The Regressive Antidote

by David Michael Green

www.regressiveantidote.net/Arti....html

Any American who’s been on the planet for more than a few years has lived through a series of economic ups and downs – what economists call the business cycle. These booms and busts seem to follow one another as inevitably as sunset does sunrise.

Phil Gramm hasn’t apparently noticed, but we’re now pretty deep into an economic downturn – whether or not it officially qualifies as a recession yet or is simply on the way to becoming one.

But two things are especially striking about this particular iteration of our economic malaise. One is that we never quite seem to have had the boom we were supposed to get in between this bust and the last one. Gross domestic product, the key single indicator of economic health used to measure the state of the economy, has done reasonably well since the downturn that began in 2000. So has the stock market, and so, especially, have the one percent or so of the richest Americans, who have lately transitioned from being ridiculously rich to obscenely rich.

Most of the rest of us, on the other hand, may be excused for wondering when the good times hit, ‘cause we somehow missed it. It’s funny (hah-hah, right?), but in the go-go late 1990s, some economists were wondering whether Alan “The Second Coming” Greenspan and Robert “Token Wall Street Pseudo-Democrat” Rubin hadn’t actually killed the business cycle forever, with only good times to come for generations on end. Ironically, the subsequent decade may be considered to have posed the same question, only with a very different meaning. Given the absence of any serious recovery content in the latest alleged recovery, maybe the business cycle is dead – only not with permanent boom, but permanent bust, instead.

In truth, though, we may come to look upon years like 2004 or 2005 as the good ol’ days. That’s because the second unique thing about the present downturn is the depth of down to which we may now be turning. I’m sure somebody was relieved when George Bush recently informed the country that the economic fundamentals are solid, but it sure wasn’t me. Hard as it is to imagine that this president could get something wrong or speak, uh, somewhat less than candidly, my fear is that conditions are quite the opposite of those the cheerleader-in-chief portrayed. I remember well the recessions of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. This one doesn’t feel anything like those. It seems a lot bigger. My fear is that the bottom may be falling out. My fear is that it’s the fire this time.

I’m not an economist (not that economists so very often know what the hell they’re talking about either), so I will readily admit that I don’t have a lot of expertise on this question. But I will say one thing with confidence, however, even as a economics dilettante (in political science we call those people ‘angry voters’). And that is that there are incredible signs of economic thin ice almost anywhere you turn today. The national debt has never been higher. Consumer debt has never been higher. Savings have never been lower. The trade deficit has never been higher. The dollar is spectacularly weak. Foreclosures are mushrooming. Quality jobs are disappearing in droves. People are working longer to maintain the same standard of living, or often less. Employers are economizing, among other ways, by cutting healthcare benefits. Real estate values are plummeting. Sure, it’s a great time to be a bankruptcy lawyer or a repo man, but probably most of us would agree that keeping people in those two fields well employed isn’t worth the trade-off of having an economy in the toilet.

George Bush has laughingly admitted that he got “gentlemen’s C’s” when he was in college (those are what the rest of us, whose daddies don’t endow library wings at Ivy League schools, refer to as F’s ), so perhaps that explains his misreading of the economy. For us folks not laughing quite so hard at his little riff out of the “Humor for Plutocrats” textbook, the real question, given the above-referenced indicators, is what in the world would it take for the Boy Wonder to finally say that the fundamentals of the economy are not sound? Does China have to start actually mailing him a monthly rental invoice for use of the White House? Does real estate have to lose fully half its value, rather than ‘merely’ 25 percent? Does the dollar need to become even more worthless than the 1930s Deutschmark for him to be concerned (“Get your wheelbarrows while they’re hot, ladies and gentlemen, right over here!”)? Or must low-hanging billionaires have to painfully downscale their lifestyles into those of impoverished multi-millionaires before he could perceive the hurt?

You wanna talk fundamentals, George? Let’s talk about some really fundamental fundamentals. And, no, I don’t mean yields-per-acre, pork belly futures or worker-productivity-to-energy-input ratios, dude.

There’s no question that America has historically been an industrious, innovative and hard-working country. We still are today, though the hard-working part has gotten simultaneously more hard, less rewarding, and less driven by desire for advancement than need for survival. Perhaps the paradigmatic moment of our time was Clueless George on the campaign trail in 2004, gushing over a woman he met who said she worked three jobs to keep afloat. For Bush, it was an ‘only in America’ moment – completely oblivious, as he seemed to be, that this represents almost nobody’s vision of the good life. Well, almost nobody. One imagines that Dick Cheney was smiling in the wings of that event, thinking to himself: “Once we get all of them doing that, our work here will be done!”. Nowadays, no industrialized country in the world has workers who put in more hours per year than the US. None has such a glaring absence of economic support programs as America does, either.

But we’ve worked hard here, historically, like the good Protestants we are, and we’ve been technologically innovative and admirably determined in achieving our far-reaching aspirations. That’s all good stuff, but just the same, though, there’s been an undeniable dark side to the phenomenal success of the American economy. We’ve worked hard to produce a lot, true, but we’ve also – in a word – stolen a lot as well.

We stole from indentured servants from the beginning. We stole from Native Americans within minutes of landing here, and never stopped until we’d grabbed all the land and resources we wanted, leaving them casinos and poverty in return. We harnessed yokes around Africans and imported them as if they were agricultural beasts of burden, and continued to do so for centuries. We built our economic accomplishments on the backs of near-slave immigrant laborers, from Chinese coolies to Mexican wetbacks, along with Irish, Italian, German, Jewish and a whole lot of other nationalities in-between. We stole fully half of Mexico following a trumped-up war no less bogus than the current one in Iraq, then we did the same for Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines and more. We broke the backs of labor movements in order to enrich a few owners while grinding ‘human resources’ into impoverishment and early death. We exploited the entire continent-and-a-half of Latin America, installing local dictators in country after country who got personally wealthy by doing the oppressive and murderous dirty work for American resource extraction corporations. We assigned to women endless domestic chores without the slightest compensation, nor political power, nor even ownership of family wealth.

These are the obvious thefts – and there is no more accurate word for it – by which we’ve massively enhanced our wealth over a period of centuries. But there are less obvious ones as well. We have raped the environment for precisely the same purposes. You can get a lot wealthier a lot faster by not concerning yourself (or even paying compensation for) the environmental destruction caused by manufacturing, mining, drilling and more, than you would by having to be responsible for those very real costs of your enterprise. Economists like to gently refer to such factors as ‘externalities’. That’s a polite way to describe a process by which the rich get even richer through offloading the costs of their business to you and me, and keeping the profits for themselves.

Not content with any of that, however, we’ve also lately been engaged in other, new and improved, more subtle forms of national wealth theft. Rampant consumerism based on little plastic cards is quite effective, leaving costs to others, like our children. So is – as exhausted consumerism now heads for the ditch – turning our houses into piggy banks to keep an economy artificially afloat, until that can no longer be sustained either. Or running incredible trade deficits, or radically deflating the value of our currency to keep sales of American goods abroad halfway viable. Another nice trick you can do is run up the national debt and leave that to your kids as well. You can also ignore your infrastructural repair and development needs so people can party on now, instead of paying the taxes necessary to keep the economy strong for the next generation. Talk about eating your young. One of the best of all these games over last decades has been the uninhibited agenda of economic globalization which has now managed to successfully export American white collar jobs to India, right behind the blue collar ones that previously went to China. That was supposed to make us all richer, remember? Some people indeed are. Those without jobs, or working for half what they used to make, aren’t in that small group however.

What all of these ploys have in common is that they are all methods allowing one to live larger than we’re rightfully entitled to. Slavery is the most obvious example. You wanna live the good life? The most basic formula ain’t that hard to figure out. Kidnap some dude from a less technologically developed part of the world, terrorize him with overwhelming force and psychological violence to go along with the real kind, then watch as he plows your field while you sit on the porch sipping Mint Juleps. Then, repeat. This is the most obvious example, yes, but really no different in principle from ripping off your own kids with tax ‘cuts’ unaccompanied by spending cuts, which drive up the national debt and hand the next generation the bill. Plus interest. Or stealing in the form of externalizing costs for remediating environmental destruction while the eco-evildoers go off scot-free with grossly inflated profits (indeed, in some cases, these would be non-existent profits, were the real costs to have been factored in). And so on, and so on.

The work of Reaganism-Bushism is nowadays finally beginning to be recognized for what it is. Americans have not felt such economic insecurity since the Great Depression. Whether the epiphany will come in time for them to finally recognize and give leave to the kind folks who dismantled the Good Times of previous generations, is unclear. A very possible scenario is that McCain barely wins in November – on the strength of fear, racism and the usual Rovian smear tactics – literally just months before economic anxiety finally crests over into newfound consciousness and rage. That would feel like a giant version of 2005, when Americans were frightened into re-electing the Little Tyrant, and almost immediately began to regret their choice. This was truly another paradigmatic moment, as Bush did his usual blustering performance, bragging about his mandate and the political capital he now planned to start spending. As he quickly found out when he tried to rip-off the Social Security system, and as his job approval ratings continued to sink until just about nobody other than a few crackers in the Texas Hill Country still thought he was doing a good job, the only mandate he had actually garnered was to be someone other than the cartoon caricature of a would-be president that Rove had turned John Kerry into (with the latter’s ample assistance).

