Dave Lindorff

Next time you see a junkie sprawled at the curb in the downtown of your nearest city, or read about someone who died of a heroin overdose, just imagine a big yellow sign posted next to him or her saying: "Your Federal Tax Dollars at Work."

Kudos to The New York Times and to reporters Dexter Filkins, Mark Mazzetti, and James Risen for their lead article today reporting that Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of Afghanistan's stunningly corrupt President Hamid Karzai, a leading drug lord in the world's major opium-producing nation, has for eight years been on the CIA payroll.

Okay, the article was lacking much historical perspective (more on that later), and the dead hand of top editors was evident in the overly cautious tone (I loved the third paragraph, which stated that "The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr. Karzai raises significant questions about America's war strategy, which is currently under review at the White House." Well, duh! It should be raising questions about why we are even in Afghanistan, about who should be going to jail at the CIA, and about how can the government explain this to the over 1,000 soldiers and Marines who have died supposedly helping to build a new Afghanistan). But that said, the newspaper that helped cheerlead us into the pointless and criminal Iraq invasion in 2003, and that prevented journalist Risen from running his exposé of the Bush/Cheney administration's massive warrantless National Security Agency electronic spying operation until after the 2004 presidential election, this time gave a critically important story full play, and even, appropriately, included a teaser in the same front-page story about October being the most deadly month yet for the U.S. in Afghanistan.

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The Nuclear Regulator Commission will be holding hearings tomorrow and Wednesday in Hawaii on an application by the U.S. Army for a permit to have depleted uranium at its Pohakuloa Training Area, a vast stretch of flat land in what's called the "saddle" between the sacred mountains of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea on Hawaii's Big Island, and at the Schofield Barracks on the island of Oahu. In fact, what the Army is asking for is a permit to leave in place the DU left over from years of test firing of M101 mortar "spotting rounds," that each contained close to half a pound of depleted uranium (DU). The Army, which originally denied that any DU weapons had been used at either location, now says that as many as 2, 000 rounds of M101 DU mortars might have been fired at Pohakuloa alone.

But that's only a small part of the story.

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How absurd is it that we have the government on the one hand pulling back from using a hollowed out mountain in Nevada to store nuclear waste because of a fear (legitimate, I grant) that hundreds or thousands of years hence, some earthquake or other catastrophe could cause the stored waste to leak into the water table, while on the other hand we have this same government deliberately taking some of the most dangerous waste -- the actual uranium from the used fuel rods -- and putting it into bombs, shells and bullets to be splattered and burned all across the landscape?

And I should note that it's not just remote places such as Iraq, Kuwait, and Afghanistan that are being covered in super toxic and radioactive uranium dust -- and I'm not just talking about the stuff that gets picked up in the wind and carried around the globe, or the stuff that gets inhaled by our troops and carried home internally, bad enough as that is.

The truth is that depleted uranium weapons are being exploded and burned right here in the USA in training operations. The center of Hawaii's Big Island, for example, which is a military zone, is heavily contaminated by depleted uranium (DU) ammunition fired by tanks there. The same is true of Vieques Island, long a favored target for the Navy, which for years has fired DU shells from its ships at the populated island, and also launched DU-tipped missiles and dropped DU-loaded "bunker-buster" bombs at it.

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The horrors of the U.S. Agent Orange campaign in Vietnam, about which I wrote on October 15, could ultimately be dwarfed by the horrors of the depleted uranium weapons that the U.S. began using in the 1991 Gulf War (300 tons), and which it used much more extensively, and in more urban, populated areas, in the Iraq War and the now intensifying Afghanistan War.

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On October 13, The New York Times ran a news story headlined "Door Opens to Health Claims Tied to Agent Orange," which was sure to be good news to many American veterans of the Indochina War. It reported that 38 years after the Pentagon ceased spreading the deadly dioxin-laced herbicide/defoliant over much of South Vietnam, it was acknowledging what veterans have long claimed: in addition to 13 ailments already traced to exposure to the chemical, it was also responsible for three more dread diseases -- Parkinson's, ischemic hedart disease, and hairy-cell leukemia.

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The Democrats in Congress, and their main man Barack Obama in the White House, have taken tens of millions in legal bribes from the health insurance industry over the past year, and have obligingly been hammering out in Congress a health "reform" bill that, instead of helping people, has been designed to help the insurance industry.

They started out by immediately blackballing any discussion of real health reform in the form of an expansion of Medicare to cover everyone of every age, which of course would have ended the problem of the uninsured, while cutting the nation's overall health bill by at least a third, but in the process shutting down the private health insurance business.

Then they chipped away and are at this point on the verge of eliminating any so-called "public option" or government-run health insurance plan to even compete with the private insurance sector.

Finally, in a move as breathtakingly accommodating of the insurance industry as was the multi-trillion-dollar bailout financial bailout of Wall Street's biggest banks, they proposed to require (on pain of a $3,800 fine by the IRS) to require everyone in America to buy a health insurance plan from the private sector -- a gift to the industry of some 40-50 million new unwilling customers.

