The JvL Bi-Weekly

 

James van Luik

Publisher & Editor

 

Saturday, January 31, 2004

Volume 3, No. 2 

 

5. Articles

 

 

1. On Marriage in "Recorded History"

2. The Pearl Harbor Deception

3. Jobs Without Power

4. Wars 'Useful', Says US Army Chief

5. No to Bio-Political Tattooing

 

 

1. ON MARRIAGE IN "RECORDED HISTORY"

BY

GARY LEUPP

 

Dear Governor Romney,

 

On November 18 the Massachusetts high court ruled that discrimination against gay couples in matters relating to marriage violated the Commonwealth's Constitution. You immediately rejected that decision, declaring: "I agree with 3,000 years of recorded history. I disagree with the Supreme Judicial court of Massachusetts. Marriage is an institution between a man and a woman … and our constitution and laws should reflect that." Your official website informed the public that you will support an amendment to the Massachusetts Constitution to make that expressly clear marriage is a special institution that should be reserved for a man and a woman."

 

So you "agree with history," you say, on this question of gay marriage. As an historian, I don't agree or disagree with "history," which is not a person with an opinion, but merely the record of countless people pursuing their own ends, interacting with one another and their environments through time. (Occasionally they make breakthroughs, producing new things; there's no reason for sentient beings to be stuck on precedent.) "I agree with history" is really a meaningless statement, rather like saying "I agree with time," or "I agree with reality," or "I agree with the way my father and grandfather and my ancestors before them thought about things." What I suppose you're really saying is that you agree with the proposition that heterosexual marriage (of some sort) should be recognized by law, to the specific exclusion of homosexual unions. You deploy in support of that proposition the assertion that this is the way it's always been. Gay marriage, you thus contend, will be a radical departure from our civilized past.

 

But this is just not true, Governor. You invoke "History" as though it's some source of authority, but you really don't know much about it, do you? "No investigation, no right to speak," I always say, and if you want to talk about homosexual unions in recorded history you should do some study first. First, I recommend you read John Boswell's fine book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (University of Chicago Press, 1980), in which he documents legally recognized homosexual marriage in ancient Rome extending into the Christian period, and his Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (Villard Books, 1994), in which he discusses Church-blessed same-sex unions and even an ancient Christian same-sex nuptial liturgy. Then check out my Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan (University of California Press, 1995) in which I describe the "brotherhood-bonds" between samurai males, involving written contracts and sometimes severe punishments for infidelity, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Check out the literature on the Azande of the southern Sudan, where for centuries warriors bonded, in all legitimacy, with "boy-wives." Or read Marjorie Topley's study of lesbian marriages in Guangdong, China into the early twentieth century. Check out Yale law professor William Eskridge's The Case for Same-Sex Marriage (1996), and other of this scholar's works, replete with many historical examples.

 

What the study of world history will really tell you, Governor, is that pretty much any kind of sexual behavior can become institutionalized somewhere, sometime. You know that polygamy remains normal and legal in many nations, as it was among your Mormon forebears in Utah. In Tibet, polyandry has a long history, and modern Chinese law seems powerless to prevent marriages between one women and two or three men. Getting back to same sex issues, the Sambia of New Guinea have traditionally believed that for an adolescent boy to grow into a man, he absolutely must fellate an adult male and chug the semen down. I'm not making this up; see Gilbert H. Herdt, Guardians of the Flutes (Columbia University press, 1981). Now you and I would see that as a kind of child abuse, but to the Sambians, it's just commonsense. It's been that way for well over 3,000 years of their history. (You might want to ask yourself: does that 3,000 years of their history make it right?) Some ancient Greek tribes had a similar notion of the necessary reception of semen to make a boy a man, only with them it was an anal-routed process. (See works by Jan Bremmer, for starters, on this practice as an "initiation rite" among various Indo-European peoples.)

