The cable chatter about Scott Brown’s surprise

But wait a minute. Inside the polling data was a more subtle message. No doubt, opinion was mixed to negative, in some polls even strongly negative, on the results of Congressional action. But inside the specifics, significant majorities – not only of Democrats, but Independents and even Republicans – favored reforming the practices of health insurance companies that allow them to avoid coverage of sick people, favored creating health insurance exchanges, were in support of closing the Medicare prescription drug “doughnut hole,” providing tax credits to small business, and increasing insurance pools for high risk individuals.

And on a deeper political level, Massachusetts voters offered the nation some genuine irony. In some ways, referring to their own 2006 comprehensive insurance law – a law crafted with significant federal financial support and bipartisan political leadership which is a virtual framework for the current federal proposals, they said, “We have a plan and we like it. Why get Washington involved and pay for everyone else? Let’s vote for Scott Brown.”

What’s going on here?  In a world of focused messages and instant expectation, it is important to remember that Congress represents, however imperfectly, the complexity, the diversity, and even simply the size of America. The House, based on population, faces voters every two years. The Senate, two votes per state, big and small alike, faces voters less frequently. And the Senate now requires a sixty vote super majority for virtually all business. And yet, facing multiple committee jurisdictions and never far removed from special interest influences, both Houses of Congress, amazingly and indeed historically, did pass significant reform bills.

But the price of process was high. Time and momentum had been wasted. Indefensible personal deals had been struck. Moreover, the leaders of the Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, elevated to their roles because of their skill inside their institutions, had become the public faces of the issue. And large segments of the electorate, fearful in a faltering economy and reminded daily of the uneven distribution of opportunity, wealth and power in the nation, were driven in their frustrations to the negative side of the polls on Congressional Health Reform. But maybe it’s the “Congressional” more than the “Health Reform” that they really didn’t like.

Inside the Obama White House the answer couldn’t have been more important.

While never putting his name on a specific bill, the President had identified Health Reform as central to his vision of future economic security. They were almost there. Throughout late December of 2009 and early January 2010, Congressional leaders convened at the White House, with the President at the table to work out an agreed-upon version of a House and Senate bill. Chances are this would have succeeded. And then, Scott Brown.

Some Democrats, taking the simplest reading of the Brown victory were ready to bolt, but others said, “Wait, there’s a different way to get this done. We don’t need sixty Senate votes if the House passes the already approved Senate bill.” Both Houses could also pass agreed-upon amendments under budget reconciliation rules which require only a simple majority vote. Senate rules stipulate that only financial issues, increased or decreased spending, can be passed under reconciliation, but that may be enough to get an agreement. This appears to be the direction in which the President is leading his party and the nation.

The December 2009 edition

Early in the Fall, I accepted LaCuadra’s invitation to put into plain language the major criteria to judge what at least for now will be called ObamaCare (Oct. / Nov. 2009) There were five:

● Could uninsured people buy a decent insurance package at a price, even with a stretch, that they could afford?

● Could the country transition Medicaid from its last-option welfare roots to a streamlined health care program for the poor?

● Could Congress agree how to raise about $50 billion per year in new revenue to add to a similar amount in projected savings?

● Could our national health care cost growth, an outlier against all other industrial economies, be slowed over time?

● Finally, can the deal survive the next two political cycles to imbed itself in the national economy?

At this point, with qualifications, it’s four “yes, we cans” on the policy issues and a “maybe” on the political question as Congress tries to nail down the final deal.

The details follow, but remarkably little substance has changed in the months since Labor Day. As is clear to any observer, the debate has become all politics all the time.  In August the myriad forces of the Right seized control of Congressional town meetings. The “plot” to create death panels emerged as among the milder charges as the shouting crowds denounced Obama’s Fourth Reich, quite a goal for someone allegedly not even born in the US of A.  A constant in earlier debates, the fear of change in our health care arrangements, was exploited into the demonization of anything governmental.  If there were potential moderate Republican supporters, the combination of frenzied constituents and threatened primaries locked Republican incumbents into total opposition.

Schooled in Chicago politics, The White House saw the scope of the potential threat. It absolutely had to regain post Labor Day control of the debate, at least among Democrats. If the Right could demonize government, the President’s team could raise the Insurance demon. When under assault, attack! And soon, the focus of health reform was to control the perceived enemies: the insurance limits on pre-existing conditions; caps on benefits; cancellation of coverage; and wasteful administrative costs. My demon checks your demon. Let’s get to counting votes.

There are real differences between the parties. During the November House debate, Congressman Joe Barton, Republican of Texas and ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee said simply and honestly, “we have a difference in philosophy.”  For Democrats, the bottom line according to Barton was insurance coverage.

Republicans, he argued, want to control costs.  They assert that if you make people pay more out of pocket at the point of service, they will limit their own use of care. The premise is that consumer choice ultimately drives the health care cost equation.  Like other services in the economy, the purchase of health insurance should be a voluntary decision.

The serious Democrats say that this health care “market” doesn’t work. If you’re sick you’re quickly priced out (or closed out) of health insurance. If you face a large out of pocket cost, you may avoid or delay a service that you really need. At some point in the course of illness, you’ll then be likely to enter the health care system with greater need and in a more expensive way. More broadly, buying services piecemeal plays into the market incentives, as they exist, for providers of care (hospitals, doctors, drug and device makers) to increase the volume of the services they provide.  Broad coverage in a structured and regulated insurance market less reliant on fee for service payment, the counter argument goes, is the more effective way to control costs.  Agreeing at least in part with Congressman Barton’s label, these Democrats assert that, yes, insurance coverage is the bottom line in crafting an alternative approach to cost control.

Perhaps the best political observation is that whatever the philosophical differences, the broad health reform issue didn’t dent the Bush 43 agenda, which, following the cyclical pattern of American politics, helped bring a Democrat back to the White House.

While Congressman Joe Wilson’s, “You lie!”

“I’m not the first President to take up this cause” (without a doubt), “but I am determined to be the last.”  No way!  Whatever happens this year, our demographics, health care’s costs, and our curiously fragmented approach to paying for health care will keep the issue front burner for years to come.

These words are written as the houses of Congress struggle to finalize their individual proposals, with weeks of contentious debate ahead. The specifics will change; the major issues will not. Polls show that almost sixty percent of Americans report confusion about the proposals. Here’s an attempt to cut through the debate.

Asked to provide one kernel of truth, a researcher friend comparing the health systems of the United States with other major industrialized countries said, “In [other] countries the idea of someone going bankrupt because of medical bills, it just does not exist.” In the United States, to all of life’s other uncertainties, we link the risk of personal economic catastrophe to serious illness.

