jedicist.org Blog

(Answer: free food and medical service to all who come)

I recently published a story on the fix about drug use at Occupy Wall Street. http://www.thefix.com/content/does-occupy-wall-street-have-drug-problem8130

I’m not unhappy with how it turned out, but if I was writing it in a more completely open and free environment, the emphasis would have been different. It sparked a lot of emotions and thoughts for me, that I want to give voice to here:

My recent attempt to report on the presence (but not prevalence) of drugs at Zuccotti park in the space in which the Occupy Wall Street movement is based, was a lesson in the political subconscious of America, which is built on a flawed notion of individuality: I’ve got mine.

Drug culture preexisted Occupy Wall Street on Zuccotti park, as it exists in most of our public spaces. Everyone understands that in a public, open space such as this, subcultures will persevere. For me, the inspiring heart of the story—and for me, it is a feel-good story—is that there is free medical care and food for everyone in that space. To me, this is one of the most radical and utopian statements of the OWS moment, so radical that it has come under fire from within the movement itself. The nearly-middle class, moderate protesters who are on the square to protest—rather than to receive food, shelter, and medical care—out of necessity look down on the people who have come to live in the shared space for their own reasons (and, yes, there are some people who are there for their own reasons, to serve their own physical needs). The Occupy Wall Street security guard told me that he doesn’t want there to be food, comfort stations, and medical care on the park because it attracts just these people who are not there “to take down the banks.” Similarly, the food/kitchen has begun to curtail its meals, to offer less food less often, and less delicious food, so that they won’t be feeding “freeloaders.” They are not limiting access of food because they don’t have enough food, but because they think that some of the people who are eating the food are not deserving of it.

And again, even in the medical tent, where the medics heroically provide free medical care to everyone who needs it, when I asked about drug overdoses, their justification was that the people who are “coming to us with a needle dangling out of their arm needing treatment” aren’t “actual occupiers.” That they’re not “part of the movement.” Well, they are.

If they felt that they had easy access to nonjudgmental medical care elsewhere, they wouldn’t come to the ad-hoc medical tent at Zuccotti park. The fact that they come there for that reason illustrates the extent of a broken system.

To me, the presence of people on the park who come for food and medical care is the most powerful and radical statement that the system is broken, that it is unjust. An equitable society takes care of its sick and its hungry, it’s as simple as that. Even if those people are perceived as distasteful for some reason. A revolution is made of hungry people gathered at the gates of opulent wealth—let them eat cake—and that is what is happening at Zuccotti park. Let the media see the subculture that endemic poverty and the soul-crushing exclusivity of the capitalist system has created. If the members of that subculture don’t have the vocabulary to express their needs in a political context—if they say they’re on the park for the free food—then that is the fault of a broken education system and from growing up in a culture that preaches a radical, unsustainable notion of individualism. The raw fact of their existence speaks more loudly than a cardboard sign. Occupy Wall Street has pulled these people out of the shadows: while they hid in the shadows, they served to enable injustice. Let the hungry masses gather at the doorways of Wall Street greed.

Remember that the Black Panthers gained their base of power by feeding schoolchildren in their communities. They did not perceive this—as many white observers do—as incidental to their cause, or as a calculated ploy to get people over to their cause. Rather, they saw their social programs as absolutely core to what they were about. They were providing the services that the system denied their community. They were the women and men who had the courage to stand up and provide for their own children when their culture isolated them in ghettos and sought to imprison them. This was their most radical action, the core of Black Power—to empower their community. The success of their social programs made them threatening to the establishment, which was revealed to be inadequate to even the basic task of providing nutrition to children.

This is where the more moderate—even conservative—elements in Occupy Wall Street come to get in the way. They are too frightened to provide this kind of service. They don’t want to see poor people and drug addicts get medical care—they just want their little white-collar jobs back, not realizing that those jobs were bubble jobs, that they never really did anything.

When we address the problem of Wall Street greed and economic inequality, we are attacking an even more endemic problem (but a very related problem) than racial oppression. Economic oppression affects all of us. Because of this, we need to consider “our community” in the broadest possible way, and it must include people who have been so disenfranchised, so hopelessly excluded, that they have chosen a way of life in a subculture/subeconomy—even if that was their own choice. We must be willing to feed all who come, to provide medical care to all who come. This is a sacred duty: if there is one thing I am sure of, it is that feeding people (good food, the fruit of life on earth) is always the right thing to do. As soon as you’ve built yourself a philosophical construct that involves you depriving people of food and medical care, you’ve got to reevaluate your values.

