MILLIONS SPENT ON WAR-- OR TO PREVENT:

Dying: Millions of Women in Childbirth, Newborns and Young Children

ScienceDaily (Apr. 13, 2010) — Widespread global use of known and proven maternal and childcare techniques, practices, and therapies could save the lives of millions of women, newborns and children each year, according to a new analysis prepared for a mid-April meeting of world leaders and technical experts on maternal and child health. The meeting is being held to focus attention on this toll and develop a plan of action to reduce it.

Despite significant advances over the past decades, the detailed analysis shows that an estimated 350,000-500,000 women still die in childbirth each year, 3.6 million newborns fail to survive the first month, and an additional 5.2 million children die before the age of five.

It shows progress has lagged mainly in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia where an estimated 82 percent of maternal, newborn, and child deaths take place.

The new analysis comes from members of Countdown to 2015, a global scientific and advocacy movement formed in 2005 to track global progress in reducing the toll of maternal and child deaths, two of the Millennium Development Goals set by 189 member nations of the United Nations General Assembly in 2000. Countdowns focus on 68 countries, most of them in Africa, which together account for 92 percent of maternal, newborn and child deaths and include some of the poorest countries in the world.


Progress on Maternal and Child Health Lags

While considerable progress has been made towards meeting other Millennium Development Goals, the two goals on maternal and child survival have lagged behind, prompting a renewed effort to meet them.

"Because we know what causes these deaths and what would prevent them, major progress is possible," says Jennifer Bryce, a child health researcher at Johns Hopkins University and a member of the Countdown group. "The Countdown analysis provides a road map, helping countries focus on their own data and take action to meet their specific needs."

Already 135 countries have child mortality rates of less than 40 per 1,000 live births or have a rate of reduction sufficient to meet the goal of two-thirds reduction by 2015, according to UNICEF. Currently 39 show insufficient progress and 18 show no progress or a worsening of child mortality, says UNICEF.

"This is a multi-layered problem that can be addressed with a combination of many, very simple interventions, says Flavia Bustreo, M.D., Director of The Partnership for Maternal, Newborn & Child Health (PMNCH), a group of more than 300 organizations, foundations, institutions, and countries that is one of the leaders in this effort.


No Single Intervention

"No single intervention is sufficient," explains Zulfiqar Bhutta, M.D., Ph.D., of Pakistan's Aga Khan University and co-chair of Countdown to 2015. "What is required is a seamless continuum of care including family planning, breastfeeding, hand washing, skilled attendance at delivery and childhood immunizations. There are multiple therapies and practices that have been proven to save lives and the use of national data can prioritize which ones will make the biggest difference in the shortest time.

"Even more, besides additional funding, we need political leadership to guarantee that actions will be taken and will be successful, and we need community engagement to keep leaders accountable," Dr. Bhutta says.

The immense global toll of women and newborns has only just come to public attention, probably because maternal death and newborn death traditionally have been considered separate problems. Also, reducing maternal and newborn deaths were considered too difficult, according to some health professionals.

The new analysis details why these deaths still happen and shows how the toll can be reduced with additional political and financial support from donors and increases in health care budgets in the poorest countries.

It points out that malaria, HIV/AIDS and immunization have received major funding, including attention to drugs and commodities, and major progress was made. Maternal, newborn and child deaths remain a larger problem, yet receive less attention and funding.

Among the reasons are societal and cultural practices. Many stillbirths, newborn and maternal deaths occur at home, unseen and uncounted. The deaths of mothers, newborns and young children are accepted as part of life in some parts of the world, and birth and death certificates are not common. That is why precise data is lacking.


Babies Don't Need to Die

"Millions of babies die without people realizing it can be different," says Joy Lawn, M.D., Ph.D., of Saving Newborn Lives/Save the Children and a Countdown to 2015 member. "This is not high tech. Up to 3 million newborns each year can be saved with simple approaches, like cutting the cord with a clean blade, and kangaroo mother care where the mother acts as an incubator for her preterm baby, or antibiotics to treat infections."

A Countdown to 2015 report, due in June, will show what progress has been made toward meeting the two goals in 68 countries with the highest toll. This information will highlight service gaps and deficiencies so countries and their development partners can focus efforts on areas of greatest need.

Attacking maternal, newborn and child deaths means attention and resources. "When attention is focused on a problem and resources are mobilized, we get results," says Mickey Chopra, M.D., Ph.D., UNICEF's chief of health, and a member of the Countdown group. "For example, immunization, use of vitamin A and treated bed nets, breast-feeding, and treatment for HIV/AIDS are way up in many countries because of resources directed to these areas.

"It's important to create a supportive environment for maternal and newborn health based on respect for women's rights, and the need to establish continuum of care for mothers, newborns and children that integrate programs for reproductive health, safe motherhood, newborn care and child survival, growth and development." For example, if women go to clinics with trained staff or midwives and proper equipment, an estimated 50 percent of mothers and newborns could be saved. If quality antenatal care is routinely provided for women, up to 2/3 of lives could be saved.

Donor countries have increased their giving for maternal, newborn and child health by almost 100 percent to $4 billion a year from 2003 to 2007.

However, the funding gap will be about $20 billion per year between 2011 and 2015, which includes both maternal and child health programs and the cost of improving health systems.

An innovative health financing task force set up by world leaders in 2008 already is working to increase funding to help close the gap.

"The gap is about $16 billion a year more than we are spending now, but it is not out of range," says Dr. Bustreo.

"The emphasis is always on external aid, but internal funds are the main source of health funding. National authorities need to recognize and honor their financial commitments on maternal and child health," says Peter Berman of the World Bank, another Countdown to 2015 member.

According to the new analysis, if the funding gap were filled by 2015, the increased funding would buy:

Modern methods of family planning for 50 million more couples;
About 234 million more births in facilities that provide quality care for both normal and complicated deliveries;
Quality antenatal care for an additional 276 million women;
Quality postnatal care for an additional 234 million women and newborn babies;
Appropriate treatment for 164 million cases of child pneumonia;
An additional 2.5 million health care professionals and 1 million more community health workers.
The results by 2015 would be enormous in the number of lives saved: up to 1 million women, 4.5 million newborn babies, and 6.5 million children aged 1 month to 5 years.


Why High Death Rates

Beyond poverty, the analysis pinpoints the many reasons for continuing high rates of death during childbirth, both of women and newborns.

Most newborn deaths are due to conditions rarely seen in high-income countries: infections, birth complications, preterm birth -- even babies who are just a few weeks preterm often do not survive for lack of simple care.

Women in childbirth die from hemorrhage, infections, hypertensive disorders, obstructed labor, and unsafe abortions. In some countries, HIV/AIDS and malaria are also important causes.

Many of these deaths could be prevented with a maternal and newborn health program that includes continuing prenatal care, hygienic care during childbirth and the postnatal period.

In some parts of the world, traditions add to the risk faced by families. In parts of south Asia, for example, childbirth is considered dirty, so women are forced to deliver their babies in cowsheds, where they must stay for one month. Cords may be cut with dirty tools, leading to possible infection. "Strong cultural practices hide the problem. Families know many mothers and babies will die so they just accept it," says Dr. Lawn. "But this does not mean they do not care. Mourning is hidden."

"Countries are unlikely to meet the goals unless they prioritize the delivery of life-saving interventions to those who need them most," says Dr. Bhutta.

Another major barrier is a shortage of skilled health care and community workers in many parts of the world. One way to ease this shortage is to upgrade skills of existing workers, so that nurses and outreach workers can provide medications and surgeon assistants can perform caesarean sections where no obstetrician is available, as has been done successfully in Mozambique. Another is to recruit and train additional health workers and provide incentives for work in remote and underserved areas.

And, while the need for more research always exists, the failure to use proven techniques more widely poses yet another barrier to rapid progress. Examples are kangaroo mother care, improved techniques to manage child birth, and providing routine postnatal visits to newborns soon after delivery to advise the family on breast feeding and keeping the baby warm, and to check for cord infection or other problems.


Programs and Interventions Known to Work

The new analysis reports on the usage of specific packages of interventions, which, if scaled up, have been proven to reduce the continuing high toll of preventable deaths.

These packages form the core of effective health systems that can deliver a full range of services to assure that every pregnancy is wanted, that every birth is safe, and that every newborn and child is healthy.

A number of these packages of interventions are underutilized and underfunded including:

Comprehensive family planning
Skilled birth attendance
Emergency obstetric care
Antenatal and postnatal care
Breastfeeding and child feeding practices
Prevention and treatment of diarrhea, pneumonia, and malaria
Ensuring these services are available to all women and children who need them would go a long way in reducing mortality and improving the health of women, newborns and children under 5, and get countries closer to reaching MDGs 4 and 5.


Missed Opportunities

Though progress has been made toward meeting those goals, significant challenges remain.

For example, while the use of contraceptives has increased steadily, an estimated 26 percent of women in least developed countries that want to delay or stop childbearing are not using contraceptives. Unintended pregnancies contribute to high mortality and poor health for both mothers and babies, according to the analysis.

While the percentage of women who give birth with the aid of a skilled attendant, defined as an educated midwife, or similarly trained person, with access to the necessary equipment, resources and services, has increased to more than 60 percent, that leaves some 40 percent of women, mostly in Africa and Asia, giving birth without access to skilled obstetric care -- 60 million births each year.

And although an estimated 70 percent of women receive at least one antenatal care visit, even in the poorest countries, the quality of care may not be sufficient. For instance, many of these visits do not include essential blood pressure readings or HIV testing and drugs to prevent HIV transmission to the baby.

"These are lost opportunities," says Cesar Victora of Brazil's Universidad Federal de Pelotas, a member of the Countdown to 2015 group. "We know the service was provided, but not necessarily what was provided at that visit.