We spend twice as much per capita as any competitor country. Health care’s share of our larger GDP is half again ahead of the nearest nation. While we benefit from extraordinary technology in individual cases, population health lags. Compared to our own economy, insurance premiums grow at three times earnings. Today’s average family premium of just over $13,000 per year could reach somewhere between $24,000 and $31,000 ten years ahead.

Most importantly, our system works exactly as it is designed.

The underlying structure is fairly simple. We rely on public insurance for the elderly (Medicare) and, with great state by state variation, the poor (Medicaid).  Employers voluntarily add health insurance as a tax advantaged fringe benefit for 165 million workers sometimes including their families. The percentage of jobs with coverage has narrowed over two decades. Recent years have seen a big jump in cost sharing by the beneficiary. There’s a small costly market for individual purchase of coverage. Otherwise, you’re on your own. Through action and inaction, we’ve designed it this way.

Neither are the costs a mystery. As believers in a free economy, everyone who sells health care (pardon the crass term) maximizes price, volume or both. Doctors choose higher income specialties. Hospitals fill beds. Drug and device makers argue that higher pricing of new products fuels advanced research. Advertising encourages “ask your doctor” demand. Underlying all of this is a unit of service based fee structure where increased tests, visits, procedures, admissions (and readmissions) generate increased revenue. To be sure, insured patients are protected from the full costs of their care. But when facing big ticket expenditures, the patient’s usual reply is “yes, doctor.”

The insurance industry plays a supportive role. After a brief, highly unpopular, foray into “managing care,” companies have retreated into managing risk. The first lesson at insurance school is that covering healthy people is the road to a healthy bottom line. “Benefit design” is the current buzz, narrowing benefits, increasing deductibles and co-payments, thereby attracting and retaining healthy people by offering them lower premiums.

Of course, it isn’t this simple. Nor is any of this a morality play.  We are simply following the design and the incentives of our own system. Enter Obama and the current debate.

Despite all the tempest, the debate is about filling in the gaps of an existing system. Neither side has played its ideological card. Bush 43 era conservatives have not surfaced their individual purchase, tax credit, free market ideas.  Or perhaps they have simply been overtaken by their own anti-government fundamentalists or anti-Obama opportunists.  Obama/Clinton Democrats have gone nowhere near a single payer replacement for the current mixed system, opting to politically freeze the left with a proposed public plan which would compete in a restructured market.

With all of the complexity pushed aside, in the end there will be four key tests for an effective bill.

First will uninsured people be able to buy decent coverage at a price they can afford? The vision behind most of the bills is that an uninsured person would have a range of understandable choices, with government subsidies sufficient to afford the premiums. The insurance industry would abandon its risk-limiting practices in return for the requirement that everyone have coverage. The special challenge is to find the right balance among costs, subsidies and benefits. How much  should, for example, a $50,000 per year worker with a family but without employer coverage, have to pay when we total up his premiums (after applying a subsidy) and his out of pocket deductibles and co-payments?  Many would argue that net costs above ten, some would say seven, even five, percent of his income may simply make the whole package unaffordable to the working guy without coverage. Faced with that squeeze, the danger in the end is that Congress will choose stripped down benefits. Win the battle. Lose the war.

A

In recent months Guatemala has been experiencing yet another period of senseless violence that make up so much of its history. It is just another example of a state that is apparently collapsing under the weight of so many corrupt men and bad governments.

During the time of armed conflict more than 250,000 human beings were killed and thousands  more were displaced and lost everything they owned. During those 36 years we were taught to think, but not to speak for fear of becoming one of the tortured or disappeared. Many of us, remembering those days, can count at least one loved one amongst the lost and recall the total devastation that crushed their families and communities after one of their own was massacred by the foul breath of a machine gun or the chop of a machete.

At present, we do not have a “declared war,” at least not officially, but we know that there is the same level of terror and death. Everyday, at least five people in Guatemala are murdered for different reasons – some because they belong to clandestine groups that fight over territory. Others are still being persecuted for their idealism and their desire to see a more just society, much like during the war. Still others are gunned down just because they live in Guatemala. Again, much like during the war.

But unlike the years of the internal war – which succeeded in pressing people to create survival techniques, not least among those being silence, people are now just trying to maintain their daily routine, while our nation is plunged deeper into the darkness of violence in the midst of national and international indifference.

These days the people have no idea who is righteous and who is hidden in the darkness, therefore it is impossible to establish mechanisms which will allow us to avoid a violent death. Today people of all ages, both genders and all ideological beliefs know in their hearts that they are constantly at risk of being physically, sexually or psychologically assaulted. We all know that we are potential victims of being kidnapped or killed. The level of violence is so high that none of us truly knows if we will safely return home after work, and we learn, more and more everyday, that for many in this country, the value of life is dropping precipitously. At the moment, it seems that the price of a human life in Guatemala is the same as a damn cell phone.

The circle of violence is getting closer everyday. I remember, not too long ago, reading the morning news about the most recent victims of our undeclared war, and being horrified. But in recent months, the murderers have touched too near my family. No longer are the photographs in the papers merely troubling images, they are now a family history. Any desensitization and dehumanization caused by the rivers of blood is gone. In its place is a feeling of helplessness, sadness and anger. And yet, though felt by nearly everyone in this nation of 13 million, it doesn’t seem to be enough to force the authorities to create order in our country that every day is plunging further into chaos and despair. Guatemalans deserve a better country.

The big question, of course, is what the hell should we do? How can we change a system so corrupt that some “citizens” of Guatemala have the freedom to steal millions while others have to live with the fear of having their precious, if impoverished, lives cut short by a bullet. Indeed, the fear is so great that many of us no longer believe that we can do anything.

Unlike at any other time in our history, we should unite. We should raise our hands and call out all the violence. We should find mechanisms that force our government to end the violence, if not actually starting to come together by creating our own systems of government in the hope that we might have a better future.

But the first step is to realize that we are still living in a time of war, declared or not, and we must stop existing in the shadow of fear and silence.

I never met a small businessman yet who didn’t have one finger up his ass and the other on the scales. - Mad Dog Howard

Like many older married men, I’d rather have my fingernails pulled out with heated pliers than go with my wife to an allegedly cultural event, which in our still quite Southern town of Winchester, Virginia, usually means attending yet another local history or genealogy lecture. And I’d rather have the late Uday Hussein personally administer the ball shockers to me than attend one of our town’s many commercial events such as First Night, First Friday, or any “celebration of” (pick your own noun) such as Winchester’s spring festival of the apple blossom, downtown days, historic main street or any of the other thinly masked events which I call “Chamber of Commerce coordinated purchasing opportunities.”