A story I did for TheFix.com used WikiLeaks to show the extent to which the US government goes out of its way to advocate for the profits of a handful of the biggest American pharmaceutical companies. The story got picked up by The Atlantic Wire.

I hope to have time to add to this blog post later.

Today marks forty years since the bloody conclusion of the Attica rebellion–the massacre part. I’m pleased to see that this event has been properly memorialized, even over the other important anniversary this weekend, from stories and editorials in the NYTimes to a breathtaking event at Riverside Church in New York.

I left that church sure that there was hope for resistance, if not hope for justice, in this country. The Attica brothers presented a substantial model for revolutionary resistance in this country, a radicalism that is called for by the extremity of the crimes committed by our government–particularly the dauntingly massive growth of incarceration since the Attica rebellion–but that is almost never practiced.

The Attica uprising was by no means nonviolent. But it is a recognition and a reminder that whenever violent resistance is employed, it will be answered with an overwhelming, abusive, murderous response from the state. There was no attempt to rescue the hostages or to capture the inmates; the resolution to Attica was a massacre. One of the Brothers told us at Riverside Church, “They wanted to use this as an opportunity to make an example–they didn’t care about the lives of us or the lives of the hostages–they just wanted to make sure that this was the last riot in NY State.” Governor Rockefeller, we found out today, called Nixon and described the massacre as “beautiful.” Forty three Americans died that day on Rockefeller’s orders.

But although the decision of the Attica inmates to rebel ended in bloodshed, their resistance was successful in exposing injustice and giving voice to repression. It was a response to the daily violence enacted on inmate’s bodies. One of the Brothers who had been in the rebellion who spoke at Riverside on Friday said, “If everybodty didn’t feel the pressure, it never woulda started right there.” The pressure was a daily racism, a daily dehumanization, idle time, abuse.

L.D. Barkley, who emerged as the leader of the rebellion and who was the victim of a targeted state assasination forty years ago today, spoke for all the inmates when he said, “The entire prison populace – that means each and everyone of us here – has set forth to change forever the ruthless brutalisation and disregard for the lives of the prisoners here and throughout the United States. What has happened here is but the sound before the fury of those who are oppressed….We are Men, We are not Beasts, And We Will Be Treated As Such!”

But that day was just the beginning of the struggle of the Attica brothers. The Attica Legal Defense, led by Elizabeth Fink, turned the case into the longest lawsuit in NY State History; a legal struggle only resolved in 2000. Although the Brothers didn’t get justice, they didn’t capitulate; they stood firm in their demands, the demands that their fallen comrade L.D. had proclaimed through a bullhorn before he was shot down. What this means is that the Brothers didn’t give in to the shame that would allow the State to paint them as Beasts, to accept punishment and incarceration as their lifelong fate.

Elizabeth Fink, who has dedicated her career to the defense of the Attica brothers, told us on Friday: There is no justice in America. What empowers you is the fight for justice. There’s only one thing that sustains us, and that is to fight.”

Have we honored the memory of the Attica Brothers? Have we fought in their memory? How have we allowed the prison system to lock up two million of our citizens? Have we allowed the men who died at Attica to die in vain? Where is the resistance to this massive injustice; the largest ongoing human rights catastrophe in the democratic world?

The folks at The Fix asked me to write their 9/11 feature, which I did over a single night, last night, which gave them quite a significant editorial job. Although I really respect all the work that they did to make the article right for their audience, their version of the article turned out quite different than my draft, which I thought I’d post here.

Disasters like 9/11 can make our own private addictions into public health catastrophes.

9/11 was a collective trauma, but many who were involved or were close to lower Manhattan on that fateful day felt and dealt with it in very private ways, including turning to drugs and alcohol. This is a natural, neurobiological response to stress, which becomes especially severe when the stress is severe enough to morph into long term Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which causes the brain to relive the trauma again and again. Drug and alcohol abuse can also be a response to self-medicating depression.

