by Gar Alperovitz,
speech delivered at Iowa State University,
Ames, IA
7 November 1994
available from Alternative Radio

Gar Alperovitz is one of the most highly regarded experts on Hiroshima and U.S. policy. He is professor of political economy at the University of Maryland. His articles appear in the Washington Post, Tikkun, The Nation and Dollars & Sense. His books include Atomic Diplomacy and America Beyond Capitalism. His award-winning book, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, is a classic.

I want to read you something to give you what’s called the latest literature review summary in the most recent assessment of the modern historiography on the bombing of Hiroshima. This is from Diplomatic History, a scholarly journal. “Careful scholarly treatment of the records and manuscripts opened over the past few years has greatly enhanced our understanding of why the Truman Administration used atomic weapons against Japan. Experts continue to disagree on some issues, but critical questions have been answered. The consensus among scholars is that the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan. It is clear that alternatives to the bomb existed and that Truman and his advisors knew it.” I want to underscore the last part. It’s long been understood by many specialists that the bombing was totally unnecessary, contrary to what you might see in the popular press. But that’s an after-the-fact judgment, after the event. This judgment is what the scholars who are specialists and most knowledgeable say, and Truman and his advisors knew in advance, before using the bomb, that there were other ways to end the war without destroying these two cities.

That’s a very controversial statement. I want to underline the source of it. This is not a left-wing politician or a radical revisionist historian or a left-Socialist scholar saying this. The man who has assessed this does not belong to any of the scholarly camps, He’s not a right-wing, left-wing, or middle-wing professor. He is currently the Chief Historian for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a very neutral body. He is telling you in this statement this is what the scholarly literature, the most recent expert studies, say. It’s not necessarily his opinion; it is what he tells you the experts are saying. Let me give you a couple more, just by way of introduction, just so you get a sense of how others have understood this who have really gone into the documents. Then we can begin to talk about the story.

This is something not from recent assessment. This is something from 1946. I’m going to give you two official 1946 government studies of the decision. Remember, the invasion of Japan, had it occurred, the one that might have cost any serious number of lives, would not, could not have occurred until March or April 1946. The bombs were dropped in August of 1945, six to seven months time before there would have been a real invasion of Japan. There was scheduled a first, preliminary landing–not the full invasion–for November 1, three months off. The reason you need to know these dates is that I’m going to read you the conclusion of one official study from 1946. “Certainly prior to 31 December 1945” that’s well before an invasion–“and in all probability prior to 1 November, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” We’re going to come back to the question about Russia entering the war. Russia was neutral at this point. That’s the conclusion of the U.S. official Strategic Bombing Survey in June of 1946.

One final one. This one was discovered only five years ago. A Spanish scholar happened upon this top-secret study misfiled at the National Archives. That’s the way historical research works. [laughter] He brought it to my attention. No one seems to have noticed it except the government officials who wrote it and did not make it public. This is 1946, a War Department study by the Strategic Policy Group of the Operations Planning Division, which was the key operational group that did planning for the military for World War II. “The dropping of the bomb was the pretext seized upon by all leaders of Japan as a reason for ending the war. But the various chain of events that led up to this make it almost a certainty that the Japanese would have capitulated upon the entry of Russia into the war” which happened on August 8th, three months before the first landing, seven months before the invasion. “The Japanese leaders had decided to surrender and were merely looking for a sufficient pretext to convince the army group that Japan had lost the war and must capitulate to the Allies. The entry of Russia into the war would almost certainly have furnished this pretext and would have been sufficient to convince all responsible leaders that surrender was unavoidable. An invasion was only a ‘remote’ possibility.”

So I’m giving you just some of the headlines of the modern scholarship, the most recent studies, and two official 1946 studies of the decision. Why is that so different from what most Americans were taught and most Americans still believe? For instance, most Americans were taught and most Americans still believe that perhaps 500,000, perhaps a million American lives were saved, and perhaps another million Japanese lives were saved by using the atomic bomb because it ended the war without an invasion. These studies and, I think, the modern expert scholarship agree that that is a myth, a complete myth. One of the questions that we want to come back to is, How is it that a myth of that kind could be created and could survive for now almost fifty years?

Let’s go back a way from the headlines and talk about what we now know and some of the details of this. What most people understand who study this is that by April of 1945, well before the August bombings, Japan was in an extraordinarily bad situation. That is to say, the U.S. Air Force was bombing virtually at will, with very little opposition. Their air force was almost totally destroyed or without fuel or with very limited fuel, so that most bomber missions lost very few flights, very different from what was happening in Germany. The American navy had cut off Japan from all its supplies and had almost totally encircled it and was also using American naval bombardment almost at will. One of the studies that I’ve been looking at for the book I’m now doing shows that the Japanese government was attempting to design airplanes made out of bamboo and with fuel made out of acorns. The situation was fully understood that the war was over. The question was, How long would it take the Japanese to realize that they were in extremely dire straits. The U.S. intelligence studies that we now have say that. What I’ve just said is not controversial. Most historians understand this to be the case. The question is, How long could they have lasted, given the fact that they were already essentially defeated?

The second thing you need to know is that for all of World War II until the time we are talking about, the massive Russian Red Army had been engaged in Europe in the fight against Hitler. It was not part of the Pacific war. It was neutral. There was in fact a neutrality agreement between the Soviet Union and Japan which was still in force up until April of 1945. So the second thing that you need to realize is that with the defeat of Germany, May 8, 1945, the question that was on the horizon for all Japanese political leaders, this is what they were thinking about was what was going to happen when the massive Red Army, which had just defeated a good part of the German armies, goes across the Trans-Siberian Railway, comes to the Manchurian border, and is poised. Japan is already in extremely dire straits. What happens if the Red Army comes in and strikes and attacks us now? That’s what the Japanese government was thinking about at that point in time. And that’s what the U.S. government was also thinking about. Remember, there was no atomic bomb. It was still a theoretical possibility.

U.S. policymakers, President Roosevelt first, then President Truman, understood exactly the same thing that the Japanese government understood: that if the Red Army could be made to attack, could come in, that shock itself–Japan is totally isolated, they’ve lost their one ally, which was Hitler. Italy’s long been out of the war. Their situation is extremely bad. If the Red Army now attacks, that would blow them out of the water and precipitate a surrender.

U.S. intelligence as of April 1945, long before the bomb was used, says, When the Russians attack, that will trigger the first step of an invasion, and by June, General Marshall is saying, that will lever them into surrender, the shock alone. We’ll go through some of the July and August discussions within the U.S. government saying, When the Russians attack, if they attack, that will blow them out of the water. That’s in fact what I just read you from the War Department 1946 study. The Russian attack would have been sufficient to knock them out. So that’s the second thing you need to understand about the context.

We were desperately trying to get the Russians in. At Tehran, at Yalta, the major goal of the administration, Roosevelt and then Truman, was to make sure that the Russians would break the neutrality pact and come and help us. Not so much because at this point it was a military necessity. I’ve said that militarily Japan was already defeated. But it was a political shock effect that we were really after, particularly after April 1945. We had arranged with the Russians at Yalta that they would come into the war three months after Germany was defeated, on the theory that it would take that long to move enough troops and materiel across Siberia to be on the Manchurian border. Three months is an important date. The Germans, as I said, were defeated on May 8. June, July, August 8 is three months. Hiroshima was bombed on August 6. Nagasaki was bombed on August 9. Welcome back to the coincidence–or was it a coincidence?–about those dates. Our goal as a matter of policy was to get the Russians in. We had gotten agreement from them that they would come in, and that was the planning.

The third element you need to understand is that we had broken Japan’s diplomatic codes. We knew everything they were telling their ambassadors back and forth all around the world, but particularly the ambassador they had in Moscow. We knew that a decision had been taken, first in May and then confirmed in June, to attempt to end the war. There were also peace feelers at the Vatican, in Lisbon, in Stockholm, in Tokyo through the Swedish ambassador, above all through Bern, Switzerland, all of them peace feelers, official, unofficial, difficult to understand, but particularly the breaking of the code suggested that by June and then on into early July a major decision had been taken within the Japanese government to attempt to end the war as soon as possible. The key date here is July 12-13, because on that date U.S. intelligence picked up a very important cable. It said the Emperor of Japan himself, breaking a tradition which was only very rarely used, had intervened and was personally attempting to end the war and was asking the Soviet Union to accept a personal envoy, an ambassador personally from the Emperor, not just from the government, Prince Kanoi, to negotiate an end to the war. We knew that as of July 12-13.

In all of this there was clearly one condition that was stated which we knew even before it was stated was the bottom line that the Japanese demanded. This is another element of the picture you need to know to understand why these assessments are what they are. That one bottom line element, so the intelligence studies suggested and so the intercepted cables suggested, was that the Japanese would not lose the Emperor of Japan. He would not he hung as a war criminal, as the Germans leaders were about to be hung. He would not be dethroned. He would be allowed to stay there in some form, politically powerless, like the Queen of England, but he would not be destroyed. It’s important to understand that unlike the Queen of England, the Japanese Emperor in this period was regarded as a deity. He was a god. He was much more like Jesus or Mohammed or Buddha than like the Queen of England. So the Japanese were saying, If you threaten our god-emperor, if you say that he will be deposed or hung or you’re unclear what you’re saying, we will fight to the death. Our intelligence said to our own leaders, advised very dearly, that if Japan were threatened in that way they would fight endlessly. Only if we told them we could keep the Emperor, perhaps in a powerless position, would a surrender be possible. All of the cable intercepts and all of the peace feelers all say that above all the bottom line is, Tell us that you will not demand unconditional surrender which will threaten the Japanese emperor-god.

You know Japan does have an Emperor. He’s still there. The son of the old Emperor is there. We did in the end tell them they could keep the Emperor. He has no power. So that condition ultimately was satisfied. We agreed almost immediately in early August that that would be OK after the bombing. It was not a matter of principle, is what I’m saying, because Japan has an Emperor and we agreed to that. But the intelligence studies said that was the one condition.

So what you’ve got is a deteriorating Japan. You’ve got the Russians poised and about to enter. On April 5 they announce to the Japanese that they will not hold on to their existing neutrality pact and that they are giving notice that it will be abrogated or will not be renewed within the year. So the handwriting is on the wall. And you have two ways, it seems, to end the war. One, get the Russians in, and the shock will blow them out of the water. Two, tell them they can keep the Emperor, and that will end the war. Moreover, two and two, or one and one, add them together, if you do both together–the Russians come in and you tell them that the Emperor will be assured, you won’t hurt their god-emperor–those two together are almost certain to end the war. Moreover, this is only April, May and June. The invasion of Japan is off in 1946, and even the first landing could not take place until November of 1945. So there’s plenty of time to see whether or not your intelligence is accurate and whether what the intelligence people are advising the President will happen. So that’s the context.

