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"We are far from that stage today in our era of the absolute
lie; the complete and totalitarian lie, spread by the
monopolies of press and radio to imprison social
consciousness." December 1936, "In 'Socialist' Norway,"
by Leon Trotsky: “Leon Trotsky in Norway” was transcribed
for the Internet by Per I. Matheson [References from
original translation removed]
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/12/nor.htm
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Wealth Inequality Charts
http://www.faireconomy.org/research/wealth_charts.html
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MALCOLM X: Oxford University Debate
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmzaaf-9aHQ
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ADDICTED TO WAR
Animated Video Preview
Narrated by Peter Coyote
Is now on YouTube and Google Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZwyuHEN5h8
We are planning on making the ADDICTED To WAR movie.
Can you let me know what you think about this animated preview?
Do you think it would work as a full length film?
Please send your response to:
Fdorrel@sbcglobal. net or Fdorrel@Addictedtow ar.com
In Peace,
Frank Dorrel
Publisher
Addicted To War
P.O. Box 3261
Culver City, CA 90231-3261
310-838-8131
fdorrel@addictedtow ar.com
fdorrel@sbcglobal. net
www.addictedtowar. com
For copies of the book:
http://www.addictedtowar.com/book.html
OR SEND CHECK OR MONEY ORDER TO:
Frank Dorrel
P.O. BOX 3261
CULVER CITY, CALIF. 90231-3261
fdorrel@addictedtowar.com
$10.00 per copy (Spanish or English); special bulk rates
can be found at: http://www.addictedtowar.com/bookbulk.html
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) Tale of last 90 minutes of woman's life
County officials express dismay at the events surrounding
the recent controversial death at King-Harbor hospital.
One nurse has resigned.
By Charles Ornstein
Times Staff Writer
May 20, 2007
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-king20may20,0,6057993.story?coll=la-home-center
2) REFLECTIONS BY THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF
THE ENGLISH SUBMARINE
By Fidel Castro Ruz
May 21, 2007
http://www.granma.cubaweb.cu/secciones/reflexiones/ing-009.html
3) Racism goes on trial again in America's Deep South
“The prosecution of three black Louisiana youths
reveals the rise of discrimination by stealth.”
by Tom Mangold in Jena, Louisiana
The Observer (UK) - May 20, 2007
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2083762,00.html
4) San Francisco Labor Council Resolution
Denounces the Proposed Iraqi Oil Law
Hands Off Iraqi Oil!
5) Immigration Raid Leaves Sense of Dread in Hispanic Students
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
WILLMAR, Minn.
May 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/23/education/23education.html?ref=us
6) Paramilitary Ties to Elite In Colombia Are Detailed
Commanders Cite State Complicity in Violent Movement
By Juan Forero
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, May 22, 2007; A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/21/AR2007052101672.html?nav=rss_world
7) Poll Shows Opposition to Iraq War at All Time High
By DALIA SUSSMAN
May 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/24/us/politics/25cnd-poll.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1180030289-x3l5VD/HWQ0i9QWaTIxPpw
8) Graft Mars the Recruitment of Mexican Guest Workers
By ELISABETH MALKIN
May 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/24/world/americas/24unions.html?ref=world
9) Castro, in First Details of Health Crisis,
Says He Is Back on Solid Food
By REUTERS
May 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/24/world/americas/24CUBA.html
10) Where Nobody Is Accountable
Inter Press Service
Ali al-Fadhily*
May 21, 2007
http://dahrjamailiraq.com
11) Bolivia: Capitalism Humanity's Worst Enemy
Associated Press
May 23, 2007
http://www.cbn.com/CBNnews/163172.aspx
12) Black Leadership and
Black Mass Incarceration
By Bruce Dixon
Black Agenda Report (BAR)
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=227&Itemid=33
13) Immigrants and Politics
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
May 25, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/05/25/opinion/25krugman.html?hp
14) Democracy or Puppetry?
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
prisonradio.org
15) Bush Expects Everything to be
Solved with a Bang
By Fidel Castro
May 25, 2007
VIA email from: Walter Lippmann
walterlx@earthlink.net
16) Chávez creates state of fear among businesses
By GERARDO REYES
MIAMI HERALD
Posted on Fri, May. 25, 2007
http://www.miamiherald.com/103/story/117973.html
17) Arrested While Grieving
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
May 26, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/05/26/opinion/26herbert.html?hp
18) Some Union Local Members Call for Using Mail Ballots
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
May 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/26/nyregion/26labor.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
19) War Without End
Editorial
May 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/27/opinion/27sun1.html?hp
20) Michael Moore's Math
‘Sicko,’ Castro and the ‘120 Years Club’
By ANTHONY DePALMA
May 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/27/weekinreview/27depalma.html?ref=world
21) Remembrance, and Protest, for a Man Slain by an Officer
By MANNY FERNANDEZ
May 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/27/nyregion/27funeral.html?ref=nyregion
22) "Baghdad is a smashed city..."
Below is an email I have just received from my close friend
and translator Abu Talat. While he has fled Baghdad with
his family and is now a refugee in Syria, he recently had
to return to Baghdad in order to try to salvage what is
left of his former life (his car, belongings from his
house, etc.) before returning back to Syria. His note
is instructive as to the current living conditions in
the capital city of Iraq. Here is the full text of
his message:
May 27, 2007
Dahr_Jamail_Dispatches@dahrjamailiraq.com
http://DahrJamailIraq.com
23) Trust and Betrayal
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
May 28, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/05/28/opinion/28krugman.html?hp
24) Cuba’s Cure
Why is Cuba Exporting Its Health Care Miracle
To The World’s Poor?
By Sarah van Gelder
Cubans say they offer health care to the world’s
poor because they have big hearts.
But what do they get in return?
May 25, 2007
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/25/1458/
25) Dear Democratic Congress
by CindySheehan
http://cindysheehan.dailykos.com
May 26, 2007 at 07:03:16 AM PDT
http://mwcnews.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=14771&Itemid=26
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1) Tale of last 90 minutes of woman's life
County officials express dismay at the events surrounding
the recent controversial death at King-Harbor hospital.
One nurse has resigned.
By Charles Ornstein
Times Staff Writer
May 20, 2007
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-king20may20,0,6057993.story?coll=la-home-center
In the emergency room at Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor
Hospital, Edith Isabel Rodriguez was seen as a complainer.
"Thanks a lot, officers," an emergency room nurse told
Los Angeles County police who brought in Rodriguez early
May 9 after finding her in front of the Willowbrook hospital
yelling for help. "This is her third time here."
The 43-year-old mother of three had been released from
the emergency room hours earlier, her third visit in three
days for abdominal pain. She'd been given prescription
medication and a doctor's appointment.
Turning to Rodriguez, the nurse said, "You have already
been seen, and there is nothing we can do," according to
a report by the county office of public safety, which
provides security at the hospital.
Parked in the emergency room lobby in a wheelchair after
police left, she fell to the floor. She lay on the linoleum,
writhing in pain, for 45 minutes, as staffers worked
at their desks and numerous patients looked on.
Aside from one patient who briefly checked on her condition,
no one helped her. A janitor cleaned the floor around her
as if she were a piece of furniture. A closed-circuit
camera captured everyone's apparent indifference.
Arriving to find Rodriguez on the floor, her boyfriend
unsuccessfully tried to enlist help from the medical staff
and county police — even a 911 dispatcher, who balked
at sending rescuers to a hospital.
Alerted to the "disturbance" in the lobby, police stepped
in — by running Rodriguez's record. They found an outstanding
warrant and prepared to take her to jail. She died before
she could be put into a squad car.
How Rodriguez came to die at a public hospital, without
help from the many people around her, is now the subject
of much public hand-wringing. The county chief administrative
office has launched an investigation, as has the Sheriff's
Department homicide division and state and federal
health regulators.
The triage nurse involved has resigned, and the emergency
room supervisor has been reassigned. Additional disciplinary
actions could come this week.
The incident has brought renewed attention to King-Harbor,
a long-troubled hospital formerly known as King/Drew.
The Times reconstructed the last 90 minutes of Rodriguez's
life based on accounts by three people who have seen the
confidential videotape, a detailed police report, interviews
with relatives and an account of the boyfriend's 911 call.
"I am completely dumbfounded," said county Supervisor
Zev Yaroslavsky, who has seen the video recording.
"It's an indictment of everybody," he said. "If this woman
was in pain, which she appears to be, if she was writhing
in pain, which she appears to be, why did nobody bother …
to take the most minimal interest in her, in her welfare?
It's just shocking. It really is."
The story of Rodriguez's demise began at 12:34 a.m. when
two county police officers received a radio call of
a "female down" and yelling for help near the front
entrance of King-Harbor, according to the police report.
When they approached Rodriguez to ask what was wrong,
she responded in a "loud and belligerent voice that her
stomach was hurting," the report states. She said she
had 10 gallstones and that one of them had burst.
A staff member summoned by the police arrived with
a wheelchair and rolled her into the emergency room.
Among her belongings, one officer found her latest
discharge slip from the hospital, which instructed
her to "return to ER if nausea, vomit, more pain
or any worse."
When the officers talked to the emergency room nurse,
she "did not show any concern" for Rodriguez, the
police report said. The report identifies the nurse
as Linda Witland, but county officials confirmed that
her name is Linda Ruttlen, who began working for the
county in July 1992.
Ruttlen could not be reached for comment.
During that initial discussion with Ruttlen, Rodriguez
slipped off her wheelchair onto the floor and curled
into a fetal position, screaming in pain, the report said.
Ruttlen told her to "get off the floor and onto a chair,"
the police report said. Two officers and a different nurse
helped her back to the wheelchair and brought her close
to the reception counter, where a staff member asked
her to remain seated.
The officers left and Rodriguez again pitched forward
onto the floor, apparently unable to get up, according
to people who saw the videotape and spoke on the condition
of anonymity.
Because the tape does not have sound, it is not possible
to determine whether Rodriguez was screaming or what
she was saying, the viewers said. Because of the camera's
angle, in most scenes, she is but a grainy blob, sometimes
obstructed, moving around on the floor.
When Rodriguez's boyfriend, Jose Prado, returned to the
hospital after an errand and saw her on the floor, he
alerted nurses and then called 911.
According to Sheriff's Capt. Ray Peavy, the dispatcher
said, "Look, sir, it indicates you're already in a hospital
setting. We cannot send emergency equipment out there
to take you to a hospital you're already at."
Prado then knocked on the door of the county police,
near the emergency room, and said, "My girlfriend needs
help and they don't want to help her," according to the
police report. A sergeant told him to consult the medical
staff, the report said. Minutes later, Prado came back
to the sergeant and said, "They don't want to help her."
Again, he was told to see the medical staff.
Within minutes, police began taking Rodriguez into custody.
When they told Prado that there was a warrant for Rodriguez's
arrest, he asked if she would get medical care wherever she
was taken. They assured him that she would. He then kissed
her and left, the police report said.
She was wheeled to the patrol vehicle and the door was opened
so that she could get into the back. When officers asked
her to get up, she did not respond. An officer tried to
revive her with an ammonia inhalant, then checked for
a pulse and found none. She died in the emergency room
after resuscitation efforts failed.
According to preliminary coroner's findings, the cause
was a perforated large bowel, which caused an infection.
Experts say the condition can bring about death fairly
suddenly.
Hours after her death, county Department of Health Services
spokesman Michael Wilson sent a note informing county
supervisors' offices about the incident but saying that
that police had been called because Rodriguez's boyfriend
became disruptive.
Health services Director Dr. Bruce Chernof said Friday
that subsequent information showed Prado was not, in fact,
disruptive. Chernof otherwise refused to comment, citing
the open investigation, patient privacy and "other issues."
Peavy, who supervises the sheriff's homicide unit, said
that although his investigation is not complete, "the
county police did absolutely, absolutely nothing wrong
as far as we're concerned."
The coroner's office may relay its final findings to
the district attorney's office for consideration of
criminal charges against hospital staff members,
Peavy said.
"I can't speak for the coroner and I can't speak for
the D.A., but that is certainly a possibility," he added.
Marcela Sanchez, Rodriguez's sister, said she has been
making tamales and selling them to raise money for her
sister's funeral and burial. Her family has been called
by attorneys seeking to represent them, but they do not
know whom to trust.
She said the latest revelations, which she learned from
The Times, are very troubling.
"Wow," she said. "If she was on the floor for that long,
how in the heck did nobody help her then?
"Where was their heart? Where was their humanity? …
When Jose came in, everybody was just sitting, looking.
Where were they?"
Sanchez said her sister was a giving person who always
took an interest in people in need, unlike those who
watched her suffer. "She would have taken her shoes
to give to somebody with no shoes," she said. Rodriguez,
a California native, performed odd jobs and lived
alternately with different relatives.
David Janssen, the county's chief administrative officer,
said the incident is being taken very seriously.
In a rare move, his office took over control of the
inquiry from the county health department and the office
of public safety.
"There's no excuse — and I don't think anybody believes
that there is," Janssen said.
Over the last 3 1/2 years, King-Harbor has reeled from
crisis to crisis.
Based on serious patient-care lapses, it has lost its
national accreditation and federal funding. Hundreds of
staff members have been disciplined and services cut.
Janssen said he was concerned that the incident would
divert attention from preparing the hospital for
a crucial review in six weeks that is to determine
whether it can regain federal funding.
If the hospital fails, it could be forced to close.
"It certainly isn't going to help," Janssen said.
At the same time, he said, the preliminary investigation
suggests that the fault primarily rests with the nurse
who resigned. "I think it's a tragic, tragic incident,
but it's not a systemic one."
Supervisor Gloria Molina, who hadn't seen the videotape,
said she wasn't sure the hospital had reformed.
"What's so discouraging and disappointing for me is that
it seems that this hospital at this point in time hasn't
really transformed itself — and I'm worried about it,"
she said.
Supervisor Mike Antonovich said he believed care had
improved at the hospital overall, but added, "It's
unconscionable that anyone would ignore a patient
in obvious distress."
Rodriguez's son, Edmundo, 25, said he still couldn't
understand why his mother died. "It's more than negligence.
I can't even think of the word."
His 24-year-old sister, Christina, said, "It just makes
it so much harder to grieve. It's so painful."
charles.ornstein@latimes.com
Times staff writers Stuart Pfeifer and Susannah Rosenblatt
contributed to this report.
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2) REFLECTIONS BY THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF
THE ENGLISH SUBMARINE
By Fidel Castro Ruz
May 21, 2007
http://www.granma.cubaweb.cu/secciones/reflexiones/ing-009.html
The press dispatches bring the news; it belongs to the Astute Class,
the first of its kind to be constructed in Great Britain in more than
two decades.
"A nuclear reactor will allow it to navigate without refuelling
during its 25 year of service. Since it makes its own oxigen and
drinking water, it can circumnavigate the globe without needing to
surface," was the statement to the BBC by Nigel Ward, head of the
shipyards.
"It‚s a mean looking beast", says another.
"Looming above us is a construction shed 12 storeys high. Within it
are 3 nuclear-powered submarines at different stages of
construction," assures yet another.
Someone says that "it can observe the movements of cruisers in New
York Harbor right from the English Channel, drawing close to the
coast without being detected and listen to conversations on cell
phones". "In addition, it can transport special troops in mini-subs
that, at the same time, will be able to fire lethal Tomahawk missiles
for distances of 1,400 miles", a fourth person declares.
El Mercurio, the Chilean newspaper, emphatically spreads the news.
The UK Royal Navy declares that it will be one of the most advanced
in the world. The first of them will be launched on June 8 and will
go into service in January of 2009.
It can transport up to 38 Tomahawk cruise missiles and Spearfish
torpedoes, capable of destroying a large warship. It will possess a
permanent crew of 98 sailors who will even be able to watch movies on
giant plasma screens.
The new Astute will carry the latest generation of Block 4 Tomahawk
torpedoes which can be reprogrammed in flight. It will be the first
one not having a system of conventional periscopes and, instead, will
be using fibre optics, infrared waves and thermal imaging.
"BAE Systems, the armaments manufacturer, will build two other
submarines of the same class," AP reported. The total cost of the
three submarines, according to calculations that will certainly be
below the mark, is 7.5 billion dollars.
