Marijuana, Once Divisive, Brings Some Families Closer

Doctors are expecting to see more medical marijuana use, legal or illegal, depending on the jurisdiction, among elderly patients.

By JOHN LELAND

Published: October 9, 2010

To the rites of middle-age passage, some families are adding another: buying marijuana for aging parents.

Matthew Staver/Bloomberg

Medical marijuana on display with its prices in Colorado.

Bryan, 46, a writer who lives in Illinois, began supplying his parents about five years ago, after he told them about his own marijuana use. When he was growing up, he said, his parents were very strict about illegal drugs.
“We would have grounded him,” said his mother, who is 72.
But with age and the growing acceptance of medical marijuana, his parents were curious. His father had a heart ailment, his mother had dizzy spells and nausea, and both were worried about Alzheimer’s disease and cancer. They looked at some research and decided marijuana was worth a try.
Bryan, who like others interviewed for this article declined to use his full name for legal reasons, began making them brownies and ginger snaps laced with the drug. Illinois does not allow medical use of marijuana, though 14 states and the District of Columbia do. At their age, his mother said, they were not concerned about it leading to harder drugs, which had been one of their worries with Bryan.


 “We have concerns about the law, but I would not go back to not taking the cookie and going through what I went through,” she said, adding that her dizzy spells and nausea had receded. “Of course, if they catch me, I’ll have to quit taking it.”
This family’s story is still a rare one. Less than 1 percent of people 65 and over said they had smoked marijuana in the last year, according to a 2009 survey by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. But as the generation that embraced marijuana as teenagers passes into middle age, doctors expect to see more marijuana use by their elderly patients.
“I think use of medical marijuana in older people is going to be much greater in the future,” said Dan G. Blazer, a professor of geriatric psychology at Duke University who has studied drug use and abuse among older people.



The rate for people ages 50 to 65 who said they smoke marijuana was nearly 4 percent — about six times as high as the 65-and-over crowd — suggesting that they were more likely to continue whatever patterns of drug use they had established in their younger years. In both age groups, the rate of marijuana abuse was very low, about 1 in 800.
Cannabinoids, the active agents in marijuana, have shown promise as pain relievers, especially for pain arising from nerve damage, said Dr. Seddon R. Savage, a pain specialist and president of the American Pain Society, a medical professionals’ group.
Two cannabinoid prescription drugs are approved for use in this country, but only to treat nausea or appetite loss. And while preliminary research suggests that cannabinoids may help in fighting cancer and reducing spasms in people with multiple sclerosis or Parkinson’s disease, the results have been mixed.
Dr. Savage said doctors should be concerned about older patients using marijuana. “It’s putting people at risk of falls, impaired cognition, impaired memory, loss of motor control,” she said. “Beside the legal aspects, it’s unsupervised use of a pretty potent drug. Under almost all circumstances, there are alternatives that are just as effective.”
Dr. Savage added, however, that there was a considerable range of opinions about marijuana use among pain specialists, and that many favored it.
Older people may face special risks with marijuana, in part because of the secrecy that surrounds illegal drug use, said Dr. William Dale, section chief of geriatrics and palliative medicine at the University of Chicago Medical Center, who said he would not oppose a law allowing medical marijuana use in Illinois.
The drug raises users’ heart rates and lowers their blood pressure, so doctors needed to weigh its effects beside those of other medications that users might be taking, he said. But patients do not always confide their illegal drug use, he said.


 “It’s a fine balance between being supportive of patients to gain their trust and giving them your best recommendations,” Dr. Dale said. “I wasn’t taught this in medical school.”
For some families, marijuana, which was once the root of all their battles, has brought them closer together. Instead of parental warnings and punishment, there are questions about how to light a water pipe; instead of the Grateful Dead, there are recipes for low-sodium brownies.
But for parents, there is also the knowledge that they are putting their children at risk of arrest.
“I was very uncomfortable getting my son involved,” said the father of Alex, 21. The father, who is 54, started using marijuana to relieve his pain from degenerative disc disease.

He soon discovered that Alex, who lives in Minnesota a few miles away, had access to better marijuana than he did.
Alex’s father had smoked marijuana when he was younger; Alex, by contrast, had been active in antidrug groups at his school and church. In college, he started smoking infrequently and studying marijuana’s medicinal properties.
“When he told me he was using cannabis, I think he expected it to be a bigger deal for me,” Alex said. “But it opened my eyes to what he was going through.”
Before trying marijuana, Alex’s father took OxyContin, a narcotic, which he said made him “feel like a zombie.” He also took antidepressants to relieve the mood disorder he associated with the OxyContin. Marijuana has helped him cut down on the painkillers, he said.
He and Alex have smoked together twice, but it is not a regular practice, both said. Yet they say the drug has strengthened their relationship.


 “We spend our bonding time making brownies,” Alex said.
Florence, 89, an artist who lives in New York, smokes mainly for relief from her spinal stenosis — usually one or two puffs before going to sleep, she said. She buys her pipes through an online shop and gets her marijuana from her daughter, Loren, who is 65.
“A person brings it to me,” said Loren, who uses marijuana recreationally. “I’m not out on a street corner.” Florence said that she had told all of her doctors that she was using marijuana, and that none had ever discouraged her or warned of interactions with her prescription drugs, including painkillers.
“I think I’ve influenced my own physician on the subject,” she said. “She came to me and asked me for some for another patient.”

The Moral Instinct

By STEVEN PINKER

Published: January 13, 2008

 

Which of the following people would you say is the most admirable: Mother Teresa, Bill Gates or Norman Borlaug? And which do you think is the least admirable? For most people, it’s an easy question. Mother Teresa, famous for ministering to the poor in Calcutta, has been beatified by the Vatican, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and ranked in an American poll as the most admired person of the 20th century. Bill Gates, infamous for giving us the Microsoft dancing paper clip and the blue screen of death, has been decapitated in effigy in “I Hate Gates” Web sites and hit with a pie in the face. As for Norman Borlaug . . . who the heck is Norman Borlaug?


Yet a deeper look might lead you to rethink your answers. Borlaug, father of the “Green Revolution” that used agricultural science to reduce world hunger, has been credited with saving a billion lives, more than anyone else in history. Gates, in deciding what to do with his fortune, crunched the numbers and determined that he could alleviate the most misery by fighting everyday scourges in the developing world like malaria, diarrhea and parasites. Mother Teresa, for her part, extolled the virtue of suffering and ran her well-financed missions accordingly: their sick patrons were offered plenty of prayer but harsh conditions, few analgesics and dangerously primitive medical care.




It’s not hard to see why the moral reputations of this trio should be so out of line with the good they have done. Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the earth. Gates is a nerd’s nerd and the world’s richest man, as likely to enter heaven as the proverbial camel squeezing through the needle’s eye. And Borlaug, now 93, is an agronomist who has spent his life in labs and nonprofits, seldom walking onto the media stage, and hence into our consciousness, at all.


 I doubt these examples will persuade anyone to favor Bill Gates over Mother Teresa for sainthood. But they show that our heads can be turned by an aura of sanctity, distracting us from a more objective reckoning of the actions that make people suffer or flourish. It seems we may all be vulnerable to moral illusions the ethical equivalent of the bending lines that trick the eye on cereal boxes and in psychology textbooks. Illusions are a favorite tool of perception scientists for exposing the workings of the five senses, and of philosophers for shaking people out of the naïve belief that our minds give us a transparent window onto the world (since if our eyes can be fooled by an illusion, why should we trust them at other times?). Today, a new field is using illusions to unmask a sixth sense, the moral sense. Moral intuitions are being drawn out of people in the lab, on Web sites and in brain scanners, and are being explained with tools from game theory, neuroscience and evolutionary biology.


