From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Mar 1 00:10:07 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2010 00:10:07 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] =?iso-8859-1?q?Istv=E1n_M=E9sz=E1ros=2C_Pathfinder_of?= =?iso-8859-1?q?_Socialism?= Message-ID: <983E71D827994362ADACD210969C6082@agingCHS072729> http://monthlyreview.org/100201foster2.php Istv?n M?sz?ros, Pathfinder of Socialism John Bellamy Foster If I were asked to sum up the significance of Istv?n M?sz?ros for our time, I would have to follow President Hugo Ch?vez of Venezuela in referring to him as the "Pathfinder of Socialism."1 His work, in such writings as Marx's Theory of Alienation (1970), The Power of Ideology (1989), Beyond Capital (1995), The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time (2008), The Structural Crisis of Capital (2009), and Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness (forthcoming, 2010), provides a strategic vision of the building of socialism, the absence of which, for many decades, constituted one of the principal weaknesses of the anti-capitalist movement, worldwide. For M?sz?ros, "the structural crisis of capital" arises, not simply from the fact that the system is now face to face for the first time with its own "absolute limits," but also from the reality that the necessary conditions of a mass-based, hegemonic socialist alternative are emerging, providing the bases of a new revolutionary situation, globally. The depth and breadth of his critique of the capital system-extending to post-capitalist regimes such as the Soviet Union-offers a powerful set of insights into the historical necessity of socialism, and this in turn informs his critique of capital itself, constituting a single strategic argument. As Ch?vez has stated, the importance of M?sz?ros's magnum opus Beyond Capital is to be found in its subtitle: "Toward a Theory of Transition." "It is a theoretical effort," said Ch?vez, "because Karl Marx did not develop a theory of transition."2 The immediate context in which M?sz?ros's Structural Crisis of Capital appears is what is commonly and euphemistically known as the Great Recession, or the immense financial and economic crisis in which we are now engulfed, manifesting itself on a scale not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s.3 M?sz?ros begins and ends his book with the current economic malaise. But he explains this as part of a wider disjuncture stretching back to the early 1970s.4 This structural crisis cannot be seen simply in narrow economic terms. Rather, it also encompasses the global ecological crisis; what M?sz?ros calls "the potentially deadliest form of global hegemonic imperialism" (179); and the manifold social and cultural contradictions emanating from the hierarchical power relations of the prevailing order. "The epochal structural crisis of the capital system," moreover, transcends all merely "cyclic and conjunctural economic crises.affecting all conceivable forms of the capital system as such, not only capitalism," asserting itself through the activation of "the absolute limits of capital as a mode of social metabolic reproduction." This poses dangers "incomparably more severe than even the Great World Economic Crisis of 1929-1933," due to the "truly global character" of the world crisis this time around (172). So dialectically interconnected, in M?sz?ros's conception, are capital's deepening structural crisis and the imperative of a genuine socialist transition that it is impossible to address the former without also addressing the latter. His critique of capital (as opposed to capitalism) is equally a critique of the early "socialist" (or post-capitalist) experiments which, in failing to eradicate the capital relation in its entirety, but merely mediating this via the state, ended up in a historical dead end-while nevertheless illuminating the path that the socialism of the twenty-first century must take. In M?sz?ros's analysis, this path can be summed up as: "substantive equality," "self-critique," and communal self-organization of productive relations, which, taken together, define a sustainable socialist society.5 M?sz?ros strongly counsels against the defensive, purely economistic orientation of laborist and social democratic movements, which, faced with the default of capital, do everything they can to bail it out and restore the very economic power that keeps them and the entire working class in subservience. Rather, it is essential, he argues, to take full offensive advantage of the current weakness of capital as a system of social metabolic reproduction to alter the rules of the game fundamentally and irrevocably by political means. Opposing those who claim that the working class has been integrated into the system, he makes it clear that this is a systemic impossibility even in the wealthiest capitalist states, and at most extends to the trade union leadership (190-95). The working class remains everywhere an alienated power, the indispensable agent of potential revolutionary change. Still, in responding to the question of whether such a revolutionary transformation will actually take place, M?sz?ros answers bluntly: "It depends" (187). Genuine human emancipation, altering society "from top to bottom," in Marx's terms, can only be brought about through unrelenting struggle; hence it is a contingent aspect of history (85). The structural crisis of capital, described in this book, has been worsening for decades and has now reached a point where it has taken on real urgency in every region of the globe. Critics of the system can therefore no longer hide behind the comforting illusion that socialism will eventually arise of its own accord, or that the world can afford to wait. In this respect, Ch?vez (quoted in Chapter Five, "Bol?var and Ch?vez") declared before the World Social Forum in Caracas in January 2006 that to limit anti-systemic activities to an annual touristic/folkloric encounter would be terrible, because we would be simply wasting time, and we have no time to waste. I believe that it is not given to us to speak in terms of future centuries.we have no time to waste; the challenge is to save the conditions of life on this planet, to save the human species, to change the course of history, to change the world (136). The out-of-control destruction that now characterizes the capital system on a world scale, and imperils all life on the planet, has its dialectical antithesis in the potential for an acceleration of history, through the activation of a genuine, mass-based revolutionary struggle for substantive equality. The conservative nineteenth-century cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt, looking back on an earlier era of revolution, once described a "historical crisis" as a time in which a crisis in the whole state of things is produced, involving whole epochs and all or many peoples of the same civilization..The historical process is suddenly accelerated in terrifying fashion. Developments which otherwise take centuries seem to flit by like phantoms in months or weeks, and are fulfilled.6 Today the structural crisis of capital provides the historical setting for a new revolutionary movement for social emancipation in which developments normally taking centuries would flit by like phantoms in decades or even a few years. But the force for such necessary, vital change remains with the people themselves, and rests on humanity's willingness to constitute itself as both subject and object of history, through the collective struggle to create a just and sustainable world. This, M?sz?ros insists, constitutes the unprecedented challenge and burden of our historical time. Notes 1. Ch?vez first called M?sz?ros "Pathfinder" (Se?alador de caminos)-referring to his role in illuminating the transition to socialism-in an inscription that he wrote in a copy of Simon Rodriguez's Collected Works, which he gave to M?sz?ros at a dinner in the Miraflores Palace on September 10, 2001. On the same occasion they discussed M?sz?ros's Beyond Capital, with Ch?vez exhibiting the copious notes he had made in his copy. 2. Hugo Ch?vez, AloPresidente, May 3, 2009. 3. On the economic crisis itself, see John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009); also pp. 181-85 of this book. 4. The fact that M?sz?ros understood this from the start as "the structural crisis of capital," and not merely a conjectural economic crisis, can be seen by looking at Chapter 3 of this book, "The Necessity of Social Control," originally delivered as a lecture in January 1971, on his receipt of the Issac Deutscher Prize for his Marx's Theory of Alienation. 5. In addition to the present book, see Istv?n M?sz?ros, "The Communal System and the Principle of Self-Critique," Monthly Review 59, no. 10 (March 2008), 33-56. 6. Jacob Burckhardt, Reflections on History (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1979), 213, 224. =============================== 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 Mon Mar 1 00:08:26 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2010 01:08:26 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The Dubai-Payoneer connection/ Dubai money trail leads back to Israel Message-ID: <0C102FAFAF364595B5817298268802A4@Upstairs> The Dubai-Payoneer connection by Paul Woodward on February 25, 2010 As I noted below, the New York-based company Payoneer is linked to Israel in a number of ways, not least through it's Israeli CEO, Yuval Tal, a former member of an elite combat unit of the Israel Defense Forces and former Vice President of Business Development for the Tel Aviv-based technology company, Radware. Tal describes how Payoneer operates in this video. As Clayton Swisher notes: Mr Tal did not exactly conceal his prior affiliations when he appeared on Fox News during the 2006 Lebanon war. He opined then that "this is a war that Israel cannot afford to lose". If Tal or his Payoneer firm are in any way involved in the conspiracy to help a foreign intelligence service (like, say providing Mossad operatives with credit cards), he may soon find himself in his own battle with little prospects of winning - in a US courtroom. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the lead agency with statutory authority and responsibilities for investigating foreign espionage activities on US soil. It's a job they take seriously and with a proven record of not shying away from the numerous instances when America's special ally played foul. As an initial inquiry, I imagine case agents will subpoena all financial records associated with the fraudulently issued credit cards. This would include the original credit card applications, which requires such things as a delivery address (to mail the card to), social security numbers, dates of birth, and employment information. If the applications were made on paper, then the documents may contain all manner of evidence, from handwriting samples to fingerprints. There will be a similar trail to pore over if the applications were made over the phone or electronically via computer. I also smell money laundering, as the money was supposedly dumped into prepaid accounts to conceal its purpose and origination. So US investigators may even want to tap in on the US treasury department's crack financial investigator, Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN). Beneath an article about Payoneer appearing at TechCrunch, a commenter suggests: "payoneer is definitely in the legal gray area when it comes to the patriot's act, anti-money laundering, and a host of other laws around 'know your customer'" Tal answers: Payoneer is meticulously compliant with all federal, state and MasterCard regulations, including AML, BSA, Patriot act, KYC etc. There is nothing grey about it. As a certified MasterCard Member Service Provider we undergo rigorous ongoing diligence related, among others, to our regulatory compliance level. If Payoneer comes under investigation, the FBI and US government regulatory agencies will not simply take Tal at his word. They will want to know exactly how Payoneer cards could be used by individuals with false identification. Dubai money trail leads back to Israel by Paul Woodward on February 24, 2010 Although the Israeli government has yet to confirm its role in the murder of Mahmoud al Mahbouh, the Dubai police have provided further evidence through financial records that connect the crime to Israel. The company Payoneer Inc., based in New York, has been named in the case - a company that helps facilitate Taglit-Birthright Israel trips. Payoneer provides financial services for trip participants and as the Wall Street Journal reports, the company's chief executive, Yuval Tal, is a former Israeli special-forces soldier. Dubai police said Wednesday they had identified credit cards used by 14 of the suspects to book hotel rooms and pay for air travel. Police named the issuing bank as MetaBank, a unit of Meta Financial Group Inc., a financial company based in Storm Lake, Iowa. The bank said it had no comment "because we are trying to confirm the accuracy of statements by the press." Dubai police identified cards issued by Britain's Nationwide Building Society, IDT Finance of Gilbraltar, and Germany's DZ Bank AG. A Nationwide spokesman told the Associated Press that bank officials were "investigating the reports and have no further comments." The other European companies weren't reachable late Wednesday. Dubai also identified a company called Payoneer Inc., based in New York, though it wasn't clear what precise role authorities believe that company played. In a chart released to reporters, authorities suggested the company distributed the cards on behalf of MetaBank. According to its Web site, Payoneer offers online payment solutions, including arranging for employers to pay overseas workers through money transfers into prepaid MasterCard debit-card accounts. Payoneer is based in New York, but has offices in Tel Aviv. The company's chief executive, Yuval Tal, appeared as a commentator on the Lebanon war in 2006 on Fox News, identifying himself as a former Israeli special-forces soldier. Mr. Tal wasn't available to comment. Dubai police name new suspects in Hamas murder by Paul Woodward on February 24, 2010 Gulf News reports: Police revealed 15 more suspects in the Al Mabhouh murder case on Wednesday. The extensive investigation has led to a total of 26 suspects so far involved in the murder of the Hamas official Mahmoud Al Mabhouh at a Dubai hotel. In addition to the previously released list of 11 suspects, Dubai Police has now identified another six suspects, who include a woman who used British passports, a man and three women travelling on Irish passports, two men who used French passports, and three people with Australian passports. The Australians included a woman. With the travel movements and photographs of 26 suspected Mossad operatives now appearing in the international media, how long will it be before one of the murder suspects is arrested? Moreover, since Mossad's assassination unit apparently included around just 50 agents, one would imagine that with half of them now in hiding (or getting reconstructive plastic surgery to change their appearances) the unit has, for the time being, rendered itself inoperative. Meanwhile, The Independent reports: Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman yesterday flatly rebuffed David Miliband's request for cooperation with an investigation into the use of forged British passports in the assassination of a Hamas leader. The request for assistance came as the total number of fake British passports believed to have been used in last month's assassination rose from six to eight. But private discussions on the sidelines of an EU meeting in Brussels - and an identical request from Irish foreign minister Miche?l Martin - yielded no concessions on the Israeli side. A statement from Mr Lieberman's office reiterated that there was "no proof" of Israeli involvement in the affair. "If someone would present information beyond articles in the media, we would relate to it," he is said to have told Mr Miliband. "But since there is no such information, there is no need to deal with the matter." A report in the Los Angeles Times, recounting an interview that an Israeli journalist, Ronen Bergman, gave on Israeli Army Radio on Monday, indicates that Mossad has been amazingly slow in covering its tracks: A man walked in to the interior ministry in Cologne, Germany on June 16, 2009, and claimed that he was Michael Bodenheimer, an Israeli citizen, descended of a German family that had been persecuted by the Nazis. He applied for German citizenship, saying he wished to leave Israel and emigrate to Germany. He presented documents, including his parents' German marriage certificate, said he lived in the community of Liman and also gave an address in Herzliya. The documents must have been convincingly authentic, and two days later, in a model of bureaucratic efficiency that seems atypical (even for Germany), the passport had been issued. The photograph on the passport is the one now in the papers as one of the assassins, but it is most definitely not that of the Michael Bodenheimer who does live somewhere else in Israel. The Israeli one is a yeshiva master, an ultraorthodox Jew living in Bnei Brak. His parents were, in fact, born in Frankfurt, Germany, but that's where the similarity ends. He has Israeli citizenship and evidently American too, but not German. The new Bodenheimer gave an address in Herzliya. Bergman said the German authorities didn't check it out. But had they done so, they would have found that he had an apparent shell company in his name with offices in Herzliya. "Michael Bodenheimer Ltd." belonged to a group of offices opened by a different company called "Top Office" located on the same floor. Top Office, says Bergman, is apparently a company that provides individuals and small businesses with an office and secretary at a respectable location. Bergman said he paid the business address a visit on Friday night, together with the Der Spiegel correspondent in Israel, he told the radio. He took a picture of the sign saying "Michael Bodenheimer Ltd," and called the number for Top Office. An American-accented woman answered, sounded very surprised and hung up after saying she didn't work on the Sabbath. By Sunday morning, says Bergman, both companies were gone. The signs had been removed. And the guard - the same one from Friday night - was awfully jittery and tried to shoo them away. Finally, The Guardian reports on a British man whose identity was stolen by Mossad decades ago: The infamous 1979 assassination of the Palestinian who masterminded the Munich massacre was carried out using a forged British passport belonging to a 27-year-old council worker living in a small flat in south London, the Guardian can reveal. Peter Derbyshire, who at the time was running leisure centres for Lambeth council, found himself being questioned by special branch over the assassination of Ali Hassan Salameh, chief of operations for Black September, the terrorist organisation behind the hostage attack at the 1972 Olympics that resulted in the death of 11 Israeli athletes. Derbyshire, who now runs a travel company in the French Pyrenees, told the Guardian: "I received a call at work from someone who said: 'I'm from ?special branch. I'm inside your apartment. Can you come home?'" He returned to find his flat in Balham, south London, had been turned upside down by two special branch officers. He was interrogated for hours by the police, who asked detailed questions about his history and political affiliations. Eventually they told him his passport number had been used by a man named Peter Scriver in the murder of Salameh in Beirut. http://warincontext.org/2010/02/25/the-dubai-payoneer-connection/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 97689 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 88610 bytes Desc: not available URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Mar 1 12:44:52 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2010 12:44:52 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Ralph Nader Was Right About Barack Obama Message-ID: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/ralph_nader_was_right_about_barack_obama_20100301/ Chris Hedges' Columns Ralph Nader Was Right About Barack Obama Posted on Mar 1, 2010 By Chris Hedges We owe Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney an apology. They were right about Barack Obama. They were right about the corporate state. They had the courage of their convictions and they stood fast despite wholesale defections and ridicule by liberals and progressives. Obama lies as cravenly, if not as crudely, as George W. Bush. He promised us that the transfer of $12.8 trillion in taxpayer money to Wall Street would open up credit and lending to the average consumer. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), however, admitted last week that banks have reduced lending at the sharpest pace since 1942. As a senator, Obama promised he would filibuster amendments to the FISA Reform Act that retroactively made legal the wiretapping and monitoring of millions of American citizens without warrant; instead he supported passage of the loathsome legislation. He told us he would withdraw American troops from Iraq, close the detention facility at Guant?namo, end torture, restore civil liberties such as habeas corpus and create new jobs. None of this has happened. He is shoving a health care bill down our throats that would give hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to the private health insurance industry in the form of subsidies, and force millions of uninsured Americans to buy insurers' defective products. These policies would come with ever-rising co-pays, deductibles and premiums and see most of the seriously ill left bankrupt and unable to afford medical care. Obama did nothing to halt the collapse of the Copenhagen climate conference, after promising meaningful environmental reform, and has left us at the mercy of corporations such as ExxonMobil. He empowers Israel's brutal apartheid state. He has expanded the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where hundreds of civilians, including entire families, have been slaughtered by sophisticated weapons systems such as the Hellfire missile, which sucks the air out of victims' lungs. And he is delivering war and death to Yemen, Somalia and perhaps Iran. The illegal wars and occupations, the largest transference of wealth upward in American history and the egregious assault on civil liberties, all begun under George W. Bush, raise only a flicker of tepid protest from liberals when propagated by the Democrats. Liberals, unlike the right wing, are emotionally disabled. They appear not to feel. The tea-party protesters, the myopic supporters of Sarah Palin, the veterans signing up for Oath Keepers and the myriad of armed patriot groups have swept into their ranks legions of disenfranchised workers, angry libertarians, John Birchers and many who, until now, were never politically active. They articulate a legitimate rage. Yet liberals continue to speak in the bloodless language of issues and policies, and leave emotion and anger to the protofascists. Take a look at the 3,000-word suicide note left by Joe Stack, who flew his Piper Cherokee last month into an IRS office in Austin, Texas, murdering an IRS worker and injuring dozens. He was not alone in his rage. "Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it's time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours?" Stack wrote. "Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country's leaders don't see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political 'representatives' (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the 'terrible health care problem'. It's clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don't get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in." The timidity of the left exposes its cowardice, lack of a moral compass and mounting political impotence. The left stands for nothing. The damage Obama and the Democrats have done is immense. But the damage liberals do the longer they beg Obama and the Democrats for a few scraps is worse. It is time to walk out on the Democrats. It is time to back alternative third-party candidates and grass-roots movements, no matter how marginal such support may be. If we do not take a stand soon we must prepare for the rise of a frightening protofascist movement, one that is already gaining huge ground among the permanently unemployed, a frightened middle class and frustrated low-wage workers. We are, even more than Glenn Beck or tea-party protesters, responsible for the gusts fanning the flames of right-wing revolt because we have failed to articulate a credible alternative. A shift to the Green Party, McKinney and Nader, along with genuine grass-roots movements, will not be a quick fix. It will require years in the wilderness. We will again be told by the Democrats that the least-worse candidate they select for office is better than the Republican troll trotted out as an alternative. We will be bombarded with slick commercials about hope and change and spoken to in a cloying feel-your-pain language. We will be made afraid. But if we again acquiesce we will be reduced to sad and pathetic footnotes in our accelerating transformation from a democracy to a totalitarian corporate state. Isolation and ridicule-ask Nader or McKinney-is the cost of defying power, speaking truth and building movements. Anger at injustice, as Martin Luther King wrote, is the political expression of love. And it is vital that this anger become our own. We have historical precedents to fall back upon. "Here in the United States, at the beginning of the twentieth century, before there was a Soviet Union to spoil it, you see, socialism had a good name," the late historian and activist Howard Zinn said in a lecture a year ago at Binghamton University. "Millions of people in the United States read socialist newspapers. They elected socialist members of Congress and socialist members of state legislatures. You know, there were like fourteen socialist chapters in Oklahoma. Really. I mean, you know, socialism-who stood for socialism? Eugene Debs, Helen Keller, Emma Goldman, Clarence Darrow, Jack London, Upton Sinclair. Yeah, socialism had a good name. It needs to be restored." Social change does not come through voting. It is delivered through activism, organizing and mobilization that empower groups to confront the hegemony of the corporate state and the power elite. The longer socialism is identified with the corporatist policies of the Democratic Party, the longer we allow the right wing to tag Obama as a socialist, the more absurd and ineffectual we become. The right-wing mantra of "Obama the socialist," repeated a few days ago to a room full of Georgia Republicans, by Newt Gingrich, the former U.S. speaker of the House, is discrediting socialism itself. Gingrich, who looks set to run for president, called Obama the "most radical president" the country had seen in decades. "By any standard of government control of the economy, he is a socialist," Gingrich said. If only the critique were true. The hypocrisy and ineptitude of the Democrats become, in the eyes of the wider public, the hypocrisy and ineptitude of the liberal class. We can continue to tie our own hands and bind our own feet or we can break free, endure the inevitable opprobrium, and fight back. This means refusing to support the Democrats. It means undertaking the laborious work of building a viable socialist movement. It is the only alternative left to save our embattled open society. We can begin by sending a message to the Green Party, McKinney and Nader. Let them know they are no longer alone. =============================== 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 Mar 1 15:01:52 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2010 15:01:52 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Tortured, Exiled Honduran Journalist Recalls His Experiences Message-ID: <5975EA31A3B34CCF91449D269AE594A1@agingCHS072729> Interview: Tortured, Exiled Honduran Journalist Recalls His Experiences Written by Tamar Sharabi Sunday, 14 February 2010 13:04 Upside Down World: Before the Honduras Coup Detat of June 28th 2009, tell me a little about your life. Cesar Silva: I have always been involved in popular struggles. During university I was elected Secretary of the University Reform Front (FRU) from where we constantly held a line of complaints denouncing corruption and participating in different actions to benefit students. I was also elected president of Journalism Students for two consecutive terms from 1998 to 2002, during which we founded the "Vanguard University Journal" and "Magazine Alert" that circulated once a month across the country's universities. Upon graduating from the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH), I worked for six years as a reporter for Channel 9 TV (Vica TV), the last two years of which I was a news director for that company in Tegucigalpa. I also worked for Channel 63 for two years, along with Renato Alvarez who is now director of the news of Televicentro. (Read, 'Coup Mouthpiece') I also worked four years at Channel 54, which produced a program called "The protagonists of the News." In 2006 Jorge Arturo Reina Idi?quez (Ambassador of Honduras to the UN) offered me a position with the Ministry of Interior and Justice in the Zelaya Government. My position was Director of Communications where I worked directly with the newspaper and Channel 8, called 'Citizen Power Information Network' founded under Zelaya's government. In May 2009 I was called to work with the Presidential Palace to coordinate work for production and coverage of the popular consultation process ('cuarta urna') for public Channel 8. I was assigned a mobile unit to report from the northern municipalities of Olancho and Francisco Moraz?n beside the first lady, Xiomara Castro. That's how I became involved directly in the events during the coup. UDW: What happened to you on June 28th? CS: Preparations were intense in the days before the coup and increased when the Armed Forces refused to distribute electoral materials. The ballot boxes were held at the air base Hernan Acosta. President Zelaya along with supporters came to rescue the ballots to distribute them into state cars. >From there it was a race of information. The night of June 27, I was at the Presidential Palace until midnight and in the early morning I left towards Olancho. When I passed the town of Guaimaca (a town 90 km from Tegucigalpa) the President was being captured. There, police and the army captured me as well. My cameraman, driver, and assistants managed to escape to warn people what had happened. People gathered in Guaimaca at the town's central park and demanded that the police release me. I was finally released by noontime because of the people's pressure. Still, the police called for reinforcements from another municipality and within a half hour an army truck arrived and began to repress people in the park and the police forces chased me down. People took me from house to house, jumping lots and properties until I was in a safe place outside the town. I stayed there until nighttime when presidential house vehicles (that were still under the legitimate government) came to pick me up. We had to travel on back roads to evade the army and police posts to arrive in Tegucigalpa at two in the morning. Since their was a curfew we had no choice but to reach the presidential palace where people remained gathered in protest. They seized the entire equipment of the team; cameras and microphones. In Olancho they stole our truck the mobile unit that accompanied the first lady, Xiomara Castro. On the 29th more chaos came and repression continued. UDW: The 5th of July you helped carry the dead body of Isis Obed. How did it feel to pause from your reporters role to help Isis receive medical attention? CS: It is impossible to separate being a journalist and being a human being. As a reporter I was interested in taking pictures, and I took the first ones because I thought that Isis Murillo Obed was dead. Then I approached him and saw that he was breathing and moving in the density of all the tear gas. People were shouting that he was dead, but when I took him in my arms he opened his eyes and tried to say something that molded into a moan of pain. There was still army gunfire hitting a small wall near where Isis Obed fell. We could hear the bullets striking the wall, and at that very moment there was an explosion and everyone hit the ground. It turned out to be a motorcycle that had exploded. Consequently, I gave the camera to a friend and shouted that we needed to move Isis. With the help of some other guys we carried him about 300 meters to a car that we found. I felt anger, pain and helplessness. I did not know the child's age, and perhaps had never seen him in my life. I thought he was 10 or 12 years old. He had no weapons, he just looked helpless. It looked so unfair that I just felt like yelling "Gorillas assassinate children." I forgot that I was a reporter and I just thought of the life of that child. I asked for his family but nobody knew anything. I hoped he would be saved in the hospital, but taking the pictures, it seemed impossible for him to live. The shot impacted his skull. On my chest there were remains of his brain and his blood. UDW: After this day, did anything change about the way you reported on the situation in the country? CS: I will never forget that moment. That event drives me to continue so that Isis's life and others will not go unpunished. The murderers must pay their crime. Witnessing so many beatings, so much unjustified repression, it was clear that the intentions of the coup were to establish a dictatorship. I decided to continue looking for ways to disseminate what was happening. I started working for the internet blog and the National Resistance Front Against the Coup, and freelanced with Radio Globo, Telesur and the History Channel. I changed; I am more insistent, I'm more critical. During the Michelletti regime I collaborated in every way possible to denounce the coup. We went from neighborhood to neighborhood, people to people. I grew more into a neighborhood journalist, I just had to be more creative because they stole or destroyed the equipment we had at every opportunity. UDW: As a national reporter, how did you feel about the international media reporting on Honduras? CS: As always there are many interests. At first it seemed somewhat balanced, but within a few days it was clear who uninformed and those who told the truth. The big chains such as CNN, Univision, Telemundo and others within a few days took off their mask and began calling Michelletti president and considered it a constitutional succession. Other European countries were more objective. The independent press were the ones who maintained the reality. They called it like it was. Telesur was objective about the crackdowns and repression, but in fact they were favorable towards Zelaya. UDW: Talk about the elections that took place under the coup regime. CS: I classify the elections on November 29th in two scenarios: 1 . The Resistance and the conscious people knew that the elections were only to change the face of the coup, but that the situation would stay the same. 2. The Nationalists interested in winning the elections wanted to secure work with the new government. There was a low turnout. Supporters of the National party took advantage of the situation because the Liberal party was split and had called on supporters to boycott the elections. The images speak for themselves. The streets were full of policemen and soldiers, the military in the polling areas, and a permanent anxiety in the population; panic, fear, terror and empty booths. UDW: When did you begin to be threatened personally? CS: The threats started after July 5 when the police and army did not view me as a journalist anymore. This increased when I traveled to Nicaragua to do reports on Zelaya and after the demonstration on August 12 at the National Congress when Deputy Ramon Velasquez Nassar was kicked. There was brutal repression that day and I was physically assaulted. The military forces took pictures and video of me. In every march afterwards the police would see me. Also in the eviction of the peasants from the National Agrarian Institute (INA), the police assaulted me and took pictures. Later, I would constantly receive anonymous threatening phone calls. I changed my number, but I was still being watched and persecuted. I ignored these threats and didn't take them seriously because everyday nothing would happen. Then I received a call from the Intelligence of the Armed Forces who warned me to stop doing my work. I denounced this to Cofadeh and CODEH, two human rights organizations. UDW: Explain the events on that day you were kidnapped. CS: I was kidnapped on Monday December 29th when I was on my way from the south where I went to distribute a documentary about the resistance and met with related colleagues. Arriving in Tegucigalpa, I took a taxi from 'Loarque' on the beltway around the city to my house. Having traveled less than one kilometer, a vehicle approached us, a beige van, and individuals drew their weapons from the window ordering the taxi to pull over. We initially tried to run, but another vehicle crossed us on the highway and we could not advance. They approached the taxi and held the driver at gunpoint, telling him to stay quiet otherwise they would kill him. They pulled me out of the taxi beating me up and took me into their car to a remote place in the mountains. We traveled about an hour while I was beaten inside the car. First they made me sit with my head between my legs, then they put a hood on me. The kidnappers did not cover their faces nor were they wearing military clothes but by their vocabulary and communication by telephone with the 'Jackal,' it was clear they were getting orders. We reached an area away from the city where they put me in a dark room. I was held from December 29 at 9:00am until the December 30th at noon. During these 27 hours I was interrogated every 45 minutes and punched in areas that leave no trace; my feet soles, testicles, stomach, and back, using their fists. I was naked and they kept wetting my body. In a moment of increased tension they tried to suffocate me with water. They threw water on my face until I was no longer able to breathe. I swallowed as much water as possible, but as I felt like I was drowning, another officer yelled that they would kill me another faster way. The interrogations were about weapons; where they were, who were my contacts and how many leaders existed. They also asked where all my photos and videos were stored and what type of profile information we had of military leaders. They continued to threaten that I would not leave there alive and that I'd better trust in God. They offered me drugs to take to ease the pain of dying which I refused to accept. On the morning of December 30, one of the officers told me that my life might be saved but that he wasn't sure. Then I heard the torturers begin to plan my death. One of them suggested a shot in the head but then decided I would not suffer enough that way. Another one said they would let me hang myself from a tree or that they drag me attached to the car along the street. Then one of them said they could open my stomach and slowly pull out my intestines so I could talk as I died. Hours later they took me out of there blindfolded with a hood and took me to "throw me out". They dumped me in Tegucigalpa between the neighborhood 'Cerro Grande' and 'El Chile,' in a sector that is mountainous and very isolated. UDW: You are currently living in exile. How much time do you imagine you will need to live outside your country in order to protect yourself? CS: Yes I am in exile now. Human rights organizations supported me to leave Honduras and my few remaining friends recommended me to do the same in order to save my life since Renan Fajardo who edited my documentary was murdered in his apartment and Walter Trochez who helped distributed the material was also killed. Without a doubt the next one was me. I do not know how long I'll be out of the country. I am anxious to return to be with my family and to continue to produce reports of the experiences of people in the street, but it is difficult at this point. UDW: In what way do you continue working from exile? CS: I have been fortunate to find many people who have been supportive and have invited me to do lectures in universities and in grassroots organizations. I've given four lectures with audiovisual students about media coverage in risky situations. I also do some radio and television to discuss my experiences and do political analysis on the situation in Honduras. I continue to write the chronicles of the coup repression and am working on a book which I think will be called "Repressed Honduras," which tells the whole story that people really lived. UDW: What is the hardest part of being in exile? CS: Maybe it's the hurry of leaving everything abandoned; your home, your family, the stuff you had a hard time sacrificing and working for. In my case, I left my loved ones in tears; my mother, my son. The difficulty in arriving in the new place is getting rid of the hatred and to stop thinking of what you left behind. You have to live here as a 'nobody' so that know one can find you and you can avoid the risks. The dreams abandon you, the uncertainty eats you. UDW: As you analyze the difficulties of the 'free press' in Honduras with the new "unity government" of Pepe Lobo? CS: Free Press?! That will be difficult. This government is only the continuation of the coup d'etat. They are not interested in telling the truth to the the population. Porfirio Lobo and his people are interested in being well and having their companies and their businesses do well. The independent press will remain at war, but the economically suffocating private enterprise will remove them within a short time. Watch Channel 36 and you will realize that the editorial policy has changed. Although it continues to support the resistance, its profile is different; it is more 'pepista'. The program 'Habla como Habla' of Channel 66 has also changed, it is not with the resistance anymore, but with the new government. Only Radio Globo stands firm. Independent journalists and foreigners using their own websites are those that will continue telling the truth. =================== Tamar Sharabi is an environmental engineer and freelance journalist living in Central America. She is working on media empowerment with human rights organizations and on a documentary about the Honduran coup detat. To support her work visit: www.giveforward.com/tamardocuments. =============================== 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 Mon Mar 1 20:21:32 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2010 21:21:32 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] More than half of Pentagon panel members have financial ties to defense contractors Message-ID: <753BD6100A6C47D2995781F0FB53C056@Upstairs> Pentagon panel has contractor contacts Analysis finds financial ties By Ray Locker and Ken Dilanian USA TODAY WASHINGTON - More than half of the panel members appointed to review the Pentagon's latest four-year strategy blueprint have financial ties to defense contractors with a stake in the planning process, a USA TODAY analysis shows. Congress created the 20-member panel in 2006 to analyze the Defense Department's four-year plan, known as the Quadrennial Defense Review. Lawmakers called for the committee to provide an independent "alternate view" of the Pentagon's plan, which shapes future military policy and spending on weapons and other needs. A dozen of the unpaid panelists were appointed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and eight by the top Republican and Democrat members of the House and Senate Armed Services committees. Eleven work for defense contractors as employees, consultants or board directors, records show. "The Pentagon often talks about its cooperation with industry, but this makes you wonder who's wearing the pants in this relationship," said Mandy Smithberger, national security investigator for the Project on Government Oversight. Gates "takes very seriously" the ethical issues confronting panelists with ties to defense firms, said Paul Hughes of the U.S. Institute of Peace, the QDR committee's executive director. Last fall, the secretary ordered that his appointees be covered by federal ethics rules and had to disclose their assets and sources of income, Hughes said. Initially, according to panelist John Lehman, congressional appointees were not to be subject to the executive branch ethics and disclosure rules. This week, after inquiries by USA TODAY, officials from the Pentagon and Congress decided that all panel members will be governed by the same rules, Hughes said. The panelists have agreed to recuse themselves from considering any recommendation that could affect a company with which they are affiliated. Committee members will have to file financial disclosure statements to the Pentagon, but those disclosures won't be publicly available, said Cynthia Smith, a Defense Department spokeswoman. One case that will require a recusal involves panelist Lehman, a former Navy secretary in the Reagan administration who was appointed to the committee by Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the ranking Republican on the Armed Services panel. Lehman runs an investment company specializing in defense holdings. His firm owns Atlantic Marine Holding Co., which repairs Navy ships in Mayport, Fla. The latest version of the review, released last week, recommends moving a nuclear aircraft carrier to Mayport from Norfolk, Va., which could mean more business for Atlantic Marine. Lehman said he would recuse himself from reviewing the Mayport carrier issue and anything else that touched on his business interests. At the same time, he said, he and others with defense ties are capable of offering unbiased advice. Most defense experts have some financial affiliation with the defense industry, Lehman said, pointing out that the Defense Department does business with more than 33,000 companies and also funds university research. "Could you find anybody who knows anything about defense who doesn't have some potential conflict of interest?" he asked. Some experts say the answer is yes. "There are retired military officers or Defense officials who don't have defense industry ties. If you wanted to find these people, you could," said Jordan Tama, an American University professor and expert on government commissions. http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20100301/1apentagon01_st.art.htm -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Tue Mar 2 01:13:52 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2010 02:13:52 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Obama angers union officials with remarks in support of R.I. teacher firings Message-ID: Obama angers union officials with remarks in support of R.I. teacher firings By Michael A. Fletcher and Nick Anderson Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, March 2, 2010 President Obama voiced support Monday for the mass firings of educators at a failing Rhode Island school, drawing an immediate rebuke from teachers union officials whose members have chafed at some of his education policies. Speaking at an event intended to highlight his strategy for turning around struggling schools by offering an increase in federal funding for local districts that shake up their lowest-achieving campuses, Obama called the controversial firings justified. "If a school continues to fail its students year after year after year, if it doesn't show signs of improvement, then there's got to be a sense of accountability," he said. "And that's what happened in Rhode Island last week at a chronically troubled school, when just 7 percent of 11th-graders passed state math tests -- 7 percent." The board that oversees Central Falls High School took the startling step last week of firing 93 teachers and other staff members after the teachers union refused to agree to a plan for them to work a longer school day and provide after-school tutoring without much extra pay. American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, whose union represents the faculty in Central Falls, one of the poorest districts in Rhode Island, responded forcefully to Obama's remarks. "We know it is tempting for people in Washington to score political points by scapegoating teachers, but it does nothing to give our students and teachers the tools they need to succeed," she said in a joint statement with other union officials. In an interview, Weingarten said Obama's comments about the school "don't reflect the reality on the ground and completely ignore the commitment teachers have made to turn things around." Weingarten said the union was "profoundly disappointed by the comments" and said the president "seems to be focused on . . . incomplete information." Obama has often challenged union orthodoxy in his education agenda, promoting the expansion of public charter schools -- which frequently are not unionized -- and teacher performance pay. The two major national educators unions are not formally opposed to those ideas, but many of their members are skeptical. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has said repeatedly that he wants to work with unions rather than impose reforms on them, and the National Education Association, with 3.2 million members, and the AFT, with 1.4 million members, have generally sought to play down policy differences with the administration. Obama's comments came as he spoke at a meeting of America's Promise Alliance, a group founded by former secretary of state Colin L. Powell and his wife, Alma. The group has launched an initiative aimed at curbing the nation's school dropout rate. "This is a problem we cannot afford to accept and we cannot afford to ignore," Obama said during the event, at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce headquarters. The White House said 1.2 million students drop out of school each year. The problem is concentrated in the nation's poorest schools and among minority students. Obama has sought to combat the problem with an infusion of federal aid for school districts that develop innovative plans to help students graduate. With the proposed funding, Obama is placing a bet on four strategies to fix thousands of failing schools. Each of the strategies, at minimum, appears to require replacing the school's principal. The "turnaround" model would also require replacing at least half the school staff. "Restart" schools would be transferred to the control of independent charter networks or other school management organizations. "Transformation" schools would be required to take steps to raise teacher effectiveness and increase learning time, among other measures. The fourth strategy would be closing a school and dispersing its students. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/01/AR2010030103560.html?hpid=sec-educ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Mar 2 09:13:23 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2010 09:13:23 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Pig Business: Who owns your food owns you Message-ID: http://www.grist.org/article/pig-business-or-business-pigs/ Pig Business: Who owns your food owns you 28 Feb 2010 8:00 AM by Kurt Michael Friese Ever feel like you were playing checkers and the other guy was playing chess? That's the impression I get when watching many of the recent spate of food documentaries. Activists announce that this or that is wrong with the food system; on the rare occasion when something appears to be getting done about it, the folks who are doing things badly simply change their tactics, not their strategy. That's how it's gone with the British 2009 documentary film Pig Business. I watched this film in several 10-minute segments via YouTube (Part One) because it hasn't been released in the U.S., primarily due to legal pressure brought upon the director (Tracy Worcester, who spent four years making the film) by the film's main villain, Smithfield Foods. The world's largest pork producer, Smithfield has 52,000 employees processing 27 million pigs per year in 15 countries, accruing annual sales around $12 billion. The UK's Channel 4 ran the film last summer despite four letters from Smithfield threatening litigation, but since no U.S. insurer would back the film's release here, it has become essentially a black-market film. Score another one for corporate censorship. Smithfield does, in one sense, have cause for concern: this film certainly doesn't show their company in the most favorable light. Right off the bat, the viewer is struck with some rather gruesome images of pigs being brutally mistreated, apparently at the hands of workers in Smithfield-run facilities. We hear from farmers and neighbors complaining of health problems that they tie to the fumes and water contamination from Smithfield hoglots. An owner of a small family farm in Poland who this large corporation has pushed out of business says, "I don't know whether I should retire, hang myself, or leave the country." [Watch the trailer on YouTube - length: 3:44] In the early '90s, there were 27,500 independent pig farmers in Poland. Today there are 2,200 hoglots, and 1,600 of them are wholly owned by Smithfield Foods. Each of those factory farms in Poland replaced 10 family farms with two to three minimum-wage jobs. Smithfield accountants and shareholders might laud the boost to the company's bottom line, but one protester in the film asks a different question: Why is it, when people are in bondage to their government it is called "tyranny," but when the oppressor is a multinational corporation, it is called "efficiency?" It was precisely this form of "efficiency" that the art and social critic John Ruskin had in mind when he said "There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse, and sell a little more cheaply. The person who buys on price alone is this man's lawful prey." Smithfield is not the only corporate specimen under Worcester's microscope; she takes large financial institutions to task as well. In an interview with noted Belgian economist Bernard Lietaer, he points out that Big Finance has its fingers in absolutely everything-making one-third of all political contributions in the United States (a figure that is sure to only increase in light of the Supreme Court's recent decision). Big Money's influence, along with that of many other large and wealthy corporations, dictates the type and scope of laws throughout the U.S. and the world. My daddy used to call this the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules. That influence is precisely what makes the competitive practices of Smithfield (not to mention many other agribusiness conglomerates) patently unfair. As Pig Business points out, if the likes of Smithfield had to pay for the damages they cause, to the environment and to human health, then any small farmer in the world could out-compete them. But they don't, because the game is rigged. So most of the time, agribusiness will take its profits and steam obliviously onward. But if anyone points out that the wreckage these companies leave in their wakes, they have scads of lawyers and PR professionals to make certain no one hears. Watching Pig Business on YouTube is one small way to get past their invisible hand. Watch Part One of Pig Business > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cz1_knWUpVk =============================== 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 Mar 2 23:26:16 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2010 23:26:16 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [Review] Michael Lewis' "The Big Short" Message-ID: <416FF9AEF2DC4AA090A1E4FC4D65B30F@agingCHS072729> http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2010/03/01/the_big_short/print.html Bringing subprime sexy back "Liar's Poker," Part II. In Michael Lewis' "The Big Short," the financial crisis finds the chronicler it deserves Andrew Leonard Mar. 02, 2010 | Near the end of "The Big Short," Michael Lewis' much-anticipated stab at explaining what just happened to the global economy, the author unloads a dump truck worth of jargon while describing a dilemma facing one of his protagonists. "How do you explain to an innocent citizen of the free world the importance of a credit default swap on a double-A tranche of a subprime collateralized debt obligation?" writes Lewis. I'm betting Lewis was grinning as he wrote that sentence, because if you wanted to summarize "The Big Short" in just one line, it might be: the most lucid explanation yet offered to readers as to the importance of a credit default swap on a double-A tranche of a subprime collateralized debt obligation. Which might not sound like a whole lot of fun, but turns out to be a blast. As someone who has struggled for years to penetrate the obtuse world of structured finance and the role it played in blowing up Wall Street, I must give credit where credit is due. "The Big Short" is superb: Michael Lewis doing what he does best, illuminating the idiocy, madness and greed of modern finance. Even though I have long been a huge Lewis fan, dating all the way back to "Liar's Poker," his hilarious and enlightening account of life as a bond broker in the go-go '80s, I did not anticipate something this good, something capable of carrying its weight as a bookend to "Liar's Poker's" delights. My heart actually sank when the galleys of "The Big Short" arrived in the mail. A library of books exploring the financial crisis has already been published, with many, many more yet to come. My bedside table groans under the weight of their unfinished tomes. What could Lewis have to say that hadn't already been said a million times over? But then I made the mistake of glancing at the first chapter and literally could not put "The Big Short" down. Lewis achieves what I previously imagined impossible: He makes subprime sexy all over again. The secret to Lewis' success is a mixture of strategy and craft. Most books on the financial crisis find their locus inside the Wall Street firms at the heart of the action. The general theme: Hubristic banksters are oblivious to what they've wrought until it is too late. Chaos ensues. Lewis takes a different tack. "The Big Short" tells the stories of an odd collection of brilliant misfits who recognize that Wall Street is wearing no clothes, become convinced a massive calamity is nigh, and seek feverishly to profit off of their understanding. They are, in Wall Street parlance, the "shorts" -- speculators who bet that the price of a given stock or bond or commodity or any derivative thereof will fall, rather than rise. Most shorts pick on a single company, or have a dour view of the direction of the price of corn or pork bellies. "The Big Short" is a little more ambitious: It's a bet on financial sector collapse. That's the strategy. Today you can find plenty of people who claim to have seen financial disaster looming, but in "The Big Short" Lewis captures protagonists who put their money on the line. That they did so by employing Wall Street's latest financial innovations against itself makes the story all the more fascinating. A typical Lewis "short" first figures out which mortgage lenders are making the absolutely crappiest loans, then determines which mortgage bonds (or collateralized debt obligations created out of slices of crappy mortgage bonds) are constructed from those loans, and then buys insurance, via credit default swaps, against the chance of those bonds or CDOs going bust. In doing so these money managers have to war against their own self-doubt, the trepidation of their investors, the arrogance of Wall Street bankers, and the giddy momentum of financial markets that defy all logic for far longer than makes any rational sense. (There's also a good question as to whether what they are doing should even be legal -- the "shorts" are buying insurance on "properties" that they don't even own!) But the loner-against-the-crowd mentality delivers a dynamic sense of tension that propels "The Big Short" merrily along. We know, as readers, exactly what will happen at the end, and yet still the ride feels nail-biting. But what truly sets Michael Lewis apart from other writers is his craft. Watch him describe Steve Eisman, a man whose desire to make money shorting subprime mortgage-backed concoctions is inseparable from his growing sense of rage that Wall Street is getting away with a rigged game. The focal point of his soft, expressive, not unkind face was his mouth, mainly because it was usually at least half open, even while he ate. It was as if he feared that he might not be able to express whatever thought had just flitted through his mind quickly enough before the next one came, and so kept the channel perpetually clear. His other features all ranged themselves, almost dutifully, around the incipient thought. It was the opposite of a poker face. When you combine an ability to evoke someone's essential character in a few spare sentences with an equal facility at deconstructing the financial engineering that goes into creation of a collateralized debt obligation, you are dealing with an exceptional talent. There are passages in "The Big Short" that get seriously wonky -- where most writers would be content to simply talk in generalities about "slicing and dicing up risk" -- but Lewis makes a game effort to communicate the nitty-gritty of how the structured finance con game actually worked. It can be intimidating, but if you stick with it the end result is devastating. Lewis does not attempt to explicitly resolve some of the bigger questions as to how it was possible for Wall Street to run so far off the tracks. If you're looking to plug "The Big Short" neatly into a political narrative you may find it wanting. By now everyone has chosen their own favorite villain -- some blame the dismantling of regulatory oversight, others point at government efforts to boost lower-class home ownership. Everybody's mad at housing speculators and people who take out loans that they can't afford. The ratings agencies, regulators, mortgage lenders and banks all clearly failed us. It's quite the toxic stew. But sitting at the center of the spider's web are the investment banks -- Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers. These banks were not creating complex derivatives tied to subprime mortgages because of government policy pushing homeownership or because individual homeowners were irresponsibly prone to lying about their income. Far from it; these banks had discovered that billions of dollars could be made transforming lousy mortgage loans into securities supposedly safe enough that they could be sold to pension funds or anyone else. So they had a huge financial incentive to encourage the creation of even more crappy loans. And even then, there wasn't enough raw product! The hunger for garbage that could be turned into gold was beyond anything the craziest real estate markets in California or Arizona or Florida or Nevada could provide. The smart brains at Goldman Sachs found many innovative ways to get around this obstacle, to the point of taking the collateralized debt obligations that already, uh, sliced and diced subprime bonds, and reslicing those into synthetic CDOS that were even further removed from actual humans living in real houses. And even that wasn't enough, so they created a superstructure of credit default insurance swaps to buy and sell, ostensibly to protect against the possibility that their synthetic CDO or subprime mortgage bond might collapse, but really, just to have another way to make another speculative bet, in a world where there actually were physical limits to how many real mortgages could be created. It all adds up to an extraordinary demonstration of how markets can fail disastrously. The tragedy, however, is that we appear, as a society, not to have learned anything lasting from this debacle. The most depressing part of "The Big Short" is realizing that now, more than a year into a new presidential administration, we have done nothing substantive to prevent a similar mess from occurring again in the future. The investment banks are minting money again, while millions of Americans have lost their jobs and their homes. In the introduction to "The Big Short," Lewis observes that when he wrote "Liar's Poker" he thought he "was writing a period piece about the 1980s in America, when a great nation lost its financial mind." He "never imagined ... that the future reader might look back on this ... and say, 'How quaint.' How innocent." But he was wrong. The madness continued. "There was no scandal or reversal, I assumed, sufficiently great to sink the system." And here we are, in 2010, shell-shocked after witnessing and living through the "most purely financial economic disaster in history" and absolutely nothing has changed. -- Andrew Leonard =============================== 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 Mar 2 23:27:43 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2010 23:27:43 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Nice Work If You Can Share It Message-ID: <2489E7D8AB19410E8E7CF7E74D87AD77@agingCHS072729> The Guardian/UK March 2, 2010 Nice Work If You Can Share It If Congress is serious about addressing unemployment, it will act on bills that aim to strengthen work-sharing programmes By Dean Baker The housing bubble and subsequent crash were the result of extreme incompetence on the part of the country's top economic policymakers. Somehow these people could not see, or did not care about, the dangers of an $8tn housing bubble. Unfortunately, economic policymaking is not like most jobs where workers get fired when they make serious mistakes. In economics, they just keep getting promoted. Therefore, the people who sank the economy are for the most part the same group of people still designing policy today. Now this group of incompetent economists is telling the rest of us that we are going to have to endure five more years of high unemployment. However, the rest of the country should not be forced to suffer even more just because those determining economic policy cannot do their jobs. We know how to get the unemployment rate down. Keynes taught us more than 70 years ago that we just have to spend money to eliminate mass unemployment. People work for money, if the government spends, people will work. It's pretty straightforward. But, the deficit hawks seems to have largely closed this route. Members of Congress somehow think that they are helping our children by putting their parents out of work. Fortunately, we can even find a way to create jobs that can keep the deficit hawks happy. It's called "work-sharing". The basic point is so simple that even an economist can understand it. Instead of paying workers to be unemployed - in the form of unemployment benefits - we pay workers to stay employed, but work fewer hours. In effect, to avoid one worker from being laid off, several workers put in somewhat less time on the job and take a small cut in pay. Germany and the Netherlands have used this path to keep their unemployment rates from rising even though they have experienced steeper downturns than the US. The way the system works in Germany, a firm will cut back the hours of its workers by 20%. The government then replaces 60% of the lost pay (12% of total pay). The firm is expected to kick in 20% of the lost pay (4% of total pay) and the worker ends up taking home 4% less pay. In this scenario the worker ends up working 20% fewer hours for 4% less pay. This can mean, for example, that the worker ends up working a four-day week instead of a five-day week. Given the savings on work-related expenses, like transportation and childcare, most workers would almost certainly end up better off under a work-sharing arrangement than they are now. While the economy is past its period of rapid job loss, a huge number of workers still lose their jobs each month through the economy's normal job churning. Each month, companies lay off or fire close to 2 million workers. These job losses are largely offset by hiring by other firms, so that the net change in jobs has been a small negative in recent months. However, if we could just reduce the rate of job loss by 10%, then it would be equivalent to creating an additional 200,000 jobs a month or 2.4 million jobs a year. This would get us back to full employment in two years, rather than five or six, as is currently projected. There are other potential benefits from work sharing. The reduction in work time could give companies an opportunity to adopt more family friendly work practices. For example, they could adopt a policy of paid family leave or paid sick days on a trial basis during the downturn. There would also be environmental benefits to reducing work hours. Suppose everyone worked a four-day week so that we reduced the number of commutes by 20%. This would substantially reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions associated with getting to and from work. The fact that Europeans tend to work far fewer hours than we do is undoubtedly one of the main reasons that their per person carbon emissions are about half of the US level. There are already 17 states that have work-sharing programmes in place. There are bills in both the House and Senate that would strengthen these programmes and give support to other states to set up their own programmes. If Congress is serious about addressing unemployment, it will act on these bills. ?2010 Guardian News and Media Limited Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer ( www.conservativenannystate.org) and the more recently published Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of The Bubble Economy. He also has a blog, "Beat the Press," where he discusses the media's coverage of economic issues. You can find it at the American Prospect's web site. =============================== 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 Mar 3 00:22:33 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2010 01:22:33 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Obama plans to close Embarassing International Labor Comparisons office Message-ID: <3E1B1A11432040B0BC6EDFC97B93E972@Upstairs> Obama administration plans to close International Labor Comparisons office By Alec MacGillis Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, March 3, 2010 Like a scorekeeper for the world, a tiny unit within the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks globalization's winners and losers, and the results are not always pretty for the United States. Manufacturing jobs here, for example, have fallen faster since 1979 than in Canada, Germany or Japan. Compensation for those jobs dropped here in 2008 but jumped in South Korea and Australia. Soon, however, Americans may be spared the demoralization in these numbers: The White House wants to shutter the unit that produces them. President Obama's budget would eliminate the International Labor Comparisons office and transfer its 16 economists to expand the bureau's work tracking inflation and occupational trends. The White House says the cut, estimated to save $2 million, is one of many difficult decisions the president was forced to make to control spending. "This budget had to make some tough choices and prioritize the nation's most pressing needs during a challenging economic and fiscal climate," said Office of Management and Budget spokesman Tom Gavin. But the proposed cut has triggered an outcry from an eclectic group of academics, business leaders and union officials -- a reminder that, in the sprawl of the federal government, some seemingly obscure offices have built a loyal following around their discrete missions. The defenders argue that, given the need to succeed in a global economy, it makes little sense to shut down the office that measures how the country stacks up. There are other sources of foreign data, such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the International Labor Organization, but none does as much as the BLS unit to vet and adjust numbers for apple-to-apple comparisons on productivity, unemployment and wage levels, supporters say. "If you were going to cut this five years after they implemented it 50 years ago, that would be one thing -- who cared then about what's going on in Asia?" said Georgetown University economist Robert Bednarzik, who spent 10 years at the BLS and has started a petition drive to save the unit. "But they've picked the worst possible time to try and get rid of it -- when we're all in this together." The International Labor Comparisons office dates to the 1960s, when President John F. Kennedy demanded to know whether Western European countries, which were reporting remarkably low unemployment rates, were using a different standard of accounting. The office later expanded to include Asia's emerging economies. The biggest challenge was China, where reliable statistics are particularly hard to come by. But in 2004, the office contracted with Judith Banister, a former Census Bureau demographer then living in Beijing, who dug up statistical books in local bookstores that helped produce solid data on the Chinese economy. The unit added Brazil to the mix, and in the near future it plans to release its first reports on India. Banister, a freelance researcher, said U.S. manufacturers need to know what they are up against overseas -- and, in some cases, whether to move work offshore. Skeptics of free-trade policies criticize the closure for other reasons -- the unit's data, they argue, show just how harsh globalization is for the American worker, a reality that may be inconvenient for an administration generally more trade-oriented than the populist rhetoric of Obama's campaign suggested. They question if the unit is being closed solely for the budget savings, noting that $2 million is a relative pittance, less than 1 percent of the BLS budget. "The type of documentation [the unit] is putting out could be detrimental to their efforts" on trade, said John Russo of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University. Gavin, the OMB spokesman, denied that motivation, saying the closure "wasn't a reflection of the quality of the work or a reflection of its usefulness so much as a reflection of priorities." The budget proposal says the unit's statistics are "not widely used." But supporters point out that the unit's Web site got 1.5 million page views in 2009 -- about 4,000 a day. Congress could yet decide to retain the program. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), for one, is concerned about the closure, said his spokeswoman Meghan Dubyak. "He plans on working with the administration and [congressional] leadership to ensure that we still have data to address offshoring and competitiveness issues," she said. Meanwhile, the unit's close-knit group of workers is waiting to learn their fate. Its director, Connie Sorrentino, who has worked in the unit since the 1960s, said her colleagues were "devastated" when they heard the news but have since been heartened by their supporters. "What helps us keep our chins up are the people who don't want to see it go under," she said. "You find out who your friends are when you're on the chopping block. Though that's a heck of a way to do a customer survey." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/02/AR2010030203433.html?hpid=politics -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Wed Mar 3 00:30:31 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2010 01:30:31 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] State Department Interference Seen in Blackwater Inquiry Message-ID: <96E26F4358B74AAAA77820B2E7D13D44@Upstairs> Interference Seen in Blackwater Inquiry By JAMES RISEN Published: March 2, 2010 WASHINGTON - An official at the United States Embassy in Iraq has told federal prosecutors that he believes that State Department officials sought to block any serious investigation of the 2007 shooting episode in which Blackwater Worldwide security guards were accused of murdering 17 Iraqi civilians, according to court testimony made public on Tuesday. David Farrington, a State Department security agent in the American Embassy at the time of the shooting in Baghdad's Nisour Square, told prosecutors that some of his colleagues were handling evidence in a way they hoped would help the Blackwater guards avoid punishment for a crime that drew headlines and raised tensions between American and Iraqi officials. The description of Mr. Farrington's account came in closed-door testimony last October from Kenneth Kohl, the lead prosecutor in the case against the Blackwater guards. "I talked to David Farrington, who was concerned, who expressed concern about the integrity of the work being done by his fellow officers," Mr. Kohl recalled. He said that Mr. Farrington had said he was in meetings where diplomatic security agents said that after they had gone to the scene and picked up casings and other evidence, "They said we've got enough to get these guys off now." Mr. Farrington, who also testified in a closed-door pretrial hearing in the Nisour Square shooting case, declined to comment. His own testimony has not yet been unsealed by the court. Blackwater became a multimillion-dollar contractor as the United States escalated wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, providing protection for State Department officials and covert work for the Central Intelligence Agency. The company, dominated by former American officials, has been described by critics as being too close to the intelligence and diplomatic agencies for which it worked. The New York Times has reported that the Justice Department was investigating allegations that Blackwater had tried to bribe Iraqi government officials in hopes of retaining their security business after the deadly shooting. In December, a federal judge dismissed the criminal charges against five former Blackwater guards in the Nisour Square shooting, and criticized the Justice Department's handling of the case, chiding prosecutors for trying to use statements from defendants who had been offered immunity and testimony from witnesses tainted by news media leaks. The documents made public on Tuesday show that before the December dismissal, prosecutors and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents working on the Nisour Square case took the stand in October to argue that they had plenty of untainted evidence. In a closed-door hearing, they also contended that they had evidence that, in the immediate aftermath of the shootings, there had been a concerted effort to make the case go away, both by Blackwater and by at least some embassy officials. In fact, prosecutors were told that the embassy had never conducted any significant investigation of any of the numerous shooting episodes in Iraq involving Blackwater before the Nisour Square case, according to the documents. In his October testimony, Mr. Kohl described how the Justice Department had "serious concerns" about obstruction of justice in the case. He also said prosecutors briefed Kenneth Wainstein, then an assistant attorney general, on evidence of obstruction by Blackwater management. Mr. Kohl disclosed that prosecutors had discovered that five Blackwater guards who were on the convoy involved in the Nisour Square shootings reported to Blackwater management what they had seen. One guard, he said, described it as "murder in cold blood." Mr. Kohl said that Blackwater management never reported these statements by the guards to the State Department. He said that prosecutors informed senior Justice Department officials as early as 2007 that they were investigating whether Blackwater managers "manipulated" the official statements made by the guards to the State Department. But he testified that prosecutors also had evidence of embassy officials thwarting the inquiry. In addition to the testimony of Mr. Farrington, Mr. Kohl said that United States military officials had told prosecutors that they witnessed State Department investigators "badgering" Iraqi witnesses. He also testified that diplomatic security agents, who conducted the embassy's initial investigation before the F.B.I. and Justice Department began a criminal inquiry, left out important facts from their report relating to a witness's account. Philip J. Crowley, assistant secretary of state for public affairs, defended the department's handling of the Nisour Square case. He said: "Seventeen people died in broad daylight. We took the case seriously from the outset. We invited the F.B.I. to join the investigation, and more than two years later, we continue to pursue the case and seek justice." Officials from Blackwater, now known as Xe Services, did not respond to a request for comment. Mr. Kohl described what he believed was "an undercurrent of obstruction in this case." He said that a Blackwater official had told him that the whole criminal investigation could have been avoided if the State Department had given Blackwater officials more time to prepare the official statements by the guards involved in the shooting. "He said, do you know why this all happened, why we're here?" Mr. Kohl recalled. "Because the State Department didn't give us enough time to work on these statements with these guys. We only had a couple hours, and we needed to get these over to the embassy." The dismissal of the criminal case against the guards for Blackwater in the Nisour Square shooting prompted bitter protests by Iraqis against the United States, and it led the Iraqi government to threaten to bring a lawsuit of its own in the case. The Justice Department has now appealed the dismissal. Blackwater has settled one series of civil lawsuits brought by victims of the Nisour Square shooting, but another lawsuit brought by another group of victims is still pending. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/03/world/middleeast/03blackwater.html?hpw -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Mar 3 12:16:04 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2010 12:16:04 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Excerpt: Norman Finkelstein's new book on Gaza Message-ID: <6CE25357B00447F798063FD98BB2E78F@agingCHS072729> http://www.counterpunch.org/finkelstein03032010.html March 3, 2010 "This Time We Went Too Far" Truth and Consequences in the Gaza Invasion By NORMAN FINKELSTEIN Editors' Note: This article is excerpted from Norman Finkelstein's important new book about the Gaza conflict, "This Time We Went Too Far" published this month by OR Books. To purchase a copy of the complete book please visit OR Books. This book is not available from bookstores or other online retailers. Public outrage at the Gaza invasion did not come out of the blue but rather marked the nadir of a curve plotting a steady decline in support for Israel. As polling data of Americans and Europeans, both Gentiles and Jews, suggest, the public has become increasingly critical of Israeli policy over the past decade. The horrific images of death and destruction broadcast around the world during and after the invasion accelerated this development. "The increased and brutal frequency of war in this volatile region has shifted international opinion," the British Financial Times editorialized one year later, "reminding Israel it is not above the law. Israel can no longer dictate the terms of debate." One poll registering the fallout from the Gaza attack in the United States found that American voters calling themselves supporters of Israel plummeted from 69 per cent before the attack to 49 per cent in June 2009, while voters believing that the U.S. should support Israel dropped from 69 per cent to 44 per cent. Consumed by hate, emboldened by self-righteousness, and confident that it could control or intimidate public opinion, Israel carried on in Gaza as if it could get away with mass murder in broad daylight. But while official Western support for Israel held firm, the carnage set off an unprecedented wave of popular outrage throughout the world. Whether it was because the assault came on the heels of the devastation Israel wrought in Lebanon, or because of Israel's relentless persecution of the people of Gaza, or because of the sheer cowardice of the assault, the Gaza invasion appeared to mark a turning point in public opinion reminiscent of the international reaction to the 1960 Sharpeville massacre in apartheid South Africa. In the Jewish diaspora official communal organizations with longstanding ties to Israel predictably lent blind support. But, at the same time, newly minted progressive Jewish organizations distanced themselves to a lesser or greater degree. Whereas in the past mainstream Jews actively supported Israeli wars, most registered ambivalence during the invasion, apart from a contracting older minority that came out swinging in Israel's defense, and an expanding younger minority that scathingly denounced it. Between the increasing estrangement of younger Jews from Israeli bellicosity and the increasing qualms of Jews generally about supporting it, the Gaza massacre signaled the break-up of hitherto blanket Jewish support for Israeli wars. In addition, whereas the antiwar demonstrations in most Western countries were ethnically heterogeneous (including significant numbers of Jews), the "pro"-Israeli demonstrations were composed almost exclusively of Jews. The fact that active opposition to Israeli policy, say, on college campuses, has spread beyond the Arab-Muslim core towards the mainstream, whereas active support for Israel has shrunk to a fraction of the ethnic Jewish core, is a telling indicator of where things are headed. The era of the "beautiful" Israel has passed, it seems irrevocably, and the disfigured Israel that in recent years has replaced it in the public consciousness is a growing embarrassment. It is not so much that Israel's behavior is worse than it was before, but rather that the record of that behavior has, finally, caught up with it. The truth can no longer be denied or dismissed. The documentation of the Arab-Israeli conflict set out by respected historians fundamentally conflicts with the version popularized in the likes of Leon Uris's Exodus. The evidence of Israeli human rights violations compiled by respected mainstream organizations cannot be reconciled with its vaunted commitment to "purity of arms." The deliberations of respected judicial and political bodies cast severe doubt on Israel's avowed commitment to a peaceful resolution of the conflict. For a long while Israel's "supporters" deflected the impact of this accumulating documentary record by wielding the twin swords of The Holocaust and the "new anti-Semitism." It was proposed that Jews could not be held to conventional moral/legal standards after the unique suffering they endured during World War II, and that criticism of Israeli policy was motivated by an ever-resurgent hatred of Jews. However, apart from the inevitable dulling that comes of overuse, these weapons proved much less efficacious once criticism of Israel broke into the mainstream of public opinion. Unable to deflect criticism of Israel, apologists now conjure bizarre theories to account for its ostracism. Reaganomics guru George Gilder posits that a free-market system singularly unleashes human potential, and that under such a system Jews are and must be "represented disproportionately in the highest ranks" because they are the most gifted. Inversely, if Jews do not rule the roost, it must be because a less-than-ideal economic system holds sway. Anti-Semitism springs from resentment of "Jewish superiority and excellence" and "the manifest supremacy of Jews over all other ethnic groups," while the hatred of Israel springs from the fact that it has evolved (under the inspired tutelage of Benjamin Netanyahu) into the perfect free-market system that "concentrates the genius of the Jews," making it "one of the world's leading capitalist powers" and the envy of the world: "Israel is hated above all for its virtues." If Jews figure prominently among critics of Israel, it is because they "excel so readily in all intellectual fields that they outperform all rivals in the arena of anti-Semitism." The West in turn must preserve and protect Israelis from the "world of zero-sum chimeras and fantasies of jihadist revenge and death" and the "barbarian masses" because Jewish endowments have enabled humanity to "thrive and prosper": Jews are "crucial to the human race." Indeed, "if Israel is destroyed, capitalist Europe will likely die as well, and America, as the epitome of productive and creative capitalism spurred by Jews, will be in jeopardy"; "Israel is at the forefront of the next generation of technology and on the front lines of a new racial war against capitalism and Jewish individuality and genius"; "Just as free economies are necessary for the survival of the human population of the planet, the survival of the Jews is vital to the triumph of free economies. If Israel is quelled or destroyed, we will be succumbing to forces targeting capitalism and freedom everywhere." Across the Atlantic, Robin Shepherd, director of international affairs at the London-based Henry Jackson Society, asserts that Israel has come under strong criticism in the West not because of its human rights record but because it is a democratic, capitalist state fighting on the front lines alongside the U.S. against the "civilizational" threat posed by radical Islam: "Israel had become an enemy not because of anything it had done" but "because it was on the wrong side of the barricades." The "primary energizing platform in the West" for this "tidal wave of hysteria, deception and distortion against the Jewish state" consists of totalitarian Marxists and left-liberal fellow travelers who, disappointed by the Western proletariat and Third World liberation struggles, have made common cause with "militant Islam" to destroy the liberal-capitalist world order. Although these critics of Israel are not anti-Semitic in the traditional "subjective" sense of despising Jews per se, they are guilty of "objective" anti-Semitism because Israel is so central to Jewish identity in the contemporary world. But opposition to Israel supposedly also emanates from ancien r?gime bluebloods who want to restore the old-world hierarchies before arriviste Jews disrupted them. This far-flung "neo-anti-Semitic" conspiracy embraces "most" of those who accuse Israel of committing war crimes and otherwise violating international law. Thus, it is to be understood that behind the condemnation of Israel by Amnesty International and the International Court of Justice, Nobel peace laureates Jimmy Carter and Mairead Corrigan Maguire, the Financial Times and the BBC, lurks the evil hand of the radical leftist-fanatic Islamic-landed aristocratic nexus. For those who want to learn more, Shepherd "highly" recommends Alan M. Dershowitz's The Case for Israel. Although such explanations for Israel's isolation lack credibility, it cannot be doubted that Israel's stock has fallen precipitously. Whereas Israel won many adherents in the West after its lightning victory in June 1967, in recent years it has been reduced almost to the status of a pariah state, especially in Europe. A 2003 poll of the European Union named Israel the biggest threat to world peace. A 2008 survey of global opinion named Israel the biggest obstacle to achieving peace in the Israel-Palestine conflict. In a BBC World Service poll taken on the eve of the Gaza invasion, fully 19 of the 21 countries surveyed held a predominantly negative view of Israel. Meanwhile, under the title "Second Thoughts about the Promised Land," the Economist reported in 2007 that although "most diaspora Jews still support Israel strongly. . . their ambivalence has grown." Dissenting Jewish voices have begun to coalesce in Great Britain, Germany, and elsewhere, challenging the hegemony of official Jewish organizations that parrot Israeli propaganda. In the United States the overall picture and trends are perhaps not as pronounced but are no less noteworthy. Judging by poll data it can broadly be said that Americans have consistently viewed Israel favorably and have sympathized much more with Israel than with the Palestinians. But Americans also overwhelmingly support an evenhanded U.S. approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict, and most recently have expressed "equal levels of sympathy" for both sides, while a substantial minority believe that U.S. policy tilts (or tilts too much) in favor of Israel; a robust majority of Americans "think Israel is not doing its part well in making efforts to resolve the conflict"; and Americans have occasionally supported the use of sanctions to rein in Israel. Significantly, a majority of Americans have also supported a two-state settlement on the June 1967 borders, meaning full Israeli withdrawal from the territories it occupied in the June war. "Yes, the polls show strong support for Israel," M. J. Rosenberg, director of policy analysis for the Israel Policy Forum observed in 2007 apropos of recent trends; however, "that support for Israel, such as there is, is broad but it is not very deep." This phenomenon can be seen almost every day in "Letters to the Editors" columns. Every time an op-ed about Israel appears, especially if it is critical, there are a slew of letters to the editor. Most support the Israeli position. And almost without exception, they are written by Jews. That vast majority [of non-Jewish Americans] out there which supposedly is so supportive of Israel virtually never chimes in. According to a 2007 poll by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) the favorable opinion of Americans towards Israel is markedly less than their favorable opinion toward Great Britain and Japan, while roughly equal to their favorable opinion of India and Mexico. Nearly half of the respondents believe that the U.S. should work with "moderate" Arab states "even at the expense of Israel." Half or more of Americans polled held Israel and Hezbollah equally to blame for the summer 2006 Lebanon War and supported a (more) neutral U.S. stance. In addition, in recent years, influential religious constituencies such as the Presbyterian Church USA, the World Council of Churches, the United Church of Christ, and the United Methodist Church have all supported initiatives, including corporate divestment, to force an end to Israel's occupation. A 2005 survey by Jewish pollster Steven M. Cohen found that "the attachment of American Jews to Israel has weakened measurably in the last two years . . . , continuing a long-term trend." Respondents were less likely than in comparable earlier surveys to say they care about Israel, talk about Israel with others or engage in a range of pro-Israel activities. Strikingly, there was no parallel decline in other measures of Jewish identification, including religious observance and communal affiliation. The survey found 26 per cent who said they were "very" emotionally attached to Israel, compared with 31 per cent who said so in a similar survey conducted in 2002. Some two-thirds, 65 per cent, said they follow the news about Israel closely, down from 74 per cent in 2002, while 39 per cent said they talk about Israel frequently with Jewish friends, down from 53 per cent in 2002. Israel also declined as a component in the respondents' personal Jewish identity. When offered a selection of factors, including religion, community and social justice, as well as "caring about Israel," and asked, "For you personally, how much does being Jewish involve each?," 48 per cent said Israel matters "a lot," compared with 58 per cent in 2002. Just 57 per cent affirmed that "caring about Israel is a very important part of my being Jewish," compared with 73 per cent in a similar survey in 1989. A 2007 American Jewish Committee poll found that 30 per cent of Jews felt "fairly distant" or "very distant" from Israel. "In the long run," Cohen predicts "a polarization in American Jewry: a small group growing more pious and attached to Israel, while a larger one drifts away." A 2006 poll found that, among American Jews under 40, fully one-third felt "fairly distant" or "very distant" from Israel, while a 2007 poll found that among Jews under 35 fully 40 per cent registered a "low attachment" to Israel (only 20 per cent registered a "high attachment"). Astonishingly, less than half responded affirmatively that "Israel's destruction would be a personal tragedy." The former chairman of the Jewish Agency recently sounded the alarm that "less than 24 per cent of young Jews in North America belong to Jewish organizations. Less than 50 per cent of North American Jews under the age of 35 feel a strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people. Less than 25 per cent of North American Jews under age 35 define themselves as Zionists." On the nation's campuses support for Israel is confined not only to Jewish students but also mostly to the Zionist faithful gathered in the Hillels. "Jewish college students are clearly less attached to Israel than in previous generations," a study commissioned by Jewish advocacy organizations reports. "Israel is losing the battle for the hearts and minds of this cohort." Indeed, of the nearly half million Jewish students attending institutions of higher education, "only about five per cent have any connection to the Jewish community." Ambivalence towards Israel verging on disaffection can also be discerned among influential sectors of American society, ever the bellwethers of U.S. intellectual life, and the reading public. A recent poll found that a majority of opinion leaders in the U.S. view support for Israel as a "major reason for discontent with the U.S." around the world.31 In a 2003 New York Review of Books essay, the Jewish historian Tony Judt asserted that "Israel today is bad for the Jews" and he doubted both the viability and desirability of a Jewish state. John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of the Harvard Kennedy School coauthored an influential paper in 2006 debunking the idealized image of Israel's history and asserting that Israel has become a "strategic liability" for the United States. A book by former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, provocatively titled Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, deplored Israeli policy in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and put the blame for the impasse in the peace process squarely on Israel. Although the Israel lobby launched vitriolic counterattacks to these interventions, its usual smears alleging anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial did not stick. When in 2006 the lobby's pressures led to cancellation of one of Tony Judt's speaking engagements, he became an instant cause c?l?bre in American intellectual circles. His critics, such as Abraham H. Foxman of the ADL, were derided for "slinging the dread charge of anti-Semitism" and for being an "anachronism." Carter, meanwhile, was said to be a plagiarist, in the pay of Arab sheikhs, an anti-Semite, an apologist for terrorism, a Nazi sympathizer, and a borderline Holocaust denier. Yet Carter's book landed on the New York Times bestseller list and remained there for months, selling an estimated 300,000 copies in hardback. Although snubbed by Brandeis University's president, Carter still received standing ovations from the student body when he came to speak at the historically Jewish institution. (Half the audience walked out when Harvard law professor Alan M. Dershowitz rose to answer Carter.Mearsheimer and Walt negotiated a book deal with the publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and their book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, also went on to become a Times bestseller. It is further testament to Israel's waning fortunes that, during Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's term of office, even Foxman and perennial Israel supporter Elie Wiesel took to publicly rebuking Israel for its failure to pursue peace.The simmering public discontent with Israeli policy in recent years reached a boiling point of indignation during the Gaza invasion. Despite Israel's carefully orchestrated propaganda blitz; despite the overwhelmingly "pro"-Israel bias of mainstream media coverage, especially during the first few days of the attack; and despite official support in the West for the assault-despite all this, large popular protests throughout Western Europe (Spain, Italy, Germany, France, and Great Britain) dwarfed in size demonstrations supporting Israel. A wave of student occupations swept across Great Britain including Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester, Birmingham, London School of Economics, School of Oriental and Asian Studies, Warwick, King's, Sussex, and Cardiff. Even in traditional bastions of support for Israel such as Canada, where the "pro"-Israel bias of the extreme right-wing political establishment and media is unusually intense, a plurality of public opinion disapproved of the assault and the Canadian Union of Public Employees passed a motion calling for an academic boycott of Israel. Declaring after the ceasefire that "the events in Gaza have shocked us to the core," a 16-strong group of the world's most experienced investigators and judges-including Antonio Cassese (First President and Judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and Head of the U.N. Inquiry on Darfur) and Richard Goldstone (Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda and Chairman of the U.N. Inquiry on Kosovo)-called for an "international investigation of gross violations of the laws of war, committed by all parties to the Gaza conflict." Unsurprisingly, Israel's apologists attributed the widespread outrage at the Gaza invasion to anti-Semitism. It might be posited as a general rule that the lower the depths to which Israel's criminal conduct sinks the higher the decibel level of the shrieks of anti-Semitism. Jews are confronting "an epidemic, a pandemic of anti-Semitism," Abraham H. Foxman declared. "This is the worst, the most intense, the most global it's been in most of our recent memories." Such fear-mongering was nothing new from Foxman, who had portended back in 2003 that anti-Semitism was posing "as great a threat to the safety and security of the Jewish people as the one we faced in the 1930s." Just as in the past, poll data used to substantiate these exaggerations tallied "indicators" of "the most pernicious notions of anti-Semitism," such as the finding that "large portions of the European public continue to believe that Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust." According to Parisian media "philosopher" Bernard-Henri L?vy, anyone doubting that the Nazi holocaust was a "moral watershed in human history" should be reckoned an anti-Semite. Few of the alleged anti-Semitic incidents in Europe went beyond merely unpleasant manifestations, such as emails and graffiti, while European anti-Semitism, notwithstanding the hype, paled beside anti-Muslim bias. (A rise in animus towards Jews and Muslims-in recent years the two curves tend to correlate-appears partly due to a resurgence of ethnocentrism among older, less educated, and politically conservative Europeans.) Nonetheless it is most probably true that the execution by a self-proclaimed Jewish state of consecutive murderous rampages in Lebanon and Gaza, and the vocal support lent these rampages by official Jewish organizations around the world, caused a regrettable-if entirely predictable- "spillover" whereby Jews generally were in some quarters held culpable. If, as the Israeli Coordination Forum for Countering Anti-Semitism asserted, there was "a sharp rise in the number and intensity of anti-Semitic incidents" during the Gaza massacre; and if "with the ceasefire there has . . . been a marked decline in the number and intensity of anti-Semitic incidents"; and if "another flare-up in the region, similar to the Gaza operation, will probably lead to an even more severe outbreak of anti-Semitic activity against communities worldwide," then an efficacious method to fight anti-Semitism would appear to be for Israel to stop committing massacres. It is also true that the growing gap between official support of Israeli war mongering and popular revulsion against it might feed anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. In Germany for example the political establishment and mainstream media do not brook any criticism of Israel because of the "special relationship" growing out of Germany's "historic responsibility." Chancellor Angela Merkel surpassed other European leaders in her embrace of Israel during the Gaza invasion. Yet recent polls have shown that 60 per cent of Germans reject the notion of a special German obligation to Israel (70 per cent of young people reject it), 50 per cent believe that Israel is an aggressive country, and 60 per cent believe that it pursues its interests ruthlessly. More generally, Gideon Levy recalled "the surreal scene at the height of the brutal assault on Gaza when the heads of the European Union came to Israel and dined with the prime minister in a show of unilateral support for the side wreaking the killing and destruction." And although it was Israel that broke the ceasefire and launched the invasion European leaders parleyed with the U.S. (and Canada) on how to thwart rearmament not of the perpetrators but of the victims. It is only a matter of time before Europeans begin to wonder-if they haven't already-at whose behest their foreign policy is being made. The ascription of popular Gentile outrage over the Gaza massacre to anti-Semitism appeared all the more preposterous in the face of widespread and vocal Jewish dissent. Whereas established communal Jewish organizations issued statements supporting Israel, ad hoc Jewish organizations and petitions deploring the invasion proliferated. Most significantly, Jews prominent in communal Jewish life criticized Israel, albeit generally in muted language. As Israel stood poised to launch the ground offensive after a week of aerial attacks, a group of Britain's most distinguished Jews, describing themselves as "profound and passionate supporters" of Israel, expressed "horror" at the "increasing loss of life on both sides" and called on Israel to cease its military operations in Gaza immediately. On a more acerbic note, British MP and former shadow foreign minister Gerald Kaufman declared during a House of Commons debate on Gaza, "My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town of Staszow. A German soldier shot her dead in her bed. My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza." He went on to indict the Israeli government for having "ruthlessly and cynically exploit[ed] the continuing guilt among Gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians." Meanwhile in France the popular Jewish writer Jean-Mo?se Braitberg called on the Israeli president to remove his grandfather's name from the memorial at Yad Vashem dedicated to victims of the Nazi holocaust "so that it can no longer be used to justify the horror which is visited on the Palestinians." In Germany Evelyn Hecht-Galinski, daughter of a former president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, wrote, "Not the elected Hamas government, but the brutal occupier . . . belongs in the dock at the Hague," while the German section of European Jews for a Just Peace issued a statement headlined "German Jews Say NO to Israeli Army Killings." In Canada eight Jewish women occupying the Israeli consulate called on "all Jews to speak out against this massacre," and celebrated Canadian pianist Anton Kuerti declared, "The unbelievable war crimes that Israel is committing in Gaza . . .make me ashamed to be a Jew."In Australia two award-winning novelists and a former federal cabinet minister signed a statement by Jews condemning Israel's "grossly disproportionate assault. The Bush administration and the U.S. Congress lent unqualified support to Israel during the invasion. A resolution laying full culpability on Hamas for the resulting death and destruction passed unanimously in the Senate and 390 to 5 in the House. Much of the mainstream media in the U.S. likewise shamelessly toed the Israeli party line. "By New Year's Day, Israel's cheering squad had turned the opinion pages of major American newspapers into their own personal romper room," the journalist Max Blumenthal observed. "Of all the editorial contributions published by the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times since the Israeli war on Gaza began, . . . only one offered a skeptical view of the assault." The New York Times's conception of op-ed balance was achieved by juxtaposing Jeffrey Goldberg's reverie on the unregenerate evil of Hamas with Thomas Friedman's counsel to Israel that it inflict "heavy pain on the Gaza population." Its hometown rival the New York Daily News ran an op-ed by Rabbi Marvin Hier that urged world leaders "not . . . to rebuild Gaza again" even though "many civilians will suffer" because "terrorists and those who support them are not entitled to receive VIP booty for their inhumanity, misdeeds and silence." Hier is the founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and its Museum of Tolerance. In the midst of this lynch-mob atmosphere even human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch reserved their strongest condemnations for Hamas. These venomous elite outpourings notwithstanding, public opinion polls showed that, although harshly critical of Hamas, only about 40 per cent of Americans approved of the Israeli attack, while among those voting Democratic (the party affiliation of most Jews) approval dropped to 30 per cent . In a dramatic display of independence reminiscent of Jimmy Carter's authorship of Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, liberal icon Bill Moyers rebuked Israel on his popular public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, albeit in a context that also took Hamas to task: "By killing indiscriminately the elderly, kids, entire families, by destroying schools and hospitals, Israel did exactly what terrorists do." Like Carter, Moyers immediately came under fire from Abraham H. Foxman, who accused him of "racism, historical revisionism and indifference to terrorism," and Harvard law professor Alan M. Dershowitz who decried Moyers's "false moral equivalence" between Hamas terrorism and the Israeli army that "inadvertently kill[s] some Palestinian civilians who are used as human shields by Hamas." But again like Carter, Moyers managed to stand his ground and, as fellow liberals rose to his defense, to emerge unscathed after the fusillade of slanders. As the Gaza invasion unfolded, and the shocking images of the carnage transmitted live by Al-Jazeera could no longer be ignored, cracks started appearing in the moderate mainstream. Under the ominous title "Time Running Out for a Two- State Solution?" the most-watched U.S. news broadcast 60 Minutes aired a devastating segment on Jewish settlers in the West Bank, which included a harrowing scene of "Arabs [who] are occupied inside their own homes" by Israeli soldiers. The right-wing editorial page of the Wall Street Journal ran a piece by law professor George E. Bisharat under the headline "Israel Is Committing War Crimes." The normally staid New York Times columnist Roger Cohen confessed in a pair of columns to being "shamed by Israeli actions." In the second piece Cohen speculated that "Israel's continued expansion of settlements, Gaza blockade, West Bank walling-in and wanton recourse to high-tech force" was "designed precisely to bludgeon, undermine and humiliate the Palestinian people until their dreams of statehood and dignity evaporate." Former editor of the New Republic and conservative writer Andrew Sullivan judged that the Israeli attack was "far from a close call morally. . . . This is an extremely one-sided war," and he labeled "thugs" the rightwing Jewish apologists for "the terrible human carnage now being inflicted by Israel (and paid for in part by Americans)." Philip Slater, author of the sociological study The Pursuit of Loneliness, declared, "The Gaza Strip is little more than a large Israeli concentration camp, in which Palestinians are attacked at will, starved of food, fuel, energy-even deprived of hospital supplies. . . . It would be difficult to have any respect for them if they didn't fire a few rockets back." Meanwhile the City Council of Cambridge, Massachusetts, a liberal enclave and home to Harvard University, adopted a resolution "condemning the attacks [on] and invasion of Gaza by the Israeli military and the rocket attacks upon the people of Israel," and a group of American university professors launched a national campaign calling for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel. A poll of American Jews found that 47 per cent strongly approved of the Israeli assault, but-in a sharp break with the usual wall-to-wall solidarity-53 per cent were either ambivalent (44 per cent "somewhat" approved or "somewhat" disapproved) or strongly disapproved (9 per cent ). Experienced observers of the American Jewish community pointed to a "post-Gaza sea change." Apart from "the more conservative segment of the pro-Israel community," M. J. Rosenberg of the Israel Policy Forum noted, "there was little show of support for this war. In New York, a city where crowds of 250,000 have come out for 'solidarity' rallies in the past, only 8,000 came to Manhattan for a community demonstration on a sunny Sunday." In a public clash with the traditional Jewish leadership, mainstream if less-established Jewish organizations such as J Street staked out a middle ground that "recognize[d] that neither Israelis nor Palestinians have a monopoly on right or wrong," and called for "shedding a narrow us-versus-them approach to the Middle East." Founded in 2008, J Street projects itself as a liberal counterweight to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). It is too soon to predict whether J Street-which currently hews to a vaguely progressive political agenda, although it also defines itself as "closest" to Kadima, the Israeli political party headed by Tzipi Livni- will calcify into a "loyal opposition" or escalate its criticism of Israeli policy as the gulf dividing American Jewry from Israel widens. Meanwhile "American Jews for a Just Peace" circulated a petition calling on "Israeli Soldiers to Stop War Crimes," "Jews Say No" demonstrated outside the World Zionist Organization and Jewish Agency offices, and "Jews against the Occupation" dropped a banner over New York City's West Side Highway declaring "Jews Say: End Israel's War on Gaza NOW!" In the liberal Jewish intellectual milieu only perennial apologists for Israel, most of whom came on board right after the June 1967 war and are now in their 70s, ventured a full-throated defense of the invasion. It was obvious to moral philosopher Michael Walzer that Israel had exhausted nonviolent options before it attacked and that Hamas bore responsibility for the ensuing civilian deaths. To Walzer the only "hard question" was whether Israel did all it possibly could to reduce these casualties. It was obvious to Alan M. Dershowitz that Israel made "its best efforts to avoid killing civilians" and that it failed because Hamas pursued a "dead baby" strategy of forcing Israel to kill Palestinian children in order to garner international sympathy. It was obvious to New Republic editor Martin Peretz from his scrutiny of the Palestinians' footwear that the Israeli blockade of Gaza was benign: "You have to look closely at the sneakers, seemingly new and, of course, costly." It was obvious to writer Paul Berman that if a "possibility" exists that Hamas might threaten Israel someday in the future with genocide "if Hamas were allowed to prosper unimpeded, and if its allies and fellow-thinkers in Hezbollah and the Iranian government and its nuclear program likewise prospered," then Israel would have the right to launch an attack now. On such an accumulation of hypotheticals stacked on conditionals, it is hard to conceive what country in the world would be safe from arbitrary attack, and what country would not be justified in arbitrarily launching an attack. If, apart from this coterie of Israel defenders, Jewish liberals recognized that the Israeli onslaught was morally problematic, they could not yet abide their dirty laundry being aired in front of the goyim. Magazines and journals of opinion pitched to the upscale and urbane Jewish public such as the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books accordingly sat out the Gaza massacre. However, one influential contingent of liberal Jewish public intellectuals did not stay silent: the new generation of liberal Jewish bloggers and regular contributors to liberal-Democratic web sites such as Salon.com and the Huffington Post. Less in thrall to establishment Jewish editors, advertisers, funders, and social networks, speaking as and for a generation that came of age when to a large degree Zionist mythology had been dispelled and displaced by sober historical research. The Israeli political establishment had grown squalid and reactionary. Israel's human rights record had been subjected to piercing scrutiny by the human rights community. Holocaust-induced paranoia and anti-Semitism-mongering palpably collided with the quotidian reality of triumphant Jewish assimilation everywhere from the Ivy League to Wall Street, from Hollywood to Washington, and from the country club to the marriage altar. Professionally, mentally, and emotionally emancipated from the shackles of the past, these Jewish habitu?s of the Internet went on the offensive denouncing the Gaza invasion from its inception. The symbolism could scarcely be missed. Whereas diehard apologists for Israel such as Walzer, Dershowitz, and Peretz clambered aboard the Zionist ship while in their youth, the generation of youthful Jewish public intellectuals now making their names on the Internet has been jumping off it."I pity them their hatred of their inheritance," Peretz hissed. "They are pip-squeaks." Here are the pip-squeaks in their own words. Ezra Klein (age 25; blogger for American Prospect) posted on Day 2 of the invasion, "The rocket attacks were undoubtedly 'deeply disturbing' to Israelis. But so too are the checkpoints, the road closures, the restricted movement, the terrible joblessness, the unflinching oppression, the daily humiliations, the illegal settlement- I'm sorry, 'outpost'-construction 'deeply disturbing' to the Palestinians, and far more injurious. And the 300 dead Palestinians should be disturbing to us all." Adam Horowitz (age 35; blogger for Mondoweiss) posted on Day 4 in response to Benny Morris's op-ed in the New York Times, "It is clear he can only see the reactions, but not the cause. He lists the responses to Israel and to Israel's ongoing Jewish colonization of historic Palestine, without mentioning the elephant in the room, that the walls closing in on Israel are all self-made." Matthew Yglesias (age 28; blogger for Think Progress) posted on Day 6, "While Israel has stated a desire to leave the Gaza Palestinians alone in their tiny, overcrowded, economically unviable enclave, the [2005] 'disengagement' from Gaza has never entailed letting Palestinians control their borders or exercise meaningful sovereignty over the area. The proposal has basically been that if Palestinians cease violence against Israel, then the Gaza Strip will be treated like an Indian reservation." Dana Goldstein (age 24; blogger for American Prospect) posted on Day 12, "I want to believe that the collective, historical experience of Jewishness and Zionism leads to something better-something more humane-than what we've witnessed in the Middle East this past week." Glenn Greenwald (age 42; blogger for Salon.com) posted on Day 13, "This is not so much of a war as it is a completely one-sided massacre," and on 30 January 2009, "It's just not possible to make real progress in the domestic aims of restoring the Constitution and reversing our military and intelligence expansions if we are simultaneously enabling and blindly supporting Israel's various wars (and therefore dragging ourselves into those wars)." On 20 February 2009 Greenwald responded to an insinuation by Jeffrey Goldberg that he was a Jew-hating Israelbasher, "People like Jeffrey Goldberg . . . have so abused, overused, manipulated and exploited the 'anti-Semitism' and 'anti-Israel' accusations for improper and nakedly political ends that those terms have become drained of their meaning, have almost entirely lost their sting, and have become trivialized virtually to the point of caricature. . . . Indeed, people like Goldberg are becoming extra rancid and reckless in their rhetoric precisely because they know that these rhetorical devices have ceased working." "There is a definite sea change when it comes to American policy debates toward Israel," Greenwald concluded. "They no longer possess the ability to stifle dissent through thuggish intimidation tactics and they know that, which is why they can now do nothing but turn up the volume on their name-calling attacks. The Israeli devastation of Gaza and its trapped, defenseless civilian population-using American bombs, arms, money and diplomatic cover-was so brutal and horrific to watch that it inevitably changed the way people view that Middle East conflict." Soon after the Gaza invasion ended, the phalanx of liberal Jewish bloggers again went tit-for-tat with the Israel lobby when the lobby sought to block the Obama administration's appointment of Chas Freeman, an official critical of Israeli policy. Another very hefty straw in the wind was a sketch titled "Strip Maul" that aired on the Comedy Channel's Daily Show on 5 January 2009. The host of the program, comedian Jon Stewart, is Jewish and has a huge following among young people. To roars of approval from the studio audience, he ridiculed the numbingly unanimous and clich?-ridden support for Israel among politicians ("It's the M?bius strip of issues-there's only one side!"); adverted to "the soul-crushing segmentation and blockading of Gaza"; and likened a Palestinian's plight to forcing someone "to live in my hallway and make him go through checkpoints every time he has to take a s**t." The generational metamorphosis regarding Israel was most evident on college campuses. "A shift toward more visible pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel sentiment has been profound on some campuses," Inside Higher Ed reported, "prompted, in part, by the winter war in Gaza." Large halls filled to overflow for lectures deploring the Gaza massacre. Whereas "pro"- Israel groups used to protest inside or outside such lectures, they were now barely seen. Students at Cornell University lined pathways with 1,300 black flags commemorating the dead in Gaza. (The display was later vandalized.) Students at University of Rochester, University of Massachusetts, New York University, Columbia University, Haverford College, Bryn Mawr College, and Hampshire College held petition drives, protests, and sit-ins demanding financial support for Palestinian students and divestment from arms companies and companies doing business with the illegal Jewish settlements. Hampshire College students successfully pressured the college's trustees to divest from American corporations that directly profit from the occupation. Although "pro"-Israel organizations alleged that "college and university campuses . . . have become hotbeds of a virulent new strain of anti-Semitism," at many campuses Jewish students have played a leading role on the local "Students for Justice in Palestine" committees, and creative and dedicated young Jewish activists in Birthright Unplugged and Anarchists Against the Wall, alongside individuals such as Anna Baltzer, author of the memoir Witness in Palestine, have gone from school to school offering personal testimony on the daily horrors unfolding in Palestine. The bonds of solidarity being forged between young Jews and Muslims opposing the occupation-the core group on many campuses consists of secular Jewish radicals and observant Muslim women-give reason for hope that a just and lasting peace may yet be achieved. After speaking on the Gaza massacre at a Canadian university, the sponsors presented me with a button reading "I ? GAZA." I pinned the button to my backpack and headed for the airport. As I stood on the queue to board the plane, a passenger behind me whispered in my ear "I like your button." Hmm, I thought, the times they are a-changing. A couple of hours later I asked the airline attendant for a cup of water. Handing me the cup he leaned over and whispered "I like your button." Hmm, I thought, there's something happening here. Norman Finkelstein is author of five books, including Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, Beyond Chutzpah and The Holocaust Industry, which have been translated into more than 40 foreign editions. This article is a chapter from his new book "This Time We Went Too Far - Truth and Consequences of the Gaza Invasion." =============================== 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 Mar 3 18:26:16 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2010 18:26:16 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Kucinich Resolution to End Afghan War Message-ID: AfterDowningStreet.org We're on Facebook and Youtube and Twitter Kucinich Resolution to End Afghan War Tomorrow, Thursday, March 4, Congressman Dennis Kucinich plans to introduce a privileged resolution to end the Afghan War. The resolution requires that the House debate, within the next week, the continuing war in Afghanistan, now the second longest war in American history. HOW THIS WILL WORK: While we may not win a majority vote in the House on this first go-round, and would still have to get past the Senate and the President (a good time if ever there was one to throw Scylla and Charybdis into a blog), we will completely change the conversation and put many congress members on record claiming to oppose the war. While the president can send congressional Democrats out to fall on their swords for unpopular wars and healthcare mandates, they may be less willing to do so if the end of their careers is held up to their noses. To keep their careers alive, congress members in progressive districts will have to claim to oppose the war in/on Afghanistan. Once they've done that, however, it will be much harder for them to turn around next month and vote for another $33 billion to escalate the same war they just pretended to oppose. It's already harder for them than it was last June when we came within 8 votes in the House of stopping the war money. They can't lie that they're voting for a war supplemental "because it's the last one" because nobody can be found who will believe that again (yes, I checked, and even Sarah Palin calls BS on it). They can't lie that they just want to support their new president, because he's not new anymore, he's not up for reelection like they are, and voters are demanding that their representatives choose jobs and healthcare and green energy instead of war. WHAT YOU CAN DO: Last June, all the Republicans in the House voted No because of unrelated measures included in the bill. That may happen again this time. But whether it does or not, and whether we block the money this time or not, we are building a movement that will eventually do so, and next week's debate on the floor of the House will be a huge step forward. If you can get to Washington, D.C., I recommend being there. If you can't, get C-Span and record what your misrepresentative pontificates. You're going to need that tape next month. Specifically, you're going to want to bring it to your local Brown Bag Vigil on March 17th -- http://pdamerica.org/articles/misc/2009-11-13-12-49-50-misc.php . On Tuesday night, March 2nd, Rep. Kucinich recorded a special message for Progressive Democrats of America. Click here -- http://blog.pdamerica.org/2010/03/iot-end-war-and-occupations-redirect-funding-march-call/ - - to listen to it and to an hour-long phone call with activists from around the country organizing efforts to defund the war. You can find and contribute to a whip list of congress members' positions on Kucinich's resolution and on voting for the next $33 billion at http://defundwar.org. Please also, right now, contact your member of Congress -- http://capwiz.com/pdamerica/callalert/index.tt?alertid=14751286 -- and ask them to be an original co-sponsor of the Kucinich resolution. Then use the link to ask your friends to do the same. Here's the text of the resolution, which will not have a number on it until Thursday: (Original Signature of Member) 111TH CONGRESS 1ST SESSION H. CON. RES. ___ Directing the President, pursuant to section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution, to remove the United States Armed Forces from Afghanistan. IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Mr. KUCINICH submitted the following concurrent resolution; which was referred to the Committee on _________ CONCURRENT RESOLUTION Directing the President, pursuant to section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution, to remove the United States Armed Forces from Afghanistan. Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), SECTION 1. REMOVAL OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES FROM AFGHANISTAN. Pursuant to section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution (50 U.S.C. 1544(c)), Congress directs the President to remove the United States Armed Forces from Afghanistan- (1) by no later than the end of the period of 30 days beginning on the day on which this concurrent resolution is adopted; or (2) if the President determines that it is not safe to remove the United States Armed Forces before the end of that period, by no later than December 31, 2010, or such earlier date as the President determines that the Armed Forces can safely be removed. Building an Anti-War Movement in March Don't forget to join in brownbagging (not teabagging!) on March 17, a march in Washington on March 20, and nonviolent resistance all through the month of March with Peace of the Action. ## Support Justice and Peace: Click "Donate" in the upper left corner of http://afterdowningstreet.org Please help us inform you of activities in your town by logging in at http://afterdowningstreet.org Then click on "My account", on "Edit", and on "Personal Information," and type in your state and zip code. Please FORWARD this message to everyone you know who doesn't think we should have one set of laws for us and another for those we put in powerful positions. If you receive this from a friend, you can subscribe by registering at http://afterdowningstreet.org/user/register =============================== 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 Mar 3 19:26:20 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2010 19:26:20 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Cheese Thief Jailed for 7 Years in California Message-ID: <5FA5AE3D4D6149EC99DC5CE36EE1AC57@agingCHS072729> [More cheap labour for xyz corporation in Silicon Valley?] http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/03/cheese-thief-jailed-for-7-years-in-california/ The Lede March 3, 2010, 9:57 am Cheese Thief Jailed for 7 Years in California By ROBERT MACKEY Updated | 11:38 a.m. On Monday, more than a year after a man was arrested outside a market in California with a $3.99 bag of Tillamook shredded cheese in his pants he had not paid for, a judge decided to go relatively easy on him, sentencing him to seven years and eight months in jail. Prosecutors in Yolo County, Calif., outside Sacramento, had originally asked for a life sentence under the state's "three strikes" law, arguing that the man, Robert Preston Ferguson, was a menace to society because of prior burglary convictions. As The Sacramento Bee reported last month, the district attorney's office asked for 11 years instead, after "a new psychological evaluation convinced prosecutors that Robert Preston Ferguson's most recent convictions for petty theft did not warrant a life sentence." At Monday's sentencing hearing, the Sacramento newspaper noted, a deputy district attorney "said Ferguson was a career criminal who wouldn't change." The prosecutor added that Mr. Ferguson, who is in his 50s, had 13 previous convictions and had been in jail for 22 of the past 27 years but still took the cheese. Ten days before the cheese theft, Mr. Ferguson had also stolen a woman's wallet from a 7-Eleven as she tended to her sick child, who had just thrown up on the floor. Because of Mr. Ferguson's prior convictions, he had been charged with felonies for both of those petty thefts. According to the Sacramento newspaper, Mr. Ferguson's defense lawyer, Monica Brushia, argued that his six other burglary convictions had taken place three decades ago and noted that his conviction for misdemeanor assault came when he was a teenager and had thrown a can of soda at one of his siblings. She also noted that the psychologist's report had concluded that Mr. Ferguson was mentally ill. He has biploar syndrome and struggles to control his impulses to steal during manic phases, she said. She concluded that his most recent thefts were petty. "We're talking about a pack of cheese," she said. Leaving aside concerns about whether the long sentence was just, some observers in California asked if the cash-strapped state should really be spending between $50,000 and $100,000 a year to lock up a cheese thief. As Sasha Abramsky noted in a commentary on the case for The Guardian last month, "a number of newspapers, including conservative publications such as the Orange County Register, ridiculed the D.A.'s office for its willingness to waste taxpayer dollars." The Orange County newspaper compared the case with that of Jerry Dewayne Williams, a man in Los Angeles who was sentenced in 1995 to 25 years to life for stealing a slice of pizza. In his column for The Guardian, Mr. Abramsky added: Three strikes is something that I have written on quite a bit over the years; I have talked with many three strikers and their families, and periodically receive updates from them on their status. This past Christmas I got a card from the wife of one inmate, who has spent the last 16 years behind bars on a drug-related offence. "It is hard to believe that nearly 16- years have gone by and we still have another 12 before D** will be eligible for parole," she wrote. "You would think that with all of California's budget problems, someone in Sacramento would realize that 16 years for a minor offence is long enough." A columnist for Sacramento Bee, Marcos Breton, took the opposite view, arguing on Wednesday that this "shoplifter with a sad life" deserves to be in jail: The truth is, there is a good chance Ferguson will victimize someone again. He has nearly 30 years' experience as a career criminal. What if he breaks into a home, stumbles in on a family and panics? You wonder if the people screaming about his treatment now would be screaming then, too, asking how it is he ever got back on the street in the first place. Update: Thanks to a reader for drawing our attention to a report in The Los Angeles Times last month on a speech by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy in which he criticized California's sentencing policies. The report noted: In an otherwise courtly and humorous address to the Los Angeles legal community, Kennedy expressed obvious dismay over the state of corrections and rehabilitation in the country. He said U.S. sentences are eight times longer than those issued by European courts. "California now has 185,000 people in prison at $32,500 a year" each, he said. He then urged voters and officials to compare that expense to what taxpayers spend per pupil in elementary schools. "The three-strikes law sponsor is the correctional officers' union and that is sick!" Kennedy said of the measure mandating life sentences for third-time criminal offenders. =============================== 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 Mar 3 19:53:49 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2010 19:53:49 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Mercenaries Circling Haiti Message-ID: <5AC91DBE084C4FA1BABA8AD5AD97DF5F@agingCHS072729> http://www.zcommunications.org/mercenaries-circling-haiti-by-bill-quigley Mercenaries Circling Haiti By Bill Quigley Wednesday, March 03, 2010 On March 9 and 10, there will be a Haiti conference in Miami for private military and security companies to showcase their services to governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in the earthquake devastated country. On their website for the Haiti conference, the trade group IPOA (ironically called the International Peace Operations Association until recently) lists eleven companies advertising security services explicitly for Haiti. Even though guns are illegal to buy or sell in Haiti, many companies brag of their heavy duty military experience. Triple Canopy, a private military company with extensive security operations in Iraq and Israel, is advertising for business in Haiti. According to human rights activist and investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill, Triple Canopy took over the Xe/Blackwater security contract in Iraq in 2009. Scahill reports on a number of bloody incidents involving Triple Canopy including one where a team leader told his group, "I want to kill somebody today.because I am going on vacation tomorrow." Another company seeking work is EODT Technology which promises in its ad that its personnel are licensed to carry weapons in Haiti. EODT has worked in Afghanistan since 2004 and provides security for the Canadian Embassy in South Africa. On their website they promise a wide range of security services including force protection, guard services, port security, surveillance, and counter IED response services. A retired CIA special operations officer founded another company, Overseas Security & Strategic Information, also advertising with IPOA for security business in Haiti. The company website says they have a "cadre of US personnel" who served in Special Forces, Delta Force and SEALS and they state many of their security personnel are former South African military and police. Patrick Elie, the former Minister of Defence in Haiti, told Anthony Fenton of the Inter Press Service that "these guys are like vultures coming to grab the loot over this disaster, and probably money that might have been injected into the Haitian economy is just going to be grabbed by these companies and I'm sure they are not the only these mercenary companies but also other companies like Haliburton or these other ones that always come on the heels of the troops." Naomi Klein, world renowned author of THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, has criticized the militarization of the response to the earthquake and the presence of "disaster capitalists" swooping into Haiti. The high priority placed on security by the U.S. and NGOs is wrong, she told Newsweek. "Aid should be prioritized over security. Any aid agency that's afraid of Haitians should get out of Haiti." Security is a necessity for the development of human rights. But outsourcing security to private military contractors has not proven beneficial in the U.S. or any other country. Recently, U.S. Representative Jan Schakowsky (IL) and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (VT) introduced bills titled "Stop Outsourcing Security" to phase out private military contractors in response to the many reports of waste, fraud and human rights abuse. Human rights organizations have long challenged the growth in private security contractors in part because governments have failed to establish effective systems for requiring them to be transparent and for holding them accountable. It is challenging enough to hold government accountable. The privatization of a public service like security gives government protection to private corporations which are also difficult to hold accountable. The combination is doubly difficult to regulate The U.S. has prosecuted hardly any of the human rights abuses reported against private military contractors. Amnesty International has reviewed the code of conduct adopted by the IPOA and found it inadequate in which compliance with international human rights standards are not adequately addressed. This is yet another example of what the world saw after Katrina. Private security forces, including Blackwater, also descended on the U.S. gulf coast after Katrina grabbing millions of dollars in contracts. Contractors like these soak up much needed money which could instead go for job creation or humanitarian and rebuilding assistance. Haiti certainly does not need this kind of U.S. business. In a final bit of irony, the IPOA, according to the Institute for Southern Studies, promises that all profits from the event will be donated to the Clinton-Bush Haiti relief fund. Bill Quigley is legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a long-time human rights advocate in Haiti. 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 Wed Mar 3 20:04:30 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2010 20:04:30 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [Afghanistan] Habeas Challenges for Bagram Prisoners Message-ID: <88786592E79B41C684F8EF253FFF39E0@agingCHS072729> http://ipsnorthamerica.net/news.php?idnews=2898 North America Inter Press Service March 04, 2010 US-AFGHANISTAN: Habeas Challenges for Bagram Prisoners William Fisher NEW YORK, 1 Mar (IPS) - Four men who have been imprisoned for over a year - some for almost two years - are going to U.S. federal court to challenge their detention at the notorious Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. The men, who their lawyers say have never engaged in hostilities against the U.S. and are not members of groups that have engaged in hostilities against the U.S., have never been told why they are being detained, permitted to speak with a lawyer or given a meaningful opportunity to challenge their detention before a court or impartial administrative board. The habeas corpus petitions were filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The petitions ask that the four men to be given access to lawyers and be allowed to challenge the legality of their detention in court. Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told IPS, "These habeas petitions seek the basic right for an individual imprisoned indefinitely by the executive to challenge his detention in a court of law." "For far too long, the U.S. has been seizing people in Afghanistan, including from their homes, and jailing them for years, without charge or a fair hearing. This serves neither our values nor our security," he said. "A court must have a chance to decide whether it's lawful to continue imprisoning these men without charge. The U.S. practice of indefinitely detaining hundreds of people at Bagram without access to lawyers, judicial review or a fair process is a stain on our reputation in the world," he added. One of the petitions filed today is on behalf of Afghan brothers Sibghatullah Jalatzai, who was a translator for the U.S. military for four years before his detention nearly 20 months ago, and Samiullah Jalatzai, who was arrested without explanation at his workplace nearly 23 months ago. The second petition is on behalf of Afghan government employee Haji Abdul Wahid and his nephew Zia-ur-Rahman, who were taken from their homes by the U.S. military during a massive neighbourhood sweep more than one year ago. The petitions charge that the military does not have the authority to detain these men and that the lack of access to a court or fair process to challenge their detention violates the U.S. Constitution and international law. Attorneys on the case include ACLU lawyers and Tina Foster of the International Justice Network, which coordinates Bagram habeas litigation. The United States is the only nation among the NATO countries participating in the conflict in Afghanistan that subjects individuals it captures to indefinite military detention. Other NATO nations reportedly detain individuals for a maximum of 96 hours and then either release them or transfer them to Afghan custody. The ACLU said, "There is growing concern that Bagram has become the new Guant?namo, except with hundreds more prisoners held indefinitely, in harsher conditions and with less due process." In response to an ACLU Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking the disclosure of documents related to the detention and treatment of prisoners at Bagram, the Defence Department recently released for the first time a list containing the names of 645 prisoners who were detained at Bagram as of September 2009, when the lawsuit was filed. Other vital information, including their citizenship, how long they had been held, in what country they were captured and the circumstances of their capture, was redacted. In April 2009, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for records relating to the detention and treatment of prisoners held at the Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. The ACLU is asking the Barack Obama administration to make public records pertaining to the number of people currently detained at Bagram, their names, citizenship, place of capture and length of detention, as well as records pertaining to the process afforded those prisoners to challenge their detention and designation as "enemy combatants." The Defence Department partially complied with the ACLU request last month when it turned over the names of its prisoners at Bagram. But human rights advocates have a decidedly mixed record in their attempts to persuade the courts to grant customary due process rights to Bagram detainees. In one of the few earlier cases, involving four Bagram prisoners, Judge John D. Bates ruled that three of them - two Yemenis and one Tunisian - had the right to petition U.S. courts for their release. But he also ruled that because the fourth prisoner, Haji Wazir, was a citizen of Afghanistan, rather than a Yemeni or a Tunisian, granting him legal rights might upset the relationship between the U.S. and Afghanistan. Judge Bates dismissed Wazir's petition. Wazir, an Afghan civilian who has been held at Bagram without charge for more than six years, was captured in Pakistan in 2002. He is notable because he is one of the very few captives in Bagram who has had a writ of habeas corpus filed on his behalf. The U.S. government's Bagram detention facility has been the focus of widespread media attention and public concern for many years, but very little information is publically available about the secrecy-shrouded facility or the prisoners held there. The U.S. government has been detaining an unknown number of prisoners at the Bagram detention facility since 2002, and recent news reports indicate that the more than 600 individuals are currently detained there - some of whom have been held for as long as six years without access to counsel or a meaningful opportunity to challenge their imprisonment. The conditions of confinement at Bagram are reportedly primitive, with allegations of mistreatment and abuse continuing to surface; in fact, at least two prisoners have died there. There is public concern in the U.S. and around the world that Bagram has become, in effect, the new Guant?namo. The ACLU says, "Although the nation is embroiled in an intense public debate about U.S. policy pertaining to the detention and treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody, most Americans remain in the dark about the basic facts about Bagram." "When prisoners are in U.S. custody and under U.S. control - no matter the location - our values and commitment to the rule of law are at stake. Now that President Obama has taken the positive step of ordering Guant?namo shut down, it is critical that we don't permit 'other Gitmos' to continue elsewhere," the group said. A recent investigation by journalist Anand Gopal revealed the existence of another prison on Bagram Air Base - one so secret that even the Red Cross does not have access. It is dubbed the "Black Jail" and is reportedly run by U.S. Special Forces. (END/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 Wed Mar 3 20:39:32 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2010 20:39:32 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] World's top firms cause $2.2tn of environmental damage, report estimates Message-ID: <9677E0017D0C45F294045C158442EE76@agingCHS072729> http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/18/worlds-top-firms-environmental-damage The Guardian 18 February 2010 World's top firms cause $2.2tn of environmental damage, report estimates Report for the UN into the activities of the world's 3,000 biggest companies estimates one-third of profits would be lost if firms were forced to pay for use, loss and damage of environment Juliette Jowit The cost of pollution and other damage to the natural environment caused by the world's biggest companies would wipe out more than one-third of their profits if they were held financially accountable, a major unpublished study for the United Nations has found. The report comes amid growing concern that no one is made to pay for most of the use, loss and damage of the environment, which is reaching crisis proportions in the form of pollution and the rapid loss of freshwater, fisheries and fertile soils. Later this year, another huge UN study - dubbed the "Stern for nature" after the influential report on the economics of climate change by Sir Nicholas Stern - will attempt to put a price on such global environmental damage, and suggest ways to prevent it. The report, led by economist Pavan Sukhdev, is likely to argue for abolition of billions of dollars of subsidies to harmful industries like agriculture, energy and transport, tougher regulations and more taxes on companies that cause the damage. Ahead of changes which would have a profound effect - not just on companies' profits but also their customers and pension funds and other investors - the UN-backed Principles for Responsible Investment initiative and the United Nations Environment Programme jointly ordered a report into the activities of the 3,000 biggest public companies in the world, which includes household names from the UK's FTSE 100 and other major stockmarkets. The study, conducted by London-based consultancy Trucost and due to be published this summer, found the estimated combined damage was worth US$2.2 trillion (?1.4tn) in 2008 - a figure bigger than the national economies of all but seven countries in the world that year. The figure equates to 6-7% of the companies' combined turnover, or an average of one-third of their profits, though some businesses would be much harder hit than others. "What we're talking about is a completely new paradigm," said Richard Mattison, Trucost's chief operating officer and leader of the report team. "Externalities of this scale and nature pose a major risk to the global economy and markets are not fully aware of these risks, nor do they know how to deal with them." The biggest single impact on the $2.2tn estimate, accounting for more than half of the total, was emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for climate change. Other major "costs" were local air pollution such as particulates, and the damage caused by the over-use and pollution of freshwater. The true figure is likely to be even higher because the $2.2tn does not include damage caused by household and government consumption of goods and services, such as energy used to power appliances or waste; the "social impacts" such as the migration of people driven out of affected areas, or the long-term effects of any damage other than that from climate change. The final report will also include a higher total estimate which includes those long-term effects of problems such as toxic waste. Trucost did not want to comment before the final report on which sectors incurred the highest "costs" of environmental damage, but they are likely to include power companies and heavy energy users like aluminium producers because of the greenhouse gases that result from burning fossil fuels. Heavy water users like food, drink and clothing companies are also likely to feature high up on the list. Sukhdev said the heads of the major companies at this year's annual economic summit in Davos, Switzerland, were increasingly concerned about the impact on their business if they were stopped or forced to pay for the damage. "It can make the difference between profit and loss," Sukhdev told the annual Earthwatch Oxford lecture last week. "That sense of foreboding is there with many, many [chief executives], and that potential is a good thing because it leads to solutions." The aim of the study is to encourage and help investors lobby companies to reduce their environmental impact before concerned governments act to restrict them through taxes or regulations, said Mattison. "It's going to be a significant proportion of a lot of companies' profit margins," Mattison told the Guardian. "Whether they actually have to pay for these costs will be determined by the appetite for policy makers to enforce the 'polluter pays' principle. We should be seeking ways to fix the system, rather than waiting for the economy to adapt. Continued inefficient use of natural resources will cause significant impacts on [national economies] overall, and a massive problem for governments to fix." Another major concern is the risk that companies simply run out of resources they need to operate, said Andrea Moffat, of the US-based investor lobby group Ceres, whose members include more than 80 funds with assets worth more than US$8tn. An example was the estimated loss of 20,000 jobs and $1bn last year for agricultural companies because of water shortages in California, said Moffat. =============================== 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 Mar 3 22:06:34 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2010 22:06:34 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Naomi Klein: Chile's Socialist Rebar Message-ID: <887F46FF1E1E477BAC16CCADDC7C54FA@agingCHS072729> http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100315/klein The Nation March 3, 2010 Chile's Socialist Rebar Naomi Klein Ever since deregulation caused a worldwide economic meltdown in September 2008 and everyone became a Keynesian again, it hasn't been easy to be a fanatical fan of the late economist Milton Friedman. So widely discredited is his brand of free-market fundamentalism that his followers have become increasingly desperate to claim ideological victories, however far-fetched. A particularly distasteful case in point. Just two days after Chile was struck by a devastating earthquake, Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens informed his readers that Milton Friedman's "spirit was surely hovering protectively over Chile" because, "thanks largely to him, the country has endured a tragedy that elsewhere would have been an apocalypse.... It's not by chance that Chileans were living in houses of brick-- and Haitians in houses of straw--when the wolf arrived to try to blow them down." According to Stephens, the radical free-market policies prescribed to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet by Milton Friedman and his infamous "Chicago Boys" are the reason Chile is a prosperous nation with "some of the world's strictest building codes." There is one rather large problem with this theory: Chile's modern seismic building code, drafted to resist earthquakes, was adopted in 1972. That year is enormously significant because it was one year before Pinochet seized power in a bloody U.S-backed coup. That means that if one person deserves credit for the law, it is not Friedman, or Pinochet, but Salvador Allende, Chile's democratically elected socialist President. (In truth many Chileans deserve credit, since the laws were a response to a history of quakes, and the first law was adopted in the 1930s). It does seem significant, however, that the law was enacted even in the midst of a crippling economic embargo ("make the economy scream" Richard Nixon famously growled after Allende won the 1970 elections). The code was later updated in the nineties, well after Pinochet and the Chicago Boys were finally out of power and democracy was restored. Little wonder: As Paul Krugman points out, Friedman was ambivalent about building codes, seeing them as yet another infringement on capitalist freedom. As for the argument that Friedmanite policies are the reason Chileans live in "houses of brick" instead of "straw," it's clear that Stephens knows nothing of pre- coup Chile. The Chile of the 1960s had the best health and education systems on the continent, as well as a vibrant industrial sector and rapidly expanding middle class. Chileans believed in their state, which is why they elected Allende to take the project even further. After the coup and the death of Allende, Pinochet and his Chicago Boys did their best to dismantle Chile's public sphere, auctioning off state enterprises and slashing financial and trade regulations. Enormous wealth was created in this period but at a terrible cost: by the early eighties, Pinochet's Friedman- prescribed policies had caused rapid de- industrialization, a ten-fold increase in unemployment and an explosion of distinctly unstable shantytowns. They also led to a crisis of corruption and debt so severe that, in 1982, Pinochet was forced to fire his key Chicago Boy advisors and nationalize several of the large deregulated financial institutions. (Sound familiar?) Fortunately, the Chicago Boys did not manage to undo everything Allende accomplished. The national copper company, Codelco, remained in state hands, pumping wealth into public coffers and preventing the Chicago Boys from tanking Chile's economy completely. They also never got around to trashing Allende's tough building code, an ideological oversight for which we should all be grateful. Thanks to CEPR for tracking down the origins of Chile's building code. About Naomi Klein Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and syndicated columnist and the author of the international and New York Times bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (September 2007); an earlier international best-seller, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies; and the collection Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (2002). more... =============================== 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 Mar 3 23:43:57 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2010 00:43:57 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The Meaning of the Eikenberry Cables Message-ID: <91859673175B47BB903A9755816F1F47@Upstairs> Last night I had the opportunity to hear Daniel Ellsberg [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg] at Goucher College. I wish I could provide a transcript, but I am sure everything important he said can be found on the internet. While we all know about the Eikenberry Cables, I at least did not fully appreciate their importance, which Ellsberg thinks are historically comparable to the Pentagon Papers. Bromwich's article is a fair summary of Ellsberg's remarks. The fact that Eikenberry's cables were leaked (and not by him), and since then has said in public hearings that his concerns have been dealt with and now supported the White House's troop increase plan, is indicative of how damaging Obama considers the leak. See also http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/world/asia/26strategy.html The Meaning of the Eikenberry Cables David Bromwich Professor of Literature at Yale Posted: January 26, 2010 11:36 AM The New York Times performed a service today by publishing the text of two cables sent in November 2009 to Secretary of State Clinton, by the American ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl W. Eikenberry. The Times story by Eric Schmitt is fairly done, and gives an adequate summary of the documents; but the small headline and the left-column treatment allow a reader to underestimate the historical importance of the cables and the startling impression they make when read in full. It is as if we had been offered a long look at several pages of the most disturbing prognosis in the Pentagon Papers; as if we could see the president reading them with us, and then deciding in spite of everything to go ahead with the war. The Eikenberry cables were timed to influence the latter part of President Obama's reappraisal of the American military role in Afghanistan. They may have meant to serve as a counterweight, also, against the schedule of troop requests which Bob Woodward had published seven weeks earlier in the Washington Post. That earlier leak by the military had clearly been executed by someone close to Generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal. No American in a position of authority knows more about Afghanistan than Ambassador Eikenberry. If there is a contender, it might be Matthew Hoh, who on September 10, 2009, two months before Eikenberry sent the first of his cables, resigned from the foreign service, giving up his position as senior U.S. Civilian Representative in Zabul province. Hoh offered as his reason, above all, "doubts about our current strategy and planned future strategy." But he also confessed his suspicion that no sanely imaginable result could justify the scale of the American investment in the war: "I fail to see the value or the worth in continued U.S. casualties or expenditures of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35-year old civil war." Both the tenor and the details of the Eikenberry cables lend support to the logic of Hoh's letter of resignation. Before becoming ambassador, Karl Eikenberry was the senior American commander in Afghanistan. To say that he knows that country better than Petraeus and McChrystal do -- from a military and a civilian point of view -- is only to say what Petraeus and McChrystal themselves have acknowledged. The first cable is dated November 6, 2009. It takes an unequivocal stand against any increase of American forces at the present time: The proposed troop increase will bring vastly increased costs and an indefinite, large-scale U.S. military role in Afghanistan, generating the need for yet-more civilians. An increased U.S. and foreign role in security and governance will increase Afghan dependency, at least in the near-term, and it will deepen the military involvement in a mission that most agree cannot be won solely by military means. Further, it will run counter to our strategic purposes of Afghanizing and civilianizing government functions here. Note that Eikenberry assumes the American purpose must be something other than an indefinite prolongation of the war. Yet that is the only end that is sure to be served by the troop increase. In the same cable of November 6, he observes, of the visual aids supplied by the generals: "None of these charts displays dollar costs." Those costs, says Eikenberry, will be "astronomical." Hamid Karzai, the leader of Afghanistan, is not (in Eikenberry's considered view) "an adequate strategic partner." Indeed the posture of Karzai is worse than inadequate: He and much of his circle do not want the U.S. to leave and are only too happy to see us invest further. They assume we covet their territory for a never-ending "war on terror" and for military bases to use against surrounding powers. It is remarkable that Eikenberry does not challenge the accuracy of this assumption by the Karzai circle: namely that American plans encompass the building of large bases and the semi-permanent use of Afghanistan for the conduct of wars elsewhere. He must have regarded the assumption as, at least, common sense from their point of view; and he brings it up only to point out that it encourages a feckless dependency among the ruling caste of warlords in Afghanistan. The November 6 cable goes on to observe the undesired effect that American escalation is sure to have on Afghan independence in the fighting. "Expanding assistance, either military or civilian," Eikenberry says, "will increase Afghan dependence and make more remote the day when we can transfer most sovereign responsibilities to the Afghans and draw down our presence." A similar observation was ventured, some 45 years ago, by those government officials who opposed American support for the American puppets in Vietnam, from Diem to Ky to Thieu. It seems likely that Eikenberry was acquainted with that history. As for civilian engagement, he notes, a "trained and honest" cadre of Afghan civilian officials "does not now exist and would take years to build." Two conclusions stand out in the cable of November 6. "More troops won't end the insurgency as long as Pakistan sanctuaries remain." And: "We have little clarity about how long it will be before cleared districts are connected to an Afghan government that both functions in Kabul and reaches down to the local level." Ambassador Eikenberry's second cable is dated November 9. It has the form of a postscript to what he must have known was already a definitive expression of his doubts: Some argue that we must decide on the full-up troop deployment now. I disagree. . . .We have the time we need certainly into early next year. We must take that time to decide on the right course. . . .