But when my wife Barb pointed out, rather firmly I thought, that main street Winchester’s “First Friday” celebration was tonight, and given that I have not been outside this house for most of the month since returning from my shack in Central America, I knew that I’d better show a bit of enthusiasm.

And so I find myself standing here holding one of those ubiquitous caterer’s plastic wine goblets in the middle of a boutique whose theme or purpose, as near as I can tell, is cool looking weathered outdoor stuff brought indoors, then matched up with expensive new china and linens. Immediately, that high whine of hysteria in the back of my head starts its klaxon: Get me the fuuuuuck outta heeeeeeeeeere! Ooooooooooooweeeeeeeeeee… Get me the fuuuuuck outta heeeeeeeeeere!

I call it the “Dead Man Shopping” siren. Or “Rod Serling’s Lost Potpourri Zone.”

On the face of it, First Friday, which is “celebrated” in thousands of American downtowns on the first Friday in June each year, seems mainly an opportunity for merchants to give away wine and cheese and crab salad cracker spread in large amounts. Almost none of the attending crowd purchases anything. And when they do it seems to be one of those reflexive small token purchases one sees only in America: as in, “I am occupying space and breathing inside a retail establishment and the owner greeted me, so I must buy something.” Especially since I ate a piece of his cheese.

If First Friday is purely a cheese giveaway, they might do well to emulate our first populist president, Andrew Jackson, who let a 1,400 pound block of cheese age in the hallway of the White House for two years. Then in 1837 the President, on his way out of office, invited the public to come and eat it. It was gone in two hours. But the stench in the White House lasted well into the following presidency of Martin Van Buren, in much the same way our former president crapped upon the carpet of American history for Obama to clean up. Jackson knew he had caused the oncoming economic crash through over-extension of what we would now call sub-prime credit, leaving Van Buren to campaign on a platform of “Everybody gets a helluva lot less from here on out, so get used to it.” Not an enviable campaign position, to be sure. But at least Van Buren stood against the idea of allowing Texas to become a state, which, if he had been successful, might have saved us all much subsequent political grief.

Earth to Bageant: Snap out of it! Someone is talking to you.

And indeed someone is. A well dressed woman, one of our many Yankee transplants, stands nearby gabbing about why she chose a certain artificial condo development called “Creekside Village,” a development more or less embedded in a shopping center at the edge of town, as opposed to others as far as a mile from a mall. What more could a person ask for in life than to be within walking distance of Jos. A. Bank, and Ann Taylor? (Banning the local atmospheric release of the 328,000 pounds of toxins annually by two local factories would be nice. But hell, you cannot have everything in this life.)

Creekside is certainly the best looking of our developments and even has a few trees left standing. And it’s far from the crumbling old malls of the Seventies where immigrants and white trash shop. No Salvadorians or Guatemalans (who are rumored to keep chickens in wire cages under their kitchen sinks) out her way. Sure, it sits in the middle of a permanent traffic jam, but you can actually walk to the mall! Now to my Luddite mind the trick would be escaping FROM the mall, but these things are a matter of perspective.

I supposed there is still a creek at Creekside Village somewhere. One wandered along there when I was a kid, though I can see no sign today of what I would actually call a rippling creek in the dragonfly, tadpole and darting minnows sense of the word – although that open concrete storm drain alongside the pavement may well be it. Anyway, Mall Locked Village would have been too obviously accurate a name, so the pretense that a creek once filled with crawdads is still there was probably a better choice. I cannot help, though, but remember the old wetland where the red winged blackbirds perched on the cattails and sumac branches, piercing the muggy stillness of summer, issuing their crystalline cry before lifting off to nudge the sky with their bold red shoulders.

Cattle mutilations on Main Street

On our main street, Loudoun Street, there was once a J. C. Penney, Montgomery Ward, hardware stores and movie theaters. Its sidewalks were clogged with working class shoppers, especially on weekends when folks came into town from the outlying counties to buy shoes for the kids, groceries and perhaps a secret bottle at the liquor store. That was when J. J. Newberry’s and Woolworth were considered massive because they had six aisles. But with America’s main street retailers now left desanguinated – rather like those strange cattle mutilations in New Mexico – by the big box stores and suburban malls, the buildings on Loudoun Street are broken down into small boutique spaces selling “handcrafted” whatnots, small “galleries” of every sort imaginable, antiquish shops, the obligatory Starbucks knockoff, pub-like drinking establishments with dark paneling, and a few high end (for Winchester anyway) restaurants with iron tables and chairs under umbrellas out front. But on any given day the street is nearly empty, as if there has been a permanent bomb threat announced for the downtown area. Boutique business owners sit waiting to pounce on out of towners, mostly summer tourists visiting the surrounding Civil War battle fields. After Labor Day, they look for an advertising connection between Chinese made desk organizers and Thanksgiving, the day after which they put up Christmas signage and begin the long grim march toward holiday sales on a street where gross sales have been in decline for years.

The first in our state of Virginia, the Loudoun Street Pedestrian Mall, and hence the First Friday event, centers around an 1840 high columned courthouse, complete with Confederate statue in front, gun in hand and bronze eyes eternally vigilant for the next attack from up north. Loudoun Street is named for John Campbell, 4th Earl of Loudoun, a Scottish nobleman and supposed military leader who managed to lose his entire regiment during the Jacobite Rising of 1745. As punishment, Loudoun was sent to the American colonies as Commander-in-Chief, where he could do less harm. However, he managed to do so, losing the frontier to the French and Indians, for which he was promoted and sent to Spain. Shortly afterward, a local land speculator and small-fry militia officer named George Washington – who quite understood the value of property protection – built the largest earthen fort of the French and Indian war, now reduced to a hill overlooking our First Friday celebration. In fact, the house from which I write this is located on what was once the fort’s parade ground. If real estate values and American history had anything to do with one another, the “For Sale” sign would not still be sticking up in my front yard lo these many months.

Strange as it may sound to some, there have been moments when our main street pedestrian mall has brought tears to my eyes. My childhood still lives somewhere between its dank old alleys and its refurbished colonial buildings, and haunts the shadowed side streets as one of those ancestral ghosts old men are so hesitant to let go of. One of my direct ancestors opened a leathersmith’s shop in 1781 on this three-block stretch that still constitutes most of our main street commercial activity. Having seen the letters and optimistic advertisements of John William Bageant, Revolutionary War veteran and former indentured apprentice turned saddle and glove maker, it saddens this crusty old heart to see that many, if not most businesses here, are struggling to stay open while others are just the expensive hobbies of developers’ and doctors’ wives. And so walking Loudoun Street, with its numerous empty “commercial spaces” is a melancholy experience.

