Last night, Bill Moyers Journal (PBS, Friday nights, 10:00 PM) had the most stunning revelations about the financial crisis I’ve heard yet. His guest was William Black, former Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention and now professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. Black was the man who, during the Savings &Loan crisis of the late 1980s, accused House Speaker Jim Wright and 5 U.S. Senators, including John McCain, of doing favors for the S&L’s to get contributions in return. Now what he’s saying is that the current financial crisis is a case of fraud, fraud that has been warned about since at least 2004, and which has been enabled and covered up by two Secretaries of the Treasury, Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner. All should read the whole transcript (http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04032009/transcript1.html) but here are some highlights.
To the question of how the CEOs and bankers committed the fraud, Black answered that they made “really bad loans, because they pay better.” In other words, they can charge higher interest. Then “you grow extremely rapidly, in other words, you’re a Ponzi-like scheme.” Finally, you employ “leverage” which means “borrowing a lot of money” to make still more loans. Thus you get record profits early on, and get rich on bonuses. Also, I assume, then you get out if you can, with your money in the Bahamas.
Bill Moyers seemed to have a hard time believing this: banks and CEOs deliberately set out to make bad loans? Black answered with an unqualified “yes.” Then came the questions about how to find evidence of the fraud. Black pointed to “specialty lenders, the ones who did most of their work in the sub-prime and what’s called Alt-A, liars’ loans.” Liars’ loans. The term was apparently deliberate, meaning the lenders knew they were fraudulent. Because not only are income and job history and assets not checked for liars’ loan, “you get a better deal if you inflate your income and your job history and your assets.” Such loans were also called “ninja” loans in the trade, meaning no income verification, no job verification, no asset verification.
The next step, as we now know, was to create complex instruments to essentially hide the “crushing risk” that was known to be lurking in all these bad loans. And then get triple-A ratings on this toxic stuff from the rating agencies, which rating signifies that there is “zero-risk.” It was only after Congress investigated these rating agencies, a year ago and after the collapse, that it found that some rating agencies had never looked at a single loan file. One statement from Fitch, the smallest of the rating agencies, said “there was the appearance of fraud in nearly every file we examined.” After the crisis, of course. So, here is a short summary from Black:
“…the investment banker that—we call it pooling—puts together these bad mortgages, these liars’ loans, creates the toxic waste of these derivatives. All of them do that. And then they sell it to the world and the world just thinks because it has a triple-A rating it must actually be safe. Well, instead, there are 60 and 80% losses on these things, because of course they, in reality, are toxic waste.”
This is where we had got to last Fall when Treasury Secretary Paulson made the problem public, and warned that without government bailouts, the whole financial system could collapse. And Alan Greenspan, at one point, claimed he had no idea there was so much trouble in the industry he was supposed to be monitoring. Except that William Black also pointed out this little fact: that “the FBI warned, in September 2004, that there was an epidemic of mortgage fraud” that would produce a major crisis. The only problem being that after 9/11, the Justice Dept transferred 500 white-collar fraud specialists to terrorism investigations, and the Bushies refused to replace them. The result is that even today, according to Black, with a crisis 100 times worse than the S&L crisis, there are “one-fifth as many FBI agents” to work this crisis as worked the S&L one.
As to the insiders who are now supposed to be fixing all this for the Obama administration, and us, consider these stunners from William Black. Not only did the Clinton administration collude in getting rid of the regulations in the Glass-Steagall law, they also passed a law to hamstring a heroic regulator, Brooksley Born, who was trying to regulate exotic (toxic) derivatives. And guess who did the dirty deed: Lawrence Summers (Clinton’s second Treasury Secretary, now chief financial adviser to Obama), Robert Rubin (Clinton’s first Treasury Secretary, senior adviser of Citigroup before he resigned under fire), and Phil Gramm (then head of the Senate Banking Committee):
“…Summers, Rubin, and Phil Gramm came together to say not only will we block this particular regulation. We will pass a law that says you can’t regulate.”
The law was the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which kept derivatives transactions and credit default swaps free of government regulation. Nice.
Regarding Timothy Geithner, the head of the New York Federal Reserve when all this took place, Black says flatly that he is “covering up. Just like Paulson did before him. Geithner is publicly saying that it’s going to take $2 trillion taxpayer dollars to deal with this problem. But they’re allowing all the banks to report that they’re not only solvent, but fully capitalized. Both statements can’t be true. It can’t be that they need $2 trillion, because they have massive losses, and that they’re fine.”
I don’t know about you, but this is enough. Enough to make my blood boil. Enough to demand from the U.S. Congress a full-fledged investigation of this whole mess—never mind “looking forward” as Obama likes to say, never mind protecting the “confidence” of the average American. Investigate, expose, and jail, if necessary, those who profited from all this, as Bernie Madoff is being jailed. Most important--and the same is true of the war crimes of the Bushies—without an investigation and the necessary information about what went wrong and exactly how it went wrong and exactly who facilitated it, there can be only another crisis in the years to come: one we may never get out of.
Lawrence DiStasi
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Money Ex Nihilo
Since our little economic crisis took center stage, I have been trying, vainly, to understand it, along the way trying to understand money and a little concept called “debt-based currency.” Recently, I think I’ve got it—not thoroughly, to be sure, but enough to be able to perceive a monstrous scam when I see one, thanks to an amazing little article I suggest everyone read: “Dollar Deception: How Banks Secretly Create Money,” by Ellen Brown, J.D. on http://www.webofdebt.com/articles/dollar-deception.php. It doesn’t have to do with AIG or with credit default swaps or securitized mortgages. It has to do with the basic idea of money creation, who creates it, and how.
Begin with some common misconceptions. 1) The Federal Reserve is the nation’s bank, a public, government entity. Wrong. The Federal Reserve is actually a consortium of private banks, which creates money and lends it to the government, to us, at a nice rate of interest. 2) The Federal Reserve, by creating its Federal Reserve notes, i.e. printing all that money we all lust after, makes most of the money supply. Also wrong. Forget paper money: most of the money that’s created is actually created by plain old banks when they make loans. 3) The money that banks create is actually backed by something substantial, like gold or silver. Wrong. The United States went off the gold standard in 1933, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt made this move to keep what money was left in the United States from fleeing to foreign banks. Since then, the legendary stash of gold in Fort Knox supposedly backing our paper dollars no longer exists. Your dollars are backed by literally nothing except the U.S. government’s pledge to honor them in some way that is not clear. It’s a bit of a magic trick, kept afloat by the faith of people and businesses (and countries like China and Saudi Arabia which hold so much U.S. debt that if they ever decided to call it in, we’d all be in the sewer).
But let’s get back to basics. Banks create money out of thin air. Ellen Brown cites an astonishing lawsuit that illustrates this in an amazing way. In 1969, a man named Daly was about to lose his home to a bank that held a $14,000 mortgage on it. Daly, a lawyer, decided to sue the bank for not having “consideration,” or something of value, backing its loan to him. In court, the bank’s president admitted this was true, saying that the bank routinely created money “out of thin air” for its loans, which he said was standard practice in the industry. The judge, a Justice of the Peace named Mahoney, reiterated what he had heard: “Plaintiff admitted that it, in combination with the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis…did create the entire $14,000 in money and credit upon its own books by bookkeeping entry. That this was the consideration used to support the note…[and that] the money and credit first came into existence when they created it. Mr. Morgan [the bank president] admitted that no United States Law or Statute existed which gave him the right to do this…” Given these facts—that the bank was actually extending credit without backing its loans with anything it actually had in its vaults—the court ruled against the bank’s foreclosure claim, and Daly kept his house.
