Year: 2007

Right-wing commentators are claiming that questioning of the nominee for the office of US attorny general on the matter of torture is hypocrisy since they had a chance to define what is torture in the law. The argument is entirely fallacious and a transparent attempt to dismiss criticisms of the administration’s policy of torture with a rhetorical prop.

Demanding an answer to the question is consistent with the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005. People should read that act. It covers interpretations of the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution, as well the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Since the Attorney General interprets and enforces the law, it is crucial to know his position on what constitutes torture according to these laws.

As for the Military Commissions Act of 2006, while this act indeed contravenes human rights standards, it also limits the ability of the president to torture people. However, in his signing statement, Bush said the law doesn’t apply to him. Therefore, since the Attorney General interprets and enforces the law for the president, it is especially crucial to know his position on what constitutes torture.

* * *

A presidential finding, signed in 2002 by President Bush, Condoleezza Rice and Attorney General John Ashcroft, approved of waterboarding as a legitimate interrogation technique. In other words, Bush approved of torturing prisoners, a war crime under international law. 

US generals designated waterboarding as an illegal practice in Vietnam 40 years ago. The above photograph, taken in 1968, of a US soldier involved in waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner led to that soldier being court martialed. In 1947, the United States sentenced to 15 years hard labor Japanese officer Yukio Asano with war crimes for waterboarding a US civilian. Before that, in 1901, an Army major who used waterboarding against an Philippine insurgent was sentenced to 10 years of hard labor. Waterboarding dates back to at least the 1500s when it was used during the Italian Inquisition, and even way back then it was considered torture.

Waterboarding is torture. President Bush ordered officials to torture human being. Bush is a war criminal.

Steve T. Suitts, author of the report A New Majority: Low-Income Students in the South’s Public Schools, was quoted in a story in Education Week as saying: “If this new majority of students fail in school an entire state, an entire region, and—sooner or later—an entire nation will fail simply because there will be inadequate human capital to build and sustain good jobs, an enjoyable quality of life, and a well-informed democracy.”

The study was published by the Southern Education Foundation, which had a time line on their web page that covers the injustices of American society. However, Suitts use of the term “human capital” shows that at least one of the foundation’s members does not grasp a fundamental reality about American society. Capital is an owned resource that generates income and wealth. It is wealth in the form of money or property used or accumulated in a business by a person (or family) or group of people (corporation). It is material resource that is used or is available for use in the production of wealth. As capital, human resources are considered in terms of capacity to generate income and wealth. Human capital means that humans, either themselves or the results of their efforts, are property that belong to some person or persons.

For example, black slaves were human capital. The slavemaster owned a member of a disadvantaged racialized caste of human beings and used that person as capital to generate income. It was not the ownership of the African person or the person of African descent that generated the income, but ownership of the value created by the slave. Ownership was the form of control used to extract the value. Transfer of value from the person producing it to a person not producing it is exploitation. As a result of exploitation, the slavemaster lived a life of leisure in a mansion while the slave lived a life of toil in a small house. Because of his power and wealth, the slavemaster determined and shaped how life happened for both himself and the slave. Because the slavemaster owned the means of production, the slavemaster controlled society.

Similarly, a worker is human capital. While the capitalist does not formally own the worker, he does own the value created by the worker, a member of a disadvantaged economic class of human beings, and uses that value as capital to generate income. Structural coercion is the form of control used to extract the value—namely, the concentration of the means of production in the hands of a small number of families compelling most persons to sell their labor rather than dedicating most of the value they produce to self and collective improvement. As noted, transfer of value from the person producing it to a person not producing it is exploitation, and as a result of these exploitative relations, the capitalist lives a life of leisure in a mansion while the worker lives a life of toil in a small house. Because of his power and wealth, the capitalist determines and shapes how life happens for both himself and the slave. Because the capitalist owns the means of production, the capitalist controls society.

Returning to what Suitts said, his argument becomes problematic when the reality of capitalism is made explicit. Let’s read the key parts of the quote again: “If this new majority of students fail in school…there will be inadequate human capital to build and sustain good jobs, an enjoyable quality of life, and a well-informed democracy.”  

