Re: Rumsfeld and Abu Ghraib by S.Hersch
Enormously important tactically and strategically. The most secret officers of the state have split and leaked the information about the whole global counter-terrorist programme. Strategically Osama bin Laden has won. US hegemonism will never be able to rule the same way again. Chris Burford - Original Message - From: k hanly [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, May 16, 2004 2:26 AM Subject: [PEN-L] Rumsfeld and Abu Ghraib by S.Hersch THE GRAY ZONE by SEYMOUR M. HERSH How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib.
Re: Roy Medvedev interview (on Putin)
Comments below: -Original Message- From: Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] I understand that Russian health care may be free, as Chris says, but my Russian friends tell me that to get decent treatment you have to bribe people. Yes. It is free in principle but requires, usually, informal cash transactions. These are usually tips but the doctor(s) may try to extort money from you if they think you can pay. I have never been asked to pay a bribe myself, but then I have never had to have serious treatment. Anecdotally the situation is particularly bad in this respect in maternity hospitals. One possible difference between the Soviet and the present system is that today a typical doctor might have difficulty surviving on her official salary. Yes. The same goes for almost all government employees. As I have said before, the reason for this is the massive tax evasion, which makes the state too poor to pay its employees. This creates a _very_ bad situation with respect to the police. A beat cop in Moscow is usually a pretty uneducated guy from Podmoskov'ye (the area around Moscow), who earns about $80 a month and carries an AK-47. You can imagine what happens. The average monthly salary for a doctor is about $120, as opposed to about $60 a few years ago, from unlivable to barely livable. Doctors were not well-paid by any means in the Soviet era. (Except for the elite -- I have a friend who was a dentist for the nomenclatura in the 70s-80s. He met Vysotsky and Brezhnev, and used to jet over to Sochi on vacation all the time. Currently, he has his own private practice in Moscow and is not at all a poor man. I see him in his ads from time to time on TV.) But they did not have to rely on tips/bribes for survival. The mother of one of my ex-girlfriends is a doctor in Podmoskov'ye, and she relies almost entirely on tips. What decline _has_ occurred in the health care system, I think, is a result of the corruption and that talented doctors have fled from the state clinics to private ones. For some reason, Russian dentistry is superb. Why this is I have been unable to figure out. Lou's description of the TB cases seems consistent with my informants. Most of the TB epidemics stem in the prisons, AFAIK, where there is also a great deal of HIV. The hepatitus derives from IV drug use, which is a serious problem in Russia, where heroin from Afghanistan is cheaper than marijuana. I find the juxtaposition of different views on this subject interesting. I also appreciate that the tone of the discussion has changed. If you're civil to me, I'll be civil to you.
Re: Roy Medvedev interview (on Putin)
Louis Proyect: Actually, Herman said the following: There is also the attempt to blame the medical crisis on alcoholism, which one Russian doctor is quoted as saying, is in first place, and there are ingrained habits so that mending this safety net will require surgery on millions of dark Russian souls. But the articles cannot escape the fact that the drastic decline began with the ending of the Soviet Union and the installation of Yeltsin and reform, and the opening article does note that, Asked when his life took its turn for the worse, he [Anatoly Iverianov] does not hesitate. Me: Well, the demographic decline actually started under Gorbachev, not Yeltsin, but point taken. The medical crisis _is_ to a geat extent because of alcoholism, which is why it has hit men and not women. Which has greatly increased due to the economic collapse of 1989-1998 and the great restructuring of social relations that has taken place. There is a great deal of rural despair in Russia, and peasants tend to drink. A lot. It is also the case that possession of a still was punishable by a prison term in the Soviet Union. This is not the case today. Alcohol was much harded to get in general. E.g., the average monthly income was about 150 rubles, and a bottle of vodka cost about 5 rubles. Today, you can get bombed in Russia for $3. Also, the state would put alcoholics in treatment programs, which no longer exist. Pkease note that the article is a bit dated, from 1995 if I recollect properly. Two years ago one out of six people in Russia were infected with TB. That's sixteen million people. I know _zero_ Russians who are or have ever been infected with TB (as far as I know). One in 6 is fanciful. Probably 1 in 20. If Russian healthcare is about the same as it was before the counter-revolution, then something else is going on. I think we all know what that is. We are dealing with economic collapse. Poverty and the lack of proper health-care in prison and in follow-up care is the main cause of the spread of TB in Russia. As I said before, most of the TB is in the prison population. There are about a million prisoners in Russia (about 1 in every 145 people). And yes I would imagine healthcare in the prisons is close to non-existent. Russia just eliminated prison sentences for drug possession for personal use, BTW. The Russian prison population has dropped by several hundred thousand people over the past several years, as the government has adopted alternative sentencing and decriminalized many activities.
