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Michael Moore- The Awful Truth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeOaTpYl8mE
Morse v. Frederick Supreme Court arguments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_LsGoDWC0o
Free Speech 4 Students Rally - Media Montage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfCjfod8yuw
'My son lived a worthwhile life'
In April 2003, 21-year old Tom Hurndall was shot in the head
in Gaza by an Israeli soldier as he tried to save the lives of three
small children. Nine months later, he died, having never
recovered consciousness. Emine Saner talks to his mother
Jocelyn about her grief, her fight to make the Israeli army
accountable for his death and the book she has written
in his memory.
Monday March 26, 2007
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,2042968,00.html
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CINE DEL BARRIO and New College Media Studies Program present:
The Red Dance (El Baile Rojo) directed by Yezid Campos
a film about Colombia, video, in color, 57 minutes, 2004
sub-titles in English
Saturday, April 7, 11:30 a.m.
at the Roxie New College Film Center
3117 - 16th Street (between Valencia and Guerrero)
San Francisco
No admission charge
This is part of "Nuestra America, Muestra de Cine y Video
Documental" series of film showings on Saturdays of March,
April, and May. All films are at 11:30am and 1:30pm on
Saturdays at the Roxie. Films on Nicaragua, Venezuela,
Colombia, Argentina, Cuba, Mexico, and the U.S. (Immigrantes
Nuevo Orleans). Films are in Spanish with English sub-titles.
For more information: 415-863-1087
www.roxie.com
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DEMAND THE RELEASE OF SAMI AL-ARIAN
March 22, 2007
The National Council of Arab Americans (NCA) demands the immediate
release of political prisoner, Dr. Sami Al-Arian. Dr. Al-Arian is currently
under his 60th day of a water-only hunger strike in protest of his
maltreatment by the US Department of Justice (DOJ). After an earlier
plea agreement that absolved Dr. Al-Arian from any further questioning,
he was sentenced up to 18 months in jail for refusing to testify before
a grand jury in Virginia.
Dr. Al-Arian is currently being held at a medical facility in North Carolina.
He is in critical condition, having lost 53 pounds, over 25% of his
body weight.
According to family members who recently visited him he is no longer
able to walk or stand on his own.
More information on Dr. Al-Arian's ordeal can be found in the transcript
of a recent interview with his wife, Nahla Al-Arian on Democracy Now.
See:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/16/1410255
ACTION:
We ask all people of conscience to demand the immediate
release and end to Dr. Al- Arian's suffering.
Call, Email and Write:
1- Attorney General Alberto Gonzales
Department of Justice
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001
Fax Number: (202) 307-6777
Email: AskDOJ@usdoj.gov
2- The Honorable John Conyers, Jr
2426 Rayburn Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-5126
(202) 225-0072 Fax
John.Conyers@mail.house.gov
3- Senator Patrick Leahy
433 Russell Senate Office Building
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510
(202)224-4242
senator_leahy@leahy.senate.gov
4- Honorable Judge Gerald Lee
U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia
401 Courthouse Square, Alexandria, VA 22314
March 22, 2007
[No email given...bw]
National Council of Arab Americans (NCA)
http://www.arab-american.net/
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Excerpt of interview between Barbara Walters and Hugo Chavez
http://www.borev.net/2007/03/what_you_had_something_better.html
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Introducing...................the Apple iRack
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-KWYYIY4jQ
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*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
"A War Budget Leaves Every Child Behind."
[A T-shirt worn by some teachers at Roosevelt High School
in L.A. as part of their campaign to rid the school of military
recruiters and JROTC--see Article in Full item number 4, below...bw]
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THIS IS AN EXCELLENT VIDEO DESTRIBUTED BY U.S. LABOR AGAINST
THE WAR (USLAW) FEATURING SPEAKERS AT THE JANUARY 27TH
MARCH ON WASHINGTON FOCUSING ON THE DEMAND - BRING
THE TROOPS HOME NOW.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6935451906479097836&hl=en
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Come listen and participate in a series of community conversations on
what's happening in public education. Get the 411 on:
Code Breakers: Deciphering Military Myths
Thursday, March 22, 2007 6pm-8pm
At New College of California
780 Valencia (@19th) San Francisco,CA
Military recruiters with a multi-billion dollar budget easily outnumber
college recruiters at most working class high schools. Black hummers,
outfitted with sound systems, flat screen TVs and video game systems
roll up to campuses luring students with false promises of job training,
college support, travel, and non combat positions. At this t4sj 411,
teachers from Community MultiMedia Academy in Hayward will lead
a workshop about the impact of military recruiters on campus and
how this can become an opportunity to think critically about media
campaigns, poverty, personal ethics and the role of a military
in US and global society. Curriculum and student work will be
shared. Participants will be encouraged to participate and share
their insights and work.
For future events check out http://www.T4SJ.org
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Defend the Los Angeles Eight!
http://www.committee4justice.com/
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George Takai responds to Tim Hardaway's homophobic remarks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcJoJZIcQW4&eurl_
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Iran
http://www.lucasgray.com/video/peacetrain.html
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Another view of the war. A link from Amer Jubran
http://d3130.servadmin.com/~leeflash/
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Petition: Halt the Blue Angels
http://action.globalexchange.org/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=458
http://www.care2.com/c2c/share/detail/289327
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*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
A Girl Like Me
7:08 min
Youth Documentary
Kiri Davis, Director, Reel Works Teen Filmmaking, Producer
Winner of the Diversity Award
Sponsored by Third Millennium Foundation
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1091431409617440489
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Film/Song about Angola
http://www.prisonactivist.org/angola/
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"200 million children in the world sleep in the streets today.
Not one of them is Cuban."
(A sign in Havana)
Venceremos
View sign at bottom of page at:
http://www.cubasolidarity.net/index.html
[Thanks to Norma Harrison for sending this...bw]
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
"Cheyenne and Arapaho oral histories hammer history's account of the
Sand Creek Massacre"
CENTENNIAL, CO -- A new documentary film based on an award-winning
documentary short film, "The Sand Creek Massacre", and driven by
Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho people who tell their version about
what happened during the Sand Creek Massacre via their oral
histories, has been released by Olympus Films+, LLC, a Centennial,
Colorado film company.
"You have done an extraordinary job" said Margie Small, Tobient
Entertainment, " on the Colorado PBS episode, the library videos for
public schools and libraries, the trailer, etc...and getting the
story told and giving honor to those ancestors who had to witness
this tragic and brutal attack...film is one of the best ways."
"The images shown in the film were selected for native awareness
value" said Donald L. Vasicek, award-winning writer/filmmaker, "we
also focused on preserving American history on film because tribal
elders are dying and taking their oral histories with them. The film
shows a non-violent solution to problem-solving and 19th century
Colorado history, so it's multi-dimensional in that sense. "
Chief Eugene Blackbear, Sr., Cheyenne, who starred as Chief Black
Kettle in "The Last of the Dogmen" also starring Tom Berenger and
Barbara Hershey and "Dr. Colorado", Tom Noel, University of Colorado
history professor, are featured.
The trailer can be viewed and the film can be ordered for $24.95 plus
$4.95 for shipping and handling at http://www.fullduck.com/node/53.
Vasicek's web site, http://www.donvasicek.com, provides detailed
information about the Sand Creek Massacre including various still
images particularly on the Sand Creek Massacre home page and on the
proposal page.
Olympus Films+, LLC is dedicated to writing and producing quality
products that serve to educate others about the human condition.
Contact:
Donald L. Vasicek
Olympus Films+, LLC
7078 South Fairfax Street
Centennial, CO 80122
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Vasicek,+Don
http://www.donvasicek.com
dvasicek@earthlink.net
303-903-2103
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) Colombia seeks eight in Chiquita terrorist scandal
"The banana conglomorate has confessed to paying right-wing
paramilitaries."
By Eoin O'Carroll | csmonitor.com
posted March 22, 2007 at 12:20 p.m. EDT -
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0322/p99s01-duts.html
2) Mayor Newsom and Supervisor Maxwell receive recommendations
from Task Force on the Revitalization of Public Housing
Task Force recommends immediate action to secure funding
for replacement of distressed units without displacing current
residents
[This press release just received from San Francisco City Hall proposes
nothing but a racist, classist land grab - privatizing City-owned public
housing by giving it to greedy developers to demolish the homes
of the poor and replace them with "mixed income communities,"
pushing poor families out of the city or onto the streets. And our
mayor and our sole Black member of the Board of Supervisors want
to saddle taxpayers with $100-200 million in debt to finance this
genocidal gentrification...SF Bay View editor@sfbayview.com ]
David Miree wrote:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday, March 23, 2007
Contact: Mayor’s Office of Communications
415-554-6131
3) House, 218 to 212, Votes to Set Date for Iraq Pullout
By JEFF ZELENY
March 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/24/washington/24cong.html?ref=world
5) Spain: Delphi Axe Prompts General Strike
March 23, 2007
http://futureoftheunion.com/?p=4180
6) Waiting for C. Wright Mills
by RICARDO ALARCON DE QUESADA
[posted online on March 23, 2007]
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070409/alarcon_eng
7) Ex - Terror Suspect Loses Aussie Election
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: March 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes. com/aponline/ world/AP- Australia- Guantanamo. html
8) The President’s Prison
"George Bush does not want to be rescued."
Editorial
March 25, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/opinion/25sun1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
9) C.I.A. Awaits Rules on Terrorism Interrogations
By MARK MAZZETTI
March 25, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/washington/25interrogate.html?hp
10) Diamonds Move From Blood to Sweat and Tears
By LYDIA POLGREEN
March 25, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/world/africa/25diamonds.html?ref=world
11) CORN BATTLE
Ethanol Reaps a Backlash
In Small Midwestern Towns
Residents Fight Plants
On Water, Air Fears;
Farmers Boycott Stores
By JOE BARRETT
March 23, 2007; Page A1
WALL STREET JOURNAL
[VIA Email...bw]
12) The Hamas Conundrum
Editorial
"Hamas — which has now formed a unity government of convenience
with the more moderate Fatah — still refuses to take the three
steps needed to demonstrate its commitment to good-faith
diplomacy: renouncing terrorism, recognizing Israel and
adhering to previously negotiated agreements."
March 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/26/opinion/26mon1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
13) Poor Behavior Is Linked to Time in Day Care
By BENEDICT CAREY
March 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/26/us/26center.html?ref=us
14) Complaints Flood Texas Youth Hot Line
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
March 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/26/us/26youth.html?ref=us
15) City Asks Court Not to Unseal Police Spy Files
By JIM DWYER
March 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/26/nyregion/26infiltrate.html
16) The War on Iraq and the Real Division in the US Ruling Class
By the Editors
March/April 2007
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/
17) The Antiwar Movement An Editorial Opinion
By Carole Seligman
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/marapr_07/marapr_07_10.html
18) Gang Injunctions
By Bonnie Weinstein
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/marapr_07/marapr_07_18.html
19) Chavez lays out collective property plan
By CHRISTOPHER TOOTHAKER, Associated Press Writer
Sun Mar 25, 10:50 PM ET
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/25/AR2007032501406.html
20) Army deployed seriously injured troops
"Soldiers on crutches and canes were sent to a main desert camp
used for Iraq training. Military experts say the Army was pumping
up manpower statistics to show a brigade was battle ready."
By Mark Benjamin
Mar. 26, 2007
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/03/26/fort_irwin/
21) War protest crowd count too low
Richard Becker
Monday, March 26, 2007
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/03/26/EDGC7N72TT1.DTL&hw=war+protest+crowd+count&sn=001&sc=1000
22) India Is Colonising Itself
By Arundhati Roy & Shoma Chaudhuri
26 March, 2007
Tehelka
http://www.countercurrents.org/roy260307.htm
23) New Coin of the Realm
Editorial
March 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/23/opinion/23fri2.html
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1) Colombia seeks eight in Chiquita terrorist scandal
"The banana conglomorate has confessed to paying right-wing
paramilitaries."
By Eoin O'Carroll | csmonitor.com
posted March 22, 2007 at 12:20 p.m. EDT -
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0322/p99s01-duts.html
The Colombian government says that it will likely seek the extradition of
eight unnamed people affiliated with the US banana giant Chiquita Brands
International for their alleged involvement in the company's payments to
and arms trafficking with a violent right-wing paramilitary group.
The Chicago Tribune reported on Thursday that Colombia's chief federal
prosecutor, Mario Iguaran, has formally requested from the US Justice
Department documents relating to Chiquita's payment of $1.7 million to the
United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (known as the AUC, by its Spanish
initials) a group that the United States labels a terrorist organization.
Chiquita pleaded guilty Monday in US federal court to making payments to
the AUC, and agreed to pay a $25 million fine, payable over five years. As
part of the plea agreement, the US government will not publicly identify
the senior Chiquita executives who approved the illegal payments.
Speaking in Bogotá, Mr. Iguaran denied Chiquita's claims that the payments
were made under duress.
"The relationship was not one of the extortionist and the extorted but
a criminal relationship," Iguaran told a handful of foreign correspondents
in an interview.
"It's a much bigger, more macabre plan," he added. "Who wouldn't know
what an illegal armed group like the AUC does . . . by exterminating and
annihilating its enemies," Iguaran said. "When you pay a group like this
you are conscious of what they are doing."
The Associated Press reported on Wednesday that Mr. Iguaran said in an
interview with a Colombian radio station that he will demand that the
United States hand over the eight suspects, whose identities have not been
disclosed by the US government. "They must be judged in Colombia," Iguaran
said.
According to the US Department of Justice, Chiquita began making payments
to the AUC in 1997 through its Colombian shipping operation, Banadex. The
payments began when the AUC's then-leader, Carlos Castaño, met with a
senior Banadex executive and implied that failure to make payments would
result in physical harm to the company's workers and property.
The United States designated the AUC a foreign terrorist organization on
September 10, 2001. Despite warnings from lawyers who advised the company
to leave Colombia, Chiquita continued to pay the group. In April 2003, the
company's board of directors learned of the payments, who later that month
confessed to the Department of Justice, who told Chiquita to stop paying.
Nevertheless, the payments continued through February 2004.
Additionally, according to a report by the Organization of American States,
in 2001 Banadex helped divert 3,000 Nicaraguan AK-47 rifles and millions of
rounds of ammunition to the AUC.
Chiquita sold Banadex, its most profitable operation, to a Colombian buyer
in June 2004.
The news comes in the midst of a major political scandal in Colombia that
has linked many members of the country's political leadership to right-wing
death squads.
Adam Isacson, an analyst at the Center for International Policy, a human
rights advocacy group, sees Colombia's extradition request as a political
move to burnish Bogotá's image domestically. He writes:
The call for Chiquita executives' extradition also taps into a
commonly felt frustration among Colombians. Many see their government
handing over Colombian citizens to face long jail sentences in the United
States, but believe that U.S. citizens accused of trafficking drugs or
supporting armed groups in Colombia - including rogue U.S. military
personnel who have dealt in drugs or weapons - get slaps on the wrist, such
as fines or a few months in prison.
Either way, if the Colombian government wishes to begin punishing
foreign executives whose corporations have paid "protection money" to
illegal armed groups, it is within its rights to do so - but it may find
itself extraditing a lot of people. Such payments are widely believed to
have been commonplace for decades.
Journalist Amy Goodman, however, says that Colombian authorities have every
right to single out Chiquita, formerly known as United Fruit. In her
syndicated column she cites the company's history of right-wing violence in
Latin America, which includes helping to orchestrate the 1954 overthrow of
Guatemala's democratically elected president and the 1928 massacre of trade
unionists in northwestern Colombia.
A $25-million fine to a multibillion-dollar corporation like Chiquita
is a mere slap on the wrist, the cost of doing business. Presidents like
George W. Bush and Uribe, businessmen first, while squabbling over
extraditions, would never lose track of their overarching shared goal of a
stridently pro-corporate, military-supported so-called free-trade regime. ...
That next organic, fair-trade banana you buy just might save a life.
The online magazine Slate points out that Chiquita pleaded guilty to the
very same crime for which John Walker Lindh, the so-called American
Taliban, is serving a 20-year sentence.
Shares of Chiquita Brands International Inc. rose six cents overnight to
open Thursday at $13.92 on the New York Stock Exchange.
www.marxmail.org
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*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
2) Mayor Newsom and Supervisor Maxwell receive recommendations
from Task Force on the Revitalization of Public Housing
Task Force recommends immediate action to secure funding
for replacement of distressed units without displacing current
residents
[This press release just received from San Francisco City Hall proposes
nothing but a racist, classist land grab - privatizing City-owned public
housing by giving it to greedy developers to demolish the homes
of the poor and replace them with "mixed income communities,"
pushing poor families out of the city or onto the streets. And our
mayor and our sole Black member of the Board of Supervisors want
to saddle taxpayers with $100-200 million in debt to finance this
genocidal gentrification...SF Bay View editor@sfbayview.com ]
David Miree wrote:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday, March 23, 2007
Contact: Mayor’s Office of Communications
415-554-6131
*** PRESS RELEASE ***
Mayor Newsom and Supervisor Maxwell receive recommendations
from Task Force on the Revitalization of Public Housing
Task Force recommends immediate action to secure funding
for replacement of distressed units without displacing
current residents
San Francisco, CA – A Task Force appointed by Mayor Gavin
Newsom and Supervisor Sophie Maxwell issued its recommendations
today regarding the revitalization of Public Housing in San Francisco.
The group, comprised of a wide range of stakeholders, was appointed
in the Fall of 2006 and was charged with development of principles
to guide the revitalization process, the identification of funding
needs, and the formation of a menu of financing options.
The San Francisco Housing Authority (SFHA) owns and manages
approximately 6,400 units of public housing. For the last two
decades, funding for public housing has been in steady decline.
Over the last six years severe cuts have caused both intense physical
distress to housing conditions and serious social and economic
consequences for residents.
In 2002, the SFHA commissioned an independent assessment
of the physical needs of its properties, which revealed a backlog
of immediate needs totaling $195 million. It also was determined
that an average of $26.6 million per year in additional physical
deterioration will occur in SFHA communities if the current problems
are not addressed. A fraction of that need is addressed
with Federal funds.
“While we understand the need to hold the federal government
accountable for support of public housing, San Francisco will
not wait for Washington to act at the peril of our residents,” said
Mayor Newsom. “We have a financial and moral obligation
to address the conditions in public housing and time to for
action is now.”
“I’d like to commend the committee for their work. This helps
ensure equity of living and much improved quality-of-life
experiences,” said Supervisor Sophie Maxwell. “ The work this
committee has done is truly helping all San Franciscans.”
The Task Force recommendations call for an aggressive initial
investment of $100-200 million. In addition the Task Force
recommends a commitment to replace all demolished public
housing units on a one-for-one basis; phased development
to facilitate on site relocation; strong resident involvement at
all levels; and the creation of mixed income communities via
the addition of affordable and market rate housing on site.
“We felt strongly that the principles had to address all of our
concerns around displacement and relocation,” said Task Force
member and Visitacion Valley resident Kevin Blackwell.
“Of course we want the community to look better, but the
main point is to improve conditions for the people who
are living there now,” added Blackwell.
In the meeting the Mayor pledged to immediately start the resident
outreach and education process and to work closely with the Board
of Supervisors to find the funding necessary to get started by looking
at the feasibility of passing a General Obligation Bond and exploring
other financial options.
David Carrington Miree
Deputy Communications Director
Mayor's Office of Communications
City Hall, RM 291
1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Pl.
San Francisco, CA 94102
(415) 554-6537-DIRECT
(415) 554-6131
(415) 554-4058-Fax
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3) House, 218 to 212, Votes to Set Date for Iraq Pullout
By JEFF ZELENY
March 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/24/washington/24cong.html?ref=world
WASHINGTON, March 23 — A deeply divided House of Representatives
voted Friday to bring most American combat troops home from Iraq
next year, with Democrats employing their new Congressional
majority to create the most forceful challenge yet to President
Bush’s war policy.
The legislation aimed at accelerating an end to the war passed on
a vote of 218 to 212, with all but two Republicans opposing. Even
as the debate moves to the Senate, where a less restrictive plan
is to be considered next week, Mr. Bush dismissed the action as
“political theater” and promised to veto attempts to manage
the war from Capitol Hill.
The Democratic leaders of Congress said they were acting on
overriding American sentiment to change course in Iraq, and
they vowed to keep pursuing legislative attempts to hold the
Iraqi and American governments accountable for progress there.
“The American people have lost faith in the president’s conduct
of this war,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, said
in bringing an end to a charged debate on the House floor.
“The American people see the reality of the war; the president
does not.”
The measure was approved as part of a $124 billion emergency
war spending request to pay for military operations in Iraq
and Afghanistan for the next six months. Fourteen Democrats
voted against the plan, with eight saying it did not end the
war fast enough and six saying it was too restrictive and
could usurp the authority of the commander in chief.
At the White House, surrounded by veterans and families
of soldiers, Mr. Bush angrily denounced the bill as one in
which Democrats had “voted to substitute their judgment
for that of our military commanders on the ground in Iraq.”
A two-thirds vote of each house of Congress would be
required to override the presidential veto that Mr. Bush
has threatened, and Democrats have conceded that they
could not meet that target. With top Pentagon officials
warning that American troops will run out of money
if the spending request is not passed in the next month,
all sides may nevertheless have an incentive to negotiate
so that they are not blamed for failing to support the military.
The withdrawal timetable provision, which calls for most
American troops to be out of Iraq by Sept. 1, 2008, is part
of a bill to provide about $100 billion to finance the war
in Iraq and Afghanistan. An additional $24 billion, largely
aimed at domestic programs unrelated to military expenses,
was added by Democrats to make the bill more acceptable
to lawmakers. But in the end, Republicans called their bluff,
standing together in near unison against the spending
provisions.
The debate was highly emotional, with lawmakers from
each side applauding loudly at several points. There were
occasional outbursts from the House gallery, which was
packed with spectators.
As the voting began, two antiwar protestors stood in the
gallery and implored lawmakers not to approve more money
for the war. “Don’t buy the war! Don’t buy the war!” one
woman shouted again and again before being led away
by police as the presiding officer of the House banged
his gavel to order.
In passing the bill, Ms. Pelosi and other Democratic leaders
labored to corral an often-fractious party and presented
a near-unified front on the most forceful measure on Iraq
that Congress has passed since the Democrats won control
of Congress last year. They predicted the outcome would
be very close — and it was, with Democrats gaining 218
votes, the bare minimum needed if all 435 members voted.
(On Friday, three lawmakers did not vote and one essentially
abstained.)
Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, the chairman of the
Democratic caucus, noted that each of the freshman Democrats
who were elected last year on a wave of discontent supported
the legislation. “Everybody came to the conclusion that more
of the same — of no change — was not a viable option,”
Mr. Emanuel said.
Several of the Democrats who voted against the bill represent
conservative Southern districts with large military populations
and said they believed the legislation imposed too many
conditions on the president. They were joined in their opposition
by liberal Democrats who objected to investing more money
in a war that has taken the lives of more than 3,200 troops.
Two Republicans voted for the measure: Representative Wayne
Gilchrest of Maryland, a former Marine Corps officer who was
wounded in Vietnam, and Walter B. Jones of North Carolina,
who called for a withdrawal nearly two years ago.
But the rest of the Republican caucus objected to the legislation
on substance and principle. Several lawmakers derided the total
of nearly $24 billion in domestic spending — benefiting spinach
growers and shrimp fishermen and peanut storage, among others
— that Democrats put into the bill to make it more palatable
to its members.
“What does throwing money at Bubba Gump, Popeye the sailor
man and Mr. Peanut have to do with winning a war? Nothing,”
said Representative Sam Johnson, a Texas Republican. “The
sweeteners in this bill are political bribery, and our troops
deserve more than this.”
But Democrats disagreed, saying they were simply financing
projects that Republicans failed to address when they were in
control of Congress. And they pointed to the money devoted
to caring for troops when they return from Iraq, including
$1.7 billion for health care programs, $900 million for treating
post-traumatic stress and brain injuries and other money
to upgrade Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
“This bill had to be very hard to vote against,” said Representative
John P. Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat. “This took care
of the troops. This took care of the families of the troops.”
The proceedings represented another step in a vote-by-vote
strategy of Democrats to attempt to gradually erode support
for the president’s Iraq policy and find an alternative to it.
Passage of the bill in the House by no means signals that
the Senate will concur, but the legislation remains a gauge
of political support that is reflected in public opinion.
After scores of lawmakers on both sides of the debate took
their turns at the microphone for one-minute speeches,
Democrats tapped Representative Patrick Murphy,
a Pennsylvania Democrat, to make their closing argument.
Mr. Murphy, 33, served in Iraq as a captain in the Army’s
82nd Airborne Division. He implored lawmakers, moments
before they voted, to consider the 19 paratroopers from
his command who died during his time in Iraq in 2003.
“To those on the other side of the aisle who are opposed,
I want to ask you the same questions that my gunner asked
me when I was leading a convoy up and down Ambush Alley
one day,” Mr. Murphy said. “He said, ‘Sir, what are we doing
over here? What’s our mission? When are these Iraqis going
to come off the sidelines and fight for their own country?’ ”
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4) Play About Iraq War Divides a Connecticut School
By ALISON LEIGH COWAN
March 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/24/nyregion/24drama.html?ref=nyregion
WILTON, Conn., March 22 — Student productions at Wilton High
School range from splashy musicals like last year’s “West Side Story,”
performed in the state-of-the-art, $10 million auditorium,
to weightier works like Arthur Miller’s “Crucible,” on stage
last fall in the school’s smaller theater.
For the spring semester, students in the advanced theater class
took on a bigger challenge: creating an original play about the
war in Iraq. They compiled reflections of soldiers and others
involved, including a heartbreaking letter from a 2005 Wilton
High graduate killed in Iraq last September at age 19, and
quickly found their largely sheltered lives somewhat transformed.
“In Wilton, most kids only care about Britney Spears shaving
her head or Tyra Banks gaining weight,” said Devon Fontaine, 16,
a cast member. “What we wanted was to show kids what was
going on overseas.”
But even as 15 student actors were polishing the script and
perfecting their accents for a planned April performance, the
school principal last week canceled the play, titled “Voices in
Conflict,” citing questions of political balance and context.
The principal, Timothy H. Canty, who has tangled with students
before over free speech, said in an interview he was worried the
play might hurt Wilton families “who had lost loved ones or who
had individuals serving as we speak,” and that there was not
enough classroom and rehearsal time to ensure it would provide
“a legitimate instructional experience for our students.”
“It would be easy to look at this case on first glance and decide
this is a question of censorship or academic freedom,” said
Mr. Canty, who attended Wilton High himself in the 1970s
and has been its principal for three years. “In some minds,
I can see how they would react this way. But quite frankly,
it’s a false argument.”
At least 10 students involved in the production, however, said
that the principal had told them the material was too inflammatory,
and that only someone who had actually served in the war could
understand the experience. They said that Gabby Alessi-Friedlander,
a Wilton junior whose brother is serving in Iraq, had complained
about the play, and that the principal barred the class from
performing it even after they changed the script to respond
to concerns about balance.
“He told us the student body is unprepared to hear about the
war from students, and we aren’t prepared to answer questions
from the audience and it wasn’t our place to tell them what
soldiers were thinking,” said Sarah Anderson, a 17-year-old
senior who planned to play the role of a military policewoman.
Bonnie Dickinson, who has been teaching theater at the
school for 13 years, said, “If I had just done ‘Grease,’ this
would not be happening.”
Frustration over the inelegant finale has quickly spread across
campus and through Wilton, and has led to protest online
through Facebook and other Web sites.
“To me, it was outrageous,’’ said Jim Anderson, Sarah’s
father. “Here these kids are really trying to make a meaningful
effort to educate, to illuminate their fellow students, and
the administration, of all people, is shutting them down.”
First Amendment lawyers said Mr. Canty had some leeway
to limit speech that might be disruptive and to consider the
educational merit of what goes on during the school day,
when the play was scheduled to be performed. But thornier
legal questions arise over students’ contention that they were
also thwarted from trying to stage the play at night before
a limited audience, and discouraged from doing so even off-
campus. Just this week, an Alaska public high school was
defending itself before the United States Supreme Court for
having suspended a student who unfurled a banner extolling
drug use at an off-campus parade.
The scrap over “Voices in Conflict” is the latest in a series
of free-speech squabbles at Wilton High, a school of 1,250
students that is consistently one of Connecticut’s top performers
and was the alma mater of Elizabeth Neuffer, the Boston Globe
correspondent killed in Iraq in 2003.
The current issue of the student newspaper, The Forum, includes
an article criticizing the administration for requiring that yearbook
quotations come from well-known sources for fear of coded
messages. After the Gay Straight Alliance wallpapered stairwells
with posters a few years ago, the administration, citing public safety
hazards, began insisting that all student posters be approved
in advance.
Around the same time, the administration tried to ban bandanas
because they could be associated with gangs, prompting hundreds
of students to turn up wearing them until officials relented.
“Our school is all about censorship,” said James Presson, 16,
a member of the “Voices of Conflict” cast. “People don’t talk
about the things that matter.”
After reading a book of first-person accounts of the war,
Ms. Dickinson kicked off the spring semester — with the
principal’s blessing — by asking her advanced students if they
were open to creating a play about Iraq. In an interview, the
teacher said the objective was to showcase people close to the
same age as the students who were “experiencing very different
things in their daily lives and to stand in the shoes of those
people and then present them by speaking their words exactly
in front of an audience.”
What emerged was a compilation of monologues taken from
the book that impressed Ms. Dickinson, “In Conflict: Iraq War
Veterans Speak Out on Duty, Loss and the Fight to Stay Alive”;
a documentary, “The Ground Truth”; Web logs and other sources.
The script consisted of the subjects’ own words, though some
license was taken with identity: Lt. Charles Anderson became
“Charlene” because, as Seth Koproski, a senior, put it, “we had
a lot of women” in the cast.
In March, students said, Gabby, the junior whose brother is serving
in the Army in Iraq, said she wanted to join the production, and
soon circulated drafts of the script to parents and others in town.
A school administrator who is a Vietnam veteran also raised
questions about the wisdom of letting students explore such
sensitive issues, Mr. Canty said.
In response to concerns that the script was too antiwar, Ms. Dickinson
reworked it with the help of an English teacher. The revised version
is more reflective and less angry, omitting graphic descriptions
of killing, crude language and some things that reflect poorly
on the Bush administration, like a comparison of how long
it took various countries to get their troops bulletproof vests.
A critical reference to Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former defense
secretary, was cut, along with a line from Cpl. Sean Huze saying
of soldiers: “Your purpose is to kill.”
Seven characters were added, including Maj. Tammy Duckworth
of the National Guard, a helicopter pilot who lost both legs and
returned from the war to run for Congress last fall. The second
version gives First Lt. Melissa Stockwell, who lost her left leg from
the knee down, a new closing line: “But I’d go back. I wouldn’t
want to go back, but I would go.”
On March 13, Mr. Canty met with the class. He told us “no matter
what we do, it’s not happening,” said one of the students, Erin Clancy.
That night, on a Facebook chat group called “Support the Troops
in Iraq,” a poster named GabriellaAF, who several students said
was their classmate Gabby, posted a celebratory note saying,
“We got the show canceled!!” (Reached by telephone, Gabby’s mother,
Barbara Alessi, said she had no knowledge of the play or her daughter’s
involvement in it.) In classrooms, teenage centers and at dinner tables
around town, the drama students entertained the idea of staging
the show at a local church, or perhaps al fresco just outside the
school grounds. One possibility was Wilton Presbyterian Church.
“I would want to read the script before having it performed here,
but from what I understand from the students who wrote it, they
didn’t have a political agenda,” said the Rev. Jane Field, the church’s
youth minister.
Mr. Canty said he had never discouraged the students from
continuing to work on the play on their own. But Ms. Dickinson
said he told her “we may not do the play outside of the four walls
of the classroom,” adding, “I can’t have anything to do with it
because we’re not allowed to perform the play and I have
to stand behind my building principal.”
Parents, even those who are critical of the decision, say the episode
is out of character for a school system that is among the attractions
of Wilton, a well-off town of 18,000 about an hour’s drive from
Manhattan.
“The sad thing was this thing was a missed opportunity for growth
from a school that I really have tremendous regard for,” said
Emmalisa Lesica, whose son was in the play. Given the age
of the performers and their peers who might have seen the
show, she noted, “if we ended up in a further state of war,
wouldn’t they be the next ones drafted or who choose to go
to war? Why wouldn’t you let them know what this is about?”
The latest draft of the script opens with the words of Pvt. Nicholas
Madaras, the Wilton graduate who died last September and whose
memory the town plans to soon honor by naming a soccer field
for him. In a letter he wrote to the local paper last May, Private
Madaras said Baqubah, north of Baghdad, sometimes “feels like
you are on another planet,” and speaks wistfully about the life
he left behind in Wilton.
“I never thought I’d ever say this, but I miss being in high
school,” he wrote. “High school is really the foundation for
the rest of your life, whether teenagers want to believe
it or not.”
Private Madaras’s parents said they had not read the play,
and had no desire to meddle in a school matter. But his
mother, Shalini Madaras, added, “We always like to think
about him being part of us, and people talking about him,
I think it’s wonderful.”
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5) Spain: Delphi Axe Prompts General Strike
March 23, 2007
http://futureoftheunion.com/?p=4180
Spain: Delphi Axe Prompts General Strike by just-auto.com
Editorial Team
Spanish trades unions have called for a general strike on 18 April
to protest against embattled US auto parts maker Delphi’s plans
to shut its Puerto Real, Cadiz factory, dismissing 4,500 permanent
and temporary workers, a union official told just-auto on Friday.
The move comes as the European Union this week said it would
support Spain’s efforts to force Delphi to explain exactly why
it is closing the site, to provide a viability plan for it and offer
layoff compensation to workers - something it has so far
refused to do.
The official said Puerto Real’s factory employs 2,000 contract
workers and 2,500 auxiliary workers and that its closure will
mean the loss of an important employer in the largely blue-collar
region of southern Spain. The plant supplies Volvo, Ford, General
Motors, Nissan, Mercedes Benz and Kia.
The general strike will be held in 14 municipalities across the
Cadiz Bay, home to the Puerto Real factory.
It will be followed by a major Madrid demonstration and
a 24-hour strike in Puerto Real on 29 March.
Those measures follow major industrial actions in recent weeks
in which 3,000 people participated in demonstrations.
Today’s announcement came after hundreds of workers from
Delphi’s Sant Cugat del Valles factory in Barcelona took to the
streets to decry Puerto Real’s planned closure.
Unions plan to hold similar actions every week until the crisis
is resolved, the union rep confirmed.
Spanish press quoted government officials as saying they will
do everything possible to fix Puerto Real’s crisis. Apart from
demanding that Delphi come clean about its intentions, they
will ask the company to explain how it used millions of euros
of European Union aid funds given it to set up in Puerto Real.
Government officials have also reportedly called a meeting
with the US embassy in Madrid to discuss the crisis.
Delphi has said Puerto Real’s factory has reported losses since
2002 and that its closure stems from its inability to operate
it profitably.
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6) Waiting for C. Wright Mills
by RICARDO ALARCON DE QUESADA
[posted online on March 23, 2007]
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070409/alarcon_eng
"I am for the Cuban revolution.
I do not worry about it, I worry for
it and with it."
--from Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba
C. Wright Mills suffered a heart attack at the age of 45 while at
home in New York on March 20, 1962. Fifteen months earlier, his
doctors had warned him that the next one would be his last. And it
was. An intense, creative and noble life ended in one swift blow. His
life, however, would continue beating within a new generation that
had found in Mills a shining example.
In the midst of McCarthyism and the cold war, he published a
half-dozen books vital to understanding contemporary US society.
Among them were The New Men of Power: American Labor Leaders (1948),
White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951), The Power Elite
(1956), The Causes of World War Three (1958) and The Sociological
Imagination (1959), as well as other essays and articles. They
unmasked the true nature of capitalism from a critical, independent,
original and lucid perspective that contributed to the birth of the
"New Left."
Although Mills was by then an accomplished author and widely
recognized by his peers, the publication of Listen, Yankee in 1960
brought him a surprising notoriety that served as the driving force
behind the debate that swirled around him until that fateful day in
March. It was a book about Cuba. Mills had come to the island in the
summer of 1960. He wanted to study the Cuban Revolution, and he had
prepared for the trip by reading as much as he could about the
island, writing down his questions and doubts. Eager to understand
the reality of this country and its young revolution, he prepared
intensely. Here he spent long hours speaking with Fidel and Che
Guevara on several occasions, as well as with many other Cubans from
all walks of life.
Upon returning to New York he worked feverishly night and day for six
weeks. Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba was published in
November. It suddenly became an extraordinary and valuable example of
engaged literature. Written without great academic pretensions, told
in straightforward language through the voice of an imaginary and
anonymous Cuban revolutionary, the book aimed to reach ordinary
Americans. It quickly became a bestseller.
Among the first to read the book were FBI analysts, since the bureau
obtained the manuscript prior to its publication. Anticipating its
impact, the FBI also tried, unsuccessfully, to convince the
publisher, Ian Ballantine, to publish a negative perspective of the
revolution by another author.
Mills received numerous messages of support and appreciation of his
book. He was also criticized, insulted and threatened. According to
the FBI, a few days following the appearance of Listen, Yankee,
someone sent Mills an anonymous letter warning him that "an American
agent disguised as a South American would assassinate him on his next
visit to Cuba." In a memo dated November 29, 1960, the FBI noted that
"Mills indicated he would not be surprised if this were true since he
does not doubt that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other
similar United States organizations do not approve of his activities.
Mills has made several inquiries in regard to purchasing a gun for
self-protection." It is significant that the paragraph immediately
following this quote is blacked out by the FBI and remains
classified.
Mills's friends recall that he was concerned not only for himself but
for his family, and that he had indeed acquired a handgun, which he
even kept next to his bed while he slept.
During those days, Mills had been preparing for an hourlong televised
debate with Adolph A. Berle Jr. on NBC, with a viewing audience of
approximately 20 million people, which was scheduled to take place on
Saturday, December 10. He had dedicated many hours to studying US
policy toward Latin America and had accumulated sufficient material
for another book.
On the eve of the highly publicized program, he suffered a severe
heart attack. He was in a coma for four days and hospitalized for two
weeks until he decided to return home. The doctors insisted that he
avoid stress. "That's like telling me to avoid eating and breathing,"
he responded. The cardiograms revealed that he had previously
suffered a heart attack, possibly in 1956 or 1957.
While Mills began his long process of recuperation, the Batista mafia
in Miami filed a $25 million defamation lawsuit, according to FBI
calculations, against Mills and the publishers of Listen, Yankee. The
bureau itself admitted that the US government tried to interfere and
impede them from mounting a proper defense.
Cuba anxiously followed Mills's difficult and solitary battle. In a
letter to Ralph Miliband on January 25, 1961, Mills wrote, "Fidel
keeps cabling me to come on down and convalesce in Cuba, and my
friend Vallejo...a medical man of real ability, as well as the head
of INRA [National Institute of Agrarian Reform] in the Oriente, says
that just to step on the island will cure me and that he has some
things to talk over anyway."
This letter is an important document, as it reveals the depth of
Mills's admirable personality. Describing the question of his health
he said, "I'm not ever going to be a track star; probably can't
really get into any revolutionary action in anybody's mountains, but
with a little carefulness on the physical side, I shouldn't be
handicapped much at all. But of course that's only medicine, which is
about living and dying, not about how one might live, or even must
live. That's well beyond medicine and well into one's own
morality....
"What we do not know, as yet, is how much intellectual and moral
tension I can stand without the silly heart blistering out again....
One point that bothers me greatly: I'm afraid there is going to come
about a very bad time in my country for people who think as I do....
What bothers me is whether or not the damned heart will stand up to
what must then be done."
In the same letter, Mills mentions some of the financial problems
brought on by his illness. "I am not teaching this Spring of course,
and do not yet know if Columbia will pay my salary for the semester
or not. I have no hospitalization or such insurance (which anyway is
a racket) and my first week (in a local suburban hospital mind you)
cost $1,100.00...that's just the hospital, no doctors or surgery."
C. Wright Mills paid a high price for his passionate love of truth.
Listen, Yankee was for him "a pivotal book," which helped him fight
the "moral ambiguity" and "cowardice" that prevailed in US
intellectual circles at the time.
Nearly half a century later, his principal message not only retains
its relevance; recent historical events vindicate it. The world has
changed a lot since 1960. The USSR and "real socialism" have
crumbled. Neoliberal capitalism is global, yet its dominion is
increasingly challenged by the peoples of Latin America and
elsewhere.
From the time when Mills came to visit us, Cuba has lived a dramatic
life with successes as well as failures. Alone and abandoned by all
after the USSR disappeared, it had to heroically resist some very
hard and difficult years during which the United States intensified
its economic and political aggression. Today Cuba forges a path to
craft its own unique socialist system, rooted on its own historical
experience and with the active participation of its people. Social
movements are transforming Latin America, with several countries
putting into practice new, diverse and multicolored forms of
socialism.
Mills's prophetic vision is becoming a reality. Indeed, now we have
many things to talk about. We are waiting for him.
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7) Ex - Terror Suspect Loses Aussie Election
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: March 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes. com/aponline/ world/AP- Australia- Guantanamo. html
SYDNEY, Australia (AP) -- A former terror suspect held at Guantanamo
Bay, Cuba, for four years didn't win his bid Saturday for a seat in
the parliament of New South Wales, Australia's most populous state.
Mamdouh Habib, 51, ran as an independent candidate in the election,
which was fought largely on the local issues of roads, schools and
train and bus services.
The Egyptian-born Habib said he was standing to raise human rights
issues and the profile of Australian Muslims, though he had little
chance of success against a Labor Party incumbent with strong local
support.
Habib won about 4 percent of the vote in the Sydney suburban seat he
contested, and said he had not expected to do any better. Labor's
Barbara Perry was returned with more than 60 percent of votes in the
district.
''The reality is it is a safe Labor seat and people wanted someone
with a proven track record,'' Habib told The Associated Press. ''But
it was important to get the message out that there are more issues
than bus timetables, like race issues and youth unemployment and
poverty.''
Habib has said previously he would stand at federal elections due
later this year if he lost in the state vote, but on Saturday
declined to commit himself.
''This is a practice run,'' he said. ''I'm not ruling anything out.''
Habib was released without charge from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after
being arrested in Pakistan and held in custody for years, during
which he alleges he was tortured.
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8) The President’s Prison
"George Bush does not want to be rescued."
Editorial
March 25, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/opinion/25sun1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
The president has been told countless times, by a secretary
of state, by members of Congress, by heads of friendly
governments — and by the American public — that the
Guantánamo Bay detention camp has profoundly damaged
this nation’s credibility as a champion of justice and human
rights. But Mr. Bush ignored those voices — and now it seems
he has done the same to his new defense secretary, Robert
Gates, the man Mr. Bush brought in to clean up Donald
Rumsfeld’s mess.
Thom Shanker and David Sanger reported in Friday’s Times
that in his first weeks on the job, Mr. Gates told Mr. Bush that
the world would never consider trials at Guantánamo to be
legitimate. He said that the camp should be shut, and that
inmates who should stand trial should be brought to the
United States and taken to real military courts.
Mr. Bush rejected that sound advice, heeding instead the
chief enablers of his worst instincts, Vice President Dick Cheney
and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Their opposition was
no surprise. The Guantánamo operation was central
to Mr. Cheney’s drive to expand the powers of the presidency
at the expense of Congress and the courts, and Mr. Gonzales
was one of the chief architects of the policies underpinning
the detainee system. Mr. Bush and his inner circle are clearly
afraid that if Guantánamo detainees are tried under the actual
rule of law, many of the cases will collapse because they are
based on illegal detention, torture and abuse — or that American
officials could someday be held criminally liable for their
mistreatment of detainees.
It was distressing to see that the president has retreated so far
into his alternative reality that he would not listen to Mr. Gates
— even when he was backed by Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice, who, like her predecessor, Colin Powell, had urged Mr. Bush
to close Guantánamo. It seems clear that when he brought
in Mr. Gates, Mr. Bush didn’t want to fix Mr. Rumsfeld’s disaster;
he just wanted everyone to stop talking about it.
If Mr. Bush would not listen to reason from inside his cabinet,
he might at least listen to what Americans are telling him about
the damage to this country’s credibility, and its cost. When Khalid
Shaikh Mohammed — for all appearances a truly evil and dangerous
man — confessed to a long list of heinous crimes, including planning
the 9/11 attacks, many Americans reacted with skepticism and
even derision. The confession became the butt of editorial cartoons,
like one that showed the prisoner confessing to betting on the
Cincinnati Reds, and fodder for the late-night comedians.
