News of the Month

December 13, 2003

I want to begin the News of the Month tonight with a follow-up story – one of those stories that was so important, so crucial to understanding how our country is being run today, that the few of our corporate media outlets who carried it buried it in their back pages. Last month, you may remember our guest was Lauren Ross, an Austin environmental engineer and global justice activist, telling us about the events that accompanied the meeting of the World Trade Organization in Cancun in September. Well, last month in Miami, the conspirators who are trying to build the Free Trade Area of the Americas – FTAA – met to continue their work.

Lauren participated in the protests there, too, because despite name, the FTAA is not about free trade. “Free trade” is the latest buzz-phrase – the latest lie – that our corporate masters have thought up to deceive those ever-growing numbers of people who don’t bother to look past the lies they see on the corporation-owned media. The Free Trade Area of the Americas is to be a network of tight controls over the way nations may exchange goods and money in this hemisphere; the only thing free about it is the fact that under it, corporations are pretty much free to do pretty much whatever they want, free of any controls by the governments involved.

Sounds pretty much like a Libertarian’s dream, doesn’t it? Well, no, actually it isn’t. Libertarianism – true Libertarianism – is about the freedom of the individual person to live his or her life free of outside control. Somehow, and I’ve said this before, the idea of Libertarianism has been perverted by a myth that’s been carefully crafted by those with the money to do it – the myth that corporations are persons, with all the rights and privileges of persons. The FTAA is all about giving “artificial persons,” that is, corporations, more rights and freedoms than “natural persons” – that is, us. “Free trade” as used by the corporate power-brokers today is a lie.

But back to Miami. Recently, I think you all know, the Bush junta steamrolled an $87 billion allocation of your children’s money through Congress, supposedly for the rebuilding of Iraq. Hidden in there was a “tiny” little item – just eight and a half million dollars – to help the Miami police “defend” their city against the “violent” demonstrators against the FTAA at last month’s meeting. Let me read a non-corporate news report about that violence and who perpetrated it; the report is by Starhawk, one of the leaders of the resistance community of which Lauren Ross is an active member; it was written on December 8, as a reflection on the actions in Miami.

“For those of us who participated in the protests against the FTAA, the Free Trade Area of the Americas, in Miami the third week in November, it’s a bit hard to feel victorious. We are bruised, battered, worried about companeros still in jail, and grieving for Jordan Feder, a young medic who died of meningitis after the action. We’ve been harassed, arrested, tear gassed, pepper sprayed, hit, beaten, assaulted, lied about, and in some cases literally tortured and sexually assaulted in jail, and we’ve stared directly into the naked red gaze of the New American Fascism.”

Let’s talk about Jordan Feder for a minute. Mr. Feder was a support member of the medical team in Miami. According to one member of his group, “he never treated a single injured person in Miami. The only medic role he fulfilled was on Friday, November 21, when he volunteered to decontaminate medical instruments used to decontaminate people from the day before. He never had person-to-person contact in the capacity of a street medic during the actions.” Another person there said that in the process of that decontamination, he cleaned up some “fine white powder” that had been spread over everything. Add to that, the fact that he was a healthy young man – and healthy young people are able to overcome meningitis infections unless they are caused by a massive dose of a contaminant of some kind. You can draw your own conclusions.

Starhawk continues:

“We were Iraqued—that is, we were attacked not for anything we’d done, but for someone’s inflated fears of what we might do; shot, gassed, beaten and arrested for weapons of destruction we did not have; targeted for who we are and what we stand for, not for acts we had committed. The 8.5 million dollars that was allocated for the policing of this event came out of the 87 billion dollar appropriations bill for Iraq. Miami was the Bush policy of pre-emptive bullying brought home.

“For true totalitarian control, misrepresenting facts, telling a false story, is not enough. Total control requires control over the frame of the story, the meaning of the language you use, the boundaries of what it is possible to think about. So ‘violence’ becomes a word whose meaning changes radically when it is applied to protestors as opposed to agents of the state. ‘Violence’ is simply not applied to police by the media or the political powers that be. The use of sound bombs, pepper spray, rubber, wooden and plastic bullets, wooden batons, bean bag pellets, and tear gas, illegal arrests, beatings, deprivation of basic human rights, medical care, food and water, overt torture, and sexual assault are properly characterized by the word ‘restraint,’ as in ‘the police acted with restraint.’