Human capital—the working family—is impoverished because of capitalist needs. Capitalists have, along with several other tactices, destroyed the labor movement in the United States to reduce wages and salaries in order to increase the surplus value produced by labor with the intent to convert that value into profit in the market to generate income for their life of leisure and privilege. Intensifying labor exploitation (whether through intensifying effort, mechanization and automation, rationalization, or globalization) is the fundamental imperative of capitalist relations. 

In the current period, is not very important from the capitalist standpoint that children from low income families have a real education for the simple fact that low income children will grow up to do jobs that don’t require a real education. Indeed, a real education is detrimental to the interests of the capitalist class; for, if you teach children to be creative and to think critically, more than a handful of them may come to the realization that capitalism is an exploitative system that should be replaced with real democracy—a government and an economy in which working families are in charge. Capitalists don’t want a “well-informed democracy.” They want a docile and subservient workforce educated just well enough to read instruction manuals and perform relatively simple calculations. The want a workforce just curious enough to turn on the television and watch corporate propaganda disguised as objective information.

So while I applaud any efforts to make real education a reality in this country, failure to understand the fundamental reality of capitalism leads to an effort that cannot substantially move the people forward in such a cause. Using the term “human capital” tells us right away that there is a failure to understand the fundamental reality of capitalism: a system of exploitation in which human beings are compelled to rent themselves to wealthy families who determine and shape how people live their lives.

The bottomline is that either a subset of persons in a society rules society or all the people in society rule society. Democracy is where the people rule themselves. Under capitalism, most people are ruled by a few people. Democracy is therefore not possible under capitalism. Ultimately, in order to make society work for working families, working families must be put in charge of ordering society. The people have to replace unelected rulers (capitalists) with democratically-elected leaders and direct democratic participation in a system that elminates the wall of separation between the polity and the economy. Democracy cannot exist without some form of socialism, and this requires a socialist revolution. We need a socialist movement.

Update (November 9, 2025): I just revisited this essay after many years and thought I should acknowledge something I have known about for some time: that University of North Carolina Wilmington professor Mike Adams killed himself in 2020 after being pushed into early retirement for offensive tweets. Greg Lukianoff, of the free speech organization FIRE, writes about the tragedy in this essay (I borrowed the image below from that essay). Wilmington treated Adams very poorly. While I disagreed with Adams over a great many things, more so back then than now, he deserved to be treated with respect and in accordance with the foundational law of this republic and the ethic of academic freedom.

Mike Adams, a conservative criminologist at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, illustrates how intelligent people are often not logical. The premise of his recent article undermines the author’s argument. If people generally don’t understand their motives, and if the author did not understand his motive all those years that he was an atheist, then it is likely the author does not understand his motive now that he has returned to Christianity.

Given his explanations, which uses cognitive dissonance theory, both imagined motives (that is, for leaving and returning) are problematic. People don’t become atheists because they don’t want to love their enemies. They simply continue hating their enemies and being Christians. It’s called hypocrisy and—apologies to my Christian friends—Christians are great at it. (I have always been particularly interested in the cognitive framework of the right-wing conservative Christian, as there is so much hatred in his heart, I often wonder why he is even a Christian.)

Cognitive dissonance can be resolved by reason and fact. The rational person needs proof to believe in the existence of things. This proof can be either logical or empirical. When confronted with his own faith-belief, the rational person experiences cognitive dissonance, namely, “I am supposed to believe in God with no logical or empirical proof, but because the rational person demands reason and fact to belief something, I have a choice to make: either I will be a theist and rely on faith belief or I will be an atheist and rely on reason.”

Either choice resolves the conflict (although they are not created equal, as reason is demonstrable in proof, whereas faith is not). In the first, the person has decided to give up rationalism. In the second, the person has decided to give up religion. Of course, most people compartmentalize, which is to say that they make a distinction between rational belief and faith belief, convince themselves that these are not in contradiction, and continue on their way. While this distinction is irrational—a truth usually not understood by the person—it allows the individual to carry on with life. Unfortunately, this irrationalism leads at the same time to a life of irrational belief and action.