"Even when the coverage is high, poor and disadvantaged women living in remote areas and ethnic groups don't necessarily get maternal, newborn and child services. Progress should be measured not only through national averages, but also by how much the poorest mothers and children are benefiting from overall progress. It is an equity issue."

"No woman should die giving life. All pregnancies should be wanted and every childbirth safe for both the woman and the baby," says Laura Laski, M.D., UNFPA's chief of Sexual and Reproductive Health, and H4 representative (WHO, UNFPA, UNICEF and the World Bank) in the planning of the mid-April meeting.


Progress is Possible Even in Poorest Countries

However, all the news is not bad.

Nineteen of the 68 countries with high incidences of maternal, newborn and infant deaths are now moving forward, and experience in several countries that were lagging shows a quick turn-around is possible, even in the poorest countries.

India's Janani Suraksha Yojana (Women's Protection Scheme) was launched in April 2005 under the Government of India's National Rural Health Mission. The program seeks to reduce maternal and neo-natal mortality by promoting institutional delivery and skilled attendance at birth by offering cash payments to women who fulfill the conditions of attending antenatal appointments and seeking skilled care at delivery. These payments are primarily to women below the poverty line.

These benefits reached only 700,000 women in 2005, increasing to 8,380,000 in 2008, more than a 10-fold increase in just a few years. The government realizes that quality of services now needs to be urgently addressed.

Nepal used national cause of death data to design programs that curb child and maternal deaths, developing innovative approaches to bring care closer to home that included community child pneumonia treatment programs and household visits to promote family planning and newborn care. The effort required recruiting and training additional community workers. Offering skilled birth care is a particular challenge with very low coverage (only 19 percent) and is now being addressed by new investments in training midwives.

Malawi, a low-income country with only four pediatricians, has been declared on track for child survival. The Ministry of Health identified the main causes of child death as pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria, HIV, and newborn problems and planned to address those problems with national scale-up of an essential health package, including programs for immunization, malaria control, prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission, and improved water and sanitation services. In spite of these efforts, diarrhea, pneumonia, and maternal and newborn care remained problematic, so Malawi trained health surveillance assistants to deliver selected services closer to the community. Over 800 health assistants now offer malaria, diarrhea, and pneumonia treatment (using the latest malaria drugs, zinc for diarrhea, and appropriate antibiotics), and some are being trained to support home based newborn care. To overcome high maternal mortality, facilities are being improved and additional staff is being hired and trained, including non-physicians to undertake emergency cesarean sections. Death rates for children and women are now declining.

Brazil's success in reducing the under 5 death rate by 4.8 percent each year since 1990 is attributed to a sharp decline in inequalities in access to health care. This decline was done through a nationwide, tax-based Unified Health System with no user fees and specific geographical targeting of family health teams to attend the poorest areas of the country. Reducing regional and socioeconomic disparities in health and development have been a central element in Brazil's political agenda for the last 20 years. As a result, primary healthcare coverage is universal, primary care is free for everyone, and even the poorest Brazilians now have access to skilled attendance at birth.

Rwanda has introduced health reforms, which expand coverage across all areas of health care. One approach gives "performance bonuses" for health facilities and hospitals, based on provision of high quality, priority services. From 2005 to 2008, births in health facilities have increased from 39 to 52 percent, the use of insecticide treated bed nets for children under 5 has risen from 4 to 67 percent, and modern contraceptive use has increased from 10 to 28 percent, contributing to a decline in under-5 mortality from 152 to 103 deaths per 100,000 live births.

"We know this global problem can be solved even in the poorest countries," says Dr. Bustreo. "It will take commitment of donors and recipient countries, and considerable ingenuity. We are seeing that Malawi, Nepal, Brazil, and Rwanda are making progress in saving the lives of women and children."

WHY PREGNANT WOMEN SHOULD BE RELOCATED FROM BIG CITIES

The following report from Science Daily shows that the amount of air pollution generated by the world capitalist system and concentrated in urban areas destroys the brain functions of the unborn child carried by its mother.['...pollutants (EXPOSURE AS A FETUS) can adversely affect children's cognitive development at age 5.' ] The children will have lower IQ scores and this will be reflected in academic performance. TWO choices !) Get rid of capitalism or 2) keep pregnant women out of urban areas. Relocation camps can be built in rural areas. There will be Republican opposition as they need a lower IQ public in order to gain support. A third alternative-- doing nothing so that all babies will be equally of lower intelligence will hurt the progressive movement. Well, comrades. what's the solution? Getting rid of pollution under capitalism? Forget it.

Children's Cognitive Ability Can Be Affected by Mother's Exposure to Urban Air Pollutants

ScienceDaily (Apr. 20, 2010) — A study by the Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health (CCCEH) carried out in Krakow, Poland has found that prenatal exposure to pollutants can adversely affect children's cognitive development at age 5, confirming previous findings in a New York City (NYC) study.

Researchers report that children exposed to high levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in Krakow had a significant reduction in scores on a standardized test of reasoning ability and intelligence at age 5. The study findings are published online in Environmental Health Perspectives.

PAHs are released into the air from the burning of fossil fuels for transportation, heating, energy production, and from other combustion sources.

"The effect on intelligence was comparable to that seen in NYC children exposed prenatally to the same air pollutants," noted Frederica Perera, professor of Environmental Health Sciences and director of the CCCEH at the Mailman School of Public Health, and senior author. "This finding is of concern because IQ is an important predictor of future academic performance, and PAHs are widespread in urban environments and throughout the world."

"These results contribute to the cumulative body of published evidence linking ambient air pollution levels and adverse health effects in children and are clearly relevant to public health policy," says Susan Edwards, study lead author.

The study included a cohort of 214 children who were born to healthy, non-smoking Caucasian women in Krakow, Poland between 2001 and 2006. During pregnancy, the mothers completed a questionnaire, wore small backpack personal air monitors to estimate their babies' PAH exposure, and provided a blood sample and/or a cord blood sample at the time of delivery. The children were followed through the age of 5 when they were tested using the Raven Coloured Progressive Matrices (RCPM) Test of reasoning ability and intelligence. The researchers accounted for other factors such as second-hand smoke exposure, lead and mother's education. Study participants exposed to air pollution levels below the median (17.96 nanograms per cubic meter) were designated as having "low exposure," while those exposed to pollution levels above the median were identified as "high exposure."

The present finding confirms the CCCEH's previous report in 2009 that prenatal exposure to PAHs adversely affected children's IQ at age 5 in a cohort of children of nonsmoking African American and Dominican American women in NYC (Perera et al, 2009).

"Air pollution knows no boundaries," said Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, which funded the study. "Researchers around the globe are finding that air pollution is harmful to children's development."

The authors also included researchers from Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, Jagiellonian University and The Southwest Research Institute: Zhigang Li, Shuang Wang, Virginia Rauh, Wieslaw Jedrychowski, Maria Butscher, Agnieszka Keiltyka, Elzbieta Mroz, Elzbieta Flak and David Camann. The research was funded by NIEHS and several private foundatio

Adapted from materials provided by Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
Journal Reference:

Edwards SC, Jedrychowski W, Butscher M, Camann D, Kieltyka A, Mroz E, et al. Prenatal Exposure to Airborne Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons and Children's Intelligence at Age 5 in a Prospective Cohort Study in Poland. Environ Health Perspect, April 20, 2010 DOI: 10.1289/ehp.0901070

World War II for "Paleofascists"

by Norman Markowitz

An intelligent reader of PA and our blog recently asked me to read and review Patrick Buchanan's "Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World," a book published for the far right market which has been widely (and outside of either right wing or anarcho-crazy circles) negatively reviewed.

I read the work after I had a nasty tooth pulled and, all things considered, I would prefer to have another tooth pulled rather than read it again. But, in its over the top distortions of general works of history, right left and center, its often comical and sometimes sinister use of classic propaganda ploys to advance its general interpretation , it deserves to be reviewed from a Marxist perspective, not simply as others have seen it as a book that attacks Winston Churchill. minimizes the Nazi danger, and trivializes the fascist genocide against the Jewish people and other aka the Holocaust,. But as progressives today should see it, a work that reflects almost completely the views of Chamberlain and those to his right like the British fascist leader, Sir Oswald Moseley, Laval, Petain, and the Vichy collaborationist government, Charles Lindbergh, Father Charles Coughlin and other open and not so open pro fascist isolationists in the U.S., and in general those forces through the world who fought on the side of the fascist axis during WWII and in many country, after reinventing themselves as good anti-Communists, have in recent decades sought to rationalize their past politics in terms of the world today.

It is difficult to really analyze a work like "Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War," since its distortions over and over again defy reason, but I will try to deal with those distortions. Buchanan uses two interrelated techniques--the Big Lie, associated with Nazi propaganda, and "multiple untruths" associated with U.S. McCarthyites and the House Un-American activities committee, namely, assertions based on distorted citations and false evidence, one after another in a way that makes it very hard to keep up with the flood of mis and disinformation.

Buchanan doesn't use primary sources. Instead, he scavenges from a wide variety of secondary sources, mostly from the right and also from the center and the left general historians , and takes assertions and bits and pieces of information to develop his plot narrative. Often, these works, including many of the right wing works, have very different interpretations than the ones he has (the British critics of Churchill for example blaming his policies as leading to the U.S. supplanting the British empire) but he doesn't even mention those differences. What matters is the master plot narrative. Critics of Ronald Reagan referred to this approach in Reagan's world-view as "movie truth," namely that all that matters is the story you are selling, and you make up situations, change them as you go along, in order to get your points across. And Buchanan has written a work based on the principles of "movie truth," even if the film makers would be closer to wartime Germany than Hollywood.

Let's start with some of the big lies. Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm was not an aggressive power and WWI was unnecessary and the result of "germanophobia." Here Buchanan uses pop geopolitics and a loving portrayal of Kaiser Wilhelm(a much more pacific individual than Winston Churchill) to make his points, taking materials from a variety of right wing pro imperialist historians. That World War I was a war of rival imperialist blocs is certainly true, but that has nothing to do with Buchanan's view, which is that the war, with the German empire a victim of its enemies , divided the "West" and brought about the ultimate evil, the Russian Revolution.

