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Russell Means Speaking at the Transform Columbus Day Rally
"If voting could do anything it would be illegal!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8Lri1-6aoY
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EMERGENCY MEETING MONDAY EVENING TO STOP JROTC IN OUR SCHOOLS!
Monday, Nov. 5, 7:00 P.M., 474 Valencia at the Childcare Center.
San Francisco schools expected to grant JROTC a year's reprieve
Jill Tucker, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, October 6, 2007
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/06/BAP3SJ72P.DTL&hw=board+of+education+jrotc&sn=001&sc=1000
The controversial demise of the Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps in San Francisco schools scheduled for this spring will likely be put off for at least a year because the school district hasn't developed a promised replacement program.
The expected reprieve would drag out what has already been a protracted and emotional battle over the district's 90-year tie to the military program.
Still, supporters say the prospect of an extra year offers hope that JROTC could survive in San Francisco.
The school board voted last November to phase out JROTC over two years because of its connection to the military, which board members said was discriminatory, homophobic and at odds with the mission of public education. They also agreed to create a task force to develop an alternative program to begin in fall 2008.
Despite JROTC's expected demise, 1,500 students in seven city high schools enrolled in JROTC this fall, with 670 of them participating in affiliated after-school programs. That's about 200 fewer than last year, although students who thought the program no longer existed continue to transfer in, JROTC instructors say.
The school board's composition has also changed, and just two of the board members who voted to eliminate JROTC last year - Eric Mar and Mark Sanchez - are still serving.
A majority of current board members - Kim-Shree Maufas, Jill Wynns, Norman Yee and Hydra Mendoza - said they were open to keeping JROTC alive.
The seventh board member, Jane Kim, said she was also willing to support JROTC, but only if there were a way to address the military's discriminatory hiring practice involving homosexuals. She suggested a JROTC diversity curriculum or a cadet campaign against the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy.
But bringing JROTC back to life is not something any of those board members seems willing to do right now.
"I wouldn't be leading any of it," Yee said. "I just don't want to do that battle."
Maufas agreed. "I respect what the board decided," she said. "I believe with hard work and enough time, we can provide a program that serves students' needs in terms of leadership development."
But there isn't enough time to do that before next fall.
District officials didn't even create the task force that was supposed to identify a new program until last spring - several months after their vote against JROTC.
The task force - consisting of 17 district staff members, students and community members, and including supporters and opponents of JROTC - met for the first time in April. By its third meeting in June, the group acknowledged serious flaws in the process.
"We do not have enough time, we do not have enough (task force) attendance, and we do not consistently have agreement on this committee," group members decided, according to minutes of the meeting.
In addition, the school board gave the task force little guidance, even about how much it could spend.
"We've been given no budgetary guidelines," said Meyla Ruwin, district director of school health programs and task force co-chair.
So the task force could ultimately come up with a plan that the district has no intention or ability to fund.
Task force members said they plan to ask the school board's curriculum committee Thursday to let JROTC continue until spring 2009.
Board President Mark Sanchez said he expects the extension to be approved by the board.
"We've been trying to find a program that the city could benefit from, the kids could benefit from, and would still provide that leadership training and the physical training," said board member Mendoza. "It's getting the program off the ground that's the key, and where are we going to get the funding?"
The $1.7 million JROTC program receives a $750,000 annual subsidy from the U.S. military. Students in the program, called cadets, earn up to two years of physical education or elective credits for the courses. [The rest is paid by the SFUSD!...bw]
Board Vice President Yee, who voted against last year's resolution, said he wasn't surprised by the lack of an alternative.
"It seems like what I thought might happen is happening," he said. "There's nothing to replace it with. ... There are a lot of practical things we didn't think about."
In the meantime, JROTC students and their instructors said they are frustrated by the inaction. The instructors don't know whether they'll have their jobs next year.
"They've got mortgages," said task force member Robert Powell, a JROTC instructor at Lincoln High School and retired Army lieutenant colonel. "They've got bills. How can you tell them, 'Just hang on'?"
Junior Yvonne Ho said that she found her niche in JROTC and that without it students would be sent to play sports - an option she dreads.
"I think it's pretty unfair to cancel the program without a backup plan," said Ho, the battalion commander of Balboa High School's 280 JROTC cadets.
"We don't know where we'd go," she said. "There's just PE."
The task force said its next step will be to survey current and former cadets about what is important about the program - characteristics they hope to build into a replacement.
Students say the program develops leadership, teamwork, community service, a sense of responsibility and a sense of belonging.
Maufas, whose daughter participated in the program while in high school, said JROTC provides strong role models: Most of the program's instructors are African American men.
"Those types of relationships are so valuable," she said. "It's hard to replace it."
JROTC'S recent history in San Francisco
Feb. 22, 1994 - JROTC hazing incident occurs at Balboa High, prompting a districtwide debate about the program's merits.
June 27, 1995 - San Francisco school board votes to keep JROTC programs.
May 23, 2006 - School board introduces resolution to eliminate JROTC.
Nov. 14, 2006 - School board votes to phase out JROTC by June 2008.
April to Oct. 3, 2007 - Task force meets five times to discuss a replacement program.
Thursday - Task force scheduled to address school board curriculum committee to request one-year extension.
E-mail Jill Tucker at jtucker@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/06/BAP3SJ72P.DTL
This article appeared on page B - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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CONGRATULATIONS TO OCT. 27 COALITION TO END THE WAR NOW! BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!
OCT. 27 COALITION EVALUATION MEETING WILL TAKE PLACE:
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 1 P.M. AT CENTRO DEL PUEBLO.
474 Valencia Street, SF (Near 16th Street)
It is incumbent upon us to continue not only our cooperation with one another but to map out future plans for ongoing protests and, especially, community organizing.
I marched with the Noe Valley Community Peace group organized as a contingent to the Oct. 27 action. Around 200 community residents assembled at Castro and 24th Street and marched down 24th Street with signs and banners to Church Street where we all got on the J-Church streetcar headed for the Civic Center. As we marched down 24th Street merchants and shoppers came out of the shops and cheered and clapped. Cars honked in support as they went by. Our reception was overwhelmingly a friendly and supportive one.
This is the kind of organizing that is needed throughout the city. To do this it will take a real coordinated effort on the part of all the antiwar groups and activists--to plan it out; to organize community meetings; to set up tables at the local malls as the holiday shopping season begins. We must give out informational material and fact sheets.
We need a long term goal of a massive protest in March for the anniversary of the war and we need short-term goals of community education, organization and ongoing antiwar activity.
San Francisco's opposition to the war is very widespread and deep yet we see few signs in the windows or public expressions of that opposition. Community organization and expressions of solidarity with one another on this issue that effects every aspect of our lives will give courage to the majority opposed to the war to be more vocal and demonstrative in opposition to it; and in demanding the things families need that we can't afford because of the terrific war spending.
I know neighbors in Noe Vally were inspired by their communal expression of opposition to the war. It was a wonderful message to the community and especially to the children in the community who witnessed this spirited march.
We are approaching the fifth anniversary of this momentous and colossal crime against humanity—a violent assault on the innocent civilians of Iraq who must fight for survival under bloody occupation and torture. We are approaching the fifth anniversary of the meat-grinding machine of war eating up the duped and lied-to cannon fodder of U.S. youth captured for the purposes of the U.S. death march across the world for private profit and gain. And we are living under the threat of an ever-widening war!
Both U.S. troops and private contractors are being trained to commit heinous crimes against innocent Iraqi and Afghani civilians who are struggling for life itself. If and when they come back home to resume a normal life, they will never be the same and will bear the burden of their actions for the rest of their lives. Their families will never be the same again either.
We have so much to do. The San Francisco Board of Education is poised to reinstate JROTC even before it has been banished! Military recruiters are running rampant and desperate in our schools and anywhere youth congregate--standing ready to ply them with money and lies and promises of a way out of the poverty, jail and second-tier wages that they do stand ready to inherit--if they are even lucky enough to get a job at all!
Our only power is in our unity, solidarity and independent action in protest of these criminal and grossly unjust acts of violence and deprivation against humanity. We want schools, jobs, housing, healthcare for all and a world without war.
And if we truly want these things, we must put aside our differences and unite to achieve those goals.
In solidarity,
Bonnie Weinstein, Bay Area United Against War Newsletter, bauaw.org
Check out these great photos of the march taken by Jeff Patterson at:
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2007/10/27/18456505.php
More photos of Labor Contingent taken by Noe Valley Labor Rep:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/12541352@N06/sets/72157602772168801/
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Wed., Nov. 7: The Jena 6 Are Back in Court
Drop All the Charges! Free the Jena 6!
Rally Wed., Nov. 7, 5pm
Federal Courthouse
7th and Mission
"Until the 6 Are Free, Neither Are We"
San Francisco
Contact 415-821-6545 or answer@actionsf.org to get involved or for more information.
Click here for a short eyewitness video from Sept. 20: http://youtube.com/watch?v=dtAZdmcKt5g
Last week, the racist judge that originally presided over Mychal Bell's conviction sent him back to jail for 18 months for "violating probation" from an earlier conviction. The precise violation was his arrest in the Jena 6 incident. While the racist thugs who started this cycle of events continue to walk free, the Jena 6 are still facing long prison sentences.
On Wednesday, Nov. 7, the growing movement to free the Jena 6 will face an important challenge. On that day, four of the Six -- Theodore Shaw, Robert Bailey, Bryan Purvis, and Mychal Bell -- are expected in court for pre-trial hearings. The ANSWER Coalition is calling on all progressive and anti-racist forces to come together for rallies in front of local courthouses across the country with the demand to free the Jena 6, and drop all the charges. Demonstrations are already confirmed in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington DC, New York City, Chicago, Seattle, and New Haven (CT).
The case of the Jena 6 has garnered international attention, and shone a spotlight on the racist nature of this country's criminal "injustice" system. Without activists taking action across the country, however, it is certain that their case -- like so many others -- would never have received the attention that it has. Mychal Bell's original conviction never would have been overturned; instead he would have become just another statistic.
On Sept. 20, tens of thousands of people demonstrated in Jena, Louisiana and in other cities around the country to demand the complete freedom of the Jena 6, and the release of Mychal Bell. A week later, after 10 months in prison, he was granted bail and released. But shortly afterwards, the Louisiana judge that originally convicted Bell struck back, ordering him back into custody.
The spirit and determination of Sept. 20 protest in Jena has to be replicated over and over across the country on November 7th. The movement is locked in a tug-of-war with the racist Louisiana justice system. Now we have to dig in our heels and until all charges against the Six are dropped, we have to keep on pulling! All out for November 7th to Free the Jena 6!
For more information email us at info@answercoalition.org.
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) Lessons from the New World
Success is beginning to look a lot like failure
by Gina Cassidy
Published in the September/October 2007 issue of Orion magazine
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/344
2) End to a Shabby Prosecution
Editorial
November 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/03/opinion/03sat2.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
3) Worsening the Odds
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
November 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/03/opinion/03herbert.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
4) The Perils of Petrocracy
By TINA ROSENBERG
November 4, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/magazine/04oil-t.html?ref=magazine
5) New Detainee Rights Weighed in Plans to Close Guantánamo
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
November 4, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/us/nationalspecial3/04gitmo.html?hp
6) The War on Poppy Succeeds, but Cannabis Thrives in an Afghan Province
By KIRK SEMPLE
November 4, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/world/asia/04cannabis.html?ref=world
7) A Fairy-Tale Ending Eludes Separated Twins
By FERNANDA SANTOS
November 4, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/nyregion/04twins.html?ref=us
8) What’s Behind the Race Gap?
