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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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USLAW Endorses September 15 Antiwar Demonstration in Washington, DC
USLAW Leadership Urges Labor Turnout
to Demand End to Occupation in Iraq, Hands Off Iraqi Oil
By a referendum ballot of members of the Steering Committee of U.S. Labor Against the War, USLAW is now officially on record endorsing and encouraging participation in the antiwar demonstration called by the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition in Washington, DC on September 15. The demonstration is timed to coincide with a Congressional vote scheduled in late September on a new Defense Department appropriation that will fund the Iraq War through the end of Bush's term in office.
U.S. Labor Against the War
http://www.uslaboragainstwar.org/
Stop the Iraq Oil Law
http://www.petitiononline.com/iraqoil/petition.html
2007 Iraq Labor Solidarity Tour
http://www.uslaboragainstwar.org/article.php?list=type&type=103
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September 15: A showdown march from the White House to Congress in Washington DC
North/Central California "End the War Now" March
Saturday, October 27, 2007, 11am, San Francisco Civic Center Plaza
I encourage anyone who can devote some time to contact the ANSWER office and sign up for one of the committees to build Oct. 27—two of the most important, of course, are outreach and fundraising.
Funds are urgently needed for all the material—posters, flyers, stickers and buttons, etc.—to get the word out! Make your tax-deductible donation to:
Progress Unity Fund/Oct. 27
and mail to:
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
2489 Mission St. Rm. 24
San Francisco, CA 94110
Please sign up to pass out flyers and to volunteer your time and energy to making this one of the truest expressions of the sentiment of we, the people this October 27.
In solidarity,
Bonnie Weinstein
To get more information on meeting times or distribution dates call or drop into the ANSWER office at the above address.
Act Now to Stop War & End Racism
http://www.ANSWERcoalition.org http://www.actionsf.org
sf@internationalanswer.org
415-821-6545
(Call to check meeting and event schedules.)
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) Oxfam Reports Growing Humanitarian Crisis in Iraq
By DAMIEN CAVE
July 31, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/world/middleeast/31oxfam.html
2) States Export Their Inmates as Prisons Fill
By SOLOMON MOORE
July 31, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/us/31prisons.html?ref=us
3) Gang Members Targeted in Calif. Sweep
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:02 p.m. ET
July 31, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Calif-Gang-Busts.html
4) Nicotine Addiction Is Quick in Youths, Research Finds
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
July 31, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/health/31toba.html?ref=health
5) A Little Easier to Occupy from the Air
Inter Press Service
By Ali al-Fadhily*
Dahr Jamail's dispatches
dahr_jamail_dispatches@dahrjamailiraq.com
6) A Nail in Maliki Government’s Coffin?
By Ali al-Fadhily
August 3, 2007
Inter Press Service
Dahr Jamail's dispatches dahr_jamail_dispatches@dahrjamailiraq.com
7) Baghdad, Iraq:
6 million people, 117 degrees and no water
By Richard Becker, Western Regional Coordinator, ANSWER Coalition
Friday, August 3, 2007
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
2489 Mission St. Rm. 24
San Francisco, CA 94110
415-821-6545
ANSWERcoalition.org
www.Sept15.org
info@internationalanswer.org
National Office in Washington DC: 202-544-3389
New York City: 212-694-8720
Los Angeles: 323-464-1636
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
Chicago: 773-463-0311
Seattle: 206-568-1661
8) Spying Measure Advances in Congress
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and MARK MAZZETTI
August 4, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/04/washington/04nsa.html?hp
9) U.S. Airstrike on 2 Taliban Commanders in South Wounds at Least 18 Civilians, Afghans Say
By ABDUL WAHEED WAFA and TAIMOOR SHAH
August 4, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/04/world/asia/04afghan.html?ref=world
10) Chávez Takes ‘Crazy Battalion’ of Supporters on the Road
By SIMON ROMERO
“As for the United States, Mr. Chávez predicted that widening budget and trade deficits portend a financial crisis that could cause it to ‘explode from within.’
‘There could be a revolution in the United States,’ Mr. Chávez said. ‘We’ll help them.’”
August 4, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/04/world/americas/04venez.html
11) A CounterPunch Special Report on the Economy In Richistan: Fantastic Wealth for a Few; Steady Decline for Many
The Return of the Robber Barons
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
August 2, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts08022007.html
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1) Oxfam Reports Growing Humanitarian Crisis in Iraq
By DAMIEN CAVE
July 31, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/world/middleeast/31oxfam.html
AMMAN, Jordan, July 30 — Poverty, hunger and public health continue to worsen in Iraq, according to a report released Monday by Oxfam International, which says that more aid is needed from abroad and calls on the Iraqi government to decentralize the distribution of food and medical supplies.
The report, based on a compendium of research from the United Nations, the Iraqi government and nonprofit organizations Oxfam works with or finances, offers little original data. But it provides one of the most comprehensive pictures to date of the human crisis within Iraq and what it describes as a slow-motion response from Iraq’s government, the United States, the United Nations and the European Union.
The report states that roughly four million Iraqis, many of them children, are in dire need of food aid; that 70 percent of the country lacks access to adequate water supplies, up from 50 percent in 2003; and that 90 percent of the country’s hospitals lack basic medical and surgical supplies.
One survey cited in the report, completed in May by the Iraqi Ministry of Planning, found that 43 percent of Iraqis live in “absolute poverty,” earning less than $1 a day.
Unemployment and hunger are particularly acute among the estimated two million people displaced internally from their homes by violence, many of whom are jobless, homeless and largely left on their own.
“The government of Iraq, international donors and the United Nations system have been focused on reconstruction, development and building political institutions, and have overlooked the harsh daily struggle for survival now faced by many,” the report says.
The solutions proposed by Oxfam, an international aid organization that opposed the 2003 American invasion and helps groups in Iraq from an office in Amman, focus on both Iraqi policy and international financing.
The report — which also includes contributions from the NGO Coordination Committee in Iraq, a network of Iraqi and international aid agencies — calls on Iraq to expand and decentralize its distribution of food rations and emergency cash payments to widows. NGO refers to nongovernmental organizations.
Medical and other aid supplies kept in seven Baghdad warehouses should be distributed to the provinces and managed by local authorities rather than the inefficient central government, the report said.
Citing the policies of aid organizations that will not accept money from countries involved in Iraq’s conflict, Oxfam also called on countries without troops in Iraq to send more money for aid. According to the report, cuts in financing and the challenge of providing assistance in an insecure environment have limited what both the United Nations and its partners can do for Iraqis. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, for example, used to work with 20 partners in Iraq; it now has only 11, the report says.
Oxfam’s analysis offers no suggestions on how to root out the corruption that has hobbled the Iraqi government and international aid efforts in the past, nor does it address the links between criminal militias and Iraqi government agencies, like the Ministry of Health, which is run by the political party loyal to the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
It also presents its statistics as hard facts, without acknowledging the wide margin of error that typically accompanies social research in a war zone. Rather, the report focuses almost exclusively on the need for more money and better distributed aid.
Joost Hiltermann, deputy program director for the Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group, an organization of experts on conflicts, said that at this point in Iraq, the focus is justified. Corruption, he said, is beyond the purview of groups like Oxfam and the lack of organized aid needs to be immediately addressed.
“The priority,” he said, “is to get aid going regardless of such problems.”
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2) States Export Their Inmates as Prisons Fill
By SOLOMON MOORE
July 31, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/us/31prisons.html?ref=us
ELOY, Ariz. — For Bob Weier, a Hawaiian convicted of armed robbery, incarceration at the Red Rock Correctional Center on the outskirts of this dusty town is the latest stop in a far-flung and nomadic exile.
Since his imprisonment 12 years ago on Maui, Mr. Weier, 53, has served his sentence in prisons in Minnesota, Oklahoma and Arizona. He last saw his daughter 11 years ago and has five grandchildren he has never met.
“To them, I’m just a voice who talks to them on the phone for a while,” said Mr. Weier, a heavyset man who expects to be released next year.
Chronic prison overcrowding has corrections officials in Hawaii and at least seven other states looking increasingly across state lines for scarce prison beds, usually in prisons run by private companies. Facing a court mandate, California last week transferred 40 inmates to Mississippi and has plans for at least 8,000 to be sent out of state.
The long-distance arrangements account for a small fraction of the country’s total prison population — about 10,000 inmates, federal officials estimate — but corrections officials in states with the most crowded prisons say the numbers are growing.
One private prison company that houses inmates both in-state and out of state, the Corrections Corporation of America, announced last year that it would spend $213 million on construction and renovation projects for 5,000 prisoners by next year.
“They find that their prison populations are at or beyond capacity and they have to relieve that capacity,” Tony Grande, the company’s president for state relations, said of states turning to private prisons. “They quickly turn to us and we have open prison capacity where we can accommodate growth.”
About one-third of Hawaii’s 6,000 state inmates are held in private in Arizona, Oklahoma, Mississippi and Kentucky. Alabama has 1,300 prisoners in Louisiana. About 360 inmates from California, which has one of the nation’s most crowded prison systems, are in Arizona and Tennessee.
But while the out-of-state transfers are helping states that have been unwilling, or too slow, to build enough prisons of their own, they have also raised concerns among some corrections officials about excessive prisoner churn, consistency among the private vendors and safety in some prisons.
Moving inmates from prison to prison disrupts training and rehabilitation programs and puts stress on tenuous family bonds, corrections officials say, making it more difficult to break the cycle of inmates committing new crimes after their release.
