March 8, 2001
THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW
Editor: Sam Smith
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WORD
The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a
mode of human behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by
behaving differently. - Gustav Landauer
MISSION CREEP
UPI: Claims by US military officials that a new skin-heating weapon causes
no permanent health problems are exaggerated and highly suspect, experts
told United Press International on Tuesday. Possible long-term side-effects
could include cancer and cataracts, they said. "Their claims are a bunch of
crap," said Professor W. Ross Adey, professor of physiology at Loma Linda
University Medical Center in Loma Linda, Calif. "We've known that many forms
of microwaves at levels below heating can cause significant health effects
in the long term." . . . Military officials say the device sends brief
pulses of electromagnetic energy 1/64 inch deep into skin, agitating water
molecules in the skin and causing thermal agitation, or a feeling of heat.
The pain is similar to touching a hot light bulb but stops once the waves
stop. The idea is to generate enough heat on the skin that the individual
retreats from the beam . . . "The principles set forth in international law
say that you can't use weapons that cause irreparable damage or irreversible
injury and we think there just hasn't been enough testing here," said Joost
Hiltermann, arms division director for Human Rights Watch in Washington.
"They've tested on volunteers who are probably healthy, but what happens
when they aim it at pregnant women or children or people who already have a
disease that could be worsened by exposure?"
ELABORATIONS
Santee High School
RICK JAHNKOW, PROJECT ON YOUTH AND NON-MILITARY OPPORTUNITIES: I thought you
all might be interested in these facts about the gun attack yesterday by
Andrew Williams, a 15-year-old student at Santana High School. Some of this
information I picked up from news reports, the rest is based on my own
experience with, and personal knowledge of, the community and the school:
--Santee, the town where Santana H.S. is located, is in a semi-rural part of
eastern San Diego County. It is a very conservative area with lots of gun
advocates. Some people refer to it as "Klantee."
--In the last two years, Santee has been in the local news because of racist
fliers circulated at the high school and a near-fatal hate-attack on an
African American Marine who was attending a party in the community.
--As of March 6, there had been no explicit statement from Andy Williams
that he was targeting any particular people when he killed two and wounded
13 others at Santana H.S. Nor had there been any stories indicating that he
belonged to any hate groups. However, while Blacks, Latinos and Asians make
up only 15% of the Santana H.S. student body, 40% of the list of people who
were shot have Spanish surnames.
--Project YANO has attended the career fairs at Santana H.S. regularly
(except for last year) to counter the presence of military recruiters. The
military, especially the Marine Corps, swarms all over the school. The
career fair coordinator has frequently used the p.a. system to urge students
to visit military exhibits. She has never plugged Project YANO as an
alternative. Santana is one of the very few schools where Project YANO has
seen overt hostility from students to its counter-recruitment message.
--The school district, Grossmont UHSD, had to be sued in the 1980s to allow
peace groups equal access to its schools. Grossmont was the plaintiff in the
9th Circuit appellate court ruling that is now used as a lever for access by
counter-recruitment groups.
--Before Andy Williams packed his gun and left for school on the morning of
March 5, he put on his Navy SEAL sweatshirt. That's what he was arrested in.
Clearly it was part of the statement he was making.
Everyone is looking for individualistic reasons to explain this tragedy (bad
parents, lack of counseling for the student, school bullies, etc.). Very few
seem willing to look at the value system, including militarism, that
encouraged Andrew Williams to think it was proper to resolve his problems
this way.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
FEEDBACK
PROFESSOR JOAN ROELOFS ON THERAPY: Seligman is good but he turned me off
because he devised his system to help life insurance salesmen, who should
give up. I enjoy, and have passed along to friends and family, "Constructive
Living" by David K. Reynolds (all his books are pretty much the same, titles
vary). This is an Americanization of Morita therapy, based on Zen Buddhism.
It is cheap, and avoids spiritual talk.