“Friends of mine who were watching the news on the days of action all reported a similar experience. They saw police move in on a crowd of peaceful protestors, swinging billy clubs and firing tear gas and rubber bullets. What they heard was commentary suggesting that protestors were ‘violent’, and that therefore the police were justified in whatever measures they chose.

“Applied to activists, ‘violence’ means ‘any act of opposition to total military and police control, any act of resistance from walking in the wrong place to talking to the wrong people to allying with other suspects.’ Above all, any attempts to remove oneself from the all-seeing gaze, to mask oneself, to carve out any space free of that hostile red arc light, are evidence of violence.

“Totalitarian control is deeply racist, sexist, and homophobic, for it depends on division and separation. Police attempted to divide the unions from the direct action folk, by pushing the action into the area where the permitted labor march was scheduled to go, attacking the crowd there, attacking union members and punishing them for associating with ‘potentially dangerous’ others.

What we had in Miami is yet one more police riot. The feds gave the Miami police more than $8.5 million to control the “violence” – they gave them, s they’ve been doing at all these actions against the injustice of the “free trade” lie, massive amounts of misinformation.

And, speaking of misinformation, did any of you participate in the “house parties” sponsored by MoveOn.org last Sunday? All around the country, people like me opened their homes to show an hour-long documentary called “Uncovered – the Whole Truth about the Iraq War.” It consists of expert after expert, all veterans of government service in the CIA, the diplomatic service, the military, and so on, demolishing the tissue of lies told by the Bush junta to “justify” our invasion of the nation of Iraq. We see Donald Rumsfeld delivering US money to Saddam Hussein for his chemical weapons program, and we see Donald Rumsfeld telling us that Saddam Hussein had (gasp!) chemical weapons. We see Dick Cheney saying that Iraq was ready to use its nuclear arsenal on the United States, and Dick Cheney saying he couldn’t remember ever having heard anyone say that Iraq had nuclear weapons. We see the lies, right there on the screen. If you’d like to buy a copy of the DVD, go to www.truthuncovered.com; they’re not expensive.

Here at home, our witless – excuse me, fearless – leaders have submitted a really enormous pork barrel of a budget to the Congress. Here, also courtesy of MoveOn.org, are some highlights; I know all you Libertarians will be especially pleased at all the ways King George has thought of to transfer your money into the pockets of his investors. Long live le roi – the ROI – the king!

· $50 million to build an indoor rainforest in Iowa

· $2 million for the First Tee Program, to get young people into golf

· $338 thousand for the Alabama Beef Connection

· $225 thousand for the National Wild Turkey Federation, a hunting concern

· $4 million for the International Fertilizer Development Center

(I don’t even have to tell you the punch line to that joke.)

· $595 million for Trilogy, an FBI information technology program

· $398 million for prison buildings and facilities

· $6 million for a Police Athletic League

· $30 million for the Southwest Border Prosecutors Initiative

· $7.1 million for construction of an international narcotics control law enforcement academy in Roswell, NM

· $120 million for a classified Defense Department project

· $225 thousand for a shopping center in Adelanto, CA

Of course, all these put together are a drop in the bucket compared to the $87 billion we’re paying VP Dick Cheney’s company, Halliburton, and other high-dollar investors in the CheneyBushCorp, to repair the billions of dollars worth of damage we did to the nation of Iraq.

