Month: July 2009

Bob Garner: ‘Nuff said’

I wrote a piece one time on a backpacking trip I was on, and closed by saying that if I could have good coffee in the morning and [Southern] Comfort at night, I could endure anything in between. A fellow named Bob chimed in that I must be a Janis Joplin fan. I didn’t get it at all. Bob told me that Janis lived each of her adult days with Southern Comfort at hand.

Later I wrote a post about a gal named Anna who was a Hillary Clinton supporter over the Left in the West. Anna was very hard to deal with. I called the post “Anna Montana“, and in it I quoted a long passage written by this same Bob. It was impassioned, thoughtful, historical and moving. Anna’s response was pathetic. I ended Bob’s words with my own … “Nuff said”. It turned out to be one of the most widely read posts here at this blog. It’s fitting that most of the words belong to Bob Garner.

I got to know Bob after that – after some hemming and hawing, we got together for coffee, and at my urging, he opened his own blog, which he called Waves and Particles. It was not about politics. It was poetry, some prose, and his photography. He didn’t do it for long, He found it too stressful to have to put something fresh up all the time.

We invited Bob out to our house for dinner, and had a fun evening. He was surprised that a curmudgeon like me had a lovely and charming wife. (He was charmed by her – that happens frequently.) We talked on into the evening. Bob often mentioned his friend Christina,who I imagined to be someone his age. Bob was in his seventies.

Later, after we told him we were moving to Colorado, Bob took us out to dinner, and we finally met Christina. Bob first met her when she was a barista at the Leaf and Bean, and took a fatherly interest in this bright and lovely girl. She’s an acupuncturist now here in Bozeman, and she and Bob shared a deep friendship. He was old and gnarly, she young and beautiful. No doubt Bob wanted to be 30 years younger.

Bob and I and another friend were to have lunch tomorrow, but Christina called this morning. Bob fell and hit his head, had some internal bleeding, and passed away.

I was at Bob’s house but one time, and now wish I had stayed longer, but we were on our way to places. His house was exactly what I expected – a small kitchen, a computer on a small desk, and books books books everywhere. I’m not clear on his life or background, and I hope others will fill me in later. I know that he lived in California, where he knew Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan. Here in Bozeman he ran a motorcycle shop, and I think he was a former biker. (I can picture that.) He was once a press secretary for our Secretary of State. He did not like my frequent criticisms of journalism. He has a son who is flying in from Africa, and a brother who is undergoing brain surgery in Pennsylvania.

Christina said that Bob did not want a memorial service. I wish they would do it anyway. I want to hear people who knew him better talk about him and his life. If anyone who reads this knows him and has a few kind words to say about Bob, please do so. There’s a far deeper and lovelier man there than I ever had time to get to know.

So long, Bob.

The ‘S’ Word

Certain terms get tossed about in discussion, among them liberal, conservative, progressive, right winger, fascist, democratic and the s-word, stupid – no – socialist. I call myself at times a liberal, a progressive, a socialist, and a conservative. Others use another term listed above.

“Conservatism” is appealing to me in this sense: Progress is slow, and achievements, though often stunning in science and engineering, are plodding and slow in politics and social structure. It is not wise to make dramatic or haphazard changes in our institutions due to unintended consequences. We should observe the example of others and respect the wisdom of those who came before us. What appears to be wise in the present may not stand the test of time.

But we have to embrace change. Piecemeal and slow is the way to go.

Conservatives tend to support “free” markets and trade. I am therefore not a conservative, as I don’t support either concept. It is here that people use the ‘s’ word against me. (“Socialist”, dammit, “socialist!”)

I reduce “free” markets to a simple analogy: markets are campfires that keep us warm. Unregulated markets are more like forest fires, destructive of everything in their path.

I am also opposed to “free”, or unregulated trade when the traders are in unequal bargaining positions. Free trade has decimated resource colonies, left Latin and Central America in extreme poverty. They cannot protect their markets or build domestic industry. They find themselves importing food and exporting cash crops from productive land owned by foreigners. It’s absurd. That’s what free trade does to poor countries – it keeps them poor.