NEWS FROM THE COLONIES
DIETMAR HENNING, WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE: Germany's Social Democratic -
Green party coalition government employed fabrications and manipulated facts
to overcome popular opposition to the participation of the German armed
forces in NATO's war against Yugoslavia two years ago. A German TV report by
journalists Jo Angerer and Mathias Werth entitled "It Began With a Lie"
provides proof of this . . . "NATO says it dropped the bombs to save the
lives of the Kosovar Albanians-from the Serbs," states the report. That was
the main argument used by the government to justify the first combat
deployment of German troops since the Second World War, 50-plus years after
Hitler's armies devastated the Balkans.
Rudolf Scharping stated on March 27, 1999: "We never would have taken
military action if there weren't this humanitarian catastrophe in Kosovo,
with 250,000 refugees within Kosovo and far more than 400,000 refugees in
total, and with a death toll we are not even able to count yet." The report
contrasts this statement with the findings of the Organization for Security
and Cooperation in Europe at the time. The OSCE's "results for March 1999"
reported "39 deaths in all of Kosovo-before the NATO bombers came" . . .
MUCH MORE. . .
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/mar2001/koso-m01.shtml
THE DARK AT THE END
OF THE CARPAL TUNNEL
The attempt by the Clinton administration to come up with ergonomic rules
for the workplace and the assault on those rules by the Republican Congress
exemplifies as well as anything a basic problem of contemporary politics.
The Republicans do little and the Democrats do badly. The Republicans are
indifferent and the Democrats are incompetent. In the end all we have is one
more campaign issue.
In truth, there isn't all that much room for ideology when dealing with back
pain and there's no Republican or Democratic way to cure carpal tunnel
syndrome. Here's a case where common sense should trump politics, but you'd
never guess it from the way both sides are talking.
AFL-CIO president John Sweeney called the killing of the regulations "a
naked payoff to big-business contributors who have opposed every effort to
enact a standard protecting workers." GOP senator Don Nickles called it
"probably the most expensive, intrusive regulation ever promulgated"
The trouble started with badly written regulations. They represent the worst
in present day rule-making: unduly complex, ambiguous in meaning, excessive
in scope, and clearly designed for large bureaucratic corporations with
time and money and lawyers on their hands rather than for the small
businesses that have kept the job market going while the Fortune 500 were
happily laying people off and bragging about what a great economy it was.
This was not the first time that the Clinton administration had come up with
bad rules. One executive order attempted to repeal the Tenth Amendment by
administrative fiat. Another would have had car owners pay large sums to
correct the deficiencies of car manufacturer, and in some states, drive
hundreds of miles to an inspection station for the privilege of being socked
with the bill.
As with the auto rules (fortunately aborted), the ergonomic regulations
placed legal, time, and economic burdens at the wrong end. Consider, for
example, an employer with a half dozen computers. To what extent should
that employer be responsible for the design failures of Compaq? What is the
government's responsibility for declaring as national policy a Dell Diaspora
which it knows will have, as one of its effects, a significant increase in
ergonomic problems? How is the employer meant to correct ergonomic
shortcomings if neither the computer manufacturers nor the government's own
public health officials know how? Consider, for example, those back belts
that were considered mandatory until researchers found them to be of little
use in preventing injuries. And what is the right way to deal with carpal
tunnel syndrome anyway?
The effect on small business would have been substantial. The Christian
Science Monitor reported, "Small businesses were particularly unhappy with
the potential cost of the ergonomics regulations. In Brick Township, N.J.,
Jeanne Heisler, president of the Ronan insurance agency, had started to
comply with the regulations by buying ergonomically correct keyboards at
$150 a piece. But it wasn't just the added cost of equipment. She says under
the new rules, her potential costs were going to skyrocket if an employee
had an ergonomic injury. Under New Jersey workers' compensation laws, there
is a cap on how long her insurance has to pay an injured worker. The firm
has to pay only two-thirds of the worker's salary. Under the Clinton rules,
there would have been no cap and the insurer would pay 90 percent of the
worker's salary." According to one insurance study, the average claim for
repetitive motion injury is more than half that for an automobile accident.
Workplace safety is effected by many factors other than those covered in
these rules. For example, the stats have improved substantially, with
accidents down 30% since 1992. What caused this? Clearly not the new regs.