 

Some suggest that there have been two basic traditions of male homosexual behavior on this planet, prior to the evolution of the contemporary egalitarian model: These intergenerational role-specific ones, in both pre-class and more sophisticated societies; and those that involve males who assume a female or transgender identity, who often also have shamanistic roles, such as the berdache of Native American peoples, or the hijra in Hindu society. These are generally available fore "straight" men to bed with if they want to. A variation of this tradition is the ancient Mesopotamian male temple-prostitute (the cult of which spread to Israel, as recorded in the Old Testament; see 1 Kings 14:24, 22:47, etc.). The idea was, you'd bugger one of these holy prostitutes, mystically unite with the deity thereby, and by your fee for this pleasure opportunity, assist in the maintenance of the temple. I'm not trying to gross you out or anything, Governor, just help you recognize that there may be more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your (somewhat too confident) perspective of sexual history.

 

Over the last 3,000 years to which you specifically allude (someone else was telling National Public Radio that the Supreme Justice court ruling defied 5,000 years, which would make departure from precedent even more serious), there has in fact been no global marriage norm. In some societies, a man and woman, of their own free will, formed a relationship, decided to forge a life-long commitment, got the necessary permissions and ceremonial legitimacy, started  have sex after that, and maintained a monogamous union thereafter until one died. That's been very unusual, though. Arranged marriages involving varying degrees of input by the couple (usually less by the female) have been more the norm. (Do you realize, Governor, how radically sections of human kind departed from the prior "history" you so validate, when we stared insisting on the freedom of young couples to marry without their parent's consent, and to do so based on "love"---which is another complex and evolving historical category? You might perhaps read Friedrich Engels' still relevant book The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, and learn something about how capitalism and the whole notion of the free market played a positive role here.)

 

For demographic and economic reasons (rather than articulated moral ones), monogamy has generally been far more widespread than polygamy. But in more societies than not, wealthy, powerful men have enjoyed the polygamous option. That of course goes for the ancient Hebrews, whose example inclined the founders of your church, that of the Latter-Day Saints, to enthusiastically endorse the practice from the church's founding in 1830 up to Wilford Wooddruff and his Manifesto in 1890. Then, whether due to a divine revelation , or to a desire to get Utah admitted to the Union (it's not for me to judge) LDS up and banned polygamy. Although, of course, some rogue elements continue the practice which mainstream Mormons now consider illicit.

 

But to agree with three, or five, or twelve thousand years of random past practice would require you, Governor Romney, to oppose the ban that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has from its inception placed on polygamy. I tell you, though: if you refused to do that, I'd be right there behind you. I'm a tolerant person and I realize that  lots of Thai and Nigerian and Saudi guys have multiple wives, and maybe I even sort of lust, Carter-like, in my heart to emulate them. But I'm not a total moral relativist, and as public policy, I think monogamy's the right road, and you should stand firm in its support, never mind the Mormon past, which isn't your fault in any case.

 

Another thing. Not to get personal, but I've been married to a Japanese woman for 20 years. I'm aware some people have problems with this sort of arrangement; for a long time (from 1905) in California "miscegenation" between whites and "Mongolians" of all types was banned by law. But such laws seem so stupid now, don't they? At the time, such intimacies were depicted as "unnatural" mixes of racial superiors with inferiors bound to mess up the pure white gene pool. Of course the Mormon Church was committed to the view that African-Africans were inferior (and certainly unfit as partners to Mormon whites) way up until 1978, when Spencer Kimball, the 12^th Prophet, got his word from the Lord and the policy was revised. Before that, the US Supreme Court had ruled that Virginia state law banning black-white  intermarriage could not be enforced; very recently (1998), South Carolina chucked its constitutional clause, dating to 1895, forbidding "marriage of a white person with a Negro or mulatto or a person who should have one-eight or more Negro blood." Things change if people want them to.

 

When I got married, the Japanese had a law that the children of Japanese men and foreign women would automatically have Japanese citizenship, but those of foreign men and Japanese women would be denied that status. (The idea was: only Japanese semen makes Japanese kids.) This discriminatory treatment reflected the long standing patriarchal prejudices of the Japanese legal code. By chance my daughter was born in the year that the law was changed (following protests by Japanese wives of foreigners), to confer Japanese citizenship on all children of Japanese nationals. So by random chance my kids are dual-nationals. That just seems reasonable, right? But there was a time in which those in power in Tokyo recoiled at the idea that a hairy–faced foreign barbarian's offspring would mix equally with the progeny of the Sun Goddess in the Land of the Gods. My point, again, is just that views on these issues aren't historically static, and good decent people can work to change them.

