Plutocrats Plan to Dominate the Planet: But the People of Chile Are Fighting for All of Us

SOURCE [1] / By William K. Black [2]
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The effort by corporate CEOs to dominate the global economy and global government is reaching the end-game stage.

Corporate CEOs view government and democracy as their gravest threats and are constantly seeking to discredit and hamstring both.  CEOs are particularly eager to discredit, destroy, or capture regulation and they have enlisted enormous support in both major U.S. parties and many of the world’s dominant parties for these efforts.  President Obama has continued and made worse the effort of President Bush to betray our nation, our democracy, and our people through the secret, draft Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement — a plan which would destroy jobs, free bankers from oversight, block access to medicine, and more. This massive new trade agreement between the U.S. and countries including Chile would cover 40 percent of the global economy.

While there is no realistic chance of convincing Obama to repudiate the TPP, there is a chance that the people of Chile will save our democracy and our national sovereignty. Chile’s national election will occur on November 17, 2013 and it is widely expected to return former President Michelle Bachelet to power. If that happens, this politician who also happens to be a pediatrician who has treated Chargas disease (more on that shortly) could help deliver a body blow to this noxious plan.

A bit of background: The U.S. has taken a disgraceful position in the TPP negotiations in which it sides with corporate interests rather than the victims of a terrible parasitical infection called Chagas disease that is epidemic in much of Latin America and a serious problem in the U.S. as well.  Chagas [3] is wreaking havoc in Chile, which is one of the countries negotiating TPP. The failure of Chile under its current conservative party’s control (and the failure of Peru and Mexico) to stand up to the U.S. and expose and block its effort to stand in the way of vital treatment for victims of Chagas disease represents a national disgrace by the heads of state of the U.S., Chile, Peru, and Mexico.

Progressives should urge Bachelet, should she be elected President, to make the full drafts of TPP public immediately.  She should also demand that the draft TPP be scrapped and fundamentally changed to build democracy and national sovereignty and to control the multinational corporations rather than allow them and their plutocrat panels to dominate and denigrate democracy and national sovereignty.

The CEOs’ audacious assault on national sovereignty, the rule of law, and democracy through TPP will effectively remove the possibility of defeating them through democratic means. The CEOs have had to mount their assult secretly, for the peoples of the world would reject the their demands by an overwhelming margin if they knew what they were up to. But for groups like Public Citizenand WikiLeaks, we would have woken up to a fait accompliand had no democratic recourse.

WikiLeaks revealed [4] part of the draft, secret TPP text on November 13, 2013.  It deals with Intellectual Property (IP).  WikiLeaks explained the TPP process.

“Since the beginning of the TPP negotiations, the process of drafting and negotiating the treaty’s chapters has been shrouded in an unprecedented level of secrecy. Access to drafts of the TPP chapters is shielded from the general public. Members of the US Congress are only able to view selected portions of treaty-related documents in highly restrictive conditions and under strict supervision. It has been previously revealed that only three individuals in each TPP nation have access to the full text of the agreement, while 600 ‘trade advisers’ – lobbyists guarding the interests of large US corporations such as Chevron, Halliburton, Monsanto and Walmart – are granted privileged access to crucial sections of the treaty text.”

The TPP negotiations are currently at a critical stage. The Obama administration is preparing to fast-track the TPP treaty in a manner that will prevent the US Congress from discussing or amending any parts of the treaty. Numerous TPP heads of state and senior government figures, including President Obama, have declared their intention to sign and ratify the TPP before the end of 2013.”

So far I’ve only discussed one obscene example of the Obama administration’s positions on TPP, but broader analyses of why TPP betrays our democracy and national sovereignty have been done well by others, particularly Public Citizen’s Lori Wallach.  I applaud her efforts and thank her for providing me with source materials.

The partial draft of the TPP agreement on IP and health contains this provision.

“Article QQ.A.5: {Understandings Regarding Certain Public Health Measures7}

The Parties have reached the following understandings regarding this Chapter:

The obligations of this Chapter do not and should not prevent a Party from taking measures to protect public health by promoting access to medicines for all, in particular concerning cases such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, [US oppose: chagas] and other epidemics as well as circumstances of extreme urgency or national emergency. Accordingly, while reiterating their commitment to this Chapter, the Parties affirm that this Chapter can and should be interpreted and implemented in a manner supportive of each Party’s right to protect public health and, in particular, to promote access to medicines for all.”

The “US oppose[s]” adding “Chagas” to this list of exceptions. In reality, vigorous efforts to reduce Chagas (there is no vaccine) should be a high priority for the U.S. and Latin America (Mexico, Chile, and Peru are also parties to the TPP negotiations).  The U.S., however, is insisting on excluding Chagas disease from the list of “epidemics” for which a nation may “protect public health by promoting access to medicines for all.”  This kind of “understanding” clause is designed to provide guidance on the correct interpretation of TPP.  It appears that the current state of the TPP draft is that the other nations included Chagas but it was excluded from this clause due to the sole opposition of the U.S.  The provision of “access to medicines for all” is particularly vital in the case of Chagas disease because early drug treatments of infected newborns are extremely effective in eliminating the disease in newborns who were infected maternally.

The combination of indifference to the victims of Chagas disease and depravity of trying to prevent governments making available low or no-cost medicines to the victims – an action that will lead to many more victims (including tens of thousands of American victims) is so obscene that it brings to mind what lawyers consider the most perfect and deserved legal insult.

Richard Kluger quotes this passage from Plessy(the Supreme Court decision that upheld racial segregation as consistent with “equal protection of the laws”) in his book Simple Justice(1976):

“We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.”

Kluger then comments:

“Of all the words ever written in assessment of the Plessy opinion, none have been more withering than those … [of] Yale law professor Charles L. Black, Jr., who [said that in] … the two sentences… ‘The curves of callousness and stupidity intersect at their respective maxima.’”

The Obama administration’s effort to block governments from providing medicine to the victims of Chagas disease represents the intersection of callousness and stupidity at their respective maxima.  The heads of state of Chile, Mexico, and Peru have disgraced their office by failing to denounce the U.S. position on Chagas, to make public the TPP documents, and to withdraw from the treaty negotiations.

Obama has caused the TPP to violate every standard he has endorsed as president, including secret lobbying.  There is no limit on the political contributions that corporations can make to influence TPP policy or disclosure of their lobbying positions.  The TPP is bankrolled” by the world’s most powerful corporate interests.  TPP policies are not made by the American people, but they are also not made by our elected representatives in Congress. Obama’s “fast track” process for adopting TPP is designed to eliminate normal congressional powers.  Obama knows TPP is indefensible and that Americans would vote against it.  He is desperate to avoid any open, democratic debate between the people of America and the corporations, most of them foreign, that TPP seeks to make our unelected, all-powerful rulers.

This is why President Bachelet could do the world a priceless service by immediately making public the entire travesty that is TPP.




The Republican Party and the Affordable Care Act

Special for The Greanville Post—
BACKGROUNDER OF THE CONTROVERSIAL LAW FROM A HISTORIC-POLITICAL PERSPECTIVE

By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
SENIOR EDITOR

Obamacare: Badly built and badly defended, but still better than the Republican option?

Obamacare: Badly built and badly defended, but still better than the Republican option?

In the fall of 1993, President and Mrs. (as she was then know, before she became brand “Hillary”) Clinton were gearing up for the introduction of what became known as “The Clinton Health Plan” to Congress. At the Annual Meeting of the American Public Health Association, held in Washington, DC in November that year, a session was held looking for volunteers to speak on behalf of the plan at community meetings to be held the following year. I had a long background in what we used to call “health care delivery systems analysis.” And so I went along to that first session, really a tryout. Each participant was asked to give a brief presentation on the problems facing the US health care system and how they thought that the Clinton Health Plan could help to ameliorate them. I was pleased that I was chosen to participate and invited to come to Washington a couple of weeks later to begin training. I was dismayed, however, when, with no further discussion and certainly no interview for the job, I was asked to become a trainer myself.