And that doesn't mean that everyone's job improved. Here are the workplace
accident rate per 100 worker for a few trades:
23.2 Vitreous plumbing manufacturing
23.2 Iron workers
21.4 Ship builders
12.6 Metal workers
12.1 Lumber industry workers
16.7 Nursing facility worker
10.6 Grocery workers
3.6 Jewelry workers
3.0 Computer manufacturing
2.3 Baking
1.6 Men's and boy's clothing (retail)
0.8 Women's accessories (retail)
0.7 Accounting
When was the last time you heard a politician talk about the workplace
safety problems of vitreous plumbing workers? Even among those activities in
which repetitive motion causes problems, secretaries and office clerks don't
make it to the top of the list. In 1996, for example, there were more
textile machine operators who were hurt than there were secretaries. Almost
four times as many assemblers and laborers suffered from repetitive motion
problems as did secretaries. And although this factor is curiously missing
from the Fed's data on the subject, one statewide study of workplace
injuries found that they were considerably more likely in large businesses
than in small.
According to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health,
various physical factors, including smoking, weight, and height can affect
the likelihood of a workplace injury. And there is nothing in the rules that
says that government can't continue to make life as difficult as possible
for the non-corporate farmer. There's even a workplace safety issue here as
well: where once accidents use to be the greatest cause of farmer deaths, in
the new economy five times as many farmers die of suicide.
None of this is to argue that one ignores the workplace safety problem. But
the Clinton administration's solution appears to have been written by people
who never held a job in which one actually did something besides writing and
meeting about it. It is the sort of thing that would drive any sane small
business operator to a lawyer, a bar or a "health care professional" - HCP
as the regs call them.
It is also the sort of thing that discredits the role of government in
protecting its citizens and has helped to lead to the Democrat's dismal
electoral status.
FLOW CHART OF THE CLINTON RULES
http://www.osha-slc.gov/ergonomics-standard/regulatory/AppendixE.pdf
BRITISH PERSPIRATION SHOPS
WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE: Callers have deluged a telephone hot line set up
recently by the Trades Union Congress to monitor the working conditions in
call centers across the UK . . . In the first week of its operation the hot
line received almost 400 calls, and by February 21 had received 550. The
calls were mainly from staff who spoke about bullying, long working hours,
impossible sales targets and their general dissatisfaction with their jobs
in call centers.
Some of the calls detailed the very harsh conditions faced by call center
workers, who are forced to work under constant surveillance, whereby every
single hour, minute and second of their working day is monitored and recorded.
* In one case a manager made staff sign a "toilet book" to check how long
they were spending away from their desks. He warned that the workers who
spent the most time in the toilet would be forced to wear nappies/diapers.
* One caller said they had been forced to go into work to report sick in
person rather than phoning; had to put their hand up for permission to go to
the toilet and were only allowed three seconds in between answering incoming
calls.
* Another call center worker told the hot line that he was disciplined for
leaving a six-second gap between calls.
* Other workers complained of suffering from "acoustic shock" (damage to
hearing caused by sudden loud noises during phone calls) that had left them
suffering from depression and other health problems . . .
In the last decade, call center employment in Britain has sky rocketed.
There are now more than 400,000 call center employees, and accounts for 1 in
50 of the British workforce. By 2008, that figure is expected to reach 1 in
30. About 70 percent of call center employees are women. Call centers are
now the fastest growing employment sector in the UK, and the industry
employs more than the combined number presently working in coal mining,
steel and car production.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/mar2001/cal-m06.shtml
HOW NOW, MAD COW?
WORLD WATCH INSTITUTE: The spread of mad cow disease and foot-and-mouth show
that no country-including the United States-is immune to the threat of
animal borne illnesses, says Brian Halweil, researcher at the World Watch
Institute. But in the US, the meat industry and government officials are
singing the same tune as British officials 15 years ago, when the British
authorities consistently downplayed news of the emergence of Bovine
Spongiform Encephalopathy or 'mad cow' disease. "Two major trends have
combined to significantly increase the risks posed to the American public by
the spread of diseases like mad cow," Halweil says. "First, factory farming
creates perfect conditions for rapid infection of large numbers of animals.
