Investigate Jan 09 edition

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INVESTIGATE January 2009:

Sinner? or Saint the unauthorised

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biography of Barack Hussein Obama: Who is he, really?

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Issue 96

A Bond Of Brothers Two men, separated by destiny

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Contents 44 24 FEATURES

32

24 Saint or Sinner?

On 20th January Barack Obama becomes the next president of the USA, but already he’s mired in a political scandal. IAN WISHART backgrounds the transition dramas unfolding around Obama

32 Unauthorised Biography

The news media have painted one portrait of Barack Obama, but it’s not the only one, TREVOR LOUDON details the people who’ve inspired and mentored Obama, and finds they’re a collection of hard-left radicals

46

46 Barbarians at the Gates

Crime may be out of control in New Zealand, but in Britain the savagery of youth crime is shocking and suggests something is seriously sick in our modern liberal outlook. HAL G.P. COLEBATCH reports on a civilisational crisis facing the UK, and those who follow not far behind

54 A Bond of Brothers

54

For eighty years they lived just six blocks apart. One even visited the other’s home once. But neither ever realised they were brothers, until a chance discovery just a few months ago. DON TERRY has the heartwarming story of one man’s quest for his roots

60 Forgive Us Our Debt

If there’s one way out of the world economic crisis, it’s cash. SIMON GEMMILL describes his own journey of personal economic discovery Cover: NZPA

60

Editorial and opinion 06 Focal Point

Volume 9, issue 96, ISSN 1175-1290

Editorial

08 Vox-Populi

The roar of the crowd

16 Simply Devine

16

Miranda Devine on red tape

18 Mark Steyn On Muslim silence

20 Eyes Right

Richard Prosser on the new regime

22 Line 1

Chris Carter on Dick Turpin’s theory

18 66

Lifestyle 64 Money

66 Education

Amy Brooke on parent power

68 Science Mercury rising

70 Technology Surveillance society

72 Sport

Chris Forster wraps up 08

74 Health

Kids and antidepressants

76 Alt.Health

Mums and antidepressants

78 Travel

The lost elegance of Laos

78

NZ EDITION Advertising Sales

82 Food

Richa Fuller Fuller Media 09 522 7062 021 03 74079 richa@fullermedia.co.nz

Contributing Writers: Melody Towns, Selwyn Parker, Amy Brooke, Chris Forster, Peter Hensley, Chris Carter, Mark Steyn, Chris Philpott, Michael Morrissey, Miranda Devine, Richard Prosser, Claire Morrow, James Morrow, Len Restall, Laura Wilson, and the worldwide resources of MCTribune Group, UPI and Newscom Art Direction Design & Layout

Peter Hensley on retirement

76

Chief Executive Officer Heidi Wishart Group Managing Editor Ian Wishart Customer Services Debbie Marcroft

Heidi Wishart Bozidar Jokanovic

Tel: +64 9 373 3676 Fax: +64 9 373 3667 Investigate Magazine PO Box 302188, North Harbour North Shore 0751, NEW ZEALAND AUSTRALIAN EDITION Editor Ian Wishart Customer Services Debbie Marcroft Advertising sales@investigatemagazine.com Tel/Fax: 1-800 123 983 SUBSCRIPTIONS Online: www.investigatemagazine.com

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92 Music

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We take no responsibility for unsolicited material sent to us. Please enclose a stamped, SAE envelope. Inquiries in the first instance should be made via email or fax.

94 Movies

Investigate magazine Australasia is published by HATM Magazines Ltd

James Morrow cooks lamb

86 Toybox

The latest and greatest

88 Pages

Michael Morrissey’s summer picks Chris Philpott’s CD reviews Frost Nixon, Day The Earth Stood Still

96 DVDs

Mad Men, season 1

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> focal point

Editorial A big year

T

wenty-08 has been a fascinating and planet shaking of our sister publication, TGIF Edition, in August. If you’re not year. The financial boom of the past decade came to an familiar with it, you’ll see a copy of TGIF online on the website abrupt end, although many foresaw it including Investigate’s as well.

Selwyn Parker and Peter Hensley.

TGIF is the equivalent of a 40 page Investigate every week, with As we head into the summer of ’09, there’s no real indicator as exclusive content that doesn’t appear in Investigate. Every Investigate to whether the rest of the world has bottomed out, or whether reader should check it out, because these new innovations are the further financial pain is on the way. future of newspaper and magazine publishing.

However, here in New Zealand we’re better insulated than most.

In the US and Britain, newspapers are facing the prospect of Our banking system is stronger and differently structured, and ending as printed editions because of the competition from interthe falling dollar makes exports cheaper in a world looking for net news sites, and the expense of shredding entire forests for a cheap options right now. print run.

The shakedown has forced some reality into the world’s politiDoes it cost? Yes, exclusive content, photography and instant cal powerhouses. No longer can leaders prate on about climate news coverage always costs because someone somewhere has to change as a vote-winner, because when the chips are down people do the work. But it doesn’t cost as much as print. TGIF, for want jobs and security, not a special haven for the rare Patagonian example, is far cheaper per issue ($36 for 50 issues) than a comrock squirrel. parable weekend newspaper, even though it’s just as good and is Which isn’t to say environmental issues are not important – of fully interactive. course they are. It’s just that Existing Investigate submuch of the climate change scribers who wish to get the TGIF is the equivalent of a 40 grandstanding has been little link to the online version more than political phallusemailed to them each month page Investigate every week, with envy; “my Kyoto adherence is on the Friday before newsbigger than yours!” stuff. stand publication can register exclusive content that doesn’t The irony of Helen Clark for free before February 20th, being awarded a climate simply by registering that appear in Investigate change prize, when New option on our shop website, Zealand’s emissions have www,tgifedition.com. You’ll increased 24% against an Australian increase of only 2%, is an effectively get a 2009 sub to the digital version for free. example of the triumph of flash over substance.

After February 20th, the digital version of Investigate will cost subThe venom poured out on Aussie PM Kevin Rudd this month scribers a small extra subscription, and non-subscribers a slightly when he announced Australia would only make big cuts if the rest larger subscription. So the moral of this story is register now, don’t of the world did, is in complete contrast to the silence from protest wait. (But you must be an existing Investigate print edition subgroups and the media when President-elect Obama’s point-man scriber to get the free digital offer, and digital sub will be same John Kerry made the same point in the same week: Obama, he length as your print sub). said, was prepared to make big emissions cuts but only if China In the meantime, we wish you all a fantastic Christmas/New and India joined the game. If they didn’t, then US cuts would Year holiday season. We look forward to bringing you more exclube small. sives and cutting edge analysis in 2009.

I guess you can get away with saying that if you’re ‘The One’, All the best. rather than ‘The Rudd’.

Closer to home, this month marks the first time that Investigate magazine has gone fully digital. Visit our website, www.investigatemagazine.com, and you’ll see what we mean. From now on we can supply an electronic version of the magazine that looks just like the print edition, online.

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> vox populi

Communiques The roar of the crowd SAY UNTO OTHERS… All of Simon Gemmill’s four pages can be summed up briefly, thus: In the modern world, Christian heritage is one thing, Christian theological belief another. Increasing numbers of us are managing this dichotomy quite nicely. As Gemmill says, “Right and wrong are determined by what we do, not by our beliefs”. In other words, you do the right thing and I’ll be happy to do the right thing alongside you – just don’t tell me that God told you to do it. And when you do the wrong thing, I’ll refrain from suggesting that the Devil made you do it.

Bruce Morley, Auckland Central

A TRUE DILEMMA Simon Gemmill constructs a true false dilemma* when he sets up words and deeds as the only criteria by which a Christian can be recognized. A third alternative is that “Christian” is what a person is. Like the person who takes oaths of allegiance to the USA becomes an American, a person pledging allegiance to Jesus as Lord becomes a Christian. Words and deeds merely determine whether they are good Christians.

His response to Pascal’s Wager, that it doesn’t cover alternative religions, is one regularly utilised by atheists on the internet and merely demonstrates their ignorance about alternative religions.

Any Eastern religion based on karma and reincarnation has no effect on the wager, if that religion is right then the Christian gets a second chance, and adherence to Christian principles may indeed merit a karmic benefit. Islam meanwhile offers a lower heaven to fellow followers of the book. Christianity is indeed the safest bet.

The parables of the sheep and goats and the talents are equally misunderstood. They are directed to believers, those who call Jesus “Lord” and yet fail to obey His commandments. Unbelievers don’t even make the initial cut. The rich young ruler is not the subject of a parable, his adherence to every facet of the law sets him well above unbelievers and the command to sell his property and give to the poor reflects that this was the one area remaining for him to be “perfect”.

Gemmill claims that humanists share Christian morality but that demands the question. Which humanists? Does he mean the eugenicist Margaret Sanger who saw blacks and the poor as pollutants to be eliminated? Or perhaps he means atheist philosopher Peter Singer who advocates both infanticide and bestiality?

Gemmill may have “Christian morals” but it’s readily apparent that his fellow humanists do not. Indeed French philosopher Michel Onfray would reject Gemmill’s “Christian atheism” in favour of INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

a hedonist utilitarianism that sees other people as little more than tools for sensual delight.

The Victorians tried to have Christian morality without the Christian religion, it failed. The Christian motivation for piety is not such a petty thing as simply gaining Heaven; we are not so self centred as Gemmill would paint us. We seek to honour our Lord by the way we live and the way we speak. The humanist does not have that motivation and their morality is at best parasitic, retaining the forms they learn from their Christian contemporaries while denying the authority thereof.

The scripture that would most readily sum up Gemmill’s unholy marriage would be 2 Corinthians 6:14-18.

Jason Clark, Auckland *Not to be confused with the false false dilemma which is the one erected by evolutionists unable to understand that the alternatives that the universe was made, or just happened, encompasses all available options and evidence against one automatically supports the other.

THE BOTEACH DOCTRINE I read with great interest the essay by Simon Gemmill in the latest issue of your magazine.

I think he would profit greatly by familiarising himself with the writings of the orthodox rabbi Shmuley Boteach.

This man is a populist preacher who has put much study into action versus belief.

Please pass this message on.

Malcolm Jackson, via email

ACTIONS VS WORDS I read Simon Gemmill’s article “The Christmas Spirit: Actions vs. Words” with interest, and have felt it important to address his concerns with Christianity. He is obviously well acquainted with the gospels and parables contained within them, and is sensitive to the materialism and hollowness that flows from a Christian faith that revolves around an ‘insurance policy’ type of belief.

The Bible’s New Testament writers, James, John continue to affirm and expand upon Jesus’ parables with the central message of actions proving one’s faith, and deeds being greater than platitudes (Matthew 7:21-23,James 3,1 John 3:18). I don’t think any pastor or clergyman would hold a contrary view, or encourage their congregations to behave differently, except maybe for some way-out hyper faith movement, that maintain all their focus on a magical avarice-fuelled ‘faith’.

Simon is inadvertently hitting on the crux of what makes Christianity unique amongst all world belief systems. While other

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religions focus their adherents on ‘actions’ (good works, karma, five pillars, eight fold path, following the law etc.) as the pathway to God, heaven or nirvana, a Christian’s highest expression is ‘Love’ not ‘Actions’. Paul speaks directly to the issue that arises in peoples’ minds (especially those with overly devout or self deprecating inclinations), with this: “And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.” (1st Corinthians 13) This ‘Love’ is characterised by ‘benevolence’, the charitable altruistic seeking of good for all people, and ‘disinterested’ or impartial in nature i.e. without gain of any kind for those that express it. It is first held as an ‘intention’ within a Christian’s heart / spirit / inner world and will flow into the ‘actions’ that the individual has capacity/ resources or talents to do. The greatest example for the Christian, is Jesus’ death on the cross, where he laid down his life, in order for mankind to be reconciled to God. There was no gain for himself in the action, only benefit for mankind, whom he sacrificed himself for, to create a pathway to God. Christians are to mimic this type of love contextually, in the ability and capacity that God has given them. (One may debate ‘the need to be reconciled to God’, which is where an atheist or agnostic might stumble, but for this brief discussion, the Christian’s notion of ‘getting right with God’ should be tolerated conceptually. With that said, the pure human action of one man dying for a massive number of people, whom he didn’t know so that they could live an immeasurably better life is awesome in itself to behold, setting aside all spiritual concepts attached to Jesus’ death.).

And this is where natural ‘transactional’ thinking is offended: The pathway to God is simply this: That you acknowledge and believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and that he laid down his life so that you could be reconciled to God and live in peace with him. With this, He grants you favour that is not merited (grace) and unending eternal and abundant life. There is nothing more or less that you can do than that. It is that simple. Natural thinking feels that something needs to be given, in order to acquire or obtain something else; if the afterlife destination is wonderful and glorious, then the ‘payment’ (works, actions, good karma etc.) in this world can be mentally permitted by adherents to be very expensive indeed. If something was broken by humans, then it can be fixed by humans. Christianity dumps this transactional notion completely; by simply trusting, in faith that God has given you eternal life through the action of Jesus Christ on the cross, you are not required to earn it. Thus, you as a Christian, and friend of God are freed to act in the same manner as Him, living a life of freely expressing benevolent and disinterested love. There is no treadmill of things that must be done or accomplished before spiritual placation occurs. You have the peace and favour of God already. God fixes what humanity broke.

Adherents of action-karma-works based religions are trapped and can never express this type of benevolent and disinterested love, no matter how many ‘good’ works they do. All their actions are rooted in accumulating karma or ‘god credit’, which selfishly (conscious or unconsciously) pertains to themselves and their own access to heaven. Thus taking actions like giving to the poor, helping the needy and other works of mercy may appear better on the surface, contrasting against empty platitudes of nominal Christians throughout the world, but may quite easily stem from human selfishness, expressed in another more insidious and covert way.

Christians are freed to outlive the parables of the Talents, Sheep and Goats, in their lives, and because of accepting the Jesus Christ 10 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

as their Saviour and Lord, they accomplish its intention, from the right heart of love and conceptual attitude. Taking the parable of the Sheep and the Goats in isolation, away from the rest of the New Testament, and analysing it separately, one might well conclude a concurrence with humanism or other karma/works based religion.

However this is not a valid as the rest of the NT (most vocal was Paul in Romans and Galatians), reject any salvation through what humans can achieve by their own hands and effort.

Dan Kilpatrick, Otaki

PHILOSOPHICAL INCONSISTENCY Simon Gemmill’s article, The Christmas Spirit: Actions vs Words, contains a mixture of half-truths, misunderstanding of the Bible, and philosophical inconsistency. The philosophical problem lies in the assumptions the author makes about the relationship between actions, words and beliefs. There are a number of statements to the effect that right and wrong are determined by what we do, not what we believe. Similarly, it is stated that people are defined by what they do, not what they believe. These comments are stated dogmatically, as absolutes. But who says so and on what authority?

Should we believe it on Simon Gemmill’s authority? If we take Mr. Gemmill’s views seriously, then neither should we believe him on the basis of what he says or believes. He has instructed us that the right and wrong of his own views are determined by what he does.

I’m afraid I can’t even imagine how I would assess Mr. Gemmill’s actions – were I privy to them – in a way that would enable me to discern the truth of his views. Furthermore, if beliefs do not matter, a convinced materialist who has no love for the poor, should be applauded for following Mr. Gemmill’s advice and helping the needy just in case God exists.

Over against Mr. Gemmill’s assertions, I would maintain that for right and wrong to be worth anything, they must be absolutes determined by God, and communicated to us infallibly. Anything short of that is shifting sand.

A second line of argumentation in the article involves the assertion that the Bible is in agreement with this view that makes actions all-important, and beliefs largely irrelevant. If God is real, argues Mr. Gemmill, we’ll go to heaven for what we’ve done, not for believing certain doctrines. This is where one of the half-truths comes in. There is no doubt that faith without works is dead (James 2:26). A good tree must produce good fruit (Matthew 7:15-23). This is not the same thing as saying we are saved on the ground of our works. When it comes to the ground of our salvation, the Bible teaches that we are saved by Christ, as a free gift of grace. Faith is the means by which we are joined to Him so that we receive that gift. We do not earn our way to heaven, not even by helping the needy. That is the point of Ephesians 2:8-9. Such faith, if it is genuine, will outwork itself in good deeds and right beliefs – the point of James 2 and Matthew 7.

There is plenty of evidence in the Bible that right beliefs are vital, along with right actions, as evidence of true, saving faith.

The apostle John, for example, in 1 John 4:2-3, mentions that every spirit that does not confess Jesus Christ – that He came in the flesh – is not from God, but of the antichrist. The apostle Peter, asked about what was necessary for salvation, replied to the Philippian jailer, “Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31). And, of course, the Lord Jesus gave the same message in John 3:16, “Whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” The Bible does not concur with Mr. Gemmill’s view of action versus belief after all!

AND T S E NOW, FROM NZs B CHILDREN WRITER ’S “It is hardly to be expected that poetry rooted in ‘a sense of place’ will always travel well, but good poetry in the English language on universal themes should be accessible beyond its own shores. One contemporary New Zealand poet whose work would appeal to many Australians – and can be read with great profit as well as pleasure – is Amy Brooke, a prominent writer and children’s author. Deep down things is a selection of her work from over four decades…the product of a passionate intelligence and a deeply effective, though unobtrusive mastery of technique…

Perhaps we are getting back, after about three decades of suppression, a poetry of meaning rather than of word-games and disconnected, de-constructed images…whose words, often deeply moving, speak of things obviously worthwhile, obviously healthy.

Deep Down Things is a breath of fresh air, and highly recommended.”

– Hal Colebatch, for Quadrant.

NIGHT FLIGHT – REMEMBERING ANZAC DAY Lord, I’m not yet twenty, My brother only twenty-three; if one of us must die tonight let it not be he!

Or me…

Yet there the crescent moon rising gold above the land cradles the ghost of another; one reborn, one dying in the arms of a brother, a sign of things to be..?

I promised to come back.

Some day I will.

But not tonight. The woods below are where my pup and I grew up. We owe that old dog, whining in his sleep our childhood days. Three pairs of eyes on silver moving in the stream…

What does he dream?

Do owls still keep the twilight watch below?

I see our fields are white with snow.

But dark shadows now streak by.

He led me by the hand once when lost and small. I understand Keep them both safe, Lord; the call for sons, while grieving mothers let them go free!

If one must go, take me. listen to our planes climb high, and fathers pace – and loving others; my girl who kissed me, smiling still.

Christmas is coming!

Amy Brooke

Deep down things, together with Amy Brooke’s magical stories for young readers, is obtainable from any good bookshop, or Nationwide Books

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w w w . a m y b r o o k e . c INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM o.nz

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BRIAN RUDMAN , NZ HERALD, NO V 10:

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Actions vs Words portrays Christianity in terms of an eternal-lifeinsurance policy. Ironically, by using a modified form of Pascal’s apologetic, Mr. Gemmill presents helping the needy, the environment, and so on, as the only safe bet in case God exists. This is the new insurance policy in this modern, works-based religion, the Gospel According to Gemmill. The idea of salvation by works has been as much a bane over the centuries as materialism.

It disappoints me that the article is so judgemental of middleclass Christians. The “average middle-class believer” is portrayed as seeking after-life insurance, while selfishly looking for ways to evade what the Scripture says about deeds of mercy. The author would have done better to point out the danger materialism and selfishness pose to all of us – the whole race, not just Christians.

But let us be wary of judging the heart of even one man, whether he be rich or poor or somewhere in the middle.

I further question the article’s use of Scripture to condemn the having of wealth as such. The author asks rhetorically, “How can they say God doesn’t mind us being rich…?” Several passages of Scripture are quoted to back this up: Matthew 25:14-30, 31-46, Luke 18:18-30 and Ezekiel 16:49.

There are, as I said, some elements of truth in what the author writes. The Bible does command that the needy be helped. It is thoroughly opposed to materialism. It is also true that materialism has plagued believers from Old Testament times – and still does.

It is usual in Bible-believing circles for preachers to warn against this danger. All that is true, but Mr. Gemmill goes a step further: he speaks as if God objects to wealth as such. It is a common misconception that the Bible sees money as the root of all evil. The verse actually reads, “The love of money is a root of all sorts of evil” (1 Timothy 6:10). Nor does the Parable of the Rich Young Ruler command all believers to sell all they have. One particular man is commanded to do so because the Lord sees that materialism is keeping him from following Christ. Note that Christ also says one must obey all the commandments, not just “you shall not covet.” By highlighting the problem of coveting, however, Christ 14 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

shows that the human heart has a problem with all of the commandments. Even the poor can be ruined by coveting, becoming materialists without material. The passage is reminding us that we are all in the same boat: inner beliefs, mind, emotions and will – as well as outward actions – must be applied to God’s whole Law, not just the 10th commandment. The disciples get the point, and ask, “Then who can be saved?” (not: “What can we sell?”).

Christ replies that what is impossible for people – saving oneself by keeping the Law – is possible with God. In other words, salvation is by grace.

In order to gain a balanced Biblical view of wealth, one should also look at verses like Proverbs 10:22, “It is the blessing of the Lord that makes rich”; and Proverbs 30:8, “Give me neither poverty nor riches.” Jesus’ disciples rebuked a woman for wasting costly perfume on the Lord (Matthew 26:6-13). The perfume could have been sold to raise money for the poor. Mr. Gemmill would no doubt have concurred. However, Christ then admonished the disciples, “You always have the poor with you; but you do not always have Me.” Helping the poor is an important priority, but not the only one. How we regard Christ – a matter that begins with our beliefs – is an even higher priority. Indeed, the point about the Parable of the Talents is that whether we’ve been given much or little, our motive is to serve the glory of the Master. Biblical care for the poor must be tied to Biblical belief about the Master, right motive and right action.

Rev. Dr. Paul Archbald, Upper Hutt

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> simply devine

Miranda Devine

Hollow solace in red tape after tragedy

E

very time there is a mishap or tragedy, the call goes out for yard pool drownings, do-gooders dreamed up draconian new new laws, rules, prohibitions or licences to prevent similar regulations, the most extreme of which was to ban pools. From harm to anyone else ever in the future. Politicians, eager to harsher fines and mandatory movement sensors to compulsory be seen to “do something”, seize the opportunities offered CPR training and council spot checks, we heard the lot, but very by an apparently clamouring public, sometimes gouging new taxes little about the imperative for more diligent adult supervision. along the way. Off they trot to parliament with great fanfare to pass Sure, technology exists to wire up every pool to sound an alarm a “Myrtle’s Law” or a “Boris’s Law”, and speak in reverent tones of when a child falls in. But technology, like fences, is not perfectly how the new legislation is a “legacy” to the departed. reliable. It is prone to human error, just as pool gates can be Thus the politician feels popular and useful, the absolute safety propped open with clothes pegs. of the public is assured and another layer of red tape is added to an And while the 1992 Swimming Pool Act requiring pools be already over-elaborate bureaucracy, with unforeseen consequences fenced was an example of worthwhile legislation that did save erupting inevitably down the line. That is not to say that good has lives, we cannot outsource human responsibilities entirely. Too not come from knee-jerk legislation, or that regulations don’t save much reliance on regulations and fences leads to complacency. In lives. Australian initiatives on seatbelts and random breath testing Adelaide, where two babies have drowned after their prams rolled are examples in which a bit of nanny stateism proved its worth. But down a riverbank, there were calls to fence the river to prevent there are things in life over which we have no control, accidents such incidents, when the obvious way to stop a pram tumbling that are nobody’s fault, or traginto a river is to keep a tight edies in which human error is grip on it.

In Adelaide, where two babies the cause, but from which no When a man and his two benefit can come from punsmall sons died after falling have drowned after their prams ishing a person already racked from a wharf while fishing with guilt. one night last month in rolled down a riverbank, there were the South Coast town of Take, for example, the death of 20-year-old Emma Hansen, Tathra, there were immecalls to fence the river to prevent crushed on a Kogarah footpath diate calls for the “death last year by an out-of-control wharf ” to be fenced. One such incidents car with learner Rose Deng at newspaper asked: “How the wheel. A Sudanese refugee, safe are our wharves?” and suffering post-traumatic stress from her wretched life in a war zone, quoted someone: “It’s law to have a fence around swimming Deng was so distressed at the accident scene she punched herself pools; it should be the same for wharves and fishing platforms.” in the face and pulled out clumps of her hair.

Imagine the expense, inconvenience and potential for new danHansen’s family is, of course, grief-stricken. Another man has gers, of fencing every wharf in NSW, for minimal, if any, benefit. lost a leg. Deng’s poor neighbour John Tittmarsh, who was teach- There is no useful lesson to be drawn from the Tathra calamity ing her to drive in his car as an act of kindness, is as shattered as except, perhaps, that children in unsecured prams have no place anyone. on wharves, which is tragically obvious.

It was simply a tragic, meaningless accident, a split-second on In Britain, where an even greater obsession with health and a weekday afternoon when a series of unfortunate events led to safety regulations is dubbed “elf and safety”, none other than the disaster. There are no obvious lessons to be learnt, yet the call went chief executive of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents out from all sorts of bright sparks during the inquest this week for sounded the warning bell last month. Tom Mullarkey told a meetimpractical new regulations to prevent accidents. Licensed drivers ing of safety experts their industry had gone too far, after a British should obtain special permits and undergo training before teaching council banned doormats as a tripping hazard.

L-platers; all cars should be fitted with kill switches. To his credit, “The application of common sense and balance is much more the coroner resisted the temptation for grand gestures and just rec- reasonable than the seeking of mindless increments towards ‘absoommended a new spiel be added to learner driver logbooks. lute safety’ … Whether walking in the hills or mowing the lawn, Similarly, when three toddlers died in recent weeks in two back- people need to be able to get on with it themselves.”

16 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

Here I have to admit that the media are part of the problem, myself included. So often, after a calamity, the natural human reaction is to comfort the bereaved by trying to make a senseless death “mean something”. Therefore we campaign for laws to prevent such tragedies. In cases such as the Port Arthur massacre, a media campaign to ban semi-automatic rifles paid off.

But knee-jerk campaigns on every human misfortune are futile and lead to bad law by approbation-hungry politicians who fail to exercise judgment. The problem is you cannot legislate for a perfect world.

The application of common sense and balance is much more reasonable than the seeking of mindless increments towards ‘absolute safety’

devinemiranda@hotmail.com

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 17

> straight talk

Mark Steyn Silence=Acceptance

S

hortly after the London Tube bombings in 2005, a and appears as this disaster in Bombay.” reader of Tim Blair, the Sydney Daily Telegraph’s columnar Really? The inflammation just “appears”? Like a bad pimple? wag, sent him a note-perfect parody of a typical newspa- The “fairer” we get to the, ah, inflamed militant practitioners, the per headline: “British Muslims Fear Repercussions Over unfairer we get to everyone else. At the Chabad House, the murTomorrow’s Train Bombing.” dered Jews were described in almost all the Western media as “ultraIndeed. And so it goes. This time round – Bombay – it was Orthodox,” “ultra-” in this instance being less a term of theological the Associated Press that filed a story about how Muslims “found precision than a generalized code for “strange, weird people, noththemselves on the defensive once again about bloodshed linked ing against them personally, but they probably shouldn’t have been to their religion.” over there in the first place.” Are they stranger or weirder than their Oh, I don’t know about that. In fact, you’d be hard pressed killers? Two “inflamed moderates” entered the Chabad House, from most news reports to figure out the bloodshed was “linked” shouted “Allahu Akbar!,” tortured the Jews and murdered them, to any religion, least of all one beginning with “I-“ and ending including the young Rabbi’s pregnant wife. Their two-year-old in “-slam.” In the three years since those British bombings, the child escaped because of a quick-witted (non-Jewish) nanny who media have more or less entirely abandoned the offending for- hid in a closet and then, risking being mown down by machinemulations – “Islamic terrorists,” “Muslim extremists” – and by gun fire, ran with him to safety. the time of the assault on Bombay found it easier just to call the The Times was being silly in suggesting this was just an “accialleged perpetrators “militants” or “gunmen” or “teenage gunmen,” dental” hostage opportunity – and not just because, when Muslim as in the opening line of this terrorists capture Jews, it’s report in the Australian: “An not a hostage situation, it’s We are told that the “vast Adelaide woman in India for a mass murder-in-waiting. her wedding is lucky to be The sole surviving “militant” majority” of the 1.6-1.8 billion alive after teenage gunmen revealed that the Jewish cenran amok…” ter had been targeted a year Muslims (in Deepak Chopra’s Kids today, eh? Always in advance. The 28-year-old running amok in an aimless rabbi was Gavriel Holtzberg. estimate) are “moderate.” Maybe so, His pregnant wife was Rivka fashion.

The veteran British TV Holtzberg. Their orphaned but they’re also quiet anchor Jon Snow, on the other son is Moshe Holtzberg, and hand, opted for the more cryphis brave nanny is Sandra tic locution “practitioners.” “Practitioners” of what, exactly?

Samuels. Remember their names, not because they’re any more Hard to say. And getting harder. Tom Gross produced a jaw- important than the Indians, Britons, and Americans targeted in dropping round-up of Bombay media coverage: The discovery the attack on Bombay, but because they are an especially revealthat, for the first time in an Indian terrorist atrocity, Jews had been ing glimpse into the pathologies of the perpetrators. attacked, tortured, and killed produced from the New York Times In a well-planned attack on iconic Bombay landmarks symbola serene befuddlement: “It is not known if the Jewish centre was izing great power and wealth, the “militants” nevertheless found strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene.” time to divert 20 percent of their manpower to torturing and killHmm. Greater Bombay forms one of the world’s five biggest cit- ing a handful of obscure Jews helping the city’s poor in a nondeies. It has a population of nearly 20 million. But only one Jewish script building. If they were just “teenage gunmen” or “militants” centre, located in a building that gives no external clue as to the in the cause of Kashmir, engaged in a more or less conventional bounty waiting therein. An “accidental hostage scene” that one territorial dispute with India, why kill the only rabbi in Bombay? of the “practitioners” just happened to stumble upon? “I must be Dennis Prager got to the absurdity of it when he invited his readthe luckiest jihadist in town. What are the odds?” ers to imagine Basque separatists attacking Madrid: “Would the Meanwhile, the New Age guru Deepak Chopra laid all the blame terrorists take time out to murder all those in the Madrid Chabad on American foreign policy for “going after the wrong people” and House? The idea is ludicrous.” inflaming moderates, and “that inflammation then gets organized And yet we take it for granted that Pakistani “militants” in a long18 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

Mumbai buries its dead / RAPPORT

running border dispute with India would take time out of their hectic schedule to kill Jews. In going to ever more baroque lengths to avoid saying “Islamic” or “Muslim” or “terrorist,” we have somehow managed to internalize the pathologies of these men.

We are enjoined to be “understanding,” and we’re doing our best. A Minnesotan suicide bomber (now there’s a phrase) originally from Somalia returned to the old country and blew up himself and 29 other people last October. His family prevailed upon your government to have his parts (or as many of them as could be sifted from the debris) returned to the United States at taxpayer expense and buried in Burnsville Cemetery. Well, hey, in the current climate, what’s the big deal about a federal bailout of jihad operational expenses? If that’s not “too big to fail,” what is?

Last week, a Canadian critic reprimanded me for failing to understand that Muslims feel “vulnerable.” Au contraire, they project tremendous cultural confidence, as well they might: They’re the world’s fastest-growing population. A prominent British Muslim announced the other day that, when the United Kingdom becomes a Muslim state, non-Muslims will be required to wear insignia identifying them as infidels. If he’s feeling “vulnerable,” he’s doing a terrific job of covering it up.

We are told that the “vast majority” of the 1.6-1.8 billion Muslims (in Deepak Chopra’s estimate) are “moderate.” Maybe so, but they’re also quiet. And, as the AIDs activists used to say, “Silence=Acceptance.” It equals acceptance of the things done in the name of their faith. Rabbi Holtzberg was not murdered because of a territorial dispute over Kashmir or because of Bush’s foreign policy.

