Monthly Archives: June 2011

In the vomit-inducing, hypocrisy stakes of 2011 there has been little to rival the sight of American journalists feeding like starved hyenas off the State Department cables made available by Wikileaks only to retreat to their word processors muttering curses against “that awful man” Julian Assange. This beautifully entertaining takeoff of the MasterCard ad, via Ralph Nader’s 2000 presidential election masterpiece, is dedicated to the Bill Keller’s and John Burns of this world and all those who think and behave like them.

We’re up at Deer Lake for the summer, in the lakeside house we were lucky to get a few years back, on the edge of the Catskills Mountains, about a three hour drive from downtown New York and a welcome escape from the torrid heat of the city at this time of the year.

Deer Lake in the Summer

One of the delights of being here is to savour the wildlife which is still, despite the best efforts of the National Rifle Association, incredibly bountiful. In Europe we never see a deer except in a zoo or grazing in the parkland of some landed gentry’s mansion but up here at the eponymously named Deer Lake you have to be careful when you’re driving in case one jumps out of the forest in front of your car. In Ireland roadkill is a squashed mouse or dog but here it’s likely to be, sadly, an entire deer carcass.

Deer Lake in Winter, seen from the lake

There’s a black bear that lives in the nearby forest and while I’ve never seen it, others have, and we did come across evidence a couple of years back that it wanders near the homes around the lake looking for food. Two years ago, Joan hung some dried corns on the tree outside our front door, an American tradition at Halloween time, and one morning we found they had been ripped down and the bark of the tree was lacerated with the hungry bear’s claw marks.

We discovered later that the tree was diseased and it had to be cut down. In a small hole in the top of the stump a family of chipmunks made their home and every now and then we will open the door to see one perched on the edge. They have this amazing ability to stay completely still for minutes at time, a trick they doubtless developed to fool a potential predator. Until I came here the only chipmunks I had ever seen were in movie cartoons.

As I write this a rabbit is crouched in the middle of the lawn chewing away at daisies or whatever. He or she lives in a bank of bushes at the edge of the property where it meets the lake and I first noticed it one evening three years ago as it stealthily crept out to feed. With the passage of time and the realisation that we mean it no harm, its forays have become longer and bolder.

Birds are everywhere, some of them, like the Baltimore Oriole, simply gorgeous in their bright yellow plumage. Humming birds arrive when the heat rises, Kingfishers in the autumn and always there’s the thump of a woodpecker somewhere, pecking away at a tree to get at the termites eating its innards. The presence of a woodpecker is a sure sign of a tree in trouble. Butterflies in colours I could never have imagined and Dragonflies, so big and of such varied hues that they could have flown right out of Pan’s Labyrinth, glide around the garden and on the edge of the lake.

Yesterday, however, I saw an animal that not only had I never, ever seen before but actually thought was extinct. It flashed across the lawn, a cinnamon-stained streak, taking short rests by each tree as its spied out the terrain in front of it before leaping across the tiny creek at the edge of the garden into the wilderness beyond. It took me a moment or two to realise what it was: a red squirrel.

I had never encountered anything but grey squirrels and the story that I had been told was that they had made their way somehow to Europe from America and made the red squirrel if not extinct then so rare it might as well be. But I could never understand how that had happened; how could one squirrel drive another out of existence?

But once I saw the red squirrel the answer was obvious. The red squirrel was small and lean but nervous and shy; the grey squirrel is much larger and, in my experience, a brazen creature. I could imagine the grey squirrel bullying the red squirrel out of the best feeding and nesting areas, terrifying it and eventually starving it, if not out of existence then into a fearful minority.

That’s what bullies do. We’ve all been bullied at one time or another; it’s a hideous experience and it leaves a hatred that is impossible to quench. But the red squirrel darting across our lawn was evidence that bullies do not always get everything their own way. The red squirrel has survived and the measure of that triumph is the beauty of the creature and an allure that the grey squirrel can never match; after all it is grey.

Guest blogger Joan Kelly writes:

The Brehon Law Society in New York City has written to the prosecution authorities in Belfast protesting the attempt to subpoena oral history archives and circulated the letter widely to other interested parties – it is well worth a read:

Brehon Law Society Letter

Guest blogger Joan Kelly writes:

As followers of the saga of the Boston College subpoena will be aware, the text of the demand for access to the oral history archive has been sealed, which means that relevant details – the who is behind this and why they are doing it for instance – have been hidden from the college and therefore the general public. But the secrecy doesn’t end there. In this remarkable piece written by Chris Bray of the History News Network, you can see that the US Department of Justice, which is facilitating the subpoena request on behalf of the British government, is refusing to answer even the most basic questions about the matter, not even which treaty between the US & UK is being used to authorise this request. Why such secrecy? What is going on here?

