Siddiqui: deformed babies legacy of U.S. bombing in Iraq

U.S. military power, ordered into action by Bush-Cheney, needs to be silenced while the last decade of human desecration is researched, reported and digested by those with power in the Pentagon.
If there were still a need of more reasons to re-elect Obama, and reject the bravado of Romney and his Republican hawks, reading the Siddiqui piece should provide all the reasons needed, by any thoughtful, self-respecting and humane American citizen.
American bombing of Iraq left legacy of deformed babies: Siddiqui
By Haroon Siddiqui, Toronto Star, October 20, 2012
Remember Falluja? That city in central Iraq was the scene of two furious attacks in 2004 by American Marines. That spring, they went on a bombing, shooting rampage to avenge the murder and mutilation of four American mercenaries. Instead of targeting the estimated 2,000 insurgents, the Marines almost levelled the city of 300,000, without conquering it. Seven months later, they attacked again with artillery and bombs in what was described as the bloodiest urban warfare involving Americans since the Vietnam War.

Remember Basra? That southern Iraqi city has been suffering since the first Gulf War, in 1991. Radioactive residue from the 800 tons of bombs and 1 million rounds of ammunition used was soon showing up in babies born with huge heads, abnormally large eyes, stunted arms, bloated stomachs and defective hearts. Later in the 1990s, Basra was hit as part of maintaining the American no fly zone on Saddam Hussein. It was attacked yet again in the 2003 American-British invasion and subsequent occupation.
Now we see that the children of Falluja and Basra are suffering a staggering rise in birth defects, primarily from the metals released by bombs, bullets and shells — the dust that gets into food, water, air, soil and crops.
A recent study by an environmental toxicologist at the University of Michigan attributes the defects to the presence of high levels of lead, mercury and other contaminants in the bodies of both parents and their afflicted children.
It substantiates what horrified doctors at Falluja General Hospital had been reporting since 2005. In September 2009, they had asked the United Nations to investigate why a quarter of the 170 babies born there that month had died within seven days and a staggering 75 per cent of the dead babies were deformed.
In 2010, the University of Ulster reported that increases in congenital birth defects, leukemia and infant mortality in Falluja were higher than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Later that same year, Mozhgan Savabieasfahani of the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health published an epidemiological study, also showing shocking levels of birth defects in Falluja children.
Since then, she and her collaborating team of doctors in Iraq and neighbouring Iran have broadened their research in Falluja and Basra. Last month, they published their findings in the Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology.
They followed 56 families from Falluja General Hospital and also thousands of records at the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Basra maternity hospital.
Between 2004 and 2006, almost half the pregnancies among those Falluja families resulted in miscarriage. Between 2007 and 2010, more than half the children born in them had some form of birth defect (compared to less than 2 per cent in 2000). Abnormalities included heart defects, malformed or missing limbs, cleft palates, swollen heads, single eyes, bloated tummies and body organs spilling out of defective abdominal walls.
Among the children with birth defects, lead levels were five times higher and mercury levels six times higher than for normal children.
In Basra, birth defects had gone up to 23 per 1,000 births by 2003, a 17-fold increase since 1994.
Mercury levels in children with defects were three times higher than among normal children. The enamel portion of the deciduous tooth from a child with birth defects showed nearly three times higher lead levels than the teeth of children from other areas. Their parents had 1.4 times higher lead levels in tooth enamel compared to parents of normal children.
If anything, the data underestimates the epidemic, says Savabieasfahani. Many parents tend to hide their children with defects and abnormalities.
The American and British governments try to deflect such damning studies by saying they were “not aware of them,” or that the findings may not be definitive.
But Savabieasfahani told me on the phone from Ann Arbor, Mich., that there’s “a clear footprint of metal in the population” in Falluja and Basra. “There is compelling evidence linking the staggering increases in Iraqi birth defects to neurotoxic metal contamination following the repeated bombardments. There is no other explanation. There has been no volcano eruption, for example.”
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization is also studying the crises not only in Falluja and Basra but also seven other “high-risk” Iraqi cities. Its report is due out next month.
These studies should be required reading for anyone who still wonders why the Arab and Muslim world remains so angry at America and its allies.

Culture clash comes to Canada...tragically and perhaps irreparably

The real battle everywhere is between extremists of all kinds and more levelheaded people

Canada is no longer a united country. An unbridgeable gap has grown between what we can broadly label conservatives and liberals. In the United States, reactionaries like Pat Buchanan for years insisted that the country was engaged in a ferocious internal culture war, and today no one doubts it. The Tea Party, the Koch brothers, the National Rifle Association, anti-choice absolutists and many others consider themselves to be at war, however metaphoric, with all who disagree with them.
(In Canada, Harper's 30%  base) disproportionately opposes abortion, gay marriage and gun control and denies global warming and evolution. Many, paradoxically, belong to the 99 per cent. As in the U.S. and Europe, culture often trumps class. They resent more successful peers rather than the 1 per cent.

