From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Feb 1 01:05:12 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 1 Feb 2010 01:05:12 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] 'Nuremberg' war crimes prosecution against Blair to be launched Message-ID: <9681834649A84733BE5CEF7059C5D40E@agingCHS072729> [I can't imagine this will get anywhere. The criminal elite, I'm sure, have all the angles covered, whether by outright bribe, or if that isn't sufficient, death threat. Moreover, it would set a "dangerous" precedent. Watch this one close to see how a "legal" system under "democracy" really works!] Daily Mail 30th January 2010 * Chilcot War Inquiry: Professor to launch 'Nuremberg' war crimes prosecution against Blair* By Glen Owen Plans to bring a war crimes prosecution against Tony Blair based on last week's bombshell evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry have been launched by a leading law professor. The move could see Mr Blair follow former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic into a dock in The Hague. Professor Bill Bowring says the revelation that the Government rejected Foreign Office warnings not to invade Iraq means there is a good chance Mr Blair can be 'investigated, at the very least' for war crimes. 'We now know that the Government was explicitly warned beforehand that the UK risked being prosecuted for going to war,' said Prof Bowring. He says that he will deploy the same law used to convict the killers of Garry Newlove, the Cheshire father of three kicked to death in front of his family in 2007, and Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials in 1945-46. He is drafting a submission to the International Criminal Court (ICC) arguing that Mr Blair is guilty under the law of 'joint enterprise', which holds people responsible for the actions of a wider group if they know they are involved in criminal enterprises. It means the former Prime Minister would be liable for any crimes committed by US forces, such as disproportionate bombing. More... *Chilcot War Inquiry: We STILL think Blair lied, say 8 out of 10 On Tuesday, Sir Michael Wood, the chief legal adviser to the Foreign Office from 2001 to 2006, said he warned the then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw that invading Iraq without UN backing would 'amount to the crime of aggression' and could lead to the prosecution of British soldiers and politicians. Mr Straw rejected the warning. Prof Bowring said the April 2002 meeting between Mr Blair and George Bush at the President's Texas ranch, described as the moment the agreement to invade was 'signed in blood', would be critical in the case. 'Joint enterprise' was used to convict the killers of Mr Newlove in 2008. Though one kick killed Mr Newlove, three men were convicted of his murder because they were aware they were engaged in joint criminality. The ICC's chief prosecutor has said that he could 'envisage' a situation in which Mr Blair found himself in the dock. An ICC spokeswoman said that the mandate of the chief prosecutor's office covered the conduct of Allied forces in the war, but would not comment on Prof Bowring's specific legal argument. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Feb 1 12:03:48 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 1 Feb 2010 12:03:48 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Environmental Determinism: a critique of Jared Diamond et al Message-ID: <> http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/hickel010210.html MRZine 01.02.10 Africa, Nature, and the March of the Development Technocrats by Jason Hickel "Development," I've discovered, operates as a flagrantly racist discourse in some guises. Scrambling to explain the reasons for Africa's perpetual poverty and apparently incurable misery, laypersons in the West point to Africans' "savagery" and alleged incapacity for civilization. This is not just a fringe opinion; even among putatively educated individuals such nonsense recurs with disturbing frequency. In an attempt to defend Africa and Africans against the cancerous ignorance that this model propagates, a collection of more thoughtful intellectuals and development theorists -- Jared Diamond and Jeffrey Sachs among them -- have proposed an alternative, more liberal-minded approach to understanding Africa's difficulties. Instead of blaming underdevelopment on the presumed genetic inferiority of black people, they insist instead that we cast our critical gaze to nature -- to the environmental conditions that Africans inhabit. In development circles the theory is known as environmental determinism, and it attempts to explain persistent poverty in Africa as the consequence of material forces outside the realm of human agency that have made it difficult for Africa to develop, suggesting that Africa's climate, geology, and natural resource portfolio has ultimately determined its economic trajectory. Compared to the racist assumptions that infuse popular pontifications about African underdevelopment, environmental determinism seems like a breath of progressive fresh air. But a closer look shows that, while it avoids victim-blaming, it still smuggles in a number of insidious claims that connive to direct attention away from the real issues at stake. Before getting to the critique, let's deal with the theory on its own terms. Environmental determinism looks as far back into the geological past as the breakup of Gondwana -- the ancient supercontinent -- to show that plate tectonics conspired to grant Africa a coastline with few natural harbors and a gradient too steep to allow easy river transportation, making regional integration difficult. In addition, the relatively older age of Africa's geological profile means that its topsoils have been weathered to the point of deep depletion, rendering most ecological zones unsuitable for productive agriculture. The notorious Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) also makes a strong appearance in the arguments of environmental determinists. This unique weather pattern pits dry continental winds against wet oceanic winds to create an annual precipitation cycle that oscillates between two dramatically different seasons: rainy and dry. The rainy season is characterized by concentrated downpours, and the dry by often extreme drought. The result: flash floods, cutting erosion, and topsoil degeneration that further militates against sustained agricultural pursuits. Furthermore, the ITCZ weather pattern produces an environment in which a number of tropical diseases flourish, among them malaria, sleeping sickness, river blindness, and schistosomiasis. As the pathogens responsible for these devastating diseases gravitate toward verdant, well-watered areas, they render some of the otherwise most arable land hostile to human settlement. The two-season weather cycle also militates against settled agriculture in certain regions, necessitating nomadism or regular migrancy to urban centers, rendering peasants vulnerable to the dictates of a violent labor market and creating ideal conditions for HIV transmission. And so it goes -- a litany of arguments that prove that Africa's problems are not necessarily the fault of Africans, but the inevitable outcome of nature's capricious designs. But while its observations are not untrue, as a standalone theory of underdevelopment, environmental determinism has some serious limitations. First, the obvious objections. The correlation between environment and development is indeterminate; there are many regions in the world with hostile geological and climactic characteristics that have nonetheless managed to keep from descending into inveterate poverty. Second, the theory focuses on what Africa lacks rather than what Africa has, that being -- among other things -- vast natural resource wealth in the form of unprecedented petroleum reserves and mineral deposits. The question should not be what to do in the absence of resources, but how existing resources get used, how they are distributed, and who pockets the profits. In these terms, it becomes clear that environmental determinism completely elides both history and politics. It elides history by ignoring past European involvement with Africa through the slave trade, colonialism, and resource extraction. It elides politics in that it ignores the present relations of power -- African, American, Chinese, and European -- that continue to develop the continent's resources in the interests of some while marginalizing others, through debt-manipulation, structural adjustment, and neoliberal trade arrangements. Because environmental determinism posits an ahistorical and apolitical analysis of the problem, it lends itself naturally to solutions that ignore how inequalities have been and continue to be generated out of the capitalist world system. We're led to believe, for example, that a massive infusion of aid and modern technology to improve agriculture, basic health, education, power, and sanitation will help clear the hurdles posed by a hostile natural world. As Jeffrey Sachs (author of the popular messianic treatise The End of Poverty) and other development technocrats have it, the solution lies in the western aid paradigm of the Monterrey Consensus and the Millennium Development Goals. Proponents of this approach are not as callous and blithely myopic as those who insist that Africans -- given their independence from colonial rule -- bear responsibility for their own problems and should pull themselves up by their bootstraps. However, they accomplish a similar shifting of blame -- a sleight of hand -- that directs attention away from the pathologies of power that lie behind the phenomenon of underdevelopment. They want us to imagine a world in which their two billion desperately poor neighbors can be raised up to decent middle-class living standards without any restructuring of the capitalist world system and its inherently uneven division of labor, production, consumption, and emission. Western development technocrats content themselves with ahistorical and apolitical solutions to poverty and underdevelopment in Africa because to tackle the real issues at stake would run up against Western economic interests. It would mean deleting debt, promoting fairer international trade, eliminating agricultural dumping, and requiring multinational corporations to pay living wages. Instead, concerned Westerners want to feel good about helping while maintaining the system that supports their lifestyles, refusing to face the fact that the wealth and privilege of their nations -- and, ironically, the very presence of the surplus that they can dispense so liberally in aid -- depend on a system of extraction and exploitation that necessarily generates inequality. As the dependency theorists have so long insisted, the wealth of the West is intimately bound up with the poverty of Africa, and vice versa. Poverty is not a problem of nature, it's a problem of power. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jason Hickel is an instructor as well as a doctoral candidate at the Department of Anthropology of University of Virginia. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Feb 1 18:09:37 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 1 Feb 2010 18:09:37 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Plan to oust Saddam drawn up two years before the invasion Message-ID: Plan to oust Saddam drawn up two years before the invasion Secret document signalled support for Iraqi dissidents and promised aid, oil and trade deals in return for regime change By Michael Savage, Political Correspondent Monday, 1 February 2010 A secret plan to foster an internal coup against Saddam Hussein was drawn up by the Government two years before the invasion of Iraq, The Independent can reveal. Whitehall officials drafted the "contract with the Iraqi people" as a way of signalling to dissenters in Iraq that an overthrow of Saddam would be supported by Britain. It promised aid, oil contracts, debt cancellations and trade deals once the dictator had been removed. Tony Blair's team saw it as a way of creating regime change in Iraq even before the 9/11 attack on New York. The document, headed "confidential UK/US eyes", was finalised on 11 June 2001 and approved by ministers. It has not been published by the Iraq inquiry but a copy has been obtained by The Independent and can be revealed for the first time today. It states: "We want to work with an Iraq which respects the rights of its people, lives at peace with its neighbours and which observes international law. "The Iraqi people have the right to live in a society based on the rule of law, free from repression, torture and arbitrary arrest; to enjoy respect for human rights, economic freedom and prosperity," the contract reads. "The record of the current regime in Iraq suggests that its priorities remain elsewhere. "Those who wish to promote change in Iraq deserve our support," it concludes. "We look forward to the day when Iraq rejoins the international community." A new regime was to be offered "debt rescheduling" through the Paris Club, an informal group of the richest 19 economies, given help from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and handed an EU aid and trade deal. Companies were to be invited to invest in its oil fields. A "comprehensive retraining programme" was to be offered to Iraqi professionals. During his evidence to the inquiry last week, Mr Blair said it was only after 9/11 that serious attention was given to removing Saddam as the attack changed the "calculus of risk". However, another classified document released by the Iraq inquiry on Friday night showed that No 10 explicitly saw the Contract with the Iraqi People as an early tool to remove the former Iraqi dictator. A memo issued in March 2001 by Sir John Sawers, then Mr Blair's foreign policy adviser, cited the document under the heading "regime change". "Regime change. The US and UK would re-make the case against Saddam Hussein. We would issue a Contract with the Iraqi People, setting out our goal of a peaceful, law-abiding Iraq," the memo states. "The Contract would make clear that the Iraqi regime's record and behaviour made it impossible for Iraq to meet the criteria for rejoining the international community without fundamental change." Officials planned to release the contract alongside tougher sanctions against Saddam's regime being negotiated in 2001. When no agreement was reached and the US began to seek more active measures to remove the Baghdad administration after 9/11, the contract was dropped. The document was not released by the Iraq inquiry, despite being cited as significant by Foreign Office officials. Sir William Patey, the Government's head of Middle East policy at the time it was drafted, said it was "our way in the Foreign Office of trying to signal that we didn't think Saddam was a good thing and it would be great if he went". He said it was used in place of an "explicit policy of trying to get rid of him". "It was a way of signalling to the Iraqi people that because we don't have a policy of regime change, it doesn't mean to say we're happy with Saddam Hussein, and there is life after Saddam with Iraq being reintegrated into the international community," he said. Ed Davey, the Foreign Affairs spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, said the document called into question Mr Blair's evidence and should have been made public before his hearing on Friday. "A plan to back Iraqis seeking to oust Saddam may have been far less damaging and certainly more legal than what happened. Yet it shows that Blair's intent was always for regime change from an early stage and before 9/11," he said. "Yet again, it seems that critical documents have not been declassified, hampering the questioning of Blair and others." * Tony Blair is to be recalled by the Chilcot Inquiry to give further evidence, according to The Guardian. It claims that Mr Blair will be questioned in both public and in private after the panel raised concerns that his evidence relating to the legality of the invasion conflicted with that given by the former Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Feb 1 21:40:51 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 1 Feb 2010 21:40:51 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The Battle of the Titans: JP Morgan Versus Goldman Sachs Message-ID: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17280 The Battle of the Titans: JP Morgan Versus Goldman Sachs Or Why the Market Was Down for 7 Days in a Row by Ellen Brown Global Research, January 29, 2010 Web of Debt - 2010-01-28 We are witnessing an epic battle between two banking giants, JPMorgan Chase (Paul Volcker) and Goldman Sachs (Geithner/Summers/Rubin). Left strewn on the battleground could be your pension fund and 401K. The late Libertarian economist Murray Rothbard wrote that U.S. politics since 1900, when William Jennings Bryan narrowly lost the presidency, has been a struggle between two competing banking giants, the Morgans and the Rockefellers. The parties would sometimes change hands, but the puppeteers pulling the strings were always one of these two big-money players. No popular third party candidate had a real chance at winning, because the bankers had the exclusive power to create the national money supply and therefore held the winning cards. In 2000, the Rockefellers and the Morgans joined forces, when JPMorgan and Chase Manhattan merged to become JPMorgan Chase Co. Today the battling banking titans are JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, an investment bank that gained notoriety for its speculative practices in the 1920s. In 1928, it launched the Goldman Sachs Trading Corp., a closed-end fund similar to a Ponzi scheme. The fund failed in the stock market crash of 1929, marring the firm's reputation for years afterwards. Former Treasury Secretaries Henry Paulson, Robert Rubin, and Larry Summers all came from Goldman, and current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner rose through the ranks of government as a Summers/Rubin prot?g?. One commentator called the U.S. Treasury "Goldman Sachs South." Goldman's superpower status comes from something more than just access to the money spigots of the banking system. It actually has the ability to manipulate markets. Formerly just an investment bank, in 2008 Goldman magically transformed into a bank holding company. That gave it access to the Federal Reserve's lending window; but at the same time it remained an investment bank, aggressively speculating in the markets. The upshot was that it can now borrow massive amounts of money at virtually 0% interest, and it can use this money not only to speculate for its own account but to bend markets to its will. But Goldman Sachs has been caught in this blatant market manipulation so often that the JPMorgan faction of the banking empire has finally had enough. The voters too have evidently had enough, as demonstrated in the recent upset in Massachusetts that threw the late Senator Ted Kennedy's Democratic seat to a Republican. That pivotal loss gave Paul Volcker, chairman of President Obama's newly formed Economic Recovery Advisory Board, an opportunity to step up to the plate with some proposals for serious banking reform. Unlike the string of Treasury Secretaries who came to the government through the revolving door of Goldman Sachs, former Federal Reserve Chairman Volcker came up through Chase Manhattan Bank, where he was vice president before joining the Treasury. On January 27, market commentator Bob Chapman wrote in his weekly investment newsletter The International Forecaster: "A split has occurred between the paper forces of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. Mr. Volcker represents Morgan interests. Both sides are Illuminists, but the Morgan side is tired of Goldman's greed and arrogance. . . . Not that JP Morgan Chase was blameless, they did their looting and damage to the system as well, but not in the high handed arrogant way the others did. The recall of Volcker is an attempt to reverse the damage as much as possible. That means the influence of Geithner, Summers, Rubin, et al will be put on the back shelf at least for now, as will be the Goldman influence. It will be slowly and subtly phased out. . . . Washington needs a new face on Wall Street, not that of a criminal syndicate." Goldman's crimes, says Chapman, were that it "got caught stealing. First in naked shorts, then front-running the market, both of which they are still doing, as the SEC looks the other way, and then selling MBS-CDOs to their best clients and simultaneously shorting them." Volcker's proposal would rein in these abuses, either by ending the risky "proprietary trading" (trading for their own accounts) engaged in by the too-big-to-fail banks, or by forcing them to downsize by selling off those portions of their businesses engaging in it. Until recently, President Obama has declined to support Volcker's plan, but on January 21 he finally endorsed it. The immediate reaction of the market was to drop - and drop, day after day. At least, that appeared to be the reaction of "the market." Financial analyst Max Keiser suggests a more sinister possibility. Goldman, which has the power to manipulate markets with its high-speed program trades, may be engaging in a Mexican standoff. The veiled threat is, "Back off on the banking reforms, or stand by and watch us continue to crash your markets." The same manipulations were evident in the bank bailout forced on Congress by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson in September 2008. In Keiser's January 23 broadcast with co-host Stacy Herbert, he explains how Goldman's manipulations are done. Keiser is a fast talker, so this transcription is not verbatim, but it is close. He says: "High frequency trading accounts for 70% of trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Ordinarily, a buyer and a seller show up on the floor, and a specialist determines the price of a trade that would satisfy buyer and seller, and that's the market price. If there are too many sellers and not enough buyers, the specialist lowers the price. High frequency trading as conducted by Goldman means that before the specialist buys and sells and makes that market, Goldman will electronically flood the specialist with thousands and thousands of trades to totally disrupt that process and essentially commandeer that process, for the benefit of siphoning off nickels and dimes for themselves. Not only are they siphoning cash from the New York Stock Exchange but they are also manipulating prices. What I see as a possibility is that next week, if the bankers on Wall Street decide they don't want to be reformed in any way, they simply set the high frequency trading algorithm to sell, creating a huge negative bias for the direction of stocks. And they'll basically crash the market, and it will be a standoff. The market was down three days in a row, which it hasn't been since last summer. It's a game of chicken, till Obama says, 'Okay, maybe we need to rethink this.'" But the President hasn't knuckled under yet. In his State of the Union address on January 27, he did not dwell long on the issue of bank reform, but he held to his position. He said: "We can't allow financial institutions, including those that take your deposits, to take risks that threaten the whole economy. The House has already passed financial reform with many of these changes. And the lobbyists are already trying to kill it. Well, we cannot let them win this fight. And if the bill that ends up on my desk does not meet the test of real reform, I will send it back." What this "real reform" would look like was left to conjecture, but Bob Chapman fills in some blanks and suggests what might be needed for an effective overhaul: "The attempt will be to bring the financial system back to brass tacks. . . . That would include little or no MBS and CDOs, the regulation of derivatives and hedge funds and the end of massive market manipulation, both by Treasury, Fed and Wall Street players. Congress has to end the 'President's Working Group on Financial Markets,' or at least limit its use to real emergencies. . . . The Glass-Steagall Act should be reintroduced into the system and lobbying and campaign contributions should end. . . . No more politics in lending and banks should be limited to a lending ratio of 10 to 1. . . . It is bad enough they have the leverage that they have. State banks such as North Dakota's are a better idea." On January 28, the predictable reaction of "the market" was to fall for the seventh straight day. The battle of the Titans was on. Ellen Brown developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In Web of Debt, her latest book, she turns those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and "the money trust." She shows how this private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her eleven books include Forbidden Medicine, Nature's Pharmacy (co-authored with Dr. Lynne Walker), and The Key to Ultimate Health (co-authored with Dr. Richard Hansen). Her websites are www.webofdebt.com, www.ellenbrown.com, and www.public-banking.com. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Feb 1 22:00:42 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 1 Feb 2010 22:00:42 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The U.S. and its unruly Latin American 'backyard' Message-ID: <401671B0397D4050A081DB1B75C076B4@agingCHS072729> http://alainet.org/active/35774%1A=en ALAI, Am?rica Latina en Movimiento 2010-01-26 The U.S. and its unruly Latin American 'backyard' ?ric Toussaint U.S. aggressiveness towards the Venezuelan, Bolivian, and Ecuadorian governments has increased in response to diminishing U.S. influence over the Latin American and Caribbean area, which Washington has been blaming on Hugo Ch?vez in particular (and also on Cuba, but Cuba is a much older story). Several examples illustrate the United States' waning control During the negotiations that followed Colombia's attack on Ecuador on 1 March 2008,[1] instead of appealing to the Organization of American States (OAS) of which the United States is a member and which is headquartered in Washington, the Latin American presidents held a meeting in Santo Domingo, within the framework of the Rio Group,[2] without inviting their great neighbour from the North, and clearly laid the blame on Colombia, a U.S. ally. In 2008, Honduras -- traditionally and wholly subordinated to U.S. policy-- joined Petrocaribe, which was created on the initiative of Venezuela to provide oil to the non-exporting countries in the region at a lower price than that practised on the world market. Honduras also joined the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA), another initiative for regional integration launched by Venezuela and Cuba. In December 2008, another important summit took place bringing together most of the Latin American presidents in Salvador de Bah?a, with the noteworthy presence of the Cuban Head of State, Ra?l Castro, next to whom was seated the Mexican president, Felipe Calder?n, who until recently had adopted a hostile attitude towards Cuba, to keep in line with the directives from Washington. A few months later, the OAS decided, in spite of U.S. opposition, to reintegrate Cuba, which had been excluded in 1964. In 2009, Ecuador also joined ALBA, and terminated the U.S. army's lease of the Manta air base. Washington has systematically attempted to thwart the shift towards the left As the following examples illustrate, since the beginning of the 2000s Washington has systematically attempted to thwart the shift towards the left made by the peoples of Latin America: supporting the coup d'Etat against Ch?vez in April 2002, offering massive financial support to the anti-Ch?vez opposition movement, supporting the Venezuelan bosses' strike from December 2002 to January 2003, the active intervention of the U.S. ambassador in Bolivia to prevent the election of Evo Morales, the World Bank's remote control intervention in Ecuador in 2005 to obtain the resignation of Rafael Correa, who was then the Minister of Economy and Finance, the organization of joint military operations in the Southern Cone,[3] the resurrection of the Fourth Fleet,[4] and a very significant increase in military aid to its Colombian ally, which serves as a bridgehead in the Andean region. In addition, to overcome the failure of the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas) in November 2005, Washington has been negotiating and/or signing as many bilateral free trade agreements as possible (with Chile, Uruguay, Peru, Colombia, Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Costa Rica). Coup d'Etat in Honduras U.S. aggressiveness towards what it sees as a dangerous "Chavist contagion" in Latin America went up another notch in June-July 2009 with the military coup d'Etat in Honduras, which overthrew the liberal president Manuel Zelaya just as he was calling for a referendum on the election of a constituent assembly by universal suffrage. The Pentagon had resented this shift to the left by a president it thought would behave obediently because Honduras is one of its subordinate countries in the region. If a constituent assembly had been elected by universal suffrage, it would have inevitably had to rule on the demand for agrarian reform, which would have called into question the enormous privileges of the major landowners and foreign agri-business transnationals present in the country. It is mainly for this reason that the local capitalist class, a significant number of whom come from the agrarian sector, supported the coup. It is also important to take account of the fact that this capitalist class is a class of compradors who are completely turned towards import-export business and dependent on good relations with the United States. This explains why it supported the signing of a free trade agreement with Washington and was opposed to ALBA. Zelaya's order for an increase in the minimum wage is also one of the factors that pushed the bosses to plot his overthrow.[5] In addition, we know that Zelaya intended to ask Washington to leave the Soto Cano air base located less than 65 miles from the capital so that it could be converted into a civilian airport. Even imagining - which is highly improbable - that the Honduran generals acted on their own initiative in collaboration with the local capitalist class, it is inconceivable that Roberto Micheletti, the puppet president designated by the military and by corporate and liberal party leaders, could have stayed in power if the U.S. government had vigorously opposed it. The U.S. has been training Honduran generals for decades, and has an important military base in Soto Cano (with 500 American soldiers stationed there on a permanent basis); moreover, as Hillary Clinton admitted after the coup, the U.S. has massively funded the opposition to President Zelaya.[6] In addition, U.S. transnational companies, particularly in the agri-business sector, are well-established in this country, which they consider to be a banana republic. The seven U.S. military bases in Colombia In order to further increase the threat against Venezuela and Ecuador, Washington got President ?lvaro Uribe to announce in July 2009 that seven Colombian bases would be handed over to the American army, thereby enabling their fighter aircraft to reach all regions of the South American continent (except Cape Horn).[7] It is no coincidence that only a short time separated the military coup in Honduras and the Colombian President's announcement: Washington was clearly indicating that it wanted to immediately halt the extension of ALBA and nip this 21st century socialism in the bud. It would be irresponsible to underestimate Washington's capacity to do damage, or the continuity characterizing U.S. foreign policy in spite of the election of Barack Obama and a softer rhetoric. While President Manuel Zelaya, who returned to his country secretly on 21 September 2009, was taking refuge in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa and the putschists were violently repressing demonstrations by partisans of the constitutional President, closing down opposition media, and on September 27 declaring a 45-day state of siege, all that Lewis Amselem, n?2 representative of Washington at the OAS, had to say was: "Zelaya's return is irresponsible and foolish." Meanwhile, for several days Hillary Clinton failed to condemn the extended curfew imposed by Micheletti to prevent people from gathering in front of the Brazilian embassy. The agreement reached on 30 October under the auspices of Washington between representatives of Manuel Zelaya and those of Roberto Micheletti expressly stipulated that the parties undertake not to call either directly or indirectly for the convocation of a constituent assembly or for any consultation of the people (point 2 of the agreement). In addition, it did not explicitly allow for the return of Manuel Zelaya to the presidency of Honduras in order to finish his term (which is due to end in January 2010). Roberto Micheletti and his partisans then decided not to restore the presidency to Zelaya, who then appealed to the population not to participate in the general elections called for 28 November 2009. The main left-wing candidate for the presidency, Carlos Reyes, together with a hundred or so candidates from different parties (including a sector of the liberal party), withdrew his candidature. On 10 November 2009, an embarrassed Washington announced at a meeting of the OAS that it would recognize the results of the elections of 29 November 2009. On the eve of the elections, human rights organizations had recorded the assassination of more than twenty political opposition activists since the coup d'Etat, 211 people injured during the repression, close to 2,000 cases of illegal detention, two attempted kidnappings and 114 political prisoners accused of sedition. Media opposing the coup were either shut down or harassed. The UN, the OAS, the European Union, UNASUR, the member countries of the Rio Group and ALBA had decided not to send observers. Estimates of the number of citizens who did not vote vary, depending on the source. According to the pro-putschist electoral Supreme Tribunal, the percentage of non-voters was 39%, while several independent organizations advance figures between 53% and 78%. In spite of this, State Department spokesman Ian Kelly considered these illegal and fraudulent elections "a necessary and important step forward."[8] Washington recognized the election to the presidency of Porfirio Lobo of the National Party, a hardline representative of the property barons and the political right who organized the coup d'Etat. The U.S. Ambassador in Tegucigalpa declared that the elections were "a great celebration of democracy" and said the U.S. would work with Porfirio Lobo, whose nickname is Pepe. "Pepe Lobo is a man of great political experience", Ambassador Llorens told HRN radio. "I wish him luck, and the United States will work with him for the good of both our countries. [...] Our relations will be very strong." While the Honduran parliament decided on 2 December 2009 not to restore President Zelaya to office up to the end of his term on 27 January 2010, Washington continues to support the process put in motion by the putschist government.[9] This creates an extremely serious precedent because Washington has repeatedly stated that the ousting of Zelaya definitely constituted a coup d'Etat.[10] Supporting an electoral process stemming from a coup d'Etat and working to promote international recognition of both the authorities that perpetrated the coup and those benefiting from it gives clear encouragement to putschist aspirants who choose to rally to the Washington camp. This clearly applies to a large number of right-wing people in Paraguay. Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo could be overthrown In December 2009 the liberal senator Alfredo Lu?s Jaeggli, chair of the domestic commission and of the budget commission, called President Fernando Lugo to be overthrown, whom he charged with wishing to enforce the Chavist model of 21st century socialism, like Manuel Zelaya. Alfredo Jaeggli, whose party belongs to the current government and represents its main 'support' in parliament, claims that the coup in Honduras was not really a coup. He sees the overthrow of Manuel Zelaya, and what has been done by the de facto regime since, as perfectly legal.[11] He would like the Paraguayan parliament to initiate a political trial against Fernando Lugo, so as to remove him from his function and replace him with the Republic's Vice-president, namely the right-wing liberal Federico Franco. Senator Jaeggli's complaint has nothing to do with Lugo's moral behaviour, his attack is focused on his political options. He complains that he does not follow the lead of countries that carried out a successful economic reform, such as Chile under Pinochet and Argentina under Carlos Menem.[12] Clearly, Honduras can easily become a dangerous precedent as it opens the door to military coups condoned by some state institutions, such as the parliament or the Supreme Court. Conclusion In the light of this experience, we can see that the Obama administration is in no hurry to break with the methods used by its predecessors: witness the massive funding of different opposition movements within the context of its policy to "strengthen democracy",[13] the launching of media campaigns to discredit governments that do not share its political agenda (Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Manuel Zelaya's Honduras and so on), maintaining the blockade of Cuba, the support for separatist movements in Bolivia (the media luna and the regional capital, Santa Cruz), in Ecuador (the city of Guayaquil and its province), and in Venezuela (the petroleum state of Zulia, the capital of which is Maraca?bo),[14] the support for military attacks, like the one perpetrated by Colombia in Ecuador in March 2008, as well as actions by Colombian or other paramilitary forces in Venezuela. The recent dispatch of 10,000 soldiers to Haiti in the wake of the January 2010 earthquake, as well as the potential support for a constitutional coup d'Etat planned by some sectors of the Paraguayan right to overthrow President Fernando Lugo in 2010, are among other threats posed by the U.S. policy in Latin America and the Caribbean that should be paid attention to in the coming weeks. (Translated by Charles La Via and Judith Harris) - Eric Toussaint, president of CADTM Belgium (Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt, www.cadtm.org ). He is the author of Bank of the South. An Alternative to the IMF-World Bank, VAK, Mumbai, India, 2007; The World Bank, A Critical Primer, Pluto Press, Between The Lines, David Philip, London-Toronto-Cape Town 2008; Your Money or Your Life, The Tyranny of Global Finance, Haymarket, Chicago, 2005. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] The Colombian army bombed and captured FARC rebels in a guerrilla camp in Ecuadorian territory, killing some twenty people, including civilians. It is important to know that although the Colombian army is extremely strong, it has very little presence on the Colombian-Ecuadorian border, a fact that has allowed FARC guerrillas to set up camps there, including one in which Ra?l Reyes, one of its main leaders in charge of international relations, was present at the time. Ecuador has regularly criticized Colombia for not providing adequate border control between these two countries. [2] Created in 1986, the Rio Group comprises 19 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean: Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, Ecuador, Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Dominican Republic, Venezuela, plus, on a rotating basis, one representative of the Caribbean Community (Caricom). [3] Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile [4] A structure created in 1943 to protect ships in the South Atlantic, and abolished in 1950. It officially resumed operations on 1 July 2008. [5] For an in-depth description of the sectors that backed the coup d'Etat, read Decio Machado's study (in Spanish), which provides a list of the companies and their CEOs that encouraged or actively supported the putschists: "Qui?nes apoyan al gobierno ileg?timo de Roberto Micheletti", http://www.cadtm.org/Quienes-apoyan-al-gobierno [6] Washington had paved the way for a putsch by massively financing the various opposition movements in the context of its policy to "strengthen democracy". A month before the coup, different organizations, business groups, political parties, high officials of the Catholic church and private media, all opposed to Manuel Zelaya's policies, grouped together in the coalition called "Democratic Civil Union of Honduras" in order to "reflect on how to put an end to it". (www.lefigaro.fr/international/2009/07/07/01003-20090707ARTFIG00310-zelaya-toujours-banni-du-honduras-.php). The majority of these groups received over US$ 50 million annually from USAID (the US Agency for International Development) and from NED (the National Endowment for Democracy) to "promote democracy" in Honduras. Read "Washington behind the Honduras coup: Here is the evidence", by EvaGolinger, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14390 [7] Eva Golinger on the website www.centrodealerta.org published two original documents produced by the U.S. Air Force regarding the agreements on the 7 bases concerned. The first document dates from May 2009 (i.e. before the agreement was publicly announced) and stresses the vital importance of one of the 7 bases, observing that it will, among other things, make possible the "full spectrum operations in a critical sub-region of our hemisphere where security and stability are under constant threat from narcotics-funded terroristinsurgencies, anti-U.S. governments, endemic poverty and recurring natural disasters." (http://www.centrodealerta.org/documentos_desclasificados/original_in_english_air_for.pdf). Eva Golinger adds the following comment: "It's not difficult to imagine which governments in South America are considered by Washington to be 'anti-U.S. governments'. The constant agressive declarations and statements emitted by the State and Defense Departments and the U.S. Congress against Venezuela and Bolivia, and even to some extent Ecuador, are evidence that the ALBA nations are the ones perceived by Washington as a 'constant threat'. To classify a country as 'anti-U.S.' is to consider it an enemy of the United States. In this context, it's obvious that the military agreement with Colombia is a reaction to a region the U.S. now considers full of 'enemies'." ("Official U.S. Air Force Document Reveals the True Intentions Behind the U.S.-Colombia Military Agreement" http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15951). [8] Quoted by AFP on 30 November 2009: "a necessary and important step forward" http://www.easybourse.com/bourse/actualite/honduran-elections-necessary-and-important-step-767041 [9] The right-wing Latin American governments who are allies of Washington (Colombia, Peru, Panama and Costa Rica) do likewise. [10] See also the press conference given by Arturo Valenzuela, n?2 of the State Department for the Western Hemisphere, on 30 November 2009: ".the election is a significant step in Honduras's return to the democratic and constitutional order after the 28 June coup." " . these elections are not elections that were planned by a de facto government at the last minute in order to whitewash their actions." "We recognize that there are results in Honduras for this election. That's quite clear. We recognize those results, and we commend Mr. Lobo for having won these elections." Arturo Valenzuela nevertheless sounded clearly embarassed when he declared in the same press conference: "The issue is whether the legitimate president of Honduras, who was overthrown in a coup d'Etat, will be returned to office by the congress on December 2nd, as per the San Jose-Tegucigalpa Accord. That was the accord that both sides signed at that time." http://www.state.gov/p/wha/rls/rm/2009/132777.htm The fact is that 3 days later, the Honduran parliament voted by an overwhelming majority against Zelaya's return to office, which did not deter Washington from continuing to support the de facto authorities. [11] On 17 December 2009 Alfredo Lu?s Jaeggli said on the Argentinian public radio: "The Honduran president, assuming the presidency with a liberal model, thereafter betrayed this model and replaced it with the Socialism of the twenty-first century. What happened in Honduras (Jaeggli clearly refers to the 28 June 2009 coup), excuse me, for me it is completely legal. " An audio version of the interview can be accessed at http://www.radionacional.com.ar/audios/el-senador-del-partido-liberal-habla-sobre-fernando-lugo-y-los-presuntos-planes-de-derrocamiento-en-paraguay.html [12] "Paraguay is the only country along with Haiti and Cuba that did not reform in order to modernize. You had your modernization; you know well with the Menem government, what I mean. Brazil also had it, as well as Uruguay, Bolivia, too, but unfortunately they had an involution. Paraguay does not, it is still as if in the 50s ..." "In Chile, (...) do you believe that the socialists in Chile are those who made the economy grow? They have not changed anything, not even the Chilean labour code. The Chilean labour code is still the code implemented by Pinochet!" [13] Eva Golinger explained : "(...) Obama called for an additional $320 million in "democracy promotion" funds for the 2010 budget just for use in Latin America. This is a substantially higher sum than the quantity requested and used in Latin America for "democracy promotion" by the Bush administration in its 8 years of government combined"! http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14390 [14] Because of the failure of the mobilizations in the media luna in Bolivia at the end of 2008 and of the right in Guayaquil, Ecuador, led by the city's mayor Jaime Nebot in September 2008, Washington has put its support on hold but may reactivate it if the context requires and allows it. The same may be said for the right in the state of Zulia in Venezuela. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Feb 1 22:51:23 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 1 Feb 2010 22:51:23 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] 'Climate emails hacked by spies' Message-ID: <635E593D2F9A4DE29F67BEC21245279B@agingCHS072729> The Independent Monday, 1 February 2010 'Climate emails hacked by spies' Interception bore hallmarks of foreign intelligence agency, says expert By Steve Connor, Science Editor A highly sophisticated hacking operation that led to the leaking of hundreds of emails from the Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia was probably carried out by a foreign intelligence agency, according to the Government's former chief scientist. Sir David King, who was Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser for seven years until 2007, said that the hacking and selective leaking of the unit's emails, going back 13 years, bore all the hallmarks of a co-ordinated intelligence operation - especially given their release just before the Copenhagen climate conference in December. The emails were stolen from a backup computer server used by the University of East Anglia. They contained private discussions between climate scientists that have embarrassed those involved, particularly Professor Phil Jones, who has stepped down from his post as head of the unit pending an independent inquiry into whether there is any evidence of scientific misconduct. He is not implicated in the hacking. In an interview with The Independent, Sir David suggested the email leaks were deliberately designed to destabilise Copenhagen and he dismissed the idea that it was a run-of-the-mill hacking. It was carried out by a team of skilled professionals, either on behalf of a foreign government or at the behest of anti-climate change lobbyists in the United States, he said. "A very clever nerd can cause a great deal of disruption and obviously make intelligence services very nervous, but a sophisticated intelligence operation is capable of yielding the sort of results we've seen here," Sir David said. "Quite simply, it's the sophistication of the operation. I know there's a possibility that they had a very good hacker working for these people, but it was an extraordinarily sophisticated operation. There are are several bodies of people who could do this sort of work. These are national intelligence agencies and it seems to me that it was the work of such a group of people," he said. More than 1,000 emails, and some 2,000 documents, were stolen from a university back-up server where remote access is difficult. This represents a small fraction of the total number of emails for the period from 1996 to 2009, suggesting they had been selected for the most incriminating phrases relating to possible scientific misconduct and breaches of the Freedom of Information Act. The leak of the emails in the weeks running up to the climate change conference in Copenhagen appeared to be carefully timed to destabilise the meeting. "I don't think that it's a coincidence that the stealing of the emails from the individuals involved in East Anglia was put out for publication one month before Copenhagen. That wasn't a coincidence," Sir David said. "The emails date back to 1996, so someone was collecting the data over many years. It looks like possibly the work of an intelligence service. What it was was a very well co-ordinated part of a campaign. It was a difficult piece of work to get that done. "I've no inside knowledge except for the fact that I did work with our [intelligence] agencies, and the American agencies, that I have some experience," he added. The existence of the stolen emails came to light on 17 November when someone tried to load them onto the RealClimate website run by climate scientists, including Gavin Schmidt of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Dr Schmidt said that the hackers were using a legitimate computer based in Turkey as a proxy server but the attack could have been launched from another computer anywhere in the world. He attempted to disable the hacking operation as it was taking place, but was prevented several times before finally succeeding because the hackers had penetrated deep into the website's database software. This required considerable skill and knowledge which an opportunistic hacker would not have had, he said. "That requires some kind of monitoring-tool set-up and required them to have more access than you would get by simply logging into the blog," Dr Schmidt said. Two days after the attempted RealClimate hack, the file of stolen emails appeared on a server used by a company called Tomcity operating from the Russian city of Tomsk in Siberia. However, again, the uploading could have been done by someone operating a proxy server anywhere else in the world. Experts have suggested that loading the email file onto a Tomsk computer server may have been a clumsy attempt to lay a trail to the door of the Russian intelligence service, which has since denied any involvement in the hacking incident. Some commentators in Russia have said that China had more to gain from destabilising the Copenhagen conference than Russia. Sir David said, however, that it was not possible to dismiss the possibility of Russia's involvement. "If it was a job done on behalf of a government, then I suppose there is the possibility that it could be the Russian intelligence agency," he said. "If it was a maverick group then I suppose it could be the Americans, but I am hazarding a guess as much as anyone else. The only thing is, I've worked within government and I've seen this in operation," Sir David added. "It was a sophisticated and expensive operation. In terms of the expense, there is the American lobby system which is a very likely source of finance. Right now, the American lobbyists are a very likely source of finance for this, so the finger must point to them," he said. Norfolk Constabulary is conducting an investigation into the hacking but said yesterday it would not comment on speculation that a foreign intelligence agency was involved. The University of East Anglia also said that it could not comment. Cyber crime: The 21st century threat *Espionage once conjured images of lonely spooks on foreign assignations during the height of the Cold War. Not any longer. The rise of capitalism, a free-market economy and an interconnected digital world have changed those terms of engagement. Last week Hillary Clinton issued a warning to China and Russia to tighten up their internet security amid a growing threat of international cyber crime. "We cannot afford in today's interconnected world to have too many instances ... where companies' accounts can be hacked into," she said. It came after Google threatened to end its operations in China following what it described as a "sophisticated and targeted" cyberattack on Google, Adobe and 20 other US companies. More recently MI5 has accused China of setting up so-called "honeytraps" with a view to obtaining sensitive commercial secrets from top UK companies. According to The Sunday Times, promotional gifts handed out at business trade shows included cameras and memory sticks have allegedly been found to contain bugs that provide the Chinese with remote access to users' computers. Estonia, too, has been a victim of cyber crime. In 2007 it was subject to a three-week cyber attack that saw hackers permeate firewalls and infiltrate websites of banks and political institutions, in a move that threatened to wipe out the country's digital infrastructure. Nato has now established a cyber-defence centre in the region and the FBI has despatched a computer security expert. Last year, Russian hackers were accused of a sophisticated cyber attack which temporarily shut down two social networking sites in order to silence a Georgian blogger critical of Moscow's policies. Kunal Dutta Dr Rajendra Pachauri *With his swept-back hair and wispy beard, Dr Rajendra Pachauri looks every inch the climate change visionary. And as chairman of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change who accepted a Nobel Peace Prize alongside Al Gore in 2007 he has become an international figurehead in the battle against global warming and one of the most powerful figures at the Copenhagen summit. But a spate of controversy over recent IPCC research papers and a resurgent mood among challengers to the theory of man-made climate change have led many to wonder who, exactly, he is. According to the "brief" two-page CV on his personal website, Dr Pachauri, 68, juggles his UN role with his position as chief executive of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) which has strong historic ties (although not for the past decade) with the Tata Group, India's largest privately-owned corporation which also owns Jaguar, Land Rover and steelmaker Corus in the UK. His critics say the other high-profile positions he holds - more than 20 - with banks, universities and think tanks could pose potential conflicts of interest with his UN role. Among his many directorships was one from 1999-2003 with the Indian Oil Corporation. Dr Pachauri says he receives no money for these roles. Yet he began his career as an engineer working with the Diesel Locomotive Works in Varanasi. Today, despite cooling relations with the Government, he is one of India's most famous figures, inhabiting the exclusive Golf Links area of Delhi where Lakshmi Mittal, Britain's richest man, owns a house and where, despite owning his own electric car, he was photographed this week being chauffeur-driven on the one-mile journey to his offices in a 1.8-litre Toyota. Perhaps most intriguingly, the cricket-loving environmentalist showed yet another side to his personality with the publication this month of a raunchy novel, Return to Almora, about an ageing academic looking back over his spiritual and sexual journey through life. Jonathan Brown =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Feb 2 09:54:39 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 2 Feb 2010 09:54:39 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Obama and the Supremes Stand Up for Slavery Message-ID: [Corporations are people; people can be classified as "unpersons", so if we torture "unpersons" then we really don't engage in torture! A oneupmanship on Orwell!] Dred Scott Redux: Obama and the Supremes Stand Up for Slavery Written by Chris Floyd Friday, 18 December 2009 14:18 While we were all out doing our Christmas shopping, the highest court in the land quietly put the kibosh on a few more of the remaining shards of human liberty. It happened earlier this week, in a discreet ruling that attracted almost no notice and took little time. In fact, our most august defenders of the Constitution did not have to exert themselves in the slightest to eviscerate not merely 220 years of Constitutional jurisprudence but also centuries of agonizing effort to lift civilization a few inches out of the blood-soaked mire that is our common human legacy. They just had to write a single sentence. Here's how the bad deal went down. After hearing passionate arguments from the Obama Administration, the Supreme Court acquiesced to the president's fervent request and, in a one-line ruling, let stand a lower court decision that declared torture an ordinary, expected consequence of military detention, while introducing a shocking new precedent for all future courts to follow: anyone who is arbitrarily declared a "suspected enemy combatant" by the president or his designated minions is no longer a "person." They will simply cease to exist as a legal entity. They will have no inherent rights, no human rights, no legal standing whatsoever -- save whatever modicum of process the government arbitrarily deigns to grant them from time to time, with its ever-shifting tribunals and show trials. This extraordinary ruling occasioned none of those deep-delving "process stories" that glut the pages of the New York Times, where the minutiae of policy-making or political gaming is examined in highly-spun, microscopic detail doled out by self-interested insiders. Obviously, giving government the power to render whole classes of people "unpersons" was not an interesting subject for our media arbiters. It was news that wasn't fit to print. Likewise, the ruling provoked no thundering editorials in the Washington Post, no savvy analysis from the high commentariat -- and needless to say, no outrage whatsoever from all our fierce defenders of individual liberty on the Right. But William Fisher noticed, and gave this report at Antiwar.com: In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's refusal Monday to review a lower court's dismissal of a case brought by four British former Guantanamo prisoners against former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the detainees' lawyers charged Tuesday that the country's highest court evidently believes that "torture and religious humiliation are permissible tools for a government to use." ...Channeling their predecessors in the George W. Bush administration, Obama Justice Department lawyers argued in this case that there is no constitutional right not to be tortured or otherwise abused in a U.S. prison abroad. The Obama administration had asked the court not to hear the case. By agreeing, the court let stand an earlier opinion by the D.C. Circuit Court, which found that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act - a statute that applies by its terms to all "persons" - did not apply to detainees at Guantanamo, effectively ruling that the detainees are not persons at all for purposes of U.S. law. The lower court also dismissed the detainees' claims under the Alien Tort Statute and the Geneva Conventions, finding defendants immune on the basis that "torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military's detention of suspected enemy combatants." The Constitution is clear: no person can be held without due process; no person can be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. And the U.S. law on torture of any kind is crystal clear: it is forbidden, categorically, even in time of "national emergency." And the instigation of torture is, under U.S. law, a capital crime. No person can be tortured, at any time, for any reason, and there are no immunities whatsoever for torture offered anywhere in the law. And yet this is what Barack Obama -- who, we are told incessantly, is a super-brilliant Constitutional lawyer -- has been arguing in case after case since becoming president: Torturers are immune from prosecution; those who ordered torture are immune from prosecution. They can't even been sued for, in the specific case under review, subjecting uncharged, indefinitely detained captives to "beatings, sleep deprivation, forced nakedness, extreme hot and cold temperatures, death threats, interrogations at gunpoint, and threatened with unmuzzled dogs." Again, let's be absolutely clear: Barack Obama has taken the freely chosen, public, formal stand -- in court -- that there is nothing wrong with any of these activities. Nothing to answer for, nothing meriting punishment or even civil penalties. What's more, in championing the lower court ruling, Barack Obama is now on record as believing -- insisting -- that torture is an ordinary, "foreseeable consequence" of military detention of all those who are arbitrarily declared "suspected enemy combatants." And still further: Barack Obama has now declared, openly, of his own free will, that he does not consider these captives to be "persons." They are, literally, sub-humans. And what makes them sub-humans? The fact that someone in the U.S. government has declared them to be "suspected enemy combatants." (And note: even the mere suspicion of being an "enemy combatant" can strip you of your personhood.) This is what President Barack Obama believes -- believes so strongly that he has put the full weight of the government behind a relentless series of court actions to preserve, protect and defend these arbitrary powers. (For a glimpse at just a sliver of such cases, see here and here.) One co-counsel on the case, Shayana Kadidal of the Center for Constitutional Rights, zeroed in on the noxious quintessence of the position taken by the Court, and by our first African-American president: its chilling resemblance to the notorious Dred Scott ruling of 1857, which upheld the principle of slavery. As Fisher notes: "Another set of claims are dismissed because Guantanamo detainees are not 'persons' within the scope of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act - an argument that was too close to Dred Scott v. Sanford for one of the judges on the court of appeals to swallow," he added. The Dred Scott case was a decision by the United States Supreme Court in 1857. It ruled that people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves, or their descendants - whether or not they were slaves - were not protected by the Constitution and could never be citizens of the United States. And now, once again, 144 years after the Civil War, we have established as the law of the land and the policy of the United States government that whole classes of people can be declared "non-persons" and have their liberty stripped away -- and their torturers and tormentors protected and coddled by authority -- at a moment's notice, with no charges, no defense, no redress, on nothing more than the suspicion that they might be an "enemy combatant," according to the arbitrary definition of the state. Barack Obama has had the audacity to declare himself the heir and embodiment of the lifework of Martin Luther King. Can this declaration of a whole new principle of universal slavery really be what King was dreaming of? Is this the vision he saw on the other side of the mountain? Or is not the nightmarish inversion of the ideal of a better, more just, more humane world that so many have died for, in so many places, down through the centuries? =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Feb 2 20:28:30 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 2 Feb 2010 20:28:30 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] How to Save the Obama Presidency: Bomb Iran Message-ID: <5007106B6C934F44BFBED48BD0A6DA99@agingCHS072729> [This is NOT a parody, but directly from the right-wing (some would say fascist) "National Review Online"] http://article.nationalreview.com/423580/how-to-save-the-obama-presidency-bomb-iran/daniel-pipes?page=1 National Review Online February 2, 2010 How to Save the Obama Presidency: Bomb Iran Circumstances are propitious, and the American people would support it. By Daniel Pipes I do not customarily offer advice to a president whose election I opposed, whose goals I fear, and whose policies I work against. But here is an idea for Barack Obama to salvage his tottering administration by taking a step that protects the United States and its allies. If Obama's personality, identity, and celebrity captivated a majority of the American electorate in 2008, those qualities proved ruefully deficient for governing in 2009. He failed to deliver on employment and health care, he failed in foreign-policy forays small (e.g., landing the 2016 Olympics) and large (relations with China and Japan). His counterterrorism record barely passes the laugh test. This poor performance has caused an unprecedented collapse in the polls and the loss of three major by-elections, culminating two weeks ago in an astonishing senatorial defeat in Massachusetts. Obama's attempts to "reset" his presidency will likely fail if he focuses on economics, where he is just one of many players. He needs a dramatic gesture to change the public perception of him as a light-weight, bumbling ideologue, preferably in an arena where the stakes are high, where he can take charge, and where he can trump expectations. Such an opportunity does exist: Obama can give orders for the U.S. military to destroy Iran's nuclear-weapon capacity. Circumstances are propitious. First, U.S. intelligence agencies have reversed their preposterous 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, the one that claimed with "high confidence" that Tehran had "halted its nuclear weapons program." No one other than the Iranian rulers and their agents denies that the regime is rushing headlong to build a large nuclear arsenal. Second, if the apocalyptic-minded leaders in Tehran get the Bomb, they render the Middle East yet more volatile and dangerous. They might deploy these weapons in the region, leading to massive death and destruction. Eventually, they could launch an electromagnetic pulse attack on the United States, utterly devastating the country. By eliminating the Iranian nuclear threat, Obama protects the homeland and sends a message to American's friends and enemies. Third, polling shows longstanding American support for an attack on the Iranian nuclear infrastructure: Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg, January 2006: 57 percent of Americans favor military intervention if Tehran pursues a program that could enable it to build nuclear arms. Zogby International, October 2007: 52 percent of likely voters support a U.S. military strike to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon; 29 percent oppose such a step. McLaughlin & Associates, May 2009: When asked whether they would support "using the [U.S.] military to attack and destroy the facilities in Iran which are necessary to produce a nuclear weapon," 58 percent of 600 likely voters supported the use of force and 30 percent opposed it. Fox News, September 2009: When asked "Do you support or oppose the United States taking military action to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons?" 61 percent of 900 registered voters supported military action and 28 opposed it. Pew Research Center, October 2009: When asked which is more important, "to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, even if it means taking military action," or "to avoid a military conflict with Iran, even if it means they may develop nuclear weapons," 61 percent of 1,500 respondents favored the first reply and 24 percent the second. Not only does a strong majority - 57, 52, 58, 61, and 61 percent in these five polls - already favor using force, but after a strike Americans will presumably rally around the flag, sending that number much higher. Fourth, if the U.S.limited its strike to taking out Iran's nuclear facilities and did not attempt any regime change, it would require few "boots on the ground" and entail relatively few casualties, making an attack more politically palatable. Just as 9/11 caused voters to forget George W. Bush's meandering early months, a strike on Iranian facilities would dispatch Obama's feckless first year down the memory hole and transform the domestic political scene. It would sideline health care, prompt Republicans to work with Democrats, and make the netroots squeal, independents reconsider, and conservatives swoon. But the chance to do good and do well is fleeting. As the Iranians improve their defenses and approach weaponization, the window of opportunity is closing. The time to act is now, or, on Obama's watch, the world will soon become a much more dangerous place. - Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Feb 2 20:28:40 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 2 Feb 2010 20:28:40 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Another U.S. War? Obama Threatens China and Iran Message-ID: <3D7404667EE44D09A6323D9BC3C40A92@agingCHS072729> http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17330 Global Research February 1, 2010 Another U.S. War? Obama Threatens China and Iran by Shamus Cooke The possibility of yet another U.S. war became more real last week, when the Obama administration sharply confronted both China and Iran. The first aggressive act was performed by Obama's Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who "warned" China that it must support serious economic sanctions against Iran (an act of war). Clinton said: "China will be under a lot of pressure to recognize the destabilizing effect that a nuclear-armed Iran would have, from which they receive a significant percentage of their oil supply." The implication here is that China will be cut off from a major energy source if they do not support U.S. foreign policy - this, too, would equal an act of war. A more direct military provocation occurred later when Obama agreed to honor a Bush-era military pact with Taiwan, a small island that lies off the mainland coast of China, and is claimed by China as its own territory. Taiwan has been a U.S. client state ever since the defeated nationalist forces fled there from China in the aftermath of the 1949 revolution. Taiwan has remained a bastion of U.S. intrigue and anti-China agitation for the past six decades. Obama has recently upped the ante by approving a $6.4 billion arms sale to Taiwan, including: "... 60 Black Hawk helicopters, Patriot interceptor missiles, advanced Harpoon missiles that can be used against land or ship targets and two refurbished minesweepers." (The New York Times, January 30, 2010). The same article quotes a Chinese government official who responded, accurately, by calling the arms sale ". a gross intervention intoChina's internal affairs, [and] seriously endanger[ing] China's national security." In 1962, When Russia supplied missiles to Cuba, nearFlorida's coast, the U.S. interpreted this to be an act of war. China responded harshly to the Taiwan arms deals, imposing "an unusually broad series of retaliatory measures. including sanctions against American companies that supply the weapon systems for the arms sales." These U.S. arms manufacturers are giant corporations who have huge political influence in the Obama administration, and are likely to further push the U.S. government towards an even more aggressive response. Obama's polices against China have been far more aggressive than Bush's, making a farce out of his campaign promises of a more peaceful foreign policy. Obama's same, deceitful approach is used inSouth America, where he promised "non-intervention" and then proceeded to build military bases in Colombia on Venezuela's border, while giving a green light to the coup in Honduras. Hillary Clinton also threatened China about internet censorship last week, while Obama consciously provoked China by agreeing to talks with the Dalai Lama, who advocates the removal of Chinese influence from Tibet. Still fresh in the memories of both the U.S. and China is the recent trade flair up, when Obama imposed taxes on Chinese imports; and China responded with protectionist measures against U.S. companies, which brings us to the heart of the matter. The attitude of the U.S. government towards China has nothing to do with the Dalai Lama, internet censorship, or human rights. These excuses are used as diplomatic jabs in the framework of a larger, geopolitical brawl. Chinese corporations are expanding rapidly in the wake of the decline of the U.S. business class, and Obama is using a variety of measures to counteract this dynamic, with all roads leading to war. This grand chessboard of corporate and military maneuvering reached a dangerous standoff yesterday, with the U.S. military provoking Iran. The New York Times explains: "The Obama administration is accelerating the deployment of new defenses against possible Iranian missile attacks in the Persian Gulf, placing special ships [war ships] off the Iranian coast and antimissile systems in at least four [surrounding] Arab countries, according to administration and military officials." (January 30, 2010). The same article mentions that U.S. General Petraeus admitted that ". the United States was now keeping Aegis cruisers on patrol in the Persian Gulf [Iran's border] at all times. Those cruisers are equipped with advanced radar and antimissile systems designed to intercept medium-range missiles." Iran knows full well that "antimissile systems" are perfectly capable of going on the offensive - their real purpose. Iran is completely surrounded by countries occupied by the U.S. military, whether it be the mass occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the U.S. puppet states that house U.S. military bases in Arab nations. Contrary to the statements of President Obama, Iran is already well contained militarily. Iran's government - however repressive it may be - has every right to defend itself in this context. It is possible that these aggressive U.S. actions will eventually force Iran's government to act out militarily, giving the U.S. military the "defensive" excuse it's been waiting for, so the tempers of the U.S. population can be cooled. A separate New York Times editorial outlines the basic agreement onIran shared by the Democrats and the Republicans. It says: "It is time for President Obama and other leaders to ratchet up the pressure with tougher sanctions." And: "If the [UN] Security Council does not act quickly, then the United States and Europe must apply more pressure on their own [Bush's Iraq war strategy]. The Senate on Thursday approved a bill that would punish companies for exporting gasoline to Iran or helping Iran expand its own petroleum refining capability [another act of war]" (January 29, 2010). The U.S. anti-war movement must organize and mobilize to confront the plans of the Obama administration. Obama's policies not only mirror Bush's, but have the potential to be far more devastating, with the real possibility of creating a wider, regional war. Iran and China are far more militarily capable than puny Afghanistan or Iraq; the consequences of a war with either will cause countless more deaths. Bring All the Troops Home! U.S. Military Out of the Middle East! Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist, and writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org). He can be reached at shamuscook at yahoo.com =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Feb 3 20:52:13 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 3 Feb 2010 20:52:13 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Vancouver's Olympics head for disaster Message-ID: <7C223324F85548418169CC640B0D60C0@agingCHS072729> <<"The Bailout Games" have already been labelled a staggering financial disaster. While the complete costs are still unknown, the Vancouver and British Columbian governments have hinted at what's to come by cancelling 2400 surgeries, laying off 233 government employees, 800 teachers and recommending the closure of 14 schools.>> <> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/jan/31/vancouver-winter-olympics-police The Guardian 31 January 2010 Vancouver's Olympics head for disaster Two weeks before the games and with police officers on every corner, Vancouver is far from an Olympic wonderland* Douglas Haddow It's now two weeks until the start of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic games, a city-defining event that is a decade in the making. But a decade is a very long time. Much of what seemed sensible in the early 2000s has proven to be the opposite: for instance, allowing investment bankers to pursue profits willy-nilly was acceptable when Vancouver won the bid in 2003, but is now viewed as idiotic. So it comes as no surprise that just days before the opening ceremony, Vancouver is gripped by dread. Not the typical attitude for a host city, but understandable when you consider that everything that could go wrong, is in the process of going wrong. Vancouver has been continually ranked as the world's most livable city. An Olympic sized-dose of gentrification would only serve to speed up Vancouver's transformation from a livable yet expensive city into a glitzy hotel for international capital. But these neoliberal dreams are now little more than fantasy. In the mid-2000s the games were originally slated to cost a pittance of $660m and bring in a profit of $10bn. This ludicrous projection was made before the market crash - an event that the Vancouver's Olympic committee failed to anticipate. "The Bailout Games" have already been labelled a staggering financial disaster. While the complete costs are still unknown, the Vancouver and British Columbian governments have hinted at what's to come by cancelling 2400 surgeries, laying off 233 government employees, 800 teachers and recommending the closure of 14 schools. It might be enough to make one cynical, but luckily every inch of the city is now coated with advertisements that feature smiley people enjoying the products of the event's gracious sponsors. Conservative estimates now speculate that the games will cost upwards of $6bn, with little chance of a return. This titanic act of fiscal malfeasance includes a security force that was originally budgeted at $175m, but has since inflated to $900m. With more than 15,000 members, it's the largest military presence seen in western Canada since the end of the second world war, an appropriate measure only if one imagines al-Qaida are set to descend from the slopes on C2-strapped snowboards. With a police officer on every corner and military helicopters buzzing overhead, Vancouver looks more like post-war Berlin than an Olympic wonderland. Whole sections of the city are off-limits, scores of roads have been shut down, small businesses have been told to close shop and citizens have been instructed to either leave the city or stay indoors to make way for the projected influx of 300,000 visitors. Vancouver's Olympic committee has also assumed the role of logo police. Librarians are being commanded to feed McDonald's to children while unauthorised brands have been banned from Olympic venues. Worse yet, they've begun to casually slip clips from Leni Riefenstahl films into their Coldplay-soundtracked promotional videos. This manic mix of hype and gloom is a byproduct of the games' utter pointlessness. For those who have been planning their resistance since 2003, Vancouver is about to become the world's premier political stage. It will be the best chance yet for the Olympics to be derailed and exposed as what they are: a corrupt relic of the 20th century that does little more than gut city coffers and line the pockets of developers and investors. If things go pear-shaped and Vancouverites resort to their riotious ways, at least the city will get its money's worth out of that bloated security force and the ensuing spectacle will boost NBC's slumping ratings. After all, the Olympics are primarily a patriotic event, and in the words of the late Howard Zinn, "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism". =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Feb 3 20:58:05 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 3 Feb 2010 20:58:05 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Blair survives Iraq Inquiry without a scratch Message-ID: <302E4ED351DB4F948166D2DFC90205BF@agingCHS072729> [so much for international law under "democracy"...] http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2010/02/02/blair-survives-iraq-inquiry-without-a-sc Blair survives Iraq Inquiry without a scratch February 2nd, 2010 1:22 PM Stuart Littlewood Claims Saddam threatened the world and picks fight with Iran Tony Blair, the poodle of the White House and darling of the Israel lobby, met the pussy-cats of the Iraq Inquiry on Friday, tickled their tummies and was purred to throughout. It was more like a cosy fireside chat, with the inquisitors falling over backwards to be polite and not probe too much. And that was in public. If it had been in private, as originally planned, it is easy to imagine them all playing with a ball of wool on the sofa. Many people hoping for the Inquiry to deal firmly with those who had a hand in this disgraceful episode in Britain's history, provide a degree of 'closure' and establish grounds for prosecution, were alarmed to read at the outset that at least two of the four panellists are Jews and probably pro-Zionist. Sir Martin Gilbert and Sir Lawrence Freedman are reported to have supported the invasion of Iraq. Gilbert, a historian, seems obsessed with the Holocaust and has written at least 10 books on the subject. According to newspaper reports Gilbert allowed himself to be interviewed by an Israeli radio station broadcasting from an illegal Jewish settlement in the West Bank, built in defiance of UN resolutions and international law and in blatant violation of Palestinian rights. TV audiences watching this Blair vs. Inquiry match at home and in pubs and offices throughout the land, raged and fumed like the despairing supporters of a bottom-of-the-league Fourth Division football team missing one open goal after another. There were no action highlights worth replaying despite the fact that the Inquiry team was primed with lethal documents and explosive testimony that could have skewered Blair to the back of the net. "Due diligence" lacking It was six hours of tedium thanks to the feeble questioning and because Blair without his scriptwriters is chaotic, disjointed and barely able to string a sentence together. Suddenly came an electric moment when Sir Lawrence Freedman uttered the highly charged words "due diligence" and it looked like sparks might fly. What has been so obvious to the general public all along is that Blair and his co-criminals - the supine cabinet and the main opposition party - failed to exercise due diligence. the thorough investigation and careful regard for information and legal considerations normally expected of a commercial organization before making a large-scale investment. Obviously something similar, at minimum, should apply within government when planning to risk vast sums of taxpayers' money, innocent lives and national reputation in an armed assault on another country for questionable motives, and for which the leadership might afterwards be held to account. Blair was asked by Freedman whether, by saying he believed the intelligence established "beyond doubt" that Saddam had continued to produce chemical and biological weapons, he was setting himself an impossibly high standard of proof. Blair replied: "I did believe it, frankly, beyond doubt." Freedman snapped back: "Beyond your doubt. But beyond anybody's doubt?" Blair tried to shrug off the challenge by pretending it was the same as the more frequently used phrase "it is clear that." Then the following exchange. FREEDMAN: "....Intelligence is often described as joining up the dots, because your information is limited, and there was a very powerful hypothesis that allowed you to join up the dots in a particular way, but there were alternative hypotheses and they were around at the time. So it is partly a question almost of due diligence. Was there a challenge to the intelligence? Are you absolutely sure that there isn't another way of explaining all this material?" BLAIR: "When you are Prime Minister and the JIC is giving this information, you have got to rely on the people doing it, with experience and with commitment and integrity, as they do. Of course, now, with the benefit of hindsight, we look back on the situation differently. But let me say what was troubling me at the time was supposing we put it the other way round and it was correct and I wasn't going to act on it, that was the thing that worried me, and when I talked earlier about the calculus of risk changing after September 11th, it is really, really important, I think, to understand this, so far as understanding the decision I took, and, frankly, would take again: if there was any possibility that he could develop weapons of mass destruction, we should stop him. That was my view. That was my view then and it's my view now." FREEDMAN: "But this is a different standard to the one that you are going to have to take to the United Nations." That was as close as it got to exciting. As the get-together drew to a close the chief pussy-cat decently allowed Blair a platform to say if he had any regrets. Instead of seizing the opportunity he sounded off about how he "takes a very hard, tough line on Iran today, and many of the same arguments apply". CHAIRMAN (again): ".And no regrets?" BLAIR: "Responsibility but not a regret for removing Saddam Hussein. I think that he was a monster, I believe he threatened, not just the region but the world." Blair in his testimony referred to Iran at least 50 times. "I would say that a large part of the de-stabilisation in the Middle East at the present time comes from Iran," he said. "The link between Iran, having nuclear weapons capability, and those types of terrorist organisations, it is the combination of that that makes them particularly dangerous." He might have been reading from a script prepared by the propaganda team in Tel Aviv. Blair to Iranians: "Let's have new relationship" Blair told the Inquiry that he sent Jack Straw to talk to the Iranians. "A very big lesson from this for me was that we tried with the Iranians, tried very hard to reach out, to in a sense make an agreement with them... One of the most disappointing, but also, I think, most telling aspects of this is that the Iranians, whatever they said, from the beginning, were a major destabilising factor in this situation and quite deliberately... "I had actually spoken myself to the President of Iran prior to September 11 when we were trying to get the new resolution on sanctions. I had actually had a telephone conversation with President Khatami at the time. I had gone out of my way to say, 'Let's have a new relationship', and so on. So in respect of Iran that was the advice, but we did go into this in some detail." The truth is that there had been little or no effort by Britain to reach out to the Iranians. We had stupidly neglected them. In 2001 Jack Straw was the first British foreign secretary to visit Iran in 22 years. He was hardly likely to be welcomed with hugs and kisses given Britain's part in overthrowing Dr Mossadeq's fledgling democratic government back in 1953 and reinstating of the cruel dictatorship of the Shah, which led eventually to the Revolution of 1979. Moreover in 1987, at the height of the Iran-Iraq war, the British government left the Iranians in the lurch by closing down their procurement office in London, which was responsible for 70% of Iranian purchases of arms abroad. Thanks to our generally poor behaviour towards Iran, in cahoots with America, Britain is branded 'Little Satan' and the US 'Big Satan'. I'm reminded of an illuminating piece by Nick Cohen in The New Statesman on 29 October 2001, in the early days of the march to war, just after 9/11. It is worth quoting here: "Jack Straw had his authority demolished when, visiting Iran in September, he dared to mention Palestine. Ariel Sharon exploded. To raise the subject proved that Straw was a definite appeaser and probable anti-Semite. Straw was to fly on to Israel to meet Prime Minister Sharon, the hero of Sabra and Shatila. Sharon cancelled the meeting and Blair, the statesman, came to the rescue. He calmed Sharon, Downing Street told the press, and persuaded him to see Straw after all. The coverage could not have been more pleasing to Blair. Here was the PM, surrounded by pygmies. Just like Robin Cook before him, Straw wasn't up to the job. No one but Blair could be trusted to guide policy and run the war. "When Straw arrived back for his first cabinet meeting, a cheery Blair told him that, by the time he called Israel, Sharon had already changed his mind and decided to see Straw in any event. We tried to persuade the media to abandon the 'Blair saves the day' stories, he continued, but they wouldn't buy it. I think I can say with confidence that no one in the cabinet believed the spinners had tried anything of the sort. "So there you have it. A prime minister who discards parliamentary democracy and cabinet government, then spins against his colleagues so that his indiscriminate love for the United States can override national interests. Britain reduced to being the American poodle my comrades on the left always said it was. "Robin Cook was booked to visit Iran three times between 1999 and 2001. On each occasion, the tour was cancelled because of pressure from Israel and America. I was a bit stunned to hear that a British foreign secretary can be instructed by Washington and Jerusalem [for the sake of political correctness he surely meant Tel Aviv] on who he can and can't see, "I can't imagine Blair standing up to the US under any circumstances." Which is why, even as "peace envoy", he still hasn't dared to drop in on Gaza's prime minister, Mr Haniyeh, for coffee. Blair today is seen for what he really is and much as Cohen described 8 years ago. Aping the Israelis, he has little respect for international law or human decency if it gets in the way of political ambition. And instead of showing contrition and apologising for the countless dead, maimed and homeless resulting from his reckless beliefs and lack of "due diligence", he continues on the warpath and is seems desperate to whip up another bloody conflict - this time against Iran - for. well, for whom? Who is the maniac working for now? Certainly not Britain's best interests. -###- Stuart Littlewood is author of the book Radio Free Palestine, which tells the plight of the Palestinians under occupation. For further information please visit www.radiofreepalestine.co.uk =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Feb 3 21:07:27 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 3 Feb 2010 21:07:27 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] U.S. headed for another bubble: TARP watchdog Message-ID: Globe and Mail Report on Business Feb. 03, 2010 U.S. headed for another bubble: TARP watchdog Proposed bank reforms address neither 'too big to fail' issue nor government's dominant role in housing market, report says BARRIE MCKENNA WASHINGTON - With the spotlight on U.S. President Barack Obama's proposed bank reforms and record-setting deficits it's easy to forget that tackling the root causes of the financial crisis remains unfinished business. Mr. Obama has proposed a series of bank reforms aimed at reining in risk, including a tax on big banks, a ban on their proprietary trading, and a limit on their liabilities. But these measures are overshadowing a key problem, some critics say. The incentives for both banks and homeowners to pile on risk are as strong as ever. In a sobering 224-page report this week, the federal watchdog responsible for overseeing the $700-billion (U.S.) Troubled Asset Relief Program argued that failed reform could put the United States on course for another bubble - and crash. "Even if TARP saved our financial system from driving off a cliff in 2008, absent meaningful reform, we are driving on the same winding mountain road, but this time in a faster car," said Neil Barofsky, TARP's special inspector general. The U.S. Federal Reserve, along with government-backed lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, continue to prop up the housing market by guaranteeing or insuring virtually all new mortgages and mortgage-backed securities. Americans also enjoy a tax system that pushes them to max out their credit limit on first and second homes because mortgage interest is fully deductible. Congress recently boosted those generous incentives with an $8,000 credit for first-time home buyers. And so far, none of the proposed financial reforms addresses the critical problem of banks that are so large they endanger the financial system, according to Mr. Barofsky. He warned that all the "money, moral hazard ... and government credibility" will be wasted if the U.S. sinks into an even deeper crisis in the next decade. "It is hard to see how any of the fundamental problems in the system have been addressed to date," he wrote bluntly. And reform won't get any easier from here on in, now that the Democrats have lost their veto-proof 60-40 vote margin in the U.S. Senate. Even Mr. Obama's call last week for a ban on proprietary trading at the country's big banks is running into stiff resistance in Congress, which must pass legislation to make it happen. The result, critics said, is likely to be a further watering down of an already ineffectual financial reform package. "Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the Obama administration remains convinced that merely tweaking our existing regulations is the only responsible way forward," said Simon Johnson, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics and a former top economist at the International Monetary Fund. Mr. Johnson echoed Mr. Barofsky's warning that the United States has not dealt with the problem of banks that are too big to fail. "We are smack in the middle of a doomsday cycle of repeated boom-bust-bailout," he cautioned. "If anything, as these banks have increased in size, the problem is now worse." Mr. Barofsky, a lifelong Democrat and former drug fighting prosecutor appointed by former U.S. president George W. Bush, also complained there has been "little fundamental change in the excessive compensation culture on Wall Street." Perhaps most ominously, Mr. Barofsky warned that the government's multiple efforts to bolster home prices may be reinflating the bubble that caused the crisis. "Between net mortgage lending and existing mortgage management, the Federal Government now completely dominates the housing mortgage market, with the taxpayer shouldering the risk that had once been borne by the private sector," he pointed out. Mr. Barofsky has been a thorn in the side of both the Obama administration and Congress for months, pursuing allegations of misuse of TARP funds as well as the events that led to the bailout of failed insurer American International Group. Mr. Barofsky acknowledged that many of TARP's stated goals have not been met. Bank lending continues to contract and home foreclosures remain at record levels and mortgage modifications haven't worked. Whatever leverage the government had to push banks to change their ways was lost when most of the large banks repaid their TARP loans, according to Mr. Barofsky. In a recent New York Times interview, Mr. Barofsky said he was stunned when he arrived in Washington to take up his post to discover billions of government dollars flying out the door, with so few controls. ***** KEY DATES IN THE U.S. MORTGAGE INDUSTRY 1989-92: U.S. government steps in during the savings-and-loan crisis, to help make up for the loss of lending capacity in that sector. 1990s: Private lenders account for approximately half of net mortgage borrowings in the U.S. 2003: Government-backed lending begins to drop, reflecting a surge in private mortgage lending, particularly that related to mortgage-backed securities (MBS). 2003-04: Government-backed share of net new mortgages decreases significantly. 2005: MBS activity accounts for majority of new loans. 2008-now: Private sector sheds more than $1.5-trillion (U.S.) of mortgage assets. Government share rises again; it now guarantees or issues almost all net new borrowing for mortgages and mortgage-backed securities. Source: Office of the Special Inspector General for TARP, January 2010 quarterly report to Congress =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Feb 3 23:22:10 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 3 Feb 2010 23:22:10 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Israeli commander: 'We rewrote the rules of war for Gaza' Message-ID: <136338B1DA574347957BFDF4ED44F5A3@agingCHS072729> The Independent 3 February 2010 Exclusive Israeli commander: 'We rewrote the rules of war for Gaza' Civilians 'put at greater risk to save military lives' in winter attack - revelations that will pile pressure on Netanyahu to set up full inquiry By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem A high-ranking officer has acknowledged for the first time that the Israeli army went beyond its previous rules of engagement on the protection of civilian lives in order to minimise military casualties during last year's Gaza war, The Independent can reveal. The officer, who served as a commander during Operation Cast Lead, made it clear that he did not regard the longstanding principle of military conduct known as "means and intentions" - whereby a targeted suspect must have a weapon and show signs of intending to use it before being fired upon - as being applicable before calling in fire from drones and helicopters in Gaza last winter. A more junior officer who served at a brigade headquarters during the operation described the new policy - devised in part to avoid the heavy military casualties of the 2006 Lebanon war - as one of "literally zero risk to the soldiers". The officers' revelations will pile more pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to set up an independent inquiry into the war, as demanded in the UN-commissioned Goldstone Report, which harshly criticised the conduct of both Israel and Hamas. One of Israel's most prominent human rights lawyers, Michael Sfard, said last night that the senior commander's acknowledgement - if accurate - was "a smoking gun". Until now, the testimony has been kept out of the public domain. The senior commander told a journalist compiling a lengthy report for Yedhiot Ahronot, Israel's biggest daily newspaper, about the rules of engagement in the three-week military offensive in Gaza. But although the article was completed and ready for publication five months ago, it has still not appeared. The senior commander told Yedhiot: "Means and intentions is a definition that suits an arrest operation in the Judaea and Samaria [West Bank] area... We need to be very careful because the IDF [Israel Defence Forces] was already burnt in the second Lebanon war from the wrong terminology. The concept of means and intentions is taken from different circumstances. Here [in Cast Lead] we were not talking about another regular counter-terrorist operation. There is a clear difference." His remarks reinforce testimonies from soldiers who served in the Gaza operation, made to the veterans' group Breaking the Silence and reported exclusively by this newspaper last July. They also appear to cut across the military doctrine - enunciated most recently in public by one of the authors of the IDF's own code of ethics - that it is the duty of soldiers to run risks to themselves in order to preserve civilian lives. Explaining what he saw as the dilemma for forces operating in areas that were supposedly cleared of civilians, the senior commander said: "Whoever is left in the neighbourhood and wants to action an IED [improvised explosive device] against the soldiers doesn't have to walk with a Kalashnikov or a weapon. A person like that can walk around like any other civilian; he sees the IDF forces, calls someone who would operate the terrible death explosive and five of our soldiers explode in the air. We could not wait until this IED is activated against us." Another soldier who worked in one of the brigade's war-room headquarters told The Independent that conduct in Gaza - particularly by aerial forces and in areas where civilians had been urged to leave by leaflets - had "taken the targeted killing idea and turned it on its head". Instead of using intelligence to identify a terrorist, he said, "here you do the opposite: first you take him down, then you look into it." The Yedhiot newspaper also spoke to a series of soldiers who had served in Operation Cast Lead in sensitive positions. While the soldiers rejected the main finding of the Goldstone Report - that the Israeli military had deliberately "targeted" the civilian population - most asserted that the rules were flexible enough to allow a policy under which, in the words of one soldier "any movement must entail gunfire. No one's supposed to be there." He added that at a meeting with his brigade commander and others it was made clear that "if you see any signs of movement at all you shoot. This is essentially the rules of engagement." The other soldier in the war-room explained: "This doesn't mean that you need to disrespect the lives of Palestinians but our first priority is the lives of our soldiers. That's not something you're going to compromise on. In all my years in the military, I never heard that." He added that the majority of casualties were caused in his brigade area by aerial firing, including from unmanned drones. "Most of the guys taken down were taken down by order of headquarters. The number of enemy killed by HQ-operated remote ... compared to enemy killed by soldiers on the ground had absolutely inverted," he said. Rules of engagement issued to soldiers serving in the West Bank as recently as July 2006 make it clear that shooting towards even an armed person will take place only if there is intelligence that he intends to act against Israeli forces or if he poses an immediate threat to soldiers or others. In a recent article in New Republic, Moshe Halbertal, a philosophy professor at Hebrew and New York Universities, who was involved in drawing up the IDF's ethical code in 2000 and who is critical of the Goldstone Report, said that efforts to spare civilian life "must include the expectation that soldiers assume some risk to their own lives in order to avoid causing the deaths of civilians". While the choices for commanders were often extremely difficult and while he did not think the expectation was demanded by international law, "it is demanded in Israel's military code and this has always been its tradition". The Israeli military declined to comment on the latest revelations, and directed all enquiries to already-published material, including a July 2009 foreign ministry document The Operation in Gaza: Factual and Legal Aspects. That document, which repeats that Israel acted in conformity with international law despite the "acute dilemmas" posed by Hamas's operations within civilian areas, sets out the principles of Operation Cast Lead as follows: "Only military targets shall be attacked; Any attack against civilian objectives shall be prohibited. A 'civilian objective' is any objective which is not a military target." It adds: "In case of doubt, the forces are obliged to regard an object as civilian." Yedhiot has not commented on why its article has not been published. Israel in Gaza: The soldier's tale This experienced soldier, who cannot be named, served in the war room of a brigade during Operation Cast Lead. Here, he recalls an incident he witnessed during last winter's three-week offensive: "Two [Palestinian] guys are walking down the street. They pass a mosque and you see a gathering of women and children. "You saw them exiting the house and [they] are not walking together but one behind the other. So you begin to fantasise they are actually ducking close to the wall. "One [man] began to run at some point, must have heard the chopper. The GSS [secret service] argued that the mere fact that he heard it implicated him, because a normal civilian would not have realised that he was now being hunted. "Finally he was shot. He was not shot next to the mosque. It's obvious that shots are not taken at a gathering." =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Feb 3 23:26:29 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 3 Feb 2010 23:26:29 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [Radio] Micheal Vonn: Olympics to leave behind a lasting security legacy Message-ID: <615C30920DF449B9A5E096F8BA2264A3@agingCHS072729> Rabble.ca | February 3, 2010 Olympics to leave behind a lasting security legacy By Mordecai Briemberg Micheal Vonn says it's a well-accepted fact that the security put in place for the Olympics doesn't leave town when the athletes go back home. Micheal Vonn is with the B.C. Civil Liberties Association http://www.rabble.ca/podcasts/shows/redeye/2010/02/olympics-leave-behind-lasting-security-legacy =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Feb 3 23:35:41 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 3 Feb 2010 23:35:41 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] =?iso-8859-1?q?US_Intelligence_Report_Classifies_Vene?= =?iso-8859-1?q?zuela_as_=22Anti-US_Leader=22?= Message-ID: <861467FCAA2944BABA3BC09DE84CDE73@agingCHS072729> http://www.chavezcode.com/2010/02/us-intelligence-report-classifies.html Wednesday, February 3, 2010 US Intelligence Report Classifies Venezuela as "Anti-US Leader" By Eva Golinger 3 February 2010 - As is custom at the beginning of each year, the different US agencies publish their famous annual reports on topics ranging from human rights, trafficking in persons, terrorism, threats, drug-trafficking, and other issues that indicate who will be this year's target of US agression. Yesterday, it was the intelligence community's turn. Admiral Dennis Blair, National Director of Intelligence, presented the Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The report details the principle threats to the interests and security of the US worldwide. This year, in addition to mentioning the usual suspects - Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, Al Qa'ida and Iraq - the report dedicates significant space to Venezuela. In the section referring to threats in Latin America, which carries the title "Latin America Stable, but Challenged by Crime and Populism", a large portion is dedicated to Venezuela. "In.countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua, elected populist leaders are moving toward a more authoritarian and statist political and economic model, and they have banded together to oppose US influence and policies in the region. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has established himself as one of the US's foremost international detractors, denouncing liberal democracy and market capitalism and opposing US policies and interests in the region." Classifying President Chavez as "one of the US's foremost international detractors" already gives indication that the US intelligence community considers the Venezuelan president as an enemy. But following that paragraph, further down, a section titled "Venezuela: Leading Anti-US Regional Force", further confirms the official US vision of Venezuela as a major adversary. "President Chavez continues to impose an authoritarian populist political model in Venezuela that undermines democratic institutions. Since winning a constitutional referendum in early 2009 that removed term limits and will permit his reelection, Chavez has taken further steps to consolidate his political power and weaken the opposition in the run up to the 2010 legislative elections." The mention of the congressional elections in Venezuela this year evidences how deeply involved US intelligence agencies are in internal Venezuelan affairs. The US is not always interested in legislative elections in a foreign nation. Such a focus only occurs when the US has some kind of investment in the outcome of the electoral process, as in this case. There is no question that the flow of US dollars will increase this year to fund campaigns of opposition candidates and aid in the execution of strategies to undermine the Chavez government. In the following paragraph, the intelligence assessment utilizes every claim made by opposition groups and media in Venezuela against Chavez, "The National Assembly passed a law that shifted control of state infrastructure, goods, and services to Caracas in order to deprive opposition states and municipalities of funds. Chavez has curtailed free expression and opposition activities by shutting down independent news outlets, harassing and detaining protestors, and threatening opposition leaders with criminal charges for corruption. Chavez's popularity has dropped significantly in recent polls as a result of his repressive measures, continued high crime, rising inflation, water and power shortages, and a major currency devaluation, raising questions about his longer term political future." Not only is the US intelligence community demonstrating poor intelligence collecting and analyses here, but also evidencing its clear dependency on opposition sources inside and outside Venezuela. No news outlets have been shut down in Venezuela. Some have been fined and sanctioned for not following legal regulations, but that happens frequently in the US as well. The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) imposes sanctions on hundreds of media outlets in the US each year. No one classifies those actions as violating freedom of expression, but rather merely enforcing the law. Furthermore, not only has the Chavez administration not detained protestors that regularly violate all kinds of laws by blocking highways and vital roads throughout the nation, marching without permission from local authorities, calling publicly for the overthrow of the government, throwing molotov cocktails and other deadly objects at state security forces, but President Chavez himself has actually ordered police to refrain from carrying deadly weapons when dealing with public protests and to respect demonstrators' human rights. In the US, protestors are regularly detained and violently repressed by police forces - almost at every demonstration - and constantly denied permission to march or protest near any government building. Also, Chavez's popularity has not "dropped significantly". It remains well above 60%, as it has been during the past several years. But the report goes on to accuse Chavez of forming an "anti-US alliance" in Latin America. "On foreign policy, Chavez's regional influence may have peaked, but he is likely to continue to support likeminded political allies and movements in neighboring countries and seek to undermine moderate, pro-US governments. He has formed an alliance of radical leaders in Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, an until recently, Honduras." (Note: Honduras was part of the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas "ALBA", until the recent Washington-backed coup d'etat. This statement in the intelligence report evidences the US's clear satisfaction with Honduras' withdrawal from the alliance). In the following phrase, the US intelligence report also relates Chavez and ALBA nations to drug-trafficking and terrorism, "He and his allies are likely to oppose nearly every US policy initiative in the region, including the expansion of free trade, counter drug and counterterrorism cooperation, military training and security initiatives, and even US assistance programs." "Chavez's relationship with Colombia's President Uribe is particularly troubled. His outspoken opposition to Colombia's Defense Cooperation Agreement with the US has led to an increase in border tensions. Chavez has called the agreement a declaration of war against Venezuela. He has restricted Colombian imports, warned of a potential military conflict and continued his covert support to the terrorist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)." In the above statement, the US again accuses the Chavez government of supporting the FARC, yet has never presented any solid evidence to back this claim, which has been repeatedly denied by the Venezuelan government. Cynically, the US is also accusing Chavez of somehow "increasing tensions" with Colombia because he opposes the establishment of seven US military bases in Colombia right across the Venezuelan border. A May 2009 US Air Force official document detailed how one of the Colombian military bases in Palanquero would be used by US armed forces to "combat the constant threat of anti-US governments in the region" and would improve the US's capacity to execute "Expedentiary Warfare". Clearly, as the report classifies Venezuela as the "anti-US leader" in the region, that would indicate, as outlined in the US Air Force document, that the increased US military presence in Colombia is precisely to threaten and/or attack Venezuela. Finally, the US intelligence report discusses the perceived threat surrounding Chavez's relationship with Iran, Russia and China. "Chavez will continue to cultivate closer political, economic and security ties with Iran, Russia and China. He has developed a close personal relationship with Iranian President Ahmadinejad and they have signed numerous agreements.Most of the agreements Moscow has signed with Chavez relate to arms sales and investments in the Venezuelan energy sector.On paper, Venezuela's acquisitions are impressive, but their armed forces lack the training and logistics capacity to use these to their full capability. Yet, the scale of the purchases has caused concern in neighboring countries, particularly Colombia, and risks fueling a regional arms race." The report ends by mentioning Venezuela in the section on "Significant State and Non-State Intelligence Threats", claiming that "North Korea and Venezuela posess more limited intelligence capabilities focused primarily on regional threats and supporting the ruling regime.Venezuela's services are working to counter US influence in Latin America by supporting leftist governments and insurgent groups." The other countries mentioned in this section are China, Russia and Cuba, along with non-state actors Al Qa'ida and Hizballah. Apparently, now the US formally views Venezuela as a threat in the same class as Al Qa'ida. What this intelligence report really means is that operations against the Chavez government will substantially increase this year. The report will be used to justify a larger budget allocation to intelligence missions against Venezuela. But even more dangerously, the focus in the report on Hugo Chavez, the man, evidences that he has become the principal target of US agression. Placing such an emphasis on one individual as the cause of major threats to US interests raises the possibilities of an assassination attempt or other tactic to rid Empire of an individual perceived as an "anti-US leader". See the original report here. http://www.dni.gov/testimonies/20100202_testimony.pdf =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Feb 3 23:54:52 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 3 Feb 2010 23:54:52 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The Earthquake Killed Haiti's Feminist Movement Message-ID: Double X January 28, 2010 The Earthquake Killed Haiti's Feminist Movement And is likely to make the situation for women worse. By: Connie May Fowler Among the many dead after the earthquake in Haiti are the three women who basically constituted the fledgling women's movement in Haiti. Myriam Merlet, Anne Marie Coriolan, and Magalie Marcelin had just begun the work of reforming a judiciary that never took rape seriously and creating an infrastructure to protect girls and women against domestic violence and trafficking. They were killed at a time when they were most needed, since post-earthquake chaos tends to leave women especially vulnerable. As heartbreaking as every lost life is, theirs seems particularly tragic in a country where, until recently, there was no notion of women's rights and what did exist was tenuous and fragile. Before 2005, rape was rarely prosecuted and convictions were virtually nonexistent. Marital rape was legal. Judges treated sexual violence as a purely civil matter, sometimes ordering meager monetary restitution or ruling that the rapist marry the victim. They judged the severity of the crime based on whether the woman or girl was a virgin. The three women started by lobbying the United Nations to pressure Haiti to pass sexual-assault laws that created a new area of criminal law. To ensure the courts abided by them, the women in 2008 led a kind of legal-flash-mob movement, getting women to flood Haitian courtrooms during rape trials so that judges would feel accountable. They began organizations that provided safe houses and microloans to domestic- violence victims. In 2001, in the midst of violent political unrest, Merlet contacted playwright and activist Eve Ensler and convinced her to bring, improbably, The Vagina Monologues to Haiti. Using the momentum from that event, the women successfully built the V-Day Haiti Sorority Safe House in Port-au-Prince. "The fact that they existed at all, that they were doing the kind of work they did, was totally innovative. Until they came along, women's rights were totally ignored," says Sabrina Solomon, director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center in Miami [2], who also lost friends and family in the earthquake. In 2000, the U.N.'s Commission on Human Rights [3] issued a scathing report about Haiti's treatment of women. "The lack of adequate legislation . results in a culture of non-reporting and of acceptance of violence against women," the report noted. Sixty-six percent of female victims never reported acts of violence, the report concluded, "for fear of reprisals and societal prejudice." It gave this as a common example: "If a girl is raped by her teacher it is generally expected that the rapist marry the victim and no criminal case is brought against the perpetrator." In 2007, when 108 U.N. peacekeeping forces from Sri Lanka were discovered to have serially raped Haitian women and girls as young as 7, Marcelin told the Los Angeles Times [4], "That a soldier can do this to a girl he's supposed to be protecting comes from the same mentality that allows a professor to do it to his student or a father to his daughter. In this society, women's bodies are regarded as meat." Merlet fled Haiti in the 1970s. She moved to Canada, where she studied feminist theory and was active in the Haitian diaspora movement. In 1986, she returned to Haiti to advocate for women and children. Eventually she led the newly created Ministry for Gender and the Rights of Women, which collected the data that became the basis for the 2000 U.N. report. Coriolan concentrated on education. In Haiti, education is not free, and families-especially in rural areas-often elect to educate only their male children while putting female children to work, primarily as domestics, factory workers, or field hands. Marcelin, a lawyer and actress, founded Kay Fanm [5], a women's rights group that offered safe haven and microloans to domestic violence victims. The three of them founded Haiti's first domestic violence shelters. When the country stabilizes, there is no guarantee that the work they did will pick up where they left it. From what we know about post-disaster environments, the day- to-day reality for women and girls looks grim. Because of Haiti's instability, human trafficking was always "very bad," says Robin Thompson, the Senior Program Manager at Florida State University's Center for the Advancement of Human Rights [6], and she believes it is likely to get worse. "Trafficking (and other forms of violence against women and children) almost always flourishes, as it did after the tsunami, during this kind of instability." On Jan. 22, UNICEF documented 15 cases of children disappearing from hospitals. Their families have no idea where the children might be, and there is growing concern that human traffickers are already at work. After the Sri Lankan U.N. peacekeepers rape scandal, women's organizations asked that the U.N. make a concerted effort to recruit more female troops. Two years later, the U.N. launched its "Power to Empower" campaign, with the aim of increasing the current 8 percent female troop level to 20 percent by 2014. But of the approximately 2,000 U.N. police in Haiti, about 90 are women [7]. "If you're going into a disaster area to help, women's safety is primary. But I don't think it's high on anyone's list right now," says Rita Smith, director of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Salomon, for one, is not optimistic. "What they were doing was in its infancy. No one is sure what will happen next, because no one knows who or what is left. We don't even know if the shelter is still standing. I suspect it's not." =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Feb 4 09:06:02 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 4 Feb 2010 09:06:02 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] CIA-Mossad Meeting, Preparation for New War against Iran? Message-ID: <28C8B063E4124A778C1B98F3709A5700@agingCHS072729> http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17376 Global Research, February 3, 2010 Secret CIA-Mossad Meeting, Preparation for New War Directed against Iran? APA - 2010-02-02 Baku -- A secret meeting between the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Leon Panetta and Israeli officials has reportedly centered on Iran's nuclear program, APA reports quoting Al Jazeera. In a secret flying visit to Israel on Thursday, the head of the CIA reportedly discussed Iran's nuclear issue in a sit-down with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Mossad Chief Meir Dagan. The trip, which was originally scheduled to take place in May, follows a recent wave of developments in the Middle East that strongly imply preparations for a possible new military conflict in the region. Israel has allegedly increased the scope of its undercover operations in the region, particularly against Lebanon, Iran, Syria and the Palestinian resistance movement, Hamas. The extent of this could be seen in recent remarks by Israeli cabinet minister Yossi Peled, in which the former army general explicitly said that another confrontation with Lebanon's resistance movement Hezbollah was almost inevitable. Lebanon's Prime Minister Saad Hariri responded to the claims on Thursday, saying that Israel's threats against Hezbollah are perceived as threats against Lebanon. "We consider the Israeli threats on Lebanon to be a threat to the Lebanese government as a whole, rather than to one particular person," said Hariri during a joint news conference with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo, Reuters reported. Meanwhile, Hamas officials say they have concrete evidence that the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, staged the recent assassination of a senior Hamas commander, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, in Dubai on January 20. Their claims have been somewhat supported by Dubai Police Chief Dhahi Khalfan. "It could be Mossad," AFP quoted police Chief Dhahi Khalfan as saying on Sunday. To add to the controversy, sources in Turkey's ruling party told Russia's Mignews on Saturday that Israeli spy agents ran an advanced electronic monitoring station from the Ankara military headquarters to keep tabs on communication networks in Iran and Syria. According to the sources who were speaking on condition of anonymity, the Signals Intelligence station was solely managed by Israeli intelligence personnel and had become off-limits for members of the Turkish government. For years Israeli politicians have masterminded a wave of undercover operations and terror plots in numerous countries, including Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Switzerland, and the US. However, much of Israel's espionage operations have lately been focused on the Tehran government, largely because of Iran's uranium enrichment activities, which Tel Aviv has been seeking to portray as a mortal threat. Tel Aviv, which is reported to have an arsenal of 200 nuclear warheads itself, accuses Iran of developing nuclear weapons and routinely threatens to reduce the country's enrichment sites to rubble. This is while Iran, unlike Israel, is a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has opened its enrichment facilities to UN inspection. On Saturday, US presidential aid James Jones rejected prospects of an Israeli attack against Iran. Although US officials normally deny having any plans to stage new war in the region, there have recently been strong hints to the contrary. The New York Times reported Saturday that Washington will further increase its military presence in the Persian Gulf - allegedly to soup up its defense against possible Iranian missile attacks. Meanwhile, US President Barack Obama has approved the deployment of new combat equipments, including advanced missile systems and special warships, to the region. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Feb 4 17:00:45 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 4 Feb 2010 17:00:45 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] If It's That Warm, How Come It's So Darned Cold? Message-ID: If It's That Warm, How Come It's So Darned Cold? An Essay on Regional Cold Anomalies within Near-Record Global Temperature James Hansen, Reto Ruedy, Makiko Sato, Ken Lo Overview. Public skepticism about global warming was reinforced by the extreme cold of December 2009 in the contiguous 48 United States and in much of Eurasia. The summer of 2009 was also unusually cool in the United States. But when a cold spell hits, we need to ask: * Cold compared to what. Our memory of the past few winters? Winters of our childhood? Winters earlier in the 20th century? * Cold where and for how long? Regional cold snaps are expected even with large global warming. Weather fluctuations can be 10, 20 or 30 degrees, much larger than average global warming. * The reality of seasons. As the plot of Earth we live on turns away from the sun, in winter or at night, it cools off. That's true even with global warming, albeit not quite so much. Before addressing these matters, we note that scientists reporting global warming have come under attack for a supposed conspiracy to manufacture evidence of global warming. Perhaps because some members of the public accept these charges as reality, vicious personal messages are sent to the principal scientists almost daily. The spiral into an almost surrealistic situation with ad hominem attacks on scientists may have originated in part with vested interests who do not want society to address climate change. But there is more than that . including honest, wishful thinking that climate change is not really happening. But wishing does not alter facts. The scientific method practically defines integrity. [Albert Einstein: "The right to search for truth implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true." - Richard Feynman: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself . and you are the easiest person to fool."]. All scientists make honest mistakes, but the scientific method is designed to correct them. The skeptical nature of the scientific method causes conclusions to be reexamined as new data appears. Cases of deliberate fudging of data, of scientific fraud, are so rare that these infrequent episodes live in infamy for decades and even centuries. We know of no cases of fraud in analyses of global temperature measurements. Despite unfounded accusations, we believe that our best approach is simply to continue to report our scientific results as clearly as possible. Most of the public continue to respect scientists for what they do and how they do it. We presume that most of the public can separate science from political commentary. Our data show that 2009 was tied for the second warmest year in the 130 years of near?]global instrumental measurements . and the Southern Hemisphere had its warmest year in that entire period. Before discussing these data, and their reconciliation with regional cold anomalies, we must consider the time frame of comparison. If we look back a century, we find cold anomalies that dwarf current ones. Figure 1 shows photos of people walking on Niagara Falls in 1911. Such an extreme cold snap is unimaginable today. About a decade earlier, in February 1899, temperature fell to -2 F in Tallahassee, Florida, -9 F in Atlanta, Georgia -30 F in Erasmus, Tennessee, -47 F in Camp Clark, Nebraska, and -61 F in Fort Logan, Montana. The Mississippi River froze all the way to New Orleans, discharging ice into the Gulf of Mexico. As we will show, climate is changing, especially during the past 30 years. The changes are perceptible, even though average temperature change is smaller than weather fluctuations. The answer to the simple question: "How come it?fs so damned cold" turns out to be simple: "Because it's winter." [Figure 1. Photographs of Niagara Falls in 1911.] Full: http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2010/20100127_TemperatureFinal.pdf =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Feb 4 21:55:40 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 4 Feb 2010 21:55:40 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Do we still need to celebrate Black History Month? Message-ID: <8DDAC9E6A05A49D1AF2E91ADA0069EC6@agingCHS072729> http://www.blackcommentator.com/361/361_cover_i_bhm_celebrate_bhm.ph The Black Commentator - Issue 361 Feb. 4, 2010 Do we still need to celebrate Black History Month? by the Reverend Irene Monroe February 1 began Black History Month, a national annual observance since 1926, honoring and celebrating the achievements of African-Americans. This February 1 the International Civil Rights Center and Museum (ICRCM) opened in Greensboro, North Carolina, honoring the courageous action of four African- American students. Their actions led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which mandated desegregation of all public accommodations. Fifty years ago on February 1, 1960 the now ICRCM was a Woolworth's store and the site of the original sit-in where Ezell A. Blair Jr. (also known as Jibreel Khazan), David Leinhail Richmond, Joseph Alfred McNeil, and Franklin Eugene McCain from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College (NC A&T), a historically black college, sat at its lunch counter as a form of non-violent direct action protesting the store's segregated seating policy. And as a result of their civil disobedience, sit-ins sprung up not only in Greensboro but throughout the South, challenging other forms of this nation's segregated public accommodations, including bathrooms, water fountains, parks, theaters, and swimming pools, to name a few. If Dr. Carter Woodson, the Father of Black History, were alive today, he would be proud that the ICRCM opened this month. However, for a younger generation of African- Americans as well as whites, whose ballots help elect this country's first African-American president, celebrating Black History Month seems outdated. "Obama is post-racial. And Black History Month is old school," Josh Dawson (26) of New Hampshire tells me. For many whites as well as people of color of Dawson's generation, Obama race was a "non-issue." And Obama's election encapsulated for them both the physical and symbolic representation of Martin Luther Kings' vision uttered in his historic "I Have a Dream" during the 1963 March on Washington. "King said don't judge by the color of our skin, but instead the content of our character," Dawson continues. In proving how "post-racial" Obama was as a presidential candidate, Michael Crowley of "The New Republic" wrote in his article "Post-racial" that it wasn't only liberals who had no problem with Obama's race but conservatives had no problem too, even the infamous ex-Klansman David Duke. "Even white Supremacists don't hate Obama," Crowley writes about Duke. "[Duke] seems almost nonchalant about Obama, don't see much difference in Barack Obama than Hillary Clinton--or, for that matter, John McCain." For years, the celebration of Black History Month has always brought up the ire around "identity politics" and "special rights." 'If we're gonna' have Black History Month, why not White History Month? Italian History Month? Chinese History Month?," Dawson questions. During the George W. Bush years we saw the waning interest in "identity politics," creating both political and systematic disempowerment of marginalized groups, like people of color, women, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people. We also saw the gradual dismantling of affirmative action policies, like in 2003 when the Supreme Court split the difference on affirmative action, allowing the Bakke case on reverse discrimination to stand. In celebrating Black History Month this year in what is now perceived by some to be one year in the "post-racial" era since Obama took office, I worry how we as a nation will honestly talk about race. For example, During Black History Month in 2009 Holder received scathing criticism for his speech on race. His critics said the tone and tenor of the speech was confrontational and accusatory. "Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot," Holder said, "in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards." Within the African- American LGBTQ community, Black History Month has always come under criticism. And rightly so! The absence of LGBTQ people of African descent in the month-long celebration is evidence of how race, gender and sexual politics of the dominant culture are reinscribed in black culture as well. It leads you to believe that the only shakers and movers in the history of people of African descent in the U.S. were and still are heterosexuals. And because of this heterosexist bias, the sheroes and heroes of LGBTQ people of African decent -- like Pat Parker, Audre Lorde, Essex Hemphill, Joseph Beam, and Bayard Rustin -- are mostly known and lauded within a subculture of black life. However, the argument that celebrating Black History Month in 2010 is no more than a celebration of a relic tethered to an old defunct paradigm of the civil rights era and is a hindrance to black people moving forward is bogus. In order to move forward you must look back. And in so doing, were it not for the successful sit-ins, marches, and boycotts of the 1960's, could we have this conversation in 2010? [BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, the Rev. Irene Monroe, is a religion columnist, theologian, and public speaker. She is the Coordinator of the African American Roundtable of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry (CLGS) at the Pacific School of Religion. A native of Brooklyn, Rev. Monroe is a graduate from Wellesley College and Union Theological Seminary at Columbia University, and served as a pastor at an African- American church before coming to Harvard Divinity School for her doctorate as a Ford Fellow. She was recently named to MSNBC's list of 10 Black Women You Should Know. Reverend Monroe is the author of Let Your Light Shine Like a Rainbow Always: Meditations on Bible Prayers for Not-So-Everyday Moments. As an African American feminist theologian, she speaks for a sector of society that is frequently invisible. Her website is irenemonroe.com. Click here to contact the Rev. Monroe.] =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Feb 4 23:09:20 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 4 Feb 2010 23:09:20 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Noam Chomsky: The Corporate Takeover of U.S. Democracy Message-ID: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/5502/the_corporate_takeover_of_u.s._democracy/ In These Times February 3, 2010 The Corporate Takeover of U.S. Democracy By Noam Chomsky Jan. 21, 2010, will go down as a dark day in the history of U.S. democracy, and its decline. On that day the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the government may not ban corporations from political spending on elections-a decision that profoundly affects government policy, both domestic and international. The decision heralds even further corporate takeover of the U.S. political system. To the editors of The New York Times, the ruling "strikes at the heart of democracy" by having "paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding." The court was split, 5-4, with the four reactionary judges (misleadingly called "conservative") joined by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. selected a case that could easily have been settled on narrow grounds and maneuvered the court into using it to push through a far-reaching decision that overturns a century of precedents restricting corporate contributions to federal campaigns. Now corporate managers can in effect buy elections directly, bypassing more complex indirect means. It is well-known that corporate contributions, sometimes packaged in complex ways, can tip the balance in elections, hence driving policy. The court has just handed much more power to the small sector of the population that dominates the economy. Political economist Thomas Ferguson's "investment theory of politics" is a very successful predictor of government policy over a long period. The theory interprets elections as occasions on which segments of private sector power coalesce to invest to control the state. The Jan. 21 decision only reinforces the means to undermine functioning democracy. The background is enlightening. In his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens acknowledged that "we have long since held that corporations are covered by the First Amendment"-the constitutional guarantee of free speech, which would include support for political candidates. In the early 20th century, legal theorists and courts implemented the court's 1886 decision that corporations- these "collectivist legal entities"-have the same rights as persons of flesh and blood. This attack on classical liberalism was sharply condemned by the vanishing breed of conservatives. Christopher G. Tiedeman described the principle as "a menace to the liberty of the individual, and to the stability of the American states as popular governments." Morton Horwitz writes in his standard legal history that the concept of corporate personhood evolved alongside the shift of power from shareholders to managers, and finally to the doctrine that "the powers of the board of directors "are identical with the powers of the corporation." In later years, corporate rights were expanded far beyond those of persons, notably by the mislabeled "free trade agreements." Under these agreements, for example, if General Motors establishes a plant in Mexico, it can demand to be treated just like a Mexican business ("national treatment")-quite unlike a Mexican of flesh and blood who might seek "national treatment" in New York, or even minimal human rights. A century ago, Woodrow Wilson, then an academic, described an America in which "comparatively small groups of men," corporate managers, "wield a power and control over the wealth and the business operations of the country," becoming "rivals of the government itself." In reality, these "small groups" increasingly have become government's masters. The Roberts court gives them even greater scope. The Jan. 21 decision came three days after another victory for wealth and power: the election of Republican candidate Scott Brown to replace the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the "liberal lion" of Massachusetts. Brown's election was depicted as a "populist upsurge" against the liberal elitists who run the government. The voting data reveal a rather different story. High turnouts in the wealthy suburbs, and low ones in largely Democratic urban areas, helped elect Brown. "Fifty- five percent of Republican voters said they were `very interested' in the election," The Wall St. Journal/NBC poll reported, "compared with 38 percent of Democrats." So the results were indeed an uprising against President Obama's policies: For the wealthy, he was not doing enough to enrich them further, while for the poorer sectors, he was doing too much to achieve that end. The popular anger is quite understandable, given that the banks are thriving, thanks to bailouts, while unemployment has risen to 10 percent. In manufacturing, one in six is out of work-unemployment at the level of the Great Depression. With the increasing financialization of the economy and the hollowing out of productive industry, prospects are bleak for recovering the kinds of jobs that were lost. Brown presented himself as the 41st vote against healthcare- that is, the vote that could undermine majority rule in the U.S. Senate. It is true that Obama's healthcare program was a factor in the Massachusetts election. The headlines are correct when they report that the public is turning against the program. The poll figures explain why: The bill does not go far enough. The Wall St. Journal/NBC poll found that a majority of voters disapprove of the handling of healthcare both by the Republicans and by Obama. These figures align with recent nationwide polls. The public option was favored by 56 percent of those polled, and the Medicare buy-in at age 55 by 64 percent; both programs were abandoned. Eighty-five percent believe that the government should have the right to negotiate drug prices, as in other countries; Obama guaranteed Big Pharma that he would not pursue that option. Large majorities favor cost-cutting, which makes good sense: U.S. per capita costs for healthcare are about twice those of other industrial countries, and health outcomes are at the low end. But cost-cutting cannot be seriously undertaken when largesse is showered on the drug companies, and healthcare is in the hands of virtually unregulated private insurers-a costly system peculiar to the U.S. The Jan. 21 decision raises significant new barriers to overcoming the serious crisis of healthcare, or to addressing such critical issues as the looming environmental and energy crises. The gap between public opinion and public policy looms larger. And the damage to American democracy can hardly be overestimated. [Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the author of dozens of books on U.S. foreign policy. He writes a monthly column for The New York Times News Service/Syndicate.] =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Feb 4 23:31:05 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 4 Feb 2010 23:31:05 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] On the claimed "war exception" to the Constitution Message-ID: <8DBCA5C868F447B895D6F401FCF306FB@agingCHS072729> Salon.com Feb 4, 2010 On the claimed "war exception" to the Constitution By Glenn Greenwald Last week, I wrote about a revelation buried in a Washington Post article by Dana Priest which described how the Obama administration has adopted the Bush policy of targeting selected American citizens for assassination if they are deemed (by the Executive Branch) to be Terrorists. As The Washington Times' Eli Lake reports, Adm. Dennis Blair was asked about this program at a Congressional hearing yesterday and he acknowledged its existence: The U.S. intelligence community policy on killing American citizens who have joined al Qaeda requires first obtaining high-level government approval, a senior official disclosed to Congress on Wednesday. Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair said in each case a decision to use lethal force against a U.S. citizen must get special permission. . . . He also said there are criteria that must be met to authorize the killing of a U.S. citizen that include "whether that American is involved in a group that is trying to attack us, whether that American is a threat to other Americans. Those are the factors involved." Although Blair emphasized that it requires "special permission" before an American citizen can be placed on the assassination list, consider from whom that "permission" is obtained: the President, or someone else under his authority within the Executive Branch. There are no outside checks or limits at all on how these "factors" are weighed. In last week's post, I wrote about all the reasons why it's so dangerous -- as well as both legally and Consitutionally dubious -- to allow the President to kill American citizens not on an active battlefield during combat, but while they are sleeping, sitting with their families in their home, walking on the street, etc. That's basically giving the President the power to impose death sentences on his own citizens without any charges or trial. Who could possibly support that? But even if you're someone who does want the President to have the power to order American citizens killed without a trial by decreeing that they are Terrorists (and it's worth remembering that if you advocate that power, it's going to be vested in all Presidents, not just the ones who are as Nice, Good, Kind-Hearted and Trustworthy as Barack Obama), shouldn't there at least be some judicial approval required? Do we really want the President to be able to make this decision unilaterally and without outside checks? Remember when many Democrats were horrified (or at least when they purported to be) at the idea that Bush was merely eavesdropping on American citizens without judicial approval? Shouldn't we be at least as concerned about the President's being able to assassinate Americans without judicial oversight? That seems much more Draconian to me. It would be perverse in the extreme, but wouldn't it be preferable to at least require the President to demonstrate to a court that probable cause exists to warrant the assassination of an American citizen before the President should be allowed to order it? That would basically mean that courts would issue "assassination warrants" or "murder warrants" -- a repugnant idea given that they're tantamount to imposing the death sentence without a trial -- but isn't that minimal safeguard preferable to allowing the President unchecked authority to do it on his own, the very power he has now claimed for himself? And if the Fifth Amendment's explicit guarantee -- that one shall not be deprived of life without due process -- does not prohibit the U.S. Government from assassinating you without any process, what exactly does it prohibit? Noting Scott Brown's campaign to deny accused Terrorists access to lawyers and a real trial, Adam Serwer wrote: This is the new normal for Republicans: You can be denied rights not through due process of law but merely based on the nature of the crime you are suspected of committing. That's absolutely true, but that also perfectly describes this assassination program -- as well as a whole host of other now-Democratic policies, from indefinite detention to denial of civilian trials. * * * * * The severe dangers of vesting assassination powers in the President are so glaring that even GOP Rep. Pete Hoekstra is able to see them (at least he is now that there's a Democratic President). At yesterday's hearing, Hoekstra asked Adm. Blair about the threat that the President might order Americans killed due to their Constitutionally protected political speech rather than because they were actually engaged in Terrorism. This concern is not an abstract one. The current controversy has been triggered by the Obama administration's attempt to kill U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. But al-Awlaki has not been accused (let alone convicted) of trying to attack Americans. Instead, he's accused of being a so-called "radical cleric" who supports Al Qaeda and now provides "encouragement" to others to engage in attacks -- a charge al-Awlaki's family vehemently denies (al-Awlaki himself is in hiding due to fear that his own Government will assassinate him). The question of where First Amendment-protected radical advocacy ends and criminality begins is exactly the sort of question with which courts have long grappled. In the 1969 case of Brandenburg v. Ohio, the Supreme Court unanimously reversed a criminal conviction of a Ku Klux Klan leader who -- surrounded by hooded indivduals holding weapons -- gave a speech threatening "revengeance" against any government official who "continues to suppress the white, Caucasian race." The Court held that the First Amendment protects advocacy of violence and revolution, and that the State is barred from punishing citizens for the expression of such views. The Brandenburg Court pointed to a long history of precedent protecting the First Amendment rights of Communists to call for revolution -- even violent revolution -- inside the U.S., and explained that the Government can punish someone for violent actions but not for speech that merely advocates or justifies violence (emphasis added): As we [395 U.S. 444, 448] said in Noto v. United States, 367 U.S. 290, 297 -298 (1961), "the mere abstract teaching . . . of the moral propriety or even moral necessity for a resort to force and violence, is not the same as preparing a group for violent action and steeling it to such action." See also Herndon v. Lowry, 301 U.S. 242, 259 -261 (1937); Bond v. Floyd, 385 U.S. 116, 134 (1966). A statute which fails to draw this distinction impermissibly intrudes upon the freedoms guaranteed by the First and Fourteenth Amendments. It sweeps within its condemnation speech which our Constitution has immunized from governmental control. >From all appearances, al-Awlaki seems to believe that violence by Muslims against the U.S. is justified in retaliation for the violence the U.S. has long brought (and continues to bring) to the Muslim world. But as an American citizen, he has the absolute Constitutional right to express those views and not be punished for them (let alone killed) no matter where he is in the world; it's far from clear that he has transgressed the advocacy line into violent action. Obviously, there are those who justify such assassination powers on the ground that radical Islam is a grave threat, but that is what is always said to justify Constitutional abridgements (it was obviously said of Communists and war critics during World War I). Indeed, in light of episodes like the Timothy McVeigh bombing and the various attacks on abortion clinics, shouldn't those who want the President to be able to assassinate American "radical clerics" without a trial also support the President's targeting of Americans who advocate extremism or violence from a far right or extremist Christian perspective? What's the principle that allows one but not the other? In response to these concerns, Admiral Blair said yesterday: "We don't target people for free speech. We target them for taking action that threatens Americans or has resulted in it." But the U.S. Government -- like all governments -- has a long history of viewing "free speech" as a violent threat or even Terrorism. That's why this is exactly the type of question that is typically -- and is intended to be -- resolved by courts, according the citizen due process, not by the President acting alone. That's especially true if the death penalty is to be imposed. But Obama's presidential assassination policy completely short-circuits that process. It literally makes Barack Obama the judge, jury and executioner even of American citizens. Beyond its specific application, it is yet another step -- a rather major one -- towards abandoning our basic system of checks and balances in the name of Terrorism and War. * * * * * That last point is the most important one here. Atrios wrote the other day that a central prong in the Washington consensus is that "all it takes to nullify the constitution is to call someone a terraist." That's absolutely true, but a close corollary is that merely uttering the word "war" justifies the same thing. That's particularly dangerous given that, by all accounts, this is a so-called "war" that will not end for a generation, if ever. To justify the abridgment or even suspension of the Constitution on the ground of "war" is to advocate serious alterations to our Constitutional framework that are more or less permanent. Several points about that "war" excuse: First, there's no "war exception" in the Constitution. Even with real wars -- i.e., those involving combat between opposing armies -- the Constitution actually continues to constrain what government officials can do, most stringently as it concerns U.S. citizens. Second, strictly speaking, we're not really "at war," as Congress has merely authorized the use of military force but has not formally or Constitutionally declared war. Even the Bush administration conceded that this is a vital difference when it comes to legal rights. In 2006, the Bush DOJ insisted that the wartime provision of FISA -- allowing the Government to eavesdrop for up to 15 days without a warrant -- didn't apply because Congress only enacted an AUMF, not a declaration of war (click image to enlarge): The contrary interpretation of section 111 also ignore the important differences between a formal declaration of war and a resolution such as the AUMF. As a historical matter, a formal declaration of war was no longer than a sentence, and thus Congress would not expect a declaration of war to outline the extent to which Congress authorized the President to engage in various incidents of waging war. Authorizations for the use of military force, by contrast, are typically more detailed and are made for the SPECIFIC PURPOSE of reciting the manner in which Congress has authorized the President to act. The Bush DOJ went on to explain that declarations of war trigger a whole variety of legal effects (such as terminating diplomatic relations and abrogating or suspending treaty obligations) which AUMFs do not trigger (see p. 27). To authorize military force is not to declare war. Finally, the U.S. is fighting numerous undeclared wars, including ones involving military action: given that our "War on Drugs" continues to rage, should the U.S. Government be able to target accused "drug kingpins" for assassination without a trial, the way we attempted to do in Afghanistan? After all, Terrorists blow up airplanes but Drug Kingpins kill our kids!!! The mindset that cheers for unlimited Presidential powers in the name of "war" invariably leads to exactly these sorts of expansions. Far beyond the specific injustices of assassinating Americans without trials, the real significance, the real danger, is that we continue to be frightened into radically altering our system of government. In Slate yesterday, Dahlia Lithwick encapsulated this problem perfectly; her whole article should be read, but this excerpt is superb: America has slid back again into its own special brand of terrorism-derangement syndrome. Each time this condition recurs, it presents with more acute and puzzling symptoms. . . . Moreover, each time Republicans go to their terrorism crazy-place, they go just a little bit farther than they did the last time, so that things that made us feel safe last year make us feel vulnerable today. . . . In short, what was once tough on terror is now soft on terror. And each time the Republicans move their own crazy-place goal posts, the Obama administration moves right along with them. . . . We're terrified when a terror attack happens, and we're also terrified when it's thwarted. We're terrified when we give terrorists trials, and we're terrified when we warehouse them at Guantanamo without trials. If a terrorist cooperates without being tortured we complain about how much more he would have cooperated if he hadn't been read his rights. No matter how tough we've been on terror, we will never feel safe enough to ask for fewer safeguards. . . . But here's the paradox: It's not a terrorist's time bomb that's ticking. It's us. Since 9/11, we have become ever more willing to suspend basic protections and more contemptuous of American traditions and institutions. The failed Christmas bombing and its political aftermath have revealed that the terrorists have changed very little in the eight-plus years since the World Trade Center fell. What's changing -- what's slowly ticking its way down to zero -- is our own certainty that we can never be safe enough and our own confidence in the rule of law. This descent has certainly not reversed itself -- it has not really even slowed -- with the election of a President who repeatedly vowed to reject this mentality. Just consider what Al Gore said in his truly excellent 2006 speech decrying the "Constitutional crisis" under the Bush presidency: Can it be true that any president really has such powers under our Constitution? If the answer is yes, then under the theory by which these acts are committed, are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited? If the president has the inherent authority to eavesdrop on American citizens without a warrant, imprison American citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can't he do? Here we are, almost four years later with a new party in power, and the President's top intelligence official announces -- without any real controversy -- that the President claims the power to assassinate American citizens with no charges, no trials, no judicial oversight of any kind. The claimed power isn't "inherent" -- it's based on alleged Congressional approval -- but it's safeguard-free and due-process-free just the same. As Gore asked of less severe policies in 2006, if the President can do that, "then what can't he do?" As long as we stay petrified of the Terrorists and wholly submissive whenever the word "war" is uttered, the answer will continue to be: "nothing." We'll have Presidents now and then who are marginally more restrained than others -- as the current President is marginally more restrained than the prior one -- but what Lithwick calls our "willingness to suspend basic protections and become more contemptuous of American traditions and institutions" will continue unabated. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Fri Feb 5 15:35:57 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 2010 15:35:57 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Obama Ignores Lessons of Community Organizing Message-ID: <807FC3D4C6174B58B8D04C8A300C25FD@agingCHS072729> http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=7639 Obama Ignores Lessons of Community Organizing by Randy Shaw, Dec. 14, 2009 When Barack Obama backed a Senate health reform plan that differed radically from prior proposals, he ignored the lessons he learned as a young organizer on Chicago's South Side. Obama once knew that it's wrong to bypass the community's agenda to strike a backroom deal, regardless of its superior terms. Obama also understood that failing to consult with the community disempowers the base, and discourages people from participating in future organizing campaigns. While progressives debate the merits of the Senate plan, the tragedy of the health care debacle is that the President asked key constituency groups and activists to mobilize for months behind a plan for public option that he suddenly abandoned - without even consulting those he claims to represent. In contrast, he seeks input from Wall Street bankers before implementing fiscal policies, and spent hours meeting with military leaders in formulating strategy for Afghanistan. Obama told labor unions, the HCAN coalition, AARP, MoveOn, Democracy for America, the progressive blogosphere, and the millions of Democrats on the Party's email lists that meaningful health reform could not happen unless they all joined him in the fight. Obama also used his Organizing for America to raise money for health reform, and to mobilize support through house meetings, phone calls, and other grassroots actions. And then he unilaterally made a backroom deal that entirely ignored both activists and those they mobilized. Obama has sent a troubling message to progressives, and particularly to young activists new to the political game. It is hard to believe that Obama could so completely forget what he learned as a community organizer. After all these groups and individuals worked day and night for a public option, the President engaged in the ultimate act of disempowerment by cutting a deal that eliminated this central reform in favor of a quasi-Medicare option that even Senators did not fully understand. And as facts about this option came out - such as the New York Times report that the Medicare option would annually cost an exorbitant $15,200 per couple - what became understandable became unconscionable. A community organizer that so manipulated their grassroots base would be fired. And while Obama is the President, this did not entitle him to inspire people to rally around a cause - and to ask them to give money in tough economic times - when he felt no hesitancy about discarding its central component. Obama Deceives His Base Obama knows that a community organizer is only as good as their word. You can't organize or mobilize people without their trust, and Barack Obama's success at mobilizing millions in his fall 2008 campaign was attributable to his convincing a cynical electorate that he could be trusted to bring real change. I now wonder why anyone who worked for the public option that Obama promoted both in his campaign and in nationally televised presidential speeches would enlist in a future Obama issue campaign. If the President feels free to unilaterally ignore his base on his signature priority, there's no reason this pattern will not apply to the rest of his agenda. And those who argue that it is unfair to blame Obama for the inability to get 60 Senators to support a robust public option miss two critical points. First, Obama chose not to insist on the reconciliation process, which would have brought the public option and other key reforms with only 51 votes. Second, Obama could have done what community organizers often must do when they realize that a goal cannot be met: speak honestly with the base about the inability to surmount political obstacles, and work collaboratively to strike the best deal possible under the circumstances. It has been no secret for months that getting 60 Senate votes for meaningful health reform would be an uphill struggle, and Obama had plenty of time to discuss alternatives with key constituency groups. Obama has no excuse for his failure to get representatives of the leading health care advocacy groups and progressive media in a room to discuss strategies to address the political realities of reform. Had Obama followed the community organizer's lesson book and spoke honestly with his base, there could have emerged a Senate strategy with constituency buy-in. Or even had Obama concluded that his base was politically unrealistic, and told them that he would accept proposals they found insufficient, the terrible feelings of surprise and betrayal that accompanied reports of the deal would have been avoided. Instead, Obama sent a message to his allies that their perceived partnership in the fight for health care was illusory. Obama felt free to unilaterally back the Senate deal, notwithstanding his longstanding rhetoric that "I can't do this alone," or his insistence that he and his supporters are working for a "common purpose." Unlike a community organizer, a President has the right to take actions opposed by his constituency. But backing a Senate deal without consulting his base is precisely the type of "politics as usual" that candidate Obama pledged to end if elected. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Fri Feb 5 15:52:28 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 2010 15:52:28 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Investment theory of party competition - a must read! Message-ID: <7DDBE62CAF244B5EA0CD058F911E7173@agingCHS072729> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Investment_theory_of_party_competition Investment theory of party competition >From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The investment theory of party competition is a political theory put forth by University of Massachusetts professor Thomas Ferguson. It describes elections as moments when blocs of investors coalesce and compete to control the state. The high costs of political participation for average voters leads to the buying of elections by businesses. This is done through contributions, as well as direct and indirect influence from corporations, law firms and the commercial media. The theory argues that in the absence of an organized populace and labor movement, power passes by default to blocs of investors, and thus, the candidate with the most financial backing always wins. Ferguson argues that members of the United States Congress earn the highest rates of return in recorded history on their portfolios, because stock market prices reflect major investor knowledge of campaign contributions, and they have inside information. Government thus acts as a protector of elite interests, and as arbiter for the conflicting interests of competing blocs of investors: e.g., those which are more or less protectionist, those which are more or less labor-intensive, more or less linked to the financial sector, etc. Since the conditions that allow certain industries to prosper and form new blocs change (e.g., the change from coal to oil at the beginning of the 20th century, market deregulation at the end of that century, etc.), and since the influence of organized labor and popular movements can be considerable, the blocs of investors that control different parties also change depending on the period-sometimes retreating to one party or even instituting a dictatorship. These last options tend to be adopted with the growth of labor and leftist movements; or in the Third World in reaction to any policy that threatens investors (e.g., nationalizations that jeopardize profits). But as long as the power of labor is relatively weak, dictatorships or single parties are not generally necessary or beneficial. Though in Ferguson's theory all businesses have common interests, such as opposition to increasingly higher taxes or labor unions, one single party doesn't allow the breadth and disparity of business interests to be fully articulated. In the investment theory, what are commonly referred to as "left" and "right" parties simply refers to blocs of investors with some conflicting interests, which allow them different levels of compromise with a relatively weak labor movement. For example, in the 19th century, almost all businesses were very labor-intensive. The change from coal to oil created a technological revolution which allowed many businesses to produce with fewer workers (in technical terms: wages as a percentage of value-added). Politically, this meant that these new or renovated capital-intensive businesses (many of them also less protectionist) had a greater tolerance for labor unions (a union in a labor-intensive industry is very expensive for the owner). This explains why they were more in favor of the social democratic "New Deal" of the 1930s (e.g., oil, paper, international banks), while older labor-intensive industries (e.g., textiles, rubber, steel, etc.) were against it. This, in turn, may generate further tensions, because while technological advance allows a somewhat higher tolerance for unions, public opposition may arise against the replacement of workers by machines. The establishment's reaction to Third World decolonization and the public political involvement in the 1960s, during the Keynesian "Golden Age of Capitalism", as well as the proliferation of a low-wage debt-driven economy and other somewhat unclear economic dynamics possibly led to the growth and deregulation of the financial sector from the 1970s onward. This meant that its influence on the political system also grew, especially on the so-called "left" parties such as the Democrats in the United States. Hence the parallel political support for deregulation, the financial bailouts of the late-2000s, and the victory of Barack Obama in the 2008 US presidential election. With the proliferation of speculation and emphasis on large short-term profits, many financial institutions have, according to Ferguson, adopted almost 19th-century labor-management relations. This largely explains the erosion of social democratic policies.[1] See also Campaign finance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance References Thomas Ferguson, Golden rule: the investment theory of party competition and the logic of money-driven political systems http://books.google.com/books?id=CU8oyIlNyQcC&dq=investment+theory+party+competition&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=qilco5PlJF&sig=NknYgcSaZF0OQ2ilcwDuz6kJssM&hl=en&ei=_8uYSvTDDof-tQOZx92pAg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4#v=onepage&q=&f=false External links "Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Politics". Documentary by Jonathan Shockley featuring Tom Ferguson, Noam Chomsky and other thinkers. http://goldenruledocumentary.blogspot.com/ =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Fri Feb 5 20:16:23 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 2010 20:16:23 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] There's real hope from Haiti and it's not what you expect Message-ID: <01A137F0B5654CDF889ADE2F32534314@agingCHS072729> The Independent 5 February 2010 There's real hope from Haiti and it's not what you expect Until 1994, the country at least grew its own staple crop: rice. But the IMF came in and ordered the government to cut its rice tariff from 35 per cent to 3 per cent. Suddenly the market was flooded with rice grown in the US by hugely subsidised farmers, and Haiti's rice farmers went bust. Hundreds of thousands swelled to the slum-cities and sweat shops of Port-au-Prince, where they built mud huts - and were buried in 2010. The IMF reduced the country from self-sufficiency to dependency, in a move known locally as "the Plan of Death". It was one of the external political earthquakes that made this natural earthquake far more deadly. By Johann Hari In the weeks after a disaster like the Haiti earthquake, journalists always search for an upbeat twist to the tale. You know it by now - the baby found alive after a week under wreckage. But this time, a shaft of light has parted the rubble and the corpses and the unshakeable grief that could last for years. In the middle of the Haitian people's nightmare, a system that has kept hundreds of millions like them poor and broken might just have shown its first fracture. To understand what has happened, you have to delve into a long-suppressed history - one you are not supposed to hear. Since the 1970s, we have been told that the gospel of the Free Market has rolled out across the world because the People demand it. We have been informed that free elections will lead ineluctably to people choosing to roll back the state, privatise the essentials of life, and leave the rich to work their magic for us all. We have seen these trends wash across the world because ordinary people believe they offer the best possible system. There's just one snag: it's not true. In reality, this gospel has proved impossible to impose in any democracy. Few politicians have believed in its core tenets more than Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher - yet at the end of their long terms, after bitter battles, the proportion of GDP spent by the state remained the same. Why? Because these doctrines are extremely unpopular, and wherever they are tried, they are fiercely resisted. There are majorities in every free country for a mixed economy, where markets are counter-balanced by a strong and active state. The gospel spread across the poor world because their governments were given no choice. In her masterpiece The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein shows how these policies were forced on the world's poor against their will. Sometimes rich governments did it simply by killing the elected leaders and installing a servile dictator, as in Chile. Usually the methods were more subtle. One of the most marked came in the form of "loans" from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The IMF would approach poor countries and offer them desperately needed cash. But from the 1970s on, they would, in return, require the countries to introduce "structural adjustments" to their economy. The medicine was always the same: end all subsidies for the poor, slash state spending on health and education, deregulate your financial sector, throw your markets open. Here's a typical example of what happened next. In Malawi, the country's soil had become badly depleted, so the government decided to subsidise fertiliser for farmers. When the IMF and World Bank came in, they called this "a market distortion", and ordered Malawi to stop at once. They did. So the country's crops failed, and famine scythed through the population. Tens of thousands starved to death. The Malawian government eventually listened to the cries of its people, kicked out the IMF, and reintroduced the subsidies - and the famine stopped that year. The country is now an exporter of food again. When people are living so close to the edge, even small increases in prices can break them. The IMF systematically disregards the fact that every country that has lifted itself out of poverty has done the opposite of its commands. For example, South Korea went from poverty to plenty in just two generations by protecting and heavily subsiding its industries and jacking up state subsidies - to the IMF's horror. Even Professor Jeffrey Sachs - one of their former lackeys - calls the IMF "the Typhoid Mary of emerging markets, spreading recessions in country after country". So why do they carry on like this? Primarily, it is because IMF programmes work very well - for the rich. They ensure that we get access to the cheapest possible labour and can help ourselves to the glistening resources that inexplicably ended up under their soil. The serve-the-rich ideology that caused our economy to crash in 2008 has been crashing poor countries for a long time. But there's a sting. After decades of ordering poor countries to slash subsidies and state spending, the IMF reacted to the recession by urging rich countries ... to spend a fortune subsidising the banks, and to increase state spending. They wouldn't dream of drinking the medicine they have been serving out to the poor for so long. It's not as if the IMF has learned from its mistakes: it has just forced countries from El Salvador to Ukraine to Pakistan to sign deals committing themselves to leave the state inert in the face of severe external shocks to their economies. No: the IMF only imposes its deadly prescriptions on those too weak and too distant to matter. Here's where Haiti comes in. The IMF agenda has often been forced on populations when they are least able to resist - after a military coup, a massacre, or a natural disaster. For example, the people of Thailand fought for years against clearing their locals off their beaches to make way for holiday resorts, and voted against the privatisation of water and electricity. But immediately after the tsunami, both were pushed through. After the earthquake, something similar was poised to happen to Haiti. The IMF announced a $100m loan, stapled on to an earlier loan, which requires Haiti to raise electricity prices, and freeze wages for the public-sector workers who are needed to rebuild the country. So when people emerged from the rubble, they would find an economy rigged even more heavily against them. There is no doubt about what the Haitian people would think: they know the IMF. Until 1994, the country at least grew its own staple crop: rice. But the IMF came in and ordered the government to cut its rice tariff from 35 per cent to 3 per cent. Suddenly the market was flooded with rice grown in the US by hugely subsidised farmers, and Haiti's rice farmers went bust. Hundreds of thousands swelled to the slum-cities and sweat shops of Port-au-Prince, where they built mud huts - and were buried in 2010. The IMF reduced the country from self-sufficiency to dependency, in a move known locally as "the Plan of Death". It was one of the external political earthquakes that made this natural earthquake far more deadly. But something new and startling happened this month. For the first time, the IMF was stopped from shafting a poor country - by a rebellion here in the rich world. Hours after the quake, a Facebook group called "No Shock Doctrine For Haiti" had tens of thousands of members, and orchestrated a petition to the IMF of over 150,000 signatures demanding the loan become a no-strings grant. After Naomi Klein's mega-selling expos?, there was a vigilant public who wanted to see that the money they were donating to charity was not going to be cancelled out by the IMF. And it worked. The IMF backed down. It publicly renounced its conditions - and even said it would work to cancel Haiti's entire debt. This is the first sign that exposing and opposing the IMF's agenda works. Klein says it is "unprecedented in my experience, and shows that public pressure in moments of disaster can seriously subvert shock doctrine tactics." Of course, the IMF needs to be watched vigilantly. Already it seems to be rolling back some of its panicked initial rhetoric and saying that "beyond the emergency phase" it may go back to business as usual. Very powerful interests want the IMF to continue to dance to their tune. But thanks to all the ordinary Europeans and Americans who pushed back, Haiti will not be IMF-ed up now, in its darkest hour. Not this time. Not these people. Not again. These should be the first baby-steps of a campaign to finally stop the IMF's poverty-promoting machine steam-rolling across continents. On the political Richter scale, that would mark a 7.0 - for the causes of democracy and justice. j.hari at independent.co.uk =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Fri Feb 5 20:22:32 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 2010 20:22:32 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Americans Are Learning Medicine the Cuban Way Message-ID: <9D5FD8225E924AF2B26E91D357556A58@agingCHS072729> http://www.alternet.org/story/145523/ Americans Are Learning Medicine the Cuban Way By Julia Landau, East Bay Express February 5, 2010 Melissa Rose Mitchell was discouraged. After taking the Medical College Admission Test, she was uneasy about applying to medical schools. In prep courses for the exams, she had glimpsed her future as a doctor, and she didn't like the environment she saw. "People were like, 'What kind of doctor do you want to be?' and it was all based on how much money you make," the Oakland resident recalled. "It was a really scary moment, because this thing that all my life I had wanted to do without question, all of a sudden I'm thinking, 'I don't know if I want to do this.'" Mitchell had scraped together the money to prepare for and take the med-school admissions test, but even as she studied, she had begun to waver. "It had taken me over a year to save the $1,400 for the test and prep course and they said, 'We recommend that you apply to no less than twenty schools,' at about $200 each." And there were still the costs of plane tickets and a proper suit to interview at schools. She did well on the exams, but Mitchell was spending a lot of money to fulfill her goal of serving the poor. But then her boyfriend saw a blurb in a church newsletter that appeared to assuage her growing worries. It was a unique offer to study in Cuba, the impoverished nation 90 miles from Florida that is internationally known for its training and use of doctors. She applied through the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization in New York, a group whose mission is to "increase minority participation in medicine" and therefore increase the doctor-patient ratio for underserved areas. Cuba began educating American medical students after members of the Congressional Black Caucus met with Fidel Castro in 2000. Congressman Bennie Thompson of Mississippi told Castro about areas in his district that suffer from extreme doctor shortages. The Cuban president responded by promising scholarships for 500 Americans to attend medical school in Cuba, under the umbrella of the Latin America School of Medicine. To qualify, the students would have to show aptitude and a commitment to work in underserved communities in the United States. Since then, 34 have graduated, and more than 160 are currently enrolled. The Bay Area, it turns out, is something of a hub for the Cuba school of thought, where Cuba-trained students, unencumbered by the massive debt that plagues grads from US medical schools, have the luxury to do the kind of medicine that Cuba instructs - family medicine. The island's medical schools focus on nutrition and other preventative approaches. Cuba also is well known for its focus on the "social determinants of health." The Cuban experience also may provide important lessons for our current health-care crisis. With a fifth of our per capita GDP, Cuba has health statistics comparable to those of industrialized nations. In the shabby, eroding, and commodity-deprived neighborhoods of Old Havana, Cubans also enjoy a better doctor-patient ratio than Americans: 59 doctors per 10,000 people compared to 26 for us. Cuban life expectancy also matches that of the United States, its infant mortality rate is lower, and the island's HIV/AIDS transmission is among the lowest worldwide. Cuba's aggressive health-care delivery system also costs much less - around $200 per capita annually, compared to our $7,000. And it provides timely and primary care for every citizen - near universal accessibility. To the Cuban government, health care is a right. This fact highlights a gap in the health-care reform initiative proposed by Congress and President Obama. Those currently without insurance, who will receive coverage with the bill, will feel the lack of family practitioners as basic care continues to be undervalued in favor of more profitable types of medicine. At a White House forum early last year, the president spelled out the problem bluntly: "We're not producing enough primary-care physicians," he said, pointing to a daunting chain of obstacles. "The costs of medical education are so high that people feel that they've got to specialize." According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, the average debt for a US medical school graduate in 2008 was $154,607. American doctors, as a result, feel forced to take up specialized practice, because ultimately the higher pay will ease their enormous student debt. Yet without enough primary care doctors, experts say, health-care costs grow exorbitant, end-stage care increases, and thousands of family practice residence positions go unfilled every year. Doctors graduating in Cuba have no such excuse to specialize, and the island does not graduate members of an elite profession. Instead, it's a veritable doctor-producing machine with more than 70,000 physicians for a population of just 11 million. And after medical school in Havana, Mitchell would return to the United States debt free. Many students enter American medical schools wanting to do family care but get discouraged, said Dr. Richard Quint, retired faculty at UC San Francisco and a medical consultant to the Oakland nonprofit group Medical Education Cooperation with Cuba. American medical schools deem primary care as having secondary import, he contends. "The overall structure of our 'non-health system' is fragmented and skewed toward specialty practices," he said. "Faculty in medical schools make comments suggesting you shouldn't go into primary care because it's not stimulating or high-achieving enough." It also no secret that physicians are reimbursed highly for procedures and surgeries rather than for preventive medicine and diagnoses. And the need for primary care in underserved areas often doesn't make it into the textbooks or the classroom. When it comes to preventative care, the shortcomings in American medical education mirror the failings in our health-care system as a whole. "There's nothing the Cubans are doing that people couldn't think of here - it's just they are looking upstream" at prevention, explained Dr. Lynn Berry, chronic disease program manager at Oakland's Highland Hospital, who has conducted research in Cuba. Berry pointed out that Alameda County has "pretty strong" community health care. "We have La Cl?nica de La Raza, the Ethnic Health Institute, Native American Health Services," which emphasize prevention and education to avoid the costs, medical and financial, of end-stage care. But "ours is a market system," Berry said, a system "organized around insurance and payer source, not necessarily the long-term health of the patient." Cuba redesigned its medical system out of financial necessity following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Faced with a supply crisis brought on by the lack of Soviet funding, Cuba revamped its medical education system towards primary care. By the mid-Nineties, they had established a comprehensive neighborhood-based family medicine standard: a consultario (neighborhood clinic) in every locale, and a revised medical school curriculum to embed family care into the model. The island's health care starts with a top-down mandate for a "bottom-up" approach to health care. Too poor to rely on high-tech equipment or expensive, invasive procedures, the Cuban model stresses prevention and spreads health-care responsibility beyond doctors - into schools, work sites, and neighborhoods. A national network of polyclinics ensures the mandate. People in all walks of life are expected to cooperate in health publicity campaigns and other measures to prevent disease. The United States' fifty-year-old embargo on goods to the island also has played a role in shaping Cuba's medical care system. The embargo prohibits or restricts the sale of some medical equipment and punishes other countries that deliver essential cargo. Drugs and medical supplies are sporadic, especially in Cuba's rural areas, where clinics work with outdated X-ray machines. And because US pharmaceutical companies develop most major new drugs, Cuban physicians don't have access to many new medicines on the world market. Countries like Spain and Venezuela donate, but routine medical supplies remain scarce or absent from some Cuban clinics. Still, Dr. Davida Flattery, an internist at Highland Hospital, was struck by Cuba's "bottom-up" approach when she observed their health system last year. "What really impressed me about Cuba was their focus on the non-medical determinants of health," she said. It's standard in Cuba, she added, to engage the psycho-social factors of a patient - level of sanitation, presence of abuse or addiction, and food habits. Doctors and nurses, in fact, make home visits to evaluate these things personally. Americans trained in Cuba see firsthand the glaring differences between the two medical education systems. Melissa Rose Mitchell learned, for example, that Cuba highlights rural medicine. "In lots of situations the professor will ask, 'What's the best test?' We'll say 'CT scan, ultrasound.' They'll say 'Well you don't have ultrasound, you're in the middle of nowhere, in the mountains, you have no electricity or phone. ... What are you going to do?'" Many past and current students of the Latin American School of Medicine in Havana, where Mitchell attended, had lived or worked in poor and underserved neighborhoods in the United States, and were chosen to study in Cuba so they could take what they learned back home. And their Cuban education equipped them to deal with health problems of the poorest communities in the United States far better than if they had gone to Harvard. Havana medical students, for example, are trained to stabilize people in places with no electricity or potable water. One might think those skills irrelevant in the wealthy United States, but a number of poor American communities have come to resemble sections of Third World countries - especially after a disaster (see Hurricane Katrina). The lack of doctors in America's neediest communities is exactly what the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization wanted to remedy as they began recruiting for the Cuban scholarships. The resulting program also is quite diverse - far more diverse group than any US med school. The majority of students in Latin American School of Medicine in Havana are African Americans from New York or California, 85 percent are minorities, and 73 percent are women. And most of the students are trained as "m?dicos de la familia," or family practitioners. But, as the students saw, medical supply shortages plague the system, and despite diabetes intervention and screening programs in schools and workplaces across the country, the Cuban national diet remains high in fat and sugar. Like the US poor, Cubans don't have easy access to fresh fruits and vegetables - or the habit of eating them - and this hinders their health. Cuba's food distribution system from the countryside to the cities is substandard. The nation imports more than 50 percent of its food. Mitchell said the training and experience suited her. "They train us just like they train Cubans," she said. "Every Cuban, regardless of specialty, has to do two years of family medicine. Until you can deal with basic, vital situations, you are not allowed to mess with other parts of the body." After graduating last summer, Mitchell settled in Oakland to work and prepare for the boards, but she says her calling is rural medicine. She used her summer breaks from medical school, in fact, to work in a mobile health-care clinic serving rural populations outside of Birmingham, Alabama, a conservative city with stark wealth disparities. "Every two weeks or once a month, this clinic on wheels visited parts of the state where some of the houses did not have electricity or indoor plumbing. Not because it couldn't be gotten, but because people didn't have the money to invest in it." When asked if the poverty compared to that of rural Cuba, she responded: "The poverty was more intense" in some areas of rural Alabama than in rural Cuba, she said, "because there were no social services." Yet back home Mitchell faced disapproval - even hostility - for deciding on a nonspecialized practice. "My first experience going home, my aunt and I had a heated argument - me saying I didn't want to specialize and if I did it would be family medicine or rural medicine. Her argument was anybody who had any sense would become a neurosurgeon or a cardiologist. But my image of a doctor is someone who can handle any situation that comes up." And having witnessed the obstacles facing Cuba, the returning American doctors are scandalized with the state of health care at home. Mitchell works as a part-time medical assistant at a Bay Area clinic and doesn't have insurance herself. "There have definitely been a couple of times I've been sick and couldn't afford to see a doctor," she said. "A friend did me a favor by seeing me, but I had to pay $60 for antibiotics - that was with the clinic's discount." Before moving to Oakland as a teen, Pasha Jackson saw firsthand on the streets of South Central Los Angeles the power of nonmedical, psychosocial factors to spread disease - both physical and mental. Violence, joblessness, and addiction merge with poverty to leave many residents out of the health-care system. "What does primary care mean for the people around me?" he said. "It's self-medication. Junk and drinking. These people really need attention, and insurance will deny them for a list of reasons." But Jackson didn't know he wanted to study medicine until he sustained a football injury. Recruited from City College of San Francisco by the University of Oklahoma, he went on to play for the San Francisco 49ers and Oakland Raiders. But academic advisors throughout high school and college, he said, actively discouraged his interest in science. "They said it was too hard," and that his best chances were with football. Reassigned by the Raiders to NFL Europe, Jackson tore his left pectoral - "a huge injury for a linebacker," he noted. "Once I left the NFL my health care ended, and to go to Cuba I needed shots and checkups to travel internationally. I couldn't believe what I had to go through. After calling around to public clinics, I had to wait for weeks and miss a day of work to see a doctor that didn't want to see me." Jackson spent a year recuperating and getting physical therapy. And during that time, the effects of Hurricane Katrina reminded him of the deep connection between poverty and disease. "I knew I didn't want to play football anymore," Jackson said. "In the NFL there's so much waste, the playing with the money and power. I saw how much a part it was of the capitalist system." Disgusted with professional football, Jackson went to the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization's web site and applied. The Cuba program "had me in Cuba, where I could learn Spanish; covered me financially; and got me back to science." With that, Pasha Jackson went socialist. On summer break from his studies in Cuba, Jackson and more than a dozen other students from the Latin American School of Medicine visited deprived American communities to deliver basic health services and expand their own cultural competency. Los Angeles' Skid Row, a place with "ridiculous numbers of homeless people," was one stop on the trip, Jackson recalled. "Mora County [New Mexico] has hardly any doctors." They stopped at Pajarito Mesa, "where the Pueblo Indians live, with no potable water and no electricity. It shows you," Jackson said. "There's the Third World - right here. There are no national boundaries." "When the earthquake hit in Haiti, over 400 Cuban medical personnel were already there - they've been there for years," said Dr. Nelson Valdez, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of New Mexico and Director of Cuba-L, which monitors news related to Cuba. According to Medical Education Cooperation with Cuba, some 700 Haitian medical students in Cuba study at the Santiago de Cuba campus of the Latin American Medical School. Cuba is sending doctors and students in droves to treat tens of thousands Haitians lying wounded in hospitals with zero or few doctors. "No one is reporting on the Cuban presence in Haiti," commented Valdez, though he said he wasn't surprised. "The additional doctors being sent are part of the same team that was offered to the United States by Cuba when hurricane Katrina hit." The assistance was refused. Valdez also said the Cuban doctors, solidly trained in disaster medicine, provide psychological as well as physical attention to victims. The State Department announced that U.S. aid workers would cooperate with Cubans on the ground in Haiti. Those who've observed what we can learn from the Cuban medical approach -- scholars and physicians, new and veteran -- all agree that cooperation and conversation with Cuba, at least in this respect, might bring us all some relief. ? 2010 East Bay Express All rights reserved. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Fri Feb 5 20:26:18 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 2010 20:26:18 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Will Obama Play the War Card? Message-ID: <97546A87A8B248EC8BBD51C26A6002EF@agingCHS072729> http://original.antiwar.com/buchanan/2010/02/04/will-obama-play-the-war-card/ February 4, 2010 Will Obama Play the War Card? By Patrick J. Buchanan Republicans already counting the seats they will pick up this fall should keep in mind Obama has a big card yet to play. Should the president declare he has gone the last mile for a negotiated end to Iran's nuclear program and impose the "crippling" sanctions he promised in 2008, America would be on an escalator to confrontation that could lead straight to war. And should war come, that would be the end of GOP dreams of adding three-dozen seats in the House and half a dozen in the Senate. Harry Reid is surely aware a U.S. clash with Iran, with him at the president's side, could assure his re-election. Last week, Reid whistled through the Senate, by voice vote, a bill to put us on that escalator. Senate bill 2799 would punish any company exporting gasoline to Iran. Though swimming in oil, Iran has a limited refining capacity and must import 40 percent of the gas to operate its cars and trucks and heat its homes. And cutting off a country's oil or gas is a proven path to war. In 1941, the United States froze Japan's assets, denying her the funds to pay for the U.S. oil on which she relied, forcing Tokyo either to retreat from her empire or seize the only oil in reach, in the Dutch East Indies. The only force able to interfere with a Japanese drive into the East Indies? The U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor. Egypt's Gamel Abdel Nasser in 1967 threatened to close the Straits of Tiran between the Red Sea and Gulf of Aqaba to ships going to the Israeli port of Elath. That would have cut off 95 percent of Israel's oil. Israel response: a pre-emptive war that destroyed Egypt's air force and put Israeli troops at Sharm el-Sheikh on the Straits of Tiran. Were Reid and colleagues seeking to strengthen Obama's negotiating hand? The opposite is true. The Senate is trying to force Obama's hand, box him in, restrict his freedom of action, by making him impose sanctions that would cut off the negotiating track and put us on a track to war - a war to deny Iran weapons that the U.S. Intelligence community said in December 2007 Iran gave up trying to acquire in 2003. Sound familiar? Republican leader Mitch McConnell has made clear the Senate is seizing control of the Iran portfolio. "If the Obama administration will not take action against this regime, then Congress must." U.S. interests would seem to dictate supporting those elements in Iran who wish to be rid of the regime and re-engage the West. But if that is our goal, the Senate bill, and a House version that passed 412 to 12, seem almost diabolically perverse. For a cutoff in gas would hammer Iran's middle class. The Revolutionary Guard and Basij militia on their motorbikes would get all they need. Thus the leaders of the Green Movement who have stood up to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollah oppose sanctions that inflict suffering on their own people. Cutting off gas to Iran would cause many deaths. And the families of the sick, the old, the weak, the women and the children who die are unlikely to feel gratitude toward those who killed them. And despite the hysteria about Iran's imminent testing of a bomb, the U.S. intelligence community still has not changed its finding that Tehran is not seeking a bomb. The low-enriched uranium at Natanz, enough for one test, has neither been moved nor enriched to weapons grade. Ahmadinejad this week offered to take the West's deal and trade it for fuel for its reactor. Iran's known nuclear facilities are under U.N. watch. The number of centrifuges operating at Natanz has fallen below 4,000. There is speculation they are breaking down or have been sabotaged. And if Iran is hell-bent on a bomb, why has Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair not revised the 2007 finding and given us the hard evidence? U.S. anti-missile ships are moving into the Gulf. Anti-missile batteries are being deployed on the Arab shore. Yet, Gen. David Petraeus warned yesterday that a strike on Iran could stir nationalist sentiment behind the regime. Nevertheless, the war drums have again begun to beat. Daniel Pipes in a National Review Online piece featured by the Jerusalem Post - "How to Save the Obama Presidency: Bomb Iran" - urges Obama to make a "dramatic gesture to change the public perception of him as a lightweight, bumbling ideologue" by ordering the U.S. military to attack Iran's nuclear facilities. Citing six polls, Pipes says Americans support an attack today and will "presumably rally around the flag" when the bombs fall. Will Obama cynically yield to temptation, play the war card and make "conservatives swoon," in Pipes' phrase, to save himself and his party? We shall see. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Fri Feb 5 22:16:45 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 2010 22:16:45 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Blair: Gaza's great betrayer Message-ID: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/03/gaza-tony-blair-betrayal The Guardian February 3, 2010 Blair: Gaza's great betrayer It's more than a year since Israel launched its immoral attack on Gaza and Palestinians are still living on the verge of a humanitarian disaster. So what has Tony Blair done to further peace in the region? Virtually nothing, argues the historian Avi Shlaim. During the Gaza war, he did not call for a ceasefire. He has one standard for ?Israel and one for its victims. His attitude to Gaza is to wait for change rather than risk ?incurring the displeasure of his American and ?Israeli friends. Partly, Blair's failure is due to his own personal limitations; his ?inability to grasp that the fundamental issue in this tragic conflict is not Israeli security but Palestinian national rights, and that concerted and sustained ?international pressure is required to compel Israel to recognise these rights. The core issue cannot be avoided: there can be no settlement of the ?conflict without an end to the Israeli occupation. There is international consensus for a two-state solution, but Israel rejects it and Blair has been unable or unwilling to use the Quartet to enforce it. by Avi Shlaim The savage attack Israel ?unleashed against Gaza on 27 December 2008 was both immoral and unjustified. Immoral in the use of force against civilians for political purposes. Unjustified because Israel had a political alternative to the use of force. The home-made Qassam rockets fired by Hamas militants from Gaza on Israeli towns were only the ?excuse, not the reason for Operation Cast Lead. In June 2008, Egypt had ?brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement. ?Contrary to Israeli propaganda, this was a success: the average number of rockets fired monthly from Gaza dropped from 179 to three. Yet on 4 November Israel violated the ceasefire by launching a raid into Gaza, killing six Hamas fighters. When Hamas ?retaliated, Israel seized the renewed rocket attacks as the ?excuse for launching its insane offensive. If all Israel wanted was to protect its citizens from Qassam rockets, it only needed to ?observe the ceasefire. While the war failed in its primary aim of regime change in Gaza, it left ?behind a trail of death, devastation, ?destruction and indescribable human suffering. Israel lost 13 people, three in so-called friendly fire. The Palestinian death toll was 1,387, including 773 civilians (115 women and 300 children), and more than 5,300 people were injured. The ?entire population of 1.5 million was left traumatised. Across the Gaza Strip, 3,530 homes were completely ?destroyed, 2,850 severely damaged and 11,000 suffered structural damage. The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, tending to the needs of four million Palestinian ?refugees, stated that Gaza had been "bombed back, not to the Stone Age, but to the mud age"; its inhabitants ?reduced to building homes from mud after the fierce 22-day offensive. War crimes were committed and possibly even crimes against humanity, documented in horrific detail in Judge Richard Goldstone's report for the UN human rights council. The report ?condemned both Israel and Hamas, but reserved its strongest criticism for Israel, accusing it of deliberately targeting and terrorising civilians in Gaza. The British government did not take part in the vote on the report, sending a signal to the hawks in Israel that they can continue to disregard the laws of war. Gordon Brown's 2007 appointment as a patron of the Jewish National Fund UK presumably played a part in the adoption of this ?pusillanimous position. One year on, the Gaza Strip, one of the most densely populated areas on earth, continues to teeter on the verge of a humanitarian disaster. Israel's ?illegal blockade of Gaza, in force since June 2007, restricts the flow not only of arms but also food, fuel and medical supplies to well below the minimum necessary for normal, everyday life. Reconstruction work has hardly begun because of the Israeli ban on bringing in cement and other building materials to Gaza. Thousands of families still live in the ruins of their former homes. Hospitals, health facilities, schools, government buildings and mosques cannot be rebuilt. Nor can the basic ?infrastructure of the Gaza Strip, including Gaza City's sewage disposal plant. Today, 80% of Gaza's population ?remain dependent on food aid, 43% are unemployed, and 70% live on less than $1 a day. Meanwhile, the so-called peace process cannot be revived because ?Israel refuses to freeze settlement ?expansion on the West Bank. Prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu recently agreed to a temporary freeze of 10 months, but this does not apply to the 3,000 pre-approved housing units to be built on the West Bank or to any part of Greater Jerusalem. It's like two men negotiating the division of a pizza while one continues to gobble it up. Politically, the disjunction between words and deeds persists. Appeals to the Israeli government to lift or relax the blockade of Gaza were not backed up by effective pressure or the threat of sanctions. In fact, the only effective pressure was applied by the US on the Egyptian government - to seal its border with Gaza. Egypt has its own reason for complying: Hamas is ideologically ?allied with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic opposition to the Egyptian regime. The tunnels under the border separating Egypt from the Gaza Strip bring food and material relief to the people under siege. Yet, under US ?supervision and with the help of US army engineers, Egypt is building an 18-metre-deep underground steel wall to disrupt the tunnels and tighten the blockade. The wall of shame, as Egyptians call it, will complete the transformation of Gaza into an open-air prison. It is the cruellest example of the concerted ?Israeli-Egyptian-US policy to isolate and prevent Hamas from leading the Palestinian struggle for self-determi?nation. Hamas is habitually dismissed by its enemies as a purely terrorist ?organisation. Yet no one can deny that it won a fair and free election in the West Bank as well as Gaza in January 2006. Moreover, once Hamas gained power through the ballot box, its ?leaders adopted a more pragmatic stand ?towards Israel than that enshrined in its charter, repeatedly expressing its readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire. But there was no one to talk to on the Israeli side. Israel adamantly refused to recognise the Hamas-led government. The US and the European Union ?followed, ?resorting to economic ?sanctions in a vain attempt to turn the people against their elected leaders. This cannot ?possibly bring ?security or stability ?because it is based on the denial of the most ?elementary human rights of the people of Gaza and the collective political rights of the ?Palestinian people. Through its special relationship with the US and its staunch support for ?Israel, the ?British government is implicated in this shameful policy. At present the British public is ?preoccupied with Tony Blair and the war in Iraq. What is often ?overlooked is that this was only one aspect of a disastrous British policy towards the Middle East, inaugurated by Blair, and which shows no sign of changing under his successor. One of Blair's arguments used to ?justify the Iraq war was that it would help bring justice to the long-suffering Palestinians. In his House of Commons speech on 18 March 2003, he promised that action against Iraq would form part of a broader engagement with the problems of the Middle East. He even declared that resolving the Israeli-?Palestinian dispute was as important to Middle East peace as removing Saddam Hussein from power. Yet by focusing international ?attention on Iraq, the war further ?marginalised the Palestinian question. To be fair, Blair persuaded the Quartet (a group consisting of the US, the UN, the EU and Russia) to issue the Roadmap in 2003, which called for the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel by the end of 2005. But President George Bush was not genuinely committed and only adopted it under pressure from his ?allies. Ariel Sharon, Israel's hard-line prime minister at the time, wrecked the plan by continuing to expand Israeli settlements on the West Bank. Could Blair really not have realised that for Bush the special relationship that ?counted was the one with Israel? Every time Bush had to choose between Blair and Sharon, he chose Sharon. Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in August 2005 was not a contribution to the Roadmap but an attempt to unilaterally redraw the borders of Greater Israel and part of a plan to ?entrench the occupation there. Yet in return for the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, Sharon extracted from the US a written agreement to Israel's ?retention of the major settlement blocs on the West Bank. Bush's support amounted to an abrupt reversal of US policy since 1967, which regarded the settlements as illegal and as an obstacle to peace. Blair publicly endorsed the pact, probably to preserve a united ?Anglo-American front at any price. It was the most egregious British ?betrayal of the Palestinians since the Balfour Declaration of 1917. In July 2006, at the height of the savage Israeli onslaught on Lebanon, Blair opposed a security council ?resolution for an immediate and ?unconditional ceasefire: he wanted to give Israel an opportunity to destroy Hezbollah, the radical Shi'ite religious-political movement. One year later, in June 2007, he resigned from office. That day he was appointed the Quartet's special envoy to Israel and the Palestinian Authority. His main sponsor was Bush and his blatant partisanship on behalf of Israel was probably considered a qualification. His appointment ?coincided with the collapse of the ?Palestinian national unity government, the reassertion of Fatah rule in the West Bank and the violent seizure of power by Hamas in Gaza. Blair's main tasks were to mobilise international assistance for the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, to promote good governance and the rule of law in the Palestinian territories, and to further Palestinian economic development. His broader mission, was "to promote an end to the conflict in conformity with the Roadmap". On taking up his appointment, Blair said that: "The absolute priority is to try to give effect to what is now the consensus across the international community - that the only way of bringing stability and peace to the ?Middle East is a two-state solution." His appointment was received with great satisfaction by the Israelis and with utter dismay by the Arabs. In his two and a half years as special envoy, Blair has achieved remarkably little. True, Blair helped persuade the Israelis to reduce the number of West Bank checkpoints from 630 to 590; he helped to create employment oppor?tunities; and he may have contributed to a slight improvement in living ?standards in Palestine. But the Americans remained fixated on security rather than on economic development, and their policy remains skewed in favour of ?Israel. Barack Obama made a promising start as ?president by insisting on a complete settlement freeze on the West Bank, but was compelled to back down, ?dashing many of our high hopes. One reason for Blair's disappointing results is that he wears too many hats and cannot, as he promised, be "someone who is on the ground spending 24/7 on the issue". Another reason is his "West Bank first" attitude - ?continuing the western policy of bolstering Fatah and propping up the ailing Palestinian Authority against Hamas. His lack of commitment to Gaza is all too evident. During the Gaza war, he did not call for a ceasefire. He has one standard for ?Israel and one for its victims. His attitude to Gaza is to wait for change rather than risk ?incurring the displeasure of his American and ?Israeli friends. As ?envoy, Blair has been inside Gaza only twice; once to visit a UN school just ?beyond the border and once to Gaza City. His project for sanitation in northern Gaza was never completed because he could not ?persuade the Israelis to ?allow in the last small load of pipes needed. A growing group of western politicians has ?publicly acknowledged the necessity of talking to Hamas if meaningful progress is to be achieved; Blair is not one of their number. Blair has totally failed to fulfil the ?official role of the envoy "to promote an end to the conflict in conformity with the Roadmap", largely for reasons beyond his control. The most ?important of these is Israel's determination to perpetuate the isolation and the de-development of Gaza and deny the Palestinian people a small piece of land - 22% of Mandate-era ?Palestine, to be precise - on which to live in freedom and dignity. It is a policy that Baruch Kimmerling, the late Israeli sociologist, named ?"politicide" - the denial to the ?Palestinian people of any independent political existence in Palestine. Partly, however, Blair's failure is due to his own personal limitations; his ?inability to grasp that the fundamental issue in this tragic conflict is not Israeli security but Palestinian national rights, and that concerted and sustained ?international pressure is required to compel Israel to recognise these rights. The core issue cannot be avoided: there can be no settlement of the ?conflict without an end to the Israeli occupation. There is international consensus for a two-state solution, but Israel rejects it and Blair has been unable or unwilling to use the Quartet to enforce it. Blair's failure to stand up for Palestinian independence is precisely what endears him to the Israeli establishment. In February of last year, while the ?Palestinians in Gaza were still mourning their dead, Blair received the Dan David prize from Tel Aviv University as the "laureate for the present time ?dimension in the field of leadership". The citation praised him for his ?"exceptional intelligence and foresight, and demonstrated moral courage and leadership". The prize is worth $1m. I may be cynical, but I cannot help viewing this prize as absurd, given Blair's silent complicity in Israel's ?continuing crimes against the ?Palestinian people. =========== Avi Shlaim is professor of international relations at St Antony's College, Oxford, and the author of Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations (Verso, 2009). His fee for this article has been donated to Medical Aid for Palestine =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Fri Feb 5 22:19:08 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Fri, 5 Feb 2010 22:19:08 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The lynch-mob mentality Message-ID: <64DA140196774B9C8D922CFA756E8130@agingCHS072729> http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2010/02/05/lynch_mobs/print.html Feb. 5, 2010 The lynch-mob mentality At least Salem witch hunters gave pretenses of trials before burning their fellow citizens at the stake. Glenn Greenwald (updated below) If I had the power to have one statement of fact be universally recognized in our political discussions, it would be this one: The fact that the Government labels Person X a "Terrorist" is not proof that Person X is, in fact, a Terrorist. That proposition should be intrinsically understood by any American who completed sixth grade civics and was thus taught that a central prong of our political system is that government officials often abuse their power and/or err and therefore must prove accusations to be true (with tested evidence) before they're assumed to be true and the person punished accordingly. In particular, the fact that the U.S. Government, over and over, has falsely accused numerous people of being Terrorists -- only for it to turn out that they did nothing wrong -- by itself should compel a recognition of this truth. But it doesn't. All throughout the Bush years, no matter what one objected to -- illegal eavesdropping, torture, rendition, indefinite detention, denial of civilian trials -- the response from Bush followers was the same: "But these are Terrorists, and Terrorists have no rights, so who cares what is done to them?" What they actually meant was: "the Government has claimed they are Terrorists," but in their minds, that was the same thing as: "they are Terrorists." They recognized no distinction between "a government accusation" and "unchallengeable truth"; in the authoritarian's mind, by definition, those are synonymous. The whole point of the Bush-era controversies was that -- away from an actual battlefield and where the Constitution applies (on U.S. soil and/or towards American citizens wherever they are) -- the Government should have to demonstrate someone's guilt before it's assumed (e.g., they should have to show probable cause to a court and obtain warrants before eavesdropping; they should have to offer evidence that a person engaged in Terrorism before locking them in a cage, etc.). But to someone who equates unproven government accusations with proof, those processes are entirely unnecessary. Even in the absence of those processes, they already know that these persons are Terrorists. How do they know that? Because the Government said so. Even when it comes to their fellow citizens, that's all the "proof" that is needed. That authoritarian mentality is stronger than ever now. Why? Because unlike during the Bush years, when it was primarily Republicans willing to blindly trust Government accusations, many Democrats are now willing to do so as well. Just look at the reaction to the Government's recent attempts to assassinate the U.S.-born American citizen and Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Up until last November, virtually no Americans had ever even heard of al-Awlaki. But in the past few months, beginning with the Fort Hood shootings, government officials have repeatedly claimed that he's a Terrorist: usually anonymously, with virtually no evidence, and in the face of al-Awlaki's vehement denials but without any opportunity for him to defend himself (because he's in hiding out of fear of being killed by his own Government). The Government can literally just flash someone's face on the TV screen with the word Terrorist over it (as was done with al-Awlaki), and provided the face is nefarious and Muslim-looking enough (basically the same thing), nothing else need be offered. That's enough for many people -- including many Democrats -- to march forward overnight and mindlessly proclaim that al-Awlaki is "a declared enemy of the United States working to kill Americans" (if you can stomach it, read some of these comments -- from Obama defenders at a liberal blog -- with several sounding exactly like Dick Cheney, screeching: "Of course al-Awlaki should be killed without charges; he's a Terrorist who is trying to kill Americans!!!"). Even now, beyond government assertions about his associations, the public knows virtually nothing about al-Awlaki other than the fact that he's a Muslim cleric with a Muslim name dressed in Muslim garb, sitting in a Bad Arab Country expressing anger towards the actions of the U.S. and Israel. But no matter. That's more than enough. They're willing not only to mindlessly embrace the Government's unproven accusation that their fellow citizen is a TERRORIST ("a declared enemy of the United States working to kill Americans"), but even beyond that, to cheer for his due-process-free execution like drunken fans at a football game. And the same people declare: no civilian trials are necessary for Terrorists (meaning: people accused by the Government of being Terrorists). Even more amazingly, the identities of the other Americans on the hit list aren't even known, but that's OK: they're Terrorists, because the Government said so. A very long time ago, I would be baffled when I'd read about things like the Salem witch hunts. How could so many people be collectively worked up into that level of irrational frenzy, where they cheered for people's torturous death as "witches" without any real due process or meaningful evidence? But all one has to do is look at our current Terrorism debates and it's easy to see how things like that happen. It's just pure mob mentality: an authority figure appears and affixes a demonizing Other label to someone's forehead, and the adoring crowd -- frothing-at-the-mouth and feeding on each other's hatred, fears and desire to be lead -- demands "justice." I imagine that if one could travel back in time to the Salem era in order to speak with some of those gathered outside an accused witch's home, screaming for her to be killed, the conversation would go something like this: Mob Participant: Hang the Witch!!! Kill her!!! Far Left Civil Liberties Extremist-Purist ("FLCLE-P"): How do you know she's a witch? Mob Participant: Didn't you just hear the government official say so? FLCLE-P: But don't you want to see real evidence before you assume that's true and call for her death? Mob Participant: You just heard the evidence! The magistrate said she's a witch! FLCLE-P: But shouldn't there be a real trial first, with tangible evidence and due process protections, to see if the accusation is actually true? Mob Participant: A "real" trial? She's a witch! She's trying to curse us and kill us all. She got more than what she deserved. Witches don't have rights!!! Return to Question 1. That's essentially how I hear our debates over Terrorism, and how I've heard them for quite some time. And it's how I hear them more loudly now than ever before. And with those deeply confused premises now locked into place on a bipartisan basis ("no trials are needed to determine if someone is a Terrorist because Terrorists don't have rights"), imagine how much louder that will get if there is another successful terrorist attack in the U.S. But in fairness to the 17th Century Puritans, at least the Salem witches received pretenses of due process and even trials (albeit with coerced confessions and speculative hearsay). Even when it comes to our fellow citizens, we don't even bother with those. For us, the mere accusation by our leaders is sufficient: Kill that American Terrorist with a drone! UPDATE: A long-time, regular commenter here, Jestaplero, is a state prosecutor in New York, and he explains -- in this comment -- how the mentality discussed here can and does easily expand beyond the realm of Terrorism. Interestingly, even Allahpundit at Michelle Malkin's Hot Air recognizes the serious dangers in allowing the Government to decree even U.S. citizens to be "Terrorists" and then treat them accordingly, with no due process. But note how his right-wing commenters are almost exclusively of the "just-kill-him" school of thought, and how identical they sound to that minority of Daily Kos commenters I linked above who, in their blind loyalty to Obama, also insist that there's nothing wrong with simply snuffing out the lives of their fellow citizens who are "Terrorists" (meaning: anyone their Leader claims is a Terrorist) with no due process or oversight whatsoever. Ultimately, authoritarians are authoritarians, regardless of whether they situate themselves on the left or right. -- Glenn Greenwald -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Sat Feb 6 10:53:18 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 6 Feb 2010 10:53:18 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Haiti - Still Starving 23 Days Later Message-ID: http://ruby.zcommunications.org/haiti-still-starving-23-days-later-by-bill-quigley Haiti - Still Starving 23 Days Later February 6, 2010 By Bill Quigley You can walk down many of the streets of Port au Prince and see absolutely no evidence that the world community has helped Haiti. Twenty three days after the earthquake jolted Haiti and killed over 200,000 people, as many as a million people have still not received any international food assistance. On February 4, the UN World Food Program reported they had given at least some food, mostly 55 pound bags of rice, to over a million people. The UN acknowledges that it still needs to reach another one million people. The 55 pounds of rice are expected to provide a two week food ration for a family. Beans and cooking oil are scheduled to come later. The Associated Press reported that people in Haiti at small protests were holding up banners reading "Help us, we're starving." Over a million people are displaced. About 10,000 families are in tents, the rest are living under sheets, blankets and tarps. One of the people living under a sheet is a brand new mother with her one day old baby. The New York Times reports that Rosalie Antoine, 33, and her one day old baby were living in a neighbor's yard with puppies and chickens under a sheet in the Bel-Air neighborhood of Port au Prince. Haiti and the United Nations estimate 250,000 children under the age of 7 are living in temporary housing. Most need vaccinations. Flavia Cherry, of the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action, this week witnessed a pregnant double amputee give birth on the ground in one of the tent camps without any medical assistance at all. "This poor mother had nothing, no milk, no clothing for the baby, nothing!" Even people who can afford to purchase food are having a difficult time. A 55 pound bag of rice costs 40 percent more today than it did before the earthquake. Dr. Louise Ivers, a Partners in Health physician in Port au Prince, reports a 25 kg (55 pounds) bag of rice that sold for $30 US dollars (1,207 Haitian Gourdes) before the quake, now costs $42 US dollars (1,690 Haitian Gourdes). The World Food Program reports prices are still rising and people outside the earthquake zone are having difficulty meeting their basic food needs. Twenty three days after the quake. ------------ Bill Quigley just returned from Haiti. He is Legal Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights. His email is Quigley77 at gmail.com =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sat Feb 6 11:06:19 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 6 Feb 2010 11:06:19 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Goldman Sachs CEO gets $9 million bonus, J.P. Morgan Chase 's gets $17 million Message-ID: <065ABF6829CA49AF95A790CD45AACDBC@agingCHS072729> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/05/AR2010020503976.html?hpid=sec-business Goldman Sachs CEO Blankfein gets stock-based $9 million bonus Tomoeh Murakami Tse Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, February 6, 2010 Goldman Sachs said Friday that its chief executive, Lloyd Blankfein, received a stock-based bonus of $9 million in 2009, ending weeks of speculation about how much the New York-based investment bank would dole out amid rising public anger over Wall Street pay. The amount, although eye-popping by Main Street standards, is smaller than the stock-based bonuses his rivals received for 2009. On Friday, J.P. Morgan Chase said it would award $17 million to chief executive Jamie Dimon. In a regulatory filing, Goldman said Blankfein received restricted stock Friday worth just shy of $9 million based on the firm's closing share price of $154.16. Two years ago, Blankfein set an industry record by receiving a $68 million bonus, about a third of it in cash, after his firm made $11.6 billion. He took no bonus in 2008, when profits plunged during the financial crisis. For 2009, Goldman reported a record profit of $13.4 billion. The firm's $16.2 billion compensation pool for 2009, which includes pensions and other benefits, translates to nearly $500,000 an employee. Wall Street pay packages have drawn sharp criticism from Washington, with lawmakers arguing that banks have returned to profitability by trading in markets boosted by federal emergency lending programs. "It is only in their world where you can come within an eyelash of destroying the economy and then reward yourself with what you call a 'modest' $9 million pay day," said Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.). Blankfein's award comes as Goldman has sought to ease public anger over pay practices. In December, it said its top 30 executives would receive their 2009 bonuses in stock units, not cash, that could be cashed in after five years. When asked whether the bonus size was indicative of future awards, Goldman spokesman Lucas van Praag said, "No, it's a reflection of the current environment." =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sat Feb 6 14:09:45 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 6 Feb 2010 14:09:45 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] William Blum on Haiti, Aristide and ideology Message-ID: <327841DA84CF46FDB3FF6A0DA07BA3BF@agingCHS072729> http://www.killinghope.org/bblum6/aer78.html Anti-Empire Report, February 6, 2010 Haiti, Aristide, and ideology by William Blum www.killinghope.org It's a good thing the Haitian government did virtually nothing to help its people following the earthquake; otherwise it would have been condemned as "socialist" by Fox News, Sarah Palin, the teabaggers, and other right-thinking Americans. The last/only Haitian leader strongly committed to putting the welfare of the Haitian people before that of the domestic and international financial mafia was President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Being of a socialist persuasion, Aristide was, naturally, kept from power by the United States - twice; first by Bill Clinton, then by George W. Bush, the two men appointed by President Obama to head the earthquake relief effort. Naturally. Aristide, a reformist priest, was elected to the presidency, then ousted in a military coup eight months later in 1991 by men on the CIA payroll. Ironically, the ousted president wound up in exile in the United States. In 1994 the Clinton White House found itself in the awkward position of having to pretend - because of all their rhetoric about "democracy" - that they supported the democratically-elected Aristide's return to power. After delaying his return for more than two years, Washington finally had its military restore Aristide to office, but only after obliging the priest to guarantee that after his term ended he would not remain in office to make up the time lost because of the coup; that he would not seek to help the poor at the expense of the rich, literally; and that he would stick closely to free-market economics. This meant that Haiti would continue to be the assembly plant of the Western Hemisphere, with its workers receiving starvation wages, literally. If Aristide had thoughts about breaking the agreement forced upon him, he had only to look out his window - US troops were stationed in Haiti for the remainder of his term. 3 On February 28, 2004, during the Bush administration, American military and diplomatic personnel arrived at the home of Aristide, who had been elected to the presidency once again in 2002, to inform him that his private American security agents must either leave immediately to return to the United States or fight and die; that the remaining 25 of the American security agents hired by the Haitian government, who were to arrive the next day, had been blocked by the United States from coming; that foreign and Haitian rebels were nearby, heavily armed, determined and ready to kill thousands of people in a bloodbath. Aristide was then pressured into signing a "letter of resignation" before being kidnaped and flown to exile in Africa by the United States. 4 The leaders and politicians of the world who pontificate endlessly about "democracy" and "self-determination" had virtually nothing to say about this breathtaking act of international thuggery. Indeed, France and Canada were active allies of the United States in pressing Aristide to leave. 5 And then US Secretary of State Colin Powell, in the sincerest voice he could muster, told the world that Aristide "was not kidnaped. We did not force him onto the airplane. He went onto the airplane willingly. And that's the truth." 6 Powell sounded as sincere as he had sounded a year earlier when he gave the UN his now-famous detailed inventory of the chemical, biological and nuclear weapons that Saddam Hussein was preparing to use. Howard Zinn is quoted above saying "The chief problem in historical honesty is not outright lying. It is omission or de-emphasis of important data." However, that doesn't mean the American mainstream media don't create or perpetuate myths. Here's the New York Times two months ago: "Mr. Aristide, who was overthrown during a 2004 rebellion ..." 7 Now what image does the word "rebellion" conjure up in your mind? The Haitian people rising up to throw off the shackles put on them by a dictatorship? Or something staged by the United States? Aristide has stated that he was able to determine at that crucial moment that the "rebels" were white and foreign. 8 But even if they had been natives, why did Colin Powell not explain why the United States disbanded Aristide's personal security forces? Why did he not explain why the United States was not protecting Aristide from the rebels, which the US could have done with the greatest of ease, without so much as firing a single shot? Nor did he explain why Aristide would "willingly" give up his presidency. The massive US military deployment to Haiti in the wake of the earthquake has been criticized in various quarters as more of an occupation than a relief mission, with the airport in the capital city now an American military base, and with American forces blocking various aid missions from entering the country in order, apparently, to serve Washington's own logistical agenda. But the large military presence can also serve to facilitate two items on Washington's political agenda - preventing Haitians from trying to emigrate by sea to the United States and keeping a lid on the numerous supporters of Aristide lest they threaten to take power once again. That which can not be spoken "The purpose of terrorism is to provoke an overreaction," writes Fareed Zakaria, a leading American foreign-policy pundit, editor of Newsweek magazine's international edition, and Washington Post columnist, referring to the "underwear bomber", Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and his failed attempt to blow up a US airliner on Christmas day. "Its real aim is not to kill the hundreds of people directly targeted but to sow fear in the rest of the population. Terrorism is an unusual military tactic in that it depends on the response of the onlookers. If we are not terrorized, then the attack didn't work. Alas, this one worked very well." 9 Is that not odd? That an individual would try to take the lives of hundreds of people, including his own, primarily to "provoke an overreaction", or to "sow fear"? Was there not any kind of deep-seated grievance or resentment with anything or anyone American being expressed? No perceived wrong he wished to make right? Nothing he sought to obtain revenge for? Why is the United States the most common target of terrorists? Such questions were not even hinted at in Zakaria's article. At a White House press briefing concerning the same failed terrorist attack, conducted by Assistant to the President for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security John Brennan, veteran reporter Helen Thomas raised a question: Thomas: "What is really lacking always for us is you don't give the motivation of why they want to do us harm. ... What is the motivation? We never hear what you find out on why." Brennan: "Al Qaeda is an organization that is dedicated to murder and wanton slaughter of innocents. ... [They] attract individuals like Mr. Abdulmutallab and use them for these types of attacks. He was motivated by a sense of religious sort of drive. Unfortunately, al Qaeda has perverted Islam, and has corrupted the concept of Islam, so that [they're] able to attract these individuals. But al Qaeda has the agenda of destruction and death." Thomas: "And you're saying it's because of religion?" Brennan: "I'm saying it's because of an al Qaeda organization that uses the banner of religion in a very perverse and corrupt way." Thomas: "Why?" Brennan: "I think ... this is a long issue, but al Qaeda is just determined to carry out attacks here against the homeland." Thomas: "But you haven't explained why." 10 American officials rarely even make the attempt to explain why. And American journalists rarely press them to explain why; certainly not like Helen Thomas does. And just what is it that has such difficulty crossing the lips of these officials? It is the idea that anti-American terrorists become anti-American terrorists to retaliate for what the United States has done to countries or people close to them or what Israel has done to them with unequivocal American support. Osama bin Laden, in an audiotape, also commented about Abdulmutallab: "The message we wanted you to receive through him is that America shall not dream about security until we witness it in Palestine." 