By VIKAS BAJAJ and FORD FESSENDEN
The Nation
November 4, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/weekinreview/04bajaj.html?ref=business
9) A Sanitation Crisis That’s No Joke
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
The Basics
"According to the World Health Organization, 40 percent of the globe, or 2.6 billion people, have no access to hygienic toilets."
“No movie star has died of diarrhea. No politician has died of poverty.”
November 4, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/weekinreview/04basicA.html?ref=health
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1) Lessons from the New World
Success is beginning to look a lot like failure
by Gina Cassidy
Published in the September/October 2007 issue of Orion magazine
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/344
Four hundred years ago, British ships deposited 104 settlers on the shores of a richly diverse and sustaining land. Their task, and that of a later shipload, was to find wealth for their underwriters, the shareholders of the Virginia Company of London, and ship it posthaste back to the mother country.
At the end of one year, sixty-six of these men had died—many of starvation. Yet sustenance was available everywhere around them, if they had only opened their minds to the New World. There were fruit and nut trees, berries, roots, greens, fish, game, herbal medicines, rocks and minerals, clay, soil, wood, and fresh water. By all accounts the native Powhatan people were robust; the English were astonished at their strength and vitality, perfect posture, cold tolerance, and lack of disease.
Why were these Englishmen fighting for their lives in a warm, abundant land when the natives lived a sustainable life?
For the English, the New World was not a place to become a part of. They did not even try to gather food for themselves. They would not eat corn, which they considered animal food, until they were absolutely desperate. They drank brackish water because that was the closest supply. They insisted on wearing armor and layers of English clothing in the Virginia heat.
The English at Jamestown were not inherently weaker or more feeble-minded than their native neighbors. Their overwhelming problems lay in the way they thought. The English were heavily invested in one, uncompromising way of life: they considered themselves above nature, and certainly not part of this foreign land. They saw the New World as a place to exploit—to gather riches from and bring (or send) them “home” to England. The Powhatans did consider themselves part of nature. The English suffered terribly. The natives thrived, even during the Little Ice Age that coincided with the English arrival.
Our modern society is built on the Jamestown mindset. We try to change the landscape, to force the Earth to bend to our will. I do not mean “we” Americans, though Americans as a whole are perhaps the most guilty. I am speaking of Western or “developed” culture—known more appropriately by Daniel Quinn as “Taker” culture, which he compares to “undeveloped” or “Leaver” culture. The Leavers lived sustainably for two million years. They used what nature offered and allowed natural cycles to determine their fates. A Leaver culture could not cause its own extinction by its use of the Earth.
Western mythology casts the Takers as winners and the Leavers as losers. Indeed, the Jamestown settlers eventually overcame their problems to promote a culture of greater wealth than had ever been imagined. Their salvation lay in the export of tobacco—a mild recreational drug. Even today, we squander our natural resources for the production of useless, or minimally useful, disposable and addictive products. We are compelled to work in an economy of things that endanger our existence, both personally and as a society. The Jamestown settlers may have “won” wealth in the short run, but their way of life required more natural resources and energy than can be sustained. Tobacco is an addictive, health-destroying crop culpable for the enslavement of Africans in the New World. That’s not winning.
I am not idealizing the Powhatans. But until they encountered Taker culture they had mastered the earthly art of staying alive in perpetuity. The Takers have led our species down the road of extinction with nuclear war, resource depletion, and pollution. We need the wisdom and knowledge of Leaver cultures in order to survive into the indefinite future.
Gina Cassidy is a former educator with the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation in Virginia.
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2) End to a Shabby Prosecution
Editorial
November 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/03/opinion/03sat2.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
The federal government agreed this week to terminate 20-year-old deportation proceedings against two Palestinian men who were wrongly targeted for their political beliefs and activities. Better late than never, but we fear that there is little hope that the Bush administration will learn any lesson from this shockingly mishandled prosecution.
The two legal United States residents at the center of the storm — Khader Hamide and Michel Shehadeh — were the remaining defendants in a travesty dating back to the Ronald Reagan administration known as the L.A. Eight case. They were arrested and marked for deportation along with six others in 1987 for supporting the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which the government lists as a terrorist group.
The key allegation was that they had distributed a magazine published by the Popular Front and raised funds for lawful charitable organizations somehow linked to the group. Yet, fairly early on, the government conceded that it had no evidence that the two defendants had ever been involved in any criminal or terrorist activity — and that had they been citizens, there would have been no grounds for their arrest.
Unfortunately, that did not stop the government from obsessively pursuing the case under four presidents.
The defendants were originally charged under provisions of the notorious 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, which helped raise guilt by association to a broadly practiced dark art. In 1989, a federal court declared those provisions unconstitutional, and Congress subsequently repealed them. Still, the government pressed on, eventually moving to retroactively apply provisions of the 2001 Patriot Act that punish people who provide “material support” for terrorism.
In January, Bruce Einhorn, an immigration judge, issued a ruling denouncing the long and winding prosecution as “an embarrassment to the rule of law.” He also castigated the government’s “gross failure” to produce potentially exculpatory and other relevant information.
We would like to believe that the government’s decision to withdraw its appeal means that Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security secretary, and his colleagues were embarrassed by the case and concerned about how it has fueled distrust and anger among Arabs and Muslims. We suspect, however, that they were more concerned about getting the judicial findings of prosecutorial misconduct vacated as moot.
It’s easy to see this case as a tragic anachronism, a relic from the bad old days of the Red Scare and cold war. But the Bush administration continues to risk injuring innocent people and deflecting resources from real terrorist threats with cases built on weak allegations of guilt by association.
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3) Worsening the Odds
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
November 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/03/opinion/03herbert.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Lonnie Lynam, a self-employed carpenter in Pipe Creek, Tex., specialized in spiral staircases. Friends thought of him as a maestro in a toolbelt, a whiz with a hammer and nails.
"His customers were always so pleased," his mother told me. "There was this one family, kind of higher class, and he built them one of those glass holders that you would see in a bar or a lounge, with the glasses hanging upside down in different sizes. It was awesome."
Lonnie had a following, a reputation. He was said to have a magic touch.
What he didn't have was health insurance.
So when the headaches came, he tried to ignore them. "We've had migraines in our family," said his mother, Betty Lynam, who is 67 and lives in Creston, Iowa. "So he thought that was what it was."
Lonnie's brother, Kelly, said: "He wasn't the type to complain. And since he didn't have insurance ..."
Kelly, 45, worked on different jobs with his brother. He was the one who rushed Lonnie to an emergency room one day last fall when the headaches became so severe that Lonnie couldn't stand up.
It would be great if there were something unusual about this story: A person without health insurance gets sick. The person holds off on going to the doctor because there's no way to pay the bill. The person is denied the full range of treatment because of the absence of insurance. The person dies.
Lonnie Lynam's headaches had been caused by cancerous tumors in his brain. During surgery, doctors discovered that the cancer had spread from other parts of his body.
Cancer is no longer the all-but-automatic death sentence that it once was. Extraordinary progress has been made in fighting the myriad forms of the disease.
But, as the American Cancer Society has recently been stressing, the health coverage crisis in the U.S. is a major drag on this fight.
"A woman without health insurance who gets a breast cancer diagnosis is at least 40 percent more likely to die," said John Seffrin, the cancer society's chief executive.
According to the cancer society: "Uninsured patients and those on Medicaid are much more likely than those with private health insurance to be diagnosed with cancer in its later stages, when it is more often fatal."
The uninsured (and underinsured) are also much less likely to get the most effective treatment after the diagnosis is made.
There are 47 million Americans without health insurance and another 17 million with coverage that will not pay for the treatments necessary to fight cancer and other very serious diseases.
The bottom line, said Mr. Seffrin, is that "the number of people who are suffering needlessly from cancer because they don't have access to quality health care is very large and increasing as I speak."
Part two of the Lynam family's nightmare began when Lonnie returned home from the hospital. Lonnie had very little money, so Kelly stepped in and began paying most of his brother's nonmedical bills.
Betty Lynam flew to Texas as often as she could to be with her son. She said he needed chemotherapy and radiation treatment, but since he couldn't afford it, he couldn't always get it.
"He was trying to pay a little bit at a time for the doctors and for the different treatments," she said. "But he didn't have a savings account or any collateral, except for his tools.
"I'd ask how he was feeling, and he'd tell me, 'Well, I didn't get the treatment today.' And I'd say, 'Why?' And he'd say, 'Well, I got in there and they found out I didn't have any insurance and the woman told me I'd have to come back another time because she'd have to check with the doctor or somebody.'
"He suffered a great deal. Yes, he did."
After awhile, as his condition deteriorated, Lonnie Lynam, carpenter extraordinaire, became all but consumed by the fear of death. Toward the end, he would sleep with a light and the television on, his mother said, "because he wanted to see something or hear something as soon as he woke up to know that he was still alive."
She said: "Some nights he'd be so frightened he'd come crawl into bed with me and just say, 'Hold me, mom.' I just slept right with him in the hospital and just held him, you know?'"
Lonnie died on March 26 at age 45. The cause of death was cancer, aided and abetted by an absurd, unnecessary and utterly unconscionable absence of health insurance.
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4) The Perils of Petrocracy
By TINA ROSENBERG
November 4, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/magazine/04oil-t.html?ref=magazine
I.
Who holds the world’s oil? You might assume it’s in the hands of big private oil companies like ExxonMobil. But in fact, 77 percent of the world’s oil reserves are held by national oil companies with no private equity, and there are 13 state-owned oil companies with more reserves than ExxonMobil, the largest multinational oil company. The popular perception in the United States is that if leaders of oil countries nationalize their oil, they are bucking a global trend toward privatization. In reality, nationalized oil is the trend. And the percentage of oil controlled by state-owned companies is likely to continue rising, mainly because of the demographics of oil. Deposits are being exhausted in wealthy countries — the ones that exploited their oil first and generally have the most private oil — and are being found largely in developing countries, where oil tends to belong to the state.
Nationalization is also a political trend in some regions, mainly Latin America, where the populist presidents of Bolivia and Ecuador have made it part of their discourse. They are led, of course, by Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. He has made private producers accept state control of their operations. When they wouldn’t, as in the case of ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, he simply nationalized their holdings. Chávez has also asserted his control over Venezuela’s state oil company, which before him operated very much like a private, profit-driven enterprise.
Chávez is a prophet in search of disciples. He seeks to present Venezuela as a more moral world power, uniting Latin America and poor countries everywhere in a socialist alliance. He has invented a new kind of socialism, which he calls Bolivarian socialism, named for the independence hero Simón Bolívar: a little Marx, a little Jesus, a little anti-imperialism and a lot of the whim of Hugo Chávez, dedicated to the “comprehensive, humanist, endogenous and socialist development of the nation.” His is a gospel greased by oil, which is financing his transformation of Venezuela. Chávez is a genius of a politician: charming, folksy, flirtatious. I first met him in New York in 1999, the year he became president. I sat next to him at an interview, very pregnant. He embraced me — “But you should come have the baby in Venezuela!” he enthused.
The appeal of his message transcends the charisma of the messenger. To other countries — especially the oil and gas nations in Latin America that watch Chávez with particular interest — the appeal is simple to understand. Oil- and gas-dependent countries are historically ill governed. Today their people are in rebellion against globalization, which promised much but has brought them little. They have been told their countries are rich, but they see they are poor. So someone must be stealing the profits.
