NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/9715

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From: Hank Roth <[e-mail]>
Subject: Building a progressive agenda
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     Title:  Building a Progressive Agenda in 1992
     Author: Dr.Helen Caldicott
     Date:  April 22, 1992 -- Earth Day
      ----------------------------------------------------------
"It seems like we're heating up the earth. But George Bush, his
New World Order says, he's not going to reduce CO2 production by
twenty percent, even though all the Western countries want him
to, because he's an oil man, you see. He had to go to Iraq and
slaughter two hundred thousand people to keep the oil supplies
running, so we could drive cars to destroy the earth."
                   Dr. Helen Caldicott
-----------------------------------------------------------------

An excerpt from an address, "Building a progressive agenda in
1992," by Dr. Helen Caldicott, author of _Missile envy_ and _If
you love this planet_.

        We're going to talk about the two "New World Orders" --
George Bush's New World Order and _our_ New World Order. We're
going to talk about how we're going to have the second American
revolution that the Soviet people have just had the guts to do.
We're going to talk about how you people are going to take your
country back from the corporate dictatorship which presently runs
your country and publishes this journal called _Time_ magazine.

        We're going to talk about how to turn this country into a
compassionate society, instead of me now for the rich, and too
bad for all the rest of you -- including three million homeless
people, one million of whom are mentally sick, who were kicked
out of the mental hospitals by one Ronald Reagan, who has a stone
for a heart. You don't evict people who are mentally sick from
hospitals. You keep them in the hospitals, you treat them, you
nurture them, and you love them. They are sick. A society that
puts its sick people on the streets is sick itself. One million
of the homeless are also alcoholics. People who are alcoholics
are also sick. They need help, nurturing, and loving care. It
would not take much money to put them in hospitals too and treat
them. And alcoholics have dysfunctional families, all of whom
need help.

        In truth, most of us come from dysfunctional families. We
all need help. We all need help to break our addictions. Now the
other one million people are people who have been evicted from
their jobs --because, you see, we're in a depression. Not a
recession, which the President likes to say, but a depression.
It's not just a slump. And the people who are leaving their jobs
or being kicked out of their jobs, they've got nowhere to go. And
this president -- I hardly like to call him a president, because
he's not really one; he is in name only, not in leadership -- he
is cutting funds for unemployment benefit so people will start
starving.

        At the moment, most people, or many people, can't afford
catastrophic illnesses.  Do you know, that just takes my breath
away? Do you know that I come from a country that has some sort
of compassion towards its citizens? I come from Australia, where
our health care is totally free. Now, you can take out private
insurance if you want, but I just had my gall bladder removed, a
cholicystectomy by the best surgeon in town. I spent ten days in
hospital with excellent nursing care and good food; it didn't
cost me a single cent. Not a single penny. Why? Because my tax
dollars are used and come back to me for my medical care, and
that is your absolute right as a citizen in the richest country
on earth.

       I am a physician but I can't treat myself, so when I go to
my doctor, I pay ninety dollars, for instance, for the
consultation; I go next door to the medicare office, and the
government hands me ninety dollars in cash, over the counter. I
pay fifty percent of my income in tax, and I am proud of it, and
I would pay more if necessary. My daughter has just been to
medical school for five years. I didn't pay a penny for her
education, and she got a living allowance as well, from the
government. That is called a compassionate society. None of you
should have to pay for your children to be educated. It should be
free.

        Thirty-seven million people in the richest country on
earth live below the poverty line, which is an income of twelve
thousand dollars for a family of four. That's starvation level.
So you've go to change your country, because the people who run
it don't give a damn about you. They care about getting richer
and richer and richer and having more and more power, and they
are, in truth, total addicts. Now if you allow them to continue
to be addicts, you are either enablers or you are co-dependents.
And as such, the whole family of the American society is sick.

        Therefore, how do you break through this dependence, this
co-dependency, this enabling, this addiction? You break through
it by caring for each other, by loving each other.... having
compassion and taking your power in your own hands. You have it
by turning this country into a democracy by having totally
compulsory voting, as we do in Australia. In Australia, if we
don't vote, we get fined fifty dollars. I would suggest that if
you don't vote, you get fined one thousand dollars, which is the
fee you get for littering. Maybe it should be two thousand
dollars. If you all have to vote, then the twenty million blacks
in this country will have a voice. The Hispanics will have a
voice. The homeless will have a voice. You'll all have a voice.
The reason people don't vote is because just about only
millionaires run for Congress, and they're mostly white, older
males, grey men in grey suits with grey brains.

        Now what about registration? At home, we're all
registered automatically. You can all be registered automatically
through your post office, which has all your names and addresses.
That's no problem, and it should be automatic. How do you do it?
You take over your country. You sit on top of the tanks like the
Soviet people did. No bloodshed, no violence, but do it!