Two hundred and twenty five years of the ordinary history of hopeful, toiling, freedom loving craftsmen, men with fingers bloodied by the cordwainer’s needle, the wheelwright’s and gunsmith’s toil vanished into the ether. All that cumulative effort reduced to trinketry and much very bad art – small watercolors of flowers that looked like they were done by a six-year-old, framed in gilt and on sale for $350, most of which were painted by hobbyists, wives and daughters of the already rich. Ten generations of craft, toil and small town mercantilism reduced to brass wind chimes with colonial motifs made in the Confucian capitalist gulags of the new industrial China. In the new globalized America, having deep roots in a place sooner or later comes to be painful. In all likelihood, the guy in Dongguan, China who made the wind chimes weeps at the memory of some remembered village street too.

Gimme a Bud Light and a Wedge of Pont-l’Evêque

Now that the artificial prosperity of the Clinton years is over, downtown boutiquers find themselves unable to sell local Southern specialties, such as those $550 framed Mort Kunstler prints of that most cold blooded of Civil War killers, Stonewall Jackson, who sucked on lemons while condemning his men into unimaginable slaughter. In the most famous of these prints Stonewall Jackson, pensively seated, asks for “Divine Guidance” while his men look on reverently. This famous (to Southerners at least) print is based on no actual event, but is a simulacra – an image of an image of something that, in this case, never happened. It is derived from a fictional scene from the worst Civil War movie ever made, “Gods and Generals.” Jackson’s Civil War headquarters, now a museum restored with the help of Mary Tyler Moore, of all people, is located maybe 50 yards from my back yard fence. In the past few years Stonewall Jackson has become the number one heroic figure of a fundamentalist movement called “Christian Manliness.” There is an eerie reverence about the visitors pouring from the tour buses outside my window to visit this shrine with its Confederate flag and cannon out front, rather symbolically pointed at Winchester’s black neighborhood.

Anyway, except for a few business owners who’ve owned their downtown buildings for a long time, things are slowly and inexorably drifting down the crapper. The fact that we have a Dollar General store plunked down amid this mélange of historical buildings and boutique businesses speaks volumes about our downtown economy. One very honest boutique merchant says, “After tonight I am closing down. I’m just plain tired of sitting around waiting for nothing.” Watching the public pretense of doing business in an economy rotting from the inside out is almost Kafkaesque in its interior grimness and exterior smiling and polishing of goods. Another downtowner tells me he/she hasn’t made a sale over $15 in two weeks, mostly art bookmarks, stationary and similar doodads.

It just could have to do with the fact that this walking mall is surround on three sides by low wage semi-slum dwellers who, after coming home on a Friday dead tired from the loading docks out there at the pasta plant, would prefer to spend eight bucks on a 12-pack and chill out, rather than come down here to figure out what to do with a heated brie knife or taste a South African cab from a thimble sized plastic cup. In the pedestrian mall’s 35-year existence, it has yet to occur to the town’s owning class leadership that, walking distance or not, it might be nice if the walkers were prosperous enough to actually buy something, and that it might also be nice if that something were actually useful.

In the end however, it’s about class distinctions that have to do with some imagined sense of taste – Care Bears and Doritos casseroles vs. the $500 latte/espresso maker and Chateau Larrivet-Haut-Brion. It’s about the tasteful and the unwashed, which here in the South somehow manage to pass one another at the juncture of kitschy Stonewall Jackson worship. Yet class distinctions have little to do with money and how much of it you make, whether it be 20-K a year or 200-K. The owning classes, and business and corporate classes will always accept your money, whether you willingly spend it a some mall, or have to be hypnotized into doing so through television, or they have to beat it out of your ass when push comes to shove. And it matters not one fritter the color of your skin or whether you are a Mexican laborer getting a usurious payday loan, or the bimbo wife of a doctor shopping at Saks. Class is about power over others, both perceived and real. You can be whiter than the inside of one of Grandma’s biscuits and still be a caste untouchable and cultural nigger. For example:

Are these wind chimes Biblically correct ma’m?

Sitting on a wicker bench outside a gallery I watch a 50-ish guy with a whitewall haircut, who probably drifted downtown from the lower working class neighborhood three blocks over. He is a fundamentalist Christian and is discussing whether First Friday is a “Biblically sanctioned Christian holiday” to an uncomfortable lady with a beautiful Virginia Tidewater accent, a tight-for-fifty butt well presented by expensive, trendy Capri pants; clearly she is the victim of too much exercise, healthy food and full medical coverage.

Now Whitewall is not preaching to anyone, just doing what would pass for making conversation in his lower working class white Christian Virginian caste. He is probably not a hard core Christian fundamentalist because if he were, he would not be down here where they are not only drinking alcohol, but giving the damned stuff away for free. Capri Pants is uncomfortable as hell just being near Mr. Whitewall and he can feel it and he can feel that there is a class wall between them four hundred feet high and made of kryptonite. One of them is a piece of shit and it ain’t her.

If Capri Pants had simply taken the man seriously as a human being, and maybe opened the discussion toward the difference between religious and secular celebrations, they might have actually had a conversation. One in which Mr. Whitewall – who I’d bet a bottle of good gin never graduated from high school – would have learned something he didn’t know and wouldn’t have minded learning it at all. Obviously he wasn’t there to argue with anyone, but just to see what this First Friday stuff was all about. So he remains in a white cultural ghetto three blocks away bounded by religion and ignorance. And she remains in a white cultural ghetto circumscribed by recreational boutique shopping, the severe capitalist indoctrination certified by her college degree, and the Oprah Book Club. You can be very damned white and middle class in this country and be living in a ghetto.

According to the US census, we’ve got 789 black people and 4000 Hispanics living within walking distance of this Friday night purchasing opportunity. Not a one of them seems to be here this evening. (Although three large, out of town black men wearing Washington DC sports team gear huddle by an iron post supporting the mall’s antique clock, observing the scene from behind sunglasses. I’d kill to know what they are smiling and chuckling about). Yet the whiteness of First Friday is not – contrary to what an outside liberal observer might think – a racial thing. Race has been ever used, and very effectively in America, to hide class issues. And besides, the good merchants get mighty tolerant when a debit card or cash is exposed. Case in point: A couple of weeks ago I walked down to the pedestrian mall wearing wrinkled flannel pajama bottoms, house slippers and a beat up, sweat stained fishing vest and sporting a week’s growth of beard – my basic ensemble when I am holed up writing. Old Southern men can be ornery for the sheer fuck of it, so I just got up from the keyboard and walked downtown to get a few things. As long as I was filling my shopping bag all I got were smiles (to my face at least.) If you are spending money in such an outfit, even smelling mildly of bourbon and B.O., you are merely eccentric. Had I been dressed the same and pushing a shopping cart full of aluminum cans, I’d have been told by the cops to move on, or maybe arrested for theft of, and deadly possession of, a shopping cart.