 

These folks did not know me, had engaged in no training for trainers, and it quickly became apparent that they were more or less shooting from the hip. Nevertheless, when we, the chosen “speakers on behalf of the Clinton Health Plan”, were invited to a plenary session at the White House, I fully expected that we would be presented with marching orders and a detailed plan, including talking points, for dealing with the policy and political problems with which we would be expected to deal out on the CHP campaign trail. Instead, there were several speeches from the designers of the plan about its contents, which were already well-known, and that was about it. No strategy, no tactics, no group meetings, just sitting in lectures. I remember coming home from that meeting and telling my wife at the time, “if this is all they’ve got, the CHP is going to lose.”

In December of that year I came across a FAX (email was not in common usage way back then) sent out by Bill Kristol (yes, THAT Bill Kristol, and I still have the FAX in my files) to about 1200 Republicans in and about Washington on why they had to oppose the Clinton Health Plan as strongly as they could. Kristol’s focus was not that it was bad policy but because if it passed it would guarantee both a Democratic Congress in 1994 and the re-election of President Clinton in 1996. And of course they defeated it, helped mightily by President Clinton himself, who maintained a studied silence all through the Spring of 1994 while the Republicans ripped his plan apart. In fact, not knowing whether they had seen the Kristol FAX or not, I sent a copy in to the CHP office suggesting that they use it to show up the Republican opposition. I got no response and they never did use it.

•••

Ironically, the anti-CHP campaign in the Senate happened to be led by Bob Dole, the same Bob Dole who, as then Republican Minority Leader in the Senate, in 1974 had introduced a comprehensive National Health Insurance Plan that was similar in many ways to the Clinton Health Plan. In fact, had it not been for Watergate and President Nixon’s forced resignation, it is likely that we would have national health insurance in the United States no later than the run-up to the 1976 Presidential elections. But it was politics, not policy, that counted for the Republicans in 1994, just as it does now.

However, we are now seeing that the President made one huge mistake when he did speak about it occasionally, the “you will be able to keep your health insurance if you like it” mantra. Whether he did not know of the niggling detail about the difference between private (often very inadequate) and employer-provided policies or did know of it is a matter for White House historians. However, if in every one of his speeches on the subject he had simply said “if you have health insurance provided by your employer you will be able to keep it and insurers providing privately-held policies will be required to bring them up to snuff” the present contretemps on that subject would not be on the table. But it is, and the President over the years since the passage of the Act simply handed the Republicans a mallet with which to beat him and his program over the head.

But why do the Republicans really want to repeal, or at least inactivate, what they call “Obamacare?” For exactly the same reason that Bill Kristol went out early on the campaign against the Clinton Health Plan: politics (and who better to lay that one out now than Karl Rove). Not policy, for the ruling class of the US health care delivery system, very much the protectorate of the Republican Party, is kept very much in place by the ACA. For the private insurance companies, the ACA keeps them at the center of the system. For the hospitals there is no “public option” that could seriously bargain with them over reimbursement rates. At the same time, the expansion of coverage means that they will have to provide much less uncompensated care than they do now. For Big Pharma there is no built-in competition on drug prices. For the states there would be major increased subsidies for Medicaid. These are all Republican ideas, ideas drawn in fact (as is very well-known) from a plan developed by the Heritage Foundation that became the foundation for “Romney-care” in Massachusetts. (Click here to inspect the original memo and documents.)

But of course now, the big Republican fear is that if the ACA goes into effect, as jerry-built as it is, it will work, and then politically it will work for the Democrats and against the Republicans. They in fact are fully self-revealing on this point, because they offer no alternatives to the ACA that deal with the problems the ACA at least attempts to deal with. And no, their favorites such as allowing health insurance companies to work across state lines and ending the opportunity for patients grievously harmed by physicians and hospitals to get just compensation, otherwise known as “tort reform,” just don’t deal with lack of coverage, no coverage for pre-existing conditions, and so on and so forth.

Of course, this strategy would probably not have a chance of working if the Federal website had worked. But it didn’t. Why not? Since just about since the time the news of the trouble with the healthcare.gov website came out I’ve had the following thought. How much did and does a possible GOP hacking machine, as well as the internal defects in the system itself, have to do with the website trouble we’ve seen. A top-level computer programmer friend of mine told me that it is very easy to do “service denial.” The target website is just overloaded with incoming requests. It takes a fairly sophisticated security system to defend against such an effort.

As another friend of mine said, we could ask the ghost of Mike Connell, Karl Rove’s “IT guy,” who was on his way to testify in a trial about the Ohio vote-rigging scandal of 2004 when his single-engine plane mysteriously (sic) crashed, killing him. But even the NSA would have a difficult time talking with ghosts these days. And one has to add that the few state exchanges that there are seem to be working pretty well. Maybe they are better protected.

I’m not the only one to raise this possibility (although the cited reports concerned the security or lack thereof of website applicants’ data). I do wonder if six to 12 months from now, in the possible wreckage of the ACA, as delays and attempted reconstructions make its truly jerry-built structure fall apart, we will see one of those multi-authored New York Times stories, like the one that revealed GOP long-range planning on the government shutdown, about how the GOP arranged to hack the website. Time will tell on that one. But we already know that half the present problem is due to the fact that the Obama Administration did just about as poor a job of selling the ACA to the public as the Clinton Administration did of selling the CHP.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Russell Brand, the Posh Left and the Politics of Class

Ambling Towards Oblivion

by KIM NICOLINI

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“Ambling Toward Oblivion,” graphite, cheap ass ballpoint pen, india ink and watercolor on paper, 18×24. Drawing by Kim Nicolini.

In case you couldn’t tell, this is a drawing I did of Russell Brand. I decided to draw him as part of my Headlines series which I am currently working on.  I seriously didn’t know a damn thing about Brand until he was brought under my radar because of his essay in the October 24 Issue of The New Statesman in which Brand – pop star Katy Perry’s ex-husband, comedian, and “notorious womanizer” – talks about ineffective government,  the silencing and apathy of the disenfranchised, and the need for revolt.

What interested me more than the Brand essay itself was the backlash that Brand and people on the Left who support his political stance received from elite Academic Leftists and insulated politically correct Secular Leftists. In my opinion, Brand stirring the pot of class, activism and political agitation is even more important than the closed circles of self-congratulatory Leftists who purport to be champions of the under and working classes while they have never gotten their hands dirty and refuse to see how class affects real people – not just people who are represented as ideas in books or vehicles for propaganda.

When I announced that I was going to draw Russell Brand, my fifteen year old daughter exclaimed with undisguised disgust: “Why would you draw Russell Brand? He’s horrible!” When I asked her why he was horrible, my daughter said that Brand exploited Katy Perry by posting photos of her on Twitter without her permission. In other words, my high school age kid knew a lot more about Brand than I did, but I quickly did my research. I read his article in the New Statesman, watched his movie Get Me To The Greek, and read his book My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up to get a sense of who this guy is that is getting so much attention. My first assessment is that he is a guy who came from the trenches and fought his way out with his humor and energy. He snubs his nose at the politically correct elite, and in his essay in the New Statesman he provides a voice that people (especially young people) will listen to. No, he’s not going to start a revolution, but he has stirred the pot, and motion is better than stagnancy.

Russell Brand and those who have “taken his side” have gotten a lot of shit. Brand has especially been reamed for taking the stance of the revolutionary while he is living high on the hog in his celebrity and riches. However, it must be noted that Brand himself outwardly critiques his position and asks “Who am I to talk?” Well, he is able to talk for a couple of reasons: 1) as a pop culture icon, his voice will be heard by young people; and 2) he has come from the lower classes himself and knows what that life is like. He is not speaking from theory but from experience. For the record, Russell Brand – asshole, womanizer or not – did not come from privilege. He came from the lower classes and was lucky enough to joke his way out of it. He personally knows the struggles that the underclass face. He knows the streets, the hopelessness, the drugs, the feeling of beaten down and not able to get out.

Let me state something else quite clearly. You cannot erase class no matter how many swank hotel rooms you stay in. Class sticks even if your bank account is lined with greenbacks. I know firsthand how it feels to wear my class like a coat of anxiety. No matter how far you climb on the cultural or economic ladder, if you come from the underclass, you never stop feeling your inferior position. With elitist Leftists slamming you at every turn, the anxiety is amplified to the Nth. Not only do you feel awkward and anxious occupying a strata where you don’t feel you belong, but you get critiqued by people who think they know more about class than you do when you live with the burdens of your class background every day. Class manifests itself in a person’s entire psycho-social biological being, and it is not simply erased because one becomes successful of the surface.

