The Obama administration should release Guantánamo Bay inmates or try them in a court of law, said Navanethem Pillay, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. Her statement follows President Obama’s remarks last May indicating that some Guantánamo detainees were too dangerous to be released and might have to be held indefinitely. The High Commissioner’s comments represent the most serious challenge to President Obama’s decision to limit investigation into past abuses and to continue to hold some Guantánamo detainees without trial.

“The Obama administration has taken aggressive action on this issue from day one, upholding our nation’s fundamental values while making the American people safer,” responded Mark Kornblau, a spokesman for the U.S. mission to the United Nations, underscoring the administration stand on human rights. But, according to Ms. Pillay, “There is still much to do before the Guantánamo chapter is truly brought to a close.”

The fate of the Guantánamo detainees is one of the most contentious legal issues facing the Obama administration. In 2003, The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) revealed its concern about the negative psychological impact that indefinite detentions were having on a large number of prisoners at Guantánamo, and on their families.

Although the detainees are entitled to judicial review, only a handful of them have received a hearing on the merits of their case. As Amnesty International has indicated,one year after the US Supreme Court ruled that the detainees were entitled to a prompt habeas corpus hearing to challenge the lawfulness of their detention, only a handful of them have received a hearing on the merits of their challenges. In addition, indefinite detention has continued even when judges have ordered the immediate release of detainees after such hearings.

When President Obama took office on 20 January 2009, there were approximately 245 men held at Guantánamo. Of those, about 200 had habeas corpus petitions pending in District Court. From inauguration day to early April 2009, only one detainee was released from Guantánamo, and the rest remained in indefinite detention at that facility.

The Obama administration has aptly rejected the term “war on terror” for US counterterrorism efforts, and has also stopped the use of the term “enemy combatant” in the Guantánamo detainee litigation process. However, as Amnesty International points out, “…it [the Obama administration] does not yet seem to be rejecting the substance of the insidious global war framework developed by its predecessor and, like the latter, is citing the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), a broadly worded congressional resolution passed after the attacks of 11 September 2001, as the basis for detentions.

According to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), “Anyone whose rights have been violated must be able to seek effective remedy, including through the courts.” This principle is violated by the continuing delay faced by the Guantánamo detainees in having effective and timely access to judicial review.

Several legal and human rights organizations have seriously questioned the US government decision to keep Guantánamo detainees without charge or trial, and call that each detainee be either charged with a recognizable criminal offense for proper trial in existing federal courts or be immediately released.

As stated by the UN Human Rights Committee in its General Comment 29, Even when confronting situations that threaten the life of the nation, “in order to protect non-derogable rights, the right to take proceedings before a court to enable the court to decide without delay on the lawfulness of detention, must not be diminished.”

As Ms. Pillay has stated, “Signals coming from America reverberate around the world. Sending the right ones is the responsibility of power.” The correct decisions on the fate of the Guantánamo detainees are an important test of the Obama’s administration intention to follow the rule of law in this controversial issue.

America is in the midst of yet another Great Awakening. There may not be any white tents out in the cotton fields or fire-and-brimstone orators, but there sure is a bandwagon.

Drive past a billboard, flick on the TV, open your newspaper or read the New York Times online and you will be swiftly inundated not only with lists of ideas to save money but stories of this new breed of American. Competitions are springing up for the “cheapest family” in cities and states across the nation as we search for self-sacrificing saints to promulgate the faith. Converts congregate in the aisles of 99-cent stores sharing recipes for bean casserole and baby boomers’ eyes glisten knowingly of those tribulations their own grandparents must have faced. A national confession of our sins and a casting off of those childish former days are accompanied by vows of chastity: “No matter if the economy improves… I will never live beyond my means again!”

The fall back to reality was hard, and like a runner’s high there is an element of catharsis and confidence through the pain. Those experiencing this sudden sensation of salvation want to share it with others, and the commandment of saving instead of spending certainly fits the times. An ascetic response to the global recession that combines a mix of adoration for “old-fashioned values” with pious devotion and religious ecstasy, it’s the inevitable swing of the pendulum back towards conservation and preservation and away from the sins of a world gone haywire with consumption. Yet while it may bring personal atonement in this time of reckoning – as well as plenty of opportunities to judge those who do not fall in line- it offers few solutions to our nation’s hard problems.

Americans, ever self-reliant and loathe to depend on the state or society to pull them up, are failing to appreciate the dimensions shaping this crisis. Instead, we are simply behaving in the same mode as we always have: every man for himself. In the 1990s it was your own fault if you weren’t making enough money and couldn’t buy yourself the world; today it is your own fault if you can’t save enough money to protect yourself from the world. Essentially unchanged…it’s as if we’ve learned nothing.

Making cleaning supplies from hand and growing our neo-victory gardens are great ideas. But they are no substitute for policy that could shape a livable future. Instead of asking ourselves how many boxes of cake mix we can buy for a dollar at one grocery store versus another, we should be reflecting on what it means to be a functioning society in 2009. A great many things are broken - from our financial institutions to our health care system to education and retirement. Trust is essential in building the local and national bond that sustains a country, but other than some nostalgic pride in our patriotic holidays, what faith in our society do we have?