It is the reason, with the documents we now have available, why this assessment of the literature that I read you at the outset, by the Chief Historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Samuel Walker is his name, is what it is. There were alternatives, essentially bringing the Russians in and telling them that they could keep the Emperor, that U.S. leaders believed were likely to end the war. The question becomes, If that was so, why did it not happen?

What I’ve said so far sounds rather controversial, but it’s pretty much the agreed position of the consensus of experts. Now we enter the area where the expert debate gets interesting and it’s no longer agreed and there’s not nearly as much a consensus. There’s much more debate about what I’m now going to describe to you as the parameters of the debate and what is now known and what people are thinking about and what is still unknown.

In this part of 1945, President Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, just about the time when the Russians said they were going to end the neutrality pact. Three weeks before the Germans had surrendered. Harry S. Truman became President. At this time there was no atomic bomb. The atomic bomb was still a theory. It was believed highly likely by the scientists who were advising and building the bomb that it would work. All their tests and calculations suggested it would work. But it was not something that had as yet been tested. So now you’re sitting in the White House. Perhaps you will have a new weapon of astounding proportions. Maybe. And you have the option of the Russians coming in plus telling them they could keep the Emperor, which seems highly like to end the war. You have to plan for an invasion. First you want to keep the Japanese on their toes. You want to keep U.S. troop morale up. There’s an outside chance you might need it, so invasion planning goes on and on throughout this period.

So the pressure was kept up. But what the President and the White House were thinking about was, What are we going to do? Maybe we’ll have a new weapon. We have a certain way to do this. What is the possibility here? What we now know is that at the same time the picture of Japan was emerging in the way that I’ve described it, something else was going on someplace else. What that was is as follows:

Just as World War II was ending in Europe, the question of who was going to control the continent now that the Germans were defeated was beginning to become very serious world politicos between the United States and particularly the Soviet Union, but also the British. The Red Army was occupying Eastern Europe, having pushed the Nazis back from Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and was poised in the middle of Europe. We were beginning to have fights with the Russians about, for instance, the composition of the Polish government: Would it be pro-Russian? Would it be neutral? Would it be pro-Western? There are a whole series of fights going on about the postwar division of Europe and what it would look like. In the midst of those discussions–remember, Stalin was an ally. Twenty to twenty-five million Russians had lost their lives in the common fight against Hitler. This is long before the Cold War gets going. These are our allies. But in the midst of this beginning to tactically prepare for the postwar period, there is also the possibility of this new weapon, quite apart from the Japanese situation, which conceivably, so these people believed, could strengthen your hand in a diplomatic fight with the Soviet Union, particularly in Europe. I want to emphasize that, because many interpretations of this period neglect a rather important fact. President Truman came into office on April 12, with the death of Roosevelt. The first full-scale briefing he got–it had been mentioned to him just after a Cabinet meeting and it was told him by the man who became Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes–the first full discussion of the atomic bomb in the White House after Truman became President had nothing to do with the war against Japan. It was brought to his attention because there was a big fight going on with the Russians over Poland. The Secretary of War, Henry Stinson, said to him, Mr. President, I’ve got to come talk to you about something very important that affects all of my thinking in all of these matters of foreign policy that we’re engaged in right now, the fight over Poland. It is the atomic bomb. On April 25 Truman got his first briefing because he was having a fight with the Russians.

Modern historiography has traced this development. There’s a whole second track going on, which has nothing to do with the war in Japan at all. It has to do with the fact that American policymakers began to understand or believe or erroneously believe there’s a whole set of possibilities-that maybe if they showed this big new weapon, they might be able to have a “hammer on those boys,” Truman says at one point, maybe about the Russians, maybe the Japanese, maybe both. “It might be a stick behind the door,” the Secretary of State says at one point. “It might be the master card of diplomacy against the Russians,” the Secretary of War says. “It might be a pistol on our hip against the Russians.” It’s all about the Russians, not about the Japanese.

I want to give you a little flavor of that, just so you have a feeling about what they were saying. For instance, this is from the diary of Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, May 14, 1945. He had just got done talking to the Assistant Secretary of War, John J. McCloy. He writes in his diary, “I told McCloy,” this was May 1945, a couple months before the bomb was tested, just after Germany surrenders, “that my opinion was that the time now and the method now to deal with Russia was to keep our mouths shut and then let our actions speak for words. The Russians will understand them better than anything else. It is a case where we have got to regain the lead and perhaps do it in a pretty rough and realistic way. This is a place where we really hold all the cards. I called it a ‘royal straight flush,’ and we mustn’t be a fool about the way we play it. They can’t get along without our help (economically they’re devastated after the war) in industries. And we have coming into action a weapon which wilt be unique. Now the thing is’–now, before it’s tested–‘~is to not get into unnecessary quarrels by talking too much and not to indicate any weakness by talking too much. Let our actions speak for words.”

That’s the Secretary of War, May 1945. I’ll give you one more. This is the way the Secretary of State expressed a similar idea two weeks later to one of the atomic scientists who came to him and said, We don’t think you should use the atomic bomb. We think you should have a demonstration in an uninhabited area. The atomic scientist was Leo Szilard. The man who became Secretary of State was James F. Byrnes. This is Szilard’s report of a meeting with the Secretary of State at the same time, May 1945. “Mr. Byrnes did not argue that it was necessary to use the bomb against the cities of Japan in order to win the war. Mr. Byrnes’ view was that our possessing and demonstrating the bomb would make Russia more manageable in Europe. Russian troops had moved into Hungary and Romania. Byrnes thought Russia might be more manageable if impressed by American military might.”

I could go on with a whole series of documents. Ambassador Joseph Davies has very similar comments. You find it in many parts of the Stlmson diaries. Most scholars who have studied this now fully recognize that one of the major things that was happening had absolutely nothing to do with the war against Japan. It had to do with the fact that this new weapon, if it worked, would be the master card, the hammer, the pistol, to make the Russians manageable, particularly in Europe and particularly in the eyes of the Secretary of State and the Secretary of War, who were very influential, particularly the Secretary of State with Truman.

Let me back up. There is no atomic bomb yet. This is May 1945. That’s why there’s nothing to talk about. The test has not yet occurred. So a second part of this issue that comes up in this odd period when people are trying to decide what to do about the Japanese war is this whole other game, this whole other planning process that’s going on: What about the Russians in Europe? It is decided that we’d better wait for just a little bit because the atomic test is going to take place, it was hoped July 1, then there were some technical problems. It was put off until July 16. This is May. So you’ve got to wait, technically, until July 16 before you know whether or not you actually have anything that’s real. So we don’t know. There was tremendous pressure to have a meeting with Stalin in Europe to decide the fate of Europe as soon as possible. Churchill, for instance, was begging Truman to meet with Stalin as soon as possible. One of the reasons he was saying that was, You’ve just defeated Germany. You’re about to take the American troops out of Europe to go to Asia. If you pull the troops out you’ve got no bargaining leverage. So let’s have a meeting right away. In fact what was decided was to put off the meeting with Stalin, which became the Potsdam Conference with Stalin. Again, note the dates. The test was July 16, the Alamogordo test. It was set for July 16. The meeting with Stalin was set for July 17. It was no accident, and indeed the test occurred on July 16. It worked. They sat down and negotiated on July 17 with this new weapon behind Truman’s back at Potsdam to settle the fate of Europe.

So that’s part of the second track of what most historians understand was going on in the summer of 1945. Let me give you a third piece which is a little bit more complicated. It’s another element in the puzzle. Let’s go back to it.

Remember I said that there was another way to end the war, which was when the Russians come in the shock of the Russian army entering the war by itself seemed likely, if the bomb wasn’t available, to end the war. There was a problem, however. If the Russians came into Manchuria and North China with the Red Army, possibly Red Army and Russian political influence might follow with the Russians. So American policymakers, quite apart from these European issues, on the one hand wanted the insurance policy of the Russians coming in, and on the other hand they didn’t want to encourage them too soon until the bomb was tested. So it’s a complicated situation. We might need them, and besides we don’t know quite how strong the bomb is. So it might work but it might not be strong enough. We may need the Russian insurance policy. So how do you encourage the Russians to come in but keep them hanging out in a tactical way during this period?

Just to give you a little bit of flavor of how that one is described in the diary of the Secretary of War, this is the next day, May 15. He says, “It may be necessary to have it out with Russia on her relations,” This is not Europe, this is Asia “to Manchuria and Port Arthur and various other parts of north China and also the relations of China to us. Over any such tangled wave of problems” he calls the atomic bomb “S-1” in his diary, “the S-1 secret would be dominant. And yet, we will not know until after that time, probably, whether this is a weapon in our hands or not. We think it will be shortly afterwards. But it seems a terrible thing to gamble with such big stakes in diplomacy without having your master card in your hand.” That’s May.

So what in fact is done is through a complicated set of negotiations over the conditions of Russian entry with the Chinese Foreign Minister T.V. Soong, we’ll just refer to it as the Soong negotiations, the negotiation is started with the Russians about exactly what will be the terms of reference for the entry into Manchuria, based on an understanding that was generally agreed at Yalta. The idea is to keep the negotiation going, on the one hand keeping them in and on the other hand stalling them, until you know exactly what happens. As soon as the bomb is tested and is shown to work as successfully as it was, and it was a great success, more power than they had expected, and more psychologically impressive than they had expected, then what happens is U.S. policy shifts and gets very rigid in the negotiations and stalls the negotiations as long as possible, quite the reverse, to keep the Russians out, even though they had wanted them in earlier, and even though you knew they could end the war. So there’s a 180 degree turnaround when the bomb works to try to keep the Red Army by stalling this complicated negotiation with T.V. Soong. What I’ve just said is not in dispute among historians who have studied this. This is common ground of the expert literature.

Now let’s back up to what’s going on in the period that really counts. We’ve gotten the atomic test, July 16. The test is a success. President Truman is in Europe the 17th meeting with Stalin for the Potsdam conference. Churchill is there as well. Then Churchill is defeated, and the next Prime Minister Attlee comes into the middle of the conference. You’ve got a tactical problem: What are you going to do? In that context, the key questions are threefold. Three decisions are made at this time.

The first one is rarely noticed by many specialists, but is rather obvious when you look at the documents. First, if you want the Japanese to surrender, if you’re not thinking about using the bomb but you’re just going to want them to surrender before a landing or an invasion, if the goal is to try to end the war without casualties of an invasion, if that’s what you’re talking about, then the Secretary of War and the Acting Secretary of State, the Undersecretary of the Navy and the Secretary of the Navy, every major policymaker with one exception we’ll come back to, says, You’ve got to start the game early and tell them they can keep their Emperor well in advance so they can digest it politically and think about it and come to terms with it. So one of the questions that’s posed.is, Do you make any moves early-timing, or do you wait until the very last minute to say anything and then drop the bomb on them. The decision is made not to do anything early but to put any kind of a warning way down the track so there’s almost no time to consider it. That’s one decision made after July 17, quite clearly recorded in the Secretary of War’s diary when he talks with the Secretary of State.

