The End of “HIV/AIDS”?

Government Backs Off from Treating AIDS as Communicable

by D. B. MURRIETA

Our government just ruled on November 2, 2009, effective Jan. 4, 2010, to exclude HIV/AIDS from the list of communicable diseases and not require HIV testing in applying for a U.S. Visa. Further to this, and in another publication, Senator John Kerry called for lifting of the ban against Gays donating blood in his Op-Ed this last month.

What is going on? How did we advance to this point? There must have been something, we all missed. Looks like a meltdown of untold magnitude in the HIV/AIDS paradigm.

Apparently the mandatory release of documents under the Freedom of Information Act made all the difference. The documents marked “Top Secret” and sealed 25 years ago were Robert Gallo's evidence in which he claimed proved the hypothesis; HIV was the virus that caused AIDS. The fact is, these documents did not prove anything. There was nothing in them that stood up to scrutiny — no paper, no studies, no lab research or equations; Only his notes, which were overwritten with added handwritten notes to make them appear to address the question. In the opinion of our Greek constituents who obtained them sealed and exposed them to the public, there was nothing in them but utter garbage and bombast (my words).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CDRaNPqFlY&feature=related

So what happens now? It looks like everyone is still sleeping.

We must free the prisoners, the enslaved and the repressed. Stop the tests and eliminate the anti-retroviral drugs. Expose all the thieves and liars — especially those that profited and knew the truth.

I'm not saying that people should go to jail. But they must, at least, admit their error before they go on to further mislead. Fines and penalties might be imposed if these culprits want to be difficult and remain in opposition. Monetary amounts received could go to compensate all those who suffered and also may have died from the drug treatments or stigma of the syndrome. Even those who refused treatment and were dissidents, should receive token amounts. The overall range of awards could be from $1000 to $10,000 per plaintiff. This would amount to “pocket change” for the pharmaceuticals. (Their last bill in 2007 to the government was $350,000,000. The total over the last twenty-six years amounted to hundreds of billions.) This does not begin to calculate the loss of human spirit and life.

In the mean time, we must gather all pertinent testimony of the CDC and/or government agencies that brought about the “Final Rule.”

http://travel.state.gov/visa/laws/telegrams/telegrams_4631.html

How do we proceed? Do we get lawyers on a contingency or pro bono? Who among us will take the initiative? Who will lead? Do we mount a class action suit?

By the way and maybe a little understated here, I want to share the good news: we won!!!

Disclaimer: The above is my opinion and does not include any other individual's or group's view. I'm sure that a properly researched paper is required and must be pursued. Hopefully, my e-mail will get the ball rolling faster on this auspicious day in the 27th year of the HIV/AIDS lie.

Queer Democrats Oppose Strong-Mayor Proposition

Back Castañeda for Chula Vista Mayor, Butler for County Assessor/Recorder/Clerk

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

PHOTOS, top to bottom: Donna Frye & Chris Ward, Todd Gloria, Steve Castañeda, David Butler

“This is the second time my opponents have refused to debate me,” said San Diego City Councilmember Donna Frye to the predominantly Queer San Diego Democratic Club at their April 22 meeting. She was there to persuade the club to oppose Proposition D on the June 8 primary ballot, a San Diego city measure that would make the strong-mayor form of government permanent, add a ninth seat to the San Diego City Council and raise the threshold for the Council to override a mayoral veto from a simple majority (five of eight) to two-thirds (six of nine). The club had originally invited an advocate of the strong-mayor system, former San Diego Charter Review Committee member Adrian Kwiatkowski, to debate Frye, but he had pleaded a “family emergency” and backed out at the last minute — so the club drafted a volunteer, Chris Ward, to present the case for strong-mayor and serve as a devil’s advocate for the ballot measure.

Though Kwiatkowski didn’t make it to the Democratic Club, he’d delivered an impassioned presentation on the subject at a meeting sponsored by San Diego Common Cause in City Heights on February 13. At that meeting he’d argued that the superiority of strong-mayor over San Diego’s previous system of government — in which the mayor sat on the City Council and had only one vote, while the Council appointed a professional city manager to run the city’s day-to-day operations — was that it shifted principal responsibility for city government from an appointed official to a directly elected one. “Before 2004 [when strong-mayor first passed for a five-year trial period] every one of you didn’t get to elect the chief executive of the city, and now you do,” Kwiatkowski told Common Cause. “There are people here in favor of having the voters lose that power. Why would you think that would empower the people?”

Frye’s presentation to the San Diego Democratic Club was largely an attempt to answer Kwiatkowski’s rhetorical question. Having served on the City Council both under the city-manager and strong-mayor systems, she said it’s actually become more difficult to get needed information out of the mayor’s office since strong-mayor passed. Under the city-manager system, Frye explained, the mayor had to attend City Council meetings and was therefore available for questions and comments not only from Councilmembers but from the public. “Making strong-mayor permanent means less accountability because the mayor can make decisions behind closed doors,” Frye argued. “The mayor needs to come back and be the leader of the City Council so you can come to a City Council meeting and talk to your elected official, not just see the mayor during staged public ‘events’ and spin sessions. Right now there is no discussion [between the mayor and Council], only edicts.”

Asked whether the strong-mayor system had ever kept her from getting the information she needed to make responsible, informed decisions as a City Councilmember, Frye was eager to quote chapter and verse. “I can tell you about the Public Records Act request to get results on a city survey,” Frye said. “I can tell you about the contract on which the mayor overspent by $2.7 million for a program the City Council didn’t even authorize, and another contract that went similarly. There is no remedy under strong-mayor for the City Council to force or compel the mayor to provide any information he does not want to provide. The only remedy I had was to sue the city.”

Other issues the club discussed about making strong-mayor permanent included the cost of creating a ninth City Council seat — which the original argument for the ballot measure estimated at “zero to $1 million,” the zero figure apparently based on the idea that the mayor would fund the new Councilmember’s office by cutting the budgets of the existing Councilmembers, until Frye and others went to court and successfully got the language changed to acknowledge that an additional Council seat would cost the city money. Frye also praised one innovation in San Diego’s governance since strong-mayor — the 2007 creation of an independent budget analyst which, she said, “is not going to go away no matter how you vote on Proposition D.” But speakers at the February 13 Common Cause meeting — including John Gordon, Frye’s appointee to the Charter Review Committee, who also attended the Democratic Club meeting April 22 — said that the budget analyst is still dependent on the mayor’s office for providing the numbers he or she crunches for their “independent” analysis.

The club members who debated Proposition D framed it largely as a battle in the ongoing war for control of San Diego’s government between downtown business interests, who favor citywide elections and a strong mayor because that makes big-money campaigns more important; and neighborhood activists who favor district elections and a strong City Council because that returns power to the grass roots. The original strong-mayor initiative “was drawn up in the back room of San Diego by the old-boys’ network that controlled city hall before the passage of district elections [for City Councilmembers] in 1988, when people with money controlled who got elected,” said former San Diego Democratic Club president Craig Roberts. “This is their end run around district elections. They don’t need to worry about the City Council; they only need to control one office, the mayor.”

Club secretary and former city employee Brad Jacobsen said he was against strong-mayor in 2004 and was even more strongly opposed to it now. “There is no communication between the mayor’s office and the City Council,” he said. “I had to meet with City Council staff members privately because every request for an official meeting had to go through the mayor’s chain of command.” Eventually the club voted to endorse No on Proposition D with only one dissenting vote.

Another city proposition turned out to be an even easier sell for support than Proposition D was for opposition. This was Proposition C, presented by Third District City Councilmember Todd Gloria as a way to reform San Diego’s hiring practices by giving a meaningful preference to veterans. Amazingly, despite San Diego’s reputation as a military town and the large number of servicemembers who decide to settle here after discharge, San Diego hasn’t revised its city charter provisions on hiring veterans since the 1970’s — and the existing charter gives preference only to veterans who served due to “conscription.” That means a draft — and, as Gloria pointed out, the U.S. hasn’t drafted anyone into the military since 1973.

“San Diego is the largest point of discharge for people in the military,” Gloria explained. “We have more people coming back to the county [from military service] than ever, including 27,000 who have already returned from Iraq and Afghanistan. We also don’t have a special consideration for people who were disabled in the military. Proposition C will strike the word ‘conscription’ and add another point [on the city workers’ exam] for a service-connected disability of 15 percent or more. We should be able to have a policy to help our military. Many people are leaving San Diego after discharge. The unemployment rate for veterans is one in four, 10 percent above the general rate in San Diego.” Gloria got what he came for: the club’s unanimous support for his ballot measure.