Finally, to clarify what cognitive dissonance is, I will use a contemporary example. Republicans are confronted with the fact that the President of the United States has ordered the torture of human beings. Because torture is a bad thing and Republicans don’t want to be seen as supportive of bad things, they deny that what Bush has ordered is tortured. Bush helps them out by redefining what torture is. Because what he is doing is called something else, Republicans can support the torturer and claim not to support torture.

The Environmental Program of the United Nations has released its 550-page report, Global Environment Outlook (or GEO-4). The UN report warns that climate change, diminishing water supplies, and species extinction, among many other threats, will irreversibly alter life on Earth.

We’re in trouble, folks, and, unfortunately, as executive director of the program Achim Steiner notes, most nations had failed to “recognize the magnitude of the challenges facing the people and the environment of the planet.” Steiner went right to the source of the problem: overshoot and collapse. The capitalist treadmill of production, its imperative to expand the depletion of resources continually for the sake of profit, is a recipe for disaster. “That equation cannot hold for much longer,” Steiner said. “Indeed, in parts of the world it is no longer holding.”

Of course, the global warming denial lunatics are out in force denying the soundness of the science in the report. So I think it is helpful to point out that this report is five years in coming and is the work of nearly four hundred scientists. They took their sweet time in producing a very carefully researched report (it’s been a long twenty years since the last one).

The facts are dramatic and incontrovertable. Just take a look at one fact, first reported in June by the World Health Organization: thirteen million human beings die annually as a result of dirty water, polluted air, and poor working conditions. The UN report found that if the trends identified by WHO continue, almost two billion people will suffer from fresh water shortages.

Nobel Prize-winning DNA scientist, the man who (along with with Francis Crick and Maurice Hugh Frederick Wilkins) won the prize in 1962 for his description of the double helix structure of DNA, and chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Dr. James Watson, said recently in an interview with the London Times that, while “there are many people of color who are very talented,” he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really.” Watson wants to deny he meant what he said, and he apologized for saying it, but he has long been a believer in the hereditary theory of intelligence and tests purported to detect such intelligence find that people of African decent are as a group less intelligent than those of European decent.

Dr. Elias Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health, said in a statement: “The comments, which were attributed to Dr. James Watson earlier this week in the London Times, are wrong, from every point of view – not the least of which is that they are completely inconsistent with the body of research literature in this area.” This is true. There is no scientific basis for there being races of human beings. Moreover – and I’m not sure Serhouni meant this but – there is no scientific basis for claiming that mental testing measures hereditary intelligence (see Stephen J. Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man). Noting what appears as the underlying agenda, Elias said, “Scientific prestige is never a substitute for knowledge. As scientists, we are outraged and saddened when science is used to perpetuate prejudice.”

The Science Museum of London canceled a speech Dr. Watson was to have given there today, saying that Dr. Watson’s assertions on race and intelligence are “beyond the point of acceptable debate.” Henry Kelly, president of the Federation of American Scientists, said it was “tragic that one of the icons of modern science has cast such dishonor on the profession.” Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory suspended Watson from the laboratory, where he was president for 35 years and remained (until yesterday) chancellor. They rebuked him and said that they do not do research there that has any bearing on what Watson argued. However, there appears to be a political motive for the laboratory moving so quickly on this matter: the eugenics archive

It’s in his influential 1971 Blaming the Victim that psychologist William Ryan of Boston College coined the phrase “blaming the victim.” For Ryan, victim blaming is an ideology and a tactic used by middle and upper class whites to invalidate demands from black or otherwise marginalized communities for social justice. Racial inequities constituted a racist situation wherein whites are able to deny racism by laying the blame for inequality on what Ryan see as the black victims of white privilege.

Ryan wrote the book in response to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s notorious 1965 The Negro Family. Moynihan was a Harvard sociologist who was the time serving as an assistant labor secretary under Lyndon Johnson. The thesis of The Negro Family. often referred to as as the “Moynihan Report,” is that a dysfunctional subculture lay at the roots of black poverty, an idea introduced in the 1930s by sociologist E. Franklin Frazier.

“Don’t you think that black people share any responsibility for the conditions of their existence?” This is the question that is sometimes put to me when discussing racial inequality, although I have noticed growing hesitation among my white students to post it. It’s a way to force me to admit that blacks are partly to blame for their situation so that those who blame blacks can feel vindicated.