Most often, nationalization is a reaction to the idea that the thief is a foreign company. For populist leftists, El Petroleo es Nuestro! — the oil is ours — is an alluring slogan. Now as the record high price of oil has made exploitation worthwhile even in places that are remote or geologically complicated (Chad comes to mind), more underdeveloped countries have to choose what to do with their oil. Those that have long held oil must decide how to spend the incomprehensible amounts of money oil is now bringing them.
Historically, almost every country dependent on the export of oil has answered this question in the same way: badly. It may seem paradoxical, but finding a hole in the ground that spouts money can be one of the worst things to happen to a nation. With one or two exceptions, oil-dependent countries are poorer, more conflict-ridden and despotic. OPEC’s own studies show the perils of relying on oil. Between 1965 and 1998, the economies of OPEC members contracted by 1.3 percent a year. Oil-dependent nations do especially badly by their poor: infant survival, nutrition, life expectancy, literacy, schooling — all are worse in oil-producing countries. The history of oil-dependent countries has produced what Terry Lynn Karl, a Stanford University professor, calls the paradox of plenty.
Oil not only creates very few jobs, it also destroys jobs in other sectors. By pushing up a country’s exchange rate, the export of oil distorts the economy. “Oil rents drive out any other productive activity,” Karl says. “Why would you bother to produce your own food if you could buy it? Why would you bother to develop any kind of export industry if oil makes your money worth more and that hurts all your other exports?” The most successful societies develop a middle class through manufacturing; oil makes this extremely difficult.
Oil concentrates a country’s wealth in the state, creating a culture where money is made by soliciting politicians and bureaucrats rather than by making things and selling them. Oil states also ask their citizens for little in taxes, and where citizens pay little in taxes, they demand little in accountability. Those in power distribute oil money to stay in power. Thus oil states tend to be highly corrupt.
II.
Venezuela is a typical victim of the oil curse. It has become a rich country of poor people. Teodoro Petkoff has seen Venezuela through booms and busts. Once a daring leftist guerrilla who in 2006 was briefly a candidate against Chávez, he publishes a newspaper, Tal Cual, that criticizes both Chávez and the opposition. “The state is booty,” Petkoff said when I met him in his small office in Caracas. “The state is hypertrophic here, a monster complex on top of society, heavy and corrupt. It has been the great contractor, the great buyer, the great provider, the great receiver. To win government is to get access to a source of personal enrichment. Money has to pass through the state. Oil has weakened our collective morality. It obliges you to be corrupt. You can’t do business if you are not corrupt. We are waiting for the easy deal, big winnings.”
Chávez has promised to break this curse, to finally use Venezuela’s oil to benefit its people. Oil is everything in Venezuela; it pays for at least half the government’s expenditures and 90 percent of its foreign exchange, according Orlando Ochoa, a prominent economist. Now “zero misery” is one of the government’s slogans, and the vehicle to get there is oil. Chávez’s oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela S.A., or Pdvsa (pronounced peh-deh-VEH-sah — S.A. stands for “sociedad anónima,” or incorporated), is proudly inefficient, proudly political. Chávez has called his revolution “oil socialism.”
“We are doing what the old regimes didn’t do,” Bernardo Álvarez, Venezuela’s ambassador to Washington and a former vice minister of hydrocarbons in the Ministry of Energy, said to me. “We are putting oil into a sustained process of development. Our first priority is a fight against poverty and exclusion.”
To that end, Pdvsa is investing the company’s profits in helping dropouts finish high school and not just in drilling wells. “Perhaps it was better run before Chávez,” says Roger Tissot, a Latin America analyst based in British Columbia who works for PFC Energy. “But it wasn’t efficient in meeting the needs of the shareholders — the people of Venezuela. Today perhaps it is less efficient but better at meeting social goals.”
Whether this is the right decision turns on whether this policy is sustainable. In the 1990s, Venezuela’s state oil company was a sleek machine, an excellent exploiter of oil, well fed on its own profits. It floated above society, unmoored from the problems of the average citizen. Today, oil money feeds and educates poor neighborhoods. The purpose of the national oil company is not to produce more oil, but to produce Bolivarian socialism. These are two very different ways to handle a nation’s oil resource. Can either model show poor countries how to convert natural resources into sustained wealth? Few questions in economic policy are more important today.
III.
Many nationalized oil companies are poorly managed — on average, national companies are 65 percent as efficient as private ones, according to one study. Still, it is possible to have a stellar national oil company, efficient in the classic sense, one that can compete favorably with any Western major. Saudi Aramco and Petrobras, in Brazil, are two examples. But perhaps the best-run national oil company that ever existed was in Venezuela. It was Pdvsa.
“On Dec. 31, 1975, I went to sleep as an Exxon employee, and I woke up on Jan. 1, 1976, as an employee of Pdvsa,” Antonio Szabo told me. Szabo now runs a software company in Houston, but until 1983, he was a high-level executive at Pdvsa. “I went to the same office, same everything. It was a brilliantly executed nationalization process. What became different the next morning? Except for the destination of the revenues, nothing. Literally nothing. That was the whole point — to continue to produce money for the country without disruption.”
President Carlos Andrés Pérez nationalized Venezuela’s oil because in the early 1970s there was an oil boom, with a barrel reaching $12 in 1974 (about $50 in today’s dollars), having quadrupled from the $3 a barrel fetched in 1973. Venezuelans demanded that the profits stay at home. The expropriation of Exxon, Shell and Gulf was negotiated and seamless, the lack of acrimony stemming from the fact that the foreign companies’ concessions had been designed from the start to be temporary, and were to expire in 1983. “I believe that everybody realized Pdvsa was the goose that laid the golden egg,” Szabo says. “To keep it healthy you must leave it alone. Every president believed this was sound policy — until Chávez.”
Paradoxically, nationalization brought the government less money and less control. When Venezuela’s oil was still in private hands, the government collected 80 cents of every dollar of oil exported. With nationalization the figure dropped, and by the early 1990s, the government was collecting roughly half that amount. This low return to the country’s coffers was partly a result of that age-old conflict between short- and long-term reward. Because wells run dry and machinery ages, oil companies everywhere must invest lots of money just to keep production steady, and to grow, they need even more. Without new investment, Pdvsa would lose 25 percent of its oil production every year. Its officials were convinced that Venezuela benefited more if Pdvsa’s profits went to producing more oil, not more government. “Social revenue has always overshadowed investing in the industry,” said Ramón Espinasa, who was chief economist of Pdvsa from 1992 to 1999. “But I think the priority has to be to maintain oil. If you have one dollar left, it should be invested in keeping capacity. Otherwise next time around you will not have a single dollar to distribute.”
Espinasa, now 55, lives in Washington and works as an energy consultant to the Inter-American Development Bank. As chief economist for Pdvsa, he was a persuasive voice for the strategy of “oil first.” During the early ’90s, the company had an extraordinary need for investment. The bulk of Venezuela’s oil lies under a 4,500-square-mile savanna called the Orinoco Belt. The reserves are enormous, but 20 years ago it was not clear that they would be commercially viable. The oil was heavy and extra-heavy crude, thick as Play-Doh. It required expensive technology and expertise to extract, and even then only a small percentage of the oil could be recovered. This crude also needed a special refining process and would most likely sell at a discount.
To ensure there would be a market for Orinoco crude, in 1982 Pdvsa began to buy refineries overseas able to process it. Among its purchases was Citgo, the American refining and distribution network. By the end of the 1990s, Pdvsa was among the top three oil refiners in the U.S. “With heavy oil, if you don’t own a refinery, your production does not have a home,” Szabo says. “If you own a refinery, you have market share.” And Pdvsa in the 1990s was focused on maximizing its market share in the United States.
Pdvsa executives also decided they didn’t want to take on the debt and risk of developing the Orinoco, so in 1989 they began to open it to private participation. Pdvsa lowered the normal royalty rate of 16 percent to a mere 1 percent to attract investment to this capital-intensive project. The royalty was meant to jump to 16 percent once the private company had recouped a certain percentage of its investment.
In hindsight, these were brilliant business decisions. Pdvsa’s refineries overseas are making record profits, and the United States is the company’s biggest customer. But back then, the gathering of adequate revenue for the Venezuelan state did not figure highly among the company’s priorities. The Orinoco contract, for example, was so generous that in 2004, with oil at $46 a barrel, the private oil companies were still paying royalties of 1 percent. (That year Chávez raised royalties to 16 percent by decree.)
In fact, some of Pdvsa’s shrewd business decisions seem to have been made with an eye to shielding its gains from the government. Pdvsa bought its first shares in an overseas oil refinery after the government seized its multibillion-dollar investment fund to help solve a financial crisis. Economists on the left who are critical of the old Pdvsa argue that the foreign holdings allowed the company to play with costs and profits. It could sell oil to its refineries at less than market price — thus incurring lower taxes.
Pdvsa attracted the cream of Venezuela’s professional class. Espinasa, who was educated at Cambridge, had an office full of young (and very well paid) Ivy League- and Oxbridge-educated Venezuelans. Pdvsa’s resources and talent outshone that of the Energy Ministry, which was supposed to be overseeing it. “In the 1990s most oil policy and macroeconomic policy for Venezuela was done inside Pdvsa,” one Venezuelan economist told me. “When the I.M.F. came to Venezuela, the meetings were done in the office of Espinasa. The figures they used came from Pdvsa and the Central Bank rather than the Finance Ministry.”
Ambassador Álvarez was one of those trying to keep control over Pdvsa, first as head of the energy and mines committee in Congress, and later as vice minister of energy for hydrocarbons. “At the ministry,” Álvarez says, “we had gone from 200 engineers to 25. Pdvsa was the only one that had cars, people. One energy minister used to call it ‘the Empire.’ ”
Pdvsa won virtually every argument. But many people, not just Chavistas, would argue that Venezuela lost. By 1998, real wages in Venezuela were less than 40 percent what they had been in 1980. A third of the country was living in extreme poverty — up from 11 percent in 1984. “It was normal for people working for Pdvsa to be very proud — it was recognized as one of the best oil companies,” says Tissot, the oil analyst. “In contrast, the politicians were making a mess managing the rest of the country. Pdvsa was working, but Venezuela was not working.”
I asked Espinasa to respond to the charge that his Pdvsa didn’t do much for the average Venezuelan.
“It shouldn’t have,” he replied. “It was an oil company.”
IV.
Ten years later, Pdvsa is no longer an oil company, at least by Espinasa’s standards. It now exists to finance Chávez’s transformation of Venezuela. The integration is illustrated by the fact that Rafael Ramírez, the minister of energy and petroleum, is also president of Pdvsa. “The Pdvsa that neglected the people and indifferently watched the misery and poverty in the communities surrounding the company premises is over,” Ramírez has said. “Now the oil industry takes concrete actions to deepen the revolutionary distributions of the revenues among the people.” If the Pdvsa of the 1990s thought it was Exxon, today’s Pdvsa amounts to the president’s $35 billion petty-cash drawer.
Chávez travels a lot. Foreign presidents who receive him may enjoy receiving his customary gift — a replica of the sword of Bolívar. But they probably appreciate even more the oil that sometimes comes with it. Chávez provides discounted or free oil to Central American and Caribbean countries, sending nearly 100,000 barrels a day to Cuba in exchange for doctors and Cuban expertise on state security. He has given millions in non-oil aid to various Latin American countries, much of it in the form of energy projects. Citgo says it gave $80 million in heating oil to poor residents of the South Bronx last winter.
Pdvsa is also subsidizing Venezuela’s domestic oil consumption. Cheap oil for Venezuelans is nothing new; when President Pérez tried to raise gasoline prices in 1989, the riots nearly toppled him. The Venezuelans feel it is their oil; why should they have to pay for it? But the subsidies are much deeper and the quantities greater today. A gallon of gasoline costs 6.3 cents at the pump at the unofficial exchange rate. And Venezuela is now gorging on gas. Venezuela will add 450,000 new cars this year — about four times the number of four years ago. Six Hummer dealerships are set to open early next year.