Now elementary banking theory seems to partially admit this. It grants that since at least the 17th century, in a practice started by goldsmiths, bankers have engaged in what is known as “fractional reserve banking.” That is, when people deposited their gold with goldsmiths, and received paper notes testifying to the amount and allowing them to redeem the gold when they needed it, the goldsmiths holding the gold noticed something. People never came all at once to redeem their gold. In fact, at any one time, only about 10 or 20% of the gold was needed to redeem the notes people presented. This meant that the goldsmith could actually lend from 5 to 10 times as much money (in notes) as they had backed with gold. This became the basis for “fractional reserve banking” and most currency: except in situations like the Depression, where everyone suddenly wants to redeem paper bank notes for gold or silver in what is known as a “run” on banks, banks could lend out—literally create—far more money than they actually had in reserves. Ellen Brown quotes some notable bankers on this.
Sir Josiah Stamp, president of the Bank of England in the 1920s:
“The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented.”
Or Graham Towers, Governor of the Bank of Canada from 1935 to 1955:
“Banks create money. That is what they are for. . . The manufacturing process to make money consists of making an entry in a book. That is all. . . .Each and every time a Bank makes a loan . . . new Bank credit is created -- brand new money.”
Or Robert B. Anderson, Treasury Secretary under President Eisenhower:
“[W]hen a bank makes a loan, it simply adds to the borrower's deposit account in the bank by the amount of the loan. The money is not taken from anyone else's deposit; it was not previously paid in to the bank by anyone. It's new money, created by the bank for the use of the borrower.”
To get some idea of the amount of money that gets created this way, and its inflationary effect (creating money means more dollars (demand) chasing the same amount of goods (supply), hence prices tend to rise) Brown cites the Fed’s own money supply (M3) statistics. First of all, new money has to be created all the time, i.e. borrowed, “just to pay the interest owed to bankers. A dollar lent at 5 percent interest becomes 2 dollars in 14 years. That means the money supply has to double every 14 years just to cover the interest owed on the money existing at the beginning of this 14-year cycle. The Federal Reserve’s own figures confirm that M3 has doubled or more every 14 years since 1959. That means that every 14 years, banks siphon off as much money in interest as there was in the entire economy 14 years earlier. This tribute is paid for lending something the banks never actually had to lend, making it perhaps the greatest scam ever perpetrated…”
Now think about it. Bankers, and especially those in the big banks like Citibank and Morgan and Chase and Wells Fargo and Bank of America, have been getting rich on this “greatest scam ever perpetrated” for years, a scam that at one time was called usury. But not content with making billions on interest, especially from the difference between the rate they pay to borrow the money from the Federal Reserve and the outrageous rate they have been allowed, since 1981, to charge their credit card customers (one of my bank credit cards just informed me that my interest rate was being raised about 4%, the difference between the essentially 1% they get it for and the 13% they now charge me being their profit, not to mention the profit they make from poorer folks whom they charge 25 and 30% for the same credit), they had to get into “subprime” mortgages and complicated securitized debt instruments as well, so they could make even more obscene profits. All of which came a cropper when the housing bubble burst and all that debt going bad (I gather that that debt or money owed them is what banks tend to use as “consideration”) threatened to take the whole financial system down with them. And which they then had the nerve to beg the Federal Government via taxpayers to rescue them from. And which the government, using taxpayer dollars, urged the sucker public to agree to because otherwise we’d all be doomed.
Now, with a new president to hopefully instill some root sense into the whole system, we find that his top advisers, the Summers and Geithners and Emanuels and Goolsbees, are not only “centrist” and rooted in the financial system themselves, as are all our so-called representatives who derive the bulk of their contributions from this same financial sector, but in practice determined to revive and maintain the same bankers and the same system that brought us all to the brink of financial Armageddon in the first place.
So consider. Bankers create money out of nothing. And then charge us and the government (also us) interest on it. Not a bad way to make a living, one you’d think would be enough for these charlatans (who, by the way, pay their working-class tellers about $11 an hour to start). But no. Greed, by definition, knows no moderation, never says ‘this is enough.’ No, greed is infinite. Until, that is, the people finally wake up and get fed up and cry “foul.” Some of that has been happening already regarding the bonuses to the AIG scoundrels. Now what one hopes is that the outrage will continue until all banks and bankers and their whole system are truly brought to heel, along with insurance companies and the rest of the Wall Street bunco artists. How this might happen is not something I’m competent to predict (Ellen Brown suggests establishing a true government bank that prints its own money but doesn’t charge itself interest; think of the savings!) But perhaps we can all find out before it’s too late. Meantime, next time you see your banker, you might let him know that you know: Money ex nihilo might sound godlike, but it’s more like what Freud said it symbolized—the doings of the other end.
Lawrence DiStasi
Begin with some common misconceptions. 1) The Federal Reserve is the nation’s bank, a public, government entity. Wrong. The Federal Reserve is actually a consortium of private banks, which creates money and lends it to the government, to us, at a nice rate of interest. 2) The Federal Reserve, by creating its Federal Reserve notes, i.e. printing all that money we all lust after, makes most of the money supply. Also wrong. Forget paper money: most of the money that’s created is actually created by plain old banks when they make loans. 3) The money that banks create is actually backed by something substantial, like gold or silver. Wrong. The United States went off the gold standard in 1933, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt made this move to keep what money was left in the United States from fleeing to foreign banks. Since then, the legendary stash of gold in Fort Knox supposedly backing our paper dollars no longer exists. Your dollars are backed by literally nothing except the U.S. government’s pledge to honor them in some way that is not clear. It’s a bit of a magic trick, kept afloat by the faith of people and businesses (and countries like China and Saudi Arabia which hold so much U.S. debt that if they ever decided to call it in, we’d all be in the sewer).
But let’s get back to basics. Banks create money out of thin air. Ellen Brown cites an astonishing lawsuit that illustrates this in an amazing way. In 1969, a man named Daly was about to lose his home to a bank that held a $14,000 mortgage on it. Daly, a lawyer, decided to sue the bank for not having “consideration,” or something of value, backing its loan to him. In court, the bank’s president admitted this was true, saying that the bank routinely created money “out of thin air” for its loans, which he said was standard practice in the industry. The judge, a Justice of the Peace named Mahoney, reiterated what he had heard: “Plaintiff admitted that it, in combination with the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis…did create the entire $14,000 in money and credit upon its own books by bookkeeping entry. That this was the consideration used to support the note…[and that] the money and credit first came into existence when they created it. Mr. Morgan [the bank president] admitted that no United States Law or Statute existed which gave him the right to do this…” Given these facts—that the bank was actually extending credit without backing its loans with anything it actually had in its vaults—the court ruled against the bank’s foreclosure claim, and Daly kept his house.
Now elementary banking theory seems to partially admit this. It grants that since at least the 17th century, in a practice started by goldsmiths, bankers have engaged in what is known as “fractional reserve banking.” That is, when people deposited their gold with goldsmiths, and received paper notes testifying to the amount and allowing them to redeem the gold when they needed it, the goldsmiths holding the gold noticed something. People never came all at once to redeem their gold. In fact, at any one time, only about 10 or 20% of the gold was needed to redeem the notes people presented. This meant that the goldsmith could actually lend from 5 to 10 times as much money (in notes) as they had backed with gold. This became the basis for “fractional reserve banking” and most currency: except in situations like the Depression, where everyone suddenly wants to redeem paper bank notes for gold or silver in what is known as a “run” on banks, banks could lend out—literally create—far more money than they actually had in reserves. Ellen Brown quotes some notable bankers on this.
Sir Josiah Stamp, president of the Bank of England in the 1920s:
“The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented.”
Or Graham Towers, Governor of the Bank of Canada from 1935 to 1955:
“Banks create money. That is what they are for. . . The manufacturing process to make money consists of making an entry in a book. That is all. . . .Each and every time a Bank makes a loan . . . new Bank credit is created -- brand new money.”
Or Robert B. Anderson, Treasury Secretary under President Eisenhower:
“[W]hen a bank makes a loan, it simply adds to the borrower's deposit account in the bank by the amount of the loan. The money is not taken from anyone else's deposit; it was not previously paid in to the bank by anyone. It's new money, created by the bank for the use of the borrower.”
