November
30, 2003
Charlie
Miller
When I was about eleven, my sister Nancy, then about four,
was given a subscription to a recorded magazine for kids. A new, plastic record arrived each month,
and she played them until the needle wore through to the turntable. We both learned the jingles, and five
decades later any two words in sequence from one will set us off singing the
rest. One song was that of the Happy
Bird. If Gretchen can sing a capella
from the pulpit, I can too, right?:
Just sing a happy
little song,
When every little
thing goes wrong,
Be as happy as can
be,
Just fill yourself
with glee,
When every little
thing goes wrong.
The next sound was some poor soul on the ground who shouted
up, “Oh, be quiet Happy Bird.”
In those days, eons before Eminem and Dr. Dre, it wasn’t possible to
say, “Shut up, Happy Bird.” At least
we’ve fixed that.
The Happy Bird’s song was an operational definition of the
adjective pollyanna, as in “Oh, don’t be so damn pollyanna.” The word came from the title of a 1913
novel, and the name of the principal character in that novel, a little orphan
girl who came from the far west to live with her rich, but incredibly crabby,
Aunt Polly. Pollyanna plays what she
calls the “glad game”, whatever happens she finds its good side. Her Mom dies, her Dad dies, but it’s good
really because they are together in heaven.
Her Aunt puts her in a miserable, bare, hot attic room, but she
recognizes that it’s good because she has a high viewpoint. Pollyanna is an early 20th
century version of Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss.
Voltaire had his tongue in cheek, while Pollyanna’s creator, Eleanor
Porter, really believed the world could me made right just by looking on the
bright side of everything.
Unfortunately,
if we look at the bright side all the time, we are very likely not to see what
is going on. We are going to be robbed
and left naked and bleeding in a wasteland of ashes. We are going to have to kill Pollyanna, or at least tell her to
shut up, for God’s sake! As a not
sufficiently popular bumper sticker says, “If you aren’t outraged, you aren’t
paying attention”
So, just where are we?
We are in a legal-political morass of the first magnitude –our
constitution (with a small “c” in the British manner) and our legal
arrangements are a shambles with representational democracy bought out by
commercial interests. Lawyers are
working in government offices crafting legislation and parliamentary strategies
to strip us of our civil rights. Unless
a law student chooses to spend the slight available elective time in the
curriculum on civil rights law, there is essentially no required indoctrination. Torts, yes, contracts and taxes, yes. Respect for, reverence for, civil liberties
is not required in the curriculum. The executioner who is currently attorney
general clearly didn’t take the course at all.
Our Supreme Court actually ruled against counting votes in
the last presidential election. If a
nation is a democracy, it holds elections.
If elections mean anything, you count the votes, but not necessarily in
America. Even when electoral results
are too clear for chicanery to distort them, the people available to elect have
sold out to the commercial interests that pay for their campaigns. Apparently good intentions applied to fixing
this fire sale on power, all the efforts of McCain and Feingold, of Common
Cause and others, have been perverted.
We have the fox in charge of the chicken coop, and we are asking the fox
to please turn in its dentures before it takes another tour of the nesting
room. Fat chance!
Republicans have the upper hand at the moment, but the
sellout to power buyers is not a Republican problem only, even if they have
taken it to a new level. Clinton and
Gore sold out and accomplished little of their environmental or social
agendas. They, not Bush refused
effective participation in the Kyoto protocols regarding global warming. Gore, of all people, author of Earth in
the Balance, represented us at Kyoto, then at Rio, and he saw to it that
the U.S. had no chance to lead the world away from its fossil fuel-burning
insanity. That damage done,
Bush-Cheney just withdrew from Kyoto altogether, no longer any big deal,
really, but that turned out to be part of their larger program of reversing the
clean air act, the endangered species act, recent limits on mining of public
lands, and enforcement of a wide range of anti-pollution regulations.
The buyers of Congress and White House from the fossil fuel
industry were allowed to write the energy bill that will pass in December,
despite some doubts. Congress will feed
their masters a gas pipeline from Alaska’s north slope, reopen drilling on a
wide range of protected continental shelves, set a moratorium on litigation for
redress of MTBE pollution in aquifers, and give to mid-west agribusiness a huge
subsidy for ethanol that cannot be transported safely and takes more fossil
fuel to produce than it replaces. The bill
was written in secret by the majority and exceeds 1200 pages. All of it is pork.