He was murdered in the name of Islam – “Allahu Akbar.”

I wrote in my book, America Alone, that “reforming” Islam is something only Muslims can do. But they show very little sign of being interested in doing it, and the rest of us are inclined to accept that. Spread a rumour that a Koran got flushed down the can at Gitmo, and there’ll be rioting throughout the Muslim world. Publish some dull cartoons in a minor Danish newspaper, and there’ll be protests around the planet. But slaughter the young pregnant wife of a rabbi in Bombay in the name of Allah, and that’s just business as usual. And, if it is somehow “understandable” that for the first time in history it’s no longer safe for a Jew to live in India, then we are greasing the skids for a very slippery slope. Muslims, the AP headline informs us, “worry about image.” Not enough. © Mark Steyn 2009

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 19

> eyes right

Richard Prosser

The changing of the guard

F

riends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears; I come not because of them, no matter how much their toadies and sycoto bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil men do lives after phants in the leftie media try to make out otherwise. them; the good is oft interred with their bones. So let it be Yessiree bob, Labour is gone, Clark is gone, and this writer is with Caesar.” crowing about it. We won, you lost, eat that. Ha. Ain’t payback And so let it be with Helengrad. The siege is over. The tide has a lady dog? turned. Ding, dong, the wit….actually no, I’m not going to go Anyways…I’m alright now, having got that off my chest, and there. Even for me that would be too harsh. But neither am I going thank you for staying with me through it. It’s been a long time to feign grace, in the face of the immensely relieving electoral vic- between drinks for this right-winger. So now to the future. tory I have just shared with all on the Right and the Centre-Right What do we have in our new Government and Prime Minister? of New Zealand’s diverse political community. That would be dis- Well, this writer is still measurably suspicious, but cautiously optihonest of me. Helen Clark is gone, and I for one am nothing but mistic nonetheless. John Key has the benefit of my doubt at this glad about that. It is nine years too late by my reckoning, but it point. If he could just bring himself to refrain from puffing sunhas come to pass. Personally I never liked the woman, and I’m shine up his predecessor’s fundament he would rise further in my not about to start pretending I did now. I can’t think of a single estimation, but hey, that’s his call. redeeming feature about the former Prime Minister or her tenure, Your scribe is a cynical observer, but I find myself wondering and frankly I find the professed forgiveness of some of her oppo- whether something profound may have happened. Is National’s nents on the right, to be a little disingenuous at best. new Leader a Machiavellian manipulator of peerless ability, or are This is not the done thing, I we witness to the birth of a know; one should be magnangenuine Parliamentary con No, those fools don’t have any imous in victory, recognising sensus Government – the of the contribution made by first since the inception of say anymore, and you know what, I MMP, which was supposed the defeated adversary, freely dispensing platitudes in the to ensure it? really feel the difference – and so, I after-glow waffle about how ACT are a formal part their efforts in testing times of the new Government, have to say, does everyone I talk to. but without the inclusion will be remembered, and blah blah blah. Well I don’t care. I of Roger Douglas; Peter It’s like the lifting of a weight. The don’t do the done thing, I do Dunne is back as a Minister, my thing. I call it like I see it, even though his vote is not hystericals have been relegated to which is why I’m your favourequired in order for the rite commentator.

Nats to govern; and perhaps their corner And let’s be quite clear most strikingly, the Maori about this; neither Labour nor Party have been offered, and Helen Clark have made any kind of positive contribution to New accepted, Ministerial roles in Key’s Government, despite the fact Zealand this past most of a decade, economically or otherwise. As that National doesn’t need them at all. I don’t know about you, has been said more than once, anyone can hold the tiller when but if that in itself isn’t an olive branch proffered and received, the sea is calm, and Labour’s years in office have coincided with then I don’t know what is. one of the longest periods of extended balmy global economic To be sure, the doubters may suggest all manner of machinaweather in modern times. The previous Government never drove tions as being behind National’s inclusive outreach; that they are New Zealand’s economy, they rode on it, and on the backs of the looking ahead to 2011, that they seek to drive a long-term wedge people who create the real wealth in this country – the farmers between Labour and its traditional Maori support, that dumpand primary producers, those who pay the nation’s bills, and who ing the “Maori problem” in the laps of the Maori Party itself, is a would have suffered most from the effects of the now deposed clever way of deflecting responsibility for the issue. Maybe some administration’s fart taxes, emissions trading schemes, and other of this is true, and maybe it isn’t – but either way, it doesn’t stop crackpot climate policies. The country survived in spite of them, the inclusive outreach from being a genuine inclusive outreach.

20 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

Pita Sharples and Tariana Turia now have the executive clout, the Ministerial warrants, and the budgetary power, to tackle the issues confronting their people head-on, rather than being confined to three years of impotent suggestion from the cross benches. I think this can work, but then I have been saying that National and the Maoris could work together, since the day the latter Party was formed.

Not everything which came out of the election has this writer’s approval. The demise of New Zealand First is not something I welcome. Winston, for all his faults, has made an enormous historical contribution to the transparency of power in this country, and if it was a lack of transparency which ironically undid him in the end, then that in itself does not detract from the value of that contribution. Perhaps his time was just up, as happens with all public figures, eventually, and at least it can be said that he went, when he went, with genuine good grace, which is more than can be applied to the former Prime Minister’s election night valedictory, or to the mean-spirited comments from the Green Party co-leader, on realising that her unworldly extremist Party, and its totalitarian views, had been effectively neutered.

The fate of the New Zealand First Party is likely to see the demise of MMP in its present configuration. In the same way that it was Labour’s failure to secure the Treasury benches in 1981 despite gaining more votes than National, and to a lesser extent the frustration of those fifth of New Zealanders who voted in vain for Social Credit, which brought about the demise of FPP, so it will prove in time that our innate sense of fairness will demand a change to a truly representative electoral system. The wheels of justice grind uncommon slow, but they do grind; and people in this country will simply not accept it as fair, that any one Party can gain more actual votes than the next three combined, and still not make it into Parliament. The fact that 96% of the nation didn’t vote for NZ First isn’t relevant – those 96% know, all too well, that any other Party of their loyalty could just as easily suffer the same fate under the system as it exists.

Personally, my greatest disappointment from election 2008 is that Ron Mark didn’t make it back to the House. Ron may very well consider this a blessing in disguise, but for my money, he was the lone voice in the wilderness (Rodney Hide aside) calling for sanity in Defence policy for many a long year, and it is my view that our Parliament is a poorer place for his absence. In Heather Roy, and her role as Associate Defence Minister, we have a new hope; but the National Party in general, and John Key in particular, have yet to demonstrate that they even take the portfolio seriously, let alone possess any desire to address it realistically and outside the constraints of policy driven by voter apathy and entrenched pacifist dogma. I’m sure John Key is a realist, so perhaps the fiasco of our Air Force’s inability to respond to the Thai terrorism crisis this week, will motivate him to look at in a new light.

But every cloud has a silver lining, and if there is a real reason for celebration to be taken from this year’s election result, it is that the lunatics are no longer in charge of the asylum. From Roger Douglas’ exclusion from Cabinet by the firm hand of John Key, to the emasculation of the Green Party, the idiot fringes have been sidelined, and effectively silenced as well, if the media’s sudden disinterest in them is any indicator of relevance.

This is tangible in its effect. I feel a real sense of something having changed. I can wake up to a glorious Central Otago morning, and think to myself that the new day will not, after so many years, be punctuated by news bulletins informing me

that my dogs must wear microchips, or that my incandescent light bulbs are evil; that children must neither be smacked nor made to sit exams; and that rainforests must be cut down to make way for palm oil plantations, and millions of the world’s poorest must be starved so that corn can be turned into ethanol, because ignorant Greenies refuse to accept that biofuels will not save the planet. No, those fools don’t have any say anymore, and you know what, I really feel the difference – and so, I have to say, does everyone I talk to. It’s like the lifting of a weight.

The hystericals have been relegated to their corner. Hell, if this keeps up, we’ll be allowed to have heterosexual men employed as teachers in our schools again.

On top of this, thanks to Rodney Hide MSc, the truth about “climate science” is finally going to have a chance to see the light of day. Not the lies of the UN and the IPCC, not the lies of Al Gore, not the lies of the Green Party, Greenpeace, the leftwing media, that joker from NASA, and the other zealots of the Global Warming religion – but the truth, the truth of the archaeological record, the ice cores, the history of ice ages, the Milankovitch cycles, sunspots, the Little Ice Age, the Mediaeval Warm Period, the 18,000 scientists who signed the petition against the Kyoto Protocol initiated by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, the 30,000 scientists who signed the Manhattan Declaration against the published findings of the IPCC, and the truth about Carbon Dioxide – essential trace gas, vital plant food, and present in our atmosphere today at about a tenth of its historical concentration.

Perhaps, though I hold my breath in saying it, within this new consensus of moderation, commonsense, and truth, we may see a real changing of the guard.

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> line one

Chris Carter

Richard Turpin’s theory of government

I

’ve always felt that calling local taxes rates was little more free of charge from a passing halfwit! Layer upon layer of bureauthan an exercise in basic deception, in that when it comes to cratic obstructionism combined with a plethora of rules and regwringing money from helpless home owners, New Zealand’s ulations is the mark of those who practice to deceive. In other City Fathers appear to enjoy an official license to plunder words, power, money and position can quite easily be gained and our money at will which, to all intents and purposes, mirrors maintained should your chosen victims who supply the money almost exactly the license issued to Her Majesty’s Inland Revenue have no real idea at all as to the true purpose in building such a Department. web of confusion. Furthermore, within that confusion can be easRates be buggered, this is additional taxation, applied at a local ily concealed everything from sheer stupidity through to major rip level, that carries the same markers as any form of taxation. “We off schemes, that of course with NZ’s legal process in complete say what you have to pay. If you don’t pony up, we will take your disarray simply means that the computer key board bandits have stuff”. To put it simply, with little or no accountability as to actual little to fear by way of any meaningful sanctions. And, out and out expenditure, councils determine their desired income requirements financial fiddle comes in so many forms doesn’t it? From hundreds and then squeeze our oranges until the pips squeak. The juice hav- of millions of dollars being spent by Government Departments/ ing thus been gathered, usually on a quarterly basis to mask the City Councils in frequently the dodgiest of circumstances on IT, total amount being extorted, the boodle when collected is then being the catch all term for essentially up-market electronic filhusbanded with all the care and attention usually displayed by ing systems. The enormous wastage of millions on IT systems those given to several hours a that have to be abandoned day spent in front of a row of because they just don’t work It all comes down to a lack of Pokie machines. is now legendary. But who Colossal wastage of enorever checks on the so-called outrage on our part that so many mous sums of our hard earned consultants? These people money by local councils is have, frequently, without rogues now feel quite comfortable endemic. Councils, nevereven going through any theless, traditionally insulate tender process, been paid in ripping us off and even boldly themselves against discovery as a fortune to produce a systo their financial ineptitude by tem that is from day one, a robbing us of both our savings the application of accountancy pure dog! practises as deviously complex That a number of comand our taxes that they’ve now become the panies supplying all sorts standard model for any organof goods and services to isation wishing to pull the wool over the eyes of the unwary. In DHB’s, City Councils and Government Departments now seemfact there is a parallel between many councils and recently failed ingly operate more on the basis of a nod and a wink rather than shonky finance companies that is really quite chilling. Starting with by due process is now common knowledge. Billions of dollars in the manner in which stakeholders are kept ill informed as to the recent years we know full well have been “liberated” from the pubtrue financial circumstances currently prevailing, if indeed the real lic purse and from hapless investors in the private sector, yet who state of the books can even be comprehended without the aid of a are the people who are now sewing mailbags or at the very least Cray super computer. Then along with this virtually uncontrolled now being forced to live on social welfare having had to pay back ability to gather up taxes we see develop within councils/finance the millions they have “sidetracked”. And you know it all comes companies and the like, pretty much almost pathological need to down to a lack of outrage on our part that so many rogues now spend enormous sums of money on sheer administration, along feel quite comfortable in ripping us off and even boldly robbing with even greater amounts on huge, flash building programmes us of both our savings and our taxes. It really does begin to make to contain the ever burgeoning army of staff. us wonder if there is some sort of an unholy alliance between our We should not forget of course, consultants and lawyers espe- nation’s leaders and those that make an extremely good living cially selected for their abilities to demand huge fees for advice that out of pure chicanery. From time to time, to be sure, we find out seems, quite frequently to an observer, could have been obtained that some rort has been uncovered, the politicians huff and puff 22 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

about it in the usual way, an editorial or two may well decry the general wickedness of it all, at which point, well certainly within our usual attention span (like around two weeks) it’s all forgotten and it’s “time to move on”.

Of course much of this is made a whole lot worse in that our decrepit so called justice system takes so long to get even a simple crime before a court, that with a reasonably complex scam or bit of old fashioned corruption, it all just gets put in the too hard basket or charges just never ever seem to be laid. I’m always amused when I read about yet another Scandinavian survey that places our country amongst the least corrupt societies in the OECD. I can only put this down to the sad fact that seeing we tend to keep quiet about the major amount of fiddle that quite plainly is well and truly going on, that we have managed to maintain an image that quite plainly is false. For instance, going right up to the top of the tree as it were, Parliament and senior Civil Servants allegedly either on the take or at the least deserving to lose their keys to the executive toilet. Immigration; at least three cases that I can think of that smell to high heaven appear to have been pretty well buried.

Fishing quota scams, very dodgy horse racing arrangements, or how about the ex Minister currently under a politically suspicious, long and drawn out investigation who most likely will die of old age before he has much else to worry about. All of this sort of thing should be sorted out within weeks and dealt with, that it never is, is simply a pointer towards our society having developed a thing about hiding nasty, corrupt and smelly stuff under the Bremworth carpet. Mustn’t whatever we do own up to having our green and pleasant land becoming overrun with rogues, robbers and scam artists, which might upset our Pure NZ image mightn’t it? Good heavens, every election we have our major Parties threatening to come down on crime like a ton of bricks, ban gangs, sort out the druggies, kick the drunks off the road, stop pre-neolithic parents beating their children to death, all good crusading stuff bound to get a few votes from the peasantry.

But any mention of taking on the establishment, that surreptitiously, is either stealing multi millions from us each year, or perhaps losing equal amounts of money because we have people in high places handling our tax, investment and rates monies that are just plain stupid? Hell no, say the Politicians, if we start going down that track, next thing we know, the milch cows might start

looking at us instead of just happily letting us and our mates continually milk them. Well guess what, you folk in high office, we are starting to give you a whole lot more of our attention, and it is to be hoped that the new Government, containing as it does, mostly members who at some time in their lives have actually worked for a living, that they may be a whole lot more attuned to life’s problems in the real world, than the disgraceful shower of no hopers that they have replaced. Certainly, we live in hope.

Chris Carter appears in association with www.snitch.co.nz, a must-see site.

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INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 23

Sinner?

The Obama mystery builds

On 20 January, Barack Obama will become America’s 44th president. But already he’s mired in scandal, and his supporters are becoming nervous about his ties to ‘Big Washington’ and his right-wing political appointments. IAN WISHART backgrounds the transition dramas unfolding around Obama

I

f you believed the media hype over the past year, Barack Hussein Obama was nothing short of the Second Coming – a political rock star of messianic proportions capable of, in his own words, lowering the sea levels and ending global warming: “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal,” Obama told a cheering crowd in July.

“A nation healed, a world repaired!...We are the ones we’ve been waiting for…I have become a symbol of America returning to our best traditions.”

24 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

When you look at it in print, the words seem almost corny. If John Key had uttered them, or Kevin Rudd, voters in Australia or New Zealand would have rolled all over the floor laughing, but when Obama intoned them the world sighed collectively like infatuated schoolgirls.

Some commentators have even gone so far as to suggest Obama’s speech patterns and vocal tones are similar to those used by hypnotists, and essentially mesmerise listeners into happily accepting whatever he says simply because they enjoy listening to his oratory.

There’s nothing sinister in the assertion – many great speakers have a similar effect and it may be the explanation as to why their

speeches are so memorable.

If there’s such a thing as a political perfect storm, Obama is it. Black, and white. African, yet raised an Asian, educated in the Pacific, nominal Christian but nominally Muslim too.

‘Transcendent’ would be another adjective capable of execution in this equation.

As a tail-end baby-boomer, Obama is close enough to the first Gen-Xers to have bridged a generational divide. When George Bush leaves the oval office in a few weeks, he’ll likely be the last full baby-boomer in office. Now that’s change you can believe in!

Obama, like John Key in New Zealand and Rudd in Australia,

benefitted hugely from the unpopularity of an incumbent leader, although to be sure for a while there the US election was a closerun thing. John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate energised the Republican party and will likely see a lurch away from the cynical internal deal-making that’s marked the Bush years towards a more conservative grassroots suite of policy platforms.

It wasn’t until the financial markets crashed that Obama’s poll fortunes recovered. Suddenly McCain looked too old to be burdened with the responsibility of leading through a recession, and his pitch wasn’t helped by some strategic blunders on the economic crisis.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 25

But while Obama played heavily on his progressive, “change” theme – a tactic that ultimately won the confidence of voters tired of the Washington establishment – liberals have been devastated that most of Obama’s cabinet appointments post-election have been right-wing establishment icons.

As just one example, President Bush’s Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, has been re-appointed to the post by Obama. Most of the other appointments are heavyweights from the Clinton and Bush years – far away from the promise of changing the face of Washington politics.

There are soundings of unease across the liberal blogosphere and in newspapers like the Washington Post, but Obama is still in his official honeymoon period and hasn’t even taken office yet – making it hard for supporters to be openly rebellious. Yet. But it is Obama’s roots in the corrupt Chicago political machine which have burned him before he’s even taken the oath. On December 9, the FBI moved against Illinois state governor Rod Blagojevich (pronounced Blah-goy-a-vich) on corruption charges.

Obama’s supporters, like Ben Smith at the US website Politico, have tried to paint Obama as neutral, and more or less untainted

by Chicago’s notorious corruption.

“Unlike many others, Obama has not enriched himself off the machine; the closest he came was accepting Tony Rezko’s apparent help in buying a house.”

But others commenting on Smith’s blog are far from convinced: “Did you forget the position that Michelle Obama received after Obama won the Senate seat? In January of 2005 Barack Obama became a freshman United States senator. In March of 2005 Mrs. Obama received a promotion at her place of employment, the not-for-profit University of Chicago Hospitals. Prior to the promotion, she was a hospital administrator earning $121,910 annually. Her promotion provided her with a title – Vice-President for Community and External Affairs – and a salary of $316,962. There is no coincidence here. There is absolutely no doubt that Mrs. Obama received a salary increase of $195,052 simply because her husband had become a senator. If one denies the causal relationship between the two events, then one has decided to allow their politics to cloud their judgment. The position of Vice-President for Community and External Affairs did not exist prior to the creation of the position for Mrs. Obama, and now that Mrs. Obama has resigned from the position in order to campaign for her husband, the hospital has not seen the need to fill the open position.

To suggest that Mrs. Obama’s work efforts had suddenly justified a weekly increase in pay of $3751 is ludicrous.”

B

ut the University of Chicago Hospitals’ generosity in nearly tripling the pay of Senator Obama’s wife was not forgotten

by Obama: in 2006 he applied to Washington for a one million dollar grant in extra taxpayer funds for the University, later denying it had anything to do with the fact his wife was by now a Vice President at the institution.

It is significant that Valerie Jarrett, who served as Barack Obama’s finance chair for his 2004 Senate campaign, was also Vice President of the University of Chicago Hospitals’ Board of Trustees at the time of Michelle Obama’s massive pay hike. Described as one of the Obamas’ “closest friends”, Jarrett was also a former employer of Michelle Obama, and has this month been named as another White House advisor to Obama, after earlier seeking the nomination for Obama’s vacant senate seat.

26 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

Antoin ‘Tony’ Rezko is another fascinating case study.

The Syrian-born property developer is currently in jail after being convicted of corruption crimes.

Obama’s relationship with Rezko dates back to 1990, when Obama’s lawfirm began representing Rezko’s company Rezmar. The work paid off – Rezmar secured some US$43 million in government funding. So when Obama first ran for political office in the mid 90s, the very first donations he received were from companies associated with Tony Rezko. Rezko would end up contributing around a quarter million dollars of his own money over the years, but helped raise millions in campaign contributions from wellheeled and well-connected donors.

Public records disclose that in return for raising the money, Rezko would supply Obama with “clout lists” of people he wanted appointed to public positions, or given public contracts where possible.

As a parody of “change you can believe in”, it is an interesting historical fact that Rezko has fundraised for both Obama, and President George W. Bush – a sign perhaps that both men were insiders of the political establishment.

Obama’s boss at the lawfirm, Allison Davis, later went directly into business with Rezko, and Davis/Rezko then ended up working for Obama’s mentor Valerie Jarrett in various public housing projects; it all ended in tears.

“According to press reports, housing projects operated by Davis and Rezko have been substandard and beset with code violations,” reported Washington DC blog The Hill recently. “The Chicago Sun

Obama and advisor Valerie Jarrett board a flight to Philadelphia, December 1. / MCT INSET: Valerie Jarrett

Times reported that one Rezko-managed housing project was ‘riddled with problems – including squalid living conditions…lack of heat, squatters and drug dealers’.

“As Chief Executive Officer of the Habitat Company Jarrett also managed a controversial housing project located in Obama’s former state senate district called Grove Parc Plaza. According to the Boston Globe the housing complex was considered ‘uninhabitable by unfixed problems, such as collapsed roofs and fire damage…

In 2006, federal inspectors graded the condition of the complex an 11 on a 100-point scale – a score so bad the buildings now face demolition’. Ms. Jarrett refused to comment to the Globe on the conditions of the complex.”

Remember, these are projects built with taxpayer funds where lots of people clipped the ticket and not much cash was spent on the actual accommodation for low income people.

In October 2006, Rezko and another Obama fundraiser, Stuart Levine, were indicted on criminal charges for extorting millions from firms wanting to do business with several state agencies in Illinois.

In what’s become known as “pay to play”, Rezko promised politi-

cal influence and lucrative contracts for companies who “donated” money – those who refused missed out. Investigators have discovered at least some of those extorted monies ended up in Obama’s campaign funds, forcing the Obama camp to refund the cash.

Levine pleaded guilty and cut a deal, and Rezko was found guilty midway through 2008. He is reportedly also trying to cut a deal to reduce his sentence in return for testifying against others, including Democrat Governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich.

But if Rezko chooses to sing, he may ultimately be singing about America’s new president. Rezko and Obama were close enough for Rezko to help Obama buy a house for $300,000 less than the asking price by arranging to purchase the neighbouring lot from the same vendor on the same day as well, and then selling a portion of it to Obama afterwards.

“Rezko definitely did Obama a favor by selling him the 10-foot strip of land, making his own parcel less attractive for development,” reported columnist Mark Brown in the Chicago Sun-Times.

For his part, Obama admitted it looked dodgy – “I consider this a mistake on my part and I regret it”.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 27

Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel normally attends every Obama news conference, watching pensively from the back. Since the Illinois scandal broke, Emanuel has avoided the media / UPI

Then there’s the developing scandal of disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, arrested December for allegedly trying to ‘sell’ Obama’s vacant seat in the Senate to the highest bidder. Under the Illinois constitution, the Governor has sole responsibility for filling the seat with a nominee of his choice, but transcripts released by the FBI are damning.

On Nov. 5, while discussing his authority to name Obama’s replacement, Blagojevich said Obama could use his influence to name the governor to a lucrative spot with a private foundation.

Blagojevich told Adviser A: “I’ve got this thing and it’s (expletive) golden, and, uh, uh, I’m just not giving it up for (exple28 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

tive) nothing. I’m not gonna do it. And, and I can always use it.

I can parachute me there.”

According to the Chicago Tribune, based on leaks from the FBI, “Advisor A” is none other than Obama’s Whitehouse Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel.

During a two-hour telephone conversation with various people on Nov. 12, Blagojevich talked about securing high-paying jobs for him and his wife in exchange for the Senate seat. He said he is “struggling” financially and does “not want to be governor for the next two years.”

An approach was evidently made to Obama’s team, who named their preferred candidate but offered no immediate cash.

Blagojevich said advisers are telling him he has to “suck it up” for two years and give this (expletive) (Obama) his senator. (Expletive) him. For nothing? (Expletive) him.”

Blagojevich raised the idea of creating a nonprofit group for him to lead. On Nov. 11, he asked Adviser A if “they” (believed to be Rahm Emanuel and by implication Obama) “can get Warren Buffett and others to put $10, $12 or $15 million into the organization.”

During a conversation with his own adviser John Harris on Nov. 11, Blagojevich said he knew Obama wanted Senate Candidate 1 [Obama’s friend Valerie Jarrett] for the open seat but “they’re not willing to give me anything except appreciation.

(Expletive) them.”

The next day, Valerie Jarrett mysteriously withdrew her name from the senate nomination list, for reasons that no one has yet explained. Did Obama’s team warn her that Blagojevich wanted money for her appointment and that they wouldn’t be paying, so “forget the gig”?

Instead, Obama named Jarrett to a position inside his advisory staff.

On Nov. 12, Blagojevich told Harris his decision about the open Senate seat would be based on three criteria in the following order of importance: “(O)ur legal situation, our personal situation, my political situation. This decision, like every other one, needs to be based upon that. Legal. Personal. Political.”

On Dec. 4, Blagojevich told Adviser B he was going to give

Senate Candidate 5 greater consideration for Obama’s seat because the person would raise money for Blagojevich if he ran for another term as governor.

In an earlier telephone conversation recorded on Oct. 31, Blagojevich described an approach by an associate of Senate Candidate 5 as “ ‘pay to play.’ That, you know, he’d raise 500 grand. An emissary came. Then the other guy would raise a million, if I made him (Senate Candidate 5) a senator.”

Blagojevich told Fundraiser A on Dec. 4 that if Senate Candidate 5 wanted to be appointed to Obama’s seat, the candidate should follow through on promises to raise money for Blagojevich. “(S)ome of this stuff’s gotta start happening now ... right now ... and we gotta see it. You understand?” But Blagojevich told Fundraiser A that “you gotta be careful how you express that and assume everybody’s listening, the whole world is listening. You hear me?”

Senate Candidate 5 has now been confirmed as Jesse Jackson Jr, son of the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Junior denies offering money for the senate seat.

B

ut the Times of London, and the Chicago Tribune, have further details of just what kind of horsetrading went down: “Jesse Jackson Jr, the Congressman son of the famed civil rights leader, also faced new questions yesterday about his quest for Mr Obama’s vacated Senate seat.

“A group of ethnic Indian businessmen with ties to Mr Jackson and Mr Blagojevich reportedly held a lunch on October 31 and discussed raising $1 million for the Governor’s campaign to encourage him to pick Mr Jackson as Senator, the Chicago Tribune said.

“Raghuveer Nayak, a major Blagojevich donor who also has ties to the Jackson family, then co-sponsored a fund-raiser for the Governor on Saturday attended by Mr Blagojevich and Jesse Jackson Jr’s brother Jonathan, the newspaper said.

“Mr Nayak, a leader of Chicago’s Asian community, owns a string of surgery clinics and was once involved in a land deal with Jonathan Jackson.

“Mr Jackson Jr met Mr Blagojevich at 4pm on Monday to discuss his interest in the Senate seat. Mr Blagojevich was arrested at his home at 6am on Tuesday by prosecutors who said they were trying to thwart a “political crime spree”. Jesse Jackson Jr is due to meet prosecutors next week, but has been told he is not a target of the investigation.”

Obama, too, has denied having discussions with Blagojevich on the senate seat, but his credibility’s been undermined by comments from his own adviser, David Axelrod, to Fox News on November 23: “I know he’s talked to the governor and there are a whole range of names many of which have surfaced, and I think he has a fondness for a lot of them,” Axelrod said on the record.

Obama’s team now claim Axelrod “misspoke”, but commentators are more sceptical. And with good reason. The ties between Obama and Blagojevich are significant.

On July 21st this year, The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza reported on Obama’s position as adviser to Governor Blagojevich in his successful 2002 gubernatorial campaign: “That year, [Obama] gained his first high-level experience in a statewide campaign when he advised the victorious gubernatorial candidate Rod Blagojevich, another politician with a funny name and a message of reform,” wrote Lizza.

Rahm Emanuel, now Obama’s Chief of Staff, told the magazine that he and Obama were among “the top strategists of Blagojevich’s 2002 gubernatorial victory”.

A slippery slope Major events leading to the arrest of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich on graft charges, following an investigation that began shortly after his 2002 election:

2003

Federal investigators begin pursuing allegations of illegal activities in Blagojevich’s administration

2004

Stuart Levine, a member of the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board, resigns on the eve of hospital expansion votes; later it is revealed that one hospital official was wearing a federal bug during meetings in an effort to expose extortion attempts by Levine and others for contributions to Blagojevich

2005

Levine indicted on corruption charges; federal grand jury investigates Blagojevich’s alleged political hiring practices

2006

The Chicago Tribune reports that Blagojevich’s administration skirted state hiring rules in at least 360 cases Levine pleads guilty to a scheme to extort millions from firms seeking state business

2007

Federal prosecutors reportedly subpoena records from Blagojevich’s campaign fund to see if aides exchanged state business and jobs for political support Blagojevich’s wife’s real estate business is reportedly part of the alleged favoritism and fraud probe

2008

The Chicago Tribune reports that at least 75 percent of those who gave $25,000 to Blagojevich got jobs, contracts, favorable regulatory rulings or other benefits State lawmakers pass ethics reform over Blagojevich’s veto, leading him to reportedly up efforts to collect contributions from state contractors before restrictions go into effect Blagojevich and his chief of staff arrested Dec. 9 on various charges, including trying to “sell” President-elect Barack Obama’s senate seat, trying to extort $50,000 from a hospital in exchange for state funding and threatening to stall the sale of Tribune Co.’s Wrigley Field if the Chicago Tribune did not fire editorial writers critical of the governor

Source: 7th U.S. District Court, Chicago Tribune, MCT Photo Service Graphic: Pat Carr

© 2008 MCT

Blagojevich told Fundraiser A on Dec. 4 that if Senate Candidate 5 wanted to be appointed to Obama’s seat, the candidate should follow through on promises to raise money for Blagojevich. “(S)ome of this stuff’s gotta start happening now . . right now . . and we gotta see it. You understand?” But Blagojevich told Fundraiser A that “you gotta be careful how you express that and assume everybody’s listening, the whole world is listening. You hear me?”

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 29

Again, the Obama camp now insists Emanuel “overstated” Obama’s role.

It’s hard to see how, though. In 2006, despite controversy swirling around Governor Blagojevich, Obama continued to endorse him, as he told journalist John Patterson in the Chicago Daily Herald of July 27: “If the governor asks me to work on his behalf, I’ll be happy to do it.”

An Associated Press report of August 16, 2006 quoted Obama: “We’ve got a governor in Rod Blagojevich who has delivered consistently on behalf of the people of Illinois.”

T

hen there’s the massive embarrassment for the President-elect of his own Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, being caught on FBI wiretaps discussing Blagojevich’s plans for the Senate seat.

Obama may not personally be snared, but there’s the overriding impression he knows far more than he’s admitted to date: “So we’re left with vagueness,” writes Slate’s John Dickerson.

“Why does it matter? It always matters when a politician won’t say the simple thing. Maybe it matters a little more with Obama, who can answer the dickens out of a question when he wants to.

There’s evidence that Obama wanted Valerie Jarrett to take his seat – the governor sure seemed to think the president-elect wanted that. Suddenly, in the middle of the process, Obama stopped wanting that. Why?” And before it became clear that Rahm Emanuel was implicated, CNN’s Campbell Brown was sounding off about Obama’s vagueness as well: “And what now looks pretty clear, at least based on these tapes and what the U.S. attorney is telling us, is that someone from Obamaworld did have communication with the governor about this.

