Wake Up the Earth!

Peter Linebaugh

On 17 April it was more than 70 degrees Fahrenheit in Ann Arbor. The daffodills were in full bloom. As usual on Wednesdays at the court house we were protesting the police shooting of Aura Roser last November and the prosecutor who refused to indict the policeman for that crime. Suddenly, such a racket of bird song poured out from the tree above us as a robin red breast sang his heart out and circled hysterically around a female! Spring had arrived at last. It has come so suddenly after an aching long winter.

Looking at the birds and the flowers it might seem that the earth could wake itself up without our help. ‘Fraid not.

The first Earth Day was 20 April 1970, the brainchild of Gaylord Nelson, Senator from Wisconsin. It was followed by a series of important environmental laws. It was preceded by the re-publication of perhaps the most important environmental book of the 19^th century, apart from Darwin’s Origin of  Species and Marx’s Das Kapital. I refer to Man and Nature; Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action written by George Perkins Marsh and published in July 1864. It helped to quicken the Earth Day crusade launched forty-five years ago.

He wrote of the disaster to come. “Another era of equal human crime and human improvidence … would reduce [the earth] to such a condition of impoverished productiveness, of shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten deprivation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the species.” He showed that forest clearance depletes the soil, impairs drainage, deranges nature, and leads to over-grazing. Despite the contemporary appearance of his prophecy, this was fully of its time, a 19^th century book. Here’s an example of the writing which dates it, beautiful as the sentence is,

“For fuel to warm our bodies and seethe our pottage we are even now, breaking up the floor and wainscoting and doors and window frames of our dwelling.”

We no longer build our own houses, we heat by oil or gas not wood, and we certainly don’t panel our walls with the superior oak known as “wainscot.” As to ‘seething pottage’ near as I can make out this means to simmer lentil soup.

No, what makes this a deep 19^th century book, and one from which we must learn, is revealed in its date of publication 1864, a year which fell between the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and the surrender at Appomattox in April 1865 concluding the bloody war of emancipation. War provides deep thinkers, the philosophers and poets of any epoch, with the necessity of taking the long view.

Consider this passage. It has both the long view and the requisite seriousness for waking up the earth. It takes us to Roman history and the explanation for the aridity of Mediterranean countries.

“… the primitive source, the causa causarum, of the acts and neglects which have blasted with sterility and physical decrepitude the noblest half of the empire of the Caesars, is, first, the brutal and exhausting despotism which Rome herself exercised over her conquered kingdoms, and even over her Italian territory; then, the host of temporal and spiritual tyrannies which she left as her dying curse to all her wide dominion, and which, in some form of violence or of fraud, still brood over almost every soil subdued by the Roman legions.”

As it was with Rome so it is with us: exhausting despotism, brooding violence, temporal and spiritual tyranny, and lest you think that he omits the exploitation of man by man, he quotes Jean de la Bruyère, the 17^th century French courtier and moralist. Listen as the One Per Cent gazes upon the Ninety-Nine Per Cent. “One sees certain dark, livid, naked, sunburnt, wild animals, male and female, scattered over the country and attached to the soil, which they root and turn over with indomitable perseverance. They have, as it were, an articulate voice, and when they rise to their feet, they show a human face. They are, in fact, men; they creep at night into dens, where they live on black bread, water, and roots. They spare other men the labor of ploughing, sowing, and harvesting, and therefore deserve some small share of the bread they have grown.”

When “dark, livid, naked, sunburnt, wild animals, male and female” don’t get a share of the bread, they rise in revolt, and lo, voilà! – French Revolution. It was followed by the next great revolution in human history, the freedom of slaves, at first in Haiti (1792-1803) and then in the U.S.A. (1860-1865).

It is an old story but not an eternal one.

Against the human crime and the human improvidence that George Perkins Marsh shows denudes the earth, it is clear that to wake up the earth is to reclaim the commons. I speak now in a parking lot, next to the downtown library. The library lot was to be our commons. The best we could think of was a permanent checker board for chess matches. Perhaps instructional oratory on important but infrequent days like May Day or Memorial Day, Juneteenth or the Fourth. Maybe an ice skating rink. Some flower beds. Perhaps a vegetable garden. That kind of thing. We had just started thinking about it, when suddenly, Bang! Bang! Bang! Aura Rosser, the mother and artist, was shot to death by David Reid, in Ann Arbor cop last November.   Now it’s all I can think about. What is the relationship between the two, thecommons and the police murders, I wonder?

The police must step down. They are there for the No Trespassing. They preserve private property unless it is to be sold and then the police preserve the traffic of the property as it passes from one private owner to another. To enclose the commons you must have police. That’s the way it goes. And that’s why we have to remind everyone with the slogan,

Whose streets?

Our streets!

We must abolish police and we must abolish inequality and we must abolish the system which uses the earth to be the means by which one class exploits another. The hog abbatoirs, the genetic corn, the waste dumps, the massive chicken factories. Seeding, ploughing, weeding, harvesting, gleaning –the Neolithic cycle – is over and agri-business triumphs. The termination of the life cycle has a new frightening chemistry. It is no longer ashes to ashes or dust to dust; species now disappear from eating plastic. When the soldiers, settlers, and land speculators seized America by waging war upon the indigenous people, the First Nations, the Indians left the slain white man on the field of battle with earth in his mouth. That is what land hunger led to.

How do you wake up that earth? It is not just a biological phenomenon, the result of the daffs blooming or the robins nesting. ‘Waking up’ requires getting out of bed, wiping the sleepers out of your eyes, and then doing what my father used to call “sitting up exercises.”

Vision and action.

William O. Douglas of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972 suggested that conservationists who “have an intimate relationship with the inanimate object about to be injured are its legitimate spokesmen.” In light of that proposition we can argue as follows. The first step is to consider the milling of the cane, the draining of the swamps, the felling of the trees, the picking of the cotton, the digging of the harbors, the mining of coal. We ask who did this labor. Our answer leads us to the coffle, the whip, and the chain-gang. No one had a more intimate relationship with these inanimate objects – coal, cane, cotton, swamps, trees, water – than the massive numbers of African American slaves who were soon to be followed by huge waves of immigrants from Europe and Asia, the industrial working class.