This has become standard.
With no effective debate they passed
the Patriot Act, the $87B supplement for Iraq, the massive Medicare drug
industry subsidy, the forest protection act (no trees, no forest), and the list
goes on. Extensions of the Patriot Act
now ride on every essential appropriations bill; that way you don’t notice the
residue of your rights dribbling away and probably most congress folks don’t
notice either.
The legal-political mess attaches
to the terrifying expansion of militarism in America. We did have options for a sane, humane globally responsible
police process in response to the destruction and murder at the World Trade
Center. Before we attacked Afghanistan
the Taliban told us they would negotiate about Al-Qaida training camps and turn
over Bin Laden to a European nation. At
least they offered to talk about it.
Not good enough, not fast enough for us.
I knew, and you knew in the minute
that you heard about it, that 911was an opportunity for career officers, even
career enlisted folks, to use what they know, to gather campaign ribbons and to
fuel promotions. We would use the tools
of massive, if sometimes precise, destruction on a nation already living by
hundreds of thousands on the bare ground, under blankets draped over strings in
lieu of tents. We bombed wedding
parties in open fields, we dropped cluster bombs that still lie about, we used
the services of rival war lords that now rule the place and still today are
fighting tank battles against each other.
Oh yes, and we dropped some yellow food packs. It was not a war fought too soon to plan completely. The plan and even some of our operatives
were in place over five years before 911.
It went quickly, but it was not
enough. Next, the opportunity that is the War on Terror, shifted to
Iraq. Virtually all of the significant
people in the present administration, save W. himself, are part of the Project
for the New American Century. Rumsfeld,
Cheney, Rice, Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, and a long list of people now
undersecretaries of state and defense signed a manifesto in 1998 saying that
only American military power can sustain an orderly world. So, we have to use it early and often. They targeted Iraq in their documents, many
on the web, long before W was elected.
Under the guidance of these warmongers, at the cost of our national
integrity and collegial relations with most of the world, particularly Europe,
we have bombed Iraq, killed them in thousands, destroyed their public records,
and usurped their sovereignty. They had
sovereignty, however warped their leadership may have been. We opened the campaign with a bombing
barrage titled “shock and awe.” We told
them it would come, then we did it.
Paul Wolfowitz, rightly accused of being the architect of the debacle,
admitted after the “end of hostilities” that we chose Iraq as a target to
secure their oil resource for western exploitation. And now some are surprised they don’t like us and continue day by
day to kill us when they can.
The militarism attaches, of
course, to one large cylinder of the exploitative economic engine, the weapons
industry. The litany around this
problem can be chanted: world’s largest
arms dealer, waste and price gouging, a force designed for theater operations
of massive armored divisions in a world fielding no visible opponents, building
nuclear missile and attack submarines 13 years after then end of the cold war
that supposedly justified them. Our
military is scared of losing the capacity to manufacture 50 main battle tanks
each month and build warships. The Navy
has a massive fleet renewal program in the pipeline.
Just how war mad are
we? Well, the congress just passed this
year’s Pentagon budget at $400 million, including $15M for engineering of a new
class of nuclear weapons, the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrators, or super bunker
busters. This is a very small amount of money, less than half the budget of my
department at OSU. However, congress
also repealed a long-standing policy, established in law until this month, that
the U.S. would not design or build new nuclear weapons.
Do you believe that these bombs
would only be used in remote mountainous regions where a latter day Bin
Laden might be holed up in a cave? If so, you still believe in the tooth
fairy. A Saddam would likely hole up
deep under a city, hoping we would be too nice to bomb him there. So, the real question is, would this kinder,
gentler nuke kill lots of people in the city when we use it anyway? And the real answer is yes, they are
certain to be very dirty bombs. A
nuclear bomb cannot be small, just a few 10’s of tons of TNT. They require a
critical mass of fissile material, a mass irreducible below a known limit. Critical mass is established by crashing
smaller pieces of U-235 or plutonium together with explosives inside a steel
case. The mass must be big enough that
neutrons from nuclear decays don’t escape before hitting more nucleii, causing
them to release more neutrons, and so
on. The steel case holds it all together until the energy build-up is
enormous. To make a cleaner bomb, you
fiddle with the case materials, and it has to go off up in the air.
