Zen Moment for Friday

In numbers that Paul Krugman has called "truly amazing," a recently updated paper by a Berkeley economist finds that income equality in the U.S. is at an all-time high, surpassing even the inequities of the Depression. Professor Emmanuel Saez found that, during the feed-the-rich Bush years of 2002-2007, the top 1 percent of Americans enjoyed two thirds of the income growth. See graph below:

- Common Dreams

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/even-more-gilded/

On the 40th Anniversary of Woodstock

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Paul Krassner
August 14, 2009

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Four decades ago, along with 499,999 others on a countercultural pilgrimage, I was headed for the Woodstock Festival of Music & Love. I was wearing my yellow leather fringe jacket for the first time. In one of the pockets there was a nice little stash of LSD. If you happen to be brand-name conscious, then you'll want to know that it was Owsley White Lightning.

The CIA originally envisioned using LSD as a means of control, but, without anybody's permission, millions of young people had already become explorers of their own inner space. Acid was serving as a vehicle for deprogramming themselves from a civilization of sadomasochistic priorities. A mass awakening was in process. There was an evolutionary jump in consciousness.

The underground press was flourishing, and when LSD was declared illegal on October 10, 1966, the psychedelic San Francisco Oracle became politicized while the radical Berkeley Barb began to treat the drug subculture as fellow outlaws. Acid was even influencing the stock market. Timothy Leary let me listen in on a phone call from a Wall Street broker who thanked Leary for turning him onto acid because it gave him the courage to sell short.

As I wandered around the Woodstock Festival, I was overwhelmed by the realization that this tribal event was in actuality what the Yippies had originally fantasized about for the 1968 counter-convention in Chicago. No longer did so many of these celebrants have to feel like the only Martians on their block. Now, extended families were developing into an alternative society right before our dilated pupils. I had never before felt such a powerful sense of community.

The soundtrack was live, and the Hog Farm commune provided meals, servicing the largest Bed & Breakfast place in history. Actually, they had been hired to provide security. But to Hog Farm leader Hugh Romney, security meant cream pies and seltzer bottles. He planned to wear a Smokey Bear costume to warn people about putting out fires. This was not merely a three-day outdoor concert. This was a Martian convention. Or, as Abbie Hoffman called it, Woodstock Nation.

The political contingent was encamped in a huge red-and-white-striped tent christened Movement City. In the afternoon, a mimeograph machine was churning out flyers proclaiming that the outdoor concerts should be free. At night, several festival-goers were busy unscrewing the metal-wire fencing that had been put up during the day. Yippie Roz Payne was among them. She helped take down the "No Trespassing" sign and changed it into a sign that read "Peoples Bulletin Board."

Abbie, Roz and I took a stroll down Merchants Way, which led to the stage that was still being constructed. They took down the "Merchants Way" sign and put in its place a sign that read "Ho Chi Minh Trail." Lights had not yet been strung up along the path, and as it got darker, we kept walking and stumbling until we got lost in the woods. After a couple of hours, we saw a light through the trees, realized that we were right back where we started, and we laughed ourselves silly.

Abbie would get serious later on, though, ebbed on by his sense of justice and fueled by the tab of White Lightning that we had each ingested. While The Who were performing, he went up on stage with the intention of informing the audience that John Sinclair, manager of the MC5 and leader of the White Panther Party, was serving ten years in prison for the possession of two joints; that this was really the politics behind the music.

Before Abbie could get his message across, Pete Townshend transformed his guitar into a tennis racket and smashed him on the head with a swift backhand. Townshend had assumed that Abbie was just another crazed fan. When The Who played at Fillmore East the previous week, a plainclothes cop rushed on stage and tried to grab the mike. He intended to warn the audience that there was a fire next door and the theater had to be cleared, but he was able to do so only after Townshend kneed him in the balls.

Now he shouted at Abbie, "Get the fuck off my stage!" To the audience: "The next person that walks across the stage is gonna get killed." The audience laughed. "You can laugh, but I mean it!"

I inadvertently ended up with a political mission of my own at Woodstock. For a while, I was hanging around the Press Tent, which later turned into the Hospital For Bad Trips. A reporter from the New York Daily News asked me, "How do you spell braless?" I replied, "Without a hyphen." He pointed out two men with cameras who were from the Criminal Intelligence Division of the Army.