The party that won’t die

Meanwhile, here within the inner bastion of the free-wheeling market capitalist economy, the party never ends. Every day we get something for nothing, by god! If it isn’t free cheese or free airline miles, or timeshare trial offers, then it’s a free service or free special event. I see in the Winchester Star that tomorrow offers yet another special event and service balled up into one: a “Privacy Day” sponsored by American Background Services. Powerful in “data resource exchange” according to its corporate self-description, ABS is owned by the Control Risk Group or CRG, a global company that provides criminal histories, personal credit and driving records, and something called “U.S. Treasury enforcement” to anyone willing to pay. And tomorrow – oh joy of joys! – American Background is offering free shredding and destruction of personal or business information to anyone who delivers their own private records into the hands of CRG at a drop off point.

Something about that smells stronger than the most pungent cheese being spread on the retail communion wafers of First Friday. But after watching people pretending to do business with people pretending to be shopping, well, delivering your most private matters into the hands of people who are paid to spy on your personal life doesn’t surprise me one bit.

]]> http://www.lacuadraonline.com/featured-stories/special-commentary/feed/ 0 http://www.lacuadraonline.com/special-commentary/special-commentary-dams-reparations-and-genocide/ http://www.lacuadraonline.com/special-commentary/special-commentary-dams-reparations-and-genocide/#comments Fri, 16 Jan 2009 03:26:52 +0000 Barbara Rose Johnston, Ph.D. http://lacuadraonline.com/?p=377 The following story explores some recent developments in the central tragedy of modern Guatemalan history – the genocide which took the lives of hundreds of thousands of Maya during this country’s long civil war.  In an email conversation with La Cuadra Dr. Barbara Rose Johnston shared additional information about the international financing of the Chixoy Dam which, we feel, provides an even wider financial and  legal context for the story.

That story centers around an act of genocide in which several  hundred Mayan men, women, and children were murdered, the proximate causes for their murder, and recent legal steps taken to exact some small measure of justice in their name. But the story also touches on the economics of their ultimate victimization.

In short, this is the story: those who were murdered lived in a valley by a river. The government decided to build a dam on their river. The lake resulting from the building of a dam on their river would have flooded their pueblo. They protested. They were targeted for their protest. They were murdered in cold blood. The dam was built. Their bodies were tossed into a mass grave.

Dr. Johnston was the principal researcher of this story during a three year long project that produced, in 2005, a truth commission style report on the consequential damages of building the Chixoy Dam.  This report was delivered to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, the Inter-American Human Rights Commission, The World Bank and the International Development Bank.

This research demonstrated that the Maya A’chi of Rio Negro held a 100+ year title to their land and that the sanctity of that title was guaranteed by the 1952 Guatemalan Constitution. The pubic utility that built the Chixoy Dam never acquired legal title to the land, the hydroelectric works or the area for the reservoir. Building the dam was clearly illegal under Guatemalan law and the international lending institutions who provided financing for the project knew this.

Conscious of their culpability in the violation of law, those international lenders continued to fund the project, though roughly three fourths of the funding simply disappeared. In 1996, when the World Bank recommended privatization of the electrical transmission grid, it was, in part, an effort to finally receive payment for these original loans.

During The World Bank’s discussions on privatization and financial loss, we strongly suspect little mention was made of those whose losses were both human and eternal.

“Dams, Reparations and Genocide” first appeared in print in CounterPunch, November 16-30, 2008, Volume 15, number 20 (1-4), and is here republished with the kind permission of the author.

The Editors

As I turn on my computer, each day I am greeted by my desktop photo – a singular image of a skull, other bones blurred in a background of dirt, a tattered shirt and a bit of boot in the margins. The jaw and teeth are grinning into the dirt, and the back of head is clearly in view. A bullet hole is prominently figured. Number 15, reads the marker, planted adjacent to the skull. For years now, this desktop image has haunted me.

The photo was taken by the Belgian ethnologist Bert Janssens in the fall of 2001, as he documented the exhumation of a mass grave in the hills above Río Negro, a village now drowned beneath the reservoir created by the Chixoy Dam. He sent it to me as part of a massive collection of images that I used to illustrate a five-volume study written to clarify – for the government of Guatemala, the World Bank and other international financiers, and the Guatemalan people – the many varied legacies of this internationally financed dam (The Chixoy Dam Legacy Issues Study, www.centerforpoliticalecology.org/chixoy.html).

Built in a time of civil war, the Chixoy Dam forced residents of Rio Negro and nearby villages to leave their homes and ancestral lands at gunpoint, and their protests were met with violence and massacre. Residents of other villages, coerced into civilian militia duties, wielded those guns and machetes. Guatemalan soldiers, serving as security on the dam site, directed their actions. The public utility, INDE, paid the salary of those soldiers with money loaned by the World Bank.

This particular image was part of Bert Janssens’ “Xococ” series, a poignant set of photographs documenting the exhumation process: relatives watching, working, digging, and forensic archeologists carefully recording the sad findings: a trench littered with shoes, clothing, the tattered remains of life and the grizzly evidence of the death of 107 children and 70 women. I keep it on my desktop as a way of insuring that this life and the questions behind this death do not get pushed aside. Who was this person? What were the events that led to this death and those of the many others whose remains lie in the same mass murder grave? What sort of life has resulted for those who survived?

Over a million Guatemalans were displaced during the nation’s internal conflict and, according to 2006 estimates, somewhere between 400,000 and 600,000 people were killed in a campaign of state-sponsored violence against a largely Mayan population. In 1999, the United Nations-sponsored Commission on Historical Clarification (CEH) reported the findings from exhumations, forensic analysis, and witness testimony: some 83 per cent of the 42,275 named victims were Mayan civilians, 93 per cent of the atrocities committed during the conflict had been the work of the armed forces, and, as evidenced by a number of exemplary cases, massacres were the result of a policy of state-sponsored violence on a Mayan civilian population. The government of Guatemala and its military dictators were responsible for acts of genocide and other crimes against humanity.

