OPINION Thursday, January 27, 2005 Opinion News Archives for:
Pull the bear
The "Crazy for You" bear controversy inches toward resolution with a meeting planned between the president of Vermont Teddy Bear Co. and the state's mental health care advocates.
In the meantime, the $69.95 honey-colored bear, wearing a straitjacket and carrying commitment papers, continues to sell. On the company's Web site, the bear is posed under the heading, "She'll go nuts over this bear."
Although Vermont Teddy Bear President and Chief Executive Officer Elisabeth Robert deserves credit for agreeing to meet with local groups, the meeting isn't scheduled until Tuesday -- less than two weeks before Feb. 14, when the shelf life of this Valentine's Day gift will essentially expire.
Previously, Robert had declined to meet Vermont advocates, preferring to limit the discussions to the National Association for the Mentally Ill at a meeting the week before Valentine's Day, according to Rep. Anne Donahue, R-Northfield, an advocate who has suffered mental illness.
These meetings shouldn't be necessary. The "Crazy for You" bear should be pulled today. It doesn't represent a light-hearted message of love. It is a demeaning and humiliating symbol that perpetuates a stigma about the mentally ill that people have fought hard to change.
Gov. Jim Douglas, who is among the heavy hitters who have stepped into this debate, has said he wouldn't have marketed the bear in the first place. It sends a "dramatic and inappropriate statement" about mental illness, he said.
The bear was a mistake, but the bigger mistake has been the company's lack of recognition that a bear in a straitjacket isn't funny to people who have suffered such a debilitating illness, especially those who have been committed to a mental health institution.
Donahue, who will be among the advocates meeting with Robert, said she wants to focus on helping the CEO understand the gravity of the issue.
Robert must also answer to Fletcher Allen Health Care, where she has been a member of the board of trustees since December 2002. This hospital has had enough conflict with the mental health care community in the past that the board's handling of this issue will be a test of its values. The board plans to discuss the bear at its Feb. 8 meeting, and board Chairman William Schubart says the hospital and board of trustees take the issue "deadly seriously."
"This is our patient community," Schubart said Wednesday. "We mended a number of historical fences with them and we have a partnership -- we don't want to jeopardize that. I know Liz (Robert) knows this."
If Robert knows it -- really knows it -- then the bear will be retired. click here to chat about this news item in our subscriber only forum! -->
R
http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/
Former CEO guilty in hospital conspiracyBoettcher misled state on cost of constructionBy Jill Fahy Free Press Staff Writer
Published January 19, 2005
William Boettcher, former chief executive officer of Fletcher Allen Health Care, pleaded guilty Tuesday to federal conspiracy charges, ending a major chapter in the story of a scandal that rocked the hospital and called into question the honesty of its leaders.
Appearing before U.S. District Court Judge William Sessions, Boettcher, 57, agreed to a plea deal in which he could face up to two years in prison. He also has agreed to pay $733,210 in restitution to Fletcher Allen, the approximate amount of the retirement package he received upon his resignation from the hospital in 2002.
Boettcher, who waived his right to a trial when he accepted the plea deal, admitted during the hearing that he was part of a conspiracy to hide the real costs of the hospital's $367 million expansion -- dubbed the Renaissance Project -- from state regulators. He will be sentenced at a hearing that is to begin April 18 and which could last a week.
Boettcher is the second former Fletcher Allen executive to be criminally charged in the scandal that led to the resignations of several top hospital executives and eight trustees.
"My, how the mighty have fallen," Vermont Attorney General William Sorrell said Tuesday. "Before today, Boettcher was a free guy with a clean resume living on a yacht in Seattle, and he starts right now as a convicted felon. Bad day at the office."
Boettcher's case was investigated on both a state and federal level, but the former CEO was brought up on only federal charges because the financing of the Renaissance Project involved issues that crossed state borders, Sorrell said. Conviction of the hospital's top executive does not close the book on a multi-faceted investigation that involves "tens of thousands of documents, e-mails and numerous individuals," Sorrell said.
"Boettcher's plea is a major step, and we're pleased to have gotten here," he said, "but there is much left to be done."
Sorrell and acting U.S. Attorney David Kirby declined to comment on the investigation, noting only that the facts remain under litigation.
Facts of the case
During Tuesday's hearing at U.S. District Court in Burlington, Kirby and assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Drescher laid out the facts of a case they believed would prove Boettcher conspired with others between 2000 and 2002 to stonewall state regulators and hide from them the true costs of the hospital's expansion project.
Drescher said Boettcher and other top hospital officials created two budgets for the Renaissance Project -- one for state regulators and the Fletcher Allen board that showed the project coming in on budget at $173 million -- and another that reflected the project's true costs, which had actually increased to more than $250 million.
Prosecutors also said Boettcher and conspirators concealed from Fletcher Allen trustees the full cost of the hospital's agreement with the University of Vermont to develop the education center component of the expansion project.
Boettcher, dressed in gray slacks, a navy blazer and a light blue shirt, appeared relaxed through much of the proceedings. He leaned back in a chair, his feet rocking back and forth. He nodded when affirming statements by Sessions, saying he was of a good mind to admit guilt.
Boettcher's demeanor changed when Drescher read the charges against him. He leaned forward. Whispers to his lawyer, Jerome O'Neill of Burlington, grew louder.
O'Neill told the court he and his client don't agree with all the facts Drescher laid out, saying Boettcher did not participate in any conspiracy to dupe the hospital's board of trustees about the project's costs.
"We're not here to minimize ... (Boettcher's) involvement. He was involved, but many other people also participated in this very complicated project," O'Neill said. "Many events took place without his knowledge, and some took place with his knowledge."
Later, when Sessions was placing restrictions on what Boettcher can do between now and his springtime sentencing, the former hospital CEO interrupted his lawyer while he was speaking to the judge. After a series of whispers, O'Neill asked the judge to allow Boettcher to bring a boat from Mexico back to the United States in March, as he had planned. The boat in Mexico is not the one he lives on. His boat is docked in Seattle.
Sessions told O'Neill his client would have to work it out with his pre-trial services officers.
After the hearing, Boettcher paused to speak to reporters, but was stopped mid-sentence by O'Neill, who urged him not to comment.
"I'm happy to see you guys," Boettcher said to reporters, "and I'll have to talk to you later. I have to go with (O'Neill) now."
Reputation declined
Boettcher was hired as Fletcher Allen's CEO in 1998. He was chosen because he had a reputation for cutting costs at troubled hospitals. His salary and benefits were tied to the hospital's prosperity. But his tenure at the hospital only worsened the hospital's reputation and financial situation.
Soon after his arrival at Fletcher Allen, he pushed through the long-stalled $173.4 million Renaissance Project. State regulators, embodied in the Department of Banking, Insurance, Securities and Health Care Administration, are required to give a nod to projects costing more than $1.5 million in an effort to control healthcare costs. Boettcher was required to notify the regulators if the total cost of the project rose more than 10 percent or $500,000, whichever was less.
As the project's price rose, Boettcher persuaded high-ranking hospital officials to lie to the state. Concerned the public and regulators wouldn't support a cost-inflated project, he insisted his subordinates find a way around the public process.
Ultimately, the hospital's chief financial officer quit. State regulators later determined if this had been done in the open, tens of millions of dollars would have been saved.
Boettcher is the second former Fletcher Allen executive to be criminally charged in covering up the real cost of the hospital's now $367 million Renaissance Project. Thad Krupka, the hospital's former chief operating officer, pleaded guilty last fall to three misdemeanor false claim counts. As part of his plea deal, Krupka agreed to cooperate with state and federal investigators and be a government witness at any trials connected with the Fletcher Allen scandal.
Boettcher's agreement gives him immunity from cooperating in ongoing investigations into the Renaissance Project, and guarantees that no new criminal or civil charges will be brought against him concerning the project. Also as part of the agreement, Boettcher was ordered to relinquish his passport and must remain within the United States and U.S. territorial waters until his sentencing.
Meanwhile, prosecutors are looking to Boettcher's sentencing as a time to show just how Boettcher's dirty dealings hurt the hospital and how he might have personally gained from his actions.
While the investigation has yet to reveal the true scope of the scandal, Sorrell said, Boettcher's conviction is a major piece of the whole.
"This is a man at the top of the food chain at Fletcher Allen saying, 'Yes, I was involved in a conspiracy with others to lie, fraud and mislead the state,'" Sorrell said. "Here, we have the number one guy saying, 'I'm guilty.'"
Thursday, January 27, 2005
We will protect the weak:Auschwitz -NYT
We will protect the weak?
"We didn't see God when we expected him, so we have no choice but to do what he was supposed to do: we will protect the weak, we will love, we will comfort. From now on, the responsibility is all ours."
January 27, 2005
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Always, Darkness Visible
By AHARON APPELFELD
Jerusalem
IN January 1945, 60 years ago today, the wheels of destruction in Auschwitz stood still.
The few people left alive describe the prevailing silence as the silence of death. Those who came out of hiding after the war - out of the forests and monasteries - also describe the shock of liberation as freezing, crippling silence. Nobody was happy. The survivors stood at the fences in amazement. Human language, with all its nuances, turned into a mute tongue. Even words like horror or monster seemed meager and pale, not to mention words like anti-Semitism, envy, hatred. Such a colossal crime can be committed only if you mobilize the darkest dark of the soul. To imagine such darkness apparently needs a new language.
"Where were we?" "What did we go through?" "What's left of us?" the survivors wondered. Primo Levi tried to use images of Dante's hell; others turned to the works of Kafka, especially "The Trial" and "In the Penal Colony."
In the penal colony of Auschwitz, the Jew was not condemned because of his old or new beliefs, but because of the blood that flowed in his veins. In the Holocaust, biology determined a person's fate. In the Middle Ages, the Jew was killed for his beliefs. A Jew who chose to convert to Christianity or Islam was saved from his suffering. In the Holocaust, there was no choice. Observant Jews, liberal Jews, communist Jews and Jews who were sure they weren't Jews were crammed into the ghettos and camps. Their one and only offense: the Jewish blood in their veins.
The Holocaust stretched over six years. Such long years there probably never were in Jewish history. Those were years when every minute, every second, every split-second held more than it could bear. Pain and fear reigned, but even then, in the midst of hunger and humiliation, the amazement sprouted: "Is this Man?"
During the Holocaust, there was no place for thought or feeling. The needs of the hungry and thirsty body reduced one to dust. People who had been doctors, lawyers, engineers and professors only yesterday stole a piece of bread from their companions and when they were caught, they denied and lied. This degradation that many experienced will never be wiped out.
Under conditions of hunger and cold, the body, we learned in the camps, is liable to lose its divine qualities. That too was part of the wickedness of the murderer: not only to murder, but first to humiliate the victim utterly, to exterminate every shred of will and faith, to turn him into a despicable body whose soul had fled, and only then, that degradation complete, to murder him. The lust to debase the victim until his last moments was just as great as the lust for murder.
In 1945, the ovens were extinguished. Jean Améry, a prisoner of Auschwitz and one of the outstanding thinkers on the Holocaust, says in one of his essays: "Anybody who was tortured will never again feel at home in the world."
Great natural disasters leave us shocked and mute, but mass murder perpetrated by human beings on human beings is infinitely more painful. Murder reveals wickedness, hatred, cynicism and contempt for all belief. All the evil in man assumed a shape and reality in the ghettos and camps. The empathy that we once believed modern man felt for others was ruined for all time.
In 1945, the great migration of the survivors began: a sea of bodies, killed many times over and now resurrected. Some wanted to return to their countries and their homes, and some wanted to go to America, and some wanted to reach the shores of the Mediterranean and go from there to Palestine. Even then, in that strange resurrection, the first questions arose: What is a Jew? Why are we persecuted so bitterly and cruelly? Is there something hidden in us that condemns us to death? Many felt - if an individual may speak for the many - that the six years of war were years of profound trial. We had been in both hell and purgatory and we were no longer what we were.
Some entered hell as pious people and came out of it just as pious. That position deserves respect. But most survivors - myself, and especially the young - were outside the realm of faith, and from the first stages of the liberation, we were engaged with the question of how to go on living a life with meaning. The temptation to forget and be forgotten and to assimilate back into normal life lurked for every survivor. We can barely grasp and internalize the death of one child. How can we grasp the death of millions?
For the sake of sanity, the survivors built barriers between themselves and the horrors they had experienced. But every barrier, every distance, inevitably separates you from the most meaningful experience of your life, and without that experience, hard as it may be, you are doubly defective: a defect imposed on you by the murderers and a defect you perpetrated with your own hands.
God did not reveal himself in Auschwitz or in other camps. The survivors came out of hell wounded and humiliated. They were betrayed by the neighbors among whom they and their forefathers had lived. They were betrayed by Western culture, by the Germans, by the language and literature they admired so much. They were betrayed by the great beliefs: liberalism and progress. They were betrayed by their own bodies.
What to hold onto to live a meaningful life? It was clear to many that the denial of one's Judaism, which characterized the emancipated Jew, was no longer possible. After the Holocaust it was immoral.
No wonder many of the survivors went on to Israel. No doubt, they wanted to get to a place where they could leave their victimhood behind and assert responsibility over their fate, a place where they could connect with the culture of their forefathers, to the language of the Bible, and to the land that gave birth to the Bible.
This is not a story with a happy ending. A doctor who survived, from a religious background, who sailed to Israel with us in June 1946, told us: "We didn't see God when we expected him, so we have no choice but to do what he was supposed to do: we will protect the weak, we will love, we will comfort. From now on, the responsibility is all ours."
Aharon Appelfeld is the author, most recently, of"The Story of a Life." This article was translated by Barbara Harshav from the Hebrew.
"We didn't see God when we expected him, so we have no choice but to do what he was supposed to do: we will protect the weak, we will love, we will comfort. From now on, the responsibility is all ours."
January 27, 2005
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Always, Darkness Visible
By AHARON APPELFELD
Jerusalem
IN January 1945, 60 years ago today, the wheels of destruction in Auschwitz stood still.
The few people left alive describe the prevailing silence as the silence of death. Those who came out of hiding after the war - out of the forests and monasteries - also describe the shock of liberation as freezing, crippling silence. Nobody was happy. The survivors stood at the fences in amazement. Human language, with all its nuances, turned into a mute tongue. Even words like horror or monster seemed meager and pale, not to mention words like anti-Semitism, envy, hatred. Such a colossal crime can be committed only if you mobilize the darkest dark of the soul. To imagine such darkness apparently needs a new language.
"Where were we?" "What did we go through?" "What's left of us?" the survivors wondered. Primo Levi tried to use images of Dante's hell; others turned to the works of Kafka, especially "The Trial" and "In the Penal Colony."
In the penal colony of Auschwitz, the Jew was not condemned because of his old or new beliefs, but because of the blood that flowed in his veins. In the Holocaust, biology determined a person's fate. In the Middle Ages, the Jew was killed for his beliefs. A Jew who chose to convert to Christianity or Islam was saved from his suffering. In the Holocaust, there was no choice. Observant Jews, liberal Jews, communist Jews and Jews who were sure they weren't Jews were crammed into the ghettos and camps. Their one and only offense: the Jewish blood in their veins.
The Holocaust stretched over six years. Such long years there probably never were in Jewish history. Those were years when every minute, every second, every split-second held more than it could bear. Pain and fear reigned, but even then, in the midst of hunger and humiliation, the amazement sprouted: "Is this Man?"
During the Holocaust, there was no place for thought or feeling. The needs of the hungry and thirsty body reduced one to dust. People who had been doctors, lawyers, engineers and professors only yesterday stole a piece of bread from their companions and when they were caught, they denied and lied. This degradation that many experienced will never be wiped out.
Under conditions of hunger and cold, the body, we learned in the camps, is liable to lose its divine qualities. That too was part of the wickedness of the murderer: not only to murder, but first to humiliate the victim utterly, to exterminate every shred of will and faith, to turn him into a despicable body whose soul had fled, and only then, that degradation complete, to murder him. The lust to debase the victim until his last moments was just as great as the lust for murder.