Henry David Thoreau wrote about the earth a little before George Perkins Marsh. In Walden; Or, Life in the Woods (1845) he observed, not the slave, but the white worker saying “The laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be any thing but a machine.” “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” This is the case now. He addressed him directly, “you are the slave-driver of yourself.”

The earth is no longer home. Consider, on the one hand, the homeless, hounded from place to place, stigmatized by the hypocritical contempt of city councilors, and then on the other hand the massive allocation of resources and propaganda to go up in the sky, to the moon, to Mars. This deep homelessness, this profound separated from earth, is the theme of poets: Seamus Heaney (Ireland), Denis Brutus (South Africa), Marge Piercy (Detroit), John Clare (England), Mary Douglas (Ohio).

It happens all over the world. Ulster in Ireland: thatcher, cart, plough, hare, otter, spade and bucket, going or gone. Herculaneum in Greece there is a festival this week-end for the commons. In Lincoln Castle of the wetlands of England where the Magna Carta is preserved, protected, and guarded the people were separated from the soggy earth by terror of hanging. In China and Japan war for territory, war for coal, war for cars, this is ruling class development. In Chiapas last year and the place where I picked coffee beans in the forest glen thanks to the generosity of commoners of the ejido but still I heard the chainsaw not far away. And Gaza, Gaza, Gaza, where Zionist aircraft first pulverize the people’s homes and then Zionist policy prohibits the cement needed for re-building. This in former olive groves. O lamentation upon lamentation!

Ida B. Wells studied lynching. It is such lawless terror that runs amok in America now. A youngster walking down the middle of the street: a guy late with his child-care payments: a twelve-year old playing with a toy gun: a big man, an entrepreneur, dealing loosies: a woman with wide eyes and a fish knife. Shot and killed. Shot in the back, the neck choked and throttled, shot in the face, shot in the heart in her own home. The poet, Fred Moten, and the historian, Robin D.G. Kelley, agree that these murders indicate a “state of war.” They are not talking about the Middle East but the mid-west, America.

It is class war. Environmental devastation is class war by other means, says Greg Palast. The economists of Chicago, the neo-liberals, speak of these crimes as “externalities.” It is we, not the earth, that needs to wake up. The One Per Cent, the owners or possessioners, must step aside, and those with the most intimate relationship with the inanimate things, to quote Justice Douglas, must step up to perform restorative justice.

The intimate relationship with the inanimate object (i.e., the earth) must now be renewed, not as exploitation of patrician to plebeian, slaver to slave, or bully to drudge, but as the only force capable of waking up the earth. We must entrust the earth to the dispossessed and despairing, the mighty Antaeus. Poseidon was god of the sea and protector of all waters. He had a son, Antaeus, who became stronger whenever he touched the earth, his mother Gaia. He defeated everyone who wrestled with him, except Hercules when lifting him into the sky.

Fugitive Facts Escape from APA Headquarters

Roy Eidelson

“Breaking News”

According to unconfirmed reports, the American Psychological Association is frantically searching for facts that have escaped from the Association’s headquarters in Washington, DC. All of the fugitive facts apparently share one characteristic in common: they support claims that the APA colluded with the CIA and the White House in the Bush Administration’s abusive detention and interrogation operations.

A distraught APA spokesperson advised that such facts are extremely dangerous on the loose. She warned that no one should approach them until they have been captured, tranquilized, and defanged by the APA’s public affairs office. “We need to turn them into mere allegations as quickly as possible,” she was overheard telling an unidentified colleague. “Obviously, we can’t refute facts!”

Despite repeated requests, members of the APA leadership have thus far declined to comment further. The total number of escaped facts is not yet known, but it appears that dozens of them had been tunneling their way out of APA headquarters for over a decade. Others reportedly still remain securely confined in APA and government custody.

Although preliminary reports have now identified many of the fugitive facts, the APA continues to warn that extreme caution should be exercised until the Association has provided specific safety guidelines. Without adequate precautions, close contact has been linked to a variety of psychological symptoms, including denial, defensiveness, and despair.

***

The “breaking news” report above is, of course, satirical. But the facts presented below are quite real. And despite the dismissive attitude that has characterized the APA’s actual public relations campaign, none of the facts that follow has been refuted (which shouldn’t really be surprising – after all, they’re facts).

Meanwhile, APA leaders now insist that they will have no further comment about collusion in the Bush Administration’s “enhanced interrogation program” until they have received and reviewed the report from attorney David Hoffman’s ongoing investigation. Then, at some still unspecified time, both that report and the APA Board’s response will be made public simultaneously.

But the APA’s silence-is-golden-we’re waiting-for-the-facts rationale is misguided and self-serving. In particular, it disguises a simple truth: while Mr. Hoffman’s report may well provide valuable new information, many critically important facts have already been established. Pretending otherwise is a disservice to APA members, to the profession as a whole, and to the public at large. Here are some of the facts we already know:

Fugitive Facts

* Office of Legal Counsel and related government memos from the Bush Administration required the presence of psychologists in order for various “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding, to be used. Nevertheless, APA Ethics Office Director Stephen Behnke publicly insisted that psychologists played a valuable role in keeping interrogations “safe, legal, ethical, and effective.” He also asserted that media reports of psychologist involvement in abuse were “long on hearsay and innuendo, short on facts,” and, according to a New York Times reporter, that psychologists “knew not to participate in activities that harmed detainees.”

* James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, the recognized architects of the CIA torture program, were invited participants at a 2003 APA-sponsored (and CIA-funded) invitation-only workshop on the “science of deception.” The workshop agenda included discussion of interrogation strategies, including the use of “pharmacological agents” and “sensory overloads.” When senior APA Science Directorate staff member Geoff Mumford sought feedback from participants after the workshop had concluded, the CIA’s Kirk Hubbard told him that Mitchell and Jessen were unavailable because they were “doing special things to special people in special places.”

* James Mitchell was an APA member during the period in which he designed the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation program” and participated directly in the torture of detainees at CIA black sites. Mitchell was also still an APA member when the first public report suggesting his possible involvement in detainee abuse appeared in the press. The APA Ethics Committee has the authority to investigate possible ethical violations on its own initiative at any time. In its immediate response last October to the publication of James Risen’s book Pay Any Price, the APA public affairs office, directed by Rhea Farberman, falsely claimed that Mitchell was never an APA member.

