A relative of ours is in the advertising business. That doesn’t give me much insight, as he doesn’t talk out of school much. But he has made a couple of revealing comments.

For one, he says that advertising people are in the business of changing our behavior. That may not sound like startling news – perhaps I could put it another way. “We’re subverting you.”

For another, he has spoken of the process by which an ad campaign is put together. First it goes to an inner circle – I assume that this is where they house their polling data and psychological consultants. Behavioral psychology is the mother’s milk of the ad game. People in the inner circle are the big-picture guys, the drivers. They identify critical factors in the ad campaign from which all else follows: The sublime message, and the target audience.

My favorite example is Bud Light Commercials. The ads usually contain some juvenile joke, like a refrigerator that opens on two walls. The message is more sublime than one would think, as the target audience is early teens – 13 and 14-year olds. It’s not that Anheuser Bush wants them to drink – they are doing something called “branding”. When these kids hit drinking age, they want them to be preselected for Bud Light.

Tens of thousands of people do advertising, and some are better at it than others. But successful advertising is not that which is funny or sexy – that helps. But the object is to change our behavior. Any means will do. It’s is an interesting profession – it has to deal with us on our two levels – our public selves, and our real selves. To change our behaviors, it has to talk to the real self.

American politics is nothing more than the ad business applied to a different product.

I added a little snippet to a previous post regarding Geraldine Ferraro’s nasty comments about Barack Obama, where she says that he is merely fortunate to be where he is because he is black. She’s mean and nasty, and after a respectable period of time, she quit the campaign, but is still swinging hard.

The question is, is she just a loose cannon, or is this calculated? The email I received asserted that Ferraro’s behavior was calculated, and that it contained a sublime message: blacks have it easy. The target audience is blue collar voters in Pennsylvania. Hillary is appealing to their base instincts, their real selves.

We’re all less than we present in public – we’re all a little racist, maybe a lot. Advertisers know this about us. Political campaigns are 75% sublime message, and only 25% concrete. Geraldine was on a sublime mission.

Race is a factor in the Democratic campaign. Someone is going to play the race card. But it can’t be done openly – that would backfire. It has to be done on a sublime level. The candidate that does it will be the most base and ruthless and ambitious one.

Hillary hasn’t wasted any time. She’s playing the race card. Why am I not surprised?

The fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq has passed without a lot of fanfare, as will the sixth, seventh … it will eventually be a non-event or one in which various fringe elements assemble on street corners to preach to a shrinking choir. The news media is currently in de-emphasize mode, hyping up other stories and virtually ignoring the conflict. It’s a testimony to how much they are in control of the agenda. We talk about whatever they put in our face. If there ain’t pictures, there ain’t news.

Foreign policy is mostly a staid affair attended to by the graduates of our elite schools. It’s neither fun nor pretty. The business of state and the business of corporate America are one. The world is full of crises, but only certain of them make the radar screen. Rwanda passes without notice (no American corporate interests threatened), while Iraq, a relatively calm place threatening no one becomes an emergency. We’re totally tooled up by the media and driven by the corporate agenda. The trick is to make an elite undertaking seem like a popular movement.

Iraq had been on the agenda for a long while, long before the fall of the Soviet Union, but not within our grasp until that event. Prior to 1990 Saddam Hussein had played one superpower against the other with relative skill, and there was deep resentment of him in Washington for that reason. We supported him when he invaded Iran, of course, as we are not the slightest troubled by invasions when they serve our interests. But we also made him strong – we gave him the weapons that we later claimed threatened us. Without us he would have had no chemical weaponry – the only thing that ever really threatened us (and the real reason why George H.W. Bush pulled back in 1991).

When opportunity presented itself in the post-Soviet world, as it did in 1990, we attacked, and rained hell on the country and its electrical grids and sewage systems. It was no accident – we meant to do that. They were a country with a first-world infrastructure, and we destroyed it. We spent the next ten years applying a vice, squeezing them hard, sanctioning food and medicine and killing their children while withholding the the tools necessary to repair their infrastructure. We meant to do that.

In the Clinton years we looked to get rid of those weapons and clear the way for an attack. It is here that Saddam failed his people, why he may in retrospect be seen as one of the biggest fools in history. He cooperated with weapons inspectors, canned his nuclear program, destroyed his chemical-bearing rocketry, and left his country basically defenseless.

