence pervades the country — a mass resignation defined by Goodwyn as “believing the dogma of ‘democracy’ on a superficial public level but not believing it privately.” We hold elections, knowing they are unlikely to bring the corporate state under popular control. There is considerable vigor at local levels, but it has not been translated into new vistas of social possibility or the political will to address our most intractable challenges. Hope no longer seems the operative dynamic of America, and without hope we lose the talent and drive to cooperate in the shaping of our destiny.

The earth we share as our common gift, to be passed on in good condition to our children’s children, is being despoiled. Private wealth is growing as public needs increase apace. Our Constitution is perilously close to being consigned to the valley of the shadow of death, betrayed by a powerful cabal of secrecy-obsessed authoritarians. Terms like “liberty” and “individual freedom” invoked by generations of Americans who battled to widen the 1787 promise to “promote the general welfare” have been perverted to create a government primarily dedicated to the welfare of the state and the political class that runs it. Yes, Virginia, there is a class war and ordinary people are losing it. It isn’t necessary to be a Jeremiah crying aloud to a sinful Jerusalem that the Lord is about to afflict them for their sins of idolatry, or Cassandra, making a nuisance of herself as she wanders around King Priam’s palace grounds wailing “The Greeks are coming.” Or Socrates, the gadfly, stinging the rump of power with jabs of truth. Or even Paul Revere, if horses were still in fashion. You need only be a reporter with your eyes open to see what’s happening to our democracy. I have been lucky enough to spend my adult life as a journalist, acquiring a priceless education in the ways of the world, actually getting paid to practice one of my craft’s essential imperatives: connect the dots.

The conclusion that we are in trouble is unavoidable. I report the assault on nature evidenced in coal mining that tears the tops off mountains and dumps them into rivers, sacrificing the health and lives of those in the river valleys to short-term profit, and I see a link between that process and the stock-market frenzy which scorns long-term investments — genuine savings — in favor of quick turnovers and speculative bubbles whose inevitable bursting leaves insiders with stuffed pockets and millions of small stockholders, pensioners, and employees out of work, out of luck, and out of hope.

And then I see a connection between those disasters and the repeal of sixty-year-old banking and securities regulations designed during the Great Depression to prevent exactly that kind of human and economic damage. Who pushed for the removal of that firewall? An administration and Congress who are the political marionettes of the speculators, and who are well rewarded for their efforts with indispensable campaign contributions. Even honorable opponents of the practice get trapped in the web of an electoral system that effectively limits competition to those who can afford to spend millions in their run for office. Like it or not, candidates know that the largesse on which their political futures depend will last only as long as their votes are satisfactory to the sleek “bundlers” who turn the spigots of cash on and off.

The property qualifications for federal office that the framers of the Constitution expressly chose to exclude for demonstrating an unseemly “veneration for wealth” are now de facto in force and higher than the Founding Fathers could have imagined. “Money rules Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us.” Those words were spoken by Populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease during the prairie revolt that swept the Great Plains slightly more than 120 years after the Constitution was signed. They are true today, and that too, spells trouble.

Then I draw a line to the statistics that show real wages lagging behind prices, the compensation of corporate barons soaring to heights unequaled anywhere among industrialized democracies, the relentless cheeseparing of federal funds devoted to public schools, to retraining for workers whose jobs have been exported, and to programs of food assistance and health care for poor children, all of which snatch away the ladder by which Americans with scant means but willing hands and hearts could work and save their way upward to middle-class independence. And I connect those numbers to our triumphant reactionaries’ campaigns against labor unions and higher minimum wages, and to their success in reframing the tax codes so as to strip them of their progressive character, laying the burdens of Atlas on a shrinking middle class awash in credit card debt as wage earners struggle to keep up with rising costs for health care, for college tuitions, for affordable housing — while huge inheritances go untouched, tax shelters abroad are legalized, rates on capital gains are slashed, and the rich get richer and with each increase in their wealth are able to buy themselves more influence over those who make and those who carry out the laws.