To get some idea of the amount of money that gets created this way, and its inflationary effect (creating money means more dollars (demand) chasing the same amount of goods (supply), hence prices tend to rise) Brown cites the Fed’s own money supply (M3) statistics. First of all, new money has to be created all the time, i.e. borrowed, “just to pay the interest owed to bankers. A dollar lent at 5 percent interest becomes 2 dollars in 14 years. That means the money supply has to double every 14 years just to cover the interest owed on the money existing at the beginning of this 14-year cycle. The Federal Reserve’s own figures confirm that M3 has doubled or more every 14 years since 1959. That means that every 14 years, banks siphon off as much money in interest as there was in the entire economy 14 years earlier. This tribute is paid for lending something the banks never actually had to lend, making it perhaps the greatest scam ever perpetrated…”
Now think about it. Bankers, and especially those in the big banks like Citibank and Morgan and Chase and Wells Fargo and Bank of America, have been getting rich on this “greatest scam ever perpetrated” for years, a scam that at one time was called usury. But not content with making billions on interest, especially from the difference between the rate they pay to borrow the money from the Federal Reserve and the outrageous rate they have been allowed, since 1981, to charge their credit card customers (one of my bank credit cards just informed me that my interest rate was being raised about 4%, the difference between the essentially 1% they get it for and the 13% they now charge me being their profit, not to mention the profit they make from poorer folks whom they charge 25 and 30% for the same credit), they had to get into “subprime” mortgages and complicated securitized debt instruments as well, so they could make even more obscene profits. All of which came a cropper when the housing bubble burst and all that debt going bad (I gather that that debt or money owed them is what banks tend to use as “consideration”) threatened to take the whole financial system down with them. And which they then had the nerve to beg the Federal Government via taxpayers to rescue them from. And which the government, using taxpayer dollars, urged the sucker public to agree to because otherwise we’d all be doomed.
Now, with a new president to hopefully instill some root sense into the whole system, we find that his top advisers, the Summers and Geithners and Emanuels and Goolsbees, are not only “centrist” and rooted in the financial system themselves, as are all our so-called representatives who derive the bulk of their contributions from this same financial sector, but in practice determined to revive and maintain the same bankers and the same system that brought us all to the brink of financial Armageddon in the first place.
So consider. Bankers create money out of nothing. And then charge us and the government (also us) interest on it. Not a bad way to make a living, one you’d think would be enough for these charlatans (who, by the way, pay their working-class tellers about $11 an hour to start). But no. Greed, by definition, knows no moderation, never says ‘this is enough.’ No, greed is infinite. Until, that is, the people finally wake up and get fed up and cry “foul.” Some of that has been happening already regarding the bonuses to the AIG scoundrels. Now what one hopes is that the outrage will continue until all banks and bankers and their whole system are truly brought to heel, along with insurance companies and the rest of the Wall Street bunco artists. How this might happen is not something I’m competent to predict (Ellen Brown suggests establishing a true government bank that prints its own money but doesn’t charge itself interest; think of the savings!) But perhaps we can all find out before it’s too late. Meantime, next time you see your banker, you might let him know that you know: Money ex nihilo might sound godlike, but it’s more like what Freud said it symbolized—the doings of the other end.
Lawrence DiStasi
Friday, March 13, 2009
The Lobby Does It Again
Two days ago, under intense pressure from the Israel Lobby, including sitting senators Charles Schumer of New York and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, President Obama’s choice for chairman of the National Intelligence Council, Chas Freeman, withdrew his name from consideration. Among other things, Freeman, a diplomat with a distinguished record compiled over thirty years, was accused of being in the pay of foreign governments like Saudi Arabia. But the real accusation, hidden as always, was his stance in bringing a balanced view to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2007, he is reported (by the New York Post) to have said:
“The brutal oppression of the Palestinians by the Israeli occupation shows no sign of ending. ... American identification with Israel has become total.”
Anyone who has followed this conflict, and its 60-year history would have to agree with the truth of that statement. Not the Israel Lobby, or the lapdog media. To say such things is to violate what has become a cardinal rule of American politics: don’t tell the truth about the occupation, and don’t tell the truth about the slavish American support of and identification with such oppression. In his statement upon withdrawing, Freeman makes this clearer than ever:
“…It is apparent that we Americans cannot any longer conduct a serious public discussion or exercise independent judgment about matters of great importance to our country as well as to our allies and friends.
The libels on me and their easily traceable email trails show conclusively that there is a powerful lobby determined to prevent any view other than its own from being aired, still less to factor in American understanding of trends and events in the Middle East. The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth. The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views, the substitution of political correctness for analysis, and the exclusion of any and all options for decision by Americans and our government other than those that it favors.” (quoted from Robert Dreyfuss’ March 11, 2009 article in the Nation)
So, once again, as in the case of I wrote about on January 13 of this year, where Israel’s prime minister Ehud Olmert made the United States Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice change her UN vote, we have American advocates for a foreign power determining crucial foreign policy decisions of the United States. By attacking the President’s intelligence choice on all fronts, including in the Congress, Israel’s American surrogates dictate to the leader of the free world who can and who cannot be selected to staff key positions. The critical question then becomes: to whom are these people primarily loyal? It is a question that has been raised often in the past, particularly during wars (I know a great deal about how it was raised during World War II with regard to Italian immigrants), including cold ones. Now, with the Netanyahu-Avigdor Lieberman government threatening to make the middle east cauldron ever hotter, the questions must be raised anew. To wit: Can any sovereign government long tolerate such foreign interference and still call itself sovereign?
Does everyone realize how serious this is? Sometimes I wonder.
Lawrence DiStasi
“The brutal oppression of the Palestinians by the Israeli occupation shows no sign of ending. ... American identification with Israel has become total.”
Anyone who has followed this conflict, and its 60-year history would have to agree with the truth of that statement. Not the Israel Lobby, or the lapdog media. To say such things is to violate what has become a cardinal rule of American politics: don’t tell the truth about the occupation, and don’t tell the truth about the slavish American support of and identification with such oppression. In his statement upon withdrawing, Freeman makes this clearer than ever:
“…It is apparent that we Americans cannot any longer conduct a serious public discussion or exercise independent judgment about matters of great importance to our country as well as to our allies and friends.
The libels on me and their easily traceable email trails show conclusively that there is a powerful lobby determined to prevent any view other than its own from being aired, still less to factor in American understanding of trends and events in the Middle East. The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth. The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views, the substitution of political correctness for analysis, and the exclusion of any and all options for decision by Americans and our government other than those that it favors.” (quoted from Robert Dreyfuss’ March 11, 2009 article in the Nation)
So, once again, as in the case of I wrote about on January 13 of this year, where Israel’s prime minister Ehud Olmert made the United States Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice change her UN vote, we have American advocates for a foreign power determining crucial foreign policy decisions of the United States. By attacking the President’s intelligence choice on all fronts, including in the Congress, Israel’s American surrogates dictate to the leader of the free world who can and who cannot be selected to staff key positions. The critical question then becomes: to whom are these people primarily loyal? It is a question that has been raised often in the past, particularly during wars (I know a great deal about how it was raised during World War II with regard to Italian immigrants), including cold ones. Now, with the Netanyahu-Avigdor Lieberman government threatening to make the middle east cauldron ever hotter, the questions must be raised anew. To wit: Can any sovereign government long tolerate such foreign interference and still call itself sovereign?
Does everyone realize how serious this is? Sometimes I wonder.
Lawrence DiStasi
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
I Was Right!
