///Taking the Illusions Out of History-I would like to be able to love my country and justice///

Saturday, June 22, 2002

Using anything to sell products. It is called commodification. Take a popular "meme" mutate it to sell a product and the past becomes a little less clear. The space we give to songs is used against us. When the mutate for commercial purposes the seller becomes the landlord of our mental environment.

© 2002 The Nation Company, L.P.

REVIEW | July 8, 2002

Riders on the Storm
by John Densmore


Dread ripples through me as I listen to a phone message from our manager saying that we (The Doors) have another offer of huge amounts of money if we would just allow one of our songs to be used as the background for a commercial. They don't give up! I guess it's hard to imagine that everybody doesn't have a price. Maybe 'cause, as the cement heads try to pave the entire world, they're paving their inner world as well. No imagination left upstairs.
Apple Computer called on a Tuesday--they already had the audacity to spend money to cut "When the Music's Over" into an ad for their new cube computer software. They want to air it the next weekend, and will give us a million and a half dollars! a million and a half dollars! Apple is a pretty hip company...we use computers.... Dammit! Why did Jim (Morrison) have to have such integrity?

I'm pretty clear that we shouldn't do it. We don't need the money. But I get such pressure from one particular bandmate (the one who wears glasses and plays keyboards).

"Commercials will give us more exposure," he says. I ask him, "so you're not for it because of the money?" He says "no," but his first question is always "how much?" when we get one of these offers, and he always says he's for it. He never suggests we play Robin Hood, either. If I learned anything from Jim, it's respect for what we created. I have to pass. Thank God, back in 1965 Jim said we should split everything, and everyone has veto power. Of course, every time I pass, they double the offer!

It all started in 1967, when Buick proffered $75,000 to use "Light My Fire" to hawk its new hot little offering--the Opel. As the story goes--which everyone knows who's read my autobiography or seen Oliver Stone's movie--Ray, Robby and John (that's me) OK'd it, while Jim was out of town. He came back and went nuts. And it wasn't even his song (Robby primarily having penned "LMF")! In retrospect, his calling up Buick and saying that if they aired the ad, he'd smash an Opel on television with a sledgehammer was fantastic! I guess that's one of the reasons I miss the guy.

It actually all really started back in '65, when we were a garage band and Jim suggested sharing all the songwriting credits and money. Since he didn't play an instrument--literally couldn't play one chord on piano or guitar, but had lyrics and melodies coming out of his ears--the communal pot idea felt like a love-in. Just so no one got too weird, he tagged that veto thought on. Democracy in action...only sometimes avenues between "Doors" seem clogged with bureaucratic BS. In the past ten years it's definitely intensified...maybe we need a third party. What was that original intent? Liberty and justice for all songs...and the pursuit of happiness.... What is happiness? More money? More fame? The Vietnamese believe that you're born with happiness; you don't have to pursue it. We tried to bomb that out of them back in my youth. From the looks of things, we might have succeeded.

This is sounding pretty depressing, John; where are you going here? The whole world is hopefully heading toward democracy. That's a good thing, John.... Oh, yeah: the greed gene. Vaclav Havel had it right when he took over as president of Czechoslovakia, after the fall of Communism. He said, "We're not going to rush into this too quickly, because I don't know if there's that much difference between KGB and IBM."
Whoa! Here comes another one: "Dear John Densmore, this letter is an offer of up to one million dollars for your celebrity endorsement of our product. We have the best weight loss, diet and exercise program, far better than anything on the market. The problem is the celebrity must be overweight. Then the celebrity must use our product for four weeks, which will take off up to 20 pounds of their excess body fat. If your endorsement works in the focus group tests, you will immediately get $10,000.00 up front and more money will start rolling in every month after that--up to a million dollars or more." Wow! Let's see...I've weighed 130 pounds for thirty-five years--since my 20s...I'll have to gain quite a bit...sort of like a De Niro thing...he gained fifty pounds for Raging Bull--and won an Oscar! I'm an artist, too, like him...

We used to build our cities and towns around churches. Now banks are at the centers of our densely populated areas. I know, it's the 1990s.... No, John, it's the new millennium, you dinosaur. Rock dinosaur, that is. My hair isn't as long as it used to be. I don't smoke much weed anymore, and I even have a small bald spot. The dollar is almighty, and ads are kool, as cool as the coolest rock videos.

Why did Jim have to say we were "erotic politicians"? If I had been the drummer for the Grassroots, it probably wouldn't have cut me to the core when I heard John Lennon's "Revolution" selling tennis shoes...and Nikes, to boot! That song was the soundtrack to part of my youth, when the streets were filled with passionate citizens expressing their First Amendment right to free speech. Hey...the streets are filled again! Or were, before 9/11. And they're protesting what I'm trying to wax on and on about here. Corporate greed! Maybe I should stick to music. I guess that's why I hit the streets with Bonnie Raitt during the 1996 Democratic National Convention. We serenaded the troops. Bob Hope did it during World War II, only our troops are those dressed in baggy Bermuda shorts, sporting dreadlocks. Some have the shaved Army look, but they're always ready to fight against the Orwellian nightmare. A woman activist friend of mine said that with the networking of the Net, what's bubbling under this brave new world will make the '60s unrest look like peanuts. I don't want "Anarchy, Now," a worn-out hippie phrase, but I would like to see a middle class again in this country.

Europe seems saner right now. They are more green than us. They're paranoid about our genetically altered food and they're trying to make NATO a little more independent in case we get too zealous in our policing of the globe. When The Doors made their first jaunt from the colonies to perform in the mother country back in '67, the record companies seemed a little saner, too. The retailers in England could order only what they thought they could sell; no returns to the manufacturers. That eliminated the tremendous hype that this country still produces, creating a buzz of "double platinum" sales, and then having half of the CDs returned. Today, there is a time limit of three to six months for the rackjobbers to get those duds back to the company.

Our band used to be on a small folk label. Judy Collins, Love and the Butterfield Blues Band were our Elektra labelmates. We could call up the president, Jac Holzman, and have a chat...and this was before we made it. Well, Jac sold out for $10 million back in '70, and we were now owned by a corporation. Actually, today just five corps own almost the entire record business, where numbers are the bottom line. At least we aren't on the one owned by Seagram's! Wait a minute...maybe we'd get free booze...probably not. Advances are always recoupable, booze probably is too.

Those impeccable English artists are falling prey as well. Pete Townshend keeps fooling us again, selling Who songs to yuppies hungry for SUVs. I hope Sting has given those Shaman chiefs he hangs out with from the rainforest a ride in the back of that Jag he's advertising, 'cause as beautiful as the burlwood interiors are, the car--named after an animal possibly facing extinction--is a gas guzzler. If you knew me back in the '60s, you might say that this rant--I mean, piece--now has a self-righteous ring to it, me having had the name Jaguar John back then. I had the first XJ-6 when they came out, long before the car became popular with accountants. That's when I sold it for a Rolls Royce-looking Jag, the Mark IV, a super gas guzzler. That was back when the first whiffs of rock stardom furled up my nose. Hopefully, I've learned something since those heady times, like: "What good is a used-up world?" Plus, it's not a given that one should do commercials for the products one uses. The Brits might bust me here, having heard "Riders on the Storm" during the '70s (in Britain only) pushing tires for their roadsters, but our singer's ghost brought me to my senses and I gave my portion to charity. I still don't think the Polish member of our band has learned the lesson of the Opel, but I am now adamant that three commercials and we're out of our singer's respect. "Jim's dead!" our piano player responds to this line of thought. That is precisely why we should resist, in my opinion. The late, transcendental George Harrison had something to say about this issue. The Beatles "could have made millions of extra dollars [doing commercials], but we thought it would belittle our image or our songs," he said. "It would be real handy if we could talk to John [Lennon]...because that quarter of us is gone...and yet it isn't, because Yoko's there, Beatling more than ever." Was he talking about the Nike ad, or John and Yoko's nude album cover shot now selling vodka?

Actually, it was John and Yoko who inspired me to start a 10 percent tithe, way back in the early '80s. In the Playboy interview, John mentioned that they were doing the old tradition, and it stuck in my mind. If everybody gave 10 percent, this world might recapture a bit of balance. According to my calculations, as one gets up into the multi category, you up the ante. Last year I nervously committed to 15 percent, and that old feeling rose again: the greed gene. When you get to multi-multi, you should give away half every year. Excuse me, Mr. Gates, but the concept of billionaire is obscene. I know you give a lot away, and it's easy for me to mouth off, but I do know something about it. During the Oliver Stone film on our band, the record royalties tripled, and as I wrote those 10 percent checks, my hand was shaking. Why? It only meant that I was making much more for myself. It was the hand of greed. I am reminded of the sound of greed, trying to talk me into not vetoing a Doors song for a cigarette ad in Japan.

"It's the only way to get a hit over there, John. They love commercials. It's the new thing!"

"What about encouraging kids to smoke, Ray?"

"You always have to be PC, don't you, John?" I stuck to my guns and vetoed the offer, thinking about the karma if we did it. Manzarek has recently been battling stomach ulcers. So muster up courage, you capitalists; hoarding hurts the system--inner as well as outer.

So it's been a lonely road resisting the chants of the rising solicitations: "Everybody has a price, don't they?" Every time we (or I) resist, they up the ante. An Internet company recently offered three mil for "Break on Through." Jim's "pal" (as he portrays himself in his bio) said yes, and Robby joined me in a resounding no! "We'll give them another half mil, and throw in a computer!" the prez of Apple pleaded late one night.
Robby stepped up to the plate again the other day, and I was very pleased that he's been a longtime friend. I was trying to get through to our ivory tinkler, with the rap that playing Robin Hood is fun, but the "bottom line" is that our songs have a higher purpose, like keeping the integrity of their original meaning for our fans. "Many kids have said to me that 'Light My Fire,' for example, was playing when they first made love, or were fighting in Nam, or got high--pivotal moments in their lives." Robby jumped in. "If we're only one of two or three groups who don't do commercials, that will help the value of our songs in the long run. The publishing will suffer a little, but we should be proud of our stance." Then Robby hit a home run. "When I heard from one fan that our songs saved him from committing suicide, I realized, that's it--we can't sell off these songs."

