Duty to Warn

pulverized

the good son has fallen

as the clock crushed twelve....

hey-ya- hey hey -ya hey

minute grains of sand

smashed beyond recognition

mired in unimaginable dimensions

late for a family photograph

-no lack of commitment

hey-ya- hey hey -ya hey

family tree can not be traced

-but for the tendencies

you want proof

you want justice

you want freedom

you think you want truth....

there is no metaphor for truth.

hey-ya- hey hey -ya hey


december 2001

Difficult times demand clarity from those who have the ability to express opinions in the media. Often times, media will seek an “expert” or an “informed” opinion to add texture to a particular story of national importance. Not surprising in the least, the lead story in The Columbus Dispatch on Sunday October 14, 2001 was “Testing America’s Resolve.” Within the text, were quotes from professor of military history at The Ohio State University, Allan R. Millett. According to the professor, “The terrorists are ahead of us by 6,000 dead to begin with, and that adds up to a lot of angry Americans.”

There's something happening here

What it is ain't exactly clear ...

It's time we stop, children, what's that sound

Everybody look what's goin' down.

-- Buffalo Springfield

AUSTIN, Texas -- In New York City last year, about 3,000 people died in the attack on the World Trade Center. In New York City last year, 30,000 people came to the new federal limits on welfare. Another 19,000 will lose assistance this year. New York has lost 95,000 jobs since Sept. 11. It lost 75,000 jobs in the year before that. There are now 30,000 people in the city shelters.

Now find the numbers for your town. In Austin, the only organization that provides help to women with breast cancer and no health insurance has just cut its staff from 30 to six, with an equal impact on the help that can be offered. Homelessness is up, shelter populations are up, food distribution centers and soup kitchens are overwhelmed.

The art of the deal is a media dream: Savvy achievers get to the top. Guile and artifice -- even outright deception -- may well be part of the game, but there's nothing like success. One way or another, money and centralized power end up calling the tunes. Or so the media script often goes.

From its beginnings a half-century ago, the Pacifica radio network set out to be quite different. Listeners tuned in for something else -- a much more inclusive embrace of human creativity and political dissent. Like most endeavors, there were failures and crises along the way. But even with Pacifica's tumultuous history, the last three years have been times of extraordinary upheaval.

Two words -- "censorship" and "democracy" -- summarize much of what has been at stake in the national battle over Pacifica.

Now, some very good news: Democracy is winning.

Mainstream news accounts have finally fingered Battelle Memorial Institute, the spooky Dr. Strangelove Institute in Columbus, as ground zero in our domestic military-industrial anthrax scare. With five people dead and eighteen ill, Battelle’s role in directing the Defense Department’s “joint vaccine acquisition program” is now coming under heavy scrutiny.

Battelle, in partnership with Michigan-based Bioport, has a virtual monopoly on military anthrax vaccine production in the U.S.. British and U.S. news accounts describe Bioport’s owner as a top secret British biowarfare consortium, Porton Down. Perhaps not ironically, the Chairman and CEO of the Porton Down company is Fuad El-Habri, a bin Laden family associate. Laura Rozen’s interesting article for the website Salon is must reading on the subject.

AUSTIN -- And a happy New Year to all the friendly folks at the Henry Cisneros' special prosecutor's office, now coming up on its seventh year. Cisneros, who left office five ago as Clinton's housing secretary, is back in San Antonio doing good works in the area of affordable housing. But his special prosecutor David Barrett, like Ol' Man River, he just keeps rolling along.

Cisneros, having long since pleaded to a misdemeanor and paid a $10,000 fine, is no longer a target of investigation, but Barrett is reportedly still investigating someone who did or did not tell him something about Cisneros. It's bound to be a high crime, since the entire flap was over whether Cisneros had lied to the FBI -- not about whether he had given money to his ex-mistress (an affair that was both over and public knowledge well before Cisneros ever went to Washington) -- but about how much he had paid her.

AUSTIN -- The president has taken to saying peculiar things again. "There are no shades of gray in our war on terrorism," he announced the other day. Excuse me, but if you've ever seen anything grayer than some of our warlord allies in the Northern Alliance, please write at once.

I especially like the reports that the warlords are now calling in American air strikes on one another. "A City, Free of Taliban, Returns to the Thieves," reports The New York Times. "Jalalabad, a city in the hands of thugs and crooks." I'd say that's grayish.

If my memory is correct, it was a Jerry Lewis movie. More than 40 years later, I still remember the scenes of a grown man so gullible that he believed his television. What a laugh riot! The guy dashed out to shop every time a commercial told him exactly what to buy. Then he'd sit in front of the TV set, dyeing his hair and smoking cigars, awaiting further instructions.

It was quite funny -- to a 10-year-old, anyway. Even back then, it seemed incontrovertibly absurd to think that someone would be so credulous about televised messages.

Today, print journalists may roll their eyes at the mention of television. Those of us who write for newspapers are (ahem) rather more sophisticated and nuanced. But even someone who sticks to reading the news has probably gotten the authoritative word that Sept. 11 changed "everything."

AUSTIN -- Here comes everyone's favorite season: The tree is down, the bills are due, January, February, Ry-Krisp and cottage cheese.

T'is the festive season for one of our nation's leading industries -- dispensers of diet advice. Since we all spent a couple of months home with mac and cheese even before the holidays, it could be a growth year for the stationary bicycle.

Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are still out there somewhere, with Judge Crater and Chandra Levy. Now that we've won the war, all the king's horses and all the king's men have to put Afghanistan back together again --- warlords and all. OPEC just cut production by 6.5 percent.

Looking on the bright side, as we are wont to do at this stand, privatization of Social Security is a dead letter and at least Congress didn't pass the economic stimulus package.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Ecuador recently moved to the dollar standard for its economy in an effort to bail itself out of one of those credit-flight crises that seems to afflict countries like a case of flu going around the globe. The dollarization of that economy has touched off a flurry of commentary among economists, who are on-the-one-handing with even more vigor than usual.

The alternative to the Ecuadorean move is something like what Singapore tried to do, a little late, during the collapse of most of the Asian economy two years ago. Basically, what Singapore did was to freeze foreign capital and say, "Sorry, buddy, but you can't take your money out of here for a while." This naturally upset all those geniuses at the International Monetary Fund, who are wedded to the "we had to destroy the village in order to save it" school of economic repair.

There's a wonderful word, "iatrogenic," describing an illness that you get from going to the hospital to have another illness treated. I always think of the IMF as a dispenser of iatrogenic ills.