But Buchanan is just warming up. In 1919-1920, during the global reaction to the Soviet revolution, capitalist media and politicians hurled everything at it that they could, including anti-Semitism as they pointed to prominent Bolshevik leaders of Jewish background. Winston Churchill, who had said things like "we must kill the baby in its crib"(which Buchanan of course would support) about the Soviet revolution, also joined in these attacks. But Buchanan, who in recent decades has become America's tolerated and and semi-official anti-Semite, argues that an article that Churchill wrote in this period, "Zionism and Bolshevism," when British imperialists among other things were seeking to consolidate their mandate over Palestine against the opposition of both Jewish settlers and Arabic people, is no different than Hitler's concept of a Judeo Bolshevik conspiracy. Churchill to Buchanan, who doesn't make any distinction, is as big an ant-Semite as Hitler, even though Churchill's career in British politics was never characterized by anti-Semitic policies and Hitler initiated policies that led to the murder of nearly 1/3 of the Jewish people of the world.

Anyone who equates Churchill with Hitler on the question of anti-Semitism is certainly capable of anything and Buchanan doesn't disappoint. The depression as Buchan , myself and everyone else knows, produced a mass Nazi party in Germany and helped bring Hitler to power. Since Buchanan identifies completely with those sectors of corporate capital who backed Hitler against the Socialists and the Communists, he makes no analysis of their role or that of the larger class struggle in Germany. Instead, he blames the French for bringing Hitler to power in 1993 by refusing to support a German Austrian "customs union" advocated, which he sees has leading to a deeper banking collapse in Austria and intensifying the depression.

While the collapse of the Kreditanstalt bank in Vienna did add to the European depression, no one sees the Customs Union as a serious solution to anything, since capital had dried up internationally, and trade had collapsed. Hitler's smashing of the trade union movement, mass arrests of socialists, communists and other anti-fascists, and persecution of the Jewish minority, to be charitable, don''t concern Buchanan. Hitler's re-armament doesn't concern Buchanan either, or rather, it is implicitly justified, since the Versailles Treaty was a monstrous violation of German rights, creating countries like Czechoslovakia which Buchanan like Hitler contends had no right to exist, ceding territory to Poland in an an unjust manner, oppressing Germany. Here Buchanan presents the view of the Nazis and their allies that Germany was a "have not power" victimized by the great powers, seeking what was fair for it in Europe as it sought to defend "Western civilization" from Bolshevik revolution. Neville Chamberlain is praised for his settlement at Munich and then attacked for not doing the same thing a year later over Poland.

Hitler, according to Buchanan and the secondary sources that he selectively cites, didn't want war with England over Poland but friendship and cooperation against the Soviets. His demands on the right wing Polish government were fair and Chamberlain should have pushed the Poles to go along with them. The anti-Comintern Pact, the fascists answer to the peoples front anti-fascist campaigns, which became a major organizing tool for them in occupied Europe, Buchanan sees positively. Not even the virulently anti-Communist Polish government would join the anti-Comintern Pact because they understood that it would make them completely a protectorate of Hitler, and, unlike Buchanan, they had read Mein Kampf and understood that Nazi imperial policy and allied race theory offered them nothing but slavery at best, extinction at worst.

The rest reads like old communiques from the Reich Ministry of Propaganda. Churchill is condemned for not playing the part of Pierre Laval and accepting Hitler's peace offers in 1940 and thus saving the "West" from the revolutionary consequences of WWII, which Buchanan sees as the ultimate evil, i.e., the survival of the Soviet Union and its expanded influence in Eastern Europe (Europe is seen as "the Christian continent") and the victory of the Chinese revolution, far greater evils than anything associated with German or Japanese imperialism---indeed, for Buchanan, the war crimes of the Nazis and the Japanese imperialists are no worse than those of the allies in their bombing of civilian populations in Germany and Japan and the forgotten and for Buchanan really important Holocaust is the expulsion of millions of Germans from Eastern Europe at the end of the war.

If Buchanan were a bit more in control, he might have presented his pro fascist, pro Axis views in way that would have been more palatable to many of his fellow "conservatives." If he were a bit more honest, he might have titled his work "the war the Axis should have won," since a British collaborator government signing a peace with Hitler in 1940 and a right wing U.S. government doing business with Hitler as it expanded its power in the Western Hemisphere and abandoned both China to Japanese imperialism and the rest of the world is really what the world according to Patrick Buchanan would have been. There would have been no expulsions of Germans from Eastern Europe. Instead, the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe, especially the people of Poland, would have been treated much like the Congolese were by Belgian imperialism at the turn of the 20th century or the African majority under the worst of apartheid, massacred, worked to death, and put on reservations. In such a world, the world of Hitler's "new order," there would have been many little and big Hitlers like Patrick Buchanan and those who support his views as there were throughout Europe and Asia, and they would have profited at the expense of must of humanity--a world where extreme forms of racism, militarism and colonial domination would be the norm.

Nearly seventy million people died in WWII on all sides, but the sides were never the same. Winston Churchill, whom Buchanan attacks in such crackpot ways, was a conservative and an imperialist whose primary interest was in saving the British empire. He took the position, against Neville Chamberlain and the great majority of his fellow conservatives that Hitler was the main enemy in the short run, not the Soviet Union. He even made a joke about it to his fellow conservatives, saying at the time of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union that if Hitler invaded Hell, he would at least say a good word about the devil in the House of Commons. After the Soviet victories at Stalingrad and Kursk in 1943, he did everything that he could to block the Soviets, in effect becoming a premature cold warrior and helping by his opposition to an early second front, to prolong the war. But he was not Chamberlain, who by the way wasn't Pierre Laval or Vidkun Quisling either. They, the right wingers who joined collaborated with the German occupation, supported WWII as a holy war against the Soviets and a war against the "inferior races" are the ones whose views dominate Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War.

You could make many jokes about this book. The old line from the late 1930s, "Hitler wants peace; a piece of Czechoslovakia, a piece of Poland." Spike Jones comedy record, "When the Fuhrer says we is the Master Race we go (farting sounds) in the Fuhrer's face." And of course, from The Producers, as the Churchill hating buffoon author of Springtime for Hitler says "Hitler was a better dresser than Churchill, Hitler was a better painter than Churchill, and he could dance the pants off of Churchill." But this book isn't really funny.

P.S. Buchanan does conclude with an attack on George W Bush for going to war in Iraq under the influence of Churchill's policies, which were represented by his neo-conservative advisors. Buchanan in the special world of the right is sometimes referred to as a "paleoconservative" as against the "neo-conservatives." This book, in my opinion, might be more accurately titled "paleofascist."

EAARTH: Book Review

EAARTH: MAKING A LIFE ON A TOUGH NEW PLANET
[reposted from Willamette Week]

reviewed by PHILLIP NEIMAN

In the preface to Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (Times Books, 253 pages, $24), environmental advocate, writer and climate-change educator Bill McKibben clues the reader in to the main thrust of his new book: Global warming is no longer some distant, amorphous threat. In fact, he says, it’s “no longer a threat at all.” Not as in it conveniently vanished; as in, we’re in it full on. As in, it’s our new reality.

Whereas McKibben’s previous book addressing climate change, The End of Nature, had a philosophical bent, Eaarth addresses the urgency of the moment, the frigid fact that we’re now experiencing globally the practical effects of a climatic phenomenon we’ve created but don’t control. We’re locked into a hotter, hairier existence where storms are more frequent and more destructive and the word “drought” is no longer applicable because it implies only temporary scarcity of water. Read: Dust Bowl 2.0. Read: Katrina revisited.

McKibben’s term, “Eaarth,” is his word for this new planetary object we inhabit. The logic is that a wholly different entity requires a different signifier.

Eaarth is our only home, and we don’t have the option of writing off remedial action as we stare into the maw of a daunting future. According to McKibben, now is precisely the time to transform our scourgelike, resource-intensive collective behavior into something more in keeping with our current circumstances. Our mantra must be dig in or hunker down, as opposed to growth at all costs or higher GDP.

McKibben advocates we take our cue from warm-weather animals. Their lower-body masses are selected for survival in warmer climates, as they regulate body temperature better. We have to shrink ourselves; shrink our toxic “eaarthly” impact by downsizing our political economy, producing locally and consuming on a smaller scale. We’ll have to once peak oil comes into full effect, because a cheap and abundant energy supply simply won’t be there anymore. And energy is wealth. We’ll have to shed our psychological dependency on fossil fuels and shift to a more decentralized society by reinvesting in the community around us, reacquainting ourselves with neighbors, and using the Internet intelligently to merge demographics and generate state and local movements.

Although our atmosphere is currently 390 parts per million carbon dioxide, there is still the opportunity, first with the acknowledgment about the truth of our situation, then by abrogating the ingrained ideology of endless economic expansion, that we can return to and maintain a less volatile planet with an atmosphere of 350 ppm CO2. It will be tough, this bearing down, but let’s say we give it the ol’ college try.

