Archives for category: United States

Ebola, AIDS, and the current state of things

October 15, 2014 //

source: http://www.youthvillage.co.za/2014/09/everything-need-know-ebola/

In 1985, the band Coil released a cover of the song Tainted Love. In the booklet for the Scatology CD on which it appears, there was a photo of the two core members, John Balance and Peter Christopherson and text indicating that at publication some relatively small (but shockingly large if you knew them) number of people in the UK had died of AIDS. 184, if I recall correctly.

In the early 1980s, when it was obvious that the vast number of westerners dying of HIV were gay or drug users, the religious right could point at the victims and claim it was divine punishment for sin. What had yet to name itself the Reality-based Community saw this demagoguery for what it was, and fought hard to get some recognition for what was actually happening: a health crisis of vast proportions. The fact that President Reagan would not utter the name of the disease until it was well past time that a concerted effort could have eradicated it. (In a 1982 press conference, White House spokesperson Larry Speakes laughed about it when a reporter asked about the 600 cases then diagnosed.) And now (though we don’t talk about it much), millions of people are still infected with it, with numbers growing primarily in Africa (for a variety of well-researched reasons), but in the west as well.

The BBC yesterday morning indicated that in the latest outbreak of Ebola, 4417 people had died of the disease. Most of them Black and most of them not in the West. The Onion ran a headline to the effect that ‘we’re only fifty white people from a cure for Ebola‘. If only. Papers yesterday ran editorials pointing to slashed medical research budgets in the US being key to our not having an effective and mass-producible treatment for Ebola. Shocking as fuck, that one. As is the fact that the US doesn’t have a surgeon general because the NRA of all groups objected to President Obama’s nomination.

Rachel Maddow reported two nights ago that new cases are coming up in Africa at a rate of 1000 per week and are on track to increase to 10,000 per week in the coming months. And how does the US react to its first case? The family of Thomas Edward Duncan were quarantined in the house where he fell ill for, what, a week? With his sweat and vomit soaked bedding, and no one would step up and take them in. Christian charity finally came in the form of a Dallas county official who secured them rooms in a private home. In all of Texas, *no one* else stood up? Big fucking state to have so many cowards. Would I step up? I don’t know. When Ebola comes to NL, we’ll see if our infrastructure is up to the task. I wish I could say ‘If Ebola’, but given the current spread, I think it’s unlikely to stay in small African countries about which the rich countries couldn’t give two farts.

Categories Medicine, Politics, United States

What if they held a war and no one came?

September 24, 2014 //

I was a teenager in the 80s and had a dreadful fear of Reagan getting us into some kind of heavy duty war. I was 22 when Bush Sr. succeeded in starting a serious war in Iraq to boost the credentials he’d earned invading Panama. As my 20s wore on, there were wars of varying scales in the Balkans, but nothing to really presage the continuous war the US has been engaged in since 2002. Which we’ve just expanded into Syria. I’ve been listening to Rachel Maddow’s reporting on our sickening new airstrikes from ships in the Red Sea and elsewhere nearby. We apparently have amazing CentCom-released footage of Tomahawk missiles going up, but we learned our lessons from 1993: Don’t show the footage of the missiles coming down. 200 missiles in one night against multiple targets including Khorosan, a group no one’s actually discussed until now.

The dread and the horror never lessen. When we invaded Iraq in 1991, my friends and I feared for end times. We didn’t know yet that Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia, and when Bush I refrained from taking Saddam Hussein down, we could breathe deeply again. Maybe we wouldn’t be at war again for a while. The focus just shifted.

I was relatively lucky, or the US governments of my youth were rather more circumspect: while there was mandatory draft registration in place from about ~~1983~~ (ETA: The draft registration was instated by Carter as a response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Reagan opposed the draft as governor and opposed the registration in the 1980 campaign but in 1982 indicated it would stay and subsequently pursued selective service prosecutions.[Ref]), there was never a call-up. I don’t recall what the upper age limit was, 30 maybe? I could hear my mother’s relief over the phone, however, when I was no longer eligible. Clinton and the Bushes, though they waged numerous wars, knew better too than to reinstate the draft. Many things brought Nixon down (his own hubris, mainly), but the executive branch learned that a draft to fight a war on foreign soil would need far more justification than any of the recent presidents could come up with. Another blog entry will look at the evaporation of opportunities for the poor such that signing on to the military sounds like a viable proposition.