The second decision, which is widely discussed, and everyone understands it who has studied the literature is the following. Every member of the U.S. government and the British government, with one exception I’m going to come back to, says, If you want the war to end you must tell them that they can keep the Emperor, explicitly. A proclamation has been drafted. It was unanimously agreed by all officials at the time, shortly thereafter one of the officials changes, and it is the famous Potsdam Proclamation. Some of you who know this story will know that a proclamation was issued at the Potsdam Conference. It is a warning to Japan to surrender or else. It’s a very general warning. I’ve just talked about that warning. One of the questions was when it would be released, and a decision was made to release it at the last minute rather than give them time. But the most important element of that warning was whether or not it would say explicitly, You can keep the Emperor, we’re not going to harm him. The draft Potsdam Proclamation recommended to the President in Paragraph 12, it’s one of the very few technical things you ought to take back from this talk, Says, recommended by the all Cabinet officials involved, essentially, You can keep the Emperor. At the Potsdam meetings, once the atomic bomb was tested, under the advice of Secretary of State James F. Byrnes and against the advice of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the British military leaders, Prime Minister Churchill, every other major American leader, Paragraph 12 is eliminated. So that the Potsdam Proclamation as it was put out on July 26 does not contain any assurances for the Emperor. And in so doing, we know, from many diaries, the President fully understood it could not be accepted. This warning proclamation could not be accepted, and it was understood, well documented, that it could not be accepted. As one historian- scholar, Leon Sigal, in a book called Fighting for the Finish, puts it, it was put out as a propaganda device. It had nothing to do with a real warning that anyone could accept. So that’s the second decision that’s made.

The third decision that’s made at the Potsdam Conference we’ve already talked about, but I want to underline it. It is to try to keep the Red Army out of the war as long as you could, even though you had wanted them earlier, by stalling these complicated negotiations with the Foreign Minister of China, the Soong negotiations, to try to keep the Russians out as best you could.

So that’s the context in mid- and late July in which we approach the very final end of the war. Another thing to know about that context is that there are new cables intercepted showing again renewed Japanese desire to end the war. The Emperor sends another cable which we intercept, and the decision is then made. The decision to use the atomic bomb–let me sharpen this because sometimes those of you who have studied it, or who will study it, may find people saying that there is no decision to use the atomic bomb. It just happens. The reason people say that is, if you look carefully, you do not find, as you do in almost every other major government decision, a very complicated set of policy papers saying, Should we or shouldn’t we? Should we or shouldn’t we use the atomic bomb? You don’t find anybody saying, Let’s decide to use the atomic bomb, although there is a recommendation of how to use it by a committee called the Interim Committee. You don’t find this kind of paperwork. You don’t find the Joint Chiefs of Staff studying the decision. You don’t find any actual meetings where anybody actually goes through it that we have on record. It just seems to happen.

How could that be? The reason it seems to happen, if you look back at what rye just said to you, is that what happens is major decisions are made which make it the only possible thing to do. That is to say, one option to end the war without an invasion was to have the Russians come in, and you take that away. The second option to end the war is to tell the Japanese they can keep the Emperor. You take that away. Then you know, since the Emperor’s threatened, they will fight forever, meaning there will be an invasion, meaning a lot of people will be killed. If you eliminate the two options, the President says we aren’t going to do A and we aren’t going to do B, then the only thing left is either an invasion, which is crazy, a total loss of lives, or to use the bomb. So it’s in that context, by the process of elimination, that that’s all that’s left. As I said earlier, when I read you the summary of the modern literature, there were alternatives. They were eliminated. The bomb was the one that was left.

I’ll put it another way. Supposing you are a policymaker, like Secretary of the Navy Forrestal or Secretary of War, Stimson, possibly General Marshall, although he’s very difficult to pin down, he plays his cards close to his vest, and you don’t believe this ought to be done. The President has decided, no, we’re not going to use the Russians and no, we’re not going to tell them to keep the Emperor. You’ve got to march into the President’s office and say, Mr. President, don’t use the atomic bomb. That’s the equivalent in that situation of saying, Lose 500,000 men, or whatever the number will be, because that’s all that’s left once he’s made the decisions to eliminate the two options. That’s essentially what happened. I think President Truman wavered a great deal about all of this. I think he personally, every time you find someone on record, in May, in June, in July, he seems to want to tell the Japanese they can keep the Emperor in every diary. The man who was the dominant figure in all this was the Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes, the one exception I’ve mentioned several times, who, it seems, at this point in time, was overwhelmingly dominant in influencing the President. He was a much more senior political figure than President Truman at the time, who was not an unknown, but he was not nearly as powerful as the man who was Secretary of State. who had been his mentor in the Senate.

It’s Byrnes who is dominant in these decisions. He’s the man who helps eliminate Paragraph 12 and most historians now agree is the dominant influence in the decision to use the atomic bomb. His concerns, we know, as Secretary of State, were very much focused on the Russians, particularly on Eastern Europe, but also on Asia. His dominant concerns are not necessarily the same as the concerns of other people. But he’s the main figure.

What happens at this point in time, I’ve now given you the basic chronology, the Potsdam Proclamation is issued on July 26, but is issued without Paragraph 12, which means it says it’s a threat to the Japanese Emperor. It is a demand for unconditional surrender. The Japanese mokusatsu the decision. The term issued by the Japanese government is important. It’s mokusatsu, which means either “reject” or ‘ignore” or “take under advisement or study.” It’s a complicated word. We later say what it meant was “reject.” The intercepted cables say what we meant was, Study it. We’ve got to figure out whether we can do this. The dates trigger along we’re at July 26, 27, 28 is the mokusatsu date. The bomb is ready on the 1st of August. The President says, You can use it any time after the 2nd of August. Weather intervenes. It is used on the 6th of August. The Red Army comes into the war as planned on the 8th of August. Nagasaki is destroyed on the 9th of August. Japan says it will surrender on the 10th of August. The 11th of August they say, One condition. We have to keep the Emperor. They’ve been saying that all year. On the 11th of August we say, You can keep the Emperor and the war is over.

Those are the sequences. What’s this got to do with us and me or is it just an interesting history lesson. I want to just go to a couple of points that are often raised in these conversations that you at least ought to flag and think about. One has to do with the casualty estimates. Many of you have seen, probably the argument that President Truman and many other people have made. A new book by David McCullough repeats this argument. That 500,000 perhaps, maybe even a million lives could have been lost. I just want to sharpen what the expert understanding of that is.

In the first instance, if what I’ve said is valid, and if what the literature summary said is valid, and if what the official studies said is valid, the war would have ended without any more major casualties. Zero. I’m exaggerating. There may have been a few people lost. There was very little fighting going on. The Japanese didn’t have any fuel and any ammunition. They were conserving it. We were trying to get in position at this point possibly to have an invasion, so there was very minor fighting going on. Some accidental things happened. But there was no invasion. And if the war could have been ended, as all these other documents said, in August or September or October, before the first landing, the casualty rate in an invasion would have been zero. Not 500,000, and not a million. Zero. It’s very important to get that really sharp, because that’s the major number. Zero.

If there had been a landing, which was highly unlikely, as this War Department study says was a remote possibility, particularly if you told them to keep the Emperor and the Russians came in, the maximum number of casualties anyone has found in a full invasion in all the planning estimates within the official papers we now have, three historians have studied it, Barton Bernstein, professor at Stanford, is the expert who studied it most, another man named Rufus Miles has studied it, and recently another professor, a military historian named John Ray Skates has studied it. The reason I mention it is because they come from different parts of the political spectrum. Skates is a military historian. Bernstein’s on the political, liberal left, and the other man is more neutral. All of them agree is that the maximum number anybody has ever been able to find in any of the documents of the time, as opposed to what was said later, was 46,000. That’s in a full invasion. If you look at what might have happened had you only had the November landing at Kyushu, the maximum number anyone has found is 25,000. Very different from the exaggerated numbers that most people believe and are told. This is pretty much no longer disputed in terms of the estimates that were made at the time and the advice given to the President. So that’s another thing to get sharply in focus.

The last thing I want to mention, as you may have noticed, I’m critical of this decision. I want you to understand that the criticism that I’ve given you so far is very much the same as the criticism that was offered, so far as we can tell, oddly enough, to me it’s the most interesting thing about this story is that some of the top U.S. military leaders, conservative generals, conservative admirals, were saying virtually the same thing modern historians are saying. Let me give you a little flavor of this, because only if you hear the documents of the time do you get some sense of what it felt like to be a top-level, that is, a military leader who knew what was going on and who knew about the intercepts and who knew what was really happening. Not a low-level guy. Guys in the field didn’t know at all. Here’s General Eisenhower, later President Eisenhower, saying what happened when he was told by the Secretary of War that the bombs in fact were going to be used against Japan in these circumstances, with Japan deteriorating. “During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression. So I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated, that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary. And secondly, because I felt that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. Japan was at that very moment seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of face. It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.” That’s Eisenhower.

I’ll give you another one. The then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the 1945 structure was slightly different. He was a conservative admiral, Admiral Leahy. He was also Chief of Staff to the President of the U.S. He wore two hats: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, conservative admiral, and Chief of Staff to the President. This is what he had to say publicly after the war. Think of Colin Powell after the bombings in the Iraq war publicly saying something like this about his friend the President. This man was a friend, not a critic of the President, a very good friend. Admiral William D. Leahy said, “The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan at all. In being the first to use it, we adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion. Wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”

I want to give you one more. All conservative military leaders of that generation, it’s a different generation. They had standards and morals and ethics about who you killed and who you didn’t kill. They did not think just bombing any city was the right thing to do. This is an interesting one. I’m going to read it to you and then tell you who said it. This is the last one I’m going to read you. The Commander in Chief in the Pacific was General Douglas MaeArthur, a conservative general. “General MacArthur once spoke to me very eloquently about it, pacing the floor of his apartment in the Waldorf Hotel in New York. He thought it a tragedy that the bomb was ever exploded. MacArthur believed that the same restrictions ought to apply to atomic weapons as to conventional weapons, that the military objective should always be limited and should limit damage to non-combatants. MacArthur, you see, was a soldier. He believed in using force only against military targets, and that is why the nuclear thing turned him off.” That’s former President Richard Nixon recalling a private discussion with MacArthur in his apartment at the Waldorf.