Quote of the day
Whereas detainees used to cry at the very thought of Abu Ghraib, for many the living conditions now are better in prison than at home. At one point we were concerned they wouldn't want to leave. - Army Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the U.S. commander in Iraq in charge of the prison system /apparatus of terror. Published December 14, 2003: Her job: Lock up Iraq's bad guys, St. Petersburg Times
Russian health care
Chris Doss: Male life expectancy has dropped 10 years; female life expectancy by about 2 years. That should tell you off the bat that it has little to do with the state of the healthcare system, and a lot to do with a giant increase in alcoholism and stress among Russian men and a greatly increased availability of alcohol in post-Soviet Russia. The majority of the excess deaths are middle-aged men dying from cardio-vascular diseases (not from hunger-related diseases either, another frequent, and strange, canard. There is not much hunger in a country in which most people grow their own vegetables.) Alcohol was expensive in the Soviet Union and very cheap today. In fact, Russian healthcare is about the same as it was in the Soviet era: free and bad, although you are expected to give the doctor a gratuity. For instance, I had an operation on my lower gum in a state clinic in Kaluga. I gave the doctor $3. For treatment of frostbite in my fingers, I gave about $1.50 to the woman who lanced the blisters. A friend of mine just had work done on her ear, and she bought the doctor a bottle of cognac. In fact the majority of the income of Russian healthcare workers is probably in the form of such gratuities from patients. Reply: Chris - I am not disputing your main thrust in your attack on NYT versions of Russian doom. However, your note above bears some additional remarks: i) There is rather a lot of abundant epidemiological data re the drift down in longevity from the change-over from socialism to restored-capitalism. Yeah I know, having said the abundant bit - someone might belikely to say where? I will dig it out if anyone wants. WHO is the best source. On the USSR health care system previously, Henry Sigerist is worth examining. ii) The majority of the excess deaths are middle-aged men dying from cardio-vascular diseases (not from hunger-related diseases I cannot cite to you data re diet in the USSR today. But your dissociation of diet from CVS deaths - is misleading. iii) No doubt 'blat' -'gratuity'-'payment' - operates reasonably well. But there is undoubtedly a difficulty with getting admissions for emergencies. As for ICU circumstances - I am informed by colleagues in the former USSR that there are serious problems. One is person-power. I have a lot of friends here in Canuckia that are ex-USSR docs working as lab techs whatever they can find. I admittedly have not seen whether the younger generations have filled that older emigre-left 'technogap'. Hari Kumar
Kerry on the line
Time Magazine, Sunday, May. 16, 2004 Iraq Is Not Just Bush's Problem John Kerry exercises a sophisticated sense of political timing when speakingand not speaking about Iraq By JOE KLEIN John Kerry has been a very good Democrat these past few weeks, roaming the country, talking up the bran-muffin issues that Democrats really, really care about: education and health care. He's even been a wee bit adventurous. He challenged the teachers' unions with a clever dealmore pay in return for less job protection (it is nearly impossible to fire a lousy teacher these days). Last week he reintroduced his thoughtful health-insurance proposal, which might even be politically plausibleif still not entirely affordableif the Bush tax cut for people earning more than $200,000 is eliminated. Of course, practically no one was listening. It was like Nero offering a brilliant water-and-sewage plan for Rome in the midst of the fire. The Bush Iraq policy lay shattered in tiny pieces; the President seemed crestfallen in his public appearances. Indeed, Kerry's message disciplinebroken by occasional, measured responses to reporters' questions about the waralmost seemed a clever way to avoid the issue. His audiences waited in vain for a passionate response to the Iraq debacle. At a town-hall meeting in Orlando, Fla., the tension was broken by a young Army reservist named Charity Thompson, recently returned from Iraq, who said she was having trouble getting medical care from the Veterans Administration. Her story, and her implicit anger about the war, was greeted with a vehement standing ovation. Kerry responded to the health-care point but stayed clear of the war. Later Thompson told me, I wanted to hear what he had to say about Iraq. I despise this war, and 99.9% of the people I served with feel the same way. We should bring our troops home now. I'd really like to know what Kerry thinks about that. full: http://www.time.com/time/election2004/columnist/klein/article/0,18471,638338,00.html -- The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
Re: Peter Lindert
I bought it after I saw the article. I looked at it briefly (it looks good), will read it this summer, and expect to use it in my doctoral social welfare policy seminar. Joel Blau Michael Perelman wrote: A few weeks ago, Jim Devine posted Jeff Madrick's New York Times article about Peter Lindert's new book, Growing Public. I am only halfway through the book -- covering the history of welfare when public schooling. As Madrick says, Lindert is no leftist by any means, but his book is an amazing compendium of information about the history of the public sector. I would think that Max Sawicky would find this book right up his alley. Is anybody else familiar with this book? -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
unity ticket?