Edward R. Murrow told his generation of journalists: “No one can eliminate prejudices — just recognize them.” Here is my bias: extremes of wealth and poverty cannot be reconciled with a genuinely democratic politics. When the state becomes the guardian of power and privilege to the neglect of justice for the people as a whole, it mocks the very concept of government as proclaimed in the preamble to our Constitution; mocks Lincoln’s sacred belief in “government of the people, by the people, and for the people”; mocks the democratic notion of government as “a voluntary union for the common good” embodied in the great wave of reform that produced the Progressive Era and the two Roosevelts. In contrast, the philosophy popularized in the last quarter century that “freedom” simply means freedom to choose among competing brands of consumer goods, that taxes are an unfair theft from the pockets of the successful to reward the incompetent, and that the market will meet all human needs while government itself becomes the enabler of privilege — the philosophy of an earlier social Darwinism and laissez-faire capitalism dressed in new togs — is as subversive as Benedict Arnold’s betrayal of the Revolution he had once served. Again, Mary Lease: “The great evils which are cursing American society and undermining the foundations of the republic flow not from the legitimate operation of the great human government which our fathers gave us, but they come from tramping its plain provisions underfoot.”

Our democracy has prospered most when it was firmly anchored in the idea that “We the People” — not just a favored few — would identify and remedy common distempers and dilemmas and win the gamble our forebears undertook when they espoused the radical idea that people could govern themselves wisely. Whatever and whoever tries to supplant that with notions of a wholly privatized society of competitive consumers undermines a country that, as Gordon S. Wood puts it in his landmark book The Radicalism of the American Revolution, discovered its greatness “by creating a prosperous free society belonging to obscure people with their workaday concerns and their pecuniary pursuits of happiness” — a democracy that changed the lives of “hitherto neglected and despised masses of common laboring people.”

I wish I could say that journalists in general are showing the same interest in uncovering the dangerous linkages thwarting this democracy. It is not for lack of honest and courageous individuals who would risk their careers to speak truth to power — a modest risk compared to those of some journalists in authoritarian countries who have been jailed or murdered for the identical “crime.” But our journalists are not in control of the instruments they play. As conglomerates swallow up newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, and networks, and profit rather than product becomes the focus of corporate effort, news organizations — particularly in television — are folded into entertainment divisions. The “news hole” in the print media shrinks to make room for advertisements, and stories needed by informed citizens working together are pulled in favor of the latest celebrity scandals because the media moguls have decided that uncovering the inner workings of public and private power is boring and will drive viewers and readers away to greener pastures of pabulum. Good reporters and editors confront walls of resistance in trying to place serious and informative reports over which they have long labored. Media owners who should be sounding the trumpets of alarm on the battlements of democracy instead blow popular ditties through tin horns, undercutting the basis for their existence and their First Amendment rights.

Bill Moyers is the author of many books including “Moyers on Democracy” (Doubleday, 2008) and the host of the PBS show, Bill Moyers Journal.

Nuclear weapons and terrorists have a lot in common.

They target civilians, killing indiscriminately.

They make us vulnerable because they strike, not on a battlefield, but where we live and work.

They intimidate through fear — changing our behavior by their very existence.

They make us feel that no place is truly safe.

So, it’s no surprise that terrorists would want to wield nuclear weapons. Nor is it a surprise that the US Government views such a destructive pairing as a serious threat.

But it may come as a surprise that a storehouse of 2,000 pounds of plutonium and weapons-grade uranium — estimated to be enough to build 300 nuclear weapons — sits only about 40 miles from San Francisco in the town of Livermore.

Even more surprising is that, according to a story in this week’s Time Magazine by Adam Zagorin, security flaws were recently exposed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the nuclear weapons research facility where the fissile material is kept.

The Time article quoted “sources” saying that “a commando team posing as terrorists attacked and penetrated the lab, quickly overpowering its defenses” to reach “a mock payload of fissile material.” The article went on to quote “experts” including “congressional staff from both parties informed of the episode,” concluding that “the test amounts to an embarrassment to those responsible for securing the nation’s nuclear facilities, and that it required immediate steps to correct what some called the most dangerous security weaknesses ever found at the lab.”

The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration said on May 9 that the “force-on-force exercise” at Livermore ” highlighted a number of areas that require immediate attention.”

And the San Jose Mercury reported that “Rep. Ellen Tauscher, whose district includes most of Lawrence Livermore, said the exercise highlights the need to remove the plutonium from the lab, which is on the outskirts of the densely populated San Francisco Bay Area.”