        You've got to have the courage and the guts, because
we've only got ten years to save the planet. I'm not just talking
about your country. I'm talking about the earth. If we don't act
now, within ten years the ozone's going to be so thin, the
plankton in the seas are going to be dying, the tropical forests
are going to be dying, and we're all going to get skin cancers.
In Australia, where the ozone is very thin, because there's a
hole in the ozone over the South Pole, malignant melanoma, the
most malignant form of skin cancer, has doubled in the last ten
years. Dermatologists -- who are skin doctors who are mostly
pretty laconic and depressed, because they see rashes they can
never cure, and the patients keep coming back all their lives --
the dermatologists are really quite hysterical. They're actually
patrolling the beaches, handing out tubes of skin block to the
kids who are lying on the beaches, totally almost naked, with
little G-strings on, soaking up the ultra-violet rays to turn tan
-- brown. We're a very racist country, we don't like the
Aborigines, but we like to emulate them in skin color. The
dermatologists are telling the kids to put on their clothes and
their hats, and cover themselves up. The sun in my country is
scary. It's scary to go outside now. For each one percent
decrease in ozone, there's a six percent increase in skin cancer.

        Every time the space shuttle goes up, it produces two
hundred and forty tons of concentrated hydrochloric acid, ejected
into the atmosphere. The chlorine splits off and turns into a
Pac-Man, and it starts eating up the ozone, continuously, for the
next hundred years. If the space shuttle program goes ahead as
planned, in the next twelve years it will have destroyed ten
percent of the ozone layer. For each one percent decrease in
ozone, I said, there's a six percent increase in skin cancer.
Anyway, the space shuttle is only doing one thing: it's
organising to launch hydrogen bombs, to have them circling the
earth. So you look up and say: Look, Emily, there's Saturn, and
there's Mars, there's Jupiter, and there's Neptune, and oh, look,
there's a hydrogen bomb! Oh, look, there's another one! Orbiting
the planet. What for? So America can fight and win a protracted
nuclear war against the Soviet Union. But the Soviet Union's
disintegrated. It's not an entity any more. Communism's gone
away. It's melted. Disappeared. The KGB is disintegrating itself.
Therefore, the CIA has no rationale or raison d'etre any more.

        So, how are you going to get rid of the CIA? _How_ are
you going to get rid of the CIA -- it's not my problem, it's
yours. Except it is my problem, because the CIA got rid of my
Prime Minister, in Australia, in 1975. The CIA has no right to be
in my country. It has no right to be in any other country in the
world except yours, and then you don't even want it. The CIA has
the largest spy base in the world, in the middle of Australia,
called Pine Gap, put there under fraudulent conditions. One of
the reasons they evicted my Prime Minister, the best one we've
ever had, called Gough Whitlam, was because the next day in
Parliament, he was going to name the CIA operatives at Pine Gap,
in Parliament. So they orchestrated the Governor General, who
represents the Queen, to get rid of him. And he did. He was "our
man," that's what the CIA said. The Governor General of my
country worked for the CIA, as does my present Prime Minister.
He's been working for the CIA since 1969; he's been groomed by
them. How dare the CIA come into my country and groom people to
become our Prime Minister? They do it in every country of the
world, just about. It's time that you got rid of them, not just
for your good, but for ours.

        Every time you drive your car and turn on your air
conditioner, the cars' air conditioners run with CFC gas. When
you throw your car away, because you have to buy a car every few
years, because the car companies tell you you should -- in _Time_
magazine (here's _Time_ magazine), the first page is a car ad:
"Introducing the new Mazda 929, the first luxury sedan that
doesn't depend entirely on luxury to make you feel good," which
is a totally nosensical sentence, but you see, you have to buy a
car every few years to keep Detroit going, to employ people to
make cars; cars are producing CO2, which is producing global
warming. Cars are obsolete! How can I say that in Los Angeles?
Cars are obsolete when you can't live without a car!

        People hardly use their legs anymore -- like walking?
People apologise when they can't park me right next to the door,
because, you know, if you don't use your legs, they're going to
drop off! It's called disuse atrophy. We used to have a great big
appendix when we ate grass. Years ago, we used to eat grass. Then
we stopped eating grass, and the appendix turned into a little
tiny thin organ, like that, which sometimes gets impacted, and we
get acute appendicitis. That's called disuse atrophy.

        Let me just finish the ozone. You've all got
refrigerators, right?  Okay, why are refrigerators so important?
Because they are run with CFC gas, which destroys the ozone.
Those styrofoam cups we use are blown up with CFC gas. The
ozone's disppearing at a rate far faster, two to three times
faster, than was predicted ten years ago. Now I want to tell you
that before there was any ozone, there was no life on this
planet. And gradually, as little plants made oxygen, the oxygen
rose up and turned into ozone, which is like a pair of sunglasses
around the earth and protects us from ultraviolet light. In a
nuclear war, we think eighty percent of ozone could be destroyed.
Meaning, we'll all go blind if eighty percent is destroyed, and
get third-degree sunburn, and die. The ozone over the South Pole
is ninety-five percent gone. Therefore, without the ozone we all
go blind, and we die of sunburn. And it's being depleted because
the firms who make the CFC gas, like Dow Chemical and Monsanto,
they can't afford to stop making it, because, you see, their
profits are going to fall if they stop making it, and really, it
makes me cry crocodile tears. Makes my nose bleed for them, if
their profits fall. I'm being facetious, as an Australian. That's
my sort of sense of humor.