Why do we have such a shortage of affordable housing - which would guarantee that everyone, regardless of their income, could afford to live in the city where they work? Why do most American cities and towns lack public transportation but have an abundance of freeways - which forces most of the Middle Class to take out huge auto loans just to get to work? Why do we hear of bridges collapsing over the Mississippi River, lead in children’s toys and almost monthly e. coli breakouts in our food supply? How can it be possible that the FAA merely “suggests” standards for our air transportation safety instead of mandating regulations, and why is college becoming so prohibitively expensive? Why is there a donut hole in Medicare coverage and how can we have 46 million people without insurance at all? In every department of our lives, the story is the same: a bloated bureaucracy of lobbyists and corporate talking-points that have driven the nail of deregulation into the coffin of the American dream.

Today we are surrounded by the wreckage of nearly three decades of this laissez-faire approach. The conventional wisdom told us that the market had “everything under control”, and somehow we were collectively brainwashed to believe that those piddly little details like civil rights, access to health care, employment for those willing to work, privacy of our personal details and credit information, and the safety of our streams, bridges and airplanes would be managed through mysterious market mechanisms that the groveling masses couldn’t possibly understand.

I’m not anti-capitalism or communist, but I’d say that in almost every regard, the market has failed. And how could it not have? The market is designed to reward the survival of the fittest, to line the pockets of those who can capitalize on the moment and make a fantastic overnight gain. It’s not designed to promote stewardship, to bring fulfillment or equality to society, or to foster a better democracy. We’ve asked of it what it simply cannot give us. That which we really need.

And now, we all wait with bated breath for the economy to turn itself back on, as if it’s merely been sleeping. The day will certainly come that the economy will improve – all recessions end – but we are fooling ourselves if we expect our lives to become measurably better. The same wealth disparity will persist, as will the revolving door between Wall Street and the halls of Congress.

In the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the US has the highest inequality after Mexico and Turkey, and the gap has increased rapidly since 2000 (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/10/21/business/main4535488.shtml). Noting that social mobility is lowest in countries with the greatest inequality, the report adds that “In the United States, the richest 10 percent earn an average of $93,000 - the highest level in the OECD. The poorest 10 percent earn an average of $5,800 - about 20 percent lower than the OECD average. "The report cautions that “Greater income inequality stifles upward mobility between generations, making it harder for talented and hardworking people to get the rewards they deserve…It polarizes societies, it divides regions within countries, and it carves up the world between rich and poor."

This, not a previous failure to clip coupons, is the real crisis that we face. All of the weekly specials on ground-chuck and 2 for 1 T-shirt deals won’t set things right.

It was the eyes that I first noticed. Do you remember the girl on the cover of National Geographic maybe ten to fifteen years ago? I think she was from Afghanistan. Eyes you just cannot forget, like green and brown jewels in a sincere serious face looking straight at you, showing all the pains and sorrows of its owner. These eyes were exactly the same.

Several days per week I go to the busiest street corner outside Boudhanath, Nepal, to the three-way junction between Mahankal, Teenchuli and Simaltar. Kathmandu Valley in the spring 2009 is hot, extremely dry, it has had almost no rainfall for 6 months and it is in a political and financial situation that is worse than most of this world’s countries. The Maoist leader and Prime Minister Prachanda has just resigned and the country is left without government. The Maoists are talking of civil war if their point of view of the conflict that led to the president’s resignation is not regarded, the newly gained peace seems once more at a risk. The traffic pollution and dust from dirt roads, street cows and dry fields makes most people cover their mouths when they go outside. There is a lack a clean drinking water, there is “load-shedding” – electricity cuts scheduled to save electricity for up to 16 hours per day – every day of the week.

But my friend, the fruit vendor, whose working place is right in the junction, is always smiling. Almost everyday I see her in the middle of the traffic chaos with her little wagon of delicious fruits, her scales and her lovely smile and beautiful, colourful sarees.

I do not know her name and she does not know mine, our communication is mostly confined to body language but she gives me the prices in English. Nevertheless we made friends immediately. She helps me pick out the best fruit, often gives me a couple of bananas extra, and she always smiles and looks wonderfully beautiful and cool in the midst of the dust, dirt and heat on the street corner. How she stays healthy and not coughing her lungs out like so many other Nepalese do, I just do not understand. Maybe it is the fruit. I hope she enjoys some of the mangoes and apples herself. But last week the visit to her was very different, there was someone she wanted me to meet.

Her brother’s daughter was there. Her niece is a young girl with the most striking eyes. I turned to her aunt and told her what fantastic eyes she had, just to discover that the girl spoke to me in almost perfect English. She asked me, “where do you come from”. I told her, “Sweden, it is in Europe”. She then told me her name and explained that the first name was her caste, the other her own name. She was wearing a very dirty, worn out, yellow t-shirt, her black hair was far from clean but I could not keep my eyes from her face, her gaze was so intense. Then her aunt seemed to urge her to tell me something.

“My mother died, five days ago”. I asked if she had been sick, and the girl nodded. Then her aunt once again urged her on. “I have a little sister, she is seven months old” and she stretched out her arms to show me the size of her sister. I said I am so sorry to hear about her mother’s death, and I asked her who takes care of the baby. “My grandmother does”, was the reply. I spoke to her a little while, I found out she is 11 years old and when I asked her about the future she said she wanted to become a doctor.

