May 3, 2010 / Lucinda / Comments Off on The Collateral Damage of an Unsustainable Lifestyle
There is so much to say about the the oil that is being spewed all over the Gulf of Mexico. Calling it a spill is a misnomer, that is what you say when a child accidentally tips over a glass of milk. This is an act of national and corporate terrorism. But still, Americans will buy gas for their cars at BP and I don’t hear Obama saying there will be a freeze on Halliburton contracts.
‘Experts’ are saying the the disaster ‘may’ cost upwards of $14 billion. No may about it, it will. Not only is there the environmental damage, we need to realize that the economy of the gulf shore is clearly shot to hell for the foreseeable future, energy prices will no doubt rise, and we already have a vulnerable economy. You add that up. And BP’s promises to pay for it, yeah, right.
Meanwhile in Massachusetts, the folly of our lack of attention to infrastructure is once more bearing fruit,
The oil, the water pipe–these are disasters for which we have only ourselves to blame. But even if we suddenly became exemplary planetary citizens, the volcanic eruption in Iceland a few weeks ago that brought the European continent to a standstill reminds us that our future would still not be ours to control.
Perhaps Margaret Atwood has already described what may happen in The Year of the Flood, –the silent flood, a disaster of epic proportions, human-made or not (it doesn’t matter in the end) that we don’t see coming and is beyond all of our fancy science and technology.
Only time will tell, but I don’t think it will take too long.
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“But love of the wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need – if only we had eyes to see.” —Edward Abbey
It’s been awhile since I posted to this blog, for all the usual reasons–family obligations, other work, too much to say, no words to adequately say it, sheer exhaustion. In the meantime, I’ve been posting assorted links to the Reclaiming Medusa Facebook page, which has given me a chance to get a sense of which of the many stories of our day resonate most deeply within my psyche. Going forward, I hope to be able to post those here first, but at least for the next few weeks, due to other commitments, it will remain sporadic.
A few nights ago, I read a wonderful passage by Jeannette Armstrong in the 2010 We Moon calendar(p. 91) describing the Okangan Indian of having someone speak for each of the components that make up our world–water, air, elders, children, etc. as part of the community decision making process which also includes examining how any given decision will impact each of these components. She writes,
There’s a built-in principle in terms of how we interact…Someone has to ask those questions…
…When we include the perspective of land and include the perspective of human relationship, one of the things that happens is that community changes. People in the community change. The realization that people and community are there to sustain you creates the most secure feeling in the world.
Many years ago, I was visiting with a friend whose young child was on a streak of wild behavior. She looked at him in exasperation and said, “You are making a lot of decisions, most of them wrong.” I’m not sure that was the most pc way a super perfect parent would have phrased it, but it was a rather accurate observation from someone with the wisdom of seeing beyond the immediate time and space horizon of a toddler.
We live in a world where we seem to have about as much collective perspective as that adorable child had that morning way back when. As children do, he survived toddlerhood without too much damage and grew to be a wonderful young man. The grownup inhabitants of planet earth on the other hand seem to be throwing one perpetual tantrum and are in serious need of time out. One wonders what would happen if we were to mature out of this and adopt the wisdom of the Okangans.
Yesterday’s observance of International Women’s Day began for me with a sober reminder that women’s lives, and those of their children, are still under siege both here in the U.S. and everywhere. The front page of my morning newspaper carried this truly disheartening picture of women in black as it were, voting in Iraq, a testament to the deterioration of women’s rights in Iraq, where previous to the U.S. invasion, women were among the most privileged in the Arab world. Now they are seen in restrictive clothing, voting while invisible.
“There’s been significant attention paid to the role of women in this weekend’s parliamentary elections, both as voters and as candidates. Much of the discussion has centered around how Iraqi women will participate in the vote. There’s been some concern over the potential for Iraqi men to unduly influence the votes of their female relatives. A number of citizens speaking to RFE/RL’s Radio Free Iraq admitted that such pressure was commonplace.