Then, globalization - trade in goods and services and intercontinental
airline travel - virtually guarantees that diseases can move swiftly across
borders. Foot-and-mouth is already a problem in South America. The recently
completed Panamerican highway from Colombia to the United States virtually
guarantees that the disease will make its way up north. Similarly, a Brit
with the foot-and-mouth virus hitchhiking on his shoes can board a plane in
London and be on a Texas cattle ranch in a matter of hours. Government
officials and the American meat industry are dragging their heals on this
issue and potentially putting all American meat-eaters at risk. The US Food
and Drug Administration's own surveys show that one in four slaughterhouses
and feed processing plants still fail to comply with steps to prevent mad
cow disease.
http://www.worldwatch.org
ECOLOGY
ELIZABETH FULLERTON, REUTERS: To regain protected forest land, loggers may
have deliberately wiped out some 22 million Monarch butterflies which
migrate annually from Canada to Mexico for the winter, a top
environmentalist said. Homero Aridjis, head of the environmental lobby Group
of 100, told Reuters loggers were believed to have sprayed pesticide on the
orange and black butterflies in order to regain some 216 square miles of
forest declared protected by the government . . . Millions of monarch
butterflies migrate some 3,000 miles annually to flee the icy winter in
Canada and the United States for the warmer fir forests in Mexico's central
Michoacan state, some 70 miles west of Mexico City. For five months of the
year, Michoacan's trees are turned into a flaming orange and the forest is
carpeted with the delicate winged creatures. The migration has taken place
for the past 10,000 years, Aridjis said. The butterflies normally arrive in
early November and return north to lay eggs at the end of March.
JUST POLITICS
ASSOCIATED PRESS: The Rev. Jesse Jackson said he will amend the tax return
of one of his nonprofit groups to reflect money paid to a staffer who was
his mistress. The staffer, Karin Stanford, was not included on the 1999 tax
return filed by the Citizenship Education Fund. Other staff members' names
also were omitted. Jackson called the omissions inadvertent. "There is no
evidence, none, of illegality or impropriety," Jackson said in [the] New
York Times. He has been under scrutiny since his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition
acknowledged in January that it paid $35,000 in severance pay to Stanford,
with whom Jackson had a child. Jackson told the Chicago Sun-Times that he
lives modestly despite estimating his annual income at about $430,000.
THE MEDIACRACY
ROBERT MCCHESNEY, SILICON ALLEY REPORTER: In 1996 the Telecommunications Act
greatly revised the rules for radio station ownership. Back in the 70s and
80s, firms could only own around a dozen stations nationwide and no more
than two in a single market. The 1996 law, rammed though by the powerful
corporate radio lobby without a shred of debate or media coverage,
eliminated any restriction on the number of stations a firm could own
nationally, and raised the limit in a single market to eight, in the largest
communities. Since the law passed, there has been a complete reformation of
US radio, with well over half the 11,000 commercial station changing hands.
Small station groups can not compete with the giant chains so they sell out.
Radio is now dominated by a small handful of firms that own hundreds of
stations each. Every market is now dominated by two or three firms that are
"maxed out" with eight stations each. The quality of radio has plummeted.
With little competition, the amount of advertising is up to 18 minutes per
hour, according to one industry trade publication, well over the figure for
a decade ago. Also, localized news and production has been dropped for
vastly less expensive standardized fare . . . The rational solution would be
to only allow one station per owner, period. The cost of stations would
plummet, while the quality and diversity and local orientation would
skyrocket. Everyone would benefit except the radio-owning billionaires who
currently floss their teeth with politicians' underpants. So don't hold your
breath expecting any policies to improve matters.
LAND OF THE FREE
MARSHALL WILSON, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE: He put his cell phone away. She
kept talking on hers. He suggested she turn it off or risk bringing the
plane down. She misunderstood, apparently, and told a flight attendant that
a nearby passenger was threatening to bring the plane down. That's how
Northwest Airlines Flight 52 hit turbulence yesterday at San Francisco
International Airport - and it had not even left the ground. Before long,
the A320 Airbus was back at the gate, and the male passenger had been
whisked off for an interview with police. The incident on the 8:20 a.m.
flight to Detroit came just after the flight crew made the routine
announcement to turn off electronic devices -- including cell phones . . .
Alerted by the woman with the phone, a flight attendant told the captain.
