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SAN FRANCISCO IS A SANCTUARY CITY! STOP THE MIGRA-ICE RAIDS!
PICKET LINE AT MISSION POLICE STATION TONIGHT!
TUESDAY, JUNE 3rd, 5:30 P.M.
630 Valencia (corner of 17th St.)
Despite calling itself a "sanctuary city", S.F. politicians are permitting the harrassment of undocumented immigrants and allowing the MIGRA-ICE police to enter the jail facilities.
We will picket any store that cooperates with the MIGRA or reports undocumented brothers and sisters. We demand AMNESTY without conditions!
BRIGADES AGAINST THE RAIDS
project of BARRIO UNIDO
(415)431-9925
Next planning meeting Thursday June 26th 7PM at 474 Valencia St. S.F.
(near 16th St.) in Room 145
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NEXT MEETING OF JROTC MUST GO TONIGHT!
Tuesday, June 3, 7:00 P.M.
Global Exchange, 2017 Mission Street near 16th.
The next meeting of the Board of Education is the following Tuesday, June 10th, 7:00 P.M. At 555 Franklin Street near McAllister Street.
415/241-6427 or (415) 241-6493
(To get on the speaker’s list call the Monday before the meeting from 8:30 AM - 4:00 PM or Tuesday, the day of the meeting from 8:30 AM - 3:30 PM. You will get at most, two minutes and most probably only one minute to speak.
http://www.jrotcmustgo.blogspot.com/
Here's an article that appeared in the BayView News:
http://www.SFBayview.com/News/Thiswk_nopics/Our_Readers_Write.html
JROTC must go now!
San Francisco made history in November 2006 when the school board voted to make this the first big city in the nation to ban JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps), one of the military’s prime recruiting tools, in June 2008.
Unfortunately, the board – except for Mark Sanchez and Eric Mar – reversed itself, extending JROTC.
In another vote this June, two progressives on the board – Kim-Shree Maufas and Green Party member Jane Kim – are critical to send the military packing.
An open letter to Jane Kim and Kim-Shree Maufas:
My name is Mara Kubrin.
I am a graduate of Lowell High School in San Francisco.
Last school year I presented the student petition to the school board in support of the resolution to phase out JROTC in the San Francisco Unified School District.
I was thrilled when the resolution passed; I had made one final contribution before heading off to college.
Unfortunately, my impression did not last.
The same issue has resurfaced just in time for me to come home and urge—no demand— that you finish what I thought we had already finished last year. JROTC must go now.
To me the issue seems so clear that I have trouble understanding your hesitation. San Franciscans have voted to prohibit recruitment in our schools. Case should be closed, but I will continue.
The anti-JROTC coalition has many concrete reasons, any of which is grounds to immediately pull JROTC out of the schools. Let me re-state them.
* The SFUSD has an anti-discrimination hiring policy. In order to be a JROTC instructor, one must have served in the military. In order to successfully serve in the military, one may not be openly homosexual. Therefore, in order to be an SFUSD JROTC teacher, one may not be openly gay. Strike one.
* State law requires that Physical Education credit only be given by properly credentialed teachers. JROTC instructors do not have these credentials, yet students get credit. Strike two.
* International law prohibits the military from trying to recruit anyone under the age of 17. Most JROTC students are well under the age of 17. Strike three.
JROTC should have been outa here a long time ago based on any one of those reasons.
So why is JROTC still here?
I have listened to supporters and I will admit that many students like JROTC. However, if schools offered a class on video games, kids would also love it. Students would rush to sign up for a class on celebrity gossip. Have we forgotten that sometimes kids are not the ones to make these decisions? The school board is here to determine the best curriculum for students.
Despite students’ enjoyment, this “class” is not beneficial to them.
What are we trying to teach here?
We are cutting music and arts, but somehow we think that learning how to salute is a good use of educational time?
Others argue that JROTC provides discipline and leadership, that it turns kids around in ways other programs can’t.
In my mind, any extra-curricular activity that requires attendance and focus, and encourages growth and maturity, will do the exact same thing.
There are plenty of available sports leagues, leadership groups, community service organizations, and clubs available to high school students. They do not need one that is explicitly a military recruitment device.
Politicians are afraid of openly opposing JROTC because of the visible student support for the program. The support is more clearly visible than the opposition because the “support” is bused in to meetings, while the opposition has been intimidated and physically threatened, myself included. Clearly, the cadets’ discipline and leadership only go so far.
So here is my suggestion:
JROTC can stay in San Francisco but not on school campuses.
JROTC is a recruitment tool, so have the program at recruitment centers.
If students are so insistent that this and only this program will provide the discipline, leadership, and family element that they want, then they can seek it out in their own time, using the military’s own funding, and on its own recruitment grounds.
The military does not belong in our schools simply based on an understanding of what is right and what is wrong, let alone the legal evidence.
Vote to make it happen.
Be the progressive you claim to be.
Kick JROTC out of our schools once and for all.
Thank you,
Mara Kubrin
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Call for an Open U.S. National Antiwar Conference
Stop the War in Iraq! Bring the Troops Home Now!
Join us in Cleveland on June 28-29 for the conference.
Sponsored by the National Assembly to End the Iraq War and Occupation
P.O. Box 21008; Cleveland, OH 44121; Voice Mail: 216-736-4704; Email: NatAssembly@aol.com
FOR REGISTRATION AND MORE INFORMATION:
http://natassembly.org/
TO READ THE CALL:
http://natassembly.org/thecall/
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY
AN OPEN NATIONAL CONFERENCE TO SUPPORT THE DEMANDS:
Stop the War in Iraq! Bring the Troops Home NOW!
We invite everyone who opposes the war and occupation to attend an open democratic
national antiwar conference to place on the agenda of the entire US antiwar movement
a proposal for the largest possible united mass mobilization to stop the war and end
the occupation.
Saturday, June 28 & Sunday, June 29, 2008
Cleveland, Ohio
Speakers include:
Donna Dewitt, President, South Carolina AFL-CIO
Fred Mason, President of the Maryland AFL-CIO and President of the
Metro Washington D.C. Central Labor Council, one of the National
Co-Convenors of U.S. Labor Against the War
Greg Coleridge, Program Director, Northeast Ohio American Friends
Service Committee; Coordinator, Northeast Ohio Anti-War Coalition
Jonathan Hutto, Navy Petty Officer, author, Anti-War Soldier and
co-founder of Appeal for Redress
Jeremy Scahill, Author, of "Blackwater: The Rise of the World‚s Most Powerful Mercenary Army"
Jesse Diaz, Organizer of the May 1, 2006 immigrant rights boycott
Cindy Sheehan, by video
To register and for more information, log on to: www.natassembly.org.
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The Girl Who Silenced the World at the UN!
Born and raised in Vancouver, Severn Suzuki has been working on environmental and social justice issues since kindergarten. At age 9, she and some friends started the Environmental Children's Organization (ECO), a small group of children committed to learning and teaching other kids about environmental issues. They traveled to 1992's UN Earth Summit, where 12 year-old Severn gave this powerful speech that deeply affected (and silenced) some of the most prominent world leaders. The speech had such an impact that she has become a frequent invitee to many U.N. conferences.
[Note: the text of her speech is also available at this site...bw]
http://www.karmatube.org/videos.php?id=433
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Not So Sweet
Why Dunkin' Donuts shouldn't have caved in the controversy over Rachael Ray's 'kaffiyeh' scarf.
By Lorraine Ali
Newsweek Web Exclusive
May 30, 2008
Read Article [#4 Below] on line at:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/139334
Sign Petition:
https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Advocacy?JServSessionIdr007=7nginw7ml3.app8a&cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=221
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MINIATURE EARTH
http://www.miniature-earth.com/me_english.htm
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"Dear Canada: Let U.S. war resisters stay!"
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/499/89/
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NO on state Prop. 98!
San Francisco Tenants Union (415) 282-5525 www.sftu.org
Wealthy landlords and other right-wing operatives placed Prop. 98 on the state ballot. This is a dangerous and deceptive measure. Disguised as an effort to reform eminent domain laws and protect homeowners, Prop. 98 would abolish tenant protections such as rent control and just-cause eviction laws, and would end a number of other environmental protection and land use laws. [The catch is, that while it's true that the landlord can increase rents to whatever he or she wants once a property becomes vacant, the current rent-control law now ensures that the new tenants are still under rent-control for their, albeit higher, rent. Under the new law, there simply will be no rent control when the new tenant moves in so their much higher rent-rate can increase as much as the landlord chooses each year from then on!!! So, no more rent-control at all!!! Tricky, huh?...BW]
SAVE RENT CONTROL! NO ON PROP. 98!
http://leftinsf.com/blog/index.php/archives/2492
We All Hate that 98!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Phrt5zVGn0
READ ALL OF PROP. 98 at: http://yesprop98.com/read/?_adctlid=v%7Cwynx8c5jjesxsb%7Cwziq39twoqov52
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Stop fumigation of citizens without their consent in California
Target: Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Senator Joe Simitian, Assemblymember Loni Hancock, Assemblymember John Laird, Senator Abel Maldonado
Sponsored by: John Russo
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/stop-fumigation-of-citizens-without-their-consent-in-california
Additional information is available at http://www.stopthespray.org
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) Royal Care for Some of India’s Patients, Neglect for Others
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
The World
June 1, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/weekinreview/01sengupta.html?ref=world
2) Think the Economy Is Bad? Wait Till the States Cut Back
By LOUIS UCHITELLE
The Nation
June 1, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/weekinreview/01uchitelle.html?ref=business
3) Comcast hires spies for feds and tracking users
By Leslie Poston
May 31, 2008
http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2008/05/31/comcast-hires-spies-for-feds-and-tracking-users/
4) A Return of That ’70s Show?
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
June 2, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/02/opinion/02krugman.html?hp
5)U.S. Remakes Jails in Iraq, but Gains Are at Risk
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
June 2, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/02/world/middleeast/02detain.html?ref=world
6) ‘No Peace No Work’ May Day Report
By The Editors
Socialist Viewpoint
May/June 2008
[See UTube Video of March at this site.]
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/
7) Healthcare Wars
By Bonnie Weinstein
Socialist Viewpoint
May/June 2008
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/mayjun_08/mayjun_08_09.html
8) Student Loans Start to Bypass 2-Year Colleges
By JONATHAN D. GLATER
June 2, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/02/business/02loans.html?ref=us
9) State Dept. Reinstates Gaza Fulbright Grants
By ETHAN BRONNER
June 2, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/02/world/middleeast/02fulbright.html?ref=us
10) Selling War -- "What WE Say Goes."
Gunnar Garbo
Introduction at the Conference on the Implications of Language for Peace and Development, (IMPLAN), University of Oslo, May2, 2008.
http://nasir-khan.blogspot.com/2008/05/grand-deception-of-selling-war.html
11) Last Flight of the Honeybee?
By Alison Benjamin
The Guardian
May 31, 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/may/31/animalwelfare.environment
12) The Great Immigration Panic
June 3, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/opinion/03tue1.html?hp
13) G.M. Closing 4 Plants in Shift From Trucks Toward Cars
By BILL VLASIC
June 4, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/04/business/04motors.html?hp
14) Retailers Expected to Post Scant May Sales
By REUTERS
Filed at 11:46 a.m. ET
June 3, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/business/business-usa-retail-sales.html
15) U.N. Issues Warning on Food Crisis
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL and ANDREW MARTIN
June 4, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/04/world/04food.html?ref=world
16) On Stand, Imam Tells of Torture in Israel
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 3, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/nyregion/03imam.html?ref=world
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1) Royal Care for Some of India’s Patients, Neglect for Others
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
The World
June 1, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/weekinreview/01sengupta.html?ref=world
BANGALORE, India — “To get the best care,” Robin Steeles said gamely, “you gotta pay for it.”
Mr. Steeles, 60, a car dealer from Daphne, Ala., had flown halfway around the world last month to save his heart, at a price he could pay. He had a mitral valve repaired at a state-of-the-art private hospital here, called Wockhardt, and for 10 days, he was recuperating in a carpeted, wood-paneled room, with a view of a leafy green courtyard.
A dietician helped select his meals. A dermatologist came as soon as he complained of an itch. His Royal Suite had cable TV, a computer, a minirefrigerator, where an attendant that afternoon stashed some ice cream, for when he felt hungry later. Three days after surgery, he was sitting in a chair, smiling, chattering, thrilled to be alive.
On his bed lay the morning’s paper. Dominating its front page was the story of other men, many of them day laborers who laid bricks and mixed cement for Bangalore’s construction boom, who had fallen gravely ill after drinking illegally brewed liquor. All told, more than 150 died that week, here and in neighboring Tamil Nadu State.
Not for them the care of India’s best private hospitals. They had been wheeled in by wives and brothers to the overstretched government-run Bowring Hospital, on the other side of town. Bowring had no intensive care unit, no ventilators, no dialysis machine. Dinner was a stack of white bread, on which a healthy cockroach crawled while a patient, named Yelappa, slept.
Wockhardt has 30 ventilators, including some that are noninvasive, so the patient does not have to have a tube rammed down his throat. At any one time, a half-dozen are in use. An elderly woman had been in its intensive care unit for a week, on dialysis; her family wanted to do whatever possible to keep her alive, no matter the cost.
At Bowring, one of the young doctors, named Harish, said a ventilator and a dialysis machine would have allowed him to keep half of his patients alive. The most severe case, Mohammed Amin, was breathing with the aid of a hand pump that his wife squeezed silently. Dr. Harish sent the relative of one man to get blood tests done at the nearest private hospital; there was no equipment to do the test here. Then the doctor rushed to the triage section in Bowring’s lobby, where the newest patient, writhing, resisting, disoriented from the poison in his gut, had to be tied down with bedsheets.
Where you stand on the Indian social ladder shapes to a large degree what kind of health you’re in, and what kind of health care you receive. The beds in Bowring were taken up by small skinny men. One of Wockhardt’s most popular offerings is a weight loss program, and the majority of walk-ins at its outpatient clinic suffer from diabetes, closely linked to obesity.
This is no anomaly. A government-sponsored National Family Health Survey released last fall says a woman born in the poorest 20 percent of the population is more than twice as likely to be underweight than one in the richest quintile, and 50 percent more likely to be anemic.
For children, the gap is equally stark. The poorest quintile is more than twice as likely to be stunted, a function of chronic malnutrition, and nearly three times less likely to be fully immunized.
It is not as if the poor do not seek treatment, Jishnu Das, an economist who studies health and poverty for the World Bank, points out. They do, and sometimes more often than the rich. It is just that they are more likely, Mr. Das says, to land at the doorstep of a caregiver who is incompetent, ill-trained or indifferent to their needs.
“The poor are not dying and sick because they do not go to seek medical care,” he said. “In fact, the poor are going to doctors in droves. There are no good options for the poor. The private hospitals and care they are able to access is of very low quality, and when they try and access government care, they receive no attention whatsoever.”
The survey found that two-thirds of Indian households rely on private medical care when sick, a preference that cuts across class. Asked why they don’t use public facilities, the most common answer was poor care.
India has a countrywide network of government-funded primary health centers and hospitals, but staffing, medicines and resources vary widely. Some, especially in rural India, are notorious for having staff doctors on paper at best. This is only beginning to change. The government has increased health spending in recent years, and this year began a health insurance program that would allow people in poverty access to a hospital of their choice.
The Planning Commission of India this year found that in government-run health centers, 45 percent of gynecologist posts and 53 percent of pediatric posts went unfilled, and that salaries for government doctors are a fraction of those at new private hospitals like Wockhardt.
Wockhardt struggles to fill its slots, too, but its facilities allow it to aggressively recruit, including from among Indian doctors who have worked abroad for years.
The morning papers did not let Mr. Steeles forget the vast gulf between his predicament and that of the hooch drinkers fighting for life at Bowring. Yet as far apart as they were, their tales followed a somewhat parallel plot. The American health care system could no more care for Mr. Steeles than the Indian system could for Mr. Amin.
Mr. Steeles came here because he is uninsured, and could not afford heart surgery in the United States, he said, without liquidating most of his assets. After five months of research and e-mail messages to doctors worldwide, he chose a heart surgeon here in Bangalore. “I’m over here for a fraction of what I would have paid in the United States,” he said. “In my personal situation, I’m just delighted I took the road that I did.”
Mr. Steele’s Royal Suite, incidentally, is available to anyone, Indian or foreigner, who can pay for it. After his stay here, he would move to a room at a private club for 16 days of further recovery, before flying home. All told, he said it cost him about $20,000, a tenth of what he would have paid at a private American hospital.