One citizen, Abu Milad, told RFI that he was sure his wife would vote for whomever he votes for. Hussein Abdel-Rahman, a young college student, admitted that he will attempt to sway his sisters’ voting choices, but attributed this phenomenon to the nature of Iraqi society, which is dominated by what he calls the “Eastern view” of relations between men and women…
…Young women from a village in Diyala province told RFI that many women in rural areas were being told that they were not allowed to leave their house to participate in the elections. They added that the male members of many households had collected the voter registration cards of all the women in their family, and planned to cast ballots on behalf of their female relatives, in addition to their own.”
Democracy? Not. But what nailed me was the article directly beneath the picture reporting that our state legislature in Kentucky once again is suffering from an acute case of brain in paranoid dick disease with some of our abortion phobic representatives trying to hijack 2 bills aimed at improving children’s lives by insisting on the addition of anti-abortion language.
Call it a tale of 2 fundamentalisms. If we really wanted to end terrorism, the first place to look is clearly at home.
On a related note, the U.S. military continues to prey on our children, marketing the fighting of war as an opportunity for occupational training and education, while the fine print on the sign up contract tells a different story. Young women in particular however face additional risk of being sexually assaulted by these snake oil recruiters. Learning Not Recruiting* has issued their annual compendium of suspect behavior by recruiters that has been reported (which they quickly point out is likely to be the tip of the iceberg in terms of actual number of cases). As they note in an email,
“With whatever other crimes in frauding, drug dealing, questionable enlistments, etc. that are committed, the vast majority of the reports involve sexual assault, rape and manipulation of young girls by recruiters.”
Documented reports for 2009:
1. Police: Army recruiter had sex contact with teen
recruit
2. Army Recruiter Arrested on Sex Charge
3. Army recruiter pleads not guilty
4. Recruiter uses slur at high schools
5. Former Recruiter Gets 3 Years on Child Sex
Charges
6. National Guard recruiter pleads guilty in theft
7. Marine guilty in sex assault of stepniece
8. Army recruiter disciplined
9. Ex-Guard recruiter sentenced to prison
10. Area Navy recruiter charged with statutory rape of
teenager
11. Marine recruiter faces 14 felonies
12. Case impugns Marine recruiting
13. Parents of recruit sue the Army, say they were
misled
14. Marine recruiter gets 3 years for sexual assault
15. Air Force recruiter charged with selling drugs
16. Marine recruiter charged with pimping girl, 14
17. Recruiter allegedly propositioned student
18. Ex-CCHS Army recruiter under investigation
19. Former Marine recruiter pleads guilty of rape
20. Miramontes guilty of manslaughter
21. Recruiter charged in child prostitution sting
22. 2 recruiting bosses fired after suicide probe
23. U.S. Navy-Marine Corps Court of Criminal
Appeals: US v. Scholz (Conviction upheld against
recruiter who had sex with and impregnated 14-
year-old 9th grade student)
24. Low morale, stress blamed in Army recruiter
suicides
25. U.S. Air Force Court of Criminal Appeals: US v.
Curran (Conviction of recruiter on multiple sex
offenses upheld)
26. Marine gunnery sergeant jailed 90 days for
adultery
27. Substance abuse appears a problem among stressed
Army recruiters
We read about the abuse of child soldiers in what the press paints as darkest Africa, all too easy to ignore because it is over there and it is someone else’s children. But it isn’t just over there, it is here too. It is terrorism being committed against our own children, and most assuredly not the defense of democracy.
Meanwhile, the military enjoys impunity from the damage caused by dumping toxics near military bases, perchlorate pollution and weaponry leashed on civilian populations such as Fallujah causing all manner of health problems, especially for children whose tiny bodies are the most vulnerable and birth defects and miscarriages.
Yet hardly a day goes by that we do not hear from our country’s leaders that they are spending billions more to fight terrorism and keep us safe from the enemy while our schools are pretty literally reduced to holding bake sales to stay solvent. Orwellian doublespeak at its finest, or as Pogo would have said, we have met the enemy and he is we. Poisoning children, sexually assaulting women and girls, depriving women of their rights while the country goes bankrupt–we are not safer and any notion that this is democracy is delusional. We are not only terrorizing others, we are terrorizing (and killing) ourselves.