It is clear from reading Brand and watching him in his movie, that he is fully aware of the vulnerability of his position because of his class background, so he exploits his class origins for humor in ways that Leftists often find offensive. (e.g. The “African Child” video in Get Him to the Greek  which is an overt critique of Hollywood centrist leftists like George Clooney, Ben Affleck et al.) Also, Brand isn’t just funny. He is self-reflexive and serious in his humor. He understands how his drug addiction and other “personality flaws” are connected to class, and he uses his experience to formulate his ideas into terms that can connect with those who are “in it” and not just outside observers.

My general position has always been that getting “the masses” to think politically outside the box is a good thing, and popular culture is an effective way to do that. This goes back to my early days with Bad Subjects whose “manifesto” promotes Political Education for Everyday Life. Academic left elitists and closed circles of politically correct secular Leftists only preach to the choir. They rarely accomplish a damn thing except stroking each others’ egos. Regardless of Brand’s celebrity, his words and repurposed Marxism will reach many more people than those Posh Lefties sitting in their ivory towers. I’m a populist at heart, and you aren’t going to reach the populace with a lot of high fallutin’ language and discourse that no one but your elite club can understand. Brand’s writing reads like a pop song with punch that will get people riled and thinking.

The text I included on my drawing is cut-up text from Brand’s New Statesman essay and reads as follows:

Ambling towards oblivion. Whores, virtueless horses and money-grabbing dicklickers. Young people have been marketed without the economic means to participate in the carnival. Apathy is a rational reaction to a system that no longer represents, hears or addresses the vast majority of people. Mechanised indifference and inefficiency. Apathy is the biggest obstacle to change. Zeroes lining up three wide. Planes falling from the sky. This is serious, you cunt. The devil has all the best tunes. No obstacles to the agendas of these slow-thighed beasts. Blithering chimps, in razor-sharp suits, with razor-sharp lines, pimped and crimped by spin doctors and speech-writers. The feeling that you aren’t being heard or seen or represented isn’t psychosis; it’s government policy. (Pieces of Russell Brand, 24 October 2013)

Those words have some bang behind them. Brand is not going to start a revolution, and he openly says as much. However, his language packs revolutionary punch, not unlike the Beat poets but for the new millennium. Speaking out politically in terms that the general populace can understand and relate to has its merits. What good does analyzing Marxist theory in a closed club of Left elitists provide for the general population on the streets? The answer is easy. None. Brand is a pop figure speaking in a language the general population can understand. Regardless of the opinion of well-credentialed Left Elites or the PoshLeft as Mark Fisher (author of Capitalist Realism) refers to them, Brand is not stupid or uninformed. He has done his homework even if it wasn’t in the halls of higher education institutions.  If you read Brand’s essay closely, he’s wielding some pretty straightforward Marxist theory, but it’s packaged like a pop song not a dissertation.

We live in times of great apathy and hopelessness. To quote one of my favorite recent phrases, kids “could give a flying fuck” about a bunch of intellectual snobs citing their source material and stroking each other’s egos while excluding the vast majority of the population from their discussion. For those of us with children, it is very hard to imagine a future for our kids, and very hard for them to imagine one for themselves. Kids are not going to listen to the PoshLeft or aging hippie activists. Sorry, it’s just not going to happen. Idealism is well and fine, but reality is reality. Kids see a big wall of hopelessness facing them down in their future. The voices they are going to listen to aren’t the voices of their parents, intellectual elites, or old school Lefty activists. What will stir them out of their numb hopeless slumber are the voices they are familiar with — the voices of pop culture, voices like Russell Brand, which can have tremendous ability to stir young people out of their state of apathy and into a state of political agitation.

When the PoshLeft isn’t excluding the general population, they get their kicks deriding people like Brand and those who are brave enough to publicly take Brand’s side. People like me, for example. I have no doubt I will come under fire for writing this essay. Maybe Brand has a Messiah Complex. Maybe he is full of shit while he sits in his posh hotel and spouts revolutionary catch phrases, but he is stirring the pot using the everyday language of the streets. Brand agitates, and it’s better to agitate than do nothing at all.

Brand has gotten a lot of shit for being a hypocrite and being a known “womanizer” flying high on his celebrity. But he never denies the hypocritical position he occupies. Brand pokes fun at himself all along the way. When he said that he took the assignment of editor for the New Statesman because “a pretty woman asked me,” clearly he is poking fun at himself and the Left media’s representation of him. It is ludicrous that people take this so seriously. Brand is obviously jibing the politically correct left who want to place everything in terms of race and gender while excluding consideration of class, as if somehow being a white man exempts someone from the underclass. Identity politics are just another form of Left Elitism. So what if Russell Brand likes women? So what if he fucks a new girl every week? Who’s to say they’re not enjoying it to? Sex happens. Focusing on Brand’s sexual activity as a reason to dismiss his overall message about class is just a sign of how identity politics are part and parcel of the problem, not part of the solution.

It’s not just Brand who has been reamed by the Left, Right and everyone in between, but more importantly Leftists who have taken Brand’s side have been put under the gun. It’s not surprising that the PoshLeft are so rigid and judgmental about Brand and anyone who supports Brand’s Brand of politicizing the masses since the PoshLeft is even less tolerant on many levels than the extreme Right. They criticize the Right Wing and they criticize any part of the Left that does not follow the rules of their elite club. As Brand states in his essay, “The right seeks converts and the left seeks traitors. This moral superiority that is peculiar to the left is a great impediment to momentum. It is also a right drag when you’re trying to enjoy a riot.”

I understand what it feels like to be against the wall and under the firing squad of the Posh Left. I am not part of them, nor will I ever be. I don’t fit the mold. Don’t hold the credentials. But I am as much a populist and political champion than the best and worst of the Posh Left. I have lived in the trenches, dug my way out, did my “book learning,” and helped a whole hell of a lot of underclass disenfranchised people in the process. I have been very “lucky” to gain some cultural capital that has put me on the map in some capacity. My writing has been published in books and journals internationally. I have articles in academic presses. I have been blessed by recognition for what I do by many people.

But being “under the radar” of the Left Elite (whether secular or academic) comes with a great deal of stress and tension. Class is hardwired into you. It doesn’t go away just because you transcend your origins. You don’t fit in with the people you came from, nor do you fit in with the place you occupy now. There is a constant sense of inferiority that can lead to actual physical anxiety, headaches, and nausea. Class is embodied, and it does not just leave the body because you publish a few articles. In fact, class tension is only amplified.  I am much more anxious and unnerved by The Left than I am by The Right as I frequently feel literally tied in knots being under their scrutiny.

I have had to develop a pretty thick skin writing for CounterPunch. While the very large majority of the readers support my work for which I am grateful, there are always those left elitists who feel the need to “set me straight.” It’s funny how many of them feel compelled to sign their name with a “Dr” or “PhD” and include their academic position, just so they’re sure I understand that they are somehow more equipped to pontificate on class than I am. Who am I? I woman with an eighth grade education, who spent her teen years getting a “street education” and who eventually got a B.A. from UC Berkeley through sheer will and the strength to fight that I learned from my working class origins. Still, I have spent my whole adult life working day jobs to make ends meet while squeezing some writing out in between. Where are these academic leftists real life class credentials, the ones they got from life in the trenches and not the classroom?

I am the daughter of an ironworker, a child of the blue collar working class, yet these “class theorists” – the academic Left elites and their secular equivalents –  somehow think that they understand class so much more than me or Russell Brand, because they have the credentials. Well they don’t understand. Their exclusionary practices make me feel sick, furious, and invisible all at once. The Left Elite is a society of privilege. They have had their way paved and paid, and their self-righteous approach to class doesn’t benefit anyone but themselves.

I guess I am lucky that my working class origins instilled in me an urgency to produce work as a way of surviving and not failing or falling back into the hole I climbed out of. I would guess that Russell Brand feels somewhat of the same pressure which is why he was able to “get out.”  The pressure of our class origins doesn’t go away. I’m no Russell Brand, but my hard work writing and producing for all these years has given me some public presence as a writer and a thinker who has gotten some recognition from the Left. Interestingly this recognition and acknowledgment comes double-edged. On the one hand, I feel empowered that my hard work has given me a voice that people listen to. On the other, I constantly scrutinized by the Elite Left, and I feel self-doubt and “marked” by the class I came from despite what cultural capital I have attained.

Interestingly, Russell Brand’s essay and the debates that arose from it inspired me to embrace my own voice and feel empowered by my ability to have faith in myself, rise up and say “Fuck you oppressors!” And I’m not talking about the oppressors from the Right, but the Left Elitists who think they are the only ones who have a right to talk about class. I’m here to inform you that they are not. Russell Brand came from the lower classes, and fought his way out with a sense of humor. Even if he is rich and famous now, he has just as much right to talk about class as anyone else. And so do I. His words matter because they are words that people can understand. So are mine. Use the language of the people to speak to the people. Use pop culture to change culture. Fuck fear inspired by class. Fuck fear of failure. Fuck those who sit in their insulated clubs of privilege and criticize for the sake of criticizing.  Russell Brand’s words are as valid as the next guy’s. They’ve got the street cred, book cred, and writing cred to go with them. And so do mine.

Kim Nicolini is an artist, poet and cultural critic living in Tucson, Arizona. Her writing has appeared in Bad Subjects, Punk Planet, Souciant, La Furia Umana, and The Berkeley Poetry Review. She recently published her first book, Mapping the Inside Out, in conjunction with a solo gallery show by the same name. She can be reached at knicolini@gmail.com.




Classic Archives: How Clinton Set the Stage for Bush

From our archives: Articles you should have read the first time around but missed.

Clinton: One of the many Pied Pipers to occupy the White House.

Clinton: One of the many Pied Pipers to occupy the White House.

By Mark H. Gaffney

[Originally 10/18/07 “ICH“]—
A
t the end of the Cold War the peoples of the earth shared a rare moment in human history. In fact, nothing like it had ever happened before. The United Sates stood alone as the lone planetary Superpower. The American star which had been rising since the second World War had now reached its zenith. For whatever reason, it seemed that destiny had selected the United States for a special role: to guide the community of nations into a period of unparalleled peace and prosperity. With the fading of East-West tensions this and much more seemed within reach. For a brief time it did appear that anything was possible. And why not? After all, the United States faced no serious military challenges. The US dollar was the favored currency in international exchange. In fact, it had been for decades. English was the lingua franca of science, diplomacy and commerce. Almost the entire world acknowledged US leadership. American culture was widely imitated. Together, this was unprecedented. Never had one nation, let alone a democracy, achieved such global influence. America had both the prestige and the power literally to shape the future of humanity.

Legacy of the Cold War

The world was desperate for a new vision. This was true for many reasons, but primarily because the titanic struggle between capitalism and socialism had been enormously destructive. The forty-five year Cold War had been waged on many fronts and in the most improbable places. It was an ideological war, not a clash of civilizations. As the vying spheres of influence ebbed and flowed across the continents, numerous nations were drawn in. Proxy wars raged along the tectonic margins and at the friction points where East and West collided. Neither side could defeat the other militarily without destroying itself, because the epic struggle was governed by a mad doctrine, Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). It was a fitting acronym for an insane time, and also a cruel paradox. For decades the world, rigged to a trip wire, could neither stand still nor move forward. The added rub, which I believe the world sensed intuitively, was that the precarious balance could not be sustained indefinitely. Of course, looking back it is now clear that that the Cold War itself, I mean the idea of the Cold War, was a carefully cultivated illusion: a false reality; but that is another story. Certainly the consequences were real enough. Citizens of the planet who lived through the period know what it means to live wedged between impossible alternatives–––the unthinkable on one hand and the unendurable on the other. Many were crushed beneath these wheels. Some nations were utterly destroyed, even beyond hope of recovery. The list of victims is long, and includes Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, East Timor, Ethiopia, Granada, Guatemala, Honduras, Indonesia, Laos, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Panama, Somalia, Sudan, and Viet Nam. No doubt, there are others…

Even as the Cold War trampled on the rights of indigenous people everywhere it despoiled the global environment. Toxic mayhem on a vast scale accompanied the nuclear arms race. Entire regions were affected and many were ruined or left permanently scarred. The open wounds from the heyday of uranium mining still deface the landscapes of the American southwest. As I write, Navaho children play on the tailing piles, amidst the radioactive dust, left behind by soul-less corporations that appeared on the scene, eager to make a fast buck, boomed briefly, then disappeared or were swallowed, in turn, by still larger corporations with even less of a conscience. Even worse scars can be found in the former Soviet republics where whole provinces were poisoned by catastrophic accidents at Sverdlovsk and Chernobyl, and entire districts, such as the Aral Sea region, were despoiled by central planning gone amok.

Dashed Hopes

By any measure, the toll of the Cold War was incalculable, and it’s no wonder that when the corrupt old Soviet state finally collapsed under its own weight the world’s response was: good riddance! The dismantling of the Iron Curtain was attended by joyous celebration across Europe. For a brief moment hope soared. In the US there was even talk of a peace dividend. Everywhere people dared to believe that the victory of the West presaged a new era of international cooperation, now desperately needed to address a long list of pressing problems, among them Third World poverty, overpopulation, the challenge of sustainable development, the energy crisis, AIDs, and the environment. Most importantly, at long last real progress toward nuclear disarmament seemed within reach. All eyes now turned to the West and especially to Washington for answers and for leadership. Yet, as I write in October 2007 it is painfully obvious, and has been for most of the presidency of George W. Bush, that the high hopes have been dashed. All that remains is the question: How and why did this happen? It is a difficult question, admittedly, but if we are to find our way back and regain a measure of hope, we must face it with brutal honesty.   

Today, many Americans hold G. W. Bush personally responsible for the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere that have brought about America’s increasing isolation in the world. Many also blame Bush for the general decline in our fortunes and for the dimming of hope. While I am no friend of the Bush administration, I do not entirely agree with this view, because I take issue with those who still naively believe in a partisan solution. The truth is more complex. In fact, the previous Democratic administration of William Jefferson Clinton bears a large measure of responsibility for the disasters that have befallen us. In many ways the Clinton White House set the stage for George W. Bush. Dr. Helen Caldicott, the tireless campaigner against nuclear oblivion, writes that she got the wake-up call about Clinton in 1999 when she was invited to attend a meeting in Florida about the weaponization of space. Caldicott was aghast as she listened to knowledgeable individuals describe US military planning, then current. Like many of us, she had trusted Bill Clinton, and had believed he was taking care of the nation’s business. Suddenly, Caldicott realized she had been living in a fool’s paradise. She writes: 

“To my horror I found that seventy-five military industrial corporations such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, TRW Aerojet, Hughes Space, Sparta Corp, and Vista Technologies had produced a Long Range Plan, written with the cooperation of the US Space Command, announcing a declaration of US space leadership and calling for the funding of defensive system and ‘a seamlessly integrated force of theatre land, sea, air and space capabilities through a world-wide global defense information network.’ The US Space Command would also ‘hold at risk’ a finite number of ‘high-value’ earth targets with near instantaneous force application–––the ability to kill from space…I also discovered that the much-vaunted missile defense system was to be closely integrated with the weaponization of space, and that all of the hardware and software would be made by the same firms, at the combined cost of hundreds of billions of dollars to the US taxpayers.”[1]

The plan envisaged “full spectrum dominance,” that is, US military domination of land, sea, air and space. Although US planners sought to portray this next generation of technological wizardry as defensive, in actuality, the planned systems, if implemented, amounted to a major break with the 1972 ABM Treaty, and with long-standing US commitments to maintain the peaceful status of outer space. The cold logic of dominance meant that the project was offensive in nature. But why? Exactly who was to be targeted? Which enemies? Remember, this was 1999. The Cold War had been over for some years. Both Russia and the US were then cooperating to reduce the size of their nuclear arsenals. The START reductions were limited, to be sure, but the process was moving in the right direction and further reductions were possible. Obviously, the US military’s sweeping new plans for the domination of space threatened to undo all of this progress toward a more sane planet. It was obvious to Caldicott that a precious opportunity was in danger of being squandered, perhaps forever. The new space weapons threatened to trigger a new arms race and, very likely, another cycle of world conflict. Caldicott writes that she staggered home from the meeting determined “to become re-involved in educating the public about the impending catastrophe associated with the mad plans of the US Space Command and its associated corporations…”

The Critical Path: Swords into Plowshares

The point is that not even one of the new weapons systems being planned were needed. In fact, the grand plan for space, if implemented, would have benefited no one but a few arms manufacturers and, of course, the bankers who finance such deranged schemes–––all at immense cost to the US taxpayer. The plans were in direct conflict with then-current US foreign policies. The weaponization of space was diametrically opposed to the limited nuclear arms reductions then in progress, yet, was being presented as in the best interests of America: a case of mendacity so brazen one has to wonder how the selfish individuals who cooked it up could sleep at night. 