MURDER CITY :Book Review

Reviewed By Cindy Widner
[ reprinted from://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/review?oid=987874]

Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields
by Charles Bowden
Nation Books, 352 pp., $27.50


Murder City reads like a nightmare, a recurring one, and not just because of its horrific subject matter. In his account of a year in the world's most homicidal city, Charles Bowden can be found revisiting particular details, people, theories, and events, often repeatedly. Interspersed are history and statistics, the kind that floor you. This impressionistic back-and-forth has the pounding rhythm of a blood tide or an intractable migraine, one that inspires both visions and moments of clarity. Bowden gives lie to the myth that Juárez's grinding, otherworldly killing explosion is a drug-cartel war, one that claims primarily drug dealers and a few people caught in their crossfire. Pointing out that organized crime figures move about with impunity, that law enforcement on all levels has traditionally been allied with the cartels and now terrorizes citizens directly, that the U.S. in many cases trained and armed many of the city's spree killers, that not a single arrest has been made in connection with any murder, that free trade has turned honest work into an impossible nightmare that ends in early death, that the press has long been cowed and ineffective, and that poverty and desperation create their own rules, he concludes that "Violence is now woven into the very fabric of the community, and has no single cause and no single motive and no on-off button." Rather than see this as a sign of regression, though, he concludes that Juárez looks like the future: "All the other things happening in the world – the shattering of currencies, the depletion of resources, the skyrocketing costs of food, energy, and materials – are old hat here." Bowden's statements about the long-running border epidemic of violence against women can be unsettling in that they imply a normalcy in this cross-cultural tendency. It is in those passages, and in his nightmare impressions, though, that we see that Bowden is advancing a theory of human nature, a gesture more typical of art than of reporting. We understand that Murder City aspires to poetry, with the singular voice and tragic bent that implies.

ENGELS ON THE DIALECTICS OF THE NEGATION OF THE NEGATION

Thomas Riggins

Engels discusses the negation of the negation in Chapter XIII of Part One of Anti-Dühring [on Philosophy].

It seems that Herr Dühring approves of Marx's discussion of primitive accumulation at the end of Vol. I of Das Kapital: he calls it "relatively the best part of Marx's book." However, he has one big objection, viz., that Marx uses the "dialectical crutch" of "Hegelian verbal jugglery" to explain how private property will become social property. That verbal jugglery consists of the Hegelian concept of "the negation of the negation."

Herr Dühring thinks Marx ends up spouting nonsense since that is what "must necessarily spring" from using "Hegelian dialectics as the scientific basis" of one's discussion. This upsets Engels, but Dühring could take comfort from the fact that most bourgeois economists today would agree with him. In fact, it is because they agree with him that most of them themselves spout nonsense

Before getting down to the nitty-gritty of the negation of the negation, Engels wants to take Dühring to task for thinking Marx was spouting nonsense when he spoke of property being both individual AND social at the same time.

Engels now explains the meaning of Marx's notion of property being both individually and socially owned at the same time. This problem comes up in Chapter 32 of volume one of DAS KAPITAL ("Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation").

In this chapter Marx details how the growth of capitalism led to the concentration of workers into factories and their loss of their own tools (which as individual craftsmen they formerly owned) resulting in their dependence on the capitalists not only for employment but also for the tools with which to work.

This development of capitalism is the FIRST NEGATION , with respect to the workers, of private property-- i.e., they lose their means of production to the capitalists (their tools and handicraft properties. But capitalism brings about its own negation (the SECOND NEGATION). This means that it gives birth to socialism as a result of its own internal contradictions ("with the inexorability of a law of Nature"). Thus Marx says: "It is the negation of the negation." [The "It" is socialism.]

"This does not, " Marx writes, "re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisitions of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production."

So, Engels maintains, Herr Dühring is way off the mark by calling that notion of Marx's a lot of contradictory Hegelian nonsense. Engels says, "To anyone who understands plain talk this means that social ownership extends to the land and other means of production, and individual ownership to the products, that is, the articles of consumption."

How can Dühring be so confused with regard to Marx's meaning? He misquotes Marx's words over and over again. Engels decides it is either because Dühring can't understand Marx, or he is quoting him from memory and getting it wrong.

It is important to realize that Marx is not using dialects in a mechanical fashion to construct his description of capitalism. Marx's famous observation, in this chapter of Das Kapital, that "One capitalist always kills many" and that capitalism should lead to socialism, is the result of an EMPIRICAL investigation of the capitalist mode of production. Due to competition and monopoly, capitalist concentration leads to the domination of a few big corporations, to over production and to the relative impoverishment of the working masses.

These masses, however, have been trained to work in large socialized industrial enterprises which run on principles of specialization of functions and cooperation of labor. It is a small step from this capitalist set up to socialism. Only the private ownership of these effectively socialized means of production needs to be replaced by public ownership.

Right now, Spring 2010, General Motors Corporation is already a virtually socialized enterprise (60% owned by the American people). It is only the lack of a socialist consciousness in the working class that allows GM to remain under capitalist control and allows representatives of the capitalist class to be elected to positions of governance in the US.

What Marx showed was that this process of change by which the petty producers were eliminated and replaced by the capitalist enterprises has now developed to the point where capitalism has, as Engels says, "likewise itself created the material conditions from which it must perish." [It's taking its sweet time about it.]

The point is that this is an HISTORICAL PROCESS, and Engels says "if it is at the same time a dialectical process, this is not Marx's fault, however annoying it may be to Herr Dühring."

This means that Marx is not appealing to the NEGATION OF THE NEGATION to demonstrate the historical necessity of the transformation of capitalism into socialism. He is doing just the opposite according to Engels. He is showing, by an appeal to history, that such a transformation is already under way and that this is the trend of future development. Only after doing this does Marx also point out this development can be described as well "in accordance with a definite dialectical law." He is NOT saying the law determines this development. E=mc2 does not determine that mass and energy are interchangeable, but that they are allows us to discover that E=mc2. Failure to realize this shows "Herr Dühring's total lack of understanding of the nature of dialectics."

Engels proceeds to give several examples of dialectical thinking that exemplify the negation of the negation. For example, in olden times there was common ownership of land which was negated by private property and all the attendant evils of that negation are currently manifest in our time and can only be eliminated by a negation of the negation (socialism).

Engels discusses how this was seen by Rousseau as far back as the middle of the 18th century, and although he did know the "Hegelian jargon" he nevertheless developed "a line of thought which corresponds exactly to the one developed in Marx's CAPITAL." Let's look at the work Engels refers to.

Rousseau wrote the DISCOURSE ON THE ORIGIN OF INEQUALITY in 1755. Unlike most of the thinkers of the Enlightenment Rousseau thinks that the development of civilization, the growth of private property and individualism have led to the intensification of human inequality rather than being forces for the growth of liberty, equality and fraternity.

The invention of agriculture brought about he concept of property and the idea of justice to ensure the rights of people with respect to it. It is not possible, Rousseau says, “to conceive how property can come from anything but manual labor.”

But once property in land and its products was introduced greed, competition, the desire to accumulate the produce and labors of others was also introduced. “All these evils were the first effects of property, and the inseparable attendants of growing inequality.”

We must remember that in the state of nature there is no “right” to property other than what a person, by his/her own labor can extract for the necessities of life. The growth of private property, the development of classes, the foundation of the state and laws to protect private property represent a negation of the original existential condition of humanity vis a vis nature.

Now, under the rule of law and living in a state, how do the rich and powerful few prevent the many, the poor and oppressed, from asserting their rights to their own labor and the natural use of the products of nature? That is, how do they keep their negation of the natural state from being negated?

Rousseau says “the rich man, thus urged by necessity, conceived at length the profoundest plan that ever entered the mind of man: this was to employ in his favor the forces of those who attacked him, to make allies of his adversaries, to inspire them with different maxims and to give them other institutions as favorable to himself as the law of nature was unfavorable.”

This was done by appealing to all to join together in forming a society based on laws designed to protect everyone from everyone. Here is what we should do, said the first usurpers of the common property of humanity: “Let us, in a word, instead of turning our forces against ourselves, collect them in a supreme power which may govern us by wise laws, protect and defend all the members of the association, repulse their common enemies, and maintain eternal harmony among us.”

Well this certainly sounds good. Liberty and Justice for All-- who could be against that. Throw in motherhood and apple pie and you have an unbeatable formula. Thus, Rousseau says, “All ran headlong to their chains, in hope of securing their liberty.”

This was, "or may have been," Rousseau says, "the origin of society and law." This was a clever set up pulled off by the rich. Engels would suggest, I am sure, that it was probably not consciously done. This scenario is a retroactive description based on a rational analysis of the consequences of the agricultural revolution. Rousseau lacked the vocabulary, as did Enlightenment intellectuals in general, to describe these historical developments as purely objective developments. This vocabulary would have to await Hegel, Feuerbach and Marx.

The result of the negation of individuals living in a state of nature was the appearance of civilization and the existence of numerous independent political organizations which recreated the conditions of the state of nature but now. on a higher level, between states and peoples.

One need only turn to the daily press to read about the outrages in Afghanistan, the rape of Iraq for its oil, or the constant bullying of small states by powerful ones to see the truth of Rousseau's words that this change is responsible for "national wars, battles, murders, and reprisals, which shock nature and outrage reason; together with all those horrible prejudices which class among the virtues the honor of shedding human blood. The most distinguished men hence learned to consider cutting each other's throats a duty; at length men massacred their fellow-creatures by thousands without so much as knowing why, and committed more murders in a single day's fighting, and more violent outrages in the sack of a single town, than were committed in the state of nature during whole ages over the whole earth." Well, this is where we find ourselves today. I hope left-center unity will get us out of here to a better place.

The remedy to this state of affairs, the negation of the negation, is the abolition of private property and the establishment of a world socialist order. The heroic attempt, and temporary defeat, to establish this order in the last century reminds us of the immense difficulty involved in this task, but it in no way diminishes the need to do it.

Engels gives several other examples of the negation of the negation for the edification of Herr Dühring but I think his point is sufficiently clear. He concludes his discussion of philosophy (part one of Anti-Dühring) with a brief conclusion (Chapter XIV) which is that Herr Dühring has absolutely nothing of importance to say about philosophy. Nevertheless, as we have seen, he served as a useful foil for Engels to give a fine presentation of Marxist philosophy. And so we conclude this brief introduction to Engels thought. If you persevered to the end with me-- thanks.

