DEEP GREEN PERSPECTIVE

I recently received an email from Ginny Welsch, who is running for Congressman Jim Cooper’s Nashville seat. In it, she said, “I’m afraid that my affiliation as the Green party nominee will harm my chances right now of getting the support I need from other segments of the community. And I can’t risk that at this point, because that is not the focus of my run for Congress. I’ve already been accused of being a Republican plant, running to make sure Cooper’s vote is split and a right winger gets in. I can’t afford to give people who are already unsure about me any ammunition to undermine what I’m trying to do.” She has decided to remove all Green Party references from her website.

Chris Lugo, running as a Green candidate for the Senate seat that Harold Ford, Jr., hopes to win, has faced the same kind of accusations. And, in spite of the fact that the Governor’s race appears to be a shoo-in for Bredesen, Green Party gubernatorial candidate Howard Switzer also finds himself regularly shunned by people who should be his constituency.

This reminds me of something that’s happened to not a few police officers down through the years, when they have attempted to stop an act of domestic violence—let’s be blunt, a guy beating up his wife—and had BOTH parties attack him for trying to break them up. Liberals afraid of a right winger replacing Jim Cooper? Hey, the guy’s apparently already a member of the Heritage Foundation. How much more right wing could an out-front Republican be? Jim Cooper has been called a “Bush Democrat” due to his support for the Central American Free Trade Agreement, Bush’s so-called bankruptcy- and tort reform bills, his unquestioning support for the war on Iraq, and his vote for the bill that denied First-Amendment protections to the internet. He gets good marks from the League of Conservation Voters, but the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) gives him only a 30% approval rating on abortion issues.

Harold Ford, Jr. largely echoes Cooper’s positions, including his lukewarm NARAL ratings and his flag-waving support of the war that’s destroying America’s future, but because he is black it is the liberal thing to do to support his candidacy. I don’t know if that’s reverse racism; it might be perverse racism. Ford is so close to Bush that when the resident visited Memphis trying to drum up support for his attempt to rip off Social Security, he gave Childe Harold a hundred tickets to distribute so there would be some supportive black faces in the room—and Ford did his master’s bidding.

Candidates like Cooper and Ford, who call themselves Democrats but don’t really take a strong egalitarian-populist stand, do not inspire confidence in the electoral process. They inspire cynicism, because they make a sham out of the idea of choice in American politics. Harold and Jim are abusing their constituencies. At election time they woo us with promises of benefits for us and protection from Republican boogeymen, but once we empower them, those benefits never show up and they become the boogeymen. Like abused women, we tolerate this….until enough of us have had enough and we leave. I’ve left, as best as I can. It will take a lot more of us getting fed up to really make a change. Won’t you slip away with me?

Bob Marley and the Wailers–”Top Rankin‘”

Last month, Robert Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer and scion of the Massachusetts Kennedy clan, created quite a stir by publishing, in Rolling Stone magazine, an article meticulously detailing the ways in which he thought the Republican party had illegally altered the outcome of our most recent Presidential election. This is a subject that has generated a lot of conspiracy theory; but Kennedy, a lawyer, included in his article only the material that, as he put it, might “convince a jury.” Going further, in an online interview with PR magazine, he said “I’ve been meeting with attorneys … to devise a litigation strategy. And I would say that very soon we’ll be announcing lawsuits against some of the individuals and companies involved.” Of course, he declined to identify just who the objects of those suits might be.

Leaving aside for a moment the question of his chances of actually prevailing in such a lawsuit, I’d like to speculate on just what kind of relief he could ask for. If the Bush junta stole the election, what then?

Is the next move impeachment?

I don’t think so. Only a legitimately elected president can be impeached, and if Bobby Kennedy prevails, that would mean that George Bush is not the legitimate President of the United States. And that’s where it gets both extremely sticky and very, very exciting, because if he is not and has not been the legitimate President of the United States, then it seems to me that none of his acts—wars, laws, signing statements, judicial appointments—from the Supreme Court on down—nothing the executive branch of the United States government has done in the last four or possibly eight years—has any legal standing. We step back to the laws, regulations, and appointees of January 19, 2001, the last day of the Clinton Administration. That’s what I think.