But when bargainers each have power, free trade makes sense. Canada and Western Europe and the United States, all strong and wealthy, should trade freely among themselves.

Progressives tend to want to regulate markets, tax wealth at high rates, provide public benefits like welfare, retirement, disability and survivor benefits, education and health care. I like those ideas except that sending support checks to young and healthy individuals each month tends to corrupt them, make them lazy. I support giving them commodity-style food, health care, and education – a fighting chance, without destroying initiative.

So I am somewhat conservative and quite progressive. If you call me a socialist, it would be technically wrong, as I don’t think that government should own or manage basic industries. But in current parlance – supportive of the welfare state – the term is accurate.

So go ahead and use the s-word on me if you wish. (“Socialist”, dammit. “Socialist!”)

One term needs proper defining, as many of them masquerade as conservatives. These are our right wingers. They are not conservative in any sense – they don’t believe in gradual change, they don’t respect the wisdom of others or the past. Given the reins of power, they would throw us all into chaos. In fact, they have.

Most so-called “conservatives” these days are really thoughtless, mindless reactionary right wingers. These people are the ones most deserving of “s” word.

Is he useful?

With all this talk I do about Baucus and the Democrats and their many failings, there is this: Obama, unlike most of the aristocrats who run for national public office, has had personal experience with health insurance companies. While his grandmother was dying, insurance companies were trying to deny her care.

The president is not all-powerful – there is concentrated wealth in this country than can bring him down – him or anyone that gets out of line. But there is this – that he is a man of common origins, and he has experienced the health insurance that all of us ordinary people have to deal with. If he is the leader that his PR people projected on us in the last election, we may have hope of getting something positive our of the health care debate.

It depends on that, it depends on organizing, it depends on dealing some pain on Democrats who jump ship. But Obama might be able to deal on them a bit. He might be useful.

Ettu Tester?

Senator Jon Tester just rolled out the latest version a wilderness bill, the Forests Jobs and Recreation Act of 2009. It’s 83 pages long, 24 lines per page, and so will be easy reading. I will do so tomorrow morning, but I’m not too good at spotting devil-in-details stuff, and there’s a lot of room between the lines of triple-spaced writing.

So I’ll just toss in a note of cynicism at this point.

For years now our congressional delegation has been attempting to come up with a final solution for our final six million acres of roadless land. Ideally, they wanted the timber industry to have the timber, and environmentalists the rocks and ice. That was always Senator Max Baucus’s objective, and “Rocks and Ice” became his nickname. Later in the game came the off-road activists – the motorized vehicle crowd, and since they represent a moneyed constituency, they quickly grew in political strength.

Prior to reading this legislation and reactions to it by the usual suspects, I’m going to postulate that Tester’s bill will give a boatload of timber to the timber industry, open up wilderness to motorized users, and offer some rocks and ice to environmentalists.

I’ll be thrilled to be wrong.

American politics is a top-down system shrouded in the illusion of inclusiveness. Successful politicians walk among us commoners while fulfilling objectives handed down from on high. Republicans politicians are deceitful in that they knowingly work for the interests of the moneyed set while diddling their constituents with so-called “wedges” like abortion and gay marriage.

The job handed Democrats is a little more complicated – they have to appear to represent loyal opposition. They must foster the illusion of inclusiveness while at the same time achieving elite objectives. Democratic deceit is more sophisticated than that of Republicans. They often posture as weak and accommodating – they are nothing of the sort. They are strong, self-assured and resolute. They are simply posturing as weak to avoid having to fight hard for progressive and environmental goals. As enemies go, Democrats are far more dangerous than Republicans.

I add in haste before being reminded so that there are good Democrats, and if we were allowed three parties, those Democrats would constitute the third one. As it is, they are Democrats by necessity, and as such, have been gelded.

Ettu Tester? The old good-cop bad cop routine had Conrad Burns playing the heavy and Max Baucus the softy. Baucus was always the one who stopped wilderness legislation in its tracks, and yet many wilderness activists actually saw him as an ally. I tend to think of Baucus as clumsy and ham-handed, but he actually pulled that off, so kudos. Burns … merely postured. He had an easy job, and was well-suited for it.

