Alas, like New Orleans’ redevelopment disaster, W’s pledge to revamp military healthcare has become equally scandalous. Almost one year to the day after Dubya commissioned a report on military healthcare, Veterans for America, a veterans advocacy group, delivered a report recently to the New York Times, entitled: “Fort Drum: A Great Burden, Inadequate Assistance.”
“The system is very much overburdened,” said Jason W. Forrester, director of policy for Veterans for America. “These problems are going to continue as long as we have units, such as the Second Brigade Combat Team, that have seen high-intensity combat, extended deployments and inadequate time between deployments.” NYTimes and other reports remind us that W has once again dropped the ball.
Child Custody Lost
On top of decrepit healthcare, returning soldiers often lose their families while ‘over there.’ Military family advocates say a growing number of soldiers are losing custody of their children, not because they're bad parents but because of extended missions in Iraq. Like many other soldiers, when reservist Tanya Towne was stop-lost to extended missions, her family broke up and she lost custody of her son.
Only last month W signed a bill to help protect service members and their families. Though legal experts say some military moms and dads, absent for so long, still lose custody of their kids, (NPR).
Debt Collectors Take Aim at Soldiers
To add insult to injury, while on stop loss, many soldiers have to deal with the bill collectors knocking on the door at home—as the NYTimes reports.
Sgt. John J. Savage III, an Army reservist, was about to climb into a troop transport plane for a flight to Iraq from Fayetteville, N.C., when his wife called with shocking news: "They're foreclosing on our house." Savage boarded a plan returning to combat, brooding all the time about losing his house and wondering where his wife would sleep the next night.
Although a longstanding federal law strictly limits the ability of a soldier’s lenders to foreclose, they do so often and aggressively. Court records and reports from military and civilian lawyers tell how soldiers often face demoralizing demands from financial companies collecting on bills.
Some cases involve prominent corporations like Wells Fargo and Citigroup; though they claim to comply with the law, they are also strapped for cash and need to collect. After six years of an unbridled, unregulated, ‘free market’ mortgage boom that helped to prop up Bush’s war time economy, a plague of foreclosures are busting the banks.
• At Fort Hood, Texas, a soldier's wife was sued by a creditor trying to collect a debt owed by her and her soldier husband fighting in Baghdad at the time. A local judge ruled against her, saying she had defaulted, despite laws protecting soldiers.
• At Camp Pendleton, California, more than a dozen marines returned from Iraq to find their cars and other property sold to cover unpaid storage and towing fees.
• In northern Ohio, Wells Fargo served a young Army couple with foreclosure.
The Big Picture—Theocon Ideology
At least Dubya and his theocon buddies are consistent in their disasters. In 1992 the theocon cabal, which includes John McCain, had written the Defense Plan Guidance document when planning to invade Iraq and seize its 115 billion barrels of oil reserves, second only to that of Saudi Arabia. The document promotes American global imperialism and outlines a policy of unilateralism and pre-emptive military action. It clearly states the theocon strategy in seizing control of oil: "In the Middle East and Southwest Asia, our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region's oil."
Whatever happened to Yankee ingenuity? Can’t we develop renewable energy rather than wage war for toxic oil? When Jimmy Carter advocated this approach in the 70’s, he was voted out of office. That was during one of many oil-price induced recessions.
As of the Reagan years, the theocons have followed the thought leaders like Norman Podhoretz a right-wing fundamentalist theocrat and Milton Friedman a free-market, corporatist economist, and others.
The young well-intended soldiers now fighting involuntarily in extended Stop Loss missions are mere pawns in a grander ideological project about which they are clueless. Most soldiers enlist to serve their country with noble, patriotic values. Meanwhile the theocons exploit these traditional ideals by transforming the military into a security service to the status quo petroleum corporations, huge campaign contributors…not to mention the contractors who profit from rebuilding Iraq after being bombed.
The Defense Plan Guidance report leaked out into public domain. Authored by theocons Scotter Libby (since then a convicted felon) and Paul Wolfowitz (‘retired’ from W’s Admin and then fired from the World Bank), the report is only a smaller artifact of a much grander project, namely: The Project of a New American Century—a.k.a. NPAC, a neoconservative think tank whose stated goal is to promote America’s dominance globally and to support "a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity."
What “Reganite military strength” means here is the traditional industrial-military complex that Eisenhower warned us against as our own Achilles heel. Bush calls for a conventional warfare—one based on big profits for defense contractor corporations—to fight non-conventional terrorists. In doing so Dubya follows the theocon ideological approach to global dominance and radical corporatist economics per Milton Friedman’s failed theories.
As for Reagan’s ‘moral clarity,’ this refers to the likes of fundamentalist Christians, Falwell, Podhoretz, Dobson, Pat Robertson… The policy laid out from this radical ideology greatly resembles that of right-wing, fundamentalist theocratic regimes. The destabilizing of the Middle East plays into their psychedelic ‘rapture’ vision of the second coming of Christ…something they learned from rubbish novels about being Left Behind.
The Wahhabist regime in Saudi Arabia provides one vivid and real political system similar to the one NPAC promotes. A religious doctrine reigns over every aspect of society—the military, judicial, educational, and economic systems. The members of this theocratic conservative political movement also call for a return to the old, ‘pure values’ of the original prophets. This includes teaching non-scientific accounts of the origin of the world as well as intolerance of homosexuality, birth-control... It’s a map to return to a Dark Ages where corporatists profit and religious nuts reign.
With a long list of other theocon buddies, including John McCain, Dubya adheres to this program as religious movement. It also includes ‘Milty’s’ economic policies of a purely unbridled, free market where corporations are uncontrolled, unregulated. During W’s watch we witness results of this policy now in the current mortgage and credit fiascos…not to mention the gun-slinging corporate militia in Iraq…
Driven by high profits, banks sold mortgages to anyone with a pulse, luring them in on teaser interest rates, starting them off low and then ‘ballooning’ them into foreclosures. Likewise, the highly profitable, yet socially irresponsible operations in the petroleum industry, or in the military industry—Halliburton, Blackwater, DynCorp…—defense contractors earn reputations for atrocious business practices...not to mention lawless slaughter of innocent civilians.