[The additional troops] would be arriving in increments, in any case. Thus, contrary to the public testimony of Petraeus and McChrystal, the military status of the war was not desperate or even alarming. But what did Eikenberry think could be done in the time the American government had to make its decision? "We have not yet conducted," he tells the secretary of state, "a comprehensive, interdisciplinary analysis of all our strategic options." The sort of analysis Eikenberry suggests would be overseen by eminent political figures of both parties and former government and congressional leaders, as well as persons of some expertise on the history and politics of Afghanistan. Among the options these people should study, which have not been studied yet, says Eikenberry, is a search for a reconciliation with insurgents (he does not call them "Taliban"). The end in view is not instruction in democracy, or the remaking of a whole society, but simply "taking them off the battlefield." What was Barack Obama's response to these extraordinary cables? He sought to satisfy a minimum of the concerns laid down by Eikenberry, while acting against their broad admonition in the largest particulars by adding 30,000 troops. Obama, in short, rated above Eikenberry the expertise of David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal and the editorial pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times. The main thing he granted to Eikenberry was an escalation of the air attacks in Pakistan, to go along with the increase in American troops in Afghanistan which Eikenberry had advised against. A second major desideratum of the November cables, the search for reconciliation with the Afghan insurgents, he delegated to Robert Gates. It was apparent as early as the summer of 2009 that Obama had no political choice but to throw in his lot with Petraeus and McChrystal and the "full-up" commitment of troops. Only a more far-sighted regard for prudence could have drawn him the other way. And, in fact, Obama went in even faster than the generals asked him to; and he did so, we now can see, in open disregard of the practical wisdom of the Eikenberry cables. He did it on the supposition that the sooner he went in big, the sooner he could get out big. In a flattering article by Peter Baker on the "process" of the troop decision, President Obama was quoted as saying, of a left-to-right time chart of contemplated troop deployments: "I want this pushed to the left." That is, move them in faster. Make the whole thing fast so we can have a credible ending by 2011. But Ambassador Eikenberry had already told him why "pushing" the graph in this way was a fantasy -- a case of wishful thinking to the point of irresponsibility. It is inconceivable that a president acting on a candid estimate of the commitment he was requiring of his country, would, in response to the Eikenberry cables, finally have bowed to the generals. No one could have done so whose guiding light was prudence and the direction of a wise policy. What drove this decision, instead, was Barack Obama's desire for an appearance of conventional solidity. He had said so many times that Afghanistan was the right war. How could he unsay it? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-bromwich/the-meaning-of-the-eikenb_b_436931.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Mar 4 09:51:05 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2010 09:51:05 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [Review] Halverson's "An Entirely Synthetic Fish...." Message-ID: <4923B086C5A54B2484C50628FEAB1129@agingCHS072729> http://chronicle.com/article/One-Strange-Fish-Tale/64348/ The Chronicle Review February 28, 2010 One Strange Fish Tale By Peter Schmidt Behold the regal rainbow trout, dappled denizen of deep lake and rushing river, fierce hunter of fish and fly-and prize of pork-barrel politics, invigorator of men, eradicator of native species, payload of numerous bombing missions. An angler can catch a lot of rainbow trout and yet have no clue what a remarkable force of nature-and mankind-the creatures truly are. Anders Halverson, a research associate at the University of Colorado's Center of the American West, hoists them up for close inspection in a book just released by Yale University Press: An Entirely Synthetic Fish: How Rainbow Trout Beguiled America and Overran the World. Few one-that-got-away stories sound nearly as improbable as his account of how our species, Homo sapiens, spread the fish species, Oncorhynchus mykiss, beyond its native range. Consider that as of the 1870s, the rainbow trout and its sea-run variant, the steelhead, lived only along the Pacific Rim, from California to Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula. Since then, Halverson says, the fish "have been introduced to every state in the United States and to at least 80 different countries on every continent except Antarctica," an expansion of range that took humans, corn, sheep, and dogs thousands of years to achieve. Halverson offers statistics that illustrate how much humans are still involved in the spread of rainbow trout: For each of the roughly four million people born in the United States each year, he says, state and federal hatcheries stock about 20 of the fish in public waters. Most of them being mature, they weigh a total of about 25 million pounds. Enlarge Photo Why make such an investment in spreading this one species of fish? It grows rapidly in hatcheries and withstands warmer waters and more-difficult conditions than other trout. Perhaps more important, Halverson says, the stocking of rainbow trout-which fight hard and leap acrobatically when hooked-has "satisfied a powerful human need": the primal urge to seek out and battle prey. Halverson's book is a microhistory, an examination of America's involvement with a favored fish that sheds light on broader truths regarding our recent relationship with the natural world. He says he fished for stocked rainbow trout while growing up in Colorado but eventually got bored with the pursuit and thought little of the fish until he became a graduate student in aquatic ecology at Yale University, where he earned his doctorate in 2005. At Yale "I came to realize there is a real paradox to the way so many fisheries are managed these days," he says. "Like most fishermen, I see fishing as a way to escape civilization and industrialization, and a way to sort of make peace with the natural world." Yet most rainbow trout, being either the products of hatcheries or the descendants of hatchery fish, "are in many ways a product of that industrialization." He decided to write a book examining the artificial spread of the rainbow trout and obtained a National Science Foundation grant to help finance the undertaking. He initially expected the project to be mainly an exercise in muckraking (he had worked as a newspaper reporter before going to graduate school). But "the more people I met and the more people I interviewed," he says, "the more I realized what a complex topic this is." Although he came across case after case in which efforts to spread the trout led to environmental disasters, his book generally does not paint those involved as fools or villains. When it comes to government policy regarding trout, he says, "there are a lot of issues for which there are no clear answers." He points to the dilemma posed by rainbow trout's ability to mate with the increasingly rare-and unhealthily inbred-cutthroat trout of the American West. Such interbreeding is causing cutthroats to become even rarer as a distinct species, but the purebred cutthroat population is having so much trouble surviving on its own that hybridization might represent the single best hope of passing the fish's genes along to future generations. It is unclear whether the long-term survival of cutthroats requires keeping rainbows at a distance or bringing the two species together. The oddest specimens in An Entirely Synthetic Fish are the people. They include Livingston Stone, a New Hampshire pastor who abandoned the pulpit to raise brook trout on a fish farm, then ventured to California in the 1870s, initially to set up a federal salmon hatchery in the Sacramento River Valley. He encountered the rainbow trout and ended up propagating that species in a hatchery on the McCloud River, where he lived under threat of attack by outlaws and members of the Wintu tribe. In one report on his activities, he remarked, "With tarantulas, scorpions, rattlesnakes, Indians, panthers and threats of murder our course here is not wholly over a path of roses." Among others described in Halverson's book is Al Reese, a crop duster and barnstormer who in the late 1940s helped persuade California's Department of Fish and Game to drop rainbow trout into mountain lakes from the air. (He tested the fishes' ability to survive the trip partly by holding live specimens out a car window at 70 miles per hour.) The state agency recruited World War II pilots and purchased surplus military airplanes to dump the fish, generally from about 200 feet. Many of the trout died on impact with the water or ended up stuck in trees, but enough survived to inspire the agency to similarly drop turkeys, partridges, and even beaver (in burlap sacks attached to parachutes). About 50 years later, the agency learned that it had gone overboard with its fish-bombing runs, inadvertently ridding lakes of rare frogs, which the fish had devoured, and filling some lakes with so many trout that their growth was stunted from too much competition for food. California fish-and-game officials are hardly the only ones who eventually altered trout-stocking policies in response to evidence of money wasted or doing more harm than good. The book devotes a chapter to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's decision in 1962 to deliberately poison the Green River in Utah and Wyoming to wipe out the native fish and make room for rainbows. At the time, few in the agency questioned the idea of pouring huge amounts of the piscicide rotenone into a body of water. Since 1952 federal and state fisheries managers had used the chemical, which kills anything with gills, to clear the way for rainbow trout and other game fish in a long list of rivers and lakes around the nation, even within national parks. A few scholars at Colorado State University and the University of Utah spoke out against the Green River plan and subsequently complained of efforts by state and federal agencies to shut them up by threatening to cut off grants to their institutions. Many of those involved in the river poisoning lived to regret it, for it ended up being a disaster for both the environment and public relations. The project's planners assumed they would be able to keep the keep the river from carrying the rotenone into Dinosaur National Monument park by having workers neutralize the poison upstream from the park with potassium permanganate, but they were wrong. When dead fish turned up in the park, the Fish and Wildlife Service found itself in the cross hairs of the National Park Service. Perhaps even more important, about three weeks after the incident, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, helping spawn an environmental movement that barraged officials in Washington with angry letters about the Green River kill. The secretary of interior at the time, Stewart Udall, responded by curbing the use of rotenone by federal agencies and calling for the welfare of unique species to be a "dominant consideration" in such projects from then on. All four of the chief so-called trash fish that the Green River poisoning sought to kill-the humpback chub, the bonytail, the razorback sucker, and the Colorado pikeminnow-now have a place on the federal endangered-species list. The federal government has spent more than $100-million trying to save them. An Entirely Synthetic Fish recounts many other governmental attempts at improving nature that went awry. In the 1960s, for example, researchers discovered that stocking a river with hatchery trout can decimate the wild trout population and actually leave it with fewer trout over all; the hatchery fish aggressively compete with the locals for food, and many end up being eaten themselves because they seem to associate the shadows of predators with those of hatchery workers tossing kibble. Beginning in the late 1980s, the Colorado Division of Wildlife inadvertently unleashed trout epidemics by stocking rivers with rainbows infected with parasite-born whirling disease, which leaves its victims disfigured and prone to swimming in tight circles. The book also compellingly traces how the nation's attitudes toward fishing have varied over time. In the 17th century, the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony regarded fishing with a hook and line as an exercise in idleness deserving punishment. During and just after the American Revolution, fishing suffered a similar image problem, thanks to its association with the English aristocracy. Beginning in the mid-1800s, however, interest in sport fishing boomed as it gained status as a diversion for the wealthy and came to be viewed as a pursuit that helped keep men virile and in touch with nature. Politicians eager to take credit for bringing hatchery jobs and better fishing to their states happily supported federal efforts to stock waters with game species. Throughout much of America, one can still encounter the absurd sight of fishermen gathered on riverbanks next to hatchery trucks, hoping to catch na?ve rainbow trout minutes after they are stocked. While not exactly shooting fish in a barrel, perhaps no other experience comes as close. For his part, Halverson is attempting to restore the populations of rarer species of trout by, counterintuitively, encouraging people to fish for them. Taking a cue from the culture of birdwatchers, many of whom will travel long distances to add to their "life list" of species they have seen, he has set up a Web site that encourages anglers to catch and release as many species as they can. His logic is that if enough people roll into small towns and say they are out to hook rare fish species X or Y, the local chambers of commerce will get word, and new constituencies will be created to lobby for the fish's restoration. Writing An Entirely Synthetic Fish has renewed his own interest in angling, both for rainbows and for other trout, Halverson says. "I actually love fishing again. You pick one of these rainbows up, and it is just a book that says so much about us." =============================== 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 Thu Mar 4 11:15:04 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2010 12:15:04 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] San Francisco Jewish Federation officially excommunicates large swath of Jewish population Message-ID: <15347A70F9044EDDB6657AAB54799D78@Upstairs> San Francisco Jewish Federation officially excommunicates large swath of Jewish population Posted on March 3 2010 by Cecilie Surasky The San Francisco Bay Area's Jewish Federation has made it official. Here in one of the most cosmopolitan, diversity-friendly and culture-loving places on earth, there is a new litmus test for Jewish identity and it has absolutely nothing to do with religious practice, cultural expression, personal history or the values you embrace. Membership in the Jewish community has been officially reduced to one and only one question- do you UNCONDITIONALLY love Israel? Do you love Israel so much that you are willing to stand by and do nothing as it destroys itself and everyone it controls by repeatedly violating international law, sending its youngest citizens to enforce the 43-year occupation of another people, imprisoning them, killing them with impunity, denying them the right to health and education and work and claiming it's all in the name of security while taking more Palestinian land and water and trees each day. In other words, are you willing to love Israel to death? If the answer is YES, you're in! If the answer is NO, and you have the chutzpah to embrace the principled, creative, peaceful methods of Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, and Gandhi as a way to pressure Israel to help provide true democracy for all Israelis and Palestinians, then you're out! Prompted by the controversy over the showing of the film Rachel at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, the federation just announced this stunning set of McCarthyite policy guidelines which seek to sever any public ties that ANY Bay area grantees -including progressive synagogues and arts and educational organizations- have with groups that support Boycotts, Divestment or Sanctions in whole or part, or who "delegitimize Israel" (according to who exactly? The judges who hold the Federation purse strings, that's who). It's meant primarily to banish one of the Bay Area's largest Jewish organizations, Jewish Voice for Peace, which supports divestment from companies that profit from the occupation, from the institutional Jewish world, but it will impact the ability of Jewish organizations to partner with Christian, Quaker or Muslim groups, many of which support some sort of BDS. It is also specifically identifies groups or individuals, so that ideological dossiers will have to be developed to make sure panelists can be certified kosher before appearing on Jewish stages in the Bay Area. Jewish filmmakers and thinkers like The Yes Men, Udi Aloni and Naomi Klein; poets like Adrienne Rich or playwrights like Tony Kushner and Wallace Shawn who, like Klein and Rich, sit on JVP's advisory board; or even journalists like Time's Joe Klein, are now banished from the institutional Jewish world here- unless they agree not to talk about Israel at all, then they're fine. Of course, it won't matter in the end. Incredibly creative Jewish life forms are growing everywhere. In fact, an entire young generation of young Jews if growing up asking why Jewish institutions that seek to police free expression are even relevant to their lives? And supporters of various elements of nonviolent resistance, BDS, are already inside most major Jewish institutions. In fact, it's got to be a source of tremendous embarrassment that Dan Sokatch, the head of the New Israel Fund, was the head of the Federation until just a few months ago. The New Israel Fund would likely not be allowed to co-sponsor an event with a Federation grantee according to these guidelines because they serve as fiscal sponsor to the group that maintains the most important global database used for the BDS movement. Here is the unintentionally humorous statement which begins by asserting the respect for diversity within Jewish life. The Jewish Community Federation's (JCF's) core values include an abiding commitment to a secure Jewish community here and abroad, to the strong democratic Jewish State of Israel, and to mutual respect and diversity within Jewish life. Consistent with its core values, the JCF funds a full spectrum of organizations that sustain and grow our community through pluralistic expressions and wide-ranging perspectives that affirm a broad and inclusive tent vital to a strong and dynamic Jewish community. This policy applies only to the grantor-grantee relationship between the JCF and other entities. The JCF does not fund organizations that through their mission, activities or partnerships: 1.. endorse or promote anti-Semitism, other forms of bigotry, violence or other extremist views; 2.. actively seek to proselytize Jews away from Judaism; or 3.. advocate for, or endorse, undermining the legitimacy of Israel as a secure independent, democratic Jewish state, including through participation in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, in whole or in part. These principles also apply to grants from the JCF's Endowment Fund. In order to be eligible for funding, organizations that engage in Israel-related programming are required to produce documentation such as their policies, procedures, guidelines, and mission statement that demonstrate consistency with the JCF's core values or - in the absence of such documentation - to abide by this policy and to initiate a process to develop organizational guidelines, policies and procedures consistent with it. There can be no uniform set of policies or procedures that is applicable to every organization. Organizations are expected to adapt this policy to their unique circumstances. This policy is not intended to discourage the presentation of a wide range of perspectives aimed at appealing to a broad cross-section of the community. The JCF and our community are well-served by fostering diverse expressions through our cultural, educational, religious, social service and community relations institutions, and by promoting a strong commitment to civil discourse. The JCF will review its policy and supporting guidelines with each grantee, address questions unique to that grantee, and explain how implementation of the policy and guidelines can be a benefit to the grantee and the community. The JCF will also be bound by this policy in its own programming, partnerships and co-sponsorships. ENFORCEMENT OF POLICY In the event of a perceived violation by a grantee of the JCF policy, the CEO of the JCF and its President and Officers will promptly review the situation, speak to the grantee, obtain the facts, understand the context, make a determination as to whether a grantee has violated the policy and - if it is determined that a grantee has violated the policy - take appropriate steps consistent with this policy. Where a grantee's overall body of work has been consistent with the JCF's core values, the grantee will be urged to swiftly address concerns that have been raised as a result of a specific program. The JCF reserves the right to suspend funding and sponsorship, particularly in any case where it determines, in its sole discretion, that an egregious policy violation has occurred, there has been a sustained pattern of violating the policy, or insufficient remedial measures were implemented. INTRODUCTION TO GUIDELINES The Jewish Community Federation (JCF) has a long and proud history as a funder of arts and other diverse community organizations which seek to inspire and celebrate Judaism and Jewish life. The JCF recognizes that art, by its very nature, may express a political statement, provoke a range of emotions, or promote ideas that are potentially controversial. The JCF believes the community and our institutions will be well-served by establishing guideposts that help ensure consistency with the JCF's core values and which are not aimed at squelching creativity, diverse expressions or critique around controversial topics. Grantees are strongly encouraged to consult with the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) in advance of potentially controversial programs that could contain any of the elements described in the scenarios below. Organizations ultimately make their own decisions, but broad consultation can help avoid conflicts with the policy, minimize surprise or polarization, and allow for the sharing of experiences before programs are set in stone. To ensure broad consultation, when there is a question whether a particular program may violate the policy or on the interpretation of the policy, JCRC will consult with the JCF's CEO, President and officers. The following guidelines are intended to assist grantees with respect to programming as it relates to the policy statement. GUIDELINES ON POTENTIALLY CONTROVERSIAL ISRAEL-RELATED PROGRAMMING Programs Generally in Accord with JCF Policy The following kinds of programs are generally in accord with the policy statement, but early JCRC consultation is strongly encouraged and the programming should be presented within an overall program strategy that is consistent with JCF's core values: 1.. Dialogue groups (i.e. non-public exchanges) 2.. Private meetings 3.. Presentations on topics other than the Middle East and Israel, that are not used to promote a BDS agenda or provide a forum for leaders of groups that espouse views inconsistent with JCF's core values 4.. Presentations by organizations or individuals that are critical of particular Israeli government policies but are supportive of Israel's right to exist as a secure independent Jewish democratic state and that do not espouse views inconsistent with this policy. 5.. Panel discussions, speaker series intended for the same audience, cultural presentations, or educational programs portraying a range of diverse perspectives that, on balance, are consistent with JCF's core values 6.. Programs that are open to the community and welcome attendees regardless of their individual views 7.. Participation in broad-based community coalitions on non-Israel-related issues provided that the coalitions do not become vehicles for undermining the legitimacy of Israel 8.. Artistic presentations (displays, exhibits, films, performances) that may include critical perspectives of Jewish life or Israel and that, on balance, are consistent with JCF's core values Programs Not Consistent with JCF's Policy In addition to the specific areas covered by the policy statement, the following kinds of programs are not consistent with the policy statement: 1.. Panel discussions, speakers series, cultural, artistic or educational programs that as an overall experience - i.e. based on the entire body of work - endorse or prominently promote the BDS movement or positions that undermine the legitimacy of the State of Israel 2.. Individual programs that endorse the BDS movement or positions that undermine the legitimacy of the State of Israel 3.. Co-sponsorship or co-presentations of public programs on Middle East issues with supporters of the BDS movement or others who undermine the legitimacy of the State of Israel a.. endorse or promote anti-Semitism, other forms of bigotry, violence or other extremist views; a.. actively seek to proselytize Jews away from Judaism; or a.. advocate for, or endorse, undermining the legitimacy of Israel as a secure independent, democratic Jewish state, including through participation in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, in whole or in part. http://www.muzzlewatch.com/2010/03/03/san-francisco-jewish-federation-officially-excommunicates-large-swath-of-jewish-population/?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 Thu Mar 4 13:27:11 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2010 14:27:11 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] =?iso-8859-1?q?Americans_are_angry_at_the_financial_c?= =?iso-8859-1?q?risis-just_not_at_the_fat_cats_who_caused_it=2E?= Message-ID: <84431C87845C4E268923EDE255FAEA18@Upstairs> Thank You, Wall Street. May We Have Another? Americans are angry at the financial crisis-just not at the fat cats who caused it. By David Corn Mother Jones January/February 2010 Issue LAST JANUARY, shortly before President Obama took office, veteran Democratic pollster John Marttila conducted a series of focus groups on a range of issues in the Philadelphia and Baltimore areas. When the conversations turned to the economy, Marttila was shocked. In the middle of the financial collapse, these people-men and women of different ages, incomes, races, and political affiliations-were predictably ticked off. But, he recalls, the "dominant emotional dynamic was self-criticism. They really felt that they had failed. They had spent too much on things they didn't need." The pollster had expected rage at Wall Street and George W. Bush, but the people in the groups barely mentioned Bush. And though they were upset by the shady and incomprehensible machinations of big banks, they were not revved up for revenge. "Their intellectual criticism was directed at the financial world," Marttila says, "but their emotional criticism was directed at themselves." Bottom line: They were not reaching for the pitchforks. A year later, as Congress struggles with financial reform, populist fury aimed at the one-time masters of the universe has yet to materialize in any targeted manner; there's no mass movement demanding fundamental change. Sure, outrage over executive compensation caught the attention of regulators and lawmakers, and President Barack Obama and the Federal Reserve have taken limited steps to curb pay. But lawmakers have apparently not been fretting too much about public sentiment as they followed the urgings of finance lobbyists and weakened legislation to rein in Wall Street. So where's the wrath? I asked a number of public opinion experts and politicians that question. Most of them said there was indeed anger outside the Beltway-just not the sort of vocal indignation that directly translates into action in Washington. Why? Politicians Don't Care. "People don't know what to do with the anger they do have," says Marttila, because they feel blocked by "senators, representatives, and [Treasury Secretary] Timothy Geithner, who speaks gobbledygook." Wall Street, in other words, is protected by the people's representatives. "There is a layer between Americans and the villains of Wall Street, and that's Congress," Marttila contends. With Obama adopting mostly mainstream positions on economic issues, no national figure has stepped in to rally the resentment. Nobody has put popular anger to good use, because nobody really wants to. Fear, Not Loathing. As a leading Democratic opponent of the banking bailouts, Rep. Brad Sherman of California has thought a fair amount about public sentiment and the economic crisis. "The public is very angry at Wall Street," he says. "But they are constantly told by all the respected voices that if we don't protect and preserve the institutions on Wall Street, we'll be fighting for rat meat on the streets." And this fearmongering works. Fear, Sherman says, is generally stronger than anger. The resentment that does exist is diffuse; it is not channeled toward specific solutions. The fear, however, is specific: What will happen to me and my family? With authorities in government and the media incessantly bleating that what's good for Wall Street is good for the country, Sherman adds, "we're angry at those people and we're too fearful to do anything about it." It's Complicated. There's no doubt Americans are upset about paying for the failures of banks and corporations, says Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. But the financial issues involved appear "incredibly arcane and difficult to penetrate. How do you regulate derivatives when 99 percent of the public don't understand it?" Marttila agrees: "The public policy implications are beyond the reach, vocabulary, and discussion of many. So the bad guys escape." Big Business vs. Big Government. For many decades, Americans have held negative attitudes toward the titans of industry. "It's a constant," says Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of the Gallup Poll. "You never go wrong vilifying big business." But Americans also don't fancy the counterbalance to corporate power: government. Since 1965, Gallup has asked survey respondents to choose the biggest future threat to the country: big business, big labor, or big government. Big government always wins-by a lot. In December 2006, 61 percent said they fretted about the government, compared with 25 percent who feared corporate power. Last spring, when Wall Street was in deep disrepute, the numbers changed only slightly: 55 percent still fingered big government as the greatest threat. "People always have concern about the government doing too much," says Newport, "even when [it's] regulating financial institutions they don't like." In fact, as recently as September, Gallup found that 45 percent of Americans believed there was too much government regulation of business. Only 24 percent said there was too little. "The lucky thing for business is that its foil is government," concludes Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center. This past summer, right-wing activists appeared to corner the market on populist rage. David Winston, a Republican consultant, maintains that this particular anger-over "death panels" and Obama "socialism"-was not widespread. Still, in September, when Rasmussen pollsters asked people how angry they were at current federal policies, without specifying which ones, two-thirds said "very" or "somewhat." Another Rasmussen poll found that 53 percent opposed greater regulation of the finance industry. And even when Americans like a new regulatory idea-such as the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which several pollsters said is popular-public sentiment hasn't been powerful enough to give lawmakers pause. Without noticeable public demand for an agency with teeth, it was easy for Congress to water down the proposal. As the House was working on this legislation in October, a consultant for the financial services industry told me that big banks were even cutting back on public relations help because they weren't sensing much popular animus and, consequently, did not expect to be whacked too hard on the Hill. Too Many Targets. Wall Street is also fortunate that it's not the only target of popular anger. Kohut's polls have found resentment at bailed-out banks, at homeowners who purchased houses they couldn't afford, and at the ballooning federal deficit. Because banks are seen as just one of the problems, "there's a little more support-but not a sea change-in how people feel about the government overseeing financial institutions." And in polling conducted since Obama took power, Kohut notes, respondents have been giving more conservative answers over time. In exit polls on Election Day 2008, more voters were in favor of activist government than had been four years earlier. But by February 2009, as an activist president settled into office, that number had already started dropping. The Obama presidency practically began with a backlash. Jobs, Jobs, Jobs. Winston, the GOP consultant, says that Americans share "a broad sense of frustration that Wall Street has been taken care of"-and they've gotten nothing. Even though the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress passed a hefty stimulus package that likely contributed to GDP growth, the jobs picture-what Americans care about the most-keeps getting worse. "Unemployment trumps Wall Street malfeasance," Winston maintains. "And most people don't see a financial protection agency or more regulation as a solution to unemployment." So is Wall Street in the clear? Just a few new regulations here and there, and then it's game on? The pollsters I consulted agreed that anyone tracking popular anger in the coming months should be watching not the Dow but the unemployment numbers. Anger prompted by joblessness will focus on politicians, not hedge fund managers. Which means that if politicians let Wall Street get away with shenanigans that kill jobs, they could end up paying for it with their careers. "Wall Street has probably weathered the worst," Rep. Sherman says ruefully. "And Washington has not faced the worst." David Corn is Mother Jones' Washington bureau chief. http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/01/financial-crisis-wall-street-anger -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Thu Mar 4 13:31:26 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2010 14:31:26 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] How Banks Got Too Big to Fail Message-ID: How Banks Got Too Big to Fail a.. January/February 2010 Issue See More Charts The nation's 10 largest financial institutions hold 54 percent of our total financial assets; in 1990, they held 20 percent. In the meantime, the number of banks has dropped from more than 12,500 to about 8,000. Some major mergers and acquisitions over the past 20 years: (Click on the chart for a larger view) This chart is part of Mother Jones' coverage of the financial crisis, one year later. http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/01/bank-merger-history -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 48783 bytes Desc: not available URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Thu Mar 4 13:33:40 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2010 14:33:40 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Federal Campaign Cash From Financial Sector Message-ID: Federal Campaign Cash From Financial Sector January/February 2010 Issue See More Charts This chart is part of Mother Jones' coverage of the financial crisis, one year later. http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/01/federal-campaign-cash-financial-sector -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 301 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 304 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 35155 bytes Desc: not available URL: From may at applebybooks.net Thu Mar 4 13:40:56 2010 From: may at applebybooks.net (May at Appleby Books) Date: Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:40:56 -0800 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Poor Grow Poorer - Richest 1% Has Captured America's Wealth Message-ID: <4B900CC8.6010302@applebybooks.net> 19 February 2010 Poor Grow Poorer: Richest 1% Has Captured America's Wealth The ultra rich have captured America - How can we take it back? By David DeGraw "The war against working people should be understood to be a real war... Specifically in the U.S., which happens to have a highly class-conscious business class... And they have long seen themselves as fighting a bitter class war, except they don't want anybody else to know about it." -- Noam Chomsky As a record amount of U.S. citizens are struggling to get by, many of the largest corporations are experiencing record-breaking profits, and CEOs are receiving record-breaking bonuses. How could this be happening, how did we get to this point? The Economic Elite have escalated their attack on U.S. workers over the past few years; however, this attack began to build intensity in the 1970s. In 1970, CEOs made $25 for every $1 the average worker made. Due to technological advancements, production and profit levels exploded from 1970-2000. With the lion's share of increased profits going to the CEO's, this pay ratio dramatically rose to $90 for CEOs to $1 for the average worker. As ridiculous as that seems, an in-depth study in 2004 on the explosion of CEO pay revealed that, including stock options and other benefits, CEO pay is more accurately $500 to $1. Paul Buchheit, from DePaul University, revealed, "From 1980 to 2006 the richest 1% of America tripled their after-tax percentage of our nation's total income, while the bottom 90% have seen their share drop over 20%." Robert Freeman added, "Between 2002 and 2006, it was even worse: an astounding three-quarters of all the economy's growth was captured by the top 1%." Due to this, the United States already had the highest inequality of wealth in the industrialized world prior to the financial crisis. Since the crisis, which has hit the average worker much harder than CEOs, the gap between the top one percent and the remaining 99% of the U.S. population has grown to a record high. The economic top one percent of the population now owns over 70% of all financial assets, an all time record. As mentioned before, just look at the first full year of the crisis when workers lost an average of 25 percent off their 401k. During the same time period, the wealth of the 400 richest Americans increased by $30 billion, bringing their total combined wealth to $1.57 trillion, which is more than the combined net worth of 50% of the US population. Just to make this point clear, 400 people have more wealth than 155 million people combined. Meanwhile, 2009 was a record-breaking year for Wall Street bonuses, as firms issued $150 billion to their executives. 100% of these bonuses are a direct result of our tax dollars, so if we used this money to create jobs, instead of giving them to a handful of top executives, we could have paid an annual salary of $30,000 to 5 million people. So while U.S. workers are now working more hours and have become dramatically more productive and profitable, our pay is actually declining and all the dramatic increases in wealth are going straight into the pockets of the Economic Elite. If our income had kept pace with compensation distribution rates established in the early 1970s, we would all be making at least three times as much as we are currently making. How different would your life be if you were making $120,000 a year, instead of $40,000? So it should come as no surprise to see that we now have the highest inequality of wealth in the industrialized world and the highest inequality of wealth in our nation's history. The backbone of America, a hard working middle class that has made our country a world leader, has been devastated. Now that we have a better understanding of how our income has been suppressed over the past 40 years, let's take a look at how the economy has been designed to take the limited money we receive and put it into the hands of the Economic Elite as well. Costs of living Other than in the workplace, in almost all our costs of living the system is now blatantly rigged against us. Let's take a look at it, starting out with our tax system. In total, the average U.S. citizen is forced to give up approximately 30% of our income in taxes. This tax system is now strategically designed to flow straight into the hands of the Economic Elite. A huge percentage of our tax dollars ultimately end up in their pockets. The past decade proves that--whether it's the Republicans or the Democrats running the government--our tax money is not going into our community, it is going into the pockets of the billionaires who have bought off both parties--it is obscene. For an example of how this system flows to the Economic Elite, just look at the Wall Street "bailout." The real size of the bailout is estimated to be $14 trillion -- and could end up costing trillions more than that. By now you are probably also sick of hearing about the bailout, but stop and think about this for a moment. Do you comprehend how much $14 trillion is? What could be accomplished with this money is almost beyond common comprehension. And this is just the tip of the iceberg that has hit us. On top of the trillions given to the Wall Street elite, we already have a record $12.3 trillion in national debt -- and we now have to pay $500 billion in interest to the Economic Elite on this debt every year, yet another way they are milking us dry. When you add in unfunded liabilities owed, like social security payments, we actually owe a stunning $74 trillion. That adds up to a debt of $242,000 for every man, woman and child in America. Trillions more, 25% of taxpayer dollars allocated to military spending, goes unaccounted for every year, not to mention the billions spent on overcharging and outright fraud. During the War on Terror, the Economic Elite have used our tax money to build a private army that has more soldiers deployed than the U.S. military -- a congressional study revealed that 69% of the "U.S." fighting forces deployed throughout the world in our name are in fact private mercenaries, 80% of them are foreign nationals. Private contractors regularly get paid three to five times more than our soldiers, and have been repeatedly caught overcharging and committing fraud on a massive scale. A congressional investigation revealed this and strongly recommended that we seize wasting tax dollars on these private military contractors. However, under Obama, there has actually been a drastic increase in total tax dollars spent on them. In 2009, just over $1 trillion tax dollars were spent on the military, it's safe to say that at least $350 billion of that was needlessly wasted. When you research our tax system you see an unprecedented level of waste and fraud rampant throughout most expenditures. Our tax system is a national disaster of epic proportions. It is literally an organized criminal operation that continues to rob us in broad daylight, with zero accountability. Politicians and mainstream "news" outlets will not tell you this, but most every serious economist knows that due to so much theft and debt created in the tax system, the only way to fix things, other than stopping the theft and seizing the trillions that have been stolen, will be for the government to cut important social funding and drastically raise our taxes. Other than the record national debt, many states are running record deficits and are barreling toward economic disaster, raising the likelihood of higher taxes, more government layoffs and deep cuts in services. Our nation's biggest state economies, like California and New York, are the ones in most trouble. To merely say that things will not be improving economically is to be a delusional optimist. The truth that you will not hear: we have been hit by an economic deathblow and the United States lay in ruins. It's not just this criminal tax system; the theft is now built into all our costs of living. Trillions more in our spending on food and fuel has been stolen due to fraudulent stock transactions and overcharging. Just 10 years ago, in 2000, American families paid 7% of our income on food and fuel. We now pay 20%. This drastic increase is primarily driven by fraudulent market manipulation that drives up stock prices. Congress uncovered this in 2006; as part of the Enron investigation they found that companies manipulated the oil market to create major spikes in stock values, and then they didn't do anything about it -- nothing to see here, just move on. As mentioned before, we have the most expensive health care system in the world and we are forced to pay twice as much as other countries, and the overall care we get in return ranks 37th in the world. On average, U.S. citizens are now paying a record high 8% of their income on medical care. Part of the reason why foreclosure rates are so high is because the percentage of income Americans pay on their housing has risen to 34%. So for these basic necessities--taxes, food, fuel, shelter and medical bills--we have already lost 92% of our limited income. Then factor in ever-increasing interest rates on credit cards, student loans, rising prices for cable, internet, phone, bank fees, etc., etc., etc. We are being robbed and gouged in all costs of living, in every aspect of our life. No wonder bankruptcies are skyrocketing and the number of people suffering from psychological depression has reached an epidemic level. The American worker is screwed over every step of the way, and it all starts with the explosion in the cost of a college education. This is one of the Economic Elite's most devastating weapons. To have any chance of succeeding in this economy, it is commonly believed that you must attend the best college possible. With the rising costs involved, today's students are graduating with record levels of debt from student loans. At the same time, the unemployment rate among recent college graduates has risen higher than the national average, and those that do find work are making significantly less than they expected to make. This combination of extreme debt and reduced pay has crippled an entire generation right from the start and has put them in a vicious cycle of spiraling debt that they will struggle with for the rest of their lives. The most recent college graduates are now known as a "lost generation." The American dream has turned into a nightmare. The economic system is a sophisticated prison cell; the indentured servant is now an indebted wage slave; whips and chains have evolved into debts. "There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by sword. The other is by debt." -- John Adams Concealing national wealth "Liberty in the concrete signifies release from the impact of particular oppressive forces; emancipation from something once taken as a normal part of human life but now experienced as bondage... Today, it signifies liberation from material insecurity and from the coercions and repressions that prevent multitudes from participation in the vast cultural resources that are at hand." -- John Dewey When you take the time to research and analyze the wealth that has gone to the economic top one percent, you begin to realize just how much we have been robbed. Trillions upon trillions of dollars that could make the lives of all hard working Americans much easier have been strategically funneled into the coffers of the Economic Elite. The denial of wealth is the key to the Economic Elite's power. An entire generation of massive wealth creation has been strategically withheld from 99% of the U.S. population. The U.S. public doesn't have any understanding of how much wealth has been generated and concentrated into the hands of the Economic Elite over the past 40 years; there is no historical frame of reference. This withholding of wealth is truly the greatest crime against humanity in the history of civilization. What could be done with all the money that has been hoarded by the Economic Elite is extraordinary! Let's consider what we could do with the money that has been stolen from us? On top of what should be our average six-figure yearly income, we could have: - Free health care for every American, - A free 4 bedroom home for every American family, - 5% tax rate for 99% of Americans, - Drastically improved public education and free college for all, - Significantly improved public transportation and infrastructure, The list goes on... This is not some far-fetched fantasy. These are all things that Franklin D. Roosevelt talked about doing in the 1940's, long before the explosion of wealth creation in our technologically advanced global economy. The money for all this is already there, stashed into the claws of the Economic Elite. The denial of wealth to the masses is the key to the Economic Elite's power. Outside of outdated and obsolete economic models and theories--and incredibly short-sighted greed--there is no reason why all this money should be kept in the hands of a few, at the immense suffering and expense of the many. If Americans could just understand how much wealth is being withheld from us, we would have a massive uprising and the Economic Elite would be swept away, into the history books alongside the evil despots of the past. [This is Part II of David DeGraw's report, "The Economic Elite vs. People of the USA," originally published at Amped Status. Click here for Part I. Read more of David McGraw's writing here.] ? 2010 Amped Status From hain at antcolbks.com Thu Mar 4 13:43:07 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2010 14:43:07 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] A year after the biggest bailout in US history, Wall Street lobbyists own it lock, stock, and barrel. Message-ID: <8AAB44CF2EF946B1BF4B6584881F9768@Upstairs> Capital City A year after the biggest bailout in US history, Wall Street lobbyists don't just have influence in Washington. They own it lock, stock, and barrel. - By Kevin Drum January/February 2010 Issue THIS STORY IS NOT ABOUT THE origins of 2008's financial meltdown. You've probably read more than enough of those already. To make a long story short, it was a perfect storm. Reckless lending enabled a historic housing bubble; an overseas savings glut and an unprecedented Fed policy of easy money enabled skyrocketing debt; excessive leverage made the global banking system so fragile that it couldn't withstand a tremor, let alone the Big One; the financial system squirreled away trainloads of risk via byzantine credit derivatives and other devices; and banks grew so towering and so interconnected that they became too big to be allowed to fail. With all that in place, it took only a small nudge to bring the entire house of cards crashing to the ground. But that's a story about finance and economics. This is a story about politics. It's about how Congress and the president and the Federal Reserve were persuaded to let all this happen in the first place. In other words, it's about the finance lobby-the people who, as Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) put it last April, even after nearly destroying the world are "still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place." But it's also about something even bigger. It's about the way that lobby-with the eager support of a resurgent conservative movement and a handful of powerful backers-was able to fundamentally change the way we think about the world. Call it a virus. Call it a meme. Call it the power of a big idea. Whatever you call it, for three decades they had us convinced that the success of the financial sector should be measured not by how well it provides financial services to actual consumers and corporations, but by how effectively financial firms make money for themselves. It sounds crazy when you put it that way, but stripped to its bones, that's what they pulled off. There's more to say about how they accomplished this, but to understand just how extravagant the finance lobby's power is, you need to understand some background first. There are a lot of places we could start: the election of Ronald Reagan and the beginning of the great era of financial deregulation. The collapse of Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust in 1984. The $100 billion bailout of the savings and loan industry. The Mexican crisis of 1994. The Asian crisis of 1997. But for our purposes, the best place to start is 1998. That was the year a hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management imploded and very nearly took the global financial system down with it. It was, if you will, a dry run for 2008. The Warning At the time it was founded, LTCM was the biggest, most prestigious hedge fund ever created. The brainchild of John Meriwether, former head of bond trading at Salomon Brothers, it had two future Nobel Prize winners as partners, a staff of virtuoso traders and brilliant mathematicians, $10 million worth of fancy engineering workstations, and an initial capitalization somewhere north of $1 billion. It was the largest start-up hedge fund in history. It was also one of the most successful. But LTCM didn't make its money by doing anything so crude as betting on things like the rise and fall of the stock market. In fact, like most big hedge funds, LTCM paid very little attention to stocks. The Dow Jones average might get all the attention, but Wall Street pros know two things: The market for debt is far larger than the market for equities, and it provides far more fertile ground for mathematical manipulation and epic profits. But clever mathematics alone isn't enough to make Gatsbyesque fortunes. For that, you need to use leverage. You need to borrow other people's money. Lots of it. It's easy to see why. A typical LTCM bet would start when someone noticed a spread that seemed a little out of whack. For example, two bonds might trade for slightly different prices even though they were nearly identical. So LTCM would go long in one bond and short in the other, essentially betting that the spread would narrow. Bond traders deal in basis points-hundredths of a percentage point-and a bet like this might depend on a spread of, say, 20 basis points narrowing to 10. That's a nearly invisible movement, and on a million-dollar trade it nets you a grand total of $1,000. Hardly worth bothering with unless you make it a billion-dollar bet instead. That's what LTCM did: It mastered a method that let it borrow huge sums of money practically for free and that turned thousand-dollar profits into million-dollar profits. Do that a few hundred times a year and you're talking real money. But leverage is a harsh mistress: It allows you to make lots of money when things go right, but it also allows you to lose lots of money very quickly when they don't. And in 1998 things didn't go right. Spreads that were supposed to narrow kept widening, and LTCM was forced to dip into its own capital to pay back the huge short-term loans it had taken out to leverage its bets. Losses kept mounting, creditors called in their loans, and eventually everything came crashing down. But a funny thing happened on the way to the crash: The New York Fed stepped in and arranged a bailout. Almost all of Wall Street's biggest firms participated, and they did so for one reason: The Fed convinced them that LTCM was too big to fail. An uncontrolled bankruptcy might set off a domino effect that could bring down dozens of banks. A few months later, an interagency report concluded, "The near collapse of LTCM illustrates the need for all participants in our financial system, not only hedge funds, to face constraints on the amount of leverage they assume." It was a bipartisan judgment, signed by Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and by Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's treasury secretary. In any sane world, it would have been a call to arms. After all, LTCM was only worth a few billion dollars. If a relative minnow like that could pose a risk to the global economy merely through the use of profligate leverage, what might happen if a money-center bank worth 100 times as much did the same thing? But we don't live in a sane world. We live in a world where leverage-as well as Wall Street's nearly endless stream of new contrivances for exploiting it-is largely controlled not by regulators or congressional committees, but by the finance lobby. And the last thing the finance lobby wants is constraints of any kind. So Wall Street promised solemnly to take the lessons of LTCM to heart and then got right down to the business of ignoring them. In fact it spent the next decade not merely blocking reform, but making things worse by lobbying relentlessly to expand leverage, complexity, regulatory forbearance, and risk. Now if the aerospace lobby had told us after the 1986 Challenger disaster that the key to better performance was to turbocharge the engines and quit performing preflight inspections, everyone would have agreed that they were crazy. Yet that's essentially what the finance lobby has done over the past decade, and in some weird way we were too mesmerized to recognize it. Within months of a near catastrophe caused by one of the industry's brightest stars, the lobbyists were busily making certain that it would happen again-and that when it did happen, it would be bigger and more disastrous than ever. Unleashing the Banks It's hard to directly observe any lobby at work-by nature, it's not business typically done out in the open-but in the same way that a meteor leaves behind a crater that lets you know its size and force of impact, so does the finance lobby. Sometimes these are laws passed by Congress. Sometimes they're tax breaks kept in place by friendly senators. Sometimes they're rulings by the Federal Reserve. Sometimes they're green lights from federal watchdog agencies. All of these are part of our story, but it starts with Congress, which left behind the two biggest craters of them all in 1999 and 2000, a little more than a year after the LTCM collapse. The first was the Financial Services Modernization Act. The follow-up was the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. The FSMA was designed to tear down a Depression-era law, the Glass-Steagall Act, that had set up the FDIC to guarantee commercial bank deposits and put up a fire wall between commercial banking and investment banking. The idea behind the 1933 law was pretty simple: Commercial banks should use their government-backed funds only for reasonably safe activities. Investment banks could take more risks, but they were on their own if things fell apart. But starting in the 1980s, that became increasingly intolerable to Wall Street. Commercial banks were sitting on an enormous pile of money that they were prohibited from investing in anything more interesting than business and home loans. So they lobbied Congress. They lobbied the Fed. They lobbied the Treasury. They lobbied tirelessly for 20 years, and finally, after spending $209 million in 1998 alone, they got what they wanted: The wall was torn down and they were free to gamble customers' funds in any way they wanted. In essence they became the world's biggest hedge funds. And if LTCM was too big to fail, suddenly Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase were way too big to fail. By itself, this was dangerous enough. But then Congress made things even worse. In the previous decade the world of derivatives-swaps, futures, and options-had become ever more complex and lucrative. The finance lobby was eager to make sure they remained largely unregulated, and in 2000 the Commodity Futures Modernization Act granted their wish. Long-standing state laws against "bucket shops"-informal exchanges that allowed investors to gamble on securities they didn't actually own-were preempted, and Wall Street was officially turned into a casino. Banks could literally bet on anything. Like so much else about the finance lobby, this was a bipartisan binge. The FSMA is also known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, and it's true that all three of those gentlemen were Republicans dedicated to the cult of deregulation. Alan Greenspan was a keen advocate too. But the law was passed by a big bipartisan majority in the House, signed into law by Bill Clinton, and had been eagerly supported by Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. By the time it was passed, however, Rubin was long gone. He had taken a top job at Citigroup, one of the banks that had lobbied hardest for the deregulation that would eventually be its downfall. Deregulation would help Rubin earn over $100 million in the following decade. Not bad. The Paycheck Lobby The finance lobby isn't just banks. Technically it's known as the FIRE lobby-Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate-and it includes basically anyone who makes money by handling money. That means big money-center supermarket banks, small community banks, Wall Street investment banks, insurance companies, mortgage brokers, hedge funds, credit card issuers, trade groups like the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, private equity firms, credit unions, and more. Some of them, like the hedge funds, didn't lobby heavily for the big deregulation of 1999 and 2000, because they were already pretty lightly regulated. Instead, they lobbied for other things. Like protecting bigger paychecks. Wall Street bankers may seem like a pretty well-off bunch, but when they decide that a million dollars doesn't go as far as it used to, they leave and start up a hedge fund. Hedge fund managers typically get paid 2 percent of the value of the assets under their control plus 20 percent of the investment profits, and for a successful manager this can add up to tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Aside from market reversals, the only real threat to their riches is the IRS. Their defense against the taxman is something called the carried interest rule, and it's elegant in both its simplicity and its shamelessness: It simply declares their compensation to be capital gains, not ordinary income. That means it gets taxed at 15 percent instead of 35 percent. At first, it's hard to figure out how they get away with this. After all, capital gains are the profit you make on money of your own that you invest. But hedge fund managers invest other people's money and get paid a piece of the action. By any customary definition, this is ordinary income, the same as a sports agent taking his 10 percent or a CEO whose bonus depends on performance. But enough money can buy you a defense of the indefensible. "If you get Chuck Schumer on your side, you are okay," one former SEC official told the New York Times, and that's exactly what the finance lobby has done. The New York Democrat is a member of both the Senate Committee on Finance and the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and he's received so much money from Wall Street over the years-more than $14 million-that he actually shut down his personal fundraising efforts between 2005 and 2008. Since then he's raised a staggering $284 million for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which he headed until recently, and much of it has come from Wall Street. In June 2007 alone, when lobbying for the carried interest rule reached a fever pitch, employees of private equity firms contributed nearly $800,000 to the DSCC. It was money well spent: Schumer agreed to support a repeal of the rule only if taxes were also raised on things like venture-capital and real-estate partnerships, a stand that guaranteed resistance from enough interest groups to let the hedge funds' special treatment survive unscathed. A million-dollar investment had allowed the hedge fund industry to keep a billion-dollar loophole. Not a bad return. A Flock of Scandals Congress isn't the only place that draws the finance lobby's attention. When the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, it was designed to be an independent agency. But that only means that it's technically independent from Congress and the president. It's not independent from the finance lobby. Just the opposite. The 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks-including the all-important branch in New York City-are governed by boards of directors dominated by bankers chosen by...the banks themselves. That might explain why the Fed has dragged its feet addressing the scandal of overdraft fees on debit cards. And "scandal" isn't too strong a word. The overdraft industry, which started only 16 years ago, has grown to nearly $40 billion. It's one of the banking industry's biggest honeypots. How? Well, many people don't realize that you can incur more than one overdraft fee in a single day, or that many banks deliberately reorder purchases to ensure that you pay the maximum number of fees. And while the Fed finally ruled that come July consumers must opt in to overdraft protection, it didn't address the central flaw: Overdraft fees are essentially a form of loan sharking. Consider that the average overdraft amount is $17 and is paid back in five days. With the typical overdraft fee now around $35, this works out to nearly $2 in fees for every $1 borrowed, an effective annual percentage rate of more than 10,000 percent. Not even the Mafia has a vig like that. And the only reason it's legal is because in 2004 the Federal Reserve bowed to industry pressure and ruled that overdraft fees shouldn't be classified as loans. Sure, it conceded, banks promote overdraft protection "in a manner that leads consumers to believe that it is a line of credit." And the Fed politely encouraged them to shape up. But it didn't actually require anyone to stop these practices. It was yet another multibillion-dollar cash cow protected by the finance lobby at the expense of consumers. As recently as 40 years ago this would have been inconceivable. In 1968 Congress passed the Truth in Lending Act, which, among other things, regulated the disclosure of interest rates on consumer loans and prevented credit card companies from charging customers more than $50 if someone stole their card and ran up a big bill. The financial industry didn't much like the new regulations, but the idea that banks should be required to watch out for both themselves and their customers was popular and widespread. The bill passed. By the end of the 20th century, though, that sort of George Bailey attitude was gone. In fact, an effort to strengthen the Truth in Lending Act to regulate predatory lending failed four separate times between 2000 and 2003 thanks to tenacious resistance from the finance lobby. So what happened between then and now? Money, of course. To get a better sense of just how much money, let's take a virtual stroll down K Street and see what everyone is spending on the world's second-oldest profession. It's all laid out for us by OpenSecrets.org. The defense lobby? Pikers. They contributed $24 million to individuals and PACs during the last election cycle. The farm lobby? $65 million. Health care? We're getting warmer. Health care was the No. 2 industry, at $167 million. And the finance lobby? They're No. 1, with a very, very big bullet. They contributed an astonishing $475 million during the 2008 election cycle. That's up from $60 million almost two decades ago. But this just pushes the question back a step: How can the finance lobby afford to spend so much more than anyone else? It feels silly to say that it's because they have all the money-these are banks we're talking about, after all-but that's basically it. They have all the money. Princeton economics professor Hyun Song Shin laid it out last June in a paper that tracked the flow of money through various parts of the economy. Between 1954 and 1980 every sector he studied grew at roughly the same pace, increasing about tenfold. (See "The Securities Boom.") But in 1980, after the great financial deregulation of the Reagan era began, his charts show a sudden discontinuity-while households, corporations, and commercial banks grew another tenfold between 1980 and 2008, the securities sector grew nearly a hundredfold. This was the financialization of America, as Wall Street evolved from providing financial services to creating products-junk bonds, credit default swaps, subprime loan securitization, collateralized debt obligations-designed to allow Wall Street itself to prosper. By the height of the credit bubble between 2000 and 2007, the financial industry earned a staggering 40 percent of all corporate profits recorded in the United States, four times what they earned in 1980. Over the same period, average pay on Wall Street doubled, while bonuses at the top sextupled. It was, depending on your perspective, either a vicious circle or a virtuous one. Deregulation produced vast profits, and those profits in turn provided the money to lobby for further deregulation. It was this ocean of money that allowed the financial industry to spend nearly $500 million on political contributions in just a single election cycle, and it was those contributions that helped keep so many flagrantly abusive-but profitable-practices alive and well. It was, for example, what allowed Big Finance to keep Congress from banning "universal default," the small-print declaration on millions of credit card applications that banks could retroactively raise interest rates on consumers at any time for any reason. It was why the FBI's warnings of an "epidemic" of mortgage fraud as early as 2004 were completely ignored. It's why no one ever did anything about the multibillion-dollar abuse of the "yield spread premium," a kickback paid to mortgage brokers for guiding their customers into higher-interest loans than they qualified for. It was why the Fed ignored years of pleading from community groups to do something about abusive mortgage lending. It's why the credit card industry could afford to spend 10 years and $100 million lobbying for a punitive bankruptcy bill that, among other things, made it harder to write off credit card debt. It's why banks are paid fat subsidies to make government-backed student loans even though the Congressional Budget Office estimates taxpayers would save $80 billion over 10 years if the government made the loans outright. It's why Hawaii Sen. Daniel Akaka's bill to require a warning to consumers about how long it takes to pay off a credit card balance if you make only the minimum payment was effortlessly swatted aside year after year. It's how the late Delaware Sen. William Roth (also the creator of the Roth IRA, another bank windfall) could get away with slashing tax audits on the superrich by doing nothing more than holding transparently comical hearings in 1997 and 1998 that portrayed IRS agents as jackbooted thugs who kicked down doors and held guns to young girls' heads while forcing them to undress. But there's more to the finance lobby than just money and political influence. Their real power lies in the fact that they've so thoroughly changed our collective attitude toward financial regulation that sometimes they barely need to lobby in the traditional sense at all. That became obvious one spring day more than five years ago-or rather, it would have, had anyone paid attention. Stockholm Syndrome In April 2004 the SEC held a hearing. It was sparsely attended and quickly forgotten, but in 2008 Stephen Labaton of the New York Times got hold of an audio recording of the session and wrote an account of what happened. The issue at hand was something called the net capital rule. Originally put in place in 1975, it set limits on how much leverage investment banks were allowed to carry on their books-limits that all five of Wall Street's biggest investment banks wanted loosened. Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson, later to become George W. Bush's treasury secretary, had begun pressing for higher limits in 2000. Now, the SEC was considering doing just that. The SEC meeting took place almost six years after the collapse of LTCM had dramatically demonstrated the systemic danger of unrestricted leverage. It came four years after a Fed staffer wrote a journal article clearly pointing out that banks were hiding more and more leverage. It came two years after the FDIC had passed a rule allowing banks to use complex hedges to effectively increase their leverage even more. It came at a time when the housing bubble was already heating up, the credit derivative market was exploding, and the Fed's easy money policy was in its third consecutive year. What's remarkable, when you listen to that recording, is not that the banks got everything they wanted-of course they did. It's that the new policy passed virtually without question. There was a single written dissent from an unknown risk management expert in Indiana, a couple of routine queries from one commissioner, and reassurances from staffers that the new rule posed no problems because the banks would police themselves. After less than an hour of desultory discussion, the new rule was in place. In other words, very little lobbying was even required. After three decades of deregulatory fervor, it had simply become unnecessary. The SEC, like so many other government watchdogs, was by 2004 a thoroughgoing victim of regulatory capture, its appointees mostly Wall Street insiders with more sympathy for banks than for the public they were supposed to protect. But the problem was bigger than just that. Unlike most industries, which everyone recognizes are merely lobbying in their own self-interest, the finance industry successfully convinced everyone that deregulating finance was not only safe, but self-evidently good for the entire economy, Wall Street and Main Street alike. It's what Simon Johnson, an MIT economics professor and former chief economist for the IMF, calls "intellectual capture." Considering what's happened over the past couple of years, we might better call it Stockholm syndrome. Like all the other products of the industry's three-decade lobbying spree, the change to the net capital rule ended up in disaster when the overleveraged financial system nearly collapsed on itself. By October 2008, even former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, one of the country's biggest cheerleaders for self-regulation, was admitting the obvious: There was a "flaw" in the free-market worldview. "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder's equity, myself especially, are in a state of shocked disbelief," he said in testimony before the House oversight committee. If the case against self-regulation was strong then, it's stronger now. Far from being chastened by last year's meltdown, banks are back to their old tricks. The sliced-and-diced mortgage securities that caused so much trouble during the credit bubble are being re-sliced and -diced via something called a RE-REMIC (resecuritization of real estate mortgage investment conduit)-and business is booming. At Goldman Sachs, leverage in the first half of 2009 was at its highest level in its history. Even more astonishingly, the Wall Street Journal estimates that overall pay on Wall Street will rise to record levels in 2009, higher than at the height of the bubble. It's as if the global collapse that nearly destroyed them has been completely forgotten. So what happens next? Congress and the Obama administration have plans to re-regulate the financial industry, but you can't undo 30 years of intellectual capture in a few months-especially when the reform effort is mostly in the hands of former finance executives. That's evident in the fact that the simplest, most striking proposals for reining in bank behavior aren't even getting a serious hearing. Former Fed chairman Paul Volcker, for example, suggests that commercial banks should simply be banned from securities trading altogether. They should go back to making loans and underwriting bonds, but leave the risky, leverage-heavy trading to hedge funds, where it's fire-walled away from the plumbing of the overall banking system. Another former Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan, thinks we should break up big banks the same way we broke up Standard Oil 100 years ago. "If they're too big to fail, they're too big," he said in October. Other economists have proposed a small tax on all financial transactions (perhaps a quarter of a percent or so), something that could reduce short-term speculation and help reduce the long-term deficit all at once. But those reforms were never even considered. The problem isn't that Obama administration officials don't know where the real fault lines lie. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner released a set of guidelines earlier this year that focused squarely on leverage, capital requirements, and regulation of the shadow financial system, not just on commercial banks. And a month later Obama economic adviser Larry Summers noted that our current deregulated system has produced economic crises like clockwork every three years. "Surely we cannot be satisfied with a system that misfires so seriously so frequently," he said. But Obama's actual regulatory proposal didn't reflect any of this sense of urgency. "We don't want to tilt at windmills," he explained last June-and there was little doubt which windmill he was talking about. Just a couple of months earlier the financial industry had won a stunning victory over a seemingly shoo-in administration proposal to modify bankruptcy laws for strapped homeowners-and they had not only won, they had managed to get billions in extra bailout money at the same time. That remarkable demonstration of raw power caught the Obama administration's attention, so rather than risk another defeat it began compromising even before its proposal was introduced. Top bank executives and financial lobbyists were part of the planning from the start, and as a result mutual funds and hedge funds got away with only modest new limits, credit ratings agencies were left largely untouched, the most dangerous varieties of derivatives were left alone, almost nothing was done to reduce the size of the biggest banks, and additional powers were given to the Fed, which has shown repeatedly that it's too close to Wall Street to ever regulate it effectively. What's worse, it's not clear that even what's left will ever see the light of day. One of the best parts of Obama's proposal-and the scariest to bankers-was a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency that would regulate financial products the same way the Consumer Product Safety Commission regulates toasters. Even Alan Greenspan, perhaps humbled by the Fed's failures under his watch, supported the idea. The Fed, he admitted, simply wasn't likely to ever crack down on lending abuses. Needless to say, the financial industry likes it that way, which is why the CFPA is the part of Obama's plan they've been working the hardest to eviscerate. And where intellectual capture isn't enough to do the job, there's always money. After a brief dip in political outlays at the end of 2008, the financial industry spent $402 million in the first 10 months of 2009 on both lobbying and campaign contributions, enough to put them on track to break 2008's record. Members of the House Committee on Financial Services alone received more than $8 million in industry contributions. Whether the CFPA eventually survives is still up in the air, but the finance lobby scored a big victory almost immediately when Obama's proposal went to Capitol Hill and was quickly stripped of its requirement that banks offer consumers "plain vanilla" products-things like standard 30-year fixed mortgages and low-interest, low-fee credit cards-in addition to their more convoluted options. A couple of weeks later banks with less than $10 billion in assets-a category that includes 98 percent of all US banks-were exempted from the CFPA's scrutiny entirely. And proposals to regulate derivatives by forcing them to be traded on supervised exchanges, as stocks and commodity futures already are, were watered down as well. How could all this happen so soon after the financial industry's reckless behavior nearly caused a global meltdown? Ironically, it's probably because the bailout was so successful. Without a sense of crisis to drive things, the political will to take on the industry has largely dissipated. Even after nearly destroying the world economy, the finance lobby is, still, simply too big to fight. http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/01/wall-street-big-finance-lobbyists -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Mar 4 17:57:40 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2010 17:57:40 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [Video] Historian Webster Tarpley on the Dalai Lama Message-ID: Video: An alternate take on the Dalai Lama http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhXw-2aqJ3E =============================== 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 Mar 4 21:20:48 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2010 21:20:48 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] 'New Left Review' at 50 Message-ID: <4FB45B34900A4294A28595BB483D51D7@agingCHS072729> http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100322/wiener 'New Left Review' at 50 Comment By Jon Wiener This article appeared in the March 22, 2010 edition of The Nation. March 4, 2010 "It is hard not to be intimidated by New Left Review," Stefan Collini wrote recently in the Guardian. He's right: first there is the intellectual range and analytical power of the NLR writers, and now there's the fact that it has been publishing for fifty years. The fiftieth anniversary issue--the 299th--reviews the magazine's history, announces its current agenda and displays the qualities that have made it so significant over the past half-century. (Note: I've been a friend of several of the editors for years, and NLR has published book reviews of mine.) The journal began as part of a mobilization of students in Britain at the end of the 1950s. In the new issue, Stuart Hall, the first editor, describes the forces that "nourished its initial cohort." They are evident in the first issue--January 1960--which included two pieces on the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, critiques of Britain's Labour Party by Ralph Miliband and Clancy Sigal, and discussions of the English working class by Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and Edward P. Thompson. Two years later, a new group, led by Perry Anderson and Robin Blackburn, took over the editorial leadership. Their focus was more international and their approach more theoretical. As the movements of the '60s reached a climax in 1968, NLR followed closely what looked to many of us like revolution. In the decade that followed, the Review became the place young people in the United States and Britain learned about "Western Marxism," from Gramsci and Luk?cs to the Frankfurt School to Althusser. The range of articles broadened to include extended essays on economics, aesthetics and philosophy, and unforgettable work by Mike Davis on Los Angeles and Fredric Jameson on postmodernism. After the NLR editors launched New Left Books in 1970 (later Verso), a new generation of students read the works of continental Marxist theory as they eagerly awaited--and then debated--each issue of the journal. In 2000 the journal was relaunched with a new political tone and a sharpened focus. After two decades of triumphant Reaganism and Thatcherism, editor Perry Anderson declared, the political baseline for NLR had to be "a lucid registration of historical defeat." The journal, Anderson said, would nevertheless continue its "refusal of any accommodation with the ruling system." Susan Watkins, who has been the editor since 2003, opens the fiftieth anniversary issue with an editorial that considers the recent global financial collapse and the absence of a concerted left response. In a sentence that exemplifies NLR's political-intellectual stance and its literary style, she writes, "That neoliberalism's crisis should be so eerily non-agonistic, in contrast to the bitter battles over its installation, is a sobering measure of its triumph." Assessing the magazine's last decade, Watkins finds that NLR's "record on ecological questions has been erratic," while its "record on social issues has been just as uneven, not least on what was once the Woman Question"--all true. But there has also been strong work during this period by Robert Brenner on economic turbulence and by a number of writers on China. The lead article in the new issue is Mike Davis's discussion of environmental politics after the failure of the Copenhagen summit. "We must start thinking like Noah," he writes. But "since most of history's giant trees have already been cut down, a new Ark will have to be constructed out of the materials that a desperate humanity finds at hand in insurgent communities, pirate technologies, bootlegged media, rebel science and forgotten utopias." In a surprising development, the publication of Davis's article prompted Alexander Cockburn to resign from the editorial committee. Cockburn, who started writing for the Review in 1963 and joined the editorial committee soon thereafter, told me it bothered him that the fiftieth anniversary issue "should be signaled by a particularly uncritical and unscientific embrace of climate catastrophism--now sadly the prime obsession of what passes for the left." Davis appealed to him to reconsider, writing in an e-mail, "Something as trivial as my opinions should not be a cause for severing a moral and political relationship as profound and long-standing as your association with the NLR." But Cockburn's name will not be on the masthead when the next issue appears. The biggest article in the new issue is Perry Anderson's "Two Revolutions," a dazzling piece contrasting the failed Soviet state with the People's Republic of China, now "an engine of the world economy." China today, he writes, represents something new in history: "never have so many moved out of absolute poverty so fast. Never have.... workers, till yesterday theoretical masters of the state, [been] treated at will so ruthlessly--jobs destroyed, wages unpaid, injuries mocked, protests stifled." "Emancipation and regression," Anderson concludes, "have often been conjoined in the past; but never quite so vertiginously as in the China that Mao helped to create and sought to prevent." The rest of the issue includes longtime editor Tariq Ali's fierce critique of Obama's foreign policy, which, he argues, continues Bush's in every significant way; an interview with Eric Hobsbawm, still brilliant at 92, on the big questions historians should seek to answer in the aftermath of the cold war; and Robin Blackburn's insightful essay on why no socialist movement developed in the United States in the late nineteenth century. The new issue shows that the 1960s cohort is still as strong as ever--and also that the Review has recruited new generations: Gopal Balakrishnan, who is 44 and a member of the editorial committee, has a fascinating piece on Obama's strange connection to Reinhold Niebuhr, the theologian of midcentury cold war liberalism. The masthead includes 33-year-old deputy editor Tony Wood, who writes on Russia and Latin America. Emilie Bickerton, another member of the editorial committee, who writes on French film, is in her 20s, as are several others who have written for the magazine over the past few years. NLR has often been criticized for being too theoretical, and also too pessimistic. Of course, the absence of a vigorous left-wing movement can make all radical thought seem irrelevant. But the journal's sustained critique of neoliberalism remains indispensable, for understanding the present and for imagining a different future. To do work of this quality during these dark decades is a tremendous achievement--and for that, we thank the New Left Review. =============================== 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 Thu Mar 4 23:32:17 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2010 00:32:17 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Levin urges Pentagon to rethink plans for $1 billion in NEW Blackwater contracts Message-ID: <6B85C2686B0A4AE692A4C17C5D0CA572@Upstairs> Levin urges Pentagon to rethink plans for $1 billion in new Blackwater contracts By Joby Warrick Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, March 5, 2010 The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee has issued a strong warning to the Defense Department over plans to award $1 billion in new contracts to the firm formerly known as Blackwater, accusing managers of the private security company of lying to win lucrative jobs in Afghanistan. Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) also cited a history of allegedly abusive behavior by Blackwater employees, including misappropriation of government weapons and hiring of workers with criminal records that included assault and drug offenses. Levin did not directly say that the Pentagon should cancel its plans for the contracts but urged officials to "consider the deficiencies" in Blackwater's performance before making a final decision. The firm's inadequacies "appear to have . . . undermined our mission in Afghanistan," the senator said in a letter to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. Levin released the letter Thursday after an investigation by his committee raised questions about efforts by Xe Services, as Blackwater is now known, to seek defense contracts to train Afghan National Army troops. The company bid for the job through a subsidiary known as Paravant. In applying for the contracts, Paravant submitted statements saying it had years of experience and a strong cadre of trained, thoroughly screened instructors. In reality, Paravant was a shell company created solely to conceal Xe's involvement and to avoid what one executive with the firm "called the 'baggage' associated with the Blackwater name," according to a statement issued by Levin's office. Evidence gathered by Levin's investigators raised "very serious questions about Blackwater's conduct," the senator said in the letter to Gates. In a separate letter, also released Thursday, Levin called on Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to launch an investigation into contract practices by Xe and Raytheon, which had hired Blackwater as a subcontractor. "If the Army contracting officer had known he was approving a subcontract with Blackwater, perhaps he would have taken . . . the company's lack of credibility into account when deciding to approve that subcontract," Levin said in the letter. Joseph Yorio, president and chief executive of Xe, acknowledged in a statement that there had been "management mistakes in the Paravant program." He said the problems had prompted a top-to-bottom review of company practices. Yorio, who testified last week before Levin's committee, also noted that Xe had successfully trained thousands of Afghan troops. "Xe . . . has provided critical assistance in the vital United States effort to create a safe and stable Afghanistan," he said. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/04/AR2010030405044.html?hpi -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Thu Mar 4 23:35:59 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2010 00:35:59 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Rockefeller pushes for 2 year moratorium on EPA ability to regulate greenhouse gases Message-ID: <9F070A5F3D784680BF52F3A02E5E772A@Upstairs> Rockefeller pushes to rein in EPA By Juliet Eilperin Sen. John D. Rockefeller (D-WVa.) will introduce legislation Thursday to impose a two-year moratorium on the Environmental Protection Agency's ability to regulate greenhouse gases from power plants and other stationary emitters, a move that could undermine the Obama administration's plan to pursue a cap on carbon emissions in the face of congressional opposition. Rockefeller's bill, one of several recent congressional efforts to curb the EPA's authority to address climate change under the Clean Air Act, highlights the resistance the administration will face if it attempts to limit carbon dioxide through regulation. Obama and his top deputies have repeatedly said they would prefer for Congress to set mandatory, nationwide limits on greenhouse gas emissions, but the EPA is moving ahead with plans to do so if legislation fails to pass this year. "Today, we took important action to safeguard jobs, the coal industry, and the entire economy as we move toward clean coal technology," Rockefeller said. "This legislation will issue a two-year suspension on EPA regulation of greenhouse gases from stationary sources--giving Congress the time it needs to address an issue as complicated and expansive as our energy future. Congress, not the EPA, must be the ideal decision-maker on such a challenging issue." Republicans, too, have repeatedly tried to rein in the EPA's climate authority--Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) has introduced a resolution of disapproval that would overturn the agency's scientific finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, and House Republicans introduced their own version of the resolution this week. But Rockefeller's effort is especially significant because it points to growing unease among Democrats over the prospect of the administration tackling climate change without explicit congressional approval. Three Senate Democrats--Blanche Lincoln (Ark.), Mary Landrieu (La.) and Ben Nelson (Neb.)--are co-sponsoring Murkowksi's resolution. House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin C. Peterson (D-Minn.) and Armed Services Chairman Ike Skelton (D-Mo.) have introduced a similar measure, and House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Nick J. Rahall (D-WVa), along with Democratic Reps. Alan Mollohan (WVa) and Rick Boucher (D-Va.), will introduce a companion bill to Rockefeller's. In addition, Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-N.D.) has introduced a measure that would strip the EPA of its authority to regulate pollution linked to global warming. A 2007 Supreme Court ruling gave the EPA the authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, and by the end of this month the agency is slated to impose the first-ever greenhouse gas limits on emissions from cars and light-trucks. While that set of rules--the product of a deal between the auto industry, the federal government and more than a dozen states--is not controversial, EPA's plan to then target power plants and other industrial facilities has sparked serious opposition. Environmentalists have opposed any attempts to undermine the EPA's Clean Air Act authority, seeing it as both a dangerous precedent and a serious blow to the administration's ability to cope with climate change if Congress fails to pass a bill. While the House passed climate legislation in June, the Senate is still divided on whether to adopt a bill setting limits on greenhouse gases. Tim Wirth, president of the U.N. Foundation, said the House-passed bill already provided several concessions to the coal industry, and urged President Obama to stop Rockefeller's legislation. "The president ought to veto it, period," Wirth said. "This is a huge affront to his authority, and it's exactly what the coal industry wants. The coal industry has everything it wants in legislation, and now it wants more." Two weeks ago a group of coal-state Democrats--led by Rockefeller--wrote EPA administrator Lisa P. Jackson, asking her to outline her timeline for regulating greenhouse gas emitters under the Clean Air Act. Jackson replied that she would not target major emitters of carbon dioxide until 2011, and many smaller facilities would not face regulation until 2016. But this move did not satisfy Rockefeller, who usually serves as one of the administration's close allies. "This is a positive change and good progress, but I am concerned it may not be enough time," he said. "We must set this delay in stone and give Congress enough time to consider a comprehensive energy bill to develop the clean coal technologies we need. At a time when so many people are hurting, we need to put decisions about clean coal and our energy future into the hands of the people and their elected representatives, not a federal environmental http://views.washingtonpost.com/climate-change/post-carbon/2010/03/rockefeller_pushes_to_rein_in_epa.html?hpid=moreheadlines -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Fri Mar 5 01:50:46 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2010 01:50:46 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Only CO2 Emissions Can Explain Global Warming Message-ID: <977A155D1E7C4A39921E4571036C8DF8@agingCHS072729> http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=1812&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+climateandcapitalism%2FpEtD+%28Climate+and+Capitalism%29 Only CO2 Emissions Can Explain Global Warming March 4, 2010 Deniers take note: No possible natural phenomenon could have caused the huge rise in temperatures experienced in last half-century by Steve Connor The Independent, March 5, 2020 Climate scientists have delivered a powerful riposte to their sceptical critics with a study that strengthens the case for saying global warming is largely the result of man-made emissions of greenhouse gases. The researchers found that no other possible natural phenomenon, such as volcanic eruptions or variations in the activity of the Sun, could explain the significant warming of the planet over the past half century as recorded on every continent including Antarctica. It is only when the warming effect of emitting millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from human activity is considered that it is possible to explain why global average temperatures have risen so significantly since the middle of the 20th century. The study updates a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and has discovered several new elements of the global climate which have been influenced by humans, such as an increasing amount of water vapour evaporating from the warmer oceans into the atmosphere and a corresponding increase in the saltiness of the sea. "There is an increasingly remote possibility that climate change is dominated by natural rather than anthropogenic [man-made] factors," the scientists concluded in their study, published in the journal Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews of Climate Change. Scientific observations based on temperature recordings on every continent, as well as thermometer readings on, in and above the oceans, leave "little room for doubt" that the earth is warming, but trying to attribute a cause for this global warming is not possible unless man-made activity in the form of carbon dioxide emissions is taken into account, the scientists said. The review, led by Peter Stott of the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter, found the "fingerprints" of human activity on many different aspects of climate change, including the overall warming of the Antarctic recently documented for the first time by other researchers. "The observations cannot be explained by natural factors," Dr Stott said. Since 1980, the Earth has warmed by about 0.5C and is now warming at a rate of about 0.16C per decade, with even higher rates at higher latitudes such as in the Arctic. "The fingerprint of human influence has been detected in many different aspects of observed climate change. We've seen it in temperature, and increases in atmospheric humidity, we've seen it in salinity changes. We've seen it in reductions in Arctic sea ice and changing rainfall patterns," Dr Stott said. "What we see here are observations consistent with a warming world. This wealth of evidence we have now shows there is an increasingly remote possibility of climate change being dominated by natural factors rather than human factors." He dismissed suggestions that variations in solar activity - the intensity of the Sun - could explain warming patterns over the past few decades. If the Sun was responsible then both the upper and lower atmosphere would be getting warmer, instead of just the lower atmosphere as predicted by computer models of greenhouse gas warming. He also said that more water vapour is evaporating into the atmosphere as a result of warmer oceans and this is driving the water cycle harder, causing wetter areas in northern latitudes such as Britain to get wetter and drier areas in tropical regions such as East Africa to get drier. Asked whether climate sceptics would agree with the findings, Dr Stott said: "I just hope people look at the evidence of how the climate is changing in such a systematic way. I hope they make up their minds on the scientific evidence." =============================== 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 Mar 5 02:29:13 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2010 02:29:13 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Paul Craig Roberts Owes Iraqi People Apology Message-ID: http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/03/roberts-owes-iraqi-people-apology/ Roberts Owes Iraqi People Apology by Qais Nawwaf / March 4th, 2010 As an Iraqi, I took serious offense to Paul Craig Roberts' patronizing article, "Muslim Disunity: A Religion Divided Among Itself," in Counterpunch, March 2, 2010. Roberts audaciously states that the "reason Americans are still in Iraq is because the Iraqis hate each other more than they hate the American invader." Roberts blames the vast majority of the violence in the war on Iraqis themselves. It almost defies logic that, after the murder of 200,000 people in the 1991 war, the death of about 1.7 million under 12 year-long sanctions, the murder of more than 1.2 million under yet another war, brutal military occupation and the unrestrained use of white phosphorus and depleted uranium, Iraqis have caused more damage to themselves than the United States has. It is a claim as bizarre as Zionists' complaints about Palestinian resistance in an asymmetrical warfare setting; while Israel possesses nuclear weapons, tanks and F-16's, with which they murdered over 1,400 people in Gaza last year, Palestinians get the brunt of the criticism for killing 13 Israelis. Roberts' condescending assertion, that Iraqis have harmed themselves more than the US has, echoes Donald Rumsfeld's delusional statement: "The sooner the Iraqis can defend their own people and generate revenue, the sooner they will be self-reliant and not dependent on either foreign troops or international assistance." Roberts also insults the Iraqi resistance by stating it inflicted losses on the American superpower "in their spare time" off from fighting Shi'is. Completely disregarding 1,400 years of Islamic history, a single athletic dispute leads Roberts to conclude that "Muslims cannot even play together". This focus on an isolated event is selective, as Mr. Roberts doesn't appear to recall that Sunnis and Shiis both celebrated the Iraqi soccer team's victory in the 2007 Asian Cup. Even if we were to assume Iraq's Muslims aren't united enough for Roberts' taste, he seems to have ignored the USA's critical divide-and-conquer role in Iraq. He doesn't appear aware of the USA's deployment of Shii and Kurdish troops to battle Sunni cities, such as Fallujah in November 2004. He ignores the USA's political and financial support of sectarian parties, politicians and clergymen. He also neglects to mention the Israeli role in sowing the seeds of conflict in Iraq, outlined in Oded Yinon's infamous A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties. Roberts is unaware of 17-year old Othman from A'athamiya, a young Iraqi who drowned after rescuing nearly a dozen Iraqis when the A'imma Bridge in Baghdad collapsed in 2005. He also overlooked the joint Sunni-Shii celebrations of Muntathar Zaidi's throwing his shoes at Bush. The US corporate media, which cheerlead for the war, has every interest to blackout, marginalize and ignore stories of Iraqi unity. It is regretful that Roberts condescends Iraqis in the same manner. One wonders whether Mr. Roberts would've displayed this same white man's burden, vilifying misbehaving oppressed peoples, by admonishing Native American tribes who may have been at odds during the theft of their land by white settlers. Would Mr. Roberts have weighed in on the dispute between the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X? Would he have demonstrated moral authority to arbitrate between Martin Luther King Jr's philosophy of nonviolence and Malcolm X's commitment to freedom by any means necessary? Would he have appointed himself as judge between the North and South Vietnamese? Dictating derogatory suggestions to the oppressed is no business of "solidarity" activists. If Roberts is entitled to instruct Iraqis to unite, surely Iraqis are far more entitled to tell Americans, including Roberts, to put their right-wing, left-wing, class and racial divisions aside to meaningfully mobilize to end their seven-year occupation of our country (by "meaningful", I mean more substantive than symbolic anti-war protests every anniversary of the war). When they have extra time on their hands, Iraqis could probably tell Americans to unite on their debilitating healthcare disputes. It is frustrating enough when the operators of the US war machine and their mouthpieces in mainstream media refer to Iraqis in demeaning sectarian language. It is far more disappointing when those involved in the "anti-war" movement, who are supposedly in solidarity with Iraqis, use such divisive, disrespectful discourse. I call on Mr. Roberts to apologize to the beleaguered Iraqi people, victims of two decades of his country's ruthless foreign policy, funded by his tax dollars, for publishing such an undeserved portrayal. Qais Nawwaf is one of millions of displaced Iraqis. He resides on a colonized part of Indigenous territory commonly referred to as the "United States." He has a degree in a discipline invented by his ancestors: writing. He may be reached at: qnawwaf at gmail.com. Read other articles by Qais. =============================== 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 Sat Mar 6 00:38:17 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Sat, 6 Mar 2010 01:38:17 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Experts: Pentagon shooter, others strike symbols of 'power for the powerless' [anti-Washington Extremists] Message-ID: <733C477C2F8F47EC9422D3530FE8F525@Upstairs> Experts: Pentagon shooter, others strike symbols of 'power for the powerless' By Joby Warrick and Spencer S. Hsu Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, March 6, 2010 The setting was seemingly random: an outer gate at the Pentagon at evening rush hour. But John Patrick Bedell's violent rampage Thursday made him only the latest in the growing ranks of the disaffected and disturbed to take aim at a symbol of official Washington. This Story a.. Pentagon shooter's erratic journey b.. Suspected gunman's Internet writings show resentment of U.S., suspicions over 9/11 attacks The shooting contained jarring echoes of other recent attacks, from last month's plane crash at an IRS building in Texas to the shooting last June of a museum guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in the District. Although the circumstances differ greatly, all were acts of rage by men who blamed their personal misfortunes on what they perceived to be sinister forces within the government. All three also appear to have drawn ideological nourishment from the same well: online communities of like-minded people who validate and amplify extreme views. Today, more than in recent years, such communities are tapping into a broad undercurrent of anti-government discontent fueled by economic recession, joblessness and concern over the growing federal deficit, according to experts who have studied the phenomenon. For Bedell and others like him, Washington and its institutions are an irresistible target -- the "ultimate symbol of power for the powerless," said Jerrold Post, a professor of political psychology at George Washington University. "We've always had individuals who strike out at the giant 'system' when they're feeling a sense of powerlessness and insignificance," said Post, author of "Political Paranoia: The Psychopolitics of Hatred," a book on extremist movements. "Now we see an alarming tendency in which these same individuals can find substantiation online for almost any point of view." Researchers who track violent groups see Bedell's rampage as a distorted manifestation of the anti-Washington view that has driven the rise of right-wing militias. A report last week by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that the number of such organizations jumped 244 percent since the election of President Obama, from 149 groups to 512, including 127 militias. At the same time, the number of extremist attacks in the United States that resulted in deaths has fallen since the 1990s. White House officials declined to comment for the record about increased militia activity and noted that the two most recent incidents, at the Pentagon and in Austin, were perpetrated by men who had specific gripes with the government that appeared to be unrelated to the president personally. But current and former officials privately acknowledge that the toxic political climate has heightened concerns about increased attacks. "Are we headed into a climate similar to Oklahoma City? It isn't clear," said one former administration official, referring to the 1995 attack on a federal building that killed 168 people. A similar surge in militias and hate groups occurred during the mid-1990s, but this time the groups are interlinked to a much greater degree by the Web and mainstream radio and TV talk shows that echo many of the same viewpoints, said Mark Potok, author of the Southern Poverty Law Center report. "People are bringing completely groundless conspiracy theories into the mainstream, and they are doing it for purely opportunistic reasons," Potok said. "To some, it may be only a ratings game, but the danger is that some people actually believe these tall tales and a few will actually act on them." Yet the motivations for the attacks differ greatly. Joseph Stack, who flew a small plane into an IRS building in Austin, was inspired in part by the anti-tax movement. Bedell's anti-government views were more libertarian, and some were from the radical left, such as his belief that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were a U.S. government conspiracy. Conservative bloggers Friday sought to label Bedell as leftist extremist, noting his online tirades against President George W. Bush's administration. "Tea party" leaders reject the notion that their movement fosters violence. "It is extremely unfortunate that certain elements are trying to malign, distort and misrepresent a movement that supports fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government and free markets," said Jenny Beth Martin, a national coordinator for Tea Party Patriots. Although concern about anti-government groups has grown, the number of ideologically motivated attacks by extremists that led to deaths in the United States has not. Between 1990 and 2009, there were about 120 attacks in the United States by far-right extremists that led to deaths, according to a study funded by the Department of Homeland Security and the University of Maryland's National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism. The number of incidents has hovered around three per year since 2002, down from an average of eight annually from 1990 to 2001 and a peak of 16 in 1999, according to the U.S. Extremist Crime Data Base. About 45 percent of incidents were motivated by white supremacist, neo-Nazi, anti-immigrant or other racist ideologies, and 15 percent by extreme anti-government views, the top two categories, according to researchers Joshua D. Freilich of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York and Steven M. Chermak of Michigan State University. Federal agencies discount attacks by "lone wolves" as terrorism. By law, the FBI, State Department and National Counterterrorism Center define terrorism as politically motivated violence committed by "subnational groups and clandestine agents." U.S. counter-terrorism officials say lone attackers pursuing a personal political agenda pose a different kind of threat than organized domestic groups or international entities such as al-Qaeda. White House and administration officials have stepped gingerly around the subject of politics and domestic attacks, mindful of how conservative groups condemned Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano when her department issued a report on right-wing extremism April that said the return of military veterans could feed the emergence of terrorist groups. Napolitano, who helped prosecute Timothy McVeigh after the Oklahoma City bombings, apologized for the report, which was revised and reissued, and later clarified that the administration does not -- "nor will we ever -- monitor ideology or political beliefs." In February, she testified that there has been an increase in "lone wolf type" attacks and more ideologically driven attacks from U.S. citizens who have become radicalized, including incidents involving al-Qaeda-trained operatives or sympathizers. Staff writers Anne E. Kornblut and Jerry Markon and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/05/AR2010030504438.html?hpid=topnews -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Sun Mar 7 00:03:12 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 2010 01:03:12 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] 7 House Defense Subcommittee Members Exonerated of Selling Earmarks - Just Coincidenceshttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/06/AR2010030602374.html?hpid=topnews Message-ID: <8827A3E6376D4431B0E59A258F9C99F0@Upstairs> Thin wall separates lobbyist contributions and earmarks By R. Jeffrey Smith Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, March 7, 2010 House Appropriations defense subcommittee member James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.) works hard at fundraising: Two to three times a week, he telephones contributors to ask for more. Yet, according to the account he supplied to the Office of Congressional Ethics last year, he is unaware of "who made donations" or how much they gave, and so that information plays no role in his earmarking -- the systematic granting of public funds for mostly private purposes. Fellow subcommittee member Norm Dicks (D-Wash.) similarly presides over fundraisers arranged by his staff for defense firms and lobbyists every three months or so, according to his office's account. An aide in charge of Dicks's earmarks attends the fundraising events. But Dicks and the aide told investigators they were unaware of the substantial overlap between defense industry contributions to Dicks and his earmarks to contributors. The House ethics committee on Feb. 26 exonerated Dicks, Moran and five other defense subcommittee members of allegations that they had abused their offices by, in essence, selling earmarks to donors. In so doing, it drew heavily on promises such as these by lawmakers and staff members that their campaign fundraising operations had been carefully walled off from their earmarking decisions. Otherwise, their actions would violate laws and rules that bar any link between such donations and legislative acts. In detailing how the lawmakers approached their earmarking, however, the ethics report and accompanying reports by the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) made clear that the wall between grants and donations in their offices was in many instances very thin. Key individuals in their offices played at least some role in both activities, starting with the lawmakers and typically including staff members responsible for reviewing and making preliminary earmark decisions. Proving a connection In the office of Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), for example, earmark requests are vetted by her deputy chief of staff, who is currently Nathan Facey. He told investigators he attended fundraisers and spoke with defense lobbyists who had requested multiple earmarks about "the process and schedule for mark-ups." He added that lobbyists did not make an explicit link to the donations, and that Kaptur would have been angry if they had. Moran's former defense aide, who now works for Boeing, similarly vetted earmarks and attended fundraisers, according to the reports, as did a military aide to Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.). "To suggest having a staffer on personal time attend his boss's fundraiser is in some way improper is absurd," said Tiahrt spokesman Sam Sackett. The chief of staff to the late Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), who died on Feb. 8, regularly received campaign contribution lists and was the first reviewer of earmark requests, the report said. A Murtha aide responded Saturday that the review was cursory, however, and covered only a fraction of the requests. The campaign manager for Rep. Peter J. Visclosky (D-Ind.) in March 2008 solicited funds directly from defense-related companies that wanted the lawmaker's earmark support, one report added, quoting from a lobbyist's e-mail. At one of those companies, 21st Century Systems, an official had bragged in internal e-mails about how employees' contributions had secured more than two hours with Visclosky, his chief of staff and a defense aide. Company employees gave $18,500 to him in March 2008, according to the report, and on the 19th of that month, Visclosky requested a $2.4 million earmark for the firm. In total, the firms studied by investigators, all clients of the now-shuttered lobbying firm Paul Magliocchetti and Associates Group, better known as PMA Group, gave more than $834,000 to the seven members and received their endorsements for earmarked grants of more than $245 million in public funds. Five of the seven lawmakers and their aides told investigators that all these earmark decisions were divorced from contributions. Tiahrt and Visclosky declined to be interviewed in the probe, but their attorneys denied any wrongdoing by the lawmakers and wrote to the committee that no one had found evidence that the earmarks were granted as a result of contributions. Visclosky's attorneys, Reid Weingarten and Brian Heberlig, wrote that his actions were nothing more than "examples of typical fundraising practices that Members have historically engaged in on a widespread and routine basis without recrimination." Details in the reports nonetheless affirmed the strange dance that occurs between wealthy private interests and public officials in election season: Even as lawmakers claim independent judgment and say they act only for the public good, those who write campaign donation checks do so expecting a return on their investments, and their experience makes that outcome a good bet. The fact that this practice appears to be legal is beside the point, because both donors and voters view it as corrupt, according to several independent campaign finance experts. "This constant claim by members that there is no link is specious, because we can see the link," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a nonprofit group. Sloan referred to data showing that well-targeted defense industry donations are routinely followed by earmarks or other legislative benefits. Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonprofit group that has criticized earmarks, has noted that 68 percent of the companies and universities that wanted earmarks and contributed to Senate defense appropriators this year got them, whereas 48 percent of those who did not make contributions got them. A similar outcome occurred in the House defense subcommittee, said Laura Peterson, a senior policy analyst at the group. A question of intent In the probe, the legislative director for Teledyne Controls, a California firm that benefited from some recent earmarks, told investigators that in making contributions, "it does go through your mind whether you are buying influence." The treasurer for the company's political action committee said more bluntly that he had never seen a proposal to donate to any lawmaker who could not influence the company's earmarks, and that he would question "why it made sense to give the money" to such a lawmaker, the report said. But Stanley M. Brand, a campaign finance lawyer who represented Dicks in the probe, said that "puffing or concluding or acting" on the corporate side of the transaction is irrelevant to whether the law was broken by a lawmaker. He said that while bribery statutes cover both donors and recipients, "donor intent does not mean you can show" a lawmaker's intent was the same. "You must show criminal intent on each side," not just a coincidence of funds flowing in both directions, he said. Otherwise, every interest group or corporation that donates to candidates and has legislative interests that succeed would be considered guilty of bribery. To Sarah Dufendach, vice president for legislative affairs at Common Cause, that's not far from the truth: "It is hard to say it does not work the way the business community thinks it works when you can show, time after time, that they seem to be getting value for their campaign dollar." Dufendach said she was troubled that under the standard posited in the new ethics committee report, investigators must find credible evidence of a quid pro quo between donations and earmarks, similar to the list of prices for legislative favors written by then-Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.) before his 2005 guilty plea to federal bribery and fraud charges. In 2004, she and others noted, when the House committee admonished then-Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) for participating with key aides in a fundraising dinner for energy firms on the eve of a critical vote, it cited the need to avoid even the "appearance" of providing special treatment to contributors. Last week, in its five-page dismissal of the complaints against the seven, the House ethics committee did not once mention the word "appearance." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/06/AR2010030602374.html?hpid=topnews -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Sun Mar 7 00:13:08 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 2010 01:13:08 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Top home-school texts dismiss Darwin, evolution Message-ID: <46230916F74C416DA3294F285613B7C6@Upstairs> Top home-school texts dismiss Darwin, evolution By DYLAN LOVAN The Associated Press Saturday, March 6, 2010; 6:57 PM LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- Home-school mom Susan Mule wishes she hadn't taken a friend's advice and tried a textbook from a popular Christian publisher for her 10-year-old's biology lessons. Mule's precocious daughter Elizabeth excels at science and has been studying tarantulas since she was 5. But she watched Elizabeth's excitement turn to confusion when they reached the evolution section of the book from Apologia Educational Ministries, which disputed Charles Darwin's theory. "I thought she was going to have a coronary," Mule said of her daughter, who is now 16 and taking college courses in Houston. "She's like, 'This is not true!'" Christian-based materials dominate a growing home-school education market that encompasses more than 1.5 million students in the U.S. And for most home-school parents, a Bible-based version of the Earth's creation is exactly what they want. Federal statistics from 2007 show 83 percent of home-schooling parents want to give their children "religious or moral instruction." "The majority of home-schoolers self-identify as evangelical Christians," said Ian Slatter, a spokesman for the Home School Legal Defense Association. "Most home-schoolers will definitely have a sort of creationist component to their home-school program." Those who don't, however, often feel isolated and frustrated from trying to find a textbook that fits their beliefs. Two of the best-selling biology textbooks stack the deck against evolution, said some science educators who reviewed sections of the books at the request of The Associated Press. "I feel fairly strongly about this. These books are promulgating lies to kids," said Jerry Coyne, an ecology and evolution professor at the University of Chicago. The textbook publishers defend their books as well-rounded lessons on evolution and its shortcomings. One of the books doesn't attempt to mask disdain for Darwin and evolutionary science. "Those who do not believe that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant Word of God will find many points in this book puzzling," says the introduction to "Biology: Third Edition" from Bob Jones University Press. "This book was not written for them." The textbook delivers a religious ultimatum to young readers and parents, warning in its "History of Life" chapter that a "Christian worldview ... is the only correct view of reality; anyone who rejects it will not only fail to reach heaven but also fail to see the world as it truly is." When the AP asked about that passage, university spokesman Brian Scoles said the sentence made it into the book because of an editing error and will be removed from future editions. The size of the business of home-school texts isn't clear because the textbook industry is fragmented and privately held publishers don't give out sales numbers. Slatter said home-school material sales reach about $1 billion annually in the U.S. Publishers are well aware of the market, said Jay Wile, a former chemistry professor in Indianapolis who helped launch the Apologia curriculum in the early 1990s. "If I'm planning to write a curriculum, and I want to write it in a way that will appeal to home-schoolers, I'm going to at least find out what my demographic is," Wile said. In Kentucky, Lexington home-schooler Mia Perry remembers feeling disheartened while flipping through a home-school curriculum catalog and finding so many religious-themed textbooks. "We're not religious home-schoolers, and there's somewhat of a feeling of being outnumbered," said Perry, who has home-schooled three of her four children after removing her oldest child from a public school because of a health condition. Perry said she cobbled together her own curriculum after some mainstream publishers told her they would not sell directly to home-schooling parents. Wendy Womack, another Lexington home-school mother, said the only scientifically credible curriculum she's found is from the Maryland-based Calvert School, which has been selling study-at-home materials for more than 100 years. Apologia and Bob Jones University Press say their science books sell well. Apologia's "Exploring Creation" biology textbook retails for $65, while Bob Jones' "Biology" Third Edition lists at $52. Coyne and Virginia Tech biology professor Duncan Porter reviewed excerpts from the Apologia and Bob Jones biology textbooks, which are equivalent to ninth- and 10th-grade biology lessons. Porter said he would give the books an F. "If this is the way kids are home-schooled then they're being shortchanged, both rationally and in terms of biology," Coyne said. He argued that the books may steer students away from careers in biology or the study of the history of the earth. Wile countered that Coyne "feels compelled to lie in order to prop up a failing hypothesis (evolution). We definitely do not lie to the students. We tell them the facts that people like Dr. Coyne would prefer to cover up." Adam Brown's parents say their 16-year-old son's belief in the Bible's creation story isn't deterring him from pursuing a career in marine biology. His parents, Ken and Polly Brown, taught him at their Cedar Grove, Ind., home using the Apologia curriculum and other science texts. Polly Brown said her son would gladly take college courses that include evolution, and he'll be able to provide the expected answers even though he disagrees. "He probably knows it better than the kids who have been taught evolution all through public school," Polly Brown said. "But that is in order for him to understand both sides of that argument because he will face it throughout his higher education." --- Apologia Educational Ministries:http://www.apologia.com Bob Jones University Press:http://www.bjupress.com/page/HS+Home Jerry Coyne's blog, "Why Evolution is True":http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/06/AR2010030601343.html?hpid=sec-education -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 14654 bytes Desc: not available URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Sun Mar 7 00:47:20 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 2010 01:47:20 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] U.S. Enriches Companies Defying Its Policy on Iran Message-ID: So, while we citizens have been and are being told that Iran is such an existential threat to our national security (not to mention Israel) that a preemptory attack is justified, our leaders are really much more worried about foreign competiton, fear of angering our allies, and, of course, our long suffering workers since many foreign companies with business interests in Iran are also large American employers. I report, you decide. U.S. Enriches Companies Defying Its Policy on Iran By JO BECKER and RON NIXON Published: March 6, 2010 The federal government has awarded more than $107 billion in contract payments, grants and other benefits over the past decade to foreign and multinational American companies while they were doing business in Iran, despite Washington's efforts to discourage investment there, records show. Multimedia Interactive Feature Profiting From Iran, and the U.S. Related a.. Iran's Ace (Or Deuce): Its Oil Reserves (March 7, 2010) That includes nearly $15 billion paid to companies that defied American sanctions law by making large investments that helped Iran develop its vast oil and gas reserves. For years, the United States has been pressing other nations to join its efforts to squeeze the Iranian economy, in hopes of reining in Tehran's nuclear ambitions. Now, with the nuclear standoff hardening and Iran rebuffing American diplomatic outreach, the Obama administration is trying to win a tough new round of United Nations sanctions. But a New York Times analysis of federal records, company reports and other documents shows that both the Obama and Bush administrations have sent mixed messages to the corporate world when it comes to doing business in Iran, rewarding companies whose commercial interests conflict with American security goals. Many of those companies are enmeshed in the most vital elements of Iran's economy. More than two-thirds of the government money went to companies doing business in Iran's energy industry - a huge source of revenue for the Iranian government and a stronghold of the increasingly powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, a primary focus of the Obama administration's proposed sanctions because it oversees Iran's nuclear and missile programs. Other companies are involved in auto manufacturing and distribution, another important sector of the Iranian economy with links to the Revolutionary Guards. One supplied container ship motors to IRISL, a government-owned shipping line that was subsequently blacklisted by the United States for concealing military cargo. Beyond $102 billion in United States government contract payments since 2000 - to do everything from building military housing to providing platinum to the United States Mint - the companies and their subsidiaries have reaped a variety of benefits. They include nearly $4.5 billion in loans and loan guarantees from the Export-Import Bank, a federal agency that underwrites the export of American goods and services, and more than $500 million in grants for work that includes cancer research and the turning of agricultural byproducts into fuel. In addition, oil and gas companies that have done business in Iran have over the years won lucrative drilling leases for close to 14 million acres of offshore and onshore federal land. In recent months, a number of companies have decided to pull out of Iran, because of a combination of pressure by the United States and other Western governments, "terrorism free" divestment campaigns by shareholders and the difficulty of doing business with Iran's government. And several oil and gas companies are holding off on new investment, waiting to see what shape new sanctions may assume. The Obama administration points to that record, saying that it has successfully pressed allied governments and even reached out directly to corporate officials to dissuade investment in Iran, particularly in the energy industry. In addition, an American effort over many years to persuade banks to leave the country has isolated Iran from much of the international financial system, making it more difficult to do deals there. "We are very aggressive, using a range of tools," said Denis McDonough, chief of staff to the National Security Council. The government can, and does, bar American companies from most types of trade with Iran, under a broad embargo that has been in place since the 1990s. But as The Times's analysis illustrates, multiple administrations have struggled diplomatically, politically and practically to exert American authority over companies outside the embargo's reach - foreign companies and the foreign subsidiaries of American ones. Indeed, of the 74 companies The Times identified as doing business with both the United States government and Iran, 49 continue to do business there with no announced plans to leave. One of the government's most powerful tools, at least on paper, to influence the behavior of companies beyond the jurisdiction of the embargo is the Iran Sanctions Act, devised to punish foreign companies that invest more than $20 million in a given year to develop Iran's oil and gas fields. But in the 14 years since the law was passed, the government has never enforced it, in part for fear of angering America's allies. That has given rise to situations like the one involving the South Korean engineering giant Daelim Industrial, which in 2007 won a $700 million contract to upgrade an Iranian oil refinery. According to the Congressional Research Service, the deal appeared to violate the Iran Sanctions Act, meaning Daelim could have faced a range of punishments, including denial of federal contracts. That is because the law covers not only direct investments, such as the purchase of shares and deals that yield royalties, but also contracts similar to Daelim's to manage oil and gas development projects. But in 2009 the United States Army awarded the company a $111 million contract to build housing in a military base in South Korea. Just months later, Daelim, which disputes that its contracts violated the letter of the law, announced a new $600 million deal to help develop the South Pars gas field in Iran. Now, though, frustration over Iran's intransigence has spawned a growing, if still piecemeal, movement to more effectively use the power of the government purse to turn companies away from investing there. Nineteen states - including New York, California and Florida - have rules that bar or discourage their pension funds from investing in companies that do certain types of business in Iran. Congress is considering legislation that would have the federal government follow suit, by mandating that companies that invest in Iran's energy industry be denied federal contracts. The provision is modeled on an existing law dealing with war-torn Sudan. Obama administration officials, while indicating that they were open to the idea, called it only one variable in a complex equation. Right now, the president's priority is on breaking down Chinese resistance to the new United Nations sanctions, which apply across borders and are aimed squarely at entities that support Iran's nuclear program. But Representative Ron Klein, a Florida Democrat who wrote the contracting provision moving through Congress with the help of a lobbying group called United Against Nuclear Iran, said it offered a way forward with or without international agreement. "We need to send a strong message to corporations that we're not going to continue to allow them to economically enable the Iranian government to continue to do what they have been doing," Mr. Klein said. An Unused Tool Sending a strong message was Congress's intention when it passed the Iran Sanctions Act in 1996. The law gives the president a menu of possible punishments he can choose to levy against offending companies. Not only do they risk losing federal contracts, but they can also be prevented from receiving Export-Import Bank loans, obtaining American bank loans over $10 million in a given year, exporting their goods to the United States, purchasing licensed American military technology and, in the case of financial firms, serving as a primary dealer in United States government bonds or as a repository for government funds. Congress is now considering expanding its purview to a broader array of energy-related activities, including selling gasoline to Iran, which despite its vast oil and gas reserves has antiquated refineries that leave it heavily dependent on imports. >From the beginning, though, the law proved difficult to enforce. European allies howled that it constituted an improper attempt to apply American law in other countries. Exercising an option to waive the law in the name of national security, the Clinton administration in 1998 declined to penalize the first violator - a consortium led by the French oil company TotalFina, now known as Total. The administration also indicated that it would waive future penalties against European companies, winning in return tougher European export controls on technology that Iran could convert to military use. Stuart E. Eizenstat, who as the deputy Treasury secretary handled those negotiations, said the law let Iran "exploit divisions between the U.S. and our European allies." Waiving it, though, was followed by additional investments in Iran - and more government largesse for the companies making them. In 1999, for instance, Royal Dutch Shell signed an $800 million deal to develop two Iranian oil fields. Since then, Shell has won federal contract payments and grants totaling more than $11 billion, mostly for providing fuel to the American military, as well as $200 million in Export-Import loan guarantee and drilling rights to federal lands, records show. Shell has a second Iranian development deal pending, but officials say they are awaiting the results of a feasibility study. In the meantime, the company continues to receive payments from Iran for its 1999 investment and sells gasoline and lubricants there. Records show Shell is one of seven companies that challenged the Iran Sanctions Act and received federal benefits. John R. Bolton, who dealt with Iran as an under secretary of state and United Nations ambassador in the Bush administration, said failing to enforce the law by punishing such companies both sent "a signal to the Iranians that we're not serious" and undercut Washington's credibility when it did threaten action. Mr. Bolton recalled what happened in 2004 when he suggested to the Japanese ambassador that Japan's state-controlled oil exploration company, Inpex, might be penalized for a $2 billion investment in the Azadegan field in Iran. "The Japanese ambassador said, 'Well, that's interesting. How come you've never sanctioned a European Union company?' " Mr. Bolton recounted. Inpex was never penalized, though several years later it decided to reduce its stake in the Iranian project. And to Mr. Bolton's chagrin, the Bush administration did not act on reports about other such investments, neither waiving the law nor penalizing violators. Recently, after 50 lawmakers from both parties complained to President Obama about the lack of enforcement and sent him a list of companies that apparently violated the law, the State Department announced a preliminary investigation. Officials said that they were looking at 27 deals, and that while some appeared to have been "carefully constructed" to get around the letter of the law, they had identified a number of problematic cases and were focusing on companies still active in Iran. Competing Interests Among the companies on the list Congress sent to the State Department is the Brazilian state-controlled energy conglomerate Petrobras, which last year received a $2 billion Export-Import Bank loan to develop an oil reserve off the coast of Rio de Janeiro. The loan offers a case study in the competing interests officials must confront when it comes to the Iran Sanctions Act. Despite repeated American entreaties, Petrobras had previously invested $100 million to explore Iran's offshore oil prospects in the Persian Gulf. But the Export-Import Bank loan could help create American jobs, since Petrobras would use the money to buy goods and services from American companies. Perhaps more important, it could help develop a source of oil outside the Middle East. After The Times inquired about the loan, bank officials said that they asked for and received a letter of assurance from Petrobras that it had finished its work in Iran. A senior White House official, in a Nov. 13 e-mail message, said that while it was the administration's policy to warn companies against such investments, "Brazil is an important U.S. trading partner and our discussions with them are ongoing." But if the administration hoped that the loan would bring Brazil in line with its objectives in Iran, it would soon prove mistaken. On Nov. 23, Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, visited Brazil, and the two countries agreed to share technical expertise on energy projects. Iranian officials said they might offer Petrobras additional incentives for further investment. The visit infuriated American officials, who felt it undercut efforts to press Iran on its nuclear program while lending international legitimacy to the Iranian president. Brazil's relationship with Iran has also complicated American maneuvering at the United Nations, where Brazil holds a rotating seat on the Security Council. Just last week, Brazil's president, Luiz In?cio Lula da Silva, restated his opposition to the administration's sanctions proposal, warning, "It is not prudent to push Iran against a wall." Carter Lawson, the Export-Import Bank's deputy general counsel, acknowledged that Mr. Ahmadinejad's visit was "problematic for us, and it raised our antenna." He said that since December the bank had been operating under a new budget rule requiring borrowers to certify that they had no continuing operations in Iran's energy industry, and was carefully monitoring Petrobras's activities. In the meantime, Petrobras's Tehran office remains open. And Diogo Almeida, the acting economic attach? at the Brazilian Embassy in Iran, said that while Petrobras was currently assessing how much it could invest in Iran, given the huge discovery off Rio de Janeiro, company officials were in active discussions with the Iranian government and were interested in pursuing new business. Opportunities for Profit For all the American rules and focus, there is still plenty of room for companies to profit in crucial areas of Iran's economy without fear of reprisal or loss of United States government business. Auto companies doing business in Iran, for instance, received $7.3 billion in federal contracts over the past 10 years. Among them was Mazda, whose cars in Iran are assembled by a company called the Bahman Group. A 45 percent share in Bahman is held by the Sepah Cooperative Foundation, a large investment fund linked to the Revolutionary Guards, according to Iranian news accounts and a 2009 RAND Corporation report prepared for the Defense Department. A Mazda spokesman declined to comment, saying the company was unaware of the links. Even companies based in the United States, including some of the biggest federal contractors, can invest in Iran through foreign subsidiaries run independently by non-Americans. Honeywell, the aviation and aerospace company, has received nearly $13 billion in federal contracts since 2005. That year it acquired Universal Oil Products, whose British subsidiary is working on a project to expand gasoline production at the Arak refinery in Iran. Universal recently received a $25 million federal grant for a clean-energy project in Hawaii. In a statement, Honeywell said it had told the State Department in January that while it was fulfilling its Arak contract, it would not undertake new projects in Iran. Ingersoll Rand, another American company with foreign subsidiaries, says it is evaluating its "minor" business in Iran in light of the political climate. But for now, according to a spokesman, Paul Dickard, it continues to sell air-compression systems with a "wide variety of applications," including in the oil and gas industries and in nuclear power plants. Senator Byron L. Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, tried to close the foreign subsidiary loophole after a furor erupted in 2004 over Halliburton, former Vice President Dick Cheney's old company, which had used a Cayman Islands subsidiary to sell oil-field services to Iran. But he said he was unable to overcome business opposition. William A. Reinsch, president of the National Foreign Trade Council, lobbied against Mr. Dorgan's bill and has opposed other unilateral sanctions. He argues that their futility can be seen in the intransigence of the Iranian government and the way American oil companies have simply been replaced by foreign competitors. Moreover, many foreign companies with business interests in Iran are also large American employers; deny them federal contracts and other benefits, Mr. Reinsch said, "and it's those workers who will pay the price." But Hans Sandberg, senior vice president of Atlas Copco, which is based in Sweden, offered a different perspective. Atlas Copco's sales of mining and construction equipment to Iran are dwarfed by its American business, including military contracts. If forced to choose, he said: "It would be no problem. We wouldn't trade with Iran." http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/world/middleeast/07sanctions.html?hp -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 43614 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 30997 bytes Desc: not available URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Sun Mar 7 01:09:44 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 2010 02:09:44 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Trading Away Productivity - Free Trade & Stagnated Wages Message-ID: <62971FD51E3D404EA33AD2110E649A33@Upstairs> Op-Ed Contributors The New York Times Trading Away Productivity By ALAN TONELSON and KEVIN L. KEARNS Published: March 5, 2010 Washington FOR a quarter-century, American economic policy has assumed that the keys to durable national prosperity are deregulation, free trade and a swift transition to a post-industrial, services-dominated future. Such policies, advocates say, drive innovation, which leads to enormous labor productivity and wage gains - more than enough, supposedly, to make up for the labor disruptions that accompany free trade and de-industrialization. In reality, though, wage gains for the average worker have lagged behind productivity since the early 1980s, a situation that free-traders usually attribute to workers failing to retrain themselves after seeing their jobs outsourced. But what if wages lag because productivity itself is being grossly overstated, especially in the nation's manufacturing sector? Then, suddenly, a cornerstone of American economic policy would begin to crumble. Productivity measures how many worker hours are needed for a given unit of output during a given time period; when hours fall relative to output, labor productivity increases. In 2009, the data show, Americans needed 40 percent fewer hours to produce the same unit of output as in 1980. But there's a problem: labor productivity figures, which are calculated by the Labor Department, count only worker hours in America, even though American-owned factories and labs have been steadily transplanted overseas, and foreign workers have contributed significantly to the final products counted in productivity measures. The result is an apparent drop in the number of worker hours required to produce goods - and thus increased productivity. But actually, the total number of worker hours does not necessarily change. This oversight is no secret: as Labor Department officials acknowledged at a 2004 conference, their statistical methods deem any reduction in the work that goes into creating a specific unit of output, whatever the cause, to be a productivity gain. This continuing mismeasurement leads economists and all those who rely on them to assume that recorded productivity gains always signify greater efficiency, rather than simple offshoring-generated cost cuts - leaving the rest of us scratching our heads over stagnating wages. Of course, just because productivity is mismeasured doesn't mean that genuine innovations can't improve living standards. It does mean, however, that Americans are flying blind when it comes to their economy's strengths and weaknesses, and consequently drawing the wrong policy lessons. Above all, if offshoring has been driving much of our supposed productivity gains, then the case for complete free trade begins to erode. If often such policies simply increase corporate profits at the expense of American workers, with no gains in true productivity, then they don't necessarily strengthen the national economy. In this regard, the case for free trade as a stimulus for innovation weakens, too. Because productivity gains in part reflect job offshoring, not just the benefits of technology or better business practices, then the American economy has been much less innovative than widely assumed. How can we actually increase innovation and real productivity? Manufacturing, long slighted by free-market extremists, needs to be promoted, not pushed offshore, since it has historically accounted for the bulk of research and development spending and employs the bulk of American science and technology workers - who in turn spur further innovation and real productivity. Promoting manufacturing will require major changes in tax and trade policies that currently foster offshoring, including implementing provisions to punish currency manipulation by countries like China and help American producers harmed by discriminatory foreign value-added tax systems. It also means revitalizing government and corporate research and development, which has languished since its heyday in the 1960s. Much of government policy and business strategy rides on false assumptions about innovation, and although the Obama administration acknowledges the problem, it has done nothing to correct it. With the economy still in need of government life support and the future of American manufacturing in doubt, relying on faulty productivity data is a formula for disaster. Alan Tonelson, a fellow at the United States Business and Industry Council, is the author of "The Race to the Bottom." Kevin L. Kearns is the president of the council, which is an association of small manufacturers. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/06/opinion/06Tonelson.html?em -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Mar 7 09:03:10 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 2010 09:03:10 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Library of humans Message-ID: <879331039F7243D68F1F5D2396BB3CC3@agingCHS072729> http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2010/03/05/library-of-humans/ Library of humans By Macleans.ca | March 5th, 2010 | 1:44 pm Guelph university lends people for 30-minute talks on prejudice When Chris Langley volunteered to help out with a project at his university library last year, he didn't imagine he'd wind up becoming a book. The 25-year-old master's student was intrigued by the notion of a human library, a space in which prospective readers scheduled half-hour time slots with real people and engaged in direct conversations about prejudice. As an atheist, Langley felt his views and experience could help fill a niche in the library's catalogue and immediately put himself into circulation. The last-minute addition proved a popular attraction, with all but one of his available time slots filling up over a two-day stretch. The atheist book was back on shelves for the 2010 edition of the human library, which began Thursday at the University of Guelph. The man behind the cover is keen to re-engage with readers on an issue he feels is often misunderstood. "The prejudice I feel is invisible. It's more a stigma attached to the label," Langley said in a telephone interview from the university campus. "We're thought of as evil, callous and even shallow." Readers who check out Langley's book will not be subjected to a lecture about the virtues of his personal religious choice, he said. Readers are strongly encouraged to come with questions and engage him in conversation on spiritual matters of every ilk. "Last year, readers were curious about how I can view the world without a supernatural power, how I cope when I lose loved ones, how I cope without an afterlife," he said, adding he was checked out by everyone from pro-life evangelists to believers in religions he'd never heard of. Michael Boterman, another one of last year's literary offerings, experienced a similarly diverse range of dialogues during his stint on library shelves. As a book entitled "Living with HIV," the 50-year-old campus staff member attracted a wide readership whose reactions to his ailment ranged from curiosity to fear. Boterman said the conversations gave him a chance to combat widespread ignorance on the subject and influence commonly held attitudes. Some of the people that came and read my book would show a lot of pity. I've had this condition longer than most of my readers have been alive. That kind of made them stop and think about that," he said. Guelph staff member Lisbeth Sider had her preconceived notions challenged last year when she checked out a book entitled "Sri Lankan Conflict Survivor." Expecting to hear harrowing tales of domestic terrorism, Sider instead listened to accounts of rebels who treated those on the opposing side with relative kindness despite their profound political differences. "It's not all black and white," she said. "You expect one thing and when you come out of it the reality is something very different." Such shifts in perspective are what the human library is all about, according to Mike Ridley, the university's head librarian. By bringing in books who were willing to engage in candid conversations on difficult subjects, organizers strove to turn the library into a place where taboos were cast aside and meaningful engagement was promoted among members of the campus community and beyond. Last year's event, which attracted 163 readers and 32 human books, proved the strategy was working, he said. "There were all these people having really intense conversations about sometimes very difficult things," Ridley said. "Libraries are all about helping users make sense of the world. Here was an event where users were making sense of the world just by talking." The two-day event has expanded this year, with 376 slots available for the 36 books on offer. Members of the campus community and general public are invited to browse the collection which includes titles such as "Dykes & Tykes: A Tale of Lesbian Motherhood," "Female Race Car Driver," "Living With Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder" and "Transsexual Guy." The Canadian 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 Sun Mar 7 09:20:49 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 2010 09:20:49 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Tax Oil Companies, Not Students Message-ID: <92F15389436144F2978C5979EA4240E9@agingCHS072729> http://www.calitics.com/diary/11217/tax-oil-companies-not-students Calitics March 4, 2010 Tax Oil Companies, Not Students By Robert Cruickshank As protests unfold across the state and the nation today against cuts to education and fee increases, more attention is finally being drawn to the massive crisis facing our students, our schools, and our future. 