In recent days some interesting articles about the PSNI’s attempt to violate Boston College’s archive of oral history interviews have appeared and are worth reading. There is this, by Liam Clarke in the Sunday Times; an insightful take by Chris Bray on the History News Network and Anthony McIntyre’s response to Danny Morrison’s rant on his own blog. Enjoy the read. I’m sure there will be more to come. And then there’s this beaut!

New York Congressman Anthony Weiner now admits he lied about sending some semi-revealing photographs of himself to assorted women via Twitter. It was a foolish act but no-one has been harmed, except Weiner himself, his wife and family. He didn’t have sex with any of the women but his political career and ambitions lie in ruins, he has been shamed in public and he may have to quit Congress. His cover-up, if it merits the description, has been awarded the suffix reserved for the most egregious efforts to sweep scandal under the carpet: Weinergate.

Most students of the Iraq war have concluded that US President George W Bush lied about Saddam Hussein and WMD’s, as did British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Iraq was invaded and a lengthy war was fought on the basis of that lie, countless tens of thousands were killed, trillions of dollars wasted and the whole Middle East thrown into chaos and instability. Both men retired as respected statesmen and live in security & comfort. Blair has amassed a fortune and works for one of Wall Street’s largest merchant banks. He and Bush have each written autobiographies that have been widely praised and which earned them a great deal of money. Neither has apologised for anything. No ‘gate’ suffix has been added to their misdeeds.

So, who’s the most offending of this bunch, Weiner or Bush & Blair? And whose misbehavior has been more scrutinized by the American media?

Tony Blair

George W Bush

Anthony Weiner

America is a human disaster waiting to happen. Correction, the human disaster has been under way for some time. It just hasn’t made it into the mainstream media.

The evidence is there in the facts and figures, in the measurements of wealth and poverty, in the scale of real joblessness and the misery that accompanies it. And it also evident in the harrowing testimony of those who must deal with distressing consequences for human health, the nurses of America whose job it is to care for the casualties of what is rapidly becoming the greatest economic disaster of our age.

Unemployed get a handout in the 1930's

The calamity that is coming/is already here is the product of two sets of circumstances, each of which would, by themselves, be catastrophic but whose combination is a toxic mix unequalled in nearly a century. One is a growing disparity in the share of national wealth in the United States, now at levels not seen since just before the Great Depression of the 1930’s, and the second is an economic recession whose only remedy, according to the consensus of political and media opinion, lies in policies that can only intensify that inequality. It is as if, knowing that the well is poisoned we return to fill our buckets to overflowing.

Wall Street

Consider this statistic. In 1929, the year of the Wall Street crash which heralded the Great Depression just one per cent of Americans owned 20 per cent of the wealth, that is one in every five dollars was owned by one in a hundred people. Guess what the figure was in 2010? The same one per cent now owns 24 per cent of the economy, that’s nearly a quarter of all wealth in the hands of a tiny fraction of the population.

How has this come about? Most people thought advanced economies like America’s had consigned those levels of income inequality to the dustbin of history and by policies designed to soften poverty – medicare for the elderly, medicaid for the very poor, social security for the elderly and progressive income tax with their equivalents in Europe – sought to make society fairer and the lot of most people more bearable.

That’s true. That all did happen. It came about in America, as it did in Europe, in the post-war years and this golden age, if you want to call it that, lasted until the end of the 1970’s. Social welfare programs and measures to more fairly redistribute wealth were enormously popular with most people but for the wealthy and very wealthy they were a source of resentment, anger and the biting, all-consuming desire to restore the status quo ante.

The election of Ronald Reagan in the US and the parallel election in Britain of Margaret Thatcher signaled that the status quo ante was indeed coming back to town. On the back of slogans like ‘Government is not the solution, it is the problem’, Reagan and Thatcher began clawing back all those gains made by ordinary people and returning the savings to the back pockets of those who claimed it was theirs to begin with.

Ronald Reagan & Margaret Thatcher

Tax changes, privatization, deregulation all served to strengthen the richest sections of society and impoverish most of the rest and those policies have more or less been adopted by governments of whatever ideological hue on either side of the Atlantic, by Republican and Democrat Presidents, by Labour and Conservative prime ministers.