The theocons preach and practice their new world order. We see the results in places like…Iraq, Afghanistan, New Orleans, in the military healthcare...
Over and over again, W’s close adherence to the theocon ideology favors big contracts with corporations…such as the theocon owned and managed Blackwater, Carlyle Group, CACI… This list of corporations goes on and on. Meanwhile in areas where regular citizens are concerned, wounded war veterans, Dubya’s Admin drops the ball.
The theocons’ new world order supports an elite corporate-owner class in a so-called free market…anyone outside this bubble of the super-rich is left to pull himself up by his own combat boot straps. The poor are disposable pawns—‘troops’—in this Christian corporatist crusade.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Monday, February 25, 2008
Stop Loss -- The Disposable Poor -- Part I
‘Backdoor Draft’ is what Senator John Kerry called it, a clause in the military enlistment contract that keeps soldiers in combat involuntarily. Stop Loss is a law by which the president can stop the loss of experienced soldiers reaching the end of their hitch.
Like many other soldiers, reservist Tanya Towne learned about this clause in her contract when deployed to Iraq; her husband divorced her and took custody of her son. Now she pays $500 per month in child support on her puny reservist salary.
Since the invasion, spring 2002, some 160,000 soldiers occupy Iraq. Bush ordered a stop loss on more than 60,000 soldiers to remain in combat beyond the normal end of their enlistment. Some 180,000 private contractors, mostly Blackwater mercenaries, also supplement the US military. As incentive, the Bush Admin pays ‘mercs’ four or five times what enlisted soldiers earn.
"The use of stop loss is often an indication of a shortfall of available personnel," says Loren Thompson, a think-tank analyst in Arlington. Meaning: fewer and fewer citizens are willing to engage in the Iraqi morass.
Cases of chronic post-traumatic stress syndrome—PTSS—drastically increase as extended missions multiply. Hundreds of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan have recently lapsed into violence as they attempt to readjust to the civilian world. Consider one of hundreds of cases: Matthew Sepi, a 20-year-old Iraq combat veteran, headed out to a 7-Eleven in the seedy Las Vegas neighborhood with an assault rifle under his jacket. Two armed gang-bangers wound up dead. Sepi now serves time.
The law reads like this:
"The President may suspend any provision of law relating to promotion, retirement, or separation applicable to any member of the armed forces…"
Stop loss became law after the Vietnam War when the Pentagon grappled to retain departing combat soldiers. Once experienced in combat, a soldier gains value. Vietnam taught the government a lesson. When engaged in an unpopular war that shows no benefit for anyone, soldiers lose all motivation to stay on the job. Stop loss straps them to combat. So much for the all volunteer military.
Like Vietnam, the endless trudge in Iraq has lost whatever patriotic appeal. ‘Fighting them over there to avoid fighting them here,’ no longer inspires. Motivated by high pay, mercenaries fill in the lack of enlisted soldiers who more and more see that Operation Iraqi Freedom benefits no one, though it has helped terrorist groups to recruit large numbers of young Iraqis who now despise the US for destroying most of the country’s infrastructure and countless innocent civilians. Soldiers’ refusal to reenlist voluntarily speaks volumes about what they think of the occupation.
Soldiers: Overworked, Underpaid
Under a Pentagon contract, retired Army officer Andrew Krepinevich wrote a recent report about human resources; he concluded that the Army cannot sustain the pace of troop deployments to Iraq long enough to break the back of the insurgency (MSNBC). He wrote that the Army is “in a race against time” to adjust to the demands of war “or risk breaking the force in the form of a catastrophic decline” in recruitment and re-enlistment.
Enlisted soldiers like Sgt. John Savage, an Army reservist, seldom realize that the term of their combat missions can continue indefinitely. When a brave soul signs up to serve our country, there’s a clause in the fine print that ties him or her into the service for as long as a war continues. It goes like this:
Although General Petaeraus claims that the surge (30,000 extra US soldiers, as of summer 2007) has yielded results, Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, assistant to the president for Iraq and Afghanistan, said last summer [2007] that he is concerned about the toll extended missions are taking on US soldiers…
Maybe the good General forgot another variable: we turn Iraq over to the Iraqis…as many of them request. Iraqis will just have to take over the burden of managing all 115 billion barrels of oil in their reserves despite Exxon’s eager offers to help.
Lute added,
Disposable Poor—Who Cares?
Lute’s comment translates: the military recruits mainly men just out of high school, healthy, and without a criminal record…uneducated, unskilled, minimum wage workers…the disposable poor. Like many officials, he uses the word ‘force’ or ‘troops’…abstract terms for real people with names and faces…soldiers like Sgt. John Savage, Tanya Towne, and Matthew Sepi.
As these workers go to war, their repeated and extended combat missions greatly increase their chances of becoming killed in action or wounded physically and psychologically. Does the Bush Admin really give a damn?
Occasionally public outrage prompts media coverage about the appalling conditions at veterans’ hospitals, notably Walter Reed, and the horrible care for wounded and traumatized soldiers. Only in response to these moments does the Bush Admin release a press announcement about how shocked the theocons are about this surprising situation. We see Pres. Bush out for photo ops, jogging with a couple of amputees as he did last summer when news broke out about despicable military healthcare. The images make us feel warm inside, as if Dubya were just one of the guys. The New York Times shows how W’s PR crew sooths public outrage.
Public healthcare is not one of W’s fortes, military healthcare no less. Last summer Dubya put together a panel of bureaucrats ‘to look into this issue.’ The panel, which included Republican Senator Bob Dole and Donna Shalala, delivered a report last March 2007 on ways and means to fix the dilapidated military healthcare system.
A year ago, with the panel’s report in hand full of recommendations, Bush had directed Gates the defense secretary, and Nicholson, secretary of veterans affairs, “to take them seriously, and to implement them, so that we can say with certainty that any soldier who has been hurt will get the best possible care…”
Asked if Shalala thought Dubya would follow through on his pledge, she said, “Senator Dole and I are going to keep an eye on him.” That was a year ago.
It appears, though, that Bush and his theocon buddies have implemented these recommendations much like they did the Iraq War Report commissioned in spring 2006…which recommended troop withdrawal— Iraq Study Group Report.