Now that we have two Democrats in the senate, the roles are convoluted. Baucus, while still a looming presence, has seemingly exited, and Tester has apparently been given the job of carrying timber industry/motorized legislation. It’s going to require sophistication on his part, and malleability on the part of his followers. It has started already.

I offer up a prayer:

Please, dear God, give us the courage to fight for the things we believe in and to oppose those who oppose us, and the wisdom to know who is friend, who is enemy.

Jon Tester has a higher likability quotient than Max Baucus. He might pull this off. This is a dangerous time for Montana’s remaining roadless lands.

P.S. Excellent piece at Counterpunch (Why Does Jon Tester Want to Log Wild Montana?) (h/t ladybug) by Paul Richards, who, like myself (ta da-da-da!) is a recipient of Montana Wilderness Association Brass Lantern Award. The organization, before being coopted by Pew, had some balls.

Anyway, here’s what Candidate Jon Tester said on May 30, 2006 in the presence of his wife, son, and two other witnesses:

“If elected, Jon Tester will work to protect all of Montana’s remaining roadless areas.”

Turns out not to be true. Joke’s on us!

Walter Cronkite, RIP

When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam died, media stars everywhere commemorated his death as though he were one of them — as though they do what he did — even though he had nothing but bottomless, intense disdain for everything they do. As he put it in a 2005 speech to students at the Columbia School of Journalism: “the better you do your job, often going against conventional mores, the less popular you are likely to be . . . . By and large, the more famous you are, the less of a journalist you are.”
Glenn Greenwald

“Over the past 10 years, almost nightly, Americans have witnessed the war in Vietnam, on television. Never before in history has a nation allowed its citizens to view uncensored scenes of combat, destruction and atrocities in their living rooms, in living color. Since television has become the principal-and most believed-source of news for most Americans, it is generally assumed that the constant exposure of this war on television was instrumental in shaping public opinion. It has become almost a truism, and the standard rhetoric of television executives, to say that television, showing the terrible truth of the war, caused the disillusionment of Americans with the war. This had also been the dominant view of those governing the nation during the war years. Depending on whether the appraisal has come from hawk or dove, television has thus been either blamed or applauded for the disillusionment of the American public with the war.” (85)

There have been several studies of the matter, suggesting a rather different picture. We will return to some of these issues in discussing the coverage of the Tet offensive, but we should observe that there are some rather serious questions about the standard formulations. Suppose that some Soviet investigators were to conduct an inquiry into coverage of the war in Afghanistan to determine whether Pravda should be blamed or applauded for the disillusionment of the Soviet public with the war. Would we consider such an inquiry to be meaningful without consideration of both the costs and the justice of the venture?

Epstein notes an obvious “logical problem” with the standard view: for the first six years of television coverage, from 1962 and increasingly through 1967, “the American public did approve of the war in Vietnam” according to polls. Furthermore, in a 1967 Harris poll for Newsweek, “64 percent of the nationwide sample said that television’s coverage made them more supportive of the American effort, and only 26 percent said that it had intensified their opposition,” leading the journal to conclude that “TV has encouraged a decisive majority of viewers to support the war.”

Epstein’s review of his and other surveys of television newscasts and commentary during this period explains why this should have been the case. “Up until 1965, the network anchormen seemed unanimous in support of American objectives in Vietnam,” and most described themselves as “hawks” until the end, while the most notable “dove”, Walter Cronkite, applauded “the courageous decision that Communism’s advance must be stopped in Asia” in 1965 and later endorsed the initial US commitment “to stop Communist aggression wherever it raises its head.” In fact, at no time during the war or since has there been any detectable departure from unqualified acceptance of the US government propaganda framework; as in the print media, controversy was limited to tactical questions and the problem of costs, almost exclusively the cost to the US.