If McCain once again drags the spent and stinking carcass of kleptocratic robber baron public policy across the finish line in November, while the economy continues to deteriorate, he’ll have only two choices on coming to office. One would be to abandon his party once and for all in a sort of reverse version of the U-turn Francois Mitterrand famously executed, moving from socialism to mixed economy capitalism during the 1980s. McCain might actually relish that notion. He probably hates the crap he’s had to take from the bastards who rule his party nearly as much as the rest of us do. Plus he may know he’s a one-term president no matter what, so what’s he got to lose? And we know that he admires Teddy Roosevelt most of all the former presidents, and such a move would be right out of TR’s playbook.

His other choice would be to continue to hew closely to right-wing orthodoxy while the ground disintegrates below our feet. This would surely please Grover Norquist and all the billionaires whose massive earnings are maybe off by ten percent lately (boo-hoo, fellas), but if he did this my guess is that the rest of the country might well turn on him with some caged-animal ferocity raging behind bared teeth. For reasons which still entirely elude me (though which nowadays probably have a lot to do with simply waiting it all out), the public massively disapproves of the Bush administration, but does nothing about it. My gut tells me, however, that having their hopes quashed once again as things get worse, and the guy they’ve just reluctantly chosen president continues the same destructive policies of doing nothing but making the rich richer, is a bridge too far. At the risk of mixing metaphors, I wouldn’t want to be John McCain on the day that particular dam breaks.

But the bigger point is simply this. Americans historically did well by working hard, educating themselves and bringing clever innovation to the table. But for just as long they got really rich by stealing the extra wealth, whether from someone else’s labor, from their neighbors, from the environment in which we live, or from the future.

What if there are no more piggy banks from which to steal? What happens if the US economy has finally hit the wall of remorseless reality, and can only produce what it can honestly produce? What happens to the American economy and American standards of living if all the gimmicks have been exhausted?

The fire this time?

“The world is changing. The old ways will not do…It is time for a new generation of leadership.”

I use the following on quote every page of Exquisite Safaris: "If you are coming to help me, you are wasting your time but if you are coming because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together." -Indigenous Saying

I believe it represents the exact message that Barack Obama is communicating when he asks you to believe in hope.

Please consider the possibility of a world where everyone collaborates in peace.

-Vidourle

Learn More:
tinyurl.com/3xjyxs
~~~~~~~

Ted Kennedy Monday January 28, 2008

So let us reject the counsels of doubt and calculation. Let us remember that when Franklin Roosevelt envisioned Social Security, he didn’t decide—no, it was too ambitious, too big a dream, too hard.

When John Kennedy thought of going to the moon, he didn’t say no, it was too far, maybe we couldn’t get there and shouldn’t even try.

I am convinced we can reach our goals only if we are “not petty when our cause is so great”-- only if we find a way past the stale ideas and stalemate of our times – only if we replace the politics of fear with the politics of hope – and only if we have the courage to choose change.

Barack Obama is the one person running for President who can bring us that change.

There was another time, when another young candidate was running for President and challenging America to cross a New Frontier. He faced public criticism from the preceding Democratic President, who was widely respected in the party. Harry Truman said we needed “someone with greater experience”—and added: “May I urge you to be patient.” And John Kennedy replied: “The world is changing. The old ways will not do…It is time for a new generation of leadership.”

So it is with Barack Obama. He has lit a spark of hope amid the fierce urgency of now.
I believe that a wave of change is moving across America. If we do not turn aside, if we dare to set our course for the shores of hope, we together will go beyond the divisions of the past and find our place to build the America of the future.

My friends, I ask you to join in this historic journey -- to have the courage to choose change.
It is time again for a new generation of leadership.
It is time now for Barack Obama.

Caroline Kennedy Monday January 28, 2008

"Over the years, I’ve been deeply moved by the people who’ve told me they wish they could feel inspired and hopeful about America the way people did when my father was president. This longing is even more profound today. Fortunately, there is one candidate who offers that same sense of hope and inspiration and I am proud to endorse Senator Barack Obama for President.

I am happy that two of my own children are here with me, because they were the first people who made me realize that Barack Obama is the President we need. He is already inspiring all Americans, young and old, to believe in ourselves, tying that belief to our highest ideals - ideals of hope, justice, opportunity and peace – and urging us to imagine that together we can do great things".

Learn More:
tinyurl.com/3xjyxs

Goodbye to all that.

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

The other obvious advantage that Obama has in facing the world and our enemies is his record on the Iraq War. He is the only major candidate to have clearly opposed it from the start. Whoever is in office in January 2009 will be tasked with redeploying forces in and out of Iraq, negotiating with neighboring states, engaging America’s estranged allies, tamping down regional violence. Obama’s interlocutors in Iraq and the Middle East would know that he never had suspicious motives toward Iraq, has no interest in occupying it indefinitely, and foresaw more clearly than most Americans the baleful consequences of long-term occupation.

This latter point is the most salient. The act of picking the next president will be in some ways a statement of America’s view of Iraq. Clinton is running as a centrist Democrat—voting for war, accepting the need for an occupation at least through her first term, while attempting to do triage as practically as possible. Obama is running as the clearer antiwar candidate. At the same time, Obama’s candidacy cannot fairly be cast as a McGovernite revival in tone or substance. He is not opposed to war as such. He is not opposed to the use of unilateral force, either—as demonstrated by his willingness to target al-Qaeda in Pakistan over the objections of the Pakistani government. He does not oppose the idea of democratization in the Muslim world as a general principle or the concept of nation building as such. He is not an isolationist, as his support for the campaign in Afghanistan proves. It is worth recalling the key passages of the speech Obama gave in Chicago on October 2, 2002, five months before the war:

I don’t oppose all wars. And I know that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war … I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.

~~~~~

...The paradox is that Hillary makes far more sense if you believe that times are actually pretty good. If you believe that America’s current crisis is not a deep one, if you think that pragmatism alone will be enough to navigate a world on the verge of even more religious warfare, if you believe that today’s ideological polarization is not dangerous, and that what appears dark today is an illusion fostered by the lingering trauma of the Bush presidency, then the argument for Obama is not that strong. Clinton will do. And a Clinton-Giuliani race could be as invigorating as it is utterly predictable.

But if you sense, as I do, that greater danger lies ahead, and that our divisions and recent history have combined to make the American polity and constitutional order increasingly vulnerable, then the calculus of risk changes. Sometimes, when the world is changing rapidly, the greater risk is caution. Close-up in this election campaign, Obama is unlikely. From a distance, he is necessary. At a time when America’s estrangement from the world risks tipping into dangerous imbalance, when a country at war with lethal enemies is also increasingly at war with itself, when humankind’s spiritual yearnings veer between an excess of certainty and an inability to believe anything at all, and when sectarian and racial divides seem as intractable as ever, a man who is a bridge between these worlds may be indispensable.

We may in fact have finally found that bridge to the 21st century that Bill Clinton told us about. Its name is Obama.

Learn More:
www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/obama

Principles of Spiritual Activism

The following principles emerged from several years' work with social change leaders in Satyana's Leading with Spirit program. We offer these not as definitive truths, but rather as key learnings and guidelines that, taken together, comprise a useful framework for "spiritual activism."

1. Transformation of motivation from anger/fear/despair to compassion/love/purpose. This is a vital challenge for today's social change movement. This is not to deny the noble emotion of appropriate anger or outrage in the face of social injustice. Rather, this entails a crucial shift from fighting against evil to working for love, and the long-term results are very different, even if the outer activities appear virtually identical. Action follows Being, as the Sufi saying goes. Thus "a positive future cannot emerge from the mind of anger and despair" (Dalai Lama).

2. Non-attachment to outcome. This is difficult to put into practice, yet to the extent that we are attached to the results of our work, we rise and fall with our successes and failures—a sure path to burnout. Hold a clear intention, and let go of the outcome—recognizing that a larger wisdom is always operating. As Gandhi said, "the victory is in the doing," not the results. Also, remain flexible in the face of changing circumstances: "Planning is invaluable, but plans are useless."(Churchill)

3. Integrity is your protection. If your work has integrity, this will tend to protect you from negative energy and circumstances. You can often sidestep negative energy from others by becoming "transparent" to it, allowing it to pass through you with no adverse effect upon you. This is a consciousness practice that might be called "psychic aikido."

4. Integrity in means and ends. Integrity in means cultivates integrity in the fruit of one's work. A noble goal cannot be achieved utilizing ignoble means.

5. Don't demonize your adversaries. It makes them more defensive and less receptive to your views. People respond to arrogance with their own arrogance, creating rigid polarization. Be a perpetual learner, and constantly challenge your own views.

6. You are unique. Find and fulfill your true calling. "It is better to tread your own path, however humbly, than that of another, however successfully." (Bhagavad Gita)

7. Love thy enemy. Or at least, have compassion for them. This is a vital challenge for our times. This does not mean indulging falsehood or corruption. It means moving from "us/them" thinking to "we" consciousness, from separation to cooperation, recognizing that we human beings are ultimately far more alike than we are different. This is challenging in situations with people whose views are radically opposed to yours. Be hard on the issues, soft on the people.

8. Your work is for the world, not for you. In doing service work, you are working for others. The full harvest of your work may not take place in your lifetime, yet your efforts now are making possible a better life for future generations. Let your fulfillment come in gratitude for being called to do this work, and from doing it with as much compassion, authenticity, fortitude, and forgiveness as you can muster.

9. Selfless service is a myth. In serving others, we serve our true selves. "It is in giving that we receive." We are sustained by those we serve, just as we are blessed when we forgive others. As Gandhi says, the practice of satyagraha ("clinging to truth") confers a "matchless and universal power" upon those who practice it. Service work is enlightened self-interest, because it cultivates an expanded sense of self that includes all others.