Once they get their foot in the door, they think (this is my interpretation of motive, anyway), they can push it wide open and confuse others as to the sources of the problems black Americans face that are allegedly more significant than racism.

The question is frustrating because it is so often asked in bad faith. Asked by somebody who is trying to prevent frank discussion of the problem marginalized groups feel, the question forces the expert into a defensive position. A lot of social liberals are made reluctant to speak frankly about the problems facing black Americans because they worry that soon the camel will be inside the tent—as well as risking the charge of victim blaming.

The strict structuralist social scientist will answer the question this way: If by bearing responsibility for the conditions of existence as a demographic category one means that there are black people who don’t pick themselves up by their bootstraps and work hard to achieve the American Dream, then the answer to the question is no. The ordinary everyday behaviors of black people, supposing they aren’t of the hard working and self-reliant type allegedly associated with success, have nothing to do with causing the conditions that befall blacks in the aggregate. To the extent that behaviors in the black community can be differentiated from the behaviors of other groups, these differences are caused by the conditions of their existence and are not the cause of them.

To understand why this is so, attempt an explanation of the circumstances of the white working class that depends on their failure to work hard and act in self-reliant ways. It’s a fact that white workers trail white managers and capitalists in every significant social category. On the whole, white workers suffer poorer health, shorter life-spans, lower incomes, cheaper houses, unstable job market, longer working days, inferior retirement, lower educational attainment, etc.

Are these the cause of their condition? The features of the conditions of the white working class result from the situation of structural inequality. White workers suffer such things because white managers and capitalists enjoy better health, longer life-spans, higher incomes, expensive houses, stable occupations, more leisure time, superior retirement, higher educational attainment, etc. In other words, the equation is not balanced, formulated as it is in the context of capitalist accumulation.

Capitalism is a system in which a few families own and control the means of production (capitalists and managers) and the rest of society is forced to sell its labor to survive or starve when its labor is not wanted—that is the dynamic of capitalist accumulation and the legal relations that maintain the status quo. White working people suffer because capitalists and managers exploit their labor, with the latter paid out of the surplus value labor generates. This is the only way that those who work so little can have so much while those who work so much can have so little.

This is why we call those who blame white workers for the conditions of the white working class classists. The elite look down on the white working class. They maintain the status quo that benefits them by maintaining that the problems working people face are caused by the workers themselves—blaming the victims of the capitalist mode of production.

Of course, we should note that there are very few people explicitly pushing the anti-working class argument these days. Why? It’s campaign season. Phil Gramm of Texas, an adviser to the John McCain campaign, told working people to stop whining and work harder. The McCain campaign quickly disavowed his comments because such an argument is offensive to white workers, and McCain needs their votes.

McCain knows that campaigning on slogans blaming the white worker for unemployment, bankruptcies, and a broken health care system is a nonstarter. McCain doesn’t want to seem like an elitist. He wants to appear to support the white working class. To be sure, Republicans make the personal responsibility argument in terms of class when they are talking among themselves. The same might be said for Democrats except that they wouldn’t be caught dead blaming the working class for its problems. They, too, want those votes. They have a legacy to leverage—however false that legacy is.

To say that black working people are responsible for unstable labor markets, poor health outcomes, educational underachievement, and residential displacement because they don’t try hard enough is something akin to saying that all working people are responsible for unstable labor markets, poor health outcomes, educational underachievement, and residential displacement because they don’t try hard enough. 

It’s not only conservatives who target blacks for special criticism. Progressives defend Obama against the charge of talking down to black people and attack critics like Jesse Jackson for criticizing Obama. It’s a double standard. White workers are the victims of large impersonal forces in their eyes, but black workers aren’t? Black workers need a little tough love from one of their own?