Thirteen percent of the island of Manhattan showed signs of PTSD or depression in the wake of 9/11. [LINK http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa013404?siteid=nejm+&keytype=ref&ijkey=RJF9k8kN%2FbQ3Q]

On that day fateful day, or just afterward, one half of the recovering addicts in the city’s outpatient and 37 percent of those in methadone drug treatment programs relapsed. [LINK PDF http://www.samhsa.gov/csatdisasterrecovery/lessons/TheImpactOf911OnNYCsSaTreatment.pdf]

A study conducted in the year after 9/11/2011 that interviewed 265,000 people who had been in the city on that fateful day found that 226,000 of those consumed more alchohol than they had before the attack, that 89,000 of them smoked more cigarettes than they had before, and that 29,000 of them used more marijuana. [LINK:http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=24251]

By 2002, the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse was reporting [LINK] that cities and states all up and down the East coast had reported an increased demand for alcohol and drug treatment.

Researchers found [LINK http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21314697] that proximity to the world trade center on 9/11 was significantly associated with increased alcohol consumption.

In the wake of the disaster, New York’s Fire Department was left coping with a drugs and alcohol problem that got worse as time went on; in the spring of 2004, the number of FDNY firefighters and EMS workers being treated for alcohol and drug abuse was more than fifty percent higher than the previous year.

As frequently occurs alongside these universal but private drives, it eventually found sensationally compelling expression in the public sphere. During the summer, The New York Post, a reliable organ of the city’s social desires, ran the story of Marcy Borders. She was the subject of one of the most iconic images of 9/11; the skinny Black woman covered from head to toe in yellow-white ash, the gold of her professionally tasteful necklace showing through.

After that day, she started drinking heavily, and eventually started smoking crack cocaine. She told The Daily Mail [LINK http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2009617/Marcy-Borders-Osama-Bin-Ladens-death-gave-9-11-dust-lady-2nd-chance.html#ixzz1XOVRvYYf], “My life spiraled out of control. I didn’t do a day’s work in nearly ten years, and by 2011, I was a complete mess.”

On April 23, 2011, she entered a rehab hospital in New Jersey. And then, on May 1, she learned with the rest of America that Osama was dead. She felt liberated, and the event became the focus of her rehabilitation. “The death of bin Laden helped focus my recovery,” she said, “God got rid of my biggest fear.”

Recovering addicts know that geopolitics don’t cure the disease; only the support of Borders’s rehab program and her own steadfast will helped her get clean and regain custody of her 3-year-old son and her 18-year-old daughter. But readers of her story will also respond to the symbolic weight of her story, and will project the darkness of the last ten years onto her life. It was easy to take comfort in the closure that she felt at the death of bin Laden, and her story became immediately popular, making it as far as Calcutta [http://www.telegraphindia.com/1030911/asp/foreign/story_2354985.asp], and precipitating a barrage of blogs internet traffic around her name. On September 6, she appeared on The View, saying that she had been sober for 145 days.

The addiction that Marcy Borders fell into is a frequent effect of PTSD, and the way she talks about her experiences is very reminiscent of a victim of PTSD (but, neither knowing her nor being a doctor, I will not go so far as to diagnose her myself). Research has drawn a strong statistical link between PTSD and drug and alcohol abuse; 75% of combat veterans with PTSD are also alcoholics or addicts. Other research has shown [LINK http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0740547200001562] that the more severe the trauma or the case of PTSD, the more extreme the addiction is likely to be. In this context, one only has to glance at that haunting image of Mary Borders to see into the depths of what her rock-bottom moment must have been like.

The reasons for the co-occurrence of addiction and PTSD are complex, and the research supports a range of theories. Addiction and alcoholism are spoke of as “self medication” for PTSD, but they are a actually strategy of avoidance. Mary Borders drank to escape the trauma, and to escape her own haunting image that had become famous. “Alcohol would make me numb,” she said, “and the more I drank the more numb I became, and it helped me forget being trapped in the tower, and looking at that photograph.” This is a common sentiment among people who suffer from PTSD; that the only way to escape the continual reoccurrence of their trauma in their mind is to try to bury it beneath drugs and alcohol. Whenever the trauma reemerges from beneath the high, they will need to use more.

Paranoia, like the paranoia that Mary Borders felt about bin Laden, is also associated with PTSD, and can equally drive a victim to substance abuse. She said, “I was convinced Osama bin Laden was planning more attacks. Every time I saw an aircraft, I panicked.” She, and other victims of PTSD, try to dull that panic with substance use.