10. Do not insulate yourself from the pain of the world. Shielding yourself from heartbreak prevents transformation. Let your heart break open, and learn to move in the world with a broken heart. As Gibran says, "Your pain is the medicine by which the physician within heals thyself." When we open ourselves to the pain of the world, we become the medicine that heals the world. This is what Gandhi understood so deeply in his principles of ahimsa and satyagraha. A broken heart becomes an open heart, and genuine transformation begins.

11. What you attend to, you become. Your essence is pliable, and ultimately you become that which you most deeply focus your attention upon. You reap what you sow, so choose your actions carefully. If you constantly engage in battles, you become embattled yourself. If you constantly give love, you become love itself.

12. Rely on faith, and let go of having to figure it all out. There are larger 'divine' forces at work that we can trust completely without knowing their precise workings or agendas. Faith means trusting the unknown, and offering yourself as a vehicle for the intrinsic benevolence of the cosmos. "The first step to wisdom is silence. The second is listening." If you genuinely ask inwardly and listen for guidance, and then follow it carefully—you are working in accord with these larger forces, and you become the instrument for their music.

13. Love creates the form. Not the other way around. The heart crosses the abyss that the mind creates, and operates at depths unknown to the mind. Don't get trapped by "pessimism concerning human nature that is not balanced by an optimism concerning divine nature, or you will overlook the cure of grace." (Martin Luther King) Let your heart's love infuse your work and you cannot fail, though your dreams may manifest in ways different from what you imagine.

www.satyana.org/principles.html

Trust the US Government?

Areas of Continental U.S. crossed by 3 or more nuclear clouds, 1951-62. Reprinted with permission of Richard L. Miller, Under the Cloud: The Decades of Nuclear Testing.

Nevada Test Site on Google Earth: snipurl.com/1vq61

Fallout from the April 25, 1953 test named Simon blanketed upstate New York during a particularly violent rainstorm. During the storm, scientists at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York documented alarmingly high levels of radioactive fallout.

**** 8 months later my grandfather died from a fast moving cancer in Troy, New York. His wife, my grandmother died from cancer in 1972. In a town nearby my cousin, died at 12 from a brain tumor in 1978. Her mother from breast cancer in 1983. *****

Simon's picture: www.atomicarchive.com/Photos/...59.shtml

Learn More:
Chapter 1: Thunderstorm in Troy, New York
www.ratical.org/radiation/...SFchp1.html

ON MONDAY MORNING, April 27, 1953, the small group of students in Professor Herbert Clark's radiochemistry class at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute walked into the metal shack that served as their laboratory, located high on a hill overlooking the city of Troy in upper New York State. The students set about making preparations for the day's experiments, but then Professor Clark interrupted to draw their attention to something unusual. All the Geiger counters were registering radiation at many times the natural rate.

Since instruments nearest the outer walls were giving the highest readings, several students immediately went outside with a portable Geiger counter. At once they found that wherever they walked, the count rate on the ground was far above normal, in some places a thousand times as high. In particular, beneath the spout of the gutters that carried the rainwater down off the roof of the shack, the needle gave a disconcertingly high reading. Evidently the previous night's heavy rains had brought down large amounts of radioactivity.

Dr. Clark quickly guessed the source. Such high readings could only have come from heavy deposits of fallout, the drifting clouds of radioactive debris created by the explosion of a nuclear bomb in the atmosphere. To verify his guess, he phoned John Harley, a friend and former colleague who now worked for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission's Health and Safety Laboratory in New York City. As one of Dr. Clark's students recalled the story many years later, Harley's first reaction was that Clark must be kidding, and, expressing amused disbelief, he hung up. But a few minutes later, New York called back. Dr. Clark summarized the details of the morning's measurements: how the count rate from the gamma radiation on the ground was anywhere from ten to five hundred times normal, how the activity from beta rays had gone up even more, and how "hot spots" beneath rainspouts and in puddles on the pavement showed still higher readings, much higher than he had ever observed after other nuclear tests, when it had been hard to measure any additional radioactivity at all. Thoroughly alarmed, the director of the New York Laboratory, Dr. Merrill Eisenbud, promised to check personally into the situation, to send some of his top people to make their own measurements on the spot, and to take any steps that might be called for to protect the public health.

For, as Dr. Clark had just learned, there had indeed been a recent atomic bomb test, conducted by the AEC in Nevada two days earlier. The bomb, code-named Simon and equivalent in power to 43,000 tons of TNT, had been detonated in the atmosphere some 300 feet above the desert. The upper portion of the mushroom cloud had reached an altitude of about 30,000 or 40,000 feet and then drifted 2300 miles across the United States in a northeasterly direction, passing high over Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania before it encountered a severe thunderstorm in progress over most of upstate New York, southern Vermont, and parts of Massachusetts.

The storm was an extraordinarily violent one, accompanied by extremely high winds, hail, and torrential rains that flooded streets and basements, undermined foundations, and caused heavy damage to trees and houses. It was one of the heaviest flash storms Dr. Clark could remember. The sudden cloudburst, he surmised, had probably brought much of the fallout down in concentrated form. Dr. Clark quickly put his students to work in an effort to determine just how serious and widespread the danger might be.

Students set out with portable radiation detectors and began measuring the radioactivity on the pavement, on pieces of cloth, on asphalt roof shingles, on burdock leaves and other vegetation -- any place it would be likely to collect and adhere. Samples were also taken of water from reservoirs and household taps. Within a matter of hours the students were reporting back from such nearby towns and cities as Watervliet, Mechanicville, Saratoga Springs, Albany, and Schenectady that everywhere the radiation levels were about the same as on the campus. Typical readings were twenty to a hundred times normal, with hot spots up to ten times higher than that.

Now knowing the radiation levels as well as the source and age of the fallout, Dr. Clark could calculate that during the next ten weeks the total gamma radiation dose to the population from the radioactivity in the environment would be, on the average, roughly equivalent to that received from a typical diagnostic X-ray exposure. This was reassuring, since such a dose was not very different from what most people in the world receive each year from the naturally occurring cosmic rays that penetrate the earth's atmosphere. And it was well below the maximum permissible dose limits set by government agencies.

However, there was also the high radioactivity in the rainwater, which was certain to contaminate the reservoirs and thus the tap water. The samples of rainwater collected from a puddle on the campus had shown a radioactivity level of 270,000 microcuries per liter, thousands of times higher than the maximum levels then permitted by AEC standards, which were set at 100 microcuries per liter. Normal drinking water usually had an activity of about 1 microcurie per liter.

There was, accordingly, much apprehension among the students until the samples of actual drinking water from the taps and reservoirs could be analyzed early the next day. When this was done, the first of the tap water samples, taken Monday night, showed an activity of 2630 microcuries per liter -- not as great as was feared, yet still well in excess of the limit. But by that evening, the same tap gave a sample with a greatly decreased activity of 1210 per liter, while samples from nearby Tomhannock Reservoir ranged from 580 to 960. The radioactive rain was evidently becoming heavily diluted in the reservoir before reaching the taps in the households of Troy.

Thus, all concerned were greatly relieved that the total radiation doses received by the populace would probably turn out to be relatively small. It would not be necessary to filter the drinking water or decontaminate the streets and rooftops by means of elaborate and costly scrubbing procedures, a monumental task in view of the tenacity with which the radioactivity had been found to cling to rough surfaces such as pavement, asphalt shingles, and burdock leaves, and especially to porous materials like paper and cloth. Dr. Clark and his students found that even treatment with hot, concentrated hydrochloric acid -- an extreme method -- was only partially effective in removing the radioactivity from the objects to which it clung. The class also conducted tests to determine the strength of this radioactivity. Surprisingly, they found that it was comparable to that reported the previous year by the AEC's New York Laboratory for fallout in desert areas only 200 to 500 miles from the point of detonation at the Nevada test site itself.

But the possible health effects of any internal doses that might result from eating, drinking, or breathing the radioactivity were considered negligible by the New York State Health Department and the AEC. And so it was decided that nothing further need be done. An editorial in the local newspaper expressed some concern, but soon the whole incident was forgotten.

Meanwhile, however, Dr. Clark, under contract to the AEC, continued to monitor the levels of radioactivity in the reservoirs, while AEC physicists, using an extremely sensitive gamma-ray detector mounted in an airplane, conducted extensive surveys of the entire region. Detailed reports on the findings were written by the staff of the New York Lab, but, since they were classified "secret," the public never learned of their contents. All that appeared was the following brief statement in the 14th Semi-Annual Report of the Atomic Energy Commission for the first half of 1953:

After one detonation, unusually heavy fallout was noted as far from Nevada as the Troy-Albany area in New York. Following a heavy rain in that area on the second day after the detonation, the concentration of radioactivity was from 100 to 200 curies per square mile. It is estimated that this level of radioactivity would result in about 0.1 roentgen exposure for the first 13 weeks following the fallout. The exposure has no significance in relation to health.

One fact the AEC did not announce, and the general public did not learn, since it was later published by Dr. Clark in the obscure, highly specialized Journal of the American Water Works Association, was that, as the AEC continued its nuclear testing in Nevada during the spring of 1953, further rainouts repeatedly raised the radioactivity in the reservoirs serving Troy to levels comparable to those measured by Dr. Clark and his students the morning after the "Simon" rainout in April.