Obama says, “I think it’s time we had a president who doesn’t deny our problems or blame the American people for them but takes responsibility and provides the leadership to solve them.” Political sophisticates on the other side say the same thing. When Sean Hannity notes that we are not in a recession and that people in the US have every opportunity to pursue their dreams, that they don’t appreciate that gift and don’t take advantage of it, Gingrich bristles and said it was the most un-Reaganesque thing Hannity had ever said. Hannity defends himself by saying that it was very Reaganesque because “if you work hard and you play by the rules, you can’t fail.” To which Gingrich replied,

If the American people are complaining, you ought to listen to them and find out why. Now why are they complaining? The price of health care is going up, the price of health insurance is going up, the price of sending their kids to college is going up, the price of gasoline is going up. They fear China as a competitor. They look at a tightening situation. I talked to manufacturers who are seeing dramatic increases in the cost of their—of their raw materials, and they say to each other, this is hard—people for the first time that I can remember, people decline the number of miles they’re driving in the last two months because it is directly affecting their pocketbook. Now if your customer comes in and complains to you it is not good to say to the customer why don’t you quit whining.

Except if you’re black, of course. If you know anything about Newt Gingrich you know that he believes that, if you’re black, then the problem is that you’re not trying hard enough. But, again, Obama operates the same way. Obama is pushing the lie that the problems of black America’s workers are caused by the behavior of black Americans.

Again, ask yourself, are white workers losing their houses and jobs, failing to go to college, etc., because they don’t exhibit proper levels of personal responsibility and pull themselves up by their bootstraps? Is Gramm right that white workers are a bunch of whiners who suffer a recession that exists only in their imagination? BrO is Gingrich right white workers have a right to whine? And black people aren’t allowed to whine?

Even though their situation is worse because of racism, even though they are in less of a position to do anything about their situation compared to whites, blacks are held to an different standard of personal responsibility, even though personal responsibility is not the reason for their problems. It’s racist when Gingrich does it. It’s racist when Obama does it.

When the Diector’s Cut of Ridley Scott’s Alien was released, it contained a formerly-cut scene in which Ripley enters a chamber to find three of her crew mates fixed in the alien’s hardened saliva undergoing transformation into eggs, each of which would contain a “facehugger” and start the alien, or “xenomorph,” reproductive cycle over. This scene was cut because Scott felt it interfered with the pace of the film. I understand his reasoning. Nonetheless, the scene is fascinating because it shows us that there is a purpose behind the killings. Moreover, it provides insight into the xenomorph life cycle.

However, for those who pay attention to science fiction canons, the Director’s Cut creates a problem: Cameron’s xenomorph in Aliens has a different life cycle, one in which a queen lays the eggs with the facehuggers in them, while in Scott’s version, as expounded in Alan Dean Foster’s 1979 novelization, the victims mutate into eggs. Even though I like Scott’s movie better, Cameron’s two-stage life cycle feels better because it is scientifically believable. There are actually species, mosses for example, that have two-generation life cycles. The ability of a creature to transform victims into eggs with facehuggers in them with its saliva, mucus, and other secretions feels a bit too fantastic to be believable. I like my science fiction to have a strong element of plausibility.

There is also a serious internal contradiction with the Director’s Cut. In the first encounter with eggs, the eggs are distributed in a regular-like fashion across the floor of a chamber in the alien ship that the crew of the Nostromo is investigating. This arrangement of eggs looks like the work of a queen xenomorph. Who else would have situated them as such? There is no hardened mucus, etc. One can’t imagine how xenomorphs would come to construct such a pattern given that, on the Nostromo, the arrangments appears nothing like the crews’ initital encounter with eggs (then again, the pattern is not so orderly in the queen’s lair in Aliens). The cut scene depicts xenomorph behavior that is contrary to the pattern of behavior indicated by the scene aboard the alien ship.

Because these contradictions bug me, I am going to suggest an interpretation that will allow us to resolve the problems so that we can enjoy both the Director’s Cut of Aliens and Cameron’s Aliens. 

In Cameron’s version, xenomorphs fix their victims in hardened saliva near eggs (or perhaps eggs can be brought to the fixed victims), so that the facehuggers can emerge and introduce the alien seed into the abdomen of its victim. This activity on the part of the xenomorphs is certainly instinctual. The xenomorph is driven, as are many terrestrial species are, by the impulse to reproduce. It makes sense, then, that the xenomorph on board the Nostromo would take it’s victims to a remote chamber and fix them in saliva, preparing them for facehuggers.