The Time article further explained that “in 2005 the Energy Department approved the doubling of the amount of plutonium stored at Livermore, less than five months after a scientific panel recommended, for security reasons, that nearly all of it be moved to a safer, more remote site.”

What neither Time nor The San Jose Mercury nor the Department of Energy spelled out is that the national labs at Livermore aren’t even run by the government.

In fact, they were managed for the government for many years by the University of California. Last year the management contract was won by Lawrence Livermore National Security LLC, a group of five organizations including the University of California and Bechtel National.

You remember, the giant company Bechtel. It won a huge reconstruction contract for Iraq in 2003. It left the country in 2006, blaming a lack of security for problems it encountered. A year later, a US government report concluded Bechtel had completed less than half its projects. Of course, Bechtel is no stranger to nuclear matters. Since 2001, they have been working on the design and construction of the $1.8 billion Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site.

But, you might wonder, why is the highly esteemed University of California doing R and D for nuclear weapons?

How could such weapons of mass destruction be part of its mandate for higher education and life-enhancing research?

Well, the UC has been involved in nuclear weapons design, testing and production since 1952 at Livermore. Yes, California’s respected public university system is very much part of the military industrial complex, using great minds to design and refine weapons that can kill the innocent on a massive scale.

The deeper you dig into the story, the more complicated, and troubling, it gets. Some Livermore residents — the town’s total population is around 82,000 — say the nuclear weapons lab is most vulnerable from the air because nearby flight paths to local airports regularly bring planes in the vicinity.

And one of the biggest flaws discovered in the “force-on-force” exercise was apparently the failure of a Gatling gun. had an idea that Gatling guns belonged to the 19th century, invented as they were during the Civil War. Well, there are modern Gatling guns, too. Monsters that spray bullets faster and much more powerfully than a machine gun. Imagine thousands of bullets fired a minute.

Maybe the thinking is that you need a really nasty conventional weapon to defend really nasty weapons of mass destruction.

But if we want a safer world, there is a better way to achieve than with fissile material and Gatling guns. I would suggest the biggest security flaw in the system is our policy on nuclear weapons. It is a policy that defends the thousands and thousands of nuclear weapons we have and the vast stores of fissile material we maintain while telling other nations that it is extremely dangerous for them to have the same weapons and fissile material. I suggest that what is bad for one is bad for all.

Why not change US policy on nuclear weapons? Instead of trying to protect the ultimate weapons of destruction and the fissile material used to make them, we could destroy these tools of death and the threat they pose in anyone’s hands.

To my mind, the only way to be truly safe is to eliminate nuclear weapons and control the nuclear material used to make them. The only way to do that is with international co-operation led by the United States for a mutual, phased and verifiable disarmament process.

Fissile material in places like the Lawrence Livermore lab is a disaster waiting to happen.

Do we really need to wait until a terrorist manages to make and detonate a nuclear device — or attack a facility like Lawrence Livermore — before we realize that we really should have done something about the situation now?

And it is possible to do something now. Go to www.wagingpeace.org and sign on to the US Leadership Appeal, a petition run by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, an educational charity. You can send a message to the next occupant of the White House. A message urging the next president to change US policy and provide leadership for a nuclear weapons-free world.

Senator Sam Nunn, the former chair of the Senate Armed Services committee, had this to say in Oslo this year as he addressed an international conference about his personal support for a world free of nuclear weapons and about the urgent need for international cooperation.

“The greatest dangers of the Cold War were addressed primarily by confrontation with Moscow. The greatest global threats today — catastrophic terrorism, a rise in the number of nuclear weapons states, increasing danger of mistaken, accidental or unauthorized nuclear launch — can only be prevented in cooperation with Moscow, Beijing and many other capitals.

“Both leaders and citizens from around the world must reflect on what is at stake. I believe that we are in a race between cooperation and catastrophe.”

Wouldn’t it be great if our next president and the Congress would take the lead us in working to engender such cooperation?

Steven Crandell is the Director of Public Affairs for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, an educational 501 ( c ) 3 charity. He helps pilot the Foundation’s signature project: US Leadership for a Nuclear Weapons-Free World -An Appeal to the Next President. It’s an on-line petition to gather the support of one million people for a major shift in US nuclear weapons policy. The petition will be sent to the next President of the United States on Inauguration Day January 20, 2009.