Any even mildly perceptive observer of the human comedy cannot help noticing the importance we all give to being right in our judgments. Whether it be supporting the “right” candidate (the one who wins), or taking the “right” political stance on the Iraq war (condemning or supporting it early), or selecting the “right” stock or selling the “right” house at the top of the market, or simply judging a new acquaintance “rightly” (I knew there was something fishy about him/her), we all do everything we can to make the “right” choices or decisions. And if we can’t always be “right,” then we make sure that we have ample reasons for having made a wrong choice, thus implying that, by all reasonable standards, it "should" have been right. In short, we—and this “we” can be an entity as grandiloquent as the Bush Administration or as humble as a weekend bettor at the race track—are always trying to justify our actions. Being right, or being seen to be right, is our constant preoccupation.
In fact, it is easy to observe that being right is a major component of our mental life. Whether we call it our “ego,” our consciousness, our narratorial self, or our left brain, it is clear both from our own observation and the relevant literature that we are constantly rationalizing our actions. In other words, though we mostly imagine that when we have a decision to make, we sit down and reason it out, making lists of pros and cons, and finally coming to a reasonable choice, in fact, research shows that it’s usually the other way round. We do something, decide something, and before we know it our conscious minds find ways to support it with reasons, with logic, with whatever we can find to shore up the rightness of our decision. Indeed, to fully realize this is somewhat disconcerting, for most of us like to think that “we” are in control of our lives. “I have free choice” is the essence of democracy. “I” decide to go or not go to the movies, date or not date that person, buy or not buy that service or new object, vote or not vote for that candidate, live or not live. But do I?
William Irvine, a philosophy professor and author of On Desire (Oxford U Press: 2006), takes up many of these issues in his book. And what he points out is brain research that shows that our choices and decisions are mostly made prior to our reasoning about them. They derive from unconscious wants or hates that stem from our emotions. Psychologist Timothy Wilson refers to this emotion-driven module as our “adaptive unconscious,” that more primitive part of our brain that detects danger, or perceives something desirable or good. And we are driven to get that which it perceives as good, and reject or flee that which is bad or dangerous. Unfortunately, sometimes what is perceived as “pleasurable” is not so good for us—like excess sugar or unsafe sex or big automobiles; and what is “bad” may actually be important to face. But since we have this ideal that says our conscious selves are in control, our minds turn the situation and its logic upside down. As Irvine points out, the mystery of our decision-making “leads us to the odd pass of assuming that we must have been consciously aware of what we wanted to do in performing actions we don’t understand…just to keep up the appearance that we ourselves are agents with conscious will.” In other words, we rationalize. Our conscious minds, our left brains, are rationalizing machines. That is what they do. ‘I just did something stupid. There must have been a reason. Of course, it happened because I was drunk, or tense, or ill, or, best of all, noticed a hidden benefit where no one else did.’
This subconscious level of decision-making has been tested in the laboratory. And what it shows is that our much-prized rational ability functions not so much as a decision-maker or truth-finder, but as a “machine for winning arguments.” The quote is from Michael Gazzaniga’s book Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique, who in turn cites Robert Wright, author of the Moral Animal, as follows: “The brain is a good lawyer: given any set of interests to defend, it sets about convincing the world of their moral and logical worth regardless of whether they in fact have any of either. Like a lawyer, the human brain wants a victory, not truth..” Gazzaniga’s own research shows some of the bizarre arguments his split-brain patients employ to rationalize their own puzzling actions (because one side of their brain cannot “see” what the other is doing). One woman, with a lesion in her right brain that causes translocations of space, was in a New York hospital but, despite her hospital garb, IV and wheelchair, firmly believed herself to be in Freeport, Maine. When Gazzaniga pointed to the hospital elevators and asked her what they were, she responded, “Those are elevators. Do you know what it cost me to have those put in my house?” Gazzaniga calls this left brain explainer “the interpreter,” because of its clear function of interpreting or rationalizing what it sees itself doing.
Both Gazzaniga and Irvine refer to the work of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio regarding the role of emotions in decision-making. Damasio has studied patients with brain damage to the ventromedial part of the prefrontal cortex. Though they are perfectly rational, test normally on moral scales, can find solutions to problems and see consequences, they exhibit almost no emotion. And with this defect comes an inability to make decisions. Damasio theorizes that this is due to the fact that having an emotional value connected to any option or choice is necessary to make that choice. In other words, consciously knowing about something isn’t enough to decide on its worth; the human brain requires an emotional response (it’s good, I want it; it’s bad, I don’t want it) to make a decision. Put another way, the decisions we make stem from emotional impulses, often unconscious, that are then ratified and justified by our conscious selves as if they had made the choice rationally, using good logic.
So next time you hear someone, or yourself, boast that “I was right,” consider what’s going on. It’s likely that something hidden—Irvine calls this our inherited Biological Incentive System—drove that choice. This is not to say that we have no reasoning ability at all, or that reason never figures in our decision-making. That we are not as impulsive or instinct-driven as most animals is evident. It is simply that, more than we know, what we boast about hides the true nature of our decisions and judgments. Given the critical nature of the judgments we are increasingly asked to make (about global warming, biotechnology, nuclear weapons, and so on), ignoring the basis for our decisions is, in effect, leaving those decisions to those who wish to manipulate us. And you can be sure that they are not overlooking the research about how most of us decide, and then deceive ourselves about how.
Lawrence DiStasi
In fact, it is easy to observe that being right is a major component of our mental life. Whether we call it our “ego,” our consciousness, our narratorial self, or our left brain, it is clear both from our own observation and the relevant literature that we are constantly rationalizing our actions. In other words, though we mostly imagine that when we have a decision to make, we sit down and reason it out, making lists of pros and cons, and finally coming to a reasonable choice, in fact, research shows that it’s usually the other way round. We do something, decide something, and before we know it our conscious minds find ways to support it with reasons, with logic, with whatever we can find to shore up the rightness of our decision. Indeed, to fully realize this is somewhat disconcerting, for most of us like to think that “we” are in control of our lives. “I have free choice” is the essence of democracy. “I” decide to go or not go to the movies, date or not date that person, buy or not buy that service or new object, vote or not vote for that candidate, live or not live. But do I?
William Irvine, a philosophy professor and author of On Desire (Oxford U Press: 2006), takes up many of these issues in his book. And what he points out is brain research that shows that our choices and decisions are mostly made prior to our reasoning about them. They derive from unconscious wants or hates that stem from our emotions. Psychologist Timothy Wilson refers to this emotion-driven module as our “adaptive unconscious,” that more primitive part of our brain that detects danger, or perceives something desirable or good. And we are driven to get that which it perceives as good, and reject or flee that which is bad or dangerous. Unfortunately, sometimes what is perceived as “pleasurable” is not so good for us—like excess sugar or unsafe sex or big automobiles; and what is “bad” may actually be important to face. But since we have this ideal that says our conscious selves are in control, our minds turn the situation and its logic upside down. As Irvine points out, the mystery of our decision-making “leads us to the odd pass of assuming that we must have been consciously aware of what we wanted to do in performing actions we don’t understand…just to keep up the appearance that we ourselves are agents with conscious will.” In other words, we rationalize. Our conscious minds, our left brains, are rationalizing machines. That is what they do. ‘I just did something stupid. There must have been a reason. Of course, it happened because I was drunk, or tense, or ill, or, best of all, noticed a hidden benefit where no one else did.’
This subconscious level of decision-making has been tested in the laboratory. And what it shows is that our much-prized rational ability functions not so much as a decision-maker or truth-finder, but as a “machine for winning arguments.” The quote is from Michael Gazzaniga’s book Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique, who in turn cites Robert Wright, author of the Moral Animal, as follows: “The brain is a good lawyer: given any set of interests to defend, it sets about convincing the world of their moral and logical worth regardless of whether they in fact have any of either. Like a lawyer, the human brain wants a victory, not truth..” Gazzaniga’s own research shows some of the bizarre arguments his split-brain patients employ to rationalize their own puzzling actions (because one side of their brain cannot “see” what the other is doing). One woman, with a lesion in her right brain that causes translocations of space, was in a New York hospital but, despite her hospital garb, IV and wheelchair, firmly believed herself to be in Freeport, Maine. When Gazzaniga pointed to the hospital elevators and asked her what they were, she responded, “Those are elevators. Do you know what it cost me to have those put in my house?” Gazzaniga calls this left brain explainer “the interpreter,” because of its clear function of interpreting or rationalizing what it sees itself doing.