What stood out the most from the transcript of Mr. Mohammed’s
hearing at Guantánamo Bay was how the military detention and
court system has been debased for terrorist suspects. The hearing
was a combatant status review tribunal — a process that is supposed
to determine whether a prisoner is an illegal enemy combatant and
thus not entitled in Mr. Bush’s world to rudimentary legal rights.
But the tribunals are kangaroo courts, admitting evidence that
was coerced or obtained through abuse or outright torture. They
are intended to confirm a decision that was already made, and
to feed detainees into the military commissions created by
Congress last year.
The omissions from the record of Mr. Mohammed’s hearing
were chilling. The United States government deleted his claims
to have been tortured during years of illegal detention at camps
run by the Central Intelligence Agency. Government officials who
are opposed to the administration’s lawless policy on prisoners
have said in numerous news reports that Mr. Mohammed was
indeed tortured, including through waterboarding, which simulates
drowning and violates every civilized standard of behavior toward
a prisoner, even one as awful as this one. And he is hardly the
only prisoner who has made claims of abuse and torture. Some
were released after it was proved that they never had any
connection at all to terrorism.
Still, the Bush administration says no prisoner should be allowed
to take torture claims to court, including the innocents who were
tortured and released. The administration’s argument is that how
prisoners are treated is a state secret and cannot be discussed
openly. If that sounds nonsensical, it is. It’s also not the real reason
behind the administration’s denying these prisoners the most
basic rights of due process.
The Bush administration has so badly subverted American norms
of justice in handling these cases that they would not stand
up to scrutiny in a real court of law. It is a clear case
of justice denied.
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9) C.I.A. Awaits Rules on Terrorism Interrogations
By MARK MAZZETTI
March 25, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/washington/25interrogate.html?hp
WASHINGTON, March 24 — A sharp debate within the Bush administration
over the future of the Central Intelligence Agency’s detention and
interrogation program has left the agency without the authority to use
harsh interrogation techniques that the White House said last fall were
necessary in questioning terrorism suspects, according to administration
and Congressional officials.
The agency for months has been awaiting approval for rules that would
give intelligence operatives greater latitude than military interrogators
in questioning terrorism suspects but would not include some of the
most controversial interrogation procedures the spy agency has
used in the past.
But the internal debate has left the C.I.A. program in limbo as top
officials struggle over where to set boundaries in the treatment
of people suspected of being involved in terrorist activities. Until
the debate is resolved, C.I.A. interrogators are authorized to use
only interrogation procedures approved by the Pentagon.
The C.I.A.’s proposed interrogation rules are part of the first major
overhaul of the agency’s detention and interrogation program since
the agency began jailing terrorism suspects in 2002. The agency has
already decided to abandon some past interrogation techniques —
among them “waterboarding,” which induces a feeling of drowning —
that human rights groups and some lawmakers have argued
are torture.
Although it is unclear whether the C.I.A. has any prisoners in custody,
the White House has not repeated its earlier statements that the
secret prisons are empty. The C.I.A.’s proposed interrogation
methods remain highly classified, but they may include exposure
to extreme temperatures and sleep deprivation.
Much of the debate over the interrogation rules has not been made
public. A draft of an executive order providing broad guidelines
for interrogators was rejected this year by State Department officials,
who argued that the language was too expansive and could leave the
Bush administration open to challenges, including some from American
allies, that the White House was legalizing practices that violated
a provision of the Geneva Conventions.
The Supreme Court ruled last year that all prisoners in American
captivity must be treated in accordance with Common Article 3
of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits the humiliating and
degrading treatment of prisoners.
The struggle is evidence of shifting dynamics within the administration
and a rethinking of some of the most polarizing policies enacted after
the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to fight terrorism worldwide.
Late last year, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates forced a debate within
the administration about whether to close the military prison at Guantánamo
Bay, Cuba, and now some senior officials are questioning how far the C.I.A.
interrogation program should go beyond the Army Field Manual for
interrogations, which the Pentagon uses to train military interrogators.
It has been six months since President Bush signed a bill authorizing
the secret C.I.A. interrogations — a measure the White House promoted
as a critical tool to obtain information from high-level terrorism suspects.
Several officials said the C.I.A. had not yet needed to press the White House
for the legal authority because there was no one in C.I.A. custody who
had required the “enhanced” interrogation techniques.
Still, C.I.A. officials have maintained that it is important to get the detention
program on a solid legal footing and to give clarity to operatives in the
field about what is permissible and what is not.
“At the end of the day, the director — any director — of C.I.A. must be
confident that what he has asked an agency officer to do under this program
is lawful,” the agency’s director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, wrote in
a note to agency employees last September. “That’s the story here.”
Some officials said that while the C.I.A. would probably be able to get
legal approvals if the agency captured someone it wished to interrogate,
doing so could take precious time. The intelligence value of detainees
sometimes diminishes quickly.
“You want established, clear rules in place,” said one American official
with knowledge of the debate over interrogations. “You don’t want agency
officials having to call back to headquarters for ‘Mother may I?’ ”
The Supreme Court decision forced the White House to press Congress
for new authority both to try terrorism suspects using military
commissions and to detain and interrogate high-level suspects
in secret C.I.A. jails abroad.
When President Bush signed the Military Commissions Act last October,
the White House released a statement calling the C.I.A. detention
program “one of the most successful intelligence efforts in American
history.” The new authority, Mr. Bush said, will “ensure that we can
continue using this vital tool to protect the American people
for years to come.”
But since passage of the bill, top officials have been wrestling with
the executive order and a separate legal opinion from the Justice
Department’s Office of Legal Counsel that would authorize the C.I.A.
interrogation techniques and explain why the techniques comply
with the standards of the Geneva Conventions.
Gordon D. Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council,
said the executive order was expected in “the next few weeks.”
“The administration has been engaged in a deliberative and thoughtful
interagency process,” Mr. Johndroe said. “This process required additional
time as new officials, including the defense secretary, director of national
intelligence and White House counsel were brought into the deliberations.”
The Military Commissions Act states that the president “shall” issue
an executive order setting out broad guidelines for the interrogation
of detainees. Administration officials said the Justice Department
had already determined that the language did not compel the White
House to issue such an order, but that the administration still planned
to complete the document.
Some human rights groups remain skeptical that, even with the Justice
Department’s blessing, the new interrogation rules would meet
international standards governing the treatment of detainees.
Specifically, they point to a series of Office of Legal Counsel memos
written in 2002 in which Justice Department lawyers took a broad
view of what is permissible under international conventions barring
torture, and said they feared that the office could again authorize
interrogation techniques that violate international law.
“I would hope that the O.L.C. has learned its lesson and that they’re
not trying to split hairs and draw fine distinctions to undermine the
spirit of U.S. law,” said John Sifton, a researcher with Human Rights Watch.
Some lawmakers have expressed anger that the White House, after
pushing Congress to pass the Military Commissions Act last year,
has yet to issue the executive order.
“Given the speed with which this bill was pushed through Congress
last year, the president should have lived up to his obligations under
the law by now,” said Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia,
chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, in an e-mail message.
“Providing legal clarity for our interrogators was one of the key factors
in my decision to support the Military Commissions legislation,”
Mr. Rockefeller said.
Both Mr. Rockefeller and Representative Silvestre Reyes, the Texas
Democrat who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, have
questioned the need for the C.I.A.’s secret prison network and have
pledged to make oversight of the agency’s detention and interrogation
program a priority during this session of Congress.
The interrogation of high-level terrorism suspects in C.I.A. prisons
is one of the most criticized aspects of the Bush administration’s
response to the Sept. 11 attacks.
The prison network was cloaked in secrecy until President Bush
confirmed its existence during a speech last September, when
he announced that the 14 remaining inmates in C.I.A. prisons
would be transferred to the military prison at Guantánamo Bay.
But President Bush defended the C.I.A.’s interrogation techniques
as “safe and lawful and necessary,” and said the spy agency would
continue to detain and question high-level terrorism suspects
in the future.
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10) Diamonds Move From Blood to Sweat and Tears
By LYDIA POLGREEN
March 25, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/world/africa/25diamonds.html?ref=world
KOIDU, Sierra Leone — The tiny stone settled into the calloused grooves
of Tambaki Kamanda’s palm, its dull yellow glint almost indiscernible
even in the noontime glare.
It was the first stone he had found in days, and he expected to get
little more than a dollar for it. It hardly seemed worth it, he said —
after days spent up to his haunches in mud, digging, washing,
searching the gravel for diamonds.
But farming had brought no money for clothes or schoolbooks
for his two wives and five children. He could find no work
as a mason.
“I don’t have choice,” Mr. Kamanda said, standing calf-deep in brown
muddy water here at the Bondobush mine, where he works
every day. “This is my only hope, really.”
Diamond mining in Sierra Leone is no longer the bloody affair
made infamous by the nation’s decade-long civil war, in which
diamonds played a starring role.
The conflict — begun by rebels who claimed to be ridding the mines
of foreign control — killed 50,000 people, forced millions to flee
their homes, destroyed the country’s economy and shocked the
world with its images of amputated limbs and drug-addled
boy soldiers.
An international regulatory system created after the war has
prevented diamonds from fueling conflicts and financing terrorist
networks. Even so, diamond mining in Sierra Leone remains a grim
business that brings the government far too little revenue to right
the devastated country, yet feeds off the desperation of some of the
world’s poorest people. “The process is more to sanitize the industry
from the market side rather than the supply side,” said John Kanu,
a policy adviser to the Integrated Diamond Management Program,
a United States-backed effort to improve the government’s handling
of diamond money. “To make it so people could go to buy a diamond
ring and to say, ‘Yes, because of this system, there are no longer any
blood diamonds. So my love, and my conscience, can sleep easily.’
“But that doesn’t mean that there is justice,” he said. “That will
take a lot, lot longer to change.”
In many cases, the vilified foreign mine owners have simply been
replaced by local elites with a firm grip on the industry’s profits.
At the losing end are the miners here in Kono District, who work
for little or no pay, hoping to strike it rich but caught in a net
of semifeudal relationships that make it all but impossible that
they ever will.
A vast majority of Sierra Leone’s diamonds are mined by hand
from alluvial deposits near the earth’s surface, so anyone with
a shovel, a bucket and a sieve can go into business; and in
a country with few formal jobs, at least 150,000 people work
as diggers, government officials said.
Most days, diggers like Charles Kabia, a 25-year-old grade-school
dropout who has been digging since the rebels forced him to mine
as a teenager, come up empty — he has not found a stone in two
months. That last diamond, a half-carat stone, went for about $65,
which he split with his three partners.
“From all my years of mining I don’t even have one bicycle,” said
Mr. Kabia, his hands trembling. “I really get nothing out of it.”
The struggle to reform Sierra Leone’s troubled mining industry
is emblematic of many of the difficulties faced by this small,
impoverished nation as it tries to heal.
Sierra Leone is at peace, its economy is growing and in July it will
hold a presidential election that will turn a fresh page in the country’s
troubled history. But the recovery has been painfully slow. In the
center of Koidu sits an enormous tank gun with a sign slung around
its barrel — “War don don, we love peace,” a hopeful message in English
and Sierra Leone’s lingua franca, Krio, placed there at the end of the war.
But five years later, the city still has no electricity. The crumbling
streets were last paved in the mid-1970s. People live in roofless
buildings left by the fighting, doing their best to scrub off the
stinking mold and rig tarpaulin roofs.
Sierra Leone has struggled for much of its history to turn its diamonds
into development and prosperity, but they have mainly been a source
of pain.
“Diamonds, from the very beginning, corrupted Sierra Leone’s most
basic sense of governance,” said Mr. Kanu, the diamond policy adviser.
Some countries, like Botswana, whose diamonds lie locked deep
underground, have been able to make their deposits a source of wealth
through careful management and control. But countries like Sierra
Leone, Congo, Angola and Ivory Coast, where diamonds wash up
in rivers and often sit just a few feet below the surface, have struggled
to manage what may be the world’s worst resource curse.
The sprawling mining business here includes about 2,500 small
operations. Unlike oil, iron ore and even gold, diamonds are so easy
to transport that if regulations are too onerous and taxes too high,
miners and exporters will simply turn to smuggling. In 2005, Sierra
Leone officially exported $141 million worth of diamonds, government
records show. That is a vast improvement over the $24 million
officially exported in 2001, before stringent new rules known as the
Kimberley Process required diamond deals to be certified by the
authorities. Before that, most diamonds were smuggled out of
the country through Liberia and Guinea and sold for weapons.
But even now, the government’s share of the revenue is modest,
just 3 percent. In 2006, the government’s take was only $3.7 million.
Licensing fees add to that total, but it is hardly enough to rebuild
a nation of six million people, still broken by war.
Usman Boie Kamara, the deputy director of the government’s mining
office, noted that new laws requiring permits for dealers, mine owners
and exporters have forced out shadowy operators, smugglers and
money launderers. Laws also set minimum standards for the pay
and benefits of diggers — though they are scarcely enforced,
miners and experts say.
“These issues are being addressed, but it takes time,” Mr. Kamara said.
At the Bondobush mine here, the grim routine of mining is on daily
display — hundreds of diggers sifting through tons of gravel. The mine
is divided into areas of 210 square yards, with each controlled by
a license holder. By law that person must be Sierra Leonean, but
in practice the licensees are often fronts for foreign backers or
migrants from the Middle East or other West African countries.
Some are paid a small sum per day, usually about 75 cents, and
given tools, food and shelter in exchange for about 30 percent of
whatever their backers claim to be the value of the diamonds they
find. And the financiers first deduct their expenses.
A few workers have no stake in their finds but are paid a wage,
usually $2 a day. Still others work solely for a share of the gravel
they extract from the vast, watery pits. In most arrangements,
a great deal of the risk is shouldered by the laborer.
The industry has long been dominated by outsiders, feeding
a nationalism that was exploited by Foday Sankoh, leader of the
Revolutionary United Front, the brutal rebel force that claimed
to be liberating the mines but instead enriched itself and terrorized
the populace.
Yet even with the laws requiring local control, working conditions
have not improved much. The mine where Mr. Kabia works is operated
by a chief who functions as a kind of local government executive.
The chief, Paul N. Saquee, 46, is a former truck driver who spent the
past two decades in the United States, most recently around Atlanta.
Mr. Saquee’s brother Prince is the chairman of the local diamond
dealers association, the first Sierra Leonean to hold that position.
Paul Saquee employs two kinds of diggers. Some are paid about
a dollar a day and 30 percent of the value of their stones, which they
must hand over to Mr. Saquee’s representative, another of the
chief’s brothers named Tamba. He watches with hawklike vigilance
as the miners dig.
Others, like Mr. Kabia, work for a percentage of the gravel they extract
and own any stones they find. In theory, this means they should get
a fair sale price, but dealers often exploit their ignorance.
Prince Saquee, the chief’s diamond-dealing brother, bankrolls several
mines and scoffs at the notion of selling his stones to only one buyer.
“If you are working for an exporter, he will dictate the price,” he said.
“To me that is indirect slavery.”
But he has no qualms about demanding precisely that arrangement
from those below him on the diamond food chain. The mine owners
and workers he bankrolls must sell only to him.
“For the miners, it is different,” he argued. A digger, “he depends
on you. He doesn’t know the value so you as the dealer have
to tell him.”
Paul Saquee, the chief, said that despite the low pay and hard
working conditions, he was providing at least some form
of employment to desperate people with no alternative.
“I wish that the miners would all go back to the farm, but they
are here and need work,” he said.
Part of Mr. Saquee’s role is to administer a fund that sends a quarter
of the government’s diamond revenues back to the community the
stones came from. Kono, home to more than half of all mining license
holders, received $377,900 in 2005 for a district of 475,000 people.
“I don’t believe that diamonds are the future of this country,”
Mr. Saquee said. “We need to find something else to get ourselves
moving.”
Indeed, the poverty rates are highest in the mining districts —
Kono’s poverty rate is 20 percent higher than that in nearby
Pujehun district, which is largely agricultural.
In the central bank building in Freetown, Mustapha B. Turay sorted
gleaming stones into small mounds to determine their value for
taxation. On a recent afternoon the country’s largest exporter,
Hisham Mackie, a longtime Lebanese kingpin, brought in $2 million
worth of stones bound for Antwerp, Belgium, that night.
Most had been dug by hand by workers in places like Koidu. But
the paper trail does not reach all the way back to the miner,
so there is no way to know how much a miner was paid. It is
a gap, said Mr. Kanu, the diamond policy adviser, that can lead
to the illusion that the problems brought to light by the civil
war have been solved.
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11) CORN BATTLE
Ethanol Reaps a Backlash
In Small Midwestern Towns
Residents Fight Plants
On Water, Air Fears;
Farmers Boycott Stores
By JOE BARRETT
March 23, 2007; Page A1
WALL STREET JOURNAL
[VIA Email...bw]
CAMBRIA, Wis. -- With empty storefronts on the main drag and corn
stubble stretching for miles in the surrounding hills, this fading
farm town seems like a natural stop for the ethanol express.
Not to John Mueller, though. The 54-year-old stay-at-home dad has led
a dogged battle to prevent a corn mill from building an ethanol plant
up the hill from the village school. Concerned about air pollution,
the water supply and the mill's environmental track record, Mr.
Mueller and his group, Cambrians for Thoughtful Development, have
blitzed the village's 800 residents with fliers, packed public
meetings and set up a sophisticated Web site.
The mill has fought back with its own publicity campaign and local
corn farmers have taken to the streets in tractors to show support.
Now, as the mill races to build the $70 million plant, the matter is
headed to the federal courthouse in Madison, 40 miles southwest.
Nuclear plants, garbage dumps and oil refineries have long faced
opposition from neighbors. Ethanol was supposed to be different. The
corn-based fuel has a reputation for being good for farmers, the
environment and rural economies. Ethanol, which already receives a
51-cents-a-gallon federal subsidy, figures prominently in President
Bush's goal of reducing gasoline consumption by 20% over 10 years.
But a backlash has been brewing in towns across the Midwest.
Fights have broken out in Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska,
Kansas and several towns in Wisconsin. Opponents complain that
ethanol plants deplete aquifers, draw heavy truck traffic, pose
safety concerns, contribute to air pollution and produce a
sickly-sweet smell akin to that of a barroom floor.
In southwestern Missouri, a Webster County citizens' group is suing
to stop a plant proposed by closely held Gulfstream Bioflex Energy
LLC of Mount Vernon, Mo. The detractors say the
80-million-gallon-a-year plant would use more water than the rest of
the 33,000-resident county, an "unreasonable" use of the area's
underground water supply.
"This is not about water," protests Bryan O. Wade, an attorney for
Gulfstream. "This is about a group of people who simply do not want
an industrial facility near their homes."
Just outside Rockford, Ill., people who live near the site of a
planned 100-million gallon ethanol plant have filed lawsuits against
Winnebago County questioning the procedures by which it granted a
rezoning to Wight Partners, a Schaumburg, Ill.-based developer. Last
October, Wight filed a $3 million lawsuit against the residents,
claiming they have abused the legal process merely to delay the
project.
Industry officials concede that ethanol plants have had problems with
smell and toxic emissions in the past, but say new technology has
largely remedied that. "Generally, communities look at these plants
as local economic engines," says Robert Dineen, president of the
Renewable Fuels Association, a Washington trade group. The plants
bring jobs and have dramatically raised corn prices and farmland
values. Many ethanol plants have paid rich dividends to investors,
who often include local farmers and other residents.
But experts hotly debate whether renewable fuels offer a panacea for
the world's energy needs. As with ethanol derived from corn -- which
slurps up water -- many alternative fuels are creating environmental
problems of their own. In Indonesia, Malaysia and Canada, forests are
being slashed for energy-yielding crops or other unconventional
fuels. In India, environmentalists say, water tables are dropping as
farmers boost production of ethanol-yielding sugar.
As the rush to build ethanol plants continues in the U.S. -- there
are 114 in operation, 80 under construction and many more in planning
stages -- clashes with locals are multiplying.
Cambria certainly looks like it could use an economic boost. Two
canning facilities run full-tilt around harvest time but slow
considerably in winter. The downtown strip features a café, two bars
(one called The Dump), a bank, a barbershop and a furniture-maker.
But a supper club, tattoo parlor, grocery store and sandwich shop are
shuttered. Many residents work in Madison or other nearby towns.
A row of grain silos towers over the village's southern edge at the
Didion Milling Inc. corn mill. There, locally grown corn is dried,
ground, sifted and mixed into different products. Didion's biggest
seller is a mix of corn, soy and nutrients that the U.S. ships
overseas as emergency food aid. The company generated about $50
million in revenue from its government food-aid programs last year.
In November 2002, Didion sent letters inviting Cambria residents to a
public meeting about its plan to build an ethanol plant. The letter
said the plant would allow Didion to "buy more corn from local
farmers, increase revenue for the local economy" and create new jobs.
Today, the company says the 40-million-gallon plant would offer 40
jobs, with salaries averaging $38,000 a year, and increase the
company's annual property tax payments to various local entities to
$276,000 from $99,000 in 2006.
Kneeling on the dusty mill floor to scoop out a sample of milled
corn, Dale Drachenberg, Didion's vice president of operations, says
the company believes it will be able to make ethanol more efficiently
than competitors. Most plants start the ethanol-making process with
whole corn kernels. But Didion's mill separates the starch that's the
most vital ingredient in ethanol. "It's a natural progression that
will allow us to continue to grow our business," he says.
More than 70 people crowded into the village hall for the first
public meeting, many of them farmers eager to sell corn to the
ethanol plant. Also attending were Mr. Mueller and a few others who
questioned Didion about safety, emissions, traffic and water. Later,
Mr. Mueller huddled with some residents who had posed questions.
Three already had formed Cambrians for Thoughtful Development. Mr.
Mueller joined the group, which has about a dozen active members, and
put up its Web site.
He and his wife, who works at the University of Wisconsin archives,
had moved to Cambria from Madison in 2001. An elfin man with a long
gray beard and pony tail, he had decided to quit his job at a lock
and security company years earlier to raise his daughter, now 14.
"There are just so many things I didn't want to miss with her," he
says.
When Mr. Mueller heard about the ethanol plant, he says, he feared
for the character of the quiet town where he'd bought a cozy house a
few blocks from the school and an old mill pond. Scouring the
Internet, he read about other places that had succeeded in blocking
ethanol plants. It was at once encouraging and daunting. "We were
just coming in from Madison," he says. "I thought we'd be the only
ones asking questions."