Across town, among the hooch drinkers, a few of the worst cases had been transferred to private hospitals that had agreed to take them, at the government’s expense.
Mr. Amin was too frail to be transferred. He died at Bowring, leaving behind a wife and two young children.
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2) Think the Economy Is Bad? Wait Till the States Cut Back
By LOUIS UCHITELLE
The Nation
June 1, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/weekinreview/01uchitelle.html?ref=business
Struggling as we are with the housing bust, the credit crunch, shrinking consumption, rising unemployment and faltering business investment, we can be forgiven for thinking that all the big shoes have dropped. There is another one up there, however, and it is about to come down.
State and city governments have yet to shrink the economy; indeed, they have even managed to prop it up. They have quietly maintained their spending at pre-crisis levels even as they warn of numerous cutbacks forced on them by declining tax revenues. The cutbacks, however, are written into budgets for a fiscal year that begins on July 1, a month away. In the meantime the states and cities, often drawing on rainy-day savings, have carried their share of the load for the national economy.
That share is gigantic. At $1.8 trillion annually in a $14 trillion economy, the states and municipalities spend almost twice as much as the federal government, including the cost of the Iraq war. When librarians, lifeguards, teachers, transit workers, road repair crews and health care workers disappear, or airport and school construction is halted, the economy trembles. None of that, or very little, has happened so far, not even in California, despite a significant decline in tax revenue.
“We are looking at a $4 billion cut to public schools and deep cuts that will result in thousands of Californians losing their health care,” said Jean Ross, executive director of the California Budget Project, offering a preview of coming hardships. “But the reality is we have not pulled money off the streets yet.”
Quite the opposite, the states and municipalities have increased their spending in recent quarters, bolstering the nation’s meager economic growth. Over the past year, they have added $40 billion to their outlays, even allowing for scattered spending freezes and a few cutbacks in advance of July 1. Total employment has also risen. But when the current fiscal year ends in 30 days (or in the fall for many municipalities), state and city spending will fall, along with employment — slowly at first and then quite noticeably after the next president takes office.
Sometime next year, the decline will reach an annual rate of $50 billion, Goldman Sachs estimates. “It is a big reason to expect a weak economy in 2009,” said Jan Hatzius, chief domestic economist at the firm.
The $90 billion swing — from more spending to less — could be enough to push down a weak economy to zero growth or less, because state and city spending has accounted for as much as half of total economic growth since last fall. (A robust economy has a growth rate of 3 percent to 4 percent, compared with the 0.9 percent or less of the last two quarters.) The $90 billion would certainly offset most of the $107 billion stimulus package now going out from the federal government to millions of Americans in the form of tax rebate checks. The hope is they will spend this windfall on consumption and in doing so sustain the economy. That might happen — for a while. But with the cutbacks in state and city outlays canceling out the consumption, the next president, struggling to revive a weak economy, will almost certainly have to consider a second stimulus package.
But what should it be? Should it be a reprise of the checks, relying again on private-sector spending for rejuvenation? Or should Washington channel extra federal money to city and state governments so they can sustain their outlays for the numerous programs that otherwise would be shrunk? The answer, even on Wall Street, is often: subsidize the states and cities.
“If you want to make sure that federal money gets spent, and jobs are created, you give it to them,” said Nigel Gault, chief domestic economist at Global Insight, a forecasting firm.
Like many others, Mr. Gault contends that more than 50 percent of the $107 billion in stimulus checks now going to households is likely to produce no stimulus at all. Instead, it will be used to pay down debt or buy imported goods and services. Imports bolster production in other countries; not in the United States.
Still, rebate checks have been a standard tool for years in efforts to revive the American economy. So have tax cuts and — the most popular tool of all — the Federal Reserve’s lowering of interest rates. Each tool assumes that people will respond to the incentive with more spending and investment, and markets will then work their magic. Not since the 1970s, when politicians still paid attention to the teachings of John Maynard Keynes, has public spending — government spending — surfaced in mainstream political debate as a potentially effective means of counteracting a downturn.
Government has to step in, Keynesians argue, when private spending is not enough to lift the economy, despite the nudge from tax cuts or lower interest rates or rebate checks. This downturn might be one of those moments, involving as it does the bursting of a huge housing bubble. That has precipitated sharp declines in various tax revenues on which the states and cities depend, forcing them into extraordinary spending cuts — not yet, of course, but after July 1.
The issue barely dents the presidential election campaign. The Republicans in particular are less than enthusiastic about Keynesian economics, with its use of government to rescue markets. They, and many mainstream economists, for that matter, argue that government is inefficient, bureaucratic, wasteful and unable to spend fast enough to counteract a downturn. The two Democratic candidates, in contrast, argue that a second stimulus package, if one is needed, should include federal subsidies to the states and municipalities, not to start new projects but to prevent cutbacks in existing ones.
No state seems more vulnerable than Florida, with its plunging home prices and slashed property-tax assessments, not yet on the books but soon to be. In anticipation, the legislature in May approved a $66.5 billion budget for the coming fiscal year, down from $72 billion in the current one.
Schools are a target, said Michael Sittig, executive director of the Florida League of Cities, “but none has been hurt yet. Nevertheless, everyone is scared. Everyone is in the mode of trying to figure out how to get through next year” — starting 30 days from now.
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3) Comcast hires spies for feds and tracking users
By Leslie Poston
May 31, 2008
http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2008/05/31/comcast-hires-spies-for-feds-and-tracking-users/
Thanks to the Computer Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) from May 2007, companies like Comcast have more latitude to spy on users for both the government and themselves. They are using this latitude now to hire someone whose sole purpose will be to spy on Comcast users.
Other internet and telecommunications providers, like AT&T, have caught intense flak for spying on users without their knowledge. The language of CALEA does not give law enforcement or, by extension, internet service providers, license to snoop on users without cause. It simply states that internet service providers must have an infrastructure in place to allow federal wiretapping and tracking if needed and warranted.
This falls under a blatant abuse of this law, in my opinion. It also comes close on the heels of Comcast’s FCC woes from throttling of torrent users, news that they are happy to use FISA against their users for a small fee of $1000 USD, and right after news that they have limited file sharing by use of hacker type tactics such as Sandvine.
The job posting was listed on Brassring as an engineer position for National Security Operations with the company. It requires an advanced degree and a familiarity with black hat practices, IT infrastructure and CALEA, among other things. Lock up your files, folks, it’s about to get bumpy for Comcast subscribers everywhere (and that is a lot of internet users, as Comcast is the second largest internet provider in the country).
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4) Not So Sweet
Why Dunkin' Donuts shouldn't have caved in the controversy over Rachael Ray's 'kaffiyeh' scarf.
Lorraine Ali
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Updated: 6:23 PM ET May 30, 2008
http://www.newsweek.com/id/139334
Dunkin' Donuts and Mideast politics go together like … Well, they don't, and that seems to be the problem of late. First, the doughnut franchise served as a hideout for Lebanese Army troops and a CNN correspondent when violence erupted in Beirut last month. Then this week the company found itself smack dab in the center of more political tumult. A recent ad by the doughnut giant was deemed dangerous by a handful of conservative bloggers because of its potential ties to the Arab world. The bloggers went on the attack when they saw spokesgal Rachael Ray wearing what they felt was a kaffiyeh, or Arab headdress, as a neck scarf. It was in fact a black and white paisley scarf, not traditional Arab garb, but that didn't matter when blogger Pam Geller posted the following under the header "Rachel [sic] Ray: Dunkin Donuts Jihad Tool": "Have you seen Rachel [sic] Ray wearing the icon of Yasser Arafatbastard and the bloody Islamic jihad. This is part of the cultural jihad," wrote Geller.
Despite the fact that the kaffiyeh is worn by millions, including Middle Eastern men, arty college students, tourists, Kanye West and even U.S. troops, who use it to keep the sand and dust at bay, the bloggers jumped on the case, exposing what they saw as the latest Mideast threat to freedom and democracy—this time in the insidious form of an iced-coffee ad. Dunkin' Donuts panicked and pulled the image from its own Web site and other commercial sites. In a written statement senior vice president of communications for Dunkin' Donuts brands, Margie Myers, said, "Absolutely no symbolism was intended. However, as of this past weekend, we are no longer using the online ad because the possibility of misperception detracted from its original intention to promote our iced coffee."
Shouldn't we be more offended that Ray was shilling their weak iced coffee, a beverage that should be criticized for impersonating, well, iced coffee. But cries of "Bad java!" just don't seem to catch the attention the way racist rhetoric against Arabs and Muslims does. This ad was pulled because anti-Arab bloggers saw it as promoting a culture they love to hate, and they used the terrorism card to push their agenda through. The amazing part is that Dunkin' Donuts caved. They should be ashamed, and not just because Krispy Kreme offers a superior glazed cruller but because they validated the warped idea that the mere existence of a race—and anything worn by its people—can be controversial. It's doubtful the ad would have been pulled if a handful of critics found Ray's garb too Hispanic or too African-American. The groups themselves would have been dismissed as bigoted or insane. Anti-racism organizations such as ANSWER have called for a "worldwide boycott of Dunkin' Donuts." According to ANSWER's spokesperson, Ben Becker, more than 7,300 letters have been sent to Dunkin' Donuts since they called for a boycott yesterday.
Let's face it, the real danger here is not the girly scarf charged with being a kaffiyeh, or that jihadists are purportedly using Dunkin' Donuts as a backdoor into America's malleable consciousness. It's that the cries of a few commentators indulging in the worst form of racial stereotyping—and their demonization of an entire culture—was enough to spook a giant corporation. As for dangers lurking beyond the kaffiyeh controversy? Beware of Dunkin's Blueberry Cake Donut. At 290 calories with 16 grams of fat, it's more deadly than a paisley scarf in spring.
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4) A Return of That ’70s Show?
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
June 2, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/02/opinion/02krugman.html?hp
Which decade is it, anyway?
Not long ago it seemed as if everyone watching the carnage in financial markets was drawing scary parallels with the 1930s.
This time, however, Ben Bernanke and his colleagues at the Federal Reserve did what their predecessors failed to do during the banking crisis of 1930-31: they acted forcefully to avert a collapse of the financial system. And their efforts seem, provisionally, to have worked. While things are far from normal in the financial markets, over the last few months the sense of panic has been gradually subsiding.
You might think, then, that everyone would be congratulating Mr. Bernanke and company for their good work. But at an economic conference I recently attended, many of the participants — including people with a lot of influence in the policy world — seemed to be bashing the Bernanke Fed.
You see, fears of a 1930s-style financial meltdown are apparently out; fears of 1970s-style stagflation are in. And the Fed stands accused of being soft on inflation.
The emerging conventional wisdom, if what I heard is any indication, is that Mr. Bernanke has been fighting the wrong enemy all along: inflation, not financial collapse, is the real threat. And to head off that threat, the critics say, the Fed has to reverse course and raise interest rates — never mind the risks of recession.
So this seems like a good time to declare that the new conventional wisdom is all wrong. We’re not watching a rerun of that ’70s show — and the misguided belief that we are could do a lot of harm.
It’s true that the soaring prices of oil and other raw materials have led to public anguish over the rising cost of living. But this time around there’s no sign whatsoever of the wage-price spiral that, in the 1970s, turned a temporary shock from higher oil prices into a persistently high rate of inflation
Here’s an example of the way things used to be: In May 1981, the United Mine Workers signed a contract with coal mine operators locking in wage increases averaging 11 percent a year over the next three years. The union demanded such a large pay hike because it expected the double-digit inflation of the late 1970s to continue; the mine owners thought they could afford to meet the union’s demands because they expected big future increases in coal prices, which had risen 40 percent over the previous three years.
At the time, the mine workers’ settlement wasn’t at all unusual: many workers were getting comparable contracts. Workers and employers were, in effect, engaged in a game of leapfrog: workers would demand big wage increases to keep up with inflation, corporations would pass these higher wages on in prices, rising prices would lead to another round of wage demands, and so on.
Once that sort of self-sustaining inflationary process gets under way, it’s very hard to stop. In fact, it took a very severe recession, the worst slump since the 1930s, to get rid of the inflationary legacy of the 1970s.
But as I said, this time around there’s no wage-price spiral in sight.
The inflation hawks point out that consumers are, for the first time in decades, telling pollsters that they expect a sharp rise in prices over the next year. Fair enough.
But where are the unions demanding 11-percent-a-year wage increases? (Where are the unions, period?) Consumers are worried about inflation, but you have to search far and wide to find workers demanding compensation in the form of higher wages, let alone employers willing to accept those demands. In fact, wage growth actually seems to be slowing, thanks to the weakness of the job market.
And since there isn’t a wage-price spiral, we don’t need higher interest rates to get inflation under control. When the surge in commodity prices levels off — and it will; the laws of supply and demand haven’t been repealed — inflation will subside on its own.
Still, why not raise interest rates a bit, as extra insurance against inflation?
Part of the answer is that the financial crisis, which seems to be in remission right now, could flare up again if money gets more expensive.
And even if the financial crisis doesn’t come back, higher rates would further weaken an already weak real economy. Never mind whether we’re technically in a recession: it feels like a recession to most people, and higher interest rates would make it worse.
The bottom line is that while expensive gas and food are inflicting real harm on American families, they aren’t setting off a ’70s-type inflationary spiral. The only thing we have to fear on that front is inflation fear itself, which could lead to policies that make a bad economic situation worse.
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5)U.S. Remakes Jails in Iraq, but Gains Are at Risk
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
June 2, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/02/world/middleeast/02detain.html?ref=world
BAGHDAD — Once a byword for torture and disgrace, the American-run detention system in Iraq has improved, even its critics say, as the military has incorporated it into a larger counterinsurgency strategy that seeks to avoid mistreatment that could create new enemies.
But these gains may soon be at risk. Thousands of detainees are to be turned over to the Iraqi government, some perhaps as early as the end of the year, a further step toward Iraqi sovereignty. Yet however tarnished America’s reputation may be for its treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, the reputation of many Iraqi prisons is worse.
“The Americans are better than Ministry of Interior prisons,” said Mahmoud Abu Dumour, a former detainee from Falluja, the Sunni stronghold west of Baghdad. “They will torture you. Maybe you will die. With the Americans, if you enter Abu Ghraib, they will only wage psychological war on you.”
Already, Human Rights Watch has criticized the military for transferring some convicted juveniles to Iraqi custody, where they are kept in what the group said are abusive conditions.
Criticism also remains high that the American military detains too many people, deprives them of due process and holds them too long, even if innocent. Many are taken in only because they were near an insurgent attack.
While nearly all of the more than 21,000 detainees in Iraq are in American custody, Maj. Gen. Douglas M. Stone, who runs detainee operations countrywide, is proceeding with a broad experiment to restructure it. His goal is to use the system of detention centers as another front in the counterinsurgency war, trying to reduce the likelihood that they become a recruiting ground for militants.
“The extremists owned the battlefield of the mind,” said General Stone, a Marine Reserve counterinsurgency expert who took responsibility for the detention system last spring. Before he arrived, moderate and extremist detainees were usually mixed, turning the American-run detention facilities into what he called a “jihadi university.”
General Stone’s goal now is to isolate those he believes are extremists, who are a minority of detainees, and persuade the other detainees that they will have better lives if they keep away from those who preach jihad. It is part of the effort to bring detention policy here in line with American military strategy that seeks to separate insurgents from civilians, mentally and physically.
General Stone’s goal is to move detainees, particularly more moderate ones, through the system faster by instituting review boards to hear each detainee’s case. So far, these boards have released at least 8,400 people. He has also pushed to expand paid work programs, like carpentry shops, brick factories and laundries, as well as educational programs, especially for juvenile detainees and the many illiterate adults.
It is difficult to assess this drive toward improvement. Outsiders are forbidden to interview detainees. The International Committee of the Red Cross has regular access to the facilities, but the United Nations and human rights groups say they have not been permitted to enter.
Still, a reporter’s visits to Camp Cropper and Camp Bucca, the two main American detention facilities; interviews with American military officers in charge of the facilities; and conversations with former detainees and human rights advocates make clear that the system has been changed in several important ways.
These changes were seen as vital after the images of prisoner humiliation and abuse at Abu Ghraib created fury throughout the Arab world. Recidivism is down: since General Stone’s arrival last year, just 28 of those released have been jailed again. That number, less than 1 percent of the total released, reflects considerably fewer repeat detentions than before the administrative hearings and other reforms, when recapture rates ran at 5 to 10 percent, according to military lawyers.
Riots, which once regularly traumatized Camp Bucca, have tailed off. The last was in September. Violence among detainees, including beatings and killings, is down as well. The last escape attempt was in November 2007, when military police officers found an 80-foot-long tunnel with an exit outside the compound.
In interviews, former detainees praised the new hearing system, which they said allowed them for the first time to tell their side of the story.
“I would consider this committee a fair and beautiful committee,” said Sheik Riyadh, who was released in early April from Camp Bucca, near Iraq’s southern border with Kuwait, after three and a half years in detention. “If only they had formed it when I was first detained. Then the detainee was not sent to any committee. But this committee works to release people.”
But the innovations have not erased memories of the Abu Ghraib scandals, nor have they mollified the many Iraqis who continue to be arrested and who maintain their innocence.
“I had not done anything,” said Mahmoud Abu Dumour, who was detained in Falluja in November 2004 and released without explanation in July 2007, before General Stone’s administrative hearing system was in place.
“It was very nice that my daughter recognized me,” he added, his arms around his 3-year-old girl. “She was 10 days old when the Americans took me.”
Human rights advocates familiar with the new system say they believe conditions have improved considerably since Abu Ghraib. But they contend that those gains do not change the underlying legal problems with the detentions themselves and the lack of legal rights afforded to detainees.
Suspects are often brought in, with little or no physical evidence, because they were near an attack on American or Iraqi troops or based on statements by informants, who often have their own reasons for lying. Detainees have no right to a lawyer nor can they challenge the grounds for their detention.
Of the total detainee population, which peaked at 25,600 last October and which was reported on Sunday to be at 21,680, only 10 to 15 percent will ever stand trial, military lawyers said. The average detainee is interned for 333 days, and as of March, about 1,500, or 5 percent, had been in detention for more than three years, said Lt. Col. Rodney Faulk, of the 300th Military Police Brigade, who runs Camp Bucca day to day.
No one knows how many of those detained are innocent of any crime, but General Stone said he believed that only about 8,000 detainees as of March were extremists who posed a continuing security risk. “One-third are genuinely continuing and imperative security risks,” General Stone said then. “But that means two-thirds are not, or at least remain a question mark.”
Although the American military has the legal right to detain suspects in Iraq under a United Nations resolution, human rights advocates say the Americans have interpreted the resolution far more broadly than was ever intended.
“Security detention is an emergency measure, and emergency measures you should try to use temporarily,” said John Sifton, executive director of One World Research, a human rights organization based in New York.
“These things have a way of becoming addictive,” he said. “It’s great the U.S. is trying to improve things. But remember, insurgency is a crime, and you should prosecute it.”
The Detention Centers
Eager to erase the stain of the Abu Ghraib scandal, the United States emptied that complex, which had a notorious reputation under Saddam Hussein, too, and turned it over to the Iraqi government in 2006.
Of the two major American-run facilities, Camp Bucca, the larger, holds 18,580 detainees. Camp Cropper has 3,100, and that includes all the juveniles in the system as well as so-called high-value detainees — Mr. Hussein was kept there before his execution in 2006 — and about 15 women, according to figures released on Sunday. About 80 percent are Sunni and 20 percent are Shiite. Just 221 of the detainees in Bucca and Cropper combined are from outside Iraq, a tiny percentage of the total number that the military views as extremists.
Recent visits to both detention centers, along with interviews of former detainees, depicted a system whose conditions increasingly resemble those of the American civilian model, in general treatment if not in rights.
On a late winter day at Camp Bucca, the detainees whom a reporter could see appeared to be in good health and at ease. Some played volleyball or table tennis. Others sat in the sun reading the Koran. One man tended a bottle of milk that he was fermenting into homemade yogurt.
Former inmates at Bucca, however, have complained in interviews about the food there, which they described as scant and sometimes nauseating.
When detainees arrive at Bucca, they are quickly profiled to separate those identified as moderates from those thought to be extremists. The procedure, which was under way before General Stone arrived, has been expanded so the military obtains a rough psychological assessment of each detainee. Former detainees say the change has made them feel safer.
“When the prisoner entered, he was terrified, and he found takferis surrounded him and taught him takferi ways,” said Abu Yahya, a former detainee who now lives on Falluja’s outskirts, using the Arabic word for Sunni Muslim fanatics. He said he spent more than three years in detention and was beaten several times by extremist detainees. “If anyone objected, he would be beaten and attacked, and sometimes he would die.”
A more recent innovation, popular with families living far away, is videoconferencing. Now, families who cannot travel from Baghdad to Bucca to see an interned relative can go to Camp Cropper and be linked by video.
The Release Boards
Detainees say the most important change has been the creation of administrative boards to determine whether an individual remains an “imperative security risk” — the legal term used in the United Nations approval for American forces to detain Iraqis. If a detainee is no longer deemed to be a risk, he can be released.
Detainees appear before a three-person panel, with no lawyer. In almost all the hearings, the detainees deny any wrongdoing, military lawyers say. They often change their accounts to try to say the right thing to obtain release.
It took months, the lawyers said, for the Americans to conclude that the Iraqi denials were a reflexive survival strategy inculcated under Mr. Hussein, not simply an effort to obfuscate. During Mr. Hussein’s rule, people were often tortured until they confessed; then the confession was used against them. So there is a deep reluctance to admit any shade of guilt, even if the cost is an inconsistency in the detainee’s testimony that can trouble American hearing officers.
Now, roughly 45 to 50 percent of those who have hearings are recommended for release.
Although the goal is for each detention to be reviewed every four to six months, interviews with detainees suggest the process is more haphazard.
Sadiq Jaber Hashim, 43, a Shiite merchant in Baghdad, was recommended for release after his first appearance before a hearing panel. A speaker of English and Turkish and a paramedic by training, Mr. Hashim tried to persuade his captors from the moment of detention that he had done nothing wrong. But only at his first hearing — eight months later — did anyone listen.
“The accusation was not that I was a terrorist, but that I knew some terrorists,” Mr. Hashim said. Because he was Shiite, he said, he was thought to have ties to the Mahdi Army militia of the cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
“I said, ‘I hate the Mahdi Army; they tried to kidnap me in 2006.’ But they did not listen,” he said.
While the hearings have succeeded in reducing the detainee population, to a visiting journalist they were difficult to follow, and the detainees often seemed to have little understanding of the process. The reasons for detention are frequently a jumble of allegations by soldiers and informers contained in documents available only to the hearing board.
The complications of the process were on display at a hearing in March, when a detainee in Bucca who had been accused of taking part in displacing families and planting bombs in the troubled Dora district of Baghdad, made his case.
“You were captured as a suspected Al Qaeda member,” said Maj. Charles Leonard, chairman of the administrative board and an acquisition officer from Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts.
“I am innocent,” the detainee said.
“We have evidence that you were a target because of information we gathered.”
“No, no, I was in my house.”
“We have evidence that you were involved in displacing and killing Sunnis and Christians in your local area.”
“I was an employee in the Ministry of Education.”
“Did you serve as a guard?”
“Yes.”
“What will you do if you get released?”
“I’ll go back to the same job, and I have a shop with my brother.”
The detainee left, and Major Leonard sighed as he looked down at the file. “This is one of the tougher ones,” he said. “There are two allegations against him, but no physical evidence. There’s been no problems with him whatsoever in detention.”
His fellow hearing officers nodded. All three voted for release.
Evaluating the System
Looming on the horizon is the end of the United Nations authorization of the American involvement in Iraq, including the detention system. The authorization expires Dec. 31 and the United Nations is not expected to take up the issue again, leaving it to negotiations between the United States and Iraq. But the outlook for such a deal, which involves sweeping issues of troop withdrawal, as well as detention and other aspects of an American presence in Iraq, is in doubt.
On Sunday, for instance, the Iraqi government said it would not accept an American draft proposal on the issues.
The detention issues at play cover difficult legal and ethical ground, so much so that no American official interviewed for this article was willing to speak on the record about the discussions.
At the heart of the problem are all the so-called security detainees, who make up an overwhelming majority of the 21,000 people in American custody. They are the people who have been arrested because, in the judgment of the United States military, they could present some threat, even if they are not accused of extremist activity.
It is expected that Iraqi officials, who are now completing new prisons, will seek to take more control of detention operations, including taking custody of at least some of the current Iraqi detainees. That prompts the question characterized by one American military lawyer as “What do we do with the red population?” or those detainees the Americans consider to be extremists — the 8,000 detainees that General Stone referred to as a continuing threat.
Even as the Americans try to overcome their reputation for past mistreatment, serious allegations of torture and substandard conditions in some Iraqi prisons persist. Iraq’s Interior Ministry detention centers, which hold the largest numbers of pretrial detainees, have been run primarily by Shiites and have a record of overcrowding and abuse against the predominantly Sunni detainee population.
There have also been many allegations of torture. In cases in 2005 and 2006, it was American and British soldiers who rescued beaten and starved prisoners.
“If the coalition is going to turn over detainees, there are real Convention Against Torture issues,” said Kevin Lanigan, a former Army Reserve judge advocate in Iraq who is director of the law and security program at Human Rights First, a rights organization.
He was referring to the international Convention Against Torture, which among other things prohibits nations that have signed it from turning detainees over to countries where there are “substantial grounds” to believe that they would be tortured. Iraq has also signed the convention.
In the end, there is some speculation that a compromise will be reached that allows the American military to continue to detain and hold at least some of the people it deems security risks. In the meantime, the American military is pushing to review as many detention cases as possible with an eye toward quickly shrinking the overall detainee population.
Whatever the result, it is unlikely to meet American standards of justice or satisfy human rights groups.
Sheik Riyadh, for example, was released because of the new hearing panel at Camp Bucca. Still, he found little justice in the three and a half years he spent in detention.
“I like the idea of democracy in America,” he said. “But I have not touched it yet.”
Thom Shanker contributed reporting from Washington.
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6) ‘No Peace No Work’ May Day Report
By The Editors
Socialist Viewpoint
May/June 2008
[See UTube Video of March at this site.]
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/
“No peace, no work!” was the slogan printed on the buttons distributed to rank-and-file longshoremen and their supporters marching against the war on Iraq and Afghanistan on May 1. And that’s exactly what happened. All West Coast U.S. ports were shutdown tight for eight hours May 1st to protest the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. As the San Francisco Chronicle put it, “Operations in Oakland and other West Coast ports ground to a halt Thursday after ILWU workers stayed off the job...and brought cargo operations to a virtual standstill.”
The mobilization for a “No Peace, No Work Holiday” was the result of a resolution passed by the Coast Caucus of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (the rank-and-file decision-making body of the international union) on February 8 this year. The resolution was submitted by San Francisco ILWU local 10. It called for an immediate end to the U.S. wars against Iraq and Afghanistan through the withdrawal of U.S. forces (see page 15, Socialist Viewpoint, March-April, 2008).
Powerful forces tried to stop the action. The bosses, operating through the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA), opposed and tried to stop the work action, even getting an arbitrator to try to order the workers to work on May 1. The top union officers tried to water down the words of the action, changing the content from “immediate withdrawal” of U.S. forces to the “safe” withdrawal of forces (a formulation more in line with the Democratic Party officeholders who speak against the war but who vote to continue funding it on the phony grounds of “supporting the troops”). And although this was an unprecedented action by American workers resisting the U.S. military crusade in the Middle East with a work stoppage, the bosses’ media mouthpieces almost completely blocked it out of the news media, even on the West Coast.
But it happened anyway. The ILWU showed the working class of the United States and the world the way forward, reviving the traditions of a labor movement that acts in defense of the working class, and isn’t afraid to show the real power workers have. If longshore workers don’t load the ships, the war materiel won’t be transported. Without war materiel, the U.S. cannot wage war. If the factories that make the weapons and ammunition, the tanks and ATVs, stopped production, the war could not be prosecuted. And no issue is more central to the interests of the working class than the issue of war.
May 1 showed the potential and the power of the working class to act in its own interests. The war could not be carried out if U.S. workers acted collectively at the point of production to stop it. That is the shining example set by the ILWU to the working class. The action showed that the interests of workers in the U.S. are the same as the interests of workers in the very countries being attacked by U.S. imperialism.
Longshoreman crane operator, Jack Heyman, one of authors and main leaders of the May 1st work stoppage, responded to attacks on the action on the internet:
“[E]ver since the 2003 ILWU Convention here in San Francisco, our union has been opposed to the war and for the immediate withdrawal of troops. It was a resolution submitted by my local, Local 10, and passed after lengthy and democratic debate. This May Day antiwar action also passed the Caucus after a full and democratic debate with only a few voting against. It’s not only the right thing to do; it’s consistent with ILWU’s Ten Guiding Principles. It just so happens that the majority of people in this country overwhelmingly oppose the war. The Caucus resolution pointed out that both Democrat and Republican politicians continue to fund this war despite popular opinion, and we have a unique opportunity to make a powerful antiwar statement that reflects the will of the majority not only of ILWU members but of working people in this country.
“The resolution calls for bringing the troops out of the Middle East and back to the U.S. It’s interesting to note that French dockworkers also went on strike to get French troops out of the Vietnam War in the ‘50s.”
In response to an attack on the action as one favoring immigrants’ rights, Heyman said, “As far as ‘illegal aliens’ the founder of our union was one. Harry Bridges, a seaman at the time, jumped ship in New Orleans. ILWU defends immigrant workers’ rights, a position we’ve consistently adopted at ILWU Conventions. Last May Day the Caucus was adjourned so delegates could participate in an immigrant workers’ rights rally in front of San Francisco’s City Hall.... As far as May Day, it’s a workers’ holiday that was started in Chicago in the struggle for the 8-hour day. The labor movement in this country needs [to] know its proud history and reclaim its holiday.”
The ILWU’s May Day action had important support from Iraqi dockworkers, U.S. postal workers, and endorsements from unionists in Britain, New Zealand, Canada and other countries. The San Francisco Labor Council passed a motion on March 24th in solidarity with the action, encouraging “other unions to follow ILWU’s call for a ‘No Peace-No Work Holiday’ or other labor actions on May Day, to express their opposition to the U.S. wars and occupations in the Middle East.”
The editors of Socialist Viewpoint applaud the ILWU workers for leading the way forward in building an antiwar movement that can really end the war. In this issue we are printing a transcript of an interview by Amy Goodman, of the Democracy Now! Radio program with ILWU rank and file leader, Jack Heyman as well as two letters from the Port Workers Union of Iraq to the ILWU and to “workers and all peace-loving people of the world,” and the S.F. Labor Council resolution.
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7) Healthcare Wars
By Bonnie Weinstein
Socialist Viewpoint
May/June 2008
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/mayjun_08/mayjun_08_09.html
Being an uninsured San Franciscan, I joined the Community Health Network (CHN) of San Francisco General Hospital as a patient with sliding-scale coverage. The monthly fee was $49.00—a bargain compared to private health plans, for sure and there was no copayment except a $5 charge for filled prescriptions. But on April 3, 2008, the CHN sent out a letter to its patients enumerating new fees:
“Emergency Room visit—that is not an emergency $50.00; Urgent Care Visit—that is not urgent $20.00; Medical and Surgical Specialty Office Visits $20.00; Certain Radiology visits $20.00; Durable Medical Equipment $5.00-$20.00 (depending on item cost); Primary Care visits $10.00 depending on your income. The fee (copayment) is due at the time of visit; Medicines that are prescribed for you also require copayment that is due to the pharmacist at the time the prescription is filled. Thank you for your cooperation.”
I had forgotten about a previous notice dated September 4, 2007, that stated, in addition to the above,
“You must pay the copayment before your visit.... Also on October 16, 2007, patients with sliding scale coverage and prescription drug benefits through the CHN will need to pay a copayment for each drug (by prescription or over-the-counter). The copayment is for both new and refill drugs.... Depending on the drug, you will need to pay a $5.00 or $25.00 copayment for each drug. [It used to be $5.00 for whatever number of prescriptions the Doctor gave you at the time.]...‘Over-the-Counter’ drugs that do not need a prescription from a doctor may cost less than your copayment if you buy them from the drug store.”
But, according to the city’s new Healthy San Francisco plan for people without health insurance, these copayments will be in addition to the quarterly fee (in my case, $150 for three months—virtually the same as I paid for the CHN plan) but paid to Healthy San Francisco, plus the additional copayments paid to San Francisco General’s clinic (or whatever clinic you are assigned to) at the time of service.
No matter which way you look at it, healthcare for the uninsured in San Francisco will be both more expensive and over-crowded.
What is Healthy San Francisco?
According to the website at healthysanfrancisco.org,
“Healthy San Francisco is a program created by the city of San Francisco that makes health care services accessible and affordable for uninsured residents. Healthy San Francisco offers a new way for San Francisco residents who do not have health insurance, to have basic and ongoing medical care that include: Preventive and Routine Care; Prescription Medicines; Specialty Care; Urgency and Emergency Care; Hospital Care; Mental Health Care; and More... Some services such as Vision, Dental, Acupuncture, and others are not included.... Participants in Healthy San Francisco are each assigned a Medical Home. A Medical Home (in most cases, a clinic) [Such as the San Francisco General Hospital CHN clinics] provides all basic health care services... You may qualify for Healthy San Francisco if you are ALL of the following: Living on a combined family income at or below 300 percent of the Federal Poverty Level; a San Francisco resident who can provide proof of San Francisco residency; Uninsured for at least 90 days; Not eligible for public insurance programs such as Medi-Cal, Healthy Families, or Healthy Kids & Young Adults(tm); Between the ages of 18 and 64.... If eligible, you may join Healthy San Francisco regardless of immigration status or pre-existing medical conditions. If you qualify, there is room for you in the program.”
What it doesn’t say is that not only has there been no increase in healthcare services to compensate for the increase in patients at the cities clinics due to Healthy San Francisco, but in fact, services have been cut back across the board! And all the clinics are now beginning to charge similar copayments as San Francisco General’s CHN, even to their poorest patients!
The healthcare crisis is mounting
Cities and states across the country are trying to come up with ways to handle the increased demand for healthcare from an ever-increasing number of the uninsured and underinsured. And while none of the politicians like to talk about it, tens of millions of people in this country are well aware of the situation, either because of the rising costs of the healthcare they now have or because they have no healthcare at all. Unfortunately, the solutions offered by the powers that be offer little more hope.
What else can we look forward to?
In Massachusetts, health insurance is now mandatory. The uninsured must buy health insurance like they have to buy car insurance. And the insurance companies, like car-insurance companies, must cover all who apply. And like car insurance, the uninsured are distributed across health-insurance companies similarly to how car insurance is assigned to the uninsured motorist. The state determines how much you can afford to pay and exactly what coverage you will get. According to a November 25, 2007, article in The New York Times entitled “Massachusetts Faces a Test on Healthcare,” by Kevin Sack,
“The Massachusetts plan was signed into law by former Gov. Mitt Romney. . . . The law, which requires adults to be covered by Dec. 31, grants exemptions from the penalty if an income-based formula determines that coverage would not be affordable. . . . The state established a mild penalty for the first year [for not purchasing health insurance when mandated to do so]: the loss of the $219 tax exemption. But in the second year, the fine can amount to half the cost of the least expensive policy available, probably at least $1,000.”
So, in Massachusetts, the first year you file a tax return without proof of insurance you lose your whopping $219.00 tax exemption. (Ironically, the first year, it’s cheaper to not buy insurance and just lose the tax exemption!) But if you get caught the next year without insurance you will be fined at least $1,000.00!
The argument in favor of this kind of healthcare plan is that at least you can buy coverage even if you happen to have a pre-existing health condition. The way it commonly is now, it’s virtually impossible to buy health insurance if you have had medical problems in the past or have an ongoing health issue like cancer, asthma, or diabetes—either the cost of insurance is fantastically high or they simply decline coverage altogether.
The obvious drawback of the Massachusetts plan is that what the government says a person can afford for health insurance may not be what the individual truly can afford. And as the economy deteriorates further and incomes lose even more ground due to inflation, many more will need exemptions from income-based fees. So, the more hardship the economy brings, the more heavily taxed the healthcare system will become.
According to a March 27, 2008, article on e Max Health,entitled “Massachusetts Officials to Reduce Cost of Health Insurance Law,”
“Massachusetts officials are seeking ways to address the increasing costs of the state’s health insurance law as ‘the state faces a recession and pivotal funding decisions that could make or break health reform,’ The Boston Globe reports. The state faces a $1.3 billion budget shortfall, with the health insurance initiative facing about a $100 million shortfall... According to The Globe, lawmakers could address the $100 million gap ‘quickly if the state approves an increase in the cigarette tax’ and uses the money for health care, as proposed by state House Speaker Salvatore DiMasi (D). A $1-per-pack increase in the cigarette tax could generate $152 million a year. A ‘larger issue’ will be securing a new three-year commitment from the federal government, which provides about half of the funds for the state’s subsidized insurance program Commonwealth Care, The Globe reports. Massachusetts is seeking $1.5 billion over three years in federal matching funds, but the ‘Bush administration has been cutting back federal payments to the states,’ according to The Globe.”
So, already, Massachusetts is in trouble. And who will pay? The tobacco-addicted consumer—overwhelmingly poor and among the most in need of good healthcare and treatment for their addiction—it is they who will bear that additional tax burden. And lawmakers will think of more things to tax. No doubt things poor people eat, or drink, or smoke. So in Massachusetts as in San Francisco, “universal healthcare coverage” means everyone is going to pay except the corporations.
What about the unions? Do they have a solution for healthcare for all?
According to the Executive Summary: Comprehensive Healthcare Reform for Colorado, as expressed by Andy Stern, President, Service Employees International Union (SEIU),
“All Americans need financial security and quality health care they can afford... The time is long overdue for America to address these problems. America needs a plan for the 21st century. Not a Democratic or Republican plan, or a business or labor plan. We need an American plan; a plan to insure that the American Dream endures for our children and grandchildren.”
And, according to the SEIU and the Colorado Association of Public Employees (CAPE), quality healthcare for all is described as a:
“System to Ensure Access to Affordable Coverage. Health care would be provided through private market insurance products offered by a Health Insurance Exchange to ensure a choice of affordable plans with options for individuals and families. The plan would provide premium assistance to low-income uninsured for the purchase of health insurance on a sliding scale, based on income, and individuals would be allowed to voluntarily opt out to enroll in employer-sponsored insurance, using their premium assistance to pay for any required employee contribution. SEIU and CAPE believe this is a cost effective and realistic approach to expanding health care coverage in Colorado at the present time. We would, however, encourage the Legislature, the Commission and the Governor to work with the federal government to continue to expand coverage in the future until every Coloradan is guaranteed affordable health care.”
Again, this is similar to the Massachusetts plan in that everyone will be required to purchase “affordable” coverage, as determined by the state and managed by private insurance companies—just like car insurance—and they will suffer the same fate as Massachusetts. So much for so-called “universal healthcare,” which simply means that everyone must buy health insurance one way or another.
Single-payer healthcare
But some are touting “single-payer” plans, such as H.R. 676, put forward by Congressman John Conyers, Jr. This plan is different in that it will be a nationwide program and will include a conversion from a private to a nonprofit healthcare system over a fifteen-year period. It promises to be “a publicly financed, privately delivered healthcare system that improves and expands the already existing Medicare program, it would be available to all U.S. residents, and all residents living in U.S. territories.” It also promises, “...to ensure that all Americans will have access, guaranteed by law, to the highest-quality and most cost-effective healthcare services regardless of their employment, income, or healthcare status.” Specifically, it would:
“Cover all medically necessary services, including primary care, inpatient care, outpatient care, emergency care, prescription drugs, durable medical equipment, hearing services, long-term care, mental health services, dentistry, eye care, chiropractic, and substance abuse treatment. Patients have their choice of physicians, providers, hospitals, clinics, and practices. No co-pays or deductibles are permissible under this act.”
It sounds pretty good, and certainly it is an improvement over Healthy San Francisco (which doesn’t cover dental or eye care) or the Massachusetts and SEIU plans. But there is a catch. “Under H.R. 676, a family of four making the median family income of $56,200 per year would pay about $2,700 for all healthcare costs, including the current Medicare tax.” So, it’s not free but on a sliding scale (which will always be adjusted upward.) And it gives businesses a real break (which will also always be adjusted upward):
“In 2006, health insurers charged employers an average of $11,500 for a health plan for a family of four. On average, the employer paid 74 percent of this premium, or $8,510 per year. This figure does not include the additional 1.45 percent payroll tax levied on employers for Medicare. Under H.R. 676, employers would pay a 4.75 percent payroll tax for all healthcare costs, including the current Medicare tax. For an employee making the median annual family income of $56,200, the employer would pay about $2,700 per year.”
How will the program be funded in the long run? H.R. 676 will:
“Maintain current federal and state funding for existing healthcare programs; Establish employer/employee payroll tax of 4.75 percent (includes present 1.45 percent Medicare tax); Establish a 5 percent health tax on the top 5 percent of income earners, 10 percent tax on top 1 percent of wage earners; 1
Of course, this is the proposal that has not been passed. And all the candidates have distanced themselves from it. But in a New York Times article dated March 1, 2007, by Robin Toner and Janet Elder entitled, “Poll Shows Majority Back Healthcare for All,” it must be noted that, “A majority of Americans say the federal government should guarantee health insurance to every American, especially children, and are willing to pay higher taxes to do it, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll.”
While it’s admirable that working people are willing to pay more taxes if it meant that everyone would have healthcare, it nevertheless should be a right, like the right to public education and fire protection. If you have to buy it, it’s not a right—except for those who can pay for it!
Who should pay for healthcare?
Prescription drug companies are some of the highest profit-earners on Wall Street. According to an April 21, 2008, New York Times article entitled “Merck Profit Jumps on Gain” by The Associated Press,
“Drugmaker Merck (NYSE:MRK) & Co.’s on Monday reported that its profit almost doubled in the first quarter due to a $1.4 billion distribution from a partner drug company; its sales were slightly higher than a year ago.... The maker of allergy and asthma pill Singulair reported net income of $3.3 billion, or $1.52 per share, for the January-March period, up from $1.7 billion, or 78 cents a share, a year ago.... Excluding the $1.4 billion gain from AstraZeneca PLC (NYSE:AZN) of Britain and other one-time items, Whitehouse Station, N.J.-based Merck earned 89 cents per share in the latest quarter.... Revenues totaled $5.82 billion, up 1 percent from $5.77 billion in the first three months of 2007.”
On the same day, The Associated Press authored an article that appeared in The Times, entitled “Eli Lilly Profit Doubles on Higher Sales.” The article reported that “Drug maker Eli Lilly and Co. said strong sales for Cymbalta and Cialis helped double its first-quarter profit” and that, “The Indianapolis-based company said earnings jumped to $1.06 billion, or 97 cents per share, from year-ago profit of $508.7 million, or 47 cents per share.”
According to an article by Adrianne Appel of Inter Press Service dated April 10, 2007, entitled “More Uninsured Means More Healthcare Corporate Profits,”
“In 2005, the drug companies Procter and Gamble, Merck, Amgen and Abbot and insurer UnitedHealth Group were among the 50 most profitable Fortune 500 companies in the United States, according to Fortune.... Many large drug companies richly reward their chief executive officers with salaries and bonuses. Johnson and Johnson’s CEO received salary and bonuses in 2006 of $28 million, according to Dow Jones. And Merck CEO Richard Clark received $10 million in compensation, according to AFL-CIO Corpwatch.... When former Pfizer CEO Henry McKinnell left the company in 2006, he was given pension, stock and other benefits worth $180 million, according to AFL-CIO Corpwatch.... But CEO William McGuire, of UnitedHealth Group, a health insurance company, stands alone. His annual salary in 2005 was $124 million, and he has been provided stock options worth more than $1.7 billion, according to Forbes.com. As part of his retirement package, he and his spouse will receive free healthcare for as long as they live, according to AFL-CIO Corpwatch.”
Clearly, we have the beginning of a base upon which to secure the funds to provide free healthcare for all, i.e., from soaring corporate profits and CEO bonuses!
Why is it so hard to demand that these corporations open their books? Or explain how they can justify accumulating such profits at the expense of the sick, and the blatant sacrifice of the lives of the poor who can’t afford the medication and medical care they need? Yes, working people are willing to pay—even for their brothers and sisters who are not insured. But the wealthiest corporations and the greediest CEOs are not willing to pay a dime that they can’t double-back in profits!
What about the profits from corporations that make people sick—like tobacco and alcohol companies; all kinds of manufacturing companies that poison the atmosphere, water, and ground with pollutants; or corporations that clear-cut forests, or build obsolescence into their products so that they break down and can’t be repaired—wasting precious un-renewable resources because a new product has to be purchased; or corporations who take risks on the lives of those who use their services, like the airlines who cut back on maintenance and air-traffic control, and who sacrifice safety, comfort and reliability for increased profits?
Is healthcare a right?
Do children have the right to live after they are born no matter what the economic status of their parents is? Do the old and infirm have the right to live even though their families can’t afford to pay for their care and are, perhaps, unable to give it themselves? Does the working person driven from a job by firing, layoffs, or buyouts have the right to go on living if he or she is driven to poverty? Does the family driven from their home by mortgage foreclosure have the right to go on living? Or should we surrender our children, our aged parents, ourselves to the “disintegration box” of Star Trek fame when we are driven to poverty or unemployment or be too young, or become too ill to work?
These are questions we have every right to ask ourselves, for these questions are at the very root of the profit-driven system of capitalism and the relationship that working people have to it.
Trillions for war
And what of the trillions of dollars spent on the war machine—the giant military-industrial complex that is stationed throughout the world, wherever oil and other natural resources can be found—to plunder them willy-nilly and put them at the disposal of U.S. profit-grabbing corporations?
We know what rights the U.S. government and its political lackeys have—whatever rights they want to declare for themselves; to invade countries; to cross any borders they choose with their armies and/or their profits; to declare war on the basis of lies and falsehoods; to give tax-cuts to the rich; to increase taxes on the poor; to build jails and appoint themselves as judges, lawmakers, jailers and executioners; to hide their profits; to cut wages and jobs; to withhold healthcare—not just to the uninsured but to the innocent children born to them—if it will turn a higher profit for them. They want the right to keep profits to themselves!
What are our rights?
Working people must start to ask themselves what rights they think they should have. What rights do they think their children deserve? What kind of a world do we all deserve?
Working people have to start asking themselves what kind of a world we could have if the profits created by our labor could be shared the world over, instead of hoarded by the top one percent of the wealthiest people on the planet. Working people must start asking themselves whether the trillions of dollars spent on war and mayhem could be put to better use—perhaps by ending the very poverty and injustice that are the true causes of war.
What rights do we working people have? Only the rights we are willing to organize together, fight for, and take!
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8) Student Loans Start to Bypass 2-Year Colleges
By JONATHAN D. GLATER
June 2, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/02/business/02loans.html?ref=us
Some of the nation’s biggest banks have closed their doors to students at community colleges, for-profit universities and other less competitive institutions, even as they continue to extend federally backed loans to students at the nation’s top universities.
Citibank has been among the most aggressive in paring the list of colleges it serves. JPMorgan Chase, PNC and SunTrust say they have not dropped whole categories, but are cutting colleges as well. Some less-selective four-year colleges, like Eastern Oregon University and William Jessup University in Rocklin, Calif., say they have been summarily dropped by some lenders.
The practice suggests that if the credit crisis and the ensuing turmoil in the student loan business persist, some of the nation’s neediest students will be hurt the most. The difficulty borrowing may deter them from attending school or prompt them to take a semester off. When they get student loans, they will wind up with less attractive terms and may run a greater risk of default if they have to switch lenders in the middle of their college years.
Tuition and loan amounts can be quite small at community colleges. But these institutions, which are a stepping stone to other educational programs or to better jobs, often draw students from the lower rungs of the economic ladder. More than 6.2 million of the nation’s 14.8 million undergraduates — over 40 percent — attend community colleges. According to the most recent data from the College Board, about a third of their graduates took out loans, a majority of them federally guaranteed.
“If we put too many hurdles in their way to get a loan, they’ll take a third job or use a credit card,” said Jacqueline K. Bradley, assistant dean for financial aid at Mendocino College in California. “That almost guarantees that they won’t be as successful in their college career.”
So far, financial aid administrators say they have been able to find fallback lenders that students can switch to, but the hurdles are costly to students — in money and time. The maximum interest rate on federal loans, now at 6.8 percent on the most commonly used loans, is set by Congress, but lenders are scrapping benefits, like rate cuts for borrowers who make their payments on time or allow direct withdrawals from bank accounts.
Some loan companies have exited the student loan business entirely, viewing it as unprofitable in the current environment. By splitting out community colleges and less-selective four-year institutions, some remaining lenders seem to be breaking the marketplace into tiers. Students attending elite, expensive, public and private four-year universities can expect loans to remain plentiful. The banks generally say these loans are bigger, more profitable and less risky, in part perhaps because the banks expect the universities’ graduates to earn more.
Lenders will not say how many colleges they have dropped, making it hard to determine just how many institutions have been affected. Although financial aid administrators say the trend is widespread, they are often reluctant to identify which lenders have stopped serving their colleges, for fear that it will complicate matters for current students who have taken out loans from those lenders and still need to deal with them.
Michelle McClain, 40, who is studying to become a teacher, learned on Friday that she would have to find a new lender after Citibank dropped William Jessup University. The news angered her.
“The loan is between me and the lender,” Ms. McClain said. “I’m the one that’s taking out the loan, I’m the one whose credit is in jeopardy if I don’t pay it, I am the one totally responsible for the loan, and as long as I’m going to an accredited college, I don’t understand why it would make one iota of difference where I am going to college.”
The government has been taking additional steps to keep the student loan market operating smoothly. And some lenders’ doors remain wide open. Sallie Mae and Nelnet recently reaffirmed their commitment to federal loans regardless of the institution a student attends. Kristin Shear, director of student financial services at Santa Rosa Junior College, said that days after the school was dropped by Citibank, Wells Fargo called to say it was eager to lend to students there.
The banks that are pulling out say their decisions are based on an analysis of which colleges have higher default rates, low numbers of borrowers and small loan amounts that make the business less profitable. (The average amount borrowed by community college students is about $3,200 a year, according to the College Board.) Still, the cherry-picking strikes some as peculiar; after all, the government is guaranteeing 95 percent of the value of these loans.
Mark C. Rodgers, a spokesman for Citibank, which lends through its Student Loan Corporation unit, said the bank had “temporarily suspended lending at schools which tend to have loans with lower balances and shorter periods over which we earn interest. And, in general, we are suspending lending at certain schools where we anticipate processing minimal loan volume.”
Financial aid officials in California said that Citibank had stopped making loans to students at all community colleges in the state. Mr. Rodgers said the bank would not provide details about which schools were affected.
The financial aid director at William Jessup, Korey Compaan, said he did not understand the bank’s explanation.
“The logic is so flawed, that for us to have volume with them in the future, we have to have had volume with them in the past,” Mr. Compaan said. Simply to cut off students at a college, he continued, “I find it totally and completely unethical.”
The government sets the criteria for college participation in federal loan programs, requiring that colleges be accredited and have low default rates to participate, for example. Now lenders are being more selective than the government.
“There’s been a certain amount of market segmentation going on, but this is the first time we’ve seen a lender, especially as large as Citibank, saying, ‘We don’t want to do business with you,’ ” said Samuel F. Collie, director of financial aid at Eastern Oregon University in La Grande, Ore.
“There’s a fundamental issue of fairness and equity that’s certainly not being addressed in this,” Mr. Collie said. “But short of completely revamping the way that financial aid, especially loans, is being delivered to students in this country, I don’t know that we have any easy answers.”
The credit crisis, which has made it harder for some lenders to raise money, and a reduction in the government’s subsidy to lenders have contributed to the reevaluations by the lenders.
“This is one of those perfect storm situations,” said Susan L. Mead, director of financial aid at Dutchess Community College in New York. She said her institution had been dropped by no less than six lenders: HSBC, Citibank, M&T, Chase, Citizens Bank and Student Loan Xpress.
Christine Holevas, a spokeswoman for Chase, said that the bank considered several factors in deciding whether to lend to a particular college’s students. “The repayment rate, you look at the size and length of the loan,” she said. “We have tightened credit standards, yes, but we haven’t cut off any category of school.”
Hugh Suhr, a spokesman for SunTrust, said it was “stepping away from some relationships” with universities, but that this was “not based on any particular type of school.” Mr. Suhr said the bank continued to lend to students at a range of institutions.
Another danger for students is that as they are forced to find and switch to replacement lenders, they may lose track of some debt obligations and miss a few payments.
“It might put them in default,” said Claudia Martin, director of financial aid at Monterey Peninsula College, a community college in California that was dropped by Citibank and two other lenders. “We always recommend that a student stay with the same lender all through school.”
Commercial colleges, among the first to suffer when lenders withdrew from the market, have been openly critical of the new differentiation.
“From what I can tell from our lawyers, it’s not technically illegal for them to reject schools,” said Harris N. Miller, the president of the Career College Association in Washington, a trade group for commercial colleges. “I just think that’s very objectionable.”
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9) State Dept. Reinstates Gaza Fulbright Grants
By ETHAN BRONNER
June 2, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/02/world/middleeast/02fulbright.html?ref=us
JERUSALEM — The American State Department has reinstated seven Fulbright grants offered to Palestinians in Gaza for advanced study in the United States, reversing a decision to withdraw the scholarships because of Israel’s ban on Palestinians’ leaving Gaza for study abroad.
The American Consulate in Jerusalem sent e-mail messages on Sunday night to all seven telling them it was “working closely” with Israeli officials to secure them exit permits. Maj. Peter Lerner, spokesman for the Israeli Defense Ministry’s office of civilian affairs, said the Gazans would be granted permits after individual security checks.
On Thursday the seven received e-mail messages saying the grants had been “redirected” because of Israel’s closing of Gaza, an area run by the militant anti-Israel group Hamas. The closing, an effort to punish Hamas for its rocket and mortar barrages of southern Israel, prevents Palestinians from leaving Gaza except for medical emergencies.
But after word of the grant withdrawals got out, senior American and Israeli officials expressed surprise and outrage, saying that training ambitious and talented young people under Fulbright grants was one of the ways to help blunt the appeal of radical forces in Palestinian society.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she was surprised to hear of the withdrawals, adding: “If you cannot engage young people and give complete horizons to their expectations and their dreams, I don’t know that there would be any future for Palestine. We will take a look. I am a huge supporter of Fulbrights.”
Tom Casey, a spokesman for the State Department, said because the seven Gazans had already been thoroughly evaluated for one of the most prestigious foreign educational programs run by the United States, “It ought to be falling off a log for them to be able to do this.”
On Wednesday, the education committee of Israel’s Parliament held a hearing on student movement out of Gaza, with many members saying they were horrified by the policy barring students from leaving. They asked the Defense Ministry to reconsider the policy and report back in two weeks.
Abdulrahman Abdullah, one of the Fulbright recipients in Gaza, said that when the consulate’s e-mail message arrived he had been in the middle of corresponding with Fulbright winners around the world who were mounting a campaign in support of the Gazans.
“Suddenly I got this e-mail, and then I told them I had succeeded in this long battle,” he said. Mr. Abdullah, 30, had been trying to get a grant for five years and plans to pursue an M.B.A. at one of several American universities.
Like the others who got the good news on Sunday, however, he said he could not be truly happy until the other 600 or so Gazans with grants to study abroad also got out.
Major Lerner said that the policy toward study abroad for Gazans was under review and could change, but that the case of the seven Fulbright scholars was accelerated. He cited their tight timetable, but it seems likely that the political pressure played a role.
Sari Bashi, who runs an Israeli organization called Gisha, which focuses on the free movement of Palestinians, said that while the group welcomed the decision to let out the seven Fulbright winners, “Gisha calls on Israel to allow all Palestinian students accepted to universities abroad to exercise their right to leave Gaza and access education, in order to obtain the tools they need to build a better future in the region.”
On Monday, Israel’s Supreme Court will hear petitions brought by Gisha on behalf of two students seeking exit permits for study programs in Germany and Britain. Since January, Ms. Bashi said, almost no students have gotten out of Gaza for such study.
Taghreed el-Khodary contributed reporting from Gaza.
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10) Selling War -- "What WE Say Goes."
Gunnar Garbo
Introduction at the Conference on the Implications of Language for Peace and Development, (IMPLAN), University of Oslo, May2, 2008.
http://nasir-khan.blogspot.com/2008/05/grand-deception-of-selling-war.html
When Hitler’s troops invaded Norway in 1940, their bomber planes also spread leaflets declaring that the troops considerately came to protect the Norwegian people and secure our freedom and independence. In warfare lies like these are common. Recently two non-profit journalism organizations in the US documented that during the first two years after 11 September President Bush and his top officials issued at least 935 false statements about reasons for attacking Iraq. Bush led with 259 lies. [1]
But the tradition of leaders’ lying is older. Already Plato proclaimed the right of leaders to tell lies in order to deceive both enemies and their own citizens for the benefit of the state. A person who enthusiastically picked up Plato’s advice was the Chicago professor of philosophy Leo Strauss, who taught his doctrines to a number of the top people who joined the staff of the Bush administration. Abram Shulsky, who produced a considerable part of the misinformation about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, once said that he had learned from Strauss that cheating is the norm in politics. [2]
However, in his farsighted book 1984 George Orwell pointed out that it is not enough for authoritarian leaders just to tell specific lies. He found that their ultimate aim is to create a new reality in the minds of people, different from the real world. Orwell gave us illustrative examples like: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. If the leaders can make most people internalize double-speak of this kind and believe that the new way of speaking depicts reality, they have actually changed the world in which we live. [3]
In connection with the first Gulf war President Bush, Sr., demonstrated that he had learned “the manufacture of consent”. Stating that the US had got a new credibility, the president proclaimed: “What WE say goes.” The administration of his son is following in senior’s footsteps. A year after 9/11 Ron Suskind, a columnist who had investigated the White House for a number of years, happened to mention the intellectual principles of empiricism and enlightenment in a conversation with a presidential adviser. “That’s not the way in which the world really works anymore”, was the answer he got. “We are an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality, we’ll act again creating other new realities, which you can study too. WE are history’s actors, and all of you will be left to just study what we do.” [4]
This is the arrogance of power. It is the way empires talk. Dictatorial authority displaces arguments. The trick is to reduce the general public to a proper spectator role. As Noam Chomsky points out, the general population should be marginalized, each person isolated, deprived of the kinds of association that might lead to independent thought and political action. By constructing a grand edifice of lies terrorizing the domestic audience by images of menacing threats from “failed states” like Iran and North Korea they manufacture consent to military interventions - instead of trying to solve conflicts by peaceful means, which they are committed to by the UN Charter. [5]
Sometimes factual developments come in handily for the deceivers. Karl Rove, who for several years was President Bush’s closest adviser, recently said to an audience that “History sometimes sends you things, and 9/11 came our way.” In an article about Euphemism and American Violence Professor David Bromwich has pointed out how President Bush viewed the September 11 attack as an opportunity. The leadership should do far more than respond to the attack, he felt. Better to use it as an opportunity to “go massive”, as Donald Rumsfeld put it: “Sweep it all up. Things related and not.” [6]
That is what they did. Instead of treating the 9/11 attack as an international crime, which it was, they responded by launching what they called a global war on terrorism. This phrase was a carefully chosen example of double-talk. It might indicate something as harmless as “a war on aids” or “a war on poverty”. But it could also mean an aggressive use of military weapons. The US Congress willingly gave the president the authority he wanted to use military force wherever in the world he found persons that he determined had contributed to the 9/11 attack and who might repeat similar performances in the future. As we have seen in Afghanistan and Iraq, his war on terror became what John Pilger calls a war of terror. And it primarily hits masses of ordinary people who had nothing to do with 9/11. [7]
Terrorism is not an armed enemy. It is a concept naming a special way of fighting, the harassing of people in order to bend their leaders to the will of the harassers. Western governments tend to define it as a cruel tool solely used by rebels. But in fact militant states are terrorizing people much more devastatingly than insurgent movements.
But missiles and bombs can’t kill a concept. Extinguishing terrorism depends upon a change in the attitudes of common people and politicians all over the world. Not the kind of brainwashing which is facilitated by double-talk, but change promoted by ethical attention, rational reflection, open debate and popular mobilization. Terrorism may be overcome when all states at long last learn to respect human rights and international law. Especially it presupposes measures to remove those underlying causes of violence which the UN General Assembly twenty years ago rightly described as “misery, frustration, grievance and despair, and which cause people to sacrifice human lives, including their own, in an effort to effect radical changes.”. [8]
Of course the Western war leaders paid no attention to the UN resolution, if they had seen it at all. Neither did they care about the motives which Osama bin Laden gave for 9/11, quoting decades of Western support to oppression in Palestine, sanctions against Iraq and US bases in Saudi Arabia as reasons for the attack. This was obviously old-fashioned language, which did not conform to the new realities which Bush and Blair were creating with their rhetoric.
They used the 9/11 attack as an opportunity to launch a war against states in which they anyhow wanted to produce “regime change” as they call it. This notion must by all means be distinguished from forced interference through military aggression. According to President Bush the plane hijackers carried out their acts because they hated the freedom of the United States. To avoid further attacks on free societies it was not sufficient to fight terrorists. It was also necessary to limit the domestic freedoms which Bush and Blair were fighting for by restrictions on private integrity, on free travel, on legal protection and on the right to information.
It may be difficult for people to understand the need to suppress freedom in order to promote it. You will first grasp its logic when you internalize double-speak.
After the hijackers on 11th September 2001 killed three thousand persons, including themselves, history was seen by the war leaders to begin anew. Neither the Bush administration nor the main media paid much attention to the fact that nearly one hundred thousand people were killed through the more trivial practice of murder in the United States during the first six years after the attack. [9] Neither were they much shocked by the fact that international acts of terrorism increased sevenfold after Bush started his war on terrorism. [10]
Rushing to the defence of USA in Central Asia Norwegian governments have exposed even Norway to the possible risk of terrorist retaliation. But the supreme commander of the Norwegian defence forces, General Diesen, has tried to calm down public opposition to war by his own contribution to the double-speak vocabulary. He states that offense is defence. Civilian assistance to rebuilding Afghanistan is according to him offensive. Military operations against Afghan resistance are on the other hand defensive. The general’s problem is to convince Afghans about the reasonableness of turning front to back. Ignorant local people may believe that words still mean what they used to do.
To demonize the enemies as evil people the way Bush did with his Axis of Evil speech is of course a valuable contribution to the new way of thinking, which also happens to be old one. Groups who oppose the US in Afghanistan or Iraq are regularly called Taliban or al-Qaida, who are seen as outlaws and free game. We are told that in Iraq a huge part of them are foreign intruders, though 98 to 99 per cent of the prisoners which the occupiers have interned are Iraqi citizens. The al-Sadr militia is vilified as “criminals” or “criminal gangs”. More than one half of the US occupying forces are mercenaries, hired by the occupier. They are referred to as contractors or security missions.
There is a striking similarity between the language used by the aggressors. When the former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 they portrayed the invasion as a humanitarian intervention. They did not come to conqueror anyone. Their aim was to prevent the establishment of a terrorist regime and to protect the people against genocide. Eleven years later the US and the UK also invaded Afghanistan, this time to protect themselves against terrorism, which also happened to be in the best interest of the Afghan people. They wanted namely to promote democracy and human rights in the Middle East. “We are not conquerors”, declared Bush, “we are liberators.”
Both invasions were proclaimed to be in conformity with international law, though none of them were. Governments on both sides called on their peoples to “back our troops”, who were fighting for a noble cause. In both cases the invaders paid much less attention to the huge number of Afghan victims than to their own losses. And in both cases the invaders warned that premature withdrawal of their troops would lead to catastrophic conditions for the local people. At long last the Soviet forces did all the same retire, and the Afghan people seem to have suffered somewhat less under the rule of Taliban. The USA and NATO are on their part escalating the war in order to avoid “losing face” or, to put it in proper language, not to expose the war-stricken population to the loss of peace and freedom.
Just as destroying vegetation in Vietnam was called pacification and invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq were presented as defence against terrorism or atomic weapons, US acts of torture in Abu Ghraib or elsewhere are termed interrogation in depth. One of the means of questioning which president Bush has reserved the right to allow is named waterboarding. This means starting to drown a suspect, but humanely interrupting the drowning before the victim dies.
We find the same preference for euphemism in a number of other cases. When Norway participated in NATO’s war over Kosovo our prime minister Kjell Magne Bondevik described it as a peace operation. To make the attack seem in conformity with international law the Government produced false testimonies to Parliament.
We are dealing not only with double-language, but also with double moral standards. While Iran and North Korea are being threatened not to acquire weapons of mass destruction, Israel, which has long ago produced atomic bombs and quietly threaten its neighbours with them, is never blamed. And while Iraq was forced by war to withdraw from Kuwait no pressure is being put on Israel to return to the Palestinians the land of theirs which Israel has occupied and annexed as its own.
Mainstream media have gone along with all this misuse of power, practically without opposing it. A few fine journalists, like Robert Fisk and John Pilger, have stood out as rare exceptions, focusing on the impact of the military violence on the victims in the form of dead or crippled corpses, suffering relatives and homeless refugees, collateral damage as this is called by the double-speakers. Even the main media have attended to impacts on the ground, but with an enormous difference between the attention shown towards the casualties of one’s own armies than towards far greater losses of human life inflicted upon the populations of the countries which are exposed to our pacification.
How shall we disclose and counter the double-language of the war-mongers? That is a job for all of us, not least for educators. People need to learn more about the ways in which the meaning of words may be twisted. Words may be used to express thoughts, to hide thoughts or to hide lack of thoughts. They may also be used to lie, to misinform and to fabricate a false consciousness. People should be less impressed by authorities. In most cases political leaders don’t understand more than common people, though they pretend to be in the know. We need the ability to listen critically, to distinguish between proven facts and dubious assertions and to make use of alternative means of information and communication.
Above all this is a challenge for journalists. To-day they tend to defend themselves as professional, when they are in fact giving priority to writing and programming which produce that audience and further those profits which owners and advertising corporations are insisting on. Media professionalism ought to be something very different, namely to provide information which shows readers and listeners the realities behind political and commercial rhetorics and to tell people what they need to know in order to check their masters and influence the forming of our societies. A leading Norwegian journalist, Ragnar Wold, many years ago said that when Hitler stated that he wanted peace with all his neighbours, newspapers should not simply quote the dictator, but announce that now Hitler had produced one more of his lies.
That is still a good advice.
[1] http://transfondo-noticias.blogspot.com/2008/01/false-statements-preceded-war.html
[2] Gunnar Garbo: Verken ny eller liberal. Kolofon forlag, Oslo, 2008, side 66.
[3] George Orwell: 1984.. A Signet Classic published by New American Library 1977. Page 16
[4]Christian Salmon: Scheherazade in the White House. Le Monde Diplomatique, April 2008
[5] Noam Chomsky: “What we say goes”; The Middle East and the New World Order. Z Magazine, May 1991.
[6] David Bromwich: Euphemism and American Violence. Ney York Review of Books, April 3 2008
[7] Joint Resolution S.J. RES. 23, 107th Congress. To authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States.
[8] Measures to prevent international terrorism. General Assembly A/RES/¤”/159, 7 December 1987
[9] Bob Herbert: America’s Other Kind of Terror. N.Y. Times August 18, 2007.
[10] Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank: The Iraq Effect: War Has Increased Terrorism Sevenfold Worldwide. A Mother Jones’ Study at the Center on Law and Security at the N.Y. University.
Gunnar Garbo (b. 1924) has been a prominent public figure in Norway. His career covers a wide range of activities, in journalism, politics and diplomatic service. In 1960s- and 70s he was one of the most noticeable political activists in Norway. As a Member of Parliament for Venstre (Liberal Party) 1958-1973, and the chairman of Venstre 1964-1970, he, later on, held different position in the United Nations and also served as Norway’s ambassador to Tanzania 1987-1992. He has written a number of books on political and international issues.
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11) Last Flight of the Honeybee?
By Alison Benjamin
The Guardian
May 31, 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/may/31/animalwelfare.environment
A bee-less world wouldn't just mean the end of honey—Einstein said that if the honeybee became extinct, then so would mankind.
Dave Hackenberg's bees have been on the road for four days. To reach the almond orchards of California's Central Valley, they pass through the fertile plains of the Mississippi, huge cattle ranches and oilfields in Texas, and the dusty towns of New Mexico on their 2,600-mile journey from Florida. The bees will have seen little of the dramatic landscape, being cooped up in hives stacked four high on the back of trucks. Each truck carries close to 500 hives, tethered with strong harnesses and covered with black netting to prevent the millions of passengers from escaping. When the drivers pull over to sleep, the bees have a break from the constant movement and wind speed, but there's no opportunity to look around and stretch their wings.
Their final destination is some two hours north of Los Angeles. As the sun begins to fade over the vast, flat terrain, the convoy slowly snakes through orchards filled with row upon row of almond trees stretching as far as the eye can see. Every February, the valley plays host to billions of honeybees as trees burst into blossom, blanketing the landscape in a soft, pinkish hue which extends to the horizon.
The sandy loam and Mediterranean climate are perfect for the cultivation of almonds, but that's where any comparisons to picturesque orchards of Spain or Italy end. Here, there are no verdant weeds, wild flowers or grass verges to please the eye, just never-ending trees that form what looks like an outdoor production line.
In the cool hours after sunset and before sunrise, more than one million hives are unloaded at regular intervals between the trees by commercial beekeepers such as Dave Hackenberg, who have travelled from the far corners of the US to take part in the world's largest managed pollination event. The mammoth orchards of Central Valley stretch the distance from London to Aberdeen, and the 60 million almond trees planted with monotonous uniformity along the 400-mile route require half of all the honeybees in the US to pollinate them—a staggering 40 billion.
By February 16, National Almond Day in the US, the trees are usually covered in flowers and humming with the sound of busy bees. Attracted by the sweet nectar that each flower offers, the bees crawl around on the petals to find the perfect sucking position. As they do so, their furry bodies are dusted with beads of pollen. As they fly from blossom to blossom in search of more of the sweet energy drink, they transfer pollen from the male part of the flower to the female part, and so fertilise it. Not long afterwards, the plant's ovaries swell into fruit, which by late August turn into precious, oval-shaped nuts.
Without this army of migrant pollinators paying a visit for three weeks every year, the trees would fail to bear the almonds that are California's most valuable horticultural export. Last year, they earned the state more than $1.9bn, double the revenue from its Napa Valley vineyards. Moreover, 80% of the world's almonds now come from this pocket of the planet. But the supply of almonds in confectionery, cakes and packets of nuts is now threatened by a mysterious malady that is causing honeybees to disappear.
Hackenberg was the first beekeeper to report that his bees had vanished. On a November day 18 months ago, he checked the hives in his Florida bee yard to find they were empty. "They weren't dead, they were just gone," he recalls.
Since then, close on two million colonies of honeybees across the US have been wiped out. The strange phenomenon, dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD), is also thought to have claimed the lives of billions of honeybees around the world. In Taiwan, 10 million honeybees were reported to have disappeared in just two weeks, and throughout Europe honeybees are in peril.
In Britain, John Chapple was the first to raise the alarm. In January 2007, he lost all of the 14 colonies in his garden in west London. "It's too cold at that time of year to open the hives," he says, "so I always check on the bees by giving the hive a thump and waiting for what sounds like a roaring sound to come back. But there was nothing, just silence." When he opened the hives to see what had happened, he found them practically empty. Examination of a further 26 hives scattered across the capital revealed that two-thirds had perished.
"I was completely shocked," says Chapple, who chairs the London Beekeepers' Association. "I could attribute some losses to a failing queen bee or wax moths, but there were a few I could find no reason for. There was a healthy queen and a few bees, but nothing else." Chapple's inquiries as to whether the parks where he kept some of his hives had sprayed new pesticides also drew a blank.
He was not alone. Beekeepers in north-west London also reported strange losses. Chapple calls the disappearance the "Mary Celeste syndrome". A year later, a survey of hives by government bee inspectors across Britain has found that one in five colonies has perished this winter.
There are some 270,000 honeybee hives in Britain run by 44,000 keepers, more than 90% of them amateurs. According to estimates by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), bees contribute £165m a year to the economy through their pollination of fruit trees, field beans and other crops. In addition, the 5,000 tonnes of British honey sold in UK stores generates a further £12m.
UK farming minister Lord Rooker, however, warned last year that honeybees are in acute danger: "If nothing is done about it, the honeybee population could be wiped out in 10 years," he said. Last month, he launched a consultation on a national strategy to improve and protect honeybee health.
People's initial response to the idea of a bee-less world is often either, "That's a shame, I'll have no honey to spread on my toast" or, "Good—one less insect that can sting me." In fact, honeybees are vital for the pollination of around 90 crops worldwide. In addition to almonds, most fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds are dependent on honeybees. Crops that are used as cattle and pig feed also rely on honeybee pollination, as does the cotton plant. So if all the honeybees disappeared, we would have to switch our diet to cereals and grain, and give our wardrobes a drastic makeover.
According to Albert Einstein, our very existence is inextricably linked to bees—he is reputed to have said: "If the bee disappears off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left."
Bees are a barometer of what man is doing to the environment, say beekeepers; the canary in the coalmine. Just as animals behave weirdly before an earthquake or a hurricane, cowering in a corner or howling in the wind, so the silent, empty hives are a harbinger of a looming ecological crisis. But what is causing them to vanish—pesticides, parasites, pests, viruses? No one knows for sure. The more fanciful theories when CCD was first detected included an al-Qaida plot to wreck US agriculture, radiation from mobile phones and even celestial intervention in the form of honeybee rapture.
Scientists around the world are trying to pinpoint the culprit, but it is proving elusive. They have even set up an international network to monitor honeybee losses—a sort of Interpol for bees—which is operating out of Switzerland. Its coordinator, bee pathologist Dr Peter Neumann, blames a bloodsucking mite called varroa. Little bigger than a pinhead, it has preyed on honeybees in Europe and the US since its arrival 30 years ago. Under a microscope, the reddish-brown mite looks like a cross between a jellyfish and a Frisbee. It activates lethal viruses in honeybees and carries them from bee to bee when it feeds on their blood, like a dirty syringe spreading HIV/Aids. "It has to be the backbone of the problem," Neumann says. "But it is probably not acting alone."
In the US, where the genetic code of the honeybee was unravelled by scientists two years ago, they have been employing advanced technology to discover if a new virus is responsible for killing the bees. Genome sequencing techniques uncovered the DNA of a virus called Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV) that was found in almost all of the hives suffering from CCD. The discovery, published in Science, was hailed as a major breakthrough in the investigation. But honeybees are riddled with latent viruses. They become a problem and cause disease only when the bee's immune system is shot. Like humans, they are prone to illness when they are stressed and run-down. So the real question is, what is making the bees too weak to fight a virus?
The answer is probably overwork, coupled with various environmental factors that are the flipside of pollination on an industrial scale and intensified food production. After Hackenberg's bees have pollinated the almonds in California, they head north to the apple orchards of Washington State, then east for the cranberries and pumpkins, before reaching Maine in May to pollinate blueberries. In a year, they can cover 11,000 miles. It's a well-worn route that's travelled by many of the 1,000 commercial beekeepers in America who between them own 90% of the country's 2.4 million honeybee colonies. It is pollination, rather than honey production, that keeps US beekeepers in business. In 2007, honey production was worth $160m to the US economy, compared with pollination services that have been estimated at $15bn.
Joe Traynor is a California bee broker. From a small office in a quiet side street in downtown Bakersfield, on the southern tip of Central Valley, he runs a lucrative business matching almond growers with beekeepers. I put to him that surely all this moving around of bees, confined to their hives for long periods, must be stressful for them. He admits that too much travel is not good for their health: "When you're trucking bees, they need sleep, just as humans do, and the bumping around in the truck for two to three days keeps them awake, and this lowers their resistance to pests and disease."
Hackenberg, however, disagrees: "I've been doing this 40-odd years. We've done all the same things, but the rules have changed. Something's messing up."
Hackenberg, 59, wears cowboy boots, a checked shirt and blue jeans. He even has a hard hat in the shape of a Stetson, with netting attached that he wears when unloading beehives. He began his own investigations into what killed 2,000 of his honeybees at the end of 2006, by talking to growers and reading up on pesticide use and research into their effects on bees. "It's those new neonicotinoid pesticides that growers are using," he says. "That's what's messing up the bees' navigation system so they can't find their way home."
Honeybees have a sophisticated dance language they use to communicate with each other in the hive. Until Karl von Frisch unlocked the mysteries of this dance—his discovery won him a Nobel prize in 1973—we didn't fully appreciate that bees returning to the hive laden with nectar and pollen will tell their sisters (all worker bees are female) where they got their supplies by doing a dance that points to the location of the flowers in relation to the sun's position.
Tests have shown that the pesticides Hackenberg refers to can interfere with the bees' communication and orientation skills, and also impair memory.
With innocuous brand names such as Gaucho, Assail and Merit, these pesticides are used worldwide, from sunflower fields to apple orchards, lawns to golf courses. The chemicals they contain are an artificial type of nicotine that acts as a neurotoxin that attacks insects' nervous systems on contact or ingestion. Because it is systemic, the chemical moves throughout a plant, so if it is applied as a seed dressing, it will travel to the shoots, stem, leaves and flowers where bees can come into contact with small doses. Many of these widely used pesticides are classified by the US Environmental Protection Agency as "highly toxic to bees" and come with a warning label intended to help prevent their exposure to the pollinators.
"It's in such small print that the growers don't see it," Hackenberg says. He accuses farmers of "stacking"—or mixing—pesticides, herbicides and fungicides. "No one has ever tested what happens to the toxicity if they do mix, simply because the chemical companies are not required to by law, but this combination could be a thousand times more lethal than if the chemicals are applied separately."
In Britain, beekeeping is very small-scale compared with the US. There are a few hundred professional beekeepers, who run an average of 100 hives each; only around 50 of them transport bees to orchards, usually over distances of 25 or so miles, rather than across a continent. Many orchards provide a year-round home for hives kept by amateur beekeepers, so there is no need for migratory beekeepers. But in this country, as in the rest of Europe, it is hard to escape pesticides and the varroa mite.
In France, beekeepers have for more than a decade waged a war against the chemical giant Bayer CropScience. They hold responsible the company's bestselling pesticide, imidacloprid, trade name Gaucho, for killing a third of the country's 1.5 million colonies. In 1999, the French government banned the use of Gaucho on sunflower crops after thousands took to the streets in protest. Two further pesticides were banned because of their potential link to bee deaths. It appeared to stem the massive bee die-offs for a time, even though the manufacturers' own tests demonstrated there is no correlation, and a long-term study by the French food safety agency revealed no significant differences in death rates before and after pesticides were banned. This winter, bee deaths across France are reported to have shot up again to 60%.
Bayer is also being blamed by German beekeepers for the eerie silence along the Rhine valley, where the buzzing of bees is a common sound at this time of year. They say two-thirds of honeybees have been killed this month by the pesticide clothianidin, sold under the trade name Poncho, which has been widely applied on sweet corn. As a result of the bee deaths, eight pesticides, including clothianidin, have been temporarily suspended in Germany. Anecdotal evidence of pesticide-related bee deaths in Italy and Holland is also piling up.
European beekeepers accuse scientists and government agencies of being in the pocket of the chemical companies. It's a similar story in the US, where scientists maintain that there is no correlation between the bees' disappearance and pesticide use. According to Hackenberg: "Big Ag has control of the USDA [the US Department of Agriculture] from the secretary right down to the lowest guy on the totem pole."
Jeff Pettis is not sure where he comes on the pole. The senior manager at the federal bee laboratory in Maryland, he's the man responsible for coordinating the US government's response to CCD. Pettis advises some beekeepers may do well to forgo the almond pollination and rest their bees. "You are getting them ready for February when the sunlight hours and the temperature are telling them it's too early in the year to be foraging at full strength," he says.
Deceiving bees is an essential part of the business. Beekeepers dupe them into thinking it's already summer by moving them to warm locations in winter and feeding them an array of protein and energy supplements. The more food that comes into the hive, the more eggs the queen lays, to create more of the worker bees to go out and pollinate.
The bee broker Joe Traynor says the deception goes much further than trucking bees south. "We're interfering with their natural cycle because we want strong colonies for almond pollination. We're stimulating hives in August, September and October, and making the queens do a lot more laying. As a result the queens are suffering burnout. It used to be that a beekeeper could pretty much leave his bees alone during winter. That's no longer the case."
Moreover, scientists funded by the Almond Board of California are now experimenting with artificial pheromones that trick bees into thinking there are more larvae in the hive that need feeding, so they forage more, and in the process pollinate more almond blossom.
This is the Almond Board's profit-driven response to a potential shortfall of honeybees: to work even harder those that remain. Bees are being treated as a machine with no consideration for their life cycle and downtimes. And any machine pushed to its limits and not well maintained will break.
Environmentalists argue for conservation measures on land planted with single crops that will both improve honeybee nutrition and attract wild pollinators that could shoulder some of the honeybees' workload. Monoculture, the hallmark of modern agriculture, covers much of the world's 1.5bn hectares of arable land. Single-crop plantations and orchards can stretch for hundreds of kilometres. The advantages for the farmer are manifold: the crop blooms at the same time, can be treated with the same pesticides and can be harvested together for maximum efficiency. But for honeybees, pollen collected from one crop does not provide a balanced, nutritious diet. Scientists agree that malnourished bees are more susceptible to disease and pesticide poisoning, while the best-fed are the hardiest.
Planting hedgerows of wild flowers would give honeybees a more varied menu. While this has happened in Europe, US almond growers have proved resistant to the idea, concerned that the bees would make fewer visits to the almond blossom if they had a choice. But hedgerows would also provide food and habitat for other pollinators such as butterflies, bumblebees and solitary bees. There are 4,500 wild bee species in North America that are capable of pollinating myriad fruits and vegetables—some more efficiently than honeybees.
Could they prevent a pollination crisis if honeybees become extinct? Only if they have somewhere to make a home in the orchards and fields, and something to eat after the single crop has bloomed. Monoculture deprives them on both counts.
The Xerces Society runs a pollinator conservation project in northern California. Farms in Yolo County receive a mixture of plants that flower throughout the year and nest blocks for wild bees, and they keep large areas of soil untilled for native bees to live on. They say they have seen the return of native bees and benefited from their pollination services. But final details being hammered out in a farm bill on Capitol Hill look like trimming conservation budgets and reducing financial incentives for farmers to manage their land in a more pollinator-friendly way.
So growers will continue to be increasingly reliant on honeybees to do a job once performed by a host of different insects. Their profits now hinge as much on honeybees' availability to pollinate fields as they do on the sun and rain. This is why there is such urgency in solving the mystery of disappearing and dying bees.
This is not the first time that honeybees have disappeared. The first recorded unexplained loss was in the US 150 years ago and ever since large numbers have vanished at intervals throughout North America, Europe and Australia. An epidemic first reported on the Isle of Wight wiped out 90% of honeybee colonies in the UK at the beginning of the 20th century. Then, as now, the main suspects were deficiencies in the bees' diet, pollution in the environment, pests and parasites and mismanagement by beekeepers, but the killer was never identified.
When bees die, beekeepers can restock their hives quickly by buying a new queen who lays 2,000 eggs a day at her peak. Across the world, most have chosen to fill their apiaries with a type of honeybee renowned for its gentle nature and prodigious honey production skills. This race of bee, originally from Italy, now dominates beekeeping. The downside is that the honeybee gene pool has been diminished and with it traits that may have helped bees fend off mites and other parasites, such as a new fungal bacteria, Nosema ceranae, that attacks its gut.
There are fears that mites are becoming increasingly resistant to chemicals administered by beekeepers to kill them. Pettis says we are controlling too many bee ailments with drugs and a more organic approach is needed that includes stocking apiaries with locally reared bees better adapted to local climate and environmental conditions.
Meanwhile scientists are hoping to use the mapping of the honeybee genome to engineer in the laboratory a super bee that has the resilience to withstand varroa but retains all the qualities of the Italian bee. Biologists will tell you, however, that it will be only a matter of time before a super bee breeds a super parasite. Geneticists also discovered that honeybees have fewer genes providing resistance to disease than other insects. In particular, the number of genes responsible for detoxification appear to be smaller, making it unusually sensitive to pesticides and poisons. Its large-scale disappearance across the US and high death rates in Europe are signalling that industrialised farming makes demands on honeybees that are not sustainable.
Central Valley has been described as a big brothel where billions of honeybees from all over the US can pick up a contagious illness and take it home. It's spread by mites from infected to healthy colonies. And there are plans to expand Central Valley's almond orchards to the point where, by 2011, they will require 1.6 million honeybee colonies for pollination.
Despite around a third of all US honeybees being wiped out last year, and again this year after beekeepers had restocked their hives, the almond pollination has yet to suffer. Why?
There are two answers. The shortage of honeybees has pushed up the price of hive rentals for almond pollination to an all-time high of $140 per hive, so more and more beekeepers are making the trip west, and the Almond Board's requirement of two hives each containing 20,000-30,000 bees per acre to pollinate the almonds is excessive, but provides a buffer should some of the hives be empty.
As the sun rises over the almond orchards after another nocturnal delivery of east coast hives, Hackenberg says it's only the money that brings him and his waning bees to California each year. "I'd rather be back in Florida with my bees. They'd be feeding on the maple and willow. It's paradise down there. Why would anyone come to this godforsaken place? But something's got to pay the bills. I'm here for a $150,000 cheque."
A World Without Bees, by Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum, is published by Guardian Books at £8.99 plus p&p. To order a copy with free UK mainland p&p, call 0845 606 4232, or go to guardianbooks.co.uk
—The Guardian, May 31, 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/may/31/animalwelfare.environment
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12) The Great Immigration Panic
June 3, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/opinion/03tue1.html?hp
Someday, the country will recognize the true cost of its war on illegal immigration. We don’t mean dollars, though those are being squandered by the billions. The true cost is to the national identity: the sense of who we are and what we value. It will hit us once the enforcement fever breaks, when we look at what has been done and no longer recognize the country that did it.
A nation of immigrants is holding another nation of immigrants in bondage, exploiting its labor while ignoring its suffering, condemning its lawlessness while sealing off a path to living lawfully. The evidence is all around that something pragmatic and welcoming at the American core has been eclipsed, or is slipping away.
An escalating campaign of raids in homes and workplaces has spread indiscriminate terror among millions of people who pose no threat. After the largest raid ever last month — at a meatpacking plant in Iowa — hundreds were swiftly force-fed through the legal system and sent to prison. Civil-rights lawyers complained, futilely, that workers had been steamrolled into giving up their rights, treated more as a presumptive criminal gang than as potentially exploited workers who deserved a fair hearing. The company that harnessed their desperation, like so many others, has faced no charges.
Immigrants in detention languish without lawyers and decent medical care even when they are mortally ill. Lawmakers are struggling to impose standards and oversight on a system deficient in both. Counties and towns with spare jail cells are lining up for federal contracts as prosecutions fill the system to bursting. Unbothered by the sight of blameless children in prison scrubs, the government plans to build up to three new family detention centers. Police all over are checking papers, empowered by politicians itching to enlist in the federal crusade.
This is not about forcing people to go home and come back the right way. Ellis Island is closed. Legal paths are clogged or do not exist. Some backlogs are so long that they are measured in decades or generations. A bill to fix the system died a year ago this month. The current strategy, dreamed up by restrictionists and embraced by Republicans and some Democrats, is to force millions into fear and poverty.
There are few national figures standing firm against restrictionism. Senator Edward Kennedy has bravely done so for four decades, but his Senate colleagues who are running for president seem by comparison to be in hiding. John McCain supported sensible reform, but whenever he mentions it, his party starts braying and he leaves the room. Hillary Rodham Clinton has lost her voice on this issue more than once. Barack Obama, gliding above the ugliness, might someday test his vision of a new politics against restrictionist hatred, but he has not yet done so. The American public’s moderation on immigration reform, confirmed in poll after poll, begs the candidates to confront the issue with courage and a plan. But they have been vague and discreet when they should be forceful and unflinching.
The restrictionist message is brutally simple — that illegal immigrants deserve no rights, mercy or hope. It refuses to recognize that illegality is not an identity; it is a status that can be mended by making reparations and resuming a lawful life. Unless the nation contains its enforcement compulsion, illegal immigrants will remain forever Them and never Us, subject to whatever abusive regimes the powers of the moment may devise.
Every time this country has singled out a group of newly arrived immigrants for unjust punishment, the shame has echoed through history. Think of the Chinese and Irish, Catholics and Americans of Japanese ancestry. Children someday will study the Great Immigration Panic of the early 2000s, which harmed countless lives, wasted billions of dollars and mocked the nation’s most deeply held values.
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13) G.M. Closing 4 Plants in Shift From Trucks Toward Cars
By BILL VLASIC
June 4, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/04/business/04motors.html?hp
Responding to a consumer shift to more fuel-efficient vehicles, General Motors said Tuesday that it would stop making pickup trucks and big S.U.V.s at four North American assembly plants and would consider selling its Hummer brand.
The moves, announced Tuesday by the company chairman G. Richard Wagoner Jr., will slash 500,000 units from the automaker’s overall production, and pave the way for increased investment in smaller cars and passenger vehicles.
Mr. Wagoner said that rising gasoline prices had forced a “structural shift” by American consumers away from truck-based vehicles built by G.M.
“These prices are changing consumer behavior and changing it rapidly,” Mr. Wagoner said at a briefing before G.M.’s annual meeting in Wilmington, Del. “We don’t believe it’s a spike or a temporary shift. We believe it is, by and large, permanent.”
In what he called “difficult” decisions, Mr. Wagoner said that G.M. would close plants in Janesville, Wisc.; Moraine, Ohio; Oshawa, Ontario; and Toluca, Mexico by or before 2010.
The actions follow previous moves to cut shifts at two truck plants in Michigan.
Mr. Wagoner said it was “unlikely” that the plants would re-open at any point with new products, but declined to provide details about relocating workers to other facilities.
Both Detroit automakers have been hit hard by rising fuel costs that have dramatically curtailed demand for pickups and full-sized S.U.V.s like the Chevrolet Tahoe. The shift toward smaller and lighter vehicles with better mileage is a problem for Detroit automakers because they offer fewer such models than Asian carmakers like Toyota and Honda.
G.M. had been expected to slash its truck production after similar moves were announced by the Ford. Ford recently eliminated a shift at each of four truck plants in Michigan, Wisconsin and Ontario and extended the summer shutdown at several truck plants to reduce inventories. The company also announced last week that it would build its new subcompact car, the Fiesta, at a Mexican factory that assembles full-size pickup trucks.
While G.M.’s production cuts were deeper than anticipated by industry analysts, the decision on the Hummer brand underscored the painful reality G.M. is facing.
Once considered an iconic brand with global market potential, the Hummer has become a symbol of the decline of the large, gas-guzzling sport utility vehicle.
Mr. Wagoner said that G.M.’s directors had approved a “strategic review” of Hummer that could include “a partial or complete sale of the brand.”
Overall, G.M. will reduce its North American production to 3.7 million vehicles from 4.2 million. The moves should add $1 billion in cost savings to an existing target of reducing costs by $5 billion by 2011.
Besides slashing truck and S.U.V. production, G.M. will place a bigger bet on its passenger cars and lighter-weight crossover vehicles.
Mr. Wagoner said G.M. will add third shifts to its plants in Lordstown, Ohio, and Orion Township, Michigan, to increase their output of Chevrolet and Pontiac cars.
He said the G.M. board also approved next-generation versions of two small Chevrolet passenger cars, as well as a new fuel-efficient, 1.4-liter turbocharged engine.
The automaker also set a firm schedule for production of the extended-range, electric-powered Chevrolet Volt. Mr. Wagoner said the Volt, which is powered by batteries augmented by a small gasoline engine, will be available for sale no later than the end of 2010.
“In other words, the Chevy Volt is a go,” he said. “We believe this is the biggest step yet in our industry’s move away from our historic, virtually complete reliance on petroleum to power vehicles.”
“From the start of our North American turnaround plan in 2005, I’ve said that our goal is not just to return G.M. to profitability, but to structure G.M. globally for sustained profitability and growth,” the chief executive, Rick Wagoner, said in a statement announcing the restructuring.
“Since the first of this year, however, U.S. economic and market conditions have become significantly more difficult,” he said. “Higher gasoline prices are changing consumer behavior, and they are significantly affecting the U.S. auto industry sales mix.”
G.M. shares rose 2.7 percent in early trading.
Tuesday’s announcement comes a few days after G.M. said said that 19,000 hourly workers — a quarter of a unionized work force that already has been drastically pared down — have accepted buyouts.
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14) Retailers Expected to Post Scant May Sales
By REUTERS
Filed at 11:46 a.m. ET
June 3, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/business/business-usa-retail-sales.html
CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. retailers are expected to post lackluster May sales this week, as consumers spent tax rebate checks on gas and food or used them to reduce debt, rather than buying discretionary items like clothes and jewelry.
The average analyst sales estimate calls for an increase of 1.2 percent this May, compared with a 2.9 percent increase a year earlier, according to Thomson Reuters.
Apparel retailers are expected to see sales at stores open at least a year fall 3.1 percent and department stores are expected to see same-store sales fall 4 percent, continuing a trend that has been in place much of the past year.
With consumers hammered by soaring food prices, gasoline near $4 a gallon or more and the continued slump in the U.S. housing market, weak retail sales show no sign of abating.
"It looks like it's going to be a lot of sluggishness for the rest of this year and into 2009," said Ken Perkins, president of Retail Metrics.
Consumers began receiving tax rebates in late April as part of the $152 billion economic stimulus package passed by Congress.
But it does not appear that those checks have done much so far to stimulate sales at most retailers.
"A lot of channel checks suggest that the rebate checks aren't being spent or are being used for gas or debt or food," Perkins said.
The International Council of Shopping Centers expects May same-store sales to rise between 0.5 percent and 1.5 percent.
"Even with a little less than about half of the federal tax rebate monies being distributed, there is little overall evidence of any spending lift given the increased spending drag from energy prices," ICSC chief economist Michael Niemira said in a research note.
Gasoline prices are up 27.6 percent from last year, according to Goldman Sachs.
The rebates could provide more of a boost in June and July as more consumers receive their rebates, Adrianne Shapira, retail analyst at Goldman Sachs, said in a research note.
Aside from economic factors, colder-than-normal weather also chilled sales, analysts said.
"Shorts and swimwear were on sale in nearly every store in the mall," Credit Suisse apparel retail analysts said in a research note. "For most retailers, we believe business fell off in the last week in April and remained weak throughout May, perhaps with some improvement at the end of the month."
May was the coldest since 2002 and the 10th-coldest since 1961, according to preliminary data from Planalytics.
Retail stocks, as represented by the Standard & Poor's Retail Index <.RLX>, are about flat since April sales were reported on May 8, while the Standard & Poor's 500 <.SPX> is down about 1 percent.
Many retailers have been cutting inventory, costs and store openings as they look to preserve profits amid weak sales.
Even shares of Wal-Mart Stores Inc
Discounters on average are expected to post a 2.1 percent same-stores sales increase, with Wal-Mart up 1.5 percent, according to Thomson Reuters. BJ's Wholesale Club Inc
Among department stores. Nordstrom Inc
In the apparel sector, Gap Inc
In the teen and children's apparel sector, Buckle Inc
(Reporting by Brad Dorfman, editing by Dave Zimmerman)
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15) U.N. Issues Warning on Food Crisis
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL and ANDREW MARTIN
June 4, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/04/world/04food.html?ref=world
ROME — Resolving the global food crisis could cost as much as $30 billion a year and wealthier nations are doing little to help the developing world face the problem, United Nations officials said Tuesday.
At a U.N. food summit attended by dozens of world leaders, Jacques Diouf, head of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, opened the meeting by sharply criticizing wealthy nations who he said were cutting back on agriculture programs for the world’s poor and ignoring deforestation — while spending billions on carbon markets, subsidies for farmers and biofuel production.
“The developing countries did in fact forge policies, strategies and programs that — if they had received appropriate funding — would have given us world food security,” Mr. Diouf, said, adding that international community finally began to mobilize to help after images of food riots and starvation emerged in the media. He said there had been plenty of meetings on the need for anti-hunger programs and agricultural development in poor nations in the last decade but not enough money to make them a reality.
Another major debate that emerged at the conference was the role of biofuels in producing food shortages. The U.S. delegation here maintains that only 2 to 3 percent of food price rises were attributable to the biofuel boom. The U.N., however, said the impact was much greater. Biofuel production affects food prices because farmers in many countries have switched from growing crops for food to growing crops for fuel.
Mr. Diouf criticized policies like those in the United States that subsidize growing crops for energy.
“Nobody understands how $11 to $12 billion a year subsidies in 2006 and protective tariff policies have the effect of diverting 100 million tons of cereals from human consumption, mostly to satisfy the thirst for fuel for vehicles,” Mr. Diouf said.
But Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the president of Brazil, pointed out that some biofuels could provide a solution to world hunger if properly deployed. In Brazil, where biofuel is made from sugar cane, the industry has provided jobs for poor people as well as sustainable fuel, he said.
The idea that biofuels have cause the world hunger crisis was “an oversimplification” and “an affront that does not stand up to serious discussion,” Mr. da Silva said.
He instead blamed the high cost of food on high fuel prices: “It offends me to see fingers pointed at biofuels, when the fingers are coated in oil and coal.”
There was little disagreement about how to resolve the spiraling costs of food and its impact on the world’s poor: more food aid to feed the world’s hungry, additional seeds and fertilizer for poor farmers, fewer export bans and tariffs that restrict the flow of trade, and more research to improve crop yields. The problem now is convincing wealthy nations to pay for it, estimated to cost as much as $30 billion a year.
Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general of the United Nations, appealed for financial support from wealthy nations to immediately provide more food aid and to help poor countries grow more food. He noted that several governments and global institutions have already pledged additional financial support to deal with the food crisis.
In addition, the United States and some other countries have suggested that genetically modified crops could play a key role in helping poor nations to grow more food, a position that some governments and non-profit groups strongly oppose. The United States is by far the world’s leading producer of genetically modified crops and seeds.
At the Circus Maximus, across from the conference site, ActionAid, an international anti-poverty group, unfurled a banner saying “Stop Profiting from Hunger — Right to Food Now.”
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16) On Stand, Imam Tells of Torture in Israel
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 3, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/nyregion/03imam.html?ref=world
NEWARK (AP) — A Muslim cleric living in New Jersey graphically described on Monday the torture to which he claims he was subjected in Israeli custody. The description came during the final day of testimony as he fought to block efforts by the United States to deport him on grounds that he lied on his residency application.
The detention is at the heart of the deportation proceedings against the cleric, Mohammad Qatanani, a Palestinian who has been the spiritual leader at the Islamic Center of Passaic County in New Jersey since 1996.
United States officials, in rejecting his bid for permanent residency, said that Mr. Qatanani failed to disclose on his green card application a 1993 arrest and conviction in Israel for being a member of the militant group Hamas.
Mr. Qatanani denies the charges, saying he and many other Palestinians were detained, not arrested, by the Israelis at the time. He claims that he was not aware of the conviction and that he was subjected to physical and mental abuse while in detention. Over the past few weeks, a number of character witnesses have testified on his behalf, including a rabbi and several high-ranking New Jersey law enforcement officials.
Lawyers for both sides have until July 31 to submit written summations, and Immigration Judge Alberto J. Riefkohl, who is presiding over the case in Federal District Court in Newark, said he would render a decision in mid-September.
In court on Monday, Mr. Qatanani recounted his time in Israeli detention — describing being tied to a small chair with his hands bound, kept in a freezing cell, and subjected to starvation, violence and threats. Several of his supporters in the packed courtroom began quietly weeping as he spoke.
“Judge, you cannot imagine,” Mr. Qatanani said, his voice breaking. “They say, ‘We will kill your family.’ They say: ‘You know what your family is doing now? We will go to them, we will burn them.’”
Mr. Qatanani paused to compose himself before telling Judge Riefkohl, “At that time, you feel that death is better than life.”
During cross-examination, lawyers for the Department of Homeland Security — which oversees immigration proceedings — sought to link Mr. Qatanani to terrorist-affiliated groups and individuals.
Alan Wolf, a lawyer for Homeland Security, questioned Mr. Qatanani about his brother-in-law, Mahmoud Abu Hanoud, who was a senior Hamas military leader killed by the Israelis.
Mr. Qatanani said that Mr. Abu Hanoud was his wife’s brother, so he knew him but did not participate with him in political activities. Mr. Wolf also pressed Mr. Qatanani about his ties with the former imam of the Paterson, N.J., mosque, Mohammed el-Mezain, who was arrested and is currently facing retrial on charges of funneling money to Palestinian terrorist groups.
Mr. Qatanani said he had never gotten along with Mr. Mezain and was unaware of his activities. He said their differing visions for the mosque led to frequent disagreements that nearly prompted him to resign.
Mr. Wolf also cited excerpts of sermons Mr. Qatanani had given calling Israelis “transgressors,” and questioned whether Mr. Qatanani or the mosque had donated money to various Islamic organizations.
Mr. Qatanani’s lawyer, Claudia Slovinsky, objected several times to the line of questioning, at one point yelling out, “Your Honor, this is slanderous. It is guilt by association.”
Monday was the fourth and final day of the trial. On the stand, Mr. Qatanani pointed to his commitment to interfaith dialogue, cooperation with law enforcement and the integration of Muslims into mainstream American society.
The streets outside the courthouse were packed with Mr. Qatanani’s supporters, many of whom carried signs calling him a man of peace.
A group of Orthodox Jews stood amid the mostly Muslim crowd, saying they were there to show solidarity with Mr. Qatanani, who they said had championed their effort to get a kosher slaughterhouse in Paterson.
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LINKS AND VERY SHORT STORIES
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Tennessee: State to Retry Inmate
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | South
The Union County district attorney said the county would meet a federal judge’s deadline for a new trial in the case of a death row inmate whose trial was questioned by the United States Supreme Court. The state is facing a June 17 deadline to retry or free the inmate, Paul House, who has been in limbo since June 2006, when the Supreme Court concluded that reasonable jurors would not have convicted him had they seen the results of DNA tests from the 1990s. The district attorney, Paul Phillips, said he would not seek the death penalty. Mr. House, 46, who has multiple sclerosis and must use a wheelchair, was sentenced in the 1985 killing of Carolyn Muncey. He has been in a state prison since 1986 and continues to maintain his innocence.
May 29, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/us/29brfs-STATETORETRY_BRF.html?ref=us
Israel: Carter Offers Details on Nuclear Arsenal
By REUTERS
World Briefing | Middle East
Former President Jimmy Carter said Israel held at least 150 nuclear weapons, the first time a current or former American president had publicly acknowledged the Jewish state’s nuclear arsenal. Asked at a news conference in Wales on Sunday how a future president should deal with the Iranian nuclear threat, he sought to put the risk in context by listing atomic weapons held globally. “The U.S. has more than 12,000 nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union has about the same, Great Britain and France have several hundred, and Israel has 150 or more,” he said, according to a transcript. The existence of Israeli nuclear arms is widely assumed, but Israel has never admitted their existence and American officials have stuck to that line in public for years.
May 27, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/world/middleeast/27briefs-CARTEROFFERS_BRF.html?ref=world
Iowa: Lawsuit Filed Over Raid
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Midwest
The nation’s largest single immigration raid, in which nearly 400 workers at an Agriprocessors Inc. meat processing plant in Postville were detained on Monday, violated the constitutional rights of workers at a meatpacking plant, a lawsuit contends. The suit accuses the government of arbitrary and indefinite detention. A spokesman for the United States attorney’s office said he could not comment on the suit, which was filed Thursday on behalf of about 147 of the workers. Prosecutors said they filed criminal charges against 306 of the detained workers. The charges include accusations of aggravated identity theft, falsely using a Social Security number, illegally re-entering the United States after being deported and fraudulently using an alien registration card.
May 17, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/17/us/17brfs-LAWSUITFILED_BRF.html?ref=us
Senate Revises Drug Maker Gift Bill
By REUTERS
National Breifing | Washington
A revised Senate bill would require drug makers and medical device makers to publicly report gifts over $500 a year to doctors, watering down the standard set in a previous version. The new language was endorsed by the drug maker Eli Lilly & Company. Lawmakers said they hoped the support would prompt other companies to back the bill, which had previously required all gifts valued over $25 be reported. The industry says the gifts are part of its doctor education, but critics say such lavish gestures influence prescribing habits.
May 14, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/washington/14brfs-SENATEREVISE_BRF.html?ref=us
Texas: Sect Mother Is Not a Minor
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Southwest
Child welfare officials conceded to a judge that a newborn’s mother, held in foster care as a minor after being removed from a polygamous sect’s ranch, is an adult. The woman, who gave birth on April 29, had been held along with more than 400 children taken last month from a ranch run by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She was one of two pregnant sect members who officials had said were minors. The other member, who gave birth on Monday, may also be an adult, state officials said.
May 14, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/us/14brfs-SECTMOTHERIS_BRF.html?ref=us
Four Military Branches Hit Recruiting Goals
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Washington
The Marine Corps far surpassed its recruiting goal last month, enlisting 2,233 people, which was 142 percent of its goal, the Pentagon said. The Army recruited 5,681 people, 101 percent of its goal. The Navy and Air Force also met their goals, 2,905 sailors and 2,435 airmen. A Defense Department spokesman, Bryan Whitman, said that if the Marine Corps continued its recruiting success, it could reach its goal of growing to 202,000 people by the end of 2009, more than a year early.
May 13, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/us/13brfs-FOURMILITARY_BRF.html?ref=us
Texas: Prison Settlement Approved
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Southwest
A federal judge has approved a settlement between the Texas Youth Commission and the Justice Department over inmate safety at the state’s juvenile prison in Edinburg. The judge, Ricardo Hinojosa of Federal District Court, signed the settlement Monday, and it was announced by the commission Wednesday. Judge Hinojosa had previously rejected a settlement on grounds that it lacked a specific timeline. Federal prosecutors began investigating the prison, the Evins Regional Juvenile Center, in 2006. The settlement establishes parameters for safe conditions and staffing levels, restricts use of youth restraints and guards against retaliation for reporting abuse and misconduct.
May 8, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/08/us/08brfs-PRISONSETTLE_BRF.html?ref=us
Michigan: Insurance Ruling
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Midwest
Local governments and state universities cannot offer health insurance to the partners of gay workers, the State Supreme Court ruled. The court ruled 5 to 2 that Michigan’s 2004 ban against same-sex marriage also blocks domestic-partner policies affecting gay employees at the University of Michigan and other public-sector employers. The decision affirms a February 2007 appeals court ruling. Up to 20 public universities, community colleges, school districts and local governments in Michigan have benefit policies covering at least 375 gay couples.
May 8, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/08/us/08brfs-INSURANCERUL_BRF.html?ref=us
Halliburton Profit Rises
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
HOUSTON (AP) — Increasing its global presence is paying off for the oil field services provider Halliburton, whose first-quarter income rose nearly 6 percent on growing business in the Middle East, Asia and Latin America, the company said Monday.
Business in the first three months of 2008 also was better than expected in North America, where higher costs and lower pricing squeezed results at the end of 2007.
Halliburton shares closed up 3 cents, at $47.46, on the New York Stock Exchange.
Halliburton said it earned $584 million, or 64 cents a share, in the three months that ended March 31, compared with a year-earlier profit of $552 million, or 54 cents a share. Revenue rose to $4.03 billion, from $3.42 billion a year earlier.
April 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/business/worldbusiness/22halliburton.html?ref=business
Illegal Immigrants Who Were Arrested at Poultry Plant in Arkansas to Be Deported
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Eighteen illegal immigrants arrested at a poultry plant in Batesville will be processed for deportation, but will not serve any jail time for using fake Social Security numbers and state identification cards, federal judges ruled. Magistrate Judge Beth Deere and Judge James Moody of Federal District Court accepted guilty pleas from 17 of those arrested last week at the Pilgrim’s Pride plant. Federal prosecutors dismissed the misdemeanor charges against one man, but said they planned to ask Immigration and Customs Enforcement to begin deportation proceedings against him. The guilty pleas will give the 17 people criminal records, which will allow prosecutors to pursue tougher penalties if they illegally return to the United States. They had faced up to up to two years in prison and $205,000 in fines. Jane Duke, a United States attorney, said her office had no interest in seeing those arrested serve jail time, as they were “otherwise law-abiding citizens.”
National Briefing | South
April 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/us/22brfs-002.html?ref=us
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GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS AND INFORMATION
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Russell Means Speaking at the Transform Columbus Day Rally
"If voting could do anything it would be illegal!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8Lri1-6aoY
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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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We Didn't Start the Fire
http://yeli.us/Flash/Fire.html
I Can't Take it No More
http://lefti.blogspot.com/2007_11_01_archive.html#9214483115237950361
The Art of Mental Warfare
http://artofmentalwarfare.com/pog/artofmentalwarfarecom-the-warning/
MONEY AS DEBT
http://video. google.com/ videoplay? docid=-905047436 2583451279
http://www.moneyasd ebt.net/
UNCONSTITUTIONAL
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6582099850410121223&pr=goog-sl
IRAQ FOR SALE
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6621486727392146155
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Port of Olympia Anti-Militarization Action Nov. 2007
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOkn2Fg7R8w
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"They have a new gimmick every year. They're going to take one of their boys, black boys, and put him in the cabinet so he can walk around Washington with a cigar. Fire on one end and fool on the other end. And because his immediate personal problem will have been solved he will be the one to tell our people: 'Look how much progress we're making. I'm in Washington, D.C., I can have tea in the White House. I'm your spokesman, I'm your leader.' While our people are still living in Harlem in the slums. Still receiving the worst form of education.
"But how many sitting here right now feel that they could [laughs] truly identify with a struggle that was designed to eliminate the basic causes that create the conditions that exist? Not very many. They can jive, but when it comes to identifying yourself with a struggle that is not endorsed by the power structure, that is not acceptable, that the ground rules are not laid down by the society in which you live, in which you are struggling against, you can't identify with that, you step back.
"It's easy to become a satellite today without even realizing it. This country can seduce God. Yes, it has that seductive power of economic dollarism. You can cut out colonialism, imperialism and all other kind of ism, but it's hard for you to cut that dollarism. When they drop those dollars on you, you'll fold though."
—MALCOLM X, 1965
http://www.accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=987
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A little gem:
Michael Moore Faces Off With Stephen Colbert [VIDEO]
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/57492/
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LAPD vs. Immigrants (Video)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/qws/ff/qr?term=lapd&Submit=S&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Search&st=s
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Dr. Julia Hare at the SOBA 2007
http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeo9ewi/proudtobeblack2/
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"We are far from that stage today in our era of the absolute
lie; the complete and totalitarian lie, spread by the
monopolies of press and radio to imprison social
consciousness." December 1936, "In 'Socialist' Norway,"
by Leon Trotsky: “Leon Trotsky in Norway” was transcribed
for the Internet by Per I. Matheson [References from
original translation removed]
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/12/nor.htm
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Wealth Inequality Charts
http://www.faireconomy.org/research/wealth_charts.html
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MALCOLM X: Oxford University Debate
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmzaaf-9aHQ
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"There comes a times when silence is betrayal."
--Martin Luther King
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YouTube clip of Che before the UN in 1964
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtATT8GXkWg&mode=related&search
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The Wealthiest Americans Ever
NYT Interactive chart
JULY 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/business/20070715_GILDED_GRAPHIC.html
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New Orleans After the Flood -- A Photo Gallery
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=795
This email was sent to you as a service, by Roland Sheppard.
Visit my website at: http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret
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[For some levity...Hans Groiner plays Monk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51bsCRv6kI0
...bw]
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Which country should we invade next?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3g_zqz3VjY
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My Favorite Mutiny, The Coup
http://www.myspace.com/thecoupmusic
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Michael Moore- The Awful Truth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeOaTpYl8mE
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Morse v. Frederick Supreme Court arguments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_LsGoDWC0o
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Free Speech 4 Students Rally - Media Montage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfCjfod8yuw
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'My son lived a worthwhile life'
In April 2003, 21-year old Tom Hurndall was shot in the head
in Gaza by an Israeli soldier as he tried to save the lives of three
small children. Nine months later, he died, having never
recovered consciousness. Emine Saner talks to his mother
Jocelyn about her grief, her fight to make the Israeli army
accountable for his death and the book she has written
in his memory.
Monday March 26, 2007
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,2042968,00.html
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Introducing...................the Apple iRack
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-KWYYIY4jQ
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"A War Budget Leaves Every Child Behind."
[A T-shirt worn by some teachers at Roosevelt High School
in L.A. as part of their campaign to rid the school of military
recruiters and JROTC--see Article in Full item number 4, below...bw]
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"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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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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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
"Award-Winning Writer/Filmmaker Donald L. Vasicek Launches New Sand
Creek Massacre Website"
May 21, 2008 -- CENTENNIAL, CO -- Award-winning filmmaker, Donald L.
Vasicek, has launched a new Sand Creek Massacre website. Titled,
"The Sand Creek Massacre", the site contains in depth witness
accounts of the massacre, the award-winning Sand Creek Massacre
trailer for viewing, the award-winning Sand Creek Massacre
documentary short for viewing, the story of the Sand Creek Massacre,
and a Shop to purchase Sand Creek Massacre DVD's and lesson
plans including the award-winning documentary film/educational DVD.
Vasicek, a board member of The American Indian Genocide Museum
(www.aigenom.com)in Houston, Texas, said, "The website was launched
to inform, to educate, and to provide educators, historians, students
and all others the accessibility to the Sand Creek Massacre story."
The link/URL to the website is sandcreekmassacre.net.
###
Contact:
Donald L. Vasicek
Olympus Films+, LLC
http://www.donvasicek.com
dvasicek@earthlink.net
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