These are the new conservatives, threatened by a world where the only certainty is constant dizzying change. They find less and less in common with other Canadians who in turn find them baffling, strangers in a strange land. The two groups can barely connect with each other. (From Gerald Caplan's piece Culture Clash spits Canadians over basic values, Globe and Mail, October 20, 2102, below)
Having spent nearly two decades in both formal training for and professional practice of ministry in one of the so-called mainline protestant churches, on both sides of the 49th parallel, I found this split in both values and in theology within the church. Those who saw God as a rule-giver and religion as a morality play, the fundamentalists, evangelicals, biblical literalists, apocalypticists, fear-mongers and hate-spreaders profoundly and unalterably ostracized those who preferred a more liberal position, who favoured the ordination of gays, the blessing of gay unions and marriages, the social gospel, the preservation of the environment, the teaching of relationship-education, such as it was then known as "sex-ed," the acccess to therapeutic abortion and contraception and the movement toward some kind of rapprochment between and among the various "christian" groups.
The divide showed itself, in stark terms, in a first-year class in seminary, where five liberals were numerically outnumbered, outgunned and treated with contempt by the twelve "fundies" as we called them. They were out to "save the world" from sin, where the liberals were more interested in searching for a healthy relationship with God and with all things spiritual.
In some parishes, we were the heathens, the black-sheep, the unconverted, the unwashed and the "ones for whom the born-again's prayed" even though those prayers were neither sought nor desired.
The "conservatives" saw the world in black and white terms, were unwilling to discuss different interpretations of anything, including scripture, and found liberals contemptible. Some parishoners of their ilk would stop at nothing to drive their liberal clergy from their jobs. Often these 'conservatives' were supported by the financial interests, the corporate donors who believed in spreading their wealth to support a "good cause".
Liberals, on the other hand, struggled for funds, for adherents and for political support within the hierarchy.
Now that this divide has spread into the wider culture, with or without the religious component of its earlier identity, and the dialogue of the deaf (as Margaret Atwood once dubbed the relationship between Quebec sovereignists and the federalists in the rest of Canada) has taken on new demographics, Quebec having become irrelevant to Harper's majority government, Canadian culture is given voice by a right-wing media conglomerate, Sun media, the acolyte to Fox News in the U.S., including the National Post and to a large extent the Globe and Mail, with the Toronto Star holding the fort for something approximating the liberal position. Yet, even that position has shifted to the right, and corporate "religion and ideology" have taken centre stage in Canada.
And Mr. Caplan is right; this is not the country we grew up in; it does not have the same values as those that successfully grew its Canadian identity, both at home and around the world. Peacekeeping has given way to militarism, multiculturalism has given way to niche marketing to segregated ethnicities for the purpose of scoring votes in elections, now that the Harper gang is in permanent "campaign battle mode", rehabilitation of miscreants has been replaced by longer sentences, more prisons, and more "security" initiatives, including armed border guards, and the spectre of selling our resources to a Chinese state-controlled conglomerate, as well as our technology infrastructure (when other countries like the U.S. and Australia have banned that initiative in the interests of national security), remains the position of a government dedicated to the support of the corporate business agenda, and its proponents who fund their agenda.
Workers, especially those who are members of legitimate unions, are disparaged and their long and hard-fought gains for all workers are being eroded, given the neo-con penchant for and addiction to military engagements, to deportation of illegal immigrants, to the purity of a society purged of therapeutic abortions, contraception and gays and an elimination of pensions, health benefits and job security especially for public employees while those same corporate leaders ship their jobs to foreign countries where labour is dirt cheap and environmental protecctions are non-existent and where the products of their manufacturing sector become the widgets we purchase to keep the economy afloat.
Income inequality is growing at a gallop; unemployment is still too high, too many families are in need of food banks and/or foodstamps, schools are falling apart and academic achievement is falling, in the U.S. more than in Canada and some other countries.
Conversations between the Canadian government and the Canadian people are either "in camera" or non-existent. Public pressure on this government is like waving a white flag in a tornado, it only points to the thrust of the tornado, without either stopping or re-directing the wind. And the people of Toronto elected both Ford and Harper, in some inexplicable and perhaps even contemptuous and derisive move to show disdain for all political leaders...what else could explain their electoral insanity?
And the country lurches between those who truly distrust and despise their federal government and the "believers" who think valhalla has finally come to Ottawa, leaving Quebec out of the national equation, Ontario struggling for both political leadership and a role in the national dialogue (of which there really is none!) and First Nations and the environment playing second fiddle to a brass band that blasts all other voices out of the room, gleefully and contemptuously.
And all this inside a country that was once known as one of the more mature and stable and peaceful and respected nations on the planet! 
Culture clash splits Canadians over basic values
By Gerald Caplan, Globe and Mail, October 20, 2012
The clash of cultures has come to Canada. Some might call it a clash of civilizations. I don’t mean the non-existent conflict not between the entire Muslim world and the “civilized’ world, which Muslim-baiting demagogues have invented. The real battle everywhere is between extremists of all kinds and more levelheaded people
Canada is no longer a united country. An unbridgeable gap has grown between what we can broadly label conservatives and liberals. In the United States, reactionaries like Pat Buchanan for years insisted that the country was engaged in a ferocious internal culture war, and today no one doubts it. The Tea Party, the Koch brothers, the National Rifle Association, anti-choice absolutists and many others consider themselves to be at war, however metaphoric, with all who disagree with them.