“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them,” wrote Immanuel Kant, “the starry heavens above and the moral law within.” These days, the moral law within is being viewed with increasing awe, if not always admiration. The human moral sense turns out to be an organ of considerable complexity, with quirks that reflect its evolutionary history and its neurobiological foundations.


 These quirks are bound to have implications for the human predicament. Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives each of us the sense that we are worthy human beings. We seek it in our friends and mates, nurture it in our children, advance it in our politics and justify it with our religions. A disrespect for morality is blamed for everyday sins and history’s worst atrocities. To carry this weight, the concept of morality would have to be bigger than any of us and outside all of us.
So dissecting moral intuitions is no small matter. If morality is a mere trick of the brain, some may fear, our very grounds for being moral could be eroded. Yet as we shall see, the science of the moral sense can instead be seen as a way to strengthen those grounds, by clarifying what morality is and how it should steer our actions.


The Moralization Switch

The starting point for appreciating that there is a distinctive part of our psychology for morality is seeing how moral judgments differ from other kinds of opinions we have on how people ought to behave. Moralization is a psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch, and when it is on, a distinctive mind-set commandeers our thinking. This is the mind-set that makes us deem actions immoral (“killing is wrong”), rather than merely disagreeable (“I hate brussels sprouts”), unfashionable (“bell-bottoms are out”) or imprudent (“don’t scratch mosquito bites”).
The first hallmark of moralization is that the rules it invokes are felt to be universal. Prohibitions of rape and murder, for example, are felt not to be matters of local custom but to be universally and objectively warranted. One can easily say, “I don’t like brussels sprouts, but I don’t care if you eat them,” but no one would say, “I don’t like killing, but I don’t care if you murder someone.”


 The other hallmark is that people feel that those who commit immoral acts deserve to be punished. Not only is it allowable to inflict pain on a person who has broken a moral rule; it is wrong not to, to “let them get away with it.” People are thus untroubled in inviting divine retribution or the power of the state to harm other people they deem immoral. Bertrand Russell wrote, “The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell.”
We all know what it feels like when the moralization switch flips inside us — the righteous glow, the burning dudgeon, the drive to recruit others to the cause. The psychologist Paul Rozin has studied the toggle switch by comparing two kinds of people who engage in the same behavior but with different switch settings.


Health vegetarians avoid meat for practical reasons, like lowering cholesterol and avoiding toxins. Moral vegetarians avoid meat for ethical reasons: to avoid complicity in the suffering of animals. By investigating their feelings about meat-eating, Rozin showed that the moral motive sets off a cascade of opinions. Moral vegetarians are more likely to treat meat as a contaminant — they refuse, for example, to eat a bowl of soup into which a drop of beef broth has fallen. They are more likely to think that other people ought to be vegetarians, and are more likely to imbue their dietary habits with other virtues, like believing that meat avoidance makes people less aggressive and bestial. 

Much of our recent social history, including the culture wars between liberals and conservatives, consists of the moralization or amoralization of particular kinds of behavior. Even when people agree that an outcome is desirable, they may disagree on whether it should be treated as a matter of preference and prudence or as a matter of sin and virtue. Rozin notes, for example, that smoking has lately been moralized. Until recently, it was understood that some people didn’t enjoy smoking or avoided it because it was hazardous to their health. But with the discovery of the harmful effects of secondhand smoke, smoking is now treated as immoral.


Smokers are ostracized; images of people smoking are censored; and entities touched by smoke are felt to be contaminated (so hotels have not only nonsmoking rooms but nonsmoking floors). The desire for retribution has been visited on tobacco companies, who have been slapped with staggering “punitive damages.”
At the same time, many behaviors have been amoralized, switched from moral failings to lifestyle choices. They include divorce, illegitimacy, being a working mother, marijuana use and homosexuality. Many afflictions have been reassigned from payback for bad choices to unlucky misfortunes. There used to be people called “bums” and “tramps”; today they are “homeless.” Drug addiction is a “disease”; syphilis was rebranded from the price of wanton behavior to a “sexually transmitted disease” and more recently a “sexually transmitted infection.”

This wave of amoralization has led the cultural right to lament that morality itself is under assault, as we see in the group that anointed itself the Moral Majority. In fact there seems to be a Law of Conservation of Moralization, so that as old behaviors are taken out of the moralized column, new ones are added to it. Dozens of things that past generations treated as practical matters are now ethical battlegrounds, including disposable diapers, I.Q. tests, poultry farms, Barbie dolls and research on breast cancer. Food alone has become a minefield, with critics sermonizing about the size of sodas, the chemistry of fat, the freedom of chickens, the price of coffee beans, the species of fish and now the distance the food has traveled from farm to plate.

 Many of these moralizations, like the assault on smoking, may be understood as practical tactics to reduce some recently identified harm. But whether an activity flips our mental switches to the “moral” setting isn’t just a matter of how much harm it does. We don’t show contempt to the man who fails to change the batteries in his smoke alarms or takes his family on a driving vacation, both of which multiply the risk they will die in an accident. Driving a gas-guzzling Hummer is reprehensible, but driving a gas-guzzling old Volvo is not; eating a Big Mac is unconscionable, but not imported cheese or crème brûlée. The reason for these double standards is obvious: people tend to align their moralization with their own lifestyles.




Reasoning and Rationalizing

It’s not just the content of our moral judgments that is often questionable, but the way we arrive at them. We like to think that when we have a conviction, there are good reasons that drove us to adopt it. That is why an older approach to moral psychology, led by Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, tried to document the lines of reasoning that guided people to moral conclusions. But consider these situations, originally devised by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt:
Julie is traveling in France on summer vacation from college with her brother Mark. One night they decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. Julie was already taking birth-control pills, but Mark uses a condom, too, just to be safe. They both enjoy the sex but decide not to do it again. They keep the night as a special secret, which makes them feel closer to each other. What do you think about that — was it O.K. for them to make love?

A woman is cleaning out her closet and she finds her old American flag. She doesn’t want the flag anymore, so she cuts it up into pieces and uses the rags to clean her bathroom.
A family’s dog is killed by a car in front of their house. They heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body and cook it and eat it for dinner.
Most people immediately declare that these acts are wrong and then grope to justify why they are wrong. It’s not so easy. In the case of Julie and Mark, people raise the possibility of children with birth defects, but they are reminded that the couple were diligent about contraception. They suggest that the siblings will be emotionally hurt, but the story makes it clear that they weren’t. They submit that the act would offend the community, but then recall that it was kept a secret. Eventually many people admit, “I don’t know, I can’t explain it, I just know it’s wrong.”

People don’t generally engage in moral reasoning, Haidt argues, but moral rationalization: they begin with the conclusion, coughed up by an unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible justification.
The gap between people’s convictions and their justifications is also on display in the favorite new sandbox for moral psychologists, a thought experiment devised by the philosophers Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson called the Trolley Problem.