But, a bunker buster has to go off
underground, and there the expanding neutron soup smacks into dirt, rock,
rebar, broken dishes, disintegrating bookcases, skulls, you name it. It will generate a witchs’ brew of hot
radionuclides: transuranics, strontium-90, cobalt-60, iodine-131,
cesium-137. Unfortunately, no bomb,
even one propelled downward by a rocket can penetrate deep enough to keep even
a small, say 1 kiloton explosion, contained, about 20 meters is all that a
super-hardened rocket can dig. So, a
radioactive dust storm will erupt from the ground, and not as a soaring
mushroom cloud that disperses far away, but at ground-level among the
people. Robert Nelson, a sort of policy
physicist, writing this month in Physics Today, states that a 1 kt bomb
(which is close to the lower limit) in a typical 3rd world city
would kill 10’s of thousands. We
already know these horrors. Our leaders
have decided, only just this week, to make them a reality. If that doesn’t kill Pollyanna, there’s
more.
The list of current environmental horror stories is enough,
just giving them titles, to fill the rest of the day. The biggest single problem is conversion of fossil fuel, coal and
oil, to atmospheric carbon dioxide. We
are dependent on CO2 to hold heat in the atmosphere, without it we would
freeze. But, we have taken it from a
pre-industrial level of 270 ppm to 360 ppm and rising 2 to 3 ppm per year. We know the basic physics of this heating
effect exactly. We cannot predict all
the complexities of its effects on climate, but they are already severe. We are the proverbial frogs, sitting in that
sauce pan. The heat is slowly rising, but we scarcely feel it. By the time we know we are in trouble, our
muscles will be cooked and we can’t jump out.
One inhabited Pacific Island has already been abandoned due to rising
sea level. The Arctic Ocean shows
serious signs of melting, which will lower the reflection of sunlight back to
space, a feedback effect that will accelerate everything frighteningly. The complications just go on and on. And this comes with 7 BILLION people who
will have to baste themselves as the deserts get drier in places and grow gills
as the rains get torrential in others.
We have obscene pesticide pollution. My favorite is that in the U.S. way into the
1990’s we spread 1 billion pounds of brominated nematocides, mostly methyl
bromide, 1 billion pounds!, mostly on vegetable fields. You wouldn’t want to have nearly invisible
and digestible nematodes in your carrots.
The bromine released eventually is part of the halogen mix that is
eating stratospheric ozone, letting in ultraviolet light that used to be
absorbed in the atmosphere. So, we have
lately reduced this habit to only 500 million pounds, slowly replacing
organo-bromides with 1,3-dichloropropene. Never mind that chlorine in the stratosphere is the main consumer
of ozone, that 1,3-D is injected as a gas and eventually escapes to the
air. And, any of these things
sterilizes the soil, which used to be a living thing, for decades. Farm workers (mostly Mexicans, not to worry)
suffer neurologic and skin damage from
inhaling and handling the compounds. We must have gorgeous carrots.
The environmental list includes the near disappearance of
song birds. Who here saw a warbler last
spring? Who has heard a dawn chorus of
anything but Blue Jays since 1980? We
have deforestation in the tropics amounting to a new pasture the size of
Pennsylvania every year. With that huge
acreage go thousands of species, not endangered but already extinct. Pennsylvania is the right areal comparison
for all the urban lawns in America, the most blatant source of nitrate and
phosphorus pollution in waterways from coast to coast, not to mention obscene
water waste in desert cities like Los Angeles, San Diego, Tucson and Dallas. Pavement alone is a major factor in climate
modification and reduced photosynthesis.
Oil spills, estuary diking and filling, eutrophication, radically
enhanced harmful algal blooms, shoreline revetments, sand loss at harbor
jetties, radical overfishing and extreme levels of organochlorides in
carnivores are just the outstanding marine pollution problems. Asthma from air pollution, lakes sterilized
by acid rain, conversion of rivers to chains of stagnant ponds, microwave
radiation levels totally new to organic experience. The list is just staggering, and we have put Michael Leavitt in
charge of the EPA. Christie Whitman, if you can imagine it, was too strong on
enforcing environmental laws. Strong moves are underway to stop the clean-up of
superfund sites.