Now, I don’t have a great opinion of Bill Clinton, though for different reasons than a lot of people. In fact, I think having a few orgasms in the Oval Office was probably one of the best things he did for the country. I agree with the wag who said, “Bill Clinton was the best Republican President this country has ever had.” He kept the lid on Al Gore, for openers. He escalated the drug wars, which resulted in the disenfranchisement of enough Florida voters to cost Al the 2000 election. Bill was a knavish politician who danced, as Lyndon Johnson put it, with them that brung him. This country dozed through the nineties when we could have moved forward.

But it’s someplace to start from. It’s a way to slice through the Gordian knot the Republifacists have tied this country in over the last eight years—let’s face it, if we don’t find a way to undo at one stroke everything Bush, Incorporated has screwed up, it will take another eight years of hard Congressional action to undo it all, with denial and rearguard actions coming from the Republifascist minority all the way, and a hostile Supreme Court—remember, abortion was just a smokescreen to distract everybody’s attention from Roberts and Mussalito’s pro-corporate and unitary executive views.

And that would put us another eight years behind, when the planet is in such crisis that there is scarcely a moment to lose. And I’m being an optimist, I suspect, to think the Demopublicans would have the spine, stomach, and attention for that kind of work. Merely letting bygones be bygones and carrying on as if it was just a minor unpleasant episode that we can put behind us will not work, though this is the path favored by most Democrats, who found Kennedy’s story as welcome as the Downing Street Memos or Ned Lamont, an act of denial as neurotic as the whole Republican lifestyle that Mr. Cheney has declared to be non-negotiable.

Listen up—I’m going to say a four-letter word on the air. Are you ready? Here it comes: COUP.

C-O-U-P—COUP. How long ’till the FCC bans that one for indecency? Coup—do you get it? We had a COUP in this country in the year 2000. I believe Al Gore looked at the idea of fighting it, realized he’d have a thoroughly antagonistic Congress to wrestle with even if he made his claim on the Presidency, and just figured, “screw it, give ‘em enough rope and they’ll hang themselves.” Besides, he knew he had skeletons in his closet that a Republicfascist dominated Congress would totally obsess on.

How hostile would Congress have been? I’m willing to bet the people who brought us Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky would have launched a full-scale investigation of Gore’s marihuana use in the 70’s—hey, if it kept Bork off the Supreme Court it should keep Al out of the Presidency, right? Aren’t we a nation of laws, not men? They had ya by the balls, Al, didn’t they? No wonder he wants to stay out of politics!

But I digress. It boils down to that there was a coup in this country in 2000 (and a Reichstag fire at the twin towers the next year to seal the deal), and the only way to undo it is to recognize it for what it was and take the appropriate, if drastic, steps. We have to get rid of the whole mess at one stroke.

So, as I was saying, what are Bobby Kennedy’s chances of finding a court that will open this can of worms? I don’t think they’re very good, but maybe he can. The U.S. Supreme Court, as hand-picked as Bush, his daddy, and uncle Ron could make it, has just surprised everyone by ruling that the Bush junta has to play by Geneva rules. In effect that makes George, Dick, and Don prosecutable as war criminals, if anyone has the cojones to follow through. Hey, they had as much right to invade Iraq as Hitler had to invade Poland. But making the junta play fair with its captives is a far cry from calling it out on a technical foul. I don’t believe the Supremes will be willing to rock that boat.

Where could Kennedy’s suit get a fair hearing? The International Court of Justice in the Hague has had brave and outspoken things to say about America’s conduct on a number of occasions, but they do not have a police force, let alone an army, to back up their decisions, rendering them, alas, moot.