...Return to Author's Website: www.markbiskeborn.com
Like many other soldiers, reservist Tanya Towne learned about this clause in her contract when deployed to Iraq; her husband divorced her and took custody of her son. Now she pays $500 per month in child support on her puny reservist salary.
Since the invasion, spring 2002, some 160,000 soldiers occupy Iraq. Bush ordered a stop loss on more than 60,000 soldiers to remain in combat beyond the normal end of their enlistment. Some 180,000 private contractors, mostly Blackwater mercenaries, also supplement the US military. As incentive, the Bush Admin pays ‘mercs’ four or five times what enlisted soldiers earn.
"The use of stop loss is often an indication of a shortfall of available personnel," says Loren Thompson, a think-tank analyst in Arlington. Meaning: fewer and fewer citizens are willing to engage in the Iraqi morass.
Cases of chronic post-traumatic stress syndrome—PTSS—drastically increase as extended missions multiply. Hundreds of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan have recently lapsed into violence as they attempt to readjust to the civilian world. Consider one of hundreds of cases: Matthew Sepi, a 20-year-old Iraq combat veteran, headed out to a 7-Eleven in the seedy Las Vegas neighborhood with an assault rifle under his jacket. Two armed gang-bangers wound up dead. Sepi now serves time.
The law reads like this:
"The President may suspend any provision of law relating to promotion, retirement, or separation applicable to any member of the armed forces…"
Stop loss became law after the Vietnam War when the Pentagon grappled to retain departing combat soldiers. Once experienced in combat, a soldier gains value. Vietnam taught the government a lesson. When engaged in an unpopular war that shows no benefit for anyone, soldiers lose all motivation to stay on the job. Stop loss straps them to combat. So much for the all volunteer military.
Like Vietnam, the endless trudge in Iraq has lost whatever patriotic appeal. ‘Fighting them over there to avoid fighting them here,’ no longer inspires. Motivated by high pay, mercenaries fill in the lack of enlisted soldiers who more and more see that Operation Iraqi Freedom benefits no one, though it has helped terrorist groups to recruit large numbers of young Iraqis who now despise the US for destroying most of the country’s infrastructure and countless innocent civilians. Soldiers’ refusal to reenlist voluntarily speaks volumes about what they think of the occupation.
Soldiers: Overworked, Underpaid
Under a Pentagon contract, retired Army officer Andrew Krepinevich wrote a recent report about human resources; he concluded that the Army cannot sustain the pace of troop deployments to Iraq long enough to break the back of the insurgency (MSNBC). He wrote that the Army is “in a race against time” to adjust to the demands of war “or risk breaking the force in the form of a catastrophic decline” in recruitment and re-enlistment.
Enlisted soldiers like Sgt. John Savage, an Army reservist, seldom realize that the term of their combat missions can continue indefinitely. When a brave soul signs up to serve our country, there’s a clause in the fine print that ties him or her into the service for as long as a war continues. It goes like this:
In the event of war, my enlistment in the Armed Forces continues until six (6) months after the war ends, unless the enlistment is ended sooner by the President of the United States.
Although General Petaeraus claims that the surge (30,000 extra US soldiers, as of summer 2007) has yielded results, Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, assistant to the president for Iraq and Afghanistan, said last summer [2007] that he is concerned about the toll extended missions are taking on US soldiers…
“Come the spring [2008], some variables will have to change — either the degree to which the American ground forces, the Marines and the Army in particular, are deployed around the world to include Iraq, or the length of time they're deployed in one tour, or the length of time they enjoy at home. Those are, essentially, the three variables,” (NPR).
Maybe the good General forgot another variable: we turn Iraq over to the Iraqis…as many of them request. Iraqis will just have to take over the burden of managing all 115 billion barrels of oil in their reserves despite Exxon’s eager offers to help.
Lute added,
“we're interested in attracting to the all-volunteer force, that we're actually competing in the marketplace—in the labor marketplace—for a very narrow slice of high school graduates without records with the law who come to us with a clean bill of health and the potential to serve this country in some very demanding missions.”
Disposable Poor—Who Cares?
Lute’s comment translates: the military recruits mainly men just out of high school, healthy, and without a criminal record…uneducated, unskilled, minimum wage workers…the disposable poor. Like many officials, he uses the word ‘force’ or ‘troops’…abstract terms for real people with names and faces…soldiers like Sgt. John Savage, Tanya Towne, and Matthew Sepi.
As these workers go to war, their repeated and extended combat missions greatly increase their chances of becoming killed in action or wounded physically and psychologically. Does the Bush Admin really give a damn?
Occasionally public outrage prompts media coverage about the appalling conditions at veterans’ hospitals, notably Walter Reed, and the horrible care for wounded and traumatized soldiers. Only in response to these moments does the Bush Admin release a press announcement about how shocked the theocons are about this surprising situation. We see Pres. Bush out for photo ops, jogging with a couple of amputees as he did last summer when news broke out about despicable military healthcare. The images make us feel warm inside, as if Dubya were just one of the guys. The New York Times shows how W’s PR crew sooths public outrage.
Public healthcare is not one of W’s fortes, military healthcare no less. Last summer Dubya put together a panel of bureaucrats ‘to look into this issue.’ The panel, which included Republican Senator Bob Dole and Donna Shalala, delivered a report last March 2007 on ways and means to fix the dilapidated military healthcare system.
A year ago, with the panel’s report in hand full of recommendations, Bush had directed Gates the defense secretary, and Nicholson, secretary of veterans affairs, “to take them seriously, and to implement them, so that we can say with certainty that any soldier who has been hurt will get the best possible care…”
Asked if Shalala thought Dubya would follow through on his pledge, she said, “Senator Dole and I are going to keep an eye on him.” That was a year ago.
It appears, though, that Bush and his theocon buddies have implemented these recommendations much like they did the Iraq War Report commissioned in spring 2006…which recommended troop withdrawal— Iraq Study Group Report.
...Return to Author's Website: www.markbiskeborn.com
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Economy -- War in Iraq
Voters are concerned about the economy.
Oh…and the war in Iraq. Both are connected at the hip.
With G W Bush’s lisping and slurring, I imagine him sitting on his favorite barstool, nursing from a glass, and talking to the bartender how someday he’d outdo his father. The bartender only half listens to W’s drivel while turning an ear to the football score on the TV.
