Life in Central America

American chemical companies poisoned banana workers

The anti-nematode Nemagon was developed in the US and touted as one of the wonder drugs of the Green Revolution. Unfortunately, it caused severe medical problems for agricultural workers and the EPA banned it in the Continental US in 1979, and then Hawaii in 1985. But it was still marketed outside the US, and used in Central America, the Caribbean, and in the Philippines until the beginning of the 1990s.

In Nicaragua, lawyers have filed large class actions against Shell Oil, Dow Chemical, and Dole on behalf of 20,000 Nicaraguan banana workers. The chemical companies retaliated by suing the workers in a federal court in California, claiming the workers violated the US Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Law. Last Wednesday, Judge Nora Manella threw out the charges.

Noriega was our friend

Noriega was not only our friend; he was one of our special friends, a key ally in our War on Communism (remember that?) and our War on Drugs. He is now as a special guest in the Miami Federal Correctional Institution, the only officially recognized prisoner of war currently held by the USA under the rules of the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of war, and the only military prisoner ever to serve simultaneously a prison sentence for violations of American civilian law—for crimes committed when he was the ruler of another country. How did this happen?

To find the answer to this question you will have to read Shooting the Moon, by David Harris, as I am doing now. This is not an easy book, so let me give you a quick summary: Noriega was a victim of the Iran/Contra scandal. I know this doesn’t make much sense, but nothing about this story makes much sense—but sometimes reality is complicated, especially at higher levels of our own government, where there are all kinds of nutty characters running around. This book is proof that freedom of the press still exists in the US, because it doesn’t say anything flattering about our rulers. It makes them look like a bunch of lunatics.

Of course you already knew this, but you don’t know half of it. Take the relationship between General Noriega and William J. Casey, the director of the CIA and Reagan’s campaign manager in the 1980 election. These were two thugs if ever there were any. Casey was an anti-communist nut and he went berserk when the Sandinistas took over Nicaragua. Suddenly, Nicaragua was the most important place on the planet. Panama also became important, and of course, the brutal dictator of Panama, General Noriega, who had been a nobody before.

But he was not a nobody to the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration). He was a valuable player in the War on Drugs, including several undercover operations. The Washington headquarters of the DEA described the General as “the best goddam friend the DEA has in all of Latin America.” Of course they overlooked the General’s own drug dealing, because everybody was doing this, including the CIA itself.

The crazy conflict here between drug enforcement and drug profits in high places has not gone away. Drug enforcement keeps up the prices and supports one of the largest industries on the globe—which includes a large penal system. But let me get back to General Noriega’s story, and the CIA’s support of the Contras in Nicaragua (or Nickawoggwha, as Bill Casey pronounced it.)

The contras were Bill Casey’s pet project, and the General helped him all the way. He allowed Panama to be used as a staging base for their supply lines, and through his close connections with the Israelis, acted as a middleman in providing weapons. He even made a personal contribution of several hundred thousand dollars to the Contra cause. This seemed like a smart strategy at the time, but the General had no understanding of American politics.

In 1984, the Democrat majority in Congress passed legislation prohibiting American support of any sort for the Contras. That left Bill Casey with two options: he could either cease his campaign or he could wage his own private war with the Sandanistas outside the framework of constitutional government. Casey decided the CIA was more powerful than the rest of the government, which made sense to the General, because this was the way it worked in Panama. Both Mr. Casey and the General were wrong.

The history of their demise is complicated, and it involved Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, USMC. He became a fixer for the whole operation. One of his operations was this:

A Honduran colonel had helped secure base camps and staging areas in Honduran territory next to Nicaragua. But the FBI apprehended the colonel when he attempted to smuggle cocaine into Florida, the proceeds of which were intended to finance the assassination of the elected president of Honduras, and the installation of a general in his place who was sympathetic to Casey’s underground enterprise. Ollie went to bat for this creep. In total, some eight high-ranking officers from the Army, the Defense Department, and the State Department (including Elliott Abrams) urged the court to be lenient. He would normally have gotten 25-30 years. He got two concurrent five years terms instead, in a minimum-security prison, and he would be allowed to stay in the US when he was finished. He did not sing on his friends.

Only a few months later, the whole Iran-Contra scandal broke. All of the Generals supporters were out of power, and he was fair bait for some gung-ho drug prosecutors who felt they were on a “Mission for God” and Noriega was the devil. In 1986, twenty thousand American solders invaded Panama and seized Noriega.

Many years later this process would be repeated, only the devil in this case would be Hussein.

The future of the underclasses in America

When I started to write this posting I was thinking of the underclasses in the US, but as soon as I touched the keyboard I realized this was a much larger problem. There are ghettos all over the world, and they are growing all the time.

Costa Rica didn’t have any until recently. It has plenty of poor people, but most of them lived in rural areas. The Central Valley, where everybody wants to live, is turning into a minature version of LA. But even worse, are the shantytowns which have sprung recently on the outskirts. I was shocked when I first saw them.

The cardboard shacks with no water or sanitation were bad enough, but the realization that Costa Rica let these developments spring up was even more shocking. They could of easily made it impossible for them to happen. Most of the inhabitants are Nicaraguan imigrants, many of them illegal, and the crime rate is shocking. But the Ticos don’t do the obvious thing and get rid of these developments, which take jobs away from the poor Ticos and increase the demands for free medical services.

Why is this? The answer is simple, as it always is: greed. Being slumlords is profitable, and cheap labor is profitable. And Ticos, like everybody else, don’t care about anything but their immediate gain. This is the sad fact of our times. And this situation is going to get worse. We are on a downhill slide to nowhere.

The economists keep saying development will solve all our problems, but this hasn’t worked, and it will keep on not working. I am now reading The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin. His kind of thinking provokes the wrath of conventional economists, but it makes sense to ordinary people, especially those on the economic fringes—and these people do exist.

He has a great chapter on Technology and the African-American Experience. This also applies to other recent minorities, especially the Hispanics. It is about how blacks went from being slaves to being nothing at all. Between 1940 and 1970 more than five million blacks moved from the South to the North, one of the largest and most rapid mass internal movement in history.

For a while the North was able to absorb many of them, but this did not last long. Their unskilled jobs were eliminated by automation and suburbanization. They were trapped in ghettos as bad as those anywhere, and there was no way out.

I have some experience working with these people. When I was unemployed in LA, I attended training programs with some young, inner-city blacks. And later I tried to teach Vietnam immigrants English. And the sad truth is this: for the most part they are untrainable. You can’t teach them anything. I know I sound like a bigot here, but I am only saying that cultural changes are difficult to reverse. I have utmost respect for those who try, and I wish them well, because they are going to need it.

But the new information economy has made it worse. This economy needs trained workers, highly trained workers with a high level of intelligence. The average high school graduate, with his rudimentary education and disinterest in the work ethic, hasn’t got a chance. Parents who want their children to suceed make sure they attend upscale school districts, or private schools. This is especially true in developing countries, which have less and less money available for public education.

The upper classes have trouble finding jobs, but the under classes are much worse off. Previously, they were exploited for their labor. Now they are not needed at all.

The effects of the industrial revolution in England

The conditions of the English working classes after the Industrial Revolution were appalling, and their situation did not improve for a long time. Indeed, when I toured Europe in the sixties, as a young man just out of college, I was shocked by the English people I saw on the ferry across the English Channel. They were the unhealthiest people I had ever seen.

But the conditions at the beginning of the 19th Century were almost beyond belief. Before the revolution, the English countryside was populated by self-reliant farmers who also had cottage industries, quite often weaving businesses. There were a still large oak forests were they could hunt, fish and graze their livestock. Wildlife was abundant.

But the enclosure movement changed that forever. From 1770 to 1830, 3,280 bills were passed by Parliament by which 6 million acres of open field, meadows, wetlands, and forests were put into private hands and improved, which made their owners wealthy. But evicted farmers could no longer make a living.

They moved to the industrial cities and lived in slums where “the loss of life from filth and bad ventilation are greater than the loss of life from death or wounds in which the country has been engaged in modern times.” People (including small children) worked 14 to 16 hours a day, in horrible, dangerous conditions for wages that were not enough to buy food. Life expectancy for all of England was 40, for the laborers it was no more than 18. Fifty-seven percent died before the age of five.

The defining achievement of the Industrial Revolution was the creation of a society in which people were reduced to a choice between wage labor and starvation.

Taken from Rebels Against the Future, a history of the Luddites, by Kirkpatrick Sale.

Affluence has destroyed the performing arts

It is much more costly today to go to the theatre than buy a bible, although in Shakespeare’s time the opposite was true. Publishing has benefited from technological progress; the theatre has not. When Shakespeare’s works were first performed, there were on average 50 major plays produced each season and 25 “afterpieces” between the seasons. The costumes, the number of actors, and the set designs were far more dazzling than those of today.

How is this possible? Don’t technological progress and productivity allow everything to be cheaper than in Shakespeare’s day? Isn’t it easier now to light stages, sew costumes, and transport actors? Certainly, but these advances lead to the same result: things cost less and less, but humans became expensive.

In 1771, the Covent Garden Theatre had to earn £157 per production. In 1963, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre had to advance £2,139 per production, representing an increase nearly twice the average inflation rate. In 1960, 80 percent of the operating costs of the theatre came from receipts and 20 percent from subsidies. Today, the proportions are reversed. Still this has not hindered things from running their natural course.

Why is a world in which machines are subjugated to humans so unfriendly to activities in which humans are the live resource? The answer is simple: Technology appears to eliminate humans, and indeed it does limit their usefulness. But this economic principle causes an irresistible increase in the price of humans in comparison with objects. We are given to think that the economy will allow the completion of a truly human scheme in which activities such as flute playing and storytelling will regain their rightful places. This has not happened, and this is where the disappointment comes in.

The foregoing was taken from the chapter Sad Tales of the Death of Kings, from Our Modern Times, by Daniel Cohen.

I want to add a few comments of my own. Technology, in the form of the movies, TV, videos and audio recordings has made live artists obsolete. I used to be addicted to classical music, and I had the latest music system and stacks of records. Even when I lived in Manhattan, I would rather listen to my recordings than get dressed up and go to Lincoln Center. By contrast, I much preferred the live theatre to the movies. But the cost of theatre tickets were much less then. Everything was much cheaper; you could have a wonderful time for nothing. I could not afford to live in Manhattan now.

The situation in poor countries is much worse. People are cheap, but things (like food) are expensive. It was not always this way. India before colonization, for example, had an abundance of arts of all kinds; it was one of the world’s great cultural centers. There are no world cultures anymore. Everybody looks at the same TV screen.

Torturing Children in Iraq

fromthewilderness article

A German TV magazine called 'Report Mainz' recently aired accusations from the International Red Cross, to the effect that over 100 children are imprisoned in U.S.- controlled detention centers, including Abu Ghraib. "Between January and May of this year, we've registered 107 children, during 19 visits in 6 different detention locations," said Red Cross representative Florian Westphal in the report.

Seymour Hersh, the New Yorker reporter who first broke the story of torture at Abu Ghraib, recently spoke at an ACLU convention. He has seen the pictures and the videotapes the American media has not yet shown. "The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling, and the worst part is the soundtrack, of the boys shrieking," said Hersh.

Why do we have a ruling class?

This is a stupid question.

But let’s back off a notch and ask a similar question, which would have been a good question a few centuries ago. “Why do we have rulers?” And if you had asked this question back then there would have been no shortage of questions—and definitive answers, at that. But they would have all boiled down to the same thing “That’s just the way it is.”

But modern man (a supposedly more advanced type) will probably say “What ruling class?” What are you talking about?”

But I assume you, dear reader, do know what I am talking about. It’s obvious to you that we have a ruling class. This is a ‘dialectical concept with a moving penumbra’ as Georgescu-Roegen would say—but it is the most powerful and useful concept we have in our intellectual arsenal. We can’t afford to lose it.

On the other hand, the most powerful weapon the ruling class has is its ability to be invisible—in the eyes of the majority of the people. And since we live in superficial democracies, a majority is all it takes.

Now let me answer my original question. We are ruled because we live in large-scale societies—or in other words, large-scale power structures. Rulers are unavoidable in this kind of situation—and in modern times this takes the form of an invisible ruling class—and also, at the other end, people who can see them, underwear and all.

The King of Torts

Recently, I listened to The King of Torts by John Grisham. Most of his novels are about the law, and this is one of the best; his characterizations are amazing. Look it up on audible.com and listen to the first chapter, and you will see (or hear) what I am talking about.

And while I’m at it, let me make a pitch for Audible Books. I gobble up a lot of books, and for me listening and reading is more pleasant then reading alone. And if I can afford them anybody can afford them. A hundred bucks a year is not much.