In 1945, the ovens were extinguished. Jean Améry, a prisoner of Auschwitz and one of the outstanding thinkers on the Holocaust, says in one of his essays: "Anybody who was tortured will never again feel at home in the world."
Great natural disasters leave us shocked and mute, but mass murder perpetrated by human beings on human beings is infinitely more painful. Murder reveals wickedness, hatred, cynicism and contempt for all belief. All the evil in man assumed a shape and reality in the ghettos and camps. The empathy that we once believed modern man felt for others was ruined for all time.
In 1945, the great migration of the survivors began: a sea of bodies, killed many times over and now resurrected. Some wanted to return to their countries and their homes, and some wanted to go to America, and some wanted to reach the shores of the Mediterranean and go from there to Palestine. Even then, in that strange resurrection, the first questions arose: What is a Jew? Why are we persecuted so bitterly and cruelly? Is there something hidden in us that condemns us to death? Many felt - if an individual may speak for the many - that the six years of war were years of profound trial. We had been in both hell and purgatory and we were no longer what we were.
Some entered hell as pious people and came out of it just as pious. That position deserves respect. But most survivors - myself, and especially the young - were outside the realm of faith, and from the first stages of the liberation, we were engaged with the question of how to go on living a life with meaning. The temptation to forget and be forgotten and to assimilate back into normal life lurked for every survivor. We can barely grasp and internalize the death of one child. How can we grasp the death of millions?
For the sake of sanity, the survivors built barriers between themselves and the horrors they had experienced. But every barrier, every distance, inevitably separates you from the most meaningful experience of your life, and without that experience, hard as it may be, you are doubly defective: a defect imposed on you by the murderers and a defect you perpetrated with your own hands.
God did not reveal himself in Auschwitz or in other camps. The survivors came out of hell wounded and humiliated. They were betrayed by the neighbors among whom they and their forefathers had lived. They were betrayed by Western culture, by the Germans, by the language and literature they admired so much. They were betrayed by the great beliefs: liberalism and progress. They were betrayed by their own bodies.
What to hold onto to live a meaningful life? It was clear to many that the denial of one's Judaism, which characterized the emancipated Jew, was no longer possible. After the Holocaust it was immoral.
No wonder many of the survivors went on to Israel. No doubt, they wanted to get to a place where they could leave their victimhood behind and assert responsibility over their fate, a place where they could connect with the culture of their forefathers, to the language of the Bible, and to the land that gave birth to the Bible.
This is not a story with a happy ending. A doctor who survived, from a religious background, who sailed to Israel with us in June 1946, told us: "We didn't see God when we expected him, so we have no choice but to do what he was supposed to do: we will protect the weak, we will love, we will comfort. From now on, the responsibility is all ours."
Aharon Appelfeld is the author, most recently, of"The Story of a Life." This article was translated by Barbara Harshav from the Hebrew.
Sunday, January 23, 2005
Pervasive and systemic Crimes against Humanity in USA
Pervasive Crimes against Humanity in USA
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/3004871Jan. 23, 2005, 12:43AM
MENTAL HEALTH SYSTEMS IN DISREPAIR
In the shadow of a crisis
A new law was supposed to streamline services and improve care for the sickest patients. But thousands still go without treatment.
By CLAUDIA FELDMAN and JEANNIE KEVERCopyright 2005 Houston Chronicle
Call him the money man.
He's schizophrenic, obsessive-compulsive and so ill he can't remember things from one day to the next. Until he was moved to a nursing home recently, he spent years entering downtown skyscrapers and holding forth on Hitler, Mussolini and the Beatles.
Security guards asked him to leave, but he couldn't, he had to get to the end of his spiel. Inevitably the police came, charged him with misdemeanor trespassing and put him in jail. From jail he went to a state mental hospital, and from there he recycled back to jail, the county psychiatric hospital and the streets.
He has cost taxpayers at least $2 million over the last 30 years, says a mental health expert who has followed his case, and even at that price tag he didn't get what he needed — long-term outpatient services or a spot in a supervised residential facility. He represents a state mental health system that's been broken for years.
Millions of dollars in tax money — the exact amount is untallied, but an informal survey of area mental health providers shows that it easily tops $70 million — goes to the treatment of mental illness in Harris County every year. While 25,000 received services from the public mental health system in 2003, almost three times as many did not.
Texas House Bill 2292, which became law in September, was supposed to fix things.
To streamline services, agencies for mental health and substance abuse were combined and eligibility requirements tightened. To save money, most mental health benefits were cut from Medicaid, the state-federal health insurance program for the poor, leaving nearly 128,000 Texas Medicaid recipients with mental illnesses without a way to pay for care.
To improve patient care, the law also implemented the concept of disease management. Instead of treating everyone with a mental illness with medication and little else, staffers at the Mental Health and Mental Retardation Authority of Harris County and other community mental health centers across the state now assign clients to one of four levels, with Level IV clients receiving the broadest range of services.
Legislators said the sickest people in the state would receive effective, even improved, treatment.
It didn't turn out that way, say those who work most closely with the mentally ill.
"Are we comfortable letting people die on the streets? Are we comfortable having a level of health care that may approach Third World status for some portion of our society?" asks Steve Schnee, executive director of the Mental Health and Mental Retardation Authority of Harris County.
Tom Mitchell, who has worked with the indigent mentally ill for 28 years, describes the four months since the law has been in effect "as the worst I've ever seen. The population is growing, and we're cutting services."
MHMRA, the region's largest provider of mental health services for the uninsured and underinsured, simply can't keep up with client demand. People not in crisis wait up to 3 1/2 months for an appointment. The day of the visit, they wait hours to see a doctor, who typically has a caseload of more than 600 patients.
According to a 2004 report by the Mental Health Needs Council, a local advocacy group, 84,000 Harris County residents who are severely ill with depression, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia depend on the public mental health system. Twenty percent of county residents in jail or prison and one-third of the county's homeless population are severely mentally ill.
Since September, mental health services in Harris County have undergone changes. Here's a look at what's happened and what the outlook is for the future.
Rationing of care
Only people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression now are eligible for more than crisis care at MHMRA. People in acute psychiatric crisis are eligible for treatment, regardless of their diagnoses, but under the new law they may be forced out of the system once they are stabilized.
Theoretically, people with other serious mental illnesses — anxiety and panic disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder and nonsuicidal depression — will be referred elsewhere, but they have few other places to go. The other main public provider, the Harris County Hospital District, has little capacity to absorb the overflow.
So far, about 125 clients who don't meet the new eligibility standards have been or soon will be purged by MHMRA, and 120 people, or 15 percent, are turned away each month, says Rose Childs of MHMRA.
At any one time, MHMRA juggles 8,830 clients, Childs says. That's one-tenth of those who need public treatment
Funding cuts
Texas already ranked near the bottom in per capita state spending for mental health care — 48th in 2002, according to a study by the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors Research Institute. And spending has dropped since then. The local MHMRA has lost $8 million in state funding for mental health services since 2003; of its $129.1 million budget for this fiscal year, $35.1 million is for adult outpatient mental health programs.
"With all these budget cuts, I'm afraid one day I might not be sick enough to qualify for help," says Bobby Harper, who has spent much of his life homeless, severely depressed and occasionally suicidal.
Calls for change
MHMRA of Harris County juggles funding issues and the delivery of care. Some lawmakers and other experts want community mental health agencies across the state to choose between the two.
State Rep. John Davis, R-Houston, filed a bill earlier this month to regionalize state-funded programs for mental health, mental retardation, substance abuse, aging and services for the disabled. Among other things, it would prohibit agencies from both overseeing funds and providing services.
The local Mental Health Needs Council and other groups focusing on the system's shortcomings agree. They'd also like to see much greater coordination between the Harris County Hospital District, MHMRA and the county public health department. The newly formed Harris County Public Health Care System Council is supposed to oversee that coordination.
Harris County faces special challenges, including the fact that rural areas in Texas have historically received more money per capita for mental health services than the state's urban areas. Couple that with urban areas' attraction for people who need such services, and the problems become clear, said Harris County Judge Robert Eckels. The county's geographic sprawl complicates the problem by making it difficult for many people to reach clinics where services are available.
Several other urban counties have begun to address the challenges, but change has been slow to arrive in Harris County.
"There are people who think we (in Harris County) have the worst mental health system in Texas," says Lois Moore, administrator of the University of Texas-Harris County Psychiatric Center, which provides short-term inpatient treatment. "It's very dysfunctional."
Once, MHMRA operated seven outpatient clinics; it's down to four. The places almost smell of budget cuts that have been going on for years.
Outside the northwest clinic, clients smoke and keep wary eyes on a man who is shouting — to himself.
Inside, patients recline in well-worn chairs and wait. For hours, they wait.
Irene Castorino, a middle-age woman, skipped breakfast to make it to the clinic for her 9 a.m. appointment. Then she sat in the dusty waiting area until her name was called at 2:15 p.m.
She waited more than five hours for a five-minute meeting with a social worker. Had to, she says. She needs medication for her depression, but she can't see the doctor who will write a prescription until she gets past the gatekeeper.
"You have to put up with it," Castorino says. "If you don't come and keep your appointment, they drop you."
Castorino has been an MHMRA client since 1995. "The waits are so much longer now," she says. "Also, I used to come to group therapy. They stopped that."
Specific budget cuts are decided locally. But the major changes have been dictated in Austin.
Davis described the legislation as an attempt to bring mental health care into the modern age.
He and other proponents note that the old system was cobbled together before the explosion of information about brain-based diseases. Now that society knows more about mental illness, they say, treatment needs to change, too.
Combining effective, new drugs with meaningful therapy will help more people manage their mental illnesses, Davis said.
Most experts like the idea of disease management.
"In theory, it makes a lot of sense," said Betsy Schwartz, executive director of the Mental Health Association of Greater Houston. "But it's mandated without any new funding in a system already totally underfunded."
MHMRA, for example, has about $35 million a year to spend on outpatient adult mental health services.
That's not nearly enough, says Schwartz, who estimates roughly 35,000 mentally ill adults would seek services if the system were accessible.
Thousands of others are so sick they may not know they need treatment.
"It costs $10,000 a year, minimum, to give an adult the care he or she needs in an outpatient clinic," Schwartz says.
"It costs $55,000 a year not to treat that client. They cycle into crisis, and crisis care is prohibitively expensive. We pay now or pay later."
Sandra Robles' story
When Sandra Robles first called for help, she was so depressed she couldn't leave her bare west Houston apartment.
She lost her job as a nursery-school teacher when she took time off to help Steven, her adult schizophrenic son. At her next job, in a nursing home, a colostomy bag exploded in her face and caused an eye infection so severe she couldn't work.
Panicked about her bills, her son, her vision and her sanity, Robles called the Mobile Crisis Outreach Team, a free emergency service that is part of MHMRA. MCOT made several home visits, providing counseling and medication. Robles' employer also came through, giving her the temporary assistance she needed to pay bills and buy groceries.
Crisis averted, it seemed, for the licensed vocational nurse who feared she'd be living on the street. Her apartment was just a little box, she sobbed at one point, but it was all she had.
Two weeks ago, just as Robles planned to return to work, everything unraveled again.
Her doctor told her she wasn't ready — one eye was getting worse. A few days after she asked her employers to extend her medical leave, she was fired. That meant she lost the financial help. Then her mother died.
Thank goodness, Robles said, she had the anti-depressants from MCOT. Otherwise, she said, she'd be suicidal.
The MCOT services, designed to be temporary, actually came to an end before the latest series of crises. The MCOT counselor directed her to MHMRA's eligibility center, where the staff told her she qualified for services but would have to start paying $89 a month.
Robles didn't have the money and gave up on any hope of treatment. The MCOT staff stepped in again, assuring her that MHMRA would help her, even if she couldn't pay.
And that's what happened. Now Robles is trying to figure out how to come up with rent and put food in the refrigerator when she has no money coming in.
"I'm not going to cry — I can't cry anymore," she said. "I'm going to fight."
When Robles is not worrying about basic survival, she frets about her son. She wants to help him, she says, but sometimes the schizophrenia is a destructive force bigger and more powerful than either of them. Even when he gets free care, she says, he sometimes refuses it.
She's no longer surprised by that, she says. He's very ill. And sometimes they both question the value of 15 minutes of talk therapy here and there.
Tom Mitchell, the MCOT director, worries about the folks he and his team members lose while transferring them from their jurisdiction to the eligibility center and outpatient clinics. He feels particularly bad for the clients who are bounced because they don't have one of the big three diagnoses.
That, says Dr. Avrim Fishkind, is his biggest beef with the legislation: "It's almost a 'who should live and who should die' kind of decision."
Fishkind is medical director of MHMRA's NeuroPsychiatric Center, which provides assessment and treatment for people in psychiatric crises. Because of their emergency status, doctors can treat them without worrying about an approved diagnosis.
"But then what?" Fishkind asked. "There are dozens of psychiatric illnesses with the risk of violence and suicide as great or greater than major depression, schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Think what would happen if doctors at Ben Taub (General Hospital) or the hospital district were told they could only treat cancer, diabetes and heart disease. That's how limiting (House Bill) 2292 is."
Joe Lovelace, executive director of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in Texas, acknowledges that some people will lose services, but he says the limits are necessary to ensure that those with the greatest needs get help.
"It's a rational rationing," said Lovelace, who got involved in mental health issues after his son was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1988.
The legislation was an appropriate if difficult step to take, says Robert Black, a spokesman for Gov. Rick Perry. "2292 merged 11 state agencies into four, eliminated a lot of duplication and saved taxpayers dollars. With a $10 billion shortfall, legislators had to make some hard decisions."
For clients who get the ax, the Harris County Hospital District is the logical fallback. But it was stretched beyond capacity even before House Bill 2292 took effect.
Already Ben Taub and other emergency centers in the Texas Medical Center, including the NeuroPsychiatric Center, periodically go on diversion, too crowded to accept even the most critically ill patients.
"We will do everything we can, but we are not staffed and funded to provide adequate mental health care to everybody in Harris County," said Dr. John Burruss, chief of psychiatric services.
Those who call for outpatient treatment aren't denied outright. The waiting time is about three months. People wait, and often they cycle into crisis.
"They end up in the ER, they end up in jail, they end up dead," Burruss said.
Limited by the system
Bobby Harper had been homeless for much of his adult life when he moved to Houston in 1997. He would get a job, rent an apartment, buy a few appliances. Then he'd get fired.
Harper's fortunes changed when he met his wife-to-be, Deborah, in a church singles group. She suffered from severe depression, she told him, and she recognized his untreated symptoms. If he didn't take care of his own mental illness, they were finished.
Last year, at age 35, Harper sought help from the Safe Havens Transitional Living Center, an MHMRA facility for homeless, mentally ill men. He is stable now. He and Deborah are married, living in their own apartment and expecting a child. He would like to say all is well, love conquers all, but in their case, it hasn't.
Deborah can't work because of multiple health problems. She receives Social Security payments of $564 a month. He wants to work, but if he earns as much as $825 a month, Deborah loses her benefits. He can earn enough to jeopardize her income but not enough to pay for their living expenses, their health problems and a high-risk pregnancy.
"I'd feel better working," Harper said. "But the system penalizes me if I do."
Harper knows most people can't relate to him or his story. He's short, stout, and can't take care of himself very well. When he and his wife first learned she was pregnant, they were thrilled but also frightened. They didn't plan the pregnancy and they knew they couldn't afford to raise a child.
In the past few weeks, they've contacted an adoption agency.
"We're going to give up the baby," Harper said.
He knows most people don't understand chronic depression.
"You're depressed?" people ask him. "So am I."
He said, "I'm not talking about getting sad or a bad day. I'm talking about waking up and not wanting to live."
Harper is not an expert on House Bill 2292, but he knows it means even more budget cuts in the future, and the prospect terrifies him.
"I just can't be homeless again," he said.
jeannie.kever@chron.com
claudia.feldman@chron.com
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/3004871Jan. 23, 2005, 12:43AM
MENTAL HEALTH SYSTEMS IN DISREPAIR
In the shadow of a crisis
A new law was supposed to streamline services and improve care for the sickest patients. But thousands still go without treatment.