So, I wish Bobby Kennedy Jr. and his lawsuit well. I hope he does not meet the fate of his illustrious, ill-starred, psychedelic uncles. (WHAT did I just say!? never mind…I’ll tell you that story some other time…) This is a complex and mysterious world, especially when we are seeking to right massive injustice. Things do not always proceed according to the plans of the powerful, but sometimes we must speak the truth whether we think it will change the world or not. Bobby, I’m with you. I’m putting my weird shoulder to the wheel.

music:  Joan Baez–”Carry It On”

The drug companies really care about our health, right? They just want to see a world of healthy, shiny, happy people who don’t need any of their products, right? Wrong—they want a world full of shiny, happy people who pay them money for the drugs that keep them that way. That’s why, when 3rd-world countries who can’t afford even the firms’ most deeply discounted prices for AIDS drugs set out to manufacture them for themselves because it’s cheaper that way, that’s why the drug companies then sue third world countries for intellectual property rights violations. It’s the international equivalent of harassing medical marihuana patients, especially since drug companies have far more resources at their command than AIDS-beleaguered third-world countries.

They get those resources through a truly-breath-taking pricing scheme. Let’s look at a couple of examples:

There’s a drug called Matulane that is used to treat Hodgkin’s lymphoma, originally introduced by Roche pharmaceuticals at sixty cents a pill. Considering typical manufacturing markups, let’s assume that this pill cost them thirty cents a pill to produce. The pill now sells in the U.S. for $55 a pill, according to the website of the Parker and Waichman law firm. Let’s translate that into something else. Apples cost abut $5 a bushel to produce, roughly twelve cents a pound. If apples were given that kind of markup, they would cost twenty-two dollars a pound in your local supermarket or health food store.

Here’s another way to think about the markups involved in drug prices: Cipro, the anti-anthrax drug that the government is so eager to stockpile, has what Bayer Pharmaceuticals terms an”average wholesale price” of $4.67 per pill, but the company has generously dropped the price to an average of eighty-five cents a pill in view of the government’s interest in buying so many. Doesn’t that seem wonderfully public-spirited?

Umm…Bayer’s cost of manufacture for Cipro is twenty cents a pill. Third world drug makers, with different salary scales and accounting methods, say they can produce it for a nickel, but let’s just focus on Bayer for now.

Suppose the price of oil were marked up like that, what would that look like?

Well, that depends on if you’re in the Mideast or not. If you’re not Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Iraq, your oil production costs are around six dollars a barrel, which means that a Cipro-proportioned markup gets you hundred-and-forty dollar a barrel oil. Based on current ratios, that’s six dollar a gallon gas.

If you’re one of those three countries with easy oil, your costs are only about a buck and a half a barrel, and that—oops, that gets oil at only about thirty-five dollars a barrel, buck-fifty a gallon, less than half the current price. Hmm….. No wonder those guys have so much money to throw around! When Bush posed in front of the “Mission Accomplished” banner, is this the mission he was proud to have accomplished? He’s an oilman, after all, and it’s Saudi Arabia’s reinvested petrodollars that, along with the Chinese, are supporting America’s colossal debt and keeping Bush’s ass out of a sling, to use a bit of technical jargon. But, I digress.

With profit margins so outlandish, the drug companies surely must be spending lots of money on research to find new, groundbreaking drugs and guarantee that the ones they are already selling are effective, right? After all, the argument they use when they sic their lawyers on third world countries is that the companies have spent money on research that is not reflected in the manufacturing cost of the drugs, and so impoverished third world countries are keeping important research from being financed by making their own drugs.

It sounds like a reasonable thesis, doesn’t it? It’s not. Let’s parse the drug companies’ argument and see what it’s really made of.

First part of the parse—drug companies are spending lots of money on research. Well, on the face of it they are—about forty billion dollars a year. But Dean Baker of the Center of Economic and Policy Research points out that this is only about a quarter of big pharma’s excess profits, estimated at a hundred and fifty billion out of the country’s total drug bill of two-hundred and twenty billion dollars. Furthermore, much of this research goes into “copycat drugs,” drugs that have the same effect as big-selling medications but are different enough to be patentable.

For instance, Nexium is a knockoff of Prilosec, developed and marketed because Prilosec’s patent was running out, and it had been a twenty-seven billion dollar cash cow for its owners, the AstraZeneca Company. AstraZeneca spent a half billion dollars promoting Nexium, which even its own studies show is only marginally better at combating heartburn than Prilosec. At a hundred and twenty dollars a month per prescription, they have been well paid for their investment, as millions of television addicts have demanded Nexium. Meanwhile, Prilosec, which will work as well as Nexium about 95% of the time, is now available over the counter for about twenty dollars a month—or people could change their diets and eating habits and avoid heartburn at no cost whatsoever. That’s what I did. But Nooo….that doesn’t contribute to the gross national product! We gotta increase the GNP! Oh dear, I’m digressing again.