* APA Ethics Office Director Stephen Behnke hosted a 2004 private meeting at APA headquarters for top-level APA staff, including Deputy CEO Michael Honaker, and senior representatives of the intelligence community, including the CIA’s Kirk Hubbard (who later went to work for Mitchell and Jessen). In his invitation to the meeting, which focused on ethics in national security settings, Behnke assured the participants that their names would never be made public and that “in the meeting we will neither assess nor investigate the behavior of any specific individual or group.” This meeting led to the creation of the APA’s 2005 Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS).

* A clear majority of the nine voting members of the APA’s 2005 PENS Task Force were on the payroll of the Department of Defense or intelligence community at the time of their participation. Several of them served in chains of command where detainee abuses allegedly took place. After a single weekend meeting, the Task Force asserted that it was ethical for psychologists to participate in national security detention and interrogation operations – a stance consistent with pre-existing Bush Administration policy. At the time of the PENS meeting, there were already news reports of psychologists’ involvement in abusive interrogations at Guantanamo Bay.

* After the PENS Report had been issued, APA’s Geoff Mumford thanked Kirk Hubbard for his role “in getting this effort off the ground.” He also assured Hubbard that his views “were well represented by very carefully selected Task Force members.” Hubbard was employed by the CIA at the time that the PENS members were selected. And when he extended his thanks to Hubbard, Mumford knew that Hubbard was employed by the firm of CIA contract psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen.

* Current APA president Barry Anton, an APA Board member in 2005, was the individual who recommended that the APA Practice Directorate’s top official, Russ Newman, participate in the PENS meeting. Even though Newman’s wife – Debra Dunivin – was a BSCT psychologist stationed at Guantanamo, where abuses had allegedly taken place, he nevertheless assumed a key role in directing the meeting. Standard 3.06 (Conflict of Interest) of the APA Ethics Code states: “Psychologists refrain from taking on a professional role when personal, scientific, professional, legal, financial, or other interests or relationships could reasonably be expected to…impair their objectivity, competence, or effectiveness in performing their functions as psychologists.”

* According to the Olivia Moorehead-Slaughter, the Chair of the PENS Task Force, current APA president Barry Anton and past president Gerry Koocher specifically approved Susan Brandon as an undisclosed PENS observer, even though just a few weeks earlier she was a senior official in the Bush Administration. According to APA’s Geoff Mumford, Brandon also participated in the actual drafting of the PENS Report, in particular the section on research. That section included recommendations that psychologists should engage in interrogation research (e.g., “research on cultural differences in the psychological impact of particular information-gathering methods and what constitutes cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment”).

* The APA Board approved the PENS Report, authorizing psychologists’ involvement in national security detention and interrogation operations, in an “emergency” session, without first bringing the matter to the Council of Representatives – APA’s governing body – for discussion and a vote. The names of the Task Force members were never included in the Report itself. These members were also required to keep the meeting discussions confidential and not to discuss the Report publicly.

* In 2013, after almost seven years, the APA Ethics Office closed anethics complaint filed against Guantanamo psychologist and APA member John Leso, asserting that there was “no cause for action.”Ethics Office Director Stephen Behnke never referred the case to the full ten-person Ethics Committee for review and resolution. The evidence that Dr. Leso played a role in the abuse and torture of detainees had been well established in authoritative reports, and the operative threshold for referral to the full Ethics Committee required merely a preponderance of the evidence. In closing the complaint, the APA did not refute any of the evidence of Dr. Leso’s role in the interrogations.

Obama on the TPP: Beckoning Us to the Graveyard

John V. Walsh

“We have to make sure America writes the rules of the global economy and we should do it today while our economy is in a position of global strength. If we don’t write the rules for trade around the world, guess what, China will. And they’ll write those rules in a way that gives Chinese workers and Chinese businesses the upper hand.”

— Barack Obama on the Trans-Pacific Partnership in a Speech at Nike Factory in Oregon, May 8, 2015

Those very few words of Obama’s, his most widely circulated PR effort to garner support for the TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership) and thoroughly representative of the thinking of our imperial elite, are so revealing, so wrong and so dangerous on so many levels that one scarcely knows where to begin. In fact they carry the seeds of our destruction.   And they are focused on China.

First, the arrogance and hegemonic intent of the statement is astonishing even though it has become routine for the U.S. elite. What gives the United States, a country of 300 million on the opposite side of the vast Pacific, the right to determine the rules of trade for East Asia, which includes China, a country of 1.3 billion people? The U.S. can no longer assert that privilege based on its economic power since its gross GDP, measured in Purchasing Power Parity is now, according to the IMF, second to China’s.

Clear evidence of the relative power of the Chinese and American economies was the world’s reaction to China’s launch of the badly needed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) to provide development funds for Asia and beyond.   The level of funding necessary for such development has long been denied by the U.S.- dominated World Bank and IMF.   U.S. allies, even the UK and Israel, stumbled over one another to join the AIIB, despite the bullying of the U.S. to stop them, leaving the U.S. and its cat’s paw in East Asia, Japan, out in the cold. More amazingly, the U.S. thinks it can write the rules of trade for China and East Asia! Given the new economic realities, that day is past. Indeed, Obama, perhaps unwittingly in his desperation to sell the measure by frightening us into acceptance of it, acknowledges this fact. What else can he mean when he says, “we should do it (pass TPP) today while our economy is in a position of global strength.” What is he saying implicitly about the situation tomorrow?

Second, there is a win-lose mentality run rampant in Obama’s words – and this is the most frightening part of his statement. Simply put, we Americans write the rules for our benefit and to the detriment of others – or others write the rules to the same end for them. This is no longer a viable view of the world. For where does that view end? It ends in conflict and then domination and submission – the struggle, economic and otherwise, of each against all. In the 21^st Century and beyond, with a world rife with high tech weapons of unimaginable power, such conflict will produce untold suffering and death for billions if not the end of the human race as we know it. Simply banning the supply of such weapons will not be enough, because they can always be recreated. There is no permanent technical fix, only a temporary one – no matter what the nuke abolitionists might like to think.