What a feat for the British! The intelligent and tenacious people of
that nation will surely not feel any sense of pride. What is most
amazing is that with such an amount of money, 75 thousand doctors
could be trained to care for 150 million people, assuming that the
cost of training a doctor would be one-third of what it costs in the
United States. You could build 3 thousand polyclinics, outfitted with
sophisticated equipment, ten times what our country possesses.
Cuba is currently training thousands of young people from other
countries as medical doctors.
In any remote African village, a Cuban doctor can impart medical
knowledge to any youth from the village or from the surrounding
municipality who has the equivalent of a grade twelve education,
using videos and computers energized by a small solar panel; the
youth does not even have to leave his hometown, nor does he need to
be contaminated with the consumer habits of a large city.
The important thing is the patients who are suffering from malaria or
any other of the typical and unmistakable diseases that the student
will be seeing together the doctor.
The method has been tested with surprising results. The knowledge and
practical experience accumulated for years have no possible
comparison.
The non-lucrative practice of medicine is capable of winning over all
noble hearts.
Since the beginning of the Revolution, Cuba has been engaged in
training doctors, teachers and other professionals; with a population
of less than 12 million inhabitants, today we have more Comprehensive
General Medicine specialists than all the doctors in sub-Saharan
Africa where the population exceeds 700 million people.
We must bow our heads in awe after reading the news about the English
submarine. It teaches us, among other things, about the sophisticated
weapons that are needed to maintain the untenable order developed by
the United States imperial system.
We cannot forget that for centuries, and until recently, England was
called the Queen of the Seas. Today, what remains of that privileged
position is merely a fraction of the hegemonic power of her ally and
leader, the United States.
Churchill said: Sink the Bismarck! Today Blair says: Sink whatever
remains of Great Britain‚s prestige!
For that purpose, or for the holocaust of the species, is what his
"marvellous submarine" will be good for.
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3) Racism goes on trial again in America's Deep South
“The prosecution of three black Louisiana youths
reveals the rise of discrimination by stealth.”
by Tom Mangold in Jena, Louisiana
The Observer (UK) - May 20, 2007
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2083762,00.html
In the cool and beflagged small courtroom in Jena, Louisiana, three
black schoolboys - Robert Bailey, Theodore Shaw and Mychal Bell - are
about to go on trial for a playground fight that could see them jailed
for between 30 and 50 years.
Jena, about 220 miles north of New Orleans, is a small town of 3,000
people, 85 per cent of whom are white.
Tomorrow it will be the focus for a race trial which could put it on the
map alongside the bad old names of the Mississippi Burning Sixties such
as Selma or Montgomery, Alabama.
Jena is gaining national notoriety as an example of the new 'stealth'
racism, showing how lightly sleep the demons of racial prejudice in
America's Deep South, even in the year that a black man, Barak Obama, is
a serious candidate for the White House.
It began in Jena's high school last August when Kenneth Purvis asked the
headteacher if black students could break with a long-held tradition and
join the whites who sit under the tree in the school courtyard during
breaks. The boy was told that he and his friends could sit where they
liked.
The following morning white students had hung three nooses there. 'Bad
taste, silly, but just a prank,' was the response of most of Jena's
whites.
'To us those nooses meant the KKK [Ku Klux Klan], they meant, "Niggers,
we're going to kill you, we're going to hang you till you die,"' says
Caseptla Bailey, a black community leader and mother of one of the
accused. The three white perpetrators of what was seen as a race hate
crime were given 'in-school' suspensions (sent to another school for a
few days before returning).
Jena's major industry is growing and marketing junk pine. Walk down the
usually deserted main street and you will not find many black employees.
Bailey, 56, is a former air force officer and holder of a business
management degree. 'I couldn't even get a job in Jena as a bank teller,'
she said. 'Look at the banks and the best white-collar jobs and you'll
see only white and red necks in those collars.'
Billy Doughty, the local barber, has never cut black men's hair. 'They
just don't come here,' he mumbled.'Anyway, their hair is different
and difficult to cut.'
The majority of blacks live in an area known as Ward 10. Many homes are
trailers, or wooden shacks. Rubbish lies in the streets. On 'Snob Hill',
where the whites live, the spacious gardens and lawns are trimmed, the
gravelled drives boast SUVs and nice new saloons. Only two black
families live there. A teacher from Jena High had enough money to buy
his way in. But when he arrived local estate agents refused to show him
a 'white'property even though several were advertised in the local paper
('they're all under contract,' the agents lied). The teacher eventually
went to see one white owner and offered him cash. 'The guy preferred
green [dollars] to black, so I got the property,' laughed the teacher,
'but since we moved in three years ago we haven't been invited by a
single neighbour.'
On 30 November, someone tried to burn Jena High to the ground. The crime
remains unsolved. That same weekend race fights between teenagers broke
out downtown, and on 4 December racial tension boiled over once more in
the school. A white student, Justin Barker, was attacked, allegedly by
six black students.
The expected charges of assault and battery were not laid, and the six
were charged with attempted second-degree murder and conspiracy to
commit second-degree murder. They now face a lifetime in jail.
Barker spent the evening of the assault at the local Baptist church,
where he was seen by friends to be 'his usual smiling self'.
Nine days later, with the case technically sub judice, the District
Attorney made the following public statement to the local paper: 'I will
not tolerate this type of behavior. To those who act in this manner I
tell you that you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law
and with the harshest crimes that the facts justify. When you are
convicted I will seek the maximum penalty allowed by law. I will see to
it that you never again menace the students at any school in this
parish.'
Bail for the impoverished students was set absurdly high, and most have
been held in custody. The town's mind seems to be made up.
But now the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
and the American Civil Liberties Union - 'damned outsiders' - have
become involved and have begun to recruit, enthuse and empower the local
black population. Reporters from the BBC and the New York Times have
been drawn to the story. Jena does not like this publicity and shifts
uncomfortably in the glare.
It is 42 years since President Lyndon Johnson closed the loopholes that
allowed southern states to discriminate against blacks. When the accused
shuffle into court tomorrow, it's Jena that will be on trial.
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4) San Francisco Labor Council Resolution
Denounces the Proposed Iraqi Oil Law
Hands Off Iraqi Oil!
WHEREAS, in the opening days of the 2003 Iraq invasion, US soldiers were
ordered to protect the Oil Ministry, oil fields and refineries while
wholesale looting of Iraq's antiquities unfolded. The message to Iraqis was
clear: "We've come for the oil." There were no weapons of mass destruction.
Rather than democracy, the US brought massive destruction and civil war to
Iraq; and
WHEREAS, giving credence to Iraqi fears, the oil cartel has prepared a new
Oil Law which, if enacted by the parliament, will put effective control of
Iraq's vast oil resources in the hands of foreign companies. Nationalized
since 1975, Iraq's oil was, before the years of US sanctions and invasions,
the foundation for a relatively high standard of living, producing more
PhD's per capita than the U.S. and a health care system prized as the best
in the region; and
WHEREAS, President Bush says the war is not about oil but his actions belie
that claim. Before the 2003 invasion, the State Dep't "Oil & Energy Working
Group" met to plan how to open Iraq to foreign oil companies. The proposed
new Oil Law is virtually a photocopy of the "Options" plan first conceived
in Texas long before the US occupied Iraq. The law would create an Oil &
Gas Council, on which would sit representatives of Chevron, Exxon-Mobil,
Shell, BP, etc., whose tasks include approving their own contracts; and
WHEREAS, the practice in Iraq -- as in other countries with giant oil
reserves -- has been that control of oil production, development and sale
rests with the public sector. Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Iran run their
industries this way. Yet the proposed Oil Law calls for long-term
contracts, handing to foreign companies effective control of Iraq's oil
industry for up to 30 years, and as much as 70% of the profits; and
WHEREAS, the Iraqi people will not take this looting of their national
treasure lying down. The Oil Law has been unanimously and strongly
condemned by all of Iraq's major labor federations, including the
Federation of Oil Unions. The law would make a mockery of Iraqi sovereignty
and deprive Iraqis of the resources they need to rebuild their shattered
country; and
WHEREAS, the leadership of the Democratic Party has embraced the draft Oil
Law and put it into the supplemental funding bill as one of the
"benchmarks" by which the Iraqi government will be measured. By doing so,
the Democratic leadership becomes complicit in a backdoor effort to
privatize Iraq's publicly owned oil resources -- second largest in the
world; therefore be it
RESOLVED, that the San Francisco Labor Council join in solidarity with the
Oil Workers and Trade Unions of Iraq in opposing the proposed new Oil Law,
which is nothing less than a hijack of Iraq's oil by the international oil
cartel; and be it further
RESOLVED, that the Council urge Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Congressional
Democrats to clearly oppose this shameful raid on Iraqi oil, and remove
passage of the Oil Law from their list of "benchmarks." The Bush
Administration and IMF are pressing Iraq to adopt this law. It is
unconscionable for the Congress to become partners in trying to shove this
law, which will benefit only the rapacious oil companies, down the throats
of the Iraqi people.
- Adopted by the San Francisco Labor Council May 14, 2007 by unanimous vote.
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5) Immigration Raid Leaves Sense of Dread in Hispanic Students
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
WILLMAR, Minn.
May 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/23/education/23education.html?ref=us
The day before everything happened, Alex Sorto left Willmar
High School as usual at 2:30, and grabbed a ride to his night
job as a janitor at the Jennie-O turkey processing plant.
He had been working there for four months, saving money
for college tuition, and hoping to study art even though
his mother wanted him to be a lawyer.
Alex had already heard there were immigration agents
in town, raiding the trailer parks and rented homes
of the Hispanics who had flocked to this county seat
on the Minnesota prairie in search of work at Jennie-O.
Alex believed that because he was a citizen, he was safe.
So he put in his eight hours sweeping and swabbing, and
went home to finish up the portfolio that was his final
project for communications class. The portfolio consisted
mostly of an autobiography. In it Alex recalled his early
years in Los Angeles, the child of two Honduran immigrants,
and the divorce that sent him and his mother, Rosa Sorto,
to a green-shingled duplex on Ann Street in Willmar.
As a senior, just a few weeks from graduation, Alex had
already passed the required state tests, which were being
administered at Willmar High the next morning.
So he knew he could sleep late, a rare treat on a weekday,
before starting his regular classes.
The next thing he knew, at the unfair hour of 6:30 a.m.
on April 13, he heard a banging noise. Groggy, he at first
assumed the racket came from the family upstairs.
By the time he tugged on a pair of jeans and walked toward
the living room, he could hear nearby voices shouting.
He saw his mother on the couch, being peppered with questions
by four immigration agents — questions about her papers,
questions about his, questions about two single men who
rented rooms from them. In his entire life, all 18 years,
Alex had never seen her so close to crying.
In the end, the agents from Immigration and Customs
Enforcement accepted the proof that Alex and his mother,
who has permanent resident status, were legal. The two
renters, Roberto and Augustine, were led away in handcuffs,
Roberto wearing only his boxer shorts.
Then Ms. Sorto discovered how the agents had apparently
entered her apartment; the window of the locked side door,
intact the previous night, was now broken.
Even after all the tumult, Ms. Sorto insisted that Alex
go to school. Even though it was 8:30, and he had no classes
for another hour, she drove him there. He watched her hands
quake as she tried to steer. In art class, his favorite,
he could not get his pencil to move. All he could think
about was what would become of him if his mother were
taken away.
Such was the triumph of Operation Cross Check, the federal
raid against illegal immigrants that went on for four days
last month in this community of about 18,500 people. To the
Department of Homeland Security, the operation was a success,
catching a convicted sex offender and several welfare cheats
among its 49 arrests. In a news release announcing the toll,
an immigration enforcement director for Minnesota said,
“Our job is to help protect the public from those who
commit crimes.”
Yet more than half of those arrested had committed no crime
other than being in the United States illegally, doing
the jobs at Jennie-O that prop up the local economy. And,
as the experience of Alex Sorto demonstrates, the aggressive,
invasive style of the sweep instilled lasting fear among
Willmar’s 3,000 Hispanics, many of them students born or
naturalized in the United States. These young people are
the political football in America’s bitter, unresolved
battle about immigration.
“All of us are scared,” said Andrea Gallegos, a junior
at the high school. “When you go to school, you don’t
know if your parents will be there when you come home.
I don’t feel safe anywhere — walking to the school bus,
walking outside the school building.”
Sharon Tollefson, a guidance counselor, had one promising
student vanish in the aftermath of the raid. The young man,
whom she identified by only his first name, Santiago, had
been attending both day and night classes to graduate this
spring. Ms. Tollefson was helping to arrange for him to visit
a local college, where he planned to study law enforcement
with the goal of becoming a police officer.
The first morning of the raids, April 10, Santiago took
his required state test in writing. The next day, when
he was supposed to sit for the math exam, he did not show
up at school. Ms. Tollefson has since heard rumors that
he was deported to Mexico.
“He was working his fanny off,” Ms. Tollefson said, almost
wistfully, in an interview last week. “I keep saying I’m not
taking him off my roster. I can’t believe he won’t be coming
back.”
THE objections to the immigration raid go far beyond the
anecdotal. A group of about 30 Hispanic residents of Willmar,
including Alex and Rosa Sorto, has filed suit in United States
District Court in Minneapolis, alleging that the immigration
and domestic security agencies violated the Constitution.
The suit maintains that the armed officers engaged in racial
profiling, and that they broke into private homes without
search warrants as part of a “campaign of terror and
intimidation.”
Tim Counts, a spokesman for the immigration agency in
Minnesota, declined yesterday to answer the suit’s
allegations in detail, beyond saying that the operation
was “fully within the law and appropriate.” He also said
that homes were entered only with the permission of
residents, and added, “We will make our case in the
court of law.”
When Alex Sorto moved to Willmar in the late 1990s, he
said he kept quiet about his past. He felt as if he was
the only child in school with divorced parents. Over time,
he grew comfortable enough to share the secret without
being ostracized.
Since that April morning, Friday the 13th, he has reacquired
the habit of silence. His communications teacher suggested
that he try to put the whole experience out of his thoughts.
But she isn’t the one who worries about what could happen
if his mother gets stopped by “la Migra,” as the immigration
agents are known, on a day she left her driver’s license
at home.
“This was the year everything was supposed to go right for
me,” Alex said. “And then all this happened.”
Samuel G. Freedman is a professor of journalism at Columbia
University. His e-mail address is sgfreedman@nytimes.com.
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6) Paramilitary Ties to Elite In Colombia Are Detailed
Commanders Cite State Complicity in Violent Movement
By Juan Forero
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, May 22, 2007; A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/21/AR2007052101672.html?nav=rss_world
MEDELLIN, Colombia -- Top paramilitary commanders have in recent days
confirmed what human rights groups and others have long alleged: Some
of Colombia's most influential political, military and business
figures helped build a powerful anti-guerrilla movement that operated
with impunity, killed civilians and shipped cocaine to U.S. cities.
The commanders have named army generals, entrepreneurs, foreign
companies and politicians who not only bankrolled paramilitary
operations but also worked hand in hand with fighters to carry them
out. In accounts that are at odds with those of the government, the
commanders have said their organization, rather than simply sprouting
up to fill a void in lawless regions of the country, had been
systematically built with the help of bigger forces.
"Paramilitarism was state policy," Salvatore Mancuso, a top
paramilitary commander, said last week at a hearing in this city's
Palace of Justice. "I am proof positive of state paramilitarism in
Colombia."
In a scandal that began to gain momentum last fall, investigators
have revealed dozens of cases of government collaboration with
paramilitary groups. But Mancuso's testimony, buttressed with remarks
made in a jailhouse interview by another top paramilitary commander,
represents the first time that major players in the scandal have
described in detail how the establishment joined forces with them.
Dozens of other top commanders are scheduled to testify before
special judicial hearings in the coming days and weeks. Their
testimony could help uncover the roots of the violence and drug
trafficking that have plagued this country and commanded significant
aid from Washington.
The administration of President Álvaro Uribe says that it has moved
aggressively to dismantle the paramilitary groups, and that its
determination to do so has made the investigations possible. The
investigations, however, have resulted in a collective and painful
catharsis for this country.
Ivan Duque, a strategist who helped formulate the ideology of the
paramilitary coalition known as the United Self-Defense Forces of
Colombia, or AUC, said in an interview that the group had alliances
with anyone of influence in the regions where it operated.