It was then that the U.S. attacked, and it is now that we celebrate the fifth anniversary of that attack. I cited an article below that highlights how, seventeen years after the 1991 attack, we have still not managed to fix those sewers and electrical grids. It’s no accident. We mean to rain hell on them, we mean to impoverish them, we mean to make them suffer, scatter their factions, install our superbases that will permanently house 100,000 troops, control their government and watch and terrorize their internal factions as closely as Castro ever did his enemies.

We mean to be in power there. It was the goal in 1989, 1991, throughout the Clinton years and well into Bush’s term. When the weapons were finally gone, when the path to invasion and occupation was finally cleared, we moved. True, things didn’t go according to plan. It’s been costly, for us anyway. But clear heads in Washington realize that it’s a price that must be paid.

Some people marked the passing of the fifth anniversary of the invasion as if it were a significant milestone. It wasn’t. It’s no big deal. Presidents will come and go, but the troops will stay. Orators and pundits will prattle on about democracy and how we toppled an evil government – grist for the mill. It was a resource grab. It’s in its infancy.

There’ll be many more anniversaries.

The following article exposes a disgraceful situation. It is unfathomable that a country as rich as ours does not provide basic foodstuffs and medical care to the Iraqi people. We could also repair of sewage and electrical systems that we destroyed in the First Gulf War. It’s been seventeen years!

The Iraqi people, once a proud and wealthy country with subsidized health care and education to the highest levels, has been decimated by two brutal and barbaric attacks, one in 1991, the other in 2003. There are apparently no serious efforts to put the country back on its feet.

After five years it rings hollow to say that the Bush Administration is merely incompetent, or to blame the victims, as Americans are wont to do. At a certain point one has to admit the possibility that the policy might well be destruction of the country, of scattering its factions to the winds, this to allow for for permanent military occupation and thereby control of its oil.

That Iraqi people happen to live atop that oil? That is the problem. They’ve been a damned incovenience from the very start.

I challenge any who have, by display of bumper-stickers and other courageous acts, supported this war. Defend, if you would, the unconscionable human toll that has followed the military occupation and conquest of Iraq, 1990 to present.

Childhood Is Dying

Inter Press Service
By Dahr Jamail and Ahmed Ali*

BAQUBA, Mar 10 (IPS) – Iraq’s children have been more gravely affected by the U.S. occupation than any other segment of the population.

The United Nations estimated that half a million Iraqi children died during more than 12 years of economic sanctions that preceded the U.S. invasion of March 2003, primarily as a result of malnutrition and disease.

But childhood malnutrition in Iraq has increased 9 percent since then, according to an Oxfam International report released last July.

A report from the non-governmental relief organisation Save the Children shows Iraq continues to have the highest mortality for children under five. Since the first Gulf War, this has increased 150 percent. It is estimated that one in eight children in Iraq dies before the fifth birthday: 122,000 children died in 2005 alone. Iraq has a population of about 25 million.

According to a UN Children’s Fund report released this month, “at least two million Iraqi children lack adequate nutrition, according to the World Food Programme assessment of food insecurity in 2006, and face a range of other threats including interrupted education, lack of immunisation services and diarrhoea diseases.”

IPS interviewed three children from different districts of Baquba, the capital city of Iraq’s volatile Diyala province, 40 km northeast of Baghdad.

Firas Muhsin is seven, and lives in Baquba with his mother. His father was killed two years ago by militants who shot him in his shop.

Firas attends school four hours every day near his house. On rare occasions he gets to play with neighbours’ children, but always under the eyes of his mother.

Firas is allowed to move no more than ten metres from the house; his mother is afraid of strangers. Kidnapping of Iraqi children is common now, and many are believed to have been sold as child labourers or as sex workers.

Iraqi officials and aid workers have recently expressed concern over the alarming rate at which children are disappearing countrywide in Iraq’s unstable environment.

Omar Khalif is vice-president of the Iraqi Families Association (IFA), an NGO established in 2004 to register cases of the missing and trafficked. He told reporters in January that on average at least two Iraqi children are sold by their parents every week. In addition, another four are reported missing every week.

“The numbers are alarming,” Khalif said. “There is an increase of 20 percent in the reported cases of missing children over a year.”

Firas spends hours each day sitting at the door looking at people. The door is his only outlet. In the afternoon, his mother calls him inside to do his homework. After dinner, his big hope is to watch cartoons — if there is electricity from their private generator.