LOOTING MAIN STREET

[This is long comrades-- but it's how the system works and what we are up against--tr]

Looting Main Street
How the nation's biggest banks are ripping off American cities with the same predatory deals that brought down Greece

MATT TAIBBI [reposted from Rolling Stone]

If you want to know what life in the Third World is like, just ask Lisa Pack, an administrative assistant who works in the roads and transportation department in Jefferson County, Alabama. Pack got rudely introduced to life in post-crisis America last August, when word came down that she and 1,000 of her fellow public employees would have to take a little unpaid vacation for a while. The county, it turned out, was more than $5 billion in debt — meaning that courthouses, jails and sheriff's precincts had to be closed so that Wall Street banks could be paid.

As public services in and around Birmingham were stripped to the bone, Pack struggled to support her family on a weekly unemployment check of $260. Nearly a fourth of that went to pay for her health insurance, which the county no longer covered. She also fielded calls from laid-off co-workers who had it even tougher. "I'd be on the phone sometimes until two in the morning," she says. "I had to talk more than one person out of suicide. For some of the men supporting families, it was so hard — foreclosure, bankruptcy. I'd go to bed at night, and I'd be in tears."

Homes stood empty, businesses were boarded up, and parts of already-blighted Birmingham began to take on the feel of a ghost town. There were also a few bills that were unique to the area — like the $64 sewer bill that Pack and her family paid each month. "Yeah, it went up about 400 percent just over the past few years," she says.

The sewer bill, in fact, is what cost Pack and her co-workers their jobs. In 1996, the average monthly sewer bill for a family of four in Birmingham was only $14.71 — but that was before the county decided to build an elaborate new sewer system with the help of out-of-state financial wizards with names like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. The result was a monstrous pile of borrowed money that the county used to build, in essence, the world's grandest toilet — "the Taj Mahal of sewer-treatment plants" is how one county worker put it. What happened here in Jefferson County would turn out to be the perfect metaphor for the peculiar alchemy of modern oligarchical capitalism: A mob of corrupt local officials and morally absent financiers got together to build a giant device that converted human shit into billions of dollars of profit for Wall Street — and misery for people like Lisa Pack.

And once the giant shit machine was built and the note on all that fancy construction started to come due, Wall Street came back to the local politicians and doubled down on the scam. They showed up in droves to help the poor, broke citizens of Jefferson County cut their toilet finance charges using a blizzard of incomprehensible swaps and refinance schemes — schemes that only served to postpone the repayment date a year or two while sinking the county deeper into debt. In the end, every time Jefferson County so much as breathed near one of the banks, it got charged millions in fees. There was so much money to be made bilking these dizzy Southerners that banks like JP Morgan spent millions paying middlemen who bribed — yes, that's right, bribed, criminally bribed — the county commissioners and their buddies just to keep their business. Hell, the money was so good, JP Morgan at one point even paid Goldman Sachs $3 million just to back the fuck off, so they could have the rubes of Jefferson County to fleece all for themselves.

Birmingham became the poster child for a new kind of giant-scale financial fraud, one that would threaten the financial stability not only of cities and counties all across America, but even those of entire countries like Greece. While for many Americans the financial crisis remains an abstraction, a confusing mess of complex transactions that took place on a cloud high above Manhattan sometime in the mid-2000s, in Jefferson County you can actually see the rank criminality of the crisis economy with your own eyes; the monster sticks his head all the way out of the water. Here you can see a trail that leads directly from a billion-dollar predatory swap deal cooked up at the highest levels of America's biggest banks, across a vast fruited plain of bribes and felonies — "the price of doing business," as one JP Morgan banker says on tape — all the way down to Lisa Pack's sewer bill and the mass layoffs in Birmingham.

Once you follow that trail and understand what took place in Jefferson County, there's really no room left for illusions. We live in a gangster state, and our days of laughing at other countries are over. It's our turn to get laughed at. In Birmingham, lots of people have gone to jail for the crime: More than 20 local officials and businessmen have been convicted of corruption in federal court. Last October, right around the time that Lisa Pack went back to work at reduced hours, Birmingham's mayor was convicted of fraud and money-laundering for taking bribes funneled to him by Wall Street bankers — everything from Rolex watches to Ferragamo suits to cash. But those who greenlighted the bribes and profited most from the scam remain largely untouched. "It never gets back to JP Morgan," says Pack.

If you want to get all Glenn Beck about it, you could lay the blame for this entire mess at the feet of weepy, tree-hugging environmentalists. It all started with the Cahaba River, the longest free-flowing river in the state of Alabama. The tributary, which winds its way through Birmingham before turning diagonally to empty out near Selma, is home to more types of fish per mile than any other river in America and shelters 64 rare and imperiled species of plants and animals. It's also the source of one of the worst municipal financial disasters in American history.

Back in the early 1990s, the county's sewer system was so antiquated that it was leaking raw sewage directly into the Cahaba, which also supplies the area with its drinking water. Joined by well — intentioned citizens from the Cahaba River Society, the EPA sued the county to force it to comply with the Clean Water Act. In 1996, county commissioners signed a now-infamous consent decree agreeing not just to fix the leaky pipes but to eliminate all sewer overflows — a near-impossible standard that required the county to build the most elaborate, ecofriendly, expensive sewer system in the history of the universe. It was like ordering a small town in Florida that gets a snowstorm once every five years to build a billion-dollar fleet of snowplows.

The original cost estimates for the new sewer system were as low as $250 million. But in a wondrous demonstration of the possibilities of small-town graft and contract-padding, the price tag quickly swelled to more than $3 billion. County commissioners were literally pocketing wads of cash from builders and engineers and other contractors eager to get in on the project, while the county was forced to borrow obscene sums to pay for the rapidly spiraling costs. Jefferson County, in effect, became one giant, TV-stealing, unemployed drug addict who borrowed a million dollars to buy the mother of all McMansions — and just as it did during the housing bubble, Wall Street made a business of keeping the crook in his house. As one county commissioner put it, "We're like a guy making $50,000 a year with a million-dollar mortgage."

To reassure lenders that the county would pay its mortgage, commissioners gave the finance director — an unelected official appointed by the president of the commission — the power to automatically raise sewer rates to meet payments on the debt. The move brought in billions in financing, but it also painted commissioners into a corner. If costs continued to rise — and with practically every contractor in Alabama sticking his fingers on the scale, they were rising fast — officials would be faced with automatic rate increases that would piss off their voters. (By 2003, annual interest on the sewer deal had reached $90 million.) So the commission reached out to Wall Street, looking for creative financing tools that would allow it to reduce the county's staggering debt payments.

Wall Street was happy to help. First, it employed the same trick it used to fuel the housing crisis: It switched the county from a fixed rate on the bonds it had issued to finance the sewer deal to an adjustable rate. The refinancing meant lower interest payments for a couple of years — followed by the risk of even larger payments down the road. The move enabled county commissioners to postpone the problem for an election season or two, kicking it to a group of future commissioners who would inevitably have to pay the real freight.

But then Wall Street got really creative. Having switched the county to a variable interest rate, it offered commissioners a crazy deal: For an extra fee, the banks said, we'll allow you to keep paying a fixed rate on your debt to us. In return, we'll give you a variable amount each month that you can use to pay off all that variable-rate interest you owe to bondholders.

In financial terms, this is known as a synthetic rate swap — the spidery creature you might have read about playing a role in bringing down places like Greece and Milan. On paper, it made sense: The county got the stability of a fixed rate, while paying Wall Street to assume the risk of the variable rates on its bonds. That's the synthetic part. The trouble lies in the rate swap. The deal only works if the two variable rates — the one you get from the bank, and the one you owe to bondholders — actually match. It's like gambling on the weather. If your bondholders are expecting you to pay an interest rate based on the average temperature in Alabama, you don't do a rate swap with a bank that gives you back a rate pegged to the temperature in Nome, Alaska.

Not unless you're a fucking moron. Or your banker is JP Morgan.

In a small office in a federal building in downtown Birmingham, just blocks from where civil rights demonstrators shut down the city in 1963, Assistant U.S. Attorney George Martin points out the window. He's pointing in the direction of the Tutwiler Hotel, once home to one of the grandest ballrooms in the South but now part of the Hampton Inn chain.

"It was right around the corner here, at the hotel," Martin says. "That's where they met — that's where this all started."

They means Charles LeCroy and Bill Blount, the two principals in what would become the most important of all the corruption cases in Jefferson County. LeCroy was a banker for JP Morgan, serving as managing director of the bank's southeast regional office. Blount was an Alabama wheeler-dealer with close friends on the county commission. For years, when Wall Street banks wanted to do business with municipalities, whether for bond issues or rate swaps, it was standard practice to reach out to a local sleazeball like Blount and pay him a shitload of money to help seal the deal. "Banks would pay some local consultant, and the consultant would then funnel money to the politician making the decision," says Christopher Taylor, the former head of the board that regulates municipal borrowing. Back in the 1990s, Taylor pushed through a ban on such backdoor bribery. He also passed a ban on bankers contributing directly to politicians they do business with — a move that sparked a lawsuit by one aggrieved sleazeball, who argued that halting such legalized graft violated his First Amendment rights. The name of that pissed-off banker? "It was the one and only Bill Blount," Taylor says with a laugh.

Blount is a stocky, stubby-fingered Southerner with glasses and a pale, pinched face — if Norman Rockwell had ever done a painting titled "Small-Town Accountant Taking Enormous Dump," it would look just like Blount. LeCroy, his sugar daddy at JP Morgan, is a tall, bloodless, crisply dressed corporate operator with a shiny bald head and silver side patches — a cross between Skeletor and Michael Stipe.