“Who was it? What was said?

“Attempts by CNN reporters and others to get answers have been met with a big: “no comment due to an ongoing investigation.”

“Sorry, but that’s not good enough for someone who ran a campaign based in part on a promise of more openness and transparency. At the very least you could have assured that you and your staff are getting to the bottom of this and fully cooperating with the investigators.

“After all, we can figure some of this out on our own.

“It seems pretty clear that Valerie Jarrett, soon to be one of Obama’s top White House advisers, was at one time on Blagojevich’s shortlist to take Obama’s Senate seat, and that there was some communication between Blagojevich and someone in Obama-world – someone who allegedly conveyed to the governor that all he would ever get from Obama was appreciation.

“So who was this point-person on Obama’s team? Did they know what Blagojevich was allegedly up to? And did they tip off investigators? Or did they know the governor was allegedly soliciting bribes and did nothing?

“These are unanswered questions,” said CNN. “There are other puzzling questions,” agrees conservative commentator Pat Buchanan.

“Why, if [prosecutor] Fitzgerald was listening to the wiretaps and laying his trap for the governor and corrupt politicians interested in buying a U.S. Senate seat, did he abort the operation with his 6 a.m. arrests of Blagojevich and his chief of staff? Why spring the trap when the mouse is just outside, mulling over whether to go for the cheese?

“Why not let the plot unfold? Why not let the corrupt bidder 30 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

for a Senate seat make a solid offer and bring in his or her down payment? Why not wait for the felony to be committed instead of acting while it was still being considered and discussed?

“This one is not going away soon.

“Forty-eight hours into the scandal, we have a governor and chief of staff arrested in their homes for attempting to sell the U.S. Senate seat of the 44th president of the United States. And one of the most famous names in politics, Jesse Jackson Jr., has hired

Obama has repeatedly endorsed Rod Blagojevich as Governor of Illinois, and was slow to condemn when his colleague was arrested December for trying to sell Obama’s seat, mail fraud and solicitation of bribes / UPI

a lawyer and been placed under a cloud of suspicion that some benefactor tried to buy him the Senate seat he coveted.

“No one is yet convicted of anything. But if this scandal touches any member of Obama’s White House staff, who may have spoken with Blagojevich and listened to his solicitation of a bribe without reporting it, we are going to have a new special prosecutor in Washington, D.C.” On 20 January Barack Hussein Obama will be sworn in as the

44th president of the United States. Elected on a wave of popular, anti-Bush sentiment, and pitching himself as a candidate of change, he nonetheless is shaping up as more a creature of the Establishment than even George Bush was.

It remains to be seen whether his deeds will ever match his rhetoric, or whether Obama’s carefully crafted image was nothing more than a cynical PR stunt to leverage himself into the world’s most powerful job. n INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 31

32 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

America’s First Red President?

Barack Obama’s radical roots New Zealand writer and blogger TREVOR LOUDON hit international headlines in November when his blog broke new details of US Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s hidden background. Here, Loudon updates his analysis and provides an ‘unauthorised biography’ of the new President

B

arack Obama is soon to be inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States of America.

Undoubtedly the most popular politician in decades, he has the world at his feet.

The world loves Obama’s good looks, his charisma, his oratory and his freshness and vigour. He is a break from the past. A symbol of hope and change. But hope for what? Change to what?

The best guide to man’s future decisions are his past choices. What kind of choices has Obama made? What is his guiding philosophy? How does that affect his associations?

Unfortunately Obama’s past is not pretty. The “change” he promises us, may not be as positive as we hope.

The key to understanding Barack Obama is a long dead black American poet and Communist Party activist named Frank Marshall Davis.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 33

Barack Obama was born in Hawaii in August 1961, the first and only child of Kansas born mother Stanley Ann Dunham and Kenyan born economist Barak Obama.

Obama’s parents were both leftists, meeting appropriately, in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii.

Barak Obama Snr, deserted the family when his young son was only two years old. He moved to Connecticut for study, then returned to Kenya where he died in a car accident in 1982..

Later Stanley Ann Dunham remarried Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian oil company manager, who re-located the family to Jakarta, when young Barack was six years old.

In 1970, the ten year old Barack Soetoro was sent back to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents.Soon after arriving, the young boy was introduced by grandfather Stanley Armour Dunham to Frank Marshall Davis. Dunham selected his friend Davis, specifically because of his race, and perhaps his political outlook Stanley Dunham Snr thought that Davis would serve as a mentor to his grandson, a black role model in a state where African Americans were still a rarity.

Grandpa Dunham almost certainly knew about Davis’s radi34 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

cal views. Dunham’s own family had been involved in a left wing church in Seattle. Certainly Dunham had many opportunities to absorb Davis’s outlook as the pair often indulged in long whiskey drinking and marijuana smoking sessions.

By the 1970s Davis’s militant days were behind him and any remaining Communist Party activity in Hawaii was well underground. There is every reason to believe he remained a communist however as Davis was still listed as sponsoring a well documented Communist Party front, Committee for Protection of Foreign Born as late as April 1973.

Frank Marshall Davis was under FBI surveillance for at least 19 years. So radical was Marshall considered that he was marked for immediate arrest should war break out between the US and the Soviet Union.

The FBI’s 600 page file traced Davis’s first interest in the US Communist party back to 1931. It detailed his participation in several Communist Party fronts in the late ‘30s and his anti War statements during the Hitler/Stalin Pact period.

During WW2 Davis formally joined the Party in Chicago as a covert member. In 1948 he moved to Hawaii on the recommen-

dation of two other secret party members, singer/activist Paul Robeson and San Francisco based union leader, Australian born Harry Bridges.

The Hawaiian Communist Party was one of the most dynamic in the US at the time. The Comintern had charged the local socialists with agitating for the closure of the US military bases on the Islands.

Davis was prominent in the Hawaiian Party, which through its control of the local International Longshore Workers Union had huge influence in local politics.

After the Hawaiian Party was driven underground in 1956 by a US Senate investigation, Davis like many of his comrades moved into the Democratic Party.

Davis remained part of an underground Communist Party cell for some time after this, with his wife and one other comrade. On several occasions the FBI observed Davis photographing remote Hawaiian beaches, provoking speculation that he may have been involved in some form of espionage.

The Davis/Obama relationship lasted until Obama left Hawaii for university on the mainland in 1979 as an eighteen year old..

Obama credited Davis as being an influence on his life his 20051995 autobiography “Dreams From My Father”. However Obama cryptically only referred to Davis as “Frank”.

T

he connection would probably have remained un-noticed had a top US communist had not let it slip. In March 2007 Communist Party historian Gerald Horne, speaking at the Tamiment library in New York, revealed that “Frank” was indeed Frank Marshall Davis. Horne went on to theorise about the significance that future historians might place on the relationship between Davis and the then not widely known young politician.

Horne was speaking to his comrades and sympathizers.. However after this writer publicised Horne’s revelations on my blog New Zeal, it was picked up by US website Accuracy in Media and went viral, sparking several investigations into Obama’s socialist background.

While studying at Columbia University in New York in the early 1980s Barack Obama apparently became linked to another leftist organisation, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

Despite its innocuous name, DSA is a radical organisation that operates partly within the US Democratic Party. DSA also cooperates closely with the Communist Party and other Marxist organisations. Many DSA leaders have close ties to Cuba and In 1997 DSA National Political Committee member Kurt Stand was jailed after it was discovered he had passing on US defence secrets to the former East Germany Obama makes an apparent, if obscure reference to DSA in his 1995 autobiography “Dreams From My Father”. Discussing his time studying political science at Columbia University, Obama reveals that he “went to socialist conferences at Cooper Union and African cultural fairs in Brooklyn.”

“Cooper Union” is the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, a privately funded college in Downtown Manhattan.

For many years, from the early ‘80s until 2004, Cooper Union was the usual venue of the annual Socialist Scholars Conferencealmost certainly what Obama was referring to.

SSC was for many years the largest socialist gathering in the USA, attracting up to 2,000 participants. Sponsored by DSA, the annual conferences attracted speakers from the Communist Party USA, its offshoot, the Committees of Correspondence (CoC), as

Frank Marshall Davis was under FBI surveillance for at least 19 years. So radical was Marshall considered that he was marked for immediate arrest should war break out between the US and the Soviet Union

well as Maoists, Trotskyists, black radicals, gay activists and radical feminists.

The SSC was founded by a group of socialists from City University of New York led by sociology professor Bogdan Denitch.

Barack Obama speaks of “conferences” plural, indicating his attendance was not the result of accident or youthful curiosity.

In 1983 Obama moved to Chicago to work as a community organizer. This move has mystified many. Why would a bright young man with good prospects move to the housing projects of Chicago to organize the poor?

Obama admits he was inspired by the election of Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington. A life long radical with strong ties to the Communist Party, Washington served as a Democratic Party Congressman, before being convinced by a Chicago communist lawyer David S Canter to run for the mayoralty.

Canter incidentally was also a mentor to a young Chicago journalist named David Axelrod, later to achieve fame as Barack Obama’s presidential campaign manager.

It is likely that Frank Marshall Davis knew Harold Washington as both moved in radical circles in post World War Two Chicago.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 35

ZUMA

Harold Washington was very close to both the Communist Party and Democratic Socialists of America. He filled City hall with hundreds of radicals, many of whom went on to help Obama’s career in some way.

C

“Obama admits he was inspired by the election of Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington. A life long radical with strong ties to the Communist Party, Washington served as a Democratic Party Congressman, before being convinced by a Chicago communist lawyer David S Canter to run for the mayoralty” Another possible connection was through prominent black Chicago journalist Vernon Jarrett, who worked with Davis in some communist influenced organizations in the late 1940s. Jarrett later used his considerable journalistic clout to mobilize black voters during Obama’s successful Senate campaign in 2004.

Vernon Jarrett’s daughter-in law Valerie Jarrett is a mentor to both Michelle and Barack Obama and now serves on Presidentelect Obama’s “Transition Team.” She is touted for a high post in the Obama administration.

36 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

hicago has a rich “red” tradition-it was the birthplce of the Communist party USA in 1919 and has been a stronghold of various socialist strands ever since. In the 1960s the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) were very active in Chicago.. In the early 1980s Chicago became a major base for Democratic Socialists of America and in the early 1990s for the Communist Party offshoot, Committees of Correspondence .

These four socialist “families” have “interbred” considerably over the years and many activists are members of more than one organisation. This loose marxist alliance has worked together to infiltrate and influence the left wing of the Chicago Democratic Party.

In 1988 Obama left Chicago to study at Harvard Law School.

He returned to the city in 1992 and in 1996 he ran for Illinois State Senate with the endorsement of DSA. That endorsement was partially earned by Obama’s performance at a DSA sponsored forum held at Chicago University earlier that year .

According to Chicago DSA’s New Ground March 1996: “Over three hundred people attended the first of two Town Meetings on Economic Insecurity on February 25 in Ida Noyes Hall at the University of Chicago. Entitled “Employment and Survival in Urban America”, the meeting was sponsored by the UofC DSA Youth Section, Chicago DSA and University Democrats.

“The panelists were Toni Preckwinkle, Alderman of Chicago’s 4th Ward; Barack Obama, candidate for the 13th Illinois Senate District; Professor William Julius Wilson, Center for the Study of Urban Inequality at the University of Chicago; Professor Michael Dawson, University of Chicago; and Professor Joseph Schwartz, Temple University and a member of DSA’s National Political Committee.”

The same year Obama became heavily involved in another radical group-the Chicago branch of the New Party.

Two groups formed the backbone of the New Party-DSA and the closely related radical grassroots organization the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). In Chicago, there was also considerable input from the Committees of Correspondence-later re-named Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS).

Together the New Party Marxists worked through the Democratic Party in order to move it far leftward.

A 1994 document entitled ”Who’s Building the New Party” lists several prominent CoC and DSA activists among the national New Party leadership.

They included two of CoC’s five co-chairs, Rafael Pizzaro (also a DSA member and a former communist) and Manning Marable, a former DSA leader.

Other DSA members listed include linguist and activist Noam Chomsky (who also now serves on the CCDS advisory board), labour academic Elaine Bernard, feminist Gloria Steinem and five contemporary Obama supporters- black activist and academic Cornel West, sociologist Frances Fox Piven, unionist Bill Fletcher, feminist Barbara Ehrenreich and Chicago physician and socialized medicine advocate Dr Quentin Young.

The New Party exploited the concept of electoral “fusion,” which enabled candidates to run on two tickets simultaneously. If a candidate ran as a Democrat and for the New Party, he or she would be on the ballot twice and could attract the votes of both centrist

Democrats and leftist New Party supporters. Both votes would be totaled giving the candidate a much greater chance of winning the election. Using this tactic, the New Party succeeded in electing hundreds of candidates to local office in several states.

“Fusion” was rendered ineffective by a Supreme Court decision on 28 April 1997 written by Justice William H Rehnquist, leading to the collapse of the New Party and similar efforts nationwide. DSA and CCDS thereafter turned to infiltrating the Democratic Party.

Obama’s links to the New Party went well beyond accepting their nominal support. Obama actively sought the New Party’s endorsement and urged members to join his campaigns.

He also formally joined the New Party, if the organisation’s own literature is to be believed.

New Party News Spring 1996 page 1, celebrated Chicago New Party member Danny Davis’ congressional victory on the and went on to say; “New Party members won three other primaries this Spring in Chicago: Barack Obama (State Senate), Michael Chandler (Democratic Party Committee) and Patricia Martin (Cook County Judiciary)...”these victories prove that small ‘d’ democracy can work’ said Obama”.

Barack Obama clearly saw the potential of the New Party, because he sought their support well before the scheduled election.

From Chicago DSA’s New Ground September/October 1995 “About 50 activists attended the Chicago New Party membership meeting in July. The purpose of the meeting was to update members on local activities and to hear appeals for NP support from four potential political candidates…

The political entourage included Alderman Michael Chandler, William Delgado, chief of staff for State Rep Miguel del Valle, and spokespersons for State Sen. Alice Palmer, Sonya Sanchez, chief of staff for State Sen. Jesse Garcia, who is running for State Rep in Garcia’s District; and Barack Obama, chief of staff for State Sen. Alice Palmer.

Obama is running for Palmer’s vacant seat...Although ACORN and SEIU Local 880 were the harbingers of the NP there was a strong presence of CoC and DSA (15% DSA)... Four political candidates were “there” seeking NP support.”

Obama’s New Party colleague Danny K Davis is still a US Congressman and remains one of Obama’s most loyal friends and supporters.

Around the time the New Party was alive, Davis was linked to several socialist organizations. Despite being a Democrat, Davis was and still remains a DSA member.

Davis also had ties to CoC. According to Chicago DSA’s New Ground of September 1994: “Over 500 delegates and observers (including 140 from Chicago) attended the founding convention of the Committees of Correspondence (CoC) held here in Chicago in July.

“Speakers…included Charles Nqukula, General Secretary of the South African Communist Party; Dulce Maria Pereira, a senatorial candidate of the Workers Party of Brazil; Angela Davis of CoC; and Andre Brie of the Party of Democratic Socialism of Germany (a revamp of the old East German Communist Party) Other guests during the Convention included Cook County Commissioner Danny Davis, Alderman Helen Schiller and Rick Munoz, a representative of the Green Left Weekly of Australia, and a representative of the Cuban Interest Section.”

Incidentally Rick Munoz, is also now an Illinois Democratic Party delegate for Obama.

Davis was also friendly with the Chicago Communist Party,

TOP: In the photo Carl Shier (center) presents an award to Egidio Clemente, then editor of La Parola del Popolo (The Word of the People), an Italian labor and socialist magazine, at Chicago DSOC’s 1981 dinner as then-Congressman and event Emcee Harold Washington looks on. BOTTOM: Chicago congressman Danny Davis is another close colleague of Obama’s, and fellow member of the socialistbased, New Party

which has for many years held an annual a fund raising banquet for its paper, the People’s Weekly World (formerly the People’s “Daily” World).

According to the PDW of July 28th 1990, Chicago alderman Danny K Davis attended that year’s banquet on July 15th.

“Davis applauded those at the banquet, who, he said, are always in the midst of struggle. PDW readers, he said, are ‘steadfast in the fight fòr justice’.”

According to the Peoples Weekly World of October 3rd 1998, Congressman Danny K Davis interrupted his campaign work for Senate candidate Carol Mosely Braun to present an award at the Chicago annual Peoples Weekly World banquet.

Many readers will recognize Carol Moseley-Braun as the US ambassador to New Zealand from 1999 to 2001. More on her later.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 37

Davidson serves on the steering committee of the communist dominated US peace umbrella organisation, United for Peace & Justice and is co-chair of the equally radical Chicagoans Against War & Injustice

Until recently returning to Pennsylvania, Carl Davidson was for decades a major force on the Chicago left.

He is a former leader of the ‘60s radical group Students for a Democratic Society (which spawned the terrorist Weather Underground) and spent many years in the pro China, Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist).

In 1992 Davidson joined hundreds of former Maoists, Trotskyists and about a third of the Communist Party USA in forming the Committees of Correspondence. Davidson serves on the steering committee of the communist dominated US peace umbrella organisation, United for Peace & Justice and is co-chair of the equally radical Chicagoans Against War & Injustice.

It was through the New Party that Davidson first met the aspiring Illinois State Senator, Barack Obama.

Davidson was and is an ardent supporter of Obama for several years and helped organise the famous peace rally in Chicago in where Obama first made his name as an opponent of the Iraq War. In early 2007 Davidson posted this piece on the Marxism Mailing List: “I’m from Chicago, too, and known Obama from the time he came to the New Party to get our endorsement for his first race ever. I’ve been in his home, and as an IL legislator, he’s helped or community technology movement a number of times. He said all the right things to the ACORN and New Party folks, and we endorsed him...

38 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

“He spoke at our first antiwar rally. He spent most of his speech detailing all the wars in history he supported, then finally made a distinction between just wars and ‘dumb’ wars, and going into Iraq, which was still six months down the road then, was a ‘dumb war,’ and he flatly opposed it. Good, that put him on our side, and some of us organized a fundraiser for him for his Senate race.”

The anti War rally was in 2002. Obama’s Senate race was in 2004.

Few people did as much to help Barack Obama as did his onetime boss Alice Palmer.

In 1995 Palmer introduced Obama to many of Chicago’s radical elite in the home of former Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

Like many Obama supporters, Alice Palmer had her own radical skeletons. From 1983 to 1985 Alice Palmer served on the executive board of the Communist Party front-US Peace Council, an affiliate the then Soviet controlled and funded World Peace Council.

In 1983 Palmer traveled to Czechoslovakia to the World Peace Council’s Prague Assembly, just in time for the launch of the Soviet Union’s “nuclear freeze” movement-designed to cement Eastern bloc military superiority over the West.

There is no doubt that Alice Palmer was a Soviet sympathiser.

In June 1986 the Communist Party newspaper People’s Daily World published an article detailing Alice Palmer’s attendance at the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Like the old Stalin-idolizing British socialists of the 1930s, Alice Palmer was completely seduced by what she saw: “We Americans can be misled by the major media. We’re being told the Soviets are striving to achieve a comparatively low standard of living compared with ours, but actually they have reached a basic stability in meeting their needs and are now planning to double their production.”

“There is no second-class ‘track’ system in the minority-nationality schools as there is in the inferior inner city schools in my hometown, Chicago, and elsewhere in the United States.”

“The Soviet government and people have always sided with the Africans in South Africa and Namibia against apartheid…. I saw this, too, at the Patrice Lumumba Friendship University in Moscow, where students from underdeveloped countries are trained to become engineers, doctors, nurses, teachers, agricultural specialists and skilled workers. There is no brain drain going on; the students receive a free education and then return to use their talents to build up their own countries.”

In 1995 Alice Palmer decided to give up her Illinois State Senate seat to run for Congress. Barack Obama served as Palmer’s chief of staff during the campaign, but Palmer failed badly, losing the three way race to Jesse Jackson Jnr. After losing to Jackson, Palmer decided to re-stand for her State Senate seat and asked Obama to step aside – he refused. This caused a huge rift and Palmer’s friend Timuel Black was called in to mediate. Black was unsuccessful, but ended up becoming a friend and supporter of Obama’s. Unsurprisingly Black himself was accused of Communist Party membership when he joined the Army during World War Two. Later he supported the Chicago socialists who formed DSA and today he serves on the advisory board of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.

Obama was too clever and ruthless for Palmer. Obama challenged the legitimacy of Palmer’s nominating signatures and an investigation found that many of the names were indeed invalid. Palmer was knocked off the ballot as were two other candidates, gifting the election to Obama..

Barack Obama’s spectacular rise in Chicago politics is part of a long established pattern. The left side of Chicago politics has long united to back promising candidates for high office.

DSA, the Communist Party and more latterly CoC/CCDS, have worked together on several occasions to elect “progressive” Democrats, starting in 1983 with the Harold Washington campaign.

It has worked since to elect Barack Obama to the Illinois State Senate, the US Senate and now the US presidency.

In between Washington and Obama, it helped elect Carol Moseley-Braun to the Illinois State Legislature and the US Senate.

In some ways Moseley-Braun, the first black female Senator in US history was a trial run for the Obama phenomenon.

Moseley-Braun’s rise was closely linked to both Washington and Obama. Like them, she was the product and protégé of the far left side of Chicago politics.

After law school, Moseley-Braun worked as a prosecutor in the United States Attorney’s office in Chicago. In 1978 she won a seat in the Illinois State Legislature.

Later she worked for leftist lawyer Judson Miner’s law firmas did Barack Obama, Michelle Obama and former Weather Underground terrorist Bernardine Dohrn.

Moseley-Braun became Chicago Mayor Harold Washington’s legislative floor leader and sponsored bills to reform education, to ban discrimination in housing and private clubs and to bar the State of Illinois from investing funds in Apartheid South Africa.

Moseley-Braun’s rise was closely linked to both Washington and Obama. Like them, she was the product and protégé of the far left side of Chicago politics

Like her boss, Moseley-Braun also had ties to the Communist Party.

In November 1979 she was a co-sponsor of the founding conference of the communist controlled US Peace Council. In May 1987 Moseley-Braun helped sponsor, with CPUSA leaders Angela Davis and Herbert Aptheker, a benefit for Chicago Communist Party veterans Claude Lightfoot and Jack Kling.

Also in 1987 Moseley-Braun joined Harold Washington’s multiethnic, multi-racial, and gender-balanced “Dream Ticket” to successfully run for the office of recorder of deeds. Washington died in office shortly after the election.

While serving as recorder of deeds Moseley-Braun decided to run for US Senate in the 1992 election-with CPUSA backing.

I quote Communist Party USA official Tim Wheeler, writing in a 1999 issue of People’s Weekly World on Chicago CPUSA chairman and Save Our Jobs (SOJ) committee leader, Frank Lumpkin: “Lumpkin also led SOJ into independent political action. They played an important role in the election of Harold Washington as mayor of Chicago, a historic victory over the most entrenched, reactionary political machine in the U.S. Bea (Lumpkin’s wife) writes that ‘At that time, Washington and Lumpkin had a special relationship ... Washington seemed to draw strength from Lumpkin’s participation. At meetings rallies, street encounters, whatever, Washington would call Frank over and say, ‘When I see you, I know things are in good hands’.”

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 39

Lumpkin was later appointed by Harold Washington to taskforces on hunger and dislocated workers.

Wheeler continues: “SOJ was also an important factor in the election of Charles Hayes, African-American leader of the Meatcutters union, (a covert member of the CPUSA) to take the Congressional seat vacated by Washington, and the election of Carol Moseley-Braun, the first Black woman to serve in the U.S. Senate.”

Incidentally Tim Wheeler, his wife and two other communists Jim and Margaret Baldridge recently led the Obama campaign in Baltimore, Maryland.

While Carol Moseley-Braun was close to Chicago’s Communist Party, other socialist groups also helped her to win elections.

According to CoC’s Portside bio of late Chicago Communist Party and CoC activist Hannah Cohen: “Hannah was active in Chicago, in what became a lifetime of political and electoral activism. Throughout the new upsurge of the 60s, 70s and 80s, Hannah was an active participant. She was active in teachers union, peace and community groups in Chicago, and later in the international campaign that won the freedom for Angela Davis.

“Hannah became a community volunteer in the mayoral campaigns of Harold Washington, and was one of the key volunteers in the election campaign of Carol Mosley Braun, the first African American woman elected to the United States Senate.

American Activities over his alleged membership in the Communist Party-specifically the north Chicago based Bethune Club (named for Canadian communist physician, Norman Bethune).

Young refused to answer his accusers, citing the “First Amendment” and “other protections”. Young invoked the US constitution as protection against his political enemies. Fitting indeed that Young’s friend, Barack Obama, may soon be charged with protecting the US constitution against its many enemiesforeign and domestic.

Jose LaLuz, a former leader of CoC and a US Peace Council supporter, was recently president of the nationwide organisation, Latinos for Obama.

Another DSA activist (and former Communist party leader) associated with Moseley-Braun was Milt Cohen.

According to the Chicago DSA’s New Ground, Cohen was a friend of Harold Washington’s.

“In 1982, Rep. Harold Washington issued a challenge to register 50,000 new voters in preparation for the coming mayoral election.

Milt helped organize a grassroots movement which met the challenge by more than double. Later he chaired the Chicago Coalition for Voter Registration.

“Milt joined the 1983 Washington campaign full-time. He later said that hard-won victory was his greatest satisfaction. The Washington movement clearly reflected Milt’s long-time priorities: anti-racism,

“In 1976 Young was questioned by the House Committee on Un-American Activities over his alleged membership in the Communist Party... Young refused to answer his accusers, citing the “First Amendment” and “other protections” DSA also backed Moseley-Braun.

One woman, closely associated with the DSA, long time Chicago Democratic Party activist Sue Purrington, played a role in MoseleyBraun’s decision to run for Senate.

According to the Chicago DSA website: “The 34th Annual Dinner was held on May 1, 1992 at the Congress Hotel in Chicago. The Master of Ceremonies was Michael Lighty, who was then the Executive Director of DSA. Sue Purrington, the Executive Director of Chicago NOW, and Dr. Quentin Young, President of Physicians for a National Health Program, were the honorees. The featured speaker was Jose LaLuz, who was the National Education Director of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union.

“Sue Purrington “We honor you as a career fighter for women’s rights and equality...

You were instrumental in persuading Carol Moseley-Braun to start her campaign to become Senator from Illinois then you produced votes to back up your pledge of support.”

Incidentally both Quentin Young and Jose Laluz are DSA members. Young is a long time friend, neighbour and political supporter of Obama’s. He was present at the famous meeting in Chicago in 1995 at the home of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn where State Senator Alice Palmer introduced Obama as her chosen successor.

In 1976 Young was questioned by the House Committee on Un40 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

political independence, and progressive multi-racial coalitions.

“A few months after his election, Washington issued a proclamation declaring Milton M. Cohen Day a day for Chicagoans to honor a man ‘who has dedicated his life to the unceasing struggle for the civil and economic rights of all people and has worked for 50 years in the cause of progressive change and reform politics in Chicago and a more democratic, humane and peaceful America and world.’ Mayor Washington noted that to honor Milt Cohen is to honor ‘thousands of rank-and-file activists who work day and night in the struggle for jobs, justice, and peace’.”

And from the same report, Cohen was also a friend of Moseley-Braun’s: “Carol Moseley-Braun’s election to the Senate in 1992 was another landmark for Milt. He had helped recruit Braun for her first legislative race in 1978, and one of his last projects before leaving Chicago was soliciting DSA members to participate in the Braun campaign.”

Chicago DSA put a big effort into Carol Moseley-Braun’s successful Senate campaign.

According to Chicago DSA’s New Ground, “Progressive forces in Illinois made history November 3 by electing Carol Moseley-Braun as the first African-American woman to the US Senate.

“Braun beat Republican millionaire Rich Williamson soundly, 57%-43%. Former DSA Youth Organizer Jeremy Karpatkin directed

Braun’s field operations. Chicago DSA contributed volunteers and money to Braun’s campaign.”

Barack Obama also played a role in Carol Moseley-Braun’s Senate victory-perhaps the decisive role, as this extract from Chicago Magazine, January 1993, discloses: A huge black turnout in November 1992 altered Chicago’s electoral landscape-and raised a new political star: a 31-year-old lawyer named Barack Obama...

The most effective minority voter registration drive in memory was the result of careful handiwork by Project Vote!, the local chapter of a not-for-profit national organization. “It was the most efficient campaign I have seen in my 20 years in politics,” says Sam Burrell, alderman of the West Side’s 29th Ward and a veteran of many registration drives.

At the head of this effort was a little-known 31-year-old AfricanAmerican lawyer, community organizer, and writer: Barack Obama...

In 1984, after Columbia but before Harvard, Obama moved to Chicago. “I came because of Harold Washington,” he says. “I wanted to do community organizing, and I couldn’t think of a better city than one as energized and hopeful as Chicago was then.”

By 1991, when Obama, law degree in hand, returned to Chicago... black voter registration and turnout in the city were at their lowest points since record keeping began.

Six months after he took the helm of Chicago’s Project Vote!, those

Exposition Authority and a fundraiser for Project Vote! “Barack ran this superbly. I have no doubt he could run an equally good political campaign if that’s what he decided to do next.”

Obama shrugs off the possibility of running for office. “Who knows?” he says. “But probably not immediately.” He smiles.

On March 13th 1998, Saul Mendelson, a lifelong socialist activist died in Chicago.

Mendelson had been a member of various Trotskyist factions in the 1930s and ‘40s before joining the US Socialist Party and later DSA. In 1983 Saul Mendelson played a significant role in the election of Harold Washington.

The Saul Mendelson Memorial Service was held on Sunday, March 29, 1998, at the First Unitarian Church, Chicago.

According to Chicago DSA leader, the late Carl Marx Shier (who addressed the gathering); “At the memorial service held at the 1st Unitarian Church on South Woodlawn, speaker after speaker recounted Saul’s contributions... speakers included Deborah Meier...Senator Carol Moseley-Braun, Alderman Toni Preckwinkle, State Senator Barak Obama, Illinois House Majority Leader Barbara Flynn Currie and a good friend from New York, Myra Russell.”

Deborah Meier was a former Trotskyist and Socialist Party comrade of Saul Mendelson’s and a leader of Chicago and Boston DSA.

“In the early 1990s Bill Ayers hired Obama to head the Annanberg Challenge, a $50 million charity which enabled Obama to fund radical organizations, many of which could help advance his political career“ conditions had been reversed...Within a few months, Obama, a tall, affable workaholic, had recruited staff and volunteers from black churches, community groups, and politicians.

He helped train 700 deputy registrars, out of a total of 11,000 citywide. And he began a saturation media campaign with the help of black-owned Brainstorm Communications...The group’s slogan-”It’s a Power Thing”-was ubiquitous in African-American neighborhoods.

“It was overwhelming,” says Joseph Gardner, a commissioner of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District and the director of the steering committee for Project Vote! “The black community in this city had not been so energized and so single-minded since Harold died…”

As for Project Vote! itself, its operations in Chicago have officially closed down. Barack Obama has returned to work on his book, which he plans to complete this month...”We won’t let the momentum die,” he says. “I’ll take personal responsibility for that. We plan to hold politicians’ feet to the flames in 1993, to remind them that we can produce a bloc of voters large enough that it cannot be ignored.”

Nor can Obama himself be ignored. The success of the voter-registration drive has marked him as the political star the Mayor should perhaps be watching for. “The sky’s the limit for Barack,” says Burrell.