The network anchormen not only accepted the framework of interpretation formulated by the state authorities, but also were optimistic about the successes achieved in the US war of defense against Vietnamese aggression in Vietnam. Epstein cites work by George Baily, who concludes: “The resultes in this study demonstrate the combat reports and the government statements generally gave the imporession that the Americans were in control, on the offense and holding the initiative, at least until Tet of 1968,” a picture accepted by the network anchormen. Television “focused on the progress” of the American ground forces, supporting this picture with “film, supplied by the pentagon, that showed the bombing of the North and suggesting that the Americans were also rebuilding South Vietnam”–while they were systematically destroying it, as could be deduced inferentially from scattered evidence for which no context or interpretation was provided. NBC’s “Huntley-Brinkley Report” described “the American forces in Vietnam as builders rather than destroyers,” a “central truth that needs underscoring.”

What made this especially deceptive and hypocritical was the fact, noted earlier, that the most advanced and cruel forms of devastation and killing–such as the free use of napalm, defoliants, and Rome plows–were used with few constraints in the South, because its population was voiceless, in contrast with the North, where international publicity and political complications threatened, so that at least visible areas around the major urban centers were spared.(86)

As for news coverage, “all threee networks had definite policies about showing graphic film of wounded American soldiers or suffereing Vietnamese civilians,” Epstein observes. “Producers of the NBC and ABC evening-news programs said that they ordered editors to delete excessively grisly or detailed shots,” and CBS had similar policies, which, according to former CBS news president Fred Friendly, “helped shield the audience from the true horror of the war.” “The relative bloodlessness of the war depicted on television helps to explain why only a minority in the Lou Harris-Newsweek poll said that television increased their dissatisfaciotn with the war”; such coverage yielded an impression, Epstein adds, of “a clean, effective technological war, which was rudely shaken at Tet in 1968.” As noted earlier, NBC withdrew television clips showing harsh treatment of Viet Cong prisoners at the request of the Kennedy administration.

Throughout this period, furthermore, “television coverage focused almost exclusively on the American effort.” There were few interviews with GVN military or civilian leaders,, “and the Vietcong and North Vietnamese were almost nonexistent on American television newscasts.”
Chomsky/Herman, Manufacturing Consent

Is there a pill for dysfunction?

Like most everything that happens in health care today, our ideas about sickness are being shaped in the long shadows cast by the global drug giants. Yet the narrowing of the focus is making it harder for us to see the bigger picture about health and disease, sometimes at great cost to the individual, and the community. To use a simple example, if an improvement in human health was our primary aim, some of the billions currently invested in expensive drugs to lower the cholesterol of the worried well might be far more efficiently spent on enhanced campaigns to reduce smoking, increase physical activity, and improve diet.
(Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies are Turning Us All Into Patients, by Ray Moynihan, Alan Cassels – Prologue, p xv)

There are two things I would change on my first day as dictator: 1) outlaw advertising to children; and 2) outlaw advertising of prescription drugs to the general public.

The first is a no-brainer. Advertisers, who are adults schooled in the art of psychological manipulation, have a decidedly unequal bargaining position over children. These poor schmucks, these kids, should be able to enjoy their childhoods. Advertising makes them dissatisfied with what they have. That’s its whole purpose, and why it works – it makes them unhappy.

Advertising to adults about drugs is no different. We grown-ups are supposedly better able to evaluate information and make wise choices, but with drugs, absent some medical training, we are children at the feet of the ad moguls.

The book I cited above is an exposé of the world of consumer drugs – overpriced remedies to manufactured conditions. The premise is that drug companies are more concerned with inventing diseases than curing them. The chapters of the book are each devoted to a particular malady – depression, high cholesterol, menopause, ADD and ADHD, high blood pressure, PDD (premenstrual dysphoric disorder), social anxiety, IBS (irritable bowel syndrome) and female sexual dysfunction. Each is either mythical or over-hyped.

The drug companies’ business model is to 1) invent (or (exaggerate the prevalence of) the disease; 2) conduct self-financed and self-directed clinical studies of drugs to treat the disease; 3) convince a large segment of the public that they have the disease; 4) market the remedy.

For any of this to be effective requires complicity of the regulatory agency, the FDA. Incredibly, in a blatant conflict of interest, that agency depends on drug companies for much of its funding. The regulator is employed by the regulatee.