Oil is now used to create electricity. Some of Venezuela’s electric plants used to burn natural gas, but gas production has dropped, creating shortages that oil is filling. Domestic consumption of oil has reached at least 650,000 barrels a day, according to Venezuelan economists. Venezuela is importing oil products and may soon have to import gasoline. There is also the problem of contraband: subsidized gasoline smuggled out and sold at world-market prices in Colombia and the Caribbean. Between its domestic consumption and its use of oil to make friends overseas, Venezuela gives away or subsidizes a third of its production. Most of the rest is sold in the United States.
The money that Pdvsa does get from selling at market prices goes to finance Chávez’s revolution at home. Last year, Pdvsa’s payments to the state totaled more than $35 billion, counting taxes, royalties and direct support for social programs. This is 35 percent of the company’s gross earnings.
Almost $14 billion is spent at the sole discretion of Chávez. It is called social-development money, although it appears that there is little “social” in some of its spending. Much of the money goes to the Fund for National Development, or Fonden, an off-budget fund controlled by Chávez, which also takes foreign reserves from the Central Bank. Fonden’s Web site in July listed 130 projects — infrastructure, foreign aid, some social projects like health clinics — as well as the purchase of helicopters, submarine technology, assault rifles and plants to build other munitions. The list was taken off the Web site shortly after it drew notice in the press and was replaced by a list containing no arms purchases. What Fonden actually buys, for how much, from whom and through what process is a mystery.
The more celebrated of Pdvsa’s projects is a network of social programs, called misiones. These missions bring health clinics and classrooms directly into poor neighborhoods. They are financed and in some cases run directly by Pdvsa. “If Pérez wanted money from his oil boom, he had to wait for Pdvsa to pay taxes, and he had to go to Congress and approve extraordinary spending,” one Venezuelan economist told me. “Today, the president gets on the phone with Ramírez and in an hour can get $200 million.”
To finance all these ambitious projects, Pdvsa must produce oil. Theoretically this should not be a problem. When Chávez was elected, Venezuelan crude went for about $9 a barrel (about $11 today). At press time it was about $78. (Venezuela crude trades at slightly under the average OPEC crude price.) Chávez is the beneficiary of the greatest oil windfall the world has seen, one based in part on political upheaval in Iran, Iraq and Nigeria but also on a surge in demand from China and India that is unlikely to end soon. So, for the foreseeable future, there should be money for everything.
Yet Pdvsa is in trouble.
V.
One good way to see Pdvsa’s many challenges up close is to look at the mystery of the missing drilling rigs. A rig has two jobs: to drill down in auspicious spots to look for oil, and to clear out working wells when they clog, like a giant Roto-Rooter. Because oil is so profitable and people are drilling madly, there is a global shortage of rigs, and the price of renting them has gone up. But Venezuela’s shortage is worse than elsewhere. In testimony before the National Assembly in July, Luis Vierma, Pdvsa’s vice president for production, called the rig shortage “a significant operational emergency.” The country needs 191 this year to meet its production goals, Vierma said. But according to Baker Hughes, the Houston firm that provides the world’s standard count of rigs, there are only 73 active rigs in Venezuela.
Rig procurement is going badly. Vierma testified that Pdvsa recently invited 63 companies to bid to supply rigs, but only 22 bid. Twelve received contracts, to supply 27 rigs, but only five companies actually took rigs to Venezuela. Vierma called this “a silent sabotage by multinational companies.”
Others might call it the market at work. Rigs are in high demand; rigs cost at least $15 million, and an offshore rig can cost more than $95 million. Why go to Venezuela? “The big contractors want to take their rigs somewhere with less risk and threat of confiscation,” one executive of a big drilling contractor in Venezuela told me. “The way this government talks, it sends investors running.”
I went to Lake Maracaibo to see the problem for myself. Maracaibo is South America’s largest lake, a huge basin of duckweed and sewage, where significant oil drilling first began in the 1920s. I expected to see very few rigs. But what I found was more complicated.
Driving down the lake’s eastern shore one hot, rainy morning, I passed Pdvsa’s Maracaibo complex. Huge oil storage tanks stood near the road. The entrance to the complex was marked by a sign with one of the revolution’s slogans: “Fatherland, Socialism or Death!” The lake was strung with electrical lines and dotted in checkerboard fashion with wells, electrical towers and the graceful, 170-foot-high towers of drill rigs. In 1997, there were 57 rigs working on the lake. On the day I visited, there were 29. I saw more rigs, including seven in Pdvsa’s yards, along the lake shore, docked along the bank. I asked one drilling contractor what they were doing there. “Why aren’t they out on the lake working if there’s such a shortage?”
“Ahh,” he said, and smiled. Like others I spoke with, he didn’t want to be identified. “I estimate that there are about 22 rigs sitting idle around the lake, but not all of them are operable, due to lack of maintenance, or because they require additional equipment,” he told me. He said there were more idle rigs in Pdvsa docks across the lake.
In June, Pdvsa took back operating and maintenance contracts for its working rigs from the contractors who held them. Ramírez, the oil minister, said that contractors were “cannibals” who were robbing the country, and that Pdvsa could do the work for a third of the price. But it’s not clear that Pdvsa can do the work at all.
I counted at least 10 rigs belonging to Pdvsa that were not even being worked on — the company’s management is so poor, contractors said, that it cannot coordinate getting rigs repaired. Pdvsa is responsible for servicing all rigs working on the lake. “You need a boat to come out to give you water, diesel, empty the cuttings, take away waste,” one contractor said. “But I’ve waited a week for them just to take trash off the rigs.” There may be other reasons there are few working rigs. Vierma himself was briefly being investigated by the National Assembly — notable, given that it contains no opposition members — for overseeing the purchase of rigs from companies that supposedly had no rigs, no experience and little capital.
VI.
Pdvsa’s administrative troubles can be traced back to one of the biggest threats to Chávez’s presidency. In December 2002, Pdvsa’s managers, fed up with Chávez’s attempts to control them, locked out the workers and shut down Venezuela’s oil production for two months. The goal was either to take back control of Pdvsa or to topple Chávez. The economy collapsed, but ultimately Chávez triumphed over the “oil sabotage,” as his government called it, cementing his hold on power.
In the aftermath of the strike, Chávez fired 18,000 of Pdvsa’s 46,000 workers — the vast majority of them were managers and professionals, many of whom have since gone to work in Calgary, Houston or Riyadh. Pdvsa has since replaced the strikers, though the new hires are largely inexperienced. In fact, Pdvsa now employs 75,000 workers, many more than in the past, and Chávez says he wants to increase the number to 102,000 next year. Part of Chávez’s new “oil socialism” is to make Pdvsa more self-sufficient, reducing dependence on outside service companies. So Pdvsa is creating new subsidiaries. One is a new oil-services unit — “our own Halliburton, ours, the ‘Bolivarian’ one,” Ramírez, the energy minister, told state TV. Pdvsa has also announced plans to build oil ships and drill rigs. In June, Pdvsa approved the creation of seven new subsidiaries, including ones to grow soybeans for ethanol, to build food-processing plants and even to make shoes. Pdvsa is running a parallel state.
The company’s workers must all have at least one qualification: they must be Chavistas. Ramírez told oil workers, in a speech that was taped clandestinely and passed to a TV station, that they should back the president or give their jobs to a Bolivarian. The company is “red, red from top to bottom,” he said. Pdvsa also wrote a letter to its contractors, warning them not to hire any of the 18,000 fired workers.
As Pdvsa has been molded to Chávez’s will, it has also become less and less transparent in its dealings. The company used to publish a standard annual report, but after 2004 it stopped filing its annual reports to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. In recent years it has released only a page or two of basic figures, with no breakdowns or auditors’ notes. When Pdvsa does release information, some of it is of questionable credibility. Even the most fundamental operational fact — how much oil Venezuela produces — is subject to debate. In 1997, Venezuela produced 3.3 million barrels per day of crude oil. Today, Pdvsa claims the country produces the same amount, but independent sources, including OPEC, say that figure is too high; OPEC puts Venezuela’s production at 2.4 million barrels a day last year.
What is clear is that much of the oil revenue is going to social spending. Last year, Pdvsa says it spent nearly $14 billion on social programs. That includes the missions and Fonden, but does not include taxes and royalties of $21 billion paid to the government. Pdvsa says it put $5.8 billion back into the company last year. While this is a $2 billion hike from 2005, it most likely includes items that no one would call investment in oil; a secret addendum to the 2007 budget described “investment” as including money for national infrastructure and social projects. Pdvsa’s own business plan calls for rapid growth in production, but oil analysts say the company is clearly not investing enough. According to Pavel Molchanov, who studies oil in Houston at Raymond James, a financial services company, Pdvsa has had two years of production decline and is likely to have at least two more. “This is against a background of global oil production increasing 1 to 2 percent a year,” he says. “If they were spending enough would their production be down? I don’t think so.” (I would have liked to have asked Ramírez about this and many other matters. His office promised me an interview with him, but it never materialized, and Pdvsa officials said no one else could even give me background information unless Ramírez authorized it personally.)
Pdvsa is also taking on debt. The company had very little debt until 2006, but this year it has borrowed $12.5 billion. While raising cash through debt offerings can be fiscally sound, and many companies do so, critics contend that Pdvsa is issuing bonds for the wrong reasons. “Their debts are low, but they didn’t have any before,” says José Guerra, formerly chief of the research department of the Central Bank, who left in disagreement about Chávez’s economic policies. “Other oil countries are getting rid of debt. And what is the debt going for? Their spending on exploration is almost nothing. They are taking on debt to have a party.”
Some of the private companies that the old Pdvsa had brought in are still working in Venezuela, but they are now only minority partners and are paying higher taxes and royalties. On May 1, foreign companies working in the Orinoco were told to cede majority control of their projects to Pdvsa. Two companies, ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, left and are now negotiating with Venezuela about compensation. Other companies, seemingly chosen for their geopolitical value, have come into the Orinoco to take their place and develop virgin areas: national oil companies from big producers like Russia, China, Brazil and Iran, but also Cuba, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina and Belarus, which presumably can bring little expertise to the business of heavy oil.
VII.
Pdvsa is now dedicated to creating a new oil product: it is turning petroleum directly into math problems. I watched this alchemy one night in the living room of Félix Caraballo. Caraballo, who is 32, lives in the El Encanto section of La Vega, a slum on the side of one of the steep mountains around Caracas. Caraballo has been working in La Vega on community projects since he was 14, when police officers killed a friend of his during the 1989 protests over the government’s attempt to reduce gasoline subsidies. He is a committed Chavista and a committed socialist. “Money should serve people and not the other way around,” he told me.
The night I visited, the couches in his living room were pushed to one side to make a classroom. Yulimar Medina, a 25-year-old college student, stood at a whiteboard with a marker and walked the students through an equation. There were 11 adults, some with young children, in the room, studying the addition and multiplication of fractions. The students — known in the program as vencedores, or triumphers — all had workbooks, and they had already watched a 45-minute video of a math lesson.
This was an eighth-grade class of Misión Ribas, a program that brings grades 6 through 12 to barrios around the country. This class meets from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. every weeknight in Caraballo’s house. The videos come from Cuba, and facilitators like Medina lead the class in discussion and exercises afterward. The vencedores study math, Spanish, history, geography, science and English, and must work together to do a community project, like building a staircase or planting a vegetable garden — that’s the part Caraballo guides. Not only is school free but most of the students also receive stipends of $85 a month to attend. The students themselves choose who gets the stipends, based on need and dedication.