Some of Daley’s closest advisers are similarly impressed. “In its technical demands, a voter-registration drive is not unlike a mini-political campaign,” says John Schmidt, chairman of the Metropolitan Pier and

Alderman Toni Preckwinkle and Illinois House Majority Leader Barbara Flynn Currie, are both leftist Democrats with ties to Chicago’s socialist community. Both endorsed Barack Obama in his successful 2004 bid for the US Senate.

Eulogies also came from Quinn Brisben, (Socialist Party presidential candidate 1976, 1992) and David McReynolds (Socialist Party presidential candidate 1980, 2000). Both Brisben and McReynolds are also DSA members.

State Senator Barack Obama probably knew Saul Mendelson through their mutual activism in Independent Voters of Illinois, a leftist organisation investigated for communist infiltration as far back as the 1940s.

In 1998 Moseley-Braun, mired in constant scandal, lost her US Senate seat. President Bill Clinton looked after her however, appointing her as ambassador to an unsuspecting New Zealand.

By 2004 Moseley-Braun was back in Chicago talking of running for her old Senate seat. After much to-ing and fro-ing, she instead made a short-lived run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.

Seizing the opportunity, Barack Obama ran for Moseley-Braun’s old Senate seat and was elected-with the active support of the Chicago Communist Party and the Young Communist League front, Youth for Obama.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 41

Charles Ogletree

Mark Rudd

42 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

During the recent election campaign Barack obama repeatedly tried to minimize his ties to former Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

Obama was being very economical with the truth. Obama’s ties to the radical couple were long term and were both business and personal.

In the early 1990s Bill Ayers hired Obama to head the Annanberg Challenge, a $50 million charity which enabled Obama to fund radical organizations, many of which could help advance his political career.

Later Ayers worked with Obama on the board of the Woods Fund, together doling out millions to leftist causes.

Since the election Ayers has even admitted that Obama was a “family friend.”

While Ayers and Dohrn kept a low profile for fear of embarrassing their friend, they were involved in an organization heavily committed to the Obama cause.

In early 2006, a group of former SDS radicals, led by DSA activist Paul Buhle joined with a new generation of young activists to re-found Students For a Democratic Society. The movement now has over 130 chapters across the USA. More importantly Buhle and comrades also founded an SDS support group for older activists – Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS). SDS is the muscle behind the new protest movement and was very prominent in the violence at the 2008 Republican National Convention at St Paul Minnesota. MDS is the brains behind the SDS brawn A review of the 2006 MDS board reveals some interesting connections.

Elliott Adams – Leader of the CPUSA front Veterans for Peace Noam Chomsky – Well known linguist, writer and activist. A member of both DSA and the CCDS Advisory Board. Formerly with the New Party.

Carl Davidson – Obama’s old New Party comrade and close friend of Bill Ayers.

Bernardine Dohrn Bill Fletcher Jr – A DSA member, former New Party leader and leading trade unionist.

Bert Garskof – Involved with SDS the 60s, a close friend of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

Tom Hayden – Founder and leader of the SDS. Gerald Horne – A member of the editorial board of Political Affairs, theoretical journal of the Communist Party USA- the historian who first exposed the Obama/Frank Marshall Davis connection.

Michael James – A former member of SDS. Robin DG Kelley – A former member of the Communist Workers Party, more recently close to the Communist Party.

Michael Klonsky – Son of Communist Party activist Robert Klonsky. A former member of SDS, who later led the proChinese, Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist). Mike Klonsky works closely with Bill Ayers and is a good friend of Obama supporter Carl Davidson.

Ethelbert Miller – Chairman of the board of the notoriously leftist and Cuban linked Washington based think tank, Institute for Policy Studies.

Charlene Mitchell – A leader of CCDS, former high ranking member of Communist Party.

Mark Rudd – A former leader of the SDS and the terrorist Weather Underground.

BLAME IT ON THE WEATHER Obama’s Weathermen pals should worry voters, writes DEROY MURDOCK

B

arack Obama’s supportbelief that Obama never learned that ers have trivialized his Ayers and Dohrn hated the USA and connections to former loved TNT. Weather Underground terObama chaired the Chicago rorists William Ayers and Annenberg Challenge, which Ayers Bernardine Dohrn. “This is a guy who inaugurated. They jointly attended at lives in my neighborhood,” Obama least seven of that charity’s top-level told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos oversight meetings between March on April 16. Campaign strategist 1995 and September 1997. They jointly David Axelrod told CNN that Obama met a dozen times as board members “certainly didn’t know the history” of Chicago’s Woods Fund between of these two barbarians when they December 1999 and December 2002. hosted a reception for him when he They appeared together on two acalaunched his political career. demic panels in 1997 and 2002. Obama Obama might not have heard of concisely reviewed one of Ayers’ books Ayers and Dohrn’s brutality from in the Chicago Tribune. the ‘60s through the ‘80s had they Ayers and Dohrn invited Windy City merely tossed a rock or two in anger. liberals into their living room to meet But these two went much, much Obama when he began his 1995 State farther.

Senate run. Ayers donated $200 to re Author and teacher Bill Ayers poses In 1970, Ayers encapsulated the elect Obama in 2001. along a path in a California coastal Weathermen’s worldview: “Kill all These considerable ties might be park, August 9, 2001. He and his wife, the rich people. Break up their cars irrelevant if Ayers and Dohrn regretBernardine Dohrn, were fugitives and apartments. Bring the revolution ted their actions.

But they are far from during the Seventies because of their home. Kill your parents.” In his 2001 remorseful. part in the radical political group The Weathermen. memoir, “Fugitive Days,” Ayers brags “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel (Chris Walker/Chicago Tribune/MCT) that he helped blast NYPD headquarwe didn’t do enough,” Ayers said in ters in 1970, the U.S. Capitol in 1971, an interview published September 11, and the Pentagon in 1972.

2001 – while Obama knew Ayers. That Dohrn was an equally stalwart subAugust, Ayers posed for a Chicago versive. In July 1969, while John McCain languished in the Hanoi Magazine photo in which he stomped on an American flag Hilton, Dohrn and five other Weathermen flew to Cuba to crumpled in the dirt. Headline: “No regrets.” conspire with the National Liberation Front, America’s North “We’d do it again,” Dohrn told ABC in 1998. “I wish that we Vietnamese enemies. Dohrn was on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted had done more. I wish we had been more militant.”

List. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called her “the most dangerIf these facts are news to Obama, he must be the most oblivious woman in America.” ous man on Chicago’s South Side. But if he knew about Ayers Throughout the 1970s, under Ayers and Dohrn’s leadership, and Dohrn’s background, he is being untruthful about it. At the the Weathermen blasted the State Department, Gulf Oil’s very least, Obama showed dreadful judgment by closely and Pittsburgh headquarters, and New York’s Queens Courthouse, repeatedly associating with these violent traitors. among at least 16 targets.

Obama today calls Ayers’ behavior “detestable acts.” But what Thankfully, one particular bomb detonated early. Three did Ayers and Dohrn see in Obama? What inspired these unreWeathermen fatally blew themselves up in March 1970 while pentant, hard-Left bomb throwers to hand the chairmanship building it in a Greenwich Village townhouse. The Weathermen of Ayers’ foundation and then share their home and friends wanted the nail-filled device to explode at New Jersey’s Fort Dix with the charismatic then-35-year-old whose current 95.5 perArmy base during a non-commissioned officers’ dance. Soldiers, cent Left-wing vote record made him The National Journal’s their spouses, and dates would have been maimed and likely “Most Liberal Senator In 2007?” killed. As Ayers said, the bomb would have ripped “through (Deroy Murdock is a columnist with Scripps Howard News windows and walls and, yes, people too.”

Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, No wonder Obama has been so evasive about his ties to Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. E-mail him at deroy.

Ayers and Dohrn. His relationship with these extreme Leftists murdock(at)gmail.com) goes far beyond waving at some folks who live nearby. It defies – Scripps Howard News Service INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 43

It was discovered that an October 2002 trip Bonior and two other congressmen made to Iraq before the US invasion was secretly financed by Saddam Hussein’s intelligence agency. Bonior and his colleagues denied all knowledge of the trip’s real funders.

Howard Zinn – A well known Marxist historian and former New Party leader.

Several other activists later joined the MDS board including CCDS leader and former New Party activist Manning Marable, DSA honorary chair and former New Party leader Barbara Ehrenreich and two more former Weathermen Jeff Jones and Bruce Rubenstein.

Bill Ayers is also involved with MDS as is at least one other former Weather Underground terrorist Howie Machtinger.

This organization unites all three socialist organizations behind Obama-DSA, CCDS and the Communist Party together with Ayers, Dohrn and several other former terrorists.

Many MDS activists were involved in the Obama campaign, but more significant is the MDS offshoot – Progressives for Obama.

While Carl Davidson spends much of his time denying the two organizations are connected, the links are undeniable.

Of the four founders of Progressives for Obama – Tom Hayden, Bill Fletcher Jnr, Barbara Ehrenreich and radical actor/activist Danny Glover, all but Glover are MDS board members.

Progressives for Obama webmaster is MDS board member Carl Davidson. Several other MDS leaders including Mark Rudd, Paul Buhle, Robin DG Kelley, Bert Garskof, Mike James and Thomas 44 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

endorse the group’s website.

DSA endorsers included old New Party activists Cornel West and Frances Fox Piven, Peter Dreier, Dick Flacks, Duane Campbell and Chicagoans Christine Riddiough and Betty Wilhoitte. The latter was formerly active with Michelle and Barack Obama, in the socialist dominated Independent Voters of Illinois.

CCDS linked activists include CCDS national chair Jim Campbell, Barry Cohen, Jay Schaffner , Harry Targ, Mildred Williamson and Zenobia Johnson-Black, the wife of Obama’s old Chicago friend and supporter Timuel Black Other endorser include Marilyn Katz a former Chicago SDS member who helped found Chicagoans Against the War on Iraq, with Carl Davidson, plus former SDSers Susan Klonsky and Fred Klonsky, wife and brother respectively of MDS board member Mike Klonsky.

Progressives for Obama was established to; “Join and engage with our brothers and sisters in the vast rainbow of social movements to come together in support of Obama’s unprecedented campaign and candidacy. Even though it is candidate-centered, there is no doubt that the campaign is a social movement, one greater than the candidate himself ever imagined.

“Progressives can make a difference in close primary races like

Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Oregon and Puerto Rico and in the November general election. We can contribute our dollars. We have the proven online capacity to reach millions of swing voters in the primary and general election. We can and will defend Obama against negative attacks from any quarter. We will seek Green support against the claim of some that there are no real differences between Obama and McCain. We will criticize any efforts by Democratic superdelegates to suppress the winner of the popular and delegate votes, or to legitimize the flawed elections in Michigan and Florida. We will make our agenda known at the Democratic National Convention and fight for a platform emphasizing progressive priorities as the path to victory.”

Progressives For Obama aimed to not only put Obama in the White House, but to build a huge united “progressive” movement that can force the new President to move America massively to the left. The influence of the CPUSA on the Roosevelt administration that produced the “New Deal” and the pressure of the CPUSA and SDS/New Left that pressured Johnson into the great social changes of the ‘60s are the model for this new movement.

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ome commentators acknowledge, at least to some small degree, Obama’s leftist roots. Most however push the line that Obama has moved to the centre, that he will moderated by the checks and balances of the US political system and by the demands of the huge problems that confront him.

Those on the far left, the people who control the unions and mass organizations that got Obama elected, do not share that view.

Now that Barack Obama is safely elected, his Communist Party backers feel confident to come out of the shadows.

Communist Party leader Sam Webb recently posted a long speech on the CPUSA website – A Springtime of Possibility: If the election of Barack Obama was a monumental victory, election night itself was a magical moment. In Chicago and across the nation, tears of joy and exhilaration mingled with memories of how far we have come. As the President-elect greeted the hundreds of thousands of well wishers in Grant Park, it was hard not to think of the many struggles for freedom mapping our nation’s history...

To say that a sea change occurred on Nov. 4 is no exaggeration. On one side, the arguably worst president in our history leaves Washington disgraced. His party’s policies, ideology and cultural symbols are discredited. The GOP is in disarray and the blame game has begun. The red/blue state paradigm and the southern strategy, a strategy conceived exactly forty years ago to divide the nation along racial lines, are in shambles. And the entire capitalist class, not only its most reactionary section, is weakened.

On the other side of the changing sea, a sense of joy, catharsis and renewal is in the air. Expectations are high. A new era of progressive change is waiting to be set in motion. If the past eight years of the Bush administration seemed like a winter of discontent, Obama’s ascendancy to the presidency feels like a springtime of possibility... in electing Barack Obama and larger Democratic Party majorities in Congress, the American people have taken the first and absolutely necessary step in the direction of building a more just society. We are not on the threshold of socialism for sure, but it is easy to see the further congealing of a growing majority that will realign politics, not incrementally and momentarily, but decisively and enduringly in the direction of economic justice, equality and peace…

The left can and should advance its own views and disagree with the Obama administration without being disagreeable. Its tone should be respectful. We are speaking to a friend…

Although we are not in the socialist stage of the revolutionary process, we are, nevertheless on the road, and the only road, that will lead to socialism – to a society that is egalitarian in the rough sense, eliminates exploitation of working people, brings an end to all forms of oppression, and is notable for the many-layered participation of working people and their allies in the management of the economy and state.

The room for socialist ideas is in the public square has grown enormously. Such ideas can be easily discussed with many people and people’s leaders. Furthermore, the force of economic events will compel millions more to consider socialist ideas that in the past were dismissed out of hand. But our vision of socialism will resonate to the degree that it addresses contemporary sensibilities and challenges...

Yes indeed.

The real test of Obama’s intentions is the people he appoints to positions of authority.

During his campaign Obama took advice from his two member strong Black Advisory Council. Obama’s old New Party/DSA/ Progressives for Obama comrade Cornel West was fifty per cent of the Council.

The other half was lawyer Charles Ogletree, a former Cubavisiting, Black Panther-supporting student radical. Ogletree is a leader of the ultra-radical Black Reparations movement which advocates huge “compensation” from the US government to the descendants of black African slaves.

Ogletree is tipped to head the US Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division under Obama, or perhaps even to be appointed to the US Supreme Court.

Obama has recently appointed former Democratic Party Congressman, David Bonior to his proto-Cabinet “Transition Economic Advisory Board”.

Once the third ranking House Democrat, Bonior was the subject of major controversy. It was discovered that an October 2002 trip he and two other congressmen made to Iraq before the US invasion was secretly financed by Saddam Hussein’s intelligence agency. Bonior and his colleagues denied all knowledge of the trip’s real funders.

Bonior was a leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, now a 70 strong grouping of leftist congressmen and women, many of whom have ties to DSA and/or the Communist Party.

It is not widely known, but Bonior is a member of Democratic Socialists of America .

President-elect Obama almost certainly knows this as he has ordered the most extensive vetting of government appointments in US history. Apparently he thinks it appropriate to appoint a paid up socialist to one of the most important positions in the US today.

Barack Obama will soon become commander in chief of the world’s most powerful military/intelligence machine.

While every cog in this vast complex, from cooks and caretakers up may be subject to vetting by the US’s array of intelligence agencies, the man elected to the top job can bypass all such scrutiny.

Yet, if Barack Obama were to apply for the humblest of positions in the US military he would face grave difficulty in gaining a security clearance.

Barack Obama could probably not get a job cleaning toilets in any of the US’s nuclear missile bases, yet he is soon to become the man with his finger on the button.

It’s the beauty of democracy, but is that a comforting thought?

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All photos posed by models

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lts su re s it d n a s ie il m fa n o r a Britain’s w

When commentators question the wisdom of liberal social attitudes, many in the media call them ‘dinosaurs’, and ‘trapped in the past’. But, as HAL G. P. COLEBATCH warns, the chickens are flying home to roost in what could be a major, civilisational threat INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 47

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o say that Britain has been run for the last decade by people who hate it and its traditional values and who are deliberately and strategically trying to destroy – among many other things – traditional families and family life as part of a programme of culturewar may sound like hyperbolic political rhetoric.

However the evidence indicates this is actually no more than a statement of fact. The evidence is also pretty suggestive about who is winning this war.

A survey from The Sunday Times of 30 November, 2008, published under the heading, “Britain on top in casual sex league” claimed: “British men and women are now the most promiscuous of any big western industrial nation, researchers have found …

The researchers behind the study say high scores such as Britain’s may be linked to the way society is increasingly willing to accept sexual promiscuity among women as well as men … Britain’s ranking was ascribed to factors such as the decline of religious scruples about extramarital sex, the growth of equal pay and equal rights for women and a highly sexualised popular culture.”

This does not surprise me. Pronounced features of British culture in the last few years have been hedonism spiced with nihilism and a peculiar loss of notions of personal dignity, decorum and modesty. The former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s wife, Cherie, by way of setting an example to young, announced in her recent memoirs that she and Tony had had sexual relations on their first date. Another survey a little later indicated that, contrary to normal patterns in virtually every society known, girls in Britain now tend to be more sexually promiscuous than boys.

Meanwhile, under progressive and politically-correct influences and the widespread seizure of institutional power by the Gramscian left, government taxation and welfare policies as well as officiallycreated or officially-condoned cultural pressures seem deliberately structured to destroy marriage and families. This appears directly related to a huge increase in violent youth crime.

Previous Home Secretary Jack Straw assured England that: “we shouldn’t get into a paddy about the decline of formal marriage.”

Other kinds of families, he said, “can do just as well for their children.” (Despite the overwhelming evidence that they don’t).

Prince Charles’ charity, the Prince’s Trust, said in 2001 that teenage girls on sink estates admired their peers who had given birth and often sought to copy their status and acquire the free flat which they thought having a baby usually brought. Developments in the years since then have done much to confirm and nothing to refute that statement.

Late in 2008 the case came to light of Karen Matthews, who was convicted of kidnapping her own daughter to obtain a ransom. Writing in the Sunday Times of 7 December, 2008, columnist Harriet Sergeant stated: Matthews is the mother of seven children by five” [at least] “different men. She has never worked, but lived off benefits of £286.60 a week. The Matthews’ house was filthy. A neighbour declared, ‘I wouldn’t want to keep a pet dog in there, let alone children.’ Her relationships with men were so promiscuous that when police built up a family tree it stretched to 300 names. Karen’s nine-year-old daughter Shannon was regularly drugged to keep her quiet, had feet encrusted with dirt, was infested with head lice and flinched at any sudden noise. Police found a note scribbled by Shannon to her brother: ‘Do you think we will get any tea tonight? If we’re quiet we might get a bag of sweets. Don’t talk too loud or get a beating.’ This was in a family receiving in benefits the equivalent 48 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

of £20,000 a year before tax. Seven children were going hungry to bed, not because of social deprivation but because their mother could not be bothered to feed them.

The Matthews household is not a one-off. Researching a report on the care system, I met many children from families such as the Matthewses … Britain has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in Europe and, in 2001, 90% of births to mothers under 20 occurred outside marriages. Two young men from council estates as far apart as Hastings and Newcastle insisted that girls giving birth at 16 or 17 were no longer the exception in their area but the norm ….

Sergeant quotes Sir Norman Bettison, chief constable of West Yorkshire police, the force responsible for arresting Karen Matthews: “We are talking here about the perverting influence of welfare. The more kids you have, the more money you get.”

This has come after many years of warnings from sources with high credentials. What conclusion can be drawn except that the destruction of the traditional family and the creation of a welfaredependent underclass has been, at some level, deliberate?

Philip Booth, Editorial and Program Director at the Institute of Economic Affairs and Professor of Insurance and risk Management at the Sir John Cass Business School, has written: “The tax system in the UK impacts on families in a particularly unfortunate way. Two examples are worth noting. If we take a family earning £25,000 with one earner and two children (for example, with the mother working in the home) the family would gain over £2,000 per annum of real income by having both family members going out to work with them each earning £12,500. This arises because child tax credit is awarded on the basis of family income but income tax and National Insurance allowances are personalized. If the same couple split up and lived separately, the tax bill would be unaffected, but benefits would rise dramatically (by several thousand pounds). These illustrations are not dramatic examples of quirks; they are integral parts of the UK tax and benefit system.”

In March, 2000, Cherie Blair, not an elected official with any mandate to make policy, though a part-time judge, claimed that change would be brought about to ensure that of 1.7 million jobs allegedly to be created in the following 11 years, 1.1 million would be filled by women. Not only would men be discriminated against but that would be pressure to force yet more women out of the family and home-making role, thus inevitably adding to the numbers of children brought up without a mother at home – a blow to the maintenance of intact families.

Settling up a government unit to combat teenage pregnancy at the cost of £40 million in 1999 was found by 2004 to have not only useless but apparently counter-productive: teenage pregnancy rates had greatly increased, and some of the worst-hit areas, such as Lambeth in South London, which had been specially targeted for supplying girls with contraceptives and contraceptive information (but not promoting sexual abstinence), had been among the worst areas. Six of the 10 worst areas saw dramatic increases in teenage pregnancies.

In Lambeth, teenage pregnancies had gone from 361 in 1998 to 406 in 2002. There was also a national increase in the levels of sexually transmitted diseases among 16 to 19-year-old of 30% in the same five-year period. Robert Wheeldon of the think-tank Civitas, said: “A number of people have been warning the government since the start of the strategy that it was designed to fail because of its almost complete reliance on ... more explicit sex

“Britain has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in Europe and, in 2001, 90% of births to mothers under 20 occurred outside marriage” education and easy access to contraception for teenagers. These policies have been pursued for 30 years to no good effect. All attempts to incorporate an element of abstinence education have been treated with contempt by the staff of the Teenage Pregnancy Unit ...” Children’s Minister Margaret Hodge said: “We do not appear to have seen a blip and that did worry me. We don’t know why that happened ... We are now focusing on those hot-spot areas with real problems.”

A milestone was passed when it was reported in March 2001 that since 1998 a majority of pregnancies had begun outside marriage. In April, 2002, funding for National Marriage Week was cut off by the Government “as part of a shift towards supporting non-marital relationships.” This was in spite, or perhaps rather because of, the overwhelming evidence that a stable and traditional family life was by far the biggest factor, considerably outweighing even good education, in allowing people to escape from poverty and to lead happy, healthy and fulfilled lives. The political implications seemed obvious: a culture of “non-traditional families” meant a dysfunctional underclass and a proletarianised culture, which was bad news for the Conservatives, the Conservative vote

and for the whole milieu of cultural conservatism. It also meant various rationales for the further expansion of State powers and further opportunities for those overwhelmingly Labour clientgroups with a vested interest in those powers, for example those in the caring professions.

One commentator, Dr David Worsley, remarked in the British magazine Right Now! of July-September 2002: “The ill effects of the decline of the nuclear families on children can be studied in numerous publications that emanate from the Institute for the Study of Civil Society, in particular the classic Families without Fatherhood by former Labour councillor Norman Dennis.

“Furthermore these developments do not just affect children, but signify a more general atomization of society. Due to the decline in marriage and the increase in divorce and single-motherhood, the proportion of households that consist of a single man aged 15-44 has quadrupled [in 2002] since 1971, whilst 36.5% of men born in 1964 had never been married by the age of 35, compared to 11.6% of those born in 1946 … a significant proportion of a whole generation of men have never known the civilizing responsibilities of INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 49

marriage and fatherhood, or are leading solitary lives whilst being fleeced by the Child Support Agency for the maintenance of offspring with whom they seldom spend time.”

Writing in Race Warriors: The Perverse Results of Anti-Racism (New European Publications, London, 2003) Russell Lewis commented that the Council for Racial Equality demeaned British Chinese, who were condemned for their traditional family values and unwillingness to provide employment for the caring professions and race-relations industries by living off welfare benefits. The Chinese respect for education and scholarship was mocked as “you’ll find wealth and beautiful wives in books, so study well,” and Chinese were admonished by the CRE to, in effect, learn from other cultures the virtues of bookless poverty and fragmented families.

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n 30 July, 2003, the Bishops of the Church of England issued a paper, “Being Human, a Christian Understanding of Personhood,” which declared that “committed relationships” were as good as marriage and that the sanctity of marriage should be questioned. It praised “committed relationships” rather than marriage as “the right background for sex.”

One of the main authors of the report said divorce could have a “redemptive dimension.” Marriage, on the other hand, could shelter abuse and rape, and stifle personal development. This report was made by the Doctrine Commission, authorised by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

It was announced in 2003 that £450,000,000 would be spent providing every teenager in Britain with a “Learning Mentor” to give advice on problems, the old-fashioned institution of parents being history. The whole idea of teenagers – particularly, perhaps delinquent teenagers who might actually need a “mentor,” accepting one was from fairyland – and what sort of person would become a “Mentor” anyway? Anyway, little more was heard about the idea, though Roy Kerridge did supply one vignette of a pupil seen with his Mentor telling him to get lost while he consummated a drug deal. The mentor obliged.

In May, 2003, it was reported that, according to the Office for National Statistics, nearly half the children in England and Wales were not being brought up in a traditional family with parents married and living together under the same roof. The figures, taken from the 2001 census, showed 2,672,000 children, nearly one in four, living in one-parent households, mostly headed by the mother. There were also 725,520 living in step-families with a re-married parent and 1,278,455 being brought up by unmarried cohabiting couples. Another 125,834 were recorded as not living with a family. This brought the total to 4,801,695, or more than 41% of children under 18. The proportion actually increased as children got younger, ranging from 43.4% of under-twos to 38.2% of 16year-olds. Figures released in January, 2004, showed the number of marriages in Britain had fallen to fewer than 300,000 a year, the lowest number since records began more than 50 years ago. There had been 408,000 weddings in 1950, 480,000 in the peak year of 1972, and, following a steady downward trend, 286,000 in 1972.

In 2008 Care, a Christian charity, concluded that single people with no children did far better financially than families. Britain was almost alone in failing to reward couples for staying together. In other OECD countries, the tax paid by one-earner married couples on average wages was around 50% of that paid by a single person on the same income. However in Britain the figure was 75%, even with tax credits and child benefit taken into account. The Care study, by former Inland Revenue consultants Don Draper and 50 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

Leonard Beighton, said: “Among highly developed economies, the UK is almost alone in operating a tax system that ignores spousal obligations.” Jill Kirby, of the Centre for Policy Studies, calculated that an average couple on single income with a mortgage and two children paid £7,600 a year more in tax than they got in benefits. If they broke up, however, the two households would receive £400 more in benefits than they paid in tax.

Not surprisingly, another survey found that married couples were no longer regarded as the social norm. Schools were reportedly ordered to drop the term “mum and dad” in case it offended pupils.

The term “normal couple” was among terms banned – and its use was a sacking or expelling offence – for staff and students at Stockport College, Greater Manchester (“Lady” and Gentleman” were also on the list of terms banned there, despite the fact that economist Alfred Marshall, a hero of Old Labour, had seen one of Labour’s goals as making “every man a gentleman.”). The government, of course, could have put a stop to this at once if it had wished, and it is only possible to conclude that it condoned it – (and where, for that matter, were the Opposition to object?)

Columnist Richard Littlejohn wrote in 2008: “Only last week it was revealed that sex education in schools is under the command of Chris Bryant MP, last seen performing a ‘sex act’ on himself in a Soho nightclub and posing in grubby underpants on the internet in a sordid attempt to attract men to have sex with him. But where’s the outrage? Bryant’s plans to spend £150 million teaching nine-year-olds about ‘alternative lifestyles’ and how to roll condoms onto bananas barely raised an eyebrow at Westminster.

Even when there is a fuss in the papers, ministers simply ride it out and the circus moves on. … Whoever thought we’d live in a country where the notion of a child having both a ‘mum and dad’ could possibly be considered offensive?”

At a speech in Brighton in April, 2008, Family Division judge Mr Justice Coleridge, one of the most senior Family Law judges, said: “In some areas of the country, even including the more urban parts of the sleepy west in which I operate, family life in the old sense no longer exists …I suggest the general collapse of ordinary family life, because of the breakdown of families, in this country is on a scale, depth and breadth which few of us could have imagined even a decade ago.”

In July, 2008, it was reported from the Office of National Statistics that married adults had become a minority for the first time since records began to be kept. In 1995 married couples had made up 56.2% of the population. This had declined to 50.3% in 2005, and to less than 50% in 2006. Shortly after this it was revealed that a majority of British babies were now born out of wedlock, though the proportion among immigrants remained a tiny minority. One member of the underclass thrust into media prominence explained that she referred to as, and regarded as, “twins” those of her children who had the same father. This was apparently widespread.

It is typical of the style of this grotesque, semi-dysfunctional, but also deeply sinister government that it should have used the concept of “family friendly” to justify one particular and destructive set of reforms: it stopped the ancient practice of Parliamentary debates going on late into the might, allegedly to allow Members of Parliament to spend more time with their families, but in actual fact to hamstring probing and criticism of what the government was doing.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph in December, 2008, Ian Duncan Smith MP, former leader of the Conservative Party and Chairman of the Centre for Social Justice, wrote:

“Britain is witnessing a growth in an underclass whose lifestyles affect everyone. Perhaps the reason why most people haven’t been aware of the extent of this is because housing policy has, over 20 to 30 years, ghettoised many of these dysfunctional families. In the Seventies, only 11% of households on the [public housing] estates weren’t working; today barely a third of working-age tenants have full-time work. Less than 15% are headed by a couple with children. Two-thirds are occupied by lone parents, lone men or lone women.

“On such estates, few children see a positive father figure, with young men having children by different mothers, with the state covering the cost …[L]look at the background of those who as young offenders end up in custody. Over three-quarters of them are from broken homes, just under half of them experienced violence in the home and half of them have educational levels below an 11-year-old.

“Girls suffer too. Many have grown up in dysfunctional families where their mothers had children as teenagers and they have shared the house with a string of ‘guesting fathers.’ Too many will repeat the lives of their mothers.

“Families like this are much more at risk of abuse than any other.

Recent NSPCC research has shown that a child growing in such a family structure is up to six times more likely to suffer abuse, which is why the social services are under growing pressure …

“Over the past ten years the cost of policing has risen by 40 per cent, prisons and the courts by 46%, youth justice by 45% and working-age benefits by 25%.”

The type of society this has created has been demonstrated by countless events. One of the most graphic illustrations was per-

haps the case of a father of five, Colin Greenwood, aged 45. Mr Greenwood was registered blind but refused to carry a white stick because he had been attacked before and feared it would attract the attention of feral children and teenagers. There are probably people in every society who would single out a blind man and regard a white stick as an invitation to attack, but I know of no other society where this would be regarded as more or less normal and to be expected, rather than the behaviour of rare, exceptionally depraved psychopaths. Anyway, in Mr Greenwood’s case his precaution did not avail him. White stick or not, he was kicked to death by teenagers while waiting at a bus-stop at night.

Among other such incidents, five hoodies aged 12 to 14 stoned a 67-year-old father to death as he played cricket on a Sunday were jailed for about 12 months with remissions. Ernest Norton was sworn and spat at, then stoned by the boys – in a gang of about 20 – as he played cricket in a park with his son James. Two stones, one the size of a half brick, struck him on the temple and fractured his cheekbone.

The Archbishop of Canterbury said that youths formed gangs to “fend off unfriendly adults.” A stream of newspaper reports showed how effective this fending off of unfriendly adults could be. On 18 April, 2008, three youths aged 16, 19 and 21 were sentenced for having kicked to death an unfriendly adult, 47-year-old father of three Mark Witherall, who had caught them burgling his house. After the fending off they completed the burglary, leaving Mr Witherall dying – he survived five weeks on a life-support machine. Less than a week later the killers of a 55-year-old ex-soldier, Stephen Green, were reported sentenced. Green had been beaten to death by a gang of drugged and drunken teenagers, all but one of whom INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 51

offender Adam Swellings, 18 at the time, had been freed on bail only hours before the killing.