Once more she looked me into my eyes with her serious gaze. Then the girl, just like her aunt had done a few minutes before, picked two more bananas for me from the wagon and put them in my black plastic bag. I awkwardly said thank you for the bananas, told her she would make a wonderful doctor and went home.

At the time of writing I do not know if this is the end of the story or the beginning of a story. I know the girl’s aunt, I can probably find out where she lives. And, I can probably try to help her. She will not be able to regain her mother, but she and her sister might get help from me and maybe others to make at least one dream come true, to become a doctor so she in her turn can help others. The fee for university here is maybe 1.000 EUR per year. Right now I have a choice; to try to help or not to help, to get involved or not get involved in another person’s life, one of so many children in Nepal who is in need of help. Will I? Would you?

Two very different events last week inspired me to do some theorizing about counter-terror. The first was the Panetta Institute presentation, “Can America Win the War on Terror?” The second was a presentation of The Hunger Project - a global, non-profit, strategic organization committed to the sustainable end of world hunger.

The Panetta Institute panel – General John Abizaid, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, and moderator Frank Sesno – spent some time debating whether the term “war” was the right word to describe what the United States has been doing since 9/11. Abizaid argued it was; Ignatius had his doubts. Neither of them said having an accurate description of U.S. counter terror offensives was important.

The “counterinsurgency war” label used to describe the U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan does not really fit offensives against al Qaeda, essentially a non-governmental terror organization (or NGTO) that moves from country to country. Al Qaeda is an occupier and effective offensives against it require a special kind collaboration among interveners like the United States, the governments, and the citizens of the countries that it occupies.

The primary targets of counter terror interventions should not be the current NGTO leaders. Rather, the targets should be the specific populations that might support them. The mission should be to change the economic, health, infrastructural, educational, and political condition of target populations so they will deny support to NGTO’s like al Qaeda.

How do you accomplish big missions like that?

Think small and long-term. After The Hunger Project Presentation I began to think in what I call “micro-contextual” terms. I began to think of multiple interventions at the grass roots level of villages, hamlets, districts, and towns inspired by the micro-contextual strategies for small communities like the local democracy, epicenter, and micro financing strategies of The Hunger Project. This organization consistently gets big empowerment pay offs in micro contexts for a small intervention price. The Hunger Project has reduced malnutrition, illiteracy, poverty, and disease by entrepreneurially, educationally, and politically empowering women in villages throughout India, Africa, and Latin America.

In India, a constitutional amendment requiring a fixed percentage of representation by women on village councils was a critical top-down reform. Once implemented, women were able to use their new political power to change themselves, their families, and their village communities. The modest intervention of the Hunger Project was to provide leadership training to equip these new village leaders to prudently exercise their judgment to allocate government resources.

In Africa, the Hunger Project’s epicenter strategy built community centers with all local labor to create gathering places for community action and links with government resources. The Hunger Project stimulated the formation of partnerships between small village populations and local governments that built the many epicenters that now provide teachers, health workers, literacy instructors, and agricultural extension workers - all of which support sustainable change at a micro-context level.

No doubt the leaders of the Hunger Project would insist that to be effective, interventions must be tailor made to fit each specific micro context whether in India, Africa, or Latin America. However, I think its strategy can be generalized: Stimulate sustainable micro context changes that empower people to self-improve their lives.

By revising that strategy somewhat you get a strategy for United States counter-terror interventions: Stimulate sustainable micro context changes that empower people to self-improve their lives to make them NGTO resistant.

How we can convince the Obama administration and other world leaders to implement micro-context strategies to counter terror? What about non-violent strategies that are rooted in the empowerment of women. What do you think?

Several myths regarding Iran stand in the way of reaching a peaceful relationship with that country. Much of the concern that Iran may attack Israel, if it successfully develops nuclear weapons, rests on the avowed statement by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that “Israel must be wiped off the map.”

However, Juan Cole, a University of Michigan Professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian History stated that, “Ahmadinejad did not say he was going to ‘wipe Israel off the map’ because no such idiom exists in Persian. Instead, he did say ‘He hoped [Israel’s] regime, a Jewish-Zionist state occupying Jerusalem, would collapse.’”

This is consistent with statements by Iran’s foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki. Speaking at a news conference, he denied that Tehran wanted to see Israel “wiped off the map.” “Nobody can remove a country from the map. How is it possible to remove a country from the map? He was talking about the regime,” Mottaki said.

“There is a huge chasm between the correct and the incorrect translations,” says Shiraz Dossa, a professor of Political Science at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada. “The notion that Iran can ‘wipe out’ U.S.-backed, nuclear armed Israel is ludicrous.”

During an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos last April, Ahmadinejad declared that the Islamic Republic of Iran would recognize the State of Israel if the Palestinians signed a two-state peace deal with Israel. Exactly a month later Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded, “If Israel does not eliminate the Iranian threat, no one will.”

It has been stated repeatedly that an aggressive Iranian government represents a danger for the region and for the U.S. Facts, however, do not substantiate such an interpretation. More frequently than not, Iran has been the recipient of aggressive actions, particularly by the U.S.

Iranians cannot forget that it was foreign intervention, particularly by the British and the U.S. that destroyed democracy in Iran, whose consequences they suffer until today. In 1953, actions by the CIA were instrumental in overthrowing the democratically elected government of Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh.