On your morning walk, you see a trolley car hurtling down the track, the conductor slumped over the controls. In the path of the trolley are five men working on the track, oblivious to the danger. You are standing at a fork in the track and can pull a lever that will divert the trolley onto a spur, saving the five men. Unfortunately, the trolley would then run over a single worker who is laboring on the spur. Is it permissible to throw the switch, killing one man to save five? Almost everyone says “yes.”
Consider now a different scene. You are on a bridge overlooking the tracks and have spotted the runaway trolley bearing down on the five workers. Now the only way to stop the trolley is to throw a heavy object in its path. And the only heavy object within reach is a fat man standing next to you. Should you throw the man off the bridge? Both dilemmas present you with the option of sacrificing one life to save five, and so, by the utilitarian standard of what would result in the greatest good for the greatest number, the two dilemmas are morally equivalent.

But most people don’t see it that way: though they would pull the switch in the first dilemma, they would not heave the fat man in the second. When pressed for a reason, they can’t come up with anything coherent, though moral philosophers haven’t had an easy time coming up with a relevant difference, either.

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The Laws Are Written by Lobbyists

Watch the full video of this session

"The average American doesn't realize how much of the laws are written by lobbyists" to protect incumbent interests, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told Atlantic editor James Bennet at the Washington Ideas Forum. "It's shocking how the system actually works."



In a wide-ranging interview that spanned human nature, the future of machines, and how Google could have helped the stimulus, Schmidt said technology could "completely change the way government works."

"Washington is an incumbent protection machine," Schmidt said. "Technology is fundamentally disruptive." Mobile phones and personal technology, for example, could be used to record the bills that members of Congress actually read and then determine what stimulus funds were successfully spent.

Schmidt pushed back on the claim that the White House doesn't understand business. He acknowledged that the American business community distrusts the administration, but he said the criticism are mostly about tone. He also brushed off the idea that the White House needs more business executives as an argument about "symbolism" rather than substance.

On the hot topic of China versus America, he made an pithy distinction between what makes the world's leading powers uniquely successful. America is a bottoms-up entrepreneurial engine, and China is more like "a well-run large business."

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Watch the full video of this session

"The average American doesn't realize how much of the laws are written by lobbyists" to protect incumbent interests, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told Atlantic editor James Bennet at the Washington Ideas Forum. "It's shocking how the system actually works."

In a wide-ranging interview that spanned human nature, the future of machines, and how Google could have helped the stimulus, Schmidt said technology could "completely change the way government works."


"Washington is an incumbent protection machine," Schmidt said. "Technology is fundamentally disruptive." Mobile phones and personal technology, for example, could be used to record the bills that members of Congress actually read and then determine what stimulus funds were successfully spent.

Schmidt pushed back on the claim that the White House doesn't understand business. He acknowledged that the American business community distrusts the administration, but he said the criticism are mostly about tone. He also brushed off the idea that the White House needs more business executives as an argument about "symbolism" rather than substance



On the hot topic of China versus America, he made an pithy distinction between what makes the world's leading powers uniquely successful. America is a bottoms-up entrepreneurial engine, and China is more like "a well-run large business."

"America's research universities are the envy on the world," he said. "We have 90 percent of the top researchers in the world. We also have a bizarre policy to train people and then kick them out by not giving them visas, which makes no sense at all."

China governs like a large industrial company, he added. "It wants to maximize its cash flow. It wants to maximize its internal and external demand. All of the interesting new ideas [for example, doubling down on solar tech] can be understood as a business expansion."

The end of the interview turned to the future of technology. When Bennet asked about the possibility of a Google "implant," Schmidt invoked what the company calls the "creepy line."



"Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it," he said. Google implants, he added, probably crosses that line.

At the same time, Schmidt envisions a future where we embrace a larger role for machines and technology. "With your permission you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches," he said. "We don't need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less now what you're thinking about."











Schmidt pushed back on the claim that the White House doesn't understand business. He acknowledged that the American business community distrusts the administration, but he said the criticism are mostly about tone. He also brushed off the idea that the White House needs more business executives as an argument about "symbolism" rather than substance.

On the hot topic of China versus America, he made an pithy distinction between what makes the world's leading powers uniquely successful. America is a bottoms-up entrepreneurial engine, and China is more like "a well-run large business."

"America's research universities are the envy on the world," he said. "We have 90 percent of the top researchers in the world. We also have a bizarre policy to train people and then kick them out by not giving them visas, which makes no sense at all."


 
 China governs like a large industrial company, he added. "It wants to maximize its cash flow. It wants to maximize its internal and external demand. All of the interesting new ideas [for example, doubling down on solar tech] can be understood as a business expansion."
The end of the interview turned to the future of technology. When Bennet asked about the possibility of a Google "implant," Schmidt invoked what the company calls the "creepy line."

"Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it," he said. Google implants, he added, probably crosses that line.


At the same time, Schmidt envisions a future where we embrace a larger role for machines and technology. "With your permission you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches," he said. "We don't need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less now what you're thinking about."

Full session below

Senate Report: Mismanaged US Contractor Money Aids Enemy in Afghanistan

The U.S. military has only minimal knowledge of - and exercises virtually no control over - the thousands of Afghans it indirectly pays to guard its installations, including "warlords and strongmen linked to murder, kidnapping, bribery" and to the Taliban, Senate investigators said in a blistering report released Thursday.

Local residents meet with Afghan an US soldiers to discuss security at an outpost near Forward Operation Base Howz-e-Madad, Zhari district, Kandahar province, Afghanistan, Wednesday, Oct. 6, 2010. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)

The bipartisan report, compiled after a year-long investigation, notes that the military has recently launched its own investigations of the situation and has taken some steps to address it. In one of the most significant steps, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, has issued new contractor guidelines.Still, the Senate investigation documents a failure to properly vet, train and supervise Afghan security subcontractors, hired
by U.S. and other international firms under multimillion-dollar military contracts.
That failure has cost American lives, undermined the U.S. mission and the Afghan government, and "helped play into the hands of the enemy," said Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Some of the Afghan security subcontractors, Levin told reporters Thursday, are "creating the very threat they are hired to combat."
Committee staff reviewed more than 125 Defense Department security contracts dated between 2007 and 2009 and provided a detailed account of two in which subcontractors had direct and well-known ties to the Taliban. The report recounts an instance in which the military raided a Taliban meeting being held at the house of a subcontractor. It also notes instances in which security subcontractors were believed by U.S. military intelligence to be Iranian agents.

According to the U.S. Central Command, the report said, there were more than 112,000 Defense Department contractor personnel in Afghanistan as of April 30. As of May, more than 26,000 armed private security personnel - nearly all of them Afghans - worked for the Pentagon and other U.S. agencies.
Subcontracted Afghans provide perimeter security for U.S. forward operating bases, civilian installations and development projects, as well as for the truck convoys that carry most of the food, fuel, weapons and other supplies for the U.S.-led coalition.
In congressional testimony in December, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton acknowledged concern that the United States was indirectly funding warlords and the Taliban. In June, a House subcommittee investigation found that Afghan private security contractors ran a "protection racket" in which militias, some tied to the Taliban, received money to protect supply convoys.


Early this year, Afghan President Hamid Karzai pledged to disband private security contracting firms. This week, Afghanistan's Interior Ministry announced that it had begun disarming those companies that are unlicensed.