from MS SLATE:
Yesterday, The NY {TIMES] fronts a story that quotes some prominent Democrats
talking up the notion of a John Kerry-John McCain ticket for the
November election. Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida, and former
Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey--both of whom have been mentioned as
possible vice-presidential picks themselves--are getting excited
about the prospect of a unity government, which wouldn't
require McCain to quit the GOP (though it would mean he couldn't
appoint any judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade, according to
Kerrey). Democratic strategist Chris Lehane, who used to work for
Kerry, compares a Kerry-McCain partnership to the Yankees
signing A-Rod. And perhaps most tantalizingly of all, an unnamed
Democratic official who works for the Kerry campaign says the
presumptive nominee himself continues to be interested in
McCain. Everyone agrees that the selection of the
straight-talking Arizona Republican, who, like Kerry, is a
Vietnam veteran, would instantly transform the race. There's just
one problem: McCain's statement yesterday that, I have totally
ruled it out.
comment:
someone actually thought seriously about a Kerry-Kerrey ticket?? the best that can be
said is that the latter is a friend of Jon Stewart. (I thought people thought that the
Left was dumb (after all, we lose all the time). If the Middle is coming up with ideas
like this...)
I'm afraid that all of us who look forward to a Redsox/Cubs world series are
alienated by that A-Rod comment.
Jim D
recovering his sense of humor.
Advertisements for Myself
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Mark Jones: right as rain
NY Times, May 16, 2004 Tight Oil Supply Won't Ease Soon By NEELA BANERJEE Two dollars for a gallon of gas? Get used to it. High fuel prices are here to stay, at least for the near future, because no relief is in sight for tight oil supplies. Most oil-producing countries and the major oil companies already produce all they can. Smaller companies and wildcatters are reopening some mothballed wells, but their combined output is not nearly enough to affect the global supply. What little spare capacity there is is almost entirely in Saudi Arabia, which is willing to pump more but the extra oil it could produce quickly is too heavy in sulfur for the main consuming nations. The world economy has learned to roll with oil price spikes, so long as they are short-lived. But sustained high fuel costs will strain its ability to cope, experts say, and the current run-up is already starting to bite. Wal-Mart Stores, for example, said last week that higher gasoline prices in the United States had taken an average of $7 a week out of the pockets of its customers, leaving them less to spend on other goods. Sales of some of the largest and most gas-hungry sport utility vehicles were down last month, compared with a year earlier. The nation's trade deficit widened to $46 billion in March, largely because of oil imports. And in Britain, the government is making contingency plans in case of mass protests against high fuel prices, the trade journal Platts Oilgram News reported Friday. The oil industry is constantly looking for new supplies, and with crude oil closing at a record high of $41.38 a barrel in New York on Friday, producers have plenty of economic incentive to step up output. But developing a new oil field takes time, and energy companies can do little to rush projects, industry experts said. Marathon Oil, a large independent company based in Houston, is pumping its fields flat out the equivalent of 365,000 barrels a day, counting crude oil and natural gas. That includes new fields in Russia that produce 15,000 barrels a day. Those fields have the potential to yield an additional 45,000 barrels, but only after five more years of investment and work, said Paul Weeditz, a company spokesman. Marathon's new projects in West Africa will take even longer. Companies are always under pressure to grow production, so they are always trying to bring new wells on, Mr Weeditz said. Many people may think it's a matter of turning the tap on and off, and that there's excess capacity, but that's just not the case. full: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/16/business/16OIL.html -- Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
Re: Peter Lindert
He is not perfect. For example, he favors school choice. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
American Empire of Torture
His daring foot is on land and sea everywhere, he colonizes the Pacific, the archipelagoes, With the steamship, the electric telegraph, the newspaper, the wholesale engines of war, With these and the world-spreading factories he interlinks all geography, all lands; What whispers are these, O lands, running ahead of you, passing under the seas? -- Walt Whitman, Years of the Modern, Leaves of Grass, 1891-92, p. 371 Among the phantoms, / unborn deeds, things soon to be that filled the space ahead in the Years of the Modern (Whitman, p. 371) -- the space which Walt Whitman, the ever-optimistic poet of empire of democracy, could not fathom -- is a worldwide constellation of detention centers (Dana Priest and Joe Stephens, Secret World of U.S. Interrogation: Long History of Tactics in Overseas Prisons Is Coming to Light, Washington Post, May 11, 2004, p. A01), a dark underside of that force advancing with irresistible power on the world's / stage . . . (Whitman, p. 370): In Afghanistan, the CIA's secret U.S. interrogation center in Kabul is known as The Pit, named for its despairing conditions. In Iraq, the most important prisoners are kept in a huge hangar near the runway at Baghdad International Airport, say U.S. government officials, counterterrorism experts and others. In Qatar, U.S. forces have been ferrying some Iraqi prisoners to a remote jail on the gigantic U.S. air base in the desert. The Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where a unit of U.S. soldiers abused prisoners, is just the largest and suddenly