On the five propositions on the statewide June 8 ballot, the club took the same positions as the ones of the California Democratic Party. It endorsed yes votes on Proposition 13, which allows people to have their homes retrofitted for earthquake safety without triggering an automatic reassessment, and resulting property tax increase, under the original Proposition 13 in 1978; and Proposition 15, which allows for direct public financing of elections for the office of secretary of state. It opposed Proposition 14, which would eliminate party primaries and replace them with a system in which the two top vote-getters in the primary, regardless of party, would be the candidates in the general election. The club also voted to support no votes on Propositions 16 and 17 after speakers pointed out that these were sponsored by single corporations — Pacific Gas and Electric for 16 and Mercury Insurance for 17 — to protect their incomes against legitimate government regulations and actions.

The club also heard from two candidates for office. One was County assessor/recorder/clerk David Butler, a rare Democrat in a countywide office in San Diego. He started as a staff member in that department 34 years ago, worked his way up and was considering retiring when he was appointed by the all-Republican County Board of Supervisors to replace the previous officeholder, Gregory Smith, when Smith retired. “I’d like to think it’s because I’m the most qualified candidate, but I think it was because they were hoping I’d serve out the rest of Greg Smith’s term and just retire instead of running for a full term of my own,” Butler joked. He described the office as “a technical position” and said one of the reasons he was running was to bring electronic data recording to the office.

As the only serious Democratic candidate in the race — there’s one other registered Democrat seeking the office, but Craig Roberts described him as “a perennial candidate who ran for the Board of Supervisors a few years ago and came to the County Democratic Central Committee and was unspeakably bad” — Butler won a unanimous endorsement.

The other candidate the club heard from on April 22 was Chula Vista City Councilmember Steve Castañeda, who’s running for mayor of his city. The club never endorsed in a Chula Vista mayor’s race until 1998, when it backed Steve Padilla — who, ironically, beat out another Democrat, Mary Salas, both for the club’s endorsement and the office itself. Padilla subsequently came out as Gay and lost his re-election bid to a Republican — Cheryl Cox, wife of San Diego County Supervisor Bill Cox. In presenting his candidacy, Castañeda pointed out that Chula Vista is the second largest city in the county and that 43 percent of its registered voters are Democrats, to 30 percent Republicans and 26 percent “decline to state” (California election-speak for people who don’t register with any political party).

Like Donna Frye and the opponents of Proposition D in San Diego, Castañeda cast his election as a battle between entrenched business interests and new grass-roots neighborhood-based sources of support. “What we’ve seen over the last 20 years is the establishment folks running Chula Vista,” he said. “In 2004 I started to look at ways we could be neighbors to city hall. Back then we had no neighborhood groups in Chula Vista; now we have four. We need to do more with respect to opening our government. I want to make those changes; the current mayor wants to run the city like it was 30 years ago.” Castañeda won his endorsement, with no opposition and only one member abstaining, but his own campaign wasn’t the only issue he addressed before the Democratic Club.

Castañeda also spoke out against Proposition G, an initiative on the June 8 ballot in Chula Vista that would allow voters there to ban Project Labor Agreements (PLA’s). According to Craig Roberts, PLA’s “force municipalities to hire local businesses and make sure they pay living wages.” Without them, PLA supporters argue, a contractor building a project for a city could bring in out-of-town workers and low-ball their pay — thus saving the city money at the expense not only of its working people but of its own economy. Local Right-wingers like San Diego City Councilmember Carl DeMaio and County Republican Party chair Tony Krvaric have made banning PLA’s a major political priority, and initiatives eliminating them will be on the June 8 ballot not only in Chula Vista but Oceanside as well.

According to Castañeda, Proposition G “is so poorly written the Chula Vista city attorney said he couldn’t figure out what it meant. It is being pushed by people outside of Chula Vista to attack labor unions. As a City Councilmember and an individual, I’m going to have to go home and tell people what’s going to happen to the bayfront development, the university we’re seeking and all our other plans. Give us the opportunity to help our citizens and our future.” The club voted to oppose Proposition G with no one against and only one abstention — but it declined to set aside the notice requirements in the club’s bylaws to vote on opposing the similar initiative being voted on in Oceanside. Ironically, Bill Irvine of the Uptown Democratic Club pointed out that neither Chula Vista nor Oceanside has ever approved a PLA as part of a city development.

Finally, an attempt by several club members to make an endorsement in the primary for California attorney general petered out when former club president Doug Case questioned whether there still was a quorum. Before that, members had split on the question of whether to take up this hotly contested race, with seven candidates seeking the Democratic nomination. Roberts and Matt Corrales had seen the candidates at the Democratic party’s recent statewide convention, but came to opposite conclusions as to whether the club should endorse. Roberts called on the club to avoid a potentially divisive primary endorsement and instead get solidly behind the primary winner for next November’s general election; Corrales said he’d left the state conventions with his own preferences in the race and wanted to discuss them. But Case’s quorum call — which revealed that there were only 24 club members in the room, eight short of the number needed to conduct business — short-circuited any discussion of the race and left club president Larry Baza with nothing to do but adjourn the meeting.

Over 50 Turn Out for Whitburn Fundraiser in Hillcrest

Candidate Faces Unfair Attacks from Both Straight and Queer Media

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Stephen Whitburn, former San Diego Democratic Club president and San Diego City Council candidate, brought his current campaign for the District Four seat on the San Diego County Board of Supervisors to Hillcrest March 28 with an early-evening fundraiser at the Bamboo Lounge restaurant in Hillcrest. Over 50 people attended the event, in which Whitburn introduced his campaign team and laid out the issues he intends to raise in his challenge to incumbent Ron Roberts.

“It is so important that we win this seat,” Whitburn said. “Fundamentally, it is time that government work for people in San Diego County. I was down at the County Board on Tuesday to speak against the gifts Supervisors receive from the organizations to which they give taxpayers’ money. In the case of Ron Roberts, over the years he has given more than $850,000 to a nonprofit organization that promotes trade with Asia. And in turn, that organization has sent Ron Roberts on six all-expense-paid trips to China — junkets to China. Now, to me that seems improper.”

Whitburn also upbraided Roberts for calling for a second supervisorial vote on the controversial Merriam Mountains development proposal near Escondido. The developer sponsoring the proposal planned to blow off the top of a mountain, flatten it and build thousands of homes atop the denuded mountain. The County Board of Supervisors first voted on the proposal on December 9, with Roberts absent, and the board deadlocked 2-2, killing the plan. But Roberts insisted that the board schedule another vote so he could be there — leading to speculation that he supported the project and wanted to see it go through — though when the second vote came on March 24, he opposed Merriam Mountains.

At his fundraiser, Whitburn said he’d attended the March 24 meeting “and Ron Roberts would not look me in the eye. He didn’t want to look like he wasn’t paying attention, so he looked past me, so he could look like he was looking at me but not look at me.” Whitburn told the Supervisors they should vote down Merriam Mountains, and he asked the audience at his fundraiser “if you think it is a good idea to consider blasting off mountaintops and building homes in fire-prone areas without an evacuation plan.”

Whitburn also ridiculed the all-Republican County Board of Supervisors for their lack of interest in social service, which along with development and land use is one of the primary responsibilities of county government in California. “The County Board will not lift a finger above and beyond what is absolutely mandated by the state to help the people who so very much need government to serve them,” Whitburn said. “That $850,000 that went for trade with China could have provided assistance to a whole lot of working people who are struggling to pay their bills and need more food to feed their families.”

According to Whitburn, “The County Board has huge responsibilities, yet many people don’t even know what it does.” He attributed that to the fact that Roberts and his four fellow Supervisors are all “like-minded Republicans” who “decide the issues amongst themselves” with little or no public debate. “Without debate, there isn’t much media coverage of the County Board of Supervisors,” Whitburn explained — “and without media coverage, there isn’t very much public attention to it. And without that kind of public attention, people aren’t very plugged into what’s going on.”

What Whitburn says he has to do to win is get the public agitated and wanting change. “I was a reporter for 18 years,” Whitburn recalled. “I love to find out what’s going on and tell people what’s going on. And you’d better believe that as a County Supervisor, I’m going to be a strong voice, not only for what we believe but for communicating to the public exactly what the priorities of the County Board ought to be; what is not being done that ought to be; and what we need to be doing to make things better for people.”