Take just one ‘disease’ – high blood pressure. There’s no consensus that the measurement we use to delineate what constitutes “high” is terribly useful by itself. It is far better that people stop smoking, eat better, and are physically active. Non-smokers who eat well and exercise can endure higher blood pressure without risk. All of the billions that we devote to drugging the population to lower the numbers would be far better spent in education on how to avoid the need for the drug at all. Far more people take high blood pressure medicine than need it.

Dr.James McCormack does presentations for senior citizens, and asks them the following:

Would you take a drug every day for five years if it …?

A: Lowered your chance of having a heart attack by 33%?
B: Lowered your chance of having a heart attack from 3% down to 2%, a difference of 1%?
C: Saved one person in a hundred from having a heart attack but there is no way of knowing in advance who that one person will be?

That’s three ways of saying the same thing. People who attend McCormack’s seminars leave feeling relieved that they are far less at risk as they are led to believe.They become less susceptible to the drug company advertising, which hits hard on A while studiously avoiding C.

Other ‘diseases’, like ADD/ADHD, are controversial at best, over-treated and over-hyped. Female sexual dysfunction, for instance, is far more likely to be a product of stress in relationships than any physical disorder. Women who feel loved and who are comfortable in their relationships are far more likely to enjoy sex than those who aren’t. There ain’t no pill for that.

There are two problems here indicative of a dysfunctional society: 1) we allow advertisers unimpeded access to the market with their crap, and 2) that our drugs are supplied by drug companies whose primary motive is their bottom line. Pharmaceutical companies long ago realized that the most profitable drugs were those taken daily for years. It was only two logical steps further that they would invent diseases and advertise the cures.

The profit motive interferes with health care delivery, and advertising interferes with information and education. Two underpinnings of capitalism lead to dysfunction. I must be a damned socialist!

If it were that easy …

Some very good work passes by our eyes every Friday might on Bill Moyers’ Journal, and July 10 was no exception. His guest was Wendell Potter, former head of corporate communications for CIGNA, the nation’s fourth largest health insurance company.

Potter had an epiphany of sorts, not unlike Dr. Peter Rost, former pharmaceutical executive who wrote a tell-all book, The Whistleblower: Confessions of a Health Care Hitman. Potter’s came when he went to a health care expedition in Wise, West Virginia.

I borrowed my dad’s car and drove up 50 miles up the road to Wise, Virginia. It was being held at a Wise County Fairground. I took my camera. I took some pictures. It was a very cloudy, misty day, it was raining that day, and I walked through the fairground gates. And I didn’t know what to expect. I just assumed that it would be, you know, like a health– booths set up and people just getting their blood pressure checked and things like that.

But what I saw were doctors who were set up to provide care in animal stalls. Or they’d erected tents, to care for people. I mean, there was no privacy. In some cases– and I’ve got some pictures of people being treated on gurneys, on rain-soaked pavement.

And I saw people lined up, standing in line or sitting in these long, long lines, waiting to get care. People drove from South Carolina and Georgia and Kentucky, Tennessee– all over the region, because they knew that this was being done. A lot of them heard about it from word of mouth.

There could have been people and probably were people that I had grown up with. They could have been people who grew up at the house down the road, in the house down the road from me. And that made it real to me.

BILL MOYERS: What did you think?

WENDELL POTTER: It was absolutely stunning. It was like being hit by lightning.

Potter recalls later riding on a CIGNA jet and eating food from gold leaf china. The contrast between West Virginia and corporate luxury troubled him deeply.

“Okay, I can’t do this. I can’t keep– I can’t.” One of the books I read as I was trying to make up my mind here was President Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage.”

And in the forward, Robert Kennedy said that one of the president’s, one of his favorite quotes was a Dante quote that, “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of moral crisis, maintain a neutrality.” And when I read that, I said, “Oh, jeez, I– you know. I’m headed for that hottest place in hell, unless I say something.”