most notorious in a worldwide constellation of detention centers -- many of them secret and all off-limits to public scrutiny -- that the U.S. military and CIA have operated in the name of counterterrorism or counterinsurgency operations since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. . . . The rest of the posting is at http://montages.blogspot.com/2004/05/american-empire-of-torture.html. -- Yoshie * Critical Montages: http://montages.blogspot.com/ * Bring Them Home Now! http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/ * Calendars of Events in Columbus: http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html, http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php, http://www.cpanews.org/ * Student International Forum: http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/ * Committee for Justice in Palestine: http://www.osudivest.org/ * Al-Awda-Ohio: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio * Solidarity: http://www.solidarity-us.org/
Islam and Democracy: The Lesson from Turkey
An excerpt from the below Counterpunch article: What does this have to do with Iraq? It is unlikely that this country, held together so effectively by tyranny, could avoid splitting into at least three separate enclaves if the US were to pull out abruptly. Of these three parts, it is unlikely that any (except, perhaps, the majority-Kurdish area) would put forth a leader with much sympathy for Western-style democracy. The Shiites would rally behind an ayatollah, and the Sunnis would fall back into Baathism. I am not so sure about this. I was born to a Sunni family but that was just by chance. As I know it, the Sunnies and Shiites see themselves as Muslims first. Kurds are Muslims too. The differences among these three peoples are not as big as the West likes to think they are. And I don't think the differences among Jews, Christians and Muslims are as big as some want to lead us believe. You never know what the future will bring us and keep my fingers crossed. We will see. Interesting article though. Sabri http://www.counterpunch.com/smith05152004.html Islam and Democracy The Lesson from Turkey By JUSTIN E.H. SMITH After Abu Ghraib, the Bush administration's insistence that its misadventure in Iraq has anything to do with promoting democracy should by now come across as grossly fraudulent to any half-thoughtful, non-self-deluding adult. At the outset, a charitable anti-imperialist could, if not share, at least conjure some sympathy for the optimistic outlook of Thomas Friedman and other opponents of tyranny who thought that the end of Hussein's regime (for 'Hussein' is his surname, and he and I are not on first-name terms) would trigger, by way of the domino effect, the conversion of all those middle eastern, pre-Enlightenment hold-outs into so many Jeffersonian republics. Beyond the obvious difference, though, that American democracy, such as it is (or once was), was born of revolution against a colonial power, and not imposed by a colonial power, our anti-imperialist might also have pointed out the hypocrisy of pretending to promote democracy in the Islamic world while simultaneously denouncing the Turkish parliament's rejection, shortly before the invasion of Iraq a year ago, of $15 billion dollars in US aid and loans, offered in exchange for permission to send over 60,000 more troops into their country as part of a two-front invasion of Iraq. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz immediately criticized the Turkish military for not playing the strong leadership role we would have expected, while the body-snatched Christopher Hitchens took Turkey's refusal as confirming something he'd long held, that Turkey is an ally we can do without. West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, in contrast, courageously proclaimed on the senate floor: It is astonishing that our government is berating the new Turkish government for conducting its affairs in accordance with its own Constitution and its democratic institutions. Wolfowitz evidently wanted Turkey to do what it indeed has traditionally done throughout its 20th-century history: to override democratic decisions that, in the long term, could easily spell the end of its alliance with the US. As the great sociologist and theorist of modernity Ernest Gellner has argued, modern Turkey's idiosyncrasy lies in the fact that its periodic military coups really have functioned to keep the democratic will of the Turkish electorate and the governing bodies from straying too far from Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's initial, revolutionary vision of what a secular, democratic, Turkey should look like, which included, among other things, alliance with Western, secular democracies. Amazingly, after the civilian leaders have been roped back in and the voters humbled, the military really does restore power to democratically elected officials. This, then, has been a feature that has distinguished Turkey from every other country in which military coups regularly happen, for in all other cases we can be sure that the general in charge, promising to restore power to civilian leaders just as soon as order is restored, will be exceedingly careful not to let things get sufficiently orderly to enable him to come good on his promise. Military coups, on Gellner's analysis, are, or have been, just a part of Turkey's unique system of checks and balances. Wolfowitz, presumably, and likely without all that much knowledge of Kemalism's history, would have liked to see the military step in at just the moment that its new governing party began leading Turkey away from its traditional role as a stalwart, strategic ally of the United States. But a coup didn't happen this time; Turkey turned its back on an ally and the military has not bothered to set the matter right. The religiously secular republic created by Ataturk in the 1920s _when I taught at a state university in Istanbul last year I used to watch female students remove their head scarves in a booth just at the campus'