In a letter Tuesday to Levin, Gates said the report had helped the Defense Department "understand the nature of the problems associated with contracting in Afghanistan." He said oversight has already been expanded in an effort to "benefit our forces on the ground while not providing aid to our enemies."
The military has been reluctant to remove U.S. troops from combat and other duties to protect the supply convoys. But in the wake of the earlier subcommittee report, it has looked for alternatives, including using Afghan national security forces to guard the trucks. The next step of Karzai's phase-out of the private security firms, U.S. military officials said, will target those providing convoy escorts. Replacement of the "static" security discussed in the Senate committee's report will come at a later date, officials said.


Karzai has said he plans to incorporate the private guards into the armed forces. But that is seen as a monumental task, given the power of the warlords to whom many of the guards owe their loyalty, and the government's inability to match their pay scale.
The report and its conclusions were adopted without objection in a voice vote by the Armed Services Committee last week, and the 86-page document was declassified with few redactions.
An addendum signed by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the ranking minority member, and other Republicans said that while the report demonstrates "the risks of using private security contractors," it would be wrong to conclude that all were disloyal and that their use "always decreased the security of U.S. and Coalition forces, or . . . inevitably undercut the Afghan government."
The Republicans noted that there were few other "feasible options" available in Afghanistan until recently, given the large U.S. deployment in Iraq and the limited number of U.S. and coalition troops available for such tasks. They also faulted the report for failure "to acknowledge the positive impact of providing employment" to Afghans.

One lengthy narrative in the report illustrated the committee's findings in detail. In March 2007, it said, the military contracted with California-based Environmental Chemical Corp. to construct a base for the Afghan Air Corps on the site of a former Soviet air base at Shindand, in Herat province. The company subcontracted with the North American subsidiary of ArmorGroup, a British company, to provide site security at the base.
ArmorGroup, according to the report, subcontracted the task to two men identified in company documents as local "warlords," whom it nicknamed "Mr. White" and "Mr. Pink" after characters in the 1992 Quentin Tarantino movie "Reservoir Dogs," about hapless criminals who turn on each other after a jewelry heist. At least one of the two was recommended to ArmorGroup by military personnel at a U.S. forward operating base adjacent to the air base, the report said.


In July 2007, Mr. White was ambushed and shot just outside the air base, leading guards loyal to him to leave their posts and seek revenge against Pink forces they believed responsible. White survived but was killed by Pink in a firefight in the local bazaar that December. Pink was reportedly "holed up with the Taliban" after the shooting, the report said.
Despite his reported Taliban links, ArmorGroup continued to employ Pink, identified in U.S. military documents as a "mid-level Taliban manager," until the contractor received reports that guards under Pink's command were providing him with military security information."
Meanwhile, the contractor replaced White with his brother, identified as Mr. White II.
In August 2008, U.S. and Afghan forces conducted an operation on a house in the village of Azizabad, south of Herat, intended to kill or capture a high-value Taliban commander during a meeting with insurgents.
U.S. airstrikes were called in, resulting in the deaths of dozens of civilians. The incident sparked outrage throughout Afghanistan and led to a military apology and a change in coalition airstrike guidelines.
A U.S. Army investigation later found that some of the insurgents in the building "may have been security contractors or subcontractors for ArmorGroup," the report said. In fact, it said, the house belonged to Mr. White II, and he and seven men employed as security guards were among those killed.
"In addition," the report said, "a search of the raid site revealed 'extensive stores of weapons, explosives, [and] intelligence materials.' "

Chinese Dissident Wins Nobel Peace Prize; China Outraged

by Karl Ritter and Bjoern H. Amland

Imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize today for "his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights" - a prize likely to enrage the Chinese government, which had warned the Nobel committee not to honor him.

Liu Xiaobo

Thorbjoern Jagland, the Norwegian Nobel Committee chairman, said Liu Xiaobo was a symbol for the fight for human rights in China and the government should expect that its policies face scrutiny."China has become a big power in economic terms as well as political terms, and it is normal that big powers should be under criticism," Jagland said.Unlike some in China's highly fractured and persecuted
dissident community, the 54-year-old Liu has been an ardent advocate for peaceful, gradual political change, rather than a violent confrontation with the government.
In China, broadcasts of CNN, which is available in tourist hotels, upmarket foreign hotels and places where foreigners gather, went black during the Nobel announcement and when reports about the award later aired.
China's Foreign Ministry did not immediately comment, but a spokeswoman said recently that choosing Liu would go against the prize's aims.
"The person you just mentioned was sentenced to jail by Chinese judicial authorities for violating Chinese law. I think his acts are completely contrary to the aspirations of the Nobel Peace Prize," said spokeswoman Jiang Yu.


It was the first Nobel for the Chinese dissident community since it resurfaced after the country's communist leadership launched economic, but not political reforms three decades ago. The win could jolt a current debate among the leadership and the elite over whether China should begin democratic reforms and if so how quickly.
The Nobel citation said China's new status a big economic and political power must entail increased responsibility.
"China is in breach of several international agreements to which it is a signatory, as well as of its own provisions concerning political rights," it said, citing an article in China's constitution about freedom of speech and assembly.
"In practice, these freedoms have proved to be distinctly curtailed for China's citizens," the citation said.


The document Liu co-authored, Charter 08, called for greater freedoms and an end to the Communist Party's political dominance. It was an intentional echo of Charter 77, the famous call for human rights in then-Czechoslovakia that led to the 1989 Velvet Revolution that swept away communist rule.
"The democratization of Chinese politics can be put off no longer," Charter 08 says.
Thousands of Chinese signed Charter 08, and the Communist Party took the document as a direct challenge.
Police arrested Liu hours before Charter 08 was due to be released in December 2008. Given a brief trial last Christmas Day, Liu was convicted of subversion for writing Charter 08 and other political tracts and sentenced to 11 years in prison.
In a year with a record 237 nominations for the peace prize, Liu had been considered a favorite, with open support from winners Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama and others.
When the Tibet-born Dalai Lama won the peace prize in 1989, both the Chinese government and some of the public were angry - the exiled Buddhist leader was endlessly vilified in official propaganda as a traitor for his calls for more autonomy for Tibet.


The son of a soldier, Liu joined China's first wave of university students in the mid-1970s after the chaotic decade of the Cultural Revolution.
Liu's writing first took a political turn in 1988, when he became a visiting scholar in Oslo - his first time outside China.
Liu cut short a visiting scholar stint at Columbia University months later to join the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing in 1989. He and three other older activists famously persuaded students to peacefully leave the square hours before the deadly June 4 crackdown.
Liu went to prison after the crackdown and was released in early 1991 because he had repented and "performed major meritorious services," state media said at the time, without elaborating.


Still, five years later Liu was sent to a re-education camp for three years for co-writing an open letter that demanded the impeachment of then-President Jiang Zemin.
President Barack Obama won the Nobel peace prize last year.

Tea & Crackers: How Corporate Interests and Republican Insiders Built the Tea Party Monster by Matt Taibbi

It's taken three trips to Kentucky, but I'm finally getting my Tea Party epiphany exactly where you'd expect: at a Sarah Palin rally. The red-hot mama of American exceptionalism has flown in to speak at something called the National Quartet Convention in Louisville, a gospel-music hoedown in a giant convention center filled with thousands of elderly white Southerners. Palin — who earlier this morning held a closed-door fundraiser for Rand Paul, the Tea Party champion running for the U.S. Senate — is railing against a GOP establishment that has just seen Tea Partiers oust entrenched Republican hacks in Delaware and New York. The dingbat revolution, it seems, is nigh.