Excerpted: Chapter 4: A Ray of Hope
www.ratical.org/radiation/...SFchp4.html

BY THE SPRING of 1963, when the article finally appeared in Science, the levels of radioactivity in milk were reaching unprecedented heights all over the United States. Extreme concern was being voiced both by scientists and the general public regardless of the repeated reassurances by local public health officials and the AEC that no danger existed. The intensified pressure began to penetrate to the highest levels of government, and in June 1963 President John F. Kennedy announced that this country, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain had agreed to negotiate a treaty to end all atmospheric testing. He further stated that he had ordered an end to all such testing by the United States. In July the President delivered an address to the nation in which he urged the ratification of the treaty by the U.S. Senate. In this address, he referred to the threat of fallout as follows:

. . . the number of children and grandchildren with cancer in their bones, with leukemia in their blood, or with poison in their lungs might seem statistically small to some, in comparison with natural health hazards, but this is not a natural health hazard -- and it is not a statistical issue. The loss of even one human life, or the malformation of even one baby -- who may be born long after we are gone -- should be of concern to us all. Our children and grandchildren are not merely statistics toward which we can be indifferent.

It appeared that the issues involved in the question of fallout hazards were at last receiving widespread public recognition. In Congress, hearings on low-level radiation effects were being held by the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, and for the first time citizens' groups and private scientists with no government affiliations were invited to testify on this subject. In August I received a letter from John T. Conway, executive director of the Joint Committee, requesting my presence at the hearings. Leafing through the transcript of the first half of the hearings held in June, I found a reprint of my Science article. It was followed by a lengthy critique prepared by the AEC's Division of Biology and Medicine. On examination, the AEC critique proved to be strikingly similar in wording and theme to the negative review for Science. It denied that any effects from low-level radiation had been proven to exist, stating that I had ignored the studies which showed no effects. The AEC critique, however, went further and cited figures showing an actual reduction in childhood cancer rates after the heavy atmospheric testing in 1957. But the figures were only for children who were less than two years old when they died, a peculiar restriction, since Stewart and MacMahon had specifically demonstrated that cancer caused by the irradiation of unborn children only showed up after the age of two. No figures for older children were given by the AEC....

Knapp wrote a report containing these conclusions in 1960, but the AEC did not release his report for publication until August 16, 1963, just a few days before the second half of the Joint Committee hearings began, by which time it was evident that the independent scientists from Utah and St. Louis were going to make public their own similar findings. Thus, during the entire early effort to achieve a test-ban treaty, this shocking and vital information was kept from the people and political leaders of the world, while hundreds of megatons of bombs were exploded by the U.S. and Russia during 1961-62. And since Knapp's report had not even been made public by the AEC and the Joint Committee by the time of the first half of the low-level radiation hearings in June of 1963, it had still been possible for the AEC to mislead Congress and the public until just before the end. From page 225 of the proceedings of the June hearings:

REPRESENTATIVE HOLIFIELD: And the testimony before this committee has been that tolerable permission dose has not been reached by the amount of radiation that comes from manmade fallout radiation, is that not true?
DR HARLEY: Yes, Sir.

Dr. Harley was John Harley, the former colleague whom Professor Clark had telephoned at the time of the Albany-Troy incident. At that time a scientist with the AEC's Health and Safety Laboratory in New York City, Harley had since become head of the lab, which had been responsible for the classified reports on the Troy fallout during the spring of 1953.

Excerpted: Chapter 5: The Evidence Begins to Emerge
www.ratical.org/radiation/...SFchp5.html

The data consisted of a table that included all reported fatal leukemia cases among children under fifteen years of age in the Albany-Troy-Schenectady area between 1952 and 1962, together with the years in which these children were born. Examination of the table showed that, beginning in the fourth to fifth years after the 1953 rainout, the yearly number of reported leukemia cases quadrupled. This was strikingly similar to the delay in onset observed in the studies of Stewart and MacMahon and among the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the Troy area, after the eighth year, the number of cases began to decline once more, as they also did in the two Japanese cities. During the years 1952-55, before any radiation-caused leukemia cases would be expected to appear, there were a total of nine cases among children under age ten for whom the data was complete. During the years of expected peak incidence, 1959-62, there were a total of thirty cases. Statistical estimates demonstrated that the chances were less than one in a billion that this increase of twenty-one cases could be regarded as purely accidental.

And when the cases were examined according to the year of birth, there was a very noticeable sudden increase in leukemia among the children born in 1953 and 1954, the period when the fallout radiation would have been strongest. When grouped in two-year periods, the figures in Lade's table for children under ten showed the following:

Birth Years No. of Cases
----------- ------------
1943-44 4
1945 46 5
1947-48 8
1949-50 5
1951-52 6
1953-54 13


Excerpted: Chapter 7: Death before Birth
www.ratical.org/radiation/...SFchp7.html

"But when I reached 1964, I found the most extraordinary figure of all. In a single year the number of reported fetal deaths in New York State had jumped by 1500 cases. After this it declined once more -- the exact same pattern as in the Troy area. In the single year 1964, then, there must have been some ten times this number of reported cases, or, ten to fifteen thousand additional children lost by miscarriage or stillbirth in New York State alone. This tremendous steplike increase for the entire state was clearly connected with the 1961-62 test series, from which large peaks in iodine and other short-lived radioactivity resulted when the spring rains came down in 1963. Unlike the local rainouts of the 1950s, the fallout from these extremely large tests came down much more uniformly over large areas of New York State. Thus there would have been few, if any, unexposed sections, and the state as a whole would show the kind of sharp increases that earlier had been seen only in localities like Albany-Troy.

But could this extraordinary figure be the result of some statistical fluctuation, or a sudden improvement in reporting methods that happened to coincide exactly with the period of the highest fallout levels ever recorded? There was one way to check this very quickly. Unlike the number of fetal deaths, more than 95 percent of all live births are reported to the public health authorities, since nearly all of them take place in hospitals. So if there had really been an increase of some 15,000 fetal deaths in New York State in 1964, then there would have to have been a corresponding sudden drop in the number of children born live the following year. And this is exactly what happened.

For 1962, the total live births in New York State were listed as 354,152. For 1963, the number had increased to 355,760. For 1964, there was a drop to 351,602. But for 1965, there was a sudden decline to 335,628. This was a drop of 15,974 live births, or almost exactly the number of babies lost in 1964 through stillbirth or miscarriage. The rise in fetal deaths must therefore have been real.

It was imperative to make still another test. New York State in the early 1960s was more or less typical of the United States as a whole with respect to the levels of fallout in milk, food, and water. Therefore, the entire country should have shown the same effect: some ten to fifteen times as many fetal deaths in 1964, and a corresponding sharp drop in live births in 1965.

It took only a few minutes to find the figures for the children born live in the United States during these years. For 1964 the number was 4,027,000, and for 1965 it had declined to 3,760,000, a sudden drop of 267,000, the sharpest single decline in the entire history of the United States. And for the entire country the year before, fetal deaths showed a corresponding jump.

It seemed that if there had been about twenty times as many bombs detonated during the 1961-62 test series, there would probably not have been many children born live in 1965....

Excerpted: Chapter 18: Too Little Information Too Late -Three Mile Island
www.ratical.org/radiation/...Fchp18.html

But in which direction was the wind blowing during the period of highest release rates? Was there any way to find out how much was coming out at any given moment? After all, according to a story sent out by the Washington Post News Service and published on April 22, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had been told by one of its staff people, Albert Gibson, that the radiation monitors in the stack went off scale on the morning of the accident. Thus, in answer to Commissioner Victor Gilinsky's question, "So we don't really know what went up," Gibson replied, "That's correct."

The story went on to say that as much as 365 millirems per hour of beta and gamma radiation were recorded on the ground some 1000 feet from the stack, and a helicopter had recorded three times this level in the air over the vent, confirming once again that the dose rates were far higher than the public had been told at the Senate hearings when the beta radiation that accounts for most of the internal dose from inhaled gases is taken into account. But Gibson went on to say that "those measurements were very inconclusive," and that "without knowing the precise weather patterns, we don't know if they were made at the appropriate locations."

However, leafing through the report of Met Ed's environmental consultants, I found that these were all completely misleading statements. Contrary to what the NRC commissioners and the public were being told, there were radiation monitoring instruments in the plant that never went off scale, namely in the auxiliary building, whose readings were directly related to the amount of radioactive gas being released. Here was the way the utility's consultants described how it was possible to know how much gas was being released every moment:

Strip chart records from all noble gas radiation monitors in the plant ventilation exhaust show no significant radiation levels during the first three hours of the accident. Since these monitors are in the most probable pathway for release, it is concluded that no significant releases occurred before 0700 March 28. Shortly after 0700, however, these monitors, which are designed to read normal low levels, indicated rapidly increasing radiation concentrations. Within a few minutes, they went off scale on the high side. At about the same time, the in-plant building area monitors which measure radiation levels inside the fuel handling and auxiliary buildings began to record increasing levels from about 1 milliroentgen to 100 milliroentgen per hour at 0740. At about 0900 the readings began to increase again to reach about 100 milliroentgen per hour at 1000 hours. They continued to fluctuate at high levels for about four days. One or more of these area monitors continued to read on scale during the course of the accident.

The report went on to explain in detail that by means of these measuring instruments it was possible to know what went out the stack because:

. . . radiation levels measured by area monitors in the auxiliary and fuel handling buildings are proportional to the rate at which airborne gamma activity was released to the environment . . .