Research suggests that PTSD was widespread among people who were in the city on that day. At least 10,000 9/11 survivors and first responders were found to have symptoms of PTSD [LINK http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/10/nyregion/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-from-911still-haunts.html?pagewanted=all]. Many more uncounted people who were in the city on that day must be suffering from PTSD; the numbers don’t count people who consulted private physicians, or who haven’t been treated at all—a category likely to include many who self medicated with drugs or alcohol.

And yet, the funds set aside to compensate and treat 9/11 survivors are unavailable to people with “only mental and emotional injuries.” [RULES LINK PDFhttp://blogs.psychcentral.com/depression/files/2011/06/DOJ-CIV-2011-0017-0001.pdf]

Because it was a major, public trauma, “9/11 changed the picture of PTSD, and transformed it from being simply a mental disorder that psychiatrists deal with to a public health issue,” says Dr. Charles Figley, a professor of disaster mental health at Tulane University (in an LA Times feature LINK http://articles.latimes.com/2011/sep/05/health/la-he-911-ptsd-20110905 ) He adds that researchers now believe that how well communities recover from mass violence is a barometer of their overall mental health. Sadly, people who are low income, who are vulnerable because of their immigration status, or who are members of a marginalized demographic—even simply being female—are more prone to PTSD, perhaps because the stress of the trauma is added to the daily stress of simple existence. Dr. Carol North, a professor of crisis psychiatry, said “low income makes everything worse.”

PTSD creates an echo chamber in the victim’s brain, where any reminder can force the brain to replay the trauma. Simply living in the city can be a constant reminder of the trauma of that day. Dr. Figley explained an important difference between wartime trauma and the trauma that many suffered on 9/11: “you go into a combat zone and then you leave. You don’t leave home. You return all the time.”

And so, PTSD has been known to reemerge around important anniversaries of the traumatic event, causing paranoia, anxiety, and depression. As we go into this weekend, with the dedication of the 9/11 memorial, as new material emerges such as the Times’s release of new audio from that day, [LINKhttp://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/nyregion/newly-published-audio-provides-real-time-view-of-911-attacks.html?_r=1&src=un&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjson8.nytimes.com%2Fpages%2Fnyregion%2Findex.jsonp] many survivors of that day will feel a reemergence of that trauma, and with that, very probably, a relapse into addiction.

However, new research shows that social and familial support can make people less vulnerable to PTSD, and that people who suffer from PTSD benefit from strong supportive mechanisms in their lives. This weekend, if we do more than pay lip service to coming together around this anniversary, and reach out to anyone who was affected by the event, we can make it easier on them. “One of the healing factors was the community,” says Dr. David Spiegel, director of Stanford University’s Center on Stress and Health, who was in New York on 9/11. This kind of support is also what many recovering addicts and alcoholics rely upon to prevent a relapse.

So, perhaps this weekend, Mary Borders is the lucky one—lucky to have her health, her family back, and the very public support of the entire city.

I have a new feature up on The Fix on the DSM-5 definition of addiction

http://www.thefix.com/content/dvm-5-definition-addiction9110

The medical definitions of addiction are poised to undergo a massive makeover—an occurrence almost as rare as a meteor sighting—and the potential ramifications are likely to be enormous, ranging from the specific treatments your health insurance is obliged to cover to the moral, social and legal “meanings” of being an “addict.” Beginning in 2013, for the first time in history, the word addiction will be used as a category by the monolithic authority of mental health in America, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). And given other major changes, such as the first-ever addition of a behavioral disorder, there will undoubtedly be a massive increase in the number of addiction diagnoses nationwide. Predicting the many ramifications requires a crystal ball.

I’ve been posting many more blogs for The Fix, some of which are good.

Dead Hockey Hulks Brains

Chargers’ Pill Popping Team Doctor

Is the War on Drugs the new War on Terror?

etc etc

First of all, I think I finally fixed comments on this blog, so you should be able to comment if you are not a spammer.  Please do.

This weekend I wrote and submitted the piece below to Longshot Mag, which is a 48 hour magazine, with 24 hours given to the writers to write.  The theme of the issue was Debt.  I didn’t make the cut with this peice, so I posted it below. Can’t win ‘em all (or even most).

We flee from ourselves, we flee from empathy. Ours is a world of refugees, yet there is no refuge. Today Karachi burns, perhaps tomorrow it will flood.

Aid, when obligatory, is top-down. Disbursements and guns. It transmutes into bribery on contact with crisis.

The US owes the army of Pakistan (not the country, and certainly not the people) $800 million, one third of the annual total in military aid. Invoiced as a reimbursement for expenses already incurred in doing the bidding of the US along the Afghan border and keeping quiet about the drones and the other improprieties of war.