With similar interest, many Americans listened to his final State of the Union speech.
To change his view on Iraq, W would have to acknowledge it as a mistake. An error like this has so far cost the US well over 4,000 soldiers—W's Admin counts war casualties by distorted criteria—as well as several hundred thousand innocent civilian lives -- 10 Oct. 2007, New York Times.
Economic woes now arise on the horizon: inflation, high interest rates, increased unemployment…
When Dubya started talking about an economic stimulus package, I hoped he might shed light on how everything in economics is connected.
In other words, if something consequential happens in one part of the US economy, it affects other parts. Spending trillions of dollars to produce something constructive would most likely have a positive impact on the US economy.
The war in Iraq produces nothing useful for anyone. This impacts the US and the global economy in enormously negative ways.
As the President burns trillions of dollars to destroy a country-- MSNBC-- the cost of capital increases, so too interest rates. Pundits and economists seldom talk about this…yet.
Mainstream media hardly discusses the economic effects of destroying Iraq and many of its citizens. President Bush did not mention it in his speech. Maybe he just forgot.
Increased oil prices benefit the Arab Monarchies, while reducing the US GDP (gross domestic product), like throwing a monkey-wrench into the economy. Some estimates indicate that for every $5 increase in oil price, US GDP drops more than .3%. That's a lot, enough to increase unemployment.
Everyone talks about how the slide in the subprime mortgage market puts a hole in our pockets.
The subprime mortgage market represents a few billion bucks. Sure, that alone will knock the wind out of the already fragile middle class.
The war in Iraq increases the cost of capital:
…which ups interest rates
…which screwed up the already fragile and unbridled mortgage market
…which tossed middle class families out in streets.
Hip bone connected to the…
The war in Iraq punches the air out of the economy. It’s yanking away the roofs over the heads of middle class families…squandering more than a trillion dollars that could have been used constructively, such as in education or even in an improved Homeland Security.
When W promoted his economic stimulus package many people probably, like me, envisioned a little balloon floating up at a small festive party for the survival of the middle class
…and then the balloon’s air fizzled out in a squeaky whistle.
Here’s a new proposal for a stimulus package:
We earmark the sons of privilege, such as, say, G W Bush, who squander opportunities to become productive citizens despite their huge advantages of opulent wealth from birth. If they grow up to cause negative impacts to the country, then we levy tax on all their assets and divvy them out to children born into poverty.
This same new tax rule would apply to the daughters of privilege too, such as, say, Paris Hilton, born into the kind of wealth most people cannot even imagine. How can people, born into so much wealth and with so much time and resources, lead their lives into utter waste?
Oh…and the war in Iraq. Both are connected at the hip.
With G W Bush’s lisping and slurring, I imagine him sitting on his favorite barstool, nursing from a glass, and talking to the bartender how someday he’d outdo his father. The bartender only half listens to W’s drivel while turning an ear to the football score on the TV.
With similar interest, many Americans listened to his final State of the Union speech.
To change his view on Iraq, W would have to acknowledge it as a mistake. An error like this has so far cost the US well over 4,000 soldiers—W's Admin counts war casualties by distorted criteria—as well as several hundred thousand innocent civilian lives -- 10 Oct. 2007, New York Times.
Economic woes now arise on the horizon: inflation, high interest rates, increased unemployment…
When Dubya started talking about an economic stimulus package, I hoped he might shed light on how everything in economics is connected.
In other words, if something consequential happens in one part of the US economy, it affects other parts. Spending trillions of dollars to produce something constructive would most likely have a positive impact on the US economy.
The war in Iraq produces nothing useful for anyone. This impacts the US and the global economy in enormously negative ways.
As the President burns trillions of dollars to destroy a country-- MSNBC-- the cost of capital increases, so too interest rates. Pundits and economists seldom talk about this…yet.
Mainstream media hardly discusses the economic effects of destroying Iraq and many of its citizens. President Bush did not mention it in his speech. Maybe he just forgot.
Increased oil prices benefit the Arab Monarchies, while reducing the US GDP (gross domestic product), like throwing a monkey-wrench into the economy. Some estimates indicate that for every $5 increase in oil price, US GDP drops more than .3%. That's a lot, enough to increase unemployment.
Everyone talks about how the slide in the subprime mortgage market puts a hole in our pockets.
The subprime mortgage market represents a few billion bucks. Sure, that alone will knock the wind out of the already fragile middle class.
The war in Iraq increases the cost of capital:
…which ups interest rates
…which screwed up the already fragile and unbridled mortgage market
…which tossed middle class families out in streets.
Hip bone connected to the…
The war in Iraq punches the air out of the economy. It’s yanking away the roofs over the heads of middle class families…squandering more than a trillion dollars that could have been used constructively, such as in education or even in an improved Homeland Security.
When W promoted his economic stimulus package many people probably, like me, envisioned a little balloon floating up at a small festive party for the survival of the middle class
…and then the balloon’s air fizzled out in a squeaky whistle.
Here’s a new proposal for a stimulus package:
We earmark the sons of privilege, such as, say, G W Bush, who squander opportunities to become productive citizens despite their huge advantages of opulent wealth from birth. If they grow up to cause negative impacts to the country, then we levy tax on all their assets and divvy them out to children born into poverty.
This same new tax rule would apply to the daughters of privilege too, such as, say, Paris Hilton, born into the kind of wealth most people cannot even imagine. How can people, born into so much wealth and with so much time and resources, lead their lives into utter waste?
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Women Stuck in Fundamentalism's Holy Book Thumping
In horribly oppressive theocratic countries, these five remarkable women bust out to find a freedom that many of us in America fear and hide from under the veils of self-imposed constraints. Awake up call to the American fundamentalists who demand more religious based laws and education. Theocracies exist and they often grow into ugly regimes.
The autobiography, entitled Infidel by Ayaan Kirsi Ali, drags gruesome truths out from the shadows of Muslim society that otherwise remain in the darkness of closed circles and communications controlled by Islamic authorities. Ayaan exposes the hidden workings of a backward society gripped tightly in religious fervor.
Ayaan shows us how the social threads in many Muslim countries weave tightly together to form a tough fabric that binds, conceals, and controls every aspect of a person’s life. The social fabric consumes all individual freedoms that we in the West take for granted.