Several recidivism studies have found that convicts who keep in touch with family members through visits and phone privileges are less likely to violate their parole or commit new offenses. There have been no studies that focused specifically on out-of-state placements.
Paige M. Harrison, a researcher for the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, said the out-of-state inmates faced problems familiar to the large number of in-state prisoners incarcerated hundreds of miles from their homes. A study in 1997 found that more than 60 percent of state inmates were held more than 100 miles from their last place of residence.
“If you’re being held on the other side of Texas or California, you better believe that for many inmates, they’re beyond visitation,” Ms. Harrison said.
The frequent moves can also have a disruptive effect on prisons, whether the transfers occur within a state or not, corrections officials said. In California, a federal court official overseeing a revamping of the prison medical system reported more than 170,000 prisoner moves within the state in the first three months of this year. The moves were found to be inhibiting the ability of inmates to receive health care and draining resources.
In Arizona, where more than 2,000 inmates have been exported to prisons in Oklahoma and Indiana, corrections officials are struggling to provide consistent and effective programming for them, said Dora B. Schriro, the director of the Arizona Department of Corrections.
“Having a long-term impact on public safety and recidivism is that much more challenging,” Ms. Schriro said of the arrangements.
The number of inmates shipped out of Arizona would be even larger, but plans for additional transfers to Indiana had to be called off in April after 500 inmates from Arizona rioted at a privately run prison in New Castle, Ind., in part because of complaints about the long distance. Two correctional officers and five inmates were injured in the two-hour incident. Officials there assigned blame to poorly trained guards, many of whom were hired just days before the transfers.
Ms. Schriro said the riot showed how desperate the situation had become. The state’s overcrowding worsened, she said, after two private prisons in Texas now run by the GEO Group, canceled Arizona’s contract and instead signed more lucrative deals with federal corrections agencies.
“We started to add provisional beds in-state through double-bunking, converting several kitchens to bed space and making preparations to bring additional tents online,” Ms. Schriro said.
Eli Coates, a 26-year-old inmate from Arizona serving 10 years for armed robbery, did time at six Arizona prisons and one in Oklahoma before arriving at the New Castle prison early this year. New Castle is managed by the GEO Group.
Mr. Coates said his frequent moves had made it hard to complete educational programs that he hoped would help him get a steady job upon release.
“I was on my way to being able to finish a college program and vocational programs to get a trade,” Mr. Coates said. “But they snatched me up from those opportunities, and here I have to start all over again.”
Mr. Weier, the Hawaiian prisoner here in Arizona, said that each time he moved, he had to reapply for phone privileges, a process that can take six months. Even when he was allowed to call home, he said, he could not always afford the long-distance bills.
“You lose your family identity,” said Mr. Weier. “And that’s not good, because when we go back into society — and more than 95 percent of us will — the only ones who are going to take care of you are your family.”
Without big construction plans or radical sentencing reforms in the offing, Arizona will continue to rely on out-of-state alternatives. The state has some of the toughest sentencing laws in the country and an inmate population exceeding 37,000, or 127 percent of the state’s official prison capacity. Several public prisons are already surrounded by tent cities to accommodate the overflow.
Adam Ramirez, 35, an inmate from Tucson serving six years for a parole violation, sat sweating recently in a 16-man tent at the 100-year-old Florence State Prison, about 15 miles northeast of Eloy in Florence, Ariz.
“It’s always crowded in here,” said Mr. Ramirez, pointing to an empty bed next to his. “They sent that guy out to Oklahoma today and there will be somebody else here today or tomorrow.”
Overcrowding has been a problem in prisons for decades, and the country’s prison and jail population has never been higher, rising 2.8 percent from July 2005 to July 2006 to reach 2,245,189, according to the most recent Bureau of Justice Statistics bulletin. A report by the Pew Charitable Trusts estimates that the prison population will grow by another 192,000 in the next five years.
State corrections officials and prison industry executives say that prison companies are an attractive alternative when cash-strapped state governments need additional prison space faster than they can build it. Private prisons can also provide political cover to elected officials seeking to avoid charges of coddling criminals and spending large sums on prison construction.
Alabama officials turned to the Corrections Corporation of American for space after a judge threatened to hold the overloaded state corrections department in contempt for failing to pick up inmates from county jails, said Mr. Grande, the company official. The company found out-of-state space for 1,500 inmates within 30 days. When hurricanes beset Florida in 2003, Mr. Grande said, the company found alternative prison space within 72 hours.
But state governments often pay a premium for those spaces. The riot in Indiana in April came after Ms. Schriro, the Arizona corrections director, agreed to pay about $14 million a year to house 610 prisoners there. That is about $3 million more than the state would have paid for inmates at in-state public prisons, said a spokeswoman for Arizona corrections, Robin Wilkins.
Ms. Schriro is moving forward with plans to expand prison space for Arizona prisoners locally and in private prisons in Oklahoma. But she expects the state prison population to exceed capacity by the time those expansion projects are complete.
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3) Gang Members Targeted in Calif. Sweep
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:02 p.m. ET
July 31, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Calif-Gang-Busts.html
LONG BEACH, Calif. (AP) -- Federal agents and police fanned out across the city early Tuesday in a huge sweep of gang members aimed at taking down violent offenders.
More than 400 officers took part in the campaign that started at around 4 a.m., said Mike Campbell, a spokesman for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
He said the daylong operation was one of the largest he had seen.
The effort was part of a wider crackdown, spearheaded by the U.S. Justice Department in cities nationwide and aimed at gang members suspected of dealing drugs and committing violent crimes.
Tuesday's operation followed a six-month investigation and focused on a neighborhood near Long Beach known locally as ''Ghost Town.''
Authorities were looking for at least 25 leaders of a street gang called the East Side Pain, said police Lt. Ruben Delatorre.
''It's an effort to retake a violent neighborhood, and it's long overdue,'' he said.
Authorities blocked off an entire street in the neighborhood, as agents charged through front doors setting off ''flash-bang'' grenades to stun suspects inside.
Several residents were detained and a large number of guns and drugs were seized, Delatorre said, although he did not immediately have any figures.
Officials didn't immediately report any injuries.
A neighborhood resident for 34 years, Rigoberto Martinez, said three of his grandchildren, ages 18 to 20, were injured in a drive-by shooting in January.
''You get accustomed to the violence,'' said Martinez, 71. ''You just live with it.''
According to FBI statistics, there are some 30,000 street gangs in the U.S. with about 800,000 members. In Los Angeles and Chicago, more than half of the combined 1,000 or so homicides reported in 2004 were blamed on gangs.
Los Angeles saw a 15 percent increase in gang-related crimes in 2006 at the same time general crime declined citywide.
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4) Nicotine Addiction Is Quick in Youths, Research Finds
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
July 31, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/health/31toba.html?ref=health
A young cigarette smoker can begin to feel powerful desires for nicotine within two days of first inhaling, a new study has found, and about half of children who become addicted report symptoms of dependence by the time they are smoking only seven cigarettes a month.
“The importance of this study is that it contradicts what has been the accepted wisdom for many decades,” said Dr. Joseph R. DiFranza, the lead author, “which is that people had to smoke at least five cigarettes a day over a long period of time to risk becoming addicted to nicotine. Now, we know that children can be addicted very quickly.” Dr. DiFranza is a professor of family medicine at the University of Massachusetts.
The researchers recruited 1,246 sixth-grade volunteers in public schools in Massachusetts, interviewing them 11 times over a four-year period. They also took saliva samples to determine blood levels of nicotine and link them to addictive behavior. At some time during the four years almost a third of the children puffed on a cigarette, more than 17 percent inhaled, and about 7.5 percent used tobacco daily.
Since inhaling is required for sufficient drug delivery to cause dependence, the researchers limited their analysis, published in the July issue of The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, to the 217 inhalers in the group. Their average age when they first inhaled was 12.8 years. Of these, almost 60 percent had lost some control over their smoking, and 38 percent developed tobacco dependence as defined by the widely used diagnostic manual published by the World Health Organization.
In the 10 percent of children who were most susceptible, cravings began within two days of the first inhalation, and saliva analysis showed that being dependent did not require high blood levels of nicotine throughout the day. In some cases dependence could be diagnosed as early as 13 days after the first smoking episode.
For most inhalers, daily smoking was not required to cause withdrawal symptoms. More than 70 percent had cravings that were difficult to control before they were smoking every day. The biochemical analyses confirmed this: the symptoms of dependence began mostly at the lowest levels of nicotine intake.
“We know very little about the natural history of dependence,” said Denise B. Kandel, a professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia and a widely published addiction researcher who was not involved in the study. “This is really the first study that addresses the issue. Its strength is that DiFranza has followed a community sample of adolescents and interviewed them every three months, which is very difficult to do.
“On the other hand,” she continued, “his definition of dependence is based on single symptoms, which may be open to question.”
The definition of tobacco addiction is controversial, but the scientists used widely accepted criteria to diagnose dependence and a well-validated questionnaire to determine the extent to which smokers had allowed the habit to dictate their behavior.
The researchers write that it may seem implausible that intermittent smoking could provide relief from withdrawal symptoms. But in fact a single dose of nicotine has effects on the brain that can last as long as a month, and the nicotine obtained from just one or two puffs on a cigarette will occupy half of the brain’s nicotinic receptors, the molecules specifically sought by nicotine in tobacco addiction.