So now we’re engaged in Syria. Our oil-wealthy allies in the region have lovely air forces that the US, UK, and French defence industries have sold them. And they say they’re prepared to use them to help us in the coming war. Except the ones that won’t. We haven’t armed Syria directly, at least not in a long time – that has been the job of Russia. The phrase ‘poking the bear’ comes to mind.

The rationale has been (until this new group was mentioned) that we’re hunting down and disarming ISIL. (I prefer the version of the name that refers to the Levant, given that one of the group’s rationales is to roll back the Western agreements that broke up the Levant into Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and so on.) Like the War on Terror (or Terra, as some prescient wags have put it), there’s no end to such wars. This is, of course, how the war-making industries would like to keep it. Again.

I think that the war, from the perspective of the United States’ adversaries, has already been won. As soon as we declared a Department of Homeland Security, they knew our security had been irretrievably breached. Once we sent troops to fight on their soil and started building installations to train people they could easily recruit (Mosul, anyone?), the war was won. The Western perspective is that it has only just been re-engaged. When we go in without an exit strategy (again), they’ve won. Orwell’s insight into the Stalinist victory was that once entrenched, the new -ism could take up with its old adversaries and make as though nothing had really changed, to the benefit of each. As long as the blood of the sons and daughters of those in power wasn’t shed.

And we’re there again. We look from man to pig and from pig to man and can’t tell which is which.

Categories Politics, United States, war

Feminism, the NFL, and Yours truly

September 22, 2014 //

First and foremost: I am probably the wrong bloke to be writing about feminism. In many ways, I’m very stereotypical in my male-ness. The way men are accused of talking over women – yeah, I do that with alarming regularity. I may distinguish myself from other men by kicking myself about it later, but so far I haven’t improved on the behaviour.

I talk the talk however about the radical notion that women are people and oh my gracious, have we still not evolved beyond notions of the glass ceiling? No, we really haven’t. I recently read a blog entry (and I really need to improve my bookmarking of these things if I’m going to cite them myself) about the number of females achieving CEO status in US corporations. Yes, that number has grown in recent years, and so has the number of female CEOs booted for not being able to turn the messes of their predecessors around on a dime.

Bloomberg’s article on the recent study is here:
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-04-29/why-women-ceos-get-fired-more-often

Oddly, the money quote isn’t “To be exact: Over the past 10 years, 38 percent of female chief executives of the world’s 2,500 biggest public companies were fired, compared to 27 percent of their male counterparts.”

The meat of the issue is that women and minorities are hired into senior positions when corporations are in crisis. If turnaround isn’t swift, the boot is, and these crisis hires are generally replaced by white males. Again.

It’s heartening occasionally to note that there are more female prime ministers than there ever have been, but discrimination is still rampant and we still have BS like the current NFL scandal (which Rachel Maddow is covering quite well). There was a bloke on Friday’s show who laid it out. Commissioner Goodell makes something like $44 million per year to keep the scandals at bay and keep the NFL the multi-billion dollar franchise it’s become. There have been three or four domestic abuse cases to come out of the NFL in the last week or so, which of course begs the question: how many have been effectively shoved under the carpet in the last ten years? When this kind of thing goes public in other realms, policies go into place right quick to show that the company in question is serious about addressing the problem. The first thing that came to my mind on hearing about these NFL cases was: why isn’t there an abuse clause in all player’s contracts? Accused of domestic abuse? Benched for an entire season. At least. Convicted? Out. The Ray Rice case is such that a conviction isn’t really necessary: He’s never denied he’s the man on the video. Is it really something we can stand to see or hear equivocated?

Goodell’s lies about when he and the league knew about the tape were almost enough to make me lose my lunch this afternoon.