And a freelance writer who knew someone with a source in the White House told me how the Nixon administration had assigned the Rand Corporation think tank to develop a game plan for suspending the 1972 election in case of disruption. I decided to mention this at every meeting I attended, every interview I did, every campus I spoke at and every radio show that I was a guest on.

In 1970, the story was officially denied by Attorney General John Mitchell. He warned that whoever started that rumor ought to be "punished." I wrote to him and confessed, but he never answered my letter. Actually, investigative journalist Ron Rosenbaum was able to trace the "rumor" back and discovered that I was the fifth level down from the original White House source. I believed it to be true, and even rented a tiny one-room apartment I could escape to when martial law was declared. It had a fireplace so that if the power went off I could cook brown rice.

My favorite moment at the festival was Jimi Hendrix's startling rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner." His guitar wailing of our national anthem brought me to tears. It was a wordless version of what I interpreted to mean, "It's not that we hate America, it's that we feel the American dream has been betrayed, and we will live our alternative." My least favorite moment was when I discovered that my new yellow leather fringe jacket had been stolen from the Movement City tent.

The '60s were coming to an end, and the quality of co-option would not be strained. "Today is the first day of the rest of your life" became a slogan for the Bank of America, and also for Total breakfast cereal. Tampax advertised its tampon as "Something over 30 you can trust."

Hippies became freaks. Negroes became blacks. Girls became women. Richard Alpert became Baba Ram Dass. Hugh Romney became Wavy Gravy, and his wife became Jahanarah. Yippie organizer Keith Lampe became Ponderosa Pine, and his girlfriend became Olive Tree. My sister Marge became Thais. San Francisco Oracle editor Allen Cohen became Siddartha and moved to a commune where everybody called him Sid. They thought his name was Sid Arthur.

But the seeds that were planted then continue to blossom now. And the spirit of Woodstock continues to be celebrated at such events as the Rainbow Gathering, Burning Man, Earthdance, the Oregon County Fair, the Starwood Neo-Pagan Festival, Pete Seeger's Clearwater Festival, the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, and yes, the electronic magic montage of musicians and singers around the globe performing "Stand By Me" on YouTube.

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Paul Krassner publishes the Disneyland Memorial Orgy poster at paulkrassner.com and he's beginning a column at sf.carnalnation.com on the 3rd Wednesday of each month.

If US health Care's So Good, Why Do Other People Live Longer?

Total Health Expenditures Per Capita, U.S. and Selected Countries, 2003

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Carrie Peyton Dahlberg
August 13, 2009 - McClatchy Newspapers

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Ask around for the healthiest country in the world, and the United States won't come close to topping the list.

People live longer in just about every industrialized nation, from Canada to our north, throughout much of Europe, and around the Pacific in Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

New mothers and their babies also face a rockier start here, with U.S. infant and maternal death rates double some of our industrialized peers.

As debate swirls in Washington and at town halls nationwide over health care reform, there is also a more fundamental question — what about health?

Could policymakers change our medical system in ways that would make America a healthier country?

Insuring everyone should help — but less than people might think, according to doctors and public health experts who've studied the issue. Putting more resources into primary care should also make a dent, they say.

Neither one, though, is likely to send America to the top ranks of its global peers.

"If you want to see dramatic changes in health, you're not going to get there even by doubling the efficiency and effectiveness of the health care system," said Dr. Richard Kravitz, a University of California, Davis, professor of medicine whose research interests include quality of care.

"When you need it, you really need it … but in general, the benefits of medical care to populations are a little bit overrated," he said.

When taken all together, the other factors that play a bigger role include education, income, toxins in the environment, crime, violence, family structure, stress, obesity, nutritious food and exercise.

Across large populations, he said, numerous studies suggest that medical care contributes only modestly to overall health, perhaps somewhere between 10 percent and 25 percent.

Health care for all would provide a "very large" improvement for some deprived populations, Kravitz said, but "a surtax on high fructose corn syrup would probably be more effective … than anything we could do for the health care system, just because of obesity."

Researchers who have delved into the effects of medical care on the health of large groups overall have made some surprising and sometimes conflicting discoveries.

An experiment in the 1980s that extended different levels of insurance to otherwise uninsured people found that more coverage fostered more use of the medical system but not necessarily healthier people, said Dr. Peter Muennig, a professor of health policy and management at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.

A 2006 study that compared white people in England with whites in the United States, in an effort to keep different ethnicities from complicating the findings, reached conclusions Muennig found startling. Even the richest white Americans, who are pretty much universally insured, had more diabetes, more high blood pressure, more heart disease and more cancer than the richest white Britons. On most measures they were a little less healthy than middle income Britons.