The authors acknowledge that some of their data is retrospective and comes from self-reports, which can be unreliable, and that it is not possible to draw conclusions about other populations from their sample. In addition, they did not consider the roles of puberty, alcohol and other drug use. But the study has considerable strengths in measuring frequency and duration of smoking and in collecting exposure data by biochemical analysis as well as by repeated interviews.
“People used to think that long-term heavy use caused addiction,” Dr. DiFranza said. “Now, we know it’s the other way around: addiction is what causes long-term heavy use.”
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5) A Little Easier to Occupy from the Air
Inter Press Service
By Ali al-Fadhily*
Dahr Jamail's dispatches
dahr_jamail_dispatches@dahrjamailiraq.com
BAGHDAD, Jul 31 (IPS) - Many Iraqis believe the dramatic escalation in U.S. military use of air power is a sign of defeat for the occupation forces on the ground.
U.S. Air Force and Navy aircraft dropped five times as many bombs in Iraq during the first six months of this year as over the first half of 2006, according to official information.
They dropped 437 bombs and missiles in Iraq in the first half of 2007, compared to 86 in the first half of 2006. This is also three times more than in the second half of 2006, according to Air Force data.
The Air Force has also been expanding its air bases in Iraq and adding entire squadrons. It is now preparing to use a new robotic fighter known as the Reaper. The Reaper is a hunter-killer drone that can be operated by remote control from thousands of miles away.
"We find it strange that the big strategists of the U.S. military have actually failed in finding solutions on the ground and are now back to air raids that kill more civilians than militants," former Iraqi army brigadier-general Ahmed Issa told IPS.
"On the other hand, they are giving away the land to local forces that they know are incapable of facing the militants, who will grab the first chance of U.S. withdrawal to bases to hit back and hold the ground again."
"Going back to air raids is an alarming sign of defeat," Salim Rahman, an Iraqi political analyst from Baghdad told IPS. "To bombard an area only means that it is in the hands of the enemy."
"Our area is under threat of air raids all the time," Mahmmod Taha from the Arab Jboor area southwest of Baghdad told IPS. "Each time they bombed our area, civilians were killed by the dozens, and civilians' houses were destroyed. They could not fight the resistance face to face, and so they take revenge from the air."
May 2007 was the most violent month for U.S. forces in Iraq in nearly three years, according to the U.S. Department of Defence.
There were 6,039 attacks on U.S. and Iraqi government forces, 1,348 roadside bombs detonated under their vehicles, 286 "complex ambushes" involving roadside bombs and coordinated teams of attackers were carried out, 102 car bombs exploded, 126 U.S. soldiers were killed and 652 were wounded.
The U.S. forces have been hitting back at predominantly Sunni areas such as those around Fallujah. But the forces have also targeted Shia pilgrims around Najaf in the south.
"Air raids are back even in Shia areas like Sadr City in Baghdad and many southern cities like Diwaniya, Samawa, and Kut where the al-Mehdi militia (of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr) controls the ground," Abbas Abdul-Mehdi from Diwaniya told IPS while on a visit to Baghdad. "Their bombs fall on our heads, while the militiamen know how to hide and escape."
The U.S. forces are looking to do more of all this. "There are times when the Army wishes we had more jets," F-16 pilot Lt. Col. Steve Williams, commander of the 13th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron told reporters.
"What the U.S. forces are doing now is increasing their air force potential in a last attempt to crush the fighters with the minimum casualties possible," retired Iraqi Army colonel Mustafa Abbood from Baghdad told IPS. "It is a desperate attempt to make Iraqis turn against their fellow-fighters. It failed in Fallujah, and I do not see how it will work elsewhere."
Iraqis around Baghdad say they have noticed more air traffic in recent months. "There is a notable increase in the number of airplanes flying in the Iraqi skies," Amjad Fadhil, a farmer from Latifiya, south of Baghdad, told IPS. "F-16s and helicopters are roaring like monsters everywhere." There are more than 100 U.S. aircraft crisscrossing Iraqi air space at any one time.
Air Force engineers are working long hours to upgrade Balad air base, just north of Baghdad, which already supports 10,000 air operations per week. One of the two 11,000-foot runways has been reinforced to withstand five to seven years more of hard use.
Ten-year-old Salli Hussein lost both her legs when her home was bombed by a U.S. jet fighter near the Abu Ghraib area of Baghdad in November 2006. Her 11-year-old brother, Akram, and cousin Tabarak were torn to pieces in that missile attack.
"I want to have legs again so that I can play with my friends and make Mama happy," she told this IPS correspondent.
(*Ali, our correspondent in Baghdad, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who travels extensively in the region)
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6) A Nail in Maliki Government’s Coffin?
By Ali al-Fadhily
August 3, 2007
Inter Press Service
Dahr Jamail's dispatches dahr_jamail_dispatches@dahrjamailiraq.com
The recent resignations of Iraq’s Army Chief of Staff and several of his council military leaders underscore a continuing decomposition of Iraq’s U.S.-backed government.
Everybody in Iraq—politicians, political analysts, poets, scientists, porters—seems to agree that the U.S.-backed Iraqi government headed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is a total failure.
Security, basic services, and all measurable levels of Iraq’s infrastructure are worse now than under the rule of Saddam Hussein. Nevertheless, the U.S., Britain and Iran all continue to support this government.
“Politicians in this country are the best at serving their personal interests, and that is what has kept al-Maliki in power,” Amjad Hussein, an Iraqi journalist in Baghdad told IPS. “Wherever I go in Iraq, people complain of the very bad living conditions caused by the wrong policies of this government. Even those who voted for the (Shia) Iraqi coalition bite their fingers in regret for the support they gave to this group of people who have led the country into darkness.”
Withdrawals from the government by individual ministers and by political groups was the first sign of the end of al-Maliki’s political life, but the U.S. government has remained insistent on keeping al-Maliki at the top of Iraq’s leadership.
“I strongly believe that it was American pressure on the (Sunni) al-Tawafuq Sunni group that stopped them from withdrawal from the government,” a senior member of al-Tawafuq told IPS on condition of anonymity. “I preferred to clear my conscience and so I have decided to end my political activities. I am looking for a way to take my family across the border for their safety. It is a sin to be a politician in Iraq nowadays.”
On August 1 Iraq’s largest Sunni Arab political bloc, the Accordance Front, announced its withdrawal from the splintering government, dealing another huge blow to al-Maliki’s hopes of maintaining a unity government.
The Front has 44 of parliament’s 275 seats, and its withdrawal from the 14-month-old government is the second such action by a faction. Five ministers loyal to Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr quit the government in April to protest al-Maliki’s reluctance to announce a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq.
One of the biggest blows to al-Maliki has come from the Iraqi army after Major General Babaker Zebari, a Kurd who was army chief of staff, resigned on Jul. 31 to leave for Kurdish controlled northern Iraq. The resignation of Maj. Gen Zebari was followed by the resignation of nine other generals in protest against “al-Maliki’s interference with their professional work, and the weakness of the defense minister.”
According to some reports al-Maliki rejected Zebari’s resignation. The regional president of Iraqi Kurdistan, Massoud Barzani, will address the issue with al-Maliki during an upcoming meeting in Baghdad.
“Only those who have strong ties with Iran will stay with al-Maliki,” one of the nine officers told a source close to IPS. “We would rather be assassinated by death squads than be part of this government that insists on being sectarian and Iranian by all measures.”
Prime Minister Maliki is secretary general of the al-Dawa Party, and was in exile in Iran after leading insurgent groups against former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.
Relations between Maliki and U.S. officials have also collapsed. Last weekend the Daily Telegraph in London reported that relations between the top U.S. general in Iraq, General David Petraeus, and al-Maliki are so bad that the Iraqi leader made a direct appeal U.S. President to George Bush for removal of Petraeus.
An Iraqi source said Maliki made the appeal to Bush through a videoconference for Petraeus’s military strategy of arming Sunni tribal fighters to battle al-Qaeda to be abandoned.
“He told Bush that if Petraeus continues, he would arm Shia militias,” the official said. “Bush told Maliki to calm down.”
Petraeus’s spokesman Col. Steve Boylan denied these reports, but evidence suggests that Maliki has been allowing Shia militias to arm themselves and control vast areas of Iraq for some time now.
A member of al-Maliki’s al-Dawa Party, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS that al-Maliki’s opponent, former prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, is leading a revolt against him and that al-Maliki is no longer the party’s favorite.
“This American and Iranian made government in Baghdad was brought to power for known reasons,” Sheikh Ali Mansoor, a member of the Sunni anti-occupation group the Association of Muslim Scholars told IPS. “They brought in al-Maliki in order to pass laws that serve American interests, and to guarantee their long-term stay in Iraq. Now he is working for Iran, and Americans are losing Iraq once and for all.”
Maliki came to be Prime Minister after political pressure from U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former British foreign secretary Jack Straw forced former al-Jaafari to resign.
“They must change the faces again, but who could the replacement be,” Dr. Lukman Salim, a physician from Baghdad told IPS. “Americans and Iranians will definitely employ someone who is worse for Iraqis and better for them.”