Pakistan may no longer protect us from itself. It has nearly paid off its indentureship to the US, which is slight when held against the weight of history.

Pakistan was born in trauma, 1947. A hasty Cesarean bi-section performed by British cartographers, cut out of an amorphous colonial mass. It was born with a permeable membrane, a congenital defect that soon hardened into thick, calloused skin.

(A bi-sectioning: colonial paranoia ruptured the country into two pieces. East versus West, Punjab versus Bengal. A Victorian grotesquery separated from itself by newborn India, which housed the civilization of Hindusthan.)

That one operation resulted in the biggest movement of humans that history had ever seen. Five million citizens flew from the country in fear of their neighbors, and three and a half million refugees arrived in their place.

Twenty-four years later, the wave of refugees fleeing Bangladesh’s war of independence against East Pakistan broke 1947’s record for the largest flight in history. Calcutta, which had been an imperial jewel of wealth and culture, received most of the refugees into its structurally inadequate city. Cue Mother Teresa.

I denied myself entry into Bangladesh after two days and $100 left at the embassy of Bangladesh in Calcutta for a stingy seven-day tourist visa. I had to leave India every six months, and I didn’t want to be confined to one half of Bengal.

Rabindranath Tagore wrote the national anthems of both Bangladesh and India.

The night before I left, as I grew apprehensive to greet Dhaka, a massive city so marginalized that you rarely hear about it, the Bangladeshi army launched a coup against the newly (and democratically for the first time) elected government in Dhaka, and I was pulled back from the edge. I do not go into war zones without a contract.

We are not always in control of our own flight. What do I owe Bangladesh, what do I owe the scholars I had planned to visit?

Bangla had met Punjab before in war and peace. In the epic Mahabharata, Bengali kings fought for the Kauravas—the losing side—on the battlefields of Kuruksetra in what became Punjab. By the end of the seventh day, all the blood had formed a bog at the southern end of the gently sloping field.

In 1930 Paremeshwar Lal moved his family from Punjab to Bengal, making his year-old son Bengali for life.

The latter, known as P. Lal, died before I had the courage to use the word guru to his face, though he was. He did not die before he had finished the greatest (and only complete) rewriting of the Mahabharata in English. He knew that stories never die but transmute themselves into us until we have learned the lesson. You cannot flee from your own karma.

Pakistan paid down its fealty to US the day Raymond Davis was released. He had been detained after shooting two people midday in a crowded intersection of Lahore, one in the back as the victim fled. One more was run down as his comrade rushed to the scene. He was acting on behalf of the US, a fact that the New York Times tried to bury.

Such crimes have been perpetrated before in the extralegal space of contract war, but Pakistani dignity can only stand so much insult. The State Department mobilized every shred of influence it was owed in Pakistan to secure his release, which could only be eventually effectuated via a bylaw of Shari’a code, which competes with civil law for dominance in Pakistan’s legal system. The State Department wired a large sum to the families of the murdered. Blood money.

But Shari’a is a code of honor, under which a murderer may find redemption by facing the family of his victim and supplicating himself, offering all the restitution he can. American blood money is paid by anonymous wire transfer insured with plausible deniability for all responsible.

Four months later, the US seeks leverage by withholding its measly $800 million, and bribes begin to dry up.

Though we may flee, history will collect.

I’m on the new episode of Doug Lain’s podcast, Diet Soap. It’s my second episode, and this one was as much a pleasure as the first.

It’s about Pakistan, which of course I have no authority to speak about, only opinions

http://dietsoap.podomatic.com/entry/2011-07-29T11_34_22-07_00

My article on America’s overprescription of antipsychotics is in the upcoming newsletter/print edition of Counterpunch.

From the Counterpunch website today:

“Imagine a world in which any child who displays any of the brooding existential dilemmas commonly associated with adolescence are almost automatically given heavy doses of antipsychotic medication that can stunt their brain development and destroy their bodies. Very soon, this could be our world.”

Thus Jed Bickman in the opening to his chilling report on the way the drug industry and the American Psychological Association, with its upcoming new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, are colluding in the compulsory dosing of the nation’s children with “atypical antipsychotic” meds that destroy creativity and brain development.

PDF (limited availability)

The typewriting is back.  Call it a disease.