"Could these three groups -- I'm talking about political people,
economic people, the institutional people, meaning the military --
operate without having contact with the chief of chiefs?" said Duque,
speaking from the Itagui prison in Medellin, which houses dozens of
paramilitary commanders. "That's impossible. That cannot be."
Chosen by his fellow commanders to speak to two American reporters,
Duque said last week that, now that the paramilitary commanders have
decided to air their dirty secrets, it also was time for the elites
who helped the AUC to come clean. He said paramilitary groups had
17,000 armed fighters and more than 10,000 other associates, from
cooks to drivers to computer technicians and informers. And he said
it was plain for anyone to see.
"Men armed to the teeth," Duque said, gesticulating as he sat in an
office provided by prison guards. "Could you really travel the whole
territory so that no one could see them, notice them, that no one
collaborate with them? That's why I talk of this county of
hypocrisies, this society of lies."
Colombia's paramilitary movement began more than a generation ago to
counter a growing Marxist guerrilla force and quickly turned into an
irregular army that committed widespread massacres and
assassinations, funding much of its operations with cocaine
trafficking. The attorney general's office estimates the paramilitary
fighters killed about 10,000 people from the mid-1990s until the
early part of this decade, when its commanders began negotiating a
disarmament with Uribe's government. The AUC is on the U.S. State
Department list of terrorist organizations.
Now, in a crucial post-disarmament phase that requires commanders to
reveal their crimes in exchange for lenient treatment, Mancuso and
others have begun to speak.
Mancuso's testimony came in the midst of a difficult week for Uribe,
whose administration has received $4 billion in mostly anti-drug and
military aid from Washington since his election in 2002. Authorities
arrested more congressional allies linked to paramilitary commanders,
and then Mancuso began making his uncomfortable disclosures.
"Salvatore Mancuso spoke," the newsweekly Semana said, "and the
country's political sector trembled."
Uribe remains highly popular in Colombia for lowering violence, but
in Washington, Democrats on Capitol Hill are citing the recent
disclosures in holding back support for a U.S. free-trade deal with
Colombia.
So far, authorities have charged 14 members of Colombia's Congress,
seven former lawmakers, the head of the secret police, mayors and
former governors with having collaborated with paramilitary
commanders. A dozen more current congressmen are under investigation.
Most have been close Uribe allies who supported a constitutional
amendment permitting his reelection and approved the lenient law,
known as Justice and Peace, that governs the paramilitary disarmament.
Though Mancuso testified earlier this year to ordering murders and
collaborating with military units, his testimony last week was much
more explosive. He spoke of working closely with three former
generals, all of whom have denied ties.
Mancuso's disclosures -- particularly about retired Gen. Rito Alejo
del Rio, known in the state of Antioquia as the "pacifier" of the
Uraba region -- are embarrassing for Uribe. Though Uribe's
predecessor, Andrés Pastrana, fired del Rio for collaborating with
paramilitary groups, and though the United States rescinded his visa,
Uribe has publicly eulogized him as an "honorable man" and defended
him in Washington.
"I support all the generals who were in Antioquia," Uribe told
Caracol radio earlier this year.
Perhaps Mancuso's biggest impact came when he said that two current
ministers in Uribe's government, Vice President Francisco Santos and
Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos, met with top paramilitary
commanders in the 1990s. The two men, cousins in an influential
family that owns El Tiempo, Colombia's most influential newspaper,
had acknowledged long ago having met with the paramilitary members.
Both said they did so to further peace in Colombia, not as part of a
sinister plot, as Mancuso alleged.
Mancuso's allegations have prompted some commentators to note that
the commander has besmirched as many people as possible while still
falling far short of accounting for all of the crimes he has
committed. "The strategy behind three days of testimony that tainted
people, institutions and business must be understood," said El Tiempo
in a Sunday editorial. "If the whole county is responsible, then no
one is responsible."
Still, Attorney General Mario Iguaran has noted that, under a new
system specially designed to try the commanders, they are required to
tell the truth or face losing benefits acquired under terms of the
disarmament law. "We should believe him," Iguaran told El Tiempo in
an interview. "That's the principle of the Justice and Peace law."
In the interview, Duque, the strategist, explained that he's writing
a book, tentatively titled "Stories of Silence," in which he plans to
lay out the history of paramilitarism. Once a small-town mayor and
teacher, Duque spoke of how deep anti-Marxist sentiments led him to
join the paramilitary groups. "I fell in love with this cause," he said.
Still, Duque called Colombia's war "dirty, slimy, anarchic,
anachronistic," and said paramilitary fighters had killed countless
civilians in massacres, contradicting long-held claims that those
slain in the attacks were Marxist guerrillas. And he said that the
paramilitary groups also murdered many union members for their
"ideological posture," not for purported ties to guerrillas, as was
claimed. "It was profoundly unjust," he said.
But Duque, like Mancuso, said that much of Colombia has to take
blame. "Colombia would turn another page," he said, "if in an act of
faith for our country we'd stand up and say straight out: 'Yes, I'm
guilty. Yes, I'm responsible.' "
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7) Poll Shows Opposition to Iraq War at All Time High
By DALIA SUSSMAN
May 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/24/us/politics/25cnd-poll.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1180030289-x3l5VD/HWQ0i9QWaTIxPpw
Americans now view the war in Iraq more negatively than
at any time since the war began, according to the latest
New York Times/CBS News poll.
Six in 10 Americans surveyed say the United States should
have stayed out of Iraq, and more than three in four say
that things are going badly there — including nearly
half who say things are going very badly, the poll found.
Still, the majority of Americans support continuing
to finance the war, as long as the Iraqi government meets
specific goals.
President Bush’s approval ratings remain near the lowest
point of his more than six years in office. Thirty percent
of poll respondents approve of the job he’s doing overall,
while 63 percent disapprove. Majorities of those polled
disapprove of Mr. Bush’s handling of the situation in Iraq,
of foreign policy, of immigration, of the economy and
of the campaign against terrorism.
At a news conference in the Rose Garden this morning,
President Bush seemed to acknowledge the erosion of public
support for his administration’s policy in Iraq, even as he
defended the policy. “Failure in Iraq affects the security
of this country,” he said. “And it’s hard for some Americans
to see that. I fully understand it. I see it clearly.”
Mr. Bush said he saw a need for “more of a national
discussion” on “the consequences of failure in Iraq.”
“See, people have got to understand that if that government
were to fall, the people would tend to divide into kind
of sectarian enclaves much more so than today,” he said.
“That would invite Iranian influence and would invite
Al Qaeda influence, much more so than in Iraq today.”Beyond
the war issue, the poll found widespread concern over the
nation’s overall direction. More Americans — 72 percent —
now say that “generally, things in the country are seriously
off on the wrong track” than at any time since the Times/CBS
News poll began asking the question in 1983. The figure
had been in the high 60’s earlier this year.
But the poll results made clear that the war continues
to be the issue Americans are most worried about. Sixty-
one percent of respondents now say that the United States
should never have taken military action against Iraq,
up from 51 percent in a CBS News poll in April and 58
percent in the same poll in January. Seventy-six percent
say that things are going badly in the effort to bring
stability and order to Iraq, including 47 percent who
say they’re going very badly.
Mr. Bush warned today of still worse violence to come
in Iraq in the months before Gen. David Petraeus is
scheduled to report on progress there in September.
“It could make August a tough month, because, you see,
what they’re going to try to do is kill as many innocent
people as they can to try to influence the debate here
at home,” Mr. Bush said, referring to Al Qaeda and
anti-American Iraqi militants. “Don’t you find that
interesting -- I do -- that they recognize that the
death of innocent people could shake our will?”
The nationwide telephone poll was conducted Friday
through Wednesday with 1,125 adults. The margin of
sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.
A large majority of the public — 76 percent, including
a majority of Republicans — say that the additional
American troops sent to Iraq this year by Mr. Bush
have either had no impact or are making things worse
there. Twenty percent think the troop increase
is improving the situation in Iraq.
A majority of Americans continue to support a timetable
for withdrawal. Sixty-three percent say the United States
should set a date for withdrawing troops from Iraq
sometime in 2008.
While the troops remain in Iraq, the overwhelming majority
of Americans support continuing to finance the war,
though most want to do so with conditions. Thirteen
percent want Congress to block all spending on the war.
The majority, 69 percent, including 62 percent of Republicans,
say Congress should appropriate money for the war, but
on the condition that the United States sets benchmarks
for progress and that the Iraqi government meets those goals.
Fifteen percent of all respondents want Congress to
approve war spending without conditions.
President Bush acknowledged the majority view at the
news conference today when he spoke about the war
spending bill now pending in Congress.
“As it provides vital funds for our troops, this bill
also reflects a consensus that the Iraqi government
needs to show real progress in return for America’s
continued support and sacrifice,” he said in his opening
remarks. “The Iraqi Study Group recommended that we hold
the Iraqi government to the series of benchmarks for
improved security, political reconciliation and governance
that the Iraqis have set for themselves. I agree. So does
the Congress. And the bill reflects that recommendation.”
Even so, the poll found that Americans now have more
faith in the Democrats than in the Republicans on the
issue of the Iraq war. For the first time, more than
half of those polled — 51 percent — said the Democratic
party is more likely than the Republican party to make
the right decisions about the war.
In general, more Americans now have a favorable view
of the Democratic party (53 percent) than of the
Republican party (38 percent). The Republican party
has not had a majority positive rating in a New York
Times/CBS News poll since December 2003.
As for Mr. Bush, 23 percent approve of his handling
of the situation in Iraq, while 72 percent disapprove;
25 percent approve of his handling of foreign policy,
while 66 percent disapprove; and 27 percent approve
of his handling of immigration issues, while
60 percent disapprove.
On the economy, 38 percent approve of Mr. Bush’s
handling of the issue, and on the campaign against
terrorism, 40 percent approve, matching his career
low on the issue.
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8) Graft Mars the Recruitment of Mexican Guest Workers
By ELISABETH MALKIN
May 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/24/world/americas/24unions.html?ref=world
TAMPAMOLÓN CORONA, Mexico — Cástulo Benavides, a union
organizer, came to this forgotten mountain town to tell
its men how to get legal jobs in the tobacco fields
of North Carolina.
But this year he introduced them to a change in
a longstanding practice: the men will not have
to pay anyone to get those jobs.
“That’s something that we won with the union,” Mr. Benavides
explained to the workers in the sweltering municipal auditorium
here. “We are stepping on some people’s toes, and we’re doing
it hard.”
The response, if that is what it is, has been brutal. In April,
Mr. Benavides’s co-worker Santiago Rafael Cruz was bound
and beaten to death at the union’s office in Monterrey,
in northern Mexico.
The Ohio-based union, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee,
says the killing was a political attack after the union
cleaned up corrupt practices of recruiting workers, like
charging them a fee to be hired.
Mr. Rafael Cruz’s killing comes as the United States Senate
has restarted debate on a long-stalled immigration package
that proposes an expanded guest worker program. But the way
those workers are recruited in Mexico has received little
attention in the debate.
Before planting and harvest time in the United States it
has been common for local recruiters to fan out across
Mexico’s parched countryside to sign up guest workers.
The recruiters charge the Mexicans hundreds of dollars,
sometimes more, for the job and the temporary visa that
comes with it.
“That line of corruption touches both countries,” said
Baldemar Velásquez, the president of the union. “And the
people at the bottom in Mexico end up paying the price.”
The aftermath of Mr. Rafael Cruz’s killing has rippled
all the way to Washington.
On May 8, Representative Marcy Kaptur, an Ohio Democrat,
and a dozen other legislators wrote to President Felipe
Calderón of Mexico and the governor of the state of Nuevo
León, of which Monterrey is the capital, urging them
to thoroughly investigate the killing and provide protection
for the rest of the Mexico staff of the farm workers’ union.
Closed-circuit cameras have been installed in the union
offices, and the police provide regular patrols.
A spokesman for the Nuevo León attorney general’s office
would not comment on whether the police were investigating
leads related to Mr. Rafael Cruz’s work. The spokesman
asked not to be identified, according to department policy.
The union opened its office in Monterrey two years ago
to help the 6,000 Mexican guest workers it represents
in a collective bargaining agreement with the North
Carolina Growers Association, a group of 650 farmers.
The association includes most of the growers in the
state who employ legal guest workers, said Stan Eury,
its executive director. Even so, a majority of farmers
in North Carolina, as in the rest of the United States,
hire undocumented immigrants.
Last year the United States issued about 37,100 temporary
visas for agricultural workers, said Todd Huizinga,
a spokesman for the United States Consulate in Monterrey.
Mexico accounted for 92 percent of them.
In Monterrey, part of the union’s work has involved
monitoring the association’s Mexican recruiting agency,
called Manpower of the Americas. That company sends out
local recruiters to hire the workers and then processes
their visas at the consulate.
After a lawsuit led to a settlement between the union
and the growers’ association in 2005, all of the workers’
recruiting fees were dropped for two years. For now it
is the growers, not the workers, who must pick up
recruiters’ charges, along with the costs of the visas.
“We did everything we could to get the word out,”
Mr. Velásquez said. “We took away a gold mine from
these operators.”
Since the start, though, the union has been threatened
and harassed in Monterrey, he said. Its office was
broken into twice and computer equipment was stolen.
Mr. Rafael Cruz, 29, who was originally from Oaxaca,
began working with Mr. Benavides in Monterrey in February
after working for the farm workers’ union in the United
States. He was sleeping in the union’s office while
looking for an apartment.
Mr. Velásquez was careful to exclude the growers’
association and the local recruiting agency’s management
from his allegations. Local recruiters working for other
agencies may have felt threatened by a series of meetings
the union held in March, union workers say.
“Who knows what underling was trying to prove himself,”
Mr. Velásquez said.
Mike Bell, president of the recruiting agency, Manpower
of the Americas, said his company kept a tight rein
on its local recruiters.
“I was already doing a good job policing before the union
ever showed up,” said Mr. Bell, a North Carolina native
who said his company sent about 12,000 Mexican workers
— including the 6,000 in North Carolina — to jobs all
over the United States.
“We don’t sit outside some bar and say, ‘Everybody pay
up and we’ll get you a job,’ ” he said.
Aside from the agreement reached in North Carolina,
there is nothing to stop the recruitment abuses, experts
on the guest worker program say.
Roman Ramos, a paralegal at Texas Rural Legal Aid in Laredo,
has followed the agricultural guest worker program, known
as H-2A, for 25 years. He was skeptical that the agreement
would have a wide impact. “There is no indication from
any source that what is happening in North Carolina
is in any form, way or fashion happening anywhere else
in the country,” he said.
“Other recruiters are still charging workers,” he added.
“Everybody makes money out of these guys.”
The starting rate is typically $600, he said. That
figure includes an unspecified fee that is split
between the local recruiter and the agent who has
been contracted to supply workers to the American
employer.
Once workers return home with money from their work,
it is common for the recruiter to stop by again.
Workers know that a couple of hundred dollars in cash,
or maybe a goat or a sheep, will get them on the
list next year.
Two years ago, Juan Bonifacio González gave about $450
to a woman here everybody knew as “La Tolentina,” who
promised to get him a legal guest worker visa. After
months of promises she disappeared. Mr. González borrowed
the money from a local moneylender and says he is still
paying back his loan, which has tripled with interest.
There are no jobs in this town of 14,000, lost in the
steep hills of the state of San Luis Potosí. The mayor
recently invited the farm workers’ union to come and
speak about legal job opportunities in North Carolina,
where the federally mandated wage for agricultural
guest workers is $9.02 an hour.
That seems a fortune to the mostly Nahuatl-speaking
Indians here, where the average wage is less than
$4 a day.
A few had worked in North Carolina and wanted to go back.
Florencio Hernández Angelina spent the past three harvests
there. This year he wanted help in changing employers.
The grower splits her work force between legal guest
workers and illegal migrants. “She gives us fewer hours,”
Mr. Hernández said.
She prefers the illegals, he said, because she pays them less.
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9) Castro, in First Details of Health Crisis,
Says He Is Back on Solid Food
By REUTERS
May 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/24/world/americas/24CUBA.html
HAVANA, May 23 (Reuters) — Fidel Castro said Wednesday that
he was eating enough solid food to recover from several
intestinal operations that had not been successful at first.