Canadians have long believed we were immune from such destructive divisions. For 145 years we’ve been proud to think of ourselves as one people, that whatever our disagreements they were trumped by our collective sense of Canadian-ness and the values we shared. By and large, from John A. on, while we criticized our governments, we rarely considered them treasonous.
Of course there have been exceptions aplenty to this enlightened form of democracy – the FLQ, Trudeau-loathing Albertans, as well as haters of Muslims, blacks, immigrants, Catholics, Jews and other bigots who have sullied our history, to name only some.
How do Stephen Harper and his Conservatives fit into this profound schism over our basic values? Many Canadians believe the Harper government has shattered the historic mould. Harperland is a place many Canadians do not recognize as theirs. Mr. Harper seems not to share many traditional Canadian cultural values and a good number of Canadians feel estranged from his government.
Still, not everyone agrees that the Harperites have gone so far as to radically break with the Canadians consensus. So let me offer two other examples that seem to me more definitive: our wildly conflicting attitudes towards Omar Khadr and Toronto Mayor Rob Ford. Each has his passionate supporters and equally passionate detractors, and each stands for something much larger than himself. And never, it seems clear, will the twain meet.
What’s fascinating about the Khadr case is how many separate aspects there are, and how sympathizers and foes disagree about every single one of them. Here’s a fast rundown: Should we be sympathetic that he was brainwashed from childhood by a fanatical father? Should we care than he was a child soldier? Should any soldier be tried for killing another soldier in combat? Did he kill U.S. Sgt. 1 st Class Christopher Speer?
Is it relevant that this 15-year old was terribly wounded in that same battle? Or that he was both physically and psychologically tortured since? That he’s been locked up, away from the world, for 10 years? That his government betrayed him and denied him his rights? That the one psychiatrist most hostile to him harbours strong anti-Muslim views? That many more experts of various kinds have found Khadr to be a sympathetic human being?
I suppose the wording of my questions give me away. Yes, on every count, I find the evidence largely to favour Khadr. But I also know that Canada’s Minister of Public Safety, Vic Toews, as well as a swarm of Sun Media sages, consider him a menace and a traitor, guilty on all counts. This is more than a disagreement. This reflects completely different world views that simply cannot be reconciled.
Now take Rob Ford – please. In the beginning, many Torontonians were sure it was impossible that this unprepossessing man could ever be elected their mayor. When he won in a landslide, the spotlight has focused on his cornucopia of bizarre antics, failures and self-inflicted scandals. Many feel humiliated that this man is seen as the reflection of Toronto. Yet his re-election is by no means impossible. The latest poll shows that even now a mind-boggling 77 per cent of his 2010 voters are still satisfied with the job he’s doing. He remains to them a populist hero, a perception completely unfathomable to opponents. There is no conceivable bridge between these two groups of Torontonians.
As with Omar Khadr, there’s something larger going on here. There’s an irreconcilable clash of cultures. There are two diametrically opposite ways of seeing the world constituting a profound conflict of values. So not only do the two sides disparage each other, they can’t begin to understand each other.
It’s a good bet that Rob Ford enthusiasts and Omar Khadr antagonists are mostly the same people and that both are part of Stephen Harper’s original and most reliable base. This 30 per cent – although not necessarily the support he has received beyond them, especially in the last election – disproportionately opposes abortion, gay marriage and gun control and denies global warming and evolution. Many, paradoxically, belong to the 99 per cent. As in the U.S. and Europe, culture often trumps class. They resent more successful peers rather than the 1 per cent.
These are the new conservatives, threatened by a world where the only certainty is constant dizzying change. They find less and less in common with other Canadians who in turn find them baffling, strangers in a strange land. The two groups can barely connect with each other. This is not the Canada we once knew and no one knows how to deal with it.

Poverty and inequality...too complex for political resolution?

When those on the left discuss inequality, they too often fall for a “lump-of-money fallacy” – the belief there’s a fixed pile of cash, too much of it in the hands of the rich, that needs to be spread around more evenly.