Arguably less fortunate in being fended off than Messrs Greenwood, Witherall, Green, Newlove et al was Christopher Ingrouille, a husband and father of two, who was set upon by three teenage youths and kicked in the head 32 times. Earlier he had rebuked them for swearing at his children. He had returned to the scene, near his home, to pick up some broken glass they had left, where they were waiting for him, and offered to shake hands. His brain was virtually destroyed. Six years later, it was reported: Today, he cannot even recognise Marion as his wife when she visits regularly to cut his hair or put up a new family picture in his room. He is fed raspberry-coloured medicine, with liquid nourishment and water through a plastic stomach tube. Doubly incontinent, every morning his rag-doll body is lifted from bed to wheelchair by nurses using a large hoist. Occasionally, he screams out in pain as if the feeding tubes are hurting his stomach. He cannot speak or communicate, and when he becomes agitated he spits at visitors, including his own sons.

T were on bail or serving community punishments for violent robberies. Green was kicked, stamped on and battered with a large stick by the gang, who wanted money to buy more alcohol and cannabis. He lasted nine days in hospital before dying. His rucksack, which contained £5.65 in change, was found discarded near the scene of the attack with the money still inside. At the same time the trial was continuing of boys aged 13 and 16 who were alleged to have beaten in the face of a 24-year-old mother of two, raped her, and thrown her into a river, where her dead body was found two days later. However, strictly speaking, it is doubtful if this could be called fending off an unfriendly adult.

Susan Collins, aged 60, had her face caved in and was put on life support after she was fended off by being kicked to the ground and repeatedly stamped on by Nicholas Hague, 22, when she would not give him a cigarette. Hague had been freed early from jail for manslaughter. After his arrest he claimed to police: “She’s just an old cow.” Susan Collins was left with her face separated from the middle of her skull. Surgeons used four metal plates to reconstruct her face and she lost the sight in one eye. She said of her injuries: “I didn’t want to look at myself.” She was still in a wheelchair when Hague was sentenced. Hague had received an 18 month jail term in 2005 after admitting helping kick a man to death in Warrington, Cheshire, in 2004. He had been freed shortly afterwards due to time spent on remand.

Garry Newlove, a father of three, was also fended off by being kicked and beaten to death by three teenagers outside his house after he had shown his unfriendliness by objecting to them vandalizing his wife’s car. They were convicted of the crime in January, 2008 amid revelations that the gang leader and repeat violent 52 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

his particular story gets worse. Much worse. An ex-policewoman, Julie Pickford, a 47-year-old mother of two, was fended off by being kicked unconscious and thrown off a train, and suffered suspected kidney damage and a fractured eye-socket as well as other injuries. She had asked one of a gang of 30-drunken teenagers on a train near Sale, greater Manchester, to stop throwing pop-corn at other passengers. It will be noted that most of these reports were gathered over only a few days. They are a small sample only. Minette Marrin wrote in the Sunday Times of 17 April, 2008: Consider just last week’s news. On Tuesday three teenagers in Leeds kicked and punched Paul Heppner into unconsciousness because he refused to buy them cigarettes. A dog walker in Milton Keynes was stabbed in the back, stomach and chest by five people. Last Sunday a man in Manchester was violently attacked by eight hooded teenagers for no reason and has narrowly escaped brain damage.

Meanwhile, a girl of 15 was convicted of aiding and abetting manslaughter; she is the drunken teenager who filmed a man in Keighley being fatally kicked to death in an unprovoked “happy slapping” attack; she showed the sequence to friends afterwards for a laugh.

Also shocking, in a similar way, was the attack by vandals last week – for the fourth time – on the Stephen Lawrence Centre, built in his memory. The vandals are aggressively proud of their mindless brutality. They are moral morons.

In August last year, when 11-year-old Rhys Jones was casually shot to death in Croxteth, I wrote about the betrayal of this country’s children, by this country’s adults. I was accused, as usual, of hysterical exaggeration …

Young people in the urban jungle live in terror of other young people and in despair of protection from adults. They carry knives because they are afraid, not least on their way to school. When they get to school they are still afraid because adults in such places do not protect them from bullying. Many of them are also bored out of their minds into delinquency. The police cannot protect them from gangs, either; there is often no alternative to the comparative safety of gang life.

Recent figures are frightening. Violent crime by children under 18 rose by more than a third between 2003 and 2006. Knife crime

among children between 10 and 17 has soared; the figures of those convicted of carrying a ”bladed weapon” has almost trebled from 482 in 1997 to 1,265 in 2006.

What is worse is that more than three-quarters of knife crime is committed by 12 to 20-year-olds. Almost 1,300 teenagers were injured in shootings, muggings, stabbings, knifepoint robberies and rapes in London between April and November last year. Also in 2007, between April and June, countrywide there were 55 murders, 1,359 serious woundings (2,000 stabbings) and 2,457 street robberies, all knife crimes, equating to a serious knife crime every 24 minutes.

I

n a December, 2008, Christmas story, John Vry, a 55-year-old father of three suffering from terminal cancer and given only months to live, was beaten to death in the street near his home in Lowestoft as he prepared to spend a last Christmas with his family. He had apparently gone out to buy a packet of cigars. He was still alive when found and taken to hospital but died the following day. “My dad briefly regained consciousness and squeezed my brother’s hand, but he didn’t wake up after that,” his daughter Wendy said. A 22-year-old and a 16-year-old were charged with the killing, while a 23-year-old was reported released on bail.

Statistics show that while fatal shootings and stabbings have increased by about 25% since the election of the Labour government in 1997, they also show the number of people beaten to death each year has risen much faster, increasing by 57% since 1998. Another string of reports tell of people arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned because they have tried to defend themselves against attacks by feral teenagers. Incredible as it may seem, it was reported in the Sunday Telegraph on 30 July, 2006, that passengers who complained three times about the behaviour of menacing or violent youths on trains, if not attacked at once in retaliation, can be reported by their victims and charged with harassment themselves.

A different indicator of social pathology was that by 2002 syphilis had returned to 1940s levels. Two years later it was reported that cases of sexually transmitted diseases had jumped in eight years, predominantly among young people. Between 1995 and 2003, according to an official report of the Health Protection Agency, cases of chlamydia rose from 30,794 to 89,818, cases of syphilis from 136 to 1,575 and gonorrhoea from 10,186 to 24,309. Women aged 16 to 24, who made up 17% of the population, accounted for 72% of chlamydia cases. Sexually transmitted diseases reported for 2003 totalled 708,083, cases, an increase of 57% since 1995.

A survey published in May, 2001, indicated 400,000 British school-children under the age of 16 were using hard drugs. Deaths among children from drugs multiplied about four times in four years. A survey of European children by various government authorities reported in February, 2001, that British children had by far the highest rate of drug-taking in Europe for drugs apart from cannabis, and the highest rate for drunkenness except for Denmark. Russia, a by-word for dangerous, drunken chaos, had a rate of teenage drunkenness just over a third of that of Britain, and France, where children were frequently given wine from childhood, a rate of just under one seventh (the survey looked at 15 and 16 year-olds who had been drunk more than 20 times in their lives.

The percentages were Britain: 29%, Russia, 10%, France 4%).

Apparently in order to raise the rate of teenage drunkenness and associated crime and under-age sexual behaviour higher, roundthe-clock drinking was instituted by the authorities in 2005. This policy succeeded. By early 2008 the number of drunker under-16-

year-olds taken to hospital casualty wards multiplied. Liverpool’s Alder Hay children’s hospital; showed a rise of 242% to in early 2008. Most, according to the press, “were aged around 13 and were taken in by friends after downing vodka and passing out.” Alcoholrelated admissions of children and adults increased widely – generally by about 25% – but doubled in many cases. A report from the World Health Organisation and the University of Edinburgh in June 2008 showed that English schoolchildren were among the most likely in the Western world to have drunk alcohol in the past week, to have taken cannabis and to have had underage sex.

The findings were based on interviews with 240,000 children in Europe and North America aged 11 to 15. Author Frederick Forsyth wrote of the epidemic of binge-drinking: Today, entire city centres are awash with torrents of staggering, puking, urinating, swearing young people. Why? I will hazard an explanation. I have noticed one common denominator among the drink-to-get-plastered category of drinker. It is a complete lack of any sense of self-worth …they have enough gut feeling to be convinced they belong to a hopeless, what’s-the-point population …

Another recent survey, from late 2008, suggested a vast increase in loneliness since even the 1970s. Another report at the end of 2008 stated: “Analysis of official data shows that many more people live in isolated existences than in previous generations, as the old ties of family, work and community life are severed. Far more people live alone, are single and are more fearful of their communities than they were more than three decades ago.” (Dr Worsley stated in the 2002 article that the suicide rate for men aged 2544 had then almost doubled since 1971). By contrast, a survey in 2003 of 7,000 Israelis indicated that they were among the happiest people in the world, despite being the victims of a continuous terror-bombing campaign and despite being surrounded by enemies sworn to their annihilation. According to this survey, some 83% of Israelis were satisfied or very satisfied with their lives, and a majority expected things to improve, a figure comparable to that in placid, secure and prosperous Canada. It was suggested that a large factor in this was that Israeli traditions encouraged family life – 99% had families, and 94% said their relations with their families were good. Indeed, the smallness of the country made all Israelis in a sense feel part of a family.

This sort of finding may perhaps be dismissed as “soft” – it is hard to know how loneliness is to be accurately measured.

Yet another set of statistics from the end of 2008, however, is rather more definite: more pensioners die of the cold in Britain than in any other country in Europe. Official figures revealed 25,000 such deaths last winter. Pensioners in colder countries such as Finland, Austria or Denmark are more likely to stay alive and healthy through the winter than Britons. Possibly they have families to care for them.

Baroness Warnock, Britain’s leading medical ethics expert and chairman of innumerable committees on such subjects, suggested a little while before that the frail and elderly should consider suicide rather than become a financial burden on their families and society. Warnock also said the parents of premature babies should be charged to keep them on life-support machines if doctors wrote off their chances of leading a healthy life, phrasing it delicately as “Okay, they can stay alive but the family will have to pay for it.”

Hal Colebatch’s Blair’s Britain was selected as a Book of the Year in the London Spectator in 1999. He is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator Online, and other publications. This is his first contribution to Investigate. n INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 53

A Bond of Brothers Journey of re-discovery

Lifetime, no see: They’re brothers. They live six blocks apart. And for 80 years, neither knew the other existed, even though they’d once met and shaken hands. The Chicago Tribune’s DON TERRY reports

C

HICAGO – Neither man had a clue what to expect that morning last March as they stood toe-totoe, 42 stories above the city. The men were guarded yet friendly, as they sized each other up, trying to decide whether to shake hands or hug.

After all, they were strangers.

The younger of the two was Lewis Manilow, prominent Chicago lawyer and real estate developer, co-founder of the Museum of Contemporary Art and major fundraiser for cultural institutions and such Democratic Party luminaries as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. The other man was Jacob “Jack” Shore, an international patent attorney who wrote the patent application for the insanely popular TMX Elmo doll, the 2006 Toy of the Year.

Over the course of their long careers, the two men have taken part in countless negotiations. But never with each other and never anything like this. Not in their wildest dreams.

This morning’s meeting had been hastily arranged by telephone at 10 o’clock the night before. It was Lew’s idea. He’s the one who had tracked Jack down, hiring a modern-day gumshoe out of Detroit to 54 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

do the job. But now that he had found his quarry – and so shockingly close; the two live only a few blocks apart – Lew wasn’t sure how he felt. “I was keeping my emotions in check,” he says.

As for Jack, he had stayed awake half the night. Never too up, never too down. That’s Jack. The streetwise ex-Navy officer doesn’t rattle easily. But this time he was shook up for sure. It surprised him how difficult it was to think this thing through. Muhammad Ali could not have hit him any harder than the news he’d learned in the last 24 hours about Manilow and himself.

The men performed an awkward not-quite-a-handshake, notquite-a-hug and Jack blurted out the question residing in the forefront of each man’s mind.

“What do you say to a brother you didn’t know existed for 80 years?”

This is the bittersweet story of Lew and Jack, two grandfathers in their early 80s who, after a lifetime as strangers, discovered they are brothers.

“The surprise of my life,” Lew says, “at my age, to find I have a brother, and he lives six blocks away.”

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 55

“I’ve always wanted a brother,” adds Jack. “But I don’t know what having a brother is.”

They are both trying to learn. Recently, Jack asked Lew from which side he batted playing baseball as a boy.

“I’m left-handed,” Lew said, “but I batted right.”

“Me, too,” Jack said.

The common ground felt good. The brothers have no history together. But they are negotiating a future.

“We have no idea where this is going,” Jack says. “We have no memories to share or to fall back on. We’re just kind of feeling our way.”

It is a uniquely America story of immigrant dreams and hard times, of broken families and Dickensian serendipity. Most of all, it is a story about the pull of blood and kin and the need to know: “Where did I come from?”

I

t began in 1955 in a restaurant in the Loop. Ernie Banks was lighting up the Wrigley Field score board and the Prudential Building dominated the Chicago skyline. Lew was in his late 20s, the son of Nathan Manilow, one of the country’s top home builders. With a law degree from Harvard and a sky’sthe-limit future in the real estate business alongside his father, Lew was having lunch with a close friend of his father. Maybe they were discussing President Dwight Eisenhower’s heart attack that September or the death in April of Albert Einstein.

Perhaps it was Broadway’s heartbreaking sensation that year, “The Diary of Anne Frank.”

Whatever the topic, it flew right out of Lew’s head as soon as his lunch companion, in reference to a mutual acquaintance, dropped a bomb on Lew’s assumptions about his own privileged life.

You know, Lew, so-and-so was adopted. “Like you.”

The words sent a jolt through him.

ADOPTED. LIKE. YOU. “I tried to keep a poker face,” he says. “But I was stunned.”

Lew forced himself to finish his meal. Outside on the sidewalk he said goodbye and hurried in the opposite direction to the Cook County Probate Court, head spinning, heart racing. There, he rifled through a thick ledger, found his name and asked a clerk behind the desk for his file. He opened the folder and there he was – or who he used to be – Irvin Inger, born in Wayne County, Mich., on Aug. 11, 1927, to Gussie and Sam Inger.

Gussie was an unschooled immigrant from Lithuania whose life in America included several rocky marriages and a history of living on public charity. Sam Inger was from the Ukraine and had little way with money. The couple met in Toledo, Ohio, the epicentre of the American Heartland. It was Sam’s first marriage, Gussie’s third. Together they had two children, Jacob and Irvin, who joined Gussie’s four older kids from previous marriages.

Sam was a junk peddler. What little money he made, Gussie later told the divorce court, he gambled away. With their marriage falling apart after three turbulent years, Gussie and Sam handed Baby Irvin over to the Detroit Hebrew Infants Orphan Home almost immediately after he was born. Jacob, 13 months older, probably never even laid eyes on him.

A year later in 1928, Irvin Inger officially became Lewis Manilow of Chicago, the beloved son of Minette and Nathan Manilow, Russian immigrant and one-time shoe store clerk, well on his way to banking his first million.

Nathan Manilow, with his two partners, carved the town of Park Forest out of the Illinois prairie in the late 1940s. “He Owns a 56 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

Town,” proclaimed the headline of a Newsweek magazine profile of the elder Manilow in 1953. He was a “soft-spoken, hard-minded” man, according to the article. “A self-made millionaire at the age of 31,” who “parlayed his moneymaking talents from shoes to suburbs with a knack for spotting what people need.”

From the probate records, Lew also discovered that the Manilows had adopted his younger sister, Betty Ann, from a Chicago couple.

“You couldn’t do that today – find the names of the birth parents like that, just by asking for the file,” he says. He recently returned to the probate court, seeking a copy of his birth certificate. “I told the woman at the office I was adopted and she said ‘You won’t be allowed to know the names of your birth parents.”

They had whited them out. I have known a number of people in their 40s, 50s and 60s, litigating to get the name of their birth parents and they’re still trying. A lot more people are adopted than anybody imagines.”

That night, Lew confronted his adoptive parents with his discovery. He wasn’t angry. He felt sorry for them. It must have been a tremendous burden, carrying that secret around for so long. Why had they kept the truth from him? What did they think he would do, stop being their son? They were his parents, the only mother and father he had ever known. He loved them.

Nathan Manilow, for one of the few times in his life, was speechless. His mother wept. Please don’t cry, Lew told her. Nothing had changed. “I tried to alleviate their concerns,” he says. “I tried to make them feel good.”

For the next several years, Lew didn’t attempt to learn any more about Gussie and Sam Inger. He felt it would be disloyal to the mother and father who had raised him. “I was conflicted about it,” he admits. “I was still in the ‘You’re my parents mode.’ I wasn’t going to try to find anybody else.”

So he went on with his life. He got married and had three children. He became an assistant state’s attorney before going into private practice, often representing his father’s real estate ventures in Illinois and Florida. He also became increasingly involved in Chicago’s theatre and arts scene as a collector and benefactor.

A principal backer of the Goodman Theatre, he would become known as the godfather of Chicago’s vibrant new downtown theatre district. And as a major art collector, he would become a pillar of both the MCA, which he helped found, and the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2000, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

But over the years things would invariably come up to remind him that there was a hole in his past. “Occasionally,” Lew says, “it would gnaw at me.” Doctors, for example, would ask about his family’s health history. Does your father have a history of heart trouble? Does cancer run in your mother’s family? He wouldn’t tell the doctors that he didn’t know because he was adopted. Instead, he says, “I would fend off the question.”

Eventually, though, he got tired of not knowing. “To not want to know,” he says, “is a form of blindness.” He decided to go looking, if for no other reason, he told himself, than to be able to answer the doctor’s questions. But he knew it was more than that, something more primal. “People want to know about their real parents, their real families,” he says. “It’s only natural to want to know where you came from.”

Every five years or so, he’d hunt up a Detroit phone book – “remember, this is pre-Google,” he says – look up a private investigator, dial the number and hire himself a detective to find out whatever they could about his birth parents. “I didn’t have much

confidence that I could find out very much.” He was right. The investigators were never able to tell him anything beyond the few sketchy details he already knew. “I thought it was a lost cause,” Lew says, “and then along came Phil.”

Phillip A. Applebaum is a 56-year-old genealogist who lives in the Detroit area and specializes in tracing the roots of Jewish families. He got hooked on genealogy as a teenager when he followed his own family tree back to Poland, birthplace of his parents. Then “Roots” came on TV and the whole country went nuts over family secrets. Applebaum was on his way.

For years most of his business came from the suburbs surrounding the Motor City. But the floundering economy has hit especially hard the last few years in Michigan. He was having trouble finding clients. “Business was drying up,” Applebaum says. “Guys on the assembly line don’t hire me. It’s a quirky luxury.”

So Applebaum bought a few books of postage stamps and sent out dozens of unsolicited letters to wealthy people throughout the country, offering his services from his basement office in his small home just outside of Detroit. He found Mr. Lewis Manilow – real estate developer, arts patron and Democratic donor – on the Internet.

Perfect.

Applebaum, knowing nothing of Lew’s adoption or Detroit connection, sent him a standard solicitation letter last February. As for Lew, he was automatically poised to throw the solicitation in the trash. “At least one friend of mine,” Lew says, “got the same letter.”

If Applebaum had been from New York, Los Angeles or even Chicago, Lew would have tossed out the letter for sure. But Applebaum was from Detroit, where Lew’s journey began, and that geographic coincidence compelled Lew to pick up the phone. Maybe this Applebaum could do what the detectives could not. It was worth one last shot. Lew would be 81. Betty Ann, the only sibling he knew, had died a few years ago. Time was running out.

Over the phone, he told Applebaum that he wasn’t interested in tracing his roots to Henry VIII or any of that jazz. All he wanted to know about was his birth family. Were any of them still alive?

That very night, Applebaum went to work on his ancient Macintosh computer. He’s been a professional genealogist for 29 years but it took him about a month on the Internet and several visits to public libraries and cemeteries in Ohio and Michigan to find the answers that Lew had been seeking for so long.

One of the factors that made tracing Gussie difficult was that she kept changing her name and moving back and forth between Toledo and Detroit. At various times she was known as Mrs. Kremer, Mrs. Shore and Mrs. Inger. After she divorced Sam Inger, she went back to calling herself Gussie Shore. When Jacob was 12, she had his name legally changed to Shore as well.

Applebaum tracked Gussie to her final resting place, a Jewish cemetery near Toledo. She had passed away in the Ohio city in

Brothers Lew Manilow, left, and Jack Shore sit together in Seneca Park, on September 25, 2008, in Chicago, Illinois. They discovered late in life that they were brothers. (Chris Walker/Chicago Tribune/MCT)

1953 at the age of 64. As for Inger, Applebaum found his grave outside Detroit, where he died in 1955 – the year Lew first learned his real parents’ names.

From the cemetery in Ohio, Applebaum got the name and telephone number of one of Gussie’s granddaughters, Karen Posner, a retired Toledo schoolteacher who is Lew and Jacob’s half-niece.

“I’d just had surgery,” she recalls. “I was on morphine, and I get this call from Applebaum. I was in a daze.”

The genealogist told her about Lew and the long search. Posner wasn’t sure if it was the drugs or the story that made her head spin. Applebaum’s words had a mesmerizing quality, like a dream.

“There’s a lot of stuff that isn’t good in life,” she says. “But this is good. It’s like an Oprah moment.”

When Applebaum asked Posner about Gussie’s children, she said that she had never heard of Irvin. But she knew all about Jacob Shore. Uncle Jack.

Asked Applebaum, “Is your Uncle Jack still alive?”

Yes. Where?

In Chicago.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 57

“I almost fell out of my chair,” Applebaum says. “Not only had I found (Lew’s) biological parents. I had found a brother, a full brother, living in Chicago. Down the street.”

That same evening in late March, Lew and his wife, Susan, were watching television at home when the phone rang around 9 p.m.

Applebaum was calling.

Lew took the call. He had hired Applebaum on a whim, really, and was braced for disappointment. He never gave much thought to what he would do if Applebaum found someone alive. It wasn’t going to happen. Not after all this time.

When he hung up, he was grinning. He announced to his wife as calmly as he could: “I have a brother.”

“Are you kidding?” she asked.

“He lives in Chicago,” Lew said. “Six blocks away. His name is Jack Shore.”

“Then,” according to Susan, “we got the giggles out of control.”

Applebaum says when he told Lew about Jack, Lew was “as giddy as a little boy on his birthday. The joy came right through the telephone line.”

Pay dirt after all these years, after all the unanswered questions.

A family of Elmo dolls sits on the sofa of his den. He has three children and nine grandchildren, all within easy reach throughout the suburbs of Chicago. After his first wife, Edith, died in 1999, he felt blessed to have found another woman he could love with all his heart – Estelle, whom friends and family call Dimpy.

They go to Las Vegas several times a year, to New York to catch a Broadway show or two and jazz clubs in Chicago. “I never listened to jazz before I met Dimpy,” Jack says. “I was in a shell.

She brought me out.”

He wasn’t looking to dig up the past. As far as he was concerned, the past was right where it belonged. Long ago he had shoved his family history as far back in his mind as he could. Too painful.

Everyone else was dead and gone. His half-sister Dorothy. His half-brothers, Frank and Israel. Jack was the lone survivor, the last of his generation.

Or so he thought.

What hurt is that he had not been close to his siblings, especially his brothers. So when he did slip up and allow himself to think back on the old days in Ohio, he was wracked with regrets. He missed what could have been, what should have been. He always wanted a second chance but they don’t come around too often.

“Gussie, who never learned to read or write English, was 17 when she came to America in 1906. No one knows for sure why she made the arduous journey from the known world to the new. But life for Jews across the Russian Empire was plagued by pogroms and poverty.

She left the pogroms behind, but poverty followed her to America and dogged her for most of her life” But Lew quickly shifted into lawyer mode. Be cautious, go slow, he told himself. Maybe his brother – the word would take some getting used to – didn’t want to be found. “My birth brother knew nothing about me,” Lew says. “It (would be) a real shock to him. I was looking for someone. He didn’t know there was someone.”

As it happened, the genealogist also called Jack. “He received the news with relative calm,” Applebaum says. “He told me he was not an emotional person and I should not expect any whooping and hollering from him.”

Jack’s wife, Estelle, recalls her husband’s reaction quite differently. “He was absolutely dumbfounded,” she says.

The next night, the brothers talked over the telephone. It was a brief conversation, just long enough to set up a face-to-face meeting at 9 o’clock the next morning at Jack’s home on the 42nd floor of a luxury condominium building just north of the Loop.

When Jack hung up, Estelle got ready for bed. Jack retreated to the den.

“It’s time for bed,” she called.

“I can’t sleep,” he responded. “I have to think this thing through.”

Jack was happy with his life. At 82, the patent attorney still goes to the office each day. “I don’t know what I would do with myself if I didn’t work,” he says.

58 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

And they certainly don’t stop at the door of an 82-year-old man.

Sometimes, however, they just might.

He figured Lew would be bursting with questions about the family. He was afraid, perhaps a little embarrassed, that he might not be able to answer them all.

As a kid, not knowing was a strategy of survival. Jack didn’t ask a lot of questions growing up and his older siblings didn’t volunteer many answers. There were some things no one ever talked about in his family, like the other kids who weren’t there. He had a vague and scary sense that his mother had other children he had never met. “My half-sister and half-brothers never told me anything about our past,” Jack says. “And I always felt guilty asking. So I didn’t.”

As a grown man, Jack experimented with psychoanalysis in the 1960s. Try as he might, he could not remember much about his life prior to the age of 7 or 8. “The analyst said I might have withdrawn because I didn’t want to get adopted out,” Jack says.

The instant they were able to, Gussie’s older children fled her home. “She alienated her children,” Jack says. By the time he was 12, he was left alone with his mother in a tiny, weary house on Jerome Street in Toledo. “I don’t think my mother knew anything about love and affection,” he says.

What she knew about was survival.

Gussie, who never learned to read or write English, was 17 when she came to America in 1906. No one knows for sure why she made the arduous journey from the known world to the new. But life for Jews across the Russian Empire was plagued by pogroms and poverty. She left the pogroms behind, but poverty followed her to America and dogged her for most of her life. “My mother,” Jack says, “was a very bitter and lonely woman. She had three husbands who didn’t amount to much.”

It appears Gussie did not make the trip alone. Applebaum believes she came with the first of her three husbands, Louis Kremer, who was one year older. They settled in Providence, R. I., where they had one child, a son, Israel Kremer, born in 1907.

Gussie was 18. Three years later, Louis filed for divorce, accusing Gussie of adultery and other “wickedness.”

After the divorce, Gussie and Israel moved to Toledo, where in 1915 she married another immigrant, a cook from Boston named Charles Shore. That marriage lasted 10 years and produced three children, Dorothy, Frank and Morris.

This time it was Gussie who initiated divorce proceedings, charging Charles with cruelty, neglect and abandonment, which forced her, she said, to rely “on the efforts of a minor son and her own exertions” to survive. As a result of Charles’ behaviour, she said, she was “compelled and forced to consent to the adoption of her youngest child, Morris, aged four years, by Mr. and Mrs. Albert Norwalk of Toledo, Ohio.”

Jack says the first time he ever heard of Morris was when Applebaum told him a few months ago. The fate of Morris is unknown.

On Dec. 3, 1925, about two months after her divorce from Charles Shore, Gussie married Sam Inger, 39, in Toledo. Sam and Gussie moved back and forth between Ohio and Michigan. They had Jacob in Toledo in 1926, and Irvin a little over a year later in Pontiac, Mich.

Sam, an unskilled labourer, immigrated to Canada from the Ukraine. Exactly when is unclear. He came to the United States from Winnipeg in 1914 and settled in Pontiac, Mich., where he peddled junk.

Gussie and Sam’s marriage was turbulent. In divorce papers, Gussie accused Sam of stealing her money to support a gambling habit. She also accused him of beating her so badly a month before Irvin was born that she had to call the police. It wasn’t the first time, she said. According to Gussie, he abandoned her and the children on three separate occasions and “assaulted, struck, beat and otherwise ill-treated” her throughout the duration of their marriage.

Jack has no recollection of his father. “I never knew him,” he says. “He disappeared. But I’d rather have a lousy father than no father. I had no guidance.”

Once when he was 9 or 10, Jack and his mother were walking down the street when Gussie told her son to keep walking while she stopped briefly to talk to a stranger. “Did you see that man we just passed?” Gussie asked Jack a few minutes later. “That was your father.”

After their first awkward embrace last March, the brothers sat in Jack’s living room and looked out on the vastness of Lake Michigan.

Estelle brought in a tray of coffee.

Then they started talking, asking each other questions like two strangers on a park bench exploring what they might have in common. How many children do you have? What are their names?

What do they do? Grandchildren? Do you take sugar? Cream?

“We are both uncovering these histories,” Lew says. “Bit by

bit we’re learning more and, I think, getting closer. But it’s complicated.”

“It’s an evolving process,” Jack agrees. “We’ll have to see where we go from here.”

“But they have to hurry,” Estelle says. “At their age, how much time do they have left?”

Jack reminded Lew that they had met once before. Jack and his late wife, Edith, had visited Lew’s art-filled home, which was then in Lincoln Park. Edith had been a docent at the Museum of Contemporary Art, where Lew is on the board. An ardent art collector, Lew on occasion opened his home for tours of his personal collection. Lew and Jack shook hands that night and then vanished from each other’s lives. Again.

“That handshake,” Lew says, “was the extent of our history together.

B

efore arriving that morning last March, Lew Googled Jack and discovered that Jack had done quite well for himself. He had become a globetrotting patent attorney and an expert on intellectual property law. He had taught for 10 years at John Marshall Law School. The profile contained a photograph of a gray-haired man in a suit and tie, wearing glasses.

So that’s what my brother looks like, Lew thought.

In fact, all of Gussie’s children did remarkably well. Counting Lew, Gussie gave birth to three lawyers, an accountant and a gifted dancer, Israel Kremer, her first born, who died in Eastern France in 1944 serving his country as a soldier in World War II. From the stories he’s heard from Jack about life with Gussie, Lew says, “It’s not exactly encouraging to feel warm or nostalgic about her. All I know is we were blessed with good genes. A lot of lawyers came from this woman who was illiterate and difficult.

We won the gene pool. We were lucky.”

After their first meeting, the brothers started getting together for breakfast every other week or so. They had dinner with their wives, attended a concert together. “It’s all totally new to me,” Lew says. “This is so overwhelming. I haven’t done a lawyerlylike job of figuring it out.”

So he and Jack are taking things slow. In August, the brothers and their families got together at Lew’s 72-acre summer compound in Wisconsin, more meet-and-greet than family reunion.

Each brother invited his large blended family, including children, step-children and grandchildren. Not everyone was there, but the house was crowded. Estelle’s daughter and son-in-law came all the way from Los Angeles to meet the new relatives. “I didn’t just find a brother,” Lew says. “I found a new family. Digesting that, relating to that is going to take time.”

When Estelle and Jack arrived, Estelle was carrying a cardboard box.

“What do you have there?” Lew asked.

“Name tags,” Estelle said.

She poured them out on a coffee table.

“Everyone, find yours and put it on,” she said.

A few minutes later, into the living room came running Lew’s youngest grandchild, 4-year-old Nathan, who is named after Lew’s father.

“Uncle Jack?” he asked, looking around at the strange new faces.

“That’s me,” Jack said, raising his hand and holding up his name tag.

The little boy waved, said “Hi, Uncle Jack,” and ran back outside to play in the sunshine. n

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 59

Give Me Convenience or Give Me Debt What’s wrong with us?, asks SIMON GEMMILL

60 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

T

hey say all things go in cycles. The title of this article is a play on the title of a Dead Kennedys album, called Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death; a parody of the state of the American/western lifestyle circa 1985. Since then, we have gone further away from the advice of our grandparents, who, having seen and come out of the depression, told us to save every penny: “A penny saved is a penny gained,” and other such adages. Now, in the name of convenience, and in the ongoing struggle to “keep up with the Joneses,” we have got ourselves into a real pickle. Not just New Zealanders, not just poor people. Many in the western world now have huge debt problems. New Zealand and the USA have paralleled each other, with finance companies lending money to people who couldn’t afford it to buy houses, and eventually going bust because they could not collect on the debt owed them; because the debtors did not have the money to repay it. It should have been obvious they could not repay it. Now we have gone so far down the path, placing convenience over common sense and fiscal parsimony, perhaps now, with a looming recession, we will start to rethink this lunacy. And perhaps after the crisis has shaken us up, we will return to some of the wisdom practised and taught by our elders; lessons learnt from the last depression.

