UNDERNEWS Sam Smith August 10, 1999 The Progressive Review 1739 Conn. Ave. NW Washington DC 20009 202-232-5544 Fax: 202-234-6222 E-MAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] INDEX: http://prorev.com RECENT UNDERNEWS: http://prorev.com/indexa.htm TODAY'S HEADLINE NEWS: http://prorev.com/altnews.htm THE REVIEW FORUM: http://prorev.com/letters.com DONATIONS AND ORDER FORM: http://prorev.com/order3.htm UNSUBSCRIBE: Reply with 'unsubscribe' in the subject line. For a free subscription to our e-mail updates send your postal address with zip code. Copyright 1999, The Progressive Review. Matter not independently copyrighted may be reprinted provided TPR is paid your normal reprint fees, if any, and is given proper credit. Because of its quantity, TPR's mail is not always answered, but it is always read. The editor is cheered or remorseful as appropriate and posts some of the more interesting messages at http://prorev.com/letters.htm ---------------------------------------------------------- SWEATSHOP SUIT SETTLED Nordstrom, Cutter & Buck, J. Crew, and Gymboree have become the first retailers to settle claims against them in a class action lawsuit contesting sweatshop conditions in garment factories on the Mariana island of Saipan. This is the first time a group of US retailers have agreed to create a joint independent monitoring system of their contractors. The settlement also prohibits the use of "recruitment fees" in Saipan factories making apparel for US retailers. The suit was brought by UNITE, Global Exchange, Sweatshop Watch, and Asia Law Caucus. The settlement establishes a million dollar fund to finance the monitoring, provide partial damages to the workers, and create a public education campaign. The new standards include the payment of overtime, providing safe food and drinking water, and guaranteeing employees basic civil rights. An Amherst, Massachusetts-based non-profit firm, Verit�, will monitor compliance with the standards outlined in the settlement, including establishing an "ombudsman" on Saipan. The settlement gives Verit� far-reaching powers to oversee the conduct of contractors working for Nordstrom, Cutter & Buck, J. Crew and Gymboree. This oversight will include surveillance, announced and unannounced visits to facilities, and investigations of worker complaints. Verit� is also empowered to remedy violations of these standards by, among other things, forcing the payment of back wages and terminating contracts where a pattern and practice of such violations exists. GLOBAL EXCHANGE http://www.globalexchange.org TRENDS -- Number of bills signed by the president last year: 241 -- Number of rules and regulations issued by the president last year: 4,899 -- Number of pages of rules issued by the president last year: 68,591 [Washington Times] TRAIN DEATHS Two law enforcement officers have been awarded about $300,000 each from a documentary filmmaker by a jury in a defamation case involving the deaths of two boys who apparently stumbled on a drug/money drop in the backwoods of Arkansas. This was not your typical defamation case as part of the argument of the officers were that they were narcotics agents investigating the same prosecutor who named them as having been implicated in the case. The charge was repeated in a film about the incident. The prosecutor is now in jail on racketeering charges. There have been about a half-dozen failed and flawed investigations of the deaths. The trial revealed little new information about the case. The outcome is tangential to the key question of how the boys ended up murdered -- run over by a train after being beaten and placed on the tracks by persons unknown. The best information suggests the boys stumbled upon a major operation for passing drugs, money and bullion to Arkansas underworld figures involved in the Iran-Contra drugs-for-weapons trade and that these figures were, in turn, closely tied to the Arkansas political machine. THE CULTURE OF IMPUNITY John Passacantando of Ozone Action reports that the two Reagan-appointed judges who ruled against the EPA on new air pollution standards --Stephen Williams and Douglas Ginsberg -- regularly go on free junkets sponsored by the corporate-backed Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment. Ginsberg also sits on the group's board of directors. THE GOP has set a new record for the purchase of elections. It has established a Team $1 Million for 100 potential individual or corporate donors willing to give $1 million over a four-year election cycle. It shouldn't be too hard to do. George Bush Jr. raised $37 million just between March and June. TPR has argued for some time that communities need not wait for legislation to act on such corrupt behavior; a non-partisan citizen uprising creating community and state coalitions of