So, in the spirit of the Bob Dylan line, "Money doesn't talk, it swears," we have been manipulated, begged, extorted and bribed to make a pact with the devil. While I was writing this article, Toyota Holland went over the line and did it for us. They took the opening melodic lines of "Light My Fire" to sell their cars. We've called up attorneys in the Netherlands to chase them down, but in the meantime, folks in Amsterdam think we sold out. Jim loved Amsterdam.



accesswater2030@yahoo.com 9:58 AM

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FEATURE STORY | July 8, 2002

DYNASTIES!
by KEVIN PHILLIPS


Maybe it's time for a new set of Fourth of July orations. Only at first blush is there silliness to the idea of the United States--the nation of the Minutemen, John and Samuel Adams and Thomas Jefferson--becoming a hereditary economic aristocracy. When you think about it, there is evidence for serious concern.

More than a decade ago, the United States passed France to have the highest inequality ratios of any major Western nation. More and more of the country's richest clans have been setting up family offices, captive trust companies and other devices to manage and entrench their swelling fortunes. The elimination of the inheritance tax being sought by the Bush Administration will only make that entrenchment easier.

Politically, we already have a dynasty at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: the first son ever to take the presidency just eight years after it was held by his father, with the same party label. This dynasticism also has its economic side: both Bushes, père et fils, having been closely involved with the rise of Enron, another first for a presidential family, more on which shortly.

If we lack an official House of Lords, there are Bushes, Tafts, Simons, Rockefellers, Gores, Kennedys and Bayhs out to create a kindred phenomenon. Laura Bush is the only wife of a 1996 or 2000 major-party presidential nominee who has not yet entertained seeking a US Senate seat in her own right. The duchesses of Clinton, Dole and Gore have already considered (or acted).

A soft, blurry kind of cultural corruption has all but muted discussion. Dynasty is no longer a bad word, and in the wake of this semantic revision, the inheritance tax supported by Presidents from Lincoln to FDR has been renamed the "death tax" by George II and may be heading toward extinction. Small-business men from Maine to San Diego are already dreaming of founding personal dynasties, built on lobsters-by-mail or Buick dealerships.

Progressive taxation--only a memory for most--died in the 1980s as regressive FICA taxes replaced income levies as the heaviest tax paid by a majority of American families. The First Amendment to the US Constitution, in turn, is not far from being twisted by the courts to include fat-cat political donations within the protection of free speech. Cynics might suggest that George Orwell set his book 1984 two decades too early.

But democracy is being eroded more by money and its power than by skilled semantics. For want of insights and data often unobtainable from the corporate media, the public opinion vital to US democracy has trouble remaining vigorous and informed. Many politicians are themselves part of the national economic elite, and others depend on that elite for campaign funding. History tells us that America overcame kindred problems in the Progressive era a century ago. The national will to do so again, however, is hardly clear.

The menace of economic and political dynastization is that it flies under the radar of the Americans who grew up believing that the democratic values of World War II and Franklin D. Roosevelt, carried by another leadership generation into the 1960s, would last forever. Instead, the 1980s and '90s ambulanced many of those values to an ideological emergency ward. But much of the liberal and progressive community--caught up in older micro-issues--has found the changing über-philosophy difficult to grasp.

A similar thing happened in the mid-to-late-nineteenth century, when aging Jeffersonians and Jacksonians remained lulled by the egalitarian implant of those earlier days, as well as by the post-1783 elimination of the British system of entail and primogeniture, which kept estates intact at death. Finally, in the 1880s, it became clear that the advent of large corporations, enjoying a long legal existence and constitutional rights equivalent to persons, had provided the framework for the rise of a new aristocracy. Hundred-year-old reforms and shibboleths had become irrelevant.

By this point, the average American had stopped believing the old Fourth of July speeches about how the forefathers had anticipated every danger. From Maine to California, citizens saw railroads taking control of state politics. Muckraking journalists began to employ a new descriptive term: plutocracy. As the trusts and monopolies flourished while America's largest fortunes grew tenfold and twentyfold between 1861 and 1901 thanks to stock values, it became clear that some critical safeguards were missing. Luckily, the need to bridle railroads, trusts and monopolies, and to tax the incomes and inheritances of the rich, voiced with increasing clarity by Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressives, brought significant results by 1914. FDR added further reforms during the New Deal years.

As of 2002, alas, old New Deal memories and 60 cents will get you a candy bar. The transformation of the US economy and its supporting politics since the 1960s has been staggering; and especially so since the 1980s, with the growth of financialization, wealth concentration, economic elitism and dynastization. Millionaires' income tax rates dropped so fast in the 1980s, for example, while those of people in the middle rose with FICA increases, that in 1985 the two almost met.

Back in 1937, an economics writer named Ferdinand Lundberg wrote about how "America's Sixty Families" (and another hundred lesser clans) owned a huge chunk of US business through their corporate stock holdings. Six decades later, the current "overclass" probably begins with the largely overlapping quarter-million "deca-millionaires" ($10 million and up) and the quarter-million Americans with incomes in excess of $1 million a year. But for sticklers, the 2000 equivalent of the rich families of 1937 could be the roughly 5,000 clans having assets of $100 million or more.

Today, following the havoc of the biggest two-year major market debacle since 1929, many of the Internet fortunes are gone, while the established rich are very much with us and, by and large, sleeker than ever. This was also true in 1937, parenthetically, when researcher Lundberg's discourse paid hardly any attention to the nouveau-riche aviation, radio, motion picture and electric gadget fortunes of the Roaring Twenties. Most had shriveled or vanished between 1929 and 1932. The old money was back on top.

So it is again, although a third of the tech billionaires of 1999 have kept billionaire status, a much better ratio than in 1929-32. Nevertheless, what is striking in the current lists is the entrenchment of established families through the good offices of the Dow Jones and the S&P 500. The top 1 percent of Americans own about 40 percent of the individually owned exchange-traded stock in the United States, and own an even higher ratio of other financial and corporate instruments.

The median US family, depending on the calculus, has only $6,000 or $9,000 of stock, a benefit overshadowed during the 1990s because its debt level rose by a good deal more. The financialization of America since the 1980s--by which I mean the shift of onetime savings deposits into mutual funds, the focus on financial instruments, the giantization of the financial industry and the galloping preoccupation of corporate CEOs with stock options instead of production lines--has been a major force for economic polarization. This is because of its disproportionate favoritism to the top income and wealth brackets. The never-ending stream of 1980s and '90s bailouts of banks, S&Ls, hedge funds, foreign currencies and (arguably) stock markets by the Federal Reserve has been another prop.

The upper-tier hogging of the economic benefits of the 1990s can be approached from a number of directions, but hardly anyone controverts that the top 1 percent made out like bandits. The New York Times, for example, reported that 90 percent of the income gain going to the top fifth of Americans went to the top 1 percent, who are only a twentieth of that top fifth. Some scholars bluntly contend that attention should focus on the top one-tenth of 1 percent, because these are the raw capitalists and money-handlers, not the high-salaried doctors, lawyers and Cadillac dealers.

In 1935, Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed that "the transmission from generation to generation of vast fortunes by will, inheritance or gift is not consistent with the ideals and sentiments of the American people," but politics became friendlier to wealth in the 1960s and '70s, and positively effusive in its courtship during the 1980s and '90s. Over the past two decades, the same soaring costs of seeking office that drove middle-class office-seekers to sell their souls to big contributors also made dynastic heirs appealing to political parties that were looking for self-funding nominees or those whose famous names gave them a built-in fundraising edge. Two billionaires, Ross Perot and Donald Trump, actually sought the presidency or talked about it during the 1990s.

The number of US senators with serious multimillion-dollar fortunes, in the meantime, has begun to approach the high set back in the early 1900s, when senators were appointed by state legislatures to whom money spoke easily and powerfully. This ended in 1913, when the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution provided for popular election of senators, although the submergence of politics in today's money culture has accomplished somewhat the same thing, despite popular election.

As for Presidents, nineteenth- and twentieth-century White House service was not much of a pathway to getting rich. Most had government pensions and some other income, but few who didn't come to Washington rich left that way unless they inherited. What seems to have happened over the past twenty years, however, is that several Presidents--George H.W. Bush and the Hamptons-craving Bill Clinton--have decided to swim with the money culture. While Clinton was governor of Arkansas, wife Hillary held a number of corporate directorships. Now Clinton's post-White House speechmaking and deal-seeking looks perfectly normal in an ethically loose sort of way.

The first Bush Administration probably represents the critical transition, both in the grabby behavior of family members and in the gravitation of top officeholders toward political investment banking, scarcely camouflaged lobbying and defense contract involvement. These practices, indeed, were vaguely reminiscent of the Whig grandees who ruled eighteenth-century England under the first George I and the first George II. One even gets the sense that the Bushes and their entourage came to see this kind of profiteering as their due, much like the families and associates of Walpole, Pelham and Newcastle.

George H.W. Bush's father and grandfather, investment bankers at old white-shoe firms, both had high reputations, but erosion soon set in. Even as the senior Bush was seeking a second term in 1992, the newspapers buzzed with the financial and deal-making escapades of his brothers and sons.

The most interesting Bush family involvement is with Enron. Over the twentieth-century emergence of modern government ethics, no presidential family has had a parallel relationship. As a senator, Lyndon Johnson buddied with Texas companies like Brown & Root, but its fingerprints on his presidency weren't all that notable. Georgia's Jimmy Carter was close to his home-state corporate giant, Coca-Cola, and Richard Nixon brought the Pepsi-Cola account to his law firm during the 1960s.

Episode by episode, none of the Bushes' Enron involvement seems to be illegal. Before 2000-01, moreover, the ties weren't overwhelming in any one national administration. However, the only way that a chronicler can seriously weigh the Enron-Bush tie is by a yardstick the American press has never really employed: the unseemliness of a sixteen- or seventeen-year interaction by the members of an American political dynasty in promoting and being rewarded by a single US corporation based in its home state.

Enron was organized in 1985, and within a year or two, Vice President Bush was chairing the Reagan Administration's energy deregulation task force and his son George W., through one of his succession of minor energy companies, had an oil-well deal with Enron Oil & Gas. The first Bush Administration saw passage of the Energy Policy Act of 1992, which obliged utility companies to transmit energy shipped by Enron and other marketers, while the Bush-appointed Commodity Futures Trading Commission created a legal exemption allowing Enron to begin trading energy derivatives. Enron chief Ken Lay, one of Bush Senior's top election contributors, was made chair of the President's Export Council.

Several years later, when George W. became governor of Texas, Lay asked him to receive visiting dignitaries from places Enron hoped to do business with, and by the time Bush got to the White House, Enron was his biggest contributor. Former Enron officials, advisers and consultants wound up getting several dozen positions in the new Administration, including White House economic adviser, Secretary of the Army and US Trade Representative. These were important to Enron on issues ranging from energy policy to its ambition to open up foreign markets by bringing exports of energy and water services under the WTO trade framework.