11 We have as well the recent case of Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a Jordanian doctor-turned-suicide bomber, who killed seven CIA employees at a base in Afghanistan December 30. His widow later declared: "I am proud of him. ... My husband did this against the U.S. invasion." Balawi himself had written on the Internet: "I have never wished to be in Gaza, but now I wish to be a ... car bomb that takes the lives of the biggest number of Jews to hell." 12 It should be noted that the CIA base attacked by Balawi was heavily involved in the selection of targets for the Agency's remote-controlled aircraft along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, a program that killed more than 300 people in the previous year. 13 There are numerous examples of terrorists citing American policies as the prime motivation behind their acts 14, so many that American officials, when discussing the newest terrorist attack, have to tread carefully to avoid mentioning the role of US foreign policy; and journalists typically fail to bring this point home to their reader's consciousness. It works the same all over the world. In the period of the 1950s to the 1980s in Latin America, in response to a long string of hateful Washington policies, there were countless acts of terrorism against US diplomatic and military targets as well as the offices of US corporations. The US bombing, invasion, occupation and torture in Iraq and Afghanistan, the bombing of Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, and the continuing Israeli-US genocide against the Palestinians have created an army of new anti-American terrorists. We'll be hearing from them for a terribly long time. And we'll be hearing American officials twist themselves into intellectual and moral knots as they try to avoid confronting these facts. In his "State of the Union" address on January 27, President Obama said: "But if anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors, and stop insurance company abuses, let me know." Well, ending America's many wars would free up enough money to do anything a rational, humane society would want to do. Eliminating the military budget would pay for free medical care for everyone. Free university education for everyone. Creating a government public works project that could provide millions of decently-paid jobs, like repairing the decrepit infrastructure and healing the environment to the best of our ability. You can add your own favorite projects. All covered, just by ending the damn wars. Imagine that. Notes 1.The Nation, June 4, 1990, pp.763-4 2."Failure to Quit: Reflections of an Optimistic Historian" (1993), p.30 3.http://killinghope.org/bblum6/haiti2.htm 4.Statement of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, March 5, 2004, from exile in the Central African Republic, Pacific News Service (San Francisco); David Swanson, "What Bush Did to Haiti", January 18, 2010; William Blum, "Rogue State", pp.219-20) 5.Miami Herald, March 1, 2004 6.CNN, March 1, 2004 7.New York Times, November 27, 2009 8.Aristide statement, op. cit. 9.Newsweek, January 18, 2010, online January 9 10.White House press briefing, January 7, 2010 11.ABC News, January 25, 2010 12.Associated Press, January 7, 2010 13.Washington Post, January 1, 2010 14.Rogue State, chapter 1, "Why do terrorists keep picking on the United States?"; this chapter ends in 2005; some later examples can be provided by the author. - William Blum is the author of: .Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2 .Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower .West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir .Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sat Feb 6 18:00:00 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 6 Feb 2010 18:00:00 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [USA] Senate passes AIPAC sponsored Iran Sanctions Act Message-ID: [AIPAC = "American Israel Public Affairs Committee" - a very powerful and extreme right-wing political lobbying group] LA Nonpartisan Examiner February 3, 2010 Senate passes AIPAC sponsored Iran Sanctions Act Robert Stark Last week the Senate passed legislation to impose economic sanctions against Iran. The House version of the bill sponsored by Reps. Barney Frank (D-MA) and Mark Kirk (R-IL) passed in December. There is a separate Petroleum Sanctions act sponsored by Ileana Ros Lehtinen (R-FL) and Howard Berman (D-CA) that passed the House in October. The Senate bill was sponsored by Democrat Chris Dodd and Republican Richard Shelby. The sanctions would target oil which Iran's economy is dependent on. The bill would also ban trade with companies that do business with Iran. The President has not stated whether he will sign the bill into law but did warn Iran that it would suffer "growing consequences" if they ignored international obligations. President Obama introduced similar legislation when he was Senator. US sanctions alone will not cripple Iran's economy since Russia and China are dependent on Iran for oil. Hillary Clinton is now pressuring China to cooperate on Iran, but we have little leverage since we are in debt to them. Congressman Ron Paul observed, "Are we to conclude, with this in mind, that China or its major state-owned corporations will be forbidden by this legislation from doing business with the United States? What of our other trading partners who currently do business in Iran's petroleum sector or insure those who do so? Has anyone seen an estimate of how this sanctions act will affect the US economy if it is actually enforced?" This bill will send a clear message that America is an enemy of Iran and will likely cause more harm to the Iranian people than to the regime. The National Iranian-American Council says "the bill will impose "indiscriminate, unilateral sanctions that will hurt the Iranian people and play into the hands of Iran's rulers, who continue to commit flagrant human rights violations." AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobby which lobbied for the bill applauded its passage and urged for its expedient implementation. AIPAC Spokesman Josh Block said, ""Iran's possession of nuclear weapons capability would be a devastating blow to America's national security interests," and that the" US and our allies must impose biting diplomatic and economic pressure to try and peaceably prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and avoid confronting more distressing alternatives." Also endorsing the Bill, US Chairman of World Jewish Congress, Rabbi Marc Schneier said, "The importance of this legislation cannot be underestimated. This legislation seeks to reinforce and increase economic pressure on Iran in order to attempt to dissuade them from pursuing what would be a devastating outcome for not only the Middle East, but to Europe and beyond. As the World Jewish Congress-United States takes every opportunity in meetings at all levels with representatives of local and foreign governments in order to emphasize this danger, the United States Senate has set an example for what needs to be done internationally in order to unify against this growing threat." =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Feb 7 09:35:48 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 2010 09:35:48 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [Review] Raj Patel's "The Value of Nothing" Message-ID: <8061CC1DE9EA48E59ABAE8E7C93CBA2A@agingCHS072729> http://us.macmillan.com/thevalueofnothing The Value of Nothing How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy Raj Patel Picador, January 2010 ISBN: 978-0-312-42924-9, ISBN10: 0-312-42924-X, 5-1/2 x 8-1/4 inches, 256 pages Includes 2 b&w photos Trade Paperback $14.00 "A deeply though-provoking book about the dramatic changes we must make to save the planet from financial madness." --Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine Opening with Oscar Wilde's observation that "nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing," Patel shows how our faith in prices as a way of valuing the world is misplaced. He reveals the hidden ecological and social costs of a hamburger (as much as $200), and asks how we came to have markets in the first place. Both the corporate capture of government and our current financial crisis, Patel argues, are a result of our democratically bankrupt political system. If part one asks how we can rebalance society and limit markets, part two answers by showing how social organizations, in America and around the globe, are finding new ways to describe the world's worth. If we don't want the market to price every aspect of our lives, we need to learn how such organizations have discovered democratic ways in which people, and not simply governments, can play a crucial role in deciding how we might share our world and its resources in common. This short, timely and inspiring book reveals that our current crisis is not simply the result of too much of the wrong kind of economics. While we need to rethink our economic model, Patel argues that the larger failure beneath the food, climate and economic crises is a political one. If economics is about choices, Patel writes, it isn't often said who gets to make them. The Value of Nothing offers a fresh and accessible way to think about economics and the choices we will all need to make in order to create a sustainable economy and society. "Win a Copy of The Value of Nothing" (50 copies available): http://us.macmillan.com/picador/promo/thevalueofnothing =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Feb 7 19:48:32 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 2010 19:48:32 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Eric Foner: The Professional (on Obama's first year) Message-ID: <7D05DFBAA80F4E119C6B687B7BBDF5AC@agingCHS072729> http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100201/foner The Nation February 1, 2010 edition The Professional By Eric Foner The first year may not be the best way to judge a president. After one year in office, Abraham Lincoln still insisted that slavery would not become a target of the Union war effort, Franklin D. Roosevelt had yet to address the need for social insurance in the wake of the Great Depression and John F. Kennedy viewed the civil rights movement as an annoying distraction. If we admire them today, it is mostly for what happened during the rest of their presidencies. Nonetheless, it is difficult to view Obama's initial year without a feeling of deep disappointment. This arises from more than unrealistic expectations, although his candidacy certainly aroused a great deal of wishful thinking among those yearning for a change after nearly thirty years of Reaganism. Nor does disappointment result from too exacting a standard of judgment. In fact, the bar has arguably been set too low. Too many of us have been willing to fall back on a comparison between Obama and his predecessor, arguably the worst president in American history, and leave it at that. Not surprisingly, given the global economic crisis, numerous observers greeted Obama's election by comparing him to FDR. This was a serious error. Obama is not a New Deal liberal. Rather, his outlook reflects how the preoccupations of liberalism have changed under the impact of the social and political transformations since the 1930s. Obama came of age politically at a time when the decline of the labor movement had eroded one social base of liberalism while new ones were emerging from the upheavals of the 1960s and the changing racial and ethnic composition of the American population. Personally, he embodies the rise to prominence in the Democratic Party of highly educated professionals, including a new black upper middle class that emerged from the struggles of the '60s and subsequent affirmative action programs. He is also closely identified with what might be called the more forward-looking wing of Wall Street, which contributed heavily to his campaign and to which he has entrusted his economic policy. Obama has no evident desire to address the questions that defined New Deal liberalism and remain all too relevant today--economic inequality; mass unemployment; unrestrained corporate power; and the struggle of workers, through unions, to enjoy "industrial democracy." Where Obama has been good is on issues that were subordinate themes during the 1930s but have become central to post-World War II liberalism--women's reproductive rights, respect for civil liberties and the rule of law, environmentalism and racial and ethnic diversity, especially in government employment. Obama also embodies a strain of thought alien to the New Deal but associated with the Progressivism of the early twentieth century, the desire to take politics out of the hands of politicians. Like the old Progressives, he seems to believe that the government can move beyond partisan politics to operate in a businesslike manner to promote the public good (despite clear evidence that the other side is not cooperating). As in the Progressive Era, this outlook goes hand in hand with a strong respect for scientific expertise (quite different from George W. Bush's approach). Listing these characteristics of Obama's thinking makes it clear that the president he most resembles is not FDR or Abraham Lincoln, as was frequently suggested before his inauguration, but Jimmy Carter. Like Carter, Obama seems to view economic globalization and American deindustrialization as an inevitable process and to see the role of government as seeking to mitigate their destructive impact. Like Carter, he has gone out of his way to appoint a racially diverse administration. Like Carter, he does not have an industrial policy or a robust jobs-creation program and seems uninterested in addressing the hardships and structural imbalances caused by the decline of manufacturing. Obama's economic program reflects and, indeed, reinforces the long-term shift from manufacturing to finance in the American economy. And his bailout of the banks and insurance mega-company AIG with no strings attached has aroused resentments that should not be ignored, even if they are often couched in extreme and racist language. There is a widespread sense that the rules of the game have been fixed to the advantage of the wealthy and that the government is indifferent to the plight of ordinary Americans. Ironically, for all the blacks appointed to highly visible positions in Washington, the condition of most African-Americans has worsened during Obama's first year. Blacks have suffered disproportionately from the decline of manufacturing employment and mortgage foreclosures. It is unlikely that an avowedly postracial president will directly address their plight. On foreign policy, the parallels with Carter are even closer, down to a joint preoccupation with Afghanistan. Both Carter and Obama reoriented the rhetoric of American foreign policy toward international cooperation, yet found it difficult to translate this ideal into practice. Carter continued to support tyrants like the Shah of Iran, launched a military buildup that paved the way for Reagan's and reinvigorated the cold war after the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. As for Obama, his recent address on Afghanistan and his surprisingly bellicose speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize reveal that he has comfortably embraced the role of wartime president, even adopting Bush-like language about a titanic global confrontation between the forces of evil and those of freedom. This has reignited the martial spirit of the liberal interventionists, who applauded the invasion of Iraq, later apologized (more or less) and now praise Obama's supposed "realism" in recognizing that wars are sometimes necessary. Only "just wars," of course. But was there ever a war its combatants did not consider just? One lesson we should learn from Obama's first year is the difficulty of effecting change, even in times of crisis. Fearful of popular democracy, the men who wrote the Constitution created a government system designed to make it far easier to prevent change than to implement it. Today this structural inertia is compounded by the power of money in politics and by an entrenched military establishment. Obama has failed to heed the lesson Kennedy learned from the Bay of Pigs debacle at the outset of his presidency--not to accept at face value the advice of his generals (a realization that served Kennedy and the world well during the Cuban missile confrontation of 1962). A crisis, however, also creates an opportunity. To seize it, the first prerequisite is to "disenthrall ourselves" from accepted maxims, as Lincoln urged Americans to do in 1862. "As our case is new," he said, "so we must think anew and act anew." Obama still has plenty of time to do this. It was only after their first year that Lincoln became the Great Emancipator, FDR the architect of the Second New Deal and Kennedy a champion of civil rights. Not one of these presidents acted simply on his own volition. All three were pressured to change by engaged social movements--abolitionists, the labor movement, the struggle for racial justice. Given this country's tortured racial history, Obama's election will always represent a symbolic watershed. To make sure that it amounts to more than this, progressives must stop making excuses or falling back on extenuating circumstances in assessing Obama. Without forgetting the differences between Obama and his increasingly retrograde Republican opposition, we must reject the outdated assumptions to which Obama clings on economic and foreign policy and forthrightly press for genuine change, speaking truth to power even when that power is held by men and women we helped put into office. .............................. Eric Foner, a member of The Nation's editorial board, is the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, specializing in the Civil War and Reconstruction, slavery and nineteenth-century America. He received his BA from Columbia in 1963 and his PhD from Columbia in 1969. His publications include Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (1970), Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (1976), Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (1980), Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (1983), Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988), Freedom's Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction (1993), The Story of American Freedom (1998) and a survey textbook, Give Me Liberty! An American History (2004). In 2000, he served as President of the American Historical Association. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Feb 7 21:09:40 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 2010 21:09:40 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Google's Deep CIA Connections Message-ID: <4B372C9161334AACA323D77A4F979855@agingCHS072729> http://english.pravda.ru/world/asia/111657-google_china-0 Pravda.Ru 14.01.2010 Google's Deep CIA Connections By Eric Sommer The western media is currently full of articles on Google's 'threat to quit China' over internet censorship issues, and the company's 'suspicion' that the Chinese government was behind attempts to 'break-in' to several Google email accounts used by 'Chinese dissidents'. However, the media has almost completely failed to report that Google's surface concern over 'human rights' in China is belied by its their deep involvement with some of the worst human rights abuses on the planet: Google is, in fact, is a key participant in U.S. military and CIA intelligence operations involving torture; subversion of foreign governments; illegal wars of aggression; and military occupations of countries which have never attacked the U.S. and which have cost hundreds of thousands of lives in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and elsewhere. To begin with, Google is the supplier of the core search technology for 'Intellipedia, a highly-secured online system where 37,000 U.S. spies and related personnel share information and collaborate on their devious errands. Agencies such as the so-called 'National Security Agency' have also purchased servers using Google-supplied search technology which processes information gathered by U.S. spies operating all over the planet. In addition, Google is linked to the U.S. spy and military systems through its Google Earth software venture. The technology behind this software was originally developed by Keyhole Inc., a company funded by Q-Tel http://www.iqt.org/ , a venture capital firm which is in turn openly funded and operated on behalf of the CIA. Google acquired Keyhole Inc. in 2004. The same base technology is currently employed by U.S. military and intelligence systems in their quest, in their own words, for "full-spectrum dominance" of the planet. Moreover, Googles' connection with the CIA and its venture capital firm extends to sharing at least one key member of personnel. In 2004, the Director of Technology Assessment at In-Q-Tel, Rob Painter, moved from his old job directly serving the CIA to become 'Senior Federal Manager' at Google. As Robert Steele, a former CIA case officer has put it: Google is "in bed with" the CIA. Googles Friends spy on millions of Internet Users Given Google's supposed concern with 'break-in's to several of its email accounts, it's worth noting that Google's friends at In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA, are now investing in Visible Technologies, a software firm specialized in 'monitoring social media'. The 'Visible' technology can automatically examine more than a million discussions and posts on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Amazon, and so forth each day. The technology also 'scores' each online item, assigning it a positive, negative or mixed or neutral status, based on parameters and terms set by the technology operators. The information, thus boiled down, can then be more effectively scanned and read by human operators. The CIA venture capitalists at In-Q-Tel say they will use the technology to monitor social media operating in other countries and give U.S. spies "early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally," according to spokesperson Donald Tighe. There is every possibility that the technology can also be used by the U.S. intelligence operatives to spy on domestic social movements and individuals inside the U.S. Finally, there is a curious absence from the statements emanating from Google - and from U.S. media reports - of any substantive evidence linking the Chinese government with the alleged break-in attempts to several Google email accounts. Words like 'sophisticated' and 'suspicion' have appeared in the media to suggest that the Chinese government is responsible for the break-ins. That may be so. But it is striking that the media has seemingly asked no questions as to what the evidence behind the 'suspicions' might be It should be noted that the U.S. government and its intelligence agencies have a long history of rogue operations intended to discredit governments or social movements with whom they happen to disagree. To see how far this can go, one need only recall the sordid history of disinformation, lies, and deceit propagated by U.S. government and media to frighten people into supporting the Iraq war. Whether the attacks on Google email originated from the Chinese government, or from elsewhere, one thing is clear: A company that supplies the CIA with key intelligence technology; supplies mapping software which can be used for barbarous wars of aggression and drone attacks which kill huge numbers of innocent civilians; and which in general is deeply intertwined with the CIA and the U.S. military machines, which spy on millions, the company cannot be motivated by real concern for the human rights and lives of the people in China. Eric Sommer China =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Feb 7 21:15:08 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 2010 21:15:08 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Natilnal Intelligence Director: U.S. Can Kill Suspected American Terrorists Abroad Message-ID: <70605C70CC6E4D9AB33C37CAC7D1974B@agingCHS072729> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/04/dennis-blair-us-can-kill_n_449170.html The Huffington Post | 02- 4-10 Dennis Blair: U.S. Can Kill Suspected American Terrorists Abroad Nick Wing Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair offered confirmation on Wednesday that the U.S. intelligence community is authorized to assassinate Americans abroad who are considered direct terrorist threats to the United States. "We take direct actions against terrorists in the intelligence community," Blair told lawmakers at a House Intelligence Committee hearing. "If we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that." Blair, who was on Capitol Hill Wednesday to give an annual threat assessment, also confirmed al Qaeda's continued ambitions to carry out another attack on American soil. This latest information comes in the wake of a string of terrorist plots that have reportedly stemmed from radicalized Americans overseas. The Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al Awlaki, a former imam at a mosque in Falls Church, Va., was in contact with both Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the perpetrator of the failed Christmas airline bombing, as well as Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the officer accused of killing 13 people at Ft. Hood, Tex. in November. Last month, the FBI charged American David Coleman Headley both as an accessory in the 2008 Mumbai attacks, and as a plotter in attacks on a Danish newspaper that printed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in 2005. Blair's latest disclosure follows last week's Washington Post report that recent military action in Yemen, which had been successful in killing many top al Qaeda officials, but not al Awlaki, was approved by President Obama. Al Awlaki is one of a handful of Americans that has been determined by the National Security Council and the Justice Department to be a U.S. intelligence target. Some House members raised concerns about these latest developments. Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), who criticized the intelligence community this week for misconduct surrounding the 2001 attack on a plane piloted by American missionaries in Peru, questioned the policy. "The targeting of Americans -- it's a very sensitive issue, but again there's been more information in the public domain than what has been shared with this committee," Hoekstra said. "There is no clarity...what is the legal framework? Glenn Greenwald penned an op-ed on Thursday criticizing the intelligence community's newly revealed authority to kill Americans abroad. Greenwald argues that "special permissions" for assassinations should not serve as sufficient credentials for murder. Without any judicial approval or oversight, Greenwald says, this process is "basically giving the President the power to impose death sentences on his own citizens without any charges or trial." =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Feb 7 22:26:00 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 2010 22:26:00 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] New York Times Israel Editor's Sticky Situation Message-ID: http://counterpunch.org/weir02052010.html Weekend Edition February 5 - 7, 2010 NYT's Israel Editor's Sticky Situation Ethan Bronner's Conflict With Impartiality By ALISON WEIR Ethan Bronner is the New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief. As such, he is the editor responsible for all the news coming out of Israel-Palestine. It is his job to decide what gets reported and what doesn't; what goes in a story and what gets cut. To a considerable degree, he determines what readers of arguably the nation's most influential newspaper learn about Israel and its adversaries, and, especially, what they don't. His son just joined the Israeli army. According to New York Times ethics guidelines, such a situation would be expected to cause significant concern. In these guidelines the Times repeatedly emphasizes the importance of impartiality. This is considered so critical that the Times devotes considerable attention to "conflict of interest" (also called "conflict with impartiality") problems, situations in which personal interest might cause a journalist to intentionally or unconsciously slant a story. The Times notes that family affiliations may cause such a conflict; as an example, it explains that a daughter's high position on Wall Street could be problematic for a business reporter. In situations where such a familial affiliation is considered significant, the journalist may be moved to a different area of reporting. Ethan Bronner's situation, therefore would appear to be sticky, at the very least. It is difficult to imagine that a son fighting for the foreign nation an editor is charged with covering does not constitute such a potential conflict with impartiality. Apart from Mr. Bronner signing up with the Israeli military himself, it is difficult to imagine a clearer example of familial partisanship. Yet, to date, Bronner and the Times have refused to address his situation. Foreign Editor Susan Chira (who may also have family allegiances to Israel) has declined to comment, other than refer people to her curt response to Electronic Intifada, which had asked her whether it was true that Bronner's son was in the Israeli military: "Ethan Bronner referred your query to me, the foreign editor. Here is my comment: Mr. Bronner's son is a young adult who makes his own decisions. At The Times, we have found Mr. Bronner's coverage to be scrupulously fair and we are confident that will continue to be the case." If that were, indeed, the case for Bronner's reporting, there would undoubtedly be less concern from outside observers. There are numerous instances of accurate reporting by both Israeli and Palestinian journalists; familial and personal affiliation do not necessarily or always result in flawed journalism. However, while both Chira and Bronner may believe he has been "scrupulously fair" in the years that he has been the paper's top editor on Israel-Palestine (before assuming his current position as Jerusalem bureau chief in March 2008, he had been deputy foreign editor overseeing the region for four years), a number of studies and analyses contradict this contention. - In 2005 a study by If Americans Knew found that the Times had covered Israeli children's deaths at a rate over seven times greater than it had reported on Palestinian children's deaths - even though Palestinian children's deaths had occurred first, in far greater numbers, and there was considerable evidence that Palestinian young people were being killed intentionally by official Israeli forces. - Princeton Professor Emeritus Richard Falk and media critic Howard Friel undertook a meticulous analysis of the Times' coverage of the issue; the title of their book indicates their findings: "Israel-Palestine on Record: How the New York Times Misreports Conflict in the Middle East." Among others things, Falk and Friel discovered that the Times had failed to report the essential fact that all Israeli settlements are illegal under international law. - A 2006 study published in the Electronic Intifada revealed that during the previous six years there had been 80 reports by respected international organizations detailing human rights violations in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Of these, 76 had been primarily critical of Israel, and four had been primarily critical of Palestinians. The study found that the Times had reported on two of the reports for each, giving readers an exceedingly distorted view of the real situation. - In a recent announcement expressing concern at Bronner's apparent conflict of interest, media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) stated that "Bronner's reporting has been repeatedly criticized by FAIR for what would appear to be a bias toward the Israeli government," detailing specific examples. Shifting the Blame Several years ago the San Francisco Jewish Bulletin published an article exploring Jewish student journalists' views on how to report on Israel-Palestine. Several said that they would find it difficult to report negative aspects about Israel, one interviewee saying that he would try to avoid printing such news. If that proved impossible, he said, he would then try to find a way "to shift the blame." New York Times' news coverage often seems to follow this pattern. When the Gaza massacre of December-January is reported, Gazan rockets are inevitably mentioned. However, the fact that these largely home-made projectiles have killed far fewer Israelis in the eight years they have been used (under 20) than Israeli forces killed in a few minutes during the invasion is virtually always omitted. Likewise left out is the fact that their use began only after Israeli forces had invaded Gaza on a number of occasions, killing and injuring numerous civilians. The Times consistently reports Israeli actions as retaliatory, despite the fact that, according to an MIT study, in at least 96 percent of ceasefires and periods of calm it was Israeli forces that had first resumed violence. In the conflict that began in fall of 2000, Israeli forces killed over 140 Palestinians before a single Israeli in Israel was killed, 91 Palestinian children (major cause of death, gunfire to the head) before a single Israeli child was killed. An example of Bronner's Israel-centric reporting is a November, 2009 report on prisoners. Bronner notes that the Israeli soldier captured by Palestinians (the only Israeli prisoner held by Palestinians) is "bespectacled and boyish-seeming," while failing to mention that many of the over 7,000 Palestinians prisoners held by Israel are equally bespectacled and boyish-seeming - in fact, 300+ are not just boyish, they are children. While Bronner includes personal information about the Israeli prisoner, he includes very few facts about Palestinian prisoners; for example, that hundreds have never been charged with a crime and that those whom Israel has found "guilty" were tried in military courts under military law in a military occupation of Palestinian land that much of the world deems illegal. While Bronner's story contains considerable mention of "terrorism," it fails to report that Israeli forces killed over a thousand Gazan civilians; Palestinians killed one Israeli civilian. Interestingly, connections to the Israeli military may not be rare for journalists covering the Middle East for US media. The husband of NPR's longtime correspondent for the region, Linda Gradstein, was a sniper in the Israeli army (and may still be a reserve officer). "Pundit" Jeffrey Goldberg, who appears throughout the media, immigrated to Israel, became an Israeli citizen, and served in the Israeli military. (It is unknown whether he is still in the Israeli reserves; it is possible he received a dispensation from this requirement.) The New York Times' other major correspondent from the region, Isabel Kershner, is an Israeli citizen. While there is universal compulsory military service in Israel, we have been unable to confirm that Kershner herself and/or her family members have been or are in the Israeli military. Breaking the silence Recently, the Israeli organization "Breaking the Silence" published 96 testimonies by female Israeli soldiers. They describe a pervasive pattern of violence, harassment, theft, and humiliation practiced by Israeli forces against Palestinian men, women, and children. Below are excerpts: "We caught a five-year-old. the officers just picked him up, slapped him around and put him in the jeep. The kid was crying and the officer next to me said 'don't cry' and started laughing at him. Finally the kid cracked a smile - and suddenly the officer gave him a punch in the stomach. Why? 'Don't laugh in my face' he said." "...it's boring, so we'd create some action. We'd get on the radio, and say they threw stones at us, then someone would be arrested. There was a policewoman, she was bored, so okay, she said they threw stones at her. They asked her who threw them. 'I don't know, two in grey shirts, I didn't manage to see them.' They catch two guys with grey shirts. beat them. Is it them? 'No, I don't think so.' Okay, a whole incident, people get beaten up. Nothing happened that day." "...two of our soldiers put him [a Palestinian child] in a jeep, and two weeks later the kid was walking around with casts on both arms and legs...they talked about it in the unit quite a lot - about how they sat him down and put his hand on the chair and simply broke it right there on the chair." An officer described soldiers shooting to death a nine-year-old as he was trying to run away: "They shot in the air, as they say - shot in the air in the lungs." In their testimonies, these soldiers emphasize that mistreatment of Palestinian civilians is widespread, routine, and known to everyone. Both the Israeli and the Palestinian press have published excerpts. Yet, New York Times Bureau Chief Ethan Bronner has so far failed to report this information about Israeli forces. And his son has just joined up. ................................. Alison Weir is executive director of If Americans Knew and a board member of the Council for the National Interest (CNI). For more information on Ethan Bronner and his upcoming speaking tour on college campuses, join IAK'S email list. Alison can be reached at contact at ifamericansknew.org SOURCES. The New York Times Company Policy on Ethics in Journalism. This also states: "Companywide, our goal is to cover the news impartially. and to be seen as doing so. The reputation of our company rests upon that perception." "Susan Chira, New York Times Foreign Editor, confirms, excuses Bronner's conflict of interest," Israel-Palestine: The Missing Headlines," Jan. 27, 2010 "New York Times fails to disclose Jerusalem bureau chief's conflict of interest Report," The Electronic Intifada, January 25, 2010 "New York Times' Ethan Bronner's Conflict of Interest: Conversation with Bronner and Alternative News Sources" AlisonWeir.org, January 26, 2010 "Off the Charts: Accuracy in Reporting of Israel/Palestine - The New York Times," If Americans Knew, 2005 "Israel-Palestine on Record: How the New York Times Misreports Conflict in the Middle East," Richard Falk, Howard Friel; ZNET Interview, May 31, 2007 "The New York Times Marginalizes Palestinian Women and Palestinian Rights," Electronic Intifada, Nov. 17, 2006 "Does NYT's Top Israel Reporter Have a Son in the IDF?" FAIR, January 27, 2010 "Killing Palestinians doesn't count: Is a ceasefire breached only when an Israeli is killed?" CounterPunch, January 29, 2009 "Reigniting Violence: How Do Ceasefires End?" Huffington Post, January 6, 2009 Remember These Children B'TSELEM - The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories "The Coverage--and Non-Coverage--of Israel-Palestine," The Link, July-August 2005, Vol 38, Issue 3 "Jewish journalists grapple with 'doing the write thing'" Jewish Bulletin of Northern California, Nov. 23, 2001 "Prisoner Swap Appears Near in the Mideast," Ethan Bronner, New York times, Nov. 23, 2009 "Political prisoners in Israel-Palestine," If Americans Knew Addameer Prisoners' Support and Human Rights Association "Israel, Hamas in mutual gestures on prisoners," Reuters, Sept. 30, 2009. "Female soldiers break their silence," YNET, Jan. 20, 2010 (According to its website, "Ynetnews is part of the prominent Yedioth Media Group, which publishes Yedioth Ahronoth - Israel's most widely-read daily newspaper) "Testimonies of Israeli Female Soldiers Regarding Violations Against Palestinian Civilians," International Middle East Media Center, January 30, 2010 "BREAKING THE SILENCE: Women Soldiers' Testimonies," 136-page booklet by the Israeli Breaking the Silence organization =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Feb 7 22:43:52 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 7 Feb 2010 22:43:52 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [BC] About that Copenhagen award Message-ID: <06ED9B4DA7A044B3AA2B48DB87B1CA2C@agingCHS072729> http://www.progressive-economics.ca/2010/02/05/about-that-copenhagen-award/ About that Copenhagen award Posted by Marc Lee February 5th, 2010 Back in December, during the Copenhagen negotiations, a group of environmentalists provided BC Premier Gordon Campbell with an award for climate leadership. Based primarily on the creation of a BC carbon tax two years ago, the Premier has gotten a lot of brownie points from the greens - in spite of the fact that there are some glaring contradictions between BC's transportation and industrial policies and climate policies, and that BC does not have a plan to achieve its legislated target of a 33% reduction in emissions by 2020 (relative to 2007 levels). Those contradictions were highlighted by the approval the other day of a new EnCana natural gas facility in BC's Northeast that will add over 2 million tonnes of CO2 per year to BC's inventory when fully built out. From the Tyee's coverage: The province's effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions is on course to suffer a 2.17 megatonne-per-year setback, after an environmental assessment (EA) certificate was approved for the $800-million Cabin Gas Plant last Thursday (Jan. 28). The green light to the EnCana-led project signals the onset of a shale gas boom in the million-acre Horn River Basin north of Fort Nelson. . The carbon dioxide implications get larger when considering the end uses of the gas. The initial volumes of gas produced daily at the plant would add up to 7.9 million tonnes of emissions each year when combusted. At full production, that downstream emissions rise to nearly 16 million tonnes - nearly 25 per cent of B.C. emissions, based on a 2007 baseline. Much of the gas will be exported to the United States. Campbell's retort is that natural gas is "actually a bridging technology that allows us to move to the new cleaner energies." There is something to this arguement, and it might even be true if we were able to guarantee that coal-fired power would be shut down in place of natural gas generated power. But no such guarantees are evident in this deal. All emissions will be additional to current emissions. And not only that, the much-lauded carbon tax does not even apply to most of the emissions from oil and gas development, as it does not cover the flaring and venting of gas, or pipeline leaks. This further goes to show that there is no political will in Canada to say no to the oil and gas industry. At some point we will have to confront the, er, inconvenient truth that the only bona fide sustainable path forward is to not get our energy out of the ground, or if we do to mandate that the emissions must be buried (sequestered) after combustion. That is, we need a moratorium on new oil and gas projects unless they implement carbon capture and storage (CCS). So the question for my friends in the environmental movement: is now a good time to revoke that award to Premier Campbell, and replace it with one of the more notorious Copenhagen awards, the Fossil of the Day? =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From may at applebybooks.net Mon Feb 8 01:48:19 2010 From: may at applebybooks.net (May at Appleby Books) Date: Sun, 07 Feb 2010 23:48:19 -0800 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Corp Count Message-ID: <4B6FC1C3.9090906@applebybooks.net> A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Corp_Court.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 29523 bytes Desc: not available URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Feb 8 09:05:10 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 8 Feb 2010 09:05:10 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The lessons of Iraq have been ignored. The target is now Iran Message-ID: <3E9B00130605493CB236A5A6E288ABE2@agingCHS072729> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/03/iraq-inquiry-blair-missile-shield-iran/print guardian.co.uk 3 February 2010 The lessons of Iraq have been ignored. The target is now Iran The US military buildup in the Gulf and Blair's promotion of war against Tehran are a warning of yet another catastrophe Seumas Milne We were ?supposed to have learned the lessons of the Iraq war. That's what Britain's ?Chilcot inquiry is meant to be all about. But the signs from the Middle East are that it could be happening all over again. The US is ?escalating the military build-up in the Gulf -- http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/31/iran-nuclear-us-missiles-gulf --, officials revealed this week, boosting its naval presence and supplying tens of billions of dollars' worth of new weapons systems to allied Arab states. The target is of course Iran. Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain are all taking deliveries of Patriot missile batteries. In Saudi Arabia, Washington is sponsoring a 30,000-strong force to protect oil installations and ports. The UAE alone has bought 80 F16 fighters, and General Petraeus, the US commander, claims it could now "take out the entire Iranian airforce". The US insists the growing militarisation is defensive, aimed at deterring Iran, calming Israel and reassuring its allies. But the shift of policy is clear enough. Last week Barack Obama warned that Iran would face "growing consequences" for failing to halt its nuclear programme, while linking it with North Korea - as George Bush did, in his "axis of evil" speech in 2002. When Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad this week renewed Iran's earlier agreement to ship most of its enriched uranium abroad to be reprocessed, the US was dismissive. Obama's "outstretched hand", always combined with the threat of sanctions or worse, appears to have been all but withdrawn. The US vice-president, Joe Biden, underlined that by insisting Iran's leaders were "sowing the seeds of their own destruction". And in Israel, which has vowed to take whatever action is necessary to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, threats of war against its allies, Lebanon's Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas, are growing. "We must recruit the whole world to fight Ahmadinejad," Israeli president Shimon Peres declared on Tuesday. The echoes of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq are unmistakable. Just as in 2002-3, we are told that a dictatorial Middle Eastern state is secretly ?developing weapons of mass destruction, defying UN resolutions, obstructing inspections, threatening its neighbours and supporting terrorism. As in the case of Iraq, no evidence has been produced to back up the WMD claims, though bogus leaks about secret programmes are regularly reproduced in the mainstream press. Most recently, a former CIA official reported that US intelligence believed documents, published in the Times, purporting to show Iran planning to experiment on a "neutron initiator" for an atomic weapon, had been forged -- http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=49833 --. Shades of Iraq's non-existent attempts to buy uranium in Niger. In case anyone missed the parallels, Tony Blair hammered them home at the Iraq inquiry last Friday. Far from showing remorse about the bloodshed he helped unleash on the Iraqi people, the former prime minister was allowed to turn what was supposed to be a grilling into a platform for war against Iran. In a timely demonstration that ?neoconservatism is alive and well and living in London, Blair attempted to use the fact that Iraq had no ?WMD as part of a case for ?taking the same approach against Iran. Perceived intention and potential ?capability were enough to justify war, it turned out. Mentioning Iran 58 times -- http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jan/30/tony-blair-iran-spin-chilcot --, he explained that the need to "deal" with Iran raised "very similar issues to the ones we are discussing". You might think that the views of a man that 37% of British people now believe should be put on trial for war crimes -- http://www.comres.co.uk/page1901435538.aspx -- would be treated with contempt. But Blair remains the Middle East envoy of the Quartet - the US, UN, EU and Russia - even as he pockets ?1m a year from a UAE investment fund -- http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article6973974.ece -- currently negotiating a slice of the profits from the exploitation of Iraqi oil reserves. Nor is he alone in pressing the case for war on Iran. Another neocon outrider from the Bush era, Daniel Pipes, wrote this week that the only way for Obama to save his presidency was to "bomb Iran" and destroy the country's "nuclear-weapon capacity", entailing few politically troublesome US "boots on the ground" or casualties. The reality is that such an attack would be potentially even more devastating than the aggression against Iraq. Iran has the ability to deliver armed retaliation, both directly and through its allies, which would not only engulf the region but block the 20% of global oil supplies shipped through the straits of Hormuz. It would also certainly set back the cause of progressive change in Iran. Iran is a divided authoritarian state, now cracking down harshly on the opposition. But it is not a dictatorship in the Saddam Hussein mould. Unlike Iraq, Israel, the US and Britain, Iran has not invaded and occupied anybody's territory, but has the troops of two hostile, nuclear-armed powers on its borders. And for all Ahmadinejad's inflammatory rhetoric, it is the nuclear-armed US and Israel that maintain the option of an attack on Iran, not the other way round. Nor has the UN nuclear agency, the IAEA, found any evidence that Iran is trying to acquire nuclear weapons, while the US's own national intelligence estimate found that suspected work on a weapons programme had stopped in 2003, though that may now be adjusted in the new climate. Iran's leadership has long insisted it does not want nuclear weapons, even while many suspect it may be trying to become a threshold nuclear power, able to produce weapons if threatened. Given the recent history of the region, that would hardly be surprising. For the US government, as during the Bush administration, the real problem is Iran's independent power in the most sensitive region in the world - heightened by the Iraq war. The signals coming out of Washington are mixed. The head of US National Intelligence implied on Tuesday there was nothing the US could do to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons if it chose to do so. Perhaps the military build-up in the Gulf is just sabre rattling. The preference is clearly for regime change rather than war. But Israel is most unlikely to roll over if that option fails, and the risks of the US and its allies, including Britain, being drawn into the fallout from any attack would be high. As was discovered in the case of Iraq, the views of outriders like Blair and Pipes can quickly become mainstream. If we are to avoid a replay of that catastrophe, pressure to prevent war with Iran will have to start now. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Feb 8 12:10:53 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 8 Feb 2010 12:10:53 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Attention Winnipeggers: Haiti Solidarity Benefit this Thursday Message-ID: <25294E797B544837A96CEB944D8B8BD7@agingCHS072729> The Weakerthans' John K Samson Ruth Moody & Nicky Mehta of The Wailin' Jennys and Daniel ROA Presented by the Winnipeg-Haiti Solidarity Group and the West End Cultural Centre. This Thursday, February 11th at the West End Cultural Centre 586 Ellice Ave. at Sherbrook. 100% of funds raised are being donated to Zanmi Lasante/Partners in Health. Being the largest NGO in Haiti to provide comprehensive primary health care regardless of ability to pay. The right of free access to health care for the poor majority in Haiti has been a cornerstone of their operation since their inception in 1985. ZL/PiH uses a community based model, training and hiring Haitians to deliver preferential health care to the poor, meaning the money donated from this fundraiser will stay in Haiti. Donations to Partners In Health will be collected throughout the event and charitable tax receipts will be issued for donations over $10. You can learn more about Partners In Health here: http://www.standwithhaiti.org/haiti 7:15 doors ~ 8:00 pm show Tickets are $15 in advance and will be available on Feb 2nd through Ticketmaster, Mondragon, the WECC, and the Winnipeg-Haiti Solidarity Group. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Feb 8 23:23:31 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 8 Feb 2010 23:23:31 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Chris Hedges: The Terror-Industrial Complex Message-ID: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_terror-industrial_complex_20100208/ Truthdig Posted on Feb 8, 2010 The Terror-Industrial Complex By Chris Hedges The conviction of the Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui in New York last week of trying to kill American military officers and FBI agents illustrates that the greatest danger to our security comes not from al-Qaida but the thousands of shadowy mercenaries, kidnappers, killers and torturers our government employs around the globe. The bizarre story surrounding Siddiqui, 37, who received an undergraduate degree from MIT and a doctorate in neuroscience from Brandeis University, often defies belief. Siddiqui, who could spend 50 years in prison on seven charges when she is sentenced in May, was by her own account abducted in 2003 from her hometown of Karachi, Pakistan, with her three children--two of whom remain missing--and spirited to a secret U.S. prison where she was allegedly tortured and mistreated for five years. The American government has no comment, either about the alleged clandestine detention or the missing children. Siddiqui was discovered in 2008 disoriented and apparently aggressive and hostile, in Ghazni, Afghanistan, with her oldest son. She allegedly was carrying plans to make explosives, lists of New York landmarks and notes referring to "mass-casualty attacks." But despite these claims the government prosecutors chose not to charge her with terrorism or links to al-Qaida--the reason for her original appearance on the FBI's most-wanted list six years ago. Her supporters suggest that the papers she allegedly had in her possession when she was found in Afghanistan, rather than detail coherent plans for terrorist attacks, expose her severe mental deterioration, perhaps the result of years of imprisonment and abuse. This argument was bolstered by some of the pages of the documents shown briefly to the court, including a crude sketch of a gun that was described as a "match gun" that operates by lighting a match. "Justice was not served," Tina Foster, executive director of the International Justice Network and the spokesperson for Aafia Siddiqui's family, told me. "The U.S. government made a decision to label this woman a terrorist, but instead of putting her on trial for the alleged terrorist activity she was put on trial for something else. They tried to convict her of that something else, not with evidence, but because she was a terrorist. She was selectively prosecuted for something that would allow them to only tell their side of the story." The government built its entire case instead around disputed events in the 300-square-foot room of the Ghazni police station. It insisted that on July 18, 2008, the diminutive Siddiqui, who had been arrested by local Afghan police the day before, seized an M4 assault rifle that was left unattended and fired at American military and FBI agents. None of the Americans were injured. Siddiqui, however, was gravely wounded, shot twice in the stomach. No one, other than Siddiqui, has attempted to explain where she was for five years after she vanished in 2003. No one seems to be able to explain why a disoriented Pakistani woman and her son, an American citizen, neither of whom spoke Dari, were discovered by local residents wandering in a public square in Ghazni, where an eyewitness told Harpers Magazine the distraught Siddiqui "was attacking everyone who got close to her." Had Siddiqui, after years of imprisonment and torture, perhaps been at the U.S. detention center in Bagram and then dumped with one of her three children in Ghazi? And where are the other two children, one of whom also is an American citizen? Her arrest in Ghazi saw, according to the official complaint, a U.S. Army captain and a warrant officer, two FBI agents and two military interpreters arrive to question Siddiqui at the police headquarters. The Americans and their interpreters were shown to a meeting room that was partitioned by a yellow curtain. "None of the United States personnel were aware," the complaint states, "that Siddiqui was being held, unsecured, behind the curtain." The group sat down to talk and "the Warrant Officer placed his United States Army M-4 rifle on the floor to his right next to the curtain, near his right foot." Siddiqui allegedly reached from behind the curtain and pulled the three-foot rifle to her side. She unlatched the safety. She pulled the curtain "slightly back" and pointed the gun directly at the head of the captain. One of the interpreters saw her. He lunged for the gun. Siddiqui shouted, "Get the fuck out of here!" and fired twice. She hit no one. As the interpreter wrestled her to the ground, the warrant officer drew his sidearm and fired "approximately two rounds" into Siddiqui's abdomen. She collapsed, still struggling, and then fell unconscious. But in an article written by Petra Bartosiewicz in the November 2009 Harper's Magazine, authorities in Afghanistan described a series of events at odds with the official version. The governor of Ghazni province, Usman Usmani, told a local reporter who was hired by Bartosiewicz that the U.S. team had "demanded to take over custody" of Siddiqui. The governor refused. He could not release Siddiqui, he explained, until officials from the counterterrorism department in Kabul arrived to investigate. He proposed a compromise: The U.S. team could interview Siddiqui, but she would remain at the station. In a Reuters interview, however, a "senior Ghazni police officer" suggested that the compromise did not hold. The U.S. team arrived at the police station, he said, and demanded custody of Siddiqui. The Afghan officers refused, and the U.S. team proceeded to disarm them. Then, for reasons unexplained, Siddiqui herself somehow entered the scene. The U.S. team, "thinking that she had explosives and would attack them as a suicide bomber, shot her and took her." Siddiqui told a delegation of Pakistani senators who went to Texas to visit her in prison a few months after her arrest that she never touched anyone's gun, nor did she shout at anyone or make any threats. She simply stood up to see who was on the other side of the curtain and startled the soldiers. One of them shouted, "She is loose," and then someone shot her. When she regained consciousness she heard someone else say, "We could lose our jobs." Siddiqui's defense team pointed out that there was an absence of bullets, casings or residue from the M4, all of which suggested it had not been fired. They played a video to show that two holes in a wall supposedly caused by the M4 had been there before July 18. They also highlighted inconsistencies in the testimony from the nine government witnesses, who at times gave conflicting accounts of how many people were in the room, where they were sitting or standing and how many shots were fired. Siddiqui, who took the stand during the trial against the advice of her defense team, called the report that she had fired the unattended M4 assault rifle at the Americans "the biggest lie." She said she had been trying to flee the police station because she feared being tortured. Siddiqui, whose mental stability often appeared to be in question during the trial, was ejected several times from the Manhattan courtroom for erratic behavior and outbursts. "It is difficult to get a fair trial in this country if the government wants to accuse you of terrorism," said Foster. "It is difficult to get a fair trial on any types of charges. The government is allowed to tell the jury you are a terrorist before you have to put on any evidence. The fear factor that has emerged since 9/11 has permeated into the U.S. court system in a profoundly disturbing way. It embraces the idea that we can compromise core principles, for example the presumption of innocence, based on perceived threats that may or may not come to light. We, as a society, have chosen to cave on fear." I spent more than a year covering al-Qaida for The New York Times in Europe and the Middle East. The threat posed by Islamic extremists, while real, is also wildly overblown, used to foster a climate of fear and political passivity, as well as pump billions of dollars into the hands of the military, private contractors, intelligence agencies and repressive client governments including that of Pakistan. The leader of one FBI counterterrorism squad told The New York Times that of the 5,500 terrorism-related leads its 21 agents had pursued over the past five years, just 5 percent were credible and not one had foiled an actual terrorist plot. These statistics strike me as emblematic of the entire war on terror. Terrorism, however, is a very good business. The number of extremists who are planning to carry out terrorist attacks is minuscule, but there are vast departments and legions of ambitious intelligence and military officers who desperately need to strike a tangible blow against terrorism, real or imagined, to promote their careers as well as justify obscene expenditures and a flagrant abuse of power. All this will not make us safer. It will not protect us from terrorist strikes. The more we dispatch brutal forms of power to the Islamic world the more enraged Muslims and terrorists we propel into the ranks of those who oppose us. The same perverted logic saw the Argentine military, when I lived in Buenos Aires, "disappear" 30,000 of the nation's citizens, the vast majority of whom were innocent. Such logic also fed the drive to root out terrorists in El Salvador, where, when I arrived in 1983, the death squads were killing between 800 and 1,000 people a month. Once you build secret archipelagos of prisons, once you commit huge sums of money and invest your political capital in a ruthless war against subversion, once you empower a network of clandestine killers, operatives and torturers, you fuel the very insecurity and violence you seek to contain. I do not know whether Siddiqui is innocent or guilty. But I do know that permitting jailers, spies, kidnappers and assassins to operate outside of the rule of law contaminates us with our own bile. Siddiqui is one victim. There are thousands more we do not see. These abuses, justified by the war on terror, have created a system of internal and external state terrorism that is far more dangerous to our security and democracy than the threat posed by Islamic radicals. AP / Fareed Khan Mohammad Ahmed, son of Aafia Siddiqui, takes part in a demonstration arranged by Human Rights Network. A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman. Copyright (c) 2010 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved. Web site development by Hop Studios | Hosted by NEXCESS.NET =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Feb 9 14:33:26 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 9 Feb 2010 14:33:26 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Fw: Maxine's "The Economy is so bad, ..." Message-ID: <6991EE1F316D4663A93A451B05020DD0@agingCHS072729> ----- Original Message ----- From: Henry F. Hain III To: ExcuseMe? Sent: Tuesday, February 09, 2010 12:50 PM Subject: [Excuse Me?] Fw: Maxine's "The Economy is so bad, ..." 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Name: message-footer.txt URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Feb 9 19:41:04 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 9 Feb 2010 19:41:04 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] More and more, Obama seems a faux liberal Message-ID: http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_rick16_12-16-09_P6GPU24_v23.3f8d8cc.html More and more, Obama seems a faux liberal December 16, 2009 By JOHN R. MacARTHUR NEW YORK Following President Obama's war speeches at West Point and Oslo ?- two breathtaking exercises in political cynicism that killed any hope of authentic liberal reform ? I've got only one question: Have the liberals who worshipped at the altar of "change you can believe in" had enough? There was already ample evidence of Obama's feeble commitment to peace, progress and justice. Ever since he started fundraising for his presidential campaign, it's been clear that the principal change in the offing was skin tone and slogans. One only needed to read "The Audacity of Hope" to see how thoroughly Obama was enmeshed in the neo-liberal orthodoxies of the Robert Rubin-Clinton wing of the Democratic Party. Obama's impeccably establishment party credentials ? that is, his fealty to the Democratic leadership of Chicago and Capitol Hill ? practically guaranteed that he would hew to the status quo when forced to choose. Even before he announced his candidacy for president, Obama endorsed the Iraq hawk Joe Lieberman for re-election to the Senate; then, when Lieberman lost the primary to the antiwar Ned Lamont, Obama made sure that he was never seen with the official nominee of the Connecticut Democratic Party, a bald act of realpolitik that helped Lieberman win as an "independent." In the U.S. Senate, meanwhile, Obama's voting record on Iraq war funding was identical to Hillary Clinton's. Liberals, exhausted by President Bush and heartened by Obama's challenge to the pro-invasion Hillary, ignored their new hero's record and fixated on his one major anti-Iraq speech, delivered when he was a state senator. Ironically, it was Clinton who best characterized Obama's candidacy when she said that she and John McCain would "put forth" a "lifetime of experience" while "Senator Obama will put forth a speech he made in 2002." Indeed, apart from extraordinary ambition, there wasn't much more to Obama than that one speech. So what's left of the liberal adoration of Obama? The first major defector among the camp followers was Gary Wills, who denounced the Afghanistan escalation as a "betrayal." As Wills astutely noted in a New York Review of Books blog, "If we had wanted Bush's wars, and contractors, and corruption, we could have voted for John McCain. At least we would have seen our foe facing us, not felt him at our back, as now we do." But Wills seems to be the exception. For now, the leading liberal commentators are clinging to the belief that Obama's blatant doubletalk ? sending more troops while announcing their eventual withdrawal ? is somehow virtuous. Typical is Frank Rich, who though critical of the troop buildup, doesn't "buy the criticism that [Obama] contrived a cynical political potpourri to pander to every side of the debate on the war." For the former New York Times theater critic, good acting still counts for a lot: "Obama's speech struck me as the sincere product of serious deliberations, an earnest attempt to apply his formidable intelligence to one of the most daunting Rubik's Cubes of foreign policy America has ever known." That Rich is so impressed by the alleged complexity of Afghanistan and Obama's supposed brilliance speaks in part, I imagine, to Rich's ignorance of American political history. As Rahm Emanuel knows well, milking the role of "war president" (with a backdrop of men in uniform) is a time-tested winner in re-election campaigns, from Abraham Lincoln in 1864, to Richard Nixon in 1972, to George W. Bush in 2004. I suspect that Rich is disturbed that his matinee idol is suddenly being called a poseur by respectable people whom Rich might meet at a dinner party. In the same vein, Hendrick Hertz-berg, of The New Yorker, twisted himself into knots to present the president as an honorable man. "His speech," Hertzberg pronounced, "was a somber appeal to reason, not a rousing call to arms." Of Obama's "plan," Hertzberg wrote that "the best that can be claimed for it is that it does not guarantee failure, as, in one form or another, the alternatives almost certainly do." From Obama's (and Hertzberg's) self-contradictory gobbledygook, we may be reassured that "if there is no Obama Doctrine, there is an Obama approach ? undergirded by humane values but also by a respect for reality." Obama's West Point speech was nothing if not a tribute to fantasy. Almost everything he said about fighting terrorism and "stabilizing" Afghanistan and Pakistan was counterproductive nonsense (see Edward Luttwak's recent article in The Times Literary Supplement). As for humane values, it takes more than gall to tell an audience that includes future dead and maimed soldiers that they're going off to fight for a good cause when, in fact, their presence in Afghanistan will create added bloodshed and recruit more volunteers for the Taliban. Then there's Tom Hayden, the former radical and author of the Students for A Democratic Society's Port Huron Statement, who was a belligerent booster of Obama during last year's campaign. Hayden, too, is upset about Afghanistan, but not enough to cast aside his self-delusion about Obama. Claiming to speak for "the antiwar movement," he laments that the "costs in human lives and tax dollars are simply unsustainable" and, worse, that "Obama is squandering any hope for his progressive domestic agenda by this tragic escalation of the war." Unsustainable? Tragic? There's no evidence that Obama and his chief of staff see any limit to their ability to print dollars, sell Treasury bonds and send working-class kids to die in distant lands. And what "progressive" agenda is Hayden talking about? So far, Obama's big domestic goals have been compulsory, government-subsidized insurance policies that will further enrich the private health-care business, huge increases in Pentagon spending and purely symbolic regulation of Wall Street. While Obama was speaking to the unfortunate cadets, I couldn't help thinking of Richard Nixon and his "secret plan" to end the Vietnam War, a plan that entailed a long and pointless continuation of the fighting. Most liberals would agree that Nixon was a terrible president. Yet, for all his vicious mendacity, I think the sage of San Clemente had a bad conscience about the harm he did, about all he caused to die and be crippled. Instead of shoring up Obama's image of goodness, liberals really should be asking, "Does the president have a conscience?" Because if he does, he's really no better than Nixon. -- John R. MacArthur, a monthly contributor, is publisher of Harper's Magazine. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Feb 9 21:34:57 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 9 Feb 2010 21:34:57 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] =?iso-8859-1?q?=27More_Terror=27_in_Honduras=2C_as_An?= =?iso-8859-1?q?other_Unionist_Murdered?= Message-ID: <67DCEAA93F38486A8A31A8DDCD95650F@agingCHS072729> http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/5522/another_honduran_unionist_murdered/ 'More Terror' in Honduras, as Another Unionist Murdered Monday February 8 8:31 am [A mural celebrates the Honduran teachers union; several of its members have been killed since the coup last June. (Photo by Victoria Cervantes)] By Kari Lydersen The body of 29-year-old Vanessa Yamileth Zepeda, still dressed in her nurse's scrubs and killed by a bullet, turned up in the Loarque neighborhood of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, on February 4. Zepeda had young children and was a leader of the SITRAIHSS labor union (Workers Union for the Honduran Social Security Institute). She had been abducted that afternoon while leaving a union meeting. The administration of the newly inaugurated President Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo has called Zepeda's murder and other recent attacks common crime. But the Honduran resistance movement - mobilized since the June 2009 coup against then-president Manuel Zelaya - see it as a clear message. Trade unionists, especially public sector workers like Zepeda, are among the strongest and largest factions making up the resistance coalition. Opposition to powerful unions was apparently among the motivations for the coup in the first place, and all the country's major union federations are part of the resistance front. Unions are an impediment to neoliberal pushes to increase privatization, and foreign companies fear clashes with unions or unionizing efforts in Honduras' maquila (factory) sector. Since Lobo's inauguration on January 27, there have been 10 to 15 assassinations of resistance members and leaders, according to Victoria Cervantes, a Chicago activist who recently returned from meeting with unionists and other groups in Honduras with the group La Voz de los de Abajo. Since the coup, a number of people have been killed and thousands arrested and detained. Most of the previous deaths involved police and soldiers opening fire on crowds or attacking people in the midst of protests. Such open state violence has ebbed in recent weeks. But the targeted kidnapping, torture and assassination of a handful of activists like Zepeda is more chilling and evokes hallmarks of the ruthless right-wing death squads of the 1980s in Central America and more recently in Colombia, according to human rights groups. (Jeremy Kryt has been reporting from Honduras on such human rights abuses for In These Times.) "Before you might have had 300 army trucks storming through Tegucigalpa," said Cervantes. "That could be terrifying, but what's probably more terrifying is the idea that if you are identified as part of the resistance movement, you or your daughter could be snatched up and tortured. This is more terror at a lower political cost." Trade unionists and gay and lesbian groups, who have become increasingly visible and organized as part of the resistance, have been the main focus of recent attacks and intimidation. Campesino communities, especially those involved in contested land takeovers, have also suffered recent increases in violence and repression from police and landowners. "Campesinos have always suffered some level of violence, but this is different," said Cervantes. There have reportedly been beheadings and a man's tongue was cut out. Cervantes said Honduran officials known for paramilitary activity in the 1980s have also resurfaced as part of the coup and/or in Lobo's conservative party. "It's the same actors as the '80s, and they're desperate to terrify the resistance out of existence," said Cervantes. "Again, it's multinational companies tied in with the oligarchy. History keeps repeating itself." =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Feb 9 21:53:56 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 9 Feb 2010 21:53:56 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The Myth of the Good War: America in World War II Message-ID: One bone to pick here: "The bombing of Dresden, then, seems to have been a senseless slaughter, and looms as an even more terrible undertaking than the atomic obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which is at least supposed to have led to the capitulation of Japan." **All indications point to the notion that the Japanese were ready to surrender, and it was only the status of the Emperor that was a sore point for the Japanese. So it was not only Dresden, but also the utter destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that proved to be an "opportunity" to "impress" the Russians and keep them at bay. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24631.htm The Myth of the Good War: America in World War II 60 Years Ago, February 13-14, 1945: Why was Dresden Destroyed By Jacques R. Pauwels February 09, 2010 "Global Research" -- In the night of February 13-14, 1945, the ancient and beautiful capital of Saxony, Dresden, was attacked three times, twice by the RAF and once by the USAAF, the United States Army Air Force, in an operation involving well over 1,000 bombers. The consequences were catastrophic, as the historical city centre was incinerated and between 25,000 and 40,000 people lost their lives.[1] Dresden was not an important industrial or military centre and therefore not a target worthy of the considerable and unusual common American and British effort involved in the raid. The city was not attacked as retribution for earlier German bombing raids on cities such as Rotterdam and Coventry, either. In revenge for the destruction of these cities, bombed ruthlessly by the Luftwaffe in 1940, Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and countless other German towns big and small had already paid dearly in 1942, 1943, and 1944. Furthermore, by the beginning of 1945, the Allied commanders knew perfectly well that even the most ferocious bombing raid would not succeed in "terrorizing [the Germans] into submission,"[2] so that it is not realistic to ascribe this motive to the planners of the operation. The bombing of Dresden, then, seems to have been a senseless slaughter, and looms as an even more terrible undertaking than the atomic obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which is at least supposed to have led to the capitulation of Japan. In recent times, however, the bombing of countries and of cities has almost become an everyday occurrence, rationalized not only by our political leaders but also presented by our media as an effective military undertaking and as a perfectly legitimate means to achieve supposedly worthwhile objectives. In this context, even the terrible attack on Dresden has recently been rehabilitated by a British historian, Frederick Taylor, who argues that the huge destruction wreaked on the Saxon city was not intended by the planners of the attack, but was the unexpected result of a combination of unfortunate circumstances, including perfect weather conditions and hopelessly inadequate German air defenses.[3] However, Taylor's claim is contradicted by a fact that he himself refers to in his book, namely, that approximately 40 American "heavies" strayed from the flight path and ended up dropping their bombs on Prague instead of Dresden.[4] If everything had gone according to plan, the destruction in Dresden would surely have been even bigger than it already was. It is thus obvious that an unusually high degree of destruction had been intended. More serious is Taylor's insistence that Dresden did constitute a legitimate target, since it was not only an important military centre but also a first-rate turntable for rail traffic as well as a major industrial city, where countless factories and workshops produced all sorts of militarily important equipment. A string of facts, however, indicate that these "legitimate" targets hardly played a role in the calculations of the planners of the raid. First, the only truly significant military installation, the Luftwaffe airfield a few kilometres to the north of the city, was not attacked. Second, the presumably crucially important railway station was not marked as a target by the British "Pathfinder" planes that guided the bombers. Instead, the crews were instructed to drop their bombs on the inner city, situated to the north of the railway station.[5] Consequently, even though the Americans did bomb the station and countless people perished in it, the facility suffered relatively little structural damage, so little, in fact, that it was again able to handle trains transporting troops within days of the operation.[6] Third, the great majority of Dresden's militarily important industries were not located downtown but in the suburbs, where no bombs were dropped, at least not deliberately.[7] It cannot be denied that Dresden, like any other major German city, contained militarily important industrial installations, and that at least some of these installations were located in the inner city and were therefore wiped out in the raid, but this does not logically lead to the conclusion that the attack was planned for this purpose. Hospitals and churches were also destroyed, and numerous Allied POWs who happened to be in the city were killed, but nobody argues that the raid was organized to bring that about. Similarly, a number of Jews and members of Germany's anti-Nazi resistance, awaiting deportation and/or execution, were able to escape from prison during the chaos caused by the bombing,[8] but no one claims that this was the objective of the raid. There is no logical reason, then, to conclude that the destruction of an unknown number of industrial installations of greater or lesser military importance was the raison d'?tre of the raid. The destruction of Dresden's industry - like the liberation of a handful of Jews - was nothing more than an unplanned "by-product" of the operation. It is frequently suggested, also by Taylor, that the bombing of the Saxon capital was intended to facilitate the advance of the Red Army. The Soviets themselves allegedly asked their western partners during the Yalta Conference of February 4 to 11, 1945, to weaken the German resistance on the eastern front by means of air raids. However, there is no evidence whatsoever that confirms such allegations. The possibility of Anglo-American air raids on targets in eastern Germany was indeed discussed at Yalta, but during these talks the Soviets expressed the concern that their own lines might be hit by the bombers, so they requested that the RAF and USAAF would not operate too far to the east.[9] (The Soviets' fear of being hit by what is now called "friendly fire" was not unwarranted, as was demonstrated during the raid on Dresden itself, when a considerable number of planes mistakenly bombed Prague, situated about as far from Dresden as the Red Army lines were.) It was in this context that a Soviet general by the name of Antonov expressed a general interest in "air attacks that would impede enemy movements," but this can hardly be interpreted as a request to mete out to the Saxon capital - which, incidentally, he did not mention at all - or to any other German city the kind of treatment that Dresden received on February 13-14. Neither at Yalta, nor at any other occasion, did the Soviets ask their Western Allies for the kind of air support that presumably materialized in the form of the obliteration of Dresden. Moreover, they never gave their approval to the plan to bomb Dresden, as is also often claimed.[10] In any case, even if the Soviets would have asked for such assistance from the air, it is extremely unlikely that their allies would have responded by immediately unleashing the mighty fleet of bombers that did in fact attack Dresden. In order to understand why this is so, we have to take a close look at inter-Allied relations in early 1945. In mid- to late January, the Americans were still involved in the final convulsions of the "Battle of the Bulge," an unexpected German counter-offensive on the western front which had caused them great difficulties. The Americans, British, and Canadians had not yet crossed the Rhine, had not even reached the western banks of that river, and were still separated from Berlin by more than 500 kilometers. On the eastern front, meanwhile, the Red Army had launched a major offensive on January 12 and advanced rapidly to within 100 kilometers of the German capital. The resulting likelihood that the Soviets would not only take Berlin, but penetrate deep into Germany's western half before the war ended, greatly perturbed many American and British military and political leaders. Is it realistic to believe that, under those circumstances, Washington and London were eager to enable the Soviets to achieve even greater progress? Even if Stalin had asked for Anglo-American assistance from the air, Churchill and Roosevelt might have provided some token assistance, but would never have launched the massive and unprecedented combined RAF-USAAF operation that the bombing of Dresden revealed itself to be. Moreover, attacking Dresden meant sending hundreds of big bombers more than 2,000 kilometers through enemy airspace, approaching the lines of the Red Army so closely that they would run the risk of dropping their bombs by mistake on the Soviets or being fired at by Soviet anti-aircraft artillery. Could Churchill or Roosevelt be expected to invest such huge human and material resources and to run such risks in an operation that would make it easier for the Red Army to take Berlin and possibly reach the Rhine before they did? Absolutely not. The American-British political and military leaders were undoubtedly of the opinion that the Red Army was already advancing fast enough. Towards the end of January 1945, Roosevelt and Churchill prepared to travel to Yalta for a meeting with Stalin. They had asked for such a meeting because they wanted to make binding agreements about postwar Germany before the end of the hostilities. In the absence of such agreements, the military realities in the field would determine who would control which parts of Germany, and it looked very much as if, by the time the Nazis would finally capitulate, the Soviets would be in control of most of Germany and thus be able to unilaterally determine that country's political, social, and economic future. For such a unilateral course of action, Washington and London themselves had created a fateful precedent, namely when they liberated Italy in 1943 and categorically denied the Soviet Union any participation in the reconstruction of that country; they did the same thing in France and Belgium in 1944.[11] Stalin, who had followed his allies' example when he liberated countries in Eastern Europe, obviously did not need or want such a binding inter-allied agreement with respect to Germany, and therefore such a meeting. He did accept the proposal, but insisted on meeting on Soviet soil, namely in the Crimean resort of Yalta. Contrary to conventional beliefs about that Conference, Stalin would prove to be most accommodating there, agreeing to a formula proposed by the British and Americans and highly advantageous to them, namely, a division of postwar Germany into occupation zones, with only approximately one third of Germany's territory - the later "East Germany" - being assigned to the Soviets. Roosevelt and Churchill could not have foreseen this happy outcome of the Yalta Conference, from which they would return "in an exultant spirit."[12] In the weeks leading up to the conference, they expected the Soviet leader, buoyed by the recent successes of the Red Army and enjoying a kind of home-game advantage, to be a difficult and demanding interlocutor. A way had to be found to bring him down to earth, to condition him to make concessions despite being the temporary favourite of the god of war. It was crucially important to make it clear to Stalin that the military power of the Western Allies, in spite of recent setbacks in the Belgian Ardennes, should not be underestimated. The Red Army admittedly featured huge masses of infantry, excellent tanks, and a formidable artillery, but the Western Allies held in their hands a military trump which the Soviets were unable to match. That trump was their air force, featuring the most impressive collection of bombers the world had ever seen. This weapon made it possible for the Americans and the British to launch devastating strikes on targets that were far removed from their own lines. If Stalin could be made aware of this, would he not prove easier to deal with at Yalta? It was Churchill who decided that the total obliteration of a German city, under the noses of the Soviets so to speak, would send the desired message to the Kremlin. The RAF and USAAF had been able for some time to strike a devastating blow against any German city, and detailed plans for such an operation, known as "Operation Thunderclap," had been meticulously prepared. During the summer of 1944, however, when the rapid advance from Normandy made it seem likely that the war would be won before the end of the year, and thoughts were already turning to postwar reconstruction, a Thunderclap-style operation had begun to be seen as a means to intimidate the Soviets. In August 1944, an RAF memorandum pointed out that "the total devastation of the centre of a vast [German] city.would convince the Russian allies.of the effectiveness of Anglo-American air power."[13] For the purpose of defeating Germany, Thunderclap was no longer considered necessary by early 1945. But towards the end of January 1945, while preparing to travel to Yalta, Churchill suddenly showed great interest in this project, insisted that it be carried out tout de suite, and specifically ordered the head of the RAF Bomber Command, Arthur Harris, to wipe out a city in Germany's east.[14] On January 25 the British Prime Minister indicated where he wanted the Germans to be "blasted," namely, somewhere "in their [westward] retreat from Breslau [now Wroclaw in Poland]."[15] In terms of urban centres, this was tantamount to spelling D-R-E-S-D-E-N. That Churchill himself was behind the decision to bomb a city in Germany's east is also hinted at in the autobiography of Arthur Harris, who wrote that "the attack on Dresden was at the time considered a military necessity by much more important people than myself."[16] It is obvious that only personalities of the calibre of Churchill were able to impose their will on the czar of strategic bombing. As the British military historian Alexander McKee has written, Churchill "intended to write [a] lesson on the night sky [of Dresden]" for the benefit of the Soviets. However, since the USAAF also ended up being involved in the bombing of Dresden, we may assume that Churchill acted with the knowledge and approval of Roosevelt. Churchill's partners at the top of the United States' political as well as military hierarchy, including General Marshall, shared his viewpoint; they too were fascinated, as McKee writes, by the idea of "intimidating the [Soviet] communists by terrorising the Nazis."[17] The American participation in the Dresden raid was not really necessary, because the RAF was undoubtedly capable of wiping out Dresden in a solo performance. But the "overkill" effect resulting from a redundant American contribution was perfectly functional for the purpose of demonstrating to the Soviets the lethality of Anglo-American air power. It is also likely that Churchill did not want the responsibility for what he knew would be a terrible slaughter to be exclusively British; it was a crime for which he needed a partner. A Thunderclap-style operation would of course do damage to whatever military and industrial installations and communications infrastructure were housed in the targeted city, and would therefore inevitably amount to yet another blow to the already tottering German enemy. But when such an operation was finally launched, with Dresden as target, it was done far less in order to speed up the defeat of the Nazi enemy than in order to intimidate the Soviets. Using the terminology of the "functional analysis" school of American sociology, hitting the Germans as hard as possible was the "manifest function" of the operation, while intimidating the Soviets was its far more important "latent" or "hidden" function. The massive destruction wreaked in Dresden was planned - in other words, was "functional" - not for the purpose of striking a devastating blow to the German enemy, but for the purpose of demonstrating to the Soviet ally that the Anglo-Americans had a weapon which the Red Army, no matter how mighty and successful it was against the Germans, could not match, and against which it had no adequate defenses. Many American and British generals and high-ranking officers were undoubtedly aware of the latent function of the destruction of Dresden, and approved of such an undertaking; this knowledge also reached the local commanders of the RAF and USAAF as well as the "master bombers." (After the war, two master bombers claimed to remember that they had been told clearly that this attack was intended "to impress the Soviets with the hitting power of our Bomber Command.")[18] But the Soviets, who had hitherto made the biggest contribution to the war against Nazi Germany, and who had thereby not only suffered the biggest losses but also scored the most spectacular successes, e.g. in Stalingrad, enjoyed much sympathy among low-ranking American and British military personnel, including bomber crews. This constituency would certainly have disapproved of any kind of plan to intimidate the Soviets, and most certainly of a plan - the obliteration of a German city from the air - which they would have to carry out. It was therefore necessary to camouflage the objective of the operation behind an official rationale. In other words, because the latent function of the raid was "unspeakable," a "speakable" manifest function had to be concocted. And so the regional commanders and the master bombers were instructed to formulate other, hopefully credible, objectives for the benefit of their crews. In view of this, we can understand why the instructions to the crews with respect to the objectives differed from unit to unit and were often fanciful and even contradictory. The majority of the commanders emphasized military objectives, and cited undefined "military targets," hypothetical "vital ammunition factories" and "dumps of weapons and supplies," Dresden's alleged role as "fortified city," and even the existence in the city of some "German Army Headquarters." Vague references were also frequently made to "important industrial installations" and "marshalling yards." In order to explain to the crews why the historical city centre was targeted and not the industrial suburbs, some commanders talked about the existence there of a "Gestapo headquarters" and of "a gigantic poison gas factory." Some speakers were either unable to invent such imaginary targets, or were for some reason unwilling to do so; they laconically told their men that the bombs were to be dropped on "the built-up city centre of Dresden," or "on Dresden" tout court.[19] To destroy the centre of a German city, hoping to wreak as much damage as possible to military and industrial installations and to communication infrastructures, happened to be the essence of the Allied, or at least British, strategy of "area bombing."[20] The crew members had learned to accept this nasty fact of life, or rather of death, but in the case of Dresden many of them felt ill at ease. They questioned the instructions with respect to the objectives, and had the feeling that this raid involved something unusual and suspicious and was certainly not a "routine" affair, as Taylor presents things in his book. The radio operator of a B-17, for example, declared in a confidential communication that "this was the only time" that "[he] (and others) felt that the mission was unusual." The anxiety experienced by the crews was also illustrated by the fact that in many cases a commander's briefing did not trigger the crews' traditional cheers but were met with icy silence.[21] Directly or indirectly, intentionally or unintentionally, the instructions and briefings addressed to the crews sometimes revealed the true function of the attack. For example, a directive of the RAF to the crews of a number of bomber groups, issued on the day of the attack, February 13, 1945, unequivocally stated that it was the intention "to show the Russians, when they reach the city, what our Bomber Command is capable of doing."[22] Under these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that many crew members understood clearly that they had to wipe Dresden from the map in order to scare the Soviets. A Canadian member of a bomber crew was to state after the war to an oral historian that he was convinced that the bombing of Dresden had aimed to make it clear to the Soviets "that they had to behave themselves, otherwise we would show them what we could also do to Russian cities."[23] The news of the particularly awful destruction of Dresden also caused great discomfort among British and American civilians, who shared the soldiers' sympathy for the Soviet ally and who, upon learning the news of the raid, likewise sensed that this operation exuded something unusual and suspicious. The authorities attempted to exorcize the public's unease by explaining the operation as an effort to facilitate the advance of the Red Army. At an RAF press conference in liberated Paris on February 16, 1945, journalists were told that the destruction of this "communications centre" situated close to "the Russian front" had been inspired by the desire to make it possible for the Russians "to continue their struggle with success." That this was merely a rationale, concocted after the facts by what are called "spin doctors" today, was revealed by the military spokesman himself, who lamely acknowledged that he "thought" that it had "probably" been the intention to assist the Soviets.[24] The hypothesis that the attack on Dresden was intended to intimidate the Soviets explains not only the magnitude of the operation but also the choice of the target. To the planners of Thunderclap, Berlin had always loomed as the perfect target. By early 1945, however, the German capital had already been bombed repeatedly. Could it be expected that yet another bombing raid, no matter how devastating, would have the desired effect on the Soviets when they would fight their way into the capital? Destruction wreaked within 24 hours would surely loom considerably more spectacular if a fairly big, compact, and "virginal" - i.e. not yet bombed - city were the target. Dresden, fortunate not to have been bombed thus far, was now unfortunate enough to meet all these criteria. Moreover, the British American commanders expected that the Soviets would reach the Saxon capital within days, so that they would be able to see very soon with their own eyes what the RAF and the USAAF could achieve in a single operation. Although the Red Army was to enter Dresden much later than the British and the Americans had expected, namely, on May 8, 1945, the destruction of the Saxon capital did have the desired effect. The Soviet lines were situated only a couple of hundred of kilometers from the city, so that the men and women of the Red Army could admire the glow of the Dresden inferno on the nocturnal horizon. The firestorm was allegedly visible up to a distance of 300 kilometers. If intimidating the Soviets is viewed as the "latent," in other words the real function of the destruction of Dresden, then not only the magnitude but also the timing of the operation makes sense. The attack was supposed to have taken place, at least according to some historians, on February 4, 1945, but had to be postponed on account of inclement weather to the night of February 13-14.[25] The Yalta Conference started on February 4. If the Dresden fireworks had taken place on that day, it might have provided Stalin with some food for thought at a critical moment. The Soviet leader, flying high after the recent successes of the Red Army, would be brought down to earth by this feat of his allies' air forces, and would therefore turn out to be a less confident and more agreeable interlocutor at the conference table. This expectation was clearly reflected in a comment made one week before the start of the Yalta Conference by an American general, David M. Schlatter: I feel that our air forces are the blue chips with which we will approach the post-war treaty table, and that this operation [the planned bombing of Dresden and/or Berlin] will add immeasurably to their strength, or rather to the Russian knowledge of their strength.[26] The plan to bomb Dresden was not cancelled, but merely postponed. The kind of demonstration of military potency that it was supposed to be retained its psychological usefulness even after the end of the Crimean conference. It continued to be expected that the Soviets would soon enter Dresden and thus be able to see firsthand what horrible destruction the Anglo-American air forces were able to cause to a city far removed from their bases in a single night. Afterwards, when the rather vague agreements made at Yalta would have to be put into practice, the "boys in the Kremin" would surely remember what they had seen in Dresden, draw useful conclusions from their observations, and behave as Washington and London expected of them. When towards the end of the hostilities American troops had an opportunity to reach Dresden before the Soviets, Churchill vetoed this: even at that late stage, when Churchill was very eager for the Anglo-Americans to occupy as much German territory as possible, he still insisted that the Soviets be allowed to occupy Dresden, no doubt so they could benefit from the demonstration effect of the bombing. Dresden was obliterated in order to intimidate the Soviets with a demonstration of the enormous firepower that permitted bombers of the RAF and the USAAF to unleash death and destruction hundreds of kilometers away from their bases, and the subtext was clear: this firepower could be aimed at the Soviet Union itself. This interpretation explains the many peculiarities of the bombing of Dresden, such as the magnitude of the operation, the unusual participation in one single raid of both the RAF and USAAF, the choice of a "virginal" target, the (intended) enormity of the destruction, the timing of the attack, and the fact that the supposedly crucially important railway station and the suburbs with their factories and Luftwaffe airfield were not targeted. The bombing of Dresden had little or nothing to do with the war against Nazi Germany: it was an American British message for Stalin, a message that cost the lives of tens of thousands of people. Later that same year, two more similarly coded yet not very subtle messages would follow, involving even more victims, but this time Japanese cities were targeted, and the idea was to direct Stalin's attention to the lethality of America's terrible new weapon, the atomic bomb.[27] Dresden had little or nothing to do with the war against Nazi Germany; it had much, if not everything, to do with a new conflict in which the enemy was to be the Soviet Union. In the horrible heat of the infernos of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Cold War was born. Notes [1] Frederick Taylor. Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945, New York, 2004, pp. 354, 443-448; G?tz Bergander, Dresden im Luftkrieg. Vorgeschichte, Zerst?rung, Folgen, Weimar, 1995, chapter 12, and especially pp. 210 ff., 218-219, 229; "Luftangriffe auf Dresden", http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luftangriffe_auf_Dresden, p. 9. [2] See for example the comments made by General Spaatz cited in Randall Hansen, Fire and fury: the Allied bombing of Germany, 1942-45, Toronto, 2008, p. 243. [3] Taylor, p. 416. [4] Taylor, pp. 321-322. [5] Olaf Groehler. Bombenkrieg gegen Deutschland, Berlin, 1990, p. 414; Hansen, p. 245; "Luftangriffe auf Dresden," http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luftangriffe_auf_Dresden, p.7. [6] "Luftangriffe auf Dresden," http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luftangriffe_auf_Dresden, p. 7. [7] Taylor, pp. 152-154, 358-359. [8] Eckart Spoo, "Die letzte der Familie Tucholsky," Ossietzky, No. 11/2, June 2001, pp. 367-70. [9] Taylor, p. 190; Groehler, pp. 400-401. Citing a study about Yalta, the British author of the latest study of Allied bombing during World War II notes that the Soviets "clearly preferred to keep the RAF and the USAAF away from territory they might soon be occupying," see C. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities: Was the Allied Bombing of Civilians in WWII a Necessity or a Crime?, London, 2006, p. 176. [10] Alexander McKee. Dresden 1945: The Devil's Tinderbox, London, 1982, pp. 264-265; Groehler, pp. 400-402. [11] See e.g. Jacques R. Pauwels, The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War, Toronto, 2002, p. 98 ff. [12] Ibid., p. 119. [13] Richard Davis, "Operation Thunderclap," Journal of Strategic Studies, 14:1, March 1991, p. 96. [14] Taylor, pp. 185-186, 376; Grayling, p. 71; David Irving. The Destruction of Dresden, London, 1971, pp. 96-99. [15] Hansen, p. 241. [16] Arthur Travers Harris, Bomber offensive, Don Mills/Ont., 1990, p. 242. [17] McKee, pp. 46, 105. [18] Groehler, p. 404. [19] Ibid., p. 404. [20] The Americans preferred "precision bombing," in theory if not always in practice. [21] Taylor, pp. 318-19; Irving, pp. 147-48. [22] Quotation from Groehler, p. 404. See also Grayling, p. 260. [23] Cited in Barry Broadfoot, Six War Years 1939-1945: Memories of Canadians at Home and Abroad, Don Mills, Ontario, 1976, p. 269. [24] Taylor, pp. 361, 363-365. [25] See e.g. Hans-G?nther Dahms, Der Zweite Weltkrieg, second edition, Frankfurt am Main, 1971, p. 187. [26] Cited in Ronald Schaffer. "American Military Ethics in World War II: The Bombing of German Civilians," The Journal of Military History, 67: 2, September 1980, p. 330. [27] A. C. Grayling, for example, writes in his new book on Allied bombing that "it is recognized that one of the main motives for the atomb-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to demonstrate to the Russians the superiority in waponry that the United States had attained.In the case of Dresden something similar is regrettably true." ? Copyright Jacques R. Pauwels, Global Research, 2010 =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Feb 9 22:00:08 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 9 Feb 2010 22:00:08 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Wars Sending US into Ruin Message-ID: <1E93F4042FE44057843F2B10E329A90A@agingCHS072729> http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/eric_margolis/2010/02/05/12758511-qmi.html Toronto Sun February 7, 2010 Wars Sending US into Ruin Obama the peace president is fighting battles his country cannot afford By Eric Margolis U.S. President Barack Obama calls the $3.8-trillion US budget he just sent to Congress a major step in restoring America's economic health. In fact, it's another potent fix given to a sick patient deeply addicted to the dangerous drug - debt. More empires have fallen because of reckless finances than invasion. The latest example was the Soviet Union, which spent itself into ruin by buying tanks. Washington's deficit (the difference between spending and income from taxes) will reach a vertiginous $1.6 trillion US this year. The huge sum will be borrowed, mostly from China and Japan, to which the U.S. already owes $1.5 trillion. Debt service will cost $250 billion. To spend $1 trillion, one would have had to start spending $1 million daily soon after Rome was founded and continue for 2,738 years until today. Obama's total military budget is nearly $1 trillion. This includes Pentagon spending of $880 billion. Add secret black programs (about $70 billion); military aid to foreign nations like Egypt, Israel and Pakistan; 225,000 military "contractors" (mercenaries and workers); and veterans' costs. Add $75 billion (nearly four times Canada's total defence budget) for 16 intelligence agencies with 200,000 employees. The Afghanistan and Iraq wars ($1 trillion so far), will cost $200-250 billion more this year, including hidden and indirect expenses. Obama's Afghan "surge" of 30,000 new troops will cost an additional $33 billion - more than Germany's total defence budget. No wonder U.S. defence stocks rose after Peace Laureate Obama's "austerity" budget. Military and intelligence spending relentlessly increase as unemployment heads over 10% and the economy bleeds red ink. America has become the Sick Man of the Western Hemisphere, an economic cripple like the defunct Ottoman Empire. The Pentagon now accounts for half of total world military spending. Add America's rich NATO allies and Japan, and the figure reaches 75%. China and Russia combined spend only a paltry 10% of what the U.S. spends on defence. There are 750 U.S. military bases in 50 nations and 255,000 service members stationed abroad, 116,000 in Europe, nearly 100,000 in Japan and South Korea. Military spending gobbles up 19% of federal spending and at least 44% of tax revenues. During the Bush administration, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars - funded by borrowing - cost each American family more than $25,000. Like Bush, Obama is paying for America's wars through supplemental authorizations ??- putting them on the nation's already maxed-out credit card. Future generations will be stuck with the bill. This presidential and congressional jiggery-pokery is the height of public dishonesty. America's wars ought to be paid for through taxes, not bookkeeping fraud. If U.S. taxpayers actually had to pay for the Afghan and Iraq wars, these conflicts would end in short order. America needs a fair, honest war tax. The U.S. clearly has reached the point of imperial overreach. Military spending and debt-servicing are cannibalizing the U.S. economy, the real basis of its world power. Besides the late U.S.S.R., the U.S. also increasingly resembles the dying British Empire in 1945, crushed by immense debts incurred to wage the Second World War, unable to continue financing or defending the imperium, yet still imbued with imperial pretensions. It is increasingly clear the president is not in control of America's runaway military juggernaut. Sixty years ago, the great President Dwight Eisenhower, whose portrait I keep by my desk, warned Americans to beware of the military- industrial complex. Six decades later, partisans of permanent war and world domination have joined Wall Street's money lenders to put America into thrall. Increasing numbers of Americans are rightly outraged and fearful of runaway deficits. Most do not understand their political leaders are also spending their nation into ruin through unnecessary foreign wars and a vainglorious attempt to control much of the globe - what neocons call "full spectrum dominance." If Obama really were serious about restoring America's economic health, he would demand military spending be slashed, quickly end the Iraq and Afghan wars and break up the nation's giant Frankenbanks. Copyright ?? 2010 Toronto Sun [Eric Margolis is a columnist for The Toronto Sun. A veteran of many conflicts in the Middle East, Margolis recently was featured in a special appearance on Britain??Ts Sky News TV as "the man who got it right" in his predictions about the dangerous risks and entanglements the US would face in Iraq. His latest book is American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World] =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Feb 9 22:05:20 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 9 Feb 2010 22:05:20 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] =?iso-8859-1?q?When_Snow_Melts=3A_Vancouver=27s_Olymp?= =?iso-8859-1?q?ic_Crackdown?= Message-ID: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/528319/when_snow_melts_vancouver_s_olympic_crackdown When Snow Melts: Vancouver's Olympic Crackdown posted by Dave Zirin on 02/09/2010 @ 1:28pm News Flash: Winter Olympic officials in tropical Vancouver have been forced to import snow - on the public dime - to make sure that the 2010 games proceed as planned. This use of tax-dollars is just the icing on the cake for increasingly angry Vancouver residents. And unlike the snow, the anger shows no signs of abating. As Olympic Resistance Network organizer Harsha Walia wrote in the Vancouver Sun, "With massive cost over-runs and Olympic project bailouts, it is not surprising that a November 2009 Angus Reid poll found that more than 30 per cent of [British Columbia] residents feel the Olympics will have a negative impact and almost 40 per cent support protesters. A January 2010 EKOS poll found that almost 70 per cent believe that too much is being spent on the Games." Officials are feeling the anger, and the independent media, frighteningly, is paying the price. Just as Democracy Now's Amy Goodman was held in November for trying to cross the border for reasons that had nothing to do with the Olympic Games, Martin Macias Jr., an independent media reporter from Chicago, was detained and held for seven hours by Canada Border Services agents before being put on a plane and sent to Seattle. Macias, who is 20 years old, is a media reform activist with community radio station Radio Arte where he serves as the host/producer of First Voice, a radio news zine. I spoke to Martin Macias today and he described a chilling scene of detention and expulsion. "I was asked the same questions for three and a half hours in a small room. They told me I had no right to a lawyer. I went from frustrated and angry to scared. I didn't know what the laws were or how the laws had been changed for the Olympics. I kept telling them I wasn't going to Vancouver to protest but to cover the protests but for them that was one and the same. This is bigger than me. We need to ask who is exactly ordering this kind of repression. Is it the government? The IOC? Why the crackdown?" Then insult on top of injury when they deported Macias and insisted he pay his own way out of the country. "They wanted me to buy a $1,300 plane ticket back to Chicago. I said 'no way' and now I'm in Seattle." Martin's story is not unique. Two delegates aiming to attend an indigenous assembly taking place alongside the games were also detained and turned away. For people with just a passing knowledge of our neighbors to the north, it must all seem quite shocking. When we think of human rights abuses and suppression of dissent, Canada is hardly the first place that comes to mind. But there actually is a long history in Canada of this kind of abuse of power. The latest chapter in that history has been written during the pre-Olympic crackdown of 2010. Now as protestors and independent, unembedded journalists gather for the February 10-15 anti-Olympic convergence, as tax dollars go toward importing snow, the need to silence dissent becomes an International Olympic Committee imperative. As Chicago's Bob Quellos, who entered Vancouver successfully after accompanying Macias, said to me, "Walking the streets, residents here are very clear about who is responsible for the billions of dollars of Olympic debt they will be paying off for generations. They are outraged that the over $1 billion that is being spent on security has placed a cop on almost every corner of Downtown Vancouver. And they are outraged by the government's priorities. For example, while Vancouver's Downtown East Side struggles with poverty similar to third-world countries and social programs continue to be gutted, VANOC is spending an untold amount of money helicoptering in snow to the Olympic venue of Cypress Mountain that would otherwise be a mud hill due to the warm weather." It's not hard to deduce why the snow is melting: it's the heat on the street. [Dave Zirin is the author of the forthcoming "Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love" (Scribner) Receive his column every week by emailing dave at edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports at gmail.com.] =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Feb 9 23:05:22 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 9 Feb 2010 23:05:22 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] More Blackwater than cops, Pakistan says Message-ID: <67D70A5693F0488F8623108072D783D4@agingCHS072729> More Blackwater than cops, Pakistan says Published: Feb. 8, 2010 at 1:10 PM ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Feb. 8 (UPI) -- There are more private security contractors from Xe, formerly Blackwater, operating in Islamabad than capital police, a religious leader said. Maulana Fazal-ur-Rahman, the leader of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, a Deobandi political party in Pakistan, said there were as many as 9,000 Xe contractors working in Islamabad, compared with just 7,000 capital police, Pakistan's News International reports. The Pakistani Taliban last week said attacks in the Lower Dir District of Pakistan's North-West Frontier province killed U.S. personnel, claiming the attack was an act of revenge against Xe contractors operating in the region. Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, confirmed the deaths were U.S. military personnel but described the Taliban claims as propaganda. Their deaths are the first known U.S. military fatalities in Pakistan. Fazal blamed foreign contractors for instability in the country, saying they undermined an already weak democratic government. He equated Xe contractors with the insurgent Taliban. Washington linked stability in Pakistan to the success of its counterinsurgency battle in neighboring Afghanistan, encouraging Islamabad to step up domestic security measures. Pakistan in October launched its own offensive in the volatile tribal regions near the Afghan border. Fazal during a weekend meeting with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari said an immediate halt to military activity in the tribal areas would bring normalcy to the region. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Feb 9 23:45:13 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 9 Feb 2010 23:45:13 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Shrimp's Dirty Secrets Message-ID: <9EA3AA2A2F904BDB9E5F93E8C42D5D06@agingCHS072729> AlterNet February 4, 2010 Shrimp's Dirty Secrets: Why America's Favorite Seafood Is a Health and Environmental Nightmare The environmental impact of shrimp can be horrific. But most Americans don't know where their shrimp comes from or what's in it. By Jill Richardson Americans love their shrimp. It's the most popular seafood in the country, but unfortunately much of the shrimp we eat are a cocktail of chemicals, harvested at the expense of one of the world's productive ecosystems. Worse, guidelines for finding some kind of "sustainable shrimp" are so far nonexistent. In his book, Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood [1], Taras Grescoe paints a repulsive picture of how shrimp are farmed in one region of India. The shrimp pond preparation begins with urea, superphosphate, and diesel, then progresses to the use of piscicides (fish- killing chemicals like chlorine and rotenone), pesticides and antibiotics (including some that are banned in the U.S.), and ends by treating the shrimp with sodium tripolyphosphate (a suspected neurotoxicant), Borax, and occasionally caustic soda. Upon arrival in the U.S., few if any, are inspected by the FDA, and when researchers have examined imported ready-to-eat shrimp, they found 162 separate species of bacteria with resistance to 10 different antibiotics. And yet, as of 2008, Americans are eating 4.1 pounds of shrimp apiece each year -- significantly more than the 2.8 pounds per year we each ate of the second most popular seafood, canned tuna. But what are we actually eating without knowing it? And is it worth the price -- both to our health and the environment? Understanding the shrimp that supplies our nation's voracious appetite is quite complex. Overall, the shrimp industry represents a dismantling of the marine ecosystem, piece by piece. Farming methods range from those described above to some that are more benign. Problems with irresponsible methods of farming don't end at the "yuck," factor as shrimp farming is credited with destroying 38 percent of the world's mangroves, some of the most diverse and productive ecosystems on earth. Mangroves sequester vast amounts of carbon and serve as valuable buffers against hurricanes and tsunamis. Some compare shrimp farming methods that demolish mangroves to slash-and-burn agriculture. A shrimp farmer will clear a section of mangroves and close it off to ensure that the shrimp cannot escape. Then the farmer relies on the tides to refresh the water, carrying shrimp excrement and disease out to sea. In this scenario, the entire mangrove ecosystem is destroyed and turned into a small dead zone for short-term gain. Even after the shrimp farm leaves, the mangroves do not come back. A more responsible farming system involves closed, inland ponds that use their wastewater for agricultural irrigation instead of allowing it to pollute oceans or other waterways. According to the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch program [2], when a farm has good disease management protocols, it does not need to use so many antibiotics or other chemicals. One more consideration, even in these cleaner systems, is the wild fish used to feed farmed shrimp. An estimated average of 1.4 pounds of wild fish are used to produce every pound of farmed shrimp. Sometimes the wild fish used is bycatch -- fish that would be dumped into the ocean to rot if they weren't fed to shrimp -- but other times farmed shrimp dine on species like anchovies, herring, sardines and menhaden. These fish are important foods for seabirds, big commercial fish and whales, so removing them from the ecosystem to feed farmed shrimp is problematic. Additionally, some shrimp are wild-caught, and while they aren't raised in a chemical cocktail, the vast majority is caught using trawling, a highly destructive fishing method. Football field-sized nets are dragged along the ocean floor, scooping up and killing several pounds of marine life for every pound of shrimp they catch and demolishing the ocean floor ecosystem as they go. Where they don't clear-cut coral reefs or other rich ocean floor habitats, they drag their nets through the mud, leaving plumes of sediment so large they are visible from outer space. After trawling destroys an ocean floor, the ecosystem often cannot recover for decades, if not centuries or millennia. This is particularly significant because 98 percent of ocean life lives on or around the seabed. Depending on the fishery, the amount of bycatch (the term used for unwanted species scooped up and killed by trawlers) ranges from five to 20 pounds per pound of shrimp. These include sharks, rays, starfish, juvenile red snapper, sea turtles and more. While shrimp trawl fisheries only represent 2 percent of the global fish catch, they are responsible for over one-third of the world's bycatch. Trawling is comparable to bulldozing an entire section of rainforest in order to catch one species of bird. Given this disturbing picture, how can an American know how to find responsibly farmed or fished shrimp? Currently, it's near impossible. Only 15 percent of our total shrimp consumption comes from the U.S. (both farmed and wild sources). The U.S. has good regulations on shrimp farming, so purchasing shrimp farmed in the U.S. is not a bad way to go. Wild shrimp, with a few exceptions, is typically obtained via trawling and should be avoided. The notable exceptions are spot prawns from British Columbia, caught in traps similar to those used for catching lobster, and the small salad shrimp like the Northern shrimp from the East Coast or pink shrimp from Oregon, both of which are certified as sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council. However, neither are true substitutes for the large white and tiger shrimp American consumers are used to. The remaining 85 percent came from other countries and about two-thirds of our imports are farmed with the balance caught in the wild, mostly via trawling. China is the world's top shrimp producer -- both farmed and wild -- but only 2 percent of China's shrimp are imported to the U.S. The world's number two producer, Thailand, is our top foreign source of shrimp. Fully one third of the shrimp the U.S. imports comes from Thailand, and over 80 percent of those shrimp are farmed. The next biggest sources of U.S. shrimp are Ecuador, Indonesia, China, Mexico, Vietnam, Malaysia and India. Together, those countries provide nearly 90 percent of America's imported shrimp. Interestingly, Ecuador's shrimp industry exists almost entirely to supply U.S. demand, with over 93 percent of its shrimp coming up north to the U.S. The vast majority of those shrimp (almost 90 percent) are farmed. Sadly, shrimp production is responsible for the destruction of 70 percent of Ecuador's mangroves. Farming practices in other countries range from decent to awful, but there's currently no real way for a consumer to tell whether shrimp from any particular country was farmed sustainably or not. Geoff Shester, senior science manager of Monterey Bay's Seafood Watch, says that ethical shrimp consumption is a chicken and egg problem. On one hand, the solution is for consumers to show demand for responsibly farmed and wild shrimp by eating it but on the other hand, ethical shrimp choices are not yet widely available. Seafood Watch is working with some of the largest seafood buyers in the U.S. to help them buy better shrimp, but it's currently a major challenge. The first challenge is that labeling and certification programs do not yet exist to identify which farmed shrimp meet sustainable production standards. The second challenge is that even when such programs are in place, the U.S. demand will likely greatly exceed their supply. Shester's advice to consumers right now is "only buy shrimp that you know comes from a sustainable source. If you can't tell for sure, try something else from the Seafood Watch yellow or green lists [3]." Knowing that many will be unwilling to give up America's favorite seafood, he advocates simply eating less of it and keeping an eye on future updates to the Seafood Watch guide to eating sustainable seafood. ?? 