But wealth doesn’t work that way: What the non-rich lack is not a share of the pot but a productive economic situation in which to generate wealth. The problem isn’t the 1 per cent. It’s the 60 per cent whose world of productivity and security is increasingly denied to the lower 40 per cent.
When politicians on the right discuss it, they too often fall for the “zero-sum fallacy”: the belief that fixing inequality through government action will kill wealth creation and, by extension, make everyone poorer. It’s true that less poverty usually equals more inequality – the policies that get people out of poverty (by creating growth) usually benefit the rich even more. When the rich get richer, the poor usually get poorer. But the converse isn’t true: Countries with strong redistributive systems and free economies are usually both wealthy and equal. (From Doug Saunders' piece, "Poverty gives way to inequality and the Great Frustration," Globe and Mail, October 20, 2012, below)
There is a gap between the reality on the ground and the headline "nuggets" that are used by political leaders in their pursuit of votes. The complexity, paradox, ambiguity and often the multiple layers of both the issues and the language used to depict those issues is too often sacrificed for the "broad impression" that both the politicians and the media engage in, that both rises above and falls below the complexity, when compared with the discussion of those same in a graduate school classroom. And those discussions would be even more effete, and even more complicated, depending on which academic discipline was entertaining them in which graduate school.
For example, the conventional thinking links poverty to inequality in a one-to-one ratio. However, as Mr. Saunders points out that ratio is not supported by the evidence on the ground. "Less poverty usually equals more inequality," from the Saunders piece, will likely surprise some readers. As will his somewhat oversimplified reduction of the headlines of both right and left political vernacular. There is neither a fixed pile of cash (from the left's perspective) nor a demon government (from right's perspective) and yet these aphorisms are piled on, one against the other, in a pugilistic presentation of the pursuit of power, as opposed to the exercise of power.
It is the public's tax returns, collectively calibrated to somehow look after public expenditures, that generates any cash for those public expenditures. And it is the government's responsibility to allocate those revenues "in the best interest" of the people of any state.
The task of the political leadership, and the media, however, is to frame the arguments that will eventually bring both poverty (and its reduction) and inequality into focus simultaneously, with a view to a balanced program that effectively moves the society into something that resembles equilibrium on this file.
And that involves a more extended education, campaign, curriculum and concerted effort on the part of leaders than most political sound-bytes and advertising campaigns will permit, or even entertain.
It is not only that our political parties are so divided in their views, their ideologies, that nothing is being accomplished. It is also that those politicians are far more interested in pursuing and retaining power, for themselves and their cohorts, and excluding their opponents from accessing any of that power, than they are interested in providing enlightened leadership of complex and seemingly paradoxical forces. Deconstructing a single word, from an opponent, has taken on a life of its own, while the mountains of inequality and the growing gap between the rich and the poor is left for "after the political debates," when one side or the other is now "in power" by virtue of the votes cast.
If there is a gap in the public's comprehension of the relationship between poverty and inequality, there is an even bigger gap between the complexities of negotiating, writing, re-writing, editing and re-negotiating and finally passing some piece of legislation that would embrace the needed equation that would bring both poverty and inequality into balance, for the benefit of all the people, including both the wealthy and the middle class, as well as the very poor whose voice is barely a whisper in the public cacophony inside the political echo-chamber.
So there is a language gap, on top of a comprehension gap, layered onto a social class gap, and an education/learning/assimilation gap, layered onto a power differential, giving the voices of the wealthy more power than they deserve in the minds of too many political practitioners...and then, there is also a gap between our willingness to examine complex and seemingly unsolvable problems and our complete denial of whatever seems too difficult and too likely to produce no political advantage for "our side" to even enter the debate.
We are mired in our own uber-analysis, (read intellectualizing, and procrastination) our radar-addiction to the prevailing public winds (read the polls) our personal (as opposed to the national) ambitions, while reducing the realities on the ground to sugar-laden sound-bytes that just might addict our audiences to our brand of sugar, so that, come election day, we will "win"....and which states have outlawed prostitution?
The question seems appropriate since all politicians are operating on the same "business model" as the one used in  the red-light districts in cities all over the world. Only the degree of satisfaction is likely to be much higher in those districts than in the poverty-of-the minds-and-hearts of real people looking to political leaders for solutions to real problems.
It’s the 60 per cent whose world of productivity and security is increasingly denied to the lower 40 per cent.(from the Saunders piece above)
Since power evolves from securing a majority of the votes, the bottom 40% will continue to mean less and less, unless and until we find a way to bring them into the full debate, and politicians will increasingly pander to the top 60% percent as most likely to serve their political interests. So, Romney, in his despicable throwing the 47% under the bus, was, ironically, telling one kernal of truth, amidst of plethora of misleading and self-compromising statements. The bottom 40% are going to continue to be rendered "dumb" in the medical sense of that word, so long as the chorus of power includes only the "successful" 60%.
And it is to and for the 40% that the political system must fully operate, if we are to create some legitimate equilibrium and some harmony and some congruency of interests and aspirations for the people...
Can we even glimpse the larger, long-term balance of both enhanced distribution and a free economy, through the fog of political battle, and the mountain of impediments generated to block our vision?

Poverty gives way to inequality and the Great Frustration
By Doug Saunders, Globe and Mail, October 20, 2012
Former Chilean president Ricardo Lagos recently told me a story to explain why he, like a growing number of political leaders, has stopped viewing poverty as his primary problem.

The story involved a poor village in the foothills of the Andes. When Mr. Lagos was education minister in the early 1990s, he built its first school. Later in the decade, as minister of public works, he built the first modern road to the village. Then as president after 2000, his programs delivered the village’s first supplies of clean water, agricultural irrigation and electricity.
And then the presidential election came around. Mr. Lagos campaigned hard in the village he had so dramatically transformed, reminding voters that he had ended poverty there within a decade.

