From: Hank Roth <odin@halcyon.halcyon.com>
Subject: Building a progressive agenda
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: The 23:00 News and Mail Service
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 1993 21:04:03 GMT

                    <<<< via P_news/p.news >>>>> 
      ----------------------------------------------------------
     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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