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Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton and other big city cops are calling for a new system of "citizen watch" programs, allegedly to help them spot hidden terrorists. I view this new call for a nation of private spies with a deep suspicion born of experience with the LAPD and its historic penchant for spying on law-abiding residents of that city.

Back in the late 1970s, together with a band of other doughty journalists, including Tommy Thompson, Ron Ridenour, Ben Pleasants, I co-founded and ran a spunky little news weekly called the LA Vanguard. In the course of just one year, we broke stories about secret "security offices" run by local phone companies (Pacific Telephone and GTE) that provided unlisted numbers and credit information to police and other government agencies without requiring a warrant, about the killing of unarmed citizens by police, about the LAPD's "shoot to kill" gun use policy, about judges in landlord-tenant cases who were slumlords themselves, and many other stories that were being ignored by the LA Times and the rest of the local establishment media.

For our efforts, we found out years later, we were targeted by the LAPD's "red squad," known at the time as the Public Disorder Intelligence Division (PDID), for an intensive program of spying that including planting a young cop, Connie Milazzo, as a member of our editorial collective. We only learned of Milazzo's real identity years later when she disclosed it herself to a judge in a public hearing (she wanted to avoid being sent to the county lockup along with a group of activists she had "joined" undercover who had all been arrested during a protest and who were refusing to provide their identities to the court).

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Some years ago, my wife and I, together with our young daughter, took a circuitous summer train trip through France, Italy, Austria, and Germany. The last leg was an overnight express from Berlin that deposited us at the Gare du Nord in Paris just at sunrise. Feeling washed out from the ride, we made our separate ways to the facilities. I was standing at the urinal with a bunch of other men, relieving myself, when I heard this awful groaning coming from a stall. The groaning grew louder and more painful sounding. Some guy was obviously having a terrible time with his bowels. The agony continued, to the point that we who were by now washing our hands at the sinks were looking at each other in puzzlement, wondering what was going on. I even wondered if someone should ask if the poor wretch if he needed help.

Finally there was this enormous, impossibly long fart of incredible volume and duration. This was followed by a long sigh of relief and an awful stench.

We men in the rest room all looked at each other, shrugging and stifling laughs. A few of us couldn't contain ourselves and actually burst out laughing.

There was a shuffle in the stall, and the latch was turned. We couldn't resist. Everyone turned to see who had just produced such a prodigious noise and odor, expecting to see some huge, ponderous guy lumber out. Instead, a shrivled little old man left the booth, nodded silently at the rest of us, and exited the room.

I'm reminded of this incident by the recent efforts in Congress to produce a health care reform bill -- especially of the efforts in Sen. Max Baucus's Senate Finance Committee, which yesterday, after weeks of allegedly painful negotiating among the so-called Gang of Six -- three conservative Democrats and three Republicans -- and several weeks more of discussions among members of the whole committee, produced a bill that essentially leaves us with the status quo, except with some rather smelly additions, such as a mandate that the uninsured and unemployed buy some crummy health insurance plan offered by the private health insurers or face a stiff fine by the IRS.

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So now it turns out that the whole Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) was a flop or more likely a scam. Remember Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson telling us last September that credit markets had locked up, and then, after half of the $750 billion that he extorted out of Congress was handed out to Wall Street firms, new President Barack Obama justifying the spending of the second half of the money because we needed to "get the banks lending again"?

Well, now Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for TARP, is telling us that all that money, and another more than $2 trillion in loans, accomplished nothing. In an interview with Lagan Sebert published in Huffington Post, Barofsky says, "We were told by Treasury that the purpose of the TARP fund was to increase lending. But we haven't increased lending."

Well yeah, that's true. Just ask any ordinary working stiff. My little bank, the Harleysville National Bank here in eastern Pennsylvania, far from expanding lending, has been shutting down customer credit lines. As a bank manager told me, they were "reviewing all our equity lines" in light of declining property values (actually, property values in our area north of Philadelphia have remained pretty stable). In general, banks across the country have been canceling credit lines, closing credit card accounts on customers deemed risky—including small businesses—and making it very hard to get a new mortgage. (They've also been raising all kinds of fees, ripping customers off in other ways, but that's another story.)

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When the White House or Democrats in Congress talk about health care reform, and about wanting to preserve the central role of the private insurance industry in health care, it pays to look at what they're so anxious to preserve.

According to the Health and Human Service's National Health Expenditures report, private insurers will pay out $854 billion in medical claims for health insurance policyholders this year. That represents about one-third of the nation's estimated $2.5-trillion medical care bill for this year. But that's not the whole story. The premiums paid for those claims payments will total $1.2 trillion, which includes $179 billion in "administrative" costs (21% or over $1 out of every $5 spent on health care) and another $150 billion in profits (a tidy 15% return). That is money that was paid out in premiums by individuals and by employers (who every year are shifting more of the cost of health coverage onto employees).

A big part of that $179 billion you and your employer pay for insurance company "administrative expenses" goes to fund private "death panels" whose job, as insurance company whistleblower Wendell Potter has testified in Congress, is to deny coverage to sick policyholders.

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