"We're shaking up the good ol' boys," Palin chortles, to the best applause her aging crowd can muster. She then issues an oft-repeated warning (her speeches are usually a tired succession of half-coherent one-liners dumped on ravenous audiences like chum to sharks) to Republican insiders who underestimated the power of the Tea Party Death Star. "Buck up," she says, "or stay in the truck."
Stay in what truck? I wonder. What the hell does that even mean?
Scanning the thousands of hopped-up faces in the crowd, I am immediately struck by two things. One is that there isn't a single black person here. The other is the truly awesome quantity of medical hardware: Seemingly every third person in the place is sucking oxygen from a tank or propping their giant atrophied glutes on motorized wheelchair-scooters.


As Palin launches into her Ronald Reagan impression — "Government's not the solution! Government's the problem!" — the person sitting next to me leans over and explains.
"The scooters are because of Medicare," he whispers helpfully. "They have these commercials down here: 'You won't even have to pay for your scooter! Medicare will pay!' Practically everyone in Kentucky has one."
A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can't imagine it.
After Palin wraps up, I race to the parking lot in search of departing Medicare-motor-scooter conservatives. I come upon an elderly couple, Janice and David Wheelock, who are fairly itching to share their views.
"I'm anti-spending and anti-government," crows David, as scooter-bound Janice looks on. "The welfare state is out of control."
"OK," I say. "And what do you do for a living?"
"Me?" he says proudly. "Oh, I'm a property appraiser. Have been my whole life."
I frown. "Are either of you on Medicare?"
Silence: Then Janice, a nice enough woman, it seems, slowly raises her hand, offering a faint smile, as if to say, You got me!
"Let me get this straight," I say to David. "You've been picking up a check from the government for decades, as a tax assessor, and your wife is on Medicare. How can you complain about the welfare state?"
"Well," he says, "there's a lot of people on welfare who don't deserve it. Too many people are living off the government."


"But," I protest, "you live off the government. And have been your whole life!"
"Yeah," he says, "but I don't make very much." Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it's going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I've concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They're full of shit. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry's medals and Barack Obama's Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them. In fact, their lack of embarrassment when it comes to collecting government largesse is key to understanding what this movement is all about — and nowhere do we see that dynamic as clearly as here in Kentucky, where Rand Paul is barreling toward the Senate with the aid of conservative icons like Palin.

Early in his campaign, Dr. Paul, the son of the uncompromising libertarian hero Ron Paul, denounced Medicare as "socialized medicine." But this spring, when confronted with the idea of reducing Medicare payments to doctors like himself — half of his patients are on Medicare — he balked. This candidate, a man ostensibly so against government power in all its forms that he wants to gut the Americans With Disabilities Act and abolish the departments of Education and Energy, was unwilling to reduce his own government compensation, for a very logical reason. "Physicians," he said, "should be allowed to make a comfortable living."
Those of us who might have expected Paul's purist followers to abandon him in droves have been disappointed; Paul is now the clear favorite to win in November. Ha, ha, you thought we actually gave a shit about spending, joke's on you. That's because the Tea Party doesn't really care about issues — it's about something deep down and psychological, something that can't be answered by political compromise or fundamental changes in policy. At root, the Tea Party is nothing more than a them-versus-us thing. They know who they are, and they know who we are ("radical leftists" is the term they prefer), and they're coming for us on Election Day, no matter what we do — and, it would seem, no matter what their own leaders like Rand Paul do.


In the Tea Party narrative, victory at the polls means a new American revolution, one that will "take our country back" from everyone they disapprove of. But what they don't realize is, there's a catch: This is America, and we have an entrenched oligarchical system in place that insulates us all from any meaningful political change. The Tea Party today is being pitched in the media as this great threat to the GOP; in reality, the Tea Party is the GOP. What few elements of the movement aren't yet under the control of the Republican Party soon will be, and even if a few genuine Tea Party candidates sneak through, it's only a matter of time before the uprising as a whole gets castrated, just like every grass-roots movement does in this country. Its leaders will be bought off and sucked into the two-party bureaucracy, where its platform will be whittled down until the only things left are those that the GOP's campaign contributors want anyway: top-bracket tax breaks, free trade and financial deregulation.
The rest of it — the sweeping cuts to federal spending, the clampdown on bailouts, the rollback of Roe v. Wade — will die on the vine as one Tea Party leader after another gets seduced by the Republican Party and retrained for the revolutionary cause of voting down taxes for Goldman Sachs executives. It's all on display here in Kentucky, the unofficial capital of the Tea Party movement, where, ha, ha, the joke turns out to be on them: Rand Paul, their hero, is a fake.
The original Tea Party was launched by a real opponent of the political establishment — Rand Paul's father, Ron, whose grass-roots rallies for his 2008 presidential run were called by that name. The elder Paul will object to this characterization, but what he represents is something of a sacred role in American culture: the principled crackpot. He's a libertarian, but he means it. Sure, he takes typical, if exaggerated, Republican stances against taxes and regulation, but he also opposes federal drug laws ("The War on Drugs is totally out of control" and "All drugs should be decriminalized"), Bush's interventionist wars in the Middle East ("We cannot spread our greatness and our goodness through the barrel of a gun") and the Patriot Act; he even called for legalized prostitution and online gambling.
Paul had a surprisingly good showing as a fringe candidate in 2008, and he may run again, but he'll never get any further than the million primary votes he got last time for one simple reason, which happens to be the same reason many campaign-trail reporters like me liked him: He's honest. An anti- war, pro-legalization Republican won't ever play in Peoria, which is why in 2008 Paul's supporters were literally outside the tent at most GOP events, their candidate pissed on by a party hierarchy that preferred Wall Street-friendly phonies like Mitt Romney and John McCain. Paul returned the favor, blasting both parties as indistinguishable "Republicrats" in his presciently titled book, The Revolution. The pre-Obama "Tea Parties" were therefore peopled by young anti-war types and libertarian intellectuals who were as turned off by George W. Bush and Karl Rove as they were by liberals and Democrats.


 The failure of the Republican Party to invite the elder Paul into the tent of power did not mean, however, that it didn't see the utility of borrowing his insurgent rhetoric and parts of his platform for Tea Party 2.0. This second-generation Tea Party came into being a month after Barack Obama moved into the Oval Office, when CNBC windbag Rick Santelli went on the air to denounce one of Obama's bailout programs and called for "tea parties" to protest. The impetus for Santelli's rant wasn't the billions in taxpayer money being spent to prop up the bad mortgage debts and unsecured derivatives losses of irresponsible investors like Goldman Sachs and AIG — massive government bailouts supported, incidentally, by Sarah Palin and many other prominent Republicans. No, what had Santelli all worked up was Obama's "Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan," a $75 billion program less than a hundredth the size of all the bank bailouts.

This was one of the few bailout programs designed to directly benefit individual victims of the financial crisis; the money went to homeowners, many of whom were minorities, who were close to foreclosure. While the big bank bailouts may have been incomprehensible to ordinary voters, here was something that Middle America had no problem grasping: The financial crisis was caused by those lazy minorities next door who bought houses they couldn't afford — and now the government was going to bail them out.
"How many of you people want to pay your neighbor's mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills? Raise your hand!" Santelli roared in a broadcast from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. Why, he later asked, doesn't America reward people who "carry the water instead of drink the water?"
Suddenly, tens of thousands of Republicans who had been conspicuously silent during George Bush's gargantuan spending on behalf of defense contractors and hedge-fund gazillionaires showed up at Tea Party rallies across the nation, declaring themselves fed up with wasteful government spending. From the outset, the events were organized and financed by the conservative wing of the Republican Party, which was quietly working to co-opt the new movement and deploy it to the GOP's advantage. Taking the lead was former House majority leader Dick Armey, who as chair of a group called FreedomWorks helped coordinate Tea Party rallies across the country. A succession of Republican Party insiders and money guys make up the guts of FreedomWorks: Its key members include billionaire turd Steve Forbes and former Republican National Committee senior economist Matt Kibbe.