The fact that there are no eggs there is not a problem for this interpretation. The creature could be waiting for the queen to deposit eggs nearby, other aliens to locate eggs nearby, or even be about looking for eggs itself. Thus, what Ripley found, is the product of the xenomorph’s instinctual activity. It was simply doing what its nature compelled it to do. With this interpretation in force, the viewer can simply disregard whatever the scene’s original intent was.

The only problem with this interpretation (apart from Foster’s novelization) is that hardened secreted matter growing around one of the characters (Brett) looks like the outer covering of a xenomorph egg. Therefore, I suggest that this scene be re-edited to exclude the seconds you see the outer covering, but otherwise leave the scene intact. Doing this, at least for the movie canon, would resolve the contradiction completely. Indeed, I am surprised that they didn’t think of this when producing the Director’s Cut. Maybe Scott didn’t want to be a slave to Cameron’s reconceptualizatin of the xenomorph life cycle.

I have been curating essays from the first iteration of Freedom and Reason. Here I curate one that represents my opposition to the Republican Party in which I conclude with the type of anti-worker rhetoric I have come to loathe in others. To be sure, the Republican Party was much worse than it is now, but I need to acknowledge that I have been guilty of a type of ad hominem attack that belittled ordinary Americans and I regret that.

Representative Jeb Hensarling, Republican of Texas, said the debate over coverage of children (SCHIP or State Children’s Health Insurance Program) was “a proxy fight” between advocates for two competing visions. “This is only the first battle in this Congress over who will control health care in America. Will it be parents, families and doctors? Or will it be Washington bureaucrats? That’s what this debate is all about.”

Okay, assuming that you don’t immediately see the problem with what he said, the choice Jeb sets before his listeners is a completely false one. Indeed, when you think about it, it’s a ridiculous argument. Why? Because families and doctors don’t control health care in America—corporate bureaucrats control our health care! And, unlike Washington bureaucrats, corporate bureaucrats work for private tyrannies that aren’t answerable to public grievances. In a democratic society, when the government controls health care that means that families and doctors control health care instead of private tyrannies. (Go here for an excellent discussion about the private tyrannies we call corporations.)

The real choice is between whether you want families and doctors to control health care in a process in which everybody participates in making decisions or whether you want corporations to run health care in a process that they control. The choice is between universal health care, in which every American has access to affordable, high-quality health care, on the one hand, and corporations running health care for profit, denying services to make a buck, and refusing to cover millions of people who can’t afford to pay (who are often nonetheless take care of with the cost of that care dumped on other patients), on the other hand. It’s a clear choice. It would be irrational for the majority of Americans to pick the latter.

There’s more that Jeb and his ilk gloss over. Most US citizens have health insurance through their employers. Health insurance is typically part of a benefits package employees receive when they are hired. Providing health care to employees saves employers money because their size and their ability to decide for their employees allows them to buy group-rate insurance more cheaply than their employees can. If employees purchased their own health care, then wages would have to increase sharply to make those purchases possible. Since the source of profit is mainly derived from the value produced by workers, capitalists will aggressively resist raising wages for this to happen. Moreover, because capitalists can deduct insurance costs on their taxes, and since corporations are only taxed on their income (profits), being able to deduct health insurance costs represents a tax subsidy. The evidence shows that at the system level, this arrangement is actually bad for business, but business consciousness doesn’t operate at that level, rather it operates at the firm level, where rational behavior is often in contradiction with what’s best at the system level (which is the reason why capitalism without massive state intervention is so erratic and self-destructive).

Now, what do we the citizen get for a system that is heavier on the private side than the public side than any other advanced democracy? The advanced countries have more practicing physicians, more nurses, and more acute care hospital beds per 1000 population than the US does. The advanced countries have better health care outcomes than does the United States, and these other countries do it while spending much less on health care (a gap that is growing rapidly, as health care costs in the United States sky rocket), while covering every one of their citizens (45 million US citizens aren’t covered under the current system, a number that grows everyday, as workers are priced out of the system). Better care for everyone for less money?! Wow! How do they do it? Simple – they turned the financing of health care over to the government. 