Related to this, the final aspect is, the bomb was used against cities. Des Moines, Milwaukee, Chicago, Mexico City. That was not the only choice. Other people, and the last military figure I want to cite raised the issue of, Did you have to use it against a city? Many of the scientists said, Let’s have a demonstration. But usually people think about demonstrations as maybe on a desert island, or maybe in a redwood forest, as Louis Strauss, the Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Navy, said. But General Marshall, who was Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, had an obvious suggestion which is rarely discussed in terms of the possibility of demonstrating it. He said, Why don’t we hit a major military target in Japan, like a navy base? We can show the bomb, destroy everything, accomplish all our objectives without destroying a city. A city was where old folks and young kids and cripples were because the young men were off to war. That’s who mainly died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that’s what mainly turned off these military leaders at that time, because they knew what it was all about. So I want to sharpen that aspect of it by reference to the military leaders of World War II who understood the distinction. The Hiroshima bombing is often thought of as the use of the atomic bomb in the abstract. It was not abstract at all. It was the destruction of civilian targets as a major shock. They understood that and that’s why they did it.. It was a choice that was made to hit cities.

I think I’ve probably exhausted the time and I’ve maybe exhausted your patience, but I suspect that last set of conversations, particularly as it appeared to these eminent conservative military leaders, opens some of the more profound questions which still face us as we approach the end of the century, with nuclear weapons still all over the world. Thank you very much. [applause]

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©2010

by Stephen Bezruchka,
speech delivered at Olympia Community Center
Olympia, WA
29 May 2010
available from Alternative Radio

Stephen Bezruchka is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Global Health at the University of Washington. He worked for many years as an emergency physician in Seattle. His particular areas of research are population health and societal hierarchy. He has spent over 10 years in Nepal working in various health programs, and teaching in remote regions. He is author of numerous articles and essays. He is a contributor to Sickness and Wealth, a book on the effects of global corporatization on health..

My challenge is how to tell the story about health and distinguish it from what is typically done by doctors and those who work with them, and in hospitals. A Scottish patriot four hundred years ago said: “whoever tells the stories of a nation need not care who makes its laws.” So I will tell some stories, but they are not ones we are familiar with in this country. We need to be if we don’t want to die young.

I want to talk today about vital issues focused on the reality of this country, this society, starting at its origins. I will use the Declaration of Independence as a starting point and come back to it periodically. The Declaration of Independence entitles us to the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I want to talk about what these inalienable rights actually mean in our times. I will talk about all three of these; life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. My perspective is to ask how we are doing as a society when it comes to fundamentals of who we are and where we are going. To do so it makes sense to start at the beginning. Back in 1776 to make this declaration was revolutionary. We were the first in the world to make such a statement. That is what this land was about at that time, breaking new ground. No other nation or political division was anywhere near such progressive thinking. So I want to bring us up to the present and see how we are doing.

What is the right to life? Back in 1776 you could kill with impunity, especially if you were well off meaning having wealth and power. So what about today? The way we kill most people today is very different from then. Today we die from the usual conditions everyone dies from, not gunshot wounds or stabbings, it is just that death rates are higher in the USA than in other rich countries. For the most part, we die not from behavioral violence, the gunshots and stabbings, but from something called structural violence which I will highlight later. Of course our rates of homicide are the highest of all rich nations, so behavioral violence is always in our midst, but the deaths pale to those from structural violence. Does the right to life mean a right to a long life, or just the right to being born? How long should that right exist? That is do we have a right to live as long as possible? What does that mean, live as long as possible? Is that right under our control?

I want to take an examined look at this thing called life, as well as at liberty and at the pursuit of happiness. How well are we doing 234 years after making the Declaration. In evaluating our progress, we should be using the same standards of comparison that were present in 1776, namely how well are we doing compared to other political entities. We were ahead of the pack of nations back then. Our Declaration set us apart. We were number one when we made it. Are we number one today?

I always thought that we enjoyed a long life, but I’ve sadly come to realize that Americans do not live a long life if the standard is comparing ourselves to people in other countries. I want us to face this grim fact and work for achieving what is stated in our Declaration, namely the right to life. A life that is short is not the right to life captured by our Declaration of Independence. We have also given up control of this societal right but it can be won back if we look at the superpowers in the world today.

Not only do we not have a very long life in the U.S., I would offer that we have only the illusion of liberty. By that I mean with a quarter of the world’s prisoners, with almost one in a hundred Americans behind bars, that we don’t have a right to liberty. I believe that liberty is another aspect of our society that is under our control yet for some reason we have decided to abrogate this control, the loss of another societal right, the right to liberty.

Finally, yes, most of us are trying to pursue happiness and also helping others do so with our daily recital of “have a nice day,” a homily we repeat endlessly and hear at almost every encounter, whether it be getting off the bus, buying our groceries, or phoning the city for a replacement recycling container. We didn’t do this forty years ago. So the question is are we having nice days? We are certainly in hot pursuit of nice days, and does wishing someone to have a nice day all the time do it for them? The answer is clearly no. Our happiness levels have been falling slowly over the last forty years, that is we are not having as many nice days as we used to. Since the Declaration clearly states we only have the right to pursue happiness, not the right to happiness, I won’t be quite so critical about our declining levels of happiness. But the attainment of happiness is also under societal control, as are the other two rights. Societies should have the right to a reasonably long life, liberty, and not just the pursuit of happiness, but its attainment.

I want to cover those precepts, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and relate this to health care. Why health care? This country has passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and some of us may think this legislation will solve some health problems. I will point out that health care is not so important to society, although it ought to be available to all and the new bill will not accomplish that but still leave ten to twenty million people without insurance. Health care isn’t as big a deal as many of us think. That heresy comes from a clinical doctor, me, who has practiced medicine for 35 years.

Let’s begin with not living a long life. How short are our lives? What do we know about length of life in the United States as presented by the most reliable sources available? I will use those sources to suggest medicines that we need to not die young. Then I will ask that we all take the first steps towards living longer and more healthy lives. These steps may take us in directions that are unexpected, at least given the new health care reform bill. I ask you to consider rethinking what you believe to be true. I have a new bumper sticker that reads: “Don’t Believe Everything You Think.” I’m always trying to examine critically what I believe to be true.

First the bad news. Despite living in the richest and most powerful nation in history, we Americans die much younger than we should. This has been brought up in many reports over the years including one published by Congress. They pointed out that for someone aged 25, their chances of reaching retirement at age 65 are less than in the other rich nations. How could this be true and be known by our elected officials who not only do not tell us, they don’t do anything about it? A report came out April 30 in The Lancet, the world’s leading medical journal, calculating what are your chances if you are 15 years of age of living to age 60. If some of you have children aged 15, that is not an unreasonable consideration. What is the likelihood of their being around at age 60? Not only do the all the other rich nations have better chances of 15-year-olds living to age 60, but we keep company with Algeria, Armenia, and Macedonia, who have the same chances as our children do. About 45 countries do better–that is, their 15-year-olds live longer than we do. To achieve this, if you believe it is medical care or health care that produces health, we spend half of the world’s health care to die this young. So clearly health care can’t have much to do with health.

Another report published last summer showed that if we are 50 years old, we won’t live as long as people in the other rich nations. That report also pointed out that better health care won’t do it, since, for example, we already outperform the healthier European nations when it comes to five-year survival rates for common cancers. That is, we may have better outcomes in treating many diseases than healthier nations, but still we don’t have a long life. Although we have better treatments, we get more diseases, and that is the key point to be addressed when it comes to our right to a long life. We are too sick to live long and health care won’t make up the difference.

Now many of you here may be thinking that these national data don’t apply to me since I take care of myself and do all the right things to be healthy. I used to think that. But it turns out that we can’t be healthy as individuals unless those around us are also healthy, and that applies to all of us in the United States of America. Earlier this month a study in The Lancet, demonstrated that we are behind about 40 countries that have lower maternal mortality ratios. Our rate of deaths for women has actually increased since 1990. Yet in 1951, we had the lowest death rates in childbirth among all nations. We had life then. What happened? Another study published in The Lancet this month pointed out that looking at deaths of children under five, in 1970 there were only 19 countries which did better than the United States, but by this year there were 41 nations. We are neck and neck with Lithuania and Bahrain. Of course some nations have to be 42 and why not the USA?

There is not a single indicator of health in which we do well, again if the standard is comparing ourselves with people in other nations. Why is our health at all levels declining when the standard is comparing ourselves with others? Although health care can treat illness the lack of health care is not the cause of that illness. How much younger do we die for living here? If we eradicated our leading killer, cardiovascular disease, and kept the other disease death rates the same, we still wouldn’t be the healthiest nation, but we’d be close. So that represents a huge gap. No doctor I know thinks we could eradicate our leading killer, but that would be possible metaphorically, if we took the right medicine which I will prescribe later tonight.

Besides dying young on average, we have huge health disparities within the U.S. meaning that some have pretty good health and some, such as a black man in Harlem lives less long than a man in Bangladesh. But our healthiest are not as healthy as the average in some of the healthier nations. We sit a close distance from Canada and the 49th parallel, the border with British Columbia. People there live much longer than in Washington state. Last year a coalition of communities in BC issued a report: “Healthy Futures for BC Families: Policy Recommendations for Improving the Health of British Columbians” in which they boasted that British Columbians are some of the healthiest people in the world, but work still needed to be done to reduce health disparities so their coalition was working on that. If you take, say working age men, mortality rates in Canada are almost fifty percent lower than for them here. That is a huge health gap. They just don’t die as young in Canada. The undertakers there have less work to do than here.

Our Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the federal body charged with monitoring and improving our health, points out in its Health United States 2009 report that when it comes to infant mortality, babies dying in their first year of life, 27 countries in their list do better than the United States but back in 1960 only 11 nations were better. The same appears to be true for length of life. That means our health compared to other nations is declining. What it will take to get a better life chance for our babies is not better medical care. Already our levels of care for newborns are the most advanced of all nations. And funding for this is not an issue, since for every premature baby born, for every sick newborn, no costs are spared in treating them. Access to the best possible care is available and paid for, either by the parents, or by health care insurance or by the state, for every newborn with health problems in this country. That they die in much greater numbers than in more than 27 other countries is not a fault of medical care.

For most of us, it is hard to know how healthy we are as a nation, and it is only by comparing ourselves with others that we can come to this understanding. That is why I call this the Health Olympics since that is why we go to the Olympic events to see how well we do in comparison to other nations. Perhaps some of you went to Vancouver for this year’s Winter Olympics, where the U.S. won the most medals. Health should be an event in those games. If the sport of health were an event in the Olympics, then we wouldn’t be there for the final day’s race in any definition of health, as we would have been disqualified in the trials. That is how bad we play at our health. Yet almost no person in the USA knows this or thinks it credible when presented with the mortal truth. It is not just an inconvenient truth, it is a deadly truth.