churches, organizations, and socially responsible individuals and businesses could declare such excesses unacceptable and establish a code of conduct for politicians. If you want to know how to do it, just check with the students organizing the anti-sweatshop campaign on your local campus. PACIFICA CRISIS The Pacifica board has hired a professional fundraiser -- apparently to help it recover from a donation drop-off following its slash-and-burn approach to its own outlets. One listener says she was told that WBAI had a shortfall of $200,000. The Share Group has represented a number of non-profits including the American Association of University Women, Greenpeace, the Audubon, the Wilderness Society and Zero Population Growth. According to the North Carolina Better Business Bureau, these groups got less than 50% of each fundraising dollar and Audubon got only 38%. HILLARY WATCH According to one news account, "HRC's PR man, Howard Wolfson, said the first lady did not know her step-grandfather Max Rosenberg 'in a religious context .... But she does have very fond memories of him and is very proud of her family.' Wolfson also said that she spent a lot of time with him when she was a child. Ray Heizer, maitre d' of the invaluable Clinton Administration Scandal bulletin board, has uncovered some different accounts of this relationship: -- FROM DAVID BROCK'S BOOK, "THE SEDUCTION OF HILLARY RODHAM," PAGE 2: Dorothy Howell had had a troubled upbringing. Born in Chicago to a fifteen-year-old Socttish-French mother and a seventeen-year-old Welsh father, her parents soon divorced and Dorothy and her younger sister were sent by train to live with their grandparents in Pasadena, California. According to an account given by Hillary, the grandparents raised the girls in hardscrabble environs, mistreating them with harsh and arbitrary discipline. At age fourteen, Dorothy -- who had learned to rely on the kindness of teachers for milk money -- moved out of her grandparents' house and went to work in another woman's home, taking care of her children. -- FROM ROGER MORRIS' "PARTNERS ON POWER,", PAGE 107: Dorothy Howell was of Welsh-Scottish descent with French and Native American ancestry as well. She was born in 1919 into the blue-collar tenements of South Chicago, the daughter of a fireman and of a half-Canadian mother who was all but illiterate. Part of the vast migration of the era, the family later moved to southern California, where Dorothy grew up in the sunlit but bittersweet promise of the Los Angeles basin. At high school in Alhanbra, she was a member of the scholarship society, an admired athlete, and an energetic organizer of student activities. She left the West Coast almost as soon as she graduated, never looking back "too fondly," as one account put it, on a seemingly painful, unreconciled childhood and adolescence. Intelligent and pretty, with a compelling smile and an abiding sense of independence, eighteen-year-old Dorothy was back in Chicago in 1937 applying for a job as a secretary with the Columbia Lace Company, when she met a witty yet severe and begrudging young curtain salesman named Hugh Rodham." FIELD NOTES LOCAL CONTRIBUTIONS: A search engine allows users to enter a zip code, metro area, or state to view a breakdown of money raised in those areas by the major presidential contenders. Totals are based on individual contributions of at least $200 reported to the Federal Election Commission (smaller contributions are not itemized in FEC filings and cannot be tracked geographically). For example, entering the zip code 10021 on New York's upper east side shows that Democrat Bill Bradley raised more money ($369,750) than either Democratic rival Al Gore ($321,800) or Republican pacesetter George W. Bush ($267,220). Punch in Tennessee under the state search and you will discover that Vice President Gore actually trails fellow favorite son Lamar Alexander in receipts from their home state. Searching for Washington, D.C. under metro area shows Bush with a narrow fund-raising advantage on the vice president. HTTP://WWW.OPENSECRETS.ORG/2000ELECT/GEOG_LOOK.HTM. THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW 1739 Connecticut Ave NW Washington DC 20009 202-232-5544 202-234-6222 Fax [EMAIL PROTECTED] Editor: Sam Smith INDEX : http://prorev.com RECENT UNDERNEWS : http://prorev.com/indexa.htm TODAY'S HEADLINES: http://prorev.com/altnews.htm THE REVIEW FORUM: http://prorev.com/letters.htm For a free trial subscription to both our bi-monthly hard copy edition and our regular e-mail updates send e-mail and terrestrial address to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To order "Sam Smith's Great American Political Repair Manual" (WW Norton) direct from Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0393316270/progressiverevieA/