By CLAUDIA FELDMAN and JEANNIE KEVERCopyright 2005 Houston Chronicle
Call him the money man.
He's schizophrenic, obsessive-compulsive and so ill he can't remember things from one day to the next. Until he was moved to a nursing home recently, he spent years entering downtown skyscrapers and holding forth on Hitler, Mussolini and the Beatles.
Security guards asked him to leave, but he couldn't, he had to get to the end of his spiel. Inevitably the police came, charged him with misdemeanor trespassing and put him in jail. From jail he went to a state mental hospital, and from there he recycled back to jail, the county psychiatric hospital and the streets.
He has cost taxpayers at least $2 million over the last 30 years, says a mental health expert who has followed his case, and even at that price tag he didn't get what he needed — long-term outpatient services or a spot in a supervised residential facility. He represents a state mental health system that's been broken for years.
Millions of dollars in tax money — the exact amount is untallied, but an informal survey of area mental health providers shows that it easily tops $70 million — goes to the treatment of mental illness in Harris County every year. While 25,000 received services from the public mental health system in 2003, almost three times as many did not.
Texas House Bill 2292, which became law in September, was supposed to fix things.
To streamline services, agencies for mental health and substance abuse were combined and eligibility requirements tightened. To save money, most mental health benefits were cut from Medicaid, the state-federal health insurance program for the poor, leaving nearly 128,000 Texas Medicaid recipients with mental illnesses without a way to pay for care.
To improve patient care, the law also implemented the concept of disease management. Instead of treating everyone with a mental illness with medication and little else, staffers at the Mental Health and Mental Retardation Authority of Harris County and other community mental health centers across the state now assign clients to one of four levels, with Level IV clients receiving the broadest range of services.
Legislators said the sickest people in the state would receive effective, even improved, treatment.
It didn't turn out that way, say those who work most closely with the mentally ill.
"Are we comfortable letting people die on the streets? Are we comfortable having a level of health care that may approach Third World status for some portion of our society?" asks Steve Schnee, executive director of the Mental Health and Mental Retardation Authority of Harris County.
Tom Mitchell, who has worked with the indigent mentally ill for 28 years, describes the four months since the law has been in effect "as the worst I've ever seen. The population is growing, and we're cutting services."
MHMRA, the region's largest provider of mental health services for the uninsured and underinsured, simply can't keep up with client demand. People not in crisis wait up to 3 1/2 months for an appointment. The day of the visit, they wait hours to see a doctor, who typically has a caseload of more than 600 patients.
According to a 2004 report by the Mental Health Needs Council, a local advocacy group, 84,000 Harris County residents who are severely ill with depression, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia depend on the public mental health system. Twenty percent of county residents in jail or prison and one-third of the county's homeless population are severely mentally ill.
Since September, mental health services in Harris County have undergone changes. Here's a look at what's happened and what the outlook is for the future.
Rationing of care
Only people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression now are eligible for more than crisis care at MHMRA. People in acute psychiatric crisis are eligible for treatment, regardless of their diagnoses, but under the new law they may be forced out of the system once they are stabilized.
Theoretically, people with other serious mental illnesses — anxiety and panic disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder and nonsuicidal depression — will be referred elsewhere, but they have few other places to go. The other main public provider, the Harris County Hospital District, has little capacity to absorb the overflow.
So far, about 125 clients who don't meet the new eligibility standards have been or soon will be purged by MHMRA, and 120 people, or 15 percent, are turned away each month, says Rose Childs of MHMRA.
At any one time, MHMRA juggles 8,830 clients, Childs says. That's one-tenth of those who need public treatment
Funding cuts
Texas already ranked near the bottom in per capita state spending for mental health care — 48th in 2002, according to a study by the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors Research Institute. And spending has dropped since then. The local MHMRA has lost $8 million in state funding for mental health services since 2003; of its $129.1 million budget for this fiscal year, $35.1 million is for adult outpatient mental health programs.
"With all these budget cuts, I'm afraid one day I might not be sick enough to qualify for help," says Bobby Harper, who has spent much of his life homeless, severely depressed and occasionally suicidal.
Calls for change
MHMRA of Harris County juggles funding issues and the delivery of care. Some lawmakers and other experts want community mental health agencies across the state to choose between the two.
State Rep. John Davis, R-Houston, filed a bill earlier this month to regionalize state-funded programs for mental health, mental retardation, substance abuse, aging and services for the disabled. Among other things, it would prohibit agencies from both overseeing funds and providing services.
The local Mental Health Needs Council and other groups focusing on the system's shortcomings agree. They'd also like to see much greater coordination between the Harris County Hospital District, MHMRA and the county public health department. The newly formed Harris County Public Health Care System Council is supposed to oversee that coordination.
Harris County faces special challenges, including the fact that rural areas in Texas have historically received more money per capita for mental health services than the state's urban areas. Couple that with urban areas' attraction for people who need such services, and the problems become clear, said Harris County Judge Robert Eckels. The county's geographic sprawl complicates the problem by making it difficult for many people to reach clinics where services are available.
Several other urban counties have begun to address the challenges, but change has been slow to arrive in Harris County.
"There are people who think we (in Harris County) have the worst mental health system in Texas," says Lois Moore, administrator of the University of Texas-Harris County Psychiatric Center, which provides short-term inpatient treatment. "It's very dysfunctional."
Once, MHMRA operated seven outpatient clinics; it's down to four. The places almost smell of budget cuts that have been going on for years.
Outside the northwest clinic, clients smoke and keep wary eyes on a man who is shouting — to himself.
Inside, patients recline in well-worn chairs and wait. For hours, they wait.
Irene Castorino, a middle-age woman, skipped breakfast to make it to the clinic for her 9 a.m. appointment. Then she sat in the dusty waiting area until her name was called at 2:15 p.m.
She waited more than five hours for a five-minute meeting with a social worker. Had to, she says. She needs medication for her depression, but she can't see the doctor who will write a prescription until she gets past the gatekeeper.
"You have to put up with it," Castorino says. "If you don't come and keep your appointment, they drop you."
Castorino has been an MHMRA client since 1995. "The waits are so much longer now," she says. "Also, I used to come to group therapy. They stopped that."
Specific budget cuts are decided locally. But the major changes have been dictated in Austin.
Davis described the legislation as an attempt to bring mental health care into the modern age.
He and other proponents note that the old system was cobbled together before the explosion of information about brain-based diseases. Now that society knows more about mental illness, they say, treatment needs to change, too.
Combining effective, new drugs with meaningful therapy will help more people manage their mental illnesses, Davis said.
Most experts like the idea of disease management.
"In theory, it makes a lot of sense," said Betsy Schwartz, executive director of the Mental Health Association of Greater Houston. "But it's mandated without any new funding in a system already totally underfunded."
MHMRA, for example, has about $35 million a year to spend on outpatient adult mental health services.
That's not nearly enough, says Schwartz, who estimates roughly 35,000 mentally ill adults would seek services if the system were accessible.
Thousands of others are so sick they may not know they need treatment.
"It costs $10,000 a year, minimum, to give an adult the care he or she needs in an outpatient clinic," Schwartz says.
"It costs $55,000 a year not to treat that client. They cycle into crisis, and crisis care is prohibitively expensive. We pay now or pay later."
Sandra Robles' story
When Sandra Robles first called for help, she was so depressed she couldn't leave her bare west Houston apartment.
She lost her job as a nursery-school teacher when she took time off to help Steven, her adult schizophrenic son. At her next job, in a nursing home, a colostomy bag exploded in her face and caused an eye infection so severe she couldn't work.
Panicked about her bills, her son, her vision and her sanity, Robles called the Mobile Crisis Outreach Team, a free emergency service that is part of MHMRA. MCOT made several home visits, providing counseling and medication. Robles' employer also came through, giving her the temporary assistance she needed to pay bills and buy groceries.
Crisis averted, it seemed, for the licensed vocational nurse who feared she'd be living on the street. Her apartment was just a little box, she sobbed at one point, but it was all she had.
Two weeks ago, just as Robles planned to return to work, everything unraveled again.
Her doctor told her she wasn't ready — one eye was getting worse. A few days after she asked her employers to extend her medical leave, she was fired. That meant she lost the financial help. Then her mother died.
Thank goodness, Robles said, she had the anti-depressants from MCOT. Otherwise, she said, she'd be suicidal.
The MCOT services, designed to be temporary, actually came to an end before the latest series of crises. The MCOT counselor directed her to MHMRA's eligibility center, where the staff told her she qualified for services but would have to start paying $89 a month.
Robles didn't have the money and gave up on any hope of treatment. The MCOT staff stepped in again, assuring her that MHMRA would help her, even if she couldn't pay.
And that's what happened. Now Robles is trying to figure out how to come up with rent and put food in the refrigerator when she has no money coming in.
"I'm not going to cry — I can't cry anymore," she said. "I'm going to fight."
When Robles is not worrying about basic survival, she frets about her son. She wants to help him, she says, but sometimes the schizophrenia is a destructive force bigger and more powerful than either of them. Even when he gets free care, she says, he sometimes refuses it.
She's no longer surprised by that, she says. He's very ill. And sometimes they both question the value of 15 minutes of talk therapy here and there.
Tom Mitchell, the MCOT director, worries about the folks he and his team members lose while transferring them from their jurisdiction to the eligibility center and outpatient clinics. He feels particularly bad for the clients who are bounced because they don't have one of the big three diagnoses.
That, says Dr. Avrim Fishkind, is his biggest beef with the legislation: "It's almost a 'who should live and who should die' kind of decision."
Fishkind is medical director of MHMRA's NeuroPsychiatric Center, which provides assessment and treatment for people in psychiatric crises. Because of their emergency status, doctors can treat them without worrying about an approved diagnosis.
"But then what?" Fishkind asked. "There are dozens of psychiatric illnesses with the risk of violence and suicide as great or greater than major depression, schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Think what would happen if doctors at Ben Taub (General Hospital) or the hospital district were told they could only treat cancer, diabetes and heart disease. That's how limiting (House Bill) 2292 is."
Joe Lovelace, executive director of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in Texas, acknowledges that some people will lose services, but he says the limits are necessary to ensure that those with the greatest needs get help.
"It's a rational rationing," said Lovelace, who got involved in mental health issues after his son was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1988.
The legislation was an appropriate if difficult step to take, says Robert Black, a spokesman for Gov. Rick Perry. "2292 merged 11 state agencies into four, eliminated a lot of duplication and saved taxpayers dollars. With a $10 billion shortfall, legislators had to make some hard decisions."
For clients who get the ax, the Harris County Hospital District is the logical fallback. But it was stretched beyond capacity even before House Bill 2292 took effect.
Already Ben Taub and other emergency centers in the Texas Medical Center, including the NeuroPsychiatric Center, periodically go on diversion, too crowded to accept even the most critically ill patients.
"We will do everything we can, but we are not staffed and funded to provide adequate mental health care to everybody in Harris County," said Dr. John Burruss, chief of psychiatric services.
Those who call for outpatient treatment aren't denied outright. The waiting time is about three months. People wait, and often they cycle into crisis.
"They end up in the ER, they end up in jail, they end up dead," Burruss said.
Limited by the system
Bobby Harper had been homeless for much of his adult life when he moved to Houston in 1997. He would get a job, rent an apartment, buy a few appliances. Then he'd get fired.
Harper's fortunes changed when he met his wife-to-be, Deborah, in a church singles group. She suffered from severe depression, she told him, and she recognized his untreated symptoms. If he didn't take care of his own mental illness, they were finished.
Last year, at age 35, Harper sought help from the Safe Havens Transitional Living Center, an MHMRA facility for homeless, mentally ill men. He is stable now. He and Deborah are married, living in their own apartment and expecting a child. He would like to say all is well, love conquers all, but in their case, it hasn't.
Deborah can't work because of multiple health problems. She receives Social Security payments of $564 a month. He wants to work, but if he earns as much as $825 a month, Deborah loses her benefits. He can earn enough to jeopardize her income but not enough to pay for their living expenses, their health problems and a high-risk pregnancy.
"I'd feel better working," Harper said. "But the system penalizes me if I do."
Harper knows most people can't relate to him or his story. He's short, stout, and can't take care of himself very well. When he and his wife first learned she was pregnant, they were thrilled but also frightened. They didn't plan the pregnancy and they knew they couldn't afford to raise a child.
In the past few weeks, they've contacted an adoption agency.
"We're going to give up the baby," Harper said.
He knows most people don't understand chronic depression.
"You're depressed?" people ask him. "So am I."
He said, "I'm not talking about getting sad or a bad day. I'm talking about waking up and not wanting to live."
Harper is not an expert on House Bill 2292, but he knows it means even more budget cuts in the future, and the prospect terrifies him.
"I just can't be homeless again," he said.
jeannie.kever@chron.com
claudia.feldman@chron.com
2nd Inauguration of president Bush
I can make this statement without equivocation –this is the best speech since “before” FDR. Make no mistake about it, advercity always asked the question of; what are we to become in the face of our sorrows. I believe more than ever that we are embedded in a perfect system and the univerce is always asking us –who do you want to be. It certainly is a amazingly creative matrix we live in?
“When the Declaration of Independence was first read in public and the Liberty Bell was sounded in celebration, a witness said, "It rang as if it meant something." In our time it means something still. America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world, and to all the inhabitants thereof. Renewed in our strength - tested, but not weary - we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom. “
For Immediate ReleaseOffice of the Press SecretaryJanuary 20, 2005
President Sworn-In to Second Term
Inauguration 2005
Vice President Cheney, Mr. Chief Justice, President Carter, President Bush, President Clinton, reverend clergy, distinguished guests, fellow citizens:
On this day, prescribed by law and marked by ceremony, we celebrate the durable wisdom of our Constitution, and recall the deep commitments that unite our country. I am grateful for the honor of this hour, mindful of the consequential times in which we live, and determined to fulfill the oath that I have sworn and you have witnessed.
At this second gathering, our duties are defined not by the words I use, but by the history we have seen together. For a half century, America defended our own freedom by standing watch on distant borders. After the shipwreck of communism came years of relative quiet, years of repose, years of sabbatical - and then there came a day of fire.
We have seen our vulnerability - and we have seen its deepest source. For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny - prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder - violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat. There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.
We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.
America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth. Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time.
So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.
This is not primarily the task of arms, though we will defend ourselves and our friends by force of arms when necessary. Freedom, by its nature, must be chosen, and defended by citizens, and sustained by the rule of law and the protection of minorities. And when the soul of a nation finally speaks, the institutions that arise may reflect customs and traditions very different from our own. America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling. Our goal instead is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom, and make their own way.
The great objective of ending tyranny is the concentrated work of generations. The difficulty of the task is no excuse for avoiding it. America's influence is not unlimited, but fortunately for the oppressed, America's influence is considerable, and we will use it confidently in freedom's cause.
My most solemn duty is to protect this nation and its people against further attacks and emerging threats. Some have unwisely chosen to test America's resolve, and have found it firm.
We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation: The moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right. America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies.
We will encourage reform in other governments by making clear that success in our relations will require the decent treatment of their own people. America's belief in human dignity will guide our policies, yet rights must be more than the grudging concessions of dictators; they are secured by free dissent and the participation of the governed. In the long run, there is no justice without freedom, and there can be no human rights without human liberty.
Some, I know, have questioned the global appeal of liberty - though this time in history, four decades defined by the swiftest advance of freedom ever seen, is an odd time for doubt. Americans, of all people, should never be surprised by the power of our ideals. Eventually, the call of freedom comes to every mind and every soul. We do not accept the existence of permanent tyranny because we do not accept the possibility of permanent slavery. Liberty will come to those who love it.
Today, America speaks anew to the peoples of the world:
All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.
Democratic reformers facing repression, prison, or exile can know: America sees you for who you are: the future leaders of your free country.
The rulers of outlaw regimes can know that we still believe as Abraham Lincoln did: "Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and, under the rule of a just God, cannot long retain it."