A recently revealed scientific study demonstrates how naive
we are about the way the natural world links up. Scientists generating genetically modified foods, transgenic
animals, even gene-jumped people get so wrapped into the details of viral
vectors, and swapping genes about among plants and beasts from different phyla,
that the larger possibilities of their work just get lost. They often have trouble even imagining why
anyone would think the risks unacceptable.
The power they have demonstrated to proceed against all objections is
amazing. The U.S. agribusiness side of
this biomodification industry forces genetically modified foods on third world,
even European, countries that don’t want them.
It’s rather like Iraq. Just who,
exactly, do we think we are?
A guy named Mark Buller, modified the virus for a disease
called “mouse pox”. It makes mice sick;
it kills some. He installed a gene that
suppresses the mouse immune system. The
modified virus kills virtually all infected mice, even those successfully
vaccinated against the unmodified form. This possibility had actually been
discovered earlier, in Australia, in an attempt to develop a disease to kill
off mice on a continent where they are an invasive species. Dr. Buller was just following a recipe in a
paper. Dr. Buller has been roundly
criticized for telling at a meeting in Switzerland just how he did this, since
a similar modification of small pox, which is about 30% lethal to people, might
render it 100% lethal and overcome immunity from vaccinia or other vaccination
strategies. Buller defends his mouse
pox research on the grounds that (1) the disease does not affect people, and
(2) that he has found a treatment, an antiviral cocktail that saves some of the
mice.
To believe that this research is just fine, just because it
doesn’t kill people is to overlook the importance of mice and to put full faith
in biosafety level-4 glove boxes and small animal containment. Mice really matter. A Dr. Ramshaw, the Australian discoverer of
improved mouse pox (and he’s improved rabbit pox, too), has doubts about such
work. He has noted that “ecological
havoc could result around the world”, from such a disease. But, he hasn’t stopped his research, either.
There is no sign in anything that Buller has said publicly about enhanced mouse
pox to imply that he knows that mice live outside laboratories. I think our educational system must be in
serious decline.
We are tinkering with the very design of life. Some tinkers are careful, and we can hope
that those here in the room with us are among those. Then we have some veritable Dr. Frankensteins. Super mouse pox strikes me as a nightmare
waiting to get out of BSL-4.
What else? Economic inequity, growth addiction, accession
of greed are rampant in the U.S. We outstrip all the world in devotion to these
sins. ENRON exemplifies the
situation. Imagine some math and econ
grads totally focused, busy developing a computer model mimicking a process to
buy, sell and rebuy power futures in a way to decrease apparent supply relative
to demand, raise prices by a factor of three with all the increase flowing into
corporate accounts. With the model
fine-tuned, they launched it into reality. It was a hoot for the Enron
folks. They set up a number of
companies with different names and corporate charters, but they were all
Enron. Then they sold the futures
around the circle to themselves, raising the price each time, but actually
paying nothing. These were futures,
after all, and they were buying from themselves. When the futures finally came
due, and Wednesday’s power must flow on Wednesday or never, they would demand
prices from the real power suppliers at a further profit over what they last
“bought” it for, from themselves, a price already massively inflated over the
initial market. Most of these crooks
aren’t in jail, yet.
What beside Enron?
Mutual fund scandals? My God,
this church’s investments are with mutual funds found involved in shady trades
after market closings. Nike
exploitation of Thai and Vietnamese workers in factories with glue solvent for
atmospheres? Shirt sewing sweatshops in
Sri Lanka that supply Land’s End? These
schemes of exploitation that make some of us rich, have made others obscenely
rich. It is quoted that the richest 200
people have more wealth than 2 billion people at the low end of the global
economic scale. Billions of families
live on less than $500 dollars per year in real purchasing power.
Heinously inflated CEO pay has become typical in America;
it’s not restricted just to Bill Gates.
The habit has spread everywhere, even to academe. Back in 1999, America’s best paid university
president, one Judith Rodin, made $603,165 in pay and $52,392 in benefits. She’s retiring in June, 2004; apparently she
has got her pile together. Even our new
president Ray at OSU is paid the surely adequate sum of $295,000 each
year. Long-time secretaries and
accountants in my department make $22,000.