In 1988, the U.S.S. Vincennes shot down an Iranian civilian airliner over the Strait of Hormuz toward the end of the Iran-Iraq war. Two hundred ninety passengers were killed, including 66 children, ranking it the seventh among the deadliest airliner fatalities. According to the U.S. government, the Vincennes crew misidentified the Iranian Airbus A300 as an attacking F-14 Tomcat fighter.

Although a settlement was reached between Iran and U.S., then Vice-President George H.W. Bush stated, “I will never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don’t care what it has done. I don’t care what the facts are.” The Vincennes captain received the Legion of Merit, and the crew was awarded Combat Action Ribbons.

The U.S. staunchly supported the Shah of Iran’s regime, despite its brutal repression of the Iranian people. According to Stephen Kinzer, author of All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup And The Roots of Middle East Terror, fears by the Iranians of more U.S. intervention in the internal affairs of their country led to their taking American diplomats as hostages.

During the Iraq/Iran war from 1980 to 1988 the U.S. supported Saddam Hussein, even though Iraq initiated the war and the U.S. had knowledge of his regime’s use of chemical weapons.

Both the U.S. and Israel have repeatedly threatened military action against Tehran, in flagrant violation of the UN Charter whose Article 2 states, “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.”

Although fear of aggression by Iran has been often cited as a justification for war against that country, an ad hoc group of Israeli academicians and peace activists issued an statement on August 6, 2008 that says, “…it is clear that the main source of the immediate danger of a new, widespread war stems from the policies of the Israeli government and the flow of threats from it, backed by provocative military maneuvers. After serious consideration, we reiterate our position that all the arguments for such an attack are without any security, political or moral justification.”

Iran’s intention to develop nuclear weapons has also been given as a justification for an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites. However, speaking at the World Economic Forum in May of 2008, Dr. Mohammad ElBaradei, a Nobel peace laureate and head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) stated, “We haven’t seen indications or any concrete evidence that Iran is building a nuclear weapon and I’ve been saying that consistently for the last five years.”

Developing a civilian nuclear program is Iran’s inalienable right and, if some predictions are true, it may also become a need in the near future. There are indications that Iran’s oil resources are fast depleting and Iran may become a net importer of oil a decade from now, according to the Campaign against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII).

Writing in the Jerusalem Post, Douglas Bloomfield quotes Keith Weissman, the former Iran expert at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) as saying that although Israel’s worries about Iran getting a nuclear weapon are understandable, the Iranian leaders “are not fanatics and they are not suicidal. They know that Israel could make Iran glow for many years.”

As President Barack Obama has repeatedly stated, diplomacy should be pursued in dealing with the Iranian government. Such an approach should include security assurances to the Iranian government that it will not be attacked and putting a stop to US efforts to undermine that country’s leadership. A linguistic equivalent to the Gulf of Tonkin incident should not be the excuse for attacking Iran and unleashing chaos in the region, if not in the whole world.

Cesar Chelala, a foreign correspondent for the Middle East Times International (Australia), writes extensively on human rights issues.

As the effort to reform our nation’s health care system intensifies, certain Republican leaders, industry front-groups and lobbyists are engaged in a last-ditch effort to frame the debate in an ideological way meant to distort the facts and strike fear into the hearts of Americans.

First is the lie that President Obama and the Democratic Party are proposing a sweeping overhaul of our medical infrastructure with the goal of micro-managing every element of your health care. Not five minutes after the President concluded a town hall meeting on the topic in Green Bay, during which he repeatedly and explicitly said that his proposed reforms would not change anything for people who had insurance and were satisfied with it, Republican leaders held press conferences stating that they were ‘absolutely opposed to government-run health care.’

Were they not listening? Or were they hoping that the American people were not listening? President Obama and others working towards a viable plan have taken great pains to reiterate their intentions. The government is not going to tell us which doctor to see or what tests we can have. But need I point out that our insurance companies already do this? The very development that Americans profess to fear most – the intrusion of an entity between the patient and the doctor- is already the status quo. This is precisely how managed care and insurance operate – by creating lists of doctors, procedures and medications that will and will not be covered.

The second series of lies are really myths about the quality of care Americans receive now versus what they will receive with a public single-payer plan option. A pamphlet I received from my health insurance provider makes the following assertions: the employer-based system will be destroyed, premiums will skyrocket, private insurance will be only for the wealthy, and there will be reduced innovation.

Hold on just one second. Aren’t all of those things happening NOW? Already? This is exactly the reason that we need health care reform!

The employer-based system is crumbling because small firms can’t afford to purchase it for their employees; a growing number of employees find the individual premiums prohibitively expensive; and because large corporations are continually downsizing their health insurance options and off-loading larger percentages of the premiums onto employees as a way to cut costs and raise stock prices.
Premiums themselves are certainly skyrocketing: just for the pleasure of being insured, we pay over $4000 per year for two healthy individuals. But who am I to complain? According to the National Coalition on Health Care, “in 2008, employer health insurance premiums increased by 5.0 percent – two times the rate of inflation. The annual premium for an employer health plan covering a family of four averaged nearly $12,700.” (The Coalition took its statistics from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation report on Employee Health Benefits: 2008 Survey published in September 2008). That same report notes that “since 1999, employment-based health insurance premiums have increased 120 percent, compared to cumulative inflation of 44 percent and cumulative wage growth of 29 percent during the same period.”