The scheme they operated went something like this: LeCroy paid Blount millions of dollars, and Blount turned around and used the money to buy lavish gifts for his close friend Larry Langford, the now-convicted Birmingham mayor who at the time had just been elected president of the county commission. (At one point Blount took Langford on a shopping spree in New York, putting $3,290 worth of clothes from Zegna on his credit card.) Langford then signed off on one after another of the deadly swap deals being pushed by LeCroy. Every time the county refinanced its sewer debt, JP Morgan made millions of dollars in fees. Even more lucrative, each of the swap contracts contained clauses that mandated all sorts of penalties and payments in the event that something went wrong with the deal. In the mortgage business, this process is known as churning: You keep coming back over and over to refinance, and they keep "churning" you for more and more fees. "The transactions were complex, but the scheme was simple," said Robert Khuzami, director of enforcement for the SEC. "Senior JP Morgan bankers made unlawful payments to win business and earn fees."

Given the shitload of money to be made on the refinancing deals, JP Morgan was prepared to pay whatever it took to buy off officials in Jefferson County. In 2002, during a conversation recorded in Nixonian fashion by JP Morgan itself, LeCroy bragged that he had agreed to funnel payoff money to a pair of local companies to secure the votes of two county commissioners. "Look," the commissioners told him, "if we support the synthetic refunding, you guys have to take care of our two firms." LeCroy didn't blink. "Whatever you want," he told them. "If that's what you need, that's what you get. Just tell us how much."

Just tell us how much. That sums up the approach that JP Morgan took a few months later, when Langford announced that his good buddy Bill Blount would henceforth be involved with every financing transaction for Jefferson County. From JP Morgan's point of view, the decision to pay off Blount was a no-brainer. But the bank had one small problem: Goldman Sachs had already crawled up Blount's trouser leg, and the broker was advising Langford to pick them as Jefferson County's investment bank.

The solution they came up with was an extraordinary one: JP Morgan cut a separate deal with Goldman, paying the bank $3 million to fuck off, with Blount taking a $300,000 cut of the side deal. Suddenly Goldman was out and JP Morgan was sitting in Langford's lap. In another conversation caught on tape, LeCroy joked that the deal was his "philanthropic work," since the payoff amounted to a "charitable donation to Goldman Sachs" in return for "taking no risk."

That such a blatant violation of anti-trust laws took place and neither JP Morgan nor Goldman have been prosecuted for it is yet another mystery of the current financial crisis. "This is an open-and-shut case of anti-competitive behavior," says Taylor, the former regulator.

With Goldman out of the way, JP Morgan won the right to do a $1.1 billion bond offering — switching Jefferson County out of fixed-rate debt into variable-rate debt — and also did a corresponding $1.1 billion deal for a synthetic rate swap. The very same day the transaction was concluded, in May 2003, LeCroy had dinner with Langford and struck a deal to do yet another bond-and-swap transaction of roughly the same size. This time, the terms of the payoff were spelled out more explicitly. In a hilarious phone call between LeCroy and Douglas MacFaddin, another JP Morgan official, the two bankers groaned aloud about how much it was going to cost to satisfy Blount:

LeCroy: I said, "Commissioner Langford, I'll do that because that's your suggestion, but you gotta help us keep him under control. Because when you give that guy a hand, he takes your arm." You know?

MacFaddin: [Laughing] Yeah, you end up in the wood-chipper.

All told, JP Morgan ended up paying Blount nearly $3 million for "performing no known services," in the words of the SEC. In at least one of the deals, Blount made upward of 15 percent of JP Morgan's entire fee. When I ask Taylor what a legitimate consultant might earn in such a circumstance, he laughs. "What's a 'legitimate consultant' in a case like this? He made this money for doing jack shit."

As the tapes of LeCroy's calls show, even officials at JP Morgan were incredulous at the money being funneled to Blount. "How does he get 15 percent?" one associate at the bank asks LeCroy. "For doing what? For not messing with us?"

"Not messing with us," LeCroy agrees. "It's a lot of money, but in the end, it's worth it on a billion-dollar deal."

That's putting it mildly: The deals wound up being the largest swap agreements in JP Morgan's history. Making matters worse, the payoffs didn't even wind up costing the bank a dime. As the SEC explained in a statement on the scam, JP Morgan "passed on the cost of the unlawful payments by charging the county higher interest rates on the swap transactions." In other words, not only did the bank bribe local politicians to take the sucky deal, they got local taxpayers to pay for the bribes. And because Jefferson County had no idea what kind of deal it was getting on the swaps, JP Morgan could basically charge whatever it wanted. According to an analysis of the swap deals commissioned by the county in 2007, taxpayers had been overcharged at least $93 million on the transactions.

JP Morgan was far from alone in the scam: Virtually everyone doing business in Jefferson County was on the take. Four of the nation's top investment banks, the very cream of American finance, were involved in one way or another with payoffs to Blount in their scramble to do business with the county. In addition to JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns paid Langford's bagman $2.4 million, while Lehman Brothers got off cheap with a $35,000 "arranger's fee." At least a dozen of the county's contractors were also cashing in, along with many of the county commissioners. "If you go into the county courthouse," says Michael Morrison, a planner who works for the county, "there's a gallery of past commissioners on the wall. On the top row, every single one of 'em but two has been investigated, indicted or convicted. It's a joke."

The crazy thing is that such arrangements — where some local scoundrel gets a massive fee for doing nothing but greasing the wheels with elected officials — have been taking place all over the country. In Illinois, during the Upper Volta-esque era of Rod Blagojevich, a Republican political consultant named Robert Kjellander got 10 percent of the entire fee Bear Stearns earned doing a bond sale for the state pension fund. At the start of Obama's term, Bill Richardson's Cabinet appointment was derailed for a similar scheme when he was governor of New Mexico. Indeed, one reason that officials in Jefferson County didn't know that the swaps they were signing off on were shitty was because their adviser on the deals was a firm called CDR Financial Products, which is now accused of conspiring to overcharge dozens of cities in swap transactions. According to a federal antitrust lawsuit, CDR is basically a big-league version of Bill Blount — banks tossed money at the firm, which in turn advised local politicians that they were getting a good deal. "It was basically, you pay CDR, and CDR helps push the deal through," says Taylor.

In the end, though, all this bribery and graft was just the table-setter for the real disaster. In taking all those bribes and signing on to all those swaps, the commissioners in Jefferson County had basically started the clock on a financial time bomb that, sooner or later, had to explode. By continually refinancing to keep the county in its giant McMansion, the commission had managed to push into the future that inevitable day when the real bill would arrive in the mail. But that's where the mortgage analogy ends — because in one key area, a swap deal differs from a home mortgage. Imagine a mortgage that you have to keep on paying even after you sell your house. That's basically how a swap deal works. And Jefferson County had done 23 of them. At one point, they had more outstanding swaps than New York City.

Judgment Day was coming — just like it was for the Delaware River Port Authority, the Pennsylvania school system, the cities of Detroit, Chicago, Oakland and Los Angeles, the states of Connecticut and Mississippi, the city of Milan and nearly 500 other municipalities in Italy, the country of Greece, and God knows who else. All of these places are now reeling under the weight of similarly elaborate and ill-advised swaps — and if what happened in Jefferson County is any guide, hoo boy. Because when the shit hit the fan in Birmingham, it really hit the fan.

For Jefferson County, the deal blew up in early 2008, when a dizzying array of penalties and other fine-print poison worked into the swap contracts started to kick in. The trouble began with the housing crash, which took down the insurance companies that had underwritten the county's bonds. That rendered the county's insurance worthless, triggering clauses in its swap contracts that required it to pay off more than $800 million of its debt in only four years, rather than 40. That, in turn, scared off private lenders, who were no longer ­interested in bidding on the county's bonds. The banks were forced to make up the difference — a service for which they charged enormous penalties. It was as if the county had missed a payment on its credit card and woke up the next morning to find its annual percentage rate jacked up to a million percent. Between 2008 and 2009, the annual payment on Jefferson County's debt jumped from $53 million to a whopping $636 million.

It gets worse. Remember the swap deal that Jefferson County did with JP Morgan, how the variable rates it got from the bank were supposed to match those it owed its bondholders? Well, they didn't. Most of the payments the county was receiving from JP Morgan were based on one set of interest rates (the London Interbank Exchange Rate), while the payments it owed to its bondholders followed a different set of rates (a municipal-bond index). Jefferson County was suddenly getting far less from JP Morgan, and owing tons more to bondholders. In other words, the bank and Bill Blount made tens of millions of dollars selling deals to local politicians that were not only completely defective, but blew the entire county to smithereens.

And here's the kicker. Last year, when Jefferson County, staggered by the weight of its penalties, was unable to make its swap payments to JP Morgan, the bank canceled the deal. That triggered one-time "termination fees" of — yes, you read this right — $647 million. That was money the county would owe no matter what happened with the rest of its debt, even if bondholders decided to forgive and forget every dime the county had borrowed. It was like the herpes simplex of loans — debt that does not go away, ever, for as long as you live. On a sewer project that was originally supposed to cost $250 million, the county now owed a total of $1.28 billion just in interest and fees on the debt. Imagine paying $250,000 a year on a car you purchased for $50,000, and that's roughly where Jefferson County stood at the end of last year.

Last November, the SEC charged JP Morgan with fraud and canceled the $647 million in termination fees. The bank agreed to pay a $25 million fine and fork over $50 million to assist displaced workers in Jefferson County. So far, the county has managed to avoid bankruptcy, but the sewer fiasco had downgraded its credit rating, triggering payments on other outstanding loans and pushing Birmingham toward the status of an African debtor state. For the next generation, the county will be in a constant fight to collect enough taxes just to pay off its debt, which now totals $4,800 per resident.

The city of Birmingham was founded in 1871, at the dawn of the Southern industrial boom, for the express purpose of attracting Northern capital — it was even named after a famous British steel town to burnish its entrepreneurial cred. There's a gruesome irony in it now lying sacked and looted by financial vandals from the North. The destruction of Jefferson County reveals the basic battle plan of these modern barbarians, the way that banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs have systematically set out to pillage towns and cities from Pittsburgh to Athens. These guys aren't number-crunching whizzes making smart investments; what they do is find suckers in some municipal-finance department, corner them in complex lose-lose deals and flay them alive. In a complete subversion of free-market principles, they take no risk, score deals based on political influence rather than competition, keep consumers in the dark — and walk away with big money. "It's not high finance," says Taylor, the former bond regulator. "It's low finance." And even if the regulators manage to catch up with them billions of dollars later, the banks just pay a small fine and move on to the next scam. This isn't capitalism. It's nomadic thievery.