Let me point out why more or better health care won’t give us a life with a story that describes the predicament we face today. Not too far from here there was a little- known, isolated town situated on the top of a cliff on a beautiful spot overlooking the water. This town was blessed with a fine natural hot spring. It was likely connected to the steam vents of the volcano nearby, Mount Rainier. People lived there happily. They knew that the spring had remarkable benefits and the local people used it and enjoyed good health. A developer came in and told the townspeople they should make it over into a modern resort where everyone could get jobs and the town would prosper.

The town did this and an exclusive resort was built there attracting the rich and well to do. Now the town was set right on the edge of this high cliff top. The guests drove to the town via the one road that headed directly to the edge of this precipitous cliff before turning left into the town and resort. On occasion, a driver would not be careful and the car would plunge over the cliff wreaking havoc to the occupants. With the periodic car wreck the townspeople feared that if they didn’t do something, they might lose their livelihood. They assembled a committee to look into the matter who hired consultants, the best in the US, to advise them. The consultants worked long and hard, reviewed the situation and wrote their recommendations. The committee reached a decision based on the consultant report that they announced at a town meeting.

The head of the committee reviewed the problem of the road coming close to the edge of the cliff so sometimes a guest car would plunge down to the bottom. They had found the ideal solution. The town would build a hospital with a state of the art trauma center at the bottom of the cliff and, along with the new health care reform bill, this would solve the problem. We need to think of a better solution. Most Americans believe that it is health care that produces health in this country. We thought we had the best health care system in the world, at least when it comes to being the most technically advanced, and doing the best research on treatments. But again, if we look at comparisons of our health care with other nations, it is far from the best.

Yet we spend half of the world’s health care bill. It is not health care that makes us healthy. That is the unfortunate truth divulged by much research. I say this as a medical doctor who has practiced for 35 years. During this period working in the emergency department I have treated heart attacks, motor vehicles crashes, shoulder dislocations and stabbings. I could help many of these people. But when you add up all that medical care does, it still doesn’t make that much of a difference. This gets us into the issue of how do you come to believe something is true. I put this to a grade 8 class in Seattle once. After a long silence, one of the students raised his hand and said: “If our parents tell us when we are very young, if our friends and teachers reinforce that, and if we’ve experienced it then we know it to be true.” I am always surprised at what our children know before we dilute their critical thinking skills with more schooling. What I’ve come to understand is that schooling often stands in the way of my education. Medical school didn’t teach me about health but about diagnosing and treating disease. We focus on diseases and not why we have the problems we do.

Thomas Pynchon wrote in Gravity’s Rainbow: “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.” Most of the time working as a doctor I was asking what disease my patient had and what treatment was needed instead of why is our society dying so young?

A group of scientists at the University of Michigan in a 2008 book titled Making Americans Healthier wrote, “As dramatic and consequential as medical care is for individual cases and for specific conditions, much evidence suggests that such care is not, and probably never has been, the major determinant of levels or changes in population health.” We should be asking do we want health or health care? Let me repeat that: “do you want health or health care?” I want both, but first I want health since that is what life is all about. With our short lives and our increasingly unhappy times, that we don’t have health in the USA. We deserve both health and health care. We have to ask what produces a long life if not medical care?

As is apparent to you from the story of the remarkable town with the therapeutic hot springs on the edge of the cliff, rather than build a trauma center at the bottom, what they really needed is a guard-rail at the top where the road turned left to enter the town. So what is the guard-rail for America? Exciting research over the last 40 years has come to the conclusion that the nature of caring and sharing relationships in a society are the critical components for its health and well-being. Once everyone has enough to eat, shelter if they need it, a clean environment, then the nature of caring and sharing matters for producing health. But caring and sharing with a few individuals won’t cut the mustard. It has to be for the whole nation. That is the leap of faith I’m asking you to make.

One way to measure caring and sharing is by indicators such as the gap between rich and poor. A small gap between rich and poor is the primordial factor that provides good health. A big gap leads to more deaths through the usual diseases we die from. This is the structural violence issue mentioned before. There is no smoking gun. Societies that are more equal have many many good things going for them. For example, they live longer lives, they have fewer teen births and fewer youth homicides. They have better educational outcomes in schools.

Studies show that if a child grows up in poverty, especially poverty in the first year of life, it is like being administered a toxin that irreversibly binds to the brain for which there is no antidote you can take later in life to rid the child of the scourge. Early life lasts a lifetime. Early life begins when we are in the womb, and the more poverty we have in our midst the sooner we will be in the tomb. All of us in this hall started life as a fertilized egg, a zygote, that grew into an embryo and became embedded in our mother’s womb. That ovum, the contribution from our mother, was made in our maternal grandmother’s womb. That is you began your existence in your maternal grandmother so her circumstances affect your health. We’ve demonstrated this with linked birth data sets in Washington State. Our health depends on the health of our forebears.

Most of us believe all men are created equal as stated in the Declaration of Independence. Unfortunately this is not a self-evident truth. People believe it but science doesn’t back it up. Stressful conditions that pregnant women face affect their health, the health of the fetus and the health of the next generation of people. Poorer people are exposed to more stress in our society so the issue of early life reflects poverty in this, the richest and most powerful nation in history that also sports the most child poverty of all rich countries. That is why improving our health will take such a long time. Roughly half of our health as adults is determined before we begin school. The time in the uterus and the first couple of years outside are key periods for laying the foundation for our health as we sit here today. If you consider how we structure early life in the U.S., you get a glimpse of why we die young.

As I said earlier, changing personal behaviors won’t produce a healthy society. We already have the smallest proportion of men smoking of all rich nations, yet we die young. Turns out the longest-lived nation, Japan, has the highest proportion of men smoking. That’s not the reason for Japan’s good health, namely that all the men smoke. It just means that factors other than personal behaviors matter more for our health, yet this is just another aspect of health production ignored by the media in the U.S. that will make it difficult for us to have the right to a long life as our Declaration of Independence entitles us to. Our government tells us that to be healthier we need to change our personal behaviors. Our First Lady says we must eat less. But in the healthier nations they don’t stress personal health related behaviors as much and instead pass legislation that enhances the amount of caring and sharing that takes place and this is the key element to produce a healthier society. It is the vital difference as to why people in other countries have longer lives. It doesn’t help that we have the most child poverty of all rich nations, as well as the most overall poverty. Poverty especially relative poverty is the killer, your standing compared to others, and it is time we faced up to that. Any political attempts to deal with that so far have failed.

Lack of societal caring and sharing, early life disadvantage and poverty are the key killers as well as the ultimate reason why our nation is falling behind others. The gap between rich and poor is a good measure of those lethal agents, lack of societal caring and sharing, of early life disadvantage and of relative poverty. In the 1920s the richest 1% had close to half of all the wealth in this country. By the mid-1970s, their share had shrunk to less than a quarter. The rich had lost half of their wealth, proportionately, and our health then, compared to other nations, was something we could almost boast about just as we could in the more equal 1950s. But now the richest 1% have their wealth share back to close to half and we all die young. The richest one percent of Americans have nearly half of all the wealth in this nation and that leaves the other 99 % of us to share the other half. Once you take out what the next 9% have, there is perhaps a third of all the wealth left for the bottom nine tenths the bottom 90% of us to make do with. The primordial risk factor is the gap between rich and poor. The guard-rail then, the restrainer we need at the edge of the wealth gap cliff, is a small gap between rich and poor.

Researchers at Harvard University came up with a mind boggling estimate of how many people die in this country because of our large gap between the rich and the poor. About 880,000 deaths a year occur in this nation that wouldn’t be there if we had an income gap like the Western European countries. That number represents one death in three. This is like a 400 passenger 747 jumbo jet crashed every 4 hours killing all on board. Or a 911 tragedy happening every 30 hours, continuously. Now the fascinating part of this grim story is that there are no collapsing towers, there are no plane wreckages. People die from the usual causes of death, and don’t blame inequality. They die from heart attacks, strokes, liver disease, and complications of diabetes. There is no smoking gun. Inequality is killing us softly. Paul Farmer, the humanitarian Harvard doctor calls this structural violence. It is violence. But the cause is the capitalistic structure of society that extracts far more than a pound of flesh, but more like a hundred million pounds of human flesh a year in this country. Any human tragedy or disaster in society, Haiti, the Tsunami, wars, pale by comparison to what the Harvard study discloses. But that study did not receive any media attention. The research that gets the media attention is about individuals and their difficulties. We don’t consider societies. The media lead is never about a country without being specifically about some individuals there and this brings us to an individual response. Exposing a nation where all of us push up daisies too soon isn’t newsworthy.

Structural violence goes on continuously and could be likened to a odorless, colorless, invisible gas that kills without mercy, all the time. That is how we need to look at the gap between rich and poor that is increasing as a legacy of capitalism. It is a gas of unfettered greed. It is released by our current putrid variety of market fundamentalism that has eroded our human and societal rights. So much for our right to a long life. What about the right to liberty?

Societies with a smaller gap between rich and poor don’t need to house the threatening population in prisons because egalitarian communities foster relationships of trust and less violent behaviors. Criminologists and sociologists have known this for decades. It is just that the general public has been taught to fear others, something helped by our mainstream media who want to commodify us into gated communities while they present the fearful evening news. If you work in the news media, you know the motto “if it bleeds it leads,” meaning that sensational stories of crime and disaster and misfortune are the ones that get the headlines. We hover there afraid and unwilling to send our children into the streets to play with other children, so instead they play violent video games to vent their hormone energies or get into chat rooms trying to find friends. We accept curtailing our freedoms to keep undesirable people off the streets. Just think of this the next time you go to the scareport and have to take off your shoes, watch and belt. America is the scareport and takes away your right to liberty. More equal societies do not need to lock everyone up. Trust is much higher there. Incarceration rates among nations pattern the gap between rich and poor. The same is true for prisoners within the states. The bigger the income gap the more people in those states are behind bars because there is less trust. If we bring back social and economic rights, then we can cast off the illusion of liberty and be entitled to live free as the Declaration of Independence exhorts. We will no longer be the world’s incarceration nation.

What about happiness and well being? We are in hot pursuit of happiness. Are we attaining it? As a nation we certainly are not the happiest country by far. Are all the little having a nice day endless refrains doing their job? How would we know how happy we are, or how many nice days we are having? What does the hedonimeter say? People measure happiness and well-being levels by a variety of means. Scoring a question about today, “how are things” indicates happiness. And for measuring well- being they ask: “over all how would you say your life is going?” Then these ratings of population samples are aggregated to give an overall estimate. It is an imperfect measure, of course. It is not like health which I like to measure by how long we live, since as a doctor the easiest thing for me to diagnose is death. Harder to diagnose unhappiness. Yet as an ER doc, I’ve had people come in the middle of the night and say “I’m not happy and I want to be admitted to the hospital.” That is what the emergency department represents. It is the final common pathway for all sorts of society problems that it can’t fix.