Who was raising these premiums? It certainly wasn’t the government, because we don’t have socialized medicine in this country.

As for private insurance being only for the wealthy, this trend is already well-underway. As stated above, increasing numbers of middle-class people simply cannot afford to pay the premiums. A parallel problem is the fact that many lower-paying jobs simply do not offer health benefits at all. Many service jobs operate on an unofficial, cash basis, but even when the work is performed on the books it tends to be at small companies that cannot afford to offer health insurance. The situation is no better at larger retailers and even local government jobs because of the prevailing policy of hiring everyone at just-below fulltime –ensuring that few employees qualify for benefits even if that firm technically offers them.

46 million Americans – some 15% of the population – have no insurance. While a few of them may be wealthy individuals who either believe themselves to be invincible or able to pay for catastrophic illness, I would hazard a guess that at least 45 million of them would like to be covered, were it available and affordable.

Of course, the real inconvenient truth is that private insurance, while highly desired, is hardly a safety net at the moment. As a recent CNBC.com article on research reported in the American Journal of Medicine points out, medical bills were a factor in 60% of US personal bankruptcies, up 50% from six years ago. More than 75% of those families had medical insurance – plus they were well-educated, owned homes and were in professional occupations. Yet even with insurance, medical expenses in 92% of the cases exceeded 10% of their income.

Even more appalling is the pervasive practice of dropping patients from their insurance. "Nationally, a quarter of firms cancel coverage immediately when an employee suffers a disabling illness; another quarter do so within a year,” CNBC.com quotes from the same article. Harvard's Dr. David Himmelstein adds grimly, “Unless you're Warren Buffett, your family is just one serious illness away from bankruptcy… For middle-class Americans, health insurance offers little protection.”
And what of that threat of reduced innovation? Well this is already happening as well. In fields with huge financial incentives, such as coronary and neurological procedures, there have been huge gains. But in fields without a strong lobby or financial incentive – children’s health care, cancer, orphan diseases and preventative medicine – there is a lengthy backlog of promising research that dies in the laboratory test tubes for lack of adequate funding.

The greatest lie of all is the one underlying this debate: the notion that the best way to operate a national health care system is through the market. The market exists to make money, and people who are well do not make money for a medical industry that bills per procedure.

Yet the corollary to this truth is that national health care makes good sense for capitalism and for that American Dream we all seek. Our companies are put at a real disadvantage when they are forced to pay for rising premiums compared to manufacturers and firms overseas. This creates a perverse incentive to off-shore these jobs and also keeps real wages from rising – after all, what company is going to raise your salary when it is already paying that much again for your health insurance? Our current system is a terrible disincentive for entrepreneurism – that combination of innovation and elbow grease that we collectively believe built this nation – because it corrupts the risk/benefit analysis by making it incredibly reckless for anyone other than the very wealthy to set out on their own and develop a new product or a revolutionary work of art. It further makes very little sense in today’s mobile society – one in which individual workers are likely to be laid off and retrain for new jobs throughout their lifetime- for health insurance to be tied to employment. The new reality is one in which most of us will experience an ebb and flow in employment: family changes, chronic illness, periods of renewed education, and of course lay-offs. That is why health insurance must remain constant, and why any viable public plan must be created at the federal level.

According to The Nation magazine, “the healthcare industry tops the list for spending on lobbying in 2009, reporting about 127 million in expenditures for the first three months alone. The lobby’s (campaign) Conservatives for Patients’ Rights vows to spend $20 million to scare Americans about Obama’s reforms.” That sounds like an awful lot of extra money they have to spend – money coming directly from our monthly premiums. When an industry is willing to sacrifice so much to preserve the status quo – one that is doing untold harm to growing millions of Americans- we know it’s time for reform.

After nearly two decades of rising excess, “Living Within Your Means” is suddenly all the rage. In magazines, newspapers and on TV, cheap is the new chic; on Wall Street, Suits are fretting about the possibly permanent return to frugality and away from recreational shopping. As Americans cart truckloads of long-forgotten belongings to Goodwill – where, incidentally, they have begun to shop for the basics– there is a real sense that a sea change in our attitude towards consumption is underway.

There is much to applaud in this trend. Most people really, truly, only need a few pairs of shoes, a few pairs of pants, and an assortment of work and casual tops. We don’t need ten sets of sheets and twenty towels when a handful will do, and we really don’t need three styles of plastic dishes for “outdoor entertaining”. Buying a car once every decade is rational and more affordable, as is downsizing into a house of reasonable square-footage. A wonderful renaissance is taking place in kitchens across the country as people realize that it is actually possible to cook meals at home, and there are intangible gains to be had by spending more time together as a family playing board games or even running around the backyard – all for free.

Yet underlying this trend is a critical misunderstanding of the crisis. While a contributing cause of the current situation was a collective spending beyond one’s means, it was not the only cause. A corrupt financial system with perverse incentives to approve buyers- particularly minorities- for homes that they could not afford, an upside-down tax system that promotes corporate welfare while sucking every penny from those least able to afford it, a continuation and even speeding-up of outsourcing for both manual labor and office jobs, exorbitant health care and education costs and a decline in real wages surely had something to do with it – arguably much more to do with it.
It wasn’t the occasional splurge on an anniversary necklace or a weekend at an amusement park that did the country in. It was the structure of our economy and the fact that most Americans cannot afford to get by – with or without the little extras. Charging the little extras to the Visa card was a symptom of the disease, not the illness itself. And so today, by avoiding the extras, Americans duck additional financial pain but are merely applying bandages to a dying patient.