This book about a young, struggling public defender in DC who has a lucky break and strikes it rich in the mass torts business. Some guy, who he finds out later is a crook, hooks him up with a pharmacutical company who desperately wants to hush up some of their operations. He ends up making 110 million. And then it really gets crazy.

Grisham is hard on the mass torts business: huge class-actions suits, where the lawers make obscene profits, and the customers get screwed. In some of his other books, he shows how honest lawyers can earn their contingency fees, so I think he has a balanced approach, overall.

It’s easy to get people worked up about this kind of thievery, but this is nothing compared to what goes on the corporate world every day. Corporate lawyers are busy concocting legal (or semi-legal) ways to cheat the public—and the public, in general, doesn’t seem to care.

But if you are one of those that do care, I propose a simple solution: outlawing outrageous incomes. The IRS is very good at sniffing out this kind of crime. I know, I know, this should be taken care of by the income tax—but as you know, the rich have shot it full of so many loopholes it is useless. I doubt if this can be changed, but we ought to at least give it a try.

Anybody that makes over a million bucks a year is a crook. Nobody’s expertise is worth this much. But I am willing to be flexible; if this limit will make the sky fall in, I am willing to settle for 10 million.

Zionists actively collaborated with Nazis

Why does the US support Isreal? Stan Goff has a answer (answers, actually) in this article in FromtheWilderness.com I have been reading his postings for quite a while, and I have been impressed. In this posting he goes into the Fascism of Zionism, but only as a side issue.
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Not only did the Zionist Federation of Germany send a resolution of support to the Nazi Party in 1933, the World Zionist Organization Congress in also defeated a resolution calling for action against Hitler by a vote of 240 to 43. (Sheonman, Ralph, The Hidden History of Zionism)

One of the most despicable ideological practices of Zionism has been its pimping of the Holocaust to justify Israel's fascist-like treatment of Palestinians. In fact, prominent Zionists consorted with Mussolini, and saw the Holocaust as a great boost for Zionism.

Jabotinsky was an admirer of Mussolini and stated his racism openly and proudly:
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It is impossible for a man to become assimilated with people whose blood is different than [sic] his own. In order to become assimilated, he must change his body, he must become one of them, in blood. There can be no assimilation. We shall never allow such things as mixed marriage because the preservation of national integrity is impossible except by means of racial purity and for that purpose we shall have this territory where our people will constitute the racially pure inhabitants.
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Zionists themselves actively lobbied western nations to refuse those trying to escape from Hitler's crematoria. In 1938, Ben Gurion had already stated, "If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the second alternative."

Masters and slaves

I have been reading about slaves and slave-owners in 16th Century Latin America. This particular subject has never appealed to me, or hardly anyone else. It’s a painful subject, and we don’t want to feel that kind of pain. But it did happen—and it is still happening, it seems to me.

Modern wage-slaves, it is true, are far different from the 16th Century variety. They have more luxuries than the greedy old slave-drivers ever dreamed of. But they share the common attribute of slaves everywhere: they are obedient and they don’t question the rights of their masters. And they are property: they can be bought and sold in any of the labor markets of the world.

But they don’t know they are slaves, and they don’t think they have any masters. They think they are their own masters. In this sense, the old-times slaves had an advantage, they knew what was going on. They could feel their pain. The modern slaves cannot.

I suspect this situation is the cause of the modern character, with it’s twin attributes of fear and rage. We are afraid because we can be killed easily. But this is a strange kind of death: we can be somebodies one day, and nobodies the next. We can still have our physical bodies, but not exist.

Galeano has a story about wild horses of Areco, which shows how have much we have to fear, at the gut level:

The wild horses wander the fields of Areco in troops that are like shoals, flying fish slithering between air and grass, and they spread their contagion of freedom among the domesticated horses. Peons bring these wild horses to the corals mixed in with the domesticated ones, and then they halter them and take them out, one by one, into the open country. Then they turn them over, and with a single slash open their bellies. The mavericks still gallop, treading on their entrails, until they roll on the grass; and the next day dawns on bones whitened by the dogs.

We have a kind of non-specific rage that can be directed almost anywhere. This has been noted over and over again, and it has not gone away. We feel threatened by unknown forces, which are real enough, but not acknowledged. We cannot grasp one simple fact: we are all slaves and we all have slave drivers.