Dave Lindorff

The outbreak of a new swine flu in Mexico, and the potential threat of a new global pandemic, shines a bright light on a major weakness in the United States -- an employment system where most workers are not paid or even face getting let go if they get sick and have to stay home from work, combined with a broken healthcare system where roughly one in six people have no ready access to a doctor.

What the American failure to mandate employer-paid sick-days means is that most Americans who don't feel well go to work anyway, in part for fear of losing their jobs, and in part because they are already living so close to the margin that they cannot afford to miss a few days' pay.

The result of this is that offices, buses, subway cars, and elevators in coming weeks will be full of highly infectious people who really should be home trying to recuperate. So even if your employer does offer you sick leave, you will be placed at risk by other employers who do not offer that benefit to their workers, or even by lower-status workers at your own company who don't get the same sick-pay benefits you do. (At Temple University where my wife works, it was only recently, after a long struggle backed by student activists, that contractor-service guards on the campus received sick pay. Before that, they had to come to work, sick or not, putting students and faculty at risk of infection.)

_{John Walker Lindh "not being tortured" in U.S. captivity in Afghanistan}

Enough is enough. It's time to free John Walker Lindh, poster boy for George Bush's, Dick Cheney's and John Ashcroft's "War on Terror," and quite likely first victim of these men's secret campaign of torture.

Lindh is in the seventh year of a 20-year sentence for "carrying a weapon" in Afghanistan and for "providing assistance" to an enemy of the United States. The first charge is ridiculously minor (after all, it's what almost everyone in Texas does every day). The second is actually a violation of a law intended for use against U.S. companies that trade with proscribed countries on a government "no trade" list such as Cuba or North Korea. Ordinarily, violation results in a fine for the executives involved.

As I wrote in an article in the Nation back in 2005, Lindh was put away for so long on these minor charges not because he was a traitor or terrorist, but because he was living proof, back at the time of his trial in 2002, that the U.S. since back in late 2001 had begun a program of brutal torture in the so-called "War on Terror."

For some time now, many Americans have wondered how Congress, the elected body that the nation's Founding Fathers saw as the bulwark of liberty, could have been so thoroughly unwilling to, or incapable of challenging the dictatorial power-grabs and the eight-year Constitution wrecking campaign of the Bush/Cheney Administration.

There has been speculation on both the far left and the far right, and even among some in the apolitical, cynical middle of the political spectrum, that somehow the Bush/Cheney Administration must have been blackmailing at least the key members of the Congressional leadership, most likely through the use of electronic monitoring by the National Security Agency (NSA).

I'll admit that I considered the idea of blackmail a bit far out. But now suddenly there is at least some evidence that such seemingly wild speculation may not have been off the mark, with reports that the NSA was indeed monitoring Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), and that the Bush Administration used the evidence it had obtained of her improper conversations with and promises to assist agents of the Israeli government and its lobby here in the U.S., the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), to blackmail her into supporting the NSA's warrantless spying program -- the very kind of spying that led to her being caught on tape plotting with an agent of a foreign power.

At the time of the taping of Harman's incriminating phone conversations, the administration was trying desperately (and ultimately successfully) to get The New York Times to hold off on publishing a shocking investigative report by journalist James Risen about a massive campaign of warrantless tapping of Americans' phone and internet communications.

Back in 1965, as a 15-year-old kid, I had a chance to spend half a year as a student at a boy's gymnasium (high school) in Darmstadt, the cultural capital of the German state of Hesse, which had the distinction of having been one of a handful of cities in Germany (Dresden was another) that were selected by the Allies to test out the terror tactic of firebombing. The town was chosen for incendiary bombardment precisely because it had no military value and thus, no air defenses (and because it consisted mostly of wooden structures). With Germany still wreaking horrific damage on the Allied bomber fleet, this made it an inviting target.

Friends and teachers recounted to me the terrors of that night, when the entire city of several hundred thousand, built mostly of wood, went up in a giant bonfire so hot and powerful that it sucked people into it with a 200 mph vortex of inward rushing air. People who hid in shelters were asphyxiated by the lack of oxygen, while those who tried to flee sank knee deep into asphalt streets. Two mountains outside town were man-made piles of rubble left over from the city's ruins, which were for the most part just carted away. There was little left to rebuild.

While I was stunned by the horror of it at the time, I still felt that after all, Germans had brought this disaster on themselves. After all, they had allowed the Nazi monsters to gain control of the nation and then proceeded with a genocidal campaign of extermination of Jews -- even German Jews who were their own neighbors -- of Gypsies, gays, and of course, Communists, and had launched a war that ultimately killed tens of millions of people around the world.

As you're mailing out that tax return again this year, it's time to remember once again how much of your hard-earned bucks are being devoted to destruction, imperialist domination, slaughter and war, to funding ridiculous programs such as the failed anti-missile system, and also to supporting a massively bureaucratic and overstaffed military.

Even with the current U.S. budget predicted to hit a record $3.5 trillion, thanks to a whopping $800 billion, two-year economic stimulus package, and with several hundred billion being poured into a group of banks and the bottomless pit called AIG, the $800 billion budgeted for the military to date (a figure that includes an $85 billion "supplemental" request for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) represents 22% of total U.S. spending.

That means that more than one in every five of the dollars you are paying to the IRS will be going to the Pentagon.