Ribas is one of an ever-growing list of Chávez’s missions. One teaches people to read. Another has imported thousands of Cuban doctors and dispatched them to poor neighborhoods around the country. Another set up stores in barrios that carry basic foodstuffs and medicines at highly subsidized prices. Another provides identity cards to undocumented citizens. While I was in Venezuela in September, Chávez announced another mission, to expand universities. The vast majority of the financing comes straight from Pdvsa.
The missions are popular and have benefited more than half of Venezuela’s poorest sector. Venezuela’s millions of poor take them as a sign of Chávez’s commitment to them and to the government’s slogan of “zero misery.” When I visited another Ribas class in an even more remote corner of La Vega, I asked the students what they valued most about the mission. “It comes to our barrio,” one student said. “It doesn’t exclude anyone,” another said.
Spending oil money on schooling and doctors for the poor seems, intuitively, like the right thing to do. “This is an investment in human capital,” argues Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a left-leaning Washington policy group. “You’ve had a focus on food and health care and education. It doesn’t cost that much, and it’s reaching a lot of people.”
The Venezuelan who finishes high school with Misión Ribas may not have the same education she would get in a formal school. But without Ribas, she would have no high-school education at all. Chávez cares about reaching zero misery, something that can be said of few governments with oil. But no one really knows if the missions are actually moving Venezuela toward zero misery; the programs have no visible internal evaluation. Increasingly, the missions are replacing their formal counterparts. It is wonderful for poor neighborhoods to have health clinics staffed with Cuban doctors — wonderful, unless you happen to need the services of one of Venezuela’s hospitals, which are falling apart.
Political and ideological training, Ribas officials told me, is the top qualification for a facilitator. I attended a session for new Ribas students in Las Torres, a La Vega barrio near the top of the mountain. After Ribas officials told students how to register for classes and what would be expected of them, María Teresa Curvelo, the district coordinator, began a 90-minute talk about a referendum of great importance to the government. The referendum, to be held on Dec. 2, proposes changing the constitution to remove Chávez’s term limits and increase his power among other things. She urged students to attend marches and street demonstrations supporting Chávez. “Chávez is someone who comes along every 100 years,” she told them. Afterward we rode down the mountain in a truck. When she got out, I thanked her. “Fatherland, Socialism or Death!” she replied.
VIII.
Venezuela’s poor have become much less so under Chávez. The population living in extreme poverty, measured by cash income, dropped from 20.3 percent in the last half of 1998 to 11.1 percent in the last half of 2006, according to official statistics. But an oil boom might be expected to alleviate poverty. The real question is whether the gains will be sustainable. Weisbrot says he thinks they will. He points to the missions and figures there are gains in health and education that cash income doesn’t measure. But so far there is no sign of them: the percentage of those living without running water and living in inadequate housing, as well as the number of young children not attending school, has scarcely budged in the last 10 years. The percentage of babies born with low birth weights actually rose from 1999 to 2006. And this is according to government statistics. It is early, but these numbers may mean that the missions are mainly helping through the stipends.
Whatever success the missions have at helping the poor may be dwarfed by the grotesque distortions in the economy as a whole. Inflation is officially at 16 percent but is most likely higher, according to Orlando Ochoa, the economist, who is usually critical of Chávez. He says that in the basket of goods and services used to measure inflation, just under half the items are sold at government-controlled prices. Many goods simply can’t be bought at those prices, and consumers must pay double the price in a street market. Or the goods can’t be found at all, their producers forced out of business by price controls. Beans and sugar were hard to find cheaply when I visited Caracas in September; fresh milk and eggs hard to find at all. Recently, people had to line up for five hours to get a liter of milk. One proposal in Chávez’s constitutional referendum could increase inflation much further by abolishing the autonomy of the Central Bank and giving the president power over Venezuela’s international reserves. The proposal would also essentially allow Chávez to print money.
The major threat to the economy comes from the exchange rate. Oil caused the bolívar to be overvalued. Farms and factories are in trouble. They can’t export and must compete at home with products imported at the official exchange rate, which is now about a third of the market rate. And so the country is awash in artificially cheap imported products, from basic foodstuffs, like Brazilian cooking oil, to fancy cars. “Our productive capacity is too weak to create jobs,” Petkoff says. “But we consume like a rich country.”
The disparity between the official exchange rate (2,150 bolívars to the dollar) and the black-market rate (6,200 bolívars at press time) has created a new class known as the Boliburgesía. Bankers, traders, anyone who works in finance or commerce, can get very rich manipulating the exchange rates. Buy all the imported whiskey and Hummers you want, is the message. Live a life of wild excess. Just don’t try to produce anything.
Even if the price of oil stays high, it may not be able to sustain Venezuela if oil production continues to drop, subsidized domestic consumption keeps rising and government spending continues unmeasured and unchecked. While other oil producers, like Russia and Nigeria, are piling up surpluses, Venezuela is spending everything it gets. Venezuela once had a $6 billion oil fund to be saved for lean years; Chávez has spent all but $700 million of it. The vast majority of Chávez’s new missions and worker cooperatives are dependent on state handouts — unsustainable when government revenue falls. A devaluation of the currency would wipe out the income gains of the poor.
This is classic oil curse, and Venezuela has seen it before. In 1973, and in 1981, Venezuela spent oil money wildly, without controls. Each time a boom ended, it left Venezuela worse off than before it began — per capita income in 1999 was the same as in 1960. Chávez has quite likely intensified these cycles, and the country is less able to produce anything other than oil.
Venezuela’s adventures in oil nationalization have produced two very different models. At a time when oil prices were low and the country in dire need of social spending, the old Pdvsa’s focus on reinvesting in oil production was undemocratic and unfair to the Venezuelan people. But the new way has produced something arguably worse — economic failure despite a boom in oil prices, and it is unfair to future generations.
IX.
Nationalization is often a response to the failure of privatized oil to respond to the people’s needs. Even in the United States, where there is a good chance of getting caught, oil companies have inflated their costs or illegally deducted costs and engaged in other machinations to minimize payouts. For poor countries, the risks of getting a raw deal from private oil companies are much greater. History is littered with contracts that give Big Oil obviously unfair advantages — Shell in Nigeria, Mobil in Kazakhstan and Texaco in Ecuador to name a few. Oil can also be an irresistible seduction to a country’s ruling class. Where democratic institutions — or even merely transparent processes — don’t exist, the lure to corruption is powerful. Oil in Russia, for example, was sold off not for maximum profit to the country but maximum profit to the officials who oversaw privatization. In Equatorial Guinea, ExxonMobil, Amerada Hess, Marathon and others made payments to President Teodoro Obiang or his family for land, security and other services, according to a Senate investigation of money-laundering involving Riggs Bank, where some of those payments ended up.
Nationalization, however, doesn’t cure these ills, and it can deprive a nation of its rightful take of its natural wealth in other ways. One is simply lack of know-how. One reason President Evo Morales of Bolivia pulled back from his threats to radically nationalize the country’s gas industry is that Bolivian officials realize they cannot manage the business themselves. Morales has focused on raising royalties on fields with known reserves, fields where companies essentially are guaranteed a return on investment. The royalty had been at 18 percent. Under pressure from popular protests, the previous government raised the rate to 50 percent, and last year Morales raised it to 82 percent in some cases. While foreign investment in Bolivia’s natural-gas industry has fallen, every analyst I talked to said it was not because of the royalty hike. Morales’s nationalization rhetoric, not royalty rates, made private companies skittish. “There’s a big difference for an investor when there’s a worry about nationalization,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, a fellow at the nonpartisan James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, at Rice University in Houston. “There are intangible factors I can’t control, and it’s creating all this political risk.” Roger Tissot of PFC Energy adds: “Companies don’t have a problem paying more rent and taxes. They do have a problem giving up control.”
So perhaps the best strategy for resource-rich countries is to keep the oil private, watch it carefully and tax the hell out of it. Better yet, raise royalties, which are more straightforward and easier to collect. “If your objective is to maximize rent, then the best way is to have companies compete with one another in open bidding for access,” Tissot says. “Angola and Libya have done this very successfully. Libya invited private companies to come back and is squeezing 90 percent of the profits out of them.”
As a slogan, “Negotiate a Better Royalty Rate!” doesn’t have the ring of “The Oil Is Ours!”; nationalization of natural resources can bolster a country’s psyche even if the management of those resources is a failure. The urge to nationalize is, at its core, a political one. Chávez seized Pdvsa not so it would produce more but so he could directly control the money. When governments give into this urge, they tend to be susceptible to the temptations of using oil for short-term gain.
But not always. Nationalized oil production doesn’t necessarily lead to political corruption or shortsightedness. If the old Pdvsa were operating in today’s booming oil market, there might be plenty of money for investment in oil and social programs. But it would be the government’s job to watch the company closely to make sure the state got its fair share — in other words, to ensure oil does what it should do: produce maximum sustainable money for the state. It’s also the government’s job to use the money wisely. That is a more important and difficult problem than the dilemma of whether to nationalize, and the solution does not depend on whether production is nationalized or privatized. It is not even an oil problem at all.
All oil production ends up at some point in the realm of politics — whose interests will the bounty serve? The only way to mitigate the political influence is transparency for state-owned and private companies alike. “There should be a law that a national oil company has to publish its corporate figures, matching an S.E.C. filing,” says Jaffe, the Baker Institute fellow. “We recommend that there be a regulator in Parliament that requires full reporting. And it should be open to the public. It’s easy to say and hard to do.”
Private companies do release credible annual reports — but many of them never reveal what they pay host governments. Several new nongovernmental campaigns, like Publish What You Pay and the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, are trying to shame companies and governments into bringing the books out into the open. So far they have had limited success.
“The problem isn’t who owns the resources, it’s what you get from the proceeds,” says David Mares, a professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, who studies energy in Latin America. “If you waste it in corruption and unsustainable programs, it’s as bad as if you have international corporations dominating, who pay very few taxes.”
Nationalization won’t keep oil from being stolen. Good oversight, accountability and management of the funds will, no matter who owns the oil. “On Jan. 1, 1976, the day of nationalization, Pérez gave his speech with a banner behind him that read ‘El Petróleo Es Nuestro,’ ” Antonio Szabo says. “Guess what? It was nuestro all along.”
Tina Rosenberg is a contributing writer for the magazine.
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5) New Detainee Rights Weighed in Plans to Close Guantánamo
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
November 4, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/us/nationalspecial3/04gitmo.html?hp
WASHINGTON, Oct. 31 — Administration officials are considering granting Guantánamo detainees substantially greater rights as part of an effort to close the detention center and possibly move much of its population to the United States, according to officials involved in the discussions.
One proposal that is being widely discussed in the administration would overhaul the procedure for determining whether detainees are properly held by granting them legal representation at detention hearings and by giving federal judges, not military officers, the power to decide whether suspects should be held.
Although the Bush administration has long defended the legal protections afforded detainees at Guantánamo against strenuous criticism, some officials now say that moving them to American soil would require giving them enhanced protections.
“If you were to bring them to the United States, there is a recognition that for policy reasons you would need even more robust procedures than those currently at Guantánamo,” one senior official involved in the discussions said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because no decisions have been made.
The administration has insisted for more than five years that a legal pillar of the war on terror is that the military alone has the power to decide which foreign terrorism suspects should be held and for how long, and backing away from that would be a sharp change of course.