"The captain takes her word for it and pulls to the gate and has the guy
taken off," said airport spokesman Ron Wilson. Northwest couldn't be reached
for comment. The man, whom police declined to identify other than to say he
was in his 50s, told authorities he was no terrorist. They believed him. But
by then, his plane was on the way to Detroit, and he was forced to take
another flight.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/03/08
/MNW19540.DTL
NEWSPAPERS at Harvard, Virginia, Colombia, University of Washington, Penn
and American University are among the nearly dozen campus media that refused
an ad opposing black reparations written and paid for by David Horowitz of
Front Page Mag. The University of Wisconsin and three other campus papers
printed the ad, two with an apology next to it . . . There's a double irony.
Not only are these newspapers engaging in censorship at the supposed ground
zero of the free marketplace of ideas, but are doing so on behalf of a basic
tenet of right-wing Christian fundamentalism: original sin.
EUROPE
AMBROSE EVANS-PRITCHARD, TELEGRAPH, LONDON: The European Court of Justice
ruled yesterday that the European Union can lawfully suppress political
criticism of its institutions and of leading figures, sweeping aside English
Common Law and 50 years of European precedents on civil liberties. The EU's
top court found that the European Commission was entitled to sack Bernard
Connolly, a British economist dismissed in 1995 for writing a critique of
European monetary integration entitled The Rotten Heart of Europe. The
ruling stated that the commission could restrict dissent in order to
"protect the rights of others" and punish individuals who "damaged the
institution's image and reputation". The case has wider implications for
free speech that could extend to EU citizens who do not work for the
Brussels bureaucracy. The court called the Connolly book "aggressive,
derogatory and insulting", taking particular umbrage at the author's
suggestion that Economic and Monetary Union was a threat to democracy,
freedom and "ultimately peace".
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et?ac=004500464513069&rtmo=r99SQh3X&atmo=rrrrrrrq
&pg=/et/01/3/7/weuc07.html
CLINTONS STILL AT LARGE
DRUDGE REPORT: Former President Clinton is quietly preparing to launch an
online version of his presidential library -- an online library which will
not allow critical analysis or comments about the nation's 42nd president.
According to sources close to the web site's development team, planned chat
rooms and bulletin boards will be strictly monitored for anti-Clinton
comments . . . "tolerated",
one well-placed insider told the Drudge Report .
http://drudgereport.com
FIELD NOTES
"TRADE SECRETS: A MOYERS REPORT," on March 26. Bill Moyers and producer
Sherry Jones uncover health and safety have been put at risk and why
powerful forces don't want the truth to be known. The report is based on a
massive archive of secret industry documents that PBS claims is as shocking
as the 'tobacco papers.'
PURCHASING POWER OF DOLLAR: 1665-PRESENT. Extremely useful for converting
historic prices into today's. http://www.eh.net/hmit/
TODAY IN HISTORY
1898 William James & other prominent US intellectuals formed the
Anti-Imperialist League to educate the public on the horrors of US policy in
the Philippines. Despite the group's efforts, however, there is no great
public outcry . . . 1906 To charges of brutality in the Phillipine war,
Secreatary of War Elihu Root responds, "The war in the Phillipines has been
conducted by the American Army with scrupulous regard for the rules of
civilized warfare...with self-restraint & with humanity never surpassed."
According to a contemporary account, "The major [accused of killing 11
defenseless Filipinos] said that General Smith instructed him to kill &
burn, & said that the more he killed & burned the better pleased he would
be; that it was no time to take prisoners, & that he was to make Samar a
howling wilderness. Major Waller asked General Smith to define the age limit
for killing, & he replied "Everything over ten." Mark Twain's description:
"We have pacified some thousands of the islanders & buried them; destroyed
their fields; burned their villages, & turned their widows & orphans
out-of-doors; furnished heartbreak by exile to some dozens of disagreeable
patriots; subjugated the remaining ten millions by Benevolent Assimilation,
which is the pious new name of the musket; we have acquired property in the
three hundred concubines & other slaves of our business partner Sultan of
Sulu, & hoisted our protecting flag over that swag & so, by the Providences
of God -- & the phrase is the government's, not mine -- we are a World Power."
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