No Party For Europe

October 25, 2011
1
Humiliating Trichet
No Party For Europe
by DEAN BAKER

Jean Claude Trichet will be retiring as head of the European Central Bank at the end of the month. He will step into retirement having wreaked the sort of destruction on the European economy that hostile powers can only dream about. Tens of millions of people across the eurozone countries are unemployed or underemployed because of his mismanagement of Europe’s economy. Meanwhile the world teeters on the brink of another financial crisis because of the ECB’s failure, along with the IMF, to effectively address the sovereign debt crisis. Most incredible of all, Trichet probably thinks he has done a good job.

This last point really is central because the ECB, like much of the economics profession, continues to be controlled by a bizarre clique that believes that the most important, and possibly only, goal that a central bank should pursue is a 2 percent inflation target. By this measure, the ECB has done reasonably well, even the as the euzo zone economy has crumbled around it. After all, inflation in the eurozone economies rarely exceeded 3 percent and averaged well under the 2 percent target over the last decade.

However, the low and stable eurozone inflation rate is not going to provide much help to the 21.2 percent of the Spanish work force that is unemployed or the 14.6 percent of the Irish workforce, nor the millions more elsewhere in the eurozone who have lost their jobs as a result of the collapsed of the housing bubbles that the ECB let grow unchecked.

If Trichet and his colleagues at the ECB had been awake, they would have noticed that real house prices in Spain had more than doubled between 1998 and 2006. The same was true in Ireland. There was no remotely comparable increase in rents, strongly indicating that this run-up was not being driven by the fundamentals of the housing market.

And in both countries, the massive run-up in house prices was having the predictable effect on the economy. Both countries had huge building booms and surging consumption, as homeowners spent based on their bubble-generated housing wealth. In both cases, this led to extraordinary balance of trade deficits that were clearly unsustainable for advanced economies.

How could Trichet and his colleagues have failed to have noticed these housing bubble and the economic distortions that they were creating? Or, insofar as they did notice them, did they have a theory whereby economies can seamlessly replace the 10 percentage points of GDP worth of demand, or thereabout, that was being generated by the housing bubbles in these countries?

It didn’t help that much of the rest of the eurozone also had bubbles in their housing markets (Germany was the big exception); although they were not creating quite as large distortions as in Spain and Ireland. Nor did it help matters that important non-eurozone countries, like the United States and the United Kingdom, also had bubbles in their housing market and that the whole process was being driven by over-leveraged banks.

It is very difficult to see how a central banker in the eurozone could have looked at the economic situation in 2004, 2005, or 2006 and not be concerned about the impending disaster that eventually overtook these economies. The warning signs were all over the place and flashing bright red everywhere, but rather than taking the regulatory and monetary actions necessary to deflate these bubbles – including giving clear and persistent warnings – Trichet and his colleagues focused on their 2 percent inflation target.

Remarkably, even after the collapse of the bubbles, with the eurozone economies smoldering in the wreckage, the ECB continues to be obsessed with its 2 percent inflation target. While the Federal Reserve Board lowered its overnight money rate to zero and has had several rounds of quantitative easing to try to reduce longer terms rates, the ECB never lowered its short-term rate below 1.0 percent. It actually raised it to 1.5 percent last spring in order to stem inflationary risks.

More recently, along with its troika partners the European Commission and the IMF, the ECB has had the whole euro zone financial system, and indeed the world financial system, teetering on the brink of disaster as it tries to squeeze additional concessions out of Greece and other debt-burdened economies. While the betting is that a resolution to the debt crisis will be reached before the whole system explodes, the ECB and its partners are imposing enormous risks on everyone else for concessions that are of questionable value, at best.

It would be tragic if Mr. Trichet is allowed to go into retirement thinking that he has done a good job. In terms of public service, Trichet’s performance ranks a notch or two below Michael Brown watching New Orleans drown when he was head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Humiliating Trichet is not just a question of justice or morality; although is painful to see someone who caused so much harm escape with impunity. More importantly, it is an issue of incentives. The people given responsibility for economic policy should be held accountable for their performance. If Trichet is toasted into retirement, we have no reason to expect any better performance from his successor. That would be a real disaster.

Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of False Profits: Recovering from the Bubble Economy . He also has a blog, ” Beat the Press ,” where he discusses the media’s coverage of economic issues.

A version of this article was published by The Guardian.

When Push Comes to Shove on the Zero Line Love Fest in the Hindu Kush

October 25, 2011
2
When Push Comes to Shove on the Zero Line
Love Fest in the Hindu Kush
by PAUL FITZGERALD and ELIZABETH GOULD

In the wild gyrations surrounding the Obama administration’s AfPak scenario, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent swing from “Blunt Warning,” to Pakistan, to sudden love fest in the Hindu Kush betrays the underlying schism in American foreign policy-thinking that is losing America its “empire” by the minute. Despite the Secretary of State’s recent conciliatory statements on her visit to Islamabad regarding Pakistan’s ISI and their support for the Haqqani Network, U.S. tensions with Pakistan will remain high. In the months since the U.S. Navy Seal raid that killed Osama bin Laden, 55 cross border rocket attacks (a substantial increase from the same period a year ago) have been waged on U.S. forces in Afghanistan across what the U.S. military refers to as the Zero line with Pakistan. Afghanistan’s sovereignty has routinely been violated since Pakistan’s creation in 1947. In fact, Pakistan’s sole value as a Cold War ally of the U.S. was to shore up what western military analysts called, “the crescent of crisis” as a strategically pivotal “frontline state” against the Soviet Union. During the Cold War Pakistan gained a reputation for inflating the threat of Soviet subversion as part of the Washington money game and was duly rewarded for playing. Pakistan’s repressive military bedeviled Afghanistan’s moderate government at every turn, saw Moscow’s hand behind every public demonstration and independence movement and used the specter of a grand Soviet design, to suppress them all. The old adage that most countries have a military but Pakistan’s military has a country is perhaps the most useful in understanding the ongoing standoff. Pakistan’s military operates its own business conglomerates which run thousands of businesses. During the 1980s under General Zia Ul Haq, the military employed its own trucking company the National Logistics Cell to ship weapons along with opium to and from the port of Karachi. Had the U.S. vigorously fostered democratic movements in the 1960s, 70s and 80s instead of empowering a succession of ruthless military regimes and radical Islamists in the name of Cold War containment, today’s Pakistan would be a different place. During the 8 years of the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” Pakistan pretended to be an ally and the U.S. pretended to believe them. Now the U.S. pays for its Cold War policy-blindness and Bush-era delusion with the blood of its soldiers and diplomats as well as its tax dollars to service a hopelessly failed policy and a Pakistani military that acts more like an enemy than an ally.

Hillary Clinton’s Islamabad statements stand in stark contrast to her stern warning on a recent visit to Kabul that Pakistan’s continued support for terrorism would incur “a very big price.” Recently, former CIA officer and senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, Bruce Riedel recommended that the United States should now apply a policy of “containment” to Pakistan, whereby the U.S. would reduce aid, cut military assistance “deeply” and resort to a “more hostile relationship” in order to restrain the Pakistani Army’s ambitions.

Riedel’s use of the premier Cold War term is a sign that some in the administration are shifting away from supporting Pakistan in its game with arch-rival India. But is America’s Secretary of State so under pressure from the Pakistan lobby in Washington that she dare not sway from a U.S. Cold War alliance whose questionable benefits have long since come and gone? The idea that such an antiquated Cold War practice as containment would even be an option when Pakistan is already waging a de facto Hot War on American and Afghan forces, should be taken as another sign of how far out of touch the debate in Washington is.

According to numerous scholars, the Cold War should never even have happened in the first place and was renounced by no less than its creator George Kennan, who believed at the time that any policy of containment should have been limited to political measures, not military. Senator J. William Fulbright in a 1972 New Yorker article bemoaned the flawed assumptions behind the Cold War and how the “perniciousness” of the ideology of the Truman Doctrine gave rise to the “distortion and simplification of reality.”

According to America’s own military thinkers, mechanical Cold War planning and programming made America’s defense strategists virtual prisoners to static and obsolete methods and practices that masqueraded as a coherent defense strategy after the Cold War. But this strategy proved wholly inappropriate to the complex, evolving geopolitical environment that gave rise to 9/11.

Yet, ten years later the U.S. continues to pursue policies toward Afghanistan and Pakistan that not only rely on these Cold War tools, but fail to accept that even in their own time these tools were criticized as unsound and not based in reality.

Pakistan takes American money but acts toward the United States as if it has nothing to lose by harassing the NATO engagement and supporting the Haqqani network. Pakistan allows the transport of NATO equipment to Afghanistan by caravan from the port of Karachi, but curries favor with China’s military to offset American pressure. Pakistan plays a waiting game as the U.S. draws down its forces, believing it can resume its pre 9/11 dominance of Afghanistan once the U.S. leaves. But with the U.S. lobbying Afghan president Hamid Karzai to forge a permanent relationship with the U.S. military, Washington’s dysfunctional Cold War relationship to Pakistan will have to give.

Pakistan’s problems run deep and wide. According to Harvard’s Dr. Charles Cogan, who served as chief of the CIA’s Near East-South Asia division in the directorate of operations from 1979 until 1984, Pakistan isn’t just a bad marriage for the U.S., it’s a country that should never have happened. Pakistan’s military fears a repeat on its western frontier of its 1971 war in East Pakistan (Bengal) which grew into a war with India and established the breakaway state of Bangladesh. It uses Pashtun Taliban to suppress Pashtun and Baluch independence movements. Its support for Islamism undermines Pakistan’s fragile secular state and threatens to bring it down, all the while provoking another and perhaps final war with India that would undoubtedly go nuclear.