In table after table and chart after chart, the releases and gamma radiation doses in different directions were worked out in detail. For every hour of the accident from 4 A.M. on March 28 until midnight of the fourth day, the readings of the area monitors were given together with the hourly wind direction and wind speeds. It showed that during the period of highest releases, from 10 A.M. on Wednesday the 28th to 7 A.M. on Thursday the 29th, the winds were blowing north, northwest, and west at 6 to 9 miles per hour, sending the radioactive gas toward upstate New York and western Pennsylvania. Only later, when the rate of release had decreased tenfold, did the winds shift briefly to the south, becoming more variable thereafter.

By the time the winds were blowing toward the northeast on Saturday, the fourth day of the accident, the intensity had dropped to less than one-twentieth of its peak value, thus largely sparing the most densely populated areas of Philadelphia, New Jersey, and New York City.

No wonder the NRC staff did not want to let the public know that they knew exactly in which direction the most radioactive clouds had moved, since this information could then be used to tie any later localized rises in fetal deaths, infant mortality, and cancer to the radioactive gas clouds from Three Mile Island. In fact, I remembered only too well the attempts of some of the same individuals formerly working for the AEC to discredit my findings on the rises of infant mortality across the southeastern United States following the first nuclear-bomb test at Alamogordo by claiming that the winds were not blowing in that direction. And they certainly did not want any of this to become known before the Kemeny Commission was scheduled to complete its report in early November.

Once again, as in the case of the Nevada tests, it was essential to keep such knowledge from the public and the scientific community at large. The NRC, the EPA, and all the other federal and state agencies knew full well that the doses were comparable with those experienced by the people of Utah, Montana, Wyoming, and the other states across the northern United States as far as New York and New England during the period of the Nevada tests, or for releases from some of the largest and most heavily emitting reactors, such as Millstone in New London, Connecticut, over a period of a year or two.

SECRET FALLOUT Low-Level Radiation from Hiroshima to Three Mile Island
Dr. Ernest J. Sternglass
www.ratical.org/radiation/...SF.html#TOC

"Professor Sternglass's courageous voice has helped keep alive the debate on the health effects of low-level radiation, a debate that the military, the nuclear industry, and even some biologists and physicians have tried to bury. His new book, Secret Fallout: Low-Level Radiation from Hiroshima to Three Mile Island, is an important new contribution to that debate and should be required reading for all who are concerned with their own health, the health of their children, and of their children's children."

Victor W. Sidel, M.D.
Professor and Chairperson
Department of Social Medicine
Montefiore Hospital and Medical Center
Albert Einstein College of Medicine

Dr. Ernest Sternglass is Professor of Radiology, specializing in radiological physics, at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School, as well as Adjunct Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is past president of the Pittsburgh Chapter of the Federation of American Scientists, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the Radiological Society of North America and the American Association of Physicists in Medicine. He has testified on low-level radiation before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy and many other groups both here and abroad.

Introduction by Dr. George Wald, Nobel Laureate in Physiology and Medicine, is Professor of Biology at Harvard.

New York Times on Philanthropic Travel

When a Luxury Vacation Cultivates Philanthropy by Jennifer Alsever -New York Times Sunday December 9, 2007

Doing charity work while on vacation no longer has to mean backbreaking labor and dorm-like accommodations. A new kind of philanthropic travel lets wealthy vacationers do good works while still enjoying plush hotel suites and fine restaurants.

More luxury tour operators now offer philanthropic-minded trips to places like Kenya, Cambodia and Vietnam that incorporate visits to local schools, hospitals or wildlife centers. Travelers also go on traditional sightseeing tours and safaris that may cost $300 to $1,000 a day, not including airfare.

Even in remote African plains, tour operators pamper guests, who may stay in deluxe cottages with all the amenities. Travelers may leave those accommodations for part of their stay to visit charitable operations and get a first-hand look at how financial donations can be put to work.

"Just one person can make a world of difference for a community," said David Chamberlain, owner of Exquisite Safaris, a tour operator based in San Francisco that offers top-of-the-line services while incorporating visits to schools, health clinics and neighborhoods with hopes that clients will make a donation or become more involved. The idea is that travelers who meet the people and see how they live can become long-term, passionate donors and proponents for change.

Not surprisingly, nonprofits are lining up to become part of such tours, with the hope that wealthy vacationers may be more willing to make long-term financial commitments long after the trip is over.

For many years, international aid groups organized their own tours for big supporters. "Those people who have actually been in the field are our biggest donors," said Lisa Giaretto, managing director of the Village Enterprise Fund, a group based in San Carlos, Calif., that offers entrepreneurship training to people in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.

Next July, the Village Enterprise Fund will be part of Exquisite Safaris tours of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Guests will visit farmers, tailors and bike-repair workers who have benefited from training by Village Enterprise.

Chuck Ebeling, a retired vice president of the McDonald's Corporation, had a similar goal when he took a nine-day tour of Tanzania in the spring of 2006. He paid $500 a day to stay in a tented camp where a chef prepared dinners and staff members delivered coffee at dawn. His trip inspired him to become involved in the country's wildlife conservation efforts and led him to pay $500 to help a conservation group raise a bongo, a rare mountain antelope, with the goal of reintroducing it into the wild.

Some travelers who work charity into their trips prefer to rough it alongside the people they are helping. However, "I don't just travel to help others," said Mr. Ebeling, 64. "I enjoy some of the comforts and luxuries. I enjoy seeing the world. And the experience in east Africa was eye-opening."

John Kay, the lead singer of the band Steppenwolf, came home from a luxury 2003 vacation to Cambodia so inspired that he started his own charity, the Maue Kay Foundation. Mr. Kay, who lives in West Vancouver, British Columbia, was struck by the lingering devastation from Cambodia's Khmer Rouge regime, which left 1.7 million people dead in the late 1970s. He donated $50,000 to build a primary school there with its own water well and vegetable garden, and he also paid for teacher salaries, books and computers with satellite e-mail access. Later, Mr. Kay and his wife, Jutta Maue Kay, gave thousands of dollars more to support the Gijedabung school, to protect African wildlife and to support food banks in Puerto Rico. "The old cliche that travel broadens the mind is very true," Mr. Kay said. "We were able to have a glimpse of certain things that go beyond staying in a hotel and a day excursion."

www.exquisitesafaris.com/index...elers/

Empowering Feminine Energy: Travelers Philanthropy

<- Future President of a free Burma

So often in our world we tend to think of strength as a quality that arises from a place of firm determination and a will to succeed no matter the cost. Even though we might want to think of a strong woman as being defined in this way, what really makes a woman confident is her capacity for listening to her true self and being able to call upon her feminine wisdom to any situation that may arise. A woman does not need to step into an assertive role or act like a man in order to be effective at what she does -she simply needs to get in touch with her insight and sense of compassion to truly demonstrate the depth of her strength.

Listening to the feminine side of ourselves may not seem easy at first for this type of energy is something that is often overlooked in many aspects of our everyday lives. If we can connect with this part of who we are, however, we will find that there is an unlimited wellspring of strength available to us. Our capacity to tap into our intuition and listen to our inner guides, to take into account the needs of those around us, and to view a situation with compassion and love are ways that we can show the world the true power that is part of our feminine nature. When we learn to integrate this source of strength into our daily tasks and decision-making, we will find that we can be more flexible and open to the things that happen around us and more receptive to new ideas. Not only will we see the world in a different light, but we will truly start to realize the potential for this form of energy to both empower ourselves and those around us.

As we cultivate our feminine energy we can redefine the meaning of strength. By embracing our feminine power as something that is strong in its own right, we are able to use it with true assurance and determination and draw upon what truly belongs to us.

Learn More:
www.exquisitesafaris.com/index...hropy/

Approaching the Omega Point..

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"Someday after mastering winds, waves, tides and gravity, we shall harness the energies of love, and then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will discover fire." -Teilhard de Chardin

There are times when we share with others a special, fully interconnected consciousness. When great music thrills us, or we are mutually inspired by an awesome sunset, or when we fall in love, we are transported temporarily into a shared world which is remarkable.

This state of true intermingling is rare, for most of us, but it is experiential, and that means we know it for what it is; we feel it immediately as real and filled with meaning. When such an experience is past and we return to our normal, separated perceptions, the experience becomes a vulnerable memory, and our educated personality may reject the consciousness that knew this deeper connection.

Yet, the suspicion remains that there is something of mind that is not just inside our heads. We feel interconnected with each other and the world in a profound and important way. We know at some level that we are not isolated, but interdependent, so that a subtle energy of mine can reach out and mingle with yours, allowing us to share a moment that is important to both of us.

If we think of this potential extending beyond the two of us to a world full of living beings, we have the foundation for a model for global consciousness. Maybe, as Teilhard de Chardin believed, the world ultimately needs that shared consciousness and is actively growing toward it.

The research described here points to subtle indications that we do live in an interconnected, potentially conscious world, in which we surely play an important role. We have shown immense capacities for both destructive and creative impact, and this implies that the future is ours to mold.

It will be a desirable future in proportion to our level of consciousness, individually and globally.

The Meadow Across the Creek

I was a young person then, some twelve years old. My family was moving from a more settled part of a Southern town out to the edge of town where the new house was still being built. The house, not yet finished, was situated on a slight incline. Down below was a small creek and there across the creek was a meadow. It was an early afternoon in May when I first looked down over the scene and saw the meadow. The field was covered with lilies rising above the thick grass. A magic moment, this experience gave to my life something, I know not what, that seems to explain my life at a more profound level than almost any other experience I can remember.