(Ali al-Fadhily, our correspondent in Baghdad, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who travels extensively in the region)
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7) Baghdad, Iraq:
6 million people, 117 degrees and no water
By Richard Becker, Western Regional Coordinator, ANSWER Coalition
Friday, August 3, 2007
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
2489 Mission St. Rm. 24
San Francisco, CA 94110
415-821-6545
ANSWERcoalition.org
www.Sept15.org
info@internationalanswer.org
National Office in Washington DC: 202-544-3389
New York City: 212-694-8720
Los Angeles: 323-464-1636
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
Chicago: 773-463-0311
Seattle: 206-568-1661
A crime against humanity committed by the occupying power
For the past 24 hours, Baghdad has had virtually no running water.
Major parts of the city of six million people have lacked running water for six days, while daily high temperatures have ranged from 115 to 120 degrees. The tiny amount of water dripping through the pipes is causing many of those who must drink it to suffer acute intestinal illness.
According to reports, not enough electricity is available to run Baghdad’s water pumps. This in a country with vast energy resources.
Corporate media outlets—to the extent they have reported this horrific and mind-boggling story at all—have treated it as a failure on the part of Iraqis.
In reality, it is an appalling war crime committed by the occupying power, the U.S. military. It threatens the lives of tens of thousands of people in the short term and unthinkable numbers of people unless it is rectified immediately.
According to Article 55 of Geneva Conventions (1949) to which the U.S. government is a signatory: "To the fullest extent of the means available to it the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population; it should, in particular, bring in the necessary foodstuffs, medical stores and other articles if the resources of the occupied territory are inadequate."
Article 59 states: "If the whole or part of the population of an occupied territory is inadequately supplied, the Occupying Power shall agree to relief schemes on behalf of the said population, and shall facilitate them by all the means at its disposal."
To say that a huge city deprived of running water is "inadequately supplied" would rank as one of the great understatements of human history.
Of course, the shortage of water—the most vital of all necessities—does not extend to the U.S. personnel and contractors occupying Iraq.
The U.S. government tries to relieve itself of its obligations by pretending that Iraq’s "sovereignty" was restored in June 2004. But that is just another hoax.
Since its illegal invasion and conquest of Iraq in the spring of 2003, the real state power in the country has been the U.S. military.
This latest catastrophe to afflict the Iraqi people is another poisonous fruit of imperialist occupation. Not even in the worst times during the U.S. blockade of Iraq from 1990-2003, did such a disaster occur.
The U.S. regime in Iraq must provide the people of Baghdad with relief in the short-term to avert unprecedented disaster. The U.S. occupation must come to an immediate end. The officials responsible for the terrible crimes committed against the Iraqi people must be held accountable. The U.S. government owes Iraq vast reparations for the death and destruction imposed on that society by an illegal war of aggression.
All Out for the September 15 Mass March!
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8) Spying Measure Advances in Congress
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and MARK MAZZETTI
August 4, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/04/washington/04nsa.html?hp
WASHINGTON, Aug. 3 —A furious push by the White House to broaden its wiretapping authority appeared on the verge of victory on Friday night after the Senate approved a measure that would temporarily give the administration more latitude to eavesdrop without court warrants on foreign communications that it suspects may be tied to terrorism.
The House is expected to take up the White House-backed measure on Saturday morning before going into its summer recess.
Democratic leaders acknowledged that the bill would probably pass.
Democrats in both the House and the Senate failed to pass competing measures on Friday that would have included tougher judicial checks and oversight on the eavesdropping powers.
The White House and Congressional Republicans hailed the Senate vote as critical to plugging what they saw as dangerous gaps in the intelligence agencies’ ability to detect terrorist threats.
“I can sleep a little safer tonight,” Senator Christopher S. Bond, the Missouri Republican who co-sponsored the measure, declared after the Senate vote.
The measure approved by the Senate expires in six months and would have to be re-authorized. The White House’s grudging agreement to make it temporary helped to attract the votes of some moderate Democrats who said they thought it was important for Congress to approve some version of the wiretapping bill before its recess.
The White House and Republican leaders pressed the point throughout the day that a vote against the measure would put the nation at greater risk of attack.
Some Democrats and civil rights advocates accused the Senate of capitulating to White House demands by broadening the ability to eavesdrop without warrants on communications that are primarily “foreign” in nature, even if they may touch on Americans’ phone calls and e-mail.
The measure “goes far, far beyond” the National Security Agency program that the president secretly approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, said Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin.
Caroline Frederickson, head of the American Civil Liberties Union office here, said: “The Democrats caved in to the politics of fear we’re seeing from this administration. They didn’t want to be depicted as soft on terrorism. But this measure removes any court oversight from surveillance on Americans in a large number of cases.”
The White House lobbying took on new urgency because of a still-classified ruling by the intelligence court this year that placed new restrictions on monitoring without warrants purely foreign communications that are routed through the United States.
Such communications were once considered outside the reach of the court, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court or the FISA court.
“Time is short,” Mr. Bush warned in an appearance at the F.B.I. headquarters. “I’m going to ask Congress to stay in session until they pass a bill that will give our intelligence community the tools they need to protect the United States.”
In an unusual maneuver, Senator Bond pressed the case for new legislative authority by reading on the Senate floor, apparently to the surprise of some administration officials, an e-mail message that the office of the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, sent to Congressional leaders on the urgency of amending the wiretapping law.
“We understand that the FISA court judges urgently support a more appropriate alignment of the court’s caseload and jurisdiction away from the focus on non-U.S. persons operating outside of the United States,” the message said. “The judges have clearly expressed frustration with the fact that so much of their docket is consumed by applications that focus on foreign targets and involve minimal privacy interests of Americans.”
Court officials and Mr. McConnell’s office refused to comment on the message. The concerns from his office appeared to reflect, at least in part, the recent restrictions imposed by the court on intercepting what is known as “foreign-to-foreign transit traffic,” in which both parties are outside the United States but the phone calls or e-mail messages are routed through telecommunications centers in the United States.
For years, judges on the court have debated whether and under what circumstances communications that happened to pass through United States “switches” should be governed by American intelligence laws.
The FISA court ruling was alluded to by the House minority leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, on Tuesday on the Fox News Channel. The Los Angeles Times published the details on Thursday.
Conflicting accounts emerged on Friday about the nature of the restrictions and what effects they have had on current intelligence operations. The ruling remains classified.
On Fox News, Mr. Boehner, said, “There’s been a ruling over the last four or five months that prohibits the ability of our intelligence services and our counterintelligence people from listening in to two terrorists in other parts of the world where the communication could come through the United States.”
A spokesman for Mr. Boehner said Friday that he was not discussing any classified rulings by the court, but was referring to a plan the administration announced in January to put under the court’s jurisdiction the National Security Agency wiretapping program.
Carl Hulse and Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting.
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9) U.S. Airstrike on 2 Taliban Commanders in South Wounds at Least 18 Civilians, Afghans Say
By ABDUL WAHEED WAFA and TAIMOOR SHAH
August 4, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/04/world/asia/04afghan.html?ref=world
KABUL, Afghanistan, Aug. 3 — The United States military said Friday that it had carried out an airstrike on two Taliban commanders during “a sizable meeting” of insurgents in a remote region of Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan, but that it could not be sure the men had been killed.
Local officials said that at least 18 Afghans were wounded in the attack.
A large number of the Taliban had gathered for a public execution near a shrine in the Baghran district and that members of the public were also present at the time of the bombing, 4 p.m. on Thursday, they said.
“The people say there were many people there,” the provincial police chief, Muhammad Hussain Andiwal, said in a telephone interview. “The Taliban were also in great numbers; some 16 to 17 vehicles belonging to the Taliban were present at the scene. There must be heavy casualties to the Taliban.”
“We have information from the wounded people who were brought to Bost Hospital in Lashkar Gah that the Taliban brought two men accused of spying and they were going to execute them publicly, and they forced the people to come and watch them,” the police chief said. “I don’t know the exact number of civilian casualties.”
The doctor on duty at the hospital in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, said at least 18 wounded civilians were being treated there, including an 8-year old boy.
The United States military released a statement from Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul, saying that it had information that two “notorious” Taliban commanders were at the gathering, and that it had monitored their movements in the village of Qaleh Chah, in the Baghran district.
“During a sizable meeting of senior Taliban commanders, coalition forces employed precision-guided munitions on their location after ensuring there were no innocent Afghans in the surrounding area,” the statement said.
“This operation shows that there is no safe haven for the insurgents,” said Maj. Chris Belcher, a spokesman for United States forces in Afghanistan. “It will take some time to determine if both targets were killed.”
The planes bombed a shrine known as Ibrahim Shah Baba, in the Baghran district, the police chief said. Baghran, one of the most remote and mountainous parts of Helmand, is a known Taliban stronghold where United States and NATO ground troops have not ventured recently. The area is so lawless that even local journalists cannot travel to the area to conduct independent reporting.
A tribal elder from the region, Hajji Zahir, speaking from Lashkar Gah, said that he had contacted people in the region and been told that hundreds were present at the Taliban execution of the men, who were charged with spying or working for the government. Taliban fighters and civilians were among the dead and wounded, he said.
“We have received 18 people, all wounded severely,” Dr. Rahmatullah, the duty officer at the provincial hospital in Lashkar Gah, said by telephone. “They are all men, there is only one 8-year-boy among them.
“One of the men, who had a serious trauma, died at the hospital,” he said.
The wounded had talked of very high casualties and said they had been near a shrine when the bombing occurred, the doctor said.
Carlotta Gall contributed from Islamabad, Pakistan.
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10) Chávez Takes ‘Crazy Battalion’ of Supporters on the Road
By SIMON ROMERO
“As for the United States, Mr. Chávez predicted that widening budget and trade deficits portend a financial crisis that could cause it to ‘explode from within.’