Pakistan’s military is driven to win the endgame for control of the gateway to Central Asia, rule Afghanistan and fulfill its destiny as the Islamic Land of the Pure. From a position of pure self-interest, it would be to America’s benefit to reassess the entire policy and the assumptions under which the United States operates in Central Asia, support a strong Afghanistan along with the independence movements of Baluchistan, Pashtunistan, Sindh and Kashmir and find a workable solution that neutralizes the Pakistani military’s control of state policy.

A frustrated Obama administration wants to get reelected in 2012 but is committed to staying in Afghanistan long after 2014. All that is needed now to justify a prolonged occupation of the Hindu Kush is an incident that will finally put the dysfunctional U.S./Pakistan relationship to the ultimate test.

If push comes to shove over Zero line, both may soon get more than they bargained for.

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story and Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire . Visit their website here.

The Closing of the American Mind

October 25, 2011
7
Occupy Boston
The Closing of the American Mind
by VIJAY PRASHAD

I. That Strange Brown Man, Gandhi.

Gandhi is standing in the bustle of Occupy Boston. The wry smile, the flapping ears, and the walking stick in hand. A sign flags near his knees, “The world holds enough for everyone’s NEED, but not enough for everyone’s GREED.” People rush past him, walking on the wooden planks that work as the walkways between tents in Dewey Square. These people are temporary heroes, the people who have walked away from their ordinary lives to seek shelter together in the public square. Some of these people are happy, pleased to be together and to model a different social life. Others are already cold, already a bit dispirited. The days have begun to drag on. The novelty will wear off. It is precisely to ward off a drop in morale that Gandhi warned his fellow activists, “If patience is worth anything, it must endure to the end of time. And a living faith will last in the midst of the blackest storm” (Young India, June 17, 1926).

Quakers from the Peace Abbey in Sherborn, Massachusetts, brought the statue to the site. They had made it as a gift to Goldman Sachs. On October 28, 2010, the Abbey workers and children from the Life Experience School came down to the Goldman office on High Street, not far from Dewey Square. They wanted to install their statue of Gandhi as a beacon against Greed. Goldman’s people declined the offer, so Gandhi was then chained to the doors of the building. He didn’t last long, went back to the Abbey, and then, when Occupy Boston started, came to his place amongst the protestors.

II. The Wrong Dewey.

Occupy Boston is in Dewey Square, in the canyons of finance – the Boston Federal Reserve, PNC Bank, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America (BofA. BofA seems never to leave the bad side of history. I remember spending nights at a shantytown in California twenty five years ago, protesting the Bank ofApartheid, as we called it, for its considerable investment in South Africa.

On September 30, about three thousand people marched from the Boston Common to the BofA office at 100 Federal Street to protest against the Bank’s aggressive foreclosure practices (particularly in majority minority neighborhoods). The Right to the City Alliance drew upon its impressive coalition of unions and community organizations to bring out the outraged, who blocked the doors to the BofA’s offices. The police arrested twenty-four people, including Presley Obasohan of Dorchester, MA, who says, “I blocked the doors at Bank of America so that my neighbors and me can stay in our homes. So many people have been thrown out of their homes or lost their jobs needlessly because of mistakes made by Wall Street Banks. Yet it’s the banks who are now rewarded with billions in tax refunds. It’s time to fight back.”

There was not much talk of foreclosures at Occupy Boston when I went there.

There were a few signs to mark the massive military frontier of the United States. Dewey Square, the site of Occupy Boston, is named forAdmiral George Dewey, the Civil War hero who led the charge into Manila during the 1898 Spanish-American War. Dewey’s central feat was first to take advantage of the desperate help afforded by the Filipino rebels (led by Emilio Aguinaldo), and then when the Spanish were in retreat to force Aguinaldo into submission to American authority. The Square itself bears the marks of American imperialism, and of the military debt that will transfer across the generations. Despite this, there was not much talk of militarism and military debt among the Occupiers.

The main issue at Occupy Boston is of a different kind of debt, those owed by young people who took out impossible student loans. Thetotal student debt in the United States is now over $1 trillion. It weighs down on the imagination of the youth, for whom education is reduced to a currency for future earnings (so as to pay off the debt) rather than an encounter totransform their intellectual horizons. This is the kind of crisis that would make sense to Vermont’s other Dewey, John, whose ideas about education are now relegated to the lonely corners of the library. In 1920, in his Democracy and Education, Dewey warned against vocational or trade education, which is the direction in which our students are now perforce to go. If vocational education dominated the curriculum, Dewey wrote, “education would become an instrument of perpetuating unchanged the existing industrial order of society, instead of operating as a means of transformation.” Any education that leads to the simple act of learning a trade or a skill is “illiberal and immoral,” Dewey argued, because the graduates “do what they do, not freely and intelligently, but for the sake of the wage earned.”

Today, the situation is more unpleasant. There are fewer wages to be earned. Yet, there is greater need for a radical imagination.

Mike, who is fixing his tent, tells me that he went to a community college with good grades. He had no scholarship and no means to pay with his family’s savings. This meant college loans. It also meant that Mike had to work a full-time job over the weekends. The financial crash of 2008 washed away the meager financial aid he had begun to receive. Mike had to drop out. He had no degree. But he had $12,000 in student debt. Nothing, not even bankruptcy, wipes out this debt. Mike went to work, trying to earn enough money both to pay off his debt and to save to go back to school. This is a Sisyphean task. Mike’s anger is against the banks, the “invisible organizations.”

Twenty-nine percent of students, such as Mike, worked more than thirty-five hours per week, and a majority of them (fifty-three percent), again like Mike, failed to graduate largely, but not wholly, because they simply did not have the time to read, to study.

A few tents down sits Drew, who like many other homeless people wants to go to Florida, where it is warmer. Drew worked at Costco, which recently fired him. “I lost everything,” he says. The system is trying to “eliminate the middle class,” he pointed out, giving him no chance to go to school or to get a stable job. Drew is afraid of debt. He’s right. It is corrosive.

I find Jen sitting very quietly. Debt came to her purposefully. She carries student loans in the tens of thousands. I can see it in her eyes. “You can be anything you want,” she says of what she was told when younger. “That’s a lie.” She comes from a middle-class suburb of Boston, where upward mobility has been blocked by the financial crisis. “Where I come from there is no community,” she says, repeating William Whyte (The Organization Man, 1956) who said of such suburbs, “it remains a development, more than a community.” It is the Occupy encampment that has allowed Jen to have a feeling of community, and hope that somehow, as if byevaporation, the experience of this protest will remove her debt.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York pointed to the $1trillion figure of student debt ($100 million of student loans taken out in2010, twice the amount from 2005). Real wages in the United States have remained stagnant since 1973. To send their children to college, families have taken out second mortgages on homes, taken out loans against their future income or else allowed their charges to take out loans on their own. There is no capacity to pay for college through earnings and savings (as the CollegeBoard has been warning us since at least 2005). Between 1992 and 1999, annual borrowing for students at four-year public colleges rose by 65 percent, from $1800 to $3000. This meant that the average debt for a four-year cycle rose in this period to $12,000. With this burden, a congressional study noted, “the students from low income families are often unable to support loans after graduation.” The understatement buried in the phrase “unable to support loans” is pointed: it means that students leave college just barely out of their teens in a financial situation that resembles bankruptcy.

Burdened by student debt and afraid of the jobs crisis, students are simply not able to enter college to expand their horizons. In 2006, Helen Lowery of Boston University told the Christian Science Monitor, “I really want to work in advocacy law, but from a practical perspective that’s not going to happen. I just won’t be able to pay back my loans.” The freedom to think is encroached upon by the encumbrances of money. This is before the current financial crisis. It is worse now.

This is the Closing of the American Mind.

III. Free Education.

Pankaj Mehta, a theoretical physicist, invited me to speak at Occupy Boston as part of the Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture Series. The Series is the first offering of the Free School University, which is poised to start offering regular classes, and perhaps offering degrees. Such an exercise will permit us to think of the de-commodification of education, study that has not been turned into a product to buy and sell.

Conversations at Occupy Boston revive ideas of free education. I broached it to those I met. The idea does sound ludicrous. However, many countries offer either free education or what amounts to free education (between 70 and 90 percent of the college costs paid for): Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey. The governments of Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom contribute between 55 and 70 percent of college costs (but not for long in Cameron’s England). The tuition and fees to all public institutions of higher education in the United States is somewhere in the ballpark of $25 billion (according to the Labor Institute). That is a small proportion of the cost of the wars ($7.6 trillion since 9/11) and of corporate tax breaks (of which, deferral on foreign income is by itself $1 trillion). The cost of higher education is a fraction of the $1.35 trillion to $3 trillion, which is range of the cost of the Bush and Obama tax cuts.

So much hidden money, so much enforced austerity.

VIJAY PRASHAD is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT His most recent book, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, won the Muzaffar Ahmad Book Prize for 2009. The Swedish and French editions are just out. He can be reached at: vijay.prashad@trincoll.edu

What is to be Done in England and Ameirca The Arab Spring and the Coward’s War on Libya

October 25, 2011

What is to be Done in England and Ameirca
The Arab Spring and the Coward’s War on Libya
by TED HONDERICH

The thoughts in this essay are those touched on in a public conversation with Tariq Ali in The Gower Street Lecture Series, arranged by Waterstones Bookshops and held in University College London. Tariq’s knowledge of the societies of the Arab Spring is wonderfully greater than mine. His judgement of their likely futures is better too. His audacity, indeed his proper arrogance, is a way to truth. They were a way to truth in the student occupation of the London School of Economics in 1968. They are recommendations of his books. I will be spending more time with two of those, The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity and The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad. In our conversation, we did not disagree about much. But if I am indeed tempted to join him in a judgement on Obama, I am not quite so confident that Obama is already to be damned forever. Nor, with respect to what is to be done by us in the current state of the world, did I get a hold on why Tariq asserts there can be no real alternative, including civil disobedience, to what he called ‘broad social movements’ like those in South America.