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*With many thanks to Ret. Col. Ann Wright for bringing the recruiting abuse story to my attention.
This morning I awoke to the image of a little girl in Afghanistan. I don’t know her name, let’s call her the Accidental Terrorist–she had the prettiest dark eyes, wide open staring sightless at the sky, her body mangled and bloody, a victim of one of the recent U.S. bombing attacks. She was just a little girl.
She must have run outside to play despite warnings from the soldiers to stay inside and keep her head down. She wasn’t a terrorist, and we are not safer for her death. Instead, we have destroyed a piece of the future of the world. It was not ours to so wantonly dismiss.
I wonder–did the young soldiers who dropped the bomb know that children would be killed? Can they live with that? What will they tell their children about the day they killed a little girl who ran out to play in Afghanistan?
We’ve gotten to a point in this country where it is almost like a case of mass assisted suicide. Jonestown without the koolaid. Our schools and roads are in disrepair. Sick, broke, unemployed and foreclosed have become our public lack of options. Our air is unbreathable and our water undrinkable, our press corp spends countless hours reporting on Tiger Woods’ apology and boys who don’t go up in balloons and teabag rallies and whether Sarah Palin is a creditable candidate for President. And in the name of ending terrorism, we send our children to kill other children half way around the world.
If Bin Laden is high-fiving somewhere out of sight, who can blame him for we have become the destructive force that he aspired to be.
Today, Rainforest Action Network (RAN) hosts PUT CHASE ON THE RUN, a social media day of action, to convince Chase bank to stop funding mountaintop removal coal mining in the Appalachian Mountains.
JP Morgan Chase is the biggest U.S. financier of Mountaintop Removal (MTR). Mountaintop removal is the highly destructive mining practice that blows apart the tops of mountains in order to access coal in the cheapest way possible. MTR has buried over 2000 miles of rivers and streams and destroyed nearly 1.2 million acres of the Appalachian range. MTR has severely contaminated the air and drinking water, causing increased rates of mortality and disease for local people in the mountains of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia.
Join dozens of organizations and thousands of online activists in convincing Chase to stop destroying American mountains. Take a simple action on your Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, blog or email to end mountaintop removal in 2010. Go to www.DirtyMoney.org for instructions and PUT CHASE ON THE RUN!
MTR has destroyed nearly 1.2 million acres of Appalachian forest and mountains
MTR has buried over 2000 miles of rivers and streams with debris and pollution
Tap water in many Appalachian communities is not safe to drink due to coal contamination
MTR techniques resulted in a 29% loss of jobs from 1987-1997, even as coal production rose 32%
JP Morgan Chase is the biggest funder in the U.S. of mountaintop removal coal mining
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This story is personal for me. Aside from the fact that I can think of few things more heinous than cutting off the top of a mountain and dumping it in a stream along with all the pollution of land, air and water that goes with it, not to mention the horrendous economic damage done, I have an account at JP Morgan Chase. I didn’t used to. When I moved to Louisville 20 plus years ago, I opened an account at a branch of Liberty National Bank that was just down the street. And check out this lovely picture of their downtown office. It was sort of like the bar in Cheers–everyone knew your name. Then Liberty was bought by Bank One and that in turn was swallowed by Chase. It never occurred to me to look into the politics of what they do with money until now, but I am deeply offended and angry. You are not being a good citizen of this state if you are destroying it. The little branch office where I go still maintains the Cheers-like familiarity but when you look beneath the surface, it doesn’t feel so friendly anymore.
It is a major pain in the ass to move your bank account, especially when you have things on auto-pay as I do. I would prefer not to have to waste my time with all that. What I do plan to do is take a copy of this post with me the next time I go to the bank and give it to the branch manager and if you have an account at Chase, I urge you to do the same. It is not okay for big banks to come into our communities and destroy them (and Chase has a pretty nasty record with home foreclosures too), and they don’t need our loyalty, even after 20 plus years, if they do so.