Jena MacGregor who blogs for the Washington Post argues (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-leadership/wp/2014/09/19/indra-nooyi-the-nfl-and-the-responsibility-of-female-ceos/) that the female CEOs of Pepsi, GM, and Campbell’s Soup would show great leadership in speaking out, but contrary to the demands of some leaders, they don’t have “a special responsibility” to do so. MacGregor doesn’t name the people calling for female CEOs to speak out, but points to (another) Bloomberg article (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-17/nfl-sponsors-staying-mum-on-abuse-crosses-ceo-gender-line.html), which names two: Donna Lopiano, the former CEO of the Women’s Sports Foundation and Pat Cook, president of Cook & Co., a boutique executive search firm in Bronxville, New York.

I suppose I agree that female CEOs have no special responsibility to speak out, but stakeholders in general – all CEOs who sponsor the NFL, for example, should stop covering their asses and look only to the moral high ground. Tracy Chapman once sang “all that you have is your soul” – well, I’m an atheist. If you believe in your soul, support its well-being by telling the NFL that your $100 million in sponsorship money might be better spent elsewhere. Or simply be honourable and do the same.

Mind you, the boards of Campbells, GM, and PepsiCo will gladly show the CEOs MacGregor cites the door as soon as such a decision is shown to affect the holy bottom line. Such are the times we live in.

Categories Politics, United States

A little about the shutdown

October 3, 2013 //

Last new year I was discussing the American scene with my friend Ellen, who teaches English to high school students in Norway. At the time I promised I would blog a bit about American politics so that her students might get a different viewpoint from that of the Norwegian press/BBC. What with one thing and another (starting a new job, starting another new job, and a few other things), I haven’t yet gotten down to it.

That said, yesterday my friend Kevin posted a really succinct take on the US government shutdown that he said I could share with Ellen’s class, with a bit of a gloss. I’ll try to do some of this kind of blogging with some regularity as well.

As noted, this is for students of English, so a little preliminary vocabulary is in order.

GOP – Grand Old Party, a nickname of the Republican party.
Barry Goldwater – Fiscally conservative Republican senator who lost the 1964 presidential election to Lyndon Johnson.
Dominionism – Dominion Theology or Dominionism is the idea that Christians should work toward either a nation governed by Christians or one governed by a conservative Christian understanding of biblical law.

Let us be clear about what is happening to our government, shall we? While it is true to say that through a combination of arrogance and obstinacy the GOP has shut down the government, this was not the intention of the GOP as a whole. Indeed, the GOP is not whole. It is a coalition of distinct factions; the old style Republicans, the wealthy oligarchs, the neo-cons, the religious conservatives, and the tea party libertarians.

Since the 80s the old Barry Goldwater Republicans and the oligarchs had a hard enough time holding the religious conservatives inside the party while making minimal progress on their theological agenda. The extremely wealthy don’t have that much in common with the people that the leaders of the religious right rely upon as a base – once the born-again trend that swept the middle class in the 70s and 80s was over, they were left with a large majority of poor working class folks.

But they truly made a deal with the devil when they brought the Tea Party and the NeoCons into the party – these groups don’t just want smaller government and lower taxes, they believe that the government itself is the root of most of the country’s problems, and that we’d all be better off without it. Combined with the Dominionists amongst the religious right, who believe that the separation of church and state and inability to institute religious laws is a restriction on their religious freedom, this view is now held by a very large percentage of the Republican Party.

For these people there is no downside to destroying Obamacare or to shutting down the US Government – both are a win in their eyes. One would scale back the government, the other would demonstrate to the nation that it can survive without the federal government. And because they have the power to unseat Republicans who do not adhere their line by challenging them at the ballot, either taking their seats or handing the Democrats a win, the Tea Party, Neocons and Dominionists were able to make the resistance of any objectors in the party ineffective. So while the more moderate Republicans learned from the arrogant gobsmacking idiocy of Newt Gingrich, their hands were tied.

And this is how a handful of fanatical ideologues were able to dictate the policy of a national party over cooler, more rational heads, and crash our government.

Categories Politics, United States