These copycat drugs soak up enough research money so that instead of one out of four dollars going for breakthrough research, it’s more like one out of ten dollars going for real research. And furthermore, according to the industry’s own data, it costs drug companies about seven times as much to perform a clinical trial as it costs those nasty socialists at the National Institute of Health. All those kickbacks to doctors, I guess. Anyway, to follow the math on down, that means that only one out of seventy dollars spent on prescription drugs really goes into basic research. So, out of a hundred and fifty billion, that’s about two billion. NIH spends about six billion and gives the results away, which the drug companies take full advantage of. Hmm….

Okay, parse of the second part: they stand behind their products—they have done research that demonstrates that the drugs they sell are effective. I’m sure I could do a whole show on how big a joke that is, but here are a couple of examples.

Celebrex is advertised as a miracle-working anti-inflammatory drug. It costs about a hundred and fifty dollars a month. Ibuprofen works about as well for most people, and costs about five dollars a month. Millions of people are being persuaded to take Celebrex by advertising and their doctors (who are persuaded by kickbacks and promotions from the drug kingpins) when they would be just as well off on the moral equivalent of aspirin.

For another example: studies appeared to show that a drug called Pravachol “lowered the risk of stroke in patients with coronary heart disease by 19%.” Again, looking at what the statistics mean, writer Malcolm Gladwell points out in the New Yorker that this amounts to preventing one stroke per thousand people, which, given the drug’s expense, means that it costs about 1.2 million dollars for each stroke prevented. There are cheaper ways to prevent strokes—smoking marihuana appears to be one of them–and furthermore, the average patient in the study was a 62 year old male, while the average stroke victim is a woman over 70—and when the statistics for women over seventy in the study were analyzed, Pravachol users actually had more strokes than those on placebos.

So maybe this shows you that, when I rant about drug companies’ ill-gotten gains, I’m not just blowing hot air. The drug companies are vampires, sucking blood and growing fat at the expense of the rest of us. It’s time for a fundamental change in health care policy in America, a change that puts personal health ahead of corporate profits.

music—Richard Thompson&Fred Frith–”March of the Cosmetic Surgeons”

Dr. Jawad Al-Ali, director of the oncology center at the largest hospital in Basra, Iraq, is seeing things he’s never seen before. “Two strange phenomena have come about in Basra which I have never seen before. The first is double and triple cancers in one patient. For example, leukemia and cancer of the stomach. We had one patient with two cancers — one in his stomach and another in his kidney. Months later, primary cancer was developing in his other kidney — he had three different cancer types. The second is the clustering of cancer in families. We have 58 families here with more than one person affected by cancer. . . . My wife has nine members of her family with cancer.” He further states, “Children in particular are susceptible to DU poisoning. They have a much higher absorption rate as their blood is being used to build and nourish their bones and they have a lot of soft tissues. Bone cancer and leukemia used to be diseases affecting them the most. However, cancer of the lymph system, which can develop anywhere on the body and has rarely been seen before the age of 12, is now also common.”

(quoted by Robert Koehler on his website Commonwonders.com)

Dr. Al-Ali is not the only one noticing this disturbing trend in Iraq. A UN commission that studied the aftermath of the first Gulf war found that “Cancer appears to have increased between seven and 10 times and deformities between four and six times,” including such anomalies as anophthalmic children—children born without eyes.

Nor are the Iraqis the only ones suffering from elevated birth defect levels. Neil McKay, writing in the Scotland Sunday Herald, notes that “a study of Gulf war veterans showed that 67% had children with severe illnesses, missing eyes, blood infections, respiratory problems and fused fingers.”