Copyright © 2008 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

I am not sure what was the worse part of this week. Living in Lebanon? Or reading the outrageous words of George Bush? Several times, I have asked myself this question: have words lost their meaning?

So let’s start with lunch at the Cocteau restaurant in Beirut. Yes, it’s named after Jean Cocteau, and it is one of the chicest places in town. Magnificent flowers on the table, impeccable service, wonderful food. Yes, there was shooting at Sodeco — 20 yards away — the day before; yes, we were already worried about the virtual collapse of the Lebanese government, the humiliation of Sunni Muslims (and the Saudis) in the face of what we must acknowledge as a Hizbollah victory (don’t expect George Bush to understand this) and the danger of more street shooting. But I brought up the tiny matter of the little massacre in northern Lebanon in which 10 or 12 militiamen were captured and then murdered before being handed over to the Lebanese army. Their bodies were — I fear this is correct — mutilated after death.

“They deserved it,” the elegant woman on my left said. I was appalled, overwhelmed, disgusted, deeply saddened. How could she say such a thing? But this is Lebanon and a huge number of people — 62 by my count — have been killed in the past few days and all the monsters buried in the mass graves of the civil war have been dug up.

I chose escalope du veau at the Cocteau — I am sickened by how quickly I decided on it — and tried to explain to my dear Lebanese friends (and they are all dear to me) how much fury I have witnessed in Lebanon.

When Abed drove me up to the north of the country three days ago, bullets were spitting off the walls of Tripoli and one of the customs officials at the Syrian border asked me to stay with him and his friends because they were frightened. I did. They are OK.

But being from the wrong religion is suddenly crucial again. Who your driver is, what is the religion of your landlord, is suddenly a matter of immense importance.

Yesterday morning (and here I will spoil the story by telling the end of it), the schools reopened round my seafront apartment and I saw a woman in a hijab riding a bicycle down the Corniche and I took a call from my travel agent about my next trip to Europe — Beirut airport reopened — and I realised that Lebanon had “returned to normal”.

The roads were open again; the hooded gunmen had disappeared; the government had abandoned its confrontation with Hizbollah — the suspension of the Shia Muslim security chief at the airport (who bought me a bottle of champagne a year ago, I seem to remember — some Hizbollah “agent” he!) and the abandonment of the government’s demand to dismantle Hizbollah’s secret telecommunication system was a final seal of its failure — and I opened my newspaper and what did I read?

That George Bush declared in Jerusalem that “al-Qa’ida, Hizbollah and Hamas will be defeated, as Muslims across the region recognise the emptiness of the terrorists’ vision and the injustice of their cause”.

Where does the madness end? Where do words lose their meaning? Al-Qa’ida is not being defeated. Hizbollah has just won a domestic war in Lebanon, as total as Hamas’s war in Gaza. Afghanistan and Iraq and Lebanon and Gaza are hell disasters — I need no apology to quote Churchill’s description of 1948 Palestine yet again — and this foolish, stupid, vicious man is lying to the world yet again.

He holds a “closed door” meeting with Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara — a man stupendously unfit to run any Middle East “peace”, which is presumably why the meeting had to be “closed door” — but tells the world of the blessings of Israeli democracy. As if the Palestinians benefit from a democracy which is continuing to take from them the land which they have owned for generations.

Do we really have to accept this? Bush tells us that “we consider it a source of shame that the United Nations routinely passes more human rights resolutions against the freest democracy in the Middle East than any other nation in the world”.

The truth is that it is a source of shame that the United States continues to give unfettered permission to Israel to steal Palestinian land — which is why it should be a source of shame (to Washington) that the UN passes human rights resolutions against America’s only real ally in the region.

And what is Washington doing in the country where I live? It has sent one of its top generals to see the Lebanese army commander, signalling — a growing Fisk suspicion, this — that it has abandoned its support for the Lebanese government. The Americans promise more equipment for the Lebanese army.