The leaders of governments with long habits of control need to know: To serve your people you must learn to trust them. Start on this journey of progress and justice, and America will walk at your side.
And all the allies of the United States can know: we honor your friendship, we rely on your counsel, and we depend on your help. Division among free nations is a primary goal of freedom's enemies. The concerted effort of free nations to promote democracy is a prelude to our enemies' defeat.
Today, I also speak anew to my fellow citizens:
From all of you, I have asked patience in the hard task of securing America, which you have granted in good measure. Our country has accepted obligations that are difficult to fulfill, and would be dishonorable to abandon. Yet because we have acted in the great liberating tradition of this nation, tens of millions have achieved their freedom. And as hope kindles hope, millions more will find it. By our efforts, we have lit a fire as well - a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress, and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world.
A few Americans have accepted the hardest duties in this cause - in the quiet work of intelligence and diplomacy ... the idealistic work of helping raise up free governments ... the dangerous and necessary work of fighting our enemies. Some have shown their devotion to our country in deaths that honored their whole lives - and we will always honor their names and their sacrifice.
All Americans have witnessed this idealism, and some for the first time. I ask our youngest citizens to believe the evidence of your eyes. You have seen duty and allegiance in the determined faces of our soldiers. You have seen that life is fragile, and evil is real, and courage triumphs. Make the choice to serve in a cause larger than your wants, larger than yourself - and in your days you will add not just to the wealth of our country, but to its character.
America has need of idealism and courage, because we have essential work at home - the unfinished work of American freedom. In a world moving toward liberty, we are determined to show the meaning and promise of liberty.
In America's ideal of freedom, citizens find the dignity and security of economic independence, instead of laboring on the edge of subsistence. This is the broader definition of liberty that motivated the Homestead Act, the Social Security Act, and the G.I. Bill of Rights. And now we will extend this vision by reforming great institutions to serve the needs of our time. To give every American a stake in the promise and future of our country, we will bring the highest standards to our schools, and build an ownership society. We will widen the ownership of homes and businesses, retirement savings and health insurance - preparing our people for the challenges of life in a free society. By making every citizen an agent of his or her own destiny, we will give our fellow Americans greater freedom from want and fear, and make our society more prosperous and just and equal.
In America's ideal of freedom, the public interest depends on private character - on integrity, and tolerance toward others, and the rule of conscience in our own lives. Self-government relies, in the end, on the governing of the self. That edifice of character is built in families, supported by communities with standards, and sustained in our national life by the truths of Sinai, the Sermon on the Mount, the words of the Koran, and the varied faiths of our people. Americans move forward in every generation by reaffirming all that is good and true that came before - ideals of justice and conduct that are the same yesterday, today, and forever.
In America's ideal of freedom, the exercise of rights is ennobled by service, and mercy, and a heart for the weak. Liberty for all does not mean independence from one another. Our nation relies on men and women who look after a neighbor and surround the lost with love. Americans, at our best, value the life we see in one another, and must always remember that even the unwanted have worth. And our country must abandon all the habits of racism, because we cannot carry the message of freedom and the baggage of bigotry at the same time.
From the perspective of a single day, including this day of dedication, the issues and questions before our country are many. From the viewpoint of centuries, the questions that come to us are narrowed and few. Did our generation advance the cause of freedom? And did our character bring credit to that cause?
These questions that judge us also unite us, because Americans of every party and background, Americans by choice and by birth, are bound to one another in the cause of freedom. We have known divisions, which must be healed to move forward in great purposes - and I will strive in good faith to heal them. Yet those divisions do not define America. We felt the unity and fellowship of our nation when freedom came under attack, and our response came like a single hand over a single heart. And we can feel that same unity and pride whenever America acts for good, and the victims of disaster are given hope, and the unjust encounter justice, and the captives are set free.
We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom. Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events. Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul. When our Founders declared a new order of the ages; when soldiers died in wave upon wave for a union based on liberty; when citizens marched in peaceful outrage under the banner "Freedom Now" - they were acting on an ancient hope that is meant to be fulfilled. History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty.
When the Declaration of Independence was first read in public and the Liberty Bell was sounded in celebration, a witness said, "It rang as if it meant something." In our time it means something still. America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world, and to all the inhabitants thereof. Renewed in our strength - tested, but not weary - we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom.
May God bless you, and may He watch over the United States of America
“When the Declaration of Independence was first read in public and the Liberty Bell was sounded in celebration, a witness said, "It rang as if it meant something." In our time it means something still. America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world, and to all the inhabitants thereof. Renewed in our strength - tested, but not weary - we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom. “
For Immediate ReleaseOffice of the Press SecretaryJanuary 20, 2005
President Sworn-In to Second Term
Inauguration 2005
Vice President Cheney, Mr. Chief Justice, President Carter, President Bush, President Clinton, reverend clergy, distinguished guests, fellow citizens:
On this day, prescribed by law and marked by ceremony, we celebrate the durable wisdom of our Constitution, and recall the deep commitments that unite our country. I am grateful for the honor of this hour, mindful of the consequential times in which we live, and determined to fulfill the oath that I have sworn and you have witnessed.
At this second gathering, our duties are defined not by the words I use, but by the history we have seen together. For a half century, America defended our own freedom by standing watch on distant borders. After the shipwreck of communism came years of relative quiet, years of repose, years of sabbatical - and then there came a day of fire.
We have seen our vulnerability - and we have seen its deepest source. For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny - prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder - violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat. There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.
We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.
America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth. Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time.
So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.
This is not primarily the task of arms, though we will defend ourselves and our friends by force of arms when necessary. Freedom, by its nature, must be chosen, and defended by citizens, and sustained by the rule of law and the protection of minorities. And when the soul of a nation finally speaks, the institutions that arise may reflect customs and traditions very different from our own. America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling. Our goal instead is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom, and make their own way.
The great objective of ending tyranny is the concentrated work of generations. The difficulty of the task is no excuse for avoiding it. America's influence is not unlimited, but fortunately for the oppressed, America's influence is considerable, and we will use it confidently in freedom's cause.
My most solemn duty is to protect this nation and its people against further attacks and emerging threats. Some have unwisely chosen to test America's resolve, and have found it firm.
We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation: The moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right. America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies.
We will encourage reform in other governments by making clear that success in our relations will require the decent treatment of their own people. America's belief in human dignity will guide our policies, yet rights must be more than the grudging concessions of dictators; they are secured by free dissent and the participation of the governed. In the long run, there is no justice without freedom, and there can be no human rights without human liberty.
Some, I know, have questioned the global appeal of liberty - though this time in history, four decades defined by the swiftest advance of freedom ever seen, is an odd time for doubt. Americans, of all people, should never be surprised by the power of our ideals. Eventually, the call of freedom comes to every mind and every soul. We do not accept the existence of permanent tyranny because we do not accept the possibility of permanent slavery. Liberty will come to those who love it.
Today, America speaks anew to the peoples of the world:
All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.
Democratic reformers facing repression, prison, or exile can know: America sees you for who you are: the future leaders of your free country.
The rulers of outlaw regimes can know that we still believe as Abraham Lincoln did: "Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and, under the rule of a just God, cannot long retain it."
The leaders of governments with long habits of control need to know: To serve your people you must learn to trust them. Start on this journey of progress and justice, and America will walk at your side.
And all the allies of the United States can know: we honor your friendship, we rely on your counsel, and we depend on your help. Division among free nations is a primary goal of freedom's enemies. The concerted effort of free nations to promote democracy is a prelude to our enemies' defeat.
Today, I also speak anew to my fellow citizens:
From all of you, I have asked patience in the hard task of securing America, which you have granted in good measure. Our country has accepted obligations that are difficult to fulfill, and would be dishonorable to abandon. Yet because we have acted in the great liberating tradition of this nation, tens of millions have achieved their freedom. And as hope kindles hope, millions more will find it. By our efforts, we have lit a fire as well - a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress, and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world.
A few Americans have accepted the hardest duties in this cause - in the quiet work of intelligence and diplomacy ... the idealistic work of helping raise up free governments ... the dangerous and necessary work of fighting our enemies. Some have shown their devotion to our country in deaths that honored their whole lives - and we will always honor their names and their sacrifice.
All Americans have witnessed this idealism, and some for the first time. I ask our youngest citizens to believe the evidence of your eyes. You have seen duty and allegiance in the determined faces of our soldiers. You have seen that life is fragile, and evil is real, and courage triumphs. Make the choice to serve in a cause larger than your wants, larger than yourself - and in your days you will add not just to the wealth of our country, but to its character.
America has need of idealism and courage, because we have essential work at home - the unfinished work of American freedom. In a world moving toward liberty, we are determined to show the meaning and promise of liberty.
In America's ideal of freedom, citizens find the dignity and security of economic independence, instead of laboring on the edge of subsistence. This is the broader definition of liberty that motivated the Homestead Act, the Social Security Act, and the G.I. Bill of Rights. And now we will extend this vision by reforming great institutions to serve the needs of our time. To give every American a stake in the promise and future of our country, we will bring the highest standards to our schools, and build an ownership society. We will widen the ownership of homes and businesses, retirement savings and health insurance - preparing our people for the challenges of life in a free society. By making every citizen an agent of his or her own destiny, we will give our fellow Americans greater freedom from want and fear, and make our society more prosperous and just and equal.
In America's ideal of freedom, the public interest depends on private character - on integrity, and tolerance toward others, and the rule of conscience in our own lives. Self-government relies, in the end, on the governing of the self. That edifice of character is built in families, supported by communities with standards, and sustained in our national life by the truths of Sinai, the Sermon on the Mount, the words of the Koran, and the varied faiths of our people. Americans move forward in every generation by reaffirming all that is good and true that came before - ideals of justice and conduct that are the same yesterday, today, and forever.
In America's ideal of freedom, the exercise of rights is ennobled by service, and mercy, and a heart for the weak. Liberty for all does not mean independence from one another. Our nation relies on men and women who look after a neighbor and surround the lost with love. Americans, at our best, value the life we see in one another, and must always remember that even the unwanted have worth. And our country must abandon all the habits of racism, because we cannot carry the message of freedom and the baggage of bigotry at the same time.
From the perspective of a single day, including this day of dedication, the issues and questions before our country are many. From the viewpoint of centuries, the questions that come to us are narrowed and few. Did our generation advance the cause of freedom? And did our character bring credit to that cause?
These questions that judge us also unite us, because Americans of every party and background, Americans by choice and by birth, are bound to one another in the cause of freedom. We have known divisions, which must be healed to move forward in great purposes - and I will strive in good faith to heal them. Yet those divisions do not define America. We felt the unity and fellowship of our nation when freedom came under attack, and our response came like a single hand over a single heart. And we can feel that same unity and pride whenever America acts for good, and the victims of disaster are given hope, and the unjust encounter justice, and the captives are set free.
We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom. Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events. Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul. When our Founders declared a new order of the ages; when soldiers died in wave upon wave for a union based on liberty; when citizens marched in peaceful outrage under the banner "Freedom Now" - they were acting on an ancient hope that is meant to be fulfilled. History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty.
When the Declaration of Independence was first read in public and the Liberty Bell was sounded in celebration, a witness said, "It rang as if it meant something." In our time it means something still. America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world, and to all the inhabitants thereof. Renewed in our strength - tested, but not weary - we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom.
May God bless you, and may He watch over the United States of America
Sunday, January 16, 2005
A Message From The Future
Report:U.S.conducting secret missions in Iran
New Yorker article says U.S. commandos in placein 10 Middle East nations
Updated: 1:14 p.m. ET Jan. 16, 2005
WASHINGTON - The United States has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran to help identify potential nuclear, chemical and missile targets, The New Yorker magazine reported Sunday.
advertisement
The article, by award-winning reporter Seymour Hersh, said the secret missions have been going on at least since last summer with the goal of identifying target information for three dozen or more suspected sites.
Hersh quotes one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon as saying, “The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible.”
One former high-level intelligence official told The New Yorker, “This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush administration is looking at this as a huge war zone. Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign.”
White House disputes reportThe White House said Iran is a concern and a threat that needs to be taken seriously. But it disputed the report by Hersh, who last year exposed the extent of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
“We obviously have a concern about Iran. The whole world has a concern about Iran,” Dan Bartlett, a top aide to President Bush, told CNN’s “Late Edition.”
Of The New Yorker report, he said: “I think it’s riddled with inaccuracies, and I don’t believe that some of the conclusions he’s drawing are based on fact.”
Bartlett said the administration “will continue to work through the diplomatic initiatives” to convince Iran — which Bush once called part of an “axis of evil” — not to pursue nuclear weapons.
“No president, at any juncture in history, has ever taken military options off the table,” Bartlett added. “But what President Bush has shown is that he believes we can emphasize the diplomatic initiatives that are underway right now.”
Bush has warned Iran in recent weeks against meddling in Iraqi elections.
Commandos in place?The former intelligence official told Hersh that an American commando task force in South Asia is working closely with a group of Pakistani scientists who had dealt with their Iranian counterparts.
The New Yorker reports that this task force, aided by information from Pakistan, has been penetrating into eastern Iran in a hunt for underground nuclear-weapons installations.
In exchange for this cooperation, the official told Hersh, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has received assurances that his government will not have to turn over Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s atomic bomb, to face questioning about his role in selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
Hersh reported that Bush has already “signed a series of top-secret findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as 10 nations in the Middle East and South Asia.”
Defining these as military rather than intelligence operations, Hersh reported, will enable the Bush administration to evade legal restrictions imposed on the CIA’s covert activities overseas.
Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters.
A Message From The Future
Date: Thu Oct 14, 2004 9:21 pm Subject: Re: The new Dark Age –“seat belts required” when reading!