Why should we care, help each other, or change our ways?

There’s a saying that civilisations are not killed, they commit suicide. While one could look at growing illiteracy, worse behaviour, growing superstition, loss of manners and general culture in the western world, the most likely way we’ll go under is by collapsing financially, and letting China take their rightful place as the leaders of the world (which would be fine for them; not so much fun for us, as we wallow in poverty and lose our way of life; taking our place in history). Every great nation and city has had their time in the sun then faded away; just think of Babylon, Egypt, Rome, and fairly recently, Baghdad, which was once the equivalent of Paris and New York. Our time to dissolve and become a has-been culture may well have come; however, we do not have to sit down and take it. Grabbing hold of our financial ineptitude will at least save us from personal ruin, if not give western civilisation a few more years to live. Furthermore, if we had money left over, and haven’t spent it all on iPods and cars, we can give aid to those in dire need.

I recall inquiring at The National Bank several years ago about obtaining a mortgage; they had tight regulations as to how much money you had to have up front, and how much you had to be earning in order to be able to pay off the debt. However, even then they were starting to run such schemes as letting people borrow against their parents’ homes.

There is no point in citing research or evidence in order to make the following point: if you lend a large amount of money to someone with a low income or bad credit, they will not be able to pay you back. Charity in this instance would be fine: give without expecting in return. Expecting in return is worse than buying a Lotto ticket each week thinking that each time you buy one your INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 61

chances improve (like tossing a coin and thinking: it’s been heads the last ten times; it has to be tails this time).

What follows is a brief personal testimony, with the hopes of inspiring people to take hold of their lives, and, as I did, ultimately, stop being stupid.

I

left school in 1994. One of the first things I did was sign up for the dole. Then I hire-purchased an acoustic guitar for $200; I paid this off over a few months. Later on, in 1999, while at university, I hire-purchased a four-track recorder and some microphones, for $1600. This took a year to repay, and was tough while being a student. I obtained, to my delight, a $1000 overdraft and a $1500 credit card, to help me spend outside my means while at university. I am grateful to the bank for easing my financial problems while a student; however, I also got used to being in debt: the bank account being $-950 meant I had $50 left, etc. I got used to never paying my overdraft or credit card off; apart from occasionally, before falling back down into the well.

Even when I started teaching in 2004, I still did not save money.

I saved some in 2005, the year I moved to Christchurch. I spent $3000 on a car, and paid $1500 off on my student loan, then recoiled back into financial obsoleteness. I moved into a flat by myself in 2006, and, even on a teachers’ salary, could not pay off my credit card after buying some new furniture. I moved into a flat with three others in 2007, halving my rent. It still took me a year to pay my credit card off.

This story takes a turn for the better in 2008, in what may be considered ironic, given the nature of bands, and the way many musicians spend more than they make when on tour.

I went on tour in April with my band, The Enright House.

We had been on a national tour in September 2007, with A Low Hum and Craftwerk, this time it was a South Island tour, going to many interesting places, such as Granity, Okarito, Stewart Island, and Oamaru. On this tour, I ended up spending some of my own money on petrol. I was usually repaid by the others in the band with cash. So I got into the habit of spending the cash, and not touching my bank account. After the tour, lo-and-behold, I still had money left in the bank. It was such an epiphany that from then on, I started getting cash out each week. This new form of budgeting allowed me to start saving, for the first time in three years, and now, I have gone from spending all I earn to about three quarters of it.

Many of us are not only used to spending what we earn, from small incomes to large ones; but we are also, thanks to financial institutions, used to spending beyond our means. While we can blame them for lending to people who could not afford to repay the loan, and thus causing a world-wide financial crisis, we should look inwardly, and ask ourselves where our self-respect and independence have gone.

When did we let ourselves borrow money rather than work for it and save up? Surely, many of us have been seduced by credit: we get the guitar today; we get to have our own house, etc.

There is a way out of it. What worked for me will work for you.

It is not about getting a teacher’s salary, which by the way is about an average salary for New Zealand, because I spent all the money I had each week, whether it was $200 or $600. It’s about going back to cash, and being conscious of how much you’re spending.

Tellingly, on the TV show Money Man, he does exactly the same thing: he cuts up all their cards, gives them a weekly budget to stick to, and they have to learn to rely on cash.

I remember being shown a video in a sixth form economics class 62 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

about loan sharks. Its message was: “these dodgy people offer you easy money, but there’s always a catch. Don’t ever go to, or trust, these people.” And there is a catch: you have to pay the money back. If you can’t, they start repossessing your possessions. How many teachers and parents today teach the youth of these dangers?

Since seeing that video, it’s been astonishing to watch the rise of the loan sharks, usually in poor neighbourhoods. Luckily for me, and thanks to that teacher, I always steered clear of them.

Besides the obvious scapegoat of finance companies for the current fiscal meltdown, in New Zealand in particular, we could blame the introduction of EFTPOS. It is easy to fall into the habit of spending without checking one’s account balance; once one loses track of it, they can spend way more than they meant to in a week.

These facts speak for themselves: I did just that. When you get cash out, it forces you to see how much you’re spending. An alarm bell goes if you find you need more before the end of the week; you start to check yourself and slow your spending down.

Don’t destroy that card; just use it to get cash out. You might even find out you can save, or, if you have credit card debt or an overdraft, you’ll find you have enough left in the bank to start repaying it. If you buy something online with a credit card, stay online and log into your bank account, transferring the money onto your credit card before the bill arrives and you’ve spent it already.

And, whatever you do, when you seen an advertisement on television telling you can “consolidate all your debt with one easy loan,” when you walk past a jeweller and the sign says: “think you can’t afford it? Yes you can! Ask us about our finance options,” quietly tell them to “go to hell” in your head and look the other way.

Yes, they are preying on your weakness, and should be despised for doing so; however, one way to get a grip on your own weakness is: go back to cash.

Anything we do without thinking is dangerous, spending money is right up the top of the list of the most stupid things; where we should really have thought first. Bertrand Russell said that most people would sooner die than think; in an era such as this all we have to do is watch the news to see he may have been onto something.

While digging our way out of the financial crisis, we do not have the money to support global aid causes for destitute people and ill-treated animals, and why are many of us in debt? In a hopeless struggle to keep up with our neighbours, usually spending money we don’t have to impress people we don’t even like, we have ruined our own lives, and robbed the poor and needy of this world of our help.

But before I condemn consumerism outright: the Pope went and did just that, when he invented some new Deadly Sins. Before he criticises, he should give all the Catholic Church’s hoarded wealth to the poor; like Jesus said: “Remove the log from your own eye before you try to remove the speck from your brother’s.”

It’s okay to want things, buy technology and all the rest; as long as you spend within your means, and, if possible, even learn to have some left over each week.

Not only can we relieve our own personal financial crisis by learning to use cash and watch what we’re spending, we can also leave money to help those in need, and, if we’re lucky, even keep our civilisation on its feet for a few more years.

How? Pay with cash.

It may be a “pain” to keep getting money out, but it will teach you to monitor your spending, and, if you’re anything like me, you will cut your spending in half. The convenience of shopping with EFTPOS and credit cards isn’t worth the debt. n

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INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 63

think life | money

The Great Depression Peter Hensley reckons the thirties offer some life lessons for Generations X & Y “What was it like in the olden days granddad?”

“Not a lot different to now really, grandkids visited with their grandparents for afternoon tea nearly every weekend” responded Jim. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, our economics teacher at school said that because the share markets around the world have collapsed and that credit is hard to come by, the world economies are going into a depression similar to the 1930’s and I was wondering what it was like then?”

64 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

“Hush now Taylor, Granddad doesn’t want to talk about that now”, said his mother Claire, “besides granddad’s not that old anyway.”

Moira knew that Jim was up to talking to his grandchildren anytime they had the opportunity to listen and she felt that now was as good a time as any. They had both been born in 1926 and both had vivid memories of the depression years. She intervened and suggested that Taylor and granddad go out on the deck and she would

bring afternoon tea out as soon as the cake had cooled enough to put the icing on. In the meantime they would have to suffice with a cup of tea and a biscuit.

Moira knew that the depression was a lot different to today. She remembered being one of eight children and having to learn how to ride a horse so that she and her siblings could get to school. They had moved every year up until she was ten. Her dad was a shearer and general farm hand and so they moved anywhere he could find work. Initially her mum had tried to home school the kids, but the constant moving and the workload of cooking for the shearing gang meant that she wasn’t coping. Her dad recognised this and arranged for the eldest four to attend the local school just on five miles away. The two littlies were too young to attend.

She remembered when it rained so much that school was closed early to enable kids to get home before the creeks and rivers became impassable. There was no new designer clothing for them, it was all hand me downs and when a hole appeared in a sock it was darned, not thrown out.

Grocery shopping was done once a month and there were no credit cards and come to think of it, no credit. You either had the cash or you did without.

Being thrifty was so ingrained to them, that people used to throw a party and invite all their neighbours around to celebrate when their house mortgage was paid off.

Back then home owners needed to put down at least a 20% deposit and visiting the bank manager was a formal affair. She still remembered their first appointment at the Rural Bank, they went with character references and pay slips and felt like a million dollars when they walked out with a £15,000 home loan.

Moira thought it was fantastic that Taylor was showing an interest in how it was back then. She shooed them out to the deck and fussed over Jim, making sure he was seated under the shade sail and comfortable with his cup of tea within reach.

Taylor had recently celebrated his 16th birthday and was genuinely interested in the olden days, he even stopped texting his girlfriend so that he could concentrate. His parents were proud of his academic achievements and Jim and Moira could not recall how many prize givings they had attended.

Jim recalled he was only 8 when it was really tough. Moira’s family were nomadic shearers and went wherever there was work whereas Jim’s dad had been a general car-

rier. His first contract was to deliver the parcels from the local railway station. In the early 1920’s he started with a single horse and cart, he also started work early each day as the train got in at 5 am every day.

It was called the roaring 20’s and business boomed. In the very early days his dad had four workers, two at the depot and two out delivering the freight.

Then in October 1929 the stock market crashed. His dad did not think much of it at the time. They didn’t own any shares, yet they did have an overdraft at the bank. He thought things would carry on as normal. It was the first of December in 1930 when Jim’s dad received a phone call from the manager of the local branch of the Bank of New South Wales. Their overdraft was being cancelled forthwith. The only explanation given was that credit was tight and he had instructions to cancel all overdrafts, no exceptions.

For three years following that fateful appointment, business slowed noticeably, but it did not stop. He had to lay off three of the four workers and he took to doing the deliveries himself. Jim remembered helping out every day after school. His dad used to do three runs a day, the last one was mainly pick ups to go back on to the morning train. In the good times he remembers

his dad telling him that they would do up to five and six runs a day.

Jim told Taylor that people of today just did not understand the value of having a job. Back when he was lad, having a job meant that a man could provide for his family. The wife rarely worked and it was her job to look after the house and kids. If you did not have cash, you didn’t buy anything. A couple were considered fortunate to have a mortgage and even luckier when they had paid it off.

Taylor interrupted his granddad and shared an anecdote from his own experience. He had been fortunate to land a summer job at local electrical appliance store.

The previous day, eight people had come into the store, identified an appliance and then applied for finance to help them pay for it. Six out of the eight were declined and he did not make any commission as the sale did not proceed. In fact he was scared he would loss his job as the manager told him that hire purchase sales normally accounted for 40% of their turnover, but the lack of available credit had seen this drop to below 10%.

Jim said that Taylor’s example was a modern version of what it was like in the depression. Shops still operated, but there were no credit cards, no hire purchase, no

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buy now and pay later.

If you had a job, you did everything you could to keep it. Because business turnover was down, profits were down, staff numbers and expenses were rigidly scrutinised.

If you wanted to buy a house, you first saved a deposit and then applied to borrow money. If you did qualify for a loan, bank managers were obliged to ensure it was paid back, on time and with interest.

By this time Moira arrived with the cake.

Jim sensed something click with Taylor. It was as if he now understood why Moira spoilt Jim the way she did. Moira had learned to cook out of necessity, she could whip up a meal without going to the supermarket. Taylor knew that grandma did not have bought biscuits at their house, and now he was starting to understand why. He also knew that Jim had worked long and hard all his life. Not only that, he knew that granddad was good with money. He had even offered to help him through university so that he did not have to get a student loan.

He was beginning to understand why granddad hated and despised debt in any form.

It was because of the great depression.

A copy of Peter Hensley’s disclosure statement is available on request and is free of charge. © Peter J Hensley, December 2008.

EVE’S BITE

THE DIVINITY CODE

“…the most politically incorrect book” in New Zealand. He is absolutely right…Prepare to be surprised and shocked.

Wishart may ruffle a few feathers but his arguments are fair as his evidence proves. If you are looking for a stimulating mental challenge, or a cause to fight for, Eve’s Bite will definitely satisfy. – Wairarapa Times-Age

Wishart takes up the gauntlet laid down by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion, and in fact, uses Dawkins own logic and methodology to launch a counter-attack against unbelief.

Challenging…thought provoking…compelling – keepingstock.blogspot.com

Discover the truth for yourself. Get these two books today from Whitcoulls, Borders, PaperPlus, Dymocks, Take Note, and all good independent booksellers, or online at

I’m having a cracking good read of another cracking good read – The Divinity Code by Ian Wishart, his follow-up book to Eve’s Bite which was also a cracking good read – comment on “Being Frank”

www.evesbite.com INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 65

think life | EDUCATION

Parent power – teaching ourselves a lesson Amy Brooke sees signs of a revolution

There was a local scandal in Nelson recently. Unaware that the present headmaster and school groups had agreed to raise money by selling some of fifteen irreplaceable paintings from the Nelson College Trust Foundation, a group of Nelson College old boys mounted a welcome last-minute protest to try to save them. In the eyes of many, Nelson College’s decision to sell an irreplaceable portrait of Lord Rutherford himself, Victoria Cross winner Leonard Trent, and a watercolour of the original wooden house, was a shocking one.

The latter was lost at auction, but thanks to these old boys rallying around, the first two paintings were saved. A reported comment, that everyone involved with the decision should hang their heads in shame, was a popular one. A shock wave went through a community stunned that that the college 66 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

long trading on Rutherford’s attendance should so little value a unique portrait of such an outstanding New Zealander. It was argued that if the college finances were in such a parlous state, the problem should have been addressed well before.

People power – parent power. When they finally begin to say Enough is enough, to take back responsibility for decisions others have inflicted on them, change is in the air. It’s ahead for the education system in this country.

Recently I was speaking with an intelligent Swedish individual whom we can call Carl, only three years in this country, and married to a New Zealander. His English was pleasant to the ear, literate and competent – far more so than thousands of today’s cheated young New Zealanders – many of whom have degenerated into a

kind of defeated yobboism. The real crime about this state of affairs is that they have been cheated – and still are.

Yes, Carl had noticed the difference between his command of English, and that of the average New Zealander. He was too polite to actually say he’d been surprised, if not shocked. In Sweden he had first started to learn English as a second language when about seven or eight.

At about age 13, a third language is introduced into the school system. Others can be taken later. Although it has long been known that school children learn a second language far better if it is introduced down at primary school level, second language teaching in this country has been withheld until secondary school – apart from today’s misguided immersion in Te Reo –with its limited, over-hyped application.

Why? Those of us picking up young Danish, Swedish or other European hitchhikers constantly hear a level of English spoken which would put so many of our own school leavers to shame – except that the shame is largely not theirs, but that of a third-rate education ministry overseeing its largely trashed system. What have they done to them that these children cannot even manage to speak and write their own language well? Parents should be demanding answers – but then many of these, too, have been failed by the same system, long the major part of our problem.

The guest speaker at a local prize-giving naïvely boasted she had learned through the songs of Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie that “war was a terrible thing” and that “a bad peace is still better than a good war.” Really? Leaving aside any challenge to her facile definitions, one would wonder what the ghettoed and starving peoples of history would have to say about this. Her infantilised formula for learning about the world and how to appreciate the human condition apparently depended upon pop and folk songs. What a pathetic and condescending message to our very bright young.

Forget history then – forget the sum of learning passed down through previous generations. And yet as Plato pointed out “not to know what happened before you were born is to be forever a child.”

Where do we turn for hope – while the British school education system shares our deficiencies, with some 240,000 primary school children on target to graduate from primary school this year, unable to read or write properly? It will, like ours, be just another typical year, for those with little choice but to attend a local state school.

The luck of the draw carries no expectancy that pupils will not advance to secondary school before they have achieved a good basic competence in the most fundamental skills of reading, writing and arithmetic. Something has gone horribly wrong when we contrast the failure to show anything worthwhile from those long years at primary school with that eagerness to learn displayed by children deprived of access to education in Third World countries.

The answer is going to be what is becoming a not-so-quiet revolution spreading among some principals, well-informed heads of departments, and quality teachers dismayed by what they frankly see as rubbishy, totally inadequate curricula – and a too-long entrenched bureaucracy of mediocrity overdue to be challenged. In Britain,

“In contrast to the average English school of 1000 pupils, the new breed of Swedish schools averages just 180 pupils, so start-up locations are not difficult to find a new blueprint is being carefully designed which would enable the setting up of local independent schools, funded but not run by the state. As The Spectator points out, when this equivalent of a voucher system was introduced in Sweden in 1992 it was dismissed as merely tokenism by the Deputy Education Minister, saying nothing would become of it. “Then, to our surprise, we had all these groups saying they’d like to set up schools.”

Over 900 schools in Sweden are already so-called free schools, with a further 1550 applications granted last year. Moreover, the older schools are improving, motivated by the pressure to shape up – or lose both pupils and funding. In contrast to the average English school of 1000 pupils, the new breed of Swedish schools averages just 180 pupils, so start-up locations are not difficult to find.

Their obvious success, especially among formerly disenchanted working class communities, is such that what was once envisaged as a radical policy is now supported by every party in parliament – except, of course, the former Communist Party. Essentially, Sweden has adopted a parent-power system, where parents choose what school their children will attend and expect these schools to actually teach their children.

The top-down edicts from our highly politicised and inadequate education bureaucracy will have finally had their day when parents and the community own schools, working with enlightened principals and dedicated, competent teachers. It will not happen without parent involvement. Hence that lesson from nearly 2000 years ago, when Pliny the Younger advised the citizens of Comum how best to set up a local school for their children. His advice was that they themselves should set aside money to hire their own teachers, that corruption and incompetence ensued when parents themselves did not have control of the school… and that where their own money was involved, parents would be less likely to be cavalier about whether or not it was being well spent, and about the quality of the teachers they hired.

It is coming here. All credit to the Nelson College old boys who reclaimed their Rutherford heritage – and to the growing number of Principals and HODS fronting up to the education bureaucrats. Their disgracefully inferior curricula are so demonstrably third-rate that their time is running out. www.amybrooke.co.nz www.summersounds..co.nz http://www.livejournal.com/users/brookeonline/

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 67

think life | SCIENCE

Mercury rising EPA scientists rebuke FDA recommendations on seafood amid mercury contamination fears, reports Michael Hawthorne In the waning days of the Bush presidency, the Food and Drug Administration is pushing to scuttle the government’s advice about mercury-contaminated seafood, a dramatic policy change that would, in effect, encourage women and children to eat more fish despite growing concerns about the toxic metal.

The FDA’s recommendations, sent recently to the White House Office of Management and Budget for approval, prompted a sharp rebuke from scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency who, in memos circulated earlier this month, described them as “scientifically flawed and inadequate.”

A joint advisory issued by the two agencies in 2004 cautions women of childbearing age, nursing mothers and young children to limit seafood consumption to 340 gm a week. But in a draft version of the FDA’s new report, the agency says its own modelling shows that kids can benefit from eating more fish, not less.

The FDA argues that nutrients in fish offset the risks posed by mercury and could boost 68 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

a child’s IQ by three points. Its conclusion is similar to claims by the seafood industry.

EPA scientists, though, say the FDA’s report reaches conclusions that aren’t supported by the studies it cites, and at various points either trivializes or overstates existing research.

Moreover, the EPA scientists say, the FDA fails to consider that some species of fish tend to have much higher mercury levels than others. The EPA’s comments reflect long-standing criticism that the government isn’t giving Americans enough advice about which types of seafood are safest to eat.

The FDA’s proposal is among a series of controversial policy changes moving quickly as the Bush administration prepares to leave office. Seafood industry lobbyists want to scale back the government’s mercury warning, which they contend is depressing sales and scaring women away from eating fish.

In contrast, President-elect Barack Obama and leaders of the Democratic-controlled Congress have pledged to enforce

tougher mercury policies.

“Once again, the Bush administration seems intent on ignoring sound science on mercury poisoning,” Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said. “This backroom bouquet for special interests should be stopped in its tracks.”

The Environmental Working Group, an advocacy organization that obtained the FDA report, sent a letter to EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson urging him to fight the proposal.

In an e-mail response to questions, the FDA said a final decision had not been reached. “The FDA will make no final determination until all the relevant comments and scientific analysis has been carefully considered,” the agency wrote.

Studies have shown that exposure to mercury in the womb, mostly from fish eaten by mothers, can irreversibly damage the brain before birth, causing subtle delays in walking and talking as well as decreased attention span and memory. Some research suggests that mercury also could increase the risk of heart disease in adults.

A recent study found that the percentage of women with high mercury levels declined from 2000 to 2004, even though those women were eating the same amount of seafood. The study’s authors said their finding suggests that consumer advisories are prompting women to eat fish low in mercury.

Sniping between the FDA and EPA is nothing new. The two agencies have fought for years about how to caution women and children about mercury.

A 2005 Chicago Tribune investigation found that the government’s advisory doesn’t reflect its own testing about mercury levels in fish. Supermarkets routinely sell mercury-contaminated fish, in part because the federal government doesn’t inspect seafood for mercury before it is sold, the newspaper found.

The government’s advisory tells pregnant women, young children and other at-risk groups to not eat shark, swordfish, king mackerel and tilefish because of high mercury levels. It also cautions those groups to limit their overall fish consumption to 340 gm a week, including no more than 170 gm of canned tuna.

Yet the government doesn’t require warnings at supermarkets. And the advisory says nothing about other commonly sold fish that contain even more mercury than albacore, including grouper, orange roughy, Chilean sea bass and marlin.

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INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 69

think life | TECHNOLOGY

It must be 1984 ‘Big Brother’ snoops and Britons don’t mind, writes Julie Sell

In an era when security is the top concern for officials in many countries – reinforced

by November’s deadly attacks in Mumbai – it takes a lot to be labelled “the most surveilled democracy in the world.” In the case of Britain, the label is not necessarily meant as a compliment. Some – including the European Court of Human Rights – fear that the snooping has run amok.

Video cameras are ubiquitous. An average Londoner is captured on video hundreds of times a day as he walks the streets, rides the “Tube,” visits the bank or drives a car.

Including private cameras in shops and banks, there may now be more than 10 million video cameras operating in a country with a population of about 60 million, according to David MurakamiWood, a specialist on surveillance issues at Newcastle University. This is more than double the number earlier this decade.

He argues that the supposed benefits of 70 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

Britain’s vast surveillance network don’t justify the growing costs and infringement on freedom.

“Britain is regarded as the society to avoid” for its pervasive surveillance and disregard for personal privacy, said Colin Bennett, a British-born author and academic at the University of Vancouver in Canada. He contends the surveillance culture is “out of control,” targeting not just suspected terrorists and criminals but millions of ordinary people.

Yet a visit to Compton Square in Islington, the north London neighbourhood where the author George Orwell wrote his novel 1984 six decades ago about an omnipresent “Big Brother,” suggests that many Britons grudgingly accept having their movements watched closely. They cite the string of bombings that hit London as recently as July 2005.

“Most people ignore it” when new surveillance cameras go up in their neigh-

bourhoods, said Fabien Cox, a 48-year-old consultant to the international water industry. Holding a pint of beer as he stood at the bar of Orwell’s favourite pub, the centuries-old Compton Arms, Cox admitted he was more accepting since a double-decker bus travelling his normal route to work was blown up during the 2005 attacks.

Trevor Lloyd, a 32-year-old broadcast engineer who lives in the area, got seven traffic tickets – each about $90 – within a week of moving to London after being caught on surveillance camera parking just inside the city’s restricted “congestion charge” zone. “You become criminalized yourself quite easily, and there’s no right of appeal,” Lloyd said.

Lloyd added, however: “The flip side is the terrorist thing.” Given security threats, he found the video cameras around the city “reassuring.” And he’s not greatly disturbed by a new plan for everyone in Britain to carry a government-issued biometric iden-

“Cameras, however, are just the beginning of the surveillance drive. Having begun to issue national identity cards, the Labour government has also proposed a new law giving police the power to arrest anyone who can’t produce identity papers on demand

tity card, which will include dozens of pieces of personal information, including fingerprints. They will be “expensive” and “a bother,” he said.

The acquiescence of ordinary Britons troubles civil-liberties advocates.

“It’s remarkable that there is no general protest” over widespread surveillance, said Simon Davies, a director with the advocacy group Privacy International.

Many of Britain’s neighbours in continental Europe consider Britain heavyhanded in its use of surveillance tools.

When even the “most law-and-order mayor in France” visits Britain, “they feel like it’s a horror film,” said Sebastian Roche, a political scientist at the University of Grenoble in France.

Yet police and public officials in other countries are studying Britain’s surveillance techniques as they grapple with their own security threats. Teams of U.S. officials arrived in London shortly after the

September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington to learn how police were using cameras, which were initially installed in the 1990s to combat threats including child molesters and bombings by the Irish Republican Army.

Studies in the U.S. and Britain suggest the cameras are a limited deterrent in combating crime and terrorism. They appear to reduce crime when installed in confined spaces, such as parking garages, but are much less effective on open streets and plazas. Experts in surveillance suggest that the boom in camera use is partly driven by an aggressive private sector that pushes technology as the solution to social problems, and the insistence of insurance companies that businesses have cameras in place.

Cameras, however, are just the beginning of the surveillance drive. Having begun to issue national identity cards, the Labour government has also proposed a new law giving police the power to arrest anyone who can’t produce identity papers on demand.

If you’re in a big crowd in Britain, look up. British authorities now use miniature drones carrying aerial cameras to watch crowds at large events.

A proposed national telecommunications bill allowing the government to monitor all electronic communications has been delayed due to protests from opposition politicians, but many experts predict it will ultimately be passed.

The latest big controversy centres on the database of DNA samples collected from anyone arrested by police. Murakami-Wood said there is “very little control” over the database, which includes a disproportionate

number of black men and even children as young as 12, he said. The European Court of Human Rights, based in Strasbourg, France, agrees. It ruled unanimously that the database violates the right of privacy.

According to the ruling, more than 1 million samples of people found innocent, among the 4.6 million in the total database, must be destroyed.

The database “overstepped any acceptable margin of appreciation” in the balance between individual rights and the public interest, the court said.

National politicians are furious that police surveilled and then earlier this month arrested one of their own, Damien Green, a “shadow” minister responsible for immigration matters in the opposition Conservative party. Counterterrorism officers searched his home and parliamentary office and seized his computer and mobile phone, claiming he’d leaked sensitive government information to the public.

This month, the speaker in the House of Commons revealed the police didn’t have a warrant for their search.

“This is disturbing at least and distressing at best,” said Davies of Privacy International. “All the warnings were laid bare to the population in a way that will resonate for many years to come. The police simply have too much power and too much discretion.”

Civil-liberties activists say one reason for the burgeoning surveillance is the relative lack of legal protections for data.

While Britain subscribes to the European Convention on Human Rights, it lacks the sort of constitutional protection of privacy that exists in the U.S. or Germany. Large numbers of Germans have taken to the streets in recent months to voice concerns about erosion of their personal privacy, yet “Britain never gave privacy a chance,” Bennett said.

One hazard of collecting so much data is that it can easily fall into the wrong hands.

Public officials and contracting firms have lost classified files for thousands of people over the past year, heightening the fears that the government cannot be trusted with the information it gathers.

Is Britain becoming Orwell’s 1984?

Murakami-Wood said that in the context of a bumbling bureaucracy, the analogy shouldn’t be taken too far. “This is not Big Brother,” he said. “It’s a lot of incompetent little brothers.” Sadly, he added, “none of these measures will stop anyone who’s determined to do something really bad.”

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 71

feel life | SPORT

The good, the excellent and the courageous By any standards 2008 has been a landmark year for New Zealand sport. World champions, golden Olympic moments, Grand Slams and a hero in America – it had it all. Sports columnist Chris Forster looks back in wonder and predicts who’ll shine in ‘09 UNLIKELY WORLD CHAMPIONS

For pure emotion, and for “leap out of your seat and yell at the TV” joy, you can’t go past the Kiwis’ unbelievable Rugby League World Cup shunting of the Kangaroos.

They were 8-to-1 outsiders before the Suncorp Stadium showdown, against an Australian team chock full of superstars and rated as the best ever.

But the gods were shining on the menin-black-and-white that November night.

The Australians started ominously, running in two early tries and close to snaring a third. But the floodgates never opened and the tide turned, dramatically.

72 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

The unfancied New Zealanders clawed their way back within striking distance. The second half was the stuff rugby league folklore is made of. All the decisions went their way, including a decisive penalty try. They were even gifted a try after a wild, brainless pass to nobody from imperious Aussie fullback Billy Slater. The axing of coach Ricky Stuart for his profane outburst at match officials after his embarrassing defeat is like the icing on the cake for New Zealand fans.

He had been told before the final – he was told the job was his for as long as he wanted it.

Famous last words.

SPEED KING

Scott Dixon made Letterman in late May. The South Auckland racer earned a guest slot in America’s ultimate late night talk show courtesy of a stunning tactical victory in the IndyCar 500. The 28 year old newlywed drank the quart of milk, kissed his new wife and became a household name in the United States. He went onto clinch his second IndyCar championship by keeping his cool in a tense season finale at Chicago four months later.

But it was the breakthrough at the Brickyard that put Dixon on a modern day par with Kiwi motor sport greats Denny Hulme, Chris Amon and Bruce McLaren.

GUTSY BRONZE

Mahe Drysdale dipped out on Gold on that hot August night in Beijing. The three-time single sculling world champion slammed into a brickwall after leading for much of the Olympic medal race, settling for one of the bravest bronze medals you

could imagine.

A severe virus laid Drysdale low the day after the opening day heats of the regatta.

He’d been up late on the previous night at the Opening Ceremony, after agreeing to take on the honour of flag-bearer for the New Zealand team.

He was on a drip for most of the week only just scraped through his semi-final – to qualify in the inside lane.

Drysdale shot out of the blocks at a furious pace and held the lead for much of the 2 kilometre row. But illness took its toll, viciously, and he somehow grasped enough strength to get over the finish line in third place.

Drysdale vomited, fainted and needed oxygen after the race.

The fact he even got to the podium is a testament to Drysdale’s courage and determination The bronze for Nick Willis in the glamour 1500 metres race also deserves to make any best of the year compilation. Willis ran a smart race and picked-up the middle distance baton 32 years after John Walker’s famous gold in Montreal.

GOLDEN KIWIS

Valerie Vili and the Evers-Swindell twins struck the jackpot on the first full night of competition in Beijing, in contrasting styles.

Vili was majestic. She never gave her Belarussian rivals a chance by dominating the women’s shot putt from qualifying through to the last heaves.