As I’ve noted, the end of the Cold War presented America and the world with a golden opportunity to move in a new direction, a direction that was, in fact, essential for the survival of our planetary civilization. As a younger man I was an admirer of the late R. Buckminster Fuller. The inventor is probably best known for the geodesic dome, but Fuller also popularized the concept of the “critical path.”[2] It is an expression used by engineers and it means exactly what it suggests. The idea is that if we are to become sustainable on “spaceship earth” and avoid destroying our planetary home we must learn to live within the physical limitations or budget imposed by Nature. This, in turn, requires that we drastically reduce our human “footprint” by becoming much more efficient in the way we use energy and natural resources. Fuller was a firm believer in human ingenuity, and he often argued that our predicament called for a designer revolution on various levels, both economic and social. None of the steps in the critical path are optional, from the standpoint of survival. Taken together, they should be understood as the minimum requirements necessary for the long-term success of the human enterprise. While experts often disagree, at the end of the Cold War the single most urgent step was obvious, or should have been, to every thinking person; and this includes the newly elected President Bill Clinton, who entered the White House in 1992 on a wave of high hopes.

As the first US president to be inaugurated in the post-Cold War era, Bill Clinton’s number one priority should have been to meet with our Russian neighbors at an early date, and to negotiate with them a mutual halt in nuclear weapons production and research, as well as a rapid build-down of existing nuclear stockpiles and delivery systems. It was also imperative that Clinton give firm direction to the US military. The Pentagon had to be made to understand that because the Cold War was now thankfully over the nation must chart a new path, one that required the urgent redeployment of resources away from the nuclear arms race. A key part of this redirection would be the announcement of a vital new mission for the national weapons labs (Lawrence, Los Alamos, and Sandia). Henceforth, the labs would cease most weapons-related research/development and would redirect their considerable energies and talents in a positive direction, the new mission being a Manhattan-scale project to solve the nation’s energy problem. The goal would be to wean America from its unhealthy dependence on coal and foreign oil. Clinton would instruct the labs to engineer a phased transition toward abundant and clean energy alternatives at the earliest possible date; and to make it happen he would also press Congress to appropriate the needed funding. Efforts would focus on a range of promising technologies, but especially wind, solar, tidal, and hydrogen. Meanwhile, the nuclear establishment would be stripped of its vast subsidies. Although in a bye-gone era these were a sound idea, the nuclear establishment had produced no energy solutions, despite years of preferential treatment. Indeed, the vast monies lavished upon it had succeeded only in creating another bureaucratic dinosaur. In fact,the nuclear industry itself had become an impediment to change, because its enormous subsidies undermined healthy market forces. Henceforth, nuclear power would have to compete on a more equal playing field with other alternatives. Assisting market forces to operate would be essential to the transition to clean energy; and for this reason another goal would be to achieve the economies of scale necessary to bring down the costs of clean and renewable alternatives. The end result would be greatly enhanced national productivity, the creation of whole new sectors of the economy, boosted foreign earnings, and millions of high-paying new jobs here in the US. Resources would also be redirected to a long list of outstanding social and environmental problems. At the top of the latter list: the urgent clean-up of the toxic mess created by the nuclear establishment during a profligate half-century of out-of-control weapons development. This alone would cost an estimated $350 billion (in 1995 dollars, according to the Department of Energy [DoE]), a whopping figure that does not even include the costs associated with cleaning up the mess at the Hanford reservation, the Nevada Test Site, and the Savannah and Clinch nuclear facilities, all so contaminated that a solution may not even be feasible.

Some will argue that the above visionary plan was (and is) unrealistically utopian–––too much to expect of any US president, let alone the Clinton White House. But I take strong exception with this viewpoint, because in the 1990s the transition I have described was already within reach. Few major technological breakthroughs were needed. Many of the important alternatives were already “on the shelf” and could have been brought to maturity without undue economic strain. Some, no doubt, would have become mainstream long since but for bureaucratic inertia and because powerful vested interests have actively suppressed them–––interests, I should add, that have long sought to keep America addicted to oil.  No, what was needed more than anything was genuine leadership in the Clinton White House, in order to beak through the inertial barriers and confront the vested interests. What is the role of a president, after all, if not to use the power of his office (the bully pulpit) to catalyze changes that are needed for the good of the nation? This is precisely why a president must stand above special interests. In the early years of his presidency Clinton did not lack for popular support. A solid majority of the American people elected Clinton because they wanted change; and they looked to him to make the tough decisions. This is not just my opinion. Other commentators have also pointed this out. Bill Clinton entered office with tremendous political capital, yet, incredibly, he never used it. The crucial factor was leadership, and he simply failed to deliver. There are various theories as to why. Dr. Caldicott’s frank assessment will make Democrats uncomfortable, but in my opinion it carries the ring of truth. Caldicott thinks Clinton lacked the necessary strength of character, and she has it right.

Clinton’s Nuclear Policy Review:
A Diminished Presidency?

Like other newly elected presidents, Bill Clinton soon ordered a policy review of US nuclear weapons doctrine. The review was of vital importance and required that Clinton become personally involved to insure its success. This also meant taking charge of the Pentagon as the commander-in-chief. Unfortunately, instead of asserting his authority, Clinton vacillated, as if he were unclear himself about priorities and objectives. The policy review was eventually delegated to mid-level officials who were easily outmaneuvered by hard-liners in the military. The generals opposed any changes in US nuclear policy and they ultimately won a decisive victory. This was a major defeat for Clinton, and one from which it seems he never recovered. Caldicott speculates that Clinton, thereafter, sought to compensate for his loss of standing by using military force abroad on more occasions than any president in two decades. She may be right. The point is that Clinton’s attempts to placate the Pentagon were no substitute for leadership. This probably explains why, even today, Clinton is widely viewed with contempt within the US armed services. Soldiers naturally respect strength and revile weakness.

Clinton’s diminished presidency did not become evident, however, for some years. Certainly none of this was immediately obvious. At the 1995 Nonproliferation Review (NPT) Conference the Clinton administration, to all appearances, achieved a major success by persuading a majority of nations to agree to an indefinite extension of the NPT. This success was probably due to Clinton’s vocal support for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), and because the US delegation agreed to a list of noble principles reaffirming the US obligation under Article VI of the NPT to take steps in the near future toward complete disarmament. The world did not then know that Clinton was about to violate those same principles, by succumbing to a deal with hard-line elements within his own administration. This in itself is an indication of Clinton’s failed leadership, for only a weak president would ever agree to such a back-room deal. What was this deal? The US Department of Energy (DoE), representing the national weapons labs, agreed to back Clinton’s support of the Comprehensible Test Ban only if Clinton agreed to preserve the labs’ traditional role as nuclear overseers; which, of course, meant preserving the nuclear arsenal itself. And so was born the Stockpile Stewardship and Management Program, otherwise known as Manhattan II. Although its stated purpose seemed innocuous: to insure the safety and reliability of the US nuclear stockpile, in reality, the program would maintain various nuclear research and development programs at roughly Cold War levels for many years. Additionally, the package created new computational and simulation programs to compensate for the anticipated ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. It is known that nuclear research secretly continued at Los Alamos–––in violation of the NPT. This came to light in 1995 when Dr. Don Wolkerstorfer, a Los Alamos manager, mentioned a new bunker buster, the B-61-11, during a radio debate.[3]  The B-61-11 is a variable-yield nuclear penetrator (maximum yield: 340 kilotons). The following year Department of Defense (DoD) spokesperson Kenneth Bacon revealed that other earth penetrators were also in the works. Bacon told reporters that “We are now working on a series of weapons, both nuclear and conventional, to deal with deeply buried targets.”[4] There were even indications that the labs were moving ahead on an even more ambitious effort to develop the next generation of nuclear weapons. On April 25, 1997, the physicist Hans Bethe, the most senior surviving scientist from the Manhattan Project, sent a letter to Clinton, a letter that one day may have historic significance. In it Bethe urged the president to halt research on new weapons designs, including a pure fusion bomb, long regarded as the nuclear Holy Grail. Bethe, who led the theoretical division at Los Alamos during the development of the Atomic Bomb, was long retired. Yet, he maintained contacts in the labs and was informed about the kind of research that was underway. Bethe informed Clinton that the US already possessed more than sufficient weapons for it security, and he urged that 