Yes, always more equipment, more guns, more bullets to the Middle Eastern armies though — I have to say yet again (and I repeat that I do not like armies) — the Lebanese army saved us all this week. Its commander-in-chief, General Michel Sleiman, will become the next president and the Americans will support him and feel safe, as they always do, with a general in charge. “Chehabism”, as the Lebanese would say, has returned.

But I am not so sure. Sleiman gets on well with Damascus. He is not going to lead his soldiers into a pro-American war against Hizbollah. And the Lebanese are not going to join Bush’s insane “jihad” against the “world terror”.

There was a lovely moment in northern Lebanon this week - and here a big cheer for my brave friend Abed — when a Lebanese soldier at a checkpoint spotted me in our car and ran into the road.

“You are Mr Robert!” he shouted. “I have seen you on television! I read your book!” And he gave the thumbs-up sign. And I had to like this man. And I think he will fight for Lebanon. But I do not think he will fight for the Americans.

Robert Fisk’s new book, ‘The Age of the Warrior: Selected Writings‘, a selection of his Saturday columns in ‘The Independent’, is published by Fourth Estate

©independent.co.uk

Forty years ago tomorrow, nine committed followers of Christ entered the Selective Service Office in Catonsville. They moved past three surprised office workers, who questioned what they were doing but did not stop them. The nine quickly gathered 378 1-A draft files in wire baskets, then took them to the parking lot and immolated them with a homemade version of napalm. They prayed quietly over the burning papers until the police arrested them 15 minutes later.

So began one of the most celebrated — or infamous — acts of civil disobedience in the nation’s history. What made it so significant was its disturbing resonance for millions of Catholics in the U.S.

War challenges every religious virtue; it tests the conflict between belief and civil act as nothing else can.

Now, four decades later, we are again in a war in a country we can barely identify, a country whose language, people, religion, history and culture we neither know nor understand. Interestingly, the Catonsville Nine anniversary is occurring during a debate over whether to establish a permanent ROTC site at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County campus in Catonsville, amid objections to the “militarization” of college life. These issues, so prominent during the Vietnam era, are still very much with us.

The Catonsville Nine took Christ’s teachings seriously, particularly his lecture from the Sermon on the Mount, where resisting evil became the moral cornerstone of the Christian faith. For them, there was no separation between belief and action. One either lived the moral code of Christ, without exemption, or abandoned it. For those of religious integrity, they believed, one cannot call oneself Christian and then live as something else.

By 1968, the Vietnam War was ripping America apart. Our actions seemed insane, our rationales ever shifting, our goal never clear. The impact on Vietnamese society as well as on our troops was confusing, demoralizing and deadly. What was clear, however, was that we were dropping more than 9 million tons of bombs on Indochina’s military and civilian populations. We were dropping 72 million liters of biochemical poisons on the land and its people. And, of course, there was hell’s fire: napalm. We used 400,000 tons of it.

By May 1968, the Catonsville Nine had enough. They chose to directly confront the state, to protest where the nation’s leaders had taken us.

The nine were not naive. One of them, the Rev. Philip Berrigan, thought their actions would probably be viewed as arrogant. Certainly they would invite scorn, punishment and perhaps the worst of responses: silence. He was wrong. For many, their actions were stunning. Many Americans fondly recall a group of people who would not be numbed by the killing.

Yet Mr. Berrigan’s concern about silence lingers. When we are silent in the face of evil — whether launched against a human fetus, a child subjected to “shock and awe” or a civilian whose death is defined as collateral damage — we are all in some sense accomplices to that evil.

In a play written by another of the nine, the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, and based upon the trial transcripts of their conviction, his brother Philip argued: “Let lawmakers, judges and lawyers think less of the law, and more of justice; less of legal ritual, more of human rights. To our bishops and superiors, we say: Learn something about the gospel and something about illegitimate power. When you do, you will liquidate your investments, take a house in the slums, or even join us in jail.”

The story of the Catonsville Nine should reignite our examination of why we find ourselves where we do. Most wars are less about ideology than money, less about providing security than maintaining power, less about faith than profit. Someone benefits, and it is never the soldier.

As we poured billions into Vietnam — and are now in the process of pouring several trillion into avast and complex void called Iraq — whose interests are served? The Catonsville Nine would say there is no escape from the question.