Mike,With all due respect, you take yourself way too seriously. I doubt any foreign or domestic leaders care about your letter much less aretalking about it.TimThe new Dark Age –"seat belts required" when reading!Well, I have rattled the whole planet with this last week when I released it (10/10/04)–many capitals are talking about this scenario. As my mother told me all the time –you are nothing but trouble. I had gotten an Israeli response and we got Russian diplomats running to Iran. Believe me this is all window dressing that makes the government official's looking good. It's nothing but free drinking and dinners and deals.In the shadow of this the republicans and democrats don't look very effective –and they were both beating around the bushes in the debates with this.Some are now thinking I am a security threat to the United States of America (who have I been talking to) and others are saying that I have shifted the geopolitical position of our country on nuclear proliferation -relations between nations. Will I have started a military action in preventing a catastrophe? They are talking about me throughout Washington DC. Did the NRC respond to this already?There is no greater governmental document on the planet that expresses the hopes and dreams of humanity –upholds the dignity of the human spirit –than our USA constitution. There are many documents of its equal -but none better in the world. I swear to god I love our constitution and I hold it sacred it in my heart.I'll give you first shot at publicly disclosing this –but I will understand it if you can't. It's going to get out!Thanks,mike mulliganHinsdale, NHLetter to the Editor:I am speaking from the year 2106. Our planet has just begun to recover from the modern dark ages. They say truth is stranger than fiction –who would have thought airplanes could be used as political guided missile messages that destroyed two skyscrapers, witness the Twin Towers in New York City in 2001. These are the astonishing events that led to depopulating of half the planet. Modernity dropped back a century in time on average to 1900 throughout the world by 2020.Ironically, this modern Dark Age holocaust saved the planet. We were heading over the unrecoverable cliff if we kept going the way we were. Human life would have ended on this planet earth without this nuclear exchange. What did we say about that life and evolution always protects itself? All of a sudden the planet wide political pressures of global warming, energy and resources shortages were drastically reduced because of the planet wide human and industrial die-off.As we sit in 2106 on a global level -all of our political and educational processes have been drastically changed. We have developed a planet wide ethical and moral code. This came through a catastrophe of enormous proportions and the death and sufferings of billions of people. The way we look at our children today is so different than in the year 2004.We know that any child born on this planet has the potential and the requirement –to change the course of history of this planet. We give even our poorest and disadvantaged children the finest educational tools that money can buy in the hopes that our child will change the course of our future history. Every child on this planet gets educated like this –and every child is our own child!The extremist Islamic Iranian wilayat al-faqih eventually got a series of nuclear bombs in 2006. They detonated two bombs in Israel, one each over downtown Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The Israelis never knew if it came by missile or was sneaked in through the boarders of a destabilized Iraq. Israel within hours immediately retaliated. They devastated Iran through a series of atomic detonation. The Israeli military destroyed the capitals of China, Syria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia (and Holy City of Makkah (Mecca) and Russia. You have no idea what this did to the price of oil –this was devastating to the global economic system.The majority of the financing of the Iranian nuclear bombs came from a surprising source. There is evidence today that there was an Al-Qaeda plot involved with the Russians and Iranians. It also seems that a few Russians generals held a grudge with the American involvement in the Afghanistan Vietnam, which led to the downfall of the old Soviet Empire. At the time Russia didn't have a real government –it was ruled by mafia don like figures.The majority of the financing of the Iranian nuclear program came from the American electric utility rate payers. By 2004, the electricity in one out of ten households was being supplied from the Russian weapons grade nuclear material through the megaton to megawatt program. We were purchasing HEU grade Uranium from the Russian nuclear bomb building program and fueling up American nuclear power plants in the hopes of reducing the nuclear proliferation problems to the tune of one half a billion dollars a years. There was just too much money to be made at all levels of the production and manufacturing with this Russian nuclear material, for anyone to having any moral qualms with this.A large proportion of the American monies got diverted into the Russian covert nuclear proliferation program that created the Iranian nuclear weapons. There was a theory that it was Chinese rocket technology that propelled the bomb to Jerusalem. It was common knowledge throughout the American political and intelligence bureaucracy that the American nuclear electric monies were disappearing in the Putin regime. We knew the Russians would sell weapon technology without a hint of morality –likewise most of the country's on this planet would sell weapons without a hint of morality including and especially the Americans.To this day we wonder why the American CIA and intelligence community didn't inform the American public of this impending catastrophe. It is recognized that the American intelligence community was going under historic reorganizations because of the intelligence failures of 9/11 and the WMD failures of Iraq. It was discovered the American intelligence community had gotten even more blinded than the lead up to 9/11 because of the failure of the American public's responsibility to manage their political system by 2006. This became another item on a long list of American institutional political failures of recent.We wonder to this day did the American intelligence community work for the particular political regime or did they work for the people at large? Why wasn't the American intelligence community working for the people's of the planet. What it was discovered, was a common relationship throughout the planet is the elites had transcended into competing for wealth and power between themselves –special access to markets and capital. They had forgotten that they were given this privilege in order to create stability and progress for the whole planetIt was a huge planet wide educational failure of theirs!Thank You,mike mulliganHinsdale, NH
posted by Mike Mulligan at 6:16 PM 1 comments
New Yorker article says U.S. commandos in placein 10 Middle East nations
Updated: 1:14 p.m. ET Jan. 16, 2005
WASHINGTON - The United States has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran to help identify potential nuclear, chemical and missile targets, The New Yorker magazine reported Sunday.
advertisement
The article, by award-winning reporter Seymour Hersh, said the secret missions have been going on at least since last summer with the goal of identifying target information for three dozen or more suspected sites.
Hersh quotes one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon as saying, “The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible.”
One former high-level intelligence official told The New Yorker, “This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush administration is looking at this as a huge war zone. Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign.”
White House disputes reportThe White House said Iran is a concern and a threat that needs to be taken seriously. But it disputed the report by Hersh, who last year exposed the extent of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
“We obviously have a concern about Iran. The whole world has a concern about Iran,” Dan Bartlett, a top aide to President Bush, told CNN’s “Late Edition.”
Of The New Yorker report, he said: “I think it’s riddled with inaccuracies, and I don’t believe that some of the conclusions he’s drawing are based on fact.”
Bartlett said the administration “will continue to work through the diplomatic initiatives” to convince Iran — which Bush once called part of an “axis of evil” — not to pursue nuclear weapons.
“No president, at any juncture in history, has ever taken military options off the table,” Bartlett added. “But what President Bush has shown is that he believes we can emphasize the diplomatic initiatives that are underway right now.”
Bush has warned Iran in recent weeks against meddling in Iraqi elections.
Commandos in place?The former intelligence official told Hersh that an American commando task force in South Asia is working closely with a group of Pakistani scientists who had dealt with their Iranian counterparts.
The New Yorker reports that this task force, aided by information from Pakistan, has been penetrating into eastern Iran in a hunt for underground nuclear-weapons installations.
In exchange for this cooperation, the official told Hersh, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has received assurances that his government will not have to turn over Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s atomic bomb, to face questioning about his role in selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
Hersh reported that Bush has already “signed a series of top-secret findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as 10 nations in the Middle East and South Asia.”
Defining these as military rather than intelligence operations, Hersh reported, will enable the Bush administration to evade legal restrictions imposed on the CIA’s covert activities overseas.
Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters.
A Message From The Future
Date: Thu Oct 14, 2004 9:21 pm Subject: Re: The new Dark Age –“seat belts required” when reading!
Mike,With all due respect, you take yourself way too seriously. I doubt any foreign or domestic leaders care about your letter much less aretalking about it.TimThe new Dark Age –"seat belts required" when reading!Well, I have rattled the whole planet with this last week when I released it (10/10/04)–many capitals are talking about this scenario. As my mother told me all the time –you are nothing but trouble. I had gotten an Israeli response and we got Russian diplomats running to Iran. Believe me this is all window dressing that makes the government official's looking good. It's nothing but free drinking and dinners and deals.In the shadow of this the republicans and democrats don't look very effective –and they were both beating around the bushes in the debates with this.Some are now thinking I am a security threat to the United States of America (who have I been talking to) and others are saying that I have shifted the geopolitical position of our country on nuclear proliferation -relations between nations. Will I have started a military action in preventing a catastrophe? They are talking about me throughout Washington DC. Did the NRC respond to this already?There is no greater governmental document on the planet that expresses the hopes and dreams of humanity –upholds the dignity of the human spirit –than our USA constitution. There are many documents of its equal -but none better in the world. I swear to god I love our constitution and I hold it sacred it in my heart.I'll give you first shot at publicly disclosing this –but I will understand it if you can't. It's going to get out!Thanks,mike mulliganHinsdale, NHLetter to the Editor:I am speaking from the year 2106. Our planet has just begun to recover from the modern dark ages. They say truth is stranger than fiction –who would have thought airplanes could be used as political guided missile messages that destroyed two skyscrapers, witness the Twin Towers in New York City in 2001. These are the astonishing events that led to depopulating of half the planet. Modernity dropped back a century in time on average to 1900 throughout the world by 2020.Ironically, this modern Dark Age holocaust saved the planet. We were heading over the unrecoverable cliff if we kept going the way we were. Human life would have ended on this planet earth without this nuclear exchange. What did we say about that life and evolution always protects itself? All of a sudden the planet wide political pressures of global warming, energy and resources shortages were drastically reduced because of the planet wide human and industrial die-off.As we sit in 2106 on a global level -all of our political and educational processes have been drastically changed. We have developed a planet wide ethical and moral code. This came through a catastrophe of enormous proportions and the death and sufferings of billions of people. The way we look at our children today is so different than in the year 2004.We know that any child born on this planet has the potential and the requirement –to change the course of history of this planet. We give even our poorest and disadvantaged children the finest educational tools that money can buy in the hopes that our child will change the course of our future history. Every child on this planet gets educated like this –and every child is our own child!The extremist Islamic Iranian wilayat al-faqih eventually got a series of nuclear bombs in 2006. They detonated two bombs in Israel, one each over downtown Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The Israelis never knew if it came by missile or was sneaked in through the boarders of a destabilized Iraq. Israel within hours immediately retaliated. They devastated Iran through a series of atomic detonation. The Israeli military destroyed the capitals of China, Syria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia (and Holy City of Makkah (Mecca) and Russia. You have no idea what this did to the price of oil –this was devastating to the global economic system.The majority of the financing of the Iranian nuclear bombs came from a surprising source. There is evidence today that there was an Al-Qaeda plot involved with the Russians and Iranians. It also seems that a few Russians generals held a grudge with the American involvement in the Afghanistan Vietnam, which led to the downfall of the old Soviet Empire. At the time Russia didn't have a real government –it was ruled by mafia don like figures.The majority of the financing of the Iranian nuclear program came from the American electric utility rate payers. By 2004, the electricity in one out of ten households was being supplied from the Russian weapons grade nuclear material through the megaton to megawatt program. We were purchasing HEU grade Uranium from the Russian nuclear bomb building program and fueling up American nuclear power plants in the hopes of reducing the nuclear proliferation problems to the tune of one half a billion dollars a years. There was just too much money to be made at all levels of the production and manufacturing with this Russian nuclear material, for anyone to having any moral qualms with this.A large proportion of the American monies got diverted into the Russian covert nuclear proliferation program that created the Iranian nuclear weapons. There was a theory that it was Chinese rocket technology that propelled the bomb to Jerusalem. It was common knowledge throughout the American political and intelligence bureaucracy that the American nuclear electric monies were disappearing in the Putin regime. We knew the Russians would sell weapon technology without a hint of morality –likewise most of the country's on this planet would sell weapons without a hint of morality including and especially the Americans.To this day we wonder why the American CIA and intelligence community didn't inform the American public of this impending catastrophe. It is recognized that the American intelligence community was going under historic reorganizations because of the intelligence failures of 9/11 and the WMD failures of Iraq. It was discovered the American intelligence community had gotten even more blinded than the lead up to 9/11 because of the failure of the American public's responsibility to manage their political system by 2006. This became another item on a long list of American institutional political failures of recent.We wonder to this day did the American intelligence community work for the particular political regime or did they work for the people at large? Why wasn't the American intelligence community working for the people's of the planet. What it was discovered, was a common relationship throughout the planet is the elites had transcended into competing for wealth and power between themselves –special access to markets and capital. They had forgotten that they were given this privilege in order to create stability and progress for the whole planetIt was a huge planet wide educational failure of theirs!Thank You,mike mulliganHinsdale, NH
posted by Mike Mulligan at 6:16 PM 1 comments
Charging the USA with "Crimes Against Humanity"
Creating the potential of cultural changes in large systems
So the question is, how does one make a charge of “crimes against humanity” of a country, community or town. It’s interesting that the USA never gets any international criticism about how we take care of the disabled. Right, another country would have to have a better record on taking care of the disabled and parentless children than the USA.
You know my tactic if I have concerns about an internal defect in me that I can’t control (say honesty). I go looking for a similar defect in another person or system. I then point out that defect in them in a situation. It’s strange I can sometimes identify defects in other peoples and systems before I can identify them in me. So as we get into this conflict –say about honesty in somebody other than me –it finally seeps in my thick noggin that I have the same problem- or I worry about being a hypocrite.
Is the whole political world in collusion about the care of the disabled –do the politicians of the planet not want to be held unaccountable for this –does the majority of the peoples of the planet not want to be held accountable for the least of us? I could make the case that the majority of peoples of this planet are cold and uncaring to the plight of the disabled –and to the poor…. At least the elites are that way…but what about the rest of you?
So charging my community –the state of New Hampshire –fundamentally the USA with “Crimes Against Humanity” forcing the UN to open an investigation of the charges –this would have the potential to reset the standards across the globe with the care of the disabled. If the most advanced and wealthy nation on the face of the planet is found corruptly not being able to adequately take care of the disabled and troubled children—that we jail a large majority of the mentally ill as medical care and all the rest… what does this say for the dictators and rest of the planet?
We world have to have another nation with unparallel courage –say a media investigation and interest about the lack of care in the USA –and that an individual(me if it comes to that)is charging his nation with “crimes against humanity”. Maybe a BBC investigation ---better yet the French could do an enormous service to the planet with their media getting involved with this. You see if the French got involve in this with all of our recent tensions –there would leverage a lot bigger debate about what we in the USA are doing here.
We could reset the standards of care across the planet for the vulnerable –the mentally and physically disabled –and our children who are immersed in turmoil!
So how does one begin to make a “Crimes against Humanity” charge to the UN against USA?
But then again the USA is the single largest contributor to the UN –and thus the UN holds us unaccountable. Is it really payoff money?
http://www.crimesofwar.org/thebook/crimes-against-humanity.html
Thanks,
mike mulligan
So the question is, how does one make a charge of “crimes against humanity” of a country, community or town. It’s interesting that the USA never gets any international criticism about how we take care of the disabled. Right, another country would have to have a better record on taking care of the disabled and parentless children than the USA.
You know my tactic if I have concerns about an internal defect in me that I can’t control (say honesty). I go looking for a similar defect in another person or system. I then point out that defect in them in a situation. It’s strange I can sometimes identify defects in other peoples and systems before I can identify them in me. So as we get into this conflict –say about honesty in somebody other than me –it finally seeps in my thick noggin that I have the same problem- or I worry about being a hypocrite.
Is the whole political world in collusion about the care of the disabled –do the politicians of the planet not want to be held unaccountable for this –does the majority of the peoples of the planet not want to be held accountable for the least of us? I could make the case that the majority of peoples of this planet are cold and uncaring to the plight of the disabled –and to the poor…. At least the elites are that way…but what about the rest of you?
So charging my community –the state of New Hampshire –fundamentally the USA with “Crimes Against Humanity” forcing the UN to open an investigation of the charges –this would have the potential to reset the standards across the globe with the care of the disabled. If the most advanced and wealthy nation on the face of the planet is found corruptly not being able to adequately take care of the disabled and troubled children—that we jail a large majority of the mentally ill as medical care and all the rest… what does this say for the dictators and rest of the planet?
We world have to have another nation with unparallel courage –say a media investigation and interest about the lack of care in the USA –and that an individual(me if it comes to that)is charging his nation with “crimes against humanity”. Maybe a BBC investigation ---better yet the French could do an enormous service to the planet with their media getting involved with this. You see if the French got involve in this with all of our recent tensions –there would leverage a lot bigger debate about what we in the USA are doing here.
We could reset the standards of care across the planet for the vulnerable –the mentally and physically disabled –and our children who are immersed in turmoil!
So how does one begin to make a “Crimes against Humanity” charge to the UN against USA?
But then again the USA is the single largest contributor to the UN –and thus the UN holds us unaccountable. Is it really payoff money?
http://www.crimesofwar.org/thebook/crimes-against-humanity.html
Thanks,
mike mulligan
Thursday, January 13, 2005
Crimes Against Humanity
Crimes Against Humanity
by Cherif Bassiouni
The term crimes against humanity has come to mean anything atrocious committed on a large scale. This is not, however, the original meaning nor the technical one. The term originated in the 1907 Hague Convention preamble, which codified the customary law of armed conflict. This codification was based on existing State practices that derived from those values and principles deemed to constitute the "laws of humanity," as reflected throughout history in different cultures.
After World War I, the Allies, in connection with the Treaty of Versailles, established in 1919 a commission to investigate war crimes that relied on the 1907 Hague Convention as the applicable law. In addition to war crimes committed by the Germans, the commission also found that Turkish officials committed "crimes against the laws of humanity" for killing Armenian nationals and residents during the period of the war. The United States and Japan strongly opposed the criminalization of such conduct on the grounds that crimes against the laws of humanity were violations of moral and not positive law.
In 1945, the United States and other Allies developed the Agreement for the Prosecution and Punishment of the Major War Criminals of the European Axis and Charter of the International Military Tribunal (IMT), sitting at Nuremberg, which contained the following definition of crimes against humanity in Article 6(c):
Crimes against humanity: murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against civilian populations, before or during the war; or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.
The Nuremberg Charter represents the first time that crimes against humanity were established in positive international law. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East, at Tokyo, followed the Nuremberg Charter, as did Control Council Law No. 10 of Germany, under which the Allies prosecuted Germans in their respective zones of occupation. Curiously, however, there has been no specialized international convention since then on crimes against humanity. Still, that category of crimes has been included in the statutes of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), as well as in the statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). In fact, there are eleven international texts defining crimes against humanity, but they all differ slightly as to their definition of that crime and its legal elements. However, what all of these definitions have in common is:
The list of the specific crimes contained within the meaning of crimes against humanity has been expanded since Article 6(c) of the IMT to include, in the ICTY and the ICTR, rape and torture. The statute of the ICC also expands the list of specific acts. In particular, the ICC statute adds the crimes of enforced disappearance of persons and apartheid. Further, the ICC statute contains clarifying language with respect to the specific crimes of extermination, enslavement, deportation or forcible transfer of population, torture, and forced pregnancy.
To some extent, crimes against humanity overlap with genocide and war crimes. But crimes against humanity are distinguishable from genocide in that they do not require an intent to "destroy in whole or in part," as cited in the 1948 Genocide Convention, but only target a given group and carry out a policy of "widespread or systematic" violations. Crimes against humanity are also distinguishable from war crimes in that they not only apply in the context of war-they apply in times of war and peace.
Crimes against humanity have existed in customary international law for over half a century and are also evidenced in prosecutions before some national courts. The most notable of these trials include those of Paul Touvier, Klaus Barbie, and Maurice Papon in France, and Imre Finta in Canada. But crimes against humanity are also deemed to be part of jus cogens-the highest standing in international legal norms. Thus, they constitute a non-derogable rule of international law. The implication of this standing is that they are subject to universal jurisdiction, meaning that all States can exercise their jurisdiction in prosecuting a perpetrator irrespective of where the crime was committed. It also means that all States have the duty to prosecute or extradite, that no person charged with that crime can claim the "political offense exception" to extradition, and that States have the duty to assist each other in securing evidence needed to prosecute. But of greater importance is the fact that no perpetrator can claim the "defense of obedience to superior orders" and that no statute of limitation contained in the laws of any State can apply. Lastly, no one is immune from prosecution for such crimes, even a head of State.
(See command responsibility)
M. Cherif Bassiouni is a professor of law and Director of the International Criminal Justice and Weapons Control Center at DePaul University in Chicago. He chaired the UN Commission of Experts on the former Yugoslavia, and is the author of Crimes Against Humanity in International Criminal Law (Martinus Nijhoff, 1998).
by Cherif Bassiouni
The term crimes against humanity has come to mean anything atrocious committed on a large scale. This is not, however, the original meaning nor the technical one. The term originated in the 1907 Hague Convention preamble, which codified the customary law of armed conflict. This codification was based on existing State practices that derived from those values and principles deemed to constitute the "laws of humanity," as reflected throughout history in different cultures.
After World War I, the Allies, in connection with the Treaty of Versailles, established in 1919 a commission to investigate war crimes that relied on the 1907 Hague Convention as the applicable law. In addition to war crimes committed by the Germans, the commission also found that Turkish officials committed "crimes against the laws of humanity" for killing Armenian nationals and residents during the period of the war. The United States and Japan strongly opposed the criminalization of such conduct on the grounds that crimes against the laws of humanity were violations of moral and not positive law.
In 1945, the United States and other Allies developed the Agreement for the Prosecution and Punishment of the Major War Criminals of the European Axis and Charter of the International Military Tribunal (IMT), sitting at Nuremberg, which contained the following definition of crimes against humanity in Article 6(c):
Crimes against humanity: murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against civilian populations, before or during the war; or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.
The Nuremberg Charter represents the first time that crimes against humanity were established in positive international law. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East, at Tokyo, followed the Nuremberg Charter, as did Control Council Law No. 10 of Germany, under which the Allies prosecuted Germans in their respective zones of occupation. Curiously, however, there has been no specialized international convention since then on crimes against humanity. Still, that category of crimes has been included in the statutes of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), as well as in the statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). In fact, there are eleven international texts defining crimes against humanity, but they all differ slightly as to their definition of that crime and its legal elements. However, what all of these definitions have in common is:
- they refer to specific acts of violence against persons irrespective of whether the person is a national or nonnational and irrespective of whether these acts are committed in time of war or time of peace, and
- these acts must be the product of persecution against an identifiable group of persons irrespective of the make-up of that group or the purpose of the persecution. Such a policy can also be manifested by the "widespread or systematic" conduct of the perpetrators, which results in the commission of the specific crimes contained in the definition.
The list of the specific crimes contained within the meaning of crimes against humanity has been expanded since Article 6(c) of the IMT to include, in the ICTY and the ICTR, rape and torture. The statute of the ICC also expands the list of specific acts. In particular, the ICC statute adds the crimes of enforced disappearance of persons and apartheid. Further, the ICC statute contains clarifying language with respect to the specific crimes of extermination, enslavement, deportation or forcible transfer of population, torture, and forced pregnancy.
To some extent, crimes against humanity overlap with genocide and war crimes. But crimes against humanity are distinguishable from genocide in that they do not require an intent to "destroy in whole or in part," as cited in the 1948 Genocide Convention, but only target a given group and carry out a policy of "widespread or systematic" violations. Crimes against humanity are also distinguishable from war crimes in that they not only apply in the context of war-they apply in times of war and peace.
Crimes against humanity have existed in customary international law for over half a century and are also evidenced in prosecutions before some national courts. The most notable of these trials include those of Paul Touvier, Klaus Barbie, and Maurice Papon in France, and Imre Finta in Canada. But crimes against humanity are also deemed to be part of jus cogens-the highest standing in international legal norms. Thus, they constitute a non-derogable rule of international law. The implication of this standing is that they are subject to universal jurisdiction, meaning that all States can exercise their jurisdiction in prosecuting a perpetrator irrespective of where the crime was committed. It also means that all States have the duty to prosecute or extradite, that no person charged with that crime can claim the "political offense exception" to extradition, and that States have the duty to assist each other in securing evidence needed to prosecute. But of greater importance is the fact that no perpetrator can claim the "defense of obedience to superior orders" and that no statute of limitation contained in the laws of any State can apply. Lastly, no one is immune from prosecution for such crimes, even a head of State.
(See command responsibility)
M. Cherif Bassiouni is a professor of law and Director of the International Criminal Justice and Weapons Control Center at DePaul University in Chicago. He chaired the UN Commission of Experts on the former Yugoslavia, and is the author of Crimes Against Humanity in International Criminal Law (Martinus Nijhoff, 1998).
Crimes against humanity: 500 deaths of abused children in Texas
I am getting ready to charge my community -Monadnock region of NH and NH itself -with "crimes against humanity" and "state sponsored systemic terrorism" against the disabled. You understand I am not charging the politicians and bureaucrats with these ghastly crimes -I am going to charge all of the good people of the community with knowingly abusing the disabled -to knowingly keeping the abuses hidden from the public's eyes because of economic self interest -low taxes.
http://www.crimesofwar.org/thebook/crimes-against-humanity.html
an. 12, 2005, 8:18PM
PICKING UP THE PIECES
After years of administrative neglect and budgetary malnutrition, elected officials must finally end their abuse of Texas Child Protective Services
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle
It's taken more than 500 deaths of abused children in Texas over the past 2 1/2 years to awaken the public and their representatives to the grievous consequences of slashing the budget of the agency entrusted with protecting those kids. Now it seems every political figure in Austin is shocked, truly shocked, and ready to free up hundreds of millions of dollars to address the problem.
"The system is obviously broken," Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst said. "It's outrageous. It's heartbreaking. It's unacceptable. And we must fix it."
Gov. Rick Perry has made CPS reform his top priority in this legislative session after commissioning an investigative report in the wake of an indictment of the agency by an Hidalgo County grand jury.
State Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn issued her own critical report on foster care last year, which found child abuse by approved foster parents and overuse of psychiatric medications to control children.
When so many elected officials suddenly agree there's a crisis, one has to wonder where they all were when the funding for Child Protective Services was repeatedly cut, creating the current emergency. As the Chronicle's Terri Langford reported, that process began in 1995 when more than 600 clerical and case technician positions were eliminated from the agency.
CPS investigators depend on staff assistance to maintain mandatory case records. When a technician is not available to transcribe caseworker dictation, that forces the worker to divert time from directly assisting clients and investigating abuse reports. That in turn feeds into growing caseload backlogs, which have now reached an average of 75 per investigator across the state and more than 100 in San Antonio. Those unworkable caseloads create burnout and rapid turnover among investigators. With a cycle like that, no one should be surprised when children fall through the cracks and end up neglected or worse as a result.
The case that caught Gov. Perry's attention occurred last year in South Texas, where lax CPS supervision allegedly allowed a stepfather to abuse three daughters. That led the Hidalgo County grand jury to return three felony indictments against the Department of Family and Protective Services, which runs CPS. The district attorney refused to file charges, explaining there was no practical way to prosecute a state agency. Other recent high-profile abuse cases include a 2-year-old girl beaten to death in San Antonio; a young boy starved to death in Arlington; and an infant fatally mutilated by a Plano mother. In all of these cases, CPS was criticized for not acting in time to save the youngsters.
Perry's report calls for an additional $329 million CPS budget increase over two years and nearly 850 additional investigators statewide. Their goal would be to reduce caseloads per worker from 75 to 45 and lower response times for some abuse calls from 10 days to 72 hours. The budget increase would also create an office of investigations that would apply law enforcement and forensic tools to CPS probes.
These are minimal steps to address a horrible situation that Texas lawmakers must take some responsibility for having created. No less than a foster parent responsible for nurturing a child, lawmakers who starve an agency cannot then express surprise at the results. The real tragedy is that in order to save children from abuse in this state, it has taken so many deaths to point the way.
http://www.crimesofwar.org/thebook/crimes-against-humanity.html
an. 12, 2005, 8:18PM
PICKING UP THE PIECES
After years of administrative neglect and budgetary malnutrition, elected officials must finally end their abuse of Texas Child Protective Services
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle
It's taken more than 500 deaths of abused children in Texas over the past 2 1/2 years to awaken the public and their representatives to the grievous consequences of slashing the budget of the agency entrusted with protecting those kids. Now it seems every political figure in Austin is shocked, truly shocked, and ready to free up hundreds of millions of dollars to address the problem.
"The system is obviously broken," Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst said. "It's outrageous. It's heartbreaking. It's unacceptable. And we must fix it."
Gov. Rick Perry has made CPS reform his top priority in this legislative session after commissioning an investigative report in the wake of an indictment of the agency by an Hidalgo County grand jury.
State Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn issued her own critical report on foster care last year, which found child abuse by approved foster parents and overuse of psychiatric medications to control children.
When so many elected officials suddenly agree there's a crisis, one has to wonder where they all were when the funding for Child Protective Services was repeatedly cut, creating the current emergency. As the Chronicle's Terri Langford reported, that process began in 1995 when more than 600 clerical and case technician positions were eliminated from the agency.
CPS investigators depend on staff assistance to maintain mandatory case records. When a technician is not available to transcribe caseworker dictation, that forces the worker to divert time from directly assisting clients and investigating abuse reports. That in turn feeds into growing caseload backlogs, which have now reached an average of 75 per investigator across the state and more than 100 in San Antonio. Those unworkable caseloads create burnout and rapid turnover among investigators. With a cycle like that, no one should be surprised when children fall through the cracks and end up neglected or worse as a result.
The case that caught Gov. Perry's attention occurred last year in South Texas, where lax CPS supervision allegedly allowed a stepfather to abuse three daughters. That led the Hidalgo County grand jury to return three felony indictments against the Department of Family and Protective Services, which runs CPS. The district attorney refused to file charges, explaining there was no practical way to prosecute a state agency. Other recent high-profile abuse cases include a 2-year-old girl beaten to death in San Antonio; a young boy starved to death in Arlington; and an infant fatally mutilated by a Plano mother. In all of these cases, CPS was criticized for not acting in time to save the youngsters.
Perry's report calls for an additional $329 million CPS budget increase over two years and nearly 850 additional investigators statewide. Their goal would be to reduce caseloads per worker from 75 to 45 and lower response times for some abuse calls from 10 days to 72 hours. The budget increase would also create an office of investigations that would apply law enforcement and forensic tools to CPS probes.
These are minimal steps to address a horrible situation that Texas lawmakers must take some responsibility for having created. No less than a foster parent responsible for nurturing a child, lawmakers who starve an agency cannot then express surprise at the results. The real tragedy is that in order to save children from abuse in this state, it has taken so many deaths to point the way.
Sunday, January 09, 2005
The ageless hope of Viginia Lee Burton to her children
Of course I like the idea of what a kid’s story means to you –not necessarily about what the author meant it to be.
We know that Virginia comes from a very educated Ivy League family: MIT and Harvard. My bet was Virginia very plugged into our culture at the time –and she was very aware of what was going on in the depression. So was she trying to tell a little story to her child explaining what was going on with the depression –and the ending of the story, was she trying to tell her son Michael that in any horrific event such as the depression –there can be a happy ending.
My bet she was writing up and sketching this story for two years prior to the copy write –that brings us to 1937. This was the year that we were seeing the second downward leg of the depression. We were still in very high unemployment and the economy disvalued worker wages at this time. So, was she trying to tell her kids about working harder and harder for less –with the economy not valuing the human spirit, which pushes us into mistakes -much family and national anger and infighting –that no matter how hopeless it looks like today –it will all end up in the happy story with everyone living in a comfortable job and living situation.
Was she trying to give her kids hope in those disparate times through the story of mike mulligan and the steam shovel–give all of our kids the message of hope in those truly horrible times?
You will note that Germany, Great Britain and then the USA drove themselves out of the depression through deficit spending; they all had to create the ideology of hate and extreme nationalism in order to justify deficit spending in military hardware in preparation to war. So we got a huge failure in the global economic system ending in global war. Right, the political leaders would rather instigate a war with another country than have the public blame the politicians for the economic damage because of a failure of leadership.
So you now understand the political necessity for all wars!
What you got to do not is to effectively create funny money on a grand scale –a global federal reserve. What we’ve got to do is create a massive global public works program on a scale the world has never seen before –you got to create a planetary educational system and you’ve got to create planetary infrastructure and energy modernization program. You got to drive the whole world into security and stabilization with all of our common needs.
You know you crazy ass people are going to spend the money anyway –either in the machines and instruments of war, death and destructions –or you are going to have to give Hope to the world that there is going to be a good future.
So where are the ideals of Virginia Lee Burton today?
We know that Virginia comes from a very educated Ivy League family: MIT and Harvard. My bet was Virginia very plugged into our culture at the time –and she was very aware of what was going on in the depression. So was she trying to tell a little story to her child explaining what was going on with the depression –and the ending of the story, was she trying to tell her son Michael that in any horrific event such as the depression –there can be a happy ending.
My bet she was writing up and sketching this story for two years prior to the copy write –that brings us to 1937. This was the year that we were seeing the second downward leg of the depression. We were still in very high unemployment and the economy disvalued worker wages at this time. So, was she trying to tell her kids about working harder and harder for less –with the economy not valuing the human spirit, which pushes us into mistakes -much family and national anger and infighting –that no matter how hopeless it looks like today –it will all end up in the happy story with everyone living in a comfortable job and living situation.
Was she trying to give her kids hope in those disparate times through the story of mike mulligan and the steam shovel–give all of our kids the message of hope in those truly horrible times?
You will note that Germany, Great Britain and then the USA drove themselves out of the depression through deficit spending; they all had to create the ideology of hate and extreme nationalism in order to justify deficit spending in military hardware in preparation to war. So we got a huge failure in the global economic system ending in global war. Right, the political leaders would rather instigate a war with another country than have the public blame the politicians for the economic damage because of a failure of leadership.
So you now understand the political necessity for all wars!
What you got to do not is to effectively create funny money on a grand scale –a global federal reserve. What we’ve got to do is create a massive global public works program on a scale the world has never seen before –you got to create a planetary educational system and you’ve got to create planetary infrastructure and energy modernization program. You got to drive the whole world into security and stabilization with all of our common needs.
You know you crazy ass people are going to spend the money anyway –either in the machines and instruments of war, death and destructions –or you are going to have to give Hope to the world that there is going to be a good future.