This view is quite the opposite from the outlook of the Chinese, which is tirelessly about creating win-win situations. Not win-lose. Not, “You are either for us or against us.” But “Win-win.” Read China Daily, as you should for some sense of balance, or any of the outlets from China, and you will find the win-win philosophy ever present. The Chinese are clearly onto something here. In that direction lies the possibility (not the guarantee but the possibility) of peace, prosperity and development for the planet. In the direction pointed to by Obama and the US imperial elite lies what we have witnessed throughout the Middle East and North Africa and now, since the U.S.-instigated coup, in Ukraine. The people of East Asia, including Japan, should be wary of the U.S. siren call to make one or another of them the “co-winner” in the region. In fact Obama’s call to write the rules (of trade or anything else) should be a warning to the people of East Asia and elsewhere. The conclusion for them is that if the U.S. decides it must write the rules to contain them or put them down, then eventually so it will be. By that very statement the U.S. forfeits its claim to leadership in the world. By that very statement the U.S. is telling the world that every nation is dispensable except this one.

Third, rarely mentioned in the objections to TPP among U.S. progressives is its role as an instrument of imperial domination. True, as these folks say, the TPP is not meant to help U.S. workers, as Obama would have us believe. True, it is a corporate giveaway. True it is a secret and therefore very anti-democratic agreement. On this last score there should be no doubt. Members of Congress get to see at least some aspects of the TPP as it is being written. But they may not bring aides or experts with them as they view the deep dark secrets of the agreement. They may not take notes or make copies of the text. They may not reveal its contents to the public. And so we the people are totally excluded from any knowledge of what lies in the TPP. Nothing could be farther from the democracy or transparency that the imperial elite likes to claim as its hallmark.  In contrast one can be certain that the rich and powerful, whether Nike executives or the international banksters, know all they need to about the TPP and have extraordinary influence over it. But such considerations are all about us Americans and our local rulers. Such considerations leave out the questions of war and peace and the reality of U.S. Empire, a phrase that rarely passes the lips of our mainstream progressives.

Yes, let us work to stop the TPP. But let us be aware that this battle is not simply about a few more goodies for Americans. The TPP is in fact one more step on the road to Armageddon, which the U.S. seems to be paving with some measure of desperation and panic.

The Accidental Operative

Camelia Entekhabi-Fard & James Ridgeway

Here is the shocking story of how the niece of former CIA director Richard Helms became an intermediary for the Taliban in Afghanistan and relayed an offer by the Taliban to the US government for the surrender of Osama Bin Laden months before the 9/11 attacks. The offer was refused. This story, written by my friend and Cockburn’s old partner at the Village Voice, James Ridgeway, and Camelia Fard, was published in the Voice on June 12, 2001, and promptly vanished from the cultural memory after 9/11. In the wake of Seymour Hersh’s recent revelations, Ridgeway asked me to re-run the article on CounterPunch. I was very happy to oblige him. It’s an astounding read. –Jeffrey St. Clair

Washington, DC, June 6, 2001.

On this muggy afternoon, a group of neatly attired men and a handful of women gather in a conference room at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. The guest list includes officials from the furthest corners of the world—Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, and Turkey—and reps from the World Bank, the Uzbekistan chamber of commerce, the oil industry, and the Russian news agency Tass, along with various individuals identified only as “U.S. Government,” which in times past was code for spook.

At hand is a low-profile briefing on international narcotics by a top State Department official, who has recently returned from a United Nations trip to inspect the poppy fields of Afghanistan, source of 80 percent of the world’s opium and target of a recent eradication campaign by the fundamentalist Taliban. The lecture begins as every other in Washington: The speaker politely informs the crowd he has nothing to do with policymaking. And, by the way, it’s all off the record.

Lecture over, the chairman asks for questions. One man after another rises to describe his own observations while in the foreign service. The moderator pauses, looks to the back of the room, and says in a scarcely audible voice: “Laili Helms.” The room goes silent.

For the people gathered here, the name brings back memories of Richard Helms, director of the CIA during the tumultuous 1960s, the era of Cuba and Vietnam. After he was accused of destroying most of the agency’s secret documents detailing its own crimes, Helms left the CIA and became President Ford’s ambassador to Iran. There, he trained the repressive secret police, inadvertently sparking the revolution that soon toppled his friend the Shah.

Laili Helms, his niece by marriage, is an operative, too—but of a different kind. This pleasant young woman who makes her home in New Jersey is the Taliban rulers’ unofficial ambassador in the U.S., and their most active and best-known advocate elsewhere in the West. As such she not only defends but promotes a severe regime that has given the White House fits for the past six years—by throwing women out of jobs and schools, stoning adulterers, forcing Hindus to wear an identifying yellow patch, and smashing ancient Buddha statues.

In meetings on Capitol Hill and at the State Department, Helms represents a theocracy that harbors America’s Public Enemy No. 1: Osama bin Laden, the man who allegedly masterminded the bombing of American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya and is suspected of blowing up the USS Cole. From his Afghan fortress, bin Laden operates a terrorist network reaching across the world.

All of which is highly ironic since bin Laden is the progeny of a U.S. policy that sought to unite Muslims in a jihad against the Soviet Union, but over a decade eroded the moderate political wing and launched a wave of young radical fundamentalists. The Taliban, says the author Ahmed Rashid, “is the hip-hop generation of Islamic militants. They know nothing about nothing. Their aim is the destruction of the status quo, but they offer nothing to replace it with.”

Now the Bush administration is lowering its sights, viewing the Taliban within a broader context of an oil-rich central Asia. The chaotic region is strewn with crooked governments, terrorist brotherhoods, thieving warlords, and smugglers. Against this backdrop, the Taliban sometimes seems to be the least of our problems.

The mullahs would like to take advantage of the Bush administration’s own fundamentalist leanings, complete with antidrug, pro-energy, and feminist-rollback policies. Their often comic efforts to establish representation in the U.S. took off when they found Helms. For them, she is a disarming presence, the unassuming woman at the back of the room.

After spending most her life in the States, Helms has impeccable suburban credentials. She lives in Jersey City and is the mother of a couple of grade-school kids. Her husband works at Chase Manhattan.

A granddaughter of a former Afghan minister in the last monarchy, she returned home during the war to work on U.S. aid missions. “Everyone thinks I’m a spy,” she said in a recent Voice interview. “And Uncle Dick thinks I’m crazy.”