Before you get confused by propaganda slogans launched from those quarters that don’t want you to have affordable high quality health care, let me emphasize the point that we aren’t talking about “socialized medicine,” where the government actually runs the health care profession. On the contrary, we are talking about a single payer financing mechanism, like they have in Canada, Sweden, and other countries. There, health care is still run by health care professionals, but the government finances health care without the aim to make a profit. Taking profit out of the system means that everybody can be covered with lots of money left over, which means the amount we all pay for health care is sharply reduced. How much money left over? Estimates show that if the US had a universal public run health care system we would save more than a trillion dollars over a 10 year period. (And with the costs of the Iraq War, we need that one trillion plus dollars!)

Estimates for the cost of administering the private system—the corporate bureaucracy, which puts government bureaucracy to shame in red tape—is estimated to run well over 300 billion dollars every year. This is because of the incredibly complex nature of private health insurance, a complexity that is sharply reduced in single payer systems. To compare, while administrative costs run more than 30 percent in the United States, administrative costs in Canada are about half that. You find similar things in other countries. 

There are many other benefits with government-financed health care. With a single payer mechanism, you not only get better and cheaper health care, but you get to choose your provider and you have portability, which means that you don’t lose your health care when you are fired from a job or leave a job for a better one. Hospitals and physicians offices save money because they don’t have to wade through the tangle of insurance company red tape. What is more, doctors get to control their practice again.

Still the Republicans spew all manner of falsehood to scare you away from the system that makes the best sense for individuals and corporations (except private insurance companies). Representative Pete Sessions of Texas said of the SCHIP program that it’s an “attempt to make millions of Americans completely reliant upon the government for their health care needs.” Senator Mel Martinez of Florida said the SCHIP bill would move the United States towards “socialized health care, a Cuban-style health care system, with rationing of care, long waiting lines and, worse yet, no choice.” These are complete lies.

I have never understood why any rational ordinary American would support the Republican Party. Not only do they lie continuously, but they stand completely opposed to the everyday concerns and interests of the working man and woman and their children. The Republican Party is anti-worker and anti-family. They believe in big government in our bedrooms and corporate control over our lives, but they oppose citizens using government to improve the lives of their families. It’s astonishing the degree to which Republican propaganda has confused Americans as to what is really in the citizens interests.

Off-duty and out of uniform, Washington DC police officers James Haskel and Anthony Clay were in Haskel’s sport-utility vehicle looking for a minibike that Haskel thought had been stolen from his home. They found 14-year-old DeOnté Rawlings on the bike and called out to him. Haskel and Clay claimed that DeOnté opened fire. The men say never had a chance to identify themselves as police officers. They chased DeOnté down and Haskel shot him in the head. The gun that Haskel and Clay said DeOnté fired at them has not been found.

Police are angry that Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) agreed to pay for DeOnté’s funeral. DC Fraternal Order of Police President Lou Cannon says many view Fenty’s actions as questionable. He says the mayor should avoid the perception that he’s siding with the victim. Defenders of the cops say that along with the eight shell casings from Haskel’s police-issued 9mm Glock recovered from the scene, three shell casings from a .45-caliber handgun were found, and that there is a damage to the SUV from DeOnté’s alleged gun. 

However, the problems with the story are many. Police are notorious for carrying with them a weapons, ammunition, and other incriminating evidence that they plant on or locate near shooting victims. It is not a problem to scatter .45-caliber shell casings around the scene of a crime to legitimate a claim that the victim returned fire or fired first. Not having a gun makes it even harder to uncover the deception. Anthony Clay drove the car away from the scene of the shooting for several minutes, parking the car in an unknown location before returning to the scene. That the SUV was driven from the scene and then, when found, showed damage from gun fire is highly suspicious. The police officers did not report the shooting, but patrol units were alerted because of technology designed to detect gun fire. A rooftop ShotSpotter sensor told police where Rawlings’ body was. Patrol units arrived to find DeOnté dead with a head wound. DeOnté’s family has asked where the minibike is. 