You know what really scares me? People who think they know God’s mind and God’s will. Hmph! As if our puny little minds could “know” the mind of the Divine. Be that as it may, the state of Texas is gifted with more than its share of these blasphemers, anyway. We’ll talk about some of them when we pass the microphone to our guest for the night, but there’s another one I want to discuss with you first – Tom DeLay. In the words of Jim Hightower, “Tom DeLay thinks he’s God’s man in Congress.” Why? Listen to this, also by Mr. Hightower:

“For us, the importance of DeLay is that (1) he is even more rabidly right-wing than the Bushites; (2) he controls what the House does and doesn't do; (3) he has cobbled together a shadowy network of money, lobbying, and grass-roots troops that exerts unrelenting right-wing pressure on the entire Republican agenda (and therefore on the country's agenda); and (4) he intends to be there long after W. is gone. On the other hand, the more America knows of DeLay, the better off we are, for he is not merely an ideological extremist – he's nutty, frightening, and butt-ugly to boot.

“DeLay did not begin as a firebrand nutball. A pest exterminator in suburban Houston, he read a how-to-campaign book and, in 1978, got himself elected to the Texas Legislature. There, he amounted to little more than furniture: He partied around, achieved next to nothing, held no leadership posts, and, as one of his colleagues recalls, was widely considered ‘an absolute zero.’

“He literally carried a book around with every lobbyist's name and the amounts of money they had donated to the GOP and the Democrats. As the price for moving their bills, he demanded that lobbyists give more to Republicans and less to Democrats, even demanding that they get rid of Democratic lobbyists and hire Republicans. ‘If you want to play in our revolution,’ he told them bluntly, ‘you have to live by our rules.’

“In ’98, when (House Speaker Newt) Gingrich imploded, DeLay realized that he was too hot to win the speakership himself, so he put forward his chief deputy from the whip’s office – the mild-mannered, colorless, and fiercely loyal Rep. Dennis Hastert of Illinois. Hastert is now Speaker, but DeLay – who has subsequently risen to majority leader – writes the script.

“Tom is eaten up with Christian zealotry, recognizing no separation between his rigid fundamentalist extremism and his powerful public position. He openly declares himself sent by God to ‘stand up for a biblical worldview in everything I do and everywhere I am.’ For him, politics is not a battle over policy, but a ‘battle of souls.’ He says that he seeks a ‘God-centered’ nation that, among other things, would discriminate against homosexuals, curb contraception, outlaw abortion, end the separation of church and state, and post the Ten Commandments in every school (even though Tom has violated more than a few of the Ten himself).”

Finally, I’d like to lead into our guest for the night by reading to you an excerpt of an editorial by Austin Chronicle editor Louis Black in the current issue of that newspaper:

“The assault on the building of Planned Parenthood’s new clinic continues. Chris Danze and gang are determined to identify, harass, and intimidate anyone who works on the project. If one is against abortion on humane grounds, it seems hard to justify brutal, bullying tactics to reach your goal. Judging your fellow humans, attacking their livelihoods, and indirectly threatening their persons in the name of deeply held religious beliefs seems both hypocritical and remarkably presumptuous. If one justifies any action by citing the Bible, one should be certain he or she is following all of the Bible’s dictates passionately and clearly. Instead, we see the smorgasbord approach, where the outrageously self-righteous pick and choose their mandates. Equating themselves with the Almighty, they feel fit to pass judgment on others rather than examine their own lives. …

“… Danze and gang evidence no … compassion or rigorous commitment. When quoted, Danze doesn’t even pretend to care much about the unborn. Again and again, he cites the family and social standards. He is happy to threaten the livelihoods of those he disagrees with in service of the goal of dictating to all of us his concept of the acceptable boundaries of social behavior. How those who rant against liberal social engineering can advocate this boycott argues for the characterization of its motivations as more arrogant bullying than moral concern. …

“They picket, protest, and try to cut the funding of Planned Parenthood instead of supporting its health, consultation, and planning agenda, which if more fully implemented would result in fewer abortions, not more. Many, if not most, of the anti-abortion groups and allied politicians also oppose sex education, unrestricted health counseling, and readily available contraception. Further, they not only don’t support but also actively oppose social programs concerned with a child’s health and opportunities after birth or the mother’s health, emotional well-being, welfare, or job opportunities.

“The groups trying to stop Planned Parenthood’s construction also want to limit your neighbor’s, your friend’s, your children’s, as well as your and my options and rights. Those of us who believe in freedom, education, and responsibility have to work to stop them.”