20 years ago a year at UC Berkeley cost just over $1,000 in fees. Even that was much higher than the $0 cost that the 1960 Master Plan pledged. The early 1990s saw a big rise in fees, and by the time I started at UCB in 1997 the cost had risen to over $4,000 a year. Now the cost is slated to rise to a whopping $10,000 per year, something many students and their families cannot afford to pay. And even as those costs rise, including at CSU and community colleges, classes are being cut as educational quality declines. It's no way to run a state. California's current prosperity is owed largely to the investments Pat Brown made in the 1960s, building a public higher education system that was the world's envy - and that fueled our innovation and economic creativity. But instead of renewing those investments for a new century, Arnold Schwarzenegger is destroying them. The fee increases are a massive tax increase on the young and on the working- and middle-classes. They must be reversed. The only way they will be reversed is to generate new revenue. That's why the Courage Campaign, where I work as Public Policy Director, is joining the California Faculty Association and the University of California Students Association in launching our pledge to support AB 656, the oil severance tax for California. AB 656, authored by Assemblymember Alberto Torrico, would generate $2 billion a year for higher education by levying a 12% tax on the extraction of oil and gas in California. Texas uses this tax to fund higher education there, and Sarah Palin increased Alaska's oil severance tax in 2007 in order to buy the love of her constituents. Every major oil producing state in the union has an oil severance tax - except California. The result of this massive tax break we give to oil companies is the destruction of our public colleges and universities. Fees have risen since the early 1990s only because of cuts in the amount of state funding the schools receive. The only way to make college affordable again is to increase that funding. An oil severance tax is a good place to begin. Stand up for students, for faculty, for staff, and for higher education by taking the pledge to support AB 656 today. We will use these pledges to help convince the legislature to pass the bill, adding to the fact that 2/3rds of Californians said they'll pay higher taxes for education. Let's tax oil companies, not students. http://www.couragecampaign.org/page/s/StandUp4Students =============================== 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 Mar 7 09:25:45 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 2010 09:25:45 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] How Sports Attacks Public Education Message-ID: <77D6BFDF62C240899A8640AF030FDFB3@agingCHS072729> http://www.edgeofsports.com/index.html Edge of Sports March 5, 2010 How Sports Attacks Public Education Dave Zirin "It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men." - Frederick Douglass On Thursday, I was proud to take part in a student walkout at the University of Maryland in defense of public education. It was just one link in a National Day of Action that saw protests in more than 32 states across the country. I am not a student, and haven't been since those innocent days when Monica Lewinsky mattered, but I was asked to come speak at a post walkout teach-in about the way sports is used to attack public education. It might sound like a bizarre topic, but it's the world that students see every day. At the University of Maryland, as tuition has been hiked and classes cut, football coach Ralph Friedgen makes a base salary of 1.75 million bucks, which would be outrageous even if the team weren't two-steps past terrible. Friedgen also gets perks like a $50,000 bonus if none of his players are arrested during the course of the season. Ground zero of the student protest movement is the University of California at Berkeley. Over at Berkeley, students are facing 32% tuition hikes, while the school pays football coach Jeff Tedford 2.8 million dollars a year and is finishing more than 400 million in renovations on the football stadium. This is what students see: boosters and alumni come first, while they've been instructed to cheer their teams, pay their loans, and mind their business. The counterargument is that college athletic departments fund themselves and actually put money back into a school's general fund. This is simply not true. The October Knight Commission report of college presidents stated that the 25 top football schools had revenues on average of $3.9 million in 2008. The other 94 ran deficits averaging $9.9 million. When athletic departments run deficits, it's not like the football coach takes a pay cut. In other words, if the team is doing well, the entire school benefits. If the football team suffers, the entire school suffers. This, to put it mildly, is financial lunacy. A school would statistically be better off if it took its endowment to Vegas and just bet it all on black. If state colleges are hurting, your typical urban public school is in a world of pain with budgets slashed to the bone. Politicians act like these are problems beyond their control like the weather. ("50% chance of sun and a 40% chance of losing music programs.") In truth, they are the result of a comprehensive attack on public education that has seen the system starved. One way this has been implemented is through stadium construction, the grand substitute for anything resembling an urban policy in this country. Over the last generation, we've seen 30 billion in public funds spent on stadiums. They were presented as photogenic solutions to deindustrialization, declining tax bases, and suburban flight. The results are now in and they don't look good for the home teams. University of Maryland sports economists Dennis Coates and University of Alberta Brad R. Humphreys studied stadium funding over 30 years and failed to find one solitary example of a sports franchise lifting or even stabilizing a local economy. They concluded the opposite: "a reduction in real per capita income over the entire metropolitan area..Our conclusion, and that of nearly all academic economists studying this issue, is that professional sports generally have little, if any, positive effect on a city's economy." These projects achieve so little because the jobs created are low wage, service sector, seasonal employment. Instead of being solutions of urban decay, the stadiums have been tools of organized theft: sporting shock doctrines for our ailing cities. With crumbling schools, higher tuitions, and an Education Secretary in Arne Duncan who seems more obsessed with providing extra money for schools that break their teachers unions, it's no wonder that the anger is starting to boil over. It can also bubble up in unpredictable ways. On Wednesday night, after the University of Maryland men's basketball team beat hated arch-rival Duke, students were arrested after pouring into the streets surrounding the campus. In years past, these sporting riots have been testosterone run amok, frat parties of burning mattresses and excessive inebriation. This year it was different, with police needing to use pepper spray and horses to quell the 1,500 students who filled Route 1. In response, students chanted, "Defense! Defense!" At the Thursday teach in, I said to the students that I didn't think there was anything particularly political or interesting about a college sports riot. One person shot his hand up and said, "It wasn't a riot until the cops showed up." Everyone proceeded to applaud. I was surprised at first that these politically minded students would be defending a post-game melee, but no longer. The anger is real and it isn't going anywhere. While schools are paying football coaches millions and revamping stadiums, students are choosing between dropping out or living with decades of debt. One thing is certain: it aint a game. [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 dh56 at parit.ca Sun Mar 7 10:00:16 2010 From: dh56 at parit.ca (David Henry) Date: Sun, 07 Mar 2010 10:00:16 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The number of extremist groups in the US exploded in 2009 Message-ID: <1267977616.25044.7.camel@localhost> ?We are in the midst of one of the most significant right-wing populist rebellions in United States history,? Chip Berlet, a veteran analyst of the American radical right, wrote earlier this year. "We see around us a series of overlapping social and political movements populated by people [who are] angry, resentful, and full of anxiety. They are raging against the machinery of the federal bureaucracy and liberal government programs and policies including health care, reform of immigration and labor laws, abortion, and gay marriage." http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/news/splc-report-number-of-patriot-groups-militias-surges-by-244-in-past-year New SPLC Report: "Patriot" Groups, Militias Surge in Number in Past Year MONTGOMERY, Ala. -- The number of extremist groups in the United States exploded in 2009 as militias and other groups steeped in wild, antigovernment conspiracy theories exploited populist anger across the country and infiltrated the mainstream, according to a report issued today by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Antigovernment "Patriot" groups -- militias and other extremist organizations that see the federal government as their enemy -- came roaring back to life over the past year after more than a decade out of the limelight. The SPLC documented a 244 percent increase in the number of active Patriot groups in 2009. Their numbers grew from 149 groups in 2008 to 512 groups in 2009, an astonishing addition of 363 new groups in a single year. Militias -- the paramilitary arm of the Patriot movement -- were a major part of the increase, growing from 42 militias in 2008 to 127 in 2009. The report, "Rage on the Right," is the cover story in the Spring 2010 issue of the SPLC's quarterly investigative journal Intelligence Report.[1] Patriot groups have been fueled by anger over the changing demographics of the country, the soaring public debt, the troubled economy and an array of initiatives by President Obama that have been branded "socialist" or even "fascist" by his political opponents. "This extraordinary growth is a cause for grave concern," said Intelligence Report editor Mark Potok. "The people associated with the Patriot movement during its 1990s heyday produced an enormous amount of violence, most dramatically the Oklahoma City bombing that left 168 people dead." The Patriot movement has made significant inroads into the conservative political scene, according to the new report. "The 'tea parties' and similar groups that have sprung up in recent months cannot fairly be considered extremist groups, but they are shot through with rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories and racism," the report says. Unlike the 1990s, the Patriot movement's central ideas are being promoted by people with large audiences, such as FOX News' Glenn Beck and U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota. Beck, for instance, reinvigorated a key Patriot conspiracy theory -- the charge that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is secretly running concentration camps -- before finally "debunking" it. The growth of Patriot groups comes at a time when the number of racist hate groups stayed at record levels -- rising from 926 in 2008 to 932 in 2009, according to the report. The increase caps a decade in which the number of hate groups surged by 55 percent. The expansion would have been much greater in 2009 if not for the demise of the American National Socialist Workers Party, a key neo-Nazi network whose founder was arrested in October 2008. There also has been a surge in "nativist extremist" groups -- vigilante organizations that go beyond advocating strict immigration policy and actually confront or harass suspected immigrants. These groups grew from 173 groups in 2008 to 309 in 2009, a rise of nearly 80 percent. These three strands of the radical right -- the hate groups, the nativist extremist groups, and the Patriot organizations -- are the most volatile elements on the American political landscape. Taken together, their numbers increased by more than 40 percent, rising from 1,248 groups in 2008 to 1,753 last year. There are already signs of radical right violence reminiscent of the 1990s. Right-wing extremists have murdered six law enforcement officers since Obama's inauguration. Racist skinheads and others have been arrested in alleged plots to assassinate the president. Most recently, as recounted in the new issue of the Intelligence Report, a number of individuals with antigovernment, survivalist or racist views have been arrested in a series of bomb cases. The hate groups listed in this report include neo-Nazis, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, racist skinheads, Klansmen and black separatists. Other hate groups target gays or immigrants, and some specialize in producing racist music or propaganda denying the Holocaust. A list and interactive, state-by-state map of active hate groups can be viewed here.[2] Links: 1. The SPLC's "Rage on the Right" report: http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2010/spring/rage-on-the-right ?We are in the midst of one of the most significant right-wing populist rebellions in United States history,? Chip Berlet, a veteran analyst of the American radical right, wrote earlier this year. "We see around us a series of overlapping social and political movements populated by people [who are] angry, resentful, and full of anxiety. They are raging against the machinery of the federal bureaucracy and liberal government programs and policies including health care, reform of immigration and labor laws, abortion, and gay marriage." 2. The SPLC Hate Map: http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/hate-map From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Mar 7 19:18:48 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 2010 19:18:48 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Forever Lost: Heritage Beneath the Canadian Museum for Human Rights Message-ID: <2AD070F0CB2249ECABD94A60D2F5CB74@agingCHS072729> (please help distribute) http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=179056386933 or http://www.facebook.com/group.php?v=wall&ref=ts&gid=179056386933 Forever Lost: Heritage Beneath the Canadian Museum for Human Rights Right now, one of the gravest violations of Aboriginal cultural and property rights in Canadian history is underway. The construction of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) is essentially bulldozing our history. Efforts to recover this rich heritage record have been stifled at every step as the CMHR has constantly under funded and minimized recovery efforts. The Province's heritage monitoring body, the Historic Resources Branch (HRB), has shown no leadership and has allowed the CMHR to carry out this totally inadequate project on its own terms. The spectacular Canadian Museum of Human Rights is being built on and through the richest ancient heritage site in Manitoba and one of the outstanding sites in Canada. It is being built at a cost of $265,000,000, now recently increased by $45,000,000 due to inflation. It has a proposed annual operating budget of $22,000.000. It covers some 7,000 m2 of its 10,000 m2 site. Initial mitigation in 2002 identified several Late Woodland Period First Nations camp or village occupations dating ca. 1000-1400 CE, and recovered an astounding record of 72,000 artifacts from a mere 53 m2, with site total estimates of 1,000,000 artifacts for every 1,000 m2 buried under the Museum. Despite all of this, a miniscule budget was determined and assigned to their contract archaeologist. Less than 2% of the buried area was recovered, leaving over 98% of the rich record to be buried and unavailable for interpretation and appreciation. The excavation took place for a limited period during only one summer/fall season, which did not even carry on throughout the winter as would happen in other provinces. CMHR has now started construction and changed recovery procedures in the spring/summer of 2009. The building of huge platforms over multiple pilings (16x16, 25 wide) guaranteed the destruction of vast areas of dense ancient camp occupations. There are over 100 piling holes, many 6 feet across. Additionally, the long water and sewer lines are being dug through the dense occupations, rather than laying them underneath the ancient camp deposits as they had initially planned. Int total, they went through 8 village levels. They totally ignored the recommendations made by their consulting archaeologist about the need to recover this heritage before it was destroyed and as a result, resigned. The early pre-fur trade history of First Nations, representing some 11,000 years, laying buried in the ground is fragile and susceptible to destruction. The lack of a federal heritage act (the only G9 if not G20 country to lack this) leaves the federal responsibly to protect, care for and manage this rich ancient heritage limited to a couple of lines in the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. As a National museum, they decided to defer to provincial standards for this project. Provincially, there is the Manitoba Heritage Resources Act which provides enabling legislation, but in the case of the ancient heritage there appears to be a long history of lack of political will to enforce it and a history of reduced resources and staff to attempt to enforce it. The City of Winnipeg has heritage responsibilities which appears to be weak and the ancient pre-fur trade heritage didn't even come up during recent public planning sessions for the new heritage plan for Winnipeg. there has never been a survey of the city's ancient archaeological heritage since the early 1960s. As a result of this lack of legislation, 1,000s of permits are let every year with no provision for assessment or recovery of the buried First Nations heritage. In other cases, only token amounts are dealt with and often inadequately For its part, Historic Resources Branch of MB worked out an arrangement that allowed the coring to be monitored without any permit and regulations in place. While a permit was eventually developed (May), it was given directly to the CMHR, rather than to a CRM contract archaeologist, which is highly unusual. It is alleged that this summer has followed the worst of expectations. A skeleton crew of 3 were hired, rather than the minimum of 15 that was recommended. They (contractors) have dug holes through the centre of the occupations and then reported it to the archaeologists. They are digging trenches through the occupations but the archaeologists cannot recover the materials because the trenches are too narrow for Health and Safety, but they refuse to widen the trenches in the upper occupation levels, so even superficial recovery cannot take place. When the CAA (Canadian Archaeological Association) national body contacted the CMHR to discuss the multitude of problems, there was no response from them. It would appear that they are either waiting for the issue to go away or they do not think that it is worth worrying about. You don't have to be an archaeologist to realize that the attitudes and motivations governing this process have been unacceptable. The artifacts and Indigenous knowledge embedded in the soil at the Forks hold remarkable education purposes. From a more recent perspective, The Forks is situated in Treaty 1 territory. The atmosphere that shaped the actions of people like Lord Selkirk and Chief Peguis is situated in our backyard, not to mention the proceedings that led to the formation of Manitoba as a province in 1870. The final recession of glacial Lake Agassiz, some 12, 000 years ago, established the monumental role the area would play for generations of people: As a keystone area of North America, rivers from all directions lead to The Forks. Regardless if these cultural facets were communicated via the provincial curriculum, museum exhibits, or possibly on display at an Aboriginal museum on an urban reserve, the potential for recognizing and celebrating our ancient First Nations history at the Forks is as yet untapped. And, sadly, it is more and more appearing that this opportunity is being lost. We owe it to not only the ancestors of the First Nations and M?tis communities who inhabited this site but to ALL Canadians that this erasure of history does not take place. While the archaeology record of our ancient ancestors has been buried beneath the foundation of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, and largely compromised, we have an obligation to continue voicing concerns. This group was designed to accommodate individuals frustrated with the abuse of our collective history(ies) and the power differential that has been exercised by certain organizations and all levels of government: This is neither a solely Aboriginal issue, nor is it an area of contention for only Manitobans. All Canadians should be made aware of these violations. Regrettably, the province of Manitoba holds some of the weakest heritage standards in all of North America. By calling attention to the grave injustices occurring right now at The Forks, we can set a precedence for future protocols and procedures. For more information, see http://www.facebook.com/group.php?v=wall&ref=ts&gid=179056386933 or email Vanda Fleury: umfleurv at cc.umanitoba.ca =============================== 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 Mar 7 21:07:10 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 2010 21:07:10 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Canada wanted Afghan prisoners tortured: lawyer Message-ID: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/03/05/afghan-attaran005.html CBC News March 5, 2010 Canada wanted Afghan prisoners tortured: lawyer Unredacted documents show officials hoped to gather intelligence, expert says Federal government documents on Afghan detainees suggest that Canadian officials intended some prisoners to be tortured in order to gather intelligence, according to a legal expert. If the allegation is true, such actions would constitute a war crime, said University of Ottawa law professor Amir Attaran, who has been digging deep into the issue and told CBC News he has seen uncensored versions of government documents released last year. "If these documents were released [in full], what they will show is that Canada partnered deliberately with the torturers in Afghanistan for the interrogation of detainees," he said. "There would be a question of rendition and a question of war crimes on the part of certain Canadian officials. That's what's in these documents, and that's why the government is covering up as hard as it can." Detainee abuse became the subject of national debate last year after heavily redacted versions of the documents were made public after Attaran filed an access to information request. They revealed the Canadian military was not monitoring detainees who had been transferred from Canadian to Afghan custody. It was later alleged that some of those detainees were being mistreated. Diplomat Richard Colvin says he warned top Canadian officials as early as 2006 that Afghan detainees handed over to Afghans were subsequently being tortured. Until now, the controversy has centred on whether the government turned a blind eye to abuse of Afghan detainees. However, Attaran said the full versions of the documents show that Canada went even further in intentionally handing over prisoners to torturers. "And it wasn't accidental; it was done for a reason," he said. "It was done so that they could be interrogated using harsher methods." The government maintains that nothing improper happened. "The Canadian Forces have conducted themselves with the highest performance of all countries," Prime Minister Stephen Harper told the House of Commons Thursday. But many facets of the issue remain top secret, such as the role of Canada's elite Joint Task Force 2, or JTF2. There have been hints that JTF2 might be handling so-called high-value prisoners. "High-value targets would be detained under a completely different mechanism that involved special forces and targeted, intelligence-driven operations," Richard Colvin, a former senior diplomat with Canada's mission in Afghanistan, told a parliamentary committee last November. Colvin claimed that all detainees transferred by Canadians to Afghan prisons were likely tortured by Afghan officials. He also said that his concerns were ignored by top government officials and that the government might have tried to cover up the issue. Opposition parties have been trying to get the Conservative government to release the uncensored versions of the documents pertaining to the handling of Afghan detainees. Retired Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci has been asked to review whether documents pertaining to the transfer of Afghan detainees can be released to Parliament. The Conservatives insist that releasing uncensored files on the issue would damage national security. On Friday, Justice Minister Rob Nicholson asked former Supreme Court of Canada Justice Frank Iacobucci to review whether there would be "injurious" effects if some Afghan detainee documents were made public. Nicholson did not give full details on Iacobucci's assignment or a timetable for when the review might be completed. However, opposition parties said Parliament is entitled to those documents regardless of what Iacobucci decides. "Parliament is supreme," said Ontario NDP MP Paul Dewar. "What this is, is a skate around Parliament." Liberal MP Ujjal Dosanjh said the government still has many questions to answer on the subject of detainees. "Who knew what and when, and who allowed the continuing saga of Afghan detainees being sent to a potential risk of torture?" Dosanjh said. It's not clear whether the government will make Iacobucci's advice public. Moreover, he is not a sitting judge and can't legally rule or force the government to do anything. Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/03/05/afghan-attaran005.html#ixzz0hWKORyhx =============================== 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 Mar 8 07:13:29 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 2010 07:13:29 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [Afghanistan] RAWA Statement on Int'l Women's Day Message-ID: RAWA, 07.03.2010 Emancipation of Afghan women not attainable as long as the occupation, Taliban and "National Front" criminals are not sacked! Statement of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) on the International Women's Day, March 8, 2010 Today, on the 8th of March, Afghan women are mourning for the gang-rape of Bashiras and Saimas, for being flogged by most lowed elements, for being auctioned in open market and for their young daughters who put an end to their miserable lives by self-immolation. But the perpetrators of all these crimes are forgiven; therefore they enjoy complete immunity, are still holding their official positions and tightening it through plundering our people and country. Though we don't expect anything different from the most corrupt and dirty puppet regime of the world, the pain of Afghan women turns chronic when the world believes that the US and NATO has donated liberation, democracy and human and women rights for Afghanistan; whereas, after eight years of the US and allies' aggression under the banner of "war on terror", they empowered the most brutal terrorists of the Northern Alliance and the former Russian puppets - the Khalqis and Parchamis - and by relying on them, the US imposed a puppet government on Afghan people. And instead of uprooting its Taliban and Al-Qaeda creations, the US and NATO continues to kill our innocent and poor civilians, mostly women and children, in their vicious air raids. In such conditions, we saw that Karzai, as the most demagogic and flagrant President, turgidly talks about the London Conference, which in face had no positive outcome for Afghan people and where he only bargained and dealt for the return of the terrorist Taliban and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar to power and the pouring of millions of more Dollars which go to the pockets of the Karzai family and the mafias of Fahim, Khalili, Dostum and other murderers. The Karzai puppet and reactionary regime is implicated in corruption and blood of the poor from top to bottom. Only the hundreds of people killed in the recent avalanche tragedy in Salang and the miseries of millions of refugee Afghans in the hands of the Iranian criminal regime are enough to punish and jail many of the so-called high ranking officials for negligence and inattention to the problems of our people. But the US government does not try to curb its Afghan stooges and allows them to commit many crimes, betrayal and lootings, so they could repress and intimidate Afghans in any possible way and stop the emergence of any anti-fundamentalist and pro-independent uprising in Afghanistan. Therefore, it comes of no surprise that the decay and corruption of top criminals such as Rabbani, Sayyaf, Dr. Abdullah, Qanoni, Karzai family, Zia Massoud, Fahim, Khalili, Saddique Chakari, Mirwas Yassini, Zahir Aghbar, Hadi Arghandewal, Anwar Jakdalak, Ismael Khan, Atta Mohammad and others are even reflected in some Western media, who have made dirty businesses and multi-billion Dollar investments in Afghanistan and Dubai as a result of their lootings and drug-dealings in Afghanistan. To show to the world that they value women's rights, the US and its Afghan mafia lackeys nourished a bunch of flunkeys and pro-occupation women to hold conferences and meet the so-called "his Excellency" President Karzai and his US-assigned spokespersons Wahid Omer, Siamak Herawi, Sibghatullah Sanjar and other traitors to ask for more ministries for Afghan women. But they are grasping the intentions of others with their own dirty mirrors and think ordinary Afghan women are unaware of the fact that even if all the members of the cabinet are made up of reactionary women such as Amina Afzali, Hassan Bano Ghazanfar, Massouda Jalal, Noorzia Atmar, Qadria Yazdanparast, Shukria Barakzai, Fouzia Kofi, Manija Bakhtari and others linked to brutal warlords, still it will not bring any positive change for Afghan women, because such women, acting as committed agents of the US government and its fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist menials, only define themselves by raising soft criticisms and asking for some reforms acceptable for the governing criminals and their foreign masters. With money and offers of official posts, the US and its Afghan agents have bought many Afghan intellectuals. Many of the writers and poets are paid by the blood-thirsty Iranian regime who instead of raising people's awareness and mobilizing them for pro-independence, pro-democracy and anti-fundamentalism struggle, try to pave the way for Iranian theocratic regime's deeper involvement in Afghanistan and inflame and fuel ethnic, sectarian and lingual tensions among Afghan people. RAWA always believes that women's problem is a political issue and we cannot tackle it separately from the current catastrophic political situation. Without the overthrow of the current puppet regime, which is becoming more mortal and odorous than before by the inclusion of Taliban and Gulbuddini murderers, none of the thousands of the problems of our unhappy people will ever be solved. Slogans about restoring peace, security, democracy and women's rights will be empty and amplified claims, as long as Afghanistan has not gained its independence; the Taliban and the Northern Alliance killers are not prosecuted and the billions of wealth they have pillaged from people are not taken back from them. The benchmark to judge if any individual or organization is truly patriotic and progressive in the current situation is their struggle in any possible means against US occupation, the criminal Taliban -- who have the enslavement harness of Pakistan around their nick -- and the hirelings of Iran and the US in the "National Front". RAWA is eager to get united in solidarity with individuals and forces that are ready to fight for democracy in an independent front against the occupation, the Taliban, Jehadi and Khalqi and Parchami homeland-sellers. While women of Afghanistan are experiencing a new era of captivity and are in the grip of the fundamentalist monsters, RAWA sends it heartfelt salutations to struggling brave women of Iran, Palestine, Kurdistan, Sudan, Nepal, India and the rest of the world and announces solidarity with them. =============================== 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 Mar 8 13:04:31 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 2010 13:04:31 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] =?iso-8859-1?q?International_Women=27s_Day=3A_March_8?= =?iso-8859-1?q?=2C_2010?= Message-ID: The Bullet International Women's Day -- March 8, 2010 This year marks the celebrating of the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day (IWD). International Women's Day was proclaimed at the meeting of the Second International of socialist parties in Copenhagen in 1910, following on years of campaigning by women in the labour and socialist movements for equality. It grew in prominence across the 20th century, and eventually in 1977 the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution stating that this day "recognized the role of women in peace efforts and development and urged an end to discrimination and an increase of support for women's full and equal participation." It hardly needs stating that a great number of challenges remain for women in Canada and around the world. These include inequalities in pay and work conditions, lack of adequate access to childcare facilities, the conditions of poverty faced by many single mothers, the deterioration of social programmes, sexual and domestic violence, amongst others. The economic crisis and the turn by governments to even 'harder' policies of neoliberalism can only make these challenges for women more difficult. The struggles for gender equality within campaigns against neoliberal policies and efforts to renew the socialist movement have particular importance and urgency. This year IWD internationally is making a special note of the disaster in Haiti. The Ontario Public Services Employees Union Provinicial Women's Committee, for example, notes "we are being asked to honour the lives of feminist Haitian leaders who died in the massive earthquake on January 12th. An activity in Haiti's Catherine Flon plaza will be held to share what they learned from three fallen feminist leaders: Myriam Merlet, Magali Marcelin, and Anne Marie Coriolan. All three leaders had a long history of feminist activism. They reformed a judiciary that never took rape seriously, created organizations and houses to protect girls and women against domestic violence and trafficking, published a feminist newspaper, expanded a documentary center and an historical archive, and struggled for the protection of sexual and reproductive rights." The Bullet reprints here an early article by the socialist-feminst and revolutionary, Alexandra Kollontai, on the linkage between international women's day and the unity of the international workers' movement. Click the following link to continue: http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/321.php#continue =============================== 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 Mar 8 17:59:39 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 2010 17:59:39 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] JKG Prize in Economics Awarded to John Loxley Message-ID: <1F0F96DFA2A54DC2B26B22FA3E69FB78@agingCHS072729> [congratulations, John! You've always been on my "favourite 40's list" - see http://tomfolio.com/shop/booksinternationale/. For those of you who don't know him, John Loxley was also involved over the years with the work of Cho!ces (a coalition for social justice) in Winnipeg, as well as kay mover and shaker in Alternative Federal Budget Reports that were produced in book form, and that resulted in conservative politicians of all stripes avoiding alternative stuff like the plague -- rm] http://myuminfo.umanitoba.ca/index.asp?sec=2&too=100&eve=8&dat=3/8/2010&npa=21898 Award-winning economist Posted Monday, March 8, 2010 4:00 PM [Photo: University of Manitoba economist John Loxley] University of Manitoba economist John Loxley has won the 2010 John Kenneth Galbraith (JKG) Prize in Economics. The JKG Prize is awarded every two years and is based on a demonstrated contribution combining economic analysis with a commitment to social justice. It is given to the economist whose work exemplifies the goals and objectives of the Progressive Economics Forum, a group of 125 Canadian economists. "I am very pleased and pleasantly surprised by the news," Loxley said. Loxley's research concerns development economics, international monetary and financial systems, and community economic development. "However," his colleague Jim Stanford said, "it is more through his enduring and important personal commitment to activism that John has really left a lasting benefit for social change efforts in Canada and around the world." Loxley has worked on, among many other things, international debt issues and developing grass-roots economic development initiatives with First Nations communities in northern Manitoba. "There are a lot of problems that need solving and inequality is a big one," Loxley said. The JKG Prize comes with a $2,000 award and the winner delivers a lecture to the PEF at the bi-annual meeting. Loxley will give his lecture in Quebec in May. =============================== 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 Mar 8 18:39:38 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 8 Mar 2010 18:39:38 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] William Blum: March 2010 Anti-Empire Report Message-ID: http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer79.html The Anti-Empire Report March 8th, 2010 by William Blum www.killinghope.org Informed consent About half the states in the US require that a woman seeking an abortion be told certain things before she can obtain the medical procedure. In South Dakota, for example, until a few months ago, staff was required to tell women: "The abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being"; the pregnant woman has "an existing relationship with that unborn human being," a relationship protected by the U.S. Constitution and the laws of South Dakota; and a "known medical risk" of abortion is an "increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide." A federal judge has now eliminated the second and third required assertions, calling them "untruthful and misleading." 1 I personally would question even the first assertion about a fetus or an embryo being a human being, but that's not the point I wish to make here. I'd like to suggest that before a young American man or woman can enlist in the armed forces s/he must be told the following by the staff of the military recruitment office: "The United States is at war [this statement is always factually correct]. You will likely be sent to a battlefield where you will be expected to do your best to terminate the lives of whole, separate, unique, living human beings you know nothing about and who have never done you or your country any harm. You may in the process lose an arm or a leg. Or your life. If you come home alive and with all your body parts intact there's a good chance you will be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Do not expect the government to provide you particularly good care for that, or any care at all. In any case, you may wind up physically abusing your spouse and children and/or others, killing various individuals, abusing drugs and/or alcohol, and having an increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide. No matter how bad a condition you may be in, the Pentagon may send you back to the battlefield for another tour of duty. They call this 'stop-loss'. Your only alternative may be to go AWOL. Do you have any friends in Canada? And don't ever ask any of your officers what we're fighting for. Even the generals don't know. In fact, the generals especially don't know. They would never have reached their high position if they had been able to go beyond the propaganda we're all fed, the same propaganda that has influenced you to come to this office." Since for so many young people in recent years one of the determining factors in their enlistment has been the economy, this additional thought should be pointed out to them - "You are enlisting to fight, and perhaps die, for a country that can't even provide you with a decent job, or any job at all." "I fear for us all, but I especially fear for those already poor. How much lower can they go without being cannon fodder or electric chair fodder or street litter or prison stuffing or just plain lonely suicide?" - Carolyn Chute, novelist, Maine USA Where seldom is heard a discouraging word ... like "bribery" I really did not know that I could still be so surprised, even shocked, by corruption in the Congress of the United States. I thought my coating of cynicism was already more than thick enough to be impervious to any new revelations. I was wrong. Consider the following. Seven members of the House of Representatives steered hundreds of millions of dollars in largely no-bid contracts to clients of a lobbying firm, PMA Group. In fiscal year 2008 alone, the seven lawmakers sponsored $112 million worth of "earmarks" (construction and other projects paid for by the government) for PMA clients while accepting more than $350,000 in contributions from the firm's clients and lobbyists. Such behavior should be investigated by the House ethics committee, should it not? And it was. The Committee on Standards of Official Conduct issued a report stating unanimously that the Congressmembers had not violated any rules or laws. "Simply because a member sponsors an earmark for an entity that also happens to be a campaign contributor does not, on these two facts alone, support a claim that a member's actions are being influenced by campaign contributions." Ethics watchdogs issued sharp denunciations, citing portions of the report that showed that the private companies themselves thought that their donations helped them win earmarks. One of the seven Congressmembers investigated was Peter J. Visclosky (D-Ind.) The Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE), a government agency not composed of members of Congress, which conducts preliminary reviews, found probable cause that Visclosky sought contributions in exchange for steering federal contracts to contributors. The OCE was in possession of e-mails suggesting that Visclosky's fundraisers were specifically targeted toward PMA's clients who were seeking earmarks. Even though the OCE recommended that the more powerful House ethics committee subpoena Visclosky and his staff to answer questions under oath about his earmarking practice, the members of the House committee chose not to subpoena Visclosky or any of the pertinent records. Wait, it gets better - The FBI actually raided the PMA offices as part of an investigation into whether the company had directed illegal campaign contributions to lawmakers who helped clients obtain earmarks, and in 2009 a federal grand jury issued subpoenas to Visclosky, one of his former aides, and his political committees.2 But nothing - apparently nothing - could move the members of the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct of the United States House of Representatives to condemn their comrades. This is the kind of Congressional corruption that drives so many Americans - on the right and on the left - to think of forming a new party. At times, the thought hits me as well. But two factors interfere. One, the overwhelming role played by money in American electoral campaigns can trump the best of intentions. Wealthy elites have no need for any other party. The Democrats and Republicans serve their needs just fine, thank you. And two, ideology. Gathering together a lot of people who are turned off by Congressional venality and amorality sounds good until the ideological shit hits the fan. There will undoubtedly be a wide range of ideological leanings in any such group because people who are serious about third parties like to be "non-sectarian" or "non-exclusionary", but this typically leads to serious friction, disputes and splits. Even if you specify something like "the United States should get out of Afghanistan as soon as possible", that can still take various conflicting forms; people's politics are complicated, not to mention confused. To those who like to tell themselves and others that they don't have any particular ideology I say this: If you have thoughts about why the world is the way it is, why society is the way it is, why people are the way they are, what a better way would look like, and if your thoughts are at all organized, that's your ideology, even if it's not wholly conscious as such. Better to organize those thoughts as best you can, become very conscious of them, and consciously avoid getting involved with a political party that is incompatible. It's like a bad marriage. Things are indeed polarizing in America. There's The Tea Party on the right and The Coffee Party on the left. On the face of it, The Tea Party scarcely makes any sense. A seemingly burgeoning new movement semi-hysterically marching and screaming that their beloved free enterprise is threatened by the "socialist" Barack Obama. (What next, that he's a committed "Marxist" or "communist"? They've probably already said that; if you're going to be dumb you may as well go all the way and be retarded.) A group of more mainstream conservatives gathered February 17 at a Virginia estate once owned by George Washington and called for a return to the principles of Washington's time to fight the political battles that lie ahead. They produced a declaration, "The Mount Vernon Statement: Constitutional Conservatism: A Statement for the 21st Century". It is a short statement, a mere 546 words, yet the idea of "limited government" or "self-government" is referred to seven times. These people, no less than the Teapartyers, are obsessed with the idea that government intrusion into society of virtually any kind is harmful, or at least much inferior to what could be derived from "free enterprise, the individual entrepreneur, and economic reforms grounded in market solutions", as they put it. This is standard and familiar conservative doctrine to be sure, but now feeding and powering a whole new generation of right-wing activists. To counter the arguments of these activists, progressives need to present their own doctrine about the role and value of government in people's lives, a concise summary of which I just happen to have prepared in my essay: "The US invades, bombs and kills for it ... but do Americans really believe in free enterprise?" It was written several years ago, as the examples I use make clear, but this matters not for the ideological principles have not changed. The essay concludes: "Activists have to remind the American people of what they've already learned but seem to have forgotten: that they don't want more government, or less government; they don't want big government, or small government; they want government on their side." 3 Paraguay, Honduras and Barack Obama During his campaign for the presidency of Paraguay, former bishop Fernando Lugo promised to bring health care to the millions unable to afford it. A month after Lugo took office in August 2008, the Ministry of Public Health and Social Welfare (MSPBS) gradually began to make some public health services free, waiving fees for office, outpatient and emergency room visits. Later, hospital admission fees were eliminated, along with charges for intensive care, post-op incision care, treatment in an infant incubator, oxygen therapy, surgery and other services. In 2009, fees were removed for diagnostic tests in all specialties, and for dental and ophthalmological services. Almost all public health services in Paraguay are now free of charge. "What we are doing is making health care a right, regardless of a person's ability to pay," said the director general of the MSPBS. After 61 years of rule by the right-wing Colorado Party, the Paraguayan left needs to institute various reforms to make sure that free health care is sustainable in the long term.4 So what would it take for free health care to reach the shores of the world's only superpower? Well, a president who believed in it and who had some backbone. But every passing day brings us fresh evidence that the man has no backbone. The Republicans, or certain Democrats, or a powerful lobby, or Israel applies a little pressure and the man buckles. Like a shack in Haiti during a quake. As to his beliefs ... In May of last year I wrote in this report: "The problem, I'm increasingly afraid, is that the man doesn't really believe strongly in anything, certainly not in controversial areas. He learned a long time ago how to take positions that avoid controversy, how to express opinions without clearly and firmly taking sides, how to talk eloquently without actually saying anything, how to leave his listeners' heads filled with stirring clich?s, platitudes, and slogans. And it worked. Oh how it worked! What could happen now, as President of the United States, to induce him to change his style?" How long before Fernando Lugo lets slip some critical remarks about the behemoth to the north that tosses Paraguay into the ODE (Officially Designated Enemy) dumpster along with Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, et al.? Undoubtedly, there are any number of old-time right-wing military officers in Paraguay who are just itching to duplicate what happened in Honduras. I can hear them now - "We don't need no stinkin' socialist government with its stinkin' communist free health care" - and just waiting for someone at the Pentagon to casually nod his head. And if that happens, the Obama administration will embrace the Paraguayan caudillos just as they've done with the Honduran golpistas, the latest show of support being the announcement by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of the resumption of aid and her urging Latin American countries to recognize the new Honduran government, despite its serious and daily violations of human rights. 5 Help wanted for an animated political cartoon I have written a script for a short video - estimated 5 to 10 minutes long, to be shown on YouTube and elsewhere on the Internet, tentatively entitled "Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country." We need a cartoonist to draw the images and a technical person to create the movement using Adobe flash or other software, and to add the narration. Could be one person for both functions. The persons should be in basic agreement with the political ideas expressed in the script, which is available for a confidential reading upon request. Halfway decent pay. Write to: bblum6 at aol.com Notes 1.Washington Post, February 26, 2010 ? 2.Washington Post, February 27, 2010 ? 3.http://killinghope.org/superogue/system.htm ? 4.Inter Press Service, January 6, 2010 ? 5.Associated Press, March 5, 2010 ? - 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 Previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website. To add yourself to this mailing list simply send an email to bblum6 [at] aol.com with "add" in the subject line. I'd like your name and city in the message, but that's optional. I ask for your city only in case I'll be speaking in your area. =============================== 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 Tue Mar 9 01:21:10 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 2010 02:21:10 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] =?iso-8859-1?q?Praising_Canadian_Health_Care-Thanks?= =?iso-8859-1?q?=2C_Sarah!?= Message-ID: MARCH 8, 2010 2:00PM Praising Canadian Health Care-Thanks, Sarah! Kanuk In a speech given over the weekend to a sold-out crowd in Calgary, Sarah Palin admitted that she and her family used to take advantage of the Universal health system in Canada (which is officially illegal, if she, as a US citizen living in the States used a Canadian health care card). As discussed in a Globe and Mail article yesterday: The vocal opponent of health-care reform in the U.S. steered largely clear of the topic except to reveal a tidbit about her life growing up not far from Whitehorse. "We used to hustle over the border for health care we received in Canada," she said. "And I think now, isn't that ironic?" Remember that our dear friend Sarah was the one who claimed that the health care system in Canada has 'death panels' to determine, apparently, who gets health care and who doesn't. And yet she and her larcenist family (unless they paid for it which I personally doubt, otherwise why not get it locally?) were able to 'hustle over the border' whenever they wanted. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. And no, in case you're wondering, there have never been 'death panels' in Canada. If you need care; you get it. For those interested, my latest (serious) post on this topic can be found here: The case against the U.S. health care system http://open.salon.com//blog/kanuk/2010/03/08/praising_canadian_health_carethanks_sarah -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From may at applebybooks.net Tue Mar 9 04:18:25 2010 From: may at applebybooks.net (May at Appleby Books) Date: Tue, 09 Mar 2010 02:18:25 -0800 Subject: [Fresh Ink] What was REALLY needed Message-ID: <4B962071.8020008@applebybooks.net> was not a bail-out, it was THIS! http://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2010/03/07/ From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Mar 9 09:25:32 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 2010 09:25:32 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The Jobs Of Yesteryear: Obsolete Occupations [NPR] Message-ID: <6A86D6908FFF4CDBA7F2B2F553207F07@agingCHS072729> The Jobs Of Yesteryear: Obsolete Occupations [NPR] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124251060 =============================== 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 Mar 9 09:45:51 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 2010 09:45:51 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Too big to fail Message-ID: <2FB66251462C4751BA5A09BBCBD40E1E@agingCHS072729> http://mondediplo.com/2010/03/01banks Next financial crisis is in public services Too big to fail by Serge Halimi States rescued the banks in country after country, neither asking nor getting anything in return. The banks are now using their newfound strength against the state, threatening to reveal the accounting tricks the banks themselves had recommended to hide some of the debt. After all, interest rates on loans are higher when the financial reputation of the state is in question. So Goldman Sachs first helped Greece to borrow billions of euros in secret, and then told it how to get round the European restrictions on public debt. The bill for this groundbreaking financial advice was subsequently added to the huge Greek deficit (1). And the winners and losers? Lloyd Craig Blankfein, CEO and chairman of Goldman Sachs, received a $9m bonus; Greek civil servants will lose the equivalent of a month's salary each year. A country, like a bank, is "too big to fail". So Greece will be rescued - at a price. The European Central Bank claims to know all about Wall Street's game, and ECB president Jean-Claude Trichet is taking a very hard line with the Greek government, warning that Greece will have to take "vigorous steps" to mend its ways, "under close and constant EU supervision". In other words, hand over control of its economic affairs and reduce its 2009 deficit - 12.7% of GDP - to 3% by 2012. To cut the deficit by almost 10%, particularly in an area of weak growth, is an almost impossible task, requiring major surgery rather than "discipline". Oddly enough, the aim of the exercise is to strengthen the euro at the very time when the US and China are devaluing their currencies in order to consolidate the process of recovery (2). Angela Merkel considered that "it would be a disgrace if it turned out to be true that banks that already pushed us to the edge of the abyss were also party to falsifying Greek statistics". Goldman Sachs is unlikely to be moved by this tirade. Barack Obama's comment on Blankfein's bonus was anodyne: "I, like most of the American people, don't begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market system." As we all know, that wealth serves the whole community: after all, Goldman Sachs paid 0.6% tax (3) on its profits last year, didn't it? (1) The New York Times for 13 February 2010 quoted a figure of $300m for the fees paid to Goldman Sachs for finding a way for Greece to borrow billions of dollars secretly, to enable the country - already deep in debt - to join the European Monetary Union. (2) See Yves de Kerdrel, "Le probl?me ce n'est pas la Gr?ce, c'est l'euro", Le Figaro, Paris, 16 February 2010. (3) Quoted in Harper's, New York, 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 hain at antcolbks.com Tue Mar 9 19:02:40 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 2010 20:02:40 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Goldman Sachs sued by International Brotherhood of Electric Workers for Overpaying Executives Message-ID: Goldman Sachs sued by big pension fund over pay NEW YORK Mon Mar 8, 2010 5:59pm EST NEW YORK (Reuters) - Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) was sued on Monday by a large union pension fund that accused the Wall Street investment bank of overpaying its executives. The International Brotherhood of Electric Workers fund filed the lawsuit in Delaware Chancery Court, seeking to recover money for the company on behalf of other shareholders. It seeks to stop Goldman from allocating roughly 47 percent of 2009 net revenue as compensation, saying such allocations "vastly overcompensate management and constitute corporate waste." The lawsuit also wants Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein and others in management, rather than shareholders, to be responsible for charitable contributions that Goldman is making as a an apology for its activities. Goldman has been at the center of a public debate over how much banks should pay out in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, after taking billions of dollars of federal bailout money. Last week, Goldman said it would cap 2009 compensation expense at $16.2 billion, for a 36 percent compensation ratio, despite posting a record profit. The bank also said its board rejected several shareholder demands to investigate recent pay awards and recoup excessive pay, while admitting it could face "negative publicity" from media portrayals. Goldman spokesman Ed Canaday said: "We believe the lawsuit is completely without merit." A lawyer for the plaintiff did not immediately return a call seeking comment. The lawsuit is similar to one filed in the same court in January by the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, or SEPTA, which oversees public transit in the Philadelphia area. The case is International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 98 Pension Fund v. Blankfein et al, Delaware Chancery Court, No. 5315, (Reporting by Jonathan Stempel and Steve Eder; Editing by Steve Orlofsky.) http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE62763320100308 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Mar 9 22:49:10 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 9 Mar 2010 22:49:10 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Roger Burbach: Chile's Social Earthquake Message-ID: <56A52A0F29094369B029F91D819E4E0B@agingCHS072729> http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/03/09-4 CommonDreams.org March 9, 2010 Chile's Social Earthquake by Roger Burbach Chile is experiencing a social earthquake in the aftermath of the 8.8 magnitude quake that struck the country on February 27. "The fault lines of the Chilean Economic Miracle have been exposed," says Elias Padilla, an anthropology professor at the Academic University of Christian Humanism in Santiago. "The free market, neo-liberal economic model that Chile has followed since the Pinochet dictatorship has feet of mud." Chile is one of the most inequitable societies in the world. Today, 14 percent of the population lives in abject poverty. The top 20 percent captures 50 percent of the national income, while the bottom 20 percent earns only 5 percent. In a 2005 World Bank survey of 124 countries, Chile ranked twelfth in the list of countries with the worst distribution of income. The rampant ideology of the free market has produced a deep sense of alienation among much of the population. Although a coalition of center left parties replaced the Pinochet regime twenty years ago, it opted to depoliticize the country, to rule from the top down, allowing controlled elections every few years, shunting aside the popular organizations and social movements that had brought down the dictatorship. This explains the scenes of looting and social chaos in the southern part of the country that were transmitted round the world on the third day after the earthquake. In Concepcion, Chile's second largest city, which was virtually leveled by the earthquake, the population received absolutely no assistance from the central government for two days. The chain supermarkets and malls that had come to replace the local stores and shops over the years remained firmly shuttered. Settling Accounts Popular frustration exploded as mobs descended on the commercial center, carting off everything, not just food from the supermarkets but also shoes, clothing, plasma TVs, and cell phones. This wasn't simple looting, but the settling accounts with an economic system that dictates that only possessions and commodities matter. The "gente decente" the decent people and the big media began referring to them as lumpen, vandals and delinquents. "The greater the social inequities, the greater the delinquency," explains Hugo Fruhling of the Center for the Study of Citizen Security at the University of Chile. In the two days leading up to the riots, the government of Michele Bachelet revealed its incapacity to understand and deal with the human tragedy wrecked on the country. Many of the ministers were gone on summer vacation or licking their wounds as they prepared to turn over their offices to the incoming right wing government of billionaire Sebastian Pi?era, who will be sworn in this Thursday. Bachelet declared that the country's needs had to be studied and surveyed before any assistance could be sent. On Saturday morning the day of the quake, she ordered the military to place a helicopter at her disposal to fly over Concepcion to assess the damage. As of Sunday morning, no helicopter had appeared and the trip was abandoned. As an anonymous Carlos L. wrote in an email widely circulated in Chile: "It would be very difficult in the history of the country to find a government with so many powerful resources--technological, economic, political, organizational--that has been unable to provide any response to the urgent social demands of entire regions gripped by fear, needs of shelter, water, food and hope." What arrived in Concepcion on Monday was not relief or assistance, but several thousand soldiers and police transported in trucks and planes, as people were ordered to stay in their homes. Pitched battles were fought in the streets of Concepcion as buildings were set afire. Other citizens took up arms to protect their homes and barrios as the city appeared to be on the brink of an urban war. On Tuesday relief assistance finally began to arrive in quantity, along with more troops and the militarization of the southern region. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on part of a Latin American tour that was scheduled before the quake, flew into Santiago on Tuesday to meet with Bachelet and Pi?era. She brought 20 satellite phones and a technician on her plane, saying one of the "biggest problems has been communications as we found in Haiti in those days after the quake." It went unsaid that just as in Chile, the US sent in the military to take control of Porte au Prince before any significant relief assistance was distributed. Milton Friedman's Legacy The Wall Street Journal joined in the fray to uphold the neoliberal model, running an article by Bret Stephens, "How Milton Friedman Saved Chile." He asserted that Friedman's "spirit was surely hovering protectively over Chile in the early morning hours of Saturday. Thanks largely to him, the country has endured a tragedy that elsewhere would have been an apocalypse." He went on to declare, "it's not by chance that Chilean's were living in houses of brick--and Haitians in houses of straw--when the wolf arrived to try to blow them down." Chile had adopted "some of the world strictest building codes," as the economy boomed due to Pinochet's appointment of Friedman-trained economists to cabinet ministries and the subsequent civilian government's commitment to neoliberalism. There are two problems with this view. First, as Naomi Klein points out in "Chile's Socialist Rebar" on the Huffington Post, it was the socialist government of Salvador Allende in 1972 that established the first earthquake building codes. They were later strengthened, not by Pinochet, but by the restored civilian government in the 1990's. Secondly as CIPER, the Center of Journalistic Investigation and Information reported on March 6, greater Santiago has twenty-three residential complexes and high rises built over the last fifteen years that suffered severe quake damage. Building codes had been skirted, and "the responsibility of the construction and real estate enterprises is now the subject of public debate." In the country at large, two million people out of a population of seventeen million are homeless. Most of the houses destroyed by the earthquake were built of adobe or other improvised materials, many in the shanty towns that have sprung up to provide a cheap, informal work force for the country's big businesses and industries. There is little hope that the incoming government of Sebastian Pi?era will rectify the social inequities that the quake exposed. The richest person in Chile, he and several of his advisers and ministers are implicated as major shareholders in construction projects that were severely damaged by the quake because building codes were ignored. Having campaigned on a platform of bringing security to the cities and moving against vandalism and crime, he criticized Bachelet's for not deploying the military sooner in the aftermath of the earthquake. Signs of Resistance There are signs that the historic Chile of popular organizations and grass roots mobilizing may be reawakening. A coalition of over sixty social and nongovernmental organizations released a letter stating: "In these dramatic circumstances, organized citizens have proven capable of providing urgent, rapid and creative responses to the social crisis that millions of families are experiencing. The most diverse organizations--neighborhood associations, housing and homeless committees, trade unions, university federations and student centers, cultural organizations, environmental groups-are mobilizing, demonstrating the imaginative potential and solidarity of communities." The declaration concluded by demanding of the Pi?era government the right to "monitor the plans and models of reconstruction so that they include the full participation of the communities."* *See Asociacion Chilena de ONGs Accion, La Ciudadania, Protagonista de la Reconstruccion del Pais. March 7, 2010, Published in Clarin, http://www.elclarin.cl/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=20384&Itemid=48 [1] Roger Burbach lived in Chile during the Allende years. He is author of The Pinochet Affair: State Terrorism and Global Justice [2] (Zed Books) and director of the Center for the Study of the Americas [3] (CENSA) based in Berkeley, CA =============================== 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 maclean101 at hotmail.com Wed Mar 10 13:13:18 2010 From: maclean101 at hotmail.com (maclean Maclean) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:13:18 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Charles Hugh Smith on the Stock Market Message-ID: The Stock Market As Propaganda by Charles Hugh Smith March 10, 2010 http://www.oftwominds.com/blogmar10/wealth-distribution03-10.html "Since 91% of stocks are owned by the Plutocracy, the much-ballyhooed rise in the stock market as proof the recession is over is perception management/ propaganda. The 75% rise in the stock market from its lows a year ago is ceaselessly offered as "proof" the economy is recovering. Too bad very few Americans are drawing any benefit from this stupendous rise. As I detail below, the Great Middle Class owns at best only 7% of all stocks and mutual funds. ... "The stock market isn't about building middle class wealth, and the middle class seems to have finally figured that out. The equity market is all about concentrating wealth and managing perception: if the top 10% is doing well, then the bottom 90% are supposed to feel better about the whole thing, too, even if they are poorer by every financial metric." http://www.oftwominds.com/blogmar10/wealth-distribution03-10.html Cheers, Maclean _________________________________________________________________ Stay in touch. http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9712959 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Mar 10 16:29:21 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:29:21 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] U.S. doctors leave Haiti as Cubans expand care Message-ID: http://www.themilitant.com/2010/7410/741051.html The Militant Vol. 74/No. 10 March 15, 2010 U.S. doctors leave Haiti as Cubans expand care BY CINDY JAQUITH With thousands in Haiti still in critical need of medical care, the U.S. government is pulling out the doctors it is responsible for. Meanwhile, the Cuban government is expanding its medical mission to Haiti and urging doctors from other countries to join it. On February 24 the last U.S. field hospital in Haiti closed. The USNS Comfort, the much-publicized Navy medical ship docked in Haiti, is also pulling up anchor. An article in the Wall Street Journal noted that an estimated 25 percent to 30 percent of those who had emergency surgery done since the January 12 earthquake will need to have more operations. "New cases of diarrhea, malaria and other diseases are picking up in tent communities crammed with tens of thousands of people who lost their homes," it added. The dangers will mount as the rainy season produces major flooding. These facts have not persuaded most doctors from the United States and other imperialist countries who went to Haiti after the earthquake to stay there for more than a few weeks. They are now "back in their antiseptic, high-tech offices," the New York Times said, "haunted by the experiences." Cuban doctors, on the other hand, are digging in for the long battle that lies ahead. "The major challenge begins now, when the press headlines abandon Haiti, the moment of emergency is over, and the supposed 'threat' of a wave of emigration is diminishing," said Cuban president Ra?l Castro in a February 23 speech to the Summit of Latin American and the Caribbean Unity, held in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. Haiti doesn't need "a fleeting and sudden gesture of 'charity,'" he said. It "requires and deserves a major international effort for its reconstruction." Castro reported that the Cuban medical mission in Haiti has now grown to about 1,430, spread throughout the country. It is called the Henry Reeve International Brigade, named after a U.S. man who joined Cuba's independence war in the late 19th century. The brigade includes nearly 800 Cuban doctors and other health-care workers, as well as Cuban-trained doctors from Haiti and more than two dozen other countries. Since the earthquake, the Cuban mission has treated more than 95,000 Haitians and performed 4,500 surgeries. It is now focusing the medical mission on advancing the long-term health system in Haiti. According to the Cuban daily Granma, the Cubans are building two new hospitals outside Port-au-Prince, the capital, in areas where health care had been practically nonexistent. Graduates from Cuba's Latin American School of Medicine as well as current students there are at the center of this effort. They number 637 and come from 27 countries. Granma interviewed one of these graduates, Marcela Vera, from Colombia. As soon as the earthquake struck she wanted to go to Haiti to help. She was turned down by many aid organizations. Doctors Without Borders told her she needed to know French. The Red Cross demanded two years' experience. But when the Latin American School of Medicine called her, "she was only asked to do her best and do it well," Granma said. Forty-eight hours later she was on her way to Haiti. Related articles: Three of Cuban Five moved from Miami jail http://www.themilitant.com/2010/7410/741054.html Write to the Cuban Five http://www.themilitant.com/2010/7410/Cuban5.pdf Chinese-Cuban general to start tour in Montreal http://www.themilitant.com/2010/7410/741057.html Cuban book fair travels throughout provinces http://www.themilitant.com/2010/7410/741050.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 Wed Mar 10 19:26:44 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:26:44 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Ayn Rand Was a Big Admirer of Serial Killer Message-ID: AlterNet / By Mark Ames Ayn Rand, Hugely Popular Author and Inspiration to Right-Wing Leaders, Was a Big Admirer of Serial Killer Her works are treated as gospel by right-wing powerhouses like Alan Greenspan and Clarence Thomas, but Ayn Rand found early inspiration in 1920's murderer William Hickman. February 26, 2010 | There's something deeply unsettling about living in a country where millions of people froth at the mouth at the idea of giving health care to the tens of millions of Americans who don't have it, or who take pleasure at the thought of privatizing and slashing bedrock social programs like Social Security or Medicare. It might not be so hard to stomach if other Western countries also had a large, vocal chunk of the population that thought like this, but the U.S. is seemingly the only place where right-wing elites can openly share their distaste for the working poor. Where do they find their philosophical justification for this kind of attitude? It turns out, you can trace much of this thinking back to Ayn Rand, a popular cult-philosopher who exerts a huge influence over much of the right-wing and libertarian crowd, but whose influence is only starting to spread out of the U.S. One reason most countries don't find the time to embrace Ayn Rand's thinking is that she is a textbook sociopath. In her notebooks Ayn Rand worshiped a notorious serial murderer-dismemberer, and used this killer as an early model for the type of "ideal man" she promoted in her more famous books. These ideas were later picked up on and put into play by major right-wing figures of the past half decade, including the key architects of America's most recent economic catastrophe -- former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and SEC Commissioner Chris Cox -- along with other notable right-wing Republicans such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Rush Limbaugh and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford. The loudest of all the Republicans, right-wing attack-dog pundits and the Teabagger mobs fighting to kill health care reform and eviscerate "entitlement programs" increasingly hold up Ayn Rand as their guru. Sales of her books have soared in the past couple of years; one poll ranked Atlas Shrugged as the second most influential book of the 20th century, after the Bible. The best way to get to the bottom of Ayn Rand's beliefs is to take a look at how she developed the superhero of her novel, Atlas Shrugged, John Galt. Back in the late 1920s, as Ayn Rand was working out her philosophy, she became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation. Rand filled her early notebooks with worshipful praise of Hickman. According to biographer Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market, Rand was so smitten with Hickman that she modeled her first literary creation -- Danny Renahan, the protagonist of her unfinished first novel, The Little Street -- on him. What did Rand admire so much about Hickman? His sociopathic qualities: "Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should," she wrote, gushing that Hickman had "no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel 'other people.'" This echoes almost word for word Rand's later description of her character Howard Roark, the hero of her novel The Fountainhead: "He was born without the ability to consider others." (The Fountainhead is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' favorite book -- he even requires his clerks to read it.) I'll get to where Rand picked up her silly superman blather later -- but first, let's meet William Hickman, the "genuinely beautiful soul" and inspiration to Ayn Rand. What you will read below -- the real story, details included, of what made Hickman a "superman" in Ayn Rand's eyes -- is extremely gory and upsetting, even if you're well acquainted with true crime stories -- so prepare yourself. But it's necessary to read this to understand Rand, and to repeat this over and over until all of America understands what made her tick, because Rand's influence over the very people leading the fight to kill social programs, and her ideological influence on so many powerful bankers, regulators and businessmen who brought the financial markets crashing down, means her ideas are affecting all of our lives in the worst way imaginable. Rand fell for William Edward Hickman in the late 1920s, as the shocking story of Hickman's crime started to grip the nation. He was the OJ Simpson of his day; his crime, trial and case were nonstop headline grabbers for months. Hickman, who was only 19 when he was arrested for murder, was the son of a paranoid-schizophrenic mother and grandmother. His schoolmates said that as a kid Hickman liked to strangle cats and snap the necks of chickens for fun -- most of the kids thought he was a budding manic, though the adults gave him good marks for behavior, a typical sign of sociopathic cunning. He enrolled in college but quickly dropped out, and turned to violent crime largely driven by the thrill and arrogance typical of sociopaths: in a brief and wild crime spree that grew increasingly violent, Hickman knocked over dozens of gas stations and drug stores across the Midwest and west to California. Along the way it's believed he strangled a girl in Milwaukee and killed his crime partner's grandfather in Pasadena, tossing his body over a bridge after taking his money. Hickman's partner later told police that Hickman told him how much he'd like to kill and dismember a victim someday -- and that day did come for Hickman. One afternoon, Hickman drove up to Mount Vernon Junior High school in Los Angeles, telling administrators he'd come to pick up "the Parker girl" -- her father, Perry Parker, was a prominent banker. Hickman didn't know the girl's first name, so when he was asked which of the two Parker twins, he answered, "the younger daughter." Then he corrected himself: "The smaller one." No one suspected his motives. The school administrator fetched young Marion, and brought her out to Hickman. Marion obediently followed Hickman to his car as she was told, where he promptly kidnapped her. He wrote a ransom note to Marion's father, demanding $1,500 for her return, promising the girl would be left unharmed. Marion was terrified into passivity -- she even waited in the car for Hickman when he went to mail his letter to her father. Hickman's extreme narcissism comes through in his ransom letters, as he refers to himself as a "master mind [sic]" and "not a common crook." Hickman signed his letters "The Fox" because he admired his own cunning: "Fox is my name, very sly you know." And then he threatened: "Get this straight. Your daughter's life hangs by a thread." Hickman and the girl's father exchanged letters over the next few days as they arranged the terms of the ransom, while Marion obediently followed her captor's demands. She never tried to escape the hotel where he kept her; Hickman even took her to a movie, and she never screamed for help. She remained quiet and still as told when Hickman tied her to the chair -- he didn't even bother gagging her because there was no need to, right up to the gruesome end. Hickman's last ransom note to Marion's father is where this story reaches its disturbing end. Hickman fills the letter with hurt anger over her father's suggestion that Hickman might deceive him, and "ask you for your $1500 for a lifeless mass of flesh I am base and low but won't stoop to that depth." What Hickman didn't say was that as he wrote the letter, Marion had already been chopped up into several lifeless masses of flesh. Why taunt the father? Why feign outrage? This sort of bizarre taunting was all part of the serial killer's thrill, maximizing his sadistic pleasure. But this was nothing compared to the thrill Hickman got from murdering the helpless 12-year-old Marion Parker. Here is an old newspaper description of the murder, taken from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on December 27, 1927: "It was while I was fixing the blindfold that the urge to murder came upon me," he continued, "and I just couldn't help myself. I got a towel and stepped up behind Marion. Then before she could move, I put it around her neck and twisted it tightly. I held on and she made no outcry except to gurgle. I held on for about two minutes, I guess, and then I let go. When I cut loose the fastenings, she fell to the floor. I knew she was dead. Well, after she was dead I carried her body into the bathroom and undressed her, all but the underwear, and cut a hole in her throat with a pocket knife to let the blood out." Another newspaper account explained what Hickman did next: Then he took a pocket knife and cut a hole in her throat. Then he cut off each arm to the elbow. Then he cut her legs off at the knees. He put the limbs in a cabinet. He cut up the body in his room at the Bellevue Arms Apartments. Then he removed the clothing and cut the body through at the waist. He put it on a shelf in the dressing room. He placed a towel in the body to drain the blood. He wrapped up the exposed ends of the arms and waist with paper. He combed back her hair, powdered her face and then with a needle fixed her eyelids. He did this because he realized that he would lose the reward if he did not have the body to produce to her father. Hickman packed her body, limbs and entrails into a car, and drove to the drop-off point to pick up his ransom; along his way he tossed out wrapped-up limbs and innards scattering them around Los Angeles. When he arrived at the meeting point, Hickman pulled Miriam's [sic] head and torso out of a suitcase and propped her up, her torso wrapped tightly, to look like she was alive--he sewed wires into her eyelids to keep them open, so that she'd appear to be awake and alive. When Miriam's father arrived, Hickman pointed a sawed-off shotgun at him, showed Miriam's head with the eyes sewn open (it would have been hard to see for certain that she was dead), and then took the ransom money and sped away. As he sped away, he threw Miriam's head and torso out of the car, and that's when the father ran up and saw his daughter--and screamed. This is the "amazing picture" Ayn Rand -- guru to the Republican/Tea Party right-wing -- admired when she wrote in her notebook that Hickman represented "the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatsoever for all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul. Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should." Other people don't exist for Rand, either. Part of her ideas are nothing more than a ditzy dilettante's bastardized Nietzsche -- but even this was plagiarized from the same pulp newspaper accounts of the time. According to an LA Times article in late December 1927, headlined "Behavioralism Gets The Blame," a pastor and others close to the Hickman case denounced the cheap trendy Nietzschean ideas Hickman and others latched onto as a defense: "Behavioristic philosophic teachings of eminent philosophers such as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer have built the foundation for William Edward Hickman's original rebellion against society," the article begins. The fear that some felt at the time was that these philosophers' dangerous, yet nuanced ideas would fall into the hands of lesser minds, who would bastardize Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and poison the rest of us. This aptly describes Ayn Rand, whose philosophy developed out of her admiration for "Supermen" like Hickman. Rand's philosophy can be summed up by the title of one of her best-known books: The Virtue of Selfishness. She argues that all selfishness is a moral good, and all altruism is a moral evil, even "moral cannibalism," to use her words. To her, those who aren't like-minded sociopaths are "parasites," "lice" and "looters." But with Rand, there's something more pathological at work. She's out to make the world more sociopath-friendly so that people her hero William Hickman can reach their full potential, not held back by the morality of the "weak," whom Rand despised. Rand and her followers clearly got off on hating and bashing those they perceived as weak. This is exactly the sort of sadism that Rand's hero, Hickman, would have appreciated. What's really unsettling is that even former Central Bank chief Alan Greenspan, whose relationship with Rand dated back to the 1950s, did some parasite-bashing of his own. In response to a 1958 New York Times book review slamming Atlas Shrugged, Greenspan, defending his mentor, published a letter to the editor that ends: "Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should. Alan Greenspan." As much as Ayn Rand detested human "parasites," there is one thing she strongly believed in: creating conditions that increase the productivity of her supermen -- the William Hickmans who rule her idealized America: "If [people] place such things as friendship and family ties above their own productive work, yes, then they are immoral. Friendship, family life and human relationships are not primary in a man's life. A man who places others first, above his own creative work, is an emotional parasite." Republican faithful like GOP Congressman Paul Ryan read Ayn Rand and declare, with pride, "Rand makes the best case for the morality of democratic capitalism." Indeed. Except that Rand also despised democracy, writing that, "Democracy, in short, is a form of collectivism, which denies individual rights: the majority can do whatever it wants with no restrictions. In principle, the democratic government is all-powerful. Democracy is a totalitarian manifestation; it is not a form of freedom." "Collectivism" is another one of those Randian epithets popular among her followers. Here is another Republican member of Congress, Michelle Bachman, parroting the Ayn Rand ideological line, to explain her reasoning for wanting to kill social programs: "As much as the collectivist says to each according to his ability to each according to his need, that's not how mankind is wired. They want to make the best possible deal for themselves." Whenever you hear politicians or Tea Partiers dividing up the world between "producers" and "collectivism," just know that those ideas and words more likely than not are derived from the deranged mind of a serial-killer groupie. When you hear them saying, "Go John Galt," hide your daughters and tell them not to talk to any strangers -- or Tea Party Republicans. And when you see them taking their razor blades to the last remaining programs protecting the middle class from total abject destitution -- Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- and bragging about how they are slashing these programs for "moral" reasons, just remember Ayn's morality and who inspired her. Too many critics of Ayn Rand -- until recently I was one of them -- would rather dismiss her books and ideas as laughable, childish, and hackneyed. But she can't be dismissed because Rand is the name that keeps bubbling up from the Tea Party crowd and the elite conservative circuit in Washington as the Big Inspiration. The only way to protect ourselves from this thinking is the way you protect yourself from serial killers: smoke the Rand followers out, make them answer for following the crazed ideology of a serial-killer-groupie, and run them the hell out of town and out of our 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 Wed Mar 10 19:49:46 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:49:46 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Einstein Was Right: General Relativity Confirmed Message-ID: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/general-relativity-confirmed-100310.html Einstein Was Right: General Relativity Confirmed By Clara Moskowitz 10 March 2010 Score one more for Einstein. A new study has confirmed his theory of general relativity works on extremely large scales. The study was one of the first rigorous tests of this theory of gravity beyond our solar system. The research found that even over vast scales of galaxies and clusters of galaxies, the equations of general relativity predict the way that mass pulls on other mass in the universe. The new work also helps rule out a competing theory of gravity that seeks to do away with the need for bizarre concepts like dark matter and dark energy that have irked some scientists. This research indicates those pesky ideas may be here to stay. What is relativity? General relativity rocked the world of physics when Einstein first published his paper on the subject in 1915. The theory built on the traditional idea of gravity based on Isaac Newton's laws, but added fundamentally new concepts like the notion that mass deforms the shape of space-time. This means that objects and even light that move through space near a large mass will travel on a curved path. Furthermore, it means that mass can stretch or shrink time as well. For example, someone watching a black hole from a distance would observe a person falling into that black hole to fall extremely slowly. To test this theory over distances up to 3.5 billion light-years from Earth, researchers analyzed a survey of about 70,000 galaxies. The scientists combined three different measurements. First, they calculated the weak gravitational lensing caused by the galaxies - that is, they measured how much the galaxies' mass was bending light from other galaxies around them by noting the average distortion of the surrounding galaxies' shapes. Then, they combined this data with measurements of the galaxies' velocities to learn how the galaxies were moving toward and away from one another. Finally, the astrophysicists calculated how clustered the galaxies were together over various distances. All of these measurements combined created a system to test theories of gravity independent of particular parameters in the theories. The scientists found that general relativity is consistent with their observations of the universe at large scales. They also tested two competing theories - the tensor-vector-scalar gravity (TeVeS) idea, and another called f(R) (pronounced "f of r"). The quantities predicted by f(R) were somewhat different from those observed, but still fell within the margin of error of the measurements, so this theory is still a possibility. TeVeS, however, made predictions that fell outside the observational error limits, so scientists think they can probably eliminate this theory from consideration. "It wasn't clear at the outset that our errors would be small enough to be able to rule out other models - it was a nice surprise," said study leader Reinabelle Reyes, a graduate student at Princeton University in Princeton, N.J. TeVeS was already looking doubtful based on recent observations of a pair of colliding galaxy clusters called the bullet cluster, which offered strong evidence for the existence of dark matter, Reyes said. The new research offers another nail in its coffin. Solid support While general relativity was already pretty well accepted among physicists, the new findings offer more solid support for the theory. "It's good to know that general relativity is consistent," Reyes told SPACE.com. "Now we have something to hold on to saying the universe really works that way." The study was detailed in the March 11 issue of the journal Nature. To further judge between Einstein's theory and other ideas, including f(R), research on more galaxies will be necessary to reduce the margins of error on the data. "Reyes and colleagues' measurements are significant not just because they are consistent within error with general relativity, but also because they point the way to future high-precision tests that will better distinguish between general relativity and some variant models," physicist J. Anthony Tyson of the University of California, Davis, wrote in an accompanying essay in the same issue of Nature. Tyson was not involved in the study. =============================== 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 Mar 10 21:04:39 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:04:39 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Don't Call it "the Global Arms Trade" Message-ID: <21E35DB4FD004783B9A00737B46D4315@agingCHS072729> http://www.truthout.org/frida-berrigan-america's-global-weapons-monopoly-don't-call-it-"-global-arms-trade"56952 from TomDispatch.com 16 February, 2010 America's Global Weapons Monopoly: Don't Call it "the Global Arms Trade" by Frida Berrigan On the relatively rare occasions when the media turns its attention to U.S. weapons sales abroad and shines its not-so-bright spotlight on the latest set of facts and figures, it invariably speaks of "the global arms trade." Let's consider that label for a moment, word by word: - It is global, since there are few places on the planet that lie beyond the reach of the weapons industry. - Arms sounds so old-fashioned and anodyne when what we're talking about is advanced technology designed to kill and maim. - And trade suggests a give and take among many parties when, if we're looking at the figures for that "trade" in a clear-eyed way, there is really just one seller and so many buyers. How about updating it this way: "the global weapons monopoly." In 2008, according to an authoritative report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS), $55.2 billion in weapons deals were concluded worldwide. Of that total, the United States was responsible for $37.8 billion in weapons sales agreements, or 68.4% of the total "trade." Some of these agreements were long-term ones and did not result in 2008 deliveries of weapons systems, but these latest figures are a good gauge of the global appetite for weapons. It doesn't take a PhD in economics to recognize that, when one nation accounts for nearly 70% of weapons sales, the term "global arms trade" doesn't quite cut it. Consider the "competition" and reality comes into focus. Take a guess on which country is the number two weapons exporter on the planet: China? Russia? No, Italy, with a relatively paltry $3.7 billion in agreements with other countries or just 9% of the U.S. market share. Russia, that former Cold War superpower in the "trade," was close behind Italy, with only $3.5 billion in arms agreements. U.S. weapons manufacturers have come a long way, baby, since those Cold War days when the United States really did have a major competitor. For instance, the Congressional Research Service's data for 1990, the last year of the Soviet Union's existence, shows global weapons sales totaling $32.7 billion, with the United States accounting for $12.1 billion of that or 37% of the market. For its part, the Soviet Union was responsible for a competitive $10.7 billion in deals inked that year. France, China, and the United Kingdom accounted for most of the rest. Since then, the global appetite for weapons has only grown more voracious, while the number of purveyors has shrunk to the point where the Pentagon could hang out a sign: "We arm the world." No kidding, it's true. Cambodia ($304,000), Comoros ($895,000), Colombia ($256 million), Guinea ($200,000), Greece ($225 million), Great Britain ($1.1 billion), the Philippines ($72.9 million), Poland ($79.8 million), and Peru ($16.4 million) all buy U.S. arms, as does almost every country not in that list. U.S. weapons, and only U.S. weapons, are coveted by presidents and prime ministers, generals and strongmen. >From the Pentagon's own data (which differs from that in the CRS report), here are the top ten nations which made Foreign Military Sales agreements with the Pentagon, and so with U.S. weapons makers, in 2008: Saudi Arabia $6.06 billion Iraq $2.50 billion Morocco $2.41 billion Egypt $2.31 billion Israel $1.32 billion Australia $1.13 billion South Korea $1.12 billion Great Britain $1.10 billion India $1 billion Japan $840 million That's more than $17 billion in weapons right there. Some of these countries are consistently eager buyers, and some are not. Morocco, for example, is only in that top-ten list because it was green-lighted to buy 24 of Lockheed Martin's F-16 fighter planes at $360 million (or so) for each aircraft, an expensive one-shot deal. On the other hand, Saudi Arabia (which inked $14.71 billion in weapons agreements between 2001 and 2008), Egypt ($13.25 billion) and Israel ($11.27 billion) are such regular customers that they should have the equivalent of one of those "buy 10, get the 11th free" punch cards doled out by your favorite coffee shop. To sum up, the U.S. has a virtual global monopoly on exporting tools of force and destruction. Call it market saturation. Call it anything you like, just not the "global arms trade." Getting Even More Competitive? It used to be that the United States exported goods, products, and machinery of all sorts in prodigious quantities: cars and trucks, steel and computers, and high-tech gizmos. But those days are largely over. The Obama administration now wants to launch a green manufacturing revolution in the U.S., and in February, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke announced a new "National Export Initiative" with the aim of doubling American exports, a move he said would support the creation of two million new jobs. The U.S. could, of course, lose the renewable-energy race to China and that new exports program may never get off the ground. In one area, however, the U.S. is manufacturing products that are distinctly wanted -- things that go boom in the night -- and there the Pentagon is working hard to increase market share. Don't for a second think that the American global monopoly on weapons sales is accidental or unintentional. The constant and lucrative growth of this market for U.S. weapons makers has been ensured by shrewd strategic planning. Washington is constantly thinking of new and inventive ways to flog its deadly wares throughout the world. How do you improve on near perfection? In the interest of enhancing that "competitive" edge in weapons sales, the Obama administration is investigating the possibility of revising export laws to make it even easier to sell military technology abroad. As Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morell explained in January, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wants to see "wholesale changes to the rules and regulations on government technology exports" in the name of "competitiveness." When he says "government technology exports," Morell of course means weapons and other military technologies. "Tinkering with our antiquated, bureaucratic, overly cumbersome system is not enough to maintain our competitiveness in the global economy and also help our friends and allies buy the equipment they need to contribute to global security," he continued, "[Gates] strongly supports the administration's efforts to completely reform our export control regime, starting ideally with a blank sheet of paper." The laws that regulate U.S. weapons exports are a jumbled mess, but in essence they delineate what the United States can sell to whom and through what bureaucratic mechanisms. According to U.S. law, for example, there are actually a few countries that cannot receive U.S. weapons. Myanmar under the military junta and Venezuela while led by Hugo Chavez are two examples. There are also some weapons systems that are not intended for export. Lockheed Martin's F-22 Raptor jet fighter was -- until the Pentagon recently stopped buying the plane -- deemed too sophisticated or sensitive to sell abroad. And there are reporting requirements that give members of Congress a window of opportunity within which they can question or oppose proposed weapons exports. Given what's being sold, these export controls are remarkably minimal in nature and are constantly under assault by the weapons industry. Bans on weapons sales to particular countries are regularly lifted through aggressive lobbying. (Indonesia, for example, was offered $50 million in weapons from 2006 to 2008 after an almost decade long congressional arms embargo.) The industry also works to relax controls on new technology exports to allies. Japan and Australia have mounted campaigns to win the ability to buy F-22 Raptors, potential sales that Lockheed Martin is now especially happy to entertain. The reporting window to Congress remains an important export control, but the time frame is shrinking as more countries are being "fast tracked," making it harder for distracted representatives to react when a controversial sale comes up. In addition to revising these export controls, the administration is looking at the issue of "dual-use" technologies. These are not weapons. They do not shoot or explode. Included are high-speed computer processors, surveillance and detection networks, and a host of other complex and evolving technologies that could have military as well as civilian applications. This category might also include intangible items like cyber-entities or access to controlled web environments. Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and other major weapons manufacturers have invested billions of dollars from the Pentagon's research and development budgets in exploring and perfecting such technologies, and now they are eager to sell them to foreign buyers along with the usual fighter planes, combat ships, and guided missiles. But the rules as they stand make this something less than a slam dunk. So the weapons industry and the Pentagon are arguing for "updating" the rules. If you translate updating as "loosening" the rules, then the United States would indeed be more "competitive," but who exactly are we trying to beat? Weapons Sales are Red Hot "What's Hot?" is the title of Vice Admiral Jeffrey Wieranga's blog entry for January 4, 2010. Wieranga is the Director of the Pentagon's Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which is charged with overseeing weapons exports, and such pillow talk is evidently more than acceptable -- at least when it's about weapons sales. In fact, Wieranga could barely restrain himself that day, adding: "Afghanistan is really HOT!" Admittedly, on that day the temperature in Kabul was just above freezing, but not at the Pentagon, where arms sales to Afghanistan evidently create a lot of heat. As Wieranga went on to write, the Obama administration's new 2010/2011 budget allocates $6 billion in weaponry for Afghan Security Forces. The Afghans will actually get those weapons for free, but U.S. weapons makers will make real money delivering them at taxpayers' expense and, as the Vice Admiral pointed out, that "means there is a staggering amount of acquisition work to do." It's not just Afghanistan that's now in the torrid zone. Weapons sales all over the world will be smoking in 2010 and beyond. The year began with a bang when Wieranga's Agency announced that the Obama administration had decided to sell a nifty $6 billion in weapons to Taiwan. Even as the United States leans heavily on China for debt servicing, Washington is giving the Mainland a big raspberry by offering the island of 22 million off its coast (which Washington does not formally recognize as an independent nation), a lethal cocktail of weaponry that includes $3 billion in Black Hawk helicopters. This deal comes on top of more than $11 billion in U.S. weapons exports to Taiwan over the last decade, and is certain to set Chinese-U.S. relations back a step or two. Other bonanzas on the horizon? Brazil wants new fighter planes and Boeing is battling a French company for the contract in a deal that could be worth a whopping $7 billion. India, once a major arms buyer from the Soviet Union, is now another big buy-American customer, with Boeing and Lockheed Martin vying to equip its air force with new fighter planes in deals that Boeing estimates may reach $11 billion. Such deals are staggering. They contribute more bang and blast to a world already bristling with particularly lethal weaponry. They are a striking American success story in a time filled with failures. Put in the lurid but everyday terms of a nation weaned on reality television, the Pentagon is pimping for the U.S. weapons industry. The weapons industry, for its part, is a pusher for every kind of lethal technology. The two of them together are working to ensure that more of the same will flow out of the U.S. in ever easier and more lucrative ways. Global arms trade? Send that one back to the Department of Euphemisms. Pimps and pushers with a lucrative global monopoly on a killing drug -- maybe that's the language we need. And maybe, just maybe, it's time to launch a "war on weapons." Frida Berrigan is a Senior Program Associate with the New America Foundation's Arms and Security Initiative. "Weapons at War 2008," a report she co-authored with William D. Hartung, goes into much more detail about the politics and pratfalls of weapons exports. =============================== 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 Mar 10 22:16:42 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010 23:16:42 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] U.S. Chamber of Commerce grows into a political force with large-scale grass-roots political operation Message-ID: U.S. Chamber of Commerce grows into a political force A swelling tide of money could put the business group in a better position to sway elections. a.. Related b.. Graphic: Growing influence By Tom Hamburger March 8, 2010 Reporting from Washington - The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is building a large-scale grass-roots political operation that has begun to rival those of the major political parties, funded by record-setting amounts of money raised from corporations and wealthy individuals. The chamber has signed up some 6 million individuals who are not chamber members and has begun asking them to help with lobbying and, soon, with get-out-the-vote efforts in upcoming congressional campaigns. The chamber's expansion into grass-roots organizing -- coupled with a large and growing fundraising apparatus that got a lift from Supreme Court rulings -- is part of a trend in which the traditional parties are losing ground to well-financed and increasingly assertive outside groups. The chamber is certainly better positioned than ever to be a major force on the issues and elections it focuses on each year, analysts think. The new grass-roots program, the brainchild of chamber political director Bill Miller, is concentrating on 22 states. Among them are Colorado, where incumbent Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet is vulnerable; Arkansas, where Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln faces an uphill reelection battle; and Ohio, where the chamber sees opportunities in numerous House races and an open Senate seat. The network, called Friends of the U.S. Chamber, has been used to generate more than a million letters and e-mails to members of Congress, 700,000 of them in opposition to the Democratic healthcare plan. That is an increase from 40,000 congressional contacts generated in 2008. What makes the initiative possible is a swelling tide of money. The chamber spent more than $144 million on lobbying and grass-roots organizing last year, a 60% increase over 2008, and well beyond the spending of individual labor unions or the Democratic or Republican national committees. The chamber is expected to substantially exceed that spending level in 2010. The chamber's expanding influence is worrisome to top officials in the White House -- including Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who has expressed concern about the chamber in the past, and senior advisor Valerie Jarrett, who tried to build direct contacts with company executives last fall when the chamber was fighting the administration's legislation to regulate carbon emissions. Several companies, including Pacific Gas & Electric and Apple, left the chamber over its stance on climate policies, but since then many more firms have joined and made substantial contributions, chamber President Tom Donohue said. Amassing cash Two major factors are driving the chamber's growing success in fundraising. First, President Obama and Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress have alarmed a widening circle of business leaders with their calls for greater government involvement in healthcare, tighter federal regulation of the financial industry and legislation to help unions organize workers, among other issues. Second, the recent Supreme Court ruling that corporations have a free-speech right to spend money to help elect or defeat candidates not only struck down a century of laws limiting such spending, but it also made many business executives feel more comfortable about using corporate money for political purposes. Industries that are the most directly affected by Washington policies and regulations -- pharmaceuticals, for example -- have always spent lavishly on lobbying and politics. But many others have held back, deterred by concern over violating the complex laws on campaign spending and by a general sense that putting money into politics might open companies to criticism. The Supreme Court decision appears to have allayed those concerns, according to corporate lawyers and others involved in the process. "In the past a lot of companies and wealthy individuals stood on the sidelines," said Robert Kelner, who heads the Election and Political Law Practice Group at Covington & Burling, one of Washington's most influential corporate law firms. "In just the last election, we had the spectacle of John McCain threatening to prosecute his own supporters if they spent their money on outside groups that ran advertising in the presidential race. "That cloud has been lifted," he said. Anonymity Using trade associations such as the chamber as the vehicle for spending corporate money on politics has an extra appeal: These groups can take large contributions from companies and wealthy individuals in ways that will probably avoid public disclosure requirements. The chamber has developed that into something of a specialty: Under a system pioneered by Donohue, corporations have contributed money to the chamber, which then produced issue ads targeting individual candidates without revealing the names of the businesses underwriting the ads. At the chamber, officials contend that rising donations are less the result of the recent Supreme Court ruling than they are of a 5-4 decision in 2007 in which the court ruled it was unconstitutional to ban issue-related advertising close to an election. As a result of that ruling, the chamber was able to spend $1 million on so-called issue ads in the final days of the Massachusetts Senate race in January to help elect Scott Brown, the state's first Republican senator in decades. As ominous music played in the background of one of the ads, a moderator intoned: "Washington politicians continue to fail us. More spending and fewer jobs. Scott Brown . . . supports measures that hold spending and cut taxes. . . . Call Scott Brown. Thank him." Powerful as the effect of such advertising could be, the chamber and its allies expect the next big expansion of influence will come in street-level organizing and voter turnout operations. Miller, a former chief of staff to a GOP lawmaker and co-owner of a restaurant in Washington's tony Georgetown section, built up the chamber's grass-roots organization in 2008 and expanded it in 2009 with the help of consulting firms. Studying magazine subscriptions, voter registration and consumer buying habits, the consultants built a list of potential allies in 122 key congressional districts. Individuals were invited to join the Friends of the U.S. Chamber initiative and were promised updates and special insights on Washington. They were then "activated," asked to write letters or call Congress on a particular issue or get involved in events in the districts. Miller said the so-called activation rate was "roughly equivalent" to the rate claimed by Organizing for America, the network known as Obama for America during the presidential campaign, which has twice as many members. The chamber has also given its staff, especially senior leaders, incentives to push fundraising. They are now working, in effect, on a commission system: the more money they bring in, the more they are compensated. Leaning right Officially, the chamber is a bipartisan nonprofit organization, but over the last decade it has tilted decidedly toward the Republicans. During 2008, 86% of the spending by the chamber's political action committee went to Republicans. Far more was spent on issue ads, most supporting GOP candidates. The chamber says it represents 3 million companies that pay dues to the national chamber or a local affiliate, though internal documents suggest the organization's treasury is filled in substantial part by contributions from a couple dozen major corporations most affected by Washington policymakers. Tax records from 2008 show that 19 companies or individuals paid between $1 million and $15.3 million, providing a third of the chamber's total revenue that year. Because the chamber is a nonprofit, it must disclose donations, but not necessarily the identity of the donors. The chamber insists that those donors remain anonymous. Some labor-backed organizations, such as Working America, which has 3 million nonunion members nationwide, have also declined to release details of its donors, which suggests a rocky road for legislation to require more transparency. tom.hamburger@ latimes.com Kim Geiger of the Washington bureau contributed to this report. Copyright ? 2010, The Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-chamber9-2010mar09,0,3996715.story -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 5401 bytes Desc: not available URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Mar 10 23:06:32 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010 23:06:32 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Charles Hugh Smith on the Stock Market References: Message-ID: <40D18413662346049D6C93A555A82857@agingCHS072729> Question: What's the difference between a stock market and a toilet? Answer: In a stock market, the paper (value) falls first, and the crash comes later ----- Original Message ----- From: maclean Maclean To: submissions freshInk Sent: Wednesday, March 10, 2010 1:13 PM Subject: [Fresh Ink] Charles Hugh Smith on the Stock Market The Stock Market As Propaganda by Charles Hugh Smith March 10, 2010 http://www.oftwominds.com/blogmar10/wealth-distribution03-10.html "Since 91% of stocks are owned by the Plutocracy, the much-ballyhooed rise in the stock market as proof the recession is over is perception management/ propaganda. The 75% rise in the stock market from its lows a year ago is ceaselessly offered as "proof" the economy is recovering. Too bad very few Americans are drawing any benefit from this stupendous rise. As I detail below, the Great Middle Class owns at best only 7% of all stocks and mutual funds. ... "The stock market isn't about building middle class wealth, and the middle class seems to have finally figured that out. The equity market is all about concentrating wealth and managing perception: if the top 10% is doing well, then the bottom 90% are supposed to feel better about the whole thing, too, even if they are poorer by every financial metric." http://www.oftwominds.com/blogmar10/wealth-distribution03-10.html Cheers, Maclean IM on the go with Messenger on your phone. Try now. _______________________________________________ FreshInk mailing list FreshInk at booksinternationale.info http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink From hain at antcolbks.com Wed Mar 10 22:35:23 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010 23:35:23 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Greg Palast: We kicked Liberia vulture butt; new boots needed Message-ID: <5CF8B48CCEC0425A90E1D7D6A9ACF9EE@Upstairs> We kicked butt; new boots needed A week ago Friday, the day after BBC Television broadcast of our investigative report on Liberia vultures, Britain's Parliament voted to put an end to the creepy business of financial "vultures" who siphon off aid money through manipulating Third World nations' debt. And our prior report on financial tricksters, on Democracy Now!, motivated two congressmen to confront the President personally, in the Oval Office with our findings. And now legislation has jets on in the USA. We've kicked vulture butt, but now we need new boots. This isn't the easiest time to be an investigative reporter and I am damn sure it's not the easiest time for you to be supporting folks like our tiny but tough Palast team. So, I wanted to be sure to let you know what YOUR support has accomplished. These accomplishments are real, but so are the bills for airfare, for the car for the stake-out, for the special microphones, for the ... you name it. BBC TV is a wonderful and prestigious outlet for our work. But "Beeb" budgets simply can't cover all our costs. We can't fly to Africa by flapping our arms. Democracy Now! shows our stuff; we love them - but it's you, our supporters, who pay our subway fares to Amy's studio. That's why-for the first time this decade-I'm asking you to help keep our work alive with your financial support. Here are a few ideas on how to do it: If you can contribute $150 or more, I'll send you signed copies of 5 great DVDs ... perfect for Mother's day, graduations, easter baskets, May Day celebrations, Bingo prizes, or better yet, to spread the word. Click here, make the tax-deductible donation, and I'll sign'em all. When our investigative team pulled the pants down on Karl Rove's vote "caging" scam, Congressman John Conyers, who made our disclosures central to Congressional hearings on Bush's firing of prosecutors told our crew, "America owes you an huge debt of thanks." I appreciate that; but we still owe the credit card company for the dozen flights to get on the scene to film the Rove-bots. New! We are now offering you, the option to donate by getting The Palast Gift Card. Redeemable at our store by the lucky recipient. Available again! Joker's Wild, my classic, tarot-size investigative playing cards. Beautiful and great fun. Better yet for us and maybe a little less burdensome to you, sign up for a modest monthly pledge of as little as $10. You will receive all new Palast releases - books or videos, as they become available. I will also mention you as a supporter in my next book (you may, of course, choose not to). Right away, as a thank you, I will send all new signees a signed copy of a DVD of your choice plus the Joker's Wild card deck. If you've beaten the odds and had a great year, consider becoming a co-Producer by making a donation of $1,000 or more. If you do, I will list your name in our next film's credits. Wait until your friends see that on your Google profile! Or simply make a donation of any size or visit our Store for other signed gifts and options. We will spend your donation wisely. I truly can't thank you enough, Greg **** Greg Palast is an investigative reporter for BBC Newsnight and the author of Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts. Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 127615 bytes Desc: not available URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Mar 11 07:13:36 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2010 07:13:36 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] E-textbooks: The New Best-sellers Message-ID: <37A2CDF3790C44B58CF283CCC78CE6C7@agingCHS072729> http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2437 E-textbooks: The New Best-sellers Published: March 03, 2010 Will Apple's iPad kill the textbook? Many educators are pointing to Apple Computer's recently announced iPad as the prototype for an e-reader that will be able to hold all the textbooks a student needs. Its color touch-screen, interactive-video capability and virtual keyboard, they say, give it greater potential for textbook users than monochrome readers like Amazon's Kindle. Apple has been quiet about its designs on the textbook business since unveiling its new device, which will go on sale this month. Meanwhile, Hewlett-Packard and Dell have also announced portable tablet computers, and Microsoft is rumored to be developing a two-screen model. While some students may be using notebooks or their more portable cousins, netbooks, to read textbooks, some experts predict that within the next 10 years, most U.S. college students -- and many high-school and elementary-school students as well -- will probably be reading course materials on an electronic device instead of in a paper book. And that will have a broad impact on students and teachers, not to mention the $9.9 billion textbook-publishing business. If this is, indeed, the future of textbook publishing, a key question remains unanswered: Is it economically sustainable? Almost every industry -- from travel agencies to newspapers -- that has moved to a digital model has seen its profits decimated and some existing participants bankrupted. Textbook "publishers are aware that their current model is doomed," says Peter S. Fader, co-director of the Wharton Interactive Media Initiative (WIMI). Adds WIMI co-director Eric Bradlow: "It's not just that the bound-dead-tree is a dead model. [It's that publishers] will have less monopoly power." Assuming the cost of production goes down, "market forces suggest prices would come down" as well. Bradlow also predicts there will be new revenue models for publishers, including timely ads and electronic coupons. For example, when students finish a chapter and show mastery by passing a self-assessment quiz, an ad could pop up suggesting they reward themselves with a run to the local Ben & Jerry's. Frank Lyman, executive vice president of online-text publisher CourseSmart, says that Apple's tablet "is likely to boost demand for digital textbooks because it will capture the imagination of the next group of students who haven't yet tried eTextbooks." He adds that there are 75 million iPod and iPhone users who already know how to use the iPad because of its similar interface. Within days of the iPad announcement, a group of major educational publishers announced they all would use technology developed by ScrollMotion, a New York-based content technology company, to transfer textbooks to the iPad. The group includes McGraw-Hill Companies; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt K-12, which is a unit of Education Media & Publishing Group; Pearson's Pearson Education, and Kaplan, the test-prep unit of The Washington Post Co. At the end of February, McGraw-Hill's Macmillan unit unveiled a new electronic book imprint, DynamicBooks, that will let professors create their own textbooks, using their own material as well as materials developed by Macmillan. "Basically, they will go online, log on to the authoring tool, have the content right there and make whatever changes they want," Brian Napack, president of Macmillan, told The New York Times. "And we don't even look at it." DynamicBooks includes such titles as Chemical Principles: The Quest for Insight, by Peter Atkins and Loretta Jones, and Psychology, by Daniel L. Schacter, Daniel T. Gilbert and Daniel M. Wegner. Students will pay about one-third as much as the the paper-bound version's list price. ScrollMotion already partners with some publishers to make books into iPhone apps. "Education-related content has always been on the cusp of taking advantage of the promise of technology. Finally it's here," says ScrollMotion CEO John Lema. Rik Kranenburg, group president of higher education for the education unit of McGraw-Hill Companies, recently told The Wall Street Journal: "People have been talking about the impact of technology on education for 25 years. It feels like it is really going to happen in 2010." "[We] have been anticipating this," adds Bruce Hildebrand, executive director for higher education at the American Association of Publishers, a trade group. Publishers, he says, will "provide their content on the best technology available," although he notes that electronic readers don't yet meet educational needs as well as textbooks do. Educators and book publishers are also predicting that eTextbooks will change the way teachers teach, students learn and textbook publishers sell their content -- often in unexpected ways. Yet while students eagerly anticipate lower costs and lighter backpacks, teachers remain wary and some publishers still question the model. Wharton management professor Daniel Raff, who has studied the book business, suggests that publishers will maintain their grip on the school market. "One expects textbooks to have a certain authority. To the extent they are brands, they would retain [that] authority." He notes that textbook publishers also have long lasting copyrights along with skills in managing licensed materials. Moreover, it isn't clear that students are ready to study from an eTextbook. As Stephen Kobrin, editor of Wharton School Publishing (WSP), notes, "we publish all our course packs [collections of customized course readings] digitally. When I ask students how they read them, they say they print them out." Kobrin estimates that currently 4% to 5% of WSP's business is digital. Indeed, approximately 88% of college students own laptops, according to a study by EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research, a Boulder, Co., think tank. But so far, few of them download electronic textbooks, even though they could save money. The National Association of College Stores estimates that less than 3% of textbook sales today are digital versions, although many paper textbooks are sold with supplemental materials on CDs or web sites. Fader predicts that soon "some innovative college" will require incoming freshmen to get an iPad and will push professors to use them for course materials. $220.95 vs. $110.49 Electronic readers have already shaken up the market for fiction and non-fiction books, known in the industry as "trade books." Trade books accounted for $8.1 billion in U.S. sales in 2008, the most recent full year reported by AAP, 18% less than the textbook market. Forrester Research estimates that book lovers bought some three million electronic readers last year. E-readers attract some of the book industry's best customers, who regret the demise of bookstores but like the idea of $10 titles that can be downloaded at will and don't crowd overburdened bookshelves. "As complex as the issues are for trade book publishing, it's far more so in textbooks," says Fader, partly because price-sensitive students are not the ones making the decisions. At the college level, text book decisions are made by teachers. In K-12, they are mostly made by school boards. K-12 schools "will be very slow to change, partly due to pure economics" since they would have to equip whole classes of students with fragile, mobile readers, says Fader. In addition, teacher unions will be skeptical, and school boards will be hesitant to make the leap because "people focus on potential downsides." Still, he says: "The evolution is inevitable. It's just a question of when." In the specialized education arena, digital textbooks are likely to appear very soon, Fader adds. "I see it most likely to start through executive education," where binders of material rather than traditional texts are typically handed out. Conceivably, an e-reader with content installed could be bundled as part of the course price. "It's a high-margin environment." Kaplan has already announced that it is making its MCAT preparatory course materials (for admission to medical school) available as apps on iPhones and iPods using ScrollMotion technology. Lema says they will also be available on the iPad. According to Kaplan, the apps replace 20 pounds of paper instructional materials. And despite mixed feelings, the textbook industry has already been moving into digital distribution. Five of the biggest textbook publishers founded CourseSmart in 2007 to provide digital versions of college textbooks. The company now has some 6,000 textbooks available in a common format that students can download. Students get a 180-day license for the book rather than permanent ownership -- which means there is no used-book market for CourseSmart titles. CourseSmart prices are typically half the list price of a textbook. For example, Harvard professor Gregory Mankiw's introductory Principles of Economics, which has a list price of $220.95, costs $110.49 for the electronic version at CourseSmart. Amazon.com sells the paper version for $168.01 and an electronic Kindle version for $141.56. The paper version has 904 pages and weighs 4.2 pounds. Although teachers and students hope that digital textbooks will mean lower prices, textbook publishers "price very aggressively," says Raff. A 2005 Government Accounting Office study of textbook prices found that publishers raised prices an average of 6% a year in the previous two decades -- twice the rate of inflation and nearly as fast as the 7% annual increase in college tuition. Raff predicts, however, that with Amazon and Apple competing to deliver content, pricing will come down. Publishing industry insiders say privately that they could realize higher profits despite much lower prices if digital downloading eliminated the used and rental book market along with the costs of printing and stocking paper books. They say they could prevent book sharing by forcing students to do workbook exercises linked to their textbooks. Many already offer their texts directly from their own web sites, sometimes at prices lower than CourseSmart, which means that none of the book's price goes to bookstores or online sellers. But digital readers could also make it easier for new entrants in the market. Amazon or Apple could become textbook publishers themselves, using their recommendation engines to replace textbook salesmen in reaching out to teachers. Some teachers might be more open to assigning open-source textbooks from the Wikimedia foundation if they were on digital readers that students already owned. At the college level, professors are already intrigued by the idea of creating custom textbooks for a course by assigning a few chapters from one book, a few chapters from another, and some articles and original source material. Such modular textbooks are available in paper form, but they haven't been popular, partly because they look odd given their many different type-faces and formats. In the digital world, it should be easier to create such customized textbooks, but licensing copyrights will remain challenging. Textbook publishers currently handle such tasks and custom print textbooks for individual classes. For example, Pearson's custom library group lets professors go online to create a book, mixing and matching chapters from several of its textbooks in subjects. Professors can include up to 20% outside material, whether written by them or chosen elsewhere, with Pearson managing permissions. Highlighting Key Passages Digital textbooks will need to have features students take for granted in paper books, such as the ability to highlight key passages and take notes that can be attached to pages. Digital versions also need consistent pagination so that teachers can give assignments. Even with a search function, digital books will still need tables of contents, indexes and glossaries. Even with these limitations, digital presentation opens up a number of new possibilities for textbooks. With interactive graphs in an economics book, for example, students could try different costs to see the impact on demand or different supply levels to gauge the change in price. ScrollMotion promises publishers that its technology will let them embed video that students can watch, record lectures linked to chapters and offer self-assessment tests. "You will see more up-to-date textbooks that incorporate cutting-edge research without waiting for the next edition," says Bradlow. Publishers may build communities of expertise around their digital textbooks with the ability to post comments or questions. As Bradlow notes, "It's not static content anymore." Additional Reading Apple's iPad: A Gadget Killer -- or Just Another Gadget? http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/signup.cfm?CFID=16736611&CFTOKEN=80392088&jsessionid=a830a65881c553a194382131314c43c1e638 Textbooks that Professors Can Rewrite Digitally: NewYorkTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/22/business/media/22textbook.html?scp=1&sq=e-textbooks&st=cse =============================== 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 Mar 11 07:28:04 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2010 07:28:04 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] =?iso-8859-1?q?Aboriginals_in_Canada_face_=27Third_Wo?= =?iso-8859-1?q?rld=27-level_risk_of_tuberculosis?= Message-ID: <> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/aboriginals-in-canada-face-third-world-level-risk-of-tuberculosis/article1496790/?cmpid=1 Aboriginals in Canada face 'Third World'-level risk of tuberculosis Bill Curry Ottawa - From Thursday's Globe and Mail Published on Wednesday, Mar. 10, 2010 9:17PM EST Last updated on Thursday, Mar. 11, 2010 3:34AM EST It's been more than 100 years since Peter Bryce, former chief medical officer at Indian Affairs, sounded the alarm over shockingly high rates of deadly tuberculosis in government-funded Indian residential schools. Now, a century later, TB continues to be a major concern in aboriginal communities. A new federal report reveals the TB rate among status Indians to be 31 times higher than that of non-aboriginal Canadians. Among the most susceptible of aboriginal populations are the Inuit, for whom the TB rate is 186 times that of Canadian-born non-aboriginals. The new data from the Public Health Agency of Canada come as Prime Minister Stephen Harper is preparing to put child and maternal health in the developing world at the top of the agenda when he hosts the G8 summit later this year. Inuit and First Nations leaders say the visitors should know that Canada's aboriginals are battling a preventable disease due to overcrowding in mouldy homes. Inuit housing and social services are almost entirely reliant on transfer money from the federal government. "I think they'll be interested to see we've got Third World conditions here in Canada," said Angus Toulouse, the Ontario regional chief for the Assembly of First Nations, who is responsible for health issues. Gail Turner, the chair of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami's national Inuit committee on health, said there is a clear link between the child health problems on the G8 agenda and TB among the Inuit. "We have the highest birth rate in Canada," she said. "Currently in the Inuit regions, we have some quite alarming statistics around rates of infant mortality, some of our birth outcomes and, in particular, our rates of respiratory illnesses in young children. And all of these can feed very naturally into TB." Ms. Turner said the new figures are significant because it has been very difficult to obtain clear statistics on TB rates among the Inuit population. The health agency data are part of a preliminary release of information in advance of a larger report on tuberculosis in Canada. Tuberculosis is a contagious infectious disease that enters the body through breathing and settles in the lungs. It can then spread through the central nervous system, infecting bones and joints. The disease is entirely curable by taking prescription medication for several months, according to the Canadian Lung Association, which describes TB as a worldwide epidemic that kills two million people annually. The data reveal TB rates among non-aboriginal Canadians have decreased from one per 100,000 in 2003 to 0.8 per 100,000 in 2008, yet rates for aboriginals are climbing. The increase is particularly dramatic among Inuit, for whom the rate climbed from 22.1 cases per 100,000 in 2003 to 157.5 cases per 100,000 in 2008. An earlier report from the Public Health Agency of Canada indicated that 8 per cent of Canadians diagnosed with TB in 2007 died before or during treatment. Federal Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq, the first Inuk to be sworn into the federal cabinet, told reporters Wednesday her government is working with the provinces and territories to curb the spread of the disease among aboriginals. Dr. Bryce penned a damning diatribe against the federal government's indifference to TB rates in the schools, titled The Story of a National Crime, after Ottawa terminated his position and shelved his reports. A 2007 Globe and Mail examination of national archival material revealed that officials continued to warn Ottawa about high TB death rates in residential schools for at least four decades after Dr. Bryce penned his first report on the situation in 1907. The Globe uncovered one caustic letter sent in 1937 to Indian Affairs by physician D.F. MacInnis on the state of the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School in Nova Scotia. "Evidently somebody has mistaken our residential school for a TB sanatorium," he wrote. New Democratic MP Judy Wasylycia-Leis on Wednesday submitted a request to House of Commons Speaker Peter Milliken asking for an emergency debate on the TB findings. The request was declined. =============================== 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 Mar 11 08:55:08 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2010 08:55:08 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Calling All Rebels Message-ID: <8C380055C9724D3193659AA5540E1DB2@agingCHS072729> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/calling_all_rebels_20100308/ Calling All Rebels Posted on Mar 8, 2010 By Chris Hedges There are no constraints left to halt America's slide into a totalitarian capitalism. Electoral politics are a sham. The media have been debased and defanged by corporate owners. The working class has been impoverished and is now being plunged into profound despair. The legal system has been corrupted to serve corporate interests. Popular institutions, from labor unions to political parties, have been destroyed or emasculated by corporate power. And any form of protest, no matter how tepid, is blocked by an internal security apparatus that is starting to rival that of the East German secret police. The mounting anger and hatred, coursing through the bloodstream of the body politic, make violence and counter-violence inevitable. Brace yourself. The American empire is over. And the descent is going to be horrifying. Those singled out as internal enemies will include people of color, immigrants, gays, intellectuals, feminists, Jews, Muslims, union leaders and those defined as "liberals." They will be condemned as anti-American and blamed for our decline. The economic collapse, which remains mysterious and enigmatic to most Americans, will be pinned by demagogues and hatemongers on these hapless scapegoats. And the random acts of violence, which are already leaping up around the fringes of American society, will justify harsh measures of internal control that will snuff out the final vestiges of our democracy. The corporate forces that destroyed the country will use the information systems they control to mask their culpability. The old game of blaming the weak and the marginal, a staple of despotic regimes, will empower the dark undercurrents of sadism and violence within American society and deflect attention from the corporate vampires that have drained the blood of the country. "We are going to be poorer," David Cay Johnston told me. Johnston was the tax reporter of The New York Times for 13 years and has written on how the corporate state rigged the system against us. He is the author of "Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense and Stick You With the Bill," a book about hidden subsidies, rigged markets and corporate socialism. "Health care is going to eat up more and more of our income. We are going to have less and less for other things. We are going to have some huge disasters sooner or later caused by our failure to invest. Dams and bridges will break. Buildings will collapse. There are water mains that are 25 to 50 feet wide. There will be huge infrastructure disasters. Our intellectual resources are in decline. We are failing to educate young people and instill in them rigor. We are going to continue to pour money into the military. I think it is possible, I do not say it is probable, that we will have a revolution, a civil war that will see the end of the United States of America." "If we see the end of this country it will come from the right and our failure to provide people with the basic necessities of life," said Johnston. "Revolutions occur when young men see the present as worse than the unknown future. We are not there. But it will not take a lot to get there. The politicians running for office who are denigrating the government, who are saying there are traitors in Congress, who say we do not need the IRS, this when no government in the history of the world has existed without a tax enforcement agency, are sowing the seeds for the destruction of the country. A lot of the people on the right hate the United States of America. They would say they hate the people they are arrayed against. But the whole idea of the United States is that we criticize the government. We remake it to serve our interests. They do not want that kind of society. They reject, as Aristotle said, the idea that democracy is to rule and to be ruled in turns. They see a world where they are right and that is it. If we do not want to do it their way we should be vanquished. This is not the idea on which the United States was founded." It is hard to see how this can be prevented. The engines of social reform are dead. Liberal apologists, who long ago should have abandoned the Democratic Party, continue to make pathetic appeals to a tone-deaf corporate state and Barack Obama while the working and middle class are ruthlessly stripped of rights, income and jobs. Liberals self-righteously condemn imperial wars and the looting of the U.S. Treasury by Wall Street but not the Democrats who are responsible. And the longer the liberal class dithers and speaks in the bloodless language of policies and programs, the more hated and irrelevant it becomes. No one has discredited American liberalism more than liberals themselves. And I do not hold out any hope for their reform. We have entered an age in which, as William Butler Yeats wrote, "the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity." "If we end up with violence in the streets on a large scale, not random riots, but insurrection and things break down, there will be a coup d'?tat from the right," Johnston said. "We have already had an economic coup d'?tat. It will not take much to go further." How do we resist? How, if this descent is inevitable, as I believe it is, do we fight back? Why should we resist at all? Why not give in to cynicism and despair? Why not carve out as comfortable a niche as possible within the embrace of the corporate state and spend our lives attempting to satiate our private needs? The power elite, including most of those who graduate from our top universities and our liberal and intellectual classes, have sold out for personal comfort. Why not us? The French moral philosopher Albert Camus argued that we are separated from each other. Our lives are meaningless. We cannot influence fate. We will all die and our individual being will be obliterated. And yet Camus wrote that "one of the only coherent philosophical positions is revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his obscurity. It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it." "A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object," Camus warned. "But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object." The rebel, for Camus, stands with the oppressed-the unemployed workers being thrust into impoverishment and misery by the corporate state, the Palestinians in Gaza, the civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, the disappeared who are held in our global black sites, the poor in our inner cities and depressed rural communities, immigrants and those locked away in our prison system. And to stand with them does not mean to collaborate with parties, such as the Democrats, who can mouth the words of justice while carrying out acts of oppression. It means open and direct defiance. The power structure and its liberal apologists dismiss the rebel as impractical and see the rebel's outsider stance as counterproductive. They condemn the rebel for expressing anger at injustice. The elites and their apologists call for calm and patience. They use the hypocritical language of spirituality, compromise, generosity and compassion to argue that the only alternative is to accept and work with the systems of power. The rebel, however, is beholden to a moral commitment that makes it impossible to stand with the power elite. The rebel refuses to be bought off with foundation grants, invitations to the White House, television appearances, book contracts, academic appointments or empty rhetoric. The rebel is not concerned with self-promotion or public opinion. The rebel knows that, as Augustine wrote, hope has two beautiful daughters, anger and courage-anger at the way things are and the courage to see that they do not remain the way they are. The rebel is aware that virtue is not rewarded. The act of rebellion defines itself. "You do not become a 'dissident' just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career," Vaclav Havel said when he battled the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. "You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society. ... The dissident does not operate in the realm of genuine power at all. He is not seeking power. He has no desire for office and does not gather votes. He does not attempt to charm the public. He offers nothing and promises nothing. He can offer, if anything, only his own skin-and he offers it solely because he has no other way of affirming the truth he stands for. His actions simply articulate his dignity as a citizen, regardless of the cost." Those in power have disarmed the liberal class. They do not argue that the current system is just or good, because they cannot, but they have convinced liberals that there is no alternative. But we are not slaves. We have a choice. We can refuse to be either a victim or an executioner. We have the moral capacity to say no, to refuse to cooperate. Any boycott or demonstration, any occupation or sit-in, any strike, any act of obstruction or sabotage, any refusal to pay taxes, any fast, any popular movement and any act of civil disobedience ignites the soul of the rebel and exposes the dead hand of authority. "There is beauty and there are the humiliated," Camus wrote. "Whatever difficulties the enterprise may present, I should like never to be unfaithful either to the second or the first." "There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop," Mario Savio said in 1964. "And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all." The capacity to exercise moral autonomy, the capacity to refuse to cooperate, offers us the only route left to personal freedom and a life with meaning. Rebellion is its own justification. Those of us who come out of the religious left have no quarrel with Camus. Camus is right about the absurdity of existence, right about finding worth in the act of rebellion rather than some bizarre dream of an afterlife or Sunday School fantasy that God rewards the just and the good. "Oh my soul," the ancient Greek poet Pindar wrote, "do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible." We differ with Camus only in that we have faith that rebellion is not ultimately meaningless. Rebellion allows us to be free and independent human beings, but rebellion also chips away, however imperceptibly, at the edifice of the oppressor and sustains the dim flames of hope and love. And in moments of profound human despair these flames are never insignificant. They keep alive the capacity to be human. We must become, as Camus said, so absolutely free that "existence is an act of rebellion." Those who do not rebel in our age of totalitarian capitalism and who convince themselves that there is no alternative to collaboration are complicit in their own enslavement. They commit spiritual and moral suicide. =============================== 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 Thu Mar 11 12:05:19 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:05:19 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] =?iso-8859-1?q?Netanyahu_and_Pastor_Hagee=27s_Lovefes?= =?iso-8859-1?q?t_on_Eve_of_Biden=27s_Arrival_in_Israel?= Message-ID: <50B9D8FA7ED940109FB8E24CC26CC14E@Upstairs> Netanyahu and Pastor Hagee's Lovefest on Eve of Biden's Arrival in Israel On 03.09.10, By Max Blumenthal (Videos recorded by Rachel Tabachnick; more videos coming shortly.) Vice President Joe Biden was greeted in Jerusalem with the announcement that the Israeli Interior Ministry approved the construction of 1600 new homes in Occupied East Jerusalem contrary to U.S. wishes and complicating Biden's mission to help jump start the peace process. But Biden should have known that Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu intended to upset his plans by Netanyahu's appearance with John Hagee. The day after a series of talks between US Special Envoy for the Middle East George Mitchell and Netanyahu, and a day before Biden's arrival, Netanyahu appeared onstage with Pastor John Hagee in Jerusalem. The occasion was Hagee's Night To Honor Israel, an event the far-right Texas-based preacher arranged to tout his ministry's millions in donations to Israeli organizations and to level bellicose rhetoric against Israel's perceived enemies. At the gathering, Hagee called Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "the Hitler of the Middle East" and denounced the Goldstone Report as "character assassination by an unbiased and uninformed committee." Netanyahu welcomed the crowd of 1000 American evangelicals to Jerusalem, a city he described as "the undivided, eternal capitol of the Jewish people. Then, he told them, "I salute you! The Jewish people salute you!" He used the rest of his speech to call for "tough, biting sanctions" against Iran that "bite deep into its energy sector." Hagee and Netanyahu appear together on stage: In the audience were top-level members of the Israeli government, from Ambassador Michael Oren to Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat to Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon. Also present was Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, the chief rabbi of the illegal West Bank settlement of Efrat who gained notoriety for lobbying President Bill Clinton to pardon his friend, fugitive billionaire Marc Rich. Ayalon had stirred controversy days before when he refused to meet with a US congressional delegation brought to Israel by the progressive Jewish group J Street. Part One of Hagee's speech: Part Two: Pastor Hagee in Jerusalem 3/8/10 (Part II) from Max J Blumenthal on Vimeo. Hagee's ceremony featured a 15-minute film highlighting the recipients of donations from John Hagee Ministries that totaled $58 million since 2001. The recipients included Jewish settlements from the West Bank like Gush Etzion and Shomron, which was involved in promoting an "Obama Hilltop project" that promoted more settlement building and compared Obama to Pharoah. Hagee also announced funding for a pressure group run by the settlers evacuated from Gush Katif in Gaza in 2005. During Israel's assault on Gaza in 2009, a group of Gush Katif residents lobbied the Israel government to allow them to resettle the Palestinian coastal region. Who Is Hagee Funding In Israel? from Max Blumenthal on Vimeo. The most notable of Hagee's funding recipients was an organization called Im Tirtzu. A student representative of this group appeared in the film to thank Hagee for "help[ing] us to ensure that students in Israel are on the right path, the path of Zionism, the love of Israel, the path of solidarity." Another student called for "the second revolution in Israel." In February, Im Tirtzu funding a smear campaign against former Knesset member and New Israel Fund Director Naomi Chazan that included posters caricaturing her with a horn on her head. The group misleadingly accused the New Israel Fund of bankrolling 16 human rights organizations that contributed documentation to the Goldstone Report. The smear campaign led to unsuccessful legislation in the Knesset designed to further cripple already marginalized Israeli human rights groups. Meanwhile, the Jerusalem Post fired Chazan as a columnist without explanation. Gideon Levy, a columnist for Ha'aretz, called Im Tirtzu "a McCarthyite movement" for its attacks on Chazan. Although CUFI attempted to distance itself from Im Tirtzu's campaign, the organization's appearance during CUFI's Jerusalem ceremony suggested that Hagee would continue to provide it with funding well into the future. Republican Senator John McCain repudiated the endorsement of Hagee during his 2008 presidential campaign after Hagee's statements describing the Holocaust as a fulfillment of divine prophecy came to light. Hagee has also said that he believed the anti-Christ was "partially Jewish, as was Adolph Hitler." However, none of Hagee's comments have deterred Israeli government officials from embracing him or accepting his millions in annual charity. During Hagee's speech, he made no secret of his support for the illegal settlement enterprise that has been the source of difficulties between the US and Israel. "The settlements are not the problem," he boomed from the podium. "The problem is the refusal of Arab leaders to respect the right of Jewish people to live anywhere in the Middle East." Hagee received a rousing ovation from the crowd and the Israeli government officials seated beside the podium when he proclaimed, "World leaders do not have the authority to tell Israel and the Jewish people what they can and cannot do in the city of Jerusalem. They don't have the authority to tell them what they can and cannot build, who can and and cannot live there." The following day, on March 9, Vice President Joseph Biden arrived in Israel to meet with Netanyahu and officials from the Palestinian Authority. He told reporters after touching down that he saw "a moment of real opportunity." A complete list of Israeli organizations funded by John Hagee Ministries is below the fold: Alut Autism American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Christian Friends of Israeli Communities - Gush Katif (settlement related) Ariel Israel Sports Building (settlement related) Council of Young Israel Rabbis (settlement related) Barzilai Medical Center, Ashkelon Ben Gurion University, Negev Boys Town Jerusalem Ehrenberg Endowment Holocaust education Elon Moreh Shechem, "renewal of the settlement in shomron" Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity Eretz Neheredet Yeshivat Reishit Friends of Gush Katif (settlement related) Hadadi Breast Cancer Survivors Haamayan Banegev Yeshiva Har Bracha Herzog hospital Im Tirtzu, student rep: "We thank you, John Hagee, for your support, which has helped us to ensure that students in israel and in jerusalem are on the right path, the path of zionism, the love of israel, the path of solidarity." Other student: "We couldn't have done it without the help of John Hagee Ministries this evening - the second revolution in Israel." Na'aleh - Jewish Agency Jewish Federation, Greater Houston Jewish Federation, San Antonio Just Life American Friends of Laniado Hospital Leo Baeck Education Center American Friends of Magen David Meir Panim Menachem Begin Heritage Center Nefesh b'Nefesh (settles diaspora Jews in Israel, including in settlements) Netanya Academic College (Hagee build the "Jewish Heritage Center, recruited the college rabbi, is paying for construction of dormitories, received an honoris causa degree) John and Diana Hagee Lovingkindness Convention Center, Ohr Torah Stone (Efrat settlement, West Bank) founded by Rabbi Shlomo Riskin One Family Fund Save a Child's Heart Table to Table Tikva Children's Home Western Galilee Hospital Shurat Hadin Israel Law Center Friends of Israeli Disabled Veterans Ziporah Education center OR movement's information and relocation center (settling negev and galilee) Gush Etzion settlement, West Bank: "We are thankful to Pastor Hagee for all of his efforts." http://maxblumenthal.com/2010/03/pastor-hagee-and-netanyahus-lovefest-on-eve-of-bidens-arrival-in-israel/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Mar 11 20:24:15 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:24:15 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Shell Halts Gasoline Sales to Iran Message-ID: <5D86E70BABCD466E8B804DA5495CC98F@agingCHS072729> [hat tip to Sid S.] [The looming crisis in Iran, brought to you by the same people who brought you the war in Iraq.....] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703701004575113280633313178.html?mod=googlenews_wsj WALL STREET JOURNAL MARCH 11, 2010 Shell Halts Gasoline Sales to Iran Company Is Latest European Energy Firm to Act as U.S. Considers Sanctions By GUY CHAZAN And SPENCER SWARTZ Royal Dutch Shell PLC said it has stopped gasoline sales to Iran, becoming the latest European energy company to scale back ties with Tehran as the threat of tougher U.S. sanctions against the country looms larger. The moves come as U.S. legislators consider steps to punish companies supplying petroleum products to Iran as part of an effort to pressure the country to abandon its uranium-enrichment program. Iran is a big oil producer, but it has little capacity to turn its crude into refined products like gasoline. Shell joins a growing list of companies cutting ties to Iran. Earlier this week, Ingersoll-Rand PLC said it had prohibited its subsidiaries from selling products to customers in Iran. Caterpillar Inc., Huntsman Corp., General Electric Co. and the German conglomerate Siemens AG have also sought to reduce their exposure to Iran. In the energy arena, companies such as Glencore International AG and Trafigura Beheer BV have recently halted gasoline shipments. Another big European independent trader, Vitol Holding BV, said that as of the beginning of 2010 it was no longer participating in tenders to supply refined products to Iran Royal Dutch Shell becomes the latest company to stop doing business with the government of Iran. WSJ's Jerry Seib joins the News Hub for a look at the growing pressure on Tehran, including threats of tougher sanctions. Plus, Grainne McCarthy on what's behind the spike in oil prices. BP PLC sent its last cargo of gasoline to Iran some 18 months ago. Shell sent its last gasoline shipment to Iran in 2009. Total SA, another fuel-product shipper to Iran, has said it will halt petroleum sales to Iran if the U.S. approves any measures turning its requests into law. The French company didn't respond to requests for comment. U.S. companies have basically been legally barred from doing business with Iran for years. Iran is the world's fourth-largest oil producer, but because of factors like past underinvestment, it has little refining capacity and is forced to import as much as 40% of the refined products it needs at a cost of several billion dollars a year. Some observers doubt that a halt in petroleum sales will have much impact. "Several other players are more than willing to supply gasoline, and Iran's reported stocks on hand would be enough to potentially handle several months' demands with no additional imports," consultancy PFC Energy said in a report. China, a big recipient of Iranian oil, is one of the countries that have shown no sign of halting shipping of petroleum products to Iran. Existing shippers could also sell petroleum products to Iran and hide the deliveries' origin. Although logistically challenging, gasoline can also be trucked in to Iran from neighboring states. It is unclear whether such countries as Azerbaijan, a U.S. and European ally, would sign off on that. Sanctions also won't affect Iran's oil exports. The country is a large oil exporter to Europe.Ingersoll disclosed its new policy on sales to Iran in a letter to the lobbying group United Against Nuclear Iran. The group has also targeted Shell and other U.S. and European companies with business in Iran. It has written to Shell calling on it to disclose the full extent of its business in Iran and complained about the company to the Securities and Exchange Commission. UANI said that it applauded Shell's decision to stop gasoline sales to Iran but that Shell should sever all business ties with the Islamic Republic. "This is an encouraging first step but they must do more," said the group's head, Mark Wallace, who was an ambassador-level diplomat to the United Nations during the Bush administration. He said Shell's ties to Iran's hydrocarbon industry remained "problematic" and made the company "toxic for investors." Shell has only a small presence in Iran: It operates a lubricants-marketing business and advises China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., or Sinopec, on the big Yadavaran oilfield project. In 2008 Shell entered the Persian LNG, a liquefied natural-gas project in the northern Persian Gulf. Shell says it won't decide whether to proceed with that project until all the commercial and engineering work is complete. The company declined to comment on whether it would divest itself of its holdings in Iran. But a spokesman insisted that the company was in compliance with disclosure and listing obligations and that "any accusations to the contrary are misleading." He added that Shell would comply if there is an international agreement on further trade sanctions against Iran. Write to Guy Chazan at guy.chazan at wsj.com and Spencer Swartz at spencer.swartz at dowjones.