/RENEGADE/

re: an article regarding symbols and prejudice [was: Re: Swastika - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2008-10-28T20:50:00.000-07:00

i need to write an article regarding symbols and prejudice (please read "prejudice" as in "preconceived notions" - i.e. "pre judged" - not just the popular definition, which relates to racial discrimination).

i think that the swastika is the prime example {it is definitely loaded!}

the swastika, a symbol of good luck for thousands of years, is now maligned and stigmatized since Hitler. there is talk about a ban on its use {at all} l in Europe, even though is is a religious symbol, from Native America to India, and has been used by countless organizations over the years.

<<< i had to go meet with my daughter"s junior high school principal once because she got in trouble for having an anarchy symbol inked on her backpack! ~ they said it was "gang related" ~ this was a few years ago, and i was worried then about what this country had become, but now i am even more worried - isn't anarchy a way of political thought? - what happened to freedom of speech? what about our symbols? are these fascists actually going to pull this off ??? <<<

the swastika is a great example (maybe the best, even?) of how people relate to symbols in their life, handle the prejudice, and continue on in a rather blinded fashion while the world goes to hell in a hand_basket.

the swastika is basically a medicine wheel - a symbol the crossroads, the juncture of all the forces that create our reality... just a variation of the medicine wheel symbol that i have used for years, and use as a stamp of my identity/purpose.

one of my mantras is "OM SWASTIASTU" ~ that means everything is great ~ OM is the great sound of the universe, and SWASTIASTU (swastika) is a representation and invocation of everything coming together and being good in an immutable way ~ it is even "the hand of god," if you care to go that deep.

and this all cascades into stuff about "brainwashing," ideas of what is right or wrong, popular culture, etc. could be a great article, i guess.

PEACE!

On Oct 28, 2008, at 4:52 PM, x wrote

The swastika in a decorative Hindu form.

The word swastika is derived from the Sanskrit word svastik (in Devanagari, स्वस्तिक), meaning any lucky or auspicious object, and in particular a mark made on persons and things to denote good luck

Buddhists outside India generally use the left-facing swastika rather than the right-facing swastika, although both can be used. There are some who claim that the left-facing swastika has inauspicious or "evil" connotations, although others dismiss this as superstition, possibly associated with the stigma of left handedness.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika

The swastika (from Sanskrit: svástika स्वस्तिक ) is an equilateral cross with its arms bent at right angles, in either right-facing (卐) form or its mirrored left-facing (卍) form. The swastika can also be drawn as a traditional swastika, but with a second 90° bend in each arm.
Archaeological evidence of swastika-shaped ornaments dates from the Neolithic period. An ancient symbol, it occurs mainly in the cultures that are in modern day India and the surrounding area, sometimes as a geometrical motif (as in the Roman Republic and Empire) and sometimes as a religious symbol. It was long widely used in major world religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism.
Though once commonly used all over much of the world without stigma, because of its iconic usage in Nazi Germany, the symbol has become controversial in the Western world.

The motif seems to have first been used in Neolithic India. The symbol has an ancient history in Europe, appearing on artifacts from pre-Christian European cultures. In antiquity, the swastika was used extensively by the Indo-Aryans, Persians, Hittites, Slavs, Celts and Greeks, among others. In particular, the swastika is a sacred symbol in Hinduism,Buddhism, Jainism and Mithraism, religions with a total of more than a billion adherents worldwide, making the swastika ubiquitous in both historical and contemporary society. The symbol was introduced to Southeast Asia by Hindu kings and remains an integral part of Balinese Hinduism to this day, and it is a common sight in Indonesia. It is also used by several Native American cultures.^{[citation needed]}

Re: anarchist strategy

2008-10-01T18:17:00.001-07:00

here is how i feel / what i think - -

radical thought requires a distillation of key elements, plus going outside the box.

one should cut to the quick, play devil's advocate once in awhile, and put it all "right in your face."

my goal in typing is to make a point, not to play chicken_shit politics. name it, analyze it, approach it... and say "take a look!"

conflicted? yes. here i am, a buddhist/anarchistic-american_patriot, living in a corrupt imperialist-fascist-corporate_monopoly state; but, you gotta' make a living, right? - - - - that does not change my views!

so - try this on for size:

multi-national corporations are bankrupting the entire ecosphere, and we shall all die because of their basic and blatant piracy of "our" planet - - - - so our socio-economic system is what, "broken?," or something - NO - these are systems that people have used to gain power and wealth and domination for quite some time, and they work quite well. their final effect, however, such concentrations and expenditures of so many "billions" of wealth, will be death.

is this naive? reactionary? overly simplistic.... it is what ever you want to call it. just please go deep and ask your self who deserves what, and who is getting screwed, and how me might help "the planet" survive.

i hope that my thoughts might help you think about what is going on, what is right, etc.

On Sep 27, 2008, rc wrote:

actually, as you might have ascertained by now: i am not just an anarchist, but a "radical american patriot" who does not appreciate our entire economy being hijacked by "corporations," with our motto of "PEACE AND JUSTICE FOR ALL" being entirely corrupted in the process.

corporations need to be abolished - - people need to show their faces, and be accountable for their actions.

incorporation is one of the most basic flaws of the current system, i think. 1

corporations allow people to hide behind their titles while they and their corporation rake in the profits and commit abuses.

a corporation is not a person (even though it is defined so by law), and the people behind it... well, some of them commit suicide, while others live fat and screw everyone else. one or two of them get thrown in jail, but the corp? ~ it gets a bailout.

one might as well be a real pirate, patch and all. how about we don't let it continue? 2

PEACE!

On Sep 27, 2008, rc wrote:

get Obama elected - (we simply cannot have another republican fascist asshole running the state / and "liberal" would be better, no doubt).

put the screws to him once in office and demand REAL CHANGE.

that means: cut the balls off of the corporations and their governmental conspirators,

and take this country back for the People.

it would involve some "diplomacy," but at least some progress could be made

towards a real working situation.

what do you think?

PEACE!

1 (this entire bank failure thing, for example? - who was looking the other way? - WHERE IS THE MONEY? {follow the money})

2 regarding the stranglehold? - one could just not pay and say: "great! throw me in jail, fuck up my life - you won't get your profit, you will make my business fail, it will cost you money, and you have actually just made my point. unless you are willing to just shoot me in the head in order for me to shut up, please go away and desist. if your political agenda is such that you need to shoot me, then you are really just not deserving of human life yourself.

Re: anarchist strategy

2008-09-27T21:41:00.001-07:00

actually, as you might have ascertained by now: i am not just an
anarchist, but a "radical american patriot" who does not appreciate
our entire economy being hijacked by "corporations," with our motto of
"PEACE AND JUSTICE FOR ALL" being entirely corrupted in the process.

corporations need to be abolished - - people need to show their faces,
and be accountable for their actions.

incorporation is one of the most basic flaws of the current system, i
think. 1

corporations allow people to hide behind their titles while they and
their corporation rake in the profits and commit abuses.

a corporation is not a person (even though it is defined so by law),
and the people behind it... well, some of them commit suicide, while
others live fat and screw everyone else. one or two of them get
thrown in jail, but the corp? ~ it gets a bailout.

one might as well be a real pirate, patch and all. how about we don't
let it continue? 2

On Sep 27, 2008, at 8:50 PM, Rob wrote:

get Obama elected - (we simply cannot have another republican fascist asshole running the state / and "liberal" would be better, no doubt).

put the screws to him once in office and demand REAL CHANGE.

that means: cut the balls off of the corporations and their governmental conspirators,
and take this country back for the People.

it would involve some "diplomacy," but at least some progress could be made
towards a real working situation.

what do you think?

1 (this entire bank failure thing, for example? - who was looking the other way? - WHERE IS THE MONEY? {follow the money})

2 regarding the stranglehold? - one could just not pay and say: "great! throw me in jail, fuck up my life - you won't get your profit, you will make my business fail, it will cost you money, and you have actually just made my point. unless you are willing to just shoot me in the head in order for me to shut up, please go away and desist. if your political agenda is such that you need to shoot me, then you are really just not deserving of human life yourself.

language is essential

2008-09-23T20:00:00.000-07:00

language is essential.

if you know nothing more than "kill you,"
then that is all will you think...

re: blood thirsty hedonists - try global anarchist peace

2008-09-23T19:24:00.000-07:00

re: blood thirsty hedonists -

try a global anarchist peace ~ and building gardens!

go talk to your best friend,
then the two of you go find your best friends,
and then ask them what they think.

get toghether, agree to put down weapons
(at least just store them for defensive use only);
and, rather that fight against each other:
Begin nurturing the earth and our peoples!

talk to all of your friends... ask them what they think.

what do you think?

"tell me where is sanity?" - (I'd Love To Change The World, Alivin Lee)

language is essential.

if you know nothing more than "kill you,"
then that is all will you think...

though 080918

2008-09-18T20:49:00.001-07:00

people should be "cultivating the soil," rather than making/using oil and weapons and war

what did you support today? ~ check your waste outflow

Fwd: I'm a little confused

2008-09-15T18:35:00.001-07:00

Begin forwarded message:

------ Forwarded Message
Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2008
To: <Undisclosed-Recipient:;>
Subject: I'm a little confused

I'm a little confused. Let me see if I have this straight . . .

If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you're 'exotic, or different.'
But, if you grow up in Alaska "eating mooseburgers" you're the quintessential American story.
If your name is Barack you're a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.
But, name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, you're a maverick.

Graduate from Harvard Law School and you are unstable.
But, attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, you're well grounded.

If you spend 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate's Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works, and Veteran's Affairs committees, you don't have any real leadership experience.

But, if your total resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the City Council and 6 years as the Mayor of a town with fewer than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you're qualified to become the country's second highest ranking executive.

If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you're not a real Christian.
But, if you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you're a stellar Christian.

If you teach responsible, age appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society.
But, if, while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state's school system, while your unwed teen daughter becomes pregnant, you're very responsible.

If your spouse is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of inner city communities, then gave that up to raise a family, your family's values don't represent America.
But, if your husband is nicknamed 'First Dude', with at least one DWI conviction and no college education, who didn't register to vote until age 25, and once was a member of a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, your family is extremely admirable.

OK, much clearer now

------ End of Forwarded Message

McCain: Worse than you think!

2008-09-11T18:32:00.001-07:00

McCain: Worse than you think

http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/325.html

Begin forwarded message:

My fellow American -- if you haven't made up you mind yet, or even if you have, take a peek at the attached...it would be funny if it were not so serious....

http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/325.html

PEACE!

questionnaire - your cooking oil? {thought for the day}

2008-08-16T22:14:00.001-07:00

what do you do with it when you are done cooking?

- - the cooking oil, oil packing (sardines, for example - packed in oil) -
- "kitchen oils," you know?

what do you do? - wash it down the drain with a bunch of hot water and
soap ?? (water waste, and carbon plus phosphate pollutions?)

this is a major resource if we recycle all that from all our kitchens, plus we would save water and stuff.

100 pounds

2008-08-11T21:15:00.001-07:00

10 pounds of seed

10 pounds of gold

10 pounds of ammo

10 pounds of steel

10 pounds of paper and pens

10 pounds of solar...

- what else?

we need those centuries of knowledge of course, and then:

another 10 pounds of seeds, and another 10 pounds of gold...

that makes 80.

- what else?

- maybe i can only do 80, but let's add another 10 pounds of steel,
and we may be good.

make art not war

2008-06-21T18:44:00.000-07:00

the art is by Shepard Fairey

see these pages:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_Fairey

http://obeygiant.com/

http://jonathanlevinegallery.com/?method=Artist.ArtistDetail&ArtistID=F65EBB86-3048-28EB-92D55AA4FC996E31&GalleryID=82C33C59-3048-28EB-92DB386C8C733405

To Wolf Blitzer: Just Say No to Cocaine Energy Dealers

2008-06-19T13:07:00.001-07:00

Please check out my blog, Earth First! videos and Winter Homeless Shelter photos at:

http://www.myspace.com/VirtualCandidate

Thanks,

Andy

To Wolf Blitzer: Just Say No to Cocaine Energy Dealers

by Andy Caffrey

June 18, 2008

The Republicans can only offer us a Cocaine Energy Policy because they are the ones who took us out to the end of the plank (the brink of economic collapse), where we find ourselves today. On the brink of planetary collapse and all these addicts can do is say drill for more Cocaine (concentrated sources of energy). They are the Cocaine Energy Dealers. To them concentrated energy sources are the only solutions to the high gas prices they caused to make themselves rich! This is organized crime. So every time I see one of these Fossil Fool Dealers on your show I wonder why you can't see them as criminals and traitors, and why you offer them respect. Why not have the Mafia do a weekly economics advice spot on your show, then?

The plank they built and have now taken us to the end of is our high energy-gobbling consumerist capitalist economy. All of us are dependent on it for sustaining our lives, and now we realize it is the cause of our problems. For four decades we should have been building decentralized, sustainable economies which ecological activists have been arguing for since the days of Small Is Beautiful. Yet you ignored them, and tragically and criminally, you still do. Why don't you get Amory Lovins or Paul Hawken or Hazel Henderson or Dave Foreman on your show?

It is either criminal or insane in this day when the Arctic ice cap is due to disappear in five years to promote cocaine, er burning more petroleum. It has been 38 years since the first Earth Day, a day when we should have launched an all-out campaign to go solar. But the Republicans and Democrats instead acted in collusion with the oil and transportation corporations to keep the big contracts flowing. Now we are in a climate crisis that they are solely and criminally responsible for, and you have been genteel with these people every step of the way, Wolf!

Instead of interviewing these psychotics and psychopaths, Wolf, why don't you talk about this criminal collusion that will most likely destroy our civilization and the ecosphere of the planet? Wake up! All of these people should immediately resign for their engagement in decades of criminal collusion that threatens the security of our entire nation. Siding with the enemies of America, the people who are destroying our country and the planet should now resign and all be tried for treason.

New Orleans was more destroyed by the Republi-Dem generated climate crisis during Katrina than the British attacks in the War of 1812. So effectively supporting the oil and coal industry, and allowing them to make the climate crisis worse even now, is worse than supporting foreign enemies. So these advocates of more drilling are traitors who should be tried and hung for treason NOW. They've killed and doomed far more Americans than their one-time friends and partners in global crime Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden ever did.

Why can't you see that, Wolf? Why the charade? If you can't see the obvious, and insist on telling us, or having guests on your shows who tell us day after mind-numbing day about the emperor's splendid finery, then resign! We don't need blind men to tell us about the news.

Today you had a Republican Congressman on your show who deceptively said we have better technology that can prevent oil spills. I just had to laugh at how ridiculous that lie is, before I cried at the realization that you let that lie-along with thousands of others over the years-pass on to your viewers unchallenged. You see we have had two oil spills in the Bay Area alone in just the last year! What he said is absolute nonsense and propaganda, and you were either too ignorant or too dim to call him on it.

He said no one could have predicted the recent increase in demand for oil ("No one could have predicted..." where have I heard that from Republicans before?). Another lie you let pass. There is an entire movement in this country that has been teaching about Peak Oil and the impending collapse of the consumer economy for years. As a Green, I've been warning about this since 1979! But you never have on your shows Peak Oil activists, Green Party activists (except Nader), or those scholars who have been using science to predict for decades the collapse of civilization from our energy policies. We've been telling you fossil fuels and nuclear are a pirate ship's plank, but you never listen.

Nuclear is not an option either because it is only economically viable because of the Price-Andeson Act which makes American taxpayers the insurers of nuclear disasters. If the nuclear companies had to buy such liability coverage from private firms, they wouldn't be able to afford it and the nuclear industry would shut down. Further, how is it economically moral to use nuclear for our benefit for the next fifty years or so, and force the next one million years of humanity to tax themselves to isolate themselves from our generated nuclear waste? How can we foist a permanent tax of that kind on our descendants for a million years?

But you have plenty of interviews with people who still believe God created the universe in a week, even though, according to that scenario, days weren't even created until the fourth day. You can't have days on Earth until you have the sun, which wasn't created until the celestial bodies were created on day four.

Don't you go insane hearing these people every hour-after-hour on your shows? Or maybe you are insane and agree with them?

There is only one solution to our energy-climate crisis, and that's a war effort to decentralize our economy and move toward steady-state economics as fast as humanly possible. We must localize, not globalize economic power. Any reforms of Big Corporate Capitalism will only make it worse, will only make us bigger Cocaine Energy addicts. The days of depending on a global economy are over.

Eighty percent or more of centrally-generated power is lost in transmission lines before it reaches its end use. If we create our energy at the point of its end use then we only have to replace with renewables and conservation the 20% that reaches the user. So we don't have to replace kilowatt for kilowatt the energy that is now generated. But that would mean eighty percent less energy sold by the big corporations! For that reason, the traitors of America sided with the energy corporations and violated their sworn oathes of office to protect Americans and their property. And you have helped these people ever since your first broadcast.

So when you look at these floods and other weather disasters around the world, Wolf, please stop thinking of them as natural disasters and start asking, what policies by which politicians, written by which corporations brought us to this point. And join us on the side that is fighting them!

So please, Wolf, no more Cocaine Energy Dealers on your show, OK? Just Say No to Cocaine Energy.

Welcome to Pompeii, Wolf,

Andy Caffrey

World's First Virtual Candidate

Actual candidate for U.S. Congress 2010

CA, First District

http://www.myspace.com/VirtualCandidate

new email

2008-04-04T22:06:00.000-07:00

strider080403@comcast.net

The War Comes Home

2008-03-21T10:31:00.000-07:00

Only by truly listening to the stories of soldiers who've come home, can we appreciate the realities of war and what we can do to help.

http://warcomeshome.org/

Dear Reader,

More than 1.6 million Americans have served in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As of August 1, 2007, 67,000 of them had been killed or wounded. In addition, more than 250,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans had been treated at Veterans Administrations hospitals since their return home from combat.

KPFA launched this website in an effort to put a human face on the conflict. Only by truly listening to the stories of soldiers who've come home, can we appreciate the realities of war and what we can do to help.

Sincerely,
Aaron Glantz
about
http://warcomeshome.org/about

A Montage That Cuts to the Heart of the War and Winter Soldier

Posted on: March 18, 2008 - 10:13am by Aaron Glantz
If you've just learned of Winter Solider, listening to the montage [below] is a good place to start. It was produced by our own Esther Manilla after two days of heart-wrenching testimony from dozens of veterans. They spoke about the killing of innocent civlians, torture, mass arrests, sexual assault, and the dehumanization of the enemy -- all of which they either committed or witnessed while deployed to the war-zone.

Listen to Archived Testimonial Audio from the Winter Soldier Event

Break the Silence About the Consequences of the Iraq War On America
More than 1.6 million Americans have served in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As of August 1, 2007, 67,000 of them had been killed or wounded. In addition, more than 250,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans had been treated at treated at Veterans Administrations hospitals since their return home from combat.

Indigenous Peoples Protest UNFCCC

2007-12-08T11:33:00.000-08:00

From:
Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2007 06:04:37 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [global-justice-ecology] Indigenous Peoples Protest UNFCCC
List-Id: global-justice-ecology.lists.riseup.net
List-Subscribe:
sympa@lists.riseup.net?subject=subscribe%20global-justice-ecology
List-Owner: global-justice-ecology-request@lists.riseup.net

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 7 December 2007

Indigenous Peoples Protest UNFCCC
Indigenous Peoples shut out of Climate Change Negotiations

Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia- Indigenous peoples representing regions from around the world protested outside the climate negotiations today wearing symbolic gags that read UNFCCC, the acronym of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, symbolizing their systematic exclusion from the UN meeting.

Yesterday a delegation of indigenous peoples was forcibly barred from entering the meeting between UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer and civil society representatives, despite the fact that the indigenous delegation was invited to attend. This act is representative of the systematic exclusion of indigenous peoples in the UNFCCC process.

"There is no seat or name plate for indigenous peoples in the plenary, nor for the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, the highest level body in the United Nations that addresses indigenous peoples rights," stated Hubertus Samangun, the Focal Point of the Indigenous Peoples delegation to the UNFCCC and the Focal Point for English Speaking Indigenous Peoples of the Global Forest Coalition.

"Indigenous peoples are not only marginalized from the discussion, but there is virtually no mention of indigenous peoples in the more that 5 million words of UNFCCC documents," argued Alfred Ilenre of the Edo People of Nigeria.

This is occurring despite the fact that indigenous peoples are suffering the most from climate change and climate change mitigation projects that directly impact their lands.

Indigenous peoples are here in Bali to denounce the false solutions to climate change proposed by the United Nations such as carbon trading, agrofuels and so-called "avoided deforestation" that devastate their lands and cause human rights violations.

"This process has become nothing but developed countries avoiding their responsibilities to cut emissions and pushing the responsibility onto developing countries," stated Fiu Mata'ese Elisara-Laula, of the O Le Siosiomaga Society of Samoa. "Projects like REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation in Developing countries) sound very nice but they are trashing our indigenous lands. People are being relocated and even killed; my own people will soon be under water. That's why I call the money from the projects blood money," he added.

Marcial Arias of the Kuna People of Panama reminded the international community that indigenous peoples' right to participate was recognized in the Earth Summit in 1992 and reaffirmed this year. "On September 13th of this year, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples [1] which enshrines the fundamental human rights of indigenous peoples to their lands, territories and environment. It is precisely these rights recognized by the UN itself that the UNFCCC is violating," he explained.

Contact: Hubertus Samangun, Indigenous Focal Point to the
UNFCCC (Bahasa, English) 0813-1077-8918
Orin Langelle, Global Forest Coalition Media Coordinator
0813-3895-9742 (English)
(photos available upon request)

Notes:

[1] http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/en/declaration.html

--

Blackwater

2007-10-14T13:52:00.001-07:00

Subject: Konformist: Blackwater
Date: Oct 11, 2007 10:09 PM
From: "Robert Sterling"
Mailing-List: list konformist@yahoogroups.com
Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2007 18:32:56 -0000
Subject: Konformist: Blackwater

Please send as far and wide as possible.

Thanks,
Robert Sterling
Editor, The Konformist
konformist.com

buzzflash.com/store/reviews/524

Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army
(Hardcover)
By Jeremy Scahill

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS

>From Nation Books:

Meet Blackwater USA, the powerful private army that the U.S. government has quietly hired to operate in international war zones and on American soil. Its contacts run from deep inside the military and intelligence agencies to the upper echelons of the White House. Blackwater is the elite Praetorian Guard for the "global war on terror," with its own military base, a fleet of twenty aircraft, and 20,000 soldiers at the ready. Run by a multimillionaire Christian conservative who bankrolls President Bush and his allies, its forces are capable of overthrowing governments, and yet most people have never heard of Blackwater.

Blackwater is the dark story of the rise of a powerful mercenary army, ranging from the blood-soaked streets of Fallujah to rooftop firefights in Najaf to the hurricane-ravaged US gulf to Washington DC, where Blackwater executives are hailed as new heroes in the war on terror. This is an extraordinary exposé by one of America's most exciting young radical journalists.

"Jeremy Scahill's exposé of the Blackwater mercenary firm forcefully demonstrates the grave dangers of outsourcing the government's monopoly on the use of force." --Joseph Wilson, former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq

"Jeremy Scahill skillfully chronicles the birth of America's frightening Praetorian Guard, one that has been unleashed--25,000- strong--in Iraq. These hired guns, with their black uniforms and automatic weapons, appeared on the streets of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. They operate, at home and abroad, beyond the bounds of legal constraints and are controlled by secretive puppet masters, such as Erik Prince, who have close ties to the radical Christian Right. Should our nation enter a period of instability following another terrorist attack on American soil, an economic collapse or a series of environmental disasters the tyranny that groups such as Blackwater impose on others could become the tyranny they impose on us. The rise of this unchecked mercenary force, as Scahill understands, could presage the final stage in the collapse of American democracy." --Chris Hedges, former New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief

"If the Republicans lose in 2008, they will leave office armed and dangerous. Blackwater is the utterly gripping and explosive story of how the Bush Administration has spent hundreds of millions of public dollars building a parallel corporate army, an army so loyal to far right causes it constitutes nothing less than a Republican Guard. The most important and chilling book about the death throes of U.S. democracy you will read in years and a triumph of investigative reporting." --Naomi Klein, author No Logo

"Of all the insane Bush privatization efforts, none is more frightening than the corporatizing of military combat forces. Jeremy Scahill admirably exposes a devastating example of this sinister scheme." --Michael Moore, Academy Award Winning Director

This engrossing investigative piece exposing, in shocking detail, a U.S. government-outsourced Frankenstein replete with helicopter gun ships may leave you incredulous. But you better believe it, for it poses a grave and gathering danger to the future of our Republic." --Ray McGovern, CIA veteran and former intelligence briefer for George H. W. Bush

"In this terrifying and thrillingly written book, Jeremy Scahill introduces us to the shape of things to come, and to the kind of people and corporations who are likely to govern our lives if we don't do something about it pretty quickly." --Arundhati Roy, author The God of Small Things

"Jeremy Scahill's comprehensive research and reporting lifts the veil off the ever-tightening relationship between the federal government and unaccountable private military corporations such as Blackwater USA. . . ." --U.S. Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-IL)

***

thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/13008.html

Blackwater `may be worse than Abu Ghraib'
Posted September 26th, 2007

To describe the ongoing Blackwater scandal as a fiasco would be a dramatic understatement. Not only do we have a situation in which private security contractors stand accused of killing Iraqi civilians without provocation, we also have deep divisions brewing between the Pentagon and the State Department, coupled by State stonewalling a congressional investigation.

A confrontation between the U.S. military and the State Department is unfolding over the involvement of Blackwater USA in the shooting deaths of Iraqi civilians in a Baghdad square Sept. 16, bringing to the surface long-simmering tensions between the military and private security companies in Iraq, according to U.S. military and government officials.

In high-level meetings over the past several days, U.S. military officials have pressed State Department officials to assert more control over Blackwater, which operates under the department's authority, said a U.S. government official with knowledge of the discussions. "The military is very sensitive to its relationship that they've built with the Iraqis being altered or even severely degraded by actions such as this event," the official said.

"This is a nightmare," said a senior U.S. military official. "We had guys who saw the aftermath, and it was very bad. This is going to hurt us badly. It may be worse than Abu Ghraib, and it comes at a time when we're trying to have an impact for the long term."

At this point, the State Department seems to be treating Blackwater contractors as the agency's own private army, accountable to no one outside the department. The Maliki government believes Blackwater is a criminal enterprise, the Iraqi people resent Blackwater's presence, the Pentagon believes Blackwater is lying about the Sept. 16 incident in Nisoor Square, and congressional Democrats have questions about what has transpired — which the State Department refuses to answer.

This is a debacle so severe and humiliating, only the Bush administration could pull it off.

David Kurtz offers this helpful timeline of events that sets the stage for where we are now.

Sun, Sept. 16: Blackwater incident in which 11 Iraqi civilians are killed after State Department convoy reportedly comes under fire, an account disputed by the Iraqis.

Mon, Sept. 17: Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Government Reform Committee announces his committee will investigate the Blackwater incident.

Tue, Sept. 18: The American Embassy in Baghdad suspends diplomatic convoys outside the Green Zone.

Wed, Sept. 19: In a phone call, Acting Assistant Secretary of State William Moser warns Blackwater that no information regarding the Blackwater contract can be released without State's prior written approval.

Thu, Sept. 20: Moser repeats the warning in a second call to Blackwater, and State sends Blackwater a follow-up letter again asserting again that the information possessed by Blackwater belongs to State and cannot be disclosed.

Fri, Sept. 21: The four-day suspension of State Department convoys ends and Blackwater resumes business. Secretary of State Condi Rice announces that her department will undertake a "full and complete review" of diplomatic security in Iraq.

And while it's certainly nice of Rice to suddenly take an interest in accountability, Congress, which has oversight responsibility and is paying the bills for all of this, believes a bipartisan review on Capitol Hill will produce a more accurate picture of what's transpired.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice not only refuses to cooperate, her office has also ordered Blackwater not to answer any questions from lawmakers.

The State Department has interceded in a congressional investigation of Blackwater USA, the private security firm accused of killing Iraqi civilians last week, ordering the company not to disclose information about its Iraq operations without approval from the Bush administration, according to documents revealed Tuesday.

In a letter sent to a senior Blackwater executive Thursday, a State Department contracting official ordered the company "to make no disclosure of the documents or information" about its work in Iraq without permission.

I appreciate the fact that outrage fatigue is inevitable when dealing with the Bush gang, but this is truly ridiculous. We have American taxpayers financing a private security army, whose members stand accused of slaughtering civilians. The Secretary of State believes no one should ask any questions about this, and those who do must be ignored. It's pure lunacy.

The State Department's cooperation with a congressional inquiry is not optional. Rice can't simply refuse to divulge information, and ordering others to remain silent is getting fairly close to the obstruction-of-justice line.

When these guys act like they have something to hide, it's almost always because they have something to hide. Stay tuned.

***

nytimes.com/2007/09/28/opinion/28krugman.html

September 28, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Hired Gun Fetish
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Sometimes it seems that the only way to make sense of the Bush administration is to imagine that it's a vast experiment concocted by mad political scientists who want to see what happens if a nation systematically ignores everything we've learned over the past few centuries about how to make a modern government work.

Thus, the administration has abandoned the principle of a professional, nonpolitical civil service, stuffing agencies from FEMA to the Justice Department with unqualified cronies. Tax farming — giving individuals the right to collect taxes, in return for a share of the take — went out with the French Revolution; now the tax farmers are back.

And so are mercenaries, whom Machiavelli described as "useless and dangerous" more than four centuries ago.

As far as I can tell, America has never fought a war in which mercenaries made up a large part of the armed force. But in Iraq, they are so central to the effort that, as Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution points out in a new report, "the private military industry has suffered more losses in Iraq than the rest of the coalition of allied nations combined."

And, yes, the so-called private security contractors are mercenaries. They're heavily armed. They carry out military missions, but they're private employees who don't answer to military discipline. On the other hand, they don't seem to be accountable to Iraqi or U.S. law, either. And they behave accordingly.

We may never know what really happened in a crowded Baghdad square two weeks ago. Employees of Blackwater USA claim that they were attacked by gunmen. Iraqi police and witnesses say that the contractors began firing randomly at a car that didn't get out of their way.

What we do know is that more than 20 civilians were killed, including the couple and child in the car. And the Iraqi version of events is entirely consistent with many other documented incidents involving security contractors.

For example, Mr. Singer reminds us that in 2005 "armed contractors from the Zapata firm were detained by U.S. forces, who claimed they saw the private soldiers indiscriminately firing not only at Iraqi civilians, but also U.S. Marines." The contractors were not charged. In 2006, employees of Aegis, another security firm, posted a "trophy video" on the Internet that showed them shooting civilians, and employees of Triple Canopy, yet another contractor, were fired after alleging that a supervisor engaged in "joy-ride shooting" of Iraqi civilians.

Yet even among the contractors, Blackwater has the worst reputation. On Christmas Eve 2006, a drunken Blackwater employee reportedly shot and killed a guard of the Iraqi vice president. (The employee was flown out of the country, and has not been charged.) In May 2007, Blackwater employees reportedly shot an employee of Iraq's Interior Ministry, leading to an armed standoff between the firm and Iraqi police.

Iraqis aren't the only victims of this behavior. Of the nearly 4,000 American service members who have died in Iraq, scores if not hundreds would surely still be alive if it weren't for the hatred such incidents engender.

Which raises the question, why are Blackwater and other mercenary outfits still playing such a big role in Iraq?

Don't tell me that they are irreplaceable. The Iraq war has now gone on for four and a half years — longer than American participation in World War II. There has been plenty of time for the Bush administration to find a way to do without mercenaries, if it wanted to.

And the danger out-of-control military contractors pose to American forces has been obvious at least since March 2004, when four armed Blackwater employees blundered into Fallujah in the middle of a delicate military operation, getting themselves killed and precipitating a crisis that probably ended any chance of an acceptable outcome in Iraq.

Yet Blackwater is still there. In fact, last year the State Department gave Blackwater the lead role in diplomatic security in Iraq.

Mr. Singer argues that reliance on private military contractors has let the administration avoid making hard political choices, such as admitting that it didn't send enough troops in the first place. Contractors, he writes, "offered the potential backstop of additional forces, but with no one having to lose any political capital." That's undoubtedly part of the story.

But it's also worth noting that the Bush administration has tried to privatize every aspect of the U.S. government it can, using taxpayers' money to give lucrative contracts to its friends — people like Erik Prince, the owner of Blackwater, who has strong Republican connections. You might think that national security would take precedence over the fetish for privatization — but remember, President Bush tried to keep airport security in private hands, even after 9/11.

So the privatization of war — no matter how badly it works — is just part of the pattern.

That lost nuke was NO MISTAKE

2007-09-15T11:18:00.000-07:00

From: Russell 'Ace' Hoffman
Subject: Make no mistake about it: That lost nuke was NO MISTAKE
Date: Sep 15, 2007 10:13 AM

September 15th, 2007

Dear Readers,

Do you want a nuclear war with Iran?

Those half-dozen nukes that were accidentally "lost" last month, which turned up at Barksdale AFB, the staging area for aerial attacks on the Middle East, could not possibly have been lost. They were moved ON ORDERS FROM THE TOP.

And one of them appears to be missing.

What can you do with just one "small" nuke (maximum size 150 kilotons, and possibly as small as 5 kilotons)?

Start a war, that's what you can do! You can set it off in America, claim it was Al Qaeda, claim they were supplied by Iran, and then blow Tehran off the map.

I hear cheering.

Stop that, you fools! The people of Tehran are NOT our enemy. The people of Iran are NOT our enemy. If / WHEN that missing nuke is blown up and 10,000 Americans are killed, it will NOT be their fault.

We went into one war on false premises (at least one). We cannot afford a nuclear retaliation. The seeds we sow will come back time and again.

AMERICA IS THE ROGUE NATION NOW.

George Bush and Dick Cheney are evil incarnate. We, the people, cannot afford to wait for them to push the button that starts World War Three. We MUST remove the Evil Empire from office. We cannot afford to wait for their "term" to run out -- provision has ALREADY BEEN MADE to prevent it from running out, anyway!

Check out the URL below, where National Security Presidential Directive 51 (aka Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20) gives FULL AUTHORITY for the White House to stay in office, prevent elections, and rule us with an iron fist:

www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/05/20070509-12.html

Oh sure, we can all just sleep, waiting to see what happens. Thinking it's out of our control. We can each, individually, be too afraid to speak out.

But that will just get us killed by radioactive poisons unleased throughout the world. Few people noticed the reddened skies after "Shock and Awe" blew Uranium dust globally. Few noticed that Iraq was attacked without provocation after flimsy excuses failed to convince the public. Few noticed that George Bush claimed in his most recent speech that "36 nations" were working together in Iraq right now, 35 alongside us, when, in truth, even our staunchest ally, Britain, has called it quits and plans to withdraw all their troops soon.

Bush lies, millions die.

Next on the agenda is a nuclear explosion on U.S. soil. Clause "B" of NSPD 51 states in no uncertain terms that such an event will be sufficient cause to stop ANY election of a new president. Read it yourself:

-----------------------------------------------
"Catastrophic Emergency" means any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions;
-----------------------------------------------

For example, a nuke.

Patriotic citizens around the country are waking up. But are there enough of us? Or has our decades-old lack of proper education brought us to a state of mass apathy about what made America great -- which was the personal involvement of the people -- people who cared about truth, justice, and the American Way?

Don't expect that nuke to be set off today or tomorrow, or even next month. It will probably be a year from now, long after everyone's forgotten about it. The war will start swiftly after that. George Bush will announce that the response has already begun -- that the missiles have started to land on Iran.

And the repercussions will be: A poisoned planet, martial law. The end of democracy and the Grand Experiment. Millions dead, hundreds of millions suffering. Trillions of dollars in "infrastructure" here, and in Iran, destroyed. Freedom gone. The Internet -- gone. Your rights -- gone.

There is only one way to stop this, and that's to recognize the plot before it's accomplished. A great patriot released the news about those errant nukes. Will more patriots do what is necessary to stop the totalitarian regime from seizing ALL remaining power?

Stay tuned to your CIA-approved news station (CNN is just as much a tool of the CIA as FOX is) and you WON'T FIND OUT.

The most ignoble death of all is the death of those who could have spoken out, but didn't. Will that be YOUR fate, or will you tell someone? Will you die quietly, or will you go down fighting? Will you send your sons and daughters off to push buttons against Iran, or will you demand the fight for peace?

Arrest George Bush and Dick Cheney TODAY! Don't wait: Waiting now, in our last moment when we might be able to do something, is the ultimate crime against humanity. Now you have a chance to do something. Tomorrow will be too late.

Signed,

Ace Hoffman

A patriot, a citizen, a humanitarian, and a sworn enemy of George Bush's totalitarian regime.

*************************************************
** THE ANIMATED SOFTWARE COMPANY
** Russell "Ace" Hoffman, Owner & Chief Programmer
** P.O. Box 1936, Carlsbad CA 92018-1936
** (800) 551-2726 (U.S. & Canada)
** (760) 720-7261 (elsewhere)
** www.animatedsoftware.com
*************************************************

Top 25 Censored Stories 2008

2007-09-07T11:15:00.000-07:00

Project Censored has released its Top 25 Censored Stories of 2006/7!

#1 No Habeas Corpus for “Any Person”
Sources:
Consortium, October 19, 2006
Title: “Who Is ‘Any Person’ in Tribunal Law?”
Author: Robert Parry
http://consortiumnews.com/2006/101906.html
Consortium, February 3, 2007
Title: “Still No Habeas Rights for You”
Author: Robert Parry
http://consortiumnews.com/2007/020307.html
Common Dreams, February 2, 2007
Title: “Repeal the Military Commissions Act and Restore the Most
American Human Right”
Author: Thom Hartmann
http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0212-24.htm
Student Researchers: Bryce Cook and Julie Bickel
Faculty Evaluator: Andrew Roth, Ph.D.
With the approval of Congress and no outcry from corporate media, the Military Commissions Act (MCA) signed by Bush on October 17, 2006, ushered in military commission law for US citizens and non-citizens alike. While media, including a lead editorial in the New York Times October 19, have given false comfort that we, as American citizens, will not be the victims of the draconian measures legalized by this Act—such as military roundups and life-long detention with no rights or constitutional protections—Robert Parry points to text in the MCA that allows for the institution of a military alternative to the constitutional justice system for “any person” regardless of American citizenship. The MCA effectively does away with habeas corpus rights for “any person” arbitrarily deemed to be an “enemy of the state.” The judgment on who is deemed an “enemy combatant” is solely at the discretion of President Bush.
The oldest human right defined in the history of English-speaking civilization is the right to challenge governmental power of arrest and detention through the use of habeas corpus laws, considered to be the most critical parts of the Magna Carta which was signed by King John in 1215.
Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist #84 in August of 1788:
The establishment of the writ of habeas corpus are perhaps greater securities to liberty and republicanism than any it [the Constitution] contains. The practice of arbitrary imprisonments have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny. The observations of the judicious [British eighteenth-century legal scholar] Blackstone, in reference to the latter, are well worthy of recital:
“To bereave a man of life” says he, “or by violence to confiscate his estate, without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism, as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole nation; but confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to jail, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is a less public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government.”
While it is true that some parts of the MCA target non-citizens, other sections clearly apply to US citizens as well, putting citizens inside the same tribunal system with non-citizen residents and foreigners.
Section 950q of the MCA states that, “Any person is punishable as a principal under this chapter [of the MCA] who commits an offense punishable by this chapter, or aids, abets, counsels, commands, or procures its commission.”1
Section 950v. “Crimes Triable by Military Commissions” (26) of the MCA seems to specifically target American citizens by stating that, “Any person subject to this chapter who, in breach of an allegiance or duty to the United States, knowingly and intentionally aids an enemy of the United States, or one of the co-belligerents of the enemy, shall be punished as a military commission under this chapter may direct.”1
“Who,” warns Parry, “has ‘an allegiance or duty to the United States’ if not an American citizen?”
Besides allowing “any person” to be swallowed up by Bush’s system, the law prohibits detainees once inside from appealing to the traditional American courts until after prosecution and sentencing, which could translate into an indefinite imprisonment since there are no timetables for Bush’s tribunal process to play out.
Section 950j of the law further states that once a person is detained, “ not withstanding any other provision of law (including section 2241 of title 28 or any other habeas corpus provision) no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider any claim or cause of action whatsoever relating to the prosecution, trial, or judgment of a military commission under this chapter, including challenges to the lawfulness of procedures of military commissions.”1
Other constitutional protections in the Bill of Rights, such as a speedy trial, the right to reasonable bail, and the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment,” would seem to be beyond a detainee’s reach as well.
Parry warns that, “In effect, what the new law appears to do is to create a parallel ‘star chamber’ system for the prosecution, imprisonment, and possible execution of enemies of the state, whether those enemies are foreign or domestic.
“Under the cloak of setting up military tribunals to try al-Qaeda suspects and other so-called unlawful enemy combatants, Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress effectively created a parallel legal system for ‘any person’—American citizen or otherwise—who crosses some ill-defined line.”
In one of the most chilling public statements ever made by a US Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales opined at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Jan. 18, 2007, “The Constitution doesn’t say every individual in the United States or citizen is hereby granted or assured the right of habeas corpus. It doesn’t say that. It simply says the right shall not be suspended.”
More important than its sophomoric nature, Parry warns, is that Gonzales’s statement suggests he is still searching for arguments to make habeas corpus optional, subordinate to the President’s executive powers that Bush’s neoconservative legal advisers claim are virtually unlimited during “time of war.”
Citation
1. “Military Commissions Act of 2006” Public Law 109-366, 109th Congress. See http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=109_cong_public_laws&docid=f :publ366.109.
UPDATE BY ROBERT PARRY
The Consortium series on the Military Commissions Act of 2006 pointed out that the law’s broad language seems to apply to both US citizens and non-citizens, contrary to some reassuring comments in the major news media that the law only denies habeas corpus rights to non-citizens. The law’s application to “any person” who aids and abets a wide variety of crimes related to terrorism—and the law’s provisions stripping away the jurisdiction of civilian courts—could apparently thrust anyone into the legal limbo of the military commissions where their rights are tightly constrained and their cases could languish indefinitely.
Despite the widespread distribution of our articles on the Internet, the major US news media continues to ignore the troubling “any person” language tucked in toward the end of the statute. To my knowledge, for instance, no major news organization has explained why, if the law is supposed to apply only to non-citizens, one section specifically targets “any person [who] in breach of an allegiance or duty to the United States, knowingly and intentionally aids an enemy of the United States.” Indeed, the “any person” language in sections dealing with a wide array of crimes, including traditional offenses such as spying, suggests that a parallel legal system has been created outside the parameters of the US Constitution.
Since publication of the articles, the Democrats won control of both the House and Senate—and some prominent Democrats, such as Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy, have voiced their intent to revise the law with the goal of restoring habeas corpus and other rights. However, other Democrats appear hesitant, fearing that any attempt to change the law would open them to charges that they are “soft on terrorism” and that Republicans would torpedo the reform legislation anyway. Outside of Congress, pro-Constitution groups have made reform of the Military Commissions Act a high priority. For instance, the American Civil Liberties Union organized a national protest rally against the law. But the public’s lack of a clear understanding of the law’s scope has undercut efforts to build a popular movement for repeal or revision of the law.
To learn more about the movement to rewrite the Military Commissions Act, readers can contact the ACLU at https://secure.aclu.org/site/SPageServer?pagename=DOA_learn
https://secure.aclu.org/site/SPageServer?pagename=DOA_learn.
Comment
On June 8, 2007 the Senate Judiciary Committee passed the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act on an 11-8 vote. If approved, the bipartisan bill, authored by Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, will restore habeas rights that were taken away last year by the Military Commissions Act. The bill will move to the full Senate for vote late June 2007.

#2 Bush Moves Toward Martial Law
Sources:
Uruknet, October 26, 2006
Title: “Bush Moves Toward Martial Law”
Author: Frank Morales
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=27769
Student Researchers: Phillip Parfitt and Julie Bickel
Faculty Evaluator: Andy Merrifield, Ph.D.
The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007, which was quietly signed by Bush on October 17, 2006, the very same day that he signed the Military Commissions Act, allows the president to station military troops anywhere in the United States and take control of state-based National Guard units without the consent of the governor or local authorities, in order to “suppress public disorder.”
By revising the two-century-old Insurrection Act, the law in effect repeals the Posse Comitatus Act, which placed strict prohibitions on military involvement in domestic law enforcement. The 1878 Act reads, “Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.” As the only US criminal statute that outlaws military operations directed against the American people, it has been our best protection against tyranny enforced by martial law—the harsh system of rules that takes effect when the military takes control of the normal administration of justice. Historically martial law has been imposed by various governments during times of war or occupation to intensify control of populations in spite of heightened unrest. In modern times it is most commonly used by authoritarian governments to enforce unpopular rule.1
Section 333 of the Defense Authorization Act of 2007, entitled “Major public emergencies; interference with State and Federal law,” states that “the President may employ the armed forces, including the National Guard in Federal service—to restore public order and enforce the laws of the United States when, as a result of a natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition in any State or possession of the United States, the President determines that domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the State or possession are incapable of (or “refuse” or “fail” in) maintaining public order—in order to suppress, in any State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.”
Thus an Act of Congress, superceding the Posse Comitatus Act, has paved the way toward a police state by granting the president unfettered legal authority to order federal troops onto the streets of America, directing military operations against the American people under the cover of “law enforcement.”
The massive Defense Authorization Act grants the Pentagon $532.8 billion to include implementation of the new law which furthermore facilitates militarized police round-ups of protesters, so-called illegal aliens, potential terrorists, and other undesirables for detention in facilities already contracted and under construction, (see Censored 2007, Story #14) and transferring from the Pentagon to local police units the latest technology and weaponry designed to suppress dissent.
Author Frank Morales notes that despite the unprecedented and shocking nature of this act, there has been no outcry in the American media, and little reaction from our elected officials in Congress. On September 19, a lone Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) noted that 2007’s Defense Authorization Act contained a “widely opposed provision to allow the President more control over the National Guard [adopting] changes to the Insurrection Act, which will make it easier for this or any future President to use the military to restore domestic order without the consent of the nation’s governors.”
A few weeks later, on September 29, Leahy entered into the Congressional Record that he had “grave reservations about certain provisions of the fiscal Year 2007 Defense Authorization Bill Conference Report,” the language of which, he said, “subverts solid, longstanding posse comitatus statutes that limit the military’s involvement in law enforcement, thereby making it easier for the President to declare martial law.” This had been “slipped in,” Leahy said, “as a rider with little study,” while “other congressional committees with jurisdiction over these matters had no chance to comment, let alone hold hearings on, these proposals.”
Leahy noted “the implications of changing the [Posse Comitatus] Act are enormous.” “There is good reason,” he said, “for the constructive friction in existing law when it comes to martial law declarations. Using the military for law enforcement goes against one of the founding tenets of our democracy. We fail our Constitution, neglecting the rights of the States, when we make it easier for the President to declare martial law and trample on local and state sovereignty.”
Morales further asserts that “with the president’s polls at a historic low and Democrats taking back the Congress it is particularly worrisome that President Bush has seen fit, at this juncture to, in effect, declare himself dictator.”
Citation
1. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_law, “Martial Law,” May 2007
UPDATE BY FRANK MORALES
On April 24, 2007, Major General Timothy Lowenberg, the Adjutant General, Washington National Guard, and Director of the Washington Military Department, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on “The Insurrection Act Rider and State Control of the National Guard.” He was speaking in opposition to Section 1076 of the recently passed 2007 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which President Bush quietly signed into law this past October 17. The law clears the way for the President to execute martial law, commandeer National Guard units around the country and unilaterally authorize military operations against the American people in the event of an executive declaration of a “public emergency.”
This move toward martial law, which is intended to facilitate more effective counterinsurgency measures on the home front, took place, according to Lowenberg, “without any hearing or consultation with the governors and without any articulation or justification of need.” This, despite the fact that Section 1076 of the new law “changed more than one hundred years of well-established and carefully balanced state-federal and civil-military relationships.” In other words, with one swipe of the pen, says the General, “one hundred years of law and policy were changed without any publicly or privately acknowledged author or proponent of the change.”
Its “Federal Plans for Implementing Expanded Martial Law Authority” are to be executed via the recently created domestic military command, the Northern Command or NORTHCOM. “One key USNORTHCOM planning assumption,” says Lowenberg, “is that the President will invoke the new Martial Law powers if he concludes state and/or local authorities no longer possess either the capability or the will to maintain order.” In fact, this “highly subjective assumption,” as Lowenberg puts it, has been in the works for some time now. According to the General, the “US Northern Command has been engaged for some time in deliberative planning for implementation of Section 1076 of the 2007 National Defense Authorization. The formal NORTHCOM CONPLAN 2502-05 was approved by Secretary of Defense Gates on March 15, 2007,”
Further, according to the General, the 2007 NDAA provisions “could be used to compel National Guard forces to engage in civil disturbance operations under federal control.” In that case, NORTHCOM will effectuate its move to martial law, its “CONPLAN,” by way of its very own “civil disturbance plan,” Department of Defense Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2, code-named Garden Plot. Major Tom Herthel, of the United States Air Force Judge Advocate General School, recently laid out the Rules of Engagement & Rules for the Use of Force during the implementation of “GARDEN PLOT,” which according to Herthel, is ”the plan to provide the basis for all preparation, deployment, employment, and redeployment of all designated forces, including National Guard forces called to active federal service, for use in domestic civil disturbance operations as directed by the President.” Among other things, the “rules” allow for the use of lethal force during domestic “civil disturbance operations.”
That is why many are urging Congress to repeal Section 1076 of the 2007 NDAA through immediate enactment of Senate Bill 513. Introduced in February 2007, and sponsored by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the bill seeks to repeal, or as the Congress puts it, “revive previous authority on the use of the Armed Forces and the militia to address interference with State or Federal law, and for other purposes,” through the “Repeal of Amendments made by Public Law 109-364-Section 1076 of the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007.”
It is critical that Senate Bill 513 becomes law, and that our popular struggle succeeds in beating back the President’s attempt to further codify the immoral and criminal seizure of state control via woefully ill-advised and dictatorial moves toward martial law and military rule.

# 3 AFRICOM: US Military Control of Africa’s Resources
Source:
MoonofAlabama.org 2/21/2007
Title: “Understanding AFRICOM”
Author: Bryan Hunt
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2007/02/understanding_a_1.html
Student Researcher: Ioana Lupu
Faculty Evaluator: Marco Calavita, Ph.D
In February 2007 the White House announced the formation of the US African Command (AFRICOM), a new unified Pentagon command center in Africa, to be established by September 2008. This military penetration of Africa is being presented as a humanitarian guard in the Global War on Terror. The real objective is, however, the procurement and control of Africa’s oil and its global delivery systems.
The most significant and growing challenge to US dominance in Africa is China. An increase in Chinese trade and investment in Africa threatens to substantially reduce US political and economic leverage in that resource-rich continent. The political implication of an economically emerging Africa in close alliance with China is resulting in a new cold war in which AFRICOM will be tasked with achieving full-spectrum military dominance over Africa.
AFRICOM will replace US military command posts in Africa, which were formerly under control of US European Command (EUCOM) and US Central Command (CENTCOM), with a more centralized and intensified US military presence.
A context for the pending strategic role of AFRICOM can be gained from observing CENTCOM in the Middle East. CENTCOM grew out of the Carter Doctrine of 1980 which described the oil flow from the Persian Gulf as a “vital interest” of the US, and affirmed that the US would employ “any means necessary, including military force” to overcome an attempt by hostile interests to block that flow.
It is in Western and Sub-Saharan Africa that the US military force is most rapidly increasing, as this area is projected to become as important a source of energy as the Middle East within the next decade. In this region, challenge to US domination and exploitation is coming from the people of Africa—most specifically in Nigeria, where seventy percent of Africa’s oil is contained.
People native to the Niger Delta region have not benefited, but instead suffered, as a result of sitting on top of vast natural oil and natural gas deposits. Nigerian people’s movements are demanding self-determination and equitable sharing of oil-receipts. Environmental and human rights activists have, for years, documented atrocities on the part of oil companies and the military in this region. As the tactics of resistance groups have shifted from petition and protest to more proactive measures, attacks on pipelines and oil facilities have curtailed the flow of oil leaving the region. As a Convergent Interests report puts it, “Within the first six months of 2006, there were nineteen attacks on foreign oil operations and over $2.187 billion lost in oil revenues; the Department of Petroleum Resources claims this figure represents 32 percent of ‘the revenue the country [Nigeria] generated this year.’”
Oil companies and the Pentagon are attempting to link these resistance groups to international terror networks in order to legitimize the use of the US military to “stabilize” these areas and secure the energy flow. No evidence has been found however to link the Niger Delta resistance groups to international terror networks or jihadists. Instead the situation in the Niger Delta is that of ethnic-nationalist movements fighting, by any means necessary, toward the political objective of self-determination. The volatility surrounding oil installations in Nigeria and elsewhere in the continent is, however, used by the US security establishment to justify military “support” in African oil producing states, under the guise of helping Africans defend themselves against those who would hinder their engagement in “Free Trade.”
The December 2006 invasion of Somalia was coordinated using US bases throughout the region. The arrival of AFRICOM will effectively reinforce efforts to replace the popular Islamic Courts Union of Somalia with the oil industry–friendly Transitional Federal Government. Meanwhile, the persistent Western calls for “humanitarian intervention” into the Darfur region of Sudan sets up another possibility for military engagement to deliver regime change in another Islamic state rich in oil reserves.
Hunt warns that this sort of “support” is only bound to increase as rhetoric of stabilizing Africa makes the dailies, copied directly out of official AFRICOM press releases. Readers of the mainstream media can expect to encounter more frequent usage of terms like “genocide” and “misguided.” He notes that already corporate media decry China’s human rights record and support for Sudan and Zimbabwe while ignoring the ongoing violations of Western corporations engaged in the plunder of natural resources, the pollution other peoples’ homelands, and the “shoring up” of repressive regimes.
In FY 2005 the Trans-Sahara Counter Terrorism Initiative received $16 million; in FY 2006, nearly $31 million. A big increase is expected in 2008, with the administration pushing for $100 million each year for five years. With the passage of AFRICOM and continued promotion of the Global War on Terror, Congressional funding is likely to increase significantly.
In the end, regardless of whether it’s US or Chinese domination over Africa, the blood spilled will be African. Hunt concludes, “It does not require a crystal ball or great imagination to realize what the increased militarization of the continent through AFRICOM will bring to the peoples of Africa.”
Update by Bryan Hunt
By spring 2007, US Department of Energy data showed that the United States now imports more oil from the continent of Africa than from the country of Saudi Arabia. While this statistic may be of surprise to the majority, provided such information even crosses their radar, it’s certainly not the case for those figures who have been pushing for increased US military engagement on that continent for some time now, as my report documented. These import levels will rise.
In the first few months following the official announcement of AFRICOM, details are still few. It’s expected that the combatant command will be operational as a subunit of EUCOM by October 2007, transitioning to a full-fledged stand-alone command some twelve months later. This will most likely entail the re-locating of AFRICOM headquarters from Stuttgart, Germany, where EUCOM is headquartered, to an African host country.
In April, US officials were traversing the continent to present their sales pitch for AFRICOM and to gauge official and public reaction. Initial perceptions are, not surprisingly, negative and highly suspect, given the history of US military involvement throughout the world, and Africa’s long and bitter experience with colonizers.
Outside of a select audience, reaction in the United States has barely even registered. First of all, Africa is one of the least-covered continents in US media. And when African nations do draw media attention, coverage typically centers on catastrophe, conflict, or corruption, and generally features some form of benevolent foreign intervention, be it financial and humanitarian aid, or stern official posturing couched as paternal concerns over human rights. But US military activity on the continent largely goes unnoticed. This was recently evidenced by the sparse reporting on military support for the invasion of Somalia to rout the Islamic Courts Union and reinstall the unpopular warlords who had earlier divided up the country. The Pentagon went so far as to declare the operation a blueprint for future engagements.
The DOD states that a primary component of AFRICOM’s mission will be to professionalize indigenous militaries to ensure stability, security, and accountable governance throughout Africa’s various states and regions. Stability refers to establishing and maintaining order, and accountability, of course, refers to US interests. This year alone, 1,400 African military officers are anticipated to complete International Military Education and Training programs at US military schools.
Combine this tasking of militarization with an increased civilian component in AFRICOM emphasizing imported conceptions of “democracy promotion” and “capacity-building” and African autonomy and sovereignty are quick to suffer. Kenyans, for example, are currently finding themselves in this position.
It is hoped that, by drawing attention to the growing US footprint on Africa now, a contextual awareness of these issues can be useful to, at the very least, help mitigate some of the damages that will surely follow. At the moment, there is little public consciousness of AFRICOM and very few sources of information outside of official narratives. Widening the public dialogue on this topic is the first step toward addressing meaningful responses.

# 4 Frenzy of Increasingly Destructive Trade Agreements
Sources:
Oxfam International, March 2007
Title: “Singing Away The Future”
http://www.oxfam.org/en/policy/briefingpapers/bp101_regional_trade_agreements_0703
IPS coverage of Oxfam Report March 20, 2007
Title: “Free Trade Enslaving Poor Countries”
Author: Sanjay Suri
http://ipsnews.org/news.asp?idnews=37008
Student Researcher: Ann Marie O’Toole
Faculty Evaluator: Peter Phillips, Ph.D.
The Oxfam report, “Signing Away the Future,” reveals that the US and European Union (EU) are vigorously pursuing increasingly destructive regional and bilateral trade and investment agreements outside the auspices of the WTO. These agreements are requiring enormous irreversible concessions from developing countries, while offering almost nothing in return. Faster and deeper, the US and EU are demanding unprecedented tariff reductions, sometimes to nothing, as the US and EU dump subsidized agricultural goods on undeveloped countries (see story #21), plunging local farmers into desperate poverty. Meanwhile the US and EU provide themselves with high tariffs and stringent import quotas to protect their own producers. Unprecedented loss of livelihood, displacement, slave labor, along with spiraling degradation of human rights and environments are resulting as economic governance is forced from governments of developing countries, and taken over by unaccountable multinational firms.
During 2006, more than one hundred developing countries were involved in FTA or Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT) negotiations. “An average of two treaties are signed every week,” the report says, “Virtually no country, however poor, has been left out.”
Much of the recent debate and controversy over trade negotiations has revolved around the increasingly devastating trade-distorting practices of rich countries versus the developing countries’ needs for food security and industrial development. The new generation of agreements, however, extends far beyond this traditional area of trade policy—imposing a damaging set of binding rules in intellectual property, services, and investment with much deeper consequences for development and impacts on the poor.
Double standards in the intellectual-property rights chapters of most trade agreements are glaring. As new agreements limit developing countries’ access to patented technology and medicines—while failing to protect traditional knowledge—the public-health consequences are staggering. The US-Colombia FTA is expected to reduce access to medicines by 40 percent and the US-Peru FTA is expected to leave 700,000 to 900,000 Peruvians without access to affordable medicines.
US and EU FTAs also require the adoption of plant-breeder rights that remove the right to share seeds among indigenous farmers. The livelihood of the world’s poorest farmers is thus made even more vulnerable, while profit margins of the world’s largest agribusinesses continue to climb. US FTAs are now pushing for patents on plants, which will not only limit the rights of farmers to exchange or sell seeds, but also forbid them to save and reuse seed they have grown themselves for generations. Under US FTAs including DR-CAFTA, US–Peru and US–Colombia FTAs, developing-country governments will no longer be able to reject a patent application because a firm fails to indicate the origin of a plant or show proof of consent for its use from a local community. As a result, communities could find themselves forced to pay for patented plant varieties based on genetic resources from their own soil.
New rules also pose a threat to essential services as FTAs allow foreign investors to take ownership of healthcare, education, water, and public utilities.
Investment chapters of new FTAs and BITs allow foreign investors to sue for lost profits, including anticipated future profits, if governments change regulations, even when such reforms are in the public interest. These rules undermine the sovereignty of developing nations, transferring power from governments to largely unaccountable multinational firms. A growing number of investment chapters and treaties further tip the scales of justice by preventing governments from screening or regulating foreign investment—banning the use of all ‘performance requirements’ in all sectors including mining, manufacturing, and services.
More than 170 countries have signed international investment agreements that provide foreign investors with the right to turn immediately to international investor-state arbitration to settle disputes, without first trying to resolve the matter in national courts. Such arbitration fails to consider public interest, basing decisions exclusively on commercial law.
Not only is the legal basis for investment arbitration loaded against public interest, so are the proceedings. Despite the fact that many arbitration panels are hosted at the World Bank and the United Nations, the investment arbitration system is shrouded in secrecy. It is virtually impossible to find out what cases are being heard, let alone the outcome or rationale for decisions. As a result, there is no body of case decisions to inform governments of developing countries when drafting investments agreements.
Oxfam notes that the only group privy to this information is an increasingly powerful select group of commercial lawyers, whose fees often place them out of reach of developing-country governments. These lawyers, according to the Oxfam report, are eager to advise foreign investors regarding opportunities to claim compensation from developing countries under international investment agreements.
Strong opposition is growing to the political asymmetry inherent in these bilateral trade and investment agreements (see stories #8, #19, and #21). As Oxfam notes, “It is in nobody’s long-term interest to have a global economy that perpetuates social, economic, and environmental injustice.”
UPDATE BY LAURA RUSU OF OXFAM INTERNATIONAL
While real progress toward achieving a development-friendly outcome in the World Trade Organization’s Doha Round is still quite elusive, the negotiation of bilateral and regional free trade agreements (FTAs) that would undermine development continues at an unabated pace.
In the United States, the new Democratic leadership in Congress recently negotiated changes in the areas of labor, environment, and intellectual property in regard to access to medicines that are to be incorporated into the completed FTAs awaiting Congressional ratification. If implemented as agreed, these changes would mean important progress in enforcing core International Labor Organization standards and multilateral environmental agreements, and in promoting public health over private profits by reducing onerous protections for pharmaceutical monopolies. Still, more must be done in these areas, and harmful provisions remain in several other areas that will adversely affect developing countries, particularly the poor.
Without further changes, the FTAs create a profoundly unfair situation in which the US provides massive domestic agricultural supports and subsidies that allow products to be exported below their cost of production, while developing country trading partners are left with no means of protection. With large portions of their populations dependent upon agriculture for their livelihoods, the FTAs provide no effective safeguard to protect poor farmers from unfair competition. In addition, investment rules in the FTAs will hinder local and national governments from directing foreign investment so that it contributes to sustainable development. The investment chapter will give foreign companies leeway to challenge investment regulations, such as laws to protect the environment and public health. These and other provisions would deny developing countries the policy space needed to further their own development.
The US Administration hopes to bring FTAs with Peru, Panama, Colombia and Korea to a vote this year, although it remains doubtful whether there would be sufficient Congressional support to move the latter two. Congressional leadership is insisting that Colombia must also address its serious problems of violence and impunity, particularly as suffered by trade unionists, and has raised market-access concerns with regard to South Korea.
In a similar vein, the European Union has proceeded with FTA negotiations with African, Caribbean, and Pacific countries by pushing forward negotiating texts that will undermine the ability of poor countries to effectively govern their economies, protect their poorest people, improve livelihoods, and create new jobs. Going beyond the provisions negotiated at a multilateral level, the EU is making requests that would impose far-reaching, hard-to-reverse rules in the areas of market access, agriculture, services and intellectual property. At the same time, the EU is proceeding to open formal negotiations with Central American countries for an FTA that would impose similar rules that undermine development. A similar agreement with Andean countries is expected to follow, and plans have been announced to open negotiations with ASEAN, India, and South Korea. In all of these negotiations, the EU, like the US, is failing to put development first.
For more information, please see http://www.oxfamamerica.org.

#5 Human Traffic Builds US Embassy in Iraq
Source:
CorpWatch, October 17, 2007
Title: “A US Fortress Rises in Baghdad: Asian Workers Trafficked to Build World’s Largest Embassy”
Author: David Phinney
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14173
Student Researcher: Kristen Kebler and Angela Purcaro
Faculty Evaluator: Andrew Roth, Ph.D.
The enduring monument to US liberation and democracy in Iraq will be the most expensive and heavily fortified embassy in the world—and is being built by a Kuwait contractor repeatedly accused of using forced labor trafficked from South Asia under US contracts. The $592 million, 104-acre fortress equal in size to the Vatican City is scheduled to open in September 2007. With a highly secretive contract awarded by the US State Department, First Kuwaiti Trading & Contracting has joined the ranks of Halliburton/KBR in Iraq by using bait-and-switch recruiting practices. Thousands of citizens from countries that have banned travel or work in Iraq are being tricked, smuggled into brutal and inhumane labor camps, and subjected to months of forced servitude—all in the middle of the US-controlled Green Zone, “right under the nose of the US State Department.”
Though Associated Press reports that, “The 5,500 Americans and Iraqis working at the embassy are far more numerous than at any other US mission worldwide,”1 there is no mention in corporate media of the 3,000 South Asian laborers working for contractors in dangerous and abysmal living and working conditions.
One such contractor is First Kuwaiti Trading and Contracting. FKTC has procured several billion dollars in US construction contracts since the war began in March 2003. Much of its work is performed by cheap labor hired from South Asia. The company currently employs an estimated 7,500 foreign laborers in theaters of war.
American FKTC employees report having witnessed the issuance of false boarding passes to Dubai, and passport seizure from planeloads of South Asian workers, who were instead routed to war-torn Baghdad. Former US Embassy construction manager for FKTC, John Owen, disclosed to author David Phinney that the deception had all the appearance of smuggling workers into Iraq.
On April 4, 2006, the Pentagon issued a contracting directive following an investigation that officially confirmed that contractors in Iraq, many working as subcontractors to Halliburton/KBR, were illegally confiscating worker passports, using deceptive bait-and-switch hiring practices, and charging recruiting fees that indebted low-paid migrant workers for many months or even years to their employers.
Section 1. (U) of the Pentagon directive states, “An inspection of contracting activities supporting DoD in Iraq revealed evidence of illegal confiscation of worker (Third Country National) passports by contractors/subcontractors; deceptive hiring practices and excessive recruiting fees, substandard worker living conditions at some sites, circumvention of Iraqi immigration procedures by contractors/subcontractors and lack of mandatory trafficking in persons awareness training. This FRAGO [fragmentary order] establishes responsibilities within MNF-1 for combating trafficking in persons.”
An April 19, 2006 memorandum from Joint Contracting Command in Baghdad to All Contractors again states that, “Evidence indicates a widespread practice of withholding employee passports to, among other things, prevent employees ‘jumping’ to other employers. All contractors engaging in the above mentioned practice are directed to cease and desist in this practice immediately.”
The Pentagon has yet to announce, however, any penalty for those found to be in violation of US labor trafficking laws or contract requirements.
In a resignation letter dated June 2006, Owen told FKTC and US State Department officials that his managers at the US Embassy site regularly beat migrant workers, demonstrated little regard for worker safety, and routinely breached security. He also complained of poor sanitation, squalid living conditions and medical malpractice in labor camps where several thousand low-paid migrant workers, recruited from the Philippines, India, and Pakistan lived. Those workers, Owen noted, earned as little as $10 to $30 for a twelve-hour workday.
Rory Mayberry, a medic subcontracted to FKTC to attend construction crews at the Embassy, shares similar complaints about treatment of migrant laborers. In reports made available to the US State Department, the US Army, and FKTC, Mayberry called for the closure of the onsite medical clinic, listing dozens of serious safety hazards, unsanitary conditions, as well as routine negligence and malpractice. He furthermore called for an investigation into deaths that he suspected resulted from medical malpractice. Mayberry is not aware of any follow-up on his allegations.
Owen says that State Department officials supervising the US Embassy project are aware of abuse, but apparently do nothing. He recalls, “Once when seventeen workers climbed the wall of the construction site to escape, a State Department official helped round them up and put them in virtual lockdown.”
Phinney says that more FKTC employees are stepping forward to say that Owen’s and Mayberry’s testimonies “only begin to scratch the surface” of the conditions workers are forced to endure in building this monument to US liberation and democracy in Iraq.
Citation:
1. Associated Press, “New US Embassy in Iraq Cloaked in Mystery,” MSNBC, April 14, 2006.
UPDATE BY DAVID PHINNEY
When I first heard that Project Censored would recognize this story on the low-wage migrant laborers from South Asia building the US embassy in Baghdad, I admit I felt the story was a failure. Allegations of forced labor, lousy treatment of workers and beatings struck me as something that should rise to the level of torture at Abu Ghraib. Despite what appears to be a whitewash review of the embassy project by the State Department Inspector General that exonerated the contractor—even though more than a dozen sources on the site say conditions were abysmal—I am now encouraged by a recent effort at the US Justice Department to investigate allegations of labor trafficking and other matters. But the problem of labor abuse has been found to be “widespread” among contractors in the theater of war in Iraq. Unfortunately, not one contractor has been penalized—in fact, many are being rewarded with new US-funded contracts. That is a crime to humanity that may haunt the United States for years to come.

#6 Operation FALCON Raids
Sources:
SourceWatch, November 18, 2006
Title: “Operation Falcon”
Author: Artificial Intelligence
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Operation_FALCON
Ukernet, February 26, 2007
Title: “Operation Falcon and the Looming Police State”
Author: Mike Whitney
http://uruknet.info/?p=m30971&s1=h1
Student Researcher: Erica Haikara and Celeste Winders
Faculty Evaluator: Ron Lopez, Ph.D.
Under the code name Operation FALCON (Federal and Local Cops Organized Nationally) three federally coordinated mass arrests occurred between April 2005 and October 2006. In an unprecedented move, more than 30,000 “fugitives” were arrested in the largest dragnets in the nation’s history. The operations directly involved over 960 agencies (state, local, and federal) and were the brainchild of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and US Marshal’s Director Ben Reyna. The DoJ supplied television networks government-shot action videotape of Marshals and local cops raiding homes and breaking down doors, “targeting the worst of the worst criminals on the run,” emphasizing suspected sex offenders. Yet less than ten percent of the total 30,150 were suspected sex offenders and less than two percent owned firearms. The press has not asked, “Who were the others?” And to date, the US Marshal’s office has issued no public statement as to whether the people arrested in Operation Falcon have been processed or released. Author Mike Whitney cautions that Attorney General Gonzales has little interest in the petty offenders who were netted in this extraordinary crackdown. This action is instead, he warns, a practice roundup in the move toward martial law.
Altogether, there were three FALCON Operations, each netting roughly 10,000 criminal suspects. Between April 4–10, 2005, FALCON I swept up 10,340 fugitives in the largest nationwide mass arrest (to that date) in American history. Alberto Gonzalez proudly announced on April 15 through corporate media, “Operation FALCON is an excellent example of President Bush’s direction and the Justice Department’s dedication to deal both with the terrorist threat and traditional violent crime. This joint effort shows the commitment of our federal, state, and local partners to make our neighborhoods safer, and it has led to the highest number of arrests ever recorded for a single initiative of its kind. We will use all of our Nation’s law enforcement resources to serve the people, to pursue justice, and to make our streets and Nation safer.”
Operation FALCON II, carried out the week of April 17–23, 2006, arrested another 9,037 individuals from twenty-seven states mostly west of the Mississippi River. Operation FALCON III, conducted during the week of October 22–28, 2006, netted another 10,733 fugitives in twenty-four states east of the Mississippi River.
The US Marshals Service has not yet disclosed the names of the people arrested in these massive sweeps nor of what crimes they were accused. We have no way of knowing whether they were provided with due process of law, where they are now, or whether they have been abused while in custody.
SourceWatch contributors further ask for clarification, “Although Attorney General Gonzales stated on April 15, 2005 that Operation FALCON was ‘an excellent example of President Bush‘s direction and the Justice Department’s dedication to deal both with the terrorist threat and traditional violent crime,’ where is the connection between the Operation FALCON roundups and catching terrorists? Why did police wait for federally orchestrated raids to arrest known sex offenders and suspected murders? Why were state and federal agencies integrated with local law enforcement to simply carry out routine police work?”
The media played an essential role in concealing the important details of the Operation. In fact, the non-critical “cookie cutter” articles which appeared in newspapers across the country suggest that the media may have collaborated directly with the Justice Department. (see Chapter 9, Fake News) Whitney notes that nearly identical “news” segments and articles put the best possible spin on a story that most Americans might find deeply disturbing, and perhaps frightening.
While mass militarized police roundups make little sense as a method of apprehending fugitives, the FALCON program does make sense as a means of effectively setting up a chain-of-command structure that radiates from the Justice Department and relocates the levers of control to Washington where they can be manned by members of the administration. Whitney warns that the plan behind the FALCON program appears to have been devised to enhance the powers of the “unitary” executive by putting state and local law enforcement under federal supervision, ready for the institution of martial law (see story #2.)
Update by Mike Whitney
Operation FALCON presents the first time in US history that all of the domestic police agencies have been put under the direct control of the federal government. The implications for American democracy are quite profound.
Operation FALCON serves no purpose except to centralize power and establish the basic contours of an American police state. It is not an effective way of apprehending criminals.
For the most part, the media completely ignored FALCON. In fact, these extraordinary police-state sweeps did not elicit even one editorial or one column-inch of commentary from any journalist in the country. Following the government’s version of events, the story was simply brushed aside as trivial. For those who care to explore the media’s true role in undermining the fundamental rights of Americans; FALCON is probably a good place to begin. It illustrates how the media deliberately obscures facts that do not serve the overall interests of the state.
The last FALCON operation was carried out on October 28, 2006. Since then, the project has been put on “hold,” presumably until some time in the future when it will be reactivated by presidential decree. The precedents have now been established for law enforcement agencies across the nation to be taken over by the chief executive at a moment’s notice. If there is another terrorist attack within the United States, or the outbreak of an epidemic, or a natural disaster on the scale of Hurricane Katrina; we can expect that President Bush will consolidate his power by asserting direct control over all of the various federal, state, and local police agencies. Eventually, we will see that FALCON was organized with that very purpose in mind.
Recent changes to the Insurrection Act of 1807 as well as to the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 allow President Bush to declare martial law at his own discretion and to take control of the National Guard from the state governors. That means that Bush now has a complete monopoly on all the means of organized violence in the country.
With the aid of the corporate media and an alliance of far-right organizations, Bush has successfully removed all the traditional obstacles to absolute power. The groundwork has been laid for an American dictatorship. FALCON is just one small part of that much larger plan.
UPDATE BY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
A more recent and less publicized sweep was made March 7, 2007, in Baltimore, with the arrest of about two hundred fugitives. The rationale for this sweep is more puzzling, perhaps, as it was the only city involved. This sweep received only local media attention.
Numerous questions, as stated in the Operation FALCON article, remain unanswered. The mainstream press does not appear to be interested in exploring beyond the initial sweep events.
Both House and Senate committees on the judiciary and government oversight are digging into DoJ operations due to the US attorney firings and politicization of the Department, with all roads leading to the White House. It is not unreasonable to expect that these sweeps may eventually come under investigation as well.
The mainstream press, to my knowledge, has not responded at all to my SourceWatch coverage of this story. The press coverage that Operation FALCON received appears to be limited to DoJ and USMS news releases with the addition of an occasional local interest story. Information on the fate of the 30,000 plus who were arrested is conspicuous by its absence.
Additional information on this story should be available from both the DoJ and USMS. In reality, it most likely will not be, as neither has provided any updates. The SourceWatch article will continue to be updated when or if additional information becomes available.

#7 Behind Blackwater Inc.
Source: Democracy Now! January 26, 2007
Title: “Our Mercenaries in Iraq: Blackwater Inc and Bush’s Undeclared Surge”
Author: Jeremy Scahill
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/26/1559232
Student Researcher: Sverre Tysl
Faculty Evaluator: Noel Byrne, Ph.D.
The company that most embodies the privatization of the military industrial complex—a primary part of the Project for a New American Century and the neoconservative revolution is the private security firm Blackwater. Blackwater is the most powerful mercenary firm in the world, with 20,000 soldiers, the world’s largest private military base, a fleet of twenty aircraft, including helicopter gunships, and a private intelligence division. The firm is also manufacturing its own surveillance blimps and target systems.
Blackwater is headed by a very right-wing Christian-supremist and ex-Navy Seal named Erik Prince, whose family has had deep neo-conservative connections. Bush’s latest call for voluntary civilian military corps to accommodate the “surge” will add to over half a billion dollars in federal contracts with Blackwater, allowing Prince to create a private army to defend Christendom around the world against Muslims and others.
One of the last things Dick Cheney did before leaving office as Defense Secretary under George H. W. Bush was to commission a Halliburton study on how to privatize the military bureaucracy. That study effectively created the groundwork for a continuing war profiteer bonanza.
During the Clinton years, Erik Prince envisioned a project that would take advantage of anticipated military outsourcing. Blackwater began in 1996 as a private military training facility, with an executive board of former Navy Seals and Elite Special Forces, in the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina. A decade later it is the most powerful mercenary firm in the world, embodying what the Bush administration views as “the necessary revolution in military affairs”—the outsourcing of armed forces.
In his 2007 State of the Union address Bush asked Congress to authorize an increase in the size of our active Army and Marine Corps by 92,000 in the next five years. He continued, “A second task we can take on together is to design and establish a volunteer civilian reserve corps. Such a corps would function much like our military reserve. It would ease the burden on the Armed Forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them.”
This is, however, precisely what the administration has already done—largely, Jeremy Scahill points out, behind the backs of the American people. Private contractors currently constitute the second-largest “force” in Iraq. At last count, there were about 100,000 contractors in Iraq, 48,000 of which work as private soldiers, according to a Government Accountability Office report. These soldiers have operated with almost no oversight or effective legal constraints and are politically expedient, as contractor deaths go uncounted in the official toll. With Prince calling for the creation of a “contractor brigade” before military audiences, the Bush administration has found a back door for engaging in an undeclared expansion of occupation.
Blackwater currently has about 2,300 personnel actively deployed in nine countries and is aggressively expanding its presence inside US borders. They provide the security for US diplomats in Iraq, guarding everyone from Paul Bremer and John Negroponte to the current US ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad. They’re training troops in Afghanistan and have been active in the Caspian Sea, where they set up a Special Forces base miles from the Iranian border. According to reports they are currently negotiating directly with the Southern Sudanese regional government to start training the Christian forces of Sudan.
Blackwater’s connections are impressive. Joseph Schmitz, the former Pentagon Inspector General, whose job was to police the war contractor bonanza, has moved on to become the vice chairman of the Prince Group, Blackwater’s parent company, and the general counsel for Blackwater.
Bush recently hired Fred Fielding, Blackwater’s former lawyer, to replace Harriet Miers as his top lawyer; and Ken Starr, the former Whitewater prosecutor who led the impeachment charge against President Clinton, is now Blackwater’s counsel of record and has filed briefs with Supreme Court to fight wrongful death lawsuits brought against Blackwater.
Cofer Black, thirty-year CIA veteran and former head of CIA’s counterterrorism center, credited with spearheading the extraordinary rendition program after 9/11, is now senior executive at Blackwater and perhaps its most powerful operative.
Prince and other Blackwater executives have been major bankrollers of the President, of former House Majority Leader, Tom DeLay, and of former Senator, Rick Santorum. Senator John Warner, the former head of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called Blackwater, “our silent partner in the global war on terror.”

#8 KIA: The US Neoliberal Invasion of India
Sources:
Democracy Now! December 13, 2006
Title: “Vandana Shiva on Farmer Suicides, the US-India Nuclear Deal, Wal-Mart in India”
Author: Vandana Shiva with Amy Goodman
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/13/1451229
Global Research, October 9, 2006
Title: “Genetically Modified Seeds: Women in India Take on Monsanto”
Author: Arun Shrivastava
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=ARU20061009&articleId=3427
SciDev.Net
Title: “Sowing Trouble: India’s ‘Second Green Revolution’”
Author: Suman Sahai
http://www.scidev.net/content/opinions/eng/sowing-trouble-indias-second-green-revolution.cfm
Student Researchers: Jonathan Stoumen and Michael Januleski
Faculty Evaluator: Phil Beard, Ph.D.
Farmers’ cooperatives in India are defending the nation’s food security and the future of Indian farmers against the neoliberal invasion of genetically modified (GM) seed. As many as 28,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide over the last decade as a result of debt incurred from failed GM crops and competition with subsidized US crops, yet when India’s Prime Minister Singh met with President Bush in March 2006 to finalize nuclear agreements, they also signed the Indo-US Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture (KIA), backed by Monsanto, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), and Wal-Mart. The KIA allows for the grab of India’s seed sector by Monsanto, of its trade sector by giant agribusiness ADM and Cargill, and its retail sector by Wal-Mart.
Though the contours of KIA have been kept so secret that neither senior Indian politicians nor the scientific community know its details, it is clear that Prime Minister Singh has agreed to sacrifice India’s agriculture sector to pay for US concessions in the nuclear field.
In one of very few public statements by a US government official regarding KIA, Nicholas Burns, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, states, “While the civilian nuclear initiative has garnered the most attention, our first priority is to continue giving governmental support to the huge growth in business between the Indian and American private sectors. Singh has also challenged the United States to help launch a second green revolution in India’s vast agricultural heartland by enlisting the help of America’s great land-grant institutions.”
Vandana Shiva translates, “These are twin programs about a market grab and a security alignment.” Burns announced that while the nuclear deal is the cutting edge, what the US is really seeking is agricultural markets and real estate markets, “to take over the land of people, not through a market mechanism, but using the state and an old colonial law of land acquisition to grab the land by force.”
Through KIA, Monsanto and the US have asked for unhindered access to India’s gene banks, along with a change in India’s intellectual property laws to allow patents on seeds and genes, and to dilute provisions that protect farmers’ rights. A combination of physical access to India’s gene banks and a possible new intellectual property law that allows seed patents will in essence deliver India’s genetic wealth into US hands. This would be a severe blow to India’s food security and self-sufficiency.
At the same time KIA has paved the way for Wal-Mart’s plans to open five hundred stores in India, starting in August 2007, which will compound the outsourcing of India’s food supply and threaten 14 million small family venders with loss of livelihood.
“This is not about ‘free trade,’” Shiva explains, “Today’s trade system, especially in agriculture, is dishonest, and dishonesty has become a war against farmers. It’s become a genocide.”
Farmers are, however, organizing to protect themselves against this economic invasion by maintaining traditional seed banks and setting up exemplary systems of community agrarian support. In response to the flood of debilitating debt tied to GM/hybrid seeds and the toxic petroleum based fertilizers and pesticides these crops depend on, one woman in the small village of Palarum says, “We do not buy seeds from the market because we suspect they may be contaminated with genetically engineered or terminator seeds.” Instead village women save and trade hardy traditional seeds that have evolved over centuries to produce low-maintenance, nutritious “crops of truth.”
Each village in this rural area of India has formed its own community-based organization called a sangham. Seventy-two sanghams are part of a regional federation. These sanghams form an informal social security network that, through the maintenance of seed banks, will come to the rescue of individuals or entire villages in times of crop failure. Every member of the community has access to food and is assured of some work even if landless. The federation furthermore trains students in skills such as carpentry, computing, pottery, bookbinding, veterinary science, herbal medicine, sewing, farming, waste management, and agro-forestry.
Author Arun Shrivastava comments that, “These seventy-two villages were once horizontally and vertically stratified along caste, class, and religious lines. Food scarcity was endemic, people were malnourished, the majority worked as unskilled day wagers. Today they are cohesive, interdependent. I did not see one malnourished person. Rarely do people go to urban centers to seek work.” Shrivastava continues, “The community is the most important entity that can help us ensure food and nutrition security. The right of access to natural resources—land, rivers, forests, air, and everything that Nature has given us, including seeds, is the fundamental right of the communities, not of the corporations or the state or the individual. No corporation has the right to expropriate what Nature gave us.”
Professor of genetics Suman Sahai concludes, “India must be cautious that it does not become the dumping ground for a technology and its controversial products that have been rejected in many parts of the world and whose safety and usefulness remain questionable. Food security is an integral part of national security. All India’s efforts in the nuclear arena to shore up its national security goals will be undermined if it allows itself to become insecure in the matter of food.”
Citation:
1. Nicholas Burns, “‘Heady Times’ For India And the US,” Washington Post, April 29, 2007.
UPDATE BY Arun Shrivastava
Nature has given us seeds and ‘crops of truth’ that do not require any tending but give us nutrition at no or low-cost. This knowledge needs to be rapidly disseminated; soon our lives may depend on it.
With current farming and food distribution systems it takes ten calories of fossil fuel energy to transport one calorie of food from farm to fork. That is unsustainable now; the era of cheap oil is effectively finished. Since we are already past peak oil, we all must learn to ensure food and nutrition security for our family and community. We will have to learn basic skills like conserving seeds, growing nutritious food, and medicinal crops without chemicals and machines. We will need more cohesive and interdependent local communities, like the women of Zaheerabad have shown.
The women of Zaheerabad save seeds in community-held seed banks and grow nutrition-dense food through a system that ensures health and livelihood for all. They have established how self-sufficient, sustainable communities might live in a post-carbon world.
A handful of multi-national corporations are patenting seeds. These genetically modified (GM) seeds neither increase yield nor reduce costs nor enhance nutritive content of foods, nor reduce dependence on oil. The seeds of deception have destroyed farmers in India, the US, and elsewhere.
Patenting ensures monopoly control while subverting farmers’ right to save seeds; it is antithetical to natural rights of local communities. The Indo-US Knowledge Initiative in Agriculture covertly seeks to gain access and control over community-held seeds.
Since publication of the article, Deccan Development Society (DDS) has extended the model to twenty-six more villages but the community FM radio station remains silent.
At People’s SAARC (South Asia Association for Regional Cooperation) summit in Kathmandu (March 2007) participants voted for a “GM-free South Asia,” community control over seeds and protection of South-Asian biodiversity. Over six million farmers requested the Supreme Court of India (April 2007) to ban open field trials of GM seeds because of the dangers of irreversible contamination of community-held seeds and adverse impact on health.
The mainstream media is silent. They don’t have space for disseminating information that will save us from disease and starvation. These are unglamorous issues.
For more information on growing crops of truth and the need for a new social order, the following are ideal sources:
1. The Web site of Deccan Development Society (DDS), initiator and facilitator of the sanghams, is http://www.ddsindia.com/www/default.asp. Contact PV Satheesh, Director of Zaheerabad Project.
2. Beej Bachao Andolan (BBA, Save the Seeds Movement) is a well-known movement of farmers who save traditional seeds of the Himalayan region. Contact Biju Negi, negi.biju@gmail.com.
3. For information on growing food for health and personal freedom, go to www.soilandhealth.org.
4. For information on threats posed by multinational seeds firms, go to www.gmwatch.org and www.mindfully.org.
5. The Seeds of Deception by Jeffrey Smith discusses how GM foods, introduced in the US in 1993 without proper biosafety assessment, endanger our health. It is available at www.seedsofdeception.com. See also the research of Dr. Irina Ermakova at http://irina-ermakova.by.ru/eng/articles.html/, and of Dr. Arpad Pusztai: http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/a.pusztai/.
6. “Heartless in the Heartland” is the ghastly story of how Monsanto blackmailed US farmers not to save their seeds. See www.mindfully.org.
7. For an excellent summary, watch The Future of Food, a documentary by Deborah Koons Garcia, downloadable from www.mindfully.org.
8. For discussions on peak oil and food security, see Richard Heinberg’s Fifty Million Farmers, published on November 17, 2006, available athttp://www.energybulletin.net/22584.html. Also visit the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, managed by Dr. Colin Campbell, one of world’s leading oil experts, at http://www.peakoil.net.
9. My two recent papers also shed light on the subject: “The attack on our seeds,” a related article published by Farmer’s Forum in India (contact the editor at bksnd@airtelbroadband.in), and “The Silent War on the People of India,” which can be found at http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2007/03/22/the_silent _war_on_the_people_of_india.
UPDATE BY Vandana Shiva
The Indo-US Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture impacts 650 million farmers of India and 40 million small retailers and it is redefining the relationships between people in the two biggest democracies in the world.
A new movement on retail democracy has begun in India that is bringing together small shopkeepers, street hawkers, trade unions and farmers unions. On August 9, 2007, which is Quit India Day, the movement will be organizing actions across the country telling Wal-Mart to leave India.
For more information, visit our website at www.navdanya.org.
#9 Privatization of America’s Infrastructure
Sources:
Mother Jones, February 2007
Title; “The Highwaymen”
Author: Daniel Schulman with James Ridgeway
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/01/highwaymen.html
Human Events, June 12,2006
Title: “Bush Administration Quietly Plans NAFTA Super Highway”
Author: Jerome R. Corsi
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=15497
Student Researcher: Rachel Icaza and Ioana Lupu
Faculty Evaluator: Marco Calavita, Ph.D.
We will soon be paying Wall Street investors, Australian bankers, and Spanish contractors for the privilege of driving on American roads, as more than twenty states have enacted legislation allowing public-private partnerships to build and run highways. Investment firms including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and the Carlyle Group are approaching state politicians with advice to sell off public highway and transportation infrastructure. When advising state officials on the future of this vital public asset, these investment firms fail to mention that their sole purpose is to pick up infrastructure at the lowest price possible in order to maximize returns for their investors. Investors, most often foreign companies, are charging tolls and insisting on “noncompete” clauses that limit governments from expanding or improving nearby roads.
In 1956, President Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, which called for the federal and state governments to build 41,000 miles of high-quality roads across the nation, over rivers and gorges, swamps and deserts, over and through vast mountain ranges, in what would later be called the “greatest public works project in human history.” Eisenhower considered the interstate highway system so vital to the public interest that he authorized the federal government to assume 90 percent of the massive cost.
Fifty years later, states are selling off our nation’s enormous, and aging, infrastructure to private investors. Proponents are celebrating these transactions as a no-pain, all-gain way to off-load maintenance expenses and increase highway-building funds without raising taxes. Opponents are lambasting these plans as a major turn toward handing the nation’s valuable common asset over to private firms whose fidelity is to stockholders—not to the public transportation system or the people who use it.
On June 29, 2006, Indiana’s governor Mitch Daniels announced that Indiana had received $3.8 billion from a foreign consortium made up of the Spanish construction firm Cintra and the Macquarie Infrastructure Group (MIG) of Australia. In exchange the state handed over operation of a 157-mile Indiana toll road for the next seventy-five years. With the consortium collecting the tolls, which will eventually rise far higher, the privatized road should generate $11 billion for MIG-Cintra over the course of the contract.
In September 2005, Daniels solicited bids for the project, with Goldman Sachs serving as the state’s financial adviser—a role that would net the bank a $20 million advisory fee. When Goldman Sachs, one of the nation’s most active and most profitable investment banks, with deep connections to Washington, began advising Indiana on selling its toll road, it failed to mention the fact that, even as it was advising Indiana on how to get the best return, its Australian subsidiary’s mutual funds were ratcheting up their positions in MIG—becoming de facto investors in the deal.
Many are suspicious that governors like Daniels across the nation are taking questionable advice from corporate investment banks—and from Washington.
Despite public concerns, privatization of US transportation infrastructure has the full backing of the Bush administration. Tyler Duvall, the US Department of Transportation’s assistant secretary for transportation policy, says the DoT has raised the idea with “almost every state” government and is working on sample legislation that states can use for such projects. Across the nation, there is now talk of privatizing the New York Thruway to the Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey turnpikes, as well as of inviting the private sector to build and operate highways and bridges from Alabama to Alaska.
In Texas, Governor Rick Perry still refuses to release details of a $1.3 billion contract his administration signed with Cintra for a forty-mile toll road from Austin to Seguin, or of an enormous $184 billion proposal to build a 4,000-mile network of toll roads through Texas.
It is known, however, that the Bush administration is quietly advancing the plan to build a huge ten-lane NAFTA Super Highway through the heart of the US along Interstate 35, from the Mexican border at Laredo, Texas to the Canadian border north of Duluth, Minnesota, financed largely through public-private partnerships. The Texas Department of Transportation will oversee the Trans-Texas Corridor as the first leg of the NAFTA Super Highway, which will be leased to the Cintra consortium as a privately operated toll road. Construction is slated to begin in 2007.
Authors Daniel Schulman and James Ridgeway warn that, just as the creation of a National Highway system promised to “change the face of America,” in Eisenhower’s words, so too could its demise.

# 10 Vulture Funds Threaten Poor Nations’ Debt Relief
Source:
BBC Newsnight, February 14, 2007
Title: “Vulture Fund Threat to Third World”
Author: Greg Palast with Meirion Jones
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17070.htm
Student Researcher: Jenifer German
Faculty Evaluator: Robert Girling, Ph.D.
Vulture funds, otherwise known as “distressed-debt investors,” are undermining UN and other global efforts to relieve impoverished Third World nations of the debt that has burdened them for many decades.
Vulture funds are financial organizations that buy up debts that are near default or bankruptcy. The vulture fund will pay the original investor pennies on the dollar for the debt and then approach the debtor to arrange a better repayment on the loan, or will go after the debtor in court.
In the private financial world, these funds, like the birds they are named for, provide a useful function for investors who are unable to follow up on defaulted debts and are themselves facing financial ruin if the debtor reneges entirely.
Under normal circumstances, distressed-debt investing—like day trading—is risky business. It is a gamble and the company knows that going in. The vulture fund may get nothing for its investment if the debtor continues to default and has no assets to attach. However, if there is still meat on the bones (the debtor has considerable assets to liquidate) the vulture fund can make millions.
A problem has arisen in recent years, however, as vulture funds have begun inserting themselves into an increasingly globalized “free market”—where no distinction is made between an irresponsible and defaulted company and a destitute and impoverished nation.
In the case of nations, the actions of vulture funds are corrupting the process begun in 1996 to provide debt relief for Third World nations struggling to emerge from the heavy debt laid upon them by previous corrupt rulers and colonial masters.
In one recent case, the poverty-stricken nation of Zambia was negotiating with Romania to reduce a $40 million debt still owed from a 1979 loan to buy Romanian tractors. In 1999, Romania had agreed to liquidate the entire loan for $3 million. Zambia planned to use the debt cancellation to invest in much-needed nurses, teachers, and basic infrastructure. Just before the deal was finalized however, investors at the England-based vulture fund Donegal International convinced the Romanian government to sell them the loan for just under $4 million—not much more than Zambia had offered. Donegal then turned around and sued Zambia (where the average wage is barely a dollar a day) for the full $40 million.
Throughout the lawsuit, global NGOs have pleaded with the English High Court to void the new contract and allow Zambia to honor the original agreement of $3 million. But on February 15, 2007, an English court ruled that Donegal was entitled to much of what it was seeking—at least $15 million, perhaps more.1
In a last desperate plea, global NGOs working to relieve Third World debt (such as Oxfam and the Jubilee Debt Campaign) turned to Donegal directly, asking them to forgive the debt. Donegal knows that, as a national entity, even a cash-poor country like Zambia has access to considerable resources; in this case copper, cobalt, gem stones, coal, uranium, marble, and much more. Public works and other civic improvement projects can also be liquidated.
Also, Donegal has no history of mercy toward impoverished nations. In 1996 it paid $11 million for a discounted Peruvian debt and threatened to bankrupt the country unless they paid $58 million. Donegal got its money. Now they’re suing Congo Brazzaville for $400 million for a debt they bought for $10 million. Donegal and other vulture funds have teams of lawyers combing the world for assets that can be seized.
Even worse, many of these vulture funds have influential ties to powerful world leaders like the Bush administration. The risk normally faced by distressed-debt investors is virtually eliminated when they have political influence that is greater than the poor nation they are suing. They raise most of their money through legal actions in US courts, where lobbying and political contributions hold influence. And many vulture fund CEOs have close links to top officials both in the US and England.
President Bush has the power to block collection of debts by vulture funds, either individual ones or all of them, if he considers it to be at odds with US foreign policy—in this case debt relief for poor countries.2 According to Congressman John Conyers, “It’s our position that the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and the comity doctrine brought from our constitution allows the president to require the courts defer in individual suits against foreign nations. And so, we’re conducting a couple of things. First of all, we want to know where these practices are going on at the present time, and, two, how we can get this information to President Bush so that he can, as he indicated to us, stop it immediately.”3
Chancellor Gordon Brown, now the prime minister of England, calls the vulture funds perverse and immoral. Oxfam and Jubilee have urged the chancellor to use his influence as chair of the International Monetary Fund’s key decision-making committee to make sure that new regulations are devised that prevent private companies from bypassing international debt rules and pursuing debts from very poor countries.
Citations
1. Ashley Seager, “Court Lets Vulture Fund Claw Back Zambian Millions,” The Guardian, February 16, 2007.
2. Ashley Seager, “Bush Could Block Debt Collection by ‘Vulture’ Funds,” Guardian Unlimited, February 22, 2007.
3. “Conyers Confronts Bush On Vulture Bonds,” an interview with Democracy Now!, February 16, 2007.

# 11 The Scam of “Reconstruction” in Afghanistan
Sources:
Tomdispatch.com, August 27, 2006
Title: “Why It’s Not Working in Afghanistan”
Author: Ann Jones
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=116512
CorpWatch, October 6, 2006
Title: “Afghanistan Inc: a CorpWatch Investigative Report”
Author: Fariba Nawa
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13518
Student Researchers: Madeline Hall and Julie Bickel
Faculty Evaluator: James Dean, Ph.D.
A report issued in June 2005 by the non-profit organization Action Aid reveals that much of the US tax money earmarked to rebuild Afghanistan actually ends up going no further than the pockets of wealthy US corporations. “Phantom aid” that never shows up in the recipient country is a scam in which paychecks for overpriced, and often incompetent, American “experts” under contract to USAID go directly from the Agency to American bank accounts. Additionally, 70 percent of the aid that does make it to a recipient country is carefully “tied” to the donor nation, requiring that the recipient use the donated money to buy products and services from the donor country, often at drastically inflated prices. The US far outstrips other nations in these schemes, as Action Aid calculates that 86 cents of every dollar of American aid is phantom.
Authors Ann Jones and Fariba Nawa suggest that in order to understand the failure and fraud in the reconstruction of Afghanistan, it is important to look at the peculiar system of American aid for international development. International and national agencies—including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and USAID, that traditionally distribute aid money to developing countries—have designed a system that is efficient in funneling money back to the wealthy donor countries, while undermining sustainable development in poor states.
A former head of USAID cited foreign aid as “a key foreign policy instrument” designed to help countries “become better markets for US exports.” To guarantee that mission, the State Department recently took over the aid agency. USAID and the Army Corps of Engineers now cut in US business and government interests from the start, making sure that money is allocated according to US economic, political, strategic, and military priorities, rather than according to what the recipient nation might consider important.
Though Afghans have petitioned to allocate aid money as they find appropriate, donor countries object, claiming that the Afghan government is too corrupt to be trusted. Increasingly frustrated and angry Afghan communities meanwhile claim that the no-bid, open-ended contracts being awarded to contractors such as Kellogg, Brown, and Root/Halliburton, DynCorp, Blackwater, and the Louis Berger Group are equivalent to licensed bribery, corruption, theft, and money laundering.
The Karzai government, confined to a self-serving American agenda, has delivered little to the average Afghan, most of whom still live in abject poverty. Western notions of progress evident in US-contracted hotels, restaurants, and shopping malls full of new electronic gadgets and appliances are beyond the imaginations or practicalities of 3.5 million war torn Afghan citizens who are without food, shelter, sewage systems, clean water or electricity.
Infrastructure hastily built with shoddy materials and no knowledge or respect for geologic or climatic conditions is culminating in one expensive failure after another. USAID’s website, for example, boasts of its only infrastructure accomplishment in Afghanistan—the Kabul-Kandahar Highway—a narrow and already crumbling highway costing Afghanis $1 million a mile. The highway was featured in the Kabul Weekly newspaper in March 2005 under the headline, “Millions Wasted on Second-Rate Roads.” The article notes that while other bids from more competent construction firms came in at one-third the cost, the contract went to the Louis Berger Group, a firm with tight connections to the Bush administration—as well as a notorious track record of other failed and abandoned construction projects in Afghanistan.
Former Minister of Planning, Ramazan Bashardost, complained that when it came to building roads, the Taliban had done a better job. “And,” he also asked, “Where did the money go?” Now, in a move certain to lower President Karzai’s approval ratings and further diminish US popularity in the area, the Bush administration has pressured Karzai to turn this “gift from the people of the United States” into a toll road, charging each driver $20 for a road-use permit valid for one month. In this way, according to American “experts” providing highly paid technical assistance, Afghanistan can collect $30 million annually from its impoverished citizens and thereby decrease the foreign aid “burden” on the United States.
Jones asks, “Is it any wonder that foreign aid seems to ordinary Afghans to be something only foreigners enjoy?”
UPDATE BY Fariba Nawa
Afghanistan, Inc. is a thirty-page report that digs deep into the corruption involved in the reconstruction of Afghanistan. The report focuses on US government-funded companies contracted to rebuild Afghanistan. The importance of this report is that it’s the first serious look at corruption of aid money spending from a grassroots level. It includes an emphasis on various projects in villages and the cities and it covers all sides of the issue. It shows how big money is spent on bad work.
The report was first published in English through CorpWatch, a watchdog of corporations, on May 2, 2006. It was translated into the Persian languages of Dari and Pashto in September 2006. The companies investigated in the report continue to receive millions of dollars in contracts from the US government despite their incompetence and wasteful spending. Louis Berger, Bearing Point, Chemonics, and DynCorp are still taking American taxpayers’ money and showing minimum results in Afghanistan.
Some of the mainstream press gave the report coverage, including NPR’s Morning Edition, KRON Channel 4 news in San Francisco when it was first published, and later on, BBC radio and many other European outlets continue to call and ask the author about the report. However, that’s a limited response to the fact that this was a groundbreaking report with important information for policy change. The report has been a source for many others researching the subject. If you’d like more information on corruption on reconstruction in Afghanistan, please refer to CorpWatch’s website www.corpwatch.org. Integrity Watch Afghanistan is another organization that monitors corruption in the country and produces various reports.
UPDATE BY ANN JONES
Nine months later the conundrum I described—no peace, no security, no development—still pertains, and Afghan hopes sour.
The US still looks for a military solution. In the first five months of 2007, seventy-five coalition troops were killed (compared to fifty-three in the same period last year), including thirty-eight Americans. Civilian casualties were variously reported—some sources said “almost 1,800”—including 135 killed by US or NATO forces.
The US position on military “progress” against the Taliban, expressed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates on June 4, 2007, as he prepared to visit Afghanistan, remained “guarded optimism.” Gates told reporters a goal of his trip was to insure close coordination of combat operations and development and reconstruction efforts. That’s a switch, suggesting some clue that reconstruction may be a better way to “kill” the Taliban, but leaving unanswered the question of how to coordinate war and peaceful activity.
The real importance of “Why It’s Not Working in Afghanistan” lies behind the front page military coverage—in what it reveals of the systemic scams and should-be scandals of American aid. The story makes news now and then when billions “disappear” from reconstruction projects in Iraq, but to my knowledge it has yet to be investigated by media or congress. What’s discussed is the occasional budgetary black hole that suggests some random malfeasance, in much the same way that torture at Abu Ghraib was discussed as the work of a few “bad apples.”
Maybe reporters don’t want to take up the story because it’s complicated. It’s about numbers. Like Enron. Dreary, ho-hum, life-shattering stuff. I don’t know. But one curious thing: when my book Kabul in Winter appeared in 2006, a very long section on this topic was the one part no reviewer touched.
Now bigger voices than mine speak out. Abdullah Abdullah, the distinguished former Foreign Minister of Afghanistan, recently complained that of every $100,000 promised to Afghan development, less than a third reaches the country. Matt Waldman, head of Afghanistan policy for Oxfam, one of the most respected humanitarian NGOs in the world, wrote in The Guardian (May 26, 2007) that “America is bankrolling Afghanistan” but “as in Iraq, a vast proportion of aid is wasted.” And more to the point, “Close to half of US development assistance goes to the five biggest US contractors in the country.” Waldman argues that too much aid money is lost to high salaries and living costs of international experts, purchase of non-Afghan resources, and corporate profits. He figures the cost of the average expat (read “American”) expert at half a million dollars a year.
So why is it left to representatives of foreign governments, foreign humanitarian organizations, and foreign press to expose this fraud?
To keep up with news about Afghanistan see news@afghanistannewscenter.com, a daily roundup of stories from the world’s English language press. For policy issues see the Web site of New York University’s Center on International Cooperation (www.cic.nyu.edu) or that of the Center’s senior fellow and Afghanistan expert Barnett Rubin (brr5@nyu.edu). To keep an eye on the corridors of power see the website of the Center for Public Integrity (www.publicintegrity.org), and specifically for information on corporate scams see www.corpwatch.org.
Journalists should also be advised that several professional organizations are protesting the increasing difficulty of covering Afghanistan because of interference by US, Afghan, and ISAF forces. They include IFJ (International Federation of Journalists), AIJA (Afghan Independent Journalists Association), and CPAJ (Committee to Protect Afghan Journalists). Currently Afghan journalists are also boycotting the Afghan Wolesi Jirga (lower house of Parliament) to protest its enactment of repressive media laws and the consequent imprisonment of journalists.

# 12 Another Massacre in Haiti by UN Troops
Sources:
HaitiAction.net, January 21, 2007
Title: “UN in Haiti: Accused of Second Massacre”
Authors: Haiti Information Project
http://www.haitiaction.net/News/HIP/1_21_7/1_21_7.html
Inter Press Service
Title: “Haiti: Poor Residents of Capital Describe a State of Siege”
Authors: Wadner Pierre and Jeb Sprague
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=36772
Student Researcher: William Leeming
Faculty Evaluator: Dianne Parness
Eyewitness testimony confirms indiscriminate killings by UN forces in Haiti’s Cité Soleil community on December 22, 2006, reportedly as collective punishment against the community for a massive demonstration of Lavalas supporters in which about ten thousand people rallied for the return of President Aristide in clear condemnation of the foreign military occupation of their country. According to residents, UN forces attacked their neighborhood in the early morning, killing more than thirty people, including women and children. Footage taken by Haiti Information Project (HIP) videographers shows unarmed civilians dying as they tell of extensive gunfire from UN peacekeeping forces (MINUSTAH).
A hardened UN strategy became apparent days after the demonstration, when UN officials stated they were entering Cité Soleil to capture or kill gangsters and kidnappers. While officials of MINUSTAH have admitted to “collateral damage,” in the raids of December 2006, they say they are there to fight gangsters at the request of the René Préval government.
But many residents and local human rights activists say that scores of people having no involvement with gangs were killed, wounded, and arrested in the raids.
Although MINUSTAH denied firing from helicopter gunships, HIP captured more than three hours of video footage and a large selection of digital photos, illustrating the UN’s behavior in Haiti.
An unidentified twenty-eight-year-old man, filmed by HIP, can be seen dying as he testifies that he was shot from a circling UN helicopter that rained gunfire on those below. HIP film also shows a sixteen-year-old, dying just after being shot by UN forces. Before dying he describes details of the UN opening fire on unarmed civilians in his neighborhood. The wounded and dying, filmed by HIP, all express horror and confusion.
IPS observed that buildings throughout Cité Soleil were pockmarked by bullets; many showing huge holes made by heavy caliber UN weapons, as residents attest. Often pipes that brought in water to the slum community now lay shattered.
A recently declassified document from the US embassy in Port-au-Prince reveals that during a similar operation carried out in July 2005, MINUSTAH expended 22,000 bullets over several hours. In the report, an official from MINUSTAH acknowledged, “given the flimsy construction of homes in Cité Soleil and the large quantity of ammunition expended, it is likely that rounds penetrated many buildings, striking unintended targets.”
Frantz Michel Guerrier, spokesman for the Committee of Notables for the Development of Cité Soleil based in the Bois Neuf zone, said, “It is very difficult for me to explain to you what the people of Bois Neuf went through on Dec. 22, 2006—almost unexplainable. It was a true massacre. We counted more than sixty wounded and more than twenty-five dead, among [them] infants, children, and young people.”
“We saw helicopters shoot at us, our houses broken by the tanks,” Guerrier told IPS. “We heard detonations of the heavy weapons. Many of the dead and wounded were found inside their houses. I must tell you that nobody had been saved, not even the babies. The Red Cross was not allowed to help people. The soldiers had refused to let the Red Cross in categorically, in violation of the Geneva Convention.” Several residents told IPS that MINUSTAH, after conducting its operations, evacuated without checking for wounded.
Following the removal of Haiti’s elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide government (see Censored 2005, story #12), up to one thousand Lavalas political activists were imprisoned under the US-backed interim government, according to a Miami University Human Rights study.
A study released by the Lancet Journal of Medicine in August 2006 estimates that 8,000 were killed and 35,000 sexually assaulted in the greater Port-au-Prince area during the time of the interim government (2004-2006). The study attributed human rights abuses to purported “criminals,” police, anti-Lavalas gangs, and UN peacekeepers.
HIP Founding Editor Kevin Pina commented, “It is clear that this represents an act of terror against the community. This video evidence shows clearly that the UN stands accused, once again, of targeting unarmed civilians in Cité Soleil. There can be no justification for using this level of force in the close quarters of those neighborhoods. It is clear that the UN views the killing of these innocents as somehow acceptable to their goal of pacifying this community. Every demonstration, no matter how peaceful, is seen as a threat to their control if it includes demands for the return of Aristide to Haiti. In that context it is difficult to continue to view the UN mission as an independent and neutral force in Haiti. They apparently decided sometime ago it was acceptable to use military force to alter Haiti’s political landscape to match their strategic goals for the Haitian people.”
Update by Kevin Pina
Since President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his Lavalas political party were ousted from power on February 29, 2004, accusations of gross human rights violations have persisted in Haiti. While the Haitian National Police (HNP) received training and assistance from the UN following Aristide’s ouster, they were also accused of summary executions, arbitrary arrests, and the killing of unarmed demonstrators. The actions of the Haitian police became so egregious that even UN police trainers (CIVPOL) began to question the motives of their commanders and the mission’s objectives. The Haiti Information Project (HIP) received the following correspondence in response to a May 8, 2005 article “UN accommodates Human Rights Abuses by police in Haiti.”1 This is the first publication of that correspondence:
Just want to reinforce your observations as all being accurate.
I am one of the 25 US CIVPOL here on the ground in Haiti, having arrived last November. As a group we are frustrated by the UN’s and CIVPOL’s unwillingness to interpret their mandate aggressively. I have been pushing them to conduct investigations into all the shootings and other significant Human Rights violations with no success. The Police Commissioner and command staff shows little interest and claim the mandate does not allow them to do this. Unfortunately I have countless examples.
The corruption in the HNP is massive with little interest in addressing the problem. Just keep up the pressure, I don’t know what else to do.
Stephen MacKinnon
Chief, Strategic Planning Unit
CIVPOL-MINUSTAH
Chief MacKinnon provided HIP with information and documents that painted a disturbing picture of a UN operation more obsessed with political embarrassment caused by mounting demonstrations for Aristide’s return than interest in reigning in human rights abuses committed by the HNP.2
The United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) now stands accused of having itself committed several massacres in the seaside shantytown of Cité Soleil. This area of the capital served as a launching site for massive demonstrations demanding the return of President Aristide and for an end to what they called the foreign occupation of their country.
The Brazilian military has responsibility for leadership of the UN military forces in Haiti and is authorized to use deadly force. They are at the top of the command structure and their influence on the overall mission should not be understated. More importantly, there is a direct parallel between Brazilian military tactics utilized by UN forces in Haiti and similar military-style assaults used by the police in their own country.
The Brazilian military police have been accused of firing indiscriminately in the poor slums of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro called favelas. This was highlighted in an Amnesty International report “Brazil: ‘They come in Shooting’: Policing socially excluded communities,” released on December 2, 2005.3
This is similar to the tactics authorized by the Brazilian generals in Haiti. It has resulted in several high-profile massacres committed in the poor slum of Cité Soleil where protestors challenged the UN’s authority by continuing to launch massive demonstrations demanding Aristide’s return and condemning the UN’s presence in Haiti. In each instance, the UN and the elite-run Haitian press demonized the entire community as being criminals and gangsters and/or collaborators of criminals and gangsters. While it is true that armed “gangs” operated in the neighborhood and a few claimed they were aligned with Aristide’s Lavalas movement, these military raids had a clear correlation to the ongoing demonstrations and opposition to the UN presence in Haiti.
Cité Soleil was terrorized on July 6, 2005 when Brazilian commanders authorized a raid by UN forces with the stated aim of routing gangs in the area.4 For Aristide supporters, the raid was a preemptive strike by the UN to dampen the impact of protests on Aristide’s birthday, planned to take place only nine days later on July 15. It also represented the first time UN forces purposely sought to assassinate the leadership of armed groups claiming allegiance to Aristide’s Lavalas movement.5 By the time UN guns stopped firing, countless unarmed civilians lay dead with many having been killed by a single high-powered rifle shot to the head. Since then, documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show the US Embassy and various intelligence agencies, were aware of the excessive use of force by UN forces in Haiti on July 6, 2005.6 Despite being heavily censored by US officials, what emerges is clear evidence of the disproportionate use of force by UN troops in Cité Soleil.
December 16, 2006 saw another large demonstration for Aristide that began in Cite Soleil and only six days later on December 22, Brazilian commanders would authorize a second deadly raid that residents and human rights groups say resulted in the wholesale slaughter of innocent victims. The unspoken parallel of Brazil’s role in leading the UN’s military strategy in Haiti is the fact that terror tactics such as these have been their modus operandi in their own country.
In the early morning hours of Feb. 2, UN forces entered Cité Soleil firing indiscriminately and their victims were two young girls killed as they slept in their own home.7 Massive demonstrations were scheduled to take place five days later demanding the return of Aristide throughout Haiti on Feb. 7. While these demonstrations went largely unreported by the international corporate media, this stood in contrast, to the avalanche of news stories filed two days later on Feb. 9, when UN forces launched yet another deadly military operation in Cité Soleil.8 Although these raids were ostensibly to rid the neighborhood of gangs, they followed the same pattern and relationship to demonstrations for Aristide’s return and military tactics used by Brazilian commanders in previous UN operations.
The only rights organizations documenting the loss of life and destruction of property resulting from the UN raid on December 22, 2006, as well as previous and subsequent UN military operations, were the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) and the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI).9 HIP, the organization originally authoring the article being recognized by Project Censored, is a news agency that has extensive video evidence and interviews from Cité Soleil taken the same day these attacks by UN forces were executed. HIP offers any human rights organization the opportunity to view the documentary footage and evidence supporting the claims of Cité Soleil residents that massacres by UN forces have been committed against them. Unfortunately, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States have remained conspicuously disinterested and silent about this evidence.
For further information and updates about Haiti, please visit www.haitiaction.net, www.ijdh.org, www.HaitiInformationProject.net, www.haitianalysis.com, www.canadahaitiaction.ca, and www.ahphaiti.org.
Notes
1. Haiti Information Project,”UN accommodates Human Rights Abuses by police in Haiti,” May 8, 2005. See http://haitiaction.net/News/HIP/5_8_5/5_8_5.html.
2. Internet correspondence received from Steve McKinnon to HIP May 12, 2005.
3. Amnesty International Report, “Brazil: ‘They come in Shooting’: Policing socially excluded communities” December 2, 2005. See http://www.amnestyusa.org/document.php?lang=e &id=ENGAMR190252005
4. Haiti Information Project, “Evidence mounts of a UN massacre in Haiti,” July 12, 2005. See http://www.haitiaction.net/News/HIP/7_12_5.html.
5. Haiti Information Project,”The UN’s disconnect with the poor in Haiti,” December 25, 2005. See http://haitiaction.net/News/HIP/12_25_5/12_25a_5.html.
6. Haiti Information Project, “US Embassy in Haiti acknowledges excessive force by UN,” January 24, 2007. Article based on FOIA documents obtained by College of DuPage Geography Professor Keith Yearman. See http://haitiaction.net/News/HIP/1_23_7/1_23_7.html.
7. Haiti Information Project—February 2, 2007. UN terror kills Haiti’s children at night http://haitiaction.net/News/HIP/2_2_7a/2_2_7a.html.
8. Haiti Information Project, “Massive demonstrations in Haiti catch UN by surprise,” February 9, 2007. See http://haitiaction.net/News/HIP/2_9_7/2_9_7.html.
9. Haiti Information Project,”The UNspoken truth about gangs in Haiti,” February 15, 2007. See http://haitiaction.net/News/HIP/2_15_7/2_15_7.html.
10. Video images documenting UN military operations on July 6, 2005 and December 22, 2006 were taken by HIP videographer Jean-Baptiste Ristil.
UPDATE ON HAITI by Jeb Sprague and Wadner Pierre: Poor Residents of Capital Describe a State of Siege
Initially neither one of us thought of ourselves as journalists, but we were so shocked by events on the ground in Haiti (which were rarely being covered) that we felt compelled to write about them. In the dominant rhetoric of donor groups and corporate media coverage we found that the voices of grassroots civil society were absent. Of any country in the western hemisphere, Haiti’s culture is filled with a vitality for democracy, personal interaction, and dialogue. Radio is the most popular form of communication partially because of economic accessibility and partially because it encourages discussion and debate. From researching our stories we’ve come to see that two civil societies exist, one tightly connected with foreign donors, the foreign embassies present in Port-au-Prince and the large media outlets; and another civil society, a pulsating grassroots that is usually ignored by foreign journalists and donors.
The testimonials and opinions of the donor and foreign government backed elite or middle class based civil society groups are propelled in the media spotlight as unbiased and independent, the Haitian civil society. These are the groups that have bilingual language skills, often higher education, and the technological tools to communicate their programs to a transnational audience. Aid groups fly them abroad to make presentations or provide them with training seminars in the Dominican Republic or Washington, DC.
In the slum- and rural-based communities another civil society exists outside of the international limelight. The members of this civil society are often broke and rarely make a profit from their positions. They are relatively unknown and unheard of by the outside world. These groups, popular and well organized on the ground, have broad participation. They carry out large mobilizations, they fill the streets with friends and family, they organize strikes, they are on the radio, and they organize co-ops, literacy centers, and community programs.
So in our articles we have tried to provide as many direct quotes and testimonials as possible from this grassroots civil society. At the same time we try to place this along side the official rhetoric, holding the official organs responsible, confronting them and asking them the hard questions (which they are often shocked to hear). But most important are the voices of the victims of violence, the wife and husband who lost their children, the unemployed man wounded on the side of the street; these are the people that are rarely heard in the mainstream media. Part of this is because corporate journalists choose to spend their time with elites, especially in developing countries, and part is because editors are dependent on their advertisers and don’t see these stories as viable.
MINUSTAH’s operations in Cité Soleil, since writing our article, have continued. But in recent months the killings have lessened (although a man just last week was shot and killed by UN troops/ early June 2007). Over the months that followed our article, MINUSTAH was able to arrest one of the most well-known gang leaders, Evens Jeune, along with many of those within his group. MINUSTAH has claimed to have set up hospital clinics in the buildings used by the gangs, but on-site visits have revealed empty houses with no hospital clinics and no UN staffers. Haitian government promises of job programs have been slow to materialize in Cité Soleil. UN officials have purposely downplayed or ignored the protests of the poor demanding reparations. However, a number of community schools and health organizations, such as the Lamp Foundation, continue to do good work in Cité Soleil. Some human rights groups, such as the GDP, BAI, CONODH, and AUHMOD, continue to be active in the neighborhoods, but other locally formed groups such as the HNVNPC have gone back to their jobs, mostly in churches and schools.
The population of Cité Soleil has suffered horribly, either caught in the crossfire or purposely targeted. The socio-economic situation and dire poverty in Cité Soleil is a direct result of the prolonged polices of wealthy countries and donor institutions; forcing and destabilizing out of power those elected Haitian governments that have advocated key policies of sovereignty and social investment, while opposing privatization and neoliberal adjustments whenever they can. Rarely told is how Haiti’s police throughout the 1990’s and early 2000’s were systematically manipulated by the US embassy, CIA, and Haitian elites—this had a direct result on the security situation in Haiti. Economic instability heightened by coups and prolonged political crises—promoted by elites unhappy with the popular electoral choice—have cost Haiti jobs and development. All of this has pushed Haiti further into the abyss.
When international institutions and governments are busy coordinating these kinds of egregious activities, we felt it the responsibility of journalists, activists, and academics (especially those lucky enough to have the resources) to investigate; all while speaking with the poor and finding out their concerns. From this experience we founded a website, haitianalysis.com, to connect foreign young journalists with young Haitian journalists in poor communities—with the specific purpose of covering poor communities and grassroots organizing. Soon after our IPS article appeared, members of the Haitian diaspora in New York were able to raise thousands of dollars to help in the funeral expenses of the two young Lubin daughters, Stephanie, seven, and Alexandra, four, killed by UN ammo according to their parents. Wadner’s photos of the young girls have appeared in numerous Haitian newspapers and websites of various languages. The Lubin parents, distraught, wanted everyone to know about what had occurred on that night of February 1st 2007. To our knowledge, the United Nations has never launched an investigation into the killing of the two Lubin daughters. We will continue asking that they do.
For more information, we suggest that readers view websites such as ijdh.org, hurah.revolt.org, haitianalysis.com, pih.org, haiti.quixote.org, jubileeusa.org, and haitilabor.org.

# 13 Immigrant Roundups to Gain Cheap Labor for US Corporate Giants
Sources:
Truthout, January 27, 2007
Title: “Which Side Are You On?”
Author: David Bacon
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/012907L.shtml
The Nation, February 6, 2007
Title: “Workers, Not Guests”
Author: David Bacon
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/020607LB.shtml
Foreign Policy in Focus, February 26, 2007
Title: “Migrants: Globalization’s Junk Mail?”
Author: Laura Carlsen
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4022
Student Researcher: Fernanda Borras
Faculty Evaluator: Diana Grant, Ph.D.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) flooded Mexico with cheap subsidized US agricultural products that displaced millions of Mexican farmers. Between 2000 and 2005, Mexico lost 900,000 rural jobs and 700,000 industrial jobs, resulting in deep unemployment throughout the country. Desperate poverty has forced millions of Mexican workers north in order to feed their families.
The National Campesino Front estimates that two million farmers have been displaced by NAFTA, in many cases related to the increase in US imports. In 1994, the first year of the agreement, the United States exported $4.59 billion of agricultural products to Mexico, according to the Department of Agriculture. By 2006 the figure had risen to $9.85 billion—an increase of 114 percent. US exports of corn, Mexico’s staple crop and largest source of rural employment, alone doubled to over $2.5 billion in 2006.
This combination of unemployment in Mexico, the huge gap between salaries in the United States and Mexico, and US demand for cheap labor to compete on global markets has created the current situation. The demand for undocumented labor in the US economy is structural. It is not just a few companies seeking to cut corners. These are not just jobs that “US workers won’t take.” Migrants work in nearly all low-paying occupations and have become essential to the US economy in the age of global competition.
The meatpacking industry provides a good example. The US meat industry as it went global shows a fast slide in working conditions over the past decades as a result of de-unionization, erosion of wages and benefits, and increasing safety and health hazards. Part and parcel of that slide has been the replacement of unionized US workers with migrants.
Aside from traditional employment in agriculture, another major use of migrant labor has been through the advent of subcontracting. This practice, well in place since the early 1980s, has contributed to the de-unionization of the workforce. It conveniently releases employees from direct responsibility for the legal status and treatment of workers in their employment.
In the wake of 9/11, Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) has conducted workplace and home invasions across the country in an attempt to round up “illegal” immigrants. ICE justifies these raids under the rubric of keeping our homeland safe and preventing terrorism. However the real goal of these actions is to disrupt the immigrant work force in the US and replace it with a tightly regulated non-union guest-worker program. This policy is endorsed by companies seeking permanent low-wage workers through a lobby group called Essential Worker Immigrations Coalition (EWIC). EWIC’s fifty-two members include the US Chamber of Commerce, Wal-Mart, Marriott, Tyson Foods, American Meat Institute, California Landscape Contractors Association, and the Association of Builders and Contractors.
ICE now has Operation Return to Sender, a program, supposedly designed to target fugitive aliens. The program has resulted in the indiscriminate roundup of over 13,000 undocumented immigrants in cities throughout the United States.
Immigrant rights organizations have noted that the crackdown has led to serious human rights violations. Families are separated. Hearings are slow, and often families do not know for long periods of time where their loved ones are being held. A January 16 report from the Homeland Security Department’s Inspector General of conditions at five detention centers identified frequent violation of federal standards, overcrowding, and health and safety violations.
The firings and raids highlight the vulnerability of immigrant workers under current US law. In 1986 Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, making it a federal crime for an employer to hire a worker without valid immigration documents. While few employers have ever faced penalties, in reality the law made it a crime for undocumented workers to hold a job. No current law requires employers to fire workers whose Social Security numbers don’t jibe. But President Bush proposed a new administrative rule, which would tell employers to fire anyone with a no-match. The regulation has never been officially issued, but many companies claim they’re already complying with it.
Both the enforcement and the agenda behind this crackdown are alarming many unions. In 1999 the AFL-CIO called for the repeal of employer sanctions, as well as for a generous legalization program, greater chances for family reunification, and enforcement of workplace rights. The federation was already on record opposing new guest worker programs. The Service Employees, and the two garment unions were among the first to push for this position. “We still call for the repeal of employer sanctions, as we have from the time it was passed,” says Bruce Raynor, UNITE HERE president. “There are 12 million undocumented people living here, who are important to the economy,” he fumes. “They have a right to seek employment, and employers have a right to hire them. The only way to deal with this is to give workers rights and a path to citizenship.”
UPDATE BY DAVID BACON
“Which Side are you On?” and “Workers, not Guests” expose the way US immigration law is being transformed into a mechanism for supplying labor to some of the country’s largest corporations. Immigration law is creating a two-tier society, in which millions of people are denied fundamental rights and social benefits, because they are recruited to come to the US by those corporations on visas that condemn them to a second-class status. Those guest workers face increased poverty and exploitation, and their status is being used to put pressure on wages, benefits and workplace rights for all workers.
“Workers, not Guests” describes the way that the Bush administration uses immigration raids to attack union organizing campaigns and efforts by immigrant workers to enforce basic workplace rights and protections. Further, the administration uses the raids to pressure Congress into adopting new, vastly expanded guest worker programs.
Both articles describe the way some groups have abandoned their historic opposition to contract labor programs. Instead, the National Council of La Raza, the National Immigration Forum, and other labor and religious organizations have developed a political alliance with some of the country’s largest corporations, with the objective of passing new guest worker legislation. This legislation also includes provisions that will make future immigration raids much harsher and more widespread.
Since publication, the Bush administration and both Democratic and Republican senators have announced new proposals that go even further. They would end the ability of immigrant families to reunite in the US, and instead institute a corporate-driven point system intended to supply skilled labor to big companies. Raids and enforcement would become even harsher, with huge detention centers built on the border. The proposals would allow corporations to recruit as many as 600,000 contract guest workers a year.
The use of immigration policy to funnel labor to corporate employers is growing at the same time that Congress is debating new corporate trade legislation, including the renewal of fast track negotiating authority for the administration, and four new trade agreements—with South Korea, Peru, Panama, and Colombia. These bills would all increase the displacement of workers and farmers in other countries, sending many of them into the migrant stream to the US. This displacement is being coordinated with Congress’s immigration proposals, which would then channel displaced workers into industries where their labor can be used profitably, and ensure that they can only remain in the US in a status vulnerable to exploitation.
The mainstream press has carried many articles about the proposals and raids. There has been very little coverage of the corporate backing for the immigration bills in Congress, however. Many reporters refer to the guest worker bills as “pro-immigrant” and “left.” This has not only been inaccurate reporting, but has actually covered up the corporate domination of the immigration agenda in Congress. There has been virtually no coverage of the connection between US trade policy and immigration policy.
For more accurate information, readers can contact the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, www.nnirr.org. Global Exchange organized a national speaking tour on trade and immigration policy by David Bacon and Juan Manuel Sandoval, a leading Mexican critic of NAFTA and US immigration policy. The presentations made during that tour are available on the Global Exchange website, www.globalexchange.org.

# 14 Impunity for US War Criminals
Source:
Congressional Quarterly, November 22, 2006
Title: “A Senate Mystery Keeps Torture Alive—and Its Practitioners Free”
Author: Jeff Stein
http://public.cq.com/public/20061122_homeland.html
Student Researcher: Marley Miller
Faculty Evaluator: James Dean, Ph.D.
A provision mysteriously tucked into the Military Commission Act (MCA) just before it passed through Congress and was signed by President Bush on October 17, 2006 (see story #1), redefines torture, removing the harshest, most controversial techniques from the definition of war crimes, and exempts the perpetrators—both interrogators and their bosses—from prosecution for such offences dating back to November 1997.
Author Jeff Stein asks, “Who slipped language into the MCA that would further exempt torturers from prosecution?”
The White House denies any involvement or knowledge regarding the insertion of such language, leaving the origin of adjustments to this significant part of the MCA a mystery.
Motivation for this provision, however, leads clearly to leadership in the Bush administration, as the passage effectively rewrote the US enforcement mechanism for the Geneva War Crimes Act, which would have, upon sworn testimonies of Lieutenant General Randall M. Schmidt, Major General Mike Dunlavey, and US Brigadier General Commander, Janis Karpinski, held former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, and President George Bush guilty of active roles in directing acts of torture upon detainees held at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib (see Censored 2007, Story #7) .
A spokesperson for the Center for Constitutional Rights comments, “The MCA’s restricted definitions arguably would exempt certain US officials who have implemented or had command responsibility for coercive interrogation techniques from war crimes prosecutions. This amendment is designed to protect US government perpetrators of abuses during the ‘war on terror’ from prosecution.”
Joanne Mariner of Human Rights Watch adds that the effect of this provision of the MCA is “that perpetrators of several categories of what were war crimes at the time they were committed, can no longer be punished under US law.”
As a whole, the MCA evolved out of the need to override the June 2006 Supreme Court declaration that the administration’s hastily assembled military commissions were unconstitutional. That momentous Supreme Court decision confirmed that all prisoners in US custody had to be held in accordance with the Geneva Convention’s Article 3, which prohibits “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.” Through passage of the MCA, Congress and the President negated the corrective role of the courts in checking and balancing executive power.
A Senate aide involved in the drafting of the Senate version of the bill that was agreed upon by John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and John Warner, said, “We have no idea who [the extended impunity provision] came from or how it came to be.” White House spokesperson Dana Perrino said the stealth changes didn’t come from the counsel’s office, “It could have come from elsewhere in the White House or Justice Department,” she said, “but it didn’t come from us.”
Whatever the source, the amended provision was passed and is now a part of US law.
# 15 Toxic Exposure Can Be Transmitted to Future Generations on a “Second Genetic Code”
Source:
Rachel’s Democracy & Health News, October 12, 2006
Title: “Some Chemicals are More Harmful Than Anyone Ever Suspected”
Author: Peter Montague
http://www.precaution.org/lib/06/ht061012.htm
Student Researchers: Kristen Kebler and Michael Januleski
Faculty Evaluator: Gary Evans, M.D.
Research suggests that, contrary to previous belief, our behavior and our environmental conditions may program sections of our children’s DNA. New evidence about how genes interact with the environment suggests that many industrial chemicals may be more ominously dangerous than previously thought. It is increasingly clear that the effects of toxic exposure may be passed on through generations, in ways that are still not fully understood. “This introduces the concept of responsibility into genetics and inheritance,” said Dr. Moshe Szyf, a researcher at McGill University in Montreal, “This may revolutionize medicine. You aren’t eating and exercising just for yourself, but for your lineage.”1
The new field of genetic research, called epigenetics, involves what scientists are referring to as a “second genetic code” which influences how genes act in the body. If DNA is the hardware of inheritance, the epigenetic system is the software. The epigenetic system determines which genes get turned “off” or “on” and how much of a certain protein they produce.
It is this switching system that allows the genetic material in each cell to influence the creation of proteins—which ones are manufactured, in what sequence, and how many. Proteins are the building blocks of our bodies. The chemicals and hormones in our bodies are proteins. They determine, in large part, how we look, how we feel, even how we act.1
Now, it seems that this chemical switching system may also act in reverse. In most cases, epigenetic changes (changes to DNA from current environmental conditions) are not passed from parents to their offspring. Scientists are still not sure how—but genes seem to be “wiped clean” after a sperm fertilizes an egg. Based on the recent data, however, researchers are intrigued by the notion that some of the genetic changes influenced by our diet, our behaviors, or our environment, may be passed on from generation to generation.
On average, 1,800 new chemicals are registered with the federal government each year and about 750 of these find their way into products, all with hardly any testing for health or environmental effects. The bad news about chemical contamination is steadily mounting, while the number of new chemicals is steadily increasing. Many critics of the chemical and pharmaceutical industries are renewing their admonitions that government agencies practice the “precautionary principle”—the rule of “do no harm first” in the approval of new drugs and chemicals.
In 2005, the European Union responded to this situation by trying to enact a new law called Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals (REACH), which requires that chemicals be tested before they are sold—not after. As they say in Europe, “No data, no market.” At the same time, US and European chemical industries—and the White House—began working overtime to subvert the European effort to enact REACH. Their efforts failed, however, and the REACH act was adopted by the European Union in December, 2006.2 Chemical companies throughout the US and Europe are still struggling with how they will respond to the new requirements.
Citations
1. Anne McIlroy, “Chemicals and Stress Cause Gene Changes That Can Be Inherited,” Globe & Mail, March 11, 2006. See http://www.precaution.org/lib/06/prn_code_2.060311.htm.
2. “European Parliament OKs World’s Toughest Law on Toxic Chemicals,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 14, 2006.
UPDATE BY PETER MONTAGUE
Basically this story tells us that environmental influences (like our mother’s diet and her exposure to toxic chemicals) are far more important to us than anyone suspected just a decade ago.
It turns out that environmental influences shape us from the moment of conception onward, and the earliest months and years of life are the most important ones. It is called “fetal programming” and it means our first environment (the womb) can determine what sorts of diseases will afflict us later in life. Furthermore, some of these early influences can be inherited by our offspring and even by their offspring. So your personal pattern of disease may have been set by your grandmother’s diet, or by her exposure to toxicants.
These findings imply that keeping toxic industrial chemicals out of the environment is far more urgent than anyone has previously thought. With more than 1,000 chemicals presently entering commercial channels each year with almost no health or safety testing, this is not welcome news.
In May 2007, a group of two hundred scientists from five continents issued strongly worded consensus statement (the “Faroes Statement”) saying that early exposure to common chemicals leaves babies more likely to develop serious diseases later in life, including diabetes,
attention deficits, certain cancers, thyroid disorders, and obesity, among others.
Notably, the scientists urged governments not to wait for more scientific certainty but to take precautionary action now to protect fetuses and children from toxic exposures.
Most of the mainstream press continued to tiptoe around this story, with a few important exceptions, until May 2007 when the Faroes statement blew the story open. Now that it is out in the open, we’ll have to see if the mainstream press has what it takes to explain the far-reaching ramifications of these findings.
The best source of information on this topic (and many others) is http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org. Search for “epigenetics,” “fetal programming,” or “gene expression.”
e concerns, warns Parry, over how the Pentagon judges “threats” and who falls under the category of “those who would harm us.” A Pentagon official said the Counterintelligence Field Activity’s TALON program has amassed files on antiwar protesters.
In the view of some civil libertarians, a form of martial law already exists in the U.S. and has been in place since shortly after the September 11 attacks when Bush issued Military Order Number One, which empowered him to detain any noncitizen as an international terrorist or enemy combatant. Today that order extends to U.S. citizens as well.
Farrell ends her article with the conclusion that while much speculation has been generated by KBR’s contract to build huge detention centers within the U.S., “The truth is, we won’t know the real purpose of these centers unless ‘contingency plans are needed.’ And by then, it will be too late.”
UPDATE BY PETER DALE SCOTT
The contract of the Halliburton subsidiary KBR to build immigrant detention facilities is part of a longer-term Homeland Security plan titled ENDGAME, which sets as its goal the removal of “all removable aliens” and “potential terrorists.” In the 1980s Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld discussed similar emergency detention powers as part of a super-secret program of planning for what was euphemistically called “Continuity of Government” (COG) in the event of a nuclear disaster. At the time, Cheney was a Wyoming congressman, while Rumsfeld, who had been defense secretary under President Ford, was a businessman and CEO of the drug company G.D. Searle.
These men planned for suspension of the Constitution, not just after nuclear attack, but for any “national security emergency,” which they defined in Executive Order 12656 of 1988 as: “Any occurrence, including natural disaster, military attack, technological or other emergency, that seriously degrades or seriously threatens the national security of the United States.” Clearly September 11 would meet this definition, and did, for COG was instituted on that day. As the Washington Post later explained, the order “dispatched a shadow government of about 100 senior civilian managers to live and work secretly outside Washington, activating for the first time long-standing plans.”
What these managers in this shadow government worked on has never been reported. But it is significant that the group that prepared ENDGAME was, as the Homeland Security document puts it, “chartered in September 2001.” For ENDGAME’s goal of a capacious detention capability is remarkably similar to Oliver North’s controversial Rex-84 “readiness exercise” for COG in 1984. This called for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to round up and detain 400,000 imaginary “refugees,” in the context of “uncontrolled population movements” over the Mexican border into the United States.
UPDATE BY MAUREEN FARRELL
When the story about Kellogg, Brown and Root’s contract for emergency detention centers broke, immigration was not the hot button issue it is today. Given this, the language in Halliburton’s press release, stating that the centers would be built in the event of an “emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S.,” raised eyebrows, especially among those familiar with Rex-84 and other Reagan-era initiatives. FEMA’s former plans ‘for the detention of at least 21 million American Negroes in assembly centers or relocation camps’ added to the distrust, and the second stated reason for the KBR contract, “to support the rapid development of new programs,” sent imaginations reeling.
While few in the mainstream media made the connection between KBR’s contract and previous programs, Fox News eventually addressed this issue, pooh-poohing concerns as the province of “conspiracy theories” and “unfounded” fears. My article attempted to sift through the speculation, focusing on verifiable information found in declassified and leaked documents which proved that, in addition to drawing up contingency plans for martial law, the government has conducted military readiness exercises designed to round up and detain both illegal aliens and U.S. citizens.
How concerned should Americans be? Recent reports are conflicting and confusing:
• In May, 2006, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began “Operation Return to Sender,” which involved catching illegal immigrants and deporting them. In June, however, President Bush vowed that there would soon be “new infrastructures” including detention centers designed to put an end to such “catch and release” practices.
• Though Bush said he was “working with Congress to increase the number of detention facilities along our borders,” Rep. Bennie Thompson, ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, said he first learned about the KBR contract through newspaper reports.
• Fox News recently quoted Pepperdine University professor Doug Kmiec, who deemed detention camp concerns “more paranoia than reality” and added that KBR’s contract is most likely “something related to (Hurricane) Katrina” or “a bird flu outbreak that could spur a mass quarantine of Americans.” The president’s stated desire for the U.S. military to take a more active role during natural disasters and to enforce quarantines in the event of a bird flu outbreak, however, have been roundly denounced.
Concern over an all-powerful federal government is not paranoia, but active citizenship. As Thomas Jefferson explained, “even under the best forms of government, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.” From John Adams’s Alien and Sedition Acts to FDR’s internment of Japanese Americans, the land of the free has held many contradictions and ironies. Interestingly enough, Halliburton was at the center of another historical controversy, when Lyndon Johnson’s ties to a little-known company named Kellogg, Brown and Root caused a congressional commotion—particularly after the Halliburton subsidiary won enough wartime contracts to become one of the first protested symbols of the military-industrial complex. Back then they were known as the “Vietnam builders.” The question, of course, is what they’ll be known as next.
Additional links:
“ Reagan Aides and the Secret Government,” Miami Herald, July 5, 1987, http://fpiarticle.blogspot.com/2005/12/front-page-miami-herald-july-5-1987.html
“Foundations are in place for martial law in the US,” July 27, 2002, Sydney Morning Herald, smh.com.au/articles/2002/07/27/ 1027497418339.html
“Halliburton Deals Recall Vietnam-Era Controversy: Cheney’s Ties to Company Reminiscent of LBJ’s Relationships,” NPR, Dec. 24, 2003, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1569483
“Critics Fear Emergency Centers Could Be Used for Immigration Round-Ups,” Fox News, June 7, 2006, http://www.foxnews.com/ story/0,2933,198456,00.html
“U.S. officials nab 2,100 illegal immigrants in 3 weeks,” USA Today, June 14, 2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-06-14-immigration-arrests_x.htm
#16 No Hard Evidence Connecting Bin Laden to 9/11
Source:
The Muckraker Report, June 6, 2006, and Ithaca Journal, June 29, 2006
Title: “FBI says, ‘No Hard Evidence Connecting Bin Laden to 9/11’”
Author: Ed Haas
http://www.teamliberty.net/id267.html
Student Researcher: Bianca May and Morgan Ulery
Faculty Evaluator: Ben Frymer, Ph.D.
Osama bin Laden’s role in the events of September 11, 2001 is not mentioned on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” poster.
On June 5, 2006, author Ed Haas contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters to ask why, while claiming that bin Laden is wanted in connection with the August 1998 bombings of US Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, the poster does not indicate that he is wanted in connection with the events of 9/11.
Rex Tomb, Chief of Investigative Publicity for the FBI responded, “The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Osama bin Laden’s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.” Tomb continued, “Bin Laden has not been formally charged in connection to 9/11.” Asked to explain the process, Tomb responded, “The FBI gathers evidence. Once evidence is gathered, it is turned over to the Department of Justice. The Department of Justice then decides whether it has enough evidence to present to a federal grand jury. In the case of the 1998 United States Embassies being bombed, bin Laden has been formally indicted and charged by a grand jury. He has not been formally indicted and charged in connection with 9/11 because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.”
Haas pauses to ask the question, “If the US government does not have enough hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11, how is it possible that it had enough evidence to invade Afghanistan to ‘smoke him out of his cave?’” Through corporate media, the Bush administration told the American people that bin Laden was “Public Enemy Number One,” responsible for the deaths of nearly 3,000 people on September 11, 2001. The federal government claims to have invaded Afghanistan to “root out” bin Laden and the Taliban, yet nearly six years later, the FBI said that it had no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.
Though the world was to have been convinced by the December 2001 release of a bin Laden “confession video,” the Department of Defense issued a press release to accompany this video in which Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, “There was no doubt of bin Laden’s responsibility for the 9/11 attacks even before the tape was discovered.”
In a CNN article regarding the bin Laden tape, then New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said that “the tape removes any doubt that the US military campaign targeting bin Laden and his associates is more than justified.” Senator Richard Shelby, R-Alabama, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said, “The tape’s release is central to informing people in the outside world who don’t believe bin Laden was involved in the September 11 attacks.” Shelby went on to say “I don’t know how they can be in denial after they see this tape.”
Haas attempted to secure a reference to US government authentication of the bin Laden “confession video,” to no avail. However, it is conclusive that the Bush Administration and US Congress, along with corporate media, presented the video as authentic. So why doesn’t the FBI view the “confession video” as hard evidence? After all, notes Haas, if the FBI is investigating a crime such as drug trafficking, and it discovers a video of members of a drug cartel openly talking about a successful distribution operation in the United States, that video would be presented to a federal grand jury. The participants identified in the video would be indicted. The video alone would serve as sufficient evidence to net a conviction in a federal court. So why, asks Haas, is the bin Laden “confession video” not carrying the same weight with the FBI?
Haas strongly suggests that we begin asking questions, “The fact that the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Osama bin Laden to 9/11 should be headline news around the world. The challenge to the reader is to find out why it is not. Why has the US media blindly read the government-provided 9/11 scripts, rather than investigate without passion, prejudice, or bias, the events of September 11, 2001? Why has the US media blacklisted any guest that might speak of a government-sponsored 9/11 cover-up, rather than seeking out those people who have something to say about 9/11 that is contrary to the government’s account?” Haas continues. “Who is controlling the media message, and how is it that the FBI has no ‘hard evidence’ connecting Osama bin Laden to the events of September 11, 2001, while the US media has played the bin Laden-9/11 connection story for [six] years now as if it has conclusive evidence that bin Laden is responsible for the collapse of the twin towers, the Pentagon attack, and the demise of United Flight 93?”
UPDATE BY ED HAAS
On June 6, 2006 the Muckraker Report ran a piece by Ed Haas titled “FBI says, ‘No hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.’” Haas is the editor and a writer for the Muckraker Report. At the center of this article remains the authenticity and truthfulness of the videotape released by the federal government on December 13, 2001 in which it is reported that Osama bin Laden “confesses” to the September 11, 2001 attacks. The corporate media—television, radio, and newspapers—across the United States and the world repeated, virtually non-stop for a week after the videotape’s release, the government account of OBL “confessing.”
However, not one document has been released that demonstrates the authenticity of the videotape or that it even went through an authentication process. The Muckraker Report has submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to the FBI, CIA, Department of Defense, and CENTCOM requesting documentation that would demonstrate the authenticity of the videotape and the dates/circumstances in which the videotape was discovered. CENTCOM has yet to reply to the FOIA request. After losing an appeal, the FBI responded that no documents could be found responsive to the request. The Department of Defense referred the Muckraker Report to CENTCOM while also indicating that it had no documents responsive to the FOIA request either.
The CIA however claims that it can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of records responsive to the request. According to the CIA the fact of the existence or nonexistence of requested records is properly classified and is intelligence sources and methods information that is protected from disclosure by section 6 of the CIA Act of 1949, as amended. Therefore, the Agency has denied your request pursuant to FOIA exemptions (b)(1) and (b)(3).
Many people believe that if the videotape is authentic, it should be sufficient hard evidence for the FBI to connect bin Laden to 9/11. The Muckraker Report agrees. However, for the Department of Justice to indict bin Laden for the 9/11 attacks, something the government has yet to do, the videotape would have to be entered into evidence and subjected to additional scrutiny. This appears to be something the government wishes to avoid.
Some believe that the video is a fake. They refer to it as the “fat bin Laden”video. The Muckraker Report believes that while the videotape is indeed authentic, it was the result of an elaborate CIA sting operation. The Muckraker Report also believes that the reason why there is no documentation that demonstrates that the videotape went through an authenticity process is because the CIA knew it was authentic, they arranged the taping.
It is highly probable that the videotape was taped on September 26, 2001—before the US invaded Afghanistan.

# 17 Drinking Water Contaminated by Military and Corporations
Sources:
Environment News Service, March 24, 2006
Title: “Factories, Cities Across USA Exceed Water Pollution Limits”
Author: Sunny Lewis
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2006/2006-03-24-05.asp
AlterNet, August 4, 2006
Title: “Military Waste in Our Drinking Water”
Authors: Sunaura Taylor and Astor Taylor
http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/39723/

Student Researchers: Jonathan Stoumen, Adrienne Magee, and Julie Bickel
Faculty Evaluator: Sasha Von Meier, Ph.D. and Steve Norwick, Ph.D.
Water is essential to life, contributing to blood circulation, digestion, metabolism, brain activity, and muscle movements. Yet reliably pure water is growing scarce, even in the United States. Despite the federal government’s avowed commitment “to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters,”1 corporations, municipalities, and the US military pollute our waters—often with little or no accountability.
“Polluters are using America’s waters as their dumping ground,” said US PIRG’s Clean Water Advocate Christy Leavitt. (US PIRG is the national lobby office for the state Public Interest Research Groups, nonprofit public interest advocacy organizations.) “Troubled Waters: An Analysis of Clean Water Act Compliance,” released by US PIRG in March 2006 shows that, between July 2003 and December 2004, over 62 percent of industrial and municipal facilities across the country discharged pollution into US waterways at rates above limits established by the Clear Water Act (CWA).
Using the Freedom of Information Act, US PIRG investigated major facilities’ compliance—or lack of it—with established federal limits on pollution discharges. The average facility discharged pollutants in excess of its permitted limit by over 275 percent, nearly four times the legal limit. Nationally, 436 major facilities exceeded their limits at least half of the time during the study’s timeframe. Thirty-five facilities exceeded their permits during every reporting period. Seven states allowed more than one hundred violations of at least 500 percent (Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, New York, Tennessee, Texas, and Massachusetts). The study could not analyze facilities in California, Oregon, or Washington due to unreliable data.
Corn farming—think ethanol—is the crop most likely to leach chemical contaminants into waterways.2 Atrazine, which several European nations have banned, is an herbicide widely used in agribusiness, especially on major crops such as corn. The EPA identifies atrazine as the second-most common herbicide in drinking wells. Maximum safe levels of atrazine in drinking water are three parts per billion, but scientists have found up to 224 parts per billion in Midwestern streams, and 2,300 parts per billion in Corn Belt irrigation reservoirs.
Today more than 40 percent of US waterways are unsafe for swimming and fishing, and, as shown by the PIRG study, industrial pollution of the nation’s waters persists—despite the goals of the 1972 Clean Water Act to make all US waters safe for fishing, swimming, and other uses by 1983, and to eliminate the discharge of pollutants into waterways by 1985.
One reason for these ongoing failures is the Bush administration’s consistent efforts to shortchange the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget and to gut the Clean Water Act. In 2003, the Bush administration significantly weakened protections for small streams, wetlands, and other waters, despite Bush having declared 2002-2003 the Year of Clean Water.
However, opposition to environmental protection for clean waterways stems from not only the Bush administration but also the US military, whose pollution poisons the very citizens it is supposed to protect in the name of national security. Weapons production, by the US military and its private contractors, generates more hazardous waste annually than the five largest international chemical companies combined, accounting for one-third of the nation’s toxic waste. Furthermore, the US military is among the most frequent violators of environmental laws.
The Department of Defense (DoD) has sought and received exemptions from a number of crucial public health and environmental laws. Dramatic increases in the amounts of trichloroethylene (TCE) in public aquifers have been one fatal consequence of these exemptions. TCE, a known carcinogen, is used commercially as a solvent. It is the most widespread industrial contaminant in US drinking water. Since the Korean War, military contractors, such as Hughes Missiles Systems (purchased by Raytheon in 1997), have used TCE to degrease airplane parts, and to clean fuel lines at missile sites.
Consequently, TCE contamination is especially common around military facilities. The Pentagon is responsible for the TCE contamination of over 1,400 properties. In 2001, the EPA sought to force the government to require more thorough cleanups at military sites, by lowering the acceptable limits on TCE from five parts per billion to one part per billion. In response, the DoD joined the Department of Energy and NASA in blocking the EPA’s proposed action. The Bush administration charged the EPA with inflating TCE’s risks, and called on the National Academy of Sciences to evaluate the EPA’s claims. The Academy’s 2003 report confirmed the EPA’s assessment, linking TCE to kidney cancer, impaired neurological function, reproductive and developmental damage, autoimmune disease, and other human ailments. The Bush administration and the DoD have ignored these inconvenient findings. As a result, citizens, who pay for the military budget with their tax dollars, are also paying with their health and sometimes their lives.
Citations
1. Federal Water Pollution Control Act (33 USC. 1251 et seq), Section 101(a).
2. Sasha Lilley, “Green Fuel’s Dirty Secret,” CorpWatch, June 1, 2006.
UPDATE BY SUNNY LEWIS
Compliance with the Clean Water Act on the part of industrial and municipal water facilities and land developers is of utmost importance to the quality of America’s waters—from wetlands, ponds, and small streams to mighty rivers and the Great Lakes.
The US Public Interest Research Group, US PIRG, which discovered the failure of 62 percent of facilities to comply with the law based on documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, intends to do more work on this subject later this year.
Christy Leavitt of US PIRG, quoted by ENS in the original article, says the group will issue another report based on updated figures obtained in May from the US Environmental Protection Agency.
As ENS reported, US PIRG recommended that all US waters be protected by withdrawal of what the group called “the Bush administration’s 2003 No Protection” policy which excludes many small streams and wetlands from protection under the Clean Water Act.
Since the ENS report was published, the US Supreme Court handed down a ruling on the scope of the Clean Water Act that many water and environmental experts as well as Members of Congress believe has muddied the legal waters and made new legislation necessary.
In June 2006, the high court ruled in the case Rapanos et ux., et at. v. United States that there are limits to the federal government’s authority to regulate wetlands under the Clean Water Act, but failed to agree on the confines of that power.
The consolidated case involved conflicts between developers who wanted to build condos and stores on wetlands and federal regulators, who refused to allow the developments under the authority of the Clean Water Act. The waters at issue were wetlands adjacent to ditches and drains that connected to “navigable waters” of the United States.
For a full discussion of the ruling, please see the ENS report, “US Supreme Court Decision Fails to Clarify Clean Water Act,” at http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jun2006/2006-06-19-10.asp.
In 2001, the Supreme Court ruled in another case, Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. Corps of Engineers, SWANCC, that non-navigable, isolated, intrastate waters do not fall under the jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act.
On May 25, 2007, a bi-partisan bill was introduced in the House of Representatives that attempts to clarify the original intent of Congress in the 1972 Clean Water Act in the wake of these two decisions.
To achieve clarification, the new measure, the Clean Water Restoration Act, replaces the term “navigable waters of the United States” with the term “waters of the United States.”
The Clean Water Restoration Act has 158 original cosponsors, and the endorsement of more than three hundred organizations representing the conservation community, family farmers, fishers, surfers, boaters, faith communities, environmental justice advocates, labor unions, and civic associations.
It replaces a bill mentioned in the original ENS report, the Clean Water Authority Restoration Act, that was not approved during the 109th Congress.
As ENS reported in March 2006, US PIRG recommended that the Clean Water State Revolving Fund be fully funded to help communities upgrade their sewer systems.
The Clean Water State Revolving Loan Fund guarantees loans for cities and towns so they can borrow for sewer projects at a lower interest rate, saving local taxpayers billions of dollars nationwide.
On March 8, 2007, ENS reported that the Bush administration’s budget proposal to cut some $400 million from the Clean Water State Revolving Fund budget came under fire by members of both parties in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
On March 9, 2007, ENS reported that the US House of Representatives passed the Water Quality Financing Act of 2007. For the first time in twenty years, the measure H.R. 720, would reauthorize the Clean Water State Revolving Funds. At press time, this measure had not come before the US Senate.
For its part, the US EPA Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, OECA, says its actions to enforce Clean Water Act requirements in FY 2006 resulted in more than 283 million pounds of pollutants reduced.
Most of these reductions are the result of the EPA’s “national priority efforts” to control overflows from combined sewer overflows and sanitary sewer overflows and contamination caused by surface runoff from stormwater and concentrated animal feeding operations, the agency said.
Working in partnership with states, OECA says it concluded major legal settlements with dozens of cities to bring critical sewer systems back into compliance.
The settlements require comprehensive plans to improve the maintenance and operation of systems to reduce overflows, and long-term capital construction projects to expand treatment capacity to ensure that sewage is properly treated before being discharged, the OECA said in the “EPA Fiscal Year 2006 Accomplishments Report.”
The settlements concluded in FY 2006 will reduce overflows of untreated or inadequately treated sewage by 26 million pounds, with an estimated investment of $930 million in sewer system upgrades and improvements.
To find out more about the scope of the Clean Water Act and compliance with this law, visit:
US Public Interest Research Group: http://www.uspirg.org/
US EPA Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance: http://www.epa.gov/compliance/
US EPA Clean Water Act Compliance Assistance:
http://www.epa.gov/compliance/assistance/bystatute/cwa/index.html
Clean Water Act State Revolving Fund:
http://www.epa.gov/owm/cwfinance/cwsrf/index.htm
Stormwater Authority: http://www.stormwaterauthority.org

# 18 Mexico’s Stolen Election
Sources:
AlterNet, August 2, 2006
Title: “Evidence of Election Fraud Grows in México”
Author: Chuck Collins and Joshua Holland
http://www.alternet.org/story/39763
Revolution, September 10, 2006
Title: “Mexico: The Political Volcano Rumbles”
Authors: Revolution Newspaper Collective
http://revcom.us/a/060/mexico-volcano-en.html
Researchers: Bill Gibbons and Erica Haikara
Faculty Evaluator: Ron Lopez, Ph.D.
Overwhelming evidence reveals massive fraud in the 2006 Mexican presidential election between “president-elect” Felipe Calderón of the conservative PAN party and Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the more liberal PRD. In an election riddled with “arithmetic mistakes,” a partial recount uncovered evidence of abundant stuffing and stealing of ballots that favored the PAN victory.
Meanwhile, US interests were significantly invested in the outcome of Mexico’s election. Though neither candidate had any choice but to cooperate with the US agenda, important differences existed around energy policy, specifically with regard to foreign privatization of Mexican oil and gas reserves.
Though the energy sector of Mexico is already deeply penetrated by US capital, as it stands, the Mexican government owns and controls the oil industry, with very tight restrictions on any foreign investment. Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), the fifth largest oil company in the world, exports 80 percent of its oil to the US. Sixty percent of its revenue ($30 billion per year) currently goes to the Mexican government, accounting for more than 40 percent of the Mexican government’s annual revenues.
Calderón promises a more thorough and streamlined exploitation of Mexico’s oil, demanding that Mexico remove barriers to private/foreign investment (which are currently written into the Mexican Constitution). Obrador, on the other hand, insisted on maintaining national ownership and control of the energy sector in order to build economic and social stability in Mexico.
In June 2005, Mexico signed an accord called Alliance for the Security and Prosperity of North America (ASPAN) with Canada and the US. The point was made that this accord would be binding on whoever became president of Mexico in the upcoming elections. Included in ASPAN is a guarantee to fill the energy needs of the US market, as well as agreements to forge “a common theory of security,” allowing US Homeland Security measures to be implemented in Mexico.
Five months later, in November 2005, an “audition” was held with Mexican presidential candidates before members of the US Chamber of Commerce in Mexico City. All candidates were asked whether they would open the energy sector in Mexico, especially the nationalized oil company, Pemex, to US exploitation.
Felipe Calderón received resounding applause when he answered that he is in favor of private investment in Pemex, and of weakening the labor unions. He also received applause when he stated that he supported George Bush’s guest worker program and that he agreed the border needed to be secured or militarized. Obrador said that he would not allow risk capital investment in Pemex—but hastened to add that other sectors would be opened to investment.
Calderón won the audition, Obrador was granted the role of understudy. Former US Ambassador to Mexico Jeffrey Davidow told Obrador, “If you win the election, we will support you.” But when Obrador appeared to be the front-runner in the election, PAN allied with forces in the US to launch a feverish campaign against him.
Though US laws prevent US influence in other countries’ elections, anti-Obrador ads airing on Mexican TV were designed by US firms and illegally financed by business councils that included such transnationals as Wal-Mart and Halliburton. US election advisers Rob Allyn and Dick Morris were contracted to develop a media campaign that would foment fear that Obrador, with ties to Chavez and Castro, posed a dangerous Socialist threat to Mexico.
Outgoing president Vicente Fox violated campaign law by making dozens of anti-Obrador speeches during the campaign, as the PAN party illegally saturated airwaves with swift-boat style attack ads against Obrador. Under Mexican law, ruling party interference is a serious crime and grounds for annulling an election.
While Obrador’s campaign and hundreds of independent election observers documented several hundred cases of election fraud in making their case for a recount, most Mexican TV stations failed to report the irregularities that surfaced. Days after the election The New York Times irresponsibly declared Calderón the winner, and Bush called to personally congratulate Calderón on his “win,” even though no victor had been declared under Mexican law. Illegal media campaigns combined with grand-scale fraud had had their effect.
Dominant forces in the US thus had a strong presence behind the scenes of the 2006 Mexican election. As a consequence, Washington looks forward to working with Calderón, who promises tighter (repressive) control and cooperation on all matters of interest to the US, in an accelerated plan to put Mexico more directly under US domination.
Mexico has thus been denied the democratic election of a president who might have joined Latin America in standing up to aggressive US neoliberal policies.

# 19 People’s Movement Challenges Neoliberal Agenda
Sources:
Trade Matters, American Friends Service Committee, May 3, 2006
Title: “Is the US Free Trade Model Losing Steam?”
Author: Jessica Walker Beaumont
http://www.afsc.org/trade-matters/trade-agreements/LosingSteam.htm
International Herald Tribune, December 28, 2006
Title: “Economic Policy Changes With New Latin American Leaders”
Author: Mark Weisbrot
http://www.cepr.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=773&Itemid=45
International Affairs Forum, March 31, 2007
Title: “Is Hugo Chavez a Threat to Stability? No.”
Author: Mark Weisbrot
http://www.cepr.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1102&Itemid=45
Student Evaluator: Toni Catelani
Faculty Evaluator: Phil Beard, Ph.D.
The US Free Trade model is meeting increasingly successful resistance as people’s movements around the world build powerful alternatives to neoliberal exploitation.
This is particularly evident in Latin America, where massive opposition to US economic domination has demanded that populist leaders and parties take control of national governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, Nicaragua, and Uruguay.
Latin American presidents are delivering on promises to fix the mistake of twenty-five years of neoliberal reforms that resulted in the region’s worst economic collapse in more than one hundred years. In the two decades preceding World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) policies, 1960-1980, the region’s income per person grew by 82 percent. By comparison it grew just 9 percent 1980–2000, and only 4 percent 2000–2005.
Strong ties between Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, and Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, along with cooperative relationships with major economies including Argentina and Brazil, are creating the real potential for autonomous alternatives to US-dictated economic policy in the Western Hemisphere.
In the past year alone several leaders have announced plans to cut ties with the World Bank and IMF. After a sweeping reelection in December 2006, Chavez announced April 30, 2007 that, having paid off debts to the World Bank and the IMF, Venezuela would cut ties with both institutions.1 Chavez has been able to put his nation on a path of solid growth by fulfilling his 1998 campaign promise to renationalize Venezuela’s oil industry (PDVSA). Though fierce US opposition to his move to end foreign privatization led to a failed US-backed military coup in 2002, nationalized oil is now the source of nearly half the Venezuela government’s revenues and 80 percent of the country’s export earnings. Venezuela’s economy has grown 38 percent in the last three years.
Chavez plans to set up a new lending institution run by Latin American nations and has pledged to support it with Venezuela’s booming oil revenues.1 Venezuela’s $50 billion in foreign exchange reserves is providing financial support to countries in the region without the exploitive policy conditions attached to WTO and World Bank lending. Leaders are thus able to deliver on promises to their people, contributing not only to stability but to the strengthening of Democracy in the region.
In April 2006, Evo Morales announced his rejection of the IMF and any future FTA with the US. He instead launched the Bolivian Peoples Trade Agreement (PTA), a socialist alternative to the neoliberal free trade model. The PTA emphasizes support of indigenous culture, reciprocity, solidarity, and national sovereignty. Above all the PTA emphasizes improved living conditions for the whole population as a result of international trade and investment. Bolivia’s 2005 passage of a Hydrocarbons Law raised the royalties paid by foreign gas companies to the government of Bolivia. While infuriating US corporations, the resulting tens of millions of dollars in revenue have enabled Bolivia to pay off its IMF debt and begin to build social programs and national reserves.
In December 2006, Rafael Correa, who recently won the presidential election in Ecuador on an anti-privatization, anti-US military base platform, announced plans to restructure Ecuador’s foreign debt in order to increase spending on crucial social programs. Ecuador has since paid its debt to the IMF and announced plans to sever ties to the institution. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega has also announced negotiations toward an IMF exit.
Argentina was one of the IMF’s most publicized “successes” turned-crushing-failure at the end of the last century. From 1991 to 1998 the country adopted a host of IMF-recommended reforms including large-scale privatizations. The economy grew substantially during this period but went into a terrible downward slide beginning in mid-1998. At the end of 2001 the whole experiment fell apart, with the country defaulting on more than $100 billion of debt. The currency collapsed soon thereafter, and the majority of people fell below the poverty line in a country that had previously been one of the richest in Latin America.2
When Argentina’s President Nestor Kirchner finally refused the IMF’s debilitating repayment mandates, Argentina’s economy began to rebound—and it hasn’t stopped growing. In a remarkable expansion, which was never supposed to have happened according to IMF predictions, Argentina’s economy has grown by 47 percent in the past few years, making it the fastest growing economy in the Western Hemisphere, and pulling more than nine million people (in a country of 36 million) out of poverty.2 Argentina decided to make its break with the IMF in January 2006 by paying off its remaining $9.9 billion debt.
As of December 2005, Brazil is also free to make its own decisions, free from IMF interference, after paying off its debt two years ahead of schedule. “We repaid the money to show the world that this country has a government and it is the owner of its own nose,” Lula said at the time, adding, “Brazil has been able to decide that it does not want another IMF deal.”3
While it is an expanding reality that many strong and growing people’s movements have not been so fortunate as to have representative governments—the people of India (see story #8), Mexico (see story #18), and Niger (see story #3) are but a few examples—more and more elected leaders in Latin America are providing models of true democratic leadership that is of, for, and by the people.
Citations
1. Jorge Rueda, “Venezuela Pulling Out of IMF, World Bank,” Associated Press, May 1 2007.
2. Mark Weisbrot, “IMF’s Fall From Power,” Washington Post.com, April 13, 2007.
3. Xinhua, “Early Debt Payment Enables Brazil to Make Own Budget Decisions,” Peoples Daily Online, December 16, 2005.
UPDATE BY Jessica Walker Beaumont
Written a year ago, the American Friends Service Committee article “Is the US Free Trade Model Losing Steam?” accurately predicted a growing resistance among Latin American and African leaders to the current “one-size-fits-all” US trade policy model.
Proponents of the current US free trade model seem willing to do whatever it takes to keep the free trade train moving down the track. However their time is literally running out, in part due to the looming July 1 expiration of “fast track” authority that gives the Bush administration the power to negotiate free trade agreements on behalf of Congress.
Although Bolivia, Ecuador and Southern Africa stand firm against US Free Trade Agreements (FTA), there remains a “coalition of the willing” lining up to get their trade agreements. Pending trade pacts for Congressional consideration include those with Colombia, Peru, Panama and Korea. Greasing the wheels to pass these FTAs is a new “breakthrough trade deal” with the Bush administration announced by Democratic leadership on May 10, 2007.
It is said that the deal would improve new free trade agreements by requiring that they include labor and environmental standards, and by insuring better access to essential medicines. Sounds good right? Well, the deal was negotiated in secret with only a handful of Congressional members, the legal text is still not released, and high-powered big business groups are supporters. The official outline of the deal reveals all that is excluded, ignoring a cry for substantial rethinking of US trade policy.
Meanwhile Bolivia continues to advance its People’s Trade Agreement. In April, 2007 Bolivia (along with Venezuela and Nicaragua) decided to withdraw from the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) housed at the World Bank. This came out of the social movement started in 2001 against the US multinational Bechtel that sued Bolivia under the ICSID for $25 million after it was thrown out during the Cochabamba Water War. Dropping out of the ICSID sends a clear message that protecting private investment at the expense of the rights of the people will not be tolerated.
Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, elected into power on an anti-FTA and anti-US military base agenda, is considering doing the same. In April Correa expelled the World Bank’s representative in Quito, accusing him of withdrawing funds in protest over the government’s oil sector reforms.
Costa Rica offers a new beacon of hope as they have yet to ratify the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Huge resistance to CAFTA grew as people learned it would require the dismantling of Costa Rica’s public telecommunications sector that is funding education. On April 12, 2007 the Supreme Electoral Court approved a measure calling for a binding referendum on CAFTA, likely to take place in August or September. The CAFTA referendum will be Costa Rica’s first public referendum since it gained independence from Spain in 1821 (Inside US Trade, May 4, 2007).

# 20 Terror Act Against Animal Activists
Sources:
Vermont Journal of Environmental Law, March 9, 2007
Title: “The AETA is Invidiously Detrimental to the Animal Rights Movement (and Unconstitutional as Well)”
Authors: David Hoch and Odette Wilkens
http://www.vjel.org/editorials/2007S/Hoch.Wilkens.Editorial.htm
Green is the New Red, November 14, 2006
Title: “US House Passes Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act With Little Discussion or Dissent”
Author: Will Potter
http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/2006/11/13/aeta-passes-house-recap/
Earth First! Journal, November, 2006
Title: “22 Years for Free-Speech Advocates”
Author: Budgerigar
Student Researcher: Sverre Tysl
Faculty Evaluator: Scott Suneson, MA
The term “terrorism” has been dangerously expanded to include acts that interfere, or promote interference, with the operations of animal enterprises. The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA), signed into law on November 27, 2006, broadens punishment present under the Animal Enterprises Protection Act (AEPA) of 1992. One hundred and sixty groups, including the National Lawyers’ Guild, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the League of Humane Voters, Physicians’ Committee for Responsible Medicine, and the New York City Bar Association, oppose this Act on grounds that its terminology is dangerously vague and poses a major conflict to the US Constitution.
The broad definition of an “animal enterprise,” for example, may encompass most US businesses: “any enterprise that uses or sells animals or animal products.” The phrase “loss of any real or personal property,” is elastic enough to include loss of projected profit. Concerns deepen as protections against “interference” extend to any “person or entity having a connection to, relationship with, or transactions with an animal enterprise.”
A letter from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to Congress dated March 6, 2006, “on behalf of hundreds of thousands of activists and members and fifty-three affiliates nationwide,” explains their opposition to AETA based on the concern that First Amendment activities such as demonstrations, leafleting, undercover investigations, and boycotts may be punishable as acts of terror under the overly vague and open-ended law.
The ACLU letter maintains, “Lawful and peaceful protests that, for example, urge a consumer boycott of a company that does not use humane procedures, could be the target of this provision because they ‘disrupt’ the company’s business. This overbroad provision might also apply to a whistleblower whose intentions are to stop harmful or illegal activities by the animal enterprise. The bill will effectively chill and deter Americans from exercising their First Amendment rights to advocate for reforms in the treatment of animals.”
Author Will Potter argues that the harsher amendments that AETA brings to its predecessor, AEPA, are hardly necessary, as AEPA was successfully used to disproportionately prosecute the SHAC 7—six animal rights activists organized to expose the illegal and inhumane operations of Huntingdon Life Sciences—for “animal enterprise terrorism.” Budgerigar of Earth First! recounts that three of the defendants were charged under AEPA in September of 2006 with interstate stalking and conspiracy to commit interstate stalking for organizing demonstrations and running a website that published names and addresses of those involved in the vivisection industry. The group was collectively sentenced to twenty-two years in prison. “The supreme irony of this case,” notes Budgerigar, “rests in the fact that these activists were convicted of conspiracy to damage the profits of an animal enterprise, but not of actually damaging it. Even so, the ever-so-honorable judge ordered the defendants to pay a total of $1,000,001 in restitution fees.”
Yet Congress deemed that AEPA was not a serious enough tool for going after animal rights “extremists.” David Hoch and Odette Wilkens of Equal Justice Alliance ask, “How did this bill [AETA] pass the House?”
Hoch and Wilkens explain that in spite of the fact that one hundred and sixty groups opposed its passage, the House Judiciary Committee placed AETA on the suspension calendar, under which process bills that are non-controversial can be passed by voice vote. The vote on the bill was then held hours earlier than scheduled, with what appears to have been only six (out of 435) Congresspersons present. Five voted for the bill, and Dennis Kucinich, who said that “[t]his bill will have a real and chilling effect on people’s constitutionally protected rights,” voted against it. Kucinich went on to say, “My concern about this bill is that it does nothing to address the real issue of animal protection but, instead targets those advocating animal rights.”
Budgerigar concludes, “The message could not be more clear: run an effective activist campaign, and you will be vilified, criminalized, and imprisoned.”
UPDATE BY DAVID HOCH AND ODETTE WILKENS
The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA), whose recent passage received virtually no media coverage, will chill the first amendment rights of animal advocates and serve as a template for future limitations on the free speech of all activists. The Act subjects anyone who (1) uses interstate commerce, (2) with the intent to damage or interfere with an “animal enterprise” or with any person or entity associated with an animal enterprise, and (3) causes any economic damage or corporate profit loss or bodily injury or fear of bodily injury, or (4) conspires or attempts to do any of the foregoing, to prosecution for “animal enterprise terrorism.”
AETA expands the Animal Enterprise Protection Act (AEPA), under which six animal activists were convicted and imprisoned for publicly advocating animal protection activities. The new law requires less serious conduct than the “physical disruption to...an animal enterprise” called for in AEPA, provides stiffer penalties for economic damage and subjects violators who cause no economic damage, bodily harm or fear of serious bodily harm, to as much as one year in prison, while also serving as a predicate for wiretapping.
AETA serves animal enterprises wishing to brand animal activists as criminals and treating dissent as terrorism, and indicates a trend toward treating dissent as terrorism, as evidenced by the Justice Department’s current attempt to increase sentences up to twenty years through the application of a concept called “terrorism enhancement.”
AETA violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments by proscribing formerly protected modes of expression and invidiously discriminating against animal activists through the imposition of harsher sanctions than those applied to similar or even more serious crimes under the 2005 federal sentencing guidelines. The Act is also unconstitutionally vague, due to the indecipherable ambiguity of statutory terms such as “interfere with” or “profit loss.” That vagueness extends to declared exemptions for lawful boycotts and peaceful protests, which could involve the same conduct that would subject one to prosecution under AETA. A lawful boycott is, by definition, the intent to interfere with and cause economic damage to some enterprise.
Furthermore, an animal enterprise need not be acting lawfully to be protected under the Act. Illegal animal enterprise is not an affirmative defense for activities such as whistle-blowing or undercover investigations into animal cruelty, labor conditions, or environmental violations.
To pass AETA, the House invoked a technicality that allows non-controversial bills to be approved by a voice vote, and then voted when only six members were present, although the bill was highly controversial, with approximately one hundred sixty organizations opposing its passage. The Act is unjust, oppressive, and unconstitutional and the honorable thing would be for Congress to repeal it, but without public knowledge and pressure that is unlikely. Therefore, a more prudent strategy would be to increase public awareness until a critical mass convinces Congress to rescind the Act.
To learn more about AETA or become involved in the effort to repeal it, visit the Equal Justice Alliance website at http://noaeta.org/index.htm.
UPDATE BY WILL POTTER
Shortly after passage of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, the Fur Commission USA distributed an announcement to supporters proclaiming “Mission Accomplished!” Corporations have been eager to appropriate much of the “War on Terrorism” rhetoric against activists, but this was an interesting PR choice. Bush stood on the USS Abraham Lincoln in front of a banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished” in 2003, only to be dogged by that hubris months, and now years, later.
It looks like corporations may be haunted by similar ghosts in this domestic front of the “War on Terrorism.” Not only has the legislation not deterred illegal activity by underground activists, it may have actually added fuel to their fire. On January 5, 2007, the Animal Liberation Front—considered by the FBI to be the “number one domestic terrorist threat”—distributed an anonymous communiqué related to vandalism at the home of a University of Utah animal researcher. It concluded: “PS. To all the vivisectors we have yet to visit: don’t bask in your recent legislative victory for too long. This new animal enterprise law means NOTHING. —ALF”
It wasn’t an isolated incident. Just two days after the president signed the law, another communiqué claimed credit for vandalizing the windows of a pharmaceutical company, and underground activists signed it: “Dedicated to the SHAC 7!” (The SHAC 7 are a group of activists convicted under the original legislation. They were never accused of anything like breaking windows: they “conspired” to violate the law by running a website and vocally supporting both legal and illegal tactics against companies doing business with a controversial lab).
If the purpose of AETA is to go after underground activists, that mission is far from accomplished. And if the purpose of AETA is to go after “the above ground,” activists are organizing to challenge that mission as well. Just a few weeks after the legislation passed, student activists protested outside the offices of US Rep. James P. McGovern in Massachusetts, naming and shaming him for not being present for a vote. McGovern’s staff quickly stated publicly that he does not support the law, he would have voted against it if he had known about a vote, and he would advocate for repeal.
And then there were dozens of community events around the world to raise awareness about labeling activists as “ecoterrorists,” from South Africa to Greece to Minneapolis, MN.
“Mission Accomplished”? Ahem.
To be clear, in some ways the mission of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act has been accomplished: it has instilled a level of fear in mainstream, above-ground, legal activists that they may one day be hit with the T-word in this ever-expanding “War on Terrorism.”
But through my reporting I’ve found that an interesting thing happens when people learn about this “Green Scare” and the corporate and political interests behind it: that fear easily turns to rage. More than 140 comments have been posted on the article I wrote about the legislation passing the House. Some of them express fear and a bit of hopelessness. Many share the tenor of “Jersey” who wrote: “do they really think everyone is going to crawl into the woodwork and stand for this?”
Since the law passed, I have been speaking regularly in public forums like the New York City Bar Association, Yale Law School, activist conferences, and with both mainstream and alternative press, and I’ve been able to see that phenomenon over and over again: questioning and investigating the legislation, and the money behind it, demystifies the law. It declaws it.
That knowledge is what ultimately worked against Senator Joseph McCarthy, succeeding where the “loyalty oaths” and the “naming names” failed. It can work now, too. If reporters do their jobs, and expose these issues to the general public, people can stop being afraid and start being pissed.
For more information, please visit www.GreenIsTheNewRed.com.

# 21 US Seeks WTO Immunity for Illegal Farm Payments
Sources:
Oxfam International, June 29, 2006
Title: “US Seeks ‘Get-Out Clause’ for Illegal Farm Payments”
http://www.oxfam.org/en/news/pressreleases2006/pr060629_wto_geneva
Financial Times UK, January 9 2007
Title: “Canada Launches WTO Case on US Subsidies”
Author: Eoin Callan
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/5debac74-9f9b-11db-9e2e-0000779e2340.html
Student Researcher: Cedric Therene
International Business Evaluator: Tim Ogburn
On July 24, 2006, after nearly five years of global trade negotiations, talks at the meetings of the World Trade Organization collapsed—perhaps permanently, say some economic analysts. In January of 2007, trade ministers from the United States, the European Union, Brazil, India, Japan, and Australia said they remained hopelessly stalemated, mostly on the contentious issue of farm trade. US negotiators blamed the breakdown on E.U., India, and Japan for balking at the unrestricted opening of markets to agricultural products.1
What went uncovered in mainstream news sources was any analysis of the content of the negotiations—what exactly the countries involved were offering, and what they expected in return.
Of utmost importance to the Bush Administration was that the US receive immunity from lawsuits by poor countries before Bush’s special “fast track” trade negotiating powers expired at the end of June, 2007.
In a last-minute proposal, one not included on the original agenda, the US suddenly insisted that all trade agreements include a special clause called a “Peace Clause” that would make its use of illegal farm subsidies immune from prosecution by the countries affected. Between 1994 and 2003, such a Peace Clause had denied developing nations any legal recourse in the face of the “dumping” of cheap foreign products that had devastated their agricultural communities.
According to international NGOs such as Oxfam International, the Peace Clause gives rich countries like the US and the European Union free rein to provide huge subsidies to their farmers. Such practices benefit the economies of already-wealthy nations, while damaging the agricultural communities of poorer nations. According to a 2003 Oxfam report, thirty-eight developing countries have suffered from unfair competition as a result of illegal subsidies in the US and EU.
Events following expiration of these legal protections make it clear why the US was so eager to reintroduce a new version of the Peace Clause (and why it was done so slyly). Following its expiration in 2003, Brazil took the US to the WTO court charging that US cotton subsidies had depressed world prices, hurting cotton producers in Brazil and around the world—and Brazil won! In 2005, the WTO agreed with Brazil’s charge, ordering that the US immediately discontinue its distribution of illegal agricultural subsidies. Fearing that other developing nations would follow suit, US negotiators were driven to reintroduce the proposal for protections they had enjoyed under the Peace Clause.
More recently, following the July 2006 collapse of the Doha trade talks, Canada has asked the WTO to review charges that the US is continuing to use illegal and “trade-distorting” agricultural subsidies. The charges focus on payments made to American corn farmers, but also challenge the total level of US agricultural subsidies. This is the most significant challenge to the structure of US agricultural subsidies since the landmark WTO ruling in favor of Brazil in 2005.
In June of 2007, The Canadian government asked the WTO to establish a dispute settlement panel to investigate the allegation.2 Under WTO rules, the United States can provide up to $19.1 billion annually in subsidies that are considered trade-distorting. Canada says the United States broke the rules every year from 1999 to 2005 except for 2003.
Gretchen Hamel, a spokeswoman for the US trade representatives, parroted the position taken previously by US officials addressing the Brazil dispute. She said, “Negotiation, not litigation, is the path to removing trade distortions in agriculture and improving opportunities for farmers and producers all around the world.”2 The US says that it needs the Peace Clause renewed in order to protect itself from litigation while it “is in the process of reducing its trade-distorting subsidies.” But Oxfam notes that, proposals included in the new Peace Clause would actually allow the US to increase its farm support from under $20 billion to almost $23 billion. The EU proposal would allow an increase in farm subsidies from $23 billion to $33 billion. Poor countries, with no surplus to supplement their farmers’ income shortfalls, would have nothing to respond with—no global support, no economic power, and no legal appeals.
Citations
1. Paul Blustein, “Trade Talks Fail After Stalemate Over Farm Issues; Collapse Comes With Finger-Pointing,” Washington Post, July 25, 2006.
2. Phillip Brasher, “Canada attacks US subsidies at WTO,” Des Moines Register, June 8, 2007.

# 22 North Invades Mexico
Source:
TomDispatch.com, September 19, 2006
Author: Mike Davis
Title: “Border Invaders: The Perfect Swarm Heads South”
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=122537
Student Researcher: Rachel Icaza and Erica Haikara
Faculty Evaluator: Francisco Vazquez, Ph.D.
The visitor crossing the Mexican border from Tijuana to San Diego these days is immediately confronted by a huge sign, “Stop the Border Invasion!” Sponsored by allies of the anti-immigrant vigilante group, the Minutemen, the same signs insult Mexican citizens at other border crossings in Arizona and Texas. The ultimate irony is that a crisis invasion is indeed occurring, but the signs, it seems, may be pointed the wrong direction.
Author Mike Davis points out that, in a “reality stood on its head,” few people—at least outside Mexico—have bothered to notice that while all the nannies, cooks, maids, and gardeners have been heading north to tend the luxury lifestyles of irate republicans, the Gringo masses have been rushing south to enjoy glorious budget retirements and affordable second homes in Mexico.
The number of North Americans living in Mexico has soared from 200,000 to 1 million (one-quarter of all US expatriates) in the past decade. With more than 70 million American baby-boomers expected to retire in the next two decades, experts predict “a tidal wave” of migration to warmer—and cheaper—climates. Baby-boomers are not simply feathering nests for eventual retirement, but also increasingly speculating in Mexican resort property and gated communities, complete with Hooters, Burger King, and Starbucks. The land rush is sending up property values to the detriment of locals whose children are consequently driven into slums or forced to emigrate north, only to face increasing “invasion” charges.
The Gringo footprint is largest (and brings the most significant geopolitical consequences) in Baja California, an epochal process that, if unchecked, will produce intolerable social marginalization and ecological devastation.
Indeed, the first two stages of informal annexation have already occurred. Under the banner of NAFTA, Southern California has exported hundreds of its sweatshops and toxic industries to the maquiladora zones of Tijuana and Mexicali. The Pacific Maritime Association, representing the West Coast’s major shipping companies, has joined forces with Korean and Japanese corporations to explore the construction of a vast new container port at Punta Colonel, 150 miles south of Tijuana, which would undercut the power of Longshore unionism in San Pedro and San Francisco.
Secondly, tens of thousands of US retirees and winter-residents are now clustered at both ends of the peninsula. Along the northwest coast from Tijuana to Ensenada, a recent advertisement for a real estate conference at UCLA boasts that “there are presently over fifty-seven real estate developments with over 11,000 homes/condos with an inventory value of over $3 billion all of them geared for the US market.”
Meanwhile, at the tropical end of Baja, a US expatriot enclave has emerged in the twenty-mile strip between Cabo San Lucas and San Jose de Cabo. Los Cabos has become an archipelago of real-estate hot spots where continuous double-digit increases in property values pull in speculative capital. Judging from the registration of private planes at the local airport, Cabos has essentially become a resort suburb of Orange County—the home of the most vehement Minutemen chapters.
Davis points out that many wealthy Southern Californians evidently see no contradiction between fuming over the “alien invasion” with one’s conservative friends at the Newport Marina one day, and flying down to enjoy their Cabos investment properties the next.
One of several multi-billion dollar real estate projects being developed for the US market is the Villages of Loreto: another 6,000 homes for expatriates in colonial-Mexico motif on the Sea of Cortez. The $3 billion Loreto project boasts that it will be the last word in green design, exploiting solar power and restricting automobile usage. It will, coincidently, balloon Loreto’s population from its current 15,000 to more than 100,000 in a decade, with the social and environmental consequences of a sort that can already be seen in the slum peripheries of Cancun and other mega-resorts.
One of the irresistible attractions of Baja is that it has preserved a primordial wildness that has disappeared elsewhere in the West. Local residents, including a very eloquent indigenous environmental movement, cherish this incomparable landscape, as they do the survival of an egalitarian ethos in the peninsula’s small towns and fishing villages.
However, thanks to the silent invasion of the baby-boomers from the north, much of the natural history and frontier culture of Baja could be swept away in the next generation. The problem is, as Tom Engelhardt of Tomdispatch points out, “Fences don’t work if you’ve got your own plane.”

# 23 Feinstein’s Conflict of Interest in Iraq
Source:
North Bay Bohemian, January 24, 2007
Title: “Senator Feinstein’s Iraq Conflict”
Author: Peter Byrne
http://www.bohemian.com/metro/01.24.07/dianne-feinstein-0704.html
Student Researcher: David Abbott, Amanda Spigut, and Ann Marie O’Toole
Faculty Evaluator: David McCuan, Ph.D.
Dianne Feinstein—the ninth wealthiest member of congress—has been beset by monumental ethical conflicts of interest. As a member of the Military Construction Appropriations Subcommittee (MILCON) from 2001 to the end of 2005, Senator Feinstein voted for appropriations worth billions of dollars to her husband’s firms.
From 1997 through the end of 2005, Feinstein’s husband Richard C. Blum was a majority shareholder in both URS Corp. and Perini Corp. She lobbied Pentagon officials in public hearings to support defense projects that she favored, some of which already were, or subsequently became, URS or Perini contracts. From 2001 to 2005, URS earned $792 million from military construction and environmental cleanup projects approved by MILCON; Perini earned $759 million from such projects.
In 2000, Perini earned a mere $7 million from federal contracts. After 9/11, Perini was transformed into a major defense contractor. In 2004, the company earned $444 million for military construction work in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as for improving airfields for the US Air Force in Europe and building base infrastructures for the US Navy around the globe. In a remarkable financial recovery, Perini shot from near penury in 1997 to logging gross revenues of $1.7 billion in 2005.
It is estimated that Perini now holds at least $2.5 billion worth of contracts tied to the worldwide expansion of the US military. Its largest Department of Defense contracts are “indefinite delivery-indefinite quantity” or “bundled” contracts carrying guaranteed profit margins. As of May 2006, Perini held a series of bundled contracts awarded by the Army Corps of Engineers for work in the Middle East worth $1.725 billion. Perini has also been awarded an open-ended contract by the US Air Force for military construction and cleaning the environment at closed military bases.
In 2003 hearings, MILCON approved various construction projects at sites where Perini and/or URS are contracted to perform engineering and military construction work. URS’s military construction work in 2000 earned it a mere $24 million. The next year, when Feinstein took over as MILCON chair, military construction earned URS $185 million. On top of that, the company’s architectural and engineering revenue from military construction projects grew from $108,726 in 2000 to $142 million in 2001, more than a thousand-fold increase in a single year.
Beginning in 1997, Michael R. Klein, a top legal adviser to Feinstein and a long-time business partner of Blum’s, routinely informed Feinstein about specific federal projects coming before her in which Perini had a stake. The insider information, Klein said, “was intended to help the senator avoid conflicts of interest.” Although Klein’s admission was intended to defuse the issue, it had the effect of exacerbating it, because in theory, Feinstein would not know the identity of any of the companies that stood to contractually benefit from her approval of specific items in the military construction budget—until Klein told her.
Feinstein’s husband has profited in other ways by his powerful political connections. In March 2002, then-Governor Gray Davis appointed Blum to a twelve-year term as a regent of the University of California, where he used his position as Regent to award millions of dollars in construction contracts to URS and Perini. At the time, he was the principal owner of URS and had substantial interests in Perini. In 2005, Blum divested himself of Perini stock for a considerable profit. He then resigned from the URS board of directors and divested his investment firm of about $220 million in URS stock.1
Citation
1. Peter Byrne, “Blum’s Plums” North Bay Bohemian, February 21, 2007.
UPDATE BY PETER BYRNE
Shortly before my expose of Senator Dianne Feinstein’s conflict of interest was published in January 2007, Feinstein, who had declined to substantively comment upon serious allegations of ethical misconduct as reported in the story, resigned from the Military Construction Subcommittee. I then wrote three follow-ups, including a news column on her resignation, an expose of her husband Richard Blum’s conflict of interest as a regent of the University of California, and an expose of Blum’s business partner, Michael R. Klein. With Blum’s financial backing, Klein, a war contractor, operates a non-profit called The Sunlight Foundation that awards millions of dollars to reporters and government watchdog groups to research government ethics.
In March, right-wing bloggers by the thousands started linking to and commenting upon these stories—agitating for a Congressional investigation of Feinstein. In just two days, the stories got 50,000 online hits. Michael Savage and Rush Limbaugh did radio segments on my findings. I declined to appear on their shows, because I do not associate with racist, misogynist, homophobic demagogues. Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly invited me to be on his national TV show, but quickly uninvited me after I promised that the first sentence out of my mouth would frame Feinstein as a neoconservative warmonger just like O’Reilly.
As the storm of conservative outrage intensified, Joe Conason, from The Nation Institute, which had commissioned the Feinstein investigation, asked to have the tag thanking the Nation Institute for funding removed from my stories because, he said, Katrina vanden Heuval, The Nation’s editor and publisher, did not want the magazine or its non-profit institute to be positively associated with Limbaugh. I told Conason that not only was I required to credit The Nation Institute under the terms of our contract, but that The Nation’s editors should be proud of the investigation and gratified by the public reaction.
The back story to that encounter is that, in October, vanden Heuvel had abruptly killed the Feinstein story, which had been scheduled to run as a cover feature before the November 2006 election in which Feinstein was up for reelection. The Nation’s investigative editor, Bob Moser, who worked closely with me on the project from start to finish, wrote that I had done a “solid job,” but that the magazine liked to have a political “impact,” and since Feinstein was “not facing a strong challenge for reelection,” they were not going to print the story. Moser added that there was no “smoking gun,” which amazed me, since Klein’s admission that he was funneling defense contracting wish lists developed by Feinstein’s husband’s company directly to the senator, who was in a position to make those wishes come true, was a hot and smoking fact pointing toward corrupt practices. Subsequently, vanden Heuval wrote an editorial praising women leaders of the newly-empowered Democratic Party, including Feinstein: go figure.
I then sold the story to Salon.com, who abruptly killed it right before publication, too. This time the editor’s explanation was that “someone talked to the Sunlight Foundation” and that Salon no longer saw the matter as a serious conflict of interest. So, I pitched the story to Slate, The NewRepublic, Harper’s, the Los Angeles Times and, by way of experiment, to the neoconservative American Spectator and Weekly Standard. Most of the editors praised the reporting, but turned down the story. I cannot help but believe that, considering the precarious balance of power in the post-election Senate, some of these editors were not eager to critique the ethics of a Democrat. As for rejection by the neoconservatives, I theorize that they secretly adore Feinstein, who has consistently supported Bush’s war and homeland security agenda and the illiberal Patriot Act.
So I sold the tale to the North Bay Bohemian, which, along with its sister papers in San Jose and Santa Cruz ran it on the cover—complete with follow-ups. After it appeared, the editors and I received a series of invective-filled emails from war contractor Klein (who is also an attorney) but, since he could show no errors of fact in the story, he did not get the retraction that he apparently wanted. In March, the story crested a Google tidal wave generated by left- and right-wing bloggers wondering why the mainstream media was ignoring the Feinstein scandal. After two dozen newspapers ran a McClatchy wire service article in April observing that no one had found any factual faults in my reporting, the lefty group Media Matters attacked me on its Web site as a right-wing pawn, without even calling me for comment, nor finding any errors in my reporting. I parried their fact-free insults with facts and they were compelled to correct the inaccurate rant.
On April 30, The Hill newspaper in Washington D.C. ran a highly-visible op-ed by a conservative pundit quoting from my story and comparing Feinstein (unfairly) to convicted felon and former Congressman, Duke Cunningham. As the Feinstein investigation gained national traction, mostly outside the realm of the mainstream media, one of Klein’s employees at the Sunlight Foundation posted a “critique” of my story, which was loaded with personal insults, but contained no factual substance. Not coincidentally, Feinstein’s press office distributes, upon request, a similarly-worded “rebuttal,” which insults my personal integrity, finds no factual errors, and does not address the damning fact, reported in the story, that four non-partisan ethics experts based in Washington D.C. found the senator had a conflict of interest after reviewing the results of my investigation.
Also, in April, CodePink and The Raging Grannies held a demonstration in front of the Feinstein-Blum mansion in San Francisco demanding that she return her war profits to the Iraqi people. That was my proudest moment.
Five months after the story was printed, opinion-floggers across the political spectrum continue to loudly ask why the mainstream media has not reported on Feinstein’s ethical problem. Some say that the hurricane of opinion raised by the investigation has killed Feinstein’s chance for a spot on the Democratic Party’s presidential ticket in 2008. Klein has continued to send me e-mails full of verbal abuse, misspellings, and implied threat of lawsuit.
Blissfully, I delete them.

# 24 Media Misquotes Threat From Iran’s President
Sources:
Global Research, January 20, 2007
Title: “Wiped Off The Map—The Rumor of the Century”
Author: Arash Norouzi
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=NOR20070120&articleId=4527
Information Clearing House, May 9, 2006
Title: “Full Text: The President of Iran’s Letter To President Bush”
Translated by Le Monde
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12984.htm
Student Researchers: Becky Bazell
Faculty Evaluator: Peter Phillips, Ph.D.
Across the world a media story has spread that Iran’s President Ahmadinejad has threatened to destroy Israel, by saying that, “Israel must be wiped off the map.” Contrary to general belief, this statement was actually a misinterpretation. However, it was the Islamic Republic News Service in Iran that first mistranslated the quote. Iran’s Foreign Minister attempted to clarify the statement, but the quote ended up having a life of its own in the corporate media.
Amid heated wrangling over Iran’s nuclear program and the threat of preemptive strikes by the US, the quote has been continually used to reinforce the idea that Iran is being run by extremists seeking the total destruction of Israel.
So what did Ahmadinejad actually say? To quote his exact words in Farsi:
“Imam ghoft een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad.”
Rezhim-e is the word “regime,” pronounced just like the English word with an extra “eh” sound at the end. Ahmadinejad did not refer to Israel the country or Israel the landmass, but the Israeli regime. This is a vastly significant distinction, as one cannot wipe a regime off the map. Ahmadinejad did not even refer to Israel by name, he instead used the specific phrase “rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods” (regime occupying Jerusalem).
A similar statement by Ahmadinejad in December 2006, “As the Soviet Union disappeared, the Zionist regime will also vanish and humanity will be liberated,” has also been misinterpreted.
In May of 2006 President Ahmadinejad published an open letter to President Bush clearly asking for peace and the mutual respect of human rights. He warns that Western media, through contrived and deceptive information, has intensified the climate of fear that leads to attacks on innocent peoples. The letter was not reported in the US news media. Ahmadinejad began the letter writing, “Mr. George Bush, For some time now I have been thinking, how one can justify the undeniable contradictions that exist in the international arena. Can one be a follower of Jesus Christ (PBUH), the great Messenger of God, Feel obliged to respect human rights, Present liberalism as a civilization model, Announce one’s opposition to the proliferation of nuclear weapons and WMDs, Make “War on Terror” his slogan, And finally, Work towards the establishment of a unified international community—a community which Christ and the virtuous of the Earth will one day govern, But at the same time, have countries attacked; The lives, reputations and possessions of people destroyed and on the slight chance of the … of a … criminals in a village city, or convoy for example the entire village, city or convey set ablaze.”
Evaluator Comment
Ahmadinejad declared that Zionism is the West’s apparatus of political oppression against Muslims. He says the “Zionist regime” was imposed on the Islamic world as a strategic bridgehead to ensure domination of the region and its assets. This position is viewed as threatening to many in the West. While threats and counter-threats escalates tensions in the Persian Gulf, I believe it is important for the media to publish both sides of issues and be as accurate as possible by seeking to build understanding rather than fear and anger.
—Peter Phillips
UPDATE BY Arash Norouzi
In May 2007, the US House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution calling on the U.N. Security Council to charge Ahmadinejad with the crime of inciting genocide “because of his calls for the destruction of the State of Israel”—a violation of the U.N.’s 1948 Genocide Convention—specifically citing the false “wiped off the map” quote from October 2005. It also called for the U.N. to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, with the “potential means to the end of carrying out President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s threats against Israel.”
This misquote has become a key component of the push for war with Iran, a war that would make Iraq look like the cakewalk it was predicted to be. Attacking Iran would result in massive death and destruction, affect world oil supplies, provoke terrorism, could initiate the next World War, and might even include the use of nuclear weapons for the first time since WWII. In this heated atmosphere, an accurate narrative is essential in averting the next cataclysmic Mideast intervention. When President Bush emphasizes the importance of taking the words of America’s enemies seriously, that process begins with first determining just what exactly those words are.
Yet my article is about more than just clarifying a mistranslated statement. It’s about the media, propaganda, plagiarism, language, false assumptions ...Functioning much like a puzzle, it engages readers by allowing them to deconstruct the quote and its meaning themselves. This self-verification process adds a compelling aspect in which credibility becomes largely obsolete. The article’s ’punchline’ demonstrates undeniably that members of the mainstream media knowingly spread this rumor, and readers are challenged to check for themselves by comparing linked sources proving this claim.
The idea is not merely to contest a single misquote, but to also promote skepticism about all pre-war intelligence. If this quote is false, then it’s logical to assume that other accusations against Iran could be wrong too—just as they were with Iraq.
The overwhelming ubiquity of this misquote has deterred others from correcting what they probably view as a lost cause. Yet my article alone has been viewed by millions, translated into at least half a dozen languages, garnered radio interviews, inspired videos on YouTube, and become the subject of an entire article in The Bangkok Post. It got the attention of people at the BBC, Washington Post, IAEA, State Department, United Nations, and the Islamic Republic itself. It’s been quoted by numerous journalists, authors and academics, in published letters to the editor, and on call-in TV shows such as on C-SPAN. The Associated Press has now begun citing the “vanish from the page of time” phrase, adding that “independent analysts” have refuted the “map” quote; and Dennis Kucinich was prepared to correct the rumor when asked about the subject on TV recently.
These are hopeful signals that underscore the importance of alternative voices in the media, and their potential effectiveness in influencing the discourse. If the first casualty of war is the truth, then it’s up to the truth tellers—whomever they may be—to enlighten us.

# 25 Who Will Profit from Native Energy?
Source:
LiP Magazine, June 5, 2006
Title: “Native Energy Futures”
Author: Brian Awehali
http://www.lipmagazine.org/articles/featawehali_nativefutures.htm
Student Researchers: Ioana Lupu and Mayra Madrigal
Faculty Evaluator: Dolly Freidel, Ph.D.
Energy on Native American land is becoming big business. According to the Indigenous Environmental Network, 35 percent of the fossil fuel resources in the US are within Indian country. The Department of the Interior estimates that Indian lands hold undiscovered reserves of almost 54 billion tons of coal, 38 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and 5.4 billion barrels of oil. Tribal lands also contain enormous amounts of alternative energy. “Wind blowing through Indian reservations in just four northern Great Plains states could support almost 200,000 megawatts of wind power,” Winona LaDuke told Indian Country Today in March 2005, “Tribal landholdings in the southwestern US…could generate enough power to eradicate all fossil fuel burning power plants in the US.”
The questions to be answered now are: what sort of energy will Indian lands produce, who will make that decision, and who will end up benefiting from the production?
According to Theresa Rosier, Counselor to the Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs, “increased energy development in Indian and Alaska Native communities could help the Nation have more reliable homegrown energy supplies.” This, she says, is “consistent with the President’s National Energy Policy to secure America’s energy future.”
Rosier’s statement conveys quite a lot about how the government and the energy sector intend to market the growing shift away from dependence on foreign energy. The idea that “America’s energy future” should be linked to having “more reliable homegrown energy supplies” can be found in native energy-specific legislation that has already passed into law. What this line of thinking fails to take into account is that Native America is not the same as US America. The domestic “supplies” in question belong to sovereign nations, not to the United States or its energy sector.
So far, government plans to deregulate and step up the development of domestic (native) energy resources is being spun as a way to produce clean, efficient energy while helping Native Americans gain greater economic and tribal sovereignty. Critics charge, however, that large energy companies are simply looking to establish lucrative partnerships with tribal corporations, which are largely free of regulation and federal oversight.
For example, in 2003, the Rosebud Sioux of South Dakota, in partnership with NativeEnergy, LLC, completed the first large-scale native-owned wind turbine in history. The project was billed as a way to bring renewable energy–related jobs and training opportunities to the citizens of this sovereign nation, who are among the poorest in all of North America.
NativeEnergy’s President and CEO Tom Boucher, an energy industry vet, financed the Rosebud Sioux project by selling “flexible emissions standards” created by the Kyoto Protocol. These are the tax-deductible pollution credits from ecologically responsible companies (or in this case, Native American tribes), which can then be sold to polluters wishing to “offset” their carbon dioxide generation without actually reducing their emissions.
Since the Rosebud test case proved successful, NativeEnergy moved forward with plans to develop a larger “distributed wind project,” located on eight different reservations. NativeEnergy also became a majority Indian-owned company in August 2005, when the pro-development Intertribal Council on Utility Policy (COUP) purchased a majority stake in the company on behalf of its member tribes.
The COUP-NativeEnergy purchase just happened to coincide with the passage of the 2005 Energy Policy Act. The act contains a number of native energy–specific provisions in its Title V, many of which set alarming precedents.
Most outrageously, it gave the US government the power to grant rights of way through Indian lands without permission from the tribes—if deemed to be in the strategic interests of an energy-related project. Under the guise of “promoting tribal sovereignty,” the act also released the federal government from liability with regard to resource development, shifting responsibility for environmental review and regulation from the federal to tribal governments. Also, according to the Indigenous Environmental Network, the act “rolls back the protections of…critical pieces of legislation that grassroots indigenous peoples utilize to protect our sacred sites.” Some critics have derided the 2005 act as a fire sale on Indian energy, characterizing various incentives as a broad collection of subsidies (federal handouts) for US energy companies.
America’s native peoples may attain a modicum of energy independence and tribal sovereignty through the development of wind, solar, and other renewable energy infrastructure on their lands. But, according to Brian Awehali, it won’t come from getting into bed with, and becoming indebted to, the very industry currently driving the planet to its doom.
UPDATE BY Brian Awehali
I believe the topic of this article was important and urgent because sometimes all that glitters really is gold, even if the marketing copy says it’s green. The long and utterly predictable history where indigenous peoples and US government and corporate interests are both concerned shouldn’t be forgotten as we enter the brave new green era. Marketing for-profit energy schemes on Indian lands as a means of promoting tribal sovereignty is both ludicrous and offensive, as are “green” development plans intrinsically tied to the extraction of fossil fuels in the deregulated Wild West of Indian Country. Energy companies are only interested in native sovereignty because it means operations on Indian lands are not subject to federal regulation or oversight. This is why I included a discussion in my article about the instructive example of the Alaska tribal corporations and the ways they’ve mutated into multi-billion dollar loophole exploiters. (My brief examination of Alaska tribal corporations drew heavily from an excellent Mother Jones article, “Little Big Companies,” by Michael Scherer). It’s also my belief that the probably well-intentioned idea of “green tags,” carbon offset credits, and market-enabled “carbon neutrality” should be examined very closely: Why are we introducing systems for transferring (or trading) the carbon emissions of “First World” polluters to those who contributed least to global warming? I would argue that this is merely a nice-sounding way for the overdeveloped world to purchase the right to continue its pathologically unsustainable mode of existence, while doing little to address the very grave ecological realities we now face.
It’s very hard to know what the impact of this story was, or to gauge mainstream response to it. In my experience, the so-called mainstream has a difficult time absorbing and understanding Native American issues, not least because this mainstream tends to think of indigenous peoples in North America in historical, rather than contemporary, terms. I am, however, encouraged by the number of journalists and writers who are beginning to ask critical questions about greenwashing, and I see my story as adding to that collective body of work.
For more information about energy policy and its impact on indigenous communities of North America, I recommend visiting the Indigenous Environmental Network (www.ienearth.org), and checking out their Native Energy Campaign.

Pick a whole number between five and six...

2007-09-06T11:00:00.000-07:00

From: Russell 'Ace' Hoffman
To: Recipient list suppressed@null, null@null
Subject: Pick a whole number between five and six...
Date: Sep 5, 2007 7:11 PM

Dear Readers,

Well, well, well. Bombs over America. Bombs in our backyard. Bombs away! While MS-NBC was reporting five nuclear warheads were accidentally flown across the country last week, CNN was reporting it was six. Nobody seems to know for sure.

We're being told these weapons cannot detonate due to "safeguards."

Are those the same safeguards that lost them in the first place?

We're being told that even if there was an accident, the plutonium in the bombs wouldn't go far.

Baloney.

The HE (high explosives) could scatter the plutonium far and wide. How far? How wide?

One bomb that fell off a jet years ago over Mars Bluff, South Carolina created a hole 50 feet across and 35 feet deep when the conventional explosives detonated. Obviously, there was no nuclear explosion, but there was significant contamination.

Each nuclear bomb in last week's incident -- W-80 model cruise missiles of up to 150 kilotons each -- contains about 10 pounds of highly radioactive material (Plutonium-239, possibly "supergrade" (very low in Plutonium-240)). Additionally, there is highly poisonous Hydrogen-3 ("tritium") which is injected into the center of the bomb moments before the explosion, and beryllium is used both to initiate the explosion (as a "neutron generator") and to reflect the neutrons released in the initial nanoseconds of the explosion back into the "pit." There is also Lithium-6, and Depleted Uranium (Uranium-238) encases the "pit." The Uranium-238 acts as a shield to protect the military personnel who handle the bomb. Then, at the moment of explosion, it too will fission.

So even without a nuclear explosion, there could be an enormous environmental problem.

And it's not like this has never happened before. Below is only a PARTIAL LIST of "Broken Arrows," "Bent Spears," "Dull Swords," and "Faded Giants" (endearing military terms for various levels of nuclear weapons accidents, all short of a "Nucflash." You can guess what that is -- it's the one they say can't happen (but then, why do they have a name for it?).

March 10, 1956: A B-47 bomber with two nuclear weapons was lost over the Mediterranean Sea. Despite an extensive search, nothing was ever recovered.

July 28th, 1957: Off Cape May, New Jersey: Three nuclear weapons without their fissile cores, and a "nuclear capsule" (the part that detonates) were lost at sea and never recovered. Other reports say only two of the nuclear weapons were jettisoned, and the other was brought back, along with the nuclear capsule. The damaged C-124 landed at an air base near Atlantic City.

February 5th, 1958, off Tybee Island, Georgia, a 7,000 pound, 4-megaton hydrogen bomb was jettisoned after a mid-air collision between a B-47 bomber and an F-86 fighter jet, and never recovered. It's still lost in the mud amongst old civil war ordinance. The Air Force insisted the bomb was not "nuclear-capable" (was missing the nuclear capsule) but this is probably untrue. At least two former Air Force personnel involved in the incident testified otherwise under oath.

November 4th, 1958, a B-47 crashed carrying a nuclear weapon.

In 1959 a B-52 crashed in Kentucky with two nuclear weapons on board. There were no explosions.

January 24th, 1961: Near Goldsboro, North Carolina a B-52 broke apart in mid-air. This incident was probably closest to being a "Nucflash" because apparently FIVE OF SIX SAFETY SYSTEMS FAILED!

On December 8th, 1964, a B-58 bomber skidded off the runway, and "portions" of five nuclear weapons burned.

In 1965 an aircraft rolled off an aircraft carrier with a "live hydrogen bomb" and sank. Fortunately, it didn't go off. This was near Okinawa. Years later it was still leaking radioactive material.

On January 17th, 1966 a B-52 collided with a KC-135 refueling tanker and crashed in Spain. Seven crew members of the KC-135 were burned to death. The clean-up cost millions of dollars. More than a thousand tons of dirt were brought back to America and dumped at the Savannah River Site, but nevertheless, the cleanup was only partially successful and people in Spain are still being sickened by the radioactive materials that remain.

January 22nd, 1968: Near Thule, Greenland, four hydrogen bombs were "scattered" over the ice (supposedly the contaminated ice was later shipped to America). This incident sparked massive protests since Greenland had banned such flights over their soil.

These accidents -- and many more -- and this latest incident prove that there is no safe place for nuclear weapons. No country, no ocean, no lake can withstand the devastation.

The last B-52 was manufactured in 1962, so the youngest the plane that was used in this latest incident could possibly be is 45 years old -- quite possibly older than the pilot and co-pilot together. Is this safe?

It's time to stop this foolishness before something really terrible happens! We're not getting ANY BETTER at handling nukes, and firing or demoting those involved, while proper, WON'T address the root cause one little bit, because the root cause is that humans make mistakes. ALL humans make mistakes, and they will continue to do so.

------------------------------------------------------------------
"Nuclear weapons are designed with great care to explode only when deliberately armed and fired. Nevertheless, there is always a possibility that, as a result of accidental circumstances, an explosion will take place inadvertently. Although all conceivable precautions are taken to prevent them, such accidents might occur in areas where weapons are assembled and stored, during the course of loading and transportation on the ground, or when actually in the delivery vehicle, e.g., an airplane or a missile."

-Atomic Energy Commission/Department of Defense, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, 1962. (quote presented by Jaya Tiwari and Cleve J. Gray).
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Had these bombs exploded, who do you think would have been blamed? Al Qaeda? Iran? North Korea? China?

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman Carlsbad, CA

Thanks to Pamela Blockey-O'Brien for her assistance in preparing this report. Numerous web sites and books were also reviewed, incuding:

http://aboutfacts.net/Weapons36.htm

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5gmqA7P-MPnRJzQ5v9Xi6M5zdr9IA

http://www.cdi.org/Issues/NukeAccidents/accidents.htm

http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Weapons/W80.html

U.S. Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History (ISBN 0-517-56740-7) by Chuck Hansen, Orion Books, New York)

*************************************************
** THE ANIMATED SOFTWARE COMPANY
** Russell "Ace" Hoffman, Owner & Chief Programmer
** P.O. Box 1936, Carlsbad CA 92018-1936
** (800) 551-2726 (U.S. & Canada)
** (760) 720-7261 (elsewhere)
** www.animatedsoftware.com
*************************************************

PR Nuke Flacks Do The Kashiwazaki Quake Death Spin

2007-07-24T10:24:00.000-07:00

Published on Monday, July 23, 2007 by CommonDreams.org

PR Nuke Flacks Do The Kashiwazaki Quake Death Spin

by Harvey Wasserman

As you read this, swarms of extremely well-paid PR flacks are spinning the Kashiwazaki nuke quake into an argument for building more reactors. They will deploy utter absurdities and personal attacks, followed by the sound of media-complicit silence.

But the news coming from Japan and not being covered here makes it clear the realities of this latest reactor disaster are beyond catastrophic. Seven reactors were put at direct risk, with four forced into emergency shut-downs while suffering numerous fires and emitting unknown quantities of radiation. Most importantly, the quake exceeded the design capabilities of all Japan’s 55 reactors, and worse seismic shocks are expected.

To counter these inconvenient realities, expect to soon see more of Patrick Moore, the alleged ex-Greenpeace founder.

Moore has called the disaster at Three Mile Island a “success story.” Moore claims to be a scientist. He’s obviously not an accountant.

His face stays straight while calling the transformation of a $900 million asset into a $2 billion liability a “success story.” It testifies to a mentality that never saw a polluter’s check that couldn’t be cashed.

On January 28, 1986, I debated a spokeswoman from Cleveland Electric Illuminating who termed the earthquake fault near the Perry Nuclear Plant a “geologic anomaly.”

As we spoke, the Challenger space shuttle blew up because NASA “scientists” said warnings from their own staff about O-rings in cold weather were not “compelling.” The shuttle was shot off to coincide with a planned presidential performance by Ronald Reagan. Seven astronauts died while the whole world watched in horror.

Three days later, a non-anomalous earthquake cracked pipes and pumps at Perry, knocking out roads and bridges. Apparently, neither the O-rings nor the fault line had read the industry’s spin.

Today the nuke flacks say Kashiwazaki was a “success story” because four reactors SCRAMmed into emergency shutdown and three more were damaged, but no apocalypse resulted (yet).

Since this is only the world’s largest nuke complex, with only seven reactors on site, and only several hundred barrels of nuke waste tipped over, and far fewer had their lids fly off, and the gas emissions the utility lied about were only tritium, which is less deadly than plutonium, the fact that all of Japan was not engulfed in a catastrophic radiation release (yet) will be used to sell more reactors.

Expect phrases like these:

“The reactors withstood the worst nature could throw at them.”

“The SCRAMs went off perfectly.”

“The shut-downs will be temporary.”

“American reactors are far stronger than Japanese ones.”

“This was a once-in-a-century fluke, and no one was hurt.”

“Even so, we must have nuke power to fight global warming.”

“The media has distorted the utility’s good-faith attempts to inform the public.”

“Those rad-waste barrels were tipped over by eco-terrorists.”

“Tritium is good for you.”

“Nuke power is a ‘zero emissions’ technology, therefore the reported leaks could not have occurred.”

“Those anti-nuke so-called scientists have been discredited.”

But most importantly, expect a tightly enforced media blackout.

It starts when all who question the industry are automatically “discredited.”

Dr. John Gofman, universally acknowledged as one of the world’s leading nuclear and medical researchers, was once in charge of health research for the old Atomic Energy Commission. When asked to determine how many people would be killed by radioactive emissions from “normal” reactor operations, he found it would be about 32,000 Americans per year.

The AEC demanded he revise his findings. Gofman refused. So he was forced out of the AEC and “discredited” despite credentials that continue to dwarf those who replaced him.

The list of physicists, engineers, medical researchers and others similarly purged for fact-based reporting is too tragic to reconstruct here.

But it even includes a park ranger at the Pt. Reyes National Seashore who noticed in the spring of 1986 that the number of live bird births had plummeted compared with the previous ten springs. The only logical link was to radioactive fallout from Chernobyl, brought down by a California rainstorm ten days after the explosion.

The ranger soon found himself out of a job.

On the other hand, the industry still falsely asserts that no one died at Three Mile Island. It even produced a “doctor” who traveled through Europe asserting that the enormous radiation releases spewed by the explosion at Chernobyl would ultimately save lives.

Predictably, the Kashiwazaki catastrophe has disappeared from the American media. But in Japan, the news has transcended the truly horrifying.

According to Leo Lewis in The Times, talk is rampant of a “Genpatsu-shinsai,” defined by Japan’s leading seismologist, Katsuhiko Shibashi, as “the combination of an earthquake and nuclear meltdown capable of destroying millions of lives and bringing a nation to its knees.” Shibashi warns that the recent 6.8 magnitude shock exceeded the design capabilities of the Kashiwazaki nuke by a factor of three. A Kobe University research team is reported as saying that if the quake had been 10km further to the southwest, a “terrible, terrible disaster” would have resulted.

Prof. Mitsuhei Murata of Tokai Gakuen University is quoted as warning that a quake at the Hamaoka nuke could bring “24 million victims and the end for Japan.” Japan’s earthquake experts assume the probability of an 8.0 quake within the next 30 years to be 87 percent.

As in the US, Tokyo Electric has long denied that its seven Kashiwazaki reactors were sited atop a fault line, only to have it turn out to be true. As at Three Mile Island, vital data has already disappeared from the Kashiwazaki disaster, and the exact quantities of radiation released are unknown. Radiation at both sites escaped well after the reactors were shut down.

As in the United States, Japanese earthquake experts have warned since the 1960s about the dangers of reactor construction, only to be ignored and “discredited.”

Undoubtedly the Japanese PR nuke spinsters will continue to attack and ignore them.

Here, 2400 central Pennsylvania families will still be denied a federal trial on the death, disease and mayhem spewed upon them by Three Mile Island nearly thirty years ago. And the seven dead Challenger astronauts are not available for comment on the “perfectly safe” O-rings that killed them just prior to the “non-credible” earthquake that struck the Perry nuke.

Any possible problems with a new generation of reactors are equally non-credible. Just ask a flack.

Harvey Wasserman’s SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030, is at www.solartopia.org. He is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and writes regularly for www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared. These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

Article printed from CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/07/23/2701/

Conyers says will begin impeachment proceedings if 3 more Reps join

2007-07-22T13:15:00.000-07:00

BREAKING: Conyers says will begin impeachment proceedings if 3 more Reps join
impeachforpeace.org/impeach_bush_blog/?p=2732

July 21, 2007
Conyers: 3 More Congress Members and I'll Impeach

From After Downing Street
By David Swanson

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers has said that if three more Congress Members get behind impeachment he will start the impeachment proceedings.

I was a guest today on Bree Walker's radio show. She's the progressive radio host from San Diego who purchased Cindy Sheehan's land from her in Crawford, Texas.

Bree attended an event on Friday in San Diego at which Congressman Conyers spoke about impeachment. Her report was extremely interesting. I had already heard reports that Conyers had said: "What are we waiting for? Let's take these two guys out!" But, of course, what we're waiting for is John Conyers. Is he ready to act? It was hard to tell from that comment. In January, Conyers spoke at a huge rally on the National Mall and declared "We can fire them!" but later explained that what he meant was that we could wait for two years and Bush and Cheney's terms would end. Was this week's remark just more empty rhetoric?

It appears to be more than that. Bree Walker told me, on the air, that Conyers said that all he needs is three more Congress Members backing impeachment, and he'll move on it, even without Pelosi. I asked whether that meant specifically moving from 14 cosponsors of H Res 333 to 17, or adding 3 to the larger number of Congress Members who have spoken favorably of impeachment but not all signed onto bills. Bree said she didn't know and that Conyers had declined to take any questions.

Either way, this target of three more members seems perfectly doable. It's safe to assume, I think, that we're talking about impeaching Cheney first. But, even if Conyers is talking about Bush, the target is perfectly achievable.

First, there are Congress Members like Jesse Jackson Jr. who have spoken out for impeachment but not signed onto H Res 333. They should be urged to act now! Second, there are dozens of members who signed onto H Res 635 a year and a half ago, Conyers' bill for an investigation into grounds for impeachment, who have not signed onto H Res 333 yet. Third, one of the excuses citizens often hear from lots of Congress Members for not signing onto articles of impeachment is that not enough of their colleagues have signed on and therefore "we don't have the votes." Well that just changed. Now three more votes is all that's needed to get this machine rolling. Fourth, many of the 14 Congress Members backing H Res 333 have used similar excuses to justify refraining from lobbying their colleagues to join them. That can now end. Our 14 leaders can do more than just put down their names.

Now, if Conyers begins impeachment proceedings in the House Judiciary Committee, we should all be clear on what that will mean. If it is serious, it will not mean sending any subpoenas or contempt citations to the emperors' court. Bush and Cheney have already repeatedly refused to comply with subpoenas.

President Richard Nixon did the same, of course, and his refusal to comply with subpoenas constituted the offense cited in one of the three Articles of Impeachment approved by the House Judiciary Committee on July 27, 1974 as warranting "impeachment and trial, and removal from office." But Bush and Cheney have gone further, ordering former staffers not to comply with subpoenas, and announcing that the Justice Department will not enforce any contempt of Congress proceedings.

What the impeachment of Cheney or Bush will be is very, very fast. It will not disrupt or distract from the important business of passing nonbinding resolutions and holding all-night gripe sessions over bills destined to be vetoed. Impeachment in the case of Dick Cheney need not take the three months it did for Nixon or the two months it did for President Bill Clinton. In fact, it could take a day. Here's why:

Bush and Cheney's lies about Iraqi ties to al Qaeda are on videotape and in writing, and Bush and Cheney continue to make them to this day. There was no al Qaeda in Iraq until the invasion.

Their claims about Iraqi weapons have been shown in every detail to have been, not mistakes, but lies.

Their threats to Iran are on videotape.

Bush being warned about Katrina and claiming he was not are on videotape.

Bush lying about illegal spying and later confessing to it are on videotape. A federal court has ruled that spying to be a felony.

The Supreme Court has ruled Bush and Cheney's system of detentions unconstitutional.

Torture, openly advocated for by Bush and Cheney and their staffs, is documented by victims, witnesses, and public photographs. Torture was always illegal and has been repeatedly recriminalized under Bush and Cheney. Bush has reversed laws with signing statements.

Those statements are posted on the White House website, and a GAO report found that with 30 percent of Bush's signing statements in which he announces his right to break laws, he has in fact proceeded to break those laws.

For these and many other offenses, no investigation is needed because no better evidence is even conceivable. This impeachment will be swift. And it will require only a simple majority. We already know that the Democrats can vote as a block if they want to, and that a few brave Republicans might join them.

Whether the Senate will then convict Cheney will depend on how much pressure citizens apply and how much information the House manages to force onto television sets. The latter could be surprisingly large and substantive, since the conflict of an impeachment is certain to generate incredible ratings.

But even an acquittal would identify the Senators to be removed from office by voters in 2008. And Cheney (or Bush) would still have been 100% impeached. Al Gore didn't run for president pretending he'd never met Bill Clinton and pick Senator Joe Lieberman as a running mate because the Senate convicted Clinton (it acquitted).

The timing of Conyers' remark may be related to the steps the White House has recently taken to assert "unitary executive" dictatorial power. Bush has commuted the sentence of a subordinate who obstructed an investigation into matters involving Bush and Cheney. And, as mentioned above, neither subpoenas nor contempt citations will go anywhere. Impeachment is no longer merely the appropriate step that it has been for the past six years. It is now the only tool left to the Congress for use in asserting its very existence as a functioning body of government.

But the timing is also quite helpful to the grassroots movement for impeachment, and rather symbolic. Five years ago this Monday, the meeting was held at #10 Downing Street that produced the Downing Street Minutes. Over two years ago, then Ranking Member Conyers held a hearing in the basement of the Capitol, the only space the Republican leadership would allow him. At that hearing, several Democratic Congress Members for the first time began talking about impeachment. The witnesses at the hearing were Ambassador Joseph Wilson, attorney John Bonifaz, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, and a then unknown gold star mother named Cindy Sheehan. They discussed the evidence of the Downing Street documents, which added significantly to the growing body of evidence that Bush and Cheney misled the Congress about the case for war.

This Monday, Sheehan and McGovern and a great many leaders of the movements for peace and impeachment will lead a march at 10 a.m. at Arlington National Cemetery. We will march to Congressman Conyers' office and ask to talk with him about impeachment. We will refuse to leave without either a commitment to begin at once the impeachment of Cheney or Bush or both, or our arms in handcuffs. The same day, groups in several states around the country will be sitting in and risking arrest for impeachment in the district offices of their congress members.

Not everyone will be able to take part. But everyone can take two minutes on Monday and do two things: phone Chairman Conyers at 202-225-5126 and ask him to start the impeachment of Dick Cheney; and phone your own Congress Member at 202-224-3121 and ask them to immediately call Conyers' office to express their support for impeachment. Your Congress Member might just be one of the three needed, not just to keep us out of jail but to keep this nation from devolving into dictatorship.

Let us know of impeachment news and help us spread the word:
impeachforpeace.org/comments.htm

Amnesty International Report 2007

2007-06-01T08:07:00.000-07:00

This report documents human rights issues of concern to Amnesty International during 2006.
>> thereport.amnesty.org

ALERT: re "at fornits" stuff

2007-04-08T00:28:00.000-07:00

ALERT: re "at fornits" stuff - most of that "at fornits" stuff is now history my friends. sorry

This now includes my email addresses - loads of lost emails, sorry!

the article server is extinct - none of those links will work!
(server swaps & glitches... someone drops off, sorry! its gone.)

>> the end of an era!

who knows? i may put up an archive of the nearly 9,000 articles that /RENEGADE/ used to serve up,
but i am not sure how that could work... maybe try to restore
some of the links and other resources at some point (?) who knows?

a new era! maybe no time for all that now. there have been those things; now:
mabye something else, some different things...

watch my blogs for updates -

Strider's RENEGADE [activism]
and
Strider's REDEMPTION SONG [movies, music &
thoughts]

!!! a special message to bar: are you enjoying the music?

and, as always:

PEACE!

If I had a hammer

2007-04-07T22:55:00.000-07:00

If I had a hammer
I'd hammer in the morning
I'd hammer in the evening ... all over this land,
I'd hammer out danger
I'd hammer out a warning
I'd hammer out love between all of my brothers and my sisters
All over this land.

If I had a bell
I'd ring it in the morning
I'd ring it in the evening ... all over this land,
I'd ring out danger
I'd ring out a warning
I'd ring out love between all of my brothers and my sisters
All over this land.

If I had a song
I'd sing it in the morning
I'd sing it in the evening ... all over this world,
I'd sing out danger
I'd sing out a warning
I'd sing out love between all of my brothers and my sisters
All over this land.

If I've got a hammer
And I've got a bell
And I've got a song to sing ... all over this land,
It's a hammer of justice
It's a bell of freedom
It's a song about love between all of my brothers and my sisters
All over this land.

War With Iran?

2007-02-23T22:36:00.000-08:00

"War With Iran? Now we'll have to shop even harder!"
freewayblogger.blogspot.com

The Women's Museum in Denmark Grants Asylum to Pregnant Teenager

2007-02-15T22:34:00.000-08:00

From: Jens Galschiøt
Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2007 19:59:48 +0100
Subject: The Women's Museum in Denmark Grants Asylum to Pregnant Teenager

Press release, 14 February 2007

This Press release as Word file:
http://www.aidoh.dk/new-struct/Happenings-and-Projects/2007/Aarhus/GB-Aarhus.doc

**The Women's Museum in Denmark Grants Asylum to Pregnant Teenager**

The Women's Museum in Denmark harbours Danish sculptor Jens Galschiot‚s artwork ŒIn the Name of God‚. The 7 metre high sculpture depicts a crucified pregnant teenager. The crucifix was put up on Wednesday 14 February at the Women‚s Museum, neighbouring the Cathedral of Aarhus.

At the inauguration there were speeches by Mr Bjarne Oerum, chairman of the parish council, curator of the museum Ms Merete Ipsen and the sculptor Jens Galschiot. Mr Oerum stressed the role of art for the renewal of the churches. Ms Ipsen emphasized the role of Mathilde Fibiger, born 1830, who had given name to the square of the exhibition. She was a pioneer for the Danish women‚s emancipation. Ms Ipsen stressed the affinity between the pioneers and the cause of the sculpture.

*From cathedral to cathedral*

The controversial sculpture has been exhibited for a couple of months in front of the Cathedral of Copenhagen, where it was put up in co-operation with the Dean and Parish Council. The exhibition in Aarhus has also a connection to the Cathedral, although the sculpture is displayed under the auspices of the Women‚s Museum.

Jens Galschiot‚s new art manifestation In the Name of God is launched to highlight Christian fundamentalists‚ attempt to the world‚s policy on contraception, alleging that the use of condoms is a kind of abortion and therefore contrary to God‚s will. About this policy the artist declares: The consequences for the proliferation of AIDS are disastrous and the advances of the women‚s movement are being set back to the Victorian era.‰

*From woman to woman

The artist has recently been to Nairobi where he displayed his crucifixion sculpture. The reactions of the 66,000 participants of the World Social Forum were generally benevolent. Especially the women in the demonstrations in the streets of Nairobi and at the venue of the WSF adopted the sculpture and saw it as a symbol of the oppression women that usually follows in the wake of the fundamentalists‚ campaign, Jens Galschiot declares and continues: So I‚m delighted that exactly the Women‚s Museum is the driving force for launching the sculpture here in Aarhus.

**For more info and photos of the event, see
www.aidoh.dk/Aarhus

**The artist: Jens Galschiot
Banevaenget 22 - DK-5270 Odense N
Tel.: +45 6618 4058 ˆ Fax: +45 6618 4158
E-mail: aidoh@aidoh.dk - Internet: www.aidoh.dk

**The Women's Museum in Denmark
Curator Ms Merete Ipsen
Domkirkepladsen 5 DK-8000 Aarhus C - Tel.: +45 86 1864 84
E-mail: mi@womensmuseum.dk
Internet: www.womensmuseum.dk

**Chairman of the parish council ˆ Mr Bjarne Oerum
Skt. Olufs Gade 1, 1. ˆ DK-8000 Aarhus C - Tel.: +45 8612 5497

***************************************

Short presentation: The artist was born in Denmark, 1954. He stakes his art to defend the ethical values of our society, regardless of political, religious or economical interests. His sculptures suddenly appear in public areas and start the performance. Best known are My Inner Beast (European cities in 1993) and the Pillar of Shame (Hong Kong, Mexico and Brazil).

The projects are financed through the sale of Galschiot's bronze sculptures to art collectors all over the world. He has a huge industrial area in Odense, Denmark with a bronze foundry, gallery and workshop. Photos of all Jens Galschiot's sculptures: http://sculptures.aidoh.dk

Hegemony

2007-02-05T21:53:00.000-08:00

why would i be interested in a latin american revolutionary? [question arose in relation to the movie "Motocycle Diaries" / but then, why would i be interested in watching a foreign language movie to begin with? / and ~then: why even question, why the effort? - aren't we comfortable?]

WELL: we are not alone in this world. what do "they" think? "we all" had better start thinking about it. that would be in "our" best interests, no? think about the future?

bottom line is that we live in a rascist, imperialistic and hegemonic republic; and things don't look so great as far as the present trajectory of "our" world goes - considering envirionment, society... sustainability. sorry, i am not very optimistic until i see a whole bunch of minds turn and some major changes taking place.

Hegemony From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hegemony (pronounced he'gem.?.ni or h?'d??.m?.ni) (Greek: hgemon?a he¯gemonía) is the dominance of one group over other groups, with or without the threat of force, to the extent that, for instance, the dominant party can dictate the terms of trade to its advantage; more broadly, cultural perspectives become skewed to favor the dominant group. The cultural control that hegemony asserts affects commonplace patterns of thought: hegemony controls the way new ideas are rejected or become naturalized in a process that subtly alters notions of common sense in a given society.

Hegemony results in the empowerment of certain cultural beliefs, values, and practices to the submersion and partial exclusion of others. Hegemony influences the perspective of mainstream history, as history is written by the victors for a congruent readership.

in the meantime: i hope we don't all get blown up. this world is a mess!

2007-01-28T04:47:00.000-08:00

>Date: Sun, 28 Jan
>Subject: RE: talking
>in the meantime: i hope we don't all get blown up. this world is a mess!

Happy Birthday Molly Rose!

2006-12-23T22:03:00.000-08:00

we miss you Sweeheart!

i see-feel you out there and inside me,
and know you are always with us

i will always think of Molly as a great revolutionary

- i had that vision of her, and now as i reflect upon her death and her short life i see a bright ray of light, and it says: "this is life and death, my kin. please think of all those that are suffering and dying needlessly these days under the direction of warmongers"

previous:
30 May 2006: Molly - a great revolutionary
i will always think of Molly as a great revolutionary - i had that vision of her, and now as i reflect upon her death and her short life i see a bright ray of light, and it says: "this is life and death, my kin. please think of all ...
-
30 Dec 2005: molly dreaming (be sure to save a tree)

LOVE, Grandpa

How Rent Makes Poverty

2006-12-05T17:58:00.000-08:00

Thanks to The Konformist

How Rent Makes Poverty
Progress.org

This story was first published on November 17, 2006.
by Julian Edney

A recent Los Angeles Times article shows an increase in child poverty to be connected with housing costs which are spiraling out of reach. Real wages are down again, while living costs are spiking: a second report in the same newspaper shows the asking rent for Southern California residential units now averaging $1,413 per month, far above a working class family's means. To keep a roof over their heads, many are moving to unsafe neighborhoods like Central and South Los Angeles, working multiple jobs to pay rent, and living in seriously overcrowded units, causing the children to suffer. South Los Angeles statistics resemble those of some third world countries: poverty rates are high (over 30% in some zip codes), the children's schools are abysmal, child disease rates are high, birth weights are small, and violent crime rates are high. Fear, poor nutrition and bad education all ripple forward into the children's adulthood, perpetuating the poverty. That type of article is not uncommon for the Times but it omits the point that nothing will be done. First, these statistics are part of a national problem and you can always point to more expensive rents in New York, and worse health sinks in Boston and New York. Second, the liberal line is that nobody really understands the causes of poverty, which are like the branches of a tree, multiple and entangled. National experiments like the War on Poverty failed, so nothing official is planned, and liberals have become quiet.

So we have fallen back on the market solution. This is the conservatives' way. Conservatives say they understand: they blame poverty on sloth, bad behavior, and having too many children. They don't approve of government handouts because such a policy would be a reward for indolence. Cheer up, say conservatives. While there is inconvenience to some, the system grows wealth; it continues to serve the greatest good for the greatest number. Because the economy is so huge and diffuse, you cannot pin the actions of one person onto the pain of another. In fact, the dynamics are mystical (the invisible hand). Using a dollar quantity for the poverty line reframes suffering and removes the moral sting. According to conservatives, the solution is to leave things alone˜laissez-faire.

My thesis is that since the damaging consequences of poverty are profound and lasting, they can never be justified by saying that the economy is making some people wealthy. If it can be shown that the added wealth of some directly causes the suffering of others, then the problem becomes a moral one again. Further, if there were a single cause which we could adjust, then we could not hide behind the thicket of multiple-causation theories. We would be accountable for our inaction.

The cause is rent.

Economists have thrown an impenetrable veil over the concept of rent (economists' definitions make many things incomprehensible) so I will clarify, briefly. Adam Smith said, rent is the quantity of money left over after a producer's (farmer, factory owner's) cost of production, and the landlord can take it. In other words, if a farmer rents a field and grows and sells his crop, then after subtracting his costs, the money left over can be charged by the landlord. That seems like a lot, but the landlord has the power to stop the whole operation. Amazingly, that definition has stood since Smith's day. It was modified by Ricardo, who added that the quality of the location also affected the rent, and Malthus, who added that rents also respond to supply and demand. Malthus also wrote that rent may be inflated by land monopolies and by price fixing. Of course you can rent a car or a washing machine or an apartment, and in all cases the owner's power is that he can stop your operation unless he gets what he wants. Smith's definition is dispassionate; morally it is a cold vacuity. His definition also meant that the rent is calculated after the production season, and that it will go down if the producer has a bad season. All these variations are politically conservative.

The only strong disagreement came later from Henry George, an American, who in 1897 pointed out certain realities: rent doesn't go down and up: it is correlated with land values, which go up and up. Also, rents are charged in advance, so actually the tenant survives on what is left after the landlord is paid. Next, monopolies (or partial monopolies) are common˜if a landlord owns a small town, all his tenants will have to pay what he wants. Their only alternatives are emigration or death, and that is not supply and demand, it is greed. Also, rents, while big money on a national scale, do not grow the nation's wealth. This is because the money is only moved around, taken from the have-nots and given to the haves (what moderns would call a zero-sum exchange). That is how fortunes are made at the expense of the poor.

Henry George got into things. Because of the simple points that rent has to be paid in advance and that rents always rise while wages do not, he said labor takes home less and less. He makes his general principle that "as land increases in value, poverty deepens." Classically, Adam Smith claimed that all the efforts of people seeking self-interest lift a society up, acting as a giant wedge driven under the society. Henry George said that rents actually tend to force the poor further down; the wedge is driven through the society. Rent is the culprit, he said, it is the thing that prevents a free market society benefiting everyone. It is eviscerating. It accounted for the widening inequality of his day, and he had powerful descriptions of American cities in which widespread destitution could be found in the midst of the greatest abundance. Since the law supports the haves, rent is legal robbery "..not like the robbery of a horse or a sum of money, that ceases with the act. It is a fresh and continuous robbery, that goes on every day and every hour... a toll levied constantly and continuously...it debases, and embrutes, and embitters."

Keep in mind, Henry George said, land is inert. So are landlords: you do not have to exert any effort to sit and collect rents, so no new work is put into the economy. It contributes nothing. The opposite: as rents rise, it spurs a competitive rush to own land in speculation, rather than to be productive.

Only Karl Marx took a rhetorical step further than George, arguing that rent is a kind of exploitation, deliberately raised high by profit-maximizing capitalists to keep labor impoverished and desperate and willing to work at subsistence wages.

Another recent Los Angeles Times article describes the slow panic now spreading through the working poor in old neighborhoods like Echo Park and parts of Hollywood as building after building is remodeled and street after street is gentrified. Rents are bracketed up, tenants are forced out, and they can only find more expensive places to live. Los Angeles rents have jumped 82% in the last 10 years to an average of $1,750.

Nationally, rents are so far above wages that of the 3,141 counties in the United States, in only four of them can a person making minimum wage afford a one-bedroom apartment.

Henry George lived in the Gilded Age, the age of the robber baron when laissez-faire was melded with Social Darwinism. It was also the time of the Populist uprising against landholders' exploitation of sharecroppers. His descriptions of rich and poor juxtaposed fit modern America so well, we wonder why his theory is out of fashion. America has become more unequal than ever. Perhaps George was forgotten because he was not a revolutionary and the publication of his book Progress and Poverty did not start riots. And after the Populist movement faded, the nation didn't do anything, again, defaulting to the market solution.

Today laissez-faire is popular again, with its refusal to recognize any moral wrong. A new wave of Social Darwinism holds that inequality and injustice are in the nature of things. Conservative economists are talking again about the invisible hand. There is the same deafness to social issues. Demands for justice are dismissed as too emotional. Any remedies that involve government planning are denounced as socialist.

Henry George's solution was to tax land values to the point that land ownership ˆ especially land monopolies ˆ would become unattractive.

It is a general point that free markets do grow wealth, but they also grow inequality. New health studies show that unequal communities, states, and nations all have higher rates of certain diseases and shorter life expectancies than do egalitarian communities. If you live in an unequal society, your environment is more violent, and the steepness of the inequality predicts a raft of social ills. (Separately, poverty is correlated with poor health.)

So an obvious policy direction is to rebuild equality. That idea threatens trickle-down ideology, so there will be enormous resistance. But we have new economic evidence that wealth actually grows stronger when there is more equality.

Renters are everywhere. 61% of Los Angeles families are renters. But there is a glacial quietness on the topic of rent. Among people who benefit from this silence are landlords who consider themselves sensitive to social issues. They do not want to talk about rents.

Business is business, but for poor people, rent is always the biggest expenditure. Millions and millions of families are just getting by. There are others who have to choose between shelter and food. For all these people, rent is fear.

Our national child poverty rate has been reported variously at 17%
and at 20.3%, but in Los Angeles County it is 24.6%.

Real, practical changes will not begin until poverty is reframed
back from a dollar quantity to a moral problem for the nation.

Rent should be made an open topic -- and a point of accountability.
-----------------------

Julian Edney holds a B.A. in Psychology from the University of California, Riverside and a M.Phil. and Ph.D. from Yale University, New Haven. He has written noted treatises on the topic of greed.

References:

Rosenblatt, S. (2006) "More youngsters in L.A. County living in poverty." Los Angeles Times, 19 October 2006, B2.

Haddad, A. (2006) "A home market that's tight: rentals." Los Angeles Times, 19 October 2006, C1.

Leovy J. (2005) "A week of painful losses tests police chief's mettle." Los Angeles Times, 12 Feb 2005, p. A 1.

Jenkins, C.D., Tuthill, R.W., Tannenbaum, S.I. and Kirby, C.R. "Zones of excess mortality in Massachusetts." (1977) New England Journal of Medicine, 296, 1354-6.

McCord, C. and Freeman, H.P. (1990) "Excess mortality in Harlem." New England Journal of Medicine,322, 173-177.

Sapolsy, R. "Sick of poverty." Scientific American, 2005, 293, 92-99 (December 2005).

George, H. (1879/1937) Progress and Poverty. NY: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation.

Cleeland, N. (2006). "Low pay, high rent, wit's end." Los Angeles Times , 24 October 2006, A1.

Out of Reach 2004. Washington DC: National Low Income Housing Coalition, 2004.

Murphey, C. "Are the rich cleaning up?" 2000, Fortune, 24 September. p. 252.

Frank, R.H. (1999) Luxury fever. NY: The Free Press.

Vleminckx, K. and Smeeding, T.M. (Eds) Child well-being, child poverty and child policy in modern nations. 2001.

------

received via The Konformist

Kirby The Konspiracy Boy says, "Don't read this magazine!!! It's all a diabolical brainwashing plot!!!"

Mailing list -
groups.yahoo.com/group/konformist

An Inconvenient Truth - Climate Crisis

2006-11-24T16:01:00.000-08:00

the climate crisis is the most serious thing we face, other than the possibility of a nuclear holocaust. drastic climate chage, perhaps much sooner than expected, is coming. it is not just a "possibilty" - climate change is happening now, and will be getting worse. we may still have time to turn it around...

so - what did you do today to reduce your contribution to carbon pollution?

- have you seen the movie "An Inconvenient Truth?" - if so: please be sure to pass the word. it is very good - especially for those who are "confused by the controversy" (which isn't really a controversy, all that doubt was created intentionally).

if you haven't seen it: get it now!

if you rented it, buy a copy and pass it around.

An Inconvenient Truth (2006)
- (@netflix) -
Director-producer Davis Guggenheim (HBO's "Deadwood") captures former Vice President Al Gore in the midst of waging a passionate campaign -- not for the White House, but for the environment. Laying out the facts of global warming without getting political, Gore makes a sobering impression on the audiences who hear his message, urging them to act "boldly, quickly and wisely" … before it's too late to act at all.

See: climatecrisis.net

and PLANT TREES!

Howling Like a Wild Wolf: Overcoming Fear and Undermining the Invader

2006-11-24T15:13:00.000-08:00

justanotherblowback.blogspot.com/2006/11/howling-like-wild-wolf.html

Howling Like a Wild Wolf: Overcoming Fear and Undermining the Invader
by Rod Coronado

It's hard to judge the radical environmental movement by the last 25 years, but if I had to, I'd say that I'm very disappointed. Twenty years ago, when I discovered the Earth First! movement, I thought that the generation of Earth warriors I shared this country with had a fighting chance. People from all walks of life in the center of the First World were coming together and strengthening an already strong love and affinity for the natural world, shaking off their consumerist upbringing and realizing their wild dreams with creative direct action that marked an allegiance with the Earth instead of the society responsible for her destruction. Monkeywrenching was the ultimate demonstration of our love for Mother Earth, and none among us questioned its historical or practical necessity, let alone its legitimacy. We were warriors, and our connection as a tribe meant the shared commitment to abandon the system that constantly betrayed the people and places we loved.

Monkeywrenching was not just another tool in the box, it was what separated EF! from the toothless, First World environmental movement. A fellow Arizonan, Dave Foreman, was our firebrand spokesperson, bringing listeners to tears with his stories of seeing the dying green fire in a wolf's eyes, telling us how the chainsaws also tore his flesh when they tore through an ancient redwood, before hoisting the sacramental monkeywrench to the sky and howling like a wild wolf himself. What else were we supposed to do once that fire was lit inside our hearts, but defend the wildness we loved by any and all means?

Back in the early days of EF!, Dave and the gang erected a monument in New Mexico to Victorio, a Mimbres Apache who drove out or killed invading miners in the late 1800s. After years of watching his people die on the dreaded reservations, Victorio had enough of being pushed around by the system. He knew there was no other way to live than with the Earth, not against her like the Invaders were forcing his people to do. So rather than die a slow death on the malaria - infested reservation, Victorio and a small band broke free to live the only way they knew how.

By identifying with the Apache wars of the American Southwest, EF! held up as an example a people whose worldview centered, like most indigenous peoples, on living in harmony with their environment and who, when attacked, fought ferociously to defend their way of life. That is what the Earth needed from the US environmental movement, then and now. That's what I thought was beginning 20 years ago when I first heard Dave Foreman speak, and I knew there was no greater responsibility than the time-honored tradition of fighting against one's Invaders and oppressors.

Then in 1990, in Arizona, FBI agents kicked in Dave Foreman's door, while simultaneously ambushing a band of monkeywrenchers in action toppling powerlines. It was the first time that EF! experienced the legal consequences of its low-intensity campaign of what Foreman called "ecotage" - acts of economic sabotage against the forces destroying the Earth. Foreman - the editor/publisher of Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching - received a suspended sentence and probation. The FBI's case against Foreman and EF! effectively ended Foreman's advocacy of ecotage. Gone were the days of Foreman pedaling Ecodefense after his lectures and signing copies for wild, awakened "ecoteur" recruits (he refused to sign my copy in 2001). Most importantly to our growing struggle, the FBI had silenced our most outspoken representative while also demonstrating that "monkeywrencher" was just another name for "terrorist." But the ecological insurrection did not end as the Invader had hoped - like the living organism it represents, seeds took to the Earth and grew into something very familiar.

Like Victorio and his struggle against the Western worldview invasion, the actions of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and Animal Liberation Front (ALF) are enough of a threat to have been deemed by the FBI as the most active domestic terrorism groups in the US. Burning SUVs would be the same as attacking the horse - drawn wagons and supply lines of the pioneer Invader; torching luxury trophy homes, the same as burning down their forts. Today, the insurrection comes from within the fort's walls, and those still fighting have been forced to realize that when they abandon the privileges of the Invader, they join the ranks of all who have challenged him before. Bloodthirsty savage, ecoterrorist - it's all the same.

The Invader continues to instill fear with outrageous prison sentences. The American Indian Movement suffered Leonard Peltier as an example, just as we have with Jeffrey "Free" Luers. What both have shown is that what fear does not kill, it makes stronger-and those conscious enough to defend the Earth do so knowing that there is no turning back on this ancestral path to freedom, no matter how dear the personal price.

That's what disappoints me today - not the constant assault or the scale of destruction against our life support system, but the lack of action to stop it. When I used to go to Game and Fish Department public hearings 20 years ago, EF!ers packed the house. If the meetings accomplished nothing else, they let us tell the bastards killing the last of the wild nations that they'd have to go through us first. It might have meant little to them, but to EF! it was another way to remind them, and ourselves, that our love and allegiance was to our Mother. Nowadays, I'm grateful to have more than myself representing our animal relations at the system's meetings. Wherever the desperately needed Earth warriors from this suicidal society have gone, they have thrown away a sacred responsibility in the hour of our planet's greatest need, and I think I know why.

The thing that prevents the multitudes of conscious and aware individuals in our culture from taking direct action to stop, or at the very least interfere with, what they know to be wrong, is fear. Fear makes us withdraw, and instead of fulfilling our social, ecological and political responsibilities, we feel depressed or guilty for remaining a part of the problem. Without an ability to deal with fear, one may feel great empathy, but not enough to risk one's own place of comfort and privilege. Some reinforce their fear by discrediting those who do try to make a difference. Fear is common in the broad, political left and its paralyzing effect on direct action in the First World is what separates our resistance to ecological destruction from that of generations past, and from those in what the Invader calls the "Third World."

We here in the First World feel fear when we think of Free's 22-year prison sentence or of a violent death. Yet for so many across the world, oppression, tragedy and violence have become all they know. How do we defeat the fear and intimidation that robs us of our wild nature, spirit and willingness to fight back? We confront it. We know how bad things are, and I'm not going to waste time rattling off the numbers and statistics. We know the unthinkable evil and cruelty that is being committed in places like Huntingdon Life Sciences and Guantanamo Bay in our own name and by our own citizens, yet we do so little to stop it-little that is truly effective.

Instead of accepting responsibility for our rogue government, the American left-including most environmentalists - has become less politically active, barely challenging the corruption that we know exists. We turn on our computers and become more aware of the suffering, oppression, war and destruction committed by US corporate armies. But rather than take to the streets, liberals worship messengers like Amy Goodman and Michael Moore.

When the Internet first became a primary form of communication for our resistance, many spoke of the information that would be shared - believing, as the American left still does, that if people are made aware of injustice, somehow it will stop. But the US is still torturing prisoners; the last wild buffalo are still being slaughtered; hundreds of thousands of young harp seals are still dying every Spring; the last wild wolves and indigenous people are under continued assault. Instead of the citizen action that one would expect from non-sympathizers and non-collaborators, we hide in our remaining privilege - hiking, river rafting, drinking, cashing our career environmentalist checks, paying the bills, growing ever more cynical, angry or depressed, but most of all ignoring the deep feeling in our hearts that still allows us to hear the Earth's cries.

Awareness without action is worthless. Most people who rise up to prevent the destruction of their lives and homes, like Victorio, didn't learn such responsibilities late in life, but were taught by families living in harmony with the life around them - something there's ever less of in our consumer-based society. That is what we must return to if any movement hoping to preserve life on this planet is to survive.

In the EF! campaign to defend Mt. Graham here in southern Arizona, an Apache elder told me that we must not forget why Mt. Graham was sacred, continue to practice that belief with prayer and teach our children to honor the mountain in the way our ancestors had. If we did that, he said, protecting Mt. Graham and all of Mother Earth would come naturally. Defending your home should be second nature, and helping others who are doing the same is still what the Earth and our movement needs most. What's needed is not just more monkeywrenching, but more of the human-to-human and animal-to-human living that keeps the Earth's spirit, and our own, alive.

In my own awakening from the fear that immobilized me while living underground as an FBI fugitive, the Earth Mother spoke to me, saying, "We are here, we have been here and always will be here, but there is nothing we can do to help you until you believe in us more than what you fear." Once freed from fear - and despite five federal grand juries investigating our ALF cell at the time - we were able to rise from hiding, organize and destroy the US government's Predator Research Facility in Utah.

We must always remember where our power comes from, and believe in it more than in the fear our enemies use. When we believe in the power of the Earth more than in our fear of prisons or death, we attain the level of warriorhood we need to survive the future. When we follow our hearts and instincts, and act to prevent the Earth's destruction and protect the innocent, we tell the Invader that the resistance is alive and strong. We say that the sisterhood and brotherhood with all life that has already survived so many generations of war will not be broken on our watch.

The price of such responsibility may result in us being hunted down like Victorio, the bison of Montana or the wolves of New Mexico and Arizona today. But if we allow fear to prevent us from doing what we know is fair and just, we disrespect our still-living and fighting wild sisters and brothers and those who are in prison, paying a higher price for freedom than most of us ever have. That is what hurts the most. Despite the number of people among us who are fully aware and able to describe the ecological turning point we have either already passed or are fast approaching - global warming, habitat destruction, species extinction, human wars and corporate pollution - so few are standing up to fight it.

Still, I'm a fool, because my strong belief in the power of the Earth gives me hope. And if grown-ups fail to answer the call now, we'd better start raising more of our own children and building the kind of community support structures that a real resistance needs to survive. And I'm not just talking about knowing how to build a fire; we must support, house, teach and feed the refugees that our enemies are always creating. The Earth will support us, that is not a question. But the society dependent on her exploitation will one day collapse, and when it does, the only ones left standing will be those who never were dependent on it in the first place. All others will once again be subject to the Invader for their daily rations.

I'm still under federal indictment for stopping a mountain lion hunt here in Arizona, and I'm facing another indictment for giving a lecture about monkeywrenching. But on November 1, I'll still be helping escort sandhill cranes safely past the hunters' guns, not far from where Victorio rode himself. And though we may only save a few birds, our hearts will remain free, and those killing our winged relations will know it. So to those still ready to ride and break free from the reservations of our minds and hearts, to build the kind of sustainable resistance our Earth needs, the tribe still awaits you. The family of all life on Earth awaits you, around the sacred fire with hero warriors of generations before. That's where you can still find me, hoisting a monkeywrench to the sky and howling like a wild wolf.

Rod Coronado is an organizer with Chuk'shon EF!, and he is looking for people to join him in the field this Fall and Winter in defense of the wild animal nations.

SOURCE: Earth First! Journal

The Truth Shall Free Us - The Pentagon Papers

2006-11-13T21:46:00.000-08:00

The Truth Shall Free Us - The Pentagon Papers

movies to see / history to study / things to think about

The Pentagon Papers

The Pentagon Papers (2003) -
This compelling political drama is based on the true story of high-ranking Pentagon official Daniel Ellsberg, who, during the Nixon era, strove to preserve American democracy by leaking top-secret Defense Department documents to the The New York Times and The Washington Post. The documents in question would eventually become famous as The Pentagon Papers. Stars Alan Arkin, Claire Forlani, James Spader and Paul Giamatti.

(quotes & links ~ netflix / no endorsement, just convenience ~ unless otherwise stated)

see: > > The Pentagon Papers @ Wikipedia > >

I look forward to the release of the IRAQ PAPERS!

other recent viewing, also reccommended:

Thirteen Days (2000) -
When a nuclear missile presence rapidly escalates in Cuba, President Kennedy (Bruce Greenwood) attempts to curb the threat with help from his aides (including Kevin Costner) and generals. After assessing the situation, they quickly realize the Soviets could launch offensive warheads at any moment. Based on historical events, Thirteen Days is a gripping reenactment of a time when the world's fate hung by a thread.

JFK (1991) -
Oliver Stone's fascinating movie is part deconstruction, part re-creation and part history lesson all wrapped up in one. One of America's most enigmatic and mythical presidents, John F. Kennedy, is assassinated in Dallas, and a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, takes the fall. But was he acting alone when he shot JFK from the Texas Book Depository? This version includes an extra 17 minutes added...

The Postman (1997) -
In the year 2013, amidst the desolation of a decimated, post-apocalypse United States, rogue groups of armed men prey on individuals. The largest of these -- the Holnists, led by General Bethlehem (Will Patton) -- seeks to rule the country. They capture a drifter (Kevin Costner), who escapes at first chance and stumbles on an abandoned mail Jeep. He begins delivering its letters, eventually restoring hope and inspiring revolution.

Last of the Dogmen, 1995 <<< long unknown surviving remnants of Native America discovered

Water, 2005 <<< [child] widows in India

The Last of His Tribe, 1992 <<< the story of Ishi, last of his tribe... ever really consider the true history of California? ...pretty recent...

Good Night, and Good Luck, 2005 <<< ah. the media...

George Clooney's Oscar-nominated docudrama pits TV newsman Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) against Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his single-minded crusade to quell the red threat at home. Despite corporate pressure to back off, Murrow and his CBS staff are determined to examine the lies and fear tactics perpetrated by McCarthy during his Communist witch-hunts. The impressive cast includes Robert Downey Jr., Patricia Clarkson and Jeff Daniels.

Munich, 2005 <<< regarding assassination...

see: > > The Pentagon Papers @ Wikipedia > >

And please check out wikipedia if you haven't yet!

37th National Day of Mourning

2006-11-06T23:18:00.000-08:00

From: "kabespir"
Subject: 37th National Day of Mourning
Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2006 15:11:48 -0500

FYI, Please circulate. Sorry if a Re-post.
Kabespir
From ARISE:

PLYMOUTH, MA] NOVEMBER 23
ANNOUNCEMENT: 37th NATIONAL DAY OF MOURNING
Since 1970, Native Americans have gathered at noon on Cole's Hill in Plymouth to commemorate a National Day of Mourning on the U.S. thanksgiving holiday. Many Native Americans do not celebrate the arrival of the Pilgrims and other European settlers. Thanksgiving day is a reminder of the genocide of millions of Native people, the theft of Native lands, and the relentless assault on Native culture. Participants in National Day of Mourning honor Native ancestors and the struggles of Native peoples to survive today. It is a day of remembrance and spiritual connection as well as a protest of the racism and oppression which Native Americans continue to experience.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
37th NATIONAL DAY OF MOURNING
Thursday, November 23, 2006
12 Noon at Cole‚s Hill (the hill above Plymouth Rock) Plymouth, MA
Pot-luck Social to Follow
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Join us as we dedicate the 37th National Day of Mourning to our brother, Native political prisoner Leonard Peltier. Add your voice to the millions world-wide who demand his freedom. Help us in our struggle to create a true awareness of Native peoples and demonstrate the unity of Indigenous peoples internationally. Help shatter the untrue glass image of the Pilgrims and the unjust system based on racism, sexism, homophobia and war.
For More Information, contact: United American Indians of New
England/LPSG
(617) 232-5135
info@uaine.org
http://www.uaine.org
To download the pdf for the Day of Mourning leaflet, open
http://www.iacenter.org/polprisoners/dom_2006.htm

No Justice No Peace
"May there be peace when we meet." --Audrey Shenandoah, ONONDAGA

good night, and good luck

2006-10-31T20:47:00.000-08:00

bravo! movie highly reccommended. thanks, Geo.

Good Night, and Good Luck (2005)
@ netflix:
George Clooney's Oscar-nominated docudrama pits TV newsman Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) against Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his single-minded crusade to quell the red threat at home. Despite corporate pressure to back off, Murrow and his CBS staff are determined to examine the lies and fear tactics perpetrated by McCarthy during his Communist witch-hunts. The impressive cast includes Robert Downey Jr., Patricia Clarkson and Jeff Daniels.

Any of you kids know what McCarthyism is ???
@Wikipedia:
McCarthyism is the term describing a period of intense anti-Communist suspicion in the United States that lasted roughly from the late 1940s to the late 1950s. The term derives from U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican of Wisconsin. The period of McCarthyism is also referred to as the Second Red Scare, and coincided with increased fears of Communist influence on American institutions, espionage by Soviet agents, heightened tension from the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, the success of the Chinese Communist revolution (1949) and the Korean War (1950-1953).

What do you think the role of "the media" should be?

How about "Cointelpro"? did you ever hear of that?
@Wikipedia:
COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) is a program of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political organizations within the United States. Although covert operations have been employed throughout FBI history, the formal COINTELPRO operations of 1956-1971 were broadly targeted against organizations that were (at the time) considered to have politically radical elements, ranging from those whose stated goal was the violent overthrow of the U.S. government (such as the Weathermen) to non-violent civil rights groups such as Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference to violent racist and segregationist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. The founding document of COINTELPRO directed FBI agents to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" the activities of these movements and their leaders.

How about Fascism? do you know what it is?
@Wikipedia:
Fascism is a radical political ideology that combines elements of corporatism, authoritarianism, nationalism, militarism, anti-anarchism, anti-communism and anti-liberalism.

so: Since when is it unpatriotic to dissent?

and: Why and how would calling for peace make you a traitor?

kinda makes you think about whats going on in the good ol' USofA these days, don't it?

reporter slain in Oaxaca

2006-10-30T18:15:00.000-08:00

IN BRAD'S MEMORY
The New York City Independent Media Center responds to the death of Brad WILL
29 Oct 2006 20:50 GMT

Brad Will was killed on October 27, 2006, in Oaxaca, Mexico, while working as a journalist for the global Indymedia network. He was shot in the torso while documenting an armed, paramilitary assault on the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca, a fusion of striking local teachers and other community organizations demanding democracy in Mexico.

The members of the New York City Independent Media Center mourn the loss of this inspiring colleague and friend. We want to thank everyone who has sent condolences to our office and posted remembrances to www.nyc.indymedia.org. We share our grief with the people of our city and beyond who lived, worked, and struggled with Brad over the course of his dynamic but short life. We can only imagine the pain of the people of Oaxaca who have lost seven of their neighbors to this fight, including Emilio Alonso Fabian, a teacher, and who now face an invasion by federal troops.

All we want in compensation for his death is the only thing Brad ever wanted to see in this world: justice.

* We, along with all of Brad's friends, reject the use of further state-sponsored violence in Oaxaca.
* The New York City Independent Media Center supports the demand of Reporters Without Borders for a full and complete investigation by Mexican authorities into Oaxaca State Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz's continued use of plain-clothed municipal police as a political paramilitary force. The arrest of his assailants is not enough.
* The NYC IMC also supports the call of Zapatista Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos "to compañeros and compañeras in other countries to unite and to demand justice for this dead compañero." Marcos issued this call "especially to all of the alternative media, and free media here in Mexico and in all the world."

Indymedia was born from the Zapatista vision of a global network of alternative communication against neoliberalism and for humanity. To believe in Indymedia is to believe that journalism is either in the service of justice or it is a cause of injustice. We speak and listen, resist and struggle. In that spirit, Brad Will was both a journalist and a human rights activist.

He was a part of this movement of independent journalists who go where the corporate media do not or stay long after they are gone. Perhaps Brad's death would have been prevented if Mexican, international, and US media corporations had told the story of the Oaxacan people. Then those of us who live in comfort would not only be learning now about this 5 month old strike, or about this 500 year old struggle. And then Brad might not have felt the need to face down those assassins in Oaxaca holding merely the ineffective shields of his US passport and prensa extranjera badge. Then Brad would not have joined the fast-growing list of journalists killed in action, or the much longer list of those killed in recent years by troops defending entrenched, unjust power in Latin America.

Still, those of us who knew Brad know that his work would never have been completed. From the community gardens of the Lower East Side to the Movimento Sem Terra encampments of Brazil, he would have continued to travel to where the people who make this world a beautiful place are resisting those who would cause it further death and destruction. Now, in his memory, we will all travel those roads. We are the network, all of us who speak and listen, all of us who resist.

The New York City Independent Media Center
www.nyc.indymedia.org
4 W. 43rd St., Suite 311
New York, N.Y. 10036
USA / EEUU
212-221-0521

http://www.indymedia.org/en/2006/10/849515.shtml

The Independent Media Center is a network of collectively run media outlets for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of the truth. We work out of a love and inspiration for people who continue to work for a better world, despite corporate media's distortions and unwillingness to cover the efforts to free humanity.

http://www.indymedia.org

Search indymedia.org for articles on Oaxaca

save whales

2006-10-22T22:14:00.000-07:00

Date: Sun, 22 Oct 2006 19:38:04 -0700
From: EF! Media Center
Subject: Iceland Murders Its First Endangered Whale

Iceland Murders Its First Endangered Whale

"I view the taking of a whales life in the same manner I would view the taking of a human life. It is murder and it is a crime to slaughter such socially complex intelligent and sensitive sentient beings. The method of killing is torturous and grossly inhumane. We would never tolerate a domestic animal to suffer such a long and painful death. Every person who regards themselves as civilized must express their disgust and their revulsion against the whale killing atrocities of Iceland, Norway, the Faeroes and Japan. These people who practice this horrific serial killing of whales are the most barbarous representatives of humanity upon this planet and cast shame upon their nations."

- Captain Paul Watson
Iceland killed an endangered Fin whale today. This is the first illegal murder of a whale since Iceland announced their intention to violate the global moratorium on commercial whaling.

The whale was swimming happily along some two hundred miles off the coast of Iceland when some Nordic nimrod cowardly slammed an exploding harpoon into its backside.

The whale struggled in incredible pain for a long time before losing strength and finally drowned after an agonizing period when it lungs ruptured and its heart burst from the strain of oxygen deprivation.

There are some who will take offense at our use of the word murder. We make no apologies.

Whales are highly intelligent, long lived, socially complex, sensitive sentient beings. It is a crime against nature and humanity to cruelly snuff out the life of even one of these great creatures.

What Iceland did today is unforgivable and tragic and leaves us with a deep resentment and anger towards Iceland.

"Every time a whale is killed by a human being, it destroys a little more of my faith in humanity." Said Captain Paul Watson. "Killing whales in the 21st Century is a savage, barbaric, ecologically ignorant act of a people who are displaying an incredible contempt and disrespect for life and for world opinion."

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is calling for a total boycott of all Icelandic products and tourism to Iceland and the Society is already planning a campaign to confront Icelandic whale killers in Icelandic waters in 2007.

"We are recruiting crew and we are organizing a plan to go to Iceland and it will be a priority following our campaign beginning December 1st to oppose the illegal whaling activities of the Japanese whaling fleet in the Antarctic Whale Sanctuary

Captain Paul Watson
Founder and President of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (1977-
Co-Founder - The Greenpeace Foundation (1972)
Co-Founder - Greenpeace International (1979)
Director of the Sierra Club USA (2003-2006)
Director - The Farley Mowat Institute
Director - http://www.harpseals.org

"Sail forth - steer for the deep waters only,
Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee and thou with me,
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all."
- Walt Whitman

http://www.Seashepherd.org
Tel: 360-370-5650
Fax: 360-370-5651

Address: P.O. Box 2616
Friday Harbor, Wa 98250 USA

Anti-Protester Headquarters Burns

2006-10-21T23:01:00.000-07:00

Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2006 17:44:43 -0400
From: Paul Wolf
Subject: Anti-Protester Headquarters Burns

See Channel 13 video
http://wjz.com/local/local_story_293161627.html

1. Blaze guts spy unit's building at Ft. Meade
http://www.hometownannapolis.com/cgi-bin/read/2006/10_21-25/TOP

2. Fire burns Fort Meade office complex
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/annearundel/bal-fire1020,0,765889.story

3. Is the Pentagon spying on Americans?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10454316

4. Bloody Stain of Vietnam in Iraq
http://www.opednews.com

http://www.hometownannapolis.com/cgi-bin/read/2006/10_21-25/TOP

Blaze guts spy unit's building at Ft. Meade

By Ryan Bagwell and Pamela Wood, The Capital, Oct 21, 2006...

...etc //////// edit: [the details now available only via the links 061022]

deadelephant.ORG

2006-10-16T16:41:00.000-07:00

Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 05:43:28 -0700
From: Bill Mandel
Subject: underground "anti-marketing" campaign against the GOP

This crossed my desk today and will be of interest to you.

DeadElephant.ORG, an "anti-marketing" campaign, distributed friend-to-friend over the web, launched last week against the GOP. The underground campaign features more than 50 bumper-stickers in a single theme which share a distinctive logo - you guessed it: a dead GOP elephant! These are available instantly and FREE directly from the website - just click and print!

The messages capture the earnest self-satisfaction of the neoCons perfectly, and are very funny. Of course no bumper-strip message, however clever, can move public opinion on its own. But picture Dead Elephant logos popping up everywhere... Now THAT will effectively express MASS disaffection with the current leadership, and will help defeat the GOP on November 7th.

Have look for yourself. Print some out. And most important:

TELL EVERYONE YOU KNOW !

Happy culture jamming!

--Bill
--
William (Bill) Mandel

My autobiography, SAYING NO TO POWER (Introduction by Howard Zinn), is a history of how the American people fought to defend and expand its rights since the 1920s (I'm 88) employing the form of the life of a 30s AND 60s activist, one who was involved in most serious movements: student, labor, 45 years of efforts to prevent war with the USSR, civil rights South and North, women's liberation [my late wife appears on 50 pages], 37 years on Pacifica Radio [where I invented talk radio], civil liberties. You may hear/see my testimony before different McCarthy-Cold-War-Era witch-hunting committees [used in six films and a play]) on my website, http://www.billmandel.net I am the author of five books in my academic field. For an autographed copy of SAYING NO TO POWER, send me $24 at 4466 View Pl.,#106, Oakland, CA. 94611

Nuclear Power: One of Humankind's Biggest Mistakes by Jim Bell

2006-10-15T20:22:00.000-07:00

Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2006 10:40:48 -0700
From: "Russell 'Ace' Hoffman"
Subject: Nuclear Power: One of Humankind's Biggest Mistakes by Jim Bell

October 15th, 2006

Dear Readers,

Dry cask storage is the greatest "enabler" the industry has ever had -- with it, they don't need Yucca Mountain to ever open, or any other solution to ever work. They can just keep building dry casks until one of them breaches somewhere and then what happens? 500,000 dead the first week, that's what! Any terrorist or Yankee pitcher in an airplane can breach one.

Industry claims about the robustness of dry cask storage are nothing but bald-faced lies supported by criminally-negligent "regulators" at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). They don't even protect the casks with earthen berms. They are left in tsunami regions along the coasts of our country, in tornado alley, under flight paths, and along earthquake faults. The industry calls dry cask storage "temporary" which makes about as much sense as calling it "robust."

In the article below, Jim Bell does an excellent job of expressing the futility of nuclear power as an energy source, without even mentioning the dangers and futility of dry cask storage. Mr. Bell has decades of experience designing green power systems in the San Diego, California area, and has done numerous studies proving that there are alternative, renewable energy solutions which can provide all the energy needed, by simply doing such things as adding solar panels on a relatively small proportion of our existing rooftops, building wind farms, taking reasonable conservation measures, and so on.

The article shown below is Bell's most extensive article on nuclear power to date, and I think you will agree it is both well-referenced and very compelling, even without mentioning the notorious and illegal dry cask storage systems being implemented around the country.

Yours,

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

============================================================
Nuclear Power: One of Humankind's Biggest Mistakes by Jim Bell
============================================================

>Nuclear Power ˆ One of Humankind‚s Biggest Mistakes
>
>By Jim Bell
>
>www.jimbell.com, jimbellelsi@cox.net, 619 758 9020
>
>
>
>Nuclear Power was a mistake and remains a mistake. If the human family survives it, our descendants will wonder what we were thinking to justify leaving them nuclear power‚s toxic legacy -- a legacy they will be dealing with for hundreds if not thousands of generations.
>
>
>
>And why did we do it? To power our lights, TVs, radios, stereos, air conditioners, etc. and the tools we used to make them.
>
>
>
>Our creation of nuclear power will be especially difficult for our descendants to understand because they will know that in the nuclear era, we already had all the technologies and know-how needed to power everything in ways that are perpetually recyclable, powered by free solar energy and which leave zero harmful residues in their wake.
>
>
>
>On its own, nuclear power‚s toxic radioactive legacy should be enough to give any thinking person sufficient reason to want to eliminate it as quickly as possible and do everything to protect our descendants from the radioactive wastes already created.
>
>
>
>The human family has been at war with itself for the majority of its history. Human history is full of successful, advanced and sophisticated civilizations that utterly collapsed. To the informed, even our current civilization(s) don‚t feel very solid. Plus there are earthquakes, tsunami‚s volcanoes, severe weather, terrorism, and just plain human error. This given, who can guarantee that anything as dangerous and long-lived as nuclear waste can be kept safe for even 100 years much less the hundreds to hundreds of thousands of years it will take before some of these wastes are safe to be around.
>
>
>
>And even if an insurance company did guarantee its safety, what is their guarantee worth? What could they do to protect us and future generations if San Onofre‚s spent fuel storage pond lost its coolant water. If this happened an almost unquenchable radioactive fire would spontaneously erupt, spewing radioactive materials wherever the wind blew for weeks if not months -- rendering Southern California a dangerous place to live for thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years.
>
>
>
>Notwithstanding the above, the nuclear industry is lobbying the public and the government to continue supporting them politically and economically so the industry can expand.
>
>
>
>Its latest rational is that nuclear power will produce fewer greenhouse gases than what would be produced using fossil fuels to make electricity. This is true if one only looks at what happens inside a reactor. It‚s not true when accounting for all the fossil fuel energy consumed during nuclear power‚s fuel cycle, and what it takes to build, operate and dismantle plants when they wear out. Additionally, even if nuclear power was ended today, fossil fuel energy must be consumed for millennia in order to protect the public from the radioactive residues that nuclear power has already generated.
>
>
>
>An increasing number of former industry and non-industry experts are saying that at best nuclear power releases slightly fewer greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than if the fossil fuels embodied in it had been burned to make electricity directly.
>
>
>
>In his 2002 book, Asleep at the Geiger Counter, p. 107-118, Sidney Goodman, (giving the industry the benefit of the doubt on a number of fronts and assuming no serious accidents or terrorism), concludes that the net output of the typical nuclear power plant would be only 4% more than if the fossil fuels embodied in it had been uses directly to produce electricity. This means, best-case scenario, replacing direct fossil fuel generated electricity with nuclear generated electricity will only reduce the carbon dioxide released per unit of electricity produced by 4%. Goodman is a long practicing licensed Professional Engineer with a Masters Degree in Mechanical Engineering.
>
>
>
>Other experts believe that nuclear power will produce about the same amount of energy as was, is, and will be consumed to create, operate and deal with its aftermath. This case was made in an article published in Pergamon Journals Ltd. Vol.13, No. 1, 1988, P. 139, titled „The Net Energy Yield of Nuclear Power.‰ In their article the authors concluded that even without including the energy that has or would be consumed to mitigate past or future serious radioactive releases, nuclear power is only „the re-embodiment of the energy that went into creating it.‰
>
>
>
>In its July/August 2006 edition, The Ecologist Magazine, a respected British publication, featured a16-page analysis of nuclear power. One of the conclusions was that nuclear power does not even produce enough electricity to make up for the fossil fuels consumed just to mine, mill and otherwise process uranium ore into nuclear fuel, much less all the other energy inputs required This is not surprising given that typical U-235 ore concentrations of .01% to .02%, require mining, crushing and processing a ton of ore to end up with 1/2 oz to 1 oz of nuclear reactor fuel.
>
>
>
>To put this in perspective, the typical 1,000 MW nuclear power plants uses around 33 tons or over 1 million oz of nuclear fuel each year.
>
>
>
>As a teenager I saw a TV program that showed a man holding a piece of metal in the palm of his hand. He was saying that if what he held was pure uranium it would contain as much energy as the train full of coal that was passing by him on the screen. I became an instant „true believer‰ in nuclear power. I thought if something that small can produce the same amount of energy as all that coal, there will be plenty of energy and therefore plenty of money to address any dangers that using it might pose.
>
>
>
>Unfortunately, to get that level of energy from a small amount of pure or near pure uranium it would require that it be exploded as an atomic bomb. Of the uranium used in a reactor, only a fraction of the energy in pure uranium gets used. That‚s why we are left with depleted uranium and other long-lived wastes.
>
>
>
>The nuclear industry says that nuclear power is safe, a big net energy producer, and that it will be cheap and easy to keep its wastes out of the environment and out of the hands of terrorists.
>
>
>
>But if these claims are true, why has an industry that supplies only 8% of our country‚s total energy and 20% of its electricity consumed hundreds of billions of tax dollar subsidies since its inception? The 2005 Federal Energy Bill continues this trend. According to U.S. PIRG, Taxpayers for Common Sense, Public Citizen and the Congressional Research Service the recently passed 2005 Federal Energy Bill includes „a taxpayer liability of $14 to $16 billion‰ in support of nuclear power.
>
>
>
>If nuclear power is so safe and wonderful, why does it require the Price Anderson Act? The Price Anderson Act puts taxpayers on the hook if the cost of a major radioactive release exceeds $10.5 billion. According to a Sandia National Laboratory analysis, this puts taxpayers on the hook for over $600 billion to cover the damage that a serious radioactive release would cause. Another Sandia Laboratory study focusing just on the Indian Point nuclear power plant in New York, concluded the damage caused by a serious release from that plant could cost up to a trillion dollars. Needless to say, any serious radioactive release from any U. S. plant would wipe out any net energy gain by nuclear power if -- there ever was one.
>
>
>
>Realizing the potential cost of a serious radioactive release, manufacturers, insurers and utilities, were unwilling to build, insure or order plants. They only got seriously involved after the Congress assigned these cost to the taxpaying public. On page 7 of a report by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research titled The Nuclear Power Deception, they included the follow 1996 quote from then NRC Commissioner James Asselstine, „given the present level of safety being achieved by the operating nuclear power plants in this country, we can expect a meltdown within the next 20 years, and it is possible that such as accident could result in off-site releases of radiation which are as large as, or larger than the released estimates to have occurred at Chernobyl.‰ Bare in mind, a meltdown is only one of several things that could happen with nuclear power to cause a serious radioactive release.
>
>
>
>As I said in the beginning, nuclear power is a mistake. Especially considering we already have all the technologies and know-how needed to make us completely and abundantly renewable energy self-sufficient. Solar energy leaves no radioactive residues for our children or future generations. Additionally, although not completely environmentally benign yet, solar energy collection systems can be designed to last generations, be perpetually recyclable and leave zero toxic residues behind.
>
>
>
>If San Diego County covered 24% of its roofs and parking lots with PV panels, it would produce more electricity than the county consumes. This assumes that 3 million resident use, on average, 10 kWh per capita per day after installing cost-effective electricity use efficiency improvements. For details read my free books at www.jimbell.com. They are also available in most local libraries.
>
>
>For ourselves, our children and future generations, let‚s move into the solar age.

==================================================
Contact information for "Ace" Hoffman:
==================================================

*************************************************
** THE ANIMATED SOFTWARE COMPANY
** Russell "Ace" Hoffman, Owner and Chief Programmer
** P.O. Box 1936, Carlsbad CA 92018-1936
** (800) 551-2726
** (760) 720-7261
** Fax: (760) 720-7394
** Visit the world's most eclectic web site:
** http://www.animatedsoftware.com
*************************************************

re: Letter to Cousin [re: impeach]

2006-09-30T23:03:00.000-07:00

Sister: Mom mentioned my "conversations" with Cousin today... so i guess you said something ???

Well - FYI: he started it - - he baited me with his fascist shit, and i replied!

sure its hard for him to have a son in the war, but that doesn't change a thing that i say. it's too upsetting? get real! i am thinking of the next several decades, what will happen with our grandchildren.

he is the one who says "stop sending me your liberal rag" - [which i did a long time ago because of his BS replies; but he initiated the current stuff] - and, standing steadfast by the 'party rule,' always egging me on, he brings in shit which is just totally off - - (tell me what YOU think!) - -

- - stuff like "Don't bother with an answer.....your actions.....or lack of... tells the story (... Take your happy ass to the hot spots of the world where Bush and Haliburton has made corruption and correct it. Go forth and make friends out of our enemies.......Tell Al-Quida...or the president of Iran that your Christian cousin is all fucked up and you are there to make things better!...);" and "The invention of the condom and the distribution of them to thousands of Africans to save them from AIDS....what [you].....you think I'm heartless? do you honestly think that we should fuck with mother nature and alter natural selection....by letting thousands of over populated illiterate, malnutritioned blacks die ? ... If someone had your daughter down kicking the shit out of her....are you going to react to stop it....or talk?" and EVEN THEN: "hope for corporate sponsors [] so you can keep working to buy your cameras, Dobro's and do the capitalist thang!" -- (and much more, this is just a few snips).

SO: oh holy fucking SHIT! - give me a break! i do what i can every day, have been active for 30 years plus doing what i can every day... so perhaps i will put a compilation of our lovely correspondence together. guess i might do that, and print it all out and distribute copies.

his kind of thinking is what is fucking up our country, and our great-grandchildren will be paying for it - mark my word.

Keywords = Dereliction of Duty, Treason, Torture, War Crimes, Violation of The Constitution, Conspiracy... i can't get past that - and wouldn't even try to, no reason to.

SO: sorry! when i hear "don't send Cousin emails, they have a son who could die, its too upsetting for them" i JUST WANT TO PUKE! - because that kind of thinking is what only drives the madness further on. i have some bit of honor and integrity, i think... and torture and illegal wars just are not okay! i will stand against them in whatever way i can. if Cousin wants to just stay blind its his choice and unfortunate, but don't give me any shit for speaking up.

another letter to my cousin

2006-09-25T04:16:00.000-07:00

hey there Cuz

whataya think?

bush et all are fucking war criminals and fascist lunatics... its all very plain - just read the news and read between the lines, listen to a few of the experts talking about The Constitution of Our United States of America (if you are willing to take a chance and listen to anything other that the admin's own spin, that is)... and ask your own son if he thinks they are really doing any good there in Iraq. - - looks like fubar, don't it? blind faith is just stupid, is not in our best interests, and ultimately amounts to dereliction of duty.

the bushites have totally screwed America for the next few generations - the report is that they have only made it worse, and America is now marked as "the devil" in most of the world. do you want your grandchildren and even great-grandchildren to have to try and live this down? it ain't gonna' be pretty!

we are just training the rest of the world to hate us. i don't see how you could possibly deny that unless you are totally delusional; but then, maybe you would rather just go back to sleep, and count bodies to the rhythm of the war drums?

no need to reply... i would rather you took a few breaths, and go check it out for yourself [try to get past the brainwash].

and please note, this ain't just some liberal BS - its going to the courts and is being enacted by some very powerful and prominent people - and those fucking megalomaniacs may just actually be impeached! hopefully the shrub's 4th Riech can be nipped in the bud before its too late. too bad they have already hooodwinked so many... and i am sorry to see you so deluded, and hope that someday you will see the light.

bush et all need to be impeached, charged with treason and war crimes, and thrown in a deep dark hole for what they have done to the people and democracy of this country, and to the whole world for that matter - and especially for the people who they have wrongly been "bombing into the stone age!" - it is just pretty sick and twisted... no regard for human life, entire cultures... the environment. they are conducting the traditional imperialistic annililations... you read history? this one will be in the books for a long time.

there are other ways to deal with this stuff! too bad that they don't realize that approaching these problems with their limited militaristic mentalities is not the only option, and is in fact probably the worst option at this point - so i have not much else to say... except that there are alternatives, and if we want to survive we had best check them out! we Americans are rapidly becoming the "outcasts" - and it will take generations for it to resolve.

mark my word Cousin! ...are you ready for life in a gulag? oh, sorry! i guess you could be one of the guards.

article server has gone extinct / broken links

2006-09-24T14:09:00.000-07:00

sorry for the broken links, guys! the /RENEGADE/ article server has gone extinct, so any link that goes to "fornits.com/renegade/peaars.cgi?" will not work. i don't think i will be able to fix them all, so please accept my apologies. i may get back to restoring the archive somehow, but no idea how or when that might happen.

PEACE!

Global Call to Action with the Youth of the World

2006-09-22T11:13:00.000-07:00

Text of a document produced by 10 Nobel Peace Prize laureates directing PeaceJam:

Global Call to Action with the Youth of the World

Today we ask the young leaders of PeaceJam and the youth of the entire world to join us in a Global Call to Action. For the next 10 years, we invite them to work side by side with us as we address 10 fundamental issues. These 10 core problems are at the root of much of the suffering in our world, and we believe that young people can mobilize to make a difference in these 10 key areas. Over the coming decade, we will continue to lead this effort, which is being launched today at the 10th Anniversary Celebration of the PeaceJam Foundation.

It is our hope that by launching this 10-year campaign, we can inspire people of all ages, worldwide, to work for change. Over the next 10 years, we hope to inspire over a billion acts of service and peace.

The Global Call to Action

-- Unequal Access to Water and Other Natural Resources: The lack of access to clean water and arable land is an increasing problem for many people around the world -- and the struggle over these limited resources provides fuel for war and conflict, especially in those parts of the world where the population is exploding. We must work to ensure access to at least the most basic of natural resources, such as safe drinking water, for all.

-- Racism and Hate: Racism and the growing divide between rich and poor are endemic, and it is a problem that affects all of us. There are two societies in most countries -- one of which is a reflection of the media image of prosperity, and one that is hidden and full of suffering. This is creating a tremendous time bomb, ready to go off at any moment, and making it easier for demagogues to fuel hate and to rule by fear.

-- The Spread of Global Disease: One of the effects of globalization is the spread of disease and the potential for devastating new diseases to ravage humanity. National boundaries no longer mean what they once did. The rapid movement of people and goods means that many 'third world' diseases are now threatening the developed world, and have now become the problem of everyone. We must address these diseases together, as one human family.

-- Extreme Poverty: Our world cannot be secure when so many billions of people are forced to exist on less than $1 per day, without access to even the most basic levels of shelter, sustenance or education. Extreme poverty can be eliminated in our lifetimes, and this must remain a fundamental goal.

-- Social Justice and Human Rights For All: the lack of basic human rights and civil liberties, and the persistence of social injustice over long periods of time with no hope or plan for progress or change, always creates a backlash. To try to impose a military solution without addressing the fundamental issues at the core of a society will only feed the growth of paramilitary groups, violence and lack of security in that society.

-- Rights for Women and Children, and Their Role as Leaders: It is essential to bring and end to the exploitation of children, and to defend the basic human rights of women around the world. This includes the right to a decent education. The role of women and youth as leaders in local communities, in developing creative solutions to problems, must be fostered and encouraged.

-- Environmental Degradation: The earth is our mother, and it is wounded. It is out of balance and needs to be healed. Global warming is a reality, and only by a concentrated effort involving individual citizens, civil society, and our government leaders can we address the many causes for the precarious situation we have created for ourselves here on earth.

-- Nuclear Weapons and the International Arms Trade: It is incomprehensible that the world still wastes nearly a trillion dollars each year on the weapons of war. We must change our values and our priorities as we enter the 21st century. We must end the ever-increasing spiral of expenditures on arms, both nuclear and conventional, which only serves to increase the likelihood of violent conflict.

-- Disarming our Armed Consciousness: One of the first things that we must do is to dismantle our own armed consciousness because we are children of a culture of violence, and our minds have been armed. Peace is the grand revolution that humanity has been waiting for. What is required is a profound understanding of the new realities created by our increasingly interconnected and interdependent world.

Focus on Human Security to Create True Security: In order to create increased security in this new world in which we live, we must focus on the issue of human security. When we ensure that basic human needs are met, we are creating a more secure world. When we work for social justice, or to stop global warming, or to provide decent education, or to end racism, we are creating a more secure world. The time has come to shift our energy and our resources from military security to a long-term investment in true human security."

The Laureates -

Archbishop Desmond Tutu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his courageous leadership in efforts to find a nonviolent solution to the conflicts over the policy of apartheid in South Africa.

President Oscar Arias, current President of Costa Rica, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987 for his efforts to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the years of conflict and war in Central America.

Rigoberta Menchú Tum was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 for her work as a peaceful advocate of native Indian rights in Central America and for her leadership among indigenous peoples worldwide.

The Dalai Lama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 for his nonviolent efforts to resolve the Tibetan conflict and for his worldwide role as a man of peace and advocate for the environment.

Aung San Suu Kyi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for her nonviolent leadership of the democratic opposition in Burma, following the principles of Gandhi. She has been under house arrest since 1989.

Mairead Corrigan Maguire & Betty Williams were presented with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977 for their efforts to create a grassroots movement to end the violence in Northern Ireland.

Jody Williams of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for her work in creating an international treaty to ban landmines and for the clearing of anti-personnel landmine fields.

Adolfo Pérez Esquivel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1980 for his leadership for human rights and true democracy for the people of Latin America.

José Ramos-Horta was presented with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996 for his sustained efforts to end the oppression of the East Timorese people.

Sir Joseph Rotblat was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 for their efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics and, in the longer run, to eliminate such arms, and for his role in creating the Pugwash Conference.

Shirin Ebadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her efforts for deomcracy, peace, and women's rights in the Middle East.

>>> GO TO PEACEJAM.ORG

update 060905

2006-09-03T14:14:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: FYI - my email is now working [more or less], the /RENEGADE/ article server has gone extict [none of those links will work], and i now have updated the /RENEGAE/ homepage to reflect that. headers and footers of my blogs are not yet updated, no time to get to that yet, but will post further updates and fix those as soon as i can get to it.

update

2006-08-26T21:36:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: FYI - my email is now working [more or less], the /RENEGADE/ article server has gone extict [none of those links will work], and i now have the ability to update the /RENEGADE/ homepage - i just haven't had time to get to that yet. headers and footers etc not yet updated, no time to get to that yet, but will post further updates and fix those.

Counting Bodies Like Sheep To The Rhythm Of The War Drums

2006-08-04T22:51:00.000-07:00

current soutndtrack: Counting Bodies Like Sheep To The Rhythm Of The War Drums

still no email or website access / blogs only

server swap = glitches. sorry.

2006-08-03T19:59:00.000-07:00

server swap = glitches. sorry.

images not showing up | ren article server not serving | lost emails

i can't update my website either; so no notices there

SORRY !!!

UPDATE 6 August:
still no email - still no FTP - i can't update /RENEGADE/ at all, and the article server is probably history. i will try and see if i can get a database dump, and restore it somehow for historical purposes... what do you think? are the nearly 9,000 articles there worth worrying about?

sorry

VOTE: Do you believe President Bush's actions justify impeachment?

2006-07-30T23:21:00.000-07:00

>GO VOTE! / The results, which you get right after you vote, are utterly astounding at this time. 87% are currently in agreement, and almost 300,000 having already voted.

>>msnbc.msn.com/id/10562904/

PEACE!

-- don't you know?

[sorry IMPEACH! link for articles @ /RENEGADE/ has gone extinct! | GO VOTE!

Live Vote
Do you believe President Bush's actions justify impeachment?
Yes, between the secret spying, the deceptions leading to war and
more, there is plenty to justify putting him on trial.
No, like any president, he has made a few missteps, but nothing
approaching "high crimes and misdemeanors."
No, the man has done absolutely nothing wrong. Impeachment would just
be a political lynching.
I don't know.
Vote to see results
Live Vote
Do you believe President Bush's actions justify impeachment? *
291786 responses
Yes, between the secret spying, the deceptions leading to war and
more, there is plenty to justify putting him on trial.
87%
No, like any president, he has made a few missteps, but nothing
approaching "high crimes and misdemeanors."
4.3%
No, the man has done absolutely nothing wrong. Impeachment would just
be a political lynching.
7.2%
I don't know.
1.8%

[sorry IMPEACH! link for articles @ /RENEGADE/ has gone extinct! | GO VOTE!

we want YOU !!! [repost]

2006-07-18T23:09:00.000-07:00

we want YOU !!!

letter to cousin

2006-07-11T01:57:00.000-07:00

ever think about how many thousands of people have been saved by one person here and there, by some sort of effort on their part? or maybe you would rather think about how many killed?

do you ever picture the wastelands of war? ...the plants and animals are all gone; the soil is eroding away...

well, we are talking about saving millions of lives, if not literally the whole planet and our very own race - Earth's entire ecosystem, in fact. nukes are simply unacceptable - no questions asked, and not to mention a bunch of other things.

one has to have at least a few principles, right?

<<< that is a period there, on "no nukes;" and it doesn't matter who has or wants them! diplomacy and negotiation are the only answer here. hopefully the lunatics will find some reason, and our scientific community will be able to save the planet from deadly contaminations over the next several hundreds of thousands of years.

my point, my Cousin, is that it is all of our making,- our Forefathers and now Us who might continue it - and its coming up to "all or nothing." so we are "at the gate" - Lord of the Rings, huh? its up to us to fix it and not continue the old ways of violence and corruption.

so it is this: "Christ! either shit or get off the fucking train, right?"

i said i wouldn't be getting into a pissing contest with you, and sorry about the quotes - i should have stuck with that first one...

you and i just may not agree on the approach. uh, yeah - i guess thats it: you have it all wrong! i am not a liberal = i am a fucking radical! my dear cousin !!! because that is what its going to take - a bit of outside the box thinking, and an ability to challenge the status quo at the very least! these are radical times - just wait and see how crazy it gets = i'll take bets! none of those shelters or safe suits would matter... our entire thinking has to change.

- the first quote that i should have just stuck with -
He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt.
He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord
would suffice.
- Albert Einstein

--previous--

people have made all this shit up - its our own doing, and its time it was undone else we won't survive

"touch not that most unclean thing"

this is not Star Wars, or Lord of the Rings...

"they" [as in "big brother is going to take care of >>them??"] -
- they/them- are not Wargs - they are people who we are going to have to
live with on this planet. why train them to hate us?

our society is so screwed up!
just think if all those billions went into
creating a truly sane and just society
instead of all the technology needed
to send smart bombs
upon the most politically
and financially lucrative
targets...

its all about power and control, Cousin

we can do much better than that

we want YOU !!!

2006-07-10T19:06:00.000-07:00

we want YOU !!!