Faith in a religion can burn so feverishly that it consumes the human spirit in the flames of dogma, superstitions, and traditions. In many Islamic countries, the religion fuels itself into an increasingly intense heat as each of its members imposes the rules of conduct on others.
The self-policing in these Muslim societies operates in ways similar to the Stasi police in the old Soviet Union where every person is coerced to control the next by threat of dishonor, ostracizing…corporal and mental punishment, prison…torture. If any one member falls out of rank from the strict confines of conduct, that person, and any one related by family or even by clan, suffers draconian consequences.
Here we discover the religious version of Orwell’s 1984. The state, driven by a closed and dictatorial ideology of God, imposes absolute conformity over its people to the point where the human soul is consumed by the bitter, resentful relationships in which every man and woman is expected to abide by and enforce the strict rules of behavior by violent force.
The Islamic faith has allowed an extreme totalitarian regime to take root and grow into every part of a person’s existence in such countries as Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, …the places where Ayaan lived as a girl. This religious belief and law forms the authority from a sacred book, the Koran (and other supplements of Sharia and hadiths…) which everyone reads as the absolute word of God. The culture that Ayaan experiences day by day represents the ultimate of a fundamentalist regime where church and state form the same authoritative body.
If nothing else, Ayaan’s view of a religious regime, a theocracy, serves as a wake-up call the popular religious culture in the US. If taken too far, the mixing of religion with politics can lead to a cancerous growth, eating away at individual spirituality. Fundamentalism is the same no matter where a fervent believer thumps a holy text as the absolute word of God.
Ayaan shows how the right mix of luck and choice can transform even the most hopeless existence. To some extent, Ayaan succeeds in obtaining her goal: individual freedom and self-expression. She overcomes seemingly insurmountable obstacles by passing over the word “no” that many people say to her.
First, as comfortable American readers, we cringe in disgust at the brutal everyday lives of most Muslim women. Ayaan wrote Submission, the short film about Islamic misogyny that led to the murder of its director, the Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh, in 2004, and Ayaan’s memoir testifies how much bitter experience lay buried in the film's foundations. The film revolves around women and quotes from the Koran giving men free use of violence to manage their female possessions. Such as: “As to those women on whose part you fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, admonish them, scourge them…”
One story among many: as a girl in Somalia, Hirsi Ali was expected to do all the household chores while her brother, Mahad, the man of the house, skipped off free. If she rebelled, her mother thrashed her; tying her up and whipping her until she repented. Her teachers beat her, too, once so badly that her skull fractured and the resulting brain haemorrhage nearly killed her.
Later, in Saudi Arabia, social pressure confines her to stay forever inside, housebound, unable to step outside without a male chaperone for fear of being raped, and, if raped, disgraced and disowned. At five years old, she was circumcised - "excised" she calls it - and sewn up, so that her husband would later know she was a virgin.
After all, what honorable Muslim could even contemplate a woman with her genitals still attached as God designed them?
Ayaan’s memoir is not the only one that has slipped out of the tight control of Islamic authorities.
Carmen bin Laden’s memoir depicts the same society with its violently enforced laws and codes of conduct. Only Carmen tells her story from the perspective of a woman entrapped in “a smooth gold-fish bowl” with no exit. As the wife of a Saudi from one of wealthiest families in the country, she enjoys the view from an ivory tower, but alas, it serves only as a prison constraining thought, movement, and behavior.
The series of memoirs by Jean Sasson, in collaboration with an anonymous Muslim princess, shows us virtually the same social dynamics where women live as playful pleasure and breeding tools for men’s amusement. The tone echoes a deep bitter and resigned hopelessness.
In her memoir, In the Name of Honour, Mukhtar Mai, a Pakistani woman, was gang-raped by order of a local court in a tribal dispute. Instead of remaining silent by shame as a victim, she took control and dragged her attackers all the way to national court and setting a precedence and example –a cause célèbre beyond her village and country.
In Unbowed we learn how Wangari Maathai grew up in a traditional Kikuyu community in Kenya. Instead of rejecting her background, she used it as a springboard for a movement for democracy and the environment that won her the Nobel peace prize.
Each woman embodies a life that starts within the horrible boundaries of local traditions, social constraints, and superstitious traditions that otherwise hold most people back in the Dark Ages. Her story ends in the open fields of globalised debate and activism.
These women survive extreme oppression and undertake a transformation - from devout Muslim to secular humanist. Their stories throw you into a spiritual journey from one of the most underdeveloped and repressed backwater specks on the planet…to a climatic self-realization. These astonishing transformations throw down the gauntlet for all of us…in the “free world”…to outdo ourselves and achieve unimaginable goals...not taking our freedoms for granted…and not cringing in fear or creating our own obstacles to the wide open opportunities before us.
Ayaan runs us down a path of unpredictable emotions, starting with disgust and pity to admiration - and ending with a clear headed rational way to deal with life’s challenges. She is the Olympic gold-medalist in the game of survival, adaptation, and success. As such, she defines her success on her own terms.
By the standards of the American notion of success, she shatters the limits and makes the American Dream look like a cheap used car transaction of the soul.
The autobiography, entitled Infidel by Ayaan Kirsi Ali, drags gruesome truths out from the shadows of Muslim society that otherwise remain in the darkness of closed circles and communications controlled by Islamic authorities. Ayaan exposes the hidden workings of a backward society gripped tightly in religious fervor.
Ayaan shows us how the social threads in many Muslim countries weave tightly together to form a tough fabric that binds, conceals, and controls every aspect of a person’s life. The social fabric consumes all individual freedoms that we in the West take for granted.
Faith in a religion can burn so feverishly that it consumes the human spirit in the flames of dogma, superstitions, and traditions. In many Islamic countries, the religion fuels itself into an increasingly intense heat as each of its members imposes the rules of conduct on others.
The self-policing in these Muslim societies operates in ways similar to the Stasi police in the old Soviet Union where every person is coerced to control the next by threat of dishonor, ostracizing…corporal and mental punishment, prison…torture. If any one member falls out of rank from the strict confines of conduct, that person, and any one related by family or even by clan, suffers draconian consequences.