The most common prescription drugs in this country are happy pills. They are not erector set drugs, the viagras, but are the SSRI anti-depressants class typified by Prozac and Paxil. Americans take more of those than statins for example which might prolong life. We take half of all the antidepressants consumed in the world, much more than in any other nation. So we are pursuing happiness with a vengeance. Are we attaining it? No the hedonimeter shows that happiness in the USA has been slowly declining for about the last forty years and the decline has been biggest in women. We used to see our happiness increasing with our economy, with the measure of the GDP, until the 60s but since then happiness has no longer improved while the economy has grown immensely. We have more stuff, more luxuries, more gadgets to make life easier, but they do not make us feel better. Coca Cola is now the Happiness Factory. With a bottle of Coke you can open happiness. How much happier can you be? Coca Cola reports that in 2008 a billion and a half bottles of happiness were opened every day on the planet! Wow! That means everyone in the world must be having happy days!

We are having fewer and fewer nice days as we make more and more progress. Studies on Americans show that in 2004 for a family, with incomes in the $50,000 to $90,000 range, comparing it to those with $90,000 or more did not make them happier if they had more. Below incomes of $50,000 having a bigger paycheck produces more happiness and well-being. But having more after $50,000 doesn’t. As a whole if a nation becomes richer, individuals in it are no happier. Surveys around the world show that Forbes magazines’ richest Americans are about as happy as the Amish, the traditional Mennonite group in Eastern United States and those two have the same happiness as Inuit or Eskimos in Greenland. Many other rich nations have seen happiness plateau despite their country gaining enormous amounts of wealth. Japan is an example with no increases over the last 50 years. Russia has seen its happiness plunge as they underwent shock therapy after 1991 yet now they have the third largest number of billionaires in the world. We of course have almost half of the world’s richest and that hasn’t made us or them very happy.

Americans think they will be happy at some future date in contrast to many rich countries. We just need to be wished to have a nice day a few more times each day and we’ll make it, to the promised land, the utopia of wealth and happiness. Our country suffers from the Lake Wobegone Syndrome. We are all above average. And if we are just a tiny bit below average today, wait until tomorrow when we open happiness.

What can we do to realize the precepts in our Declaration of Independence, namely life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. We don’t have life, since we don’t live that long. We don’t have liberty since one in a hundred Americans is locked up. An even greater proportion is in the criminal justice system. I might add that the real criminals, the banksters that hijacked tens of trillions of our dollars over the last years are not in the criminal justice system, but are still the recipients of our generosity. They should be locked up but their role in the prison industrial complex is to make profits off it.

In one sense we do have liberty. I can stand here and say all these things and it is very unlikely that people will come to the stage, put me in a strait jacket and carry me off to a gulag. We do have freedom of expression, but since most Americans don’t realize that we don’t have a long life or happiness, maybe that is a false freedom. If it were mainstreamed in the commercial media, then we might get together and do something to produce better health. Happiness, well, the declaration never said we were entitled to happiness, just the pursuit of it. I’ll leave you to ponder over whether that is enough.

The way we Americans try to solve problems today is just plain wrong. Let me start with an example. We have many unhoused families and long lines at the food banks today. I used to call them homeless but these people have places they have called homes, it is just that they don’t have them today. They are unhoused. This is not healthy for us. We have students come to UW in our global health department from all over the world. They are shocked when they arrive and see all the unhoused, something that is never portrayed about the U.S. in their media back home. They are shocked to see beggars and long lines at food banks. We are not longer shocked, we’ve become used to it, just like we are used to dying young and not thinking it abnormal.

In the 1970s there were a few hundred missions throughout the nation that were feeding the few destitute and unhoused. Then in the 1980s the unhoused numbers grew immensely. By 2005 there were over 40,000 agencies providing food for various groups. These food banks have become a thriving institution in our country and are very organized. There is the California Association of Food Banks helping members collect truckloads of fruits and vegetables that are too small, too ripe or misshapen for supermarkets to sell. A national network, Feeding America, through its members, supplies food to over 25 million Americans. Their website helps you find a food bank by zip code. What is going on here?

We started with a situation forty years ago, a time when we were much healthier as a country compared to other nations, and we didn’t depend on charity to feed people. Societies that don’t depend on charity with food banks to feed its population, care more for them in meaningful ways so that those who have less don’t feel the humiliation and disrespect of having to ride the shame train to the food banks. Now most of the food pantries provide food for people living in homes, that is those who are housed, who use the food to feed their families. I’m not suggesting that we let these families go without food, like we do with countless people in Africa and India where starvation is a real problem. We don’t ask why we need over 40,000 agencies doling out food? We now have more people on food stamps than ever before. The reason is that this country resembles a failed state, the sort we have invaded in the last decade.

We have unhoused all over the place. Not just old men down on their luck, but unhoused school children by the hordes. The estimates of homelessness in the 1970s suggested this was not a problem. But by the 1980s they were there in droves. Why? I asked that question to a group of unhoused seniors in Seattle. “When did homelessness become a problem?” Their chorus came back “Reagan.” What did Reagan do? He cut funding for low cost housing and mental health services. So they took to the streets and we have our problems today.

Why can’t we create a society where people have jobs and the dignity to live? We have to face up to the fact that not only do we die young, but in many other ways, we are a society in decline. If we are not careful, we may become like the Sumerians, the Romans, or the Incas who vanished and little is known about the reasons why. To date our solution, rather than to address the fundamental problem, to cure it, is to tide it over, to cover it with some bandages. With the food banks it is like putting a trauma center at the bottom of the big cliff. Is this the way the richest and most powerful country in history should behave?

By fixing inequality, I’m not suggesting we need to all be on a perfectly equal footing. We just need more equality than we have had for many years. Our increasing inequality has resulted from various political choices we made that were really not very informed choices. These choices cut taxes, but mostly for the rich. We deregulated many institutions and their policies that had protected us. We deregulated banks in 1999 by repealing an act from the 1930s that separated investment banking from keeping our savings secure and that led to the great recession that we are in today. There are a whole host of policies that changed, and we were sleeping at the switch. We did not realize the repercussions of our political choices. We did not consider the structural violence that would come to kill us. We did not think that it would be the U.S. variety of capitalism that turns out to be the odorless, colorless, highly toxic lethal gas.

Other healthier nations, have a different variety of capitalism, one that is kinder, that doesn’t kill us softly. Western Europe is a great example of another way of doing business. They have amazing social safety nets. If you are out of a job, you get generous benefits and schooling for a new job. Most higher education is free in Europe. If you have a baby, you get time off to spend with your baby. Dad’s too. Europeans have shorter work weeks and take longer vacations. Yes, they are having economic problems right now, but they will solve them.

Earlier I talked about our life, liberty and happiness being under our control and by that I meant that in the U.S. we the people have the power. But we have sold our power to the rich for very little. It was almost like a fire sale. We have given both our power as well as our wealth and resources to the rich. We didn’t ask them to share their wealth for taking our power. Instead we have government of Goldman Sachs by Microsoft for The Gap. We could take our power back since the Constitution gives we the people the power. The rich and powerful are few and we are many.

What needs to be done? We need to take back some of the wealth we have given to the rich. One of my public health students said: “We can’t make the rich less rich!” There lies the problem. Most of us believe that the rich taking everything is beyond our control. We are just in a period of time when we’ve lost the means to take back what is ours. That will change and the new health care reform legislation is a baby step with a tiny increase in the taxes the rich pay.

Earlier I mentioned two superpowers. The word was plural. Only two superpowers remain in the world. Yes, one is the United States of America, with its military might and concentrated economic wealth. Who is the other superpower? The other superpower, ladies and gentlemen, girls and boys, is sitting in front of our noses. It is you. Together we are the most powerful force in the world today. Much more powerful than the United States of America. Much more powerful than Coca Cola and its Happiness Factory. We are over six billion strong, while the rich and politically powerful around the world today number less than a million. There are six thousand times more of us. How do we exercise our superpower status? That is the challenge we, you and I together, face.

We can exercise our superpower status in many ways. One would be to boycott the open happiness campaign and not drink sodas. What if Coca Cola’s one and a half billion bottles were to sit there un-drunk every day. What if we didn’t open happiness that way, but sought it in our collective strength? What if we didn’t focus on consumption as a way to achieve well-being. Remember consumption was the 19th century word for tuberculosis. What if we stopped the consumption of stuff that didn’t actually open happiness?

Another way to exercise our superpower status is politically. Remember that the power of those few on top of the hierarchy depends on the obedience of the other superpower which is huge. Do we have to obey and indulge their avarice? We need to consider the difference between the have-nots in the world of which there are billions and the have-yachts who are very few. They can have their yachts only because we, the other superpower, let them sail.

We need policies that have been proposed before. Policies that narrowed the gap and some that would have if they had been put in place. Then we need some very innovative policies that we have never considered before. They are policies that exist in the healthier countries, and may need to be duplicated here. Americans don’t like to do that, but why not use tested medicines that work? I’ll detail the prescription.

Economic and social policies fostering economic rights produce health in a society. The kinds of policies we need are those that presidents have proposed and tried to enact not long ago. They are health policies but we would not recognize them as such. An important health policy was proposed by President Nixon in 1969, namely his Family Assistance Plan. This legislation would have provided a guaranteed income to every American family with children. Our children are our future yet today we have the most child poverty of all rich countries, and we should be ashamed of that. So we need similar legislation that President Nixon managed to get passed through the House of Representatives back in the early 1970s, a period when our health as a nation was much better, compared to other countries.

A Democratic president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, proposed legislation in 1942 that would tax those who are wealthier in this country. He wanted a hundred percent tax on incomes above $25,000 at that time. What passed was a 94% tax, not quite 100 but close enough. What might be good today is the same tax President Roosevelt proposed on incomes above half a million dollars. Let $500,000 be the maximum wage. That is about what $25,000 in 1942 represents today. Many of us could live on that if we had to. While many Americans may shudder at limiting the incomes of those who make more than a half a million dollars a year, the studies demonstrate that it is not good for our health and contributes to our dying younger. FDR also proposed an economic bill of rights but he died before he could make progress there. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was all about an economic bill of rights but he was assassinated.

Good policies need to be supported so policies whether proposed by Republicans or Democrats that make healthy sense today need to be enacted. What will we do with the revenue from increasing taxes? They would fund the Family Assistance Plan that President Nixon proposed. Decreasing poverty, especially child poverty, is the first step. Specific policies would provide paid maternity/paternity leave for every family in the U.S. Sweden for example, makes it mandatory to have a full year’s paid maternity leave. The leave is combined, meaning that if the mother takes the whole year, the father also has to take 3 months. They recognize the importance of both parents being involved in the care of the newborn. You get your full pay from the government. The second year’s leave is optional but at only 80% pay. In the third year if you go back to work, you can put your child in a free Swedish government run day care. To work in a Swedish daycare center, you have to have an advanced degree in play. That is what daycare is all about, socializing the child and we need experts there.