“My opponent? I am not sure he knew where that village was,” Mr. Lagos said. “But he got 60 per cent of the vote there, and I got 40 per cent. Why? After we gave them so many things? Well, what the villagers told me was that those things had made them less poor, but also gave them more stress and made them less happy.”
Water and electricity meant there were now bills to pay, and expensive TVs on which to watch the inaccessible lives of the country’s upper-middle class. With roads came car payments and trips to the city, and the growing discovery of just how poor these newly middle-class villagers really were – and how impossible it would be to bridge that gap.
Around the world, politicians are making the same discovery. Their constituents, who were satisfied simply not to be poor a generation ago, have now entered an era that might be called the Great Frustration. Those people on the lowest edge of the middle class – in both poor and rich countries – have discovered they have little chance of advancing further. In countries such as Canada, they may be starting to slip back.
That’s why inequality has replaced poverty as the great political theme of the moment. Once upon a time, we might have believed the two were related – but it turns out, as leaders from Beijing to Berlin to Bogota are discovering, they’re very different problems.
Five decades ago, Lyndon Johnson built his presidential election campaign around a “war on poverty,” a phrase that was to dominate his country’s politics for a generation. Today, Barack Obama is running a re-election campaign that makes far less mention of poverty, instead focusing on inequality and the frustrations of an American lower-middle class whose situation, financially and emotionally, looks a lot like those Chilean villagers.
In poor countries, the emerging almost middle classes are stuck. In countries such as Canada, the middle classes have seen their incomes and purchasing power stagnate, even slip back somewhat. Inequality has increased – and when that happens, economists have shown that there’s a corresponding collapse of social mobility, the ability to escape your income group for a higher one.
Yet, as much as we use the word “inequality” to describe this problem, we really don’t understand it. Politicians on both ends of the spectrum abuse the term, and suggest unrealistic solutions.
When those on the left discuss inequality, they too often fall for a “lump-of-money fallacy” – the belief there’s a fixed pile of cash, too much of it in the hands of the rich, that needs to be spread around more evenly.
But wealth doesn’t work that way: What the non-rich lack is not a share of the pot but a productive economic situation in which to generate wealth. The problem isn’t the 1 per cent. It’s the 60 per cent whose world of productivity and security is increasingly denied to the lower 40 per cent.
When politicians on the right discuss it, they too often fall for the “zero-sum fallacy”: the belief that fixing inequality through government action will kill wealth creation and, by extension, make everyone poorer. It’s true that less poverty usually equals more inequality – the policies that get people out of poverty (by creating growth) usually benefit the rich even more. When the rich get richer, the poor usually get poorer. But the converse isn’t true: Countries with strong redistributive systems and free economies are usually both wealthy and equal.
And it isn’t inevitable: Both Brazil and South Korea have seen lengthy periods where their citizens became both wealthier and more equal. The U.S. once did that, too, a century ago. Now that the fulcrum has swung from poverty back to equality, maybe it will again.

The Economist: "Inequality bad for growth"...that's news!

British author Richard Wilkinson, whose 2009 book, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, focused attention on the issue, still believes the tide will turn. “The world is full of closet egalitarians,” he said on a recent visit to Toronto, “I’m just opening the door of the closet.”

No politicians, bankers or business magnates have tumbled out yet. Government leaders continue to turn a blind eye to disparities among their people and a deaf ear to voices warning that a hyper-wealthy minority is taking too much of the nation’s income. Corporate executives continue to argue that any measure impeding their ability to produce wealth would do profound harm to the economy. (from Carol Goar's piece on the Economist magazine's conversion to "progressivism" in Toronto Star, October 18, 2012, below)
What will it take to bring the wealthy and the powerful to their senses?
We know that corporate executives who demonstrated compassion and ethics, commons sense and reason in the treatment of their workers, as far back as the beginning of the twentieth century created enterprises that were more productive and more profitable than those of their Scrooge competitors.
Just because there is a tech revolution does not mean that we must return to the beginning of the industrial revolution in our attitudes to our workers, to the tax policies that favour the rich, to the abandonment of our environment, and to the times that Charles Dickens documented in Hard Times.
There is a kind of collective narcissism gripping the rich and the powerful that, they believe, because they have substantial wealth, they are the ones most favoured, the ones to be emulated, the ones even, according to some, whom God favours. ("God wants you to be rich is a theme" being preached in some "christian" churches with memberships in the hundreds of thousands in the U.S.)
There is a religious fervour to their self-righteousness, to their unleashed hubris, to their arrogance that smacks not so much of personal superiority, but a kind of superiority that comes from "scoring the most points" in the most important game, as they see it, and thereby securing for them the nomination as the "forbes richest" a moniker that endorses their approach to the public good.
Yet, for them, there is no "public good" so enmeshed are they with the pursuit of their own personal and corporate "good" as if such a pursuit provides the kind of example, motivation, model and cultural goals for everyone else. The public good consists of the removal of all government regulations, all government partnerships, all government social programs, and anything the smacks of a civil service that researches the complicated data of how people are living in the new economy.
And, for over a century, The Economist has been their cover, has had their backs, has trumpeted their achievements, their goals, their ambition and their wealth.
Even though the magazine has changed its tune, there is  still, in the Congress of the United States, and on the ticket for the Republican party for President, people whose political agenda emphasizes policies that would support the wealthy at the expense of the growing number of poor, unemployed, uneducated and underemployed.
How can the people of the United States, according to most polls, consider this a "tight race" when the stakes are both so high, and so clear?
Do those polls neglect, for example, the Latino vote, which is trending for the President? Are the pollsters gathering bogus information? Are their methodologies flawed to the point of rendering their results redundant?
Without acknowledging their endorsement for the President, has The Economist, in effect, pushed the electorate in the direction of both re-electing the President and of  ridiculing and removing the obligation for Republican leaders to sign the Norquist pledge for not a single dollar of new taxes?
We can only hope that might be one of the impacts of their change in editorial policy and position!
Venerable Economist sounds alarm over growing inequality: Goar