It was not only the lilies. It was the singing of the crickets and the woodlands in the distance and the clouds in an otherwise clear sky. It was not something conscious that happened just then. I went on about my life as any young person might do. Perhaps it was not simply this moment that made such a deep impression upon me. Perhaps it was a sensitivity that was developed throughout my childhood. Yet, as the years pass, this moment returns to me, and whenever I think about my basic life attitude and the whole trend of my mind and the causes that I have given my efforts to, I seem to come back to this moment and the impact it has had on my feeling for what is real and worthwhile in life.

This early experience, it seems, has become normative for me throughout the range of my thinking. Whatever preserves and enhances this meadow in the natural cycles of its transformation is good; what is opposed to this meadow or negates it is not good. My life orientation is that simple. It is also that pervasive. It applies in economics and political orientation as well as in education and religion and whatever.

That is good in economics that fosters the natural processes of this meadow. That is bad in economics that diminishes the capacity of this meadow to renew itself each spring and to provide a setting in which crickets can sing and birds can feed. Such meadows, I would later learn, are themselves in a continuing process of transformation. Yet these evolving biosystems deserve the opportunity to be themselves and to express their own inner qualities. As in economics so in jurisprudence and law and political affairs: That is good which recognizes the rights of this meadow and the creek and the woodlands beyond to exist and flourish in their ever-renewing seasonal expression even while larger processes shape the bioregion in the larger sequence of transformations.

Religion too, it seems to me, takes its origin here in the deep mystery of this setting. The more a person thinks of the infinite number of interrelated activities taking place here the more mysterious in all becomes, the more meaning a person finds in the Maytime blooming of the lilies, the more awestruck a person might be in simply looking out over this little patch of meadowland. It had none of the majesty of the Appalachian or the Western mountains, none of the immensity or the power of oceans, nor even the harsh magnificence of desert country; yet in this little meadow the magnificence of life as celebration is manifested in a manner as profound and as impressive as any other place that I have known in these past many years.

It seems to me we all had such experiences before we entered into an industrial way of life. The universe as manifestation of some primordial grandeur was recognized as the ultimate referent in any human understanding of the wonderful yet fearsome world about us. Every being achieved its full identity by its alignment with the universe itself. With indigenous peoples of the North American continent every formal activity was first situated in relation to the six directions of the universe: the four cardinal directions combined with the heavens above and Earth below. Only thus could any human activity be fully validated.

The universe was the world of meaning in these earlier times, the basic referent in social order, in economic survival, in the healing of illness. In that wide ambiance the muses dwelled whence came the inspiration of poetry and art and music. The drum, heartbeat of the universe itself, established the rhythm of dance whereby humans entered into the very movement of the natural world. The numinous dimension of the universe impressed itself upon the mind through the vastness of the heavens and the power revealed in thunder and lightning, as well as through springtime renewal of life after the desolation of winter. Then, too, the general helplessness of the human before all the threats to survival revealed the intimate dependence of the human on the integral functioning of things. That the human had such intimate rapport with the surrounding universe was possible only because the universe itself had a prior intimate rapport with the human.

This experience we observe even now in the indigenous peoples of the world. They live in a universe, in a cosmological order, whereas we, the peoples of the industrial world, no longer live in a universe. We live in a political world, a nation, a business world, an economic order, a cultural tradition, in Disneyworld. We live in cities, in a world of concrete and steel, of wheels and wires, a world of business, of work. We no longer see the stars at night or the planets or the moon. Even in the day we do not experience the sun in any immediate or meaningful manner. Summer and winter are the same inside the mall. Ours is a world of highways, parking lots, shopping centers. We read books written with a strangely contrived alphabet. We no longer read the book of the universe.

Nor do we coordinate our world of human meaning with the meaning of our surroundings. We have disengaged from that profound interaction with our environment inherent in our very nature. Our children do not learn how to read the Great Book of Nature or how to interact creatively with the seasonal transformations of the planet. They seldom learn where their water comes from or where it goes. We no longer coordinate our human celebration with the great liturgy of the heavens.

We have indeed become strange beings so completely are we at odds with the planet that brought us into being. We dedicate enormous talent and knowledge and research to developing a human order disengaged from and even predatory on the very sources whence we came and upon which we depend at every moment of our existence. We initiate our children into an economic order based on exploitation of the natural life systems of the planet. To achieve this perspective we must first make them autistic in their relation with the natural world about them. This disconnection occurs quite simply since we ourselves have become insensitive toward the natural world and do not realize just what we are doing. Yet, if we observe our children closely in their early years and see how they are instinctively attracted to the experiences of the natural world about them, we will see how disorientated they become in the mechanistic and even toxic environment that we provide for them.

To recover an integral relation with the universe, planet Earth, and North America needs to be a primary concern for the peoples of this continent. While a new alignment of our government and all our institutions and professions with the continent itself in its deep structure and functioning cannot be achieved immediately, a beginning can be made throughout our educational programs. Especially in the earlier grades of elementary school new developments are possible. Such was the thought of Maria Montessori in the third decade of this century.

In speaking about the education of the six-year-old child, Maria notes in her book To Educate the Human Potential that only when the child is able to identify its own center with the center of the universe does education really begin. For the universe, she says, "is an imposing reality." It is "an answer to all questions." "We shall walk together on this path of life, for all things are part of the universe, and are connected with each other to form one whole unity." This it is that enables "the mind of the child to become centered, to stop wandering in an aimless quest for knowledge." Then the writer mentions how this experience of the universe creates in the child admiration and wonder and enables the child to unify its thinking. In this manner the child learns how all things are related and how the relationship of things to each other is so close that "No matter what we touch, an atom or a cell, we cannot explain it without knowledge of the wide universe."

The difficulty is that with the rise of the modern sciences we began to think of the universe as a collection of objects rather than a communion of subjects. We frequently identify the loss of the interior spirit-world of the human mind and emotions with the rise of modern mechanistic sciences. The more significant thing, however, is that we have lost the universe itself. We achieved extensive control over the mechanistic and even the biological functioning of the natural world, but this control itself has produced deadly consequences. We have not only controlled the planet in much of its basic functioning; we have, to an extensive degree, extinguished the life systems themselves. We have silenced so many of those wonderful voices of the universe that once spoke to us of the grand mysteries of existence.

We no longer hear the voices of the rivers or the mountains, or the voices of the sea. The trees and meadows are no longer intimate modes of spirit presence. Everything about us has become an "it" rather than a "thou." We continue to make music, write poetry, and do our painting and sculpture and architecture, but these activities easily become an aesthetic expression simply of the human and in time lose the intimacy and radiance and awesome qualities of the universe itself. We have, in the accepted universe of these times, little capacity for participating in mysteries celebrated in the earlier literary and artistic and religious modes of expression. For we could no longer live in the universe in which these were written. We could only look on, as it were.

Yet the universe is so bound into the aesthetic experience, into poetry and music and art and dance, that we cannot entirely avoid the implicit dimensions of the natural world, even when we think of art as "representational" or "impressionist" or "expressionist" or as "personal statement." However we think of our art or literature, its power is there in the wonder communicated most directly by the meadow or the mountains or the sea or by the stars in the night.

Of special significance is our capacity for celebration which inevitably brings us into the rituals that coordinate human affairs with the great liturgy of the universe. Our national holidays, political events, heroic human deeds: These are all quite worthy of celebration, but ultimately, unless they are associated with some more comprehensive level of meaning, they tend toward the affected, the emotional, and the ephemeral. In the political and legal orders we have never been able to give up invocation of the more sublime dimensions of the universe to witness the truth of what we say. This we observe especially in court trials, in inaugural ceremonies, and in the assumption of public office at whatever level. We still have an instinctive awe and reverence and even a certain fear of the larger world that always lies outside the range of our human controls.

Even when we recognize the psychic world of the human we make everything referent to the human as the ultimate source of meaning and value, although this mode of thinking has led to catastrophe for ourselves as well as for a multitude of other beings. Yet in recent times we begin to recognize that the universe itself is, in the phenomenal order, the only self-referent mode of being. All other modes of being, including the human, in their existence and in their functioning are universe-referent. This fact has been recognized through the centuries in the rituals of the various traditions.

From paleolithic times humans have coordinated their ritual celebrations with various transformation moments of the natural world. Ultimately the universe, throughout its vast extent in space and its sequence of transformations in time, was seen as a single multiform celebratory expression. No other explanation is possible for the world we see around us. Birds fly and sing and perform their mating rituals. Flowers blossom. Rains nourish every living being. Each of the events in the natural world is a poem, a painting, a drama, a celebration.

Dawn and sunset are mystical moments of the diurnal cycle, moments when the numinous dimension of the universe reveals itself with special intimacy. Individually and in their relations with each other these are moments when the high meaning of existence is experienced. Whether in the gatherings of indigenous peoples in their tribal setting or in the more elaborate temples and cathedrals and spiritual centers throughout Earth these moments are celebrated with special observances. So, too, in the yearly cycle the springtime is celebrated as the time for renewal of the human in its proper alignment with the universal order of things.

The proposal has been made that no effective restoration of a viable mode of human presence on the planet will take place until such ritual rapport of the human with the Earth community and the entire functioning of the universe is reestablished on an extensive scale. Until this is done the alienation of the human will continue despite heroic efforts being made toward a more benign mode of human activity in relation to Earth. The source of Norden's confidence that the present is not a time for desperation but for hopeful activity he finds in the writings of indigenous peoples such as James Welch, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, and David Seals, all authors with profound understanding of the ritual rapport of humans with the larger order of the universe.