Had Bush tried to bail out Enron in November or December of 2001, his personal and dynastic ties to the company would have come under intense scrutiny. Without that bailout, most of the Washington press corps has been content to leave alone the much larger story--the apparent seventeen-year connection between the Bush dynasty and Enron.

Even without such information, it seems clear, counting campaign contributions, consultancies, joint investments, deals, presidential library and inaugural contributions, speech fees and the like, that the Bush family and entourage collected some $8 million to $10 million from Enron over the years, which is more than changed hands in Harding's Teapot Dome scandal. Depending on some still-unclear relationships, it could be as high as $25 million.

Obviously, this sort of dynastic financial outreach is not confined to Republicans. When Bill Clinton left the White House in a glare of unfavorable publicity over his last-minute pardons, especially that of fugitive financier Marc Rich, some of the focus was on money paid to or arrangements made by his wife's two brothers. Nor is it confined to Presidents. Texas Senator Phil Gramm and his wife, Wendy, got themselves referred to in Barron's Financial Weekly as "Mr. and Mrs. Enron" for his legislative work on the company's behalf at the same time that she was taking home money and company stock as an Enron director.

Because the dynastic aspect of American wealth and politics has been growing much faster than public (and press) appreciation of its ballooning significance, much of this record has received little attention. The neglect, however, is something that American democracy cannot afford. If Americans still believe in what Franklin Roosevelt said back in 1935 about the unacceptability of inherited wealth and power--and frankly, even if few have thought about it--a whole new political, ethical and economic agenda calls out for immediate and vocal embrace.

It's easy to limn broad outlines--further reform of campaign finance (perhaps including a constitutional amendment), federal tax changes, maintenance of the federal inheritance tax (certainly on estates over $3 million or so) and regulatory overhauls to curb the widespread corporate abuses pushed into the spotlight by Enron, Tyco and the accounting and brokerage firms. Still, a century ago, and then again in the early 1930s, the critical impetus for Americans' insistence on reform came from stock-market crashes and deep economic downturns. In 2002, we have had the first but not yet the second--and since 9/11, antiterrorism has been a rallying point, with patriotism offered to the electorate in lieu of economic concern.

As for economic and political dynastization, the United States is not the first republic to tilt in this direction. Rome did, and in the eighteenth century even the once proudly middle-class Dutch Republic let many of its offices become hereditary. Let's hope Americans do not also allow political and economic inheritance to displace democracy.


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accesswater2030@yahoo.com 9:42 AM

NADER SENDS PUBLIC LETTER TO BILLIONAIRE BILL GATES ABOUT WEALTH DISPARITIES

Mr. William H. Gates
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Microsoft Corporation
1 Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052

Dear Mr. Gates:

An astonishing calculation comes from Professor Edward Wolff of New York University and presents an important opportunity for you. Professor Wolff, a wealth economics specialist, estimated that your net wealth is greater than the combined net worth of the poorest 40 percent of Americans (106 million people). That includes their home equity, pensions, mutual funds and 401(k) plans, but excludes their personal cars.

When Professor Wolff made his analysis, your net worth was only $40 billion. Now, according to the latest Forbes listing of billionaires, your assets exceed $51 billion and that may be outdated, given the most recent surge in Microsoft stock. So it is fair to assume that the mostly secondhand cars of these 106 million Americans can now be included and then some.

All this wealth makes you the world's number one working rich person. Apart from the more than medieval size gap between your wealth and theirs, it is more than a little worrisome that tens of millions of Americans have so little net property worth, some after a lifetime of labor. As Jeff Gates, author of the new book - The Ownership Solution - says: "Capitalism is very good at creating capital but terrible at creating capitalists." The United States now has the sharpest wealth disparity of any western nation. The wealth of the top one percent is greater than that of the bottom ninety percent of Americans.

As author Gates observes: "The implications attending inaction are staggering fiscally, socially, politically, and even environmentally." If you knew the range of Gates' experience in Washington and the business community, you would conclude that his normative conclusion was not "a random thought." As might be expected, on a worldwide plane, wealth disparities are staggering. According to the United Nations Development Program, the assets of the world's 358 billionaires were greater than the combined incomes of countries with 45 percent of the world's people (about 3 billion human beings)!

All these chasms are widening against a background of modern and accelerating technology, declining trade barriers, mobility of capital, medical advances and presumably a greater awareness of what history's most tragic mistakes, avarice, monopolies, and cruelties can produce. As one illustration, last year, more people in the world died (nearly six million) from Tuberculosis and Malaria than in any previous year. The growth in gross global GNP and capability did not stop these diseases of poverty from their mass destruction. Concentration of power and wealth and the gross insensitivity of economic and political leadership had a good deal to do with these preventable casualties. There is obviously a problem of distributive justice that has not been given the attention it deserves by the leaders of global capitalism. I saw a T-Shirt being distributed at a conference recently with the message: "A Rising Tide Lifts All Yachts." A telling phrase for our times.

Warren Buffett, possibly the world's number two working rich person with assets exceeding $33 billion, is your dear friend and fellow card player. Let me suggest that you team up with him to sponsor, plan and lead a conference of billionaires and multi- billionaires on the subject of National and Global Wealth Disparities and What to Do About It. The quantity, quality and distributional dimensions of economic output will drive participants to come to grips with the fundamental purposes of economic systems and their economic indicators. With the dual sweep of the Gates-Buffett hands, the serious and consequential plight of humanity would become a matter of high alert for those business colleagues and acquaintances of yours who aspire to move from success to significance.

During our brief meeting earlier this year at the Time-Warner 75th anniversary dinner in New York, you replied that you were open to communication (by E-Mail, you smilingly suggested). I look forward to your response.

Sincerely, Ralph Nader
P.O. Box 19312
Washington, DC 20036



accesswater2030@yahoo.com 9:38 AM

Is this criminal behavior?



Events Raise Nuclear Safety Questions
Mon May 6, 9:17 PM ET
By H. JOSEF HEBERT, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - A nuclear reactor in Ohio is found to have a large hole nobody thought possible, burned almost through its six-inch protective steel cover. Cracks of a type never seen before are discovered at a reactor in South Carolina, triggering widespread inspections.


Both events caught industry leaders and government regulators by surprise, and they are fueling new questions about aging nuclear power plants and plant inspection programs.

The cracks found early last year at the Oconee Unit 3 reactor plant in South Carolina and the hole discovered in March in the steel reactor lid at the Davis Besse plant in Ohio were in areas thought largely impervious to such problems.

"It was material degradation that wasn't expected," acknowledges Alex Marion of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's trade group.

The 25-year-old Davis Besse reactor on the shore of Lake Erie is one of four nuclear plants owned by FirstEnergy Corp. It has been shut down since February, waiting for the hole in the reactor dome to be patched.

An inspection of most of the 68 other plants with similar designs and conditions reported no corrosion. But the regulators ordered special inspections at 14 reactors thought to be vulnerable to nozzle cracking because of their age.

Some senior officials at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission are viewing the Davis Besse and Oconee discoveries as the most significant safety issue facing the nuclear industry since the Three Mile Island accident 23 years ago.

The steel reactor vessel, which encloses the reactor's core, has always been viewed as "a sacred component" that will not be breached, said Brian Sheron, the commission's assistant director for licensing and technology assessment. "This really challenges that assumption."

The problems at both reactors were discovered before they posed an immediate safety risk. A break through the reactor cover would have caused thousands of gallons of radioactive water to spew into the containment building, raising the risks of the core overheating and a potential meltdown and possible release of radiation into the environment.

Only a thin noncorrosive stainless steel membrane kept the hole at the Ohio reactor from bursting open. The cracks at the Oconee plant, owned by Duke Power, were less urgent. But had the crack expanded it could have caused the nozzle to separate, also causing a loss of cooling water inside the reactor, nuclear experts said.

Duke Power spokesman Tom Shiel said the cracks found in series of outages at the three Oconee reactors in late 2000 and early 2001 have been repaired. All three reactors will get new reactor vessel lids next year, he said.

Industry spokesmen said backup safety systems would have averted more serious problems, by pumping more water into the reactor than was being allowed to escape, keeping the nuclear fuel safe until the reactor could be shut down.

But that's true if everything worked perfectly, said David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer and industry watchdog for the Union of Concerned Scientists. And that may not be the case if emergency pumping systems became clogged with debris, if other equipment is damaged, or a gauge is misread by plant operators struggling to make sure the reactor core remains covered with water, he said.

At the very least, argue nuclear industry critics, the Davis Besse and Oconee incidents reveal shortcomings in how utilities inspect older power plants and how the NRC monitors them.

"The industry is trying to ensure safety while turning a profit, so they have competing interests that ... at times diverge," says Lochbaum.

The hole and cracks were found in largely inaccessible areas where there is substantial radiation and inspections can be done only when the plant is shut down.

The Davis Besse corrosion was caused by a buildup of boric acid from leaking reactor cooling water dating back to the mid-90s. The first signs of corrosion appeared in 1998. Concerns about nozzle cracking were first raised in 1991 after an incident in France.

Yet their significance was not fully recognized until the recent alarms.

"If this occurred in Russia we would be saying it could never happen here," former NRC Commissioner Victor Gilinsky wrote in a recent commentary in The Washington Post on the Davis Besse discovery. Gilinsky called it "a narrow escape" from a potential catastrophic accident.

NRC officials said inspections of other reactors have found no buildup of boron contamination. The NRC reports 62 nozzle cracks have been found at a dozen reactors, and all but 16 had been repaired as of last month. Two additional reactors, although having no cracks, are being closely watched because of their age and other characteristics, the agency said.

FirstEnergy acknowledges signs of corrosion as early as 1998 when filters at Davis Besse became clogged with rust and some of the boron crystals were observed as turning from white to red.

"We didn't do a good job of recognizing pieces of the puzzle," says Todd Schneider, a spokesman for FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Co., the subsidiary that runs the plant 26 miles east of Toledo.

NRC officials and industry executives say the 1991 nozzle incident in France was discounted because a test concluded that the cracking could not cause nozzle separation. A decade later at Davis Besse, similar cracks were leaking as much as 12 gallons of water an hour.

The hole at the Ohio plant was found only because of an NRC inspection order arising from the cracking at the Oconee plant.

A nozzle supposedly affixed to the reactor dome at Davis Besse unexpectedly moved several inches when engineers began repairing cracks in it.

Leaking borated water in itself is not a corrosion problem. But at Davis Besse, the water, rather than evaporating, settled beneath the hardened layers of boron — just enough moisture needed to turn the crystals back into corrosive boric acid.