Here we discover the religious version of Orwell’s 1984. The state, driven by a closed and dictatorial ideology of God, imposes absolute conformity over its people to the point where the human soul is consumed by the bitter, resentful relationships in which every man and woman is expected to abide by and enforce the strict rules of behavior by violent force.
The Islamic faith has allowed an extreme totalitarian regime to take root and grow into every part of a person’s existence in such countries as Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, …the places where Ayaan lived as a girl. This religious belief and law forms the authority from a sacred book, the Koran (and other supplements of Sharia and hadiths…) which everyone reads as the absolute word of God. The culture that Ayaan experiences day by day represents the ultimate of a fundamentalist regime where church and state form the same authoritative body.
If nothing else, Ayaan’s view of a religious regime, a theocracy, serves as a wake-up call the popular religious culture in the US. If taken too far, the mixing of religion with politics can lead to a cancerous growth, eating away at individual spirituality. Fundamentalism is the same no matter where a fervent believer thumps a holy text as the absolute word of God.
Ayaan shows how the right mix of luck and choice can transform even the most hopeless existence. To some extent, Ayaan succeeds in obtaining her goal: individual freedom and self-expression. She overcomes seemingly insurmountable obstacles by passing over the word “no” that many people say to her.
First, as comfortable American readers, we cringe in disgust at the brutal everyday lives of most Muslim women. Ayaan wrote Submission, the short film about Islamic misogyny that led to the murder of its director, the Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh, in 2004, and Ayaan’s memoir testifies how much bitter experience lay buried in the film's foundations. The film revolves around women and quotes from the Koran giving men free use of violence to manage their female possessions. Such as: “As to those women on whose part you fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, admonish them, scourge them…”
One story among many: as a girl in Somalia, Hirsi Ali was expected to do all the household chores while her brother, Mahad, the man of the house, skipped off free. If she rebelled, her mother thrashed her; tying her up and whipping her until she repented. Her teachers beat her, too, once so badly that her skull fractured and the resulting brain haemorrhage nearly killed her.
Later, in Saudi Arabia, social pressure confines her to stay forever inside, housebound, unable to step outside without a male chaperone for fear of being raped, and, if raped, disgraced and disowned. At five years old, she was circumcised - "excised" she calls it - and sewn up, so that her husband would later know she was a virgin.
After all, what honorable Muslim could even contemplate a woman with her genitals still attached as God designed them?
Ayaan’s memoir is not the only one that has slipped out of the tight control of Islamic authorities.
Carmen bin Laden’s memoir depicts the same society with its violently enforced laws and codes of conduct. Only Carmen tells her story from the perspective of a woman entrapped in “a smooth gold-fish bowl” with no exit. As the wife of a Saudi from one of wealthiest families in the country, she enjoys the view from an ivory tower, but alas, it serves only as a prison constraining thought, movement, and behavior.
The series of memoirs by Jean Sasson, in collaboration with an anonymous Muslim princess, shows us virtually the same social dynamics where women live as playful pleasure and breeding tools for men’s amusement. The tone echoes a deep bitter and resigned hopelessness.
In her memoir, In the Name of Honour, Mukhtar Mai, a Pakistani woman, was gang-raped by order of a local court in a tribal dispute. Instead of remaining silent by shame as a victim, she took control and dragged her attackers all the way to national court and setting a precedence and example –a cause célèbre beyond her village and country.
In Unbowed we learn how Wangari Maathai grew up in a traditional Kikuyu community in Kenya. Instead of rejecting her background, she used it as a springboard for a movement for democracy and the environment that won her the Nobel peace prize.
Each woman embodies a life that starts within the horrible boundaries of local traditions, social constraints, and superstitious traditions that otherwise hold most people back in the Dark Ages. Her story ends in the open fields of globalised debate and activism.
These women survive extreme oppression and undertake a transformation - from devout Muslim to secular humanist. Their stories throw you into a spiritual journey from one of the most underdeveloped and repressed backwater specks on the planet…to a climatic self-realization. These astonishing transformations throw down the gauntlet for all of us…in the “free world”…to outdo ourselves and achieve unimaginable goals...not taking our freedoms for granted…and not cringing in fear or creating our own obstacles to the wide open opportunities before us.
Ayaan runs us down a path of unpredictable emotions, starting with disgust and pity to admiration - and ending with a clear headed rational way to deal with life’s challenges. She is the Olympic gold-medalist in the game of survival, adaptation, and success. As such, she defines her success on her own terms.
By the standards of the American notion of success, she shatters the limits and makes the American Dream look like a cheap used car transaction of the soul.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Religions Muddle Democracy
Institutionalized religion has almost always served as a political tool, but its jumbled dogmas befuddle our thinking. Democracy depends on rational thinking.
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—share the same God and many of the same prophets give or take a holy man or two. We have to admit the benefits of religions. They have contributed to building civilization throughout history, spreading some level of moral consciousness and culture.
So, what’s all the fuss? Why do these portals to eternal life cause so much mayhem and destruction in the world today?
They’ve certainly served political purposes, unifying people under a similar belief and custom. The mega-religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—that surround us today, still benefit folks in some ways. They console and reassure us in times of trouble. Faced with confusing situations, we flock to religion for answers although usually simple and superficial, if not altogether illusionary.
Take the Lakewood Church in Huston, Texas, where Joel Osteen lifts people’s spirits by preaching a cheery version of the Bible, not an easy feat considering the Old Testament’s blood’n guts.
Osteen preaches how positive thinking cures life’s cuts and scrapes. He teaches his enormous congregation that God delivers prosperity to those who pray for it. This version of Christianity opens our eyes wide to the big cookie jar in the sky. By showing the bright side of life, Osteen has built a mega-church, one of the largest, most profitable in the country.
The Lakewood flavor of God and prophets serves up a far more optimistic view than most traditional preachers of Yahweh, Allah, God—different words for the same Big Spirit.
Yet, during the few and brief moments of political guidance, Osteen advises his flocks to follow the authority of elected officials. In passing, he sometimes slips in his political wisdom as some form of ‘the President knows best.’
Submission to authority repeats as a common mantra in most religions. Take the word ‘Islam,’ it means submission. Though, on the contrary, strong democracy depends on critical thinking.