In his first detailed account of his health crisis since
handing over power as Cuba’s leader 10 months ago, Mr. Castro
said he had spent months being fed intravenously. “It wasn’t
just one operation, but various. Initially there was no success
and this led to a prolonged recuperation,” Mr. Castro said
in an article distributed by the Cuban government by e-mail.
“For many months I depended on IVs and catheters through
which I received an important part of my nourishment,”
he wrote. “Today I receive orally everything my recovery
requires.”
Mr. Castro, 80, has not appeared in public since emergency
surgery forced him to relinquish power temporarily
on July 31 to his brother Raul for the first time since
his 1959 revolution.
He is thought to have suffered from diverticulitis or inflamed
bulging of the large intestine.
Mr. Castro, who gave up smoking cigars 20 years ago, said
his greatest dangers now were his age and the abuses
he subjected his health to when he was younger.
The Cuban leader gave no indication of when he might
show up again in public or resume leadership of Cuba’s
Communist government.
Video images of Mr. Castro released in October showed
a gaunt and shuffling old man. Last month, however, images
of him meeting with a Chinese Communist Party delegation
showed him looking heavier, although still in a hospital.
Cuban officials say he has regained 40 pounds he had lost
after surgery.
Mr. Castro took to writing columns in March to reassert
himself in Cuba. The columns, called “Reflections
of the Comandante,” are published in the ruling
Communist Party’s newspapers and read repeatedly
on radio and television.
His articles have attacked the United States for threatening
the world’s food supply with its biofuels plans, promoting
free trade and encouraging defections from Cuba.
A column published Tuesday criticized Britain for building
nuclear-powered attack submarines, saying the money could
have been used to train 75,000 doctors, treat 150 million
people or build 3,000 polyclinics in poor countries.
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10) Where Nobody Is Accountable
Inter Press Service
Ali al-Fadhily*
May 21, 2007
http://dahrjamailiraq.com
BAGHDAD, May 21 (IPS) - Killings, crime, lack of medical care,
collapse of education, the list goes on. But with the
occupation by U.S.-led forces now into a fifth year, and
a supposedly democratic government in place, no one knows
who to hold accountable for all that is going wrong.
It is the occupation forces, particularly the United States
and Britain, that must be held accountable, many Iraqis say.
"It is good of these people to discuss accountability for
theft, but the most important thing to account for is Iraqi
blood," Numan Ahmed, a human rights activist from the Adhamiya
neighbourhood in Baghdad told IPS.
The British medical journal Lancet has reported that by
July 2006, 655,000 people had died as "a consequence of
the war." It has reported that the risk of death among
civilians is now 58 times higher than before the U.S.-led
invasion in March 2003.
"By now a million Iraqis have been killed for no reason,
and many millions disabled or badly injured just because
of some thieves in Baghdad and Washington," Ahmed said.
"We are prepared to reveal the documents to condemn them
even if takes us a lifetime."
But Iraqis have no means to take action against occupiers.
The United States has not accepted jurisdiction of the
International Criminal Court, which has the power to
investigate complaints of genocide. The United States
took the view that the court could conduct "politically
motivated investigations and prosecutions of U.S. military
and political officials and personnel."
U.S. opposition to the ICC is in stark contrast to the
strong support for the Court by most of its closest
allies. But Iraqis have found no way to proceed against
these either.
With no doors of justice open to them, many Iraqis are
now taking to unlawful ways to hit back at occupation
forces and government targets.
"The only way to do it is at gunpoint," 32-year-old Ali
Aziz from Ramadi, 100 km west of Baghdad, told IPS.
"They invaded us at gunpoint and we find it ridiculous
to talk about any other way of getting back what
belongs to us."
Aziz said he had lost several friends in attacks by U.S.
soldiers. "The whole world is dealing with this in
a hypocritical way, and there is only us to claim our
rights the way we find proper."
The human rights group al-Raya filed a case in a local
court in Fallujah against U.S. forces in 2004, following
a massive military crackdown. About three-quarters
of all buildings in the city were destroyed or heavily
damaged during the U.S. assault in November 2004.
But U.S.-backed Iraqi security forces have hit out
at the human rights group. "The secretary-general for
the organisation has now been arrested by Fallujah
police for reasons that we are not aware of, and the
organisation is not functioning any more," a member
of the board, speaking on condition of anonymity,
told IPS in Baghdad.
"It is not the right time to talk about accountability
when daily killings by U.S. and Iraqi soldiers are
still ongoing. God knows if it will ever be possible."
A case for accountability could well be made. A judge
from the United States wrote at the time of the trial
of Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg in Germany in 1946:
"To initiate a war of aggressionàis not only an
international crime; it is the supreme international
crime differing only from other war crimes in that
it contains within itself the accumulated evil of
the whole."
The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was judged by former
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan Sep. 16, 2004 as
"an illegal act that contravened the UN charter."
The lack of accountability appears now to be leading
to greater support for armed resistance against
occupation forces.
"What accountability are you talking about, sir," said
Abu Jassim from Fallujah, who lost four members of his
family when a U.S. bomb destroyed his home during the
first U.S. offensive in the city in April 2004. "Americans
are criminals, and the whole world is covering up for
their crimes." They will be held accountable, he said,
by "Allah" and by "the heroes of the Iraqi resistance."
Iraqis are also angry over destruction of their civilian
infrastructure, for which no one has been held responsible.
"The U.S. crime of deliberately crushing Iraqi infrastructure
must be looked at as a crime against humanity," chief engineer
Jalal Abdulla at Baghdad's Ministry of Electricity told IPS.
"They did not have to do this to support their military effort,
but they did it just to cause hundreds of thousands of deaths
for no reason but cruelty."
Others vent their frustration against what they see as an
impotent United Nations. "The UN should be the place for
asking those Americans why they committed so many crimes
in Iraq," said Baghdad resident Malik Hammad.
(*Ali, our correspondent in Baghdad, works in close collaboration
with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who
travels extensively in the region)
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11) Bolivia: Capitalism Humanity's Worst Enemy
Associated Press
May 23, 2007
http://www.cbn.com/CBNnews/163172.aspx
CBNNews.com - LA PAZ, Bolivia - President Evo Morales called
capitalism the "worst enemy of humanity" at a conference of Latin
American leftist intellectuals on Tuesday.
A coca-growers' union leader who became Bolivia's first Indian
president, the leftist Morales has nationalized oil and natural gas
resources as part of his effort to redistribute wealth in South
America's poorest country.
"The transnational corporations always provoke conflicts to
accumulate capital, and the accumulation of capital in a few hands is
no solution for humanity," Morales said at forum in Cochabamba. "And
so I have arrived at the conclusion that capitalism is the worst
enemy of humanity."
Morales also said Bolivia's new constitution, now being written,
would declare Bolivia a pacifist nation and explicitly renounce war.
"Instead of making more weapons and bullets to kill humankind, we
must concentrate on producing more food," he said.
The president spoke at a two-day conference on the role of media in
political efforts to create a new Latin American socialism, sponsored
by Bolivia, Venezuela, Cuba, and Ecuador. Morales counts Venezuelan
President Hugo Chavez and Cuban leader Fidel Castro as close allies.
Morales has criticized the historic role of foreign business
interests in Bolivia, often noting that the 1879 War of the Pacific,
in which Bolivia lost its seashore to Chile, was sparked in part by a
British trading company's rush to control the coast's valuable guano
and saltpeter deposits.
Bolivia later lost tens of thousands of soldiers and another wide
swath of territory in the 1930s Chaco War with Paraguay, which many
historians describe as a proxy battle between U.S. company Standard
Oil and Dutch-British Shell Oil over land thought to hold valuable
petroleum deposits.
Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
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12) Black Leadership and
Black Mass Incarceration
By Bruce Dixon
Black Agenda Report (BAR)
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=227&Itemid=33
America’s undeclared but universal policies of racially
selective policing, prosecution and mass incarceration of
its Black citizens have imposed unprecedented strains on
the social and economic viability of Black families and
communities—of the entire African American polity. This
malevolent social policy demands a political response
from Black leadership, just as Jim Crow and lynching did
in our grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ day. Why is
the current crop of Black leaders unable to rise to the
crisis of this generation—the fact of racially selective
mass incarceration? And if they did, what would such
a response look like?
—Bruce Dixon
The dismal stats are familiar to us all. America leads
the world in numbers of prisons and prisoners, and African
Americans, though only one eighth of its population, make
up nearly half the locked down. One out of three black men
in their twenties are out on bail, probation, court supervision,
community service or parole—or behind bars. And the fastest
growing demographic of the incarcerated, aside from immigration
prisoners, are black women.
America’s malevolent social policy of racially selective
mass incarceration is so ubiquitous, so thoroughly part of
its statutes, courts, its law enforcement apparatus and
traditions, that it’s hard to believe it was enacted in
a single generation, since the ending, about 1970 of the
black Freedom Movement. But as late as the 1960s whites,
not Blacks were the majority of the nation’s prisoners.
Since 1970 the U.S. prison population has multiplied about
sevenfold, with neither a causative or accompanying increase
in crime, and without a public perception that we are somehow
seven times safer.
The present level of mass incarceration and its deleterious
effects for decades to come upon the black work force,
on economic and health outcomes, on culture and family
formation are facts of African American life that seem
to demand a political response, a concerted and long-term
effort to change these awful public policies, much like that
called forth by lynching and legal segregation. But what
passes for today’s African American leadership is simply
not up to the challenge.
It doesn’t take a social scientist, let alone a rocket
scientist to spot some key differences between black
leadership fifty and sixty years ago and the current crop
of supposed African American leaders.
Throughout the 1930s, 40s and 50s, being identified as an
active member of the NAACP in the South could cost your
livelihood and home, your freedom, even your life. Many
whose names nobody remembers served, and quite a few paid
that price.
Today’s NAACP officials, like their counterparts in corporate
America, fly and dine first class. They hobnob with celebrities
and CEOs, and they depend on Disney, Chrysler, Bank of America
and Fox TV to broadcast its annual Image Awards, which are
handed out to other celebrities and black officials of
whichever administration is in power. The NAACP has in the
recent past even chosen its CEO from the ranks of black execs
at telecommunications corporations that digitally redline
African American neighborhoods.
A significant portion of the black leadership in those days
was responsible to black communities alone. They crafted
political responses to the public policy crises of that era
which they pursued both inside and outside America’s legal
system, responses aimed at changing public policies that
harmed African American communities. Attorneys Charles
Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall crisscrossed the
continent defending black prisoners on death row and filing
cases to overturn legal segregation. It was due to years
of these efforts that Thurgood Marshall, in the 1940s became
known as “Mr. Civil Rights.”
By contrast, a current black elected official like Atlanta’s
Kasim Reed, whose legal practice consists of defending
corporate employers from civil rights and discrimination
lawsuits, represents himself with a straight face as
a “civil rights lawyer.” Presidential candidate Barack
Obama too, is widely credited with being a “civil rights
lawyer,” despite having tried few or no significant civil
rights cases in any court of law.
And of course our parents and grandparents’ generation
did not confine their challenges to Jim Crow to the
boundaries of the law. Visionaries like James Foreman,
Kwame Toure, Ella Baker, Diane Nash, E.B. Nixon and Martin
Luther King crafted strategies around mass mobilizations
in African American communities, and deliberately, creatively
violated the law in order to change the nation’s misguided
public policies. It was common practice, for instance,
in towns and cities where the 1960s Freedom Movement was
in high gear, to turn out a city’s colleges and high schools
for days on end.
Can you imagine the black leadership in your town even
talking to high school students, let alone calling them
out in the street to accomplish a change in public policy?
Can you envision today’s celebrity and business-oriented
black leadership trying to mobilize black America for
anything more radical than watching their TV shows, buying
their books, or volunteering and voting in their campaigns
for political office. It is hard to construct a scenario
in which today’s black leaders might be induced to stand
up to the crime control industry, to become persistent,
forceful advocates of revolutionary reforms which can
appeal broadly to the African American community like:
—Sunsetting all two and three strikes laws, and ending
indeterminate sentencing.
—Ending the trial and sentencing of children as adults.
—Requiring an ethnic impact statement before the
passage of any new sentencing legislation.
—Unconditional restoration of voting rights for all
persons who have served their sentences.
—Restoration of Pell Grants and student financial aid
to persons convicted of felonies.
Though many of the visionary leaders of that earlier generation
were young people it would be a mistake to compare today’s youth
unfavorably to them. Young would-be movement activists in the
1940s, the 50s, all the way till the early 1970s had at least
one key advantage today’s aspiring young movement activists
do not. They had black news, written in black newspapers.
They had black news broadcast on black radio, and with these,
this by itself created what media sociologists call a “public
sphere,” a space in which we could bring our individual and
family crises and situations and compare them with those of
others, and speculate on the nature of collective efforts
to solve what would otherwise be individual problems.
Corporate media has, in the ensuing decades, privatized and
commercialized what used to be public space, by virtually
eliminating broadcast news on black radio. The black print
press confines most of its “reporting” to government and
celebrity press releases. Black TV is worse than useless.
Activists in earlier eras could find out about each other’s
affairs on black radio and in the black press. Now that space
is reserved only for commercial “entertainment.”
Radical shifts in public policy have never arisen from the
pronouncements of public officials, bankers and celebrities.
They don’t come from the good will of real estate and marketing
professionals, or from enlightened decisions on the bench or
sermons in the pulpit. They come from widespread discussion
and exchange in the public sphere. They come from mass movements
which exists outside of and sometimes in spite of the law, and
which are able to capture the risk-taking energy and spirit
of youth.
Whenever we DO see the beginnings of a mass movement to
challenge our nation’s misguided policy of black mass
incarceration, one that unites our young and our old, our
churches and our unions and the people on our street corners
it won’t be led by the folks we think of as black leaders today.
And until the policy of mass incarceration is transformed into
an explicitly political issue and directly challenged, black
youth have little reason to listen to those leaders.
Black leadership has yet to rise to the challenge of the
current generation of black youth—ending our nation’s public
policy of mass imprisonment. And until they do, there will
be no resumption of a mass movement, and little or no real
progress.
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13) Immigrants and Politics
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
May 25, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/05/25/opinion/25krugman.html?hp
A piece of advice for progressives trying to figure out where
they stand on immigration reform: it’s the political economy,
stupid. Analyzing the direct economic gains and losses from
proposed reform isn’t enough. You also have to think about
how the reform would affect the future political environment.
To see what I mean — and why the proposed immigration bill,
despite good intentions, could well make things worse — let’s
take a look back at America’s last era of mass immigration.
My own grandparents came to this country during that era,
which ended with the imposition of severe immigration
restrictions in the 1920s. Needless to say, I’m very glad
they made it in before Congress slammed the door. And today’s
would-be immigrants are just as deserving as Emma Lazarus’s
“huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.”
Moreover, as supporters of immigrant rights rightly remind
us, everything today’s immigrant-bashers say — that immigrants
are insufficiently skilled, that they’re too culturally alien,
and, implied though rarely stated explicitly, that they’re
not white enough — was said a century ago about Italians,
Poles and Jews.
Yet then as now there were some good reasons to be concerned
about the effects of immigration.
There’s a highly technical controversy going on among economists
about the effects of recent immigration on wages. However that
dispute turns out, it’s clear that the earlier wave
of immigration increased inequality and depressed the
wages of the less skilled. For example, a recent study
by Jeffrey Williamson, a Harvard economic historian, suggests
that in 1913 the real wages of unskilled U.S. workers were
around 10 percent lower than they would have been without
mass immigration. But the straight economics was the least
of it. Much more important was the way immigration diluted
democracy.
In 1910, almost 14 percent of voting-age males in the United
States were non-naturalized immigrants. (Women didn’t get
the vote until 1920.) Add in the disenfranchised blacks
of the Jim Crow South, and what you had in America was
a sort of minor-key apartheid system, with about a quarter
of the population — in general, the poorest and most
in need of help — denied any political voice.
That dilution of democracy helped prevent any effective
response to the excesses and injustices of the Gilded Age,
because those who might have demanded that politicians
support labor rights, progressive taxation and a basic
social safety net didn’t have the right to vote. Conversely,
the restrictions on immigration imposed in the 1920s had
the unintended effect of paving the way for the New Deal
and sustaining its achievements, by creating a fully
enfranchised working class.