There was never any doubt it was going to be Valerie’s night.

Two hours earlier Georgina and Caroline defied their critics and denied the Germans with a last ditch lunge to defend their Olympic title and create double sculling history.

Three days later it was Takapuna boardsailor Tom Ashley’s turn to ride the wave.

The 29 year old kept his nerve in a tense three-way battle for gold in the last race of the regatta, joining the fine windsurfing tradition laid down by Barbara and Bruce Kendall as Olympic champions.

The four gold medallists are sure to be among the top nominations at the Halberg Awards.

DANNY BOY

He’s a quietly-spoken South Korean teenager from Rotorua – awkward with the media – but fluent with his golf clubs.

Danny Lee struck amateur golf gold in late August, just a few hours after the lavish Closing Ceremony to the Games in

Beijing. He’d comfortably beaten American Drew Kittleson in the 36 hole final of the US Amateur Championships after a week of dominant form at Pinehurst in North Carolina.

It’s the same course Michael Campbell scored his famous US Open win three years earlier.

The trophy has the names of Tiger Woods – three times – Phil Mickelson and Jack Nicklaus , and now Eddie Lee, inscribed on it.

He’s the world’s top-ranked amateur and gets automatic entry into this year’s US and British Opens.

WHAM BAM ANOTHER GRAND SLAM

For joyful redemption you can’t go past the All Blacks.

Cardiff’s World Cup calamity eventually faded into acceptance as Graham Henry masterminded a sweep of the Bledisloe and Tri Nations trophies over his public nemesis Robbie Deans.

Another gutsy effort got them past the Wallabies in the neutral test at Hong Kong, setting the mood for a Grand Slam march past the four home nations in the UK. Henry relied on his frontline players for five tests, as rotation fell victim to the necessity of winning.

Henry was named Coach of the Year at rugby’s annual awards. His satisfaction at winning over the rugby public again was a stark contrast to the near funereal ceremony one year earlier.

SURPRISE SPRING HIT

The FIFA Under-17 Football World Cup for women didn’t have the hype or media attention of the All Blacks or the Olympics.

But for audacious skill and a refreshing lack of cynical professionalism the three week battle of 16 nations was an unexpected delight.

The fans loved it too – 213,000 of them attended the matches at the five venues

Ones to watch in

2009

HAYDEN ROULSTON u Ashburton’s finest – won silver and bronze inside the futuristic velodrome in Beijing.

Now he’s taking those powerful legs and unyielding drive for success to Europe and a crack at the Tour de France. Don’t be surprised if he wins a stage or two.

THE WARRIORS u Stacey Jones is back. A trio of top Australian imports have been drafted into Ivan Cleary’s well-drilled unit.

Fiery fullback Wade McKinnon is fully fit. 2009 looks a great chance to become the first Warriors side to go all the way and win the NRL Grand Final.

USAIN BOLT u He’s Jamaican of course. “Lightning Bolt”, whose three gold sprint medals in world record time in Beijing were phenomenal.

Bolt is still only 22, and looks to have even more speed in that impressive athletic frame. More world records and the title of the greatest ever, could await this man.

spread between North Harbour, Hamilton, Wellington and Christchurch. New Zealand was knocked out in pool play.

Tears flowed – as you’d expect with teenage girls – but they played 3 fine games culminating in a 3-1 victory over Colombia.

North Korea won over hearts in their 1-nil extra-time victory over the USA in the final. These young women with near identical haircuts and from one of the most oppressed countries on earth let their emotional guard down to reveal the uncensored joy of success.

n Early declaratio Last month Investigate reported on the intimidating schedule facing coach John Bracewell in his last summer in charge of the Black Caps.

His swansong was cut short by the New Zealand Cricket bosses in late November.

They plucked a relatively unknown Englishman from provincial cricket and gave Bracewell his marching orders during their two test hammering in Australia.

Suddenly this bloke called Andy Moles has the job of turning around the Black Caps fortunes against the West Indies, Australia (again) then India.

CEO Justin Vaughan denied there was any panic over the sudden change of tack.

The often tempestuous Bracewell is sidestepping the media on the exact reasons for the abrupt end to his five year reign. It must feel like he’s been sacked.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 73

feel life | HEALTH

Children and antidepressants Claire Morrow is becoming increasingly depressed at kiddie prescriptions A recent article in daily broadsheet The Australian reported the unreleased figures document an astonding number of subsidised prescriptions for antidepressants in Australia. An astounding number in general but, more alarmingly, an astounding number of prescriptions for children. Note that these are only the prescriptions that were subsidised. There are no data on private prescriptions. The figures document 4000 children under 10 being prescribed antidepressants last financial year, including 553 children under five and 48 babies. Stop the world, I want to get off.

A report in the New Zealand Herald a year ago documented a substantial reduction in the prescription of antidepressants for children; amongst 1-year-olds, ��������������������� 768 prescriptions were written in 2004-05, down to 24 in 2005-2006 . For those under 1, there were 453 prescriptions in 2004-05 but only nine the next year. But those are slightly dubious numbers. For all other age groups under 10, the number of prescriptions showed a marked decline but each group remained in the hundreds last year.

There is a good explanation for the reduc74 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

tion in prescriptions – a 2004 warning about the increased risk of suicide in children prescribed antidepressants – but also the suggestion that the figures may be too low, perhaps the result of incredulous data entry staff misreading the birthdates.

These figures are confusing and horrifying to me, and also to the general public and a number of eminent paediatricians who have commented. I simply cannot conceive of a devil’s advocate argument in defence of this. And this is because it is, as a matter of fact, truly outrageous. It is simply, straightforwardly, all different kinds of wrong and it causes me to wonder what can be wrong with the thinking equipment of a small but significant number of doctors and parents.

Antidepressants are drugs and they affect the mind, which is the point of them.

Like all medicines that work, they have side effects. Like all medicines that work, they may not work well or at all and the way to find out is – unfortunately – to “suck it and see”. But like all medicines that work, antidepressants are not ‘tic tacs’.

Antidepressants are the most commonly

prescribed medicine in the United States, the second being blood pressure medicine. There are probably more people taking antidepressants than there are buying tic-tacs. Something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.

I believe in antidepressants, I really do. Many people experience depression at a level which is significant, which doesn’t respond adequately to non-drug approaches and are helped enormously by antidepressants. There are people who have undiagnosed, untreated depressions which should be treated with antidepressants, and they will get better. Depression itself has the potential to do a tremendous amount of damage. But no medicine is risk free. Medicine is for people who need it.

Medicine is what you have when the sick is worse than the risk of the medicine. Some of these millions of people on medicine, surely, are just lazy, or their doctors are.

A certain amount of unhappiness is part of the human condition.Asked what the aim of psychoanalysis was, Freud said that it was to turn “hysterical misery into ordinary human unhappiness.” Bad things hap-

pen. People feel bad. These are not medical pathology. Mental illness is devastating for sufferers, their families, and society. But there is also a case to be made, and it may not be unreasonable, that some people find that their life is better on antidepressants, and they’d like to keep taking them. My point is merely that all decisions about taking a medicine should be considered carefully. If there is no immediate risk to the patient, no-risk approaches should generally be tried first. Sure, exercise, diet, counseling and so on are boring, but they are not associated with seizures, increased sociality, hallucinations or liver failure. That goes for all medicines, including herbal ones.

But children are not adults. We don’t understand the brain as well as we would like to, or how medicines work, or what makes people tick. We know even less about children, whose minds are growing and developing and on whom – for evident reason – it is considered unethical to experiment on.

We do know that children are more likely to suffer permanent damage than adults when they are exposed to nutritional deficiencies, toxins and, obviously, some medicines. We do know that although bone fide indisputable mental illness is rare in young children, it can occur, and that some children are – for want of a better word – quite disturbed.

But these should be extraordinary events. I do not dispute the fact that some children have minds which are in urgent need of help, and that help may include medication.

But the level of caution should be extremely, extremely high.

Some antidepressants are approved for use in obsessive compulsive disorder – but not depression – in children over 6. For some reason of as-yet-poorly-understood neurochemistry, this group appear to have a different side effect profile to the depressed – people with OCD are less likely to have an increase in suicide on antidepressants.

But it is not illegal, or necessarily at all wrong, for a doctor to prescribe a medication which is not “approved”. Medications are sometimes – quite legally – used for “off-label” purposes. This happens when a medicine is thought to perhaps be able to do something other than what it is intended to do and for some reason trying it is the best and safest option.

Some of the older antidepressants are occasionally used to treat nerve pain, insomnia and allergy. These can be important uses; novel uses often arise in palliative (end of life) care or when there are complex or multiple medical conditions such as organ failure or allergy which mean that other treatments are not possible. Some older antidepressants are approved (but rarely prescribed) to treat bedwetting in children. But those were not the medicines prescribed in this case, anyway. Those are the qualifications, and none of them apply to very young children. No study, no recommendation, no off label use has ever indicated that there is any reason to think that the prescription of antidepres-

sants is either safe or effective in treating anything in very young children. There is, simply, no reason for this.

Measured against the standards of adulthood, all children are abnormal – they cry most days (depression), they have rapid and extreme mood swings (bipolar), they believe illogical things and cannot be reasoned with (psychosis) and they are exponentially more affected by everything in their environment, from parental consistency to toxins. The explanation that kids are…well, kids, infuriates parents whose children are at the extreme end of a spectrum, and rightly so. There is a point at which one has to concede that some children are extremely trying. With the best and kindest parenting in the world some babies really do cry around the clock, many toddlers truly are nightmarish little hellians, most parents have occasionally wondered if their 9 year old is a sociopath utterly devoid of human feeling. But children are, as they say, children. They are still growing and developing and most of the time they need tolerance, consistency, and a trip to the park. Children need to be loved and looked after and to have their sometimes difficult personalities guided in the most functional direction, and sometimes they must simply be loved and endured until time brings change. It’s the adults responsible for giving children medicine for which no-one can fathom the reason need their heads read.

HEALTHBRIEFS But flu shots don’t work anyway… u WASHINGTON, – Nearly half of all U.S. adults say they’re not planning to get a flu shot this year, a RAND survey said. Dr. William Schaffner, presidentelect of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, said the finding that only 53 percent of adults have been vaccinated falls far short of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s goal of at least 70 percent, WebMD reported. “Seventy percent of us adults should be vaccinated according to CDC’s specific recommendations – never mind that the CDC says everybody else should, too,” Schaffner said at a news conference. “This looks like we are not doing very well, and must do better.” The RAND survey of about 4,000 U.S. adults shows that 53 percent have no plans to get the flu vaccine and 17 percent said they plan to but haven’t yet.

Low-carb diets may cause memory loss u BOSTON, – A U.S. psychologist says a low carbohydrate diet can reduce memory skills. Holly A. Taylor of Tufts University said dieters who eliminated carbohydrates from their meals performed more poorly on memory-based tasks than when they reduce calories, but maintain carbohydrates, the university said in a release. She said reduced carbohydrate intake reduces the brain’s source of

energy. “The data suggest that after a week of severe carbohydrate restriction, memory performance, particularly on difficult tasks, is impaired,” Taylor said. “Cognition skills returned to normal when carbohydrates were reintroduced.” The report was published earlier this year in the journal Appetite.

FDA panel rules against asthma drugs u ROCKVILLE, Md., – A U.S. Food and Drug Administration panel said the drugs Serevent and Foradil shouldn’t be used for treating asthma. The panel said Serevent and Foradil are often prescribed inappropriately by doctors and used incorrectly by patients, The New York Times said. The drugs are longer-acting beta agonists intended to prevent attacks but have been shown to increase the risk of more severe attacks if used without a steroid, the newspaper said. The panel ruled that Advair and Symbicort should continue to be used as asthma treatments. Advair and Symbicort combine longer-acting beta agonists with steroids in a single inhaler. The newspaper said some drug safety experts recommended that all four drugs be banned from treating asthma, although others said the drugs’ benefits outweighed their risks.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 75

feel life | ALT.HEALTH

The oestrogen wars Are anti-depressants being prescribed when a dietary supplement may be all that’s needed, asks Ian Wishart Ask anyone these days about the hectic pace of life, and few would disagree that the daily grind is fast becoming exhausting. For women, the problem can be doubly exasperating as they attempt to juggle careers, motherhood and time off, thanks to the myth of “superwoman” pushed in glossy media articles.

Coupled with the tighter deadlines and shorter days, however, is also an issue over the toxicity of modern living. Case in point? Hormones and additives.

Our food is often pumped full of additives, or to be more accurate the animals we eat are treated with hormones and antibiotics, while the vegetables and grains may contain pesticides, hormones or GM material.

In the US, the end result of increased hormone use in the food chain, coupled with widespread use of the contraceptive pill, has been oestrogen pollution of the waterways and drinking catchments of many cities and towns. In some rivers, there’s so much oestrogen that it’s changed the sexual orientation of fish and aquatic birdlife.

So the question has to be asked, what’s the impact of all these chemicals on humans?

Well, our disease rates are shooting through the roof, and mental health is worsening as, collectively, these various aspects of modern life take their toll.

One particular modern malaise is the exhaustion, mood swings and general anxiety and stress many women feel. Australian clinical nutritionist and specialist naturopath Jeff Butterworth had been pondering female burnout, and wondered if it might be tied to oestrogen imbalances.

76 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

After all, large numbers of women use the contraceptive pill, or have diets high in phyto-estrogens, like soy. After analysing the data, Butterworth developed a specific formula to counterbalance the hormone deficiencies, the supplement 30-Plus.

Butterworth writes of his concerns that many doctors appear to be prescribing antidepressants when all many women really need is a boost in some areas. For example, the oral contraceptive pill strips away some of the key B group vitamins. That has an effect if left untreated, says Butterworth.

“This issue relates to the overuse and a possible misdiagnosis of the medical profession in prescribing anti-depressants.

This concern is highlighted when viewing a study published in the Medical Journal of Australia which shows the alarming increase in daily dosages being prescribed from 2.4 DDD’s per 1000 pop. /day to 35.7 DDD’s per 1000 pop. / day. A staggering 1400% increase in dosage prescriptions over an 8 year period.

“In regards to the issue of misdiagnosis, I have dealt with many women patients aged 30 to 45 whom suffer from the apparent symptoms of depression and have been prescribed anti-depressants by their G.Ps as a quick solution to their problems. In reality they are often hormonally imbalanced, which can mimic the symptoms of depression. When these women’s hormones are balanced, their lives can be changed dramatically for the better.

“It appears that an extreme solution is being offered, when in reality the problem in many cases could be stemming from a

basic hormonal issue. The problem though may not be entirely the GP’s as there is no middle road in treatment, it is “all or nothing” and unfortunately the ‘all’ is an anti-depressant.

“The placement of a person on an antidepressant can have untold repercussions with withdrawal symptoms, suicidal tendencies, social and family conflicts that dramatically effects the woman’s life, when in fact she may have only had a mild or moderate hormonal imbalance. Statistics are now telling us that anti-depressants are on such an increase that they are almost being handed out in a revolving door scenario by GP’s, with no consequences. An extreme solution for what could be a mild or moderate cause,” warns Butterworth.� So what’s in 30 Plus?

• Black Cohosh – improves hormonal regulation via receptor sites and glandular action • L-Tyrosine – Balances glandular function – thyroid and adrenals, effect, increased energy, weight management, less anxious • Vitamin B6, (B9) Folic acid, B12 – increased oestrogen clearance via the liver • Chromium Picolinate – helps natural balance of blood sugar levels, effect, increased energy, reduced cravings • Calcium When Australian athlete Lisa CurryKenny endorsed 30 Plus because of the difference it had made in her life, members of the public backed her up with their own experiences.

“I’m a mum of two children (5yrs & 3yrs) and keep myself fit … you as a mum you would understand you have to keep going and my health started to play up. I ended up with women’s health problems…. It was totally ruling my life and made me feel pretty unbalanced. At times I just felt like screaming and locking myself in a room so nobody could ask me anything or so I wouldn’t snap at the kids or my husband,” commented one woman.

“30 Plus has changed my life dramatically and for this I thank you and my family thanks you as well… I know that there are a lot of women out there that could benefit from 30 Plus and I only hope they take the opportunity to try it. Sometimes as mothers, we try to burn the candle but as you would have found in speaking to a lot of women about these issues and your honesty about your personal experiences that women are all pretty much the same.”

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taste life travel

Echoes of a colonial paradise Ellen Creager goes back in time LUANG PRABANG, Laos – Like beautiful people, beautiful towns are always adored. While Laos as a whole is a poor Communist country, Luang Prabang glides along in a golden bubble of coolness, propelled by quaint French colonial architecture, spectacular mountain setting and its storybook Buddhist temples.

Royal families lived here until overthrown by the Pathet Lao Communist government in 1975.

Now, Western tourists are the kings and queens.

Cell phone service, the Internet, ATMs and satellite TV have arrived, plus pizza, 78 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

bratwurst, ice cream, an English book exchange shop, white picket fences, fine dining and boutique hotels.

Eco-tourism is big, too – hiking to waterfalls, elephant riding, visiting villages, taking a slow boat up the Mekong River.

I liked it, but ... it has one of those atmospheres that you either love or hate.

The local people are formal and polite.

Unfortunately, the town is packed with snobbish international tourists who want to be the first to visit a cool spot, then get mad when they discover anyone else is there.

Deemed a World Heritage site in 1995,

the city of about 100,000 in northern Laos is in a fortunate location, hugged by two rivers – the Mekong and the Nam Khan.

Only an hour by plane from Hanoi and two from Bangkok, it is a world away in terms of pristine setting and small-town feel. Gentle mist lingers at the top of lush green mountains. At dawn, hundreds of orange-robe-clad Buddhist monks walk down the street, accepting bits of rice from tourists and the devout for their breakfast, while hundreds of cameras snap. (I saw the monks’ laundry hanging on a line at one monastery – orange, orange, orange and orange.)

The town is walkable, picturesque, and the World Heritage status gained in 1995 prevents its quaint downtown from ever building above two stories high. Its architecture remains a charming combination of French (who ruled here 1880-1954) and Lao – blue shutters, sloping roofs, small passageways, lush gardens.

Compared with its Asian neighbours, not that many tourists have been to Laos, which did not open itself to international tourism until 1989 and did not normalize relations with the United States until 2004.

And Luang Prabang, its major tourist attraction, has a lot worth seeing:

At the top of my list are the National Museum’s cut-glass mosaics. The former home of the Lao royal family was made a museum in the 1970s after the Pathet Lao took power and exiled or imprisoned the monarchy.

Chief among the beautiful things left behind was a throne room whose walls are covered with cut-glass mosaics on a bright red background. Created in the 1950s, the mosaics make a glittering rainbow of light on sunny days.

The vista from the top of Mount Phou Si. Yes, it’s 328 steps up to the top of the downtown hill (the first 100 steep steps are

killers), but those who persevere will be rewarded by the spectacular mountainous green view, which looks a bit like Bavaria, and by the tiny Vat That Chomsi Temple at the peak.

The temples. Although Americans may think one temple looks pretty much like another and be confused by all the Buddha images, Luang Prabang is known for its gorgeous temples, particularly the Vat Xieng Thong Temple from the mid-1500s.

The ride on a long-tail Laos slow boat up the Mekong for lunch, stopping at Pac Ou Caves, which has a collection of 5,000 Buddhas.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 79

IF YOU GO GETTING THERE u Fly Thai Airways from Auckland to Bangkok, then you can catch a regional flight into the small Luang Prabang Airport, or alternatively you can stay with Thai all the way to the Laos capital, Vientiane, and again take a domestic flight into Luang Prabang.

Thai’s booking schedule is available at www.thaiairways.co.nz WHERE TO STAY u Many boutique hotels and guesthouses are in town and walkable to most sights; try the Chang Heritage Hotel (www.the-chang.com).

VISA u Laos offers tourist visas upon arrival for US$35 cash and two passport photos.

MONEY u Currency is the kip, but U.S. dollars are widely accepted.

SHOPPING u Art and crafts, pottery and jewellery at the downtown shops and markets. Nearby handicraft villages sell finely woven textiles and handmade Saa paper.

FOR MORE u www.tourismlaos.gov.la

The handicraft village of Ban Sang Khong near Luang Prabang, which makes beautiful handmade Saa paper and textiles. The village also has incredible butterflies – not in a cage, but just flitting around wild.

Unique Hmong culture alive in Laos

BAN LONG LAO, Laos – The houses are made of reddish teak. The children play in the muddy streets. Piglets, ducks, chickens and dogs wander in the yards. Lush gardens of beans, corn, squash, onions and lettuce grow as if they’re in a hothouse. Up at the plateau near the top of a mountain, the mist hovers just above, just beyond the town, letting the sunshine peek through.

No wonder many Hmong people had trouble when they emigrated to America after the Vietnam War. This is about as far as you can get from American life.

For tourists interested in minority cultures, a visit to this Hmong village south of Luang Prabang is a brush with a fascinating group with ties to the United States. The visit is pure cultural tourism – you meet people, you tread lightly, you go away. They are not selling anything. There is no welcome committee.

It takes nearly two hours to drive the rutted dirt roads up the mountains from Luang Prabang into the highlands where 80 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

the Hmong live. Once, our vehicle got stuck in the red sloppy mud and had to be pushed out.

The Hmong (pronounced Mong), a poor mountain people, are not beloved by their countrymen because they helped the American CIA during the Vietnam War. The ethnic minority came to Laos centuries ago from the highlands of China.

They are not Buddhist like most Laotians.

Instead, they have their own ancestor- and spirit-worship religion, which often made them targets of persecution.

Thousands left after the Vietnam War, many escaping to refugee camps in Thailand.

Some went on to the United States and culture shock. Others finally returned to Laos.

Most are subsistence farmers.

About 210,000 Hmong now live in the United States.

Meanwhile, an estimated 490,000 Hmong still make Laos their home, out of a population of 6.7 million, the U.S. State Department estimates.

Ban Long Lao seems a zillion miles from America.

Yes, the village has electricity. It also has a white stucco school built by international assistance groups, although it appeared closed the day I visited.

The men and older children were away tending the lush hillside fields by hand.

Left in town were mothers, elderly people and young children.

On a stoop in front of a one-room house, a mother held on her lap a toddler, who held on his lap a chicken, which had a string around its leg.

Up the hill at a pump, a woman washed a huge basket of beans so vividly green they looked as if they’d been painted.

Most of the children played outside in the red mud. Many of them, barefoot and in shabby clothing, had a persistent cough. The Hmong use shamans and healers instead of modern medicine.

As a reminder of the nation’s spectacular natural beauty – and poverty – a trip to Ban Long Lao is a trip worth taking, even if you don’t understand everything you are seeing.

Visits may be arranged through your hotel concierge or tour company.

Tourism to Laos is growing 9.2 percent a year, accounting for 34 percent of its gross domestic product. That is significant in a country with only a couple of major tourist attractions – here and the capital city of Vientiane.

But it is relatively unspoiled compared with its neighbours Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia. In Laos, the air is clear and the views are sweet, and the only thing you have to worry about are stuck-up tourists.

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INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 81

taste life FOOD

Feeding the multitudes James Morrow offers a crash course in crash cuisine Warren Buffett, perhaps the world’s greatest investor, the Sage of Omaha, and the distant relative of Margaritaville’s Jimmy, is by all accounts a pretty odd cat.

According to the new doorstop-sized autobiography, this brilliant man with all his wealth is also known for his frugality (he lives in a modest house in Nebraska) and his all too human frailties and vulnerabilities, a man who could not bring himself to attend his wife’s funeral.

But one piece of wisdom he is well known for – even if those who are aware of it do not put it into practice themselves – is the notion that one should buy into a bear market and sell when the bulls are running.

It is perhaps in that spirit that auto racers, seeing a crash up ahead, drive towards the carnage, knowing full well that if they aim 82 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

for the periphery they will head right for where the twisted metal is spinning.

So it is in that spirit that I think we need to talk about food. Not in the sense that most food columns around the world are doing these days: This is not about supposedly rediscovering the Depression or wartime-era “joys” of Marmite soup and victory gardens, nor about hedge fund managers telling their cooks lay off the premium, organic baby spinach.

No, in the spirit of Warren Buffett, I think if the spirit of the times calls for more eating at home, than we must do so in style.

Indeed, doing so might just paradoxically be the answer to the Western world’s woes.

Yet every day we are warned to cut back, buy home brands, and generally immiserate ourselves. It is almost as if, with scep-

ticism over climate change becoming ever more widespread, our media and elite classes need a new way to sell retrograde lifestyles and increased government regulation to a broad-based middle class that has enjoyed too much freedom to live as they like over the past few decades.

This is exactly the wrong approach to present financial calamities. Buying good food from reputable producers shoots money straight into the local economy.

Meanwhile avoiding processed food which is deceptively expensive is in the long run better for both health and wealth.

And for those of us who still have jobs of reasonable security, a roof over our head, and more than two bob savings in the bank, avoiding panic also, in a small way, helps fight the culture’s tend to reify the crisis. For the paradox of the markets are that the more we act like there is a problem, the more the problem grows.

It’s a bit like a faltering relationship, or the last days of a Parliamentary government, where the problems between the partners, or between electors and elected, become the entire rationale for transactions between them. The same thing happens in the economy: Consumers and business owners are told there is a crisis, thus they act as though there is, thus they exacerbate it. It’s what the suddenly-rediscovered economist John Maynard Keynes called the paradox of thrift.

Yet there is another principle which, at the table at least, should be invoked in protest.

The late, great Australian wine character Len Evans famously said that life is short to drink bad wine, and thus that one should, when drinking, drink the best wine one can afford – even if that means taking care to find out what a good $8 drop is versus one that tastes like paint thinner.

The same thing should apply to food.

While the newspapers are full of stories about hedge fund managers coming home and announcing to their trophy wives that they need to stop buying organic by way of economising, and guides to actually living within one’s means, this doesn’t mean one should sit at home and eat toast by candlelight.

Instead, embrace the new austerity and do like the US Congress: Socialise your losses, get some good food into the house and have a feed with family and friends.

They’re more permanent than bank balances anyway, and where we should all be investing. One could do worse than making them the following lamb dish…

Rack of Lamb With Pearl Barley and Black Olive Jus (Adapted from Steve Szabo, Palazzo Versace, Gold Coast, Queensland) You’ll need Olive oil 3 racks of lamb (8 cutlets each), French-trimmed 25 gm unsalted butter 500 gm washed baby spinach leaves For the Black Olive Jus 1.2 litres beef or veal stock 1 onion, chopped 1 carrot, chopped 1 leek (white part only), chopped 1 head of garlic, halved lengthways 125 ml dry red wine 40 gm chopped, pitted kalamat olves Sprigs of rosemary and thyme For the Pearl Barley 25 gm butter 1 onion, finely chopped 1 clove garlic, finely chopped 1 litre chicken or veal stock 140 gm pearl barley, rinsed and drained Juice of half a lemon 60 gm goats feta Sprig of thyme

Method: 1. Organise your jus and pearl barley. For the jus, reduce the stock over medium heat for 30 minutes or until halved. In another pan, add onion, carrot, leek and garlic and sauté until golden, then add wine, and, when the liquid is all but gone, Add the reduced stock, and boil over a low heat until reduced to a sauce-like consistency. Remove from heat, add olives and herbs to infuse for at least 15 minutes, season to taste, and strain well, pushing down on the solids.

2. Meanwhile for the pearl barley, heat butter in another saucepan and fry garlic and onion over low heat until soft. Add stock, bring to a boil, add the barley, return to the boil then reduce heat to low and simmer for an hour, or until liquid is absorbed and barley is tender. Remove from heat.

3. With all the fiddly prep done, when it comes time to serve heat some oil in a heavy-based frying pan and brown your lamb over medium heat, then roast in the oven at 200C for 15-20 minutes.

Remove from oven, tent with foil and allow to rest. Before serving cut each rack into quarters and reheat jus.

4. While the lamb is resting, reheat the pearl barley, stir in thyme, lemon and feta, and season with salt and pepper.

5. Melt butter in a pan, and fry your spinach off with some salt and pepper until just wilted, and plate up!

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 83

touch life > drive

84 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 85

touch life > toybox Epson Stylus T20 Epson has released the stylish Epson Stylus T20 – an affordable and economical entry-level A4 all-purpose inkjet single function printer that produces high quality photo and document printing for home users at up to 26 black and white A4 pages per minute and up to 14 colour A4 pages per minute. The Epson Stylus T20 is capable of printing at up to 5760 optimised dpi, generating both images and text with great detail and accuracy. Epson’s MicroPiezo print head technology produces variable sized ink droplets as small as 4 picolitres for more precise image reproduction and colour gradation.

The T20 provides users with extra value for money by giving the choice of individual colour standard or Economy ink cartridges, starting from $10.99 RRP including GST. By replacing only the ink cartridge that has been used, Epson provides consumers with an economical printing solution. The T20 comes ready to print with an included USB cable for immediate out-of box use making for a more convenient printing experience. The Epson Stylus T20 is $69 RRP including GST, and is available for purchase at consumer electronics retailers, computer superstores, mass merchants and office superstores. www.epson.co.nz

Toshiba NB100 The Toshiba NB100 is an easy-to-use notebook offering access to email and the internet, as well as entertainment such as music and movies. For more advanced computer users, it acts as secondary PC to stay in touch and gain access to all important documents while in transit. The NB100 is also a low-cost mobile companion for the classroom. Its simple design features a large touchpad and easyto-use mouse buttons, making it easy for students to quickly navigate their way around the notebook.

The NB100 can easily store all documents and files needed for the classroom. The NB100 weighs one kilogram and features an 8.9 inch screen. It comes housed in a cosmic black and aluminium silver case and is pre-loaded with Windows XP Home. Its wireless capabilities enable easy connection to wireless hot spots and the internet on the go. The NB100 also has a built-in webcam and microphone to chat with friends and family. The NB100’s unique ‘diversity antenna’ automatically adjusts signal reception for optimal connectivity to the internet, minimising drop outs and disruption while online. It also includes three USB 2.0 sleep and charge ports, allowing users to charge up mobile devices, such as MP3 players, mobile phones, PDAs and game consoles, even when the notebook is turned off. The NB100 is available now through Toshiba’s Authorised Retailers and Channel Partners at a recommended retail price from $896.63 RRP including GST. www.toshiba.com.au

86 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

Nokia N97 The N97 trumps all previous models with a slide-out full QWERTY keyboard and a tilting 3.5-inch touch screen. The smartphone provides easy access to a number of social-networking sites, and the Web browser supports streaming Flash videos. The Home screen can be personalized with widgets of favorite Web and social-networking sites. Finally, the N97 is fully compatible with Nokia’s Ovi Internet services, which include the Nokia Music Store, Nokia Maps, and the N-Gage gaming platform--though these services have yet to fully launch in the United States. The Symbianbased smartphone also features a music and video player, a 5-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, and a whopping 32GB of onboard memory that can be expanded with a 16GB microSD card. The quad-band (GSM 850/900/1800/1900) world phone is HSDPA-capable handset, but it currently supports only the 900/1900/2100MHz bands. There is integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, however. The Nokia N97 is expected to ship in Europe during the first half of 2009, with an estimated price of 550 euros. www.nokia.com [source: www.cnet.com]

Switch-to-Mac Cable The new Belkin Switch-to-Mac Cable provides a simple way to transfer files, settings, preferences, and more from your PC to a new Mac computer. Unlike existing products where you have to drag and drop specific files you want to transfer, the Switch-to-Mac Cablewith its easy-to-use Switch-to-Mac Utility software-automatically moves your music, movies, photos, files, and Internet preferences, making the transition from PC to Mac as seamless as possible. Now that Mac computers support Windows applications, a growing number of PC owners are switching to them, making the ability to work with existing PC files a necessity. www.belkin.com

Pentax K-m The K-m offers simplified, user-friendly operation, in an easy-tomaneuver, compact, lightweight body. Designed with those new to digital SLR photography in mind, PENTAX engineers have developed the K-m body with a newly designed control system which simplifies operation. While compact in size, there has been no compromise in image quality and features. The K-m has an upgraded version of the PENTAX-original Auto Picture mode, which automatically detects the type of subject or scene and sets the proper shooting mode, and a host of advanced features and sophisticated functions, including the innovative in-body Shake Reduction mechanism, 10.2 megapixel CCD with the sophisticated PRIME (PENTAX Real Imagine Engine), comprehensive Dust Removal system and high-speed continuous shooting at approximately 3.5 frames per second. The K-m’s Custom Image function and 14 built-in digital filters, including the new Toy Camera and Retro filters, let you add some creative and artistic touches to your images with ease. www.pentax.com

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 87

see life / pages

The good old days Michael Morrissey finds solace in retrospective works THE CELLULOID CIRCUS

By Wayne Brittenden Godwit, $49.99 I have reached the age when a royal wallow in nostalgia seems a lot more fun than knocking back a six pack. And, besides, a romp through the past provides no hangover. On the contrary, it whets your appetite for more. Here is a book gloriously replete with posters, advertisements and period black and white photographs of New Zealand’s picture theatre heyday from 1925 to 1970. The contemporary cinema complex may have infinitely better sound systems but in terms of lavish curtains, potted palms, ribbed ceilings, (gold leaf in the case of Auckland’s St James), luxuriant lounges, arching prosceniums, whirling Wurlitzers, they are a more spartan experience these days. The wonderful chapter break illustrations and dazzling cover suggest that this is more a box of chocolates than a mere book. Ideal for the Christmas stocking!