Whitburn admitted he has an uphill battle. He first has to get through the June 8 primary and hope his three Democratic rivals split the vote enough to deny incumbent Roberts the 50 percent plus one he would need to win re-election outright, then he has to be the top vote-getter among the four Democrats (including one, San Diego Unified School District board member Shelia Jackson, who unlike Whitburn has actually served in elective office). But he said if he can do it, he hopes it will be an inspiration for other Democrats to challenge Republican incumbents in the South Bay and coastal districts and win a majority on the Board of Supervisors the way they have on the City Council.

“This starts here tonight,” Whitburn said. “It starts with all of us. … It starts with our fellow warriors for civil liberties. It starts with our fellow warriors for social and economic justice.” Whitburn pointed with pride to his endorsements from State Senator Christine Kehoe, City Councilmember Donna Frye and former City Councilmember Toni Atkins — “real leaders,” he called them — and added, “It starts with you. You are my friends. You’re the ones who know me as a person, and you are the ones who will most effectively communicate to other people how important this is, and why not only do we need to win, but we will win this race.”

Whitburn closed the event by introducing his campaign team: campaign manager Don Mullen, consultant Jennifer Tierney (who ironically represented Whitburn’s successful opponent, Todd Gloria, in the 2008 election for the District 3 seat on the San Diego City Council), field organizer Fernando Lopez, Web designer Matt Ferris and the hosts for his March 28 event, David Higgins and David Miles, He also thanked “government watchdog” and former San Diego City Council candidate Ian Trowbridge, event volunteer John Logan and longtime community volunteer Mel Merrill.

Since the March 28 event, Whitburn has taken some surprising hits in the media. San Diego CityBeat sent a reporter to the fundraiser but, instead of writing an actual story, ridiculed it in their “Turds & Blossoms” column. They called the event “disheartening” and made fun of Mullen and the two other Whitburn supporters who tried to get a chant of “Stephen! Stephen” going at the end — ignoring the enthusiastic response of the crowd earlier, when Whitburn asked them to back up his opposition to the Merriam Mountains development and Roberts’ junkets to China.

And the April 1 edition of the Gay & Lesbian Times ran a vituperative editorial attacking Kehoe and Atkins for supporting Whitburn. Once beyond the terms of personal abuse (the editorial writer said the two pioneering Lesbian politicians “need to take a shower and use some deodorant”), the Gay & Lesbian Times seemed to be saying that because Roberts endorsed both Kehoe and Atkins in their City Council races, he deserves their support in perpetuity. For a candidate who was a journalist for 18 years, Whitburn arguably has received a lot of unfair treatment from people who share his former profession — including some who also share his sexual orientation.

First U-U Church Screens “Rethink Afghanistan”

Three Veterans for Peace Second Hard-Hitting Message of Film

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

PHOTO: Jack Doxie and Jim Brown

The three members of San Diego’s chapter of Veterans for Peace who spoke at the First Unitarian-Universalist Church March 18 after the church showed Robert Greenwald’s hard-hitting anti-war movie Rethink Afghanistan may have been talking about the earlier wars in which they had served, but their meaning was unmistakable. “In Viet Nam, they had a campaign for us to work with the villagers, to try to win their hearts and minds,” said Jim Brown. “We’d do that during the day — and then at night we’d shoot at them. It’s crazy to send in an army, whose job is to kill, and expect them to help build a country. Troops don’t go out there to do good. They’re there to maintain order and kill people.”

Brown’s remarks made a mockery of “nation-building,” “counter-insurgency,” “counter-terrorism” and all the noble-sounding lies with which the American people are brainwashed by their government and media to support one war of naked conquest and aggression after another. So did Rethink Afghanistan, a 62-minute DVD from Greenwald’s Brave New Films that meticulously demolished all the various justifications that have been offered by two consecutive Presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and many other politicians and opinion makers for the U.S.’s continuing and escalating military involvement in Afghanistan — including the idea that by intervening in Afghanistan we are fighting al-Qaeda and making the U.S. safer from terrorism.

Greenwald made his film in 2009, releasing it as Obama was considering whether to grant the U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, his request for 40,000 additional troops for the war effort. Obama eventually authorized 30,000 but said they would be withdrawn within a year and a half. The movie features interviews with a wide variety of sources, and not all of them the usual suspects from the Left either. Among Greenwald’s interviewees are former CIA field operative Robert Baer — who bluntly calls the idea that the U.S. is fighting terrorism in Afghanistan “bullshit” — and former CIA station chief Robert Grenier, as well as former Taliban official Ursala Rahmani and Mohammed Osman Tariq, former commander in the mujahedin — the so-called “freedom fighters” the CIA recruited to fight the secular, socialist, Soviet-supported Afghan government in the 1970’s and who eventually morphed into the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Rethink Afghanistan focuses much of its attention on a truly dangerous country sandwiched between Afghanistan and India: Pakistan. “It’s not as if Pakistan is standing idle; 120,000 troops have been dispatched to the Afghan border,” says CNN correspondent Stan Grant in a clip shown in the film. “The [Pakistani] government says more than 1,000 soldiers [were] killed in the fighting. But the United States and others still question whether the Pakistan Military and Intelligence Service are playing a double game, [with] elements secretly supporting the Taliban to block a potential India-Afghanistan alliance.”

The sources quoted in Greenwald’s film — including Steve Coll, president and CEO of the New America Foundation; and Carl Conetta, co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives — note that the one country Pakistan considers an “existential threat” is India, against which they have fought two wars over the disputed province of Kashmir. “The Pakistan army fears that India sees Afghanistan as a way to encircle Pakistan, to come in through the back door, to promote instability,” Coll says in the film. Other sources note that Pakistan, not Afghanistan, is the country in the region the U.S. should be worried about: it has a weak central government, a strong movement promoting militant Islam, and fully developed nuclear weapons. Should Pakistan fall into the hands of militant Islamist military officers or its own version of the Taliban, these sources warn, they could make nuclear weapons available to terrorists for an attack on the U.S. that would make 9/11 look like a mugging in the park by comparison.

Other topics covered in Rethink Afghanistan include the endemic corruption in the current Afghan government, the way U.S.-based contractors and their Afghan subcontractors are siphoning off vast amounts of money intended as reconstruction aid, and the sheer cost of the war to the U.S. itself. Linda J. Bilmes, co-author of The $3 Trillion War, estimates the cost of maintaining the U.S. forces in Iraq as $500,000 per troop per year — and for Afghanistan that figure is still higher, $775,000, mainly because it’s much harder to get supplies into Afghanistan’s landlocked, mountainous territory than into Iraq, which has ports and is virtually all flat desert. By contrast, Blimes says, the inflation-adjusted cost of the U.S. involvement in World War II was $50,000 per troop per year.

“Right now, the United States, through fiscal year 2009, will have committed and/or spent more than $185 billion on the U.S. war in Afghanistan,” says Jo Comerford, executive director of the National Priorities Project. Comerford devised an intriguing way to look at the cost of the war by breaking it down per U.S. state, calculating that Alabama has contributed $1.695 billion to the war effort — enough to pay for full health coverage for all Alabamans, plus 200,000 other Americans, for one year. In New York, the cost will have been $17 billion — enough for “nearly two million Head Start placements.” Arizona’s share of the tab for the war is $2.5 billion — enough to cover half the 20 percent of Arizonans who don’t currently have health insurance.

One of the more powerful sections of Rethink Afghanistan is the one about women. Many otherwise progressive Americans were encouraged to support the war by the horror stories of how Afghan women were treated under the Taliban. But according to the film, life for women in Afghanistan was hell before the Taliban took over — and it still is. One anonymous representative of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) reports at least 23 rapes in just two months in northern Afghanistan and “a lot of violence against women in west Afghanistan.” The film shows girls who have had acid thrown in their faces for the “crime” of going to school, and Kabul in Winter author Ann Jones quotes Afghan Supreme Court Chief Justice Faisal Ahmad Shinwari — a hard-core Islamist personally appointed by supposedly secular president Hamid Karzai — as saying that Afghan women have two “equal rights”: to obey their husbands, and to pray (but not inside a mosque, since that space is reserved for men).