Those of you of a certain age will remember those grade school Armageddon drills where we we were instructed to get under our desks and put our heads between our knees in case of a nuclear attack, a tactic that served no purpose and certainly wouldn’t have saved us if the Commies attacked.
Afghan villagers should stay inside and “keep their heads down” when thousands of U.S. Marines launch a massive assault on a densely-populated district in coming days, NATO’s civilian representative to Afghanistan said Tuesday.
The results are predictable, here is Robert Naiman‘s well-worded summary of the results:
“Civilian casualties are inevitable,” said U.S. officials before launching their weekend military assault on Marja in southern Afghanistan, and in this case, they were telling the truth. Yesterday, the New York Timesreports, a U.S. rocket strike “hit a compound crowded with Afghan civilians… killing at least 10 people, including 5 children.”
What justification has been provided by the government of the United States for its decision to kill these five children?
It will be argued that the government of the United States did not decide to kill these five children specifically, and that’s absolutely true. The U.S. government did not decide to kill these particular children; it only decided to kill some Afghan civilians, chosen randomly from Marja’s civilian population, when it decided to launch its military assault. These five children simply had the misfortune of holding losing tickets in a lottery in which they did not choose to participate…
…NATO forces have decided to advise civilians in Marjah not to leave their homes, although they say they do not know whether the assault will lead to heavy fighting.
These five kids were staying inside, as instructed. It didn’t save them from U.S. rockets. Perhaps they weren’t keeping their heads down.
You can read the rest of Naiman’s commentary here. Suffice it to say, “Duck” is not an acceptable strategy for protecting civilians and should be seen as a gross violation of international law.
Billions of dollars spent killing children. How dare we talk about winning or honor.
My first car was a Buick, a hand-me-down from my father who wanted me to have a safe car. It came with Firestone 500 tires, but that’s another story. When the Buick finally died, as an act of rebellion, I bought a Toyota. Since then, I’ve owned 4 of them. 4 cars in 30 years. I was a good driver and they were, for the most part good cars. Until last August when I traded in my 10 year old van, who went by the name of Van Gogh, for a Camry. I’d been planning to buy a smaller, more efficient car, but the very nice shocks and lumbar support spoke to my middle-aged body (that’s defined as I could get in and out of it without pain). And the mileage was much better than the van, which sadly had gotten an official 19 mph, meaning it wasn’t a Clunker so no rebate like those folks who traded in for more efficient trucks that got 18 mph.
By the time I had owned it for 2 days, I knew that despite months of test-driving various cars, I’d made a bad choice. For one thing, there was no logical place to put my purse, something I’m guessing male designers weren’t too worried about. Second, the rear vision is lousy. And you have to do some weird body contortions to plug your pod into the USB port.
But its those new-fangled electronic keys that are not actually keys that leave me just gob-smacked. You start the car by pushing a button that works if the key is in radio range. Okay, kinda cool but…if the battery in the gizmo dies, it’s a problem although there is a workaround, explained in detail in the manual that I completely did not understand.
20th Century Key versus 21rst Century Smart Key System
And what if you lose your keys? No problem, Toyota will make you a new one. But it will cost a couple hundred dollars. This is supposedly an advancement on the old-fashioned kind of key that cost about $3 to replace and could be gotten at the hardware store and did not require batteries. But wait, it gets better.
The very best thing about the key that isn’t a key (in fact just to avoid any confusion, Toyota refers to it as a “smart key system”) is that it takes more than 20 pages in the manual to explain how to use it as well as a whole other section on what to do if the key fails. My particular favorite paragraph reads,
When riding in an aircraft:
When bringing a key with a wireless remote control function onto an aircraft, make sure you do not press any buttons on the key while inside the aircraft cabin. If you are carrying the key in your bag, etc. ensure that the buttons are not likely to be pressed accidentally. Pressing a button may cause the key to emit radio waves that could interfere with the operation of the aircraft.
Of course Toyota could have maybe provided a locking mechanism, but no dice. The best part is that instead of posting this warning in huge letters on the front of the manual, it is buried on page 25.