 

The freedom to link yourself to another, and benefit from whatever range of privileges your political and cultural environment confer on "marriage," should not be arbitrarily confined to males who are attracted to females, and to females attracted to males. Even if that premise had, in fact, as you suggest, prevailed since the dawn of civilization, it would be irrational. If history (with a capital H), has any function at all, it is to induce people, merely through cumulative experience, to get more rational, and thereby alleviate the kinds of suffering they can inflict upon themselves. Recognition of gay marriage is a step towards recognizing reality, and alleviating the oppression homophobic ignorance and hatred inevitably inflict. That's the reasoning behind the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts' ruling.

 

You, in response, panicking at the prospect of a broader, more inclusive concept of marriage, have proposed as a half-way measure legislation recognizing "civil unions" between same-sex couples. But please, Governor, go to sleep, have a dream, an open-minded divinely inspired dream. Let God Almighty, or whomever, Himself appear to you and say, "I've decided to revise the earlier, 3,000-year old institution you've been talking about. For no more shall ye make any distinction among my people as to their sexual preference. I the Lord God am no respecter of persons, but all shall come unto me and all of legal age may be worthy to receive all the blessings of marriage. So, Mitt, assemble the people in the tabernacle which is the Massachusetts State House, on Beacon Street and Park Street in Boston, and speak unto them these words, saying: 'Gay marriage actually has lots of historical precedents. May Massachusetts, cradle of the Revolution, point the way once again in demanding recognition of what is just, fair, reasonable, and civilized.'"

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2. THE PEARL HARBOR DECEPTION

BY

ROBERT B. STINNETT

 

Two questions about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor have ignited a controversy that has burned for 60 years: Did US naval cryptographers crack the Japanese naval codes before the attack" Did Japanese warships and their commanding admirals break radio silence at sea before the attack?

 

If the answer to both is "no," then Pearl Harbor was indeed a surprise attack described by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a "Day of Infamy." The integrity of the US government regarding Pearl Harbor remains solid.

 

But if the answer is "yes," then hundreds of books, articles, movies, and TV documentaries based on the "no" answer—and the integrity of the federal government—go down the drain. If the Japanese naval codes were intercepted, decoded, and translated into English by US naval cryptographers prior to Pearl Harbor, then the Japanese naval attacks on American Pacific military bases were know in advance among the highest levels of the American government.

 

During the 60 years, the truthful answers were secreted in bomb-proof vaults, withheld from two congressional Pearl Harbor investigations and from the American people. As recently as 1995, the Joint Congressional Investigation conducted Sen. Strom Thurmond and Rep. Floyd Spence, was denied access to a naval storage vault in Crane, Indiana, containing documents that could settle the questions.

 

Americans were told of US cryptographers' success in cracking pre-Pearl Harbor Japanese diplomatic codes, but not a word has been officially uttered about their success in cracking Japanese military codes.

 

In the mid-1980s I learned that none of the hundreds of thousands of Japanese military messages obtained by the US monitor stations prior to Pearl Harbor were introduced or discussed during the congressional investigation of 1945-46. Determined to penetrate the secrets of Pearl Harbor, I filed Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests with the US Navy. Navy officials in Washington released a few pre-Pearl Harbor documents to me in 1985. Not satisfied by the minuscule release, I continued filing FOIAs.

 

Finally in 1993, the US Naval Security Group Command, the custodian of the Crane Files, agreed to transfer the records to National Archives in Washington, D.C. In the winter of 1993-94 the files were transported by truck convoy to a new government facility built on the College Park campus of the University of Maryland inside the Washington beltway, named Archives II. Mr. Clarence Lyons, then head of the Military Reference Branch released the first batch of Crane Files to me in the Steny Hoyer Research Center at Archives II in January 1995.