[From Issue 1102 — April 15, 2010]

More by Matt Taibbi:
Wall Street's Bailout Hustle
Wall Street's Naked Swindle
The Great American Bubble Machine

WHAT KILLED THE MINERS?

Jeff BiggersAuthor, "Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland"

What Killed the Miners? Profits Over Safety? [reposted from The Huffington Post]

All coal mining safety laws have been written in miners' blood.

My grandfather, who barely survived an explosion in a coal mine in southern Illinois, taught me this phrase. He also taught me about the 150-year-old battle in the coalfields over reckless production at the cost of responsible safety measures.

As our prayers and condolences go out to the many coal mining families in Raleigh County, West Virginia, I think about the needless safety violations and subsequent disasters that have taken place over the past century.

Over 104,000 Americans and immigrants have died in our coal mines. According to one inspector, many, if not a majority of those "accidents" should not be considered mishaps, but acts of negligent homicide.

As a coal miner's widow from Raleigh County, West Virginia told me on the phone last night, every time she sees a miner just off his shift, draped in coal dust, standing at the convenience market, she knows that mine is rife with violations.

Three coal miners still die daily from black lung disease -- one of the most flagrant safety issues and scandals overlooked in our nation.

While we are still waiting for the details on the Performance Coal Co. Upper Big Branch Mine disaster, and whether methane gas buildup -- the release of highly flammable and toxic gas that has haunted coal miners for centuries -- led to the explosion that has taken at least 25 lives, reports are now coming out of the mine's history of safety violations. According to Ry Rivard in the Daily Mail:

In March alone, U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration officials cited the mine, which is owned by Massey subsidiary Performance Coal Co., for failing to control dust; improperly planning to ventilate the mine of dust and the combustible gas methane; inadequate protection from roof falls; failing to maintain proper escapeways; and allowing the accumulation of combustible materials.

Since 1995, there have been more than 3,000 violations at Upper Big Branch, though it was not immediately clear how that compared to other mines of its size.

Massey, of course, has become infamous for its devastating mountaintop removal operations.

But the company also pleaded guilty to criminal violations for a January, 2006 fire at the Aracoma mine in Logan County, WV, which took the lives of two miners. As Charleston Gazette reporter Ken Ward noted:

a huge problem at Aracoma was also that Massey officials had removed key ventilation walls, or stoppings, allowing smoke to enter that primary escape tunnel in the first place -- a move that U.S. District Judge John T. Copenhaver later said "doomed two workers to a tragic death"
In a now infamous internal memo to employees that was used in the Aracoma mine trial, Massey's CEO Don Blankenship openly declared: "If any of you have been asked by your group presidents, your supervisors, engineers or anyone else to do anything other than run coal (i.e. build overcasts, do construction jobs, or whatever) you need to ignore them and run coal," the complaint quotes the memo. "This memo is necessary only because we seem not to understand that coal pays the bills."

Nonetheless, Massey is ramping up its mine productions and profits, especially in its hurry to export coal to India and China. Last year, nearly 3,000 coal miners died in China's own mines.

When my grandfather was in the mines in southern Illinois, a group of UMWA miners from Centralia, Illinois, outraged by the political machinations in the Department of Mines and Minerals, wrote a letter in 1946 urging the governor to take action on clearly dangerous buildups of coal dust. The letter described the mine's situation, the politics, and then made a desperate request for intervention:

In fact, Governor Green, this is a plea to you, to please save our lives, to please make the Department of Mines and Minerals enforce the laws at No. 5 mine of the Centralia Coal Company at Centralia, Illinois, at which mine we are employed, before we have a dust explosion at this mine like just happened in Kentucky and West WV.
Despite numerous inspections, recommendations, and noted violations, the mine owners did not consider the dust situation to be of imminent danger. On March 25, 1947, an explosion ripped through the Centralia mine and killed 111 miners. Half of them died from carbon monoxide poisoning. Three of the four men who had written the governor also died in the explosion.

As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch pointed out, a crime was committed at Centralia. Just like modern operators, the Centralia Coal Company had made it a habitual practice to violate mining safety laws and simply pay the fines.

And the violations and the deaths continue today.

I can't get the words of an old Welsh coalfield ballad out of my mind:

"Oh what will you give me, say the sad bells of Rhymney
Is there hope for the future, say the brown bells of Merthyr
Who made the mine owners, say the blackbells of Rhondda
And who killed the miners, say the grim bells of Blaenau. . . "

Jeff Biggers is the author of Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland , and The United States of Appalachia.

Archbishop Romero remembered on the 30th Anniversary of His Assassination

'Life has the last word': Archbishop pays tribute to Oscar Romero

Sunday 28 March 2010

A sermon given by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, at a service to mark the 30th anniversary of the martyrdom of Archbishop Oscar Romero, Westminster Abbey.

The Archbishop in the pulpit © Westminster Abbey

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Archbishop Oscar Romero is commemorated as a martyr in the Church of England's liturgical calendar on 24 March each year. His image is among ten statues of martyrs of the twentieth century placed over the Great West Doors of Westminster Abbey in 1998.

Click here for the Order of Service and more photos.

Listen to the Archbishop's sermon [8Mb]

Transcript

Sentir con la Iglesia: 'feeling with the Church'. This was Oscar Romero's motto as a bishop – you'll see it in many photographs inscribed on the episcopal mitre he wore. It is in fact an ancient phrase, very often used to express the ideal state of mind for a loyal Catholic Christian; indeed, it's usually been translated as 'thinking with the Church'. It can be used and has been used simply to mean having the same sentiments as the Church's teaching authority.

But the life and death of Monseñor Romero take us to a far deeper level of meaning. Here was a man who was by no means a temperamental revolutionary. For all his compassion and pastoral dedication, for all the intensity of his personal spirituality as a young priest and later as a bishop, he seems originally to have been one of those who would have interpreted sentir con la Iglesia essentially in terms of loyalty to the teaching and good order of the Church. And for all the affection he inspired, many remembered him in his earlier ministry as a priest who was a true friend to the poor - but also a friend of the rich. In the mordant phrase of one observer, 'His thinking was that the sheep and the wolves should eat from the same dish'.

His breakthrough into a more complete and more demanding vision came, of course, as a result of seeing at close quarters what the wolves were capable of, and so realising the responsibility of the shepherd in such a situation. The conversion that began with the vicious slaughter of innocent peasants by the Salvadorean National Guard in 1974 and 1975 came to its decisive climax with the murder of his Jesuit friend Rutilio Grande in March 1977, a few weeks after Romero's installation as Archbishop. From that moment on, sentir con la Iglesia had a new meaning and a deeply biblical one. 'The poor broke his heart', said Jon Sobrino, 'and the wound never closed.'

'Feeling with the Church' meant, more and more clearly, sharing the agony of Christ's Body, the Body that was being oppressed, raped, abused and crucified over and over again by one of the most ruthless governments in the western hemisphere. In the early summer of the same year, 1977, in the wake of the atrocities committed by government forces at Aguilares, he spoke to the people in plain terms: 'You are the image of the divine victim...You are Christ today, suffering in history'. These words were uttered in a town where the soldiers had shot open the tabernacle in the church and left the floor littered with consecrated hosts. There could be no more powerful a sign of what was going on in terms of the war of the state against the Body of Christ.

Romero knew that in this war the only weapons of the Body were non-violent ones, and he never spared his criticisms of those revolutionaries who resorted to terror and whose murderous internal factionalism and fighting were yet another wound in the suffering body of the people. For him the task of the church was not to be a subsidiary agency of any faction but to be the voice of that suffering body.

And so his question to all those who have the freedom to speak in the Church and for the Church is 'who do you really speak for?' But if we take seriously the underlying theme of his words and witness, that question is also, 'who do you really feel with?' Are you immersed in the real life of the Body, or is your life in Christ seen only as having the same sentiments as the powerful? Sentir con la Iglesia in the sense in which the mature Romero learned those words is what will teach you how to speak on behalf of the Body. And we must make no mistake about what this can entail: Romero knew that this kind of 'feeling with the Church' could only mean taking risks with and for the Body of Christ – so that, as he later put it, in words that are still shocking and sobering, it would be 'sad' if priests in such a context were not being killed alongside their flock. As of course they were in El Salvador, again and again in those nightmare years.

But he never suggests that speaking on behalf of the Body is the responsibility of a spiritual elite. He never dramatised the role of the priest so as to play down the responsibility of the people. If every priest and bishop were silenced, he said, 'each of you will have to be God's microphone. Each of you will have to be a messenger, a prophet. The Church will always exist as long as even one baptized person is alive.' Each part of the Body, because it shares the sufferings of the whole – and the hope and radiance of the whole – has authority to speak out of that common life in the crucified and risen Jesus.

So Romero's question and challenge is addressed to all of us, not only those who have the privilege of some sort of public megaphone for their voices. The Church is maintained in truth; and the whole Church has to be a community where truth is told about the abuses of power and the cries of the vulnerable. Once again, if we are serious about sentir con la Iglesia, we ask not only who we are speaking for but whose voice still needs to be heard, in the Church and in society at large. The questions here are as grave as they were thirty years ago. In Salvador itself, the methods of repression familiar in Romero's day were still common until very recently. We can at least celebrate the fact that the present head of state there has not only apologized for government collusion in Romero's murder but has also spoken boldly on behalf of those whose environment and livelihood are threatened by the rapacity of the mining companies, who are set on a new round of exploitation in Salvador and whose critics have been abducted and butchered just as so many were three decades back. The skies are not clear: our own Anglican bishop in Salvador was attacked ten days ago by unknown enemies; but the signs of hope are there, and the will to defend the poor and heal the wounds.