Which brings us to the small matter of the floor mats that might catch on accelerator pedals that might not quit accelerating. And you know it is major doodoo when they quit making the cars and haven’t issued a fix. But they have lots of helpful advice about what to do if the problem occurs (press down firmly on the brakes and presumably kiss your ass goodbye).
So cars were invented what, about a hundred years ago? Forgive me the presumption, but if I’m paying tens of thousands of dollars for one of these (and that after hours of dickering, and I do not use that word lightly, with the sales dude, I’m taking the leap of faith that the car manufacturer will provide me a product that:
Starts
Goes
Stops and
Does 1-3 safely
Hello Toyota, your customers deserve better than being told to just keep driving your new-fangled death mobiles. How about you give us our money back? Offer us free service for life if indeed this is fixable? In the meantime, and I can just imagine my father trying not to smirk, might be time to go check out those Buicks.
I’ll leave you with Neil Young’s ode to his first car:
Like many of you, I have discouragement fatigue. No matter what we do, it seems that the corporate and and government leaders are determined to take the fast road to hell in a handbasket. We keep waging war, we continue to destroy the environment, people are hungry and sick, too many have lost jobs and homes, our schools and roads are in disrepair. Getting out of bed in the morning sounds like a really bad idea. What difference will it make if we sign one more petition, call our elected officials one more time, let alone head out into frigid temperatures to a protest gathering?
One very good reason is that it is not so much about the impact our actions have on others but rather how our actions empower ourselves. I have written multiple times about the power of protest and standing up for what you believe in (here, here and here) but what is so difficult to capture in words is the spiritual empowerment of standing your ground. I’m not sure how many protests I attended before I came to understand this–quite a few–until one day, standing with a few friends protesting outside of a lecture given by Condoleezza Rice, I found myself feeling literally rooted to the cold sidewalk where we stood. That is something you have to feel to understand, not something that can be adequately said in words. But since that time, whenever I am out on the street, I stop to pay attention to the strength and connectedness that comes from standing your ground.
Wile at a vigil in 2005, two days after being arrested and jailed when trying to enlist at the Times Square Recruiting Center (left to right: Miriam Poser, Joan Wile, Cindy Sheehan, Carole Abrahams, Joan Kaye and Maggie Vall)
Joan Wile, founder of Grandmothers Against the War and one of my sheroes has a wonderful piece on her blog, where she talks about why the sense of empowerment that comes from standing up for what you believe in is so important in these discouraging times (and while both she and I are talking about standing in the literal sense, as I try to do in my writing every day, you can do a whole lot of standing up from a sitting down position :-). Describing the weekly gathering of Grandmothers Against War on the day after George Bush was re-elected she writes,
The other people standing on Fifth Avenue with me were equally depressed and ready to give up the struggle. You’ve never seen so many long faces.
Then, an amazing thing happened. As we stood there with our peace signs and banners, the black clouds in our minds began to waft away. Slowly, we began to smile and chatter in our usual good spirits. By the end of the vigil, we were practically jubilant. Nothing had changed — the grim reality was still the fact that the worst President in history was going to head the government for another four years and reap hideous injustices and catastrophes. But, WE had changed. We had decided to press on and continue battling for our issues.
It was clear that in the act of fighting back, we were able to banish our hopeless feelings.
Eve Tetaz at an anti-war protest in March 2007. By Lori Perdue.
Or put another way, in the words of Eve Tetaz, an almost 79 year old who has racked up her 21rst arrest for protesting puts it,
“In everything I do,” she said, flashing her large smile, “I want to be a reflection of my faith.”
Indeed. Imagine the power of what might happen if every person who feels that corporations should not be more powerful than people and every person who is unemployed and every person who cannot afford healthcare and every person who believes in the right to breathable air and drinkable water and every person who has lost a home or lost a child or spouse to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were to gather with their neighbors in the town squares of this country. Not in anger although goodness knows we have every right to be, but simply to empower ourselves with the act of standing up for our lives. That would be a force to be reckoned with.