In alliance with such authors as these I would give a certain emphasis here on the need to understand the universe primarily as celebration. The human I would identify as that being in whom the universe celebrates itself and its numinous origins in a special mode of conscious self-awareness. That spontaneous forms of community ritual, such as the All Species Festivals inaugurated by John Seed, have already been developed gives promise for a future with the understanding, the power, the aesthetic grandeur, and the emotional fulfillment needed to heal the damage that has already been wrought upon the planet and to shape for Earth a viable future, a future with the entrancing qualities needed to endure the difficulties to be encountered and to evoke the creativity needed.

Here I would suggest that the work before us is the task, not simply of ourselves, but of the entire planet and all its component members. While the damage done is immediately the work of the human, the healing cannot be the work simply of the human any more than the illness of some one organ of the body can be healed simply through the efforts of that one organ. Every member of the body must bring its activity to the healing. So now the entire universe is involved in the healing of damaged Earth, more especially, of course, the forces of Earth with the assistance of the light and warmth of the sun. As Earth is, in a sense, a magic planet in the exquisite presence of its diverse members to each other, so this movement into the future must in some manner be brought about in ways ineffable to the human mind. We might think of a viable future for the planet less as the result of some scientific insight or as dependent on some socio-economic arrangement than as participation in a symphony or as renewed presence to the vast cosmic liturgy. This insight was perhaps something that I vaguely experienced in that first view of the lilies blooming in the meadow across the creek.

Thomas Berry
December 1993
www.thomasberry.org/Biography/

T.S.O.G. The Creature That Ate the Constitution

Tsarism represents an intermediate form between European monarchism and Asian despotism, being, possibly, closer to the latter of these two.
Leon Trotsky, Russia's Social Development and Tsarism

by Robert Anton Wilson

How, how, how did we ever get ourselves in a predicament where an Oriental-style despot controls American medicine and most doctors fear to prescribe what they think best for their patients? Why, over 200 years after a war to liberate ourselves from a half-mad king, have we allowed our lives and health to come under the rule of a totally mad Tsar? And has this monstrous tumor destroyed most of the Constitution only "by accident," or did its creators have that intent all along?

Well, here's my theory:

Most people think the TSOG [Tsarist Occupation Government] began its infestation of America with George Bush Sr., when he appointed a Tsar to discombobulate our previously democratic form of government; but Bush had a long C.I.A. career behind him and the C.I.A. had a long, long Tsarist history before they came out in the open with a public and blatant Tsar, a functionary not endowed or permitted by any clause in our Constitution.

Actually, the TSOG began replacing representative democracy in the U.S. way back in 1945, when Gen. Rheinhard Gehlen, Hitler's Chief of Soviet Intelligence, surrendered to the U.S. Army, after first prudently burying several truckloads of "inside information" about the Soviet Union at a secret location.

Gehlen was not only a master spy but a wizard negotiator. Within a week, he was out of his Nazi uniform and into a U.S. Army General's uniform; the U.S. intelligence services, in return, got the info about the Soviets, including access to Gehlen's agents in the Soviet government -- a group of Mystical Tsarists who had infiltrated both the Red Army and the KGB.

You see, their leader and Gehlen's major "asset," General Andrei Vlassov, had a fervent belief, not just in common or garden Tsarism, but especially in the "mystical Tsarism" espoused in the later half of the 19th Century by the anti-Semitic novelist Dostoyevsky and even more by Konstantin Pobedonostsev, an advisor to two Tsars [Alexander III and Nicholas II].

Pobedonostsev, popularly called "The Grand Inquisitor" because of the vast platoons of spies, snoops, agents provocateur and informers he unleashed upon the Russian people , combined theological obsessions with reactionary politics, always an explosive and nefarious mixture.

"Mystical Tsarism" deserves a whole book in itself. especially since it now rules our own country; but we must be brief here. This holy religion, or superstition -- as you will --has two major tenets: (1) The Tsar is guided by God and can do no wrong (2) Reason is "cold" and inhuman, faith is "warm" and human; therefore we should ignore reason and guide ourselves by faith in the Tsar, our "Little Father." I don't think any of Pobedonostsev's crew actually believed in the Tooth Fairy, though.

Besides, Roman Catholics of the old school have similar attitudes, but merely prefer a Pope to do their thinking for them instead of a Tsar, and most of us consider them sane, but just "weird."

Gen. Gehlen and Gen. Vlassov formed what became the Gehlenapparat, the CIA's main source of info on Soviet affairs; Gehlen became the fulcrum of the CIA's "Soviet penetration" sector, working under James Jesus Angleton, Chief of Counter-Intelligence, breeder of prize orchids, lover of the arts, and a devout Catholic.

Since the U.S. government based its foreign policies on CIA reports, and the CIA based its Soviet reports on Gehlen and some other former Nazis, plus a crew of Mystical Tsarists, as filtered and interpreted by a Papist intellectual, the U.S. government's ideas and actions became increasingly "weird, " bizarre and frightening, in the view of the rest of the world. The results are very sad and very funny. In a nutshell, most of the world thinks we've gone batshit crazy. "Tsarists and Nazis and spooks, oh my!"

Although James Jesus Angleton was Gehlen's alleged supervisor, data indicates that the Gehlenapparat engaged in many activities, including kidnapping, extortion, murder etc. about which Angleton either did not know or devoutly did not want to know.

But James J. Angleton was a pathological case of some sort himself; he often hid his middle name because it revealed his half-Hispanic genes. An exceptionally intelligent and sensitive student of modern literature while at Yale, Angleton adored Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, I.A. Richards, e e cummings and other SuperStars of Modernism; he met most of them personally. They collectively influenced Angleton's fascination with multiple perspectives, labyrinthine ambiguity and the eternal uncertainty of all inferences and "interpretations." These modernist tendencies, which also appeared in science and philosophy at the same time, blossomed into obsessions and, perhaps, raging madness when Angleton systematically applied them to the spy-game. After all, modernism really begins with Wilde's "The Reality of Masks" and Yeats's hermetic mystique the world we know emerging from interactions of Mask, Anti-Mask, Self, and Anti-Self: which may or may not fit all of us or all the world but certainly fits the world of spooks and snoops that Angleton created.

Another CIA officer, Edward Petty, described Angleton as "a lone wolf" and "a strange bird"; every other source I have found bluntly calls him "paranoid." He suspected everybody else in the CIA, and in "our" government generally, of being KGB moles, and operated with so much modernist ambiguity and hidden trapdoors that, in Petty's words, "nobody really knows" what he was doing most of the time. In short, he became as esoteric as the poets he admired, and remade the C.I.A. and, increasingly, our whole nation into a theatre of impenetrable mystery.

A.J. Weberman, a leading Kennedy assassination buff, thinks Angleton personally organized the JFK hit, an idea also strongly hinted at by Norman Mailer's documentary novel, Harlot's Ghost, in which Angleton appears as "Hugh Montague." [Angleton's father was named Hugh; Angleton's code name was "Mother," and Montague's is "Harlot."Work on that, ye seekers of multiple meaning. ]

If James Jesus really arranged the JFK assassination, he had probably decided that Kennedy was the top Soviet mole of all.

Why not? Angleton had Tsarist agents in all sorts of nooks of the Soviet system, and he knew the KGB was smart enough and tireless enough to reciprocate by planting their own Masks and Anti-Masks in his own backyard, or maybe under his bed at night. According to Edward Jay Epstein, J.J.A.s endless search for Soviet moles nearly destroyed the C.I.A. itself. Certainly, everybody in "the Company" learned to distrust everybody else.

Imagine a U.S. Caine with not one Queeg as captain, but a whole crew of Queegs, each worrying about what the others might be plotting. Angleton created that ship of shape-shifters in the C.I.A. and then by osmosis it spread through the government, evolving into the TSOG.

In short, the government cannot trust us, because it can never know with absolute certainty what mischief we may hatch; and every sentence we speak into a bugged phone may have as many possible meanings as Eliot's "The rose and the fire are one."

In William F. Buckley Jr.'s docu-novel Spytime: The Undoing of James Jesus Angleton occurs a scene that epiphanizes the TSOG's looped and relooped logic. Angleton and an associate discuss 17 or 37 possible interpretations of a bit of information [or disinformation] passed on by a possible Soviet defector [who might be a Soviet mole.] At the end of the discussion, J.J.A. points out one more "reading" that the associate hadn't considered: namely, that Angleton himself might be the top Soviet mole of all. You can't learn more about ambiguity and irony in a seminar on the poetry of Empson.

In the same vein, after the death by drowning of "Montague"[Angleton] in Harlot's Ghost, the CIA systematically investigates such alternative scenarios as: he's not dead, and another water-rotted corpse has been foisted on them; the Soviets did it and have him full of truth serums already; he went over to the Soviets willingly; he was working for the Reds all along.

"Trust No One," the motto of X Files, seems the only safe rule in the world Angleton created.

In any case, Angleton had an alliance with Italian fascists and the Mafia, dating from 1944 when he was an O.S.S. officer in Italy. "Operation Gladio," a CIA project to control Italian elections, was based on Angleton's fascist-Mafia connections, and employed techniques as varied as hiring Sophia Loren to do TV commercials for politicians the CIA liked, bribing liberal/left politicos to move toward more right-wing positions, and employing the Mafia to assassinate some who couldn't be bribed, e.g. Prime Minster Aldo Moro. In recruiting for Gladio, Angleton had a secret meeting with his old friend Ezra Pound, in Genoa. Pound, under indictment for radio broadcasts that he called "personal propaganda on behalf of the U.S. Constitution" and the Department of Justice called "treason," did not get recruited into Gladio and instead spent 13 years in a hospital for the criminally insane, for expressing his views about bankers over the wrong radio station.