The activists began plotting strategy at each other's homes. Sarah
Lloyd, 35, a doctoral student in rural sociology who later got
herself elected to the Columbia County board, says she initially
thought ethanol was a good thing. But she concluded that small
Midwestern towns were being asked to accept what amounts to new
chemical plants in their midst in the national drive to clean up
big-city auto emissions and reduce dependence on foreign oil.
"We were really being asked to take one for the team," she says.
Mr. Mueller filed open-records requests with the Wisconsin Department
of Natural Resources and the Environmental Protection Agency.
He discovered that Didion had repeatedly run afoul of federal
environmental rules. Grain processing -- like ethanol production --
is subject to such rules because it creates tiny airborne particles
that can cause respiratory problems and aggravate heart conditions.
In 2000, Didion had paid $107,500 to the EPA to settle allegations
that the company expanded a grain-barge loading facility without
obtaining permits or controlling particulate emissions. Didion's Mr.
Drachenberg says the expansion amounted to some portable equipment
brought in to help meet peak demand at harvest. The company settled
rather than go through costly litigation, he says.
Didion also had expanded its Cambria milling facility without proper
permits, according to a 2002 notice from the DNR. By adding to
storage capacity and increasing the amount of grain processed, the
plant had come under tougher emissions rules, the notice said. The
infraction was considered a High Priority Violation under EPA rules,
carrying penalties of $25,000 per violation per day.
Mr. Drachenberg says the company had merely tried to build enough
permanent silos to avoid storing grain on the ground at harvest. He
says the company had an exemption from the state, but the official
who had granted it left and others in the DNR interpreted it
differently.
One Sunday, a few weeks after the first public meeting, the activists
fanned out in the village to distribute to each home a flier listing
Didion's alleged violations and asking: "Is Ethanol Production in the
Village of Cambria the Development That We Want?"
This set the stage for a tense meeting the next night at the school
gym, amid images of the school mascot, the Hilltopper, a
pickax-wielding mountain climber. Residents and farmers packed the
bleachers as speakers struggled to be heard through the faltering PA
system. Chet Stringfield, then the village's president, talked
excitedly about the economic opportunity the plant represented.
As the night wore on, the exchanges grew more heated, Mr. Mueller
recalls. At one point, one of Didion's project contractors drew
laughter with his assertion that the plant would help America defeat
terrorism. "It was heartening to me that, even at that point, some
people found that outrageous on the face of it," Mr. Mueller says.
That Saturday, local farmer Brian Jung fired up his eight-wheeled
Steiger tractor and pointed it toward Cambria. There, he joined about
50 farmers in tractors and trucks in a parade down the main street in
support of the plant. The event was organized by the wife of
Republican state Rep. Eugene Hahn, who raises corn, wheat and lima
beans near Cambria. For years, he has championed state legislation to
support ethanol.
Mr. Hahn, 77, recalls a time when Cambria had three grocery stores
and a car dealership. "That's all kind of dried up," he says. Of the
people opposing the plant, he says, "it's a bedroom community to
them."
The community split. Farmers, frustrated with the opposition, started
an informal boycott of village businesses. "I think the overall
feeling, when Cambria was so against everything, a lot of guys they
just didn't participate in town," says Mr. Jung. The local Chamber of
Commerce decided to back the plant only after serious debate.
Meantime, Mr. Mueller and his fellow activists filed suit in Columbia
County Circuit Court to nullify a variance Didion had received on
building-height restrictions. And they garnered enough signatures to
persuade the village council to put a referendum on the plant on that
April's ballot.
Didion shot back with several direct-mail appeals to residents,
including one that accused opponents of "trying to scare the people
of Cambria and to divide our community."
Cambria voters passed a referendum to bar ethanol from the town or
its surroundings, 263 to 136, effectively killing Didion's chances of
building in the town.
Plans for a plant were on hold until last April. By then, President
Bush had exhorted the country to wean itself from its "addiction" to
oil, and scores of new ethanol plants had sprouted across the
Midwest. Didion announced that it would again seek to build a plant,
this time on a small parcel it had acquired directly across the road
from its previous site -- and just outside Cambria's border.
The new site remained close enough to the mill that Didion could
trundle its corn starch over by truck or conveyer belt, out of
Cambria's regulatory reach. For Mr. Mueller, the new application
brought "a sinking feeling -- like the beginning of a recurring
nightmare."
This time, despite continuing objections from Mr. Mueller's group and
Cambria officials, Didion's rezoning applications to Columbia County
and Courtland Township sailed through. "It was unanimous that we
thought that this would be a good thing," says Courtland supervisor
JoAnn Wingers, whose family farms 1,500 acres of corn and soybeans
near Cambria.
As for the opponents, she says, "If we could go back at least 50
years, that's how they'd like us to stay farming. The economy doesn't
allow that. We're trying to be progressive and economically
beneficial to the entire area."
Didion broke ground on the plant in October, and was soon embroiled
in more controversy. On Dec. 20, the state issued a notice saying
Didion hadn't abided by a new air permit covering both the mill and
the ethanol plant. "There was a misunderstanding between my engineer,
the DNR and Didion," Mr. Drachenberg says, over how much Didion could
use the corn drier at the grain mill before the ethanol plant came
online.
The company has applied for a revised permit and scaled back work to
comply with the current permit.
The opponents have not given up. On Feb. 12, lawyers for Mr.
Mueller's group served Didion 60 days notice that they would file a
federal lawsuit in Madison under the Clean Air Act, citing the
history of alleged environmental violations at the mill, including
the one noted in December.
Christa Westerberg, a Madison attorney who represents Cambria and
other Wisconsin citizens' groups battling ethanol plants, says
Didion's latest troubles are "part of this pattern of doing whatever
it takes to get the permit, then either don't live up to it or try to
get it changed." If successful, the lawsuit could lead to Didion
paying millions in penalties and require them to get new permits.
Whether that stops the ethanol plant "depends on how Didion reacts,"
she says.
Mr. Drachenberg, who lives near Madison, says Didion plans to have
its ethanol plant operating by November. He says the company is in
compliance with all federal rules and has worked to resolve any
issues when they came up. He was surprised at the intensity of the
opposition four years ago, he says, and, "I'm still surprised."
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12) The Hamas Conundrum
Editorial
"Hamas — which has now formed a unity government of convenience
with the more moderate Fatah — still refuses to take the three
steps needed to demonstrate its commitment to good-faith
diplomacy: renouncing terrorism, recognizing Israel and
adhering to previously negotiated agreements."
March 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/26/opinion/26mon1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice moves into the final days
of her Middle East trip, she still needs to come up with a way to
translate the current lull in the violence between Israel and the
Palestinians into an opening for genuine peace negotiations.
Nobody pretends that will be easy. Hamas — which has now formed
a unity government of convenience with the more moderate Fatah
— still refuses to take the three steps needed to demonstrate its
commitment to good-faith diplomacy: renouncing terrorism,
recognizing Israel and adhering to previously negotiated agreements.
And until it does, Israel refuses to negotiate with Hamas or conduct
serious business with the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud
Abbas, of Fatah.
Standing back and waiting for more promising conditions is not
an option — and never has been. After six wasted years of Bush
administration posturing, Ms. Rice appears, belatedly, to realize
that a just, negotiated peace between Israel and the Palestinians
is essential for Israeli security and American diplomacy. But recognizing
it is not enough. If serious negotiations are to begin any time soon,
Washington has to help jump-start the process.
That will require Ms. Rice to be willing to talk to any Palestinian
genuinely willing to discuss peace — no matter Israel’s objections.
Ms. Rice’s clear message to all Palestinians — those in the room
and those outside it — needs to be that if their new government
is ready to stop all terrorist attacks against Israel, Ms. Rice is ready
to press Israel to take matching steps, like halting all settlement
construction and easing onerous restrictions on movements
within the West Bank that have throttled economic development
and stoked almost universal anger among ordinary Palestinians.
If Hamas wants American aid restored, it still must meet the three
conditions on ending terrorism, recognizing Israel and accepting
past agreements. European governments should hold that line
as well. That still leaves room for humanitarian aid delivered
through nongovernmental channels, which should continue
as needed.
And it also leaves room for funneling Western aid to government
departments independent of Hamas, like Mr. Abbas’s presidential
security forces. That practice could be extended to those ministries
not controlled by Hamas, provided the aid is kept insulated from
other government accounts.
Selective assistance can be used to reward well-run ministries
that steer a responsible political course. Otherwise, there is a risk
that the Palestinian government will become ever more dependent
on non-Western sources, like Iran and Saudi Arabia. That would
further dilute America’s already diminished influence in the region.
Ms. Rice’s ultimate diplomatic goal must be to resume bilateral
negotiations on trading land for peace to create a Palestinian state
committed to live alongside Israel. That end result is also envisioned
in a 2002 Saudi peace proposal that King Abdullah hopes to revive
at an Arab League summit meeting in Riyadh later this week
As events five years ago made tragically clear, the renewed Saudi
initiative will not get anywhere unless Hamas renounces terrorism
and the Palestinian leadership moves aggressively to stop terrorists.
Just as an Arab League summit meeting was adopting the initial
version of the Saudi plan, Hamas blew up a hotel filled with Israeli
civilians celebrating the Passover holiday. That effectively ended
the initiative. Ms. Rice’s biggest challenge will be moving beyond
that sterile cycle of diplomacy and terror. She clearly has her work
cut out for her.
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13) Poor Behavior Is Linked to Time in Day Care
By BENEDICT CAREY
March 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/26/us/26center.html?ref=us
A much-anticipated report from the largest and longest-running
study of American child care has found that keeping a preschooler
in a day care center for a year or more increased the likelihood
that the child would become disruptive in class — and that the
effect persisted through the sixth grade.
The effect was slight, and well within the normal range for healthy
children, the researchers found. And as expected, parents’ guidance
and their genes had by far the strongest influence on how children
behaved.
But the finding held up regardless of the child’s sex or family income,
and regardless of the quality of the day care center. With more than
two million American preschoolers attending day care, the increased
disruptiveness very likely contributes to the load on teachers who
must manage large classrooms, the authors argue.
On the positive side, they also found that time spent in high-quality
day care centers was correlated with higher vocabulary scores
through elementary school.
The research, being reported today as part of the federally financed
Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, tracked more than
1,300 children in various arrangements, including staying home with
a parent; being cared for by a nanny or a relative; or attending a large
day care center. Once the subjects reached school, the study used
teacher ratings of each child to assess behaviors like interrupting
class, teasing and bullying.
The findings are certain to feed a long-running debate over day
care, experts say.
“I have accused the study authors of doing everything they could
to make this negative finding go away, but they couldn’t do it,”
said Sharon Landesman Ramey, director of the Georgetown University
Center on Health and Education. “They knew this would be disturbing
news for parents, but at some point, if that’s what you’re finding,
then you have to report it.”
The debate reached a high pitch in the late 1980s, during the
so-called day care wars, when social scientists questioned whether
it was better for mothers to work or stay home. Day care workers
and their clients, mostly working parents, argued that it was the
quality of the care that mattered, not the setting. But the new
report affirms similar results from several smaller studies in the
past decade suggesting that setting does matter.
“This study makes it clear that it is not just quality that matters,”
said Jay Belsky, one of the study’s principal authors, who helped
set off the debate in 1986 with a paper suggesting that nonparental
child care could cause developmental problems. Dr. Belsky was
then at Pennsylvania State University and has since moved
to the University of London.
That the troublesome behaviors lasted through at least sixth grade,
he said, should raise a broader question: “So what happens
in classrooms, schools, playgrounds and communities when more
and more children, at younger and younger ages, spend more and
more time in centers, many that are indisputably of limited quality?”
Others experts were quick to question the results. The researchers
could not randomly assign children to one kind of care or another;
parents chose the kind of care that suited them. That meant there
was no control group, so determining cause and effect was not
possible. And some said that measures of day care quality left
out important things.
The study did not take into account employee turnover, a reality
in many day care centers that can have a negative effect on children,
said Marci Young, deputy director of the Center for the Child Care
Workforce, which represents day care workers. Most employees
are “egregiously underpaid and have no benefits,” Ms. Young said,
and when they leave for other work, “children experience this
as a loss, and that does have an effect on them.”
The study, a $200 million project financed by the National Institute
of Child Health and Human Development, recruited families
in 10 cities from hospitals, after mothers gave birth. The researchers
regularly contacted the mothers to find out where their children were
being cared for, and visited those caregivers to see how attentive
and how skilled they were with the youngsters.
In 2001, the authors reported that children who spent most
of their day in care not provided by a parent were more likely to be
disruptive in kindergarten. But this effect soon vanished for all
but those children who spent a significant amount of time
in day care centers.
Every year spent in such centers for at least 10 hours per week
was associated with a 1 percent higher score on a standardized
assessment of problem behaviors completed by teachers,
said Dr. Margaret Burchinal, a co-author of the study and
a psychologist at the University of North Carolina.
The Children’s Defense Fund estimates that 2.3 million American
children under age 5 are in day care centers, many starting
as toddlers and continuing until they enter kindergarten.
Some 4.8 million are cared for by a relative or a nanny,
and 3.3 million are at home with their parents.
The study was not designed to explain why time in day care could
lead to more disruptive behavior later on. The authors and other
experts argue that preschool peer groups probably influence
children in different ways from one-on-one attention. In large
groups of youngsters, disruption can be as contagious as silliness,
studies have found, while children can be calmed by just the sight
of their own mother.
“What the findings tell me is that we need to pay as much attention
to children’s social and emotional development as we do to their
cognitive, academic development, especially when they are together
in groups,” said Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families
and Work Institute, a nonprofit research group.
Loudell Robb, program director of the Rosemount Center in
Washington, which cares for 147 children ages 5 and under at its
main center and in homes, said she was not surprised that some
children might have trouble making the transition from day
care to school.
“At least our philosophy here is that children are given choices,
to work alone or in a group, to move around,” Ms. Robb said.
“By first or second grade, they’re expected to sit still for long
periods, to form lines, not to talk to friends when they want to;
their time is far more teacher-directed.”
And as parents in the thick of it know all too well, the stress
of juggling chores, work and young children does not help.
“It’s not an easy ride,” Ms. Robb said, “and you can see that
here at drop-off time and in the evening when kids are picked up.”
The continuing research project began in 1991. The investigators
have financing to follow the same children into high school,
and are proposing to follow some into their 20s.
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14) Complaints Flood Texas Youth Hot Line
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
March 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/26/us/26youth.html?ref=us
AUSTIN, Tex., March 22 — “Investigations hot line,” said Brian Yasko,
answering the phone at the Texas Youth Commission in a windowless
command post that officers are calling “the belly of the beast.”
Quickly, Mr. Yasko began scribbling down details of yet another
complaint, this one from a mother who said her son at the San
Saba State School, now called the John Shero State Juvenile
Correctional Facility, had been threatened by a sexually deviant
corrections officer.
Yes, said Mr. Yasko, an investigator for the inspector general
of the state Department of Criminal Justice; she could remain
anonymous. “What I’ll do is send this out to the field and have
investigators interview your son,” he promised.
Since a sexual abuse scandal at the Texas Youth Commission
became public last month, prompting mass firings and resignations,
more than 1,100 investigations have been opened into new accusations
of rape and other mistreatment. At last count 282 cases had been
closed without action.
Many of those complaints have been flooding into the makeshift
situation room here staffed around the clock by employees of the
inspector general’s office of the adult prison system and of the
state attorney general’s office.
These officers, in turn, parcel out the cases to about 100 investigators
from the two agencies and the Texas Rangers who are interviewing
witnesses at 24 youth detention centers and scores of small contract
facilities across Texas, where more than 4,000 youths ages 10 to 21
are serving sentences of at least nine months — but almost always
longer — for criminal violations.
One of the centers is the West Texas State School in Pyote, where
a Texas Ranger’s investigation in early 2005 substantiated accusations
that two top supervisors had carried on sexual relationships with
juveniles. Both later resigned but were never charged with a crime.
The case languished for almost two years in the Ward County district
attorney’s office until news reports last month, and the resulting
outcry prompted the part-time prosecutor, Randall Reynolds, who
operates his own law business, to request assistance from the state
attorney general. A grand jury has been hearing evidence.
“I imagine we have got their attention,” said John M. Moriarty, the
inspector general for the prison system, who is running the hot
line center and deploying investigators.
“Our thing is to get the police in there, enforce the law,” said
Mr. Moriarty, a former police officer who grew up in the Bronx.
“There’s a new sheriff in town.”
Jay Kimbrough, named by Gov. Rick Perry as special master
to overhaul the Youth Commission, also voiced determination
in a separate interview. “I’m sadder, and I’m madder than I was
the day before,” said Mr. Kimbrough, a former deputy state
attorney general.
In a commandeered office at the Youth Commission headquarters,
eerily empty of senior staff members who were purged in the uproar,
bulging cardboard files and intake boxes are marked “New Cases,”
“Cases to Be Assigned,” “For Review” and “To Be Closed.”
Against the backdrop of a white board on which is scrawled
a toll-free hot line number, and injunctions like “Record Prank
Calls on Log, Get Exact Time,” officers with holstered handguns
fill the air with investigative crosstalk.
“When are you going to serve it?”
“No, the Ranger has got to go.”
“We want to execute the warrant.”
“Tell him I want him to meet with the D.A. at 1, no matter what.”
Of the 1,100 complaints that have come in since March 6,
an estimated 225 concern sexual abuse, said Capt. Bruce W. Toney
of the inspector general’s office. Captain Toney described some others
as trivial grievances, like complaints of ill-fitting shoes, “I don’t agree
with the teaching” and “not letting me talk.” He said some accusations
appeared to be fabricated, some were pranks. One complaint stemmed
from 1981. In another case, he said, a mother claimed that her son
had entered juvenile detention able to read and write, but came
out illiterate.
In some cases, Mr. Moriarty said, criminal files are being opened
on cases that the Youth Commission had disposed of with nothing
more than administrative penalties. One such incident, he said,
involved a corrections office at the Al Price State Juvenile
Correctional Facility in Beaumont who used excessive force
to get a child to release a mattress he was grabbing. The officer,
Mr. Moriarity said, “bit the child.”
A few Youth Commission employees, Mr. Moriarity said, were
found to have histories as sex offenders. Job applicants now are
subject to background checks with fingerprint searches, he said.
To sort out the complaints, the command center includes four
polygraph experts. The inspector general’s office normally investigates
complaints in the state’s 106 adult prisons. But a proposal to extend
its jurisdiction to youth detention centers is among pending bills
in the Texas Legislature that address the abuse of juvenile detainees
— now the leading issue of the session.
Among the bills are proposals by Representative Jerry Madden,
a Republican from the Dallas area and chairman of the House
corrections committee, to extend the attorney general’s jurisdiction
and to give a special state criminal justice prosecutor concurrent
jurisdiction with local district attorneys in cases of juvenile justice
complaints. Currently, outside prosecutors are barred from entering
a case unless invited in by the district attorney.
Apart from the investigations into the mistreatment of youths, many
other proposals are under consideration. These include a plan
for review panels to verify that juveniles are not being frivolously
held beyond their minimum nine-month sentences.
Alternatives to incarceration are being explored, said Mr. Kimbrough,
the special master. Meanwhile, at the command post, investigators
who are reviewing old files forwarded another case for possible
criminal prosecution, an accusation that a corrections officer
at the Ron Jackson State Juvenile Correctional Complex
in Brownwood had carried on a romance with an 18-year-old
girl and arranged to meet her for a tryst upon her release.
In a letter intercepted by investigators and now part of the case,
the accused guard wrote, “She sets my sole on fire.”
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15) City Asks Court Not to Unseal Police Spy Files
By JIM DWYER
March 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/26/nyregion/26infiltrate.html
Lawyers for the city, responding to a request to unseal records
of police surveillance leading up to the 2004 Republican convention
in New York, say that the documents should remain secret because
the news media will “fixate upon and sensationalize them,” hurting
the city’s ability to defend itself in lawsuits over mass arrests.
In papers filed in federal court last week, the city’s lawyers also say
that the documents could be “misinterpreted” because they were
not intended for the public.
“The documents were not written for consumption by the general
public,” wrote Peter Farrell, senior counsel in the city’s Law Department.
“The documents contain information filtered and distilled for analysis
by intelligence officers accustomed to reading intelligence information.”
Because the materials have not yet been used to decide or argue
any issues in the civil lawsuits, Mr. Farrell said, “there is no right
of public access.”
The documents show that the Police Department’s Intelligence
Division sent undercover detectives around the city, the country
and the world to collect information on political activists and
others planning to demonstrate at the 2004 convention, according
to a sampling of records reviewed by The New York Times that were
the subject of an article yesterday. The records included intelligence
digests and field reports from detectives, known as DD5s.
Those records showed that some of the surveillance was conducted
on groups that planned to disrupt the convention, but the bulk of it
was on groups and people who expressed no apparent intention
to break the law. In at least some cases, the reports were shared
with other law enforcement agencies.
Before monitoring political activity, the police must have some
indication of wrongdoing, a federal court judge has said.
Yesterday a spokesman for the Police Department reiterated an earlier
statement that the surveillance was conducted lawfully and that the
preparations helped keep order when large crowds of demonstrators
gathered in the city the week of the convention.
Christopher Dunn, the associate legal director of the New York Civil
Liberties Union, said the revelations of widespread surveillance would
increase pressure for the records’ release. “People all over the country
will want these documents to see if they were spied upon,” he said.
“That will make the debate about releasing them all the more important.”
In late January, the city turned over about 600 pages of intelligence
digests to the civil liberties union and other lawyers suing the city
on behalf of people who say they were wrongly arrested and detained
during the convention. The documents are under court seal, but
Mr. Dunn and a lawyer for The Times have asked a federal court
magistrate to make them public.
City lawyers have described the intelligence documents as central
to the city’s defense.
“They detail what information the N.Y.P.D. relied on in formulating
its policies,” Gerald C. Smith, an assistant corporation counsel with
the Law Department, wrote in a letter filed in federal court last month.
He said the intelligence helped the police forecast how many people
were coming to New York for the convention and had spoken about
breaking the law.
Moreover, Mr. Smith wrote, the intelligence showed the city was
justified in applying intensive scrutiny to the 1,806 people arrested
during the convention, including fingerprinting more than a thousand
people who faced charges no more serious than traffic tickets. Some
were detained as long as two days for minor offenses.
“The decisions to adopt those policies were based in large part upon
intelligence that had been gathered regarding the number of individuals
planning to attend the R.N.C. in some capacity and the number
of groups and individuals intending to, or at least professing
to intend to, engage in unlawful behavior,” Mr. Smith wrote.
In ruling that some of that information could be used by the city
for its defense, a federal magistrate judge said that a debate over
security and First Amendment rights would come to a head
in the litigation.