Helms’s home across the Hudson has become a sort of kitchen-table embassy. She says she patches together conference calls between the Taliban leadership and State Department officials. A recent one cost more than $1000, an expense she covered from her own checking account.

One moment she’s packing up a used computer for the foreign ministry in Kabul, the next driving down to Washington for a briefing or meeting with members of Congress. Her cell phone rings nonstop. “These guys,” she says, referring to the Taliban leaders, “are on no one else’s agenda. They are so isolated you can’t call the country. You can’t send letters out. None of their officials can leave Afghanistan now.”

Indeed, the Taliban government is virtually unrecognized by most others. It has no standing at the UN, where it has come under scathing indictment for human rights abuses. In February, the U.S. demanded that Taliban offices here be closed.

Helms may be just another suburban mom in the States, but last year in Afghanistan she got movie-star treatment, driving around downtown Kabul in a smart late-model Japanese car, escorted by armed guards waving Kalashnikov rifles, rattling away in English and Farsi as she shot video footage to prove that Afghan women are working, free, and happy.

She stands at the public relations hub of a ragtag network of amateur Taliban advocates in the U.S. At the University of Southern California, economics professor Nake M. Kamrany arranged last year for the Taliban’s Rahmatullah Hashami, ambassador at large, to bypass the visa block. He even rounded up enough money for Hashami to lecture at the University of California, both in Los Angeles and Berkeley. The trip ended at the State Department in D.C., with a reported offer to turn Osama bin Laden over to the U.S.

Kamrany hardly looks the part of a foreign emissary, showing up for an interview recently in Santa Monica dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, and insisting on a tuna fish sandwich before getting down to defending the burqa, the head-to-toe covering required for Afghani women. In addition to Kamrany, there’s the erstwhile official Taliban representative, Abdul Hakim Mojahed, in Queens, whom Helms dismisses with a wave of her hand as a do-nothing, not worth talking to. Mojahed’s voice line has been disconnected, and his fax number never picks up.

Dr. Davood Davoodyar, an economics professor at Cal State in San Francisco, joined the jihad to fight against the Soviets in the early 1980s. Today he keeps in touch with the elusive Mojahed, who seems to have gone underground since his office was shuttered. Davoodyar thinks the Taliban is helping to stabilize Afghanistan, but concedes, “If I asked my wife to wear the burqa, she’d kill me.”

Also in San Francisco, Ghamar Farhad, a bank supervisor, has served as host to the Taliban’s visiting deputy minister of information along with the ambassador at large. She generally likes the Taliban because she believes they have cut down on rape, but got very upset when they blew up the Buddha statues. When the Taliban explained to her that these satanic idols had to go, Farhad says, she changed her mind.

Led by Helms, these people have answers for all the accusations made against the Taliban, starting with its treatment of women. To a visitor it might seem as if women had just disappeared, as if by some sort of massive ethnic cleansing. Though they made up 40 percent of all the doctors and 70 percent of teachers in the capital, women were forced to abandon Western clothes and stay indoors behind windows painted black “for their own good.” Ten million reportedly have been denied education, hospital care, and the right to work.

The Taliban insists that a woman wear a burqa, stifling garb with only tiny slits for her eyes and no peripheral vision. Even her voice is banned. In shops or in the market, she must have her brother, husband, or father speak to the shopkeeper so that she will not excite him with the sound of her speaking.

Helms argues that foreign observers have forgotten conditions in the country following the war against the Soviets. “Afghanistan was like a Mad Max scenario,” she says. “Anyone who had a gun and a pickup truck could abduct your women, rape them. . . . When the Taliban came and established security, the majority of Afghan women who suffered from the chaotic conditions were happy, because they could live, their children could live.”

But a current Physicians for Human Rights poll taken in Afghanistan reports that women surveyed in Taliban-controlled areas “almost unanimously expressed that the Taliban had made their life ‘much worse.’ ” They reported high rates of depression and suicide.

Last year a group of Afghani women gathered in Tajikistan made a concerted demand for basic human rights, citing “torture and inhumane and degrading treatment.” Their address noted that “poverty and the lack of freedom of movement push women into prostitution, involuntary exile, forced marriages, and the selling and trafficking of their daughters.”

The Taliban drew more worldwide criticism for its abuse of other religious and ethnic minorities. It required that Hindus wear yellow clothing—saris for women and shirts for men, so they could be distinguished from Muslims—a move that immediately brought back images of Jews in Nazi Germany wearing the Star of David. There are 5000 Hindus living in Kabul and thousands more in other Afghan cities. An Indian external affairs spokesman condemned the new requirements as “reprehensible” and told The Times of India it was another example of the Taliban’s “obscurantist and racist ideology, which is alien to Afghan traditions.”

Helms argues outsiders don’t understand the import of the yellow tags. “We asked them to identify themselves [to protect] their religious beliefs. Everyone has identity cards. The intention is to protect people.” She shrugs. “Here you have labels for handicapped people. So you can have special parking.”

Blowing up the ancient statues of Buddhas, hewn from cliffs in the third and fifth centuries B.C., was another matter. “That was a very big deal,” she says. “That was them thumbing their nose at the international community.”

Helms has little regard for Osama bin Laden, whom she sneeringly refers to as a “tractor driver.” She says he was inherited by the Taliban and is widely viewed as a “hang nail.”

In 1999, Helms says, she got a message from the Taliban leadership that they were willing to turn over all of bin Laden’s communications equipment, which they had seized, to the U.S. When she called the State Department with this offer, officials were at first interested, but later said, “No. We want him.”

In the same year, Prince Turki, head of Saudi intelligence, reputedly came up with a scheme to capture bin Laden on his own; after consulting with the Taliban he flew his private plane to Kabul and drove out to see Mullah Omar at his HQ. The two men sat down, as Helms recounts the story, and the Saudi said, “There’s just one little thing. Will you kill bin Laden before you put him on the plane?” Mullah Omar called for a bucket of cold water. As the Saudi delegation fidgeted, he took off his turban, splashed water on his head, and then washed his hands before sitting back down. “You know why I asked for the cold water?” he asked Turki. “What you just said made my blood boil.”

Bin Laden was a guest of the Afghanis and there was no way they were going to kill him, though they might turn him over for a trial. But that the deal collapsed, and Turki flew home empty-handed.