This points to a vast range of things health care cannot do, from providing mass transit that makes it likelier people will walk more, to providing the kind of education that correlates strongly with better health.

"Education is the fundamental ingredient for what you need to survive in any ecological niche," Muennig said. People with less education are likely to have jobs that are lower paying, higher stress and possibly more dangerous. They're likelier to live in unsafe housing and eat cheap, calorie-dense food. They're less likely to be offered job-related health insurance. Except for the insurance, he said, health care reforms cannot fix that.

Those who examine health across many nations puzzle over other oddities.

In international health care measures, America's ranking improves when life expectancy is measured for people age 65 and older. While still not at the top of the health heap, Americans who make it to age 65 have remaining life expectancies closer to 65-year-olds in other developed countries, and men stack up a little better than women against their peers worldwide.

That might mean that American medicine treats older people more effectively. Or it could mean that Medicare, universal coverage available at age 65, may be keeping older people healthier. Or it could be something called the "survivor effect," suggesting those who have lived past earlier perils are more robust.

While the factors that optimize health are complex, doctors say there are things federal policymakers could do to make America a little healthier.

Among them are strengthening primary care, finding ways to encourage better diet and exercise, and effectively reforming how health care is financed, said Dr. James G. Kahn, a professor of health policy and epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco.

People do better in nations that encourage them to have a regular primary care provider, Kahn said, perhaps partly because regular, front-line care helps bolster healthy habits.

"Even in the United States, in locations with a higher concentration of primary care providers, people have somewhat better outcomes and also lower costs," he said.

Rewarding and encouraging primary care might also offset an American tendency to do too much, driven by a system that pays for each procedure performed by a doctor, hospital or testing lab, Kahn added.

"We do too many surgeries," he said. "Rates of cardiac surgery are lower in Canada, yet they have better outcomes."

There is hope, too, for "accountable care" groups that would move away from fee for service payments but be held accountable for keeping all their patients as healthy as possible, said Stephen Shortell, dean of the school of public health at UC Berkeley.

Shortell is also pleased that the health legislation being discussed in Washington includes billions for disease prevention and health promotion.

"You can't ignore the health care system, but the big payoff is in lifestyle factors and disease prevention," he said. "A dollar spent on those activities saves $5 in health care costs."

Afghanistan: Mission Essential, Translators Expendable

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Pratap Chatterjee
August 13, 2009 - Inter Press Service

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Basir "Steve" Ahmed was returning from a bomb-clearing mission in Khogyani district in northeastern Afghanistan when a suicide bomber blew up an explosive-filled vehicle nearby. The blast flipped the military armoured truck Ahmed was riding in three or four times, and filled it with smoke. The Afghan translator had been accompanying the 927th Engineer Company near the Pakistan border on that October day in 2008 that would forever change his life.

"I saw the gunner come out and I followed him. The U.S. Army soldiers helped pull me out, but I got burns," says Ahmed, who had worked as a contract translator with U.S. troops for almost four years. "The last thing I remember was the 'dub-dub-dub' of a Chinook helicopter." A medical evacuation team took the injured men to a U.S. Army hospital at Bagram Base.

Three days later Ahmed regained consciousness, but was suffering from shrapnel wounds in his scalp and severe burns covering his right hand and leg.

A little more than three months after his accident, Ahmed was fired by his employer, Mission Essential Personnel (MEP) of Columbus, Ohio - the largest supplier of translators to the U.S. military in Afghanistan. In a statement released to this reporter, the company said that Ahmed's "military point of contact (POC) informed MEP that Basir was frequently late and did not show up on several occasions. A few days later, Basir's POC called MEP's manager and told her that they were not able to use him and requested a new linguist."

Ahmed says he missed only one day of work and arrived late twice.

Today, he lives in hiding in nearby Jalalabad for fear that his family will be targeted because he had worked with the U.S. military. The 29-year-old has no job and had to wait nine months for disability compensation to pay for medical treatment for the burns that still prevent him from lifting his hand to his mouth to feed himself.

Ahmed is one of dozens of local Afghans who have been abandoned or poorly treated by a complex web of U.S. contractors, their insurance companies, and their military counterparts despite years of service risking life and limb to help the U.S. military in the ongoing war in Afghanistan.