‘There could be a revolution in the United States,’ Mr. Chávez said. ‘We’ll help them.’”
August 4, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/04/world/americas/04venez.html
LA FRIA, Venezuela, Aug. 3 — “Surely they will take photos of us by satellite,” said President Hugo Chávez, referring to intelligence agencies from the United States, as his Airbus touched down Friday in this Andean city with the actor Sean Penn, a clutch of cabinet ministers and visiting dignitaries from half a dozen countries in tow.
“They’ll say, ‘There goes Chávez with a crazy battalion containing Africans, Canadians, Cubans,’ ” the president continued as he broke into a meandering riff on political relations between the United States and Venezuela. “Even gringos!”
Mr. Penn’s visit to write about Mr. Chávez follows others by Hollywood luminaries like Danny Glover, public intellectuals like Tariq Ali and film directors like Argentina’s Fernando Solanas, all of whom have recently traveled to this country to take in the transformation of Venezuelan society that Mr. Chávez calls a “Bolivarian revolution.”
But rarely has the reception of foreign actors and writers been as warm as it was this week for Mr. Penn, whom Mr. Chávez, perhaps smarting from international condemnation over his government’s treatment of critics in the local news media, hailed as “valiant” for his outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq and other policies of the Bush administration.
After sending Mr. Penn on guided tours of Villa del Cine, the state movie studio near Caracas created to weaken Hollywood’s grip on the film industry, and the Afro-Venezuelan city of Barlovento, the president dined privately with the actor on Thursday before whisking him away Friday for a jaunt into western Venezuela.
What followed, for a handful of journalists given the rare opportunity of accompanying Mr. Chávez on such a trip, was a glimpse into his government’s use of imagery and pomp to court public opinion both at home and abroad.
During the flight, Mr. Chávez regaled Mr. Penn with lectures on Venezuelan history and tales of his own past as a soldier, between talking politics with other travelers on the spacious Airbus with leather seats.
The border region in Táchira State where the plane landed, Mr. Chávez warned, “was very close to where the C.I.A. is,” a not-so-subtle dig at the close political relationship between Colombia’s government and the Bush administration.
As for the United States, Mr. Chávez predicted that widening budget and trade deficits portend a financial crisis that could cause it to “explode from within.”
“There could be a revolution in the United States,” Mr. Chávez said. “We’ll help them.”
Mr. Penn took in most of Mr. Chávez’s comments with a warm smile, some nods and few intelligible utterances. “He’s a quiet man,” Mr. Chávez reassured other passengers, gesturing to Mr. Penn. “But he has fire within him.”
Mr. Chávez, it can be guaranteed, likes to be in the driver’s seat in such forays — literally. On the tarmac of the airport in La Fria, he climbed behind the wheel of a Tiuna, a Humvee-esque military vehicle assembled in Venezuela, put Mr. Penn in the back seat and proceeded to drive through picturesque Andean villages.
A trip that normally takes 90 minutes to Pueblo Encima, a small farming community where Mr. Chávez was scheduled to celebrate the opening of a fertilizer facility and the arrival of dairy cows from Argentina and Uruguay, took more than four hours as the president stopped the Tiuna dozens of times to greet supporters on the side of the road.
A truck carrying journalists traveled in front, lurching ahead as desperate news cameramen and photographers yelled at the driver to start or stop. At times they cheered, as when they got shots of Mr. Penn urinating on the side of the road.
Chaperoned by Andrés Izarra, the president of Telesur, the regional news network backed by Venezuela’s government, Mr. Penn looked somewhat pained when asked about his impressions of the country.
In a brief interview at one of the motorcade’s many stops, Mr. Penn declined to discuss any similarities that might exist between the president in the driver’s seat of the Tiuna and the Southern populist, loosely based on Louisiana governor Huey Long, that Mr. Penn played in the recent film adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men.”
Instead, Mr. Penn produced a business card from the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, which he said he was representing during his Venezuela trip.
“I’m going to write about this experience, so I’m a little hesitant to talk about it,” Mr. Penn said, dressed in a T-shirt and wearing dark aviator sunglasses. (Mr. Penn has written similar dispatches following trips to countries like Iran and Iraq.) “It’s been extraordinary so far.”
Then, with the same quiet intensity Mr. Chávez had referred to earlier, the actor proceeded to try to find someone with a match for a Marlboro Light.
Undaunted by criticism from some Venezuelan actors and directors who deride the warm ties between some of their foreign counterparts and Mr. Chávez, the president hailed Mr. Penn’s presence at each stop of the trip.
At a speech in Pueblo Encima, before hundreds of followers clad, like Mr. Chávez and much of his entourage, in the red of his political party, a cold mountain rain caused the entourage from tropical Caracas to shiver as Mr. Chávez broke into song in praise of dairy cows.
He celebrated Venezuela’s alliance with Cuba in the presence of Ricardo Alarcón, the president of Cuba’s National Assembly. He welcomed dignitaries from Burkina Faso, Canada and Belgium who spoke in favor of his policies.
And with the acumen of a politician who knows how to celebrate friends where he can find them, Mr. Chávez switched into English with a few words for Mr. Penn: “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
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11) A CounterPunch Special Report on the Economy In Richistan: Fantastic Wealth for a Few; Steady Decline for Many
The Return of the Robber Barons
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
August 2, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts08022007.html
The US economy continues its 21st century decline, even as the Bush Regime outfits B-2 stealth bombers with 30,000 pound monster “bunker buster” bombs for its coming attack on Iran. While profits soar for the armaments industry, the American people continue to take it on the chin.
The latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the real wages and salaries of US civilian workers are below those of 5 years ago. It could not be otherwise with US corporations offshoring good jobs in order to reduce labor costs and, thereby, to convert wages once paid to Americans into multi-million dollar bonuses paid to CEOs and other top management.
Good jobs that still remain in the US are increasingly filled with foreign workers brought in on work visas. Corporate public relations departments have successfully spread the lie that there is a shortage of qualified US workers, necessitating the importation into the US of foreigners. The truth is that the US corporations force their American employees to train the lower paid foreigners who take their jobs. Otherwise, the discharged American gets no severance pay.
Law firms, such as Cohen & Grigsby, compete in marketing their services to US corporations on how to evade the law and to replace their American employees with lower paid foreigners. As Lawrence Lebowitz, vice president at Cohen & Grisby, explained in the law firm’s marketing video, “our goal is clearly, not to find a qualified and interested US worker.”
Meanwhile, US colleges and universities continue to graduate hundreds of thousands of qualified engineers, IT professionals, and other professionals who will never have the opportunity to work in the professions for which they have been trained. America today is like India of yesteryear, with engineers working as bartenders, taxi cab drivers, waitresses, and employed in menial work in dog kennels as the offshoring of US jobs dismantles the ladders of upward mobility for US citizens.
Over the last year (from June 2006 through June 2007) the US economy created 1.6 million net private sector jobs. As Charles McMillion of MBG Information Services reports each month, essentially all of the new jobs are in low-paid domestic services that do not require a college education.
The category, “Leisure and hospitality,” accounts for 30 per cent of the new jobs, of which 387,000 are bartenders and waitresses, 38,000 are workers in motels and hotels, and 50,000 are employed in entertainment and recreation.
The category, “Education and health services,” accounts for 35 per cent of the gain in employment, of which 100,000 are in educational services and 456,000 are in health care and social assistance, principally ambulatory health care services and hospitals.
“Professional and technical services” accounts for 268,000 of the new jobs. “Finance and insurance” added 93,000 new jobs, of which about one quarter are in real estate and about one half are in insurance. “Transportation and warehousing” added 65,000 jobs, and wholesale and retail trade added 185,000.
Over the entire year, the US economy created merely 51,000 jobs in architectural and engineering services, less than the 76,000 jobs created in management and technical consulting (essentially laid-off white collar professionals).
Except for a well-connected few graduates, who find their way into Wall Street investment banks, top law firms, and private medical practice, American universities today consist of detention centers to delay for four or five years the entry of American youth into unskilled domestic services.
Meanwhile the rich are getting much richer and luxuriating in the most fantastic conspicuous consumption since the Gilded Age. Robert Frank has dubbed the new American world of the super-rich “Richistan.”
In Richistan there is a two-year waiting list for $50 million 200-foot yachts. In Richistan Rolex watches are considered Wal-Mart junk. Richistanians sport $736,000 Franck Muller timepieces, sign their names with $700,000 Mont Blanc jewel-encrusted pens. Their valets, butlers (with $100,000 salaries), and bodyguards carry the $42,000 Louis Vuitton handbags of wives and mistresses.
Richistanians join clubs open only to those with $100 million, pay $650,000 for golf club memberships, eat $50 hamburgers and $1,000 omelettes, drink $90 a bottle of Bling mineral water and down $10,000 “martinis on a rock” (gin or vodka poured over a diamond) at New York’s Algonquin Hotel.
Who are the Richistanians? They are CEOs who have moved their companies abroad and converted the wages they formerly paid Americans into $100 million compensation packages for themselves. They are investment bankers and hedge fund managers, who created the subprime mortgage derivatives that currently threaten to collapse the economy. One of them was paid $1.7 billion last year. The $575 million that each of 25 other top earners were paid is paltry by comparison, but unimaginable wealth to everyone else.