By Carol Goar, Toronto Star, Thursday October 18, 2012
After defending capitalism stoutly for 169 years, the British weekly, The Economist, made a reluctant admission this week. “Inequality has reached a stage where it can be inefficient and bad for growth.”
To support this departure from its traditional stance, the magazine presented a thoroughly researched 19-page report examining the widening gap between rich and poor in North America, Europe, China, Russia and India. The reasons differed — top-heavy state enterprises, corruption, regressive taxation, monopolistic corporations — but the net effect was a trajectory heading in a harmful direction, the Economist stated.
Others reached this conclusion long ago. But they were dismissed as bleeding hearts with no understanding of global forces, left-wingers with no concern about fiscal responsibility, cranks, renegades and malcontents. Even when the International Monetary Fund and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development joined the chorus, the debate went nowhere.
British author Richard Wilkinson, whose 2009 book, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, focused attention on the issue, still believes the tide will turn. “The world is full of closet egalitarians,” he said on a recent visit to Toronto, “I’m just opening the door of the closet.”
No politicians, bankers or business magnates have tumbled out yet. Government leaders continue to turn a blind eye to disparities among their people and a deaf ear to voices warning that a hyper-wealthy minority is taking too much of the nation’s income. Corporate executives continue to argue that any measure impeding their ability to produce wealth would do profound harm to the economy.
The Economist’s thoughtful analysis won’t change their minds. But it will get their attention. It is one of the few publications that leaders around the globe read.
It will also prevent decision-makers from labelling those who sound the alarm as the usual left-wing fringe. No one would describe the market-friendly Economist — long regarded as a bastion of reasoned conservatism — that way.
The great equalizers of the past, the magazine points out, have come from all political camps. Trust-busting U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt, for example, who took on the “robber barons” of the late 19th century, was a tough-minded Republican. British prime minister David Lloyd George was a reform-minded Liberal.
But history doesn’t provide the answer to today’s disparities, it says. Governments can no longer afford massive economic intervention and breaking up globe-straddling monopolies is a far greater challenge than dismantling the industrial empires of the Gilded Era.
The magazine’s primary focus is the U.S., which has bifurcated into two nations: the rich and the rest. Neither presidential candidate is offering a workable solution. Republican Mitt Romney promises tax cuts at the top of the economic pyramid, spending cuts to social security and education and smaller government. Democrat Barack Obama, who calls inequality “the defining issue of our time,” can’t persuade Congress to make America’s tax system more progressive.
“Roosevelt would have been appalled at the timidity,” the Economist contends. “A subject of such importance requires something bolder.”
Unfortunately, the magazine’s own solution — “true progressivism” — falls far short of that standard. It is grab bag of top-down and populist measures; fine-tuning and structural change; sensible and politically unpalatable correctives. Its editorialists deserve credit for putting forward a formula to make societies fairer without stifling economic growth. But their prescription lacks the coherence to convert skeptics into reformers.
Here is what the Economist recommends:
• A Roosevelt-style attack on Wall Street’s too-big-to-fail banks.
• Increase school choice to loosen the grip of teachers unions.
• Raise the retirement age sharply and require means testing.
• Get rid of costly fuel subsidies.
• Target government spending at the young and poor.
• Provide more retraining for the jobless.
• Eliminate tax deductions that benefit the wealthy.
• Narrow the gap between the taxes charged on earnings and capital gains.
There are certainly some good ideas on the list. But they don’t amount to a bold new strategy and they don’t address the underlying political issue: Wealth redistribution is anathema to most governments.
What is needed is a rational debate. The Economist provides a credible framework. It lifts the issue out of the left-wing ghetto. It exposes the plutocrats who claim to be wealth creators.
Best of all, it’s a voice world leaders can’t ridicule or disregard.