Ol' Time Religion-Fundamentalists
Like most of the neoconservative fundamentalists, Pat Robertson, ol’buddy of G. W. Bush, offers the doom and gloom variety of divine mysteries where God punishes us for our sins and where evil slithers among us and we must stamp it out; ‘if we don’t kill them over there, they’ll kill us here.’ G.W. Bush and his neocon cronies adhere to this ‘old time religion.’
With mainstream religion, the doom gets ever gloomier at the Christians United for Israel's annual Washington-Israel Summit. Founded by San Antonio-based megachurch pastor John Hagee, CUFI has added the grassroots muscle of the Christian right to the already potent Israel lobby. Hagee recently endorsed Senator McCain as presidential candidate.
Hagee’s minions had forged close ties with the fundamentalist Bush White House and they are passing that righteous troche to McCain as well as to Sen. Joseph Lieberman.
In its call for a unilateral military attack on Iran and the expansion of Israeli territory, CUFI has found unwavering encouragement from traditional pro-Israel groups like AIPAC and elements of the Israeli government. Religious fervor inspired the 9/11 attack and other pathological policies among the Islamists. So too, among God-fearing Christians.
CUFI has an agenda: its support for Israel derives from the belief of Hagee and his flock that Jesus will return to Jerusalem after Armageddon and cleanse the earth of evil. In this scenario of the Rapture, all the non-believers - Jews, Muslims, Hindus, mainline Christians, etc. - must convert or suffer the torture of eternal damnation.
CUFI members, like Hagee, eagerly reveal their excitement at the prospect of Armageddon occurring tomorrow.
McCain is enraptured about Hagee’s endorsement, saying, “I’d like to say on his [Hagee’s] behalf, he’s been a very strong supporter of the state of Israel and when we were doing the No Surrender tour, he came and spoke on behalf of not surrendering in Iraq.”
Among the rapture enthusiasts was Lieberman, who delivered a long sermon hailing Hagee as nothing less than a modern-day Moses. A possible running McCain running mate, Lieberman went on to describe Hagee's flock as "even greater than the multitude Moses commanded."
Neocons flock to many such flimflam preachers and other highway con artists as Norman Podhoretz as their guru. They do this mainly because they are desperate for votes and they must pander to the uneducated and gullible. For decades Podhoretz contributed to Commentary Magazine, serving right-wing neocons as their ideologue spin-Meister, encouraging the invasion of Iraq and Iran—in his recent book entitled World War IV.
One way to picture this: Podhoretz is to the neocons what Hassan al-Banna is to the Muslim Brotherhood, the latter being an ultra-conservative, right-wing religious-political group. Oh, yeah, that does sound just like the neocons, except it’s the Islamic version. Just like the Republican neocons, the Islamists want to return to the pure source of their divine roots…to get right with God and recoil from modern social progress—reproductive choice, tolerance, diversity, homosexuality, habeas corpus, human rights…ecology…
All too often, especially in current American voting, mangled religious thought has muddled our democratic processes. To understand the Republicans since, say, Reagan, we have to consider fundamentalists like his buddy Jerry Falwell who unified Christians into a political movement. Back then Falwell and other neocons minted a newly perverted version of Christ’s teachings. We have to peek in on fundamentalist thought leaders like Falwell and Podhoretz.
So what is God according to Podhoretz? For him, modern Bible interpreters, including Jewish scholars, have tainted the prophets with pusillanimous Christian teachings of charity and peace.
Podhoretz wants to strip away what he considers a 'modern revisionist view' of ‘our God’ and follow the old prophets in their ‘original thinking.’ He enlightens us with his ‘true and authentic’ understanding of each Old Testament prophet as motivated by a hatred of idolatry, a love of sacrifice, and a sense of Israel as a chosen people.
Like Hagee and Robertson, Podhoretz pulls out the old tribal Prophets of Yahweh’s days and embellishes their rough, hard-bitten conservative attributes. He denounces the liberal, charitable Prophet Isaiah as unworthy of the pages in the Book—as if Constantine’s editorial board should have left Isaiah out of the Bible. Jews are the people chosen to redeem the world.
The simple fact that the Jews survived proves that the prophets got this right. Only if they cling to the covenant between God and themselves can they fulfill their divinely appointed duty. They must support Zionism and eschew idolatry—which Podhoretz equates with the culture of narcissism, moral relativism, feminism, gay rights…and most anything else that progresses society beyond the ‘good old religion’ days of Yahweh long before Christ rebelled against the Roman and Jewish status quo of imperial politics.
A large part of the uneducated and gullible voters have been taught to follow this nonsense. The Neocons use this religious base as one of their most important constituency. They cannot obtain votes from educated, rational Americans.
Neocons and Islamists
No matter how you look at it, churches offer us an ideology, almost always political, a set of answers when we need security and fast solutions. Folks tend to flock to the quick fix philosophies of churches especially in times of trouble. Many of us go to ‘our church’ out of habit, unaware of the underlying political ideology.
The irony of this: the neocons and the Islamists, the Republicans and the Muslim Brotherhood…share many views of ultra-conservative fundamentalism. Their ideologies call for a return to the old, original prophets and to the pure sources of their religion of long ago…before the Enlightenment ushered in Science, tolerance, human rights, and freedom. It’s ironic that the Islamists and the Neocons share so much common ground in ideology.
The Neocons and the Islamists differ perhaps only in economics. Who should benefit from the oil? The corrupt Arab monarchs and the Big Oil corporations? Or the broader society? And this question, according to some interpretations of old sacred texts, is worth going to war.
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—share the same God and many of the same prophets give or take a holy man or two. We have to admit the benefits of religions. They have contributed to building civilization throughout history, spreading some level of moral consciousness and culture.
So, what’s all the fuss? Why do these portals to eternal life cause so much mayhem and destruction in the world today?
They’ve certainly served political purposes, unifying people under a similar belief and custom. The mega-religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—that surround us today, still benefit folks in some ways. They console and reassure us in times of trouble. Faced with confusing situations, we flock to religion for answers although usually simple and superficial, if not altogether illusionary.
Take the Lakewood Church in Huston, Texas, where Joel Osteen lifts people’s spirits by preaching a cheery version of the Bible, not an easy feat considering the Old Testament’s blood’n guts.