Just imagine the situation. Here is a 14-year-old black kid being chased by an SUV with two men inside screaming at him. The officers were off duty, out of uniform, and driving a sports utility fan. How was DeOnté supposed to know they were cops? A sport-utility fan with two big men in it screaming at a 14-year old is going to have what effect on the kid on the minibike? What is a kid in a rough neighborhood supposed to think about the situation? Of course he’s going to run. The police ran him down and shot him in the head. This is the phenomenological reality gleened from the cops’ version. 

The eye witness version is even more damning. According to witnesses in the neighborhood, several youths were riding motorbikes on Atlantic Street and in the alleyway behind it. The SUV showed up sometime after 7:00 pm. The SUV made three passes around the block. On its third passes, the SUV and one of the minibikes crossed paths in the alley. The SUV backed up and several shots rang out in quick succession. DeOnté had been shot in the head. Witnesses say only the police fired. They observed DeOnté, lying bleeding to death on the concrere, and the officers doing nothing to save his life.

A DC police official has confirmed what the family has said, that the teen was never considered dangerous. However, it has come to light that police were frustrated with DeOnté because he always refused to help them with investigations. Both official and relatives have reported this fact. DeOnté father has stated publicly that the cops “were trying to make DeOnté into a snitch.” The several visits to the Rawlings home by police questioning him about various crimes that occurred around the city support Mr. Rawlings’ claims.

At a news conference, Mayor Fenty invited Rawlings’ sisters to the microphone. The girls asked why the officers hadn’t been indicted for killing their brother. That’s my question. This case screams homicide.

Dani Klein, Campus Director of the pro-Israel activism group Stand With Us, said in protest of ‘s visit to Columbia University, “Free speech is one thing. Honoring a modern day Hitler is another.” Now in what manner can the Iranian president be compared to Hitler? Is Iran invading other countries? Is Iran pursuing an expansionist policy? Is Iran dividing people based on ethnicity and relegating despised minorities to ghettos? Does Iran have a vast military apparatus capable of taking over the Middle East? Is Iran engaged in a policy of ethnic cleansing? (The only country in the Middle East that approximates this description is Israel.)

Of course, Klein is taking his cue from those around him. Earlier in the day, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Gillerman, likened the Iranian president to Hitler and said that allowing Ahmadinejad to visit Ground Zero would be like allowing a Nazi leader to visit the site. “We are reminded of a similar situation in 1933, when then Columbia President Nicholas Murray Butler hosted a reception for the Nazi ambassador,” Gillerman said. “We ask Columbia and President Bollinger not to dignify Ahmadinejad, do not honor him, and do not emulate President Butler from 1933.”

In response to Gillerman’s claims, the university’s dean, John Coatsworth, said that he would have extended an invitation to Hitler himself had such an appearance been feasible. “If Hitler were at the League of Nations or some meeting in New York, if Hitler were in the United States, and wanted a platform from which to speak… if he were willing to engage in debate and discussion, to be challenged by Columbia students and faculty, we would certainly invite him.” In an era where free speech is rapidly eroding, Columbia still gets it.

It’s long been clear that Abraham Foxman of the ADL has no concept of free speech, and his comments on the Ahmadinejad-Columbia matter provide yet another example of the dim-witted mentality that makes it so hard for the man to see why comparing right-wing Zionists to fascists isn’t such a leap. “It is inappropriate and a perversion of the concept of freedom of speech,” Foxman said of Columbia’s decision. “Columbia University has no moral imperative, no legal imperative, no social imperative to give Ahmadinejad a platform, which he would not give them in Tehran. Why give him the credibility and the respectability of a major institution of higher learning? What message does that send to the students? This is not what the First Amendment is all about.”

Foxman’s argument is this? Because Iran doesn’t allow voices critical of Iran and its allies to be heard in Iranian forums, then the US shouldn’t allow Iranian voices to be heard in American forums. But isn’t that the problem with Iran? Isn’t the argument that Iran is not like the West because it doesn’t have the liberal democratic traditions we enjoy here in the United States. So instead of showing the world why we are more free by allowing a politician we disagree with to speak on one of our college campuses, we are supposed to instead be like Iran and suppress speech with which some members of our society disagree? Make you wonder if Foxman’s mouth and ears are operated by the same brain.