The risk today is that ordinary Americans, instead of challenging the status quo and pressing for real transformative change, are berating themselves and devolving into martyrs of frugality. Like anorexic patients who count every calorie as if the counting, not the enjoying of the meal, was the end goal, many today are expending all of their energy on the tallying and the agonizing instead of on the living. Sure, there has been a lot of waste, and certainly, where there is waste, there can be a rectification and therefore a future increase in savings. Yet, what qualifies as waste is a difficult matter – and in the frenzy toward cutting costs, important elements of life can be the first to go.

Shelter and food (and in many places, transportation) are necessities, so they stay. What about the type of food they’ll buy, though? Will it be nutritious produce, yogurt and lean meat, which cost more, or ready-made packaged meals, which cost less but offer far more calories, fat and sodium? And what about their shelter and transportation? Will they perform annual maintenance to ensure the proper functioning and safety of their homes and vehicles, or will they postpone it all for a better year? What about pets – are they ‘family’ or are they a luxury? As the abundance of abandoned pets seems to suggest, responsibility for the lives that once dwelled with the family has been brushed off as a needless excess in the quest for a balanced budget.

And what of extra-curricular activities for kids (to say nothing of hobbies for adults)? Is Pop-Warner football, a weekly ballet lesson, a summer theater class, or piano lessons too much to ask for in a recession? Will parents cancel their children’s best chance at enrichment, at experiencing the world, and at both personal and interpersonal development so that their ledger will be tidy? Many school districts seem to agree that these are worthless trivialities in life, demonstrated by their decision to ax artistic, athletic and even industrial and technology programs despite a proven record of improving students’ lives and rounding out their education – not to mention jump-starting and inspiring future careers.

Let’s think of all of the other things that could go: weekend afternoons at the movies; birthday parties and gifts on religious holidays; the feasts for those religious holidays; extra books and developmental toys for our children’s book-shelves and toy chests; art to adorn our hallways; family vacations; outings to the zoo or the museum; cameras to record the special moments in our lives, sports equipment and the chance to perfect one’s game; camping and boating gear to facilitate our exploration of the outdoors; the time wasted by exploring nature when one could be working a second or third job; houseplants; the Internet and cell-phones; coffee, tea, chocolate, wine, seafood, cheese, jams and other yummy treats; weddings, births and retirements with their expensive festivities; Netflix and cable TV; craft sets and other hobbies; contact lenses; electronic games; higher education.. and maybe we could all start washing our clothes in the back yard, too. The list goes on and on. After food and shelter, we could pretty much cut out everything and still survive.

If we do that, if we cut out everything not immediately necessary to everyday survival, we can succeed in our rush to return to the supposed good-old-days when households managed their finances without access to credit and abstained from frivolities. But once we return, I’m afraid we’ll see that the reality can be bleak. An example that always comes to mind is that of my father’s tragic teeth. Born in 1950, when the economy was supposedly improving, my father’s family had no dental care. The neglected trips to the dentist saved his parents – a WWII veteran turned car salesman and his wife, a secretary- thousands of much-needed dollars over the years, I am sure. But today, it hasn’t saved any money or teeth. Dozens of crowns and cavities later – not to mention thousands of dollars in expense and countless hours of pain – it is clear that the trade-off wasn’t worth it. Yet it is the reality of living within one’s means when one’s means are simply too small.

And that, I fear, is the real problem in our economy and our society. When over 60% of personal bankruptcies are due to medical bills, when promising students drop out of college for financial reasons, when expectant mothers cannot provide their babies with pre-natal care, when two incomes is not enough to make ends meet, when a parent cannot afford to enroll their little boy in Little League or give their daughter swimming lessons, and when the queues outside food banks is ever-growing, we don’t have a problem with living within our means. We have a problem with the means themselves. While we all have a responsibility to manage our households the best we can, it is time that we start demanding answers to why it is increasingly impossible to succeed in that task. Could it be because of the inequities inherent in our current system? I believe so. The time for change and reform is now, as Congress debates a flurry of new bills pertaining to the health care, industrial and financial sectors.

Your leaders need to hear from you. They are certainly hearing from the lobbyists.

“This book is about the uterus and the ovaries. What they are, where they’re located, and their many important life-long functions. The common reasons women are told they need treatment, including surgery, as well as alternatives in treatment and the ways that hysterectomy (removal of the uterus) and oophorectomy (removal of the ovaries, castration) impacts a woman’s body, her health, and every aspect of her life…”

Thus begins The H Word: The diagnostic studies to evaluate symptoms, alternatives in treatment, and coping with the aftereffects of hysterectomy. Co-authored by Nora W. Coffey, the founder of the Hysterectomy Educational Resources and Services (HERS) Foundation and playwright Rick Schweikert, the book details the HERS Foundation’s 2005-2006 nationwide protest against the lack of “informed consent” for this life-altering surgery.