Ron Manuto writes on civil rights and legal issues from California. His e-mail is rmanuto@sbcglobal.net. Sean Patrick O’Rourke is chairman of the communication studies department at Furman University in Greenville, S.C. His e-mail is sean.orourke@furman.edu.

Copyright © 2008, The Baltimore Sun

WASHINGTON - In separate speeches delivered an ocean apart, the two standard bearers of the Republican Party Thursday offered rosy visions of a future designed to gladden the hearts of Israel-centred neo-conservatives without offering any details about how their dreams will be achieved.

In an address marking the 60th anniversary of Israel’s founding before the Knesset in Jerusalem, President George W. Bush predicted that, 60 years from now, the Jewish state will co-exist with a Palestinian homeland in a democratic Middle East where “Al Qaeda and Hezbollah and Hamas will be defeated” and “Iran and Syria will be peaceful nations, with today’s oppression a distant memory…”

“From Cairo to Riyadh to Baghdad and Beirut, people will live in free and independent societies, where a desire for peace is reinforced by ties of diplomacy and tourism and trade,” he said.

Such a “bold vision” will not “arrive easily overnight”, he said. But it will be possible “so long as a new generation of leaders has the courage to defeat the enemies of freedom, to make the hard choices necessary for peace, and stand firm on the solid rock of universal values.”

Just a few hours later and some 11,000 kms away, Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, told a partisan audience in Columbus, Ohio that, if elected, he will have “won” the Iraq war by 2013 and brought home “most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom.”

By the end of his first term, he went on, the threat from the Taliban in Afghanistan will have been greatly reduced, al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden and his key lieutenants captured or killed, and Iran “persuaded (by) a reluctant Russia and China to cooperate in pressuring Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions, and North Korea to discontinue its own.”

In contrast to Bush, however, McCain failed to mention any progress on settling the Israel-Palestinian conflict, suggesting that such an effort will not rate particularly high on his foreign policy agenda.

That should be just fine with pro-Likud neo-conservatives who, despite their appreciation for Bush’s staunch support for former hard-line Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (whom the president Thursday praised as “warrior for the ages, a man of peace” in his speech), have been uneasy about his thus far feeble efforts to prod the two sides towards a framework peace agreement by the time he leaves office next January.

Indeed, Thursday’s speeches served to underline how powerful and durable the neo-conservative vision of the world, particularly for the Middle East, remains, at least for the Republican Party, and how likely it will be that a President McCain will “stay the course” set by Bush.

Bush’s speech was pure neo-conservatism, beginning with his assurance that Washington was “Israel’s closest ally and best friend in the world” and featuring a familiar depiction of the world as a struggle between the forces of “good and evil”, the latter embodied by the most immediate threats to Israel’s security — Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria.

“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along,” he declared in a thinly veiled slap at the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Barack Obama, who, along with most of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, has called for engagement with Tehran and Damascus.

“We have heard this foolish delusion before,” he said, referring to the failure of western powers to challenge the Nazis in the 1930s, a core neo-conservative leitmotif. “We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history,” he continued, implicitly comparing the threats faced by Israel with Nazi Germany and explicitly assuring his audience that “…(T)he world must not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

But, apart from confronting “evil”, presumably through military force, if necessary, and steadfastly promoting basic freedoms and democracy in the region — a policy which even some of his neo-conservative backers believe Bush has largely abandoned as he has sought to rally Sunni Arab leaders against Iran and its allies — Bush offered no ideas as to how his hopeful vision of the Middle East, particularly that of a “homeland (Palestinians) have long dreamed of and deserved”, in 2068 will be achieved.

McCain similarly failed to explain how he would achieve his own vision of victory in Iraq, substantial progress in Afghanistan, a defeated al Qaeda, and Iran’s abandonment of its alleged nuclear ambitions by 2013. His comments led Rand Beers, a top counter-terrorism official under both George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton who resigned from the National Security Council to protest the younger Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, to compare the speech to Richard Nixon’s “secret plan” to end the Vietnam War as a gimmick to win the 1968 presidential election.

McCain’s vision for 2013 was more modest than Bush’s for 2068 — in addition to omitting any mention of an Israeli-Palestinian peace process, he made no predictions about “transforming” the Middle East as a whole — but the basic trajectory was consistent.