But now we’re living in the second Gilded Age. And as
before, one of the things making antiworker, unequalizing
policies politically possible is the fact that millions
of the worst-paid workers in this country can’t vote. What
progressives should care about, above all, is that immigration
reform stop our drift into a new system of de facto apartheid.
Now, the proposed immigration reform does the right thing
in principle by creating a path to citizenship for those
already here. We’re not going to expel 11 million illegal
immigrants, so the only way to avoid having those immigrants
be a permanent disenfranchised class is to bring them into
the body politic.
And I can’t share the outrage of those who say that illegal
immigrants broke the law by coming here. Is that any worse
than what my grandfather did by staying in America, when
he was supposed to return to Russia to serve in the czar’s
army?
But the bill creates a path to citizenship so torturous
that most immigrants probably won’t even try to legalize
themselves. Meanwhile, the bill creates a guest worker
program, which is exactly what we don’t want to do. Yes,
it would raise the income of the guest workers themselves,
and in narrow financial terms guest workers are a good deal
for the host nation — because they don’t bring their families,
they impose few costs on taxpayers. But it formally creates
exactly the kind of apartheid system we want to avoid.
Progressive supporters of the proposed bill defend the
guest worker program as a necessary evil, the price that
must be paid for business support. Right now, however, the
price looks too high and the reward too small: this bill
could all too easily end up actually expanding the class
of disenfranchised workers.
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14) Democracy or Puppetry?
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
prisonradio.org
With wars waged abroad purportedly for “spreading democracy,”
it’s time to face some uncomfortable truths. People are awake
and aware that the U.S. and the West doesn’t give a fig about
democracy. They care about puppets—people in state power who
are answerable to them—and fear democracy more than terrorism.
From Karzai in Afghanistan, Siniora in Lebanon, al-Maliki in
Iraq, and beyond, people are rising up against these shills
for Western, corporate interests. Protests from Kabul to
Pakistan are raging against America’s alleged allies, who
rule by brutality, barbarity and torture.
There are several reasons for this state of affairs, but
perhaps it all bubbles down to two: Abu Ghraib, and the
Iraq invasion/occupation.
American performance on the ground, their treatment of
Iraqis, the chaos that has seized the country like a fever,
had fueled protests far beyond the borders of Iraq, blowing
around the world like the borderless wind. The war in Iraq,
and all of its consequences, has caused the U.S. to be
one of the most-feared and most-hated nations on earth.
Beyond the rhetoric of democracy lies the gloved hand of
international business; or, in a more commonly used term—
globalization. Globalization is far more than the newest
expression of an old economic theory (capitalism); it is
the force that requires the installation of puppets
throughout the Middle East.
One of the many, many protesters against the Siniora
regime in Lebanon, in explaining her opposition to the
government, voiced a concern not usually translated for
American audiences:
“We are peacefully contesting the government to show
that people without a voice are actually the majority.
It is only the rich people who have a voice in this current
government, while the middle and lower classes are not
listened to. There is a class mentality in this government.”
[Fr.: Jamail, Dahr, “Lebanon: this protest won’t go away,”
Asheville Global Report, May 3-May 9, 2007, p.12].
The reason for this infiltration? Oil! Do you really
think that Americans suddenly care about Arab suffering?
One glance at the pain of Palestinians will answer that
question. Indeed, life under any of America’s allies in
the region ain’t no cup of tea; in Egypt, Saudi Arabia,
Pakistan, or in Iraq, democratic activists have faced
the brutality of their regime’s police in the streets,
and the sneer of their torturers in the dungeons beneath
the streets.
America’s response is little more than stony silence,
broken intermittently by the cold academic listing in the
State Dept. report. The message couldn’t be clearer: “We’ll
talk about democracy, but that’s it!”
The U.S. didn’t march to Iraq to bring democracy, to spread
freedom, or anything even remotely like it. It didn’t go
there to stop the oppression of Iraqis. It didn’t go there
because Saddam Hussein was a “bad guy.” It went there because
access to the most precious commodity left on earth—oil—was
there. And the U.S. figured, that as a Superpower, Iraqi
oil was its imperial due.
Every nation in the world knows this. Billions of people
around the globe know this. The tragedy is that there are
still a few Americans who claim to believe in this madness.
If there really was democracy, America’s closest allies would
be out of a job (at the very least,) or hanging from the spires
of their professional palace. If there really was democracy
either in the U.S. or Britain, the most unpopular governments
in generations wouldn’t still be in power.
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15) Bush Expects Everything to be
Solved with a Bang
By Fidel Castro
May 25, 2007
VIA email from: Walter Lippmann
walterlx@earthlink.net
A word popped up in my mind. I looked it up in the dictionary
and there it was; it’s an onomatopoeic word and its connotation
is tragic: bang. I’ve probably never used it in my life.
Bush is an apocalyptic person. I observe his eyes; his face
and his obsessive preoccupation with pretending that everything
he sees on the “invisible screens” are spontaneous thoughts.
I heard his voice quaver when he answered criticism from his
own father about his Iraq policy. He only expresses emotions
and constantly feigns rationality. Of course he is aware of
the impact of every phrase and every word on the public he
addresses.
What’s dramatic is that what he expects to happen may cost
the American people many lives.
One can never agree, in any kind of war, with events that
take the lives of innocent civilians. Nobody could justify
the attacks of the German Air Force on British cities during
World War II, nor the thousands of bombers that systematically
destroyed German cities in the decisive moments of the war,
nor the two atomic bombs, which the United States dropped
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in an act of pure terrorism against
old people, women and children.
Bush expressed his hatred of the poor world when he spoke
on June 1, 2002 at West Point, of the pre-emptive attacks
on “60 or more dark corners of the world.”
Whom are they going to convince now that the thousands of
nuclear weapons in their possession, the missiles and the
precise and exact delivery systems they have developed are
just to combat terrorism? Could it be perhaps that the
sophisticated submarines being constructed by their British
allies, capable of circumnavigating the globe without
surfacing and reprogramming their nuclear missiles
in mid-flight, will be used for that as well? I would
never have imagined that one day such justifications
would be used. Imperialism intends to institutionalize
world tyranny with these weapons. It aims them at other
great nations, which arise not as military adversaries
capable of surpassing their technology with weapons of
mass destruction, but as economic powers that would rival
the United States whose chaotic and wasteful consumerist
economic and social system is absolutely vulnerable.
What’s worse about the bang upon which Bush is hanging
his hopes is the antecedent of his actions during the
September 11th events, when, knowing full well that
bloody attack on the American people was imminent, and
having the capacity to foresee it and even to prevent
it, he took off on a vacation with his entire administrative
apparatus.
From the day of his appointment as President—thanks to the
fraud orchestrated by his friends from the Miami mafia,
in the manner of a “banana republic”—and prior to his
inauguration, W. Bush was informed in detail of the same
facts and in the same way as the president of the United
States, who directed that he be informed. At that moment,
the tragic events symbolized by the fall of the Twin Towers
were still more than 9 months away.
If something similar were to happen with any kind of
explosives or nuclear material, given that enriched uranium
flows like water throughout the world since the days of the
Cold War, what would be the probable fate of humanity?
I try to remember and analyze many moments of humanity’s
march through the millennia, and I wonder: could my views
be subjective?
Just yesterday Bush was bragging about having won the battle
over his adversaries in Congress. He has a hundred billion
dollars, all the money he needs to double, as he wishes, the
number of American troops sent to Iraq, and to carry on with
the slaughter. The problem in the region is increasingly
aggravated.
Any opinion about the president of the United State’s latest
feats grows old in a matter of hours. Is it perhaps that
the American people can’t take this little moral fighting
bull by the horns?
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16) Chávez creates state of fear among businesses
By GERARDO REYES
MIAMI HERALD
Posted on Fri, May. 25, 2007
http://www.miamiherald.com/103/story/117973.html
When the company president showed up to sign a loan from the
government of Venezuela, an official told him, without a greeting:
``To be rich is to be bad. Come in.''
Days later, the executive had to sign a form asking if he would
support the government's social missions and share with workers the
management of, and profits from, his business.
The businessman, who asked not to be identified, rejected the loan a
few days later, saying he had received it too late. The real reason,
he said: ``It was too much of a commitment for $200,000.''
Such experiences are part of what business people call ''the siege of
private industry'' -- government measures and threats that are
depressing the country's production capacity to an alarming degree,
they say.
''The industrialist lives in a constant state of fear,'' Agustín
Díaz, manager of the Center for Economic and Legal Studies of the
Venezuelan Industrial Federation, Conindustria, said. ``No growth can
take place in a country where the government's concept of private
property is different from that of the entrepreneur's.''
Yet the uncertainty and malaise come at a time when few can complain
about sales. In a survey by Conindustria in the second quarter of
2006, all forms of industry -- major, midsize and light -- responded
that their situation is good. The levels of satisfaction do not seem
to have changed this year.
''What's produced is sold,'' explained Diaz, who acknowledges the
irony of the economic picture. Another businessman, who asked for
anonymity, said the constant clashes between the good news of
prosperity and the bad news from the government are creating a dual
personality among producers.
''One minute we celebrate an increase in sales or a big order just
received, and the next minute we're struck by the feeling that
everything is going to burst and we'll have to drop everything, lose
everything,'' he said.
Some businessmen keep going and take advantage of the bonanza the
country is going through and the credits offered by the government.
Others stay in the country but do not invest in their companies'
growth because they don't believe in the future.
Others fold for fear of being punished if they don't comply with
government demands on prices, taxes and production. Yet others keep
their stores open but invest their profits abroad.
CHAVEZ SUPPORTERS
Two weeks ago, the Federation of Socialist Entrepreneurs, Conseven,
launched to shouts of ''Oooo-hey, Chávez is here to stay.'' As
reported in the daily El Nacional, director Marcos Zarikian proposed
that tax savings be invested in social works.
''I have a dream,'' Zarikian intoned. ``I would like to go someday
through the barrios of Petare [a marginal zone east of Caracas] and
dine in a fancy restaurant with the people who live there. I would
like to share a table with a rich man and a poor man, so we might
talk about a possible Venezuela.''
The federation claims it has 500,000 member companies, an exorbitant
figure it has not documented.
Venezuela's productive capacity is at its highest, yet the industrial
sector is not expanding. The 11,117 industrial establishments
officially registered in 1998 shrank to 6,756 in 2005, according to
figures by the National Institute of Statistics quoted by
Conindustria.
In the past two years, Venezuela has been the country with the lowest
level of competitiveness worldwide, according to the IMD business
management school in Lausanne, Switzerland.
The government attributes the reduction in industrial capacity to
sabotage and the unease created by groups that oppose Chávez. But
businessmen say other factors discourage growth, such as:
-Threats to the guarantees of private property.
-Minimum-salary adjustments without consultation.
-Price controls.
-Massive importations and the waiving of tariffs for products the
government is interested in.
-The direct adjudication of government contracts.
`LIVING IN LIMBO'
''We're living in limbo,'' said Marinella Mata, legal advisor to the
Federation of Chambers and Associations of Commerce of Venezuela,
Fedecámaras. ``We used to have greater legal security. Now we work on
a day-to-day basis.''
Businessmen also are nervous about bills such as one that orders them
to grant employees four hours a week to attend ''ideological
training'' in socialism. Chávez's announcement that the work week
will be reduced to 36 hours also disturbs them.
Businessmen say the government is forcing the entrepreneurial sector
to shrink and cutting the production even of basics such as meat,
milk, cheese and sugar. The government claims the scarcities are due
to hoarding by merchants.
The government ''threat'' that has most recently troubled
entrepreneurs is so-called ''co-management,'' a system whereby the
employees have the right to manage the company or share in profits --
or both.
As part of the official campaign to promote co-management, a National
Encounter of Workers for the Recovery of Businesses was held in
Caracas in October 2005. Summoned by the National Workers Union of
Venezuela (UNT), the conference analyzed forms of ''occupation by
workers,'' the final report said.
''In Venezuela, co-management is an alternative to capitalism,'' said
Canadian economics professor Michael A. Lebowitz at the conference.
Lebowitz is a foreign scholar often quoted by Chávez sympathizers.
The businessmen interviewed by El Nuevo Herald say they have no
objection to discussing co-management. But they worry that someday,
without warning or discussion, the practice will be imposed.
''In industry, fear is never a good raw material,'' a businessman
said.
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17) Arrested While Grieving
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
May 26, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/05/26/opinion/26herbert.html?hp
No one is paying much attention, but parts of New York City
are like a police state for young men, women and children who
happen to be black or Hispanic. They are routinely stopped,
searched, harassed, intimidated, humiliated and, in many
cases, arrested for no good reason.
Most black elected officials have joined their white colleagues
and the media in turning a blind eye to this continuing outrage.
And many black cops have joined their white colleagues in the
systematic mistreatment.
Last Monday in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, about three
dozen grieving young people on their way to a wake for
a teenage friend who had been murdered were surrounded
by the police, cursed at, handcuffed and ordered into paddy
wagons. They were taken to the 83rd precinct stationhouse,
where several were thrown into jail.
Leana Matia, an 18-year-old student at John Jay College,
was one of those taken into custody. “We were walking toward
the train station to take the L train when all these cops
just swooped in on us,” she said. “They cursed us out and
pushed the guys. And then they handcuffed us. We kept asking,
‘What are you doing?’ ”
Children as young as 13 were among those swept up by the
cops. Two of them, including 16-year-old Lamel Carter,
were the children of police officers. Some of the youngsters
were carrying notes from school saying that they were allowed
to be absent to attend the wake. There is no evidence that
I’ve been able to find — other than uncorroborated statements
by the police — that the teenagers were misbehaving in any way.
Everyone was searched, but nothing unlawful was found —
no weapons, no marijuana or other drugs. Some of the kids
were told at the scene that they were being seized because
they had assembled unlawfully. “I didn’t know what unlawful
assembly was,” said Kumar Singh, 18, who was among those
arrested.
According to the police, the youngsters at the scene were
on a rampage, yelling and blocking traffic. That does not
seem to be the truth.
I spoke individually to several of the youngsters, to the
principal of Bushwick Community High School (where a number
of the kids are students), to a parent who was at the scene,
and others. Nowhere was there even a hint of the chaos
described by the police. Every account that I was able to
find described a large group of youngsters, very sad and
downcast about the loss of their friend, walking peacefully
toward the station.
Kathleen Williams, whose son and two nieces were rounded up,
was at the scene. She said there was no disturbance at all,
and that when she tried to ask the police why the kids were
being picked up, she was told to be quiet or she would be
arrested, too.
Capt. Scott Henderson of the 83rd Precinct told me that the
police had developed a “plan” to deal with youngsters going
to the wake because they suspected that the murder was gang-
related and there had already been some retaliation. He said
he had personally witnessed the youngsters in Bushwick
behaving badly and gave the order to arrest them.
Many of the kids were wearing white T-shirts with a picture
of the dead teenager and the letters “R.I.P.” on them. The
cops cited the T-shirts as evidence of gang membership.
Thirty-two of the youngsters were arrested. Most were charged
with unlawful assembly and disorderly conduct. Several were
held in jail overnight.
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly did not exactly give the arrests
a ringing endorsement. He said, in a prepared statement,
“A police captain who witnessed the activity made a good-faith
judgment in ordering the arrests.”
A spokesman for the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles Hynes,
said, “It wouldn’t be unusual for a lot of this stuff to get
dismissed.”
The principal of Bushwick Community High, Tira Randall, said,
“My kids come in here on a daily basis with stories about
harassment by the police. They’re not making these stories up.”
New York City cops stopped and, in many cases, searched
individuals more than a half million times last year. Those
stops are not happening on Park Avenue or Fifth Avenue in
Manhattan. Thousands upon thousands of them amount to simple
harassment of young black and Hispanic males and females who
have done absolutely nothing wrong, but feel helpless to object.
It is long past time for this harassment of ethnic minorities
by the police to cease. Why it has been tolerated this long,
I have no idea.
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18) Some Union Local Members Call for Using Mail Ballots
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
May 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/26/nyregion/26labor.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Larry Davis says it is ridiculous that only 2 percent of the
27,000 members in his union local — the largest in the
umbrella union, District Council 37 — voted in the local’s
last election.