Coffey and Schweikert organized a protest in front of a major hospital in a large city in each state of the country each week for an entire year to deliver information to educate women and their families. Schweikert, author of un becoming, a play about the effects of hysterectomy on a doctor’s wife and, consequently, her family, directed performances of the play with local actors in 23 cities. Each performance was followed by a talkback discussion. Women were remarkably candid and courageous with their statements, the play providing a venue for truth.

Beginning in Birmingham, Alabama, the birthplace of the Civil Rights movement, and culminating in Washington, D.C., the protest inspired a legislative initiative to establish the HERS Foundation’s educational video Female Anatomy: the Functions of the Female Organs as required information for informed consent prior to the removal of their female organs.

Informed consent means that you have been told and that you understand your female anatomy and the changes that will take place after the uterus is removed. Not only that you won’t menstruate or be able to have children, but that the uterus is a reproductive sex organ with functions that affect every cell in a woman’s body. To remove the uterus, all the nerves, muscles, ligaments, and blood supply that support these organs must be severed. Informed consent means that you understand these facts, the aftereffects hysterectomized women experience, and that you have been presented with alternative treatments.

As a retired nurse, I found The H Word to be a remarkable and revealing look at the circumstances of “women’s healthcare” in this country.

Alternating between Coffey’s and Schweikert’s viewpoints, the chapters are devoted to the events of the protest in each city, the reactions of the people to the protest and the play unbecoming, and the logistics and challenges of disseminating their information via educational pamphlets. This data is interwoven with Coffey’s experiences, having counseled women about hysterectomy throughout the last 25 years, as well as her own experiences and intimate revelation of an “unconsented and uniformed” surgery. The loss of the vital woman she was inspired Coffey to find ways of getting this information to women prior to surgery, as well as helping women to try to cope with the adverse effects they experience after the surgery.

I was astounded to read that the protestors were harassed by police and hospital staff, despite having permits to protest. Some of the women who joined them were at first tentative, but then clearly relieved to be able to speak, often for the first time, about how the surgery had diminished their lives. For too long, silence has been the way women deal with the physical and emotional pain, but this protest and this book ends the whispering of the H word.

The authors encountered women in every state who were told by doctors that “they would be a new woman” after their reproductive and sexual organs were removed and then were silenced by the doctors who denied that the problems they experienced had anything to do with the surgery. These women speak about how they were twice victimized—first with the surgery, when other less invasive treatments would have sufficed, and then by the denial of the consequences.

According to The H Word, women experience “a diminished or total loss of sexual feeling, vitality, short-term memory, maternal feeling, an increase in heart disease, osteoporosis, difficulty socializing, and a host of other problems they didn’t have before the surgery… They’re told it’s a routine operation, but there is nothing routine about it.”

The protest gave a voice to the 22 million living women in the U.S. who have been hysterectomized, and the 73% of them who were castrated at the time of the surgery. The CDC reports that one out of three women is hysterectomized by the age of 60. According to Coffey’s research and the counseling of nearly one million women over the last 25 years, the surgery is lifesaving for only 2% of the women for whom it is recommended.

The purpose of The H Word is clearly to deliver this message: the travesty of this life-altering surgery will only be stopped with the education of women, so they can understand the consequences and alternatives. Each page is an education.

I recommend that you get a copy and let at least two friends know about it…so they can tell two friends and so on.

At the end of Schweikert’s play un becoming, Halley, the central character, delivers a monologue to the audience:

“Every morning I wake up, I look out the window and I’m amazed that women aren’t screaming in the streets. Every life split in two should be an atomic explosion; instead it just results in more silence. Every story is too unbelievable to be true. And yet, there’s another one, every minute of every hour of every day. Something must be done. I’m through watching. This thing must stop. This thing must stop!”

The H Word is the beginning of the end… the silence is over!

Following President Obama's historic speech today, CNN followed up with a variety of correspondents and commentators. One of them was Republican Representative Mike Pence, who called the speech "disappointing" because it seemed to create a "moral equivalency" between the Israelis and the Palestinians. In Pence's opinion, Israel is America's ally, and we should only be pursuing peace in the Middle East insofar as it promotes the interests of our ally. He asserted that "millions of Americans" were on the side of Israel, and that the burden of peace was squarely on the shoulders of Palestinians.

Embedded in Mr. Pence's logic is the root of the problem.

To Mr. Pence, I say, “Moral equivalency? Exactly." Moral equivalency is not ours to grant - it is inherent in all peoples' quest for self-determination and survival. Each side believes that it has God on its side, each side has a litany of reasons validating its own righteousness, and each side has historical precedent to justify its current position. Moral equivalency, in the sense that each side has a right to fight for its interests - is a given and a fact of life.

Political equivalency - now that is the real question. It's political equivalency that Americans are not willing to grant - but without it, no progress can be made.

Many Americans are uneasy with Muslims and their unfamiliar dress, believe all Muslims must be closet terrorists, feel a residual guilt over the Holocaust, and have a religious affinity with the Israelis due to the sharing of the Old Testament with Christianity. Add to this the fact that historically, there have been many more Jews than Arabs in the United States (particularly in influential political cities), plus memories of the long gas lines from the 1970s, and it is unsurprising that Americans would want to side indefinitely with Israel.

The problem with this is.... well, there are numerous problems with this.