You might respond and say, “Hey, I don’t want the government to pay me when I have a baby. That is something we should only ask charities to do with the very poor. Otherwise it would be socialism!” But think just a moment and consider that we have paid the rich about ten trillion dollars in various ways over the last year just as Newsweek highlighted in its February 16th issue last year with the red hand clasping the blue hand and the bold headline: WE ARE ALL SOCIALISTS NOW. Of course what they meant was that we are all socialists for only the rich now. The poor have to face market discipline but not the rich. They rich can have socialism, but not the rest of us. Socialism for the rest of us is the most important part of our prescription for health, the medicine that will keep our children from dying young. Canada does it, England does it. France does it. In fact only the United States, Swaziland, Liberia and Papua New Guinea do not have a mandated paid maternity leave. So we get what we pay for. We deserve better.

We need a paid prenatal leave policy. The other rich countries mandate a minimum number of days of paid leave when you are pregnant. Chile, which is as healthy as the U.S., despite being much less wealthy, mandates six weeks of paid prenatal leave and twelve weeks of paid maternity leave no matter how long the mother has worked. Cuba, which is healthier than we are, guarantees 18 weeks of paid prenatal leave and 40 weeks of paid maternity leave. Those two policies, generous paid prenatal leave and paid maternity/paternity leave are the medicines that will do the most for our health. This is the guard rail we need at the edge of the cliff.

Healthier parts of the world are aware of these issues. Last year, Time February 3 European issue had Karl Marx on the cover and a long story inside about the relevance of his ideas today. The U.S. edition had the inauguration on the cover and not a word about Karl inside. Marx is a four-letter word in this country. We need to utter this kind of profanity in the United States of America if we are ever going to get ourselves out of the current capitalistic mess. Capitalism has this incredibly amazing ability to adapt to every new situation. Many of us no longer work together, face to face, and organize. Instead we are the typing left. We sit there alone, in front of this idol we call a computer, and make mystical motions with our fingers and create the click and clack of how we want to make our way ahead. This typing left, blogs, emails, and does endless mouse work. Mouse work is the spiritual motion most of us do with our right hand in a highly ritualized fashion. Mouse work is our religion. We have all become mouse workers. This is how capitalism wants us to behave. This is killing us. We are all in the mouse family, a little like lemmings, running to the edge of the precipice. In the USA we are disposable mice. Some 880,000 of us are recycled every year.

I’m asking you to take first steps, not as lemmings or doing mouse work, not as part of the typing left, so we don’t all die young. These would get us in the direction of policies proposed by presidents of both Republican and Democratic parties and be the non-partisan way of getting us the health we deserve.

Understanding how our health as a nation has declined when the standard is comparing ourselves to others is critical to living more healthy, happy and fulfilling lives. Our children and our grandchildren, our future generations, will long remember the steps we took to ensure their long lives.

So let us take the freedom of expression we all have. We don’t have to be afraid that by talking about our health and advocating for it, that we will be harmed. Recognize that we have a choice between charity or solidarity. Take the ideas I’ve presented and research if they are true or not. Do we die young? Is health care what will make us healthier? Is giving everything to the rich good for the rest of us? If we had a more egalitarian society where there was a maximum wage of $500,000 a year, would we have a longer life, true liberty, and be better off as a nation? If you agree with me, talk to your family, talk to your friends, talk to your co-workers and start prescribing the medicine we need for this nation. Health begins by organizing baby steps. Not by mouse clicks. Those organized steps lead to walking which leads to organizing one another to work together. We need to organize or die. Once we, the other superpower, recognize our collective strength, we are hundreds of millions in this country, the rich are only tens of thousands, then we can get the economic justice policies that turn out to be the best health policies.

If you give me a fish, you’ve fed me for a day. If you teach me to fish then you’ve fed me until the river is contaminated or the shoreline seized for development. But if you teach me to organize then whatever the problem, I can work together with my peers and we will fashion our own solution. As the world’s other superpower, let’s organize for the right to a long life in the United States. Thank you.

For information about obtaining CDs, MP3s, or transcripts of this or other programs, please contact:
David Barsamian
Alternative Radio
P.O. Box 551
Boulder, CO 80306-0551
(800) 444-1977
info@alternativeradio.org
www.alternativeradio.org
©2010

Other AR Stephen Bezruchka programs:
Health & Wealth
From the Womb to the Tomb
Damaged Care
Is America Driving You Crazy?

¡Sandalias pacientes de espíritu amable!
Esperan por horas, hasta el alba, al lado de la puerta.
Esperan estas centinelas leales hasta que me las ponga
Para salir resueltamente con ellas.
Siempre me reconocen, mis sandalias concienzudas.

Patient sandals of spirit endearing!
They endure for hours, until dawn, beside the door.
These loyal sentinels wait until I slip into them,
Resolutely to sally forth with them.
They always comprehend me, my conscientious sandals.

¡Sandalias dulces y sensuales!
Se casan con los pies queridos,
Se confortan en sus camas moldeadas de corcho blando,
Esculpen sendas de sandalias con cada huella,
Se ajustan a los contornos de los huesos, de los ligamentos, de los músculos.
Dan espacio suficiente para los dedos movedizos.
Se adhieren con fibras fuertes y ataduras de yute resistente,
Dos correas con hebillas que no sueltan dan seguridad,
Y sus suelas de caucho amortiguan el choque de mi andadura.

Sweet and sensuous sandals!
They are wedded to the feet beloved,
Which they comfort in their molded beds of tender cork.
The dints in the sandals are sculpted with every tread.
They correspond to the contours of the bones, of the tendons, of the sinews.
They endow ample room for the wiggling toes.
They adhere with strong and bonded strands of resilient jute.
Two strips with cinched buckles ensure security,
And the soles of rubber cushion the shock of my sauntering.

¡Sandalias sobresalientes y ostentosas!
No puedo endomingarme sin éstas.
Lucen los celestiales calcetines a los cuales un chileno conocido rindió homenaje
(A veces cada calcetín ceñido es distinto, lucido, aun chillón, u ominoso a su propia manera).
En junio como en enero (otro verso conocido del alma)—
Cualquier estación—sí aun in invierno—
Ya me pongo mis sandalias soñadoras
Y con ellas ando por todas partes debajo del cielo.

Outstanding and ostentatious sandals!
I cannot dress up without them.
They display the socks sublime
As those a well-known Chilean paid homage to
(Sometimes each snug sock is unmatched–or resplendent, even loud–
Or repugnant in its own way).
In January just as in June (another famous verse of the soul)–
Whatever the season–yes, even in the winter–
Notwithstanding, I wear my fantastic sandals,
And with them I walk everywhere under the heavens.

¡Sandalias escandalosas y antipatrióticas!
Éstas son del Sanedrín de la costa este estimable o de la costa oeste de vanguardia.
Con éstas me señalo: Alias Birkenstocks, éstas dan un barquinazo a los derechistas,
Que entonces dicen muchas sandeces resentidas y endemoniadas:
Nosotros que las llevamos hemos de ser élites orgullosos y endiosados.
Hemos de comer arúgula y cilantro y almendras y tofu y sushi y muesli y queso brie,
Hemos de sorber vino blanco y café latte, hemos de escuchar la NPR,
Hemos de acariciar a gatos, hemos de montar en bicicleta, hemos de reciclar,
Hemos de conducir el Prius o el Volvo, hemos de cantar kumbayá.
Según el señor endiablado Antonín Scalía
Estas sandalias las llevan incendiarios barbudos de banderas de cendal.

Scandalous and dissenting sandals!
These are of the Sanhedrin
Of the esteemed East Coast or the vanguard West Coast,
With these I distinguish myself: Alias Birkenstocks,
These startle the right-wingers,
Who then prattle their plentiful nonsense resentful and fiendish:
We who wear them must be proud, self-vaunting elites,
We must eat arugula and scallions and cilantro and almonds
And tofu and sushi and granola and brie,
We must drink white wine and café latte,
We must listen to NPR,
We must pet cats, we must ride a bike, we must recycle,
We must drive a Prius or a Volvo, we must sing kumbayá.
According to wicked Mr. Antonin Scalia,
These sandals are worn by bearded incendiaries of silken flags.

No me gusta el cilantro, tampoco el brie, no conduzco ni Prius ni Volvo,
No canto kumbayá, prefiero vino tinto, tampoco no soy incendiario.
Pero el resto es cien por ciento cierto (y no tan sandio) para mí,
Esta oveja negra de Centralia (mi pueblo natal cateto):
Quizás con mis sandalias sembraré cizaña entre tales retrógrados
Que quieren censurar los conceptos geniales.

I don’t like cilantro, nor brie,
I don’t drive a Prius or a Volvo,
I don’t sing kumbayá, I prefer red wine.
I’m not even an incendiary.
But the remainder is one hundred percent true (and not so silly) for me,
This black sheep of Centralia, my redneck hometown.
Maybe with my sandals I will sow discord among such reactionaries
Who like to censure our enlightened concepts.

¡Sandalias osadas y emprendedoras!
Como soldados marchando, juntos saludamos al mundo afuera.
Recogemos la leña que he hendido, y la llevamos por el solado al horno,
Y después sacamos las cenizas al montón detrás del traspatio.
Andamos con la perra por la calle y a la cenaduría de la vecindad,
Y juntos conducimos por coche a la clase de español.
Nos enderezaremos tal vez a Alaska, a Londres, a Irlanda, a Andalucía,
Seguiremos marchando en apoyo del sindicalismo (pero nunca del Sendero Luminoso),
Aun algún día buscaremos el centauro y un endriago saltando del ensueño.

Daring and enterprising sandals!
Like marching soldiers, together we greet the outside world.
We gather the firewood I have split
And carry it over the tiled floor to the stove,
And afterward we haul out the ashes to the heap behind the patio.
We walk with the dog to the end of the road,
And to the neighborhood diner.
And together we drive by car to Spanish class.
One day we will set out to Alaska, to London, to Ireland, to Andalucia.
We will join marches to support unions (but never the Shining Path).
Even someday we will seek the centaur and the leaping dragon of dreams.

Con todo es verdad que no dormimos juntos nunca:
Mis andalones descansan solamente al lado de la puerta

Withal it’s true that we never sleep together:
Beside the door my horses rest alone.

On January 21, 2010, with its ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are persons, entitled by the U.S. Constitution to buy elections and run our government. Human beings are people; corporations are legal fictions. We, the People of the United States of America, reject the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United, and move to amend our Constitution to:

• Firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.
• Guarantee the right to vote and to participate, and to have our vote and participation count.
• Protect local communities, their economies, and democracies against illegitimate “preemption” actions by global, national, and state governments.