Netaji Bose

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netaji

Madness and Civilization on Sociological Imagination

http://sociologicalimagination.org/posts/jed-bickman/madness-and-civilization/

This weekend, two unrelated events revealed the nature of the karmic demise of the United States empire. The first was the major cyberattack against the IMF. The second was the release of a statement by the Pakistani army that said it would no longer accept aid and would no longer be complicit in US actions in Pakistan.

The IMF won’t say who launched the attack on their computers, but it’s safe to venture a guess that it’s not China. Instead, it’s likely hackers associated with the group Anonymous, who I’ve written about before. The same day the IMF was hacked, Anonymous released a YouTube statement decrying the actions of the IMF, accusing them of fraud and of assisting tax evasion by helping US corporations move money to the Cayman Islands. Anonymous also called for further action on June 14, and asked for public protests on that day.

Cyber-activism opens up a powerful means of resistance that leftists in this country should support when it is used in this way.  The IMF has, as Anonymous claims, been guilty of crimes against humanity. It is an agent of thoroughly arrogant imperialist economic policies that have caused food shortages, depressions, unemployment, and environmental exploitation. The IMF and the World Bank seek to remake the world so that its resources can be easily exploited by American capitalism. Their structural readjustment policies replace economic traditions and institutions firmly rooted in societies around the world with instant-gratification schemes to extract and exploit resources for the benefit of the first world.  Just look at the people who head the institution; even if he’s gone now, it is clear that Dominique Strauss Kahn has been a misogynist and a rapist throughout his career, including his tenure at the IMF. His personal misogyny recapitulates the patriarchy and aggression that the first world shows toward the third. The IMF is a legitimate target of aggressive action on behalf of those who believe in justice. The Anonymous hack is a response to a crisis That action must be nonviolent, but mere widespread protests 1) are unlikely in America due to a lack of a unified left and absolute ideological control by the media, and 2) unlikely to topple these massive and undemocratic (unelected) structures of oppression.  But cyber-activism is promising.  Anonymous is more sophisticated and powerful than you think; they have chosen in the past to limit their actions, but in this case, they’ve chosen their target wisely, and we’ll see just what they can do.

Across the globe, the Pakistani elite, especially the military elite, met to decide what they should do about America. Pakistan is the most vital ally that America has right now; it is important to remember, on top of all that we’re familiar with (Pakistan’s large nuclear arsenal, its potential to be taken over by the Taliban), that it is also the only supply route for our war in Afghanistan.  Although Pakistan is dependent upon the US for money, we’re dependen upon them for the vast majority of our foreign policy in the region.  While we are at war in Afghanistan, we are NOT at war in Pakistan in any official capacity, and it is illegal by international law for the American Military to operate within Pakistani boarders. The CIA is supposed to be the main American presence in Afghanistan, and they’ve been alienating people with their drone strikes and their unchecked, murderous contractors (see my earlier post on Raymond Davis). And yet they do, frequently.  The May 1st raid against Osama bin Laden was just the latest example of a long-term strategy that includes frequent unilateral actions that, frankly, piss off the Pakistani military.

Historically, the Pakistani military has had much more control over the country than the government; one can say that the Pakistani political establishment serves at the pleasure of the military.  American actions in the region–from the drone strikes to Raymond Davis to the May 1st raid on Osama–have provided a massive, gaping, and extremely justified hole in the dialogue for anti-american voices to gain prominence.  The Pakistanis feel condescended to by the Americans, who consistently disregard their sovereignty, their dignity, their international rights.

The statement that they released last week is the latest installment in a massive cooling of relations that deeply threatens American interests in the region. By claiming to end all US military aid to Pakistan, they declare themselves autonomous, militaristically.

Pakistanis would not be lost if America forsakes them; they have been renewing their relationship with China. But America will be utterly powerless against the Taliban in the region (including Afghanistan) if the Pakistani government ceases to cooperate.

Watch these developments carefully, and remember what is at stake.  If the Pakistanis get really angry, they’ll stop paying off their citizens–some of whom sympathize with the Taliban–along the American supply routes to Afghanistan.

I’m not, in any way, saying that these events are good news, nor am I saying that they are in themselves climactic or important.  But they were both overlooked, and they are both very clearly signs of the times.  Bellwethers for the type of news that awaits us in the near future.   They are a result of America’s arrogances and exertions, and are pieces of a rising tide that will weaken America as a world and economic power. May you live in interesting times…