On once occasion when Monseñor Romero was returning from abroad, an official at the airport said loudly as he passed, 'There goes the truth'. It is hard to think of a better tribute to any Christian. If we believe that the Church is graced with the Spirit of Truth, we need to remember that this is not about a supernatural assurance that will tell us abstract truths: it is, according to Our Lord in the Gospel of John, a truth that 'convicts' – that exposes us to a divine presence, a light that will show us who we are and what the world is and where our values are adrift. The Church has to be truly the dwelling place of the Spirit by becoming a place where suffering and injustice are named for what they are. It may not make for a superficially placid Church; but only when truth about human pain is allowed an honest voice can there be healing for Church or world. The deepest unity of the Body is created by Christ's own embrace without reservation of the appalling suffering, the helplessness and voicelessness, the guilt, the frustration, the self-doubt of human beings, so as to infuse into it his own divine compassion. With Christ, said Romero in a Christmas sermon, 'God has injected himself into history'.

If that is the foundation for the unity of the Body, a true martyr-saint is someone who does not belong to a faction or party in the Church, who is not just a simple hero for left or right, but one who expresses clearly and decisively the embrace of Christ offered to all who suffer, who struggle, who fear to be lost and fear even more to be found. It is an embrace offered to all, including those who are trapped in their own violence and inhumanity: it is good news for the rich as well as the poor. But the embrace of Christ for the prosperous, let alone the violent, is not a matter of getting sheep and wolves to mingle freely; it is an embrace that fiercely lays hold on the sinner and will not let go until love has persuaded them to let go of their power and privilege.

That was the love out of which Monseñor Romero spoke in his last sermon when he urged the soldiers of the government to lay down their arms rather than obey unjust orders and commanded the rulers of El Salvador to stop the murder and repression. That was the love which provoked exactly what the love of our Lord provoked – that ultimate testimony to the emptiness and impotence of violent power that is murder. Organised evil has no final sanction except death; and when death is seen, accepted and undergone for the sake of the only true power in the universe, which is God's love, organized evil is helpless. It is exposed as having nothing to say or do, exposed as unreal, for all its horrific ingenuity and force. 'Life has the last word', said the great Gustavo Gutierrez preaching in 1995 in memory of the martyrs of El Salvador.

'Life has the last word' is a good text for Holy Week. Exactly thirty years ago today, the Requiem Mass for Monseñor Romero – a mass which was attended by people who are present here today – was interrupted by violence and overshadowed by more deaths. It must have seemed that the forces of death were still active and resourceful. So they were and are; yet the Mass itself embodies the truth that life is triumphant and active in the very heart of evil, betrayal, rejection and violence; it is the breaking of bread in the same night in which Jesus was given up to death, as our liturgies remind us. Today we give thanks for Oscar Romero's witness to life, the life of Christ in his Body; and, as we embark on Holy Week, we are left with the questions that Jesus puts to us again and again, in his own words, his death and resurrection, but also in the life and death of his saints and martyrs: 'Whose is the voice you speak with? Whose are the needs you speak for? What is the truth you embody?' Sentir con la Iglesia: can you – can we – make this more than an aspiration, so that we may 'gain Christ and be found in him'?

© Rowan Williams 2010

Under the Radar-- Books We Missed (Breaking Ranks by Ronit Chacham)

It's hard to keep up with all the books we need to know about-- here is one from several years ago that slipped by us-- but better late than never. If anyone wants to recommend a really good one that we missed let me know about it- email me at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net. Thomas Riggins

Ronit Chacham: Breaking Ranks: Refusing to Serve in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (Other Press, LLC)

Reviewed by Daphna Baram [reposted from oznit.com]


The late Jewish philosopher (he lived more than half his life in Jerusalem and was among the founders of its Hebrew university, but it is still somehow hard to relate to him as an Israeli philosopher), Yesha’ayahu Leibowitz, had only contempt for physical courage. He used to remind his audiences of brave and daring acts by Nazi special units soldiers during the WW II. "They were extraordinarily fearless, they risked their own lives in service of their leader," he shouted at the top of his unique prophet’s voice. "Do we think of them as heroes? No, we do not." The real heroes, according to Leibowitz, are those who speak their minds without fear of scorn, contempt and ostracism; those who do the unpopular thing and follow their conscious, willing to bear the consequences for their beliefs.

Leibowitz was a spiritual leader for refuseniks of my generation in the early 1990s. Before reporting to reserve service in the IDF only to announce a refusal to serve in the occupied territories, the guys would make a pilgrimage to Leibowitz’s modest apartment to receive his encouragement, some would say his blessing. Leibowitz lived a very long and fruitful life, but not long enough to see his own grandson, Shamai, join the honourable club of Israeli refuseniks. There is no doubt he would have been proud to read his grandson’s thoughtful and articulate account of his decision to refuse in Breaking Ranks.

Ronit Chacham’s book comprises of nine interviews with conscientious objectors (or 'refusers'). I was amazed by the strong emotional impact it had on me. I thought I knew everything there was to know about refuseniks. My father refused to serve in the occupied territories when I was 12 years old; his best friend was imprisoned in the same year, 1982, for refusing to serve in the invasion of Lebanon; the vast majority of my male friends are refuseniks. And still, the words of these 21st century refuseniks excited and inspired me, as I’m sure they would affect any reader.

The question what leads a person to dissent may remain unsolved forever. Why was Yaniv Iczkovitz, who used to hold, according to his own account, racist and derogatory views of Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular, driven to dissent after watching -- from atop a watch tower -- the ordinary day to day life of a Palestinian family in a refugee camp, while so many others have watched, and continue to watch worse atrocities remain unmoved? What made Ishay Rosen-Zvi defy the rabbis - the political and spiritual leaders of his community - and turn his back on his peer group of settlers, while most of his contemporaries carry on the oppression of Palestinians without questioning it?

What makes a man like Rami Kaplan, who never wanted a thing in his life but to serve in a combat unit of the IDF, who had his identity defined by being an officer in the Israeli army, wake up one morning and see no choice but to leave his fellow officers and his subordinates and choose the hard ungrateful path of dissent? Those questions may well be unanswerable, but the book provides many hints and small keys to the souls of the interviewees, and to that of Israeli society.

One important observation is offered by an interviewee who notes that most of the refuseniks come from the middle class, and are, for the most part, of eastern-European origins. Those who were raised to see themselves as the salt of the earth, he explains, are less afraid to defy the consensus.

The members of Courage-To-Refuse mentioned above believed that coming from them -- the backbone of Israeli society -- defiance would cause a political and social earthquake. They were not, they knew, a bunch of radical leftists; no one, they thought, would dare to question their patriotism; when they refuse, they had no doubt, everyone will understand that something is fundamentally wrong with government policies. That’s why they strove to maintain a distance from the veteran refusenik organization, Yesh-Gvul, whose members had long ago been labelled ‘radical leftists,’ and marginalized. Courage-to-Refuse and its members did their best to avoid the hug of the radical left. Little did they know that when Yesh-Gvul was formed, 25 years ago, its members harboured similar thoughts. Yesh-Gvul founders also saw themselves as unquestionable patriots. They too believed that no one will dare to call them traitors. They too tried, at first, to distance themselves from the traditional left.

I disagree with Chacham when she writes that the new refuseniks were quickly marginalized by Israeli media. I was working as news editor at a Jerusalem weekly magazine at the time, and followed all other media closely. I remember well the vast coverage given to the new refuseniks group by various papers and electronic media. It stood out against the backdrop of ultra-nationalist collaborative stance adopted by most Israeli media at the time of CTR’s first public appearance. Their lineage in itself called for attention: Leibowitz the grandson, a high court judge’s son.

Speakers for the new group were interviewed by the weekend supplements of all major Israeli newspapers, and managed to embarrass the army profoundly. In those first months they even refused to talk to the foreign press, to bolster their patriotic image. And in spite of all that, CTR has so far managed to mobilize 'only' a few dozen more than 500 other soldiers. The left views it as a huge success, but some of the new refuseniks were disappointed: the earth did not shake, and consensus in Israel did not move much. In that sense, they were indeed marginalized. As was the story of Jonathan Ben-Arzi (not interviewed in this book), a nephew (by marriage) of Israel’s former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As were the Shministim (high school seniors) with their truly radical manifesto, school leafleting, and -- scariest of all -- dialogue with Palestinians.

It is fascinating to observe how the process of refusal and the creation of a political organization radicalised these main stream men’s views. Some told Chacham they have lost their faith in Zionism. Others developed critical views regarding Israel’s treatment of Mizrahi immigrants, women, the poor. Having taken one major step outside consensus, other ideological barriers also lost their grip on them.

Chacham conducted the interviews with of sensitivity and wisdom. Her conversations with the refuseniks make a fascinating read. She brings the real heroes, the interviewees, to the fore. All of them are eloquent, intelligent, and honest. The last interview, a talk Chacham had with her own son, David, is especially touching, in spite of, or perhaps because of a lack of any mother-son emotional statements.

It is rare for Israelis to find something to feel proud of in our country these days, but reading the words of these compatriots of mine made me feel proud indeed. Ironically, I was reminded of a poem by the Zionist Chaim Chefer, relating to his brothers in arms of the Palmach, "They are my brothers, They are my brothers." That’s what Ronit Chacham’s book made me feel toward these brave young men.



Daphna Baram is a Senior Associate Member of St. Antony's College, Oxford. She was a fellow of the Reuters Foundation Program in Oxford University, and News Editor of Jerusalem weekly Kol Ha'ir. Her book Disenchantment: The Guardian and Israel (buy from Amazon UK) was published by Guardian Books, in July 2004.