He described an Iraq at the end of his first term in office as “a functioning democracy” in which violence would be “spasmodic (but) much reduced”, militias would be disbanded, al Qaeda in Iraq defeated, the central government able to impose its authority “in every province of Iraq”, and the U.S. military presence “much smaller” and no longer engaged in combat.

And not only would the threat from the Taliban be “greatly reduced” and the al Qaeda leadership captured or killed, he said, but a newly formed “League of Democracies” — another neo-conservative chestnut — would “apply stiff diplomatic and economic pressure” on Sudan to stop genocide in Darfur and use similar tools to end gross human rights abuses, such as human trafficking, in other parts of the world.

The absence of detail regarding how these goals will be accomplished drew mainly scorn from both Democrats and independent observers, with the former president of the influential Council on Foreign Relations, Leslie Gelb, describing McCain’s vision as “kind of a wild-eyed, unsupported prediction.”

“I think John McCain has been one of the most important voices on national security policy for many years now, so it really surprises me to see him giving speeches like the one today that are almost in la la land,” Gelb told reporters in a teleconference sponsored by the National Security Network.

At the same time, Sen. Hillary Clinton, who is lagging behind Obama in the race for the Democratic nomination, noted that “this is not the first time Sen. McCain has predicted victory in Iraq” and that his speech “promises more of the same Bush policies…”

McCain himself suggested that his worldview was not so different from Bush’s. Asked later Thursday about the president’s assertion that negotiating with “terrorists and radicals” today was similar to appeasing Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, McCain said he agreed with the analogy.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy, and particularly the neo-conservative influence in the Bush administration, can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.

© 2008 Inter Press Service

A psychologist who helps lead the post-traumatic stress disorder program at a medical facility for veterans in Texas told staff members to refrain from diagnosing PTSD because so many veterans were seeking government disability payments for the condition.

“Given that we are having more and more compensation seeking veterans, I’d like to suggest that you refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out,” Norma Perez wrote in a March 20 e-mail to mental-health specialists and social workers at the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Olin E. Teague Veterans’ Center in Temple, Tex. Instead, she recommended that they “consider a diagnosis of Adjustment Disorder.”

VA staff members “really don’t . . . have time to do the extensive testing that should be done to determine PTSD,” Perez wrote.

Adjustment disorder is a less severe reaction to stress than PTSD and has a shorter duration, usually no longer than six months, said Anthony T. Ng, a psychiatrist and member of Mental Health America, a nonprofit professional association.

Veterans diagnosed with PTSD can be eligible for disability compensation of up to $2,527 a month, depending on the severity of the condition, said Alison Aikele, a VA spokeswoman. Those found to have adjustment disorder generally are not offered such payments, though veterans can receive medical treatment for either condition.

Perez’s e-mail was obtained and released publicly yesterday by VoteVets.org, a veterans group that has been critical of the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a nonprofit government watchdog group.

“Many veterans believe that the government just doesn’t want to pay out the disability that comes along with a PTSD diagnosis, and this revelation will not allay their concerns,” John Soltz, chairman of VoteVets.org and an Iraq war veteran, said in a statement.

Melanie Sloan, executive director of CREW, said in a statement: “It is outrageous that the VA is calling on its employees to deliberately misdiagnose returning veterans in an effort to cut costs. Those who have risked their lives serving our country deserve far better.”

Veterans Affairs Secretary James B. Peake said in a statement that Perez’s e-mail was “inappropriate” and does not reflect VA policy. It has been “repudiated at the highest level of our health care organization,” he said.

“VA’s leadership will strongly remind all medical staff that trust, accuracy and transparency is paramount to maintaining our relationships with our veteran patients,” Peake said.

Peake said Perez has been “counseled” and is “extremely apologetic.” Aikele said Perez remains in her job.

A Rand Corp. report released in April found that repeated exposure to combat stress in Iraq and Afghanistan is causing a disproportionately high psychological toll compared with physical injuries. About 300,000 U.S. military personnel who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan are suffering from PTSD or major depression, the study found. The economic cost to the United States — including medical care, forgone productivity and lost lives through suicide — is expected to reach $4 billion to $6 billion over two years.

Ng said diagnosing PTSD often requires observing a patient for weeks or months because the condition implies a long, lingering effect of stress.

“Most people exposed to