Both Gazzaniga and Irvine refer to the work of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio regarding the role of emotions in decision-making. Damasio has studied patients with brain damage to the ventromedial part of the prefrontal cortex. Though they are perfectly rational, test normally on moral scales, can find solutions to problems and see consequences, they exhibit almost no emotion. And with this defect comes an inability to make decisions. Damasio theorizes that this is due to the fact that having an emotional value connected to any option or choice is necessary to make that choice. In other words, consciously knowing about something isn’t enough to decide on its worth; the human brain requires an emotional response (it’s good, I want it; it’s bad, I don’t want it) to make a decision. Put another way, the decisions we make stem from emotional impulses, often unconscious, that are then ratified and justified by our conscious selves as if they had made the choice rationally, using good logic.
So next time you hear someone, or yourself, boast that “I was right,” consider what’s going on. It’s likely that something hidden—Irvine calls this our inherited Biological Incentive System—drove that choice. This is not to say that we have no reasoning ability at all, or that reason never figures in our decision-making. That we are not as impulsive or instinct-driven as most animals is evident. It is simply that, more than we know, what we boast about hides the true nature of our decisions and judgments. Given the critical nature of the judgments we are increasingly asked to make (about global warming, biotechnology, nuclear weapons, and so on), ignoring the basis for our decisions is, in effect, leaving those decisions to those who wish to manipulate us. And you can be sure that they are not overlooking the research about how most of us decide, and then deceive ourselves about how.
Lawrence DiStasi
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Earth Breath
Yesterday morning I came across this lovely passage in Claire Cummings’ book, "Uncertain Peril, Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds":
“As the earth wobbles on its axis, the oceans ebb and flow and the seasons change. Early climate studies revealed that this causes an annual cycling of carbon dioxide from summer to winter. In the spring, as plants and other photosynthetic organisms grow, they absorb carbon dioxide from the air. Then in the fall and winter, as they die and decay and are eaten by other organisms, they release it. As Fred Pearce ["With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change"] so eloquently put it, ‘The earth, in effect, breathes in and out once a year.’” (Cummings, 126)
What Cummings and Pearce refer to is the notion that Gaia, the name many use to personify our planet, actually breathes—on a slower scale than we do, to be sure, but breathes nonetheless.
The notion struck me both for its beauty, and for its resonance with some recent personal thoughts and experiences re: breathing. To begin with, Buddhism, like many other eastern spiritual traditions, focuses a great deal of energy and attention on the breath. The Buddha no doubt derived this from the Indian concept of “prana,” which refers to the breath, and breathing, as the pillar upon which all else depends. It is due to this centrality of prana that yoga practitioners often do specific breathing exercises, and work to harmonize and control breath during their maneuvers. Just one random website on prana yoga describes it thus: “Prana is simply life force energy. All living things and the Universe itself consist of this energy. Breath is our own amazing and yet tangible experience of prana…” (http://www.pranayoga.org/). Our word “spirit,” similarly, stems from “spirare,” meaning ‘to breathe.’
In Zen, especially at the beginning, sitting or zazen practice has to do not with specific breathing practices, but simply with counting one’s breath—counting breaths to ten, and then repeating this counting to ten throughout the meditation period. Practitioners gradually move to other forms of concentration, for example, simply observing the breath in great detail as it proceeds in and out of the body, and exactly what happens when it does. And though most move on to still other practices, observing thought formation or bodily sensations and so on, breath watching often remains at least a part of the practice.
Having been through several of these practices, recently it occurred to me to return in zazen to simply breathing. Simply breathing. And it was from here that earth or Gaia or prana came into play. For at some point as I observed how I was breathing, and how it still seemed to be something like, ‘I am breathing, this body is pulling oxygen in from outside me and pushing carbon dioxide out to somewhere else,’ a changed perception, momentary but very real, occurred. It suddenly felt as if it were not “I” who was drawing in air from the outside, but as if the exchange were simply transpiring of itself, more, as if outside and inside were “not two” as the saying goes. As if there were not just an individual self seizing a few quarts of oxygen from the air outside, but something very much larger pulsing in a rhythm with others. As if a kind of universal rhythm were in play. And that that rhythm, which included all else in its pulsations, was breathing me. And I it.
Hence the power of the above image of the earth, each year breathing in, and breathing out. As if we are all, along with the earth, part of this breathing in, and breathing out. And we are. Each being that breathes has a different rate and rhythm. Plants breathe differently from animals who breathe differently from fish or fowl. But in a certain sense, all breathing is one breathing. The earth breathes. Plants breathe. Dogs and toads breathe. Humans breathe. Together. As a Zen master once said (referring only to humans),
“We are all members of the same nose-hole society.”
All of which means it is well not to ignore either our in-breaths or our out-breaths. And what we have been discovering increasingly is that we humans, especially, have indeed been ignoring not only the fact, but the consequences of both our in-breaths and our out-breaths. What is it that we are breathing in? What is it that we are breathing out? Are we foolishly, determinedly ignorant of our out-breathing—the wastes, the carnage, the indigestible detritus that increasingly forms part of our legacy? And just as ignorant of what we are breathing in, as if having to wrestle it from someone or something, like insatiable children?
The answer is fairly obvious. We have forgotten, or chosen to ignore what breathing is. We have insisted on confining it to our lungs, our personal area of responsibility and concern, our little quart or two of breath. It is a kind of willful blindness, a blindness to what we are, which all begins with the simplest, most elemental, most inclusive of our acts: breathing.
Lawrence DiStasi
“As the earth wobbles on its axis, the oceans ebb and flow and the seasons change. Early climate studies revealed that this causes an annual cycling of carbon dioxide from summer to winter. In the spring, as plants and other photosynthetic organisms grow, they absorb carbon dioxide from the air. Then in the fall and winter, as they die and decay and are eaten by other organisms, they release it. As Fred Pearce ["With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change"] so eloquently put it, ‘The earth, in effect, breathes in and out once a year.’” (Cummings, 126)
What Cummings and Pearce refer to is the notion that Gaia, the name many use to personify our planet, actually breathes—on a slower scale than we do, to be sure, but breathes nonetheless.
The notion struck me both for its beauty, and for its resonance with some recent personal thoughts and experiences re: breathing. To begin with, Buddhism, like many other eastern spiritual traditions, focuses a great deal of energy and attention on the breath. The Buddha no doubt derived this from the Indian concept of “prana,” which refers to the breath, and breathing, as the pillar upon which all else depends. It is due to this centrality of prana that yoga practitioners often do specific breathing exercises, and work to harmonize and control breath during their maneuvers. Just one random website on prana yoga describes it thus: “Prana is simply life force energy. All living things and the Universe itself consist of this energy. Breath is our own amazing and yet tangible experience of prana…” (http://www.pranayoga.org/). Our word “spirit,” similarly, stems from “spirare,” meaning ‘to breathe.’
In Zen, especially at the beginning, sitting or zazen practice has to do not with specific breathing practices, but simply with counting one’s breath—counting breaths to ten, and then repeating this counting to ten throughout the meditation period. Practitioners gradually move to other forms of concentration, for example, simply observing the breath in great detail as it proceeds in and out of the body, and exactly what happens when it does. And though most move on to still other practices, observing thought formation or bodily sensations and so on, breath watching often remains at least a part of the practice.
Having been through several of these practices, recently it occurred to me to return in zazen to simply breathing. Simply breathing. And it was from here that earth or Gaia or prana came into play. For at some point as I observed how I was breathing, and how it still seemed to be something like, ‘I am breathing, this body is pulling oxygen in from outside me and pushing carbon dioxide out to somewhere else,’ a changed perception, momentary but very real, occurred. It suddenly felt as if it were not “I” who was drawing in air from the outside, but as if the exchange were simply transpiring of itself, more, as if outside and inside were “not two” as the saying goes. As if there were not just an individual self seizing a few quarts of oxygen from the air outside, but something very much larger pulsing in a rhythm with others. As if a kind of universal rhythm were in play. And that that rhythm, which included all else in its pulsations, was breathing me. And I it.