This seems to be traceable to the U.S.’s use of depleted uranium munitions in Iraq, both in the first Gulf War and in our current attempt to subdue the unruly, ungrateful people we have liberated over there. During the first Gulf War, the U.S. Army claims to have used about 300 tons of depleted uranium munitions. So far, the official tally for Gulf War 2 is 1700 tons. That’s 2,000 tons of uranium that’s about half as radioactive as unrefined uranium—depleted uranium has had the most radioactive fraction removed from it—it’s what’s left over after uranium is processed for use in nuclear reactors, or to make bombs. So it’s recycled. Isn’t that nice?

Now there is some controversy over whether this uranium is dangerous or not, but to me it’s kind of like the controversy over global warming—the only people disputing its danger are the ones who have much to gain by claiming it’s safe. There is a body of “official” scientific research by the military that purports to prove that low levels of radiation are not harmful, while at the same time there is plenty of “unofficial” science from people like Dr. Rosalie Bertell indicating that low levels of radiation are, in fact, poisoning us and our planet as we speak.

One of the strongest voices to speak out against depleted Uranium has been the man the Pentagon originally sent in to Iraq to assess the situation. Dr. Doug Rokke, a 36-year Army Veteran, didn’t start out as a peacenik. He gladly bombed Vietnam. It took going to Iraq to snap him into a conversion experience. He said: “When I went in as the director of the DU project, my total intention was to ensure that the military could use uranium munitions in combat, simply because the job is to kill and destroy. And what I found out, when I did the research, is that you can’t use them because you can’t clean up and you can’t do the medical. I reached that conclusion and I told them so. I can guarantee you that they didn’t like that conclusion coming from their expert. They were really, really unhappy.” Now he calls America’s use of radioactive weapons (let’s forget this “depleted uranium” jazz and call a spade a spade) a “war crime.” Because he has refused to be silent about his findings, Dr. Rokke is no longer one of the Army’s top Nuclear Medical Science Officers; he is teaching high school science in Illinois.

Let’s consider for a moment the effects of these radioactive weapons. Uranium is a very dense, but soft, metal, and it has the peculiar quality of being pyrophoric—it burns—that is, oxidizes—at a low enough temperature so that the friction of the shell traveling through the air is enough to ignite it, spreading radioactive ash in its wake. Because it is so dense, it is used for what are called “armor piercing” shells. When the U.S. shot up the Iraqi army’s retreat from Kuwait in 1991, the reason all those vehicles caught fire and burned so intensely is that they were hit with uranium shells. Now the U.S. is using radioactive weapons in a counterinsurgency operation, against people who do not have tanks or armor. What’s going on here? What’s wrong with this picture? Why are they using armor piercing shells on people who don’t have armor?

For the same reason the Bush junta ignores global warming, that’s why. If they admit it’s happening, then they have to do something about it, but they don’t want to do anything about it, because they welcome the catastrophic effects of both global warming and radioactive munitions. They think there are too many people in the world, and this, they think, is a good way to get rid of some of the surplus—not just Iraqis, and any of those unpleasant brown-skinned people who live downwind from them, but also lower-class Americans who have nothing better to do with their lives than join the Army. That’s why they won’t recognize the real nature of Gulf War syndrome, why they treat it pyschiatrically as post-traumatic stress syndrome when they treat it at all, why the VA has had its funds cut and soldiers are having their benefits cut and being denied the right to vote by the same Republifascist legislators who cynically claim that they are the ones who “support our troops.” What lying scum.

But the Bush junta, no matter how clever they think they are, still earn the title of “the gang that can’t think straight.” There is no wall in the air that will protect the continental United States and all its inhabitants, from the President on down, from those two thousand tons of radioactive uranium that we have unleashed. Chris Busby, who is a chemical physicist, a member of the British government’s radiation risk committee and a founder of the European Committee on Radiation Risk, said, “We used to think (DU) traveled up to a hundred miles. It looks like it goes quite around the planet.”

So…they’re not just mistreating a few ragheads in Guantanamo, folks. The Bush-Cheney junta’s callous, criminal disregard for human life is blowing radioactive uranium into your lungs and mine and everybody else’s. Everybody. Every man, woman and child on this planet. The gang that can’t think straight is poisoning its own grandchildren. I don’t think it gets any lower than that.

music: The Waterboys, “His Word Is Not His Bond”