Early this year, the Taliban’s ambassador at large, Hashami, a young man speaking perfect English, met with CIA operations people and State Department reps, Helms says. At this final meeting, she says, Hashami proposed that the Taliban hold bin Laden in one location long enough for the U.S. to locate and destroy him. The U.S. refused, says Helms, who claims she was the go-between in this deal between the supreme leader and the feds.

A U.S. government source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, made clear that the U.S. is not trying to kill bin Laden but instead wants him expelled from Afghanistan so he can be brought to justice. Acknowledging that Laili Helms does a lot of lobbying on behalf of the Taliban, this source said Helms does not speak to the Taliban for the U.S.

In the realpolitik of Bush foreign policy, the Taliban may have improved its chances for an opening of relations with the rest of the world. As it now stands, there seems little question that Afghanistan has indeed stopped the production of poppies in the areas under its control. Partly as a result, its farmers are destitute, their lives made more miserable by drought.

But that’s not likely to faze the powers that be in Afghanistan, since most of the country’s real money comes from taxing non-dope trade. Nor will it bother the drug traffickers, who swarm the region and are shifting production north and west into such places as Turkmenistan. As of last month, the U.S. had committed $124 million in aid to Afghanistan, according to the State Department. Meanwhile, Iran, which harbors some 2 million Afghan refugees and is fighting massive drug addiction, has sent agricultural engineers north to help repair Afghanistan’s irrigation systems.

Last week Milt Bearden, the former CIA station chief in Pakistan and Sudan, argued in The Wall Street Journal that the Bush administration should take a “more restrained approach” to bin Laden. “There may be a realization that the two years of unrestrained rhetoric of the Clinton administration following the 1998 attacks in Africa may have done little more than inflate the myth that has inspired others to harm Americans,” he wrote.

None of this has changed the impression most people here have of the Taliban. Helms and her cohorts have a lot of work to do. As she freely admits, the Taliban leaders “are considered fascists, tyrants, Pol Pots. They can’t do anything right. We perceive them as monsters no matter what they do.”

Can the Gyrocopter Gang Start a Political Reform Movement?

Ralph Nader

Last month when Florida postal worker, Doug Hughes, landed his tiny aircraft, known as a gyrocopter, on the lawn of the U.S. Capitol with 535 letters addressed to every member of Congress, the conversation should have been about his desperate message. Instead, his letter to each Senator and Representative arguing for an end to the corruption of private money in public election campaigns was largely ignored. The media focused instead on an airspace violation with an unregistered aircraft.  The delivery of a letter remarking on racism or sexism in the United States may have gotten far more attention. While issues of gender and race are important and making much progress, less personal topics that don’t invoke a human, emotional reaction, are in danger of being swept under the rug.

Hughes is currently under house arrest in Ruskin, Florida, amidst a torrent of media speculation about how he got through restricted airspace and a no-fly zone undetected (the readers of the radar screens thought he was probably a flock of geese).

Undiverted, the well-read and articulate Hughes, 61, a former Navy veteran, responded on his website, the Democracy Club: “anybody in politics or the news media who want to spend inordinate amounts of time talking about me is avoiding the real discussion—which is about Congress. Let’s keep the discussion focused on reform—not me.”

While recognizing this crucial point, even journalist William Greider couldn’t avoid writing “we spend $600 billion a year on defense, but couldn’t stop a mailman from landing his gyrocopter on the Capitol Lawn.” So far Hughes, not any of the blundering security specialists, is the only one feeling the force of the law.

Hughes started thinking about what to do on campaign finance reform when he met a fellow rural letter carrier, army veteran Michael P. Shanahan. (Yes, all reform starts with a small conversation between citizens.) Shanahan had developed a proposal called “Civilism” which he described as “a systematic plan to fix Congress” by organizing an association of moderates “united by faith in principles of democracy.”

Greider sees this risky landing, which could have cost Hughes his life, as more evidence of an emerging “convergence of left and right…among rank-and-file voters at the grassroots. For all their angry differences, Tea Party adherents and working-class Dems share many of the same enemies and same frustrated yearnings,” he added.

Certainly, Hughes’ condemnation is transpartisan. He points out that nearly half of retired members of Congress are subsequently employed as lobbyists, drawing down big money rewarding their votes as Senators and Representatives. He calls this scenario “legalized, institutionalized bribery.”

It wasn’t as if his spectacular landing on the West Lawn was a secret. His “Freedom Flight,” as he calls it, was announced September 16, 2013 on his website, he told the Tampa Bay Times in detail about his plans, the Secret Service visited his home in October of 2013, and he sent out an all points email to Florida media well before he took off from a Maryland airstrip.

Unfortunately, he got little national press, other than the Tampa Bay Times, which published his letter in its entirety. But, quoting Senator John Kerry’s words in his farewell speech to the Senate that “the unending chase for money I believe threatens to steal our democracy itself,” Hughes did stimulate some congressmen, such as Republican Walter Jones, Jr., to make statements on the House floor about the worsening influence of money in politics.

Interviewed from his home on Democracy Now by Amy Goodman, Hughes, a grandfather, said he sees “the change over the decades as we slide from a democracy to a plutocracy. Just like Alan Grayson said, the fat cats are calling the shots. They’re getting everything they want. And the voters know it. Across the political spectrum—center, left and right—they know that this Congress isn’t representing the people. And yes, it was worth risking my life, it was worth risking my freedom, to get reform so that Congress works for the people.”

Hughes related that he and Shanahan, in their research, “discovered the existence of other groups and other very sophisticated plans that had been written by people a lot smarter than me. But we also observed these groups weren’t getting any traction.” He also stated their lack of media attention and mentioned the need for a states-driven constitutional convention.

Well, Doug Hughes, you’re on the right track. All you have to do with your buddy Shanahan is get less than one percent of the American people to organize in each of the 435 congressional districts, throw in their pledge to each devote 200 volunteer hours a year and open up one office in each district with two full-time people and you’ll get public financing of public campaigns through a constitutional amendment.

Why? Because this peoples’ One Percent would have the overwhelming public sentiment behind them—Left/Right and unstoppable. So take your Democracy Club viral with the gyrocopter gang. Lead and the politicians will follow.