Several years ago, in an effort to make sure that I had no excuse for not getting enough exercise, I bought a treadmill. Multi-tasker that I am, the plan was that I would do catch up on my inevitably overflowing reading pile while doing the cardio-vascular thing. Turns out that I am not one of those walks and chews gum let alone runs well with scissors types. So I broke down and started to watch television while I exercise.
Before going further, I should perhaps share that I didn’t watch much television as a child, an hour a day at most, well below today’s norm. We didn’t even have a color television until I was almost in college, not that we couldn’t, it was just deemed unnecessary. After I graduated college and got my first apartment, one of my first purchases was a small television. I actually bought that before I bought a bed or a table. And I sat down and watched it. And watched it. I watched soaps, I watched Dallas. The cheesier the better. This went on for a few years. And then I was over it and since then, my limited television watching, by national standards, has been practically unpatriotic.
But now thanks to my treadmill, I am catching up with what makes America tick, and it isn’t pretty, and I”m not even watching Fox (it might get my heart rate up a bit higher, the gastro-intestinal risk is just too high). While there is no shortage of edifying entertainment options out there , I’m finding the advertisements far more interesting. For instance, after a lifetime of being told to worry if my butt is too big, now there are undies that make your butt look bigger.
Not only that, but ‘news’ programs that you are supposed to take seriously actually spend time analyzing if this is a good product or not.
This is serious stuff, it is our ticket out of economic malaise according to Robert Reich who tells us that we need to spend if we are going to recover:
The truth, of course, is that the most important fiscal indicator is the ratio of the debt to the GDP. And the most important issue there is how quickly America can get jobs back and the GDP growing again. More spending in the short term is the only way to accelerate a jobs recovery, and reduce the debt-GDP ratio over the longer term.
So spend, baby, spend, get that 2nd pair of Booty Pops free, you just have to spring for the extra shipping and handling. But first we might want to do a wee bit of thinking about the economy those fancy new undies are helping to save.
First the good news, at least if you happen to work in the top echelon of a large financial institution:
Major U.S. banks and securities firms are on pace to pay their people about $145 billion for 2009, a record sum that indicates how compensation is climbing despite fury over Wall Street’s pay culture.
An analysis by The Wall Street Journal shows that executives, traders, investment bankers, money managers and others at 38 top financial companies can expect to earn nearly 18% more than they did in 2008—and slightly more than in the record year of 2007. The conclusions are based on an examination of securities filings for the first nine months of 2009 and revenue estimates through year-end.
earned $11.7 billion last year, more than double its profit in 2008, and generated record revenue. The bank earned $3.3 billion in the fourth quarter alone.
on Friday announced a record $9.3 billion payday for its investment-banking employees, setting the stage for competitors like Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS) to also make eye-popping payouts. On a per employee basis, JPMorgan investment bankers, sales staff and traders, on average, are set to make about $379,000 for 2009, up more than $100,000 from 2008, when the broader financial sector was mired in crisis.
“People looking at it from the outside look at the dollars and say they are high,” said Kenneth Raskin, the head of law firm White & Case. “There is no question the dollars are high. The question is whether they were deserving.“
No, actually the question is how do these people live with themselves and why has this been allowed to happen. Based on the above, they earned as much as $279,000 a piece in 2008 while the economy imploded. There is no question of whether they are deserving. They are not, and no amount of Booty Pop wearing women is going to make them look better. Incidentally, according to the same article, median U.S. household income in 2008 was $50,303.
Consumer inflation was tame in 2009, with prices rising 2.7 percent. Yet families felt squeezed as their spending power sank in the face of falling wages, job losses and higher prices for energy, medical care and education.A surge in energy prices last year offset the biggest drop in food costs in nearly a half century.
The Labor Department says its Consumer Price Index rose a modest 0.1 percent in December. Excluding food and energy, prices were also up just 0.1 percent last month.
The Commerce Department said on Thursday retail sales fell 0.3 percent last month, the first decline since September, as consumers spent less on vehicles and an array of other goods during the holiday shopping month.