This produced "a whole new phenomenon," says John Grobe, head of an NRC task force investigating the incident. "This kind of corrosion has never been seen before on a reactor pressure vessel head."

___

Nuclear Regulatory Commission: http://www.nrc.gov

Nuclear Energy Institute: http://www.nei.org.

Union of Concerned Scientists: http://www.ucsusa.org
accesswater2030@yahoo.com 9:32 AM

I think this headline is wrong, the faith of the stockholders in executives, accountants and public relations is exhausted. If they could trust the preceeding then the war on terror which is an infusion of government money for software and hardware products would float the stocks higher. Tis reporter is using the assumptions and words of the companies instead of analysis.
Stocks plummet in wake of scandal, terror threats
David R. Baker, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, June 22, 2002
©2002 San Francisco Chronicle.

Their confidence sapped by terror warnings, weak corporate profits and an accounting scandal that will not die, investors sent stock markets reeling Friday to close near their post-Sept. 11 lows.

The Dow Jones average dropped 177.98 points to 9,253.79, bringing its losses this year to 7.7 percent of its total value. The Nasdaq, home to many Silicon Valley technology stocks, fell 23.79 points to 1,440.96 and has tumbled 26.1 percent this year.

Friday's slide capped five straight weeks of losses for Wall Street, a prolonged slump that will devastate the upcoming quarterly reports of many 401(k) plans. The Nasdaq now hovers just 1.3 percent above the low hit following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The Dow stands 12.4 percent above its 2001 low. Both hit bottom on Sept. 21.

Investors are selling heavily even as many economic indicators show that a recovery is under way. Those signals, however, have been drowned out by a barrage of bad news.

Almost daily suicide bombings and retaliations in the Middle East stoke fears of a full-blown war. Government warnings hint at further attacks in the United States, with the FBI suggesting Friday that terrorists could use fuel tanker trucks to attack synagogues and Jewish schools.

Worries about corrupt accounting linger long after Enron's collapse. Three former Rite Aid Corp. executives were indicted Friday for allegedly tampering with the drugstore chain's books. And as another round of quarterly earnings reports approaches, many companies have warned of sluggish sales.

Taken together, those reasons for investor unease could drive the markets still lower, analysts warn.


PREPARED FOR WORST
"When you're dealing with factors like the war on terrorism and geopolitical events like we are now, you have to be prepared for the worst- case scenario," said Alan Adelman, chief investment strategist for Wells Fargo Private Client Services. "You've got to be prepared for more dislocation and downside."

The markets' decline in the first half of 2002 also raises the possibility they could face a third consecutive year of losses. That, in turn, could force many everyday investors who pumped money into their 401(k) plans and other investments during the 1990s to rethink their strategy.

"You can't sit here and say people are just gonna take it on the chin forever and ever," said John Goode, chief investment officer for Davis Skaggs Investment Management. "For our industry, that's a risk."

Goode predicts a major low within the next month, but says the long bear market has just about run its course. That may be of little comfort to investors, however, considering the turmoil that often accompanies a significant change in market direction.

"We're heading into a major buying opportunity," Goode said. "We're in the 11th hour of the bear market, but the last leg of the bear market is the most excruciating one."

Many technology stocks continue to suffer, trading at fractions of their historic highs. Bellwethers Intel Corp. and Sun Microsystems both hit 52-week lows Friday, and others are close behind.


FIRMS CUTTING PURCHASES
Companies that once spent lavishly on tech equipment haven't this year, instead cutting purchases to shore up their own profits. The sales drought continues to dog Silicon Valley companies, giving investors little reason to sink money into their stocks.

And yet some companies have seen their earnings stabilize, or even rise, in recent months. Wireless provider Qualcomm actually increased its third quarter forecast Friday, for example, although gains in its stock didn't spread to the broader market.

"We've had a stealth earnings recovery," said Gary Schlossberg, senior economist at Wells Capital Management in San Francisco. "The economic data are in a seesaw pattern. We haven't had the sustained drumbeat of good economic news that might lift the pessimism."

The long downturn may have one positive effect. Many stocks are now trading at levels that make far more economic sense than did their highs reached during the bull market's last giddy months in late 1999 and early 2000. That doesn't necessarily mean they are cheap or that their prices will soon rise. But it does suggest that some investors may be willing to buy in, hoping to lock up a long-term bargain.

"The markets look fairly priced," Adelman said. "I don't want to say they're undervalued, but they're looking attractive."



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Associated Press contributed to this report. / E-mail David R. Baker at dbaker@sfchronicle.com.


Hit hard
Several high-profile Bay Area stocks were among the most actively traded
Friday on the Nasdaq, and a look at where they are and where they've been
suggests that it's very much a buyer's market these days.
Close 52-week low 52-week high
Cisco $13.74 $11.04 $21.92
Sun 5.51 5.51 18.24
Intel 18.73 18.73 36.78
Oracle 13.74 7.25 20.02
Applied Materials 18.76 13.30 27.95
JDS Uniphase 2.84 2.50 13.60
Siebel 13.47 12.24 50.91
Xilinx 23.72 19.52 47.16
Altera 13.96 14.33 33.60
Veritas 20.48 17.30 69.90
Peoplesoft 16.92 15.78 51.00
Nvidia 22.66 22.66 72.66
Maxim 36.67 32.20 62.67
Source: Yahoo Finance
Chronicle Graphic



accesswater2030@yahoo.com 8:26 AM

Is this a conspiracy for good or evil?
Posted June 21st, 2002 3:30 PM


Nat Hentoff
'All of Us Are in Danger'
The Sons and Daughters of Liberty



n 1756, in Boston and other cities and towns, the coming of the American Revolution was speeded by mechanics, merchants, and artisans who organized against British tyranny. Calling themselves the Sons of Liberty, they set up committees of correspondence in the colonies to spread detailed news about British attacks on their liberties. They focused on the general search warrant, which allowed customs officers to invade and ransack their homes and offices at will.
Previous Columns
6/25/02 Remembering Teddi King


6/18/02 Church and State Separation in Crisis


6/11/02 Unleashing the FBI


6/11/02 Your Taxes for Church Schools?


6/4/02 The FBI's Magic Lantern


5/28/02 A Book Unfit for 'The New York Times'


5/21/02 A Liberal Slant to the News?


5/14/02 Who's an Anti-Semite?


5/7/02 Daschle-Gephardt-Clinton Waltz


4/30/02 Joe Klein and the Comeback Kid





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In the spirit of the Sons of Liberty, on February 4 of this year, some 300 citizens of Northampton, Massachusetts, held a town meeting to organize ways to—as they put it—protect the residents of the town from the Bush-Ashcroft USA Patriot Act. On that night, the Northampton Bill of Rights Defense Committee began a new American Revolution. Similar committees are organizing around the country.

Speakers at that town meeting were defying John Ashcroft, who threatened dissenters in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last year. He denounced those "who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty. . . . Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies."

But speakers at the meeting emphasized that the USA Patriot Act and the the succession of unilateral Ashcroft-Bush orders that followed apply not only to noncitizens but also to Americans in that very hall. William Newman, director of the ACLU of Western Massachusetts, pointed out that law enforcement agencies are now permitted "the same access to your Internet use and to your e-mail use that they had to your telephone records"—and may overstep their authority. "The history of the FBI," Newman warned, "is that they will do exactly that."

Also speaking was University of Massachusetts professor Bill Strickland, whom I first met when he directed the Northern Student Movement during the civil rights campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s. Said Strickland, "The elements of the Patriot Act place all of us in danger."

One result of that meeting was a petition, signed by over 1000 Northamptonites, urging the town government to approve a "resolution to defend the Bill of Rights." Thanks to a persistent organizing drive, that resolution passed the Northampton city council by a unanimous vote on May 2. It targets not only the USA Patriot Act but also all subsequent actions by Ashcroft and others that "threaten key rights guaranteed to U.S. citizens and noncitizens by the Bill of Rights and the Massachusetts Constitution."

Among those key rights: "freedom of speech, assembly, and privacy; the right to counsel and due process in judicial proceedings; and protection from unreasonable searches and seizures."

The city of Northampton officially asks, from now on, that "federal and state law enforcement report to the local Human Rights Commission all local investigations undertaken under aegis of the [USA Patriot] Act and Orders; and that the community's congressional representatives actively monitor the implementation of the Act and Orders, and work to repeal those sections found unconstitutional."

This is a signal to the mostly passive members of Congress that actual voters are watching them.

In April, similar resolutions to defend the Bill of Rights from the Bush administration and from complicit members of Congress afraid to challenge Ashcroft were passed in the nearby towns of Amherst and Leverett. And Dr. Marty Nathan, of the ever industrious Northampton Bill of Rights Defense Committee, informs me that "the city councils of Ann Arbor and Berkeley passed civil liberties resolutions in January," as did the Denver city council in March and the city council in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on June 17. Other cities are also preparing resolutions.

You would think this grassroots movement to secure our liberties would be of interest to the national media, but I have seen little of it on television or in the print press.

To find out about these campaigns around the country, and about a range of organizing tools, you can visit the Northampton Bill of Rights Defense Committee's Web site, and its links: www.gjf.org/NBORDC.

At the town meeting in Leverett, Massachusetts, Don Ogden, who initiated the resolution, noted—and I hope the FBI transmits this to John Ashcroft—that "it is truly Orwellian doublespeak to call such unpatriotic efforts a 'patriot act.' "

Like Northampton, the town of Amherst also passed its resolution unanimously. Select Board Person Anne Awad did not at all see Ashcroft's "phantoms of lost liberty," but rather a clear and present danger to our constitutional rights.

"As members of the Select Board," she said, "we want to know that all residents and visitors to our town feel safe. We do not want to support profiling of particular types of people. If one group is viewed suspiciously today, another group will be added to the list tomorrow."

A further indication that many Americans are ahead of their representatives in Washington in wanting to be safe from Ashcroft is an April 24 Associated Press report: "Despite the fear of future terrorist attacks, a majority of Americans are unwilling to give up civil liberties in exchange for national security, according to a Michigan State University study. Nearly 55 percent of 1488 people surveyed nationwide said they don't want to give up constitutional rights in the government's fight against terrorism. . . .

"The telephone survey, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, was conducted from November 14 through January 15 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.7 percentage points." Sixty-six percent "opposed government monitoring of telephone and e-mail conversations."