Some of the super rich, such as Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, have benefited society along with themselves. Both Buffet and Gates are concerned about the rapidly rising income inequality in the US. They are aware that America is becoming a feudal society in which the super-rich competes in conspicuous consumption, while the serfs struggle merely to survive.
With the real wages and salaries of American civilian workers lower than 5 years ago, with their debts at all time highs, with the prices of their main asset--their homes--under pressure from overbuilding and fraudulent finance, and with scant opportunities to rise for the children they struggled to educate, Americans face a dim future.
Indeed, their plight is worse than the official statistics indicate. During the Clinton administration, the Boskin Commission rigged the inflation measures in order to hold down indexed Social Security payments to retirees.
Another deceit is the measure called “core inflation.” This measure of inflation excludes food and energy, two large components of the average family’s budget. Wall Street and corporations and, therefore, the media emphasize core inflation, because it holds down cost of living increases and interest rates. In the second quarter of this year, the Consumer Price Index (CPI), a more complete measure of inflation, increased at an annual rate of 5.2 per cent compared to 2.3 per cent for core inflation.
An examination of how inflation is measured quickly reveals the games played to deceive the American people. Housing prices are not in the index. Instead, the rental rate of housing is used as a proxy for housing prices.
More games are played with the goods and services whose prices comprise the weighted market basket used to estimate inflation. If beef prices rise, for example, the index shifts toward lower priced chicken. Inflation is thus held down by substituting lower priced products for those whose prices are rising faster. As the weights of the goods in the basket change, the inflation measure does not reflect a constant pattern of expenditures. Some economists compare the substitution used to minimize the measured rate of inflation to substituting sweaters for fuel oil.
Other deceptions, not all intentional, abound in official US statistics. Business Week’s June 18 cover story used the recent important work by Susan N. Houseman to explain that much of the hyped gains in US productivity and GDP are “phantom gains” that are not really there.
Other phantom productivity gains are produced by corporations that shift business costs to consumers by, for example, having callers listen to advertisements while they wait for a customer service representative, and by pricing items in the inflation basket according to the low prices of stores that offer customers no service. The longer callers can be made to wait, the fewer the customer representatives the company needs to employ. The loss of service is not considered in the inflation measure. It shows up instead as a gain in productivity.
In American today the greatest rewards go to investment bankers, who collect fees for creating financing packages for debt. These packages include the tottering subprime mortgage derivatives. Recently, a top official of the Bank of France acknowledged that the real values of repackaged debt instruments are unknown to both buyers and sellers. Many of the derivatives have never been priced by the market.
Think of derivatives as a mutual fund of debt, a combination of good mortgages, subprime mortgages, credit card debt, auto loans, and who knows what. Not even institutional buyers know what they are buying or how to evaluate it. Arcane pricing models are used to produce values, and pay incentives bias the assigned values upward.
Richistan wealth may prove artificial and crash, bringing an end to the new Gilded Age. But the plight of the rich in distress will never compare to the decimation of America’s middle class. The offshoring of American jobs has destroyed opportunities for generations of Americans.
Never before in our history has the elite had such control over the government. To run for national office requires many millions of dollars, the raising of which puts “our” elected representatives and “our” president himself at the beck and call of the few moneyed interests that financed the campaigns.
America as the land of opportunity has passed into history.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com
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LINKS AND VERY SHORT STORIES
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Sean Penn applauds as Venezuela's Chavez rails against Bush
The Associated Press
August 2, 2007
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/08/03/arts/LA-A-E-CEL-Venezuela-Sean-Penn.php
California: Gore’s Son Pleads Guilty to Drug Charges
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Al Gore III, son of the former vice president, pleaded guilty to possessing marijuana and other drugs, but a judge said the plea could be withdrawn and the charges dropped if Mr. Gore, left, completed a drug program. The authorities have said they found drugs in Mr. Gore’s car after he was pulled over on July 4 for driving 100 miles an hour. He pleaded guilty to two felony counts of drug possession, two misdemeanor counts of drug possession without a prescription and one misdemeanor count of marijuana possession, the district attorney’s office said. Mr. Gore, 24, has been at a live-in treatment center since his arrest, said Allan Stokke, his lawyer.
July 31, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/us/31brfs-gore.html
United Parcel Service Agrees to Benefits in Civil Unions
By KAREEM FAHIM
July 31, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/nyregion/31civil.html?ref=nyregion
John Stewart demands the Bay View retract the truth, Editorial by Willie Ratcliff, http://www.sfbayview.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=278&Itemid=14
Minister to Supervisors: Stop Lennar, assess the people’s health by Minister Christopher Muhammad, http://www.sfbayview.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=306&Itemid=18
OPD shoots unarmed 15-year-old in the back in East Oakland by Minister of Information JR, http://www.sfbayview.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=308&Itemid=18
California: Raids on Marijuana Clinics
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents raided 10 medical marijuana clinics in Los Angles County just as Los Angeles city leaders backed a measure calling for an end to the federal government’s crackdown on the dispensaries. Federal officials made five arrests and seized large quantities of marijuana and cash after serving clinics with search warrants, said a spokeswoman, Sarah Pullen. Ms. Pullen refused to disclose other details. The raid, the agency’s second largest on marijuana dispensaries, came the same day the Los Angeles City Council introduced an interim ordinance calling on federal authorities to stop singling out marijuana clinics allowed under state law.
July 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/26/us/26brfs-RAIDSONMARIJ_BRF.html
States Weigh Safety With Dog Owners’ Rights
By IAN URBINA
July 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/23/us/23dogs.html
Guantanamo Hunger Strikers Stay Defiant
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/072007R.shtml
Pentagon Extends Iraq Tours for 2,200 Marines
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/072007S.shtml
Bush Executive Order Targets Domestic Assets
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/072207A.shtml
Texas: 274 Immigrants Arrested in Raids
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Federal agents arrested 274 illegal immigrants over five days during raids in Dallas, Fort Worth and surrounding suburbs, federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement said. The authorities took into custody 233 men, 28 women and 13 children, said an agency spokesman, Carl Rusnok. The operation, which began Monday and ended yesterday, yielded illegal immigrants, people wanted by immigration authorities and immigrants with criminal records. Of those arrested, 99 had criminal convictions, the agency said. “These operations are a critical element in removing threats to public safety,” said Nuria T. Prendes, field office director for the agency’s Office of Detention and Removal Operations.
July 21, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/21/us/21brfs-274IMMIGRANT_BRF.html
California: Ruling on Veterans’ Benefits
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
A federal appeals court said the Veterans Affairs Department was obliged to pay retroactive disability benefits to Vietnam War veterans who contracted a form of leukemia after exposure to Agent Orange. The ruling from the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, was on a technical matter involving whether a lower court had properly interpreted an agreement in 1991 on benefits, stemming from a lawsuit filed in 1986.
July 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/20/us/20brfs-RULINGONVETE_BRF.html
Bush Denies Congress Access to Aides
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
July 9, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/09/washington/09cnd-prexy.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
California: No Jail for Marijuana Advocate
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
A marijuana advocate will not spend time in prison despite a conviction for growing and distributing hundreds of marijuana plants, a federal judge ruled. The man, Ed Rosenthal, 63, was convicted in May on three cultivation and conspiracy charges. But the judge, Charles Breyer of Federal District Court, said a one-day prison sentence was punishment enough for Mr. Rosenthal, who said he planned to appeal his conviction. “I should not remain a felon,” he said. Mr. Rosenthal was convicted on the same charges four years ago. Judge Breyer sentenced him to one day in prison because Mr. Rosenthal reasonably believed he was immune from prosecution because he was acting on behalf of Oakland city officials. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overturned that 2003 conviction and ordered a retrial because of juror misconduct.
July 7, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/07/us/07brfs-advocate.html
Patterns: In Studies, Surprise Findings on Obesity and Heart Attacks
By ERIC NAGOURNEY
Two new studies shed light on the role obesity may play in causing heart attacks and, surprisingly, keeping them from being fatal.
In one study, published by the European Heart Journal, researchers followed more than 1,600 patients who were given angioplasty and, usually, stents after a type of heart attack known as unstable angina/non-ST-segment elevation. They found that the obese and very obese patients were only half as likely as those of normal weight to die in the three years after the attack.
Part of the explanation may be that obese people are more likely to have their heart problems detected by doctors and treated with medications that later help them recover from heart attacks.
Heart attack patients who are obese also tend to be younger. And other changes in the body that often occur with obesity may also help, the study said. (Of course, as the researchers noted, obesity is not desirable when it comes to heart disease; it causes medical problems that can lead to heart attacks in the first place.)
In the second study, presented at a recent meeting of the American Society of Echocardiography, researchers reported that excess weight was associated with a thickening of muscle in the left ventricle, the part of the heart that acts as a pump. The study was led by researchers from the University of Arizona Sarver Heart Center.
July 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/03/health/03patt.html
New Scheme Preys on Desperate Homeowners
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON and VIKAS BAJAJ
July 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/03/business/03home.html?ref=us
Keeping Patients’ Details Private, Even From Kin
By JANE GROSS
July 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/03/health/policy/03hipaa.html?ref=us
Lessons from Katrina
How to Destroy an African American City in 33 Steps
By BILL QUIGLEY
June 28, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.com/quigley06282007.html
After Sanctions, Doctors Get Drug Company Pay
By GARDINER HARRIS and JANET ROBERTS
June 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/health/03docs.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Somalia: The Other (Hidden) War for Oil
by Carl Bloice; Black Commentator
May 07, 2007
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12768
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GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS AND INFORMATION
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FREE THE JENA SIX
http://www.mmmhouston.net/loc/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=114&Itemid=66
This is a modern day lynching"--Marcus Jones, father of Mychal Bell
WRITE LETTERS TO:
JUDGE J.P. MAUFFRAY
P.O. BOX 1890
JENA, LOUISIANA 71342
FAX: (318) 992-8701
WE NEED 400 LETTERS SENT BEFORE MYCHAL BELL'S SENTENCING DATE ON JULY 31ST. THEY ARE ALL INNOCENT!