Analysts had expected an increase of 0.5 percent, but disappointment was tempered by upward revisions to prior months’ data. November sales were revised to show a 1.8 percent gain from an initially reported 1.3 percent increase, and October sales were bumped up a touch as well.
A separate report from the Labor Department showed initial claims for state unemployment benefits rose 11,000 to 444,000 last week, higher than the 437,000 claims analysts surveyed by Reuters had forecast.
A separate report showed inflation-adjusted weekly wages for the 12 months ending in December were down 1.6 percent, the biggest decline since 1990. Slack wages and scarce job creation have slowed consumer spending, hindering the economy’s ability to mount a strong recovery…
…While the economy remains on a steady recovery path, the housing market — the main trigger of the economic downturn — continues to show signs of stress.
The nation closed out 2009 with a record number of foreclosure actions and is poised to set a fresh record this year, real estate data company RealtyTrac said.
According to the group, 2.8 million properties with a mortgage received a foreclosure notice last year, up 21 percent from 2008 and 120 percent from 2007.
And in case you were curious, even the porn industry is suffering.
This is what a buy stuff so we can make more stuff economy looks like when it goes bad. Mr. Reich’s solution is to prop that system up, including more military spending, which the President and Congress keep happily ponying up,
President Barack Obama will ask Congress for an additional $33 billion to fight unpopular wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on top of a record $708 billion for the Defense Department next year, The Associated Press has learned..
Compare that to the amount of aid that the U.S. is offering to Haiti, as Jesse Hagopian points out,
Yesterday, Secretary Hilary Clinton was sent to Haiti and gave a speech saying that the US is doing “every thing we can” to help the Haitian people. But that fact that her trip to the Haitian airport stopped all aid from arriving for three hours – three critical hours on a day when the difference between life and death for tens of thousands is a drink of water – should tell you everything you need to know about the US relief effort.
Obama has pledged $100 million, which will only just begin to help; and only if it is used for direct aid at all and not squandered on private contractors looking to make a dime (or many millions of dimes) off the suffering of Haitians.
U.S. Bankers got bonuses totaling over $100 billion last year. The US is spending trillions to destroy countries in the Middle East. We can raise the money needed to help our brothers and sisters of Haiti, but it is going to take ordinary people doing extraordinary things to push even the liberals in power to help.
Then there is the healthcare bill, which whatever the cost, will still leave some of the most needy in the lurch,
At any given time, an estimated 1.8 million disabled workers languish in the Medicare coverage gap, a cost saver instituted nearly 40 years ago. Many, like Walker, are uninsured. Lawmakers had hoped to eliminate the gap as part of health care overhaul, but concluded it would be too expensive.
Too expensive to care for those most in need…And just a little over a week ago, Secretary Clinton pledged “$63 billion over six years to improve global health by investing in efforts to reduce maternal and child mortality, prevent millions of unintended pregnancies, and avert millions of new HIV infections.”
So there you have it, our national economy--$63 billion over 6 years for global health, $100 million in aid and not enough to care for the most medically needy…$145 billion to bankers on Wall Street…$708 billion for ‘defense’, and $19.95 (plus shipping and handling) for Booty Pops. Not technically the definition of a depression, but definitely depressing.
Until we redefine what a healthy economy is, one that supports caring and sustainability, Wall Street may continue to thrive. For awhile. But the downhill spiral for Main Street and our national soul is picking up momentum and the current prescriptions from economic talking heads will not save it.
A few days ago, I saw an ad on television proclaiming that using Lysol will keep your countertops safe from H1N1 germs. This sounded hugely useful to me in case someone with the flu starts hacking and wiping snot all over your kitchen and bathroom because you certainly can’t inoculate a countertop and you wouldn’t want the poor thing to get sick. It also occurred to me that if there is a shortage of vaccine (although from news reports in recent days, it sounds like exactly the opposite is true and there is glut of the vaccine because apparently enough people aren’t properly scared), maybe we could all just spray ourselves with Lysol.
We don’t use commercial store-bought cleaners in our house because of asthma and chemical sensitivity issues. That said, the house is clean and we rarely get the flu not to mention we save a fortune every year by using such dirt cheap substitutes as baking soda, vinegar and wait for it…soap.