It is reported that Gaddafi asked those killing him “Do you know right from wrong?”

Do we? Do we know it with respect to the new revolutions from Tunisia onward, and our air war in Libya, and our inspiring democracies? By what means do we know right from wrong about them?

Analytic philosophy, including moral and political analytic philosophy, is not deep, airy or arcane. It has nothing to do with such performers as Ludwig Wittgenstein in Cambridge past, or French self-publicists of the present day. It is just a concentration on the logic of ordinary intelligence.

That logic consists in three things — clarity by such means as analysis, and consistency and validity, and completeness. Analytic philosophy of course doesn’t own this logic — what it does is concentrate more on it than on questions and propositions of fact. Say questions of probability, say the probability of different outcomes of political action, maybe of civil disobedience or terrorism.

Analytic philosophy is my line of life, and so, as you guess, I’m a shorter on factual knowledge than political scientists, labourers in institutes of Arab and Islamic studies, historians, and good journalists.

But I am reassured a little by the lack of logic, as it seems to me, on the part of most adversaries on the Right in politics. I am reassured too by what is in fact the mixed nature of some supposedly factual disciplines. Almost all economics, to take the outstanding example, is in fact is no pure science. It is more than half morals and politics, in fact a pompous politics of capitalism that in 2011 is helping to drag down the world. It includes the illusion or delusion or indeed grandiose disorder that is the conviction that our capitalism is the only possibility.

It would be inane to take the utterances of our George Osborne, our Chancellor of the Exchequer, our elected economist-in-chief, as factual utterances as to what is necessary and what is impossible. For him to appear on the telly is for me to remember a story, no doubt true. As an Oxford undergraduate he switched to the B.A. course in Modern History rather than plough on with PPE — Philosophy, Politics and Economics — because he couldn’t understand the economics.

RIGHT AND WRONG, A LIST OF FAILURES

We all need a general principle of right and wrong in order to keep ourselves from self-deception on any subject, to keep ourselves from failing to see that we are cheating on behalf of ourselves, or a social class, or the political class.

One of these is the Happiness principle of the Utilitarians. It is that we must have the possible society with the largest total of happiness, well-being or satisfaction, however it is shared out. But happiness or the like is left vague, and open to manipulation. And the greatest total of happiness might depend, despite protestations and bits of theory to the contrary, on the existence of a slave class, or on the state punishment of the innocent. Also, Utilitarianism has lately included the good idea that the badly-off are to be helped partly not by changing the world but by changing their feelings about it, by way of neuroscience and psychoanalysis.

Another large principle is that of Equality — everbody to be equal in terms of something. What? Happiness? But in any case surely everybody being equal at a certain level of something is not preferable to everybody being at a higher although unequal level? You didn’t have to be a neo-conservative to see that. It wasn’t neo-conservatives who saw it first.

A principle of Desert or Retributive Justice then? Everybody getting what they deserve? Everybody getting their just rewards? Any arguable version of that principle reduces to something. It takes what someone deserves to be what it is right that he has. That is no answer to anything. It is the principle that what is right is what is right.

To those traditional answers to the general question of right and wrong must be added the stuff of political thinkers in the traditions of conservatism and liberalism.

Conservatism, in fact, is unique among political traditions in having no arguable principle to justify the self-interest that it shares with us all. Certainly it cannot be, as used to be said, a principle against change — remember Thatcher. She changed things. Certainly there is no arguable principle in talk of freedom, since what is necessary is a principle for preferring the freedoms desired by conservatives to the freedoms desired by others. Conservatives used to say, taught by the greatest book of conservatism, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, that conservatism’s principle consists in being against something. Revolutions. They’re not saying it now.

Liberalism is a tradition of better intentions — but not intentions taken forward with resolution. In England it is the middle class pretending not to be looking after itself. It is bumble, about as vague as conservatism. Its founding father in England, John Stuart Mill, declared that you are to be free from state interference, at liberty, unless you harm someone else. Then he did not say what harm consists in. He was a typical liberal in that.

Which brings us down to the politicians of our own day.

HIERARCHIC DEMOCRACY, PUSHERS’ DEMOCRACY

The refrain of our politicians is that in deciding on right and wrong for our society, we must go by our democracy.

The fundamental and plainly absolutely essential justification for all democracy must be that this decision-procedure’s outputs are better than those of any other decision-procedure, say dictatorship — better in terms of laws, policies, institutions, whole societies, the state of the world.

The argument in support is that two heads are better than one and more heads are better than two. Or more wants expressed in a decision-procedure are better than fewer. The argument obviously depends on equality and freedom in the democracy. That is, the argument depends on the heads having the possibility of equal expression of what is in them.

But our particular democracy is hierarchic or pushers’ democracy. In it the highest economic tenth of population has more than a thousand times the political power and influence of the bottom tenth.

It is another glory of our science of economics, by the way, and of our political science, that it goes in for a lot of quantification, but not quantification of political power and influence in relation to economic power and influence. We don’t have to join our betters in this reluctance. A thousand to one is about right. Remember the wealth of the bottom tenth is about zero.

Is our democracy, if absurdly unequal, still a decision-procedure of freedom? No. Not at all. Important freedom requires and varies with equality. If you and I are in dispute, and we become unequal in that you have a gun and I don’t, my freedom reduces to zero. Something the same is true with money. The argument for our hierarchic democracy that two heads are better than one and more heads better than two is just an indicator of the level of public intelligence and moral intelligence in hierarchic democracy.

I myself say three cheers even for pushers’ democracy when compared with an authoritarian state of the Right. I say no cheers for pushers’ democracy when compared to a democracy of equality and freedom, a possible democracy we are not right now in sight of having.

I don’t know how many cheers to give pushers’ democracy when compared with some actual or possible authoritarian states of the Left.

Cuba still exists. They live longer there. They all have healthcare. They are all full members of their society. They can read. Cuba is in such ways unique in that part of the world and elsewhere. Denmark is relevant too, if differently relevant. That Cuba and Denmark are small does not detract from their great achievements.

The Soviet Union existed in an unprecedented extent of fairness until a leaders lost his moral nerve and lost the Cold War, which was not in itself an argument in which the other side was better. It was nothing of the sort. A battle is not an experiment either.

I have never been any kind of Marxist, Green or otherwise, having been put off Marxism by the high Hegelian theory, including the theory of history in my old colleague Jerry Cohen’s defence of it. So I have been saved from doctrinal commitment to the Soviet Union.

I am not saved from the difficulty of thinking about its recommendations by the ignorance, passion, lies, propaganda and of course statistics of those who condemn it — in blinded America above all. There the sludge of manufactured convention fills and stops the stream of intelligence.

At the least the Soviet Union raises an awful question about the necessity of means to ends. The necessity of terrible means to ends. It also raises a question about the moral guilt of those opponents of the Left who make the means of the Left irrational. The opponents of what is not rational force or violence are as responsible for it as its agents.

What is needed in place of dim incantation in favour of hierarchic democracy, or any of the other stuff of most politicians, certainly the economic wisdom, is a clear and arguable principle of right and wrong, a determinate principle, not any kind of metaphor. Nothing else but such a principle will make for consistency and hence intelligence. Nothing else will make for the defeat of selfish self-deception.

This has to be the case with any conclusion on the Arab Spring as well as on everything else — say what is happening now in England. Is there a principle that issues in or anyway contributes to the proposition that an economic depression is being converted into a vicious immiseration of the poor and a victimization of all the poorer? Is there a principle that supports the proposition that we live in an historic period of awfulness as certain to be recorded in future history books as its awful predecessors are recorded in decent history books now, say the enclosures of common land and massacres and then the genocides?

THE PRINCIPLE OF HUMANITY

I repeat that an explicit principle of right and wrong is absolutely necessary — with unvague central concepts and other necessary strengths. A principle therefore resistant to self-deception — and of course resistant to the deception of some by others.

Start towards such a thing with definition of bad lives.

Bad lives, in a sentence, are lives of deprivation or frustration in terms of six great human goods, the fundamental desires of human nature, of course interrelated. The great goods in one arguable list are (1) a decent length of conscious life, (2) bodily quality of life, (3) freedom & power, including political freedom and power, (4) respect & self-respect, (5) the goods of relationship, (6) the goods of culture.

The Principle of Humanity is that the right thing as distinct from others — the right action, practice, institution, government, society, possible world — is the one that according to the best judgement and information at the time is the rational one, in the sense of being effective and not self-defeating, with respect to the end of getting and keeping people out of bad lives.

It is the only content of real fairness, of real justice. It is the principle of the Left in politics whenever the Left is true to itself. It gives actual content, so often missing, to thought and talk of human rights.

It escapes the objections to the traditional principles mentioned earlier. It is a very long way from what it is closest to, which is traditional Utilitarianism. If the principle calls for equalities that serve its end, which it most certainly does, its end is not equalities. Plainly it is not cant, not public relations, not party-political advertising.

The principle is beyond piety and spiritualism and most religion about morality too, some of which turns up in talk of desert. It recognizes that all moral principles are attitudes, including desire and in particular empathy. They are not factual or logical truths. No alternative to the morality of humanity is a higher thing, has any innate superiority.

The principle is not all of a morality. For one thing, it understands the relation of any principle to particular cases, e.g. the sexual torture of a child, or the rape of a people, as in Palestine. For a principle to excuse or justify these things would be for the principle to be refuted. There is a relation of mutual support between a principle and its particular consequences, as John Rawls saw in A Theory of Justice, despite his mere liberalism.

The Principle of Humanity does not leave the justifications of killing or starving to any state, hierarchic democracy, or political class. It is a principle of independence, not a principle of respect to betters. It leaves deference to others. Is it a principle of envy? No, it understands the rudimentary distinction, lost on conservatives, between envy and a rational awareness of real deprivation.

The principle is of course what moral philosophers call consequentialist. It judges actions by their consequences, as in fact all moral principles do, despite selfishness, illusions and subterfuges. But it is not the principle that the end justifies the means. It is that the ends and the means justify the means.

Of course it is a maximizing principle. It does not contemplate for a moment the unspeakable proposition that 1000 people dying is only as bad as one person dying because no one person suffers more than one dying. Anything that does not count lives taken or wasted by different courses of action, different governments, is not worth considering and is not considered outside of a seminary in Wales or a recent college in Cambridge left over from an earlier century.

The Principle of Humanity has more general support from us than any alternative, more support in terms of both fact and logic. It is uniquely consistent with the realities of human nature and also the generalness or universal application or universal commitment of all reasons. It has the Golden Rule in its past. There is also the relevant fact of our human convergence on the principle when our own self-interest does not distract us. We come together about great natural disasters elsewhere. It has happened a lot lately.

The Principle of Humanity is in fact easier to argue for than for than answers to factual questions that it raises. The factual questions are far harder than the question of what is right and wrong in general. These are factual questions, say, about the probability of courses of action, say civil disobedience or terrorism, having certain consequences. Anyone confident about these judgements of probability is likely to be something like a politician in a pushers’ democracy.

There is also a smaller question raised by the principle. It is the question of the rational choice of a mode of address on any occasion, or a particular occasion. A mode of address in advocating the principle and its consequences. Parliamentary language? Academic restraint? Tolerance? Civil speech? Or a proper contempt for the contemptible?

You have heard a thing or two illustrative of my own tentative answer these days. Here is some more.

OUR COALITION GOVERNMENT

When your subject is the level of intelligence of our public discourse in England, our discourse now and since Thatcher and Blair, it is hard to think of our coalition government of conservatives and liberals, anyway when they are on the telly, as other than the new Teletubbies.

The new Teletubbies are the Westminster successors to those creatures in that children’s telly program of the past, the program that kept the kids quiet for their parents, not in trouble or asking questions, not thinking. The new Teletubbies are the Westminster successors to those four round, pudgy, large-eyed, brightly-coloured inhabitants of that cartoon landscape, getting messages from somewhere else and making those funny noises. They too are amiable, uttering things in a kind of gurgling baby language. Never actual answers to questions, of course, never actually relevant replies to such an interrogator as Jon Snow or Jeremy Paxman on a good evening, but reassuring all the way.

There on our screens, for a start, is the new Tinky Winky. He is matey, but still in royal purple, as befits the majesty of a graduate of the public relations industry. Otherwise known as Dave Cameron. He is the pre-eminent Teletubby, the leader, full of new and very little ideas, fresh from the Creative Department of the advertising agency that is now the Conservative Party. He says there is The Big Society that will take care of us all when the social services are cancelled, and that we’re all one family. And, about the challenge of the depression, that he is really our Winston Churchill come back, and that it’s not the size of the dog in a fight, but the size of the fight in the dog.

The new Dipsy is there too. In green, from the liberal side of the coalition, serving as deputy prime minister to Tinky Winky. Also known as Nick Clegg, and as Once-The-Great-Debater, and as the maker of coalition out of rational necessity and perfect decency, and as Mr-Always-True-To-My-Word unless the word was a solemn undertaking in the election.

Thirdly there is Laa-Laa, in yellow, second in Tinky Winky’s own Conservative party. George Osborne when off the screen. He of whom you heard earlier, in connection with problems with PPE in Oxford. In charge of the economy now, and the great truths of economics, and the deficit, and the financial recovery, the latter now widely known as his absolutely necessary job of robbing the poor to feed the rich more tax relief.

And then there is Po. Vincey Cable, in there elbow-to-elbow with Dipsy in the liberal side of the coalition. Po in cunningly deceptive scarlet, also known as Vincey from Shell Oil, of course unfamiliar with that company’s depradations in Nigeria. Po was to be the great hammer of Rupert Murdoch, that greatest servant or master of Tinky Winky, but boasted early to a comely journalist with a tape recorder and was relieved of his duties as Business Secretary by the wise Tinky Winky.

But leave for a while all that proper and necessary condescension. Anyway leave it as long as I can.

The coalition government is indeed choosing to visit a depression on the poor and the poorer. It is doing its very best to save Greece, it says, by this wholly unavoidable policy for the dragging down of lives. Stay in the streets, Greeks, as long as it takes. If ever a demonstration of the viciousness of conservatism and to a very slightly lesser extent of liberalism was needed, here it is. Here we have a proof. Wait no longer.

There is the nonsense, the drivel, of the analogy offered in justification of the English economic policy for England, cutting public expenditure on the poorer, the analogy so clear to Tinky Winky. That is the analogy of a family needing to take care about expenditure so as to pay off a deficit, a family needing to balance its income and its expenditure, balance the books.

What we have as a society is in fact precisely not a family. It is not a family for an overwhelming reason. The society’s state or government makes law. It can determine the society’s income, decide on the income. That happens by way of what is called taxation. It can happen by really acting, not pretending to act, with respect to the scrounger-corporations arranging not to pay their taxes by having a brass door plate on a fake office in some island somewhere else.

Also, in so far as any metaphor or simile of family is to to be a guide to us, it must be a decent family. What decent family, when times are hard, when money is short, deprives its worse-off and worst-off members before its better-off, penalizes its weaker before its stronger members, looks after the well before the sick?

In the last few weeks in England there has also been a rare moment of exposure of some of our inspiring democracy, if no real news about it.

That was the fact of a coalition government minister — Fox of the Ministry of Defence — being found to have been involved in typical money-grubber corruption. More precisely, involved in corruptly inducing sleezy corporations to give bribes in order to get defence and other contracts, the bribe-money going to the financing of organized political cells whose conservative reality is exactly opposition to humanity.

But forget England for a while. Think about Tunisia, Egypt, and the rest.

THE ARAB SPRING GENERALLY

Certainly the Principle of Humanity supports the overthrow of authoritarian and worse regimes, despite the necessary uncertainty as to what will replace them, and the significant possibility or probability that it will not be a lot better.

Certainly the Principle of Humanity supports all national liberation movements, struggles by a people to win liberation from oppression by another people, as in Palestine. The worst of these movements are superior to the lying rapes they replace.

And the Arab Spring? The aim of the Arab Spring is a low or lower form of part of one of the six aims of the Principle of Humanity — not all of freedom and power, but freedom and power of the political kind. So I know the Arab Spring must of course be supported by the Principle of Humanity. Supported despite thoughts having to do with other kinds of freedom and power — and with the other five great goods lacked by bad lives.

Another thing I know is that the Arab Spring has the fine recommendation that it must strengthen the position of the Palestinians in their liberation struggle against neo-Zionism. The latter thing, neo-Zionism, is the taking of at least their autonomy from the Palestinians in the last one-fifth of the territory of which they are indubitably the indigenous people. Neo-Zionism is not Zionism, which in my sense is the founding and actually necessary defence of Israel within its 1948-1967 borders.

Whatever is to be said of Zionism, which I myself persist in justifying by means of the Principle of Humanity and some factual premises, there is another truth.

The Palestinians have a moral right to their terrorism within all of historic Palestine against neo-Zionism. Their terrorism, which is also their liberation struggles and their self-defence, is no less to be reverenced than the fact of Jewish lives now rooted in Israel. On another occasion we can talk about (a) moral rights on the model of legal rights, with the fundamental moral principle in the place of the law of the land. We can also talk about (b) the proposition that to have a moral right to X is to have a moral right to the only possible means to X. Certainly I believe it, and I suspect you do. You have to. If you give up either right you have to give up the other.

LIBYA — OUR AIR WAR ON SELECTED LIBYANS

I know little about Libya, and admit it. There should be more of us doing so.

A little thing I know is about something said by a London professor on television, a fellow taken by the British Broadcasting Corporation to know about Libya but no apologist for it. When asked who the supporters of Gaddafi could possibly be, he replied that they fell into three categories. Tribes, regions — and the poor. Gaddafi’s Green Book, at which I have glanced enough in order to see that it is among other things a condemnation of pushers’ democracy, is not on the side of the rich. What about the now victorious counter-revolutionaries supported by Tinky Winky? Tinky Winky is not on the side of the poor.

But there is no doubt whatever that the Libyan regime violated the Principle of Humanity, to whatever extent. It did some or many of the things with which it is charged. Our air war in Libya — our 20,000 of what are called sorties by our lethal aircraft, and the 5,000 successful attacks — is against a culpable government and its supporters.

That will remain true even if the Libyan regime is replaced by a regime of hierarchic democracy of which something is true — that it is a regime of more violation. More violation if omissions are counted as well as commissions, as they have to be among grown-ups. Hierarchic democracies are good at omissions when they are not at war.

And Gaddafi himself, his death celebrated on the telly by Tinky Winky?

If it is our concern to find moral monsters in the world, to find war criminals, to find butchers, do we have in our Blair and Bush two stronger candidates than Gaddafi was? I am talking about killing and who gets killed. I am talking about the intentional killing of innocents. The numbers count. Great numbers in Iraq count. We have no need of either the gurgling baby-thinking on the subject or the celebration of killing.

A lot of other things also come to mind about the war in Libya, about the attacks by our air forces, the horrible deaths. Let me enumerate some of these other things quickly.

Is our war in Libya a humanitarian intervention? Have our planes been engaged in killing in Libya only in order to protect civilians from attacks by their regime? The answer Yes is childish. No human or social or political action is so simple. None has but one cause or other necessary condition. It is in fact ludicrously false that our government’s motives were only as they said. Causal explanation of things is not this kind of childish simplicity, indeed this idiocy, whatever is mouthed by ad men in Westminister and New York and Washington.

Our war in Libya, whatever is to be said about protecting civilians, is also ideological war. It is a war for pushers’ democracy. It is a war for the capitalism that goes with that democracy, is inseparable from it. Tinky Winky would not have supported any other revolution. No revolution against a conservative despot.

As for America’s record of intervention and terrorism in South America, read the histories and analyses of the greatest of realist authorities on the relevant international relations, Noam Chomsky. Look at What Uncle Sam Really Wants for a start.

Our war in Libya, too, is what you heard of a while back. It is a war that includes the intentional killing of civilians. That is to say it includes what reasonable foresight settled in advance for everybody beyond doubt, that civilians would be killed by our war. It is is true of all wars. It is nonsense to assign the intentional killing of innocents only to terrorism by way of the usual loaded and thus feeble definition.

Do you say that my comment above about moral monsters, and Blair and Bush as against Gaddafi, and now the comment just made about our intentional killing of innocents Libya, are so extreme as to discredit themselves? So extreme as to discredit me?

Well, truth and argument are not a matter of popularity, as decent philosophers and scientists and almost all reflective persons are ready to agree, however inclined they may be to keep their heads down. The aim of selling is never truth, but I am not selling. Still, let me say a word more about intentional killing, give you an example, an example that might come from your newspaper.

A man’s wife has an affair, and then leaves him. He cannot handle it. He eventually goes to the house she is in with petrol and matches. He knows she is in there. But he now sees the cleaning woman go in. That does not stop him from putting the petrol through the letter box and throwing in the matches. Two people are burned to death.

In court, he says he did not intend to kill the cleaning woman, only his wife. He had nothing against the cleaning woman. He is guilty of only one murder. The court, like any decent court, disdains this. He is convicted of two murders, not one, of course on the ground that he did something of which he knew or could be expected to know a possible or probable outcome.

So with killing of innocents in wars. But there is still more to say of our air war in Libya.

That air war, it is worth remembering, is as much a war of aggression as it is a defensive war on behalf of some of the people of Libya.

Our war in Libya is also a cowardly war — it is a war of our cowardly politicians, fearful of paying the price of ordering a war that would include casualties on our side and therefore affect the careers of the politicians. The nature of agents is not irrelevant to the judgement of their actions, not irrelevant to seeing more fully the probable consequences of those actions.

Terrorism and terrorist war come to mind. Yes, terrorism needs defining. My definition of it is (1) killing and other violence, (2) smaller-scale than war, (3) with a political and social aim rather than personal gain — maybe the aim of a whole people, (4) against national or international law, and (5) prima facie wrong. Terrorism includes state terrorism.

There is also terrorist war. It is same as terrorism except with respect to (2). That is, it is larger-scale than terrorism.

Our air against Libyans verges on terrorist war — or at least a war not demonstrably or even clearly otherwise than terrorist. This is a matter of legality. What the U.N. sanctioned, in common understanding of its treacherous motion, is not what has happened. To say otherwise is to lie about the implication of a piece of the English language. But what is important about wars is not their legality, or pretence of legality, or near-illegality. It is their humanity or inhumanity.

There is more to say about Libya. We are to support the anti-Gaddafi people because they are fighting to achieve one form or part, admittedly the most important form, a political form, of the great human good of freedom and power. You will remember there are other forms of freedom and power, one of them being the having of a job, another having a future for your children. And all freedom and power, as you have heard, is itself but one of the six great human goods. It is also good to live decently long, not to be in pain, not to be personally disdained, to be an accepted member of a society, to be able to read.

Could the good of freedom and power in its political part, certainly not all of the good of freedom and power, ever be outweighed by other freedom and power and the other five great goods? Could that be the case despite political freedom and power being a kind of means to the other things? Could there be a society that is better than another despite having less political freedom and power, less of the political kind? The question, which takes us back to Cuba and Denmark and the Soviet Union, isn’t easy outside of Teletubbyland.

Do you say, if less hopefully than you might have five years ago, that the political freedom and power of hierarchic democracy is indubitably always the best means to the realization of the rest of freedom and power, sometimes called social freedom, and the other five great human goods? Do you live in America? In England? Have you been in Texas for a long time riding the range? Or in a London postal district looking out of a hedge fund?

The government or regime being brought into being in Libya will not be better than our hierarchic democracies. If there were any prospect of that, Cameron and the poseur of France, Sarkozy, would not have supported the Libyan revolution. Cameron would not have taken us into an air war likely to contribute to anything better than the society which he leads.

That is a society, incidentally, whose present nature he would in certain circumstances indubitably defend by force, defend by violence, no doubt defend by terrorism — and defend by attacks against certain civilians.

Do you say stick to the facts, give up low speculation about hypothetical cases? Well, you cannot be optimistic about the society to come in Libya given that the war has been taken forward by the leader of a party engaged in a certain project at home in England. That is the project, of course a lying project, of destroying or dragging down the greatest work of civilization in the whole history of what was a great country. I refer, of course, to the profitization of the National Health Service.

WHAT TO DO, CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE, GESTURE

The future in the world is not so settled as it seemed to be. Things have in a way changed. If the authoritarian regimes in the Arab societies can be brought down, so can the conservative regimes of hierarchic democracy be changed. That is possible. Actually possible.

Civil disobedience works. Remember the fall of a Wall and an empire after it. Remember the numerous successes of civil disobedience in the more recent past.

We in English lecture halls ought not to be here. We ought to be somewhere else . We ought to be outside St. Paul’s Cathedral, with those occupiers who are following the example of others in Wall Street. Can we learn at last from America?

Yes — the response of moral and other intelligence to inhumanity anywhere in the world must be mass civil disobedience. New ideas of it. New kinds of it. Gestures too.

Remember Col. Rainsborough of the 17th Century civil war in England, and what he said. Remember the greatest of utterances in English political history. “For really I think the poorest he hath a life to live, as the greatest he….” Shall we have another English colonel today? The gesture by a colonel of the British army who takes his tank from a barracks in Pimlico to Parliament Square, right outside the Houses of Parliament, and parks in the road there to stop the traffic? No shells in the guns, though. No violence. After the television cameras get to the square, there is a return to the barracks by the colonel, and acceptance of his penalty for civil and military disobedience.

Ted Honderich is Grote Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at University College London and author of After The Terror (Edinburgh University Press, 2002), On Political Means and Social Ends (Edinburgh University Press, 2003), Humanity, Terrorism, Terrorist War (UK: Continuum Publishing / US: Seven Stories Press, 2006), Punishment: The Supposed Justifications Revisited (Pluto, 2006); Philosopher: A Kind of Life (Routledge, 2001).

मेलान्चोली Philadelphia

Have been talking much recently with my dear friend and confidant, Dr Lenora Jean Daniels who is a nationally syndicated columnist with the Black Commentator (and if you are not regularly reading BC, you REALLY ought to be).

She went to Philly about five years ago, from Madison, where there was the academic equivalent of "ethnic cleansing" in the air, University of Wisconsin, Madison, so greased by US government military research funding that no how, no way, does the university administration want ANYTHING resembling a return of the 1960's, when ordinary Madisonites joined with U.W. kids in protest of the American War, Invasino, and Occupation of the Vietnamese Peoples and Lands, which had been on-going since 1946 (first American military casualty of the war was 1946, first American POWs were taken in 1953, first U.S. protest of U.S. military presence in Vietnam issued by U.S. Merchant Marines who were INCENSED that they were being forced to return captured Japanese Generals to assist the French in their attempt to regain France's old imperial glory (always an illusion), by regaining France's old territories in the Far East. The U.S. people too, ordinary citizens were incensed that we had already fought a war to defeat totalitarianism, and imperialism, and here we were, supporting the French in their totalitarian, imperialistic efforts; Congress critters too had the courage to up and RAIL about the injustice of it all, and the violation of all the things this country was (supposedly) founded upon; all the myths we learn at such a tender, impressionable age in grade school, junior high school, senior high school, and then discover we must unlearn, purge from memory, forget forever, if we are fortunate (or stupid) enough to continue to receive a liberal arts college education.

RECOMMENDED READING TO YOU: Vietnam and Other American Fantasies, H. Bruce Franklin

http://www.amazon.com/Vietnam-American-Fantasies-Culture-Politics/dp/1558493328

So, anyway, Lenora escapes (she wrongly, as events transpire, thinks) to the greener Quaker pastures of Philly, where, a woman with HER perspective, willing to speak truth to students, simply CANNOT BE TOLERATED, and in short order, she is de facto forced into seeking more "greener pastures."

She goes to an interview at Drexel, foolishly (at the time - by now she has learnt that since you can't please everybody, you've got to please yourself, and pretty much be in-their-faces with your politics, because, sooner or later, it WILL come out, and nobody likes to eat shit kow-towing to the trappings of ower) carrying her Eduardo Galeano book outside her hand bag. Her interview with the department chair begsin, "Is that the book you're reading now?"

"Yes."

"Oh, I see."

And, not at all surprisingly, she never heard from him again. Not even a pro forma, "Thank you for your interest. We are sorry there is not at the present time a good fit here. Best wishes for your continuing academic success. Sincerely, xxx"

SEE ... it ain't all that frickin' tough.

So, the longer Leanora has to get to know Philly, the more disheartened she becomes. "Mark," she says, "This is a corporate town. Comcast owns it all. And the people are HAPPY! They want it this way. They don't wanna talk NO politics, no how, no way. They hear you say 'Bill Cosby' and they equate him with Mumia {about whom no one is writing any more}. See, the kids, they are IGNORANT. They have no good education; they have no good schools; only the Quaker school which has security all over, but so far out of the way, you never notice; it has kids of all ages walking all over the campus, carrying their book bags, engaged in conversations about history - politics, economics - the most amazing thing. And they are all in uniform, and smiling. These are HAPPY kids, you see, IT CAN BE DONE!