"I Trust Him With My Life"

On a table inside a safe house in Kabul, Basir Ahmed placed dozens of photos, certificates of appreciation, and letters of recommendation from the U.S. military units he had worked with between 2005 and 2009. Some pictures showed him in Nuristan wearing T-shirts and wraparound sunglasses and sitting next to the sandbags and concrete barriers. In others, he stood in camouflage gear in the depths of winter next to a snowman.

For example, Sergeant David R. Head and First Lieutenant Candace N. Mathis of the Provincial Reconstruction Team at Task Force Spartan at the Kamdesh base wrote on Dec. 22, 2006 that: "his performance was superb and very professional. He works well as a linguist, and is always punctual."

On May 11, 2008, Ahmed received a certificate of appreciation from Lieutenant Colonel Anthony O. Wright of the 70th Engineer Battalion (Kodiaks) for his help as an interpreter during the road-clearing programme from 2006 to 2008.

It was just five months later, on a similar patrol with the 927th Engineer Company, that Ahmed was injured. At the Bagram Base, the military doctors did some skin grafts, but after about 11 days, sent him to an Afghan military hospital in Kabul. For two to three months he could not sleep properly - scaring his family when he woke up yelling.

Then Gabby Nelson - the MEP site manager - summoned Ahmed back to Jalalabad, where she had the military doctors look at him again. For about 15 days, they treated the burns. He had to report to the gate of the base at 7 a.m. in the middle of winter for Nelson to drive him to the hospital one kilometre away - too far to walk with his injuries. She was often an hour late, he said, a painful and cold delay, but when he asked her to be more punctual, she said she would stop picking him up. He stopped going to the hospital.

Two weeks later Ahmed says Nelson asked him to report for a 12-hour shift starting at 6 a.m. despite the doctors' recommendation for a month's rest. After working for the full month, he received 578 dollars, significantly less than the 845 dollars that he normally earned.

Then as luck would have it, he says, he missed work once and was late twice, because of delays on the road to the base, where the Afghan and U.S. forces often tied up traffic with their manoeuvres, he explained. Nelson told him to turn in his badge. He tried to appeal to the military, but they said they couldn’t help him - so he left the base on Jan. 24, 2009.

Soldiers who had previously worked with Ahmed, confirmed the certificates of appreciation and recommendations about his punctuality and the quality of his work. "He did his job diligently and willingly. He served with us during the most uncomfortable times, but never complained," said one soldier, who asked to remain anonymous.

Official Response

Ahmed's employer - Ohio-based Mission Essential Personnel - was awarded a five-year contract in September 2007 by the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM). The contract, to provide 1,691 translators in Afghanistan, is worth up to $414 million.

MEP spokesman Sean Rushton says that the company did the best it could to help Ahmed with his medical needs. "A desire to improve treatment of linguists is what began our company," said the spokesman.

Rushton and MEP's senior management said that they were pained to hear that Basir was upset at being "let go."

"Anyone reading an account of a translator who was simply let go by a company after being wounded would of course be outraged at the company, but that not only isn't true in this instance, exactly the opposite is the case," the company said in a statement released to the media.

"We have financial records showing seven disability and salary payments between his injury and the final settlement. It has been said Basir [Ahmed] received insufficient medical care, yet MEP employees not only ensured his medical coverage, they regularly took him to his treatment and got him into a U.S. military hospital," the company stated.

"It has been suggested Basir waited endlessly for his disability settlement, yet the funds arrived within six weeks of his rehabilitation's conclusion. It has been suggested MEP forced Basir to return to work when he was still recuperating, yet MEP had no financial incentive to do so and in fact, at Basir's request, MEP got him onto accommodated duty, free of physical hardship. It has been suggested MEP cut Basir loose after he was dismissed by his military supervisor, yet MEP was and is anxious to help Basir, including by considering him for a new job."

Reached by phone for his response to MEP's statement, Ahmed says that he did get disability payments such as a check for $10,000 sent to him in early July 2009 - nine months after he was injured. Yet he still feels that his employer and the military abandoned him.

But he has not been completely forgotten. About two months after leaving his job, he started receiving death threats. "Believe me, my family is too scared. One day I saw a night letter from the Taliban. They put it in our door: 'You three brothers work for the U.S. Army. Quit your job. Otherwise we are going to kill your whole family,'" he says.

Like many of his colleagues, Ahmed had kept his employment a secret from his neighbours, he believes that the injuries provided a clue about the true nature of his occupation to Taliban sympathizers in the community.