 Prior to the Tea Party phenomenon, FreedomWorks was basically just an AstroTurfing-lobbying outfit whose earlier work included taking money from Verizon to oppose telecommunications regulation. Now the organization's sights were set much higher: In the wake of a monstrous economic crash caused by grotesque abuses in unregulated areas of the financial-services industry, FreedomWorks — which took money from companies like mortgage lender MetLife — had the opportunity to persuade millions of ordinary Americans to take up arms against, among other things, Wall Street reform.
Joining them in the fight was another group, Americans for Prosperity, which was funded in part by the billionaire David Koch, whose Koch Industries is the second-largest privately held company in America. In addition to dealing in plastics, chemicals and petroleum, Koch has direct interests in commodities trading and financial services. He also has a major stake in pushing for deregulation, as his companies have been fined multiple times by the government, including a 1999 case in which Koch Industries was held to have stolen oil from federal lands, lying about oil purchases some 24,000 times.
So how does a group of billionaire businessmen and corporations get a bunch of broke Middle American white people to lobby for lower taxes for the rich and deregulation of Wall Street? That turns out to be easy. Beneath the surface, the Tea Party is little more than a weird and disorderly mob, a federation of distinct and often competing strains of conservatism that have been unable to coalesce around a leader of their own choosing. Its rallies include not only hardcore libertarians left over from the original Ron Paul "Tea Parties," but gun-rights advocates, fundamentalist Christians, pseudomilitia types like the Oath Keepers (a group of law- enforcement and military professionals who have vowed to disobey "unconstitutional" orders) and mainstream Republicans who have simply lost faith in their party. It's a mistake to cast the Tea Party as anything like a unified, cohesive movement — which makes them easy prey for the very people they should be aiming their pitchforks at. A loose definition of the Tea Party might be millions of pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the handful of banks and investment firms who advertise on Fox and CNBC.

The individuals in the Tea Party may come from very different walks of life, but most of them have a few things in common. After nearly a year of talking with Tea Party members from Nevada to New Jersey, I can count on one hand the key elements I expect to hear in nearly every interview. One: Every single one of them was that exceptional Republican who did protest the spending in the Bush years, and not one of them is the hypocrite who only took to the streets when a black Democratic president launched an emergency stimulus program. ("Not me — I was protesting!" is a common exclamation.) Two: Each and every one of them is the only person in America who has ever read the Constitution or watched Schoolhouse Rock. (Here they have guidance from Armey, who explains that the problem with "people who do not cherish America the way we do" is that "they did not read the Federalist Papers.")


 Three: They are all furious at the implication that race is a factor in their political views — despite the fact that they blame the financial crisis on poor black homeowners, spend months on end engrossed by reports about how the New Black Panthers want to kill "cracker babies," support politicians who think the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was an overreach of government power, tried to enact South African-style immigration laws in Arizona and obsess over Charlie Rangel, ACORN and Barack Obama's birth certificate. Four: In fact, some of their best friends are black! (Reporters in Kentucky invented a game called "White Male Liberty Patriot Bingo," checking off a box every time a Tea Partier mentions a black friend.) And five: Everyone who disagrees with them is a radical leftist who hates America.
It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists. They're completely blind to how offensive the very nature of their rhetoric is to the rest of the country. I'm an ordinary middle-aged guy who pays taxes and lives in the suburbs with his wife and dog — and I'm a radical communist? I don't love my country? I'm a redcoat? Fuck you! These are the kinds of thoughts that go through your head as you listen to Tea Partiers expound at awesome length upon their cultural victimhood, surrounded as they are by America-haters like you and me or, in the case of foreign-born president Barack Obama, people who are literally not Americans in the way they are.

 Keep reading

Lou Dobbs, American Hypocrite Anti-immigration crusader Lou Dobbs has been relying on undocumented, illegal workers in his stables and homes by Isabel McDonald

Research support for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.

Lou Dobbs, American Hypocrite

In Lou Dobbs's heyday at CNN, when he commanded more than 800,000 viewers and a reported $6 million a year for "his fearless reporting and commentary," in the words of former CNN president Jonathan Klein, the host became notorious for his angry rants against "illegal aliens." But Dobbs reserved a special venom for the employers who hire them, railing against "the employer who is so shamelessly exploiting the illegal alien and so shamelessly flouting US law" and even proposing, on one April 2006 show, that "illegal employers who hire illegal aliens" should face felony charges. 

 

Since he left CNN last November, after Latino groups mounted a protest campaign against his inflammatory rhetoric, Dobbs has continued to advocate an enforcement-first approach to immigration, emphasizing, as he did in a March 2010 interview on Univision, that "the illegal employer is the central issue in this entire mess!"
His scheduled October 9 address at the Virginia Tea Party Convention will mark his second major Tea Party address of the year, reviving questions about whether the former CNN host is gearing up for an electoral campaign. He recently told Fox's Sean Hannity that he has not ruled out a possible Senate or even presidential run in 2012.
But with his relentless diatribes against "illegals" and their employers, Dobbs is casting stones from a house-make that an estate-of glass.


Based on a yearlong investigation, including interviews with five immigrants who worked without papers on his properties, The Nation and the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute have found that Dobbs has relied for years on undocumented labor for the upkeep of his multimillion-dollar estates and the horses he keeps for his 22-year-old daughter, Hillary, a champion show jumper.


 Dobbs lives in a sprawling white mansion on his 300-acre estate in Sussex, New Jersey, where he and his family run a horse farm. In 2005 he acquired another house-a spacious multimillion-dollar winter holiday home in Eagle Isle, the most exclusive enclave of the Ibis Golf and Country Club, a gated community in West Palm Beach, Florida. It offers his daughter a place to stay during her competitions at the Wellington Winter Equestrian Festival, one of the most important events in the horse show world.
Dobbs's daughter keeps five European Warmbloods, a breed that often fetches close to $1 million apiece. In the official results of her competitions, her horses' owner is always listed as The Dobbs Group-a corporate entity for which few details are available on the public record. However, incorporation documents and other state records reveal it to be a New Jersey company of which Lou Dobbs is president. This same company also owns the copyright on Dobbs's books.


The upkeep of Dobbs's multiple properties creates no small demand for labor in two sectors where undocumented immigrants are known to be particularly prevalent. Jay Hickey, president of the American Horse Council, the horse industry's main lobby group, suggested in 2009 that more than half of the workers in his industry are likely undocumented. Likewise, studies have found that undocumented workers make up an estimated 28 percent of workers in landscaping. In both of these sectors, the use of contractors is commonplace, so it is not surprising that Dobbs has relied on third parties to supply the labor he needs. Vicky Moon, author of A Sunday Horse: Inside the Grand Prix Show-Jumping Circuit, explained that contracting out the care of one's horses "alleviates the time involved in coordinating the horses' care, transport, and management but it also removes the responsibility of hiring competent grooms, providing housing and meals, possibly paying Social Security taxes, health insurance and, most important, making extra sure they are legal."
Dobbs has heaped scorn on the government for using contractors that hire undocumented immigrants. On CNN in 2007, he called private firms that oppose verification requirements for their contractors' employees "ridiculous." Yet interviews with several such employees show that Dobbs has been far from vigilant about the status of workers laboring on his own properties.