 

Apparently, the pre-Pearl Harbor records had not been seen or reviewed since 1941. Though refilled in PH-safe archival boxes by Lyons' staff, some of the Crane documents were covered with dust, tightly bunched together in the boxes and tied with unusual waxed twine. Lyons confirmed the records were received from the US Navy in that condition.

 

It took me a year to evaluate the records. The information revealed in the files was astonishing. It disclosed a Pearl Harbor story hidden from the public. I believed the story should be told to the American people. The editors of Simon & Schuster/The Free Press published Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor on December 7^th, 1999.

 

Day of Deceit was well received by media book reviews and the on-line booksellers, Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. com, earning a 70% public approval rating. Day of Deceit continues among the top ten bestsellers in the non-fiction Pearl Harbor book category, according to Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com.

 

About 30% of the reviews have discounted the book's revelations. The leaders of the dispute include Stephen Budiansky, Edward Drea, and David Kahn, all of whom have authored books or articles on code breaking. To bolster their pre-Pearl Harbor theories, the trio violated journalistic ethics and distorted the US Navy's pre-Pearl Harbor paper trail. Their efforts cannot be ignored. The trio has close ties to the National Security Agency, the overseer of US naval communications files. Kahn has appeared before NSA seminars. The NSA has not honored my FOIA request to disclose honorariums paid the seminar participants but has released records that confirm Kahn has been a participant.

 

Immediately after Day of Deceit appeared in bookstores in 1999, NSA began withdrawing pre-Pearl Harbor documents from the Crane Files housed in Archives II. This means the government decided to continue 60 years of Pearl Harbor censorship. As of January 2002, over two dozen NSA withdrawal notices have triggered the removal of Pearl Harbor documents from public inspection.

 

The number of pages in the withdrawn documents appears to be in the hundreds. Among the records withdrawn are those of Admiral Harold R. Stark, the 1941 Chief of Naval Operations, as well as crypto records authored by Commander Joseph J. Rochefort, the chief cryptographer for the Pacific Fleet at the time of Pearl Harbor. Under the Crane File transfer agreement with National Archives, NSA has the legal right to withdraw any document based on national defense concerns.

 

Concurrent with the NSA withdrawals, Budiansky, with the aid of Kahn and Drea, began a two-year media campaign to discredit the paper trail of the US naval documents that form the backbone of Day of Deceit. One of the most egregious examples of ethical violations appeared in an article by Kahn published in the New York Review of Books on November 2, 2000. In that article, Kahn attempted to bolster his contention that Japanese admirals and warships observed radio silence while en route to  attack American Pacific bases. Kahn broke basic journalism ethics and rewrote a US Naval Communication Summary prepared by Commander Rochefort at his crypto center located in the Pearl Harbor Naval Yard.

 

About 1,000 intercepted Japanese naval radio messages formed the basis of each Daily Summary written by Rochefort and his staff. The Japanese communication intelligence data contained in the messages was summarized and delivered daily to Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet. Rochefort's summary of November 25, 1941 (Hawaii time) was not to Kahn's liking. It revealed the Commander Carriers of the Imperial Japanese Navy were not observing radio silence but were in "extensive communications" with other Japanese naval forces whose admirals directly commanded the forces involved in the Pearl Harbor attack. Because of the International Dateline, the "extensive communications" mentioned in the summary took place on November 26, 1941, Japan time, the exact day the Japanese carrier force began its journey to Hawaii.

 

In its entirety the Rochefort summary reads: "FOURTH FLEET—CinC. Fourth Fleet is still holding extensive communications with the commander Submarine Fleet, the forces at Jaluit and Commander Carriers. His other communications are with the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Base Forces."

 

The meaning of the summary is unequivocal: The commanders of the powerful Japanese invasion, submarine, and carrier forces did not observe radio silence as they maneuvered toward US bases in Hawaii, Wake, and Guam Islands in the Central Pacific. Instead they used radio transmitters aboard their flagships and coordinated strategy and tactics with each other.

 

The summary corroborates earlier findings by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian John Toland. In the late 1970s, Toland interviewed personnel and obtained US naval documents from San Francisco's Twelfth Naval District that disclosed that the "extensive communications" were intercepted by the radio direction finders of the US Navy's West Coast Communications Intelligence Network. Doubleday Published Toland's account in 1982 as Infamy: Pearl Harbor and its Aftermath.