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 Mar 11 20:49:51 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:49:51 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Author assumes guise of 10-year-old to punk famous Message-ID: <7B644FCCF72B438B829F42A46CF433A2@agingCHS072729> http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gX3SuXj0mdcWaZGlSMzO4XMa6aywD9ECJUQ80 Author assumes guise of 10-year-old to punk famous By KEVIN S. VINEYS (AP) - 7 hours ago WASHINGTON - Over the years, "Little Billy" learned much from the country's top minds. Secretaries of state, touched by the 10-year-old's handwritten letters on grade-school notepaper, wrote back advising him how to settle a treehouse dispute with his sister. O.J. Simpson's lawyer told him how to get off the hook on accusations he destroyed a doll. A publisher of racy magazines, asked whether there was a version for kids, told him to read the Sears catalog instead, and "you'll be 18 before you know it." Billy also turned to twisted minds for their counsel. He wrote to notorious criminals asking whether he should stay in school. Son of Sam told him not to waste his life, like he did; the Unabomber merely wished him luck. It was all a big setup. Little Billy was actually grown-up Bill Geerhart, punking the famous and infamous by writing letters to them asking questions out of the mouths of babes. Their correspondence back - humorous, head-scratching, poignant - is compiled in a book, "Little Billy's Letters," out this week. Geerhart, who admits to a history of making crank phone calls and other mischief in his youth, collected the letters over 15 years, starting in the mid-1990s while he was killing time as an unemployed writer in Los Angeles. Most of the letters in the book go back to a time before e-mails took over written communication. But some are recent. In 2008, Sarah Palin's dad, Chuck Heath - handling the deluge of mail for his daughter, the Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate - declined to take Billy hunting wolves by air. "No wolf hunting from helicopters here," scribbles Heath. For career advice, Billy - who was leaning toward convenience store clerk because he would have access to video games on the job - polls those in other fields, including assisted-suicide figure Dr. Jack Kevorkian. From his prison cell, Kevorkian responds, "sometimes I wish I was a 7-11 clerk!" As Billy mounts a campaign for third-grade class president, he gets good-luck wishes from former President Gerald Ford and former Vice President Dan Quayle. Less civic-mindedly, Billy writes to Anheuser-Busch asking "if there is a beer for kids" just as he asked Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt about porn for the pint-sized. No dice. Flynt writes that Billy could subscribe to Hustler when he turned 18: "Until then, you should read the Sears & Roebuck catalog." An Anheuser-Busch executive rats on him, sending his parents a brochure on how to talk to kids about drinking. Robert Shapiro, member of the legal "dream team" that won O.J. Simpson's acquittal in the 1994 slayings of his ex-wife and her friend, was full of ideas when Billy wrote to ask for help defending himself against allegations that he - not his dog - destroyed his sister's doll. "Is there any forensic evidence that will support your theory that the dog killed the doll?" Shapiro replied. "Were any scraps of doll clothing found near his dog house, perhaps? How about tooth marks on the doll's remains (assuming there were remains)? If so, a good forensic dentist should be able to match them to the dog." David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam slayer who killed six women in a late-1970s rampage in New York City, tells Billy, "don't do self-destructive things" and opens up about his own grief and guilt. Murderous cult leader Charles Manson merely beefs that he's not getting his Los Angeles Times in prison. Seeking the wise counsel of retired diplomats for how to stop incursions by his sister "Connie" into his treehouse, Billy gets former secretaries of state James Baker and Henry Kissinger to bless a handwritten, one-year "treaty" that would keep Connie out - though Baker thought it should last two years. Probing the high court's opinions of McDonald's menu items, Billy learns that then-Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor favors the Big Mac, while her colleague Clarence Thomas replies, "I like almost everything there." Writes Associate Justice Harry Blackmun: "Almost anything they put out is acceptable. I like to go to Roy Rogers, too, for a beef sandwich. But I hope most of all that you eat something more than what these fast food places put out." And when his beloved dog "Tippy" dies, Billy is gently consoled by cryonics company executives who learn that he has put the animal in a meat freezer and wants to bring it back to life. Geerhart, who works as a record producer in Los Angeles and is curator of a Cold War pop culture Web site, once had Little Billy's exploits catch up with him. As Billy contemplated which religion to join, he asked officials at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to verify that "you get to wear cool underwear and have extra wives." The inquiry earned Geerhart a visit from a pair of Mormon missionaries wanting to meet the youngster. Geerhart concocted an excuse for Billy's absence and dutifully snapped a picture of the tie-clad missionaries in his disheveled apartment. Naturally, he includes the photo in the book. EDITOR'S NOTE _ "Little Billy's Letters" is published by William Morrow. It runs 240 pages and sells for $19.99. =============================== 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 Fri Mar 12 00:00:22 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2010 01:00:22 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] New round of foreclosures threatens housing market Message-ID: <6A79F92E3A4548F9B28D7ED77EDB3B6D@Upstairs> New round of foreclosures threatens housing market By Renae Merle Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, March 12, 2010 The housing market is facing swelling ranks of homeowners who are seriously delinquent but have yet to lose their homes, and this is threatening a new wave of foreclosures that could hit just as the real estate market has begun to stabilize. About 5 million to 7 million properties are potentially eligible for foreclosure but have not yet been repossessed and put up for sale. Some economists project it could take nearly three years before all these homes have been put on the market and purchased by new owners. And the number of pending foreclosures could grow much bigger over the coming year as more distressed borrowers become delinquent and then, if they can't obtain mortgage relief, wade through the foreclosure process, which often takes more than a year to complete. As these foreclosed properties add to the supply of homes for sale, they could undercut housing prices, which have increased modestly through December, according to the most recent figures in the S&P/Case-Shiller home prices index. That rise partly reflected a slowdown in the flow of foreclosed homes onto the market. The rate at which J.P. Morgan Chase seized properties, for example, peaked in the middle of 2008 and fell steadily last year, according to a February investor report. But the bank expects repossessions to increase this year, nearly doubling to 45,000 by the fourth quarter. "Some of the positive housing data may not be signaling a true turning point, as many servicers are holding back on foreclosures and the related houses are not yet being offered for sale," said Diane Westerback, a managing director at Standard & Poor's. Westerback said it could take 33 months to clear the backlog. Data released Thursday by RealtyTrac illustrate the dynamic. While banks repossessed fewer homes in February than a month earlier, borrowers continued to fall behind on their payments, adding to the inventory of properties headed toward foreclosure that have yet to be put on the market, said Daren Blomquist, RealtyTrac's spokesman. "Just looking at the numbers, we would expect there to be a bigger percentage of properties" repossessed by banks by now, he said. This "shadow market" reflects the increasing lag between defaults and foreclosures. Many lenders are struggling to keep up with the overwhelming number of borrowers who can't make their payments, and they're reluctant to rush repossessed homes onto the market when prices are depressed. Delinquent borrowers Today's delinquent borrowers, for the most part, differ in a key regard from those who were caught up in the surge of defaults in 2008. That earlier wave, which precipitated the financial crisis, consisted largely of subprime borrowers who defaulted when their risky loans became unaffordable. The borrowers in trouble now are, for the most part, people who have better credit and safer loans and have become delinquent because they've lost their jobs or are dealing with other economic setbacks, economists said. More than 75 percent of the borrowers who are now seriously delinquent -- meaning they have missed at least three monthly payments -- have traditional prime loans, according to First American CoreLogic. Most of these borrowers have not made a mortgage payment in six months. These borrowers are among the most difficult to help. Homeowners with economic troubles such as extended unemployment often cannot make even reduced mortgage payments. And the longer borrowers stay delinquent, the more difficult it is to fashion a mortgage relief plan for them. Some lenders are giving distressed borrowers more time to see whether they can modify the terms of their loans. It can take a borrower six to seven months to find out whether he or she qualifies for a permanent loan modification under the federal foreclosure relief program, Making Home Affordable, according to Barclays Capital. In Maryland, for example, lawmakers extended the foreclosure process from 15 days to 135 days in 2008 and are considering emergency legislation to force lenders into mediation with a borrower before foreclosing on a property. But other states and jurisdictions have even more drastic measures to slow down the foreclosure process. "There were cases where sheriffs were refusing to file foreclosure notices," said Jay Brinkmann, chief economist for the Mortgage Bankers Association. After a temporary foreclosure moratorium in 2008, the backlog of homeowners facing foreclosure in Maryland has surged. The number of Maryland homeowners who are seriously delinquent or in the midst of the foreclosure process nearly doubled during the fourth quarter of 2009 compared with the same period a year earlier, according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association. "Lenders are deluged by late-stage delinquencies. The pent-up foreclosure inventory is there," said Massoud Ahmadi, director of research for the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development. Housing prices The uptick in foreclosure sales is helping depress Maryland home prices, he said. "We have seen that home sales are on an upswing, but prices are on a downswing. That is the impact of the shadow inventory. It is keeping prices down," Ahmadi said. In addition to those already in default are 11 million more U.S. borrowers who owe more on their mortgage than their home is worth -- known as being underwater -- and are in danger of becoming delinquent, said Sam Khater, chief economist for First American CoreLogic. Over the past year, the number of foreclosed homes going up for sale has declined. Distressed properties made up just 38 percent of purchases in January, compared with the 49 percent peak in March 2009, according to the National Association of Realtors. That helped the inventory of homes on the market fall to a 7.8-month supply, close to the figure during normal times and down from more than 11 months in July 2008. But as prices continue to stabilize, lenders are likely to take advantage of the situation by putting more of these distressed properties on the market, economists said. "Banks have remained in foreclosure paralysis, allowing that backlog to get larger and larger. You can't do that indefinitely," said Sandeep Bordia, head of U.S. residential credit strategy at Barclays Capital. That impact could be muted if enough buyers emerge to snap up properties or efforts to enroll borrowers in mortgage relief programs improve. Some lenders are looking for ways to ease delinquent borrowers out of their homes without a foreclosure. For example, lenders are allowing more short sales, in which the home is sold for less than the outstanding loan balance. Citigroup is testing a program that allows delinquent borrowers to stay in their home for six months free if they leave the property in good condition, making it easier to sell afterward. "We are anticipating a foreclosure glut that is likely to come up in next 16 to 18 months. We are trying to stay ahead of this," said Sanjiv Das, chief executive of CitiMortgage. These types of programs are "protecting house prices and consumer sentiment from going down further," he said. Regional impact The impact of the coming foreclosure wave will vary by region. The Washington area has a "shadow inventory" of about 67,000 properties that could go into foreclosure this year, an 11-month supply at the current sales rates, according to research by John Burns Real Estate Consulting in Irvine, Calif. That is slightly higher than the national average but far less than the hardest-hit communities, such as Orlando and Miami, where there is two-year backlog. And the backlog will hang over some communities for years. By the end of 2012, 39 percent to 50 percent of home purchases in Phoenix will still be foreclosed properties, J.P. Morgan Chase has estimated. In Los Angeles, they'll account for 28 percent of home sales. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/11/AR2010031104866.html?hpid=topnews -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 26506 bytes Desc: not available URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Fri Mar 12 00:08:43 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2010 01:08:43 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Report Details How Lehman Hid Its Woes as It Collapsed - Just for the record Message-ID: <2C26D85769284B8D863E04BA5F9DDC8D@Upstairs> It is the Wall Street equivalent of a coroner's report - a 2,200-page document that lays out, in new and startling detail, how Lehman Brothers used accounting sleight of hand to conceal the bad investments that led to its undoing.... http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/business/12lehman.html?hp -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Fri Mar 12 00:12:22 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2010 01:12:22 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Rapid Rise in Seed Prices Draws U.S. Scrutiny - Apparent focus on Monsanto Message-ID: <6FD20A8696584EFCB361F7824BCFC6EC@Upstairs> Rapid Rise in Seed Prices Draws U.S. Scrutiny By WILLIAM NEUMAN Published: March 11, 2010 During the depths of the economic crisis last year, the prices for many goods held steady or even dropped. But on American farms, the picture was far different, as farmers watched the price they paid for seeds skyrocket. Corn seed prices rose 32 percent; soybean seeds were up 24 percent. Such price increases for seeds - the most important purchase a farmer makes each year - are part of an unprecedented climb that began more than a decade ago, stemming from the advent of genetically engineered crops and the rapid concentration in the seed industry that accompanied it. The price increases have not only irritated many farmers, they have caught the attention of the Obama administration. The Justice Department began an antitrust investigation of the seed industry last year, with an apparent focus on Monsanto, which controls much of the market for the expensive bioengineered traits that make crops resistant to insect pests and herbicides. The investigation is just one facet of a push by the Obama administration to take a closer look at competition - or the lack thereof - in agriculture, from the dairy industry to livestock to commodity crops, like corn and soybeans. On Friday, as the spring planting season approaches, Eric H. Holder Jr., the attorney general, and Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, will speak at the first of a series of public meetings aimed at letting farmers and industry executives voice their ideas. The meeting, in Ankeny, Iowa, will include a session on the seed industry. "I think most farmers would look to have more competition in the industry," said Laura L. Foell, who raises corn and soybeans on 900 acres in Schaller, Iowa. The Iowa attorney general, Tom Miller, has also been scrutinizing Monsanto's market dominance. The company's genetically engineered traits are in the vast majority of corn and soybeans grown in the United States, Mr. Miller said. "That gives them considerable power, and questions arise about how that power is used," he said. Critics charge that Monsanto has used license agreements with smaller seed companies to gain an unfair advantage over competitors and to block cheaper generic versions of its seeds from eventually entering the market. DuPont, a rival company, also claims Monsanto has unfairly barred it from combining biotech traits in a way that would benefit farmers. In a recent interview at Monsanto's headquarters in St. Louis, its chief executive, Hugh Grant, said that while his company might be the market leader, competition was increasing as the era of biotech crops matured. "We were the first out of the blocks, and I think what you see now is a bunch of people catching up and aggressively competing, and I'm fighting with them," Mr. Grant said. He said farmers chose the company's products because they liked the results in the field, not because of any untoward conduct on Monsanto's part. Yet in a seed market that Monsanto dominates, the jump in prices has been nothing short of stunning. Including the sharp increases last year, Agriculture Department figures show that corn seed prices have risen 135 percent since 2001. Soybean prices went up 108 percent over that period. By contrast, the Consumer Price Index rose only 20 percent in that period. Many farmers have been willing to pay a premium price because the genetically engineered seeds that make up most of the market come with advantages. Genetic modifications for both corn and soybeans make the crops resistant to herbicides, simplifying weed control and saving labor, fuel and machinery costs. Many genetically engineered corn and cotton seeds also resist insect pests, which cuts down on chemical spraying. Lee Quarles, a Monsanto spokesman, said the price increases were justified because the quality of the seeds had been going up, and new biotech traits kept being added. For example, he said, many corn varieties now include multiple genes to battle insect pests, raising their value. Mr. Quarles said higher prices were justified because the traits saved farmers money and made their operations more efficient. Monsanto began investing heavily in biotechnology in the 1980s - ahead of most other agricultural companies. In the mid-1990s, it became the first to widely market genetically engineered seeds for row crops, introducing soybeans containing the so-called Roundup Ready gene, which allowed plants to tolerate spraying of its popular Roundup weed killer. Soon after, it began selling corn seed engineered with a gene to resist insect pests. The number of biotech plant traits has grown since then, and other large companies - including DuPont, Dow Chemical, Syngenta, BASF and Bayer CropScience - have gotten into the business. But Monsanto has taken advantage of its head start. Today more than 90 percent of soybeans and more than 80 percent of the corn grown in this country are genetically engineered. A majority of those crops contain one or more Monsanto genes. As biotechnology has spread, Monsanto and its competitors have bought dozens of smaller seed companies, increasing the concentration of market power in the industry. Monsanto sells its own branded seed varieties, like Dekalb in corn and Asgrow in soybeans, to farmers. But it has expanded its influence and profits by licensing those traits to hundreds of small seed companies, allowing them to incorporate the traits in the seeds they sell. It has also granted licenses to the other large trait developers, allowing them to create combinations of engineered traits in a process known as stacking. Monsanto says that its licensing shows it is the opposite of a monopolist, encouraging rather than hampering competition. But critics say the licenses give Monsanto excessive control. Seed company executives said the licenses were sometimes worded in a way that compelled them to sell Monsanto traits over those of its competitors. Mr. Quarles denied that, saying the contracts contain sales incentives typical of the industry. Some of the most pointed accusations have come in a court battle between Monsanto and DuPont. Last year Monsanto sued its rival, saying DuPont had used a Monsanto trait to create a gene combination that was not permitted in its licensing agreement. DuPont countered by charging that Monsanto was using its market power to strong-arm competitors and quash innovation that would benefit farmers and consumers. In January, Monsanto won a partial victory. A federal judge ruled that the license barred DuPont from creating the gene stack. But the judge said that DuPont could move ahead with its antitrust claims, which, if successful, could potentially nullify the stacking ban. DuPont made another accusation that caught the attention of farmers and regulators, saying that Monsanto was trying to head off the eventual entry into the marketplace of generic Roundup Ready seeds. The company's patent on the Roundup Ready trait in soybeans expires before the 2014 planting season, meaning that, just as in the pharmaceutical business, rivals would be free to sell a cheaper version. Farmers would also be free to save seed from one year to the next, a money-saving step they are now barred from taking. But DuPont charged that Monsanto was trying to force seed companies to switch prematurely to its second-generation Roundup Ready soybeans and taking other steps to make the entry of generics more difficult. Monsanto responded by announcing that it would not block companies from selling a generic version of Roundup Ready seeds. But farmers have continued to fret that cheaper generic seeds may be at risk. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/business/12seed.html?hp -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Fri Mar 12 00:50:26 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2010 01:50:26 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Glenn Beck misses Joe McCarthy - A New Hero for the Tea Partiers? Message-ID: Thursday, Mar 11, 2010 18:42 EST Glenn Beck misses Joe McCarthy The Fox News host reaches a new low in his rewriting of U.S. history Video By Mike Madden Fox News Joe McCarthy WASHINGTON -- Glenn Beck's obsession with rooting out the evils of progressivism have led him to take up history lately. But it's a strange kind of history, an alternative one that bears little resemblance to what you might read in textbooks. (Since textbooks, after all, are all written by socialists.) On his show Thursday, Beck gave a special Fox News Channel gloss on Franklin D. Roosevelt -- the villain in Beck's narrative -- and on Joe McCarthy -- who magically transformed from a life-destroying demagogue to a hero. Roosevelt, Beck explained, hired Communists all over the place for the growing federal government during the Depression and World War II. Not only that, but he wasn't as popular as people think he was. "If FDR was so beloved, and no one was spooked by how much power he took, why is it that his body was barely cold when they passed the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution to make sure no one could ever serve as long as he did?" Beck asked. That's not, strictly speaking, really true; Roosevelt died in 1945, and Congress didn't pass the 22nd Amendment until 1947. It wasn't ratified by the states until 1951. Next came a blast of what's become standard-issue conservative blather about how the New Deal actually made the economy worse during the 1930s, not better. "His policies didn't save us," Beck explained. "In fact, it was only in America that the period known as 'the Depression' is known as the 'Great Depression'. Why? Because his policies stripped the free-market system and actually prolonged the depression." That's not just slightly false, it's really false. A British economist, Lionel Robbins, helped popularize the term with a book, "The Great Depression," published in 1934 -- when he worked at the London School of Economics. Also, only the most dogmatic anti-New Deal conservatives -- like Beck -- think Roosevelt's policies made the Depression worse. Many historians, in fact, think things worsened in the middle of the decade when FDR backed away from New Deal policies. But the best part of Beck's little history lesson came a few minutes later, when he segued on to the 1950s. "It was Republican Sen. Joe McCarthy, who shined the spotlight on the Communist Party again," Beck said rhapsodically. "McCarthy later led a Senate committee investigation into inefficiencies in the government. Critics accused him of falsely identifying Communists, and smearing their names." Those pesky critics! Beck then brought up, for some reason, the Cold War "domino theory," that if one nation went Communist, so would its neighbors. "Kind of feels like that now, doesn't it?" he asked. Bashing FDR is, like it or not, becoming second-nature to conservatives. But you don't often hear people willing to offer praise for McCarthy, who -- as even Beck had to admit -- was censured by the Senate in 1954 for his feverish pursuit of Reds, little of which he was able to substantiate. What any of this had to do with current affairs was -- as it often is while watching Beck's show -- a bit of a mystery. Until later in the program. On Monday's show, he promised, he'd reveal a new Communist -- working for the Obama White House. (Can't be bothered to expose the scandal Friday, though; after all, on Fridays, Beck usually airs pre-taped shows.) Watch the whole weird rant here, courtesy of a source who captured it as it aired: as it aired: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tprbzg3oN0 http://www.salon.com/news/glenn_beck/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2010/03/11/beck_mccarthy -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 37863 bytes Desc: not available URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Fri Mar 12 13:23:14 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2010 13:23:14 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [Review] A Country Called Amreeka Message-ID: A Country Called Amreeka: Arab Roots, American Stories by Alia Malek New York: Free Press, 2009 Hardcover, 320 pages ISBN-10: 1416589724 ISBN-13: 9781416589723 http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/view/9324/1/387/ 3-08-10, 2:01 pm Book Review: A Country Called Amreeka By Joel Wendland Few, if any, books published in the past 10 years or so which deal with the histories and lives of people of Arab descent actually deal with Arabic experiences in America. This fact leaves the impression that Arab people entered the American consciousness only after 2001. And while it is clear that predominant views of Arab peoples are typically distorted, stereotypical and organized to promote violence and animosity toward Arabic countries, many Americans have furthered refused careful examination of the experiences of Americans of Arab descent, both historical and contemporary, in this country. By detailing the lives of a number of different individuals in different contexts and times in America, Alia Malek's A Country Called Amreeka begins to fill in that gap in our collective understanding of our own history. Alia Malek is a second generation American of Syrian background. She works as a civil rights attorney in Baltimore, but her writing sparkles as she brings to life the men and women who are the subjects of this book. Though Malek provides a space in which 11 men and women tell about their individual lives in Amreeka, the Arabic word for the US, they stand in in some ways for the 3.5 million people of Arab descent in this country. As she notes, these Americans are of Christian and Muslim background (of different sects). They live in all 50 states. Some are new immigrants; some came in the wave of the great migration to the US in the latter part of the 19th century. They are workers, business owners, teachers and students; they are our neighbors, co-workers, friends and relatives. They are voters, consumers, rich and poor. "The purpose of this book isn't to separate them out," Malek explains, "but to fold their experience into the mosaic of American history and deepen our understanding of who we Americans are." The book opens with the story of Ed Salem, a football star at the University of Alabama in the 1940s. Salem's family, who were Christians, had moved to the US a generation before from Lebanon and made this country their new home. Almost 100,000 people from Arabic-speaking countries entered the US in this time period, the vast majority of whom were Christians. Like immigrants from Europe, Salem's father, Yussef Salem El Ankar had arrived at Ellis Island. Confused by the pronunciation of his name, authorities there changed it to Joe Salem. The Salem's moved to Birmingham, Alabama where a thriving Lebanese community existed within the racial hierarchies and violence of the mid-20th century South. When the civil rights movement challenged Southern Jim Crow laws, Salem and the Lebanese community found they were subjected to segregation and racial red-lining in housing. In each of the stories, Malek sets the individual lives within a global, national and local context that tells as much about the individuals as it does about the communities they live in and the major social and cultural trends at the time. For example, Rabih AbuSahan, whose family sent him off to Iowa State University in the mid-1980s both as a way to avoid the violence that plagued their home country of Lebanon and to help him find more opportunities, struggled with the complexities of being gay, Muslim and from an Arabic country just after the first Gulf War (1991), the first World Trade Center bombing (1993) and the terrorist attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City (1995). Because he lived and worked as a medical professional in Midwestern cities like Kansas City and Des Moines, Rabih felt isolated, Malek writes. His own religious values promoted a sense of self-hate because of his sexuality, and this combined with fears about how he would be treated by Americans generally as a result of the major confrontations between the US and Arabic countries. Racism, religious bigotry and homophobia seemed to be a powerful web he could only hide from rather than confront. That is until he met other gay men of diverse backgrounds who had struggled with similar issues. He joined a group called "Men of Colors and Cultures Together" and began to meet and work with gay men who had struggled to reconcile their religious values with their sexuality and the views of their families. He met and worked with men who experienced racism and fought back with slogans like "Black is beautiful!" While, according to Malek's narration, Rabih never fully resolves all the tensions, contradictions and challenges of being in America, he does finally start to make America his home when he joins the ongoing struggle for equality and erasing the hatreds that are so much a part of this country's history. These are just two of the stories that make this book a worthwhile read. Richly told and beautifully written, this book is as valuable a contribution to the American story as Malek hopes it will be. =============================== 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 Fri Mar 12 23:58:10 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 2010 00:58:10 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Clinton rebukes Israel over East Jerusalem plans, cites damage to bilateral tiesClinton rebukes Israel over East Jerusalem plans, cites damage to bilateral ties Message-ID: Clinton rebukes Israel over East Jerusalem plans, cites damage to bilateral ties By Glenn Kessler Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, March 13, 2010 Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton rebuked Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Friday about the state of the U.S.-Israeli relationship, demanding that Israel take immediate steps to show it is interested in renewing efforts to achieve a Middle East peace agreement. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley described the nearly 45-minute phone conversation in unusually undiplomatic terms, signaling that the close allies are facing their deepest crisis in two decades after the embarrassment suffered by Vice President Biden this week when Israel announced during his visit that it plans to build 1,600 housing units in a disputed area of Jerusalem. Clinton called Netanyahu "to make clear the United States considered the announcement a deeply negative signal about Israel's approach to the bilateral relationship and counter to the spirit of the vice president's trip," Crowley said. Clinton, he said, emphasized that "this action had undermined trust and confidence in the peace process and in America's interests." >From the start of his tenure, President Obama identified a Middle East peace deal as critical to U.S. national security, but his efforts have been hampered by the administration's missteps and the deep mistrust between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Last fall, he softened his demand for a full freeze on settlement construction, accepting a limited 10-month moratorium that did not include the East Jerusalem area where the construction announced this week is to take place. Clinton at the time hailed the Israeli plan as "unprecedented." Special envoy George J. Mitchell has struggled to relaunch peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Last week, he got the two sides to agree to indirect talks, with Mitchell shuttling between them, but the Israeli announcement has imperiled that development. Rising Palestinian anger led Israeli forces on Friday to seal off the West Bank and post riot squads around Jerusalem's Old City and Arab neighborhoods. U.S. officials were especially furious about the announcement because they thought they had reached a private understanding with Netanyahu that even though East Jerusalem was not officially included in the moratorium, he would prevent any provocative actions there. Its release during Biden's trip, intended as a fence-mending mission, was seen as another slap. "The announcement of the settlements on the very day that the vice president was there was insulting," Clinton told CNN on Friday. Obama had approved Clinton's call, sitting down with her during their weekly meeting Thursday to determine the language she would use. "The secretary and the president worked through together the specific points she would be making to Prime Minister Netanyahu," deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said. Biden also called Netanyahu on Friday to reinforce the message, officials said, and Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren was summoned to a meeting with Deputy Secretary of State James B. Steinberg. Some analysts applauded the administration's tough stance, saying it may jar the right-leaning Israeli government into making gestures to the Palestinians. But others said Clinton's call risked emboldening Arab and Palestinian officials to make new demands before talks start, if only so as not to seem softer than the Americans. In her call, Clinton appeared to link U.S. military support for Israel to the construction in East Jerusalem, which Palestinians view as the site for their future capital. "The secretary said she could not understand how this happened, particularly in light of the United States' strong commitment to Israel's security," Crowley said. "She made clear that the Israeli government needed to demonstrate, not just through words but through specific actions, that they are committed to this relationship and to the peace process." U.S. officials said Clinton made specific requests of Netanyahu to get the peace process back on track and to repair the damage to the relationship. They declined to identify the steps she demanded or to spell out possible consequences. Officials noted the length of the call -- such diplomatic conversations usually last about 10 minutes -- and said Clinton did most of the talking. "We think the burden is on the Israelis to do something that could restore confidence in the process and to restore confidence in the relationship with the United States," said a senior U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly. Clinton's blunt message to Netanyahu came three days after Biden condemned the plans while in Israel. Netanyahu has apologized for the timing of the announcement -- he said he did not know it was coming -- but has not taken steps to reverse the action. U.S. officials said they found his response inadequate, which in part prompted Clinton's call. Crowley's statement was issued after the Sabbath started in Israel, and there was no immediate comment from the government there. Relations with Israel have been strained almost since the start of the Obama administration. Now they have plunged to their lowest ebb since the administration of George H.W. Bush. Then, as now, the two countries quarreled over Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied Palestinian territories. In 1990, then-Secretary of State James A. Baker III publicly gave out the phone number of the White House switchboard and told the Israelis, "When you're serious about peace, call us." The future of Jerusalem is a major point of dispute in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with both sides claiming it as their capital. Israel captured East Jerusalem during the 1967 war and subsequently annexed and populated it in a move not recognized by the international community. Netanyahu's fragile coalition government includes members who oppose giving up any part of the city. The housing units announced this week would be added to an ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood called Ramat Shlomo, making it politically difficult for the prime minister to roll back the action. The "quartet" of Middle East peace mediators -- the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia -- on Friday condemned the construction announcement and said it would "take full stock of the situation" at a previously scheduled meeting in Moscow next week. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/12/AR2010031202615.html?hpid=topnews -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Sat Mar 13 00:07:11 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 2010 01:07:11 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Russia dismisses U.S. human rights report - as supremely hypocritical Message-ID: <814BE7A7321B4DA3AB74854F22BDC33F@Upstairs> Russia dismisses U.S. human rights report Reuters Friday, March 12, 2010; 12:22 PM MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia indignantly dismissed U.S. criticism of its human rights record on Friday, saying the United States was guilty of its own abuses from Afghanistan to "the streets of America." In a statement laced with sarcasm, the Foreign Ministry said the main purpose of what it called the U.S. State Department's annual "opus" on human rights worldwide was to "solve the internal political problems of the American establishment." The Russia section of the State Department report, released on Thursday, cited problems and abuses ranging from corruption and unfair elections to the killings of journalists who reported critically on the government. This year's report came amid efforts to mend Russian-U.S. ties, which hit a post-Cold War low after Russia's war with U.S.-supported Georgia in August 2008. The Russian Foreign Ministry said that despite those efforts, the United States was using human rights as a tool "to forward quite concrete, material foreign policy interests." "Everything in the report fits tradition and ritual -- the approaches, the theses, the conclusions, the sources," it said. "In this area we noticed no big difference, despite the current (U.S.) administration's declared 'reset' in our relations." As in past years, Russia said the United States had no right to lecture others. The Foreign Ministry said it was looking forward to a U.S. report on human rights in the United States and singled out U.S. military prisons in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. "It would be interesting to learn how (the State Department), which loves to moralize on the issue of human rights, would comment on torture and inhumane or humiliating treatment in the United States itself," the statement said. "And not just the widely known cases in Bagram and the special prison in Guantanamo -- which, contrary to the administration's promises, just doesn't close -- but also in the prisons and on the streets of America," it said. A report on rights in the United States should not omit "domestic violence leading to the murder of children, including those adopted in Russia," as well as "racism and xenophobia toward migrants, and Islamophobia," it said. (Writing by Steve Gutterman; editing by Robin Pomeroy) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/12/AR2010031202019.html?hpid=sec-world -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Sat Mar 13 00:51:32 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 2010 00:51:32 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Albie Sachs: Lessons from a Revolutionary Life Message-ID: <0B602A30DE2D4B8F9B13000F3352D05E@agingCHS072729> http://www.alternet.org/world/145976/lessons_from_a_revolutionary%27s_lifetime_crusade_for_justice?page=entire Alternet.org March 10, 2010 Lessons from a Revolutionary's Lifetime Crusade for Justice Albie Sachs lost an arm and half his eyesight and lived in exile for years, but he never lost his vision for a just and equitable society in South Africa. By Maria Armoudian As a member of the African National Congress' struggle against apartheid, Albie Sachs had his home raided, was imprisoned without charge, tortured, left in solitary confinement and blown up in a car bomb. He lost one arm, half his eyesight and lived in exile for years, but Sachs never lost his vision for a just and equitable society, even for the perpetrators. In 1988, he began penning that vision full-time into passages that would become the guiding document -- the new constitution -- to shape South Africa's future as a just, democratic society. In 1994, Sachs became a founding member of the South African constitutional court, appointed by then newly elected President Nelson Mandela. Sachs' latest book, The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law, describes how he attempted, as a Supreme Court justice, to apply those ideals in a complicated world, a much tougher task than he had imagined. But in a dozen or so years, South Africa has gained ground and even stepped ahead of many in the West in its efforts to bridge the equality gap. Sachs recently discussed his sometimes contradictory life as a human rights lawyer, an outlaw and a justice, and the vision that has been guiding South Africa's quest in leaps and bounds toward true equality. Maria Armoudian: As a young white lawyer in South Africa and a member of the ANC, you found yourself simultaneously advocating the law and yet an outlaw. How did you reconcile this? Albie Sachs: During the day I practiced in the high court in Capetown, wearing the advocate's gown and using my skills and persuasive power for my clients. It was very stimulating, but it was in a totally white court, except for the black people who faced prison. So by day, I defended my clients in court, and at night I challenged the whole legal order. Because the constitution and legal system in South Africa was abysmal, explicitly based on race, and manifestly unjust, we challenged it through the legal system while we prepared an underground resistance to overturn the whole order. MA: You, as a lawyer, ended up in solitary confinement, imprisoned and tortured. What happened? AS: It was under the 90-Day Law under which you could be locked up for 90 days without access to lawyers, family, anybody -- in total isolation. It was very grim and harsh. After those 90 days went by, one by one, I was released, per the law, but only for three minutes. Then, they re-detained me for another 90 days. Sadly the Supreme Court, the highest court in South Africa at that stage, upheld the validity of repeated 90-day sessions. MA: The 90 days were without any charges? AS: No charges, no access to counsel, just to be interrogated and questioned, on the basis that you were suspected of having information about terrorism. MA: How many of these 90 days in sequence could one go through? AS: At that time, I knew of people who were detained for at least three sessions. But afterward the law was changed to take away the 90-day limit, so it was open- ended, and people were held in solitary confinement for months or years, not charged with anything -- maybe to be called as a potential witness or if they were obdurate, refusing to cooperate with the authorities. It literally could be indefinite. MA: You ended up leaving South Africa and living in exile after that. AS: Yes, my clients expected me to keep them out of jail, not to go to jail myself. It was a very bitter decision. But one couldn't escape from Capetown. We were right in the bottom end of South Africa with no land borders that I could get over. So leaving meant going by boat with an Exit Permit, which allowed you to leave the country on the basis that it would be a criminal offense to ever return. MA: And so you took the exit permit and you moved to first to England and eventually to Mozambique. Was it in Mozambique that you were blasted in the car bomb? AS: Yes, after I did a Ph.D. at Sussex University, I taught international law at Southampton University, thinking all the time what can I take back to South Africa and always with a view to repatriating and bringing that material to South Africa. So I went to Mozambique, close to my country, to the problems of my country, and totally engaged until 1988. MA: You wrote that the car bomb that blew off your arm and took away half of your eyesight also blasted away the 'schism that had divided you,' that it 'hurled you out of a legal routine and freed you to recreate your life.' How did that happen? AS: It's funny hearing you say that. I'd forgotten I'd written that, but it sounds rather good. The solitary confinement and the sleep deprivation -- attacks on my mind, my will and my soul -- were far more injurious than the attack on my body. Yes, I did lose an arm, and the sight of one eye. But this is what everybody in the freedom struggle thinks about: Will they come for me today? If they do come for me, will I be strong, will I get through? And I survived. And even more than that, I think every human being wonders: If I were to die tomorrow, will somebody cry? People thought I was dead, and they cried and I know that. So surviving that bomb gave me an extraordinary, almost unreal sense of vitality, a near immunity to the tiny vicissitudes of life. It swept away a lot of triviality and the little neuroses that we all have and reconfigured my life, giving me an opportunity to determine what I wanted to do and be and how I wanted to spend my days. I managed to get my wish, which was to work full-time on preparing the new constitution for South Africa. What made this marvelous was that we were not simply denouncing apartheid or calling for people to isolate racist South Africa. We were actually creating the foundations, the imaginative, legal and institutional foundations for a new democratic South Africa. MA: You have coined a phrase called 'soft vengeance' in relation to the guy who planted that bomb. AS: Yes, it's sometimes hard to get that concept across to an American audience, and it seems to be almost a contradiction in terms. The phrase came to me when I was lying in a London hospital recovering from the bomb. I used to sing to console myself at about 4am when the painkillers were wearing off, and I felt very alone. Then, I received a letter from a friend, who said, "Don't worry Albie, we will avenge you." And I thought, what does he mean? Are we going to cut off the arms of the people who sent these bombs? Are we going to blind them in one eye? What sort of country will we be living in? Then I heard that one of the persons that placed the bomb in my car was caught in Mozambique. And I thought, if he is put on trial and the evidence is insufficient, and he's acquitted because there's no proof beyond reasonable doubt, this will be my soft vengeance -- because it is more important to live under the rule of law and with due process than it was just to send one rascal to jail. Similarly, I was thinking about getting everyone the right to vote, and I said to myself, "If we get democracy for everybody and build a nonracial, nonsexist society, roses and lilies will grow out of my amputated arm." When we voted, I had a look at [my arm] and didn't see any roses and lilies there. But it did convey the idea that it isn't about doing to them what they'd done to us, either directly or indirectly. It is about transcending what they had done. It was about building a new society. MA: You have said that writing and expounding the constitution was the primary instrument for accomplishing a completed peaceful revolution. It was through this process in law that you saw South Africa healing itself. Do you think that it has? AS: One can't stress enough the role of making the constitution; not the text, but the process of elaborating it, finding agreed terms within which people can live together, build confidence and develop trust based on guaranteed protections. The process was part of the guarantee that the constitution would be meaningful. There were two gaps -- one between apartheid law -- which used the law as an instrument of oppression -- and the ideals of justice and freedom to which I think any decent lawyer should aspire. The other was between the high falutin' beautiful phrases of the law and what law meant to ordinary people living in shacks. There seemed to be no connection between these beautiful phrases of the law and the lives led by the desperately poor but extremely active and dynamic people. To them, the law was police, jail, and oppression, whereas justice to them was freedom, and they were willing to give their lives for justice. It was only when we wrote the constitution that we linked up these two worlds. That was healing. Working on the constitution I could see how these grand phrases of the ages could really be meaningful for the poor and disenfranchised. They could have an emancipatory character if we got the constitution right. MA: You have also asserted that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was one means of healing a torn-apart nation. Yet you met the person who organized the bomb in your car and others who had tortured your colleagues, and many of the perpetrators were given amnesty. How was this process healing? Was it the role of truth? The role of apology? The public process? AS: It played an enormously positive role because it enabled the pain to come out. Somebody described it as converting knowledge into acknowledgement. We knew terrible things had happened; we knew there was pain and that people died in detention. We had statistics and facts. But facts are cold, and data lacks the human dimension. The Truth Commission brought these events and experiences into the public place. We saw the tears, heard the voices; we heard the lamentations, and the sometimes stilted apologies. These were our people on television, heard on the radio, read in the press. It was the humanizing and personalizing of what had happened that captured people's spirits. Although it didn't heal inequities of our country, it created a common platform that there are things that people just can't and mustn't do to other people, that in the new country, there would be no secrets and no lies, and that we mustn't allow these things to ever happen again. Until we addressed these extremely sore points, these hidden and denied examples of atrocious conduct, we couldn't even reach the problem of a forward-looking government. So the Truth Commission helped to repair and lay the basis for common citizenship and for joint efforts to improve the lives of everybody. It didn't solve the big problems of injustice. We are de- racializing wealth, but poverty is still overwhelmingly a black phenomenon, and until we have real equality in the lives people lead, I don't think we will have full and lasting reconciliation. We still have a long way to go. MA: Having lived through one of the most profound political transformations of our time, I want to ask you a bit about some of the factors within the transformation, because there are debates among thinkers about these means of achieving such ends. So for example, what was the role of violence? Could you have achieved the same end result in South Africa without violence? AS: There are two aspects that were very significant in our story: We resisted using violent methods for as long as possible; nonviolence was our slogan. The result was more and more oppression. People didn't have the right to vote; our organizations were banned; our leaders were in prison; and our newspapers closed down. It became a question of whether to submit or fight. Fighting back was important and historically justified, but at the same time, it was important not to engage in terrorism. Violence and terrorism are not synonymous. Violence can be used to counteract the repressive violence of the State. But it can also be an indiscriminate method of sowing as much mental and psychic destruction as you can, targeting people who are not direct participants in the struggle. We used tactical violence but absolutely denounced terrorism, It was very important that we resisted any of terrorism's lure. That would have polarized our country so much that we could never have gotten the transformation that we've got now. When you become an instrument of death, you lose your own humanity. And we were fighting for humanity. That was the core of everything we were doing, which made it all the more paradoxical that we were being locked up as terrorists, because we were challenging the State and using armed force as part of the challenge to the State. Then we found out that some of our officials were using violence against captured enemy agents, who were sent to blow us up, destroy us, poison us and create mayhem. We were shocked to the core and decided, as an organization, to prohibit the use of torture under any circumstances, even in the direst circumstances. Whatever the emergency, we don't use torture, and we don't use it because we are not like that, because we are fighting for life. That became a kind of bill of rights within our liberation organization and a core ingredient of the struggle, which meant that we were ready for a Bill of Rights in a new democratic South Africa. MA: What about the role of media and communication before, during and after the transformation? AS: Under apartheid, the media overwhelmingly reflected the social situation in our country. White people owned the media. For example, in a simple thing like a murder story, the murder of a white person got headlines, particularly if it was in an up-market suburb, whereas the murder of a black person in a poor area didn't register any treatment at all, so the focus was, in that sense, very white. At the same time there were honest journalists and campaigning journalists, though not huge in numbers. They were battling to get some critique through. I worked for a while on a weekly newspaper that we tried to make lively and readable. Looking back, a lot of it probably was pretty stodgy. But it came from the vantage point of struggle. It was seen as an organizing tool, a way of getting the words of [Nelson] Mandela, [Oliver] Tambo and others to people who otherwise wouldn't know what was being said. It was suppressed. In the struggle period, we also had Radio Freedom, which got tremendous encouragement and support. But it was so distant and its presentation of information and news might have been a bit stale. I don't think it played a very big role. Journalists were useful for keeping up morale but out of touch because they had to produce from faraway about the day-to-day events. Now we have a whole new caucus of editors, mostly from the black community, many who were involved in the struggle as young people. So the newspapers are far more diverse, and in some ways, more lively. There's certainly much greater freedom of the press and openness of criticism now than ever before. MA: As I recall, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was broadcast throughout the country, is that right? AS: Yes, the impact was enormous. It was broadcast daily and weekly as television summaries and excerpts in the news every day as part of the news programs or like a special Sunday evening recap of the week's events. You just had to acknowledge what was going on. Some people would switch it off, but even the act of switching off the program, in a way, was a response. MA: What were your guideposts for writing the new constitution of South Africa? AS: We had a document called the Freedom Charter that the ANC had adopted in 1955, which set out a vision of a future nonracial, democratic South Africa that belonged to all who live in it, black and white together. In a conceptual and imaginative sense, that was the core. But we also had to transform a visionary statement into an instrument and set of institutions that could be made practicable in real-life situations. So we directed the energy toward institutions and mechanisms for entrenching basic rights. Many people call it the most forward, progressive looking and comprehensive constitution in the world. MA: Some of the complications, I understand, were incorporating things such as 'bread rights' into the bill of rights. How were they complicated? AS: Traditionally, lawyers focus on the freedom rights, civil rights, freedom of speech, to assemble, to speak, freedom of conscience and the right to vote. Things like the right to health, education and housing were instead seen as what good governments do but not as fundamental rights. In South Africa, we couldn't separate freedom rights from bread rights. We wanted them all. We couldn't allow development to be used as a justification for suppressing freedom. Freedom without adequate housing, the minimum decencies of life or with children dying of preventable diseases, would be anti- freedom. So our constitutional order, our bill of rights expressly speaks about everyone having the right of access to free health, housing, education, water, minimum decencies of life. The state must take progressive measures to realize those rights in its available resources. The task of the courts was to give meaning to those broad statements. We've quite a developed jurisprudence now in our courts about reasonable measures to realize these rights, such as housing and access to health care, particularly important in terms of access to the provision of anti- retroviral treatment. MA: As a justice on the Constitutional Court, you dealt with and opined on some landmark cases that tested these rights and dealt with homelessness, HIV and same- sex marriage. Tell us about these, starting with the homeless Mrs. Grootboom. AS: [In the first case] the court didn't order that Mrs. Grootboom [who lived in a shack] get a home, but she was given provisions. The court ordered that there should be an emergency program to deal with evicted people, victims of fire and flood who had no shelter whatsoever. There had to be something in place for them. Since then something like two million brick homes have been given for free to people to move from shacks into brick homes. They pay nothing. But we have an enormous backlog and also cases of people being evicted from the town center by city councils for purposes of urban renewal. We've insisted on meaningful engagement: They must have a voice in what happens to them. The council can't just have them booted out. In the case of the right of access to health, the most important was the Navirapine case, where the court ordered that a woman in labor living with HIV who was about to give birth has the right to the drug Navirapine, which would be given only with informed consent under the supervision of the doctors in the facilities that provide it. On same-sex marriages, one of my last written opinions, our constitution speaks about nondiscrimination on grounds of race, color, creed, national origin, birth, sexual orientation or disability. So we had a strong foundation for saying that denying same-sex couples the right to celebrate their unions with the same public acknowledgement, rights and responsibilities of heterosexual couples violates the constitution. We gave parliament one year to rectify the situation. And if it didn't, we would have written in the necessary changes into the marriage act ourselves. Parliament adopted a civil union law that enabled same-sex couples to say "I marry you," such the "M" word was part of the text. Same-sex couples now get married, and the world hasn't come tumbling down. It's becoming a well-accepted fact of public life to see same-sex couples openly acknowledging the character of their relationship and being accepted in their communities as a married couple. MA: From your experience, what advice do you have for other struggles for justice? AS: I think there are some principles that are pretty universal. And one of them is: Don't lose your own humanity in your struggle for rights and humanity. To me that's absolutely central. The minute that everything becomes a question of calculation, you forget what your goal is. Your goal is to rescue and preserve human dignity and to enable human dignity to flourish. But if you're destroying that at its source because somehow you've become cruel, you lose the value foundation of what you're doing. Or if you simply see enemies out there, then you don't see human beings. Maybe the armed dimension becomes inevitable because there are no possibilities of free expression of your views, no legal or democratic ways in which you can express yourself. Even then, it doesn't mean that the revolutionary end justifies cruel means, or the liberatory, emancipatory end justifies any tactic whatsoever being used. That means that things like terrorism and torture that belong to cruel societies don't belong to freedom movements, and that's the only thing I can urge. And it's not simply a question of morals and the integrity that you have amongst yourselves. It also works. You will get friends, people to believe in you, and you believe in yourself, build up alliances. People see the justness of your struggle, and they're not diverted by the methods that are being used. You win out in the end. Certainly that was our experience in South Africa. Maria Armoudian is a journalist, singer/songwriter and legislative consultant whose articles have been syndicated by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times syndicates. She has written for Salon.com, Daily Variety, Billboard, the Progressive and Business Week among others. =============================== 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 Mar 13 09:06:19 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 2010 09:06:19 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Texas Conservatives revise win curriculum change, revise history Message-ID: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr. Published: March 12, 2010 AUSTIN, Tex. - After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers' commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light. The vote was 10 to 5 along party lines, with all the Republicans on the board voting for it. The board, whose members are elected, has influence beyond Texas because the state is one of the largest buyers of textbooks. In the digital age, however, that influence has diminished as technological advances have made it possible for publishers to tailor books to individual states. In recent years, board members have been locked in an ideological battle between a bloc of conservatives who question Darwin's theory of evolution and believe the Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles, and a handful of Democrats and moderate Republicans who have fought to preserve the teaching of Darwinism and the separation of church and state. Since January, Republicans on the board have passed more than 100 amendments to the 120-page curriculum standards affecting history, sociology and economics courses from elementary to high school. The standards were proposed by a panel of teachers. "We are adding balance," said Dr. Don McLeroy, the leader of the conservative faction on the board, after the vote. "History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left." Battles over what to put in science and history books have taken place for years in the 20 states where state boards must adopt textbooks, most notably in California and Texas. But rarely in recent history has a group of conservative board members left such a mark on a social studies curriculum. Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state's large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, "They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don't exist." "They are going overboard, they are not experts, they are not historians," she said. "They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world." The curriculum standards will now be published in a state register, opening them up for 30 days of public comment. A final vote will be taken in May, but given the Republican dominance of the board, it is unlikely that many changes will be made. The standards, reviewed every decade, serve as a template for textbook publishers, who must come before the board next year with drafts of their books. The board's makeup will have changed by then because Dr. McLeroy lost in a primary this month to a more moderate Republican, and two others - one Democrat and one conservative Republican - announced they were not seeking re-election. There are seven members of the conservative bloc on the board, but they are often joined by one of the other three Republicans on crucial votes. There were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings, though some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics. The conservative members maintain that they are trying to correct what they see as a liberal bias among the teachers who proposed the curriculum. To that end, they made dozens of minor changes aimed at calling into question, among other things, concepts like the separation of church and state and the secular nature of the American Revolution. "I reject the notion by the left of a constitutional separation of church and state," said David Bradley, a conservative from Beaumont who works in real estate. "I have $1,000 for the charity of your choice if you can find it in the Constitution." They also included a plank to ensure that students learn about "the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association." Dr. McLeroy, a dentist by training, pushed through a change to the teaching of the civil rights movement to ensure that students study the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers in addition to the nonviolent approach of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He also made sure that textbooks would mention the votes in Congress on civil rights legislation, which Republicans supported. "Republicans need a little credit for that," he said. "I think it's going to surprise some students." Mr. Bradley won approval for an amendment saying students should study "the unintended consequences" of the Great Society legislation, affirmative action and Title IX legislation. He also won approval for an amendment stressing that Germans and Italians as well as Japanese were interned in the United States during World War II, to counter the idea that the internment of Japanese was motivated by racism. Other changes seem aimed at tamping down criticism of the right. Conservatives passed one amendment, for instance, requiring that the history of McCarthyism include "how the later release of the Venona papers confirmed suspicions of communist infiltration in U.S. government." The Venona papers were transcripts of some 3,000 communications between the Soviet Union and its agents in the United States. Mavis B. Knight, a Democrat from Dallas, introduced an amendment requiring that students study the reasons "the founding fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring the government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion above all others." It was defeated on a party-line vote. After the vote, Ms. Knight said, "The social conservatives have perverted accurate history to fulfill their own agenda." In economics, the revisions add Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, two champions of free-market economic theory, among the usual list of economists to be studied, like Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. They also replaced the word "capitalism" throughout their texts with the "free-enterprise system." "Let's face it, capitalism does have a negative connotation," said one conservative member, Terri Leo. "You know, 'capitalist pig!' " In the field of sociology, another conservative member, Barbara Cargill, won passage of an amendment requiring the teaching of "the importance of personal responsibility for life choices" in a section on teenage suicide, dating violence, sexuality, drug use and eating disorders. "The topic of sociology tends to blame society for everything," Ms. Cargill said. Even the course on world history did not escape the board's scalpel. Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term "separation between church and state.") "The Enlightenment was not the only philosophy on which these revolutions were based," Ms. Dunbar said. =============================== 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 Mar 13 09:30:08 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 2010 09:30:08 -0600 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Man arrested for overdue library books Message-ID: <043A723DCD2C4187A61C5C606F93B81E@agingCHS072729> [No book police? Thank again.....] Return Library Books or Else: Borrowers Arrested for Failing to Return Overdue Books, DVDs Frustrated by Loss of Property, Towns Resort to Arresting Negligent Library Patrons By SARAH NETTER March 11, 2010 Handcuffed and in the back of a police cruiser, Aaron Henson wracked his brain trying to figure out how a simple speeding violation had led to his arrest. The answer from the Colorado State Patrol stunned him. Henson never returned the DVD he'd checked out of the Littleton library, and there was a warrant out for his arrest. "I was just shocked," he said. "I was like 'What? I've got a what now?'" After spending eight hours in a county jail, during which time he was fingerprinted, photographed and booked, Henson's father bailed him out. He had tried calling his mother for help, but she didn't seem to believe him, telling Henson there was no "book police." But indeed there is. Towns across the county, frustrated with trying to replace wayward materials on a shoestring budget, have turned to issuing citations, court appearances, even reporting the offending library patron to their credit bureaus. Full: http://abcnews.go.com/WN/arrested-cuffed-overdue-library-books/story?id=10062565&partner=yahoo =============================== 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 Sat Mar 13 23:55:42 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2010 00:55:42 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Iraq reconstruction program allowed Americans who took bribes to get off scot-free. Message-ID: New Fraud Cases Point to Lapses in Iraq Projects By JAMES GLANZ Published: March 13, 2010 Investigators looking into corruption involving reconstruction in Iraq say they have opened more than 50 new cases in six months by scrutinizing large cash transactions - involving banks, land deals, loan payments, casinos and even plastic surgery - made by some of the Americans involved in the nearly $150 billion program. Some of the cases involve people who are suspected of having mailed tens of thousands of dollars to themselves from Iraq, or of having stuffed the money into duffel bags and suitcases when leaving the country, the federal investigators said. In other cases, millions of dollars were moved through wire transfers. Suspects then used cash to buy BMWs, Humvees and expensive jewelry, or to pay off enormous casino debts. Some suspects also tried to conceal foreign bank accounts in Ghana, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Britain, the investigators said, while in other cases, cash was simply found stacked in home safes. There have already been dozens of indictments and convictions for corruption since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But the new cases seem to confirm what investigators have long speculated: that the chaos, weak oversight and wide use of cash payments in the reconstruction program in Iraq allowed many more Americans who took bribes or stole money to get off scot-free. "I've had a continuing sense that there is ongoing fraud that we have not been able to nail down," said Stuart W. Bowen Jr., who leads the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, an independent oversight agency. "This spate of new cases is evidence that that sense was reasonably well placed." The cases were uncovered during the first phase of a new, systematic inquiry into financial activities, which investigators said began in earnest last summer. A related investigation of rebuilding funds for Afghanistan began in February. Mr. Bowen's office agreed to answer general questions on the new inquiry but declined to divulge the names of the suspects, who include private contractors, military officers and civilian officials. Developed in the Treasury Department, the financial monitoring effort goes by the generic name of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or Fincen, which continually generates data on suspicious financial transactions in support of more than 275 federal and state law enforcement agencies, according to a December report by the Government Accountability Office. Stephen Hudak, a spokesman at the Treasury Department for Fincen, said it generated 15 million to 16 million reports a year on suspicious financial activity or major currency transactions, including cash deposits of more than $10,000. He said that transactions in banks, check-cashing outlets, wire services, casinos, stockbrokers' offices and insurance companies were covered. "Basically, we follow dirty money," Mr. Hudak said. "Authorized users can access Fincen's databases to make connections in criminal investigations." Mr. Hudak confirmed that Fincen was being used to investigate reconstruction corruption in Iraq. Because the investigation has covered only limited areas in the United States so far, Mr. Bowen said he estimated that dozens of additional cases would be opened by the end of the year. Mr. Bowen, who spoke by phone from Baghdad, described the effort as a "concerted, focused, forensic financial review involving all the Iraq reconstruction funds." Congress has appropriated about $53 billion for reconstruction projects, and the rest of the money has come from Iraqi assets and international pledges. According to testimony before the Wartime Contracting Commission last month by Arnold Fields, who leads the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, Congress has appropriated $51 billion to rebuild that country since 2002. John Brummet, the assistant inspector general for audits in that office, said that the office's staff members had been studying the Iraq investigation for nearly a year and that they had started a related effort last month. "What we're trying to do is basically replicate what they've done without having to pay the price of the learning curve," Mr. Brummet said. Investigations involving the inspector general's office for Iraq's reconstruction have led to 35 indictments and 27 convictions for fraud in numerous forms; the number of convictions rises to 58 when cases pursued by other government agencies are included, according to figures compiled by the Justice Department. Mr. Bowen would not comment on whether indictments had yet been written up for the new cases, which numbered 52 by last week. But he said that at least 45 of those had come directly from the forensic effort. Wayne White, who until 2005 was a senior intelligence official with the State Department focused on Iraq and is now a scholar with the Middle East Institute in Washington, said he was not surprised that new cases were still turning up. Since Iraq's economy collapsed after the 1991 Persian Gulf war, the country's dealings with foreign companies and contractors have been laced with bribery, kickbacks and other fraud, Mr. White said, adding that weak oversight of the reconstruction efforts almost guaranteed that those problems would not be rooted out. "That's been very disappointing, and we've seen it in Afghanistan as well," Mr. White said. A senior federal official said that some of the new cases appeared to be closely linked to known networks of conspiracy and fraud and were likely to extend investigators' knowledge of cases that had already ended with convictions. Many other cases seem to be entirely new, the official said. Mr. Bowen said that many of the new cases involved bribes and kickbacks for awarding lucrative work to contractors, and that in a number of cases, spouses or other relatives of the suspects are accused of setting up fraudulent companies to hide the illicit gains. When people who turn up in the net are initially contacted by investigators, the reaction "runs the gamut," Mr. Bowen said. Some deny wrongdoing and others admit to accepting small bribes, which on further investigation rise into hundreds of thousands of dollars. One suspect, he said, made the job especially easy on investigators who arrived at his door. "I've been waiting for you," the suspect said. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/world/middleeast/14reconstruct.html?hp -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Mar 14 09:59:09 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2010 09:59:09 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Colored Revolutions: A New Form of Regime Change Message-ID: <415126136E5948EE9D2838C44C09AF27@agingCHS072729> http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/5139 Colored Revolutions: A New Form of Regime Change, Made in USA February 15th 2010, by Eva Golinger - Postcards from the Revolution In 1983, the strategy of overthrowing inconvenient governments and calling it "democracy promotion" was born. Through the creation of a series of quasi-private "foundations", such as Albert Einstein Institute (AEI), National Endowment for Democracy (NED), International Republican Institute (IRI), National Democratic Institute (NDI), Freedom House and later the International Center for Non-Violent Conflict (ICNC), Washington began to filter funding and strategic aid to political parties and groups abroad that promoted US agenda in nations with insubordinate governments. Behind all these "foundations" and "institutes" is the US Agency for Inter- national Development (USAID), the financial branch of the Department of State. Today, USAID has become a critical part of the security, intelligence and defense axis in Washington. In 2009, the Interagency Counterinsurgency Initiative became official doctrine in the US. Now, USAID is the principal entity that promotes the economic and strategic interests of the US across the globe as part of counterinsurgency operations. Its departments dedicated to transition initiatives, reconstruction, conflict management, economic development, governance and democracy are the main venues through which millions of dollars are filtered from Washington to political parties, NGOs, student organizations and movements that promote US agenda worldwide. Wherever a coup d'etat, a colored revolution or a regime change favorable to US interests occurs, USAID and its flow of dollars is there. How Does a Colored Revolution Work? The recipe is always the same. Student and youth movements lead the way with a fresh face, attracting others to join in as though it were the fashion, the cool thing to do. There's always a logo, a color, a marketing strategy. In Serbia, the group OTPOR, which led the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic, hit the streets with t-shirts, posters and flags boasting a fist in black and white, their symbol of resistance. In Ukraine, the logo remained the same, but the color changed to orange. In Georgia, it was a rose-colored fist, and in Venezuela, instead of the closed fist, the hands are open, in black and white, to add a little variety. Colored revolutions always occur in a nation with strategic, natural resources: gas, oil, military bases and geopolitical interests. And they also always take place in countries with socialist-leaning, anti-imperialist governments. The movements promoted by US agencies in those countries are generally anti-communist, anti-socialist, pro-capitalist and pro-imperialist. Protests and destabilization actions are always planned around an electoral campaign and process, to raise tensions and questions of potential fraud, and to discredit the elections in the case of a loss for the opposition, which is generally the case. The same agencies are always present, funding, training and advising: USAID, NED, IRI, NDI, Freedom House, AEI and ICNC. The latter two pride themselves on the expert training and capacitation of youth movements to encourage "non violent" change. The strategy seeks to debilitate and disorganize the pillars of State power, neutralizing security forces and creating a sensation of chaos and instability. Colonel Robert Helvey, one of the founders of this strategy and a director at AEI, explained that the objective is not to destroy the armed forces and police, but rather "convert them" -- convince them to leave the present government and "make them understand that there is a place for them in the government of tomorrow". Youth are used to try and debilitate security forces and make it more difficult for them to engage in repression during public protests. Srdja Popovic, founder of OTPOR, revealed that Helvey taught them ". . . how to select people in the system, such as police officers, and send them the message that we are all victims, them and us, because it's not the job of a police officer to arrest a 13-year old protestor, for example. . . ." It's a well-planned strategy directed towards the security forces, public officials and the public in general, with a psychological warfare component and a street presence that give the impression of a nation on the verge of popular insurrection. Venezuela In 2003, AEI touched ground in Venezuela. Colonel Helvey himself gave a 9-day intensive course to the Venezuelan opposition on how to "restore democracy" in the country. According to AEI's annual report, opposition political parties, NGOs, activists and labor unions participated in the workshop, learning the techniques of how to "overthrow a dictator". This was a year after the failed coup d'etat -- led by those same groups -- against President Chavez. What came right after the AEI intervention was a year of street violence, constant destabilization attempts and a recall referendum against Chavez. The opposition lost 60-40, but cried fraud. Their claims were pointless. Hundreds of international observers, including the Carter Center and the OAS, certified the process as transparent, legitimate and fraud-free. In March 2005, the Venezuelan opposition and AEI joined forces again, but this time the old political parties and leaders were replaced by a select group of students and young Venezuelans. Two former leaders of OTPOR came from Belgrade, Slobodan Dinovic and Ivan Marovic, to train the Venezuelan students on how to build a movement to overthrow their president. Simultaneously, USAID and NED funding to groups in Venezuela skyrocketed to around $9 million USD. Freedom House set up shop in Venezuela for the first time ever, working hand in hand with USAID and NED to help consolidate the opposition and prepare it for the 2006 presidential elections. ICNC, led by former Freedom House president Peter Ackerman, also began to train the youth opposition movement, providing intensive courses and seminars in regime change techniques. That year, the newly-trained students launched their movement. The goal was to impede the electoral process and create a scenario of fraud, but they failed. Chavez won the elections with 64% of the vote, a landslide victory. In 2007, the movement was relaunched in reaction to the government's decision to not renew the broadcasting license of a private television station, RCTV, a voice of the opposition. The students took to the streets with their logo in hand and along with the aid of mainstream media, garnered international attention. Several were selected by US agencies and sent to train again in Belgrade in October 2007. Student leader Yon Goicochea was awarded $500,000 USD from the right-wing Washington think tank, Cato Institute, to set up a training center for opposition youth inside Venezuela. Today, those same students are the faces of the opposition political parties, evidencing not only their clear connection with the politics of the past, but also the deceit of their own movement. The colored revolutions in Georgia and the Ukraine are fading. Citizens of those nations have become disenchanted with those that took power through an apparent "autonomous" movement and have begun to see they were fooled. The colored revolutions are nothing more than the red, white and blue of US agencies, finding new and innovative ways to try and impose Empire's agenda. Source: Postcards from the Revolution http://www.chavezcode.com/2010/02/colored-revolutions-new-form-of-regime.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 Mar 14 10:02:20 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2010 10:02:20 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] War on the horizon in Latin America Message-ID: http://www.chavezcode.com/2010/03/permanent-aggression-war-on-horizon-in.html Postcards from the Revolution Thursday, March 11, 2010 PERMANENT AGGRESSION: War on the horizon in Latin America The Empire will stop at nothing to find mechanisms and techniques to achieve its final objective, and we cannot disregard the possibility of a military conflict in the near future. If the US places Venezuela on the "terrorist list" this year, we could be on the verge of a regional war. Latin America has suffered constant aggressions executed by Washington during the past two hundred years. Strategies and tactics of covert and overt warfare have been applied against different nations in the region, ranging from coup d'etats, assassinations, disappearances, torture, brutal dictatorships, atrocities, political persecution, economic sabotage, psychological operations, media warfare, biological warfare, subversion, counterinsurgency, paramiliary infiltration, diplomatic terrorism, blockades, electoral intervention to military invasions. Regardless of who's in the White House - democrat or republican - when it comes to Latin America, the Empire's policies remain the same. In the twenty-first century, Venezuela has been one of the principle targets of these constant aggressions. Since the April 2002 coup, there has been a dangerous escalation in attacks and destabilization attempts against the Bolivarian Revolution. Although many fell beneath the seductive smile and poetic words of Barack Obama, it's not necessary to look beyond the past year to see the intensification of Washington's aggressions against Venezuela. The largest military expansion in history in the region - through the US occupation of Colombia - the reactivation of the Fourth Fleet of the US Navy, as well as an increased US military presence in the Caribbean, Panama and Central America throughout the past year, can be interpreted as preparation for a conflict scenario in the region. ESCALATION IN AGGRESSIONS The hostile declarations from various Washington representatives during the past few weeks, accusing Venezuela of failure to combat narcotics operations, violating human rights, "not contributing to democracy and regional stability", and of being the "regional anti-US leader", form part of a coordinated campaign that seeks to justify a direct aggression against Venezuela. Soon, Washington will publish its annual list of "state sponsors of terrorism", and if Venezuela is placed on the list this year, the region could be on the brink of an unprecedented military conflict. Evidence seems to indicate a move in that direction. A US Air Force document justifying the need to increase military presence in Colombia affirmed that Washington is preparing for "expeditionary warfare" in South America. The 2009 Air Force document, sent to Congress last May (but later modified in November after it was used to demonstrate the true intentions behind the military agreement between the US and Colombia), explained, ""Development of this CSL (Cooperative Security Location) will further the strategic partnership forged between the US and Colombia and is in the interest of both nations.A presence will also increase our capability to conduct Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR), improve global reach, support logistics requirements, improve partnerships, improve theater security cooperation and expand expeditionary warfare capability". ON THE VERGE OF WAR The first official report outlining the defense and intelligence priorities of the Obama administration dedicated substantial attention to Venezuela. The Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community - which has mentioned Venezuela in years past, but not nearly with the same emphasis and extension - particularly signaled out President Chavez as a major "threat" to US interests. "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", said the intelligence document, placing Venezuela in the same category as Iran, North Korea and Al Qa'ida. Days after the report was published, the State Department presented its 2011 budget to Congress. In addition to an increase in financing through USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to fund opposition groups in Venezuela - more than $15 million USD - there was also a $48 million USD request for the Organization of American States (OAS) to "deploy special 'democracy promoter' teams to countries where democracy is under threat from the growing presence of alternative concepts such as the 'participatory democracy' promoted by Venezuela and Bolivia". One week later, the Inter-American Human Rights Commission of the OAS - funded by Washington - emitted a whopping 322-page report slamming Venezuela for human rights violations, repression of the press and undermining democracy. Despite the fact that it was a report - and a Commission - dedicated to the topic of human rights, the detailed study barely mentioned the immense achievements of the Chavez government in advancing human rights; advances which have been recognized and applauded over the past five years by the Unted Nations. The evidence used by the OAS to elaborate the report came from opposition testimonies and biased media outlets, a clear demonstration of dangerous subjectivity. Simultaneous to these accusations, a Spanish court accused the Venezuelan government last week of supporting and collaborating with the FARC and ETA - organizations considered terrorist by both the US and Spain - provoking an international scandal. President Chavez reiterated that his government has absolutely no ties with any terrorist group in the world. "This is a government of peace", declared Chavez, after explaining that the presence of ETA members in Venezuela is due to an agreement made over 20 years ago by the government of Carlos Andres Perez in order to aid Spain in a peace treaty with the Basque separatist group. THE EMPIRE HAS NO COLOR Last week, on tour in Latin America, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton couldn't stop attacking Venezuela during her different declarations made before international media. She expressed her "great concern" for democracy and human rights in Venezuela, accusing President Chavez of not "contributing in a constructive manner" to regional progress. In a cynical tone, Clinton advised President Chavez to "look further south" for inspiration, instead of towards Cuba. Clinton's regional trip was part of a strategy announced by the Obama administration last year, to create a divide between the so-called "progressive left" and the "radical left" in Latin America. It's no coincidence that her first tour of the region coincided with the announcement of a new Latin American and Caribbean Community of States, which excludes the presence of the US and Canada. THE COMING CONFLICT A military conflict is not initiated from one day to the next. It's a process that involves first influencing public perception and opinion - demonizing the target leader or government in order to justify aggression. Subsequently, armed forces are strategically deployed in the region in order to guarantee an effective military action. Tactics, such as subversion and counterinsurgency, are utilized in order to debilitate and destabilize the target nation from within, increasing its vulnerability and weakening its defenses. This plan has been active against Venezuela for several years. The consolidation of regional unity and Latin American integration threatens US possibilities of regaining domination and control in the hemisphere. And the advances of the Bolivarian Revolution have impeded its "self-destruction", provoked by internal subversion funded and directed by US agencies. However, the Empire will not cease its attempts to achieve its final objective, and a potential military conflict in the region remains on the horizon. Posted by Eva Golinger at 5:44 PM =============================== 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 Mar 14 10:07:18 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2010 10:07:18 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The amazing true story of Zeitoun Message-ID: <05B1B30CBB4448999FAA8EADEE329DA5@agingCHS072729> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/11/dave-eggers-zeitoun-hurricane-katrina guardian.co.uk 11 March 2010 The amazing true story of Zeitoun Abdulrahman Zeitoun is the real-life hero of Dave Eggers's new book. In the aftermath of hurricane Katrina he paddled from house to house in a canoe, offering help to his neighbours. For his trouble, he was arrested as a suspected terrorist Ed Pilkington [Photo: Abdulrahman Zietoun in the New Orleans Greyhound bus station where he was held after ?being arrested. Photograph: Julie Dermansky/Polaris] Saturday afternoon and the Zeitoun household is bustling with activity, as you quickly get the impression it always is. Kathy Zeitoun, dressed in a blue silk shirt and matching hijab, is fluttering around making spiced pumpkin-flavoured coffee and answering the constantly ringing phone. Noises emanating from four of her five children bubble up like broth from the back room where they are watching Kung Fu Panda on a giant flat-screen TV. Kathy seats me in the neat and orderly living room, which is dominated by cream leather sofas and a watercolour of a street scene from her husband's native Syria. Beside it is a framed 3D model of the Qur'an. Gradually, out of this domestic pleasure dome, telltale signs emerge of the calamity that struck the Zeitouns almost five years ago. An outside wall of the house is stained with a faint but still clearly discernible line at about shoulder height, a record etched in paint of where the flood waters settled. "Most of the time I don't think about what happened at all," Kathy says, as she pours the coffee. "Until I step out on to the street - then it all comes back to me." In recent days Kathy has been forced to think back a lot on the events leading up to and following 29 August 2005, when hurricane Katrina ripped through her city of New Orleans, breaching its levees and immersing much of it, including her home, in several feet of water. The reason for her current preoccupation is the publication of the new book by that one-man literary factory Dave Eggers, whose best-known previous work is the memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. The book, entitled Zeitoun, is, as its name suggests, a very personal telling of a national tragedy. It explores what happens when the entire fabric of society collapses, plunging a city into a parallel universe where there is no justice, no government, no protection, no respect. It does so exclusively through the eyes of the Zeitouns. Eggers spent three years on and off interviewing the family, then translating their memories into his trademark vivid yet restrained prose. At the centre of the book is Kathy's husband, Abdulrahman, or Zeitoun as he is universally known, a New Orleans building contractor who has attained almost mythical status. Not only is he the dominant character in the 339 pages of Eggers's book, but in the US press he has been dubbed an "all-American hero" for the phlegmatic way he conducted himself in the midst of catastrophe. That said, when I arrive at his house he is nowhere to be seen. He turns up an hour and a half late, which Kathy insists is wholly true to form and actually not that bad: he kept her waiting for two hours on their wedding day. He could have turned up 10 hours late and still you'd forgive him, just as soon as you felt his firm handshake and the embrace of his warm smile. "Zeitoun," he says in self-introduction, as though there were any doubt. He comes into the room straight from a building site with his trousers splattered in mud. "I really don't feel we deserve all this attention," he says in a thick Middle-Eastern accent. "I only did what I had been brought up to do." What he did was to stay in New Orleans when the hurricane struck, driven by a conviction that that is where he belonged. While Kathy and the kids joined the mass evacuation from the city, he hunkered down at home; and when the levees broke and the flood water poured in, he put to use a battered old canoe he owned to navigate the streets of his neighbourhood, now turned into canals. Zeitoun paddling through New Orleans in his canoe may well become one of the enduring images of Katrina. A line drawing of him in the boat is printed on the cover of Eggers's book, and the film director Jonathan Demme plans to make an animated movie of his story next year. Zeitoun takes us on a guided tour of the route that he negotiated in his canoe in the days after the storm. He begins by pointing to a pillar at the front of his house. "That's where I kept the canoe tied, like you'd tie up your horse." We set off by car along the maze of streets around his neighbourhood. On every street corner he has a tale to tell. The first stop we make is at a house of grey clapboard standing on stilts. In the hurricane, the flood waters reached almost up to its windows. As he paddled by, Zeitoun explains, he heard a voice faintly crying "Help!". He swam to the front door and inside found a woman in her 70s hovering above him. In one of the most memorable phrases of the book, Eggers writes: "Her patterned dress was spread out on the surface of the water like a great floating flower." "She was inside the house holding on to the bookshelf with water up to her shoulder," Zeitoun recalls, as we stand outside the house. "She must have been in the water for about 24 hours by then." Zeitoun helped the woman reach safety in a fishing boat, which was no small feat given that she weighed 90kg (14st). His construction skills and great strength proved invaluable as he levered her on a ladder out to the vessel. Our tour continues and we pass the house of a local Baptist church pastor and his wife whom the Zeitouns had known for years and who similarly cried out for help. Further on, we come to the residence of a man who was stranded and to whom Zeitoun brought food and water every day while he still had his canoe and his liberty. All in all, Zeitoun reckons he must have helped to save or rescue more than 10 neighbours. "The way I thought of it was, anything you can do to help. God left me here for a reason. I did what I was brought up to do - to help people." At this point, our journey begins its descent to a much darker place. Zeitoun points out the spot where he saw a human body floating in the filthy water. Then we arrive at Claiborne Avenue where the weirdness truly began. It was 6 September, six days after the hurricane, and he was in the house - his own property, which he rents out - along with a Syrian friend, Nasser Dayoob, his tenant Todd Gambino and Ronnie, a white man Zeitoun didn't know but who had asked to stay in the house for shelter. Zeitoun was on the phone to his brother in Syria when six unidentified police officers and National Guardsmen burst through the front door dressed in military fatigues and bullet-proof vests and carrying M16s and pistols. Zeitoun explained he was the landlord, but the only response was a demand from one of the National Guardsmen for his identity card. "All he did was look at my ID," Zeitoun says, "and that was enough. Nothing else. No other questions. The moment he saw my name he said, 'Get into the boat!'" We get back into the car and retrace the route of that boat ride, stopping at the Greyhound bus station near the city centre. Today it's back to a semblance of normality, with its familiar canine logo and silver buses lined in rows. But when Zeitoun was carted off there, he and his three companions found themselves surrounded by 80 or so men with assault rifles and dogs, a mixture of National Guardsmen, prison wardens and soldiers, some of whom had recently been serving in Iraq and who seemed to approach the situation in New Orleans with a war-zone mentality. The closest thing it reminded him of was Guant?namo. He takes us to see a concrete compound at the back of the bus station and describes the network of chain-fence pens that had been erected overnight to convert the area into a makeshift detention centre. Zeitoun and his companions were flung into one such cage, with armed soldiers standing guard over them on the roof. "Why are we here?" they asked a passing soldier. "You guys are al-Qaida," came the reply. Another soldier said as he passed: "Taliban." It was like a dagger blow for Zeitoun, for himself personally and for his vision of America, the country where he had come to live as a young merchant seaman from Syria and which he had always believed was a land of fairness and opportunity. He had come initially in search of work, never expecting to stay, but he then met Kathy, a local Louisiana woman who had converted to Islam four years previously. They had built a life together, grown their construction business and had children. And now here he was being called a terrorist. "I felt very bad. It was very hurtful. These guys wanted revenge on us, no matter what." He was kept penned up at the bus station for three days and nights, and interviewed by officers from homeland security who seemed to think they had caught a big fish. He says now that whenever he drives by the Greyhound station - or Camp Greyhound as it was dubbed - dark thoughts enter his mind. What dark thoughts? "Being called those terrible names. The memory of people refusing to help. Imagine you see a doctor and you shout at him, 'Can you help me?', because your foot is infected and hurting badly, and he's wearing a green medical gown and a stethoscope around his neck, and he says, 'I'm not a doctor,' and walks on. How would you feel?" While Zeitoun was incarcerated, first at Camp Greyhound and then in a maximum-security prison, Kathy was, as she puts it, "battling her own demons". One of the gross injustices against them both was that Zeitoun was allowed no phone call, which left her in mounting despair. For two weeks she had no word from her husband, concluding in the end that he must be dead. Then, on 19 September, she learned of his detention from a missionary who called her after having seen Zeitoun in prison. She dashed back to the city from Texas, where she had been staying with friends. The nadir came for her when she tried to find out the address of the courthouse where he was due to appear, charged with looting. Court officials told her they couldn't divulge such information as it was private. "I cracked open at that point," she tells me. "How could the address of a courthouse be private? I cried harder then than I did at any other time. I felt like I was a little kid again - with no say-so, no rights, no voice. I felt lost." Zeitoun was detained for almost a month before he was released on $75,000 (?50,000) bail for having looted his own house. The others fared worse: Dayoob, Gambino and Ronnie spent five, six and eight months in prison respectively, despite Zeitoun's efforts to prise them out. Eventually, the charges against all four of them were dropped. Their experiences were just a blip in the civil rights catastrophe that was Katrina. Camp Greyhound held a total of 1,200 detainees in the aftermath of the hurricane, most of whom were African-Americans and all of whom suffered the indignity of having their right to habeas corpus removed. As they approach the fifth anniversary of those events, the Zeitouns have managed with striking success to put their lives back together. The children are starting to sleep in their own beds again having for years insisted on cramming into their parents' for security. Kathy has been diagnosed with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, including memory loss and dizziness. "Katrina was a great reality slap. I was naive before - I felt I had things under control. But I've come to the conclusion that I don't control anything. I'm in control of nothing," she says. Zeitoun still gets angry about the way he was treated, particularly as an American Muslim. "Muslim is a very simple word. Translated into English it means peace or believers. So why have these two nice, beautiful words been changed in people's minds to 'terrorist'?" he asks. Despite that, he refuses to be bitter and vengeful. Instead, he dedicates his time to rebuilding the city, which is what he was doing when he was so late for our meeting. So far he has renovated a museum, some schools and about 250 houses damaged in the floods. He says he is more disciplined now about his religious observance, making sure he at least is punctual for his five daily prayer sessions. He is also extra careful to follow all the civil rules - he doesn't speed or cut through red lights or park where he shouldn't. "I don't want to give these guys the chance to do the same thing to me again." He has never even thought of abandoning the US. He refuses to bear a grudge, and says, for him, it remains a great country - you don't judge 300 million people on the behaviour of a few bad guys. Nor will he contemplate quitting New Orleans. "This is my home, my city. My life is here now," he says. To prove the point to himself, perhaps, he plans to buy another boat; his canoe went missing following his arrest. This time, though, he wants a bigger model that would allow him to rescue people more easily. But surely that suggests that he fears another Katrina, I ask him. "It happened before," he says. "It can happen again." Zeitoun by Dave Eggers is published by Hamish Hamilton in hardback on 15 March, ?18.99. =============================== 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 Mar 14 13:02:12 2010 From: may at applebybooks.net (May at Appleby Books) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2010 11:02:12 -0700 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Obama Defends "Savvy Businessmen" Message-ID: <4B9D24A4.7030908@applebybooks.net> 11 March 2010 US banks and corporations announce huge pay packages for 2009 Wells Fargo executives double their compensation By Andre Damon US corporations are beginning to release figures on CEO pay for last year. Multi-million dollar packages are the norm in a year that saw the continued deterioration in the living conditions of the vast majority of the population. Each of the top five executives at Wells Fargo at least doubled their compensation last year over 2008. The five men each received over $11 million in 2009, while Wells Fargo's chief executive, John Stumpf, took home $21.3 million, far higher than his 2008 package of $8.8 million. Mark Oman, the head of consumer business for Wells Fargo, nearly quadrupled his previous pay package to $13.5 million. Howard Atkins, the chief financial officer, received $11.6 million. The other Wells Fargo executives who received huge payouts were David Carroll, the head of the brokerage unit ($14.3 million), and David Hoyt, the head of wholesale banking ($13.5 million). In December 2009, Wells Fargo announced that it would repay the $25 billion it received from the government as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Like other banks, Wells Fargo has sought to repay its TARP assistance as quickly as possible in order to escape compensation restrictions put on banks that received "extraordinary assistance." Wells Fargo accepted the infusion of government funds in 2008. At the time, it also purchased its smaller rival, Wachovia, leaving Wells Fargo the fourth largest US bank by assets. Other banks have yet to release proxy statements, but these will come out over the next several weeks. Companies throughout the US are reporting multi-million dollar pay packages for their executives. A sampling includes: Texas Instruments CEO Rich Templeton ($9.8 million); IBM CEO Sam Palmisano ($21.2 million); insurance company Aflac CEO Daniel Amos ($13.2 million); nuclear power company Exelon CEO John Rowe ($12 million); Black & Decker CEO Nolan Archibald ($89 million, including a $45 million "cost synergy bonus" expected following a merger with Stanley Words); etc. GMAC, previously the finance arm of General Motors, paid its CEO, Michael A. Carpenter, $1.2 million for a month and a half of work in 2009, amounting to a yearly compensation rate of $9.5 million. The big payout came despite the fact that GMAC has not been profitable since 2008. The company lost $10.3 billion last year, after posting a record loss in the fourth quarter of $3.7 billion. Other executives did just as well for themselves. GMAC's senior risk officer, Samuel Ramsey, took home $7.7 million. Robert Hull, the chief financial officer, was handed $4.9 million. The company said that the Obama administration's compensation overseer, Kenneth Feinberg, approved its executive compensation packages. Last week, the Wall Street Journal republished an overview of 2008 compensation for 200 major corporations. The figures give a taste of what is likely to come out as companies publish their proxy statements for 2009. Among the 200 companies in the Wall Street Journal survey, 124 paid their chief executives over $10 million. Topping the list of highest-earning executives was Ray Irani of Occidental Petroleum, whose total income in 2008 amounted to over $200 million. The Journal also reported various schemes by which companies are seeking to downplay the amount of money they gave to their executives in 2009. The article noted that companies are increasingly presenting their own, more modest, compensation-accounting formulas to the public, alongside those used to report compensation figures to the Securities Exchange Committee. As one example, the Journal cited the case of John Lechleiter, CEO of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Co., who received $20.9 million last year according to SEC reports. However, the company is claiming publicly that it only paid him $15.9 million. In another example, Disney wrote in its proxy statement that it paid out $29 million to its CEO, Robert Iger, in 2009, but reported publicly that his compensation was $21.6 million. These latest reports come in the wake of Barack Obama's statement last month that he does not "begrudge" the bonuses of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. Blankfein got a $9 million bonus lat year, while Dimon received $16 million. (Their total packages have not yet been released). Obama defended the bonuses on the grounds that Blankfein and Dimon are "savvy businessmen." This statement gave what amounted to official carte blanche for the multi-million-dollar bonuses paid to hundreds of other "savvy businessmen," even as the government oversees a massive attack on the living conditions of the vast majority of the population. From hain at antcolbks.com Sun Mar 14 21:11:21 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2010 22:11:21 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] USNS Hospital Ship Declares Haitian Mission Accomplished But was it? Message-ID: <434F474C091845139221C9A2E8809AEC@Upstairs> "The Haitian government, which faced pressure from fee-for-service doctors who lost business to foreigners providing free health care, also supported the Comfort's departure. Haiti Loses Its Lifeboat" by Sheri Fink, ProPublica The USNS Comfort left Haitian waters this week, declaring the Navy boat's humanitarian mission accomplished. But was it? ProPublica's Sheri Fink on the medical mess left behind. The U.S. Navy's vast hospital ship, the Comfort, departed Haiti Wednesday and is due back to its home port of Baltimore this weekend. In the harbor off of Port-au-Prince, its gleaming white topsides accented with red crosses have been a conspicuous symbol of U.S. generosity since the country's devastating earthquake. But for 11 days before it departed, as some hospitals on the ground in Haiti overflowed with patients, no inpatients with earthquake injuries were treated onboard. Instead, the Comfort's personnel engaged Monday in an "abandon ship drill," and its overhead paging system has recently heralded the visits of a host of dignitaries, including the secretary of the Navy, who came to congratulate the crew. Lt. Cmdr. Thomas Olivero, department head of the ship's main operating room, said staff members were still itching to offer aid. "You want to take care of people. We know there's a lot of people out there that still need help." As the staff awaited direction, debate brewed over whether it was an appropriate time to leave-as many American and Haitian officials believed-or whether the unique capacities of the ship should continue to be used to save lives beyond treating acute earthquake injuries, as some health professionals urged. Not long after the earthquake, the hospital offered services that are scarce in Haiti, including CT scans, intensive care and advanced surgery in sterile conditions. Over a period of around six weeks beginning January 19th, staff members performed more than 800 surgeries and treated close to 900 patients, many of them severely injured, according to military public-affairs officers. The care the ship provided drew kudos from Haitians and civilian aid workers. But last month the Comfort stopped taking admissions and began the careful and painstaking work of transferring its remaining patients to other facilities, according to military officers on board and doctors who received the Comfort's patients. On February 24, workers mopped the near-empty wards and waited for word on the ship's deployment status. One of the last of the two dozen inpatients-a tearful woman with an injured right leg-was lifted into a helicopter on the way to a field hospital set up by Harvard physicians near Haiti's border with the Dominican Republic. The decision to release the ship from service in Haiti was made by the U.S. Southern Command, which judged its humanitarian relief mission to be completed, according to a press release issued this week. That mission was defined mainly as treating critically injured earthquake survivors and international responders. By contrast, a similar hospital ship, the USNS Mercy, responding to the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, had only just arrived on the scene at a similar time point as when the Comfort began drawing down its operations. The Mercy then stayed in Indonesia for five and a half weeks. All land-based field hospitals and clinics operated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which provided surgery, wound care, and childbirth services, have also closed in recent days. "The medical mission here in Haiti is converted," said Captain Jim Imholte, who served as the head of the HHS mission in Haiti. Acute surgical needs, he said, were giving way to needs for rehabilitation and primary care. "It's a natural transition point for us back to the Haitian government and the medical institutions that are here and the [non-governmental organizations] that are here that have the skill sets perhaps in that area that we don't necessarily have." One HHS field hospital was converted into an outpatient clinic run by a small charity. There, steps away from a soccer field filled with thousands of the dispossessed living under sheets and tarps, a curling piece of paper affixed to a wall announced the change in services in Haitian Creole: "We don't deliver babies. We don't do operations. We don't take people with gunshot wounds. We don't take people with serious injuries." Where patients could go to get those services was unclear. U.S. officials say that decisions about withdrawing the highly visible-and expensive - governmental medical assets were made based on factors such as changing needs and capacities in Haiti. The number of patients requiring urgent surgery for wounds sustained in the quake has sharply declined. "The needs have shifted, and there are other more effective ways to meet the current needs," said Dr. Ron Waldman, who coordinated the medical response for the U.S. Agency for International Development. The agency has provided nearly half a billion dollars in aid to date, including the donation of federal field hospital caches to Haitian hospitals and the ongoing support of private charities that are offering health-care services such as mobile medical clinics for the displaced. "USAID recognizes that the needs of the Haitian people remain great," Waldman said, "and will continue to adapt its programs to the needs even as they continue to change." The Haitian government, which faced pressure from fee-for-service doctors who lost business to foreigners providing free health care, also supported the Comfort's departure. "The Haitian government thanked them for the good job that they did and invited them to leave," said Dr. Jack Lafontant, a Haitian physician who served as a liaison between national health officials and the Comfort. "After two to three weeks, the field hospitals, the Comfort and even the public hospitals in Haiti did not receive as many patients," he added. "There is no more emergency." But that characterization was disputed by longtime aid workers who expect the emergency phase of Haiti's disaster to continue for a long time, as the rainy season begins and hundreds of thousands continue to live with inadequate shelter. Other Haitian physicians pointed to the need for skin grafts, complicated wound treatment, and the correction of surgeries performed hastily under less-than-optimal conditions. "You can't expect to come in for six weeks, restore [medical services] to what they were previously, and leave," said Dr. Vanessa Rouzier, who works with the Gheskio medical clinic in Port-au-Prince. "Everybody knows full well that's inadequate." While international planning to support Haiti's evolving health care needs is under way, she said, "the concern is that all these institutions are leaving and there's still a huge gap." A short boat trip away from hospital ship's empty wards, one type of gap was evident. Volunteers at the partially destroyed general hospital said that patients in the crowded, bare-bones medical ward are visited rarely by doctors, and nurses are in short supply. On a recent day, a child died for lack of an oxygen regulator, a common piece of equipment that fits atop an oxygen tank, according to leaders of the medical organization Partners in Health. "The system, such as it is, is pretty well broken," said Dr. James Wilentz, a cardiologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York who recently volunteered at the university hospital. "I don't know whether there was that much of a system prior to this." Bringing advanced medical care to a developing country that had little of it prior to a disaster presents built-in ethical questions: What level of care must be restored before it is acceptable to depart? And does "earthquake-related" medical need include only broken bones suffered during the event-much as the Comfort defined it-or does it extend to children injured weeks or months later playing around mounds of sharp concrete rubble, or an asthma attack brought on by living outdoors breathing burning garbage in a tightly packed camp? "The problem is that need is never going to go away 100 percent," said Dr. Miriam Aschkenasy, who served as a rotating director of the Fond Parisien Disaster Recovery Center in Haiti run by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. Aschkenasy said the timing of the Comfort's departure was reasonable. "They're not a solution. They're an emergency bridge. To me, that's what I see their role is, and I think they played that perfectly." Whether outside health organizations have risen to replace that bridge fully remains to be seen. A number of non-governmental field hospitals have remained open, helping to replace collapsed or damaged Haitian health facilities. Foreign medical volunteers, including many Americans, continue to work alongside Haitian colleagues at public and private hospitals around the country. However, as some medical groups depart, others committed to staying for a longer period are experiencing difficulty covering all needs. And development experts say that strengthening Haitian government institutions-a goal of international assistance before the earthquake-has scarcely begun. On a morning in late February, an inflatable field hospital established by Doctors Without Borders had 20 percent more patients than beds. Dr. Michel Jannsen, then the hospital's head, said nearly 100 additional patients arrived in a single day after military and governmental field hospitals from Europe, North American and Asia as well as smaller non-governmental organizations had pulled out of the country. The patients, he said, "are not cured. They are still sick." What's more, he said, given the massive destruction of the city and the few options for decent shelter, even those well enough for discharge and outpatient care had no place to go. Two months after the quake, hundreds of thousands of displaced Haitians are still squatting in vast fields under sheets and tarps. As surgical activities wound down on the Comfort, Lt. Cmdr. Thomas Olivero, department head of the ship's main operating room, said staff members were still itching to offer aid. "Particularly military people, when they're deployed they like to be kept busy," he said. "You want to take care of people. We know there's a lot of people out there that still need help." Experts agree that support to Haiti's medical and public-health infrastructure will be needed for the long haul to protect the investments the U.S. has already made. "There are big challenges ahead," said Dr. Helen Miller, a pediatric emergency physician from Oregon who worked at a government field hospital last month. People living in crowded camps are at risk for infectious-disease outbreaks, she said, and their regular illnesses may worsen under the stressful conditions. "This is a marathon." Dr. Sheri Fink wrote the award-winning book, War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival (Public Affairs, 2003), about wartime Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina. She received her M.D. and Ph.D. from Stanford. She was the recipient of a Kaiser Media Fellowship in Health from the Kaiser Family Foundation and is a senior fellow at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center. http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-03-13/haiti-loses-its-lifeboat/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Mar 14 23:20:04 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2010 23:20:04 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [Cuba] For whom is death a useful tool? Message-ID: http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2010/marzo/lun1/death.html For whom is death a useful tool? Enrique Ubieta G?mez THE total lack of martyrs within the Cuban counterrevolution is proportional to its lack of scruples. It is not easy to die in Cuba, not because life expectancy now parallels that of the developed world - nobody dies of hunger, despite a lack of resources - but because the law and honor prevails. Cuban mercenaries can be detained and tried in accordance with existing legislation. In no country can the laws be violated: [in this case,] receiving money and collaborating with the embassy of a country considered an enemy. In the United States, for example, such an act can result in a harsh sentence, but they know that in Cuba nobody disappears or is killed by the police. There are no "dark corners" for "unconventional" interrogations of missing prisoners, such as those of Guant?namo or Abu Ghraib. Moreover, one devotes one's life to an ideal that prioritizes the happiness of others, not to one that prioritizes one's own. However, in the last few days, certain news agencies and governments have rushed to condemn Cuba for the death in prison, on February 23, of Cuban Orlando Zapata Tamayo. Any death is painful and lamentable. But the media echo this time is tinged with enthusiasm: at last - it seems to be saying - a "hero" has appeared. For that reason, it is necessary to briefly explain, without unnecessary words, who Zapata Tamayo was. Despite all the dressing up, he was a common prisoner who began his criminal activities in 1988. He was tried for the crimes of "unlawful entry" (1993), "assault" (2000), "fraud" (2000), "assault and the possession of a sharp weapon" (2000: wounds and a fractured skull inflicted on the citizen Leonardo Sim?n with a machete), "public disorder" (2002), and other charges bearing no relation to politics. He was paroled in March 2003 and committed another crime on the 20th of the same month. Given his criminal record and parole status, he was then sentenced to three years' imprisonment, but the initial sentence was considerably lengthened in the following years on account of his aggressive behavior in prison. His name does not appear on the list of the so-called political prisoners drawn up in 2003 to condemn Cuba in the manipulated and extinct United Nations Human Rights Commission - as claimed by the Spanish news agency EFE, without verifying sources or facts - although his last arrest coincided in time with theirs. If previous political intent had existed, he would not have been released 11 days beforehand. The avidity to enroll the largest possible number of supposed or real followers in the ranks of the counterrevolution, on the one hand, and on the other, convinced of the material advantages of a "membership" fostered by foreign embassies, Zapata Tamayo adopted a "political" profile when his criminal record was already lengthy. In that new role, he was consistently encouraged by his political mentors to initiate hunger strikes, which definitively weakened his body. He received Cuban medical attention throughout. Highly-qualified specialists in the different hospitals where he was treated - in addition to those consulted at a number of other centers - spared no resources in his medical care. He was fed through a nasal tube and his family was informed of every step taken. His life was prolonged for some days by artificial respiration. There is documentary evidence of everything stated above. But there are questions that remain unanswered and which are not medical ones. By whom and why was Zapata encouraged to maintain an attitude that was obviously suicidal? For whom was his death convenient? The fatal outcome delighted the "bereaved" hypocrites. Zapata was the perfect candidate: a man the enemies of the Cuban Revolution could "dispense with," and who could be easily convinced to persist in an absurd undertaking with impossible demands (television, stove and personal telephone in his cell), which none of the real capos had the courage to sustain. Each prior hunger strike on the part of the instigators was announced as a probable death, but those hunger strikers always desisted before irreversible health incidents occurred. Instigated and encouraged to continue to the death - those mercenaries were rubbing their hands together in that expectation, despite doctors' unstinting - his name is now being cynically paraded as a collective trophy. Some in the media acted like vultures - local mercenaries and international right-wing forces - hovering over the dying man. His decease is a feast. The spectacle is sickening. Because those writing are not lamenting the death of a human being - in a country without extra-judicial killings - but instead brandishing it almost with glee, and are utilizing it for premeditated political ends. Zapata Tamayo was manipulated and, to a certain extent, led premeditatedly to his self-destruction, in order to meet others' political needs. Is this not a charge against those who have now appropriated his "cause"? This case is a direct consequence of Cuba's political murderer, who stimulates illegal emigration and contempt and violation of the established law and order. That is the sole cause of that undesired death. But why are governments joining in the campaign of defamation, when they know - because they do know - that there are no summary executions, torture, or use of extrajudicial methods in Cuba? One can find cases in any European country - in some cases, open violations of ethical principles - that do not receive the attention that ours does. Some of them, like the Irish prisoners who fought for their independence in the 1980s, died in the face of the total indifference of politicians. Why are there governments that elude an explicit condemnation of the unjust incarceration being endured by five Cubans in the United States for fighting against terrorism, but which hasten to condemn Cuba if media pressure endangers their political image? Cuba has already stated it once: we can send them all the mercenaries and their families, but give us back our heroes. Nobody will be able to use political coercion against the Cuban Revolution. We trust that our imperial adversaries know that our country can never be intimidated, bowed or diverted from its heroic and dignified course by acts of aggression, lies and infamy. Translated by Granma International =============================== 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 Mar 14 23:58:07 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2010 23:58:07 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Rove to Palin: Get Ready for 2012 Message-ID: http://www.politico.com/blogs/politicolive/0310/Rove_to_Palin_Get_Ready.html?showall March 14, 2010 Rove to Palin: Get Ready Former George W. Bush political adviser Karl Rove said Sunday that the political winds will change quite a bit, but that 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, should get ready now, if she is planning for president to run in 2012. "This is her year to get ready for the hot spotlight that will fall on her.I don't know if she wants to, she certainly can, she did very well in the 63 days she was on the national stage," Rove said on NBC's "Meet the Press." On the fate of the tea party movement, Rove said that a deep-pocketed figure like Ross Perot would be necessary to make the party a real threat in 2012. But the movement has energized the left, right and independents to focus on government spending. "They are going to exact their revenge this fall and it's not going to be pretty for Democrats." Posted by Nia-Malika Henderson 10:55 AM =============================== 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 Mar 15 00:00:12 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 00:00:12 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Limbaugh Endorses Socialist Paradise (?) Message-ID: http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2010031009/limbaugh-endorses-socialist-paradise Limbaugh Endorses Socialist Paradise By Sara Robinson Campaign for America's Future March 9, 2010 - 4:41pm ET So Rush Limbaugh has threatened to move to Costa Rica if health care reform passes. As Brian Docksteader wrote, the irony of this is almost too rich to believe. Given Rush's well-known proclivities, you have to wonder: Why Costa Rica? If he's looking for beaches, palm trees, and warm weather, why not head off to Somalia -- that free-market paradise that's implemented every aspect of the conservative political agenda Rush promotes, and in the process given the whole world such a shining example of why there's no government like no government? Rush would fit in so well there. No taxes, no pesky regulations, no government interference. He'd be free to set up his own roads, his own water supplies, even his own courts and currency -- and hire his own private army to defend it all. And think of the statement it would make about his deep-seated commitment to conservative principles! Nobody could ever accuse him again of not walking his talk. But Costa Rica? Really? This is a country where the American-style health care reform that Rush would be so desperately fleeing is considered nothing short of criminally inadequate. In Costa Rica, they've got constitutionally-guaranteed cradle-to-grave socialized medicine. Not just single- payer, mind you; I'm talking real British-style socialized health care, the kind where your doctor works directly for the government. It's interesting, too, that Rush seems to suffer from the delusion that -- despite his oxycontin-induced deafness, excess poundage, and history of annoying butt pimples -- he's going to somehow escape the clutches of those Costa Rican death panels. (There must be death panels. After all: he's assured us, loudly and often, that wherever there's socialized medicine, there are death panels.) There's only one reason a guy like Rush would subject himself to this kind of existential threat: Since they don't speak English down there, they're probably stupid enough that he can either trick them or bribe them into keeping his sorry carcass alive. Unfortunately for him, that's not the case. Costa Ricans have a 97% literacy rate -- the highest in the world. College is free at the state-run universities, which are some of the best in Latin America. Any kid who gets the grades gets to go, regardless of whether or not her family can afford it. You can get a PhD entirely on the government dime. The upshot of this is that Rush would find himself surrounded by a whole lot of people who are at least as smart as he is -- including a high percentage of people with advanced degrees. For the first time in his life, he'd have to keep up. If bloviates at them, those sassy Ticos might even fire right back at him, facts at the ready. I know he's not accustomed to that, and it would take some getting used to. Not to mention that, even though the average Costa Rican speaks passable English, they'd probably choose rebut Rush Spanish, which he'd have to learn. What would his anti-immigrant, anti-Spanish language listeners say if they found out that El Rushbo had picked up the lingo of those dirty brown people he's taught them to hate so much? And it gets worse. Costa Rica does not have a military. (OK, it's got a plane and a handful of Jeeps and a couple of dozen guys in green uniforms who patrol the airport in San Jose. In other words: a single unit of the capitol city's police department probably has more firepower than the whole Costa Rican military does.) For Rush, this is nothing short of a manhood issue. What kind of red-blooded American male affiliates himself with any country that doesn't have any penetrative capability whatsoever? That's never invaded anybody -- in fact, never wanted to invade anybody? And worse: one that was so wussy that it actually put a "no military" clause into its Constitution? I mean: what would his listeners say? Then there's the economy, which includes lots and lots of co-ops: coffee and fruit growers' co-ops, arts co-ops that get generous government subsidies, tourism co-ops that run rustic lodges in the jungles, educational co- ops that run schools, women's co-ops that market crafts, local food co-ops that furnish the grocery stores in the outback. And, as we all know, "co-op" is just another word for "socialism." The only way around this is for Rush to fly in pretty much everything he consumes from somewhere that isn't communist, like Nicaragua or Colombia. And then there's the greenie thing. The New Economics Foundation ranked Costa Rica as the greenest country in the world. It's also on track to become the world's first carbon neutral country by 2021. The country also ranked third in the world, and first in the Americas, in the 2010 Environmental Performance Index. A full 25% of Costa Rica's territory is locked up in national parks, out of the clutches of Rush's developer friends. The country's commitment to sustainability is so bone-deep that global warming deniers like Rush have a very rough time finding people to talk to at dinner parties. Hope he's not planning to hobnob much with the local gentry. Finally, Costa Rica has a unicameral legislature and well over a dozen political parties, including several that have the word "socialist" or "communist" in the title. Yes, that's right: Rush is talking about moving to a country where avowed socialists and communists are actually allowed to participate freely in the political process -- a choice that we can only conclude must make him some kind of commie sympathizer. Choosing Costa Rica as an escape hatch -- even in an off-the-cuff remark -- reveals far more about Rush's real values and priorities than he probably wants us to see. When push comes to shove, even Mr. Talent On Loan From God has finally admitted that personally, he'd bypass all those sorry countries that have taken fatal doses of the free-market medicine he's spent the last 25 years promoting. Given the choice, even he would rather live in a country where there's a strong social contract that guarantees economic opportunity, ensures fairness, protects the environment, and invests richly in the future of its own people. Having done far more than his share to ensure that America can no longer be that country, he's ready to jet off and make a new start in a place where the progressive spirit is still alive and well and creating a strong, prosperous, future-oriented nation. As Brian said: if Rush goes through with this, we promise to line up at the airport to see him off, waving signs saying "Admit it. We were right. You were wrong. Progressivism works -- or you wouldn't be leaving." Costa Rica: Pura vida -- home of the good life. And now also the last refuge of the world's biggest hypocrite. =============================== 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 Mon Mar 15 00:44:03 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 01:44:03 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Frank Rich: The New Rove-Cheney Assault on Reality Message-ID: <3F781443E1BA46B3A49546708E500987@Upstairs> The New Rove-Cheney Assault on Reality By FRANK RICH Published: March 13, 2010 THE opening salvo, fired on Fox News during Thanksgiving week, aroused little notice: Dana Perino, the former White House press secretary, declared that "we did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term." Rudy Giuliani upped the ante on ABC's "Good Morning America" in January. "We had no domestic attacks under Bush," he said. "We've had one under Obama." (He apparently meant the Fort Hood shootings.) Now the revisionist floodgates have opened with the simultaneous arrival of Karl Rove's memoir and Keep America Safe, a new right-wing noise machine invented by Dick Cheney's daughter Liz and the inevitable William Kristol. This gang's rewriting of history knows few bounds. To hear them tell it, 9/11 was so completely Bill Clinton's fault that it retroactively happened while he was still in office. The Bush White House is equally blameless for the post-9/11 resurgence of the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Iran. Instead it's President Obama who is endangering America by coddling terrorists and stopping torture. Could any of this non-reality-based shtick stick? So far the answer is No. Rove's book and Keep America Safe could be the best political news for the White House in some time. This new eruption of misinformation and rancor vividly reminds Americans why they couldn't wait for Bush and Cheney to leave Washington. But the old regime's attack squads are relentless and shameless. The Obama administration, which put the brakes on any new investigations into Bush-Cheney national security malfeasance upon taking office, will sooner or later have to strike back. Once the Bush-Cheney failures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran again come home to roost, as they undoubtedly and explosively will, someone will have to remind our amnesia-prone nation who really enabled America's enemies in the run-up to 9/11 and in its aftermath. There's a good reason why Rove's memoir is titled "Courage and Consequence," not "Truth or Consequences." Its spin is so uninhibited that even "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job!" is repackaged with an alibi. The book's apolitical asides are as untrustworthy as its major events. For all Rove's self-proclaimed expertise as a student of history, he writes that eight American presidents assumed office "as a result of the assassination or resignation of their predecessor." (He's off by only three.) After a peculiar early narrative detour to combat reports of his late adoptive father's homosexuality, Rove burnishes his family values cred with repeated references to his own happy heterosexual domesticity. This, too, is a smoke screen: Readers learned months before the book was published that his marriage ended in divorce. Rove's overall thesis on the misbegotten birth of the Iraq war is a stretch even by his standards. "Would the Iraq war have occurred without W.M.D.?" he writes. "I doubt it." He claims that Bush would have looked for other ways "to constrain" Saddam Hussein had the intelligence not revealed Iraq's "unique threat" to America's security. Even if you buy Rove's predictable (and easily refuted) claims that the White House neither hyped, manipulated nor cherry-picked the intelligence, his portrait of Bush as an apostle of containment is absurd. And morally offensive in light of the carnage that followed. As Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, said on MSNBC, it's "not a very comforting thing" to tell the families of the American fallen "that if the intelligence community in the United States, on which we spend about $60 billion a year, hadn't made this colossal failure, we probably wouldn't have gone to war." Rove and his book are yesterday. Keep America Safe is on the march. Liz Cheney's crackpot hit squad achieved instant notoriety with its viral video demanding the names of Obama Justice Department officials who had served as pro bono defense lawyers for Guant?namo Bay detainees. The video branded these government lawyers as "the Al Qaeda Seven" and juxtaposed their supposed un-American activities with a photo of Osama bin Laden. As if to underline the McCarthyism implicit in this smear campaign, the Cheney ally Marc Thiessen (one of the two former Bush speechwriters now serving as Washington Post columnists) started spreading these charges on television with a giggly, repressed hysteria uncannily reminiscent of the snide Joe McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn. This McCarthyism has not advanced nearly so far as the original brand. Among those who have called out Keep America Safe for its indecent impugning of honorable Americans' patriotism are Kenneth Starr, Lindsey Graham and former Bush administration lawyers in the conservative Federalist Society. When even the relentless pursuer of Monicagate is moved to call a right-wing jihad "out of bounds," as Starr did in this case, that's a fairly good indicator that it's way off in crazyland. This is hardly the only recent example of Republicans' distancing themselves from the Cheney mob. The new conservative populist insurgency regards the Bush administration as a skunk at its Tea Parties and has no use for its costly foreign adventures. One principal Tea Party forum, the Freedom Works Web site presided over by Dick Armey, doesn't even mention national security in a voluminous manifesto on "key issues" as far-flung as Internet taxes and asbestos lawsuit reform. Ron Paul won the straw poll at last month's Conservative Political Action Conference after giving a speech calling the Bush doctrine of "preventive war" a euphemism for "aggressive" and "unconstitutional" war. Paul's son, Rand, who has said he would not have voted for the Iraq invasion, is leading the polls in Kentucky's G.O.P. Senate primary and has been endorsed by Sarah Palin. In this spectrum, the Keep America Safe crowd is a fringe. But it still must be challenged. As we've learned the hard way, little fictions, whether about "death panels" or "uranium from Africa," can grow mighty fast in the 24/7 media echo chamber. Liz Cheney's unsupportable charges are not quarantined in the Murdoch empire. Her chummy off-camera relationship with a trio of network news stars, reported last week by Joe Hagan in New York magazine, helps explain her rise in the so-called mainstream media. For that matter, Thiessen was challenged more thoroughly in an interview by Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show" on Tuesday than he has been by any representative of non-fake television news. What could yet give some traction to the Keep America Safe revisionism is the backdrop against which it is unfolding: an Iraq election with an uncertain and possibly tumultuous outcome; the escalation of the war in Afghanistan; and an increasingly cavalier Iran. If any of these national security theaters goes south, those in the Rove-Cheney cohort will claim vindication in their campaign to pin their own failings on their successors. Obama may well make - or is already making - his own mistakes. And he will bear responsibility for them. But they must be seen in the context of the larger narrative that the revisionists are now working so hard to obscure. The most devastating terrorist attack on American soil did happen during Bush's term, after the White House repeatedly ignored what the former C.I.A. director, George Tenet, called the "blinking red" alarms before 9/11. It was the Bush defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who lost bin Laden in Tora Bora, not the Obama Justice Department appointees vilified by Keep America Safe. It was Bush and Cheney, with the aid of Rove's propaganda campaign, who promoted sketchy and often suspect intelligence about Saddam's imminent "mushroom clouds." The ensuing Iraq war allowed those who did attack us on 9/11 to regroup in Afghanistan and beyond - and emboldened Iran, an adversary with an actual nuclear program. The Iran piece of the back story doesn't end there. As The Times reported last weekend, Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton, kept doing business with Tehran through foreign subsidiaries until 2007, even as the Bush administration showered it with $27 billion in federal contracts, including a no-bid contract to restore oil production in Iraq. It was also the Bush administration that courted, lionized and catered to Ahmed Chalabi, the Machiavellian Iraqi who lobbied for the Iraq war, supplied some of the more egregious "intelligence" on Saddam's W.M.D. used to sell it, and has ever since flaunted his dual loyalty to Iran. Last month, no less reliable a source than Gen. Ray Odierno, the senior American commander in Iraq, warned that Chalabi was essentially functioning as an open Iranian agent on the eve of Iraq's election, meeting with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and other Iranian officials to facilitate Iran's influence over Iraq after the voting. (Dexter Filkins of The Times reported on Chalabi's ties to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2006.) As the vote counting began last week, fears grew that he could be the monkey wrench who corrupts the entire process. It's no surprise that Chalabi, so beloved by Bush that he appeared as an honored guest at the 2004 State of the Union, receives not a single mention in Rove's memoir. If we are really to keep America safe, it's essential we remember exactly which American politicians empowered Iran, Al Qaeda and the Taliban from 2001 to 2008, and why. History will be repeated not only if we forget it, but also if we let it be rewritten by those whose ideological zealotry and boneheaded decisions have made America less safe to this day. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/opinion/14rich.html?src=me&ref=homepage -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Mar 15 11:35:52 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 11:35:52 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Vandana Shiva: Water Wisdom Message-ID: <9129150D07324B1CA1C7135D58352760@agingCHS072729> http://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article3044-water-wisdom.html Resurgence Issue 259 - March/April 2010 Water Wisdom Vandana Shiva Since 1966 - and as a consequence of the introduction of the Green Revolution model of water-intensive, chemical farming - India has over-exploited her groundwater, creating a water famine. Intensification of drought, floods and cyclones is one of the predictable impacts of climate change and climate instability. The failure of monsoon in India, and the consequent drought, has impacted two-thirds of the country, especially the breadbasket of India's fertile Gangetic plains. Bihar, for example, has had a 43% rainfall deficit, and the story is the same in many other parts of India. In the final analysis, India's food security rests on the monsoon. Monsoon failure and widespread drought imply a deepening of the already severe food crisis triggered by trade-liberalisation policies, which have made India the capital of hunger. They also imply a deepening of the water crisis. The monsoons recharge the groundwater and surface-water systems. Since 1966, as a consequence of the introduction of the Green Revolution model of water-intensive chemical farming, India has over-exploited her groundwater, creating a water famine. The chemical monocultures of the Green Revolution use ten times more water than the biodiverse ecological farming systems. In the 1970s, the World Bank gave massive loans to India to promote groundwater mining. It forced states like Maharashtra to stop growing water-prudent millets like jowar, which needs 300mm of water, and shift to water-guzzling crops such as sugar cane, which needs 2,500mm of water. In a region with 600mm of rainfall, this is a recipe for water famine. A new study published in Nature magazine and led by Matthew Rodell of the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland shows that water levels in North India fell by 40mm between August 2002 and August 2008. And over the same period more than 109km3 of groundwater disappeared from aquifers, most of it extracted for chemical, Green Revolution-style farming. Not only has chemical agriculture mined groundwater, but it has also mined soil fertility and contributed to climate change. Chemical fertilisers destroy the living processes of the soil and make soils more vulnerable to drought. Chemical fertilisers also produce nitrogen oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. The solution for the climate crisis, the food crisis and the water crisis is the same: biodiversity-based, organic farming systems. Biodiverse ecological farms address the climate crisis by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases such as nitrogen oxide, and absorbing carbon dioxide in plants and in the soil. Biodiversity and compost-rich soils are the most effective carbon sinks. They also help adapt to climate change and drought by increasing organic matter, which increases the moisture-holding capacity of soil, and hence provides drought-proofing of agriculture. Biodiverse organic farms increase food security by increasing the resilience and reducing the climate vulnerability of farming systems. They also enhance food security because they have a higher production of food and nutrition per acre than Green Revolution monocultures, which measure the yield of a cash-crop commodity, not the total food output, nor the nutritional quality of that food. Biodiverse organic systems also address the water crisis. Firstly, production based on water-prudent crops such as millets reduces water demand. Secondly, organic systems use ten times less water than chemical systems. Thirdly, by transforming the soil into a water reservoir by increasing its organic matter content, biodiverse organic systems reduce irrigation demand and help conserve water in agriculture. Maximising biodiversity and organic matter in the soil thus simultaneously increases climate resilience, food security and water security. However, the dominant paradigm of agriculture based on the Green Revolution and genetic engineering is based on reducing biodiversity and reducing organic matter to promote monocultures based on intensive inputs of chemicals, water and fossil fuels. And as the multiple crises deepen because of these non-sustainable practices, corporations try and transform the crisis into new business and marketing opportunities. Examples include the patenting of climate-resilient traits that farmers have evolved over centuries and projecting this biopiracy as an 'invention'. In a recent article published in the Wall Street Journal, 'Fight Droughts with Science', Henry I. Miller, co-author of The Frankenfood Myth, stated: "The first drought-resistant crop, maize, is expected to be commercialised by 2012. If field testing goes well, India would be a potential market for this variety." What Miller fails to mention is that India already has hundreds of thousands of drought-resistant crops. These are the crops farmers are growing in times of drought. While cultivation of rice has gone down from 25.673 million ha to 19.13 million ha, the area under water-prudent drought-resistant nutritious crops has gone up from 15.325 million to 15.956 million ha. The biotechnology industry is clearly a laggard in breeding for drought resistance, compared to centuries of breeding by India's farmers. Miller also fails to mention that the genetically engineered drought-resistant maize seed performs badly in normal years. This is not science. Another example of corporate opportunism in this period of drought is the pushing of Roundup (a broad-spectrum herbicide). Roundup kills everything green other than one single crop and therefore destroys the biodiversity and organic matter that is needed to promote climate resilience, conserve water and increase food production. It is vital that the government of India does not use this emergency of drought to act as a marketer of GM seeds and Roundup. The alternative is clear. It involves: 1. Conservation and large-scale distribution of the seeds of water-prudent crops. 2. The promotion of organic agriculture to increase climate resilience and food and water security. 3. Incentives to farmers to encourage a shift from water-guzzling Green Revolution agriculture to water-conserving biodiverse organic agriculture. Farmers did not create the Green Revolution. They should not be punished for its consequences. Vandana Shiva is the author of Soil Not Oil. She teaches regularly at Schumacher College in the UK and The School of Seed in India. =============================== 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 Mar 15 11:44:45 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 11:44:45 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The Economic Potential of Local Building Materials Message-ID: <2FE840B544B849919F77D951003EE4B8@agingCHS072729> http://transitionculture.org/2010/03/15/the-economic-potential-of-local-building-materials/ Transition Culture 15 March 2010 The Economic Potential of Local Building Materials A while ago now I was in London for the launch of the Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment's 'Building a New Green Economy' conference, where I was a speaker alongside Tim Jackson, David Orr and Stewart Brand. You can read about the event here - http://www.princes-foundation.org/index.php?id=1123 -, and films of our talks will be posted soon. I mention it today because I want to draw your attention to the report launched at the conference, Sustainable Supply Chains that Support Local Economic Development, available to download here - http://www.princes-foundation.org/files/PFBE_SupplyChains_Paper_2010.pdf . As someone who has, for many years, been fascinated by local, natural building materials, this is a fascinating piece of research, one of the first things I have seen which starts trying to calculate the financial benefits to an area of moving towards more locally-sourced building materials. In particular, the paper focuses on the use of locally manufactured aerated clay blocks. As well as analysing the potential of this one product, the authors reflect on the potential of scaling up the approach of using local materials more widely; "Although this study only explored a single element of the building supply chain - structural clay blocks - these findings suggest that certain general lessons include tailoring construction techniques to local skills, designing building components which provide a range of secondary and tertiary benefits, and taking advantage of the positive impacts of simplified, generalisable approaches to complex, high-tech, specialised ones" (page 18) The paper identifies a range of benefits that such an approach would bring: - The simplicity of the systems means "it enables a local workforce to be used . this ensures that a greater proportion of economic value is captured in the local economy" - Jobs would be created by the manufacturing of the materials - It would also result in professional skills development - a heightened sense of personal dignity and respect resulting from long-term professional employment - enhanced social well-being - improved social capital - healthier buildings - a more resilient building supply chain - reduced CO2 emissions and - increased longevity of the building stock (page 15) While many of the natural and local building materials and techniques outlined above have advantages from a Transition perspective, what has almost never been mentioned in the natural building literature is the potential for local materials in the retrofitting of existing buildings, arguably a more pressing concern than new build homes. This theme is, however, picked up in the Prince's Foundation paper; "beyond new build construction, a natural approach to materials sourcing means many of the products identified are equally suitable to retrofit in buildings of traditional construction" (page 19). It also sets out to calculate the financial returns to an area through the use of these materials, the first example I have seen of such a calculation, based on some case study developments the Foundation is involved in. It is also intended for developers and architects, and presents the argument that more sustainable building need not necessarily mean more technical building, that more of a focus on materials could still produce buildings of a very high level of energy efficiency. This fascinating report is highly recommended and of great relevance to those exploring the relocalisation of construction. =============================== 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 Mar 15 11:51:17 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 11:51:17 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The Video That Will Put Geithner Behind Bars Message-ID: <591774641A94441FB956C270F09F71B3@agingCHS072729> (running time: 10:57, and worth every second!) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/35841681#35841681 - The Dylan Ratigan Show From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Mar 15 13:01:44 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 13:01:44 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] =?iso-8859-1?q?Democracy_Now!=3A_Noam_Chomsky_on_Obam?= =?iso-8859-1?q?a=27s_Foreign_Policy_=2E=2E=2E?= Message-ID: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/3/15/noam_chomsky_on_obamas_foreign_policy Democracy Now! March 15, 2010 Noam Chomsky on Obama's Foreign Policy, His Own History of Activism, and the Importance of Speaking Out We spend the hour with world-renowned linguist and dissident, Noam Chomsky. In a wide-ranging public conversation at the Harvard Memorial Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Chomsky talks about President Obama's foreign and national security policies, the lessons of Vietnam, and his own activism. "You just can't become involved part-time in these things," Chomsky says. "It's either serious and you're seriously involved, or you go to a demonstration and go home and forget about it and go back to work, and nothing happens. Things only happen by really dedicated, diligent work." [includes rush transcript] AMY GOODMAN: Defense Secretary Robert Gates met with leaders of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia last week to increase support for a new round of United Nations-imposed sanctions on Iran over its uranium enrichment program. While the Obama administration intensifies its efforts to win Chinese and Russian backing for tougher sanctions, France and Finland have indicated the European Union could consider unilateral measures against Iran if a UN resolution fails to materialize. Well, as the United States, the EU and Israel step up the pressure on Iran, we spend the hour with the world-renowned linguist and dissident, Noam Chomsky, whose latest speech begins with a critical look at US policy towards Iran. An internationally celebrated professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Chomsky is the author of over a hundred books on linguistics, mass media, American imperialism, and US foreign policy. The New York Times called him perhaps "the most important intellectual alive today," but his opinions are rarely heard in the mainstream media. Well, I had a wide-ranging conversation with Professor Chomsky at Harvard Memorial Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts just a week ago. He talked about antiwar activism, the lessons of Vietnam, President Obama's foreign and national security policies, and also the risks that Noam Chomsky himself took as an activist and someone who has consistently spoken truth to power. We begin with an excerpt of Chomsky's speech, a critique of the Obama administration's push for tighter sanctions against Iran. NOAM CHOMSKY: My favorite newspaper, the London Financial Times, a couple of days ago identified Obama's major foreign policy problem today as Iran. The occasion for the article was Hillary Clinton's failure to convince Brazil to go along with the United States on calling for harsher sanctions and President Lula's insistence that there should be engagement with Iran, commercial relations, and so on, and that it has a right to enrich uranium for producing nuclear energy, as do all signers of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Well, it was reported here, too, of course, and Lula's position was considered sort of paradoxical. Why is he not going along with the international community, with the world? It's an interesting usage, which is a very striking reflection of the depth of the culture of imperialism. Who is the international community? Well, it turns out, if you look, that the international community is Washington and whoever happens to agree with it at the moment. The rest are not part of the world. They're kind of in opposition. Well, in this case, Lula's position happens to be that of most of the world. You can think it's right or wrong or whatever, but just as a matter of fact, for example, it's the position of the former non-aligned countries, the majority of countries of the world and the large majority of their populations. They have repeatedly and vigorously supported Iran's right to enriched uranium for peaceful purposes, reiterating that it's a signer of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which does grant that right. So they're not part of the world. Another group that's not part of the world is the population of the United States. The last polls that I've seen, a couple of years ago, in those polls a considerable majority of Americans agreed that Iran has a right to develop nuclear energy, but of course not nuclear weapons. And in fact, as the poll demonstrated, the opinions of Americans on this issue were almost identical with opinions of Iranians on a whole range of issues. And, in fact, when the poll was presented in Washington at a press conference, the presenter pointed out that if people were able to make policy, could be that these tensions and conflicts would be resolved. Well, that was a few years ago. Since then, there's been a huge mass of propaganda about the threat of Iran and so on. And it's very likely, I would guess, that if the poll were taken today, those figures for the American population would be different. But that was 2007, three years ago. So, at that point, Americans were not part of the world. Most of the majority of people of the world were not part of the world. And Lula, by repeating their view, is also not part of the world. Could be added that he's almost surely the most popular political figure in the world, but that doesn't mean anything, either. So, what about the conflict with Iran and the threat of Iran? Nobody in their right mind wants Iran to develop nuclear weapons, or anyone, for that matter. So, on that, there's complete agreement. And in fact, there are significant problems about proliferation of nuclear weapons. It's not a joke. And Obama's vision forcibly includes, stresses the need to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons and to reduce or maybe remove nuclear weapons. Well, that's the vision. What's the practice? Well, the practice became clear a couple of months ago. Once again, the Security Council passed a resolution, 1887-I think it was October-calling on-with criticism of Iran for not living up to commitments that were demanded by the Security Council and also calling on all states to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty and to solve all their conflicts within the framework of the Non-Proliferation Treaty without any threats of force. Well, that particular part of the resolution was not exactly headlined here, for a simple reason: it was directed at two countries, the two countries that are regularly threatening the use of force, the United States and Israel. The threat of force is in violation of the UN Charter, if anybody cares about that stale old stuff, even older than the '60s. But that's never mentioned. But every-just across the spectrum here, almost everyone insists that-the usual phrase is "we must keep all options open." That's a threat of force. And the threat of force is not just idle. So, for example, Israel is sending its nuclear submarines into the Gulf, firing distance-they're undetectable, basically-into areas where they could fire nuclear missiles-of course, Israel has plenty of nuclear weapons-fire them at Iran. The US and others are-its allies are carrying out field operations, you know, the exercises, plainly aimed at Iran. And there's a little hitch, because Turkey is refusing to go along, but that's what they've been trying to do. So there are regular threats, verbal and in policy. Israel actually is sending the nuclear submarines and other warships through the Suez Canal, with the tacit agreement of Egypt, the Egyptian dictatorship, another US client in the region. Well, those are all threats-constant, verbal, actual. And the threats do have the effect of inducing Iran to develop a deterrent. Whether they're doing it or not, I don't know. Maybe they are. But if they are, the reason, as I think almost all serious analysts would agree, is not because they intend to use nuclear weapons and missiles with nuclear weapons. If they even loaded a missile was nuclear weapons, assuming they had them, the country would be vaporized in five minutes. And nobody believes that the ruling clerics, whatever one thinks about them, have a kind of a death wish and want to see the entire country and society and everything they own destroyed. In fact, US intelligence figures pretty high, who have talked about it, estimate the possibility of Iran ever actually using a nuclear weapon is maybe one percent, you know, so low that you can't estimate it. But it's possible that they develop them as a deterrent. One of Israel's leading military historians, Martin van Creveld, a couple of years ago, after the invasion of Iraq, wrote in the international press that of course he doesn't want to see Iran have nuclear weapons, he said, but if they're not developing them, they're crazy. The US had just invaded Iraq, knowing that it was totally defenseless. It was part of the reason why they felt free to invade. Everybody can understand that. The Iranian leaders could certainly understand it. So, therefore, to quote van Creveld again, "if they're not developing a nuclear deterrent, they're crazy." Well, whether they are or not is another question. But there's no doubt that the hostile and aggressive stance taken by the United States and its Israeli client are a factor in whatever planning that's going on in top Iranian circles as to whether to develop a nuclear deterrent or not. AMY GOODMAN: MIT Professor Noam Chomsky, speaking recently at Harvard University. When we come back from our break, I interview him about President Obama's foreign policy. Stay with us. [break] AMY GOODMAN: We return to Professor Noam Chomsky. I interviewed him at the Harvard Memorial Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I began by asking him for his assessment of President Obama's foreign policy. NOAM CHOMSKY: When Obama came into office, or when he was elected, one high Bush official-I think it was Condoleezza Rice-predicted that Obama's foreign policy would be a continuation of Bush's second term. The first and second term of Bush were quite different. The first term was aggressive, arrogant, kicking the world in the face, even allies, and it had such a negative effect-this is in action as well as manner-that US prestige in the world sank to the lowest point it's ever been. That was really harmful to the interests of those who actually set foreign policy-business world and corporate interests and, you know, state planners and so on. So there was a lot of criticism of Bush right from the mainstream in the first term. Well, you know, the second term was somewhat different. For one thing, some of the most extreme figures were kicked out. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, a couple of others, were sent off to pasture. They couldn't get rid of Cheney, because he was the administration, so can't dismantle it. But a lot of the others went, and policy shifted more towards the norm, to the more-or-less centrist norm. And a little talk about negotiations, I mean, less aggression, and so on. And a more polite attitude toward allies. So that was more acceptable, and fundamentally it didn't change, but it was more acceptable. And this prediction was that that's what Obama would do. And I think that's pretty much what happened. In fact, there's a pretty interesting characterization of this, which sort of captures it, I think, pretty well. It's anachronistic, but I think it applies. Back in 1962, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world really was coming, you know, dangerously close to a nuclear war, which would have been sort of the end-most dangerous moment in history, Arthur Schlesinger called it, Kennedy's adviser-right at the peak of the missile crisis, US planners were considering measures which they knew might destroy Europe, and in fact, in particular, Britain. So they were kind of playing out these scenarios which led to the destruction of Britain, but they-and taking them very seriously, in fact taking the steps towards it. But they didn't let Britain know. Britain is supposed to have a special relationship with the United States, and the British were pretty upset. They couldn't find out what was going on. The prime minister, Macmillan, all he could find out was what British intelligence was picking up. So here they're-the best and the brightest are making plans that might well lead to the destruction of Britain, but they're not telling them. At that point, a senior adviser-I think it was probably Dean Acheson-of the Kennedy administration entered the discussion, and he defined the special relationship. He said the special relationship with Britain means that Britain is our lieutenant; the fashionable word is "partner." And the British, of course, like to hear the fashionable word. Well, that's pretty much the difference between Bush and Obama. Bush simply told them, "You're our lieutenant. You do what we say, or you're irrelevant." In fact, that's the word that I think Colin Powell used at the UN. "Do what we say, or you're irrelevant. You're just our lieutenant, and forget about it." They don't like to hear that. What they like to hear is "You're our partner." You know, "We love you." And then, back in secret, we treat you as our lieutenant, but that's OK. And I suspect that that's the main difference. AMY GOODMAN: What about the antiwar movement in the United States? You've long been a participant in it, very active in Vietnam right up until today. But where do you see it in relation to the person that many of them devoted tremendous efforts to elect? NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, you know, there-actually, my view, which is not the standard one, is that the antiwar movement is far stronger now than it was in the '60s. In the 1960s, there was a point, 1968, '69, when there was a very strong antiwar movement against the war in Vietnam. But it's worth remembering that the war in Vietnam started-an outright war started in 1962. By then, maybe 70,000 or 80,000 people had already been killed under the US client regime. But in 1962, Kennedy really opened an outright war, you know, sent the American Air Force to start bombing South Vietnam-under South Vietnamese markings, but everybody knew, it was even reported-authorized napalm, authorized chemical warfare to destroy crops and ground cover, started open-started the programs which drove ultimately millions of people from the countryside into what amounted to concentration camps, to try to-the words were "to protect them from the guerrillas," who the government knew perfectly well they were supporting. Same kind of things you read now in Afghanistan, if you bother to read the fine print about the conquest of Marjah. But we had to drive them into concentration camps to protect them from the people, the guerrillas, they were supporting. That's a war. You know, it's a serious war. Protest was zero, literally. I mean, it was years before you could get any sign of protest. I mean, those of you who are old enough may remember that in Boston, liberal city, in October 1965-that's three years after that, hundreds of thousands of American troops rampaging the country, you know, war spread to North Vietnam and so on-we tried to have our first public demonstration against the war on the Boston Common, usual demonstration place. This is October 1965. I was supposed to be one of the speakers. I couldn't say a word. It was broken up, you know, violently. A lot of students marched over trying to break it up, hundreds of state police there. The next day, the Boston Globe, most liberal paper in the country, you know, devoted its whole front page to denouncing the demonstrators, not the ones who were breaking it up. You know, a picture of a wounded soldier in the middle, that sort of thing. Well, that was October 1965, you know, hundreds of thousands of troops there, war escalating beyond. Well, finally, after years, in 1968, you got a substantial antiwar movement, '67, '68. By then, South Vietnam was gone. It was virtually destroyed. And the same was true of much of the rest of Indochina. Well, the war did go on for a long time, with horrible effects, and we were unwilling to face the fact, even to report the fact. But nevertheless, the antiwar movement did have an effect very late. Well, compare Iraq. There were huge protests before the war was officially launched. I mean, we now know that Blair and Bush were simply lying when they said that they were trying to work for a diplomatic settlement. They had already started the war. OK, that came out in the famous Downing Street memos in England, but it hadn't been officially announced, so-but there were huge demonstrations. And I think they had an effect. The US war in Iraq was horrible enough, probably killed about a million people, drove a couple of million out of the country, devastated the country, destroyed it, horrible cultural destruction and so on. It was pretty awful. Could have been a lot worse. It's not what the US did in South Vietnam. Nothing like it. You know, no saturation bombing with B-52s, chemical warfare and so on. And I think it was retarded by the antiwar movement. The population here had just become more civilized. That's one of those grim effects of the 1960s. AMY GOODMAN: And Afghanistan? NOAM CHOMSKY: Pardon? AMY GOODMAN: And Afghanistan? NOAM CHOMSKY: Afghanistan is an interesting case. I mean, Afghanistan was sold here as a war to retaliate-a just-it's always called a "just" war-to prevent terror, you know, retaliate against a terrorist attack. I mean, it's such a standard view that to take it apart, you know, requires more time than I'd be allowed. But the fact of the matter is that that was not the goal of the war. I mean, if the goal of the war was to isolate al-Qaeda, eliminate terror, there were straightforward ways to proceed. I mean, if you go back to that time, the jihadi movement itself was highly critical of the 9/11 attack. There were fatwas coming out from the most radical clerics, and, you know, Al Azhar University, the main theological center, denouncing al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and the terrorist attacks-it's not Islamic, we wouldn't do that, and so on. Well, if you wanted to end terror, the obvious thing to do at that point is to isolate al-Qaeda, to try to gain support, even from the jihadi movement, and of course from the population they're trying to mobilize. You know, terrorists regard themselves as a vanguard. They're trying to mobilize others to their cause. I mean, every specialist on terrorism knows that. So you could have done it then, and you could have proceeded to identify the perpetrators, which, incidentally, they couldn't do because they didn't know who they were, and that was conceded later. But they could have tried to identify them, bring them to justice, you know, to trials-with fair trials and not torture, but fair trials, which would have probably sharply reduced, if maybe not-maybe even have ended Islamic terrorism. Well, they did the opposite. What they tried to do is to mobilize the population and mobilize the jihadi movement to support al-Qaeda. That's exactly the effect of first invading Afghanistan and later invading Iraq. And it's also the effect of Guant?namo and Bagram and the other torture centers. I mean, everyone who's involved in them, you know, seriously, knows, yeah, they created terrorists. AMY GOODMAN: Do you think Obama should have these Guant?namo prisoners tried in New York? NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, it depends whether we want to be-regard ourselves as a civilized country or as a rogue state. If you want to be a rogue state, you know, do whatever you like. You know, kill them, torture them, whatever. If you want to be part of the civilized world, and also if you want to reduce the appeal of the extreme jihadi movement, then try them in civilian courts. In fact, the very fact that they're in Guant?namo is outlandish. First of all, what's Guant?namo? I mean, Guant?namo was taken from Cuba a century ago at gunpoint. They said, "Give us Guant?namo, or else." Cuba was under military occupation. It's called a treaty, but, you know-OK. And the treaty of Guant?namo, if you want to call it that, allowed Guant?namo to be used as a calling station for the Navy. Well, you know, it's not what it's being used for. In fact, as you know perfectly well, it was used for Haitian refugees. When Haitians were fleeing from the dictatorships that the US was supporting, the US refused to permit them political asylum. It claimed that they were just economic refugees. The Coast Guard tried to stop them, and if any got through, they sent them to Guant?namo. OK, now you know what they're being used for. Actually, what they are being used for is to create terrorists. It's not my opinion; that's the opinion of the main US interrogators, people like Matthew Alexander, who actually has an article on it in the same issue of National Interest that I mentioned. He said, yeah, it's a great way to create terrorists. It inspires terrorism all over, and it turns many of these people there into terrorists, if they were picked up for whatever reason it was. So, yes, if you want to-if your goal is to reduce the threat of, say, Islamic terrorism and to become part of the civilized world, you have civilian trials, just as those who are in Guant?namo-first of all, most of those who are in Guant?namo, I mean, it's kind of outrageous anyway. They're like some fifteen-year-old kid who was found holding a rifle when the US was invading his country. That's a terrorist. OK, but that's a large part of maybe almost all of what's in Guant?namo. But if you want to-but what should have been done with them, if the goal was to be civilized and to reduce terrorism, is to put them in prison in the United States. There's no security problem. You know, they're not going to get out of a maximum-security prison, and they don't have some magic way of spreading poison around the world or anything. But, of course, the government didn't want to do that, because they had no evidence. And if they were-they were sent to Guant?namo so that they could, it was hoped, be free from US jurisdiction, so you could play that-you could pretend that they weren't under your US jurisdiction, so the laws didn't apply. Well, the Supreme Court finally, after a long time, kind of whittled away at that and said, yes, they have the right of habeas corpus. The Bush administration accepted that; Obama doesn't. Obama-the Obama administration is trying to overturn a decision by a right-wing Bush judicial appointee that the Supreme Court decision holds for Bagram, the torture center in Afghanistan. And the Obama administration is trying to override that, so that that means that the Supreme Court decision is just a joke. If you want to torture somebody, don't send them to Guant?namo, because the Supreme Court said you can't torture them there; let's send them to Bagram. So if you pick somebody up in Yemen or, you know, wherever you pick him up, and you want them not to be subject to international law, also US law, OK, send him to Bagram. That's the Obama administration position. I mean, it's for reasons like these that even the most hawkish anti-terrorism specialist, people like Michael Scheuer, who was in charge for the CIA of following Obama for years, he says that al-Qaeda's-Osama bin Laden's best ally is the United States. You know, we're doing exactly what he wants. What he wants is he's trying to sell a line to the Muslim world, you know, these guys are on a crusade, they're trying to kill us, we've got to defend ourselves. And the US is acting, you know, as if they're under command. Yeah, we do everything he wants. AMY GOODMAN: MIT Professor Noam Chomsky in a public conversation at Harvard University. If you want a copy of today's program, you can go to our website at democracynow.org. We'll come back to our conversation after break. Stay with us. [break] AMY GOODMAN: We return now to the conclusion of our public conversation with Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We were speaking at Harvard Memorial Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We talked about the risks he took as an antiwar activist. But first, I asked him about what he thought of the Obama administration, what it should be doing with Israel and Palestine. NOAM CHOMSKY: Israel-Palestine happens to be a particularly easy case. I mean, there has been an overwhelming international consensus for thirty-five years on how to settle the problem-short term, at least-namely, a two-state settlement on the international border, which everyone agrees on, with, the phrase was, "minor and mutual modifications." That was US official policy until the US departed from the world in the early '70s, as it did. That's just overwhelming. I mean, there was a Security Council resolution in 1976 calling for a two-state settlement. The US vetoed it. And it just goes on from there. I won't run through it, but if you get 'til today, there's just overwhelming agreement. I mean, it includes all the Arab states for a long time. It includes Iran, the Organization of Islamic States. It includes Hamas. You know, in fact, everybody, except the United States and Israel. So, what has Obama had to say about this? Well, it's interesting. He has this great vision, but if you look-if you go below the vision and take a look at the words, it's a little different. So his only word so far-there are two, really. One is to politely ask Israel to stop expanding settlements. Well, first of all, that's meaningless. The issue is the existence, not the expansion of the settlements. But furthermore, those words were also meaningless. He was quoting Bush. In fact, he was quoting the-what's called the Road Map, the official-you know, supposedly the agreed-upon scenario for moving forward. He was quoting it. OK, that's meaningless, but that's part of his great vision. The other part, which is more interesting, was a few days after he took office, and he gave his one, and so far only, serious talk about Israel-Palestine. That's when he was introducing George Mitchell as his negotiator, which is a good choice, if he's given any leeway. And Obama explained what he was going to do. He said-this was his, you know, being very forthcoming to the Arab world. He said, well, there's a constructive proposal on the table, the Arab peace proposal-you know, pat people on the head for producing it. And then he went on to say, "Well, it's time for the Arabs to live up to their peace proposal. They should start normalizing relations with Israel." Well, you know, Obama is literate, intelligent. I suppose he chooses his words carefully. He knows perfectly well that that was not the Arab peace proposal. The Arab peace proposal re-endorsed the longstanding international consensus and said, in the context of a two-state settlement, the Arab states will proceed even beyond to normalize relations with Israel. Well, Obama picked out the corollary, but omitted the substance, which is a way of saying we're going to maintain our rejectionist stance. Couldn't have been clearer. And that's what's happened. With regard to his repetition of the call to stop expansion of settlements, he did go a little bit farther-not he, but his spokespersons in press conferences. They were asked, is the administration going to do anything about it if Israel rejects it? And they said, "No, it's purely symbolic." In fact, explicitly said that the administration is not going to do what George Bush the 1st did. George Bush the 1st had some light taps on the wrist if Israel continued to reject what the US was asking for. Clinton pretty much withdrew that, and Obama withdrew it totally. He said, "No, this is just symbolic." Well, that's telling Benjamin Netanyahu, "Go ahead and do what you like. We'll say we don't like it, but there will be a wink saying, yeah, go ahead. Meanwhile, we participate in it. You know, we send you the arms. We give you the diplomatic support and a direct participation." That's the vision. You know? It could hardly be clearer. Now, what can we do about it? Well, you know, we can get the United States to join the world. In this case it's literally the whole world. Just accept-join the world and accept the international consensus and stop the direct participation in violating it-I mean, what Israel is doing. And I should have said what the US and Israel are doing. Everything Israel does is a joint operation. They can't go beyond what the US permits and participates in. So what the US and Israel are doing in Gaza and in the West Bank is destroying the hope of the-for realization of the international consensus. And there's no alternative around, I should say, with regard to a lot of the anti--to pro-Palestinian-you know, supporters of the Palestinians. In fact, some of the leading Palestinian activists themselves are saying, well, we ought to give up on the two-state solution and just let Israel take over all the territories, maybe annex them, and then there will be a civil rights struggle and like an anti-apartheid struggle, and that can work like South Africa. That's just blindness. That's not going to happen. The US and Israel are not going to permit that to happen. They're going to continue with exactly what they're doing: strangling Gaza, separating it from the West Bank, in violation of international agreements, and in the West Bank take over whatever they want. AMY GOODMAN: As you look out on folks here, many young people, many students, I was wondering if you could reflect on your career at the moments when you had to make a decision about whether to take a risk that might risk your position or your standing in some way, when you felt-what you say to people when it comes to issues of courage. NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, you know I don't like to talk about myself. It's not important. But since you ask, a couple of times. The first time-I mean, I had been a political activist all my life, you know, since childhood. I mean, you talked about my newsstand and so on. But with regard to, say, really doing something, say, becoming involved with the nonexistent antiwar movement, the first time was around 1962. You could see what was happening in 1962. It wasn't really concealed. And I decided to try to get involved in organizing antiwar activism. Now, that wasn't risky, but it meant giving up a lot. You cannot put-I don't have to tell you-you can't put one toe in this. If you get into it, it's a full-time occupation. AMY GOODMAN: Were you a tenured professor at the time? You-1956, you went to MIT. You were teaching. NOAM CHOMSKY: Nineteen fifty-five. I forget what year it was. But it wasn't a consideration. In fact, it may be odd for you to think about, but MIT in the 1960s had two interesting characteristics. One was it was almost entirely funded by the Pentagon. In fact, I was in a lab which was 100 percent funded by the three armed services. Two, it was the main center of antiwar resistance. I'm not talking about dissent or, you know, protest. I'm talking about resistance, you know, organizing resistance activities, illegal activities. And the Pentagon didn't care much, because, contrary to what a lot of people believe, one of the main functions of the Pentagon is just to provide a cover for the way the economy functions. The way the economy functions, it's-you know, people like to claim it's a free market economy, but, you know, most of it comes out of the state sector-I mean, computers, internet, airplanes, you know. The idea is the public is supposed to pay the costs and take the risks, and if anything works out, you hand it over to private enterprise. That's called the free market. And the way it-when the economy was mainly electronics-based, the Pentagon was the cover. So, you know, you got to do this because the Russians are coming. But they actually didn't really care what you were doing. I mean, it's an interesting story. Anyhow, so, yeah, maybe I was tenured, maybe not, but it didn't matter. I got involved in 1962, and what that meant-so, like, if I'd give a talk in a church, which I sometimes did, it would mean four people-you know, the minister, the organizer, a drunk who walked in off the street and a guy who wanted to kill me. That was a talk in a church. And that went on for a couple of years. The only really risky step- AMY GOODMAN: Are you suggesting the antiwar movement during Vietnam was mainly alcoholic? NOAM CHOMSKY: Right. Don't tell David Brooks. In 1966-in 1965, I tried to organize-a friend of-an artist friend of mine, since died, tried to organize a national tax resistance. Well, we got somewhere, so that's taking, you know, sort of a mild risk. But in 1966, there were the stirrings of an effort to organize more serious resistance. AMY GOODMAN: Did you not pay your taxes? NOAM CHOMSKY: I didn't pay my taxes for years. But what-you know, it's-I mean, there is a-how the IRS reacted is kind of interesting. In my case, of course they can get the money, you know. AMY GOODMAN: And did they just take it out of your salary? NOAM CHOMSKY: They just took it. I got a nasty letter from them from some computer. But in some cases, they randomly, as far as I could tell, you know, they took people's houses. People went to jail, and so on. So there's a kind of a risk associated with it. But more serious was support of direct resistance, support for resisters, deserters, and so on and so forth. That began around 1966. It became public in 1967. And that did carry potential penalties. I mean, actually my wife-we had three kids. She went back to college after seventeen years, because we expected I'd probably end up in jail. And I came pretty close. I mean, I was-a trial was announced in '68, which I was the main defendant. I was saved, as were others, by the Tet Offensive. The Tet Offensive came along in January 1968, and it convinced the business world in the United States that the US shouldn't-that this was just becoming too costly. AMY GOODMAN: What were you charged with? NOAM CHOMSKY: The charges were conspiracy to, you know, resist the draft or overthrow the government or something or other. The conspiracy trials are kind of an interesting story. I could talk about them, but it was real, you know. If it hadn't been for the Tet Offensive, I probably would have spent a couple years in jail. But- AMY GOODMAN: Did you go through the trial? NOAM CHOMSKY: The trials were called off right after the Tet Offensive. There was one that was underway, but-you know, the Spock trial, where they picked all the wrong people, but-and that was overturned on appeal, but mainly because of the Tet Offensive. I mean, the business world just said, "Look out." In fact, what they did-what happened in 1968 is that a group of so-called wise men-you know, big shots from Wall Street and so on-went down to Washington and basically gave the President marching orders. It was a very real power play. Johnson was told, "Stop the bombing of North Vietnam. Don't run for office again. And begin negotiations and start to withdraw." And he followed orders, to the letter. Then Nixon came along and did it a different way. But the visible escalation of the war declined. Visible, I say, because some of the worst atrocities were in 1969, and then it went off to Cambodia and Laos, where it was even worse. But that was kind of invisible. It still is. But it kind of tempered at that point, and one of the things that was done was to call off the trials, because there was an effort on the part of the government to sort of make peace, you know, make peace with the students. And that was an interesting story, too. But that ended the trials. But yeah, that was-yeah, it was risky. Civil disobedience is-it's no fun. You know, I mean, you can't really say it's risky. So, maybe you get maced or beaten or something like that, spend a couple days in jail, but-not the pleasantest experience, but it's not the kind of risk that dissidents take in other countries. But yeah-but that's the kind of decisions you have to make. You just can't become involved part-time in these things. It's either serious and you're seriously involved, or, you know, you go to a demonstration and go home and forget about it and go back to work, and nothing happens. I mean, things only happen by really dedicated, diligent work. I mean, we're not allowed to say nice things about the Communist Party, right? That's like a rule. But one of the reasons why the New Deal legislation worked, you know, which was significant-you know, just changed the country-was because there were people who were there every day. Whether it was a civil rights issue, a labor rights issue, organizing, anything else, they were there, ready to turn the mimeograph machines-no internet-organize demonstrations. They had a memory. You know, the movement had a memory, which it doesn't have now. Now everyone starts over from fresh. But it had a kind of a tradition, a memory, that people were always there. And if you look back, it was very heavily Communist Party activists. Well, you know, that was destroyed. And it's one of the-the lack of such a sector of dedicated, committed people who understand that you're not going to win tomorrow, you know, you're going to have a lot of defeats, and there'll be a lot of trouble, you know, and a lot of things will happen that aren't nice, but if you keep at it, you can get somewhere. That's why we had a civil rights movement and a labor movement and so on. The lesson that we ought to learn, there was a split in American public opinion, very sharp split, very visible, in the early '70s, between elite opinion-you know, newspapers, Harvard faculty and so on-on the one hand, and the general population, on the other. Not the antiwar movement, the general population. In elite opinion, articulate opinion-and that you can read, so it's easy to document-the most extreme condemnation of the war was that it was a mistake which proved to be too costly. OK, that's about as far as you can go. Among the public, about 70 percent, in polls, said it's not a mistake, it's fundamentally wrong and immoral. OK? It's a very sharp and significant split. And I think the lesson we ought to learn is, to bring it to today, that, say, when Obama is praised for opposing the war in Iraq because he thought it was a mistake, we should recognize that to be on a par with Nazi generals after Stalingrad who thought that the two-front war was a mistake. The issue isn't was it a mistake; it's whether it's fundamentally wrong and immoral. Well, that's the lesson that has to be drawn. That's what the public probably already understands, but we have to do something with them and organize with them. AMY GOODMAN: I'll just say one thing. There's this quote that I've been trying to find out who said it. "I think back on my life over all the times I thought I went too far, and I realize now I didn't go far enough." I don't think Noam Chomsky said that. AMY GOODMAN: World-renowned linguist and dissident, Noam Chomsky, speaking at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts at an event sponsored by the Harvard Extension International Relations Club. Oh, about 800 people packed Memorial Church. =============================== 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 Mar 15 16:27:08 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 16:27:08 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] China lobs charges back at United States Message-ID: <2A7B0842409C4E9EA5E9A3FC26F9FE14@agingCHS072729> http://www.vancouversun.com/entertainment/China+lobs+charges+back+United+States/2679761/story.html Vancouver Sun March 13, 2010 China lobs charges back at United States By Aileen McCabe, Canwest News Service Not one to turn the other cheek these days, China issued a report Friday on human rights violations by the U.S. A day after the State Department pointed the finger at China in its annual report on human rights abuses in 194 countries, Beijing responded in kind, accusing Washington of "posing as the world judge of human rights again." The Chinese said the U.S. continues to "turn a blind eye to, or dodge and even cover up rampant human rights abuses on its own territory." And it aimed at Washington's jugular, stating: "At a time when the world is suffering a serious human rights disaster caused by the U.S. subprime crisis-induced global financial crisis, the U.S. government still ignores its own serious human rights problems but revels in accusing other countries." China claimed: "The United States with its strong military power has pursued hegemony in the world, trampling upon the sovereignty of other countries and trespassing their human rights." It cited as evidence abuses that were reported in the media and by the United Nations in Afghanistan, Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The State Department report criticized Chinese censorship of the Internet and China lobbed the charge right back at the Americans. "The United States is pushing its hegemony under the pretence of Internet freedom," it said. "The United States monopolizes the strategic resources of the global Internet, and has been retaining a tight grip over the Internet ever since its first appearance." The Chinese also charged: "While advocating 'freedom of speech,' 'freedom of the press' and 'Internet freedom,' the U.S. government unscrupulously monitors and restricts the citizens' rights to freedom when it comes to its own interests and needs." It used examples of U.S. wiretapping, eavesdropping and hacking in the name of the War on Terror to prove its case. China also claimed jobless and homeless people were so prevalent in the U.S. now that "workers' economic, social and cultural rights cannot be guaranteed." It chided the U.S. for allowing endemic inequality, saying, "racial discrimination is still a chronic problem of the United States." And it added: "The living conditions of women and children in the United States are deteriorating and their rights are not properly guaranteed." The Chinese report relies heavily on articles published in the U.S. media, without ever acknowledging that no Chinese media outlet would ever be able to scrutinize or hold to account the government in Beijing to such an extent. The tit-for-tat human rights reports are just the latest in a series of clashes between the U.S. and China in recent months that have badly frayed relations between Beijing and Washington. There is increasing talk that an upcoming U.S. Treasury report will label China a currency manipulator. If that happens, Chinese President Hu Jintao might easily postpone his state visit to Washington, which many expected to come as early as April. =============================== 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 Mar 15 20:27:53 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:27:53 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Fiction of Marjah as City Was (Part of) US Information War Message-ID: <51D75D5CA2FA4AE6991CEDA4F6BE5A11@agingCHS072729> companion piece: Further info on Counter-Insurgeny (COIN) and Human Terrain Systems here: http://www.counterpunch.org/price02152010.html ========== http://www.truthout.org/fiction-marja-city-was-us-information-war57470 Fiction of Marjah as City Was US Information War By Gareth Porter Inter Press Service March 9, 2010 For weeks, the U.S. public followed the biggest offensive of the Afghanistan War against what it was told was a "city of 80,000 people" as well as the logistical hub of the Taliban in that part of Helmand. That idea was a central element in the overall impression built up in February that Marja was a major strategic objective, more important than other district centres in Helmand. It turns out, however, that the picture of Marja presented by military officials and obediently reported by major news media is one of the clearest and most dramatic pieces of misinformation of the entire war, apparently aimed at hyping the offensive as a historic turning point in the conflict. Marja is not a city or even a real town, but either a few clusters of farmers' homes or a large agricultural area covering much of the southern Helmand River Valley. "It's not urban at all," an official of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), who asked not to be identified, admitted to IPS Sunday. He called Marja a "rural community". "It's a collection of village farms, with typical family compounds," said the official, adding that the homes are reasonably prosperous by Afghan standards. Richard B. Scott, who worked in Marja as an adviser on irrigation for the U.S. Agency for International Development as recently as 2005, agrees that Marja has nothing that could be mistaken as being urban. It is an "agricultural district" with a "scattered series of farmers' markets," Scott told IPS in a telephone interview. The ISAF official said the only population numbering tens of thousands associated with Marja is spread across many villages and almost 200 square kilometres, or about 125 square miles. Marja has never even been incorporated, according to the official, but there are now plans to formalise its status as an actual "district" of Helmand Province. The official admitted that the confusion about Marja's population was facilitated by the fact that the name has been used both for the relatively large agricultural area and for a specific location where farmers have gathered for markets. However, the name Marja "was most closely associated" with the more specific location, where there are also a mosque and a few shops. That very limited area was the apparent objective of "Operation Moshtarak", to which 7,500 U.S., NATO and Afghan troops were committed amid the most intense publicity given any battle since the beginning of the war. So how did the fiction that Marja is a city of 80,000 people get started? The idea was passed on to the news media by the U.S. Marines in southern Helmand. The earliest references in news stories to Marja as a city with a large population have a common origin in a briefing given Feb. 2 by officials at Camp Leatherneck, the U.S. Marine base there. The Associated Press published an article the same day quoting "Marine commanders" as saying that they expected 400 to 1,000 insurgents to be "holed up" in the "southern Afghan town of 80,000 people." That language evoked an image of house to house urban street fighting. The same story said Marja was "the biggest town under Taliban control" and called it the "linchpin of the militants' logistical and opium-smuggling network". It gave the figure of 125,000 for the population living in "the town and surrounding villages". ABC news followed with a story the next day referring to the "city of Marja" and claiming that the city and the surrounding area "are more heavily populated, urban and dense than other places the Marines have so far been able to clear and hold." The rest of the news media fell into line with that image of the bustling, urbanised Marja in subsequent stories, often using "town" and "city" interchangeably. Time magazine wrote about the "town of 80,000" Feb. 9, and the Washington Post did the same Feb. 11. As "Operation Moshtarak" began, U.S. military spokesmen were portraying Marja as an urbanised population centre. On Feb. 14, on the second day of the offensive, Marine spokesman Lt. Josh Diddams said the Marines were "in the majority of the city at this point." He also used language that conjured images of urban fighting, referring to the insurgents holding some "neighbourhoods". A few days into the offensive, some reporters began to refer to a "region", but only created confusion rather than clearing the matter up. CNN managed to refer to Marja twice as a "region" and once as "the city" in the same Feb. 15 article, without any explanation for the apparent contradiction. The Associated Press further confused the issue in a Feb. 21 story, referring to "three markets in town - which covers 80 square miles.." A "town" with an area of 80 square miles would be bigger than such U.S. cities as Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh and Cleveland. But AP failed to notice that something was seriously wrong with that reference. Long after other media had stopped characterising Marja as a city, the New York Times was still referring to Marja as "a city of 80,000", in a Feb. 26 dispatch with a Marja dateline. The decision to hype up Marja as the objective of "Operation Moshtarak" by planting the false impression that it is a good-sized city would not have been made independently by the Marines at Camp Leatherneck. A central task of "information operations" in counterinsurgency wars is "establishing the COIN [counterinsurgency] narrative", according to the Army Counterinsurgency Field Manual as revised under Gen. David Petraeus in 2006. That task is usually done by "higher headquarters" rather than in the field, as the manual notes. The COIN manual asserts that news media "directly influence the attitude of key audiences toward counterinsurgents, their operations and the opposing insurgency." The manual refers to "a war of perceptions.conducted continuously using the news media." Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, commander of ISAF, was clearly preparing to wage such a war in advance of the Marja operation. In remarks made just before the offensive began, McChrystal invoked the language of the counterinsurgency manual, saying, "This is all a war of perceptions." The Washington Post reported Feb. 22 that the decision to launch the offensive against Marja was intended largely to impress U.S. public opinion with the effectiveness of the U.S. military in Afghanistan by showing that it could achieve a "large and loud victory." The false impression that Marja was a significant city was an essential part of that message. =============================== 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 Mar 15 21:41:38 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 21:41:38 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Why I Changed My Mind About School Reform Message-ID: [in a Conservative era, one should always know what "reform" leads to.....] Wall Street Journal March 9, 2010 Why I Changed My Mind About School Reform Federal testing has narrowed education and charter schools have failed to live up to their promise. By Diane Ravitch I have been a historian of American education since 1975, when I received my doctorate from Columbia. I have written histories, and I've also written extensively about the need to improve students' knowledge of history, literature, geography, science, civics and foreign languages. So in 1991, when Lamar Alexander and David Kearns invited me to become assistant secretary of education in the administration of George H.W. Bush, I jumped at the chance with the hope that I might promote voluntary state and national standards in these subjects. By the time I left government service in January 1993, I was an advocate not only for standards but for school choice. I had come to believe that standards and choice could co-exist as they do in the private sector. With my friends Chester Finn Jr. and Joseph Viteritti, I wrote and edited books and articles making the case for charter schools and accountability. I became a founding board member of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and a founding member of the Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution, both of which are fervent proponents of choice and accountability. The Koret group includes some of the nation's best-known conservative scholars of choice, including John Chubb, Terry Moe, Caroline Hoxby and Paul Peterson. As No Child Left Behind's (NCLB) accountability regime took over the nation's schools under President George W. Bush and more and more charter schools were launched, I supported these initiatives. But over time, I became disillusioned with the strategies that once seemed so promising. I no longer believe that either approach will produce the quantum improvement in American education that we all hope for. NCLB received overwhelming bipartisan support when it was signed into law by President Bush in 2002. The law requires that schools test all students every year in grades three through eight, and report their scores separately by race, ethnicity, low-income status, disability status and limited-English proficiency. NCLB mandated that 100% of students would reach proficiency in reading and math by 2014, as measured by tests given in each state. Although this target was generally recognized as utopian, schools faced draconian penalties-eventually including closure or privatization-if every group in the school did not make adequate yearly progress. By 2008, 35% of the nation's public schools were labeled "failing schools," and that number seems sure to grow each year as the deadline nears. Since the law permitted every state to define "proficiency" as it chose, many states announced impressive gains. But the states' claims of startling improvement were contradicted by the federally sponsored National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Eighth grade students improved not at all on the federal test of reading even though they had been tested annually by their states in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007. Meanwhile the states responded to NCLB by dumbing down their standards so that they could claim to be making progress. Some states declared that between 80%-90% of their students were proficient, but on the federal test only a third or less were. Because the law demanded progress only in reading and math, schools were incentivized to show gains only on those subjects. Hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in test- preparation materials. Meanwhile, there was no incentive to teach the arts, science, history, literature, geography, civics, foreign languages or physical education. In short, accountability turned into a nightmare for American schools, producing graduates who were drilled regularly on the basic skills but were often ignorant about almost everything else. Colleges continued to complain about the poor preparation of entering students, who not only had meager knowledge of the world but still required remediation in basic skills. This was not my vision of good education. When charter schools started in the early 1990s, their supporters promised that they would unleash a new era of innovation and effectiveness. Now there are some 5,000 charter schools, which serve about 3% of the nation's students, and the Obama administration is pushing for many more. But the promise has not been fulfilled. Most studies of charter schools acknowledge that they vary widely in quality. The only major national evaluation of charter schools was carried out by Stanford economist Margaret Raymond and funded by pro-charter foundations. Her group found that compared to regular public schools, 17% of charters got higher test scores, 46% had gains that were no different than their public counterparts, and 37% were significantly worse. Charter evaluations frequently note that as compared to neighboring public schools, charters enroll smaller proportions of students whose English is limited and students with disabilities. The students who are hardest to educate are left to regular public schools, which makes comparisons between the two sectors unfair. The higher graduation rate posted by charters often reflects the fact that they are able to "counsel out" the lowest performing students; many charters have very high attrition rates (in some, 50%-60% of those who start fall away). Those who survive do well, but this is not a model for public education, which must educate all children. NAEP compared charter schools and regular public schools in 2003, 2005, 2007 and 2009. Sometimes one sector or the other had a small advantage. But on the whole, there is very little performance difference between them. Given the weight of studies, evaluations and federal test data, I concluded that deregulation and privately managed charter schools were not the answer to the deep-seated problems of American education. If anything, they represent tinkering around the edges of the system. They affect the lives of tiny numbers of students but do nothing to improve the system that enrolls the other 97%. The current emphasis on accountability has created a punitive atmosphere in the schools. The Obama administration seems to think that schools will improve if we fire teachers and close schools. They do not recognize that schools are often the anchor of their communities, representing values, traditions and ideals that have persevered across decades. They also fail to recognize that the best predictor of low academic performance is poverty-not bad teachers. What we need is not a marketplace, but a coherent curriculum that prepares all students. And our government should commit to providing a good school in every neighborhood in the nation, just as we strive to provide a good fire company in every community. On our present course, we are disrupting communities, dumbing down our schools, giving students false reports of their progress, and creating a private sector that will undermine public education without improving it. Most significantly, we are not producing a generation of students who are more knowledgable, and better prepared for the responsibilities of citizenship. That is why I changed my mind about the current direction of school reform. Ms. Ravitch is author of "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education," published last week by Basic Books. =============================== 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 Tue Mar 16 00:13:49 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:13:49 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Wife of Justice Thomas starts group for 'citizen activists' - OH MY GOD!!!!!!!!!!! Message-ID: Virginia Thomas's biography on the site says she "is a fan of Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin and Laura Ingraham and other talk radio hosts," and that she is "is intrigued by Glenn Beck and listening carefully." Wife of Justice Thomas starts group for 'citizen activists' Justice Clarence Thomas's wife, Virginia, a longtime activist, started Liberty Central in January. (Charles Dharapak/associated Press) By Robert Barnes and Dan Eggen Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, March 16, 2010 Into the heightened political atmosphere between the Supreme Court and the Obama administration comes now Virginia Thomas, the conservative activist and wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, who is founder of a new nonprofit lobbying and political-organizing group catering to the "citizen activists" of the "tea party" movement. Virginia "Ginni" Thomas says Liberty Central Inc. will educate motivated citizens to "preserve freedom and reaffirm the core founding principles," according to the group's Web site, and will serve as a way for concerned Americans to "make a difference in the fight for liberty and against the liberal Washington agenda." Virginia Thomas did not return calls on Monday. But she said in an interview with a conservative blogger at a meeting of the Conservative Political Action Committee last month that she had left her job working for a small college because of her concern that the country is off-track. "We've got to get the Constitution back to a place where it means something . . . or we're headed for tyranny," she told blogger Ed Morrissey. Thomas's group was founded in January and she promoted it at the CPAC convention. But it was not until this past weekend, after a story in the Los Angeles Times, that awareness of the new organization prompted a debate about the involvement of a justice's spouse in a political movement. It comes at a time of increased sensitivity between the White House and congressional Democrats on one side and the court's conservative majority on the other. It started with President Obama's unusually blunt criticism of the court during his State of the Union address, when he lambasted the court's 5 to 4 ruling that gave corporations and unions greater leeway to use their general treasuries to buy ads for and against political candidates. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said last week that Obama's use of the address to criticize the court -- six of the nine black-robed justices were at the front of the House chamber -- was "very troubling." Roberts questioned whether the court should continue to attend what he described as a "political pep rally." The White House responded with a renewed broadside, and Obama has said he was working with Congress to try to temper the effects of the decision, which he said would allow special interests to bankroll American elections. A court spokeswoman said Justice Thomas would not comment on his wife's new endeavor or how he might recuse himself should a conflict arise. Justices make their own decisions about removing themselves from cases and usually do not explain why. Most typically, they recuse themselves when they have a financial interest in an issue before them, or when a decision could affect a family member. Sue Hamblen, Liberty Central's national coordinator, said Virginia Thomas met with ethics officials for the federal courts and was told her work "was in no way a conflict of interest." "She did not give up her First Amendment rights when her husband became a Supreme Court judge," Hamblen said. Hamblen said that the group is nonpartisan and does not intend to make endorsements in political campaigns but that it will issue "scorecards" ranking candidates on conservative issues. "We are very seriously not Republican or Democrat; we are conservative," Hamblen said. "Our intent is to remain nonpolitical except in terms of furthering the core principles of the founding fathers." Liberty Central, which is organized as a nonprofit, is free to raise unlimited amounts of money and is generally not required to disclose its donors. Hamblen said the group has "received a lot of donations over the last couple days," mostly from small donors. Hamblen said the group is not formally affiliated with the conservative "tea party" groups that have sprouted across the nation over the past year to protest the Obama administration's fiscal policies. The group conducted a joint online poll in January with one of the largest such groups, Tea Party Patriots, whose leaders also issued a statement of support for Thomas's new venture. The LibertyCentral.org Web site also lists an endorsement from former defense secretary Donald M. Rumsfeld, who says that "Ginni can help channel the frustration felt by millions across America at the current course of our country." Virginia Thomas's biography on the site says she "is a fan of Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin and Laura Ingraham and other talk radio hosts," and that she is "is intrigued by Glenn Beck and listening carefully." A longtime political activist, she has worked for former House Republican leader Richard A. Armey (Tex.), the conservative Heritage Foundation and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. She most recently worked in Washington for Hillsdale College, a small liberal arts school in Michigan. Hamblen said other judges have had politically active spouses. For instance, Judge Marjorie O. Rendell of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit in Philadelphia is married to Pennsylvania's Democratic governor, Ed Rendell. Following the judicial Committee on Codes of Conduct, Marjorie Rendell does not accompany her husband to political events. But she presides over other events as first lady. She seeks guidance from the committee over potential conflicts, and has a policy of recusing herself from a case in which a party has made a hefty contribution to her husband's campaign, unless both sides agree to waive the disqualification. In California, Judge Stephen R. Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit recuses himself in cases brought by the Southern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is headed by his wife, Ramona Ripston. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/15/AR2010031503399.html?hpid=moreheadlines -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 41084 bytes Desc: not available URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Mar 16 00:17:49 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:17:49 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Glenn Beck boosts sales of "The Coming Insurrection" Message-ID: <596DC5199B5E48448BB99D208D1BAB20@agingCHS072729> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/15/business/media/15tract.html A Book Attacking Capitalism Gets Sales Help From a Fox Host By NOAM COHEN Published: March 14, 2010 "Revolutionary movements do not spread by contamination but by resonance," write the anonymous authors of "The Coming Insurrection," a call to overthrow capitalism that first appeared in France in 2005 and was recently published in translation in the United States. Writers, however, do not get to pick how and where their work resonates: Among the first in America to be stirred by the manifesto's explosive words was a Fox News host, Glenn Beck. In July, Mr. Beck introduced the book to his three million or so viewers, accompanied by video of burning cars and swarming protesters. "Here is the one thing everyone seems to be missing. The extreme left is actively calling for violence," he told his audience. "It calls for violent revolution. An anonymous group from France, of all places, called the Invisible Committee, penned it. They want to bring down capitalism and the Western way of life." This month, Mr. Beck proclaimed it "the most evil book I've read in a long, long time." The next day, "The Coming Insurrection," whose authors call themselves the Invisible Committee, rose to No. 54 on Amazon's best-seller list. In July, the book briefly reached No. 1. And even this weekend the book remained around No. 240. Sylv?re Lotringer, a professor emeritus of French language and philosophy at Columbia and the general editor of Semiotext(e), which translated and published the book, said there was no doubt that Mr. Beck was feeding what had been "in a short duration, the most books we have ever sold." He did not provide a sales number. As for trying to play to Mr. Beck or the book's other critics on the right, Mr. Lotringer said he was torn. "I would be willing to come on the show if he had read the book, but he has never read it," he said. "Nothing that he has said shows that he read it. He is incapable of reading it." Christopher Balfe, president and chief operating officer of Mercury Radio Arts, Mr. Beck's production company, said, "Glenn read this book because he believes it is important for people to read everything, especially the titles they disagree with, so they can clearly understand all points of view and have open and honest debates." This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: March 16, 2010 An article on Monday, about a sales spike for a French book called "The Coming Insurrection" after it was mentioned by the Fox News host Glenn Beck gave an incomplete title for Christopher Balfe. While Mr. Balfe commented on Mr. Beck's behalf for the article, he is president and chief operating officer of Mercury Radio Arts, Mr. Beck's production company; he is not "a spokesman" for Mr. Beck. A version of this article appeared in print on March 15, 2010, on page B6 of the New York edition. =============================== 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 Mar 16 01:01:12 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:01:12 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Mike Davis: Labor War in the Mojave Message-ID: <557596CEF5C740A39B68350BADB962B5@agingCHS072729> http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100329/davis The Nation Labor War in the Mojave By Mike Davis The biggest hole in California, with the exception of the current state budget, is Rio Tinto's huge open-pit mine at the town of Boron, near Edwards Air Force Base, eighty miles northeast of Los Angeles. Seen from Google Earth, it is easy to imagine that the 700-foot-deep crater was blasted out of the Mojave Desert by an errant asteroid or comet. From the vantage point of Highway 58, however, the landscape is enigmatic: a mile-long rampart of ochre earth and gray mudstone, terminating at what looks like a giant chemical refinery. At night, when a driver's mind is most prone to legends of the desert, the complex's intense illumination is startling, even slightly extraterrestrial, like the sinister off-world mining colony in Aliens. Terri Judd's labor owns part of this eerie landscape-- or rather its void. She's a third-generation borax miner, as deeply rooted in the high desert as one of the native Joshua trees. Every working morning for the past thirteen years, she has bundled her long red hair under a hard hat, climbed up the ladder of a giant Le Tourneau wheel loader and turned on its 1,600- horsepower Detroit Diesel engine. Her air-conditioned cab perches almost treetop height above custom-made, twelve-foot-high tires that cost $30,000 each. She operates this leviathan with delicate manipulations of two joysticks, more high-skill video game than Mad Max. In a regular twelve-and-a-half-hour shift, she ceaselessly repeats the same mechanical calisthenic: lowering her twenty-foot-wide bucket, deftly scooping up twenty-five to thirty tons of borax ore, then delivering the load to one of the mine's plants to be made into boric acid or granulated for eventual use in dozens of industrial applications, from fiberglass surfboards to HD display screens. Each year 1 million tons of borax products are fed into hopper cars (800 of which are permanently assigned to the mine) and hauled to the LA harbor for shipment to China and other industrializing countries hungry for the caustic residue of the Mojave's ancient lakes. The Boron pit, which replaced an underground mine, produces almost half the world's supply of refined borates. Strip-mining the Mojave may not be everyone's cup of tea, but Terri--a combat veteran of Operation Desert Storm and a single mom--flat-out loves her job. "What can I say? We get to play with the big toys. I guess I was always a tomboy. I preferred Tonkas to Barbies, socket wrenches to dollhouses." But she doesn't play alone: Big Brother is looking over her shoulder, evaluating her performance. "In effect, the boss rides with me. The GPS in my loader can be monitored not only from the plant but from Rio Tinto's US headquarters in Denver, or, for that matter, from the global head office in London." Peeping Toms, however, don't normally perturb Terri. "There are no slackers in the pit. Our productivity is sky-high because borax mining is our family history." Indeed, a Boron workforce shrunk to less than 40 percent of its 1980 size produces record outputs despite a rapidly aging plant; an ornery, dipping ore body; and an increasingly remote and hostile management. I Terri acknowledges that her devotion to the mine has been an act of unrequited love. In last year's contract negotiations, Rio Tinto (the British-Australian multinational acquired its Boron facility, U.S. Borax, in 1968 and renamed it Rio Tinto Borax) stunned members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, ILWU, Local 30 (Boron), by demanding abolition of the contractually enshrined seniority system and the surrender of any worker voice in the labor process. According to Dean Gehring, the latest in a succession of recent mine managers, international competition compels a drastic switch to "high-performance teams that have the flexibility to do many different jobs, and we need to reward and promote our top performers. The old contract doesn't allow us to do that." The company wants a contract that would allow it to capriciously promote or demote; to outsource union jobs; to convert full-time to part-time positions with little or no benefits; to reorganize shift schedules without warning; to eliminate existing work rules; to cut holidays, sick leave and pension payments; to impose involuntary overtime; and to heavily penalize the union if workers file grievances against the company with the National Labor Relations Board. Rio Tinto, in essence, claims the right to rule by divine whim, to blatantly discriminate against and even fire employees for felonies like "failing to have or maintain satisfactory inter-personal relationships with Company personnel, client personnel, contractor, and visitors." "The company's proposal," union negotiators emphasize, "would destroy our union, lower our living standards, and give Borax total control over our jobs." On January 30, Local 30 members unanimously rejected the concessions demanded by Rio Tinto. The company deadline expired the next morning, when Terri Judd set off for work as usual with her lunchbox and thermos. At the locked front gate she and other day-shift workers encountered a phalanx of nervous Kern County sheriff's deputies in full riot gear. Inside the plant, an elite "strike security team" hired by Rio Tinto had taken control of operations. Delaware-based J.R. Gettier & Associates brags that it is the Home Depot of unionbusting, a one-stop source for security planners, armed guards, legal experts, industrial spies and, most important, highly skilled replacement workers. It even has staff who can operate Terri's giant loader. The Gettier mercenaries wore sneers and dark glasses as they pushed their convoy past a crowd of angry Local 30 members. "Being locked out," says Terri, "is different from going on strike. Initially there's disbelief that the company is actually serious about booting you out the door. Hey, my granddad worked in this mine. But then you see that caravan of scabs coming to take your jobs, and the betrayal cuts like a knife in your heart." II Once upon a time, there were several thousand mining communities in North America; perhaps fewer than a hundred still exist. Boron (unincorporated, population 2,000) is one of the survivors--and all the more anomalous since it is not in the red desert of Wyoming or the hills of West Virginia but in the outer orbit of Los Angeles sprawl. In the boom days of the 1930s it was a textbook company town, where employees of what was then called Pacific Borax--many of them, like Terri Judd's grandfather, Dust Bowl Oklahomans--lived in company houses and used company scrip to shop at the company store. Unionization (originally by an old AFL affiliate called the Borax Workers Union) ended the feudal era, but the one-employer character of the town remained intact until a bitter, often violent 132-day strike in 1974 forced blacklisted miners to seek new jobs. Some found work at a nearby rocket-test range, while others learned to polish mirrors at an Israeli-built solar power station or applied for guard jobs at the federal prison up the road. But economic diversity remains limited, and fully one- quarter of Boron's households still punched a Rio Tinto time clock this past New Year's. There are probably an equal number of mine retirees and former employees, so virtually everyone in town has some intimate link to the mine and its turbulent history. During the 1974 conflict Boron polarized into majority pro-union and minority pro-company factions. There was a famous riot at the front gate in the first hours of the conflict, followed by the dynamiting of several foremen's homes, the blowing up of the mine's power line, episodic exchanges of gunfire, an exodus of managerial employees and de facto martial law during the nearly yearlong occupation of the community by Kern County sheriffs. The current lockout, in contrast, rallies a far more inclusive local patriotism. Along Twenty Mule Team Road, Support Borax Miners placards festoon the windows of homes and pickups. Skateboarders and grandmothers wear black Union Tough T-shirts. Sympathy with the ILWU is not a condition for loathing Rio Tinto's hireling army of scabs and guards. III Day twelve. The lockout is beginning to feel like a reverse siege. It is the town, not the mine, that is under growing pressure. At the Local 30 hall, the "gate watch" crew reports that the sheriff's deputies have become quite relaxed, even friendly, probably because they're engaged in their own contract battle with county supervisors. But the replacements have become more brazen, at one point deliberately bumping into a union member with their van. One of the organizers gravely notes the incident on his legal pad, then returns to the kitchen, where he huddles with his cellphone. He's calling the Local roster to remind members about next week's big solidarity march. Boron workers are awaiting the arrival of ILWU members from up and down the West Coast, as well as a contingent of mining and dock union-leaders from around the world. Across the hall, meanwhile, Terri is arguing with another loader operator, Kevin Martz, over which of them performs the most herculean labor in the pit. Quantitatively, there should be no contest: Kevin operates a P&H 4100 "ultra class" shovel with a 115-ton payload capacity, one of the biggest machines in the mining world. In a few workdays he could probably dig the Panama Canal by himself. But Terri believes that quality is more important. "Come on, Kevin, you only shovel dirt; I dig ore. I'm high value." Kevin pretends a smirk, then chuckles. He explains that a mining shift, like an army platoon in combat, relies upon constant ribbing to sustain camaraderie. "Our work depends upon friendship, not competition. In an environment of dangerous machines and high explosives, we have to watch each other's backs." Neither he nor Terri discerns any rational logic in Rio Tinto's zeal to atomize the traditional work community and promote a dog-eat-dog struggle for bonuses. "Some genius in Denver or London," Terri says, "believes that you can improve output by adopting the law of the jungle. But without a fair system to determine promotion and pay, teamwork will be undermined and morale will collapse. The mine will become less productive and more dangerous." Conversation moves to the impact of the lockout on the town's economy. Terri is a major mover-shaker in the Veterans of Foreign Wars, while Kevin is a scout leader and active member of his Latter-day Saints ward. "Normally the VFW is packed to the rafters on Friday nights for karaoke," Terri explains, "but last Friday there were just three families. Business at Domingo's [a Mexican restaurant made famous by its popularity among Space Shuttle crews from nearby Edwards] is way down, and the town dentist could close because everyone has lost their family dental benefits." Kevin adds that many Local 30 families, especially those who recently bought homes in now-sunk boom-burbs like Victorville and Palmdale, forty or so miles from Boron, face imminent disaster. "Their mortgages are already below periscope depth, so the lockout is just the final shove out the front door. They'll lose their homes." Kevin believes that fundamental values are under threat. Like many working-class Mormons--the most misunderstood social group in the American West--he's a good trade unionist but no liberal. Not inaccurately, he sees Local 30 making a conservative last stand on behalf of the decent jobs that allow frugal families to prosper in stable, human-scale communities like Boron. "My wife's a schoolteacher at Edwards Air Force Base, we've no debts other than our mortgage, our kids flourish in local schools, we love the desert--yet if Rio Tinto continues to play this hand, we'll eventually be forced to leave, perhaps to Wyoming." Terri, the quintessential Boronite, confesses that she also has been wondering whether pits in Nevada or Wyoming are looking for experienced loader operators. She's optimistic about the union but knows that Rio Tinto wields power almost beyond ordinary people's reckoning. "Will we be a ghost town next year? That's the real issue." IV "Where the hell is Bougainville?" someone asks Dave Dorton. "An island near New Guinea," he replies. The Local 30 gate-watchers are gathered under a sun canopy, drinking black coffee and talking about the skeletons in the company's closet. Dave, a dashing character who looks like he just jumped off a Viking longship, is "silo chief" at the plant and one of Local 30's many old-school bikers. He says that the lockout has incited new rank-and-file interest in Rio Tinto's notorious history. "It's like waking up and discovering that you're married to a serial murderer." Last summer the US district court in Los Angeles upheld the standing of Bougainville residents--represented by Steve Berman, the superstar class-action litigator--to sue Rio Tinto in an American court for "crimes against humanity, war crimes, and racial discrimination." Like the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce in Dickens's Bleak House, the suit is moving glacially through the courts against terrific opposition from the corporation and may take years to reach a judgment, but the charges are horrifying. In the late 1960s Rio Tinto, supported by Australia (and after 1975 by the independent government of Papua New Guinea--PNG), began expropriating land in the fertile center of the northernmost Solomon Island of Bougainville to mine one of the world's richest copper deposits. Millions of tons of pit tailings poisoned ecosystems and devastated local agriculture, and by 1989 the relentless repression of nonviolent protest ignited a full-scale revolutionary uprising. The company appealed to its business partner, the neocolonial Papuan government. In Bougainville, according to its former commander, General Singirok, "the PNG Defence Force was Rio Tinto's personal security force and was ordered take action by any means necessary." The lawsuit provides stunning evidence of company/government atrocities in a conflict that led to the death of almost 10 percent of the island's population. (During the Spanish Civil War, Rio Tinto applauded Gen. Francisco Franco for executing the radical miners who had occupied its namesake Spanish property.) Bougainville is only one item in a long r??sum?? of devastation. The Norwegian government pension fund, the world's second-largest, recently divested $870 million in Rio Tinto stock to protest its "unethical" partnership with Freeport McMoRan in the infamous Grasberg mine in Indonesian-occupied Irian Jaya (western New Guinea). Grasberg is an environmental disaster almost beyond imagination, and as in Bougainville, tribal resistance has been met with assassinations and massacres by the Indonesian Army. If Rio Tinto's operations in the southwest Pacific recall King Leopold's Congo, its industrial relations, from southern Africa to Labrador and Utah, are a state- of-the-art experiment in worker intimidation. In southern Africa, miners' unions have long questioned whether Rio Tinto, long rumored to have supplied uranium to Pretoria's clandestine atomic weapons program in the 1970s, has ever really broken with apartheid in its treatment of black workers. In February there was a worker uprising at its huge R??ssing uranium pit in Namibia over management's unilateral raising of performance quotas and its refusal to address worker grievances. (Interestingly, the government of Iran is Rio Tinto's junior partner, with 15 percent of shares, at R??ssing.) In Australia, where the company exploits some of the world's most important iron, coal and uranium reserves, it has uprooted traditional unions, cut real wages and (as it is now trying to do in Boron) replaced collective bargaining with variable individual contracts. Aussie miners and train drivers, however, have fought back with wildcat strikes and new organizing campaigns. Their defiance has led the company to an extraordinary solution: a fully automated "mine of the future" that won't require unruly miners or railroad workers. A working prototype is being developed in the remote Pilbara iron range: eleven mines with robotized drilling, automated haul trucks and, soon, driverless ore trains, all controlled from an operations center in Perth, 800 miles away. Industry analysts debate whether this automated mining revolution will be feasible outside the largest, near- surface iron and coal deposits, so Local 30 probably doesn't need to worry about any imminent augmentation of scabs with robots. But they're urgently trying to decipher the complex and ruthless game that Rio Tinto and other mining superpowers are playing on a world stage. V The industrial revolution in Asia is bringing to a climax the struggle for ownership of the earth's strategic metals and minerals that began in the late nineteenth century. For instance, a single merger, between Rio Tinto and the even larger BHP Billiton, would create the world's third-largest corporation (after ExxonMobil and GE), with unprecedented power to set prices for exports of iron, aluminum, copper and titanium. To put it another way, such a mega-merger could exact enormous rents from the future industrial growth of China and the rest of Asia--something that Beijing, at least, has no intention of allowing to happen (iron ore is China's second most costly import, after oil). What Forbes called "the Battle for Rio Tinto" began two years ago, at the end of the 2000s mining boom, when cash-flush BHP attempted a hostile takeover that was countered by multibillion-dollar blocking offers of new investment from the government-controlled Aluminum Corporation of China. But as resource prices slumped after the Wall Street crash, Rio Tinto share values were immediately pulled under by the weight of the $38 billion debt the company had incurred to buy Alcan (before BHP did) in 2007. BHP, faced with Rio Tinto's inability to sell its Alcan debt as bonds, as well as the subsequent downgrading of its credit, temporarily called off the attack, while the still ardent Chinese were rudely rebuffed by Rio Tinto's rebellious shareholders, supported by xenophobic Australian politicians. Rio Tinto managed to survive the first year of recession by cutting thousands of jobs and selling off $10 billion of nonessential assets while retrenching in its core mission of exploiting "large, low-cost ore bodies." Mine managers in its minerals division, which includes borates, were told that future investment in their operations would only reward dramatic cost- cutting and higher earnings, not status quo profits. Labor, it seems, is an especially "compressible" cost. In the specific case of Boron, the financing of a project called "the Modified Direct Dissolving of Kernite," advertised as the key to the mine's long-term profitability, was made conditional upon achieving "flexibility and accountability in our work practices"--that is to say, scrapping the old collective bargaining agreement with Local 30. In negotiations, Rio Tinto took the intransigent stand that the crisis in world mining had made such union contracts obsolete. Yet since last fall, Rio Tinto and other ore giants have surfed spectacular recoveries on the wave of China's renewed growth, with iron prices expected to rise by as much as 50 percent this year. Cash flow from other mineral products, including borates, and surges in mine share prices have been bolstered by a huge influx of investment from pension funds and other institutional investors--probably a speculative bubble in the making. Then, in a staggering move, Rio Tinto betrayed its Chinese suitors and eloped with BHP. Their love child is a joint-production venture--in essence, a partial merger--that consolidates their huge iron ore operations in Australia, giving them unprecedented price-setting power over the world's most important metal. Indeed, both Tom Albanese, Rio Tinto's CEO, and Marius Kloppers, his counterpart at BHP, recently warned major customers that annual price benchmarks will become a thing of the past, as the mining combination adjusts pricing to the volatile spot market. China, in particular, could see its steel and manufacturing costs rise by billions. Beijing's immediate, furious response was to arrest Rio Tinto's top four executives in Shanghai for "espionage" (the charges were later reduced to bribery). Chinese officials talk darkly about the Rio Tinto/BHP "monopoly," although undoubtedly they would prefer to own part of it rather than actually dismantle it. VI The future of a small town in the Mojave is thus entangled in geoeconomic competitions far larger and more important than the borate market itself. So what chance do 560 miners and their families have in a fight with Godzilla? The record of the past twenty years is not encouraging. With some heroic exceptions--the 1989-90 Pittston coal strike in Virginia, the 1990s Frontier Casinos strike in Las Vegas and a few others--international unions have seldom been willing to support a local fight to the last bullet or bitter dime. But ILWU has a unique street credibility. The pit bull of CIO-generation unions, it bit into the heels of the West Coast stevedoring industry in 1934 and never let go. Industrial unions are supposed to be dying, but the ILWU, despite its modest size, punches hard enough to keep the powerful Pacific Maritime Association sulking in its corner, while ensuring that the docks remain safe and well paid. As the only union that survived McCarthyism with its left-wing leadership (under Harry Bridges) intact, the ILWU is also legendary for putting muscle behind the slogan of "working-class solidarity." Since the 1960s it has conducted scores of job actions and walkouts in support of striking Australian dockers, California farmworkers and South African freedom fighters. Indeed, in May 2008 the union shut down the West Coast for a day to protest the war in Iraq. In anticipation of the Boron lockout, ILWU had persuaded members of an international coalition of mining and maritime unions--many of whom have done battle with Rio Tinto--to hold their periodic conference in the nearby desert city of Palmdale. On February 16 the delegates, along with rank and file from other ILWU locals, arrive in Boron for a march to the mine followed by a big Local 30 barbecue. The overture to the protest is the earthshaking full- throttle roar of shovelhead and twin-cam Harley- Davidson engines. The stevedore-bikers of Local 13 (LA Harbor) emerge out of the desert haze like Marlon Brando's leather-clad horde in The Wild One (or, better, the Comanches in Blood Meridian). Someone, awe-struck, whispers, "Glad these guys are on our side." Later I count twenty-six Harley black beauties corralled in a reverential semicircle on the street side of the union hall. (The unfortunate owners of rice-burners and pasta rockets have had to remove their imported Japanese and Italian bikes to a discreet distance.) Carloads of out-of-town ILWU members arrive, then two buses carrying dozens of US and foreign labor leaders. The crowd applauds, people shake hands, someone turns up the volume on "Born in the USA" and the marchers begin to assemble, about 600-strong, behind a banner that spans the entire width of the road: An Injury to One Is an Injury to All. It's an easy one-mile walk in pleasant weather to the front gate. Local 30 brings a dozen American and Marine Corps flags to the front, and begins to chant, "We Wanna Work, We Wanna Work." The sheriffs are relaxed, but the Gettier security guards up the road nervously shift their feet. As usual, their faces are inscrutable behind dark glasses, but you can almost smell their guilty sweat. VII Imagine a picnic jointly organized by the IWW, the American Legion and the Hells Angels. One of the first speakers is Oupa Komane from the South African miners' union. He has a magnificent voice: "Comrades, I bring you revolutionary greetings from the miners of South Africa!" I look around to see how the "comrades" waving American flags react. Komane gets warm applause. A battle-hardened copper miner from Utah (where Rio Tinto owns the great Kennecott pit at Bingham Canyon) says, "I can't tell you what I think of this company-- not in front of women and children." An Australian warns, "They will kill your town. That's what they did to us." A Canadian talks about more dead mill towns in Quebec, while a New Zealander tells a story about Rio Tinto's sinister role in defeating climate-change legislation in his country. The fiery head of the Turkish borate workers, whose state-owned industry (Eti Mine Works) was founded by Atat??rk, father of the Turkish Republic, brings greetings from the Borons of Anatolia: Kirka, Emet, Kestelek and Bandirma. He scoffs at Rio Tinto's claim that his miners' lower hourly wages (almost $10 in a cheap country, versus an average of $26 in Boron) necessitates the trashing of union rights in California. Finally, Ken Riley, president of the largely black International Longshoremen's Association Local 1422 in Charleston, South Carolina, and a leader of one of the most courageous fights in modern US labor history [see JoAnn Wypijewski, "Audacity on Trial," August 6/13, 2001], summarizes the case for optimism: "You pick on the ILWU, you pick on the world. When our own international deserted us, they were there. Now we're here." Later, I take Ken aside and confess my doubts. He shakes his head. "I understand what you're saying, but you're wrong," he says. "This isn't political theater. The first month of a struggle is decisive, and the ILWU is doing a terrific job marketing Boron's importance to the rest of the labor movement. Internationally, our unions understand that we have to organize the logistics chain, from producers to transport to distributor to retailer. This is a new model of power for the labor movement, like industrial unionism in the 1930s, but adapted to the reality of globalization." "But Boron?" I ask. "Hey, something new is being born here. It has to be." Toni McCormick, a pretty, jovial woman in her late 20s, gives me a ride back to my car. The wife of a Local 30 member, she coaches the cheer squad at Boron High. "I'm fourth generation," she tells me. "My great- grandfather's house is still standing, made out of old dynamite boxes held together with chicken wire. Our football team plays in a high desert league with other mining and military towns. Sometimes they have to tackle each other in the dirt because grass won't grow in a saline lake bed." "Can anything grow in a dry lake?" I wonder. "Sure," Toni smiles. "Miners can." =============================== 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 Tue Mar 16 00:23:30 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:23:30 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Junk Bond Avalanche Looms for Credit Markets - $700 billion in risky corporate debt begins to come due Message-ID: <1B4CF9284E744EA696F8325021455482@Upstairs> Junk Bond Avalanche Looms for Credit Markets By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ Published: March 15, 2010 When the Mayans envisioned the world coming to an end in 2012 - at least in the Hollywood telling - they didn't count junk bonds among the perils that would lead to worldwide disaster. The New York Times Payback Time Articles in this series will examine the consequences of, and attempts to deal with, growing public and private debts. a.. Previous Articles in the Series Maybe they should have, because 2012 also is the beginning of a three-year period in which more than $700 billion in risky, high-yield corporate debt begins to come due, an extraordinary surge that some analysts fear could overload the debt markets. With huge bills about to hit corporations and the federal government around the same time, the worry is that some companies will have trouble getting new loans, spurring defaults and a wave of bankruptcies. The United States government alone will need to borrow nearly $2 trillion in 2012, to bridge the projected budget deficit for that year and to refinance existing debt. Indeed, worries about the growth of national, or sovereign, debt prompted Moody's Investors Service to warn on Monday that the United States and other Western nations were moving "substantially" closer to losing their top-notch Aaa credit ratings. Sovereign debt aside, the approaching scramble for corporate financing could strain the broader economy as jobs are cut, consumer spending is scaled back and credit is tightened for both consumers and businesses. The apocalyptic talk is not limited to perpetual bears and the rest of the doom-and-gloom crowd. Even Moody's, which is known for its sober public statements, is sounding the alarm. "An avalanche is brewing in 2012 and beyond if companies don't get out in front of this," said Kevin Cassidy, a senior credit officer at Moody's. Private equity firms and many nonfinancial companies were able to borrow on easy terms until the credit crisis hit in 2007, but not until 2012 does the long-delayed reckoning begin for a series of leveraged buyouts and other deals that preceded the crisis. That is because the record number of bonds and loans that were issued to finance those transactions typically come due in five to seven years, said Diane Vazza, head of global fixed-income research at Standard & Poor's. In addition, she said, many companies whose debt matured in 2009 and 2010 have been able to extend their loans, but the extra breathing room is only adding to the bill for 2012 and after. The result is a potential financial doomsday, or what bond analysts call a maturity wall. From $21 billion due this year, junk bonds are set to mature at a rate of $155 billion in 2012, $212 billion in 2013 and $338 billion in 2014. The credit markets have gradually returned to normal since the financial crisis, particularly in recent months, making more loans available to companies and signaling confidence in the pace of economic recovery. But the issue is whether they can absorb the coming surge in demand for credit. As was the case with the collapse of the subprime mortgage market three years ago, derivatives played a big role in the explosion of risky corporate debt. In this case the culprit was a financial instrument called a collateralized loan obligation, which helped issuers repackage corporate loans much as subprime mortgages were sliced, diced and then resold to other investors. That made many more risky loans available. "The question is, 'Should these deals have ever been financed in the first place?' " asked Anders J. Maxwell, a corporate restructuring specialist at Peter J. Solomon Company in New York. The period from 2012 to 2014 represents payback time for a Who's Who of private equity firms and the now highly leveraged companies they helped buy in the precrisis boom years. The biggest include the hospital owner HCA, which was taken private in 2006 by a group led by Bain Capital and Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts for $33 billion, and has $13.3 billion in debt payments coming due between 2012 and 2014. Another buyout led by Kohlberg Kravis, for the giant Texas utility TXU, has $20.9 billion that needs to be refinanced in the same period. Realogy, which owns real estate franchises like Century 21 and Coldwell Banker, was taken private by Apollo in the spring of 2007 just as the housing market was beginning to unravel and as the first tremors of the subprime crisis were being felt. Realogy was saddled with $8 to $9 of debt for every $1 in earnings, well above the "$5 to $6 level that is manageable for a company in a highly cyclical industry," according to Emile Courtney, a credit analyst with Standard & Poor's. Realogy has survived - barely. "The company's cash flow is still below what's needed to cover the interest on its debt," Mr. Courtney said. Realogy said it ended 2009 with a substantial cushion on its financial covenants and over $200 million of available cash on its balance sheet. "The company generated over $340 million of net cash provided by operating activities in 2009 after paying interest on its debt," the company said. Not everyone is convinced that 2012 will spell catastrophe for the junk bond market, however. Optimists like Martin Fridson, a veteran high-yield strategist, note that investors seeking high yields snapped up speculative-grade bonds last year and early this year, and he suggests that continued demand will allow companies to refinance before their loans come due. "The companies have nearly two years to push out the 2012 maturity wall," he said. "Of course, the ability to refinance will depend upon the state of the economy." That is still a wild card, but even if the economy improves, companies with a lot of debt will be competing with a raft of better-rated borrowers that are expected to seek buyers of their debt at around the same time. Chief among those is the best-rated borrower of all: the United States government. The Treasury Department estimates that the federal budget deficit in 2012 will total $974 billion, down from this year's $1.8 trillion, but still huge by historical standards. Most critics of deficit spending have focused on the budget gap alone, but Washington will actually have to borrow $1.8 trillion in 2012, because $859 billion in old bonds will come due and have to be refinanced in addition to the deficit. By 2013 and 2014, $1.4 trillion will have to be raised annually. In the late 1990s, the federal government ran a surplus and actually paid down a small portion of the national debt. But with the huge deficits of the last few years, the national debt has grown to more than $12 trillion. Next in line are companies with investment-grade credit ratings. They must refinance $1.2 trillion in loans between 2012 and 2014, including $526 billion in 2012. Finally, there is the looming rollover of commercial mortgage-backed securities, which will double in the next three years, hitting $59.7 billion in 2012. Even if most of the debt does get refinanced, companies may have to pay more, if heavy government borrowing causes rates for all borrowers to rise. "These are huge numbers," said Tom Atteberry, who manages $5.6 billion in bonds for First Pacific Advisors, and is particularly alarmed by Washington's borrowing. "Other players will get crowded out or have to pay significantly more, because the government is borrowing so much." http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/business/16debt.html?hp -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 60836 bytes Desc: not available URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Mar 16 10:43:07 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:43:07 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Breaking Yugoslavia: an interview with Diana Johnstone Message-ID: <4AB54BFD11304152940DDC0CE1CF22B9@agingCHS072729> http://www.spectrezine.org/breaking-yugoslavia-interview-diana-johnstone Breaking Yugoslavia: an interview with Diana Johnstone March 16, 2010 14:11 | New Left Project in Europe Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions. She spoke to the New Left Project (NLP) on the wars in the former Yugoslavia, western involvement and the trial of Slobodan Milosevic. What was your view of Yugoslavia before its dissolution. What was admirable about that society? What was not so admirable? Every society has its good and bad points, and I am not qualified to make an overall judgement of such a complex society as former Yugoslavia. >From my personal experience, what was not admirable was that in Tito's lifetime it was a personal dictatorship. Tito didn't run everything, but he had the right of final decision in case of conflict. The harshest repression was reserved for communists loyal to the Soviet Union after Tito's break with Stalin in 1948. But repression is not all that is wrong with a dictatorship, a system which encourages hypocrisy and lack of recourse for unfair or unwise measures. Nevertheless, despite the undemocratic regime, it was always easy to find critical intellectuals in Yugoslavia who thought for themselves and said what they thought. Yugoslavia's "self-managed socialism" was certainly an improvement over the Soviet model. It provided full employment, which is what people most acutely miss today. It is noteworthy that many former critics of the socialist system today declare that the so-called free market democracy they have now is much worse. As the only European member of the Non-Aligned Movement, Yugoslavia enjoyed privileged relations with Third World countries, notably in the Arab world. The Yugoslav passport was welcome everywhere, and Yugoslavs enjoyed their freedom to travel throughout the world as citizens of a country whose international prestige was great for its size. Tito's policy toward the great ethnic diversity of Yugoslavia had been to give considerable cultural and linguistic rights to each group, a policy which is pursued today by Serbia - although not by Croatia and Slovenia. (For example, Serbia provides bilingual schools using the mother tongue of Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Albanian and Slovak minorities.) If, in 1990, there had been a national referendum on the subject, I have little doubt that an overwhelming majority of Yugoslavs would have voted to maintain the federation. But elections were held only within the various republics, enabling the bureaucracies of Croatia and Slovenia to promote their secessionist projects. You argue that Western governments bear significant responsibility for the wars in the former Yugoslavia by encouraging the secession of the constituent republics. Was the West not merely supporting those states in their struggle for self-determination? There is nothing in international law or diplomatic practice that justifies secession from an existing state on grounds of "self-determination". There is great confusion and hypocrisy on this point. First one can point to comparisons: Why did the United States not support the struggle of the Basques against Spain, which has been going on much longer? Why did they not support Corsicans against France, Scottish nationalists against Britain, the Kurds against Turkey - a violent struggle with deep historic roots, including Western promises to Kurds after World War I? Why did they not support the separatist "Padania" movement that was growing about the same time in northern Italy, seeking separation from the poorer south of Italy - a movement that had a great deal in common with the Slovenian separatist movement? The answer is obvious: the United States does not support separatist movements in countries they consider their allies. The targets are either countries they consider rivals, like Russia or China, or countries that are too weak to resist, and where they can obtain totally dependent client states from the breakup - which is what happened with Yugoslavia. Second there are the simple facts of the matter. History, to start with. Former Yugoslavia was not formed by conquest, but by a voluntary association after World War I as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The Croats and Serbs speak essentially the same south Slavic language, and Slovenian is quite similar. This association was sought by Croatian leaders who wished to leave Austro-Hungarian rule and who actually coined the word "Yugoslavia", meaning land of southern Slavs. Since Serbia already existed as an independent country, Serb leaders were wary of this union, but accepted it under urging from the Western powers, France and Britain. After Tito's death in 1980, Yugoslavia entered an extremely clumsy phase of political transition, which was distorted by severe economic regression caused by the debt crisis. Since Tito's method of rule had been to respond to unrest by decentralization rather than by democratization, the local Communist parties in each republic of the federal state, as well as the autonomous provinces within Serbia, enjoyed considerable autonomy. Rivalry between the party bureaucracies undermined national unity. The dynamic thus tended toward dissolution rather than democratization. This trend was encouraged by outside forces (German and Austrian organizations represented by the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Otto von Habsburg, who was very active in this phase) which supported secession of the parts of Yugoslavia which had belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire before World War I, Croatia and Slovenia. Now, assuming that "self-determination" would lead to dissolution of the federation, there was the crucial issue of how this would be done. The Serbs interpreted the constitution to argue that Yugoslavia was a political union of three peoples - Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, who would have to negotiate the terms of secession. The Slovenes and especially the Croats maintained that the constituent units were the "republics" in the boundaries set for them by Tito during World War II, which left sizeable Serb populations in both Croatia (about 12%) and Bosnia-Herzegovina (a relative majority up until the 1971 census). Germany persuaded the United States and the European Union to accept the Croatian claim without ever seriously considering the Serbian argument. This was unacceptable to the Serb minority in Croatia who had been persecuted by Nazi-sponsored independent Croatia during World War II, and whose "self-determination" was thereby denied. This was the cause of the civil war in Croatia. Both Slovenia and Croatia enjoyed full equality and autonomy within Yugoslavia. In no way could they be considered oppressed minorities. Tito was a Croat as was the last functioning prime minister of Yugoslavia, Ante Markovic, not to mention a disproportionate number of senior officers in the Yugoslav armed forces. As the richest part of Yugoslavia, Slovenia's desire to secede was based almost solely on the desire to "jump the queue" and join the rich EU ahead of the rest of the country, which it succeeded in doing. The Croatian secessionist movement was nationalistic, with strong racist overtones, and was strongly supported by a Croatian diaspora with crucial political influence in Germany and in Washington (in the office of Senator Bob Dole). In the absence of any legal justification for unnegotiated secession, nationalist leaders in both Slovenia and Croatia provoked units of the Yugoslav army stationed in their territory and used the inevitable response as their justification for seceding. This succeeded only because it was supported by Western governments and media - otherwise the Yugoslav army would have held the country together. Instead, the collapsing Yugoslav army effort to preserve the federation, as it was supposed to do, was denounced as a "Serbian invasion". Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic handled this crisis badly, but he did not, as accused, instigate the dissolution of Yugoslavia. You have suggested that there are certain continuities between the policies of the German government and the objectives of the Third Reich in the Balkans. Can you describe those continuities for us? Even before the Third Reich, the government of Kaiser Wilhelm and even more the democratic Weimar Republic supported self-determination of ethnic minorities, and the Federal Republic of Germany continues to do so today, for reasons of national interest and ideology. The "revenge" against Serbia, and detachment of former Austro-Hungarian territories within Yugoslavia, harks back to World War I. Of course, the Third Reich cut Yugoslavia into pieces, and on that point the 1991 German policy was more than disturbingly reminiscent, it was essentially the same. Germany has reasons for wanting to bring Slovenia and Croatia into its own sphere of influence. In a sense I am more critical of Western governments which followed the German policy without bothering or daring to evaluate the situation clearly for themselves. As this turned out to be disastrous, they had to blame the devil Milosevic for everything, in order to cover their own mistakes. Why did the United States so strongly support Bosnian secession? I think this support was the product of a number of factors. One, pointed out by former State Department official George Kenney, was the influence of media reports, in turn heavily influenced by a propaganda campaign run by Ruder Finn public relations agency on behalf of the government of Croatia, and later the Bosnian Muslims, which succeeded in presenting the Serbs as "new Nazis". This public relations campaign was hugely successful with the public and politicians alike. American foreign policy-making can be vulnerable to the propaganda of lobbies, and the Croatian lobby was active and influential. The Bosnian lobby was smaller but very well connected, notably through Mohammed Sacirbey, the American son of a colleague of Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic who chose him to be Bosnia's ambassador to the United States. There was a natural class affinity between American officials like Richard Holbrooke and the Bosnian Muslims, who had been the upper class under the Ottoman Empire and presented themselves as more anti-communist than the Serbs. A second element was that since Germany was emerging as the sponsor of Croatia, the United States could have its own client state by supporting the Bosnian Muslims. Some US leaders thought that siding with the Muslim party in Bosnia would make a good impression in the Muslim world, counterbalancing US support to Israel. The late influential Congressman Tom Lantos, who was chairman of the House foreign affairs committee, called US support for the Bosnian Muslims and Kosovo independence "just a reminder to the predominantly Muslim-led governments in this world" that "the United States leads the way for creation of a predominantly Muslim country in the very heart of Europe." Support to Bosnian Muslims was strongly advocated by the pro-Israel neo-conservatives. It is hard to believe that neo-con guru Richard Perle served as advisor to Muslim leader Izetbegovic at the Dayton peace talks with no private agenda of his own. The Clinton administration found it natural to do a favour to the Afghan mujahidin (which then included Osama bin Laden), whom they had supported and used against the Soviet Union, by helping them fight the Orthodox Christian Serbs in the Bosnian civil war. But perhaps the main cause should be seen in the main effect: to reassert United States supremacy in Europe. The August 1995 NATO bombing "marked a historic development in post-Cold War relations between Europe and the United States", wrote Richard Holbrooke in his memoirs, citing columnist William Pfaff who alone seemed to get the point: "The United States today is again Europe's leader: there is no other." (Richard Holbrooke, To End a War, Random House, 1998, p.101.) By the policy of an "even playing field", the United States created a stalemate between the Bosnian parties which allowed Holbrooke to take charge of what he called "the Bosnian end game" at Dayton. The United States was able to pose as "the indispensable nation". Some have accused you of downplaying or even denying the Srebrenica massacre. How do you respond to such accusations? First of all, I think these accusations are designed primarily to distract public attention from the main focus of my writing on Yugoslavia, and in particular my book, Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions. That focus is political. As the title indicates, my book is not about Srebrenica. It is about the historical and political background, and the deception and self-deception involved in media coverage and Western policy-making that led to the illegal NATO war of aggression in 1999. The only reason I wrote about Srebrenica at all is that I could not very well avoid the subject, but I stated from the start I was not writing about what happened at Srebrenica (on which I claim no special knowledge) but about the political uses of it. I am not a war correspondent but a political analyst. The trouble is that some people do not welcome political analysis of the Balkan conflicts, and use Srebrenica to ban it. If mothers are weeping, how can anyone engage in such a heartless exercise as political analysis? Judging complex events solely on the basis of images and emotions, which are often deceptive, is infantile. But we are living in a period of infantile regression. For instance, the wives and mothers of the men who were killed deserve sympathy, but is their individual grief any greater if their son was one of several hundred or one of several thousand? Why this insistence on a particular number, which has not been clearly proved? Isn't it possible, and even likely, that the genuine grief of mourning women is exploited for political ends? How many people are in a position to know exactly what happened at Srebrenica? Where are the documents, where are the photographs? Yet people who know nothing are ready to consider it scandalous if someone says openly, "I don't know exactly what happened." I do know that from the very start of the Yugoslav tragedy, there were significant massacres of Serb civilians (for instance, in the town of Gospic in Croatia) that were studiously ignored in the West. But I do not care to engage in competitive victimhood. As for Srebrenica, certainly any execution of prisoners is a war crime and deserves punishment, even if the figure of 8,000 is certainly exaggerated, since it includes men who died in ambush while trying to escape, or even men who actually did escape. But whatever the number of victims, a single massacre of military-age men while sparing women and children cannot in my opinion be correctly described as "genocide" - unless the term "genocide" is redefined to fit the single case of Srebrenica. And this is precisely what was done by the International Criminal Tribunal on former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. In order to convict General Radislav Krstic (who was not even present at the scene) of complicity in "genocide", the ICTY judges ruled in August 2001 that killing a large number of Muslim men from Srebrenica was "genocide" because of the "patriarchal" nature of their society. Women and children survivors were too insignificant in such a patriarchal society to matter! This preposterous verdict simply confirmed the obvious fact that ICTY is working for those who set it up, choose its judges and pay its expenses: that is, essentially, NATO. It is there to justify the NATO interpretation of the conflicts in former Yugoslavia, by putting the entire burden of blame on the Serbs. Unless an Orwellian future bans free historical inquiry, I am confident that my critical appraisal of ICTY will be justified by history. Why do you believe NATO carried out its bombing war against Serbia? The essential reason was to save NATO from obsolescence after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, whose supposed threat had been its ostensible raison d'?tre. The United States came up with a new "humanitarian mission", and the large-scale NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 served to prove that NATO could get away with it, without United Nations authorization. This was "the war to start wars". It is regularly cited by apologists as "the good war" which proves that "human rights" constitute the most efficient excuse for aggression. It was indeed a perfect little war, waged safely from the air with all the casualties on the ground, whether Serb or Albanian. How do you view the UK's role in the conflicts of the former Yugoslavia? As absolutely shameful. The British foreign office certainly had experts able to understand the complexities of the Yugoslav situation, and indeed the conservative government hesitated. Lord Carrington and then Lord Owen, if supported, might have brokered an early peace in Bosnia. But Tony Blair preferred to strut the stage of "humanitarian intervention", and most of the left swallowed the wild tale according to which the world's most powerful military alliance was henceforth motivated by sentimental concern for the underdog. What did you make of the trial of Slobodan Milosevic? That trial actually aroused my first admiration for Slobodan Milosevic. He defended himself, and his country, with great courage and intelligence, and successfully disproved most of the charges against him, even though he died before the defence could make its case. The ICTY was set up largely to convict Milosevic, and would surely have found a way to do so regardless of the evidence. His death spared them that trouble. Of course, Western media failed totally to report fairly on the proceedings. You speak of your admiration for Milosevic "defending his country" in the Hague. But is there not a wider and more fundamental sense in which Milosevic's rule was by no means beneficial for Serbia? V. P. Gagnon Jr. has written about how Milosevic used war as a tool against movements for democratic reform, by effectively changing the subject to whether people were pro or anti-Serb at any point where these movements became too strong. Karel Turza and Eric Gordy have written about the deleterious effect that Milosevic's rule had on Serbian society and culture. Little of this speaks of a man worthy of admiration, even from a Serbian perspective. Was Milosovic defending Serbia, or just defending his regime? When I said that Milosevic on trial in The Hague aroused my first admiration for the man, I was obviously making the distinction between Milosevic as President and Milosevic as prisoner of a biased tribunal that had been set up to convict him. However unfortunate his policies as president, he became a victim when he was illegally shipped off to The Hague, in a rather sordid deal between prime minister Zoran Djindjic, who violated Serbian law in the hope of economic rewards, and the NATO powers, who needed the trial in order to justify their 1999 bombing campaign. What is meant by "democratic reforms"? Milosevic did introduce a multi-party system, which is the basic democratic reform. Whatever his faults, it is by no means clear that his political adversaries in the early 1990s would have been better for the Serbian people than he was. Now that Serbia has Western-approved "democratic" governments, major industries have been sold to Western corporations, the media are more uniform than ever, and the economic situation of the majority of the population has worsened considerably. Many people in Serbia who hated Milosevic when he was in office admired his defence at The Hague. His self-defence was automatically a defence of his country, since the totally arbitrary (and unproven) charge of a "joint criminal enterprise" in effect implicated collective guilt, since the alleged enterprise had no defined limits. Little blame for the Balkan wars appears to attach to the Serb side in your account. Yet Bosnian Serb figures such as Vojislav Seselj, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic have stated publicly that there was a drive for a Greater Serbia. Doubtless there have been many attempts to reduce the conflict to nothing more than a case of Serbian aggression, but while correcting for that is it not also important to still leave room for attaching the appropriate level of blame to the Serbian side? Testifying at the Milosevic trial, Vojislav Seselj stated clearly that Milosevic was not in favour of Greater Serbia, and that he had slandered him politically for that very reason, because Seselj himself did favour Greater Serbia. The meaning of "Greater Serbia" is complicated, and I have dealt with it in my book, "Fools' Crusade". But Serbs were divided on the matter, and Milosevic for one did not advocate a "Greater Serbia". Milosevic was competing with politicians such as Vuk Draskovic and Zoran Djindjic, whom the West considers "democratic", but who were far more nationalistic than he was. No Serbian politician could be totally indifferent to Serb populations cut off from Serbia by the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Nevertheless, starting in 1992, Milosevic signed onto a series of potential peace accords that left Serbs outside of shrinking Yugoslavia, and were clearly incompatible with a greater Serbia. I do not presume to attach "appropriate levels of blame" to the various Yugoslav parties. I simply point out certain facts, and the only blame that really interests me is that of the Western powers and especially of the United States. That is my responsibility as an American citizen. It is the United States that exploited the tragedy to strengthen NATO, and the people of Yugoslavia who suffered and are still suffering. Many of our readers will find it hard to accept your expressing admiration for Milosovic. Its well understood that the West portrays its enemies dishonestly (take Saddam's mythical WMD, for example). But to praise the "courage" of a man widely seen (including by those who are no fans of Western power) as having a lot of blood on his hands goes a good deal further than this. Is your choice of words here really appropriate? I am not going to change what I say because many of your readers, as you allege, have a limited capacity to understand the complexities of human character. Of course, all leaders of countries involved in wars can be said to "have blood on their hands". The stereotype of an inhuman Milosevic is a fictional propaganda creation, like the long line of "Hitlers" the West keeps discovering. But supposing the man was utterly ruthless, does that preclude courage? I fear our "humanitarian" age is adopting an unprecedentedly simplistic notion of what people are - either innocent lambs or savage beasts. Look at many of the heroes of ancient tragedy, who were complicated enough to be ruthless and courageous, and often displayed a mixture of good and bad qualities. If we are incapable of recognizing the humanity of our chosen enemies (and Milosevic was a chosen enemy, who actually liked the United States where he had lived as a banker, and never even slightly threatened the West), then there can be no peace in the world. What have been the consequences for the constituent republics of becoming independent states? In general, secession is beneficial to the bureaucrats. Someone who was only a minor official in a large country gets to be Cabinet Minister, or ambassador. So secession was a good thing for members of the bureaucracy in each statelet. It has also been good for a minority who live off crime and corruption. For the rest of the population, it was beneficial primarily to Slovenia, whose leaders succeeded in getting into the European Union ahead of the others. Of course it was not beneficial to the small population of Yugoslavs who were not ethnic Slovenians and found themselves living in Slovenia without any civil status. Croatia has the advantage of strong German support, but so far this has not yielded all the economic benefits hoped for. Most of the Serb population has been driven out, which is of course satisfying to the racist Croat nationalists, and does not seem to disturb the Western leftist multiculturalists. Otherwise, people who once were citizens of an independent, medium-sized European country find themselves confined in small mutually hostile statelets, dependent on outside powers and poorer than before. Outside intervention has served to exacerbate ethnic hatreds, and continues to do so, notably in Bosnia and Kosovo. The political situation of most of the successor states is precarious and further tragedy is almost certain. This interview was conducted and first published by the New Left Project =============================== 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 Tue Mar 16 20:05:44 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2010 21:05:44 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] White House threatens veto on bill strengthening oversight of intelligence activities Message-ID: <2E99026A454049CF9E3B8898BD27C0CB@Upstairs> White House threatens veto on intelligence activities bill By Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, March 16, 2010 The White House has renewed its threat to veto the fiscal 2010 intelligence authorization bill over a provision that would force the administration to widen the circle of lawmakers who are informed about covert operations and other sensitive activities. When the bill passed the House on Feb. 25, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Tex.), hailed it for improving "congressional oversight by strengthening certain disclosure requirements of intelligence activities to the House and Senate intelligence committees." Lawmakers had spent the previous six months working out provisions that the White House still opposes. Under the House plan, which is similar to one passed by the Senate, the White House would have to inform all members of both intelligence committees of the "main features" of activities disclosed in detail to the Gang of Eight -- the speaker and minority leader of the House, the majority and minority leaders of the Senate, and the chairmen and ranking minority members of the Senate and House intelligence committees. In a letter sent to the senior members of the intelligence panels, Office of Management and Budget Director Peter R. Orszag said Gang of Eight notifications are made in only "the most limited of circumstances" affecting "vital interests" of the United States, arguing that the new requirement would "undermine the president's authority and responsibility to protect sensitive national security information." Orszag also opposed a Senate bill provision that required notification of "any change in a covert action," which he described as setting up "unreasonable burdens" on the agencies, particularly the CIA . The House bill also requires notification of intelligence "significant undertakings," a term that Orszag described as "vague and uncertain." Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), ranking minority member of the House intelligence panel, noted that the White House objections were similar to those raised by Republicans, especially regarding notifications provisions. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the Senate panel, said House and Senate staffers were working on the issues and that she thinks a bill can be passed. Orszag wrote that the notification provisions were one of three items in the bills that would draw a veto recommendation from the president's advisers. Another such provision would give the Government Accountability Office legal authority to review practices and operations throughout the intelligence community. The White House contends that broadening the GAO's purview would upset current relations with the office, which already has access to some intelligence activity, and adversely affect oversight relationships between the committees and the community. The provision would also permit any committee of Congress with an arguable claim of jurisdiction over an intelligence activity to request a GAO investigation of that activity. Budgetary issues also drew serious objections. A proposed cut of $60 million in the spending of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, part of the House bill, would have "a serious and disruptive effect" on its operations, Orszag said. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/15/AR2010031503720.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Mar 16 21:50:20 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2010 21:50:20 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The Great Forest Die-off Message-ID: http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2252 15 Mar 2010: Report What's Killing the Great Forests of the American West? Across western North America, huge tracts of forest are dying off at an extraordinary rate, mostly because of outbreaks of insects. Scientists are now seeing such forest die-offs around the world and are linking them to changes in climate. by jim robbins For many years, Diana Six, an entomologist at the University of Montana, planned her field season for the same two to three weeks in July. That's when her quarry - tiny, black, mountain pine beetles - hatched from the tree they had just killed and swarmed to a new one to start their life cycle again. Now, says Six, the field rules have changed. Instead of just two weeks, the beetles fly continually from May until October, attacking trees, burrowing in, and laying their eggs for half the year. And that's not all. The beetles rarely attacked immature trees; now they do so all the time. What's more, colder temperatures once kept the beetles away from high altitudes, yet now they swarm and kill trees on mountaintops. And in some high places where the beetles had a two-year life cycle because of cold temperatures, it's decreased to one year. Such shifts make it an exciting - and unsettling - time to be an entomologist. The growing swath of dead lodgepole and ponderosa pine forest is a grim omen, leaving Six - and many other scientists and residents in the West - concerned that as the climate continues to warm, these destructive changes will intensify. "A couple of degrees warmer could create multiple generations a year," she said, as she chopped off a piece of bark on a dead lodgepole pine to show the galleries of burrowing larvae. "If that happens, I expect it would be a disaster for all of our pine populations." Across western North America, from Mexico to Alaska, forest die-off is occurring on an extraordinary scale, unprecedented in at least the last century-and-a-half - and perhaps much longer. All told, the Rocky Mountains in Canada and the United States have seen nearly 70,000 square miles of forest - an area the size of Washington state - die since 2000. For the most part, this massive die-off is being caused by outbreaks of tree-killing insects, from the ips beetle in the Southwest that has killed pinyon pine, to the spruce beetle, fir beetle, and the major pest - the mountain pine beetle - that has hammered forests in the north. These large-scale forest deaths from beetle infestations are likely a symptom of a bigger problem, according to scientists: warming temperatures and increased stress, due to a changing climate. Although western North America has been hardest hit by insect infestations, sizeable areas of forest in Australia, Russia, France, and other countries have experienced die-offs, most of which appears to have been caused by drought, high temperatures, or both. One recent study collected reports of large-scale forest mortality from around the world. Often, forest death is patchy, and research is difficult because of the large areas involved. But the paper, recently published in Forest Ecology and Management, reported that in a 20,000-square-mile savanna in Australia, nearly a third of the trees were dead. In Russia, there was significant die-off within 9,400 square miles of forest. Much of Siberia has warmed by several degrees Fahrenheit in the past half-century, and hot, dry conditions have led to extreme wildfire seasons in eight of the last 10 years. Russian researchers also are concerned that warmer, dryer conditions will lead to increased outbreaks of the Siberian moth, which can destroy large swaths of Russia's boreal forest. While people in some places have the luxury to doubt whether climate change is real, it's harder to be a doubter in the Rocky Mountains. Glaciers in Glacier National Park and elsewhere are shrinking, winters are warmer and shorter, and the intensity of forest fires is increasing. But the most obvious sign is the red and dead forests that carpet the hills and mountains. They have transformed life in many parts of the Rockies. It has hit home for me on a personal level. Virtually every one of the hundreds of old-growth ponderosa pines on the 15 acres of land where I live near Helena, Montana is dead, and we are surrounded by a valley of dead and dying forest. Most trees have been logged and taken to a pulp mill, where they were turned into cardboard for boxes. University of Montana ecologist Steve Running says warmer temperatures in the Rockies bring spring earlier and fall later, each by about a week, yet precipitation has remained about the same. That translates into a drought, and stressed trees are highly susceptible to beetle infestations. Wintertime minimum temperatures in the 1950s, meanwhile, ranged from 40 F to 50 F below zero. That's risen to the 30-below range, and there are fewer days when minimums are reached. It's not getting cold enough anymore to kill the beetles, which over-winter in their larval stage and survive the milder temperatures because they are filled with glycol, a natural anti-freeze. In addition, the past suppression of fire and the fact that many Western trees are reaching the age at which beetles target them - 80 to 100 years - are also factors in the widespread loss of forests. So the forests across the West are dying, in such large numbers that U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar called it the West's Hurricane Katrina. In Colorado and southern Wyoming, the U.S. Forest Service has created an emergency management team to cut down dead trees around towns and along roads and power lines. Forest Service campgrounds and trails have been closed because of the hazard from dead trees, and communities surrounded by dead forests have drawn up emergency evacuation plans for residents. Large-scale die-offs have occurred in the past. Mountain pine beetles are native to the West and are part of the ecosystem. Lodgepole forests regenerate through large-scale "stand replacing events," which include fire and insects. The die-offs now, though, are on a scale unprecedented since the West was settled and are so big that they are having unusual impacts on ecosystems. The whitebark pine, once largely protected from the beetles because it grew at high altitudes and was shielded by cold, is functionally extinct and may no longer be able to feed grizzly bears and other species that love its high-fat nut. In Mexico, bark beetles are beginning to kill oyamel fir trees in a rare 139,000-acre biosphere preserve where the majority of North America's monarch butterflies travel each fall to spend the winter. So far, about 100 acres in a core area of 33,000 acres have been killed by bark beetles. Tree-killing bugs aren't the only problem. In 2005 Colorado researchers noticed that aspens were suddenly dying in large numbers. That year they found 30,000 acres of dead aspen forest. The next year there were 150,000 acres, and in 2008 it had soared to 553,000. The die-off is called Sudden Aspen Death, or SAD. "It's growing at an exponential rate," said Wayne Shepperd, who researches aspen for the Forest Service. "It's pretty sobering when you see a whole mountainside or whole drainage of aspen forest dead." Groves at low elevations and facing south are dying fastest, and scientists believe the cause is hotter temperatures and drier weather. It's not only killing mature trees, but the root mass as well. An aspen grove is the offspring of a large single underground clonal mass, which sends up shoots. "The whole organism is disappearing and it has profound implications," Shepperd said. "When the roots die, groves that are hundreds or thousands of years old aren't going to be there anymore." If the die-offs continue, the loss of the aspen trees would be a blow to goshawks, songbirds, and a number of other species that find food and refuge in the groves. Perhaps more than anyone, Craig Allen is familiar with these large-scale forest die-offs. A forest ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey's Jemez Mountain Field Station in New Mexico, not only are his office and home surrounded by a pinyon die-off, he also is the lead author of the paper - with 19 other authors -published in Forest Ecology and Management, which sought to document and begin to understand what is happening to forests in North America and around the world as the result of climate change. Coming up with a definitive understanding at this point is impossible, Allen says. Forests are complex, and unfortunately, woefully understudied, and there isn't nearly enough data to draw a conclusion about the reasons behind forest die-offs globally. "There's huge information gaps and uncertainties," says Allen. What contributors were able to do in the paper is collect anecdotal reports of broad-scale forest mortality from around the world. "The point of this paper is to connect the dots, at least the ones we can connect," says Allen. "We can't even tell you for sure if there's more forest mortality. There's not consistent monitoring." In 2005 a strong El Nino caused a dramatic drought in the Amazon. It killed forest across the region and is extremely well documented because so many researchers had existing plots there. "The heart of the biggest rainforest in the world turned from a carbon sink to a carbon source," said Allen. "If you have long-term drought you can bleed a lot carbon into the atmosphere." A lot of beetles can also turn vast tracks of forest from carbon sinks to carbon sources. Take British Columbia, which is ground zero for the mountain pine beetle infestation in North America. Some 53,000 square miles of mature pine forest is dead and the province is projected to lose 80 percent of its mature trees by 2013. The second largest known die-off there occurred in the 1980s and claimed just 2,300 square miles. Bill Wilson - the province's director of Industry, Trade and Economics Research - said he has flown in a plane for hours over the province and seen nothing but dead forest the entire time. In 2008, so much of British Columbia's forests had died they also went from being a net carbon sink to carbon source. Diana Six works in Africa where she has seen other die-offs first-hand. "In Africa where I work, suddenly whole hillsides are dropping dead," she said. "It's happening so fast people are in shock. It's a tragedy." Species include the quiver tree, camel-thorn, and the giant euphorbia, a 30-foot-tall succulent. The causes are not known, but the suspects are hotter and drier weather, or shifting rainfall patterns. All told, the paper that Allen co-authored describes 88 well-documented forest die-offs around the world, going back as far as the 1960s and 1970s, although most are in the 1990s and 2000s. If there was a way to predict die-offs, Allen said, land managers could take preemptive action, such as mechanical thinning or prescribed burning to increase the vigor of forests. What gives researchers pause is that many of these large die-offs have occurred with minimal warming, in just a few years. In the West, for example, the average temperature has warmed on average 1.8 F over the past century. "This is before we put two to four degrees centigrade (3.6 F to 7.2 F) into the system," said Allen, referring to forecasts for warming by the end of this century. Trees across the world are stressed already from fragmentation, air pollution, and other problems, he said. "I don't know how much stress the forests of the world can take," said Allen. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jim Robbins is a veteran journalist based in Helena, Montana. He has written for the New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, and numerous other publications. His fifth book, The Forgotten Forest, about the poorly understood role of trees in the environment, will be published next year by Random House. =============================== 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 Mar 16 23:23:46 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2010 23:23:46 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Fun facts from Texas Message-ID: <05FCE603D65944E38652B4F67CBF6642@agingCHS072729> http://www.harpers.org/subjects/Texas?Event#SubjectOf Number of Texas high schools that offered Bible courses as electives last year: 25 Number of these courses that broke the law by being primarily devotional and sectarian, according to a September study: 22 Amount appropriated by the governor of Texas in June to set up border-watching webcams: $5,000,000 Percentage change last year in the number of stolen cattle recovered in Texas and Oklahoma: +104 Minimum number of ranches in Texas where one can shoot a zebra: 56 Number of U.S. counties where more than a fifth of ?residents? are prison inmates that are in Texas: 10 Minimum number of times a Houston woman stabbed her husband last year : 193 Number of suspensions a Dallas-area high school handed out last fall for dress-code violations : 1,116 Rank of Texas among states in which the largest percentage of citizens lack health insurance : 1 Number of a Texas toddler's burned fingers amputated in 1992 after she was left in a car with her mother's lit cigarette : 9.5 Estimated percentage change since 2000 in acres of Texas recognized as wetlands by the Army Corps of Engineers: -40 Amount the U.S. Air Force will pay a Texas woman this year for mistakenly hitting her home with a dummy bomb: $12,000 Ratio of the average age of those executed in Texas under Bush to the average U.S. life expectancy: 1:2 Percentage of the 145 lawyers in the offices of Houston's U.S. Attorney who were recused from the Enron case in January: 100 Total voting population of a Denton, Texas, tax district when a development plan was approved there in 1996: 1 Estimated year in which El Paso, Texas, will exhaust its current sources of water: 2030 Percentage of the working residents of Del Rio, Texas, who are directly employed in the war on drugs: 20 Amount Houston reimbursed its mayor in January for a course he took in public speaking: $2,900 Years that Mexico spent fighting a Texas death sentence given one of its citizens before his execution last fall: 9 Factor by which Texas's incarceration rate has increased since 1990 for every 1 percent drop in its crime rate: 4 Days by which a Texan's prison sentence for candy-bar theft this year exceeded his sentence for marijuana possession: 550 Number of families in a Texas town who have sued the school district over its adoption of random drug testing: 1 Number of Colt revolvers that a Texas judge repaired during jury selection in a capital-murder trial last fall: 2 Chance that a government execution since 1976 was performed in Texas: 1 in 3 Number of pawnbrokers for every bank in Laredo, Texas: 1.2 Ratio of the average 1850 price in Texas of a healthy male slave to that of 200 acres of prime farmland: 1:1 Percentage of eligible Texans who voted for George W. Bush for governor in 1994 and 1998, respectively: 27, 22 Portion of Texas industrial plants operating under ?grandfathered? emissions rules that predate 1971's Clean Air Act: 1/2 Chance that a U.S. juvenile offender on death row is in Texas: 1 in 3 Chance that a Texan living below the poverty line receives welfare: 1 in 10 Federal anti-poverty funds granted Texas since 1996 that have not been spent: $149,000,000 Maximum amount of time that a recent Texas bill proposed holding suspects before assigning a lawyer, in days: 20 Number of death sentences upheld by Texas courts since 1990 for men whose lawyers slept during their trials: 3 Number of Texas and California counties colonized by African ?killer? bees since 1994: 51 Percentage of the proceeds of an AIDS fund-raising bike ride across Texas last fall used to cover ?production costs?: 85 Number of months after the Civil War ended that slaves in Texas were told of their emancipation: 2 Number of years that Texas has observed a ?Juneteenth? state holiday to commemorate the day its slaves were told they were free: 19 Percentage by which Jasper County, Texas, raised property taxes this year to finance the murder trial of John William King: 4.5 Number of times that a white man has been executed for killing a black man in Texas since 1860: 0 Rank of Jos?, among the most popular names given boys born in California or Texas last year: 1 Fee that an anonymous family has paid Texas A&M University to clone their pet collie mix, Missy: $2,300,000 Percentage change in the number of Texans favoring the death penalty since the execution of Karla Faye Tucker: -21 =============================== 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 Mar 17 00:30:01 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2010 01:30:01 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] A historoy of how Palestinians ended up on a tiny fraction of the land once recognized as theirs Message-ID: Tuesday, Mar 16, 2010 The unmaking of the Palestinian nation How did Palestinians end up on a tiny fraction of the land once recognized as theirs? By Juan Cole For more Juan Cole, visit his blog Informed Comment. On March 10, I posted on the humiliation heaped on Vice President Joe Biden by the Israeli government of far-right Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu. Biden went to Israel intending to help kick off indirect negotiations between Netanyahu and Palestine Authority president Mahmoud Abbas. Biden had no sooner arrived than the Israelis announced that they would build 1600 new households on Palestinian territory that they had unilaterally annexed to Jerusalem. Since expanding Israeli colonization of Palestinian land had been the sticking point causing Abbas to refuse to engage in negotiations, and, indeed, to threaten to resign, this step was sure to scuttle the very talks Biden had come to inaugurate. And it did. The tiff between the U.S. and Israel is less important that the worrisome growth of tension between Palestinians and Israelis as the Israelis have claimed more and more sites sacred to the Palestinians as well. There is talk of a third Intifada or Palestinian uprising. As part of my original posting, I mirrored a map of modern Palestinian history that has the virtue of showing graphically what has happened to the Palestinians politically and territorially in the past century. Andrew Sullivan then mirrored the map from my site, which set off a lot of thunder and noise among anti-Palestinian writers like Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, but shed very little light. The map is useful and accurate. It begins by showing the British Mandate of Palestine as of the mid-1920s. The British conquered the Ottoman districts that came to be the Mandate during World War I. (The Ottoman sultan threw in with Austria and Germany against Britain, France and Russia, mainly out of fear of Russia.) But because of the rise of the League of Nations and the influence of President Woodrow Wilson's ideas about self-determination, Britain and France could not decently simply make their new, previously Ottoman territories into simple colonies. The League of Nations awarded them "Mandates." Britain got Palestine, France got Syria (which it made into Syria and Lebanon), Britain got Iraq.The League of Nations Covenant spelled out what a Class A Mandate (i.e. territory that had been Ottoman) was: Article 22. Certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognised subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory [i.e., a Western power] until such time as they are able to stand alone. The wishes of these communities must be a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory. That is, the purpose of the later British Mandate of Palestine, of the French Mandate of Syria, of the British Mandate of Iraq, was to 'render administrative advice and assistance" to these peoples in preparation for their becoming independent states, an achievement that they were recognized as not far from attaining. The Covenant was written before the actual Mandates were established, but Palestine was a Class A Mandate and so the language of the Covenant was applicable to it. The territory that formed the British Mandate of Iraq was the same territory that became independent Iraq, and the same could have been expected of the British Mandate of Palestine. (Even class B Mandates like Togo have become nation-states, but the poor Palestinians are just stateless prisoners in colonial cantons). The first map thus shows what the League of Nations imagined would become the state of Palestine. The economist published an odd assertion that the Negev Desert was 'empty' and should not have been shown in the first map. But it wasn't and isn't empty; Palestinian Bedouin live there, and they and the desert were recognized by the League of Nations as belonging to the Mandate of Palestine, a state-in-training. The Mandate of Palestine also had a charge to allow for the establishment of a 'homeland' in Palestine for Jews (because of the 1917 Balfour Declaration), but nobody among League of Nations officialdom at that time imagined it would be a whole and competing territorial state. There was no prospect of more than a few tens of thousands of Jews settling in Palestine, as of the mid-1920s. (They are shown in white on the first map, refuting those who mysteriously complained that the maps alternated between showing sovereignty and showing population.) As late as the 1939 British White Paper, British officials imagined that the Mandate would emerge as an independent Palestinian state within 10 years. In 1851, there had been 327,000 Palestinians (yes, the word "Filistin" was current then) and other non-Jews, and only 13,000 Jews. In 1925, after decades of determined Jewish immigration, there were a little over 100,000 Jews, and there were 765,000 mostly Palestinian non-Jews in the British Mandate of Palestine. For historical demography of this area, see Justin McCarthy's painstaking calculations; it is not true, as sometimes is claimed, that we cannot know anything about population figures in this region. See also his journal article, reprinted at this site. The Palestinian population grew because of rapid population growth, not in-migration, which was minor. The common allegation that Jerusalem had a Jewish majority at some point in the 19th century is meaningless. Jerusalem was a small town in 1851, and many pious or indigent elderly Jews from Eastern Europe and elsewhere retired there because of charities that would support them. In 1851, Jews were only about 4 percent of the population of the territory that became the British Mandate of Palestine some 70 years later. And, there had been few adherents of Judaism, just a few thousand, from the time most Jews in Palestine adopted Christianity and Islam in the first millennium CE all the way until the 20th century. In the British Mandate of Palestine, the district of Jerusalem was largely Palestinian. The rise of the Nazis in the 1930s impelled massive Jewish emigration to Palestine, so by 1940 there were over 400,000 Jews there amid over a million Palestinians. The second map shows the United Nations partition plan of 1947, which awarded Jews (who only then owned about 6 percent of Palestinian land) a substantial state alongside a much reduced Palestine. Although apologists for the Zionist movement say that the Zionists accepted this partition plan and the Arabs rejected it, that is not entirely true. Zionist leader David Ben Gurion noted in his diary when Israel was established that when the U.S. had been formed, no document set out its territorial extent, implying that the same was true of Israel. We know that Ben Gurion was an Israeli expansionist who fully intended to annex more land to Israel, and by 1956 he attempted to add the Sinai and would have liked southern Lebanon. So the Zionist "acceptance" of the UN partition plan did not mean very much beyond a happiness that their initial starting point was much better than their actual land ownership had given them any right to expect. The third map shows the status quo after the Israeli-Palestinian civil war of 1947-1948. It is not true that the entire Arab League attacked the Jewish community in Palestine or later Israel on behalf of the Palestinians. As Avi Shlaim has shown, Jordan had made an understanding with the Zionist leadership that it would grab the West Bank, and its troops did not mount a campaign in the territory awarded to Israel by the UN. Egypt grabbed Gaza and then tried to grab the Negev Desert, with a few thousand badly trained and equipped troops, but was defeated by the nascent Israeli army. Few other Arab states sent any significant number of troops. The total number of troops on the Arab side actually on the ground was about equal to those of the Zionist forces, and the Zionists had more esprit de corps and better weaponry. The final map shows the situation today, which springs from the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank in 1967 and then the decision of the Israelis to colonize the West Bank intensively (a process that is illegal in the law of war concerning occupied populations). There is nothing inaccurate about the maps at all, historically. Goldberg maintained that the Palestinians' "original sin" was rejecting the 1947 UN partition plan. But since Ben Gurion and other expansionists went on to grab more territory later in history, it is not clear that the Palestinians could have avoided being occupied even if they had given away willingly so much of their country in 1947. The first original sin was the contradictory and feckless pledge by the British to sponsor Jewish immigration into their Mandate in Palestine, which they wickedly and fantastically promised would never inconvenience the Palestinians in any way. It was the same kind of original sin as the French policy of sponsoring a million colons in French Algeria, or the French attempt to create a Christian-dominated Lebanon where the Christians would be privileged by French policy. The second original sin was the refusal of the United States to allow Jews to immigrate in the 1930s and early 1940s, which forced them to go to Palestine to escape the monstrous, mass-murdering Nazis. The map attracted so much ire and controversy not because it is inaccurate but because it clearly shows what has been done to the Palestinians, which the League of Nations had recognized as not far from achieving statehood in its Covenant. Their statehood and their territory has been taken from them, and they have been left stateless, without citizenship and therefore without basic civil and human rights. The map makes it easy to see this process. The map had to be stigmatized and made taboo. But even if that marginalization of an image could be accomplished, the squalid reality of Palestinian statelessness would remain, and the children of Gaza would still be being malnourished by the deliberate Israeli policy of blockading civilians. The map just points to a powerful reality; banishing the map does not change that reality. Goldberg, according to Spencer Ackerman, says that he will stop replying to Andrew Sullivan, for which Ackerman is grateful, since, he implies, Goldberg is a propagandistic hack who loves to promote wars on flimsy pretenses. Matthew Yglesias also has some fun at Goldberg's expense. People like Goldberg never tell us what they expect to happen to the Palestinians in the near and medium future. They don't seem to understand that the status quo is untenable. They are like militant ostriches, hiding their heads in the sand while lashing out with their hind talons at anyone who stares clear-eyed at the problem, characterizing us as bigots. As if that old calumny has any purchase for anyone who knows something serious about the actual views of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu or Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, more bigoted persons than whom would be difficult to find. Indeed, some of Israel's current problems with Brazil come out of Lieberman's visit there last summer; I was in Rio then and remember the distaste with which the multi-cultural, multi-racial Brazilians viewed Lieberman, whom some openly called a racist. http://www.salon.com/news/israel/index.html?story=/opinion/feature/2010/03/16/palestine_history -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 85933 bytes Desc: not available URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Mar 17 22:15:40 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2010 22:15:40 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] San Patricio / St. Pat's Day and the New Immigrants Message-ID: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/17/opinion/17wed4.html Editorial San Patricio Published: March 16, 2010 On this day of all days in the Irish-American calendar, when ethnic pride swells, let's raise a toast: Here's to the Irish, and here's to the rest of us. May we never forget where we came from. Nearly all of us were Mexicans once. That is: the new immigrants, poor and reviled, propelled by hope and hunger into America's prickly embrace. What brings this juxtaposition to mind is "San Patricio," a new album from Paddy Moloney of the great Irish traditionalist band the Chieftains. It commemorates a historical footnote: the San Patricio battalion of Irish-immigrant soldiers who deserted the United States Army and fought for Mexico in the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. They picked the losing side, were captured, executed or branded as traitors, and then forgotten, except by Mexicans. Mr. Moloney, a musician of restless curiosity, saw it as a tale of tragedy and loss, but also a chance for creative collision. "If the Irish were there, there would most certainly have been music," he says. The same goes for the Mexicans. He invited Irish, Mexican and American musicians to play and sing, to see what would happen. What happened was not all dolorous lamentation, though there is some of that. The rest is joy, thoroughly Mexican yet utterly Irish, carried aloft by tin whistles, skin drums, pipes, harps, guitars and stomping feet. It's a mix you've never heard, but eerily familiar. Listen to the classic "Canci?n Mixteca," sung in Spanish by the Mexican supergroup Los Tigres del Norte, accompanied by accordion, bajo sexto, tin whistle and uilleann pipes: - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJM2Hd_ET5c "How far I am from the land where I was born! Immense longing invades my thoughts, and when I see myself as alone and sad as a leaf in the wind, I want to cry. I want to die of sorrow." That old song, woven into the Mexican soul, is as Irish as it gets. And it's an American song, too. We are all people who have lost our land in one sad way and found another. Whether we lament and celebrate in a pub or cantina, whether our tricolor flag has a cactus on it or not, we are closer to one another than we remember. =============================== 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 Thu Mar 18 00:15:48 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 2010 01:15:48 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Vatican responds to sex abuse scandals by letting its official exorcist speak" It's Satan's fault Message-ID: "I don't want to read too much into it here, but did the honorary president of the International Association of Exorcists actually just sort of suggest that if some priest in Rio is sodomizing his altar boys, it might be my fault because I have a job? Cripes, you eat one lousy piece of fruit from the tree of knowledge and you get blamed for everything." Wednesday, Mar 17, 2010 11:14 EDT Vatican unleashes exorcist for campaign of crazy Rome responds to sex abuse scandals by letting its official Satan fighter speak. Turns out it's Satan's fault By Mary Elizabeth Williams When you're one of the most powerful institutions in the world and you've got an escalating series of sex abuse scandals erupting in such far-flung locales as Ireland, Germany, Brazil and beyond on a near daily basis, how do you even begin to do damage control? If you're the Catholic Church, maybe you say you're going to investigate. You issue a few letters. And then just to cover all your bases, you do a little Satan blaming. In a bold and arguably wack move, the Vatican's normally press-shy exorcist Don Gabriele Amorth has been granting interviews left and right lately, and they are a treasure trove of WTF moments. You say you hadn't been aware the Vatican even had an official exorcist? Thought that stuff was just for Linda Blair movies? That's likely because, prior to last week, the Vatican had permitted its exorcist to grant one interview in the entire last century. Now, suddenly he's doing the rounds like he's got a new rom-com with Gerard Butler opening Friday. Speaking to La Republica last week, Amorth, who in fact does have a new book, "Memoirs of an Exorcist," to shill, said, "When one speaks of 'the smoke of Satan' in the holy rooms, it is all true - including these latest stories of violence and pedophilia." A few days later, he told the UK Times, "All evil is due to the intervention of the Devil, including pedophilia." He also added that contemporary culture has "given in to the Evil One. You see it in the lack of faith, the empty churches, the collapse of the family. Compare the world of today to when I was a boy in Modena: families and parish communities were strong, women did not go out to work." I don't want to read too much into it here, but did the honorary president of the International Association of Exorcists actually just sort of suggest that if some priest in Rio is sodomizing his altar boys, it might be my fault because I have a job? Cripes, you eat one lousy piece of fruit from the tree of knowledge and you get blamed for everything. But he didn't stop there. Amorth then took his world publicity tour to the big time - granting an on camera interview Tuesday on CNN, he helpfully explained that pedophiles are "not possessed by the devil, they're tempted by the devil. They don't need exorcism; they need to be converted to God. They need to confess, they need true penance, true repentance." I'm someone who self-identifies as a Catholic, who believes we shouldn't judge Christianity by its most evil elements any more than we would do likewise for any political, social or educational system we hold dear. My Catholic upbringing taught me kindness, forgiveness and non-materialism. I believe I can be outraged by the crimes of individuals - and their perpetuation by an institution looking out for its own best interests - and still find worth in a spiritual philosophy that would never tolerate that BS for one minute. All of which is my way of saying - I'm no Church basher, and I'm quite confident Don Gabriele Amorth is NUTS. At least Amorth didn't completely insult the planet by suggesting that pedophila can be waved away with a little holy water and some incantations, any more than it can by transferring the offender to another parish. You likewise won't find too many people who'd disagree that confession and repentance are long, long overdue here. But that's just for starters. Until the Vatican gets it through its thick skull that sexual abuse isn't a sin but a crime, isn't a moral weakness but a dangerous pathology, it's going to continue putting up with predators within its ranks, thinking they can say they're sorry and make it all go away. It will go on holding the devil responsible for its own worst acts. And it will continue condemning its youngest and most vulnerable members to hell on earth. http://www.salon.com/life/sexual_abuse/index.html?story=/mwt/feature/2010/03/17/catholic_exorcist_blames_satan -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Wed Mar 17 23:43:53 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 2010 00:43:53 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Israel Reject U.S. Construction Demands, Expressed Anger over Public upbraiding of Netanyahu Message-ID: <7B055A2F818C4C69BDF5D14FF0F36D38@Upstairs> Israel Objects to U.S. Construction Demands Dan Balilty/Associated Press Israeli undercover police officers detained Palestinians during clashes in East Jerusalem on Tuesday. By ETHAN BRONNER Published: March 16, 2010 JERUSALEM - The discord between the United States and Israel over Jewish building in East Jerusalem deepened Tuesday with Israeli officials saying they would reject demands by Washington and expressing anger over the public upbraiding of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by the Obama administration. Related a.. Israel Feeling Rising Anger From the U.S. (March 16, 2010) b.. Enlarge This Image Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times Palestinians wearing masks took part Tuesday in disturbances in East Jerusalem, which they view as the capital of a future state. Enlarge This Image Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times Israeli police officers arrested a Palestinian stone thrower just outside the walls of Jerusalem's Old City on Tuesday. On a day of scattered disturbances by Palestinians in East Jerusalem, news emerged that Israel was moving ahead with a second building project there. A notice on the Web site of the Israel Lands Authority invited bids on construction of 309 new homes in the Jewish suburb of Neve Yaakov, in northeast Jerusalem. A spokesman for the Jerusalem municipality said building and planning across the city were moving ahead. "For us, it is business as usual," the spokesman, Stephan Miller, said. In the disturbances, several hundred Palestinian youths protesting Israeli control and construction in East Jerusalem set tires and garbage ablaze. The police responded with tear gas and rubber bullets. About 10 people were seriously injured and about 60 arrested, the police said. The Palestinians want East Jerusalem for their future capital. Israeli officials also grappled with a storm of American anger. The Obama administration's Middle East envoy, George J. Mitchell, said Tuesday that he would not come here this week as originally scheduled, meaning indirect peace talks with the Palestinians are now officially delayed. In Washington, pro-Israel activists sought help from friends in Congress and elsewhere. "They are demanding that Jews not be allowed to build in East Jerusalem," Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Israel Radio. "We cannot bar only Jews from building in a certain section of the city. Can you imagine if they told Jews in New York they could not build or buy in Queens?" Since Israel has annexed East Jerusalem, Israeli officials say, a request to scrap Jewish building projects there is both legally unfeasible and a betrayal of the mandate of the current government, elected on a platform of keeping Jerusalem united under Israeli sovereignty. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton asked Mr. Netanyahu in a telephone call last Friday to respond to a number of demands, but Israeli officials made clear Tuesday that there would be no quick reply. In public, both sides tried to smooth over their differences. In Washington, Mrs. Clinton sought to dampen reports of a diplomatic crisis, saying the relationship between Israel and the United States was not in danger. "We have an absolute commitment to Israel's security," she said at a news conference. "We have a close, unshakable bond between the United States and Israel." In Jerusalem, Mr. Netanyahu issued a statement saying that Israel "appreciates and respects the warm words" from Mrs. Clinton on "the deep bond between the U.S. and Israel, and on the U.S. commitment to Israel's security." But serious disagreements remained. Mrs. Clinton said Washington expected action from Israel, and a crucial American demand is that Israel neither promote nor permit "provocative" acts, meaning anything that would disturb the atmosphere as Palestinians and Israelis prepare for the indirect peace talks. That would include new building projects. When Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was here last week, the government announced plans for 1,600 new Jewish housing units for East Jerusalem, setting off the tumult. Because of other Israeli steps that the Americans considered provocative - declaring two sites in the occupied West Bank as Israeli heritage sites, announcing other large East Jerusalem housing construction projects and proposing a plan to remake an entire Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem - the announcement last week was viewed with particular severity. Mr. Netanyahu said he had been taken by surprise by the housing announcement and apologized for its timing. He thought the problem was behind him after Mr. Biden left on Thursday. But President Obama and his aides say that Mr. Netanyahu should have been in control of the construction process and should have done what was needed to stop it, according to officials in Jerusalem and Washington. Israeli officials, however, say that the Obama administration misread the situation, and that stopping building in Jerusalem was never an option. "We must tell the American government that there are things we can do and things we cannot do," said Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, reflecting the government's thinking. "Freezing building in East Jerusalem is one of those things we cannot do." Mr. Netanyahu has said Jerusalem's future can be a topic of negotiation with the Palestinians, but the Israelis say that at no time did the government agree to modify its policy on Jerusalem as part of indirect talks. As Mr. Netanyahu said in Parliament on Monday, "No government of Israel for the last 40 years has agreed to place restrictions on building in Jerusalem." Israeli officials also say that some Obama administration officials have been implying that Mr. Netanyahu had been acting in bad faith. David Axelrod, a top White House official, said on television on Sunday that the housing project announcement during the Biden visit "seemed calculated to undermine" the so-called proximity talks, in which American officials plan to shuttle between Israeli leaders in Jerusalem and Palestinian leaders in Ramallah, in the West Bank. Israeli officials took umbrage at the suggestion that the announcement was aimed at sabotaging the talks, which they say they have been pressing to start for months. But government opponents say that the way East Jerusalem building has been proceeding is not random. As evidence, they cite the latest announcement for the suburb of Neve Yaakov, which was dated March 11 but came to light on Tuesday when it was pointed out by the leftist group Peace Now. "The Netanyahu government is trying to make Jerusalem indivisible so that it will not be possible to reach a solution based on two states for two peoples," Hagit Ofran of Peace Now charged. The current disagreement echoes one last year. The Obama administration demanded a complete settlement freeze in the West Bank, while the Israelis said it was impossible and was a betrayal of earlier agreements between Washington and Jerusalem. Ultimately, the Americans accepted a partial, 10-month moratorium on settlement building that excluded East Jerusalem. It was a compromise for both sides. Isabel Kershner contributed reporting from Jerusalem, and Mark Landler from Washington. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/17/world/middleeast/17mideast.html?ref=todayspaper -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 57947 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 17720 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 17840 bytes Desc: not available URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Thu Mar 18 14:14:00 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:14:00 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Fw: Did you know AT&T gave $22,500 to Joe Lieberman? Message-ID: <412F6411189A46F3ADA74CAE2E03A188@Upstairs> ----- Original Message ----- From: Michael Kieschnick, CREDO Mobile To: Henry Hain III Sent: Thursday, March 18, 2010 8:36 AM Subject: Did you know AT&T gave $22,500 to Joe Lieberman? CREDO Specials: Free phones and 25% off your monthly fee for 12 months. View this message as a web page | Need to unsubscribe? Does your phone company support Joe Lieberman? Or progressive change? 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Verizon Wireless is a trademark of Verizon Trademark Services, LLC and is not associated with CREDO. Questions? Send us an e-mail or write us at: 101 Market Street, Suite 700, San Francisco, CA 94105. This message was sent to (hain at antcolbks.com). We hope you like hearing from us, but you can unsubscribe or change your subscription details at any time. View our privacy policy. Add us to your address book: credo.service at credomobile.com. ?2010 CREDO This is an ad. credomobile.com | workingassets.com | credoaction.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Thu Mar 18 14:31:40 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:31:40 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] University of California faculty support arrested Muslim students Message-ID: <00A8800C06F34B09A83EBF1935848BA1@Upstairs> "MuzzleWatch" a.. University of California faculty support arrested Muslim students If you keep heckling the Israeli ambassador to the US during a talk at UC Irvine, the school has a right to throw you out of the room. And if you violate school standards, they have a right to take you to task on such violations as long as they consistently apply the standards to all students. Any student protester knows this and makes the choice to risk those outcomes when they choose disruption over, say, really uncomfortable questions. But do they have the right to arrest you? Amazingly, 11 Muslim students at UC Irvine weren't handed the usual disciplinary action for violating student codes (they each got up, made a statement and then would walk to the door to be escorted out by police). NO, they were actually arrested. I remember doing almost the exact same thing when I was that age- a bunch of liberal students repeatedly interrupted former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft at a campus talk-only we weren't so mad. People we knew hadn't been killed or imprisoned. We recited Jabberwocky and got hauled out. Our punishment? Nothing. Just change the names: "11 members of the Young Israel Alliance were arrested for heckling the Palestinian ambassador at UC Berkeley today." No matter who it is, there's something not right here and the answer to the over-reaction is likely outside pressure (which students who are genuinely concerned about Jewish-Muslim relations report tends to polarize and hinder, not help.) Apparently, conservative students who committed a similar disruption last year got very different treatment. No arrest for them. LA Jewish Journal reports in: UC Riverside Faculty Voice Support for Protesters Against Oren Faculty at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), joined voices at UC campuses statewide in support of 11 students arrested for heckling Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren during his Feb. 8 speech at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). Thirty-one professors and graduate students from several UCR departments signed a "Statement on Free Speech, Palestine and the 'UC Irvine 11,' " drafted by Dylan Rodriguez, chair of the university's Ethnic Studies department. The March 11 pronouncement calls on the UC administration and the Orange County district attorney's office to drop disciplinary and punitive action against eight UCI and three UCR students, which it calls "discriminatory, cynical, and politically and intellectually repressive." The UCI students have been charged with violations of the student codes of conduct. Officials at UCR could not confirm whether action would be taken against their students. "We believe that this is a cynical and opportunistic attempt at political repression that reflects the racial criminalization of young Arab, Middle Eastern and Muslim men and women as actual or potential 'terrorists.' By way of contrast, Ethnic Studies faculty have taught courses in Ethnic Studies in which classroom proceedings were disrupted by students with opposing views, and the university administration did not pursue any disciplinary or punitive measures against them. In fact, we have sometimes been told that such disruptions are an expression of academic free speech," the statement said. Rodriguez said the statement was intended to take issue with the tendency, since at least 2001, to affiliate Muslim men with terrorism within popular discourse, as well as to challenge what he sees as selective enforcement of codes of conduct by university administrators. "People protesting is something to be expected," he said, noting that UCR administrators did not take disciplinary action against what he called "conservative" student protesters following a similar incident last fall. "When people get selectively subjugated to enforcement of codes of conduct, it has a chilling affect on political discussion and freedom." It remains to be seen whether UC Irvine administrators can prove that this is a routine response to such disruptions, or exceptional treatment consistent with our undeniable and absolutely shameful criminalization of Muslims and Arab Americans. Meanwhile, to his credit, Michael Oren has offered to come back and have a dialogue with students. I hope the arrested students, some of whom lost close relatives during the attack on Gaza, will take him up on his offer. I really do. It would take an incredible amount of courage and character to sit down face to face with a man who defends a massive military attack that killed your family members and destroyed schools and hospitals. If I were in their place, I'm not sure I would have that kind of inner strength. But what a meeting it could be. Related articles a.. Israeli ambassador offers to return to UC Irvine (seattletimes.nwsource.com) b.. Zionist group asks donors to avoid UC Irvine (seattletimes.nwsource.com) c.. 11 arrested during Israeli ambassador's talk (seattletimes.nwsource.com) More Recent Articles a.. Reut Institute report author lies about Naomi Klein b.. Omar Barghouti asks Jewish Federation to a debate on BDS c.. San Francisco Jewish Federation officially excommunicates large swath of Jewish population d.. Reframing myths and reality e.. Think tank tells Israeli government to declare war on peace groups -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Mar 18 14:45:09 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:45:09 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Francis Boyle: The Great Irish Famine Was Genocide Message-ID: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18156 Global Research March 16, 2010 The Great Irish Famine Was Genocide by Prof. Francis Boyle Some controversy has surrounded the use of the word "genocide" with regard to the Great Irish Famine of 160 years ago. But this controversy has its source in an apparent misunderstanding of the meaning of genocide. No, the British government did not inflict on the Irish the abject horrors of the Nazi Holocaust. But the definition of "genocide" reaches beyond such ghastly behavior to encompass other reprehensible acts designed to destroy a people. As demonstrated by the following legal analysis, the Famine was genocide within the meaning of both United States and International law. The United States Government is party to the 1948 Convention On The Prevention And Punishment of the Crime of Genocide ("Genocide Convention"). As a Treaty of the United States , the Genocide Convention is therefore "the Supreme Law of the land" under Article VI of the U.S. Constitution. The U.S. Government has also passed implementing legislation which substantially adopts the Genocide Convention and makes any violation of the Convention punishable under federal law. 18 U.S.C. ? 1901. Article II of the Genocide Convention provides: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within a group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. (emphasis supplied) >From 1845-50, The British government pursued a policy of mass starvation in Ireland with the intent to destroy in substantial part the national, ethnical and racial group known as the Irish People. This British policy caused serious bodily and mental harm to the Irish People within the meaning of Genocide Convention Article II(b). This British policy also deliberately inflicted on the Irish People conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction within the meaning of Article II(c) of the Convention. Therefore, from 1845-50 the British government knowingly pursued a policy of mass starvation in Ireland which constituted acts of Genocide against the Irish People within the meaning of Article II(b) and (c) of the 1948 Genocide Convention. While there are many legitimate subjects of debate surrounding the Famine, there is no doubt that the British Government committed genocide against the Irish People. This particular "debate" should therefore come to an end. (See Irish Echo, Feb.26-March 4, 1997 at page 7 for the list of 125 distinguished signatories) Francis Boyle is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Francis Boyle - http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=listByAuthor&authorFirst=Francis&authorName=Boyle =============================== 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 Thu Mar 18 20:34:19 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 2010 21:34:19 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Burmese democracy activists considered terrorists by US Message-ID: <0F8442A6C638413381E6C6DD14168E58@Upstairs> Very long, but worth the trip Mother Jones March/ April 2010 For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question Living with the crazy, fearless young men who risk life and limb to document Burma's genocide. - By Mac McClelland .... "IMAGINE, FOR A moment, that Texas had managed to secede from the union, and that you live there, in the sovereign Republic of Texas. Imagine that shortly after independence, a cadre of old, paranoid, greedy men who believed in a superior military caste took over your newly autonomous nation in a coup. Your beloved president, who had big dreams of prosperity and Texan unity, whom you believed in, was shot, and now the army runs your country. It has direct or indirect control over all the businesses. It spends 0.3 percent of GDP on health care, and uses your oil and natural gas money to buy weapons that Russia, Pakistan, and North Korea have been happy to provide. It sends your rice and beans to India and China, while your countrymen starve. There is no free press, and gatherings of more than five people are illegal. If you are arrested, a trial, much less legal representation, is not guaranteed. In the event of interrogation, be prepared to crouch like you're riding a motorbike for hours or be hung from the ceiling and spun around and around and around, or burned with cigarettes, or beaten with a rubber rod. They might put you in a ditch with a dead body for six days, lock you in a room with wild, sharp-beaked birds, or make you stand to your neck in a cesspool full of maggots that climb into your nose and ears and mouth. If you do manage to stay out of the prisons, where activists and dissidents have been rotting for decades, you will be broke and starving. Your children have a 10 percent chance of dying before they reach their fifth birthday, and a 32 percent chance they'll be devastatingly malnourished if they're still alive. What's more, you and 50 million countrymen are trapped inside your 268,000-square-mile Orwellian nightmare with some 350,000 soldiers. They can snatch people-maybe your kid-off the street and make them join the army. They can grab you as you're going out to buy eggs and make you work construction on a new government building or road-long, hard hours under the grueling sun for days or weeks without pay-during which you'll have to scavenge for food. You'll do all this at gunpoint, and any break will be rewarded with a pistol-whipping. Your life is roughly equivalent to a modern-day Burmese person's. Now imagine that you belong to a distinct group, Dallasites, or something, that never wanted to be part of the Republic in the first place, that wanted to either remain part of the United States, which had treated you just fine, or, failing that, become your own free state within the Republic of Texas, since you already had your own infrastructure and culture. Some Dallasites have, wisely or unwisely, taken up arms to battle the Texas military government, and in retaliation whole squads of that huge army have, for decades, been dedicated to terrorizing your city. You and your fellow Dallasites are regularly conscripted into slavery, made to walk in front of the army to set off land mines that they-and your own insurgents-have planted, or carry 100-pound loads of weaponry while being severely beaten until you're crippled or die. If you're so enslaved, you might accompany the soldiers as they march into your friends' neighborhoods and set them on fire, watch them shoot at fleeing inhabitants as they run, capturing any stragglers. If you're one of those stragglers, and you're a woman, or a girl five or older, prepare to be raped, most likely gang-raped, and there's easily a one-in-four chance you'll then be killed, possibly by being shot, possibly through your vagina, possibly after having your breasts hacked off. If you're a man, maybe you'll be hung by your wrists and burned alive. Maybe a soldier will drown you by filling a plastic bag with water and tying it over your head, or stretch you between two trees and use you as a hammock, or cut off your nose, pull out your eyes, and then stab you in both ears before killing you, or string you up by your shoulders and club you now and again for two weeks, or heat up slivers of bamboo and push them into your urethra, or tie a tight rope between your dick and your neck for a while before setting your genitals on fire, or whatever else hateful, armed men and underage boys might dream up when they have orders to torment, and nothing else to do. And though you've been sure for decades that the United States can't possibly let this continue, it has invested in your country's oil and will not under any circumstances cross China, which is your country's staunch UN defender and economic ally, so you really need to accept that America is decidedly not coming to save you. Nobody is. Now your life is pretty much equivalent to a modern-day Burmese Karen's......" http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/02/mac-mcclelland-burma-genocide-karen -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Mar 18 21:57:38 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 18 Mar 2010 21:57:38 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [Canada] Protect Lake Winnipeg's East Side Boreal Forest Message-ID: <11D5100C722A4EBAB3E015FE94BA69FE@agingCHS072729> ----- Original Message ----- From: Susanne McCrea To: friends Sent: Thursday, March 18, 2010 5:49 PM Subject: [fgn] Action Aert - Protect the East Side Boreal Check out new website www.heartoftheboreal.ca and sign the action alert to protect the East Side boreal today. Groups back Manitoba decision on boreal protection Announcing Heart of the Boreal action alert/website For Immediate Release: March 17, 2010 Canadian, Manitoban and U.S. organizations have joined together in an action alert to urge the Manitoba Government to stand firm on its commitment to not construct the BiPole III hydro transmission line on the east side of Lake Winnipeg and to protect millions of hectares of unique boreal forest as an UNESCO World Heritage Site (WHS). The Boreal Forest Network (BFN), Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS), the Wilderness Committee (WC) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) are calling on the public, in Canada and the United States, to tell the province to continue to say no to an industrial transmission line on the east side and to move forward with the creation of a World Heritage Site. The Manitoba based groups launched a joint website today at heartoftheboreal.ca to celebrate the ecological and cultural attributes of the majestic east side lands and their peoples. To sign the action alert go to: take action on the website. ?Critics of the government of Manitoba?s BiPole III decision have attempted to pressure our government to reverse their decision to keep this pristine area intact,? said Susanne McCrea of the Boreal Forest Network. ?We applaud the province for their commitment and we?ve launched this website to show the public what a gift Manitoba has to offer to the world.? ?Manitoba has a conservation opportunity that most places in the world have lost,? stated Ron Thiessen of CPAWS Manitoba. ?Protecting the east side will help curb global climate change while providing tourism revenues for local communities.? The U.S.-based Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) launched the action alert, with the support of the Manitoba groups, to bring attention to this international boreal treasure. NRDC had designated the region a ?BioGem? of high international ecological importance several years ago. ?Manitoba?s Heart of the Boreal is globally important as an irreplaceable part of the world's intact boreal forest ecosystem,? said Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, of NRDC. ?NRDC?s over 1.2 million members and activists want to support local communities in their conservation efforts and in the establishment of a World Heritage Site.? The UNESCO World Heritage Site (WHS) nominated area spans the Manitoba/Ontario border, includes two provincial parks, the Bloodvein River (designated a Canadian Heritage River), and the traditional lands of four Manitoba First Nations and one Ontario First Nation. The UNESCO WHS nomination is a First Nations-led initiative and represents the vision these communities have for their traditional lands. This vision is fully supported by BFN, CPAWS, WC and NRDC. It is, also, supported by the actions of the Province of Manitoba. "Grade-school students the world over know of the amazing Amazon rainforest, but not one in a million could tell you about our planet?s other great forest--the Heart of the Boreal," said Eric Reder, Campaign Director for the Wilderness Committee. "People need to know that this area is a global treasure, and then raise their voices to preserve it." Contact: Susan Casey- Lefkowitz, The Natural Resources Defense Council, 202-289-2366, sclefkowitz at nrdc.org Ron Thiessen, Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, 204?794?4971, ron at cpawsmb.org Eric Reder, the Wilderness Committee, 204?997-8584, eric at wildernesscommittee.mb.ca Susanne McCrea, The Boreal Forest Network 204-297-0321, borealaction at gmail.com -- Susanne McCrea Boreal Action -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Thu Mar 18 23:44:40 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2010 00:44:40 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Psychiatrist says German archdiocese led by future Pope Benedict XVI ignored repeated warnings about abuse Message-ID: <3F85C2A8E011490B836858F0AA9A3971@Upstairs> Psychiatrist Says Church Was Warned About Priest By NICHOLAS KULISH and KATRIN BENNHOLD Published: March 18, 2010 ESSEN, Germany - The German archdiocese led by the future Pope Benedict XVI ignored repeated warnings in the early 1980s by a psychiatrist treating a priest accused of sexually abusing boys that he should not be allowed to work with children, the psychiatrist said Thursday. "I said, 'For God's sake, he desperately has to be kept away from working with children,' " the psychiatrist, Dr. Werner Huth, said in a telephone interview from Munich. "I was very unhappy about the entire story." Dr. Huth said he was concerned enough that he set three conditions for treating the priest, the Rev. Peter Hullermann: that he stay away from young people and alcohol and be supervised by another priest at all times. Dr. Huth said he issued the explicit warnings - both written and oral - before the future pope, then Joseph Ratzinger, archbishop of Munich and Freising, left Germany for a position in the Vatican in 1982. In 1980, after abuse complaints from parents in Essen that the priest did not deny, Archbishop Ratzinger approved a decision to move the priest to Munich for therapy. Despite the psychiatrist's warnings, Father Hullermann was allowed to return to parish work almost immediately after his therapy began, interacting with children as well as adults. Less than five years later, he was accused of molesting other boys, and in 1986 he was convicted of sexual abuse in Bavaria. Benedict's deputy at the time, Vicar General Gerhard Gruber, said he was to blame for that personnel decision, referring to what he called "serious mistakes." The psychiatrist said in an interview that he did not have any direct communications with Archbishop Ratzinger and did not know whether or not the archbishop knew about his warnings. Though he said he had spoken with several senior church officials, Dr. Huth's main contact at the time was a bishop, Heinrich Graf von Soden-Fraunhofen, who died in 2000. Even after his conviction in 1986, Father Hullermann, now 62, continued working with altar boys for many years. He was suspended Monday for ignoring a 2008 church order not to work with youths. The former vicar general of the Munich archdiocese did not respond to repeated attempts to contact him for comment at home. Phone calls to the archdiocese for reaction on Thursday night were not answered. On Wednesday, speaking generally about the question of Father Hullermann's therapy, a spokesman at the archdiocese, Bernd Oostenryck, said, "Thirty years ago, the subject was treated very differently in society." "There was a tendency to say it could be therapeutically treated," Mr. Oostenryck said. Father Hullermann was transferred in December 1977 to the St. Andreas Church in Essen, an industrial city in the Ruhr region not far from where he was born in Gelsenkirchen. The three sets of parents who complained to the church said Father Hullermann had had "sexual relations" with their children in February 1979, according to a statement this week by the diocese in Essen. In the minutes taken by the priest in charge of the parish at the meeting with the parents, he noted that in order to protect their children they "would not file charges under the current circumstances." For decades it was common practice in the church not to involve law enforcement in sexual abuse cases. Vowing to change that, Bavarian bishops called Thursday for strengthening the duty of church officials to report cases of abuse, and even urged a change in German law requiring them to do so. Spared prosecution after his transgressions in Essen, which according to the statement released by the diocese he "did not dispute," Father Hullermann instead was ordered to undergo therapy with Dr. Huth. The archdiocese said that order was personally approved by Archbishop Ratzinger. Dr. Huth said he had recommended one-on-one sessions, which Father Hullermann refused. Instead the priest took part in group sessions, usually seated in a circle with eight other patients, who had a mix of disorders, including pedophilia. Dr. Huth, 80, said that Father Hullermann had problems with alcohol, for which he prescribed medication, but that he was "neither invested nor motivated" in his therapy. "He did the therapy out of fear that he would lose his post" and a "fear of punishment," Dr. Huth said. The psychiatrist, whom Father Hullermann had authorized to report to church officials about his treatment on request, said he shared his concerns with them frequently. He said the constraints he put on the priest - that he stay away from children, not drink alcohol, and be accompanied and supervised at all times by another priest - were enforced only intermittently. Not long after the therapy began, Father Hullermann returned to unrestricted work with parishioners. Archbishop Ratzinger was still in charge in Munich, but church officials have not said if the future pope was kept up to date on the case. After the future pope's departure in 1982, Father Hullermann was moved in September to a church in the nearby town of Grafing, where he also taught religion at a local public school. Two years later, the police began investigating him on suspicion of sexual abuse of minors. The court commissioned another psychiatrist, Dr. Johannes Kemper, to examine him and write an expert opinion for the 1986 trial. "Alcohol played a big role," said Dr. Kemper, 66, who had examined Father Hullermann in his practice for half a day. As a prelude to sexual abuse, Dr. Kemper said, "he drank, and then under the influence of alcohol he watched porn videos with the youths." The prosecutor's office in Munich confirmed Thursday that Father Hullermann was convicted in 1986 of sexually abusing minors and distributing pornographic images, according to a spokeswoman for the office, Andrea Titz, and sentenced to a fine and five years of probation. Little information is publicly available about the court proceedings. The court file was sealed after Father Hullermann's probationary period ended. Dr. Kemper said that at the trial the victims waited outside the courtroom and came in one at a time to testify. He did not remember exactly how many victims there were, saying there were "between 5 and 10." The mayor of Garching an der Alz, where Father Hullermann worked for 21 years after his conviction, was sharply critical of the church Thursday for failing to inform the community of the priest's criminal record at the time he was sent to work there, saying that they had been used "as guinea pigs." "Had we known, we definitely would have done something," said Wolfgang Reichenwallner, the mayor and a friend of Father Hullermann. "We just can't afford the risk that children in our community are put in harm's way." "We got lucky that nothing seems to have happened," Mr. Reichenwallner said. According to the mayor and church officials, there have been no new accusations of sexual abuse since Father Hullermann's 1986 conviction. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/world/europe/19church.html?hp -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Fri Mar 19 08:28:54 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2010 08:28:54 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [Manitoba] Provincial Budget 2010/11: A message from the people Message-ID: (as of this writing the CCPA-Manitoba hasn't posted this yet on their website, so no URL) Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives-Manitoba FAST FACTS Budget 2010/11: A message from the people March 19, 2010 As the Manitoba government prepares for this year's budget, the air of equanimity evident in last year's budgetary deliberations has given way to hyper-timidity, if not panic. Government leaders seem preoccupied with the fact that the deficit could reach $500 million and talk relentlessly about the need for restraint. This mindset has already resulted in some bizarre (coming from a social democratic government) decisions: not proceeding with an increase in the minimum wage April 1, 2010; announcing, prior to commencement of collective bargaining, that the government would be seeking a two-year wage freeze in all parts of the public sector dependent on provincial government funds; and delaying planned investment projects. The sad thing about these decisions is that they are likely to produce the very results the government fears: a stagnant economy, rising unemployment and a demoralized work force. Our economic recovery is too fragile for us to be pulling back from stimulus spending. One of the best ways to promote economic growth is to increase the minimum wage so that low-income people can spend more money. Collective bargaining is supposed to be a democratic process; the province's heavy-handed approach will do nothing to promote goodwill and trust between the parties. While the government is willing to place the burden of economic recovery on the backs of its own employees and on minimum-wage workers, it is unwilling to make corporations take any responsibility. Corporate income taxes were at 17 percent in 1999 when the NDP took power; as of last year, they were 12 percent. The Budget There are serious pitfalls in adopting a conservative-style budget in the present circumstances. Let's remember what happened in the last serious recession in the early 1990s. The unemployment rate for Canada increased from 7.5 percent in 1989 to 11.4 percent in 1993. Manitoba fared better with an increase in the unemployment rate of 1.8 percentage points - from 7.5 percent to 9.3 percent. All jurisdictions experienced increases in their deficits; all responded with cuts in spending, taxes and public sector wages. In Manitoba, spending cuts were particularly damaging in health care, education, housing and social welfare programs; tax cuts were finessed with an expansion in gambling revenues; and cuts to wages were imposed in the public sector. These policies undermined public sector services and drove professional people (doctors, nurses and teachers) out of Manitoba. It has taken almost a decade to recover from the impact of the cutbacks in health care and education; we haven't even started to deal with the serious housing crises that now exist in Winnipeg, Brandon and Thompson, and throughout the province. The policy responses to the recessions of the 1980s and 1990s contributed to creating the so-called "new" economy, characterized by wide and growing inequalities, high rates of persistent and pervasive poverty, homelessness, soup kitchens and food banks, and money lenders and pawn shops. This legacy is not only a blight on society, but also a drag on our economy. In the coming weeks and months business interests, business columnists and right-wing think tanks will be calling for cuts to deficits (so that we don't increase the debt burden on future generations) and cuts to corporate taxes and personal income taxes (to improve incentives and raise productivity). These claims are specious. Cuts to deficits that are achieved through reduced spending will, as happened in the 1980s and 1990s, further erode our social infrastructure and increase social needs. Cuts to taxes will further compromise the ability of the public sector to sustain spending to meet those needs. Those most in need will bear the bulk of this burden, but we will all suffer as a consequence. Nor is our debt out of control as some claim. As of last year, Manitoba's debt/GDP ratio was 23 percent, one of the lowest in OECD countries. That ratio will increase this year because: our GDP will likely be a bit smaller, because of the recession; and we are incurring a deficit which will add to the amount of the debt. But it is important to keep in mind what would have happened if this deficit had not been incurred: GDP - and employment - would have shrunk much more than it did and our debt/GDP ratio could have increased even more than it will under the present circumstances. If it becomes necessary down the road to rein in deficits, the appropriate method is through progressive increases in taxes on personal and corporate incomes. The government should also consider differential sales taxes (for example, increasing the rate on luxury automobiles and recreational vehicles) not just to bolster revenues, but also to advance green objectives. At a recent poverty forum in Brandon involving Ministers MacIntosh and Irvin-Ross, presenters called on the Ministers and the government to recognize that business interests do not speak for working people and their families, including direct producers like the majority of farmers. They have their own voice and the government needs to seek them out and hear their insights and wisdom. Errol Black is a Brandon City Councillor and CCPA-Mb. board member. Lynne Fernandez is a research associate for CCPA Mb. =============================== 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 Fri Mar 19 11:02:53 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2010 12:02:53 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Glenn Greenwald: Those authoritarian, torture-loving French Message-ID: <76215581EF91457880FE55855A370C09@Upstairs> Wednesday, Mar 17, 2010 Those authoritarian, torture-loving French By Glenn Greenwald BBC screenshot (updated below) French documentarians conducted an experiment where they created a faux game show -- with all the typical studio trappings -- and then instructed participants (who believed it was a real TV program) to administer electric shock to unseen contestants each time they answered questions incorrectly, with increasing potency for each wrong answer. Even as the unseen contestants (who were actors) screamed in agony and pleaded for mercy -- and even once they went silent and were presumably dead -- 81% of the participants continued to obey the instructions of the authority-figure/host and kept administering higher and higher levels of electric shock. The experiment was a replica of the one conducted in 1961 by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, where 65% of participants obeyed instructions from a designated authority figure to administer electric shock to unseen individuals, and never stopped obeying even as they heard excruciating screams and then silence. This new French experiment was designed to measure the added power of television to place people into submission to authority and induce them to administer torture. None of this should be at all surprising to anyone who has observed, first, the American political and media class, and then large swaths of the American citizenry, enthusiastically embrace what was once the absolute taboo against torture, all because Government officials decreed that it was necessary to Stop the Terrorists. But I just watched an amazing discussion of this French experiment on Fox News. The Fox anchors -- Bill Hemmer and Martha MacCallum -- were shocked and outraged that these French people could be induced by the power of television to embrace torture. Speaking as employees of the corporation that produced the highly influential, torture-glorifying 24, and on the channel that has churned out years worth of pro-torture "news" advocacy, the anchors were particularly astonished that television could play such a powerful role in influencing people's views and getting them to acquiesce to such heinous acts. Ultimately, they speculated that perhaps it was something unique about the character and psychology of the French that made them so susceptible to external influences and so willing to submit to amoral authority, just like many of them submitted to and even supported the Nazis, they explained. I kept waiting for them to make the connection to America's torture policies and Fox's support for it -- if only to explain to their own game show participants at home Fox News viewers why that was totally different -- but it really seemed the connection just never occurred to them. They just prattled away -- shocked, horrified and blissfully un-self-aware -- about the evils of torture and mindless submission to authority and the role television plays in all of that. Meanwhile, the bill recently introduced by Joe Lieberman and John McCain -- the so-called "Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act" -- now has 9 co-sponsors, including the newly elected Scott Brown. It's probably the single most extremist, tyrannical and dangerous bill introduced in the Senate in the last several decades, far beyond the horrific, habeas-abolishing Military Commissions Act. It literally empowers the President to imprison anyone he wants in his sole discretion by simply decreeing them a Terrorist suspect -- including American citizens arrested on U.S. soil. The bill requires that all such individuals be placed in military custody, and explicitly says that they "may be detained without criminal charges and without trial for the duration of hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners," which everyone expects to last decades, at least. It's basically a bill designed to formally authorize what the Bush administration did to American citizen Jose Padilla -- arrest him on U.S. soil and imprison him for years in military custody with no charges. This bill has produced barely a ripple of controversy, its two main sponsors will continue to be treated as Serious Centrists and feted on Sunday shows, and it's hard to imagine any real resistance to its passage. Isn't it shocking how easily led and authoritarian the French are? UPDATE: Led by people like Rush Limbaugh, the American Right celebrated even the most extreme torture brutalities, such as those at Abu Ghraib, by embracing them as "a good time," an "emotional release," "blowing off steam," a "fraternity prank," and S&M pornography. At least the contestants in the French show acquiesced to torture reluctantly and even with resistance, rather than with the demented pleasure, vicarious sensations of power, 24-type entertainment, and primal arousal which many disturbed individuals on the American Right derive from it. And, as always, no discussion of the American torture and detention regime is complete without noting that the vast majority subjected to its horrors was completely innocent. As for the McCain/Lieberman atrocity, it's been reported that the Obama White House (a) is actively negotiating with Lindsey Graham on a bill to provide for indefinite detention power and (b) has already designated numerous detainees to be held indefinitely with no charges of any kind. It remains to be seen what their (and, then, their supporters') position on this bill will be. http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/03/17/torture/index.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 44020 bytes Desc: not available URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Fri Mar 19 12:06:22 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:06:22 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Video: Jon Stewart Does Glenn Beck Message-ID: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-march-18-2010/conservative-libertarian -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Fri Mar 19 12:09:49 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2010 12:09:49 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] California's public schools send out 22, 000 pink slips Message-ID: <9FBB6344B2464F53A390A1B5C796F491@agingCHS072729> [I'm not sure how many schools in the USA are being shuttered compared to the number of prisons being built, but the two are not necessarily unrelated and the ratio must be shockingly high...] See also: U.S. schools in 'category 5' budget crisis Thousands of teachers face layoffs as recession meets falling enrollments http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35883971/ns/us_news-education/ ==================== http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/california-politics/2010/03/california-public-schools-send-out-22000-pink-slips.html Los Angeles Times | Local PolitiCal On politics in the Golden State California's public schools send out 22,000 pink slips March 15, 2010 | 12:58 pm Faced with another year of potentially deep budget cuts, California's public schools have sent out 22,000 pink slips to teachers and school employees, according to the state's superintendent. "Our state budget crisis has forced districts to lay off thousands of teachers over the past few years," said Jack O'Connell, the state superintendent of public instruction. "The governor has proposed cutting another $2.4 billion from public education. While the education community opposes these cuts, our schools are forced to prepare for this potential outcome by issuing a massive wave of potential layoff notices." According to figures provided by O'Connell's office, more than 16,000 teachers lost their jobs in 2009. The latest round of pink slips do not guarantee that these 22,000 school employees will be laid off. Final staffing decisions will be based on the budget passed by lawmakers this summer. But school districts had until Monday to notify anyone who may be laid off before the next school year begins. Still, a spokesman for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Aaron McLear, took umbrage with O'Connell's characterization of the governor's January budget proposal, noting that Schwarzenegger has proposed allocating the same amount of money for K-12 and community colleges as he did last year. "With a $20-billion deficit, we're forced to make devastating cuts across the board, but have proposed to protect education," McLear said. "Education is getting the same amount as last year, and that is $50 billion of our $86-billion budget." -- Anthony York =============================== 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 Sat Mar 20 00:23:56 2010 From: may at applebybooks.net (May at Appleby Books) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2010 22:23:56 -0700 Subject: [Fresh Ink] MAPLight - analysis, connections, tracking data Message-ID: <4BA45BEC.9060608@applebybooks.net> The non-partisan MAPLight.org has launched a site that analyzes the intricate connections between money and politics. It tracks data on corporate and special interest contributions by legislator, vote, state, committee, bill and other mind-boggling ways. http://maplight.org/ From may at applebybooks.net Sat Mar 20 00:31:39 2010 From: may at applebybooks.net (May at Appleby Books) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2010 22:31:39 -0700 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Utah Bill Reduces Women to Incubators Message-ID: <4BA45DBB.8010100@applebybooks.net> Published on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 by The Guardian/UK Utah Bill Reduces Women to Incubators It's already hard to get an abortion in Utah. Now a new bill opens the door to prosecuting women who 'intentionally' miscarry by Melissa McEwan Last week, Utah governor Gary Herbert signed into law Utah HB 462, known ignominiously as "the miscarriage bill". It was a reworked version of the original bill, introduced by Republican State Representative Carl D Wimmer, adjusted to address criticisms that the initial language "could have got women sent away for lifelong prison terms for falling down stairs or staying in an abusive relationship". The revised version "designates the 'intentional or knowing' miscarriage as criminal homicide" and "stipulates that a woman can be charged with homicide for 'the death of her unborn child', unless the death qualifies as legal abortion". Thus are the women of Utah left with a new law that criminalises illegal abortion in a state that increasingly discourages legal abortions. Utah already requires parental notification and consent for minors seeking abortions, mandates a 24-hour waiting period to terminate a pregnancy, subjects women seeking abortions to state-directed counselling which overtly discourages abortion, and allows public funding for terminations only in cases of rape, incest, fetal abnormality, or threat to the women's life or physical health. (Don't think you can get away with claiming your psychological health is at risk, ladies! Everyone knows that women would just lie about that to get an abortion because there's nothing conceivably traumatising about being forced to carry a pregnancy you don't want to term.) As of 2005, according to the Guttmacher Institute, 93% of Utah counties had no abortion provider, leaving 25% of women in the state to travel at least 50 miles, and 8% to travel more than 100 miles, to get an abortion. There were six abortion providers in the whole of the state in 2005, and currently the state has only one licensed abortion clinic. Utah has become, like many other states, a frontline in the war against legal abortion. Yes, Roe is still in place, but anti-abortion activists are battling to render it an impotent and largely symbolic statute, hollowed out by state legislation that chips away at abortion rights with "partial-birth abortion bans" and "parental consent laws" and mandatory (ostensible) disincentives like "look at your foetus on an ultrasound". The Democrats, and the leftwing activists who try to use the spectre of a world without Roe to coerce progressive feminists into line during every election, tend to regard legal abortion like an on-off switch, but it doesn't work that way. Legal abortion is only worth as much as the number of women who have reasonable and affordable and unencumbered access to it, and that number is dwindling: the National Abortion Federation reports that 88% of counties in the US have no identifiable abortion provider?a figure that rises to 97% in non-metropolitan areas. That's not merely an inconvenience?between travel expenses and time off work, especially when a 24-hour waiting period necessitates at least two days of one's time, the cost of securing an abortion can become an undue burden. It can put legal abortion out of a woman's reach. That's what state legislatures like Utah's are hoping. And because even the most publicly mendacious anti-choice activists know that even criminalising abortion doesn't stop women from getting them, they know that merely restricting access to legal abortion isn't enough?a woman who doesn't want to be pregnant will find a way to not be pregnant. Thus is their current strategy is to make legal abortion as inaccessible as possible and criminalise everything else. An abortion performed by someone other than a doctor is ergo illegal. An abortion performed on a minor without parental consent, or on an adult without state-mandated counseling and a 24-hour waiting period, is ergo illegal. An abortion late in the pregnancy is ergo illegal. Inducing a miscarriage is ergo illegal. Terminating a pregnancy by any other method than the one which has been most ruthlessly restricted--via piecemeal legislation and the defunding of clinics and the unfettered terrorising of abortion providers--is illegal. In Utah, women still have a technical legal right to abortion, but very little means to exercise that right. And now, in pursuit of ensuring that women's right to abortion is as limited as possible, the state has opened the door to prosecuting women who miscarry after having a drink of caffeinated coffee or a beer or a cigarette, or take a vigorous walk, or miss a prenatal care appointment, or shoot up heroin, or go to spinning class, or any one of a number of things that pregnant women do every day, good and bad, during pregnancies that come to term, if there's someone who will testify she did it to miscarry; she was trying to miscarry; she told me. In pursuit of ensuring that women's right to abortion is as limited, the state has conferred personhood on foetuses, and reduced women to incubators. And watch out if the machinery breaks. The architects of this legislation insist it was not designed to punish women, but to protect the unborn. Somehow I don't find that comforting, coming from the same lot who won't properly fund childhood education or support universal healthcare. Or any other legislation that would make a material difference in the lives of the born. ? 2010 Guardian News and Media Limited Melissa McEwan is a freelance writer and founder of the progressive blog Shakespeare's Sister http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/mar/16/utah-miscarriage-bill-abortion From may at applebybooks.net Sat Mar 20 00:45:04 2010 From: may at applebybooks.net (May at Appleby Books) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2010 22:45:04 -0700 Subject: [Fresh Ink] MAPLight - analysis, connections, tracking data Message-ID: <4BA460E0.4060003@applebybooks.net> The non-partisan MAPLight.org has launched a site that analyzes the intricate connections between money and politics. It tracks data on corporate and special interest contributions by legislator, vote, state, committee, bill and other mind-boggling ways. http://maplight.org/ From menecraj at shaw.ca Sat Mar 20 10:22:27 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 2010 10:22:27 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Amazon Threatens Publishers as Apple Looms Message-ID: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/18/technology/internet/18amazon.html Amazon Threatens Publishers as Apple Looms By MOTOKO RICH and BRAD STONE Published: March 17, 2010 Amazon.com has threatened to stop directly selling the books of some publishers online unless they agree to a detailed list of concessions regarding the sale of electronic books, according to two industry executives with direct knowledge of the discussions. The hardball approach comes less than two months after Amazon shocked the publishing world by removing the "buy" buttons from its site for thousands of printed books from Macmillan, one of the country's six largest publishers, in a dispute over e-book pricing. Amazon is the largest online seller of printed books and the biggest e-book seller in the United States, and it is trying to use its clout to hold on to its early lead in the e-book market. But the last time it went down that path, it was widely accused of abusing its position. An Amazon spokesman, Craig Berman, declined to comment on any talks with publishers. The company is pressuring publishers just as Apple is also preparing to sell digital books for reading on its iPad tablet, which will reach the market in early April. After a weekend of brinksmanship in January, Amazon effectively conceded that it could not stop Macmillan from setting what it described in a post on its Web site as "needlessly high" e-book prices. The company says those prices should reflect the reduced cost of distributing digital works. Five of the country's six largest publishers - Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, HarperCollins and Penguin - have already reached deals with Apple to sell their books through its iBookstore, which will be featured on the iPad. (The holdout is Random House.) Under those agreements, the publishers will set consumer prices for each book, and Apple will serve as an agent and take a 30 percent commission. E-book editions of most newly released adult general fiction and nonfiction will cost $12.99 to $14.99. Amazon has agreed in principle that the major publishers would be able to set prices in its Kindle store as well. But it is also demanding that they lock into three-year contracts and guarantee that no other competitor will get lower prices or better terms. Apple, for its part, is requiring that publishers not permit other retailers to sell any e-books for less than what is listed in the iBookstore. So the publishers have sought to renegotiate agreements they have with Amazon under which they sold books to it at wholesale, allowing Amazon to set the consumer price. Amazon has built up a 90 percent share of the American e-book market, in part because it sells most new releases and best sellers at a heavily discounted standard price of $9.99. Many Kindle owners have said the low price motivates them to buy more e-books, but publishers feared that the price would eventually erode their profits. According to three people briefed on the discussions, publishers are reluctant to sign three-year contracts because the digital book world is changing so rapidly and they want room to adjust as it takes shape. Amazon has also begun talking with smaller publishers that have not yet signed contracts with Apple. In those conversations, according to one person briefed on the discussions, Amazon has said it prefers to retain its wholesale pricing model, as opposed to Apple's so-called agency model. But some of these smaller publishers have begun talking with Apple, which has effectively said that any publisher that wishes to sell its books on the iPad must offer the same terms to all booksellers. In other words, to do business with Apple, publishers must export Apple's business model to all retailers. Amazon, by contrast, has not promised to adopt the agency approach for any but the largest publishers. Amazon appears to be responding to the Apple threat by waging a publisher-by-publisher battle, trying to keep as many books as possible out of Apple's hands, while preserving as much flexibility as it can to set its own prices. But if Amazon tries to enforce its demands by removing "buy" buttons from some pages again, some believe it could harm its reputation in the eyes of customers and the publishing industry. "They cannot remove the 'buy' buttons from two major publishers' lists without doing serious long-term damage to their own brand," said Mike Shatkzin, chief executive of Idea Logical, a company that advises book publishers on e-books. If Amazon does stop directly selling books from some publishers, many of those books will still be available from outside sellers that use Amazon's site as a storefront. Amazon may have more leverage with smaller publishers, which typically sell their books in fewer outlets and thus tend to rely more on Amazon for sales. Amazon may believe that if it can keep those publishers from moving to an agency model, Apple will choose not to sell their e-books, and Amazon will be seen as having a broader selection. Amazon's strategy "is to work very hard to limit participation in the agency model to only the big four or five firms that are already announced," said Evan Schnittman, vice president for global business development at Oxford University Press. "This would leave 50 to 60 percent of the content out there subject to the standard distribution terms, enabling Amazon to promote and price as it does today, and forcing Apple to have to compete with Amazon's strength." Apple is not likely to give up on smaller publishers. A new job posting on its Web site is for an "independent publisher account manager, iBookstore." The posting says the person would be "responsible for building and growing relationships with small- and medium-size book publishers, self-published authors and other content providers for the iBookstore." =============================== 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 Mar 20 16:36:14 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 2010 16:36:14 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The American government's anti-Venezuela election campaign Message-ID: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/mar/18/venezuela-election The Guardian 18 March 2010 The anti-Venezuela election campaign Venezuela's election is not until September, but the international campaign to delegitimise the government has already begun Venezuela has an election for its national assembly in September, and the campaign has begun in earnest. I am referring to the international campaign. This is carried out largely through the international media, although some will spill over into the Venezuelan media. It involves many public officials, especially in the US. The goal will be to generate as much bad press as possible about Venezuela, to discredit the government, and to delegitimise the September elections ? in case the opposition should choose to boycott, as they did in the last legislative elections, or refuse to recognise the results if they lose. There's no need for conspiracy, since the principal actors all know what to do. Occasionally some will be off-message due to lack of co-ordination. A fascinating example of this occurred last week when Senator John McCain tried to get General Doug Fraser of the US Southern Command to back his accusations that Venezuela supports terrorist activities. Testifying before the Senate armed services committee on March 11, General Fraser contradicted McCain: "We have continued to watch very closely ? We have not seen any connections specifically that I can verify that there has been a direct government-to-terrorist connection." Oops! Apparently Fraser didn't get the memo that the Obama team, not just McCain, is in full campaign mode against Venezuela. The next day, he issued a statement recanting his testimony: "Assistant Secretary Valenzuela [the state department's top Latin America official] and I spoke this morning on the topic of linkages between the government of Venezuela and the Farc. There is zero daylight between our two positions and we are in complete agreement. "There is indeed clear and documented historical and ongoing evidence of the linkages between the government of Venezuela and the Farc ? we are in direct alignment with our partners at the state department and the intelligence community." Well it's good to know that the United States still has civilian control over the military, at least in the western hemisphere. On the other hand, it would be even better if the truth counted for anything in these Congressional hearings or in Washington foreign policy circles generally. The general's awkward and seemingly forced reversal went unnoticed by the media. The "documented and historical and ongoing evidence" mentioned by General Fraser refers to material alleged to come from laptops and hard drives allegedly found by the Colombian military in a cross-border raid into Ecuador in 2008. Never mind that this is the same military that has been found to have killed hundreds of innocent teenagers and dressed them up in guerrilla clothing. These laptops and hard drives will continue to be tapped for previously undisclosed "evidence", which will then be deployed in the campaign against the Venezuelan government. We will be asked to assume that the "captured documents" are authentic, and most of the media will do so. US secretary of state Hillary Clinton's attacks on Venezuela during her trip to South America were one of the opening salvos of this campaign. Most of what will follow is predictable. There will be hate-filled editorials in the major newspapers, led by the neocon editorial board of the Washington Post (aka Fox on 15th Street). Ch?vez will be accused of repressing the media, even though most of the Venezuelan media ? as measured by audience ? is still controlled by the opposition. In fact, the media in Venezuela is still far more in opposition to the government than is our own media in the United States, or for that matter in most of the world. But the international press will be trying to convey the image that Venezuela is Burma or North Korea. In Washington DC, if I try to broadcast on an FM radio frequency without a legal broadcast licence, I will be shut down. When this happens in Venezuela, it is reported as censorship. No one here will bother to look at the legalities or the details, least of all the pundits and editorial writers, or even many of the reporters. The Venezuelan economy was in recession in 2009, but will likely begin to grow again this year. The business press will ignore the economic growth and hype the inflation, as they have done for the past six years, when the country's record economic growth cut the poverty rate by half and extreme poverty by 70% (which was also ignored). Resolutions will be introduced into the US Congress condemning Venezuela for whatever. The US government will continue to pour millions of dollars into Venezuela through USAid, and will refuse to disclose the recipients. This is the non-covert part of their funding for the campaign inside Venezuela. The only part of this story that is not predictable is what the ultimate result of the international campaign will be. In Venezuela's last legislative elections of 2005, the opposition boycotted the national elections, with at least tacit support from the Bush administration. In an attempt to delegitimise the government, they gave up winning probably at least 30% of the legislature. At the time, most of the media ? and also the Organisation of American States ? rejected the idea that the election was illegitimate simply because the opposition boycotted. But that was under the Bush administration, which had lost some credibility on Venezuela due to its support for the 2002 coup, and for other reasons. It could be different under an Obama administration. That is why it is so ominous to see this administration mounting an unprovoked, transparently obvious campaign to delegitimise the Venezuelan government prior to a national election. This looks like a signal to the opposition: "We will support you if you decide to return to an insurrectionary strategy," either before or after the election. The US state department is playing an ugly and dangerous game. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Sat Mar 20 16:37:01 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 2010 16:37:01 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] =?windows-1252?q?Canada=92s_Long_Embrace_of_the_Hondu?= =?windows-1252?q?ran_Dictatorship?= Message-ID: <33FB77774030418B890E53E91CA831F5@agingCHS072729> http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/330.php#continue The B u l l e t Socialist Project ? E-Bulletin No. 330 March 20, 2010 Canada?s Long Embrace of the Honduran Dictatorship Todd Gordon and Jeffery R. Webber Peter Kent recently returned from a three day trip (February 17-20) to Honduras, proudly declaring the mission a success. As Canada's Minister of State for the Americas, Kent is the Tory government's point person for Canada's growing political and economic interests in the region. Honduras has become an important focus of those interests, since the military coup last June against the moderately left-leaning president, Manuel Zelaya, swung the country sharply back to the right. Ignoring the ongoing abuses of human rights in the country under the new coupist presidency of Porfirio ?Pepe? Lobo, Kent has been following through with his promise to promote the normalization of the country's relations with the rest of the hemisphere. Lobo won fraudulent elections held in November under the military dictatorship in a context of repression and intimidation. The election was boycotted by the anti-coup movement, and the Organization of American States and European Union refused to send official observers. Despite this, immediately following Lobo's inauguration on January 27, Kent declared that Canada will ?support President Lobo's efforts as he moves to fully reintegrate Honduras into the international and hemispheric community, including in the Organization of American States.? Canada, Honduras and the OAS On his way to Honduras Kent met with the Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS), Jos? Miguel Insulza, on February 16. Kent used the meeting to push Canada's goal of recognizing the Lobo government onto the OAS agenda. Roberto Micheletti, the dictator that replaced Zelaya after the coup, withdrew Honduras from the organization when it became clear that the majority of member states were going to vote to kick the country out. While some staunch imperial allies in the region, such as Colombia and Peru, have recognized the Lobo government, other countries, notably Venezuela and Brazil, have refused to do so. The re-admittance of Honduras into the OAS will be a contentious and divisive issue, pitting the U.S., Canada, and their right wing allies, against those countries that want less influence from North American imperialism in the region. Kent's visit to Honduras, following his meeting with Insulza, was thus intended to strengthen the new government's claim to legitimacy and its case for reinsertion into the OAS. Acting as if everything is once again well and good in Honduras also makes it easier for Canada to deepen its economic ties with the country. Canada is the largest mining investor in Honduras, for example, and its interests will increase significantly should Lobo and the right get their way and pass a new mining law that increases the rights of foreign capital. Peter Kent and the Boys in Honduras Unsurprisingly, then, Kent was all praise for Lobo and his administration during his latest trip. He was pleased that ?President Lobo is beginning the process of national reconciliation, including supporting the formation of a truth commission.? Besides meeting with Lobo, Kent also met with three of the latter's cabinet ministers. These included Micheletti's spokesperson, Minister of Planning and Cooperation, Arturo Corrales. Corrales supported the Micheletti government's refusal to implement the San Jos?-Tegucigalpa Accord, which it had initially signed along with Zelaya and which called for a government of national reconciliation (itself a very problematic feature of the Accord from a democratic perspective). Kent also met with Foreign Minister, Mario Canahuati. Canahuati is the son of one of Honduras's most powerful capitalists, the maquila magnate, Juan Canahuati. His brother, Jesus, is the president of the Honduran Manufacturers? Association. Mario, meanwhile, was Lobo's vice presidential candidate in the 2005 election, which Lobo lost to Zelaya, and is the past president of the Honduran National Business Council, a pro-coup organization. Kent also met with Canadian business leaders in the country, though he didn?t publicly disclose which ones (requests from his office for the names of companies with which he met went unanswered). Who Kent Didn?t Talk To Kent suggested the Lobo government was taking crucial steps toward, ?healing the wounds created by the recent political impasse,? steps which will allow ?Honduras to regain a sense of trust in their country's democratic institutions.? This depiction of political developments in the country is hard to square with facts on the ground ? namely, political assassinations, repression, torture, and mass arrests. Kent might have grasped this had he bothered to meet with the Committee of Family Members of the Disappeared of Honduras (COFADEH), the country's most prestigious human rights organization, founded in the 1980s. On January 30, three days after the celebrated inauguration of Pepe Lobo, COFADEH reports that: Blas L?pez, a Secondary School Teacher and known member of the anti-coup resistance, was discovered dead from multiple gun shot wounds. On February 2, Vanessa Zepeda, a 29-year-old union activist and active member of the resistance, was killed after she was thrown from a moving vehicle in the streets of Tegucigalpa. On February 15, just two days prior to Kent's arrival in Honduras, Julio F?nez Ben?tez, a union activist and resistance member who had received multiple death threats by coupist supporters, was gunned down and killed by men on a motorcycle. Four days after Kent left the country, and only a day after the release of his press communiqu? exalting the successes of Lobo's administration, Claudia Larisa Brizuela Rodr?guez, the 36-year-old daughter of a prominent radio journalist and resistance activist was shot in the face in front of her children after opening the front door to her home. Such para-military terrorization of peaceful resisters has been a continuous stain on Honduras? human rights record from the moment of Micheletti's coup on June 28, 2009, through the transition to Pepe Lobo, and on until the present day. According to COFADEH, by the end of February, 2010, there had been 43 politically-motivated assassinations of civilians associated with the resistance since the coup. This number is almost certainly a low estimate, the human rights organization acknowledges, as community members and the families of those killed are often too afraid to come forward for fear of reprisal. Many political murders are passed over in the mainstream media as ?gang killings.? As far back as January, the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular (National Front of Popular Resistance, FNRP) claimed that over 130 activists had been assassinated. In a communiqu? released on March 5, 2010, COFADEH argues that the selective attacks against members of the resistance are part of an orchestrated campaign to demobilize and fragment the FRNP. They document 250 violations of human rights since Lobo's inauguration. According to the report, the government is also engaged in a full-blown disinformation campaign through the domestic, coup-backing, private media, and the mainstream international media outlets, to consolidate the image of Pepe Lobo as a legitimate, democratic, and civilian government open to foreign investment and good relations with North America and the European Union. Disgracefully, the EU fell in line with North American imperialism and decided at the end of February to normalize relations with Honduras. Imperialism Re-Booted in Latin America The first decade of this century witnessed mass, extra-parliamentary mobilizations overthrow a series of heads of state in Argentina, Ecuador, and Bolivia, followed by the election of a vast array of self-described left and centre-left governments across South and Central America. Overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. state has felt its grip on the region loosen. Recent years have seen renewed efforts by the Bush and Obama governments to reconstitute the contours of a new counter-reform offensive. The Obama administration, today, sees new sources of hope in the consolidation of right-wing governments in Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Panama, and, more recently, Honduras and Chile. New U.S. military bases in Colombia and Panama illustrate the utility of such clients. Washington is also betting on its ability to turn a number of centre-left regimes ? Kirchner in Argentina, Funes in El Salvador, Colom in Guatemala, and Mujica in Uruguay, among others ? against the relatively more independent regimes in Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spent the first five days of March on a whirlwind tour of the region, denouncing Venezuelan leader Hugo Ch?vez and attempting to pressure various governments into normalizing relations with the Honduran dictatorship. Clinton met with Lobo in Guatemala City on March 5. ?We support the work that President Lobo is doing to promote national unity and strengthen democracy,? she told journalists gathered at a news conference. Earlier in the week, during a visit to Buenos Aires, she claimed that the ?Honduras crisis has been managed to a successful conclusion.? It was also apparently ?done without violence.? As Eric Toussaint, president of the Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt, recently pointed out in the Socialist Worker: ?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?; 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 Maracaibo); 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.? Canada's imperial role in the region has taken on a similar guise as the U.S., although shaped more specifically around Canadian mining and other capitalist interests in the area. Kent's last trip to the region, prior to the Honduras visit, saw him in Venezuela. Apparently there was insufficient time to meet with any representatives of the democratically-elected government of Hugo Ch?vez, although he met with a number of groups associated with the far-right opposition. On January 28, after having returned to Canada, Kent issued a news release declaring that there was ?shrinking democratic space in Venezuela? under Ch?vez. ?During my recent visit to Venezuela,? Kent said, ?I heard many individuals and organizations express concerns related to violations of the right to freedom of expression and other basic liberties.? The comments elicited a response from Ch?vez on his weekly Alo Presidente TV program. The Venezuelan President said he wouldn?t take advice from an ?ultraright? government that had just ?closed? parliament. Ch?vez was referring to Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper's, notorious suspension, or ?proroguement,? of the Canadian parliament on December 30 until March 3 to avoid debate surrounding Canadian military abuses in occupied Afghanistan. The Vancouver Sun reported that Roy Chaderton Matos, Venezuela's ambassador to the OAS, accused the Canadian government of backing ?coup-plotters? and ?destabilizers? the country. Last week, Peter Van Loan, Minister of International Trade, made a further show of whom Canada considers its friends in the region, tabling legislation to implement the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement. Of course, no word was uttered of the infamous record of human rights violations committed by the ?lvaro Uribe regime in Colombia, nor of its intimate ties to paramilitary networks operating with impunity throughout the country. ?The Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement will provide greater market access for Canadian exporters of goods such as wheat, pulses, barley, paper products and heavy equipment,? the press release from the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade declared this week. ?An increasing number of Canadian investors and exporters are entering the Colombian market, and it is also a strategic destination for Canadian direct investment, especially in mining, oil exploration, printing and education.? The effort to consolidate the coupist installation of the far-right in Honduras is, in other words, merely the latest puzzle piece in a much wider and reviving North American imperial project in Latin America and the Caribbean. Resistance Continues In Honduras, as elsewhere, the resistance has not been cowed. On March 8, the FNRP released their 51st communiqu?. They announced that they would be organizing a poll of the Honduran people on June 28, 2010 to assess the popularity of the call for an Inclusive and Popular Constituent Assembly. The date will commemorate the first anniversary of the coupist regime, and will represent the unbreakable will of the Honduran people to resist, and to build an authentic democracy that transforms at its roots the reigning system of injustice and repression. The communiqu? condemned the U.S. government's efforts to construct a legitimate face for this dictatorship, especially the role played by U.S. ambassador to Honduras, Hugo Llorens. The resistance also pointed to the role played by the private media in defending the Honduran oligarchy and the coup regime that serves its interests. In particular, the FNRP pointed to the way in which the daily newspapers La Prensa and El Heraldo, owned by business tycoon, Jorge Canahuati, have portrayed working class families and popular leaders aligned with the resistance as terrorists. The FNRP also highlighted the parallel part played by the TV station Corporaci?n de Televicentro, property of Rafael Ferrari. The Communiqu? closed with a call to popular movements to attend the Second Gathering for the Refoundation of Honduras, in the city of La Esperanza, between March 12 and 14. According to Claudia Korol's Am?rica Latina en Movimiento report, dispatched from on scene in La Esperanza, over a thousand delegates had gathered by March 13th, representing an array of different popular sectors: Lenca and Gar?funa peoples? movements; feminists; environmentalists; rural and urban trade unionists; peasants; and different currents of the revolutionary left ? many with links going back to the Central American revolutionary struggles of the 1980s. A mix of popular political traditions focusing on decolonization, anti-imperialism, and socialism converged as those gathered broke off into twenty simultaneous popular assemblies to discuss a variety of themes: the preservation of water, forests, land, subsoil, traditional territories, and air; the political system and popular sovereignty; culture; justice; autonomy; sexual diversity; health; communications; foreign policy and international relations; anti-patriarchal struggles; anti-racism; national security; work and workers? rights; the economic system; indigenous and black communities; youth; fighting corruption and learning about popular accounting. These different general discussions then fed into issues of strategic orientation: What does refounding Honduras mean, and how is it different than mere reform? What will a refounded Honduras look like? What are the necessary stages to get there? What do we mean by constituent power and the building of popular power from below? How can we strengthen our popular organizations to foment this popular power? What are we really calling for when we demand a Popular and Democratic Constituent Assembly? How can we shape our participation as a resistance movement to ensure that the genuine interests, aspirations, and proposals of the people will be included in the new constitution? In the coming months these questions will begin to take concrete form through the extra-parliamentary struggles in the streets and the countryside, in defiance of selective assassinations, intimidation, media obfuscation, and imperialist meddling. ? Todd Gordon teaches political science at York University, in Toronto. He is the author of Cops, Crime and Capitalism: The Law-and-Order Agenda in Canada (Fernwood), and the forthcoming Imperial Canada (Arbeiter Ring Publishing). Jeffery R. Webber teaches political science at the University of Regina. He is the author of two forthcoming books: Red October: Left-Indigenous Struggles in Modern Bolivia (Brill) and Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia: Class Struggle, Indigenous Liberation and the Politics of Evo Morales (Haymarket). Together they are currently writing a book on Canadian imperialism in the Americas in the age of neoliberalism. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Sat Mar 20 16:47:18 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 2010 16:47:18 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] UC Berkeley student senate passes divestment resolution Message-ID: UC Berkeley student senate passes divestment resolution By Yaman Press release from UC Berkeley SJP. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE For the first time in the University of California history, the UC Berkeley Student Senate has approved a bill to divest from two US companies in response to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and to Israel's siege and bombardment of the Gaza Strip. The Senate bill directs both the UC Regents and the Student Government to divest from General Electric and United Technologies. General Electric manufactures Apache helicopter engines; United Technologies manufactures Sikorsky helicopters and F-16 aircraft engines. In addition, the bill creates a task force to look into furthering a socially responsible investment policy for the UC system. Student Senator Rahul Patel supported the bill, declaring that "in the 1980s the Student Government was a central actor in demanding that the university divest from South African apartheid. 25 years later, it is a key figure in shaping a nationwide movement against occupation and war crimes around the world. Student Government can be a space to mobilize and make decisions that have a significant impact on the international community. We must utilize these spaces to engage each other about issues of justice worldwide." The Senate deliberation, which started Wednesday night, concluded at 3 am Thursday morning, March 18. The meeting was flooded with students, educators, and community members, which prompted the relocation of the Senate session from the Senate Chambers to a larger room. The attendees took turns making impassioned arguments for and against the bill. The diverse list of guest speakers included 76 names, ranging in age from college freshmen to Vietnam veterans. After amendments, the final bill passed on a 16-4 vote. In addition to Israeli military action, the student initiative was motivated by an 2005 call on behalf of 171 Palestinian civil society organizations calling on "people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel . until it fully complies with the precepts of international law." According to Emiliano Huet-Vaughn, co-author of the bill, "this vote is an historic step in holding all state and corporate actors accountable for their violations of basic human rights. The broad cross section of the community that came out to demand our university invest ethically belies the notion that the American people will tolerate the profiting from occupation or other human rights abuses." Student Senator Emily Carlton, co-sponsor of the bill, agreed, adding "this action will only be historic if it is repeated throughout the country and the world; I hope that student governments all over America will see in this a sign that the time to divest from war is now." In 2009, Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, became the first US educational institution to divest from companies directly involved in the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Hampshire College action was advocated by the group Students for Justice in Palestine, and ultimately adopted by the Board of Trustees. Today, through its Student Senate bill, UC Berkeley becomes the first large, public US institution to endorse a similar measure. UC Berkeley Students for Justice in Palestine has been working on a divestment campaign from entities that profit from the occupation of Palestine since 2000. UC Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine, founded in 2007, played a central role in researching the legal issues and the international laws pertaining to Israeli human rights violations. See text of the UC Berkeley Divestment Bill below: (File updated 3/19; earlier version had minor errors) http://www.kabobfest.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/SB118A-As-Approved.pdf A BILL IN SUPPORT OF UC DIVESTMENT FROM WAR CRIMES Authored By: Emiliano Huet-Vaughn and Tom Pessah Sponsored By: Senators Gaurano , Carlton, Kwon, Oatfield 1. WHEREAS, the ASUC notes the complexity of international relations in all cases, including the Middle East, and recognizes the inability of a body such as the ASUC to adjudicate matters of international law and human rights law, or to take sides on final status issues on wars and occupations throughout the world. Yet, we do note the following findings from the United Nations and other leading human rights organizations regarding the Israel/Palestine conflict, and use it as a case study; and, 2. WHEREAS, prior and subsequent to the bombing the Israeli government has engaged in collective punishment of the whole of the Palestinian population, in the view of the human rights community,1 as exemplified by the ongoing 32 month blockade on Gaza, of which Physicians for Human Rights-Israel has written, "the prolonged siege imposed by the Israeli government on Gaza, the closing of its borders, the tightening of policies regarding permission to exit Gaza for medical purposes, and the severe shortage of medications and other medical supplies all severely damage the Palestinian health system and endanger the lives and health of thousands of Palestinian patients,"2 and of which the Red Cross has said "the whole strip is being strangled, economically speaking" making life in Gaza "a nightmare" for the civilian population, with essential supplies, including electricity, water, and fuel, being denied to the 1.5 million inhabitants 90% of whom depend on aid to survive;3 and 3. WHEREAS, within the occupied West Bank (including East Jerusalem), the Israeli government continues a policy of settlement expansion that, in the opinion of the United Nations Security Council, Human Rights Watch, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and numerous other organizations concerned with enforcement of international law, constitutes a direct violation of Article 49, paragraph 6 of the 4th Geneva Convention which declares "an occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into territories it occupies."4; and 4. WHEREAS, in the context of this bill, "occupation" refers to the current state of Palestinian life under Israeli's military control in the West Bank and Gaza; a definition that is consistent to commonly-held international law; and 5. WHEREAS, student research5 has revealed that, according to the most recent UC investment report6, within the UC Retirement Program fund and the General Endowment Program fund there exist direct investments in American companies materially and militarily supporting the Israeli government's occupation of the Palestinian territories, including American companies General Electric and United Technologies; and 6. WHEREAS, General Electric holds engineering support and testing service contracts with the Israeli military and supplies the Israeli government with the propulsion system for its Apache Assault Helicopter fleet, which, as documented by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, has been 1 * Amnesty International: Israeli Military Action is Collective Punishment - http://www.amnesty.org/en/report/info/MDE15/045/2002 * United Nations press release - http://www.unhchr.ch/huricane/huricane.nsf/0/183ED1610B2BCB80C125751A002B06B2?opendocument * Human Rights Watch 'Israel/Gaza: Donors Should Press Israel to End Blockade' - http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/02/28/israelgazadonors- should-press-israel-end-blockade 2 * Physicians for Human Rights; http://www.phr.org.il/phr/article.asp?articleid=506&catid=55&pcat=45&lang=ENG 3 * Red Cross Report "Dignity Denied in the Occupied Palestinian Territories" - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/13_12_07palestineicrc.pdf * BBC - "British MPs Granted Gaza Access" - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7890977.stm 4 * Human Rights Watch "Israel's Settlements Are on Shaky Ground" - http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/06/28/israels-settlementsare- shaky-ground 4 * Human Rights Watch "Israel's Settlements Are on Shaky Ground" - http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/06/28/israels-settlementsare- shaky-ground * International Committee of the Red Cross - http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/c525816bde96b7fd41256739003e636a/77068f12b8857c4dc12563cd0051bdb0 5 *The research has been conducted over the past year by a group of Berkeley students. A report of the findings is available from ucbdivest at gmail.com 6 * http://www.ucop.edu/treasurer/report/UCTreasurer_AnnualReport_2009.pdf used in attacks on Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, including the January 4, 2009 killings of Palestinian medical aid workers7; and 7. WHEREAS, United Technologies supplies the Israeli government with Blackhawk helicopters and with F-15 and F-16 aircraft engines and holds an ongoing fleet management contract for these engines, and, Amnesty International has documented the Israeli government's use of these aircraft in the bombing of the American School in Gaza, the killing of Palestinians civilians, and the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian homes;8 therefore, be it RESOLVED, that the ASUC will ensure that its assets, and will advocate that the UC assets, do not include holdings in General Electric and United Technologies because of their military support of the occupation of the Palestinian territories; be it further RESOLVED, that the ASUC will further examine its assets and UC assets for funds being invested in companies that a) provide military support for or weaponry to support the occupation of the Palestinian territories or b) facilitate the building or maintenance of the illegal wall or the demolition of Palestinian homes, or c) facilitate the building, maintenance, or economic development of illegal Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian territories; be it further RESOLVED, that if it is found that ASUC and/or the UC funds are being invested in any of the abovementioned ways, the ASUC will divest, and will advocate that the UC divests, all stocks, securities, or other obligations from such sources with the goal of maintaining the divestment, in the case of said companies, until they cease such practices. Moreover, the ASUC will not make further investments, and will advocate that the UC not make further investments, in any companies materially supporting or profiting from Israel's occupation in the abovementioned ways; be it further RESOLVED, that this ASUC resolution not be interpreted as the taking of sides in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, but instead as a principled expression of support for universal human rights and equality; be it further RESOLVED, that the ASUC Senate engage in education campaigns to publicize the divestment efforts and violation of international human rights law, and that furthermore, a committee of 5 members, 2 senators selected by the senate body as a whole, 2 members of or students selected by the UC Berkeley Divestment Task Force, and the ASUC President or a representative from his/her office, form at the end of this semester to monitor and promote university progress in regards to the above mentioned ethical divestment goals; be it finally RESOLVED, that this Committee will recommend additional divestment policies to keep university investments out of companies aiding war crimes throughout the world, such as those taking place in Morocco, the Congo, and other places as determined by the resolutions of the United Nations and other leading international human rights organizations 7 * Amnesty International - 'Fuelling Conflict: Foreign Arms Supplies to Israel/Gaza' - http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/MDE15/012/2009/en/5be86fc2-994e-4eeb-a6e8- 3ddf68c28b31/mde150122009en.html#4.0.4.Aircraft%20and%20Helicopters|outline * Human Rights Watch - 'Fatal Strikes: Attacks on Civilian Homes' http://www.hrw.org/en/node/11265/section/5 * New England Conference of the United Methodist Church Divestment Task Force Report and Recommendations - http://www.neumc.org/pages/detail/178 8 * Amnesty International - 'Fuelling Conflict: Foreign Arms Supplies to Israel/Gaza' - http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/MDE15/012/2009/en/5be86fc2-994e-4eeb-a6e8- 3ddf68c28b31/mde150122009en.html#4.0.4.Aircraft%20and%20Helicopters|outline * New England Conference of the United Methodist Church Divestment Task Force Report and Recommendations - http://www.neumc.org/pages/detail/178 * Israeli Air Force: http://www.iaf.org.il/Templates/Aircraft/Aircraft.IN.aspx?lang=EN&lobbyID=69&folderID=82&docfolderID=211&docID=18321¤t PageNumber=5 * http://palestineinformation.org/divestment.htm =============================== 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 Mar 20 16:53:15 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 2010 16:53:15 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Bolivia to host new climate talks, will not 'betray its people' Message-ID: <20D5E674B91A42838FBFD7FAA6A06311@agingCHS072729> http://boliviarising.blogspot.com/2010/03/bolivia-creates-new-opportunity-for.html Bolivia creates a new opportunity for climate talks that failed at Copenhagen Bolivia will host an international meeting on climate change next month because it is not prepared to 'betray its people' Pablo Sol?n Romero In the aftermath of the Copenhagen climate conference, those who defended the widely condemned outcome tended to talk about it as a "step in the right direction". This was always a tendentious argument, given that tackling climate change can not be addressed by half measures. We can't make compromises with nature. Bolivia, however, believed that Copenhagen marked a backwards step, undoing the work built on since the climate talks in Kyoto. That is why, against strong pressure from industrialised countries, we and other developing nations refused to sign the Copenhagen accord and why we are hosting an international meeting on climate change next month. In the words of the Tuvalu negotiator, we were not prepared to "betray our people for 30 pieces of silver". Our position was strongly criticised by several industrialised countries, who did their brazen best to blame the victims of climate change for their own unwillingness to act. However, recent communications by the European Commission have confirmed why we were right to oppose the Copenhagen accord. In a report called International climate policy post-Copenhagen (pdf), the commission confirmed that the pledges by developed countries are equal to between 13.2% and 17.8% in emissions reductions by 2020 - far below the required 40%-plus reductions needed to keep global temperature rise to less than 2C degrees. The situation is even worse once you take into account what are called "banking of surplus emission budgets" and "accounting rules for land use, land use change and forestry". The Copenhagen accord would actually allow for an increase in developed country emissions of 2.6% above 1990 levels. This is hardly a forward step. This is not just about gravely inadequate commitments, it is also about process. Whereas before, under the Kyoto protocol, developed countries were legally bound to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by a certain percentage, now countries can submit whatever targets they want without a binding commitment. This dangerous approach to climate negotiations is like building a dam where everyone contributes as many bricks as they want regardless of whether it stops the river. The Copenhagen accord opens the dam and condemns millions. Various estimates suggest that the commitments made under the accord would lead to increases of between three to four degrees celsius - a level that many scientists consider disastrous for human life and our ecosystems. For Bolivia, the disastrous outcome of Copenhagen was further proof that climate change is not the central issue in negotiations. For rich countries, the key issues in negotiations were finance, carbon markets, competitiveness of countries and corporations, business opportunities along with discussions about the political makeup of the US Senate. There was surprisingly little focus on effective solutions for reducing carbon emissions. President Evo Morales of Bolivia observed that the best way to put climate change solutions at the heart of the talks was to involve the people. In contrast to much of the official talks, the hundreds of civil society organisations, communities, scientists and faith leaders present in Copenhagen clearly prioritised the search for effective, just solutions to climate change against narrow economic interests. To advance an agenda based on effective just solutions, Bolivia is therefore hosting a Peoples' Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth on 19-22 April, and inviting everyone to participate. Unlike Copenhagen, there will be no secret discussions behind closed doors. Moreover the debate and proposals will be led by communities on the frontlines of climate change and by organisations and individuals dedicated to tackling the climate crisis. All 192 governments in the UN have also been invited to attend and encouraged to listen to the voices of civil society and together develop common proposals. We hope that this unique format will help shift power back to the people, which is where it needs to be on this critical issue for all humanity. We don't expect agreement on everything, but at least we can start to discuss openly and sincerely in a way that didn't happen in Copenhagen. . Pablo Sol?n is Ambassador to the UN for the Plurinational State of Bolivia. He is a sociologist and economist, was active in Bolivia's social movements before entering government, and is an expert on issues of trade, integration, natural resources and water. Republished from The Guardian Posted by Bolivia Rising on Saturday, March 20, 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 Sun Mar 21 00:21:35 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2010 00:21:35 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Stewart Udall, Lion of the American West, Dead at 90 Message-ID: <4A16353DE7E44ED7817C0FE903296522@agingCHS072729> Stewart Udall, Lion of the American West, Dead at 90 http://sfreporter.com/stories/stewart_udall_lion_of_the_american_west_dead_at_90/5446/ Stewart L. Udall, 90, Conservationist in Kennedy and Johnson Cabinets, Dies http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/nyregion/21udall.html Richard Menec www.booksinternationale.com =============================== Join the bookseller list-serv 'Fresh Ink' Forward this email with 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 Mar 21 00:28:16 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2010 01:28:16 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] When drug makers' profits outweigh penalties Message-ID: Bloomberg Markets When drug makers' profits outweigh penalties By David Evans Bloomberg News Sunday, March 21, 2010 Prosecutor Michael Loucks remembers clearly when attorneys for Pfizer, the world's largest drug company, looked across the table and promised it wouldn't break the law again. ? It was January 2004, and the lawyers were negotiating in a conference room on the ninth floor of the federal courthouse in Boston, where Loucks was head of the health-care fraud unit of the U.S. Attorney's Office. One of Pfizer's units had been pushing doctors to prescribe an epilepsy drug called Neurontin for uses the Food and Drug Administration had never approved. ? In the agreement the lawyers eventually hammered out, the Pfizer unit, Warner-Lambert, pleaded guilty to two felony counts of marketing a drug for unapproved uses. New York-based Pfizer agreed to pay $430 million in criminal fines and civil penalties, and the company's lawyers assured Loucks and three other prosecutors that Pfizer and its units would stop promoting drugs for unauthorized purposes. ? What Loucks, who was acting U.S. attorney in Boston until November, didn't know until years later was that Pfizer managers were breaking that pledge not to practice off-label marketing even before the ink was dry on their plea. Fines against drugmakers On the morning of Sept. 2, 2009, another Pfizer unit, Pharmacia & Upjohn, agreed to plead guilty to the same crime. This time, Pfizer executives had been instructing more than 100 salespeople to promote Bextra -- a drug approved only for the relief of arthritis and menstrual discomfort -- for treatment of acute pain of all kinds. For this new felony, Pfizer paid the largest criminal fine in U.S. history: $1.19 billion. On the same day, it paid $1 billion to settle civil cases involving the off-label promotion of Bextra and three other drugs with the United States and 49 states. "At the very same time Pfizer was in our office negotiating and resolving the allegations of criminal conduct in 2004, Pfizer was itself in its other operations violating those very same laws," Loucks, 54, says. "They've repeatedly marketed drugs for things they knew they couldn't demonstrate efficacy for. That's clearly criminal." The penalties Pfizer paid for promoting Bextra off-label were the latest chapter in the drug's benighted history. The FDA found Bextra to be so dangerous that Pfizer took it off the market for all uses in 2005. Across the United States, pharmaceutical companies have pleaded guilty to criminal charges or paid penalties in civil cases when the Justice Department finds that they deceptively marketed drugs for unapproved uses, putting millions of people at risk of chest infections, heart attacks, suicidal impulses or death. It used to be legal for companies to promote drugs in the United States for any use. Congress banned the practice in 1962, requiring pharmaceutical companies to first prove their drugs were safe and effective for specific uses. If the law is clear, why do drug companies keep breaking it? The answer lies in economics. Pharmaceutical companies spend about $1 billion to develop and test a new drug. To recoup their investment, the companies want doctors to prescribe their drugs as widely as possible. Since May 2004, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Bristol-Myers Squibb and four other drug companies have paid a total of $7 billion in fines and penalties. Six of the companies admitted in court that they marketed medicines for unapproved uses. In September 2007, New York-based Bristol-Myers paid $515 million -- without admitting or denying wrongdoing -- to federal and state governments in a civil lawsuit brought by the Justice Department. The six other companies pleaded guilty in criminal cases. In January 2009, Indianapolis-based Lilly, the largest U.S. psychiatric drugmaker, pleaded guilty and paid $1.42 billion in fines and penalties to settle charges that it had for at least four years illegally marketed Zyprexa, a drug approved for the treatment of schizophrenia, as a remedy for dementia in elderly patients. In five company-sponsored clinical trials, 31 people out of 1,184 participants died after taking the drug for dementia -- twice the death rate for those taking a placebo, according to an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association. "Marketing departments of many drug companies don't respect any boundaries of professionalism or the law," says Jerry Avorn, a professor at Harvard Medical School. "The Pfizer and Lilly cases involved the illegal promotion of drugs that have been shown to cause substantial harm and death to patients." The widespread off-label promotion of drugs is yet another manifestation of a health-care system that has become dysfunctional. "It's an unbearable cost to a system that's going broke," Avorn says. "We can't even afford to pay for effective, safe therapies." About 15 percent of all U.S. drug sales are for unapproved uses without adequate evidence the medicines work, according to a study by Randall Stafford, a medical professor at Stanford University. As large as the penalties are for drug companies caught breaking the off-label law, the fines are tiny compared with the firms' annual revenue. The $2.3 billion in fines and penalties Pfizer paid for marketing Bextra and three other drugs cited in the Sept. 2 plea agreement for off-label uses amount to just 14 percent of its $16.8 billion in revenue from selling those medicines from 2001 to 2008. The total of $2.75 billion Pfizer has paid in off-label penalties since 2004 is a little more than 1 percent of the company's revenue of $245 billion from 2004 to 2008. Lilly already had a criminal conviction for misbranding a drug when it broke the law again in promoting schizophrenia drug Zyprexa for off-label uses beginning in 1999. The medication provided Lilly with $36 billion in revenue from 2000 to 2008. That's more than 25 times as much as the total penalties Lilly paid in January. Companies regard the risk of multimillion-dollar penalties as just another cost of doing business, says Lon Schneider, a professor at the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine in Los Angeles. In 2006, he led a study for the National Institute of Mental Health of off-label use of drugs, including Zyprexa. "There's an unwritten business plan," he says. "They're drivers that knowingly speed. If stopped, they pay the fine, and then they do it again." Paying the doctors In pushing off-label use of drugs, companies find ready and willing partners in physicians. Under the fragmented system of U.S. medical regulation, it's legal for doctors to prescribe FDA-approved drugs for any use. The FDA has no authority over doctors, only over drug companies, regarding off-label practices. It's up to the states to oversee physicians. "I think the physician community has to take some ownership responsibility and do their own due diligence beyond the sales and marketing person," says Boston's former U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan. Doctors generally don't tell people they're prescribing drugs pitched to them by pharmaceutical salespeople for unapproved treatments, says Peter Lurie, former deputy medical director of Public Citizen, a Washington-based public interest group. Most doctors don't keep track of FDA-approved uses of drugs, he says. "The great majority of doctors have no idea; they don't even understand the distinction between on- and off-labeling," he says. Pfizer's marketing program offered doctors up to $1,000 a day to allow a Pfizer salesperson to spend time with the physician and his patients, according to a whistle-blower lawsuit filed by John Kopchinski, who worked as a salesman at Pfizer from 1992 to 2003. "By 'pairing up' with a physician, the sales representative was able to promote over a period of many hours, without the usual problems of gaining access to prescribing physicians," Kopchinski says. "In essence, this amounted to Pfizer buying access to physicians." Pfizer spokesman Chris Loder says the company stopped what it calls "mentorships" in 2005. He says Pfizer paid doctors $250 a visit. The goal was clear: Get doctors to prescribe a new drug as widely as possible. Pfizer's Neurontin is a case in point. The FDA approved the drug as a supplemental medication to treat epilepsy in 1993. Pfizer took in $2.27 billion from sales of Neurontin in 2002. A full 94 percent -- $2.12 billion -- of that revenue came from off-label use, according to the prosecutors' 2004 Pfizer sentencing memo. Since 2004, companies that are now Pfizer divisions have pleaded guilty to off-label marketing of two drugs. Pfizer continued off-label promotions for these medications after buying the firms, according to documents. Pfizer first stepped into an off-label scheme in 1999, when it offered to buy Warner-Lambert, based in New Jersey. Prosecutors charged that Warner-Lambert marketed Neurontin off-label between 1995 and 1999. Warner-Lambert admitted doing so for one year in a May 2004 guilty plea for which Pfizer paid $430 million in fines and penalties. When the FDA approved Neurontin in 1993 to be used only along with other epilepsy drugs, the agency wrote that as a side effect, the drug can induce depression and suicidal thoughts in patients. The whistle-blower Much of what prosecutors learned about Warner-Lambert's marketing of Neurontin comes from a former employee, David Franklin, who holds a Ph.D. in microbiology. Franklin, 48, whose title at Warner-Lambert was medical liaison, says his job involved more salesmanship than science. He told doctors that Neurontin was the best drug for a dozen off-label uses, including pain relief, bipolar disease and depression. "Technically, I had responsibility for answering physician questions about all of Parke-Davis's drugs," Franklin says. "In practice, my real job was to promote Neurontin for off-label indications heavily -- to the exclusion of just about everything else." Franklin says he knew such uses of the drug had no scientific support for effectiveness and safety. "I was actually undermining their ability to fulfill the Hippocratic oath," Franklin says, referring to a physician's pledge to "First, do no harm." After working for Warner-Lambert for three months, Franklin quit and filed a whistle-blower lawsuit on behalf of taxpayers to recover money the government paid for illegally promoted drugs. He stood to collect as much as 30 percent of any settlement the company made with the government. Franklin had to wait four years -- until 2000 -- before the Justice Department began a criminal investigation. In November 1999, Pfizer made its public offer to buy Warner-Lambert. In January 2000, a federal grand jury in Boston issued subpoenas to Warner-Lambert employees to testify about the marketing of Neurontin. That March, Warner-Lambert's annual report disclosed that prosecutors were building a criminal case. Undeterred, Pfizer bought Warner-Lambert in June for $87 billion -- the third-largest merger in U.S. history. More sales than Viagra A year after the acquisition, the FDA discovered that Neurontin was still being marketed off-label. In a June, 2001 letter to the company, the agency wrote that Pfizer's promotion of the drug "is misleading and in violation of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act." Pfizer marketed Neurontin off-label after receiving that letter, agency records show. For 2001, Pfizer reported revenue of $1.75 billion from Neurontin sales, making it the company's fourth-largest-selling drug that year, ahead of impotence pill Viagra, which Neurontin topped for four years. As Neurontin sales soared to $2.27 billion in 2002, the FDA found that Pfizer was improperly claiming that the drug was useful for a broader range of brain disorders than scientific evidence had established. The agency sent a letter dated July 1, 2002, that said the company's marketing practices were in violation of FDA rules. It asked Pfizer to stop using misleading promotions. Pfizer reported $2.7 billion in revenue from Neurontin in 2003. Overall, the drug has provided Pfizer with $12 billion in revenue. Pfizer spokesman Chris Loder says, "Regarding the 2001 and 2002 FDA letters, we do not believe that they were suggestive of any continuing off-label promotion." For blowing the whistle on his employer, Franklin collected $24.6 million under the False Claims Act. Prosecutors Loucks and Sullivan got involved in the case after Franklin filed his suit, relying on information from Franklin and their own investigation. Before 2004, prosecutions for off-label marketing were rare. "Until a couple of these cases became public, companies were probably saying, 'Everybody does it this way,' " Sullivan says. Loucks had a track record in off-label prosecutions. In 1994, he negotiated a $61 million settlement with C.R. Bard of New Jersey, which pleaded guilty to promoting off-label use of a heart catheter that led to patient deaths. The off-label campaign In the January 2004 settlement negotiations with Loucks, Sullivan and two other prosecutors, Pfizer's lawyers assured the U.S. Attorney's Office that the company wouldn't market drugs off-label. "They asserted that the company understood the rules and had taken steps to assure corporate compliance with the law," Loucks says. "We remember those promises." What Pfizer's lawyers didn't tell the prosecutors was that Pfizer was at that moment running an off-label marketing promotion using more than 100 salespeople who were pitching Bextra, according to a Pfizer sales manager who pleaded guilty to misbranding a drug in March 2009. Pharmacia & Upjohn developed Bextra, which was approved by the FDA in 2001 for only the treatment of arthritis and menstrual discomfort. P&U and Pfizer had by then crafted a joint marketing agreement to sell the drug. In November 2001, Mary Holloway, a Pfizer Northeast regional manager, began illegally training and directing her sales team to market Bextra for the relief of acute pain, Holloway admitted in the plea. On Dec. 4, 2001, Pfizer executives sent Holloway a copy of a nonpublic FDA letter to the company. The agency had denied Pfizer's application to market Bextra for acute pain. Clinical trials had shown Bextra could cause heart damage and death. Pfizer bought Pharmacia & Upjohn in April 2003. From 2001 through 2003, P&U, first as an independent company and then as a unit of Pfizer, paid doctors more than $5 million in cash to lure them to resorts, where salespeople illegally pitched off-label uses for Bextra, P&U admitted. In her guilty plea, Holloway said her team had solicited hospitals to create protocols to buy Bextra for the unapproved purpose of acute pain relief. Her representatives didn't mention the increased risk of heart attacks in their marketing. They told doctors that side effects were no worse than those of a sugar pill, Holloway said. In 2003, Holloway reported her unit's off-label promotions of Bextra up the corporate ladder at Pfizer, according to a presentencing memo to the judge written by Robert Ullmann, Holloway's attorney. Top managers didn't attempt to halt the illegal conduct, the memo said. By late 2004, Bextra reached blockbuster status, with annual sales of $1.29 billion. Holloway promoted Bextra until the FDA asked Pfizer in April 2005 to pull it from the market for all uses. The agency concluded that the drug increased the risk of heart attacks, chest infections and strokes in cardiac surgery patients. In June 2009, Holloway, 47, was sentenced to two years on probation and fined $75,000. She didn't return phone calls seeking comment. 'We regret . . . ' By 2007, the criminal and civil cases against Pfizer, its employees and its subsidiaries had begun to mount. The tally of drugs cited by federal prosecutors for off-label promotion reached six by 2009. In April 2007, P&U pleaded guilty to a felony charge of offering a $12 million kickback to a pharmacy benefit manager. Pfizer paid a criminal fine of $19.7 million. In September 2009, Pfizer agreed to pay $2.2 billion in fines and penalties. P&U pleaded guilty to a felony charge of misbranding Bextra with the intent to defraud. After the settlement, Pfizer general counsel Amy Schulman said the company had learned its lesson. "We regret certain actions we've taken in the past," she said. "Corporate integrity is an absolute priority for Pfizer." One reason drug companies keep breaking the law may be because prosecutors and judges have been unwilling to use the ultimate sanction -- a felony conviction that would exclude a company from selling its drugs for reimbursement by state health programs and federal Medicare. At Pfizer's Pharmacia sentencing in October, U.S. District Court Judge Douglas Woodlock said companies don't appear to take the law seriously. "It has become something of a cost of doing business for some of these corporations, to shed their skin like certain animals and leave the skin and move on," he said. As prosecutors continue to uncover patterns of deceit in off-label marketing, millions of patients across the nation remain in the dark. Doctors often choose the medications based on dishonest marketing by drug company salesmen. Loucks says that putting an end to the criminal off-label schemes will be difficult. As drugmakers repeatedly plead guilty, they've shown they're willing to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in fines as a cost of generating billions in revenue. The best hope, Loucks says, is that drug companies actually honor the promises they keep making -- and keep breaking -- to obey the law of the land. As much as $100 million for health-care fraud enforcement is tied up in the stalled reform legislation, according to Loucks. "It will be increasingly hard for the threat of exclusion to seem credible and thus serve as a deterrent to bad corporate behavior," he says, "unless Congress supports health-care fraud prosecutions with more money." A version of this story originally appeared in Bloomberg Markets Magazine. It was awarded a 2010 Society of American Business Editors and Writers award for enterprise reporting and general excellence. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/19/AR2010031905578.html?hpid=moreheadlines -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Sun Mar 21 00:40:21 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2010 01:40:21 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] U.S. Turns Blind Eye to Opium in Afghan Town - pitting them against some Afghan officials who are pushing to destroy the harvest Message-ID: "How can we allow the world to see lawful forces in charge of Marja next to fields full of opium, which one way or another will be harvested and turned into a poison that kills people all over the world?" said Zulmai Afzali, the spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Counternarcotics. "The Taliban are the ones who profit from opium, so you are letting your enemy get financed by this so he can turn around and kill you back," he added.... U.S. Turns a Blind Eye to Opium in Afghan Town By ROD NORDLAND Published: March 20, 2010 KABUL, Afghanistan - The effort to win over Afghans on former Taliban turf in Marja has put American and NATO commanders in the unusual position of arguing against opium eradication, pitting them against some Afghan officials who are pushing to destroy the harvest. Marines landed in an Afghan opium field last month on the outskirts of Marja, where opium is the main crop of the area's farmers. >From Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal on down, the military's position is clear: "U.S. forces no longer eradicate," as one NATO official put it. Opium is the main livelihood of 60 to 70 percent of the farmers in Marja, which was seized from Taliban rebels in a major offensive last month. American Marines occupying the area are under orders to leave the farmers' fields alone. "Marja is a special case right now," said Cmdr. Jeffrey Eggers, a member of the general's Strategic Advisory Group, his top advisory body. "We don't trample the livelihood of those we're trying to win over." United Nations drug officials agree with the Americans, though they acknowledge the conundrum. Pictures of NATO and other allied soldiers "walking next to the opium fields won't go well with domestic audiences, but the approach of postponing eradicating in this particular case is a sensible one," said Jean-Luc Lemahieu, who is in charge of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime here. Afghan officials, however, are divided. Though some support the American position, others, citing a constitutional ban on opium cultivation, want to plow the fields under before the harvest, which has already begun in parts of Helmand Province. "How can we allow the world to see lawful forces in charge of Marja next to fields full of opium, which one way or another will be harvested and turned into a poison that kills people all over the world?" said Zulmai Afzali, the spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Counternarcotics. "The Taliban are the ones who profit from opium, so you are letting your enemy get financed by this so he can turn around and kill you back," he added, referring to how the Taliban squeeze farmers for money to run their operations. The argument may strike some as a jarring reversal; in the years right after the 2001 invasion, tensions rose as some Afghan officials vehemently resisted all-out American pressure to stop opium production. Though the United States government's official position is still to support opium crop eradication in general, some American civilian officials say that the internal debate over Marja is far from over within parts of the State Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration. A spokesman for the United States Embassy in Kabul, Brendan J. O'Brien, said officials would decline to comment while the matter was under review. At the heart of the debate with Afghan officials is an important question of cause-and-effect: is poor security in Marja the reason there is so much opium, or is so much opium the reason there has been poor security? "Every province in Afghanistan where you find opium cultivation, you have insecurity as a result," Mr. Afzali said. American military officials and United Nations drug officials see it the other way around. Opium cultivation has been largely wiped out in 20 provinces where security has been improved, and in the seven most insecure provinces, poppy is still farmed. "Nothing can compete with opium in an insecure environment," Mr. Lemahieu said. "A secure environment is the precondition for governance and a long-term solution." Although the International Security Assistance Force, the NATO force that General McChrystal commands, no longer carries out eradication programs itself, its official position is that it supports the Afghan government's efforts to eradicate, and lends backup and protection to the provincial officials, who are responsible for carrying out the eradication program. The ardently anti-opium governor of Helmand Province, Gulab Mangal, has a record of success, cutting back cultivation by 33 percent last year. But he, too, is willing to make an exception for the current harvest in Marja - for the moment. "In general I've been told by my higher-ups that this year you will not eradicate there, because people have suffered a lot of hardships because of the fighting," Mr. Mangal said. "We may do it next year." Mr. Afzali, however, said the Counternarcotics Ministry still hoped to prevail in time to eradicate the current crop in Marja. Mr. Mangal said, "If they order me, I will start the destruction of Marja's opium the same day." The problem of Marja's opium harvest is being discussed intensely by General McChrystal's advisers, but none of the proposed solutions have proved satisfactory. One idea was to buy up and destroy the opium harvest, but opponents of that proposal feared that it would only encourage more opium cultivation - and might be illegal under United States law, turning American troops into de facto drug financiers. Another idea was to give incentives to farmers to change to legal crops next year, while this year concentrating on interdiction of smugglers and the laboratories they use to make opium or heroin from the poppy paste. That would institute a sort of "don't ask, don't tell" policy toward the cultivators and would present a thorny question: where would troops interdict the opium - just outside the farm gate, on the lane leading from the farm, on the road to town? "How do you support the rule of law while providing a proper penalty and disincentive so they switch crops next year?" Commander Eggers said. "We are in a real dilemma." There is little time left to find an answer: two-thirds of Marja's fields are now blooming with tall red poppies, and the forthcoming harvest would provide work for thousands of Afghans from outside the area because it is so labor intensive. The New York Times The fate of Marja's opium crop is a matter of intense debate. Afghan soldiers and American Marines last month in Marja. Some Afghan officials pushed for opium eradication there. Helmand produces more than half of Afghanistan's opium harvest, with 22 percent of its arable land devoted to poppies, even after Governor Mangal's forces eradicated a third of the crop last year. His province was awarded a $10 million Good Performer's Initiative grant by the American Embassy for that effort. Afghanistan now produces 90 percent of the world's opium. And one way or another the opium trade supports an estimated 1.4 million households in the country, which has a population of 25 million to 30 million. It also provides enormous amounts of money to the Taliban, with a recent United Nations study estimating the insurgents had earned as much as $600 million in taxes from farmers and traffickers just from 2005 to 2008. The farmers themselves do not get rich on the harvest. Hajji Said Gul, a 51-year-old farmer with nine acres of poppies in Marja, said that after he paid back loans to buy seeds, and gave the Taliban their 10 percent of the profits, he earned $500 an acre with each harvest. He is not worried about eradication. "The Taliban have already promised us that they will keep fighting the government and foreign forces until we collect our harvest from the fields," he said. "All my hopes are related to the poppy harvest." Muhammad Nabi, 52, a tribal elder, said: "It's better if they don't destroy the crops this year. Next year, if they provide better security, reconstruction and work programs, then we guarantee they will not grow poppy." Opium prices now are at historic lows, after years of over-production in Afghanistan. A few years ago, farmers could earn 37 times as much from opium as from wheat, the favored substitution crop recently; now it is more like two or three times as much, United Nations officials say. Mr. Lemahieu said he thought that provided an opportunity to persuade the farmers that if they changed to legal crops, the government would provide them with services like schools and clinics, and then they might be willing to accept lower profits. "Between yesterday's opium income and tomorrow's legal income, today requires an increase in quality of life for the farmer and his family," he said. Destroy his crop this year, Western officials say, and he won't see anything but red. Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Marja, Afghanistan, and an Afghan employee of The New York Times from Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/world/asia/21marja.html?hp -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 33911 bytes Desc: not available URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Sun Mar 21 00:46:25 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2010 01:46:25 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Ahmad Chalabi, Finally Within Grasp of Power Message-ID: <8F897234E16244AD95C54AF655EB81FF@Upstairs> The Saturday Profile Early Backer of War, Finally Within Grasp of Power By TIM ARANGO Published: March 19, 2010 "I did more than anyone else in persuading the U.S. to get rid of Saddam," said Ahmad Chalabi, sitting in the dark next to his empty swimming pool. Soon the American troops that did so will be gone. Mr. Chalabi, as perplexing and contentious as he was in the prelude to the war, will be staying behind, perhaps finally with an official grasp on power in Iraq that has always eluded him. He was a candidate in the recent elections, his alliance of Shiite parties with ties to the radical cleric Moktada al-Sadr is running third in the balloting, and he could well claim a seat in Parliament - something he did not accomplish in the last parliamentary election, in 2005, when his party, the Iraqi National Congress, received just 30,000 votes of 12 million. His electoral prospects aside, Mr. Chalabi, at 65, has improbably - and controversially - reinserted himself in Iraqi politics. His role before the parliamentary elections in disqualifying nearly 500 candidates with ties to Saddam Hussein's Baath Party helped raise fears about a rigged election as well as worries of disenfranchisement among Sunni Arabs, who are a minority here but were politically ascendant under Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. "Baathism in Iraq equals Nazism in Germany," he said. When he appeared recently at the government election commission, amid a ballot-counting process that was becoming more opaque by the day, he stoked conspiracy fears of political meddling among a population prone to believe them - even though political parties have a right to have representatives present, and Western diplomats have said that nothing sinister was afoot with Mr. Chalabi's appearance. It has been six years since Mr. Chalabi was the guest of President George W. Bush at the State of the Union address. Five months after that his home was raided by the Americans, who suspected him of spying for Iran. Then the sectarian war began and tens of thousands of Iraqis died. In decades of exile in London, he made a fortune in banking and real estate, though not without the usual element of controversy; in 1992 he was convicted in absentia of bank fraud in Jordan. He did return to London during the sectarian war, but says it has been more than a year since he has been there. Mr. Chalabi was born into a prominent and wealthy Iraqi Shiite family in Baghdad, but left in 1956, years before Saddam Hussein assumed power. He returned in 2003 but quickly ran afoul of the Americans, and the animosity still simmers. In February, Gen. Ray Ordierno, the top commander in Iraq, said Mr. Chalabi and his partner on the panel that disqualified the parliamentary candidates were "clearly influenced by Iran." Hazim al-Nuaimi, a political science professor in Baghdad, said Mr. Chalabi, "has very strange instincts for the winning hand in political poker." "He felt the American role decreasing in the country and the Middle East and he went to play another winning set of cards, which is the Iranian cards," Mr. Nuaimi said. Mr. Chalabi says he has had close relationships with both the United States and Iran, but admitted that relations these days with Americans are "in abeyance." But he said he was still friends with two of his former neoconservative allies in the Bush administration, Paul D. Wolfowitz, the former deputy secretary of defense, and Richard N. Perle, who was chairman of the Defense Policy Board. MR. CHALABI will not discuss his political ambitions, but few here doubt that he wants to be prime minister. In a mocking tone, he derides newspaper reports that, he says, paint him as a man of "unbridled ambition" who "is determined to be prime minister." "There is no such thing," he said. And despite his incongruities - a former American ally now cozy with Iran; a secular Shiite, wealthy and educated at M.I.T., now in lockstep with radical Islamist parties - he is skilled at maneuvering himself into a power broker's role, even if it is unclear how popular he is among the Iraqi people. The early results of this election tend to confirm that he has managed the feat again. "Anyone who calls him over and done is always going to be wrong," said Aram Roston, an author who wrote a biography of Mr. Chalabi called "The Man Who Pushed America to War." And while his allegiances seem constantly in flux, he can inspire deep loyalty. One of his closest advisers remains Francis Brooke, an American who met him in 1991 through C.I.A. connections and lives in a house in Georgetown owned by Mr. Chalabi's political organization. "He is a Machiavellian politician who has no respect for any principle or any ideology," said Professor Nuaimi. "Politics to him is just bargaining and deals." Mr. Chalabi has been accused of opportunism in forging his alliance with Shiite extremists, but he said that was not his intent. "Sectarian politics gets votes in Iraq," he said. "But sectarian government fails in Iraq." THE de-Baathification controversy, which caused an uproar both in the West and among Sunnis, was actually, say some Western diplomats now, a masterstroke by Mr. Chalabi. It cemented his alliance with Shiites, tapping into their still bubbling reservoir of resentment here toward the indignities of living under Mr. Hussein. "He's a hero, Chalabi, because he uprooted the Baathists," said Ahmed Khalaf, 33, who works in a grocery store in Sadr City, a predominantly Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad. "Any Baathists he found, he tore them out of the government." Another Sadr City resident, Abu Ahmed Hassan, 50, called Mr. Chalabi "beloved." He said, "The Americans hate him, the Jordanians arrested him. So he must be good." Underscoring the complexities of Mr. Chalabi's political character, it is easier to find an Iraqi to say something nice about him on the hardscrabble streets of Sadr City than it is in the halls of the Iraqi Hunting Club, a social club for Baghdad's elite in the wealthy Mansur district. It is near one of Mr. Chalabi's homes, and served as a base of operations for him after the 2003 invasion. He also held events there during the recent campaign. "If Ahmad Chalabi walked in here you wouldn't see him because he would be surrounded by so many guards," said Abu Shakeen, 38, on a recent afternoon. "First, he's a businessman," he said. "He knows how to use politics for his own gain in business." And he knows how to manipulate images to make a point. A few days ago, Mr. Chalabi hosted a group of Iraqi amputees at his compound to be fitted with prosthetic limbs, paid for by his family's charity. "American troops shot all these guys," he said. Many of the injured had actually lost their limbs during the war between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s. But one, Haider Kareem, 38, said he lost his right leg in 2005 when he was caught in the middle when an American convoy opened fire. While seven years have passed since the invasion, Mr. Chalabi still proudly takes credit for helping craft the argument that justified it. Of course, much, if not most of that artifice, crumbled after intelligence about Iraq's weapons programs - some of it provided by Mr. Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress - proved to be entirely wrong. Nevertheless, he said the war still made sense. "The world is a safer place now, and the U.S. gave us the gift of democracy." Anthony Shadid and Riyadh Mohammed contributed reporting. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/20/world/middleeast/20chalabi.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Sun Mar 21 00:52:47 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2010 01:52:47 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Pope Offers Apology, Not Penalty, for Sex Abuse Scandal Message-ID: Pope Offers Apology, Not Penalty, for Sex Abuse Scandal By RACHEL DONADIO Published: March 20, 2010 VATICAN CITY - Faced with a church sexual abuse scandal spreading across Europe, Pope Benedict XVI on Saturday apologized directly to victims and their families in Ireland, expressing "shame and remorse" for what he called "sinful and criminal" acts committed by members of the clergy. Documents From Vatican Addressing Abuse But the pope did not require that Roman Catholic leaders be disciplined for past mistakes as some victims were hoping, nor did he clarify what critics see as contradictory Vatican rules that they fear allow abuse to continue unpunished. "You have suffered grievously, and I am truly sorry," the pope said in a long-awaited, eight-page pastoral letter to Irish Catholics. "Your trust has been betrayed and your dignity has been violated." He also criticized Ireland's bishops for "grave errors of judgment and failures of leadership." The letter was written in language that was at once impassioned, personal and sweeping. And the pope did take the relatively rare step of ordering a special apostolic delegation to be sent to investigate abuse in unspecified dioceses in Ireland. But even that decision raised questions among many who wondered what the investigators might unearth beyond what the Irish government found in two wide-ranging and scathing reports released last year. One report found systemic abuse in church-run schools; another said the church and the police in Ireland had systematically colluded in covering up decades of sexual abuse by priests in Dublin. The pope has apologized before for sexual abuse scandals, most notably when meeting with victims in the United States in 2008. But the letter once again showed the difficulties facing Benedict, as a problem that he felt he had already decisively addressed appears to be intensifying, with hundreds of new allegations of sexual abuse surfacing. The crisis also stands to damage Benedict's central goals of fortifying the church and fighting secularism in Europe. The letter was especially anticipated, coming after weeks of damaging reports in several countries that brought the scandal close not only to the leader of Ireland's church, but also to the pope himself. Last week, a psychiatrist who treated a priest decades ago in a German archdiocese run by the future pope said he had repeatedly warned that the priest, who was accused of sexually abusing boys, should never work with children again. The priest was re-assigned to parish work almost immediately after his therapy began, and one of Benedict's deputies at the time has taken responsibility for that decision. Less than five years later, the priest was accused of molesting other boys, and in 1986 was convicted of sexual abuse. The pope did not address that case in his letter to the Irish, nor did he call for Cardinal Sean Brady, the head of the Irish church, to resign. Cardinal Brady said last week that he would step down if the pope asked, after revelations that he took part in a church investigation in 1975 in which two children were forced to sign secrecy oaths. The letter also remained tightly focused on Ireland - to the dismay of many victims' groups around the world - even as the crisis has widened to include Catholics in Austria, the Netherlands and Germany. "I find that deceitful because we know that this is a global and systemic problem in the global church," said Colm O'Gorman, the co-founder of a victims' group who said he was sexually abused by a priest as a teenager in Ireland in the early '80s. "It's all about protecting the institution and, above all, its wealth." "The greatest contribution the pope could have made was to stop the abuse of victims, and he's not even done that," he added. In recent years, the Catholic Church in the United States has paid over $2 billion in abuse settlements. In Ireland, some parishes have said they may have to take up a Sunday collection to help fund abuse settlements. For many Catholics, the letter offered a critical test of whether the pope can stem a crisis that has shaken the credibility and authority of the Roman Catholic Church in other parts of the world. Even as Benedict urged Irish clergy to cooperate with civil justice authorities, the abuse scandals have put to the test a Vatican culture of protecting its own even in the face of crimes against civil and canon law. While many Irish Catholics were hoping for concrete measures after the government reports that criticized Vatican norms for dealing with the abuse, Benedict instead offered a prescription for how to renew their faith. He urged all Irish clergy to go on a spiritual retreat and suggested that dioceses set aside special chapels where Catholics could pray for "healing and renewal." "There's a strong tendency to approach this as a problem of faith, when it is a problem of church management and a lack of accountability," said Terrence McKiernan, founder and president of BishopAccountability.org, which tracks church records on abuse cases. In a statement, the group said the "most glaring" omission in the letter was Benedict's "failure to acknowledge his own culpability," adding that, "he pointedly does not include himself in his criticism of church leaders." In a news conference on Saturday, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, defended the pope's statements, saying the document was intended as a pastoral letter, not an outline of "administrative or juridical measures." Indeed, Benedict spoke movingly and directly to the pain of victims. "Many of you found that, when you were courageous enough to speak of what happened to you, no one would listen," the pope wrote. He added, "I know some of you find it difficult even to enter the doors of a church after all that has occurred." The pope told abusers to "submit yourselves to the demands of justice, but do not despair of God's mercy." The letter is to be read aloud in churches across Ireland on Sunday. In a homily Saturday after reading the letter, Cardinal Brady made no reference to the possibility of resigning. "Let us pray that the Holy Father's pastoral letter will be the beginning of a great season of rebirth and hope in the Irish church," he told worshipers at a morning Mass in St. Patrick's Cathedral in Armagh, Northern Ireland. Beyond revealing decades of abuse, the Irish government's reports issued last year found that the church did not routinely inform civil authorities about priests who had committed felonies. Four Irish bishops offered their resignation in the wake of the publication of the report on Dublin in November, but the pope has accepted only one. As reports of abuse cases have spread, many questions have been raised about the line between Vatican secrecy and civil judicial process. Some Irish church officials have said the problem has been deepened by confusion over the interpretation of a 2001 directive by Benedict, then a cardinal, reiterating a strict requirement for secrecy in handling abuse cases. The directive also gave the authority for handling such cases to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith; Benedict was prefect of the congregation from 1982 until becoming pope in 2005. Some see an inherent contradiction between the directive and the Vatican's telling local dioceses to cooperate with civil justice. The Vatican says that its secrecy norms help protect the victims. In his letter, Benedict spoke of "a well-intentioned but misguided tendency to avoid penal approaches," to violations of canon law. The pope attributed that problem in part to "a misplaced concern for the reputation of the church and the avoidance of scandal." And he said that bishops should "continue to cooperate with the civil authorities in their area of competence." In the case in Germany in 1980 that made headlines recently, Benedict, then Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, allowed a priest who was accused of molesting boys to move to Munich for therapy. The diocese he oversaw did not notify civil authorities of the sexual abuse allegations. Reporting was contributed by John F. Burns and Eamon Quinn from Dublin, Alan Cowell from Paris, Nicholas Kulish from Berlin, and Laurie Goodstein from New York. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/world/europe/21pope.html?hpw -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Mar 21 01:12:00 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2010 01:12:00 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] "Enemy Belligerent" Act Could Set U.S. on Path to Military Dictatorship Message-ID: <6EED0D8A071848579EEDDDA2DD287687@agingCHS072729> http://www.alternet.org/story/146081/ AlterNet March 19, 2010 McCain and Lieberman's "Enemy Belligerent" Act Could Set U.S. on Path to Military Dictatorship By Liliana Segura On March 4th, Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman introduced a bill called the "Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010" that, if passed, would set this country on a course to become a military dictatorship. The bill is only 12 pages long, but that is plenty of room to grant the president the power to order the arrest, interrogation, and imprisonment of anyone -- including a U.S. citizen -- indefinitely, on the sole suspicion that he or she is affiliated with terrorism, and on the president's sole authority as commander in chief. The Act begins with the following (convoluted) requirement: Whenever within the United States, its territories, and possessions, or outside the territorial limits of the United States, an individual is captured or otherwise comes into the custody or under the effective control of the United States who is suspected of engaging in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners through an act of terrorism, or by other means in violation of the laws of war, or of purposely and materially supporting such hostilities, and who may be an unprivileged enemy belligerent, the individual shall be placed in military custody for purposes of initial interrogation and determination of status in accordance with the provisions of this Act. In other words, if at any point, anywhere in the world, a person is caught who might have done something to suggest that he or she is a terrorist or somehow supporting a terrorist organization against the U.S. or its allies, that person must be imprisoned by the military. For how long? As long as U.S. officials want. A subsequent section, titled "Detention Without Trial of Unprivileged Enemy Belligerents," states that suspects "may be detained without criminal charges and without trial for the duration of hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners." In a press conference introducing the bill earlier this month, Sen. Joe Lieberman said, "I know that will be -- that may be -- a long time, but that's the nature of this war." As constitutional expert Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, "It's basically a bill designed to formally authorize what the Bush administration did to American citizen Jose Padilla -- arrest him on U.S. soil and imprison him for years in military custody with no charges." What happened to Padilla, a notorious perversion of justice in a country that claims to be a democratic standard-bearer, would thus go from being an exception to the rule itself. As "war on terror"-era legislation goes, Greenwald calls the Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act "probably the single most extremist, tyrannical and dangerous bill introduced in the Senate in the last several decades, far beyond the horrific, habeas-abolishing Military Commissions Act." This is a sobering statement, especially given the intense controversy the MCA generated at the time of its passage, in the heady weeks preceding the 2006 midterm elections. Then-Senator Obama was one of only 34 senators who voted against it, calling it "sloppy," and expressing his wish that "cooler heads . prevail after the silly season of politics is over." Now, however, as president, Obama has helped pave the way for such radical legislative efforts as the one introduced by McCain and Lieberman, by embracing -- and re-branding -- the military commissions he once opposed. "Belligerents" are the new "Combatants" Three years after Obama eloquently opposed the Military Commissions Act, the now-president signed a Military Commissions Act of his own, as part of the 2010 Defense Authorization Bill. The law, which sought to overhaul the discredited Bush-era military commissions for "alien enemy combatants," introduced what is apparently turning out to be an important new term to the counterterror lexicon: Unprivileged Enemy Belligerent, defined as "an individual who: 1) has engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners; or 2) has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners." Months before, in March of 2009, the Obama administration announced that it was phasing out the term "alien enemy combatant," even as it held on to the authority to hold terror suspects indefinitely. "Unprivileged Enemy Belligerent," then, was its replacement. As Human Rights Watch attorney Joanne Mariner wrote last fall, "this is a cosmetic change, not a real improvement, which mirrors the administration's decision to drop the enemy combatant formula in habeas litigation at Guantanamo Bay." What overshadows all of these differences is, however, a key similarity with the Bush-era definition. Just as, in the Guantanamo habeas litigation, the Obama administration has adopted the Bush-era position of claiming that persons who provide support to hostilities can be treated just like persons who engaged in hostilities, the new law's "unprivileged enemy belligerent" definition takes the same tack." In other words, it is as expansive a definition of "terrorism" as possible. In Obama's defense bill, the word "alien" preceded the term "unprivileged belligerents," in defining who can be held before a military commission. For McCain and Lieberman's purposes, omitting the word "alien" apparently means the label can apply to U.S. citizens, while, politically, the word "unpriviliged" provides a useful connotation: terror suspects will not be coddled like common criminals! This now-familiar line is the one Senators McCain and Lieberman have taken in pushing their legislation. "These are not common criminals. They are war criminals," Lieberman told reporters at his press conference with McCain. The bill now has eight Republican co-sponsors: Sen. Saxby Chambliss (GA), Sen. James Inhofe (OK), Sen. George LeMieux (FL), Sen. Jeff Sessions (AL), Sen. John Thune (SD), Sen. David Vitter (LA), Sen. Roger Wicker (MS), and the newly-elected Sen. Scott Brown (MA). In case there was any doubt that terror suspects will have no rights under this law, the Right's cynical attack on Miranda rights has been conveniently inscribed into the Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010: A individual who is suspected of being an unprivileged enemy belligerent shall not, during interrogation under this subsection, be provided the statement required by Miranda v. Arizona . or otherwise be informed of any rights that the individual may or may not have to counsel or to remain silent consistent with Miranda v. Arizona. But what is perhaps most dangerous is the tremendous amount of power it gives to a U.S. president to determine who is and who is not a terrorist. Under the bill, the president would establish a 'high-value detainee interrogation group," comprised of Executive Branch experts "in matters relating to national security, terrorism, intelligence, interrogation, or law enforcement as the President considers appropriate." This group would be in charge of making a "preliminary determination whether or not the detainee is an unprivileged enemy belligerent . based on the result of its interrogation of the individual and on all intelligence information available to the interrogation group." Its findings would go to the Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General, who would "jointly submit to the President and to the appropriate committees of Congress a final determination whether or not the detainee is an unprivileged enemy belligerent." "In the event of a disagreement between the Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General, the President shall make the final determination." Also, all of this has to happen no more than 48 hours after the detainee is brought into military custody. Where's the Controversy? The Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act has yet to go anywhere -- it has been referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee -- which might account for the lack of discussion about it. But, especially coming from two politicians as influential as McCain and Lieberman -- "Serious Centrists" as Greenwald calls them, regularly "feted on Sunday shows" -- such a radical stab at authoritarian rule must be swiftly and loudly condemned. "Why is the national security community treating the 'Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010,' introduced by Sens. John McCain and Joseph Lieberman ... as a standard proposal, as a simple response to the administration's choices in the aftermath of the Christmas Day bombing attempt?" asked The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder this month, "A close reading of the bill suggests it would allow the U.S. military to detain U.S. citizens without trial indefinitely in the U.S. based on suspected activity." This is a defining characteristic of a military dictatorship. Where's the outrage? And will it come before it's too late? _______________ Liliana Segura is an AlterNet staff writer and editor of Rights & Liberties and World Special Coverage. Follow her on Twitter. c 2010 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved. View this story online at: =============================== Join the bookseller list-serv 'Fresh Ink' Forward this email with 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 Mar 21 22:52:28 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2010 22:52:28 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Obama Continues Bush's Iran Policy Message-ID: <62CDAB437D7846999419663E2E90A861@agingCHS072729> http://www.truthout.org/obama-continues-bushs-iran-policy57853 Sunday 21 March 2010 Obama Continues Bush's Iran Policy by: Daan de Wit | Deep Journal Under President Obama, Iran continues to dominate the world agenda. Iran is being presented as a crucial problem that must be solved. The Iran Problem is one with several layers. The uppermost layer is that Iran is a potential threat to world peace. What are the facts and the fiction that make up this first layer? Critical thinker Noam Chomsky recently made it clear following a reading at the Harvard Memorial Church (23:00) that the foreign policy of President Barack Obama is a continuation of the policy from the second term of his predecessor, President Bush. This pronouncement means that if Bush had served a third term he would have maintained the same foreign policy as Obama - a not unreasonable hypothesis from Chomsky. Chomsky explains (16:45) what this means for the Iranian situation. He cites UN Security Council Resolution 1887, which criticizes Iran and calls on all countries to resolve conflicts within the bounds of the non-proliferation treaty without the threat of force. 'That particular part of the resolution was not exactly headlined here, for a simple reason. It was directed at the two countries that are regularly threatening the use of force: the United States and Israel'. Words and Deeds Against Iran Whoever wants to understand what Chomsky means in the concrete sense need only open the newspaper. It looks like old news from the Bush years, but it's actually news from 2010, after a year of Obama and his Nobel Peace Prize. 'We must recruit the whole world to fight Ahmadinejad'. 'Who is Ahmadinejad? A dictator!', according to the Israeli President Shimon Peres, last month. These statements were quickly followed up by Secretary Clinton, who said she feared that Iran was drifting toward a military dictatorship. But it's not limited to words alone. In January it was made known that 'the Pentagon had decided to double the value of emergency military stockpiles it stores in Israel to the value of $800 million'. Other countries in the region are also being armed by the U.S. so as to offer a counterweight to the danger from Iran. The Guardian writes: 'The US is dispatching Patriot defensive missiles to four countries ? Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Kuwait ? and keeping two ships in the Gulf capable of shooting down Iranian missiles. [...] Besides the new missile deployment, Washington is also helping Saudi Arabia to create a 30,000-strong force to protect oil installations and other infrastructure, as well as expanded joint exercises between the US and military forces in the region. The move is a continuation of the military build-up begun under former president George W Bush. In the past two years, Abu Dhabi has bought $17bn (?11bn) worth of weapons from the US, including the Patriot anti-missile batteries and an advanced anti-missile system. UAE recently bought 80 US-made fighter jets. It is also buying fighters from France. Petraeus said in a speech in Bahrain last year the UAE air force "could take out the entire Iranian air force, I believe".' According to the Washington Post, it's 'part of a broader push that includes unprecedented coordination of air defenses and expanded joint exercises between the U.S. and Arab militaries, the officials said. All appear to be aimed at increasing pressure on Tehran'. Chomsky: A Threatened Iran Steps Up Threat The constant military and diplomatic threat from the U.S. that according to Chomsky has been emanating first from Bush and now from Obama - in combination with the threat from Israel and its allies - are actions that are not going unanswered. Chomsky sees this as having far-reaching consequences (19:20): 'Those are all threats, constant, verbal, actual. And the threats do have the effect of inducing Iran to develop a deterrent'. Thus the deterrent that Iran is developing is a consequence of feeling threatened. Chomsky adds that he doesn't know if the country is actually developing nuclear weapons. He does say that Iran knows that if it weaponized just one rocket with a nuclear warhead, 'the country would be vaporized in five minutes'. Project Iran Requires More Patience Than Iraq The Iran Project - regime change in Iran - is still on track. As I demonstrate in my book The Next War - The Attack on Iran - A Preview, a public, diplomatic trajectory is being pursued that runs parallel to a hidden, clandestine process. It's the same modus operandi as in the case of Iraq, except that this time more patience is being execercised because the circumstances demand it. Just like with Iraq, non-existent weapons of mass destruction are being used as an argument, and just like with Iraq, it ultimately gets down to strategic political concerns and energy interests. Yet the threat of Iran as a nuclear power is not a minor detail. It really does play a leading role in the minds of American and Israeli leaders. Not because of the argument propagated by the media - namely the danger of an Iranian attack. The reason that the nuclear weapons issue is playing such a major role is because the moment that Iran becomes a nuclear power, it becomes untouchable. Race To Iran Leads to Conflict These conflicting interests concerning the same subject - Iran as a nuclear power - mean that both parties have found themselves in a race that is heading towards a situation in which there is going to be only one winner and one loser. If the combo of Israel and America wins, Iran doesn't become a nuclear power and won't assume the position in the region that it aspires to. If Iran gets to the point where it is capable of producing a nuclear weapon - or if it actually goes ahead and does that - then it has won the race. One of the consequeces of this will be that Israel will have to give up its dominant position in the region in favor of Iran. The former Russian premier, Primakov, points out that Iran has already seen its influence increase as a result of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq, both former enemies of Iran. Another result will be that the U.S. won't be able to lay claim to Iranian mineral resources, which will cause Iran to expand energy deals with countries like China, America's big competitor. Because the interests surrounding the geopolitical game involving Iran are so great, and because there can be only one winner in this race, a conflict that comes during the last stage of the race is almost unavoidable. Translated by Ben Kearney -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Daan De Wit currently works at the NOS Journaal, Dutch tv news, website, is the programmer and interviewer for Docs at the Docks, a monthly series of evenings with critical journalistic documentaries, interviews and performing arts, and the author of De Volgende Oorlog The Next War - The Attack on Iran - A Preview. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Mar 21 23:13:44 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2010 23:13:44 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] =?iso-8859-1?q?The_Democrats=27_Healthcare_Disaster?