Hence the power of the above image of the earth, each year breathing in, and breathing out. As if we are all, along with the earth, part of this breathing in, and breathing out. And we are. Each being that breathes has a different rate and rhythm. Plants breathe differently from animals who breathe differently from fish or fowl. But in a certain sense, all breathing is one breathing. The earth breathes. Plants breathe. Dogs and toads breathe. Humans breathe. Together. As a Zen master once said (referring only to humans),
“We are all members of the same nose-hole society.”
All of which means it is well not to ignore either our in-breaths or our out-breaths. And what we have been discovering increasingly is that we humans, especially, have indeed been ignoring not only the fact, but the consequences of both our in-breaths and our out-breaths. What is it that we are breathing in? What is it that we are breathing out? Are we foolishly, determinedly ignorant of our out-breathing—the wastes, the carnage, the indigestible detritus that increasingly forms part of our legacy? And just as ignorant of what we are breathing in, as if having to wrestle it from someone or something, like insatiable children?
The answer is fairly obvious. We have forgotten, or chosen to ignore what breathing is. We have insisted on confining it to our lungs, our personal area of responsibility and concern, our little quart or two of breath. It is a kind of willful blindness, a blindness to what we are, which all begins with the simplest, most elemental, most inclusive of our acts: breathing.
Lawrence DiStasi
Friday, February 27, 2009
Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?
Recent reports coming out of Gaza concern Israel’s use of horrendous new weapons to inflict almost untreatable wounds on the Palestinian civilians, many of them children, who were their victims. A January 18, 2009 article in the London Independent by Raymond Whitaker is titled: “Tungsten Bombs Leave Israel’s Victims with Mystery Wounds.” The bombs in question seem to be a relatively new type of weapon developed in the United States called DIME bombs, DIME being an acronym for “dense inert metal explosive.” Like many military acronyms, the word sounds harmless—a thin dime—in order to disguise the weapon’s fiendish attributes. Instead of containing shrapnel, as traditional anti-personnel weapons did, the DIME bomb is packed with a powdered tungsten alloy that includes cobalt. Where shrapnel can be seen, and hence removed in treating the wound, the powdered tungsten does not show up on X-rays, and so, being virtually invisible, cannot be removed. Its effect inside the body is devastating—causing irreparable harm to limbs and flesh, leading to a huge increase in amputations, and bleeding so severe that even massive doses of anti-coagulant fail to stop it.
Dr Erik Fosse, who has treated large numbers of patients in Gaza with such wounds, said: “It was as if they had stepped on a mine, but there was no shrapnel in the wounds. Some had lost their legs. It looked as though they had been sliced off. I have been to war zones for 30 years, but I have never seen such injuries before.” Fosse then added more details: “All the patients I saw had been hit by bombs fired from unmanned drones. The bomb hit the ground near them and exploded.”
Fosse’s colleague, Mads Gilbert went further, accusing Israel of using Gaza to test new “extremely nasty” explosives. “This is a new generation of small explosive that detonates with extreme power and dissipates its power within a range of 5 to 10 metres,” he said. The narrow range conforms with the fact that DIME bombs are designed to be used where the usual weapons might kill or injure innocent bystanders instead of targeted combatants. They do not spray their deadly cargo widely, as with shrapnel, but focus the tungsten powder narrowly, to presumably hit only the intended target. And part of the reason for their development was to use tungsten to disable hard targets, instead of depleted uranium.
These weapons, not incidentally, were developed in the United States at the US Air Force Research Laboratory. That Gaza was the intended testing lab is indicated by the fact that a huge supply of DIME bombs were reportedly rushed to Israel just before its most recent Gaza offensive. Furthermore, the same weapons were allegedly used in 2006 (see James Brooks: “Warfare of the Future, Today?” Dec. 12, 2006; http://www.traprockpeace.org.) when Israel initially invaded Gaza after “leaving” it. Both charges lend credence to the accusation that, as in many other cases such as “bunker busters,” Israel has been using Palestine as a live testing ground for weaponry the United States has developed, and clearly intends to use in the future (if it hasn’t done so already in those other middle east testing grounds, Iraq and Afghanistan).
In Brooks’ 2006 article, Dr. Joma Al-Saqqa, of Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital, described what he observed in his patients: no foreign material in the wounds, burning as if from the inside, tissue death, and, in spite of amputation, higher mortality, the effects appearing “radioactive.” Dr. Al-Siqqa added that the interior burning not only affects tissue around bones, it also “burns and destroys internal organs, like the liver, kidneys, and the spleen and other organs and makes saving the wounded almost impossible. As a surgeon, I have seen thousands of wounds during the Intifada, but nothing was like this weapon.”
So now we understand. In response to the “unfair” tactics of resistance fighters in Arab countries who “hide” amongst civilians, as well as the negative publicity that has continued to surround the use of depleted uranium, advanced nations like the United States apply their superior technological skill to develop more “humane” weapons like DIME bombs. These weapons are meant to explode viciously, but “humanely,” by limiting the “collateral damage” they do to a minimum (they are known as LCDs for “low collateral damage.”) That they also pose intractable problems for doctors trying to treat them is simply part of the march of progress. Also part of that march is the scientific evidence that the powdered heavy metal tungsten alloy (HMTA), which is distributed throughout the wound area, is chemically toxic. It damages the immune system, attacks DNA, and is a known carcinogen (lab mice implanted with tiny doses of HMTA developed cancers 100% of the time, according to research cited by Brooks). As Dr. Fosse warned, “These patients should be followed up to see if there are any carcinogenic effects.”
But then, what’s a little cancer, a little immune system damage, a little DNA breakage among neighbors?
Well, one problem is that, as James Brooks reports, the Geneva Convention on Weapons “prohibits the use of any weapon the primary effect of which is to injure by fragments which in the human body escape detection by X-rays.” Which HMTA does.
But even beyond the violations of international conventions, what about the violations of humanity here? What kind of fiends from hell would consider using weapons that not only horribly disable human bodies by slicing off limbs, but disable from the inside as well? Who are the monsters who think up such things? Consider the problem: we need a heavy metal weapon to replace depleted uranium because of the bad publicity we’ve been getting, not to mention the fact that so many of our own soldiers are showing signs of radiation poisoning. And some highly-paid engineering genius says: I know, how about some of the other heavy metals? We can combine them—a little tungsten, a little cobalt, a little nickel—to augment their blast effects, and powder them so as to make them undetectable. Then we can narrow their explosive range and voila—we have a perfect anti-personnel weapon to use in the dense, heavily populated quarters we will be fighting many future wars in. Perfect. And not only do these babies slice off limbs like a laser, CLEANLY and undetectably, they also continue working on the inside with tumors and mutations and such, so the enemy has to expend enormous effort trying to save his people and save his genome. More than perfect! All with the perfect open air laboratory—the Gaza strip, with more pesky humans per square mile than anywhere on earth—to test them in. Beyond perfect.
Our last president used to talk about evil, those evil terrorists who attacked us, a whole Axis of Evil arrayed against us. To this observer, true evil lies in the premeditated attack not on people so much—that has been with us since the beginning—but on the source of life itself. Not in the attempt to slaughter mere bodies, but in the attempt to disable the very code of life. That is what the new weapons, since at least the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, have targeted. And it is the shame of nations, the shame of humanity itself, that the most powerful militaries on this planet are devoting their resources, OUR resources, to finding and testing always more lethal ways to do precisely that.