First of all, this intransigent position reflects a lack of appreciation for the way the world is changing. Clinging to a dogged support for Israel is no longer politically neutral - or equivalent to taking the moral high ground - because of Israel's own egregious actions since its founding. The forced exodus of the Palestinian people from their homes and the refusal of their right to return pale in comparison to the continued policy of responding to any protest large or small with overwhelming force -the most notorious being the firing of tanks in retaliation for young boys throwing stones. These repeated actions, in combination with the draconian legal restrictions placed on Palestinians' freedom of movement, economic vitality and educational opportunities, have caused Israel's support in Europe to drop off precipitously.

Which leads me to the second problem. Europe, still the home of the United States’ most enduring allies, is undergoing a social transformation that can only be called revolutionary. To blindly side with Israel is now politically untenable domestically for European countries that have large Arab populations – to do so would be to light the powder keg under all of their feet.

If we need a third reason that our absolute loyalty to Israel needs revisiting, let’s consider the relative failure of our policy up to this point. Billions upon billions of dollars have been sent to both Israel and Egpyt, among other allies, and countless conferences have been held, but no true solution has been met. Why? One reason is that the US has continued to act as Israel's advocat. To create a real solution, it must act as a neutral partner.

Today, as I watched President Obama’s speech, I felt a flicker of hope that perhaps the next eight years of my adult life will not be spent fighting the Crusades but will be an era of increased collaboration. Whether the crisis between the Palestinians and Israelis will ultimately be resolved remains to be seen. But it is time to begin viewing that as only one piece of the diplomatic puzzle, not a lens through which all policies are viewed. The Middle East is here, and is everywhere. We must extend our hand, and attempt to work together. If they are willing to forgive us for all of Bush’s blunders, there may be some common ground after all.

(Readers interested in reading an extended version of this blog are invited to visit http://bravetheworld.blogspot.com/)

"We are going to smash your hands to pulp like the Chileans did to Victor Jara." Those were the words of the torturers in a Uruguayan prison spoken to my friend Miguel Angel Estrella, a pianist from Argentina. They were referring to the fate of the imprisoned Chilean singer and guitarist Victor Jara, whose hands were destroyed so that he would never play the guitar again. Jara, a fervent opponent of the Pinochet regime, was brutally tortured and later machine-gunned to death following the coup that brought Pinochet to power in 1973.

Estrella was being held in Uruguay's Libertad prison, accused of being a guerrilla from Argentina fighting the Argentine military regime. Unable to prove the charges against him, and given the unprecedented international pressure, the Uruguayan government released him in 1978 after having kidnapped him at the end of 1977.

Estrella was luckier than most of those imprisoned by the South American military. Although tortured and held for a long time in isolation, Estrella eventually recovered, leads a brilliant career as a musician, and is now Argentina's ambassador to UNESCO.

One of those who trained the Uruguayan torturers was an American operative, Daniel (Dan) Mitrione, who was later captured and killed by Uruguayan guerrillas. According to A.J. Langguth, a former New York Times bureau chief in Saigon, Mitrione was among the U.S. advisers who taught torture to the Brazilian police.

Mitrione's method for the application of torture was carefully orchestrated. Langguth reports that the method was described in detail in a book by Manuel Hevia "Cosculluela," a Cuban double agent who worked for the CIA, "Passport 11333, Eight Years with the CIA."

This is Mitrione's voice: "When you receive a subject, the first thing to do is to determine his physical state, his degree of resistance, through a medical examination. A premature death means a failure by the technician. Another important thing to know is exactly how far you can go given the political situation and the personality of the prisoner. It is very important to know beforehand whether we have the luxury of letting the subject die . . . before all else, you must be efficient. You must cause only the damage that is strictly necessary, not a bit more. We must control our tempers in any case. You have to act with the efficiency and cleanliness of a surgeon and with the perfection of an artist . . ."

In Uruguay, Mitrione was the head of the Office of Public Safety, a U.S. government agency established in 1957 by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower to train foreign police forces. At Mitrione's funeral, Ron Ziegler, the Nixon administration's spokesman, stated that Mitrione's "devoted service to the cause of peaceful progress in an orderly world will remain as an example for free men everywhere." Thanks to former U.S. Sen. James Abourezk's efforts, the policy advisory program was abolished in 1974.

Mitrione's case was far from unique. Through the School of the Americas, thousands of military and police officers from Latin America were trained in repressive methods, including torture. On Nov. 16, 1989, six Jesuit priests, a coworker and her teenage daughter were massacred in El Salvador. I knew one of those killed, Ignacio Martin-Baro, vice rector of the Central American University. He was the closest I have ever been to a saint.

A U.S. Congressional Task Force concluded that those responsible for their deaths were trained at the U.S. Army School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia.

Human beings make culture. And we also make torture, that bastard child of culture. It is up to us to change this situation. When running for president, Barack Obama stated, referring to the Iraq war, "It is not enough to get out of Iraq; we have to get out of the mind-set that led us into Iraq."

A similar assertion could be made about torture. It is not enough to say that torture will not be practiced any longer by the U.S. We need to get out of the mind-set that made torture possible in the first place.

Cesar Chelala, a writer on human rights issues, is a cowinner of an Overseas Press Club of America award for an article on human rights.