The Supreme Court is misguided in principle, and wrong on the law. In a democracy, the people rule. We Move to Amend.

Go to Move to Amend.

Then check out this short, humorous video.

And for great background, read this speech by Paul Cienfuegos.

Over the past century, America’s rich made their millions and billions through the use of public assets shared by everyone. By virtue of those profits, they have not only a moral, but a rational obligation to pay more for the upkeep of public services.

See this article.

And see this article by William Greider:

The claim that cutting Social Security benefits will “strengthen” the system is erroneous. In fact, Obama has already undermined the soundness of Social Security by partially suspending the FICA payroll tax for workers—depriving the system of revenue it needs for long-term solvency.

“The mendacity has a more fundamental dimension. Obama helped conservatives concoct the debt crisis on false premises, promoting a claim that Social Security and other entitlement programs were somehow to blame while gliding over the real causes and culprits. Social Security has never contributed a dime to the federal deficits (actually, the government borrows the trust fund’s huge surpluses to offset its red ink).

“This mean-spirited political twist amounts to blaming the victims. There should be no mystery about what caused the $14 trillion debt: large deficits began in 1981, with Ronald Reagan’s fanciful “supply side” tax-cutting. Federal debt was then around $1 trillion. By 2007 it had reached $9 trillion, thanks to George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy and his two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus the massive subsidy for Big Pharma in Medicare drug benefits. The 2008 financial collapse and deep recession generated most of the remainder, as tax revenues fell drastically. Obama’s pump-priming stimulus added to the debt too, but a relatively small portion….

“The White House evidently thinks it’s good politics for 2012 to dismiss the left and court wobbly independents. Obama no doubt assumes faithful Democrats have nowhere else to go. It’s true that very few will wish to oppose him next year, given the fearful possibility of right-wing crazies running the country. On the other hand, people who adhere to the core Democratic values Obama has abandoned need a strategy for stronger resistance. That would not mean running away from Obama but running at him—challenging his leadership of the party, mobilizing dissident voices and voters, pushing Congressional Democrats to embrace a progressive agenda in competition with Obama’s.

“To be blunt, progressives have to pick a fight with their own party. They have to launch the hard work of reconnecting with ordinary citizens, listening and learning, defining new politics from the ground up. People in a rebellious mood should also prepare for the possibility that it may already be too late, that the Democratic Party’s gradual move uptown is too advanced to reverse. In that event, people will have to locate a new home—a new force in politics that speaks for them.”

And see and hear this interview with economist Richard Wolff.

This [issue of the debt ceiling] is political theater in which the two parties are posturing for the election coming next year, using this occasion—to put it in perspective, the number of times the government has raised the debt ceiling since 1940: 90, almost twice a year. This is a normal, automatic procedure. Every president, Republican and Democrat, has asked for it…. What you’re seeing is a decision, politically, to make it theatric, out of what otherwise would have been a normal procedure….[S]o, suddenly, the Republicans basically decided to make theater, to run their campaign a little early this year, and to slow it all down and make a big to-do….

[The] Democrats also have participated in the process by making this seem [that] Armageddon will occur unless we get this done by August 2nd. And in essence, at times it seems almost like the Obama administration is seeking this deadline to start moving in a more centrist direction economically that it has wanted to do, but has been absent the type of crisis that it would be able to convince the American public that it needs to do….

Basically, the Democrats have said, ‘We will do massive cuts. They just won’t be as massive as the Republicans want.’ And then they will appeal to the American people in the hope that Americans will choose the lesser evil: the Democrats who won’t cut so terribly compared to the Republicans.

And the Republicans are appealing to folks that are very upset by the economic situation, don’t know who to be angry at. In the American way, they get angry at the government…. The overwhelming majority of people who’ve lost our jobs in this crisis have been fired by private employers. The overwhelming majority of people who have been thrown out of their homes have had that happen because a private bank has gone to court to get that to happen. And yet, the American people have this tendency, built into our culture, to leap right over the person who’s actually done you the damage and to blame the government. And so, the government, in general, and the particular government of Mr. Obama, is the target, and the Republicans are playing on this. And that’s their ploy.

And the Democrats are saying, ‘Well, we’re not so bad. We’re going to tax the rich, just a little, and the corporations a little less. And that’s something the Republicans won’t do. And we will protect your Social Security, at least more than…’

In the process, everything moves over to massive cutting. And besides the morals of that, it’s economically crazy. In an economic situation where recovery is very poor, very uneven, to have the government cut back… is to make an economic situation that’s bad worse….

[Economist] Joe Stiglitz, [has] said, over time, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will cost $5 trillion [but the idea of cutting ‘defense’ spending is off the table]. There are a number of things that are not on the table. And frankly, I’m amazed that the President refers to what he does as a ‘balanced approach.’ First of all, the war and its enormous costs, off the table in any serious way. Going back to a serious taxation of corporations and of the rich in America, just, for example, at the scale that they were taxed in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, off the table.

[Now], after a ‘recovery,’ in quotations, that has only recovered the stock market and corporate profits and bank reserves, that has done nothing about unemployment and foreclosure—we haven’t had a balanced economic arrangement in this country for years. So, suddenly we’re going to be balanced in what’s coming next. That’s a strange kind of logic. Why is there not facing up to the war, the fact that you’re not taxing the rich? And perhaps the worst, we’re at a crisis because we have an economic system that hasn’t worked well, and the government bailed out banks and corporations by using public money. That was done to help them. It hasn’t helped many other folks. So now is not the time to do balance. Now is the time to correct the imbalance that has built up over all these years….

If you look at what happened to the American budget over the last 20 or 30 years, the culprit is obvious. We have dropped corporate taxes. We have dropped taxes on the rich.

[In the 1940s for] every dollar that individuals paid in income tax, corporations paid $1.50. [Today for] every dollar that individuals pay to the federal government, corporations pay 25 cents….

In the ’50s and ’60s, … [every] dollar over $100,000 that a rich person earned, he or she had to give 91 cents to Washington and kept 9…. The top rate for rich people today, 35%… a shift from corporate income tax to individual income tax, and among individuals, from the rich to everybody else…. And there’s something shameful about… how we’re going to take out our budget problems by cutting back benefits to old people, to people who have medical needs….

If corporations were going to do what the President gave them incentives to do [to create jobs], they would have done it. They’re not doing it. There’s no sign they’re going to do it. You have to face: that policy didn’t work….

The private sector has answered: ‘We are not going to hire people here. We’re either going to hire no one, because we don’t like the way the economy looks, or we’re going to hire people in other countries, because they pay lower wages there.’

[What] the corporations are doing [with the huge piles of cash they are sitting on]—because it’s not profitable for them to hire—in large part, is they lend it to the United States government to fund these deficits. The United States government refuses to tax corporations and the rich. It then runs a deficit. It spends more than it takes in, because it’s not taxing them. And here comes the punchline. It then turns around to the people it didn’t tax—corporations and the rich—and borrows the money from them, paying them [tax-deductible] interest and paying them back….

And now the ultimate irony, we’ve borrowed so much as a nation from the rich and the corporations, they now are not so sure they want to continue to lend to us, because we’re so deeply in debt. And they want us instead to go stick it to poor people and sick people instead. It’s an extraordinary moment in our history as a nation.

This interview was very dramatic and informative.

Then note this.

(WARNING: THE FOLLOWING EXCERPT USES THE NAUGHTY WORD CAPITALIST)

The national debt, all $14.29 trillion of it, does not exist because of profligate spending on social programs. It was not caused by public works projects, aid to students, Medicare, Social Security or any other initiative to help working people. In fact, Social Security as a program funds itself, does not contribute to the debt and continues to run a large surplus.

The national debt exists because of the programs the capitalist class created to help itself. Trillions of dollars are directly attributed to the bailouts of Wall Street and other corporate criminals at the heart of the economic crisis. Trillions more are for the capitalists’ wars—Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya in the current context, but also every attack, overt or covert, on oppressed nations, going back generations, as well as for the two hugely expensive inter-imperialist wars of the 20th century.

Compared to the largesse the capitalist class grants itself by controlling the mechanisms of government, social programs are a relative drop in the bucket. Indeed, social programs have been under attack for decades as part of a cruel, double-edged strategy to redistribute to the rich ever more of the social wealth while making workers who produce that wealth ever more desperate and reliant on the capitalists.

It should be no surprise, then, that Obama and his advisors have been planning to eviscerate Social Security and Medicare almost since they came to power in 2009. The famed National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, a “bipartisan” commission formed by the president in 2010 (a different group, the so-called “Gang of Six,” is furthering the commission’s work during the current debate), was composed of men hostile to Social Security and Medicare, and its findings clearly pointed to these and other vital programs as being at the heart of the nascent debt crisis.

Those accusations that Obama is a wimp getting pushed around by the right wing are false. It’s a bad-cop-good-cop game.

See this article by Jeff Cohen.

Independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont — widely seen as “America’s Senator” — is so disgusted by recent White House actions that he called Friday for a challenge to Obama in Democratic primaries: “I think it would be a good idea if President Obama faced some primary opposition.

Also check out this article in Al-Jazeera by Dean Baker.

President Obama’s distortion preserved the idea of the deficit as a chronic problem, while also getting in an attack on the Republicans. It also allows him to avoid talking about the housing bubble. This is a topic that he seems anxious to avoid, since many large contributors to his re-election and to the Democratic Party profited enormously from the bubble.

[The] crisis over the debt ceiling is the answer to the prayers of many people in the business community. They desperately want to roll back the size of the country’s welfare state, but they know that there is almost no political support for this position. The crisis over the debt ceiling gives them an opportunity to impose cutbacks in the welfare state by getting the leadership of both political parties to sign on to the deal, leaving the opponents of cuts with no plausible political options.

To advance this agenda they will do everything in their power to advance the perception of crisis. This includes having the bond-rating agencies threaten to downgrade US debt if there is not an agreement on major cuts to the welfare state.

In principle, the bond rating agencies are only supposed to assess the likelihood that debt will be repaid. However, they showed an extraordinary willingness to allow profit to affect their ratings when they gave investment-grade ratings to hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities during the housing bubble. Given their track record, there is every reason in the world to assume that the bond rating agencies would use downgrades or the threat of downgrades for political purposes.

This means that the battle over the debt ceiling is an elaborate charade that is threatening the country’s most important social welfare programmes. There is no real issue of the country’s creditworthiness of its ability to finance its debt and deficits any time in the foreseeable future. Rather, this is about the business community in general, and the finance sector in particular, taking advantage of a crisis that they themselves created to scale back the country’s social welfare system. They may well succeed.

NEVER LET A GOOD CRISIS GO TO WASTE (paraphrasing Rahm Emanuel)