 

Yet in his NYRoB article Kahn deleted portions of the Rochefort summary in the middle of the first sentence, profoundly diminishing its significance. Kahn's version: "Fourth Fleet is still holding extensive communications with the Commander Submarine Fleet."

 

Kahn violated basic journalism rules by deleting crucial words and not using ellipsis to indicate a deletion. When I cited these ethical violations to the editors of the NYRoB, Kahn offered an excuse and implied that Rochefort's summary was too long. "I had to condense my review," he wrote.

 

Kahn probably believes his deletion was insignificant because he denies that the Commander Carriers were involved in the Pear Harbor attack. "The force that attacked Hawaii was not that of the Commander Carriers but the First Air  Fleet," he wrote in his reply to my Letter to the Editor of the NYRoB (February 8, 2001). Kahn revealed his ignorance of the Japanese naval organization. The First Air Fleet operated under Commander Carriers, that is, Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, who was in charge of the entire Hawaii Operation.

 

Captain A. James McCollum, USNR(Ret), who served in San Francisco's Twelfth Naval District intelligence office (and later on the intelligence staff of Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz) accused Kahn of committing "journalistic crimes." "That critic, David Kahn, seems to have deliberately distorted some facts and even altered quotations…," McCollum wrote in his letter to the editors of the NYRoB on February 14, 2001. The letter was never published.

 

Stephen Budiansky continued his media blitz in the Wall Street Journal. In a December 27, 2001 Letter to the Editor of the Journal, Budiansky praised Kahn as "…widely regarded as the world's leading authority on the history of code breaking…" Then in following paragraphs, Budiansky mimicked Kahn and misreported the facts concerning the US naval monitor station on Corregidor, known as CAST. He challenged the Day of Deceit account and wrote that CAST was located in Cavite, Philippines.

 

Budiansky's errors involving CAST  reveal a poor understanding of US naval communications intelligence operations. CAST was temporarily located at the Cavite Naval Base in 1936, then moved to Mariveles on the Bataan Peninsula. In October 1940, the station was relocated to Corregidor. The new quarters were located in an underground crypto center carved from the rock of Corregidor. CAST remained on the rock until the spring of 1942 when advancing Japanese troops forced its removal to Australia. Budiansky did not differentiate between the 1940-41 US naval broadcast radio center at Cavite and the US navy cryptographic monitor station on Corregidor.

 

The mistakes of the Budiansky-Drea-Kahn team concerning Station CAST worsen.

 

In the same Wall Street Journal edition, Edward J. Drea, a retired US Army historian, also wrote a misleading account of the crypto operations at CAST in November 1941. Mr. Drea challenged a CAST report dated November 16, 1941, by its commanding officer Lieutenant John M. Lietwiler who reported to Washington that his staff was "current" in intercepting, decoding, and translating the Japanese navy's Operation Code.

 

Lietwiler was a highly trained crypto expert in deciphering the Japanese Navy's main operation code known to Japan in the fall of 1941 as the Kaigun Ango-sho D, Ransuhyo nana (Navy Code Book D, random numbers table seven). He spent 1940 and most of 1941 learning the principles of decoding Code Book D from Agnes Meyer Driscoll, the brilliant Chief Civilian Cryptanalyst for the US Navy. MS. Driscoll was the first American to discover the solution of Code Book D, soon after Japan introduced it in June 1939.

 

Upon completing the Code Book D crypto course, Lietwiler was dispatched to CAST with the latest decoding details of Table Seven. He arrived and took command of CAST in September 1941. Lietwiler's expertise and devotion to his crypto duty meant nothing to Drea. In his letter, Drea demoted Lieutenant Lietwiler and described him as a "1941 writer."

 

Challenging my interpretation of Lietwiler's letter, Drea states: "Nowhere in the cited communications is the Japanese naval code mentioned." Drea is correct in the narrowest sense. To understand that Lietwiler was discussing the Japanese naval operations code requires a broader context.