IF YOU GOT $40,000 to pay for your kid's education, and the black folk here, the old ones, they are all, "hush, hush, don't go talkin' 'bout 'dat; we got it good here; we got shopping malls; we got a black mayor; don't make no waves; don't go stirrin' up no trouble."

"Mark," she continues, "Bill Cosby, that man was so wrongly villified, because what people don't know, or don't remember, or simply choose to ignore, was that when he MADE those comments, they were made in a VERY specific context of time and place, when he returned to Temple University to get his PhD. He was talking about PHILADELPHIA youngsters, with no respect, who dressed like punks, like outlaws, like drug dealers, whose mouths just spewed filth, who go out of their way to intimidate their elders. Mark, it was Philadelphia Bill was talkin' 'bout. And he should have been more specific."

So Lenora is trying desperately to escape, to return to the midwest (she was born and raised in Chicago - "Mark, can you imagine either one of the Daly's letting a corporation call the shots in Chicago?" - and understand how it works, how you must go about getting that 3 foot deep pot hole fixed, not because some little girl might fall in and kill herself or be crippled for life, no, not that, but because IT MAKES THE CITY OF CHIDAGO LOOK BAD.

And God Dammit to hell, if there was one fire you could light under a Richard Daly ass to get something done, it was the pointing out that unless an issue was addressed and SOON, it would make Chicago look bad, to all those tourists, to all the conventions.

The City that WORKS!

Let's hear it now, for the city that works! With Rahm at the helm, his man OBUMMAH in the Caucasian House, gonna be a BIG next four years! BIG BUCKS - money makes the world go round (chicago too) the world go round (chidago too) the world go round

and on
and on
and on
and on

Good Luck Lenora Jean
Philly, I visited you in 1996, and really liked what I saw,
But, it was the Spring National Bridge Tournament,
And I didn't see much
And I didn't hear anything
Although, I was not listening

I trust Lenora's judgment enough
No reason to return to the city of brotherly love
Where, as long as the Afro-American brothers are kept employed
And can shop till they drop
They are comfortably uncomfortable in their consumption
Of material goods and services
But oh, how that je ne c'est quoi,
How it lingers
Tapping, rapping, on the roofs and walls of the mind
Of the window to the soul

Something is wrong in Philly
Melancholy, melancholy Philadelphia
I laid me down, and I picked me up again.

(From the band Mara Loves
(Which performed at the small auditorium theatre
(at Western Illinois University in Macomb, Illinois
(back in the fall of 1969
(when I was young, and first on my own
(and loving every drunken minute of it
(and even to this day
(I think back fondly, except, of course
(for those bleak winters, when I was forever
(wanting to withdraw
(until I found contract bridge and duplicate bridge
(and Jim and Helen Schaedel took me in
(like a Joseph, looking for a manger.)

With Love to All, and ALL YOU LOVE,

Mark

A Grass-Roots Newscast Gives a Voice to Struggles By BRIAN STELTER

October 23, 2011
A Grass-Roots Newscast Gives a Voice to Struggles
By BRIAN STELTER

Hours after Amy Goodman, the host of the grass-roots newscast “Democracy Now!,” was arrested in Minnesota in 2008 while trying to cover protesters at the Republican National Convention, she was sitting in a network news studio above the convention floor, when a producer said: “I don’t get it. Why wasn’t I arrested?”

Ms. Goodman asked him, “Were you out on the streets?” No, he said, he had been in the studio the whole time. “I’m not being arrested here either,” she said she told him. “You’ve got to get out there.”

For Ms. Goodman, that exchange expresses both a shortcoming of the network newscasts that many Americans consume and a strength of “Democracy Now!,” the 15-year-old public radio and television program. The newscast distinguishes itself by documenting social movements, struggles for justice and the effects of American foreign policy, along with the rest of the day’s developments.

Operated as a nonprofit organization and distributed on a patchwork of stations, channels and Web sites, “Democracy Now!” is proudly independent, in that way appealing to hundreds of thousands of people who are skeptical of the news organizations that are owned by major media companies. The program “escapes the suffocating sameness that pervades broadcast news,” said John Knefel, a comedian and freelance writer who started listening about four years ago and now tries never to miss an episode.

Though it has long had a loyal audience, “Democracy Now!” has gained more attention recently for methodical coverage of two news events — the execution of the Georgia inmate Troy Davis and the occupation of Wall Street and other symbolic sites across the country. Ms. Goodman broadcast live from Georgia for six hours on Sept. 21, the evening of the execution, and “Democracy Now!” reporters were fanned out in Manhattan from the first day of the protests against corporate greed.

“At the time, we had no idea if the protest would even last the night, but we recognized it as potentially an important story,” said Mike Burke, a senior news producer for the program. He noted that “it took NPR more than a week to air its first story on the movement.”

Distribution for “Democracy Now!” — which is live each weekday at 8 a.m. Eastern — comes from public, community and college radio stations; public access television stations and some PBS affiliates; the noncommercial satellite networks Free Speech TV and Link TV; and from the program’s Web site, DemocracyNow.org, which streams each hourlong newscast in full.

The producers say the program is broadcast on more than 950 stations. But because the distribution is cobbled together and because the program has no commercials, no Nielsen ratings are available.

The media, Ms. Goodman said in an interview last week, can be “the greatest force for peace on earth” for “it is how we come to understand each other.” But she asserted that the views of a majority of Americans had been “silenced by the corporate media.”

“Which is why we have to take it back,” she said, echoing the sentiments of many of her fans.

Friends and former colleagues describe Ms. Goodman as ferocious and persistent, traits that have not changed since the program’s inception in 1996 on five Pacifica Radio stations.

“On the radio, she sounded at times like a giant, at others a giant slayer,” said Jeremy Scahill, now an investigative reporter for The Nation magazine, who practically begged Ms. Goodman to let him volunteer for the program in 1997. She agreed and initially paid him $40 a day from her own pocket. On Facebook he lists the program as his college education.

“What drove us was telling stories we felt were being ignored, misreported or underreported by corporate media outlets,” Mr. Scahill said.

The program slowly gained more stations and, amid a dispute with Pacifica, which was later resolved, it established itself as a nonprofit news organization in 2001. The week of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the program began to be simulcast on television. Since then, Ms. Goodman said, “the growth has just been phenomenal.”

While many media outlets were faulted for playing down antiwar protests after the attacks, “Democracy Now!” covered such events extensively.

Some fans as well as critics describe “Democracy Now!” as progressive, but Ms. Goodman rejects that label and prefers to call it a global newscast that has “people speaking for themselves.” She criticized networks in the United States that have brought on professional pundits, rather than actual protesters, to discuss the Occupy protests.

Last week, no United States television network covered the filing of a lawsuit in Canada by four men who said they had been tortured during the Bush administration and who are seeking Mr. Bush’s arrest and prosecution. But one of the men, Murat Kurnaz, a former prisoner at Guantánamo Bay, was interviewed at length by Ms. Goodman and her co-host, Juan Gonzalez.

The nonprofit nature of the program means that the producers “never have to worry about how an advertiser might feel,” avoiding potential self-censorship, Mr. Burke said. But it also sharply limits the size of the staff. The program relies on volunteers to transcribe segments and, occasionally, to translate foreign-language interviews.

Ms. Goodman regularly helps raise money for stations that broadcast the program. The Internet has given the program a global audience and the ability to reach that audience for more than an hour a day. On the evening of Sept. 21, the live stream about the execution of Mr. Davis was viewed more than 800,000 times.

The live stream attested to “the hunger for this kind of information,” Ms. Goodman said. “Yet there was no network that was there to cover this moment throughout the night.”

Except, in a sense, “Democracy Now!” was able to be that network, at least for a night.

Albany Police Defy New York Governor and Refuse to Arrest Protesters

In Albany, New York, protesters are continuing to camp across the street from the New York State Capitol. On Sunday, local police refused to remove the protesters from the park in defiance of Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the city’s mayor. One police official said: "These people were not causing trouble. The bottom line is the police know policing, not the governor and not the mayor."

This is a stunning, astonishing statement for a police official to make. Can't think of any sooner way to become an ex-official, but, the police are SO correct here. Anyone wish to move to Albany?

A conversation I imagine that has occurred recently in heaven

24 October, 2011
Mark Ganzer
1004 S Grove Ave
Barrington, IL 60010-5025
To: Georgine C#####

My Dear Georgine,

Thank you for attending mom's memorial service. Given your inevitably jaundiced view on life, it is safe for me to assume that at least someone saw the service through my eyes, and that's enough for me.

Unto me has fallen the rather interesting role of archivist and curator – what with my own Spring House Cleaning Project, 2000, begun 17 September, 2010, and on-going, the passing of Annie-Belle has afforded a momentuous opportunity, the likes of which make Disaster Capitalism such a profitable theroy in practice for its practitioners, of going through the boxes of letters, not well-marked, but not haphazardly collected; case-in-point, have just found a collection of Marianne's River Run Upcoming announcements (that the event is upcoming and to where you can send your check) and the RiverRunCompletionLetter, documenting her sensory observations that remain in the memory banks upon digestion of the exhaustion and careful refleciton upon arising from that achey dream-like sleep which is the sleep of those who have done well, even if they have done for naught that which they set out to accomplish. Anne, with her pack-rat mentality and squirrel it away habits honed handsomely over the years when we had perhaps not even little in the way of material things, save for the children's drawings, the childrens' school papers, and the children's voluntarily entered into creative writing – poetry – stories. Treasures such as these are priceless; historical evidence of interesting lives well-lived.

Had been focusing on my own creative writing stuffers, which I thought I had all in one big pile (several thousand pages high) on the coffee table in the family room downstairs, which, sadly, I had recontaminated (the family room that is) after having spent 30 hours dissinfecting it (I am flourishingly using metaphorical language here; in point of fact, the gorgeous ganzer bachelor boys are doing quite a bit better with hygeiene and house cleaning than mom would have ever dreamt. I can just see her up in heaven with John, and her older sister Cathy (Cottie), settin' at the bar, where they are amusing John and Werner Von Klemper who were, prior to being so rudely interrupted, smoking big thick cuban cigars and drinking VERY expensively priced brandy out of 24 ounce snifters.