"I Looked After Dobbs's Horses While I Was Illegal"

This year, Hillary Dobbs became the youngest-ever horse show rider to win $1 million in prize money. While all horses require extensive maintenance, the labor entailed in the upkeep of competition horses like the ones ridden by "Dobbs's million dollar baby" (as the New York Post dubbed Hillary) is particularly strenuous.
Every November, all five of The Dobbs Group's show-jumping horses must be transported from their summer stables in Vermont to their winter stables in Wellington, Florida.


The workers are transported to the tropics too, returning to New England with the horses in April. They ride in trucks each way alongside their expensive equestrian charges, tending to the horses' needs throughout the thirty-two-hour journey. Their return to Vermont marks the start of a new annual circuit of horse shows-an exhausting schedule during the spring, summer and fall months that entails constant travel between their Vermont base and horse shows around the country. At these shows, it is not unusual for the grooms who care for Dobbs's horses to rise in the middle of the night or in the predawn hours to clean, brush and prepare the horses for a training session or early morning competition.
For years, undocumented immigrants from Mexico have been relied upon to meet these labor demands.



A 36-year-old Mexican immigrant I'll call Marco Salinas was working with a group of horses in a stable at the bustling Wellington Winter Equestrian Festival when I approached him for an interview. (Fearing deportation or job loss, Salinas, like the other workers interviewed for this story, asked that neither his real name nor the name of his employer be used.) Several hours later, when he finished his ten-hour workday, Salinas recounted how he had come to the United States five years ago for a job. Seated on an outdoor bench near the stable, the Mexico City native told the story of how he had crossed the Yuma Desert on foot, from the Mexican city of San Luis Río Colorado and into the United States, eluding the border patrol.
Salinas said he braved the journey for one reason-because he had the promise of a job on the other end. An old friend of Salinas's worked as a groom with some of the horses owned by Dobbs, and he had sent word that Salinas could be hired on as a groom at the Vermont stable contracted to care for the Dobbs Group horses.

Salinas got the job, he said, and worked at it for more than two years without documents until he was finally able to obtain a guest-worker visa designed for seasonal foreign workers (the same kind of visa denounced as a form of "indentured servitude" on Dobbs's CNN show).
I asked Salinas, still clad in his work clothes-a polo shirt and jeans-about Dobbs, the owner of the horses he cared for. But the father of three simply flashed a disarming grin, let out an easygoing laugh and politely declined to comment.
In his work as a groom for Dobbs's horses, Salinas said he regularly started at 5 am and did not get off until after 6 in the evening. According to Pedro Gomez, another undocumented worker, who cared for Dobbs Group horses in Vermont and Florida, the workday during horse shows like the three-month-long Wellington Winter Equestrian Festival was typically twelve hours or longer.


I caught up with Gomez, who cared for Dobbs's horses for a year in 2008 and 2009, at a different Florida stable, where he now works. A native of the Oaxaca region of Mexico, Gomez, now 24, came to the United States to work when he was only 18. Seated on a plastic chair in the dim stable, wearing baggy blue jeans and a T-shirt, he told me he desperately wants legal status. "My situation with immigration is bad," he said, "because I [still] don't have papers." For him, documentation would mean "better work."
When Gomez worked for the Vermont-based stable contracted by Lou Dobbs, his wages were $500 per week, and he typically worked sixty-five hours, meaning he was earning only slightly above minimum wage. During shows in which Gomez was caring for the Dobbs Group horses, Dobbs's daughter would sometimes give him a $100 weekly tip, according to Gomez. But he says he was never paid overtime.
While there is some disagreement over whether federal labor laws apply to horse stable workers, according to West Palm Beach labor lawyer Jill Hanson, the working conditions described by these stable workers likely violate both the federal Fair Labor Standards Act-which requires time-and-a-half pay for hours worked beyond a forty-hour workweek-and a Florida law that requires overtime pay for any workday longer than ten hours.

 I sat down with Marco Esperanza, 39, another Mexican worker who cared for Dobbs Group horses, after hours in the stable where he was then working in Wellington, Florida. Seated on the concrete barn floor, his back against the wooden siding of a horse stall, he explained that the work requires him to "be available twenty-four hours a day." When a horse is sick, Esperanza said, "it doesn't matter what time it is: in the night or at dawn, you have to check the horse. You always, always have to be at work." When I asked whether he had a green card or guest-worker visa while he worked for the stable hired by Dobbs, he shook his head: "I looked after Dobbs's horses while I was illegal."
At the Vermont stable that cared for the Dobbs Group horses from spring through autumn while Gomez worked there, the workers lived right at the horse barn. This arrangement has benefits, as Gomez points out; for example, the workers don't have to pay rent. However, according to Gomez, their quarters-a two-bedroom apartment on the top floor of the barn-were extremely crowded. When Gomez lived there, nine workers were packed into the small apartment, and he had to share a bedroom with four of them.
When I asked whether the Dobbs family knew that undocumented workers were caring for their horses, Gomez responded by saying that at least in the case of Hillary Dobbs, "I believe she knew." The stable owner knew "that some people didn't have papers," Gomez said, and had even taken precautions to keep the workers away from the immigration agents who often patrol the areas around horse shows. Gomez said it was hard to believe that Dobbs's daughter, who was in close contact with these undocumented workers almost every weekend, could have been unaware of their status.
Hillary Dobbs did not respond to repeated attempts to contact her for comment.

"The Pay Is Bad" for Work in Dobbs's Gardens

Nor are stable workers the only undocumented immigrants who have worked on Dobbs's properties. Rodrigo Ortega, a native of Chiapas, Mexico, who has lived and worked in the United States for fourteen years, was busy tending the immaculate garden of a large luxury home under the blazing afternoon sun when I approached him. Though he had been working since 7 am, he agreed to talk once his ten-hour workday ended.
Speaking with The Nation in a Mexican restaurant where Univision blared in the background, Ortega, who had worked for a Florida company contracted by Dobbs to do garden maintenance on his West Palm Beach property, described himself as "an immigrant who doesn't have papers." Ortega said he had been responsible for "cutting the grass, cutting the trees, cleaning the garden-all the garden work" at Dobbs's house for more than three years.
Ortega, who was one of approximately fifteen Latin American employees of the company, recalled meeting Dobbs one day while he was working on his garden: "He told me, in Spanish, that his name was Luis." According to Ortega, the two had a brief interaction, during which Dobbs instructed him to tell his boss that a certain plant needed to be moved in the garden.

Ortega said his status was far from a secret. His employer "knew very well that the majority of us didn't have papers," he said, but this was "never a problem." Employees of the landscaping firm "never needed to have a good Social Security number" as a condition of work, he said.
Nor were they ever paid the overtime they are entitled to under federal labor laws, although they typically worked a fifty-hour week, plus a monthly shift on a Saturday.
In a telephone interview, Jorge Garcia, a 24-year-old Guatemalan immigrant who worked for seven years at the same landscaping company, said that he and his brother had also regularly worked on Dobbs's property. The two brothers worked two and a half to three hours each week for more than three years on the upkeep of the lawns, gardens and trees at Dobbs's house, Garcia said. He was hired to do that work even though, he said, "I don't have papers." Neither did his brother.


Originally from the town of Momostenango in Guatemala's department of Totonicapán, Jorge came to the United States looking for work seven years ago. His brother Miguel, now 27, followed him soon after. As Jorge explained, the two of them had family they needed to support back home, including Miguel's wife and three children.
But at his hourly wage of $9, Jorge said, he was "not able to save much money" after covering his rent and bills. Miguel was making only $8 an hour. "The pay is bad," Jorge said. "There are no benefits, there's no medical coverage-nothing." Yet the landscaping work was sometimes dangerous, he said, especially when workers were required to prune Dobbs's trees and taller bushes.
Jorge said that he'd come to America to earn better wages-"to live better." However, his experience working as a landscaper, on Dobbs's and other properties, was "the opposite" of that.
During one of Dobbs's many shows devoted to immigration, in April 2006, the host described $10 an hour as "a decent wage, not, in my opinion, an adequate wage, but a decent wage." He then turned to his viewers with a pointed question: "How much more would you be willing to pay each year for fruits and vegetables if it would improve working conditions and raise wages for farmworkers?"

At the time Dobbs said that, an undocumented Guatemalan worker laboring in his own yard, Miguel Garcia, was being paid only $8 an hour.
Responding to The Nation's request for comment from Lou Dobbs, Chad Wilkinson, producer of The Lou Dobbs Show, said by e-mail that "Lou will not be commenting for the piece." Dobbs's attorney, Robert Zeller, clarified by e-mail that Dobbs would only answer questions if posed on his live radio show. (The Nation agreed to appear on the show but only after publication of this article.)
I asked Mike Sedlak, the owner of Sedlak Landscaping, the contractor that maintains the grounds on Dobbs's West Palm Beach property, whether Dobbs has ever inquired about the status of his employees. Sedlak said only, "I don't feel comfortable talking about it," and quickly got off the phone.



I also asked Missy Clark, the owner of North Run Farm, the stable in Warren, Vermont, where the Dobbs Group horses are housed, whether Dobbs or his daughter had ever inquired about the immigration status of the workers caring for Hillary's horses. She said, "They're very well aware that the people taking care of the horses are 100 percent legal," and said she'd given the Dobbs family assurances to that effect. But she later described her difficulty obtaining work visas for many of her employees. "It was a big process and a total pain in the neck," she said. "I had been working on it for years."
According to Christine Biederman, a Dallas-based immigration lawyer hired by Clark to obtain visas for North Run's employees, a California law firm Clark had initially hired had failed to deliver on visas it promised its clients and had gone out of business. Biederman took over and finally filed the visa applications for Clark's workers in June 2009, including for workers caring for Dobbs Group horses. It took three months for these H-2B visa applications to be processed, Biederman said.
When asked whether the workers who look after Dobbs's horses had legal immigration status before then, Biederman declined to comment.
 
"Imprisoned in a Palace"

Immigration attorney Laurie Volk explained that immigrant workers in jobs designated "low-skilled" are caught in a bind because "there's a demand for their work, but there's no way for them to do it legally." "There's no visa categories-or there's limited visas-for unskilled labor," she said.
For undocumented workers who have been in the United States for more than a year without status, being apprehended by immigration authorities poses a risk of being deported and barred from re-entry for ten years. That risk was very real for many of the workers who labored on Dobbs's properties, since many of them were in the United States for several years without status. The risks of apprehension were particularly great for the stable workers, whose work caring for the Dobbs Group horses forced them to travel constantly-including to border areas closely monitored by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
Salinas traveled back to see his three kids and wife in Mexico on four occasions, but to avoid being apprehended he had to travel by bus, an exceptionally long journey from Vermont. For his part, Gomez is so afraid he will not be able to return to the United States that he has not seen his mother and brothers at all since immigrating six years ago, at the age of 18.

To avoid the risk associated with driving while undocumented, most of the workers interviewed for this piece don't ever drive, which imposes upon their lives an extreme isolation, given that Dobbs's horses are stabled in rural Vermont. Workers relied on their manager to transport them once a week to buy groceries at a store a half-hour's drive away. As Gomez told me, "Here one can't leave." This arrangement left the stable workers feeling, as Esperanza put it, like they were "imprisoned in a palace."
Yet even such precautions as not driving and not traveling home are no guarantee of safety. On the morning of October 5, 2009, Miguel Garcia was arrested by undercover ICE agents while he was on his way to his work cleaning Miami office buildings. (After four years of landscaping at Dobbs's and other properties, he'd quit because of the low pay.) "He was waiting for the train-nothing more," his brother Jorge explained. "They brought him to the jail." After a week in immigration detention, Miguel was deported to Guatemala.


Dobbs has long championed such enforcement measures. Yet according to Raúl Hinojosa-Ojeda, a UCLA professor and author of a recent Center for American Progress report, "Raising the Floor for American Workers," these measures "only serve to push undocumented workers further under the table, lowering their wages and the wages of native workers as well."
Commenting on this scapegoating of undocumented workers, Hinojosa-Ojeda remarked, "The irony is that the biggest users of services of the undocumented are affluent white people." In the case of Lou Dobbs, who made his name and his fortune lambasting "illegals" and their employers, the irony is breathtaking.

© 2010 The Nation

The FLU Case

Let's move on!

Dear friends and visitors.

Last year we made an effort to shine some light on the false pandemic, the horrendous propaganda and the clearly corrupt mass media. This site alone has reached over 3 million people all over the world, and played a role in helping many to make a more informed decision about being vaccinated against the so called Swine Flu. We believe we helped many to avoid severe side effect - immediate ones like death, and other very severe problems - but most important the long term slow degradation of health.





Much has happened and many discussions has passed. Among all the activists, a rainbow of individuals of different race, sex, political color, religious faith and spiritual convictions, we all share a common goal - to stop the madness of depopulation by vaccination.

Setting all our differences aside for a while, I am sure we would be able to take those responsible to court and have them stopped. Some efforts have been made so far - very few actually came deep enough into the system to gain momentum.
Some efforts was completely doomed from start, others became doomed because of infighting and others became doomed because of lack of funds, skills, expertise or stamina.

This is why we now, with the whole fake pandemic come and gone, with access to much more data and experience, can start to create a solid case against the creators of this crime.

What we need:

• All our collected data and information from all over the world, also from "insiders" who dare to share the real numbers instead of the polished official propaganda, when it comes to deaths and severe side effects. Facts - no speculations.
• We need to collaborate and cooperate, even if we got caught in fights about something in the past.
• We need a fully capable and experienced, professional legal team that can navigate the system.
• We need funds to keep this all moving forward.

This initial call for support and a gathering of likeminded activists will attempt to create a base for such work in a serious and effective way. Wikileaks has proven that truth is extremely powerful and in their spirit we will once and for all put an end to the vaccination madness.
If you have any ideas contact us. If you want to take part, contact us, If you want to support, contact us. If you want to share information, contact us. If you believe you have what it takes to be a team member, contact us.
This time we will do it for real and the way it should have been done from the start.



This is not to say that all efforts in the past was incorrect or unsuccessful - we want to build on previous work and efforts to reach a result which puts an end to the mass poisoning and potential genocide happening in our own time. The ones responsible should not be able to get away with this!