“…the time has come for our Nation to declare that it is not working, in any way, to develop further weapons of mass destruction of any kind. In particular, this means not financing work looking toward the possibility of new designs for nuclear weapons. And it certainly means not working on new types of nuclear weapons, such as pure-fusion weapons.”[5] 

Bethe deserved to be taken seriously. After all, he won the 1967 Nobel Prize in physics for describing the fusion process that drives the stars. In his letter Bethe further wrote that because “new types of weapons [i.e., a pure fusion bomb] would, in time, spread to others and present a threat to us, it is logical for us not to pioneer further in this field.” Although the great physicist affirmed his support for the stewardship program, he also cautioned that computational experiments could be used to design new categories of weapons, even in the absence of underground testing. For this reason Bethe urged Clinton not to fund such programs. Again, this was sage counsel. It is believed that Israel evaded international detection while clandestinely developing nuclear weapons by this very means, i.e., through the use of computational models and computer simulations. Israel, which has never signed the NPT, is known to have staged only a very few small nuclear tests, perhaps even as few as one.[6]  Yet, Israel succeeded in developing a large and advanced nuclear arsenal. Six weeks later Bethe received a polite reply from Clinton, in which the president deftly side-stepped all of the main points Bethe had raised. 

Just five months later, in November 1997, Clinton issued a presidential directive, PDD-60, formalizing the outcome of his nuclear policy review. Most of the document remained classified, but more than enough was released to serve notice to the world that the United States had now become a far greater threat to the nonproliferation treaty than any terrorist or rogue state.[7]  Clinton’s directive flew squarely in the face of the noble principles he had agreed to at the 1995 NPT conference. The directive reaffirmed the logic of the Cold War and announced a cornucopia of new spending to be showered upon the nuclear establishment over the next two decades. The directive announced that the US would maintain the status quo, that is, the Cold War triad of nuclear forces (i.e., bombers, ICBMs and submarines) as well as the hair-trigger launch-on-warning posture. The US insisted upon the right to nuclear first-use and even the right to use nukes against non-nuclear states that might somehow threaten US “interests.” These shocking revelations were unprecedented. The US also rejected a Russian proposal for deeper cuts in the number of strategic warheads. Instead, the US would move ahead with plans to upgrade the US Trident missile force and the B-2 bomber. The US would also resume production of plutonium pits, which are the fissile cores used in nuclear weapons. The directive reaffirmed the new emphasis on sub-critical testing and advanced computer modeling procedures: the very thing that Hans Bethe had cautioned against. Additionally, the US announced that it would resume production of tritium, an isotope of hydrogen used in thermonuclear weapons. The stated purpose was to provide additional supplies for the stewardship program. Because tritium has a half-life of twelve years, the tritium gas used in nuclear weapons decays and periodically must be replenished. Even so, the explanation was dubious, since tritium can be scavenged from deactivated weapons and recycled. Given even modest reductions in the size of the US nuclear force, in 1997 there was at least a thirty-year supply for the stewardship program.[8] This hinted that Hans Bethe was correct and the US was already secretly developing the next generation of nukes. As if all of this were not enough, the directive also announced that the US would complete construction of a brand new National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore laboratory, where the world’s most powerful lasers would be used to study nuclear fusion–––another clue. 

These policies had been decided with no public debate or consultations with Congress. Ten years later, it appears that Clinton had made a bargain with the devil. He may have acted in the mistaken belief that the much-anticipated ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban by the US Senate would provide him some flexibility, allowing him to later rescind at least some of the newly announced policies. As we know, of course, in 1998 the Republican-controlled Senate rejected the Test Ban, dealing Clinton a stinging defeat. Obviously, Clinton’s attempts to placate the militarists in his administration backfired, with the tragic result of locking the US into a Cold War posture for many years to come, even though the Cold War was long over. All of which raises serious questions about Bill Clinton’s style of leadership, or lack thereof. But his character issues were not limited to placating generals. The more fundamental problem is that he chose to serve a small group of rich and powerful men, instead of serving the nation.

Clinton’s Expansion of NATO

For many years, during the Cold War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was the first line of defense against a possible Soviet attack on Western Europe. But when the old Soviet state collapsed in the late 1980s during the presidency of Mikhail Gorbachev, NATO’s original purpose also ceased to exist. Later, when the Berlin wall came down, President George Bush Sr. assured Gorbachev that the US would not expand NATO into eastern Europe, if Russia did not oppose the reunification of Germany. The agreement was mutually beneficial, and Russia was true to its word. However, during his second term in the White House Clinton reneged on Bush’s promise by proposing to admit eastern European nations to the NATO alliance, starting with Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, went on tour promoting the new plan. She argued that NATO expansion was a good idea because it would stabilize central Europe politically and economically. Thoughtful critics, however, such as former Senator Sam Nunn (R-GA), a long-time expert on US nuclear policy, pointed out that because Moscow would naturally view the eastward expansion of NATO as a threat to its national security, the probable consequence would be exactly the opposite. Clinton’s plan would destabilize Europe, stall progress toward arms reductions, and over the long term might even lead to a new Cold War. The critics also warned that the US taxpayer would pick up much of the tab for NATO expansion to the tune of many billions of dollars, most of which would end up in the bank accounts of various arms merchants. Yet, in 1998, with almost no debate the US Congress closed ranks behind Clinton and voted to support NATO expansion.

With hindsight, the critics were correct. Despite claims by the Clinton administration to the contrary, the expansion of NATO into eastern Europe was not in the best interests of the United States, nor in the best interests of Europe. At the time, the relatively poor nations of eastern Europe did not have money to waste on arms. Their top priority was to rebuild their infrastructure after the disaster of communism, and to improve the lives of their people. Of course, Washington promised that in return for purchasing our weapons the US would support their entry in the European Union (EU), which most of western Europe opposed at the time. Yet, this was an illusion, since their purchase of large quantities of US weapons actually slowed their economic recovery, and this more than anything delayed their entry into the European Union. No, the primary beneficiaries of NATO expansion were the US arms makers and their financial backers on Wall Street. All of whom saw in the break-up of the former Soviet bloc an opportunity to enrich themselves. A scurrilous lot, they can only be compared with the wave of carpetbaggers who infested the southern states after the American Civil War, for the purpose of exploiting the defeated Confederacy. The US arms industry, the world’s largest, spent millions successfully lobbying the US Congress and the Clinton administration to expand NATO, and subsequently they cashed-in on this vast new arms bazaar. As early as 1995 Clinton had telegraphed his obeisance to these same powerful interests when he issued presidential directive 41, which announced that arms sales were essential for preserving US jobs. The directive instructed US diplomats to get busy and boost foreign sales of US-made weapons for the good of the economy. Obviously, Clinton found it easier to maintain the status quo, however perilous, rather than use the considerable power of his office to change that reality and move the nation away from the weapons economy built up during the Cold War. When Moscow protested the expansion of NATO Clinton brushed aside Russia’s security concerns with practiced aplomb. The president insisted that NATO was a force for stability, and his casual demeanor seemed to make light of this quaint idea that NATO might somehow threaten the Russians. How absurd! 