If you can do long division in your head, you will come up with a factor
of 13, which is actually modest compared to the range of remuneration in many
corporations, where a factor of 100 might apply in America. The ratio of CEO pay to that of maquiladora
workers who make actual products can be over 10,000 times. They not only rip off the poor in the third
world, they rob their shareholders, probably you.
Maquiladoras: Under
the North American Free Trade Agreement, almost all goods can cross the borders
between Mexico and the US without tariff.
And that was established at the behest of companies aware that Mexico
has 10’s of millions who will work for 5% of what they must pay Americans. Our immigration restrictions make it dicey
to employ them here, and working here, we have to pay them enough to sustain
life at Fred Meyer. So, across from the
border towns of Texas, particularly, they built some factories that the
Mexicans call Maquiladoras. People come
up the long peninsula to take jobs in these assembly plants for all sorts of
stuff, say starter motors for cars.
Families often shove young people, and the factories favor young women,
out the door with bus fare to Ciudad Juarez to take these jobs at wages
typically $4 per day, less in a day than the US hourly minimum wage. On this
they must feed and clothe themselves.
And, they must find housing, and often a bed is far from the
factory. They can’t afford bus fare, so
they have to walk, often in the dark going both ways. Out there in the almost unlighted, dusty barrens of the desert
town, they fall prey to sexual predators, who have been raping and killing them
in staggering numbers. The deaths
aren’t counted very well, but over 500 in the past 6 years. The Mexican authorities have taken very
little interest; these are throw-away people in their culture. And, they are throwaway people for us. We don’t see them alive or dead.
Who benefits? Well,
we do. That starter motor goes into
cars like Martha and I own, a Volkswagen Jetta, which was constructed in
Mexico. It’s a wonderful car and it was
cheap. The assembly plant has almost
reasonable wages, but it gets things like starting motors from suppliers who
make them in maquiladoras. The
exploitation enabled by NAFTA is just breathtaking. And, it is paralleled by importation of the labor component of a
fantastic array of goods from Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, China, China and
again China.
Our corporate masters are out to expand this scheme to all
of the hemisphere as the Free Trade Area of the Americans. That story just played in your
newspaper. The problem is that the
playing field isn’t level when a huge, high-wage, relatively rich economy is
doing a deal with struggling, already indebted developing nations.
All of this profiteering depends upon the ongoing
consumption of stunning tonnages of stuff nobody really needs. I suggest you go north to Wilsonville and
visit Fry’s Electronics. It is
enormous. It reminded me of six huge
basilicas laid down side by side, open to each other. Each hall of worship is filled with shelved aisles of computers,
digital cameras, binoculars, CD players, televisions of seventeen sizes. There are side apses with high-definition
TV’s the size of a twin bed. Before those
TV’s the faithful sit, watching DVD action, totally engrossed, so help me worshipping. Other worshipers are slowing cruising the
aisles of modems, camcorders, even toasters with brains. They are glazed. Given the 500 cars in the lot on a weekend afternoon, there must
be 1000 people spread through the holy place, but the checkout stands are
attended by very few. Some are buying,
but more have just come to worship things. Eventually, of course, some of it must be bought. I bought a printer there myself, one I
needed because, as my computer guru assured me, I could not possibly get my
broken one fixed for twice the cost of a new one. The new one says Indonesia on the back.
All this management of trade to the detriment of people is
just one side of the social debacle we are perpetrating on ourselves.
John Nichols, a prominent author, spoke at OSU on Nov.
20. He was promoting what he calls
‘liberation ecology’. His Jeremiad was
1.5 hours long, yet he came far from getting in the full catalogue of our
debacle. I haven’t done it in 25
minutes. Healthcare gaps, throwaway
people hungry in America, particularly Oregon, unemployment generating
desperation that should lead to revolution, a skid in education, Israelis
favored over Palestinians, AIDS infections rising here and everywhere, a
genocidal war in Zaire, agglomeration of all press media, renewed starvation in
Somalia, depleted aquifers, dependence on foreign oil, Guantanamo, more than 2
million Americans in prison, the list is just too long to get into a short
talk.
So, Pollyanna is dead.
She hasn’t had a chance since the election of 2000. We have not only killed her, we have driven
wooden stakes through her heart and liver, welded her coffin shut and buried it
in a garlic patch.
John Nichols began his talk at OSU with a quote from Woody
Allen. I will end with it:
More than any time in history
mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness,
the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose
correctly.