No one and nothing has been forgotten. Apart from the obviously required chapters on the picture theatres and the films there are also chapters on the managers, the projectionists, the censors and the audiences – even the intervals are included. Guess what?

Bob Harvey sold ice creams at the Cameo in 1950 and rose to being assistant projectionist at the St James. One chapter simply entitled ‘The Others” reminds us of those wonderful ladies called usherettes who were always hovering attentively, large torch in hand, ready to focus it on bothersome patrons but who now seem to disappear once the movie has started.

By the end of the Second World War, New Zealanders had one cinema seat per six people – the highest proportion in the world and in terms of cinema attendance were only exceeded by the Americans. Clearly, we were a nation who needed to do a lot of dreaming in public places. Speaking for myself, going to see a Hopalong Cassidy movie at the Tudor in Remuera Auckland, was more thrilling than a visit to the museum, zoo or beach.

And as for the mighty 3500-seat Civic, opened in the height of 88 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

the Depression, I am going to quote Brittenden’s marvellous evocation: “There were elephants and tigers, and a pair of blinking blue-eyed panthers, sprawled on either side of the stage, guarding an Arabian Nights-meets-Gunga Din proscenium. All this under a night sky of twinkling stars and drifting clouds. The red-trousered staff, complete with turbans and thirty piece orchestra provided the finishing touches to the grand opening, while the Wurlitzer organ rose from the depths of the building, as it would do for decades to come.” By the time I became a patron, the orchestra had put away its violins, the staff had doffed their turbans, the clouds had drifted off and the panthers were blinking with green eyes. But it was still magnificent, stately and majestic. Such monarchical names as these were given to other theatres throughout the country, reinforcing the fanciful notion that the bedazzled customer was visiting a palace, not just going to the movies.

The Civic’s Wurlitzer has found a new home in the Hollywood at Avondale formerly run by the indefatigable Ron Grefstadt.

Brittenden further informs us that Allan Webb is the longest sole manager, exhibitor and proprietor in our cinema history. Webb has purchased the Te Awamutu’s old Regent and refurbished it handsomely. Judging by the colour photograph, it has been restored in the grand manner – which gives me a compelling reason to visit that King Country town some time soon. Brittenden’s survey covers the four main cities plus small towns and provinces with a lavish spread of photographs. Alas, a lifetime spent in Auckland does not allow me to comment on the cinemas of other centres except to say they look every bit as grand as the Auckland ones.

A vital part of New Zealand cinema history lies with the two leading impresarios, Michael Moodabe of Amalgamated and Robert Kerridge of Kerridge-Odeon. At its peak, the Kerridge chain had 133 theatres and Amalgamated sixty-eight. Both had Hollywood flair though Moodabe was the flashier – but despite his cigar-chomping Cadillac-driving mogul style he could be generous with his staff. Perhaps his common touch resulted from his humble beginnings as a peanut seller. Curiously enough, Brittenden notes,

“Neither was a real film goer, they simply loved the industry”.

My sole criticism of this book is that it renders the colour-rich Civic in black and white thereby failing to do justice to its fabulous foyer. Rich in anecdotes and encyclopaedically indexed, this more than stylish book would make the ideal Christmas gift for that aging relative who still has a twinkle for the glorious picture palace past in their eye.

GANGS II

By Ross Kemp Michael Joseph, $37 I missed GANGS (the first installment of this series) but the publisher’s blurb reveals this tantalising and depressing titbit – New Zealand “has more gangs per head than any other country in the world”. While local gangs here can be as rough and tough as any (see review of The Devils Are Here in Investigate November 2008), New Zealand cannot as yet – thankfully – equal the distressing nadir of Colombia where boys as young as ten have already committed their first murder. The Colombian Paramilitary are not just a male stronghold – one in five is a woman. In such locales as Medellin, government officials who investigate human rights abuses are in constant danger of death. Kemp met with Jorge Ceballos who informed him 12 officials like him had been assassinated in the previous three weeks. An assassination can cost as little as $135 NZ. Kemp also visited gangs in Poland, East Timor, Los Angeles, Kenya and Liverpool. In some ways, East Timor proved the most intimidating because the top gang there – the PSHT – has 31,000 members. Considering the population is only a million, gives an idea of the size of the problem. East Timor was of course the recent victim of Indonesian invasion which took 250,000 lives as opposed to 10,000 Indonesian dead. The aftermath has left a combat zone that borders on civil war. Kemp writes that the East Timorese, while outwardly pleasant, can move from “volume one to volume ten in a matter of seconds”. The gangs then are basically a corruption of warrior culture – wasn’t that the point of Once Were Warriors?

The ferocious even medieval rivalry of gangs such as the Bloods and Crips in Los Angeles and the PSHY and 7/7 in East Timor

are usually rooted in forgotten wrongs and the often quoted justification for ongoing warfare is – “It’s not us, it’s them.” Perhaps they could take up soccer? This is the case in Poland (so to speak) but here the football gangs, who just happen to be neo-Nazis, display a violence comparable to the more straightforwardly criminal gangs of other countries. Apart from ancestral feuding the other main reason for gang warfare is territorial – each side wants the more lucrative segment (in terms of drug dealing) of the neighbourhood. Kemp himself looks like a gang member and when asked where he came from he somewhat hesitantly replied, “Er ...London”. A wrong answer in terms of local territory could have meant a shortened life.

I have saved the worst wine to last – Kenya. In this beleaguered land, when mothers want to scare their children into good behaviour, they say the Mungiki man will come and get you. Needless to say, the Mungiki man is the local “gang”. If the East Timor figure intimidates, the Mungiki’s size is frightening – allegedly three million! We are not talking about a gang here so much as a second army. However, Kemp uncovered some evidence to suggest that the Mungiki might after all be in some measure the good guys. But isn’t that how every gang sees themselves? Kemp has no real solutions to offer – his role has been to observe and report.

However, there is no doubt that poverty and civil unrest are often major driving factors.

MEMOIRS OF THE SIXTIES

By Lois R. McIvor Remuera Gallery, $25 The attractive thing about a memoir is that it doesn’t contain the minutiae of the lived life – laundry lists, and so forth – but tracks the major rivers and tributaries of memory. McIvor’s memoir reveals a generous and warm spirit – she expresses frequent appreciation and praise for her fellow artists and it would appear there isn’t a bitchy bone in her body.

Her most important mentor and most admired figure is Colin McCahon – now universally regarded as New Zealand’s most important and influential painter – and gifted teacher besides.

Oddly enough, though I met McCahon on a number of occasions and had not the slightest doubt regarding his integrity, sincerity and quiet authority, I have never found it easy to warm to his paintings. This despite the lavish appreciation and learned analysis bestowed on his work by such important critics as Peter Simpson, Wystan Curnow, Hamish Keith, Gordon Brown and Tony Green and indeed by my good friend Don Wood, retired architect and co-founder of the Ikon Gallery back in 1960 which featured much of McCahon’s early work. Indeed, sacrilege and blasphemy – so to speak – I prefer McIvor’s own work which is rather too sparsely represented with just four examples.

McIvor was a protege, friend and neighbour of McCahon’s and therefore knew him in a rich variety of ways. It was news to me, though possibly not to those versed in art history, that McCahon’s visit to the United States in 1958 resulted in a strong influence by Chinese and Japanese scroll paintings. As a teacher, McCahon taught McIvor to recognize “that a subject is composed of abstract forms in space,” and “to be self-critical and to train our eyes to recognize brushstrokes which were out of tone, or did not sit on the canvas, or make shapes that you did not want”. More than the accounts of McCahon’s significance as an artist, McIvor’s book richly communicates the powerful and lasting legacy of McCahon as teacher.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 89

McIvor gives characteristic tribute to key art focal points such as The Auckland Art Gallery (where McCahon worked), Kees and Tine Hos’s New Vision Gallery, the Barry Lett Galleries and the Elam School of Fine Arts plus the joys and stimulus of Coromandel and the bohemian atmosphere of Titirangi – not the friendliest environment in winter.

The sixties were a crucial and adventurous time when being an artist or an art dealer was a hazardous and financially unrewarding activity. Everyone who was an artist then whether they declared it or not was an art for art’s sake person because the prospect of the high prices many of their works now enjoy seemed not only just a remote dream but a flat impossibility. But happily times have changed. Young artists today may well not appreciate how hard it was back then. Nonetheless, there was a heady excitement in the air, a camaraderie often (one suspects) liberally fuelled by a few (or more than a few) glasses of red wine or maybe DB Lager.

The only reservation I have about McIvor’s memoir is that while her appreciations are lavish, sometimes I would have liked to enjoy the opportunity to read more extended anecdotes and stories to illustrate the affection and admiration she felt for her fellow artists. But this remains an amiable and engaging record of a courageous era. Salute!

SENSIBLE SINNING

By Bernard Brown Cape Catley, $35 The stage is silent. The music begins a familiar descending rumble. A tall sinister figure with swirling black cape and face half-hidden by a white mask strides in ... it’s the Phantom of the Opera. Actually no, it is none other than a disguised Professor Brown still teaching criminal law in his mid 70s and more than capable of provoking an uplift of merriment by a series of quickfire puns while giving his usual masterful theatrical performance as auctioneer at the Society of Author’s annual Christmas fund raiser. Has the learned professor perhaps missed a second thespian career as a standup comedian? He has certainly not missed a brilliant career as a teacher of many of the country’s finest legal and political minds.

Brown, author of many learned books on law and several volumes of engagingly witty verse, is a well-read, author-encouraging man who wears his erudition with a playful and modest demeanour. While his previous literary works contained only poems and also brownian sketches, this latest book has a goodly number of highly amusing anecdotes from Brown’s colourful 50-year career as a teacher of law mainly at the University of Auckland where he attained the rank of Associate Professor. His ex-students form a roll call of prominent members of the Labour party (with not a few Nats thrown in) plus legal luminaries - Prime Minister Lange; Deputy Prime Minister Jim McLay; Minsters Doug Graham, Richard Prebble, Simon Upton, Winston Peters (whose nimble feet have filled many shoes); Attorney General Paul East; Justices Baragwanath and Blanchard and of course Governor General Anand Satyanand. Authors Greg Newbold, (criminologist), Charlotte Grimshaw (novelist and short story writer) and the reviewer (short story writer and poet) complete the roll call.

Brown has the attractively English quality of humorous self-deprecation. This means many occasions of amiable error – the time he was called to speak only be told he was the wrong Brown - the correct one was Vernon Brown, architect. True to affable form, the 90 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

professor declined to be browned-off. Then there was the occasion he turned up for the wrong wedding and therefore failed to recognise anyone, or the faux pas of inadvertently causing the premature lowering of a coffin at a funeral which led to his having to surrender his belt to help retrieve it back to ground level. Or getting stuck in a gorilla suit and having to walk home thereby becoming the focus of a helicopter search light and being compelled to hide in the Newmarket railway tunnel ... thankfully, no oncoming trains. Patently, a brisk case of browning movement.

Brown has also had jungly adventures in New Guinea (sustaining a poison arrow in the shoulder while in the company of a seven feet-tall anthropologist) and weathered the political upheavals of Singapore - seeing his talented poet colleague Dennis Enright roughed up and tossed into the monsoon ditch. Apart from his well-known penchant for puns, Brown writes superbly elegant English guaranteed to provoke humour in the most sombre. An hour in the Professor’s company will yield a lot more laughs than over-rated Prozac and there are no side effects apart from aching sides. For those who have enjoyed the privilege of having the Ipswich wit as a teacher, it must be said the number of comic anecdotes is by no means exhausted. Perhaps there will be Sensible Sinning 2? I also understand his late mother, God rest her soul, was the world’s oldest Brownie ... er ... Girl Guide. More brown sugar please Professor, my coffee needs a sweetener.

THE EXPRESSIVE FOREST: Essays on the arts and ecology in Oceania

By Denys Trussell Brick Row Publishing, $49.95 Denys Trussell is the author of one of our finest literary biographies (Fairburn), one of the founding directors of Friends of the Earth, the author of several books of poetry, three of which contain long poems – that most challenging of poetic forms, requiring a marathon runner’s endurance seldom possessed by sprinter sonneteers and five minute wonder creators of haikus. He is also a classical pianist available for private concerts and a teacher of the piano. In recent times, he has written several essays on ecology for The Ecologist and the Pacific Ecologist, several of which are collected in this volume. In his spare time he cooks delicious home-made bread and scrumptious omelettes. In short, he is a Renaissance man living right here in Newton, Auckland. Presumably, he could cut the mustard in sixteenth century Florence and design a cathedral or two while informing warmongering Florentine princes not to cut down too many trees for machines of war – did I mention he is a Pacifist (yes, a pun is intended) as well?

The book has three sections – the first is a miscellany of essays on poetic, ecological and ethnic issues; the second focuses on painters Dean Buchanan, Nigel Brown, Alan Pearson and Reginald Nicholas while the third focuses on poetry and literary matters – 21 essays in all. What is striking about the book overall is Trussell’s referential and intellectual eclecticism – he leaps from Descartes to Blake, Thales to Aristotle, Mary Shelley to de Chardin, Coleridge to Edmund Burke and so forth. To read Trussell is to be taken on a fierce romp through the Western intellectual tradition with which he is dazzlingly familiar. And that’s just the first essay.

Trussell can be sizzlingly provocative. Look at this – “We are still in the Romantic movement. Why? Because it was essentially a movement of revolt against the Cartesian world-view, and this revolt has continued through a bewildering variety of artistic

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stratagems to this day. Some have been nihilistic and self-destructive, others visionary and affirmative. In their totality through the twentieth century they have constituted the history of Modernism and Post-Modernism.” Wow! I doubt whether modernists or postmodernists (note my lower case spelling) would agree and indeed would be shocked by this assertion. Of course in a sense all art since Michelangelo has the romantic aspect/aspiration of expressing the self whether or not that is the admitted agenda. According to Carlos Fuentes, Surrealism was Romanticism’s last gasp – and perhaps it is still gasping – or is it breathing the rich oxygen subversively emitted by the cinema where romance never dies or the nitrous oxide exuded by the myriads of novels which have resolutely ignored the Death of the Novel, a much-vaunted phrase of the 60s, ironically uttered even as large corporations were gobbling up publishers and spewing out highly embossed airport books – the anorexically romantic equivalent of fast food.

Trussell’s attitude to postmodernism seems in the main antagonistic, and a hostile view might deem it anachronistic, for it fails to encompass postmodernism’s vast range – extending over poetry, fiction, architecture, music, dance and also, I’ve recently been informed, theology – not to mention its quirky humour and knowing aesthetic sardonicism which helps deflate the preceding pomposities of modernism.

Postmodernism is of our time and is here to stay – until the next major aesthetic movement overtakes it. Though I feel uneasy about Trussell’s view on postmodernism, his – one could so deem it – retrogressive romanticism is completely in synchrony with his ecology – let us conserve. Yes, please. And this makes the title brilliantly apt. Expressionism is romantic and the view that the forest is expressive is correspondingly romantic – I’m with you on that Denys, one hundred per cent. The debate about postmodernism which I have always regarded as best left in the aesthetic and artistic sphere, (my 80s perspective no doubt) has now been widened in my view, inappropriately, to philosophy and the wider arena of ideas and human/humane and even religious values.

It would take an essay to respond to all of Trussell’s aggressive provocations and this is only a short review. Let me hasten to say that the illustrations are superb and have made me fall in love with all four painters artistically though alas not romantically. I was provoked to minor volcanic aesthetic eruption by his review of An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry edited by the gifted Gregory O’ Brien, the somewhat less gifted Jenny Bornholt and that prize academic nincompoop Mark Williams which Trussell examines in “A Well-Turned Compost Heap?” – a title that can only ambiguously echo Fairburn’s love of this useful organic mulch.

Noted also with mild horror a number of third raters that Trussell misguidedly thinks should have been included and (ahem!) the baffling omission of the reviewer. (Too much red wine, Denys?)

Trussell is warrior-strong on ecology; well-tuned if somewhat selective on painting but possibly in error in his judgement of poetry.

Trussell “disagrees with the centrality accorded to Allen Curnow”.

In my view, and it is one commonly held, Curnow is our greatest poet ever and would have been a better New Zealand candidate for the Nobel Prize than Janet Frame – his international reputation exceeded that of hers though the Wellington literary establishment of the day seemed unaware of this. I am sure this book of essays is intended to challenge – it certainly worked its green(ie) magic on me – and for that we should all be grateful.

see life / music

Avoid the snow Chris Philpott gets stuck in a musical blizzard, but finds hope in Jo’anna Snow Patrol A Hundred Million Suns I could tell from the unintelligible buzzing that kicks off opening track “If There’s a Rocket Tie Me To It” that I was going to end up feeling completely let down.

It’s really my own fault that my hopes were up - Snow Patrol’s last album, Eyes Open, is still on regular rotate at my place (for long time readers, I gave it a 4.5 out of 5 back in July 2006), and was deemed a massive success behind popular single “Chasing Cars”.

Unfortunately A Hundred Million Suns is not half the album its predecessor was.

Far too much reliance is placed on large over-blown soundscapes, lyrical clichés, and bland guitar and drum parts that really don’t seem to go anywhere. First single “Take Back the City” is the perfect example, with its simple 4-chord guitar line and ridiculously basic arrangement.

Gone are the emotional, minimalist moments of tracks like “Set the Fire to the Third Bar” from Eyes Open, replaced by would-be dance influences on tracks like “The Golden Floor”, courtesy of producer ‘Jacknife’ Lee. Sadly the formula doesn’t work, making A Hundred Million Suns one album you might want to miss out this summer.

Eddy Grant The Best Of Eddy Grant: Road To Reparation For a number of years starting in the late 1970s, it seemed that wherever you turned artists were trying as hard as they could to popularize the new reggae sound, following the lead of artists like Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff.

The explosion was especially intense in the UK, as punk artists like The Police and The Clash incorporated reggae influences into their music, and a number of artists rode the Brit-reggae wave well-into the 1980s and beyond, including UB40, and Eddy Grant 92 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

– the subject of this review.

Eddy Grant began his career as the lead guitarist and songwriter for The Equals, best known for writing the well known reggae-dance crossover hit “Baby Come Back”, popularized by Pato Banton in the mid-nineties, but after setting up his own label he began releasing music of his own, scoring his first major hit with “Living on the Frontline”, a fantastic dub-fused cry to his brothers in Africa.

Eddy Grant is undoubtedly one of British reggae’s most important contributors, and Road to Reparation captures his career perfectly, starting with his time in The Equals, through seminal tracks like “Gimme Hope Jo‘anna” and “Electric Avenue”, to his downward spiral in the late 1980s. Recommended.

David Cook David Cook It might seem odd that for my final review this month I’ve chosen to go with an album from the latest winner of American Idol, the world’s greatest talent show.

The thing is, in the wake of the success of recent Idol alumni such as rocker Chris Daughtry and last years’ winner Jordin Sparks, the bar has been raised to a level that the music being produced by these artists is as good as anything on the current pop market.

Enter David Cook, winner of the seventh series of American Idol, and owner of one of the most impressive voices around.

The blunt truth is that this album – Cook’s second, as he independently released an album titled Analog Heart prior to entering Idol – doesn’t really bring anything new to the table; for the most part, its generic middle-of-the-road rock and ballad-based pop.

That said, Cook’s voice is immaculate throughout, his sound direct but obtuse enough to draw the listener in, while several key tracks exude his own personal style, including highlight first single “Light On”, co-written with ex-Audioslave front-man Chris Cornell.

No, it’s not the album of the year - but it is listener-friendly, wellproduced and thoroughly enjoyable, despite its cliché sound.

INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 93

see life / movies

David and Goliath Frost/Nixon the movie to catch this summer FROST/NIXON Starring: Michael Sheen, Frank Langella, Sam Rockwell, Kevin Bacon, Oliver Platt Directed by: Ron Howard Rated: TBC 122 minutes In this corner, the president who resigned in disgrace, the man they call “Tricky Dick” for good reason, Richard M. Nixon.

And in this corner, the ultimate lightweight, blow-dried discoera “TV presenter,” Mr. “Hello, good evening and welcome,” David Frost.

Frost/Nixon, the hit play now a Ron Howard movie, is a “prize fight” recounting of the famous 1977 TV chats between the glib bon vivant Brit and the eye-gouging “enemies list” president.

Howard’s workmanlike and entertaining film has wit and history and some choice performances. But it’s a fight without a knockout blow.

We begin with a quick overview of Watergate and the Nixon resignation and pardon, underscored by the real White House tapes – Nixon threatening IRS reprisals against the press. Frank Langella doesn’t so much resemble Nixon as suggest the inner “un convicted co-conspirator,” small enough to spend his life getting back at a world that looked down on him.

Michael Sheen, terrific as Tony Blair in screenwriter/playwright Peter Morgan’s The Deal and The Queen, is brilliant as Frost, suggesting a vapid dandy with an eye for the main chance without turning the easily lampooned Frost (Monty Python had a go at him) into a caricature.

Frost sees the worldwide audience for Nixon’s farewell address.

He jumps ahead of the Mike Wallaces of America by knowing the way into Nixon’s heart: He writes him a cheque. Nixon agrees to be interviewed because he needs the cash, and his agent, the legendary wheeler-dealer Irving “Swifty” Lazar (Toby Jones), prom94 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009

ises him that the shallow Frost will deliver “a big wet kiss.”

As the ground rules are worked out (four interviews in all), the two men assemble their “corner” teams – Frost, a Brit producer (Matthew McFadyen), a veteran American reporter (Oliver Platt) and a passionate Nixon-hating academic, James Reston, played with wild-eyed verve by Sam Rockwell.

“Most Americans think the man belongs in jail. You’re making him rich!”

Nixon has his trusty ex-military aide (Kevin Bacon) and a team that included a very young Diane Sawyer.

The play and the film weigh things rather heavily in Frost’s favor, showing us Frost’s financial gamble in the show, the shallow striver who had much in common with his adversary. Langella’s Nixon is the more fascinating character, and despite stretches where he seems to rush the lines as if he’s played the role too long (Sheen and Langella co-starred in this in London and on Broadway), the onetime Dracula gets across Nixon’s guile and his self-awareness.

He knew he was a piece of work.

The play was a theatrical event, and the claustrophobia of the stage made the boxing metaphor more apt. But opening it up beyond the interviews and their prep work has the effect of pulling punches. Nixon lands his blows, Frost counters. And Ron Howard?

He gets the decision, but it’s just a decision on points.

Reviewed by Roger Moore THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL Starring: Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Connelly Directed by: Scott Derrickson Rated: M (for medium level violence) 104 minutes The remake of the sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still stars Keanu Reeves, an actor whose passive stare and inexpressive monotone would seem to make him ideally suited to play a space

alien, and Jennifer Connelly, an actress so preternaturally humourless and glowering that she seems to have had a stick lodged in her posterior since 1998.

This is not a Hollywood pairing for the ages.

Reeves requires a co-star with pluck and quirk – someone who can make the actor’s woodenness seem like it’s part of the joke, like Sandra Bullock in Speed or Diane Keaton in Something’s Gotta Give. Alas, Connelly doesn’t look like she’s heard a joke in years; and watching these two performers try to generate sparks or emotion – or whatever the heck they’re supposed to be generating here – quickly turns into chore. “The Day the Earth Stood Inert” is more like it.

Reeves plays Klaatu, an alien who arrives in Central Park, in the company of an immense robot and a giant floating orb, and then immediately asks to address the United Nations. But the tough-as-nails secretary of defence (Kathy Bates, looking like the unfortunate love child of Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright) insists that Klattu be sedated and interrogated. Enter Dr. Helen Benson (Connelly), a Princeton University scientist who sees a glimmer of decency in Klaatu’s eyes and helps him escape from the United States government’s clutches.

Released in 1951, the Robert Wise-directed original is a seminal text in any study of post-World War II/Cold War-era cinema: Klaatu tells the terrified citizenry that unless they begin to behave civilly to one another, he and his robot pal Gort will wipe out humanity in order to salvage planet Earth. This remake, written

by David Scarpa, updates the central premise for a more ecologically sensitive era, but otherwise it’s pretty much the same: Klaatu and Gort, having observed the Earth for decades, believe that the planet is much too precious a commodity to be left to the devices of the bunch of people who inhabit it.

The end-of-the-world genre requires both imagination (remember New York City freezing solid in The Day After Tomorrow?) and ruthlessness (remember the quivering zombies trying to gob-

ble up Will Smith whole in I Am Legend?). Directed by Scott Derrickson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose), The Day the Earth Stood Still has neither.

For most of its running time, the movie piles belaboured exposition atop dopey contrivances atop corny sentimentality (in this version, Dr. Helen has a churlish stepchild, played by Jaden Smith, whose father was killed in the Iraq War). By the time John Cleese turns up, as a Nobel prize winner for his “biological altruism,” it’s a minor miracle that anyone in the cast is able to keep a straight face. (Indeed, the scene in which Cleese watches in awe as Reeves writes out an impossibly convoluted math equation on a chalkboard qualifies as an instant camp classic.)

The mayhem, when it finally arrives, is too little and way too cheesy. After having a massive drill bit unsuccessfully applied to his skull, Gort decides to unleash a swarm of metallic insects, which seems to have the power to eat through all matter. Fun the first few times – especially when those critters chomp their way through Giant Stadium – but a tad tedious after the sixth or seventh such scene. More often, the CGI looks cheap and cartoonish – particularly the sections involving Gort, who is rendered as a cross between an overgrown Iron Man doll and an Oscar statuette.

With its easily digestible lessons about the importance of treating your surroundings with care, and believing that even the most hard-hearted souls are capable of change, The Day the Earth Stood Still will probably resonate best with the pre-teens in the crowd, who might not necessarily care about the sluggish direction or the considerable gaps in logic (if Klaatu and Gort can land in Central Park, and place floating orbs all across the planet, can’t they just beam themselves directly into the United Nations)?

Everyone else would be much better off staying home and revisiting Armageddon or Deep Impact, which – compared to this movie – are models of intelligence, wit and complexity.

Reviewed by Christopher Kelly INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009 95

see life / dvds At the centre of the story is Don Draper (Jon Hamm of Providence), whose cool public reserve masks inner turmoil. Like an aging gunfighter beset by younger, faster rivals, Draper is fighting to keep his perch atop Sterling Cooper, but the ideas don’t come as quickly as they used to – especially when it comes to the agency’s prized tobacco account.

Increasingly testy government regulators, muttering about cancer, have warned that ads can no longer boast that cigarettes cure coughs or build strong bodies. Tobacco-company executives are outraged – “What is this, communism?” grumbles one – and Draper is worried. “All I have is a crush-proof box and `four out of five dead people smoke your brand,’ “ he confides to a girlfriend.

“Next time you see me, there’ll be a bunch of young executives picking meat off my bones.”

The most ambitious of those young rivals is Pete, a new hire whose professional ambitions are exceeded only by his voracious sexual appetite for the girls (and that’s what everybody calls them) in the steno pool. “I bet the whole world looks like one great big brassiere strap just waiting to be snapped,” Draper snaps at Pete after one particularly raw round of sexual banter.

In truth, Pete’s regard for the office’s women as sexual playthings differs from the other men’s only in its crudity. The relentless sexism of the males in Mad Men, and the kittenish response of the females, is like forgotten film footage of a lost world (though a Swinging in the Sixties, quick look at early 1960s accounts of women in the workplace like Sex and the Single Girl and Coffee, Tea Or Me? will confirm was it really like this? its accuracy).

It’s not merely that Peggy (Elisabeth Moss, The West Wing), the agency’s naive but ambitious new steno, must endure a lecture Mad Men (“Easy women don’t find husbands”) from her gynaecologist when Starring: Jon Hamm, Elisabeth Moss, Vincent Kartheiser, she asks him for birth-control pills. Or her instructions from a January Jones, Christina Hendricks, Bryan Batt female office manager to stock her desk with aspirin, Band-Aids Created by: Matthew Weiner and whiskey: “Most of the time they’re looking for something between a mother and a waitress. The rest of the time, well.” It’s They’re glib and they’re smart and they’re cynical; they take that she accepts the treatment as her due, the hazards a working their martinis dry and their secretaries loose; they believe in nothing, girl endures in her eternal quest to snag a rich husband.

Of course, this whole world is teetering. As Mad Men opens, except that anything can be sold as long as it’s packaged with a catchy slogan and a picture of a busty blond. They think the world is their the crooner ballad “Band Of Gold” is playing on the soundtrack, playground, though it’s really the Titanic moments away from the a signal that this is the 1960s not of the Beatles but the Rat Pack.

Soon enough, the cynicism of the advertising men and their coniceberg. Welcome to the wild, doomed universe of the Mad Men. They were the account executives who worked in the adver- temporaries will give way to alienation; Helen Gurley Brown and Frank Sinatra to Betty Friedan tising agencies stacked high in and Woodstock. A WASP forskyscrapers along New York’s tress like Sterling Cooper, where Madison Avenue. In 1960, when “The fascinating Mad Men is set they have to bring up a stray AMC’s new drama series takes in the Sterling Cooper Advertising Jew from the mailroom to pose place, the Mad Men were the as a copywriter to placate an high priests of the gaudy new Agency, which sells everything from uncomfortable departmentAmerican consumer society cigarettes to candidates to a seemingly store client, will be swept into that had risen from the ashes of the dustbin of history.

World War II. Everything they endlessly gullible American public The world they inhabited touched turned to gold, including the women who were starting to enter the U.S. workforce in didn’t last long; it was a blip, a brief interregnum between the grim resolve of the Depression and World War II and the anarlarge numbers.

The fascinating Mad Men is set in the Sterling Cooper Advertising chy sewn by the Baby Boomers as they came of age. It probably Agency, which sells everything from cigarettes to candidates to a wasn’t a very nice place to live. But taking a visit in Mad Men is seemingly endlessly gullible American public. Their success has bred a captivating experience.

The DVD box set contains all 13 episodes from season one, an easy contempt: for business, for rules, for themselves. “Shall we drink before the meeting, or after?” one executive smirks to another along with audio commentaries on various episodes, and behind as they get ready to pitch a new campaign to a client. Another chides the scenes featurettes.

Reviewed by Glenn Garvin his boss, “You’re a whore!” only to get a smart salute in return.

Mad Men – the complete first season

96 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM January 2009