The original Sons of Liberty were an instrumental cause of the American Revolution, and they spread the liberating news without an Internet. Think of how much more and swifter organizing can be done on the Web now. Let me know, at the Voice, what other towns and cities are doing to keep the Bill of Rights alive. Please do not use e-mail.

accesswater2030@yahoo.com 8:10 AM

This give real conspiracy theories a bad name. He starts with the wrong assumptions, changes the facts and then weaves a good story.
June 22, 2002
Conspiracy Theory Grips French: Sept. 11 as Right-Wing U.S. Plot
By ALAN RIDING


ARIS, June 21 — Even before the fires were extinguished at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, conspiracy theories began flooding the Internet. A few quickly spilled out of Web sites and were widely circulated by e-mail before fading into oblivion. One, however, has taken on a life of its own in France. It was turned into a book that has become the publishing sensation of the spring.

In the book, "L'Effroyable Imposture," or "The Horrifying Fraud," Thierry Meyssan challenges the entire official version of the Sept. 11 attacks.

He claims the Pentagon was not hit by a plane, but by a guided missile fired on orders of far right-wingers inside the United States government. Further, he says, the planes that struck the World Trade Center were not flown by associates of Osama bin Laden, but were programmed by the same government people to fly into the twin towers.

What really interests him, though, is what he sees as the conspiracy behind these actions. He contends that it was organized by right-wing elements inside the government who were planning a coup unless President Bush agreed to increase military spending and go to war against Afghanistan and Iraq to promote the conspirators' oil interests.

To achieve their goals, the theory goes, they blamed Osama bin Laden for Sept. 11 and later broadened their targets to include the "axis of evil," centered on Iraq.

The 235-page book has been universally ridiculed by the French news media, while its arguments have been dismantled point by point in "L'Effroyable Mensonge," or "The Horrifying Lie," a new book by two French journalists.

A Pentagon spokesman said, "There was no official reaction because we figured it was so stupid."

Yet in the past three months, Mr. Meyssan's book has sold more than 200,000 copies in France, placing it at the top of best-seller lists for several weeks. Foreign rights have also been sold in 16 countries (a Spanish version is already on sale), and Mr. Meyssan traveled to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates in April to present his arguments at a local university.

The book's French publisher, Éditions Carnot, said it would release an English version in the United States in July.

Mr. Meyssan said in an interview that he was surprised his book had so far provoked no major debate, but he was convinced that his message was being heard.

"Two-thirds of the hits on our Web site come from the United States," he said. "I'm not saying all my readers agree with me, but they recognize that the official American version of the attacks is idiotic. If we can't believe the official version, where do we stand?"

It is nonetheless puzzling why so many of the French have been willing to pay the equivalent of $17 for "The Horrifying Fraud." Is it a symptom of latent anti-Americanism? Is it a reflection of the French public's famous distrust of its own government and mainstream newspapers? Or has the French love of logic been tickled by the apparent Cartesian neatness of a conspiracy theory?

Certainly, after Sept. 11, some leftist intellectuals suggested that the United States had invited the attacks through its support for Israel. Others recalled that Islamic militants had been financed and armed by the United States to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980's. Yet, in this case, Libération and Le Monde, left-of-center newspapers with no love for the Bush administration, have led the assault on Mr. Meyssan's book.

"The pseudotheories of `The Horrifying Fraud' feed off the paranoid anti-Americanism that is one of the permanent components of the French political caldron," Gérard Dupuy wrote in an editorial in Libération. Edwy Plenel, news editor at Le Monde, wrote: "It is very grave to encourage the idea that something which is real is in fact fictional. It is the beginning of totalitarianism."

Guillaume Dasquié and Jean Guisnel, the authors of "The Horrifying Lie," favor a different explanation for the book's success. They write of France's "profound social and political sickness," which leads people to embrace the idea "that they are victims of plots, that the truth is hidden from them, that they should not believe official versions, but rather that they should demystify all expressions of power, whatever they might be."

Still, even if some French are susceptible to conspiracy theories, few had heard of the book until March 16, when Mr. Meyssan appeared on a popular Saturday evening television program on France 2, a government-owned but independently run channel. In the program, Mr. Meyssan was allowed to expound his theory without being challenged by the host. In the two weeks that followed, his book sold 100,000 copies.

Mr. Meyssan himself seems an unlikely purveyor of tall stories. A 44-year-old former theology student, he dabbled in leftist politics before forming a political research company, Réseau Voltaire, or Voltaire Network, in 1994.

The company's Web site (www .reseauvoltaire.com) adopted specific causes, like fighting homophobia and opposing Jean-Marie Le Pen's far-right National Front. Its investigative methods seemed thorough and objective.

In person too, Mr. Meyssan, a slim, wiry man with short hair and penetrating eyes, comes over as both serious and rational.

French journalists who had given some credibility to his Web site were all the more surprised, then, to find him building a vast conspiracy theory around the fact that photographs of the Sept. 11 attack showed no airplane parts in or near the smoldering gap in the Pentagon. This became the departure point for his book.

The line of reasoning that follows is a case study in how a conspiracy theory can be built around contradictions in official statements, unnamed "experts" and "professional pilots," unverified published facts, references to past United States policy in Cuba and Afghanistan, use of technical information, "revelations" about secret oil-industry maneuvers and, above all, rhetorical questions intended to sow doubts. At the end of each chapter, Mr. Meyssan presents his speculation as fact.

To gather his evidence, he worked mainly from articles, statements and speculation found on the Internet. He did not travel to the United States to interview any witnesses. Indeed, he dismisses the accounts of witnesses to the crash of the American Airlines Boeing 757 into the Pentagon.

"Far from believing their depositions, the quality of these witnesses only underlines the importance of the means deployed by the United States Army to pervert the truth," he said.

His "truth" is that no Muslims took part in the attacks "because the Koran forbids suicide." To his original claim that the Pentagon was bombed from the inside, he has now added his conviction that the building was struck by an air-to-ground missile fired by the United States Air Force. "This type of missile, seen from the side, would easily remind one of a small civilian airplane," he said.

In response, Mr. Dasquié and Mr. Guisnel said they traveled to Washington and interviewed 18 witnesses to the Pentagon crash.

They also have named experts explaining how the Boeing 757 could disappear inside the crater caused by the impact. Further, they identify several people mentioned only by their initials in Mr. Meyssan's acknowledgments, including a French Army officer currently on trial for treason and a middle-ranking intelligence officer.

The book has proved to be a windfall for Mr. Meyssan's publisher. More accustomed to publishing marginal books on subjects like the "false" American moon landing in 1969 and the latest "truth" about U.F.O.'s, Éditions Carnot can now boast of its first best seller.

Further, confident that this conspiracy theory will endure, Mr. Meyssan and Carnot have just published a 192-page annex, with new documents, photographs and theories. They call it "Le Pentagate."



Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company | Permissions | Privacy Policy

accesswater2030@yahoo.com 7:53 AM

Friday, June 21, 2002

Exploding the myth that we are even a partially free country because the people no longer have any power since the coup and the Patriot Act.
Civil wrongs
Since September 11, President Bush's war on terror has highlighted issues of immigration, nationality, race and culture, and widened the divide between 'insiders' and 'outsiders'. And what that means, according to law professor and author Patricia Williams, is that a great many Americans have more to fear than ever. Maya Jaggi reports

Maya Jaggi
Saturday June 22, 2002
The Guardian

Patricia J Williams was snagged in thick traffic on her way to Columbia Law School in New York's Upper West Side. A lethal explosion in downtown Manhattan had triggered panic at a possible terrorist strike, though the cause turned out to have been nothing more than a faulty boiler. Williams, a Columbia law professor and former attorney, shares the fear of terrorism gripping the city and its hinterland. Yet, once settled in an office, she softly warns that America's response has triggered "one of the more dramatic constitutional crises in US history".

Since President George W Bush launched his "war on terror" in the wake of September 11, he and attorney-general John Ashcroft have pushed through "anti-terrorism" measures that have had constitutional and civil rights lawyers warning of an encroachment of powers akin to a police state. Blanket secret detentions on US soil have been likened by human rights groups to "disappearances" under Latin America's military regimes. This amid a climate of suspicion and recrimination fuelling a surge of attacks on "Arab-looking" Americans. Yet the administration's measures have been marked by a limited public outcry. It is lawyers who are leading a slow challenge to them through US courts.

Williams is among relatively few Americans raising their voices in alarm. She is disturbed by the apparent ease with which fundamental rights, such as habeas corpus - the right to a court hearing before prolonged detention - are being set aside in the name of an emergency that may have no end. "I appreciate the necessity for extraordinary measures in wartime," she says, "but an indefinite period of emergency measures worries me more than a list of finite military objectives. We need a clearer definition of what we're at war with. The 'war on terror' is making war not on acts of terror, but on things that terrify us." In this "war of the mind", the enemy is apt to become "anybody who makes us afraid".

The secret detention without charge, and transfer to military custody, of the US citizen Abdullah al-Muhajir - formerly Jose Padilla - on suspicion of plotting to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" in Washington is also cause for alarm, she believes. There is, she says, a "dangerously non-specific policy regarding who gets to go to a court of law, and who can be confined secretly and indefinitely".

On sabbatical from Columbia, Williams lives outside Boston, in Massachusetts, with her adopted son, aged nine. In 2000, she won a MacArthur Fellowship - worth $500,000 over five years - to pursue her intellectual interests. She was completing a critique of "racial profiling" - a practice civil libertarians argue is illegal since it makes race alone grounds for stop-and-searches or questioning - when the September 11 attacks took place. Williams is now updating the book, aware that global counterterrorism aimed, in the main, at ethnic groups such as Arabs or Muslims has lent a fresh urgency to the subject.

Her misgivings are rooted not only in legal training but in a historical perspective as a child of the civil rights era, and her perception of the persistent workings of race in post-Jim Crow, post-segregation America. In her book The Alchemy Of Race And Rights (1991), now a feminist classic, and its follow-up, The Rooster's Egg (1995), she invented a novel form of legal writing by enlivening dust-dry jurisprudence with literary theory, social research, memoir and often ironic personal anecdote, raising subjects from Oprah to OJ to pose fundamental questions about rights and justice in late 20th-century America.

Her BBC Reith lectures five years ago, published by Virago as Seeing A Colour-Blind Future (1997), argued that the "liberal ideal of colour-blindness" was still far distant. What, she asked, had become of civil rights if she, as an African-American, had to pay a higher mortgage than a white home-buyer on the grounds that by moving into a white neighbourhood she would spark "white flight" and lower her house's value? Or if she found herself barred on sight by the entryphone security at a Benetton store - the clothes brand that flaunts an ethnic rainbow of models?