One of the Mayan massacres investigated by the CEH is the case of Río Negro, a village that now lies under the reservoir created by the Chixoy Dam. Built in the late 1970s and early 1980s with Inter-American Development Bank and World Bank financing, designs were approved, the project financed, and construction begun in 1975, without notifying the local population. Construction began without legal acquisition of the land supporting the construction works, a portion of the dam and hydroelectric generation facility, the reservoir, nor the farms needed to support evicted communities. Construction proceeded without a comprehensive census of affected people or a plan to address compensation, resettlement and alternative livelihoods for some 3,445 – mostly Mayan – residents, displaced by the dam and its reservoir or the additional 6,000 – mostly Mayan – households in surrounding communities. Civilian protest occurred when negotiations with authorities failed and petitions were submitted to the Guatemalan government and the Spanish Embassy. These complaints were interpreted by the military government as evidence of insurgent influence, and the army declared these “resistant communities” subversive. When construction was complete and the reservoir waters rose in January 1983, ten communities in the Chixoy River Basin had been destroyed by massacre. In Río Negro alone, some 444 of the 791 original inhabitants had been killed.

Earlier this year this nameless, numbered skull regained a sense of humanity: it is someone whose life, loves, and death has been described by surviving relatives in a Guatemalan courtroom. Some 26 years after death, the occupants of this mass grave were finally the subject of a court proceeding. On trial were six men from the Mayan village of Xococ, former members of the Xococ Civil Defense Patrol.

The facts of the case, as confirmed by witness testimony and exhumed remains, are as follows: On March 13, 1982, army officers and six members of the Xococ civilian patrol traveled to Río Negro, assembled the residents and took them to the “Portezuelo,” a place called K’oxom in the hills above Río Negro, where they massacred 107 children and 70 women. Eighty-four survivors fled, some taking refuge in the community of Los Encuentros near Pueblo Viejo. Others took refuge in the community of Agua Fría. Eighteen children were kept as slaves for the civil patrollers.

O

This issue we’re proud to feature a recent story by John Ross, a legend of radical journalism. John’s been writing about Mexico and Latin America for over 50 years. Here he takes a look at the madness known as “The War on Drugs.”

Look forward to more of his insights and observations, and the insights and observations of his colleagues, in coming issues.

The Editors

The fiery November 4 crash of a private Lear jet not a mile from Los Pinos, the Mexican White House, that killed President Felipe Calderon’s closest collaborator, Interior Secretary Juan Camilo Mourino, was largely buried by the U.S. press, coming as it did on Election Day in the USA.

As Interior Secretary responsible for internal security, Mr. Mourino, who had just met with outgoing U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey to map out bi-lateral drug war strategies, was the second most powerful official in Mexico.

Also killed in the crash that took a total of 19 lives was Mexico’s former drug czar, Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcellos, himself a frequent assassination target for Mexican drug gangs. Last spring Vasconcellos was replaced as top dog at the SIEDO (“Sub-prosecutor for Special Investigations into Organized Crime”) which he had directed for eight years, and appointed special drug war advisor to Calderon.

Despite public incredulity, the Calderon administration has fought hard to spin the plane crash as an accident, pinning the mishap on the inexperience of the pilot and co-pilot of the privately owned Lear jet, both of whom were killed on impact. Transportation Secretary Luis Tello has held serial press conferences presenting the black box retrieved from the crash and flogging expert testimony from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Federal Aeronautics Administration. The bamboozlement campaign has been accompanied by a burst of government-bought print ads and electronic spots that are designed to boost the president’s credibility as the second anniversary of his chaotic swearing-in approaches.

Nonetheless, the public remains archly skeptical. In a country where the government and the media relentlessly fudge and lie about everything from unemployment numbers and the depth of the recession to its questionable successes in the drug war, no one quite believes the plane crash was an accident. Indeed, ever since writer Sara Sefchovich, whose hot new book is titled “A Country of Lies,” launched an Internet page inviting readers to list Calderon’s biggest whoppers, the “accident” has been at the top of the list.

The plane crash in which Mourino and Vasconcellos were killed is an apt metaphor for the current state of Calderon’s drug war, which, after an embarrassing round of high level arrests of anti-drug officials, appears to be similarly going down in flames.

Presidente Felipe Calderon first declared his anti-drug crusade just days after being sworn in as Mexico’s president two years ago on December 1st, a job he was awarded in a July 2006 election that half of all Mexicans thought he won by fraud. In a move to bolster his pretensions of authority, the new president sent 30,000 troops into the field to confront the drug cartels – that number has since increased to 45,000, a third of the Mexican Army.

Since December 2006, 6000 Mexicans have been slain in drug war combat, 4000 alone this year, with no notable reduction in the drug flow north to the United States. Hundreds of troops and police officials have perished in the past 23 months, in addition to dozens of innocent civilians gunned down by soldiers at highway checkpoints and other collateral damage. Over a thousand complaints against the drug war troops have been registered with the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH.)  Between 20 and 30 corpses, many without heads, are found every 24 hours in battleground states like Chihuahua and Sinaloa, with no end in sight.

Furthermore, rattled by persistent scandal, Mexico’s lead anti-drug agencies are in turmoil. The detention of dozens of top officials in recent months, including the nation’s liaisons to the United Nations Drug Agency, Interpol, and even the U.S. Embassy in Mexico, has shaken Washington.

Among those in custody is Santiago Vasconcellos’ replacement at the SIEDO, Noe Ramirez Mandujano, who is reportedly being held on a 40 day investigation warrant at the agency’s heavily fortified headquarters in the Ixtapalapa delegation (borough) of the capital. Ramirez, who at the time of his detention served as Mexico’s representative to the United Nations’ Drug Agency in Vienna, is charged with accepting monthly payments of $450,000 US from a branch of the Sinaloa Cartel under the thumb of the Beltran Leyva brothers. The Beltran Leyvas are presently embroiled in a bloody turf war with their former boss, Joaquin “El Chapo” (“Shorty”) Guzman, the dean of Mexican drug lords.

According to the released testimony of ex-SIEDO intelligence officer, Fernando Rivera, who is currently in a U.S.-run witness protection program, agency officials have been servicing the Sinaloa Cartel since 2004. In addition to Ramirez and Rivera, four military officers have been arrested for feeding drug war intelligence to the Sinaloa boys.

Another drug warrior currently under arraignment is Ricardo Gutierrez who headed up the Mexican office of Interpol and sat on the agency’s international commission. According to the Interpol Internet page, such commissions “share crucial information about crimes and criminal activity with other police agencies.” This job description must send shivers down the spine of U.S. drug fighters who worked with Gutierrez. Gutierrez’s successor at Interpol, Rodolfo de la Guardia, is also in custody.