The mother faces a shortage of kerosene needed just for heating. “My children feel cold and I cannot afford kerosene,” she told IPS.

Many children Firas’s age do not get to school at all. According to the UN, 17 percent of Iraqi children are permanently out of primary school, and an estimated 220,000 more are missing school because they and their families have been displaced. That adds up to 760,000 children out of primary school in 2006.

These are in-country figures, and do not include the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children and youth whose education is interrupted or ended because their families have fled to other countries. UNHCR estimates that at least 2.25 million Iraqis have fled their country.

Qusay Ameen is five, and lives with his mother, father, two sisters and a brother. His father was a sergeant in the former military, and is now unemployed. He receives a monthly pension of 110 dollars. He tries to support the family by selling cigarettes on the roadside. Qusay’s mother is a housekeeper. Qusay hopes to begin school next year when he turns six.

After breakfast, always something simple like fried tomato with bread, Qusay wants to play, but he has nothing to play with but a small broken plastic car his brother found near the neighbour’s door. He spends most of the morning playing with this car. He seems happiest when he gets to visit his neighbour’s house, because they have a swing in the garden.

Like most Iraqi children now, Qusay has grown used to being in need. He rarely gets sweets, or new clothes.

The family house is incredibly small — one bedroom and a place used as both kitchen and bathroom. Everyone sleeps in one room, which is extremely cold through the winter months. There are not enough beds or covering, and everyone has to sleep close together for warmth.

The house has few basic necessities, and of course no television or useful household appliances. There is a small kerosene cooker used for both cooking and heating.

According to the UN Children’s Fund, only 40 percent of children nationwide have access to safe drinking water, and only 20 percent of people outside Baghdad have a working sewerage service. About 75,000 children are among families living in temporary shelters.

Ali Mahmood, 6, has lived with his uncle in Baquba after his parents were killed by a mortar explosion two years ago in random shelling by militants. Next year he will join primary school near his uncle’s house.

Ali’s days are alike, and quiet. His only friends are his uncle’s children. When they go to school, he simply spends his time alone. It does seem the uncle’s family is not able to look after him as well as his own might have. His uncle Thamir is doing his best, but life is difficult, and Thamir has responsibility for a big family.

Ali is deprived of just about everything in childhood; he has no place to play, or things to play with. And he has nobody to think of his future.

And already, he has responsibilities waiting; he has been told he must take care of his younger brother when he grows up.

Firas, Qusay and Ali are all children, but none the way children should be.

(*Ahmed, our correspondent in Iraq’s Diyala province, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who has reported extensively from Iraq and the Middle East)

Democrats often tell us that we have to support their right-leaning candidates in order to get some of what we want. Settling for less is their way of existence. So when Steve Kelly of Bozeman ran against Dennis Rehberg in 2002, Democrats dropped him like a hot stone. Acquiescence is not Kelly’s strong suit.

Kelly is a bright and creative man, and would have made an excellent Congressman. His passion is the environment, and he is one of the founders of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, an aggressive and non-compromising environmental group. He had a letter in yesterday’s Bozeman Chronicle (not available on line) about environmental toadies.

Back when Marc Racicot was governor and Republicans controlled the legislature, they came up with a scheme for dealing with environmentalists called “Consensus Councils”. The idea was to get everyone to sit down at a table and talk out their problems, with government officials acting as mere facilitators. However, in cynical Racicot fashion, the councils were soon turned on their ears, and facilitators were trumpeting concessions by environmentalists that had never been made. It was a triangulation process designed to work against them. These were Clinton times.

Consensus Councils have gone away, but the concept lives. Recently here in Bozeman quiet trail users lost their shirts in a facilitated set of meetings put on by Gallatin National Forest. Trails formerly devoted to quiet use were turned over to motorized users for the majority of the time. True to form, GNF trumpeted the loss of quiet time as a wonderful achievement of accommodation by trail users.

Which brings us to Steve Kelly. He’s not a consensus guy. He’s a fighter. He wrote to the Chronicle in response to two op-eds put up by Bob Ekey of the Wilderness Society, who is making a big deal about “civility” and “collaboration”. Kelly doesn’t care for Ekey’s tendency to seek agreement by yielding ground.

Civility requires politeness and courtesy, as well as an understanding that some independent-minded people have no interest in abandoning strongly held positions based on principles. Excoriating “radicals” because they won’t compromise is hardly a recipe for collaborative success. This kind of father-knows-best attitude breeds all sorts of mistrust and discontent and fuels the myth that all environmentalists are elitist.