She was unprepared for the media mauling. Although a "tremendous honour", the lectures introduced her to "the best and worst of the British press". While there may have been legitimate objections to selecting an American rather than a Briton as the first black Reith lecturer - and only the fourth woman in almost 50 years - US neo-conservatives were marshalled in the Daily Mail to attack what one called her "virulent, anti-white racism". Williams, who has written with subtlety and verve about the tension between America's rugged individualism and the tendency to stereotype, found herself caricatured as a "militant black feminist" and single mother. "I was also compared to Al Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan, and described as 'no Toni Morrison'." Her eyes widen in disbelief.

The BBC received almost 1,000 letters and phone calls in a week about the lectures, "before I even opened my mouth". They included far-right hate mail addressed to her and her son, then aged four (whose name she still prefers to keep out of print). Being savaged by Melvyn Bragg on Radio 4's Start The Week was "the most painful - it took me off guard. He described my work as 'violent', which offended my Quaker sensibility." Yet much of the criticism abated once her first lecture had aired on Radio 4. While the Guardian's then radio critic, Anne Karpf, savoured her "sensitivity, wit and poetic turn of phrase", the Daily Telegraph reviewer, Gillian Reynolds, asked what her attackers were so afraid of. "All our submerged anxieties about race, class, gender and academic status have already been let off the leash at her in what seems to me a very un-British display of vile prejudice," she wrote. "Try listening."

It is partly the insights of her Reith lectures that have led Williams to caution against the war on terror. "The issues of immigration, nationality, race, culture and categorisation are bound up with the global expansion of anti-terrorism," she says. According to US attorney-general John Ashcroft, "Foreign terrorists who commit war crimes against the United States . . . are not entitled to and do not deserve the protections of the American constitution." Aside from the presumption of guilt in this statement, it leaves some 20 million non-citizen US residents subject to what Williams calls a "new martial law: Bush has been seeking to distinguish our constitutional rights, which belong to citizens alone, from human rights, which don't have the same status; to distinguish the legal protection owed a citizen from what's owed a non-citizen. Before, due process did extend to everyone." Yet with the indefinite detention of al-Muhajir, announced on June 10, even "fully-fledged citizens may not be seen as 'deserving' the protections of the American court system," she says.

Most attention has so far focused on the suspected al-Qaida and Taliban fighters captured in Afghanistan, particularly the 300-odd held at Camp X-Ray in Cuba's Guantanamo Bay: President Bush's order last November that they would be tried secretly in military tribunals, without traditional legal safeguards against wrongful conviction, proved so contentious that he was forced to make concessions on the rules that would govern the tribunals. Yet "homeland security" has wider implications.

According to Amnesty International, some 1,200 people were detained after September 11 - "mainly men from Muslim or Middle Eastern countries", though some may have been US nationals of Middle Eastern origin - of whom 327 were still in detention in February, when the justice department stopped releasing figures. An unknown number are still detained, their location often undisclosed. "That's an astonishing number," Williams says. "Exercised or not, it's a very dangerous power."

An interim rule brought in after September 11 allows the US immigration service to hold people for up to 48 hours without charge, or indefinitely "in an emergency, or in other extraordinary circumstances". Of charges brought, most have been for routine visa violations that do not normally warrant detention. Williams cites one couple "who have been here for 18 years and led exemplary lives. They have a visa violation and are being deported. It's a disproportionate response - it only inflames things. I've seen it in African-American communities, where people wanted greater policing. But it ends with communities distrusting the police. That's how urban riots occur."

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, up to 5,000 men, aged between 18 and 33, from Middle Eastern countries were rounded up for questioning in what critics see as a dragnet based on ethnic profiling, not evidence. Williams's forthcoming book grew from notorious instances of male motorists stopped in New Jersey for what is ironically dubbed "driving while black". As she has written, "the kind of profiling that seems to inform the majority of stops and searches is usually based on statistical relations so vague as to be useless . . . premised on diffuse probabilities about looks and dress, ethnicity or nationality, class or educational status." Targeting neighbourhoods in a country in which housing is still often segregated may result in a kind of racial profiling. "The statement, 'There's a greater crime rate in poor or deprived neighbourhoods' becomes 'so most people in these neighbourhoods must be criminals'. To my ear, as an African-American, it's the kind of thinking that turns whole communities into suspect communities . . . I worry that in time of emergency, these policing tactics have become legitimised and exported."

Rudolph Giuliani's "zero tolerance" approach to crime has admirers. "But there was a huge scandal," Williams insists. She cites New York's Washington Heights: "Crime did drop because of a more visible police presence in an area that had been neglected, but not without police corruption that poisoned relations with the community, and setting up of the much vilified 'cowboy' Street Crimes Unit - which included the men who shot Amadou Diallo [an unarmed west African man killed by police in 1999].

"There was a ringing of neighbourhoods; 90% of the male population, and half the female, was being stopped, arrested, frisked and abused. If you pick up half the population, crime will drop. But they arrested many people who weren't criminals and the rate of complaints went up, from 1,000 to 53,000. Whole communities become alienated. We should be wary of those lessons."

For Williams, the supposed trade-off between freedom and security in combating the threat of terrorism is a false choice. Her point is that such profiling is not simply unfair but an ineffectual misuse of data; it delivers neither security nor justice. "It's a panic measure that diverts resources we should be expending on specific threats." In her view, "we must be wary of persecuting those who conform to our fears instead of prosecuting enemies who were, and will be, smart enough to play against such prejudices." She says, "Random checks or profiling aren't going to stop the determined operatives who are trained to defy visual expectations. The moment one has a fixed image, say of a man, it'll be a woman next time." Both the British "shoe bomber" Richard Reid, and the Chicago Latino al-Muhajir, bucked the expected profile of an "Islamist terrorist". Mindful of a historical "tendency to see evil embodied in witches, in Jews, in blacks or heathens", she warns: "We're buying into the idea that we can stop terrorism if we investigate 'outsiders' in our midst."

She quotes aghast from an article by Harvard law professor Richard Parker in the Harvard Journal Of Law And Public Policy, advocating a "four-point test for love of country" to rival David Blunkett's compulsory "citizenship tests" for would-be migrants. Set out in the nationality, immigration and asylum bill, those entail exams in the English language and British institutions. Parker, meanwhile, ranks subjective reactions to the September 11 attacks according to whether people felt it was an attack on the US which should now defend itself (patriotic) or worried more about US "past misdeeds" and "the way our actions are perceived abroad" (unpatriotic).

For Williams, the test exemplifies a new xenophobia. "It says, 'Love of country involves drawing a line between insiders and outsiders, Americans and others. It privileges one over the other.' I think I might fail a couple of those tests; they could make suspects out of Quakers, or people with dual citizenship, or people who like to travel, or who are as concerned about 'outsiders' as 'insiders' because they all fall into the category of 'human'. In the question of what's unpatriotic, the American psyche is very fragile now. I appreciate the fear of terror, but trying to define the inside from the outside in a moment as diasporic as ours, and a country as diverse as ours, could splinter us even further."

Yet even "insiders" are now subject to expanded surveillance. According to another critic, Ronald Dworkin, Quain Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London, the USA Patriot Act passed last October sets out a "breathtakingly vague and broad definition of terrorism and aiding terrorists" and sweepingly expands the government's powers to search the premises and property of even its own citizens. Williams sees it as "an unprecedented merger between the functions of intelligence agencies to foresee crimes, and law enforcement to punish crimes." She feels "advantage was taken of the times" to push through the 342-page act. "It swept into force, but it's an intricate act; it wasn't devised just in the wake of September 11. It satisfied ideological pressures from the right that in calmer times would have been resisted. As a lawyer, I'm a great admirer of the constitutional balance; both the USA Patriot Act and the executive order establishing military tribunals threaten that balance."

Why then, though there is growing protest from lawyers and civil liberties groups, has outrage been so muted? The Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz has even argued that torture should be permissible under special warrants, in cases where time is of the essence - a supposed "ticking time-bomb" scenario - while a CNN poll after September 11 found 45% of Americans would not object to torturing someone if it would provide information about terrorism. Williams hints at a reason other than simple fear: it may be easier for some traditional liberals to believe that only those who have something to hide have anything to fear. They belong to a "class of those who have never been harassed, never been stigmatised or generalised or feared just for the way they look," she says. "They feel this will never be levelled against them - though that's fraying at the edges with airport security." Now, well-dressed professionals are themselves a "suspect class".

Williams grew up without such illusions. She was born in Boston in 1951, into the only black family in a "white, working-class neighbourhood". Both her parents were college-educated; her mother was a teacher, her father a technical editor. From her maternal grandmother and great aunts Williams learned that the family had "escaped from plantation society in Tennessee, where the families that owned our family were still in charge". Her grandmother fled with her sisters to Boston, "perceived as the cradle of the abolitionist movement".

Many of their neighbours were recent immigrants - Russian, Portuguese, Irish, Italian and German. "I grew up very aware of parallels between the black struggle for civil rights in the south and pogroms in Russia, or the British treatment of the Irish," she says. "Each of my neighbours had a story." Her aunt was a journalist, "one of the first UN correspondents; she was definitely the most romantic member of my family. Through her, I had a tremendous sense of what the world could be."

The family joined the civil rights movement and the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. She was "taken out to march before I could read". They were "tumultuous times; Boston was far from the south, but the news was everywhere. I was tormented; stones were thrown and there was name-calling." When a few black families moved into the neighbourhood, "the area changed overnight. Whites who had seen me born and baked me cookies at Halloween and grown up with my mother now fled for their lives." She sees the resulting de facto segregation as "part of the first great backlash to the civil rights movement", the second being a move against equal opportunity "disguised as a fight about reverse discrimination and 'quotas'."

Williams was expected to become a school teacher, one of few professions open to black women. But as a first-generation "affirmative action baby", she found law school was now open to her. "I grew up when the laws of Jim Crow were being overturned by lawyers going to court, all the way up to the supreme court; they were appealing to the constitution, arguing that this was not American. I developed a sense of possibility." Yet she had reason to beware of the law. She tracked down the contract of sale for her great-great-grandmother, Sophie, who was bought at the age of 11 and soon after impregnated, by a white slave owner named Austin Miller, who was anxious to increase his "stock".

Miller, Williams's great-great-grandfather, was also reputed to be one of Tennessee's finest lawyers. "The manipulation of law has been responsible for some of the worst tragedies in American history," says Williams, mindful of how her ancestor was listed as property by age and sex, not name, and how the law underpinned slavery as well as Jim Crow segregation. "The appeal to law is far from perfect. But it's one of the better ways to resolve aggression and injustice. I see no other way."

At Wellesley College in the late 1960s and early 1970s, "people wanted to invite you home for the specific purpose of shocking their parents". Students' brothers would date her "out of solidarity", while playing the Rolling Stones' Brown Sugar. It was an "all-girls school with a reputation for being terribly refined, and training many women in positions of power; it was a wonderfully protected environment at a time when women weren't taken seriously as scholars." By contrast, her class at Harvard Law School in the mid-1970s was only 8% women. Old-boy networking and humiliating initiation rites were rife. "There were rituals and inner circles, cigars to be smoked. It was my first taste of what it meant to have your opinion weigh less than men's. I learned to roll with the punches. You had to fight hard just to be heard."

Williams worked in consumer protection at the city attorney's office in Los Angeles, and the Western Centre on Law and Poverty, but left out of frustration. "I loved practising as a trial lawyer, but I burned out. Many of my clients in LA were Mexicans, but [President Ronald] Reagan limited the ability to represent undocumented persons; I felt I needed to write, not just argue their cases in court."

As a law teacher, Williams found herself the first African-American, or the first black woman, at each of the colleges where she was hired. She soon gained a reputation for "troublemaking". Williams wrote: "I don't think I am either remarkable or a troublemaker . . . My attempt to share the insights of women, of people of colour, of a certain degree of powerlessness is what human beings do - they bring their insights and sensibilities along with their physical presence. And if women enter environments where men have only been talking to men, the conversation is bound to change." She kept a journal, and shared it with students. "Many women would come to me, trying to make the institution more responsive." The Alchemy Of Race And Rights grew from those journals.

Her work has been criticised for being personal and anecdotal. "This emotional stuff leaves me cold," one male colleague remarked. "It's not how I teach contract law or bring a piece of litigation." She laughs. "I don't write briefs like that when I'm representing a client. I don't see my writing as subverting law as it's practised, though it may challenge people to be more creative." She adds: "I wrote at a time and to an audience when the first person was strictly forbidden. But an individual story can be enormously informative. I go back and forth between the abstract and the personal."

She often writes of her son, whom she adopted "after an engagement broke off; I walked into an adoption agency on my 40th birthday, thinking, it's now or never". Though she anticipated refusal "because I was single and 40", she expressed no racial preference, and soon had a two-day old boy. "There's a seven-year wait for 'healthy white newborns', but a shortage of parents prepared to adopt black children," she says. "I had my son, sweetly, in nine months." As for men, "I haven't had the time. Parenting keeps you busy. When I've taken care of my son's needs, and as he grows, I might don parrot feathers and a pair of red mules, and hit the social circuit. Right now, life is quiet."

She took time out from teaching partly because of the death from cancer of her brother-in-law, who was also, like her sister, a lawyer. "We were all together at law school," says Williams. "He was a very hard-working corporate lawyer and exemplar of that great Puritan American virtue, delayed gratification. He kept saying he'd take a holiday. I began to reflect on how short life is." She travelled to South Africa, the Caribbean and Europe, and lectured across the US, while "home schooling" her son and writing a fortnightly column in Nation magazine, Diary Of A Mad Law Professor.

"Much of what gets resolved in legal cases is filtered through the mass media, and often the law is trumped by public opinion," she says. "The dry questions of law are important to our judicial system, but in heated cases - from OJ to the Enron scandal - people don't want to hear. Increasingly, I've turned to journalism, where I get a huge response." She writes that "Americans suddenly seem willing to embrace profiling based on looks and ethnicity, detention without charges, searches without warrants, even torture and assassinations." While she is heartened by legal challenges to such steps, her aim is to stir wider debate. "I recognise I live in a democracy and I'm in a minority. The majority support Bush - but perhaps without understanding everything that's at stake."


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002
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(*Editors Note | This page contains two stories. The first, yesterday's Reuters newswire report of Dick Cheney's call for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The second is an account his business dealings with the Iraqi government. Cheney originally denied that Halliburton under his tenure as CEO had in fact circumvented US law to do business with Hussein's Iraqi government. He was later forced to retract his denials when presented with evidence of Halliburton's dealings.)

Cheney Sees 'Gathering Danger' in Iraq
By Reuters | New York Times

Thursday, 20 June, 2002 (Several bombing this day in Iraq buried on the back pages of latimes.com

DETROIT (Reuters) - Iraqi President Saddam Hussein represents a "gathering danger'' to the United States, Vice President Dick Cheney said on Thursday, while warning that Washington will act preemptively against threats of terrorism.

"We are greatly concerned about any possible linkup between terrorists and regimes that have or seek weapons of mass destruction,'' said Cheney. "In the case of Saddam Hussein, we've got a dictator who is clearly pursuing and already possesses some of these weapons,'' he said.

"A regime that hates America and everything we stand for must never be permitted to threaten America with weapons of mass destruction,'' the vice president added, referring to Saddam and the Iraqi forces he fought as defense minister under President Bush's father during the Gulf War in 1991.

Cheney, who spoke at a political fund-raiser here, stopped short of saying there were any established ties between Baghdad and the al Qaeda network, or the Sept. 11 attacks that took about 3,000 U.S. lives.

But he said the possibility of such links was too great to ignore, especially in light of Saddam's defiance of U.N. weapons inspection programs and international oversight.

"This gathering danger requires the most urgent, deliberate and decisive response,'' he said.

"It is very clear that our enemies are determined to do further significant damage to the American people,'' Cheney said, citing recent intelligence reports.

"Wars are not won on the defensive,'' he added. "We must take the battle to the enemy anywhere necessary, to preempt greater stress to our country,'' he said.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)




Cheney Made Millions Off Oil Deals with Hussein
by Martin A. Lee
San Francisco Bay Guardian

November 13, 2000

Here's a whopper of a story you may have missed amid the cacophony of campaign ads and stump speeches in the run- up to the elections.

During former defense secretary Richard Cheney's five-year tenure as chief executive of Halliburton, Inc., his oil services firm raked in big bucks from dubious commercial dealings with Iraq. Cheney left Halliburton with a $34 million retirement package last July when he became the GOP's vice-presidential candidate.

Of course, U.S. firms aren't generally supposed to do business with Saddam Hussein. But thanks to legal loopholes large enough to steer an oil tanker through, Halliburton profited big-time from deals with the Iraqi dictatorship. Conducted discreetly through several Halliburton subsidiaries in Europe, these greasy transactions helped Saddam Hussein retain his grip on power while lining the pockets of Cheney and company.

According to the Financial Times of London, between September 1998 and last winter, Cheney, as CEO of Halliburton, oversaw $23.8 million of business contracts for the sale of oil-industry equipment and services to Iraq through two of its subsidiaries, Dresser Rand and Ingersoll-Dresser Pump, which helped rebuild Iraq's war-damaged petroleum-production infrastructure. The combined value of these contracts exceeded those of any other U.S. company doing business with Baghdad.

Halliburton was among more than a dozen American firms that supplied Iraq's petroleum industry with spare parts and retooled its oil rigs when U.N. sanctions were eased in 1998. Cheney's company utilized subsidiaries in France, Italy, Germany, and Austria so as not to draw undue attention to controversial business arrangements that might embarrass Washington and jeopardize lucrative ties to Iraq, which will pump $24 billion of petrol under the U.N.-administered oil-for-food program this year. Assisted by Halliburton, Hussein's government will earn another $1 billion by illegally exporting oil through black-market channels.

With Cheney at the helm since 1995, Halliburton quickly grew into America's number-one oil-services company, the fifth-largest military contractor, and the biggest nonunion employer in the nation. Although Cheney claimed that the U.S. government "had absolutely nothing to do" with his firm's meteoric financial success, State Department documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times indicate that U.S. officials helped Halliburton secure major contracts in Asia and Africa. Halliburton now does business in 130 countries and employs more than 100,000 workers worldwide.

Its 1999 income was a cool $15 billion.

In addition to Iraq, Halliburton counts among its business partners several brutal dictatorships that have committed egregious human rights abuses, including the hated military regime in Burma (Myanmar).

EarthRights, a Washington, D.C.-based human rights watchdog, condemned Halliburton for two energy-pipeline projects in Burma that led to the forced relocation of villages, rape, murder, indentured labor, and other crimes against humanity.

A full report (this is a 45 page pdf file - there is also a brief summary) on the Burma connection, "Halliburton's Destructive Engagement," can be accessed on EarthRights' Web site

Human rights activists have also criticized Cheney's company for its questionable role in Algeria, Angola, Bosnia, Croatia, Haiti, Rwanda, Somalia, Indonesia, and other volatile trouble spots. In Russia, Halliburton's partner, Tyumen Oil, has been accused of committing massive fraud to gain control of a Siberian oil field.
And in oil-rich Nigeria, Halliburton worked with Shell and Chevron, which were implicated in gross human rights violations and environmental calamities in that country. Indeed, Cheney's firm increased its involvement in the Niger Delta after the military government executed several ecology activists and crushed popular protests against the oil industry.

Halliburton also had business dealings in Iran and Libya, which remain on the State Department's list of terrorist states. Brown and Root, a Halliburton subsidiary, was fined $3.8 million for reexporting U.S. goods to Libya in violation of U.S. sanctions. (nobody went to jail)

But in terms of sheer hypocrisy, Halliburton's relationship with Saddam Hussein is hard to top. What's more, Cheney lied about his company's activities in Iraq when journalists fleetingly raised the issue during the campaign.

Questioned by Sam Donaldson on ABC's This Week program in August, Cheney bluntly asserted that Halliburton had no dealings with the Iraqi regime while he was on board.

Donaldson: I'm told, and correct me if I'm wrong, that Halliburton, through subsidiaries, was actually trying to do business in Iraq?

Cheney: No. No. I had a firm policy that I wouldn't do anything in Iraq even arrangements that were supposedly legal. (a prevaricator as CEO)

And that was it! ABC News and the other U.S. networks dropped the issue like a hot potato. As damning information about Halliburton surfaced in the European press, American reporters stuck to old routines and took their cues on how to cover the campaign from the two main political parties, both of which had very little to say about official U.S. support for abusive corporate policies at home and abroad.

But why, in this instance, didn't the Democrats stomp and scream about Cheney's Iraq connection? The Gore campaign undoubtedly knew of Halliburton's smarmy business dealings from the get-go.

Gore and Lieberman could have made hay about how the wannabe GOP veep had been in cahoots with Saddam. Such explosive revelations may well have swayed voters and boosted Gore's chances in what was shaping up to be a close electoral contest.

The Democratic standard-bearers dropped the ball in part because Halliburton's conduct was generally in accordance with the foreign policy of the Clinton administration. Cheney is certainly not the only Washington mover and shaker to have been affiliated with a company trading in Iraq. Former CIA Director John Deutsch, who served in a Democratic administration, is a member of the board of directors of Schlumberger, the second-largest U.S. oil-services company, which also does business through subsidiaries in Iraq.
Despite occasional rhetorical skirmishes, a bipartisan foreign-policy consensus prevails on Capital Hill, where the commitment to human rights, with a few notable exceptions, is about as deep as an oil slick.

Truth be told, trading with the enemy is a time-honored American corporate practice or perhaps "malpractice" would be a more appropriate description of big-business ties to repressive regimes.

Given that Saddam Hussein, the pariah du jour, has often been compared to Hitler, it's worth pointing out that several blue-chip U.S. firms profited from extensive commercial dealings with Nazi Germany.

Shockingly, some American companies =96 including Standard Oil, Ford, ITT, GM, and General Electric secretly kept trading with the Nazi enemy while American soldiers fought and died during World War II.

Today20000( General Electric is among the companies that are back in business with Saddam Hussein, even as American jets and battleships attack Iraq on a weekly basis using weapons made by G.E. But the United Nations sanctions committee, dominated by U.S. officials, has routinely blocked medicines and other essential items from being delivered to Iraq through the oil-for-food program, claiming they have a potential military "dual use." These sanctions have taken a terrible toll on ordinary Iraqis, and on children in particular, while the likes of Halliburton and G.E. continue to lubricate their coffers.


© : t r u t h o u t 2002


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Guns, Germs and Steel
The Fates of Human Societies
Jared Diamond
Random House 1997
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A book review by Danny Yee - http://dannyreviews.com/ - Copyright © 1997
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Why is it that Europeans ended up conquering so much of the world? Or, as one of Diamond's New Guinean friends asks him, why do they have all the "cargo"? Despite all the contrary evidence from anthropology and human biology, many persist in attributing the differing political and economic successes of the world's peoples to biological, "racial" differences. Others appeal to cultural differences or to historical contingency. But Diamond sees the fundamental causes as environmental, resting ultimately on ecological differences between the continents. An extended argument for this, Guns, Germs and Steel is nothing less than a history of Homo sapiens on a scale of continents and millennia.
Diamond begins with a survey of human pre-history, covering the spread of humans around the world down to 11000 BC. He then introduces Polynesia as a "natural experiment", an illustration on a smaller scale of his overall thesis. In the Polynesian exploration and settlement of the Pacific, settlers from the one cultural and ethnic background ended up in vastly different environments, ranging from continental New Zealand, through volcanic islands of various sizes, to barren atolls and remote Easter Island. Hunter-gatherer societies eventuated on some islands - and sophisticated states and proto-empires on others.

As an exemplar of contact between different societies, Diamond chooses the meeting of the Spanish conquistador Pizarro and the Inca Atahuallpa at Cajamarca in 1532. This resulted in Pizarro's victory, despite a numerical disadvantage, and the capture of Atahuallpa. The proximate causes of this were germs, technology (guns and steel weapons, ships), domestic animals (horses), and writing. Hence the title.



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Underlying these immediate causes, however, is what Diamond sees as the central key to understanding human history - food production, or the domestication of plants and animals. In an excellent summary - probably the best popular account I have seen - Diamond chronicles the origins of agriculture. He describes where and when food production originated, how it spread with demographic expansion and by emulation, and why it never took off in some regions. He also touches on the largely unconscious coevolutionary processes underlying domestication, the origins of specific crops, and the characteristics that made some plants more suitable than others for domestication.

Next Diamond considers, and rejects, the idea that some peoples failed to adopt agriculture, or adopted it late, because of cultural characteristics ("backwardness"). Hunter-gatherers have a good understanding of the potential of the plants in their environment and, while some groups are conservative and resist change, there are always some who are prepared to innovate. The Fertile Crescent had a climate which favoured annual plants (which tend to have large seeds) and a species mix which included critical, large-seeded, self-pollinating grasses. The result was a swag of crops including protein-rich cereals and pulses; other regions (New Guinea and the eastern United States are his examples) lacked such a crop suite. (Potential crops can't be evaluated in isolation - you can't maintain a sedentary society on apple cultivation alone.)

A similar analysis is carried out for the domestication of large mammals. Here, again, Eurasia was favoured with almost all the suitable species. While there appear to be many others which could have been domesticated (especially in Africa), they have behavioural traits which militate against it. (As evidenced by the failure of modern animal-breeders, backed by genetics, to domesticate any of them.) When they did become available, the indigenous peoples of other continents rapidly adopted Eurasian domestic animals. The rapid mastery of the horse by some Amerindian groups is a notable example.

Finally Diamond suggests a key difference between the continents: the primary axis of Eurasia is east-west, whereas the axes of Africa and the Americas are north-south. Because crops are climate dependent and climate varies strongly with latitude, crops and domestic animals could spread across Eurasia more easily.



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Returning to the proximate causes touched on earlier, Diamond looks more closely at diseases, writing, technology, and centralised government. Contagious diseases caused high levels of mortality in populations throughout the New World and Australia, often well before direct contact with European settlers. In contrast, European penetration into the tropics was slowed by Old World tropical diseases to which they lacked immunities. Where did these diseases come from, and why did so few travel in the other direction? Higher population densities in Eurasia created a niche for new diseases, the presence of domestic animals provided a reservoir of suitable candidates, and their spread was assisted by good cross-continental communications.

Next Diamond presents a capsule history of the origins of writing (in Mexico and Sumeria, and possibly in China and Egypt), exploring the limited uses of early writing systems, its gradual refinement, and its spread by emulation and copying. This is followed by a chapter on technological innovation more generally, highlighting its dependence on population size, the easy diffusion of ideas, and auto-catalytic feedback (with synergism between different forms of technology).

But the single most significant consequence of food production was that, by creating reliable food surpluses, it allowed large, dense, sedentary, and stratified societies to come into existence. Diamond uses a simple band/tribe/chiefdom/state typology to illustrate the relationship between population density and social structure and the movement from egalitarian societies to redistributive "kleptocracies". He also touches on the contributions of religion and ideology to political organisation.



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Part four presents a series of case studies from different regions, drawing on archaeological and linguistic evidence to reconstruct their history in the context of the framework developed earlier. Diamond briefly glances at how good communications and early political unification produced China's unusual linguistic and cultural unity. He also returns to the collision of the Old and New Worlds, comparing the dates for the adoption of agriculture, metallurgy, states, and writing in different regions. And there's room for a quick look at New World linguistics and the brief Norse contacts with North America.

Despite geographical proximity, Australia and Papua New Guinea had very different histories. Australia remained a continent of hunter-gatherers, while New Guinea was one of the original centres of food production. But New Guinea never developed centralised states and agriculture never crossed the Torres Strait. The explanations for this rest, once again, with environmental differences and ecological barriers. When Europeans did build an industrialised state in Australia, they had to import the key elements, the crops and technology, from outside.

The Austronesian expansion into Southeast Asia and the Pacific, starting from Taiwan and Southern China around 3000 BC, was one of the most significant movements of human history. Equipped with outrigger canoes, domestic animals and agriculture, Austronesian-speaking peoples overran and replaced the hunter-gatherer populations of Indonesia and the Philippines, and eventually expanded into the Pacific in the Polynesian diaspora. But the Austronesians failed to penetrate far into New Guinea, or to have any significant impact on Australia.

Ecology is also a major factor behind the complex human geography of sub-Saharan Africa. Iron-working and agriculture powered the Bantu expansion into southern Africa, displacing the pygmies and the Khoi-San. The characteristics of their crops explain why they stopped at the Fly River, leaving it for European settlers with suitable crops to introduce agriculture to South Africa. And the extraordinary Austronesian settlement of Madagascar is book-sized subject all by itself.



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An epilogue, "The future of human history as a science", proposes extending the approach of Guns, Germs and Steel to smaller geographic and shorter time scales. Diamond suggests geographical fragmentation (producing the "right" amount of political unity) as an explanation for why, within Eurasia, it was Europe rather than China that eventually took the lead in technological innovation. (It is all too easy, however, to imagine a Chinese writer in an alternative universe invoking exactly the opposite argument.) He also hints briefly at a role for alternatives to environmental explanations, namely "cultural factors and idiosyncratic individuals". And he argues that history should be considered a science, sharing methods with the other historical sciences, though he barely scrapes the surface of the epistemological issues this raises.

While this is a program that I have a lot of sympathy with, it also leads me to some of the qualms I have about Guns, Germs and Steel: I am always nervous when biologists turn their attention to history or anthropology. Though Diamond is a physician turned evolutionary biologist, he avoids the major pitfalls and can be read by historians and social scientists without flinching. He achieves this by avoiding some areas rather than engaging with them, however.

In his introduction Diamond writes that "since Toynbee's attempt, worldwide syntheses of historical causation have fallen into disfavor among most historians, as posing an apparently intractable problem". This disfavour is not entirely wilful, however, so Diamond's failure to elaborate is frustrating. Despite the breadth of Guns, Germs and Steel, it doesn't even begin to be a general synthesis of historical causation. When Diamond writes about the proximate and ultimate causes of the collision at Cajamarca, for example, he is not explaining why Pizarro captured Atahuallpa at Cajamarca - only why a Eurasian leader was confronting a Native American leader somewhere in the Americas. Finer explanations require the invocation of forms of historical causation on which Diamond doesn't touch at all.

Diamond moves confidently around an amazing range of disciplines, but there are some where he isn't so well informed. Religion, for example, is for him just a handmaiden of the state, providing a justification for conquest and a method of inspiring personal sacrifice for the collective good. This naive functionalism hardly stands up to critical examination, so it was not surprising to find that the "Further Readings" section doesn't mention any studies of religion. (And it has been argued that Macassan contacts with North Australia did influence Aboriginal religion.)

But carping too much on this would be uncharitable, given the breadth of Diamond's achievement. He has produced a superb work of synthesis, bringing together history, archaeology, agriculture, linguistics, medicine and many other fields. It is hard to evaluate just how strong his overall thesis is, but he is persuasive and surely has the right general idea. And even those who disagree with Diamond completely may appreciate Guns, Germs and Steel, many chapters of which can stand alone. If you are looking for a last minute Christmas present, Guns, Germs and Steel is a book which should appeal to anyone who enjoys history or popular science.

23 December 1997



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