In the amazing series of elections

The big question when Morales was elected was whether he could stay long in office, or whether the Bolivian right, perhaps in collusion with the armed forces, could oust him. He has now demonstrated that he can.

There were three major elements in his program. Bolivia’s national income today is primarily drawn from its gas exports, essentially to Brazil and Argentina. The gas is located in the eastern provinces, the so-called Half Moon. And these areas are the ones in which there are the lowest percentages of indigenous peoples. The majority are Euro-descendants. Until Morales came to power, the prices at which the gas was sold were ridiculously low. And the income remained largely with the eastern provincial governments.

So, Morales sought to renegotiate the prices of the gas being exported. And he instituted a hydrocarbon tax so that much more of the income would come to the national government. Morales intended to use the money for social redistribution throughout the country, which would of course significantly benefit the indigenous populations.

In addition, the land in the eastern provinces is exceptionally mal-distributed. Two-thirds of the land are owned by one-sixth of 1% of the population. Morales wished to place a cap on the acreage any one person could own – a form of major agrarian reform.

In foreign policy, Morales attempted to maintain reasonable relations with the United States. He continued to accept the money the U.S. had been giving for anti-narcotic operations, especially since this money went to the armed forces. He did, however, in addition, welcome Venezuelan aid and Cuban doctors. The U.S. government was clearly not happy with Morales and would have preferred to see the Bolivian right return to power.

The strategy of the Bolivian right was to demand more autonomy for the regional governments, ultimately hinting at secession – a project they had never advocated as long as they controlled the central government. They demanded a recall election of Morales. The tactic badly backfired.

Morales accepted the challenge, adding to the recall election the question of whether the nine provincial prefects should also be recalled. In the elections Morales got a whopping 68% support, far greater than the votes he had originally received when he was elected. Seven prefects were returned but two anti-Morales governors were ousted, which has allowed Morales to name successors.

The right in the eastern provinces then sought to block exports of gas. They hoped thereby to induce the Brazilian and Argentine governments to put pressure on Morales. Supporters of Morales then began to demonstrate. The governor of Pando province, Leopoldo Fernández responded with repression. Over 30 demonstrators were killed in the city of El Porvenir. Morales arrested the governor and named a navy admiral as the new prefect.

At this point, President Michelle Bachelet of Chile convened an emergency meeting of the organization of the 12 South American states, UNASUR, to consider the situation. All twelve presidents came to Santiago for the meeting, and unanimously adopted a resolution of “full and complete support for the constitutional government of Evo Morales,” denouncing any possible coup d’état. The significance of this resolution was that it was unanimous, being signed even by the deeply pro-American president of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe. The resolution was then endorsed by the Grupo Río, composed of 22 countries from all of Latin America and the Caribbean, including Mexico.

UNASUR called for dialogue. Morales called for dialogue himself, even before the UNASUR resolution. The right is stymied. Its last hope was some U.S. intervention. But Bolivia has now expelled the U.S. ambassador, Philip Goldberg, for “conspiring against democracy,” that is, with the Bolivian right. The United States is now withdrawing its small aid projects in Bolivia. Russia has offered to enter the breach. The United States is becoming more and more irrelevant in Latin America.

If one asks why even Uribe supported the resolution, it is because no president wants to see the new tactic of secession receiving support. The United States is trying this also in Ecuador, where it has backfired equally, with the great victory of President Rafael Correa’s referendum on the constitution.

This commentary is reprinted with the permission of the author and Agence Global. Professor Wallerstein is a Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, he can be reached at: immanuel.wallerstein@yale.edu.

TITS UP!

The Global Financial Markets.

Tits up, tits up, tits up!

The Pseudo Free Market-All-OnCredit-Capitalist Charade.

TITS UP!

Gnashing, Insatiable Metastasis of Consumer Madness.

TITS UP!

Not to belabor the point, but TITS UP!

This is how it is.

Take your choice. Tits Up, or the less prosaic, Dick in the Dirt.

Not normal tits, BIG TITS! Trillion dollar tits.

The empress has no clothes. She has been stripped and tripped and is lying flat on her back. And damn, sans Victoria Secret lingerie, and in the nipple hardening breeze of reality, she looks magnificent for a bloated old whore who’s been fucked every which way from Sunday.

Imagine

Imagine, in the space of 3 months, most world equity markets have plummeted. The US stock market is down approximately 40%, while those of Poland, China and Hong Kong are down more than 60%.

Imagine all the zeros as 16 trillion dollars of equity get sucked through a black hole. Yang has swallowed Ying.

Imagine Merrill Lynch, Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, Wachovia, AIG and virtually every other major con-game/Ponzi-scheme masquerading as financial institution has either gone under, or been bailed out and reconfigured.

Imagine:  the price of General Motors stock is now less than it was in 1950. Japan’s stock market is at its lowest level in 20 years. Approximately 10% of homes in the US have a mortgage that is at risk of defaulting.

Imagine: Uncle Sam has already promised 1 trillion to bail out banks, insurers, the auto industry, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. France, Germany and England have pledged another trillion to shore up their own institutions. Two trillion dollars that could have been spent on education, healthcare, development of clean and renewable energy.

By the way, the 2 trillion is just the beginning. Multiply it by five and we get close.

Imagine, tent cities popping up around the US like zits on a teenager who eats at MacDonalds.

Imagine the arteries of global credit so clogged that pre-death rigor mortis has taken hold of businesses large and small.

Kiddies, all the bubbles have burst, the champagne glass has been crushed under foot, and the bottle smashed on the side of sinking ship.

Iceland almost went bankrupt. Bjork tiny homeland is Ba-roke.

Christ on a crutch! Golly Gee Wiseacres  and Hell in a Bucket. It don’t look good.

As the saying goes: A trillion here and a trillion there; eventually it adds up to real money.

It’s all going kafooee, kerpuff, adios, seeeeeeee ya!

Yessiree, unfettered and systemic rapaciousness has met the law of unintended consequences.

OOOOOPS!!!

“Oooops! Sorry. Our risk model didn’t work,” say the half-witted Harvard whiz kids running hedge funds.

“Oops,” says former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, “silly me to think that total deregulation and a loosey-goosey monetary policy would not lead to mass larceny. Ooopsy.”

Ooopsy, maybe someone should have listened to Warren Buffet in 2002 when he described derivatives as financial weapons or mass destruction.

The maggots of short term private profit have devoured the whole apple pie and the oven it was baked in. There is a breadline at the door and the maggots have said, “Write us a check and we’ll build you a new oven. Till then, STARVE, SUCKAS!”

Uncle Sam said, “Sure, why not? Here’s the check.” Because, in truth, old Uncle Sam himself is just a pile of maggots stuffed in a clown suit.