Again the figures tell the story. In 1980, when Reagan and Thatcher came to power, one per cent of Americans owned eight per cent of the wealth. By 1990 they owned 12%, by 2000 it was 16% and it is now 24%. In 1965 the average CEO made twenty four times the wages of his workforce. By 1978 it was thirty-five times; by 1989 it was seventy-one times; by 2000 three hundred times and by 2007 it was three hundred and sixty-four times larger. Inexorably the rich have got richer, the poor poorer.

Now whenever people in America complain about figures like these they are almost sure to be accused of indulging in class warfare, something that is decried as being unAmerican. In fact class warfare is exactly what’s going on. Even Warren Buffet, America’s favorite billionaire, can see that. A few years back he was quoted in a perceptive New York Times piece about tax inequalities that favor the rich: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

It is against this background that the Wall Street-created financial crisis of 2008 happened and the consequent economic recession, now about to go into a double dip. Officially unemployment is above nine per cent and rising but the real jobless figure, which includes those who have lost hope and given up the search for work or part-timers who would like to work full-time but can’t find a job, is nearer to 18 per cent, not far off one in every five people.

The political establishment seems united on one thing. The problem of federal deficits is a more serious and urgent issue. Both major political parties are agreed on that and how to tackle it: government spending must come down. The only thing they differ on is the mix: should it be spending cuts plus tax hikes or just spending cuts. Either way an awful lot of public money is going to be taken out of the economy and the result will be an even more serious and long lasting recession, more poverty and hardship and greater inequality. Where are ye, John Maynard Keynes when we need you?

Back in the 1930’s John Steinbeck’s magnificent novel The Grapes of Wrath captured the misery and waste of the Great Depression. Ask ordinary Americans about today’s economic crisis and they will tell you, it may not be called a Great Depression but it sure as hell feels like one.

There’s no Steinbeck around today to paint the word pictures of this economic calamity in the unique way he could. But there are few people better placed to tell it as it as than America’s nurses.

This week, some eight hundred members of National Nurses United, the union that represents 170,000 of America’s Registered Nurses (RN’s) are this week holding a conference in Washington DC in an effort to highlight the growing health disaster that is overtaking the United States and to put forward a program to redraw national priorities, for jobs at living wages, access to health care, schools, decent housing and an equitable tax system. During the week they will rally outside the White House in the hope that someone, Barack Obama and/or the media, will start to take notice.

The nurses call it a health emergency, the direct consequence of the economic crisis and the worst some of them have seen in careers that have lasted forty years or more.

The health crisis is disarmingly straightforward. Not knowing if you’ll ever work again, worrying about how long the unemployment checks will come in, anxiety about children and families and sheer poverty all cause stress which in turns creates health disorders.

The nurses identify a surge in heart ailments, especially in middle-aged men, hypertension, pancreatitis, colitis, increased obesity caused by poor diets, mental illnesses like anxiety disorders, growing rates of asthma and, in America’s privatized health insurance system, an inability to pay growing premium costs and co-pays (for European readers, a co-pay is like an insurance deductible) as all the consequence of the Wall Street recession. And many of the nurses are sharing the problems they see their patients suffering.

This is what they say:

“Every day patients call me to say that are putting off a procedure, like a colonoscopy, because they cannot afford the co-pay. Employers change the terms of health insurance coverage, raising costs to workers, and many do not know it’s happened until they show up in need of care and are shocked and unable to pay. People are working harder than ever, two or even three jobs to make ends meet. Often it’s tied to a problem in the household or extended family—unemployment or sickness. Men in their 50s, engineers who were laid off and living in my community, have given up looking for work.  There is nothing out there.” – NNU Co-president Deborah Burger, RN.

“People are going without care at a time when stress-related illnesses are up. Mental illness is enormous and largely untreated. We see extreme angst in children—serious anxiety disorders. They are worried about whether mom and dad have jobs and they hear the talk about losing the house. Patients cannot afford to be out of work, so they are coming to work ill and with symptoms.” – Jean Ross, RN, a NNU co-president. 

Jean Ross

“Stress-induced illnesses are growing—gut disorders in people of all ages, even kids. It is all stress from economic circumstances. RNs are scared and nervous.  Some are single moms, others have laid off spouses, and their paycheck is critical.  Many work an extra shift or two to get by. Many of us have to put off retirement. We are back involved in the lives of our parents because they are aging and vulnerable and do not have the resources to get by.” – NNU Co-president Karen Higgins, RN.