In his view, the reason for the low turnout was obvious. His
local’s members, who are mostly school cafeteria aides and
crossing guards, work throughout the city, yet there was
just one voting site, at union headquarters in Lower Manhattan,
and it was open for only four hours.
In an effort to increase turnout, Mr. Davis, the parent
support officer for a school district in Harlem, has
collected 2,100 signatures as part of a petition drive
hoping to persuade his union, Local 372, to elect its
officers by mail ballot.
“The current system doesn’t give a lot of members the
opportunity to come down there and vote,” said Mr. Davis,
who lost a bid to be Local 372’s president two years ago.
“There are members who live in Staten Island and on Long
Island, and they don’t feel like trekking down all the
way to Local 372 to vote.”
Mr. Davis and several allies are seeking to collect 5,000
signatures because that would represent 12 times the number
of votes that Local 372’s president, Veronica Montgomery-
Costa, received when she won a new three-year term in 2005.
She received 417 votes to Mr. Davis’s 122.
Ms. Montgomery-Costa also serves as president of District
Council 37, which comprises 56 locals representing 121,000
municipal workers.
Tony Ferina, an aide at a high school in Elmhurst, Queens,
said it was important to increase democratic participation
in Local 372 because of its corrupt past. For more than
two decades, the local’s former president, Charles Hughes,
ran the local as his personal fief. In 2000, he was sentenced
to three to nine years in prison after pleading guilty
to stealing more than $2 million from the local.
“The advantage of a mail ballot is it gives everyone an equal
opportunity to vote,” said Mr. Ferina, who ran for secretary-
treasurer in 2005 but lost. “Since we’re the poorest-paid
union in the city, some of our members can’t afford the
$4 subway trip to go down to vote. And many of them work
second jobs and don’t have the luxury to take two hours
out of their day to travel back and forth to vote.”
Many of the local’s members earn less than $20,000 a year.
In an interview, Ms. Montgomery-Costa voiced no intention
of changing the voting system. She said Local 372’s
constitution permitted the system of voting at union
headquarters on a single day. She noted that a judicial
panel from the parent union, the American Federation
of State, County and Municipal Employees, had rejected
Mr. Davis’s appeal that the voting method denied many
workers the opportunity to vote.
After the decision, Ms. Montgomery-Costa agreed to lengthen
voting in next year’s election to nine hours.
“I have done nothing but follow the constitution,” she said,
adding that since being elected, she has worked to clean
up Local 372 and protect its members’ rights.
Ms. Montgomery-Costa said one problem with mail ballots
is the cost — about $2.50 per union member or $67,500
for Local 372.
Mr. Davis said that was a small cost considering that
the local’s members pay millions of dollars in dues
each year.
“If we took the $76,000 raise that Veronica gave herself
in 2002, that would easily pay for a mail ballot,”
Mr. Davis said.
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19) War Without End
Editorial
May 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/27/opinion/27sun1.html?hp
Never mind how badly the war is going in Iraq. President
Bush has been swaggering around like a victorious general
because he cowed a wobbly coalition of Democrats into
dropping their attempt to impose a time limit on his
disastrous misadventure.
By week’s end, Mr. Bush was acting as though that bit
of parliamentary strong-arming had left him free to
ignore not just the Democrats, but also the vast majority
of Americans, who want him to stop chasing illusions
of victory and concentrate on how to stop the sacrifice
of young Americans’ lives.
And, ever faithful to his illusions, Mr. Bush was
insisting that he was the only person who understood
the true enemy.
Speaking to graduates of the Coast Guard Academy, Mr. Bush
declared that Al Qaeda is “public enemy No. 1” in Iraq
and that “the terrorists’ goal in Iraq is to reignite
sectarian violence and break support for the war here
at home.” The next day, in the Rose Garden, Mr. Bush turned
on a reporter who had the temerity to ask about Mr. Bush’s
declining credibility with the public, declaring that Al Qaeda
is “a threat to your children” and accusing him of naïvely
ignoring the danger.
It’s upsetting to think that Mr. Bush believes the raging
sectarian violence in Iraq awaits reigniting, or that
he does not recognize that Americans’ support for the war
broke down many bloody months ago. But we have grown accustomed
to this president’s disconnect from reality and his habit
of tilting at straw men, like Americans who don’t care about
terrorism because they question his mismanagement of the
war or don’t worry about what will happen after the United
States withdraws, as it inevitably must.
The really disturbing thing about Mr. Bush’s comments is
his painting of the war in Iraq as an obvious-to-everyone-
but-the-wrongheaded fight between the United States and
a young Iraqi democracy on one side, and Al Qaeda on the
other. That fails to acknowledge that the Shiite-dominated
government of Iraq is not a democracy and is at war with
many of its own people. And it removes all pressure from
the Iraqi leadership — and Mr. Bush — to halt the sectarian
fighting and create a real democracy.
There is no doubt that organized Islamist terrorism — call
it Al Qaeda or by any other name — is a dire threat. There
is also no doubt that terrorists entered Iraq — mostly
after the war began.
We, too, believe that Iraq has to be made as stable as
possible so the United States can withdraw its troops
without unleashing even more chaos and destruction. But
Mr. Bush is not doing that and his version of reality only
makes it more unlikely. The only solution lies with the
Iraqi leaders, who have to stop their sectarian blood feud
and make a real attempt to form a united government. That
is their best chance to stabilize the country, allow the
United States to withdraw and, yes, battle Al Qaeda.
The Democrats who called for imposing benchmarks for
political progress on the Iraqis, combined with a withdrawal
date for American soldiers, were trying to start that process.
It’s a shame they could not summon the will and discipline
to keep going, but we hope they have not given up. As
disjointed as the Democrats have been, their approach
makes far more sense than Mr. Bush’s denial of Iraq’s
civil war and his war-without-end against terror.
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20) Michael Moore's Math
‘Sicko,’ Castro and the ‘120 Years Club’
By ANTHONY DePALMA
May 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/27/weekinreview/27depalma.html?ref=world
CUBA works hard to jam American TV signals and keep out
decadent Hollywood films. But it’s a good bet that Fidel
Castro’s government will turn a blind eye to bootleg copies
of “Sicko,” Michael Moore’s newest movie, if they show up
on the streets of Havana.
“Sicko,” the talk of the Cannes Film Festival last week,
savages the American health care system — and along the way
extols Cuba’s system as the neatest thing since the white
linen guayabera.
Mr. Moore transports a handful of sick Americans to Cuba
for treatment in the course of the film, which is scheduled
to open in the United States next month, and he is apparently
dumbfounded that they could get there what they couldn’t
get here.
“There’s a reason Cubans live on average longer than we do,”
he told Time magazine. “I’m not trumpeting Castro or his
regime. I just want to say to fellow Americans, ‘C’mon, we’re
the United States. If they can do this, we can do it.’ ”
But hold on. Do they do it? Live longer than, or even
as long as, we do? How could a poor developing country —
where annual health care spending averages just $230
a person compared with $6,096 in the United States —
come anywhere near matching the richest country
in the world?
Statistics from the World Health Organization, the C.I.A.
and other sources all show that the people of Cuba and
the United States have about the same life expectancy —
77 years, give or take a few months — while infant mortality
in Cuba is significantly lower than in the United States.
Of course, many people regard any figures about Cuba as
at least partly fiction. But even if the longevity
statistics are correct, they are open to interpretation.
Carmelo Mesa-Lago, a professor emeritus of economics
at the University of Pittsburgh, said statistics also
show that Cuba has a high rate of abortion, which can
lower infant mortality rates and improve life expectancy
figures. The constant flow of refugees also may affect
longevity figures, since those births are recorded but
the deaths are not.
Despite such skepticism, many medical experts say they
do believe that average Cubans can live as long as
Americans, and the reason may lie in a combination
of what Cuba does well and the United States does
poorly, if at all.
Dr. Robert N. Butler, president of the International
Longevity Center in New York and a Pulitzer Prize-winning
author on aging, has traveled to Cuba to see firsthand
how doctors are trained. He said a principal reason that
some health standards in Cuba approach the high American
level is that the Cuban system emphasizes early intervention.
Clinic visits are free, and the focus is on preventing
disease rather than treating it.
Dr. Butler said some of Cuba’s shortcomings may actually
improve its health profile. “Because they don’t have
up-to-date cars, they tend to have to exercise more by
walking,” he said. “And they may not have a surfeit of
food, which keeps them from problems like obesity, but
they’re not starving, either.”
Cuban markets are not always well stocked, but city streets
are dotted with hot dog and ice cream vendors. Bellies
are full, but such food can cause problems in the future,
as they have in the United States.
Dr. Butler has just completed a study that shows it is
possible that because of the epidemic of obesity in children,
“this may be the first generation of Americans to live
less long than their parents.”
There could be one great leveler for Cubans and Americans.
While all Cubans have at least minimal free access to
doctors, more than 45 million Americans lack basic health
insurance. Many are reluctant to seek early treatment they
cannot afford, Dr. Butler said. Instead, they wait to be
admitted to an emergency room.
“I know Americans tend to be skeptical,” he said, “but
health and education are two achievements of the Cuban
revolution, and they deserve some credit despite the
government’s poor record on human rights.”
Universal health care has long given the Cuban regime
bragging rights, though there is growing concern about
the future. In the decades that Cuba drew financial and
military support from the Soviet Union, Mr. Castro poured
resources into medical education, creating the largest medical
school in Latin America and turning out thousands of doctors
to practice around the world.
But that changed after the collapse of the Soviets, according
to Cuban defectors like Dr. Leonel Cordova. By the time
Dr. Cordova started practicing in 1992, equipment and drugs
were already becoming scarce. He said he was assigned to
a four-block neighborhood in Havana Province where he was
supposed to care for about 600 people.
“But even if I diagnosed something simple like bronchitis,”
he said, “I couldn’t write a prescription for antibiotics,
because there were none.”
He defected in 2000 while on a medical mission in Zimbabwe
and made his way to the United States. He is now an urgent-
care physician at Baptist Hospital in Miami.
Having practiced medicine in both Cuba and the United States,
Dr. Cordova has an unusual perspective for comparison.
“Actually there are three systems,” Dr. Cordova said, because
Cuba has two: one is for party officials and foreigners like
those Mr. Moore brought to Havana. “It is as good as this one
here, with all the resources, the best doctors, the best
medicines, and nobody pays a cent,” he said.
But for the 11 million ordinary Cubans, hospitals are often
ill equipped and patients “have to bring their own food, soap,
sheets — they have to bring everything.” And up to 20,000
Cuban doctors may be working in Venezuela, creating
a shortage in Cuba.
Still Cuban officials assert that free health care, a variety
of sports programs, a healthy, if limited, diet and cultural
activities have kept enough Cubans healthy enough well into
old age to warrant starting the 120 Years Club, which enrolls
people who are 80 and older and strives to help them reach
an even riper old age.
Until he had to have emergency surgery last year, Fidel
Castro — who turned 80 this year — was considered a model
of vibrant long life in Cuba. But it was only last week that
he acknowledged in an open letter that his initial surgery
by Cuban doctors had been botched. He did not confirm,
however, that a specialist had been flown in from Spain
last December to help set things right.
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21) Remembrance, and Protest, for a Man Slain by an Officer
By MANNY FERNANDEZ
May 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/27/nyregion/27funeral.html?ref=nyregion
Wendy Castillo stood at the front of the dimly lighted
chapel, the open coffin a few steps away. Her uncle Fermin
Arzu lay inside. He was dressed elegantly, in a black
suit with white gloves.
“Look what they did,” said Ms. Castillo, 32, pointing
to the coffin. “Look, at our pain. We don’t deserve this
pain. We don’t deserve it. And no one else deserves
this pain.”
As mourners filled the Parkchester Funeral Home in the
Bronx yesterday for Mr. Arzu’s funeral, several of his
relatives and community leaders used the occasion not
so much to remember his life, but to condemn — and demand
justice for — his death. They drew comparisons between his
death and that of Sean Bell, who was killed by police
gunfire in November in Queens.
Both men were involved in confrontations with police
officers, and both were unarmed.
“This man did nothing to warrant being here today,” the
Rev. Al Sharpton told the mourners. Mr. Sharpton, whose
civil rights organization, the National Action Network,
is assisting the Arzu family, attended the funeral with
Mr. Bell’s fiancée, Nicole Paultre Bell, and her mother.
He asked, “How many times do police have to tell us,
‘I thought there was a gun’?”
Shortly before midnight on May 18, Mr. Arzu, 41, who
worked as a building porter and was from Honduras,
crashed his minivan into a parked car near an off-duty
officer’s home on Hewitt Place in the Bronx. The officer,
Raphael Lora, rushed outside and confronted Mr. Arzu,
who had driven half a block from the scene of the accident.
What happened next is not clear. According to someone
involved in the investigation and familiar with Officer
Lora’s account, Officer Lora said he opened the driver’s
side door and found Mr. Arzu to be “completely irrational
and unresponsive.”
Early reports had said that Officer Lora feared Mr. Arzu
might have been reaching for a gun in his glove compartment.
But the person familiar with his account said last week
that the officer realized before any shots were fired
that Mr. Arzu had not produced a gun and that the glove
compartment was not a threat.
The person said that according to Officer Lora, Mr. Arzu
tried to close the door, injuring the officer. Then, as
Mr. Arzu started to drive away, Officer Lora was trapped
by the door and dragged. After partially freeing himself,
Officer Lora reportedly said that he tried to keep up with
the car but lost his footing and began to shoot.
Mr. Arzu was killed by a bullet that entered his back;
four more bullets were found in the vehicle’s door frame,
rear back panel and the panel over the taillight, the
police said. He was shot, Mr. Sharpton pointed out,
on what would have been Mr. Bell’s 24th birthday.
Mr. Bell died in a barrage of police bullets in Jamaica
on Nov. 25 after crashing his car into a detective and
an unmarked police minivan. Three officers have been
indicted, two on manslaughter charges and one on reckless
endangerment charges.
Mr. Arzu’s case is being investigated by the Bronx district
attorney’s office, as well as the Police Department’s
Internal Affairs Bureau.
Mr. Arzu’s funeral drew about 100 relatives, friends,
elected officials and other supporters, and it came on
a day when news media reports surfaced that he had been
drinking that night.
Family members and supporters, including Mr. Sharpton
and Assemblyman Rubén Díaz Jr. of the Bronx, said Mr. Arzu
was the victim in the case, not the suspect, and they
characterized such questions as an effort to criminalize
him.
“They’re saying a lot of things, that he was drunk,”
said Maria Suazo, Mr. Arzu’s niece, who spoke in Spanish
with the aid of a translator earlier in the morning, at
a rally at the Harlem headquarters of the National Action
Network. “O.K., it may happen, it may be true, but there’s
no right for no one to take that person’s life.”
The possibility that Mr. Arzu was intoxicated could color
how investigators, or a grand jury, view Officer Lora’s
actions.
Maki Haberfeld, the chairwoman of the department of law,
police science and criminal justice administration at
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said that if someone
acts irrationally, it elevates the level of stress for the
police officer, and thus affects his decision-making.
“The danger that the person poses to the police officer
is also elevated,” she said.
Mr. Arzu’s body is being flown tomorrow to Honduras, to
the city of San Pedro Sula, for burial. Mr. Arzu was
a member of the Bronx’s Garifuna community, a Central
American ethnic group made up of descendants of West
African slaves and Arawak Indians from the Caribbean
island of St. Vincent.
Mr. Arzu had until recently played in a Latin music group
called the Rio Tinto Stars Band. Friends and relatives
described him as a garrulous man who looked after his
fiancée, Thomasa Sabio, 46, a cancer patient. At the
Clinton Towers in the Bronx, where he worked, he was known
by residents as helpful and generous.
“Big guy, smiling all the time,” said Tina Gray, who lives
in the high-rise complex and came to the funeral yesterday.
“We’ve been crying all week.”
Mr. Díaz, the assemblyman, said he was struck by how
powerful Mr. Arzu looked, even in the coffin. “They took
this strong figure from the community, from the family,
recklessly,” he said. “He should have been outside enjoying
the day with his family.”
Cara Buckley, Cassi Feldman and Thomas J. Lueck contributed
reporting.
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22) "Baghdad is a smashed city..."