Sign the NAACP's Online Petition to the Governor of Louisiana and Attorney General
http://www.naacp.org/get-involved/activism/petitions/jena-6/index.php
JOIN THE MASS PROTEST IN SUPPORT OF
MYCHAL BELL & THE JENA 6
WHERE: JENA COURTHOUSE in Louisiana
WHEN: TUESDAY, JULY 31ST
TIME: 9:00AM
THE HOUSTON MMM MINISTRY OF JUSTICE IS ORGANIZING A CARAVAN TO JOIN FORCES WITH THE JENA 6 FAMILIES, THE COLOR OF CHANGE, LOCs, AND OTHER ORGANIZATIONS ON THE STEPS OF THE COURTHOUSE THAT DAY TO DEMAND JUSTICE!
ALL INTERESTED IN GOING TO THE RALLY CALL:
HOUSTON RESIDENTS: 832.258.2480
ministryofjustice@mmmhouston.net
BATON ROUGE RESIDENTS: 225.806.3326
MONROE RESIDENTS: 318.801.0513
JENA RESIDENTS: 318.419.6441
Send Donations to the Jena 6 Defense Fund:
Jena 6 Defense Committee
P.O. Box 2798
Jena, Louisiana 71342
BACKGROUND TO THE JENA SIX:
Young Black males the target of small-town racism
By Jesse Muhammad
Staff Writer
"JENA, La. (FinalCall.com) - Marcus Jones, the father of 16-year-old Jena High School football star Mychal Bell, pulls out a box full of letters from countless major colleges and universities in America who are trying to recruit his son. Mr. Jones, with hurt in his voice, says, “He had so much going for him. My son is innocent and they have done him wrong.”
An all-White jury convicted Mr. Bell of two felonies—aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated battery—and faces up to 22 years in prison when he is sentenced on July 31. Five other young Black males are also awaiting their day in court for alleged attempted second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit second-degree murder charges evolving from a school fight: Robert Bailey, 17; Theo Shaw, 17; Carwin Jones, 18; Bryant Purvis, 17; and Jesse Beard, 15. Together, this group has come to be known as the “Jena 6.”
Updated Jul 22, 2007
FOR FULL ARTICLE:
http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/article_3753.shtml
My Letter to Judge Mauffray:
JUDGE J.P. MAUFFRAY
P.O. BOX 1890
JENA, LOUISIANA 71342
RE: THE JENA SIX
Dear Judge Mauffray,
I am appalled to learn of the conviction of 16-year-old Jena High School football star Mychal Bell and the arrest of five other young Black men who are awaiting their day in court for alleged attempted second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit second-degree murder charges evolving from a school fight. These young men, Mychal Bell, 16; Robert Bailey, 17; Theo Shaw, 17; Carwin Jones, 18; Bryant Purvis, 17; and Jesse Beard, 15, who have come to be known as the “Jena 6” have the support of thousands of people around the country who want to see them free and back in school.
Clearly, two different standards are in place in Jena—one standard for white students who go free even though they did, indeed, make a death threat against Black students—the hanging of nooses from a tree that only white students are allowed to sit under—and another set of rules for those that defended themselves against these threats. The nooses were hung after Black students dared to sit in the shade of that “white only” tree!
If the court is sincerely interested in justice, it will drop the charges against all of these six students, reinstate them back into school and insist that the school teach the white students how wrong they were and still are for their racist attitudes and violent threats! It is the duty of the schools to uphold the constitution and the bill of rights. A hanging noose or burning cross is just like a punch in the face or worse so says the Supreme Court! Further, it is an act of vigilantism and has no place in a “democracy”.
The criminal here is white racism, not a few young men involved in a fistfight!
I am a 62-year-old white woman who grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Fistfights among teenagers—as you certainly must know yourself—are a right of passage. Please don’t tell me you have never gotten into one. Even I picked a few fights with a few girls outside of school for no good reason. (We soon, in fact, became fast friends.) Children are not just smaller sized adults. They are children and go through this. The fistfight is normal and expected behavior that adults can use to educate children about the negative effect of the use of violence to solve disputes. That is what adults are supposed to do.
Hanging nooses in a tree because you hate Black people is not normal at all! It is a deep sickness that our schools and courts are responsible for unless they educate and act against it. This means you must overturn the conviction of Mychal Bell and drop the cases against Robert Bailey, Theo Shaw, Carwin Jones, Bryant Purvis, and Jesse Beard.
It also means you must take responsibility to educate white teachers, administrators, students and their families against racism and order them to refrain from their racist behavior from here on out—and make sure it is carried out!
You are supposed to defend the students who want to share the shade of a leafy green tree not persecute them—that is the real crime that has been committed here!
Sincerely,
Bonnie Weinstein, Bay Area United Against War
www.bauaw.org
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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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Youtube interview with the DuPage County Activists Who Were Arrested for Bannering
You can watch an interview with the two DuPage County antiwar activists
who arrested after bannering over the expressway online at:
http://www.youtube.com/user/DuPageFight4Freedom
Please help spread the word about this interview, and if you haven't
already done so, please contact the DuPage County State's attorney, Joe
Birkett, to demand that the charges against Jeff Zurawski and Sarah
Heartfield be dropped. The contact information for Birkett is:
Joseph E. Birkett, State's Attorney
503 N. County Farm Road
Wheaton, IL 60187
Phone: (630) 407-8000
Fax: (630) 407-8151
Email: stsattn@dupageco.org
Please forward this information far and wide.
My Letter:
Joseph E. Birkett, State's Attorney
503 N. County Farm Road
Wheaton, IL 60187
Phone: (630) 407-8000
Fax: (630) 407-8151
Email: stsattn@dupageco.org
Dear State's Attorney Birkett,
The news of the arrest of Jeff Zurawski and Sarah Heartfield is getting out far and wide. Their arrest is outrageous! Not only should all charges be dropped against Jeff and Sarah, but a clear directive should be given to Police Departments everywhere that this kind of harassment of those who wish to practice free speech will not be tolerated.
The arrest of Jeff and Sarah was the crime. The display of their message was an act of heroism!
We demand you drop all charges against Jeff Zurawski and Sarah Heartfield NOW!
Sincerely,
Bonnie Weinstein, Bay Area United Against War, www.bauaw.org, San Francisco, California
415-824-8730
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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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ADDICTED TO WAR
Animated Video Preview
Narrated by Peter Coyote
Is now on YouTube and Google Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZwyuHEN5h8
We are planning on making the ADDICTED To WAR movie.
Can you let me know what you think about this animated preview?
Do you think it would work as a full length film?
Please send your response to:
Fdorrel@sbcglobal. net or Fdorrel@Addictedtow ar.com
In Peace,
Frank Dorrel
Publisher
Addicted To War
P.O. Box 3261
Culver City, CA 90231-3261
310-838-8131
fdorrel@addictedtow ar.com
fdorrel@sbcglobal. net
www.addictedtowar. com
For copies of the book:
http://www.addictedtowar.com/book.html
OR SEND CHECK OR MONEY ORDER TO:
Frank Dorrel
P.O. BOX 3261
CULVER CITY, CALIF. 90231-3261
fdorrel@addictedtowar.com
$10.00 per copy (Spanish or English); special bulk rates
can be found at: http://www.addictedtowar.com/bookbulk.html
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"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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DEMAND THE RELEASE OF SAMI AL-ARIAN
The National Council of Arab Americans (NCA) demands the immediate
release of political prisoner, Dr. Sami Al-Arian. Although
Dr. Al-Arian is no longer on a hunger strike we must still demand
he be released by the US Department of Justice (DOJ). After an earlier
plea agreement that absolved Dr. Al-Arian from any further questioning,
he was sentenced up to 18 months in jail for refusing to testify before
a grand jury in Virginia. He has long sense served his time yet
Dr. Al-Arian is still being held. Release him now!
See:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/16/1410255
ACTION:
We ask all people of conscience to demand the immediate
release and end to Dr. Al- Arian's suffering.