Bullying requires both preventive attitudes and personal acceptance

Bully is a viral relationship problem
By David Wolfe, Globe and Mail, October 18, 2012
David A. Wolfe is senior scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) and director of the Fourth R program.
Bullying is not about an argument, a fight or an insult tossed out in anger. Rather, it consists of systematic, repeated and persistent attempts to cause fear, distress or harm to another person or their sense of safety, self-worth or reputation. Notably, studies emphasize that bullying occurs in a relationship context where there’s a real or perceived power imbalance.
Forget the notion that there are bullies and there are victims, and somehow we can identify who they are and get them the proper help. It’s clear that some young people will purposefully create an imbalance of power, most likely in an attempt to bolster their own status with peers. Some bullies become victims, and some victims learn to bully. The critical issue underlying this dynamic is that bullying occurs in an attempt to establish relationships based on power, rather than on equality or trust.
Bullies have always relied on physical, verbal and social methods of intimidation and domination, but they now have access to almost unlimited forms of technology that shield their identities from authorities. This has taken young people further from the reality that violence is a human behaviour that causes suffering, loss and sadness. Rather, “entertainment violence” triggers visceral thrills in the audience without portraying much human cost. To many youths, violence depicted in television, movies and video games is acceptable or even amusing. For some, negotiating relationships is made simpler by breaking them down into victims and victimizers.
Canadian students’ reports of bullying rank near the middle in comparison with 35 other countries, which I find surprising and disturbing given our noted concern for human rights. We can reverse the spread of bullying by first acknowledging that it’s not normal or typical behaviour, that it’s not harmless and that we can do something about it. We need to revise our beliefs of what it means to be a bullying victim. And we need to think of bullying as a viral relationship problem, not a fact of life.
Prevention is everyone’s responsibility but least of all the victim’s. Our school systems are getting up to speed in this regard. CAMH’s Fourth R project is a school-based program developed to help adolescents form healthy relationships and make better choices while they navigate critical developmental minefields such as substance use, sexual relationships, bullying and violence. This new awareness among schools may be too late for many but has the potential to curb such behaviour before it gets out of hand.
But don’t just leave it up to the schools. When you ask how a child’s day went, remember to ask how it was for the child’s friends, too. Did he hear of someone getting “teased” on Facebook? Does she worry about being bullied? Does he feel safe at school? Parents need to ask themselves what they may inadvertently be doing or not doing to promote this activity. Are insults and put-downs between siblings ignored? Does everyone enjoy a good joke at another’s expense or humiliation on the latest TV show? Are respectful interactions demonstrated at home? While a situation like Amanda Todd’s is tragic, news reports about bullying’s harm can be used as teachable moments.
How a child learns to relate to others is analogous to building a house: Early relationships form the foundation for future ones. It’s more likely that children and teens who engage in bullying will carry these patterns into future relationships with spouses, children and colleagues. This can’t be what we want for our children and grandchildren – so let’s turn some serious attention to reducing bullying by promoting healthy, non-abusive relationships.
The social, preventive features of bullying do, indeed, need increased exposure, integration and advocacy. Yet, these are all extrinsic, as compared with the intrinsic acceptance of one's "self", one's uniqueness, one's idiosyncracies and eccentricities. And together in a supportive environment, we need to pursue both the extrinsic and the intrinsic pathways.
It says here that our reduction to absurdity of our intrinsic self, sacrificing our spirits on the altar of public performances, thereby transforming ourselves into pure function reduces us to power-manipulators driven to the acquisition of more extrinsic power, and the need therefore to feed a monster appetite, an addiction really, to more empirical evidence of that power, as a cover for our profound powerlessness.
We need examples of the "conquest" in our march toward a false "wholeness" depicted by the public media as a "big house" and a sleek and sexy car, a big office and an even bigger investment portfolio. Just as the macho male stereotype pursues "notches on a belt" to parade sexual conquests, we seek to acquire "notches on the belt" of extrinsic acquisition, represented in the aphorism: "He with the most toys wins the game!"
Having reduced human beings to "things" in a transactional universe of commodities, we need more "things" as examples of our power over, thereby enabling our denial of our eroded sense of identity, purpose, meaning and health. Romney depicts this desperate emptiness in his line, "I like to fire people who do not provide the kind of service I deserve!"
That is a kind of bullying that indicates to others a profound, tragic and negative model of human modelling, and there are no bruises, no blood spilled and no public criticism of the line, because we all seek to join the parade of power over, in the face of the denial of our powerlessness.
Taking all the preventive "actions" to raise healthy children, to teach in healthy classrooms and to support those being abused will merely "band-aid" over the cancer of self-denigration and self-rejection and the reduction of our persons to acquiring machines.

Romney's "Binders full of women" offends on many levels

Romney's "Binders full of women" gaffe, and why women should be furious
By Erin Anderssen, Globe and Mail, October 17, 2012
If anything gets remembered from last night’s presidential debate it will be Mitt Romney’s answer to a question about helping women achieve pay equity with men that he botched on so many levels.
Dodging the actual question, the Republican candidate offered the example of his own administration while Massachusetts governor – how he was supposedly aghast that there were so few women and went out and asked for a list of female candidates from women’s group. “Can you help us find folks,” he quoted himself in last night’s debate, in an appeal to women’s groups. In response, he received that now infamous “binder full of women.
Not exactly, David Berstein, a writer with the Boston Phoenix, pointed out, stressing that he had been careful to confirm the true version of events.