Below is an email I have just received from my close friend
and translator Abu Talat. While he has fled Baghdad with
his family and is now a refugee in Syria, he recently had
to return to Baghdad in order to try to salvage what is
left of his former life (his car, belongings from his
house, etc.) before returning back to Syria. His note
is instructive as to the current living conditions in
the capital city of Iraq. Here is the full text of
his message:
May 27, 2007
Dahr_Jamail_Dispatches@dahrjamailiraq.com
http://DahrJamailIraq.com
Habibi…
Baghdad is a SMASHED city…no roads to drive on…most of them
are closed off by concrete obstacles with concertina wire.
In addition, the presence of the Iraqi military, who cover
their faces with black masks and hold their guns in such
a way that when you see them you will definitely be afraid
that they will shoot you.
The shops in most of the area I went to see are closed.
I asked one of the shop owners I know, 55-year-old Abu Fadhil,
since I heard that his shop was robbed. I found his door
closed and locked and he was nowhere to be found.
Later, on my way to Sadr City, I found that two of the
three roads which lead all the way from south to north
Baghdad are either partially or totally closed in some
places. You still remember the highways in Baghdad…well
now most of them are closed, or at least fenced off with
obstacles, yet they say there is some progress in the security
situation inside the city! Everyday two or three cars explode
across Baghdad, killing big numbers of civilians.
When I returned to my neighborhood of al-Adhamiya, I couldn’t
get in unless the soldiers checked my ID and my car, even
though the guards are from the same neighborhood and they
know me personally. But they had to check it to ensure that
no car bombs might happen. Nevertheless, daily mortars shell
my neighborhood and those are out of control, despite this
concrete wall placed by the Americans which now surrounds
our neighborhood. Despite all that they do, they cannot bring
security to our small neighborhood.
Needless to say, Baghdad has been changed into THE CITY OF
GARBAGE. You can find it everywhere. You can smell the stench
of dead bodies wherever you go.
Talking of electricity, there is now only one hour daily.
That’s it. From where we’re staying in the city center,
in Bab al-Muadham, I can see from the balcony that people
sleep nearly naked on their rooftops because it is so hot
and there is no electricity to run fans or air conditioners.
Thank God that there are two large generators that maintain
electricity in our building.
Everyday by 2-3 pm the buildings where we are staying are
closed so that no one can leave or enter. That way it is kept
secure, and this is how it remains until the next morning.
As far as my family life in this condition, we are as
though we are in jail from 2-3 pm until the second morning
where the doors are opened at 7 am.
My son goes to the hospital to work, but for the last two
days he finds it without any running water. [His son works
in Baghdad Medical City, the largest hospital in Iraq]
For the last 2 weeks, as he told me, the hospital has
been without any air conditioning and almost without
patients, although it’s the biggest hospital in Iraq.
My sons wife, who is also a doctor, has to go to another
hospital just to try to assist since there is a drastic
lack of Gynecologists. She stays in her hospital for three
days continuously before my son picks her up with his car
on the fourth day to bring her home, in order to insure
her safety so she doesn’t have to take a bus or taxi.
As for my daughter, she has not passed out the doorway
of this apartment where we are staying for the last week
except for one time for some work she had to accomplish.
My wife left here only once, when she went to her job
(which she has been on leave from since we left to Syria)
in order to apply for a full year vacation. Thank God
she got it.
As for me, I found my car ruined, so I had to repair
it. For that I called the mechanic to come to my home
and repair it, since I couldn’t take the car to him
since all the mechanics shops are closed and there
is no place to have a car repaired. All of those
shops are totally closed.
When I saw the mechanic he said, “We cannot live anymore,
and there is no job we can find.”
Dahr, this short letter gives you just a glance of the
current situation in Baghdad. With the next letter
I will tell you some more.
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23) Trust and Betrayal
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
May 28, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/05/28/opinion/28krugman.html?hp
“In this place where valor sleeps, we are reminded why
America has always gone to war reluctantly, because we
know the costs of war.” That’s what President Bush said
last year, in a Memorial Day ceremony at Arlington
National Cemetery.
Those were fine words, spoken by a man with less right
to say them than any president in our nation’s history.
For Mr. Bush took us to war not with reluctance, but
with unseemly eagerness.
Now that war has turned into an epic disaster, in part
because the war’s architects, whom we now know were
warned about the risks, didn’t want to hear about them.
Yet Congress seems powerless to stop it. How did it
all go so wrong?
Future historians will shake their heads over how easily
America was misled into war. The warning signs, the
indications that we had a rogue administration determined
to use 9/11 as an excuse for war, were there, for those
willing to see them, right from the beginning — even
before Mr. Bush began explicitly pushing for war with Iraq.
In fact, the very first time Mr. Bush declared a war
on terror that “will not end until every terrorist group
of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated,”
people should have realized that he was going to use
the terrorist attack to justify anything and everything.
When he used his first post-attack State of the Union
to denounce an “axis of evil” consisting of three
countries that had nothing to do either with 9/11
or with each other, alarm bells should have gone off.
But the nation, brought together in grief and anger over
the attack, wanted to trust the man occupying the White
House. And so it took a long time before Americans were
willing to admit to themselves just how thoroughly their
trust had been betrayed.
It’s a terrible story, yet it’s also understandable.
I wasn’t really surprised by Republican election victories
in 2002 and 2004: nations almost always rally around their
leaders in times of war, no matter how bad the leaders
and no matter how poorly conceived the war.
The question was whether the public would ever catch on.
Well, to the immense relief of those who spent years trying
to get the truth out, they did. Last November Americans
voted overwhelmingly to bring an end to Mr. Bush’s war.
Yet the war goes on.
To keep the war going, the administration has brought
the original bogyman back out of the closet. At first,
Mr. Bush said he would bring Osama bin Laden in, dead
or alive. Within seven months after 9/11, however, he
had lost interest: “I wouldn’t necessarily say he’s at
the center of any command structure,” he said in March
2002. “I truly am not that concerned about him.”
In all of 2003, Mr. Bush, who had an unrelated war to
sell, made public mention of the man behind 9/11 only
seven times.
But Osama is back: last week Mr. Bush invoked his name
11 times in a single speech, warning that if we leave
Iraq, Al Qaeda — which wasn’t there when we went in —
will be the winner. And Democrats, still fearing that
they will end up accused of being weak on terror and
not supporting the troops, gave Mr. Bush another year’s
war funding.
Democratic Party activists were furious, because polls
show a public utterly disillusioned with Mr. Bush and
anxious to see the war ended. But it’s not clear that
the leadership was wrong to be cautious. The truth is
that the nightmare of the Bush years won’t really be
over until politicians are convinced that voters will
punish, not reward, Bush-style fear-mongering. And that
hasn’t happened yet.
Here’s the way it ought to be: When Rudy Giuliani says
that Iran, which had nothing to do with 9/11, is part
of a “movement” that “has already displayed more aggressive
tendencies by coming here and killing us,” he should
be treated as a lunatic.
When Mitt Romney says that a coalition of “Shia and Sunni
and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and
Al Qaeda” wants to “bring down the West,” he should be
ridiculed for his ignorance.
And when John McCain says that Osama, who isn’t in Iraq,
will “follow us home” if we leave, he should be laughed at.
But they aren’t, at least not yet. And until belligerent,
uninformed posturing starts being treated with the contempt
it deserves, men who know nothing of the cost of war will
keep sending other people’s children to graves at Arlington.
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24) Cuba’s Cure
Why is Cuba Exporting Its Health Care Miracle
To The World’s Poor?
By Sarah van Gelder
Cubans say they offer health care to the world’s
poor because they have big hearts.
But what do they get in return?
May 25, 2007
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/25/1458/
They live longer than almost anyone in Latin America. Far
fewer babies die. Almost everyone has been vaccinated, and
such scourges of the poor as parasites, TB, malaria, even
HIV/AIDS are rare or non-existent. Anyone can see a doctor,
at low cost, right in the neighborhood.
The Cuban health care system is producing a population
that is as healthy as those of the world’s wealthiest
countries at a fraction of the cost. And now Cuba has begun
exporting its system to under-served communities around
the world—including the United States.
The story of Cuba’s health care ambitions is largely hidden
from the people of the United States, where politics left
over from the Cold War maintain an embargo on information
and understanding. But it is increasingly well-known in the
poorest communities of Latin America, the Caribbean, and
parts of Africa where Cuban and Cuban-trained doctors
are practicing.
In the words of Dr. Paul Farmer, Cuba is showing that
“you can introduce the notion of a right to health care
and wipe out the diseases of poverty.”
Health Care for All Cubans
Many elements of the health care system Cuba is exporting
around the world are common-sense practices. Everyone has
access to doctors, nurses, specialists, and medications.
There is a doctor and nurse team in every neighborhood,
although somewhat fewer now, with 29,000 medical professionals
serving out of the country—a fact that is causing some
complaints. If someone doesn’t like their neighborhood
doctor, they can choose another one.
House calls are routine, in part because it’s the responsibility
of the doctor and nurse team to understand you and your health
issues in the context of your family, home, and neighborhood.
This is key to the system. By catching diseases and health
hazards before they get big, the Cuban medical system can
spend a little on prevention rather than a lot later on to
cure diseases, stop outbreaks, or cope with long-term disabilities.
When a health hazard like dengue fever or malaria is identified,
there is a coordinated nationwide effort to eradicate it. Cubans
no longer suffer from diphtheria, rubella, polio, or measles
and they have the lowest AIDS rate in the Americas, and the
highest rate of treatment and control of hypertension.
For health issues beyond the capacity of the neighborhood doctor,
polyclinics provide specialists, outpatient operations, physical
therapy, rehabilitation, and labs. Those who need inpatient
treatment can go to hospitals; at the end of their stay, their
neighborhood medical team helps make the transition home.
Doctors at all levels are trained to administer acupuncture,
herbal cures, or other complementary practices that Cuban labs
have found effective. And Cuban researchers develop their own
vaccinations and treatments when medications aren’t available
due to the blockade, or when they don’t exist.
Exporting Health Care
For decades, Cuba has sent doctors abroad and trained international
students at its medical schools. But things ramped up beginning
in 1998 when Hurricanes George and Mitch hammered Central America
and the Caribbean. As they had often done, Cuban doctors rushed
to the disaster zone to help those suffering the aftermath.
But when it was time to go home, it was clear to the Cuban
teams that the medical needs extended far beyond emergency
care. So Cuba made a commitment to post doctors in several
of these countries and to train local people in medicine
so they could pick up where the Cuban doctors left off. ELAM,
the Havana-based Latin American School of Medicine, was born,
and with it the offer of 10,000 scholarships for free medical
training.
Today the program has grown to 22,000 students from Latin
America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and the United States
who attend ELAM and 28 other medical schools across Cuba.
The students represent dozens of ethnic groups, 51 percent
are women, and they come from more than 30 countries.
What they have in common is that they would otherwise be
unable to get a medical education. When a slum dweller
in Port au Prince, a young indigenous person from Bolivia,
the son or daughter of a farmer in Honduras, or a street
vendor in the Gambia wants to become a doctor, they turn
to Cuba. In some cases, Venezuela pays the bill. But most
of the time, Cuba covers tuition, living expenses, books,
and medical care. In return, the students agree that,
upon completion of their studies, they will return to
their own under-served communities to practice medicine.
The curriculum at ELAM begins, for most students, with
up to a year of “bridging” courses, allowing them to
catch up on basic math, science, and Spanish skills.
The students are treated for the ailments many bring
with them.
At the end of their training, which can take up to eight
years, most students return home for residencies. Although
they all make a verbal commitment to serve the poor, a few
students quietly admit that they don’t see this as
a permanent commitment.
One challenge of the Cuban approach is making sure their
investment in medical education benefits those who need
it most. Doctors from poor areas routinely move to
wealthier areas or out of the country altogether. Cuba
trains doctors in an ethic of serving the poor. They
learn to see medical care as a right, not as a commodity,
and to see their own role as one of service. Stories
of Cuban doctors who practice abroad suggest these lessons
stick. They are known for taking money out of their own
pockets to buy medicine for patients who can’t afford
to fill a prescription, and for touching and even
embracing patients.
Cuba plans with the help of Venezuela to take their
medical training to a massive scale and graduate 100,000
doctors over the next 15 years, according to Dr. Juan
Ceballos, advisor to the vice minister of public health.
To do so, Cuba has been building new medical schools
around the country and abroad, at a rapid clip.
But the scale of the effort required to address current
and projected needs for doctors requires breaking out
of the box. The new approach is medical schools without
walls. Students meet their teachers in clinics and hospitals,
in Cuba and abroad, practicing alongside their mentors.
Videotaped lectures and training software mean students
can study anywhere there are Cuban doctors. The lower
training costs make possible a scale of medical education
that could end the scarcity of doctors.
U.S. Students in Cuba
Recently, Cuba extended the offer of free medical training
to students from the United States. It started when
Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi got curious
after he and other members of the Congressional Black
Caucus repeatedly encountered Cuban or Cuban-trained
doctors in poor communities around the world.
They visited Cuba in May 2000, and during a conversation
with Fidel Castro, Thompson brought up the lack of medical
access for his poor, rural constituents. “He [Castro] was
very familiar with the unemployment rates, health conditions,
and infant mortality rates in my district, and that surprised me,”
Thompson said. Castro offered scholarships for low-income
Americans under the same terms as the other international
students—they have to agree to go back and serve their
communities.
Today, about 90 young people from poor parts of the United
States have joined the ranks of international students
studying medicine in Cuba.
The offer of medical training is just one way Cuba has
reached out to the United States. Immediately after
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, 1,500 Cuban doctors volunteered
to come to the Gulf Coast. They waited with packed bags and
medical supplies, and a ship ready to provide backup support.
Permission from the U.S. government never arrived.
“Our government played politics with the lives of people
when they needed help the most,” said Representative
Thompson. “And that’s unfortunate.”
When an earthquake struck Pakistan shortly afterwards,
though, that country’s government warmly welcomed the Cuban
medical professionals. And 2,300 came, bringing 32 field
hospitals to remote, frigid regions of the Himalayas. There,
they set broken bones, treated ailments, and performed
operations for a total of 1.7 million patients.
The disaster assistance is part of Cuba’s medical aid
mission that has extended from Peru to Indonesia, and
even included caring for 17,000 children sickened by
the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in
the Ukraine.
It isn’t only in times of disaster that Cuban health
care workers get involved. Some 29,000 Cuban health
professionals are now practicing in 69 countries—mostly
in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa. In Venezuela,
about 20,000 of them have enabled President Hugo Chávez
to make good on his promise to provide health care to
the poor. In the shantytowns around Caracas and the
banks of the Amazon, those who organize themselves
and find a place for a doctor to practice and live
can request a Cuban doctor.
As in Cuba, these doctors and nurses live where they
serve, and become part of the community. They are
available for emergencies, and they introduce
preventative health practices.
Some are tempted to use their time abroad as an
opportunity to leave Cuba. In August, the U.S. Department
of Homeland Security announced a new policy that makes
it easier for Cuban medical professionals to come
to the U.S. But the vast majority remain on the job
and eventually return to Cuba.
Investing in Peace
How do the Cuban people feel about using their country’s
resources for international medical missions? Those
I asked responded with some version of this: We Cubans
have big hearts. We are proud that we can share what
we have with the world’s poor.
Nearly everyone in Cuba knows someone who has served
on a medical mission. These doctors encounter maladies
that have been eradicated from Cuba. They expand their
understanding of medicine and of the suffering associated
with poverty and powerlessness, and they bring home the
pride that goes with making a difference.
And pride is a potent antidote to the dissatisfaction
that can result from the economic hardships that continue
50 years into Cuba’s revolution.
From the government’s perspective, their investment in
medical internationalism is covered, in part, by ALBA,
the new trade agreement among Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua
and Cuba. ALBA, an alternative to the Free Trade Area
of the Americas, puts human needs ahead of economic growth,
so it isn’t surprising that Cuba’s health care offerings
fall within the agreement, as does Venezuelan oil, Bolivian
natural gas, and so on. But Cuba also offers help to countries
outside of ALBA.
“All we ask for in return is solidarity,” Dr. Ceballos says.
“Solidarity” has real-world implications. Before Cuba sent
doctors to Pakistan, relations between the two countries
were not great, Ceballos says. But now the relationship
is “magnificent.” The same is true of Guatemala and El
Salvador. “Although they are conservative governments,
they have become more flexible in their relationship
with Cuba,” he says.