This is how things are. This is how things are PRIOR TO A GLOBAL RECESSION SETTING IN. Fuck Republicans. Fuck Democrats. The Kleptocrats have won and smashed the game board.

And it’s just the beginning. Now it is going to get interesting and messy. (Or maybe it’s the end . . .  I mean like, THE END. . . . scroll credits. . . . God I hope not, I still want to learn to play the harmonica.)

IT’S GETTING INTERESTING

It’s going to get interesting because it was long overdue for this farce to cease.

It’s going to get interesting because modern capitalism has been revealed to be an ugly cross-dresser where the profits get privatized and the losses get democratized and the bandits keep all that they’ve stolen. Modern day capitalism is socialism for the wealthy, Disney Land for the duped middle class, and promises for the rest. Not exactly what Adam Smith had in mind.

It’s going to get interesting because we are about to live through both an overhaul of capitalism and witness a serious shift in global power. China is already vying to be the holder of the world’s reserve currency, and given their balance sheet it probably makes sense.

It’s going to get interesting because the overhaul of capitalism may be for the worse, not the better. Remember the solution cooked up on Wall Street and in Washington is to put the reconstruction into the hands of the same crooks and ideologues who fucked everything up in the first place.

It’s going to get interesting because the zombified, lobotomized, and supersized of the First World are going to have to learn to make do, to get along, with less, to perhaps question everything. . . to perhaps stop marching the consumer goose-step toward a social and ecological abyss.

It’s going to get interesting to watch bloated babies get angry that every day can’t be Christmas.

It’s going to get interesting because constructive creativity sometimes emerges from the ashes of anger and desperation. Let’s pray a lot of it does.

GETTING MESSY

AND IT’S GOING TO GET MESSY, horribly messy, because all these numbers and percentages reach into real lives.

The Third World, the countries that are most vulnerable and out of Western view, are already being battered about due to currency fluctuations, inflation and soaring commodity prices. To put it another way, more people simply can’t get food and clean water. In the last year alone, and directly related to the collapse of the markets, directly related to idiotic deregulation and blind greed, 100 million more people have been pushed into poverty and as many as 2 billion on the verge of disaster. This is according to The World Bank. Remember that half the world’s population lives on less than $2.50 per day and does not have access to fresh water.

Hey, but who really cares, out of sight out of mind. Well, you’ll care soon enough, because as things get worse the Third World will encroach on the First very quickly and perhaps not so peacefully.

In the First World it’s going to get messy too. Already under-funded and vital social programs will have less funding. There will be more pink slips and more jobless and more homeless and more people crowding emergency rooms because of a lack of insurance or a rise in violence or more substance abuse. There will be more people looking for scapegoats and finding them in the guise of foreigners or people of a different religion. The anger will be stoked by the same media outlets which, for the sake of ratings and advertising dollars, play to our worst fears, the same people who brought us the war in Iraq and are cheering for one with Iran.

It’s going to get messy as those about to retire see their savings halved. It’s going to get messy because the homeless shelters are at overflow.

It’s going to get messy because  in the U.S. chaos and protests will spill into the streets giving the government false cause to restrict more personal freedoms, abuse The Constitution and label everyone who disagrees with them unpatriotic or a terrorist.

God, I wish none of this were so. But when I do the math 1 and 1 still equals 2.

If only I could borrow a calculator from one of those hedge fund boys and make it equal 10 trillion.

Merry, Merry Christmas….

I recently read an article by Ron Jacobs

The court in Garrett grappled with the definition of battery and how that definition would apply to these facts.  Essentially, battery is defined as any intentionally harmful or offensive contact for which there is no consent or other legally recognized justification.  In Garrett, the court focused on the issue of intent, holding that a person is liable for battery if he or she knows with substantial certainty that their actions will produce a harmful or offensive contact.  The Supreme Court remanded the matter to the trial court for review based on its guidance, and the trial court subsequently awarded damages for the plaintiff, Garrett.

The approach to civil battery utilized by the court in Garrett is almost universally applied in U.S. jurisdictions today.

Garrett was a civil case, though criminal law provides an analogous analysis.  The American Law Institute’s Model Penal Code (MPC) offers four levels of mens rea, or mental culpability, to analyze potential crimes:  purposely, knowingly, recklessly, and negligently.  As an example of how this mental culpability analysis works, the MPC provides:

§ 210.2. Murder.

1. …criminal homicide constitutes murder when:

(a) it is committed purposely or knowingly; or

(b) it is committed recklessly under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life.

Under the MPC one acts purposely when one acts desiring a particular outcome.  One acts knowingly when one acts knowing with practical certainty that a particular outcome will result (it is not necessary to desire or hope for the particular result – knowledge with practical certainty is enough).

How does this analysis relate to Ron Jacobs’ Conspiracy to Kill Iraqis?  Paraphrasing Howard Zinn from his book, Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal, Jacobs writes:

“Since killing civilians is inevitable in modern warfare it cannot be called an accident.  Bombers and helicopter pilots don’t necessarily intend to kill civilians, but when they attack villages and crowded city streets they know that civilians will be killed. When soldiers and Marines on the ground cannot tell the difference between a civilian and an insurgent and are told to clear an area, they will kill civilians. This killing may not be deliberate, but it is not an accident.”

The civil and criminal legal analyses almost beg to be applied here.  Clearly, under the civil standard, bombers and pilots act with substantial certainty that their actions will cause the death of civilians.  Similarly, in the criminal context, under the MPC, these actions are taken with practical certainty that civilians will die.

Naturally, those who attempt to justify modern wars will proudly assert the righteousness of the cause and the great intentions of those prosecuting the wars.  Yet, when wars are justified by trumped up charges, bogus claims, and fabricated evidence, this line falls to the ground like poor Ms. Garrett, her chair pulled unceremoniously from under her.

Not so incidentally, the MPC defines criminal conspiracy as follows:

§ 5.03. Criminal Conspiracy.

(1) Definition of Conspiracy. A person is guilty of conspiracy… to commit a crime if, with the purpose of promoting or facilitating its commission:

(a) he agrees with such other person or persons that they… will engage in conduct that constitutes such crime, or an attempt or solicitation to commit such crime; or

(b) he agrees to aid such other persons in the planning or commission of such crime or of an attempt or solicitation to commit such crime.

I wonder who might fall into the category of co-conspirator for the murder of civilians in this context?    Who has agreed with others to commit such crimes, or solicited others to commit such crimes?  Just off the top of my head, a few names come to mind….

David W. Remington, J.D., a former law professor, works as legal counsel in private industry in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia.

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