Karen Higgins

Welcome to Barack Obama’s America.

The news that Tyler Hamilton, Lance Armstrong’s former cycling teammate on three of his Tour de France victories has now revealed that he witnessed Armstrong injecting himself with the blood boosting drug EPO – “like we all did, like I did many, many times” – may or may not end with Armstrong facing federal charges that he defrauded the US Postal Service for taking their money while insisting that he was clean of performance enhancing chemicals.

As the NYT’s George Vescey summarised: “According to Hamilton, Armstrong provided illegal drugs to teammates; showed them how to use them; used secret cellphones and code words like Edgar Allan Poe for EPO, the blood-boosting drug; flew Hamilton to Spain for illegal doping; and paid his way out of a positive test.”

Whatever the outcome of the federal probe one thing is for sure, and that is that virtually nobody now believes Armstrong’s claims that he won his record-breaking seven Tour de France crowns fairly and solely by virtue of his own physical abilities. Hamilton’s recent appearance on CBS’ Sixty Minutes follows similar claims from another Armstrong teammate, Floyd Landis who last year admitted to doping while describing Armstrong as the kingpin of doping on the Postal Service team whose management, he added, knew about and encouraged the practice.

Tyler’s claim was made all the more credible by the fact that after the CBS interview he returned his 2004 Olympic gold medal on the grounds that he had cheated to win it. Armstrong, a cancer survivor, has traded on his work for his cancer charity and his claim that he had never ever failed a doping test during his long career. But in the face of evidence that such tests can be and have been faked, and even that Armstrong has covered up, at least once, a failed drug test Hamilton’s interview has created what the New York Times recently called “another huge crack……in Armstrong’s formerly unbreakable facade”.

None of this would have happened but for the great journalism of David Walsh, sports writer for the Sunday Times and a former colleague on the Sunday

David Walsh

Tribune. Back in 2004, Walsh published LA Confidentiel along with French sportswriter Pierre Ballester, an investigation into suspicions that Armstrong’s astonishing cycling feat – coming back from a near fatal cancer to Tour de France glory – could only have been possible with the help of performance boosting drugs.

As American journalists now eagerly follow the path first trodden by Walsh they should remember that when LA Confidentiel first appeared it was either ignored or panned by much of the US media some of whom reacted as though this was the most outrageous and biased slur possible on a national hero and therefore not worthy of a follow-up or serious consideration.

When the book came out America had just invaded Iraq and anti-French sentiment was at a disconcerting height. With great common sense the French had queried the evidence linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda and pressed for a diplomatic solution to the WMD issue. In America the reaction was anger, chauvinism and racism: the French were wimps, interested only in making a buck out of Saddam, hadn’t they surrendered to Hitler and wasn’t De Gaulle a pompous pain in the ass? And in Congress the restaurant menus were altered to reflect all this. French Fries became Freedom Fries.

So a book written in French, published in France and co-authored by a French writer which sought to portray Armstrong as a cheat and liar had to be part of ‘Old Europe’s’ payback for the Freedom Fries insults.

It is to David Walsh’s great credit that he persisted in the face of all this. He knew he was right and he followed up LA Confidentiel with From Lance to Landis, written under his sole byline which took the case against Armstrong to the next stage. His perseverance, tenacity and confidence in his sources and the story have paid off. Enjoy the moment, David.

My apologies first of all to all and sundry for my lamentable absence from this blog. First I had horrendous problems with our internet connection and no sooner had they been fixed that I learned that someone in the British security set up had slapped subpoenas on the two participants in the IRA part of the paramilitary oral history archive I had helped to create at Boston College.

Needless to say this latter event has consumed a great deal of my time recently and because of legal constraints I am unable to say all that I would like to say. Suffice it for now to observe that this is yet another example of lazy policemen trying to live off other people’s work. The offence which they are seemingly interested in happened forty years ago and they showed as little interest in the event just after it happened as they did in the intervening years, despite the plethora of evidence and material to follow up that has been available for at least the last decade – and that doesn’t take into account the secret intelligence which was no doubt available on both sides of the Border.

But it is only now, after they learned of the possible existence of ready-made evidence that the police have chosen to move. If I came away with one conviction about the forces of law and order from all my years watching the police at work in Belfast, it was not that they were corrupt or politically biased, although there was never any shortage of evidence for both, it is that policemen are as work-shy and indolent as it possible to be.

In the meantime this recent item on Boston public television is well worth watching. It can be accessed here.