“The situation for women today in the Pashtun areas is actually worse than it was during the Taliban time, and the reason is because under the Taliban women were kept in burkas and in their homes, away from education,” says Wall Street Journal Washington correspondent Anand Gopal. “Today, the same situation persists — they’re kept in burkas, in homes, away from education — but on top of that, they’re also living in a war zone. And women disproportionately suffer, from the effects of a war. The majority of civilian casualties have been women. Women that I talk to in these areas often say that they actually wish the Taliban were back in power, because even though their lives were a prison then, at least they were kept free from bombs or from house raids. … Women also suffer in war zones because when their husbands are killed, they can’t work in any traditional jobs, so often they have to turn to prostitution. Otherwise they can’t work at all.”

Perhaps the most heart-rending section of the film is the one in which Greenwald and his translators interview Afghans trapped in an IDP (internally displaced persons) refugee camp in Kabul because their homes and farms have been destroyed by U.S. air raids. “If it wasn’t for the war, I would want to go back,” one unidentified man tells them. “If there was freedom, I would want to go back. Why am I here? Now there is war and bombardment. I can’t go back. Before I was a farmer, but I can’t go back. I was growing wheat and poppy and corn, melons. I was taking care of the children. But right now I can’t do anything. Look, they are barefoot in this cold weather. … One of my daughters is dead, and they will die too. This child, I can sell her but nobody would buy her. What can I do? … I have nothing. I am poor. I don’t have any blankets or shawls. I don’t have any clothes. There is no food that I can put in her mouth. … I know nobody wants to sell their daughter, but I have to. She is innocent, but I am poor.” Then a title reveals that the girl he was talking about trying to sell, just to get her out of the refugee camp and into the hands of people who could afford to take care of her, has since died.

Greenwald follows this heartbreaking sequence with a devastating demolition of the whole idea that we’re fighting in Afghanistan to protect Americans against future attacks by al-Qaeda. “Both wars have made the Middle East and the world much more dangerous for Americans and for any American presence overseas,” says Graham Fuller, former CIA station chief in Kabul and former vice-chair of the National Intelligence Council. “Terrorism has increased worldwide in the past seven years,” adds Carl Conetta, “and we’ve spent a tremendous amount of treasure and blood to achieve a result of increased terrorism.”

Finally, the film’s “Solutions” segment focuses on non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) which are actually building schools, providing jobs and offering health care to Afghans. The film depicts the Norwegian Afghanistan Committee (www.Afghanistan.no/ English/Education/index.html), which operates schools for Afghan girls and distributes food for 50,000 students; Jobs for Afghans (www.jobsforafghans.org), which seeks to provide just that — jobs for Afghans — so they can survive without joining the Taliban just for the $8 per day stipend the Taliban pays its fighters; and Emergency in Afghanistan (www.emergency.it), which has built three hospitals and 30 clinics. All their care is provided free of charge, explains Emergency in Afghanistan medical director Dr. Marco Garatti, “because we believe that a state, a decent state, should take care of its own citizens” — an ironic thing to hear at the end of the acrimonious Congressional debate on health insurance reform, which if nothing else made clear how many in Congress and the American public don’t agree that the state has a responsibility to safeguard its citizens’ health.

The three Veterans for Peace representatives who led the post-film discussion at the First Unitarian-Universalist Church March 18 — Viet Nam veteran Jim Brown, Korean War veteran Jack Doxie and Gil Field, a Viet Nam-era veteran but one who avoided combat by volunteering for the U.S. Coast Guard — made brief opening statements and then threw the meeting open to questions. “After serving in Viet Nam, it was obvious to me just from being on the ground that we were pulling the triggers as Americans — and the people we were shooting lived there,” said Brown. “We coerced the government into giving us ‘permission’ and stayed there as long as we could make people money. Our leaders will send us off to war anywhere in the world to take what we want. We could have all the raw materials we needed if we paid for them and hired local people, and built them schools and hospitals, and this would cost far less than what we spend on combat.”

“Well over 50 years ago, I was in combat in Korea — and we still have troops in Korea,” Doxie said. “They sent us to Korea in a World War II-era transport ship that was probably built in eight days, and it took us 16 days to meet the enemy. The thought came to me that if I had to go 16 days to meet the enemy, then perhaps this was not my enemy. … It’s amazing that we can’t learn our lesson. We persist in trying to resolve issues through violence. In a very unjustifiable way, we show our might. I’d like our country to have a bias towards negotiating instead of fighting. Just weeks before we invaded Iraq, the whole world realized we were wrong. Two million people in London, one million in Rome and hundreds of thousands elsewhere asked us not to do what we did. Where would we be now if we had gone to the United Nations instead of going to war?”

“By sheer luck of birth, I was born in 1948, finished college in 1970 and immediately applied to the Coast Guard in New York City,” said Field. “I served admirably on a small island in New York harbor. … So much of the background of the Veterans for Peace is determined by our ages and backgrounds. People three years younger didn’t go at all. People four to five years older had to go. It’s amazing how our government uses situations as they occur to create excuses to go to war.”

The questions covered a wide range of topics, moving far back in history from Afghanistan and Iraq not only to the wars Doxie and Brown served in but even farther — questioning whether the U.S. even had a right to fight World War II, Some audience members raised the argument made by pacifists at the time — that the U.S. and the other victors in World War I created the Nazi threat by imposing a harsh peace on Germany in 1919 and thereby wrecking its economy and creating the political situation that allowed Hitler to come to power. “Is there any such thing as a ‘good war’?” Brown said. “Was World War II something we should have been in?”

Definitely not, said Doxie. “Seventy to 80 percent of the U.S. people did not want the war,” he noted. “Franklin Roosevelt won his third term by saying he wouldn’t send soldiers into war. The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor because the U.S. had a plan to embargo Japan and keep them from getting oil and rubber. When you poke a smaller adversary in the eye with a brush, they’re going to react. The Japanese may not have been justified [in attacking Pearl Harbor], but we were the ones who dropped the A-bombs on civilian targets in Japan.”

An audience member raised the controversial claim — still hotly debated among historians — that President Roosevelt knew about the Pearl Harbor attack in advance and allowed it to happen because he knew the only way he could unify the country in support of a war it didn’t want was to frame it as a response to foreign aggression. The same person also claimed that the 9/11 attacks were not carried out by Osama bin Laden but were either known in advance or actively perpetrated by the U.S. government — and Doxie hinted that he agreed. “It looked like a controlled demolition,” Doxie said, “not something that happened from outside.”

Brown also expressed his cynicism — largely shared by most of the audience — that President Obama has any intention of pursuing a policy in Afghanistan or Iraq that differs in the slightest from President Bush’s. “We’re supposed to be out of Iraq by 2011, but I haven’t seen anyone pulled out,” Brown said. “I’ve heard he’s being politically expedient for the powers that be in America, and will pull the troops out by the end of his term, but I don’t believe that. That’s what they said in Viet Nam, too.”

“Obama said he was going to escalate in Afghanistan in his campaign,” said Peace and Freedom Party organizer Roger Batchelder. “Even in the peace movement, we labor under delusions, including the idea that America is not an empire. We are an empire. The other myth is that the Democratic Party is the party of the little person and the party of peace. World War II could have been stopped if Americans like Prescott Bush [father and grandfather of the two Presidents Bush] and Henry Ford hadn’t helped Hitler. We have a ruling class that gives to both parties, and Wall Street gave more money to Obama than to McCain. FDR interned the Japanese and Truman used A-bombs against civilians twice, and also started the U.S. involvement in Viet Nam. It’s all about the money. The richest 1 percent gives money to both parties.”

And despite the promises Obama has made to withdraw the extra 30,000 troops in Afghanistan within a year and a half, Doxie warned that the U.S. commitment there is likely to last far longer than that. “General McChrystal has said that if everything in Afghanistan goes exactly right, the way he wants it to, we have a minimum of 10 more years there — on top of the nine years we’ve already been there. And of course it won’t go exactly according to plan. It never does.”

Echoing a point made by some of the speakers in the movie that al-Qaeda no longer has, seeks or needs a permanent base in Afghanistan, Field added, “And the enemy is no longer even there.”