For a typical family of four with taxable income of $60,000 and a tax bill of $8201, that would mean a "war tax" of $1,804. For a wealthier two-income family of four with a taxable income of $100,000 with a tax bill of $17,681, that would mean a "war tax" of $3,890.

Of course, it's never that simple. Actually, the government's tax collections this year, because of the deepening recession that has been with us since December 2007, means that tax collections will be way down, not to mention the cuts that were part of the above-mentioned stimulus package. That is to say, tax revenues this year could be below $2.4 trillion, meaning the government will have to borrow at least $1 trillion to pay its bills.

At least a fifth of that debt, or $200 billion, will be for war and general military spending, and it will have to be paid off at interest rates that mean by the time that debt is retired, it will have cost us perhaps triple that amount, or $600 billion.

Reading the latest AP report on how American citizens are being snatched up, detained and deported (sic) by the Immigration and Naturalization Service has reminded me just what a screwed up place this country has become.

Ever since September 11, 2001, the country has simply lost it.

Remember back then, no sooner had the dust settled over Lower Manhattan, than the INS and other police agencies began rounding up thousands of people with Muslim sounding names, or even with non-Muslim sounding names but Muslim-looking faces, and locking them away in federal and county detention centers, with no access to lawyers. People who were here on grants of asylum because of political persecution in their home countries were being shipped home to likely torture and death, without any hearings.

When I was a 17-year-old kid in my senior year of high school, I didn't think much about Vietnam. It was 1967, the war was raging, but I didn't personally know anyone who was over there; Tet hadn't happened yet. If anything, the excitement of jungle warfare attracted my interest more than anything (I had a .22 cal rifle, and liked to go off in the woods and shoot at things, often, I'll admit, imagining it was an armed enemy.)

But then I had to do a major project in my humanities program and I chose the Vietnam War. As I started researching this paper, which was supposed to be a multimedia presentation, I ran across a series of photos of civilian victims of American napalm bombing. These victims, often, were women and children -- even babies.

A Colorado TV station is reporting that interviews with some of the six jurors in the unfair dismissal court case filed by University of Colorado Professor and Native American activist Ward Churchill against the university reveal that five of the six wanted to award him $150,000 in damages after establishing unanimously that he had been improperly dismissed by the school.

Reportedly one lone juror held out for a minimal $1 symbolic award and ultimately, because they "wanted to go home," the rest of the jurors conceded the point.

Churchill, who claimed that the case was "not about money" but about vindicating his claim that he had been hounded out of his job because of his political views, hailed the verdict as a victory, because the jury decided that he had in fact been fired for political reasons, and that charges of plagiarism and fraud in his scholarship were unsubstantiated.

The accounting profession might seem like the last place that you'd find serious political hanky-panky going on, and it's probably not on very many people's A-list of fun subjects to read about. The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), a quasi-governmental body that has statutory authority to regulate and establish the rules by which public companies, including banks, do their books, has just caved in to pressure from those banks and from the large number of members of Congress who pocket huge piles of campaign swag and perks from those banks and other public companies, and gravely undermined the integrity of corporate balance sheets.

This may sound incredibly arcane, but what the FASB has done is declare that assets held by companies (including banks) on their books will no longer have to be valued at their current market value. Under new guidelines, effective retroactively to March 15, these assets can now be valued at what the corporate managers think (or pretend to think) they will be worth at some time in the future when they might try to sell them.

Think about it for a minute. Say you own a house, which you might have bought 10 years ago for $200,000, using a $180,000 mortgage. Today, depending on where you live in the country, that house might be worth as little as $100,000. If you still owe $100,000 on your mortgage, that would give you a net worth of 0 (a lot more than what Citibank and Bank of America are worth today). Now let's say you want to go out and buy a $20,000 car on credit. The auto dealer, before extending you a car loan, will want to know what your net worth is. Under market-to-market accounting rules, you would have to say that your net worth is 0, and you probably wouldn't get a loan -- especially if your employment, like that of many Americans, is iffy, and you're carrying a big balance on your credit cards. But under the new FASB guidelines, if you were to be treated like a bank, you could estimate the value of your house as $200,000 (the price you paid for it), or perhaps even $250,000 (the price you "expect" it to get when you decide to sell it). You have no real way of knowing whether your house will ever return to being worth $200,000. For all you know, it could fall further over the next five years to $75,000 or $50,000, but that doesn't matter. You, the owner, are saying that your "reasonable expectation" is that this asset of yours is "worth" $200,000. And bingo, thanks to the magic of modern FASB-approved accounting, your net worth, instead of being 0, is now $100,000. You can buy your car.

A group of six ordinary people in a Colorado courtroom saw through the McCarthyite political tactics of the University of Colorado officials and Colorado politicians who conducted a witch hunt against tenured professor and long-time Native American activist Ward Churchill, saying with remarkable clarity and sense that he never would have had his tenure revoked and been fired by the university had it not been for his unapologetic left-wing politics and writings.

It was an enormous victory for academic freedom and for the First Amendment protection of freedom of speech.

It is unclear at this point what the split was on the jury on the issue of damages, which ultimately resulted in a symbolic award of $1. There was a letter from the jury to the trial judge, Denver District Court Judge Larry J. Naves, during deliberations, asking whether they could replace one juror if they couldn't get a unanimous agreement on the $1 award, but when told that was not possible, they reached that decision unanimously.