“The questions posed by these cases have great public significance,”
the judge, James C. Francis IV of Federal District Court in Manhattan,
wrote on March 12. “At issue is the proper relationship between
the free speech rights of protesters and the means used by law
enforcement officials to maintain public order.”
One group that learned it had been the subject of an intelligence
report, Billionaires for Bush, offered a lighthearted response
to the news. The group, a satirical troupe, dresses in tuxedos
and gowns to provide faux endorsements of the administration.
Marco Ceglie, a national co-chairman who performs as Monet
Oliver DePlace, said a member of the group known as Meg A. Buck
had issued a statement: “We suspect they were looking for stock tips.”
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16) The War on Iraq and the Real Division in the US Ruling Class
By the Editors
March/April 2007
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/
Aside from the deep division over foreign and domestic policy between
the U.S. ruling class and the American people, and aside from the fake
division between Republicans and Democrats, there is a very real division
among the ruling elite. As we shall see, however, it is not a division
between those for and against the War on Iraq, but rather how the
war can still be won.
What are the real reasons for the war on Iraq (since contrary to their
pretensions, there are no fundamental differences between the opposing
factions of the ruling class in regard to the real aims of the U.S.)? And
while everyone knows that it's really all about oil, behind that lies a more
complex and ambitious goal.
That is, the American Empire's aims go much further than a rip-off
of the world's second largest proven deposits of oil in Iraq. It's longer
-term objective is gaining decisive control over the largest of the world's
oil reserves in Saudi Arabia and the other oil-rich nations in the region.
• • •
As things now stand, the countries that formed the Organization
of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) (which was formed in 1960
to combat attempts by imperialism's international oil corporations
and cartels to gain a larger share of the profits from the oil-exporting
nations), are now a mite better able to defend their own interests.
Consequently, U.S. and British oil corporations, in retaliation, have
been pushing their governments toward policies leading to a radical
increase in their share of oil profits by any and all means-none fair!
This helps explain why both factions are also in agreement with the
administration's construction of 13permanent U.S. military basesin Iraq
immediately after the six-week invasion ousted Saddam Hussein's
dictatorship and disbanded his armed forces. The U.S. removed Hussein,
their man-in-Iraq, because he was beginning to go too far in putting
his regime's interests over Uncle Sam's. Besides, the U.S. wanted more
Iraqi oil as well.
The establishment of a powerful U.S. military stronghold in Iraq can
have no other purpose than to serve as a launching pad for gaining
a far greater measure of control over all Middle Eastern oil-providing,
of course, the U.S. superpower can subdue the Iraqi insurgency.
This contradiction between the Bush administration's words and deeds
gives the lie to itsstated intention of bringing freedom and democracy
and improved living standards to the people of Iraq and establishing
a democratic Iraqi government with a military force capable of defending
itself. And the fact that the administration's critics have not bothered
to point to this contradiction between words and deeds, goes a long
way toward proving that they also support the construction of a very
large U.S. military stronghold in Iraq as a launching pad for the
American Empire's longer-term goals in the Middle East.
In fact, when President Bush ordered 21,000 more troops to Iraq, he
also dispatched a powerful naval task force, including two big aircraft
carriers, into the Persian Gulf. Although it was loudly proclaimed as
being directed at Iran, it nevertheless constituted ade facto-threat
against Arab and Iranian oil most of which is transported by tanker
through the Gulf. Since then, a third U.S. Naval aircraft-carrier group
(twenty more ships) has been deployed in the Gulf!
There's yet another reason for building a powerful stronghold in Iraq.
Starting in 1948, because the colonial revolution had begun picking
up steam during and immediately after the Second World War, world
imperialism-through the medium of the UN-created the Israeli settler
state as its first major military foothold in the Middle East. Israel would
be a primarily American imperialist instrument for controlling the rising
rebellion against imperialist domination of the colonial world.
However, the Zionist containment of the Palestinian rebellion has
become a bigger and tougher job than anyone expected. Besides,
the irrepressible Palestinian rebellion has contributed heavily to the
destabilization of imperialist control over the entire Middle East,
including Iran. And when account is taken of the vast deposits of oil
already controlled by the United States, the achievement of even their
immediate goal of gaining decisive control over the prices and profits
of Iraqi oil would give corporate America an important lever with which
to regulate the market price of oil on a global scale.
But while both factions of the capitalist power structure are in agreement
with the two main objectives in Iraq and the Middle East, they are in sharp
disagreement over what it will take to win the war against Iraq's mass
rebellion. That's why the opposing faction has latched onto the well-
founded criticisms made by senior U.S. Generals, Army Chief of Staff
Eric Shinseki and CENTCOM Commander Tommy Franks, who have argued
from its outset that it would take at least 200,000 troops for the offensive
to succeed; and far more troops-as many as 300,000-to pacify and police
the country after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the disbanding
of his armed forces!
But, while the Generals merely argue that a larger force is needed to win
the war, they don't of course, dare call for the reinstitution of the Draft.
And the reason they don't is no secret. The so-called Vietnam syndrome
has convinced both factions of the ruling class to avoid conscription like
the plague. The Vietnam experience has given them all very good reason
to believe that it would cause an explosive expansion of the already
existing mass opposition to the war.
But there may still be another way-if it's not too late-to get the additional
troops needed at this stage of a losing war. The Bush administration's critics,
who include among its chief spokespersons theNew York Times, and
a substantial portion of important representatives of the capitalist political
and economic establishment, had proposed such a solution starting before
the invasion of Iraq was launched in March 2003. And that could have been
done by offering the European Union the same guarantees they gave the
British to win its full political, economic and military support.
We now come to the main reason for the opposition by the more conservative
and less adventurous wing of the ruling class-an opposition that grows
with every military setback suffered by the Bush administration in its
losing war against the Iraqi insurgency.
What most of America's ordinary folks have not been told, is that the U.S.
had to pay a price to secure the whole-hearted military, political and
financial support of Great Britain for the daunting task of conquering
and pacifying the mass Iraqi insurgency. And that price could only have
been a promise to the British that in exchange for the pain of helping
in the conquest and pacification of Iraq, British capitalism would get its
fair share of the gain-joint monopoly control over Iraqi oil. And after the
consolidation of their grip on Iraq, the two world powers would then be
in position, to shoot for a monopoly on as much of the world's largest
proven deposits of oil in the entire Middle East and beyond that their
military and economic power would allow.
Furthermore, the U.S. power structure's insiders-including the
administration's critics-also understoodwhy Bush and company
had refused to make the same commitment to the European Union
that they made to the British.
Global economic competitionand the role played by oil
However, we must first establish how decisive control over Middle
Eastern oil today, can determine the winners and losers of the ever-
intensifying competition among the world's capitalist nations for
a larger share of the shrinking world marketplace tomorrow.
The main reason why the U.S./UK is locked on a course toward
gaining a virtual monopoly over the world's largest deposits of oil
becomes clearer when account is taken of their already existing
control over a major portion of the world's oil supply. Thus, gaining
decisive control over Iraqi oil would enable the American Empire and
its British junior partner to raise the cost of energy to selected
competitors and thereby raise the latter's cost of production
of all its exports.
And that's where the European Union's major powers, headed by France
and Germany, come into the picture. Western Europe is far more dependent
on Iraqi and Middle Eastern oil than other of the American Empire's major
competitors at the present stage of the deepening trade wars. That,
in turn, would permit the U.S./UK alliance to capture a larger share
of the world market forits products from one of its main competitors,
the EU, which is also its most vulnerable rival at this stage of the inter-
imperialist economic conflict.
In a word, that's why the U.S. refused to offer the same inducement
to the EU that won it the whole-hearted support of British imperialism
for the task of conquering Hussein and subduing the Iraqi insurgency.
It conflicts with the Bush administration's double purpose, of gaining
strategic control over the world supply of oil and stealing a march on
some of its main competitors today and more tomorrow.
Evidently, the faction of the U.S. ruling class opposed to the course of
action chosen by the Bush administration have judged it to be far too
risky. That is, the administration's decision to crush the insurgency
without the help of the political, economic and military support of the
European Union was too big a gamble, even though the rewards would
have been much greater.
A further reason why the administration's loyal opponents rejected such
a high-stakes gamble is the already enormous size of the antiwar
movement in the U.S. which can help upset the administration's
best-laid plans as it did in Vietnam.
They may well also have a deeper concern. Though the U.S. today may
not be the Russia of 1917 when the Bolshevik slogan "Land, Peace and
Bread" helped them lead Russia's workers and peasants to the overthrow
of Czarism, and toward socialist revolution, the U.S. can become another
Russia tomorrow, because the revolutionary dynamics at work at that
time in Russia apply with even greater force today to a capitalist world
that is on an irreversible course toward economic catastrophe.
Besides, capitalist America has been living on borrowed money and,
by the same token, borrowed time. The public debt, now stands at
8.7-trillion dollars and rises in pace with the balance of trade and
budget deficits that are rising faster than can be registered on the
U.S.-Debt Clock.
In addition, now that the world monetary system's link with gold has
been stretched to the breaking point, the U.S. Treasury is for all practical
purposes, already bankrupt. Two factors, however, stand in the way
of outright bankruptcy. One is the world's faith in the dollar because
of the enormity of the U.S. economy. The other is the fact that should
too many of the world's bankers and moneylenders demand payment
on the barrelhead or cash in their dollar holdings for Euros at the same
time, there would be a run on the dollar leading to its collapse. And
if the dollar collapses, the entire global monetary system would also
come crashing down.
More on the unique role of oil in the world today
This takes us closer to what is really driving U.S. economic, political
and military policy in the Middle East, in particular, and the world
in general.
Oil is a commodity unlike any other. It's more than a source of energy.
It is also more plentiful, accessible, portable and generally more
efficacious than any other fuel. The by-products of oil, after the
various fuels are extracted, are also an indispensable raw material
for the production of a multiplicity of products ranging from plastics,
to dyes to chemicals to dozens of other commodities.
Throughout most of the 20th century most of the world's industrial,
commercial and financial entrepreneurs had considered oil to be a special
commodity whose value, in many respects, was considered to be as
"good as gold" giving rise to its nickname, "Black Gold." This
characterization refers to its universal acceptance between industrialized
nations, by virtue of its "liquidity" (the abilityor ease with which a commodity
can be converted into cold cash).
Besides, this extraordinarily versatile raw material, whose value as a source
of profits greatly increases after it has been reduced and divided into
its valuable components, goes far beyond that of most other universally
coveted raw materials. Most importantly, the economy of industrialized
nations would come to a dead stop without oil, gas and other fossil fuels.
Oil, moreover, is a far more efficient fuel for powering everything from
cars, trucks, trains, planes and last but not least, the electricity-generating
powerhouses of the world!
Thus, in the world as it is today, oil is perhaps the closest thing to
a universal equivalent like gold, silver and other semi-precious metals
like copper which still serve as money in the form of coins.
And this adds another dimension to the value of oil in today's global
economy. Because the growing crisis of the dollar worsens in pace
with the rising balance of payments and budget deficits, gaining
a near monopoly over Iraqi oil would serve to stop and perhaps
reverse this deficit which would also strengthen the weakening
U.S. dollar.
However, the longer the war goes on, along with the increasing
effectiveness of the Iraqi insurgency in downing helicopters, destroying
armored vehicles and increasing the rate of killed and wounded
U.S. troops, it is draining the U.S. treasurynow, while the hoped
for Iraqi oil bonanza has yet to be realized-if ever!
Most importantly, the war is undermining the American Empire's
military and political position in Iraq as well as right here in the
imperialist heartland.
The US has broken from its winning policyduring the Cold War
The course being followed by the United States today in regard to
ts changed relationship with its imperialist allies during the Cold War
is a sharp departure from its successful leadership of world imperialism
against the Soviet superpower during the more than 40 years
of the Cold War.
During those years, it should be remembered, the policies followed
by the U.S. were guided by the need to maintain the unity of world
imperialism based on the defense of their most fundamental class
interests. The formidable power of the Soviet Superpower, its
satellites and neocolonial allies, kept the U.S. from going too far
in the direction of subordinating the interests of world imperialism
to the narrower interests of the American Empire.
The Bush administration's big mistake, as perceived by its critics,
is its break from the policy followed by the U.S. during the Cold War:
a policy that subordinated the narrower interests of U.S. imperialism
to those of world imperialism as a whole. That is, while the most sober
of the ruling class had no doubts about its ability to single-handedly
crush the army of Saddam Hussein and replace his dictatorship with
a "democratic" government subservient to the American Empire, they
knew it was something else again to suppress the Iraqi insurgency
solely with the help of the British Empire.
What divides the Bush administration from its critics is the former's
willingness to bet the family jewels on a long shot; and the latter's
belief that the gamble is not worth the effort. Besides, the critics may
well believe that it would be a better and safer bet to share the spoils
with the EU in exchange for their help in crushing the insurgency and
then play the inter-imperialist conflict by ear from then on.
Making bad matters worse is the recent deepening of the division
in the ruling class when the Iraq Study Group (ISG) published its Report
on the state of the war in the Middle East on December 6, 2006.
The ISG is a ten-person bipartisan panel appointed on March 15, 2006,
by the United States Congress.
The panel, composed of five Republicans and five Democrats, is no ordinary
congressional commission. All ten members had held high positions
in government including two former Secretaries of State, a former U.S.
Attorney General, a former U.S. Secretary of Defense, a retired Supreme
Court Justice, two former Senators, a former White House Chief of Staff
and one "highly respected" business executive.
Congress charged this prestigious panel with assessing the situation
in Iraq and the U.S.-led Iraq War and making policy recommendations.
The ISG Report, "The Way Forward-A New Approach," was widely interpreted
as being in essential accord with the political, military and diplomatic
orientation of the administration's Democratic Party critics. At the same
time, like all other of its critics, the ISG Report nevertheless made crystal
clear it's support for the main objectives in Iraq and the Middle East
of both the Bush Administration and it's loyal opposition.
However, what might be called the elder statespersons of the U.S. political
establishment who had been appointed to the ISG have taken the rebuff
by the Bush administration in stride. The reason for this is their obvious
concern that their differences, though very serious, should not be
allowed to get out of hand.
Obviously, it's not in either side's interests to let their real differences
over military and political strategy disrupt their need to stick together.
And secondly, an untoward sharpening of tone in their debate raises
the danger that one side or the other, in their zeal to score points
with the undecided sector of the ruling class, might lead them,
inadvertently, toward spilling the beans regarding the real reasons
for the Iraq War.
Ironically, while tens of thousands of antiwar protestors have been
chanting the slogan "No Blood for Oil!" starting with the first mass
march by ten million demonstrators in most of the world's major
cities back in February 2003, just weeks before the U.S. invasion
of Iraq had begun, both factions of the ruling class have issued little
more than one-sentence denials of the charge that oil had anything
to do with the invasion of Iraq.
But as the saying goes, though a lie can circle the globe before the
truth gets its shoes on, the truth will out in time.
Capitalism can no longer give its real reasons for war
There was a time-now long past-when capitalists organized and led
progressive wars. That is, wars such as the French and American
revolutions which were genuinely designed to improve the lives
of the great majority as well as advancing the interests of the
capitalist class. But even a progressive war like the U.S. Civil War-in
the hands of the capitalist class-killed many more innocent victims
than necessary.
That was more than a matter of being able to honestly give their real
reasons for war. Since there is no more effective propaganda than the
simple truth, it gave the revolutionary capitalist class a very powerful
weapon.
And no less importantly, the capitalist revolution also gave a powerful
impulse to the development of science and technology, which laid
the foundation for a more or less steady expansion of the productive
forces of capitalist society. All of these revolutionary transformations
being the precondition for higher living standards, greater control
over the forces of nature, all of which leads to curative medicines
and vaccines that prevent disease. After all, there is no greater
improvement in mass living standards than a longer and healthier life.
However, even when capitalism did what was needed to develop science
and technology, control over the forces of nature and development
of the forces of production, it was consciously motivated by capitalist
greed and at the expense of the unnecessary human suffering of the
very people producing all of society's wealth-its workers and farmers.
While it is important to give due credit to the progressive role played
by capitalism and capitalistsin the past, it's more important to recognize
that whatever positive role it has played has gradually turned into
its opposite simply because it has outlived its usefulness.
And while the ruling class of every one of history's outmoded social
orders have refused to pass peacefully into oblivion without a fight
to the death, the consequences for humanity has never been as potentially
unthinkable as they are today. And that's because the very same forces
enhancing the forces of mass production-science and technology-are
also the forces of mass destruction.
Today, capitalism's once great contributions to humanity are no longer
forces of mass construction and progress. Rather capitalism today has
become the most powerful force for mass destruction in world history.
Consequently, long before the Vietnam War, it had become increasingly
difficult for capitalists to justify their wars, wars which have been re-
occurring with greater frequency as time marches on.
That's why the ruling class is compelled to come up with spurious
rationalizations for wars that are intended to benefit the rich with
the bulk of the fighting and dying imposed on the poor.
That's why the bipartisan U.S. government is compelled to justify its
horrendous crimes against humanity with the false claim that the war
on Iraq, like so many others that preceded it, is intended to bring
freedom, democracy and a better life to the people of Iraq
and the United States.
That's why, both factions are as economically and politically bankrupt
as is the U.S. Treasury today and even more importantly, that's why
the global capitalist monetary system is also a financial bankruptcy
just waiting to happen.
And, finally, that's also why, in the final analysis, both factions are
on an irreversible trajectory toward wars, more wars and unless the
capitalist social and economic order is overthrown and replaced by
a socialist world without borders, it's doomed to end in a global
thermonuclear conflagration.
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17) The Antiwar Movement An Editorial Opinion
By Carole Seligman
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/marapr_07/marapr_07_10.html
A critical time for the antiwar movement arrived several months ago,
around the summer of 2006, when the tide of U.S. public opinion
turned against the war on Iraq. The majority of the American people
joined with the rest of humanity in opposing the war and they started
to weigh the various proposals on how to end it. This opposition and
open-mindedness continues to grow. It was reflected in the gigantic
antiwar mobilization in Washington, D.C., at the antiwar march
sponsored by United for Peace and Justice on January 27th.
The turn in massive war opposition signaled to the organized, independent,
antiwar movement that the time for unity in action against the war was
of critical importance. It also meant that there was a great need to get
our proposal for how to stop the killing and end the war out on the table
for the people to consider. The diverse organizations of the antiwar
movement all agree on how to end the war. They address these
demands to the government: Bring the troops home now! Stop
funding the war!
These are the means by which the antiwar movement champions the
cause of self-determination for the people of Iraq by ending U.S. war
and occupation. At the same time, these demands on the government
meet the needs of American workers not to be put in harms way, not
to kill, and not to die in an unjust war on behalf of the big oil corporations
and other private businesses who are raking in the profits as war contractors.
These demands put this antiwar movement way ahead of the Vietnam
antiwar movement in some respects. It took many years for the whole
movement against the Vietnam War to adopt the “Out Now!” demand.
There were a few years of debate and division within the movement
between the “Out Now!” wing of the movement and the liberals who
called for negotiations (between the United States and Vietnam’s National
Liberation Front) as a solution for ending that war. At that time, in the
1960s, only the conscious left wing of the movement, the socialists and
the radical pacifists, understood that the U.S. had no right to negotiate
anything in Vietnam, and that only unconditional withdrawal of the U.S.
from Vietnam could end the war.
Now, the debate on how to end the war is between the whole organized
antiwar movement on the one hand, and on the other, the various factions
of the government, whose views range from ending the war through total
U.S. military victory (Bush administration and some Congressional
supporters of both parties), to mild non-binding resolutions criticizing
the latest troop escalation, to liberals in Congress who call for withdrawal
within six months, or by the end of 2007, or later, or some other formula
which allows the U.S. to keep troops and bases there for some time to come.
So, why, if the national antiwar groups and coalitions agree that the war
must end, and they agree on how to end it, why can’t they manage
to put aside other differences of opinion in order to get the most massive
protest demonstrations of people in the streets on the same day and
the same locations? For example: Why can’t the UFPJ whole-heartedly
support and build the March 17th, 4 year anniversary of the war March
on the Pentagon initiated by the Act Now To Stop War and End Racism
(A.N.S.W.E.R.) Coalition?
The sticking point for the leadership of the biggest national antiwar
coalition seems to be an overly (and foolishly, I would argue) optimistic
hope that the new Democratic Party majority in Congress will actually
move to end the war. Some sections of the antiwar movement are tempted
to try to form an alliance with the Democratic Party “liberals” who advocate
gradual withdrawal (Woolsey, Lee, Waters), phased withdrawal (Obama),
or even re-deployment outside of Iraqi borders, but continue to encircle
the region with bases and warships (Murtha, Clinton).
Unfortunately, most of this Democratic Party majority is tainted with
its votes for the war budget, for the military, and even, in many cases,
for authorizing the war on Iraq. Even the most peace-talking Democrats
in Congress fail to put forward the sensible demands of complete and
unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq and the immediate
cessation of all funding for the war and occupation!
In San Francisco, for example, some sections of the antiwar movement
put great efforts into building a public meeting for Democratic Party
presidential hopeful, Dennis Kucinich, who talks a lot about peace, instead
of efforts to build a massive demonstration in San Francisco. Despite this
partial abstention, the S.F. demonstration on January 27th mobilized about
10,000 people for “Out Now!” It was a case of the unorganized people
having a more developed consciousness about how to end the war than
several of the antiwar organizations.
There seems to be a welling up of antiwar sentiment among the people.
The internet and Pacifica radio (and even National Public Radio, to some
extent) have daily reports on a wide range of actions of all kinds of protests
against the war—speak-outs, die-ins, sit-ins, civil disobedience, pickets,
marches, rallies, lobbying of Congresspersons, coordinated meetings
in localities, petitions, town meetings, referendums, to name only a few.
But the gigantic turnout on January 27 (half a million was the reported
size of the Washington, D.C. demonstration!) shows that masses want
to unite and express their opposition to the war in the most massive
numbers possible because in unity there is strength. And in massive
numbers, there is power. And the activists know that the potential for
mobilizing on a more massive scale than ever is now possible with the
new antiwar majority and the growing number of Iraq war veterans and
active duty soldiers who are marching and speaking out against the war.
This phenomenon, of active duty soldiers going into opposition to the
war at a time when there is no draft, is unprecedented.