JEEZUS FUCKIN' CHRIST COTTIE – DO YOU BELIEVE THAT? ASS HOLE RALPH IS CLEANING THE FRIGGIN' TOILET WITH THE RIGHT PRODUCT! 83-YEARS OLD AND HE NEVER BEFORE KNEW THAT BATHROOMS HAD TO BE CLEANED. OMFGIH! LOOKS AT THE ASS-HOLE MAMA'S BOY – CLEANING THE DAMN GRUNGE FROM THE BATH TUB. COTTIE, THESE SONS-OF-BITCHES HAVE THE FUCKIN' HOUSE LOOKIN' MORE ORDERLY AND CLEANER THAN I EVER GOT IT TO. WHAT THE FUCK'S WITH THAT?

Annie, I tried to tell you, Ginny Bonne tried to tell you, Barbara Grace tried to tell you: “As long as you keep doing it for them, and don't force them to do it for themselves, and don't make such responsibilitites part and parcel of the requirements for them to get served food, THEY HAVE NO MOTIVATION TO LEARN. Annie, you have taught them to be willfully ignorant of house-up-keeping 101, and quite frankly, the only valid excuse you might have for that is that you wanted them to die (from stupidity) as quickly as possible so you can gather the clan all here together in heaven, like you used to fantasize about buying that house out on Lake Zurich Road and having EVERYBODY move in – kinda' like with Verna, Dale, you, me, Lynne, Jimmie, Gramma Hockett, Uncle Harold, and the farm girl; one big happy family livin' in a commune in Barrington.

Annie, just think about it! Ralph, clearly never the sharpest knife in the drawer, STILL has a Master's Degree plus 60 hours beyond. Mark is quite clearly capable of doing anything he sets his mind to, and some things he even does, almost in his sleep. Did you really think they were gonna miss you for your HOUSEKEEPING SKILLS (which, btw, love, were never anywhere near as good as you liked to think they were; which is why you always got depressed in the fall and in the winter months after Thanksgiving, and after Christmas, because your house, quite frankly, to any one who took an interest in such things (and none of your good friends do – which is why they are your good friends in the first place), a quick glance would have revealed you to be the imposter you always have been. You ain't organized; you're a disaster a-waitin' to misplace an important document, probably even shred it; you don't really pay attention to details any more, and you ain't no 18-year old kid seeing the whole world as your oyster! Annie, you never gave a good god-damn about the housekeeping EXCEPT TO THE EXTENT that you came up short of the rich bitches you always were trying to impress with your sophistication (and Annie, you were NEVER sophisticated, no matter how many damn sophisticated books you read, or how many damn sophistitcated people you think about.

Yeah, Annie, they can take care of themselves. Oh, and Mark – note please: He's having NO difficulty whatsoever cooking for two, and he's even got Ralphie boy trained to boil his own damn water when Mark's not at h ome, and Ralphie-boy might get his stomach all up in a knot if he didn't feed his sad sack face exactly at 11:00 am.

See, Annie, you spoiled them, and RALPH took your spoilin' his stinky ass for granted (no, Mark never did, but he was never really quite like a guy any way; I actually think you had the fag son, the lezbo-daughter, and that Mark's a hermaphrodite, trending homo. Remember when I told you, “It is not natural for children to be this well-behaved,” well, Annie, I married the pedopheliac pediatrician with whom I popped out another baby every time we had sex. Who in the world would have ever suspected, back in the day, that my five kids, including the fucked-up pot head boys, well, not Craig, would all be happily married (to the extent that such a state of bliss can even be envisioned) for 25+ years, all with children (leaving me with GRAND CHILDREN – why ain't chew got no grand kids Annie? Wazzup wid dat?) and you'd end up with two homo's, an alchey-bipolar, and one narmal kid (who was your least favorite, and the ONLY one you ever disciplined; WTF was THAT all about? AND FURTHERMORE, she was the first one to move out of the house, get her own place, etc, etc, etc, she is in SO many ways the only fully functioning adult you raised; and you managed to do it by loving her the least!

So, ain't it funny no, ironic is the proper and most descriptive term), Annie, sure, here, have another glass of wine, by loving them the least, we love them the best, and we love them the most. Are you still willfully clueless? Chrissakes alive, Annie, we got the front row seats here, I'm just sayin', and I don't give a damn if you get all pouty, cry-baby face mad or what, you got to DEAL with this reality. You were a shitty mother and a shitty wife, and you raised (most) of your kids to be willfully dependent on you and your husband too, so that you would always feel as if you were needed. Do you think it isi NATURAL for a 60-year old to come back to live with his folks? Do you think he was all “cured” as he spent 22 hours a day either laying in bed or sitting at the computer, in his underwear, his bathrobe, his unwashed body (which, Annie, admit it, stunk after 3 days, although he had the “class” to shower twice a week, whether or not he needed to)? Did you think everything was hunky dory as you watched his weight go from 180 to 278 in merely three years? Did you think that the man that converted to Islam in January, 2007, who taught Sunday School in the Mosque, who was BELOVED in the Mosque, and honored above all other Muslims in the Mosque who were botn into Islam, because HE CHOSE Islam, did you think that he only flirted with the faith because he was having one of them “manicky moments? Well, let's conceed you that debatable point. Then why in the fucking hell didn't he ever go to Atonement? NOT EVEN ONCE, Not Christmas, Not Easter, Not to see even his beloved son Adam James play drums AT LEAST ONCE in that three year period, when you were assured he was getting so much better. That he did not even go to the library once in that period (he, who used to take out 30 books / magazines / CDs / DVD's a month, going way back to the 90's when he was just popping his Tegretol regular That he did not even go to the Rainbow Record Store to see his beloved friend John Thominet, with whom he would spend 20 hours a week, back in the day, before he got “well” again, from his meds – his Effexor, and his Equitro. And aren'tcha' glad he got hisself up and hooked up with SSSDI? Where they sent you his check for $435 and change a month, of which $388 a month went for meds, and you were kind enough to give him $10 a week, so he could get his hair cut once a month. (Did you know that he tipped the damned barber, Fat Phil the Lip who never misses a quip and is always so quick, to put down queers and homos, did you know her tipped Fat Phil $4 every hair cut Phil ever game him; but, it wasn't just Phil, nope, he'd give Dennis or Warren the same $20 for the $16 hair cut. Hey, Annie, don'tcha' think that if Mark really gave a damn about “his” SSSDI money, he might have figured out to get his hair clipped at one of the discount hair places where the lovely young ladies cut it? He could have left a 20% tip and had an extra $2 to spend each week of the month. Annie, he didn't play in one duplicate bridge game in that 3-year period when you were so happy that he was “getting better, doing fine.”

Christ alive, Annie, you were the worst mother in the whole wide world, and (almost) ALL of your kids know it. And, no, it doesn't really matter that “you didn't know.” You were willfully ignorant! And you see, just like Mark would sometimes tell you and Ralph, “You only like me when I'm depressed.”

He wasn't wrong. It's just that he didn't SEEM depressed, (except for the weight gain, the bad hygiene, the laying in bed for hours, the not going out for exercise, not going to church, not seeing his son, and that long-distance girl friend of his? What the fuck was the matter with her? She was such a lovely creature that her oldest son blows his face off with a shot gun and her own husband drives the pick up, STRAIGHT THE FUCK INTO THE SWAMP, he didn't even TRY to turn the goddamned wheel, and then, they do his BAL, and he's at .40, and this is 12 hours AFTER HE died. And Annie, did you ever see how FAT she was? Damn near 200 pounds, on a 4' 11½” frame. What the hell did he ever see in her? What the hell did she ever see in him? Face it, Annie, your son would rather have a virtual girl friend than go to church; than go to the relatives; than talk to his son. But, like Mark says (behind your back) “Out of sight, out of mind.”

And did you READ that poem he wrote 'bout you from the nuthouse? The little mother fucker even had the audacity to post it to his blog site. Anne, that Mark is a spiteful shit head. You are SO much better off here in heaven without the little shit. Just write him off. He's a worthless piece of garbage. HERE it is, READ THAT ASSHOLE's BLOG!!!

THAT ASSHOLE'S BLOG

While house cleaning, I FINALLY found my poetry written from the mental hospital to which I was confined from August 2-August 13 this past summer, during which time a memorial service was held for my mother, and her visitation was also held. She had a stroke, driving through the lovely countryside of Barrington Hills, IL, as we were returning from shopping at ALDI's where we had a most enjoyable time.

At the stop sign, her jaw went slack, her head went back, and her eyes rolled up into their sockets. I put a compress mirror under her nostrils, but she was not breathing. I dialed 9-1-1 on the cell, and they told me to lay her back. This I did, her foot was still firmly attached to the brake pedal, and was heavy to remove. Then they told me to get her to flat ground and administer mouth-to-mouth rescusitation. An angel who lived near by returned from his home to help. I tried, but could not get her to breath. The emergency vehicle arrived within six minutes of my call, and they tried for 25 minutes before driving her off to the hospital. In addition to her stroke, she had pneumonia in both lungs (she had congenitive heart failure), and this made it impossible for any air to enter her lungs. Four days later, they pulled the plug on her in the hospital. She never regained consciousness.

I sent out over 550 e-mails to keep people advised on her status. Our neighbors up the block stayed with her 10 hours a day in the visitors room, they held a constant vigil. But she was, for all practical intents and purposes, dead once she had the stroke, because she could not get any oxygen soon enough.