Yet some officials say that enhancing detainees’ rights could also help the administration strategically, by undercutting a case brought by suspects at Guantánamo that is now before the Supreme Court, which could wind up winning them even more power to challenge their detention.
Under current procedures at Guantánamo, military officers decide whether detainees are properly held as enemy combatants, and the suspects are not permitted lawyers in the detention hearings, known as Combatant Status Review Tribunals.
Facing international criticism for holding hundreds of men without charge for years, officials from President Bush on down have said they would like to close Guantánamo. In recent interviews, officials said the discussion of detainee rights was not an acknowledgment that past policies were flawed, but rather was an indication that the administration was engaged in trying to assess the legal and practical consequences of shutting the detention center and moving detainees to the United States.
Even so, some officials are arguing against major policy shifts, and similar proposals have failed to gain steam within the administration in the past. In addition, any administration proposal would probably face intense scrutiny in Congress.
Before any detainees can be moved, officials have said that they would need to find or build a secure site in the United States and that they would need legislation allowing detainees deemed to be a threat to be held “until the end of hostilities” in the war on terror, even if they were not charged with war crimes. Under current proposals, scores of detainees might continue to be held indefinitely without facing criminal charges.
“These are dangerous men,” said Sandra L. Hodgkinson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs. “There has to be an appropriate way of handling that.”
The administration has fought for years in court and in Congress against granting the detainees more rights. In the latest instance, the Supreme Court is to consider a case brought by Guantánamo detainees who are seeking to challenge their confinement in habeas corpus suits in federal court.
If the administration loses that case, it could give the detainees even more legal rights and create a precedent limiting the president’s and the military’s power. Lawyers inside and outside of government said a detailed proposal from the administration to give detainees fuller legal protections could convince the justices that they need not resolve the case, Boumediene v. Bush.
The discussions now under way in the administration show the complexities of the internal debate over whether to close Guantánamo, with some officials convinced they are facing unattractive choices: keeping the detention camp open and continuing to draw worldwide criticism or transferring the most dangerous detainees to the United States, where American courts would probably grant them increased legal protections.
Officials have said that to close Guantánamo, perhaps 200 of the 330 detainees there could be transferred to the United States. The remainder would be sent back to their home countries or to other countries, a painstaking process of reducing the number of detainees that has been going on for several years.
But the officials have said that about 200 of the detainees are considered too dangerous to repatriate. Of those, 80 or more, officials say, would be tried for war crimes in military commissions, with the remaining 120 or fewer held indefinitely because of military assertions that they are a threat to American security.
The officials said the current discussions about ways of closing Guantánamo had become more concrete in recent weeks, with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates directing his advisers to come up with a proposal for closing the detention center.
Although Mr. Gates had urged the closing of Guantánamo shortly after he became defense secretary last December, he has said he quickly encountered resistance in the administration. But on Sept. 26 he told Congress in testimony that he had directed his deputies “to put together our own proposal inside the Department of Defense that we could then perhaps use as a basis for discussion” in the administration on how to close the center.
Some people outside the administration who are involved in Guantánamo issues said the political and international pressure on the detention center had now combined with concerns about the impending Supreme Court case in accelerating consideration of potential options.
Matthew Waxman, a former detainee affairs official at the Defense Department who now teaches at Columbia Law School, said the proposal to involve federal judges and detainees’ lawyers in hearings on detainees’ status had been discussed previously in the administration.
But, Mr. Waxman said, the proposal now “is gaining currency because you have greater recognition of the strategic costs of maintaining Guantánamo, combined with the legal risks of leaving it to the Supreme Court to decide what legal rights exist at Guantánamo.”
Under the current proposal, a specially created federal court with strict rules to protect classified information would hear detainee challenges to their detention. Judges who usually sit in regular federal courts would preside and would hear arguments from detainees’ lawyers.
Few details of the proposal are known, but such proceedings would be unlikely to give the federal judges the latitude they would have in the habeas corpus cases the detainees are seeking in the Supreme Court, lawyers said.
Other proposals to give detainees increased rights are also part of the discussions, people knowledgeable about the talks said. The administration could simply agree that detainees held in the United States were entitled to have their cases reviewed in habeas corpus cases, which would undercut several years of legal and Congressional arguments.
Another proposal would improve on the Pentagon’s current detention hearings, now conducted by officers, by adding military judges, for example, one person who has been briefed on the discussions said.
The discussions involve fierce competition between agencies and, at times, within agencies, which sometimes have sharply differing views on Guantánamo. Under Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, the Justice Department was often perceived in the administration as resisting proposals to close Guantánamo.
If Mr. Bush’s nominee, Michael B. Mukasey, is approved as attorney general, he has signaled he might shift the course of the department. In testimony at his confirmation hearings he said he would seek ideas “with the goal of closing it down because it’s hurting us,” and said Guantánamo had “given us a black eye.”
But he added that there was “no easy solution” to the question of what to do with current detainees.
Ms. Hodgkinson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, said there were many practical concerns with proposals to increase the legal rights of detainees if they were moved to the United States. She said Pentagon officials continued to insist that enemy combatants held outside the country could be held by the military until they were no longer a threat.
She said the proposal to provide lawyers to detainees for their detention hearings and have their cases heard by judges would need to be clearly limited to detainees held inside the United States. Military officials said this summer that they were holding 24,500 detainees in Iraq alone.
“How would we provide 25,000 lawyers in Iraq?” Ms. Hodgkinson said. “We couldn’t do it if we tried.”
Critics of the Bush administration have accused the government on several occasions of shifting legal tactics on detainee issues when it anticipated losses in court.
That perception could hurt the administration’s credibility with the Supreme Court justices if there is a new shift while the court is considering the case that is to be argued in December, said Barry Friedman, a professor at New York University School of Law who is an expert on the Supreme Court.
Still, Professor Friedman said, if the administration were to propose giving detainees new legal rights, the justices might conclude they did not need to answer the complicated question the case presents of defining the rights of terrorism suspects at Guantánamo.
“It is a tough question,” Professor Friedman said. “As a general matter the court doesn’t answer tough constitutional questions if it doesn’t need to.”
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6) The War on Poppy Succeeds, but Cannabis Thrives in an Afghan Province
By KIRK SEMPLE
November 4, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/world/asia/04cannabis.html?ref=world
KHWAJA GHOLAK, Afghanistan — Amid the multiplying frustrations of the fight against narcotics in Afghanistan, the northern province of Balkh has been hailed as a rare and glowing success.
Two years ago the province, which abuts Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, was covered with opium poppies — about 27,000 acres of them, nearly enough to blanket Manhattan twice. This year, after an intense anti-poppy campaign led by the governor, Balkh’s farmers abandoned the crop. The province was declared poppy free, with 12 others, and the provincial government was promised a reward of millions of dollars in development aid.
But largely ignored in the celebration was the fact that many farmers in Balkh simply switched from opium poppies to another illegal crop: cannabis, the herb from which marijuana and hashish are derived.
As the Afghan and Western governments focused on the problem of soaring Afghan opium production, which hit record levels this year and remains a booming industry, cannabis cultivation increased 40 percent around the country, to about 173,000 acres this year — from about 123,500 acres last year, the United Nations said in an August report. And even though hashish is less expensive per weight than opium or heroin, the report said, cannabis can potentially earn a farmer more than opium poppies because it yields twice the quantity of drug per acre and is cheaper and less labor intensive to grow.
“As a consequence,” the United Nations report warned, “farmers who do not cultivate opium poppy may turn to cannabis cultivation.”
Many farmers in Balkh have done just that, officials and residents say, and the province now has one of the most bounteous cannabis crops in the country.
The plant is certainly not hard to find. It lines the main highways leading into Mazar-i-Sharif, the provincial capital, and is visible to passing drivers. The crop’s chief byproduct, hashish, is sold openly at many roadside fruit and grocery stands, particularly around Balkh, the ancient citadel town about 15 miles west of Mazar-i-Sharif.
Late on an October afternoon, Muhammad Ayud, 30, a kindly sharecropper, was finishing a day of work at the three-acre parcel he farms here in this poor village just outside the town of Balkh. His plot was covered by a forest of cannabis plants, some more than nine feet tall.
“This is nothing,” he said, gesturing toward the towering plants. “If you give it real fertilizer, you’d see how tall it grows!”
Last year Mr. Ayud’s parcel was mostly opium poppies. But his crop was wiped out by government officials during a campaign led by the provincial governor, Atta Mohammad Noor, who jailed dozens of growers for disobeying him and personally waded into several poppy fields swinging a stick at the flower stems.
Mr. Ayud, one of only two wage earners in his 16-member family, lost most of his expected earnings for the year, about $1,000, he said.
This year he planted cannabis instead, with some cotton as a fallback in case the government followed through on its promises to eradicate the illicit crop. It was a return to a family tradition, he said. His father and grandfather grew cannabis here.
Mr. Ayud said he knew it was illegal to grow cannabis, but that it was the only crop that would produce enough profit to feed his family. “I don’t have anything else to grow,” he said. The difference in potential earnings is vast: cannabis can earn about twice the profits of a legal crop like cotton, local officials say.
Farmers in this region have cultivated cannabis for more than 70 years and, by the estimates of several Balkh residents, at least half the adult male population smokes hashish. Resinous, pungent and black, the hashish is sold in thin, palm-size sheets that resemble large tire patches and sell for about a dollar each. Hashish from this area — called Shirak-i-Mazar, or Milk of Mazar — was once prized by smokers around the world, though its primacy has since been supplanted by varieties from other countries.
Many farmers here, as elsewhere in Afghanistan, process the cannabis into hashish in their homes, then sell it to traffickers who come to their doors to pick it up. The best hashish is exported, residents here say, while the inferior stuff is consumed nationally.
Mr. Atta says he has a plan to eradicate cannabis next growing season. Farmers have begun to harvest their current crop, and officials say they do not want to destroy the farmers’ livelihood without giving them time to plant an alternative.
“Marijuana is not difficult to control, like poppy,” the governor said in an interview in October in his vast, opulent office in Mazar-i-Sharif. “It’s very easy to eradicate. It’s a very simple issue.”
But Mr. Atta said he was still waiting for the development money that the central government and international community had promised Balkh in return for ridding itself of opium poppies. The money — he puts it at more than $5 million; officials in the central government say it is closer to $3 million — is earmarked for a range of projects including rural development programs to promote farming alternatives to poppies and cannabis.
Mr. Atta cautioned that unless the money arrived promptly, he could not guarantee that the farmers would eschew poppies.
“It’s the responsibility of the central government and international community to improve the lives of farmers, which they aren’t doing,” he said. “Well, we’ll try our best to not let them grow poppy, but it’s going to cause problems.”
Many farmers around the town of Balkh suggested that forswearing cannabis might be harder than poppies. Not only are cannabis and hashish a more integral part of their customs, they said, but beyond cannabis there are no profitable alternatives.
The farmers said they would not grow cannabis only if the government provided an alternative source of livelihood, or improved the market for their legal crops.
“If, in the future, the government helps the farmers — and really helps — we will destroy all the poppy and cannabis,” said Hoshdel, 40, a well-weathered farmer in Khwaja Gholak who has nine children. “If they don’t help us, I swear I’ll grow it.”
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7) A Fairy-Tale Ending Eludes Separated Twins
By FERNANDA SANTOS
November 4, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/nyregion/04twins.html?ref=us
SCARSDALE, N.Y., Nov. 1 — It had all the trappings of a Cinderella story. Carl and Clarence Aguirre, impoverished Filipino twins conjoined at the top of their heads, arrived in New York in 2003, sick and malnourished, and after a series of death-defying operations, emerged late one night on separate gurneys — fragile, sedated and bandaged, but each with his own life.