Lawrence DiStasi
Dr Erik Fosse, who has treated large numbers of patients in Gaza with such wounds, said: “It was as if they had stepped on a mine, but there was no shrapnel in the wounds. Some had lost their legs. It looked as though they had been sliced off. I have been to war zones for 30 years, but I have never seen such injuries before.” Fosse then added more details: “All the patients I saw had been hit by bombs fired from unmanned drones. The bomb hit the ground near them and exploded.”
Fosse’s colleague, Mads Gilbert went further, accusing Israel of using Gaza to test new “extremely nasty” explosives. “This is a new generation of small explosive that detonates with extreme power and dissipates its power within a range of 5 to 10 metres,” he said. The narrow range conforms with the fact that DIME bombs are designed to be used where the usual weapons might kill or injure innocent bystanders instead of targeted combatants. They do not spray their deadly cargo widely, as with shrapnel, but focus the tungsten powder narrowly, to presumably hit only the intended target. And part of the reason for their development was to use tungsten to disable hard targets, instead of depleted uranium.
These weapons, not incidentally, were developed in the United States at the US Air Force Research Laboratory. That Gaza was the intended testing lab is indicated by the fact that a huge supply of DIME bombs were reportedly rushed to Israel just before its most recent Gaza offensive. Furthermore, the same weapons were allegedly used in 2006 (see James Brooks: “Warfare of the Future, Today?” Dec. 12, 2006; http://www.traprockpeace.org.) when Israel initially invaded Gaza after “leaving” it. Both charges lend credence to the accusation that, as in many other cases such as “bunker busters,” Israel has been using Palestine as a live testing ground for weaponry the United States has developed, and clearly intends to use in the future (if it hasn’t done so already in those other middle east testing grounds, Iraq and Afghanistan).
In Brooks’ 2006 article, Dr. Joma Al-Saqqa, of Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital, described what he observed in his patients: no foreign material in the wounds, burning as if from the inside, tissue death, and, in spite of amputation, higher mortality, the effects appearing “radioactive.” Dr. Al-Siqqa added that the interior burning not only affects tissue around bones, it also “burns and destroys internal organs, like the liver, kidneys, and the spleen and other organs and makes saving the wounded almost impossible. As a surgeon, I have seen thousands of wounds during the Intifada, but nothing was like this weapon.”
So now we understand. In response to the “unfair” tactics of resistance fighters in Arab countries who “hide” amongst civilians, as well as the negative publicity that has continued to surround the use of depleted uranium, advanced nations like the United States apply their superior technological skill to develop more “humane” weapons like DIME bombs. These weapons are meant to explode viciously, but “humanely,” by limiting the “collateral damage” they do to a minimum (they are known as LCDs for “low collateral damage.”) That they also pose intractable problems for doctors trying to treat them is simply part of the march of progress. Also part of that march is the scientific evidence that the powdered heavy metal tungsten alloy (HMTA), which is distributed throughout the wound area, is chemically toxic. It damages the immune system, attacks DNA, and is a known carcinogen (lab mice implanted with tiny doses of HMTA developed cancers 100% of the time, according to research cited by Brooks). As Dr. Fosse warned, “These patients should be followed up to see if there are any carcinogenic effects.”
But then, what’s a little cancer, a little immune system damage, a little DNA breakage among neighbors?
Well, one problem is that, as James Brooks reports, the Geneva Convention on Weapons “prohibits the use of any weapon the primary effect of which is to injure by fragments which in the human body escape detection by X-rays.” Which HMTA does.
But even beyond the violations of international conventions, what about the violations of humanity here? What kind of fiends from hell would consider using weapons that not only horribly disable human bodies by slicing off limbs, but disable from the inside as well? Who are the monsters who think up such things? Consider the problem: we need a heavy metal weapon to replace depleted uranium because of the bad publicity we’ve been getting, not to mention the fact that so many of our own soldiers are showing signs of radiation poisoning. And some highly-paid engineering genius says: I know, how about some of the other heavy metals? We can combine them—a little tungsten, a little cobalt, a little nickel—to augment their blast effects, and powder them so as to make them undetectable. Then we can narrow their explosive range and voila—we have a perfect anti-personnel weapon to use in the dense, heavily populated quarters we will be fighting many future wars in. Perfect. And not only do these babies slice off limbs like a laser, CLEANLY and undetectably, they also continue working on the inside with tumors and mutations and such, so the enemy has to expend enormous effort trying to save his people and save his genome. More than perfect! All with the perfect open air laboratory—the Gaza strip, with more pesky humans per square mile than anywhere on earth—to test them in. Beyond perfect.
Our last president used to talk about evil, those evil terrorists who attacked us, a whole Axis of Evil arrayed against us. To this observer, true evil lies in the premeditated attack not on people so much—that has been with us since the beginning—but on the source of life itself. Not in the attempt to slaughter mere bodies, but in the attempt to disable the very code of life. That is what the new weapons, since at least the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, have targeted. And it is the shame of nations, the shame of humanity itself, that the most powerful militaries on this planet are devoting their resources, OUR resources, to finding and testing always more lethal ways to do precisely that.
Lawrence DiStasi
Monday, February 16, 2009
February Miscellany
So many things going on, and so much to comment upon, so this one will be a mix of thoughts, with no attempt to make them cohere.
All the news about the crimes among our major bankers and their cohorts on Wall Street—including the $50 billion Madoff scandal, the billions in bonuses to investment bankers, and the billions given to major banks with no indication that they did anything but use it to buy other distressed banks or simply sock it away—coupled with the growing awareness among Americans that the past 40 years, since Reagan, have seen the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor and middle classes to precisely these scheming bankers and other elites, brings to mind a comment made long ago by the French essayist Michel de Montaigne. Charles Mann mentions it in his book on the Americas before Columbus, 1491, and it goes like this:
Indians who visited France, Montaigne wrote, “noticed among us some men gorged to the full with things of every sort while their other halves were beggars at their doors, emaciated with hunger and poverty. They [the Indians] found it strange that these poverty-stricken halves should suffer such injustice, and that they did not take the others by the throat or set fire to their houses.” (Mann, p. 335).
It occurs to me that we could learn a thing or two from those Indians. I think the masses of Americans who are now suffering the loss of their homes, their pensions, their jobs, and their futures because of the outright theft perpetrated by these “geniuses” of Wall Street, ought to be thinking very hard about why they, why WE continue to honor a social compact which promotes obscene levels of wealth and comfort for a very few, and penury for the very many. Why do we, the majority, allow it? Why do we continue to not simply tolerate, but actually celebrate a system that gives immense wealth and power to CEOs and financiers who make nothing, while those who actually do produce the goods and services needed for survival—the farmers, the factory workers, the nurses and teachers and carpenters and truckers—are left begging for crumbs? Left trying to justify a meager raise in their salaries? or health coverage? or child care? or decent schools for their children? And why do we not make plain to those living in McMansions, including our elected representatives, that if something doesn’t change, and soon, they may find their houses, and themselves, going up in flames?
*
Also economic are some snippets heard on radio station KPFA from a documentary by Adam Curtis entitled “The Trap” (Curtis has also produced, for the BBC but of course not available in our media, a documentary called the “Century of Self” [on the rise of public relations and consumerism], and another called “The Power of Nightmares” [on the rise of religious fundamentalism both here and in the Arab world]). In “The Trap,” Curtis points out how bankrupt the once-reigning economic theory espoused by the Chicago School (free-market capitalism) really has become, partly because the theory upon which it is based—that people act rationally when they make economic decisions—was promoted mainly by John Nash (of “A Beautiful Mind” fame) as game theory. This is the same John Nash who has not only disavowed his theory of rational actors, but has said that when he concocted the theory, he was anything but rational or even sane; he was a paranoid schizophrenic. Thus we have an entire economy based on a theory that is, all things considered, insane. As Curtis points out in the documentary: in tests, only two groups were found to act fully rationally in economic situations—economist themselves, and psychopaths. And of course, as Curtis’ other documentary, the “Century of Self,” points out, those who concocted the ploy that saved capitalism in the 1920s, the pubic relations boys led by Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, knew this all too well. They invented advertising and public relations in order to induce consumers to want and buy goods (and wars, dictators, etc.) that were not truly needed, but were desired for subconscious reasons. We now have a global economy based on this insanity: growing numbers of people lusting after what Americans seem to have, an array of useless goods to “satisfy” desires implanted in their overstimulated psyches by constant advertising. The only question that remains is: will the current crisis force Americans to examine the basis of their economic lives, or will the solutions now being offered simply put the diseased patient on life support for a few more years?