J.J.A. had better luck with a former Gestapo informant named Licio Gelli, who formed a secret society called P2 within the Grand Orient Lodge of Egyptian Freemasonry and eventually infiltrated over 950 agents into the Italian government. Through P2 connections and Roberto Calvi, a P2 member and president of Banco Ambrosiano in Milan, Gladio merged the Mafia's drug laundering system with ongoing CIA projects, using as screens the Vatican Bank and 200 "ghost banks" which existed only in Calvi's ledgers. The Tsarist-CIA-Mafia chieftains then had almost total control over both the multi-billion dollar illegal drug business and the even more profitable anti-drug business.

It worked like this: among the 200 "ghost banks" that existed only as a postal drops, a few real, or tangible, banks existed. One, the Cisalpine Bank in the Bahamas, jointly owned by Roberto Calvi of Banco Ambrosiani and Archbishop Paul "The Gorilla" Marcinkus, served as the major funnel for money laundering. Its primary links were the Franklin National Bank, owned by fellow Gladio asset Michele "The Shark" Sindona, and the World Finance Corporation, owned and managed by 8 "former" [or allegedly "former"] C.I.A. officers.

Cocaine profits generally went through the World Finance Corporation, in Miami, and thence via Cisalpine, into the maze of ghost banks, and thence through Ambrosiano and the Vatican to numbered Swiss bank accounts. Heroin profits ran through the Nyugun Hand Bank, also run by "former" C.I.A. agents and thence into the same labyrinth.

Some of the drug money bought guns for terrorists and generally financed what Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward called "the undeclared wars of the C..I.A." The rest was sheer gravy, for those high in the TSOG, and it ran into billions a year for the Gladio group alone.

Meanwhile, the TSOG drug cartel scored psycho-political gains as well as stuffing those numbered bank accounts. By flooding the U.S with crack, they were able to create a mob hysteria that surpassed McCarthyism and now ranks beside the medieval witch-hunts; in the smoke and mirrors, only a few noticed that the Constitution is being dismantled plank by plank.

As William S. Burroughs wrote 30 years ago, "Drug control is a thin pretext, and getting thinner, to increase police powers and to brand dissent as criminal." A voice crying in the wilderness.....

Angleton was finally removed from the CIA in 1974 when caught meddling in U.S. elections -- something that the CIA is only supposed to do in other countries. Calvi of Banco Ambrosiano was assassinated by the Mafia, for unknown reasons, in 1982. His secretary fell or was thrown out of her office window the same day Calvi was found hanged. Michele "The Shark" Sindona, another of the Gladio/P2/Mafia inner circle--remember? -- was convicted of 64 counts of stock and currency fraud in New York, and of murdering a bank examiner in Rome; he was poisoned in prison while awaiting trial on other charges. Archbishop Paul "The Gorilla" Marcinkus was replaced as president of the Vatican Bank, when his role in Gladio drug-money laundering was revealed in the trials of lesser culprits, and later he got booted out of the Vatican entirely.

Licio Gelli stood trial for conspiracy but was acquitted. Later, evidence showed that Gelli was working for the KGB as well as the CIA; which side he double-crossed most often remains unknown. But then Gelli had worked for the Communist Underground in WWII, while also on the payroll of the Gestapo, and nobody claims to know which side he betrayed most often in that case either.

Mino Pecorelli, the first journalist to expose Gladio/P2 infiltration of the Italian government, was killed on a street in Rome, shot through the mouth -- the sasso in bocca, traditional Mafia punishment for informers. The same fate befell Sam Giancana,Mafia boss of Chicago, when subpoenaed by a congressional committee on assassinations -- another sasso in bocca. Johnny Roselli, another Mafioso often involved in Tsarist/CIA projects, simply disappeared when he got his subpoena. His body was found floating in a barrel in the Gulf of Mexico.

The major open functions of Mystical Tsarism now are the Drug Enforcement Administration [DEA] and the Food and Drug Administration [FDA.] You all know about the DEA and its vast army of snoops and informers -- a vision to gladden the heart of Pobedonostsev himself. The FDA operates similarly but with less publicity; it was described in these terms by Saul Kent of the Life Extension Foundation: "The FDA's strong-arm tactics are used to intimidate and terrorize Americans into toeing their police-state line on health care and medicine."

In 1957, the FDA burned all the books of dissident physician Wilhelm Reich, M.D., smashed his laboratory equipment with axes, and threw him in jail, where he died.

Lately, their major targets have been midwives, herbalists and others who offer safer and cheaper health care than the TSOG itself.

Although our first official and open Tsar was appointed during the brief, bloody reign of George Bush, the Tsar's powers only reached tyrannical status under Bill Clinton, a hillbilly with a perpetual hard-on.

Our recent Tsar, General Barry McCaffrey, recently stated the theology of Mystic Tsarism in an article for the Denver Post. I condense a bit because, like most Tsars, Mac the Knife is a bit of a windbag:

"Each week, millions of Americans attend religious services to seek guidance, reaffirm moral values, offer charity and obtain a sense of community. Each of these four elements underscores the importance of faith-based organizations .... Educating young people ... requires us to guide them and teach them values. .....On May 10, I traveled to Colorado Springs to stand with Dr. James Dobson and the Young Life Christian Ministry. The ministry's youth programs are model efforts for how faith-based organizations can play a critical role in helping our young people choose the right path....[blah blah blah]... The One Way 2 Play program of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes is another example of how faith groups help young people ..... The One Way 2 Play program uses sports to teach the importance of a healthy lifestyle and a commitment to faith. .. ... As British Theologian Dean William Inge said: 'If we are to safeguard our children and communities, rabbis, priests, clerics, deacons, sisters, brothers and cantors must help lead the way'" ...[emphasis added]

Faith and docility are the bulwarks of Tsarism; any hint of scientific knowledge, rationality or even plain "horse sense" among the serfs are its major worries, and it blocks them every way it can. No Tsar will ever lavish such praise on scientists or other professional skeptics as McCaffery lavishes on the faithful and the sheep-herders who lead and fleece them.

And so, the Constitution in tatters, spies everywhere, we inhabit "one nation under surveillance with wiretaps and mail covers for all;" and everybody is terrorized about whether their houses and property will be seized next. In short, we find ourselves, as Trotsky found the Russians a century ago, midway between European monarchism and Asiatic despotism.

It comes as no surprise that McCaffery stands accused of war crimes, under the Nuremberg rulings.

Bill Clinton may be 77 kinds of sonofabitch, as most of us now agree, but he is no fool. When he picks a Tsar he finds the right kind of man for the job. The only way Bore or Gush can improve on Mac the Knife is if, with further advances in genetic engineering, they dig up the bones and clone the most famous, mystical and murderous Tsar of them all, Ivan the Terrible, who alternated between murdering masses of people and retiring to monasteries for meditation and prayer.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

For more info on the Gehlenapparat, see The Yankee and Cowboy War by Carl Oglesby, Berkeley Medallion, NY, 1977; and Everything Is Under Control by RAWilson, Harper, NY, 1998. The best overview of TSOG/CIA operations in general is Norman Mailer's docu-novel Harlot's Ghost, Random House, NY, 1991, in which Angleton appears as "Hugh Montague" and Gehlen has a walk-on under his own name.

On the Gladio/P2 side of the TSOG, excellent books include The Strange Death of God's Banker, Foot and della Torre, Orbis, London, 1984; The Calvi Affair, by Larry Gurwin, Pan, London, 1984; The Brotherhood, by Stephen Knight, Grenada, London, 1984. The Calvi "ghost banks" and their strange links with real banks, including Chase Manhattan, are discussed amply in In Banks We Trust, Doubleday, NY, 1984, by Penny Lernoux, who leaves open the question of how many of the real banks were unwitting accomplices and how many knew what was going on and just kept mum while raking in the profits.

In God's Name, by David Yallop, Cape, London 1984, covers all this in greater depth, and also explores Licio Gelli's role in creating fake ID for Nazi war criminals, whom he later farmed out to the CIA death squads. It also adds Pope John Paul I to the list of mysterious deaths involving the Vatican Bank, along with Pecorelli, Moro, Calvi et. al.

My current acceptance that the Mafia killed Calvi [in previous writings I was unsure] rests on the confession of Calogero Ganci, a Mafia hitman turned informant, who says he strangled Calvi himself. See London Times, 20 June 1996. Ganci was never told why the mob wanted "God's banker" dead; his job was to kill people, not to ask rude questions. Mrs. Calvi, the widow, still claims the orders came from the Vatican.

Our current Tsar's war crimes are documented in "Overwhelming Force," by Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker, 22 May 2000.

The best depth analysis of Mystical Tsarism remains The Mass Psychology of Fascism, by Wilhelm Reich, M.D. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 1970. Although Dr Reich doesn't analyze Tsarism in particular, he relates Fascism to the dogmatic religions, faith in "leaders" ["little Fathers"]and sexual misery of all the "Patriarchal Authoritarian" regimes throughout history, and his major bio-psychological theorems describe both Russian and American Tsarism as neatly as they fit the Holy Inquisition or German-Italian Fascism.

Or -- you can find most of this data, in one form or another by simply surfing the web. Set your search engine for "Rheinhold Gehlen," "Cisalpine Bank,""Licio Gelli," "Gladio" and all the other individual and group names in this synopsis, and you'll be astounded at how many Dirty Secrets are now open to the light of day.