Queer Democrats’ Surprising Endorsement for Lt. Governor

Reject S.F. Mayor Newsom, Embrace L.A. City Councilmember Hahn

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

PHOTOS, top to bottom: Stephen Whitburn, Shelia Jackson, Juan del Río

In a surprising move, the predominantly Queer San Diego Democratic Club rejected San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s candidacy for California lieutenant governor at their regular meeting March 25. Instead, they endorsed Los Angeles City Councilmember Janice Hahn for the June 8 Democratic primary, after a brief but spirited debate in which two veteran club activists debated the race on behalf of the candidates. A third candidate, State Senator Dean Florez (D-Fresno), dropped out in mid-March but was unlikely to have got the club’s endorsement anyway because of his long-standing opposition to same-sex marriage equality. (Ironically, when Florez dropped out of the race he endorsed strong marriage-equality advocate Newsom.)

Former club president Craig Roberts spoke for Janice Hahn, but his remarks had the tone of a jilted lover about them as he described how he’d changed from supporting Newsom in his former bid for governor to opposing him now. During his gubernatorial campaign, Roberts said, Newsom “made disparaging remarks about the office of lieutenant governor and about Jerry Brown,” the former governor who’s the Democrats’ presumptive nominee for the top office in 2010. He stressed Hahn’s family background — her father Kenneth was a long-term member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and her brother James served one term as mayor of Los Angeles — and the fact that unlike Newsom, Hahn has “been running for several months without apology.”

Speaking for Newsom, club vice-president for political action Alex Sachs stressed his courageous stand in 2004, when he unilaterally ordered San Francisco officials to start marrying same-sex couples who applied. Though the California Supreme Court shut down the marriages after one month and declared them invalid, Newsom’s actions, according to Sachs, “put marriage equality on the national issue map.” Sachs argued that Newsom would make a better lieutenant governor than Hahn because he has executive experience as mayor. “He and Jerry Brown can be an effective leadership team,” Sachs said, adding that Newsom had put 2,100 unemployed San Franciscans to work with federal stimulus money and had worked to get one-half of the city’s taxicabs to run on liquefied natural gas (LNG) instead of gasoline.

“I’m not that impressed with either Brown or Newsom,” said club member Bryan Wildenthal. “Other than on marriage equality, Newsom is not considered a progressive in San Francisco.” Wildenthal pointed out to the turmoil in Newsom’s personal life — his own marriage broke up during his mayoralty over an affair he had with a campaign staff member, and he has since divorced and remarried — and said that not only would he support Hahn for lieutenant governor, “I wish she were running for governor.”

Speaking for Newsom, club member Gerry Senda said, “Janice Hahn would be a great workaday lieutenant governor, but Gavin is a lightning rod and an attention-getter who would allow Jerry Brown to advance the progressive agenda three inches instead of one inch.”

“When Gavin Newsom was running for governor, the Young Democrats did a fundraiser for him down here, but he’s no longer running for that position, and when the California Young Democrats had their endorsement meeting in Sacramento, they endorsed Janice Hahn,” said Allan Acevedo, immediate past president of the Stonewall Young Democrats, the club’s youth affiliate. “Part of the reason we did that was because the progressives in San Francisco, the Young Democrats chapter, endorsed Janice Hahn. They wouldn’t endorse their own mayor. He’s not very well liked.” Acevedo said one of his concerns was that if Brown and Newsom head the Democrats’ statewide ticket, the party will be fielding two white men from the San Francisco Bay Area versus Republican Meg Whitman, who has a big lead in her party’s race for governor; and state legislator Abel Maldonado, likely Republican nominee for lieutenant governor. Like Roberts, Acevedo stressed the importance of nominating a woman to maintain the California Democratic Party’s progressive reputation against a Republican ticket likely to be headed by a woman.

The final vote on the endorsement wasn’t even close. With 49 votes cast, Hahn was backed by 33 members — well above the 60 percent threshold needed for an endorsement — with 13 votes for Newsom and three for no endorsement.

Four Democrats vs. Roberts for Supervisor

The lieutenant governor’s endorsement, and its surprising outcome, took some attention away from what was supposed to be the main business of the evening: hearing Democratic candidates seeking to replace Republican incumbent Ron Roberts on the San Diego County Board of Supervisors. Since Roberts won his seat in 1994 — ironically, with the endorsement of the San Diego Democratic Club, before the San Diego County Democratic Party changed its rules and forbade party clubs from endorsing non-Democrats even in non-partisan races — the Board of Supervisors has consisted of five Republicans and no Democrats, and party officials and activists have been frustrated by the unwillingness of Democrats with elective office experience and name identification even to run for the seats.

The frustration continued this year, as two “name” Democrats who were highly touted for Roberts’ seat failed to emerge as contenders. Assemblymember Lori Saldaña, whom the club actually endorsed in the race last November, dropped out, and termed-out City Councilmember Donna Frye procrastinated throughout the filing period and finally decided at the last minute not to run. So San Diego County Democratic Party chair Jess Durfee hit on a strategy to run four Democrats from different demographic backgrounds and political bases in the June 8 primary, in hopes that together they can deny Roberts the 50-percent-plus-1 he would need to win the seat outright in June and set the stage for a runoff between Roberts and whoever tops the Democratic field.

Three of the candidates — former San Diego City Council candidate Stephen Whitburn, San Diego Unified School District board member Shelia Jackson and Latino activist Juan del Río — spoke to the club on March 25. Ironically, the only one who didn’t show was former club vice-president Margaret Moody. Though the three candidates who did appear had slightly different emphases, all of them used the slogan, “Throw the bum out!,” and keyed their appeals to the need to get at least one Democrat on the Board of Supervisors rather than keep it an all-Republican club, insensitive to the needs of social-service recipients, working-class people and other consumers of the social services that are one of the county’s principal responsibilities.

“Ron Roberts has had too many years to do whatever he’s done,” said del Río. “There’s never been a Latino on the San Diego County Board of Supervisors, even though we’re 30 percent of the county’s population. I was in MEChA [the Latino student activist group Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán] at San Diego State University, and have worked with nonprofit organizations, standing up for people who need social services. Right now I’m a foreclosure counselor, because of the economic crisis we’re in that Ron Roberts doesn’t have a clue about.” Del Río said that his clients have included traditionally middle-class people — “electrical engineers, registered nurses” — and said that housing and public transportation are among his top priorities.

Jackson stressed her experience as the only Democratic candidate for Roberts’ seat who has actually served in elective office. “I started looking at this seat several years ago,” she said. “We have students coming to school hungry; 60 to 70 percent of our kids are on free or reduced-cost lunches. It’s the county that’s responsible for that. We don’t have a county hospital or a good food service program. The county has failed us. … Our county [government] has no clue about the suffering of people in the county. They don’t even consider how their decisions affect the most vulnerable people in the county. To get out of the economic crisis, we need well-fed and well-educated people.”

“Everyone in this room agrees it’s time to put a Democrat on the Board of Supervisors,” said Whitburn. “Let’s talk about specific issues. The Board of Supervisors has two major areas of responsibility — social services and development and land use issues — and because so much of their work is behind closed doors, most people don’t have a clue what the Board of Supervisors does.” Whitburn said they are “horrendously bad” on both social services and land use: “They don’t even seek available money for social services from the state and federal governments.” He praised the Board for voting down the proposed development atop Merriam Mountain near Escondido — which would have meant blowing off the top of the mountain to make room for over 25,000 homes — but said they should never let it get so far through the planning process that it took the Board itself to block it. Whitburn also criticized Roberts, as a county representative to the board of the Metropolitan Transit System (MTS), for voting for the recent sweeping cutbacks in Sunday bus service.

Though coming from widely varying backgrounds — Jackson an African-American woman, del Río a Latino man, Whitburn a Gay man and the absent Moody a straight woman — the candidates showed few differences on the issues. All three endorsed the controversial proposal from the local Service Employees’ International Union (SEIU) to impose a two-term limit on service on the Board of Supervisors — even though term limits are usually favored by Republicans and opposed by Democrats, and the limits would affect them if one of them won but not the Republican incumbents. All three also opposed privatizing or outsourcing county jobs, and del Río called himself “a victim of outsourcing,” since he’d been a state employee until former governor Pete Wilson privatized his job out of existence.

Asked about medical marijuana dispensaries, Jackson said they would be fine “as long as they are regulated the correct way” — which provoked a comment from Whitburn to the effect that Jackson had signed a letter calling for a complete ban on “pot shops.” Jackson said she’d signed onto the letter in support of a community organization seeking to keep dispensaries from being located near schools. Asked how they’ll handle being the lone Democrat on a board with four Republicans, Jackson said she’s used to the experience because when she got elected to the school board she was also an “unwelcome stranger,” but had been able to win votes and make her minority positions into majority ones. Whitburn stressed his 18 years’ experience as a reporter and his ability to ask tough questions, and del Río said he thought the staff and other resources of a supervisor’s office will help him persuade his colleagues to run the county “not as a private business, but for the public good.”

The club debated the race only briefly, pointing out that all three candidates would be an improvement over Roberts. Bob Leyh, the club’s vice-president for development, said the club should decline to endorse, but instead should rate all three candidates acceptable and mount a major push for whichever one makes it to the runoff in November — if there is one. Most of the other members who spoke favored Whitburn, not only because he’s a former president of the club and the club strongly backed him in his 2008 City Council campaign (which he lost to fellow Gay Democrat Todd Gloria) but because, as Gerry Senda put it, they felt it important “to keep Ron Roberts from getting LGBT [Queer] votes.” Whitburn won the endorsement easily, with 46 votes to three for Jackson, one for del Río and four for no endorsement — and Whitburn, in his acceptance speech, thanked the Stonewall Young Democrats for endorsing him as well.

Governor, Sheriff and a Farewell

The club also made a unanimous endorsement of Jerry Brown for governor — as the only major Democrat in the race, this was practically a given — and briefly considered the race for San Diego County Sheriff. Since there are only three candidates — appointed incumbent and former undersheriff Bill Gore; Jim Duffy, son of controversial former sheriff John Duffy; and former Assemblymember Jay LaSuer — and they are all Republicans, the club couldn’t endorse anyone in the race. Nor could they rate any of the candidates acceptable, since none had appeared or filled out the club’s issues questionnaire.

What the club did do was rate LaSuer “unacceptable.” Most club members were familiar with LaSuer’s background — elected to the La Mesa City Council and then to the California State Assembly on an anti-immigrant, anti-Queer platform — but for those who weren’t, political action vice-president Sachs read a November 4, 2009 blog post from self-proclaimed “ex-Gay” anti-Queer Christian activist James Hartline, strongly endorsing LaSuer and saying both Gore and Duffy had disqualified themselves by seeking Queer community endorsements and support.

“Time after time, Assemblyman LaSuer would hold his head up high and walk into the midst of the very radical, anti-Christian Democrat-controlled State Assembly and make his stand for the moms and dads of San Diego, California,” Hartline wrote in the blog post Sachs read. “Faced with the overwhelming assault of the radical Gay lobby and the extremist Democrat socialists who were redefining family, Jay LaSuer never once compromised his values or backed down from his opponents. In September of 2005, when radical Lesbian and homosexual legislators Mark Leno, Christine Kehoe, Carol Migden, John Laird and Sheila Kuehl were plotting to subvert the will of California voters to pass AB 849, the Gay marriage bill, Assemblyman Jay LaSuer planted his feet in the middle of the assembly chambers and declared, ‘Not On My Watch!’”

Finally — although it was actually the first item on the agenda — Gloria Johnson, the club’s second president and first woman president, paid a fond tribute to the late Midge Costanza, who had died two days before. Costanza was a New York activist in the 1970’s who campaigned for Jimmy Carter and was appointed to his White House staff — only to quit 20 months later when she couldn’t accept Carter’s support for a ban on federal funding for abortions. Costanza later moved to San Diego and worked for Democratic candidates, and officials, including Governor Gray Davis and Congressmember Lynn Schenk, and frequently appeared at club events. She keynoted the club’s Freedom Banquet one year and talked about how she had organized the first meeting of Queer community leaders ever held inside the White House — surreptitiously, during a weekend while President Carter was out of town.

“I first met Midge Costanza when she was working for Carter,” Johnson recalled. “She came to San Diego for a speaking engagement and I asked her what Carter was doing for Lesbian and Gay rights. She stumbled over the question but always remembered that I was the first one who ever asked her. She moved to San Diego in 1990 and really did a lot for our community. She was appointed by Gray Davis to the California Commission on the Status of Women. Midge and I didn’t always get along — a few years ago we had an argument over her support of Jerry Sanders instead of Donna Frye for mayor — but I always respected her.” Johnson announced that the Midge Costanza Institute is mounting a fundraising campaign in her memory; the Institute can be contacted at P. O. Box 15523,
San Diego, CA 92175, by phone at (619) 594-8033 or via e-mail at midgecostanza@att.net

Congratulations to Anthony Rollar and Tiger, Mr. and Ms. San Diego Leather 2010!

Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Photos taken at the Mr. San Diego Leather contest, Rich’s in Hillcrest, March 20, 2010

1) Mr. San Diego Leather 2010 winner Anthony Rollar

2) Mr. San Diego Leather 2010 runner-up Al Smith

3) Ms. San Diego Leather 2010 Tiger

4) Mr. San Diego Leather 2010 MC Lenny Broberg (a San Francisco police officer!)

5) wolfgang and slave jeff, “judges’ boys” at the 2010 Mr. San Diego Leather contest

6) slut bottom chris, one of the judges for Mr. San Diego Leather 2010

7) Mr. San Diego Leather 2009 Bryan Teague gets a shine from a bootblack

8) Rafael

9) Mark Gabrish Conlan and Joshua Simon

10) The color guard at the 2010 Mr. San Diego Leather contest

There Is No God — and He Can Prove It

Horacio Hanson Makes that Claim to S.D. Humanist Association

By MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

There is no God, says 85-year-old author and ex-Roman Catholic Horacio Hanson — and he can prove it. That’s the claim he makes in his self-published book There Is No Creator: Religion Is a Fraud: What Now? — a title he readily admits is a deliberate in-your-face challenge to believers — and repeated when he spoke about it to the San Diego Humanist Association at the San Diego Public Library downtown on March 13. After noting that the worst insult in the Arabic language is, “May God deprive you of your religion,” Hanson launched into an hour-long presentation that made it clear that depriving his listeners — and the rest of humanity — of religion is precisely his intention.

“The purpose of this book is to liberate humanity from all religion,” Hanson said. “The intent is not to insult or injure an individual. I do understand that not everyone is capable of restraining strong emotion when challenged.” Hanson called atheism “the fastest-growing philosophy” and claimed that “there are about 1 billion non-religious people in the world today.” Why, then, isn’t atheism a mass movement? “Because there is no money in atheism,” Hanson said, “no chapels, no cathedrals, no priests, rabbis or mullahs, and no atheists collecting money for ‘salvation IOU’s’.”

According to his biographical note on the back cover, the roots of Hanson’s book came when, as a disillusioned ex-Catholic in his mid-20’s, he decided to read the Bible for himself without a lot of priests explaining away its nastier, more gruesome or more flatly unbelievable contents. For good measure, he read the Quran as well. His “proof” of the non-existence of God relies on taking the statements in the Bible and the Quran absolutely literally and subjecting them to the logical test called reductio ad absurdum — that is, extrapolating from them until they obviously defy both physical reality and common sense.

Most of the text of There Is No Creator is a kind of anti-spiritual nit-picking of the text of the scriptures of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, pointing out not only the passages of the Bible and Quran that unequivocally advocate slavery and genocide but the contradictions between different parts of the scriptures, as well as between the scriptures and observed reality. (One of the most grimly amusing passages is the description of how big Noah’s ark would have to have been to contain everything the Bible says it contained.) But his talk to the Humanist Association mostly avoided details of his critique and focused on the social harm done by religion and the abuses committed by believers in its name.

“Physical and economic crime and social abuses, committed in the name of religion, have been accepted and even justified as ‘freedom of religion’,” Hanson said. “During the past 12 decades, Islamic religious groups have unleashed indiscriminate attacks in many parts of the world, but the commission of crimes is not the principal reason religion must be denounced. Its basic excuse for existing, God or Allah, is false. It is not there. If this can be proven, religion is exposed as a fraud, and believers will face the embarrassment of having been suckered. Some people will resist, but a lot will be glad to be relieved of meaningless rituals and rules.”

Hanson admitted that the response of some religious people to his fly-specking the scriptures and pointing out all the logical absurdities and physical errors will be to assert that the Bible and Quran are just “parables” and are not to be read as literally true. The story he cited was the Exodus and the Hebrews’ years in the desert, during which — according to the Old Testament — they wandered for 40 years, traveled 87,650 miles (3.5 times the circumference of the earth) … and ended up in what is now Israel, only 180 miles from their starting point in Egypt. Citing “the appalling excuses given for God’s prolonging” their agony, Hanson said, “How can the brutal stupidity of Numbers have survived the Age of Reason?”

“Some religious propagandists say, ‘If it weren’t for the Bible, where would we get our morals?’” Hanson said. “Imagine what the world would be like if everyone who worked on the Sabbath were killed, as the Old Testament demands.” Hanson made it clear he doesn’t think much of “Biblical morality,” including “the institution and organization of slavery by God: God dictates that servants and their descendants must serve their masters.” He quoted Exodus 21:7 — “If a man sell his daughter to be a maidservant, she shall not go out as the menservants do” — and asked, “These are morals?”

Hanson also cited God’s — or at least his representatives on earth’s — seemingly endless need for money and the vicious punishments prescribed in the Bible for those who don’t fork it over. One would, he argued, expect the Creator of Heaven and Earth not to need continually to soak his creations for contributions — but that’s not what God says in Malachi 3:8-10: “Will a man rob God? Yet ye have robbed me. But ye say, Wherein have we robbed thee? In tithes and offerings. Ye are cursed with a curse: for ye have robbed me, even this whole nation. Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house.”

According to Hanson, the contradictions that run through the Bible begin at the very beginning — between the statement that “God created Man in his own likeness” and the part a bit later that says, “Male and female created He them.” Then which is God? Male or female? “The writers are stuck with multiple images of God because there are multiple images of man,” Hanson said. “And since 98 percent of chimpanzees’ genes are identical to human genes, God would have to be in the image of chimps as well.”

Arguing that “never have so few failed so many for so long” — a description of religious leaders he admitted paraphrasing from Churchill — Hanson also confronted the problem theologians call “theodicy”: the attempt to reconcile the idea that God is good with the disasters, natural and otherwise, that repeatedly strike humanity. In his book, Hanson ridicules the Exodus story by pointing out that God supposedly intervened to spare the Israelites from being kept in perpetual servitude by the Egyptians — but he didn’t do jack in the 20th century to stop the Jews from being annihilated en masse by the Nazis.

To Hanson, “theodicy” is just one more piece of evidence that there is no such thing as God: things just happen to people, sometimes at the hands of other people, sometimes not, and the sheer randomness of accidents, both good and bad, is one of his proofs that there is no God. Ridiculing some of the typical excuses religious people make for God — that “He works in mysterious ways,” that “everything happens for a reason,” that God is “testing our faith” — he cited some hypothetical stories chilling in their happenstances as proof that there is no design, no conscious intent, ruling the fates of human beings, and therefore there is no God.

“A soldier is badly wounded in battle, but the medics are close by and apply first aid. Then a mine explodes, killing the soldier and one of the two medics carrying him in the stretcher. Or a five-year-old boy goes into a river in the jungle to get his ball, and he starts to drown. His mother jumps in to save him, and then a crocodile comes and eats both of them. Or a group of people are on a camping trip and a bear attacks one of them, a woman. The others run away at the sight of the bear, and then they hear the woman’s cries for help: ‘Oh, God! He’s tearing off my arm! I’m dying!’ No one helps, including the nonexistent ‘God.’ What could she have done to ‘deserve’ being eaten by a bear?”

Hanson argued that there are “two basic elements of every religion: a Creator and a soul. But if the soul is eternal, what’s the purpose of having a body? What’s the point of the extinction of species, including ones that became extinct before there were humans? If you’re thinking pain, anguish, injury and death for humans is ‘punishment’ for ‘original sin,’ you will be disappointed. Why are there miscarriages and stillbirths? Why the institutionalization and eternalization of poverty? Religion does not have the answers to these questions — or the billions of things that happen beyond human control. ‘God is mysterious in His ways’ is an obvious cop-out.”

Perhaps the most interesting part of Hanson’s book is part four, in which he outlines a non-religious system of morality based on German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s “categorical imperative” and argues that, once freed from the yoke of religion, that people will be able to end war and solve many other social and psychological problems, including sexual jealousy. His argument about sex is that, once “free from religion or traditional social rules,” people will no longer believe that their relationships will last “till death do us part” and won’t have unreasonable expectations that the person they love will never have or want sex with anyone else again. This will also solve the abortion issue, Hanson said, since once people cease to believe religious preachments that regard the fetus as a “person” and instead realize that plenty of abortions happen without human intervention — we merely call them “miscarriages” or “stillbirths” — there will no longer be any justification for not allowing women reproductive choice.

Hanson described his book’s section on “War” as “a detailed plan for the antithesis of aggression and the total abolition of war, which in Eisenhower’s words will happen when ‘the demand for it by the hundreds of millions… become[s] so universal and insistent that no man, no government, anywhere can resist it.’ This may seem illusory to most people, but those who think beyond the box should pay attention.” But, Hanson argued, the end of religion is a necessary precondition for the end of war, because religion not only supplies the excuses over which people and nations fight, it also provides the rationale for people to set aside their usual moral scruples against killing other people, and justifies mass murder.

Asked how he could say that religion was the foundation of all war and genocide when the 20th century produced leaders like Lenin, Stalin and Mao — avowed atheists who killed millions of their own people — Hanson described them essentially as amoral psychopaths. “Lenin and Stalin were just murderers,” he said. “They killed, but not for religious beliefs. Stalin was so self-centered he didn’t care about religion. He just wanted to kill people.”

One questioner brought Hanson back to a topic he’d briefly touched on in his lecture and discussed in more detail in his book: how do you create a morality and get people to accept limits on their behavior without invoking God and the spectre of divine retribution. “Morals have been established forever,” Hanson said. “Even primitive people had certain rules. The Code of Hammurabi, the Roman code, the Napoleonic Code and the U.S. Constitution were not based on religion at all. People — except for the handful with busted-up minds — routinely stay away from cruelty. Religion didn’t stop John Gardner [the alleged killer of Chelsea King].”

Hanson cited Kant’s “categorical imperative” as a model for a non-religious code of ethics, though he said he’d come up with a pithier way of stating it than Kant’s (“Act as if the maxim of your action were to become, through your will, a general natural law”): “What if everybody did it?” This, he said, would provide enough of a rationale for any sane person to draw back from social nuisances and crimes, from playing your music too loud for your neighbors to killing people, without having to believe in a God that would punish them if they did things that would benefit themselves but harm others. “Morals don’t require religion,” Hanson said. “You can have morals completely independent of religion.”

Ironically, one questioner compared Hanson’s conversion to atheism in his 20’s with St. Paul’s in the other direction — moving from rejecting to accepting Christianity — and asked if there was a moment of epiphany in his 20’s when he rejected the church he’d grown up in, been educated by and, until then, believed in totally. “It doesn’t depend on epiphany,” Hanson said. “There are trillions of neurons in the brain and they never stop functioning. It was gradual at the beginning, but then I took an extended boat trip for 45 days and I had some doubts. I decided to make up my mind, and ultimately concluded, ‘No way!’”

Above the Law

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN, Editor

Copyright © 2010 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

There is a force in our society that controls trillions of dollars and has such totally unaccountable power it has literally put itself above the law — and no, unlike most people who write that way these days, I don’t mean the federal government. I mean the private business sector, especially the large corporations that dominate the U.S. economy. They fund the political system, paying millions of dollars in campaign contributions to elected officials and candidates, and in return getting legal changes that make them billions in profits. Among the laws they order from their kept politicians — with all the certainty you or I expect from a fast-food order from McDonald’s — are custom-tailored exemptions from the normal expectations of civilized behavior, ranging from paying taxes to not dumping your waste in other people’s backyards. Over and over again, corporate and business leaders tell us that they are the ones who provide the jobs and create all social wealth — and over and over again, we go on believing them and letting them live and operate beyond law, beyond ethics, beyond morality and beyond basic decency.

Just one month’s reading in a major newspaper will offer plenty of articles in support of everything I’ve just said. Los Angeles Times, February 20: “The billionaires’ club of private financiers who took over the remains of IndyMac bank from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. turned a profit of $1.57 billion last year on the failed mortgage lender — more than they invested less than a year ago.” And guess who’s on the hook for the failed bank’s losses? The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which operated the entity for the eight months between the time the previous owners’ mistakes drove it out of business and the time the new owners took over. This fund, which is supposed to make good on money you and I lose from our bank accounts if our banks go out of business, lost up to $11 billion making those financiers $1.57 billion richer.

Los Angeles Times, also February 20: “After months of public input and consultation with experts, the state’s pharmacy board appeared to be poised to adopt strict new requirements for prescription drug labels last month. But that changed when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger placed a drugstore industry executive” — Deborah Veale of CVS, the company that of late has been gobbling already large chains like Sav-On and Long’s — “on the board a day before the vote.” The losers: “consumer advocacy groups and senior citizen and minority organizations.” The winners: the California Retailers Association, who had been fighting the changes — and had also contributed $400,000 to Schwarzenegger’s political campaign.

Los Angeles Times, February 23: David Lazarus’s column in the business section tells the story of 50-year-old Bob Iritano, who has terminal cancer. “It’s not a question of whether he’s going to die,” Lazarus wrote. “The only question is when, and how much longer he’ll be with his family. Iritano, understandably, wants all the time he can get … His health insurer, he believes, has a different time frame in mind. ‘My best guess is they want me dead as soon as possible … They know that the premiums I pay will never cover how much they’ll spend on me.’”

Iritano and his wife contacted Lazarus after his insurer, HealthNet, refused to pay for a procedure — microwave radiation — they’d covered just six months earlier. What’s more, they waited to tell him that until he was already in the hospital, ready to go, surrounded by doctors, nurses and an anaesthesiologist ready to treat him — and a HealthNet rep phoned the O.R. and said they weren’t going to pay for it, and if he went ahead it was going to cost him $20,000 out of pocket. The letter he got from HealthNet later said they thought it would be more cost-effective if he had chemo instead of radiation — even though his doctors were sure he couldn’t handle chemo and trying it would probably kill him.

Los Angeles Times, February 7: “Employing a broad-based lobbying effort, the soft drink industry has smothered a [federal] plan to tax sugared beverages — a plan advocates said would have reduced obesity and helped finance health care reform.” According to reporters Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger, “the White House staff reviewing funding options never embraced the idea even after President Obama expressed interest last summer.” The soft drink industry went after the proposed tax with all barrels blazing, using tactics ranging from ridiculing the scientists who’d done the research linking soft drink consumption with obesity to tapping the goodwill from years of contributions they’d given “minority advocacy groups, including some committed to fighting obesity” and getting them to oppose the tax.

Los Angeles Times, February 21: “Manufacturing businesses, big financial firms and energy companies are eager for new tax breaks in California — but not if it means officials will take a harder look at how they claim the credits.” The story, by Sacramento-based reporter Evan Halper, said that “a coalition of corporations” was fighting a bill that stood to make them money because they didn’t like the 20 percent fee they’d have to pay if they were later found to have taken a tax credit they weren’t entitled to. “The only reason you would oppose this penalty is if you’re cheating on your taxes,” a frustrated state senator Lois Wolk, chair of the senate’s tax committee, told Halper.

And if you think that corporations have any sense of accountability even to their stockholders — the people they’re supposedly in business to benefit by paying them profits as dividends — think again. Los Angeles Times, February 24: “Since Brian Moynihan took over as chief executive at Bank of America Corp. at the turn of the year, he has sought to convey a flexible and cooperative attitude. But the accommodating approach hasn’t been extended to shareholders seeking to put proposals regarding executive pay on the ballot at the company’s April 28 annual meeting. The bank is ‘being aggressive in doing whatever they can do to keep shareholders off the ballot,’ said John Chevedden of Redondo Beach, a retired aerospace worker who has proposed a number of shareholder resolutions at banks.” Not that the executives at Bank of America would be in any real danger of losing such a vote — most corporations head into their annual meetings with so many shares locked up in favor of the existing management that such resolutions are usually swamped in the final vote — but this company doesn’t even want a few dissident shareholders to be able to stage a token protest vote against their swollen pay packages, stock options and bonuses.

Two more items show how the voter initiative — originally approved in California in 1912 as a way the people could bypass the control of the Southern Pacific Railroad and other mega-companies of the time over the legislative process — has instead become a way for corporations to set themselves even further above the law by tricking the people into giving them what they want when they haven’t been able to persuade elected legislators. Los Angeles Times, February 10: Michael Hiltzik’s column is about Proposition 16 on the June 8 state ballot. The measure would require any public entity to win two-thirds voter approval before it could start, expand or finance a publicly owned power service as an alternative to private utilities like Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), the state’s largest private utility — which put up $3.5 million to get the measure on the ballot and had just contributed $3 million more in the face of a letter from nine state legislators, including State Senate President pro tem Darrell Steinberg, questioning whether PG&E’s use of the initiative process violated state law.

“By undermining all competition from public power agencies, [Proposition 16] will benefit no one except PG&E and other private utilities,” Hiltzik wrote. “In official documents, PG&E identifies its campaign finance committee as ‘a coalition of taxpayers, environmentalists, renewable energy, business and labor,’ but at this stage it’s a coalition of one: PG&E. No one else has contributed a dime, according to the most recent campaign finance filings. By the way, PG&E claims it is so strapped for money that it is currently seeking a $1.1-billion rate increase.”

Hiltzik again: Los Angeles Times, February 21. This time his column is about a corporate power grab in the tiny Pacific Coast city of Carpinteria, just south of Santa Barbara, pitting an elected city council against a Denver-based oil company called Venoco. This firm, Hiltzik wrote, “is spending lavishly to pass a ballot initiative specifically exempting itself from the city’s industrial development and environmental rules. That’s because it’s afraid that Carpinteria’s elected officials, left to their own devices, might not greenlight its proposal to operate a 10-story oil derrick round the clock on its property next to a 225-home residential neighborhood and on the edge of the ecologically sensitive coastal bluffs.” When, after four years of negotiation, the city refused to give Venoco the permit they wanted, the company spent its money to put the initiative on the ballot and is counting on stoking public fear and promising voters “royalties” that may never materialize.

All these examples — and they only scratch the surface — indicate an attitude on the part of corporate and business America that the ordinary rules of law, ethics and morals simply do not apply to them. The argument of the corporate leaders and their political, media and intellectual flunkies is that in a capitalist economy, it is the private sector that creates jobs and enables people to survive economically — and therefore they should be allowed to do anything they wanted, free from pesky regulations or social obligations the rest of us take for granted, like paying taxes. And ever since the 1970’s, elected officials — either out of genuine belief in the pro-corporate, anti-society mantras or out of fear the spigots of campaign cash they depend on would be turned off if they did otherwise — have consistently given the corporate desperadoes whatever they wanted: freedom from taxation, from regulation, from controls on so-called “innovations” that — especially in the so-called “FIRE” (finance, investment, real estate) sector that is now the largest part of the U.S. economy — usually just mean creative new ways of screwing ordinary people out of their money.

What’s more, we the people are letting them get away with it big-time. At the turn of the last century, plenty of Americans looked to building up the public sector as a viable way of controlling the abuses of private enterprises. No more: after decades of Right-wing propaganda extolling private enterprise as good, efficient and virtuous, and government as evil and corrupt — and after the failure of the socialist ideal in the face of the dictatorship and misery to which the Soviet Union and other “really existing socialisms” subjected their people — most Americans reflexively regard the business interest as the public interest and reject all organized challenges to it — from labor, environmentalists, people of color or anyone else — as “special interests.”

The ease with which the Right-wing propaganda machine in this country was able to demonize President Obama’s corporate-friendly health insurance reform as “socialism” and a “government takeover” of health care shows just how much most Americans have been brainwashed into the private-good, public-bad idolatry of “the Market.” The Rightists were able to win this stunning propaganda victory even in the face of the most far-reaching collapse of the private sector and the really existing market economy since the Great Depression of the 1930’s. And their successful strategy was to convince the American public that any expansion of government’s role in health care would bring such intolerable evils as long waits, arbitrary denials of treatment and bureaucrats coming between you and your doctor — which are already being done every day, in spades, by the private, for-profit health insurance industry.

Until the American people get over their zombie-like support of and faith in “the Market,” there will be no effective reform either of American politics or of any sector of the U.S. economy. There will only be scofflaw corporations, thumbing their noses at the people while they continue to drive wages down, export jobs to foreign countries, destroy the social safety net, pollute the environment and, through putting the pedal to the metal on global warming, ultimately speed up the extinction of the entire human race. If the people of this country were truly aware of how they’re getting screwed and who’s screwing them, we wouldn’t be seeing misled idiots staging “tea party” rallies trashing the government and calling for lower taxes; instead we’d be seeing a broad-based movement to demand accountability from a runaway private sector.