That’s rare. Rare indeed. Most of us adapt our minds to the power structure around us, internalizing the contradictions and self-justifying as we must, shutting out everything else. I doubt any other health insurance executives in this country bother to attend health care expeditions. They are more likely to be found in their blinded offices looking over financial reports and making decisions that destroy lives. All in insulated splendor.

Sources now say that there’s a parade of lobbyists going in and out of Senator Max Baucus’s office. Recently the Washington Post disclosed (Familiar Players in Health Bill Lobbying) that Baucus is being lobbied by two former chiefs of staff, David Castagnetti, whose clients include PhRMA and America’s Health Insurance Plans, and Jeffrey A. Forbes, working now for PhRMA, Amgen, Genentech, Merck and others.

He’s completely shut off from ordinary people. He doesn’t know how bad it is, how ordinary people on Main Street don’t go see doctors because of cost, don’t have insurance because they can’t afford it or are not allowed the privilege.

Potter says that the industry has its ways. He talked about Michael Moore’s movie, Sicko, and how the insurance industry deliberately set out to blunt its effect on Capitol Hill:

WENDELL POTTER: …part of the effort to discredit this film was to use lobbyists and their own staff to go onto Capitol Hill and say, “Look, you don’t want to believe this movie. You don’t want to talk about it. You don’t want to endorse it. And if you do, we can make things tough for you.”

BILL MOYERS: How?

WENDELL POTTER: By running ads, commercials in your home district when you’re running for reelection, not contributing to your campaigns again, or contributing to your competitor.

BILL MOYERS: This is fascinating. You know [quoting from a document circulated on Capital Hill], “Build awareness among centrist Democratic policy organizations–”

WENDELL POTTER: Right.

BILL MOYERS: “–including the Democratic Leadership Council.”

WENDELL POTTER: Absolutely.

BILL MOYERS: Then it says, “Message to Democratic insiders. Embracing Moore is one-way ticket back to minority party status.”

The people who lobby Capitol Hill are not amateurs, and they do not persuade by force of reason alone. Money and relationships are part of it, to be sure.

But my dark side also thinks that there is more, much more going on that we’ll never be privy to. There are potentially damaging financial relationships and sexual dalliances, knowledge of which is available to lobbyists when needed to keep congress people in line. John Ensign was recently exposed – how many other lay awake at night knowing that someone knows something about them- that they’ve been Abscammed or given the Gary Hart treatment?

In my many dark moments of concern for Max Baucus, I wonder if he’s been caught doing something naughty, perhaps even entrapped. That is, after all, a common form of persuasion – one that we seldom hear about. We only know the fallout.

We’re shut out. Our job is to break down the barriers, make our voices heard inside the velvet curtains of the offices of Congress. It’s not an easy task. Blogs don’t do it – staffers only monitor us for damage control. Phone calls and letters don’t do much good either -these people are not fools – they know what public opinion says. They are unable to respond to it.

Protests are routinely ignored – as Russian expatriate Dmitry Orlav observed,

The American way of dealing with dissent and with protest is certainly more advanced [than that in Russia]: why imprison dissidents when you can just let them shout into the wind to their heart’s content?

Baucus, of course, ham-handedly adopted the Russian response. He’s not particularly good at public relations.

What is the answer? It is no different for us than any other country under the thumb of power – we have to rise up and cast off our rulers. The various peoples of the Soviet Union did this with apparent ease, but theirs was a different situation. Most of them did not suffer the illusion of living under a democratic regime. Americans are deliberately led to think they are in charge of their own lives by mere exercise of meaningless voting rituals every two years, replacing one set of scoundrels with another. If it were that easy, the whole planet would be free.

I don’t see change happening any time soon, I’m afraid. I talk to very few people who have a much of a level of awareness of the true nature of our society and government. There are not enough to make a difference at this time.

So the only answers are patience and education.

This could not be worse …

What could be worse for a liberal? I drove up to my favorite coffee shop, Rockford, here in Bozeman, and it had that yellow tape around it, and the front window was covered with a gray tarp. There had been a fire.

I thought of how Norm must have felt when the Hungry Heifer went down.

Anyone know what happened? Wulfy, Bob? Any ideas on what’s the second best coffee shop in Bozone?