The real reason for the hostility of UFPJ to the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition,
which sponsored most of the big national antiwar demonstrations to date,
is the Democratic Party’s absolute hostility to any criticism of U.S. imperialism’s
best ally in the Middle East—Israel. Even the most “liberal” antiwar Democrats
are supporters of Israeli apartheid and have endorsed full funding for the
Israeli regime’s occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people
indigenous to the land now claimed by Israel. Opposition to the war on
Iraq cannot be artificially separated from the cause of Palestine’s struggle
against Israeli oppression and occupation. Israel and the United States carry
out their oppressive policies in collaboration. With the U.S. backed Israeli
attack on Lebanon, its bombing of nuclear plants, and its development
of nuclear weapons, Israel and the United States are in active collusion
in planning an attack on Iran.
During the Vietnam War, when the U.S. spread its air strikes (the heaviest
tonnage dropped until that date in the history of air war) to Laos and
Cambodia, the U.S. antiwar movement responded accordingly, demanding
that the U.S. stop all the bombing and get out of all of Southeast Asia.
In the same way, the antiwar movement today must demand an end
to all U.S. funding of Israel, whose violent acts of war against the
Palestinians allow their land (the Israeli state) to be used as a base
of U.S. imperialism in the whole Middle East.
Even if the antiwar movement cannot reach an agreement on the need
for the U.S. to stop funding Israel, there should be an agreement
to unite in massive demonstrations to get the U.S. out of Iraq and
let people who have different views on Palestine bring their own
signs and slogans and placards to a unified march. The Democratic
Party should not set the agenda for the antiwar movement and dictate
who is welcome and who is not. Letting the Democratic Party operatives
play any role in determining the degree of unity in the antiwar movement
is akin to allowing the Democrats to divide the movement. That’s what
happened in the very early days of the Vietnam antiwar movement.
It was a conscious effort on the part of a section of the ruling class
to keep the peace movement within respectable (and harmless) bounds
of opposing war in general, but not actively opposing the specific
Vietnam War of U.S. imperialism!
War is the most basic prerogative that the class in power reserves
for itself. And the development of a massive antiwar movement that
challenges that prerogative—that opposes killing people in other countries
—has within it the seeds of profound social change. Without the ability
to make war, the ruling class, the capitalists who profit financially from
war (and an economy based on production for war), can lose their ability
to rule over the workers at home. Workers who begin to see that we have
more in common with workers and farmers in foreign lands than with
our own ruling class at home are ready to rule society in our own name
and for our own interests. That is a potential revolutionary development,
whose seeds are germinating within class society right now.
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18) Gang Injunctions
By Bonnie Weinstein
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/marapr_07/marapr_07_18.html
In San Francisco there is a new gentrification project going on in
Bayview/Hunters Point, a predominantly Black community made
up of people already displaced from the great Fillmore District
gentrification project in the late 1960s and early ‘70s.
When I first moved into a flat in San Francisco’s now famous Castro
district (bordering the Fillmore) in 1966, the community was half Black.
Within a year or two it became almost all white. The rents began
to skyrocket. Renovations were going on all over and it was not
uncommon to see Victorian houses moving through the streets
on super-wide trucks as the Fillmore and Castro districts were
being transformed and gentrified. Now Fillmore Street boasts
of the most expensive boutiques in the city. It borders on Pacific
Heights, the wealthiest community in the city, and one of the
wealthiest communities in the world.
Now, especially in this commuting-nightmare situation of today,
where many former residents of the city who were forced to move
into the suburbs are experiencing a threefold increase in their
commute time to and from work, the Bayview/Hunters Point
district with its warm San Francisco summers (the warmest
district, right on the bay and in close proximity to downtown)
sits on choice land.
The City and County of San Francisco is bound and determined
to transform it into luxury land but has to get rid of the Black
community first. It is using every means, including the implementation
of eminent domain (whereby local governments may force property
owners to sell out and make way for private economic development
when officials decide it would “benefit the public”); citing building-
inspection violations against elderly owners of dilapidated homes;
frequent code inspections of Black-owned businesses in the community,
etc., to achieve their goal of driving out the Black and poor from the
community.
They even disqualified a petition that gathered over 33,000 signatures
this summer to put a measure on the ballot against the current
gentrification plans in the Bayview/Hunters Point district. A court
case is pending against the city government office that dismissed
the petition out of hand and against all ballot regulations. (A declaration
by the city’s own signature-verification worker stated that the required
number of signatures were valid and received on time to qualify the
initiative for the ballot.)
They are beginning to use yet a new tactic—“gang injunctions”—
to facilitate the removal of the Black population. Gang injunctions have
been used to evict tenants from public housing. If you have a child in
a gang, you’re out. If you have a relative who’s a drug user and they
come to your house to stay a few days, you’re out. And so on.
Those the police identify as gang members are subject to immediate
search and arrest at any moment and are not allowed out in the street
after midnight; they can’t stand outside a store or in front of their
house together with one or more persons; and they’re barred from
public housing altogether.
What the City completely ignores is the unbelievably high unemployment
rate and rates of abject poverty in this same community, as well as in
similar poor communities across the country. Here are some statistics,
taken from a March 20, 2006, New York Times article, “Plight Deepens
for Black Men, Studies Warn,” by Erik Eckholm:
“The share of young Black men without jobs has climbed relentlessly,
with only a slight pause during the economic peak of the late 1990s.
In 2000, 65 percent of Black male high school dropouts in their 20s were
jobless—that is, unable to find work, not seeking it, or incarcerated.
By 2004, the share had grown to 72 percent, compared with 34 percent
of white and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts. Even when high school
graduates were included, half of Black men in their 20s were jobless
in 2004, up from 46 percent in 2000.... Incarceration rates climbed
in the 1990s and reached historic highs in the past few years. In 1995,
16 percent of Black men in their 20s who did not attend college were
in jail or prison; by 2004, 21 percent were incarcerated. By their
mid-30s, 6 in 10 Black men who had dropped out of school had
spent time in prison.
“In the inner cities, more than half of all Black men do not finish high
school.... With the shift from factory jobs, unskilled workers of all races
have lost ground, but none more so than Blacks. By 2004, 50 percent
of Black men in their 20s who lacked a college education were jobless,
as were 72 percent of high school dropouts, according to data compiled
by Bruce Western, a sociologist at Princeton and author of the forthcoming
book “Punishment and Inequality in America” (Russell Sage Press). These
are more than double the rates for white and Hispanic men....
“Among Black dropouts in their late 20s, more are in prison on a given
day—34 percent—than are working—30 percent—according to an
analysis of 2000 census data by Steven Raphael of the University
of California, Berkeley.”
These are conditions resulting from centuries of slavery, racism and
imperialist-capitalist exploitation around the world. And this is the daily
brutal reality that poor and working poor residents of Bayview/Hunters
Point and in all such districts around the country must endure. The same
thing is happening in poor white communities. The difference between
those in the inner cities and those in the deteriorating rural areas is that
nobody wants the land in the rural areas. It’s only logical that those who
can afford to pay the highest price for real estate will buy up the choicest
property in the country. This is happening in all the metropolitan cities
around the world—it’s a worldwide trend.
When the gang injunction was put into effect on November 22, 2006,
for the first time in San Francisco, I searched the Internet with the words
“gang injunction,” thinking that the relevant article pertaining to the S.F.
injunction would come up right away. To my surprise, lists of gang
injunctions came up all over the country—especially in areas that the
real estate is at a premium.
This is just one more arm of the war on the poor designed to divide
worker against worker and enforce oppressive police measures against
the poorest communities.
How capitalism benefits from criminalizationof the poor
The City and County of San Francisco are supposed to use only local
labor for their constructions projects—private or public. This sounds
good, except for the fact that anyone with a felony is disqualified.
Drug tests further screen prospective construction workers, almost
all of whom are young and reflect the high rate of drug use among
youth of all colors, economic status, and ethnic backgrounds in today’s
world. Statistics show that young people use drugs—certainly marijuana
—on a routine basis, yet drug screening disproportionately leaves Black
youth out of job opportunities since they represent the bulk of the
applicants for the hardest and lowest paid jobs.
Because Black and Latino youth are disproportionately arrested and
incarcerated, their criminal records further screen them out of job
opportunities. Youth with felony records are disqualified from government
financial aid for college—even community college. This is being fought
but the incidences of discrimination are rampant. The criminal records
follow these youth to adulthood and remain an anchor to poverty and
hopelessness.
San Francisco construction projects routinely violate the rule to hire
within the community and to employ union labor. Their excuse? They
can’t find a drug-free or criminal-record-free applicant. But there has
been a building boom of sorts, especially in California. In a review
of Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s new book, “Golden Gulag Prisons, Surplus,
Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California”, which appeared in the
S an Francisco Chronicle of December 31, 2006, author Tony Platt explains:
“California may lag behind many other states in high school graduation
rates, welfare benefits, and investment in public health, but when it comes
to punishment, we rank at or near the top. We’ve crammed 173,000 convicts
into the nation’s largest prison system, designed to house at least one-third
less. Our prison suicide and recidivism rates approach twice the national
average. And we have one of the most extravagant penal systems in the
country, costing taxpayers about the same as the state spends on higher
education.... Today, 90 penitentiaries, small prisons and camps stretch
across 900 miles of the fifth-largest economy in the world. It hasn’t always
been this way. Between 1852 and 1964, California built only 12 prisons.
Since 1984, the state has erected 43 penal institutions, making it a global
leader in prison construction.
“Most of the new prisons have been built in out-of-the-way rural areas,
making it easier to lose sight of the humanity of the people we warehouse:
mostly men (93 percent), mostly Latinos and African Americans (two-thirds),
mostly from big cities (60 percent from Los Angeles), and mostly unemployed
or the working poor.”
Now there is a massive criminalization of undocumented workers going
on across the country—many of whom share the same communities with
Black America. Police occupation of the inner cities is being beefed up and
expanded with new technology. They are putting up cameras on targeted street
corners; in front of every store; in front of public housing; and anywhere
young people tend to gather. In some of these communities it is illegal
for youth to gather, period—unless it’s at a private residence that isn’t
a housing project, a club, a store, or a ball game. I’m not kidding.
In San Francisco after 8:00 p.m., kids are not allowed to sit together in
a park. That’s illegal. So is hanging out together on a street corner or
on a front stoop.
Money for human needs, not war
Compounding the problems of youth, the general lack of employment,
and the high incarceration rate, is the fact that youth between 17 and
25 years of age are just now feeling the impact of the multi-tiered
union contracts their parents have been forced to sign. These kids
will earn, on average, half what their parents earned at the same job.
They won’t be able to afford to flee the nest. And many of them have
children of their own. Families are doubling up as they did in the
Depression.
The multi-trillion-dollar U.S. war machine is feeding on these very
youth. With nothing but illegal street sales that lead to incarceration,
or a job at the local burger joint or supermarket to look forward
to for an income, the military seems like a good alternative. Especially
when the recruiters lie and tell them they won’t go to war. The military
also preys on poor rural areas, where they are sometimes more successful
because the youth so desperately want to get out. Many of their parents
have suffered the effects of factories closing down and the lack
of employment that results. These youth are more vulnerable
to the allure of the military because there are no opportunities
available in these communities that will allow them to rise above
abject poverty.
The military is even promising instant citizenship to non-citizens
if they join. But less than 10 percent ever actually get citizenship;
it’s easy to be disqualified for myriad reasons—like getting drunk,
say. Oh, you still get to stay and be cannon fodder, but you are
disqualified for future citizenship, or even benefits. There are now
plans to search Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America for volunteers
for the U.S. military, offering the chance of citizenship as a lure. This
will be a mercenary army being paid with the “promise” of citizenship
and the “American way of life.”
This is nothing but gang mentality: “We will provide for you if you fight
for us. And if you don’t, we’ll relegate you to poverty and the constant
threat of deportation, imprisonment or worse.” Ironically, the capitalist
class cannot survive without the masses, but the masses can save all
of humanity by disarming the capitalists—both financially and militarily.
This is a job for organized labor!
The recent Swift raids and the courageous stand of the fellow workers
of those who were arrested is an inspiration. Autoworkers are also
beginning to organize into a fighting force. Joining all our forces
together can become the axis of a new revolutionary movement
to defend the rights of all workers—organized and unorganized,
documented and undocumented.
The Democratic Party, which intends to dazzle American workers with
a meager increase in the minimum wage—an increase that still leaves
the working poor living on starvation wages—will not be able to
significantly change the circumstance of the poor. The capitalist can’t
afford to raise the standard of living of the poor without dipping into
the untouchable zone of soaring private profits. They will and must
continue to squeeze more, send more troops, hire more police, and
militarily assault more of the world to maintain their domination and
control over wealth, power, and natural resources, no matter whose
borders they have to cross to get them. From oil to gold to diamond
mines—the capitalists want to get their hands on it all. And right now,
U.S. capitalists are the most powerful.
The American labor movement is in a position to organize the unorganized.
By taking up the rallying cry of Blacks, Latinos, and white workers
for a decent living wage, healthcare, and educational opportunities—
especially for the young—by taking up the rallying cry of the most
disadvantaged workers of every ethnic background, the American
labor movement can expand its own ranks, broaden its base of support,
and successfully challenge capitalism’s interminable greed.
But no matter how many victories workers win, as long as capitalism
is in control, every one of these victories will be continually challenged.
To defeat these challenges, workers need to stand united against
capitalists and capitalism. Together, the workers of the world are
an undefeatable force. We make everything work and we can make
it stop working. This is the power of organized labor acting in its
own defense.
As leaders of the working class, organized labor has the job of giving
workers the tools necessary to harness the great power of the growing
turmoil. Labor must show how to direct its energy against capitalism
by organizing working-class solidarity in defense of all workers—
documented or undocumented, Black or Latino or whatever race,
religion or ethnic background they are from. The captains of labor—
those who are already organized into a fighting force—must begin
to organize the unorganized working class to join their ranks throughout
the world and across all borders, as the capitalists do. This is the depth
and breadth of solidarity needed to turn back these attacks and disarm
and defeat the ruthless and bloodthirsty capitalist attacker.
The single-minded principles of international working-class solidarity
for a world socialist revolution, the legacy of Lenin and Trotsky based
upon the fundamental analysis of Marx and Engels, still form the bedrock
of the struggle for human emancipation to come. This is because the
basic contradictory forces between workers and their bosses is still the
reality of capitalism on an international scale. But it’s the workers
themselves—also positioned internationally—that have the jackhammers
and the know-how to break up the foundations of capitalism and render
their military might defenseless.
We are only as strong as our weakest link. Our success will depend
on how seriously the organized labor movement adheres to the principle
that an injury to one is an injury to all and carries it out in concrete and
unified defensive action.
Special role of international, revolutionary socialists
Revolutionary socialists have the further responsibility to make the class
line clear! At every opportunity we must show that, indeed, this is a class
struggle between two fundamentally contradictory forces—labor and capital
—and that either labor is victorious or life on our planet will end at the hands
of the capitalist class and their mighty weapons of earthly destruction.
We must take up the struggle of inner-city youth; we must defend
undocumented workers; we must demand an immediate end to the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the War on Terror! We must demand
that all the troops be brought home now and that all U.S. funding and
support to Israel be stopped immediately. We must demand that massive
financial reparations be made to the people this government falsely made
war upon—making sure the money comes from the profits of the giant
corporations that have already profited from this bloody war for oil.
We must further demand that the multi-trillion-dollar Pentagon budget—
voted for by a 100 to 0 vote by the U.S. Senate last year—should be reallocated
to fulfill the needs of the people! We should demand that we tax the rich
not the poor, and promote a progressive income tax beginning with incomes
over $100,000, say. Enforce a sharply increasing rate of tax for incomes
higher than $100,000 per year, i.e., a progressive income tax where the
rich pay more and at higher, graduated rates and the poor don’t pay at all.
We must demand that the giant war budget be redirected to social and human
services such as improved housing and healthcare for all workers, the sick,
the very young, and the elderly. (It is a testament to capitalist injustice that
we even have to spell this out!) We must defend the inalienable right of all
human beings to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That includes
the right to move to a location that will offer such when no such opportunity
exists where one lives. (Should we blame the masses who left the drought-
ridden dust bowl during the Great Depression to find work in California
to quench their thirst and feed their bellies, for leaving certain death
for a chance for survival?)
A powerful organized labor movement capable of organizing the unorganized
will be able to show concretely that universal labor solidarity in defense
of these basic human rights, whenever they are threatened, can ensure
them for everyone!
This will require that unconstitutional labor laws be revoked; that workers
from one industry, indeed, should go out on strike in support of workers
from other industries; that documented and native-born citizens should
support undocumented immigrant workers and their right to enjoy the same
pay, benefits, and conditions that they have. This kind of labor solidarity
increases workers’ power. In fact, workers in each industry should organize
themselves to fight for the same demands in each country across the globe
—after all; they very often work for the same corporations! The right
to strike should be exercised across all borders. That is workers’ solidarity!
These are just a few examples of the power and effectiveness of labor
solidarity and how it could solve so many of the economic problems
faced by the vast majority of humanity at the hands of the elite and
wealthy one percent. As dedicated Marxists, Leninists, and Trotskyists,
that’s our job. That’s what we’re supposed to aim the world’s working
class toward.
We already have a vast and powerful arsenal of Marxist thinking and
practice. We have the advantage of watching history in action from
a Marxist point of view and over a dynamic period of change—from
a period of an increase in the living conditions of workers to a marked,
overall decrease—in both living standards and in numbers of organized
workers in the past 50 or so years. We have seen the fall of the Soviet
Union, on the one hand, and the perseverance of the Cuban revolution
and the spread of its influence across Latin America and the world,
on the other. And we are witnessing a speed-of-light increase in the
gap between the wealthy and poor of the globe. Profits cross all borders
freely while workers are criminalized for seeking work where they can.
We are standing on the threshold of a new day. The economic impact
of lower wages and higher costs will force the issue. Workers will be
compelled to fight back and the capitalists themselves will be helpless
to stop it.
In the words of my mother, the great revolutionary fighter “I am an optimist.
I have witnessed the magnificent power of the workers in struggle for their
unions, women who have defended our clinics against the pro-life fanatics,
Blacks who have fought and won against the most racist system of Jim
Crow, and oppressed people who have the power to fight and the will
to win. If we are united and know who the real enemy is, we cannot lose.”
We who consider ourselves revolutionary Marxists, are obligated to
illuminate the glowing pathway of revolutionary worker’s solidarity
for a world socialist revolution, which will ultimately lead to human
salvation and universal emancipation.
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19) Chavez lays out collective property plan
By CHRISTOPHER TOOTHAKER, Associated Press Writer
Sun Mar 25, 10:50 PM ET
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/25/AR2007032501406.html
President Hugo Chavez said Sunday that his administration plans to
create "collective property" as part of sweeping reforms toward
socialism, and that officials would move to seize control of large
ranches and redistribute lands deemed "idle."
The Venezuelan leader, speaking on his television and radio program
"Hello President," said the government was "advancing quickly" with a
concept of "social, or collective, property" to be included in
forthcoming constitutional reforms.
"It's property that belongs to everyone and it's going to benefit
everyone," said Chavez, who vowed to undermine capitalism's continued
influence in Venezuela.
Chavez did not elaborate, but stressed that collective property must
benefit workers equally.
"It cannot be production to generate profits for one person or a
small group of people that become rich exploiting peons who end up
becoming slaves, living in poverty and misery their entire lives," he
said.
Government advisers preparing a blueprint for pending constitutional
reforms have floated proposals that would roughly define collective
property as state-owned assets such as farms that are managed by
workers who share profits.
Venezuela's government already helps organize and finance thousands
of cooperatives, but the state does not have full ownership of the
real estate or infrastructure used by most co-ops.
Chavez, who hosted Sunday's program from a ranch in Venezuela's sun-
baked plains, said his government planned to seize control of large
ranches and farms spanning more than 740,000 acres and redistribute
"idle" lands to the poor under a nationwide agrarian reform.
Re-elected to a fresh 6-year term in December, Chavez has accelerated
his push toward socialism by nationalizing Venezuela's largest
telecommunications company and the electricity sector, and imposing
greater state control over the oil and natural gas industries.
The leftist leader also plans to slap new luxury taxes on the wealthy
and do away with presidential term limits that would otherwise bar
him from running again in 2012.
Since reform began five years ago, officials have redistributed more
than 4.6 million acres of land that had been classified as
unproductive or lacked property documents dating back to 1847,
according to a recent government census.
Critics say reform has failed to revive Venezuela's agriculture
industry, which does not produce enough food to satisfy domestic
demand. The government has been forced to import food amid shortages
of staples such as meats, milk and sugar.
"If Mr. Chavez really wants to help Venezuela's poor farmers, he must
offer them technical assistance and sufficient financing because land
doesn't become productive without investment," said opposition leader
Alfonzo Marquina. "We're only seeing increasing shortages and more
expensive products."
Opponents accuse Chavez, a close ally of Cuban leader Fidel Castro,
of steering oil-rich Venezuela toward Cuba-style communism, becoming
increasingly authoritarian and dangerously dividing the country along
class lines.
Supporters say Venezuela's democracy is as healthy as ever under left-
leaning Chavez and applaud president's initiatives to improve living
conditions for the poor.
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20) Army deployed seriously injured troops
"Soldiers on crutches and canes were sent to a main desert camp
used for Iraq training. Military experts say the Army was pumping
up manpower statistics to show a brigade was battle ready."
By Mark Benjamin
Mar. 26, 2007
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/03/26/fort_irwin/
Mar. 26, 2007 | Last November, Army Spc. Edgar Hernandez,
a communications specialist with a unit of the Army's 3rd Infantry
Division, had surgery on an ankle he had injured during physical
training. After the surgery, doctors put his leg in a cast, and he
was supposed to start physical therapy when that cast came
off six weeks later.
But two days after his cast was removed, Army commanders
decided it was more important to send him to a training site
in a remote desert rather than let him stay at Fort Benning, Ga.,
to rehabilitate. In January, Hernandez was shipped to the
National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., where his unit,
the 3,900-strong 3rd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division,
was conducting a month of training in anticipation of leaving
for Iraq in March.
Hernandez says he was in no shape to train for war so soon
after his injury. "I could not walk," he told Salon in an interview.
He said he was amazed when he learned he was being sent to
California. "Did they not realize that I'm hurt and I needed this
physical therapy?" he remembered thinking. "I was told by my
doctor and my physical therapist that this was crazy."
Hernandez had served two tours in Iraq, where he helped maintain
communications gear in the unit's armored Bradley Fighting
Vehicles. But he could not participate in war maneuvers conducted
on a 1,000-square-mile mock battlefield located in the harsh
Mojave Desert. Instead, when he got to California, he was led
to a large tent where he would be housed. He was shocked by
what he saw inside: There were dozens of other hurt soldiers.