 

Mr. Drea failed to comprehend Lietwiler's technical crypto language used in the letter. It was addressed to Lietwiler's counterpart in Washington, D.C., Lieutenant Lee W. Parke, another of the US Navy's brilliant cryptographers. Parke had devised a crypto machine that automatically decoded the additive/subtractive columnar tables of Table Seven. Parke called his invention the JEEP IV and sent it to CAST by officer courier. It arrived on Corregidor on October 6, 1941, via the armed US naval transport USS Henderson.

 

The construction of JEEP IV was specifically authorized by Rear Admiral Royal Ingersoll, Acting Chief of Naval Operations. In a memo dated October 4, 1940, Ingersoll wrote, referring to Code Book D: "an additive key cipher is employed in this code, and, although the method of recovery is well defined, the process is a laborious one, requiring from an hour to several days for each message. A machine is under construction which will aide in the mechanical part of the solution, but it must be accepted that current information will seldom be available immediately…" The Ingersoll memo directly connects the Lietwiler memo to the Japanese naval operations code.

 

Lietwiler refers explicitly to JEEP IV in the letter and ads that his Crypto Yeoman Albert Myers Jr., bypassed JEEP IV and was able to "walk across" the many columnar tables of Code Book D. Readers of the Wall Street Journal should know that Code Book D used columnar random number Table Seven in the fall of 1941. If Mr. Drea had done more crypto homework, he would have known the purpose of JEEP IV. It is fully spelled out in US Navy files. JEEP IV is derived from Parke's unit whose secret navy crypto designator was GYP (phonetic = jeep). But he failed to understand the esoteric language used by the two code breakers.

 

I could point out more errors by the trio, but I will limit myself to one more. They refer to errors in dates in Day of Deceit. The so-called date "errors" they cite are not "errors" but are related to the geography of the International Date Line. Like many easterners who have never been west of the Hudson river, the trio does not realize that November 25 in Hawaii is November 26 in Japan. The mid-ocean date change between America and Japan is known throughout the world. It is the result of geographers establishing the Date Line in the Mid-Pacific. America's day begins in Guam, not New York.

 

"Many of us who are veterans of World War II's Pacific Theater of Operations have always suspected that the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was deliberately provoked. A half century later, Robert Stinnett has come up with most of the smoking guns. Day of Deceit shows that the famous 'surprise' attack was no surprise to our war-minded rulers, and the three thousand American military men killed and wounded one Sunday morning in Hawaii were, to our rulers and their present avatars, a small price to pay for that 'global empire' over which we now so ineptly preside." – Gore Vidal

 

"Step by step, Stinnett goes though the prelude to war, using new documents to reveal the terrible secrets that have never before been disclosed to the public. It is disturbing that eleven presidents, including those I admired, kept the truth from the public until Stinnett's Freedom of Information act requests finally persuaded the Navy to release the evidence." – John Toland, author of Infamy.

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3. JOBS WITHOUT POWER

BY

Jonathan Tasini

 

For at least half their waking hours, the American people live in a dictatorship. At home or in public places, Americans enjoy a measure of freedom and liberty envied by most people around the world: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of association (true, John Ashcorft is trying to change all that but that's another story). But, the moment Americans walk through the doors of their work place, they enter into a world that strips away all their basic rights. Within the walls of the workplace, the whim of the corporation is more powerful than the US Constitution.

 

Workers cannot say what they believe lest they risk being shown the door. They are fired if they try to exercise their right to freedom of association. They can be secretly monitored via telephone, computer or camera. Grown adults must ask for the right to pee. Having very little power to shape their working environment and subjected to a daily diet of control, oppression and humiliation, I'm actually amazed that more workers have not revolted or even resorted to physical violence.

 

When we can't band together at work, if that's our choice, we leave our economic future in the hands of companies that break the law every day, with no consequences, because they make money every day they don't have to bargain with a union chosen by workers. Companies fire employees, threaten to close plants and they hire trained union-busters to strike fear into the hearts of workers. Millions more of our neighbors, friends and relatives would happily join a union if they weren't faced with an antiquated legal system, which long ago ceased to become relevant because it is simply a tool used to brutalize Americans at work.