        Okay, now, so how do we stop -- well, they had a
conference last year in London about the end of the earth. The
ozone depletion. And one old man came up to a young Australian
woman, who went there and said, Please let me live! Please save
the ozone, I want to have a future! And he said, Look, my dear,
my attitude is, if you're on the Titanic, you may as well have
the best berth. Do you know they built the Titanic never to sink?
Never to sink. It was on its maiden voyage, full of Rockefellers
and those sort of types of people, with all their diamonds and
stuff, and they were all dancing, and it struck an iceberg. And
it sank, on its maiden voyage. But they had a nice time before it
sank. And that's what the person from Dow Chemical was saying to
this young woman -- in other words, he didn't care about her
future or for her future. They will reduce the production of CFC
by fifty percent by the year 1995. That's like if you're a very
sick patient, you're under the intensive care unit, I go in to
you and I say, Look my dear, my profits are falling. I can only
afford to get rid of half your infecting organisms. Half of them,
and that's it, then I'm going to bed. You'll die. The earth's
dying. And it's being killed for profit. Therefore, capitalism is
obsolete.

        So, clearly, communism was obsolete, it was a stupid
system, and they fouled their countries pretty badly. But it did
give everyone free medical care and free education, they were all
well fed, and no one was unemployed. So they want capitalism now;
they want plastic, blue jeans, transistor radios, and they think
that's what's going to make them happy, because that's what
Hollywood sends out to the rest of the world. It doesn't make
people happy. It makes people really lonely, because they've
still lost contact with the earth. The people who really know how
to be happy are the American Indians, when they lived in contact
with the planet, with the earth, with nature, and we're losing
that.

        Now I want to get on to -- so, you've got to stop these
Dow Chemicals; I mean, these corporations are called not now
multi-nationals, they are "trans-nationals." They have
transcended all boundaries and have taken over the planet. I'll
tell you about that in a little while, but they are obsolete,
they are anachronistic, and they need to be dismembered. They are
like amoebae. Nameless, faceless organisms, just taking over the
planet, answerable to nobody, bigger than most governments in the
world, they are, Dow Chemical and Monsanto, and Ford and Chrysler
and General Motors and Standard Oil and Exxon and you name them.
And we have no say, except we do, because they come from your
country, they emanate from you, many people work for the
corporations, and they only work for them because they get their
health benefits. They are corporate hostages. And what we've got
to do is dismantle the corporations, because they are no longer
appropriate if the earth is to survive. They are destroying the
ozone.

        Now, they're producing global warming, because if you
look at this _Time_ magazine, there are pages after pages of car
advertisements. Plus cigarette advertisements. Here's one: it
says "In the past, there was only one way ... " No, that's not a
car ad, it looked like one. Sorry! But there are many, page after
page. And you see, you've got to buy their cars so they can make
a profit. Well, here's one; this is oil, Chevron Oil, and it's a
picture of a very pretty little duck. A duck. I don't know what a
duck has to do with oil, except when a duck gets oil in its
feathers, it dies. Here's one: it's called "Funny, it doesn't
look like a Civic." I don't understand that headline, either, do
you? It's strange, the sort of advertisement they use. They have
advertisements for cigarettes with a whole lot of young people on
it, and it says, "You're laughing!" What are they laughing about,
that they're going to get cancer when they're forty, or
emphysema, and they won't be able to breathe, and they'll have to
live with nasal prongs of oxygen giving them oxygen twenty-four
hours a day? That doesn't make people laugh in my experience. It
makes them cry. These advertisements are lies. They're not just
euphemisms, they're lies.... This is eight pages of full-page ads
in _Time_ magazine, which must have cost an absolute fortune. Who
can afford that? Chrysler. And it says, "America's favorite
places," and they've got beautiful pictures, with beautiful prose
by who? John Denver! "John Denver's faith in the environment," so
they've got this beautiful canyon with a Chrysler jeep at the
bottom. Now, jeeps use an awful lot of gasoline. Next page:
they've got a lovely soliloquy by who? Olivia Newton-John, one of
my fellow countrypeople, and a beautiful beach with a Chrysler
jeep. What have they got next? I don't know some of these people.
Cliff Lake, I don't know who he is, but he's very keen on the
mountains. And then we've got another one by Louis Gosset Jr., I
don't know who he is either, but he likes sunsets. And this is
all for Chrysler! For jeeps.

        Now these cars are pushing out carbon dioxide, which
hangs around the earth like a big electric blanket, and it's
heating us up. You're in the middle of a drought. We don't know
when you're going to get rain again. Seven of the last ten years
have been the hottest in the record keeping of the human race,
the last 187 years. It seems like we're heating up the earth. But
George Bush, his New World Order says, he's not going to reduce
CO2 production by twenty percent, even though all the Western
countries want him to, because he's an oil man, you see. He had
to go to Iraq and slaughter two hundred thousand people to keep
the oil supplies running, so we could drive cars to destroy the
earth.

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