Some were on crutches, and others had arms in slings. Some
had debilitating back injuries. And nearby was another tent,
housing female soldiers with health issues ranging from injuries
to pregnancy.
Hernandez is one of a dozen soldiers who stayed for weeks in
those tents who were interviewed for this report, some of whose
medical records were also reviewed by Salon. All of the soldiers
said they had no business being sent to Fort Irwin given their
physical condition. In some cases, soldiers were sent there even
though their injuries were so severe that doctors had previously
recommended they should be considered for medical retirement
from the Army.
Military experts say they suspect that the deployment to Fort Irwin
of injured soldiers was an effort to pump up manpower statistics
used to show the readiness of Army units. With the military
increasingly strained after four years of war, Army readiness
has become a critical part of the debate over Iraq. Some
congressional Democrats have considered plans to limit the
White House's ability to deploy more troops unless the Pentagon
can certify that units headed into the fray are fully equipped
and fully manned.
Salon recently uncovered another troubling development in the
Army's efforts to shore up troop levels, reporting earlier this
month that soldiers from the 3rd Brigade had serious health
problems that the soldiers claimed were summarily downgraded
by military doctors at Fort Benning in February, apparently so that
the Army could send them to Iraq. Some of those soldiers were
among the group sent to Fort Irwin to train in January.
After arriving at Fort Irwin, many of the injured soldiers did not train.
"They had all of us living in a big tent," confirmed Spc. Lincoln Smith,
who spent the month there along with Hernandez and others. Smith
is an Army truck driver, but because of his health issues, which
include sleep apnea (a breathing ailment) and narcolepsy, Smith
is currently barred from driving military vehicles. "I couldn't go out
and do the training," Smith said about his time in California.
His records list his problems as "permanent" and recommend that
he be considered for retirement from the Army because of his health.
Another soldier with nearly 20 years in the Army was sent to Fort Irwin,
ostensibly to prepare for deployment to Iraq, even though she suffers
from back problems and has psychiatric issues. Doctors wrote
"unable to deploy overseas" on her medical records.
It is unclear exactly how many soldiers with health issues were sent
to the California desert. None of the soldiers interviewed by Salon
had done a head count, but all agreed that "dozens" would be
a conservative estimate. An Army spokesman and public affairs
officials for the 3rd Infantry Division did not return repeated
calls and e-mails seeking further detail and an explanation
of why injured troops were sent to Fort Irwin and housed
in tents there during January.
The soldiers who were at Fort Irwin described a pitiful scene.
"You had people out there with crutches and canes," said an Army
captain who was being considered for medical retirement himself
because of serious back injuries sustained in a Humvee accident
during a previous combat tour in Iraq. "Soldiers that apparently
had no business being there were there," another soldier wrote
to Salon in an e-mail. "Pregnant females were sent to the National
Training Center rotation" with the knowledge of Army leaders,
she said.
One infantry sergeant with nearly 20 years in the Army who had
already fought in Iraq broke his foot badly in a noncombat incident
just before being sent to Fort Irwin. "I didn't even get to put the
cast on," before going, he said with exasperation. He said doctors
put something like an "open-toed soft shoe" on his foot and put
him on a plane to California. "I've got the cast on now. I never even
got a chance to see the [medical] specialist," he claimed. The infantry
sergeant said life in the desert was tough in his condition. "I was on
Percocet. I couldn't even concentrate. I hopped on a plane and hobbled
around NTC on crutches," he said. He added, "I saw people who were
worse off than I am. I saw people with hurt backs and so on.
I started to think, 'Hey, I'm not so bad.'"
Master Sgt. Ronald Jenkins was one of those soldiers at NTC with
a hurt back, even though late last year, doctors recommended he
be considered for medical retirement. Jenkins, 42, has a degenerative
spine problem and a long scar down the back of his neck where
doctors fused three of his vertebrae during surgery. He takes
morphine for the pain in his neck and back.
"I slept on a damn metal cot for 26 days with serious back problems,"
Jenkins told Salon. "It was an unpleasant experience," he said, adding
that his condition worsened while he was there. Hernandez, the
communications specialist, said he reinjured his ankle at Fort Irwin,
leaving him hobbling around in the sand and gravel for a month.
When he returned to Fort Benning, Hernandez had to be put into
another cast. (He is still in that cast now and hopes to start physical
therapy when it comes off on March 26.)
"We could not train," Jenkins said. "Why were we even there?"
Military experts point to the brigade's readiness statistics, including
"unit status reports" that carefully track personnel numbers and are
sent up through the Army's chain of command. "There are a number
of factors used to establish whether a unit is mission-capable,"
explained John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an independent
organization that studies military and security issues. "One of them
is the extent to which it is fully manned," he said. Pike says he
suspects the injured soldiers were camped out at Fort Irwin so that
on paper, at least, "the unit would have a sufficient head count
to be mission-capable."
Lawrence Korb, who was an assistant secretary of defense for manpower
during the Reagan administration and is now with the liberal Center
for American Progress, says that the 3rd Brigade can show statistically
that more troops trained in California simply because they were there.
"Basically, they could say 90 percent went through Fort Irwin," Korb
said about the brigade.
But injured soldiers from the brigade were not just shuttled
to California; some were sent on to Iraq. Earlier this month Salon
reported that on Feb. 15, shortly after returning from Fort Irwin
to Fort Benning, 75 injured soldiers from the 3rd Brigade lined
up for screenings at the troop medical clinic. Some of the soldiers
there that day described cursory meetings with a division surgeon
-- meetings designed to downgrade their health problems, the
soldiers said, so that they could be deployed to the war zone.
Records for some of those soldiers show doctors had previously
concluded that those soldiers could not wear body armor because
of serious skeletal and other injuries.
A military official knowledgeable about the training in California
in January and the medical processing of the injured soldiers
at Fort Benning in February told Salon that commanders were
taking desperate actions to meet an accelerated deployment
schedule dictated by President Bush's so-called surge plan for
securing Baghdad. "None of this would have happened if we
had just slowed down a little bit," the military official said.
"A lot of people were under a lot of pressure at that time."
In an interview for the Salon report earlier this month, Col. Wayne
W. Grigsby Jr., the commander of the 3rd Brigade, did not dispute
that injured troops were being deployed, but insisted they would
be put in safe noncombat jobs once they were in Iraq.
Some of those soldiers have since been deployed, while others
fought orders to go to Iraq. Jenkins, with the bad back, even
appealed his case to the Army surgeon general. Three days
after he was quoted in the Salon report, Jenkins received official
word through his chain of command that he would not be going
to Iraq. Smith, the soldier with sleep apnea and narcolepsy,
who was also quoted in the Salon report, also had his deployment
orders dropped by the Army in mid-March.
Jenkins said the disregard for soldiers' health motivated him
to speak out, despite his fears that as an active-duty soldier
he could suffer reprisal from superiors. "I am a guy who has
been in the Army for 21 years," he said. "For me to speak
about this -- and risk everything -- then there has got to be
a problem. There has got to be an issue here."
Pete Geren, the acting Army secretary, told a Senate panel
on March 14 that the Army would investigate the injured soldiers'
claims that their medical records were modified at Fort Benning
in February in order for them to be sent to Iraq. House Armed
Services Committee chairman Ike Skelton, D-Mo., has asked the
Government Accountability Office to investigate. The Army
inspector general has also launched a probe. It remains unclear
if any of those probes will also look into injured soldiers' being
sent to the National Training Center at Fort Irwin in January.
Experts say there is little doubt that military readiness has
diminished with the strain of the Iraq war. But the Army says
the problem is limited to units recuperating in the United States,
and that by shifting around troops and equipment, brigades
going to Iraq are in tip-top shape. "Today's deployed soldiers
are the best-trained, best-equipped and best-led we have ever
sent into combat," Army vice chief of staff Gen. Richard Cody
told a House Armed Services Committee panel March 13.
"However, we've done this -- after five years of combat --
we've done this at the expense of our non-deployed forces,"
he admitted. "We do have shortages with the non-deployed
forces." The New York Times reported on March 20 that of the
20 Army brigades not currently deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan,
only one has enough equipment or soldiers to be sent quickly
into combat.
Indeed, there are indications that the problems go beyond Fort
Benning. When Skelton, the chairman of the House Armed Services
Committee, wrote to the GAO asking for an investigation into
the deployment of injured troops to Iraq, he added in that letter
that "the committee has received a number of phone calls and
letters from concerned service members and their families,
including similar allegations that injured and wounded service
members are being deployed into combat despite their injuries."
"My back was broken while I was in the military, I now have
a ruptured/bulging discs in my lumbar spine," one distressed
soldier wrote to Salon in an e-mail earlier this month. She said
she had been in the process of a medical review that would
end her service in the Army. But upon her return from the National
Training Center in California, she claimed, doctors at Fort Benning
"changed my profile and made me deployable." She pleaded
for help in bringing attention to her case, after frantically seeking
help through military and congressional channels.
"If anyone has the ability to help ... PLEASE do so," she wrote.
"I am heading to Kuwait tomorrow where I will then
go to Baghdad with my unit."
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21) War protest crowd count too low
Richard Becker
Monday, March 26, 2007
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/03/26/EDGC7N72TT1.DTL&hw=war+protest+crowd+count&sn=001&sc=1000
WHILE TENS of thousands of spirited anti-war marchers were still
entering the San Francisco Civic Center on Sunday, March 18, ANSWER
(Act Now to Stop War & End Racism) Coalition organizers got word that
a Chronicle reporter covering the event had already determined that
only 3,000 people were present. The San Francisco march was part
of a worldwide day of protest against on the fourth anniversary of the
U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Mainstream media undercounting of progressive demonstrations
is nothing new, but this one had a magician's touch. With just
a few keystrokes, a reporter made 90 percent of Sunday's crowd
disappear, hundreds of whom have since expressed their outrage.
Typical was the comment by one angry participant: "The Chron's
numbers were only off by about 1,000 percent."
We don't know why The Chronicle published such a shocking
undercount, but we do know that the first line of the Monday
Chronicle's report stated that just 3,000 people marched in San
Francisco on Sunday -- fewer, oddly enough, than took to the
streets in many U.S. cities. It wasn't just people in the Bay Area
who were misinformed by The Chronicle's article; the Associated
Press spread The Chronicle's ludicrous number across the country.
A Chronicle reporter claims to have counted 3,000 people in the
march. He agrees that it took 50 minutes for the entire march
to pass a fixed point as it made its way along Market and McAllister
streets. This does not make sense.
If people are walking at a moderate pace in pairs, 60 people will
pass a fixed point in roughly one minute. That would translate
into 3,000 people in 50 minutes. But the march wasn't made
up of people marching in pairs.
Many photos and video footage show the marchers were 20 to
30 across, filling wide streets. If The Chronicle maintains that
just 3,000 people joined the march, and the march took 50 minutes
to pass a stationary point, then only two or three rows of marchers
would have passed a fixed point in a minute, making the average
pace of the march about one step every 20 to 30 seconds.
That is impossible.
As TV news reports showed, it was a very dense, fast-moving
crowd. ANSWER organizers counted an average of 600 to 650
people passing per minute on McAllister St. between Hyde and
Leavenworth, from 1:42 p.m. to 2:32 p.m. Many people also
attended the opening or closing rallies without participating
in the march. At the peak of the rally, the Civic Center was about
two-thirds full. According to a 2003 Chronicle article, police
estimate that the Civic Center holds 42,000 people. As in every
similar demonstration, thousands of people who marched didn't
join the closing rally.
A Chronicle photo in the March 19 edition belied its own crowd
estimate. It shows just part of the packed center section of the
Civic Center early in the rally. When the photo was taken, the
march was still entering the plaza.
There are other factual inaccuracies in the article. Most notable
is the assertion of a stage speaker "telling the crowd it was
3,000 strong." As program manager, I can state definitively
that that is not true.
This is what actually happened: When informed of The Chronicle's
gross undercount, I took the microphone to say that there were
tens of thousands participating, and that The Chronicle estimate
was both ridiculous and demeaning. Those gathered expressed
thunderous agreement. This was the only mention of "3,000
people" from the stage. The reporter, in a serious journalistic
error, turned its meaning upside down.
Once again, The Chronicle failed to quote organizers on our
crowd estimate -- or anything else. In fact, no mention was
made of the sponsoring organization, the ANSWER Coalition.
Perhaps some reporters believe that stages and sound systems
spring out of the ground for anti-war rallies, and that thousands
of hours of volunteer labor doing logistical work and political
organizing are irrelevant to a growing movement.
Unlike corporate events, where official spokespersons are
invariably quoted, reporters covering progressive events
frequently ignore representatives of sponsoring organizations.
This practice continues despite a pledge made by Chronicle
editors to do otherwise after last May's huge immigrant rights
march sparked a similar controversy. When tens of thousands
of people come together to engage in collective free-speech
actions, they have the right to expect that their message and
very presence will be reported on in a fair and objective manner.
Richard Becker is the Western Regional Coordinator of the
ANSWER -- Act Now to Stop War & End Racism Coalition.
For more information and photos of the march, www.actionsf.org.
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22) India Is Colonising Itself
By Arundhati Roy & Shoma Chaudhuri
26 March, 2007
Tehelka
http://www.countercurrents.org/roy260307.htm
There is an atmosphere of growing violence across the
country. How do you read the signs? Do you think it
will grow more in the days to come? What are its
causes? In what context should all this be read?
You don‚t have to be a genius to read the signs. We
have a growing middle class, being reared on a diet of
radical consumerism and aggressive greed. Unlike
industrializing western countries which had colonies
from which to plunder resources and generate slave
labour to feed this process, we have to colonize
ourselves, our own nether parts. We‚ve begun to eat
our own limbs. The greed that is being generated (and
marketed as a value interchangeable with nationalism)
can only be sated by grabbing land, water and
resources from the vulnerable. What we‚re witnessing
is the most successful secessionist struggle ever
waged in Independent India. The secession of the
middle and upper classes from the rest of the country.
It‚s a vertical secession, not a lateral one. They‚re
fighting for the right to merge with the world‚s elite
somewhere up there in the stratosphere. They‚ve
managed to commandeer the resources , the coal, the
minerals, the bauxite, the water and electricity. Now
they want the land to make more cars, more bombs, more
mines ˆ super toys for the new super citizens of the
new superpower. So it‚s outright war, and people on
both sides are choosing their weapons. The government
and the corporations reach for Structural Adjustment,
the World Bank, the ADB, FDI, friendly court orders,
friendly policy makers, help from the Œfriendly‚
corporate media and a police force that will ram all
this down peoples‚ throats. Those who want to resist
this process have, until now, reached for dharnas,
hunger-strikes, satyagraha, the courts, and what they
thought was friendly media. But now, more and more are
reaching for guns. Will the violence grow? If the
Œgrowth rate‚ and the sensex are going to be the only
barometres the government uses to measure progress and
the well-being of people, then of course it will. How
do I read the signs? It isn‚t hard to read
sky-writing. What it says up there, in big letters is
this: The shit has hit the fan, folks.
You once remarked that though you may not resort to
violence yourself, you think it has become immoral to
condemn it, given the circumstances in the country.
Can you elaborate on this view?
I‚d be a liability as a guerilla! I doubt I used the
word Œimmoral‚-morality is an elusive business, as
changeable as the weather. What I feel is this:
Non-violent movements have, for decades knocked on the
door of every democratic institution in this country
and have been spurned and humiliated. Look at the
Bhopal Gas victims, the Narmada Bachao Andolan. The
NBA for example, had a lot going for it, high profile
leadership, media coverage, more resources than any
other mass movement. What went wrong? People are bound
to want to re-think strategy. When Sonia Gandhi begins
to promote Satyagraha at the World Economic Forum in
Davos it‚s time for us to sit up and think. For
example, is mass civil disobedience possible within
the structure of a democratic nation-state? Is it
possible in the age of disinformation and
corporate-controlled mass media? Are hunger-strikes
umblically linked to celebrity politics? Would anybody
care if the people of Nangla Machhi or Bhatti mines
went on a hunger-strike? Sharmila Irom has been on a
hunger strike for six years. That should be a salutary
lesson to many of us. I‚ve always felt that it‚s
ironic that hunger-strikes are used as a political
weapon in a land where most people go hungry anyway.
We are in a different time and place now. Up against a
different, more complex adversary. We‚ve entered the
era of NGOs ˆ or should I say the era of palthu shers
- in which mass action can be a treacherous business.
We have demonstrations which are funded, we have
sponsored dharnas and social forums which posture
militantly but never follow up on what they preach. We
have all kinds of Œvirtual‚ resistance. Meetings
against SEZs sponsored by the biggest promoters of
SEZs. Awards and grants for environmental activism and
community action given by corporations responsible for
devastating whole ecosystems. Vedanta, a company
mining bauxite in the forests of Orissa wants to start
a university. The Tatas have two charitable trusts
that directly and indirectly, fund activists and mass
movements across the country. Could that be why Singur
has drawn so much less flak than Nandigram, and why
they have not targeted, boycotted, gheraoed? Of course
the Tatas and Birlas funded Gandhi too ˆ maybe he was
our first NGO. But now we have NGOs who make a lot of
noise, write a lot of reports,but who the sarkar is
more than comfortable with. How do we make sense of
all this? The place is crawling with professional
diffusers of real political action. ŒVirtual
resistance‚ has become something of a liability.
There was a time when mass movements looked to the
courts for justice. The courts have rained down a
series of judgments that are so unjust, so insulting
to the poor in the language they use, they take your
breath away. A recent Supreme Court judgment allowing
the Vasant Kunj Mall to resume construction though it
didn‚t have the requisite clearances said in so many
words, that the question of Corporations indulging in
malpractice does not arise! In the era of corporate
globalization, corporate land-grab, in the era of
Enron and Monsanto, Halliburton and Bechtel, that‚s a
loaded thing to say. It exposes the ideological heart
of the most powerful institution in this country. The
judiciary along with the corporate press, is now seen
as the lynchpin of the neo-liberal project.
In a climate like this when people feel that they are
being worn down, exhausted by these interminable
Œdemocratic‚ processes, only to be humiliated
eventually, what are they supposed to do? Of course it
isn‚t as though the only options are binary ˆ violence
versus non-violence. There are political parties that
believe in armed struggle, but only as one part of
their overall political strategy. Political workers in
these struggles have been dealt with brutally, killed,
beaten, imprisoned under false charges. People are
fully aware that to take to arms is to call down upon
yourself the myriad forms of violence of the Indian
State. The minute armed struggle becomes a strategy,
your whole world shrinks and the colors fade to black
and white. But when people decide to take that step
because every other option has ended in despairˆshould
we condemn them? Does anyone believe that if the
people of Nandigram had held a Dharna and sung songs
the West Bengal Government would have backed down? We
are living in times, when to be ineffective is to
support the status quo (which no doubt suits some of
us). And being effective comes at a terrible price. I
find it hard to condemn people who are prepared to pay
that price.
You have been traveling a lot on the ground -- can you
give us a sense of the fissures you are seeing on the
ground. What are the trouble spots you have been to?
Can you outline a few of the combat lines in these
places?
Huge question ˆ what can I say? The military
occupation of Kashmir, neo-facism in Gujarat, civil
war in Chhattisgarh, MNCs raping Orissa, the
submergence of hundreds of villages in the Narmada
Valley, people living on the edge of absolute
starvation, the devastation of forest land, the Bhopal
victims living to see the West Bengal government
re-wooing Union Carbide ˆ now calling itself Dow
Chemicals - in Nandigram. I haven‚t been recently to
Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharshtra, but we know
about the almost hundred thousand farmers who have
killed themselves. We know about the fake encounters
and the terrible repression in Andhra Pradesh. Each of
these places is has its own particular history,
economy, ecology. None is amenable to easy analysis.
And yet there is connecting tissue, there are huge
international cultural and economic pressures being
brought to bear on them. How can I not mention the
Hindutva project, spreading its poison
sub-cutaneously, waiting to errupt once again. I‚d say
the biggest indictment of all is that we are still a
country, a culture a society which continues to
nurture and practice the notion of untouchability.
While our economists number-crunch and boast about the
growth rate, a million people, human scavengers - earn
their living carrying several kilos of other peoples‚
shit on their heads every day. And if they didn‚t
carry shit on their heads they would starve to death.
Some fucking superpower this.
How does one view the recent State and police violence
in Bengal?
No different from police and State violence anywhere
else ˆ including the issue of hypocrisy and
doublespeak so perfected by all political parties
including the mainstream Left. Are communist bullets
different from capitalist ones? Odd things are
happening. It snowed in Saudi Arabia. Owls are out in
broad daylight The Chinese Government tabled a bill
sanctioning the right to private property. I don‚t
know if all of this has to do with climate change. The
Chinese Communists are turning out to be the biggest
capitalists of the 21st century. Why should we expect
our own Parliamentary Left to be any different?
Nandigram and Singur are clear signals. It makes you
wonder ˆ is the last stop of every revolution advanced
capitalism? Think about it - the French Revolution,
the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, the
Vietnam War, the Anti- Apartheid struggle, the
supposedly Gandhian Freedom struggle in India∑what‚s
the last station they all pull in at? Is this the end
of imagination?
The Maoist attack in Bijapur -- the death of 55
policemen. Are the rebels only a flip face of the
State?
How can the rebels be the flip side of the state?
Would anybody say that those who fought against
Apartheid ˆ however brutal their methods - were the
flip side of the state? What about those who fought
the French in Algeria? Or those who fought the Nazis?
Or those who fought Colonial Regimes? Or those who are
fighting the US occupation of Iraq? Are they the flip
side of the State? This facile new report-driven
Œhuman rights‚ discourse, this meaningless
condemnation game that we all are forced to play,
makes politicians of us all and leaches the real
politics out of everything. However pristine we would
like to be, however hard we polish our halos, the
tragedy is that we have run out of pristine choices.
There is a civil war in Chattisgarh sponsored, created
by the Chattisgarh Government which is publicly
pursing the Bush doctrine ˆ if you‚re not with us, you
are with the terrorists. The lynch pin of this war,
apart from the formal security forces, is the Salwa
Judum ˆ a government backed militia of ordinary people
forced to take up arms, forced to become SPOs (Special
Police Officers). The Indian State has tried this in
Kashmir, in Manipur, in Nagaland. Tens of thousands
have been killed, hundreds of thousands tortured,
thousands have disappeared. Any Banana Republic would
be proud of this record.. Now the government wants to
import these failed strategies into the heartland.