Berstein reported that a bipartisan women’s group called MassGAP put together a list of strong female candidates for government positions, and presented it to Romney after he became governor. He didn’t go looking for one; there was no “recruiting effort” on his part, as he claimed in the debate. And while Romney did flip through the “binder” and hire a number of women for his administration, The Phoenix story points out that they were given departments and agencies that weren’t priorities for him – and the percentage of women holding senior positions in his government declined overall while he was in office.
But as an Atlantic story also pointed out this morning, that’s really not what makes his comment so off-putting. It’s the notion that Romney needed “a binder” in the first place to find qualified women in his state to hire - that he didn’t know any coming into office and apparently, hadn’t consulted with any during his campaign, and needed to be reminded of their existence after his election. The suggestion then is that hiring women was a checklist requirement to be covered off for political purposes – rather than because these qualified candidates had merit on their own.
As New Yorker blogger Amy Davidson put it: “One got the sense of Mitt Romney coming from a place where women were generally in the other room, waiting to be invited in only when the moment – or the visibility of the job – called for it.” The Boston Globe quickly noted that there were no female partners at Bain Capital when Romney was chief executive officer.
But the “binder” reference wasn’t the only jarring comment in Mitt Romney’s answer: He went on to mention, for good measure, that he allowed a female staffer to work flexible hours - she needed to get home to see her kids and “make dinner.”
Aside from failing to address the substantive issue of pay equity, he also offered this assurance: In a strong economy, he said, employers “are going to be so anxious to get good workers they’re going to be anxious to hire women.”
What’s the inference there? In other words, don’t worry little ladies, with Romney in the White House, companies will be so desperate for workers, they’ll have to resort to hiring women. Of course, they just might not pay you the same as the man they hired first.
The 23 per cent of American families – that is, those lead by single mothers – also received their due from Mr. Romney. In response to a specific question about getting "AK-47s out of the hands of criminals," he drifted into the topic of parents – or more specifically the importance of having two parents in the home. “But gosh,” he said, “to tell our kids that before they have babies, they ought to think about getting married to someone, that's a great idea.” Golly gee, it’s good to know criminals would give up their assault weapons, if only those single parents would try a little harder to get (or keep) that ring on their finger.
Maybe “binder full of women” will makes waves across the web and then fade away. CBS is already dubbing it the “Big Bird” of the second debate, referring to Mitt Romney’s vow to cut funding to PBS.
The trouble for Romney is that what happens on Wall Street matters a lot more in this election than Sesame Street, and being reduced to a list of names stuffed in a binder who employers (and, perhaps, certain politicians) will hire only when their options are limited and their hand is forced, might make female voters, well, grouchy. And thanks to the web, they can express that sentiment over and over again.

Romney "offensive" in both style and substance in 2nd round

Rivals bring bare fists to rematch
By Jim Ruterberg and Jeff Zeleny, New York Times, October 16, 2012
But at other moments the verbal sparring took on a deeper, emotional resonance, such as when Mr. Romney suggested that the administration was intentionally misleading in its shifting explanations for the attack on the American mission in Benghazi, Libya, that resulted in the deaths of the American ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans there.

“The suggestion that anybody in my team, whether the secretary of state, our U.N. ambassador, anybody on my team would play politics or mislead when we’ve lost four of our own, Governor, is offensive,” Mr. Obama said, standing and looking intently at his opponent. “That’s not what we do. That’s not what I do as president.”
The president's charge that Romney's assumption and intimation of that he was playing politics and misleading anyone over the death of the American ambassador to Lybia is "offensive" charcterizes Romney not only in this specific moment, but serves as a metaphor for the Republican candidate, and his campaign.
Offensive Romney was as the bully in the ring, attempting to wrest control of the microphone from the moderator, Candy Crawley of CNN, who wrested it back rather adroitly.
But more importantly, it was the offensive stance to human beings, as if the only thing that matters is how much money is in the retirement account, that depicts both the Republican platform and the candidate who both advocates and then seeks to run from the specifics.
Tightly wired, with a face of jelly and eyes inserted like raisins in deep sockets, Romney's presence, while masked with that pretentious and impertinent smile, every ready to spring from his perch to dominate the clock, the attention of the audience and the moderator's steering of the debate, was offensive.
It is never too early to acknowledge that his combativeness and his pretentiousness, his self-righteous "ministry for my church" helping people in trouble, while likely accurate, is nevertheless overshadowed by his assault on the companies he and his company (Bain) trashed, sent offshore and then pocketed the profits from the destruction.
This businessman is the archetype of the narcissism that Wall Street has inflicted on the world's economy...and that is offensive!
This businessman is the voice of the rich and the tax-evaders, and that is offensive!
This businessman is committed to the pursuit of profit at the personal and corporate level and his attention to the daily and legitimate needs of ordinary people is negligible...and that is offensive.
This businessman is funded by millionaires and billionaires, whose agendas are really the puppeteers writing those mega-cheques for their own self-interest... and that is offensive!
This businessman believes that if he isolates and solves "one problem" he will have addressed the contextual issues is both myopic and unrealistic...and that is offensive!
This businessman believes that government should operate on the principles of profit-seeking businesses, trashing the human component of their enterprise, including the labour movement, the social programs that sustain the needy and the building a fortress of military hardware, while ignoring schools, the hiring of teachers, obliterating Planned Parenthood, appointing judges who will overturn Roe v Wade, and playing the bully in the international arena...and that is extremely offensive!
It is not just that the candidate ( and his mutiple stances on most issues) and his party (and its inhuman policy planks on the rights of women) that offend, but the combination of these two, and the gestalt of pandering to the 1%, at the expense of the 99% that seeks to create two America's, and two sides, their's and the rest of us in the international theatre that is offensive, not only to American citizens but also to those of us who live elsewhere and who watch and speculate on the next four years under a Romney-Ryan administration....and that is offensive!
We do not need a bully in the White House, nor do we need a prevaricator and an archetype for the "establishment"...we need a human being who has demonstrated both his capacity to negotiate and to protect and enhance American interests on behalf of all Americans, including those whose lives have been decimated by the recession and those who are fighting for America around the world.
Score this round for the president, and get your neighbours to the polls to vote for the Democratic ticket...the world needs another four years of his leadership!