= Message-ID: <76C350264D664482A941148F5CE72AB3@agingCHS072729> [This should be appear soon at Robin Hahnel's ZSpace page, at http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/robinhahnel ] The Democrats' Healthcare Disaster By Robin Hahnel I completely agree with Norman Solomon's excellent piece on the Democratic Party Healthcare Bill. The bill is a disaster and the Democratic Party "cave" on healthcare reform is another example of how progressives are betrayed by the Democratic Party - as if we needed another example! I also find looking for silver linings to console oneself with in the form of "when it proves to be a disaster we can move on to fix it" too pathetic to be of any comfort. (I truly wonder about people who can find comfort in that thought.) And I agree with others who have pointed out that this outcome was pretty predictable. I know few single-payer advocates who are truly surprised. So let's move on to something we all did not already know. (1) I think the Democrats have failed to realize how furious the bear they have witlessly and unnecessarily poked will become. No, the bear I am talking about is not progressives. Obama/Pelosi/Reid & Co. know they have poked the progressive bear. They know this every time they do it, and they know they will do it from the very beginning, It is always a calculated risk they take that the progressive bear will continue to sleep no matter how much they poke us because we have nowhere else to go on general election day. But I am talking about a different bear. The bear the Democrats don't realize they have poked in this case is low to moderate income people of no particular political persuasion (until now) who the healthcare bill will force to buy a lousy product they have trouble affording. This bill will infuriate tens of millions of Americans who will not hate the private insurance companies who gouge them, but will instead become life-long haters of "big government" Democrats. Unlike progressives who are trapped, this bear will wake up and move when poked. And Obama/Pelosi/Reid Democrats Inc. will not like the direction this bear moves because these millions will flock to a readily available alternative - Limbaugh, Beck, Fox, Pallin, Gingrich, et. al. -- are all waiting to welcome them with open arms. I know how this works. In 1968 when Lyndon Johnson told me I either had to go to Vietnam, Canada, or jail I became a life-long peacenik as did millions like me. So besides a catastrophe for real healthcare reform, this bill is a political catastrophe for the Democratic Party and progressives who seek to work in tandem with the Democratic Party. It is not only a huge gift to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, it is a huge political gift to right wing Republicans. To make the point a little more poignant: When these unwilling consumers stop making payments on their overpriced, lousy private health insurance policies - and these are people who know what the Repo Man looks like! -- exactly what is going to happen? If anyone thinks through the possible options I think they will understand what a Rube Goldberg machine the Democratic Party Healthcare Bill really is. If the law says they must have coverage, will the US government enforce the law? How exactly? If their private insurers cancel their policies after they are three months behind paying their premiums, what then becomes of universal coverage and making sure that the pool of insured includes young and healthy people not just old and sick ones? (2) Before this becomes another round of "I told you not to vote for Democrats but to vote for Nader or McKinney instead" let me hasten to point out that advocates of building a third party in the US have failed just as miserably as progressives trying to work through the Democratic Party. The reason Obama/Pelosi/Reid & Co. can get away with poking the progressive bear is that third party advocates have also failed completely to build a credible alternative. I say this as a card caring member of the Green Party who is honest enough to admit that running progressive candidates in general elections - at every level of office - practically never works either. More stone throwing between "third party-ers" and "work-with-the-most-liberal Democrats" is one of the more useless activities progressives engage in to avoid the hard work of talking with someone in America who does not already agree with us. There is nothing to say on that subject that has not been said a million times already. If someone has a solution to the spoiler problem then please, let them come forward and enlighten the rest of us. But for both sides to keep telling us why the other side will fail is not only monotonous, it is debilitating! The truth is that both sides throwing stones in this spat among progressives live in houses built of glass. Yes, Clintonism accelerated the process of wrecking the Democratic Party as a vehicle for progressive reform, and Obamism is finishing the job far quicker than I thought possible 15 months ago. Yes, I think this particular piece of healthcare legislation will weaken the Democratic Party and strengthen the Republican Party for decades to come in ways that few yet understand. But none of this wisdom gets us any closer to a solution to our problem. The name of the game we need to concentrate on is "credible threat." Until we figure out some way to create a credible threat on general election day the progressive bear will keep getting poked on every day that is not election day. And no, "Nader in 2012" is not going to prevent us from getting poked again! =============================== Join the bookseller list-serv 'Fresh Ink' Forward this email with 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 Mar 21 23:48:00 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2010 00:48:00 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Chavez rules out Internet controls - aims to increase Web access Message-ID: <946121C60BD24FE2A5C414F0C2D1D425@Upstairs> Venezuela's Chavez rules out Internet controls The Associated Press Sunday, March 21, 2010; 7:32 PM CARACAS, Venezuela -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez denied that the government plans to impose controls on the Internet, saying Sunday that his administration aims to increase Web access rather than limit it. Earlier this month, Chavez sparked concerns of a possible crackdown on Web sites critical of his government when he called for regulation of the Internet and urged prosecutors to act against Noticiero Digital, a site popular among his opponents. Chavez has become increasingly critical of social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook and says adversaries use them to deceive the public. On Sunday, speaking during his weekly television and radio show, the socialist leader said the government has inaugurated 668 Internet centers in much of the country that offer Venezuelans access to the Web, and his administration plans to spend close to $11 million this year to build 200 more. Still, Chavez also told his audience that government critics often use the Web "to generate panic," and said such actions "cannot be permitted." He announced plans to counter such online criticism by launching his own Web page and becoming a cyber-activist himself: "I'm going to have my Internet trench, my trench for the battle." The number of Internet subscribers climbed to more than 1.5 million last year in this politically divided South American country of 29 million - up from about 273,000 nine years ago - according to Chavez. He said roughly 35 percent of all Internet users get access to the Web at government centers. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/21/AR2010032102265.html?hpid=sec-world -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Mar 22 00:23:50 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2010 00:23:50 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Nuclear reactors, but no fuel Message-ID: <81EFCD7BD9D2455488BD3550F9B0EB64@agingCHS072729> Nuclear reactors, but no fuel http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2007/08/nuclear-react-1.html From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Mar 22 00:28:44 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2010 00:28:44 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Post-Katrina New Orleans: A Third Reconstruction? Message-ID: <67511FF258A34BF3ACDAF536B5D29FA7@agingCHS072729> http://www.solidarity-us.org/current/node/2610 Post-Katrina New Orleans: A Third Reconstruction? Derrick Morrison WHEN UNION ARMY troops under the command of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler entered and occupied New Orleans in April of 1862, so began the first Reconstruction of the city and the state of Louisiana. The rise and then the defeat of the historic democratic struggle known as the first Reconstruction - discussed in the accompanying sidebar [as well as reviews by Robert Caldwell and Jim Toweill elsewhere in this issue] - sets the context in which we find today's New Orleans, four years after the levee collapse. What is required for New Orleans and the Gulf Coast stretching from Florida through Alabama, Mississippi, and over to Texas is a new Reconstruction - a third Reconstruction (the first one followed the Civil War, the second was the modern Civil Rights movement). But is the present political, social and economic system capable of giving birth to the effort? The balance sheet since Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita in August and September of 2005 does not look good. The Times-Picayune, the New Orleans daily that is the mouthpiece of big business interests, ran a front page article in the September 5, 2009 edition headlined, "Delgado is forced to reject students." The sub-headline was "Impasse with FEMA over repairs leaves campus short on space." Staff writer John Pope began, "For the first time in Delgado Community College's 88-year history, the area's most populous institution of higher education has turned away 1,500 applicants because it ran out of building space." Pope continued, "The needed rooms are there, but they are in buildings that are still awaiting repairs from the damage that Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters inflicted four years ago. Educators are furious that they had to reject students this fall. In Louisiana and elsewhere, community colleges traditionally have an open policy." Pope quotes Delgado Chancellor Ron Wright, "This is my 39th year in community colleges, and I never turned away a student." According to the article, Delgado has 16,715 registered students. But at the main campus in City Park, eight of 21 buildings are totally unusable, representing 40% of the square footage of the City Park campus - Tulane University, a very rich private college across town, is getting its FEMA bucks. The same writer, John Pope, reported in the September 3 Times-Picayune, "Tulane University will receive $16 million from FEMA to replace mechanical, plumbing, and electrical equipment that drowned under eight feet of Hurricane Katrina's floodwater in the Library basement." Big bucks for the few, none for the many: That is the essence of federal, Louisiana state, and New Orleans city government policy. After Hurricane Katrina hit on August 31, 2005, the policy of all three levels of government has been open war on public housing, schools and health care. Before that date, there were over 4,600 rental units in four of the biggest public housing developments. Of the total, low-income workers and their families occupied over 3,000 apartment homes (figures from a front-page article in the December 3, 2008 Times-Picayune). Despite the greatest need for living quarters after a catastrophe unrivalled in New Orleans history, the Mayor and the City Council voted unanimously to demolish the four big developments in December of 2007, after police had tasered, pepper sprayed and beaten protesters inside and outside the Council Chamber. This anti-working-class measure was actively backed by the federal and state governments. Big business, government and media successfully turned higher-income workers and middle strata against low-income workers. Public housing residents who participated in protests were threatened with reprisals by government agencies. The brick buildings that were public housing could clearly have been renovated rather than torn down. Charterizing the Schools On public education, the picture is mixed. The Louisiana state government of Democratic Governor Kathleen Blanco used the disarray after Hurricane Katrina to fire or push into early retirement all the public school teachers and workers in Orleans Parish (New Orleans). A class action suit by eight fired employees revealed the number of workers terminated was over 8,500 (December 12, 2008 Times-Picayune). The State school board took over most of the schools and proceeded to "charterize" them - that is, hand them over to private organizations, both nonprofit and for-profit. Charter schools are publicly owned and government- funded, but privately managed. The State school board has 38 schools privately run and 30 publicly run. It hopes to charterize the remaining 30. The Parish school board runs four schools directly and oversees 12 charter schools (July 25, 2009 Times-Picayune). New Orleans has the highest percentage of charter schools of any city. Many parents believe their children will get a better education in the privately-run schools. But reports have surfaced of high rates of student expulsion, especially students with disabilities. The end result will be a balkanized school system, with each school a little island competing against other schools for funds and students - a real dog-eat-dog existence. Proponents of this model contend this introduces "free market" principles into education. With each school principal hiring and firing at will, the organization of a union by school employees is extremely difficult. But the United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO), the local affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, continues the struggle - fighting for a contract with the Parish school board and beginning to attract dissatisfied charter school teachers. Fighting for Charity Hospital The struggle for public health care, while similar to that for public housing and public schools, rides on a different level of public consciousness and sentiment. The depth and breadth of support for the demand to reopen the Rev. Avery C. Alexander Charity Hospital (Rev. Alexander was a local civil rights leader and state legislator) is nothing short of amazing. Low-income and high-income workers; middle strata like lawyers, doctors, managers and shopkeepers; all support reopening the biggest public hospital in the state of Louisiana. And the organized movement reflects that - embracing groups from the Foundation for Historical Louisiana (FHL) in Baton Rouge down to street radicals organized in the New Orleans Committee to Reopen Charity Hospital. Recent revelations by top U.S. military officers offer a damning indictment of state officials. "(T)hen-Gov. Kathleen Blanco said the publicly run Charity Hospital would not reopen even though the military had scrubbed the building to medical-ready standards..," wrote Cain Burdeau in a July 14, 2009 Associated Press article. He continued, ".Lt. Gen. Russel Honore said Blanco told him in late September 2005 the 20-story building that served the region's poor residents would not reopen. 'Ma'am, we got the hospital clean, my people report.if you want to use it,' Honore recalled telling Blanco. 'Her reply to me: Well general, we're not going to open it, we're working on a different plan.'" Closing Charity is not just myopia, it's madness, it's dollar signs blinding state officials to the needs of the vast majority. The existence of a public hospital is deeply ingrained in the Louisiana psyche. Charity in New Orleans was founded in 1736. Under the impact of Huey P. Long - whom some consider a most eloquent populist and the greatest ever Louisiana governor - a state-wide system of Charity hospitals was developed in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The present New Orleans Charity Hospital was built in 1938, with federal funds from the New Deal. The depth of this legacy explains why a March 2006 demonstration by a couple hundred people - led by the doctors and nurses of Charity who had helped clean the hospital - resulted in the New Orleans City Council unanimously passing a resolution the following month ".urging the state to.repair and reopen Charity Hospital," and why the following month in May, the Louisiana Senate and House also unanimously passed a resolution to "hereby urge and request the governor.to develop and implement a plan to use a portion of the Medical Center of New Orleans (Big Charity Hospital) to provide medical services to the New Orleans community and region on an interim basis.." This legacy, coupled with the health care crisis gripping post-Katrina New Orleans, has sustained an ever-widening movement to reopen Charity. In the January 23, 2006 New York Times an article was headlined, "Long After the Storm, Shortages Overwhelm New Orleans's Few Hospitals." This was obvious to everyone except Governor Blanco and the Louisiana State University (LSU) officials who run the Charity system for the state. Right now, all metro area hospitals - the for-profits and nonprofits - are bleeding red ink due to the overload. The April 2, 2009 Times-Picayune reported, "Since 2005 East Jefferson.has lost $104 million, while West Jefferson.has lost $66 million.. Other hospitals in the area also posted hefty operation losses.. Ochsner Health System lost $137 million, Touro Infirmary lost $87 million, and Tulane University Hospital lost $96 million." In January 2008, a group of lawyers filed a class-action suit embracing former Charity patients against LSU officials for illegally closing Charity - LSU hadn't gotten the approval of the State Legislature. This case is still in the court system. The biggest bombshell to explode in the faces of the state and LSU was an announcement in August 2008, when the FHL preservationist group unveiled a study by an architect firm showing that Charity could be renovated and reopen as a 21st century hospital. The world-renowned architect firm RMJM Hillier concluded in the summary of the feasibility study "that there are no fatal flaws in the building structural integrity and capacity that would impede the rehabilitation of Charity Hospital into a state-of-the art healthcare facility." The Hillier group spent two months inside Charity during the summer of 2008 conducting their study. No LSU study of the building was this intensive and extensive. We activists had been demanding an interim reopening of the hospital to relieve the worst aspects of the healthcare crisis for the physically and mentally ill. After Hillier, we were now armed with a 248-page report detailing the total renovation of the facility. (The plan can be found at fhl.org.) LSU officials have partnered with the Veterans Administration to propose destroying 70 acres of homes and businesses in an area called Lower Mid City to build a new state hospital and a new VA hospital. Residents of Lower Mid City came back after Katrina, rebuilt their homes and now face an LSU-VA wrecking ball. They are organizing to oppose the destruction of the neighborhood. Since the heady days of 2006, the State Legislature and the City Council are now backing the LSU plan. Still, these elected officials and LSU have no substantial support in the metro area. All polls and surveys show overwhelming public support for renovating Charity. On Aug 31, 2009, a "Save Charity Hospital" parade with two brass bands attracted over 1200 people in a march from the hospital through parts of Lower Mid City. Because New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin went behind the backs of the people to serve up Lower Mid City to the VA, he has been slapped with a lawsuit, filed in July 2009, charging violation of the City Charter. Resisting Privatization The preservationist groups and community organizations have called for public hearings before the City Planning Commission and the City Council on the hospital proposals - the LSU-VA plan and the Hillier plan. Meanwhile Governor Bobby Jindal, a Republican, is intent on privatizing all public health care. In July 2009 he shut down the only public mental health hospital - NOAH, New Orleans Adolescent Hospital. The hospital treated both young people and adults. When the Governor revealed his plans for NOAH in the spring of 2009, the Mayor, the whole City Council, and area state legislators came out in opposition. The pro-Charity movement joined with these forces in organizing two evening community speak-outs in the City Council Chamber. Around 200 people attended both events. A lawsuit demanding the reopening of NOAH has been filed against Jindal. Even though the pro-Charity movement commands majority public support, the public is tied down in all the issues of the recovery: rebuilding their housing; fighting to tear down flooded, ruined properties in their neighborhood; finding a school for their kids; searching for adequate mental and physical healthcare; and dealing with job loss stemming from the national recession. The federal administration under President George W. Bush dispensed aid with an eyedropper. The reality under President Barack H. Obama is not substantially different. His VA has not dropped the plans to destroy Lower Mid City. During the protests over NOAH, the movement did draw support from an SEIU local. But the union leadership made clear its support of the big business plan for the State and VA hospitals. Reports have it that the construction unions are also onboard with LSU and the big land developers. Only the small local of Orleans Parish teachers, UTNO, have supported and stood with the public majority on Charity and NOAH. What New Orleans and the Gulf Coast need is a massive public works program, a new New Deal. The outcome of the struggle remains in the balance. ATC 144, January-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 Mon Mar 22 08:26:33 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2010 08:26:33 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Beck, Coulter and Limbaugh: Avatars of Julius Streicher Message-ID: http://www.truthout.org/beck-coulter-and-limbaugh-avatars-julius-streicher57551 March 10, 2010 Beck, Coulter and Limbaugh: Avatars of Julius Streicher by: Davidson Loehr Making fun of demagogues like Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh has become a kind of parlor game, an escape valve to let out some of the frustration of impotent rage. This was brought home again when I read "Defying Hitler" by Sebastian Haffner. Writing between 1933 and 1939, he came of age during Hitler's rise to power. His observations are so searing it's still hard to believe that someone could see this clearly while the spirit of his times was morphing into a broad and deep spirit of evil. Once the Zeitgeist had changed, all kinds of murderous and insane actions became logical means toward transforming German culture into its Nazi metastasis. "Avatars of Julius Streicher" doesn't sound quite sober - hardly anyone recognizes his name today, but Streicher's spirit is alive and well in Beck, Coulter and Limbaugh. Streicher was one of the 11 Nazis sentenced to hang by the Nuremberg Trials on October 16, 1946. Only ten were hanged because Hermann Goering committed suicide with some cyanide capsules the night before. Of the 11, Streicher was the only one who was not in the military, not in any significant position to command anything regarding the treatment and execution of millions of people who didn't fit the Nazi mold. But Streicher may have been the person most responsible for implanting the spirit of anti-Semitism that let Germans dehumanize and slaughter millions of people. Between 1923 and 1945, Streicher published "Der Stuermer" ("The Stormtrooper"), and spoke wherever he could to instill this deadly spirit into everyone he could reach. He especially liked to address schoolchildren, and would get them so conditioned that when he asked if they knew who the enemy of Germany was, they would shout, "The Jew! The Jew!" Streicher was hanged with the Nazi leaders for publishing this fact-free newspaper that did more than anything else to prepare the way for the Nazi death machines. A typical issue of "Der Stuermer" was described as "nothing but an incitement to the people of Germany who read it, an incitement to murder. It is filled with pictures of murder. It is an encouragement to all who read it to avenge themselves in the same way." At his trial in Nuremberg, the prosecution said that while Streicher was not directly involved in the physical commission of these deadly crimes against humanity, "his crime is no less worse for that reason.... It was to the task of educating and poisoning the people with hate, and of producing murderers, that Streicher set himself. For 25 years, he continued unrelentingly the perversion of the people and youth of Germany. He went on and on as he saw the results of his work bearing fruit. In the early days, he was preaching persecution. As persecution took place, he preached extermination and annihilation and, as millions of Jews were exterminated and annihilated in the Ghettos of the East, he cried out for more and more. "The crime of Streicher is that he made these crimes possible, which they would never have been had it not been for him and for those like him. In its extent Streicher's crime is probably greater and more far-reaching than that of any of the other defendants. The misery which they caused ceased with their capture. The effects of this man's crime, of the poison that he has put into the minds of millions of young boys and girls goes on, for he concentrated upon the youth and childhood of Germany. He leaves behind him a legacy of almost a whole people poisoned with hate, sadism, and murder, and perverted by him. That people will remain a problem and perhaps a menace to the rest of civilization for generations to come." Against that historical background, consider just a few of these sound bites: Ann Coulter: We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. [Her suggestion for dealing with the Middle East.] Liberals are always against America. They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America's self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant. "I don't really like to think of [the murder of Dr. Tiller] as a murder. It was terminating Tiller in the 203rd trimester.... I am personally opposed to shooting abortionists, but I don't want to impose my moral values on others." [On the murder of Kansas abortion doctor George Tiller, FOX News interview, June 22, 2009.] "We just want Jews to be perfected, as they say." [Arguing that it would be better if we were all Christian.] "If I'm going to say anything about John Edwards in the future, I'll just wish he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot." "Liberals love America like O.J. loved Nicole." "There are a lot of bad republicans; there are no good democrats." "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building." "God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, 'Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours.'" "I think the government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East and sending liberals to Guantanamo." Glenn Beck: "I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it.... No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out of him." [Responding to the question, "What would people do for $50 million?," "The Glenn Beck Program," May 17, 2005.] "When I see a 9/11 victim family on television, or whatever, I'm just like, 'Oh shut up' I'm so sick of them because they're always complaining." ["The Glenn Beck Program," September 9, 2005.] "The only [Katrina victims] we're seeing on television are the scumbags." ["The Glenn Beck Program," September 9, 2005.] "This president I think has exposed himself over and over again as a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.... I'm not saying he doesn't like white people, I'm saying he has a problem. This guy is, I believe, a racist." [On President Obama, sparking an advertiser exodus from his FOX News show.] "Progressivism is the cancer in America and it is eating our Constitution, and it was designed to eat the Constitution, to progress past the Constitution." Rush Limbaugh: "The difference between Los Angeles and yogurt is that yogurt comes with less fruit." "The feminist movement was created to allow ugly women access to the mainstream of society" "Women were doing quite well in this country before feminism came along" "When a gay person turns his back on you, it is anything but an insult; it's an invitation." "Take that bone out of your nose and call me back" "They vote with their vaginas" "If we are going to start rewarding no skills and stupid people - I'm serious, let the unskilled jobs, let the kinds of jobs that take absolutely no knowledge whatsoever to do - let stupid and unskilled Mexicans do that work." The spirit of these three Americans is the same spirit that filled Streicher. It is a spirit of hateful bigotry, preparing the way for these vulgar sentiments to become deadly atrocities. The overwhelming majority of Americans, like the overwhelming majority of Germans, are far better than this. We need to respond, not by stooping to the same level, but by reminding ourselves that the better angels of our nature call us to a higher standard. A great nation is at stake. =============================== Join the bookseller list-serv 'Fresh Ink' Forward this email with 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 Mar 22 09:07:37 2010 From: may at applebybooks.net (May at Appleby Books) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2010 07:07:37 -0700 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Europe: Green capitalism can be just as deadly Message-ID: <4BA779A9.7020909@applebybooks.net> Europe: Green capitalism can be just as deadly If you are one of those employed in the rapidly expanding green jobs sector, don't assume your green employer is any less likely to exploit and endanger you. This is the message from Laurent Vogel, director of the European TUC's health and safety research arm, HESA. In an editorial in the latest issue of the organisation's Just Transition newsletter, he cites the case of Spanish multinational Gamesa, 'one of the finest examples of green capitalism, certified, labelled, and making much of its commitments to the environment, its 'collaborators'-in other words its staff-and 'communities'. The company is posting enviable profits. Is it a success story for a win-win-win scenario?' The answer, it seems, is 'no'. According to Vogel: 'On wind farms, upkeep and maintenance are outsourced. For example, Gamesa has hired the company Guascor to repair the blades at its wind farms. This involves injecting resin to seal the cracks, filing them down and then repainting them. Women were recruited from rural areas to do what the company described as 'rapid and well-paid work'.' The real story is less rosy. 'A few months after having started work, several women were showing symptoms of poisoning: irregular periods, nosebleeds, headaches and so on,' writes Vogel. 'Tipped off by the trade unions, the factories inspectorate investigated and discovered that these women were handling extremely dangerous substances and no protective measures whatever had been put in place. Seven women were advised by their doctors not to have children over the next two years because of the risk of birth defects!' He concludes: 'Green jobs do not always involve such dramatic conditions, but private management of environmental protection activities does sacrifice working conditions for the sake of competitiveness.' The relative appeal of green jobs, Just Transition editorial, Laurent Vogel, February 2010. Green jobs, safe jobs blog. Visit the address below to view the document in full, in print format or in text-only format. http://www.tuc.org.uk/h_and_s/tuc-17625-f0.cfm Copyright material presented in TUC e-bulletins is owned by the TUC, unless otherwise stated. Recipients are permitted to print and download extracts for their own personal or union use, provided the source and TUC's copyright is acknowledged. From may at applebybooks.net Mon Mar 22 09:11:43 2010 From: may at applebybooks.net (May at Appleby Books) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2010 07:11:43 -0700 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Debunk'g Insurers' Explanation for Exorbitant Rate Hikes Message-ID: <4BA77A9F.6070307@applebybooks.net> STUDY DEBUNKS INSURERS' EXPLANATION FOR EXORBITANT RATE HIKES http://www.prwatch.org/node/8922 The pro-health care reform group Health Care for America Now has released a study (pdf) that contradicts insurance companies' claims that their recent, exorbitant rate hikes were driven by increases in the cost of medical care. The study shows that over the last eight years premiums have almost doubled, while medical inflation only increased by 40 percent. HCAN found that insurance companies are raising their rates more than 20 percent faster than the amount they are paying out to doctors, and twice as fast as their underlying costs of medical care are rising. In short, insurance companies are hiking premium prices much more quickly than their costs are increasing. HCAN also found that insurance companies are spending the extra money on perks. For example, Anthem spent $27 million on 103 executive retreats to locations like Hawaii in 2007 and 2008 alone. From 2000 to 2008, insurance companies spent $716.4 billion of their premium dollars on administrative costs, salaries for their CEOs, and investor profit--practically enough to fund the entire health reform bill. SOURCE: Health Care for America Now -------------------------------------------------------------------- The Weekly Spin features selected news summaries with links to further information about media, political spin and propaganda. It is emailed free each Wednesday to subscribers. PR Watch, Spin of the Day, the Weekly Spin and SourceWatch are projects of the Center for Media & Democracy, a nonprofit organization that offers investigative reporting on the public relations industry. We help the public recognize manipulative and misleading PR practices by exposing the activities of secretive, little-known propaganda-for-hire firms that work to control political debates and public opinion. Please send any questions or suggestions about our publications to editor at prwatch.org. To subscribe to the Weekly Spin, visit: http://www.prwatch.org/sub CMD also sponsors SourceWatch, a collaborative research project that invites anyone (including you) to contribute and edit articles. For more information, visit: http://www.sourcewatch.org From may at applebybooks.net Mon Mar 22 10:41:18 2010 From: may at applebybooks.net (May at Appleby Books) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2010 08:41:18 -0700 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The Andy Sternification of Irish Unions Message-ID: <4BA78F9E.5050308@applebybooks.net> 6 March 2010 Irish unions seek new partnership with government-employers against working class By Steve James http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/mar2010/irel-m06.shtml The Irish trade unions bear primary responsibility for the successful imposition of austerity measures against workers after the world financial crisis overwhelmed the country's financial sector in late 2008. In doing so, the unions have provided invaluable service not only to the Irish financial oligarchy, but to the entire European ruling class who have been emboldened in their own preparation for attacks on living standards. The unions' role fully expresses these organisations' transformation into an industrial police force devoted to defending their own domain as an investment base by driving down the living standards of the working class. The Irish government's response to the financial crisis was to inject vast sums of public money into the banks such as Bank of Ireland, Anglo-Irish Bank and AIB. By a series of panic measures, including a ?400 billion investment guarantee, direct nationalisations of Anglo-Irish Bank and the "bad bank" National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) that has taken over poorly backed bank debts, the Fianna Fail/Green Party government has been able, temporarily, to stabilise the situation. The resources for the bailout will be found through devastating cuts in all areas social spending for the foreseeable future. In its last budget, the Irish government cut public sector pay by between five and 15 percent, on top of a previous seven percent "pension levy". Welfare payments were cut by an average of 4.1 percent for all claimants. Child benefit was cut, prescription charges have been introduced and hospital consultants pay cut. Some 60,000 students will lose a portion of their grant, while education spending as a whole will be cut by six percent. Finance Minister Brian Lenihan has repeatedly made clear that these measures, themselves only the latest of a series, would be followed in the coming years by cuts of comparable magnitude. The government's approach has been endorsed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) since NAMA was announced last year. For its part, the European Central Bank, which has provided resources to underpin NAMA, hailed the government as "courageous", while on March 1, the European Commission announced that it would finally approve the "bad bank". In the face of this onslaught, the trade unions have made clear they agree with the thrust of government policy, but have argued that to implement it a new "social partnership" agreement must be established between employers, government and the unions. Social partnership deals have been the norm in Ireland since 1987 when the Irish Congress of Trades Unions (ICTU) and the "partners" in the national project agreed to suppress strikes and cut taxes in order to attract overseas, primarily US, investment. A series of deals followed over the 1990s and early 2000s. With titles such as "Programme for National Recovery", "Programme for Competitiveness and Work", "Programme for Prosperity and Fairness", the partnership deals allowed for carefully restricted wage increases to be conceded to workers in return for productivity gains while the vast wealth generated was either re-exported back to US corporate HQs or scooped up by the local financiers and developers. The resulting levels of exploitation formed the basis of the Celtic Tiger boom. Swathes of US transnational investors moved to Ireland to exploit low wages, an English speaking workforce and access to European markets. Growth rates temporarily reached 10 percent, but only prior to both Eastern Europe and particularly China emerging as global centres of industrial exploitation. The IMF was clear about the advantages of "social partnership." A 2004 report noted that, in addition to restraining wage increases amongst unionised workers, the agreements held back wages in all sectors of the economy, generated support for the European Union and delivered an "era of labour peace". The report explained that during the 15 years from 1972 to 1987 a total of 7,535,320 working days were lost to strikes, an average of 470,959 annually. Over the next 15 years, the total of strike days was 1,622,403, an average of 101,400 annually?less than a quarter of the previous period. This collapse in strike days lost coincided with an increase in the overall size of the workforce. By the mid 2000s, the industrial boom was coming to an end. Wage rates in Ireland had been undercut globally, while Ireland's adoption of the euro meant that traditional tool of currency devaluation vis-?-vis major markets was unavailable. Profit levels, however, were sustained by a speculative property bubble based largely on the expectation that boom conditions would quickly return. At the same time Dublin had become a significant centre for speculative finance, hosting a number of long standing Irish banks and new start hedge funds. Much of this came crashing down in 2008 and 2009. In response to the government's first efforts to offload the crisis onto the working class, the unions made clear that they had no intention of leading any opposition. Rather, weeks after a February 21, 2009 demonstration that brought 120,000 workers on to the streets of Dublin, the unions called off a one day general strike against austerity measures planned for March 30. This gave the ruling class the clearest signal that, hot air and token protests not-withstanding, the unions would place no obstacles in the government's way. Social partnership formally continued until late 2009. But the current "Towards 2016" partnership agreement, which promised to "enhance Ireland's competitive advantage in a changing world economy", broke up following the government's further imposition of pay cuts on public service workers. The unions had taken partnership with business so far as to offer their own programme of budget cuts?some ?1.3 billion, to be taken as unpaid leave, voluntary redundancies and large scale rationalisation of public services. In the end, this was not enough for the corporate Ireland. Presented with the trade unions' prostration, goaded on by leading business commentators, the government, which had already accepted the unions' offer, changed its mind and went ahead with even bigger cuts, leaving the social partnership in tatters. In response to the most devastating social attacks seen in the history of the Irish republic, the unions have made clear that their sole aspiration, and the one to which all their energies will be directed, is to re-establish partnership. Thus on January 7, 2010, the ICTU, an organisation which nominally has 840,000 members, outlined a minimal and token programme of "industrial action and potential strikes". This included "selective strike action to be used intermittently", "a sustained work-to rule non-cooperation campaign" and "consideration of the wide-scale strike at a strategic point". Action on the civil service would "entail refusal to answer telephones". In health-care, "staff would withdraw goodwill service and additional time that is currently given on a non-paid basis". The purpose of such low key, futile and protracted tactics is to confuse and exhaust workers, and divert their struggles. At the same time a message is sent to the employers and government saying "look how helpful we are being to you". At the campaign's launch ICTU President and leader of the SIPTU union, Jack O'Connor, one of social partnership's principle architects, insisted that a "structured dialogue between representatives of different interests of society... is a requirement of any civilised society." At the same time the unions are making certain limited criticisms, not of capitalism, but of "neo-liberalism" which they use as an argument for the government and the employers to utilise their services. David Begg, ICTU General Secretary, complained, "If capitalism really is in crisis?or at least the liberal market version of it, adopted by Ireland, UK and US?it presents opportunities for the trade union movement." "Look at what's left behind of that model. The building industry, which employed up to 400,000 people indirectly, has collapsed. The financial sector? We were setting ourselves up as an alternative to the Cayman Islands. Where's that gone?" Begg went on to praise the "Nordic" model of capitalism, where the unions are even more closely integrated into the structure of capitalist government than in Ireland. Today, the Nordic model has, along with its Irish counterpart, reduced itself to the unions proposing to implement drastic increases in exploitation, as can be seen in their response to the sale by General Motors of Saab. It is false, therefore, to suggest as the middle class ex-left groups do, that the end of formal partnership will lead to any leftward alteration in the position of the unions. Social partnership, the Nordic model or whatever else it might be called, exemplify the completed transformation of the trade unions into allies of big business, committed to the defence of "their" section of capital at the expense of workers everywhere. Working people in Ireland seeking to defend themselves against the escalating onslaught on living standards need new organisations and a new perspective based on unifying struggles in Ireland with those rapidly emerging across Europe and internationally. This can only be achieved through a political and organisational break with the trade unions and their nationalist, pro-capitalist perspective. From hain at antcolbks.com Mon Mar 22 11:23:54 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2010 12:23:54 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Sen. Bayh Tells AIPAC force should be on the table in stopping Iran from getting nukes Message-ID: <0D37DCF23D7C4DD4BF6418781B4BB9D6@Upstairs> Sen. Bayh: Force should be on the table in stopping Iran from getting nukes By Bridget Johnson - 03/21/10 12:12 PM ET Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) said Sunday that the White House needs to consider the use of force against Iran to keep the country from getting nuclear weapons. Bayh, speaking at a roundtable discussion on the opening day of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference, said that the administration should go through the motions of proceeding with planned tougher sanctions against the Islamic Republic, but cautioned that they probably wouldn't work and that the White House should be prepared for the worst-case scenario. "We need to go forward with aggressive sanctions that are likely to hurt the regime... but that's unlikely to work," Bayh said. "Now we have to turn to contemplate the final option -- the use of force to prevent them from getting a nuclear weapon." "...In the long run, you have to do what you have to do," he said. On the risk of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapons capability, "the State of Israel can't run even a 5 percent chance of that happening and neither can we," Bayh added. Bayh predicted that Iran would not "moderate behavior" as a result of the sanctions -- which he advocated against financial and even energy sectors, though he didn't think oil sanctions would come to fruition -- and "the clock will continue to tick." "The moment of truth will be within 12 months," he said when asked about the prospects for the upcoming year. Bayh, whose retirement at the end of his term has raised speculation about a possible 2012 presidential run, earned the first standing ovation of the conference when he commented on the U.N.'s Goldstone report on the Gaza conflict. "The truth of the matter is that the Israeli Defense Forces risked their lives to avoid civilian casualties," he said. After telling the conference "our relations with our allies are actually not in good shape right now," Bayh told The Hill that President Barck Obama "inherited an incredible set of challenges" on the foreign policy front, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Iran. "Considering all that, I think they've done well," he said. "There's obviously challenges that remain but I think that they're learning as they go along. But you've got to remember that it's an incredibly difficult, challenging world, and I think in some respects there are a lot of hard decisions that still remain, Iran foremost among them." Bayh told the AIPAC crowd it could be "damaging" if Iran sees the current disputes over settlements between Israel and the United States as a "lack of resolve." He told The Hill afterward that he was "pleased that we're in the process of putting that behind us." "I think the timing of the housing announcement was unfortunate and some of the rhetoric on our side was probably too aggressive, but the main thing is the relationship is strong and unshakable and we should now move forward and build on that," Bayh said. Bayh's fellow panelists were generally critical of the Obama administration's foreign policy thus far, marking a shift from the hopeful tone of last year's conference, which was held in the early days of the Obama presidency. Panelist Robert Kagan, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, criticized the White House for dragging its heels on Iran and not backing the opposition enough, and said the administration likely found the mass protests after the disputed June 12 elections "inconvenient" in its efforts to engage in dialogue with Tehran. "I think it would pack an enormously powerful punch for Barack Obama to say in capitals around the world that I am a Zionist," said Robert Satloff executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Outside the plenary hall, Bayh was greeted by conference attendees who mugged for photos with the first lawmaker to address the conference, and asked him the same 2012 question. The senator patted on the shoulder and thanked one man who told Bayh he should run for the Oval Office. "I don't know what my future will involve," Bayh told The Hill. "I care about public policy and I care about helping people and I care about our country, so I hope in whatever capacity I hope to continue to make a contribution even if it's in the private sector, but I obviously have no idea what I'm going to be doing. "But I've had a great relationship with AIPAC and that will continue," he said. "I do plan on continuing to come to conferences like this." http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/88093-bayh-force-should-be-considered-against-iran -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 43 bytes Desc: not available URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Mon Mar 22 17:34:13 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2010 17:34:13 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Noam Chomsky: Militarizing Latin America Message-ID: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/chomsky210310.html MRZine 21.03.10 Militarizing Latin America by Noam Chomsky The United States was founded as an "infant empire," in George Washington's words. The conquest of the national territory was a grand imperial venture, much like the vast expansion of the Grand Duchy of Moscow. From the earliest days, control over the Western Hemisphere was a critical goal. Ambitions expanded during World War II, as the US displaced Britain and lesser imperial powers. High-level planners concluded that the US should "hold unquestioned power" in a world system including not only the Western Hemisphere, but also the former British Empire and the Far East, and later, as much of Eurasia as possible. A primary goal of NATO was to block moves towards European independence, along Gaullist lines. That became still more clear when the USSR collapsed, and with it the Russian threat that was the formal justification of NATO. NATO was not disbanded, but rather expanded, in violation of promises to Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not even fully extend to East Germany, let alone beyond, and that "NATO would be transforming itself into a more political organization." By now it is virtually an international intervention force under US command, its self-defined jurisdiction reaching to control energy sources, pipelines, and sea lanes. And Europe is a well-disciplined junior partner. Throughout the expansion of US Empire, Latin America retained its primacy in global planning. As Washington was considering the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile in 1971, Nixon's National Security Council observed that if the US couldn't control Latin America, how could it expect "to achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world?" That policy has become more severe with recent South American moves towards integration, a prerequisite for independence, and establishment of more varied international ties, while also beginning to address severe internal disorders, most importantly, the traditional rule of a rich Europeanized minority over a sea of misery and suffering. In July 2009, the US and Colombia concluded a secret deal to permit the US to use seven military bases in Colombia. The official purpose is to counter narcotrafficking and terrorism, "but senior Colombian military and civilian officials familiar with negotiations told The Associated Press that the idea is to make Colombia a regional hub for Pentagon operations." There are reports that the agreement provides Colombia with privileged access to US military supplies. Colombia had already become the leading recipient of US military aid. Colombia has had by far the worst human rights record in the hemisphere since the Central American wars of the 1980s wound down. The correlation between US aid and human rights violations has long been noted by scholarship. AP also cited an April 2009 document of the US Air Mobility Command, which proposed that the Palanquero base in Colombia could become a "cooperative security location" (CSL) from which "mobility operations could be executed." The report noted that from Palanquero, "Nearly half the continent can be covered by a C-17 (military transport) without refueling." This could form part of "a global en route strategy," which "helps achieve the regional engagement strategy and assists with the mobility routing to Africa." For the present, "the strategy to place a CSL at Palanquero should be sufficient for air mobility reach on the South American continent," the document concludes, but it goes on to explore options for extending the routing to Africa with additional bases. Establishing US military bases in Colombia is only one part of a much broader effort to restore Washington's capacity for military intervention. There has been a sharp increase in US military aid and training of Latin American officers, focusing on light infantry tactics to combat "radical populism" -- a concept that sends shivers up the spine in the Latin American context. Military training is being shifted from the State Department to the Pentagon, eliminating human rights and democracy conditionalities under congressional supervision, which has always been weak, but was at least a deterrent to some of the worst abuses. The US Fourth Fleet, disbanded in 1950, was reactivated in 2008, shortly after Colombia's invasion of Ecuador, with responsibility for the Caribbean, Central and South America, and the surrounding waters. The official announcement defines its "various operations" to "include counter-illicit trafficking, theater security cooperation, military-to-military interaction and bilateral and multinational training." Militarization of South America is a component of much broader global programs, as the "global en route strategy" indicates. In Iraq, there is virtually no information about the fate of the huge US military bases, so they are presumably being maintained for force projection. The immense city-within-a-city US embassy in Baghdad not only remains but its cost is to rise to $1.8 billion USD this year, from an estimated $1.5 billion USD last year. The Obama administration is also constructing mega embassies that are completely without precedent in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In short, moves towards "a world of peace" do not fall within the "change you can believe in," to borrow Obama's campaign slogan. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Noam Chomsky is an internationally renowned linguist, scholar, writer, and activist and author of more than 80 books. He is the most quoted person in world history. This article was first published in the 12 March 2010 issue of Orinoco International; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- =============================== Join the bookseller list-serv 'Fresh Ink' Forward this email with subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From hain at antcolbks.com Mon Mar 22 20:01:16 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2010 21:01:16 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Fw: Half a Billion Bottles of Water A Week Message-ID: <88CAB14B55AC416589C4C8413E9599D2@Upstairs> ----- Original Message ----- From: Annie Leonard To: hain at antcolbks.com Sent: Monday, March 22, 2010 3:43 PM Subject: Half a Billion Bottles of Water A Week To view this email as a web page, go here. Dear Henry, Today is World Water Day, and to mark the occasion I'm joining with some of North America's leading environmental groups to release the latest Story of Stuff Project short film: The Story of Bottled Water. Like The Story of Stuff, this new film uses simple words and images to explain a complex problem, in this case manufactured demand: how you get people to think they need to spend money on something they don't actually need or already have. Over the last two decades, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Nestle and other big beverage companies have spent untold millions of dollars making us afraid of tap water. They've told us that if we want to be sure what we drink is pure and clean-not to mention hip and fashionable-we should buy bottled water. Unfortunately, it worked. In the United States alone, we consume approximately 500,000,000 bottles of water each week. Imagine that: while 1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water worldwide, other people spend billions of dollars on a bottled product that's no cleaner, harms people and the environment and costs up to 2,000 times the price of tap water. But there's good news: Last year, for the first time in a long time, bottled water sales fell-not that much, but they went down. Consumers who want economy, portability and convenience are switching to refillable metal bottles. Restaurants are proudly serving tap water. And cities, states, companies and schools around the world are ditching the bottle to save money and do their part for the environment. Still, we've got a ways to go. So please, take a minute today to watch The Story of Bottled Water. Then pass it along to your friends, family, neighbors and co-workers-anyone you think might be interested. You are The Story of Stuff Project's strongest allies: You made the original Story of Stuff an Internet phenomenon, with nearly 9 million views total. Last December, you pushed The Story of Cap & Trade past half a million views in just under six weeks. And in the last ten days, you've helped our new book, The Story of Stuff, enter the New York Times extended bestseller list at #35. Thank you a million times over. After you've forwarded The Story of Bottled Water to your networks, I encourage you to join a campaign for investment in clean tap water for everyone, like those sponsored by our partners at Corporate Accountability International, Food & Water Watch, Polaris Institute, Environmental Working Group, and Pacific Institute. Visit these fantastic groups' websites to learn more, sign-up and get involved. Together, we can send Coke, Pepsi, Nestle and the rest of the industry a message as clear as a glass of tap water: We're not buying into your manufactured demand anymore. We'll choose our own demands, thank you very much, and we're demanding clean safe water for all! Sincerely, Annie Leonard P.S. It takes a pretty penny to make and distribute these short films. After The Story of Bottled Water we have films coming on electronics (planned obsolescence anyone?), personal care products and more. Please consider a tax-deductible gift to The Story of Stuff Project today to help us keep these films coming and on-line for free. Connect with us! Forward to a Friend This email was sent to: hain at antcolbks.com This email was sent by: Story of Stuff 1442 A Walnut Street, #272, Berkeley, CA, 94709, We respect your right to privacy - view our policy Update Profile and Subscription Preferences | Unsubscribe From All Emails -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Mon Mar 22 23:49:58 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2010 00:49:58 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] ACORN disbanding because of money woes, scandal Message-ID: ACORN disbanding because of money woes, scandal By MICHAEL TARM The Associated Press Monday, March 22, 2010; 7:23 PM CHICAGO -- The once mighty community activist group ACORN announced Monday it is folding amid falling revenues - six months after video footage emerged showing some of its workers giving tax tips to conservative activists posing as a pimp and prostitute. "It's really declining revenue in the face of a series of attacks from partisan operatives and right-wing activists that have taken away our ability to raise the resources we need," ACORN spokesman Kevin Whelan said. Several of its largest affiliates, including ACORN New York and ACORN California, broke away this year and changed their names in a bid to ditch the tarnished image of their parent organization and restore revenue that ran dry in the wake of the video scandal. ACORN's financial situation and reputation went into free fall within days of the videos' release in September. Congress reacted by yanking ACORN's federal funding, private donors held back cash and scores of ACORN offices closed. Earlier this month, a U.S. judge reiterated an earlier ruling that the federal law blacklisting ACORN and groups allied with it was unconstitutional because it singled them out. But that didn't mean any money would be automatically be restored. Bertha Lewis, the CEO of ACORN, which stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, alluded to financial hardships in a weekend statement as the group's board prepared to deliberate by phone. "ACORN has faced a series of well-orchestrated, relentless, well-funded right wing attacks that are unprecedented since the McCarthy era," she said. "The videos were a manufactured, sensational story that led to rush to judgment and an unconstitutional act by Congress." ACORN's board decided to close remaining state affiliates and field offices by April 1 because of falling revenues, with some national operations will continue operating for at least several weeks before shutting for good, Whelan said Monday. For years, ACORN could draw on 400,000 members to lobby for liberal causes, such as raising the minimum wage or adopting universal health care. ACORN was arguably most successful at registering hundreds of thousands of low-income voters, though that mission was dogged by fraud allegations, including that some workers submitted forms signed by 'Mickey Mouse' or other cartoon characters. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/22/AR2010032202792.html?hpid=moreheadlines -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Mar 23 07:59:21 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2010 07:59:21 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [Review] The Bases of Empire; The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts Message-ID: The Bases of Empire The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts Edited by Catherine Lutz Paperback: $24.00 ISBN: 9780814752449 Release Date: 3/01/2009 320 pages ================= http://www.palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=15819 03/21/2010 The Bases of Empire - Book Review By Jim Miles A book that detailed all the military posts around the world would be encyclopaedic in size and nature, for in order to be comprehensive to cover all the bases and all the impacts and affects on human culture and demographics would require a vast array of information. Thankfully that information can be obtained from choosing prime examples of military exploitation as found in The Bases of Empire edited by Catherine Lutz. Lutz's intention is "to describe both the worldwide network of U.S military bases and the vigorous campaigns to hold the United States accountable for that damage and to reorient their countries' security policies in other, more human, and truly secure directions." The truly secure position from those whose lives have been so occupied with the invasive bases would be to eliminate the bases altogether, limiting them to the U.S. 'homeland' - but even that has problems as Puerto Rico and Hawaii, both are contested territories (as many sites within the 'homeland' probably are). The conditions presented and argued in this book provide excellent examples of the overbearing presence of U.S. military might around the world. The various authors hold mainly academic positions, but regardless all are actively involved in illuminating and clarifying the intents and purposes of military occupation. Empire Up until the Bush II administration the denial machine still actively denied the U.S. its rightful position among the empires of global history. Those that did accept empire usually did so with the qualifier of it being an "accidental" empire, with its main purpose being to save the people, spread democracy, and civilize/Christianize the natives. Empire is denied for various reasons, the main factor argued in is that the U.S. has no colonies and does not have an empirical land base with which to operate within. Lutz provides a very clear definition of empire as when a countries "policies aim to assert and maintain dominance of other regions. Those policies succeed when wealth is extracted from peripheral areas and redistributed to the imperial center." This highlights two features of the U.S. empire. First, that while it does not have colonies it does have many - hundreds, eight or nine, approaching or exceeding a thousand depending on sources - bases that dominate most of the world. The wealth extracted is not so much redistributed to a physical center as Rome, Paris, London as in older empires, but is redistributed to a more amorphous corporate base encompassing the U.S. and the European Union. It can be argued as well that both the U.S. and EU have their own internal arrangements of 'heartland' and 'hinterland'. Corporations One of the underlying themes arising from Lutz's introduction and inclusive within the various essays is that "corporations and the military itself as an organization have profited from bases' continued existence, regardless of their strategic value." Military liaisons with other countries usually are "linked with trade and other kinds of agreements, such as access to oil and other raw materials and investment opportunities." The idea of corporate 'investment' via the military is reiterated throughout the essays. The introduction by John Lindsay-Poland to "U.S. Military Bases in Latin America and the Caribbean" says the bases there "have served explicitly to project and protect U.S. government and commercial interests in the region," and are "tangible commitments to U.S. policy priorities such as ensuring access to strategic resources, especially oil and natural gas." Further , the bases serve "to control Latin populations and resources." In "Iraq as a Construction Site" Tom Engelhardt argues that "American [U.S.] officials are girding for an open-ended commitment to protect the country's oil industry." The obverse of this is recognized in Roland Simbulan's essay on ".U.S. Military Activities in the Philippines" where opposition to the bases "articulate.the possibility and desire for human security and genuine development through their common opposition to neoliberal globalization." He notes that those opposed to the U.S. military bases also "consider themselves part of the anti-corporate globalization movement as well." More specifically, David Vine and Laura Jeffery highlight the power of trade in conjunction with the military in their essay "Give us Back Diego Garcia." The Chagossians exiled from Diego Garcia ended up in Mauritius, where the U.S. and the U.K have used corporate-government threats "against Mauritian sugar and textile export quotas" to sideline the Mauritian agenda at the UN. They add more generally that former colonies are constrained by political and economic power that must "confront the power of governments like the [U.S.] and the ]U.K.]" The smaller the nation the more constraints apply "given their deep dependence on economic agreements with the major powers for their economic survival." And again, the powerful can change laws to their liking and buy off opposition "with what for them are relatively small trade benefits." Larger nations are affected as well. Turkey's decision to not participate in the invasion of Iraq brought forth concerns that the "price of non-cooperation was regarded as an impossible political and economic bargain for a country that relied heavily on IMF funding." While debating the issue one of the main reference points was the "science of economics" showing that "acting alongside the USA would c certainly be in the benefit of Turkey in regard to the wealth of its population." Economics is of course far from being a science, more in the realm of mythology, and the significant factor that most arguments for the military miss have little if anything to do with global/national economics as presented by the Washington consensus. And as exemplified in the case of "Okinawa," by Kozue Akibayashi and Suzuyo Takazato, the situation becomes one in which the occupied territory provides "a considerable amount of financial aid.a cost born by host nations to maintain the U.S. military." Much of the devolves from the involvement of a local elite who would lose much of their power and personal wealth if the trade arrangements were abrogated. As argued within the text as a whole, a return to the indigenous populations original patterns of economy would benefit the population in areas much broader than just in monetary terms. Another example of this is Hawaii. Kyle Kajihiro writes that "the militarization of [Hawaii] involved collaboration by different sets of local elites." The "haole elite, the descendents of missionaries and business owners, leveraged the [U.S.] desire for a navel base in [Hawaii] to their advantage." Corporations are an underlying theme, not the main theme, yet it is an issue that arises in each of the essays examining a particular base or set of bases in a country. There can be little doubt that U.S. "free trade capitalism" operates from the strength not of U.S. economic might, but that the economic might has been gained through the use of a militarized empire to promote corporate interests. Resistance Having made my connections to the work above, the subtitle of the text defines the greater thrust of the essayists in the book. The military bases around the world are not welcomed by the indigenous populations except for a few select elite who benefit with the financial and political power that arises from liaising with the U.S. For the majority, there is a resistance to the ongoing utilization of their land by the U.S. military. Apart from the globalization/economic arguments of the larger scale, there are many other common causes between the different protesting groups. The losses are many in regions occupied by the U.S. military. Democracy, freedom, and equality, the main rhetorical features of U.S. arguments are all denied by the occupation forces and by the local elites that benefit from their association with them. In all cases presented, democracy has been limited, from the desires of the Okinawan people, the native Hawaiians, the citizens of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Latin America, Diego Garcia, to Turkey. For one thing, the bases themselves create artificial divisions that would not exist if they were not there in the first place. Certainly small elements of the native population may do well, but the wealth generally stays with the elites. As in the case of Hawaii, Okinawa, and Diego Garcia, racism becomes a factor as the indigenous population is denied any credence in the face of the corporate power of the military and the local power structures. Damages There are other damages to people, societal structures, and the cultural and natural environments of the occupied areas. In all of the cases, the presence of the U.S. military has created social problems ranging from the abuse of women and children, through the denial of social services and a true legal system, to the overall restructuring or destruction of a society. The environment, the native lands and oceans so important to indigenous survival anywhere, suffers from toxic pollutants ranging from standard industrial and agricultural chemicals to the unique chemicals and biological weapons of the military. The focus in these essays is on 'traditional' weapons used in firing ranges on land and sea but also includes nuclear weapons in storage or transit and the use of depleted uranium. The people who protest against these bases suffer from the lack of legal rights, the tendency for frontier justice in many places in Latin America and the Philippines, and the verbal and physical attacks perpetrated by the occupying forces. Since 2001, the role of terrorism has had a great impact on many of the protesters as terrorism becomes the new communism - the overall threat that is used to justify many new laws of control and the creation of outlaws - extra-judicial murder by declaring anyone opposed to the government as a terrorist. The Philippines is proposing to enact a National Identification System and an Anti Terrorism Bill "in which draconian measures are to be introduced to clamp down on critical and dissenting voices and curtail civil liberties and democratic rights." In Hawaii, terrorism in the form of "Homeland security" names an amorphous threat and simultaneously unleashes fantasies about assault and vulnerability. Within its terms, opposition is rendered unintelligible; to oppose the security of the homeland is unthinkable..Hawaii pays a high price." International law obviously takes a definite hit under these conditions. Occupation of territory, environmental laws, laws about humane treatment of prisoners of war (Diego Garcia is considered to be a particular spot to which people are 'rendered'), laws and actions of the International Criminal Court are all abrogated or avoided by the U.S. For the indigenous peoples of the Philippines, Hawaii, Diego Garcia, Latin America - for that matter all areas with U.S. military bases including the current occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan - all are subject to the UN declaration of indigenous rights, and are "aware of the rights to self-determination accorded to indigenous peoples under international law." Except for the U.S. who have not signed the declaration, for obvious reasons. Be Informed One of the first steps in protesting and resisting U.S. occupation - at least for those not directly in the line of fire, literally or figuratively - is to become educated about the nature and principles that rule the world of the U.S. military occupations of foreign lands. The Bases of Empire is a well crafted study and an important contribution to the general understanding of the militarization of the globe and to specific problems as faced by individual groups. Collectively they represent a majority of the people within their regions and will need the support of as many outside voices as can understand their problems and concerns. This book contains a powerful set of ideas and well referenced information to help inform the world of the reality of U.S. militarization of the global community. - Jim Miles is a Canadian educator and a regular contributor/columnist of opinion pieces and book reviews for The Palestine Chronicle. Miles' work is also presented globally through other alternative websites and news publications. If you like this article, please consider making a contribution to the Palestine Chronicle. =============================== Join the bookseller list-serv 'Fresh Ink' Forward this email with 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 Mar 23 09:40:42 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2010 09:40:42 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Fwd: Please, please watch this and pass it along Message-ID: From: peter kulchyski this is a nice video plea, on an important issue, from first nations university of canada students... peter ----- Forwarded message from jepiskenew at firstnationsuniversity.ca ----- Date: Sat, 20 Mar 2010 17:14:17 -0600 From: "Episkenew, Jo-Ann" Reply-To: "Episkenew, Jo-Ann" Subject: Please, please watch this and pass it along Please watch this video and pass it along. These are my students, and I'm so proud of them. We're fighting for our collective lives here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zc1xmmQlOY Jo-Ann Jo-Ann Episkenew, Ph.D. Director, Indigenous Peoples' Health Research Centre and Professor of English CK115, University of Regina 3737 Wascana Parkway Regina, SK S4S 0A2 Canada Phone: 1-306-337-3318 Facs: 1-306-585-5694 jo-ann.episkenew at uregina.ca ----- End forwarded message ----- ____________________________ mors ante servitium! peter kulchyski bush doctor department of native studies university of manitoba winnipeg, mb, canada r3t 5v5 204-474-6333 fax 204-4747657 www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/native_studies -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Mar 23 22:54:15 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2010 22:54:15 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] "A Ticket for Rush" to Costa Rica Fundraiser Launched - Will he go? Message-ID: <603597175B60434E97CF626421DB4568@agingCHS072729> http://www.aticketforrush.com/ =============================== Join the bookseller list-serv 'Fresh Ink' Forward this email with 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 Mar 24 00:39:18 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2010 01:39:18 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Britain expels senior Israeli diplomat over passports allegedly used in Hamas killing Message-ID: <3CA7FB2D10AD49E1A91BBBB38849C4B7@Upstairs> Britain expels Israeli envoy over passports allegedly used in Hamas killing By Karla Adam Washington Post Foreign Service Wednesday, March 24, 2010 LONDON -- The British government, in a rare move on Tuesday, expelled a senior Israeli diplomat over the alleged use of fake British passports in the assassination of a Hamas operative in Dubai this year. "There are compelling reasons to believe that Israel was responsible for the misuse of British passports," David Miliband, Britain's foreign secretary, said in the House of Commons. The misuse of British passports is "intolerable," he said, and the fact that Israel is "a friend" to Britain "only adds insult to injury." The Israeli government, which has not confirmed or denied a role in the assassination, expressed disappointment. "The relationship between Israel and Britain is mutually important," said Yigal Palmor, the Foreign Ministry spokesman. "We therefore regret the British decision." The move to expel the diplomat, who has not been identified, follows an investigation by Britain's Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA) into 12 British passports used in the January killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Dubai authorities charge that Mossad, Israel's intelligence service, is behind the killing and that the hit squad used European and Australian passports, some of them forged. Interpol has issued arrest warrants for 27 people in connection with the killing. Agents from SOCA concluded that genuine British passports were copied when handed over to "individuals linked to Israel, either in Israel or in other countries," who were meant to inspect them, Miliband said. Given the professional quality of the forgeries, he said, it was highly likely that they were made by "a state intelligence service." Britain's Foreign Office amended its travel advice on Israel on Tuesday, telling British citizens, "Your passport details could be captured for improper uses while your passport is out of your control." Gad Shimron, a former Mossad agent, said Israel would never officially admit any involvement in the killing. But, he added in an interview, "the British are hypocrites because when they operate against al-Qaeda, they do not do it with genuine passports." Miliband met his Israeli counterpart, Avigdor Lieberman, in Brussels on Monday, he said, and demanded assurances from Israel that this will not happen again. The last time an Israeli diplomat was expelled from Britain was in 1988, following a diplomatic dispute involving the alleged use of fake British passports. Special correspondent Samuel Sockol in Jerusalem contributed to this report. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/23/AR2010032304124.html?hpid%3Dtopnews&sub=AR -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Wed Mar 24 01:04:50 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2010 02:04:50 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Insurgent Faction Presents Afghan Peace Plan Message-ID: Insurgent Faction Presents Afghan Peace Plan By CARLOTTA GALL Published: March 23, 2010 KABUL, Afghanistan - Representatives of a major insurgent faction have presented a formal 15-point peace plan to the Afghan government, the first concrete proposal to end hostilities since President Hamid Karzai said he would make reconciliation a priority after his re-election last year. The delegation represents fighters loyal to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, 60, one of the most brutal of Afghanistan's former resistance fighters who leads a part of the insurgency against American, NATO and Afghan forces in the north and northeast of the country. His representatives met Monday with President Karzai and other Afghan officials in the first formal contact between a major insurgent group and the Afghan government after almost two years of backchannel communications, which diplomats say the United States has supported. Though the insurgent group, Hezb-i-Islami, or Islamic Party, operates under a separate command from the Taliban, it has links to the Taliban leadership and Al Qaeda and has fought on a common front against foreign forces in Afghanistan. A spokesman for the delegation, Mohammad Daoud Abedi, said the Taliban, which makes up the bulk of the insurgency, would be willing to go along with the plan if a date was set for the withdrawal of foreign forces from the country. Publicly, a Taliban spokesman denied that. The plan, titled the National Rescue Agreement, a copy of which was given to The New York Times, sets that date as July 2010, with the withdrawal to be completed within six months. Those dates are ahead of the schedule outlined by President Obama, who set a target of July 2011 to start drawing down American troops. But the representatives said the dates were a starting position and could change. "This is a start, this is not the word of the Koran that we cannot change it," Mr. Abedi said. Despite the Taliban's hard-line public statement, he also said he was confident that the Taliban would be willing to countenance the plan. "They have said if the U.S. announces a withdrawal date, they are ready to support our plan," said Mr. Abedi, an Afghan-American businessman. "I promise that personally, this is my own connection and I personally promise that. I have said that to the U.S. all along." A spokesman for the Taliban said, however, that they had had nothing to do with the Hezb-i-Islami plan and would not accept such conditions. "What we want is expulsion of foreign occupation forces unconditionally," the spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, said when contacted by telephone. "They have to leave Afghanistan now, and no condition is acceptable for us." An American Embassy spokesman said the United States supported Mr. Karzai's effort to reach out to members of the Taliban and Hezb-i-Islami through a reconciliation process, as long as the insurgents accepted the Afghan Constitution, renounced violence and renounced links to Al Qaeda and other insurgents. "Our policy is that it is an Afghan-led process, and we completely support reintegration and reconciliation," said the spokesman, Brendan O'Brien. Members of Hezb-i-Islami have held meetings with State Department officials, who have urged the Afghans to make peace among themselves if they want American troops to withdraw, said Mr. Abedi, the spokesman for the delegation. Mr. O'Brien said American officials would not be meeting with the Hezb-i-Islami delegation while it was in Kabul, but diplomats here have said that the United States gave the green light for Mr. Karzai to open contacts with Mr. Hekmatyar nearly two years ago. The Hezb-i-Islami proposal, while categorical about the demand for foreign forces to leave Afghanistan, and to end military operations and detentions, goes some way toward meeting the demands of Western nations and the Afghan government on other issues. It accepts having the current government to stay in power, and having the Afghan police, army and intelligence services assume responsibility for security, while a seven-member national security council is formed as the ultimate decision-making body until foreign forces leave and new elections are held. A future elected parliament would have the right to review the Constitution, and the Afghan courts would prosecute those accused of corruption, drug smuggling, theft of the national wealth, and war crimes. Although the provision is not stated in the document, Mr. Abedi said his party wanted international assistance for rebuilding Afghanistan to continue, and for the United Nations and the Organization of the Islamic Conference to help broker the peace. The plan also declares that no foreign fighters would be present in the country after the departure of the international forces, a wording unlikely to please Western countries concerned about the influence of Al Qaeda and other foreign militant groups. Mr. Abedi, a former fighter, said his party had no links with Al Qaeda, nor did it need to make use of foreign fighters. But Mr. Hekmatyar is named on the United Nations sanctions list of Taliban and Al Qaeda figures. In drafting the document and sending his envoys, Mr. Hekmatyar was responding to Mr. Karzai's offer of peace talks as well as to the messages from President Obama's administration that it wanted to withdraw forces and end the war, Mr. Abedi said. Pakistan, which has long been a supporter of Mr. Hekmatyar's bid for power in Afghanistan, has been demanding a role in negotiations between the insurgents and the Afghan government. Mr. Abedi emphasized that Hezb-i-Islami was putting its plan to the government to establish a stable transition when foreign troops left and prevent the chaos and infighting that occurred after the departure of the Soviet troops and the collapse of the Communist government in the 1990s. "We want, this time, the departure of international forces to be organized so they leave something behind after they leave and not to destroy what is achieved now," he said. "This is the goal. We want to have this government in its position and we are ready to assist them with the security situation." The delegation met with Mr. Karzai and his brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, who is a powerful figure in southern Afghanistan. It also met separately with figures from the northern opposition movement, longtime opponents of Mr. Hekmatyar: the Parliament speaker, Younus Qanooni; a lawmaker, Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf; and Vice President Marshall Mohammad Qasim Fahim. Mr. Abedi described their reception in Kabul as "fabulous" and said "the president was very, very gentle, very, very friendly." Politicians familiar with Mr. Hekmatyar warned that any agreement would be a long way off. Yet the document clearly had Mr. Hekmatyar's fingers all over it, said Daoud Sultanzoi, a member of Parliament who met with Mr. Hekmatyar's delegation on Tuesday. "The gist of the whole is very important," he said. "He senses a fatigue in American and European public opinion and he is seizing on that," he said. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/24/world/asia/24afghan.html?hpw -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Wed Mar 24 01:13:11 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2010 02:13:11 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] =?iso-8859-1?q?Ex-Times_Lawyer=2C_Army=27s_General_Co?= =?iso-8859-1?q?unsel_Nominee=2C_Trust_is_Questioned_by_GOP_about_L?= =?iso-8859-1?q?eaks?= Message-ID: Ex-Times Lawyer, an Army Nominee, Is Queried on Leaks By CHARLIE SAVAGE Published: March 23, 2010 WASHINGTON - Senate Republicans on Tuesday grilled President Obama's nominee to be the Army's general counsel, Solomon B. Watson IV, over the publication of two articles in The New York Times disclosing classified information when Mr. Watson was the newspaper's chief legal officer. At a confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, a series of Republicans portrayed the articles as jeopardizing national security and questioned whether Mr. Watson could be trusted to protect classified secrets. The ranking Republican, Senator John McCain of Arizona, asked how Mr. Watson "would respond to public disclosures that endanger U.S. citizens, neutralize the effectiveness of classified defense programs and harm national security." Mr. Watson, a Vietnam veteran who spent 32 years at The Times before retiring in 2006, said he would "take aggressive action" against anyone in the Army who leaked classified information. "I believe in national security," he said. "I'm a patriot. I do not, as a professional, abide people leaking classified information. I certainly wouldn't be a leaker, if that's the question for me. As general counsel for the Army, I certainly wouldn't abide anyone within my jurisdiction leaking classified information." Mr. Watson also initially expressed discomfort about talking in detail about the two Times articles. One article, published in December 2005, disclosed that President George W. Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans' international phone calls and e-mails without a warrant, bypassing a 1978 law requiring court approval. The article was later awarded a Pulitzer Prize. The other, published in June 2006, disclosed that a Belgium-based banking cooperative was secretly providing United States counterterrorism agents with access to vast databases of international financial transfers without individual warrants. Mr. Watson said the newspaper's publisher and its top editor had made the decision to run the articles. He said that he had not personally played a role in vetting their legality because he focused more on corporate matters, but that another Times lawyer who dealt with newsroom issues had decided it was lawful for the articles to be published. "There was not a violation of the law to publish those stories," Mr. Watson said. But, pressed repeatedly by Mr. McCain to say whether he thought their publication was justified, Mr. Watson eventually criticized that decision. "Senator, my opinion is that the decision was justified," he said. "Were it my decision to make, I would not have made that decision. So I think, that is to say that - no." Diane McNulty, a spokeswoman for The Times, defended the publication of the articles. "The stories were important pieces of journalism, done responsibly and protected by the First Amendment," she said. "Editors, not lawyers, make editorial decisions at The New York Times, and Mr. Watson didn't make any editorial decisions with these or any other stories that ran in The Times. We also believe that Mr. Watson would be an outstanding public servant." http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/24/us/politics/24lawyer.html?hpw -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Wed Mar 24 09:28:11 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2010 09:28:11 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Made Easy Message-ID: (for anyone with a website, this just in this morning from Register.com) http://www.register.com/learning_center/seo_made_easy.html SEO Made Easy Concrete steps you can take to improve your search engine rankings by Don Deveau Summary: The process of search engine optimization (SEO) isn't terribly complicated. However, getting improved search engine rankings for your site takes time and an understanding of how search engines work. Register.com's SEO expert, Don Deveau explains that they keys to success are increasing the content on your site and increasing the number of links into your site from other sites. In this article, Don shares specific steps you can take to improve your site's rankings. Keywords: Search Engine Optimization, search marketing, blog for SEO value, research keywords, don't use flash, local search The process of search engine optimization (SEO) isn't terribly complicated. On the other hand, there aren't a lot of shortcuts to making your Web site rank high in search results on the popular search portals such as Google and Yahoo!. This process takes time. You'll have to invest some hours in tasks that build your search rankings, and it will take several months to a year or more for them to fully pay off. We tell our clients, "Don't even think about search rankings for the first three to six months your site is live." The good news is that some of the steps to better SEO can be delegated to an employee or even an intern. Some, however, will have best results when done by the business owner. Search engines aren't very smart. Essentially, they are text-reading robots. Splashy images are invisible to them. If that's all that's on your site, it's like your site doesn't exist to search engines! To improve your search results, you'll need to make two basic moves: increase the content that engines can read, and increase your site's links from other sites, ideally heavily trafficked ones. Here are some concrete steps to improving your rankings: .Hire a SEO expert (don't rely on a Web designer). Even if it's just paying $100 for an hour or two, hire an expert to evaluate your existing site. The consultant can give you a sense of how well your site does in key-word searches now, and suggest the most efficient steps for improving its search rankings. But make sure you hire a SEO expert, not a Web designer to do this job. I've had many small business customers come to us at Register.com with beautiful, expensive Web sites they've had a designer build using Flash, or using Frames. These sites look great, but search engines can't read content from these technologies, so customers won't be able to find these sites using search engines. A SEO expert will be able to tell you what needs to change on your site to make it rank higher in search engines. .Start a blog. Blogs are a fairly simple way to regularly add content to your site, which is what you want. Search engines assign higher rankings to sites that are updated frequently. The best blogs are written in a personal tone and are focused on a niche - don't blog about what your dog did this morning. If your company sells paint, that's what you want to talk about. It takes time, but even blogging once or twice a week will make a huge difference in SEO. .Use social media. Social-media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are highly ranked, and links from there back to your site will help your rankings and increase traffic to your site. Pick a platform, build a profile, and then update your status regularly to draw visitors. Once you're established, comment or answer questions for others, and sign with your Web site URL. That'll create valuable backlinks to your site. .Do key word research. To optimize your site, you'll need to discover what key phrases your customers search on most. Don't try to optimize on a single word - you'll never get near the top, as there's too much competition. Refine your niche: Search on gourmet chocolate instead of chocolate, for instance. Use free key-word checking tools such as WordTracker to see which phrases are getting the most searches in your industry. Then as you optimize your site, use free tools such as SEOBook to track your progress. .Add key words to your site content. Once you know which key words customers are using to search for your company, you can examine your site and look for places to add these words. Your best piece of Internet real estate is your home page title. On many small-business Web sites I've looked at, the headline just says "Home." That tells search engines nothing! Try to get your key words into your headline .Use local search features. A great one is Google Maps, where you can place your business on a map of your town. Increasingly, on Google searches that include a city, this local map is the first result. Get a Google account and then get on the map, and you're at the top of page one for your key word searches. .Use free directories. Search on your "keywords + directories" in a search portal. This will bring up results for directories of companies in your sector. Some of them will cost money to list in, but some will be free. Take the time to fill out a listing for your business in the free ones. Directories tend to be highly trafficked, so the link from the directory site to yours will boost your own site traffic and rankings. These are all relatively easy tactics that all small businesses can engage in to increase their rankings on search engines, and subsequently increase traffic (and hopefully purchases) to their site. =============================== Join the bookseller list-serv 'Fresh Ink' Forward this email with 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 Mar 25 10:01:53 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2010 10:01:53 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] John Michael Greer: The Logic of Abundance Message-ID: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/ The Archdruid Report Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society Wednesday, March 24, 2010 The Logic of Abundance The last several posts here on The Archdruid Report have focused on the ramifications of a single concept - the importance of energy concentration, as distinct from the raw quantity of energy, in the economics of the future. This concept has implications that go well beyond the obvious, because three centuries of unthinking dependence on highly concentrated fossil fuels have reshaped not only the economies and the cultures of the industrial West, but some of our most fundamental assumptions about the universe, in ways all too likely to be disastrously counterproductive in the decades and centuries ahead of us. Ironically enough, given the modern world's obsession with economic issues, one of the best examples of this reshaping of assumptions by the implications of cheap concentrated energy has been the forceful resistance so many of us put up nowadays to thinking about technology in economic terms. It should be obvious that whether or not a given technology or suite of technologies continues to exist in a world of depleting resources depends first and foremost on three essentially economic factors. The first is whether the things done by that technology are necessities or luxuries, and if they are necessities, just how necessary they are; the second is whether the same things, or at least the portion of them that must be done, can be done by another technology at a lower cost in scarce resources; the third is how the benefits gained by keeping the technology supplied with the scarce resources it needs measures up to the benefits gained by putting those same resources to other uses. Nowadays, though, this fairly straightforward calculus of needs and costs is anything but obvious. If I suggest in a post here, for example, that the internet will fail on all three counts in the years ahead of us - very little of what it does is necessary; most of the things it does can be done with much less energy and resource use, albeit at a slower pace, by other means; and the resources needed to keep it running would in many cases produce a better payback elsewhere - you can bet your bottom dollar that a good many of the responses will ignore this analysis entirely, and insist that since it's technically possible to keep the internet in existence, and a fraction of today's economic and social arrangements currently depend on (or at least use) the internet, the internet must continue to exist. Now it's relevant to point out that the world adapted very quickly to using email and Google in place of postage stamps and public libraries, and will doubtless adapt just as quickly to using postage stamps and libraries in place of email and Google if that becomes necessary, but this sort of thinking - necessary as it will be in the years to come - finds few takers these days. This notion that technological progress is a one-way street not subject to economic limits invites satire, to be sure, and I've tried to fill that need more than once in the past. Still, there are deep issues at work that also need to be addressed. One of them, which I've discussed at length elsewhere, is the way that progress has taken on an essentially religious value in the modern world, especially but not only among those who reject every other kind of religious thinking. Still, there's another side to it, which is that for the last three hundred years those who believed in the possibilities of progress have generally been right. There have been some stunning failures to put alongside the successes, to be sure, but the trajectory that reached its climax with human footprints on the Moon has provided a potent argument supporting the idea that technological complexity is cumulative, irreversible, and immune to economic concerns. The problem with that argument is that it takes the experience of an exceptional epoch in human history as a measure for human history as a whole. The three centuries of exponential growth that put those bootprints on the gray dust of the Sea of Tranquillity were made possible by the conjunction of historical accidents and geological laws that allowed a handful of nations to seize the fantastic treasure of highly concentrated energy buried in the Earth's fossil fuels and burn through it at ever-increasing rates, flooding their economies with almost unimaginable amounts of cheap and highly concentrated energy. It's been fashionable to assume that the arc of progress was what made all that energy available, but there's very good reason to think that this puts the cart well in front of the horse. Rather, it was the huge surpluses of available energy that made technological progress both possible and economically viable, as inventors, industrialists, and ordinary people all discovered that it really was cheaper to have machines powered by fossil fuels take over jobs that had been done for millennia by human and animal muscles, fueled by solar energy in the form of food. The logic of abundance that was made plausible as well as possible by those surpluses has had impacts on our society that very few people in the peak oil scene have yet begun to confront. For example, many of the most basic ways that modern industrial societies handle energy make sense only if fossil fuel energy is so cheap and abundant that waste simply isn't something to worry about. One of this blog's readers, Sebastien Bongard, pointed out to me in a recent email that on average, only a third of the energy that comes out of electrical power plants reaches an end user; the other two-thirds are converted to heat by the electrical resistance of the power lines and transformers that make up the electrical grid. For the sake of having electricity instantly available from sockets on nearly every wall in the industrial world, in other words, we accept unthinkingly a system that requires us to generate three times as much electricity as we actually use. In a world where concentrated energy sources are scarce and expensive, many extravagances of this kind will stop being possible, and most of them will stop being economically feasible. In a certain sense, this is a good thing, because it points to ways in which nations facing crisis because of a shortage of concentrated energy sources can cut their losses and maintain vital systems. It's been pointed out repeatedly, for example, that the electrical grids that supply power to homes and businesses across the industrial world will very likely stop being viable early on in the process of contraction, and some peak oil thinkers have accordingly drawn up nightmare scenarios around the sudden and irreversible collapse of national power grids. Like most doomsday scenarios, though, these rest on the unstated and unexamined assumption that everybody involved will sit on their hands and do nothing as the collapse unfolds. In this case, that assumption rests in turn on a very widespread unwillingness to think through the consequences of an age of contracting energy supplies. The managers of a power grid facing collapse due to a shortage of generation capacity have one obvious alternative to hand: cutting nonessential sectors out of the grid for as long as necessary, so the load on the grid decreases to a level that the available generation capacity can handle. In an emergency, for example, many American suburbs and a large part of the country's nonagricultural rural land could have electrical service shut off completely, and an even larger portion of both could be put on the kind of intermittent electrical service common in the Third World, without catastrophic results. Of course there would be an economic impact, but it would be modest in comparison to the results of simply letting the whole grid crash. Over the longer term, just as the twentieth century was the era of rural electrification, the twenty-first promises to be the era of rural de-electrification. The amount of electricity lost to resistance is partly a function of the total amount of wiring through which the current has to pass, and those long power lines running along rural highways to scattered homes in the country thus account for a disproportionate share of the losses. A nation facing prolonged or permanent shortages of electrical generating capacity could make its available power go further by cutting its rural hinterlands off the power grid, and leaving them to generate whatever power they can by local means. Less than a century ago, nearly every prosperous farmhouse in the Great Plains had a windmill nearby, generating 12 or 24 volts for home use whenever the wind blew; the same approach will be just as viable in the future, not least because windmills on the home scale - unlike the huge turbines central to most current notions of windpower - can be built by hand from readily available materials. (Skeptics take note: I helped build one in college in the early 1980s using, among other things, an old truck alternator and a propeller handcarved from wood. Yes, it worked.) Steps like this have seen very little discussion in the peak oil scene, and even less outside it, because the assumptions about technology discussed earlier in this post make them, in every sense of the word, unthinkable. Most people in the industrial world today seem to have lost the ability to imagine a future that doesn't have electricity coming out of a socket in every wall, without going to the other extreme and leaning on Hollywood clich?s of universal destruction. The idea that some of the most familiar technologies of today may simply become too expensive and inefficient to maintain tomorrow is alien to ways of thought dominated by the logic of abundance. That blindness, however, comes with a huge price tag. As the age of abundance made possible by fossil fuels comes to its inevitable end, a great many things could be done to cushion the impact. Quite a few of these things could be done by individuals, families, and local communities - to continue with the example under discussion, it would not be that hard for people who live in rural areas or suburbs to provide themselves with backup systems using local renewable energy to keep their homes viable in the event of a prolonged, or even a permanent, electrical outage. None of the steps involved are hugely expensive, most of them have immediate payback in the form of lower energy bills, and local and national governments in much of the industrial world are currently offering financial incentives - some of them very robust - to those who do them. Despite this, very few people are doing them, and most of the attention and effort that goes into responses to a future of energy constraints focuses on finding new ways to pump electricity into a hugely inefficient electrical grid, without ever asking whether this will be a viable response to an age when the extravagance of the present day is no longer an option. This is why attention to the economics of energy in the wake of peak oil is so crucial. Could an electrical grid of the sort we have today, with its centralized power plants and its vast network of wires bringing power to sockets on every wall, remain a feature of life throughout the industrial world in an energy-constrained future? If attempts to make sense of that future assume that this will happen as a matter of course, or start with the unexamined assumption that such a grid is the best (or only) possible way to handle scarce energy, and fixate on technical debates about whether and how that can be made to happen, the core issues that need to be examined slip out of sight. The question that has to be asked instead is whether a power grid of the sort we take for granted will be economically viable in such a future - that is, whether such a grid is as necessary as it seems to us today; whether the benefits of having it will cover the costs of maintaining and operating it; and whether the scarce resources it uses could produce a better return if put to work in some other way. Local conditions might provide any number of answers to that question. In some countries and regions, where people live close together and renewable energy sources such as hydroelectric power promise a stable supply of electricity for the relatively long term, a national grid of the current type may prove viable. In others, as suggested above, it might be much more viable to have restricted power grids supplying urban areas and critical infrastructure, while rural hinterlands return to locally generated power or to non-electrified lifestyles. In still others, a power grid of any kind might prove to be economically impossible. Under all these conditions, even the first, it makes sense for governments to encourage citizens and businesses to provide as much of their own energy needs as possible from locally available, diffuse energy sources such as sunlight and wind. (It probably needs to be said, given current notions about the innate malevolence of government, that whatever advantages might be gained from having people dependent on the electrical grid would be more than outweighed by the advantages of having a work force, and thus an economy, that can continue to function on at least a minimal level if the grid goes down.) Under all these conditions, it makes even more sense for individuals, families, and local communities to take such steps themselves, so that any interruption in electrical power from the grid - temporary or permanent - becomes an inconvenience rather than a threat to survival. A case could easily be made that in the face of a future of very uncertain energy supplies, alternative off-grid sources of space heating, hot water, and other basic necessities are as important in a modern city as life jackets are in a boat. An even stronger case could be made that individuals and groups who hope to foster local resilience in the face of such a future probably ought to make such simple and readily available technologies as solar water heating, solar space heating, home-scale wind power, and the like central themes in their planning. Up to now, this has rarely happened, and the hold of the logic of abundance on our collective imagination is, I think, a good part of the reason why. What makes this even more important is that the electrical power grid is only one example, if an important one, of a system that plays a crucial role in the way people live in the industrial world today, but that only makes sense in a world where energy is so abundant that even huge inefficiencies don't matter. It's hardly a difficult matter to think of others. To think in these terms, though, and to begin to explore more economical options for meeting individual and community needs in an age of scarce energy, is to venture into a nearly unexplored region where most of the rules that govern contemporary life are stood on their heads. We'll map out one of the more challenging parts of that territory in next week's post. Posted by John Michael Greer at 8:03 PM 27 comments =============================== Join the bookseller list-serv 'Fresh Ink' Forward this email with subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From hain at antcolbks.com Thu Mar 25 12:16:43 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2010 13:16:43 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Norman Finkelstein booted, again Message-ID: <7D5A264BC11D434AB660E324071A0986@Upstairs> MuzzleWatch Norman Finkelstein booted, again Norman Finkelstein may be a curmudgeon who can barely contain his contempt for institutions he feels have violated the public trust. But look past the attitude and sometimes poor choices (which, after all, Finkelstein's nemesis Dershowitz has in spades) and he's an excellent, even obsessively detailed scholar, and certainly no anti-Semite. And he's fundamentally morally right. We Jews especially should be outraged. Finkelstein is someone possessed with the intense and justified anger of a son of concentration camp survivors who saw his parents' devastating experiences exploited while they received little support. He rails against not just the financial but also the ideological exploitation of the Holocaust. And I think he has the rage of disappointment of the loyal Jewish son who believed all the words about all Jews working to stop injustice, and discovered they weren't true. (Many of his charges are by now well-documented by numerous scholars and accounts, but it goes so far against the cinematic swelling violin background music of our favorite Holocaust narratives, that we still can't even imagine elderly Israeli Holocaust survivors and their families protesting in the streets because they are living in poverty, while prominent lawyers and various advocacy organizations pocket millions and Israel continues to take Palestinian land while crying anti-Semitism every time someone says "No!". And so Finkelstein becomes the target of our collective discomfort. He's essentially a whisteblower for corrupt Jewish organizations and it's no wonder that many of us, in the Jewish community and beyond, don't want to listen. To be fair, it's also true that he doesn't seem concerned about getting more people to listen.) Finkelstein lost tenure at DePaul. He most recently got disinvited by the Greens in Germany. And this morning, word that the global shunning continues in Chicago, where event organizers report that since he's not allowed to speak at DePaul (part of his severance agreement-amazingly), they found, and then just lost, an alternative venue: I've been very involved in organizing Norman Finkelstein's April midwest tour, which will include Purdue, Beloit, Michigan State, and Chicago events (DePaul, Northwestern, UofC). Unfortunately, today I received this news from our friends and partners at DePaul: As you know, former professor and academic Norman G. Finkelstein is scheduled to speak in Chicago on Friday, April 16th. SJP DePaul and friends have been working diligently for this event, from securing a venue, booking his flight and hotel, and fundraising from scratch to make this event happen successfully. Everything was finally coming together, and we were all excited. Unfortunately, today we received horrible news. The event coordinator received the following email from the venue we had secured for the event: "Good morning Shirien, We had a Parish council meeting this past week, I notify everyone on the up coming events that are held at our church, and of course, your event was one of the topics A few of our board members are attorneys and they are the ones that look into almost everything from the individuals that rent the gym out and if they are covered insurance wise. they looked deeper into the Professor that will be speaking at our church and they insisted that we couldn't be affiliated with the ideologies of Mr. Norman Finkelstein so I am sorry to say that the church is going to have to cancel and will not be able to rent the gym the night of April the 16th 2010 Please again I am very sorry for the inconvenience." Write a nice note to St. George Greek Orthodox Church to let them know Finkelstein should speak: Deno Diamantakos DDiamantakos at tempel.com And if you have an alternative venue idea for April 16 in Chicago, contact organizer shiriendamra at gmail.com http://www.muzzlewatch.com/2010/03/24/norman-finklestein-booted-again/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 19603 bytes Desc: not available URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Thu Mar 25 15:08:09 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2010 15:08:09 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Shit Happens Message-ID: http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=536&Itemid=63 Shit Happens by Keith Farnish for Culture Change 25 October 2009 Where will you go when the sewers clog up? Where will you go when the porcelain finally cracks? Where will you go when the Toilet Duck quacks its last? Let's go back to the beginning... We all eat and drink without exception; the food is partially broken down by acids in the stomach then transferred to the small intestine where the moisture, along with that from what we drink, is squeezed out to be cleaned by the kidneys and washed around the body to perform all of the vital functions that it is required for. When returned to the kidneys it is expelled via the urethra to the outside world. Solid materials are also used, except that only the useful food matter is absorbed into the body: anything not used -- excess fats, inert matter, fibers and a large weight of bacteria is passed through the gut and out of the body. Piss and shit; that's what it's about. It has to go somewhere, and throughout the history of humanity, different cultures have found different ways to deal with it. This story is about our tribal nomadic and village past; our civilized present; our self-determined future. It is not quite the story of shit, but a salutary lesson in how we must learn to treat something so fundamental to what we are. Before The Cities Highlighting the hygiene aspects of shit (piss is pretty much sterile, containing a mixture of water, urea and salts, so is not so much of an issue) is very enlightening at this stage because, to be quite frank, non-civilized cultures had it pretty well sorted right from the start. This is not just a human thing: observe a field of cattle, and you will see one corner which is heavily used for defecation. Cows have toilets, as do most domesticated animals -- and not for no good reason; our instinct of disgust is deeply rooted in what we understand to be unhealthy. A pile of rotting meat, writhing with maggots, or a steaming pile of fresh shit are immediately offensive to most of us, whatever culture we live in. The phrase: "Don't shit in your own back yard" (or variations upon) is sound advice, if your back yard is anywhere near where you grow, pick or prepare food; wash yourself and your things or, and probably most importantly, draw water for drinking. Some tribal cultures are still nomadic, barely settling in any one location, making the issue of waste disposal of little consequence: a Bedouin will dig a hole in the ground and cover it up with sand or stones when ready to move on. Village life, on the other hand requires more thought, unless you have a very large river nearby, such as the Amazon or the Zambezi, in which case all the little fishies get a regular meal, and the water stays pretty much the same along its course, as long as there is only the occasional village. Away from the flowing river (and believe me, rivers really are among the best things to live near to from a survival point of view) there comes the issue of standing waste: unlike the "ocean drop" toilets used by the Kuna Indians of Panama, if you live near to a even a decent sized lake it doesn't take long for your local wash area to become contaminated with enterococci and other faecal bacteria. You certainly don't want to be drinking anything from a lake that is used for shitting in. In fact, what is most typical is for tribal persons to simply leave the village, have a crap in a convenient bit of undergrowth (with accompanying leaf moist-wipes), and return much lighter. Something for the beetles to feast upon. In this context, it is just waste to be disposed of; but in more settled cultures, especially those that practice food cropping of any scale, the concept of "humanure" becomes relevant. Joseph Jenkins, author of The Humanure Handbook has the following to say about this most wonderful of substances: "Human waste" is a term that has traditionally been used to refer to human excrements, particularly fecal material and urine, which are by-products of the human digestive system. When discarded, as they usually are, these materials are colloquially known as human waste, but when recycled for agricultural purposes, they're known by various names, including night soil when applied raw to fields in Asia. Humanure, unlike human waste, is not waste at all - it is an organic resource material rich in soil nutrients. Humanure originated from the soil and can be quite readily returned to the soil, especially if converted to humus through the composting process. Anyone who grows vegetables on a regular basis will be comfortable with the idea of using horse manure as a soil conditioner, hence the old joke: "What do you put on your rhubarb?" "Horse shit." "Really, I prefer custard." It's not that far a step from handling horse shit to handling human shit, albeit having given a bit more time for the bacteria and other micro-organisms to have done their work. Our cultural attitude to shit has played a significant part in shaping how we deal with it. * * * It wasn't that long ago that the most common type of toilet in the USA was the Outhouse. With their distinct crescent-moon door cut-outs, outhouses have carved themselves a unique furrow in the American cultural pantheon. Yes, some of them used and (where they still exist) still use cesspits, but such a large bacterial digester was a comparative luxury for most rural dwellers. Deep holes in the ground, covered by seats (a.k.a. "long drops") were the norm, and still exist in vast numbers today throughout the Mid-West USA, Australia (traditionally called "Dunnys") and, as a standard form of settled rural facility, in many less industrialised parts of the world. In theory, given a large enough hole and not too many visitors, such a "primitive" facility can operate in perpetuity. But civilized cultures are based around cities, and so with the advent of cities a simple hole in the ground, bush outside the village or flowing river were no good at all. Particularly the river. The Civilized Way Of Going It's impossible to imagine the stench of an unsanitary city unless you are actually there. The heated slums of Mumbai and Manila still provide a modern testament to the past of Western cities, where everywhere that was not surrounded by sizeable gardens reeked with the stench of shit. King Edward II described fourteenth century London thus: When passing along the water of Thames, we have beheld dung and lay stools and other filth accumulated in diverse places within the city, and have also perceived the fumes and other abominable stenches arising therefrom, from the corruption of which great peril to persons dwelling within the said city will, it is feared, ensue. Quite frankly, millions of people needing to piss and shit in a densely populated place is an urban horror, rife with not just the smell, but diseases of many types, not least cholera and typhoid - the twin curses of mixing faeces with water and allowing to become fetid. For 500 years, the people of London somehow tolerated the filth; no doubt had you been born into that smell it would have been barely noticeable, and since there was little awareness of micro-organisms, why would anyone consider such a ubiquitous thing a serious cause of illness? Only when Jon Snow traced the source of a cholera outbreak to a water pump in Broad Street in 1854 and showed that through the simple act of removing the handle could a local epidemic be prevented, did authorities start to take sewerage seriously. So began the great Victorian sewer systems of Joseph William Bazalgette; a model for all other industrial cities. Forward to the 21st century, and the streets of most cities stink only of diesel and gasoline, while the confluence of these cities' waste runs beneath in head-height pipes, to be treated in great settling pools many miles away. Sounds wonderful, doesn't it? The gleaming sewers of the West: something for all cities to aspire to. Only it's not quite that simple. The rich cities can afford these systems, but even then many of them still discharge their "low grade" waste into the oceans, reaping a pathogenic soup in the waters close to the outfalls. The poor cities, in particular those that are growing at dizzying speed, can only imagine systems capable of dealing with the increasing volume of waste that pours into ditches, rivers and seas. And even with the finest of sewerage systems, things can go badly wrong, such as in 2004, when 600,000 tonnes of raw sewage was dumped into the Thames during a rainstorm. That said, when those in the "developed" world poo and then flush, what they are usually left with is a pretty clean and pathogen free toilet; which is handy, not only to prevent disease, but because we have an astonishingly bad relationship with what comes out of our backsides. I mentioned our cultural attitude to shit earlier on, and it's worth reflecting on the lengths we usually go in Industrial Civilization to prevent others from witnessing our bodily functions: we go to a different room, we lock the door, we feel embarrassed if anyone hears our farts echoing in the bowl, and even more so if we leave any sulphurous gas behind for others to enjoy. Then I think of the place where my mother was born, the small Channel Island of Guernsey, where I first encountered a toilet seat with not one, but two holes! It came as a complete shock to me that people would not only shit together, but have a conversation to pass the time (and the paper) as though it was the most natural thing in the world. How many people in a modern Western city, or an Eastern one for that matter - for the modern Japanese attitude to bacteria verges on the paranoid - would happily sit on a compost toilet, knowing what was beneath them? After The Fall Over 50% of the world's population live in urban areas, and that's increasing at a rapid rate; one day the systems will start to fail and the sewage will back up, either because of energy failure or simply that the stressed out system can't cope with the influx of waste when we get up, or before we go to bed. If the sewers fail, you won't be using your toilet, I can guarantee that. In times not so long into the future, water will also be rationed and the gallons we once used to flush down the pan will be restricted: "if it's yellow, let it mellow; if it's brown, flush it down," will be a mantra that might serve inhabitants well for a while, but eventually things will have to change fundamentally. It's a strange thing, but as the "civilized" world, suffering from peak oil and system overload, looks across to the so-called "less developed" people - those who haven't been crammed into cities by the theft of their land and the promise of material wealth - there might be a sense of something primitive, a yearning for a simpler life. In rural areas without the density of population that necessitates mass waste removal, collapse might not even be that big a deal, certainly when it comes to defecation. Dig a hole in the back yard and put a privy over it: maybe even cut a crescent moon in the door. Or perhaps install a compost toilet that reinstates the terminally broken nutrient cycle and turns "waste" into "humanure." [see diagram] Even if you live in a suburban area, you can start preparing for the loss of your gallons of toilet water, and the packing up of the electrically pumped sewerage system. I have a craving for an outside toilet, and it's not such a stupid idea regardless of the current state of things; after all who of us that really care for our surroundings feels nothing when we flush away our waste and send it to the great unknown - and who wouldn't want a beautifully crumbly supply of humus for growing veg in? Those of you living in apartment blocks, and other places without gardens; yes, act on the yellow and brown mantra, but start thinking of alternatives, such as indoor dry toilets - they do exist, even if they are pretty bulky. Personally, though, I wouldn't want to be in a city when the sewers are blocked up and the water stops flowing, because although you may have a neat solution, you can guarantee that few other people will. Nor will anyone in authority make serious long-term preparations: knowing the hierarchical, commerce-led system as I do, I am almost certain that no authority would dare to suggest, or respond to suggestions, that we start pooling our humanure in giant municipal digesters, or we use communal toilet facilities. That would be acceptance that Industrial Civilization can fail...an acceptance that uncivilized people had things right all along. * * * * * Editor's note: I informed Keith Farmish that in Portland, Oregon the first public-use composting toilet facility in the U.S. opened earlier this year. We decided that an article on the subject of humanure versus sewage would be a contribution to our movement for a sustainable, regenerative society. I have seen various well-functioning compost toilets, but the only compost-toilet business I visited was in all places occupying the former studio of Ivan Illich, in Cuernavaca, Mexico. I was given a fun promotional booklet by the proprietor, Cesar Anorve, an eco-architect: Cesar Anorve has been promoting two chamber (double-vault) dry toilets. (One chamber is used until full, then left to dehydrate while the other is used.) Anorve has added an entrepreneurial element to his efforts by designing and selling attractive toilet fixtures. He collaborates with a nonprofit organization, Espacio de Salud... from the May/June 2001 issue of Dollars and Sense magazine, "Sustainable Sanitation: A Global Health Challenge" by Laura Orlando Anorve's bowl design allows for immediate separation of urine and feces, sent to different chambers. More on Cesar Anorve's work can be read at Water Treatment & Alternative Technology, y mucho mas en Espa?ol: Excellent Examples: Live healthy without hurting others por Lourdes Castillo Castillo, Nov. 2003. Keith Farnish is a writer, philosopher and radical environmental campaigner who lives in Essex, UK with his family and his garden. His book, Time's Up! An Uncivilized Solution To A Global Crisis, was published in September 2009 by Chelsea Green in the USA. The book is available for free via amatterofscale.com. He is also author of The Earth Blog where the above article first appeared. He also runs the anti-greenwashing site The Unsuitablog. Keith Farnish's previous articles in Culture Change were Time To Decide What Matters last month and Thinking About The Future last April. With Dmitry Orlove Keith has begun the three-part series on sea level rise, "The Oceans Are Coming" =============================== Join the bookseller list-serv 'Fresh Ink' Forward this email with 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 Mar 25 16:07:19 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2010 16:07:19 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The sky is the limit: human powered cranes and lifting devices Message-ID: <91D6FFC8DA844A8BAB463D6B1ABA3ACA@agingCHS072729> March 25, 2010 The sky is the limit: human powered cranes and lifting devices >From the earliest civilisations right up to the start of the Industrial Revolution, humans used sheer muscle power, organisation skills and ingenious mechanics to lift weights that would be impossible to handle by most power cranes in operation today. The most powerful hand crane in history multiplied the force of its operator 632 times See this excellent article, superbly illustrated, at: http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2010/03/history-of-human-powered-cranes.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Fkrisdedecker%2Flowtechmagazineenglish+%28Low-tech+Magazine%29 or http://tinyurl.com/ykxe2nv =============================== Join the bookseller list-serv 'Fresh Ink' Forward this email with 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 Mar 25 16:25:41 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2010 16:25:41 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Proposal for a Participatory Socialist International Message-ID: <51EDFEC1E03D4754936B2F9C9FD2D5FE@agingCHS072729> [from ZNet] >From the top page of ZNet there is a link to a page devoted to a Proposal for a Participatory Socialist International (PSI Proposal). The proposal page is at http://www.zcommunications.org/newinternational.htm and in addition to displaying the PSI Proposal text, which also appears below, the page also provides a discussion of the context, the origins and the process of the PSI Proposal. Indeed, the page also includes a list of Initial Endorsers and links to see all endorsers alphabetically or by country, with over forty countries represented, and of course, finally, it also has a link you can use to become an endorser. An initial draft of the PSI Proposal was sent to a few individuals. In accord with their responses, changes were made and refinements included. Then a second draft was sent to more people with the first five endorsers noted - John Pilger from Australia, Vandana Shiva from India, Fernando Vegas from Venezuela, Noam Chomsky from the U.S., and Michael Albert from the U.S. That second mailing again asked people to endorse or to please indicate why they had problems, and also asked people to suggest changes they might want in the wording. This was repeated, included incorporating proposed changes into new drafts, until there were about twenty endorsers. At that point, continuing to make changes was pretty much impossible since each endorser would need to okay each change, and there was no practical or timely way to engage in such a discussion so widely. Thus, the proposal was at that point finalized in the form you will see below, even as more initial endorsers signed on, bringing the final total of initial endorsers to roughly 115. Next, a bulk mailing was sent to some writer lists, and to Z's Reimagining Society lists. These mailings in turn attracted many more endorsements, and we also put up the web site that is linked above to provide means for people who first read the material online to also lend their support using the site's link to endorse. After these many steps, the PSI Proposal now has about 1420 endorsers. The PSI Proposal emerged in context of the call for a new International by President Chavez of Venezuela and more specifically his plan for Venezuela to host a gathering seeking a new International in April 2010. The hope was that the PSI Proposal would be conveyed to the Venezuelans who would be working on the April meeting as well as to those who would be attending, and help inspire and orient a discussion of how to proceed, what features to discuss, etc. While the proposal has indeed been conveyed to and positively received by the Venezuelans, it is very unclear what is going to happen in April. Without belaboring, there may be a meeting and there may not be one. We do not know. If there is a meeting, it will likely be small, since invitations will be short notice. From a small meeting, presumably there will either be a rescheduling to go forward or some other kind of message about proceeding on a wider basis. If there isn't a meeting, nonetheless, presumably there would be some kind of rescheduling and message. The PSI Proposal, in this context, has potentially considerably more importance than its endorsers envisioned. Rather than being one of many foci for possible discussion, as the endorsers expected, instead the PSI Proposal seems to be the one public intervention on behalf of a new International that has been made, and, in particular, that suggests features that a new International, in the view of the endorsers, ought to adopt. The PSI Proposal is, therefore, a potential spur to participation, discussion, and resolution of critically important issues for having a new International. Of course, to endorse the PSI Proposal, one should like the bulk of the positive ideas offered, and, even more so, one should believe that the conception and implementation of something as critical to social change as a new International should involve widespread and worldwide discussion of options, exploration of diverse possibilities, refinement of emerging ideas, and development of defining structure and policies, including addressing the points in the PSI Proposal and others. But how would your personally endorsing the proposal help? Our belief is that if it is widely endorsed and publicly explored and refined, the PSI Proposal can spur ever enlarging circles of people to think both individually and collectively about issues associated with founding a new International and can thus propel debate and creative engagement with related ideas, including hopefully influencing what choices any new International ultimately makes. In other words, the proposal seeks increased participation in the "International process" just as the proposal is itself participating in that process. When President Chavez made the initial call we expected massive discussion around the world, offering up ideas and hopes, that would in turn be merged, refined, and become the basis for going forward. That did not happen, however, at least in public. Chavez took initiative, but others, so far, have not. Yet it needs to happen, and the PSI Proposal may be the most hopeful vehicle for spurring it to happen, and the Proposal is certainly, in any event, one such vehicle. The value of the proposal in helping to inspire and inform such a process will depend on two main variables - ? how many people not only become endorsers but then later also contribute to further refining and spreading the ideas - and, ? whether the people hosting any founding convention of a New International, and participating in developing any new International in turn enter into discussions including assessing and perhaps being influenced by the ideas proposed here. To endorse this proposal is to contribute to the above scenario. Perhaps our view is distorted by closeness to the PSI Proposal process to date, but given the response of people when we have seen them read and talk about the PSI Proposal, we believe literally tens of thousands of people who use ZCom would, if only they read and considered it, favor what the proposal indicates and seeks. So the issue becomes manifesting that desire by making visible that high degree of unity and hope. Imagine the proposal had 2,000 endorsers. Imagine it had 5,000. Imagine it had many many more. The power of the PSI Proposal to inspire widening discussion and energy will increase, obviously, with each new signature. And unlike many petitions, this proposal isn't addressed to some enemy who will not pay the slightest attention. Instead, it is in essence addressed to us all, to everyone who needs a voice, a vehicle able to attain sufficient international coherence to be international effective. In essence, we are, or will be, if we endorse, saying to all who seek real change, and to all who might help build a New International - look - we are ready, we are eager, we have basic defining ideas, let's move forward! We sincerely hope you will take the time to click the link you will find on the page http://www.zcommunications.org/newinternational.htm so as to add your endorsement to the growing list! Here, then, is the proposal. If there is sufficient new support, pending the implications of April developments form Venezuela, we will refine and improve the ZCom page so it incorporates right there on the page easy means for visitors to debate the issues, register views, develop and refine ideas, etc. ============= http://www.zcommunications.org/newinternational.htm Proposal for a Participatory Socialist International We, the undersigned, endorse the idea of a new International and urge that its creation include assessing, refining, augmenting, and then implementing as many of the following points as the International's participants themselves, after due deliberation, decide mutually agreeable: 1. A new International should be primarily concerned (at least) with: .economic production, consumption, and allocation, including class relations .kinship nurturance, socialization, house keeping, and procreation, including gender, sexuality, and age .cultural community relations including race, nationality, and religion .politics including relations of law and legislation .international relations including matters of mutual aid, exchange, and immigration .ecology including relations with the natural environment and other species And that the new International should address these concerns without elevating any one focus above the rest, since (a) all will critically affect the character of a new world, (b) unaddressed each could subvert efforts to reach a new world, and (c) the constituencies most affected by each would be intensely alienated if their prime concerns were relegated to secondary importance. 2. Our vision for a Participatory Socialist future should (at least) include that: .economic production, consumption, and allocation be classless - which includes equitable access for all to quality education, health care, food, water, sanitation, housing, meaningful and dignified work, and the instruments and conditions for personal fulfillment .gender/kinship, sexual, and family relations not privilege by age, sexual preference, or gender any one group above others - which includes ending all forms of oppression of women while providing day care, recreation, health care, etc. .culture and community relations among races, ethnic groups, religions, and other cultural communities protect the rights and identity of each community up to equally respecting those of all other communities - which includes an end to racist, ethnocentric, and otherwise bigoted structures while simultaneously securing the prosperity and rights of indigenous people .political decision making, adjudication of disputes, and implementation of shared programs deliver "people's power" in ways that do not elevate any one sector or constituency above others - which includes participation and justice for all .international trade, communication, and other interactions attain peace and justice while dismantling all vestiges of colonialism and imperialism - which includes canceling the debt of nations of the global south and reconstructing international norms and relations to move toward an equitable and just community of equally endowed nations .ecological choices not only be sustainable, but care for the environment in accord with our highest aspirations for ourselves and our world - which includes climate justice and energy innovation 3. The guiding values and principles informing internal strategic and programmatic deliberations of an International highlight at least the following values which includes implementing whatever structural steps prove essential to organizationally embody the values as well as possible in the present: .solidarity, to help align worldwide movements and projects into mutual aid and collective benefit .diversity, to spur creative innovation, respect dissent, and recognize that minority views thought to be crazy today can lead to what is brilliant tomorrow .equity, to seek wealth and income fairness .peace with justice, to realize international fairness and fulfillment .ecological sustainability and wisdom, to seek human survival and interconnection ."democracy" or perhaps even a more inspiring conception of "people's power," "participatory democracy," or "self management," to foster participation and equitable influence for all 4. That a new International be the greatest sum of all its parts, including rejecting confining itself to a single line to capture all views in one narrow pattern. To achieve this the new International should: .include and celebrate "currents" to serve as vehicles for contending views, help ward off sectarianism, and aid constant growth .establish that currents should respect the intentions of other currents, assume that differences over policy are about substance and not motive, and pursue substantive debate as a serious part of the whole project .afford each current means to openly engage with all other currents to try to advance new insights bearing on policy and program. .guarantee that as long as any particular current accepts the basic tenets of the International and operates in accord with its norms and methods, its minority positions would be given space not only to argue, but, if they don't prevail, to continue developing their views to establish their merit or discover their inadequacies 5. Members of the new International would be political parties, movements, organizations, or even projects, where: .members, employees, staff, etc., of each new International member organization would in turn gain membership in the International .individuals who want to be members of the International but have no member group that they belong too, would have to join one .every member group would have its own agenda for its separate operations which would be inviolable .at the same time, each member group would be strongly urged to make its own operations consistent with the norms, practices, and agendas of the International,establishing solidarity but also autonomy. .member groups would have a wide range of sizes - but since the International's decisions would not bind groups other than regarding the collective International agenda, a good way to arrive at decisions might be serious discussion and exploration, followed by polls of the whole International membership to see peoples' leanings, followed by refinements of proposals to seek greater support and to allow dissidents to make their case, culminating in final votes of the membership 6. Programmatically, of course what a new International chooses to do will be contextual and a product of its members desires, but, for example: .a new International might call for international events and days of dissent, for support campaigns for existing struggles by member organizations, and for support of member organizations against repression, as well as undertake widespread debates and campaigns to advance related understanding and mutual knowledge... .more ambitiously, an International might also undertake, for example, a massive international focus on immigration, on ending a war, on shortening the work week worldwide, and/or on averting climatic catastrophe, among other possibilities. It might prepare materials, undertake education, pursue actions, carry out boycotts, support local endeavors, etc. .general program would be up to member organizations to decide how to relate to, yet there would be considerable collective momentum for each member organization to participate and contribute as best it could in collective campaigns and projects since clearly one reason to have an International is to help organizations, movements, and projects worldwide escape single-issue loneliness by becoming part of a larger process encompassing diverse focuses and united by agreements to implement various shared endeavors. =============================== Join the bookseller list-serv 'Fresh Ink' Forward this email with 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 Mar 25 16:34:59 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2010 16:34:59 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Ralph Nader: Israel & Aid Message-ID: <9348E9D5F5B043238D4FA6CC92500DF7@agingCHS072729> Common Dreams March 23, 2010 Israel & Aid By Ralph Nader On July 10, 1996, at a Joint Session of the United States Congress, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received a standing ovation for these words: "With America's help, Israel has grown to be a powerful, modern state. .But I believe there can be no greater tribute to America's long-standing economic aid to Israel than for us to be able to say: we are going to achieve economic independence. We are going to do it. In the next four years, we will begin the long-term process of gradually reducing the level of your generous economic assistance to Israel." Since 1996, the American taxpayers are still sending Israel $3 billion a year and providing assorted loan guarantees, waivers, rich technology transfers and other indirect assistance. Before George W. Bush left office a memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Israel stipulated an assistance package of $30 billion over the next ten years to be transferred in a lump sum at the beginning of every fiscal year. Israel's wars and colonies still receive U.S. taxpayer monies. What happened to Mr. Netanyahu's solemn pledge to the Congress? The short answer is that Congress never called in the pledge. In the intervening years, Israel has become an economic, technological and military juggernaut. Its GDP is larger than Egypt's even though Israel's population is less than one tenth that of the Arab world's most populous nation. The second largest number of listings on America's NASDAQ Exchange after U.S. companies are from Israel, exceeding listings of Japan, Korea, China and India combined. Its venture capital investments exceed those in the U.S., Europe and China on a per capita basis. Israel is arguably the fifth most powerful military force in the world, and Israel's claims on the U.S.'s latest weapon systems and research/development breakthroughs are unsurpassed. This combination has helped to make Israel a major arms exporter. The Israeli "economic miracle" and technological innovations have spawned articles and a best-selling book in recent months. The country's average GDP growth rate has exceeded the average rate of most western countries over the past five years. Israel provides universal health insurance, unlike the situation in the U.S., which raises the question of who should be aiding whom? Keep in mind, the U.S. economy is mired in a recession, with large rates of growing poverty, unemployment, consumer debt and state and federal deficits. In some states, public schools are shutting, public health services are being slashed, and universities are increasing tuition while also cutting programs. Even state government buildings are being sold off. Under U.S. law, military sales to Israel cannot be used for offensive purposes, only for "legitimate self-defense." Nonetheless, there have been numerous violations of the Arms Export Control Act by Israel. Even the indifferent State Department has found, from time to time, that munitions such as cluster bombs were "likely violations." Violations would lead to a cut-off in aid but with the completely pro-Israel climate in Washington, the White House has never allowed such findings to be definitive. The same indifference applies to violations of the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act that prohibits aid to countries engaging in consistent international human rights violations. These include the occupation, colonization, blockades and military assaults on civilians in the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza, regularly documented by the highly regarded Israeli human rights group B'Tselem as well as by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. This week, Prime Minister Netanyahu visits President Barack Obama after the recent Israeli announcement of 1,600 new housing units in East Jerusalem made while Vice President Joe Biden was visiting that country. The affront infuriated New York Times columnist, Tom Friedman, who wrote that Mr. Biden should have packed his bags and flown away leaving behind a scribbled note saying "You think you can embarrass your only true ally in the world, to satisfy some domestic political need, with no consequences? You have lost total contact with reality." Friedman, a former Times Middle East correspondent, concluded his rebuke by writing: "Palestinian leaders Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad are as genuine and serious about working toward a solution as any Israel can hope to find." But until a few days ago, the U.S. government had no levers over the Israeli government. Cutting off aid isn't even whispered in the halls of Congress. Raising the issue would further galvanize Israel's allies, including AIPAC. The only lever left for the U.S. suddenly erupted into the public media a few days ago. General David Petraeus told the Senate that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has foreign policy and national security ramifications for the United States. He said that "The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the Area of Responsibility.Meanwhile, Al-Qaeda and other military groups exploit that anger to mobilize support." A few days earlier, Vice President Joe Biden told Prime Minister Netanyahu in Israel that "what you're doing here undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan." What Obama's people are publically starting to say is that regional peace is about U.S. vital interests in that large part of the Middle East and, ultimately, the safety of American soldiers and personnel. As one retired diplomat commented "This could be a game-changer." =============================== Join the bookseller list-serv 'Fresh Ink' Forward this email with 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 Mar 25 16:42:29 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2010 16:42:29 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Dispute over island resolved by Global Warming Message-ID: <43AC99C4811748DDB24754CB0E9C88AA@agingCHS072729> http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/03/2010324181956779486.html Disputed island lost to the sea A tiny island claimed for nearly 30 years by India and Bangladesh in the Bay of Bengal has disappeared beneath the rising seas, scientists in India say. The uninhabited territory south of the Hariabhanga river was known as New Moore Island to the Indians and South Talpatti Island to the Bangladeshis. Its disappearance has been confirmed by satellite imagery and sea patrols, the School of Oceanographic Studies in Calcutta said. New Moore Island in the Sunderbans has been completely submerged, Sugata Hazra, oceanographer and professor of the School of Oceanographic Studies at Jadavpur University in Calcutta, said. "What these two countries could not achieve from years of talking, has been resolved by global warming," he said. Anyone wishing to visit now, he observed, would have to think of travelling by submarine. Rising sea levels Scientists at the School of Oceanographic Studies at the university have noted an alarming increase in the rate at which sea levels have risen over the past decade in the Bay of Bengal. Until 2000, the sea levels rose about 3 millimetres (0.12 inches) a year, but over the last decade they have been rising about 5 millimetres (0.2 inches) annually, Hazra said. Another nearby island, Lohachara, was submerged in 1996, forcing its inhabitants to move to the mainland, while almost half the land of Ghoramara island was underwater, he said. At least 10 other islands in the area were at risk as well, Hazra said. "We will have ever larger numbers of people displaced from the Sunderbans as more island areas come under water," he said. Bangladesh, a low-lying delta nation of 150 million people, is one of the countries worst-affected by global warming. Officials estimate 18 per cent of Bangladesh's coastal area will be underwater and 20 million people will be displaced if sea levels rise one metre by 2050 as projected by some climate models. India and Bangladesh both claimed the empty New Moore Island, which is about 3.5 kilometres long and three kilometres wide. There were no permanent structures on New Moore, but India sent some paramilitary soldiers to its shores in 1981 to hoist its national flag. The demarcation of the maritime boundary - and who controls the remaining islands - remains an open issue between the two South Asian neighbours, despite the disappearance of New Moore, said an official in India's foreign ministry, who spoke on condition of anonymity. =============================== Join the bookseller list-serv 'Fresh Ink' Forward this email with subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From hain at antcolbks.com Thu Mar 25 18:35:43 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2010 19:35:43 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Vatican Declined to Defrock U.S. Priest Who Abused About 200 Deaf Boys Message-ID: Vatican Declined to Defrock U.S. Priest Who Abused Boys By LAURIE GOODSTEIN Published: March 24, 2010 Top Vatican officials - including the future Pope Benedict XVI - did not defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even though several American bishops repeatedly warned them that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the church, according to church files newly unearthed as part of a lawsuit. Arthur Budzinski, at a cemetery behind St. John's School for the Deaf, says he was first molested in 1960 when he went to Father Murphy for confession. The internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, shows that while church officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their highest priority was protecting the church from scandal. The documents emerge as Pope Benedict is facing other accusations that he and direct subordinates often did not alert civilian authorities or discipline priests involved in sexual abuse when he served as an archbishop in Germany and as the Vatican's chief doctrinal enforcer. The Wisconsin case involved an American priest, the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who worked at a renowned school for deaf children from 1950 to 1974. But it is only one of thousands of cases forwarded over decades by bishops to the Vatican office called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, led from 1981 to 2005 by Cardinal Ratzinger. It is still the office that decides whether accused priests should be given full canonical trials and defrocked. In 1996, Cardinal Ratzinger failed to respond to two letters about the case from Rembert G. Weakland, Milwaukee's archbishop at the time. After eight months, the second in command at the doctrinal office, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, now the Vatican's secretary of state, instructed the Wisconsin bishops to begin a secret canonical trial that could lead to Father Murphy's dismissal. But Cardinal Bertone halted the process after Father Murphy personally wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger protesting that he should not be put on trial because he had already repented and was in poor health and that the case was beyond the church's own statute of limitations. "I simply want to live out the time that I have left in the dignity of my priesthood," Father Murphy wrote near the end of his life to Cardinal Ratzinger. "I ask your kind assistance in this matter." The files contain no response from Cardinal Ratzinger. The New York Times obtained the documents, which the church fought to keep secret, from Jeff Anderson and Mike Finnegan, the lawyers for five men who have brought four lawsuits against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. The documents include letters between bishops and the Vatican, victims' affidavits, the handwritten notes of an expert on sexual disorders who interviewed Father Murphy and minutes of a final meeting on the case at the Vatican. Father Murphy not only was never tried or disciplined by the church's own justice system, but also got a pass from the police and prosecutors who ignored reports from his victims, according to the documents and interviews with victims. Three successive archbishops in Wisconsin were told that Father Murphy was sexually abusing children, the documents show, but never reported it to criminal or civil authorities. Instead of being disciplined, Father Murphy was quietly moved by Archbishop William E. Cousins of Milwaukee to the Diocese of Superior in northern Wisconsin in 1974, where he spent his last 24 years working freely with children in parishes, schools and, as one lawsuit charges, a juvenile detention center. He died in 1998, still a priest. Even as the pope himself in a recent letter to Irish Catholics has emphasized the need to cooperate with civil justice in abuse cases, the correspondence seems to indicate that the Vatican's insistence on secrecy has often impeded such cooperation. At the same time, the officials' reluctance to defrock a sex abuser shows that on a doctrinal level, the Vatican has tended to view the matter in terms of sin and repentance more than crime and punishment. The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, was shown the documents and was asked to respond to questions about the case. He provided a statement saying that Father Murphy had certainly violated "particularly vulnerable" children and the law, and that it was a "tragic case." But he pointed out that the Vatican was not forwarded the case until 1996, years after civil authorities had investigated the case and dropped it. Father Lombardi emphasized that neither the Code of Canon Law nor the Vatican norms issued in 1962, which instruct bishops to conduct canonical investigations and trials in secret, prohibited church officials from reporting child abuse to civil authorities. He did not address why that had never happened in this case. As to why Father Murphy was never defrocked, he said that "the Code of Canon Law does not envision automatic penalties." He said that Father Murphy's poor health and the lack of more recent accusations against him were factors in the decision. The Vatican's inaction is not unusual. Only 20 percent of the 3,000 accused priests whose cases went to the church's doctrinal office between 2001 and 2010 were given full church trials, and only some of those were defrocked, according to a recent interview in an Italian newspaper with Msgr. Charles J. Scicluna, the chief internal prosecutor at that office. An additional 10 percent were defrocked immediately. Ten percent left voluntarily. But a majority - 60 percent - faced other "administrative and disciplinary provisions," Monsignor Scicluna said, like being prohibited from celebrating Mass. To many, Father Murphy appeared to be a saint: a hearing man gifted at communicating in American Sign Language and an effective fund-raiser for deaf causes. A priest of the Milwaukee Archdiocese, he started as a teacher at St. John's School for the Deaf, in St. Francis, in 1950. He was promoted to run the school in 1963 even though students had disclosed to church officials in the 1950s that he was a predator. Victims give similar accounts of Father Murphy's pulling down their pants and touching them in his office, his car, his mother's country house, on class excursions and fund-raising trips and in their dormitory beds at night. Arthur Budzinski said he was first molested when he went to Father Murphy for confession when he was about 12, in 1960. "If he was a real mean guy, I would have stayed away," said Mr. Budzinski, now 61, who worked for years as a journeyman printer. "But he was so friendly, and so nice and understanding. I knew he was wrong, but I couldn't really believe it." Mr. Budzinski and a group of other deaf former students spent more than 30 years trying to raise the alarm, including passing out leaflets outside the Milwaukee cathedral. Mr. Budzinski's friend Gary Smith said in an interview that Father Murphy molested him 50 or 60 times, starting at age 12. By the time he graduated from high school at St. John's, Mr. Smith said, "I was a very, very angry man." In 1993, with complaints about Father Murphy landing on his desk, Archbishop Weakland hired a social worker specializing in treating sexual offenders to evaluate him. After four days of interviews, the social worker said that Father Murphy had admitted his acts, had probably molested about 200 boys and felt no remorse. However, it was not until 1996 that Archbishop Weakland tried to have Father Murphy defrocked. The reason, he wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger, was to defuse the anger among the deaf and restore their trust in the church. He wrote that since he had become aware that "solicitation in the confessional might be part of the situation," the case belonged at the doctrinal office. With no response from Cardinal Ratzinger, Archbishop Weakland wrote a different Vatican office in March 1997 saying the matter was urgent because a lawyer was preparing to sue, the case could become public and "true scandal in the future seems very possible." Recently some bishops have argued that the 1962 norms dictating secret disciplinary procedures have long fallen out of use. But it is clear from these documents that in 1997, they were still in force. But the effort to dismiss Father Murphy came to a sudden halt after the priest appealed to Cardinal Ratzinger for leniency. In an interview, Archbishop Weakland said that he recalled a final meeting at the Vatican in May 1998 in which he failed to persuade Cardinal Bertone and other doctrinal officials to grant a canonical trial to defrock Father Murphy. (In 2002, Archbishop Weakland resigned after it became public that he had an affair with a man and used church money to pay him a settlement.) Archbishop Weakland said this week in an interview, "The evidence was so complete, and so extensive that I thought he should be reduced to the lay state, and also that that would bring a certain amount of peace in the deaf community." Father Murphy died four months later at age 72 and was buried in his priestly vestments. Archbishop Weakland wrote a last letter to Cardinal Bertone explaining his regret that Father Murphy's family had disobeyed the archbishop's instructions that the funeral be small and private, and the coffin kept closed. "In spite of these difficulties," Archbishop Weakland wrote, "we are still hoping we can avoid undue publicity that would be negative toward the church." Rachel Donadio contributed reporting from Rome. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/25/world/europe/25vatican.