Today, of course, as George W. Bush prepares to install an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system in Poland and a new ABM radar site in the Czech Republic, on Russia’s doorstep, and as we hover on the brink of world war, it is perfectly clear that Moscow’s concerns were well-founded. The issue is why our former president, a Rhodes scholar, was purblind to the fact, ten years ago. The truth is that Bill Clinton’s expansion of NATO was never about the stability of Europe. It was never about US or global security. It was always about one thing: the sale of weapons for profit. All of this becomes more obvious as the world situation deteriorates, yet, the Democratic candidates in the presidential marathon apparently still don’t get it. As far as I can tell, they have been conspicuously silent about Clinton’s failed NATO policy. Which I take as a sober commentary on our deaf and dumb political culture. Someone needs to corner Hillary and ask her this pointed question, on camera: Why did your husband put the interests of the weapons manufacturers and bankers above the interests of our nation and our planet? Why, Hillary? Because there is no doubt that Bill’s NATO policy set the stage for the disasters that have overtaken us. Perhaps the real issue is whether Hillary, or any of the Democratic front-runners, have the integrity and courage to answer a simple question.

Mark H. Gaffney’s latest book, Gnostic Secrets of the Naassenes, was a finalist for the 2004 Narcissus Book Award. Mark can be reached for comment atmarkhgaffney@earthlink.net  Check out Mark’s web site www.GnosticSecrets.com  

[1] Helen Caldicott and Craig Eisendrath, War in Heaven: The Arms Race and Outer Space, The New Press, New York, 2007, p. ix; also see Helen Caldicott, The New Nuclear Danger, The New Press, New York, 2004.

[2] Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path, St. Martin’s Griffin, New York, 1982.

[3] Broadcast by radio station KSFR in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on July 18, 1995. For more details about the B-61-11 go tohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B61_nuclear_bomb

[4] Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Public Affairs), DoD News Briefing, Tuesday April 23, 1996.

[5] The text of Bethe’s letter, and Clinton’s reply, have been posted by the Federation of American Scientists. http://www.fas.org/bethecr#letter

[6] Mark Gaffney, Dimona: The Third Temple?, Amana Books, Brattleboro, 1989, chapters 4 and 5.

[7]  For an excellent discussion of PDD-60 see Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll, USN (ret), “The NPT Review — Last Chance?”, The Defense Monitor,  Vol. XXIX, No. 3, 2000. Posted at http://www.cdi.org/dm/2000/issue3/NPT.html

[8] Kenneth D. Bergeron, Tritium On Ice, MIT Press, 2002. Also see Charles D. Ferguson’s review in the March/April 2003 issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, (vol. 59, no. 02) pp. 70-72.




Lou Reed and That Junkie Life

The Spike in Our Veins
by KIM NICOLINI

Kim Nicolini and her portrait of Lou Reed.

Kim Nicolini and her portrait of Lou Reed.

Quadrophenia brings me back to my working class home in Pacifica, CA where I found solace and escape at the cold foggy seaside. The noise of childhood was woven into The Who’s lyrics and music that thrummed with experiential reality put into a single piece of music art. The Joy Division albums have the same effect. They distill experience (bodily and emotional) into a multi-layered sound where music, poetry, and rebellion collide and produce music that simultaneously opens a door inside myself and outside of myself. Clearly the sound and sentiment of Joy Division were influenced by Velvet Underground. All of these albums beautifully mesh the interior and the exterior. The sound of the music leads us to a place that blurs the division between reality and dream while the lyrics are poetry carved out of the material of real life.

I’m not here to give you a history lesson on Velvet Underground or tell you about all the bands their sound influenced (e.g. the heroin-driven “shoe gazing” rock of the 1990s or New York-based art rock like Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo). What I can tell you is that I immediately fell in love with the album because of 1) its addictively seductive sound; 2) its ability to capture a cohesive experiential moment in a multi-track LP; 3) its poetic lyrics that capture both the literal reality of life on the streets and the abstract sensation of getting high; 4) finally, and most importantly, because it is the album above all other albums that most effectively captures life on the streets and, more specifically, the life of a heroin addict. It’s like the music equivalent to the film Panic In Needle Park (1972) which so perfectly captures the ups and downs of the life of the junkie. On the VU album, the layered sound of the music and the poetic lyrics capture so perfectly what it feels like to live the life of a dope addict – the dream, the drug, the space of being propelled into a numbed nothingness that heroin delivers.

I will state straight out and without apology that I know firsthand the life of the street junkie. I spent a good chunk of my teenage years putting a needle in my arm and hunting for my next fix. I can say, as any living former junkie can tell you, that shooting heroin feels like nothing else. You never stop wanting it, no matter how many years of sobriety you have under your belt. Heroin is the Great Seductress. Once she has you in her clenches, it is almost impossible to let go. It feels so damn good that all you want is more, more, and then more, and you’ll do anything to get it. Heroin is the “Femme Fatale” of all drugs. She gets you in her grip, lures you into her bed, covers you with a blanket of dark kisses that lead you into the darkness of oblivion, and then she keeps you groveling for more.

Here she comes, you better watch your step
She’s going to break your heart in two, it’s true
It’s not hard to realize
Just look into her false colored eyes
She builds you up to just put you down, what a clown

I will pull no punches here when I say what I’m about to say about Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground. The more conscious I became of class, the less enamored I became of the whole idea of Andy Warhol’s Factory. In my early years, I totally fetishized it. Imagine the glitter glam world of art films, art bands, false eyelashes, and endless dope floating in silver balloons. I thought if I could ever go anywhere in the past, it would be a party at The Factory. But now, after years of understanding the nuances of class and, in particular, class divisions within the art scene, I can say that if I went to a party at Andy Warhol’s factory, I’d probably be pretty miserable. What The Factory produced were a lot of elitist art snobs. It was a very elite insulated culture created by artist insiders wearing the guise of outsiders. Period.

Lou Reed liked to play off his sexuality as being “bisexual” or “homosexual”, but the truth of the matter is that Lou Reed was straight as a ruler. He used “alternative sexuality” as a marketing scheme. His true lover was his drugs, but that can be said about any junkie, so this is no condemnation of Lou Reed. The only “lay” the junkie wants is the one with a needle in his or her arm. Lou Reed may have been hanging out with queers and trannies, but when it came time to getting penetrated, he was getting it on with the needle. That’s largely why he was still alive to produce art in the 80s and 90s when the queer art world was dying off from AIDS. But this doesn’t mean that Lou Reed was not a ground-breaking artist. This is just a sign of the times when sexual identity was often manipulated and exploited for art and profit (see David Bowie and the New York Dolls for examples). So let me cast no stones here.

This brings me to why I love Velvet Underground & Nico so much even though it was produced by a very elite school of artists from which I would have felt completely excluded and alienated. The needle is a great class leveler. Regardless of where you come from and where you are, when you put that needle in your arm, every junkie is the same. Whether shooting up in a back room at Andy Warhol’s factory or a skid row hotel, the feeling of the drug is absolutely the same and universal. That feeling and the experiences that accompany it are what this album captures so completely through poetic lyrics and beautifully crafted sound. The album is like a Romantic ode to heroin carved out of poetry and layers of sound. Transpose Samuel Coleridge to late 1960s New York, and he could have written the lyrics.

The Wikipedia entry on the LP describes it as an album with “a focus on controversial subject matter expressed in many of its songs including drug abuse, prostitution, sadism and masochism and sexual deviancy.” Sure, on the surface, you can give the album this read. The content is all there. But, if you listen to the album from the perspective of a junkie, the entire album is about the experience of being a heroin addict. The drug is the sex, the perversion, the deviancy. The prostitution is double-edged. Every junkie is a prostitute to the drug, and the drug often leads to prostitution for its acquisition. Velvet Underground & Nico is above all else an epic album about the heroin lifestyle and all it encompasses on a sensory and experiential level.

No doubt, Lou Reed’s iconic song “Heroin” completely embodies the experience of shooting dope. The sound of the music perfectly mimics the feel of heroin coursing through your veins, from the first shot to the rush to the lull into nothingness. I can get high just listening to its build, its ebb and flows. I feel the “spike” go into my vein. I feel the rush go through my body. Even today, over thirty years after I last put a needle in my vein, I can still feel high listening to that song.

Heroin, be the death of me
Heroin, it’s my wife and it’s my life
Because a mainer to my vein
Leads to a center in my head
And then I’m better off than dead
Because when the smack begins to flow
I really don’t care anymore

But this isn’t the only song about using heroin on the album. Every single track captures the junkie lifestyle on some level, even when you think it’s Velvet Underground Lite or playing on sexual perversion. Take “Venus In Furs”. I think this might be the most accurate song about being a junkie on the album. In fact, the title of my drawing of Lou Reed is taken from lyrics to this song. The song title refers to the sado-masochistic novel written by Sacher-Masoch, from whom the term masochism was derived. On the surface, the song may seem like a simple parable of sexual perversion (a sexual slave being dominated by his lover), but the truth is that the mistress in this song is a drug not a human, and the slave is the junkie held in her clutches. (“Heroin — It’s my wife and it’s my life.”)

I am tired, I am weary
I could sleep for a thousand years
A thousand dreams that would awake me
Different colors made of tears

Kiss the boot of shiny, shiny leather
Shiny leather in the dark
Tongue of thongs, the belt that does await you
Strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart

Heroin, above all drugs, delivers the opiated dream, the life of sleep. You tie off your arm with the leather belt and get kissed by a tongue of thongs. You “dream the sleep of a thousand years,” and you become a slave to the only thing you desire. The next high. The next spike. The belt strapped around your arm while you let your alluring mistress take over your body. Heroin is the great dominatrix, the lover you will give anything for. And you consummate that love with a belt and a needle.

Heroin is the great “Femme Fatale” – the ultimate tease who will keep you begging for more and “break your heart in two” with her “false colored eyes.” She is your mistress, and you are her slave. And it feels good to give over to her so completely. If you are entirely enslaved to the drug, the rest of the world no longer matters. You can lose yourself “in a thousand dreams” until you run out, and you’re left high and dry. Until you’re “out on the streets again” selling your body and soul for your next high . . .

There she goes again
She’s out on the streets again
She’s down on her knees, my friend
But you know she’ll never ask you please again . . .
Now take a look, there’s no tears in her eyes
Like a bird, you know she will fly, fly, fly away
See her walking on down the street . . .

or standing on the corner “waiting for the man” . . .

I’m waiting for my man
Twenty-six dollars in my hand
Up to Lexington, 125
Feeling sick and dirty, more dead than alive

Shooting heroin is all about being dead and alive at the same time. It’s about flirting with the dark side and pushing the envelope while you push in the needle. And the sound and the lyrics of this album beautifully and perfectly capture that place between life and death, where you ride the limbo land of heroin’s dark waves, and everything you do is centered on keeping the waves coming. The risk is part of the thrill – knowing that you are pushing right to the brink of death and that the danger of falling over the edge and never coming back is real. Because death is part of life for the junkie like in “Run Run Run”:

Seasick Sarah had a golden nose
Hobnail boots wrapped around her toes
When she turned blue, all the angels screamed
They didn’t know, they couldn’t make the scene

Even songs that seem bright and light like “Sunday Morning” are actually dark dreams of what could be and isn’t because everything is shrouded in the lows of the high. Junkies aren’t always passed out in needles in their arms. There are always these moments of euphoria where everything seems absolutely perfect. The glimpses of hope that at the end there really is a rainbow, but inevitably the clouds come back and the rain comes down.

Sunday morning rain is falling
Steal some covers, share some skin
And clouds are shrouding us in moments unforgettable

What this album does so beautifully is seduce us just like a drug. The way Warhol pushed the levels to the max causing the layers of sound to blur and warp perfectly captures getting high, and the music becomes its own drug. The sound, the lyrics, the play between sex, dreams, and the reality of the street life all combine to a sensory experience that seduces us into feeling high. The music becomes the great seductress. The album is our mistress as we listen to over and over want more and more. The thrum of guitar and bass mesh like blood coursing through our veins.

The entire album – every track, every lyric, every sound embodies the life of the junkie, and that life is pretty much the same no matter who or where you are. It involves highs and lows, prostitution and desperation, sex displaced onto needles, and needles penetrating you like sex. It is living death and dreams layered on dreams. It is the great escape even when you have to go through hell to get there. You will sell your body. You will sell your soul, just to feel that spike in your vein and that rush of escape. Lou Reed new that feeling, that life, and he put it into lyrics with poetic brilliance. Even after thirty years of sobriety, the feelings of getting high on heroin — the warm burn of the first shot, the rush as the drugs go to my brain and heart — are still real when I listen to this album. I can’t listen to “Heroin” without unconsciously scratching the veins on my inner arm or feeling a wave of nausea.

What’s interesting is that the album was created within an elite environment, but the aesthetics and poetics of the music transcend class. The overall “feel” of the songs is one that any junkie can relate to. The needle is the great leveler, and interestingly being a junkie transcends class on an experiential level. We’re all the same with the spike in our vein.

So now, 46 years after the album came out and thirty years drug-free in my life, I can still listen to the album and feel “high.” The music itself has becomes my drug even in my sobriety. I play the album and feel my body chemistry change just by immersing myself in the sound of the music. Couple the way the music feels with where I “go” when I’m making art, and the high I experience is undeniably one of the best highs of my life, especially because I am sober, and everything I do and feel is coming straight from me and not induced by synthetic external chemicals. I’m mainlining my own internal “art chemistry” combined with the sensory experience of the music. It’s a kind of Art Speedball. I don’t need to go “meet the man” to get what I need to get high. I get it from within myself with the soundtrack of Velvet Underground giving me a boost to push me through to the other side.

I listened to the entire Velvet Underground & Nico LP multiple times while drawing my tribute portrait of Lou Reed. And between the music and channeling my own “art chemistry” into the drawing, I was as high as I’ve ever been. I felt myself on the streets. I felt myself sitting in a hotel room priming the syringe for a fix. Yet, I also felt the euphoria of being alive and sober now. I was completely immersed in the present and rocking my sobriety hard as I vigorously scratched away at my drawing. The only thing I was “shooting” was a lot of black ink out of pens onto a big old piece of paper.

Interestingly, Lou Reed was sober just about the same amount of time I have been when he died this past Sunday. Yet, he never stopped channeling what he put into his music back in 1967. He just learned that you can tap the vein without the drug. I tap the vein every time I pick up a Cheap Ass Ballpoint Pen and put it to paper. I tapped the vein when I drew Lou Reed. I am tapping the vein right now as I write this. I am my own mirror:

I’ll be your mirror
Reflect what you are, in case you don’t know
I’ll be the wind, the rain and the sunset
The light on your door to show that you’re home

When you think the night has seen your mind
That inside you’re twisted and unkind
Let me stand to show that you are blind
Please put down your hands
‘Cause I see you

Sadly, it is the “source” of this great album that ultimately did Lou Reed in when his drug and alcohol abuse killed his liver. He got sober. He learned how to mainline life, but it was too late. I’ve been lucky. I kicked heroin cold. I kicked alcohol. I learned how to get high on life, love, art and the thrill of my own survival rather than the flirtation with my own death.

Here’s to Lou’s legend and to many more years of mainlining life for this old girl. Here’s to you Lou Reed for giving me a place in music to understand my years on the streets and my years as a drug addict. Here’s to Lou Reed for giving me a soundtrack to understand my past while also transcending it in the present. It’s funny to think that Lou Reed and I shared experiences since we came from such different worlds, but the world of the junkie is the world of the junkie. Thankfully, I have discovered a clean and clear place within myself where I can channel my own chemistry into a sober high that is far better than anything I shot into my vein for a twenty dollar bill that cost so much more than the numbers printed on that green piece of paper. Here’s to celebrating life in the wake of Lou’s death.

Kim Nicolini is an artist, poet and cultural critic living in Tucson, Arizona. Her writing has appeared in Bad Subjects, Punk Planet, Souciant, La Furia Umana, and The Berkeley Poetry Review. She recently published her first book, Mapping the Inside Out, in conjunction with a solo gallery show by the same name. She can be reached at knicolini@gmail.com.