2010 Independent Media Institute [Jill Richardson is the founder of the blog La Vida Locavore [4] and a member of the Organic Consumers Association policy advisory board. She is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It. [5].] =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Feb 10 09:38:39 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 10 Feb 2010 09:38:39 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] New Mexico House Votes 65-0 To Move State's Money To Credit Unions, Community Banks Message-ID: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/09/new-mexico-house-votes-65_n_456043.html New Mexico House Votes 65-0 To Move State's Money To Credit Unions, Community Banks First Posted: 02- 9-10 07:45 PM | Updated: 02-10-10 01:00 AM New Mexico's House of Representatives voted Monday to pass a bill that allows the state to move $2 billion - $5 billion of state funds to credit unions and small banks. The municipal funds bill was approved 65-0 (roll call - PDF), and is subject to a vote by New Mexico's Senate. Governor Bill Richardson told the bill's sponsor that he supports the legislation. Credit Union Times, spoke to one banker who believes that the bill got a boost from Huffington Post's Move Your Money campaign: The altered view of New Mexico lawmakers in favoring local control of state funds, officials said, follows national mention of the New Mexico effort in the "Move Your Money" campaign of New York pundit Arianna Huffington in her online Huffington Post columns. "I think Huffington gave this bill a little traction," said Juan Fernandez, vice president of government affairs for the Credit Union Association of New Mexico Move Your Money is a project started by Arianna and Rob Johnson that aims to spur financial reform at big banks by encouraging account holders to move their money to smaller credit unions and community banks. New Mexico currently keeps $1.4 billion in accounts at Bank of America. New Mexico State Representatives Brian Egolf (D-Santa Fe) and Timothy Keller (D-Bernalillo) sponsored the bill, HB 66. Rep. Eglof told the Huffington Post in January that the legislation would "direct the New Mexico Department of Finance and Administration to 'give a preference to a community bank to act as the fiscal agent of the general fund operating cash depository account.'" =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Feb 10 10:01:40 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 10 Feb 2010 10:01:40 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Obama's "Change" Mask Falls as Dems go after Social Security Message-ID: <050A7F2A2B72476C9D068D14129838FF@agingCHS072729> http://www.counterpunch.org/cooke02092010.html February 9, 2010 Obama's "Change" Drops Its Mask The Democrats are Coming After Social Security By SHAMUS COOKE It's official: the Democrats are coming after Social Security and Medicare. All the backroom scheming and political conspiring is finally out in the open. In an unusually long, 1,800 word editorial, entitled The Truth about the Deficit, published February 7, The New York Times -- cheerleader for neoliberalism -- gives its solution to the country's debt problems. The main idea is summed up thus: "To truly tame deficits will require serious health care reform [Obama's plan slashes Medicare], the sooner the better. Other aspects of the long-term fiscal problem - raising taxes and retooling [reducing] Social Security - must take place in earnest as the economy recovers." Later the article is clearer: "And then there is Social Security. What is needed is a combination of benefit cuts and tax increases that preserve the program's essential nature." Of course those surviving on Social Security already live in poverty and cannot afford "benefit cuts." Also, to make a dent in the deficit, benefit cuts to social security will have to be quite substantial, to the point where the program's "essential nature" will be destroyed. The New York Times acknowledges that such a course of action will be completely undemocratic and unpopular, but that politicians "must gather the political will to do what must be done." How can politicians destroy these cherished social programs in the face of such popular resistance? By trickery, of course. And this is exactly what Obama has proposed with his "bi-partisan deficit-reduction commission." This idea puts Democrats and Republicans together to create a plan to destroy social programs. This way both parties share the blame, so that no one is to blame. The New York Times reveals Obama's hidden motives: "The deficit commission that Mr. Obama intends to establish could be helpful in breaking this logjam [resistance to cutting social security], by calling for necessary changes that politicians would be loath to broach without political cover." Labor unions and community groups also understand Obama's treacherous motives. Dozens of them - including the AFL-CIO and Change to Win - signed a statement condemning the goals behind Obama's "deficit commission." The statement included some politically savvy points, including the following: ".the proposed budget commission - which will be viewed as a way to actually cut Medicare benefits, while insulating lawmakers from political fallout - could confuse people and undermine the reform effort. And an American public that only recently rejected privatization of Social Security will undoubtedly be suspicious of a process that shuts them out of all decisions regarding the future of a retirement system that's served them well in the current financial crisis." The statement concludes: "We urge you to act decisively to prevent the creation of such an extraordinary and undemocratic budget commission." However, it is not enough for only the leaders of unions and community groups to pressure the Democrats over this issue, especially when Obama has made it clear that he prefers the advice of Wall Street CEO's. Unions and progressive groups must educate and mobilize their base to confront both the Democrats and Republicans over the protection of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. None of the major unions which signed the anti-commission statement have information about this plot on their websites; none are organizing their members to confront this plan - a plan that the entire political establishment is in agreement with. Nor are unions seriously proposing other ideas to fix the deficit, and the fixes are obvious. The military budget must be slashed. Obama plans to spend over $700 billion in 2011 for the military. Both Democrats and Republicans are fine with this. Most Americans are not. More importantly, taxes on the rich need to be increased. The nation's tax structure changed drastically under Reagan and the two Bushes, with taxes on the wealthiest Americans dropping from 70 percent to the present day 35 percent. Under Eisenhower the richest Americans paid 90 percent of their income towards taxes. The loss in revenue that resulted from these giant tax reductions is one of the major contributors to the current deficit. It must be reversed in order to save Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. This is the solution that working-class Americans would prefer, rather than have their Medicare, Social Security, and public education destroyed. It is up to the union movement and community groups to unite and mobilize their members and all working people to demand this as a solution to the deficit and Great Recession. Without a massive mobilization with rank and file participation, the corporate elite will continue to have their way unchallenged, with more bank bailouts and more war. A coalition of progressive groups with clear demands to address the recession will have the backing of the majority of Americans, while being resisted adamantly by both Democrats and Republicans. Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist, and writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org). He can be reached at shamuscook at yahoo.com =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Feb 10 14:11:20 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:11:20 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [Canada] Foundation for "Political Warfare" Takes Cue from U.S. Strategy Message-ID: <2FCA4AE2807845F889D56EF81E3A0059@agingCHS072729> http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=50262 CANADA: Foundation for "Political Warfare" Takes Cue from U.S. Strategy By Anthony Fenton VANCOUVER, Feb 9, 2010 (IPS) - Indicating further integration with its closest neighbour and ally's foreign policy priorities, the Canadian government is in the advanced stages of establishing a foundation to promote liberal democracy, akin to the controversial U.S. National Endowment for Democracy. Last December, the minority Conservative government of Stephen Harper quietly tabled in parliament a bipartisan blue panel report titled, "Advisory Panel Report on the Creation of a Canadian Democracy Promotion Agency". The panel is recommending that the government create The Canadian Centre for Advancing Democracy, with a proposed budget of between 28 million and 65 million U.S. dollars per year. Since it assumed power in 2006, Harper's government has touted its commitment to placing democracy promotion as "one of the four core principles of its foreign policy." Speaking recently in Davos, Switzerland, as global elites gathered for the World Economic Forum, Harper included democracy promotion among the issues which "require the close cooperation of friends and like-minded allies." Steven Fletcher, Harper's minister of state for democratic reform, said he was given the responsibility to "construct and implement" the new democracy foundation. To do so, his office gathered "experts in the area of democracy promotion." Now that their report has been tabled, Fletcher told IPS that the government "will be plotting the appropriate course," but would offer no timeline on when it may be legislated. Canada already has an array of existing organisations that promote democracy abroad. In 2005, the then-Liberal government established the Democracy Council, which is an informal forum of Canadian organisations actively involved in democracy promotion who meet biannually. Once in power, the Conservatives kept the Democracy Council in place, and accelerated Canadian collaborations with the U.S., including funding several National Endowment for Democracy (NED) related projects. Dennis Pilon, a professor of politics at the University of Victoria, says the Harper government is "taking a lot of their cues from the Americans, particularly the Republicans," and adds that they conduct a lot of their policies "by stealth". "And I think this [democracy foundation] is an example of the stealth; they think that a democracy institute will allow them to more effectively integrate their efforts with the United States, which will then allow them to gain all sorts of kudos and points with the Americans," Pilon said. Fletcher said the new foundation "will be a made in Canada agency that will complement what other countries are doing but it will be run by Canadians to explain the importance of democracy...in emerging and post-conflict countries." Recent developments also follow an extensive study on democracy promotion that was conducted by the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade in 2007. The Committee's final report declared, "The creation of a new foundation to carry out our nation's democratic development efforts is the most significant recommendation resulting from our deliberations." Two federal parties, the Bloc Quebecoise and the New Democratic Party, issued "dissenting opinions" against the report. The Bloc cautioned that "the types of measures recommended in this report may lead to political interference in the domestic affairs of another country," while the NDP warned, "'Democracy' promotion can be, and has frequently undermined indigenous democratic processes around the world, when abused for the partisan foreign policy purposes of an external state." Fletcher told IPS that the dissenting opinions are "just not valid. This will be an arms-length agency to help countries develop democracy, and we know that democracy is the best way to empower people." In a statement e-mailed to IPS, the NDP's foreign affairs critic, Paul Dewar, said "It's rather ironic for the government to be pitching the creation of a democratic development organization at a time that our parliament has been shut down by the prime minister." Instead of returning to session as scheduled on Jan. 25, Harper suspended parliament until Mar. 3, following the conclusion of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games. Critics say he did so to suppress debate over allegations that Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan handed detainees over to Afghan security forces who, in turn, tortured them. Mark Neufeld, a professor in the Department of Political Studies at Trent University, said Canada's role as an "occupier" in Afghanistan precludes it from promoting democracy there. "You can argue the occupying and intervention legacy of Canada in Afghanistan means that it can never be a democracy promoter there. People will never trust us to be some kind of neutral purveyor of good governance along a democratic model. We've been there mainly propping up a government that's not democratic." Several U.S. experts have indicated that a Canadian democracy foundation would be welcomed. In the Standing Committee's report, former USAID consultant and advisor to the NED, Gerald Hyman, was described as stressing to committee members "that there is a role for Canada...where the U.S. carries a lot of counter-productive baggage...[Hyman] acknowledged that Canada can do things that the U.S. cannot." Robert Pee, who is completing a PhD on the NED and the use of democracy promotion as a tool of "political warfare" at the University of Birmingham, attributes such sentiments to the "tactical flexibility" that such a Canadian foundation might provide as a complement to U.S. efforts. In an e-mail to IPS, Pee explained, "Such a foundation would be able to operate more under the radar than the NED itself; thus, it seems likely that its creation would result in a division of labor between it and the NED, with the Canadian foundation working in areas that are too 'hot' for the NED to touch." Political warfare, says Pee, citing since-declassified definitions produced by Cold War U.S. policy planners "is the employment of all the means at a nation's command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives." Created in the waning days of the Cold War by President Ronald Reagan, since then the NED "continues its core mission of protecting U.S. national security interests." The Barack Obama administration has continued to provide the NED with unprecedented levels of funding. One danger for the Canadian foundation lies in the possibility that it will emulate the NED's mission. A document dating to 2006, obtained by IPS from Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs through the Access to Information Act describes the little-known Democracy Council as an "incarnation of earlier models such as NDI (National Democratic Institute) and NED in the United States." As Pee told IPS, "The issue is that the NED does not decide which groups it will support on the basis of determining which group would be best for the ordinary people of the country concerned, but on the basis of which group would best serve the strategic or economic interests of the United States." Pee offered a warning for Canadians, where "citizens will find that their taxes are being used, not only or primarily to implement their own government's 'political warfare' programmes - which would be bad enough - but largely those 'political warfare' programmes which the U.S. would like to see carried out as part of its foreign policy. Thus, Canadians will be paying to implement the foreign policy of the U.S." (END) =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Feb 11 09:54:01 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 11 Feb 2010 09:54:01 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [Video] Cynthia McKinney: "My Country Has Been Hijacked" Message-ID: <7C6D065396A24B9E95FC833E23FCFEB1@agingCHS072729> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24641.htm "My Country Has Been Hijacked" (Munich Peace Rally Speech) By Cynthia McKinney Posted February 10, 2010 Transcript: Thank you for allowing me to come from the United States and participate in this rally for peace. My country has been hijacked by a criminal cabal intent on using the hard-earned dollars of the American people for war, occupation, and empire. As a result, the national leadership of my country, both Democratic and Republican, became complicit in war crimes, torture, crimes against humanity, and crimes against the peace. As a Member of Congress from the Democratic Party, I drafted Articles of Impeachment against George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice. Later, when Democrats voted to support more war rather than take care of the needs of the people, I declared my independence from them and all national leadership; the Green Party nominated me to run for President, which I did on a platform of truth, justice, peace, and dignity. I watched as Candidate Barack Obama came here to Germany to speak. I saw tears on the faces of many in the crowd who believed that, finally, there was something worth believing in again. That America had turned a page from its evil playbook that had so outraged and disappointed the world. That good was finally about to triumph over evil. I know that beleaguered people all over the world, victims of cruel and deadly military, economic, imperial policies finally could believe in hope and change. And America could be believed in again. Everywhere I went all over the world there were pictures of Barack Obama, slogans "Yes, We Can," and the words "Hope" and "Change" plastered everywhere. And after eight years of George W. Bush, Barack Obama seemed to be the man the world was waiting for. So when the Candidate became the President, we held our breath in anticipation. That torture and rendition; spying on innocent, dissenting Americans; war and occupation; crimes against the U.S. Constitution and crimes against the peace would end and that the United States would finally join the community of nations. Sadly, one year into the Presidency of Barack Obama, that is not the case. On our front door step we have witnessed U.S. complicity in the overthrow of President Zalaya in Honduras and the hostile takeover of Haiti by 20,000 troops with guns sent in when the devastated people needed food, doctors, and heavy lifting equipment. President Obama is expanding U.S. troop presence in Colombia, threatening the people's gains in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Cuba, and Nicaragua. President Obama has drones killing innocent people in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. And Administration lawyers are trying to figure out how to legally kill U.S. citizens. You even have U.S. assassination teams on German soil! Sadly, President Obama is guilty of every item I cited in my Articles of Impeachment against President Bush. Both Tony Blair and President Obama justify war in Afghanistan by citing the tragedy of the September 11th attacks in New York and on the Pentagon. But my government has not told the truth about what really happened that day. Just like they lied to start a war against Iraq. So what are we to do? Let us work together on behalf of truth, justice, peace, and dignity. I will struggle in the U.S. and I will struggle with you: Not one more dime for war. We can't give in and we can't give up. We must take our countries back. ====================================== International Peace Conference, Keynote Address By Cynthia McKinney The most recent official report on employment states that 85,000 U.S. jobs were lost in the month of December. Everything I have read indicates that things are going to get a lot worse in the United States before they get better. Already, the United States has slipped to 7th in the world's best places to live, behind France, Australia, Switzerland, Germany, and New Zealand. The U.S. place in the world will slip more than that in the future if the brakes are not put on current trends. The United States is rapidly becoming a country even more divided: Over 31% of Puerto Ricans live in poverty, making them the poorest ethnic group in the U.S. Meanwhile the war on Latinos continues with police harassment, racial profiling, and deportations of the undocumented--for driving, if you can believe that. Approximately 166 legal cases winding their way through U.S. courts target Palestinians in the United States who were trying to help Palestine, and they are being prosecuted with new laws that would have been unthinkable a generation ago-like the Secret Evidence Act. My sister, Lynne Stewart, an activist lawyer of conscience, sits in a U.S. prison right now because she dared to represent a Muslim cleric who ran afoul of the U.S. What a message that sends to other lawyers committed to the notion that everyone at least deserves a fair trial. According to United for a Fair Economy, whose work I adore, Black unemployment is now at 14.7 percent compared to 8.7 % for whites. And in 2007, for every dollar of white wealth, a black family had just one dime. >From the sub-prime banking scam alone, because of mortgage foreclosures, Blacks and Latinos are currently experiencing the greatest loss of wealth in recent U.S. history because 53% of blacks and 47% of Latinos were saddled with sub-prime mortgages, as compared to only 26% of whites. The greedy banking class were in a feeding frenzy, feeding on black and brown hopes to become a part of the American Dream. According to a recent study, U.S. schools today are more segregated than in the 1950s. In our most diverse state, California, one-half of black and Asian students attend segregated schools, as do one fourth of Latino and Native American students. And, young black girls are experiencing unwanted sterilizations and other complications because of forced vaccinations with an experimental drug in these schools. In 1954, the Supreme Court found that segregation inherently meant "unequal." Correspondingly, schools in low-income areas are highly unequal with not even the slightest remediation of the root societal causes that strongly affect student performance. This of course feeds quite nicely into the prison-industrial complex that is a nice money-maker for those with the disposable income to invest in the private prisons of the U.S., or are lucky enough to have a business that contracts with the prisons to employ U.S. inmates for pennies an hour. Yes, the United States, imprisoning more people than any country on the planet, has become an incarceration nation, but only for certain people. Be suspected of being a Latino driving without a drivers license and you can get stopped and deported for having one tail light bulb that's out; but Presidents George Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama can order the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents all over the planet and they walk around free without the worry of even a citizen's arrest, let alone a warrant from a real, legal Tribunal. Incredibly, Whites whose fortunes were sinking in the pile of unkept political promises and debilitating U.S. national debt were proselytized to by special interest media that hatred of the "other" was OK. There was little national outrage when Pat Robertson said that Hugo Chavez should be assassinated and then, more recently, when this man of the cloth opined that Haitians suffered so much because they made a deal with the devil to throw off French slavery. Incredibly, while a record number of Blacks are seeking emergency food assistance, and people of color are losing not only their homes, but their dreams too, FOX News and CNN propagandize that it is those "others," those people of color who are responsible for the drowning of White America. And that includes President Obama who, one Southern Baptist preacher prayed to God should die. I wonder, who is his God? True to fashion, the news that is watched by most people in the United States refuses to tell the people the truth of the conditions facing too many in our country and why. However, according to Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, certain Whites also constitute part of the problem: according to her they are environmentalists and white supremacists. Interestingly, hatred spewing from the likes of special interest television hosts seems OK as long as they buy into the Republican/Democrat political paradigm and stay there. Napolitano's enemies of the state, White supremacists and environmentalists, left that conformist paradigm over two generations ago. And I believe that any of us who leave that paradigm, and begin to think for ourselves and then act politically on our own independent, critical analysis can begin to put our country on the road to real independence from the special interests that have overtaken every aspect of our governmental, legal, and political apparatus, and like a parasite, has sapped the life from our body politic. But leaving the acceptable political order puts us in the crosshairs of those whose position and power come from it. And because the United States today is a rudderless, leaderless, divided society coming apart at the seams, now is the time more than ever that we need to employ what public schools in this country stopped supplying long ago: critical thinking about where we want to stand as a community of nations and where we in the United States want to stand as a country. And this brings me to the real winners in the midst of this socio-economic collapse. Most people spend so much time looking at the losers in such a scenario, and we must care about the innocent victims that pay the ultimate price in the grand political power plays of our day. But, we must not neglect taking the time to study who it is that is actually sneaking off with the stolen merchandise. There are real winners and they are the ones whom George Bush called his base: that is, the haves and the have mores. President Obama has hastened approximately 23.7 trillion of our hard-earned dollars to them. Therefore, the real purpose of our political activity must be to thwart the wholesale theft of a nation under the guise of "Hope," "Change," and "Yes we Can." That is the only purpose our political activities must now be geared toward. It means then, that, those of us who have stepped outside of the "acceptable" political paradigm must be willing to break bread with one another and find common ground on which we can operate. My experience has been that such interactions only enhance future opportunities for positive political interactions. A careful read of the COINTELPRO papers will reveal that the biggest fear inside the government was that the interests of those who pulled the strings would get totally engulfed and swallowed up by Black people and White people coming together during that time, of the civil rights movement and beyond, and successfully pressing for a full justice agenda that encompassed both domestic AND foreign policies. If they were afraid of that then, I guarantee you they are still afraid of it, now. Secondly, the leadership of this new movement cannot be the leadership that is responsible for the death of the truth, justice, and peace movements inside the United States. Going to the same people who caused the problem by abandoning their publicly-stated convictions is not going to get us closer to the truth or peace. This means that we might have to thin our ranks, but we will at least know that those deep in the trenches with us are not sleeping with the enemy. Finally, we need a voting bloc that places peace and the budget priorities of peace and people's needs above any other special interest. This voting bloc will not support any candidate running for office from The War Party. Because it should be crystal clear to everyone who cares about peace that we can't get from here to where we want to be by doing what those who are responsible for this mess want us to do. We've got to do something different in order to take our country back and make our country better. The fact is that unless we are willing to step outside of the box of political conformity, we will continue to get what we've always gotten. Now, finally for the record, let me say that I left Congress, not because I wanted to, but because the special interests and the War Party wanted me out. What could I have possibly done to raise their ire? Well, for the twelve years that I was in Congress, I: 1. Filed articles of impeachment against George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Condoleeza Rice; 2. Voted against every Pentagon appropriation, considering it immoral to spend so much money on war when millions of our children go to bed hungry every night; 3. Defied Congressional Democratic Party leaders, by holding a Congressional Hearing exploring the role of race and class in the government's response to Hurricane Katrina and introduced legislation to punish law enforcement that prevented the mostly Black citizens fleeing the floodwaters from crossing over from New Orleans into its mostly White suburbs; 4. Wrote legislation to ban the importation of coltan from the Democratic Republic of Congo into the United States because of the horrific human rights abuses committed during its mining; 5. Was the first Member of Congress to ask the Bush Administration of the September 11, 2001 attack on the United States, what did it know and when did it know it; and I 6. Led the Congressional Black Caucus Task Force at the 2001 World Conference Against Racism, defying President Bush's boycott. Currently, I am an endorser of the Brussels Tribunal that cooperated in the filing of a lawsuit in Spain against all the U.S. Presidents responsible for war crimes in Iraq. I participate in the Malaysia Peace Organization's efforts to criminalize war, establish a War Crimes Tribunal, and hold leaders accountable for their wars. And in December of 2008, I tried to take humanitarian supplies to the people of Gaza after the start of Operation Cast Lead and the Israeli military rammed and destroyed our boat. In June 2009, I tried to take crayons to the children of Gaza and the Israelis hijacked our boat, kidnapped us, took us to Israel, where I spent seven days in an Israeli prison. I do with my body what I did with my Congressional office. I left Washington because the pro-Israel Lobby was able to utilize all of its leverage inside both the Democratic and Republican parties target and oust me. They ousted me because I dared to believe that all human beings, including Palestinians, have human rights. In 2007, at a peace rally in front of the Pentagon, I did what I am now asking one million U.S. voters to do: I declared my independence from a national leadership that had caused my country to become complicit in war crimes, torture, crimes against humanity, and crimes against the peace. I joined the Green Party and in 2008, ran for President of the United States. I traveled the length and breadth of my country and now I travel the world carrying a message of truth, justice, peace, and dignity. I spent approximately 10 of the 12 months in 2009 outside of the country. But, I'm being told now by my friends and supporters that it's time to come back home. That the real heavy lifting is inside our country. That if we want life to be better for the people in the refugee camps all over the world, that we've got to change the policies coming out of Washington, D.C. My very first campaign theme was "Warriors Don't Wear Medals, They Wear Scars." And I've borne my scars in public for all the world to see. And honestly, sometimes, I wonder if it's worth it. I take a look at where the world is and I say what could I possibly do to stop this. And then, I think of the people of Gaza whom I saw after Israel's Operation Cast Lead. I saw in Gaza, the indomitable spirit of humanity. Despite the pain, the murder, the killing, the destruction--I saw life. I experienced love. But we don't have to go to Gaza to gain inspiration to continue to struggle. If we just dare to look into the eyes of the homeless man looking for a warm bed, or the tired face of a mother on her way to work at 6:00 in the morning when it's still dark, if we would just dare to love the nameless human beings whose lives turn on the policies that powerful politicians choose to support or ignore, I know we can become inspired. And in the process, spark some bit of hope in the desperate and the hopeless. No one deserves to be hopeless. So, I've come a long way to be with you. And I thank you for the invitation. When we were organizing our "Emergency Anti-Afghanistan Escalation Rally" in front of the White House, one of my supporters reminded me of my own saying: "We must never give in when we are right." Peace is right and we must never give up. Thank you so much for giving me this time to share with you this evening. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Feb 11 11:51:00 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 11 Feb 2010 11:51:00 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The CPCCA: What It Means For Canadians Message-ID: <97345F94A47B474A90FB5087A6F6CA39@agingCHS072729> http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/310.php#continue The B u l l e t February 11, 2010 Socialist Project . E-Bulletin No. 310 [This talk was given as part of a public meeting titled "One Year Later...Gaza Remembered," held at the Vancouver Public Library on January 30, 2010.] The Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism: What It Means For Canadians Joanne Naiman We are here tonight primarily to hear about the effects of an illegal occupation and war on the people of Gaza, and to express our solidarity with the Palestinian people. In the anti-apartheid movement, a popular slogan was the old Wobbly saying "An injury to one is an injury to all." What I hope to show you tonight is that, indeed, the "injuries" affecting people half way around the world are about to have serious consequences for us all. Specifically, I'm going to talk about the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism (CPCCA),[1] which has been meeting in Ottawa since last fall, and is now meeting through February. "What Coalition?" you may be asking yourselves. Exactly: this entity has been almost totally out of the public eye since its inception. While many Canadians have expressed dismay about the recent prorogation of Parliament, few are aware of a committee whose main aim is, to quote one critic, "an attempt to curtail freedom of speech and academic freedom across Canada, and to possibly criminalize certain kinds of human rights discourse."[2] Committee Without Authority What, exactly, is the CPCCA? The Canadian House of Commons regularly sets up parliamentary committees to study particular subjects and make recommendations back to parliament. In the case of the CPCCA, however, this procedure was totally circumvented, and despite its name, this entity has no authority from parliament as a whole, despite being made up of 22 MPs from all four parties currently sitting in the House of Commons. The two key players in setting up the CPCCA (and who are ex-officio members of its Steering Committee) are Irwin Cotler - a lawyer, past president of the Canadian Jewish Congress, and former Liberal Justice Minister - and Jason Kenney, Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism. In March of 2009, Kenney - who has been described by Murray Dobbin as "point man for Stephen Harper on issues involving Israel" - banned British MP George Galloway from entering Canada, almost certainly because he'd just led a humanitarian relief convoy to Gaza. He also recently reallocated funding away from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA) because of its assistance to Palestinian refugees. At a recent conference in Jerusalem, Kenny boasted of his government's "zero tolerance approach to antisemitism." As examples of this he noted the following actions taken by his government: (1) the elimination of funding to the Canadian Arab Federation (whose leadership he described as anti-Semitic and apologists for terrorism); (2) ending contact with "like minded organizations" [to the Canadian Arab Federation] such as the Canadian Islamic Congress; and (3) the de-funding of KAIROS, a church-led NGO agency, which Kenney (incorrectly) described as "taking a leadership role in the [Israeli] boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign." To further quote Kenny: "The existential threat faced by Israel on a daily basis is ultimately a threat to the broader Western civilization." In other words, Kenney endorses an "us" vs "them" view of the world, a "clash of civilizations" that pits the Christian "west" against the Muslim "east." The other half of this duo, Irwin Cotler, is considered an expert on international law and human rights law. He has served on the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and its sub-Committee on Human Rights and International Development, as well as on the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. In 2000, he was appointed special advisor to the Minister of Foreign Affairs on the International Criminal Court. However, despite this background, he has a long record of supporting Israel's violations of Palestinian human rights and breaches of international law. Cotler strongly opposed the Goldstone report, and concluded, "if there had been no Hamas war crimes, there would have been no need for an Israeli response."[3] Cotler's wife, Ariela, is a native of Jerusalem and has a longstanding connection to the right-wing Likud party in Israel, and two daughters have been in the Israeli military. Cotler's views on antisemitism are clear: "Compared to most previous anti-Jewish outbreaks, this [new antisemitism] ...attacks primarily the collective Jews, the State of Israel. ...In the past, the most dangerous anti-Semites were those who wanted to make the world Judenrein, 'free of Jews.' Today, the most dangerous anti-Semites might be those who want to make the world Judenstaatrein, 'free of a Jewish state'."[4] The CPCCA emerged from the experience of a delegation of eleven MPs, led by Kenny and Cotler, at the London Conference to Combat Antisemitism in February 2009. The London Conference was itself an off-shoot of the Inter-Parliamentary Committee for Combating Antisemitism (ICCA). Working backward, the ICCA was originally co-founded in 2002 by none other than Irwin Cotler, with Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister Rabbi Michael Melchior and former Deputy prime Minister of Sweden Per Ahlmark. However, this committee apparently was thought to be too closely tied to the State of Israel to be effective, and didn't move forward. Its second incarnation - now distanced from direct Israeli involvement - met in London in February 2009, with funding from the UK government and a British charitable organization.[5] The underlying assumption and key premise of the CPCCA, even prior to hearing any witnesses (in line with both the ICCA & the London Conference), is clear from its website: that we are witnessing an expansion of antisemitism both in Canada and internationally, and its form is being referred to as the "new antisemitism."[6] All three of these groups express an urgent need to combat this new antisemitism, especially in the media and in academia. Is antisemitism in fact growing in Canada? I am a sociologist, and in the submission I made to the CPCCA in the summer of 2009, I made clear that all the traditional data used to assess the level of prejudice and discrimination toward groups - such as income, discrimination in hiring and housing, educational level, hate crimes etc... - do not indicate that this is the case. Does antisemitism in all its odious forms exist in Canada? Certainly. Is it expanding and intensifying? No. Nonetheless, and without any supportive evidence, the CPCCA website states that "the extent and severity of antisemitism is widely regarded as at its worst level since the end of the second World War" and "recorded incidents of antisemitism have been on the rise both locally and globally." Who is Funding the CPCCA? The CPCCA claims independence from the government of Canada, NGOs, and Jewish community organizations, and that it "will voluntarily disclose all sources of funding."[7] However, no one to date has been able to get any information on their funding sources. And this is no small organization: listed on the website are seventy individuals who have been or will be brought to Ottawa to appear as "witnesses" at their inquiry. The CPCCA received around 150 written submissions last summer. The hearings have largely been attempts to confirm the positions the CPCCA had from the outset. Many submissions disputed the CPCCA's premises of a "new antisemitism," and pointed out both the deficiencies and the dangers of such an argument. This hasn't stopped Panel Chair Mario Silva from saying: "The breadth and depth of experience these witnesses have will do a lot to augment our understanding of the present situation and will thoroughly inform our coming recommendations."[8] To give you a true sense of the Kafka-esque nature of this committee, one of the first speakers to be called was Irwin Cotler, while Jason Kenney is one of the last. Clearly, this Coalition knew where it was headed from the day it sent out its first call for submissions. The rest has been pure window dressing. It's not hard to see that if one accepts Cotler's premise that Israel is what he calls "the collective Jew," then any criticism of the state of Israel is, de facto, anti-Semitic. There can be little doubt, therefore, that this Coalition will soon be putting forward recommendations to the government that certain criticisms of the State of Israel within Canadian universities and in the media should be defined as a form of antisemitism, and therefore an incitement to hatred. Thus, in the strange Alice-in-Wonderland world we're now in, those who stand up and charge Israel (correctly) with gross violations of both the Geneva Conventions and of international humanitarian law may soon find themselves charged under section 319 of the Canadian Criminal Code and section 13(1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act, or else silenced by judicial warrants of seizure issued under section 320 of the Criminal Code.[9] We can assume that this would include calls for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), as well as using the term "apartheid" to describe the actions of the Israeli state. Given Jason Kenney's recent comments in Israel, it is clear that the CPCCA anticipates a very attentive and rapid response from the Canadian government. In his December 16 speech in Jerusalem mentioned earlier, he noted the presence in the audience of Irwin Cotler, as well as Scott Reid and Mario Silva, the Co-Chairs of the CPCCA, and concluded by saying "that we can offer some useful reference points and best practices to share with the rest of the world and parliamentarians who share our concern about the new antisemitism."[10] Put plainly, the CPCCA is a front for what is effectively a done deal, with four federal parties as willing participants. It is also clear that Canada is to be a testing ground for what is being planned for other international jurisdictions. New McCarthyism Without a doubt, the main purpose of this redefinition of antisemitism is to create a serious chill on university campuses and in the media. Teachers will be afraid to discuss Israeli policies in their classrooms, while the various Israeli Apartheid Weeks will be prohibited by administrations on campuses across the country for fear of being charged with inciting hate crimes. Likewise, articles critical of Israeli government policies or actions (as rare as they are) will likely disappear from the print and electronic media. It is possible that websites could be shut down. Organizations critical of Israel will be unable to rent public venues for meetings. Already, I've heard that some Palestinian support groups fear they may be charged under hate laws. In other words, what we will be seeing - in fact are already seeing - is a new form of McCarthyism. For me, as a Jew, one of the worst ironies here is that - should such legislation actually come to pass, as seems likely - antisemitism will actually increase. As Bahija Reghai has noted, by equating Jews with Israel and Zionism, the CPCCA reinforces "the reductionist and false notion that all Jews are responsible for the acts of the state of Israel."[11] It is worth noting that this past Wednesday (January 27), speaking at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referred to himself as "leader of the Jewish people."[12] I don't think it's too extreme to say that if the proposals likely to come out of the CPCCA become law, meetings such as this one may well be very risky undertakings in the future. I should also point out that, if this legislation comes into being, we will be in the bizarre situation of being able, in Canada, to stand up and roundly criticize our own government (for, say, something like prorogation of parliament or poor treatment of Afghani prisoners) in a way that we won't be able to criticize a foreign government. Something is terribly wrong with this picture. What to Do So, here's what can you do: first, start by taking a look at the CPCCA website (cpcca.ca), so you can see for yourself where this Coalition is headed. We are also asking all of you here tonight to write letters to your MPs and party leaders, which you can easily do via e-mail, expressing opposition to the participation of their party in the CPCCA - two Vancouver MPs, Joyce Murray and Hedy Fry actually sit on this committee, so if you're in their riding it's particularly important that you write them. However, since all four parties in the House of Commons currently sit on this body, none of them should be immune from our criticism. In your letter, be sure to ask for information regarding CPCCA funding. (Surely MPs should know who's funding a committee they're sitting on!) If you are connected to one of the federal parties as a volunteer or donor, or if you can speak on behalf of an organization, your letter would be particularly important. Also, check out the website of the Seriously Free Speech Committee (seriouslyfreespeech.wordpress.com) and keep up to date on this issue. And help us spread the word about the secretive and dangerous CPCCA by inviting someone to speak to your group. As I noted at the outset, the term "solidarity" is not just about pity and charitable handouts. What is happening to the Palestinian people today will likely have serious consequences for us here in Canada tomorrow. However, history has shown that the degree to which governments - all governments - take away peoples' democratic rights and freedoms to serve their own ends always depends on the degree to which we allow them to get away with it. Together, let's insure that the current government doesn't take away our right to free speech. . Joanne Naiman is formerly Professor of Sociology at Ryerson University now living in Vancouver. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Footnotes 1. This paper will employ the spelling of the term "antisemitism" that is used by the CPCCA. 2. Michael Keefer, Antisemitism Real and Imagined: Responses to the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism. Waterloo, ON: The Canadian Charger, forthcoming in February 2010. Much of the general information on the CPCCA, and its legal implications, are taken from the introductory chapter. 3. Irwin Cotler, "The Goldstone Mission - Tainted to the Core (II)," Jerusalem Post (18 August 2009), available online at Understanding the Goldstone Report. 4. Irwin Cotler, "The global reawakening of antisemitism." (Keynote address at the founding conference of the Inter-parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism). National Post on-line, February 21, 2009. 5. Information regarding Cotler's role in the ICCA and the London conference is from Keefer, op. cit. 6. www.cpcca.ca 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Keefer, op. cit. 10. Ibid. 11. "Confusing politics and prejudice in the fight against antisemitism," rabble January 6, 2010. 12. Globe and Mail, Jan 28, 2010, p. A13. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Feb 11 18:22:33 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 11 Feb 2010 18:22:33 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] No We Can't Message-ID: <6E578BC4ECBB40F2ADD73556151AE142@agingCHS072729> No We Can't http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/31961846/no_we_cant Obama had millions of followers eager to fight for his agenda. But the president muzzled them - and he's paying the price TIM DICKINSON Feb 02, 2010 "Staff are replaceable. A mass of dedicated volunteers is not." ? David Plouffe -- As the polls were closing in Massachusetts on the evening of January 19th, turning Ted Kennedy's Senate seat over to the Republicans for the first time in half a century, David Plouffe was busy reminiscing about the glory days. The president's former campaign manager was nowhere to be found at the sprawling war room of Organizing for America, the formidable grass-roots army he had forged during the 2008 campaign. Instead, Plouffe ? who serves as a "supersenior adviser" to OFA and its only direct conduit to Obama ? was across town at a forum hosted by the Progressive Book Club, where he pimped his memoir, The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory. It was a bitterly ironic way to mark the end of the president's first year in office. Together with David Axelrod, Plouffe was the brains of Obama's campaign, the man who transformed a shoestring organization into a high-tech juggernaut. After the 2008 election, Plouffe had taken OFA, previously known as Obama for America, and moved its entire operation into the Democratic National Committee. There, he argued, the people-powered revolution that Obama had created could serve as a permanent field campaign for the Democratic Party, capable of mobilizing millions of Americans to support the president's ambitious agenda. Fresh off the campaign, the group boasted 13 million e-mail supporters, 4 million donors, 2.5 million activists connected through the My.BarackObama social network and a phenomenal $18 million left in the bank. Even Republican strategists were staggered. "This would be the greatest political organization ever put together, if it works," said Ed Rollins, who was to Ronald Reagan what Plouffe is to Obama. "No one's ever had these kinds of resources." Yet rather than heeding the lessons of Obama's historic victory, Plouffe and OFA permitted Martha Coakley to fumble away Kennedy's seat ? destroying the 60-vote supermajority the Democrats need to pass major legislation. In December and early January, when it should have been gearing up the patented Obama turnout machine ? targeting voters on college campuses, trumpeting the chance to make history by electing Massachusetts' first female senator ? OFA was asking local activists to make phone calls to other states to shore up support for health care reform. "Our Massachusetts volunteers were calling into Pennsylvania or Ohio to recruit volunteers in support of the president's agenda," admits OFA director Mitch Stewart. It wasn't until 10 days before the election, after OFA finally woke up to Coakley's cratering poll numbers, that the group sent out an urgent appeal to members, asking them to help turn out Massachusetts voters from phone banks across the country. But after having been sidelined by the White House for most of its first year, OFA discovered that most of its 13 million supporters had tuned out. Only 45,000 members responded to the last-minute call to arms. In the final week, volunteers organized 1,000 phone banks and placed more than 2.3 million calls to Massachusetts. OFA also scrambled to place 50 staffers in the state to gin up a door-knocking operation. But it was too late: In a race decided by 110,000 votes, 850,000 of those who voted for Obama in Massachusetts failed to turn out for Coakley. "The relationship-building process we did with Obama for America," concedes Stewart, "is not something you can manufacture in three weeks." The failure to reignite Obama's once indomitable field operation has left many of the president's former campaign staff shaking their heads. "How in the hell did we let that happen in Massachusetts?" asks Temo Figueroa, who served as Obama's national field director and is now a political consultant in Texas. "How in the hell did the White House not get Organizing for America seriously engaged in this until there was a week and a half to go?" As a candidate swept into office by a grass-roots revolution of his own creation, Obama was poised to reinvent Washington politics, just as he had reinvented the modern political campaign. Obama and his team hadn't simply collected millions of e-mail addresses, they had networked activists, online and off ? often down to the street level. By the end of the campaign, Obama's top foot soldiers were more than volunteers. They were seasoned organizers, habituated to the hard work of reaching out to neighbors and communicating Obama's vision for change. As president, Obama promised to use technology to open up the halls of power and keep the American people involved. "If you want to know how I'll govern," he said, "just look at our campaign." His activists wouldn't just be cheerleaders; they would be partners in delivering on his mandate, serving as the most fearsome whip Washington had ever seen. "At the end of the campaign, we entered into an implied contract with Obama," says Marta Evry, who served as a regional field organizer in California for the campaign. "He was going to fight for change, and we were going to fight with him." The problems started before Obama was even elected. While his top advisers worked for months to carefully plot out a transition to governing, their plan to institutionalize its campaign apparatus was as ill-considered as George Bush's invasion of Iraq. "There was absolutely no transition planning," says Micah Sifry, the co-founder of techPresident, a watchdog group that just published a special report on OFA's first year. In what Sifry decries as a case of "criminal political negligence," Obama's grass-roots network effectively went dark for two months after Election Day, failing to engage activists eager for their new marching orders. "The movement moment," he says, "was lost." The blame, insiders say, rests squarely with Plouffe. "That was totally Plouffe's thing," a top member of the president's inner circle recalls of the transition planning. "It really was David." By that point, at the end of the campaign, Plouffe had his eyes on the exit. He was gaunt, exhausted. His wife was about to give birth to their second child. He needed a break. "There was no question of my joining the administration," he recounts in his memoir. So Plouffe, in a truly bizarre call, decided to incorporate Obama for America as part of the Democratic National Committee. The move meant that the machinery of an insurgent candidate, one who had vowed to upend the Washington establishment, would now become part of that establishment, subject to the entrenched, partisan interests of the Democratic Party. It made about as much sense as moving Greenpeace into the headquarters of ExxonMobil. Steve Hildebrand, Obama's deputy campaign manager, tried to dissuade Plouffe. "The DNC is a political entity," he says. "Senators who you are going to need to put significant pressure on to deliver change ? like Ben Nelson of Nebraska, who was opposed to health care reform ? are voting members of the DNC. It limited how aggressive you could be." Hildebrand pushed Plouffe to make "Obama 2.0" an independent nonprofit, similar to FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, the right-wing instigators of the Tea Party uprising. Free from the party apparatus, Hildebrand argued, the group could raise unlimited funds and "put enough pressure on conservative Democrats to keep them in line." But Plouffe was resolute. Obama was troubled by the prospect of big-dollar donors driving an independent nonprofit, and the DNC offered a ready infrastructure and fewer legal hurdles. "The president is a Democrat," says Stewart, a veteran of Obama's victory in Iowa who took over from Plouffe as OFA's director. "It would be very hard to explain why Obama's grass-roots field team is not housed with his party." Plouffe checked out to write his memoir ? but as a senior adviser, he continued to call many of the shots. In a muddy chain of command, Stewart officially reports to the head of the DNC, but in practice he takes many of his cues from Plouffe. "He has an incredible input on what we do and don't do," says Stewart. The decision to shunt Organizing for America into the DNC had far-reaching consequences for the president's first year in office. For starters, it destroyed his hard-earned image as a new kind of politician, undercutting the post-partisan aura that Obama enjoyed after the election. "There were a lot of independents, and maybe even some Republicans, on his list of 13 million people," says Joe Trippi, who launched the digital age of politics as the campaign manager for Howard Dean in 2004. "They suddenly had to ask themselves, 'Do I really want to help build the Democratic Party?'" In addition, with Plouffe providing less input in his inner circle, Obama began to pursue a more traditional, backroom approach to enacting his agenda. Rather than using OFA to engage millions of voters to turn up the heat on Congress, the president yoked his political fortunes to the unabashedly transactional style of politics advocated by his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. Health care reform ? the centerpiece of his agenda ? was no longer about mobilizing supporters to convince their friends, families and neighbors in all 50 states. It was about convincing 60 senators in Washington. It became about deals. "There were two ways for Barack Obama to twist arms on Capitol Hill," says Trippi. "You can get the best arm-bender in town to be your chief of staff ? and I don't think there'd be many people who would deny that Rahm is a pretty good pick. Or the American people can be your arm-bender. What I don't understand is why the White House looked at it as an either/or proposition. You could have had both." The shift in tactics left OFA sitting on the sidelines. A far cry from the audacious movement that rose to the challenge of electing America's first black president, the group has performed like a flaccid, second-rate MoveOn, a weak counterweight to the mass protests and energetic street antics of the Tea Baggers. Rather than turning out thousands of voters at rallies for the "public option" in health care reform, the White House instructed OFA to adopt a toothless, almost invisible approach: asking followers to sign a generic "statement of support." In July, when OFA ran ads asking voters to call their senators and urge them to vote for health care reform, the effort was quickly slapped down by party leaders. "It's a waste of money to have Democrats running ads against Democrats," fumed Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Not only did the White House fail to crank up its own campaign machinery on behalf of health care, it also worked to silence other liberal groups. In a little-publicized effort, top administration officials met each week at the Capital Hilton with members of a coalition called the Common Purpose Project, which included leading activist groups like Change to Win, Rock the Vote and MoveOn. In August, when members of the coalition planned to run ads targeting conservative Democrats who opposed health care reform, Rahm Emanuel showed up in person to put a stop to the campaign. According to several participants, Emanuel yelled at the assembled activists, calling them "fucking retards" and telling them he wasn't going to let them derail his legislative winning streak. "We're 13-0 going into health care!" he screamed. "We're not going to be 13-1!" Emanuel also locked down OFA: When liberal activists approached the group about targeting conservative Democrats, they were told, "We won't give you call lists. We can't go after Democrats ? we're part of the DNC." It was exactly the danger that Hildebrand had warned about when Plouffe made OFA part of the party apparatus. In the end, the activists scrapped the organizing effort, leaving the president without a left flank in the health care debate. "Instead of channeling the energy of the base, they've been squashing it," says Markos Moulitsas, founder of the influential online forum Daily Kos. "When special interests are represented by people like Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson, you've got to go after those people. Instead, you had OFA railing against Republican obstructionists, when the Republicans were irrelevant to the debate." Given Emanuel's background as a legislative insider, it's not surprising that the White House shelved its activist base. "They don't give a crap about this e-mail list and don't think it's a very useful thing," a well-sourced former campaign staffer told tech-President. "They want to do stuff the delicate way ? the horse-trading, backroom talks, one-to-one lobbying." The feeling inside the White House, the ex-staffer said, is that "unleashing a massive grass-roots army is only going to backfire on us." What backfired, it turns out, was ceding populist outrage on health care to the far right. Because OFA failed to mobilize the American people to confront the insurance companies, it allowed industry-funded Republicans, like former House majority leader Dick Armey, to foment a revolt by the Tea Partiers, whose anger dominated the news. Stewart, the director of OFA, says the failure to anticipate last summer's town-hall ragefest was his. "Organizing for America did not properly plan for that first week of August," he says. "That was an error on my part." OFA scrambled to rally its troops, generating more than 300,000 calls to Congress on a single day. But the belated effort typified the group's first year. "It's always reactive and half-hearted," says Moulitsas. "The movement was built on the concept of big change ? but they haven't gone after the things you need to do to enact change." Indeed, OFA's own numbers reveal a sharp drop-off in activist participation: All told, only 2.5 million of its 13 million followers took part in its health care campaign last year ? and that's counting people who did nothing but sign the group's "statement of support." "It didn't work ? with an exclamation point at the end!" says Rollins, the former Reagan strategist. "They didn't keep the organization alive. They thought it was out there to use whenever they wanted to use it. But with constituents who feel like they've been part of a revolution ? as ours did in '80 and '81 ? you've got to feed them. You've got to make sure that they feel important." Instead, says Rollins, OFA "e-mailed them to death, but without any real steps to make them feel a part of the process, like they felt a part of the campaign." In the wake of Coakley's loss, OFA has been silent on the health care front. "There hasn't been a single directive from OFA since Election Day in Massachusetts," observes Evry, the former campaign coordinator. "No 'Let's get those e-mails out there.' No 'Let's phone-bank.' No 'Let's target this politician.' Nothing." The failure to secure a bill through Emanuel's fuck-the-activists dealmaking has created a double whammy heading into this fall's midterm elections: no legislative victory on health care, coupled with widespread disillusionment among the party's base. Acknowledging that it was blindsided in Massachusetts, the president has summoned Plouffe back to the White House to oversee campaign efforts. The move is an implicit admission that Plouffe's intermittent engagement was part of the problem. "They thought this was the Harry Potter school of organizing," says one insider. "Just wave your wand. But this shit isn't easy." The good news is, OFA's last-minute blitz in Massachusetts underscored what it's still capable of. In just 10 days, the group generated more than twice as many calls on Coakley's behalf as they did in support of health care last year ? an effort credited with helping to cut Republican Scott Brown's final margin of victory in half. Yet asked if the lesson from Massachusetts is that OFA should recommit itself to being a Democratic turnout machine this fall, Stewart is noncommittal. "We're still figuring it out," he says. Privately, some party leaders complain that OFA isn't doing enough to campaign for vulnerable Democrats. The only true accomplishment from OFA's first year, they say, is the work it's done to build a national infrastructure for the president's 2012 re-election campaign. To reproduce the organizational structure developed by Obama for America in 2008, OFA has quietly deployed paid staff to all 50 states, building a network from state directors all the way down to a corps of supervolunteers, trained in organizing, who recruit an army of neighborhood team leaders. "There's a skeleton of a re-election campaign already set up ? beyond a skeleton," says Figueroa, the campaign's former field director. "There's already meat to the bone in every state in the union. Three years away from the next election, that army is already being continually fed. If you're Barack Obama and his political operation, revving the engine, how is that not a good thing?" The failures of the past year, however, have left a strong sense of betrayal among many who once were Obama's fiercest advocates. "After all the sweat and tears of the campaign," says the creator of a popular pro-Obama website, "we were owed the opportunity to fight for something." Adds another, "We thought we had earned an ownership stake in the future of our country through this campaign, but that ownership stake has been revoked." Had Obama let his activists lead the charge and gone to the mat for health care reform, would the outcome have been any different? "I can't say that we would have health care reform," says Moulitsas. "But people wouldn't be so demoralized. We'd have an engaged base still willing to fight for that change. And I tell you what: We would not have lost Ted Kennedy's seat." =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Feb 11 18:27:34 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 11 Feb 2010 18:27:34 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Obama pleads for Republican support at White House meeting Message-ID: <6AEC4B5843C344A38DB83168A35AC892@agingCHS072729> Obama pleads for Republican support at White House meeting http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/feb2010/obam-f11.shtml By Tom Eley 11 February 2010 In a closed-door White House meeting with top Congressional leadership held Tuesday, President Obama emphasized the right-wing character of his effort to drive down health care costs and other components of his domestic agenda and pleaded for Republican Party support. The contours of the discussion came to light through a White House news briefing by Obama? -- his first since last summer? -- and a joint press conference held by Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner and Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. In his briefing, Obama reiterated his plea for bipartisanship. "I'm willing to move off some of the preferences of my party in order to meet them halfway, but there's got to be some give from their side as well," Obama said. Bipartisanship cannot mean "Democrats give up everything they believe in" while supporting "the handful of things that Republicans have been advocating for," he added. Reading these lines, one who knew little of US politics could be forgiven for assuming the Democrats are a small minority party. In fact they hold a 9-seat majority in the Senate and a 39-seat majority in the House. The central issue in the White House discussions is Obama's health care legislation, which has been thrown into doubt by Republican Scott Brown's victory last month for the open Senate seat left behind by Democrat Ted Kennedy, which resulted in the Democrats' loss of their 60-seat, "filibuster-proof" majority. Brown ran as an opponent of the legislation, tapping into widespread apprehension over the measure's aim of limiting medical services in the name of "cost-cutting." He also benefited from a significant decline in the turnout of traditionally Democratic voters who have become disillusioned with the policies of the Obama administration. In his efforts to secure support from even a small number of Congressional Republicans for the legislation, Obama has jettisoned any pretense that "health care reform" will significantly expand coverage to the uninsured. The focus is now entirely on cost cutting. Any additional changes will benefit the major corporate interests in the health care industry -- ?pharmaceuticals, insurance companies, and HMOs. "Not only is it deficit neutral," Obama said of his health care legislation, "but the Congressional Budget Office, which is the bipartisan office that is the scorekeeper for how much things cost in Congress, says it is going to reduce the costs by $1 trillion." Health care reform is the "single best way to bring down our deficits," he added. "Nobody can dispute the fact that if we don't tackle surging health care costs, then we can't control our budget." Obama reiterated that he is prepared to support a Republican proposal placing new limitations on medical malpractice lawsuits, a measure that would effectively shield industry groups from the consequences of their own malfeasance, while making Democrats "uncomfortable," Obama said. The more Obama adopts an openly right-wing agenda, the more firm the Republicans become, with McConnell and Boehner now declaring that the health care bill circulating in Congress should be entirely scrapped and started over from scratch. Congressional Republicans have little motivation to negotiate. Republicans are able to use White House appeals as leverage to advance their own legislative agenda -- ?including their goal of maintaining intact President George W. Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy that are set to expire at year's end. They also sense they can capitalize on the broad popular hostility to Obama's reactionary health care agenda. There will be a televised "health care summit" between Obama and Congressional Republicans on February 25. The only points of agreement that emerged from the meeting related to initiatives where Obama has largely adopted Republican proposals. In his recent State of the Union address, Obama indicated his support for nuclear power, "clean coal," and offshore oil drilling. "Of course, he likes that," Obama said of McConnell. "That's part of the Republican agenda for energy, which I accept." But Republicans have said they will block Obama's "clean energy" proposals and cap-and-trade, which seeks to make carbon pollution a tradable commodity and new source of profit for some energy concerns. Republicans have also indicated they might support Obama's $85 billion jobs bill. In fact Obama's plan offers no money for direct job creation. Its primary feature is $35 billion in additional tax cuts for businesses, including a waiver for employer contributions to Social Security payroll taxes for firms that hire unemployed workers. The measure will likely extend jobless benefits through May 31. Included in the bill is a rider that will renew for another year the Patriot Act, which allows US spy agencies to circumvent the Bill of Rights when they claim they are investigating terrorists. "We're certainly open to it," McConnell said of the "jobs" bill. "I think there's a chance the Senate could get there with a small package." In his news briefing, Obama also asked Republicans to allow his federal nominees up-and-down votes from the Senate floor. He said he will consider using a provision that allows the president to seat nominees when Congress is in recess. Such appointments would last through 2011. Senate Republicans continue to block dozens of Obama's appointments, including his union-backed nominee for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), Craig Becker, a union attorney. The NLRB has wide latitude to rule on labor disputes and supervise union elections. On Monday, Democrats secured only 52 of the 60 votes needed to overcome a Republican filibuster against the appointment. Two Democratic Senators, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, joined with Republicans in upholding the maneuver. One Republican senator, Richard Shelby, by himself held up 70 Obama appointees until this week in a dispute over federal funding for his home state of Alabama. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Feb 11 18:34:40 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 11 Feb 2010 18:34:40 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Student detained at Pennsylvania airport for English-Arabic flashcards Message-ID: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/10/AR2010021002026.html?hpid=moreheadlines College student sues U.S. for detainment at Pennsylvania airport By Spencer S. Hsu Thursday, February 11, 2010 A Pennsylvania man sued the federal government Wednesday, alleging that he was abusively interrogated, handcuffed and detained for five hours at Philadelphia's airport in August because he carried a set of English-Arabic flashcards as part of his college language studies. Nicholas George, 22, of Montgomery County, Pa., a senior majoring in physics and Middle Eastern studies at California's Pomona College, charged that three Transportation Security Administration officers, two Philadelphia police officers and two FBI agents violated his constitutional rights to free speech and freedom from unreasonable seizure. A Justice Department spokesman in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia police had no immediate comment. Representatives of the FBI and the TSA said they would not comment on pending litigation. A federal official familiar with the matter, discussing the case on the condition of anonymity, said that TSA officers observed "anomalous" behavior by George before he entered the checkpoint. The official said his "erratic" conduct escalated upon screening and, along with other unspecified factors, that led officers to call police to investigate further. "Arresting and restraining passengers who pose no threat to flight safety and are not breaking any law not only violates people's rights, but it won't make us any safer," said Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union's National Security Project. The ACLU and its Pennsylvania chapter are representing George. The suit gives this account: George was returning to school when TSA screeners saw his flashcards. A supervisor asked him his views on the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks; whether he knew who carried them out; and what language Osama bin Laden speaks. The supervisor added: "Do you see why these cards are suspicious?" FBI agents asked George whom he met during his travels, which included a semester as an exchange student in Jordan and visits to Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Malaysia and Indonesia. Under questioning, George said he was not a terrorist, a communist, a Muslim or a member of any campus "pro-Islamic group." FBI agents told him he was not a real threat and released him. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Fri Feb 12 06:39:56 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Fri, 12 Feb 2010 06:39:56 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [Canada] "Aryan Guard" Vows New Violence Message-ID: <5412C0EDB30B418AA851F51ECD82695B@agingCHS072729> http://www.peoplesvoice.ca/Pv16ja10.html#5_ARYAN_GUARD_VOWS_NEW_VIOLENCE "ARYAN GUARD" VOWS NEW VIOLENCE (The following article is from the January 16-31, 2010 issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 133 Herkimer St., Unit 502, Hamilton, ON, L8P 2H3.) Accused pipe-bomber Kyle McKee (see our Jan. 1-15 issue) was arrested on Dec. 16 in Winnipeg, after a two-hour standoff with police at a North End home. The 24-year-old neo-nazi faces two counts of attempted murder, related to a failed attack against two of his fellow fascists last November 21 in Calgary. McKee is also charged with possession of explosives, and possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose. The incident led to the announcement that the Calgary-based Aryan Guard group had disbanded in the wake of severe internal divisions. There is speculation that the tip which led police to McKee's hide-out may have come from another disgruntled neo-nazi. But there are also indications that some of this notorious gang may be preparing to renew their criminal activities in southern Alberta. A recent statement was posted on a fascist website by a "Hans Krieger", claiming to speak for the Aryan Guard. "Krieger" says that the dissolution was made only by "a few rogue ex-council members" who no longer represent the group. "If anything," he says, "we will function far more efficiently without the bureaucratic, half-assed diplomacy of three tired old farts who have no stomach for street life." Acknowledging "some recent inconveniences," the message claims that "the bulk of the Aryan Guard is still here, and still able and willing to carry on the march of salvation." >From there, the message descends into vile, racist threats, including a pledge to treat Third World immigrants as "unwelcome, alien invaders." "Krieger" also promises that the "final days are at hand" for "those who hate the White race, be you communists, anarchists, or various other forms of deluded, hateful scum..." "Every time you seek to strike a blow against us, the blow shall be dealt back ten thousand fold," continues "Krieger." "You will crumple to your knees and expire, drown in pools of your own filthy blood, crumble away to dust and be completely forgotten by generations to come..." This bombastic message is a clear attempt to intimidate anti-racist activists, including Communist Party members Jason Devine and Bonnie Collins, who have been prominent in efforts to alert residents to the violent racist organization active in the city. Devine and Collins (and their young children) have been the target of frequent phone and email threats, and their home has been hit with a molotov cocktail, cinder blocks, and nazi graffiti. Now, "Krieger" has promised to retaliate against opponents of the Aryan Guard, essentially by murdering anti-racists in Calgary. The fact that this threat was issued while Kyle McKee is in police custody is evidence that the danger is far from eliminated. The Central Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Canada has responded with a letter to the Calgary Police Service, the RCMP, and the local, provincial and federal governments, demanding quick action to ban the Aryan Guard in whatever form it resurfaces, and to lay criminal charges against whoever posted the latest threats. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Fri Feb 12 12:29:17 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Fri, 12 Feb 2010 12:29:17 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Chris Hedges on the Zero Point of Systemic Collapse Message-ID: <7B7DE568476243B59037FDB4F58CDDA4@agingCHS072729> https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/88/chris-hedges.html Chris Hedges on the Zero Point of Systemic Collapse We stand on the cusp of one of humanity's most dangerous moments. Chris Hedges|08 Feb 2010|44 comments Aleksandr Herzen, speaking a century ago to a group of anarchists about how to overthrow the czar, reminded his listeners that it was not their job to save a dying system but to replace it: "We think we are the doctors. We are the disease." All resistance must recognize that the body politic and global capitalism are dead. We should stop wasting energy trying to reform or appeal to it. This does not mean the end of resistance, but it does mean very different forms of resistance. It means turning our energies toward building sustainable communities to weather the coming crisis, since we will be unable to survive and resist without a cooperative effort. These communities, if they retreat into a pure survivalist mode without linking themselves to the concentric circles of the wider community, the state and the planet, will become as morally and spiritually bankrupt as the corporate forces arrayed against us. All infrastructures we build, like the monasteries in the Middle Ages, should seek to keep alive the intellectual and artistic traditions that make a civil society, humanism and the common good possible. Access to parcels of agricultural land will be paramount. We will have to grasp, as the medieval monks did, that we cannot alter the larger culture around us, at least in the short term, but we may be able to retain the moral codes and culture for generations beyond ours. Resistance will be reduced to small, often imperceptible acts of defiance, as those who retained their integrity discovered in the long night of 20th-century fascism and communism. We stand on the cusp of one of the bleakest periods in human history when the bright lights of a civilization blink out and we will descend for decades, if not centuries, into barbarity. The elites have successfully convinced us that we no longer have the capacity to understand the revealed truths presented before us or to fight back against the chaos caused by economic and environmental catastrophe. As long as the mass of bewildered and frightened people, fed images that permit them to perpetually hallucinate, exist in this state of barbarism, they may periodically strike out with a blind fury against increased state repression, widespread poverty and food shortages. But they will lack the ability and self-confidence to challenge in big and small ways the structures of control. The fantasy of widespread popular revolts and mass movements breaking the hegemony of the corporate state is just that - a fantasy. My analysis comes close to the analysis of many anarchists. But there is a crucial difference. The anarchists do not understand the nature of violence. They grasp the extent of the rot in our cultural and political institutions, they know they must sever the tentacles of consumerism, but they na?vely believe that it can be countered with physical forms of resistance and acts of violence. There are debates within the anarchist movement - such as those on the destruction of property - but once you start using plastic explosives, innocent people get killed. And when anarchic violence begins to disrupt the mechanisms of governance, the power elite will use these acts, however minor, as an excuse to employ disproportionate and ruthless amounts of force against real and suspected agitators, only fueling the rage of the dispossessed. I am not a pacifist. I know there are times, and even concede that this may eventually be one of them, when human beings are forced to respond to mounting repression with violence. I was in Sarajevo during the war in Bosnia. We knew precisely what the Serbian forces ringing the city would do to us if they broke through the defenses and trench system around the besieged city. We had the examples of the Drina Valley or the city of Vukovar, where about a third of the Muslim inhabitants had been killed and the rest herded into refugee or displacement camps. There are times when the only choice left is to pick up a weapon to defend your family, neighborhood and city. But those who proved most adept at defending Sarajevo invariably came from the criminal class. When they were not shooting at Serbian soldiers they were looting the apartments of ethnic Serbs in Sarajevo and often executing them, as well as terrorizing their fellow Muslims. When you ingest the poison of violence, even in a just cause, it corrupts, deforms and perverts you. Violence is a drug, indeed it is the most potent narcotic known to humankind. Those most addicted to violence are those who have access to weapons and a penchant for force. And these killers rise to the surface of any armed movement and contaminate it with the intoxicating and seductive power that comes with the ability to destroy. I have seen it in war after war. When you go down that road you end up pitting your monsters against their monsters. And the sensitive, the humane and the gentle, those who have a propensity to nurture and protect life, are marginalized and often killed. The romantic vision of war and violence is as prevalent among anarchists and the hard left as it is in the mainstream culture. Those who resist with force will not defeat the corporate state or sustain the cultural values that must be sustained if we are to have a future worth living. From my many years as a war correspondent in El Salvador, Guatemala, Gaza and Bosnia, I have seen that armed resistance movements are always mutations of the violence that spawned them. I am not na?ve enough to think I could have avoided these armed movements had I been a landless Salvadoran or Guatemalan peasant, a Palestinian in Gaza or a Muslim in Sarajevo, but this violent response to repression is and always will be tragic. It must be avoided, although not at the expense of our own survival. Democracy, a system ideally designed to challenge the status quo, has been corrupted and tamed to slavishly serve the status quo. We have undergone, as John Ralston Saul writes, a coup d'?tat in slow motion. And the coup is over. They won. We lost. The abject failure of activists to push corporate, industrialized states toward serious environmental reform, to thwart imperial adventurism or to build a humane policy toward the masses of the world's poor stems from an inability to recognize the new realities of power. The paradigm of power has irrevocably altered and so must the paradigm of resistance alter. Too many resistance movements continue to buy into the facade of electoral politics, parliaments, constitutions, bills of rights, lobbying and the appearance of a rational economy. The levers of power have become so contaminated that the needs and voices of citizens have become irrelevant. The election of Barack Obama was yet another triumph of propaganda over substance and a skillful manipulation and betrayal of the public by the mass media. We mistook style and ethnicity - an advertising tactic pioneered by the United Colors of Benetton and Calvin Klein - for progressive politics and genuine change. We confused how we were made to feel with knowledge. But the goal, as with all brands, was to make passive consumers mistake a brand for an experience. Obama, now a global celebrity, is a brand. He had almost no experience besides two years in the senate, lacked any moral core and was sold as all things to all people. The Obama campaign was named Advertising Age's marketer of the year for 2008 and edged out runners-up Apple and Zappos.com. Take it from the professionals. Brand Obama is a marketer's dream. President Obama does one thing and Brand Obama gets you to believe another. This is the essence of successful advertising. You buy or do what the advertisers want because of how they can make you feel. We live in a culture characterized by what Benjamin DeMott called "junk politics." Junk politics does not demand justice or the reparation of rights. It always personalizes issues rather than clarifying them. It eschews real debate for manufactured scandals, celebrity gossip and spectacles. It trumpets eternal optimism, endlessly praises our moral strength and character, and communicates in a feel-your-pain language. The result of junk politics is that nothing changes, "meaning zero interruption in the processes and practices that strengthen existing, interlocking systems of socioeconomic advantage." The cultural belief that we can make things happen by thinking, by visualizing, by wanting them, by tapping into our inner strength or by understanding that we are truly exceptional is magical thinking. We can always make more money, meet new quotas, consume more products and advance our career if we have enough faith. This magical thinking, preached to us across the political spectrum by Oprah, sports celebrities, Hollywood, self-help gurus and Christian demagogues, is largely responsible for our economic and environmental collapse, since any Cassandra who saw it coming was dismissed as "negative." This belief, which allows men and women to behave and act like little children, discredits legitimate concerns and anxieties. It exacerbates despair and passivity. It fosters a state of self-delusion. The purpose, structure and goals of the corporate state are never seriously questioned. To question, to engage in criticism of the corporate collective, is to be obstructive and negative. And it has perverted the way we view ourselves, our nation and the natural world. The new paradigm of power, coupled with its bizarre ideology of limitless progress and impossible happiness, has turned whole nations, including the United States, into monsters. We can march in Copenhagen. We can join Bill McKibben's worldwide day of climate protests. We can compost in our backyards and hang our laundry out to dry. We can write letters to our elected officials and vote for Barack Obama, but the power elite is impervious to the charade of democratic participation. Power is in the hands of moral and intellectual trolls who are ruthlessly creating a system of neo-feudalism and killing the ecosystem that sustains the human species. And appealing to their better nature, or seeking to influence the internal levers of power, will no longer work. We will not, especially in the United States, avoid our G?tterd?mmerung. Obama, like Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the other heads of the industrialized nations, has proven as craven a tool of the corporate state as George W. Bush. Our democratic system has been transformed into what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin labels inverted totalitarianism. Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism, a free press, parliamentary systems and constitutions while manipulating and corrupting internal levers to subvert and thwart democratic institutions. Political candidates are elected in popular votes by citizens but are ruled by armies of corporate lobbyists in Washington, Ottawa or other state capitals who author the legislation and get the legislators to pass it. A corporate media controls nearly everything we read, watch or hear and imposes a bland uniformity of opinion. Mass culture, owned and disseminated by corporations, diverts us with trivia, spectacles and celebrity gossip. In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi fascism or Soviet communism, economics was subordinate to politics. "Under inverted totalitarianism the reverse is true," Wolin writes. "Economics dominates politics - and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness." Inverted totalitarianism wields total power without resorting to cruder forms of control such as gulags, concentration camps or mass terror. It harnesses science and technology for its dark ends. It enforces ideological uniformity by using mass communication systems to instill profligate consumption as an inner compulsion and to substitute our illusions of ourselves for reality. It does not forcibly suppress dissidents, as long as those dissidents remain ineffectual. And as it diverts us it dismantles manufacturing bases, devastates communities, unleashes waves of human misery and ships jobs to countries where fascists and communists know how to keep workers in line. It does all this while waving the flag and mouthing patriotic slogans. "The United States has become the showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed," Wolin writes. The practice and psychology of advertising, the rule of "market forces" in many arenas other than markets, the continuous technological advances that encourage elaborate fantasies (computer games, virtual avatars, space travel), the saturation by mass media and propaganda of every household and the takeover of the universities have rendered most of us hostages. The rot of imperialism, which is always incompatible with democracy, has seen the military and arms manufacturers monopolize $1 trillion a year in defense-related spending in the United States even as the nation faces economic collapse. Imperialism always militarizes domestic politics. And this militarization, as Wolin notes, combines with the cultural fantasies of hero worship and tales of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through surgery, action measured in nanoseconds and a dream-laden culture of ever-expanding control and possibility to sever huge segments of the population from reality. Those who control the images control us. And while we have been entranced by the celluloid shadows on the walls of Plato's cave, these corporate forces, extolling the benefits of privatization, have effectively dismantled the institutions of social democracy (Social Security, unions, welfare, public health services and public housing) and rolled back the social and political ideals of the New Deal. The proponents of globalization and unregulated capitalism do not waste time analyzing other ideologies. They have an ideology, or rather a plan of action that is defended by an ideology, and slavishly follow it. We on the left have dozens of analyses of competing ideologies without any coherent plan of our own. This has left us floundering while corporate forces ruthlessly dismantle civil society. We are living through one of civilization's great seismic reversals. The ideology of globalization, like all "inevitable" utopian visions, is being exposed as a fraud. The power elite, perplexed and confused, clings to the disastrous principles of globalization and its outdated language to mask the looming political and economic vacuum. The absurd idea that the marketplace alone should determine economic and political constructs led industrial nations to sacrifice other areas of human importance - from working conditions, to taxation, to child labor, to hunger, to health and pollution - on the altar of free trade. It left the world's poor worse off and the United States with the largest deficits - which can never be repaid - in human history. The massive bailouts, stimulus packages, giveaways and short-term debt, along with imperial wars we can no longer afford, will leave the United States struggling to finance nearly $5 trillion in debt this year. This will require Washington to auction off about $96 billion in debt a week. Once China and the oil-rich states walk away from our debt, which one day has to happen, the Federal Reserve will become the buyer of last resort. The Fed has printed perhaps as much as two trillion new dollars in the last two years, and buying this much new debt will see it, in effect, print trillions more. This is when inflation, and most likely hyperinflation, will turn the dollar into junk. And at that point the entire system breaks down. All traditional standards and beliefs are shattered in a severe economic crisis. The moral order is turned upside down. The honest and industrious are wiped out while the gangsters, profiteers and speculators walk away with millions. The elite will retreat, as Naomi Klein has written in The Shock Doctrine, into gated communities where they will have access to services, food, amenities and security denied to the rest of us. We will begin a period in human history when there will be only masters and serfs. The corporate forces, which will seek to make an alliance with the radical Christian right and other extremists, will use fear, chaos, the rage at the ruling elites and the specter of left-wing dissent and terrorism to impose draconian controls to ruthlessly extinguish opposition movements. And while they do it, they will be waving the American flag, chanting patriotic slogans, promising law and order and clutching the Christian cross. Totalitarianism, George Orwell pointed out, is not so much an age of faith but an age of schizophrenia. "A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial," Orwell wrote. "That is when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud." Our elites have used fraud. Force is all they have left. Our mediocre and bankrupt elite is desperately trying to save a system that cannot be saved. More importantly, they are trying to save themselves. All attempts to work within this decayed system and this class of power brokers will prove useless. And resistance must respond to the harsh new reality of a global, capitalist order that will cling to power through ever-mounting forms of brutal and overt repression. Once credit dries up for the average citizen, once massive joblessness creates a permanent and enraged underclass and the cheap manufactured goods that are the opiates of our commodity culture vanish, we will probably evolve into a system that more closely resembles classical totalitarianism. Cruder, more violent forms of repression will have to be employed as the softer mechanisms of control favored by inverted totalitarianism break down. It is not accidental that the economic crisis will converge with the environmental crisis. In his book The Great Transformation (1944), Karl Polanyi laid out the devastating consequences - the depressions, wars and totalitarianism - that grow out of a so-called self-regulated free market. He grasped that "fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function." He warned that a financial system always devolves, without heavy government control, into a Mafia capitalism - and a Mafia political system - which is a good description of our financial and political structure. A self-regulating market, Polanyi wrote, turns human beings and the natural environment into commodities, a situation that ensures the destruction of both society and the natural environment. The free market's assumption that nature and human beings are objects whose worth is determined by the market allows each to be exploited for profit until exhaustion or collapse. A society that no longer recognizes that nature and human life have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, commits collective suicide. Such societies cannibalize themselves until they die. This is what we are undergoing. If we build self-contained structures, ones that do as little harm as possible to the environment, we can weather the coming collapse. This task will be accomplished through the existence of small, physical enclaves that have access to sustainable agriculture, are able to sever themselves as much as possible from commercial culture and can be largely self-sufficient. These communities will have to build walls against electronic propaganda and fear that will be pumped out over the airwaves. Canada will probably be a more hospitable place to do this than the United States, given America's strong undercurrent of violence. But in any country, those who survive will need isolated areas of land as well as distance from urban areas, which will see the food deserts in the inner cities, as well as savage violence, leach out across the urban landscape as produce and goods become prohibitively expensive and state repression becomes harsher and harsher. The increasingly overt uses of force by the elites to maintain control should not end acts of resistance. Acts of resistance are moral acts. They begin because people of conscience understand the moral imperative to challenge systems of abuse and despotism. They should be carried out not because they are effective but because they are right. Those who begin these acts are always few in number and dismissed by those who hide their cowardice behind their cynicism. But resistance, however marginal, continues to affirm life in a world awash in death. It is the supreme act of faith, the highest form of spirituality and alone makes hope possible. Those who carried out great acts of resistance often sacrificed their security and comfort, often spent time in jail and in some cases were killed. They understood that to live in the fullest sense of the word, to exist as free and independent human beings, even under the darkest night of state repression, meant to defy injustice. When the dissident Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was taken from his cell in a Nazi prison to the gallows, his last words were: "This is for me the end, but also the beginning." Bonhoeffer knew that most of the citizens in his nation were complicit through their silence in a vast enterprise of death. But however hopeless it appeared in the moment, he affirmed what we all must affirm. He did not avoid death. He did not, as a distinct individual, survive. But he understood that his resistance and even his death were acts of love. He fought and died for the sanctity of life. He gave, even to those who did not join him, another narrative, and his defiance ultimately condemned his executioners. We must continue to resist, but do so now with the discomforting realization that significant change will probably never occur in our lifetime. This makes resistance harder. It shifts resistance from the tangible and the immediate to the amorphous and the indeterminate. But to give up acts of resistance is spiritual and intellectual death. It is to surrender to the dehumanizing ideology of totalitarian capitalism. Acts of resistance keep alive another narrative, sustain our integrity and empower others, who we may never meet, to stand up and carry the flame we pass to them. No act of resistance is useless, whether it is refusing to pay taxes, fighting for a Tobin tax, working to shift the neoclassical economics paradigm, revoking a corporate charter, holding global internet votes or using Twitter to catalyze a chain reaction of refusal against the neoliberal order. But we will have to resist and then find the faith that resistance is worthwhile, for we will not immediately alter the awful configuration of power. And in this long, long war a community to sustain us, emotionally and materially, will be the key to a life of defiance. The philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote that the exclusive preoccupation with personal concerns and indifference to the suffering of others beyond the self-identified group is what ultimately made fascism and the Holocaust possible: "The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people." The indifference to the plight of others and the supreme elevation of the self is what the corporate state seeks to instill in us. It uses fear, as well as hedonism, to thwart human compassion. We will have to continue to battle the mechanisms of the dominant culture, if for no other reason than to preserve through small, even tiny acts, our common humanity. We will have to resist the temptation to fold in on ourselves and to ignore the cruelty outside our door. Hope endures in these often imperceptible acts of defiance. This defiance, this capacity to say no, is what the psychopathic forces in control of our power systems seek to eradicate. As long as we are willing to defy these forces we have a chance, if not for ourselves, then at least for those who follow. As long as we defy these forces we remain alive. And for now this is the only victory possible. Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, is the author of several books including the best sellers War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and his latest, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. He is married to the Canadian actress Eunice Wong. They have a son, Konrad, who is also a Canadian. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sat Feb 13 19:04:58 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 13 Feb 2010 19:04:58 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [Los Angeles] Demand for food 'staggering' Message-ID: <56F0F6FDAFC74D8183CAD011033B6297@agingCHS072729> <> http://www.dailynews.com/ci_14320250 Demand for food 'staggering' By Troy Anderson, Staff Writer Updated: 02/02/2010 11:40:29 PM PST The number of Los Angeles County residents seeking help from food pantries, soup kitchens and shelters skyrocketed 46 percent in the last four years as the country plunged into recession, according to a report issued Tuesday. The Los Angeles Regional Foodbank report found that the number of residents seeking food assistance grew from 674,100 in 2005 to a record 983,400 last year. The number of children receiving food assistance more than doubled from 185,000 to 393,000 in that time. "This means one in 10 people in Los Angeles County are seeking food assistance," Foodbank President Michael Flood said. "The number of children has increased markedly, which is very concerning to us." Belinda Crawford, executive director of the Santa Clarita Valley Food Pantry, said demand at her food pantry has soared 80 percent in the last two years. "We're seeing a dramatic increase," Crawford said. "We are seeing a lot of people who have lost their jobs and never thought they'd be in a position of needing services from a food pantry." The increase in need corresponds with the region's and nation's economic problems. In the last four years, the county's unemployment rate has more than doubled from 5 percent to 12 percent. An estimated 584,300 county residents are now unemployed, up from 243,000 in 2005. The report found 20 percent of the people seeking food assistance held managerial or professional jobs in the past. "What we find is it's the food portion of the budget that ends up being cut and putting people in a situation of not being able to feed themselves," Flood said. The study was based on 451 interviews with clients at food pantries, soup kitchens and shelters, and 363 surveys of volunteers and staff who manage the programs. It was released simultaneously with a similar national report by Feeding America, the nation's largest domestic hunger-relief organization. That national study found more than 37 million people, or one in eight Americans - including 14 million children and nearly 3 million seniors - receive emergency food each year through the nation's network of food banks. That's up 46 percent since the organization's last study in 2006. "Clearly, the economic recession, resulting in dramatically increasing unemployment nationwide, has driven unprecedented, sharp increases in the need for emergency food assistance and enrollment in federal nutrition programs," said Vicki Escarra, president/CEO of Feeding America. "Millions of our clients are families with children finding themselves in need of food assistance for the very first time." At the Burbank Temporary Aid Center, pantry and facility Director Edward Stapleton said the center is busy around the clock. Those seeking help range from the homeless to newly unemployed people living in upscale homes. "We used to have quiet days," Stapleton said. "But there is no gap now. We used to provide 10 to 15 lunches a day to the homeless. We now provide 60 lunches a day. We also help people with their gas, electric and water bills. More and more people are coming in for help paying those bills. People have lost their jobs and their bills are burying them." But even while food pantries and other agencies are serving more people - double the number in some cases - the agencies are reporting the need for more food and other resources to meet the growing demand, Flood said. More than 49 percent of food pantries report "problems with funding" while 42 percent of food pantries and 30 percent of soup kitchens report "problems with food supplies." David Risk, director of St.Charles Holy Family Services Center in North Hollywood, said the food pantry fed 1,349 people, including 530 children, in January. That's up from 670 people, including 257 children, in January 2009. "The problem is our donations haven't gone up with the number of people seeking help," Risk said. "Our donations have almost held steady to what it was last year. It's become harder and harder to serve everyone and food prices have not gone down." The lack of financial security and food security also leads to health problems. The Foodbank report found 30 percent of the households seeking help had members with health problems. County Department of Health Services Director Dr.Jonathan E. Fielding, who described the increase in people seeking food assistance as "just staggering" and "unbelievable," said people experiencing food insecurity often turn to less expensive foods such as fast food or prepackaged foods with low nutritional value. Fielding said poor nutrition is a leading cause of many of the major killers in society, including heart disease, stroke, diabetes and many types of cancer. Fielding said he is especially concerned about the health of the growing number of children whose families can't afford to feed them balanced and nutritious meals - a phenomena that affects school performance, graduation rates and the nation's future economic productivity. "I can't believe we live in a society that requires people to choose between food and utilities, food and rent and food and medicine," Fielding said. "We are all appalled at what is going on in Haiti, but we should be equally concerned about what is going on in our own backyard." =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sat Feb 13 19:56:13 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 13 Feb 2010 19:56:13 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] =?iso-8859-1?q?Honduras=3A_The_making_of_a_death_squa?= =?iso-8859-1?q?d_=22democracy=22?= Message-ID: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/feb2010/pers-f12.shtml Honduras: The making of a death squad "democracy" 12 February, 2010 Bill Van Auken With the restoration of diplomatic relations and the resumption of aid and credits from the world's major governments and financial institutions, Honduras is being welcomed back into the fold of "democratic" nations, even as the organizers of last year's coup remain at their posts and death squad murders continue. The Obama administration is leading the way in affirming that an election held last November under state-of-siege rule and the inauguration of Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo as president late last month have washed away all the sins of the past. For Washington, the June 28 military overthrow of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, along with the brutal repression that followed, is a dead letter. Earlier this month, Honduran Minister of Security Oscar ?lvarez met with US Ambassador Hugo Llorens to sign a bilateral agreement that will resume the direct flow of US military aid to the armed forces and police of the Central American country. In July 2009, the Obama administration withheld $16.5 million in military aid to the coup regime headed by Roberto Micheletti as one of the few and inconsequential sanctions imposed in response to Zelaya's overthrow. This week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Lobo to announce that civilian aid programs would also resume shortly and to praise him for working to strengthen the "unity of Honduran society." High-level Spanish delegations have also flown to Tegucigalpa, and French officials have indicated that relations with Paris will soon be resumed. The Organization of American States is preparing to consider readmitting Honduras, which was expelled from the OAS following the coup. Finally, the World Bank announced on Wednesday that it is restoring loans that had been frozen in the aftermath of the coup, increasing the amount on offer from $270 million to $390 million, assuring the further indebtedness of the impoverished country and a new round of austerity measures and attacks on the already miserable living standards of Honduran workers. The supposedly democratic transformation that has made all of this possible took place on January 27, with the inauguration of right-wing National Party candidate Lobo, a product, like Zelaya, of the land-owning oligarchy. In an earlier stage of his career, Lobo was a supporter of Stalinism, active in the Honduran Communist Party and educated at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. In his more recent political incarnation he is an advocate of the death penalty and economic development based on free trade and maquildaora sweatshops. He is also a loyal ally of Washington. The assumption of power by Lobo in what amounts to the legitimization of the June 28 coup was prepared through protracted political maneuvers and negotiations involving the Obama administration, Zelaya, the coup regime, and sections of the Latin American bourgeoisie. >From the outset of this process, Zelaya counted on Barack Obama to restore him to the presidential palace. He, like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, accepted Obama's talk about a new era of "mutual respect" between the US and Latin America as good coin. In reality, this rhetoric was merely window dressing for a more aggressive policy of US imperialism in the region, which included the covert backing of the Pentagon and US intelligence agencies for the Honduran coup. US aims were indicated recently in the testimony of Obama's national intelligence director, Dennis Blair, before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Blair accused Venezuela's Chavez of forging an "anti-US alliance" in Latin America and seeking to "undermine moderate, pro-US governments." He noted with satisfaction, however, that Chavez's influence "may have peaked," pointing out that "recently" Honduras had removed from that alliance. Zelaya agreed to the parameters laid down by Washington in negotiations orchestrated by its principal agent in Central America, Costa Rican President ?scar Arias. These included his returning to office as a figurehead president in a government of "national reconciliation" dominated by the right-wing politicians and military officers who overthrew him. In the end, the coup's organizers were not interested in such a resolution. With the support of US officials, they devised another "compromise" that conditioned Zelaya's reinstatement on a vote of the congress and the recommendation of the high court, both of which had backed the coup. Predictably, both institutions rubberstamped the decision of the Honduran oligarchy not to allow Zelaya back in office, even for a day. A day before the inauguration, all accounts were settled, with the supreme court ruling that the military commanders who carried out the coup merely acted to preserve the peace and with Zelaya leaving the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa, where he had been holed up for more than four months, for a second exile, this time in the Dominican Republic. Just as Zelaya subordinated his attempt to return to office to decisions made in Washington, so the leaders of the mass movement that emerged to challenge the coup subordinated the struggle undertaken by Honduran workers, peasants and youth to Zelaya and the futile quest for "dialogue" with the leaders of the coup regime. Despite the heroism of Honduran working people in the face of vicious repression, the bankrupt perspective of the leaders of the National Front of Resistance led this powerful movement into a political blind alley, leaving the masses unprepared to confront Zelaya's capitulation and the "democratic" charade through which the coup regime has consolidated its power under Lobo. Now, C?sar Ham, the leader of the "left" Democratic Unification Party, which was counted as Zelaya's closest political supporter, has agreed to join the Lobo government, allowing it to posture as a regime of "national unity and reconciliation." While Washington and other governments are praising Lobo's democratic credentials, the repression continues unabated, with workers, journalists and others who resisted the coup facing kidnappings, torture and assassinations. In one recent case, Vanesa Yaneth Zepeda, a 29-year-old nurse and mother of three who was active in the anti-coup demonstrations, disappeared on February 2. Her lifeless body was thrown out of a car in Tegucigalpa two days later. The "democratic" consolidation of the coup in Honduras represents a stark warning to working people across Latin America and internationally. Under conditions of the deepening global economic crisis, the ruling elites throughout the capitalist world are prepared to dispense with all democratic forms of rule in order to carry out lethal violence against any challenge to their interests. The Honduran events have also once again demonstrated that workers in Latin America cannot advance their struggle by means of political subordination to supposedly "left" and nationalist representatives of the bourgeoisie, such as Zelaya and Chavez. Those calling themselves "socialists" who promote illusions in these figures are disarming the working class and preparing even greater defeats. The only way forward for Latin American workers is to forge their political independence from all sections of the ruling elites and unite in a common struggle for workers' governments and the socialist transformation of the entire hemisphere. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sat Feb 13 21:23:29 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 13 Feb 2010 21:23:29 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Michael Parenti: What Do Empires Do? Message-ID: http://www.zcommunications.org/what-do-empires-do-by-michael-parenti What Do Empires Do? February 13, 2010 By Michael Parenti Michael Parenti's ZSpace Page / ZSpace When I wrote my book Against Empire in 1995, as might be expected, some of my U.S. compatriots thought it was wrong of me to call the United States an empire. It was widely believed that U.S. rulers did not pursue empire; they intervened abroad only out of self-defense or for humanitarian rescue operations or to overthrow tyranny, fight terrorism, and propagate democracy. But by the year 2000, everyone started talking about the United States as an empire and writing books with titles like Sorrows of Empire, Follies of Empire, Twilight of Empire, or Empire of Illusions --- all referring to the United States when they spoke of empire. Even conservatives started using the word. Amazing. One could hear right-wing pundits announcing on U.S. television, "We're an empire, with all the responsibilities and opportunities of empire and we better get used to it"; and "We are the strongest nation in the world and have every right to act as such"---as if having the power gives U.S. leaders an inherent entitlement to exercise it upon others as they might wish. "What is going on here?" I asked myself at the time. How is it that so many people feel free to talk about empire when they mean a United States empire? The ideological orthodoxy had always been that, unlike other countries, the USA did not indulge in colonization and conquest. The answer, I realized, is that the word has been divested of its full meaning. "Empire" seems nowadays to mean simply dominion and control. Empire---for most of these late-coming critics--- is concerned almost exclusively with power and prestige. What is usually missing from the public discourse is the process of empire and its politico-economic content. In other words, while we hear a lot about empire, we hear very little about imperialism. Now that is strange, for imperialism is what empires are all about. Imperialism is what empires do. And by imperialism I do not mean the process of extending power and dominion without regard to material and financial interests. Indeed "imperialism" has been used by some authors in the same empty way that they use the word "empire," to simply denote dominion and control with little attention given to political economic realities. But I define imperialism as follows: the process whereby the dominant investor interests in one country bring to bear their economic and military power upon another nation or region in order to expropriate its land, labor, natural resources, capital, and markets-in such a manner as to enrich the investor interests. In a word, empires do not just pursue "power for power's sake." There are real and enormous material interests at stake, fortunes to be made many times over. So for centuries the ruling interests of Western Europe and later on North America and Japan went forth with their financiers---and when necessary their armies---to lay claim to most of planet Earth, including the labor of indigenous peoples, their markets, their incomes (through colonial taxation or debt control or other means), and the abundant treasures of their lands: their gold, silver, diamonds, copper, rum, molasses, hemp, flax, ebony, timber, sugar, tobacco, ivory, iron, tin, nickel, coal, cotton, corn, and more recently: uranium, manganese, titanium, bauxite, oil, and---say it again-oil. (Hardly a complete listing.) Empires are enormously profitable for the dominant economic interests of the imperial nation but enormously costly to the people of the colonized country. In addition to suffering the pillage of their lands and natural resources, the people of these targeted countries are frequently killed in large numbers by the intruders. This is another thing that empires do which too often goes unmentioned in the historical and political literature of countries like the United States, Britain, and France. Empires impoverish whole populations and kill lots and lots of innocent people. As I write this, President Obama and the national security state for which he works are waging two and a half wars (Iraq, Iran, and northern Pakistan), and leveling military threats against Yemen, Iran, and, on a slow day, North Korea. Instead of sending medical and rescue aid to Haiti, Our Bomber sent in the Marines, the same Marines who engaged in years of mass murder in Haiti decades ago and supported more recent massacres by proxy forces. The purpose of all this killing is to prevent alternative, independent, self-defining nations from emerging. So the empire uses its state power to gather private wealth for its investor class. And it uses its public wealth to shore up its state power and prevent other nations from self-developing. Sooner or later this arrangement begins to wilt under the weight of its own contradictions. As the empire grows more menacing and more murderous toward others, it grows sick and impoverished within itself. >From ancient times to today, empires have always been involved in the bloody accumulation of wealth. If you don't think this is true of the United States then stop calling it "Empire." And when you write a book about how it wraps its arms around the planet, entitle it "Global Bully" or "Bossy Busybody," but be aware that you're not telling us much about imperialism. ------------------ Michael Parenti's most recent books include God and His Demons (2010), and Contrary Notions (2007). For further information visit his site: www.michaelparenti.org. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sat Feb 13 21:32:53 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 13 Feb 2010 21:32:53 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The Cleveland Model (on worker-owned industry) Message-ID: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100301/alperowitz_et_al The Nation February 11, 2010 - March 1, 2010 edition The Cleveland Model By Gar Alperovitz, Ted Howard & Thad Williamson Something important is happening in Cleveland: a new model of large-scale worker- and community-benefiting enterprises is beginning to build serious momentum in one of the cities most dramatically impacted by the nation's decaying economy. The Evergreen Cooperative Laundry (ECL)--a worker-owned, industrial-size, thoroughly "green" operation--opened its doors late last fall in Glenville, a neighborhood with a median income hovering around $18,000. It's the first of ten major enterprises in the works in Cleveland, where the poverty rate is more than 30 percent and the population has declined from 900,000 to less than 450,000 since 1950. The employees, who are drawn largely from Glenville and other nearby impoverished neighborhoods, are enthusiastic. "Because this is an employee-owned business," says maintenance technician and former marine Keith Parkham, "it's all up to us if we want the company to grow and succeed." "The only way this business will take off is if people are fully vested in the idea of the company," says work supervisor and former Time-Warner Cable employee Medrick Addison. "If you're not interested in giving it everything you have, then this isn't the place you should be." Addison, who also has a record, is excited about the prospects: "I never thought I could become an owner of a major corporation. Maybe through Evergreen things that I always thought would be out of reach for me might become possible." These are not your traditional small-scale co-ops. The Evergreen model draws heavily on the experience of the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation in the Basque Country of Spain, the world's most successful large-scale cooperative effort (now employing 100,000 workers in an integrated network of more than 120 high-tech, industrial, service, construction, financial and other largely cooperatively owned businesses). The Evergreen Cooperative Laundry, the flagship of the Cleveland effort, aims to take advantage of the expanding demand for laundry services from the healthcare industry, which is 16 percent of GDP and growing. After a six-month initial "probationary" period, employees begin to buy into the company through payroll deductions of 50 cents an hour over three years (for a total of $3,000). Employee-owners are likely to build up a $65,000 equity stake in the business over eight to nine years--a substantial amount of money in one of the hardest-hit urban neighborhoods in the nation. Thoroughly green in all its operations, ECL will have the smallest carbon footprint of any industrial-scale laundry in northeast Ohio, and probably the entire state: most industrial-scale laundries use three gallons of water per pound of laundry (the measure common in industrial-scale systems); ECL will use just eight-tenths of a gallon to do the same job. A second green employee-owned enterprise also opened this fall as part of the Evergreen effort. Ohio Cooperative Solar (OCS) is undertaking large-scale installations of solar panels on the roofs of the city's largest nonprofit health, education and municipal buildings. In the next three years it expects to have 100 employee-owners working to meet Ohio's mandated solar requirements. OCS is also becoming a leader in Cleveland's weatherization program, thereby ensuring year-round employment. Another cooperative in development ($10 million in federal loans and grants already in hand) is Green City Growers, which will build and operate a year-round hydroponic food production greenhouse in the midst of urban Cleveland. The 230,000-square-foot greenhouse-- larger than the average Wal-Mart superstore--will be producing more than 3 million heads of fresh lettuce and nearly a million pounds of (highly profitable) basil and other herbs a year, and will almost certainly become the largest urban food-producing greenhouse in the country. A fourth co-op, the community-based newspaper Neighborhood Voice, is also slated to begin operations this year. Organizers project that an initial complex of ten companies will generate roughly 500 jobs over the next five years. The co-op businesses are focusing on the local market in general and the specific procurement needs of "anchor institutions," the large hospitals and universities that are well established in the area and provide a partially guaranteed market. Discussions are under way with the "anchors" to identify additional opportunities for the next generation of community-based businesses. Evergreen Business Services has been launched to support the growing network by providing back-office services, management expertise and turn-around skills should a co-op get into trouble down the road. Significant resources are being committed to this effort by the Cleveland Foundation and other local foundations, banks and the municipal government. The Evergreen Cooperative Development Fund, currently capitalized by $5 million in grants, expects to raise another $10-$12 million--which in turn will leverage up to an additional $40 million in investment funds. Indeed, this may well be a conservative estimate. The fund invested $750,000 in the Evergreen Cooperative Laundry, which was then used to access an additional $5 million in financing, a ratio of almost seven to one. An important aspect of the plan is that each of the Evergreen co-operatives is obligated to pay 10 percent of its pre-tax profits back into the fund to help seed the development of new jobs through additional co-ops. Thus, each business has a commitment to its workers (through living-wage jobs, affordable health benefits and asset accumulation) and to the general community (by creating businesses that can provide stability to neighborhoods). The overall strategy is not only to go green but to design and position all the worker-owned co-ops as the greenest firms within their sectors. This is important in itself, but even more crucial is that the new green companies are aiming for a competitive advantage in getting the business of hospitals and other anchor institutions trying to shrink their carbon footprint. Far fewer green-collar jobs have been identified nationwide than had been hoped; and there is a danger that people are being trained and certified for work that doesn't exist. The Evergreen strategy represents another approach--first build the green business and jobs and then recruit and train the workforce for these new positions (and give them an ownership stake to boot). Strikingly, the project has substantial backing, not only from progressives but from a number of important members of the local business community as well. Co-ops in general, and those in which people work hard for what they get in particular, cut across ideological lines--especially at the local level, where practicality, not rhetoric, is what counts in distressed communities. There is also a great deal of national buzz among activists and community-development specialists about "the Cleveland model." Potential applications of the model are being considered in Atlanta, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Detroit and a number of other cities around Ohio. What's especially promising about the Cleveland model is that it could be applied in hard-hit industries and working-class communities around the nation. The model takes us beyond both traditional capitalism and traditional socialism. The key link is between national sectors of expanding public activity and procurement, on the one hand, and a new local economic entity, on the other, that "democratizes" ownership and is deeply anchored in the community. In the case of healthcare the link is also to a sector in which some implicit or explicit form of "national planning"--the movement toward universal healthcare--will all but certainly increase public influence and concern with how funds are used. Whereas the Cleveland effort is targeted at very low- income, largely minority communities, the same principles could easily be applied in cities like Detroit and aimed at black and white workers displaced by the economic crisis and the massive planning failures of the nation's main auto companies. Late in October, in fact, the Mondragon Corporation and the million-plus-member United Steelworkers union announced an alliance to develop Mondragon-type manufacturing cooperatives in the United States and Canada. Says USW's Rob Witherell: "We are seeking the right opportunities to make it work, probably in manufacturing markets that we both understand." Consider what might happen if the government and the UAW used the stock they own in General Motors because of the bailout to reorganize the company along full or joint worker-ownership lines--and if the new General Motors product line were linked to a plan to develop the nation's mass transit and rail system. Since mass transit is a sector that is certain to expand, there is every reason to plan its taxpayer-financed growth and integrate it with new community-stabilizing ownership strategies. The same is true of high-speed rail. Moreover, there are currently no US-owned companies producing subway cars (although some foreign-owned firms assemble subway cars in the United States). Nor do any American-owned companies build the kind of equipment needed for high-speed rail. In 2007 public authorities nationwide bought roughly 600 new rail and subway cars along with roughly 15,000 buses and smaller "paratransit" vehicles. Total current capital outlays on vehicles alone amount to $3.8 billion; total annual investment outlays (vehicles plus stations and other infrastructure) are $14.5 billion. The Department of Transportation estimates that a $48 billion investment in transit capital projects could generate 1.3 million new green jobs in the next two years alone. There are also strong reasons to expedite the retirement of aging buses and replace them with more efficient energy-saving vehicles with better amenities such as bike racks and GPS systems--the procurement of which would, in turn, create more jobs. President Obama has endorsed a strategy for making high-speed rail a priority in the United States. In a January 28 appearance in Florida he announced support for rail expansion in thirteen corridors across the nation based on an $8 billion "down payment" for investments in high-speed rail included in last year's stimulus package. The administration plans an additional $5 billion in spending over the next five years. Interest at the state level is also strong; in November 2008 voters in California approved a $10 billion bond to build high-speed rail. Even more dramatic possibilities for a new industry organized on new principles are suggested by experts concerned with the impact of likely future oil shortages. Canadian scholars Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl, projecting dramatic increases in the cost of all petroleum-based transportation, have proposed building 25,000 kilometers (about 15,000 miles) of track devoted to high-speed rail by 2025. Along with incremental upgrades of existing rail lines to facilitate increased and faster service, they estimate total investment costs at $2 trillion (roughly $140 billion each year for fifteen years). All of this raises the prospect of an expanding economic sector--one that will inevitably be dominated by public funds and public planning. In the absence of an effort to create a national capacity to produce mass-transit vehicles and high-speed-rail equipment, the United States in general, and California and other regions in particular, will likely end up awarding contracts for production to other countries. The French firm Alstom, for example, is likely to benefit enormously from US contracts. The logic of building a new economic sector on new principles becomes even more obvious when you consider that by 2050 another 130 million people are projected to be living in the United States; by 2100 the Census Bureau's high estimate is more than 1 billion. Providing infrastructure and transportation for this expanding population will generate a long list of required equipment and materials that a restructured group of vehicle production companies could help produce--and, at the same time, help create new forms of ownership that anchor the economies of the local communities involved. As reflection on transportation issues and the current ownership structure of General Motors suggests, the principles implicit in the nascent Cleveland effort point to the possibility of an important new strategic approach. It is one in which economic policy related to activities heavily financed by the public is used to create, and give stability to, enterprises that are more democratically owned, and to target jobs to communities in distress. The model does not, of course, rely only on public funds; as in Cleveland it serves a private market and hence faces the "discipline" of the market. We are clearly only on the threshold of developing a sophisticated near-term national policy approach like that suggested for transportation--to say nothing of the fully developed principles of a systemic alternative. The Cleveland experiment is in its infancy, with many miles to go and undoubtedly many mistakes to make, learn from and correct. On the other hand, as New Deal scholars regularly point out, historically the development of models and experiments at the local and state levels provided many of the principles upon which national policy drew when the moment of decision arrived. It is not too early to get serious about the Clevelands of the world and the possible implications they may have for one day moving an economically decaying nation toward a new economic vision. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sat Feb 13 23:28:29 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 13 Feb 2010 23:28:29 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The World's Greatest Insurance Heist Message-ID: http://www.truthout.org/aig-gate-the-worlds-greatest-insurance-heist56809 AIG-Gate: The World's Greatest Insurance Heist Wednesday, 10 February, 2010 by: Ellen Brown, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed Rumor has it that Timothy Geithner is on his way out as Treasury Secretary due to his involvement in the AIG scandal that is now unraveling in hearings before the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Bob Chapman writes in The International Forecaster: Each day brings more revelations of efforts of the NY Fed and Goldman Sachs to hide the details of the criminal conspiracy of the AIG bailout.... This is a real crisis on the scale of Watergate. Corruption at its finest. But unlike the perpetrators of the Watergate scandal, who wound up looking at jail time, Geithner evidently has a golden parachute waiting at Goldman Sachs, not coincidentally the largest recipient of the AIG bailout. At least that is the rumor sparked by an article by Caroline Baum on Bloomberg News, titled "Goldman Parachute Awaits Geithner to Ease Fall." Hank Paulson, Geithner's predecessor, was CEO of Goldman Sachs before coming to the Treasury. Geithner, who has come up through the ranks of government, could be walking through the revolving door in the other direction. Geithner has been under the House microscope for the decision of the New York Fed, made while he headed it, to buy out about $30 billion in credit default swaps (over-the-counter derivative insurance contracts) that AIG sold on toxic debt securities. The chief recipients of this payout were Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Societe Generale and Deutsche Bank. Goldman got $13 billion, roughly equivalent to its bonus pool for the first nine months of 2009. Critics are calling the New York Fed's decision a back-door bailout for the banks, which received 100 cents on the dollar for contracts that would have been worth far less had AIG been put through bankruptcy proceedings in the ordinary way. In a Bloomberg article provocatively titled "Secret Banking Cabal Emerges From AIG Shadows," David Reilly wrote: [T]he New York Fed is a quasi-governmental institution that isn't subject to citizen intrusions such as freedom of information requests, unlike the Federal Reserve. This impenetrability comes in handy since the bank is the preferred vehicle for many of the Fed's bailout programs. It's as though the New York Fed was a black-ops outfit for the nation's central bank. The beneficiaries of the New York Fed's largess got paid in full although they had agreed to take much less. In a November 2009 article titled "It's Time to Fire Tim Geithner," Dylan Ratigan wrote: [L]ast November ... New York Federal Reserve Governor Tim Geithner decided to deliver 100 cents on the dollar, in secret no less, to pay off the counter parties to the world's largest (and still un-investigated) insurance fraud - AIG. This full payoff with taxpayer dollars was carried out by Geithner after AIG's bank customers, such as Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and Societe Generale, had already previously agreed to taking as little as 40 cents on the dollar. Even after the GM autoworkers, bondholders and vendors all received a government-enforced haircut on their contracts, he still had the audacity to claim the "sanctity of contracts" in the dealings with these companies like AIG. Geithner testified that the Fed's hands were tied and that the bank could not "selectively default on contractual obligations without courting collapse." But if it was all on the up and up, why all the secrecy? The contention that the Fed had no choice is also belied by a recent holding in the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, in which New York Bankruptcy Judge James Peck set aside the same type of investment contracts that Secretaries Paulson and Geithner repeatedly swore under oath had to be paid in full in the case of AIG. The judge declared that clauses in those contracts subordinating other claims to the holders' claims were null and void in bankruptcy. "And notice," commented bank analyst Chris Whalen, "that the world has not ended when the holders of [derivative] contracts are treated like everyone else." He called the AIG bailout "a hideous political contrivance that ranks with the great acts of political corruption and thievery in the history of the United States." If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, said Joseph Goebbels, people will eventually come to believe it. The bailout of Wall Street, initiated in September 2008, was premised on the dire prediction that if major counterparties in the massive edifice of derivative contracts were allowed to fall, the whole interlocking house of cards would collapse and take the economy with it. A hijacked Congress dutifully protected the derivatives game with taxpayer money while the real economy proceeded to collapse, the financial sector choosing to put their money into this protected form of speculative betting rather than into the more mundane and risky business of making loans to struggling businesses and homeowners. In the end, $170 billion of federal funds went to AIG and the banks feeding at its trough. Meanwhile, a survey of state finances by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities think tank found that state governments face a collective $168 billion budget shortfall for fiscal 2010. If the money used to bail out AIG and the banks had been used to bail out the states instead, the states would not be facing insolvency today. There is no law against gambling, but there is a law against fraud. In Watergate, a special prosecutor was appointed to bring criminal charges; but times seem to have changed. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Feb 14 08:50:35 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 14 Feb 2010 08:50:35 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [Video] John Bellamy Foster: The Triple Crisis of Capital Message-ID: <51773707D6684BE9BA28597D1775BB15@agingCHS072729> John Bellamy Foster: The Triple Crisis of Capital February 13, 2010 The editor of Monthly Review talks about the triple crises facing the people of the United State today in the economy, the environment, and in the imperial wars and occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Feb 14 09:24:23 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 14 Feb 2010 09:24:23 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Jon Elmer in Bethlehem: 'A prescription for civil war' Message-ID: <6FFB8785FDC149D887D8BF22414CAA93@agingCHS072729> http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2009/12/2009121311331278355.html 'A prescription for civil war' By Jon Elmer in Bethlehem Abu Abdullah has never been charged with a crime, but he has been arrested by Palestinian security forces so many times in the past two years that he has lost count. He has been arrested at work, in the market, on the street, and, more than once, during violent raids by masked men who burst into his home and seized him in front of his family. Deep in the heart of the Deheishe refugee camp on the outskirts of Bethlehem, Abu Abdullah describes in detail the beatings he has endured in custody, the numerous cold, sleepless nights in cramped and filthy cells, the prolonged periods bound in painful stress positions, and the long hours of aggressive questioning. "The interrogations always begin the same way," Abu Abdullah explains. "They demand to know who I voted for in the last election." Abu Abdullah is not alone. Since Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad's caretaker government took power in Ramallah in June 2007, stories like Abu Abdullah's have become commonplace in the West Bank. The arrests are part of a wider plan being executed by Palestinian security forces - trained and funded by American and European backers - to crush opposition and consolidate the Fatah-led government's grip on power in the West Bank. An international effort The government of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, is bolstered by thousands of newly trained police and security forces whose stated aim is to eliminate Islamist groups that may pose a threat to its power - namely Hamas and their supporters. Under the auspices of Lieutenant-General Keith Dayton, the US security coordinator, these security forces receive hands-on training from Canadian, British and Turkish military personnel at a desert training centre in Jordan. The programme has been carefully coordinated with Israeli security officials. Since 2007 the Jordan International Police Training Center has trained and deployed five Palestinian National Security Force battalions in the West Bank. By the end of Dayton's appointment in 2011, the $261mn project will see 10 new security battalions, one for each of the nine West Bank governorates and one unit in reserve. Their aim is clear. Speaking before a House of Representatives subcommittee in 2007, Dayton described the project as "truly important to advance our national interests, deliver security to Palestinians, and preserve and protect the interests of the state of Israel". Others are even more explicit about what the force is for. When Nahum Barnea, a senior Israeli defence correspondent, sat in on a top-level coordinating meeting between Palestinian and Israeli commanders in 2008, he says he was stunned by what he heard. "Hamas is the enemy, and we have decided to wage an all-out war," Barnea quoted Majid Faraj, then the head of Palestinian military intelligence, as telling the Israeli commanders. "We are taking care of every Hamas institution in accordance with your instructions." After the takeover When he arrived in the last days of 2005, Dayton's assignment was to create a Palestinian security force ostensibly tasked with confronting the Palestinian resistance. The project began in Gaza. Sean McCormack, a state department spokesman at the time, explained Dayton's role as "the real down in the weeds, blocking and tackling work of helping to build up the security forces". But within weeks of his arrival, things began to fall apart. Hamas' decisive January 2006 election victory ushered in a crippling international blockade on the Palestinians in Gaza. Soon after, the security forces of Hamas and Fatah began fighting in the streets, culminating in Hamas' June 2007 takeover of the enclave. Dayton's initial aims lay in tatters, and while Fayyad became prime minister in a 'caretaker' government in Ramallah, a new security strategy was formulated. As a grim status-quo established itself in Gaza, Dayton's new mission became clear. The job of the security coordinator was now "to prevent a Hamas takeover in the West Bank," according to Michael Eisenstadt, Dayton's former plans officer. A coordinated attack on Hamas' civilian apparatus was launched immediately after the takeover in Gaza in June 2007. Major-General Gadi Shamni, the head of the Israeli army's central command, led an initiative to target the base of Hamas' support in the West Bank. The plan, dubbed the Dawa Strategy, involved pin-pointing Hamas' extensive social welfare apparatus, the lynchpin of their popularity amongst many Palestinians. Dr Omar Abdel Razeq, a former finance minister in the short-lived Hamas government, explains the effect this had. "When we talk about the infrastructure we are talking about the societies and the cooperatives and the institutions that were to help the poor," he says. "They finished [off] the infrastructure of Hamas." Israeli Brigadier-General Michael Herzog, the chief of staff to Ehud Barak, Israel's defence minister, summed up the Israeli view of the project. "[Dayton's] doing a great job," he said. "We're very happy with what he's doing." Torture allegations The Dawa Strategy has seen more than 1,000 Palestinians jailed by Palestinian Authority (PA) forces. The arrests - though concentrated on Hamas and its suspected allies - have touched a broad swathe of Palestinian society, and all political factions. They have targeted social workers, students, teachers, journalists. There have been regular raids on mosques, university campus' and charities, and repeated allegations of torture carried out by US and European-funded security officers, including several deaths in custody. In October, Abbas issued a decree against the most violent forms of torture used by his forces and replaced the interior minister, General Abdel Razak al-Yahya, a long-time US and Israeli partner, with Said Abu Ali. While noting an improvement since the decree, human rights workers say the changes are not enough. "There is still no due process, still no legal justifications for many of the arrests and civilians are still being brought before military courts," says Salah Moussa, an Independent Commission for Human Rights attorney. Major-General Adnan Damiri, a spokesperson for the Palestinian security forces, acknowledged wrongdoing but attributed the acts to individuals and not to a policy. "Sometimes there are officers or soldiers who have made mistakes in this way, with torture," Damiri said. "But now we are punishing them." Damiri cited 42 cases of torture in the past three months that resulted in various forms of reprimand, including loss of rank. Six soldiers were dismissed for their acts. But on the streets, the mood is darkening as the foreign-backed security services tighten their grip on the West Bank. Naje Odeh, a leftist community leader in Deheishe who operates a thriving youth centre in the camp, characterised the security apparatus as akin to the US-allied regimes in Jordan and Egypt. "If you speak out, you are arrested," he explains. "This behaviour will destroy our society." Odeh says the security forces carrying out the raids know that what they are doing is wrong. "Why are they masked?" he asks rhetorically. "Because we know these people. We know their families. They are ashamed of what they are doing." Some fear that the behaviour of the US and EU-trained security forces will spark potentially deadly confrontation. "If they attack your mosques, your classrooms, your societies, you can be patient, but for how long?" a senior Islamist leader in the West Bank asks. Abdel Razeq, the former Hamas finance minister, is more explicit in his predictions. He says: "If the security forces insist on defending the Israelis, this is a prescription for civil war." =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Feb 14 21:06:12 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 14 Feb 2010 21:06:12 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Reinforcements: International Team of Cuban-Trained Doctors Arrives in Haiti Message-ID: <2AD0C3A4006A48E39AD760B55988D26B@agingCHS072729> See http://www.medicc.org/ns/index.php?s=19&p=19 For following release: Reinforcements: International Team of Cuban-Trained Doctors Arrives in Haiti ELAM grads from Mali on their way to Haiti. February 11, 2010 ? An international team of some 50 doctors trained at Havana's Latin American Medical School (ELAM) has arrived in Port-au-Prince to join Cuba's medical relief contingent in post-quake Haiti. Coming from a dozen countries, they are the first wave of ELAM graduates expected to number over 200 from 24 countries in the next week. They will join the 1,147-strong Cuban-led International Henry Reeve Emergency Medical Contingent, already comprised of 736 Cubans plus 402 ELAM graduates from Haiti, 7 from the USA and 2 from Nicaragua?together the largest medical relief effort in Haiti. Heading the international team is Dr. Luther Castillo, a Garifuna physician from Honduras, who was in ELAM?s first graduating class in 2005. ?When Hurricane Mitch hit my country in 1998, the Cuban doctors were right there with us, among the poorest of the poor,? he told MEDICC. ?They taught us never to abandon anybody, and they?re the reason I?m a doctor today. Now ELAM has given all of us the chance to pass on that solidarity.? Dr Castillo and Minister Balaguer. Dr Betanco: "as long as necessary". Dr. Jos? Ram?n Balaguer, Cuban Minister of Public Health, speaking at the team?s sendoff last night, emphasized the long-term responsibility of the young physicians and their Cuban partners to ?help build a public health system that meets the needs of all the Haitian people?. Gabriel Jacques, a 1st-year Haitian medical student at ELAM, told the departing graduates of his school that ?even in the hell that my country has become, you will find people like you who believe in the future, and who are willing to dream and rebuild.? ELAM Grads: Activating the Network Since the first class of 2005, ELAM has graduated 7,290 physicians from the Americas, Africa, the Mideast, Asia and Oceania. The graduates began organizing former classmates immediately following the earthquake, sending out thousands of emails, and recruiting hundreds willing to serve in Haiti. From all over Latin America they have come; from the Caribbean and the USA; and a few from as far away as Mali. Dr. Bechri Ahmed Ali hails from the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic: ?But Haiti is where I belong right now,? he told MEDICC. "This isn't an adventure. This is a commitment,? said Dr Wilberth Barral, a Bolivian ELAM graduate preparing to depart for Haiti. "My classmates are Haitian. Some lost their whole families, fathers, siblings, their homes. They need our help." None of the dozens of ELAM-trained doctors interviewed expressed anxiety about the open-ended nature of their assignment. On the contrary, said Dr Mar?a Esther Betanco from Nicaragua, "we'll stay as long as necessary, unconditionally." This is no small effort for many of these young doctors who themselves come from low-income families, and who will depend on networks back home to cover their absence. Disaster Medicine Training In preparation for departure, the ELAM graduates attended a week-long disaster course organized by the Latin American Center for Disaster Medicine (CLAMED), including modules on epidemiology, disease prevention, and vector control. They also had sessions in Haitian geography, culture, and history. In addition to a battery of vaccinations and basic materials every Henry Reeve volunteer receives before departure, each doctor also packed MEDICC?s trilingual Spanish-Creole-French Health for All Glossary of 4000+ essential health care terms. To date, the Cuban-led Henry Reeve Contingent in Haiti has treated over 65,000 victims and performed more than 3,600 surgical interventions in field hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and other health installations throughout Haiti. Countries Represented in the Henry Reeve International Emergency Medical Contingent This is also the first time the Henry Reeve Contingent--which has provided health services in post-disaster Guatemala, Pakistan, Indonesia and elsewhere--will formally include ELAM graduates. The Contingent, named after a Brooklyn-born hero of Cuba's independence war against Spain, was created after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast of the USA. In addition to Cuban and Cuban-trained Haitian physicians, the Contingent in Haiti includes over 200 ELAM graduates from the following countries, expected to continue arriving in Haiti over the next five days: Argentina Belize Bolivia Brazil Chile Colombia Dominica Dominican Republic Ecuador El Salvador Guatemala Honduras Lebanon Mali Mexico Nicaragua Panama Paraguay Peru Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic St. Lucia United States Uruguay Venezuela ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Gail Reed International Director, MEDICC Executive Editor, MEDICC Review medic at infomed.sld.cu www.medicc.org www.saludthefilm.net Donate to Cuban-trained Haitian doctors on the front lines of Haiti relief: www.medicc.org Follow the work of the Cuban-Haitian medical teams on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/mediccglobal -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... 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Name: not available Type: image/jpeg Size: 19542 bytes Desc: not available URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Feb 15 07:44:54 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 15 Feb 2010 07:44:54 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The boss' secret: Cashing in on your death Message-ID: <0AA728570A3B4B7A925630A1AB1C35B9@agingCHS072729> http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-in-the-news/boss-secret-cashing-your-death February 14th, 2010 1:38 AM The boss' secret: Cashing in on your death By Dave Fehling / KHOU HOUSTON-Big corporations, including banks and convenience store chains in Houston, have taken out life insurance policies on their employees and received hundreds of thousands of dollars when a worker died. The policies have become known as "dead peasant" policies, because they are taken out on low-level employees. "It is a profit center for their business," said Scott Clearman, a Houston lawyer who has represented the families of local convenience store clerks killed on the job. He said the stores had taken out policies that paid the company $250,000 if an employee accidently died. Houston became somewhat of a hot-bed for such litigation with one of the latest cases making it to the big screen. Michael Moore's latest documentary, "Capitalism: A Love Story," features Irma Johnson, who lives in The Woodlands. Her husband had worked for Amegy Bank. In 2008, he died of brain cancer. She said she did not know about a life insurance policy the bank took out on her husband. After his death, she said the policy paid not her, but the bank, over $1.5 million. Her Houston attorney, Mike Myers, said they reached a confidential settlement last month. Amegy didn't respond to a call from 11 News, but reportedly the bank had contended that Irma Johnson's husband had given his permission for the policy and that such policies are common in the banking industry. Actually, they've been common in a number of industries. In fact, so many companies have them that U.S. Rep. Gene Green, a Democrat from Houston, has been trying to pass a law making it illegal to keep the policies secret. "If you buy an insurance policy on Gene Green, I ought to have notice," said the Congressman. He also has tried to take away the favorable tax treatment that companies get for paying the premiums. "They even kept insurance policies on people who'd long since left the company," Rep. Green said. As things are now, lawyers say there's virtually no way you can make your employer reveal if it has taken a policy out on you. But if you could? "One of the big repercussions would be attorneys like me would bring suits to collect the money for people who've died. And they cannot let that happen," said Clearman. Another Houston attorney, Kerry Notestine, knows all about this controversy. A law firm he used to work for had a policy on him. "The reason they had it on me was so if I died, they'd be able to buy back my partnership interest," said Notestine. He had no problem with that, because in his case, the insurance money would actually help pay his survivors for his part-ownership of the firm. In fact, he once defended a Houston software company whose founder died and whose widow sued for the company-owned life insurance payout. "The jury ruled for the company in this instance," Notestine said. It was an instance where the company argued it had a right to protect its financial interests because the founder was so vital. In legalese, the company had an "insurable interest." But in the case of rank-and-file workers-the so-called "dead peasants"-Texas courts have generally ruled in their favor, ruling that companies are not entitled to make money off an employee's death. ================================== A few interesting points in the comments section follow: ================================== adrienrain February 14th, 2010 8:25 PM Here's something even worse. A facebook friend of mine was mailed a packet by mistake. His HEALTH INSURANCE COMPANY has taken out an insurance policy ON HIS LIFE! This is a cleat conflict of interest and really should be illegal. If they turn him down for medication or a procedure and he dies, they will benefit financially. ............................ Brad_Co66 February 14th, 2010 3:17 PM Too bad investors cannot take life insurance policies out on corporations they own stock in. ............................ DavidBz February 14th, 2010 10:46 AM Here's what you do about this everyone.... Those of you who work for companies that participate in this purely immoral disgusting practice. Send your boss an anonymous letter saying everyone pitched in and got a dead peasant insurance policy on him........... =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Feb 15 07:52:05 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 15 Feb 2010 07:52:05 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Health Insurers Break Profit Records Message-ID: http://hcfan.3cdn.net/a9ce29d3038ef8a1e1_dhm6b9q0l.pdf Health Insurers Break Profit Records As 2.7 Million Americans Lose Coverage Health Care for America NOW February 10, 2010 The five largest U.S. health insurance companies sailed through the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression to set new industry profit records in 2009, a feat accomplished by leaving behind 2.7 million Americans who had been in private health plans. For customers who kept their benefits, the insurers raised rates and cost-sharing, and cut the share of premiums spent on medical care. Executives and shareholders of the five biggest for- profit health insurers, UnitedHealth Group Inc., WellPoint Inc., Aetna Inc., Humana Inc., and Cigna Corp., enjoyed combined profit of $12.2 billion in 2009, up 56 percent from the previous year. It was the best year ever for Big Insurance. The outsize earnings are a vivid reminder that without comprehensive national health care reform the gatekeepers of our broken health insurance system always will put the short-term interests of Wall Street before the needs of millions of patients and a national economy plagued by joblessness. The 2009 financial reports from the nation's five largest insurance companies reveal that: The firms made $12.2 billion, an increase of $4.4 billion, or 56 percent, from 2008. Four out of the five companies saw earnings increases, with CIGNA's profits jumping 346 percent. The companies provided private insurance coverage to 2.7 million fewer people than the year before. Four out of the five companies insured fewer people through private coverage. United- Health alone insured 1.7 million fewer people through employer-based or individual coverage. All but one of the five companies increased the number of people they covered through public insurance programs (Medicaid, CHIP and Medicare). UnitedHealth added 680,000 people in public plans. The proportion of premium dollars spent on health care expenses went down for three of the five firms, with higher proportions going to administrative expenses and profits. It was clear from the earnings reports that reduced enrollment in private plans correlates with big gains in net income. Aetna, the lone company that substantially increased both membership and the share of premium revenue it spent on actual medical care, was the only one of the five companies to post net income that was less than it reported the previous year. The shedding of 2.7 million members from private health plans is part of the industry's long-term shifting of responsibility for the care of millions of sick, older or lower-income customers to taxpayersupported government health programs, such as Medicaid and the state Children's Health Insurance Plans. State and federal programs have increasingly been hiring big insurers to manage their care. Insurance industry officials see great opportunity in serving government- run programs because other markets are not growing. That is because private buyers of insurance are steadily being priced out of the market. During 2009, the five insurers boosted enrollment in government-subsidized programs administered by private plans, including Medicare and Medicaid, by 688,000.2 Medicaid growth is the biggest single driver of increased national health spending, according to a study released Feb. 4 by the policy journal Health Affairs. The authors project that by 2012 government health programs will pay for half of the health care purchased in this country, up from 47 percent in 2008. Last year the five health insurers continued managing their capital resources carefully to benefit investors and corporate executives. Most of the companies reported that they wait six to eight weeks after receiving claims to pay doctors, hospitals and patients. The cash they hold during this period builds up company reserves and improves balance sheets, but the delay is yet another way that the managers of the existing system harm patients and health care providers. Secondly, most of the five insurers participate in share repurchase programs. Since 2003, the five companies have bought $55.4 billion of their own stock on the open market,4 increasing earnings per share by reducing the number of shares outstanding, thereby boosting a company's stock price. Companies make share repurchases with excess cash on hand or with borrowed funds. Buybacks are a way of removing money from a company's balance sheet for the benefit of investors, reflecting management's decision not to invest in improving a company's operations, in making the health system run more efficiently or in giving customers rate relief when premiums are soaring. The companies prefer to hand over the money to Wall Street investors. Chief executive officers are primary beneficiaries of share buybacks because their soaring compensation packages depend on reaching earnings-per-share goals that often would be unachievable without repurchasing programs. Executives also are compensated with stock options that put enormous numbers of company shares in their hands, so they benefit personally and directly from everything that pushes share prices higher. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Feb 15 08:06:11 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 15 Feb 2010 08:06:11 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Greenpeace Greenwash Message-ID: <250093216F1B42C488A06F95D898F767@agingCHS072729> http://vancouver.mediacoop.ca/story/2765 Environment February 15, 2010 Greenpeace Greenwash Greenpeace International hires torchbearer Tzeporah Berman as chief climate campaigner by Macdonald Stainsby - 2010 Olympics As the world turned their attention to the spectacle of the 2010 Olympics, Greenpeace International played another kind of game, appointing Tzeporah Berman as their new energy and climate campaign director. As a result, she will inherit their "Stop the Tar Sands" campaign and take responsibility for 110 Greenpeace climate campaigners in 28 countries. In the last few years Berman has been known to accommodate corporate interests, provided they make minor concessions and release joint statements. Greenpeace itself, by teaming with Olympic corporate sponsor Coca-Cola, has made clear this strategy also falls within their overall corporate strategy. Berman, a former a Greenpeace BC campaigner, was recently appointed to the BC Liberal government as an "adviser" on free market-based "green energy" initiatives. She immediately conferred an award to BC Premier Gordon Campbell's "leadership" in fighting climate change while at the Copenhagen negotiations. This, even though BC was the only province in Canada whose tally of greenhouse gas emissions for the year 2009 was higher than the year before. While Berman was on the inside at Copenhagen handing an award to Premier Campbell (whom she now worked for), tens of thousands of activists calling for real action on climate change were being arrested, beaten and tear gassed. According to the Vancouver Sun, Berman "decided to apply for the job after reconnecting with Greenpeace representatives at the Copenhagen climate conference last December." Her decision came roughly the same time as Greenpeace International was releasing their statement with Coca-Cola. On February Fifth, Berman, whose birth name was Suzie Faye Berman, carried the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Torch Indigenous and grassroots environmental activists have been blocking, through Brackendale, near Squamish BC. In a statement released prior, she said she carried the torch to "make the connection between the hope and inspiration of the Olympics and the promise of electric vehicles and clean energy." Berman rode an electric scooter with the torch, escorted by police. Greenpeace itself has refused to oppose the 2010 Winter Games despite their massive carbon footprint and the dynamiting of mountains to expand a highway from Vancouver to Whistler for the same Games. She has previously demonstrated in both word and deed that her strategic deployment is to work in tandem with corporations and neo-liberal governments, not to oppose or resist them in any way. Berman's likely corporate engagement strategy, which could include tar sands giants and experienced greenwashers Shell and Suncor would negate the possibility of carrying out the chant of anti Olympics demonstrators to "shut down the tar sands." In December of last year Greenpeace released a joint press release with Coca-Cola, one of the larger corporate sponsors of the 2010 Olympic Games. The announcement was timed as world attention shifted to Copenhagen, Denmark for the international climate change discussions. The release, among other things, stated: "This announcement is a direct result of work with Greenpeace that began in 2000, and a demonstration that phasing out the use of HFCs is a tangible and near-term action corporations can take to protect the climate." There is no way to determine if this was a part of a push from Coca-Cola to get official endorsement rights to the COP15 negotiations. While the press release ignored Cokes record of complicity in the murder of multiple trade union activists in Colombia, it was said to show however that the release was "a direct result of discussions with Greenpeace that began in the run-up to the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Greenpeace challenged Coca-Cola to go HFC-free in all of the equipment it supplied to the Games. By the Torino Games in 2006 and the Beijing Games in 2008, the Company was using all HFC-free technology at Olympic venues. For the past five years, the relationship between Greenpeace and Coca-Cola has become increasingly cooperative [...]" Greenpeace & Coca-Cola also had zero comment on the destruction of clean water aquifers within India, notably Kerala, rendering the land where much of global Coke's bottling plants fill up parched of water and contaminating what's left. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Feb 15 12:22:51 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:22:51 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The Economic Elite Have Engineered an Extraordinary Coup Message-ID: <94A0C8216068496EA114FA69AEFE1191@agingCHS072729> [I have a major problem with the conspiracy theory nature of this article. The natural trajectory that advanced capitalism follows always involves an attempt to maintain profit levels at any expense, including driving down wages, downright slavery (Haiti, much of Africa), dismissing union organizers, improper use of pension funds, financial scams and heists of various kinds such as cashing in on life insurance policies (see today's FreshInk post from Michael Moore's website), and of course imperialist and criminal wars for control of natural resources. There is no conspiracy in any of this: it is the natural outcome of a capitalist world organized around production for profit rather than production for use. Far-sighted capitalists around the world know this game, and plan their wars accordingly.] http://www.alternet.org/story/145667/ Amped Status / By David DeGraw The Economic Elite Have Engineered an Extraordinary Coup, Threatening the Very Existence of the Middle Class The economic elite have robbed us all. The amount of suffering in the United States of America is literally a crime against humanity. February 15, 2010 "The American oligarchy spares no pains in promoting the belief that it does not exist, but the success of its disappearing act depends on equally strenuous efforts on the part of an American public anxious to believe in egalitarian fictions and unwilling to see what is hidden in plain sight." -- Michael Lind, To Have and to Have Not We all have very strong differences of opinion on many issues. However, like our founding fathers before us, we must put aside our differences and unite to fight a common enemy. It has now become evident to a critical mass that the Republican and Democratic parties, along with all three branches of our government, have been bought off by a well-organized Economic Elite who are tactically destroying our way of life. The harsh truth is that 99 percent of the U.S. population no longer has political representation. The U.S. economy, government and tax system is now blatantly rigged against us. Current statistical societal indicators clearly demonstrate that a strategic attack has been launched and an analysis of current governmental policies prove that conditions for 99 percent of Americans will continue to deteriorate. The Economic Elite have engineered a financial coup and have brought war to our doorstep...and make no mistake, they have launched a war to eliminate the U.S. middle class. To those who feel I am using extreme rhetoric, I ask you to please take a few minutes of your time to hear me out and research the evidence put forth. The facts are there for the unprejudiced, rational and reasoned mind to absorb. It is the unfortunate reality of our current crisis. Unless we all unite and organize on common ground, our very way of life and the ideals that our country was founded upon will continue to unravel. Before exposing exactly who the Economic Elite are, and discussing common sense ways in which we can defeat them, let's take a look at how much damage they have already caused. Casualties of Economic Terrorism, Surveying the Damage The devastating numbers across-the-board on the economic front are staggering. I'll go through some of them here, many we have already become all too familiar with. We hear some of these numbers all the time, so much so that it appears as if we have already begun "to normalize the unthinkable." You may be sick of hearing them, but behind each number is an enormous amount of individual suffering, American lives and families who are struggling worse than they ever have . America is the richest nation in history, yet we now have the highest poverty rate in the industrialized world with an unprecedented amount of Americans living in dire straights and over 50 million citizens already living in poverty. The government has come up with clever ways to downplay all of these numbers, but we have over 50 million people who need to use food stamps to eat , and a stunning 50 percent of U.S. children will use food stamps to eat at some point in their childhoods. Approximately 20,000 people are added to this total every day. In 2009, one out of five U.S. households didn't have enough money to buy food. In households with children, this number rose to 24 percent , as the hunger rate among U.S. citizens has now reached an all-time high . We also currently have over 50 million U.S. citizens without health care. 1.4 million Americans filed for bankruptcy in 2009, a 32 percent increase from 2008. As bankruptcies continue to skyrocket, medical bankruptcies are responsible for over 60 percent of them, and over 75 percent of the medical bankruptcies filed are from people who have health care insurance. We have the most expensive health care system in the world, we are forced to pay twice as much as other countries and the overall care we get in return ranks 37th in the world. In total, Americans have lost $5 trillion from their pensions and savings since the economic crisis began and $13 trillion in the value of their homes. During the first full year of the crisis, workers between the age of 55 - 60, who have worked for 20 - 29 years, have lost an average of 25 percent off their 401k . "Personal debt has risen from 65 percent of income in 1980 to 125 percent today ." Over five million U.S. families have already lost their homes, in total 13 million U.S. families are expected to lose their home by 2014, with 25 percent of current mortgages underwater. Deutsche Bank has an even grimmer prediction: "The percentage of 'underwater' loans may rise to 48 percent, or 25 million homes ." Every day 10,000 U.S. homes enter foreclosure. Statistics show that an increasing number of these people are not finding shelter elsewhere, there are now over 3 million homeless Americans, the fastest-growing segment of the homeless population is single parents with children. One place more and more Americans are finding a home is in prison. With a prison population of 2.3 million people , we now have more people incarcerated than any other nation in the world -- the per capita statistics are 700 per 100,000 citizens . In comparison, China has 110 per 100,000, France has 80 per 100,000, Saudi Arabia has 45 per 100,000. The prison industry is thriving and expecting major growth over the next few years. A recent report from the Hartford Advocate titled "Incarceration Nation " revealed that "a new prison opens every week somewhere in America." Mass Unemployment The government unemployment rate is deceptive on several levels . It doesn't count people who are "involuntary part-time workers," meaning workers who are working part-time but want to find full-time work. It also doesn't count "discouraged workers," meaning long-term unemployed people who have lost hope and don't consistently look for work. As time goes by, more and more people stop consistently looking for work and are discounted from the unemployment figure . For instance, in January, 1.1 million workers were eliminated from the unemployment total because they were "officially" labeled discouraged workers. So instead of the number rising, we will hear deceptive reports about unemployment leveling off. On top of this, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently discovered that 824,000 job losses were never accounted for due to a "modeling error " in their data. Even in their initial January data there appears to be a huge understating, with the newest report saying the economy lost 20,000 jobs. TrimTabs employment analysis, which has consistently provided more accurate data, "estimated that the U.S. economy shed 104,000 jobs in January ." When you factor in all these uncounted workers -- "involuntary part-time" and "discouraged workers" -- the unemployment rate rises from 9.7 percent to over 20 percent . In total, we now have over 30 million U.S. citizens who are unemployed or underemployed. The rarely cited "employment-participation" rate, which reveals the percentage of the population that is currently in the workforce, has now fallen to 64 percent . Even based on the "official" unemployment rate, just to get back to the unemployment level of 4.6 percent that we had in 2007, we need to create over 10 million new jobs , and most every serious economist will tell you that these jobs are not coming back. In fact, we are still consistently shedding jobs, on just one day, January 27, several companies announced new cuts of more than 60,000 jobs . Due to the length of this crisis already, millions of Americans are reaching a point where the unemployment benefits they have been living on are coming to an end. More workers have already been out of work longer than at any point since statistics have been recorded, with over six million now unemployed for over six months. A record 20 million Americans qualified for unemployment insurance benefits last year, causing 27 states to run out of funds , with seven more also expected to go into the red within the next few months. In total, 40 state programs are expected to go broke. Most economists believe the unemployment rate will remain high for the foreseeable future. What will happen when we have millions of laid-off workers without any unemployment benefits to save them? Working More for Less The millions struggling to find work are just part of the story. Due to the fact that we now have a record high six people for every one job opening , companies have been able to further increase the workload on their remaining employees. They have been able to increase the amount of hours Americans are working, reduce wages and drastically cut back on benefits. Even though Americans were already the most productive workers in the world before the economic crisis, in the third quarter of 2009, average worker productivity increased by an annualized rate of 9.5 percent , at the same time unit labor cost decreased by 5.2 percent . This has led to record profits for many companies. Of the 220 companies in the S&P 500 who have reported fourth-quarter results thus far, 78 percent of them had "better-than-expected profits" with earnings 17 percent above expectations, "the highest for any quarter since Thomson Reuters began tracking data." According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national median wage was only $32,390 per year in 2008, and median household income fell by 3.6 percent while the unemployment rate was 5.8 percent. With the unemployment rate now at 10 percent, median income has been falling at a 5 percent rate and is expected to continue its decline. Not surprisingly, Americans' job satisfaction level is now at an all-time low . There are also a growing number of employed people who, despite having a job, are still living in poverty. There are at least 15 million workers who now fall into this rapidly growing category. $32,390 a year is not going to get you far in today's economy, and half of the country is making less than that. This is why many Americans are now forced to work two jobs to provide for their family to hopefully make ends meet. A Crime Against Humanity The mainstream news media will numb us to this horrifying reality by endlessly talking about the latest numbers, but they never piece them together to show you the whole devastating picture, and they rarely show you all the immense individual suffering behind them. This is how they "normalize the unthinkable" and make us become passive in the face of such a high causality count. Behind each of these numbers, is a tremendous amount of misery; the physical toll is only outdone by the severe psychological toll . Anyone who has had to put off medical care , or who couldn't get medical care for one of their family members due to financial circumstances, can tell you about the psychological toll that is on top of the physical suffering. Anyone who has felt the stress of wondering how they were going to get their child's next meal or their own, or the stress of not knowing how they are going to pay the mortgage , rent, electricity or heat bill, let alone the car payment, gas, phone, cable or Internet bill. There are now well over 150 million Americans who feel stress over these things on a consistent basis . Over 60 percent of Americans now live paycheck to paycheck . These are all basic things every person should be able to easily afford in a technologically advanced society such as ours. The reason we struggle with these things is because the Economic Elite have robbed us all. This amount of suffering in the United States of America is literally a crime against humanity. This is Part I of David DeGraw's report, "The Economic Elite vs. People of the USA. " AlterNet will run Part II in the coming days. Read more of David DeGraw's work on Amped Status . 2010 Amped Status All rights reserved. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Feb 16 10:14:40 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 16 Feb 2010 10:14:40 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] John Michael Greer: Becoming a Third World Country Message-ID: <28F0E5A59E244FF183C365401B78E656@agingCHS072729> http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/02/becoming-third-world-country.html The Archdruid Report February 10 2010 Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society Becoming a Third World Country by John Michael Greer In the course of writing last week's Archdruid Report post, I belatedly realized that there's a very simple way to talk about the scope of the brutal economic contraction now sweeping through American society - a way, furthermore, that might just be able to sidestep both the obsessive belief in progress and the equally obsessive fascination with apocalyptic fantasy that, between them, make up much of what passes for thinking about the future these days. It's to point out that, over the next decade or so, the United States is going to finish the process of becoming a Third World country. I say "finish the process", because we are already most of the way there. What distinguishes the Third World from the privileged industrial minority of the world's nations? Third World nations import most of their manufactured goods from abroad, while exporting mostly raw materials; that's been true of the United States for decades now. Third World economies have inadequate domestic capital, and are dependent on loans from abroad; that's been true of the United States for just about as long. Third World societies are economically burdened by severe problems with public health; the United States ranks dead last for life expectancy among industrial nations, and its rates of infant mortality are on a par with those in Indonesia, so that's covered. Third World nation are very often governed by kleptocracies - well, let's not even go there, shall we? There are, in fact, precisely two things left that differentiate the United States from any other large, overpopulated, impoverished Third World nation. The first is that the average standard of living here, measured either in money or in terms of energy and resource consumption, stands well above Third World levels - in fact, it's well above the levels of most industrial nations. The second is that the United States has the world's most expensive and technologically complex military. Those two factors are closely related, and understanding their relationship is crucial in making sense of the end of the "American century" and the decline of the United States to Third World status. The US has the world's most expensive military because, just now, it has the world's largest empire. Now of course it's not polite to talk about that in precisely those terms, but let's be frank - the US does not keep its troops garrisoned in more than a hundred countries around the world for the sake of their health, you know. That empire functions, as empires always do, as a way of tilting the economic relationships between nations in a way that pumps wealth out of the rest of the world and into the coffers of the imperial nation. It may never have occurred to you to wonder why it is that the five percent of the world's population who live in the US get to use around a third of the world's production of natural resources and industrial products - certainly it never seems to occur to most Americans to wonder about that - but the economics of empire are the reason. A century ago, in 1910, it was Britain that had the global empire, the worldwide garrisons, and the torrents of wealth flowing from around the world to boost the British standard of living at the expense of everyone else's. A century from now, in 2110, if the technology to maintain any kind of worldwide empire still exists - and it can be done with wooden sailing ships and crude cannon, remember; Spain managed that feat very effectively in its day - somebody else will be in that position. It won't be America, because empire is the methamphetamine of nations; in the short term, the effects feel great, but in the long term they're very often lethal. Britain managed to walk away from its empire without total catastrophe because the United States was ready, willing, and able to take over, and give Britain a place in the inner circle of US allies into the bargain; most other nations have paid for their imperial overshoot with a century or two of economic collapse, political chaos, and social disintegration. That's the corner into which the United States is backing itself right now. The flood of lightly disguised tribute from overseas, while it made Americans fantastically wealthy by the standards of the rest of the world, also gutted America's domestic economy - the same economic imbalances that funnel wealth here also make it nearly impossible to produce goods or provide services at home at a cost that can compete with overseas producers - and created a culture of entitlement that includes all classes from the bottom of the social pyramid right up to the top. As always happens, in turn, the benefits of empire are failing to keep pace with its rapidly rising costs, and in addition, rising demands for imperial largesse from all parts of society are drawing down an increasingly straitened supply of wealth. Meanwhile other nations with imperial ambitions are circling like sharks; the wisest among them know that time is on their side, and that any additional burden that can be loaded onto a drowning empire will hasten the day when it goes under for the third time and they can close for the kill. This view of the world situation is not one that you'll find in the cultural mainstream, or for that matter any of its self-proclaimed alternatives. The contrast with a century ago is instructive. A great many people in late imperial Britain knew perfectly well that the empire on which the sun famously never set - critics suggested that this was because God Himself wouldn't trust an Englishman in the dark - had had its day and was itself setting; the lines of Rudyard Kipling's poem "Recessional" - Far-called, our navies melt away; On dune and headland sinks the fire. Lo! All our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre. - simply put in powerful imagery what many were thinking at that time. You won't find the same sort of historical sense nowadays, though, and I suspect the role of the myth of progress as the secular religion of the modern world has a lot to do with it. In 1910, the concept of historical decline was on a great many minds; these days you'll hardly hear it mentioned, because the belief in history as perpetual progress has become all the more deeply entrenched as the foundations that made the progress of recent centuries possible have rotted away. The resulting insistence on seeing all social changes through onward-and-upward colored spectacles has imposed huge distortions on our perceptions of recent events. One good example is the rise and fall of the so-called "global economy" in recent decades. Its proponents portrayed it as the triumphant wave of a Utopian future that would enable everybody to live like middle-class Americans; its critics portrayed it as the equally triumphant metastasis of a monolithic corporate power out to enslave the world. Very few people saw it as the desperate gambit of a faltering imperial society that could no longer even afford to run its own economy, and was forced to outsource even its most basic economic functions to other countries. Nonetheless, this is what it has turned out to be, and it had the predictable result that several other nations used the influx of capital and technology to build their own industrial sectors, bide their time, and then enter the market themselves and outcompete the very companies and countries that gave them a foot in the door. More broadly, it seems to have escaped the attention of a great many observers that the day of the multinational corporations is drawing to an end. The struggle over Russia's energy resources was the decisive battle there, and when Putin crushed the Western-funded oligarchs and retook control of his country's energy supply, that battle was settled with a typically Russian sense of drama. The elegance with which China has turned international trade law against its putative beneficiaries is in its own way just as typical; a flurry of corporations owned by the Chinese government have spread operations throughout the world, using the mechanisms of global trade to lay the foundations of a future Chinese global empire, while the Chinese government efficiently stonewalled any further trade negotiations that would have put Chinese economic interests at home in jeopardy. More recently, China has begun buying sizable stakes in the multinational corporations that so many well-meaning people in the West once thought would reduce the world to vassalage; the day when ExxonMobil is a wholly-owned subsidiary of CNOOC may be closer than it looks. The same biases that make such global changes invisible have impacts at least as sweeping here at home. Faith in progress, coupled with the tribute economy's culture of entitlement I mentioned earlier, have made it nearly impossible for anybody in American public life to talk about the hard fact that America can no longer afford most of the social habits it adopted during its age of empire. It's almost impossible to think of an aspect of daily life in America today that will not change drastically as a result. We will have to give up the notion, for example, that most Americans ought to go to college and get a "meaningful and fulfilling" job of the sort that can be done sitting at a desk. We will have to abandon the idea that it makes any sense to spend a quarter of a million dollars giving an elderly person with an incurable illness six more months of life. We will have to relearn the old distinction between the deserving poor - those who are willing to work and simply need the opportunity, or who have fallen into destitution through circumstances outside their control - and those who are simply trying to game the system. The great majority of us will get to find out what it's like to make things instead of buying them, even when that means a sharp reduction in quality; to skip meals, or make do with very little, because the money to pay for anything more simply isn't there; to treat serious illnesses at home because care from a doctor costs too much; I could go on for paragraphs, but I trust you get the idea. All these changes, it needs to be said, would be inevitable at this point even if the industrial world depended on renewable resources and had a stable, sustainable relationship with the planetary biosphere that supports all our lives. The United States has played its recent hands in the game of empire very badly indeed, and responded to each loss by doubling down and raising the stakes even higher. If, as a growing number of perceptive commentators have suggested, the US government has been reduced to borrowing money from itself in order to pay its bills - the theme of last week's Archdruid Report post - the end of that road is in sight. It's hard to see this as anything but a desperation move on the part of a political and economic establishment that sees no other options for short-term survival and thinks it has nothing left to lose. It's the exact equivalent of paying household bills by running up debt on credit cards; it can buy a little time, but at the cost of making bankruptcy a certainty once that time runs out. The global context of the crisis, though, also needs to be kept in mind. The industrial world does not depend on renewable resources, and its relationship with the biosphere is leading it straight down the well-worn path of overshoot and collapse; the endgame of American empire, while it would be taking place anyway, has the additional factor of the limits to growth in play. In an alternate world where energy and resource flows could be counted on to remain stable for the foreseeable future, it's quite possible that one of the rising powers might offer America the same devil's bargain we offered Britain in 1942, and prop up the husk of our empire just long enough to take it over for themselves. As it is, it cannot have escaped the attention of any other nation on the planet that something like a quarter of the world's dwindling resource production could be made available for other countries, if only the United States were to lose the ability to purchase energy and other resources from outside its own borders. It's not hard to think of nations that would be in a position to profit mightily from such a readjustment, and nothing so unseemly as a global war would necessarily be required to make it happen; to name only one possibility, it's by no means unthinkable that the United States, having manufactured "color revolutions" to order in countries around the world, might turn out to be vulnerable to the same sort of well-organized mob action here at home. Exactly how things will play out in the months and years to come is anybody's guess. One of the consequences of America's descent into Third World status, though, is that a great many of us may have scant leisure to contemplate global and national issues amid the struggle to keep food on the table and a roof over our heads. In the long run, this shift in focus may have certain advantages; I have argued in previous posts that those nations that undergo the deindustrial transition soonest, and are thus forced to learn how to get by on the very modest energy and resource flows available in the absence of fossil fuels, may find that this gives them a head start in making changes that everyone else will have to make in due time. Still, making the most of those advantages will require a very different approach to economics, among other things, than most of us have pursued (or imagined pursuing) so far. Interestingly, this brings us back to the point where this blog's exploration of deindustrial economics started some months ago: the thought of the maverick economist E F Schumacher. Among his other achievements, Schumacher developed a theory of economic development for the Third World that cut straight across the assumptions of his own time and ours alike, and proposed a route toward relative prosperity that took the limits to growth and the failures of empire into account. That route was not taken in his time; it may be the only way left open in ours. We'll discuss it in detail in next week's post. _____ John Michael Greer, The Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA), has been active in the alternative spirituality movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of more than twenty books, including The Druidry Handbook (Weiser, 2006) and The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age (New Society, 2008). He lives in Cumberland, Maryland. ? =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Feb 16 11:31:31 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 16 Feb 2010 11:31:31 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Spying for Dollars: Military Contractors and Security Firms Reap Huge Profits Message-ID: <5CA02E1FE40E409E833EA545DD39B447@agingCHS072729> www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17626 Global Research February 15, 2010 Spying for Dollars: Military Contractors and Security Firms Reap Huge Profits As the Defense Budget Soars, Billions of Dollars are Channelled Offshore to Avoid Paying Taxes By Tom Burghardt The Obama administration is seeking to increase the obscenely bloated U.S. Defense Department budget to a whopping $708 billion for fiscal year 2011, 3.4% above 2010's record level, The Wall Street Journal reported. While the overall budget deficit will balloon to a staggering $1.6 trillion in 2011, the result of massive tax cuts for the rich, declining revenues, a by-product of capitalism's economic meltdown, imperial adventures abroad and general corporate malfeasance (the old tax-dodge grift), the administration plans to cut $250 billion over three years from non-military "discretionary spending" on domestic social programs. However, as the World Socialist Web Site points out: "President Barack Obama has done nothing to reverse decades of wage stagnation, mounting poverty, and attacks on the social welfare system. On the contrary, following George W. Bush, he has seized on the crisis to redistribute wealth to a tiny financial elite through the ongoing bailout of the finance industry." It is no small irony that despite stark budget figures and an even bleaker future for the American working class, Washington Technology reported January 28 that the "29 largest publicly traded defense contractors increased their use of offshore subsidiaries by 26 percent from 2003 to 2008." Citing reports by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), journalist Alice Lipowicz disclosed that the "subsidiaries helped the contractors reduce taxes, in part by avoiding Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes for U.S. workers hired at the foreign subsidiaries." Considering that the Pentagon hands out some $396 billion annually to contractors, outsourcing everything from "in theatre" construction in places like Afghanistan and Iraq to pricey "intelligence analysts" at secret state agencies, cash not spent on payroll taxes by dodgy firms slices another hole into the already-shredded social safety net. Amongst the largest firms cited in GAO's 2008 report, updated inJanuary 2010, Oracle Corp., operates in 77 tax havens; Boeing Co., 38; Dell Inc., 29; BearingPoint Inc., 28; Computer Sciences Corp., 21; Fluor Corp., 34; General Dynamics, 5; Harris Corp., 13; Hewlett-Packard, 14; Honeywell International, 7; ITT Corp., 18; L-3 Communications, 15; Sprint Nextel, 7. Many of the firms are heavily-leveraged in the lucrative "homeland security" market and provide technology and "cleared" intelligence analysts, many of whom jumped ship from government service for richer, if more dubious employment, to a host of secret state agencies including the CIA, DIA, NSA as well as ultra-secretive outfits engaged in global satellite surveillance such as the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). You would think these firms, flush with record profits since the U.S. embarked on its "War on Terror" in 2001, would do something as pedestrian as paying their fair share of taxes or providing benefits to workers, given severe budgetary pressures on domestic programs, dizzying housing foreclosure rates and skyrocketing unemployment. You'd be wrong, however; dead wrong. An "Island Paradise" Where Profits Go to Hide Despite fabulous riches showered on shareholders by taxpayers, the Military-Industrial-Security-Complex will not rest until every dime has been squeezed from the American people, swelling corporate abdomens well-past the bursting point. In cinematic terms, think of America's ruling elite as a horde of sociopathic zombies gobbling everything in sight. Instead of screaming "Brains!" as in Sam Raimi's cult classic, The Evil Dead, corporate zombies cry "Cash! I Need Cash!" as they take down entire nations in one rapacious bite! A new report published by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in January found, "Many of the top 29 U.S. publicly traded defense contractors--those with $1 billion or more in DOD contracts in fiscal year 2008--have created offshore subsidiaries to facilitate global operations. Between fiscal years 2003 and 2008, they increased their use of these subsidiaries by 26 percent, maintaining at least 1,194 in 2008." GAO auditors revealed that corporate subsidiaries in tax havens such as the Bahamas, Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, Bahrain, Netherlands Antilles, Jersey, Bermuda, the Channel Islands, Luxembourg, Macao, Lebanon, Liechtenstein and Cyprus "helped the 29 contractors reduce taxes, with about one-third decreasing their effective U.S. corporate tax rates in 2008 in part through the use of foreign affiliates, lower foreign tax rates, and indefinite reinvestment of foreign income outside of the United States." A convenient shell game since the "indefinite reinvestment of foreign income" isn't taxable until its been repatriated to the United States. What do you think the chances are of thathappening any time soon? As an added incentive that helped firms hit the old corporate "sweet spot," the congressional watchdogs found that "companies principally used offshore subsidiaries to hire U.S. workers providing services overseas on U.S. government contracts in order to avoid Social Security, Medicare--known as Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA)--and other payroll taxes. This practice allowed contractors to offer lower bids when competing for certain services and thereby reduce costs for DOD." Not that workers derived any benefit from this "special" arrangement; in fact, the use of off-shore tax havens by defense grifters had dire consequences when workers lost their jobs. "In one state," GAO auditors revealed, "we reviewed documentation for about 140 former employees of several contractors who were denied unemployment benefits in 2009. State workforce officials indicated these benefits were denied because the employees worked for a foreign subsidiary and not an American employer." Interestingly enough, many of the global hidey-holes used to shield corporate wealth from the IRS have long been identified by law enforcement investigators and political researchers as prime money-laundering venues for the international drugs trade. This is hardly surprising. Considering the close proximity of U.S. covert operations, illicit arms- and drug trafficking, and general subversive activities carried out by the CIA and other members of the "Intelligence Community," what better way for defense firms to keep it "all in the family" so to speak, then to stash war-derived loot in discrete locations. As researcher Alan Block described the metastatic growth of the tax-haven phenomenon in his groundbreaking work, Masters of Paradise: Organized Crime and the Internal Revenue Service in the Bahamas, "professional criminals were those who took it upon themselves to organize crime. Their true work was the process of organizing crime itself." Block's description is all the more appropriate considering that it is the American militarist state that "took it upon themselves" to organize corporate looting on a planetary scale. After all, resource wars, military interventions or the standing-up of death squad states through CIA fomented coups, directly benefit imperialism's real, indeed only, constituents: U.S. multinational corporations. Out of Sight, Out of Mind A futile exercise perhaps, given that our corrupt representatives in Congress, "change" Democrats and troglodytic Republicans alike, will do nothing to close tax loop-holes big enough to sail an aircraft carrier through. And why would they, since the largest contributors flooding congressional campaign coffers with cold, hard cash are the same firms that reap the benefits of corporate-friendly tax codes, as the Center for Responsive Politics points out. Just for kicks, let's take a look at some of the worst malefactors, firms whose stated mission is to "protect" heimat citizens while inflating the bottom line through the creative use of foreign subsidiaries. Aside from "taking advantage of foreign government markets for commercial work," the GAO reports, "a key benefit of using offshore subsidiaries cited by contractors and other experts we spoke with was the ability to reduce overall taxes." Indeed, "one defense contractor's offshore subsidiary structure decreased its effective U.S. tax rate by approximately 1 percent equaling millions of dollars in tax savings," which of course did nothing to reduce America's swelling deficit or ameliorate crashing social services for millions of workers. GAO "identified some defense contractors that used subsidiaries registered outside the place of contract performance to support DOD service contracts abroad. These offshore subsidiaries had no staff or business activity where registered." I don't know about you, but I don't think Netherlands Antilles or the Cayman Islands have ever been major manufacturing hubs producing ballistic missiles, spy satellites, supercomputers or other assorted goodies for the National Security State! Typically however, GAO discovered that for "one contract task order we reviewed, more than 80 percent of the contractor's staff were employed by its offshore subsidiary." Tellingly, "while five of the six contractors in our case studies said that reducing FICA tax payments was the primary reason for using offshore subsidiaries," the auditors concluded that "this practice also allowed the contractors to reduce costs by avoiding state and federal unemployment insurance taxes for U.S. personnel working overseas." "For U.S. citizens performing certain work outside the United States," we're informed that "federal law requires only American employers to pay unemployment taxes; foreign subsidiaries are not defined as American employers under the law." Therefore if a worker is "let go," the enterprising grifter is off the hook for unemployment payments. Pretty neat trick, eh! Flying the Friendly Skies ... With the CIA! What do these studies tell us? It pays to have friends in high places! Let's take a peek at just two of the 29 firms profiled in GAO's 2010 report as well as their earlier 2008 investigation. The Boeing Company (Boeing): Washington Technology lists Boeing as No. 2 on their Top 100 list of federal contractors with $10,838,231,984 in overall revenue. Primary government contracts include projects for NASA, the Navy, Air Force, Army, Marine Corps, the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department. One subsidiary, and contract, which the giant firm isn't too keen on publicizing is Jeppesen International Trip Planning, the booking agent for CIA torture flights. As Antifascist Calling previously reported, the firm is being sued by victims of the Bush administration's illegal practice of "rendering" (kidnapping) so-called "terrorists" into the hands of torture-friendly regimes or to CIA "black sites" in Europe and the Middle East. The ACLU's landmark litigation on behalf of the victims,Mohamed et al. v. Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. seeks to hold the Boeing subsidiary accountable for planning and providing logistical support for CIA "ghost flights." The Obama administration, like their Bushist predecessors oppose the suit on grounds that "vital state secrets" will be disclosed. On February 10, the British High Court ordered Britain's secret state to release documents disclosing MI5's collaboration in Binyam Mohamed's torture. Mohamed is a litigant in the ACLU's suit against Jeppesen. The Guardian reported that "MI5 faced an unprecedented and damaging crisis tonight after one of the country's most senior judges found that the Security Service had failed to respect human rights, deliberately misled parliament, and had a 'culture of suppression' that undermined government assurances about its conduct." In response to the release of previously classified documents by the British government, as promised, the U.S. Government has threatened that the disclosure "would cloud future intelligence relations with Britain," The Wall Street Journal reported. Meanwhile back in the heimat, Boeing and Jeppesen's corporate officers continue to hold get-out-of-jail-free cards from the Obama administration. As investigative journalist Jane Mayer revealed in The New Yorker back in 2006, Bob Overby, the managing director of Jeppesen International Trip Planning, said during a breakfast for new hires in San Jose, Calif., "We do all of the extraordinary rendition flights--you know, the torture flights. Let's face it, some of these flights end up that way." Technical writer Sean Belcher blew the whistle on the firm and told Mayer that Overby, extemporaneously extolling the virtues for the corporatist bottom line, said: "It certainly pays well. They"--the CIA--"spare no expense. They have absolutely no worry about cost. What they have to get done, they get done." But facilitating CIA torture flights wasn't the only, or even the most lucrative, enterprise driving Boeing's close collaboration with the National Security State. Little known outside the security industry, Boeing's Defense, Space and Security division (DSS, formerly Integrated Defense Systems or IDS) is the firm's intelligence unit. With some 71,000 employees, most holding top secret clearances, DSS is probably the most profitable of the firm's divisions with some $32 billion in revenues, about half of Boeing's annual earnings. According to investigative journalist and security analyst Tim Shorrock, writing on CorpWatch's Spies for Hire collaborative research web site, DSS "has close ties with the NSA and the intelligence community's signals intelligence units. It has an important office about a mile from the agencys headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, in an industrial park filled with NSA contractors." And within DSS, its most important intelligence unit is theAdvanced Global Services & Support division. According to Boeing, Advanced Global Services & Support "is the advanced arm of the Global Services & Support business unit ... responsible for driving the development, growth and transition of innovative, knowledge-based logistics capabilities for Global Services & Support. With a central focus on the emerging network-centric logistics marketplace, Advanced Global Services & Support is working on deploying integrated solutions for end-to-end (factory-to-foxhole) logistics. Its focus--'readiness transformation'." The unit provides "horizontal integration" for "Intelligence Community customers" such as the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA). "In December 2007" Shorrock writes, "Boeing formed a new Intelligence and Security Systems (I&SS) division that appears to combine many of the company's services for foreign and domestic intelligence. Based in Washington, D.C., I&SS has a workforce of about 2,000 people at nine locations nationwide, and includes four program areas: Advanced Information Systems; Mission Systems; Security Solutions, which includes SBInet (the electronic wall being built on the US-Mexico border); and Advanced I&SS. According to a company press release, the new division 'enables increased focus on the complex challenges faced by our homeland security and intelligence community customers. ...I&SS will improve our ability to bring comprehensive, net-enabled capabilities to meet our customers' dynamic requirements'." Much the same can be said of Boeing's imaginative use of tax-havens. According to GAO's 2008 study, Boeing maintained 38 foreign subsidiaries in major airline manufacturing hubs such as Bermuda (6); Cayman Islands (1); Gibraltar (2); Hong Kong (4); Ireland (4) Netherlands Antilles (2); Singapore (3); and U.S. Virgin Islands (16). Spying for Dollars Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC): One of the largest defense contractors operating under the radar, CSC is No. 9 on Washington Technology's Top 100 list of prime federal contractors with some $3,435,767,906 in revenue. The Falls Church, Virginia-based outfit's business includes consulting, systems integration and outsourcing, and their major customers include the Defense Department, NASA, Navy, Army, Air Force, Treasury Department, Health and Human Services, the Environmental Protection Agency, Transportation Department and Department of State. In his essential book Spies for Hire, Shorrock has described CSC as "one of the NSA's most important contractors," managing "global information networks and produces and disseminates intelligence products, including specialized expertise in the area of imagery processing and archiving." "After 9/11" Shorrock writes, "CSC formed a new business unit to go after homeland security and intelligence work," including contracts with the Defense Intelligence Agency. Shorrock reveals that one of the "mission critical" consortiums that run DIA global operations "is managed by Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC). ... The CSC team includes CACI International and L-3 MPRI. This last company is one of the largest private armies in the world, and would have at its disposal hundreds of paramilitary officers who would fit in exceedingly well with the DIA's secret intelligence teams in the Middle East and North Africa." According to the firm's web site, CSC's Intelligence Analysis and Operational Support division "applies advanced information technology, expert knowledge, best practices, and business process improvement in all phases of the intelligence cycle (planning and direction, collection, processing, analysis and production, and dissemination)." "At the enterprise level," CSC informs us, "our prowess in systems integration, engineering, and consulting help create IT infrastructures and ways of doing business that put the right tools in the right hands at the right time, so that intelligence staffs and decision makers can get on with the business of protecting the country." With no end in sight, the data-mining growth curve continues along its merry way, integrating and analyzing the electronic communications of Americans "captured" by CIA, DIA, FBI, NCTC and NSA data miners and their partners in the telecommunications industry. Accordingly, CSC "develops and integrates automated tools for unique requirements of specialized intelligence analysts." Tools that enable secret state agencies to "Capture and mine information from multiple sources in multiple languages; Collaborate in real time with fellow analysts; Create models in which to store working data and test hypotheses; Discover insider threats by tracking network behavior; Automatically analyze and visualize complex data using intelligent software agents." As with hundreds of other firms who trade top secret security clearances as if they were trading cards, CSC provides "experienced, cleared intelligence professionals who perform intelligence analysis, database construction and population, editorial support and quality assurance, production and collection management, analytic tradecraft training, on-the-ground acquisition of unique data sets, and foreign language support." Conveniently, CSC has some 1,200 employees who they rent to the secret state at a premium price "who meet DCID 6/4 eligibility requirements and have access to Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) or Special Access Programs (SAPs)," i.e., Pentagon, CIA and NSA "black programs" only known by code words that escape congressional scrutiny, or indeed any democratic oversight. The firm's "Information Refinery" is touted as an "innovative approach to open source intelligence that captures multilingual information from the Internet and other publicly available sources, then mines, refines and translates it for use by government intelligence analysts and decision makers." Translation: CSC, on behalf of secret state "stakeholders" surveil web pages, blog posts and other electronic communications and "assist" spooks in transforming data, including First Amendment-protected free speech into grist for the "actionable intelligence" mill. One would think a red-blooded, patriotic American firm like CSC would do their all for "God and Country," and pay their fair share of taxes, considering the billions of dollars in contracts the firm has speared from the government. Think again, chumps! GAO reports that CSC has 21 subsidiaries "in jurisdictions listed as tax havens" by the federal government. Some of the firm's global operations are located in tech manufacturing powerhouses such as Bermuda (1); British Virgin Islands (4); Costa Rica (1); Hong Kong (5); Ireland (2); Luxembourg (2); Macao (1); Singapore (4); Switzerland (1). Despite the fact that "DOD officials were aware of the roles offshore subsidiaries played in the DOD contracts we reviewed," GAO investigators found that "contracting officials stated that the use of offshore subsidiaries did not negatively impact contract schedule or performance." After all, $708 billion does a lot of talking! =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Feb 16 14:50:44 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 16 Feb 2010 14:50:44 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] You Think Greece Has Problems? Latvia's Road to Serfdom Message-ID: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24688.htm You Think Greece Has Problems? Latvia's Road to Serfdom By MICHAEL HUDSON and JEFF SOMMERS February 15, 2010 "Counterpunch" -- While most of the world's press focuses on Greece (and also Spain, Ireland and Portugal) as the most troubled euro-areas, the much more severe, more devastating and downright deadly crisis in the post-Soviet economies scheduled to join the Eurozone somehow has escaped widespread notice. No doubt that is because their experience is an indictment of the destructive horror of neoliberalism - and of Europe's policy of treating these countries not as promised, not as helping them develop along Western European lines, but as areas to be colonized as export markets and bank markets, stripped of their economic surpluses, their skilled labor and indeed, working-age labor generally, their real estate and buildings, and whatever was inherited from the Soviet era. Latvia has experienced one of the world's worst economic crises. It is not only economic, but demographic. Its 25.5 per cent plunge in GDP over just the past two years (almost 20 per cent in this past year alone) is already the worst two-year drop on record. The IMF's own rosy forecasts anticipate a further drop of 4 per cent, which would place the Latvian economic collapse ahead of the United States' Great Depression The bad news does not end there, however. The IMF projects that 2009 will see a total capital and financial account deficit of 4.2 billion euros, with an additional 1.5 billion euros, or 9 per cent of GDP, leaving the country in 2010. Moreover, the Latvian government is rapidly accumulating debt. From just 7.9 per cent of GDP in 2007, Latvia's debt is projected to be 74 per cent of GDP for this year, supposedly stabilizing at 89 per cent in 2014 in the best-case IMF scenario. This would place it far outside the debt Maastricht debt limits for adopting the euro. Yet achieving entry into the eurozone has been the chief pretext of the Latvia's Central Bank for the painful austerity measures necessary to keep its currency peg. Maintaining that peg has burned through mountains of currency reserves that otherwise could have been invested in its domestic economy. Yet nobody in the West is asking why Latvia has suffered this fate, so typical of the Baltics and other post-Soviet economies but only slightly more extreme. Nearly twenty years since these countries achieved freedom from the old USSR in 1991, the Soviet system hardly can be blamed as the sole cause of their problems. Not even corruption alone can be blamed - a legacy of the late Soviet period's dissolution, to be sure, but magnified, intensified and even encouraged in the kleptocratic form that has provided such rich pickings for Western bankers and investors. It was Western neoliberals who financialized these economies with the "business friendly reforms" so loudly applauded by the World Bank, Washington and Brussels. Far lower levels of corruption obviously are to be desired (but whom else would the West trust?), but dramatically reducing it would perhaps only improve matters up to the level of Estonia's road into euro-debt peonage. These neighboring Baltic counties likewise have suffered dramatic unemployment, reduced growth, declining health standards and emigration, in sharp contrast to Scandinavia and Finland. Joseph Stiglitz, James Tobin and other economists in the West's public eye have begun to explain that there is something radically wrong with the financialized order imported by Western ideological salesmen in the wake of the Soviet collapse. Neoliberal economics certainly was not the road that Western Europe took after World War II. It was a new experiment, whose dress rehearsal was imposed initially at gunpoint by the Chicago Boys in Chile. In Latvia, the advisors were from Georgetown, but the ideology was the same: dismantle the government and turn it over to political insiders. For the post-Soviet application of this cruel experiment, the idea was to give Western banks, financial investors, and ostensibly "free market" economists (so-called because they gave away public property freely, untaxed it, and gave new meaning to the term "free lunch") a free hand in much of the Soviet bloc to design entire economies. And as matters turned out, every design was the same. The names of individuals were different, but most were linked to and financed by Washington, the World Bank and European Union. And since the West's financial institutions were the sponsors, one hardly should be surprised that they came up with a design in their own financial interest. It was a plan that no democratic government in the West could have passed. Public enterprises were doled out to individuals trusted to sell out quickly to Western investors and local oligarchs who would move their money safely offshore into Western havens. To cap matters, local tax systems were created that left the traditional two major Western bank customers - real estate and natural infrastructure monopolies - nearly tax free. This left their rents and monopoly pricing "free" to be paid to Western banks as interest rather than used as the domestic tax base to help reconstruct these economies. There were almost no commercial banks in the Soviet Union. Rather than helping these countries create banks of their own, Western Europe encouraged its own banks to create credit and load down these economies with interest charges - in euros and other hard currencies for the banks' protection. This violated a prime axiom of finance: never denominate your debts in hard currency when your revenue is denominated in a softer one. But as in the case of Iceland, Europe promised to help these countries join the Euro by suitably helpful policies. The "reforms" consisted in showing them how to shift taxes off business and real estate (the prime bank customers) onto labor, not only as a flat income tax but a flat "social service" tax, so as to pay Social Security and health care as a user fee by labor rather than funded out of the general budget largely by the higher tax brackets. Unlike the West, there was no significant property tax. This obliged governments to tax labor and industry. But unlike the West, there was no progressive income or wealth tax. Latvia had the equivalent of a 59 per cent flat tax on labor in many cases. (American Congressional committee heads and their lobbyists can only dream of so punitive a tax on labor, so free a lunch for their main campaign contributors!) With a tax like this, European countries had nothing to fear from economies that emerged tax free with no property charges to burden their labor with taxes, low housing costs, low debt costs. These economies were poisoned from the outset. That is what made them so "free market" and "business friendly" from the vantage point of today's Western economic orthodoxy. Lacking the power to tax real estate and other property - or even to impose progressive taxation on the higher income brackets, governments were obliged to tax labor and industry. This trickle-down fiscal philosophy sharply increased the price of labor and capital, making industry and agriculture in neoliberalized economies so high-cost as to be uncompetitive with "Old Europe." In effect the post-Soviet economies were turned into export zones for Old Europe's industry and banking services. Western Europe had developed by protecting its industry and labor, and taxing away the land rent and other revenue that had no counterpart in a necessary cost of production. The post-Soviet economies "freed" this revenue to be paid to Western European banks. These economies - debt-free in 1991 - were loaded down with debt, denominated in hard currencies, not their own. Western bank loans were not used to upgrade their capital investment, public investment and living standards. The great bulk of these loans were extended mainly against assets already in place, inherited from the Soviet period. New real estate construction did indeed take off, but the great bulk of it has now sunk into negative equity. And the Western banks are demanding that Latvia and the Baltics pay by squeezing out even more of an economic surplus with even more neoliberal "reforms" that threaten to drive even more of their labor abroad as their economies shrink and poverty spreads. The pattern of a ruling kleptocracy at the top and an indebted work force - non- or weakly unionized, with few workplace protections - was applauded as a business-friendly model for the rest of the world to emulate. The post-Soviet economies were thoroughly "underdeveloped," rendered hopelessly high-cost and generally unable to compete on anywhere near equal terms with their Western neighbors. The result has been an economic experiment seemingly gone mad, a dystopia whose victims are now being blamed. Neoliberal trickle-down ideology - apparently being prepared for application to Europe and North America with an equally optimistic rhetoric - was so economically destructive that it is almost as if these nations were invaded militarily. So it is indeed time to start worrying about whether the Baltics may be a dress rehearsal for what we are about to see in the United States. The word "reform" is now taking on a negative connotation in the Baltics, as it has in Russia. It has come to signify retrogression back to feudal dependency. But whereas feudal lords from Sweden and Germany ruled their Latvian manors by the power of landownership, they now control the Baltics by their foreign-currency mortgage loans against the region's real estate. Debt peonage has replaced outright serfdom. Mortgages far in excess of actual market values, which have plunged by 50-70 per cent in the past year (depending on housing type), also are far in excess of the ability of Latvian homeowners to pay. The volume of foreign-currency debt is far beyond what these countries can earn by exporting the products of their labor, industry and agriculture to Europe (which hardly wants any imports) or other regions of the world in which democratic governments are pledged to protect their labor force, not sell it out and subject it to unprecedented austerity programs - all in the name of "free markets." Two decades have passed since the neoliberal order was introduced, and the results are disastrous, if not almost a crime against humanity. Economic growth has not occurred. Soviet-era assets have simply been loaded down with debt. This is not how Western Europe developed after World War II, or earlier for the matter - or China most recently. These countries pursued the classical path of protection of domestic industry, public infrastructure spending, progressive taxation, legal prohibitions against insider dealing and looting - all anathema to neoliberal free-market ideology. What is starkly at issue are the underlying assumptions of the world's economic order. At the core of today's crisis of economic theory and policy are the all but forgotten premises and guiding concepts of classical political economy. George Soros, Stiglitz and others describe a global casino economy (which Soros certainly enriched himself by playing) in which finance has become detached from the process of wealth creation. The financial sector makes increasingly steep, even unpayably high claims on the real economy of goods and services. This was the concern of the classical economists when they focused on the problem of rentiers, owners of property and special privilege whose revenues (with no counterpart in any necessary cost of production) led to a de facto tax on the economy - in this case, by imposing debt on it. Classical economists recognized the need to subordinate finance to the needs of the real economy. This was the philosophy that guided U.S. banking regulation in the 1930's, and which West Europe and Japan followed from the 1950s through the 1970s to promote investment in manufacturing. Instead of checking the financial sector's ability to engage in speculative excess, the United States overturned these regulations in the 1980s. From a bit below 5 per cent of total U.S. profits in 1982, the financial sector's after-tax profits rose to an unprecedented 41 per cent in 2007. In effect this zero-sum activity was an overhead "tax" on the economy. Along with financial restructuring, the main item in the classical tool-kit was tax policy. The aim was to reward work and wealth creation, and to collect the "free lunch" resulting from "external" social economies as the natural tax base. This tax policy had the virtue of reducing the burden on earned income (wages and profits). Land was seen as supplied by nature without a labor-cost of production (and hence without cost value). But instead of making it the natural tax base, governments have permitted banks to load it down with debt, turning the rise in land's rental value into interest charges. The result, in classical terminology, is a financial tax on society - revenue that society was supposed to collect as the tax base to invest in economic and social infrastructure to make society richer. The alternative has been to tax land and industrial capital. And what tax collectors have relinquished, banks now collect in the form of a rising price for land sites - a price for which buyers pay mortgage interest. Classical economics could have predicted Latvia's problems. With no curbs on finance or regulation of monopoly pricing, no industrial protection, privatization of the public domain to create "tollbooth economies," and a tax policy that impoverishes labor and even industrial capital while rewarding speculators, Latvia's economy has seen little economic development. What it has achieved - and what has won it such loud applause from the West - has been its willingness to rack up huge debts to subsidize its economic disaster. Latvia has too little industry, too little agricultural modernization, but over 9 billion lati in private debt - now at risk of being shifted onto the government's balance sheet, just as has occurred with the U.S. bank bailouts. If this credit had been extended productively to build Latvia's economy, it would have been acceptable. But it was mostly unproductive, extended to fuel land-price inflation and luxury consumption, reducing Latvia to a state of near debt serfdom. In what Sarah Palin would call a "hopey-change thing," the Bank of Latvia suggests that the bottom of the crisis has been reached. Exports finally have begun to pick up, but the economy is still in desperate straits. If current trends continue there will be no more Latvians left to inherit any economic revival. Unemployment still stands at more than 22 per cent. Tens of thousands have left the country, and tens of thousands more have decided not to have children. This is a natural response to saddling the country with billions of lati in public and private debt. Latvia is not on a trajectory toward Western levels of affluence, and there is no way out of its current regressive tax policy and anti-labor, anti-industry and anti-agriculture neoliberalism being imposed so coercively by Brussels as a condition for bailing Latvia's central bank out so that it can pay Swedish banks that have made such unproductive and parasitic loans. Albert Einstein stated that "insanity [is] doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Latvia has employed the same self-destructive anti-government, anti-labor, anti-industrial, anti-agricultural "pro-Western" Washington Consensus for almost 20 years, and the results have become worse and worse. The task at hand now is to liberate the economy Latvia from its neoliberal road to neo-serfdom. One would think that the path selected would be the one charted by the classical 19th-century economists that guided the prosperity we see in the West and now also in East Asia. But this will require a change of economic philosophy - and that will require a change of government. The question is, how will Europe and the West respond. Will it admit its error? Or will it brazen it out? Signs today are not promising. The West says that labor has not been impoverished enough, industry has not been starved enough, and economic the patient has not been bled enough. If this is what Washington and Brussels are saying to the Baltics, imagine what they are about to do to their own domestic populations! Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street economist and now a Distinguished Research Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC), and president of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET). He is the author of many books, including Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (new ed., Pluto Press, 2002) and Trade, Development and Foreign Debt: A History of Theories of Polarization v. Convergence in the World Economy. He can be reached via his website, mh at michael-hudson.com Jeffrey Sommers is co-director of the Baltic Research Group at ISLET, and visiting faculty at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga. He can be reached at jeffrey.sommers at fulbrightmail.org =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Feb 16 15:10:42 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:10:42 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] =?iso-8859-1?q?For_sale=3A_Iraq=27s_smuggled_heritage?= Message-ID: <81B9798C67BC41EBA4AABFD3A4951204@agingCHS072729> http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100216/NATIONAL/702159871/1010 [Photo: Dubai Customs foils an attempt to smuggle archeological remains of Iraqi origin. Courtesy of Dubai Customs] For sale: Iraq's smuggled heritage Loveday Morris Last Updated: February 16. 2010 Tens of thousands of precious artefacts looted from Iraq are circulating on a clandestine world market, smuggled out of the war-ravaged country and into the hands of private collectors in Europe and the US. Those objects discovered by authorities, such as the Dubai Customs' haul last week that included bronze statues and coins that are more than a millennium old, are just "the tip of the iceberg", according to Dr Mark Beech, of the Historic Environment Department at the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (Adach). "With the UAE such a hub for international trade and travel in the region, it's inevitable that such items will pass through here," he said. Though the most popular smuggling route from Iraq is through Kurdistan to Turkey and then on to the West, a significant number of artefacts exit through Iraq's porous border with Iran. From there, the UAE is an obvious next port of call, according to experts. "One of the routes is definitely through the UAE," said Dr Farouk al Rawi, an Iraqi professor in ancient languages and archaeology and researcher at the British Museum. "I'm sure the customs authorities of the UAE are very strict on these matters, but smugglers are good at avoiding laws. They are bypassing the customs laws everywhere." He said it is difficult to estimate the number of items that pass through the UAE, but the total taken out of Iraq since the 2003 invasion is likely to be in the hundreds of thousands. More than 15,000 items were taken from the National Museum in Iraq. Although many have been recovered, particularly those which never left the country, thousands have disappeared into private collections. Iraq has about 124,000 archaeological sites, Dr al Rawi said, and the a lack of security makes it impossible to keep watch on all the treasures. "If you look at aerial photos, you see that the land looks like it's covered in moon craters from illegal excavations and the damage caused by the war itself," Dr al Rawi said. "It's really saddening. "This isn't just the heritage of the Iraqis, this heritage is very important worldwide. It's the history of humanity." Mohammed al Marri, the executive director of cargo operations at Dubai Customs, said the UAE is improving its efforts to detect stolen items. Customs officials have received extra training, and an electronic programme assesses the risk of each assignment coming through, cross-referencing against past activities of the company shipping the goods. In June 2008, Dubai Customs found 128 items, including pottery, jewellery and coins, behind a false wall in a dhow believed to have originated in Iran. "It's a continuous challenge between us and the smugglers," Mr al Marri said. Under regulations adopted by the GCC last summer, any cultural object passing through the Emirates must have a Unesco export certificate, giving ownership and origin. However, the UAE lacks a federal law governing the smuggling of antiquities. Regulations are determined by individual emirates. "The federal law covering this is still in its draft form; it has been for some years," Dr Beech said. "When it's passed it will give a better degree of protection and more severe penalties for those involved in these activities." Mr al Marri said most antiquities smuggled into the UAE are intended for other markets, where there are more "end users". "Most [smugglers] don't have an end-user here. They come in to try and identify an end user," he said. "[Shipments] mainly come addressed not to a company but as personal belongings." Last week's confiscated consignment, which contained items dating to the Sassanid period, from AD226 to 651, and the Hellenistic era, which began in 323BC and lasted 250 years, was allegedly bound for an Arab dealer, who has been arrested. The items were concealed in a consignment of furniture. Dr al Rawi said most genuine items are sold to markets in Europe and the US, where they fetch higher prices, but they are often copied in Iran first, with the fakes sold in the region. Dr Beech said between 60 per cent and 80 per cent of the items he is asked to identify turn out to be fakes. "The European collectors are more knowledgable so the originals tend to make their way there," Dr al Rawi said. "Lots of them are faked according to originals and the workmanship looks Iranian." lmorris at thenational.ae =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Feb 16 15:24:46 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:24:46 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [Afghanistan] US Poised to Commit War Crimes in Marjah Message-ID: <7E730E93C2E147BBB4DA8F36F01C2279@agingCHS072729> http://www.truthout.org/us-poised-commit-war-crimes-marjah56863 US Poised to Commit War Crimes in Marjah Friday 12 February 2010 by: Robert Naiman, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis (Image: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: hansvandenberg30, The U.S. Army) Editor's note: The US-led offensive in Marjah was launched Friday afternoon. Please see this report -- http://www.truthout.org/us-led-offensive-under-way-southern-afghanistan56874 -- for an update. The United States and NATO are poised to launch a major assault in the Marjah District in southern Afghanistan. Tens of thousands of Afghan civilians are in imminent peril. Will President Obama and Congress act to protect civilians in Marjah, in compliance with the obligations of the United States under the laws of war? Few civilians have managed to escape the Afghan town of Marjah ahead of a planned US/NATO assault, raising the risk of civilian casualties, McClatchy News reported. [see video] Under the laws of war, the US and NATO - who have told civilians not to flee - bear an extra responsibility to control their fire and avoid tactics that endanger civilians, Human Rights Watch noted. "I suspect that they believe they have the ability to generally distinguish between combatants and civilians," said Brad Adams of Human Rights Watch. "I would call that into question, given their long history of mistakes, particularly when using air power. Whatever they do, they have an obligation to protect civilians and make adequate provision to alleviate any crisis that arises," he said. "It is very much their responsibility." "If [NATO forces] don't avoid large scale civilian casualties, given the rhetoric about protecting the population, then no matter how many Taliban are routed, the Marjah mission should be considered a failure," said an analyst with the International Crisis Group. A report in The Wall Street Journal cast fresh doubt on the ability - and even on the interest - of US forces to distinguish combatants from civilians. "Across southern Afghanistan, including the Marjah district where coalition forces are massing for a large offensive, the line between peaceful villager and enemy fighter is often blurred," the Journal says. The commander of the US unit responsible for Pashmul estimates that about 95 percent of the locals are Taliban or aid the militants. Among front-line troops, "frustration is boiling over" over more restrictive rules of engagement than in Iraq, the Journal said - a dangerous harbinger of potential war crimes when the US is about to engage in a major assault in an area densely populated with civilians. Today, AFP reported, military helicopters dropped leaflets over Marjah as radio broadcasts "warned residents not to shelter Taliban ahead of a massive assault." Doesn't this suggest that the invading US forces may regard any civilian alleged to be "sheltering Taliban" as a legitimate target, including women and children? If the US assault in Marjah results in large scale civilian casualties, the US will have committed a major war crime. If the United States cannot protect civilians in Marjah, as the US is required to do under the laws of war, the assault should be called off. Under international law, every US citizen is legally obligated to work to bring about the compliance of the United States with international law. Raise your voice now, before it is too late. This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Feb 16 15:30:04 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:30:04 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [Marjah] US military rockets kill 12 civilians in their home Message-ID: <8E9FC7424B444F9686A557DB232577EC@agingCHS072729> Rockets kill 12 near Marjah More civilian deaths as US launches offensive in southern Afghanistan By Patrick Martin 15 February 2010 In what is likely to be the first of many such atrocities, two US military rockets slammed into a house near Marjah, the target of the current offensive, killing 12 people. US military authorities admitted that the victims were innocent civilians sheltering in their own home, as they had been advised to do by US and NATO officials. Full: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/feb2010/afgh-f15.shtml =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Feb 16 21:30:09 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 16 Feb 2010 21:30:09 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [Video] Dick Cheney: I was a big supporter of water-boarding Message-ID: Cheney: "I was a big supporter of waterboarding. I was a big supporter of the enhanced interrogation techniques..." Watch the video....it's right from the horse's mouth.... http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/must-read/week-transcript-former-vice-president-dick-cheney From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Feb 17 18:33:28 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 17 Feb 2010 18:33:28 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Must see film: "La Commune" by Peter Watkins Message-ID: (hat tip to Lou Proyect's marxism list -- the film itself is accessible from the final [YouTube]) "La Commune" by English filmmaker Peter Watkins. Two reviews here: http://chtodelat.wordpress.com/2008/10/31/peter-watkins-la-commune/ http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2006/11/05/la-commune/ Wikipedia's bio of Watkins http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Watkins Watkins' personal website: http://pwatkins.mnsi.net/ Part 1 (the remaining 25 parts will show up in the sidebar on YouTube): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5UjXpynCbI =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Feb 17 20:44:06 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:44:06 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Derrick O'Keefe: Where's that Olympic Truce? Message-ID: http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/derrick/2010/02/wheres-olympic-truce Where's that Olympic Truce? By Derrick O'Keefe | February 17, 2010 Last week, I wrote a piece in the Georgia Straight about the war in Afghanistan and the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver: "The 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow were boycotted in protest of the Soviet Union's invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Then-U.S. president Jimmy Carter announced the boycott in February 1980, and Canada and dozens of other countries soon followed suit ... Thirty years later, it is the United States, Canada, and the other NATO countries that are occupying Afghanistan. Instead of a boycott, the Vancouver 2010 Olympics are being used to promote militarism in general and Canada's role in the occupation of Afghanistan in particular." It's now fair to speculate that the Games have been used even more cynically -- as cover for a massive new NATO offensive in Afghanistan that has already claimed many Afghan civilians' lives. Operation Moshtarak, with Canadian Forces participation, was launched in the southern province of Helmand on Feb. 12, the day of the Opening Ceremonies in Vancouver. And it has already taken its toll on Afghans, as reported in the Globe and Mail: "In two days, coalition troops have killed as many as 20 civilians in five separate incidents in two Afghanistan provinces. Three men were shot and killed after being individually mistaken for insurgents; five men were killed in an air strike on Monday after Canadian-commanded troops erroneously thought they were planting bombs; and as many as 12 civilians were killed in a high-profile rocket attack a day earlier, the details of which remained unclear amid varying accounts yesterday." This military offensive in Afghanistan, the largest in nine years of war, makes a complete mockery of the commitment to a so-called "Olympic Truce" made by the Vancouver Olympic Committee (VANOC) and the Canadian government. John Furlong, VANOC's CEO, said this from the rostrum of the United Nations in October 2009: "The Games are an opportunity for all of us to uphold sport as an inspirational means to promote a culture of peace among nations and people everywhere ... Just like every athlete is held to account on the playing field where the values of respect, fair play and inclusion must prevail, we urge all UN member states to observe these values individually and collectively as we welcome the world to the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games in February and March 2010." Following Furlong's speech, Canada and the 191 other UN member states passed, by consensus, a resolution to uphold the values expressed by the Olympic Truce movement. Like so many beautiful words on paper in this world of inequality backed by the might of empire, the Olympic Truce is meaningless. Or worse. It has been used, together with the spectacle of the Games, to deceive and distract from the state violence being perpretrated by the host country, among others, in occupied Afghanistan. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Feb 17 20:56:22 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:56:22 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Action Alert: Gaza photo exhibition threatened with closure Message-ID: http://www.muzzlewatch.com/2010/02/16/action-alert-gaza-photo-exhibition-threatened-with-closure/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Muzzlewatch+%28MuzzleWatch%29 Action Alert: Gaza photo exhibition threatened with closure Posted on February 16 2010 by Cecilie Surasky Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East just sent out this action alert. The video features some of the photos in the exhibit. [Use link below to view video] Dear Friends, On Monday, Feb. 15th, Cinema du Parc received an email insisting that CJPME's Photo Exposition, Human Drama in Gaza, be immediately removed from the Cinema. The email was from a legal representative of Gestion Redbourne PDP Inc., the owners of the building housing Cinema du Parc. The Cinema has hosted dozens of expositions in the past three years, and this is the first time that such action has been taken. This move on the part of Redbourne seems entirely political, to muzzle the message of Human Drama in Gaza. If you live outside Montreal, click here http://www.cjpme.ca/action_cinema_2010_02.shtml to protest this action. If you live in Montreal, click here http://www.cjpme.ca/action_cinema_mtl_2010_02.shtml to protest Redbourne's action and to support the Cinema and the Exposition. More Info CJPME's Human Drama in Gaza Photo Exposition features 44 photos, taken before, during and after last winter's 22-day assault on Gaza by professional photographers from Israel, Palestine, and the West. Produced by CJPME, and funded through private donations, the Montreal stop at Cinema du Parc is the first in a series of cross-Canada shows. The Montreal Exposition began on Friday, Jan. 15th and was originally scheduled to continue through through Sunday, February 28th. The Exposition is open from 6:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. on weekdays, and from 3:00 p.m. until 9:30 p.m. on weekends. All the photos and captions used in the Exposition can be found here, and a video trailer introducing the Exposition can be found here. Cinema du Parc has been a great partner in the hosting of the Exposition in Montreal, and is standing its ground in the face of Redbourne's action. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Feb 17 21:33:43 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 17 Feb 2010 21:33:43 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [Video] Poverty activists angry at Olympics Message-ID: from the video: <> http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2010/02/201021495840226852.html Poverty activists angry at Olympics UPDATED ON: Sunday, February 14, 2010 14:01 Mecca time, 11:01 GMT [see video: 2:49] More than 200 masked demonstrators have staged protests in the Canadian city of Vancouver as the 2010 Winter Olympics officially got under way. Many of the protesters were anti-poverty activists who say that Canada has failed to live up to promises it made to tackle poverty when it bid for the event in 2003. Al Jazeera's Cath Turner reports from Vancouver on the Olympic Resistance Network, created with the express intent of disrupting the Winter Games. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Feb 17 22:44:18 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 17 Feb 2010 22:44:18 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Langston Hughes & Kem: Matter of Time (for Black History Month) Message-ID: Kem: Matter of Time http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COnTkjV3oak Langston Hughes: Let America Be America Again: http://booksinternationale.pbworks.com/Langston+Hughes =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Feb 17 22:55:07 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 17 Feb 2010 22:55:07 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Single-Payer Healthcare Coming to Another State? Message-ID: http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/50183 AfterDowningStreet.Org Candidate for North Carolina House Commits to Introducing State Single-Payer Healthcare Submitted by davidswanson on Wed, 2010-02-17 18:11 By David Swanson A bill to create single-payer healthcare in California has passed that state's senate for the third time now. Californians just need to persuade a governor to sign it. Single-payer healthcare bills are advancing in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and a growing list of states, including New Mexico, where State Senator Jerry Ortiz y Pino, a long-time supporter of single-payer healthcare, is running for Lieutenant Governor. Now North Carolina house candidate Marcus Brandon has pledged to introduce a bill to create single-payer healthcare in that state. Brandon, whom I know and like and who worked for Congressman Dennis Kucinich's 2008 presidential campaign, is a candidate in North Carolina House District 60. That's near Greensboro, where I can just picture Marcus sitting at a lunch counter and refusing to be provoked. Brandon has promised that if he is elected, the first piece of legislation he will introduce will be the "North Carolina Healthcare Act" which will provide universal single-payer healthcare to every citizen of the state. Brandon says that he remains a supporter of national single-payer healthcare and will continue lobbying for passage of HR 676, Congressman John Conyers' bill: "The HR 676 fight is definitely not over, but we must now strategically shift the focus to the state level. When other states see that we can cut the cost of healthcare, streamline our medical industry, and still provide universal coverage to all North Carolinians, then all of the sudden, single-payer health care doesn't look so bad." Brandon argues that a single-payer system could save over $1.5 billion per year in reduced bureaucracy in the state of North Carolina alone. And he speaks confidently about making this happen: "North Carolina is poised to be the first state to adopt single-payer, once I am able to introduce it. North Carolinians are ready for real solutions to healthcare. North Carolina has the third highest healthcare cost of any state, while it sags at 37th in average income. This is a disparity that most North Carolinians feel when they have to think about healthcare. Every day, as I am knocking on doors to talk to voters, I hear stories of people who cannot afford insurance and become victims of this for-profit industry." Brandon says his bill is similar to other states' initiatives such as the "Minnesota Health Act" or the "California Universal Healthcare Act." Brandon points to these two bills as excellent examples of how a single payer healthcare system could be both fiscally sound and provide full coverage. Brandon served in 2007 and 2008 as Dennis Kucinich's National Finance Director and Deputy Campaign Manager. He says that Kucinich inspired him: "Dennis urged me to run for office so we could build a state-by-state grassroots movement for single payer and other progressive issues. My campaign for the North Carolina House is an extension of the work I did with Dennis Kucinich." While Kucinich has struggled unsuccessfully thus far to pass federal legislation facilitating the state creation of single-payer healthcare systems, states are pressign ahead and will deal with lawsuits from "health" corporations when and if they arise. Marcus Brandon's website is at http://www.marcusbrandon.com He has a primary on May 4th. Those who want a real healthcare system in this country would be wise to pour money into his campaign and those of other state leaders across the country. Alternatively we could keep putting all our eggs in the basket of fantasies about the United States Senate getting its act together. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Feb 17 23:12:03 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 17 Feb 2010 23:12:03 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Yves Engler: Canada & Venezuela Message-ID: http://www.zcommunications.org/canada-and-venezuela-by-yves-engler Yves Engler's ZSpace Page / ZSpace February 17, 2010 Canada & Venezuela By Yves Engler The government of Hugo Chavez was correct last week when a representative said Ottawa supports "coup plotters" and "destabilizers" in Venezuela. But it's not because Harper is of the "ultra right" as suggested. In fact, both Liberal and Conservative governments have tacitly supported the U.S. campaign to replace the government of Venezuela. In April 2002 a military coup took Chavez prisoner and imposed an unelected government. While most Latin American leaders condemned the coup, Canadian diplomats who were working under the direction of a Liberal government were silent. It was particularly hypocritical of Ottawa to accept the coup. Only a year earlier, during the Summit of the Americas in Qu?bec City, Jean Chr?tien's Liberals made a big show of the new Organization of American States (OAS) "democracy clause" that was supposed to commit the hemisphere to electoral democracy. Eight months after the coup, the Venezuelan opposition renewed its campaign to oust Chavez by sabotaging the oil industry and closing their businesses. In the midst of the upheaval, Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham simply asked both sides to resume dialogue, never stating Canada's opposition to any government that gained power undemocratically. But, growing social reforms in Venezuela increased Ottawa's ire. While the NDP called on the Liberal government to invite Chavez for an official visit, the president was passed over in favour of the leader of a U.S.-funded opposition group. In January 2005, Paul Martin's Liberals invited Maria Corina Machado to Ottawa. Machado was in charge of S?mate, an organization at the forefront of anti-Chavez political campaigns. Just prior to her invitation, in August 2004, S?mate led the unsuccessful campaign to recall Chavez through a referendum. Before that, Machado's name appeared on a list of people who endorsed the 2002 coup, for which she faced charges of treason. She denied signing the now-infamous "Carmona decree" that dissolved the National Assembly and Supreme Court and suspended the elected government, the Attorney General, Comptroller General, governors as well as mayors elected during Chavez's administration. It also annulled land reforms and increases in royalties paid by oil companies. Canada also helped finance S?mate, giving the group $22,000 in 2005-06. Minister of International Cooperation Jos? Verner explained that "Canada considered S?mate to be an experienced NGO with the capability to promote respect for democracy, particularly a free and fair electoral process in Venezuela." In October 2006 Canada sided with the U.S. in a diplomatic row with Venezuela over the Western Hemisphere's Security Council seat. The U.S. and Canada backed the notorious human rights violator Guatemala, while Venezuela was seen as a protest vote by developing countries fed up with U.S. policy. When Chavez was reelected with 63 percent of the vote two months later, 32 members of the OAS supported a resolution to congratulate him on the victory. Ottawa was the only nation to join Washington in opposing a message of congratulations for an election win monitored by the OAS. Just after Chavez's reelection U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Hemispheric Affairs, Thomas Shannon, called Canada "a country that can deliver messages that can resonate in ways that sometimes our messages don't for historical or psychological reasons." Seven months later, Harper toured South America, "to show [the region] that Canada functions and that it can be a better model than Venezuela," in the words of a high-level Foreign Affairs official. During the trip, Harper and his entourage made a number of comments critical of the Venezuelan government. Last April Harper responded to a question regarding Venezuela by saying, "I don't take any of these rogue states lightly." A month earlier, the Prime Minister referred to the far right Colombian government as a valuable "ally" in a hemisphere full of "serious enemies and opponents." The most recent example of Ottawa supporting Venezuela's opposition took place at the end of January. After meeting only with opposition figures during a trip to Venezuela Peter Kent, minister of state for the Americas, said: "Democratic space within Venezuela has been shrinking and in this election year, Canada is very concerned about the rights of all Venezuelans to participate in the democratic process." (Venezuela's ambassador to the OAS, Roy Chaderton Matos, responded: "I am talking of a Canada governed by an ultra right that closed its Parliament for various months to (evade) an investigation over the violation of human rights - I am talking about torture and assassinations - by its soldiers in Afghanistan.") Ottawa' s antagonism towards Chavez is motivated by a desire to support Washington, but is also being driven by particular Canadian business interests. In 2001 the Venezuelan National Guard seized Vancouver-based Vanessa Ventures' gold project. According to the Globe and Mail, this prompted the company to spend "seven years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees on nearly a dozen legal proceedings before unsympathetic Venezuelan courts to claim more than $181-million it says it invested in the mining camp." In early 2007 Venezuela forced private oil companies to become minority partners with the state oil company, prompting Calgary based Petro-Canada to sell its portion of an oil project. And, reported the National Post:"Gold Reserve Inc. has seen its share price get punished by the uncertainty surrounding mining projects in that country and the possibility that Hugo Chavez's government will take over their deposits." But the move that received the most attention from the business press was the government's legal maneuvers over the Las Cristinas gold mine, Venezuela's largest gold deposit. The stock of Toronto-based Crystallex, which had the rights to operate Las Cristinas, plunged and in December 2008, Reuters reported: "Crystallex International filed a letter with Venezuela's government claiming that the country's denial of approvals to mine the Las Cristinas gold deposit goes against a treaty between Canada and Venezuela." Despite his company not owning any properties in Venezuela, the head of Barrick Gold, Peter Munk, has repeatedly attacked Chavez. In a August 2007 letter to the Financial Times headlined "Stop Chavez' Demagoguery Before it is Too Late", he wrote: "Your editorial 'Chavez in Control' was way too benign a characterization of a dangerous dictator - the latest of a type who takes over a nation through the democratic process, and then perverts or abolishes it to perpetuate his own power . aren't we ignoring the lessons of history and forgetting that the dictators Hitler, Mugabe, Pol Pot and so on became heads of state by a democratic process? . autocratic demagogues in the Chavez mode get away with [it] until their countries become totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, or Slobadan Milosevic's Serbia . Let us not give President Chavez a chance to do the same step-by- step transformation of Venezuela." Munk, among Embassy magazine's "Top 50 People Influencing Canadian Foreign Policy", sees Venezuela's reforms as a threat to his profit-making possibilities and as an example that might be replicated elsewhere. It is a view likely held by most of Canada's foreign focused business community, especially in the resource sector. Over the past two decades there has been an explosion in Canadian miners in the region. Canadian companies now control some 1,300 concessions in Latin America. These corporations have benefited from the privatization of state-run mining companies, opening the sector to foreign investment and reductions in royalty rates. Growing calls for increased state control over extractive industries are a major threat to Canadian miners. And these are almost always among the first reforms pushed by those resisting neoliberalism. Put simply, Canadian miners profit-making in the region is closely tied to maintaining and expanding 'free' market capitalism. Home to the majority of the world's mining companies, as well as many oil and gas firms, Canadian capital is highly dependent on an extreme version of 'free' market capitalism. In light of this reality, is it a surprise that Ottawa -Liberal and Conservative governments alike - has worked to undermine the government in the region most actively resisting neoliberalism? Yves Engler is the author of The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy (available at turning.ca). His latest book is Canada and Israel: Building Apartheid. If you are interested in helping to organize an event as part of his book tour in March please contact: yvesengler at hotmail.com =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Feb 18 08:30:07 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 18 Feb 2010 08:30:07 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Wikileaks and Iceland MPs propose 'journalism haven' Message-ID: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8504972.stm Friday, 12 February 2010 Wikileaks and Iceland MPs propose 'journalism haven' By Chris Vallance Reporter, BBC News Iceland could become a "journalism haven" if a proposal put forward by some Icelandic MPs aided by whistle-blowing website Wikileaks succeeds. The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI), calls on the country's government to adopt laws protecting journalists and their sources. It will be filed with the Althingi - Iceland's parliament - on 16 February. If the proposal succeeds it will require the Icelandic government to consider introducing legislation. Julian Assange, Wikileaks' editor, told BBC News that the idea was to "try and reform Iceland's media law to be a very attractive jurisdiction for investigative journalists". He has been in Iceland for a number of weeks and is advising MPs on the IMMI. The hope is that journalist-friendly laws will encourage media businesses to move to Iceland. "If it then has these additional media and publishing law protections then it is likely to encourage the international press and internet start-ups to locate their services here," Mr Assange said. He believes the political mood in Iceland is receptive to the need for change. "The Icelandic press has itself suffered from libel tourism, so there does seem to be the political will to push this through." Wikileaks is a non-profit website that has established a reputation for publishing leaked material. In October 2009, it posted a list of names and addresses of people said to belong to the British National Party (BNP). Other high-profile documents hosted on the site include a copy of the Standard Operating Procedures for Camp Delta, a document that detailed restrictions placed on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. It recently had to suspend operations because of a lack of funding. Legal threats The IMMI aims to pull together good practice from around the world and incorporate it into a single body of law. "We've found good laws in different countries but no country that has all of these laws put together," said Mr Assange. The proposal has been informed by Wikileaks' experience in fighting legal threats to publication. "In my role as Wikileaks editor, I've been involved in fighting off many legal attacks," Mr Assange said in an e-mail. "To do that, and keep our sources safe, we have had to spread assets, encrypt everything, and move telecommunications and people around the world to activate protective laws in different national jurisdictions. "We've become good at it, and never lost a case, or a source, but we can't expect everyone to go through the extraordinary efforts that we do." Measures in the IMMI include legal protection for sources and whistleblowers and the protection of communications between sources and journalists. 'Transparent nation' The proposals also include steps to end so-called "libel tourism", the practice of pursuing libel actions in the most favourable legal jurisdiction irrespective of where the parties are based. But legal threats are faced not just by journalists, but by publishers, internet hosts and other "intermediaries", Wikileaks said. As a result, the proposals include plans to clarify the protection for "mere conduits". Wikileaks has been working with a small group of Icelandic legislators on the issue. One of the proposal's supporters, Birgitta Jonsdottir of The Movement, a political party with 3 MPs in the Icelandic parliament, told the BBC that she was confident the measure would become law. "From what I have experienced from discussions with MPs from all the different parties, there is incredible good will," she said. But the troubles of the financial sector may lead some Icelanders to be sceptical of efforts to transform their country and Ms Jonsdottir is aware of the need not to make exaggerated claims, "We don't want to be the Vikings of transparency in the way the bankers presented themselves," she said. But Ms Jonsdottir believes that making a strong statement in favour of freedom of expression could be a way for Iceland to create a positive new identity. "There are still very many Icelanders who feel ashamed. I think it is part of the self-recovery we have to go through," she said. 'Positive support' At a meeting with a small group of Icelandic MPs about the IMMI, to which the BBC had exclusive access, Mr Assange stressed how Iceland's image would benefit from becoming a champion of free speech. For example, one of the proposals calls for the creation of The Icelandic Prize for Freedom of Expression which "promotes Iceland and the values represented in this proposal". Whether arguments like that are persuasive enough to convince a majority of Iceland's legislators remains to be seen. Mr Assange says that at present around 14 MPs are known to support the proposal. There is also interest in the IMMI among some members of the Icelandic government. The Icelandic Minister for Education Culture and Sports Katrin Jakobsdottir told the BBC that she thought that "the general idea was good" and said that she thought that it "might get positive support". But she stressed that it was very early days and that the changes would involve many ministries. She said that elements of the proposal coincided with changes to media law currently being considered by her department. But not everyone is convinced of the need for an Icelandic "journalism haven". Andrew Scott Senior, lecturer in law at the London School of Economics and a critic of the need for extensive libel reform in the UK, said that caution was needed. "The provisions allowing defendants to counter-sue 'libel tourists' in their home courts could transform the humble Icelander into a legal superman, virtually untouchable abroad for comment written - and uploaded - at home," he said. "Its debatable whether such laws are ever appropriate." His view is not shared by Mr Assange. "We have received approximately 100 legal threats in the past 18 months so we are keen to see legislation that protects the press and quality reporting", he said. At present Wikileaks operates in a number of different jurisdictions to "take advantage of good laws," he said. "It seems the Icelandic proposal is going to pull all those laws together and put them in one place." -------------------------------------- You can hear more about Wikileaks during the BBC's SuperPower ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/specialreports/superpower.shtml ) season on the BBC World Service. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Feb 18 16:42:11 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:42:11 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer on The Cuban Five Message-ID: <9FEF53E1EA1248EEA93C8B8E694D0669@agingCHS072729> www.antiterroristas.cu Declaration on the Cuban Five of the South African Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer 2/17/2010 Declaration Yesterday, Tuesday February 16, I met with relatives of the five Cuban political prisoners held in US jails for over 11 years. I have had firsthand experience of the drama these families are suffering. I was given the following information as confirmation of what I already had obtained. On June 16th and 17th, 1998, the Cuban government invited two important FBI officials to hand them documents with evidences on dangerous activities done by several persons residing in Florida and seriously implicated in terrorist actions against Cuba. Up until now, none of them have been questioned by US authorities despite the evidence placed in the hands of the FBI. Three months later, on September 12th, 1998, the FBI arrested five Cubans: Antonio Guerrero, Fernando Gonz?lez, Gerardo Hern?ndez, Ram?n Laba?ino and Ren? Gonz?lez. Crime committed? That of infiltrating, at the risk of their own lives, the Cuban exile groups responsible for numerous violent actions which have put an end to the lives of many innocent people. Since 1959, terrorist actions against the Cuban people have resulted in 3,478 dead and have left 2,099 people permanently disabled. After a legal process, presenting several legal violations, the five Cubans were sentenced, collectively, to four life sentences plus 77 years, for fighting terrorism. For over 11 years now, they have been imprisoned in 5 different maximum security prisons. These five Cubans have been the victims of cruel and inhumane treatment. >From day one of their arrests until February 3rd, 2000, i.e. for over 17 months, they have been in solitary confinement, with no contact with other prisoners or even guards. On May 27th, 2005, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention denounced the "arbitrary" detention of the Cuban five, stating that it was a violation of international norms and demanded a new trial. On August 9th 2005, three judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, with 80 years of accumulated experience, unanimously decided to declare the original verdict null and requested a new trial. On September 28th, 2005, the US government asked the full Court of Appeals, made up by twelve judges, to reconsider the decision of August 8th, 2005, a very uncommon action, according to US legal experts. On August 9th, 2006, after strong political pressures, the Atlanta Court of Appeals reversed the decision by the three judges and sent the case once again to a panel. On August 20th, 2007, the defense launched a new appeal process. In 2008, a panel formed by three judges from the Atlanta Court of Appeals ratified the guilty verdict for the five Cubans, confirming the sentences imposed against Gerardo and Rene and annulled the sentences for Ramon, Antonio and Fernando because they were considered incorrect, thus sending the cases of these three Cubans to the Miami District Court for re-sentencing. On that occasion the Appeals Court in full acknowledged there was no evidence whatsoever on the obtainment or transmission of secret information or of a national defense nature. In 2009, the US Supreme Court, based on a request by the Obama Administration, rejected the possibility of revising the case. The statements made by the relatives of the five Cubans give proof of the psychological and moral torture they have been suffering in the hands of US legal authorities. Olga Salanueva, wife of Ren? Gonz?lez, as well as Adriana P?rez, wife of Gerardo Hern?ndez, have not been yet authorized to visit their love ones. On June 25th, 2002, Adriana P?rez was finally granted a US visa to visit her husband in Los Angeles. But upon her arrival in the United States, she was detained by the FBI, interrogated for 11 hours and then expelled to Cuba without seeing Gerardo. Adriana has not been able to see Gerardo for over 11 years and Olga has not seen Rene for over 10 years. Such a cruel act is unacceptable. Now, after meeting the relatives of the five Cubans I have been able to assess the dignity and staunchness of the mothers and wives who have suffered, with striking strength of character this inhumane abuse for over a decade now. I would like to add my voice to the petition for justice for these five innocent Cubans. I request President Obama for their immediate release. I appeal to citizens from all over the world: it is time to put an end to the torment these five Cubans and their relatives are suffering. Nadine Gordimer Havana, February 17th, 2010. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Feb 18 18:34:47 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 18 Feb 2010 18:34:47 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] How credible is Human Rights Watch on Cuba? Message-ID: [After reading this report and others over the years, the question, it seems, needs to be reframed: "How credible is Human Rights Watch (period)?" Not just HRW's reports on Cuba (which have always seemed strained and sensationalized), but any of HRW's international reports.] http://links.org.au/node/1506 How credible is Human Rights Watch on Cuba? Human Rights Watch does not see the US blockade of Cuba as a human rights abuse. By Tim Anderson February 11, 2010 -- In late 2009 the New York-based group Human Rights Watch published a report titled New Castro Same Cuba. Based on the testimony of former prisoners, the report systematically condemns the Cuban government as an "abusive" regime that uses its "repressive machinery . draconian laws and sham trials to incarcerate scores more who have dared to exercise their fundamental freedoms". The group says it interviewed 40 political prisoners and claims to have identified extraordinary laws by which Cubans can be imprisoned simply for expressing views critical of their socialist system. At first glance one might be forgiven for thinking that Cuba must be among the worst of human rights abusers in the Americas. A little reflection, however, might lead one to question such statements coming from the USA, a country with thousands held in an international network of secret prisons, many subject to torture regimes. So how credible is this scathing report on Cuba? And who does Human Rights Watch represent? Answering the latter question is a little more difficult than it is for other organisations such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), established by the US government, or even the France-based Reporters without Borders (RSF), funded directly by the US State Department for some of its anti-Cuba campaigns. In the manner of "embedded journalists" who travel with US troops around the world, the NED and RSF can be considered "embedded watchdogs", helping to legitimise or delegitimise regimes, consistent with US policy. `Privatised, US-based selection of issues' Human Rights Watch, however, is not funded by the US government. Yet it gets most of its funds from a variety of US foundations, in turn funded by many of the biggest US corporations. These wealthy, private foundations often tie their contributions to particular projects. So for example HRW's Middle East reports often rely on and acknowledge grants from pro-Israel foundations. Other groups ask for a focus on women's rights or HIV/AIDS issues. More than 90% of HRW's US$100 million budget in 2009 was "restricted" in this way. In other words, HRW offers a privatised, wealthy, US-based selection of rights issues. The coordination of all these interests is best illustrated through HRW's new chairperson, James F. Hoge Jr. A publisher and journalist, Hoge was editor of Foreign Affairs from 1992 to 2009, and a prominent member of that magazine's sponsor, the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The CFR, regarded as the most influential of US foreign policy think tank, includes much of the US corporate elite (including banks and media) as well as past and present leaders of the two major parties. Past US secretaries of state, such as Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice, and the current US secretary of deence Robert Gates are CFR members. It is really a "Who's Who" of the US elite. The HRW board is similarly dominated by the US corporate elite, such as banking and corporate media executives, and some academics, but not government officials. The board includes former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Casta?eda (a former Marxist academic turned right-wing politician), while Chilean-born lawyer Jos? Miguel Vivanco serves as director of HRW's Americas division. Vivanco has been the subject of most controversy in Latin America through his attacks on Venezuela and Cuba. If HRW has at times appeared to be acting somewhat independently of US foreign policy, for example, when it supported the US "war on terror" but criticised US operations in Iraq, this has not been the case in Latin America, where the group has closely followed Washington's line. Of the HRW's reports on Latin America over the past few years, the only systematic criticism of regimes has been of Venezuela and Cuba. Reports on Brazil, Honduras and Mexico have been on much more specific issues, such as police violence, transgender people's rights and military justice. When it comes to Colombia, HRW has published reports on the use of landmines and the "paramilitary mafias". The latter report does note that Colombia has had worse violence "than almost any other country in the western hemisphere". Indeed, Colombia is way ahead of any other Latin American country in terms of the murder of trade unionists, journalists, lawyers and ordinary people. The Colombian military and its allied right-wing militias have been responsible for most of this slaughter, yet HRW blames left guerrillas and right militias equally, without implicating the regime of Alvaro Uribe, the major Latin American recipient of US aid. Biased reports On the other hand, the group's December 2008 report on Venezuela (A Decade Under Chavez) had an open political motivation. According to Vivanco, it was written "because we wanted to demonstrate to the world that Venezuela is not a model for anyone". That report was roundly criticised by more than a hundred academics for not meeting "even the most minimal standards of scholarship, impartiality, accuracy of credibility". Rather than a careful report on human rights, it was an attempt to discredit a government, mainly on the basis on allegations of "political discrimination" in employment and the judiciary. The evidence was poor and the approach anything but systematic. HRW disregarded this criticism. The recent report on Cuba (Different Castro, Same Cuba) is a similar attempt to pillory an entire social system on the basis of some anecdotes. As has been the case for some years, the major US focus on "human rights" in Cuba is on the few dozen people arrested and jailed for what HRW says was simply pursuing their basic rights. The Cuban government says most of these people were taking money from US programs designed to overthrow the Cuban social system. HRW ignores Cuba's right to protect itself from Washington's interventionist programs. In respect of the 40 former prisoners said to have been interviewed in Cuba, HRW draws attention to what it calls a law: "that allows the state to imprison individuals before they have committed a crime, on the suspicion that they might commit an offence in the future . This `dangerousness' provision [refers to] any behaviour that contradicts socialist norms. The most Orwellian of Cuba's laws, it captures the essence of the Cuban government's repressive mindset." Other laws have been used, it says, which: "criminalize the exercise of fundamental freedoms, including laws penalizing contempt, insubordination, and acts against the independence of the state. Indeed, article 62 of the Cuban constitution prohibits the exercise of any basic right that runs contrary to `the ends of the socialist state'." HRW also claims that in January 2009 a number of young people in eastern Cuba were charged with "dangerousness" simply for being unemployed. One was said to have been jailed for two years just "for being unemployed". HRW notes that Cuba links some arrests to "a US policy aimed at toppling the Castro government . However, in the scores of cases Human Rights Watch examined for this report, this argument falls flat." Let's examine some of the legal and practical aspects of these claims. Firstly, article 62 of the Cuban constitution actually says that citizens liberties "cannot be used against that established by constitution and the law, nor against the existence and objects of the socialist state, nor against the decision of the Cuban people to build socialism". That is not the same thing as "prohibiting the exercise of any basic right that runs contrary to `the ends of the socialist state'". Dissent is not the same thing as attacking the constitutional order. Legally, there is indeed a principle of "social dangerousness" in Cuban law, but is a concept that qualifies criminal and other offences. For example, "social dangerousness" can aggravate an "act" which is an offence under labour law (Law 176). Conversely, under the Penal Code (art. 14) the absence of "social dangerousness" can mitigate the penalty for an offence. The "dangerous state" defined by the Penal Code (art. 72) is also a qualifier to a range of anti-social conduct, including drunkenness. In other words, the HRW focus on "dangerousness" is an artefact. There is no substantive offence of "dangerousness". It is a qualifier to actual conduct. Similarly ,the fact of being unemployed in Cuba is not any sort of offence. That is just absurd. `Dissidents' However in the case of the celebrated "dissidents" - which include many of the "independent journalists" and "human rights defenders" funded by the US State Department and USAID programs to promote a "transition" in Cuba - the possession of large amounts of money while unemployed can constitute evidence of an offence. For example, "dissident" Oscar Espinosa Chepe had been unemployed for 10 years at the time of his March 2003 arrest, yet he had more than $7000 hidden in the lining of his suit. That money could have been in the bank with his other savings, but it had recently come from a US-linked group. Similarly, Ra?l Rivero, H?ctor Palacios, Osvaldo Alfonso Vald?s and others were charged because there was evidence (including receipts) that they had received money from US programs aimed to overthrow the Cuban constitution. The HRW report ignores this evidence. The same Miami groups that sent money to these Cubans (but note, most of the US government money stays in Miami, provoking conflicts within these groups) had organised bombings of tourist hotels in Cuba in the late 1990s. Cuban authorities are unsurprisingly intolerant of this terrorism. The March 2003 arrests were provoked by Cuban fears that the Bush regime would mount an Iraq-style invasion, making use of these paid agents. After the New Castro report, Human Rights Watch maintained its campaign on behalf of the US-funded "dissidents". It demanded in January 2010 that the Cuban government "immediately cease its harassment of the blind human rights defender Juan Carlos Gonz?lez Leiva, a leader of the Council of Human Rights Rapporteurs". Gonz?lez Leiva heads the Camag?ey chapter of the Cuban Foundation for Human Rights, a body which has been funded by Washington via Miami for at least a decade. Some US "aid" for Cuban agents bypasses Miami. The US government directly supports the "independent journalists" over whom both Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and HRW express so much righteous anger. The US Interests Section in Havana (the de facto embassy) directly prints the Revista de Cuba magazine of the "M?rquez Sterling Journalists Society", while El Disidente magazine is printed in Puerto Rico but distributed through the Interests Section. This information is published in some detail in Cuba but is barely mentioned by HRW, or in any other US reports. Since the US "consensus" has effectively disqualified the entire Cuban system, no regard need be paid to such detail. Yet there can be no doubt that independent countries have the right to self-defence from US subversion and terrorism. HRW does not condemn US blockade HRW says the 50-year economic blockade by the US of Cuba has failed, but (unlike the 187 countries that voted against the blockade at the United Nations in 2009) the New York-based group does not condemn this blockade as a violation of human rights. Rather, HRW argues that Cuba uses the blockade as a pretext for repression. It proposes a new program against Cuba where Europe and Latin America join with Washington in demanding "the unconditional release of all political prisoners", including "the 53 dissidents still in prison from the 2003 crackdown". If these demands do not achieve their end, then countries, including the US, "should be able to choose individually whether or not to impose their own restrictions on Cuba". In fact, the US is the only country with such sanctions against Cuba. This sort of "human rights intervention" is consistent with US foreign policy in Latin America. Dispensing with troublesome, independent regimes was practised ad nauseum throughout the "American Century", and was always backed by the US corporate elite. Delegitimisation campaigns have always preceded "regime change", for example in Guatemala and Chile. Human Rights Watch apparently sees no abuse of human rights in such interventions. Sitting down with CIA agents Jos? Miguel Vivanco has sat on panels with Caleb McCarry, the Bush-appointed and Washington-based "Transition Administrator" for a "Free Cuba", without a word about the appalling human rights abuse implicit in one country pretending to organise the political "transition" of another country. On this count, HRW needs a little homework on article 1 of the International Bill of Rights, which sets out the "right of a people to self-determination". Vivanco has similarly spoken on panels with former CIA agents Frank Calzon and Carlos Montaner, people who have personally organised terrorist attacks on Cuba. He did not sit down to condemn them for these attacks, but rather to concur with them over support for the US-backed "dissidents". Such is the flexibility of his advocacy. As a reward for his services, in June 2009 Vivanco received a National Endowment for Democracy award for his work for "Democracy in Cuba". This made the US government link quite clear. US propaganda campaigns against Cuba have not flagged in half a century, and HRW is just one of the more recent contributors. Responding to cries from the US for "human rights and freedom", one Cuban diplomat wearily replied, "of course, and the US has a very long history in this, from Batista, Somoza, Trujillo, Duvalier, Pinochet, Videla", referring to the US-backed dictators of Cuba, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Chile and Argentina. All the prisoners HRW spoke with had been released. One wonders what the HRW report might have said had it discovered a hidden prison in Cuba where hundreds were held without charge, tortured and argued to be beyond the reach of any legal system? In the case of those prisoners - held by the US military in occupied Cuba, at Guantanamo Bay - HRW wrote (in January 2010) that US President Barrack Obama should "renew his pledge" to close the prison. No condemnation of the "abusive" Washington regime for its "repressive machinery". But why should we expect such candour and self-criticism from the US elite? The lesson from the Human Rights Watch reports on Cuba is that we have nothing to learn about the little Caribbean island - whether on its weaknesses or strengths - from a self-appointed organisation which represents the US corporate and foreign policy elite. [Tim Anderson is a senior lecturer in political economy at Sydney University.] A note on sources: Some detail of the charges against the "dissidents" arrested in March 2003 was published at that time by Cuba's foreign ministry (MINREX), and remains online. More detail emerged in the 2003 book The Dissidents by Cuban journalists Luis B?ez and Rosa Miriam Elizalde. Many articles on the US-funded organisations (mostly Miami-based, but also the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders) that work with the US government against Cuba have been written by the French-Canadian journalist Jean-Guy Allard, French academic Salim Lamrani and US journalist Diana Barahona. Human Rights Watch funders appear in its annual reports and linked funding is often acknowledged in its country reports.] =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Fri Feb 19 14:13:42 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Fri, 19 Feb 2010 14:13:42 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Terrorism: the most meaningless and manipulated word Message-ID: <9E456AC1849344F98BD0FFB57CB0543F@agingCHS072729> [Not a Muslim -- NOT a terrorist!!] http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/02/19/terrorism/index.html Friday, Feb 19, 2010 07:20 EST Terrorism: the most meaningless and manipulated word By Glenn Greenwald Yesterday, Joseph Stack deliberately flew an airplane into a building housing IRS offices in Austin, Texas, in order to advance the political grievances he outlined in a perfectly cogent suicide-manifesto. Stack's worldview contained elements of the tea party's anti-government anger along with substantial populist complaints generally associated with "the Left" (rage over bailouts, the suffering of America's poor, and the pilfering of the middle class by a corrupt economic elite and their government-servants). All of that was accompanied by an argument as to why violence was justified (indeed necessary) to protest those injustices: I remember reading about the stock market crash before the "great" depression and how there were wealthy bankers and businessmen jumping out of windows when they realized they screwed up and lost everything. Isn't it ironic how far we've come in 60 years in this country that they now know how to fix that little economic problem; they just steal from the middle class (who doesn't have any say in it, elections are a joke) to cover their asses and it's "business-as-usual" . . . . Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn't so, but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer. Despite all that, The New York Times' Brian Stelter documents the deep reluctance of cable news chatterers and government officials to label the incident an act of "terrorism," even though -- as Dave Neiwert ably documents -- it perfectly fits, indeed is a classic illustration of, every official definition of that term. The issue isn't whether Stack's grievances are real or his responses just; it is that the act unquestionably comports with the official definition. But as NBC's Pete Williams said of the official insistence that this was not an act of Terrorism: there are "a couple of reasons to say that . . . One is he's an American citizen." Fox News' Megan Kelley asked Catherine Herridge about these denials: "I take it that they mean terrorism in the larger sense that most of us are used to?," to which Herridge replied: "they mean terrorism in that capital T way." All of this underscores, yet again, that Terrorism is simultaneously the single most meaningless and most manipulated word in the American political lexicon. The term now has virtually nothing to do with the act itself and everything to do with the identity of the actor, especially his or her religious identity. It has really come to mean: "a Muslim who fights against or even expresses hostility towards the United States, Israel and their allies." That's why all of this confusion and doubt arose yesterday over whether a person who perpetrated a classic act of Terrorism should, in fact, be called a Terrorist: he's not a Muslim and isn't acting on behalf of standard Muslim grievances against the U.S. or Israel, and thus does not fit the "definition." One might concede that perhaps there's some technical sense in which term might apply to Stack, but as Fox News emphasized: it's not "terrorism in the larger sense that most of us are used to . . . terrorism in that capital T way." We all know who commits terrorism in "that capital T way," and it's not people named Joseph Stack. Contrast the collective hesitance to call Stack a Terrorist with the extremely dubious circumstances under which that term is reflexively applied to Muslims. If a Muslim attacks a military base preparing to deploy soldiers to a war zone, that person is a Terrorist. If an American Muslim argues that violence against the U.S. (particularly when aimed at military targets) is justified due to American violence aimed at the Muslim world, that person is a Terrorist who deserves assassination. And if the U.S. military invades a Muslim country, Muslims who live in the invaded and occupied country and who fight back against the invading American army -- by attacking nothing but military targets -- are also Terrorists. Indeed, large numbers of detainees at Guantanamo were accused of being Terrorists for nothing more than attacking members of an invading foreign army in their country, including 14-year-old Mohamed Jawad, who spent many years in Guantanamo, accused (almost certainly falsely) of throwing a grenade at two American troops in Afghanistan who were part of an invading force in that country. Obviously, plots targeting civilians for death -- the 9/11 attacks and attempts to blow up civilian aircraft -- are pure terrorism, but a huge portion of the acts committed by Muslims that receive that label are not. In sum: a Muslim who attacks military targets, including in war zones or even in their own countries that have been invaded by a foreign army, are Terrorists. A non-Muslim who flies an airplane into a government building in pursuit of a political agenda is not, or at least is not a Real Terrorist with a capital T -- not the kind who should be tortured and thrown in a cage with no charges and assassinated with no due process. Nor are Christians who stand outside abortion clinics and murder doctors and clinic workers. Nor are acts undertaken by us or our favored allies designed to kill large numbers of civilians or which will recklessly cause such deaths as a means of terrorizing the population into desired behavioral change -- the Glorious Shock and Awe campaign and the pummeling of Gaza. Except as a means for demonizing Muslims, the word is used so inconsistently and manipulatively that it is impoverished of any discernible meaning. All of this would be an interesting though not terribly important semantic matter if not for the fact that the term Terrorist plays a central role in our political debates. It is the all-justifying term for anything the U.S. Government does. Invasions, torture, due-process-free detentions, military commissions, drone attacks, warrantless surveillance, obsessive secrecy, and even assassinations of American citizens are all justified by the claim that it's only being done to "Terrorists," who, by definition, have no rights. Even worse, one becomes a "Terrorist" not through any judicial adjudication or other formal process, but solely by virtue of the untested, unchecked say-so of the Executive Branch. The President decrees someone to be a Terrorist and that's the end of that: uncritical followers of both political parties immediately justify anything done to the person on the ground that he's a Terrorist (by which they actually mean: he's been accused of being one, though that distinction -- between presidential accusations and proof -- is not one they recognize). If we're really going to vest virtually unlimited power in the Government to do anything it wants to people they call "Terrorists," we ought at least to have a common understanding of what the term means. But there is none. It's just become a malleable, all-justifying term to allow the U.S. Government carte blanche to do whatever it wants to Muslims it does not like or who do not like it (i.e., The Terrorists). It's really more of a hypnotic mantra than an actual word: its mere utterance causes the nation blindly to cheer on whatever is done against the Muslims who are so labeled. UPDATE: I want to add one point: the immediate official and media reaction was to avoid, even deny, the term "terrorist" because the perpetrator of the violence wasn't Muslim. But if Stack's manifesto begins to attract serious attention, I think it's likely the term Terrorist will be decisively applied to him in order to discredit what he wrote. His message is a sharply anti-establishment and populist grievance of the type that transcends ideological and partisan divisions -- the complaints which Stack passionately voices are found as common threads in the tea party movement and among citizens on both the Left and on the Right -- and thus tend to be the type which the establishment (which benefits from high levels of partisan distractions and divisions) finds most threatening and in need of demonization. Nothing is more effective at demonizing something than slapping the Terrorist label onto it. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sat Feb 20 11:28:24 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 20 Feb 2010 11:28:24 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Dutch government collapses over Afghan mission Message-ID: <7BCD69B07E9142DE9AD02C4A2A133443@agingCHS072729> Dutch government collapses over Afghan mission By ARTHUR MAX The Associated Press Saturday, February 20, 2010; 2:49 AM AMSTERDAM -- The Dutch coalition government collapsed Saturday over whether to extend the country's military mission in Afghanistan, leaving uncertain the future of its 1,600 soldiers fighting there. Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende announced that the second largest party in his three-party alliance is quitting, in a breakdown of trust in what had always been an uneasy partnership. Balkenende made no mention of elections as he spoke to reporters after a 16-hour Cabinet meeting in The Hague that ended close to dawn. However, the resignation of the Labor Party - which has demanded the country stick to a scheduled withdrawal from Afghanistan - would leave his government with an unworkable majority, and political analysts said early elections appeared inevitable. Balkenende said his center-right Christian Democratic Alliance would continue in office together with the small Christian Union, and would "make available" Labor's cabinet seats. But he did not spell out his intentions. The coalition, elected to a four-year term, marks its third year in office on Monday. "Where there is no trust, it is difficult to work together. There is no road along which this cabinet to go further," Balkenende said. Dutch soldiers have been deployed since 2006 in the southern Afghan province of Uruzgan on a two-year stint that was extended until next August. Labor demanded that Dutch troops leave Uruzgan as scheduled. Balkenende's Christian Democratic Alliance wanted to keep a trimmed down military presence in the restive province, where 21 soldiers have been killed. "A plan was agreed to when our soldiers went to Afghanistan," said Labor Party leader Wouter Bos. "Our partners in the government didn't want to stick to that plan, and on the basis of their refusal we have decided to resign from this government." NATO recently sent a letter to the government asking if it would consider staying longer - a move that the Western alliance normally would do only if it had a clear signal of agreement. "The future of the mission of our soldiers in Afghanistan will now be in the hands of the new Cabinet," said Deputy Defense Minister Jack de Vries. The split came after a buildup of tension over several weeks between Balkenende and Bos, the finance minister, mainly over Afghanistan and the government's earlier political support for the war in Iraq. "This is the end of this cabinet," said Andre Rouvoet, leader of the third coalition party. He said Queen Beatrix, Holland's ceremonial head of state, who will formally accept the resignations of the Labor ministers on Saturday, "will ask the remaining ministers to prepare for elections." It was an uncomfortable alliance of convenience from the start, with Balkenende and Bos exchanging unusually sharp barbs during the 2006 election campaign. The acrimony surfaced again during a parliamentary debate Thursday over Afghanistan, with the two government leaders in open discord in the face of concerted attacks by the opposition parties. Opinion polls suggest the Afghan war is deeply unpopular. Labor, which has been dropping in the polls, appeared determined to take a stand with next month's scheduled local elections in mind. Bert Koenders, the Labor minister for overseas development aid, said his party was abiding by the government's promise when it prolonged the Afghanistan mission last time - that it would be the last extension. "We are sticking the Cabinet decision of two years ago," he said. An election within the next few months could see a further rise in power of the extreme anti-immigrant populist Geert Wilders, whose ranking in the polls rivals Balkenende's. Balkenende has been prime minister since 2002, but he resigned twice before because of the country's fractious political alignments. --- Associated Press Writer Bruce Mutsvairo contributed to this report. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sat Feb 20 11:39:13 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 20 Feb 2010 11:39:13 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The next war for the old reasons (ad in Ha'aretz) Message-ID: <2E0461B28882489D8E85D08A1062A4AD@agingCHS072729> ("Thus depriving Israel of any pretext for attacking the Iranians".... might be more accurate) Ad in Ha'aretz, Feb. 19, 2010 Prevent! The War can be prevented - In spite of the threats The readiness to make peace And to leave The occupied territories Will make it possible To reach agreement With the Syrians And the Palestinians Thus depriving the Iranians Of any pretext for an attack If war breaks out It will be again For territories and settlements Cheques to help us continue the ads - and the campaigns - to: Gush Shalom, P.O.Box 3322, Tel-Aviv 61033 weekly ads archive http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/weekly_ad =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sat Feb 20 12:11:22 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 20 Feb 2010 12:11:22 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Three in a Million - Voices from the Haitian Camps Message-ID: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/02/19 CommonDreams.org February 19, 2010 Three in a Million - Voices from the Haitian Camps by Bill Quigley The United Nations reported there are 1.2 million people living in "spontaneous settlements" or homeless camps around Port au Prince. Three people living in the camps spoke with this author this week, before the hard rains hit. ........................... Jean Dora, 71 My name is Jean Dora. I was born in 1939. I live in a plaza in front of St. Pierre's church in Petionville [outside of Port au Prince]. I am here with twelve members of my family. We all lost our home. We have a sheet of green plastic to shade us from the sun. We put up some bed sheets around our space. I have many small grandchildren living here with me. My son and daughters live with here too. My daughter will soon have a child. She will go to the Red Cross tent when it is time for the baby to come. I worked for the Chinese Embassy for 36 years. I cleaned their offices. I retired in 2007. Until the earthquake I lived in an apartment with my family. The building was destroyed. At night we put a piece of carpet down on the ground. Then we lay covers down and try to sleep. When it rains, the water comes in. We bring bottles to fill up with water. But we have very little food. There is no toilet in the park. We must go behind the church. My son used to work to support us. He is a good chef. He worked at a restaurant by the Hotel Montana. The restaurant was destroyed. He lost his job. There is no work. During all my days, I have never seen anything like this. I am not in a good position to say what will happen next. I think things are not going to change. I hope things will get better. But I don't think so. My son has no job and he cannot help our family. If my son is working, we can all stand up. If he is not working, we are down. The future is not clear. It looks dark for us. ............................. Nadege Dora, 28 My name is Nadege Dora. I am 28. I have three boys and one girl. I am supposed to deliver my baby this month. I now live in the plaza in Petionville with the rest of my family. Our house was destroyed. I used to sell bread on the street to make a little money. The father of the children does not help us. It is as if we are not alive to him. We are just trying to survive. No one in our family is working. There is no work. If you get a ticket you can go get a bag of rice. But I am a pregnant woman. I cannot fight the crowds for a ticket. I tried. But people were squashing me and I was afraid I would get knocked down and crushed. My niece helped a woman bring rice back from Delmas [another neighborhood outside of Port au Prince]. She shared her rice with us. Right now we still have some rice. But we have no oil. No meat, no milk, nothing but rice. We have no money to buy other ingredients. Since the earthquake I have never eaten a full meal. When my baby comes, I will go to the Red Cross tent to have the baby. I went there to see a Doctor. They gave me some pills. Those pills made me sick. The mayor came here and asked people if we had relatives in the countryside. They would help us go there. But we do not want to go to the countryside. We don't know anybody in the countryside. We need to have a better life than this. .............................. Garry Philippe, 47 My name is Garry Philippe. I am 47. I live by the airport entrance. I built my own tent. I tied a sheet to a tree and I put up poles to hold up other sheets. I live here with my five children. My wife was killed in our house in the incident. We lived in Village Solidarity. I owned our house. I built our house over 4 years, step by step, as I got the money. I was outside when it happened. My girls were by the front door and ran out. My wife ran back to help the boys and she died. We had no funeral for my wife because we have no money for a funeral. I buried her myself in a cemetery by Cite Soleil. The children cannot imagine that their mother is gone just like that. They are always thinking about their mother. We do not have beds. When it is time to sleep we put bags on the ground. Then we put our covers on the bags and sleep. We wash ourselves by putting water in a bottle. Then we stand in a pot and pour the water on our selves. When it rained we went to a place where they had a plastic tent. We stayed there till the rain stopped. More than 20 people were inside that tent. Before, I was a mechanic in a garage. Where I worked was destroyed. There is no work since the quake. We heard other camps got bags of rice. In our camp, nothing. I ask friends for food. Sometimes someone will give us something to eat. We have no toilet in this camp. When we have to make a toilet, we do it in a bag. Then we bring the bag to the edge of the camp. It is about a one minute walk away. We see the trucks going in and out of the airport. Many trucks. But the trucks never stop for us. It is not safe here. But what can I do? I accept it, it is God's work. We pray in the camp together. No one has come to talk to us to tell us what is going on. We know nothing about tents or tarps. There is no school for the children. I cannot tell you exactly what is going to happen next. I am not the Lord. I think it is going to get worse for us in the camps. We need tents and food. We need water and school and jobs. We need help to find a place to stay. The rain is coming soon. Water is going to come and our babies will lose their lives. ------------------------------- Bill is legal director at the Center for Constitutional rights and a long time human rights advocate. This article was written with the assistance of Vladimir Laguerre in Port au Prince. You can contact Bill at quigley77 at gmail.com. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sat Feb 20 12:46:55 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 20 Feb 2010 12:46:55 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Socialism: the Goal, the Paths and the Compass Message-ID: <9BA34B7BA82B4C77BAF95841E9020F8A@agingCHS072729> http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/315.php#continue The B u l l e t February 20, 2010 Socialist Project . E-Bulletin No. 315 Socialism: the Goal, the Paths and the Compass [Presentation of "El Socialismo no Cae del Cielo: Un Neuvo Comienzo" at the 2010 Havana Book Fair, 18 February 2010.] Michael A. Lebowitz There's an old saying that if you don't know where you want to go, any road will take you there. As I've said on many occasions, this saying is mistaken. If you don't know where you want to go, no road will take you there. In other words, you need an understanding of the goal. You need a vision for the future. Marx had a very clear vision. It was a vision of a society which would permit the full development of human beings - a society which allowed everyone to develop their potential. And, that would occur not because of gifts from above but, rather, as a result of the activity of human beings. This was his concept of revolutionary practice - the simultaneous changing of circumstances and human activity or self change. Human development and practice - this "key link" in Marx reminds us that there are always two products as the result of our activity, the change in circumstances and the change in people themselves. It reminds us that what Marx called rich human beings, socialist human beings, produce themselves only through their own activity. The Goal Elementary triangle of socialism. The Bolivarian Constitution of Venezuela incorporates this concept. It stresses that the goal of society must be the full development of every human being and that participation and protagonism is "the necessary way of achieving the involvement to ensure their complete development, both individual and collective." In 2007, President Chavez of Venezuela reinforced this vision by introducing what he called "the elementary triangle of socialism." Social ownership of the means of production, social production organized by workers and production for social needs and purposes make up this triangle. Firstly, social ownership of the means of production is the way to ensure that our communal, social productivity is directed to the free development of all rather than used to satisfy the private goals of capitalists, groups of producers, or state bureaucrats. Secondly, social production organized by workers permits workers to develop their capacities by combining thinking and doing in the workplace and, thus, to produce not only things but also themselves as self-conscious collective producers. Thirdly, satisfaction of social needs and purposes is the necessary goal of productive activity in the new society because it substitutes for the focus upon self-interest and selfishness an orientation to the needs of others and relations based upon solidarity. The Paths This is the vision of the society we want to build. This is where we want to go. And if we don't know that, no road will take us there. However, knowing where you want to go is not enough. It's not true that if you do know where you want to go, any road will take you there. Isn't there a relationship between the goal, and the road you take to get there? Are these independent of each other? For example, can you get to the goal by going in the opposite direction? Do you build social ownership by relying upon capitalist ownership of the means of production and the capitalist monopoly of our social heritage and of the products of our labour? Do you build a society of associated producers and social production by preventing decision-making by workers and retaining the gap between thinking and doing? Do you build a society based upon solidarity, where production is for social needs, by stressing selfishness? In other words, do you go forward by going backwards? Maybe. Maybe sometimes it is necessary. Socialism does not fall from the sky. It is necessarily rooted in particular societies. We all start from different places - in our development, in our histories. Therefore, there cannot be one single path. All paths will be different. Some will be longer than others. Some will be relatively straight, while others will require switchbacks because of the obstacles along the road. As we have learned, the biggest mistake is thinking that there is one road and one model. The Compass But there is a problem. When you are not going directly toward the goal, how do you avoid getting lost? How you avoid the problem of the growth of capital and capitalist interests, the alienation of workers in the process of production and thus an emphasis upon possessing things and consumerism, the growth of self-interest at the expense of solidarity? Some would say that there is no problem as long as we have a compass, as long as we have a directional finder. And that the party is that compass; the party can point in the direction of the goal when obstacles have temporarily forced you to go in the opposite direction. I agree with that in principle. But I also believe that we need to learn from historical experience that the party is not itself immune, that it does not stand outside society and thus does not always point to the true North. This was certainly the case, for example, in Hungary, Yugoslavia and China. And, not only there. I have just returned from an intense month in Vietnam. There is no question in my mind that under the conditions facing Vietnam in the 1980s, it was essential for them to make a significant change in the path they were on. The Example of Vietnam By developing an economy which they describe as a market economy with a socialist orientation, they have succeeded in lifting their people from significant poverty. Whereas previously people were facing starvation, now Vietnam exports food. This is a very important achievement. They have also begun a process of industrialization. However, there are serious problems. Young people are overwhelmingly oriented toward capitalism. They say openly that Vietnam needs more foreign investment, and they credit that foreign investment with ending poverty. They want capitalism, and they look upon Marxism as having no relevance to their lives. I stress this point because the students we met were not selected randomly. They came largely from the young communists. And the dominant views increasingly are in fact no different from those in other countries in Southeast Asia: Thailand, Malaysia, and other nearby countries relying upon foreign investment and export oriented industrialization are the basis of constant comparison in Vietnam. In other words, capitalism is winning in Vietnam. There is growing inequality, there is the emergence of millionaires (not as many as in China so far) and there is a significant process of privatization of state-owned industry (which is called equitisation). And then there is the party, "the socialist orientation." It is my sense that a growing portion of the party is looking to Sweden and social democracy as the appropriate model. (In fact, this was openly advocated at the conference I attended at the Ho Chi Minh National Political Academy, the Party school.) In other words, an emerging goal is not the socialist vision but, rather, capitalism plus social policies which reduce inequality - a capitalist welfare state. There is an infection in Vietnam, and the party is not immune to that infection. I suspect that the next Party Congress will involve a struggle over this direction. Some party leaders are very worried about these tendencies. Certainly, the direction of change in the party in recent congresses has been to strengthen capitalist tendencies - for example, they have removed the prohibition on membership in the party by capitalists. Something has been missing in Vietnam. Missing so far has been a sufficient emphasis upon that participation and protagonism that is "the necessary way" to ensure the complete development of human beings, "both individually and collectively." While there has been some focus upon grassroots democracy (for example, in Ho Chi Minh City), there has been very little decision-making by workers in workplaces (outside of annual congresses in state-owned industry), and there has been little emphasis upon conscious production for social needs. And, the results are predictable. In the absence of social production organized by workers and production for social needs, the third side of the socialist triangle, social ownership, is withering away. And, increasingly, the human product is people who embrace the logic of capital. I think that Vietnam reinforces the lesson that every step to the market must be accompanied by two steps in the direction of building a socialist society: building worker decision-making in workplaces and building institutions based upon solidarity. If we recognize that people produce themselves through their activity, then their activity should unleash their potential rather than be left to an orientation to the market and self-interest. This is what I was stressing in Vietnam - that the party needs to create the conditions in which people can develop their capacities as protagonists within their workplaces and their communities, institutions such as the communal councils and workers councils being developed in Venezuela. I suggest that through such a process of producing rich human beings with confidence and dignity, both the people and the party will be inoculated against the infection that can prevent us from reaching the socialist goal. That won't be achieved, however, by a one-sided focus upon developing productive forces. In short, we should never forget the essential insight of Che Guevara - the necessity simultaneously to build productive forces and socialist human beings. . Michael A. Lebowitz is professor emeritus of economics at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and the author of Beyond Capital: Marx's Political Economy of the Working Class (also available on Scribd) and Build It Now: Socialism for the Twenty-First Century. This article also published at MRZine.org. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sat Feb 20 13:05:09 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 20 Feb 2010 13:05:09 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] 1-2 Punch: Bernanke and the Debt Ceiling Message-ID: <20E6487A8F144F8289C351989A360732@agingCHS072729> http://www.lewrockwell.com/goyette/goyette11.1.html lewrockwell.com February 10, 2010 1-2 Punch: Bernanke and the Debt Ceiling by Charles Goyette Not long after the State of the Union address, the Congress voted to substantially worsen that state, delivering a one-two punch directly at the value of the US dollar. Not light jabs, but crippling body blows that will leave the prosperity of the American people reeling. The damage this combination of monetary and fiscal hits will do is being telegraphed in advance: first the monetary blow, as the Senate confirmed Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke for another four-year term; next the fiscal blow, as both the House and Senate approved another increase in the statutory national debt ceiling. The new limit, a debt increase on steroids, adds $1.9 trillion to bring the ceiling to $14.3 trillion, an amount roughly equal to the US gross domestic product. When freshman Senator Barack Obama said that a Bush debt-ceiling hike was a sign of "leadership failure", he was right. When Bush came into office the debt ceiling was less than $6 trillion dollars; it was $11.315 trillion when he went out the door. Bush presided over seven increases in eight years. In less than a full year of Obama's presidency, the debt ceiling was lifted twice. This new increase is his third. Just the increase in the national debt under the joint leadership of Bush and Obama in the last two years is almost three times the entire federal debt accumulated between the nation's founding in 1776 and 1980. Because long-term increases in sensitive barometers like the global price of oil and gold are a reflection of the world's assessment of the prospects for the dollar, a referendum on the US debt and America's fiscal irresponsibility, it should come as no surprise that under Bush and Obama, increases in the national debt ceiling have been a harbinger of higher gold and oil prices. Gold tells the story in detail. In November 2004, a Republican Congress under a Republican president raised the government's debt ceiling to $8.18 trillion. Gold was $434 that day. Sixteen months later, March 2006, the Congress voted to raise the debt ceiling again, this time to $9 trillion. Gold had moved up as well, to $556. After the Republican majority had made a fiscal mess of things for a few years, and sent gold to $625, Americans thought it was time to try the Democrats again and gave them a majority in both houses in the next mid-term elections, November 2006. But it was business as usual. A year later the Senate voted another $850 billion increase in the US debt ceiling, increasing it to almost $10 trillion. Gold had begun the month at $672; that day it traded at about $740. It has kept climbing ever since except for a short period during the mortgage meltdown, when hedge funds and other institutions sold everything in sight to raise cash for a flood of redemptions. But even that was a short-lived reversal as gold prices soon resumed their march over $1,000 to the drumming of national debt increases. Meanwhile, oil, about $35 a barrel when Bush was inaugurated, has more than doubled. The rest of the world sees America's exploding debt and wonders why anyone would want to continue trusting the US dollar or continue holding US dollars as reserves. And in fact, they are losing trust in the dollar. As crude oil has flirted with $80 a barrel - even during a period of "weak" global energy demand - it should be noted that the Gulf Co-operation Council monetary union agreement was recently ratified by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar. It is a major step toward the establishment of a Gulf central bank and joint currency that could be pegged against something other than the dollar. Similar steps reflecting dollar skepticism are being taken elsewhere around the world. In November the central bank of India chose to substantially dis-hoard its dollar reserves, buying 200 metric tons of gold instead. Russia recently began to reduce its dollar exposure, diversifying its reserves into Canadian currency and securities. There may be no better gauge of Washington's fiscal irresponsibility than the statutory national debt ceiling. It is something everybody can understand: Congress passes a bill, which is signed by the president, allowing them to spend even more money and to take the country deeper in debt. It is as though a family could raise its Visa or MasterCard credit limit around the dinner table. Of course, if a family were allowed to simply print money to pay its bills, it probably could raise its own credit-card debt limit! That's where the Federal Reserve's monetary blow to the dollar comes in - with a new four-year term for the enabler-in-chief of Washington's spendthrifts - because the Fed can and does print money, and it has done so exceedingly aggressively under Bernanke's direction. It is foolish to think that the explosion of the monetary base, which grew by 150 percent during Bernanke's first term, can have done so without consequence. The global price of gold is signaling that consequence, having practically doubled during Bernanke's first term. As US debt heads toward $14 trillion, the Fed will do its part, buying government bonds increasingly as others back away, with money it creates out of thin air. It amounts to a direct hit on the purchasing power of every dollar you own. Don't be surprised when, as gold and oil prices have done, consumer prices begin to take off. When a series of knockout blows are clearly telegraphed, smart people see them coming and do something about it. _____ Charles Goyette is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Dollar Meltdown: Surviving the Impending Currency Crisis with Gold, Oil, and Other Unconventional Investments (2009). His mail address is charlesgoyette at cox.net Copyright (c) 2010 Charles Goyette =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sat Feb 20 14:34:52 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:34:52 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Colonial War Media: Reflections on a Recent Issue of the New York Times Message-ID: Colonial War Media: Reflections on a Recent Issue of the New York Times By Paul Street Saturday, February 20, 2010 "Frightening" Marines With Bullets "Oh My, Colonial Subjects Are Shooting Back." That would have been a good title for a recent New York Times story on the U.S. military assault on Marja, in Afghanistan's HelmandProvince. Times reporter C.J. Chivers reports breathlessly that "Five Marines have been struck in recent days by bullets at long range." Yes, it appears that some natives are firing back - with guns and bullets. Goodness. According to Chivers, "Almost every American infantryman" involved in the Marja campaign "has had frightening close calls." Chivers mentions "lone bullets striking doorjambs beside their faces as Marines peeked around corners, single rounds cracking by just overhead as Marines looked over mud walls, and bullets slamming into the dirt beside them..." [1] Imagine. "You Strap on a Gun and go Struttin' Around Some Other Man's Country..." Yes, the colonials are coming at "our" brave young troops with live ammunition. What next? I wonder if Chivers and his editors ever heard the following bit from the admittedly arch-cynical comedian George Carlin's 2005 "Life is Worth Losing" show: "When all those beheadings started in Iraq," Carlin ranted, "it didn't bother me. A lot of people here were horrified, 'Whaaaa, beheadings! Beheadings!' What, are you fucking surprised? Just one more form of extreme human behavior." Further: "Besides, who cares about some mercenary from Oklahoma who gets his head cut off? Hey Jack, you don't want to get your head cut off? Stay the fuck in Oklahoma. They ain't cuttin' off heads in Oklahoma, far as I know. But I do know this: you strap on a gun and go struttin' around some other man's country, you'd better be ready for some action, Jack. People are touchy about that sort of thing... And let me ask you this... this is a moral question, not rhetorical, I'm looking for the answer: what is the moral difference between cuttin' off one guy's head, or two, or three, or five, or ten - and dropping a big bomb on a hospital and killing a whole bunch of sick kids? Has anybody in authority given you an explanation of the [moral] difference?" Strong stuff, to be sure, but Carlin had a point - he usually did. Stray Kalashnikovs v. 250-Pound Bombs Of course, the American troops in Afghanistan are mainly working class kids with few job options - pawns who have been ordered into bloody colonial war. And the United States has a bit more than rifles in its arsenal when it comes to countering scary attacks - with, yes, bullets - from Afghan militants in Marja. Chivers reports that U.S. forces have responded to Taliban sniper fire with "mortars, artillery, helicopter attack gunships, and airstrikes." After one rifle "ambush" against American soldiers, U.S. Marine Capt. Akil R. Bacchus put in a call for assistance from above. "About a minute later," Chivers writes, "a 250-pound GPS-guided bomb whooshed past overhead and slammed into the compound with a thunderous explosion." "After the airstrike, two pairs of attack helicopters were cleared to strafe a set of bunkers and canals that the Taliban fighters had been firing from." "They climbed high over the canal and bore down toward a tree line, guns and rockets firing. Explosions tossed soil and made the ground shudder." With the Pashtun snipers pulverized (along with any civilians who might have been in their vicinity), U.S. Marines First Platoon was free to continue clearing "insurgents" from the colonial hinterland. An Unimaginable Headline Chivers' article is titled "Snipers Imperil U.S.-Led [2] Forces in Afghanistan." Imagine a New York Times article (front page or anywhere else) titled "World's Only Military Superpower Imperils Afghanistan." Uncle Sam has killed many thousands of Afghanis - mainly civilians - in countless bombings (wedding parties have been a recurrent target), missile and artillery attacks, strafing assaults, and executions since October of 2001. The attacks have continued and indeed escalated into the Age of Obama, who has made good on his campaign promise to escalate the "good war" in Afghanistan [3]. Nobody in a position of imperial authority has been willing to respond to George Carlin by explaining the moral difference between Muslim beheadings and American bombings of Afghan villages and wedding parties. "Air Warfare" (Supposedly) Hampered By (Supposed Excessive) Concern About "Dead Civilians" An Op-Ed by the cold-blooded U.S. "intelligence analyst" Lara Dadkhah in the same day's Times (Thursday, February 18, 2010) decries the supposed terrible impact of "new air warfare rules" on "our troops" in Afghanistan. "Air warfare"? Have Taliban fighters sent up propeller planes to shoot bullets at "our" pilots? No. "Air warfare" is Dadkhah'e term for bombing runs by U.S. warplanes, which meet no resistance in the air beyond the occasional flocks of (Islamo-terrorist and al Qaeda trained?) geese. Didkhah's opinion piece is titled "Empty Skies Over Afghanistan." It worries about American and NATO leaders' concern not to be seen as killing "an inordinate number of civilians." This consideration is making "our soldiers.wait an hour or more for air support" as U.S. officials (allegedly) work to distinguish "enemy" fighters from "innocent" bystanders. Some U.S. troops have been shot while waiting for the U.S. forces units to wage "air warfare" against the dastardly enemy, which insists on defending their lands from foreign assault The "pendulum has swing too far in favor of avoiding the death of innocents," Dadkhah proclaims. Hardly bashful about announcing his willingness to embrace the unavoidable slaughter of bystanders, Dadkhah wishes to disabuse readers of the childish "premise that dead civilians are harmful to the conduct of war. The trouble is," he writes, "no previous war supplies compelling proof of that claim." Look, let's be real, Dadkah argues, "wars are ugly" and "harmful to civilians." But they must be fought, of course. The doctrinal assumption that We (the U.S) are Good, noble, and well-intentioned in our foreign policies is ubiquitous in U.S. dominant media and indeed across the spectrum of respectable opinion in the "mainstream" political and intellectual culture. You can't get on the supposedly left New York Times' Op Ed page if you question that childish nationalistic premise, which Lara Dadkhah automatically and almost invisibly embraces. The front-page story twenty pages ahead of Dadkhah's opinion piece suggests that U.S. "air warfare" is less than completely inhibited and slowed-down by the crippling rules of engagement imposed by such noted pacifists and humanitarians as Gen. Stanley McChrystal [4]. Col. Bacchus' wait-time for the launching of American weapons of mass destruction from on high - what Lara Dadkhah called "air warfare" - was one minute. "As Illegal as the Invasion of Iraq" There's something missing from both Chivers' reflexive angst over the horror of Taliban fighters shooting rifles at Marines and Dadkhah's willingness to embrace the butchering of civilians. The absent ingredient is the simple, brazen, and imperial criminality of the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. Throughout the national "debate" over Obama's "Afghanistan options" in the summer and fall of 2009, there was no discussion outside marginal left circles of the fact that the initial bombing and invasion of the Afghanistan took place in bold defiance of international law forbidding aggressive war. Sold as a legitimate defensive response to the September 2001 jetliner attacks, it was undertaken without definitive proof or knowledge that that country's Taliban government was responsible in any way for 9/11. It occurred after the Bush administration rebuffed offers by that government to extradite accused 9/11 planners to stand trial in the U.S. It sought to destroy the Taliban government with no legal claim to introduce regime change in another nation. It took place over the protest of numerous Afghan opposition leaders and against the warnings of aid organizations who expected a U.S. attack to produce a humanitarian catastrophe. U.S. claims to possess the right to bomb Afghanistan - an action certain to produce significant casualties - raised the interesting question of whether Cuba and Nicaragua were entitled to set off bombs in the U.S. given the fact that the U.S. provided shelter to well-known terrorists known to have conducted murderous attacks on the Cuban and Nicaraguan people and governments [5]. The United States' attack on Afghanistan met none of the standard international moral and legal criteria for justifiable self-defense and occurred without reasonable consultation with the United Nations Security Council. As prominent legal scholar Marjorie Cohn noted in July of 2008, "the invasion of Afghanistan was as illegal as the invasion of Iraq." As Cohn explained, the U.N. Charter requires member states to settle international disputes by peaceful means. Nations are permitted to use military force only in self-defense or when authorized by the Security Council. After 9/11, the Council passed two resolutions, neither of which authorized the use of military force in Afghanistan. Assaulting that country was not legitimate self-defense under article 51 of the Charter since the jetliner assaults were criminal attacks, not "armed attacks" by another country. Afghanistan did not attack the U.S. and 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, there was no "imminent threat of an armed attack on the United States after September 11 or Bush would not have waited three weeks before initiating his October 2001 bombing campaign." As Cohn added, "The necessity for self-defense must be 'instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.' This classic principle of self-defense in international law has been affirmed by the Nuremberg Tribunal and the U.N. General Assembly"[6]. Not surprisingly, an international Gallup poll released after the bombing was announced showed that global opposition was overwhelming. In 34 of the 37 countries Gallup surveyed, majorities opposed a military attack on Afghanistan, preferring that 9/11 be treated as a criminal matter rather than as a pretext for war. Even in the U.S., just 54% supported war [7]. "In Latin America, which has some experience with US behavior," Noam Chomsky noted, "support [for the U.S. assault] ranged from 2% in Mexico, to 18% in Panama, and that support was conditional on the culprits being identified (they still weren't eight months later, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported) and civilian targets being spared (they were attacked at once). There was an overwhelming preference in the world for diplomatic/judicial measures, rejected out of hand by [Washington, claiming to represent] 'the world'" [8]. If it was the Other Way Around... The late George Carlin's (understandable) cynicism aside, one should hardly want to see young working class American women and men subjected to sniper fire, IED attacks, and/or other forms of violence in Afghanistan or anywhere else. But U.S. troops are at once agents and hostages of an Empire that has no legitimate moral or true legal basis for invading and attacking Afghanistan (or Pakistan or Iraq or Somalia or Yemen or Iran or.fill in the blank). At the same time, the "insurgents" on the other side of "our" (Empire's) guns (and cannons and tanks and missiles, and bombs, and drones) have the fully legitimate right to resist "our" colonial incursions with force. The Times reports with sensitivity on the fear and exhaustion experienced by U.S. troops "ambushed" by snipers in a foreign country their masters have illegally invaded. But of course their "ambushers" are doing exactly what many Americans would proudly do to Russian or Chinese troops order to take over part of, say, California. And imagine Dadkhah writing so coldly about the unavoidable necessity of a certain number of "ugly" civilian casualties in a Chinese assault on, say, Honolulu. These inverted scenarios are absurd, of course, but the point of imagining them is not. It is to suggest how nationalistic doctrine prohibits an honest discussion of what "we" are really doing in the world. Paul Street (paulstreet99 at yahoo.com)is the author of many articles, chapters, speeches, and books, including Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008); Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007; Segregated School: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Routledge, 2005); and Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008). Street's next book The Empire's New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2010), will be released next summer. Street's article "The Enemy At Home" will appear in the March 2010 issue of Z Magazine,on newsstands. NOTES 1. C.J. Chivers, "Snipers Imperil U.S.-Led Forces in Afghanistan," New York Times, February 18, 2010, A1. 2. The use of the phrase "U.S.-led" is meant to downplay the fact that the United States is by far and away the real force behind the imperial violence. 3. "Peace prize? He's a killer." Thus spoke a young Pashtun man to an Al Jazeera English reporter on ecember 10, 2009 - the day that Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize. "Obama," the man added, "has only brought war to our country." The man spoke from the village of Armal, where a crowd of 100 gathered around the bodies of 12 people, one family from a single home. The 12 were killed, witnesses reported, by U.S. Special Forces during a late night raid. "Why are they giving Obama a peace medal?" another village resident asked. "He claims to want to bring security to us but he brings only death. Death to him" Al Jazeera went to the Afghan village of Bola Boluk, where a U.S. bombing butchered dozens of civilians last spring. "He doesn't deserve the award," a young woman said. "He bombed us and left us with nothing, not even a home" See Aljazeera English, "Afghans Anger at Obama's Nobel Peace Prize," YouTube (December 10, 2009) qt www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBHrnQTinGY&feature=related 4. For some instructive reflections on McChrystal's blood-soaked/death-squad past, see Tom Engelhardt, "The Pressure of an Expanding War," TomDispatch.com (May 21, 2009), read at http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175074/the_pressure_of_an_expanding_war; Alexander Cockburn, "How Long Does it Take?" CounterPunch (May 23 2009), read online at http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn05222009.html 5. Noam Chomsky, Hegemony Over Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance (New York: Metropolitan, 2003), pp. 199-206. See also Rajul Mahajan, The New Crusade: America's War on Terror (New York: Monthly Review, 2002), p. 21. 6. Marjorie Cohn, "End the Occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan," ZNet (July 30, 2008), read at http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/18303.Many defenders of the invasion, Democrats as well as Republicans, upheld Bush's right to attack prior to UN consultation by making the analogy of a maniac who had broken into your house and already killed some residents: "do you sit and around a negotiate with the murderers while they kill more or do you go in and take them out?" But, as Rajul Mahajan argued, "the analogy to the U.S. action would have been better if the maniac had died in the attack, and your response was to bomb a neighborhood he had been staying in, killing many people who didn't even know of his existence - even though you had your own police force constantly on the watch for more attacks." By this analogy, the U.S. would have also been allowed to bomb the German neighborhoods in which many of the 9/11 conspirators planned their operation. 7. Abid Aslam, "Polls Question Support for Military Campaign," Inter Press Service, October 8, 2001; Gallup International, Gallup International Poll on Terrorism "(September 2001); Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, "' Obama's Foreign Policy Report Card': Juan Cole Grades His President - and Very Positively," MR Zine (November 9, 2009), at http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/hp091109.html 8. Noam Chomsky, "The World According to Washington," Asia Times (February 28, 2008). =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sat Feb 20 14:42:47 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:42:47 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Yoo Said Bush Could Order Civilians to Be 'Massacred' Message-ID: <6C46F5AB98894029829BA6439CEA95BF@agingCHS072729> see companion piece: Authors of waterboarding memos won't be disciplined (not even a slap on the wrist!) ================ http://readersupportednews.org/news-section/10-war/1049-yoo-said-bush-could-order-civilians-to-be-massacred Yoo Said Bush Could Order Civilians to Be 'Massacred' By Michael Isikoff, Newsweek 20 February 2010 The chief author of the Bush administration's "torture memo" told Justice Department investigators that the president's war-making authority was so broad that he had the constitutional power to order a village to be "massacred," according to a report by released Friday night by the Office of Professional Responsibility. The views of former Justice lawyer John Yoo were deemed to be so extreme and out of step with legal precedents that they prompted the Justice Department's internal watchdog office to conclude last year that he committed "intentional professional misconduct" when he advised the CIA it could proceed with waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques against Al Qaeda suspects. The report by OPR concludes that Yoo, now a Berkeley law professor, and his boss at the time, Jay Bybee, now a federal judge, should be referred to their state bar associations for possible disciplinary proceedings. But, as first reported by NEWSWEEK, another senior department lawyer, David Margolis, reviewed the report and last month overruled its findings on the grounds that there was no clear and "unambiguous" standard by which OPR was judging the lawyers. Instead, Margolis, who was the final decision-maker in the inquiry, found that they were guilty of only "poor judgment." The report, more than four years in the making, is filled with new details into how a small group of lawyers at the Justice Department, the CIA, and the White House crafted the legal arguments that gave the green light to some of the most controversial tactics in the Bush administration's war on terror. They also describe how Bush administration officials were so worried about the prospect that CIA officers might be criminally prosecuted for torture that one senior official - Attorney General John Ashcroft - even suggested that President Bush issue "advance pardons" for those engaging in waterboarding, a proposal that he was quickly told was not possible. At the core of the legal arguments were the views of Yoo, strongly backed by David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney's legal counsel, that the president's wartime powers were essentially unlimited and included the authority to override laws passed by Congress, such as a statute banning the use of torture. Pressed on his views in an interview with OPR investigators, Yoo was asked: "What about ordering a village of resistants to be massacred? ... Is that a power that the president could legally -" "Yeah," Yoo replied, according to a partial transcript included in the report. "Although, let me say this: So, certainly, that would fall within the commander-in-chief's power over tactical decisions." "To order a village of civilians to be [exterminated]?" the OPR investigator asked again. "Sure," said Yoo. Yoo is depicted as the driving force behind an Aug. 1, 2002, Justice Department memo that narrowly defined torture and then added sections concluding that, in the end, it essentially didn't matter what the fine print of the congressionally passed law said: The president's authority superseded the law and CIA officers who might later be accused of torture could also argue that were acting in "self defense" in order to save American lives. The original torture memo was prompted by concerns by John Rizzo, the CIA's general counsel, that the agency's officers might be criminally prosecuted if they proceeded with waterboarding and other rough tactics in their interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, an allegedly high-level Al Qaeda-linked operative who had been captured in Pakistan and in the spring of 2002 was transferred to a CIA "black site" prison in Thailand. Rizzo wanted the Justice Department to provide a blanket letter declining criminal prosecution, essentially providing immunity for any action engaged in by CIA officers, a request that Michael Chertoff, then chief of the Justice Department's criminal division, refused to provide. It was at that point that Yoo began crafting his opinion, the contents of which he actively reviewed with senior officials at the White House. "Let's plan on going over [to the White House] at 3:30 to see some other folks about the bad things opinion," he wrote in a July 12, 2002, e-mail quoted in the OPR report. The report describes two meetings at the White House with then-chief counsel Alberto Gonzales and "possibly Addington." (Addington refused to talk to the OPR investigators but testified before Congress that he did in fact have at least one meeting with Yoo in the summer of 2002 to discuss the contents of the torture opinion.) After the second meeting, on July 16, 2002, Yoo began writing new sections of his memo that included his controversial views on the president's powers as commander in chief. When one of his associates, Patrick Philbin, questioned the inclusion of that section and suggested it be removed, Yoo replied, "They want it in there," according to an account given by Philbin to OPR investigators. Philbin said he didn't know who the "they" was but assumed it was whoever it was that requested the opinion (technically, that was the CIA, although, as the report makes clear, the White House was also pressing for it). Yoo provided extensive comments to OPR defending his views of the president's war-making authority and disputing OPR's take that he slanted them to accommodate the White House. He did not immediately respond to NEWSWEEK'S request for comment Friday night. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sat Feb 20 17:07:46 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 20 Feb 2010 17:07:46 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] False Flag Terror Operations Around the World Message-ID: <84B42BA80937464A9F51F30EEE019739@agingCHS072729> Saturday, February 20, 2010 Guest Post: Governments From Around the World ADMIT That They Carry Out False Flag Terror Preface: Please skip to the end of this essay (entitled "Why Should I Care?") if you want to see why this issue is important to the economy, civil rights, and the political causes which are most important to you. Yves does not necessarily agree with this essay. Indeed, she may dislike it so much that she bans me from the site. Please send any hate mail to me, not Yves, as I am solely responsible. So why am I posting this? Because if I don't have the courage of my convictions to speak unpopular truths, then why should I write at all? Governments from around the world admit they carry out false flag terror: a.. A major with the Nazi SS admitted at the Nuremberg trials that - under orders from the chief of the Gestapo - he and some other Nazi operatives faked attacks on their own people and resources which they blamed on the Poles, to justify the invasion of Poland. Nazi general Franz Halder also testified at the Nuremberg trials that Nazi leader Hermann Goering admitted to setting fire to the German parliament building, and then falsely blaming the communists for the arson a.. The CIA admits that it hired Iranians in the 1950's to pose as Communists and stage bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected prime minister a.. Israel admits that an Israeli terrorist cell operating in Egypt planted bombs in several buildings, including U.S. diplomatic facilities, then left behind "evidence" implicating the Arabs as the culprits (one of the bombs detonated prematurely, allowing the Egyptians to identify the bombers, and several of the Israelis later confessed) (and see this and this) a.. The former Italian Prime Minister, an Italian judge, and the former head of Italian counterintelligence admit that NATO, with the help of the Pentagon and CIA, carried out terror bombings in Italy and other European countries in the 1950s and blamed the communists, in order to rally people's support for their governments in Europe in their fight against communism. As one participant in this formerly-secret program stated: "You had to attack civilians, people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security" (and see this)(Italy and other European countries subject to the terror campaign had joined NATO before the bombings occurred) a.. As admitted by the U.S. government, recently declassified documents show that in the 1960's, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to blow up AMERICAN airplanes (using an elaborate plan involving the switching of airplanes), and also to commit terrorist acts on American soil, and then to blame it on the Cubans in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. See the following ABC news report; the official documents; and watch this interview with the former Washington Investigative Producer for ABC's World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. Official State Department documents show that - only nine months before - the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other high-level officials discussed blowing up a consulate in the Dominican Republic in order to justify an invasion of that country a.. An Algerian diplomat and several officers in the Algerian army admit that, in the 1990s, the Algerian army frequently massacred Algerian civilians and then blamed Islamic militants for the killings (and see this video; and Agence France-Presse, 9/27/2002, French Court Dismisses Algerian Defamation Suit Against Author) a.. According to the Washington Post, Indonesian police admit that the Indonesian military killed American teachers in Papua in 2002 and blamed the murders on a Papuan separatist group in order to get that group listed as a terrorist organization. a.. The well-respected former Indonesian president also admits that the government probably had a role in the Bali bombings a.. As reported by BBC, the New York Times, and Associated Press, Macedonian officials admit that the government murdered 7 innocent immigrants in cold blood and pretended that they were Al Qaeda soldiers attempting to assassinate Macedonian police, in order to join the "war on terror". a.. Former Department of Justice lawyer John Yoo suggested in 2005 that the US should go on the offensive against al-Qaeda, having "our intelligence agencies create a false terrorist organization. It could have its own websites, recruitment centers, training camps, and fundraising operations. It could launch fake terrorist operations and claim credit for real terrorist strikes, helping to sow confusion within al-Qaeda's ranks, causing operatives to doubt others' identities and to question the validity of communications." a.. United Press International reported in June 2005: U.S. intelligence officers are reporting that some of the insurgents in Iraq are using recent-model Beretta 92 pistols, but the pistols seem to have had their serial numbers erased. The numbers do not appear to have been physically removed; the pistols seem to have come off a production line without any serial numbers. Analysts suggest the lack of serial numbers indicates that the weapons were intended for intelligence operations or terrorist cells with substantial government backing. Analysts speculate that these guns are probably from either Mossad or the CIA. Analysts speculate that agent provocateurs may be using the untraceable weapons even as U.S. authorities use insurgent attacks against civilians as evidence of the illegitimacy of the resistance. Why Should I Care? You may ask yourself "why should I care?" You should care because terrorism harms the economy. Specifically, a study by Harvard and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) points out: From an economic standpoint, terrorism has been described to have four main effects (see, e.g., US Congress, Joint Economic Committee, 2002). First, the capital stock (human and physical) of a country is reduced as a result of terrorist attacks. Second, the terrorist threat induces higher levels of uncertainty. Third, terrorism promotes increases in counter-terrorism expenditures, drawing resources from productive sectors for use in security. Fourth, terrorism is known to affect negatively specific industries such as tourism. The Harvard/NBER concludes: In accordance with the predictions of the model, higher levels of terrorist risks are associated with lower levels of net foreign direct investment positions, even after controlling for other types of country risks. On average, a standard deviation increase in the terrorist risk is associated with a fall in the net foreign direct investment position of about 5 percent of GDP. Moreover: Terrorism has contributed to a decline in the global economy (for example, European Commission, 2001). And see this. In addition, you should care because terror causes governments to strip liberties and civil rights from the people: "This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector." - Plato "If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." - U.S. President James Madison "Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death". - Adolph Hitler "Why of course the people don't want war . But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship . Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." - Hermann Goering, Nazi leader. "The easiest way to gain control of a population is to carry out acts of terror. [The public] will clamor for such laws if their personal security is threatened". - Josef Stalin Indeed, the political causes you hold most dear will be derailed if false flag terror is carried out. To see that this is true, let's take a step back .. Imagine, if you would, that you were a citizen in Germany right after the example of false flag terror by the Nazis discussed above had occurred. Do you believe you could have stopped the government from invading Poland by reminding Germans that war is bad and peace is good? Do you imagine you could have stopped the brownshirts and loss of domestic rights by writing about the desirability of civil liberties? Do you think that you could have convinced people that protecting the environment, or addressing human or civil rights, or helping the poor, or education, or equality, or any other political crusade was more important than "protecting the Fatherland" when Germans were terrified for their safety? Please think about it. The German people were whipped up into a state of hysteria and fear, because they thought they were under attack by Poles and other "bad guys". The German's were in shock, and rallied around their "strong" leader (it wasn't just the bad economy). Without first exposing the truth that the attacks were false flag attacks - which were largely the source and root cause of the German people's fears, and which allowed the German parliament and other institutions to hand Hitler total power - the sweeping away of good political causes by the wave of fear could not be stopped. Moreover, the Nazis might have been derailed and perhaps brought to justice well before the Nuremberg trials if the false flag hoaxes had been exposed at the time. The German people could have been spared from the horrors inflicted on their nation and the world by the Nazis. And sanity and positive political changes might have prevailed in 1940's-era Germany. Please think about it . . . Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Sat Feb 20 20:59:33 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 20 Feb 2010 20:59:33 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Dresden Beats the Nazis Message-ID: <6EC6544CA9CC48F9A60ED9330732BE45@agingCHS072729> http://www.portside.org/?q=showpost&i=7333 (Posted on Sat, 20 Feb 2010 15:14:04 -0500) Dresden Beats the Nazis By Victor Grossman, Berlin The Berlin anti-fascists waiting near the Spree River at 4.30 AM for the buses to Dresden were sleepy, cold and nervous. Not without reason. Some had faced the Nazis a year earlier. Every year these latter day storm troopers try to misuse the emotions of Dresdeners mourning the loss of 25,000 to 35,000 people in the bombing inferno which incinerated the city on February 13th 1945 by downplaying the Holocaust and Nazi crimes in general. The antifascists always oppose them. But last year it was again they who were treated coolly by the authorities. The police took their time at the city limits frisking them for weapons and then concentrated on protecting the Nazis. While driving home a bus load of union members was severely attacked by Nazis from Sweden; one man's skull was fractured. The attackers have never been apprehended; the police said they were "overburdened." And this year the Nazis threatened to break all records with 10,000 adherents from near and far. Just in case, the antifascists were given maps, telephone numbers and as well as tape for the bus windows in case stones were thrown. They felt somewhat safer when they got moving, with 1300 people from Berlin. When buses from the state of Brandenburg joined up they formed a convoy of 30 buses for the 2-3 hour trip. The police checkup at the Dresden city limits was quicker and far less unfriendly this time. They had barely arrived when they heard calls to "Hurry up, our blockade is forming!" 29 buses rolled in from all parts of Thuringia, others were arriving after a long night's trip from the Rhineland, a group from Vienna had arrived a day earlier. Legislators from The Left held four ?open air caucus meetings? and attracted local inhabitants; a famous leftwing singer attracted more. Before long four main groups had formed, with two to five thousand people each, waiting in the icy cold, sitting on mats, stamping their feet or sipping hot tea or soup, and effectively blocking off, from all sides, the big railroad station where the Nazis planned to start their march. Two organizations had joined and prepared this demonstration for a whole year, the main one called "Dresden Nazi frei" ("free of Nazis"), the other using as its name the Spanish Civil War slogan, "non pasaran". Two very different events were planned across the Elbe River which bisects Dresden. One was the habitual ceremony at the cemetery, in front of the memorial monument to all those who died during the inferno which engulfed Dresden 65 years ago. The mayor of Dresden, the minister president of Saxony, of which Dresden is the capital, a leading rabbi and Jewish representative and other celebrities were present, but also a menacing contingent of black-clad Neo-Nazis, including some from their small but loud-mouthed caucus in the state legislature. But this year the Dresden authorities had altered their previous attitude of routine, half-hearted opposition to the Nazis. Looking in their direction, Mayor Helma Orosz, a Christian Democrat, spoke more clearly than many other politicians in recent years: "By working together and protesting jointly, opponents of the rightist extremists , whether they are radical leftists or Christian Democrats, antifascists or church groups, can prevent them from spreading their inhumane National Socialist ideology, their racism, anti- Semitism, their lies and their distortions of history? "Before Dresden burned, Semper's synagogue burned, Warsaw, Rotterdam and Coventry burned. These truths must be used in confronting these latter-day warriors. Dresden does not want them." Last year's images of marching Nazis, sent out throughout the world, had evidently alarmed both Dresden's conservative leaders as well as a large number of its citizens. In the early afternoon, it had been decided, a human chain would link the rebuilt synagogue with City Hall to demonstrate their opposition to the Nazis. There were doubts as to whether the required 5,000 people would take part. But they did. By 2 o'clock there were so many that the single chain became a double line. Then it was extended around the Old Market Square, where thousands of corpses had been collected and burned in 1945, then on to the newly-rebuilt Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady) and the grandly rebuilt Opera House. An estimated 15,000 took part, often for the first time in such a demonstration. After the chain was dissolved some tried to cross the river to join the blockades, not easy because both a railroad bridge and some pedestrian bridges had also been blockaded. Meanwhile tension was mounting at the railroad station, the same one from which a last group of Dresden Jews had been sent off to the death camps just before the bombing raid. Police forces, three deep, protected the Nazis when they marched from their buses to the station, though some smaller gangs vandalized through the area, attacking one left-wing youth center and injuring several of its defenders, one of them severely. There were a few minor skirmishes with less disciplined anti-fascists, the violence-prone types who join in most demonstrations, but most Nazis were finally cordoned off by the police in front of the station, impatient, angry, occasionally violent ? but cornered. Although the courts had given official permission for the Nazi march, against the protest of the city of Dresden, a police spokesman said that the force of almost 5,700 in uniform, plus 1,700 as reinforcements from other states, was unable to break up the blockades of the antifascists, now at least 10,000 in number, and including both elderly people and women with children. All they could do was maintain the safety of the estimated 6,400 fascists in front of the station until 5 PM, when the time allotted them for their demonstration ran out, and then get them away safely. So the crowd, overwhelmingly young, with many from The Left and from several Communist parties, also from union groups as well as some Greens and leftwing Social Democrats, waited patiently in the cold, kept their ears to their cell phones and pocket radios and waited for new developments. They cheered at 5 o'clock when the police announced that the Nazi march had been canceled but stayed on to make sure and then cheer even louder at about 7 PM when the police refused the Nazi demand to march back to their buses and loaded them instead on trains which kept them off the streets. And then, in a twitter message, the top Nazis made it official: "The mourning march did not take place." After a final victory meeting the demonstrators ended the ten hour blockades and headed home. It was good that the mayor and the big shots had also opposed the Nazis and that so many people in Dresden had given up their apathy and joined them. It was a surprise that this time the police had been fairer than ever before in recent years. But the real victory in stopping the Nazis, and just possibly making them give up Dresden marches in the future: that, the tired antifascists were convinced as they headed for home, had been achieved by their powerful blockades. Many of them won't be waiting a year to demonstrate again. Only one week later, Saturday, February 20, a demonstration is scheduled in Berlin to pressure the Bundestag and German government leaders to pull the troops out of Afghanistan. February 16 2010 =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sat Feb 20 23:25:31 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 20 Feb 2010 23:25:31 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] John Michael Greer: Why Factories Aren't Efficient Message-ID: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/02/why-factories-arent-efficient.html Why Factories Aren't Efficient by John Michael Greer The Archdruid Report (February 17, 2010) Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society Last week's Archdruid Report post fielded a thoughtful response from peak oil blogger Sharon Astyk {1}, who pointed out that what I was describing as America's descent to Third World status could as well be called a future of "ordinary human poverty". She's quite right, of course. There's nothing all that remarkable about the future ahead of us; it's simply that the unparalleled abundance that our civilization bought by burning through half a billion years of stored sunlight in three short centuries has left most people in the industrial world clueless about the basic realities of human life in more ordinary times. It's this cluelessness that underlies so many enthusiastic discussions of a green future full of high technology and relative material abundance. Those discussions also rely on one of the dogmas of the modern religion of progress, the article of faith that the accumulation of technical knowledge was what gave the industrial world its three centuries of unparalleled wealth; since technical knowledge is still accumulating, the belief goes, we may expect more of the same in the future. Now in fact the primary factor that drove the rise of industrial civilization, and made possible the lavish lifestyles of the recent past, was the recklessness with which the earth's fossil fuel reserves have been extracted and burnt over the last few centuries. The explosion of technical knowledge was a consequence of that, not a cause. In what we might as well get used to calling the real world - that is, the world as it is when human societies don't have such immense quantities of highly concentrated energy ready to hand that figuring out how to use it all becomes a major driver of economic change - the primary constraints on the production of wealth are hard natural limits on the annual production of energy resources and raw materials. Even after two billion years of evolutionary improvements, photosynthesis only converts about one percent of the solar energy falling on leaves into chemical energy that can be used for other purposes, and that only when other requirements - water, soil nutrients, and so on - are also on hand. Other than a little extra from wind and running water, that trickle of energy from photosynthesis is what a nonindustrial society has to work with; that's what fuels the sum total of human and animal muscle that works the fields, digs the mines, wields the tools of every craft, and does everything else that produces wealth. This, in turn, is why most people in nonindustrial societies have so little; the available energy supply, and the other resources that can be extracted and used with that energy, are too limited to provide any more. The same sort of limits apply to the contemporary Third World, though for different reasons. Here the problem is the assortment of colonial and neocolonial arrangements that drain most of the world's wealth into the coffers of a handful of industrial nations, and leave the rest to tussle over the little that's left. I've commented here before that the five percent of the world's population that happens to live in the United States, for example, doesn't get to use roughly a third of the world's resources and industrial production because the rest of the world has no desire to use a fairer share themselves. Rather, our prosperity is maintained at their expense, and until recently - when the current imperial system began coming apart at the seams - any Third World country that objected too strenuously to that state of affairs could pretty much count on having its attitude adjusted by way of a coup d'etat or "color revolution" stage-managed by one or more of the powers of the industrial world, if not an old-fashioned invasion of the sort derided in Tom Lehrer's ballad "Send the Marines" {2}. One consequence of all this is that over the last century or so, a handful of insightful thinkers have tried to explore ways in which the cycle of exploitation and dependency can be broken. One of those was the maverick economist E F Schumacher, whose ideas have been central to quite a few of the posts here over the last year or so. Though he had degrees from Oxford and taught for a while at Columbia University, Schumacher was not primarily an academic; he was the polar opposite of those ivory-tower economists who have done so much damage to the world in recent decades by insisting that their theories are the key to prosperity even when the facts argue forcefully for the opposite case. He spent most of his career working in the places where government and business overlap, helping to rebuild the German economy after the Second World War and then, for two decades, serving as chief economist for the British National Coal Board, at that time one of the world's largest energy corporations. This was the background he brought to bear on the problems facing the Third World. Still, he drew some of his central ideas from a very different source: the largely neglected economic ideas of Gandhi. (May I interrupt this post to address a pet peeve? The family name of the founder of modern India is spelled "Gandhi", not "Ghandi". It's not that difficult to spell it right, any more than it's hard to avoid writing "Abraham Lcinoln", say, or "Nelson Mdanela"; despite which, I recently got sent a review copy of a book referencing Gandhi - I won't mention the publishers, to spare them the embarrassment - which misspelled the name on the top of every single page. If you need a mnemonic, just remember that the beginning of his name is spelled like "Gandalf", not like "ghastly". Thank you, and we now return you to your regularly scheduled Archdruid Report.) A lot of Americans - even, ahem, those who can spell his name correctly - think of Mohandas K Gandhi as a spiritual leader, which of course he was, and as a political figure, which of course he also was. It's not as often remembered that he also spent quite a bit of time developing an economic theory appropriate to the challenges facing a newly independent India. His suggestion, to condense some very subtle thinking into too few words, was that a nation that had a vast labor force but very little money was wasting its time to invest that money in state-of-the-art industrial plants; instead, he suggested, the most effective approach was to equip that vast labor force with tools that would improve their productivity within the existing structures of resource supply, production and distribution. Instead of replacing India's huge home-based spinning and weaving industries with factories, for example, and throwing millions of spinners and weavers out of work, he argued that the most effective use of India's limited resources was to help those spinners and weavers upgrade their skills, spinning wheels, and looms, so they could produce more cloth at a lower price, continue to support themselves by their labor, and in the process make India self-sufficient in clothing production. This sort of thinking flies in the face of nearly every mainstream economic theory since Adam Smith, granted. Since nearly every mainstream economic theory since Adam Smith has played a sizable role in landing the industrial world in its current mess, though, I'm not so sure this is a bad thing. Current economics dismisses Gandhi's ideas on the grounds of their "inefficiency", but this has to be taken in context, "efficiency", in today's economic jargon, means nothing more or less than efficiency in producing somebody a profit. As a way of keeping millions of people gainfully employed, stabilizing the economy of a desperately poor nation, and preventing its wealth from being siphoned overseas by predatory industrial nations, Gandhi's proposal is arguably very efficient indeed - and this, in turn, was what brought it to the attention of E F Schumacher. One of Schumacher's particular talents was a gift for intellectual synthesis; his work is full of cogent insights that sum up a great deal of more specialized work and make it applicable to a wider range of circumstances. This is more or less what he did with Gandhi's ideas. Schumacher argued that talk about "developing" the Third World typically neglected to deal with one of the most pragmatic issues of all - the cost of setting up workers with the tools they needed to work. Take a moment to follow the logic. You are the president of the newly independent Republic of Imaginaria. You've got a population that's not particularly well fed, clothed, and housed, and a fairly high unemployment rate; you've got a very modest budget for economic development; you've also got raw materials of various kinds, which could be used to feed, clothe, and house the Imaginarian people. Your foreign economic advisers, who not coincidentally come from the industrial nation that used to be your country's imperial overlord, insist that your best option is to use your budget to build a big modern factory that will turn those raw materials into goods for export to their country by their merchants, giving your country cash income to buy goods from them, and in the process employ a few thousand Imaginarians as factory workers. Not so fast, says Schumacher. If your goal is to feed, clothe, house, and employ the Imaginarian people, building a factory is a very inefficient way to go about it, because that approach requires a very large investment per worker employed. You can provide many more Imaginarians with productive jobs for the same amount of money, by turning to a technology that's less expensive to build, maintain, and supply with energy and raw materials - say, by providing them with hand tools and workbenches instead of state-of-the-art fabrication equipment, and setting up supply chains that supply them with local raw materials instead of imports from abroad. The goods those workers produce may not be as valuable in the export market as what might come out of a factory, but that's not necessarily a problem - remember, your main goal is to feed, clothe, and house Imaginarians, so maximizing production for domestic use is a better idea in the first place, since less of the value produced by those workers will be skimmed off by the middlemen who manage international trade. Furthermore, since you won't have to to trade with overseas producers for as many of the necessities of life, your need for cash from overseas goes down, and you get an economy less vulnerable to foreign-exchange shocks into the bargain. This was the basis for what Schumacher called "intermediate technology", and the younger generation of activist-inventors who followed in his footsteps called "appropriate technology". The idea was that relatively simple technologies, powered by locally available energy sources and drawing on locally available raw materials, could provide paying jobs and an improved standard of living for working people throughout the Third World. A lot of very productive thinking went into these projects, and there were some impressive success stories before the counterrevolution of the 1980s cut what little funding the movement had been able to find. Mind you, Schumacher's thinking was never popular among economists or the business world, and it happened more than once that countries that tried to adopt such economic policies were treated to the sort of attitude adjustments mentioned above. Still, pay attention to those Third World nations that have succeeded in becoming relatively prosperous, and you'll find that some version of Schumacher's scheme played a significant role in helping them do that. It's when the same logic is applied to the industrial world, though, that Schumacher's ideas become relevant to the project of this blog. If, as I've suggested, the United States (and, in due time, the rest of the world's industrial nations) have begun a descent to Third World status, thinking designed for the Third World may be a good deal more applicable here and now than the conventional wisdom might suggest. It seems utterly improbable to me that the governments of today's industrial powers will have the foresight, or for that matter the common sense, to realize that economic policies that deliberately increase the number of people earning a living might be a very good idea in an age of pervasive structural unemployment - or, for that matter, to glimpse the unraveling of the industrial age, and realize that within a finite amount of time, the choice will no longer be between high-tech and low-tech ways of manufacturing goods, but between low-tech ways and no way at all. Still, national governments are not the only players in the game. What Schumacher proposed, in fact, is one of the missing pieces to the puzzle of economic relocalization. The economies of scale that made centralized mass production possible in recent decades were simply one more side effect of the vast amount of energy the industrial nations used up during that time. As fossil fuel depletion brings those excesses to an end, the energy and other resources needed to maintain centralized mass production will no longer be available, and what I've described above as the economics of the real world come into play. At that point, the question of how much it costs to equip a worker to do any given job becomes a central economic issue, because any resources that have to go to equipping that worker must be taken away from another productive use. Now of course it's true that the cost of equipping somebody to perform some economic function locally has already entered the relocalization movement in an informal way. What Rob Hopkins calls "the great reskilling" - the process by which individuals who have no productive skills outside a centralized industrial economy learn how to make and do things on their own - has had to take place within the tolerably strict constraints of what individuals can afford to buy in the way of tools and workspaces, since there isn't exactly a torrent of grant money available for people who want to become blacksmiths, brewers, boatbuilders, or practitioners of other useful crafts. It may be worth suggesting, though, that Schumacher's logic might be worth applying directly to the relocalization project by those individuals and communities who are willing to put that project into practice. The less it costs in terms of energy and other resources to prepare a community to deal with one or more of its economic needs, after all, the more will be available for other projects. Equally, the more good ideas that can be garnered from the dusty pages of publications issued by Schumacher's Intermediate Technology Development Group and its many equivalents, and put to work during the industrial world's decline to Third World status, the more creativity can be spared for other challenges. Yet there's also a broader context here, which Schumacher addressed only indirectly, and which has only been hinted at in this post - the need to redefine our notions of economics to make sense in the real world, and above all, to respond to the most economically important of the laws of physics. Yes, those would be the laws of thermodynamics. We'll talk more about this in next week's post. Links: {1} http://scienceblogs.com/casaubonsbook/2010/02/pick_up_your_hat.php {2} http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93n-EmGknEU _____ John Michael Greer, The Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA), has been active in the alternative spirituality movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of more than twenty books, including The Druidry Handbook (Weiser, 2006) and The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age (New Society, 2008). He lives in Cumberland, Maryland. ? From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Feb 21 09:17:12 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 21 Feb 2010 09:17:12 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Think tank tells Israeli government to declare war on peace groups Message-ID: MuzzleWatch Think tank tells Israeli government to declare war on peace groups Posted on February 19 2010 by Cecilie Surasky . They're baaaaack - Israel's "most influential" think tank tells Israeli government to "attack" and "sabotage" global peace and human rights groups (as opposed to domestic groups which are already under attack.) I wrote last month about the Reut (pronounced Ray-OOT) Institute's report on what they see as the new existential threat to Israel. No longer military, the report said, the primary threat to Israel is political. Israel must fight a "delegitimization network" of peace and human rights groups based largely in four international "hubs": Toronto, Madrid, London and the San Francisco Bay Area (where Jewish Voice for Peace is located.) (Now, more of the report is available on-line, including a cool animated PowerPoint! Read terrific in-depth pieces on the new material by Ali Abunimah and Richard Silverstein.) There are many astonishing elements of the report. One is the blame it places on others including the global left for the increasing political viability of a one-state solution. In fact it is Israel's never-ending expansion of settlements that has made a two-state solution seem more and more unlikely by the day, not the global human rights movement. What groups like Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) seek to delegitimize is the occupation and massive inequality and human rights violations committed against Palestinians, not Israel itself. Even most Palestinians, polls show, want their own viable state over a one-state solution. (JVP is neutral on the issue of one state or two or three for that matter, supporting any resolution consistent with international law which is largely supported by both parties.) If the Israelis really wanted the Palestinians to have a state of their own, they could have made it happen years ago and the entire world would have cheered, and since 2002, they would have had full relations with all their Arab neighbors. But instead, the Israeli government has used endless peace negotiations as a way to expand settlements while keeping the international community at bay. If the one-state solution marks the greatest existential threat to Israel, as the Reut report suggests, the Israeli government has no one to blame but itself. The global peace and justice movement is the symptom, not the cause. Secondly, the report actually dares to suggest "sabotage" of groups like Jewish Voice for Peace who are part of an international peace and justice human rights network and who actively support Israeli and Palestinian activists on the ground (our sites include: www.December18th.org, www.FreeEzra.org, www.TheOnlyDemocracy.org etc..). We take this very seriously. Perhaps this is the way NGOs are increasingly handled in Israel, especially under Netanyahu. But it's certainly not how the government, and especially a foreign government, is expected to respond to law- abiding NGOs here in the United States (Ahem, Cointelpro and other efforts notwithstanding). And frankly, we won't stand for it. Plus it's just a stupid idea. How a report that says in one breath that Israel's future lies in branding itself as a high-tech, eco-conscious and cultured democracy while simultaneously suggesting "sabotage" and "attacks" on law-abiding peace groups is stunning. Instead of driving a wedge between "soft" and "hard" critics of Israel, as the report suggests, promoting these kinds of war-like responses against human rights groups will backfire and turn the most casual critics of Israeli policies into supporters of much harsher measures. This, after all, is the primary legacy of Cast Lead, Israel's massive attack on Gaza's entrapped population. If the Reut Institute really wanted to offer some helpful advice on how Israel might stop the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, they might start by advising the Israeli government to end the occupation. http://www.muzzlewatch.com/2010/02/19/think-tank-tells-israeli-government-to-declare-war-on-peace-groups/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Muzzlewatch+%28MuzzleWatch%29 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Tue Feb 23 00:21:13 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Tue, 23 Feb 2010 01:21:13 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] =?iso-8859-1?q?Destroying_C=2EI=2EA=2E_Tapes_of_Bruta?= =?iso-8859-1?q?l_Interrogations_Wasn=27t_Opposed=2C_Memos_Say?= Message-ID: Destroying C.I.A. Tapes Wasn't Opposed, Memos Say By SCOTT SHANE Published: February 22, 2010 WASHINGTON - At a closed briefing in 2003, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee raised no objection to a C.I.A. plan to destroy videotapes of brutal interrogations, according to secret documents released Monday. The senator, Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, also rejected a proposal to have his committee conduct its own assessment of the agency's harsh interrogation methods, which included wall-slamming and waterboarding, the documents say. But Mr. Roberts, through a spokesman, denied having approved the destruction of the videotapes, which is under criminal investigation, and defended his record in overseeing the interrogation program. His assertions were backed by his former staff director on the Intelligence Committee, William D. Duhnke, who said that while the senator had not objected to the tapes' destruction, he was "in receive mode" and was simply listening to get the facts about the interrogation program, which he was learning about for the first time. According to a memorandum prepared after the Feb. 4, 2003, briefing by the C.I.A.'s director of Congressional affairs, Stanley M. Moskowitz, Scott Muller, then the agency's general counsel, explained that the interrogations were reported in detailed agency cables and that officials intended to destroy the videotapes as soon as the agency's inspector general completed a review of them. "Senator Roberts listened carefully and gave his assent," the C.I.A. memo says. In November 2005, after nearly three years of internal debate, the agency destroyed 92 videotapes of interrogations of two people suspected of being terrorists, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. That action has been under criminal investigation by the Justice Department since early 2008. A prosecutor, John H. Durham, is trying to determine whether it violated court orders to preserve evidence related to detention and interrogation or violated any laws. Last August, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. directed Mr. Durham to expand his inquiry to consider whether the interrogations themselves broke any law. Mr. Holder noted that in at least a few instances, interrogators went beyond methods authorized by the Justice Department, including threatening Mr. Nashiri with a pistol and a power drill. Those incidents were also described in the 2003 briefing for Mr. Roberts; when they were described, "Senator Roberts winced," according to the memo on the briefing. The same document says that Senator Bob Graham of Florida, the Democrat who had preceded Mr. Roberts as chairman, had proposed that the committee "undertake its own 'assessment' of the enhanced interrogation," the C.I.A.'s term for coercive methods. Agency officials told Mr. Roberts that they would oppose allowing any Senate staff members to observe interrogations or visit the secret overseas prisons where they were taking place. "Quickly, the senator interjected that he saw no reason for the committee to pursue such a request and could think of '10 reasons right off why it is a terrible idea,' " the report says. In a separate statement, Mr. Roberts said the memo did not "begin to represent the entirety of my oversight of interrogations." Mr. Duhnke, the former Intelligence Committee staff member, said he had originally proposed placing a committee staff member who was a trained interrogator at the C.I.A.'s secret overseas prisons to observe interrogations. Agency officials twice refused the request, he said. While Mr. Roberts did not push the matter at the 2003 briefing, he did later persuade the agency to clear more Senate staff members to learn about the interrogation program. None were permitted to observe the questioning, Mr. Duhnke said. The memo is among more than 100 pages of heavily redacted documents about Congressional briefings on interrogation made public Monday as a result of a freedom of information request by Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University. The groups said the documents showed the need for a full public investigation of the interrogation program and also suggested that Congress was too involved in approving the program to conduct an objective investigation. The documents shed no new light on a dispute last year between Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, and C.I.A. officials about what exactly she was told in a briefing on interrogation in the fall of 2002. Ms. Pelosi has said that while waterboarding, a tactic that simulates drowning, was describing at the briefing, she was not told that it was already in use. In fact, the waterboarding of Mr. Zubaydah had begun by that time, and C.I.A. officials have said they believe that was reported at the briefing with Ms. Pelosi. The records do show that Representative Jane Harman of California, who succeeded Ms. Pelosi as the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, asked pointed questions about the value of coercive interrogation methods at a closed briefing in July 2004. Ms. Harman protested that the committee "had not been getting full and candid testimony on the detainee issue" and questioned whether the harsh methods were necessary and effective, according to a C.I.A. memo. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/us/politics/23intel.html?hp -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Tue Feb 23 00:30:20 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Tue, 23 Feb 2010 01:30:20 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] NATO Airstrike Kills Afghan Civilians Message-ID: NATO Airstrike Kills Afghan Civilians By ROD NORDLAND Published: February 22, 2010 KABUL, Afghanistan - An airstrike launched Sunday by United States Special Forces helicopters against what international troops believed to be a group of insurgents ended up killing as many as 27 civilians in the worst such case since at least September, Afghan officials said Monday. "The repeated killing of civilians by NATO forces is unjustifiable," President Hamid Karzai's cabinet said in a statement. "We strongly condemn it." The Special Forces helicopters were hunting for insurgents who had escaped the NATO offensive in the Marja area, about 150 miles away, according to Gen. Abdul Hameed, an Afghan National Army commander in Dehrawood, which is part of Oruzgan Province. General Hameed, interviewed by telephone, said there had been no request from any ground forces to carry out an attack. The airstrike took place in an area under Dutch military control, and there were concerns over the possibility of political repercussions in the Netherlands, where the Afghan war is unpopular. On Saturday the government collapsed over an effort to extend the deployment of 2,000 Dutch troops in Afghanistan. But a Dutch Defense Ministry spokesman in The Hague said Dutch forces were not involved in calling for the airstrike. The spokesman, who spoke in return for customary anonymity, did not say who had called for air support. NATO officials did not immediately identify the forces involved in the strike. "Yesterday a group of suspected insurgents, believed to be en route to attack a joint Afghan-ISAF unit, was engaged by an airborne weapons team resulting in a number of individuals killed and wounded," the American-led International Security Assistance Force, also known as ISAF, said in a statement released Monday. "After the joint ground force arrived at the scene and found women and children, they transported the wounded to medical treatment facilities." Zemarai Bashary, a spokesman for the Afghan Interior Ministry, said the victims were all civilians. He said two Land Cruisers and a pickup truck carrying a total of 42 people were attacked by air near Khotal Chowzar, a mountain pass that connects Daykondi Province with Oruzgan Province in central Afghanistan. Mr. Bashary said there were no Afghan forces known to be operating in the area where the airstrike took place, but an investigation was under way to determine who was involved. The cabinet statement, posted on the president's Web site in English and Dari, said there were 27 dead, including 4 women and a child, and 12 people wounded. Mr. Bashary said only 21 dead had been confirmed so far, with 14 wounded and 2 missing, but he said those were preliminary figures. The commander of ISAF, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, apologized to Mr. Karzai on Sunday night and ordered an investigation into what had happened, the international force said, and on Monday, the force distributed a video statement by the general translated into Dari and Pashto. Mr. Karzai's office said in a statement that the president "reminded the NATO commander that the issue of civilian casualties was a major hurdle against an effective war on terror and it must stop." "We are extremely saddened by this tragic loss of innocent lives," General McChrystal said in the video. "I have made it clear to our forces that we are here to protect the Afghan people. I pledge to strengthen our efforts to regain your trust to build a brighter future for all Afghans." Last June, General McChrystal announced a shift in policy greatly restricting the use of airstrikes to reduce civilian casualties. The change meant airstrikes would normally be used only to save the lives of coalition forces when under attack, and would be carefully reviewed in advance. "If the reports are true, this is the worst case since McChrystal has announced his new strategy of reducing the use of air power," Nadir Nadery, commissioner of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, said Monday. "In Kunduz, the target was legitimate militarily but the bombing was disproportionate, 70-plus civilians died, but at least it was a justified military target." A strike requested by German forces in Kunduz on Sept. 4 struck two fuel tanker trucks that had been seized by the Taliban, and it killed more than 90 people. It later emerged that most of the victims were civilians forced by the Taliban to participate in unloading the tankers. The chief of staff of the German armed forces resigned over accusations that the German military withheld information about the civilian deaths, and the case provoked an inquiry in Germany's Parliament. The latest episode was far from the scene of the allied offensive in Marja, in southern Helmand Province, that began Feb. 13. The international force has apologized for the deaths of at least 16 civilians during the Marja campaign, including 12 killed by a ground-to-ground rocket strike. A news release by the coalition forces on Monday said there continued to be "limited small-arms engagements throughout" the district of Nad Ali, which includes Marja, and in the city itself. "Determined resistance from small pockets of insurgents continues," it said. At the Pentagon, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, issued a sobering assessment of progress in the offensive. "We're making steady, if perhaps a bit slower than anticipated, progress," Admiral Mullen said at a news conference. "We will see success in Marja, but we must be patient, and we must resist the temptation to derive from any one event, good or bad, an unnecessary trend." Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, at the same news conference, cautioned that it was too early to let the current status of the Marja mission influence long-term planning for operations in Afghanistan. Separately, the international force also reported that in Kapisa Province, north of Kabul, a firefight Monday between joint international and Afghan forces and insurgents in the Tagab district resulted in insurgents firing a rocket into a civilian car, killing one passenger and wounding five others. The international force's account of the episode, however, said that no civilians were killed but that four insurgents were. Reporting was contributed by Sangar Rahimi, Taimoor Shah and Abdul Waheed Wafa from Kabul, an employee of The New York Times from Jalalabad; Marlise Simons from The Hague, and Thom Shanker from Washington. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/world/asia/23afghan.html?hpw -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Tue Feb 23 00:33:11 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Tue, 23 Feb 2010 01:33:11 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Afghans Voice Their Fears (and Anger) Amid Marja Campaign Message-ID: <774DD1BCEBA7458B8B8417C6CDF94F82@Upstairs> Afghans Voice Their Fears Amid Marja Campaign By C. J. CHIVERS Published: February 21, 2010 MARJA, Afghanistan - Since the American-led offensive into the last large Taliban enclave in Helmand Province began nine days ago, local Afghans have faced a dangerous and uncertain world. Their homes are now in a region where the Marines have established a presence, the Taliban have moved into the shadows as a potent guerrilla force, and the Afghan government insists it will soon provide services and bring Marja into the national fold. All the while, in northern Marja, the fighting grinds on at a pace of several firefights a day - a climate that has displaced many civilians and kept others hiding inside. Abdul Ajahn, an elder here, voiced a lingering fear. "If the Taliban shoots from that side, and you are on this side, and I am in between?" he said to the Marines at a meeting arranged by a commander and local elders over the weekend. "Then I am sure you will shoot me." One by one at the meeting, attended by the elders of several rural villages and the leaders of Company K, Third Battalion, Sixth Marines, the elders asked questions and expressed worries, summarizing local reactions to an offensive that so far had frightened and disoriented them. How can farmers water and feed their livestock or work on crops without risking being shot? When will it be safe enough to visit the bazaar, which has been all but closed? When will searches of their homes stop? Can the mullah move through the village before dawn to open his mosque for morning prayer? If the meeting was any indication, the Marines face local Afghans deeply worried for their safety and suspicious of American actions, even as the elders expressed an interest in collaborating with development projects once security conditions improve. But first things first. One elder, Yamatullah, a man with a long, fine goatee, asked the Marines to respect the people's possessions. On many days since the Marines landed by helicopter, firefights have led to Marines chasing Taliban gunmen, often into the mud-walled compounds that ring local homes. The Marines have also conducted deliberate sweeps. "We are innocent people," Mr. Yamatullah said. "We have a lot of expensive things in our homes. Please do not break our things or take them." The Marines said they would try not to disturb anyone's homes or goods. They also told the elders that once the fighting subsided, Marja would enjoy many services and development opportunities it had lacked: police protection, mosque repair, school and medical care. About an hour into the meeting, long bursts of rifle fire and the thump of a machine gun could be heard a few kilometers away. A Marine reconnaissance unit was in a fight. The shura, as the meeting was called, continued nonetheless. The Marines said they wanted to keep hearing from the elders. One man, Izmarai, vented at the Marines for setting up an outpost at a home he said he owned. He demanded they leave. "If you want to arrest me, arrest me," he said. "If you want to shoot me, shoot me now. You say you want to make peace and security. Then why did you make your compound in my home, and between my home and my field? Did you ask me? No." Mr. Izmarai was so angry that at one point he tossed stones at First Lt. Cory J. Colistra, the company's executive officer. The Marines promised the man they would not stay on his property long. They offered to pay rent. Mr. Izmarai was unimpressed. After the shura ended, he at first refused to shake the Marines' hands. But later he returned, saying his presentation had been a performance. There were Taliban members at the meeting, he said, and he spoke as he did to impress them. The Marines said they were not sure what to believe. Was he telling the truth? Or playing both sides? By this time, midday Saturday, the company had returned to the current day-to-day fight. Third Platoon set out to set up an overnight patrol base. The Taliban were waiting. A firefight ensued. A Marine was struck by a bullet in the leg; he was evacuated and in good condition. On Sunday, the fighting was more intense. Second Platoon left its patrol base to clear an area north of a bridge that the company seized last week. It came under machine-gun fire. A Marine was shot in the hip. (The names of both Marines have been withheld pending notification of their families.) The Marine's bleeding was difficult to stop. The corpsman who tried to save him lost the man's pulse, then managed to resuscitate him. He kept the man alive until a helicopter could land and carry him to a military hospital. The platoon continued its sweep. Company K felt a surge a relief. About an hour later the radio brought grim news. The wounded Marine had died. In all but one of the nine days Company K has been clearing a small portion of Marja, there have been multiple skirmishes. And at times two or more fights have occurred simultaneously, as patrols in different places have clashed with separate groups of Taliban. Most have not resulted in American casualties. The Taliban have often bounded away as the Marines massed supporting fire or brought in air support. But eight members of Company K and two Afghan Army soldiers have been struck by bullets in six different engagements. Two Marines and one Afghan soldier have died. The Taliban have suffered much heavier losses. Yet they continued through the weekend to fire at most of the company's patrols. The civilians, meanwhile, sought cues as to what to do. So far, the small number of Afghans tending crops in the fields or looking after livestock, or even walking along roads and trails, suggested that local Afghans were not convinced that it was safe enough here to resume their routines. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/22/world/asia/22civilian.html?ref=asia -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Tue Feb 23 00:52:27 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Tue, 23 Feb 2010 01:52:27 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Glenn Greenwald: The NYT on its "kill more civilians" Message-ID: <9A96854AAC524CD0828C9BF82FDA120E@Upstairs> Monday, Feb 22, 2010 17:23 EST The NYT on its "kill more civilians" By Glenn Greenwald (updated below) Last week, I wrote about the mysterious Op-Ed writer, Lara M. Dadkhah, published by The New York Times, who urged that the U.S. be less restrained about slaughtering Afghan civilians with air attacks (when Dadkhar reads things like this from today -- "Airstrike kills dozens in Afghanistan . . . Ground forces at the scene found women and children among the casualties" -- she presumably thinks: "yes, that's exactly what we need more of"). As I noted, beyond how deranged the argument was, virtually no information was disclosed about Dadkhah herself, who was allowed to tout her work for a "defense consulting company" without even specifying who it was. The Hillman Foundation's Charles Kaiser asked NYT Op-Ed Page Editor David Shipley about this strange matter and received this reply: We found Ms. Dadkhah from work she did in Small Wars Journal, work that was part of her Ph.D. dissertation at Georgetown. Ms. Dadkhah only recently took a job at Booz Allen. We tend not to mention the names of companies -- as it can run the risk of seeming self-promotional. I thought it was sufficient to have the author say, as she did high up in the piece, that "While I am employed by a defense consulting company, my research and opinions on air support are my own." It's worth underscoring that Ms. Dadkhah's research regarding close air support came entirely from her doctoral research, and that these are issues she has written about over the the last couple years for Small Wars. Shipley's answer strongly suggests that Dadkhah did not submit her Op-Ed unsolicited, but rather, the NYT purposely sought out an Op-Ed to urge more civilian deaths in Afghanistan ("We found Ms. Dadkhah from work she did in Small Wars Journal"). Why would they do that? Maybe tomorrow the NYT Editors can actively solicit an Op-Ed urging the use of biological agents and chemical weapons on civilian populations in Yemen. After that, they can search out someone to advocate medical experiments on detainees in Bagram. Perhaps the day after, they can host a symposium on the tactical advantages of air bombing hospitals and orphanages as a means of keeping local populations in line. Beyond that, Dadkhah's employer -- Booz Allen -- has more overlapping ties with the Pentagon than virtually any other corporation on the planet. The very idea that Dadkhah's employment with a company that has its hooks in virtually every aspect of war policy need not have been disclosed, when she's advocating greater use of air power, is absurd on its face. And Shipley's claim that the companies which employ Op-Ed writers are not typically mentioned by the NYT is insultingly false; just today, Newt Gingrich's short Op-Ed contribution is accompanied by this tagline: "founder of the Center for Health Transformation, a health-care policy consulting firm." Yesterday, the NYT published an Op-Ed from the "former general counsel of the National Association of Computer Consultant Businesses," and throughout the month, the NYT had Op-Ed writers identified as "chairman of Convers Group in Moscow," "a vice president at Microsoft from 1997 to 2004," and "the director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop." Suffice to say, concealing the employer of the Op-Ed writer is not customary policy. To summarize: the NYT Op-Ed Page decided, for whatever reasons, that it wanted to find someone to urge more civilian deaths in Afghanistan. The person it found to do that is someone about whom virtually nothing was known, yet works for one of the largest, most sprawling and influential defense firms in the nation, a virtual arm of the Pentagon, but they decided there was no reason to have its readers know that. http://www.salon.com/news/media_criticism/index.html?story=/opinion/greenwald/2010/02/22/nyt -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Feb 23 08:21:48 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 23 Feb 2010 08:21:48 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Competition for Google Books?? Message-ID: <> http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,676591,00.html 02/19/2010 Competition for Google A German Library for the 21st Century By Manfred Dworschak The German Digital Library wants to make millions of books, films, images and audio recordings accessible online. More than 30,000 libraries, museums and archives are expected to contribute their digitized cultural artifacts. The idea, in part, is to compete with Google Books. But will it work? On a good day this reader gets through as many as 1,216 pages per hour. Hissing quietly, devouring book after book. Now and then it says, "Pffft." This is a state-of-the-art robot at work. It automatically scans every book placed open in front of it. A slender wedge drops down to the fold, sucks in a page from left and right and lifts the goods. It's photographed and with a gentle puff of air -- pffft -- the robot flips the page. So it goes, day after day, at the Munich Digitization Center of the Bavarian State Library. Some 45,000 works have been scanned -- from the "Nibelungenlied" on parchment to an original score from the hand of Gustav Mahler. Admittedly, treasures from the early years of book culture are generally scanned by hand. The robot surrenders when faced with fragile tomes, which can weigh up to half a hundredweight with leather bindings or wooden covers. Eventually a new Internet portal will benefit from the riches of these Munich databases. The German Digital Library (Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, or DDB) will become an online center for millions of books, magazines, photographs and films. Libraries, museums and archives all over the country are expected to contribute digitized cultural artifacts. A Chamber of Wonders But it will take time. The first trial version may go online in 2011 -- "and that will only be for a restricted group of users," says Ute Schwens, a director of the German National Library in Frankfurt, which is coordinating the DDB. Germany's Culture Minister Bernd Neumann (CDU) calls the long-term vision a "project of the century." The initiators promise a virtual chamber of wonders, as suitable for lay people as it will be for researchers hunting specific sources and scientific documents. Type in "Beethoven" and you will find not only books about the composer, but -- eventually -- handwritten sheet music, music samples and perhaps a movie version of "Fidelio." Germany's federal cabinet gave the green light in early December. The goal is to integrate the DDB with Europeana, the European portal launched in 2008 with similar ambitions. This European industriousness has been spurred, primarily, by Google, which has digitized more than 10 million books around the world already. There were warnings about a private corporation gaining a cultural monopoly. Europeana and the DDB promise to respect the copyrights that Google has so far only reluctantly observed. Jean-No?l Jeanneney, former president of the French National Library, spoke of an "anti-capitalist model to counter Google's power play." Digitization is also a measure against the vulnerability of the book as a medium. A 2004 fire at the Anna Amalia Library in Weimar destroyed 50,000 volumes, some of them irreplaceable. Digital backup copies could limit such losses in future. Even as the experts in Germany embark on the preliminary work, it's apparent that the venture faces fearsome challenges. The technical goals alone seem ambitious. The Fraunhofer Institute in Sankt Augustin, near Bonn, is responsible for the DDB's computer technology. It's developing programs to recognize people in films, convert speech recordings to searchable text, and automatically index documents. Most audacious is the proposed sweep of the new portal. More than 30,000 museums, archives and scientific collections across Germany are supposed to hook up. The DDB's creators will be pleased, for now, with a hundred participants, but prestigious institutions such as the Hamburger Kunsthalle or the St?del Museum in Frankfurt are not even on the list yet. Overambitious, and Underfunded Rolf Griebel, Director General of the Bavarian State Library, who regards the project as "good and overdue," nevertheless warns against over-ambitious plans. "I have real doubts about whether the DDB can be filled with content properly and within a reasonable timeframe," he says. Griebel estimates that scanning a book from the 16th or 17th century costs between ?70 and ?140, depending on the amount of work. Contemporary titles are cheaper, but the quantities involved are enormous. The German Library Association is proposing to digitize around 5.5 million volumes in the first 10 years. That would cost at least ?165 million. But where is the money supposed to come from? Germans are gazing enviously at France, where President Nicolas Sarkozy recently promised to raise ?750 million to pay for the digitization of France's national culture. The German project, by contrast, may have obvious cultural gaps for years to come. Will the user be content to chance upon occasional prize discoveries? Wouldn't it be preferable to do less, but do it all right? "To start with it would certainly makes sense to limit this to selected areas and themes," says Griebel. But the DDB's planners won't settle for that. Every cultural activity, every science, every type of document is fair game -- preferably from every German museum and library. And the search technology will be more sophisticated than just looking up terms, as offered by Google. The DDB collections (under the current plan) will be indexed according to a range of criteria -- place, time, subject area. Such an index can only work if the objects are described in detail. In this effort the DDB has the benefit of some basic technology from the German government-funded Theseus program. Researchers at Theseus have been working since 2007 on methods of indexing images, films, audio recordings and books. If the computer has a rudimentary understanding of what's going on, it can fill out several fields automatically -- indispensable for the vast quantities of documents the DDB will have to contend with. The researchers are reporting initial progress in recognition of elements in films and photographs. "Faces are still hard, but it's going well with trees, cars and buildings," says Thomas Niessen, head of Theseus. The computer is also having some success with converting spoken word into searchable text -- it even attempts to distill the relevant people, places and events. Complete With German Rail Tickets Meanwhile, a debate is underway about the bigger picture. How exactly should the DDB serve both lay people and researchers? And what should the ideal portal look like? Reinhard Altenh?ner of the German National Library thinks users might be able to post their own contributions. "If a city archive provides material about the history of a street," he says, "the residents could enrich that with their own stories and photos." Museums could place links in search results to relevant current exhibitions. A small demonstration on the screen illustrates how that might work. "And here," says Altenh?ner, clicking another link, "here you can even buy the Deutsche Bahn ticket on the spot." Such subtle extras can't be found on Google. The search-engine firm prefers projects that can be explained in one sentence. In the case of digitization, the goal is simple: every book in the world in a user-friendly presentation. Beyond that, the best indexing technology is of little benefit. The consequences of ignoring this axiom are illustrated by the Europeana site. Following a long stagnation, the collection is due to grow to 10 million cultural artifacts by mid-2010. "That makes us a global leader," says Berlin information scientist Stefan Gradmann, a member of Europeana's executive committee. Some exhibits are accessible now on the site, on a trial basis, using intelligent search. Type, say, "Paris" and Europeana also returns Montmartre and the Tuileries; sources appear relating to Paris, the prince from Greek mythology. The search engine is likewise familiar with his fateful deed, the "theft of Helen." It finds documents, in other words, that do not contain the search term. But browsing in Europeana is just not very pleasurable. The results are displayed in thumbnail images the size of postage stamps. And if you click through for a closer look, you're taken to the corresponding institute. Soon you're wandering helplessly around a dozen different museum and library Web sites -- and you end up lost somewhere between the "Vlaamse Kunstcollectie" and the "Wielkopolska Biblioteka Cyfrowa." Would it not be preferable to incorporate all the exhibits within the familiar scope of Europeana? "We would have preferred that," says Gradmann. "But then the museums would not have participated." They insist on presenting their own treasures. Digital Libraries, Babylonian-Style If the DDB yields to the vanity of the participating institutes, the result will be a Babylonian structure with 30,000 annexes. Would anyone have the patience to browse an index consisting of 30,000 idiosyncratic Web sites? The promise to strictly observe copyright also poses problems. The only works the DDB may scan freely are those by authors who have been dead for at least 70 years. For newer documents whose authors cannot be contacted, a settlement will be worked out with the relevant copyright collectives. DDB coordinator Schwens wants to incorporate contemporary material, too. "It would be a shame," she says, "if current scientific knowledge could not be found via the DDB." Negotiations with publishers are already in progress. Ideally, says Schwens, there would be a "one-stop-shop," where the user can electronically buy or borrow the work that interests them. Online shop Libreka, operated by the German Booksellers' Association, would be available for book sales. However, Libreka has a dubious reputation: Many of its electronic books have convoluted copy protection. The publishers want it that way. And many of their bestselling books tend not to appear, for fear of digital piracy. The German digitization project is threatened from two sides: There isn't enough money for the scanning of older works, while access to new works -- which may exist in digital form already -- is liable to be blocked by anxious publishers. So would it be better to let Google take over the whole thing? By mid-2010 the American firm wants to start trading in electronic books. A half-million titles have been designated for the "Google Editions" project. Sixty-three percent of each sale will to the publisher, with Google keeping the rest. The Bavarian State Library's experience with Google has been good so far. Since 2007 Google has digitized out-of-copyright books for Munich's cultural custodians -- around a million volumes so far. In tough negotiations, the library secured the right to have its own copy of each book, to present however it wishes. Open access to these treasures is thus guaranteed. And the scanning is going like clockwork. Each week around 5,000 volumes leave the halls of the state library. A truck delivers them to a top-secret location in Bavaria, where Google's scanners work away unswervingly. At this rate, it will all be done and dusted in just four years. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Feb 23 14:54:31 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:54:31 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The Great Reskilling (1) Message-ID: [This blog examines the far-reaching consequences of the coming (or already-arrived) peak in oil production. These issues are explored in the form of longer essays. This blog is a collaboration between Daniel-1 who writes the texts in Swedish and Daniel-2 and Magnus who translates them to English. Welcome to the idea of a life after oil. Contact: efteroljan(at)gmail.com] http://life-after-oil.blogspot.com/2010/01/great-reskilling.html Life After Oil January 17, 2010 by Daniel Pargman The Great Reskilling Rob Hopkins {1} has founded and popularaized the Transition Town movement {2}. One of his ideas is The Great Reskilling. The basic idea is simple - the twin challenges of peak oil and climate change mean that society will change fundamentally, and this will in turn force each one of us to acquire new knowledge and skills. These "new" skills are often old skills; knowledge of how to do things in a world of drastically reduced access to energy, and incidentally leading to a much lower environmental impact. They include old craft skills, resource management and farming - knowledge that was alive and widely distributed in society only two generations ago {3}: "Re-learning the skills that our grandparents took for granted, such as how to use hand tools, how to build our own structures, how to mend and make clothing, how to make our own medicine, how to forage, grow, preserve and store our food". To some extent, The Great Reskilling is about turning the clock back. Not for dogmatic reasons ("technology is evil") or for romantic reasons ("everything was better in ye olde times"), but because the required direction of action - given coming (energy) resource scarcity and climate change concerns - is so obvious. And it is thus better to start acting now, rather than to wait until we have no other choice than to learn everything all at once. However, we should of course hold on to any and every technology that we can possible manage to maintain. From this perspective, it is clear that cars are not a sustainable transportation technology, and that resources for transporting people (in cities) already today should focus on rail traffic and bicycles, rather than wasting resources on building brand new roads. A good text about the kinds of knowledge {4} we all need to acquire outlines a long list which includes cultivation and storage of (part of) your own food, husbandry, sewing, carpentry, basic mechanical skills and much more. One could add many more things to such a list, for example basic medical knowledge. However, ultimately you end up with a long list of things which - until now - we have not had to concern ourselves with, because it has been so easy to go to the supermarket to buy our food, to buy a cheap (and fashionable) shirt if we get tired of the old one, and to buy a new tool as soon as the old on breaks (or we can't find it). The problem with such a list is that it might feel overwhelming for an individual to get started. Indeed, you must have a strong will to take the first, and second, and the tenth step, when it is so easy to throw-away-and-buy-a-new, when there are so many "must-haves" and when popular culture distract us and steals our time. But reskilling is not just about the skills you need, but also about how to acquire them. Hopkins writes about "reskilling events" and the benefits of organizing or participting in such activities. Reskilling events: - Teach people new (old) skills - Bring people together, helping them to build networks - Give strength and convey a sense of "can do it myself" (as opposed to powerlessness) - Create links between the generations when old skills are being taught to the young (or middle-aged) - may result in physical manifestations which act as "advertisement" for the newly acquired knowledge Hopkins' guess is that these events will initially be short courses, and that the ambition and the length of the courses may increase over time. Of course, many people could participate in these events/courses without having any deeper thoughts about potential/future needs for the knowledge they acquire - they just do it simply because they think it is fun and because they want to immerse themselves and learn something new. From these observations, I will make a detour to the ecovillage-to-be that I am involved in and then return to the topic of reskilling. Since the beginning of May 2009, I am one of six co-owners of a farm with 22 hectares of land in S?rmland (just south-west of Stockholm). Much has happened since then and more will happen in the future. There are one hundred issues on various levels to discuss, decide on and implement (who fixes a broadband connection and who copies the keys, how do we keep track of which co-owner has been spending how much money on what and how much of which plants we should grow where, what policy should we have regarding land use et cetera.) One thing we did during the summer was to arrange courses. These courses were about things we wanted to learn, and they were all in line with the push to reskill ourselves. Our thought was that if we have our own farm and want to learn practical skills, then why not carry out activities in the form of courses at the farm where others are also welcome to participate? We decided to organize three courses on our farm last summer. They were all open to the public and as it so happened, they all turned out to be successful: - Building with natural materials (including clay, rammed earth, strawbales et cetera) - Permaculture Design - Local Economic Regeneration Here are brief summaries of the courses, from the most practical to the most theoretical: "Building with natural materials" was about building with natural and locally occurring materials (clay, sand, straw, sawdust, cow dung). The course was practical, offering a hands-on experience of different building techniques. The goal of this three-days course was for the participants to build something concrete, but even more important, to learn about and try a variety of building techniques. "Permaculture Design" was about creating/designing ecosystems for human benefit. The idea is not complicated, but the term permaculture (permanent agriculture) is most likely unfamiliar to most people. In permaculture, natural ecosystems are the model, and the goal is to "design" new ecosystems so that they produce food and other goods that are of benefit for humans. The basic ideas are well summarized here: "Imagine a natural forest. At the top is a roof of tree crowns, beneath it small trees, large and small shrubs, herbs and land covering plants, as well as plants that primarily exist below ground level and climbing plants that occupy all levels. The production of organic material is surprisingly high in comparison with, for example, a wheat field, which consists of a single layer of about half a meter. Imagine what an abundance this forest would contain if it consisted of edible plants! It would greatly surpass the yield of the wheat field!" [I don't have the original text {5}, this is a translation back to English from the Swedish edition] Unlike the other two courses, "Local Economic Regeneration" was a theoretical course. The premise was that current economic theories have brought the capitalist economic system to the brink of a systemic collapse. As we pass peak oil, the period of cheap energy {6} will end. Less energy means reduced production and the end of globalization and long transports. The trend will be towards local (regional, national) production of goods and services {7}. Based on this, how can we create local economic regeneration in an economy beyond growth? What should we switch to, and how? What can you produce that is profitable both today and after the coming changes? How can you initiate, finance and be a successful entrepreneur even if it becomes increasingly difficult to show a bank how you will be able to repay your loans (because of economic turbulence and questioning of old economic "truths")? This brings the text back to where it started - to the ideas underlying the Transition Town Movement and the Great Reskilling. We, in our ecovillage-to-be, feel that we have done some of our share by arranging courses, and feel confident about continuing to organize other courses in the future (in fact, we organized another course two months ago, I might come back to that later). And there are many suggestions for new course topics: food conservation, building a root cellar, building houses with timber and stone, foraging for edible plants and herbs, brewing beer, beekeeping, aquaculture and so on. The list could easily become very long since there are lots of things that we would like to know more about. Today, people participate in courses like these because they find them interesting and fun. Tomorrow, the kind of practical knowledge such courses provide may become a hard currency. As a bonus, you meet interesting people and extend you social network when you attend these courses! Links: {1} http://transitionculture.org/ {2} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_Towns {3} http://transitionvermont.ning.com/profiles/blogs/wild-edibles-and-the-great {4} http://campfire.theoildrum.com/node/5226 {5} http://www.amazon.com/Permaculture-Nutshell-Patrick-Whitefield/dp/1856230031 {6} http://life-after-oil.blogspot.com/2009/10/energy-free-of-charge.html {7} http://life-after-oil.blogspot.com/2010/01/death-of-rationalization.html =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Feb 23 14:57:30 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:57:30 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Saudi Arabia Preparing For Peak Oil Message-ID: <49E83797B2CB4D48B6D66F78C099647C@agingCHS072729> http://www.countercurrents.org/tablawy230210.htm Saudi Arabia Preparing For Oil Demand To Peak By Tarek El Tablawy 23 February, 2010 Associated Press JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia, 15 February, 2010 - A top Saudi energy official expressed serious concern Monday that world oil demand could peak in the next decade and said his country was preparing for that eventuality by diversifying its economic base. Mohammed al-Sabban, lead climate talks negotiator, said the country with the world's largest proven reserves of conventional crude is working to become the top exporter of energy, including alternative forms such as solar power. Saudi Arabia was among the most vocal opponents of proposals during the climate change talks in Copenhagen. And al-Sabban criticized what he described as efforts by developed nations to adopt policies biased against oil producers through the imposition of taxes on refined petroleum products while offering huge subsidies for coal - a key industry for the United States. Al-Sabban said the potential that world oil demand had peaked, or would peak soon, was an "alarm that we need to take more seriously" as Saudi charts a course for greater economic diversification. "We cannot stay put and say 'well, this is something that will happen anyway," al-Sabban said at the Jeddah Economic Forum. The "world cannot wait for us before we are forced to adapt to the reality of lower and lower oil revenues," he added later. Some experts have argued that demand for oil, the chief export for Saudi Arabia and the vast majority of other Gulf Arab nations, has already peaked. Others say consumption will plateau soon, particularly in developed nations that are pushing for greater reliance on renewable energy sources. With oil demand only now starting to pick up after it was pummeled by the global recession, some analysts say consumers may have learned to live permanently with a lower level of consumption. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, as well as other international energy organizations, is forecasting a slight rise in oil demand this year, based mainly on increased consumption in Asia after last year's sharp hit. Either peak oil scenario presents grave challenges for the Gulf region and OPEC, whose countries rely on oil sales for as much as 90 percent of their budgets. Al-Sabban, who also serves as the chief economic adviser to Saudi Oil Minister Ali Naimi, said an oil demand peak would be "very serious" for the country. Saudi has about 264 billion barrels of crude reserves and currently produces about 8 million barrels per day out of its overall output capacity of around 12 million barrels per day. The kingdom, widely seen as the de facto leader of the 12-member OPEC, has embraced an ambitious expenditure program aimed not only at further developing its oil base but also expanding and diversifying its economic base. Its expansionary policies came even as other nations were tightening purse strings in response to the world's worst financial crisis in over six decades. The outlays included billions of dollars for a new research university that opened last year, as well as major ventures such as the construction of new economic cities and other infrastructure. Oil's pre-recession price boom also helped pad Saudi Arabia's foreign reserves, now in excess of $400 billion, and have helped the government weather the worst of the global crisis. International ratings agency Moody's, in a reflection of the country's macroeconomic position, on Monday upgraded Saudi Arabia's foreign and local currency government ratings to Aa3 from A1 citing "the continued solid state of government finances which have largely withstood oil price volatility and the global economic crisis." Al-Sabban said that along with investing in education and economic diversification, Saudi must ensure that it become the top energy exporter, including in solar power, to keep moving forward. The country recently launched its first solar-powered desalination plant and al-Sabban said oil giant Saudi Aramco was working on a pilot project to inject carbon emissions back into wells to help boost output. The carbon sequestration project, which he said would be operational by 2012, was a sign of Saudi Arabia's commitment to environmentally sound energy development. The push for cleaner technology is pivotal for the oil rich kingdom. Copyright ? 2010 The Associated Press =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Feb 23 21:27:46 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 23 Feb 2010 21:27:46 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Chris Hedges: Boycott FedEx Message-ID: <22A4AB77570A454C986DC94D4FE2FA3F@agingCHS072729> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/boycott_fedex_20100222/ Truthdig.com Feb. 22, 2010 Boycott FedEx by Chris Hedges Dean Henderson's career with FedEx ended abruptly when a reckless driver plowed into his company truck and mangled his leg. His doctor will decide this week if it needs to be amputated. No longer able to drive, stripped of value in our commodity culture, he was tossed aside by the company. He became human refuse. He spends most of his days, because of the swelling and the pain, with his leg raised on a recliner in the tiny apartment in Fairfax, Va., he shares with his stepsister. He struggles without an income and medical insurance, and he fears his future. Henderson is not alone. Workers in our corporate state earn little when they work--Henderson made $18 an hour--and they are abandoned when they can no longer contribute to corporate profits. It is the ethic of the free market. It is the cost of unfettered capitalism. And it is plunging tens of millions of discarded workers into a collective misery and rage that is beginning to manifest itself in a dangerous right-wing backlash. "This happened while I was wearing their uniform and driving one of their company vehicles," Henderson, a 40-year-old military veteran, told me. "My foot is destroyed. I have a fused ankle. I have had over a dozen surgeries. It hurts to wear a sock. I was limping pretty badly, but in the spring of 2008 FedEx said I had to come back to work and sit in a chair. It saved them money on workers' compensation payments. I worked a call center job and answered telephones. I did that for three months. I had my ankle fused in January 2009, and then FedEx fired me. I was discarded. They washed their hands of me and none of this was my fault." Our destitute working class is beginning to grasp that Barack Obama and other elected officials in Washington, who speak in a cloying feel-your-pain language, are liars. They are not attempting to prevent wages from sinking, unemployment from mounting, foreclosures from ripping apart communities, banks from looting the U.S. Treasury or jobs from being exported. The gap between our stark reality and the happy illusions peddled by smarmy television news personalities and fatuous academic and financial experts, as well as oily bureaucrats and politicians, is becoming too wide to ignore. Those cast aside are reaching out to anyone, no matter how buffoonish or ignorant, who promises that the parasites and courtiers who serve the corporate state will disappear. Right-wing rage is being fused with right-wing populism. And once this takes hold, a protofascism will sweep across our blighted landscape fueled by a mounting personal and economic despair. Take a look at Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here." [1] It is a good window into what awaits us. "One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out," the philosopher Richard Rorty [2] warns in his book "Achieving Our Country." "Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words 'nigger' and 'kike' will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet." Whoever rides to power on the back of this rage will swiftly broker a deal with corporations and corporate overlords. But by then it will be too late. Dissent will become a form of treason. The security state will be quickly cemented in place. The bankrupt liberal class, which abandoned the working class and the fight for basic civil liberties, will be reviled, discredited and impotent. America will develop its own peculiar form of Christian fascism. Obama, entranced with power and prestige, is more interested in courting the elite than saving the disenfranchised. The president, when asked to name a business executive he admires, cited Frederick Smith of FedEx, although Smith is a union-busting Republican. Smith, who was a member of Yale's secret Skull & Bones Society [3] along with George W. Bush, served as John McCain's finance chair. I guess Obama is hoping for some cash. And Smith has a lot of it. He founded FedEx in 1971, and the company had more than $35 billion in revenue in the fiscal year that ended in May. Smith is rich and powerful, but there is no ethical system, religious or secular, that would hold him up as a man worthy of emulation. Those who make vast profits at the expense of workers and the common good are not moral. They are not worthy of adulation. They build fortunes and little monuments to themselves off the pain and suffering of people like Henderson. Jesus called them "vipers." "He's an example of somebody who is thinking long term," the president said [4] of Smith in an interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, adding that he "really enjoyed talking" with him at a Feb. 4 White House luncheon. Smith does think in the long term. His company lavished money on members of Congress in 1996 so they would vote for an ad hoc change in the law banning the Teamsters Union from organizing workers at Federal Express. A few stalwarts in the Senate, including Edward Kennedy (in a speech reprinted in the Congressional Record on Oct. 1, 1996) and his then-colleague Paul Simon, denounced the obvious. The company had bought its legislative exemption. Most members of Congress, then as now, had become corporate employees. "I think we have to honestly ask ourselves, why is Federal Express being given preferential treatment in this body now?" Sen. Simon said at the time. "I think the honest answer is Federal Express has been very generous in their campaign contributions." Following the Senate vote, a company spokesman was quoted as saying, "We played political hardball, and we won." What happened to our historical memory? How did we forget that those who built our democracy and protected American workers were not men like Smith, who use power and money to further the parochial and selfish interests of the elite, but the legions of embattled strikers in the coal fields, on factory floors and in steel mills that gave us unions, decent wages and the 40-hour workweek. How was it possible in 1947 to pass the Taft-Hartley Labor Act [5], which, in one deft move, emasculated the labor movement? How is it possible that it remains in force? Union workers, who at times paid with their lives, halted the country's enslavement to the rich and the greedy. And now that unions have been broken, rapacious corporations like FedEx and toadies in Congress and the White House are turning workers into serfs. UPS is unionized. It is the largest employer of the Teamsters. Labor costs, because of the union, account for almost two-thirds of its operating expenses. But Smith spends only a third of his costs on labor. There is something very wrong with a country that leaves a worker like Henderson sitting most of the day in a tiny apartment in excruciating pain and fighting off depression while his billionaire former boss is feted as a man of vision and invited to lunch at the White House. A country that stops taking care of its own, that loses the capacity for empathy and compassion, that crumples up human beings and throws them away when it is done with them, feeds dark ideological monsters that inevitably rise to devour the body politic. FedEx is busy making sure Congress keeps unions out of its shops. It has lavished $17 million, double its 2008 total, on Congress to fight off an effort by UPS and the Teamsters to revoke Smith's tailor-made ban on unions. Smith, again thinking "long term," plans to continue to hire thousands of full-time employees and list them as independent contractors. If his workers are listed as independent contractors he does not have to pay Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance taxes. And when they get sick or injured or old he can push them onto the street. Henderson says FedEx treats its equipment as shabbily as its employees. There's no difference between trucks and people to corporations that view everything as a commodity. Corporations exploit human beings and equipment and natural resources until exhaustion or collapse. They are cannibals. "The trucks are a liability," Henderson said. "They are junk. The tires are bald. The engines cut out. There are a lot of mechanical problems. The roofs leak. They wobble and pull to one side or the other. The heating does not work. And the company pushes its employees in the same way. The first Christmas I was there I worked 13 hours without a break and without anything to eat. It is dangerous. I could have fallen asleep at the wheel and injured someone." If you have to send packages do not be a scab. Send it with UPS or the U.S. Postal Service. They have unions. Every step, however tiny, we take to thwart the corporate rape of the country and protect workers counts. We would have to do more, much more, but this would be a small start. Like Smith, our politicians have sold their souls. They will not help us. We must help ourselves. And the longer we stand by and permit the Democrats and the Republicans to strip American workers of their jobs and their dignity the less we will have to say when the day of angry retribution arrives. Copyright (c) 2010 Truthdig, L.L.C. Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com [6]. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning [7], What Every Person Should Know About War [8], and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. [9] His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle [10]. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Feb 23 22:03:20 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 23 Feb 2010 22:03:20 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The Unemployed Have Begun to Organize Their Own Union Message-ID: The Unemployed Have Begun to Organize Their Own Union to Press Fight for Jobs By Harry Kelber February 23, 2010, LaborTalk http://www.laboreducator.org/lt100223.htm It's been only a month that a union for the unemployed has come into existence through an ingenious grass- roots organizing campaign. In case you haven't heard about it, the union's name is "UR Union of the Unemployed" or its nickname, "UCubed," because of its unique method of organizing. UCubed is the brain-child of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), whose leaders feel that the millions of unemployed workers need a union of their own to join in the struggle for massive jobs programs. The idea is that if millions of jobless join together and act as an organization, they are more likely to get Congress and the White House to provide the jobs that are urgently needed. They can also apply pressure for health insurance coverage, unemployment insurance and COBRA benefits and food stamps. An unemployed worker is virtually helpless if he or she has to act alone. Joining a Cube is as simple as it is important. (Please check the union web site: www.unionofunemployed.com< http://www.unionofunemployed.com>) Six people who live in the same zip code address can form a Ucube. Nine such UCubes make a neighborhood. Three neighborhood UCubes form a power block that contains 162 activists. Politicians cannot easily ignore a multitude of power blocks, nor can merchants avoid them. The union is built from the ground up. Cube activists will select their own leadership in each cube, neighborhood, block and higher group as well. Jobless Union's Encouraging Progress in One Month The UR Union of Unemployed (or UCubed) already has members in over 300 zip code addresses and 43 states, reports Rick Sloan, acting executive director of the union. Seventy-five cubes are up and running. For the first month, 19,998 people visited the site and viewed over 138,000 pages of content. The union's Op-Ed article appeared in 62 newspapers, ranging from the "Black News" to the "Mexican American Sun," and from the "Las Vegas Tribune" to the "Senior Life of Northern Indiana." Total circulation exceeded 12 million readers. UCubed put out three press releases last month, informing politicians in Washington that the union of unemployed will be watching-and reacting-to their vote on the latest job proposals of the Obama administration. * * * * It is to the advantage of the AFL-CIO and Change to Win to encourage their unemployed members to participate in the UCubed organizing campaign. It is important for organized labor to display meaningful sympathy and solidarity with those who have been without a pay check for many months. A large union of unemployed workers can be an important ally in political campaigns and a source of legions of volunteers. When those unemployed workers finally get back to their jobs, we want them to have a favorable memory of how unions stood by their side. Let's give the unemployed the support they need to be effective in their own defense.-Harry Kelber =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From hain at antcolbks.com Wed Feb 24 01:02:55 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Wed, 24 Feb 2010 02:02:55 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] 'God gap' impedes U.S. foreign policy, task force says Message-ID: <3480102A46EB4ADAA456C2DFAD69A20D@Upstairs> 'God gap' impedes U.S. foreign policy, task force says By David Waters Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, February 24, 2010 American foreign policy is handicapped by a narrow, ill-informed and "uncompromising Western secularism" that feeds religious extremism, threatens traditional cultures and fails to encourage religious groups that promote peace and human rights, according to a two-year study by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. The council's 32-member task force, which included former government officials and scholars representing all major faiths, delivered its report to the White House on Tuesday. The report warns of a serious "capabilities gap" and recommends that President Obama make religion "an integral part of our foreign policy." Thomas Wright, the council's executive director of studies, said task force members met Tuesday with Joshua DuBois, head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and State Department officials. "They were very receptive, and they said that there is a lot of overlap between the task force's report and the work they have been doing on this same issue," Wright said. DuBois declined to comment on the report but wrote on his White House blog Tuesday: "The Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnership and the National Security Staff are working with agencies across government to analyze the ways the U.S. government engages key non-governmental actors, including religious institutions, around the globe." The Chicago Council isn't as influential as the Council on Foreign Relations or some other Washington-based think tanks, but it does have a long-standing relationship with the president. Obama spoke to the council once as a state senator and twice as a U.S. senator, including his first major foreign policy speech as a presidential candidate in April 2007. Michelle Obama is on the council's board. American foreign policy's "God gap" has been noted in recent years by others, including former secretary of state Madeleine K. Albright. "It's a hot topic," said Chris Seiple, president of the Institute for Global Engagement in Arlington County and a Council on Foreign Relations member. "It's the elephant in the room. You're taught not to talk about religion and politics, but the bummer is that it's at the nexus of national security. The truth is the academy has been run by secular fundamentalists for a long time, people who believe religion is not a legitimate component of realpolitik." The Chicago Council's task force was led by R. Scott Appleby of the University of Notre Dame and Richard Cizik of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good. "Religion," the task force says, "is pivotal to the fate" of such nations as Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Iraq, Iran, Nigeria and Yemen, all vital to U.S. national and global security. "Despite a world abuzz with religious fervor," the task force says, "the U.S. government has been slow to respond effectively to situations where religion plays a global role." Those include the growing influence of Pentecostalism in Latin America, evangelical Christianity in Africa and religious minorities in the Far East. U.S. officials have made efforts to address the God gap, especially in dealings with Islamic nations and groups. The CIA established an office of political Islam in the mid-1980s. Congress passed the International Religious Freedom Act in 1998 to make religious freedom a U.S. foreign policy priority. During the second Bush administration, the Defense Department rewrote the Army's counterinsurgency manual to take account of cultural factors, including religion. The Obama administration has stepped up the government's outreach to a wider range of religious groups and individuals overseas, trying to connect with people beyond governments, said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The effort, he said, is more deliberate than in the past: "This issue has senior-level attention." He noted that Obama appointed a special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference and created a new Muslim outreach position in the State Department. In the past year, he said, embassies in Muslim-majority countries have held hundreds of meetings with a broad range of people not involved in government. To end the "episodic and uncoordinated nature of U.S. engagement of religion in the world," the task force recommended: -- Adding religion to the training and continuing education of all foreign service officers, diplomats and other key diplomatic, military and economic officials. That includes using the skills and expertise of military veterans and civilians returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. -- Empowering government departments and agencies to engage local and regional religious communities where they are central players in the promotion of human rights and peace, as well as the delivery of health care and other forms of assistance. -- Address and clarify the role of religious freedom in U.S. foreign policy. Cizik said some parts of the world -- the Middle East, China, Russia and India, for example -- are particularly sensitive to the U.S. government's emphasis on religious freedom and see it as a form of imperialism. Staff writer Michelle Boorstein contributed to this report. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/23/AR2010022305103.html?hpid=moreheadlines -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Wed Feb 24 13:44:44 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:44:44 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Vladimir Putin Criticizes Tycoons Who Underinvest In Power Message-ID: Vladimir Putin Criticizes Tycoons Who Underinvest In Power Published: February 24, 2010 SAYANO-SHUSHENSKAYA DAM, Russia (Reuters) - Russia's prime minister, Vladimir Putin, told four businessmen their companies faced fines and would not be able to sell power at market prices as a result of underinvesting in the sector. "During the crisis we did everything we could to support you," Putin said on Wednesday at the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydropower plant. "The crisis is fading away so I ask you to fulfill your obligations." The four companies are OGK-3 controlled by Vladimir Potanin, TGK-2 controlled by Leonid Lebedev, TGK-4 controlled by Mikhail Prokhorov, and Complex Energy Systems controlled by Viktor Vekselberg. Putin said underinvesting firms faced fines and would not be able to sell power at market prices nor be able to reap the benefit of the long-term power market being created in Russia. Putin said state-run power firms and foreign power companies such as Enel, Eon and Fortum were sticking to investment obligations. "Meanwhile, our domestic investors have run away," he said. Putin said 66 billion roubles ($2.20 billion) out of 450 billion raised by the power sector during reform carried by former chief of state power monopoly RAO UES Anatoly Chubais, were used for "speculative purposes". "They received the money from the share issues to develop the sector and used them for other purposes. This is simply not on," Putin said, adding only 250 billion roubles were invested. "We had hoped the owners will take a responsible position. Unfortunately, not everyone has taken it, citing the crisis and lack of demand," he said. Putin said only 38 out of 100 power plants planned for construction this year were currently being built while work has not yet started at 45 power plants. January power consumption returned to the pre-crisis level of 103 billion MW due to cold weather, he said. ($1 = 29.99 roubles) (Writing by Gleb Bryanski; Editing by Dan Lalor) http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2010/02/24/world/international-us-power-putin.html?_r=1 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Wed Feb 24 15:12:18 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Wed, 24 Feb 2010 16:12:18 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Wall Street shifting political contributions to Republicans Message-ID: Wall Street shifting political contributions to Republicans By Dan Eggen and Tomoeh Murakami Tse Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, February 24, 2010 Commercial banks and high-flying investment firms have shifted their political contributions toward Republicans in recent months amid harsh rhetoric from Democrats about fat bank profits, generous bonuses and stingy lending policies on Wall Street. Wall Street political donations The wealthy securities and investment industry, for example, went from giving 2 to 1 to Democrats at the start of 2009 to providing almost half of its donations to Republicans by the end of the year, according to new data compiled for The Washington Post by the Center for Responsive Politics. Commercial banks and their employees also returned to their traditional tilt in favor of the GOP after a brief dalliance with Democrats, giving nearly twice as much to Republicans during the last three months of 2009, the data show. At the same time, total political donations by the major banks and investment houses alike dropped in the waning months of that year. The nascent shift came even before the White House announced proposals for a new tax on banks and a curb on some of their riskiest trading activities. The proposals, offered last month, particularly alarmed Wall Street and have triggered renewed industry efforts to work with Democrats as well as Republicans on regulatory reform legislation that the bankers can live with, according to industry and government officials. Wall Street executives would prefer to engage with Democratic leaders now rather than face prolonged uncertainty about the rules to govern the industry, the sources said. The new campaign contributions data underscore the political quandary facing Democrats, who want Wall Street donations to help fend off a GOP resurgence in congressional elections this fall but hope to distance themselves from an industry vilified by the public as greedy and ungrateful. President Obama has sought to strike a balance, calling outsize Wall Street bonuses "shameful" and "obscene" while also assuring business executives that he does not "begrudge people success or wealth." Republicans, meanwhile, are soliciting Wall Street for donations with the argument that Democratic proposals would hurt the bottom lines of major financial institutions. House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) told reporters this month that he was urging Wall Street executives to "help our team" oppose the "bizarre policies" coming out of the Obama administration. One senior Republican staff member on Capitol Hill, who discussed contributions on the condition of anonymity, said: "Democrats in Washington are clearly trying to move legislation that would be very damaging to that industry. It was almost like there was a free ride time. But now they're starting to see the real negative impact of Democratic proposals." Obama had unusually strong backing from Wall Street for a Democratic presidential candidate. He raised more than $18 million from bank and brokerage employees, for example, compared with rival John McCain's $10 million. (Obama did not accept money from PACs.) Prominent among Obama's bundlers -- individuals who raised at least $50,000 -- were private equity executives and hedge fund titans, including billionaire Kenneth C. Griffin of Citadel Investment Group, who had previously backed Republicans. But Obama soon encountered stiff opposition from the financial industry -- and some fellow Democrats -- over proposals to curb executive pay, tighten rules on financial derivatives and create an agency to protect consumers of mortgages, credit cards and other financial products. Financial executives have also bristled at the president's increasingly populist tone over the past year, including his quip in December that he did not run for office to help "fat-cat bankers on Wall Street." The industry has responded with its own change in attitude, according to contribution data and interviews. For some prominent executives, the final straw came in January, when Obama proposed a fee on big banks to recoup losses from the government's $700 billion program to bail out financial firms. When the president followed up a few days later with another plan to restrict the growth of large banks, some on Wall Street said they regretted their earlier support. "I'm not voting for him again," one said. Still, others said they would not switch alliances just yet. "I understand people are not happy about this. Wall Street did pour a lot of money into the campaign, some of which I solicited," said one Wall Street executive and Democratic bundler, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic. "Having said that, we're kind of responsible for a lot of what went down." One Democratic-leaning firm that has signaled particular displeasure with the administration's direction is J.P. Morgan Chase, which is headed by Obama supporter James Dimon and features several other prominent Democrats in its upper ranks. The bank and its employees, who doled out nearly $500,000 in federal contributions last year, went from giving 76 percent of the money to Democrats in the first quarter to giving 73 percent to Republicans in the fourth. In a pointed break with recent practice, the company's political action committee also contributed $30,000 to GOP congressional campaign committees in 2009 while giving nothing to their Democratic equivalents. According to one source familiar with its donation strategy, the bank did not want to offer blanket support for the Democratic committees, which could then use the money to support anti-Wall Street hopefuls. Yet the bank and its executives are still ready to support specific Democratic candidates considered friendly to the financial sector. Last Wednesday, Jes Staley, the head of J.P. Morgan's investment bank, held a 50-person fundraiser at his home for Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.), who is trying to fend off a primary challenge by Harold E. Ford Jr., a former congressman who holds a senior position at Bank of America's investment bank. Ford has his own support in the financial sector. The move toward the GOP is most evident among commercial banks, a buttoned-down sector that has historically favored Republicans to a greater degree than their swashbuckling counterparts in the investment banks. Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo all favored the GOP in combined individual and PAC contributions last year, according to the quarterly data compiled by CRP. But analysts note that Democrats still came out ahead in gathering money from Wall Street in 2009 and said it is too early to tell whether the move toward the Republicans will continue. Many Democrats also declined contributions last year from banks that received federal bailout money, possibly accounting for some of the shift. "There could be some changes at the margins," said Scott E. Talbott, chief lobbyist with the Financial Services Roundtable, which represents the largest financial institutions. The anger toward Washington, he added, "doesn't always translate to changes in political giving. The environment changes quickly and constantly. No one issue drives political donations." Steve Hildebrand, a Democratic strategist who served as Obama's deputy national campaign director, argues that the party needs to swear off Wall Street money altogether. "I think Democrats ought to be leaders in renouncing all money from special-interest groups, whether it's banks or trial lawyers or unions," he said. "But let's not kid ourselves; they're all doing it. Democrats are still fighting for the same money as Republicans. They're just not crowing about it." Democrats in Washington have seized on GOP fundraising efforts in an attempt to link the party to unpopular Wall Street financiers. "Republicans have sent a clear message to the American people that Wall Street matters more than middle-class families and small businesses that are hurting on Main Street," Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said in a recent statement. One GOP strategist said the party expects to face attacks on the issue no matter what. "We'd rather have the whacks and the money than the whacks and no money," he said. Tse reported from New York. Staff writer David Cho contributed to this report. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/23/AR2010022305537.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Thu Feb 25 00:17:15 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Thu, 25 Feb 2010 01:17:15 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Officials puzzle over millions of dollars leaving Afghanistan by plane for Dubai Message-ID: Officials puzzle over millions of dollars leaving Afghanistan by plane for Dubai By Andrew Higgins Washington Post Foreign Service Thursday, February 25, 2010 KABUL -- A blizzard of bank notes is flying out of Afghanistan -- often in full view of customs officers at the Kabul airport -- as part of a cash exodus that is confounding U.S. officials and raising concerns about the money's origin. The cash, estimated to total well over $1 billion a year, flows mostly to the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai, where many wealthy Afghans now park their families and funds, according to U.S. and Afghan officials. So long as departing cash is declared at the airport here, its transfer is legal. But at a time when the United States and its allies are spending billions of dollars to prop up the fragile government of President Hamid Karzai, the volume of the outflow has stirred concerns that funds have been diverted from aid. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, for its part, is trying to figure out whether some of the money comes from Afghanistan's thriving opium trade. And officials in neighboring Pakistan think that at least some of the cash leaving Kabul has been smuggled overland from Pakistan. "All this money magically appears from nowhere," said a U.S. official who monitors Afghanistan's growing role as a hub for cash transfers to Dubai, which has six flights a day to and from Kabul. Meanwhile, the United States is stepping up efforts to stop money flow in the other direction -- into Afghanistan and Pakistan in support of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Senior Treasury Department officials visited Kabul this month to discuss the cash flows and other issues relating to this country's infant, often chaotic financial sector. Tracking Afghan exchanges has long been made difficult by the widespread use of traditional money-moving outfits, known as "hawalas," which keep few records. The Afghan central bank, supported by U.S. Treasury advisers, is trying to get a grip on them by licensing their operations. In the meantime, the money continues to flow. Cash declaration forms filed at Kabul International Airport and reviewed by The Washington Post show that Afghan passengers took more than $180 million to Dubai during a two-month period starting in July. If that rate held for the entire year, the amount of cash that left Afghanistan in 2009 would have far exceeded the country's annual tax and other domestic revenue of about $875 million. The declaration forms highlight the prominent and often opaque role played by hawalas. Asked to identify the "source of funds" in forms issued by the Afghan central bank, cash couriers frequently put down the name of the same Kabul hawala, an outfit called New Ansari Exchange. Early last month, Afghan police and intelligence officers raided New Ansari's office in Kabul's bazaar district, carting away documents and computers, said Afghan bankers familiar with the operation. U.S. officials declined to comment on what prompted the raid. New Ansari Exchange, which is affiliated with a licensed Afghan bank, closed for a day or so but was soon up and running again. The total volume of departing cash is almost certainly much higher than the declared amount. A Chinese man, for instance, was arrested recently at the Kabul airport carrying 800,000 undeclared euros (about $1.1 million). Cash also can be moved easily through a VIP section at the airport, from which Afghan officials generally leave without being searched. American officials said that they have repeatedly raised the issue of special treatment for VIPs at the Kabul airport with the Afghan government but that they have made no headway. One U.S. official said he had been told by a senior Dubai police officer that an Afghan diplomat flew into the emirate's airport last year with more than $2 million worth of euros in undeclared cash. The Afghan consul general in Dubai, Haji Rashoudin Mohammadi, said in a telephone interview that he was not aware of any such incident. The high volume of cash passing through Kabul's airport first came to light last summer when British company Global Strategies Group, which has an airport security contract, started filing reports on the money transfers at the request of Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security, the domestic intelligence agency. The country's notoriously corrupt police force, however, complained about this arrangement, and Global stopped its reporting in September, according to someone familiar with the matter. Afghan bankers interviewed in Kabul said that much of the money that does get declared belongs to traders who want to buy goods in Dubai but want to avoid the fees, delays and paperwork that result from conventional wire transfers. The cash flown out of Kabul includes a wide range of foreign currencies. Most is in U.S. dollars, euros and -- to the bafflement of officials -- Saudi Arabian riyals, a currency not widely used in Afghanistan. Last month, a well-dressed Afghan man en route to Dubai was found carrying three briefcases stuffed with $3 million in U.S. currency and $2 million in Saudi currency, according to an American official who was present when the notes were counted. A few days later, the same man was back at the Kabul airport, en route to Dubai again, with about $5 million in U.S. and Saudi bank notes. One theory is that some of the Arab nation's cash might come from Saudi donations that were supposed to go to mosques and other projects in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But, the American official said, "we don't really know what is going on." Efforts to figure out just how much money is leaving Afghanistan and why have been hampered by a lack of cooperation from Dubai, complained Afghan and U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Dubai's financial problems, said a U.S. official, had left the emirate eager for foreign cash, and "they don't seem to care where it comes from." Dubai authorities declined to comment. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/24/AR2010022404914.html?hpid=sec-world -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Thu Feb 25 00:21:24 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Thu, 25 Feb 2010 01:21:24 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Senate votes to extend USA Patriot Act for 1 year after Dems Rtreated from New Privacy Protections Message-ID: <6A4660957F494396A80C43F93E430231@Upstairs> Senate votes to extend USA Patriot Act for 1 year By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER The Associated Press Wednesday, February 24, 2010; 9:25 PM WASHINGTON -- The Senate voted Wednesday to extend for a year key provisions of the nation's counterterrorism surveillance law that are scheduled to expire at the end of the month. In agreeing to pass the bill, Senate Democrats retreated from adding new privacy protections to the USA Patriot Act. The Senate approved the bill on a voice vote with no debate. It now goes to the House. Three important sections of the Patriot Act are to expire at the end of this month. One authorizes court-approved roving wiretaps that permit surveillance on multiple phones. A second allows court-approved seizure of records and property in anti-terrorism operations. A third permits surveillance against a so-called lone wolf, a non-U.S. citizen suspected of engaging in terrorism who may not be part of a recognized terrorist group. Supporters say extending the law enables authorities to keep important tools in the fight against terrorism. It would also give Democrats some cover from Republican criticism that the Obama administration is soft on terrorism. Republicans have criticized the administration for trying terrorist suspects in civilians courts, rather than military ones, and for trying to close the military-run prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Some Democrats, however, had to forfeit new privacy protections they had sought for the law. The Judiciary Committee bill would have restricted FBI information demands known as national security letters and made it easier to challenge gag orders imposed on Americans whose records are seized. Library records would have received extra protections. Congress would have closely scrutinized FBI use of the law to prevent abuses. Dissemination of surveillance results would have been restricted and after a time, unneeded records would have been destroyed. "I would have preferred to add oversight and judicial review improvements to any extension of expiring provisions in the USA Patriot Act," said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. "But I understand some Republican senators objected." --- Associated Press writer Larry Margasak contributed to this report. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/24/AR2010022404926.html?hpid=politics -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Thu Feb 25 15:58:04 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:58:04 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Torture Whitewash Message-ID: <830E31A979AA44AA9FA26367B415C2F2@Upstairs> THE PROGRESS REPORT February 25, 2010 by Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Matt Corley, Benjamin Armbruster, Zaid Jilani, Matt Duss, and Alex Seitz-Wald Torture Whitewash On Friday, the Department of Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) released a long-awaited report investigating whether the legal advice in crucial Bush administration memos authorizing torture "was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys." The report found that attorneys John Yoo and Jay Bybee "had committed professional misconduct in writing the legal opinions that authorized torture." The report was softened, however, by Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis, the top career attorney at the department, who "overruled OPR's finding of misconduct" in an accompanying memo, concluding only that that Yoo and Bybee exercised poor judgment and made bad legal arguments. While stating that his "decision should not be viewed as an endorsement of the legal work that underlies" the torture memos, Margolis also "barred OPR from referring the matter to state bar disciplinary authorities where Yoo and Bybee are licensed." What's troubling, Margolis' memo indicated that Yoo and Bybee's legal decisions were understood as having occurred in the heat of the post-9/11 moment, (even though they were written in 2002) implying that "being under pressure" is an excuse for ignoring laws against torture. PRESSURE FROM BUSH OFFICIALS?: OPR is the Justice Department's "internal watchdog" and "has the authority to recommend referring errant DoJ lawyers for professional discipline or even criminal prosecution." The OPR's investigation of Yoo and Bybee began after Jack Goldsmith -- who succeeded Bybee as head of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in 2003 -- "protested the legal arguments made in the memos." In a highly irregular move indicating how poorly reasoned the memos were, Goldsmith withdrew them. Goldsmith resigned the following year, and later wrote that he was "astonished" by the memos' "deeply flawed" and "sloppily reasoned" legal analysis. OPR's report was originally submitted in the final weeks of the Bush administration and sharply criticized the legal work of Bybee and Yoo, "as well as that of Steven Bradbury, who was chief of the OLC at the time." In February 2009, Newsweek's Michael Isikoff reported that a draft of OPR's report was "causing anxiety among former Bush administration officials." The Washington Post reported that, at the urging of representatives of Yoo and Bybee, former Bush administration officials were "lobbying behind the scenes to push Justice Department leaders to water down" the final report. NO VINDICATION: Seizing on the fact that the Justice Department will not recommend any further disciplinary action against them, Bybee and Yoo's defenders have attempted to present the report as a victory. Writing in National Review, former Bush administration officials Dana Perino and Bill Burck claimed that the Justice Department had "officially exonerated" Yoo and Bybee. Yoo, who is now a law professor at the University of California Berkeley, was quick to claim vindication. In the Wall Street Journal, Yoo wrote "Barack Obama may not realize it, but I may have just helped save his presidency" by having devised a legal rationale for unfettered executive national security authority, and "winning a drawn-out fight to protect his powers as commander in chief." Yoo's lawyer Miguel Estrada went so far as to suggest that Attorney General Eric Holder should identify those in the Justice Department who had leaked previous findings and "refer them for prosecution or bar discipline." But an editorial in the Los Angeles Times stated that the report "is far from a vindication" for Yoo and Bybee's "shamefully narrow interpretations of laws against torture." The editorial worried that Margolis' "measured verdict will be misrepresented as an exoneration of two lawyers," noting, "They may not be disbarred, but they are disgraced." An editorial in the New York Times asked incredulously, "Is this really the state of ethics in the American legal profession? Government lawyers who abused their offices to give the president license to get away with torture did nothing that merits a review by the bar?" DO LAWS AGAINST TORTURE HAVE ANY MEANING?: Though the Justice Department's own internal investigation into the matter is now officially closed, Washington Independent legal analyst Daphne Eviatar writes, "The battle now will be over whether the U.S. government will meet its obligations to thoroughly investigate what happened and hold the perpetrators accountable." Last year, The Progress Report led an effort to demand that either Bybee voluntarily step aside from his perch on 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, or if not, Congress should impeach him. Even though President Obama announced shortly after taking office that his administration would no longer use the "enhanced interrogation techniques" enabled by the torture memos, there are real questions as to whether future abuses can be deterred if there is no accountability for those who authorized and engaged in such abuses in the past. Appearing on ABC's This Week on Feb. 14, former Vice President Cheney openly admitted that he had approved of waterboarding -- a practice that is acknowledged as torture by an overwhelming international legal consensus, including Holder. If there's no accountability, asked attorney and blogger Glenn Greenwald asked, "What would stop a future President (or even the current one) from re-authorizing waterboarding and the other Bush/Cheney torture techniques if he decided he wanted to?" http://pr.thinkprogress.org/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Thu Feb 25 16:05:14 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:05:14 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Liberian leader urges MPs to back action against vulture funds Message-ID: Liberian leader urges MPs to back action against vulture funds An investigation for BBC's Newsnight, to be broadcast tonight, Thursday at 10:30pm GMT, has uncovered allegations that speculators subverted the international debt relief process. By Heather Stewart and Greg Palast for The Guardian Thursday, February 25, 2010 BBC cameraman Rick Rowley in Liberia, reporting with Greg Palast from the village of Demeh, Liberia. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the president of Liberia, is urging MPs to back a bill banning vulture funds from using British courts to prey on poor countries when it comes to a vote on Friday. Liberia lost a $20m (?13m) case in London last year against two so-called vultures. Such funds buy up the loans of poor governments, wait for them to win from the international community, and then use courts to pursue the countries for assets. Sirleaf said: "We've been waiting for a parliament or an assembly to take this kind of hard decision. I hope the US Congress and maybe some others in Europe will pick up this gauntlet and will follow the example of Britain." An investigation for BBC's Newsnight, to be broadcast tonight, has uncovered allegations that speculators subverted the international debt relief process for Liberia, in an attempt to gain more money from its government and international donors than 97% of its other creditors accepted. Liberia received debt relief worth $4bn from the international community in 2007 under the heavily indebted poor countries initiative, including $2bn from private-sector bondholders. Insiders to negotiations allege that two US financiers, Eric Hermann and Michael Straus, allowed other creditors to accept a low payout from Liberia, then quietly transferred their holdings to two other firms, which then sued in Britain for the debt in full. One of Liberia's biggest creditors, Hans Humes, owner of New York's Greylock Capital, criticised the behaviour of speculators in the negotiations over the country's debts. "[They were] just sitting there and saying: 'OK, we're the last guys and we're going to hold up any process by which the country can grow unless somebody takes care of us.' It's extortion," he said. Two others who were involved in the negotiations confirmed that Humes's criticisms must refer to Hermann and Straus. The private member's bill, which will receive its second reading on Friday, would prevent vultures from pursuing any of the 40 countries that have qualified as heavily indebted poor countries. Sponsored by Labour MP Andrew Gwynne, it would prevent assets being seized, even in cases that have already been brought - so campaigners say it should help Liberia. When a Newsnight crew went to Hermann's New York office to question the financier, the company's nameplate had been unbolted from the wall, the suite number removed and the firm's staff locked inside the office. A security guard said he had been ordered to look out for the BBC crew and keep it out of the building. In 1998, a US judge found lawyer Straus guilty of "champerty" - buying poor nations' debts just for the purpose of suing them. An appeals court later reversed the finding. In February 2002, Straus and Hermann sued Liberia for $18m for debts they had obtained for a fraction of that sum. They filed the suit in the US, the week Liberia's capital was under siege from rebels, without electricity, water or a functioning government. Straus and Hermann won a judgment for the $18m by default. ********* Greg Palast, investigative reporter for BBC Newsnight Television. Sign up for Palast's reports at www.GregPalast.com and subscribe to his podcast. You can also support the work of the Palast team's continued investigations by making a tax deductible donation today. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 245705 bytes Desc: not available URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Thu Feb 25 23:40:34 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Fri, 26 Feb 2010 00:40:34 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Probe: Did big U.S. banks contribute to the financial crisis in Greece? Message-ID: Probe: Did big U.S. banks contribute to the financial crisis in Greece? By Neil Irwin and Zachary A. Goldfarb Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, February 26, 2010 The financial tumult now unsettling Europe came to Washington on Thursday, as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said that the federal government is looking into the role U.S. banks may have played in the Greek fiscal crisis. The Federal Reserve and Securities and Exchange Commission are seeking information about whether Goldman Sachs and other U.S. firms helped set up financial transactions over the past decade that effectively hid the amount of debt Greece was taking on. Another potential issue is whether banks and hedge funds, by taking big bets that Greece would default, are creating a self-fulfilling downward spiral for the Mediterranean nation. "We are looking into a number of questions related to Goldman Sachs and other companies and their derivatives arrangements with Greece," Bernanke said, testifying before the Senate banking committee. Addressing concerns that financial firms have been engaging in trades to bet on a Greek default, Bernanke said that "using these instruments in a way that intentionally destabilizes a company or a country is counterproductive, and I'm sure the SEC will be looking into that." It was unusual for Bernanke to comment publicly on the Fed's review of the actions of a bank under its supervision. That information is usually confidential, and it was unclear whether his comments were a slip of the tongue or meant more strategically to show that the Fed is being tough on Goldman and other Wall Street firms. The Fed is not a law enforcement agency, but it is the primary regulator of the largest U.S. banks, including Goldman Sachs. The New York Fed has examiners on site at large firms such as Goldman, and at this stage those staffers are gathering information on the Greek debt deals. The examiners can demand documents and ask questions of bank staffers, and the Fed is also bringing in experts in the complex derivatives involved in the transactions. Fed bank supervisors would look for actions that put the bank at legal risk or endangered its reputation, either of which could in turn put the bank at financial risk, sources said. It could then order the bank to stop engaging in those actions. The SEC declined to comment on whether it is investigating the role of U.S. banks in Greek debt. But a spokesman, John Nester, said the agency has been conducting a broad examination of how derivatives known as credit default swaps and other opaque financial products are used, looking for potential abuses and destabilizing effects. He said that the SEC is cooperating with domestic and foreign regulatory agencies in the review. An SEC investigation could look at several areas related to Goldman Sachs and Greece's debt issuance. One part of the investigation could review whether debt offerings underwritten by Goldman Sachs in 2000 and 2001 misled investors about the country's true financial condition. Goldman served as investment banker for Greece as the country borrowed billions by entering complex financial contracts known as cross-currency swaps. The contracts allowed Greece to limit the amount of debt it seemed to be taking on to fund its national budget. Now, with a widening budget deficit, Greece has been struggling to raise money to pay off old debts and continue to fund government operations. In turn, those troubles have prompted fears that some of Europe's other weaker economies might also face difficulties in covering their debts, which could provoke a wider financial crisis and hamstring the global economic recovery. A Goldman Sachs spokesman declined to comment, saying that as a matter of policy the company does not address questions on legal or regulatory matters. Speaking to a British parliamentary committee earlier this week, Gerald Corrigan, a Goldman managing director, said that the transactions could have been more transparent but emphasized that Goldman was one of several firms involved. Another part of the investigation would look at an area the agency has been focusing on over the past year: whether speculators are using credit default swaps to manipulate the price that Greece has to pay to borrow money. That specific concern was raised by the banking committee's chairman, Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), in the hearing Thursday. "We have a situation in which major financial institutions are amplifying a public crisis for what would appear to be for private gain," Dodd said. There are past examples of the Fed and the SEC working together to examine alleged misdeeds by banks. In 2003, Citigroup and J.P. Morgan Chase agreed to pay the SEC a combined $255 million in fines for assisting Enron in transactions that helped the now-defunct energy company defraud its investors. Simultaneously, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York entered into agreements with the two banks that obligated them to improve their risk management and internal controls to avoid such misconduct in the future. Staff writer Tomoeh Murakami Tse contributed to this report. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/25/AR2010022502183.html?hpid=topnews -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From may at applebybooks.net Sat Feb 27 02:14:07 2010 From: may at applebybooks.net (May at Appleby Books) Date: Sat, 27 Feb 2010 00:14:07 -0800 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Making a Place for Labor History Message-ID: <4B88D44F.7030205@applebybooks.net> Published on Wednesday, February 24, 2010 by CommonDreams.org Making a Place for Labor History by Michael Schwalbe When teaching about social movements in America, I ask my students how many of them had to take a U. S. labor history course in high school. For the last twenty-five years the answer has been the same. Not a one. I ask the question to make a point about how we learn what's needed for social change to occur. If all we know about social change comes from celebrating the lives of Susan B. Anthony, Rosa Parks, or Martin Luther King Jr., we may think that change results mainly from individual moral heroism. The study of labor history teaches a different lesson: change occurs through organized, persistent, collective action by ordinary people. It's not surprising that those with the biggest stake in preserving the status quo don't want that lesson taught. But times might be changing. After twelve years of legislative efforts, the state of Wisconsin recently passed the Labor History in the Schools Bill, the first such law in the country. The new law makes labor history part of the state's standard social studies curriculum. The purpose of the bill is to ensure that students learn about the roles played by workers, labor unions, and collective bargaining in the history of America. Every state ought to enact a version of this law. Students everywhere need to know their labor history. Pro-union bumper stickers remind us that unions are the people who brought us the weekend. The rest of the story would include other benefits won by organized labor: pensions, workers' compensation, health plans, vacations, the eight-hour day, overtime pay, and many safety laws. To take these benefits for granted is not simply a failure to appreciate how unions have helped us all. It is a failure to understand U.S. history. It is akin to taking for granted our independence from the British, with no knowledge of the Revolutionary War. Promoting the study of labor history is not, in other words, a matter of being for or against unions. It's a matter of being for education. The present, as the saying goes, is incomprehensible without an understanding of the past. For example, my students at North Carolina State University are often surprised to learn that ours is the least unionized state in the nation; that North Carolina is one of only two states that outlaw public sector collective bargaining; and that economic inequality is greater today than at any time since the Great Depression. They want to know how things got this way. A good labor history course would answer this question. Students would learn how southern textile workers in the late 1920s and early 1930s organized to resist exploitation by mill owners, and how mill owners, in collusion with police and politicians, used violence to quash strikes. One legacy of this violence is a fear of unions, a fear that partly accounts for the low unionization rate in North Carolina. A study of labor history would reveal that violence associated with union organizing originated not with workers but with bosses afraid of losing power and profits. Students would also learn how North Carolina's General Statute 95 - 98, which prohibits collective bargaining by public employees, grew out of 1950s anti-communist hysteria and fear that alliances between black and white workers would challenge the dominance of North Carolina's ruling white oligarchy. Every state has its equivalent labor history stories that need to be told. Students should learn both the local stories and how these stories connect to national labor movements and international labor struggles. "Globalization" is a trendy topic these days among professional educators. But any teaching about globalization that fails to connect local, national, and international struggles for economic justice by working people is seriously incomplete. To understand rising inequality in the United States, students would need to look at changes in union strength. Historically, strong unions have put a brake on inequality. Dramatic increases in inequality in the last thirty years are attributable largely to the success of big business in weakening unions. Of course, labor history is not only about unions and protest. It's also about the history of work and changes in the economy. And so students would also learn how labor has changed because of changes in technology, corporate deregulation, and international trade policies. Passing more laws like Wisconsin's won't be easy. I don't expect it to happen any time soon in North Carolina. But nor did I expect to see tobacco-rich North Carolina ban smoking in bars and restaurants, as it did earlier this year. All it takes for this kind of thing to happen, against the odds, is a critical mass of people who have learned the lessons of labor history. Michael Schwalbe is a professor of sociology at North Carolina State University. He can be reached at MLSchwalbe at nc.rr.com. http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/02/24-7 From menecraj at shaw.ca Sat Feb 27 02:46:15 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 27 Feb 2010 02:46:15 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Teaching kids to read from the back of a burro Message-ID: http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/02/25/cnnheroes.soriano/index.html Teaching kids to read from the back of a burro By Ebonne Ruffins, CNN February 26, 2010 11:15 a.m. EST [PHOTO: Luis Soriano's 'biblioburro' has helped some 4,000 children in rural Colombia.] Magdalena, Colombia (CNN) -- To the unaccustomed eye, a man toting 120 books while riding a stubborn donkey would seem nothing short of a circus spectacle. But for hundreds of children in the rural villages of Colombia, Luis Soriano is far from a clown. He is a man with a mission to save rural children from illiteracy. "There was a time when many people thought that I was going crazy," said Soriano, a native of La Gloria, Colombia. "They'd yell, 'Carnival season is over.' ... Now I've overcome that." Soriano, 38, is a primary school teacher who spends his free time operating a "biblioburro," a mobile library on donkeys that offers reading education for hundreds of children living in what he describes as "abandoned regions" in the Colombian state of Magdalena. "In [rural] regions, a child must walk or ride a donkey for up to 40 minutes to reach the closest schools," Soriano said. "The children have very few opportunities to go to secondary school. ...There are [few] teachers that would like to teach in the countryside." Do you know a hero? Nominations are open for 2010 CNN Heroes At the start of his 17-year teaching career, Soriano realized that some students were having difficulty not just learning, but finishing their homework assignments. Most of the students falling behind lived in rural villages, where illiterate parents and lack of access to books prevented them from completing their studies. To help bridge the learning gap, Soriano decided to personally bring books to the children. "I saw two unemployed donkeys at home and had the idea [to use] them in my biblioburro project because they can carry a heavy load," Soriano said. "I put the books on their backs in saddles and they became my work tools." Every Wednesday at dusk and every Saturday at dawn, Soriano leaves his wife and three young children to travel to select villages -- up to four hours each way -- aboard a donkey named Alfa. A second donkey, Beto, follows behind, toting additional books and a sitting blanket. They visit 15 villages on a rotating basis. "It's not easy to travel through the valleys," Soriano said. "You sit on a donkey for five or eight hours, you get very tired. It's a satisfaction to arrive to your destination." At each village, some 40-50 youngsters await their chance to get homework help, learn to read or listen to any variety of tall tales, adventure stories and geography lessons Soriano has prepared. "You can just see that the kids are excited when they see the biblioburro coming this way. It makes them happy that he continues to come," said Dairo Holguin, 34, whose two children take part in the program. "For us, his program complements what the children learn in school. The books they do not have access to ... they get from the biblioburro." More than 4,000 youngsters have benefited from Soriano's program since it began in 1990. Soriano says countless others have been helped, too; parents and other adult learners often participate in the lessons. Soriano has spent nearly 4,000 hours riding his donkeys, and he's not traveled unscathed. In July 2008, he fractured his leg when he fell from one of the donkeys; in 2006, he was pounced on by bandits at a river crossing and tied to a tree when they found out he had no money. Despite these injuries, which left him with a limp, Soriano has no intention of slowing down. In addition to the biblioburro program, he and his wife built the largest free library in Magdalena next to their home. The library has 4,200 books, most of which are donated -- some from as far away as New York City. They also run a small community restaurant. Soriano's hope is that people will understand the power of reading and that communities can improve from being exposed to books and diverse ideas. "For us teachers, it's an educational triumph, and for the parents [it's] a great satisfaction when a child learns how to read. That's how a community changes and the child becomes a good citizen and a useful person," Soriano said. "Literature is how we connect them with the world." Want to get involved? E-mail Luis Soriano at eldoctosoriano at hotmail.com =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sat Feb 27 02:52:46 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 27 Feb 2010 02:52:46 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Iceberg the size of Luxembourg breaks off Antarctica Message-ID: <0B83F35951244326B238630BF79517E0@agingCHS072729> http://rawstory.com/2010/02/iceberg-size-luxembourg-breaks-antarctica/ Iceberg the size of Luxembourg breaks off Antarctica By Agence France-Presse Friday, February 26th, 2010 -- 8:57 am An iceberg the size of Luxembourg knocked loose from the Antarctic continent earlier this month could disrupt the ocean currents driving weather patterns around the globe, researchers said. While the impact would not be felt for decades or longer, a slowdown in the production of colder, dense water could result in less temperate winters in the north Atlantic, they said Thursday. The 2,550 square-kilometre (985 square-mile) block broke off on February 12 or 13 from the Mertz Glacier Tongue, a 160-kilometer spit of floating ice protruding into the Southern Ocean from East Antarctica due south of Melbourne, researchers said. Some 400 metres (1,300 feet) thick, the iceberg could fill Sydney Harbour more than 100 times over. It could also disturb the area's exceptionally rich biodiversity, including a major colony of emperor penguins near Dumont d'Urville, site of a French scientific station, according to the scientists. "The ice tongue was almost broken already. It was hanging like a loose tooth," said Benoit Legresy, a French glaciologist who has been monitoring the Metz Glacier via satellite images and on the ground for a decade in cooperation with Australian scientists. The billion-tonne mass, 78 kilometres long and half-again as wide, was dislodged by another, older iceberg, known as B9B, which split off in 1987. Jammed against the Antarctic continent for more than 20 years, B9B smashed into the Metz tongue like a slow-motion battering ram after it began to drift. Both natural cycles and man-made climate change contribute to the collapse of ice shelves and glaciers. Tide and ocean currents constantly beat against exposed areas, while longer summers and rising temperatures also take a toll. "Obviously when there is warmer water, these ice tongues will become more fragile," said Legresy, who works at the Laboratory for Geophysics and Oceanographic Space Research in Toulouse, southern France. The Metz Glacier Tongue, fitted with GPS beacons and other measurement instruments, could provide crucial insights into how these influences should be apportioned. "For the first time, we will have a detailed record of the full cycle of a major calving event -- before, during and after," he said. "We are using the ice tongue as a laboratory to study the processes that might be impacted by climate change, including calving, ocean temperature, sea level change." Since breaking off, the iceberg -- along with the newly mobile B9B, which is about the same size -- have moved into an adjoining area called a polynya. Distributed across the Southern Ocean, polynyas are zones that produce dense water, super cold and rich in salt, that sinks to the bottom of the sea and drives the conveyor-belt like circulation around the globe. If these icebergs move east and run aground, or drift north into warmer climes, they will have no impact on these currents. "But if they stay in this area -- which is likely -- they could block the production of this dense water, essentially putting a lid on the polynya," Legresy explained. The Metz Glacier Polynya is particularly strong, and accounts for 20 percent of the "bottom water" in the world, he added. Eventually, the icebergs will die a natural death, but their lifespan depends on where they go. Adrift, they could melt in a couple of decades. If they remain lodged against the Antarctic landmass, they could persist far longer. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sat Feb 27 03:00:45 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 27 Feb 2010 03:00:45 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Honduras Resistance Movement Leader Assassinated Message-ID: <0A5B1EB2BF8C43B299FE2D88085BD56F@agingCHS072729> Alert: Call in Solidarity with the Honduras Resistance Movement Thursday, 25 February 2010 Leader Assassinated Yesterday in Front of Her Two Children, Denounce U.S. Support for Repressive State Run by Pepe Lobo Today, February 25, 2010 marks an historic date in the struggle for true democracy and the respect for human rights in Honduras. Tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of supporters of the National People's Resistance Front (FNRP) will march through the streets of Tegucigalpa to demand that the largely unrecognized month-old government of Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo halt its attacks on the peaceful Resistance movement. The FNRP has documented at least 254 human rights violations, including murder, kidnappings and rape, since Pepe Lobo took over for the de facto government. Just yesterday, FNRP supporter Claudia Larisa Brizuela Rodriguez was gunned down in her home in San Pedro Sula. Her two young children, ages 2 and 8, witnessed their mother's murder. Claudia was the daughter of high-profile Resistance leader and Radio Uno host, Pedro Brizuela. It is believed that Claudia's cowardly assassination is meant to intimidate not only the FNRP, but also the independent media. Radio Uno hosts, including Pedro Brizuela, have consistently denounced the abuses and corruption of the post-coup governments, and therefore have become a consistent target of threats. Yesterday those threats became violent action once again. Please join us in calling the State Department's Human Rights desk in order to demand that our government not continue to ignore systematic human rights violations. The United States is one of only a handful of governments that has officially recognized Pepe Lobo's coup-stained administration, which is not recognized by the UN, OAS, and the vast majority of Latin America. The United States is dramatically impeding any progress towards international human rights by attempting to force others to legitimize the abusive government of Honduras. Dial 202-647-4000 and ask for Human Rights Desk at the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Alternately, you can ask to speak to the office of Maria Otero, Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs, who coordinates the work of the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. Sample script: Hi, my name is ____________ and I am calling because I am deeply concerned about the human rights situation in Honduras. Just yesterday, Claudia Larisa Brizuela, activist and daughter of prominent member of the resistance movement and opposition media personality Pedro Brizuela, was assassinated in her home in San Pedro Sula in front of her two young children. In recent weeks, other resistance leaders have been attacked and murdered, amounting to over 254 documented human rights violations since Porfirio Lobo took power only a month ago. This represents the continuance of an ongoing policy of state terrorism and aggression that began after the July 28th coup d'etat. The U.S. has not supported democracy in Honduras through this crisis. I understand that the U.S. split from a regionally unified position on the Honduran coup in supporting a transition that did not require the return of President Zelaya or hold any of the coup-perpetrators accountable for their actions. The U.S. also split from the majority of Latin America by recognizing the fraudulent November 29th elections that took place under conditions of martial law. While the U.S. may never repair the damage done by its anti-democratic actions around Honduras, I demand that steps be made in the correct direction. I ask that the U.S. SOTRONGLY CONDEMN the Lobo administration for continued human rights violations and call for the protection of all human rights defenders and media workers in Honduras, while cutting military aid to the country. I also urge the U.S. to reject the Lobo administration's proposed Truth Commission, and push for an independent truth process that would thoroughly investigate the human rights violations and other crimes committed under the interim government of Roberto Micheletti, as well as the current administration, instead of simply whitewashing the coup in Honduras. NO BUSINESS AS USUAL. Thank you." This alert was written by allies in the Central American solidarity movement. For more information about the crisis in Honduras, please visit: Comunicado about the murder from the FNRP: http://quotha.net/node/723 The Quixote Center: http://quixote.org/ School of the Americas Watch: http://soaw.org/ Honduras Resiste: http://hondurasresists.blogspot.com/ National Resistance Front Against the Coup (en espa?ol): http://contraelgolpedeestadohn.blogspot.com/ =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sat Feb 27 03:34:39 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 27 Feb 2010 03:34:39 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Robert Scheer: No Banker Left Behind Message-ID: <725507B68E9B48D7A4B67A325F8472D5@agingCHS072729> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/no_banker_left_behind_20100223/ Truthdig February 23, 2010 No Banker Left Behind by Robert Scheer They do have a license to steal. There is no other way to read Tuesday's report from the New York state comptroller that bonuses for Wall Street financiers rose seventeen percent to $20.3 billion in 2009. Of course that is less than the $32.9 billion for bonus rewards back in 2007, when those hotshots could still pretend that they were running sound businesses. The economy is anything but sound, but you would hardly know that from looking at the balance sheets of the big investment banks. The broker-dealer firms on Wall Street made a record profit, estimated at greater than $55 billion by the comptroller, and the only thing holding back even more grotesque bonuses was concern over criticism from a public that was hardly doing as well. The enormous rewards last year come not from their having righted the ship of finance by lowering the rate of mortgage foreclosures for ordinary folks, one of four who are now "underwater" on their loans. Consumer confidence this month is the lowest in 27 years, and unemployment is expected to hover near ten percent for the next two years. No, they get bonuses because the Federal Reserve, backed by the Treasury, bought the toxic mortgage securitization packages that Wall Street banks were left holding. They, and they alone, were made whole. The way the scam worked is that the Treasury deposited taxpayer dollars with the Federal Reserve, which in turn purchased a whopping $1.25 trillion in toxic mortgages. That's the figure after the Treasury on Tuesday committed to depositing $200 billion more with the Fed to increase spending on this program - one that was ostensibly designed to increase credit availability to small businesses and others but has hardly accomplished that goal. Credit is still very tight because the big financiers have used the low-cost cash they received from those charitable government programs to solidify their own positions through acquisitions and the like. Call it the "no banker left behind" program. While this plan didn't keep people in their homes, it did wonders for Wall Street profits. To be accurate, it's mostly the big bankers who reaped the rewards, for, as the FDIC reported Tuesday, the list of smaller banks throughout the country faced with default is growing longer. The big financial conglomerates, which have come to be covered by the FDIC under questionable circumstances, benefit from that arrangement, but they are hardly the ones hurting. The victims are primarily the smaller traditional banks that played by the rules but were overwhelmed after the housing market became dreadfully corrupted. The number of banks on the FDIC's "problem list" soared from 252 at the end of 2008 to 702 last month, and the government's fund to insure depositors fell to minus $20.9 billion. The source of the problems for those banks is the sorry state of the housing market, with the number of loans that are more than three months overdue at the highest level in the 26 years that such records have been collected. Those hurting are mostly smaller banks, which are paying for the havoc in the housing market that the Wall Street giants created with their collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and credit default swaps (CDSs). Those mysterious financial innovations meant turning the housing market into a grand casino using people's homes as chips, with the Wall Street crowd holding all the high cards. Yet when the crash occurred, it was not those who designed and sold the toxic packages that suffered but rather the individual homeowners whose mortgages had been put into play. They and the smaller banks were still playing by the old rules, which meant that houses were presumed to be worth the money loaned on them. But there was no such disadvantage for the brokers, who would convert those mortgages into stock bundles. They had succeeded in getting the US Congress, at the end of 2000, to exempt those CDOs and CDSs from any regulation. This debacle was the accomplishment of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, pushed through Congress during the last years of the Clinton administration by former Goldman Sachs honcho and onetime Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and his protege and successor, Lawrence Summers, now the top economic adviser in the Obama White House. The intent was, in Summers' words, to provide "legal certainty" for those CDO investment gimmicks, meaning no regulator could look to see what was inside the packages. We still don't know, although we taxpayers now are on the hook for 1.25 trillion dollars' worth of them. Can't say it didn't work out for the folks at Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, where total average compensation was up last year by 31 percent. How did you make out? _____ A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman. Copyright (c) 2010 Truthdig, LLC. All rights reserved. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sat Feb 27 04:14:03 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 27 Feb 2010 04:14:03 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The Hottest Decade Message-ID: <299222DEACCE4DA38A4FDB2F18CF14EA@agingCHS072729> http://www.zcommunications.org/the-hottest-decade-by-saul-landau ZCommunications.org February 19, 2010 The Hottest Decade by Saul Landau The decade ending in 2009 was the warmest on record, new surface temperature figures released Thursday by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration show ... 2009 was the second warmest year since 1880, when modern temperature measurement began. The warmest year was 2005. The other hottest recorded years have all occurred since 1998, NASA said. Global temperatures varied because of changes in ocean heating and cooling cycles. 'When we average temperature over five or ten years to minimize that variability', said Dr James E Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, one of the world's leading climatologists, 'we find global warming is continuing unabated'. -- John M Broder New York Times (January 21 2020) In the documentary, The Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore - remember him? - warned that greenhouse gasses and other sources of hydro carbons would increase, and threaten future planetary life. After issuing this filmic challenge, Gore advised citizens to recycle and buy gas-efficient cars. Inconvenient? How about shutting down most of the factories belching smoke around the world, which contribute little to global health? Or abandoning the high rise office buildings that require heating and cooling 24/7? Traffic jams have become ever more inconvenient. How about doing away with them by closing auto and truck plants in China, Brazil, India as well as those in the West and Japan? How about thinking of exhaust pipes as shotguns loaded with deadly vapors and aimed at the common atmosphere? Convenient American suburbia with individual family dwellings, involves daily commuting, two car or more garages and fireplaces! How comfy! What would Hollywood, TV and advertisers do without these "happy" people to use as models to sell entertainment products, all of which require pollution as part of their production process? Think how inconvenient life would become if we had no more McDonald's, Burger King, Carl's Junior or any fast food chains! Instead, think of no more farting (methane) cows bunched together like four-legged sardines in open air pens. Oops, I'm getting nauseated. The foundations and routines of modern industrial life - the context for the fabled American dream - assume perpetual consumption; more and technologically improved commodities as symbols of prosperity and even identity. The United States has exported this "dream" throughout much of the world in its films and TV programs. But these "entertainment" products don't contain warning signs, similar to those on cigarette packages: this product will cause serious environmental damage; future generations will suffer from an unsustainable environment. Most political leaders face a challenge they refuse to acknowledge: To gain control of runaway climate change - alongside of melting ice sheets releasing more hydro carbon gasses. To accomplish this Herculean task, they must abandon convenience, the unchallenged assumptions that place the corporation as means and ends of policies. When the now-retired Fidel Castro reflected on this situation or Bolivia's President Evo Morales spoke about it, the New York Times and equivalents in the major capitals give scant or no coverage. Not convenient material? Castro said (author's interview) last September that the greatest crime of the right wing exiles "was the theft of the 2000 election because it set back the environmental movement by ten years". He referred to votes cast by non US citizens in Miami and to intimidation by goon squads who threatened vote counters in certain south Florida precincts. After recovering from his failed presidential bid, Gore, using his access to mass media, delivered a first alarm message. Last December, German Chancellor Angela Merkel flayed doubters of global warming. She said: In our knowledge, however, there has never been so rapid an increase in temperatures as predicted by science today. Previously, she noted, "plants and animals had the opportunity to adapt to changes over thousands of years. Not anymore." She expressed concern over people in coastal areas who "are most vulnerable to global warming with rapidly rising sea levels". She pleaded for "a sensible use of valuable and limited resources such as natural gas and oil". She reminded the public that "in 2050, nine billion people will live on the earth. It won't work without conservative use of resources." (December 16 2009 Bild am Sonntag) President Obama's State of the Union speech to Congress avoided truly inconvenient truths. Their voters (consumers not citizens) might not want to curtail production and consumption, the twin life bloods of the world's economies. Instead, Obama boasted of how he and Congress bailed out the job - and pollution - producing auto industries. It's convenient to piously refer to "green technology", but the least gas guzzling vehicles still emit polluting compounds. In 2009, the powerful convened in Copenhagen to demonstrate pathetic if not criminal timidity. Only the demonstrators showed they understood the stakes; few of their concerns reached front pages or lead TV stories. Rather, headlines emphasized violence and chaos - appeal to consumers' base tastes. Who wants to face the "inconvenient" challenge humans face about their future on the planet? Hey, this Sunday it's Super Bowl time and we can put aside those trivial concerns about resources and climate and root for our team! _____ Landau is an Institute for Policy Studies fellow. His films on dvd are available from roundworldproductions at gmail.com. Counterpunch published his A Bush and Botox World (2007). =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sat Feb 27 04:24:33 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 27 Feb 2010 04:24:33 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Rachel Corrie Gets Her Day in Court Message-ID: <3CCB436528F34FA5BAB8A076FC6E529B@agingCHS072729> http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/naiman260210.html MR ZINE 26.02.10 Rachel Corrie Gets Her Day in Court by Robert Naiman On March 10, in the Israeli city of Haifa, American peace activist Rachel Corrie will get her day in court. Rachel's parents, Cindy and Craig Corrie, are bringing suit against the Israeli defence ministry for Rachel's killing by an Israeli military bulldozer in Gaza in March 2003. Four key American and British witnesses who were present at the scene -- members of the International Solidarity Movement -- will be allowed into Israel to testify, despite having been barred previously by the Israeli authorities from entering the country. This reversal by the Israeli authorities is apparently due to U.S. government pressure, the Guardian reports. (Three cheers for any U.S. officials who contributed to this pressure. What else could you make the Israeli government do?) A Palestinian doctor from Gaza who treated Corrie after she was injured has not been given permission by the Israeli authorities to leave Gaza to attend. (This would seem to be important testimony concerning the nature of Rachel's injuries -- did U.S. officials exert pressure for his appearance?) This case isn't just about accountability for Rachel's death. It's a test case for the power of the rule of law in Israel, when the rule of law comes into conflict with the policies of military occupation. When the rule of law in Israel comes into conflict with the policies of occupation, the rule of law often loses. But it does not always lose, particularly when the rule of law gets a boost from vigorous protest and political agitation. This month, Reuters reported, Israel began rerouting part of its "West Bank barrier" near the village of Bilin -- the site of many Palestinian, Israeli, and international protests -- in response to a petition filed in 2007 by Palestinians whose land was confiscated for the project. This was only a partial victory, because it only affected a minority of the confiscated land. But it shows that the rule of law in Israel is not totally impotent against the occupation, particularly when the rule of law is aided by protest and agitation. It's also a test case for the power of nonviolent resistance to the Israeli occupation. It's a commonplace among some poorly informed commenters -- Edith Garwood of Amnesty International cites Bono, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, and President Obama as recent examples -- that Palestinians should "find their Martin Luther King." But this commentary is foolish and retrograde, as Rahm Emanuel might say. A necessary condition for the ascendance of a King or Gandhi -type movement in Palestine is that if Palestinian nonviolence activists are killed by the Israeli occupation, the government of Israel pays a significant price for that killing. If the Israeli government can kill an American peace activist and pay little price, what chance do the Palestinian Kings and Gandhis have? It's instructive to do a press search on the recent developments in the Rachel Corrie case. Searching on Yahoo News, I found Israeli and Palestinian press, Jewish and Arab press, British and Australian press. But outside of the Seattle Weekly -- Rachel is from Olympia, and Brian Baird is her Representative -- I found no general US press. Isn't it remarkable that we Americans have to read the British press to find out about developments in the case of our compatriot? Isn't this state of affairs something that Bono, Nicholas Kristof, and President Obama ought to reflect on, especially given the fact that they have significant ability to do something about it? The persistence of Rachel's case as a thorn in the side of the Israeli occupation authorities recalls the 1960s Costa-Gavras docudrama Z, about the political fallout from the assassination by the U.S.-supported Greek government of the Greek parliamentarian and peace movement leader Gregoris Lambrakis. There is a powerful scene in the movie in which one of Lambrakis' associates visits Lambrakis' widow to deliver the news that four high-ranking military police officers have been indicted in the killing. On the way to meet her, Lambrakis' associate passes a group of Greek students painting the letter "Z" on the sidewalk, meaning "he (Lambrakis) lives." Marveling at the students' determined activism in the face of mounting repression, Lambrakis' associate says, "It's almost as if he were alive." They murdered her, and yet she dogs them. It's almost as if she were alive. --------------------------------- Robert Naiman is National Coordinator of Just Foreign Policy. Naiman also edits the daily Just Foreign Policy news summary and blogs at the Web site of Just Foreign Policy. This article was first published in the Just Foreign Policy blog on 25 February 2010. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sat Feb 27 20:18:49 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 27 Feb 2010 20:18:49 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] American Mayor Criticizes Imprisonment of Cuban Antiterrorists in the US Message-ID: <8DCB9F2B1BFB4A87BC64C69A9265DA78@agingCHS072729> American Mayor Criticizes Imprisonment of Cuban Antiterrorists in the US 2010.02.25 - 15:26:58 / web at radiorebelde.icrt.cu HAVANA, Cuba. - Gayle McLaughlin, Mayor of the US city of Richmond, California, criticized the imprisonment in her country of five Cuban antiterrorist fighters. The mayor told Prensa Latina news agency that Americans must learn about the serious injustice around the case of the five Cuban antiterrorists and noted that this is the key to have justice made and to achieve their release. Mclaughlin added that important political causes in her country have been resolved only when there is a massive support of the public opinion, and she mentioned as an example the case of civil rights activist Angela Davis. The mayor said it is very important to work among the biggest sectors of the American public, which are extremely valuable in moments when solidarity with Gerardo Hernandez, Ramon Laba?ino, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando Gonzalez and Rene Gonzales - internationally known as the Cuban Five - is needed. She said it is extremely hypocritical on the part of the US government to maintain the five Cubans in prison, when at the same time true terrorists like Luis Posada Carriles walk freely in the country. "This shows that the war on terror is not actually to protect the people against criminal actions but to keep the control and hegemonic power of the United States," she stated. Meanwhile, regional newspapers in France recently published articles in defense of the release of the Cuban Five written by Jacqueline Roussie, an activist with the movement for the release of the Cuban patriots. The articles emphasize the contradictory character of the judging and imprisonment of the Cuban Five, when the United States has been the promoter of violent actions against the Cubans. Roussie highlights that the US government has fostered a hostile policy against Cuba for 50 years aiming at overthrowing the Cuban Revolution. The activist announced that new actions for the release of the Cuban Five will be held within a few weeks during the Americas Culture Festival of the University of Pau, and in the monthly gatherings of friends with Cuba in Paris, Arras and Lille. (ACN) =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From may at applebybooks.net Sun Feb 28 01:14:44 2010 From: may at applebybooks.net (May at Appleby Books) Date: Sat, 27 Feb 2010 23:14:44 -0800 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Zombies! Message-ID: <4B8A17E4.2000709@applebybooks.net> Political theatre is alive and well. And effective. --- Zombies! The U. S. Court of Appeals has ruled in favor of a group of Minneapolis zombies who had filed a federal lawsuit charging they were wrongfully arrested while protesting mindless consumerism in 2006. Police said they arrested the six lurching protesters because they thought they were carrying "simulated weapons of mass destruction," which turned out to be portable sound systems for a Zombie Dance Party. "I don't give a goddamn about anybody's constitutional fucking rights."-Police officer Edward Nelson at the station after the arrest, according to the undead plaintiffs. Star Tribune, Last update: February 24, 2010 - 11:03 PM Appeals court gives new life to local 'zombie' suit The U. S. Court of Appeals on Wednesday released a ruling in favor of a group of zombies who say they were wrongfully arrested while protesting consumerism during the 2006 Aquatennial. By JAMES WALSH Apparently, it's OK to be a zombie in Minneapolis after all. The U.S. Court of Appeals on Wednesday released a ruling in favor of a group of zombies who say they were wrongfully arrested while protesting consumerism during the 2006 Aquatennial. The ruling reanimates the group's federal lawsuit against the city of Minneapolis and its police, seeking damages of at least $50,000 for each person arrested. A three-judge panel of the court ruled 2-1 that police lacked probable cause to arrest the group -- seven people wearing white powder, fake blood and black around their eyes and shuffling around like zombies -- for disorderly conduct. Police do not have immunity from claims against them for making the arrest, the court ruled. The appeals court did side with the city on two other points -- affirming the lower court's dismissal of the zombies' claims of false imprisonment and First Amendment retaliation. Jordan Kushner, the zombie group's attorney, said that the appeals court decision is correct and cuts to the heart of the matter. "They recognized my clients' rights in this case, that this is really an outrageous violation of free expression," he said. "They were trying to make a very thoughtful political statement and the police came up with these bogus reasons to arrest them for it and put them in jail." Minneapolis City Attorney Susan Segal released a statement saying: "The court affirmed two of the three claims in the city's favor, and we are disappointed that a third claim was returned to the district court. We're now preparing to revisit that claim in court." A Minneapolis police spokesman declined to comment. The decision reverses, in part, a ruling by U. S. District Judge Joan Ericksen dismissing the case in favor of the city and police. It all began around 6 p.m. on Saturday, July 22, 2006, when the zombies -- Jessica Baribeau, Jamie Jones, Kate Kibby, Kyle Kibby, Raphi Rechitsky, Jake Sternberg and Christian Utne -- met at the Nicollet Mall light-rail station on a day of Aquatennial events. Their plan was to protest what they viewed as consumers' mindlessness by shuffling through the shopping zone dressed as zombies. >From the light-rail station, they lurched and scraped down the Nicollet Mall, carrying four bags that contained sound equipment, including an iPod, speakers and a radio transmitter. They played music and broadcast statements such as "Get your brains here." They stumbled close to bystanders and, according to court papers, received "weird" looks from some. Around 7 p.m., police got word of an anonymous 911 call complaining about the group's antics. Police found the group near 7th Street and Nicollet Mall, and the zombies explained what they were doing. Police told the group to turn down their music and keep their distance from bystanders. Later, however, after officers heard a supervisor mention a violent gang from Washington state known for wearing face paint, police went back to the zombies to try to identify them. While the zombies were listening to a performance of a high school drum unit, an officer said, a young girl appeared to be frightened of them. Because most in the group did not have IDs, officers took them to a police station to be identified. There, other officers said they were worried that the equipment in the zombies' bags might be dangerous. It wasn't. Nonetheless, all but one of the zombies were taken to the Hennepin County jail, and stayed there for two days. The zombies filed suit, claiming their constitutional rights had been violated. But in September 2008, Judge Ericksen dismissed their claims, saying police had probable cause to arrest them for disorderly conduct. The zombies appealed. On Wednesday, the appellate court ruled that the officers should have more narrowly defined disorderly conduct. It was not enough that the zombies were loud and may have been bothering people. Their "expressive conduct" was protected by the Constitution, the court ruled. "I feel vindicated," Sternberg said. "We didn't do anything wrong." http://www.startribune.com/local/85287037.html From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Feb 28 08:12:15 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 28 Feb 2010 08:12:15 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Israel's Undermining of International Law Message-ID: <9C188E5CD77D40BC9CACC312D62D7E2F@agingCHS072729> 26.02.10 The Second Battle of Gaza: Israel's Undermining of International Law by Jeff Halper http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/halper260210.html =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Feb 28 08:21:05 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 28 Feb 2010 08:21:05 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] =?iso-8859-1?q?=5BReview=5D_Chris_Hedges_on_=27The_De?= =?iso-8859-1?q?ath_and_Life_of_American_Journalism=27?= Message-ID: Book Review The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again By Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols Nation Books 352 pages Chris Hedges on 'The Death and Life of American Journalism' Posted on Feb 26, 2010 By Chris Hedges Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols in "The Death and Life of American Journalism" argue correctly that the old models for delivering the news are dead. They see the government as the savior of last resort. The authors cite the massive postal and printing subsidies that lasted into the 19th century as a precedent for government intervention. And they propose building a new generation of journalists and publications from new government subsidies and from programs such as their suggested News AmeriCorps, which would train the next generation of journalists. The authors offer a series of innovations including "citizen news vouchers" and low-cost, low-profit newsrooms. They write: "The government will pay half the salary of every reporter and editor up to $45,000 each. Assuming most daily and weekly newspapers go post-corporate and employment returns to the high-water mark of two decades ago-the latter is a very big assumption, we know-this would cost the state $3.5 billion annually. If employment stayed at current levels it would run half that total. Newspapers that benefit from these subsidies would also be prime candidates for News AmeriCorps rookie journalists." As utopian fantasies go, this is pretty good. But it ignores the critical shift within American society from a print-based culture to an image-based culture. It assumes, incorrectly, that people still value and want traditional news. They do not. We have become unmoored from a world of print, from complexity and nuance, and with it information systems built on the primacy of verifiable fact. Newspapers, which engage rather than entertain, can no longer compete with the emotional battles that hyperventilating hosts on trash talk shows mount daily. The public, which has walked away from newspapers, has embraced the emotional carnival that has turned news into another form of mindless entertainment. And the authors, with whom I have a great deal of sympathy, mistakenly believe that the general public values what they value. Their cri de coeur for a return to reason, logic and truth is the last cry raised by the forlorn representatives of a dying civilization. Cicero did the same in ancient Rome. And when his severed head and hands were mounted on the podium in the Colosseum and his executioner, Mark Anthony, announced that Cicero would speak and write no more, the crowd roared its approval. The plan proposed by the authors would work only if the public, and our corporate state, recognized and cared about journalism as a vital public good. But without public outcry and visionary political leaders, neither of which we have in abundance, there is little hope that the government or anyone will save us. We are shedding, with the decline and death of many newspapers, thousands of reporters and editors, based in the culture of researched and verifiable fact, who monitored city councils, police departments, mayor's offices, courts and state legislators to prevent egregious abuse and corruption. And we are also, even more ominously, losing the meticulous skills of reporting, editing, fact-checking and investigating that make daily information trustworthy. The decline of print has severed a connection with a reality-based culture, one in which we attempt to make fact the foundation for opinion and debate, and replaced it with a culture in which facts, opinions, lies and fantasy are interchangeable. As news has been overtaken by gossip, the hollowness of celebrity culture and carefully staged pseudo-events, along with the hysteria and drama that dominate much of the airwaves, our civil and political discourse has been contaminated by propaganda and entertainment masquerading as news. And the ratings of high-octane propaganda outlets such as Fox News, as well as the collapse of the newspaper industry, prove it. [To see long excerpts from "The Death and Life of American Journalism," click here. http://books.google.com/books?id=E3Sh7PGpWJ4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=%E2%80%9CThe+Death+and+Life+of+American+Journalism%E2%80%9D&cd=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false ] Corporations, which have hijacked the state, are delighted with the demise of journalism. And the mass communications systems they control pump out endless streams of gossip, trivia and filth in lieu of news. But news, which costs money and takes talent to produce, is dying not only because citizens are migrating to the Internet and corporations are no longer using newsprint to advertise, but because in an age of profound culture decline the masses prefer to be entertained rather than informed. We no longer value the culture or journalism, as we no longer value classical theater or great books, and this devaluation means the general public is not inclined to pay for it. Journalists, like artists, are expected to provide their work free-this is the idea behind websites like The Huffington Post-and the only people who receive adequate compensation in our society are those skilled in the art of manipulation. Money flows to advertising rather than to art or journalism because manipulation is more highly valued than truth or beauty. Journalism, like culture, in America has become advertising. Certainly, as the authors point out, the faux objectivity and neutrality of the traditional news industry hastened the cultural irrelevance of traditional news gathering. The narrowing of debates within the press to the minor differences among the power elite had a debilitating effect on news. The structure of "objectivity" works far better when there are powerful social movements, such as the civil rights movement, that provide an actual alternative and demand a voice. But without these movements the press functions as courtiers in the corridors of power. It dutifully reports the Democratic and Republic positions, a condition that imposes a bland uniformity of opinion. The two parties are in fundamental agreement about the underlying economic, political and military structures which are largely responsible for our decline. The power elites do not question the permanent war economy, unfettered capitalism and the rise of the security state, and voices that do are, in effect, censored out of the commercial press because they have no power base. This has left most traditional reporters without a moral core and trapped in a ridiculous court pantomime that has damaged their content as much as the loss of advertising and the rise of the Internet. The lie told by newspapers and traditional news is the lie of omission, which is not as bad as the outright lies told on Fox News, but in the end it is still a lie. Our power elite are bankrupt, and the press, tethered to the elite, is as bankrupt as those it covers. "The real problem with professional journalism becomes evident when political elites do not debate an issue and march in virtual lockstep," the authors write. "In such a case professional journalism is, at best, ineffectual, and, at worst, propagandistic. This has often been the case in U.S. foreign policy, where both parties are beholden to an enormous global military complex, and accept the right of the United States, and the United States alone, to invade countries when it suits U.S. interests. In matters of war and foreign policy, journalists who question the basic assumptions and policy objectives and who attempt to raise issues no one in either party wishes to debate are considered 'ideological' and 'unprofessional.' This has a powerful disciplinary effect upon journalists." American society, once we lose a system of information based on verifiable fact, will become disconnected from reality. All totalitarian societies impart their propaganda through manipulated images and spectacles. And the death of traditional news is one more stage in the terminal illness that is ravaging American democracy. The rise of a totalitarian capitalism will follow, and we already have many of the new system's information networks in place. Corporations, as the authors point out, "will be better positioned than ever to produce self-promotional 'information'-better described as 'propaganda'-that can masquerade as 'news.' The technology actually makes it easier. A major development in the past decade has been video news releases, PR-produced news stories that are often run as if they were legitimate journalism on local TV news broadcasts. The stories invariably promote the products of the corporation which funds the work surreptitiously." Journalism will again become what it was more than a century ago-a form of art. It will be as concerned with truth and beauty as it is with justice. It will no longer speak in the deformed language of balance and objectivity but instead be a conduit for unvarnished moral outrage and passion. It will, like classical theater, be relegated to the margins of society but will endure for the literate and the moral. It will sustain all who seek to live with a conscience in an unconscious age. Journalism will survive, but it will reach a limited audience, as the sparsely attended productions of Aristophanes or Racine in small New York theaters are all that is left of great classical theater. The larger society will be deluged with propaganda, spectacle and entertainment as news. Those who carry the flame of journalism forward will live lives as difficult, financially precarious and outside the mainstream as most classical actors and musicians. The solutions proposed by McChesney and Nichols to save journalism would work if we lived in a culture that placed primacy on truth and beauty. The failure to recognize America's profound cultural shift into collective self-delusion makes the book stillborn. The authors, who know and understand journalism and the news industry, have a lot to say about the history of journalism and its decline that is worth reading, but their fatal flaw is to propose solutions that are no longer culturally relevant. They grasp the terrible consequences of a culture disconnected from a world of verifiable fact. They admirably look for solutions to save us from a world where opinions and facts are interchangeable, where lies become true. I applaud their effort, but I fear it is too late. Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent, worked for The New York Times for 15 years and before that for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio. He is the author, most recently, of "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle." =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Feb 28 09:06:18 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 28 Feb 2010 09:06:18 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Democrats vote to renew Patriot Act Message-ID: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/feb2010/patr-f27.shtml Democrats vote to renew Patriot Act By Bill Van Auken 27 February 2010 With almost no debate, the Democratic leadership in Congress pushed through an unamended extension of the USA Patriot Act's most notorious provisions, granting sweeping powers to eavesdrop and seize library, Internet and other personal records of US citizens. The provisions were set to expire by Sunday. President Barack Obama is expected to sign the legislation before then, securing his administration the ability to continue and expand the domestic spying and attacks on basic democratic rights that he and other Democrats had pretended to oppose under the Bush administration. The three extended provisions give US intelligence agencies the power to: 1) conduct "roving" wiretaps without specifying a particular phone number or e-mail account; 2) force institutions to surrender credit, banking, medical, mental health and library records; and 3) spy on so-called lone-wolf foreign nationals, who have no affiliation to either terrorist organizations or foreign governments. The Senate approved the one-year extension Wednesday by a voice vote and without any debate. The House followed suit on Thursday night, voting 315 to 97 in favor of the legislation. Originally, the three provisions were to expire at the end of December, but Congress passed a two-month extension late last year, while continuing to discuss proposed amendments that would ostensibly introduce greater protection of privacy and constitutional rights. Last fall, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved President Obama's request to renew the measures after debating various limited proposals to increase judicial oversight and otherwise reform the legislation, while keeping its essential powers intact. The Obama administration offered no support for even the most modest changes, with both the Justice Department and the FBI calling for the provisions to be extended as is. Among the proposed changes was an amendment that would have barred the government from using National Security Letters (NSLs)-administrative subpoenas issued by the FBI, the CIA and the Pentagon-to obtain confidential records of US citizens who are not suspected of terrorism or espionage. Another would have let the "lone-wolf" provision expire. A third would have required the government to issue written statements setting out the factual basis for obtaining an NSL. There was also a proposal to allow recipients of NSLs limited ability to challenge the so-called gag orders that bar them from informing anyone that they have been targeted for investigation. A separate proposal called for the repeal of the section of the FISA Amendments Act that granted blanket immunity to telecommunications companies that cooperated with the government in its illegal warrantless wiretapping program. Seeking bipartisan consensus on the legislation, all of these measures were defeated, with the committee ultimately adopting-with eight Democrats voting in favor and only three against-virtually meaningless proposals introduced by Senator Dianne Feinstein, a member of the Judiciary Committee and chairman of the Senate intelligence panel. Even these toothless amendments were stripped from the final extension resolution. Democratic leaders justified the action on the grounds that it was necessary to secure Republican support. Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy justified extending the worst abuses in the Patriot Act without any changes by declaring, "I would have preferred to add oversight and judicial review improvements to any extension of expiring provisions in the USA Patriot Act, but I understand some Republican senators objected." The media has largely attributed the Democrats' support for the renewal of the Patriot Act provisions and the scrapping of any attempt to amend them as an attempt to avoid any debate that would allow the Republican minority to portray them as "soft on terrorism" in the run-up to the midterm election. While no doubt such cowardice and opportunism govern all of the decisions made by the Democrats like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the reality is that support for the police state measures introduced with the Patriot Act has been bipartisan from the outset. The measure was passed by the Senate in 2001 with just one dissenting vote and under conditions in which members of Congress acknowledged that they had not even read the legislation. The Democrats have provided the necessary votes for approving every attack on democratic rights enacted since, while leading members of the party in Congress have collaborated in covering up illegal surveillance activities. While the Democratic Party won the 2008 election based on a platform that explicitly promised to overturn unconstitutional provisions in the Patriot Act and halt "the use of national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime," since coming to office the Obama administration has continued and expanded these practices. Successive reports have revealed that hundreds of thousands of NSLs have been issued since the Patriot Act was initially enacted, and there have been repeated revelations of illegal spying on American citizens-including reporters writing stories placing intelligence agencies in a bad light. Nonetheless, the Obama administration Justice Department insisted that there was no real abuse of authority under the Bush administration, and that therefore the act should be renewed. At the same time, the administration has intervened repeatedly in lawsuits challenging illegal wiretapping under the Bush administration, invoking the "state secrets privilege" to have them quashed. Last October, US Attorney General Eric Holder used this method to seek the dismissal of a suit demanding a halt to the National Security Agency's illegal dragnet surveillance of AT&T Internet communications and to hold Bush administration officials responsible for this unconstitutional program accountable. The Obama White House opposes such lawsuits because it does not want its own powers curtailed and fears that any prosecution of former officials could set a legal precedent that could be used against it. Similarly, it has opposed any probe of senior Bush administration and CIA officials responsible for the torture and killing of detainees, under conditions in which the Obama administration has upheld the policies of rendition and administrative detention without charges or trials. Just as with its foreign policy that continues the wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan and an economic policy designed to defend Wall Street at the expense of workers' jobs, wages and benefits, the Obama administration is continuing the wholesale assault on democratic rights initiated by its predecessor. The staggering repudiation of the promises made by the so-called candidate of "change" is not a matter merely of Obama's own duplicity. He heads a government that is dedicated to the defense of the essential interests of a financial oligarchy. Under conditions of deepening economic crisis and in the face of ever-wider social polarization at home, it can defend these interests only by embracing the unconstitutional methods adopted by the Bush administration. The Obama White House is continuing to build up a police state not for use against some ubiquitous terrorist threat, but to counter the inevitable growth of mass struggles by the American working class. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Feb 28 09:41:15 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 28 Feb 2010 09:41:15 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Elinor Ostrom Wins Nobel for Common(s) Sense Message-ID: [There are, occasionally, deserving winners for Nobel Prizes!] The Commons [Nobel winner Elinor Ostrom has built her career on the science of cooperation. Photo by Chris Meyer / Indiana University] Elinor Ostrom Wins Nobel for Common(s) Sense Elinor Ostrom was an unusual choice for the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. posted Feb 26, 2010 For one thing, she is the first woman to receive the prize. Her Ph.D. is in political science, not economics (though she minored in economics, collaborates with many economists, and considers herself a political economist). But what makes this award particularly special is that her work is about cooperation, while standard economics focuses on competition. Ostrom's seminal book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, was published in 1990. But her research on common property goes back to the early 1960s, when she wrote her dissertation on groundwater in California. In 1973 she and her husband, Vincent Ostrom, founded the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. In the intervening years, the Workshop has produced hundreds of studies of the conditions in which communities self-organize to solve common problems. Ostrom currently serves as professor of political science at Indiana University and senior research director of the Workshop. Fran Korten, YES! Magazine's publisher, spent 20 years with the Ford Foundation making grants to support community management of water and forests in Southeast Asia and the United States. She and Ostrom drew on one another's work as this field of knowledge developed. Fran interviewed her friend and colleague Lin Ostrom shortly after Ostrom received the Nobel Prize. Fran Korten: When you first learned that you had won the Nobel Prize in Economics, were you surprised? Elinor Ostrom: Yes. It was quite surprising. I was both happy and relieved. Fran: Why relieved? Elinor: Well, relieved in that I was doing a bunch of research through the years that many people thought was very radical and people didn't like. As a person who does interdisciplinary work, I didn't fit anywhere. I was relieved that, after all these years of struggle, someone really thought it did add up. That's very nice. And it's very nice for the team that I've been a part of here at the Workshop. We have had a different style of organizing. It is an interdisciplinary center-we have graduate students, visiting scholars, and faculty working together. I never would have won the Nobel but for being a part of that enterprise. Fran: It's interesting that your research is about people learning to cooperate. And your Workshop at the university is also organized on principles of cooperation. Elinor: I have a new book coming out in May entitled Working Together, written with Amy Poteete and Marco Janssen. It is on collective actions in the commons. What we're talking about is how people work together. We've used an immense array of different methods to look at this question-case studies, including my own dissertation and Amy's work, modeling, experiments, large-scale statistical work. We show how people use multiple methods to work together. Fran: Many people associate "the commons" with Garrett Hardin's famous essay, "The Tragedy of the Commons." He says that if, for example, you have a pasture that everyone in a village has access to, then each person will put as many cows on that land as he can to maximize his own benefit, and pretty soon the pasture will be overgrazed and become worthless. What's the difference between your perspective and Hardin's? Elinor: Well, I don't see the human as hopeless. There's a general tendency to presume people just act for short-term profit. But anyone who knows about small-town businesses and how people in a community relate to one another realizes that many of those decisions are not just for profit and that humans do try to organize and solve problems. If you are in a fishery or have a pasture and you know your family's long-term benefit is that you don't destroy it, and if you can talk with the other people who use that resource, then you may well figure out rules that fit that local setting and organize to enforce them. But if the community doesn't have a good way of communicating with each other or the costs of self-organization are too high, then they won't organize, and there will be failures. Fran: So, are you saying that Hardin is sometimes right? Elinor: Yes. People say I disproved him, and I come back and say "No, that's not right. I've not disproved him. I've shown that his assertion that common property will always be degraded is wrong." But he was addressing a problem of considerable significance that we need to take seriously. It's just that he went too far. He said people could never manage the commons well. At the Workshop we've done experiments where we create an artificial form of common property-such as an imaginary fishery or pasture, and we bring people into a lab and have them make decisions about that property. When we don't allow any communication among the players, then they overharvest. But when people can communicate, particularly on a face-to-face basis, and say, "Well, gee, how about if we do this? How about we do that?" Then they can come to an agreement. Fran: But what about the "free-rider" problem-where some people abide by the rules and some people don't? Won't the whole thing fall apart? Elinor: Well if the people don't communicate and get some shared norms and rules, that's right, you'll have that problem. But if they get together and say, "Hey folks, this is a project that we're all going to have to contribute to. Now, let's figure it out," they can make it work. For example, if it's a community garden, they might say, "Do we agree every Saturday morning we're all going to go down to the community garden, and we're going to take roll and we're going to put the roll up on a bulletin board?" A lot of communities have figured out subtle ways of making everyone contribute, because if they don't, those people are noticeable. Fran: So public shaming and public honoring are one key to managing the commons? Elinor: Shaming and honoring are very important. We don't have as much of an understanding of that. There are scholars who understand that, but that's not been part of our accepted way of thinking about collective action. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Feb 28 23:55:45 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 28 Feb 2010 23:55:45 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] John Bellamy Foster on `Marx's Ecology' and `The Ecological Revolution' Message-ID: http://links.org.au/node/1534 John Bellamy Foster on `Marx's Ecology' and `The Ecological Revolution' John Bellamy Foster interviewed by Aleix Bombila John Bellamy Foster is editor of the US socialist journal Monthly Review and author of Marx's Ecology and The Ecological Revolution. Aleix Bombila writes for En Lucha (Spain).This interview first appeared in English at MRZine. En Lucha: In your book Marx's Ecology you argue that Marxism has a lot to offer to the ecologist movement. What kind of united work can be established between Marxists and ecologists? John Bellamy Foster: I think it is important to recognise that Marxists and ecologists are not entirely different groups. Of course it is true that there have been Reds who have been anti-ecological and Greens who have been anti-Marxist. But it is not uncommon for the two to overlap, and increasingly to converge. Many socialists are environmentalists and many environmentalists are socialists. Indeed, there is a sense in which Marxism and ecology, both classically and today, lead to the same conclusion. For Marx, the goal was the creation of a society in which the metabolic relation between humanity and nature (i.e. production) was rationally regulated by the associated producers. The original title of my book that you refer to was supposed to be Marx and Ecology, but I changed it to Marx's Ecology because of the depth of Marx's ecological conceptions. I would argue that a critical Marxist approach, especially in our time, requires an ecological worldview, while a critical human ecology requires an anti-capitalist and ultimately socialist orientation (i.e., a Marxist one). In terms of united work that Marxists and ecologists can share, I would say social justice and environmental sustainability: saving humanity and saving the Earth. You can't expect to achieve one without the other, and neither is possible under the existing system. Probably the strongest single voice for an ecological relation in the world today is Evo Morales, the socialist (and Indigenous) president of Bolivia. After the failed Copenhagen conference on climate change, Fidel Castro said that we used to think we were in a struggle simply to determine the society of the future, but we now know we are in a struggle for survival. We have reached a point where historical materialists are taking global leadership in defining the ecological needs of humanity. The struggle against climate change looks kind of abstract at first sight. How can we organise campaigns against climate change with a real impact? Who should promote them? Climate change, and the planetary ecological crisis as a whole, which is much bigger, is the greatest material threat that civilisation, and indeed humanity, has ever confronted. We are facing, if we don't change course, the demise of the Earth as a habitable planet for most of today's living species. But, as you say, it seems abstract. People can't feel it because it is not reflected consistently in the short-term weather conditions they experience on a daily or even a seasonal basis. Moreover, it is not a problem that grows gradually and smoothly, but rather one that will accelerate with all sorts of tipping points, issuing in irreversible changes. So time is extremely short, and it requires a certain degree of education as to what is happening. Scientists are now almost unanimous on the threat, if not on all the details, but they do not have a direct line to the population. There are very few actual authoritative global warming deniers and their scientific claims, such as they are, been refuted again and again, but because of the power of the capitalist class, which sees any action to avert the problem as a threat to its immediate interests, the denial view is constantly amplified in the corporate media. Ordinary people are thus left uncertain as to what to think. Besides, they are hit with other material problems that seem more immediate: economic stagnation, the current extreme downturn, and the destructive effects of neoliberal policy. Workers are seeing their economic standard of living decline and are worried about their jobs; increasing numbers are unemployed and in poverty. So it is hard to concentrate on something as seemingly nebulous as climate change. If we are looking for a massive revolt from below in this area I believe that it will emerge first not at the centre but at the periphery of the capitalist world. Toynbee in his studies of history used to talk about an internal and an external proletariat. On climate change, as well as in the revolts against capitalism in general, it is the external proletariat in the periphery of the capitalist world economy that will undoubtedly take the leading role. I have pointed in recent writings to the possibility of what I have called an "environmental proletariat" -- for whom resistance to environmental conditions broadly, and not simply industrial conditions, is the defining struggle. Those most oppressed in the world, who have nothing to lose, are to be found predominantly in third world regions. So this is where the environmental proletariat also is mainly to be found. This is especially evident in the effect that sea level rise will have on the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta in Bangladesh and India and on the low-lying fertile areas of the Indian Ocean and China Sea -- Kerala in India, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia. Some areas, like the low-lying delta of the Pearl River in China, correspond to the areas of fastest development (in this case Guangdong industrial region from Shenzhen to Guangzhou), and some of the sharpest class contradictions. So the world epicenters of environmental and class struggle may overlap. There are all sorts of signs -- as in the water, hydrocarbon, and coca wars in Bolivia, which helped bring a socialist and Indigenous-based political movement to power -- that the material bases of social struggle is being transformed, raising issues that are more all-encompassing. Even in the centre of the system (the internal proletariat), there are a lot of ongoing struggles by environmentalists, and particularly the youth-based climate justice movement. Although there is no sign of a revolt from below from workers at present, and even though the labour movement seems to be entirely dormant in the United States in particular in the context of worsening economic (and environmental) conditions, there is hope that community-based, labour-environmental struggles will generate a new context for change. It is to be hoped that something like an environmental proletariat will eventually emerge in the centre too. If one reads classic works like Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England one gets the sense in which environmental struggles were crucial to the making of the English working class in the classical era, in ways that belie a narrow productivist vision. The truth is that when it comes to the dual contradictions represented by the economic and environmental failures of the system, it is only socialists that are able effectively to bring these issues together. Only historical materialists fully embody a theory and a practice that recognises that these are not separate issues but have a common basis in the capitalist mode of production. Indeed, I think we are increasingly seeing a convergence of socialist and ecological visions of the future, in a way that leads in a much more revolutionary direction than we have ever seen before. But we should not be blindly optimistic. This also requires organisation. And there are great dangers, such as the growth of ecofascism, and the delaying tactics of those in power that could spell "the common ruin of the contending classes." How can we foster environmental justice without prejudicing the working class? One might as well ask: How can we not foster environmental justice without prejudicing the working class? One of the first works on environmental justice, as I have already suggested, was Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England, which focused on how the working class was subject to toxic living conditions and the consequences in terms of health, looking at how this has affected class divisions and urban structure. Such concerns were part of the working-class struggle in the beginning. Environmental justice also includes health and safety within factories -- and in a broader sense than this is usually understood, encompassing such issues as length of working day, intensity of hours, etc. It is only the growth of a business-oriented trade union movement, and its segmentation from other working-class issues under contemporary capitalist systems of legal/political regulation, that has allowed people to think that the labour movement in particular and class struggle in general centres on a very restrictive set of issues, separated from environmental justice, which is in reality the measure of how inequality affects people in the multiple material domains of life. Of course environmental injustice in the United States is understandably seen as related to race perhaps even more than class, since its greatest impact is on those individuals and communities that are subject to environmental racism. Toxic wastes, as is well known, are more commonly dumped in communities of colour. One then sometimes runs into the misconception that this is a race and not a class issue for that very reason. Often implicit in this is the false notion that the working class is white, and so, if the problem is one that primarily affects American Indians, blacks, Latinos, Asians, then it is not a class issue. But of course the working class in the United States is predominantly made up of so-called "minority races". There is no sense in which the working class is a white working class, as is commonly supposed (and as contemporary whiteness studies teach us the whole issue of "white" needs examination). Environmental justice is thus a race and class (and indeed a gender) issue. It raises issues that the contemporary labour movement, with its limited "bargaining" position and the racial divides that it has often helped perpetuate, is not very well equipped to deal with, but that a socialist working-class movement could much more easily address. Are taxes on polluting industries a solution? If you mean an ultimate solution, the answer is No. The only real solution is to get rid of capitalism and put an egalitarian, sustainable society, run by the associated producers, in its place. But we have to face the fact that the environmental problem, including climate change, is accelerating, that this is a question of survival for humanity and most species on the earth. The time in which to act if we want to avoid irreversible environmental decline is incredibly short, with only a generation or so in which to implement a drastic change of course. That at least is what science is telling us at present. Under these circumstances we need both short-term radical responses and a longer-term ecological revolution. The first needs to help promote the conditions for the second. The immediate, short-term response requires, I am convinced, a carbon tax of the kind proposed by James Hansen: a progressively increasing tax imposed at well head, mine shaft, or point of entry with 100 per cent of the revenue going back to the population on a monthly basis. The point of this set-up, as Hansen says, is to make sure that the carbon tax is imposed as much as possible at the point of production and falls on those with the largest carbon footprints (mostly the rich), with the majority of the population gaining from the distribution of the revenue from the tax, since they have less-than-average per-capita footprints. Neither capital nor the governments controlled by capital would have their hands on the revenue, which would flow directly to the population. Implementing this in the kind of society that we have would of course be difficult. But once it was understood as having the effect of both protecting the earth (by making the price of carbon higher) and generally redistributing income toward those at the bottom of the society, it would gain strong popular support. The truth is that as long as we are in a capitalist society a key means of controlling a pollutant -- and carbon dioxide has unfortunately become that -- is going to be increasing its price. More direct political forms of regulation should of course be used as well. For example, we need simply to ban the building of coal-fired plants as long as sequestration technology doesn't exist (and at present there are all sorts of obstacles), and existing coal-fired plants need to be rapidly phased out. To accomplish this on the necessary scale, however, requires a general ecological revolution affecting what we produce and consume and how our society is organised. Is a collective solution to the ecological crisis possible within this system (renewable energies, improvement of public transport, cessation of big infrastructures, etc.)? Again, there is no collective solution within the system. But we can promote collective solutions from within the system, which, going against its logic, will play a part in the transition to another, people-controlled system. The new society will emerge from the womb of the old. Fred Magdoff and I have discussed the problem of capitalism and the environment in detail in an article that is appearing in the March 2010 issue of Monthly Review, entitled "What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know about Capitalism." The basic point, which needs elaboration of course, is the fact that the regime of capital is one of self-expanding value. Capitalism requires for its very existence constant economic growth and, more explicitly, accumulation of capital. Such a system can clearly be very effective up to a certain point in promoting production and economic development. But it also is very exploitative and ultimately leads to the destruction of the environmental conditions of existence. The only real social and ecological solution is a society not focused on accumulation or economic growth per se, but on sustainable human development. No matter what measures you introduce to modernise capitalism ecologically, the system requires a constant growth of the treadmill of production. If we substitute public for private transportation, introduce renewable energies, and adopt other collective measures, it can help. But these themselves tend to be limited by the accumulation goal of the system. Reliance on renewable resources, for example, is important. But it requires a system that uses them only at the level at which they can be renewed. Capital pushes beyond all such boundaries. What this means is not that we back off from promoting more social, collective, public solutions. But we need to recognise that going in that direction invariably means going against the logic of the system, so it requires radical organisation. What we are talking about is trying to create, in part from within capitalism, the infrastructure for a different kind of society. With constant pressure from below some things can be achieved, as long as they don't impinge substantially on the accumulation drive of the system. But if accumulation itself is threatened capital fights back, and small victories are likely to be reversed. The only answer -- no longer to be seen simply as a question of justice but also one of survival -- is to push beyond what capital is willing to accept, i.e., to promote human and collective needs beyond the so-called "market system". In that case, you are talking, if you take it far enough to make a real difference, about an ecological and social revolution and the transition to another kind of society. Some social movements believe it is possible to live apart from capitalism. Do you think this is possible, or does it just lead to the atomisation of the opposition? The US socialist Scott Nearing, who wrote a regular column for many years in Monthly Review, was one of the leaders of the self-sufficiency and back-to-the-land movement. There is no doubt that this kind of separation of oneself from the main logic of the system and its effects (a kind of living apart from the system) constitutes a form of passive resistance (still a form of resistance). Throughout history human beings, faced by repressive systems, have returned to the land, and cultivated their own gardens, so to speak. This can be a way of healing, regrouping, etc. Many of those who have gone in this general direction have pioneered in alternative forms of agriculture, including organic farming, community-supported agriculture. We should not underestimate the degree to which such actions can sometimes create alternatives crucial to the development of a new society, within the various interstices of the system. But the real struggle to create a new society requires in addition an active resistance and political organisation: a direct revolt against the existing relations of production. So the new strengths that were gained during a period of retreat have to become a part of an active resistance. Complete withdrawal in a globalised capitalist system is largely an illusion. It is interesting how Nearing himself combined his life of self-sufficiency with continual, active resistance. He worked it from both ends. Today we need people who are active in their resistance. If they can combine this with various ways of freeing themselves from the rat race, so much the better. The degrowth movement champions individual and collective initiatives in the search for alternatives to capitalism. What is your opinion about it? How can we decrease globally within the capitalist system? Decrease globally within capitalism? We can't. Capitalism is all about accumulation. It is a grow-or-die system and on an increasingly global scale. When economic growth, particularly the growth of profits, is not taking place, the system goes into a crisis, as at present. This results in massive unemployment. There are a lot of good things to be said about the "degrowth movement," as articulated particularly in Paris in April 2008. But it is based on a voluntaristic approach to decrease consumption, and on the unreal assumption that you can have a stationary state (that is a no-growth economy), as envisioned by John Stuart Mill in the 19th century, somehow in the context of the present system. This is simply a misunderstanding as to the nature of capitalism. As Joseph Schumpeter wrote, a no-growth capitalism is a contradictio in adjecto. It is certainly true that we need a new economic structure focused on enough and not more. An overall reduction in economic scale on the world level, particularly in the rich countries, could be accompanied by progress in sustainable human development, improving the real conditions of humanity by moving from possessive individualism to non-possessive humanism-collectivism. But this would require a socialist economy to make it possible (not inevitable). If the alternative to capitalism is a democratically planned economy, how should this work so as to include environmental issues? I think we need to remember Marx's warning in Capital about writing "recipes for the cook-shops of the future." It would be a mistake to try to write an actual blueprint for a socialist society, including one that incorporated environmental issues. Yet, I think that Paul Burkett has demonstrated in a brilliant article on "Marx's Vision of Sustainable Human Development" in the October 2005 issue of Monthly Review that Marx's notion of communism was one of sustainable human development, and that it is indeed only in those terms that we can understand what Marx's conception of a society of freely associated producers regulating their metabolism with nature was all about. Hugo Ch?vez has defined the struggle for socialism in the 21st century in terms of "the elementary triangle of socialism". According to this view, derived from Marx, socialism consists of: (1) social ownership; (2) social production organised by workers; and (3) satisfaction of communal needs. In my view, one can also speak of an "elementary triangle of ecology", derived directly from Marx, which takes the struggle to a deeper level. This can be defined as: (1) social use, not ownership, of nature; (2) rational regulation by the associated producers of the metabolism between human beings and nature; and (3) the satisfaction of communal needs -- not only of present but also future generations. All of this is spelled out in detail at the end of the introduction to my book The Ecological Revolution, as well as in the final chapters of that book. Finally, why should we read your last book, The Ecological Revolution? The opening words of the preface to The Ecological Revolution state: "My premise in this book is that we have reached a turning point in the human relation to the earth: all hope for the future of this relationship is now either revolutionary or it is false." The reason to read the Ecological Revolution is to begin to approach this question, which is now obviously the most important question facing humanity as we go forward into the future. =============================== Support the alternative online news service FreshInk. Forward this article and subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From hain at antcolbks.com Sun Feb 28 23:48:26 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2010 00:48:26 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Manure becomes pollutant as its volume grows unmanageable creating "dead zones" in waterways. Message-ID: <51BCC76430BA4F74AC0AF0C8E30296E5@Upstairs> Manure becomes pollutant as its volume grows unmanageable By David A. Fahrenthold Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, March 1, 2010 Nearly 40 years after the first Earth Day, this is irony: The United States has reduced the manmade pollutants that left its waterways dead, discolored and occasionally flammable. But now, it has managed to smother the same waters with the most natural stuff in the world. Animal manure, a byproduct as old as agriculture, has become an unlikely modern pollution problem, scientists and environmentalists say. The country simply has more dung than it can handle: Crowded together at a new breed of megafarms, livestock produce three times as much waste as people, more than can be recycled as fertilizer for nearby fields. That excess manure gives off air pollutants, and it is the country's fastest-growing large source of methane, a greenhouse gas. And it washes down with the rain, helping to cause the 230 oxygen-deprived "dead zones" that have proliferated along the U.S. coast. In the Chesapeake Bay, about one-fourth of the pollution that leads to dead zones can be traced to the back ends of cows, pigs, chickens and turkeys. Despite its impact, manure has not been as strictly regulated as more familiar pollution problems, like human sewage, acid rain or industrial waste. The Obama administration has made moves to change that but already has found itself facing off with farm interests, entangled in the contentious politics of poop. In recent months, Oklahoma has battled poultry companies from Arkansas in court, blaming their birds' waste for slimy and deadened rivers downstream. In Florida, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed first-of-their-kind limits on pollutants found in manure. In the Senate, Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.) has proposed a bill that would allow farmers in the Chesapeake watershed to cut pollution more than required and sell the extra "credits" to other polluters. The EPA, in the middle of an overhaul for the failed Chesapeake cleanup, also has threatened to tighten rules on large farms. "We now know that we have more nutrient pollution from animals in the Chesapeake Bay watershed" than from human sewage, said J. Charles Fox, the EPA's new Chesapeake czar. "Nutrients" is the scientific word for the main pollutants found in manure, treated sewage, and runoff from fertilized lawns. They are the bay's chief evil, feeding unnatural algae blooms that cause dead zones. Around the country, agricultural interests have fought back against moves like these, saying that new rules on manure could mean crushing new costs for farmers. "It's clearly going to put a squeeze on people that they've always said they didn't want to squeeze," including family-run farms, said Don Parrish of the American Farm Bureau Federation. The story of manure is already a gloomy counterpoint to the triumphs in fighting pollution since the first Earth Day in 1970. An air pollutant that causes acid rain has been cut by 56 percent. By one measure, the output from sewage plants got 45 percent cleaner. But, according to Cornell University researchers, the amount of one key pollutant -- nitrogen -- entering the environment in manure has increased by at least 60 percent since the 1970s. "We've dealt with the kind of conventional pollutants," that helped spark the first Earth Day, said Donald F. Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. "Now, we see the things that are eating our lunch, if you will, are natural products . . . that are just overloading the system." The reasons for manure's rise as a pollutant have to do, environmentalists say, with a shift in agriculture and a soft spot in the law. In recent decades, livestock raising has shifted to a smaller number of large farms. At these places, with thousands of hogs or hundreds of thousands of chickens, the old self-contained cycle of farming -- manure feeds the crops, then the crops feed the animals -- is overwhelmed by the large amount of waste. The result in farming-heavy places has been too much manure and too little to do with it. In the air, that extra manure can dry into dust, forming a "brown fog." It can emit substances that contribute to climate change. And it can give off a smell like a punch to the stomach. "You have to cover your face just to go from the house to the car," said Lynn Henning, 52, a farmer in rural Clayton, Mich., who said she became an environmental activist after fumes from huge new dairies gave her family headaches and burning sinuses. The way that modern megafarms produce it, Henning said, "Manure is no longer manure. Manure is a toxic waste now." In the water, the chemicals in manure don't poison life, like pesticides or spilled oil. Instead, they create too much life, and the wrong kinds. "You get Miracle-Gro for your water," said David Guest, a lawyer for the group Earthjustice who has fought for tougher limits on pollution in Florida. The chemicals in manure serve as fertilizer for unnatural algae blooms. They drain away oxygen as they decompose. Scientists say the number of suffocating dead zones -- oxygen-depleted areas where even worms and clams climb out of the mud, desperate to respire -- has grown from 16 in the 1950s to at least 230 today. The Chesapeake's is usually the country's third largest, after the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Erie. The law, however, has treated manure and other agricultural pollutants differently than pollutants from smokestacks and sewer pipes. The EPA does not set a hard cap on how much manure can wash off farms, instead issuing guidelines that apply only to the largest operations. There, the rules might limit how much manure farmers can spread on individual fields, for instance, or order them to plant grassy strips along riverbanks to filter manure-laden runoff. Even that level of regulation has only been in place since the 1990s. But now, the EPA has signaled an intent to tighten its grip. Last Monday, the agency announced that reducing manure-laden runoff was one of its six "national enforcement initiatives." New rules went into effect in December that will impose even tighter restrictions on large farms. Last fall, the U.S. Department of Agriculture also considered a change to its guidelines, which would have limited the amount of manure farmers could apply to their fields. But then it scrapped that idea, saying the issue needed more study. Last week on the Eastern Shore, where farmers raised 568 million chickens last year, the problem of excess manure was still big enough to see from the road. "See how dark that one pile is? That's chicken manure," said Kathy Phillips, 61, an environmental activist who patrols the peninsula for piles of manure stored outdoors. As a steady rain fell, she said that pollutants were probably leaching off that mound -- as tall as a van and the color of dark-roast coffee-- and into ditch water that would eventually reach the Pocomoke River, then the Chesapeake. Phillips usually surveys these piles from the air. She has a mental map of dozens of these off-smelling mounds. "I don't want to be the Poop Lady," said Phillips, who got into environmentalism because she loved to surf Ocean City's beaches. "But, you know, somebody had to talk about this. It's like this dirty little secret." A few miles north, the poultry giant Perdue has come up with one way to dispose of excess manure. At a $13 million plant outside Seaford, Del., tons of poultry manure are dried, heated to kill off bacteria and compressed into pellets of organic fertilizer that is sold to golf courses or homeowners. "This is sort of a reverse chicken," said Perdue spokesman Luis Luna, as bulldozers moved manure below. "In a chicken, the food goes in and the poop goes out. Here, the poop comes in and the plant food goes out." That helps Chesapeake's manure problem, but it isn't the whole solution. Luna said there is enough manure on the Shore to keep more plants like this running-- but Perdue isn't planning to build more yet. So far, the fertilizer doesn't sell well enough to make that cost-effective. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/28/AR2010022803978.html?hpid=topnews -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: