From: dxc4@po.CWRU.Edu (David Condon)
Subject: Dr. Helen Caldicott: "Building a progressive agenda in 1992"
Reply-To: dxc4@po.CWRU.Edu (David Condon)
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH (USA)
Date: Wed, 15 Apr 92 03:56:18 GMT



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_. Caldicott was speaking at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on 
October 24, 1991. The address was broadcast on radio station WBAI in New 
York. Thanks to John DiNardo for providing me with a copy of this tape.

________________________________________________________________________


[Applause]
	Helen Caldicott: Thank you for the great welcome. And thank you, 
KPFK, for sponsoring this event. Everywhere I go in the States, KPFA 
seems to lead me, and people say, I heard you the other day on the radio,
and it's one of my old speeches being played again. So I've got to give a 
new speech tonight because KPFK needs a new speech. [laughter] So I've 
been pacing around outside, wondering what I'm going to say, but anyway, 
here goes. 
	We're going to talk about the two "New World Orders" -- George 
Bush's New World Order and _our_ New World Order. [applause] 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. 
[applause] 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. [applause] 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. Hands up, those in this audience who can afford a 
catastrophic illness. 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. 
[applause]
	I am a physician, but I can't always treat myself, and heal 
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. [applause]
	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, as those wonderful people did who 
just received the prizes from KPFK; 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 
[applause]. 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. 
[applause]
	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. [applause and cheers]
	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. [applause] 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. [applause]
	Now these seats you're sitting on are made with plastic inside, 
the foam. And the plastic is blown up with CFC gas. So every time you sit 
down, out goes a cloud of CFC gas to rise up to eat up the ozone layer. 
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 [laughter], 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? 
Hands up, those who don't have a refrigerator. [from the audience: Me!] 
Good girl! The one heroine in the room. 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. [groans] 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. [applause]
	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. [applause]
	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. Now here we come to another one; it's Suzuki, 
it says: "Dirty fingernails," and it's got a big cake of soap at the 
bottom. And it says, "Don't be surprised if you see them from time to 
time at Suzuki. I don't understand that either, do you? Now we get to 
another one. 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. [applause]

-- 
		Full frontal nudity? Yes, I'd do it if it was
		valid ... er, if the money was valid ... and
		if it were a small part.
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