*
One last thought, this after seeing a lovely French film called “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” (2008, directed by Julian Schnabel). Based on the memoir by Jean-Dominique Bauby, it portrays life for the editor-in-chief of Elle Magazine after he has a massive stroke that leaves him paralyzed with a condition called ‘locked-in syndrome.’ Only one eye and its eyelid are capable of movement. The film begins with the paralysis and takes us through the superhuman efforts by speech therapists and Bauby himself to fashion a system, using blinks of that one eye, to communicate, one letter at a time. Incredibly, not only does Bauby learn how to “say” what he wants and feels, but he is able, after years of effort, to write an entire book, the memoir Le scaphandre et le papillon upon which the film is based. The film takes us through the gamut of emotions, from the initial horror at feeling Bauby’s paralysis (everything is shot through his point of view), to awe and triumph at his eventual publishing success, shortly after which he dies from pneumonia.
What strikes one, aside from the emotions generated, is how different this “medical” story is from our comparable American ones. There is not one technical shot of his brain, or a CT scan, or a bloody, dramatic crisis requiring noble doctors with advanced technology and techniques to save him. The physicians, indeed, are hardly seen, and when they are, they appear as grotesques who sew Bauby’s one non-seeing eye closed. The heroes, if they can be called that, are the therapists, especially the speech therapist. In fact, the person who takes Bauby’s dictation is an editor from his magazine who is sent by the acting head of Elle to help him. She learns how to interpret his blinks, and stays with him as devoted amanuensis to the very end. And what we are left with is not the superhuman capacity of doctors and technologies, as in TV shows like “Grey’s Anatomy” or “ER,” but rather the eminently human capacity of language and story telling, the courage and indomitable spirit of humans helping each other despite all odds. It is a telling difference I think—in cultures, in views of what matters, what’s important in life, and where one seeks salvation. In America, it seems, salvation is always sought via some miraculous new technology; in France, at least in this film, via humans and their capacity for an interior life that matters, no matter how apparently ruined the external circumstances.
Lawrence DiStasi
All the news about the crimes among our major bankers and their cohorts on Wall Street—including the $50 billion Madoff scandal, the billions in bonuses to investment bankers, and the billions given to major banks with no indication that they did anything but use it to buy other distressed banks or simply sock it away—coupled with the growing awareness among Americans that the past 40 years, since Reagan, have seen the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor and middle classes to precisely these scheming bankers and other elites, brings to mind a comment made long ago by the French essayist Michel de Montaigne. Charles Mann mentions it in his book on the Americas before Columbus, 1491, and it goes like this:
Indians who visited France, Montaigne wrote, “noticed among us some men gorged to the full with things of every sort while their other halves were beggars at their doors, emaciated with hunger and poverty. They [the Indians] found it strange that these poverty-stricken halves should suffer such injustice, and that they did not take the others by the throat or set fire to their houses.” (Mann, p. 335).
It occurs to me that we could learn a thing or two from those Indians. I think the masses of Americans who are now suffering the loss of their homes, their pensions, their jobs, and their futures because of the outright theft perpetrated by these “geniuses” of Wall Street, ought to be thinking very hard about why they, why WE continue to honor a social compact which promotes obscene levels of wealth and comfort for a very few, and penury for the very many. Why do we, the majority, allow it? Why do we continue to not simply tolerate, but actually celebrate a system that gives immense wealth and power to CEOs and financiers who make nothing, while those who actually do produce the goods and services needed for survival—the farmers, the factory workers, the nurses and teachers and carpenters and truckers—are left begging for crumbs? Left trying to justify a meager raise in their salaries? or health coverage? or child care? or decent schools for their children? And why do we not make plain to those living in McMansions, including our elected representatives, that if something doesn’t change, and soon, they may find their houses, and themselves, going up in flames?
*
Also economic are some snippets heard on radio station KPFA from a documentary by Adam Curtis entitled “The Trap” (Curtis has also produced, for the BBC but of course not available in our media, a documentary called the “Century of Self” [on the rise of public relations and consumerism], and another called “The Power of Nightmares” [on the rise of religious fundamentalism both here and in the Arab world]). In “The Trap,” Curtis points out how bankrupt the once-reigning economic theory espoused by the Chicago School (free-market capitalism) really has become, partly because the theory upon which it is based—that people act rationally when they make economic decisions—was promoted mainly by John Nash (of “A Beautiful Mind” fame) as game theory. This is the same John Nash who has not only disavowed his theory of rational actors, but has said that when he concocted the theory, he was anything but rational or even sane; he was a paranoid schizophrenic. Thus we have an entire economy based on a theory that is, all things considered, insane. As Curtis points out in the documentary: in tests, only two groups were found to act fully rationally in economic situations—economist themselves, and psychopaths. And of course, as Curtis’ other documentary, the “Century of Self,” points out, those who concocted the ploy that saved capitalism in the 1920s, the pubic relations boys led by Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, knew this all too well. They invented advertising and public relations in order to induce consumers to want and buy goods (and wars, dictators, etc.) that were not truly needed, but were desired for subconscious reasons. We now have a global economy based on this insanity: growing numbers of people lusting after what Americans seem to have, an array of useless goods to “satisfy” desires implanted in their overstimulated psyches by constant advertising. The only question that remains is: will the current crisis force Americans to examine the basis of their economic lives, or will the solutions now being offered simply put the diseased patient on life support for a few more years?
*
One last thought, this after seeing a lovely French film called “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” (2008, directed by Julian Schnabel). Based on the memoir by Jean-Dominique Bauby, it portrays life for the editor-in-chief of Elle Magazine after he has a massive stroke that leaves him paralyzed with a condition called ‘locked-in syndrome.’ Only one eye and its eyelid are capable of movement. The film begins with the paralysis and takes us through the superhuman efforts by speech therapists and Bauby himself to fashion a system, using blinks of that one eye, to communicate, one letter at a time. Incredibly, not only does Bauby learn how to “say” what he wants and feels, but he is able, after years of effort, to write an entire book, the memoir Le scaphandre et le papillon upon which the film is based. The film takes us through the gamut of emotions, from the initial horror at feeling Bauby’s paralysis (everything is shot through his point of view), to awe and triumph at his eventual publishing success, shortly after which he dies from pneumonia.
What strikes one, aside from the emotions generated, is how different this “medical” story is from our comparable American ones. There is not one technical shot of his brain, or a CT scan, or a bloody, dramatic crisis requiring noble doctors with advanced technology and techniques to save him. The physicians, indeed, are hardly seen, and when they are, they appear as grotesques who sew Bauby’s one non-seeing eye closed. The heroes, if they can be called that, are the therapists, especially the speech therapist. In fact, the person who takes Bauby’s dictation is an editor from his magazine who is sent by the acting head of Elle to help him. She learns how to interpret his blinks, and stays with him as devoted amanuensis to the very end. And what we are left with is not the superhuman capacity of doctors and technologies, as in TV shows like “Grey’s Anatomy” or “ER,” but rather the eminently human capacity of language and story telling, the courage and indomitable spirit of humans helping each other despite all odds. It is a telling difference I think—in cultures, in views of what matters, what’s important in life, and where one seeks salvation. In America, it seems, salvation is always sought via some miraculous new technology; in France, at least in this film, via humans and their capacity for an interior life that matters, no matter how apparently ruined the external circumstances.
Lawrence DiStasi
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)