So where are the ideals of Virginia Lee Burton today?
mike mulligan and his steam shovel
Virginia Lee BurtonAris & Mike
mike mulligan and his steam shovel was copy writed in 1939.
I was born on August 30, 1909, in Newton Center, Massachusetts. My mother was English, a poet and a musician. My father was the dearly beloved Dean Burton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . . . their first dean and only dean until he retired in 1921.
My memories of early childhood in Newton Corner consist of English folk songs and English folk dancing around a Maypole . . . celebrating Twelfth Night when everyone dressed up in costumes and the neighbors came in to sing and dance and "wassail" the old apple trees. On other holidays our parents put on marionette shows for us and our friends. Our old barn was converted into a school, and I believe the first Montessori System in this country was taught there. Dad, instead of giving us toys for birthdays and Christmas, gave us beautifully illustrated children's books, which he would read aloud to us. I am sure my interest in picture books stemmed from this.
We lived in Newton Corner until I was about eight. The New England winters were getting to be too much for my mother's health, and as it was about time for my father to retire, we moved to California. We stayed one year in San Diego and then moved up the coast to Carmel-by-the-Sea. Carmel was then a simple unspoiled small town inhabited by retired and semi-retired artists, writers, and musicians. There were three theaters and a little old two-room schoolhouse. Always there was a play or an operetta in rehearsal going on and everybody took part. To be sure it was all amateur, but it was a lot of fun. My sister and I loved dancing and studied at every opportunity (of which there were many) and appeared in the local productions.
When I was sixteen and a junior in high school, where there was a good art teacher, I happened to win a state scholarship to the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. In my senior year I was editor of the school annual and, on the side, started a dancing class of my own.
MIKE MULLIGAN AND HIS STEAM SHOVEL® is a registered trademark of Houghton Mifflin Company.
Aristides Burton Demetrios, Virginia Lee Burton’s oldest son, is a renowned contemporary sculptor whose works can be seen throughout the United States and elsewhere around the world. Educated at Harvard University in history and literature, Demetrios later studied sculpture with his father, George Demetrios, in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Since then, he has worked with the some of the nation’s leading designers (Thomas Church, Lawrence Halprin, Peter Walker, Ken Kay, Peter Calthrope, and Michael Taylor) to create bronze fountains and sculptures, large scale outdoor stainless steel sculptures, and painted steel sculptures commissioned for public pavilions, private residential gardens, and corporate facilities. Demetrios also exhibits his work in galleries throughout the United States. He is currently an artist-in-residence at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Michael Burton Demetrios was born on August 30, 1935 in Groton, Massachusetts. When he was four, Virginia Lee Burton dedicated Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel to him and he served as the model for the little boy who helps Mike and Mary Anne dig the cellar in one day. A graduate of Harvard Business School, Demetrios was the president of Marine World Africa USA for more than twenty years. While president, Demetrios, together with a group of businessman, purchased the park from Resorts International and successfully relocated to Vallejo, California. Now, Marine World Africa USA is a world class facility and has reached annual attendance levels of 1.9 million. Since January 1998, Demetrios has served as President of Intra-Asia, a US Company with two amusement parks in China and plans to have five additional parks. He travels extensively throughout China and sees this as an "exciting and fascinating time to be doing business with China". Michael Demetrios lives outside of Los Angeles.
TIMELINES OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
http://cla.calpoly.edu/~lcall/timeline.dep.html
1929
Herbert Hoover becomes President. Hoover is a staunch individualist but not as committed to laissez-faire ideology as Coolidge.
More than half of all Americans are living below a minimum subsistence level.
Annual per-capita income is $750; for farm people, it is only $273.
Backlog of business inventories grows three times larger than the year before. Public consumption markedly down.
Freight carloads and manufacturing fall.
Automobile sales decline by a third in the nine months before the crash.
Construction down $2 billion since 1926.
Recession begins in August, two months before the stock market crash. During this two month period, production will decline at an annual rate of 20 percent, wholesale prices at 7.5 percent, and personal income at 5 percent.
Stock market crash begins October 24. Investors call October 29 "Black Tuesday." Losses for the month will total $16 billion, an astronomical sum in those days.
Congress passes Agricultural Marketing Act to support farmers until they can get back on their feet.
1930
By February, the Federal Reserve has cut the prime interest rate from 6 to 4 percent. Expands the money supply with a major purchase of U.S. securities. However, for the next year and a half, the Fed will add very little money to the shrinking economy. (At no time will it actually pull money out of the system.) Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon announces that the Fed will stand by as the market works itself out: "Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate real estate… values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wreck from less-competent people."
The Smoot-Hawley Tariff passes on June 17. With imports forming only 6 percent of the GNP, the 40 percent tariffs work out to an effective tax of only 2.4 percent per citizen. Even this is compensated for by the fact that American businesses are no longer investing in Europe, but keeping their money stateside. The consensus of modern economists is that the tariff made only a minor contribution to the Great Depression in the U.S., but a major one in Europe.
The first bank panic occurs later this year; a public run on banks results in a wave of bankruptcies. Bank failures and deposit losses are responsible for the contracting money supply.
Supreme Court rules that the monopoly U.S. Steel does not violate anti-trust laws as long as competition exists, no matter how negligible.
Democrats gain in Congressional elections, but still do not have a majority.
The GNP falls 9.4 percent from the year before. The unemployment rate climbs from 3.2 to 8.7 percent.
1931
No major legislation is passed addressing the Depression.
A second banking panic occurs in the spring.
The GNP falls another 8.5 percent; unemployment rises to 15.9 percent.
1932
This and the next year are the worst years of the Great Depression. For 1932, GNP falls a record 13.4 percent; unemployment rises to 23.6 percent.
Industrial stocks have lost 80 percent of their value since 1930.
10,000 banks have failed since 1929, or 40 percent of the 1929 total.
About $2 billion in deposits have been lost since 1929.
Money supply has contracted 31 percent since 1929.
GNP has also fallen 31 percent since 1929.
Over 13 million Americans have lost their jobs since 1929.
Capital growth investments have dropped from $16.2 billion to 1/3 of one billion since 1929.
Farm prices have fallen 53 percent since 1929.
International trade has fallen by two-thirds since 1929.
The Fed makes its first major expansion of the money supply since February 1930.
Congress creates the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.
Congress passes the Federal Home Loan Bank Act and the Glass-Steagall Act of 1932.
Top tax rate is raised from 25 to 63 percent.
Popular opinion considers Hoover's measures too little too late. Franklin Roosevelt easily defeats Hoover in the fall election. Democrats win control of Congress.
At his Democratic presidential nomination, Roosevelt says: "I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people."
1933
Roosevelt inaugurated; begins "First 100 Days" of intensive legislative activity.
A third banking panic occurs in March. Roosevelt declares a Bank Holiday; closes financial institutions to stop a run on banks.
Congress authorizes creation of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Farm Credit Administration, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the National Recovery Administration, the Public Works Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Congress passes the Emergency Banking Bill, the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, the Farm Credit Act, the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Truth-in-Securities Act.
U.S. goes off the gold standard.
Roosevelt does much to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor, but is obsessed with a balanced budget. He later rejects Keynes' advice to begin heavy deficit spending.
The free fall of the GNP is significantly slowed; it dips only 2.1 percent this year. Unemployment rises slightly, to 24.9 percent.
1934
Congress authorizes creation of the Federal Communications Commission, the National Mediation Board and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Congress passes the Securities and Exchange Act and the Trade Agreement Act.
The economy turns around: GNP rises 7.7 percent, and unemployment falls to 21.7 percent. A long road to recovery begins.
Sweden becomes the first nation to recover fully from the Great Depression. It has followed a policy of Keynesian deficit spending.
1935
The Supreme Court declares the National Recovery Administration to be unconstitutional.
Congress authorizes creation of the Works Progress Administration, the National Labor Relations Board and the Rural Electrification Administration.
Congress passes the Banking Act of 1935, the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act, the National Labor Relations Act, and the Social Security Act.
Economic recovery continues: the GNP grows another 8.1 percent, and unemployment falls to 20.1 percent.
1936
The Supreme Court declares part of the Agricultural Adjustment Act to be unconstitutional.
In response, Congress passes the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act.
Top tax rate raised to 79 percent.
Economic recovery continues: GNP grows a record 14.1 percent; unemployment falls to 16.9 percent.
Germany becomes the second nation to recover fully from the Great Depression, through heavy deficit spending in preparation for war.
1937
The Supreme Court declares the National Labor Relations Board to be unconstitutional.
Roosevelt seeks to enlarge and therefore liberalize the Supreme Court. This attempt not only fails, but outrages the public.
Economists attribute economic growth so far to heavy government spending that is somewhat deficit. Roosevelt, however, fears an unbalanced budget and cuts spending for 1937. That summer, the nation plunges into another recession. Despite this, the yearly GNP rises 5.0 percent, and unemployment falls to 14.3 percent.
1938
Congress passes the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938 and the Fair Labor Standards Act.
No major New Deal legislation is passed after this date, due to Roosevelt's weakened political power.
The year-long recession makes itself felt: the GNP falls 4.5 percent, and unemployment rises to 19.0 percent.
Britain becomes the third nation to recover as it begins deficit spending in preparation for war.
1939
GNP rises 7.9 percent; unemployment falls to 17.2 percent.
The United States will begin emerging from the Depression as it borrows and spends $1 billion to build its armed forces. From 1939 to 1941, when the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, U.S. manufacturing will have shot up a phenomenal 50 percent!
The Depression is ending worldwide as nations prepare for the coming hostilities.
World War II starts with Hitler's invasion of Poland.
1945
Although the war is the largest tragedy in human history, the United States emerges as the world's only economic superpower. Deficit spending has resulted in a national debt 123 percent the size of the GDP. By contrast, in 1994, the $4.7 trillion national debt will be only 70 percent of the GDP!
The top tax rate is 91 percent. It will stay at least 88 percent until 1963, when it is lowered to 70 percent. During this time, America will experience the greatest economic boom it has ever known.
mike mulligan and his steam shovel was copy writed in 1939.
I was born on August 30, 1909, in Newton Center, Massachusetts. My mother was English, a poet and a musician. My father was the dearly beloved Dean Burton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . . . their first dean and only dean until he retired in 1921.
My memories of early childhood in Newton Corner consist of English folk songs and English folk dancing around a Maypole . . . celebrating Twelfth Night when everyone dressed up in costumes and the neighbors came in to sing and dance and "wassail" the old apple trees. On other holidays our parents put on marionette shows for us and our friends. Our old barn was converted into a school, and I believe the first Montessori System in this country was taught there. Dad, instead of giving us toys for birthdays and Christmas, gave us beautifully illustrated children's books, which he would read aloud to us. I am sure my interest in picture books stemmed from this.
We lived in Newton Corner until I was about eight. The New England winters were getting to be too much for my mother's health, and as it was about time for my father to retire, we moved to California. We stayed one year in San Diego and then moved up the coast to Carmel-by-the-Sea. Carmel was then a simple unspoiled small town inhabited by retired and semi-retired artists, writers, and musicians. There were three theaters and a little old two-room schoolhouse. Always there was a play or an operetta in rehearsal going on and everybody took part. To be sure it was all amateur, but it was a lot of fun. My sister and I loved dancing and studied at every opportunity (of which there were many) and appeared in the local productions.
When I was sixteen and a junior in high school, where there was a good art teacher, I happened to win a state scholarship to the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. In my senior year I was editor of the school annual and, on the side, started a dancing class of my own.
MIKE MULLIGAN AND HIS STEAM SHOVEL® is a registered trademark of Houghton Mifflin Company.
Aristides Burton Demetrios, Virginia Lee Burton’s oldest son, is a renowned contemporary sculptor whose works can be seen throughout the United States and elsewhere around the world. Educated at Harvard University in history and literature, Demetrios later studied sculpture with his father, George Demetrios, in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Since then, he has worked with the some of the nation’s leading designers (Thomas Church, Lawrence Halprin, Peter Walker, Ken Kay, Peter Calthrope, and Michael Taylor) to create bronze fountains and sculptures, large scale outdoor stainless steel sculptures, and painted steel sculptures commissioned for public pavilions, private residential gardens, and corporate facilities. Demetrios also exhibits his work in galleries throughout the United States. He is currently an artist-in-residence at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Michael Burton Demetrios was born on August 30, 1935 in Groton, Massachusetts. When he was four, Virginia Lee Burton dedicated Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel to him and he served as the model for the little boy who helps Mike and Mary Anne dig the cellar in one day. A graduate of Harvard Business School, Demetrios was the president of Marine World Africa USA for more than twenty years. While president, Demetrios, together with a group of businessman, purchased the park from Resorts International and successfully relocated to Vallejo, California. Now, Marine World Africa USA is a world class facility and has reached annual attendance levels of 1.9 million. Since January 1998, Demetrios has served as President of Intra-Asia, a US Company with two amusement parks in China and plans to have five additional parks. He travels extensively throughout China and sees this as an "exciting and fascinating time to be doing business with China". Michael Demetrios lives outside of Los Angeles.
TIMELINES OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION:
http://cla.calpoly.edu/~lcall/timeline.dep.html
1929
Herbert Hoover becomes President. Hoover is a staunch individualist but not as committed to laissez-faire ideology as Coolidge.
More than half of all Americans are living below a minimum subsistence level.
Annual per-capita income is $750; for farm people, it is only $273.
Backlog of business inventories grows three times larger than the year before. Public consumption markedly down.
Freight carloads and manufacturing fall.
Automobile sales decline by a third in the nine months before the crash.
Construction down $2 billion since 1926.
Recession begins in August, two months before the stock market crash. During this two month period, production will decline at an annual rate of 20 percent, wholesale prices at 7.5 percent, and personal income at 5 percent.
Stock market crash begins October 24. Investors call October 29 "Black Tuesday." Losses for the month will total $16 billion, an astronomical sum in those days.
Congress passes Agricultural Marketing Act to support farmers until they can get back on their feet.
1930
By February, the Federal Reserve has cut the prime interest rate from 6 to 4 percent. Expands the money supply with a major purchase of U.S. securities. However, for the next year and a half, the Fed will add very little money to the shrinking economy. (At no time will it actually pull money out of the system.) Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon announces that the Fed will stand by as the market works itself out: "Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate real estate… values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wreck from less-competent people."
The Smoot-Hawley Tariff passes on June 17. With imports forming only 6 percent of the GNP, the 40 percent tariffs work out to an effective tax of only 2.4 percent per citizen. Even this is compensated for by the fact that American businesses are no longer investing in Europe, but keeping their money stateside. The consensus of modern economists is that the tariff made only a minor contribution to the Great Depression in the U.S., but a major one in Europe.
The first bank panic occurs later this year; a public run on banks results in a wave of bankruptcies. Bank failures and deposit losses are responsible for the contracting money supply.
Supreme Court rules that the monopoly U.S. Steel does not violate anti-trust laws as long as competition exists, no matter how negligible.
Democrats gain in Congressional elections, but still do not have a majority.
The GNP falls 9.4 percent from the year before. The unemployment rate climbs from 3.2 to 8.7 percent.
1931
No major legislation is passed addressing the Depression.
A second banking panic occurs in the spring.
The GNP falls another 8.5 percent; unemployment rises to 15.9 percent.
1932
This and the next year are the worst years of the Great Depression. For 1932, GNP falls a record 13.4 percent; unemployment rises to 23.6 percent.
Industrial stocks have lost 80 percent of their value since 1930.
10,000 banks have failed since 1929, or 40 percent of the 1929 total.
About $2 billion in deposits have been lost since 1929.
Money supply has contracted 31 percent since 1929.
GNP has also fallen 31 percent since 1929.
Over 13 million Americans have lost their jobs since 1929.
Capital growth investments have dropped from $16.2 billion to 1/3 of one billion since 1929.
Farm prices have fallen 53 percent since 1929.
International trade has fallen by two-thirds since 1929.
The Fed makes its first major expansion of the money supply since February 1930.
Congress creates the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.
Congress passes the Federal Home Loan Bank Act and the Glass-Steagall Act of 1932.