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Thu Mar 25 18:40:19 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2010 19:40:19 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Disputed island lost to the sea by alarming increased rate of rising sea levels Message-ID: <43AAA35CD0F24A22B1E0C66B791ABF41@Upstairs> Thursday, March 25, 2010 Disputed island lost to the sea A tiny island claimed for nearly 30 years by India and Bangladesh in the Bay of Bengal has disappeared beneath the rising seas, scientists in India say. The uninhabited territory south of the Hariabhanga river was known as New Moore Island to the Indians and South Talpatti Island to the Bangladeshis. Its disappearance has been confirmed by satellite imagery and sea patrols, the School of Oceanographic Studies in Calcutta said. New Moore Island in the Sunderbans has been completely submerged, Sugata Hazra, oceanographer and professor of the School of Oceanographic Studies at Jadavpur University in Calcutta, said. "What these two countries could not achieve from years of talking, has been resolved by global warming," he said. Anyone wishing to visit now, he observed, would have to think of travelling by submarine. Rising sea levels Scientists at the School of Oceanographic Studies at the university have noted an alarming increase in the rate at which sea levels have risen over the past decade in the Bay of Bengal. in depth Until 2000, the sea levels rose about 3 millimetres (0.12 inches) a year, but over the last decade they have been rising about 5 millimetres (0.2 inches) annually, Hazra said. Another nearby island, Lohachara, was submerged in 1996, forcing its inhabitants to move to the mainland, while almost half the land of Ghoramara island was underwater, he said. At least 10 other islands in the area were at risk as well, Hazra said. "We will have ever larger numbers of people displaced from the Sunderbans as more island areas come under water," he said. Bangladesh, a low-lying delta nation of 150 million people, is one of the countries worst-affected by global warming. Officials estimate 18 per cent of Bangladesh's coastal area will be underwater and 20 million people will be displaced if sea levels rise one metre by 2050 as projected by some climate models. India and Bangladesh both claimed the empty New Moore Island, which is about 3.5 kilometres long and three kilometres wide. There were no permanent structures on New Moore, but India sent some paramilitary soldiers to its shores in 1981 to hoist its national flag. The demarcation of the maritime boundary - and who controls the remaining islands - remains an open issue between the two South Asian neighbours, despite the disappearance of New Moore, said an official in India's foreign ministry, who spoke on condition of anonymity. http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/03/2010324181956779486.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Fri Mar 26 01:18:12 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2010 02:18:12 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Acts & threats of vandalism & violence, death threats, snipers, etc. Tea Partiers go Nucking Futs Message-ID: <60644E4E4A3348A9910B0CC9121EFBB6@Upstairs> Sarah Palin: "Don't Retreat, Instead - RELOAD!" http://twitter.com/SarahPalinUSA/status/10935548053 Iowa man joins protest against Obama and health-care reform Gallery A tea party protestor in Iowa wants to be heard Randy Millam, 52, was resolved to attend a protest rally on the University of Iowa campus where President Obama made a speech on health-care reform on March 25, 2010. ? LAUNCH PHOTO GALLERY By Eli Saslow Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, March 26, 2010 IOWA CITY, IOWA -- He had no plans to throw bricks, issue death threats, spit in faces or scream racial slurs. But Randy Millam, 52, intended to make a scene, so he woke up early Thursday morning to prepare for President Obama's visit. Millam sat at his kitchen table in Lowden, Iowa, with 14 Sharpie markers and a piece of foam board, working to condense a year of frustration into a 3-by-3-foot catchphrase. "Chains We Can Believe In," he wrote, drawing the communist hammer and sickle on the poster's top left corner. Then he grabbed an American flag, inserted batteries into a megaphone bought on the cheap for $25 and guzzled a 24-hour energy drink. Just as Obama took off in Air Force One for Iowa City, Millam loaded into his muddy Ford Fusion and drove 50 miles across the cornfields of eastern Iowa. "The president just about declared war against the American people last weekend," he said. And it is a war Millam intends to fight. Millam's resolve Thursday was reinforced by the sense that he was taking part in a movement -- a rising tide of anger, fear and vitriol in the wake of the health-care overhaul signed into law by Obama this week. Millam joined a chorus of discontent surrounding the president's visit: a warm-up protest Wednesday night, a greeting party of protesters waiting at the airport and hundreds more with plans to chant outside the downtown arena while Obama spoke. In the hours before he left for Iowa City, Millam watched reports on Fox News Channel about vandalism at Democratic offices and visited a Web site of the conservative "tea party" movement, where he was inspired by a Thomas Jefferson quote about how bloodshed might be necessary to protect a country from tyranny. "I'm not ready for outright violence yet. We have to be civil for as long as we can," Millam said. But, he added, "we are watching the infrastructure of this country crumble under our feet. The government doesn't want to hear us. We have to make them listen." With that as his goal, Millam arrived in Iowa City wearing an "Army Dad" T-shirt and a cap inscribed with the words of the Second Amendment. He parked his car and joined a crowd of about 300 protesters, who carried signs that addressed most of Millam's frustrations. "America's Disastrous Economy," read one; that was the economy that had contributed to him losing a job on the assembly line at Kraft Foods a few years ago and had left him unemployed since. "Insane Overspending!" read another; that was the overspending that made him fear for the futures of his two teenage children: a high school honors student and a daughter who recently enlisted in the military. "Obama Lies!" was the reason he no longer trusted government, stockpiling firewood and bricks and starting his own vegetable garden. "ObamaCare," was what he considered the final insult to the Constitution. Even though he has health insurance through his wife's job, the politics of the past few weeks confirmed his fears about the direction of his country and gave him a "locked-and-loaded focus." He walked to the front of the protest crowd and lifted the megaphone to his mouth. "Fellow patriots," he bellowed. "We are standing outside the arena right now because the president controls the crowd, controls the message, controls the people of this country. That is not freedom! That is not democracy! That is not the America I grew up in!" The demonstrators cheered and began to gather around Millam, and two police officers came to stand nearby. "If you're going to deny me my constitutional rights, you can arrest me," Millam told the officers. Then he leaned into the megaphone and started shouting again. "I got news for you, Barack," Millam said. "You can't blame everything on Bush anymore. You either are the president, or you're not. We've got 17 percent real unemployment. Home sales are at historic lows. . . . And now the most pro-choice president this nation has ever elected is forcing us to have health care. Every single person's body in this whole country belongs to the government now." Millam swayed from side to side, waving the American flag and catching his breath. He was silent now, but the crowd continued to swell around him. Tommy Leforce, a 19-year-old student at Cornell College in Iowa, tapped Millam on the shoulder and asked for the megaphone. "My dad is unemployed right now," Leforce shouted, "but this government is more focused on what their political party wants instead of what Americans need." Another person took the megaphone: "I want nothing to do with Washington, D.C." Another: "It's communism!" Another: "Obamunism!" By now a group of about 200 Obama supporters had stopped to watch and listen, congregating across the street from the protesters. Seven police officers stood in the middle of the road, monitoring both sides. On one sidewalk: Obama T-shirts, health-care-reform advocates, and students from the University of Iowa, one of whom held a sign inviting Obama to join him at a local bar for Thursday night's $1 you-call-it drink special. On the other sidewalk: college Republicans, middle-aged conservatives and retirees who waved homemade signs, bullhorns, doctored pictures of Obama and yellow tea party flags, which showed coiled snakes under the motto "Don't Tread on Me." Millam looked across the street at the students and shook his head. "They don't understand that our government doesn't listen," he said. He had spent the past week calling congressional offices and the White House to tell them about his feelings on health-care reform, waiting through hold times only to reach answering machines and busy signals. Maybe he could enlighten these Obama supporters. He stepped closer to the street and raised the megaphone. "I voted for a Democrat once," he said. "I was young once. Kumbaya and all that. Then I grew up. If you believe in freedom, you need to come to this side of the street." Nobody moved. "If you don't think it takes 2,700 pages to explain a health-care plan, come to this side of the street." Still nothing. "If you haven't given up on our Constitution, on our founders, on the hope and dream of a free country, then come to this side of the street." Finally, one student walked across. He wore dark sunglasses and carried a poster-board sign, made moments earlier. It read: "These People are Idiots." He stood with the protesters, his sign mocking them, while he listened to an iPod. Millam rested the megaphone on his stomach. His voice was getting hoarse, and his legs ached. He'd been shouting for almost two hours now, and some protesters were beginning to leave. "Where is Obama?" he asked. Another demonstrator told him that the president had finished his speech, entering and exiting the arena through a different entrance, and Millam snorted in disgust. "Why does the president of the United States have to sneak in the back door to avoid seeing the real people in this country?" he shouted into the megaphone. "That's not right. That's just not right." His words died out. The rally was over. He turned off the megaphone and walked to his car. While the president flew back to Washington, Millam drove home on the rural highways of Iowa. He wondered: What would it take to be heard, and what would he try next? He carried the sign and megaphone into the house and stored them in the closet, knowing he would use them again http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/25/AR2010032503849.html?hpid%3Dtopnews&sub=AR Accusations Fly Between Parties Over Threats and Vandalism By MICHAEL COOPER Published: March 25, 2010 IVY, Va. - The authorities here confirmed Thursday that a gas line had been deliberately cut at the home of a brother of a Democratic congressman who voted for the health care bill, making it potentially the most dangerous of many acts of violence and threats against supporters of the bill in the last week. The house had been mistakenly listed on the blog of a Tea Party activist as the home of the congressman, Tom Perriello, a first-term Democrat representing southern Virginia. But the damage that took place on Tuesday was no blunder, the authorities said. "We do now believe that it was a deliberate act of vandalism and that the supply hose was intentionally cut," said Lee Catlin, a spokeswoman for Albemarle County, where fire marshals have been investigating the incident along with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. "Our investigators do believe that the leaking gas could have posed a danger if there had been an ignition source." The incident, along with several other acts of vandalism and threats to at least 10 Democratic lawmakers around the country, on Thursday set off heated accusations of incitement on Thursday between the two parties in Washington. While the New York City police investigated a white powder that was sent to the office of Representative Anthony Weiner, along with a threatening letter that the police said referred to the health care bill, Democrats accused Republicans of using heated rhetoric that encouraged extremists. Republicans in turn accused Democrats of politicizing the issue. At the same time, the vandalism threatened to be a public relations disaster for the fledgling Tea Party movement, which has tried to argue that it is, in the words of Dick Armey, the chairman of the umbrella group FreedomWorks, "more well-mannered" than protesters on the left. Leaders of the movement tried to contain the damage on Thursday, denouncing the violence and distancing themselves from those behind the acts. Some suggested that outsiders were responsible. In Colorado, where Representative Betsy Markey was among the Democrats reporting threats, Lesley Hollywood, the director of the Northern Colorado Tea Party, said, "Although many are frustrated by the passage of such controversial legislation, threats are absolutely not acceptable in any form, to any lawmaker, of any party." The threats and property damage, which have led to stepped-up security for some members of Congress, have been widespread around the country. In Cincinnati, protesters demonstrated outside the home of Representative Steve Driehaus, another Democrat who voted for the bill, after his home address was published on a conservative blog. Mr. Driehaus has received a death threat, and someone threw a rock into the headquarters of the county Democratic Party. Pictures of nooses were faxed to the offices of at least two Democratic congressmen, Bart Stupak of Michigan, and James E. Clyburn of South Carolina. In Tucson, the full-length glass door to Representative Gabrielle Giffords's office was shattered by what her staff believes was a shot from a pellet gun or air pistol. A brick was thrown through the glass door of the Monroe County Democratic Committee in Rochester. The white powder sent to Mr. Weiner's district office in Kew Gardens, Queens, was pronounced nonhazardous by the police, but the office had to be closed for much of the day. Some Democrats accused the Republicans of stoking anger on the right with their fierce language during the health care debate. After a brick was thrown into Representative Louise M. Slaughter's Congressional office in Niagara Falls, N.Y., and a telephone message mentioning snipers was left on an answering machine at her campaign office, she issued a statement accusing Republicans of "fanning the flames with coded rhetoric." Ms. Slaughter referred, among other things, to a Twitter message in which Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee, urged her followers, "Don't Retreat, Instead - RELOAD!" Mr. Perriello, who won his seat here in 2008 by knocking out a Republican incumbent in one of the closest races in the nation, in a district that Senator John McCain had carried in the presidential election, said that the threats and acts of vandalism undermined democracy - in a way that he had seen overseas. "I think people have to realize what it means to say in a Democracy that 'I will kill your children if you don't vote a certain way,' " said Mr. Perriello, 35, a graduate of Yale Law School who worked on national security issues and conflict resolution in areas like Afghanistan, Darfur, Kosovo and Liberia before he was elected to Congress. "What's at stake here is the sanctity of our democracy." He took issue with a statement by Representative John A. Boehner, the House minority leader, in which Mr. Boehner condemned the violence and threats as unacceptable but said the anger behind it should be redirected to registering voters and volunteering on political campaigns. Mr. Perriello said that that statement simply sent the wrong message. "No, the answer is, we want those people to go to jail who are committing a crime," he said. "We want all those other good, law-abiding people who are adamantly opposed to health care to join our campaigns." But some Republicans accused Democrats of using the issue for political gain. Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the Republican whip, told reporters on Thursday that he had also been the subject of threats and that a shot was fired through a window of his campaign office building in Richmond this week, but that he had chosen not to publicize the incident. "It is reckless to use these incidents as media vehicles for political gain," said Mr. Cantor, who delivered a stern-faced statement on the issue but did not take questions. "To use such threats as political weapons is reprehensible. By ratcheting up the rhetoric, some will only inflame these situations to dangerous levels." Representative Jean Schmidt, Republican of Ohio, released a profanity-laced voicemail message left in her Ohio office in which the caller accused Republicans of racism for blocking the health care measure, said he wished Ms. Schmidt had broken her back in a car accident and said he would have shot anyone who spit on him during weekend protests at the Capitol. "We released this call to show that is not just Democrats receiving them," said Bruce Pflaff, a spokesman for Ms. Schmidt. Ms. Giffords, at least, said she would uphold Arizona's tradition of self-protection. "I have a Glock 9-millimeter, and I'm a pretty good shot," she said. Reporting was contributed by John Dougherty in Arizona; Carl Hulse in Washington, D.C.; Paul Lane, Michael S. Schmidt and Kate Zernike in New York; and Christopher Maag in Ohio. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/26/us/politics/26threat.html?hpw -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 172 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 42460 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 226 bytes Desc: not available URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Fri Mar 26 18:07:03 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2010 19:07:03 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Lack of investor appetite for new US debt sent the benchmark 10-year yield to its highest level since last June. Message-ID: <77BCD35C8A1F4FC3AC51C8F2C636664A@Upstairs> Supply fears start to hit Treasuries By Michael Mackenzie in New York and David Oakley in London Published: March 26 2010 19:18 | Last updated: March 26 2010 19:18 The bond vigilantes are finally flexing their muscles. A long period of stability for the US government bond market showed signs of cracking this week as a lack of investor appetite for new debt sent the benchmark 10-year yield to its highest level since last June. For more than a year, analysts have been warning that record sized debt sales by the US Treasury were at odds with a 10-year yield sitting comfortably below 4 per cent. This week, the yield on 10-year notes jumped from 3.65 per cent to a peak of 3.92 per cent on Thursday. On Friday it was 3.87 per cent. Falling inflation, rising unemployment, the housing market slump, the Federal Reserve's policies of a near zero overnight borrowing rate and its purchase of up to $1,700bn in bonds have all helped keep Treasury yields near historic lows. But this week the mood shifted as yields for $118bn of new US debt were much higher than forecast, sparking overall selling of Treasuries. Sentiment also deteriorated in the UK bond market after the government's budget ahead of a general election expected in May failed to resolve doubts over future spending and debt reduction. The term "bond vigilantes" was coined in the 1980s when bond investors pushed up long-term yields to force central banks into taking action to curb inflation. This time, bond investors are less worried about inflation: they are fretting about huge fiscal deficits and the looming bond supply needed to finance them. "Everyone thought we would see rising rates due to higher inflation, but it appears the bond vigilantes are demanding a higher real rate due to concerns about Treasury issuance," says George Goncalves, head of fixed income strategy at Nomura Securities. Swap rate falls below 10-year Treasury yield - Mar-23 Foreign demand for US assets falls - Mar-15 Worries about the debt loads of developed economies have come into focus this year amid the crisis threatening Greece and other members of the eurozone periphery. The fact that German Bunds have outperformed both Treasuries and gilts in recent months highlights this increasing worry over public debt. Germany's budget deficit is much lower than the US and UK and inflation there is also expected to remain low. "The spotlight on Greece only helped to reveal that the US's kitchen - with Federal and state budget balances - was itself full of cockroaches," says William O'Donnell, strategist at RBS Securities. It hasn't helped that the US announced a big overhaul of its healthcare system this month, adding to worries about the scale of US spending. Moreover, the Fed completes its bond buying programme next week, leaving the market to absorb the supply of new debt on its own. Next week's March employment report, which economists say could see 150,000 jobs created, also looms as a test for bond market sentiment. "The environment for debt auctions has turned negative," says Rick Klingman, managing director at BNP Paribas. "Long-term rates are rising and it is no coincidence that this has occurred after the passage of healthcare reform and the end of Fed buy-backs." Also rattling US investors this week was a report by the Congressional Budget Office that falling payroll taxes due to high unemployment, means that the social security programme will pay out more in benefits than it receives for this fiscal year. "A sustained rise in yields is upon us and bond funds will start to incur losses," says Jim Caron, global head of interest rate strategy at Morgan Stanley. He expects 10-year yields to reach 4.50 per cent in the second quarter, as investors pull their money from bond funds. March looms as the first month for negative returns for investors in Treasuries this year. For now, other key markets such as equities and the dollar have not been affected by the rise in yields, but that may change if the 10-year rises decisively above 4 per cent and big auctions next month are also poorly received. "This appears as a credit shot across the Treasury market bow and concerns over the US fiscal spending could well move to the dollar and equities," says Mr Goncalves. A sign of the strains across US fixed income markets was this week's historic rupture between the 10-year Treasury yield and its close derivative, the interest rate swap. For the first time since swaps emerged in the mid-1980s, the 10-year swap rate traded below that of the "risk free" 10-year Treasury yield. Analysts say this reflects how government debt issuance has altered the dynamics between "risk-free" yields and swaps, which reflect borrowing costs for non-sovereign borrowers. In the UK, swap rates have been below those of 10-year gilt yields since January. The yield on 10-year gilts was at 4.03 per cent on Friday, up from a low of 3.91 per cent earlier this week. The peak yield so far this year was 4.27 per cent in February. In Europe, however, swap rates are 20 basis points higher than 10-year yields. "If we get clarity on what the UK will do on deficit reduction once the election is behind us, then the market and gilt yields could stabilise," says Mike Amey, UK portfolio manager for Pimco. Since the UK budget on Wednesday, the negative spread, or inversion, has widened with swap rates trading nearly 20 basis points below gilts for 10-year maturities compared with a negative spread of 10bps just before the government statement on public finances. In other words, huge issuance is already creating unexpected distortions and stresses in the market. It is far from clear that we have seen the last of them, given the amounts that still need to be raised. Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c51fbbce-3908-11df-8970-00144feabdc0.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Fri Mar 26 18:19:11 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2010 19:19:11 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Haaretz: Netanyahu leaves U.S. disgraced, isolated and weaker Message-ID: <869D05FCED7D4AB38B0AEF7F79B74D52@Upstairs> "His arrogant tone underscored the fact that Netanyahu believed that on the strength of his AIPAC speech, he could call the next few steps of the diplomatic dance." Last update - 12:46 25/03/2010 Netanyahu leaves U.S. disgraced, isolated and weaker By Aluf Benn Details emerging from Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to Washington remain incomplete, but the conclusion may nonetheless be drawn that the prime minister erred in choosing to fly to the United States this week. The visit - touted as a fence-mending effort, a bid to strengthen the tenuous ties between Netanyahu and U.S. President Barack Obama - only highlighted the deep rift between the American and Israeli administrations. The prime minister leaves America disgraced, isolated, and altogether weaker than when he came. Instead of setting the diplomatic agenda, Netanyahu surrendered control over it. Instead of leaving the Palestinian issue aside and focusing on Iran, as he would like, Netanyahu now finds himself fighting for the legitimacy of Israeli control over East Jerusalem. The most sensitive and insoluble core issues - those which when raised a decade ago led to the dissolution of the peace process and explosion of the second intifada - are now being served as a mere appetizer. At the start of his visit, Netanyahu was tempted to bask in the warm welcome he received at the AIPAC conference, at which he gave his emotional address on Jerusalem. Taking a page from Menachem Begin, he spoke not on behalf of the State of Israel, but in the name of the Jewish people itself and its millennia of history. His speech was not radical rightist rhetoric. Reading between the lines, one could spot a certain willingness to relinquish West Bank settlements as long as Israel maintains a security buffer in the Jordan Valley. But at the White House, the prime minister's speech to thousands of pro-Israel activists and hundreds of cheering congressmen looked like an obvious attempt to raise political capital against the American president. Knowing Netanyahu would be reenergized by his speech at the lobby, Obama and his staff set him a honey trap. Over the weekend they sought to quell the row that flared up during U.S. Vice President Joe Biden's trip here two weeks ago, and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described Netanyahu's response to the ultimatums Washington presented to him as "useful." Special envoy George Mitchell made a televised visit to the prime minister's bureau Sunday to invite Netanyahu to the White House. Washington, it seemed, was trying to make nice. Far from it. Just when Netanyahu thought he had resolved the crisis by apologizing to Biden, Clinton called him up for a dressing down. This time as well, Netanyahu almost believed the crisis had passed, that he had survived by offering partial, noncommittal answers to the Americans' questions. Shortly before meeting with Obama, Netanyahu even warned the Palestinians that should they continue to demand a freeze on construction, he would postpone peace talks by a year. His arrogant tone underscored the fact that Netanyahu believed that on the strength of his AIPAC speech, he could call the next few steps of the diplomatic dance. But then calamity struck. At their White House meeting, Obama made clear to his guest that the letter Netanyahu had sent was insufficient and returned it for further corrections. Instead of a reception as a guest of honor, Netanyahu was treated as a problem child, an army private ordered to do laps around the base for slipping up at roll call. The revolution in the Americans' behavior is clear to all. On Sunday morning Obama was still anxiously looking ahead to the House of Representatives vote on health care - the last thing he wanted was a last-minute disagreement with congressmen over ties with Israel. The moment the bill was passed, however, a victorious Obama was free to deal with his unruly guest. The Americans made every effort to downplay the visit. As during his last visit in November, Netanyahu was invited to the White House at a late hour, without media coverage or a press conference. If that were not enough, the White House spokesman challenged Netanyahu's observation at AIPAC that "Jerusalem is not a settlement." The Americans didn't even wait for him to leave Washington to make their disagreement known. It was not the behavior Washington shows an ally, but the kind it shows an annoyance. The approval of construction at the Shepherd Hotel in Sheikh Jarrah, announced before his meeting with Obama, again caught Netanyahu unawares. Apparently the special panel appointed after the Ramat Shlomo debacle to prevent such surprises failed its first test. Netanyahu is having his most difficult week since returning to office, beginning with the unfortunate decision to relocate the planned emergency room at Ashkelon's Barzilai Medical Center and lasting through his humiliating jaunt through Washington. Returning to Israel today, Netanyahu will need to work hard to rehabilitate his image, knowing full well that Obama will not relent, but instead demand that he stop zigzagging and decide, once and for all, whether he stands with America or with the settlers. http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1158992.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 43 bytes Desc: not available URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Fri Mar 26 18:22:39 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2010 19:22:39 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Obama snubbed Netanyahu for dinner with Michelle & the girls, Israelis claim Message-ID: <77DC3A2041BE47F18343572F236CE175@Upstairs> Obama snubbed Netanyahu for dinner with Michelle and the girls, Israelis claim Benjamin Netanyahu was left to stew in a White House meeting room for over an hour after President Barack Obama abruptly walked out of tense talks to have supper with his family, it emerged on Thursday. By Adrian Blomfield in Jerusalem Published: 2:52PM GMT 25 Mar 2010 The snub marked a fresh low in US-Israeli relations and appeared designed to show Mr Netanyahu how low his stock had fallen in Washington after he refused to back down in a row over Jewish construction in east Jerusalem. The Israeli prime minister arrived at the White House on Tuesday evening brimming with confidence that the worst of the crisis in his country's relationship with the United States was over. Over the previous two days, he had been feted by senior Republicans and greeted warmly by members of Congress. He had also received a standing ovation from the American Israel Public Affairs Affairs Committee, one of the most influential lobby groups in the United States. But Mr Obama was less inclined to be so conciliatory. He immediately presented Mr Netanyahu with a list of 13 demands designed both to the end the feud with his administration and to build Palestinian confidence ahead of the resumption of peace talks. Key among those demands was a previously-made call to halt all new settlement construction in east Jerusalem. When the Israeli prime minister stalled, Mr Obama rose from his seat declaring: "I'm going to the residential wing to have dinner with Michelle and the girls." As he left, Mr Netanyahu was told to consider the error of his ways. "I'm still around," Mr Obama is quoted by Israel's Yediot Ahronot newspaper as having said. "Let me know if there is anything new." For over an hour, Mr Netanyahu and his aides closeted themselves in the Roosevelt Room on the first floor of the White House to map out a response to the president's demands. Although the two men then met again, at 8.20 pm, for a brief second meeting, it appeared that they failed to break the impasse. White House officials were quoted as saying that disagreements remained. Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, added: "Apparently they did not reach an understanding with the United States." It was the second time this month that Mr Netanyahu has been at the receiving end of a US dinner-time snub. A fortnight ago, Joe Biden the US vice president, arrived 90 minutes late for a dinner Mr Netanyahu hosted in Jerusalem after Israel announced plans to build 1,600 new homes in Ramat Shlomo, a Jewish settlement in the city's predominantly Arab east. Erupting in fury, the United States described the decision to expand Ramat Shlomo as an "insult" that undermined Mr Biden's peace making efforts and demanded that it be reversed. Palestinians see east Jerusalem, captured by Israel during the 1967 Six Day War, as their future capital and regard any Jewish building there as a barrier to a peace settlement. Mr Obama's mood further soured in the minutes before his meeting with Mr Netanyahu after it emerged that approval had been given for an even more contentious Jewish building project in the heart of one of east Jerusalem's Palestinian suburbs. Sending a clear message of his displeasure, Mr Obama treated his guest to a series of slights. Photographs of the meeting were forbidden and an Israeli request to issue a joint-statement once it was over were turned down. "There is no humiliation exercise that the Americans did not try on the prime minister and his entourage," Israel's Maariv newspaper reported. "Bibi received in the White House the treatment reserved for the president of Equatorial Guinea." It is not the first time that Mr Netanyahu has been involved in a dinner-time snub, although he is arguably more used to delivering, rather than receiving, them. In 1998, during his first term as Israeli prime minister, Mr Netanyahy angrily cancelled a dinner he was due to give with the then Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook. Mr Cook had earned his host's ire after he briefly visited a new Jewish settlement in east Jerusalem with a Palestinian official and called for an end to all settlement construction in the parts of the city Israel occupied after the Six-Day war. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackobama/7521391/Obama-snubbed-Netanyahu-for-dinner-with-Michelle-and-the-girls-Israelis-claim.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Sat Mar 27 00:34:29 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 2010 01:34:29 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] 2nd TSA Nominee Withdraws - His business & personal dealings as a military contractor questioned Message-ID: <6F3C365AA79B4A6193833D141C33E9F8@Upstairs> Second TSA nominee withdraws his name By Spencer S. Hsu and Ed O'Keefe Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, March 27, 2010 The Obama administration's second choice to lead the Transportation Security Administration withdrew from consideration Friday, days after senators questioned his business and personal dealings as a military contractor who provided services ranging from Iraq war interrogators to private guards at the White House. "Distractions caused by my work as a defense contractor would not be good for this Administration nor the Department of Homeland Security," retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert A. Harding said in a late-evening statement released by the White House. "The president is disappointed in this outcome," Obama spokesman Nicholas Shapiro said in a separate statement. Obama's previous nominee, Los Angeles airport police executive Errol Southers, withdrew from consideration in January. He blamed stalling tactics by Republicans opposed to extending collective bargaining rights to TSA employees, but his withdrawal also followed disclosures that he gave Congress and the White House misleading information about incidents two decades ago. When it nominated Harding three weeks ago, the administration presented him as a military and intelligence veteran with 33 years of military service, including as director for operations of the Defense Intelligence Agency and deputy to the Army's chief of intelligence. Harding advised the Obama transition team on intelligence matters, but he was little known to the aviation industry or government worker unions before his nomination. Privately, two sources tracking Harding's nomination said he grew frustrated by the confirmation process. Lawmakers were surprised to learn, after the White House put forward his name, that his defense and intelligence company did business with TSA and Homeland Security Department contractors. He formed the firm in 2003 and sold it last year. Lawmakers also raised questions about a contract with the DIA that was terminated after $6 million worth of work. Harding Security Associates agreed to return to the government $1.8 million that he had tried to pay as severance to 40 of his interrogators assigned to Iraqi prisons. Contrary to initial White House statements, the company provided interrogation-related work at a Baghdad prison, although it did not have any direct involvement with abuses committed there, congressional aides said. Lawmakers also asked about five inspector-general investigations during Harding's military career. Harding was cleared of allegations, but senators sought additional information. Harding was asked at hearings this week if he supported extending bargaining rights to TSA workers, but he said only that the TSA "would never bargain away security." His withdrawal creates more delays in filling one of the administration's top remaining vacancies, 14 months after Obama took office, a vulnerability made clear after the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Detroit-bound Northwest jetliner by an alleged al-Qaeda operative. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/27/AR2010032705855.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Sat Mar 27 00:59:14 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 2010 01:59:14 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] =?iso-8859-1?q?For_Years=2C_Deaf_Boys_Tried_to_Tell_o?= =?iso-8859-1?q?f_Priest=27s_Abuse?= Message-ID: <30EBDC545CAC45479E945941E300B3EA@Upstairs> For Years, Deaf Boys Tried to Tell of Priest's Abuse By LAURIE GOODSTEIN and DAVID CALLENDER Published: March 26, 2010 They were deaf, but they were not silent. For decades, a group of men who were sexually abused as children by the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy at a school for the deaf in Wisconsin reported to every type of official they could think of that he was a danger, according to the victims and church documents. Multimedia Interactive Feature Timeline: The Predator Priest Who Got Away Interactive Feature Documents: The Case of the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy Related a.. The Words of a Victim (March 27, 2010) b.. Pope May Be at Crossroads on Abuse, Forced to Reconcile Policy and Words (March 27, 2010) They told other priests. They told three archbishops of Milwaukee. They told two police departments and the district attorney. They used sign language, written affidavits and graphic gestures to show what exactly Father Murphy had done to them. But their reports fell on the deaf ears of hearing people. This week, they learned that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, received letters about Father Murphy in 1996 from Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland of Milwaukee, who said that the deaf community needed "a healing response from the Church." The Vatican sat on the case, then equivocated, and when Father Murphy died in 1998, he died a priest. "That man should have been in prison for a very long time, but he was lucky," Steven Geier, one of Father Murphy's victims, said Thursday. "What about me? I wasn't supposed to touch girls. What gave him the right to be able to do that? Father Murphy constantly thought about sex with children, and he got away with it." Young victims of sexual abuse are often so confused, ashamed or traumatized that they wait years to report the violations. Some never say a word. One of the remarkable aspects of the Father Murphy case is that young victims began alerting the authorities in the mid-1950s, when sexual abuse was hardly even a part of the public vocabulary. In his ranch house in Madison, where he lives with his wife, Ann, and two dachshunds, Mr. Geier said through an interpreter that he entered St. John's School for the Deaf in St. Francis, Wis., when he was 9. His father had helped build a Catholic church in rural Dane County, and his aunt was a nun. His family wanted him to get a good education in a Catholic school. Mr. Geier, now 59, said that between the ages of 14 and 15, starting around 1965, Father Murphy molested him four times in a closet at the school. The priest, a hearing man fluent in sign language, said that God wanted him to teach the boy about sex but that he had to keep it quiet because it was under the sacrament of confession. Mr. Geier said he felt sick. "First thing in the morning," Mr. Geier said, "we took communion, and as he passed out the communion wafers, I thought about how many boys did he touch with those hands and all of the germs, all of the filth of his hands." Father Murphy may have molested as many as 200 boys while he worked at the school from 1950 to 1974, according to the accounts of victims and a social worker hired by the Archdiocese of Milwaukee to interview him. Mr. Geier said he first tried to tell the priest at his home parish in Madison, where he served as an altar boy, in 1966 when he was just 16. But the priest, he said, told him he did not want to hear about it, and to just forget about it. He told another priest while he was still a teenager, and yet a third priest years later, after he married. That priest, the Rev. Tom Schroeder, 72, who led Masses for the deaf in Madison from 1970 to 1992, said in an interview Friday that he remembered Mr. Geier's telling him about Father Murphy. Father Schroeder said that he told a nun, who told another nun who was a dormitory supervisor at St. John's, but that the supervisor did not believe it and nothing ever came of it. "I assumed that if enough people told her, she would finally believe it," Father Schroeder said. Internal church correspondence unearthed in a lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and given to The New York Times, which made it public it this week, included a letter from the Rev. David Walsh, who served as a chaplain for the deaf in Chicago, saying that teenage students at St. John's had told him in the late 1950s about Father Murphy's abuse. Father Walsh said he told Archbishop Albert Gregory Meyer of Milwaukee, who sent Father Murphy on a retreat and then put him back in the school to undo "the harm he had done." In the 1970s, a group of former students who were in a vocational rehabilitation program in Milwaukee began telling their hearing supervisors about Father Murphy, a sequence of events reported in two articles in The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2006. Among the supervisors was John Conway, now the deputy administrator of workers' compensation for the State of Wisconsin. Mr. Conway, the students and others collected affidavits from 15 to 20 former students about Father Murphy's violations. They were granted a meeting with Archbishop William E. Cousins. "In my extreme na?vet?," said Mr. Conway in an interview on Friday, "I told them the archbishop would take care of this." He said they were surprised to find the room packed with people, including several nuns and teachers from the school, two priests who said they were representing the apostolic delegate in Chicago, and Father Murphy himself. Arthur Budzinski and Gary Smith, two more victims of Father Murphy, said in an interview last week that they remember seeing Archbishop Cousins yell, and Father Murphy staring at the floor. The deaf men and their advocates were told that Father Murphy, the school's director and top fund-raiser, was too valuable to be let go, so he would be given only administrative duties. They were outraged. They distributed "Wanted" posters with Father Murphy's face outside the cathedral in Milwaukee. They went to the police departments in Milwaukee, where they were told it was not the correct jurisdiction, and in St. Francis, where the school was located, Mr. Conway said. They also went to the office of E. Michael McCann, the district attorney of Milwaukee County, and spoke with his assistant, William Gardner. "A criminal priest was an oxymoron to them," Mr. Conway said. "They said they'll refer it to the archdiocese." Calls to Mr. McCann and Mr. Gardner this week were not returned. Mr. Conway said it was only when they filed a lawsuit that the archdiocese removed Father Murphy from St. John's and sent him to northern Wisconsin to live at his family's summer house. The lawsuit was withdrawn. Mr. Smith, one of two of the plaintiffs whose cases were still within the statute of limitations, received a settlement of $2,000, he and Mr. Conway said. Father Murphy continued working in parishes and schools, with deaf people, and leading youth retreats in the Diocese of Superior for the next 24 years. Laurie Goodstein reported from New York, and David Callender from Madison, Wis. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/27/us/27wisconsin.html?hp -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 9829 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 12841 bytes Desc: not available URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Sat Mar 27 01:09:48 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 2010 02:09:48 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Tighter Rules Fail to Stem Deaths of Innocent Afghans at Checkpoints Message-ID: <2A2E8EB406574124860286AD8B6C7D15@Upstairs> "We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat," said Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal Tighter Rules Fail to Stem Deaths of Innocent Afghans at Checkpoints By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. Published: March 26, 2010 KABUL, Afghanistan - American and NATO troops firing from passing convoys and military checkpoints have killed 30 Afghans and wounded 80 others since last summer, but in no instance did the victims prove to be a danger to troops, according to military officials in Kabul. "We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat," said Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who became the senior American and NATO commander in Afghanistan last year. His comments came during a recent videoconference to answer questions from troops in the field about civilian casualties. Though fewer in number than deaths from airstrikes and Special Forces operations, such shootings have not dropped off, despite new rules from General McChrystal seeking to reduce the killing of innocents. The persistence of deadly convoy and checkpoint shootings has led to growing resentment among Afghans fearful of Western troops and angry at what they see as the impunity with which the troops operate - a friction that has turned villages firmly against the occupation. Failure to reduce checkpoint and convoy shootings, known in the military as "escalation of force" episodes, has emerged as a major frustration for military commanders who believe that civilian casualties deeply undermine the American and NATO campaign in Afghanistan. Many of the detainees at the military prison at Bagram Air Base joined the insurgency after the shootings of people they knew, said the senior NATO enlisted man in Afghanistan, Command Sgt. Maj. Michael Hall. "There are stories after stories about how these people are turned into insurgents," Sergeant Major Hall told troops during the videoconference. "Every time there is an escalation of force we are finding that innocents are being killed." One such case was the death of Mohammed Yonus, a 36-year-old imam and a respected religious authority, who was killed two months ago in eastern Kabul while commuting to a madrasa where he taught 150 students. A passing military convoy raked his car with bullets, ripping open his chest as his two sons sat in the car. The shooting inflamed residents and turned his neighborhood against the occupation, elders there say. "The people are tired of all these cruel actions by the foreigners, and we can't suffer it anymore," said Naqibullah Samim, a village elder from Hodkail, where Mr. Yonus lived. "The people do not have any other choice, they will rise against the government and fight them and the foreigners. There are a lot of cases of killing of innocent people." After assuming command last summer, General McChrystal moved to reduce the killing of civilians through directives that, according to United Nations human rights researchers, have led to a 28 percent reduction in such casualties last year by American, NATO and Afghan forces. The biggest impact was reducing deaths from aerial attacks, which fell by more than a third in 2009, the United Nations found. More recently, General McChrystal moved to bring nearly all Special Operations forces in Afghanistan under his control. NATO officials said concern about civilian casualties caused by these forces was partly behind the decision, along with the need to better coordinate units and ensure that local commanders were aware of what was happening. One unit could be doing counterinsurgency, while another carried out "a raid that might in fact upset progress," General McChrystal explained during the videoconference. He also challenged criticism that some of the new rules might hinder troops' safety. "Nothing has changed to limit your right or responsibility to defend yourself," he said. Shootings from convoys and checkpoints involving American, NATO and Afghan forces accounted for 36 civilian deaths last year, down from 41 in 2008, according to the United Nations. With at least 30 Afghans killed since last June in 95 such shootings, according to military statistics, the rate shows no signs of abating. And those numbers do not include shooting deaths caused by convoys guarded by private security contractors. Some tallies have put the total number of escalation of force deaths far higher. A spokesman for the Afghan Interior Ministry, Zemary Bashary, said private security contractors sometimes killed civilians during escalation of force episodes, but he said he did not know the number of instances. A NATO military spokesman in Kabul emphasized that commanders were not second-guessing troops, but urging them to practice "courageous restraint" and recognize that "you are more likely to be hurting someone who is confused rather than dangerous if you open fire" during an escalation of force episode. Sharifullah Sahak and Abdul Waheed Wafa contributed reporting from Kabul. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/27/world/asia/27afghan.html?hpw -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Sat Mar 27 01:14:48 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 2010 02:14:48 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Catholic Order (an ally of the late Pope Paul) Admits Its Founder Abused Boys Over Decades Message-ID: <3AFD12472422478384DC5941A3EB4462@Upstairs> Catholic Order Admits Its Founder Abused Boys Over Decades By RACHEL DONADIO Published: March 26, 2010 ROME - A powerful Roman Catholic religious order acknowledged in a statement on Friday that its founder, a close ally of the late Pope John Paul II, molested seminarians and fathered several children, and it expressed "sorrow and grief" to anyone "damaged by our founder's actions." The statement was the first official admission by the Legionaries of Christ that its charismatic Mexican founder, the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, who died in 2008, was responsible for many "grave acts." Around two dozen people had claimed that Father Maciel's molesting of boys continued for decades. The statement was viewed as an important development because Father Maciel was a beloved friend of Pope John Paul, and the accusations of abuse against him were vetted personally by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. The order's account of the scandal surrounding its founder comes ahead of the recommendations of a recently completed apostolic visitation, a high-level Vatican inquiry, which is expected to render a harsh verdict about Father Maciel, experts said. The Vatican has also been forced to grapple with a new wave of abuse cases in Europe, including a number in the pope's home country, Germany, where he has come under scrutiny for his handling of a pedophile priest in 1980, when he was an archbishop in Munich. For years, the Vatican ignored complaints against Father Maciel, who enjoyed a strong cult of personality. But in 2004 Cardinal Ratzinger reopened a stalled investigation into the order when he was the head of the Vatican's doctrinal office, sending a Vatican official to interview Legionaries and accusers of Father Maciel worldwide. The Legionaries' statement offered no concrete changes to the management or traditions of the order, but in a rare case of a religious order disavowing its founder, it said, "We accept and regret that, given the gravity of his faults, we cannot take his person as a model of Christian or priestly life." The statement continued, "We had thought and hoped that the accusations brought against our founder were false and unfounded, since they conflicted with our experience of him personally and his work." Observers said the statement seemed to pave the way for the Vatican to take strong action to discipline the Legionaries. Last week, a team of Vatican investigators presented the results of its yearlong inquiry to the communities, seminaries and schools of the group and its lay order, Regnum Christi. The results remain secret. Father Maciel was never defrocked, but he was ordered by the Vatican in 2006 to live in seclusion. George Weigel, a Vatican expert and biographer of Pope John Paul, called the Legionaries' statement "very significant" because it spelled out that Father Maciel could no longer be a model for the organization, and because "this is being done because Joseph Ratzinger insisted on getting to the bottom of the controversy." Mr. Weigel said he hoped it paved the way for the "refoundation" of the order. The Rev. Thomas Berg, a former Legionaries priest who has begun the process of joining the Archdiocese of New York, said the statement left a number of questions unaddressed. "What about the irresponsibility of current superiors in misleading members and Regnum Christi for several years when these things were known?" Father Berg asked. But he added: "The big gaping hole in the Legion right now is there's no founder. It's been decapitated." The Legionaries' spokesman in the United States, Jim Fair, said he could not speculate on the concrete results of the Vatican investigation, including who would lead the organization or whether Father Maciel's books would still be taught in formation courses. "We'll all have to wait for the indications of the Holy See," Mr. Fair said in an e-mail message. Juan Vaca, 73, who was sexually abused by Father Maciel in Mexico when he was 10 and for years tried to get the Vatican to investigate Father Maciel, said he was disappointed by the statement. "It's very tepid, very general, nothing new," he said. Mr. Vaca, who left the Legionaries in the 1970s and is now a professor of psychology at Mercy College on Long Island, said, "They have to amend all these errors and mistakes by facts and actions, not words and promises." He said he did not expect much from the apostolic delegation. "They are communicating in secrecy," he said, "and they will get everything under secrecy." In Mexico, the order reaches the upper echelons of business, the church and government, and for most of his life, Father Maciel was treated as something of a saint. The Legionaries' acknowledgment that he had fathered at least three children out of wedlock and molested several boys, confirming the worst accusations and long-held suspicions among many Catholics there, seriously damaged the order's reputation. Elio Masferrer, a Mexican scholar who heads the Latin American Association for the Study of Religions, said the statement, with its vague plea for forgiveness, still did not address the damages done to victims by Father Maciel, or the civil crimes he committed. "They think of the sexually abused as if they were people in the wrong place at the wrong time," Mr. Masferrer said. "The strategy is not to forgive the sinner; it is to protect the sinner." Mr. Fair, the spokesman for the order, said the statement had not gone into detail about possible crimes committed by Father Maciel in order to protect the privacy of the victims. He also said that the timing of the statement was not connected to the Vatican's investigation. Laurie Goodstein contributed reporting from New York, and James C. McKinley Jr. from Houston. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/27/world/europe/27legion.html?hpw -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Sat Mar 27 12:33:49 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 2010 13:33:49 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Update: Mohammad Omer got his visa to come to US Message-ID: Update: Mohammad Omer got his visa to come to US Posted on March 26 2010 by Cecilie Surasky We wrote a few days ago in Is the U.S. Consulate Cooperating in Silencing Palestinian Activists? Mohammed Omer, the Gazan journalist and photographer, is scheduled for a U.S. speaking tour together with Ali Abunimah. The U.S. consulate in the Netherlands, where Omer now resides, has put an extended hold on his visa application, effectively cancelling the tour. Omer has lived in the Netherlands since 2008, after he was detained and severely beaten by the Shin Bet when he returned to Gaza from London, where he had been awarded the prestigious Gellhorn Award for Journalism. We just got word that Omer got his visa. Thank you to everyone for your letters- they made a difference. http://www.muzzlewatch.com/2010/03/26/update-mohammad-omer-got-his-visa-to-come-to-us/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Muzzlewatch+%28MuzzleWatch%29 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 12773 bytes Desc: not available URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Sat Mar 27 13:29:48 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 2010 13:29:48 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Political Murders in Honduras Continue Message-ID: <793573AD81D74A9F82BD3F058948AA9B@agingCHS072729> digital at juventudrebelde.cu Juventud Rebelde March 24, 2010 JUVENTUD REBELDE Political Murders in Honduras Continue Tegucigalpa, March 24.- Honduran Professor of Social Sciences Jose Manuel Flores, an active member of the resistance movement against the Porfirio Lobo government, was shot to death on Tuesday at the Jose Pedregal high school, south of Tegucigalpa, by four unknown men wearing balaclavas. Hondurans working in the education sector held a general strike on Wednesday to protest Flores' murder which adds to a growing number of recent killings of opposition activists in Honduras. Education unions warned that the dictatorial regime is venting its anger against opposition members to the extent of murdering professors at their own workplaces. In a press release, the Honduran National Resistance Front held the national oligarchy and the Porfirio Lobo de facto regime responsible for the assassination of Flores, reported the Prensa Latina news agency. "We call for the violence against our people to stop and call on the international community to condemn the Lobo dictatorship." Flores' murder took place just days before the National Resistance Front called a national strike on Thursday to demand the end of repression and the creation of a National Constituent Assembly. =============================== Join the bookseller list-serv 'Fresh Ink' Forward this email with 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 Mar 27 13:34:47 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sat, 27 Mar 2010 13:34:47 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The 2010 Census: Will your answers stay private? Message-ID: <73365F37988A4DFDBD576977675AA9CA@agingCHS072729> Opinion The 2010 Census: Will your answers stay private? What you need to know about the 2010 Census: The bureau has a proven history of violating privacy in the name of security. By James Bovard / March 24, 2010 Rockville, Md. In his State of the Union message, President Obama warned that America is suffering from a "deficit of trust." One example of this deficit is the controversy over whether citizens can trust the feds to keep the census responses they're filling out in coming weeks confidential. Americans are told that the Census Bureau operates under a reverse Miranda warning: Any information gathered will never be used against them. The House of Representatives, in a Census Awareness Month resolution passed March 3, proclaimed that "the data obtained from the census are protected under United States privacy laws." Unfortunately, thousands of Americans who trusted the Census Bureau in the past lost their freedom as a result. In the 1940 Census, the Census Bureau loudly assured people that their responses would be kept confidential. Within four days of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Census Bureau had produced a report listing the Japanese-American population in each county on the West Coast. The Census Bureau launched this project even before Congress declared war on Japan. The Census Bureau's report helped the US Army round up more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans for concentration camps (later renamed "internment centers"). Until a decade ago, the bureau denied any improper role in the internment. Two researchers in 2000 provided so many smoking gun documents that the bureau finally admitted some culpability. But it proudly declared that it had never provided the names and addresses of specific Japanese-Americans to law enforcement or the military. In 2007, a study by those researchers, William Seltzer of Fordham University and Margo Anderson of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, proved that the Census Bureau gave the Secret Service the names and addresses of all persons of Japanese ancestry in the Washington, D.C., area during World War II. The bureau responded by insisting that this was ancient history. While the disclosure may have been dated, the bureau's deceit lasted for more than 60 years and undermines its credibility. And we do not know how many other census confidentiality violations have yet to surface. In 2003-04, the Census Bureau provided the Department of Homeland Security with a massive cache of information on how many Arab Americans lived in each ZIP Code around the nation, and which country they originated from. Such information could have made it far easier to carry out the type of mass roundup that some conservatives advocated. But the Census Bureau denied it had done anything wrong in providing such information. Citizens are supposed to pretend that their census responses will exist in a politically antiseptic vacuum. Yet if top politicians decide to use census responses for another roundup or crackdowns on specific individuals or groups, then federal law will either be changed or ignored. It was the Census Bureau that led the charge in 1942 to persuade Congress to pass a law permitting disclosure of census responses to federal law enforcement and other agencies. (That law expired in 1947.) But the bureau did not even wait for the law's passage before betraying its pledge to Americans. Since the last census was taken, the feds have consistently scorned legal and constitutional protections of Americans' privacy. After 9/11, Justice Department and White House lawyers decided that the Fourth Amendment's prohibitions on warrantless searches were null and void, and that the president could order any surveillance he pleased. The National Security Agency illegally compiled records of the phone calls made by tens of millions of Americans. The Federal Bureau of Investigation illegally vacuumed up the e-mail and other personal data of thousands of Americans, according to the Justice Department's Inspector General's Office. A surplus of lies naturally produces a deficit of trust. Instead of viewing census critics as conspiracy theorists, the nation's political leaders should recognize how their policies have undermined public faith in government. If the government brazenly ignores laws prohibiting torture, why expect officials to scrupulously obey laws regarding a public survey? Snappy Census Bureau ad campaigns cannot expunge the federal record book. The more information the government collects on people, the more control it will have over them. The Constitution requires that the population be counted every 10 years to apportion seats in the House of Representatives. All the census really needs to know is how many people live at each address. Citizens should refuse to answer any census question except for the number of residents. A partial boycott of the census questionnaire is a tiny but important step to safeguard our remaining liberties. Citizens are not obliged to pave the data highway for Leviathan's next intrusion into their lives. James Bovard, who worked as a census taker in 1980, is the author of "Attention Deficit Democracy" and eight other books. He's also a policy adviser to the Future of Freedom Foundation. Join the discussion on Facebook and Twitter. =============================== Join the bookseller list-serv 'Fresh Ink' Forward this email with 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 Mar 28 00:59:43 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 2010 01:59:43 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] FRANK RICH: The Rage Is Not About Health Care Message-ID: <6DA8CCC9198A4E46BD8660D5ED4E9466@Upstairs> "If Obama's first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House - topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman - would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play." Op-Ed Columnist The Rage Is Not About Health Care By FRANK RICH Published: March 27, 2010 THERE were times when last Sunday's great G.O.P. health care implosion threatened to bring the thrill back to reality television. On ABC's "This Week," a frothing and filibustering Karl Rove all but lost it in a debate with the Obama strategist David Plouffe. A few hours later, the perennially copper-faced Republican leader John Boehner revved up his "Hell no, you can't!" incantation in the House chamber - instant fodder for a new viral video remixing his rap with will.i.am's "Yes, we can!" classic from the campaign. Boehner, having previously likened the health care bill to Armageddon, was now so apoplectic you had to wonder if he had just discovered one of its more obscure revenue-generating provisions, a tax on indoor tanning salons. But the laughs evaporated soon enough. There's nothing entertaining about watching goons hurl venomous slurs at congressmen like the civil rights hero John Lewis and the openly gay Barney Frank. And as the week dragged on, and reports of death threats and vandalism stretched from Arizona to Kansas to upstate New York, the F.B.I. and the local police had to get into the act to protect members of Congress and their families. How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn't recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht. The weapon of choice for vigilante violence at Congressional offices has been a brick hurled through a window. So far. No less curious is how disproportionate this red-hot anger is to its proximate cause. The historic Obama-Pelosi health care victory is a big deal, all right, so much so it doesn't need Joe Biden's adjective to hype it. But the bill does not erect a huge New Deal-Great Society-style government program. In lieu of a public option, it delivers 32 million newly insured Americans to private insurers. As no less a conservative authority than The Wall Street Journal editorial page observed last week, the bill's prototype is the health care legislation Mitt Romney signed into law in Massachusetts. It contains what used to be considered Republican ideas. Yet it's this bill that inspired G.O.P. congressmen on the House floor to egg on disruptive protesters even as they were being evicted from the gallery by the Capitol Police last Sunday. It's this bill that prompted a congressman to shout "baby killer" at Bart Stupak, a staunch anti-abortion Democrat. It's this bill that drove a demonstrator to spit on Emanuel Cleaver, a black representative from Missouri. And it's this "middle-of-the-road" bill, as Obama accurately calls it, that has incited an unglued firestorm of homicidal rhetoric, from "Kill the bill!" to Sarah Palin's cry for her followers to "reload." At least four of the House members hit with death threats or vandalism are among the 20 political targets Palin marks with rifle crosshairs on a map on her Facebook page. When Social Security was passed by Congress in 1935 and Medicare in 1965, there was indeed heated opposition. As Dana Milbank wrote in The Washington Post, Alf Landon built his catastrophic 1936 presidential campaign on a call for repealing Social Security. (Democrats can only pray that the G.O.P. will "go for it" again in 2010, as Obama goaded them on Thursday, and keep demanding repeal of a bill that by September will shower benefits on the elderly and children alike.) When L.B.J. scored his Medicare coup, there were the inevitable cries of "socialism" along with ultimately empty rumblings of a boycott from the American Medical Association. But there was nothing like this. To find a prototype for the overheated reaction to the health care bill, you have to look a year before Medicare, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Both laws passed by similar majorities in Congress; the Civil Rights Act received even more votes in the Senate (73) than Medicare (70). But it was only the civil rights bill that made some Americans run off the rails. That's because it was the one that signaled an inexorable and immutable change in the very identity of America, not just its governance. The apocalyptic predictions then, like those about health care now, were all framed in constitutional pieties, of course. Barry Goldwater, running for president in '64, drew on the counsel of two young legal allies, William Rehnquist and Robert Bork, to characterize the bill as a "threat to the very essence of our basic system" and a "usurpation" of states' rights that "would force you to admit drunks, a known murderer or an insane person into your place of business." Richard Russell, the segregationist Democratic senator from Georgia, said the bill "would destroy the free enterprise system." David Lawrence, a widely syndicated conservative columnist, bemoaned the establishment of "a federal dictatorship." Meanwhile, three civil rights workers were murdered in Philadelphia, Miss. That a tsunami of anger is gathering today is illogical, given that what the right calls "Obamacare" is less provocative than either the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Medicare, an epic entitlement that actually did precipitate a government takeover of a sizable chunk of American health care. But the explanation is plain: the health care bill is not the main source of this anger and never has been. It's merely a handy excuse. The real source of the over-the-top rage of 2010 is the same kind of national existential reordering that roiled America in 1964. In fact, the current surge of anger - and the accompanying rise in right-wing extremism - predates the entire health care debate. The first signs were the shrieks of "traitor" and "off with his head" at Palin rallies as Obama's election became more likely in October 2008. Those passions have spiraled ever since - from Gov. Rick Perry's kowtowing to secessionists at a Tea Party rally in Texas to the gratuitous brandishing of assault weapons at Obama health care rallies last summer to "You lie!" piercing the president's address to Congress last fall like an ominous shot. If Obama's first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House - topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman - would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It's not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver - none of them major Democratic players in the health care push - received a major share of last weekend's abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan "Take our country back!," these are the people they want to take the country back from. They can't. Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. The week before the health care vote, The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven't had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded. If Congressional Republicans want to maintain a politburo-like homogeneity in opposition to the Democrats, that's their right. If they want to replay the petulant Gingrich government shutdown of 1995 by boycotting hearings and, as John McCain has vowed, refusing to cooperate on any legislation, that's their right too (and a political gift to the Democrats). But they can't emulate the 1995 G.O.P. by remaining silent as mass hysteria, some of it encompassing armed militias, runs amok in their own precincts. We know the end of that story. And they can't pretend that we're talking about "isolated incidents" or a "fringe" utterly divorced from the G.O.P. A Quinnipiac poll last week found that 74 percent of Tea Party members identify themselves as Republicans or Republican-leaning independents, while only 16 percent are aligned with Democrats. After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, some responsible leaders in both parties spoke out to try to put a lid on the resistance and violence. The arch-segregationist Russell of Georgia, concerned about what might happen in his own backyard, declared flatly that the law is "now on the books." Yet no Republican or conservative leader of stature has taken on Palin, Perry, Boehner or any of the others who have been stoking these fires for a good 17 months now. Last week McCain even endorsed Palin's "reload" rhetoric. Are these politicians so frightened of offending anyone in the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base that they would rather fall silent than call out its extremist elements and their enablers? Seemingly so, and if G.O.P. leaders of all stripes, from Romney to Mitch McConnell to Olympia Snowe to Lindsey Graham, are afraid of these forces, that's the strongest possible indicator that the rest of us have reason to fear them too. Correction: Timothy Geithner's title at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York was president and chief executive officer, not chairman, as I wrote here last week. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/opinion/28rich.html?hp -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Mar 28 09:08:21 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 2010 09:08:21 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Noam Chomsky: Globalization Marches On Message-ID: <> http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/03/26-14 Common Dreams Marxch 26, 2010 New York Times Syndicate Globalization Marches On Growing popular outrage has not challenged corporate power. By Noam Chomsky Shifts in global power, ongoing or potential, are a lively topic among policy makers and observers. One question is whether (or when) China will displace the United States as the dominant global player, perhaps along with India. Such a shift would return the global system to something like it was before the European conquests. Economic growth in China and India has been rapid, and because they rejected the West's policies of financial deregulation, they survived the recession better than most. Nonetheless, questions arise. One standard measure of social health is the U.N. Human Development Index. As of 2008, India ranks 134th, slightly above Cambodia and below Laos and Tajikistan, about where it has been for many years. China ranks 92nd-tied with Belize, a bit above Jordan, below the Dominican Republic and Iran. India and China also have very high inequality, so more than a billion of their inhabitants fall far lower on the scale. Another concern is the U.S. debt. Some fear it places the U.S. in thrall to China. But apart from a brief interlude ending in December, Japan has long been the biggest international holder of U.S. government debt. Creditor leverage, furthermore, is overrated. In one dimension-military power-the United States stands alone. And Obama is setting new records with his 2011 military budget. Almost half the U.S. deficit is due to military spending, which is untouchable in the political system. When considering the U.S. economy's other sectors, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and other economists warn that we should beware of "deficit fetishism." A deficit is a stimulus to recovery, and it can be overcome with a growing economy, as after World War II, when the deficit was far worse. And the deficit is expected to grow, largely because of the hopelessly inefficient privatized health care system-also virtually untouchable, thanks to business's ability to overpower the public will. However, the framework of these discussions is misleading. The global system is not only an interaction among states, each pursuing some "national interest" abstracted from distribution of domestic power. That has long been understood. Adam Smith concluded that the "principal architects" of policy in England were "merchants and manufacturers," who ensured that their own interests are "most peculiarly attended to," however "grievous" the effects on others, including the people of England. Smith's maxim still holds, though today the "principal architects" are multinational corporations and particularly the financial institutions whose share in the economy has exploded since the 1970s. In the United States we have recently seen a dramatic illustration of the power of the financial institutions. In the last presidential election they provided the core of President Obama's funding. Naturally they expected to be rewarded. And they were- with the TARP bailouts, and a great deal more. Take Goldman Sachs, the top dog in both the economy and the political system. The firm made a mint by selling mortgage-backed securities and more complex financial instruments. Aware of the flimsiness of the packages they were peddling, the firm also took out bets with the insurance giant American International Group (AIG) that the offerings would fail. When the financial system collapsed, AIG went down with it. Goldman's architects of policy not only parlayed a bailout for Goldman itself but also arranged for taxpayers to save AIG from bankruptcy, thus rescuing Goldman. Now Goldman is making record profits and paying out fat bonuses. It, and a handful of other banks, are bigger and more powerful than ever. The public is furious. People can see that the banks that were primary agents of the crisis are making out like bandits, while the population that rescued them is facing an official unemployment rate of nearly 10 percent, as of February. The rate rises to nearly 17 percent when all Americans who wish to be fully employed are counted. Bringing Obama to Heel Popular anger finally evoked a rhetorical shift from the administration, which responded with charges about greedy bankers. "I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat-cat bankers on Wall Street," Obama told 60 Minutes in December. This kind of rhetoric was accompanied with some policy suggestions that the financial industry doesn't like (e.g., the Volcker Rule, which would bar banks receiving government support from engaging in speculative activity unrelated to basic bank activities) and proposals to set up an independent regulatory agency to protect consumers. Since Obama was supposed to be their man in Washington, the principal architects of government policy wasted little time delivering their instructions: Unless Obama fell back into line, they would shift funds to the political opposition. "If the president doesn't become a little more balanced and centrist in his approach, then he will likely lose" the support of Wall Street, Kelly S. King, a board member of the lobbying group Financial Services Roundtable, told the New York Times in early February. Securities and investment businesses gave the Democratic Party a record $89 million during the 2008 campaign. Three days later, Obama informed the press that bankers are fine "guys," singling out the chairmen of the two biggest players, JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs: "I, like most of the American people, don't begrudge people success or wealth. That's part of the free-market system," the president said. (Or at least "free markets" as interpreted by state capitalist doctrine.) That turnabout is a revealing snapshot of Smith's maxim in action. The architects of policy are also at work on a real shift of power: from the global work force to transnational capital. Economist and China specialist Martin Hart-Landsberg explores the dynamic in a recent Monthly Review article. China has become an assembly plant for a regional production system. Japan, Taiwan and other advanced Asian economies export high-tech parts and components to China, which assembles and exports the finished products. The Spoils of Power The growing U.S. trade deficit with China has aroused concern. Less noticed is that the U.S. trade deficit with Japan and the rest of Asia has sharply declined as this new regional production system takes shape. U.S. manufacturers are following the same course, providing parts and components for China to assemble and export, mostly back to the United States. For the financial institutions, retail giants, and the owners and managers of manufacturing industries closely related to this nexus of power, these developments are heaven sent. And well understood. In 2007, Ralph Gomory, head of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, testified before Congress, "In this new era of globalization, the interests of companies and countries have diverged. In contrast with the past, what is good for America's global corporations is no longer necessarily good for the American people." Consider IBM. According to Business Week, by the end of 2008, more than 70 percent of IBM's work force of 400,000 was abroad. In 2009 IBM reduced its U.S. employment by another 8 percent. For the work force, the outcome may be "grievous," in accordance with Smith's maxim, but it is fine for the principal architects of policy. Current research indicates that about one-fourth of U.S. jobs will be "offshorable" within two decades, and for those jobs that remain, security and decent pay will decline because of the increased competition from replaced workers. This pattern follows 30 years of stagnation or decline for the majority as wealth poured into few pockets, leading to what has probably become the greatest inequality between the haves and the have-nots since the end of American slavery. While China is becoming the world's assembly plant and export platform, Chinese workers are suffering along with the rest of the global work force. This is an unsurprising outcome of a system designed to concentrate wealth and power and to set working people in competition with one another worldwide. Globally, workers' share in national income has declined in many countries-dramatically so in China, leading to growing unrest in that highly inegalitarian society. So we have another significant shift in global power: from the general population to the principal architects of the global system, a process aided by the undermining of functioning democracy in the United States and other of the Earth's most powerful states. The future depends on how much the great majority is willing to endure, and whether that great majority will collectively offer a constructive response to confront the problems at the core of the state capitalist system of domination and control. If not, the results might be grim, as history more than amply reveals. c 2010 The New York Times ___________________ Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (retired) at MIT. He is the author of many books and articles on international affairs and social-political issues, and a long-time participant in activist movements. His most recent books include: Failed States, What We Say Goes(with David Barsamian), Hegemony or Survival, and the Essential Chomsky. =============================== Join the bookseller list-serv 'Fresh Ink' Forward this email with 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 Mar 28 09:17:06 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 2010 09:17:06 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Paul Craig Roberts on the loss of liberty Message-ID: <7657E5F04154415CADF7632C56632A13@agingCHS072729> www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18339 Global Research, March 26, 2010 Counterpunch - 2010-03-25 Good-Bye: Truth Has Fallen and Taken Liberty With It By Paul Craig Roberts There was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial interest. Today Americans are ruled by propaganda. Americans have little regard for truth, little access to it, and little ability to recognize it. Truth is an unwelcome entity. It is disturbing. It is off limits. Those who speak it run the risk of being branded "anti-American," "anti-semite" or "conspiracy theorist." Truth is an inconvenience for government and for the interest groups whose campaign contributions control government. Truth is an inconvenience for prosecutors who want convictions, not the discovery of innocence or guilt. Truth is inconvenient for ideologues. Today many whose goal once was the discovery of truth are now paid handsomely to hide it. "Free market economists" are paid to sell offshoring to the American people. High-productivity, high value-added American jobs are denigrated as dirty, old industrial jobs. Relicts from long ago, we are best shed of them. Their place has been taken by "the New Economy," a mythical economy that allegedly consists of high-tech white collar jobs in which Americans innovate and finance activities that occur offshore. All Americans need in order to participate in this "new economy" are finance degrees from Ivy League universities, and then they will work on Wall Street at million dollar jobs. Economists who were once respectable took money to contribute to this myth of "the New Economy." And not only economists sell their souls for filthy lucre. Recently we have had reports of medical doctors who, for money, have published in peer-reviewed journals concocted "studies" that hype this or that new medicine produced by pharmaceutical companies that paid for the "studies." The Council of Europe is investigating the drug companies' role in hyping a false swine flu pandemic in order to gain billions of dollars in sales of the vaccine. The media helped the US military hype its recent Marja offensive in Afghanistan, describing Marja as a city of 80,000 under Taliban control. It turns out that Marja is not urban but a collection of village farms. And there is the global warming scandal, in which NGOs. the UN, and the nuclear industry colluded in concocting a doomsday scenario in order to create profit in pollution. Wherever one looks, truth has fallen to money. Wherever money is insufficient to bury the truth, ignorance, propaganda, and short memories finish the job. I remember when, following CIA director William Colby's testimony before the Church Committee in the mid-1970s, presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan issued executive orders preventing the CIA and U.S. black-op groups from assassinating foreign leaders. In 2010 the US Congress was told by Dennis Blair, head of national intelligence, that the US now assassinates its own citizens in addition to foreign leaders. When Blair told the House Intelligence Committee that US citizens no longer needed to be arrested, charged, tried, and convicted of a capital crime, just murdered on suspicion alone of being a "threat," he wasn't impeached. No investigation pursued. Nothing happened. There was no Church Committee. In the mid-1970s the CIA got into trouble for plots to kill Castro. Today it is American citizens who are on the hit list. Whatever objections there might be don't carry any weight. No one in government is in any trouble over the assassination of U.S. citizens by the U.S. government. As an economist, I am astonished that the American economics profession has no awareness whatsoever that the U.S. economy has been destroyed by the offshoring of U.S. GDP to overseas countries. U.S. corporations, in pursuit of absolute advantage or lowest labor costs and maximum CEO "performance bonuses," have moved the production of goods and services marketed to Americans to China, India, and elsewhere abroad. When I read economists describe offshoring as free trade based on comparative advantage, I realize that there is no intelligence or integrity in the American economics profession. Intelligence and integrity have been purchased by money. The transnational or global U.S. corporations pay multi-million dollar compensation packages to top managers, who achieve these "performance awards" by replacing U.S. labor with foreign labor. While Washington worries about "the Muslim threat," Wall Street, U.S. corporations and "free market" shills destroy the U.S. economy and the prospects of tens of millions of Americans. Americans, or most of them, have proved to be putty in the hands of the police state. Americans have bought into the government's claim that security requires the suspension of civil liberties and accountable government. Astonishingly, Americans, or most of them, believe that civil liberties, such as habeas corpus and due process, protect "terrorists," and not themselves. Many also believe that the Constitution is a tired old document that prevents government from exercising the kind of police state powers necessary to keep Americans safe and free. Most Americans are unlikely to hear from anyone who would tell them any different. I was associate editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal. I was Business Week's first outside columnist, a position I held for 15 years. I was columnist for a decade for Scripps Howard News Service, carried in 300 newspapers. I was a columnist for the Washington Times and for newspapers in France and Italy and for a magazine in Germany. I was a contributor to the New York Times and a regular feature in the Los Angeles Times. Today I cannot publish in, or appear on, the American "mainstream media." For the last six years I have been banned from the "mainstream media." My last column in the New York Times appeared in January, 2004, coauthored with Democratic U.S. Senator Charles Schumer representing New York. We addressed the offshoring of U.S. jobs. Our op-ed article produced a conference at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. and live coverage by C-Span. A debate was launched. No such thing could happen today. For years I was a mainstay at the Washington Times, producing credibility for the Moony newspaper as a Business Week columnist, former Wall Street Journal editor, and former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. But when I began criticizing Bush's wars of aggression, the order came down to Mary Lou Forbes to cancel my column. The American corporate media does not serve the truth. It serves the government and the interest groups that empower the government. America's fate was sealed when the public and the anti-war movement bought the government's 9/11 conspiracy theory. The government's account of 9/11 is contradicted by much evidence. Nevertheless, this defining event of our time, which has launched the US on interminable wars of aggression and a domestic police state, is a taboo topic for investigation in the media. It is pointless to complain of war and a police state when one accepts the premise upon which they are based. These trillion dollar wars have created financing problems for Washington's deficits and threaten the U.S. dollar's role as world reserve currency. The wars and the pressure that the budget deficits put on the dollar's value have put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block. Former Goldman Sachs chairman and U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is after these protections for the elderly. Fed chairman Bernanke is also after them. The Republicans are after them as well. These protections are called "entitlements" as if they are some sort of welfare that people have not paid for in payroll taxes all their working lives. With over 21 per cent unemployment as measured by the methodology of 1980, with American jobs, GDP, and technology having been given to China and India, with war being Washington's greatest commitment, with the dollar over-burdened with debt, with civil liberty sacrificed to the "war on terror," the liberty and prosperity of the American people have been thrown into the trash bin of history. The militarism of the U.S. and Israeli states, and Wall Street and corporate greed, will now run their course. As the pen is censored and its might extinguished, I am signing off. Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts at yahoo.com =============================== Join the bookseller list-serv 'Fresh Ink' Forward this email with 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 Mar 28 09:19:50 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 2010 09:19:50 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] World War III Has Already Begun Message-ID: <6E0D6111F67E4B1482D11BE48415470A@agingCHS072729> http://english.pravda.ru/world/americas/25-03-2010/112718-world_war_three-0 Pravda.Ru 25.03.2010 World War III Has Already Begun Some experts believe that World War III will start 100 years after the first one and will take lives of hundreds of millions of people. Some scientists think that the war is already going on, nearing the completion of its first stage. Konstantin Sivkov, first VP of the Academy for Geopolitical Issues, developed a scientific concept of the reasons, stages and timeframes of World War II. He shared his forecast with Svobodnaya Pressa. Sivkov believes that planet Earth has experienced a global, civilized crisis. The crisis was caused by several disproportions, namely: 1) conflicts between growth of production/consumption and available resources 2) conflicts between "poor" developing countries and "rich" industrially developed countries, between nations and transnational elite; 3) conflicts between spiritless free market with the power of money and spiritual roots of various civilizations, including Orthodox, Muslim, Buddhist and others. "The analysis of possible solutions of these misbalances and conflicts shows that they are of antagonistic nature, and the crisis cannot be solved without significant infringement of interests of some large geopolitical subjects. This means that participation of military forces is unavoidable. Considering the global nature of the crisis, we may assume that military participation will be global as well," Sivkov believes. He predicts that World War III will be of coalitional nature. Countries will form coalitions based on their loyalty to one of the two models of world order. The first model is "the world of civilized hierarchy." Select few brutally exploit the rest of humanity. The second model is "civilized mutual support" or "civilized harmony." "In other words, the war will be waged to define the spiritual basis of new world order. It will either be based on individualism, selfishness and suppression, or community, domination of mutual interest to survive and develop and support each other. This is the main difference between the war to come and previous wars that were fought for economic redistribution." Two coalitions already exist. The first one is the alliance of the so-called industrially developed countries represented by Western civilizations. Spiritual foundations of this coalition are based on individualism and material possessions generating power of money. The coalition's military and political core is represented by the block NATO. The second coalition involves countries of orthodox, Islamic and other civilizations based on the domination of spiritual over material. This coalition is interested in multipolar world order. Yet, these countries have not realized that they have mutual geopolitical interests, let alone a necessity in a political or military unity. "The countries that are not a part of Western civilization are not ready for military confrontation neither in terms of organization nor technical preparedness. On the other hand, this coalition has overwhelming majority of people and control over ample natural resources and territories. This greatly increases their chances to win a long war and provides favorable circumstances for fighting the aggressor during the initial stages of war. Another potential advantage is that simultaneous attacks in all directions are practically impossible. This creates a reserve of time for consolidation of countries into an anti-imperialistic coalition. There is a possibility of supporting the countries that will become the first victims of aggressors," Sivkov says. The scientist is convinced that the war is already going on. So far it is in a relatively peaceful stage. "The first stage that we may call an "attempt of peaceful crisis resolution" is nearing its completion. 20G summits fighting in the battle field right now are obviously not bringing the results. Imedi and Helsingin Sanomat provocations mark the beginning of stage two, that we may call a "threat period before the beginning of world war." During this stage Western civilization has commenced preparation for local wars and armed conflicts for resources. The main actions at this stage are information operations and actions in economic area that may take various forms, from economic sanctions to terrorist attacks against industrial facilities, as well as different activities of Special Forces," says Sivkov. "In a few years, the third stage will commence, the stage of "limited wars," that will later turn into a full scale world war with all types of weapons. The only restricting factor at the moment is Russia's nuclear potential. According to the forecast of the scientist, the West will try to take away Russia's nuclear shield. "Considering the situation in Russia, when the fifth column of the West significantly affects decisions in Russia's defense sector, in particular, the direction Russia's armed forces will take, we can expect the form of SNF contract that will deprive Russia of its nuclear shield. Of course, it will be presented with a beautiful wrapping of struggle for the world without nuclear weapons. Russia may expect physical elimination of its nuclear potential during first stages of the world war (organized terrorist attacks, etc.) with further transition of neo-imperialistic coalition to unlimited use of nuclear weapons, which will bring it victory in the war," Sivkov stated. He believes that aggressors will not be stopped with a possibility of death of hundreds of millions of people. "History shows that the elite of "selfish" civilization do not get stopped by human sacrifices if there is a guarantee they themselves will survive in bunkers. The analysis shows that if the new world war is waged, it will touch the majority of the world population, all continents, oceans and seas. Over 100 million people may participate in this war. Total demographic losses may exceed several hundred millions of people. Therefore, all honest people on Earth, including those who form the "selfish" coalition must do everything they can not to allow it to happen. To do this, we have to mitigate with the force of law or other methods, the greed of transnational and national tycoons of the financial sector. We have to stop their ambitious, greedy, shameless and sometimes stupid politicians. This can only be done based on international consolidation efforts," the expert summarized. =============================== Join the bookseller list-serv 'Fresh Ink' Forward this email with 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 Mar 28 09:21:10 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 2010 09:21:10 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] John Pilger: Have a nice world war, folks Message-ID: http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=570 Have a nice world war, folks By John Pilger Here is news of the Third World War. The United States has invaded Africa. US troops have entered Somalia, extending their war front from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and now the Horn of Africa. In preparation for an attack on Iran, American missiles have been placed in four Persian Gulf states, and "bunker-buster" bombs are said to be arriving at the US base on the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. In Gaza, the sick and abandoned population, mostly children, is being entombed behind underground American-supplied walls in order to reinforce a criminal siege. In Latin America, the Obama administration has secured seven bases in Colombia, from which to wage a war of attrition against the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay. Meanwhile, the secretary of "defence" Robert Gates complains that "the general [European] public and the political class" are so opposed to war they are an "impediment" to peace. Remember this is the month of the March Hare. According to an American general, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is not so much a real war as a "war of perception". Thus, the recent "liberation of the city of Marja" from the Taliban's "command and control structure" was pure Hollywood. Marja is not a city; there was no Taliban command and control. The heroic liberators killed the usual civilians, poorest of the poor. Otherwise, it was fake. A war of perception is meant to provide fake news for the folks back home, to make a failed colonial adventure seem worthwhile and patriotic, as if The Hurt Locker were real and parades of flag-wrapped coffins through the Wiltshire town of Wooten Basset were not a cynical propaganda exercise. "War is fun", the helmets in Vietnam used to say with bleakest irony, meaning that if a war is revealed as having no purpose other than to justify voracious power in the cause of lucrative fanaticisms such as the weapons industry, the danger of truth beckons. This danger can be illustrated by the liberal perception of Tony Blair in 1997 as one "who wants to create a world [where] ideology has surrendered entirely to values" (Hugo Young, the Guardian) compared with today's public reckoning of a liar and war criminal. Western war-states such as the US and Britain are not threatened by the Taliban or any other introverted tribesmen in faraway places, but by the antiwar instincts of their own citizens. Consider the draconian sentences handed down in London to scores of young people who protested Israel's assault on Gaza in January last year. Following demonstrations in which paramilitary police "kettled" (corralled) thousands, first-offenders have received two and a half years in prison for minor offences that would not normally carry custodial sentences. On both sides of the Atlantic, serious dissent exposing illegal war has become a serious crime. Silence in other high places allows this moral travesty. Across the arts, literature, journalism and the law, liberal elites, having hurried away from the debris of Blair and now Obama, continue to fudge their indifference to the barbarism and aims of western state crimes by promoting retrospectively the evils of their convenient demons, like Saddam Hussein. With Harold Pinter gone, try compiling a list of famous writers, artists and advocates whose principles are not consumed by the "market" or neutered by their celebrity. Who among them have spoken out about the holocaust in Iraq during almost 20 years of lethal blockade and assault? And all of it has been deliberate. On 22 January 1991, the US Defence Intelligence Agency predicted in impressive detail how a blockade would systematically destroy Iraq's clean water system and lead to "increased incidences, if not epidemics of disease". So the US set about eliminating clean water for the Iraqi population: one of the causes, noted Unicef, of the deaths of half a million Iraqi infants under the age of five. But this extremism apparently has no name. Norman Mailer once said he believed the United States, in its endless pursuit of war and domination, had entered a "pre-fascist era". Mailer seemed tentative, as if trying to warn about something even he could not quite define. "Fascism" is not right, for it invokes lazy historical precedents, conjuring yet again the iconography of German and Italian repression. On the other hand, American authoritarianism, as the cultural critic Henry Giroux pointed out recently, is "more nuance, less theatrical, more cunning, less concerned with repressive modes of control than with manipulative modes of consent." This is Americanism, the only predatory ideology to deny that it is an ideology. The rise of tentacular corporations that are dictatorships in their own right and of a military that is now a state with the state, set behind the fa?ade of the best democracy 35,000 Washington lobbyists can buy, and a popular culture programmed to divert and stultify, is without precedent. More nuanced perhaps, but the results are both unambiguous and familiar. Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, the senior United Nations officials in Iraq during the American and British-led blockade, are in no doubt they witnessed genocide. They saw no gas chambers. Insidious, undeclared, even presented wittily as enlightenment on the march, the Third World War and its genocide proceeded, human being by human being. In the coming election campaign in Britain, the candidates will refer to this war only to laud "our boys". The candidates are almost identical political mummies shrouded in the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes. As Blair demonstrated a mite too eagerly, the British elite loves America because America allows it to barrack and bomb the natives and call itself a "partner". We should interrupt their fun. www.johnpilger.com =============================== Join the bookseller list-serv 'Fresh Ink' Forward this email with 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 Mar 28 16:41:40 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 2010 17:41:40 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Leaked CIA Report: "Public Apathy Enables Leaders to Ignore Voters" A MUST READ!!! Message-ID: "Over the past several years, WikiLeaks -- which aptly calls itself "the intelligence agency of the people" -- has obtained and then published a wide array of secret, incriminating documents (similar to this CIA Report) that expose the activities of numerous governments and corporations." Saturday, Mar 27, 2010 08:29 EDT The war on WikiLeaks and why it matters By Glenn Greenwald A newly leaked CIA report prepared earlier this month (.pdf) analyzes how the U.S. Government can best manipulate public opinion in Germany and France -- in order to ensure that those countries continue to fight in Afghanistan. The Report celebrates the fact that the governments of those two nations continue to fight the war in defiance of overwhelming public opinion which opposes it -- so much for all the recent veneration of "consent of the governed" -- and it notes that this is possible due to lack of interest among their citizenry: "Public Apathy Enables Leaders to Ignore Voters," proclaims the title of one section. But the Report also cites the "fall of the Dutch Government over its troop commitment to Afghanistan" and worries that -- particularly if the "bloody summer in Afghanistan" that many predict takes place -- what happened to the Dutch will spread as a result of the "fragility of European support" for the war. As the truly creepy Report title puts it, the CIA's concern is: "Why Counting on Apathy May Not Be Enough": Remember the last post where Robert Gates said: "The demilitarization of Europe - where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it - has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st." [http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x4280749] The Report seeks to provide a back-up plan for "counting on apathy," and provides ways that the U.S. Government can manipulate public opinion in these foreign countries. It explains that French sympathy for Afghan refugees means that exploiting Afghan women as pro-war messengers would be effective, while Germans would be more vulnerable to a fear-mongering campaign (failure in Afghanistan means the Terrorists will get you). The Report highlights the unique ability of Barack Obama to sell war to European populations (click on images to enlarge): ages to enlarge): It's both interesting and revealing that the CIA sees Obama as a valuable asset in putting a pretty face on our wars in the eyes of foreign populations. It is odious -- though, of course, completely unsurprising -- that the CIA plots ways to manipulate public opinion in foreign countries in order to sustain support for our wars. Now that this is a Democratic administration doing this and a Democratic war at issue, I doubt many people will object to any of this. But what is worth noting is how and why this classified Report was made publicly available: because it was leaked to and then posted by WikiLeaks.org, the site run by the non-profit group Sunshine Press, that is devoted to exposing suppressed government and corporate corruption by publicizing many of their most closely guarded secrets. * * * * * I spoke this morning at length with Julian Assange, the Australian citizen who is WikiLeaks' Editor, regarding the increasingly aggressive war being waged against WikiLeaks by numerous government agencies, including the Pentagon. Over the past several years, WikiLeaks -- which aptly calls itself "the intelligence agency of the people" -- has obtained and then published a wide array of secret, incriminating documents (similar to this CIA Report) that expose the activities of numerous governments and corporations. Among many others, they posted the Standard Operating Manual for Guantanamo, documents showing how corrupt offshore loans precipitated the economic collapse in Iceland, the notorious emails between climate scientists, documents showing toxic dumping off the coast of Africa, and many others. They have recently come into possession of classified videos relating to civilian causalities under the command of Gen. David Petraeus, as well as documentation relating to civilian-slaughtering airstrikes in Afghanistan which the U.S. military had agreed to release, only to change their mind. All of this has made WikiLeaks an increasingly hated target of numerous government and economic elites around the world, including the U.S. Government. As The New York Times put it last week: "To the list of the enemies threatening the security of the United States, the Pentagon has added WikiLeaks.org, a tiny online source of information and documents that governments and corporations around the world would prefer to keep secret." In 2008, the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Center prepared a secret report -- obtained and posted by WikiLeaks -- devoted to this website and detailing, in a section entitled "Is it Free Speech or Illegal Speech?", ways it would seek to destroy the organization. It discusses the possibility that, for some governments, not merely contributing to WikiLeaks, but "even accessing the website itself is a crime," and outlines its proposal for WikiLeaks' destruction as follows (click on images to enlarge): As the Pentagon report put it: "the governments of China, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Vietnam and Zimbabwe" have all sought to block access to or otherwise impede the operations of WikiLeaks, and the U.S. Government now joins that illustrious list of transparency-loving countries in targeting them. It's not difficult to understand why the Pentagon wants to destroy WikiLeaks. Here's how the Pentagon's report describes some of the disclosures for which they are responsible: The Pentagon report also claims that WikiLeaks has disclosed documents that could expose U.S. military plans in Afghanistan and Iraq and endanger the military mission, though its discussion is purely hypothetical and no specifics are provided. Instead, the bulk of the Pentagon report focuses on documents which embarrass the U.S. Government: information which, as they put it, "could be manipulated to provide biased news reports or be used for conducting propaganda, disinformation, misinformation, perception management, or influence operations against the U.S. Army by a variety of domestic and foreign actors." In other words, the Pentagon is furious that this exposing of its secrets might enable others to engage in exactly the type of "perception management" which the aforementioned CIA Report proposes the U.S. do with regard to the citizenry of our allied countries. All of this is based in the same rationale invoked by President Obama and the Democratic Congress when they re-wrote the Freedom of Information Act last year in order to suppress America's torture photos. It's the same rationale used by all governments to conceal evidence of their wrongdoing: we need to suppress our activities for your own good. WikiLeaks is devoted to subverting that mentality and, relatively speaking, has been quite successful in doing so. For that reason, numerous governments and private groups would like to see them destroyed. Corporations have sued to have the site shut down. And in addition to this 2008 Pentagon report, WikiLeaks has acquired, though not yet posted, other U.S. Government classified reports on its activities, including a U.S. Marine Intelligence Report and an analysis prepared by the U.S. military base in Germany, both of which speak of WikiLeaks as a threat. Moreover, the FBI has refused to provide any information about its investigations and other activities aimed at WikiLeaks, citing, in response to FOIA requests, national security and other excuses for concealing it. * * * * * In my interview this morning with Assange, he described multiple incidents that clearly signal a recent escalation of surveillance and other forms of harassment directed at WikiLeaks. Many of those events are detailed in an Editorial they just published, which, he explained, was part of an effort to publicize what is being done to them in order to provide some safety and buffer. A good summary of those events is provided by Gawker. As but one disturbing incident: a volunteer, a minor, who works with WikiLeaks was detained in Iceland last week and questioned extensively about an incriminating video WikiLeaks possesses relating to the actions of the U.S. military. During the course of the interrogation, the WikiLeaks volunteer was not only asked questions about the video based on non-public knowledge about its contents (i.e., information which only the U.S. military would have), but was also shown surveillance photos of Assange exiting a recent WikiLeaks meeting regarding the imminent posting of documents concerning the Pentagon. That WikiLeaks is being targeted by the U.S. Government for surveillance and disruption is beyond doubt. And it underscores how vital their work is and why it's such a threat. WikiLeaks editors, including Assagne, have spent substantial time of late in Iceland because there is a pending bill in that country's Parliament that would provide meaningful whistle blower protection for what they do, far greater than exists anywhere else. Why is Iceland a leading candidate to do that? Because, last year, that nation suffered full-scale economic collapse. It was then revealed that numerous nefarious causes (corrupt loans, off-shore transactions, concealed warning signs) were hidden completely from the public and even from policy-makers, preventing detection and avoidance. Worse, most of Iceland's institutions -- from its media to its legislative and regulatory bodies -- completely failed to penetrate this wall of secrecy, allowing this corruption to fester until it brought about full-scale financial ruin. As a result, Iceland has become very receptive to the fact that the type of investigative exposure provided by WikiLeaks is a vital national good, and there is real political will to provide it with substantial protections. If that doesn't sound familiar to Americans, it should. At exactly the time when U.S. government secrecy is at an all-time high, the institutions ostensibly responsible for investigation, oversight and exposure have failed. The American media are largely co-opted, and their few remaining vestiges of real investigative journalism are crippled by financial constraints. The U.S. Congress is almost entirely impotent at providing meaningful oversight and is, in any event, controlled by the factions that maintain virtually complete secrecy. As I've documented before, some alternative means of investigative journalism have arisen -- such as the ACLU's tenacious FOIA litigations to pry documents showing "War on Terror" abuses and the reams of bloggers who sort through, analyze and publicize them -- but that's no match for the vast secrecy powers of the government and private corporations. The need for independent leaks and whistle-blowing exposures is particularly acute now because, at exactly the same time that investigative journalism has collapsed, public and private efforts to manipulate public opinion have proliferated. This is exemplified by the type of public opinion management campaign detailed by the above-referenced CIA Report, the Pentagon's TV propaganda program exposed in 2008, and the ways in which private interests covertly pay and control supposedly "independent political commentators" to participate in our public debates and shape public opinion. Last month, I was on a panel at the New School's Conference on how information is controlled in a democracy, and also on the panel were Daniel Ellsberg, who risked his liberty to leak the Pentagon Papers, and The New York Times' David Barstow, who won the Pulitzer Prize for exposing the Pentagon's propaganda program. Ellsberg described how massive is the apparatus of secrecy in the National Security State, and Barstow made the vital point -- which I summarized in the clip below when speaking later that day at NYU Law School -- that the public and private means for manipulating public opinion are rapidly increasing at exactly the same time that checks on secrecy (such as investigative journalism) are vanishing: http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/index.html?story=/opinion/greenwald/2010/03/27/wikileaks Aside from the handful of organizations (the ACLU, the NYT) with the resources and will to engage in protracted FOIA litigations against the government, one of the last avenues to uncover government and other elite secrets are whistle blowers and organizations that enable them. WikiLeaks is one of the world's most effective such groups, and it's thus no surprise that they're under such sustained attacks. This is how Assange put it to me this morning in explaining why he believes his organization's activities are so vital and why he's willing to make himself a target in order to do it: This information has reform potential. And the information which is concealed or suppressed is concealed or suppressed because the people who know it best understand that it has the ability to reform. So they engage in work to prevent that reform . . . . There are reasons I do it that have to do with wanting to reform civilization, and selectively targeting information will do that -- understanding that quality information is what every decision is based on, and all the decisions taken together is what "civilization" is, so if you want to improve civilization, you have to remove some of the basic constraints, which is the quality of information that civilization has at its disposal to make decisions. Of course, there's a personal psychology to it, that I enjoy crushing bastards, I like a good challenge, so do a lot of the other people involved in WikiLeaks. We like the challenge. The public and private organizations most eager to maintain complete secrecy around what they do -- including numerous U.S. military and intelligence agencies -- are obviously threatened by WikiLeaks' activities, which is why they seek to harass and cripple them. There are numerous ways one can support WikiLeaks -- donations, volunteer work, research, legal and technical assistance -- and that can be done through their site. There aren't many groups more besieged, or doing more important work, than they. http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/index.html?story=/opinion/greenwald/2010/03/27/wikileaks -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 36136 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 47762 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 53138 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 67711 bytes Desc: not available URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Sun Mar 28 16:56:09 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 2010 17:56:09 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Church Abuse Victims Dissect '08 Pope's Secret Meeting Anew Message-ID: <2FE9F099B75B49B599060919707C7CE3@Upstairs> Mar. 27, 2010 Church Abuse Victims Dissect '08 Pope Meeting Anew Europe Church Sex Abuse Revelations Have US Victims Re-examining 2008 Secret Meeting With Pope (AP) BOSTON (AP) - Two years ago, Bernie McDaid stepped out of a police escort and into a Washington, D.C., chapel for a secret meeting with Pope Benedict XVI and a handful of clergy sex-abuse victims like him. McDaid left afterward believing Benedict was beginning to understand the scope of his church's corruption. He doesn't believe that today. "Was it a PR move? Looking back at that now, I have to say it was," McDaid said of the meeting. "Everything they do is not about the children. It's about the church. It's always the church first." Pope Benedict and the Vatican have come under growing criticism as allegations of clergy sex abuse have spread across Europe. Some of the cases have raised questions about whether Pope Benedict did enough to root out pedophile priests under his watch before he became pope. The renewed scrutiny has McDaid and another abuse victim who attended the 2008 meeting with the pope re-examining its meaning and lasting impact. Olan Horne, 50, of Westfield, believes Benedict was sincere that day, but that it's now apparent the pope hasn't done enough to help victims or reform a church that's tainted at every level. "His feet need to be held to the fire more today than it was two years ago, that's evident in the headlines we're reading today," Horne said recently. "If Jesus Christ was alive today and walking this earth, he'd be overturning some tables." The scandal in Europe has accelerated years after the U.S. church was devastated by revelations that church officials shipped pedophile priests from parish to parish while concealing their crimes. The April 2008 meeting, clandestinely inserted between a Mass and a talk with Catholic educators, was arranged by Boston Cardinal Sean O'Malley after Pope Benedict declined an invitation to visit Boston. Horne, like McDaid, was abused by a Boston-area priest. He recalled sensing a heaviness on Pope Benedict as he entered the room and offered the five people before him what Horne viewed as a heartfelt apology. "We sat almost like we were in a jury box in the pew," Horne said. "He came out and sat in front of us like he was appealing his sentence." Some victims wept openly. Each had several minutes in private with the pope. During their conversation, Horne asked the pope for forgiveness for his hatred toward the church. He said he needed to get past the anger to continue his work of making the church accountable for the vast, and still unrecognized, damage it had caused. "I had an opportunity to look a man in the eye who you could influence by your conversation," Horne said. "I'm as earnest today as I was then. I would love the opportunity to speak to him again." When McDaid, 54, of Peabody, spoke alone with Benedict, he squeezed the pope's hand and implored him to do something about the "cancer" in his church. When days passed and he hadn't heard much from church officials, McDaid suspected the meeting didn't mean much. With Europe now in the grip of scandal, McDaid said the church's hierarchy must change. He has begun planning a "Reformation Day" this fall at St. Peter's Square in Rome, where he envisions people gathering en masse to deliver that message. "I want people to stand up and say, 'Enough is enough,'" he said. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/03/27/ap/national/main6338689.shtml?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CBSNewsVideoISP+%28ISP%3A+CBSNews.com%29 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Sun Mar 28 17:02:11 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 2010 18:02:11 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] =?iso-8859-1?q?Pope=2C_in_Sermon=2C_Says_He_Won=27t_B?= =?iso-8859-1?q?e_Intimidated_=22by_the_petty_gossip_of_dominant_op?= =?iso-8859-1?q?inion=2E=22?= Message-ID: Pope, in Sermon, Says He Won't Be Intimidated By REUTERS Published: March 28, 2010 VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Benedict, facing one of the gravest crises of his pontificate as a sexual abuse scandal sweeps the Church, indicated on Sunday that his faith would give him the courage not to be intimidated by critics. With Scrutiny, Vatican Faces Test of 'Moral Credibility' (March 28, 2010) The 82-year-old pontiff led tens of thousands of people in a sunny St. Peter's Square in a Palm Sunday service at the start of Holy Week events commemorating the last days in the life of Jesus. While he did not directly mention the scandal involving sexual abuse of children by priests, parts of his sermon could be applicable to the crisis. The pontiff said faith in God helps lead one "towards the courage of not allowing oneself to be intimidated by the petty gossip of dominant opinion." He also spoke of how man can sometimes "fall to the lowest, vulgar levels" and "sink into the swamp of sin and dishonesty." One prayer asked God to help "the young and those who work to educate and protect them," which Vatican Radio said was intended to "sum up the feelings of the Church at this difficult time when it confronts the plague of pedophilia." [Sure does since Church won't protect them!] As the scandal has convulsed the Church, the Vatican has gone on the offensive, attacking the media for what it called an "ignoble attempt" to smear Pope Benedict and his top advisers. On Saturday, the Vatican's chief spokesman acknowledged that the Church's response to cases of sexual abuse by priests was crucial to its credibility and it must "acknowledge and make amends for" even decades-old cases. "The nature of this issue is bound to attract media attention and the way the Church responds is crucial for its moral credibility," the Vatican's chief spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, said on Vatican Radio. Although the cases cited happened long ago, "even decades ago, acknowledging them and making amends to the victims is the price for re-establishing justice and looking to the future with renewed vigor, humility and confidence," Father Lombardi said. Sunday marked the start of a hectic week during which the Pope presides over seven major events leading up to Easter. But while Catholics commemorate Christ's passion, the 1.1 billion member Church is reeling from media reports on abuse that have led to the pope's doorstep. The Vatican has denied any cover-up in the abuse of 200 deaf boys in the United States by the Reverend Lawrence Murphy from the 1950s to the 1960s, after reports that he was not defrocked although the case was made known to the Vatican and to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then the Church's top doctrinal official, now Pope Benedict. The Vatican also said that the pope, while archbishop of Munich in 1980, was not involved in the decision by a subordinate to allow a priest who had been transferred there to undergo therapy for sexual abuse to return later to pastoral duties. The European epicenter of the scandal is Ireland, where two bishops have resigned over their handling of abuse cases years ago. Three others have offered their resignation and there have been calls for the head of the Irish Church, Cardinal Sean Brady, to step down. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/29/world/europe/29pope.html?hp -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Sun Mar 28 23:44:06 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 2010 23:44:06 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] The X-Woman's Fingerbone Message-ID: <81460D147AEE4FE199F989904FA39BF4@agingCHS072729> http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2010/03/24/the-x-womans-fingerbone/ Discover Magazine Blogs / The Loom March 24, 2010 The X-Woman's Fingerbone Carl Zimmer In a cave in Siberia, scientists have found a 40,000- year old pinky bone that could belong to an entirely new species of hominid. Or it may be yet another example of how hard it is to figure where one species stops and another begins-even when one of those species is our own. Big news, perhaps, or ambiguous news. In Nature today, Svante Paabo and his colleagues published a paper describing their work in a place known as the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia. There are lots of hominid bones and tools indicating people lived in the cave, off and on, for 125,000 years. There's good evidence of Homo sapiens in the region for at least 40,000 years, and Paabo and his colleagues have also isolated 30,000-year old DNA from Siberian sites that is similar to the DNA from Neanderthals in Europe. The scientists succeeded in fishing out human-like DNA from a pinky bone found in Denisova, and so far they've sequenced its mitochondrial DNA-that is, the DNA that is housed in mitochondria, sausage-shaped, fuel-producing structures in our cells. The majority of our DNA, which sits in the nucleus of cells, comes from both our mother and father. But mitochondrial DNA all comes from Mom. When the scientists compared the pinky DNA to DNA of humans and Neanderthals, they got something of a shock. If you line up the mitochondrial DNA from any given living human to any other living human, you might expect to find a few dozen points at which they are different. Compare human mtDNA to Neanderthal DNA, and you'll find about 200 differences. But when the scientists compared the Denisova DNA to a group of human mitochondrial genomes, they found nearly 400 differences. In other words, their DNA was about twice as different from ours than Neanderthal DNA. The scientists then used the DNA to draw a family tree. Here's the figure from the paper, which you can also see here for full-size viewing. The Denisova mitochondrial DNA has been passed down, mother to child, on a lineage of hominids that's separate from the one that produced mitochondria in Neanderthals and in living humans. Paabo and his colleagues estimated the age of common ancestor from which all the mitochondria evolved, based on the mutations in each branch. They concluded that common ancestor lived 1 million years ago. Below is a simple tree that shows the timing more clearly, from an accompanying commentary in Nature. No matter how you slice it, this is very exciting. All the mitochondrial DNA from living humans is believed to date back just 150,ooo years. That doesn't mean that we all descend from a single "Eve." There were other woman around at the time, and they passed down their own mitochondria. But those lineages eventually hit dead ends. In some cases, women only had sons. In others, they never had children. Eventually, all the mitochondrial DNA in the human population could be traced to only one of the women alive at the time. All the Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA also shares a relatively recent common ancestor of its own-probably thanks to the same process. And now, for the first time, scientists have found hominid mitochondrial DNA that comes from a far more ancient split. So-how to explain this? A couple possibilities present themselves. 1. The DNA belongs to a species of hominid that's neither human nor Neanderthal. This is the most interesting, most science-fictionish possibility. Our hominid ancestors evolved into upright apes in Africa some six million years ago. By about 1.9 million years ago, some of those hominids had made their way out of Africa and strolled all the way to Indonesia. They go by the name of Homo erectus, and they stuck around Asia for quite a long time-some would argue they were still around 40,000 years ago. Neanderthals appear to have evolved from another wave out of Africa, which spread to Europe and Siberia several hundred thousand years ago. Meanwhile, our own ancestors appear to have stayed put in Africa. The oldest fossils of anatomically modern humans come from Africa 200,000 years ago, for example, and studies on human DNA find that African lineages are the oldest. The Denisova DNA split too recently from our own to have been carried by H. erectus, the first globe-trotting hominids. But paleoanthropologists have found a fair number of other hominid fossils in Europe and Asia that might belong to more recent waves out of Africa. (Here, for example, is a report on hominids in Europe 1.2 million years ago.) So perhaps there was at least one other wave aside from H. erectus, the expansion of Neanderthals, and the spread of modern humans. If that's true, this new discovery also means that this wave produced a long lineage of hominids that survived long enough to live alongside humans. We coexisted with yet another species of hominid-along with Neanderthals, H. erectus, and those lovable hobbits, Homo floresiensis- for thousands of years. Our current solitude is a recent fluke. If #1 turns out to be true, then this DNA deserves a species name of its own. But for now, Paabo and his colleagues have refrained from giving it one. Instead, they've nicknamed the source of the DNA "X-woman." Why the reticence? Probably because of possibility #2. 2. The DNA comes from the finger of a Neanderthal or a human-thanks to a love that dare not speak its name. Imagine, if you will, that an early Neanderthal male takes a morning constitutional in search of woolly rhinos when, gadzooks, he meets up with a fetching X- woman hominid. For whatever reason, the two of them decide to have an interspecies tryst, and X-woman gets pregnant. She gives birth to a girl carrying Neanderthal and X-woman DNA in her nucleus-and nothing but X-woman DNA in her mitochondria. Somehow this girl becomes a part of Neanderthal society; she has Neanderthal children of her own, and they continue to carry the X- woman mitochondrial DNA. Remember that in every generation, nuclear DNA gets mixed up. Half of the DNA a child carries in the nucleus comes from its father, half from its mother. And with the generation of new eggs and sperm, chromosomes from each parent get chopped up and shuffled back into new combinations. So over generations, the X-woman DNA might gradually dwindle away from the Neanderthal gene pool- but some Neanderthals might still carry X-woman mitochondria, handed down from mother to daughter to grand-daughter. (It's also possible that the interbreeding male in this scenario was a human-although just in terms of timing, that's less likely, since Neanderthals were out of Africa sooner than we were.) One reason to take this possibility seriously is the fact that other primate species regularly mix up their DNA in just this way. Mongoose lemurs expanded into the range of brown lemurs, for example, and mitochondrial DNA ended up jumping the species barrier. In many cases, the species were separated by a million years or so, just like the Denisov DNA and human/Neanderthal DNA. (This is why it's hard to use DNA-barcoding to tell closely related primates apart.) Another reason to take this possibility serious is lies in our own genomes. Some scientists have made a forceful case for the presence of ancient non-human DNA in the gene pool of living humans. Still, even if this scenario turned out to be right, it would mean that a previously unknown X-woman hominid line expanded out of Africa and lived in Asia until relatively recently. Whether that lineage could be rightly considered a separate species of its own is tricky. (For more on that trickiness, see my article, "What is a Species?" from Scientific American.) I can imagine other possible interpretations, but I'm not sure how plausible they really are. I've sent out some queries to some experts, and will add anything interesting I get back [Update: See the end of the post]. Fortunately, it may be possible to rule some possibilities out in just a few months. Paabo and company are busily churning out the sequence of the nuclear DNA from the Denisova pinky. It's conceivable that the nuclear DNA will be a lot more like human DNA, or a lot more like Neanderthal DNA-making it likely that the fossil belongs to a hybrid. But if the nuclear DNA is just as exotic as the mitochondria, then perhaps the finger bone really does belong to a distinct species that lived 40,000 years ago-a species, it's worth pointing out, that left its bones behind in the same layer of sediment where Russian scientists have dug up tools and ornaments made of stone and antler. The possibility of a highly intelligent Siberian Other will have to dance in our heads until more studies come out. Update: After I posted this, the paleoanthropologist John Hawks offers an alternative explanation on his blog. I followed up with a few questions via email, and based on his post and his reply, here's my quick distillation: Maybe the X-woman was not a separate species at all. Wind back the clock to a million years ago. In Africa, there's a population of hominids that will eventually give rise to Neanderthals and humans. The Neanderthal lineage expands out across Europe and Asia. They take with them a wide diversity of mitochondria. Most of the studies on Neanderthal DNA have focused on European Neanderthals-and have thus only captured a limited sample of that diversity. Now, in Siberia, Paabo and his colleagues have moved so far from the areas they had studied before that they're finally getting to other branches of Neanderthal mitochondria. In this scenario, Neanderthals play a role similar to that of Africans in the diversity of living humans. In Africa, you can find people with genes belonging to very old lineages. The Khoisan bushmen of southern Africa, for example, have genes that branched off from all other human lineages long ago. In other words, the genes of other Africans share a closer ancestor with genes from people out of Africa. Likewise, some Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA is more like human DNA than it is to the Neanderthal DNA found in the Denisova pinky. [3/27/10: Time to go Borges: an update within an update! The Atavism (which has already displayed great skills in visualization by illustrating my recent reader survey) whipped together a diagram that gets this concept across nicely: I'll post more replies as they come in. Update, 3/25/10 10:15 am: I also got in touch with Laurent Excoffier, a biologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland, who has published models of human evolution indicating that there has been little, if any interbreeding between our own lineage and Neanderthals or other hominids. Excoffier has argued that some genes that have been claimed to have entered our lineage through interbreeding were actually already present in ancient African human populations. I wondered if the mitochondrial DNA in the Denisova pinky might just be from an old human, not a separate species. Excoffier was skeptical: This seems relatively unlikely, since it is difficult to understand why this mtDNA lineage would not have been preserved in Africa. Of course some otherwise rare mutations (or DNA sequences) can surf to higher frequencies during range expansions, and this could potentially explain why it could be seen outside Africa and not within Africa. But if that was the case, then it would be difficult to understand why this once frequent sequence would then have disappeared. So, I would thus consider this hypothesis as very unlikely. I then asked if he thought the best explanation for this DNA was that it came from a separate species, or that it spread from a separate species into Neanderthals or humans through interbreeding. If this sequence is really true (not an artefact from next-gen sequencing) and if there was no contamination, then a more plausible explanation would be that this sequence comes from a divergent Homo species, as claimed by the authors of the paper. It is indeed plausible that some non-modern homo or non- Neanderthals roamed in Asia before modern humans spread there, and this sequence could well belong to one of them. The interesting point for me is that if this sequence is representative of, say, erectus mtDNA diversity in Asia 40-60,000 years ago, then it means that some divergent erectus were there when modern humans expanded into that region, and that did NOT hybridize with them, or at least not enough to be introgressed by them during their expansion (which is the expectation when hybridization can occur between a local and an invading species). So there's a vote for possibility #1. =============================== Join the bookseller list-serv 'Fresh Ink' Forward this email with 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 Mar 28 23:51:48 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 2010 23:51:48 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] [Video] Helen Thomas On Her one Question for Obama Message-ID: Helen Thomas On Her one Question for Obama http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25089.htm =============================== Join the bookseller list-serv 'Fresh Ink' Forward this email with subscribe link below to a friend. To view previous postings or to subscribe: http://booksinternationale.info/mailman/listinfo/freshink =============================== From hain at antcolbks.com Mon Mar 29 00:59:18 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2010 01:59:18 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Afghan corruption: How to follow the money? Message-ID: <0741B3E10F2E41F98145C33C47A58632@Upstairs> Afghan corruption: How to follow the money? By Karen DeYoung Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, March 29, 2010 Hamed Wardak, the soft-spoken Georgetown University-educated son of an Afghan cabinet minister, has a Defense Department contract worth up to $360 million to transport U.S. military goods through some of the most insecure territory in Afghanistan. But his company has no trucks. Instead, Wardak sits atop a murky pyramid of Afghan subcontractors who provide the vehicles and safeguard their passage. U.S. military officials say they are satisfied with the results, but they concede that they have little knowledge or control over where the money ends up. According to senior Obama administration officials, some of it may be going to the Taliban, as part of a protection racket in which insurgents and local warlords are paid to allow the trucks unimpeded passage, often sending their own vehicles to accompany the convoys through their areas of control. The essential question, said an American executive whose company does significant work in Afghanistan, is "whether you'd rather pay $1,000" for Afghans to safely deliver a truck, even if part of the money goes to the insurgents, or pay 10 times that much for security provided by the U.S. military or contractors. President Obama made a surprise trip to the country Sunday to press President Hamid Karzai to do more to clean up corruption in Afghanistan. Congress has warned repeatedly that U.S. assistance depends on progress in this area. The likelihood that U.S. money is finding its way to the enemy as well as lining officials' pockets -- charges that Wardak says could be true for other transport contractors but not for his company -- is "one of the many very important things that came to light" during last fall's White House strategy review, an administration official said. The problem extends beyond military supply transport to Afghan-provided security for reconstruction and other U.S.-funded projects, according to John Brummet, audit chief for the congressionally mandated special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, known as SIGAR. "If you go to the U.S. Embassy, to USAID, to the Army Corps [of Engineers] and ask if they can assure that their money is not going to the Taliban, they'd be hard-pressed to say," he said. Prime contractors such as Wardak's NCL Holdings, Brummet said, "say that subs take care of their security," but U.S. officials "do not have visibility on who is providing it." According to SIGAR chief investigator Ray Dinunzio, "there is no database in the U.S. government" that provides reliable subcontractor information. The U.S.-led coalition command in Afghanistan does not dispute that assessment. Although there is "rigorous" oversight of prime contracts, the command said in a statement, "the relationships between contractors and their subcontractors, as well as between subcontractors and others in their operational communities, are not entirely transparent." Both Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton raised the issue in congressional testimony explaining Obama's new strategy. Clinton called "siphoning off contractual money from the international community . . . a major source of funding for the Taliban." Corruption, she said, "frankly . . . is not all an Afghan problem." Although security for trucks carrying U.S. military supplies around Afghanistan is considered a particularly lucrative source of extortion, the administration has not investigated it or even estimated its scope, according to several officials involved in Afghanistan policy, none of whom was authorized to discuss the issue on the record. Congressional investigators who have opened a probe into the Defense Department's $2.16 billion Host Nation Trucking (HNT) contract described what one called "willful blindness" on the part of a U.S. military that "likes having its trucks showing up and doesn't want to get into the details of how they got there." Price of doing business? Virtually everything used by U.S. troops in Afghanistan, from food, water and fuel to arms and ammunition, is imported, most of it overland, through Pakistan or Central Asia. U.S. military officials say they are well aware that Afghan officials who control the border towns are involved in smuggling and skimming contract money and goods. But the Afghans also facilitate the flow of supplies and provide intelligence. Their criminal activities, although not condoned, are viewed largely as the price of doing business. Once U.S. supplies enter Afghanistan, most are taken to central distribution points, such as U.S. headquarters at Bagram, north of Kabul, and transferred to a separate fleet of vehicles for distribution to hundreds of military facilities and forward operating bases around the country. Up to 90 percent of the internal transport is handled by eight firms with a piece of the HNT contract; they include Wardak's NCL Holdings, two other Afghan companies, three based in the Persian Gulf region and two with U.S. principals. Most of them serve largely as facilitators, organizing the local subcontractors who provide vehicles and security. Gates has said he wants to reduce the number of contractors in Afghanistan, but Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander there, has praised the logistics deals because of their Afghan participation. "They are supporting operations. It's helping the [Afghan] economy," he said in a speech in December. "In many cases, it's developing different processes that'll help them in the future." Rep. John F. Tierney (D-Mass.), chairman of the national security subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, opened an investigation that month into what he said were "serious allegations . . . that private security providers for U.S. transportation contractors in Afghanistan are regularly paying local warlords and the Taliban for security." Tierney said many of the allegations were first raised in a November report by the Nation magazine. It described an entrenched system of protection payoffs and the close connections most Afghan contractors have to senior government officials. In letters to Gates and each of the eight HNT firms, Tierney asked that all documents related to the transport operations and security subcontractors be provided to the subcommittee by mid-January. "It's a long-standing business practice within Afghanistan to use your control of the security environment in order to extort payment from those who want to operate within your space, whether it's construction of a cellphone tower, a dam, or running trucks," said the House investigator, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the examination is ongoing. Over the past three months, the subcommittee has examined hundreds of documents and interviewed numerous Defense Department and Afghan officials, as well as Western expatriates working as program managers for the HNT firms who have become their primary sources. "We have found nothing that would change that original core narrative" of widespread protection payments, the investigator said. The subcommittee plans a publicly released report and possibly hearings. Its tentative conclusions, the investigator said, do not definitively point to the Defense Department and HNT prime contractors as direct participants in the scheme. But whistleblowers who have met with investigators, he said, spoke up only after failing to get the attention of both. There is a difference, the investigator said, between not knowing, "and then having people come and tell you it's happening, and still saying 'I don't know.' " 'A wonderful opportunity' "We welcome this investigation," said Wardak, the son of Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak, in an interview at the bare-bones office NCL maintains in McLean. "We think this is a wonderful opportunity to point out that we have the highest ethical standards and the best processes in place. We want to be the premier gold standard of the logistics contract in Afghanistan." Wardak, 34, left Afghanistan with his family at age 3 and returned only after the ouster of the Taiban in 2001. He said he shares McChrystal's goal of developing Afghan capabilities. His main value to the United States, he said, is the ability to "combine the best Western practices of management and internal financial controls" with "local knowledge and relationships with civil society leaders." His rise has been nothing short of meteoric. Valedictorian of Georgetown's Class of 1997 and a Rhodes Scholar, he worked briefly in mergers and acquisitions at Merrill Lynch before becoming the "private envoy to the United States" of Ashraf Ghani when Ghani served as Karzai's finance minister early last decade. According to several U.S. officials involved in Afghan policy, Wardak first appeared on the Washington policy scene as a young protege of Zalmay Khalilzad, who served in the Bush administration National Security Council and as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, and of Marin Strmecki, a special adviser on Afghanistan to then-Defense Secretary Donald A. Rumsfeld. "The first time I met him" during the Bush years, said one Obama official who previously worked outside the government on Afghanistan, "he was accompanied by an emissary of Rumsfeld." After leaving Technologists Inc., an Afghan-owned engineering and consulting firm, to start NCL in 2007, building a team of more than 700 Afghan employees, he quickly landed several relatively minor Defense Department maintenance, linguistics and security contracts. He decided to bid for the HNT contract, Wardak said, when he saw it posted on fedbizops.gov, a government Internet site. He and his father, Wardak said, "don't talk about business matters. We only talk about father-son type of relationship issues." Although he had little direct transportation expertise, he said, it runs in his family all the way back to when "Afghanistan was an important part of the Silk Road," the interconnected trade routes that historically traversed Central Asia. Ethnic Pashtuns from the Afghan province of the same name, the Wardaks "were not only a warring family, but also a transport family," he said. Trucks for the missions are supplied by subcontractors, who are also responsible for security, he said. "In certain places that are more dangerous," he said, "our vendor adds more security." To ensure that his convoys are not attacked in dangerous areas, he said, he depends on his "relationships with local tribes," adding that it was "inconceivable" that any protection money was being paid. Although seldom seen in public in Washington, Wardak has a prominent profile. He contributed $20,000 to the presidential campaigns of Obama and Clinton in 2007 and 2008. He also founded an organization called Campaign for a U.S.-Afghanistan Partnership, which promotes an ongoing U.S. presence in Afghanistan. On several occasions, he said, NCL has received the Pentagon's highest performance ratings for its work on the HNT contracts, which Army Col. Wayne M. Shanks, public affairs chief for the International Security Assistance Force headquarters in Afghanistan, confirmed. The assessment is based on "a variety of performance-based criteria," none of which he was at liberty to reveal, Shanks wrote in an e-mail. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/28/AR2010032802971.html?hpid%3Dtopnews&sub=AR -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 42 bytes Desc: not available URL: From hain at antcolbks.com Tue Mar 30 00:12:59 2010 From: hain at antcolbks.com (Henry F. Hain III) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2010 01:12:59 -0400 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Miracle under scrutiny in John Paul beatification - and record in combatting pedophile priests Message-ID: <1720EF55242D4F32B7607C95918FFECA@Upstairs> Miracle under scrutiny in John Paul beatification By NICOLE WINFIELD The Associated Press Monday, March 29, 2010; 2:34 AM VATICAN CITY -- The Vatican this week marks the fifth anniversary of Pope John Paul II's death amid some doubts that the miracle needed for his saint-making cause will stand up to scrutiny and questions about his record combatting pedophile priests. The inexplicable cure of a young French nun from Parkinson's disease had initially seemed like the perfect case for a miracle as the Vatican fast-tracked John Paul's beatification. The nun, who suffered from the same disease that ravaged John Paul for years, had prayed to him for relief and one morning two months after John Paul died, woke up completely, inexplicably cured. But from the beginning, Simon-Pierre's mysterious cure seemed difficult for the Vatican to certify as a miracle. According to the Vatican's own rules, the medically inexplicable cure must be instantaneous, complete, and lasting. While the nun's cure was by all indications instantaneous and complete, some would argue the world will have to wait her entire lifetime to determine whether it was lasting, in case the symptoms return. New questions were raised in recent weeks, after a Polish newspaper reported that doubts had been cast about whether Simon-Pierre had Parkinson's to begin with. The Rzeczpospolita daily, one of Poland's most respected and widely read newspapers, suggested that Simon-Pierre instead may have suffered from another neurological disease which has smilier symptoms as Parkinson's but which can be cured. Without citing sources, it said the Vatican had called in new experts to examine the case. Responding to the report, the emeritus head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Saints, Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins, suggested that what may have happened was that a doctor, who is asked in a preliminary phase by the Congregation to advise whether it's worth sending the case onto the fuller Vatican-appointed medical board, may have expressed some doubts. "It could be that one of the two medical consultants perhaps had some doubts," he told reporters last week. "And this, unfortunately, leaked out. But we cannot confuse one thing with another." "So it's wrong to say the doctors haven't approved the miracle," he said. "It's absurd because the doctors of the medical consultation board haven't pronounced themselves." That said, he acknowledged that the doubts would require further investigation. In such cases, he said, the Congregation would ask more doctors to come in and offer an opinion. The postulator who is spearheading John Paul's cause, Monsignor Slawomir Oder, has declined to comment on the reports, citing the Vatican rule for secrecy in the handling of the case. Beatification is the first step toward possible sainthood. The Vatican must confirm one miracle has occurred due to the intercession of John Paul before he can be beatified. A second miracle is needed for him to be declared a saint. Saraiva Martins was also asked how the Vatican could be certain that the cure is lasting, when a disease like Parkinson's is something that most commonly occurs late in life. For a woman who suffered from it in her 40s, how could the Vatican be certain she won't get it again? The cardinal acknowledged the difficulty of the case, and hinted that waiting might be necessary. "It depends on the nature of the illness," he said. "For some illnesses, it's clear: it's totally cured. Some others return. That's why we need to wait." Saraiva Martins stressed that he was speaking only in his capacity as someone knowledgeable with the Congregations' procedures and not as someone currently involved in the case. Benedict put John Paul on the fast-track for possible sainthood just weeks after his April 2, 2005, death, heeding the calls of "Santo Subito!" or "Sainthood Immediately!" that erupted in St. Peter's Square during the funeral of the much-loved pontiff. Benedict waived the customary five-year waiting period and allowed the investigation into John Paul's life and virtues to begin immediately. In December 2009, Benedict signed a decree attesting to his "heroic virtues." And on Monday, Benedict will celebrate Mass at the Vatican marking the fifth anniversary of John Paul's death. The Vatican moved the service to Monday so the Mass wouldn't conflict with Good Friday. But recently, new questions have been raised about John Paul's record in combatting pedophile priests. John Paul presided over the church when the sex abuse scandal exploded in the United States in 2002 and the Vatican was swamped with complaints and lawsuits under his leadership. Yet during most of his 26-year papacy, individual dioceses and not the Vatican took sole responsibility for investigating misbehavior. But John Paul himself had long championed the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, the conservative order that fell into scandal after it revealed that its founder had fathered a child and had molested seminarians. The Vatican began investigating allegations against the Rev. Marcial Maciel of Mexico in the 1950s, but it wasn't until 2006, a year into Benedict's pontificate, that the Vatican instructed Maciel to lead a "reserved life of prayer and penance" in response to the abuse allegations - effectively removing him from power. Subsequently, Benedict ordered a full-on investigation of the order since its entire existence was so closely intertwined with that of its discredited founder. Saraiva Martins said historians who studied the pope's life as part of the sainthood process didn't find anything problematic in John Paul's handling of abuse scandals. "According to them there was nothing that was a true obstacle to his cause of beatification," he said. The OK from historians led to Benedict's decree last December that John Paul had led a virtuous life. As a result, all that's needed for him to be beatified is for the miracle to be confirmed. But with such a high-profile case as John Paul's, the miracle is going to be heavily scrutinized - as will Simon-Pierre for the rest of her life. Amid reports earlier this month that the nun had again fallen ill, the Aix-en-Provence archdiocese issued a statement March 10 attesting to her health. "I categorically deny this rumor," Rev. Luc Marie Lalanne, archdiocese chancellor said. "Little Sister Marie Simon-Pierre remains to this day in perfect health." Saraiva Martins said the case of Simon-Pierre is still very much in play. But he added that there are many other reports of inexplicable cures, or "graces" as he termed them, that have reached the Vatican in the five years since the pope died and any one of them could be used if need be. Associated Press reporters Vanessa Gera and Monika Scislowska in Warsaw, and Elaine Ganley in Paris, contributed to this report. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/29/AR2010032903441.html?hpid=sec-religion -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From menecraj at shaw.ca Tue Mar 30 09:44:29 2010 From: menecraj at shaw.ca (Richard Menec) Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2010 09:44:29 -0500 Subject: [Fresh Ink] Earth Out of Sync: Rising Temperatures Throwing off Seasonal Timing Message-ID: <3F594DBC96BF4276B1A3745593FA40B9@agingCHS072729> http://blog.sustainablog.org/global-warming-effects-seasonal-timing/ Earth Out of Sync: Rising Temperatures Throwing off Seasonal Timing by Earth Policy Institute on March 29, 2010 in Science By Janet Larsen A newly hatched chick waits with hungry mouth agape for a parent to deliver its first meal. A crocus peaks up through the snow. Rivers flow swiftly as ice breaks up and snows melt. Sleepy mammals emerge from hibernation, and early frog songs penetrate the night. Spring awakening has long provided fodder for poets, artists, and almanac writers. Even for a notoriously fickle time of sunshine, rain, and temperature swings, some old-fashioned seasonal wisdom was consistent enough to be passed down through generations. The first blooming of a specific flower, for example, could traditionally signal when to find certain fish running the rivers, when to hunt for mushrooms, or when to plant crops. The timing of such seasonal events is coordinated in an intricate dance-a dance under-appreciated, perhaps, until something jolts it out of step. With global average temperatures up 0.5 degrees Celsius since the 1970s, springtime warming is coming earlier across the earth's temperate regions. A number of organisms have responded to the warming temperatures by altering the timing of key life-cycle events. The problem, however, is that not all species are adjusting at the same rate or in the same direction, thus disrupting the dance that connects predator and prey, butterfly and blossom, fish and phytoplankton, and the entire web of life. The timing of seasonal biological events, otherwise known as phenology, has been tracked in some places for centuries. Japan's much-feted cherry tree blossoming has been carefully recorded since before 1400. The trees showed no clear trend in timing until the early 20th century, when they began to bloom earlier, with a marked advancement since around 1950. The meticulous records of Henry David Thoreau help us gauge how spring has changed in Concord, Massachusetts, since the mid-1800s. Comparing his notes on over 500 species and subspecies of plants with modern surveys and records in between, researchers found that springtime blooming advanced by an average of one week over the past 150 years as local springtime temperatures rose. Seasonal timing changes: plants The plant varieties that advanced their timing appear to have thrived