So being a tad cynical about these things (which you may have already gathered), I decided to take a little look-see at Lysol’s site which, after providing us with the facts about H1N1 (not that they want us to be scared or anything), helpfully tells us which of their products will kill it:
LYSOL® Disinfectant Spray
LYSOL® Disinfecting Wipes
LYSOL® All Purpose Cleaners (both pourable and trigger products)
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Household Products Database, there are multiple versions of these products. For Lysol Brand All Purpose Cleaner With Bleach (trigger bottle), the database provides the following information:
PRECAUTIONARY STATEMENT: Hazard to Humans and Domestic Animals. Warning: Causes eye and skin irritation. Do not get in eyes, on skin or clothing. Remove contaminated clothing and wash clothing before reuse. For sensitive skin or prolonged use, wear gloves. Odors may irritate. Use in well ventilated area. Avoid breathing of vapors. Not recommended for use by persons with heart or chronic respiratory diseases such as asthma, emphysema or obstructive lung disease. Harmful if swallowed.
Last I heard, the flu definitely qualifies as a respiratory disease, so why would you use this product to fight it? I decided to look a tad further and what I found next just floored me–the Center for Disease Control specifically recommends Lysol by brand name!According to theCenter For Disease Control’s “Ounce of Prevention Campaign:
Arming health educators and consumers with information as well as practical and useful tips on preventing infectious diseases, the Ounce of Prevention campaign was created by the National Center for Infectious Diseases, Coordinating Center for Infectious Diseases of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in partnership with Reckitt Benckiser, Inc., the makers of LYSOL® Brand Products.
Talk about a marketing coup! Why Lysol instead of say Purell, whose dispensers have been popping up faster than dandelions in spring. According to the EPA, there are a whopping 500 products that will kill Influenza A on hard non-porous surfaces. Um wait a minute, weren’t we talking about H1N1? Not to worry,
EPA believes, based on available scientific information, that the currently registered influenza A virus products will be effective against the 2009-H1N1 flu strain and other influenza A virus strains on hard, non-porous surfaces.
Guess we’ll have to take that on faith. But many of these products, like Lysol are contraindicated for anyone with respiratory issues. In addition, with mounting concerns about the overuse of antibiotics, both in people and in our food supply and cases of drug-resistant TB being reported there is also the concern that we are buying a huge risk with the over-use of these products.
But the big question remains, how did Lysol get the very cushy real estate on the CDC site which is tantamount to recommending it over other products. You don’t have to look very far to find out just how incestuous the relationship is between the governmental bodies that oversee our health policies and corporate America. Just recently, former CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding took a position with Merck & Co. in their vaccine division:
“I am very excited to be joining Merck where I can help to expand access to vaccines around the world,” added Gerberding, who will head up the company’s $5 billion global vaccine business that includes shots to prevent chickenpox, cervical cancer and pneumonia.
The CDC under Gerberding has strongly recommended Merck’s Gardisil vaccine to protect against HPV and cervical cancer for all young girls, despite significant doubts as to whether this is good medical practice. The vaccine costs approximately $375 according to the CDC, which needless to say has enriched Merck’s coffers substantially.
The CDC has also strongly recommended the use of Tamiflu to fight the flu, but it’s effectiveness has also come under scrutiny:
Nick Fremantle and Melanie Calvert from the University of Birmingham reviewed additional studies and concluded the drug may reduce the risk of pneumonia in otherwise healthy people who get the flu, but the benefit is probably very small and needs to be weighed against potential side effects.
Stay tuned to find out which lucky CDC official will be jumping ship to go work for Lysol. Eat your heart out Purell.
Lucinda Marshall is the author of the full-length poetry collection, Inheritance Of Aging Self (Finishing Line Press,2021) and is available for purchase from Finishing Line Press, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon. She is also a quilt, mixed media, and graphic design artist. For more information, please email LucindaMarshall @ lucindamarshall.com.
lking about H1N1? Not to worry,