Call, Email and Write:
1- Attorney General Alberto Gonzales
Department of Justice
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001
Fax Number: (202) 307-6777
Email: AskDOJ@usdoj.gov
2- The Honorable John Conyers, Jr
2426 Rayburn Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-5126
(202) 225-0072 Fax
John.Conyers@mail.house.gov
3- Senator Patrick Leahy
433 Russell Senate Office Building
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510
(202)224-4242
senator_leahy@leahy.senate.gov
4- Honorable Judge Gerald Lee
U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia
401 Courthouse Square, Alexandria, VA 22314
March 22, 2007
[No email given...bw]
National Council of Arab Americans (NCA)
http://www.arab-american.net/
Criminalizing Solidarity: Sami Al-Arian and the War of
Terror
By Charlotte Kates, The Electronic Intifada, 4 April 2007
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6767.shtml
Related:
Robert Fisk: The true story of free speech in America
This systematic censorship of Middle East reality
continues even in schools
Published: 07 April 2007
http://news. independent. co.uk/world/ fisk/article2430 125.ece
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[For some levity...Hans Groiner plays Monk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51bsCRv6kI0
...bw]
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Excerpt of interview between Barbara Walters and Hugo Chavez
http://www.borev.net/2007/03/what_you_had_something_better.html
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Which country should we invade next?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3g_zqz3VjY
My Favorite Mutiny, The Coup
http://www.myspace.com/thecoupmusic
Michael Moore- The Awful Truth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeOaTpYl8mE
Morse v. Frederick Supreme Court arguments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_LsGoDWC0o
Free Speech 4 Students Rally - Media Montage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfCjfod8yuw
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'My son lived a worthwhile life'
In April 2003, 21-year old Tom Hurndall was shot in the head
in Gaza by an Israeli soldier as he tried to save the lives of three
small children. Nine months later, he died, having never
recovered consciousness. Emine Saner talks to his mother
Jocelyn about her grief, her fight to make the Israeli army
accountable for his death and the book she has written
in his memory.
Monday March 26, 2007
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,2042968,00.html
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Introducing...................the Apple iRack
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-KWYYIY4jQ
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"A War Budget Leaves Every Child Behind."
[A T-shirt worn by some teachers at Roosevelt High School
in L.A. as part of their campaign to rid the school of military
recruiters and JROTC--see Article in Full item number 4, below...bw]
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THIS IS AN EXCELLENT VIDEO DESTRIBUTED BY U.S. LABOR AGAINST
THE WAR (USLAW) FEATURING SPEAKERS AT THE JANUARY 27TH
MARCH ON WASHINGTON FOCUSING ON THE DEMAND - BRING
THE TROOPS HOME NOW.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6935451906479097836&hl=en
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Defend the Los Angeles Eight!
http://www.committee4justice.com/
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George Takai responds to Tim Hardaway's homophobic remarks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcJoJZIcQW4&eurl_
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Iran
http://www.lucasgray.com/video/peacetrain.html
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Another view of the war. A link from Amer Jubran
http://d3130.servadmin.com/~leeflash/
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Petition: Halt the Blue Angels
http://action.globalexchange.org/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=458
http://www.care2.com/c2c/share/detail/289327
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A Girl Like Me
7:08 min
Youth Documentary
Kiri Davis, Director, Reel Works Teen Filmmaking, Producer
Winner of the Diversity Award
Sponsored by Third Millennium Foundation
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1091431409617440489
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Film/Song about Angola
http://www.prisonactivist.org/angola/
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"200 million children in the world sleep in the streets today.
Not one of them is Cuban."
(A sign in Havana)
Venceremos
View sign at bottom of page at:
http://www.cubasolidarity.net/index.html
[Thanks to Norma Harrison for sending this...bw]
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
"Cheyenne and Arapaho oral histories hammer history's account of the
Sand Creek Massacre"
CENTENNIAL, CO -- A new documentary film based on an award-winning
documentary short film, "The Sand Creek Massacre", and driven by
Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho people who tell their version about
what happened during the Sand Creek Massacre via their oral
histories, has been released by Olympus Films+, LLC, a Centennial,
Colorado film company.
"You have done an extraordinary job" said Margie Small, Tobient
Entertainment, " on the Colorado PBS episode, the library videos for
public schools and libraries, the trailer, etc...and getting the
story told and giving honor to those ancestors who had to witness
this tragic and brutal attack...film is one of the best ways."
"The images shown in the film were selected for native awareness
value" said Donald L. Vasicek, award-winning writer/filmmaker, "we
also focused on preserving American history on film because tribal
elders are dying and taking their oral histories with them. The film
shows a non-violent solution to problem-solving and 19th century
Colorado history, so it's multi-dimensional in that sense. "
Chief Eugene Blackbear, Sr., Cheyenne, who starred as Chief Black
Kettle in "The Last of the Dogmen" also starring Tom Berenger and
Barbara Hershey and "Dr. Colorado", Tom Noel, University of Colorado
history professor, are featured.
The trailer can be viewed and the film can be ordered for $24.95 plus
$4.95 for shipping and handling at http://www.fullduck.com/node/53.
Vasicek's web site, http://www.donvasicek.com, provides detailed
information about the Sand Creek Massacre including various still
images particularly on the Sand Creek Massacre home page and on the
proposal page.
Olympus Films+, LLC is dedicated to writing and producing quality
products that serve to educate others about the human condition.
Contact:
Donald L. Vasicek
Olympus Films+, LLC
7078 South Fairfax Street
Centennial, CO 80122
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Vasicek,+Don
http://www.donvasicek.com
dvasicek@earthlink.net
303-903-2103
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A NEW LOOK AT U.S. RADIOACTIVE WEAPONS
Join us in a campaign to expose and stop the use
of these illegal weapons
http://poisondust.org/
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You may enjoy watching these.
In struggle
Che:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqcezl9dD2c
Leon:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukkFVV5X0p4
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FIGHTBACK! A Collection of Socialist Essays
By Sylvia Weinstein
http://www.walterlippmann.com/sylvia-weinstein-fightback-intro.html
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[The Scab
"After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad,
and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with
which he made a scab."
"A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul,
a water brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue.
Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten
principles." "When a scab comes down the street,
men turn their backs and angels weep in heaven, and
the devil shuts the gates of hell to keep him out."
"No man (or woman) has a right to scab so long as there
is a pool of water to drown his carcass in,
or a rope long enough to hang his body with.
Judas was a gentleman compared with a scab.
For betraying his master, he had character enough
to hang himself." A scab has not.
"Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage.
Judas sold his Savior for thirty pieces of silver.
Benedict Arnold sold his country for a promise of
a commision in the british army."
The scab sells his birthright, country, his wife,
his children and his fellowmen for an unfulfilled
promise from his employer.
Esau was a traitor to himself; Judas was a traitor
to his God; Benedict Arnold was a traitor to his country;
a scab is a traitor to his God, his country,
his family and his class."
Author --- Jack London (1876-1916)...Roland Sheppard
http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret]
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END ALL U.S. AID TO ISRAEL!
Stop funding Israel's war against Palestine
Complete the form at the website listed below with your information.
https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Advocacy?
JServSessionIdr003=cga2p2o6x1.app2a&cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=177
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Sand Creek Massacre
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FEATURED AT NATIVE AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL:
http://www.aberdeennews.com/mld/aberdeennews/news/local/16035305.htm
(scroll down when you get there])
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING
WRITER/FILMMAKER DONALD L. VASICEK REPORT:
http://www.digitalcinemareport.com/sandcreekmassacre.html
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FINALIST IN DOCUMENTARY CHANNEL COMPETITION (VIEW HERE):
http://www.docupyx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=41
VIEW "THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FILM MOVIE OF THE WEEK FOR FREE HERE:
http://twymancreative.com/twymanc.html
On November 29, 1864, 700 Colorado troops savagely slaughtered
over 450 Cheyenne children, disabled, elders, and women in the
southeastern Colorado Territory under its protection. This act
became known as the Sand Creek Massacre. This film project
("The Sand Creek Massacre" documentary film project) is an
examination of an open wound in the souls of the Cheyenne
people as told from their perspective. This project chronicles
that horrific 19th century event and its affect on the 21st century
struggle for respectful coexistence between white and native
plains cultures in the United States of America.
Listed below are links on which you can click to get the latest news,
products, and view, free, "THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" award-
winning documentary short. In order to create more native
awareness, particularly to save the roots of America's history,
please read the following:
Some people in America are trying to save the world. Bless
them. In the meantime, the roots of America are dying.
What happens to a plant when the roots die? The plant dies
according to my biology teacher in high school. American's
roots are its native people. Many of America's native people
are dying from drug and alcohol abuse, poverty, hunger,
and disease, which was introduced to them by the Caucasian
male. Tribal elders are dying. When they die, their oral
histories go with them. Our native's oral histories are the
essence of the roots of America, what took place before
our ancestors came over to America, what is taking place,
and what will be taking place. It is time we replenish
America's roots with native awareness, else America
continues its decaying, and ultimately, its death.
You can help. The 22-MINUTE SAND CREEK MASSACRE
DOCUMENTARY PRESENTATION/EDUCATIONAL DVD IS
READY FOR PURCHASE! (pass the word about this powerful
educational tool to friends, family, schools, parents, teachers,
and other related people and organizations to contact
me (dvasicek@earthlink.net, 303-903-2103) for information
about how they can purchase the DVD and have me come
to their children's school to show the film and to interact
in a questions and answers discussion about the Sand
Creek Massacre.
Happy Holidays!
Donald L. Vasicek
Olympus Films+, LLC
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Vasicek,+Don
http://www.donvasicek.com
dvasicek@earthlink.net
303-903-2103
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FEATURED AT NATIVE AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL:
http://www.aberdeennews.com/mld/aberdeennews/news/local/16035305.htm
(scroll down when you get there])
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING
WRITER/FILMMAKER DONALD L. VASICEK REPORT:
http://www.digitalcinemareport.com/sandcreekmassacre.html
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FINALIST IN DOCUMENTARY CHANNEL COMPETITION (VIEW HERE):
http://www.docupyx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=41
VIEW "THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FILM MOVIE OF THE WEEK FOR FREE HERE:
http://twymancreative.com/twymanc.html
SHOP:
http://www.manataka.org/page633.html
BuyIndies.com
donvasicek.com.