 

Shockingly, America as a nation does not grasp the daily war people face at work. If you ask the average person – certainly white-collar professionals, but even traditional  blue-collar laborers – whether any worker can simply decide to exercise their rights under the law without fear of harmful consequences, they would answer in the affirmative. In a recent poll by Peter Hart Research Associates, 92 % of the people said they would find it unacceptable for corporations to fire employees who support a union – but only 17 % of those people  believed that employers engage in such behavior, which is rampant. There is a huge disconnect between perception and reality.

 

Here's another disconnect. Consider, for a moment, some grim long-term economic factors, not the short-term focus on whether we're in a recovery or not: people are out of a job longer than at any time since the 1960s; we have an underemployment rate – which includes people who are unemployed and people working part-time who would like to have full-time work – that has hit double digits (10.3% in June 2003); over 40 million Americans, millions of them children, have no health insurance; and an impending global hemispheric shift in 2005, brought on by trade rules, will send hundreds of thousands of jobs to poorer countries, devastating urban and rural America.

 

We rarely connect the draining of our economic vitality – if you will, the American dream we extol in our yearnings for a decent livelihood – to the unrelenting corporate war against people's desires to form unions. In states where unions are strong, people earn more money and have better health care, their children go to better schools, and they experience less crime and poverty than states where unions are invisible. Check it out – why does Canada have national health insurance? Over 40% of its workers have unions.

 

Something is terribly wrong in America. I'm not talking just about corporate corruption, or the spectacle of executives looting their companies with the excuse that they deserve their stock options and obscene pay, or the cynical, fiscal madness of a political bribe (read: tax-cut) tossed like bread crumbs to millions of desperate people who face a steady erosion of pay, pensions and health care in very corner of urban and rural America.

 

No, what's far scarier is what we've come to live with at work. Our political and legal system has created a world where a corporation decides, with virtually no restraints, what to do with our jobs – the jobs for which our communities provide the sons and daughters who create the wealth of a corporation. We get distracted when a few corporate scoundrels get tossed in jail – even though that never changes the fundamental imbalance of power in the workplace. We ponder the value of our 401(k)s, instead of demanding pensions secure from casino-like investments in the stock market. We endure titles like "associate," which convey false security and stature to minimum-wage workers with no benefits. We have accepted as economic "fact" that we will have to take many jobs in our lifetime and retrain ourselves, not out of choice but, so we're told, because that's the way the economy works, particularly the global economy.

 

This can change. The cries for power at work are there, the demands that could ignite a modern-day civil rights movement are percolating. It is still inchoate, atomized by the shear size of our country and the invisibility of the message in our mass culture. But, with each decade bringing new frustrations piled upon past economic burdens – pensions declining or being taken away; slow growth in income; the attacks on Social Security and Medicare; the health care crisis; bad trade agreements; and a government policy that favors the rich over the rest of us – the desire grows strong to bring to the workplace the principles of democracy, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

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4. WARS 'USEFUL', SAYS US ARMY CHIEF

AS REPORTED BY

A BBC STAFF MEMBER

 

(Editor's note: I put this article in because I was stunned by the statements quoted for the head of the US Army. To me they seem to be at the level of television commentary generally geared to the 12 year old mind.)

 

 

The head of the US Army has said that the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have provided a "tremendous focus" for the military.

 

General Peter Schoomaker said in an interview with AP news agency that the wars had allowed the army to instill its soldiers with a "warrior ethos".

 

But the general who became chief of staff in August, denied warmongering saying the army must be ready to fight.

 

He also said he doubted recruiting more troops was a solution to army stress.

 

"You aren't stronger because you have more people," he said, adding that expanding the army was similar to pouring water on sand.

 

Many senior military figures have expressed concern about "over stretch", a problem which has become particularly acute in post-war situations like Iraq which require more troops than combat.

 

 But General Schoomaker says the answer could be to expand combat strength by freeing troops from other assignments.

 

'Silver Lining'

 

General Schoomaker said the attacks on America in September 2001 and subsequent events had given the US army a rare opportunity to change.