Thousands of Adivasis have been forcibly moved off
their mineral ˆrich lands into police camps. Hundreds
of villages have been forcibly evacuated. Those lands,
rich in iron-ore are being eyed by corporations like
the Tatas and Essar. MOUs have been signed, but no one
knows what they say. Land Acquisition has begun. This
kind of thing happened in countries like Colombia ˆ
one of the most devastated countries in the world.
While everybody‚s eyes are fixed on the spiraling
violence between government backed militias and
guerilla squads, multinational corporations quietly
make off with the mineral wealth. That‚s the little
piece of theatre being scripted for us in Chattisgarh.
Of course it‚s horrible that 55 policemen were killed.
But they‚re as much the victims of Government policy
as anybody else. For the Government and the
Corporations they‚re just cannon fodder ˆ there‚s
plenty more where they came from. Crocodile tears will
be shed, prim TV anchors will hector us for a while
and then more supplies of fodder will be arranged. For
the Maoist guerillas the police and SPOs they killed
were the armed personnel of the Indian State, the
main, perpetrators of repression, torture, custodial
killings, false encounters. The ones whose
professional duties involve burning villages and
raping women. They‚re not innocent civilians ˆ if such
a thing exists - by any stretch of imagination.
I have no doubt that the Maoists can be agents of
terror and coercion too. I have no doubt they have
committed unspeakable atrocities. I have no doubt they
cannot lay claim to undisputed support from local
people ˆ but who can? Still, no guerrilla army can
survive without local support. That‚s a logistical
impossibility. And the support for Maoists is growing,
not diminishing. That says something. People have no
choice but to align themselves on the side of whoever
they think is less worse.
But to equate a resistance movement fighting against
enormous injustice, with the Government which enforces
that injustice is absurd. The government has slammed
the door in the face of every attempt at non-violent
resistance. When people take to arms, there is going
to be all kinds of violence ˆ revolutionary, lumpen
and outright criminal. The government is responsible
for the monstrous situations it creates.
The term Naxals and Maoists and outsiders is being
used very loosely these days. Can you declutter it.
ŒOutsiders‚ is a generic accusation used in the early
stages of repression by governments who have begun to
believe their own publicity and can‚t imagine that
people have risen up against them. That‚s the stage
the CPI (M) is at now in Bengal, though some would say
repression in Bengal is not new, it has only moved
into higher gear.. In any case what‚s an outsider? Who
decides the borders? Are they village boundaries?
Tehsil? Block? District? State? Is narrow regional and
ethnic politics the new communist mantra? About Naxals
and Maoists ˆ well∑ India is about to become a police
state in which everybody who disagrees with what‚s
going on risks being called a terrorist. Islamic
terrorists have to be Islamic ˆ so that‚s not good
enough to cover most of us. They need a bigger
catchment area. So leaving the definition loose,
undefined, is effective strategy, because the time is
not far off when we‚ll all be called Maoists or
Naxalites, terrorists or terrorist sympathisers and
shut down, by people who don‚t really know ˆ or care
-who Maoists or Naxalites are. In villages of course
that has begun ˆ thousands of people are being held in
jails across the country, loosely charged with being
terrorists trying to overthrow the state. Who are the
real Naxalites and Maoists? I‚m not an authority on
the subject, but here‚s a very rudimentary potted
history.
The Communist Party of India the CPI was formed in
1925. The CPI (M) Communist Party Marxist- split from
the CPI in 1964 and formed a separate party. Both of
course were parliamentary political parties. In 1967
the CPI (M) along with a splinter group of the
Congress, came to power in West Bengal. At the time
there was massive unrest among starving peasantry in
the countryside. Local leaders of the CPI(M) ˆ Kanu
Sanyal and Charu Mazumdar led a peasant uprising in
the district of Naxalbari which is where the term
Naxalites comes from. In 1969 the government fell and
the Congress came back to power under Siddharta
Shankar Ray. The naxalite uprising was mercilessly
crushed - Mahashweta Devi has written powerfully about
this time. In 1969 the CPI (ML) ˆ Marxist Leninist
split from the CPI (M). A few years later around 1971,
the CPI (ML) devolved into several parties: the CPI
-ML (Liberation) largely centred in Bihar, CPI ˆML
(New Democracy) functioning for the most part out of
Andhra Pradesh and Bihar, the CPI-ML (Class Struggle)
mainly in Bengal. These parties have been generically
baptized ŒNaxalites.‚ They see themselves as Marxist
Leninist, not strictly speaking Maoist. They believe
in elections, mass action and, when, absolutely pushed
to the wall or attacked- armed struggle. The MCC ˆ the
Maoist Communist Centre at the time mostly operating
in Bihar was formed in 1968. The PW Peoples War,
operational for the most part in Andhra Pradesh was
formed in 1980. Recently, in 2004 the MCC and the PW
merged to form the CPI (Maoist) They believe in
outright armed struggle and the overthrowing of the
state. They don‚t participate in elections. This is
the party that is fighting the guerilla war in Bihar,
Andhra Pradesh, Chattisgarh and Jharkhand.
The Indian state and media largely view the Maoists as
"internal security" threat. Is this the way to look at
them?
I‚m sure the Maoists would be flattered to be viewed
in this way.
The Maoists want to bring down the State. Given the
autocratic ideology they take their inspiration from,
what alternative would they set up? Wouldn't their
regime be an exploitative autocratic violent one as
well? Isn't their action already exploitative of
ordinary people? Do they really have the support of
ordinary people?
I think it‚s important for us to acknowledge that both
Mao and Stalin are dubious heroes with murderous
pasts. Tens of millions of people were killed under
their regimes. Apart from what happened in China and
the Soviet Union, Pol Pot, with the support of the
Chinese communist party (while the West looked away
discreetly) wiped out two million people in Cambodia
and brought millions of people to the brink of
extinction from disease and starvation. Can we pretend
that China‚s cultural revolution didn‚t happen? Or
that that millions of people in the Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe were not victims of labour camps,
torture chambers, the network of spies and informers,
the secret police. The history of these regimes is
just as dark as the history of Western Imperialism,
except for the fact that they had a shorter life-span.
We cannot condemn the occupation of Iraq, Palestine
and Kashmir while we remain silent about Tibet and
Chechnya. I would imagine that for the Maoists, the
Naxalites as well as the mainstream Left, being honest
about the past is important to strengthen peoples‚
faith in the future. One hopes the past will not be
repeated, but denying that it ever happened doesn‚t
help inspire confidence∑.Nevertheless, in this part of
the world, the Maoists in Nepal have waged a brave and
successful struggle against the monarchy in Nepal.
Right now in India the Maoists and the various Marxist
Leninist Groups are leading the fight against immense
injustice in India. They are fighting not just the
State, but feudal landlords and their armed militias.
They are the only people who are making a dent. And I
admire that. It may well be that when they come to
power they will as you say, be brutal, unjust and
autocratic, even worse than the present government.
Maybe, but I‚m not prepared to assume that in advance.
If they are, we‚ll have to fight them too. And most
likely someone like myself will be the first person
they‚ll string up from the nearest tree ˆ but right
now, it is important to acknowledge that they are
bearing the brunt of being at the forefront of
resistance. Many of us are in a position where we have
are beginning to align ourselves on the side of those
who we know have no place for us in their religious or
ideological imagination. It‚s true that everybody
changes radically when they come to power ˆ look at
Mandela‚s ANC. Corrupt, capitalist, bowing to the IMF,
driving the poor out of their homes ˆ honouring
Suharto the killer of hundreds of thousands of
Indonesian communists with South Africa‚s highest
civilian award. Who would have thought it could
happen? But does this mean South Africans should have
backed away from the struggle against apartheid? Or
that they should regret it now? Does it mean Algeria
should have remained a French Colony, that Kashmiris,
Iraqis and Palestinians should accept military
occupation? That people whose dignity is being
assaulted should give up the fight because they can‚t
find saints to lead them into battle?
Is there a communication breakdown in our society?
Yes.
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23) New Coin of the Realm
Editorial
March 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/23/opinion/23fri2.html
President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela had an especially good time baiting
President Bush during their recent competing tours of Latin America.
But demagoguery and showmanship will do nothing to solve Venezuela's
20 percent inflation rate — now the highest in Latin America — and
growing food shortages that are punishing the poor whose interests Mr.
Chávez so loudly declaims.
Venezuela's biggest problem is that there is no one to question Mr.
Chávez's increasingly erratic decisions. The National Assembly has
given him the power to rule by decree for 18 months. So instead of
seriously addressing Venezuela's serious problems, the showman has
settled for more showmanship.
As Simon Romero reported in The Times, Venezuela's currency, the
bolívar, has lost about a fifth of its value since January. The
government has now announced it will introduce a new "bolívar fuerte,"
or strong bolívar — worth 1,000 old bolívar, or roughly 25 American
cents. It is also reintroducing a coin known as the locha — to be
worth one-eighth of a bolívar fuerte — which last circulated in the
1970s.
Mr. Chávez appears to be counting on a psychological boost from a
currency with three fewer zeros and a coin that evokes financially
happier days. But by drawing attention to the bolívar's recent
weakness and — even worse — to the government's capricious response,
the maneuvers could further undermine confidence, rather than raise
it.
Government spending — fueled by the nation's oil wealth — rose an
extraordinary 48 percent last year, and is one of the main forces
driving inflation. Private-sector investment, meanwhile, has weakened
since Mr. Chávez decided to nationalize utility companies earlier this
year.
Price controls intended to help the poor buy food and hold down rising
prices have led to a scarcity of staples like beef, chicken and milk.
Threats to nationalize grocery stores and jail their owners — whom Mr.
Chávez accuses of hoarding — have only made the situation worse.
Venezuela still has billions of dollars in foreign currency reserves.
And Mr. Chávez has used some of the oil wealth to push social programs
— including for literacy and health clinics — to improve the lives of
Venezuela's poor. But we fear that any good is quickly being undone by
the old strongman formula of cronyism, corruption and incompetence.
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LINKS AND VERY SHORT STORIES
Note: Op-Eds from the Times can't be viewed without subscription to
Times Select. They are posted here only after I have previously published
them in full and they can still be found on the archive at www.bauaw.org...bw
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Failing Schools See a Solution in Longer Day
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO
March 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/26/us/26schoolday.html?ref=us
Aged, Frail and Denied Care by Their Insurers
By CHARLES DUHIGG
March 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/26/business/26care.html?hp
Chavez Launches Formation of Unified Socialist Party of Venezuela
Sunday, Mar 25, 2007
By: Chris Carlson - Venezuelanalysis.com
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news.php?newsno=2250
Four Years Later in Iraq
Where are the Laptop Bombardiers Now?
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Weekend Edition
March 24 / 25, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.com/cockburn03242007.html
The Women’s War
By SARA CORBETT
Editors' Note Appended
March 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/magazine/18cover.html
City Police Spied Broadly Before G.O.P. Convention
By JIM DWYER
For at least a year before the 2004 Republican National Convention,
teams of undercover New York City police officers traveled to cities
across the country, Canada and Europe to conduct covert observations
of people who planned to protest at the convention, according
to police records and interviews.
March 25, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/nyregion/25infiltrate.html?hp
Another Casualty: Coverage of the Iraq War
Dahr Jamail | March 23, 2007
Editor: Erik Leaver, IPS and John Feffer, IRC
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org
"Iraq is the most dangerous place in the world for journalists.
Along with names and dates, the Brussels Tribunal has listed
the circumstances under which Iraqi media personnel have been
killed since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. This
extremely credible report cites 195 as dead. If non-Iraqi media
representatives are included, the figure goes beyond 200.
Both figures are well in excess of the media fatalities suffered
in Vietnam or during World War II."
http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com/hard_news/archives/newscommentary/www.fpif.org
Kentucky: New Mine Rules
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Coal mines will get increased scrutiny from state inspectors under
legislation signed into law by Gov. Ernie Fletcher. The law will require
inspectors from the Office of Mine Safety and Licensing to double
their visits to underground coal mines to a minimum of six a year.
Two of the annual inspections must focus on electrical work inside
mines. The law also requires at least one member of every underground
crew to have a detector to monitor for the explosive gas methane.
Miners working alone would also have a detector. The law follows
one of the deadliest years in recent history for Kentucky coal miners;
16 miners were killed in 2006.
March 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/24/us/24brfs-MINE.html
Three Detectives Are Indicted in 50-Shot Killing in Queens
By AL BAKER
March 17, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/17/nyregion/17grand.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Taming Fossil Fuels
Editorial
The importance of these projects cannot be overstated. As a report
released Wednesday by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology observed, coal produces more than 30 percent of America’s
carbon dioxide emissions."
March 17, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/17/opinion/17sat1.html?hp
Utah Sets Rigorous Rules for School Clubs, and Gay Ones May Be Target
By KIRK JOHNSON
March 17, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/17/education/17utah.html?ref=us
TERRORISM
Cuba -- How scared should we be?
BY PHILIP PETERS
http://www.miamiherald.com/851/story/43180.html
The Ides of March 2003
By FRANK RICH
Op-Ed Columnist
March 18, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/opinion/18rich.html?hp
In March, Protesters Recall War Anniversaries
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and SARAH ABRUZZESE
March 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/us/18protest.html
The Army, After Iraq
Editorial
March 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/opinion/nyregionopinions/18sun1.html?hp
Death of a Marine
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
March 19, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/03/19/opinion/19herbert.html?hp
The Medicaid Documentation Mess
Editorial
March 19, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/19/opinion/19mon1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Tens of Thousands March on the Pentagon
Riot Police Block Buses and Deny Access to People
Coming to the Demonstration, plus, full
Message from Immortal Technique
on being denied entrance to the March
on the Pentagon
March 17, 2007
http://www.pephost.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=8421&JServSessionIdr004=19pxequxo1.app8a
Students’ Right to Free Speech
Editorial
March 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/opinion/20tue1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Stepping on the Dream
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
March 22, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/03/22/opinion/22herbert.html?hp
Congress’s Challenge on Iraq
Editorial
March 22, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/22/opinion/22thu1.html?hp
Illegal Worker, Troubled Citizen and Stolen Name
By JULIA PRESTON
March 22, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/22/us/22raids.html?ref=us
Abolishing the Middlemen Won’t Make Health Care a Free Lunch
By TYLER COWEN
March 22, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/22/business/22scene.html
Foreclosures Force Suburbs to Fight Blight
By ERIK ECKHOLM
"Noting that the problem with the desertion numbers arises
when the service cannot find enough recruits to fill certain
crucial specialties like medical experts and bomb defusers..."
March 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/23/us/23vacant.html?ref=us
Army Revises Upward Number of Desertions in ’06
By PAUL von ZIELBAUER
March 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/23/us/23awol.html?ref=us
New to Job, Gates Argued for Closing Guantánamo
By THOM SHANKER and DAVID E. SANGER
"Some administration lawyers are deeply reluctant to move
terrorism suspects to American soil because it could increase
their constitutional and statutory rights..."
March 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/23/washington/23gitmo.html?ref=us
State Takes Control of Troubled Public Schools in St. Louis
By MALCOLM GAY
March 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/23/us/23missouri.html
They’re Looking for a Few Good Coal Miners
By STUART ELLIOTT
"YOU load 16 tons, and what do you get? How about a paycheck,
vacations, a dental plan and a 401(k)?"
[The Army is looking for a few good bomb diffusers, too!...bw]
March 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/23/business/media/23adco.html?ref=business
California: The Land of Milk and Megadairies
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
The Tulare County Board of Supervisors approved a plan Tuesday
for two 160-acre megadairies to be built across from Colonel Allensworth
State Historic Park, a site dedicated to the history of California’s first
and only black planned community. The county approved the proposal
by a local rancher to establish two dairies with some 16,000 cows near
the park, in a remote corner of the Central Valley. Citizens, including
some from the original Allensworth Colony, and environmentalists
have protested the plan.
March 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/23/us/23brfs-MILK.html
California: Marijuana Card Ruling
By CAROLYN MARSHALL
An appeals court ruled that California’s medical marijuana law does
not automatically shield patients from searches by law enforcement.
The unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel of the State Court of
Appeal said a Napa County sheriff’s deputy had probable cause to
search the vehicle of Gabriel Strasburg, who claimed to have a medical
marijuana card, in October 2005. The law limits patient possession
to eight ounces. The deputy claimed Mr. Strasburg had about 23
ounces and a scale and was smoking in a parked car. Mr. Strasburg
pleaded no contest to misdemeanor possession but appealed, claiming
an unlawful search. In the decision, Justice James Marchiano said the
amount of marijuana found in the search left “a strong suggestion”
that Mr. Strasburg “was using the act as a façade to conceal illegal
activity.”
March 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/23/us/23brfs-CALIFORNIA.html
Rat Poison Found in Tainted Pet Food
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:09 p.m. ET
March 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Pet-Food-Recall.html?ref=us
French Court Rules for Newspaper That Printed Muhammad Cartoons
By CRAIG S. SMITH
March 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/23/world/europe/23france.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Kentucky: Soldier Pleads Guilty
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
A soldier pleaded guilty to being an accessory to the rape and murder
of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the killing of her family. The soldier,
Pfc. Bryan Howard, 19, also pleaded guilty to conspiracy to obstruct
justice. Under a plea deal, Private Howard will not serve more than
27 months if he obeys certain conditions. Private Howard’s rank will
be reduced, and he will be dishonorably discharged. He will also have
to testify against others charged in the attacks last year in Mahmoudiya,
20 miles south of Baghdad.
March 22, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/22/us/22brfs-SOLDIER.html
After Bell, Critics Want Mayor to Broaden Focus on Police
By DIANE CARDWELL
March 21, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/21/nyregion/21bloomberg.html?ref=nyregion
Israel Workers Launch General Strike
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:45 a.m. ET
March 21, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Israel-Strike.html
Britain Proposes Allowing Schools to Forbid Full-Face Muslim Veils
By ALAN COWELL
March 21, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/21/world/europe/21britain.html?ref=world
F.B.I. Is Warned Over Its Misuse of Data Collection
By SCOTT SHANE
March 21, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/21/washington/21fbi.html?hp
Doctors’ Ties to Drug Makers Are Put on Close View
By GARDINER HARRIS and JANET ROBERTS
March 21, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/21/us/21drug.html?hp
No Paradise for Criminals Deported to Jamaica
By MARC LACEY
March 21, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/21/world/americas/21kingston.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070402/scahill
Dems Abandon War Authority Provision
By DAVID ESPO and MATTHEW LEE
Associated Press
03.13.07, 12:28 AM ET
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/03/13/ap3510002.html
Defense Spending Soars to Highest Levels Since World War II
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines07/0320-05.htm
Iraqis Increasingly Pessimistic, Anti-US
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines07/0320-02.htm
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GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS
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A NEW LOOK AT U.S. RADIOACTIVE WEAPONS
Join us in a campaign to expose and stop the use of these illegal weapons
http://poisondust.org/
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You may enjoy watching these.
In struggle
Che:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqcezl9dD2c
Leon:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukkFVV5X0p4
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FIGHTBACK! A Collection of Socialist Essays
By Sylvia Weinstein
http://www.walterlippmann.com/sylvia-weinstein-fightback-intro.html
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END ALL U.S. AID TO ISRAEL!
Stop funding Israel's war against Palestine
Complete the form at the website listed below with your information.
https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Advocacy?
JServSessionIdr003=cga2p2o6x1.app2a&cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=177
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Sand Creek Massacre
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FEATURED AT NATIVE AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL:
http://www.aberdeennews.com/mld/aberdeennews/news/local/16035305.htm
(scroll down when you get there])
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING
WRITER/FILMMAKER DONALD L. VASICEK REPORT:
http://www.digitalcinemareport.com/sandcreekmassacre.html
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FINALIST IN DOCUMENTARY CHANNEL COMPETITION (VIEW HERE):
http://www.docupyx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=41
VIEW "THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FILM MOVIE OF THE WEEK FOR FREE HERE:
http://twymancreative.com/twymanc.html
On November 29, 1864, 700 Colorado troops savagely slaughtered
over 450 Cheyenne children, disabled, elders, and women in the
southeastern Colorado Territory under its protection. This act
became known as the Sand Creek Massacre. This film project
("The Sand Creek Massacre" documentary film project) is an
examination of an open wound in the souls of the Cheyenne
people as told from their perspective. This project chronicles
that horrific 19th century event and its affect on the 21st century
struggle for respectful coexistence between white and native
plains cultures in the United States of America.
Listed below are links on which you can click to get the latest news,
products, and view, free, "THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" award-
winning documentary short. In order to create more native
awareness, particularly to save the roots of America's history,
please read the following:
Some people in America are trying to save the world. Bless
them. In the meantime, the roots of America are dying.
What happens to a plant when the roots die? The plant dies
according to my biology teacher in high school. American's
roots are its native people. Many of America's native people
are dying from drug and alcohol abuse, poverty, hunger,
and disease, which was introduced to them by the Caucasian
male. Tribal elders are dying. When they die, their oral
histories go with them. Our native's oral histories are the
essence of the roots of America, what took place before
our ancestors came over to America, what is taking place,
and what will be taking place. It is time we replenish
America's roots with native awareness, else America
continues its decaying, and ultimately, its death.
You can help. The 22-MINUTE SAND CREEK MASSACRE
DOCUMENTARY PRESENTATION/EDUCATIONAL DVD IS
READY FOR PURCHASE! (pass the word about this powerful
educational tool to friends, family, schools, parents, teachers,
and other related people and organizations to contact
me (dvasicek@earthlink.net, 303-903-2103) for information
about how they can purchase the DVD and have me come
to their children's school to show the film and to interact
in a questions and answers discussion about the Sand
Creek Massacre.
Happy Holidays!
Donald L. Vasicek
Olympus Films+, LLC
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Vasicek,+Don
http://www.donvasicek.com
dvasicek@earthlink.net
303-903-2103
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FEATURED AT NATIVE AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL:
http://www.aberdeennews.com/mld/aberdeennews/news/local/16035305.htm
(scroll down when you get there])
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING
WRITER/FILMMAKER DONALD L. VASICEK REPORT:
http://www.digitalcinemareport.com/sandcreekmassacre.html
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FINALIST IN DOCUMENTARY CHANNEL COMPETITION (VIEW HERE):
http://www.docupyx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=41
VIEW "THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FILM MOVIE OF THE WEEK FOR FREE HERE:
http://twymancreative.com/twymanc.html
SHOP:
http://www.manataka.org/page633.html
BuyIndies.com
donvasicek.com.
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