Indeed. The faulty logic behind the consensus process is that the answer always lies somewhere in the middle. In the Gallatin trails dispute, for example, it was perfectly appropriate to insist on no motorized vehicles on our quiet trails. But that position was seen as radical. As soon as the quiet trail users sat down at the table to negotiate, they lost.

I believe we have institutions and political processes in place that need reform. What we don’t need is a substitute (stakeholder) process that relieves our elected public officials and agencies of their mandatory duty to make tough political and policy decisions.

And that is the driving force behind these consensus processes – public officials are intimidated by the noisy, belligerent factions, usually the motorized crowd. Fearing to take them on, and also fearing back-door backlash from higher-up elected officials (usually the late Conrad Burns, but also Dennis Rehberg), forest service and other public employees have opted for the collaboration process. It’s a way of dodging bullets.

What’s wrong with decisions based on sound economic and scientific evidence, and the rule of law? Public participation is the mechanism anyone, and everyone, can use to keep the pressure on during government decision-making processes.

Protecting wilderness, old growth habitat, lynx and grizzly bear habitat and key bull trout watersheds is controversial business. We don’t give up, and we don’t give in without a fight. In this age of political correctness, there are still a few environmentalists out there who believe in results.

Being well-liked by one’s opponents is so conveniently compromising.

Kelly pretty much sums up the problem we have with Democrats, in addition to milquetoasty environmental groups. He underlines why that party abandoned him in 2002. He’s everything modern Democrats aren’t, bold and thorough and possessing courage of convictions. Both the party and the environmental community could use a few more like him.

I frankly don’t think that either Obama or Clinton will get us our of Iraq. Look at the stakes – they are much too high. We invaded to take control of their oil and establish permanent military bases. Those were bipartisan goals – it is no accident that Clinton voted for the war. She still supports it. Most likely Obama too. Candidates don’t get much media attention unless they are ballplayers, and Obama has never lacked for media attention.

So we’re not about to reverse course based on election year politicking. It’s just not in the cards. It’s about as likely as renegotiation of NAFTA.

Nonetheless, I liked this ad. Emotionally, and for no good reason, I’m pulling for Obama. Clinton strikes me as having that hungry look, even if not lean.

1. A guy with a company that makes razors went to his boss and said “Hey – I know a way to double our sales. Put two blades in each razor.” (They’re up to five now.)

2. A guy with a beer company went to his boss and said “Hey – let’s take some of the calories out of beer so people will drink more of it. We can charge the same price.”

I am privileged to speak out on the man who represents me in Helena, Representative Roger Koopman of Bozeman, our own version of Eric Coobs. Koopman, I think by all standards and definitions, is a wingnut. He wiles away his hours in Helena proposing legislation that goes nowhere while at the same time alienating the people he has to work with to get anything accomplished. He’s a classic crank. Even when he speaks in a friendly manner and tries to sound reasonable, I can feel the rage beneath. This is not a sane man.

Koopman’s latest gambit is an attack on his fellow Republicans, namely, those who were so bold as to make a deal with Governor Schweitzer to formulate a workable budget in 2007. Koopman, in the name of ideological purity and calling them “socialists”, is forming a movement to run true believers against them. It’s going to be somewhat comical.

The list was complied based on a voting index released last fall by Missoula law professor Rob Natelson. Here’s his hit list: Llew Jones (Conrad), Walter McNutt (Sidkeny), Duane Ankney (Colstrip), Jesse O’Hara (Great Falls), Bill Glaser (Huntley), Bruce Malcolm (Emigrant), John Ward (Helena), Carol Lambert (Broadus), Elsie Arntzen (Billings), Gary McLaren (Victor), and Mike Milburn (Cascade).

It’s hard to predict the fallout here. Koopman is a fringe player, though not necessarily marginalized within his own party. Primary battles between the socialists listed above and hard right foes could well further polarize the party and give the Democrats a workable majority. Maybe in Montana, unlike Washington, a majority can get something done.

Another possible outcome: The Republican Party regroups, expels its far-right radical elements, and once again becomes a bastion for common-sense conservatives.

Somehow, I don’t see that happening. These are tempestuous times, and the extremes rule. More likely, Koopman and Natelson will have modest success, and we end up with another standoff in Helena with the far right entrenched, and the reasonable people advised, quoting Billings Senator Mike Lange, to shove it up their asses.