 

"There is a huge silver lining in this cloud," he said.

 

"War is a tremendous focus…. Now we have this focusing opportunity, and we have the fact that [terrorists] have actually attacked our homeland, which gives it some oomph."

 

He said it was no use having an army that did nothing but train.

 

"There's got to be a certain appetite for what the hell we exist for," he said.

 

"I'm not warmongering, the fact is we're going to be called and really asked to do this stuff."

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5. NO TO BIO-POLITICAL TATTOOING

BY

GIORGIO AGAMBEN

 

(Translated from Italian to French by Martin Rueff. & Translated from French to English by French language correspondent Leslie Thatcher.)

 

The newspapers leave no doubt: from now on whoever wants to go to the United States with a visa will be put on file and will have to leave their fingerprints when they enter the country. Personally, I have no intention of submitting myself to such procedures and that's why I didn't wait to cancel the course I was supposed to teach at New York University in March.

 

I would like to explain the reasons for this refusal here, that is, why, in spite of the sympathy that has connected me to my American colleagues and their students for many years, I consider that this decision is at once necessary and without appeal and would hope that it will be shared by other European intellectuals and teachers.

 

It's not only the immediate superficial reaction to a procedure that has long been imposed on criminals and political defendants. If it were only that, we would certainly be morally able to share, in solidarity, the humiliating conditions to which so many human beings are subjected.

 

The essential does not lie there. The problem exceeds the limits of personal sensitivity and simply concerns the juridical-political status (it would be simpler, perhaps, to say bio-political) of citizens of the so-called democratic states where we live.

 

There has been an attempt the last few years to convince us to accept as the humane and normal dimensions of our existence, practices of control that had always been properly considered inhumane and exceptional.

 

Thus, no one is unaware that the control exercised by the state through the usage of electronic devices, such as credit cards or cell phones, has reached previously unimaginable levels.

 

All the same, it wouldn't be possible to cross certain thresholds in the control and manipulation of bodies without entering a new bio-political era, without going one step further in what Michel Foucault called the progressive animalization of man which is established through the most sophisticated techniques.

 

Electronic filing of finger and retina prints, subcutaneous tattooing, as well as other practices of the same type, are elements that contribute towards defining this threshold. The security reason that are invoked to justify these measures should not impress us: they have nothing to do with it. History teaches us how practices first reserved for foreigners find themselves applied later to the rest of the citizenry.

 

What is at stake here is nothing less than the new normal bio-political relationship between citizens and the state. This relation no longer has anything to do with free and active participation in the public sphere, but concerns the enrollment and the filing away of the most private and incommunicable aspect of subjectivity: I mean the body's biological life.

 

These technological devices that register and identify naked life correspond to the media devices that control and manipulate public speech: between these two extremes of a body without words and words with a body, the space we once upon a time called politics is ever more scaled–down and tiny.

 

Thus, by applying these techniques and these devices invented for the dangerous classes to a citizen, or rather to a human being as such, states, which should constitute the precise space of political life, have made the person the ideal suspect, to the point, that it's humanity itself that has become the dangerous class.

 

Some years ago, I had written that the West's political paradigm was no longer the city state, but the concentration camp, and that we had passed from Athens to Auschwitz. It was obviously a philosophical thesis, and not historic recital, because one could not confuse phenomena that it is proper, on the contrary, to distinguish.

 

I would have liked to suggest that tattooing at Auschwitz undoubtedly seemed the most normal and economic way to regulate the enrolment and registration of deported person into concentration camps. The bio-political tattooing the United States imposes now to enter its territory could well be the precursor  to what we will be asked to accept  later as the normal identity registration of a good citizen in the states' gears and mechanisms. That's why we must oppose it.

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(Editor's note: I would like to bring to the attention of the Bi-Weekly subscribers the article by Elizabeth Drew. Click on:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16895

The article is called Hung Up in Washington. Ms Drew is an exceptionally fine investigative journalist. In this article, she presents very clearly the majority political thought. If one is interested in radical political thinking, Ms Drew shows clearly what one faces from those in political power.)

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