----- Original Message ----- From: Leslie Cagan, UFPJ To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2007 1:01 PM Subject: Ed , Make Them Hear Your Outrage!
Please circulate widely Tomorrow (Thursday), Congress will vote on another $100 billion for the war in Iraq. We urge you to call your senators and representative NOW. Call 202-224-3121 and ask to be connected to their offices. · Tell them to VOTE NO on the war funding bill. · Voting for it DOES NOT support the troops; it supports a disastrous war and occupation. We're frustrated. You're frustrated. We all have called, written, marched, rallied, sat-in, and vigiled. Last November the voters of this country made their views very clear, yet the war goes on. And now, rather than holding the Bush administration accountable for their failed policy in Iraq, Congress may simply blame the country we invaded and continue to occupy. That's right -- the new funding bill that Congress will vote on tomorrow requires the Iraqi government to pass laws the U.S. wants them to pass in order to prove that they are a democracy or our government will withhold funding for much-needed reconstruction. For months the Congressional leadership promised action to change the course in Iraq, promised they will hold Bush accountable, promised they would not give Bush a blank check. But now, instead of standing up for what's right, the Democratic leadership has caved in to Bush. They are giving him a check for $100 billion to continue and further EXPAND the war. That surge they all claimed they don't like? The money for it is in this bill! LET THEM HEAR YOUR OUTRAGE! And, most importantly, don't give up! While the pace of change in the Congress has been glacial, we need to see what's been positive and build from that. There has been more debate, discussion and voting on Iraq in Congress over the last 5 months than in the last 5 years. There have been some significant votes that show momentum is going our way. Obviously not as quickly or substantively as we want and need, but we -- the antiwar movement active in every state of the nation -- are slowly but surely forcing a change. The funding in this current bill will run out in September, and Bush has already asked for another $145 billion to keep the war going. We will need to use our time and energy over the next three months to increase our power, show our outrage and put greater pressure on Congress to stand up to Bush. WHAT CAN WE DO? 1) Make those calls to Congress today (202-224-3121). Yes, they do make a difference!! 2) Use this Memorial Day as an opportunity to ask your members of Congress -- how many more U.S. soldiers will we be honoring next year for making the ultimate sacrifice in Iraq? Isn't it time for those we elected to truly represent us and use their power to end this war? Use any means you can to ask these questions! Letters to the editor, signs hanging from highway overpasses, banners and signs at parades, speeches, your front lawn. Your members of Congress will be in their home districts next week, so be sure to visit and call their local offices. Don't let them return to Washington without hearing your voice and feeling your frustration! Get the message out! 3) Download, copy and circulate the People's Emergency Funding Bill, and use it as a tool to help you talk to people. 4) Check our calendar for activities over the Memorial Day weekend and the coming weeks, and please be sure to post any events you are organizing or know about on there too! If you're in the Northeast, join the protest against Dick Cheney's graduation speech at West Point on Saturday, 5/26. 5) After you've visited your members of Congress in their local offices, if you can, follow them back to Washington! Peace activists are surging on the Capitol with Marine mom Tina Richards to keep the pressure on Congress throughout June and July. UFPJ member group CODEPINK is hosting an activist house and trainings over the summer. And there's still time for students to apply to attend the one-week Iraq Action Camp, June 10-14, sponsored by Campus Progress Action and Move On Civic Action. *** http://select.nytimes.com/2007/05/21/opinion/21krugman.html?th&emc=th Fear of Eating By PAUL KRUGMAN Published: May 21, 2007 Yesterday I did something risky: I ate a salad. These are anxious days at the lunch table. For all you know, there may be E. coli on your spinach, salmonella in your peanut butter and melamine in your pet's food and, because it was in the feed, in your chicken sandwich. Who's responsible for the new fear of eating? Some blame globalization; some blame food-producing corporations; some blame the Bush administration. But I blame Milton Friedman. Now, those who blame globalization do have a point. U.S. officials can't inspect overseas food-processing plants without the permission of foreign governments - and since the Food and Drug Administration has limited funds and manpower, it can inspect only a small percentage of imports. This leaves American consumers effectively dependent on the quality of foreign food-safety enforcement. And that's not a healthy place to be, especially when it comes to imports from China, where the state of food safety is roughly what it was in this country before the Progressive movement. The Washington Post, reviewing F.D.A. documents, found that last month the agency detained shipments from China that included dried apples treated with carcinogenic chemicals and seafood "coated with putrefying bacteria." You can be sure that a lot of similarly unsafe and disgusting food ends up in American stomachs. Those who blame corporations also have a point. In 