Top tax rate is raised from 25 to 63 percent.
Popular opinion considers Hoover's measures too little too late. Franklin Roosevelt easily defeats Hoover in the fall election. Democrats win control of Congress.
At his Democratic presidential nomination, Roosevelt says: "I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people."
1933
Roosevelt inaugurated; begins "First 100 Days" of intensive legislative activity.
A third banking panic occurs in March. Roosevelt declares a Bank Holiday; closes financial institutions to stop a run on banks.
Congress authorizes creation of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Farm Credit Administration, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the National Recovery Administration, the Public Works Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Congress passes the Emergency Banking Bill, the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, the Farm Credit Act, the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Truth-in-Securities Act.
U.S. goes off the gold standard.
Roosevelt does much to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor, but is obsessed with a balanced budget. He later rejects Keynes' advice to begin heavy deficit spending.
The free fall of the GNP is significantly slowed; it dips only 2.1 percent this year. Unemployment rises slightly, to 24.9 percent.
1934
Congress authorizes creation of the Federal Communications Commission, the National Mediation Board and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Congress passes the Securities and Exchange Act and the Trade Agreement Act.
The economy turns around: GNP rises 7.7 percent, and unemployment falls to 21.7 percent. A long road to recovery begins.
Sweden becomes the first nation to recover fully from the Great Depression. It has followed a policy of Keynesian deficit spending.
1935
The Supreme Court declares the National Recovery Administration to be unconstitutional.
Congress authorizes creation of the Works Progress Administration, the National Labor Relations Board and the Rural Electrification Administration.
Congress passes the Banking Act of 1935, the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act, the National Labor Relations Act, and the Social Security Act.
Economic recovery continues: the GNP grows another 8.1 percent, and unemployment falls to 20.1 percent.
1936
The Supreme Court declares part of the Agricultural Adjustment Act to be unconstitutional.
In response, Congress passes the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act.
Top tax rate raised to 79 percent.
Economic recovery continues: GNP grows a record 14.1 percent; unemployment falls to 16.9 percent.
Germany becomes the second nation to recover fully from the Great Depression, through heavy deficit spending in preparation for war.
1937
The Supreme Court declares the National Labor Relations Board to be unconstitutional.
Roosevelt seeks to enlarge and therefore liberalize the Supreme Court. This attempt not only fails, but outrages the public.
Economists attribute economic growth so far to heavy government spending that is somewhat deficit. Roosevelt, however, fears an unbalanced budget and cuts spending for 1937. That summer, the nation plunges into another recession. Despite this, the yearly GNP rises 5.0 percent, and unemployment falls to 14.3 percent.
1938
Congress passes the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938 and the Fair Labor Standards Act.
No major New Deal legislation is passed after this date, due to Roosevelt's weakened political power.
The year-long recession makes itself felt: the GNP falls 4.5 percent, and unemployment rises to 19.0 percent.
Britain becomes the third nation to recover as it begins deficit spending in preparation for war.
1939
GNP rises 7.9 percent; unemployment falls to 17.2 percent.
The United States will begin emerging from the Depression as it borrows and spends $1 billion to build its armed forces. From 1939 to 1941, when the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, U.S. manufacturing will have shot up a phenomenal 50 percent!
The Depression is ending worldwide as nations prepare for the coming hostilities.
World War II starts with Hitler's invasion of Poland.
1945
Although the war is the largest tragedy in human history, the United States emerges as the world's only economic superpower. Deficit spending has resulted in a national debt 123 percent the size of the GDP. By contrast, in 1994, the $4.7 trillion national debt will be only 70 percent of the GDP!
The top tax rate is 91 percent. It will stay at least 88 percent until 1963, when it is lowered to 70 percent. During this time, America will experience the greatest economic boom it has ever known.
The Al-Qaeda strategy...
Believe me the next planet wide tsunami will be when Saudi Arabia and OPEC benchmarks the value of a barrel of oil away from the dollar! Its right around the corner and the result will be a Pearl Harbor of a different type. Watch what the value of the dollar does then.
The Al-Qaeda strategy to destabilize the planet
I think Iraq and 9/11 are just a diversion. I think Ben Laden recognizes that if he hit the USA too many times as in 9/11, this would stimulate the military strengthening of us –and our reorganization.
So I think on one side he is trying to stimulate our dysfunctional government into making enormous unproductive spending and the political payoffs as seen by the homeland security –but not enough to be really effective. He knew this would all come down to selfish self interest of our political establishment. So on the other side he wants to increase the world hated of us –with the primary task of distancing us from our foreign energy sources –this is truly a long term strategy.
So as peak oil digs in –the world will withhold energy sources to us. So in an example would be in Russia –where the Russians are diverting energy sources towards China. So I think the fastest collapse of the USA could come from an energy crisis as seen in the USA. Take Laden’s strategy of Saudi Arabia –that’s to disconnect the west from that oil. So the world hates us more and more now –I think these countries will more and more disconnect us from our energy sources –much like we disconnected oil from the Japanese prior to WWII.
So an energy crisis would lead to an enormous financial crisis as seen throughout the planet -remember our governmental and individual debt—this would lead to a historic planetary reorganization away from America.
I think the Saudi Arabia model is very telling –we are so dependant on their financing and resources –that they are blackmailing us –such that we can’t respond to their attempts to slowly destabilize us ---threats of withdrawing oil from the markets, which has frozen our national policy because we are too afraid to act because of the threatening consequences.
I think that is the planetary model to us now, where our dependence on our needs coming from foreign sources; trade…debt financing… energy resources, with our political fear of the huge consequences with the organized withdrawal of these resources creating a collapse –has frozen us from taking any action which could mitigating these threats in the future.
What we are going to find out in the future –is how all of our trade agreements have destabilized us in the long term –with making a very small majority of us rich beyond imagination and undermining the take home pay of millions of us. We too much fear the world’s backlash against us now –such that we can’t act in our national interest.
Every one of them had sold us down the river for individual profits!
mike mulligan
Hinsdale, NH
So I think on one side he is trying to stimulate our dysfunctional government into making enormous unproductive spending and the political payoffs as seen by the homeland security –but not enough to be really effective. He knew this would all come down to selfish self interest of our political establishment. So on the other side he wants to increase the world hated of us –with the primary task of distancing us from our foreign energy sources –this is truly a long term strategy.
So as peak oil digs in –the world will withhold energy sources to us. So in an example would be in Russia –where the Russians are diverting energy sources towards China. So I think the fastest collapse of the USA could come from an energy crisis as seen in the USA. Take Laden’s strategy of Saudi Arabia –that’s to disconnect the west from that oil. So the world hates us more and more now –I think these countries will more and more disconnect us from our energy sources –much like we disconnected oil from the Japanese prior to WWII.
So an energy crisis would lead to an enormous financial crisis as seen throughout the planet -remember our governmental and individual debt—this would lead to a historic planetary reorganization away from America.
I think the Saudi Arabia model is very telling –we are so dependant on their financing and resources –that they are blackmailing us –such that we can’t respond to their attempts to slowly destabilize us ---threats of withdrawing oil from the markets, which has frozen our national policy because we are too afraid to act because of the threatening consequences.
I think that is the planetary model to us now, where our dependence on our needs coming from foreign sources; trade…debt financing… energy resources, with our political fear of the huge consequences with the organized withdrawal of these resources creating a collapse –has frozen us from taking any action which could mitigating these threats in the future.
What we are going to find out in the future –is how all of our trade agreements have destabilized us in the long term –with making a very small majority of us rich beyond imagination and undermining the take home pay of millions of us. We too much fear the world’s backlash against us now –such that we can’t act in our national interest.
Every one of them had sold us down the river for individual profits!
mike mulligan
Hinsdale, NH
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
Lynx,
I still think you are a genius –you are struggling to use your intellect to put me down. If your were the real thing, you’d find a way to raise me up no matter what my sins and defects are. You would know that my sins are the greatest tools of the universe in helping me make my move towards enlightenment –and my faults and failures have the power to interact with the world around me. I am telling you it’s a perfect system –and you can’t go the wrong way. Take a look at the early apostles –some of these people weren’t nice men.
So you put your money in the pot –why and what’s your angle. Of all the people in the world why do you pay so much attention to me?
Of course Jesus Christ was the biggest bum on the planet in his days. He stole fruit from other people’s hard work and from their farms. Most of the world hated him.
Of course when you are a bum, when you have disconnected yourself from many aspects of the world, your pride, peoples opinion of you, of not adequate pay and benefits…Well, you are then sitting on the edge of tremendous creativity without any attachments. Here is my prayer to the universe.
Old dear god of the universe make my life a stinking rotten smelly sore. I am taunting you –you don’t have the courage or the strength to do it. I dare you too take everything away from me –make me starve, take my family away from me –make me sleep to the streets, let me watch terrible suffering of the innocent people around me –take away all of my dignity, my hopes and dreams –have everyone spit on me, urinate, throw feces on me, beat me, cut and mutilate me…
I then will be in the environment that where I feel most comfortable with. In those moments, you know you will see the tinkle in my eye. I will never give up–you know that I will have the most power and be at my creative best. Come on god, have faith in me as I have faith in you. You know I will figure out a way to drag the whole world into these problems --and by that they will see you. What are you afraid of? Come on they will see divine aspects in me of you. You know it’s in all of us to mirror your divine aspects here on this planet.
Oh dear god make my life a miserable stinking rotten mess… I’ll show them you…
I still think you are a genius –you are struggling to use your intellect to put me down. If your were the real thing, you’d find a way to raise me up no matter what my sins and defects are. You would know that my sins are the greatest tools of the universe in helping me make my move towards enlightenment –and my faults and failures have the power to interact with the world around me. I am telling you it’s a perfect system –and you can’t go the wrong way. Take a look at the early apostles –some of these people weren’t nice men.
So you put your money in the pot –why and what’s your angle. Of all the people in the world why do you pay so much attention to me?
Of course Jesus Christ was the biggest bum on the planet in his days. He stole fruit from other people’s hard work and from their farms. Most of the world hated him.
Of course when you are a bum, when you have disconnected yourself from many aspects of the world, your pride, peoples opinion of you, of not adequate pay and benefits…Well, you are then sitting on the edge of tremendous creativity without any attachments. Here is my prayer to the universe.
Old dear god of the universe make my life a stinking rotten smelly sore. I am taunting you –you don’t have the courage or the strength to do it. I dare you too take everything away from me –make me starve, take my family away from me –make me sleep to the streets, let me watch terrible suffering of the innocent people around me –take away all of my dignity, my hopes and dreams –have everyone spit on me, urinate, throw feces on me, beat me, cut and mutilate me…
I then will be in the environment that where I feel most comfortable with. In those moments, you know you will see the tinkle in my eye. I will never give up–you know that I will have the most power and be at my creative best. Come on god, have faith in me as I have faith in you. You know I will figure out a way to drag the whole world into these problems --and by that they will see you. What are you afraid of? Come on they will see divine aspects in me of you. You know it’s in all of us to mirror your divine aspects here on this planet.
Oh dear god make my life a miserable stinking rotten mess… I’ll show them you…
Make me the Pope!
I wouldn’t lose the teachings of the past –but I’d turn every Catholic Church into a moral and ethical gateway for advance technological creativity.
All of the priest and church bureaucrats would be continually educated with sitting on the modern cutting edge of management and technological innovation -they’d be educated on all of the sub atomic, quantum mechanics, genetic engineering, the internet, computing, IT, space time and travel, medicine, and how our brains work..... All of the churches would be wired up in the most advanced manner. The churches architecture would represent the gifts of future modernity –not death as we now worship.
I mean all of the governments, bureaucracies and corporation would beat a path to the churches doors knowing the church has the cutting edge answers, or better yet the questions –within the planets most advanced ideas of human integrity, freedom, ethics, truth, scientific evidence, technological advancements… I mean the church would be the conduit of transparency with moral modernity accessible on any place on this planet…
Did you catch what they are talking about in Texas? I mean man, highways of the future...
They are talking about overlaying and embedding a completely new architecture on our idea of our current interstates and highways. These would be mega pathways with huge highway travel lanes, separate travel lanes for cars and trucks, new train tracks for passenger and commerce –and in the center would be electrical grid lines, internet lines, gas and petroleum pipelines, and all of the rest. I guess all of these infrastructures would be buried. Could you make it ecstatically pleasing with grasses and trees…absolutely?
I mean when all of this is built –can you imagine what our creativity could add to this.
Now that is sexy!
mike mulligan
Hinsdale, NH
All of the priest and church bureaucrats would be continually educated with sitting on the modern cutting edge of management and technological innovation -they’d be educated on all of the sub atomic, quantum mechanics, genetic engineering, the internet, computing, IT, space time and travel, medicine, and how our brains work..... All of the churches would be wired up in the most advanced manner. The churches architecture would represent the gifts of future modernity –not death as we now worship.
I mean all of the governments, bureaucracies and corporation would beat a path to the churches doors knowing the church has the cutting edge answers, or better yet the questions –within the planets most advanced ideas of human integrity, freedom, ethics, truth, scientific evidence, technological advancements… I mean the church would be the conduit of transparency with moral modernity accessible on any place on this planet…
Did you catch what they are talking about in Texas? I mean man, highways of the future...
They are talking about overlaying and embedding a completely new architecture on our idea of our current interstates and highways. These would be mega pathways with huge highway travel lanes, separate travel lanes for cars and trucks, new train tracks for passenger and commerce –and in the center would be electrical grid lines, internet lines, gas and petroleum pipelines, and all of the rest. I guess all of these infrastructures would be buried. Could you make it ecstatically pleasing with grasses and trees…absolutely?
I mean when all of this is built –can you imagine what our creativity could add to this.
Now that is sexy!
mike mulligan
Hinsdale, NH
LYNX: "I see solutions all the time"
I see solutions all the time.
The technology that puts the big square
styrofoam in the box your TV came in
only needs a small change of tooling
to produce a weatherproof, floatable,
heat-insulated single-person home
for less than a dollar each.
A new alpha-particle powered
nuclear microbattery now exists
which would last 50 years each
without recharging, enabling
communications, light
and heat for the styrofoam modules,
for about 60% of the lifetime
of each user, should they choose
to maintain residence.
The technology used to build
open overhead parking lots
needs very little retooling
to create open communities of
the styrofoam houses,
in a semi-weatherized environment
extending their utility,
partially covered, or even
heated with infrared glowpipes
attached to the underside
of the overhead concrete,
such glow pipes, powered by propane,
now heat vast areas in Home Depots
and Walmarts for a pittance.
24-7 overhead surveillance cameras
will make peace
holding activities easy,
with any incident viewable, and thus judgeable
instantly, by empowered peace cadres.
But nobody wants to do it.
The red staters want MacMansions,
and the blue staters want Volvos
and great enviro-vacations overseas,
so we just let everybody rot
as usual
--Posted by lynx to The Popperville Town Hall at 1/3/2005 02:20:36 PM
The technology that puts the big square
styrofoam in the box your TV came in
only needs a small change of tooling
to produce a weatherproof, floatable,
heat-insulated single-person home
for less than a dollar each.
A new alpha-particle powered
nuclear microbattery now exists
which would last 50 years each
without recharging, enabling
communications, light
and heat for the styrofoam modules,
for about 60% of the lifetime
of each user, should they choose
to maintain residence.
The technology used to build
open overhead parking lots
needs very little retooling
to create open communities of
the styrofoam houses,
in a semi-weatherized environment
extending their utility,
partially covered, or even
heated with infrared glowpipes
attached to the underside
of the overhead concrete,
such glow pipes, powered by propane,
now heat vast areas in Home Depots
and Walmarts for a pittance.
24-7 overhead surveillance cameras
will make peace
holding activities easy,
with any incident viewable, and thus judgeable
instantly, by empowered peace cadres.
But nobody wants to do it.
The red staters want MacMansions,
and the blue staters want Volvos
and great enviro-vacations overseas,
so we just let everybody rot
as usual
--Posted by lynx to The Popperville Town Hall at 1/3/2005 02:20:36 PM
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