Feeling Trapped in a Dead-End System?

Mark Hand

Activists and organizers for social change undoubtedly experience periods of burnout. Working long hours — typically without pay and little appreciation — on campaigns, issues and causes where victories are few and far between can be demoralizing. Some activists get so frustrated with the perceived lack of results from their hard work, the divisions within the Left, and the rampant apathy among the general public that they give up entirely and retreat from activism.

Cartoonist, writer and organizer Stephanie McMillan saw the depression, feelings of hopelessness and other difficulties faced by her fellow activists. And she wanted to do something to help people overcome these. So she started writing uplifting messages to empower individuals to continue working for a better world. She calls her inspirational messages “Daily Affirmations for the Revolutionary Proletarian Militant.” Similar to the memorable characters in her popular comic strips Minimum Security and Code Green, McMillan’s affirmations are accompanied by cute and colorful animals, plants and insects.

McMillan is almost finished writing 365 affirmations, and when she puts the final touches on the last one, she hopes to gather them all up and offer the entire collection as a 365-day perpetual desk calendar. The Fort Lauderdale, Fla., native is holding a campaign that ends June 12 to raise enough money to get the calendars printed.

In mid-May, a few days after McMillan launched her fundraising campaign, I asked her why she decided to write these affirmations. The conversation then moved on to broader questions about living in a world filled with barriers to positive change.

Mark Hand: When did you start writing and drawing the Daily Affirmations for Revolutionary Proletarian Militants?

Stephanie McMillan: I started on January 1, 2014, to provide an alternative for revolutionaries to the same old New Year’s resolutions. I intended to post them every day for a year, but some of them straggled into 2015. I’m finishing up the final 34 this month, daily through June 12, to wind up with 365 on the final day of the Kickstarter campaign.

MH: What inspired you to write them?

SM: Capitalists constantly push us to want things that keep us trapped in the system and obsessed with trivialities that distract us from resistance. All kinds of support is available if we strive to make money, worship a god, lose weight, find romance.

But there is a huge lack of inspirational literature to encourage and uplift people whose lives are dedicated to social transformation. Most writing on the Left is theoretical and political — these are obviously crucial, but there isn’t much that addresses us on the ideological level, on helping us change our ways of thinking so we stay strong, on track, and motivated, that helps us establish standards of behavior that serve our goals. All we hear is the constant barrage of capitalist ideology telling us that we’re wrong, our aspirations are impossible, we’re crazy to try, and “we can’t beat ‘em, might as well join ‘em. No wonder many people feel so hopeless, depressed and overwhelmed.I started writing the Affirmations to bolster my own resolve and strategic optimism, and when I started sharing them, I saw that they filled a strong need for many others as well. So I decided to draw them regularly.

MH: When you started writing them, why did you decide to use “Revolutionary Proletarian Militants” in the title? Wouldn’t a more general, less strident title have appealed to a wider audience?

SM: Certainly a more general title would have been more broadly appealing, but I’m not trying to be broadly appealing. These are specifically for people who already realize that the global capitalist system has no future for us, who consider it to be our enemy, and want to do something about it. I’m an organizer, and I’m looking for people who want to do common work that serves the same goal, who are seeking ways to get involved in the struggle. The Affirmations are also for those already involved in their own organizing efforts, to uphold high standards of outlook and behavior as a counterweight to the rampant sectarianism, dogmatism, bureaucratism, opportunism and other problems that currently weaken the Left.

The word proletarian is important because it indicates the only class that is fundamentally opposed to capital and that can offer an alternative to capitalism: the working class. If we want revolution, then we need to be aware of this fundamental antagonism and take the side of the working class, always.

MH: When you first started writing the Affirmations, was the feedback from your readers immediately positive? Have you heard from anyone about the affirmations having the opposite of the intended effect? For example, revolution and overthrowing global capitalism may seem so implausible that these affirmations may make some people feel even more demoralized.

SM: The overwhelming response has been from people who say that the Affirmations make them feel stronger, less alone, and encouraged to keep struggling. I haven’t had many negative responses except sometimes people have pointed out when the meaning wasn’t clear enough, or could be misinterpreted. If they made a compelling case, I changed them accordingly. Occasionally someone expresses disagreement, but that’s fine — they don’t speak to everyone.

There are many who really appreciate and want this kind of message. Some have told me that they print them out and post them in their homes or workplace. One folded up a bunch of them and put them in a bowl, and draws one out randomly each day to reflect upon. One person wrote to me just yesterday to say, “Every time I read one of your affirmations, I want to shout it from the rooftops and tattoo it where I can see it every day.”

So, all indications tell me that they don’t discourage or demoralize, but do quite the opposite.

MH: What did you draw upon when writing these affirmations? Old writings? Previous books you had written?

SM: The ideas come from my practice, in building organizations. Most of them directly address weaknesses and problems that I observe and deal with in real life. I think their origin in actual current practice makes them more immediately relatable, useful and thus popular — these problems are widespread and many are grappling with the same issues.

MH: When you need your spirits lifted, what do you turn to? What inspires you?

SM: When I start to fall into a fuck-it-this-is-hopeless mood — those thoughts are rare for me but they do occasionally arise — then I think about all the people all over the world who are fighting for emancipation, for an end to class divisions, and all those who have suffered and sacrificed for it, and the fact that we are all connected. We are comrades across time and space, even though we will never know each other personally. I think about the irrepressible spirit of human beings to not submit to domination. Today, right now, there are millions of people struggling in all their different ways against exploitation and oppression, and I will never abandon our common cause. I realize that if I give up, then my life will have been a waste. I think about the beautiful and miraculous world we live in, and the fact that if we let it be destroyed, there’s no coming back from that — it’s forever. Our personal sorrows and troubles are nothing compared to the problem of the larger social framework, and we need to stay focused on that.

MH: Why did you launch this Kickstarter campaign to raise money for the calendar? If you reach your goal, when will the calendar be available?

SM: All the Affirmations are available online, but I think there’s something special about having then in the form of a physical object that can be handled and contemplated without the mediation of a screen. Many people have asked for some kind of book or calendar of the Affirmations, so they can have them nearby to constantly remind them of the things they want to keep in mind. They also want something material with weight and gravity — to share with others and give as a gift. Digital files evaporate, but this will stick around. I formatted it to be a perpetual calendar so it can be re-used year after year.
I’ve budgeted plenty of time for them to be done by early November — this is why I’m doing the Kickstarter campaign now — so that people can have them to give during the winter holidays.