Osteen preaches how positive thinking cures life’s cuts and scrapes. He teaches his enormous congregation that God delivers prosperity to those who pray for it. This version of Christianity opens our eyes wide to the big cookie jar in the sky. By showing the bright side of life, Osteen has built a mega-church, one of the largest, most profitable in the country.
The Lakewood flavor of God and prophets serves up a far more optimistic view than most traditional preachers of Yahweh, Allah, God—different words for the same Big Spirit.
Yet, during the few and brief moments of political guidance, Osteen advises his flocks to follow the authority of elected officials. In passing, he sometimes slips in his political wisdom as some form of ‘the President knows best.’
Submission to authority repeats as a common mantra in most religions. Take the word ‘Islam,’ it means submission. Though, on the contrary, strong democracy depends on critical thinking.
Ol' Time Religion-Fundamentalists
Like most of the neoconservative fundamentalists, Pat Robertson, ol’buddy of G. W. Bush, offers the doom and gloom variety of divine mysteries where God punishes us for our sins and where evil slithers among us and we must stamp it out; ‘if we don’t kill them over there, they’ll kill us here.’ G.W. Bush and his neocon cronies adhere to this ‘old time religion.’
With mainstream religion, the doom gets ever gloomier at the Christians United for Israel's annual Washington-Israel Summit. Founded by San Antonio-based megachurch pastor John Hagee, CUFI has added the grassroots muscle of the Christian right to the already potent Israel lobby. Hagee recently endorsed Senator McCain as presidential candidate.
Hagee’s minions had forged close ties with the fundamentalist Bush White House and they are passing that righteous troche to McCain as well as to Sen. Joseph Lieberman.
In its call for a unilateral military attack on Iran and the expansion of Israeli territory, CUFI has found unwavering encouragement from traditional pro-Israel groups like AIPAC and elements of the Israeli government. Religious fervor inspired the 9/11 attack and other pathological policies among the Islamists. So too, among God-fearing Christians.
CUFI has an agenda: its support for Israel derives from the belief of Hagee and his flock that Jesus will return to Jerusalem after Armageddon and cleanse the earth of evil. In this scenario of the Rapture, all the non-believers - Jews, Muslims, Hindus, mainline Christians, etc. - must convert or suffer the torture of eternal damnation.
CUFI members, like Hagee, eagerly reveal their excitement at the prospect of Armageddon occurring tomorrow.
McCain is enraptured about Hagee’s endorsement, saying, “I’d like to say on his [Hagee’s] behalf, he’s been a very strong supporter of the state of Israel and when we were doing the No Surrender tour, he came and spoke on behalf of not surrendering in Iraq.”
Among the rapture enthusiasts was Lieberman, who delivered a long sermon hailing Hagee as nothing less than a modern-day Moses. A possible running McCain running mate, Lieberman went on to describe Hagee's flock as "even greater than the multitude Moses commanded."
Neocons flock to many such flimflam preachers and other highway con artists as Norman Podhoretz as their guru. They do this mainly because they are desperate for votes and they must pander to the uneducated and gullible. For decades Podhoretz contributed to Commentary Magazine, serving right-wing neocons as their ideologue spin-Meister, encouraging the invasion of Iraq and Iran—in his recent book entitled World War IV.
One way to picture this: Podhoretz is to the neocons what Hassan al-Banna is to the Muslim Brotherhood, the latter being an ultra-conservative, right-wing religious-political group. Oh, yeah, that does sound just like the neocons, except it’s the Islamic version. Just like the Republican neocons, the Islamists want to return to the pure source of their divine roots…to get right with God and recoil from modern social progress—reproductive choice, tolerance, diversity, homosexuality, habeas corpus, human rights…ecology…
All too often, especially in current American voting, mangled religious thought has muddled our democratic processes. To understand the Republicans since, say, Reagan, we have to consider fundamentalists like his buddy Jerry Falwell who unified Christians into a political movement. Back then Falwell and other neocons minted a newly perverted version of Christ’s teachings. We have to peek in on fundamentalist thought leaders like Falwell and Podhoretz.
So what is God according to Podhoretz? For him, modern Bible interpreters, including Jewish scholars, have tainted the prophets with pusillanimous Christian teachings of charity and peace.
Podhoretz wants to strip away what he considers a 'modern revisionist view' of ‘our God’ and follow the old prophets in their ‘original thinking.’ He enlightens us with his ‘true and authentic’ understanding of each Old Testament prophet as motivated by a hatred of idolatry, a love of sacrifice, and a sense of Israel as a chosen people.
Like Hagee and Robertson, Podhoretz pulls out the old tribal Prophets of Yahweh’s days and embellishes their rough, hard-bitten conservative attributes. He denounces the liberal, charitable Prophet Isaiah as unworthy of the pages in the Book—as if Constantine’s editorial board should have left Isaiah out of the Bible. Jews are the people chosen to redeem the world.
The simple fact that the Jews survived proves that the prophets got this right. Only if they cling to the covenant between God and themselves can they fulfill their divinely appointed duty. They must support Zionism and eschew idolatry—which Podhoretz equates with the culture of narcissism, moral relativism, feminism, gay rights…and most anything else that progresses society beyond the ‘good old religion’ days of Yahweh long before Christ rebelled against the Roman and Jewish status quo of imperial politics.
A large part of the uneducated and gullible voters have been taught to follow this nonsense. The Neocons use this religious base as one of their most important constituency. They cannot obtain votes from educated, rational Americans.
Neocons and Islamists
No matter how you look at it, churches offer us an ideology, almost always political, a set of answers when we need security and fast solutions. Folks tend to flock to the quick fix philosophies of churches especially in times of trouble. Many of us go to ‘our church’ out of habit, unaware of the underlying political ideology.
The irony of this: the neocons and the Islamists, the Republicans and the Muslim Brotherhood…share many views of ultra-conservative fundamentalism. Their ideologies call for a return to the old, original prophets and to the pure sources of their religion of long ago…before the Enlightenment ushered in Science, tolerance, human rights, and freedom. It’s ironic that the Islamists and the Neocons share so much common ground in ideology.
The Neocons and the Islamists differ perhaps only in economics. Who should benefit from the oil? The corrupt Arab monarchs and the Big Oil corporations? Or the broader society? And this question, according to some interpretations of old sacred texts, is worth going to war.
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