Fortunately, she and father had made plans for just such an event, and both of them have stipulated that there will be no extraordinary means applied to keep them alive in a vegatative state. So those choices were easy.

While in the hospital (for threatening to kill my parents' pastor, who had kicked me out of church back in February, for singing too high, and for talking to the praise band as they set up for 3rd service - and would not even let me enter the church where I was confirmed, and for 47 years a memmber - and only my mother even once came to my defense, on that Easter Sunday when the Roman Catholics let me be an usher, but the Lutherans would not even let me attend one of their services - so, I thought it inappropriate for the pastor to officiate her memorial service; he disagreed, as did my father and sister, which was very disappointing to me) we had an exercise where we were told to keep a free form writing journal. Until just this afternoon, I had lost track of where I had left it, but, voila! C'est ici!

WRITE ABOUT YOUR HOPES & DREAMS & GOALS

I hope to see my grandchildren
(although as of now, I have none).

I dream to sing at the Super Dome
In New Orleans, Lousianna, in front of 40,000 ninth ward residents.

My goal is to stumble the
Fuck out of this nutzoid place
That allows Alchoholic-Bipolar-Weenie Waggers
out in three (working) days
But keeps me in for ever And ever and evah
AH, MEN?

(they would ultimately confine me for nine working days
(although all other patients were discharged within five
(they wanted me to take a $1,000+ injection rather than
(the $13 / month medications that I had taken for more
(than 10 years during which time my mood was stable
(and no one felt as if I had to be controled.
(Clearly, at some point in time, I stopped being a patient
(to be healed, and started to become a profit center
(to be exploited. Ass hole bastards!

It seems as if tomorrow I shall be released

Today, now, finally, from this place of incarceration which is in no way
unpleasant and, in fact, offers me the one thing (besides intimacy)
that I most crave – companionship.

And in this absolutely delightful circumstance Fellowship too -
the best of all companioships; With cable TV, sometimes
a mere backdrop, And sometimes a focal point, an interesting
Collection of CDs, DVDx and cassettes, and a  Crowd which,
for the most part, would accept Whatever -
no one's in control of the remote And every one's in control,
and snacks and Drinks (nno booze, no surprise, no coffee regular, dammit
(to hell in a hand basket and back) are available Virtually 24/7,
and you can wander the halls Even after lights out, and talk,
again, even after Lights out, in hushed tones.

So I'm going to miss this place More than I'll ever miss my mother
albeit only Loopy Audrey (Who is in No manner Loopy)
and pot-headed Sue afre left, and one of my favorites,
Tree-man-Mike, has displayed enough Anger issues to have his discharge
Revoked (WHEW - he barely made it out). So what will I take
from this experience?

Five friends - four girls and Tom S. Who will share with me the Magical
Mystery Tour Just about time To hop on the bus,
FLY AWAY, FLY AWAY, FLY AWAY
(And always - to visit pot-head Sue)


LIKE SHEEP TO THE SLAUGHTER
(OR LIKE LEMMINGS TO THEIR DESTINY)

Pot-head Sue (the former care giver) was kind enough
to gently put the crappy socks they dole out
here on my feet. With this particular second
shift crew, I probably could have made it
past 7:00 am without being told to stuff
'em into socks. But, I don't want to cause trouble.
And they have kindly asked, twice already,
"Mark, would you please put your socks on? We
"know not what evil stuff resides 'twixt the tiles."

But, as with most things, I need help to put
on my socks - either a chair to sit in (end
even then, it's a stretch), or a step to step up
on, since my overly fat belly is an 
obstacle to socking up. And also to 
wiping my ass after I shit. Sad state
of affairs.

But, Angel Pot-Head Sue is here now for me,
and freely offers to have socks with me,
and thus I with her, and, sadly to say,
this as as erotic as anything I have
engaged in (with a woman) since August, 2008,
with my beloved Natalie Jean, in Galesburg.

I need a dog. Amen.

Caribbean Islands Struggling to Dismantle Gangs

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

BASSETERRE, St. Kitts (AP) — When Dudley Williams was a police commander in the mid-1980s, law enforcement in St. Kitts and Nevis was a leisurely occupation. Violent crime was rare on the sleepy specks of land in the eastern Caribbean.

"If fellows got into a heated dispute at a rum bar, things were settled with fists, a piece of stick, a knife at the worst," said Williams, now 79. "You'd get a shooting once every five years."

Times have changed here and for many islands across the Caribbean, where an escalating arms race among criminal gangs has turned once-peaceful neighborhoods into battle zones.

St. Kitts and Nevis, a two-island federation of nearly 50,000 people, has tallied 31 homicides so far in 2011, already making it the bloodiest year on record. Police blame gangs with names like Killer Mafia Soldiers and Tek Life for the escalating violence.

Usually far from the view of sunbathing tourists, tit-for-tat shootings by trigger-happy gangsters have become common in the Caribbean, according to a new report on global homicides by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.

Alarmed citizens are putting pressure on politicians throughout the region to attack the problem. In Trinidad and Tobago, which is off Venezuela's coast along a prime drug shipment route, the government has declared a state of emergency, imposing nightly curfews and giving police and soldiers broad powers to conduct searches and seizures.

Little of the violence so far has affected tourists to the Caribbean, where about 6 million Americans visit each year. Many stick to all-inclusive resorts, and those who don't rarely stray into the gritty slums where the violence flares up.

Still, there are isolated cases: A vacationing U.S. Army sergeant was killed during a robbery in Trinidad last year. A Welsh couple was butchered in an Antigua vacation cottage on the last day of their two-week honeymoon in 2008. In St. Kitts, bandits held up a small bus of tourists last year, prompting two cruise lines to briefly suspend stops there. Two British women were raped on a remote beach in St. Lucia earlier this year.

Drug traffickers have helped drive up the crime rates by introducing firearms and narcotics with a street value exceeding the size of the Caribbean's legal economy.

Although the islands remain near-perfect conduits for drug shipments, with their numerous unpoliced islets and barely monitored coasts, the U.N. crime office says Caribbean drug seizures actually diminished 71 percent between 1997 and 2009 as more contraband shifted to Central American routes.

According to the agency, the increase in the Caribbean's lethal violence can partly be traced to frenzied competition between underworld groups fighting for turf in a diminished drug smuggling market.

Caribbean experts worry a culture of violence has become entrenched on the islands, where nearly 70 percent of homicides are committed by firearms.

"Until fairly recently, we had an innocence about ourselves in the Caribbean, but that's been lost. This thing is a Pandora's Box and I'm not sure you can ever close it again," said Marcus Day, director of the Caribbean Drug & Alcohol Research Institute in St. Lucia.

Comparisons with other parts of the world can be stark. Jamaica, an island of roughly 3 million people that has been hit hard by drug and extortion gangs for years, chalked up 1,428 killings in 2010. Chicago, a city of nearly 3 million, reported 435 homicides last year.

Statistics from the U.N. crime office show homicide rates nearly doubling in a number of Caribbean countries since 1995. In St. Kitts and Nevis, slayings have increased sixfold since 2002, when there were just five killings.

Ivelaw Griffith, an expert on Caribbean security at City University of New York, said outmaneuvered and outgunned law enforcement agencies on the islands have a limited ability to cope with the problem on their own.

He said the spread of cable television and popular music has raised expectations among youths by depicting the easy life even as the rough global economy is making pockets of poverty grow deeper and wider. It's "really creating a very unholy and unhealthy recipe for these small societies," Griffith said.

To counter the gang culture, the Bahamas is toughening crime and bail laws, building more courts, trying to round up unlicensed guns and funding programs to steer at-risk youth away from crime.

The archipelago off Florida's east coast has seen 104 people killed so far this year, easily topping the previous full-year record of 94 set just last year.

Norelle Scott, a 19-year-old college student who lives on the most populous island of New Providence, said she is now fearful of leaving home at any time of day and is pessimistic about the chances for change.

"Criminals are getting bold these days. I'm ashamed to know that my people are killing each other over small things, material things, and it's getting worse," she said.

Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham is urging Bahamians to join neighborhood watch programs and help police identify criminals.

"Community engagement and service will be more effective in combating crime than iron bars and gated communities," Ingraham said during a recent televised address.

Trinidad and Tobago's emergency decree, imposed in August and expected to extend through December, angered some young people, but others applauded the move.

"We don't mind living under curfew conditions if it makes the country safer," said Zana Ramdial, a fortysomething mother of three in the capital of Port-of-Spain.

Many Caribbean islands have been known for feeble local enforcement. In St. Lucia, drug smugglers know immediately when the maritime police are on patrol, making evasion nearly effortless, said Day, the crime researcher in St. Lucia.

"We don't really have enough fuel to pay for the police boats so we can only run them at certain times. And the criminals know when they go out," Day said.

Some of the poor, developing islands have reached out to Scotland Yard and the FBI for help, or brought in foreign police and security consultants.

St. Kitts recruited a new police commissioner, Celvin G. Walwyn, who is a native islander with long experience as police officer in Texas and Florida. He has warned street gangs he plans to eradicate them and has special teams of police and soldiers to patrol crime hotspots together. A tough new law can put people away for 20 years if they are convicted of recruiting for the gangs.

"Rumors on the street are that the gangs have an arsenal. But if push comes to shove, we can wipe them out," Walwyn told The Associated Press.

He said employment and other services will be available for young people who wish to leave gangs.

Dale Watley, a 31-year-old who served three years in an overcrowded St. Lucia prison for a shooting, says youths can be lured away. He turned his back on the underworld life he had known since childhood and now runs his own barber shop.

"The young guys, they want a movie kind of life, like 'Scarface,'" he said. "But once they get a chance to survive in the real world with respect, they don't want to shoot anyone anymore. They want to live."

_____

Associated Press writer Megan Reynolds in Nassau, Bahamas, contributed to this story.

___

David McFadden on Twitter: http://twitter.com/dmcfadden