MH: How do you respond to liberals or leftists who support existing political and economic institutions and who say, “If you think there’s going to be a revolution to overthrow capitalism, you’re nuts. You should work within the system we already have”?

SM: Well, I’m not seeking the support of liberals; insofar as I address them it’s to attempt to convince them not to be liberals, to break their loyalty to the capitalist class. These are explicitly for people who believe that revolution is, even if not likely, at least necessary and worth fighting for. Any leftist who doesn’t believe that, and/or argues that we should work within capitalist institutions, which cannot possibly lead to or contribute to revolution, isn’t really a leftist.

MH: We live in communities where most people cannot comprehend our political beliefs, and when we explain our beliefs to them, they either disagree with them or call the ideas impractical and label us crazy idealists. Do you write these affirmations to address these situations?

SM: Yes, certainly that’s part of it. It’s to break the isolation of those who express these views. It’s to say, openly and unapologetically, the words that are usually forbidden, erased from normal discourse. Revolution is the highest, greatest, and most necessary goal we can be working for. It is the only hope for the future of humanity, and yet we’ve been trained to be defensive and self-effacing about it, to be afraid to even speak of it for fear of being socially ostracized and subject to repression. Well, we need to speak of it, loudly, and we should be proud to do so. We should put those who uphold this wretched system on the defensive. They should feel bad; not us.

MH: How do you maintain your sanity and stay so emotionally calm in such an insane world?

SM: Because I have to. We have to. If we are to overcome the insanity, we need to be strong. We can fully feel our emotions, of course (they will come out somehow no matter what), but we can’t give them control over us. We need to live up to the necessities of the historical moment we are facing, and take up the tasks required of us. If we fail, future generations will not forgive us. They may not even survive. We, who are alive today, are the bridge into the future. We can either collapse and consign our children all living beings in fact — to miseries, tortures and sufferings that will continue to worsen as capitalism drags us ever further into its hellish dystopia, or we can hold it together, rise to the occasion, serve our cause well, and win it. Each of us has that choice to make.

Who is the We in American Public Education?

Peter A. Coclanis

In 2006 Dave Eggers published a powerful non-fiction novel called What is the What? based on the difficult path of one of the “lost boys” dislocated during the second Sudanese civil war. With respect to the difficult path of many boys and girls in American public education, now and in the future, another question comes to mind: ‘who is the we?’

There are four factors to consider.

First, our students. Data compiled by the U.S. Department of Education recently led the department to project that for the first time most children attending the nation’s public schools this year are non-white. Moreover, the Southern Education Foundation, employing state-level data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics, issued a report in January stating that in 2013 a majority of students enrolled in America’s public schools were classified as low income. More specifically, the report found that the percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch programs in 2013 had risen to 51 percent  (from 42 percent in 2006 and 48 percent in 2011). The rise in recent years was in part the result of a broadening of eligibility standards, but most reasonable people would consider the students covered under the new criteria to be “low income” and therefore deserving of aid. After all, granting free lunches to students residing in households whose income is less than 135 percent of the poverty threshold, and reduced-price meals for those residing in households within 185 percent of the poverty threshold hardly seems profligate.

Secondly, some data relating to aggregate population and wealth-holding patterns. As the nation’s   public schools become darker and poorer, the U.S. as a whole is becoming older, with older age cohorts in the U.S. much whiter than younger cohorts. Moreover, studies of household wealth-holding patterns in the U.S. have demonstrated that median household wealth rises with age of householders in the U.S. at least through the ages of 65-69, before beginning to decline a bit (though remaining, even after 75. far higher than households in all cohorts under 65). They also show that median wealth levels of white households are significantly higher in all age cohorts than those for Black and Hispanic households, with the racial gap widening as households age.

Thirdly, findings regarding age-specific and race-specific voting behavior. In the U.S., participation in elections by cohorts comprised of middle-aged and senior voters is consistently higher than levels for younger voting cohorts. As for race, blacks—at least in the last two presidential elections—have voted at about the same rate as whites (actually at a slightly higher rate in 2012), with both groups voting at much higher rates than Hispanics.

Fourthly, patterns relating to social spending. Several takeaways from UC-Davis economist Peter Lindert’s landmark 2-volume comparative study Growing Public: Social Spending and  Growth Since the Eighteenth Century (2004), are relevant, two positive and another, not so much. Lindert’s main finding, broadly speaking, is that the efficiency costs of investment in education and social welfare, contrary to the assumptions of many neo-classically oriented economists, historically have been small.

Regarding investment in public education per se, Lindert found that prior to the 20th century the U.S. and Germany were the leaders, largely because of widespread voting rights and the fact that both places were characterized by local control of schools. What about the situation in the US today? Despite some recent efforts to constrain voting rights, such rights are still relatively widespread and, despite federal inroads, local districts still exercise considerable sway over their schools.

One other finding by Lindert, however, offers less support to those supportive of social spending. He found that since World War II the countries that have invested most robustly in education and social welfare have been pretty homogenous—Scandinavia in particular. In other words, taxpayers around the world generally like their taxes to go for programs helping people like themselves, and historically have voted accordingly.

To return to my opening question, will the older cohorts of the US population — whiter and wealthier than the population as a whole — vote into office people who will support robust investment in education and other forms of human capital (health and social welfare) for darker and poorer populations?

There are plenty of reasons (selfless and selfish) for investing in education and social welfare, according to recent observers (from Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam to Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell). One can point to lofty Rawlsian notions of fairness and social justice or to matters more material: but unless today’s young get decently educated, they aren’t going to be in position to keep the U.S. economy operating at a high level, much less to contribute to the needs of retirees.

Polls have shown that a large majority of Americans say they believe in equality of opportunity, though not of outcome. People interpret equality of opportunity in different ways, either narrowly and formally, or broadly and substantively. In the former case, non-discrimination is the goal; in the latter, what counts is rendering more equal the conditions in which people start out in life. Investment in education, including pre-school education, is one of the best ways to narrow gaps relating to birth. Which way will we have it, America, and who is the we?