2005, the F.D.A. suspected that peanut butter produced by ConAgra, which sells the product under multiple brand names, might be contaminated with salmonella. According to The New York Times, "when agency inspectors went to the plant that made the peanut butter, the company acknowledged it had destroyed some product but declined to say why," and refused to let the inspectors examine its records without a written authorization. According to the company, the agency never followed through. This brings us to our third villain, the Bush administration. Without question, America's food safety system has degenerated over the past six years. We don't know how many times concerns raised by F.D.A. employees were ignored or soft-pedaled by their superiors. What we do know is that since 2001 the F.D.A. has introduced no significant new food safety regulations except those mandated by Congress. This isn't simply a matter of caving in to industry pressure. The Bush administration won't issue food safety regulations even when the private sector wants them. The president of the United Fresh Produce Association says that the industry's problems "can't be solved without strong mandatory federal regulations": without such regulations, scrupulous growers and processors risk being undercut by competitors more willing to cut corners on food safety. Yet the administration refuses to do more than issue nonbinding guidelines. Why would the administration refuse to regulate an industry that actually wants to be regulated? Officials may fear that they would create a precedent for public-interest regulation of other industries. But they are also influenced by an ideology that says business should never be regulated, no matter what. The economic case for having the government enforce rules on food safety seems overwhelming. Consumers have no way of knowing whether the food they eat is contaminated, and in this case what you don't know can hurt or even kill you. But there are some people who refuse to accept that case, because it's ideologically inconvenient. That's why I blame the food safety crisis on Milton Friedman, who called for the abolition of both the food and the drug sides of the F.D.A. What would protect the public from dangerous or ineffective drugs? "It's in the self-interest of pharmaceutical companies not to have these bad things," he insisted in a 1999 interview. He would presumably have applied the same logic to food safety (as he did to airline safety): regardless of circumstances, you can always trust the private sector to police itself. O.K., I'm not saying that Mr. Friedman directly caused tainted spinach and poisonous peanut butter. But he did help to make our food less safe, by legitimizing what the historian Rick Perlstein calls "E. coli conservatives": ideologues who won't accept even the most compelling case for government regulation. Earlier this month the administration named, you guessed it, a "food safety czar." But the food safety crisis isn't caused by the arrangement of the boxes on the organization chart. It's caused by the dominance within our government of a literally sickening ideology. *** From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] sent by Simon McGuinness [Extracted form a long review of the Cannes Film Festival and the various movies shown so far which ends with a review of "Sicko" by Michael Moore. -SMcG] The Irish Times News - May 22, 2007 http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/features/2007/0522/1179498562820.html A heart of darkness at Cannes It has often been remarked that the people who return suntanned from the Festival de Cannes are those who didn't do any work. This year, however, the sun has been so strong every day and the queues for most screenings are so long that we are all getting sunburned just standing in line. How we suffer for our art. Once inside the festival cinemas, it's a very different story, as the mood darkens time after time. After dishing up an opening film in My Blueberry Nights that proved more slight and insubstantial than an amuse-bouche, Cannes has presented a menu heavy on serious issues, encompassing abortion, suicide, adultery, domestic abuse, and diverse forms of graphic violence - all in the first five days. [...] Michael Moore ladles out the humour in equal measure with the message in Sicko, his first documentary since Fahrenheit 9/11, the 2004 Palme d'Or winner at Cannes. His target this time is the US health-care system, and adhering to his now familiar formula, he draws on statistical data and human experience - his website request, "Send Me Your Health Care Horror Stories", yielded over 25,000 such stories within a week of being posted. >From the evidence he presents, it is hard to disagree with his depiction of the US health-insurance industry as callous and avaricious, of the pharmaceutical companies as exploiters grossly overcharging for medication, and of the political establishment as being in their well-lined pockets. Moore is as selective as ever as he loads his case in this polemic-as-entertainment, but some of the biggest laughs from the Cannes audience came when he uncritically extolled the British National Health Service and the French 35-hour working week, with all its associated benefits, as templates the US should adopt. Nevertheless, the best place to live, he concludes at the end of his global tour, is Cuba - although there's no sign of him moving there. More from Michael Dwyer on Cannes in The Ticket on Friday C 2007 The Irish Times --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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