The tale captivated the public and generated headlines around the globe. “Dateline NBC” chronicled the boys’ journey; one newspaper hailed the surgeons as miracle doctors; and the twins’ mother, Arlene Aguirre, appeared on CNN and on the “Today” show. She repeatedly expressed her gratitude for the medical care, attention and good wishes her children received at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. And always, she smiled.
Four years later, the cameras are gone, but the Aguirres are not. The twins need more surgery, and it can only be performed here. And Ms. Aguirre is alone, contemplating the uncertainties of the future and struggling to care for her boys, who are still in diapers even though they are 5.
Carl can speak a few words, but they are often unintelligible, and he cannot walk on his own because of an impaired left side; he crawls with his right knee and arm, dragging his limp left limbs as he moves about the house. Clarence can walk and talk, though his speech is somewhat garbled.
The boys do not eat well, so they must be fed all night, every night. Liquid food is pumped into their bodies through tubes Ms. Aguirre attaches to an opening in their bellies. On a recent afternoon, a dozen boxes of Nutren Junior, the liquid formula they are fed as they sleep, were stacked against a wall in the kitchen.
There are also financial concerns: The family lives in a home managed by a charity, and Ms. Aguirre is not sure how much longer they will be allowed to stay. If the donations that have supported them dry up, she wonders, how is she going to provide for her sons since, as a visitor from abroad, she is not allowed to work? What if their visas are not renewed and they are forced to return to the Philippines, where they lived in a poor village with no electricity, before doctors can close the holes left in the boys’ skulls?
“I guess nobody really think, if ever we’re going to live in a community, how we’re going to survive,” she said, struggling to express herself in English.
Every year, hundreds of gravely ill children from poor countries come to the United States for life-saving medical care, but little attention is paid to what happens afterward. Many return home after surgery and go on to live healthy lives; some, though, suffer severe setbacks, in part because they return to dire living conditions and a lack of adequate care in their own countries, said Cris Embleton, co-founder of Healing the Children, a charitable organization that has brought thousands of ailing children to the United States for treatment.
The Aguirres’ case is somewhat exceptional: The boys need further treatment, which must be carried out here, but it is unclear how much longer they will be able to stay.
“Conjoined twins have a unique situation that requires people to look at other alternatives with them because it can be life-threatening to send them home,” said Ms. Embleton, who is now director of Mending the Kids International, based in Santa Clarita, Calif. “After all the work that went into getting them to the point of separation, you have to determine if it’s prudent for them to go home, and if it’s not, how they’re going to be cared for while they’re here.”
A pair of Guatemalan twin sisters who were also conjoined at the heads were surgically separated in August 2002 in California and returned home five months later. But in May 2003, they came back after one of them contracted meningitis. The twins are still in the United States, living with volunteer families; their parents visit sometimes, said Ms. Embleton, whose charity is sponsoring their stay through private donations.
Over the last two years, Ms. Aguirre, 33, has slowly cut the family’s daily ties to the doctors, nurses, therapists and social workers who had made up their safety net. The family had been living at Blythedale Children’s Hospital in Valhalla, N.Y., but in November 2005, the boys were transferred to an outpatient program, and the family had to move. Then, last August, the twins were discharged from Blythedale altogether and Ms. Aguirre had to enroll them in the public school district, though at the time she had no idea what a school district was.
Now Ms. Aguirre and her sons are caught in a vacuum, celebrating the end of the first phase of the boys’ recovery while waiting to hear when the next portion of their treatment, an operation to reconstruct the parts of their skulls that were removed in the separation surgeries, will take place. (Had they not been separated, the boys would probably not have survived their second birthday, doctors said.)
Montefiore Medical Center, where Carl and Clarence were separated, is still paying for their prescription medications and other medical supplies. Pamela Adkins, the hospital’s public relations director, said Montefiore had provided “millions and millions and millions of dollars in medical care for the boys and their mother.”
She noted that the broader issues facing the family fell outside the scope of a hospital’s responsibilities.
Residents in Scarsdale collected donations that provide a monthly food allowance of $160 for the Aguirres at a local supermarket, but it is not certain how much longer the allowance will last. Ms. Aguirre has no relatives or friends here, except for Meredith Gosin, a social worker once employed by Blythedale, and Ronald E. Feiner, a Manhattan entertainment lawyer who took pity on the Aguirres and is volunteering his time to help them. Mr. Feiner has set up a trust fund to administer cash donations made to the Aguirres; he estimates the money will be enough to cover the family’s needs for about six months.
“The operation was a miracle,” Mr. Feiner said. “The twins are alive and functioning. But, unfortunately, this is not the happy ending we all hoped for, not the perfect story we were all led to believe.”
For the last two years, Ms. Aguirre and the twins have lived in Scarsdale, in a house managed by Westhab, a charity that provides shelter for homeless families in Westchester County. The arrangement was meant to be temporary from the start, and last August, a Westhab worker told Ms. Aguirre that their home would have to be vacated by the end of the school year. Ms. Aguirre called Mr. Feiner in a panic.
“How do I find a house?” she asked him, as they recalled later in separate interviews. (After a reporter’s inquiry, a Westhab spokeswoman, Connie Elkinson, said that “the position of our president, Robert Miller, is that the family can stay at the home for as long as they need.”)
The Aguirres’ medical visas must be renewed every six months. Ms. Aguirre, who fills out the visa renewal forms with Ms. Gosin’s help, said that the last visas expired in September, and she still does not know if new ones have been approved.
“I’m so nervous and afraid,” Ms. Aguirre said. “Nobody really explained me or told me, when you come to New York, all this is going to happen.
“I see about immigrants deported on TV,” she said, “and I’m thinking, is this going to happen to us? If we don’t have visa, are we going back to the Philippines? My boys are not ready.”
Craniopagus joined twins, as twins fused at their heads are known, are rare, estimated to occur once in 10 million births. Dr. James T. Goodrich, chief pediatric neurosurgeon at Montefiore and one of the doctors who operated on Clarence and Carl, said that no more than 60 sets of craniopagus twins worldwide have undergone separation surgery, and that, in most cases, the separation was carried out in one operation. The single-operation approach, Dr. Goodrich explained, often resulted in serious neurological setbacks for at least one of the children.
After carefully reviewing the Aguirre twins’ case, Dr. Goodrich and his colleagues decided to separate them in stages and wound up performing four operations over 10 months.
Dr. Goodrich and Dr. David A. Staffenberg, a pediatric plastic surgeon who is part of the twins’ medical team, have traveled the world giving lectures about the technique they used to separate Clarence and Carl, including talks at the Royal Society of Medicine of London and at a medical conference in Brazil. They have also advised other doctors on the treatment of craniopagus twins, and last year they helped a team of British doctors separate a pair of such twins.
A section devoted to the boys on the Montefiore Web site describes the medical work as “the first-ever separation of craniopagus twins where both twins survived with no neurological damage or deficit incurred from the surgery.”
By many measures, Carl and Clarence’s separation was a success, even if the boys have progressed unequally. Clarence is learning his ABCs and spends hours in front of a computer at home, playing games that feature Diego, one of Nickelodeon’s animated stars, making his way across a dense forest.
Carl can maneuver a children’s VCR hooked to a television in the playroom, and he seemed to entertain himself turning the TV on and off. But because of his limp left side, he has to hold on to something to take a few steps. When he goes to school, he wears plastic braces on his lower legs for more stability.
“I’m sure this is related to the separation because we had to cut through the brain to get them apart and Carl took the hit,” Dr. Goodrich explained.
“We hope that he will outgrow” it, he said.
The boys wear blue helmets to protect their fragile skulls and sleep in special cribs with high bars to prevent falls.
Sometimes, when the boys are frustrated, they slap their helmets repeatedly. Late one afternoon, as Ms. Aguirre tried to get him to sit down for dinner, Clarence hit her and yelled, angrily, “Stop it! Stop it!”
The stress has taken a visible toll on Ms. Aguirre, who sat slumped on a couch one recent afternoon, bags under her eyes. When she was exasperated, she let out a short, high-pitched scream.
She has developed an ulcer, she said, and often cries herself to sleep.
“I cry, but nobody see,” Ms. Aguirre said. “I feel embarrassed to cry. If I’m going to cry, I’m like a weak person, and nobody is going to help me because I’m a weak person.”
She added, “Because of everything that’s going on with the boys, with our lives, I have to stay strong.”
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8) What’s Behind the Race Gap?
By VIKAS BAJAJ and FORD FESSENDEN
The Nation
November 4, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/weekinreview/04bajaj.html?ref=business
High-cost subprime mortgages have often been framed as loans that catered to people with blemished credit records or little experience with debt.
There has been less attention paid to the concentration of these loans in neighborhoods that are largely black, Hispanic, or both. This pattern, documented in federal loan records, holds true even when comparing white middle-income or upper-income neighborhoods with similar minority ones.
Consider two neighborhoods in the Detroit area. One, located in the working-class suburb of Plymouth, is 97 percent white with a median income of $51,000 in 2000. To the east, a census tract in Detroit just inside Eight Mile Road has a very similar median income, $49,000, but the population there is 97 percent black.
Last year, about 70 percent of the loans made in the Detroit neighborhood carried a high interest rate — defined as 3 percentage points more than the yield on a comparable Treasury note — while in Plymouth just 17 percent did.
Last year, blacks were 2.3 times more likely, and Hispanics twice as likely, to get high-cost loans as whites after adjusting for loan amounts and the income of the borrowers, according to an analysis of loans reported under the federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. (Asians are somewhat less likely than whites to take out high-cost loans.)
Researchers and industry officials agree that there is probably no single explanation for the lending patterns, though the history of banks’ avoiding minority neighborhoods, the practice known as “redlining,” is a good place to start. (Experts have to resort to guesswork because the government does not require lenders to report information about borrowers’ credit scores, down payments and other details used in pricing loans.)
Lenders say that in general higher rates are justified to account for the bigger risks posed by borrowers who have a poor record at paying bills on time and defaulting on debts. And a recent Federal Reserve study noted that neighborhoods where people tend to have lower credit scores also tend to a greater concentration of high-cost loans.
The study suggests that the concentration of high-cost loans is not caused by an area’s racial makeup, though there is a correlation, said Jay Brinkmann, vice president for research and economics at the Mortgage Bankers Association.
But the Fed study also suggests that a big part of the reason may have to do with the lenders that minority borrowers do business with. The biggest home lenders in minority neighborhoods are mortgage companies that provide only subprime loans, not full-service banks that do a range of lending.
It may be that these borrowers do not have access to traditional banks, because there are no branches near them. The Community Reinvestment Act, enacted 30 years ago, was intended to address redlining by forcing banks to make loans in lower-income areas. But the law’s provisions do not apply to banks in neighborhoods where they have no branches.
“You could go into a middle-class area in Queens County that is white and there will be lots of banks on the shopping street,” said Alfred A. DelliBovi, president of the Federal Home Loan Bank of New York and a deputy secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the first Bush administration. “If you go to an area that is equal income and that is black, you won’t see many.”
Banks typically locate branches where they believe they will get the most deposits. A lower savings rate and a distrust of banks stemming from a legacy of redlining may help explain why there are fewer branches in minority neighborhoods, Mr. DelliBovi said.
A bigger reason may be that in recent years many subprime loans were not sought out by borrowers but actively sold to them by brokers and telemarketers, said Calvin Bradford, a housing researcher and consultant. A majority of the loans were refinance transactions allowing homeowners to take cash out of their appreciating property or pay off credit card and other debt.
Lenders made the risky loans, then often sold them to Wall Street investors. Many borrowers appear to have been swayed by brokers and lenders offering to look out for their best interests even when they had no obligation to do so.
“If we turn the clock back 30 years ago, we had redlining,” said Nicholas Retsinas, director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. “In the last few years, we have had the opposite — an overextension of credit by lenders and an overextension by borrowers.”
The country needs to find a balance, “a way to extend credit at a reasonable cost to people with impaired credit,” he said. The government, through programs like the Federal Housing Administration and the big mortgage purchasers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, must play a critical role, Mr. Retsinas said, adding that he worries that the efforts initiated so far are not robust enough.
“There are lots of people trying to do the right thing,” he said. “But at this time I’m not very sanguine that we will deal with this in a concerted manner.”
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9) A Sanitation Crisis That’s No Joke
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
The Basics
"According to the World Health Organization, 40 percent of the globe, or 2.6 billion people, have no access to hygienic toilets."
“No movie star has died of diarrhea. No politician has died of poverty.”
November 4, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/weekinreview/04basicA.html?ref=health
The nation with the greatest lead in potty technology is, no doubt, Japan. Toilets there aren’t just self-flushing; that’s Jurassic technology by Japan’s standards. The best detect you as you enter the bathroom, lifting their lids and firing up their seat-warmers. When finished, you have a choice of warm spritzes — “bidet” or “shower” — followed, if you like, by a drying blast of hot air.
But it takes a wealthy nation, like Japan, to provide such luxury. Far more of the world gets along without even the fundamentals. According to the World Health Organization, 40 percent of the globe, or 2.6 billion people, have no access to hygienic toilets. They must use latrines, outhouses or buckets — or simply the bushes or rivers nearby. Anyone traveling in the third world will have seen villagers squatting along Indian railroad tracks, off the decks of houses over Indonesian lagoons, or even in the outgoing tide on Madagascar beaches.
The World Toilet Summit, which just took place in New Delhi, is an attempt to improve that situation by drawing attention to the problem and pushing for better sanitation technologies. It is the brainchild of Jack Sim, a Singapore real estate mogul who grew up in poverty and remembers seeing children in his neighborhood shedding worms as they ran around diaperless. In 2001, he founded the World Toilet Organization, which has a blue toilet seat for its logo.
Despite the silly name, he means serious business.
Diarrhea kills 1.6 million children each year — more, even, than malaria — and the pollution of drinking water with waste is a principal cause.
Also, about 160 million people have intestinal worms, which can cause malnutrition and anemia. Worms competing for the nutrition that their hosts eat can leave their victims too weak to farm or go to school and prone to other infections.
Experts all agree that the two most important public health measures in the world, measures that saved more lives than either vaccines or antibiotics, were in place by the time of the Roman Empire: running water and toilets that carry feces safely away. But, because of the expense of pipes and plumbing, they have remained for over 2,000 years the province of the relatively rich of the world, even though measures that save far fewer lives — from cinchona bark for malaria to antiretrovirals for AIDS — have been hailed as godsends.
Toilets get too little respect, Mr. Sim argues, openly wishing that someone with more celebrity than he has would take up the cause, because lack of adequate toilets threatens more children than, for example, global warming does. Or, as he lamented in an interview with Agence France-Presse in September: “No movie star has died of diarrhea. No politician has died of poverty.”
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LINKS AND VERY SHORT STORIES
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Writers Set to Strike, Threatening Hollywood
By MICHAEL CIEPLY and BROOKS BARNES
November 2, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/02/business/media/02cnd-hollywood.html?ref=us
Raids Traumatized Children, Report Says
By JULIA PRESTON
Hundreds of young American children suffered hardship and psychological trauma after immigration raids in the last year in which their parents were detained or deported, according to a report by the National Council of La Raza and the Urban Institute. Of 500 children directly affected in three factory raids examined in the report in which 900 adult immigrants were arrested, a large majority were United States citizens younger than 10. With one or both parents deported, the children had reduced economic support, and many remained in the care of relatives who feared contact with the authorities, the study said. Although the children were citizens, few families sought public assistance for them, the study found.
November 1, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/01/us/01brfs-raids.html?ref=us
Newark: Recalled Meat Found in Store
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
New Jersey consumer safety officials said yesterday that state inspectors bought recalled frozen hamburgers at a store weeks after the meat was recalled because of fears of E. coli contamination. The 19 boxes were bought in Union City on Wednesday, nearly four weeks after the manufacturer, the Topps Meat Company, issued a nationwide recall of 21.7 million pounds of frozen patties. Officials would not name the store yesterday because of the investigation, and investigators have not determined when the store received the meat, said Jeff Lamm, a spokesman for the state’s Division of Consumer Affairs.
New Jersey
October 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/nyregion/26mbrfs-meat.html?ref=nyregion
Florida: Sentence for Lionel Tate Is Upheld
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
An appeals court has upheld a 30-year probation violation sentence for Lionel Tate, who for a time was the youngest person to be sentenced to life in an American prison. The ruling Wednesday by the Fourth District Court of Appeal in West Palm Beach sets the stage for Mr. Tate’s trial on robbery charges that could carry another life term. Mr. Tate, 20, had sought to have the sentence thrown out based on procedural mistakes. Mr. Tate was 12 at the time of the 1999 beating death of 6-year-old Tiffany Eunick. An appeals court overturned his murder conviction in 2004, and he was released but was on probation. In May 2005, the police said, Mr. Tate robbed a pizza delivery man, and he was found to be in possession of a gun even before that, a violation of his probation.
October 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/us/26brfs-lionel.html?ref=us
Submarine’s Commanding Officer Is Relieved of His Duties
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The commanding officer of the nuclear-powered submarine Hampton was relieved of his duty because of a loss of confidence in his leadership, the Navy said. The officer, Cmdr. Michael B. Portland, was relieved of duty after an investigation found the ship had failed to do daily safety checks on its nuclear reactor for a month and falsified records to cover up the omission. Commander Portland will be reassigned, said Lt. Alli Myrick, a public affairs officer. [Aren't you glad they are out there making the world safe for democracy?...bw]
October 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/us/26brfs-sub.html?ref=us
Britain: New Claim for Sovereignty in Antarctica
By REUTERS
World Briefing | Europe
Britain plans to submit a claim to the United Nations to extend its Antarctic territory by 386,000 square miles, the Foreign Office said. Argentina wants some of it, and its foreign minister said his country was working on its own presentation. May 13, 2009, is the deadline for countries to stake their claims in what some experts are describing as the last big carve-up of maritime territory in history.
October 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/world/europe/18briefs-claim.html?ref=world
California: Veto of 3 Criminal Justice Bills
By SOLOMON MOORE
Bucking a national trend toward stronger safeguards against wrongful convictions, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed bills that would have explored new eyewitness identification guidelines, required electronic recordings of police interrogations and mandated corroboration of jailhouse informant testimony. Mr. Schwarzenegger cited his concern that the three bills would hamper local law enforcement authorities, a contention shared by several state police and prosecutor associations. The proposals had been recommended by the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, a bipartisan body of police officials, prosecutors and defense lawyers charged by the State Senate to address the most common causes of wrongful convictions and recommend changes in criminal justice procedures.
October 16, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/16/us/16brfs-VETOOF3CRIMI_BRF.html?ref=us
Illinois: Chicagoans May Have to Dig Deeper
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Chicagoans would have to spend 10 cents more on a bottle of water, pay higher property taxes and spend more for liquor under Mayor Richard M. Daley’s proposed budget for next year. Also financing Mr. Daley’s $5.4 billion budget are higher water and sewer fees and more expensive vehicle stickers for people driving large vehicles, $120 a vehicle sticker, up from $90. Mr. Daley announced his budget to aldermen, calling it a last resort to ask taxpayers for more money. His budget closes a $196 million deficit and avoids service cuts and layoffs. Budget hearings will be held, and a city spending plan will require a vote by aldermen.
Midwest
October 11, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/us/11brfs-CHICAGO.html?ref=us
Wisconsin Iraq vet returns medals to Rumsfeld
By David Solnit, Courage to Resist / Army of None Project.
"I swore an oath to protect the constitution ... not to become a pawn in your New American Century."
September 26, 2007
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/
Madison, Wisconsin--Joshua Gaines, who served a year long tour in Iraq in 2004 to 2005 with the Army Reserve, returned his Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal and National Defense Service Medal to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld today by mail as dozens of supporters look on.
Verizon Reverses Itself on Abortion Messages
By ADAM LIPTAK
September 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/business/27cnd-verizon.html?ref=us
Manhattan: Slain Soldier to Receive Citizenship
A soldier from Washington Heights who was killed while serving with the Army’s Second Infantry Division in Iraq is to receive citizenship posthumously on Monday, immigration officials said in a statement yesterday. The soldier, Cpl. Juan Alcántara, 22, left, was one of four soldiers killed in an explosion as they searched a house in Baquba on Aug. 6. Representative Charles B. Rangel, a Harlem Democrat, will speak at a ceremony at the City University Great Hall in Manhattan and present a certificate to Corporal Alcántara’s family. The corporal was born in the Dominican Republic and grew up in Washington Heights, Mr. Rangel’s office said.
September 14, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/14/nyregion/14mbrfs-SOLDIER.html?ref=nyregion
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GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS AND INFORMATION
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Stop the Termination or the Cherokee Nation
http://groups.msn.com/BayAreaIndianCalendar/activismissues.msnw?action=get_message&mview=1&ID_Message=5580
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"They have a new gimmick every year. They're going to take one of their boys, black boys, and put him in the cabinet so he can walk around Washington with a cigar. Fire on one end and fool on the other end. And because his immediate personal problem will have been solved he will be the one to tell our people: 'Look how much progress we're making. I'm in Washington, D.C., I can have tea in the White House. I'm your spokesman, I'm your leader.' While our people are still living in Harlem in the slums. Still receiving the worst form of education.
"But how many sitting here right now feel that they could [laughs] truly identify with a struggle that was designed to eliminate the basic causes that create the conditions that exist? Not very many. They can jive, but when it comes to identifying yourself with a struggle that is not endorsed by the power structure, that is not acceptable, that the ground rules are not laid down by the society in which you live, in which you are struggling against, you can't identify with that, you step back.
"It's easy to become a satellite today without even realizing it. This country can seduce God. Yes, it has that seductive power of economic dollarism. You can cut out colonialism, imperialism and all other kind of ism, but it's hard for you to cut that dollarism. When they drop those dollars on you, you'll fold though."
—MALCOLM X, 1965
http://www.accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=987
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A little gem:
Michael Moore Faces Off With Stephen Colbert [VIDEO]
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/57492/
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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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"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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"There comes a times when silence is betrayal."
--Martin Luther King
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YouTube clip of Che before the UN in 1964
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtATT8GXkWg&mode=related&search
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The Wealthiest Americans Ever
NYT Interactive chart
JULY 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/business/20070715_GILDED_GRAPHIC.html
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New Orleans After the Flood -- A Photo Gallery
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=795
This email was sent to you as a service, by Roland Sheppard.
Visit my website at: http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret
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[For some levity...Hans Groiner plays Monk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51bsCRv6kI0
...bw]
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Which country should we invade next?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3g_zqz3VjY
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My Favorite Mutiny, The Coup
http://www.myspace.com/thecoupmusic
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Michael Moore- The Awful Truth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeOaTpYl8mE
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Morse v. Frederick Supreme Court arguments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_LsGoDWC0o
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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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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.Peace Articles at Libraryofpeace.org">
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