Those investments in health care missions “are resources
that prevent confrontation with other nations,” Ceballos
explains. “The solidarity with Cuba has restrained
aggressions of all kinds.” And in a statement that
acknowledges Cuba’s vulnerabilities on the global stage,
Ceballos puts it this way: “It’s infinitely better
to invest in peace than to invest in war.”
Imagine, then, that this idea took hold. Even more
revolutionary than the right to health care for all
is the idea that an investment in health—or in clean
water, adequate food or housing—could be more powerful,
more effective at building security than bombers and
aircraft carriers.
Sarah van Gelder, executive editor of YES!, was in Cuba
(legally) in December 2006 visiting medical schools,
clinics, and hospitals. Her travel was supported by The
Atlantic Philanthropies, and MEDICC provided program
consulting.
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25) Dear Democratic Congress
by CindySheehan
http://cindysheehan.dailykos.com
May 26, 2007 at 07:03:16 AM PDT
http://mwcnews.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=14771&Itemid=26
Dublin, Ireland
Dear Democratic Congress,
Hello, my name is Cindy Sheehan and my son Casey Sheehan
was killed on April 04, 2004 in Sadr City , Baghdad , Iraq .
He was killed when the Republicans still were in control of
Congress. Naively, I set off on my tireless campaign calling
on Congress to rescind George’s authority to wage his war
of terror while asking him "for what noble cause" did Casey
and thousands of other have to die. Now, with Democrats
in control of Congress, I have lost my optimistic naiveté
and have become cynically pessimistic as I see you all
caving into as one Daily Kos poster called: "Mr. 28%"
There is absolutely no sane or defensible reason for you
to hand Bloody King George more money to condemn more of
our brave, tired, and damaged soldiers and the people
of Iraq to more death and carnage. You think giving him
more money is politically expedient, but it is a moral
abomination and every second the occupation of Iraq
endures, you all have more blood on your hands.
Ms. Pelosi, Speaker of the House, said after George
signed the new weak as a newborn baby funding authorization
bill: "Now, I think the president’s policy will begin
to unravel." Begin to unravel? How many more of our
children will have to be killed and how much more of
Iraq will have to be demolished before you all think
enough unraveling has occurred? How many more crimes
will BushCo be allowed to commit while their poll numbers
are crumbling before you all gain the political "courage"
to hold them accountable. If Iraq hasn’t unraveled in
Ms. Pelosi’s mind, what will it take? With almost 700,000
Iraqis dead and four million refugees (which the US
refuses to admit) how could it get worse? Well, it is
getting worse and it can get much worse thanks to your
complicity.
Being cynically pessimistic, it seems to me that this
new vote to extend the war until the end of September,
(and let’s face it, on October 1st, you will give him
more money after some more theatrics, which you think
are fooling the anti-war faction of your party) will
feed right into the presidential primary season and
you believe that if you just hang on until then, the
Democrats will be able to re-take the White House.
Didn’t you see how "well" that worked for John Kerry
in 2004 when he played the politics of careful fence
sitting and pandering? The American electorate are
getting disgusted with weaklings who blow where the
wind takes them while frittering away our precious
lifeblood and borrowing money from our new owners,
the Chinese.
I knew having a Democratic Congress would make no
difference in grassroots action. That’s why we went
to DC when you all were sworn in to tell you that
we wanted the troops back from Iraq and BushCo held
accountable while you pushed for ethics reform which
is quite a hoot...don’t’ you think? We all know that
it is affordable for you all to play this game
of political mayhem because you have no children
in harm’s way...let me tell you what it is like:
You watch your reluctant soldier march off to a war
that neither you nor he agrees with. Once your
soldier leaves the country all you can do is worry.
You lie awake at night staring at the moon wondering
if today will be the day that you get that dreaded
knock on your door. You can’t concentrate, you can’t
eat, and your entire life becomes consumed with
apprehension while you are waiting for the other
shoe to drop.
Then, when your worst fears are realized, you begin
a life of constant pain, regret, and longing. Everyday
is hard, but then you come up on "special" days...like
upcoming Memorial Day. Memorial Day holds double pain
for me because, not only are we supposed to honor our
fallen troops, but Casey was born on Memorial Day
in 1979. It used to be a day of celebration for us
and now it is a day of despair. Our needlessly killed
soldiers of this war and the past conflict in Vietnam
have all left an unnecessary trail of sorrow and deep
holes of absence that will never be filled.
So, Democratic Congress, with the current daily death
toll of 3.72 troops per day, you have condemned 473
more to these early graves. 473 more lives wasted
for your political greed: Thousands of broken hearts
because of your cowardice and avarice. How can you
even go to sleep at night or look at yourselves in
a mirror? How do you put behind you the screaming
mothers on both sides of the conflict? How does
the agony you have created escape you? It will
never escape me...I can’t run far enough or hide
well enough to get away from it.
By the end of September, we will be about 80 troops
short of another bloody milestone: 4000, and
MoveOn.org will hold nationwide candlelight vigils
and you all will be busy passing legislation that
will snuff the lights out of thousands more human
beings.
Congratulations Congress, you have bought yourself
a few more months of an illegal and immoral bloodbath.
And you know you mean to continue it indefinitely so
"other presidents" can solve the horrid problem BushCo
forced our world into.
It used to be George Bush’s war. You could have ended
it honorably. Now it is yours and you all will descend
into calumnious history with BushCo.
The Camp Casey Peace Institute is calling all citizens
who are as disgusted as we are with you all to join us
in Philadelphia on July 4th to try and figure a way out
of this "two" party system that is bought and paid for
by the war machine which has a stranglehold on every
aspect of our lives. As for myself, I am leaving the
Democratic Party. You have completely failed those
who put you in power to change the direction our country
is heading. We did not elect you to help sink our ship
of state but to guide it to safe harbor.
We do not condone our government’s violent meddling in
sovereign countries and we condemn the continued
murderous occupation of Iraq.
We gave you a chance, you betrayed us.
Sincerely,
Cindy Sheehan
Founder and President of
Gold Star Families for Peace.
Founder and Director of
The Camp Casey Peace Institute
Eternally grieving mother of Casey Sheehan
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LINKS AND VERY SHORT STORIES
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Site Pulled Calling Anti-War Advocates Terrorists
Anti-Abortion, Gay-Rights Groups Also Included
http://www.nbc6.net/news/13398523/detail.html?taf=ami
Stun gun use on mentally ill questioned
© 2007 The Associated Press
May 28, 2007, 12:28AM
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/nation/4840930.html
As Allies Turn Foe, Disillusion Rises in Some G.I.’s
By MICHAEL KAMBER
May 28, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/28/world/middleeast/28delta.html?ref=world
Wealthy Enclave Offers Windfall for Candidates
By ALISON LEIGH COWAN
"GREENWICH, Conn., May 25 — Senator John McCain made his
pitch to this gilded shoreline suburb back in April.
Former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts came on May 7,
followed one night later by former President Bill Clinton
on behalf of his wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Last weekend, it was back-to-back appearances by Senator
Barack Obama, topped off on Sunday with a visit from
Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor.
With the mansions along its winding back roads now awash
in hedge fund money, Greenwich has joined New York,
Los Angeles and Silicon Valley as must stops on the
presidential fund-raising tour, with prominent locals
now boasting of candidate scuff marks on their basketball
courts, Secret Service T-shirts in their closets and framed
pictures of their children with the candidates on their
mantels. For a town that has wealth and corporate clout
to spare, the fund-raisers fill a void: access to a potential
White House resident."
May 28, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/28/us/politics/28greenwich.html?hp
Site Pulled Calling Anti-War Advocates Terrorists
Anti-Abortion, Gay-Rights Groups Also Included
MONTGOMERY, Ala. -- The Alabama Department of Homeland
Security has taken down a Web site it operated that
included gay rights, anti-war and anti-abortion organizations
in a list of groups that could include terrorists.
The site included the groups under a description of what
it called "single-issue extremists." The Web site says
such groups include people who feel they are trying to
create a better world.
The director of the department said his agency received
a number of calls and e-mails from people who said they
felt the site unfairly targeted certain people just
because of their beliefs. He said he plans to put the
Web site back on the Internet, but will no longer
identify specific types of groups.
POSTED: 10:27 pm EDT May 27, 2007
UPDATED: 10:28 pm EDT May 27, 2007
http://www.nbc6.net/news/13398523/detail.html?taf=ami
INTERVIEW: AS'AD ABUKHALIL ON THE NAHR AL-BARED SIEGE
By Ali Abunimah, Electronic Lebanon, 24 May 2007
"Thousands of Palestinian refugees are fleeing from Nahr
al-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon as five days of
fighting by the Lebanese army and a militant group known
as Fath al-Islam has left dozens of soldiers and fighters
and an unknown number of civilians dead. As the situation
of these Palestinian refugees worsens, 59 years after they
were first expelled from their homeland into Lebanon, the
world looks on in silence. Electronic Intifada co-founder
Ali Abunimah spoke with As'ad Abukhalil, the creator of
the Angry Arab News Service blog on the origins of Fath
al-Islam, the events that led to the violence and what it
means for Lebanon and the region."
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6945.shtml
US Show of Force in Gulf "Greatly Alarming"
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/052607A.shtml
Federal agents arrest over 100 for immigration violations
in Missouri raid
Michael Sung
JURIST@law.pitt.edu
5/23/2007
http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2007/05/federal-agents-arrest-over-100-for.php
Oil Industry Says Biofuel Push May Hurt at Pump
By JAD MOUAWAD
May 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/24/business/24refinery.html?ref=business
For the First Time, New York Links a Death to 9/11 Dust
By ANTHONY DePALMA
May 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/24/nyregion/24dust.html?ref=nyregion
$5 Million Settlement in Boot Camp Death
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
TALLAHASSEE, Fla., May 23 (AP) — The family of a teenager
who died after being roughed up by guards at a juvenile boot
camp last year will receive $5 million under a bill signed
Wednesday by Gov. Charlie Crist.
The teenager, Martin L. Anderson, 14, died in January 2006
shortly after being kneed and struck and having ammonia
tablets held to his nose at the military-style facility
run by the Bay County Sheriff’s Office in Panama City, Fla.
Mr. Crist and several lawmakers pushed for the settlement
this spring despite the Legislature’s general distaste
for claims measures.
The state has already paid Martin’s parents $200,000, the
most allowed by law without legislative approval. The bill
signed by Mr. Crist pays the remaining $4.8 million.
The sheriff’s office has separately settled with the Anderson
family for $2.4 million. Seven guards and a nurse employed
at the camp face manslaughter charges.
An initial autopsy said Martin died of complications from
sickle cell trait. But a second autopsy said the death
was caused by suffocation resulting from being forced
to inhale the ammonia.
Martin entered the camp for a probation violation for
trespassing at a school after he and his cousins were
charged with stealing their grandmother’s car.
May 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/24/us/24florida.html
ELECTRONIC INTIFADA
http://electronicIntifada.net
ONGOING SPECIAL COVERAGE OF SIEGE OF LEBANON REFUGEE CAMP:
http://electronicintifada.net/bytopic/674.shtml
ONGOING SPECIAL COVERAGE OF RENEWED ISRAELI STRIKES ON GAZA:
http://electronicintifada.net/bytopic/672.shtml
Democrats Pull Troop Deadline From Iraq Bill
By CARL HULSE
May 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/23/washington/23cong.html?ref=world
Film Offers New Talking Points in Health Care Debate
By MILT FREUDENHEIM and LIZA KLAUSSMANN
May 22, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/22/business/media/22react.html?ref=business
Kentucky: Families Sue in Mine Blast
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The sole survivor of a mine explosion last year and relatives
of four of the five miners killed sued the coal company,
saying it had put production over safety. The suit cited
safety violations against the company, Kentucky Darby;
a supervisor, Ralph Napier; and Jericol Mining, which
provided management, planning, engineering and safety
training to the mine, Darby Mine No. 1. The plaintiffs
also seek damages against the manufacturer of the emergency
air packs that the victims used.
May 22, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/22/us/22brfs-FAMILIESSUEI_BRF.html
IRAQ: Educational standards plummet, say specialists
http://www.irinnews.org/PrintReport.aspx?ReportId=72168
Exclusive: Secret US plot to kill Al-Sadr
By Patrick Cockburn In Baghdad
Published: 21 May 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2565123.ece
What's Next in Iraq? Juan Cole Interviews Ali A. Allawi
"Will a surge of U.S. troops make
a difference in Iraq? How viable is
the current Iraqi government? Will
an American withdrawal lead to
all-out civil war?
May 25, 2007
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i38/38b00601.htm
Black Media Delegation Returns from Darfur
Final Call, News Report, Jehron Muhammad,
Posted: May 20, 2007
http://news.ncmonline.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=b4a5f713b944aebb26047375d0629bf7
Soldier’s Smallpox Inoculation Sickens Son
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
"A 2-year-old boy spent seven weeks in the hospital
and nearly died from a viral infection he got from
the smallpox vaccination his father received before
shipping out to Iraq, according to a government report
and the doctors who treated him."
May 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/18/health/18smallpox.html?ref=health
My Dear Fellow Species
By MARY JO MURPHY
"THE Origin of Species” is almost 150 — a fit survivor
of the science canon even if not everyone has seen fit
to jump from the Ark to the Beagle on the matter of
evolution (three Republican presidential candidates,
for example). But Darwin himself was slow to come to
his ideas, and slower still to disclose them to
a skeptical public. Last week, the Darwin Correspondence
Project, based at Cambridge University, put about 5,000
letters to and from Darwin, some of them previously
unpublished, online at darwinproject.ac.uk, with thousands
more to follow. The searchable database lets anyone track
the painstaking development of his research and thinking
— on all kinds of topics, personal and professional,
and with a huge array of correspondents." MARY JO MURPHY
May 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/weekinreview/20word.html?ref=science
The Closing of the University Commons
by Michael Perelman
May 19, 2007
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/perelman190507.html
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GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS AND INFORMATION
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LAPD vs. Immigrants (Video)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/qws/ff/qr?term=lapd&Submit=S&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Search&st=s
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Dr. Julia Hare at the SOBA 2007
http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeo9ewi/proudtobeblack2/
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"There comes a times when silence is betrayal."
--Martin Luther King
DEMAND THE RELEASE OF SAMI AL-ARIAN
The National Council of Arab Americans (NCA) demands the immediate
release of political prisoner, Dr. Sami Al-Arian. Although
Dr. Al-Arian is no longer on a hunger strike we must still demand
he be released 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. He has long sense served his time yet
Dr. Al-Arian is still being held. Release him 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/
Criminalizing Solidarity: Sami Al-Arian and the War of
Terror
By Charlotte Kates, The Electronic Intifada, 4 April 2007
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6767.shtml
Related:
Robert Fisk: The true story of free speech in America
This systematic censorship of Middle East reality
continues even in schools
Published: 07 April 2007
http://news. independent. co.uk/world/ fisk/article2430 125.ece
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[For some levity...Hans Groiner plays Monk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51bsCRv6kI0
...bw]
Excerpt of interview between Barbara Walters and Hugo Chavez
http://www.borev.net/2007/03/what_you_had_something_better.html
Which country should we invade next?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3g_zqz3VjY
My Favorite Mutiny, The Coup
http://www.myspace.com/thecoupmusic
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
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'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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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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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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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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[The Scab
"After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad,
and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with
which he made a scab."
"A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul,
a water brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue.
Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten
principles." "When a scab comes down the street,
men turn their backs and angels weep in heaven, and
the devil shuts the gates of hell to keep him out."
"No man (or woman) has a right to scab so long as there
is a pool of water to drown his carcass in,
or a rope long enough to hang his body with.
Judas was a gentleman compared with a scab.
For betraying his master, he had character enough
to hang himself." A scab has not.
"Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage.
Judas sold his Savior for thirty pieces of silver.
Benedict Arnold sold his country for a promise of
a commision in the british army."
The scab sells his birthright, country, his wife,
his children and his fellowmen for an unfulfilled
promise from his employer.
Esau was a traitor to himself; Judas was a traitor
to his God; Benedict Arnold was a traitor to his country;
a scab is a traitor to his God, his country,
his family and his class."
Author --- Jack London (1876-1916)...Roland Sheppard
http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret]
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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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