[BRC-NEWS] EXXONMOBIL BUSTED BY GREENPEACE

[j w]

http://www.dontbuyexxonmobil.org/background?text_id=pr_05272003

May 27, 2003

EXXONMOBIL BUSTED BY GREENPEACE GLOBAL WARMING CRIMES UNIT

Global Headquarters Shut Down Day Before Annual Meeting

DALLAS, Tex. - Business at the international headquarters of
the world's most powerful company ground to a halt this morning
as the Greenpeace Global Warming Crimes Unit converged on
ExxonMobil's compound in Irving, Texas. Some members of the
Unit are positioned across the entrance while others have
entered the building to serve a list of charges against the
company. The move comes as ExxonMobil's Board of Directors and
international executives attempt to gather from across the
world for tomorrow's Annual General Meeting.

As of 7:45 AM (CDT), 15 members of the Global Warming Crimes
Unit are secured to the main gates, where two police-style vans
are parked across the entrance used by staff and management.
More than 30 members of the Unit have entered the compound,
fabled for its high security. Some members of the Unit,
including a Baptist minister, are actually inside the building,
while others are on the roof, holding a banner that brands the
building a "global warming crime scene." Employees arriving to
work are turning away.

James Moore of the Global Warming Crimes Unit said, "This is
where ExxonMobil plots to sabotage all meaningful efforts to
solve global warming. Within these walls, ExxonMobil executives
fight to conduct business as usual while the catastrophe of
global warming - which impacts millions of ordinary people - is
completely ignored."

ExxonMobil stands accused of running a 10-year campaign of
sabotage against international efforts to solve global warming.
The company has used its influence and money to block
agreements that would reduce global warming pollution. Recent
figures show the company gives millions of dollars to
ultra-conservative groups that aggressively lobby against
action to protect our climate and direct President Bush's
extreme energy policies.

The list of charges is accompanied by pages of evidence against
the company. Copies of classified documents and letters
demonstrate the unique role that ExxonMobil has played in
sabotaging action on global warming, fraudulently
misrepresenting the science, and lying to the American people.

"While 109 nations have signed the Kyoto Protocol to fight
global warming, ExxonMobil has done all it can to ensure the
United States sits on the sidelines," added Moore. "We will
leave only when the company agrees to stop sabotaging
international action on global warming. Meanwhile, everyone can
help by refusing to buy gas from ExxonMobil."


__
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM).
http://calendar.yahoo.com

[IMPORTANT NOTE: The views and opinions expressed on this
list are solely those of the authors and/or publications,
and do not necessarily represent or reflect the official
political positions of the Black Radical Congress (BRC).
Official BRC statements, position papers, press releases,
action alerts, and announcements are distributed exclusively
via the BRC-PRESS list. As a subscriber to this list, you
have been added to the BRC-PRESS list automatically.]

[Articles on BRC-NEWS may be forwarded and posted on other
mailing lists, as long as the wording/attribution is not altered
in any way. In particular, if there is a reference to a web site
where an article was originally located, do *not* remove that.

Unless stated otherwise, do *not* publish or post the entire
text of any articles on web sites or in print, without getting
*explicit* permission from the article author or copyright holder.
Check the fair use provisions of the copyright law in your country
for details on what you can and can't do.

As a courtesy, we'd appreciate it if you let folks know how to
subscribe to BRC-NEWS, by leaving in the first seven lines of the
signature below.]

--
BRC-NEWS: Black Radical Congress - General News Articles/Reports
--
Unsubscribe: 
--
Subscribe: 
--
Digest: 
--
Help: 
--
Archive: 
--
Archive: 
--
Archive: 
--

[BRC-NEWS] Iraq Intel Deliberately Skewed

[j w]

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0531-01.htm
 
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0501-09.htm
 
Published on Saturday, May 31, 2003 by Reuterss.com


U.S. Insiders Say Iraq Intel Deliberately Skewed 


by Jim Wolf

 


WASHINGTON - A growing number of U.S. national security professionals are accusing the Bush administration of slanting the facts and hijacking the $30 billion intelligence apparatus to justify its rush to war in Iraq. 
A key target is a four-person Pentagon team that reviewed material gathered by other intelligence outfits for any missed bits that might have tied Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to banned weapons or terrorist groups. 
This team, self-mockingly called the Cabal, "cherry-picked the intelligence stream" in a bid to portray Iraq as an imminent threat, said Patrick Lang, a former head of worldwide human intelligence gathering for the Defense Intelligence Agency, which coordinates military intelligence. 
That agency was "exploited and abused and bypassed in the process of making the case for war in Iraq based on the presence of WMD," or weapons of mass destruction, he added in a phone interview. He said the CIA had "no guts at all" to resist the allegedly deliberate skewing of intelligence by a Pentagon that he said was now dominating U.S. foreign policy. 
U.S. intelligence "simply wrong" 
The New York Times reported that Secretary of State Colin Powell on Friday fiercely defended the intelligence used by the Bush administration to justify war against Iraq. Powell told the Times that he spent several late nights poring over the CIA's reports because he knew the credibility of the country and the president were at stake. 
Vince Cannistraro, a former chief of CIA counterterrorist operations, said he knew of serving intelligence officers who blame the Pentagon for playing up "fraudulent" intelligence, "a lot of it sourced from the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmad Chalabi." 
That group, which brought together groups opposed to Saddam, worked closely with the Pentagon to build a for the early use of force in Iraq. 
"There are current intelligence officials who believe it is a scandal," he said in a telephone interview. They believe the administration, before going to war, had a "moral obligation to use the best information available, not just information that fits your preconceived ideas." 
The top Marine Corps officer in Iraq, Lt. Gen. James Conway, said Friday U.S. intelligence was "simply wrong" in leading military commanders to fear troops were likely to be attacked with chemical weapons in the March invasion of Iraq that ousted Saddam. 
CIA head denies charges 
Richard Perle, a Chalabi backer and member of the Defense Policy Board that advises Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, defended the four-person unit in a television interview. 
"They established beyond any doubt that there were connections that had gone unnoticed in previous intelligence analysis," he said on the PBS NewsHour Thursday. 
A Pentagon spokesman, Marine Lt. Col. David Lapan, said the team in question analyzed links among terrorist groups and alleged state sponsors and shared conclusions with the CIA. 
"In one case, a briefing was presented to director of Central Intelligence Tenet. It dealt with the links between Iraq and al-Qaida," the group blamed for the Sept. 2001 attacks on the United States, he said. 
George Tenet denied charges the intelligence community, on which the United States spends more than $30 billion a year, had skewed its analysis to fit a political agenda, a cardinal sin for professionals meant to tell the truth regardless of politics. 
"I'm enormously proud of the work of our analysts," he said in a statement on Friday ahead of an internal review. "The integrity of our process has been maintained throughout and any suggestion to the contrary is simply wrong." 
Tenet sat conspicuously behind Colin Powell during a key Feb. 5 presentation to the U.N. Security Council arguing Iraq represented an ominous and urgent threat - as if to lend the CIA's credibility to the presentation, replete with satellite photos. 
House to re-evaluate data 
Powell told the Times on Friday that the accuracy of the pre-war assessments was proven by the discovery of two Iraqi trailers that the CIA and Pentagon have concluded were designed to produce deadly germs. Powell presented drawings of suspected mobile biological labs to the United Nations in February. 
"You should have seen the smile on my face when one day the intelligence community came in and gave me a photo, and said 'look,' " Powell said on Friday. "And it was almost identical to the cartoon that I had put up in New York on the 5th of February." 
But doubts about the accuracy of the prewar intelligence have spread in Congress. In a letter sent last week to Tenet, the House intelligence committee said it intends "to re-evaluate" U.S. intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs and links to terrorists. 
"Top-down" intelligence 
Greg Thielmann, who retir

[BRC-NEWS] Anti-Gay Discrimination is "Civil Rights and Religious Liberty"

[j w]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

JUNE 25, 2003

CONTACT: National Gay and Lesbian Task Force

Newsroom: 323-857-8751

[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Bush Administration's Orwellian Logic: Anti-Gay Discrimination
is "Civil Rights and Religious Liberty"

  WASHINGTON - June 25 - The National Gay and Lesbian Task
Force condemned the Bush Administration's position paper on the
Faith-Based Initiative recently sent to Capitol Hill and
reported in today's Washington Post. The position paper argues
that faith-based service providers receiving public money
should be able to discriminate in hiring for jobs funded by
federal and state funds. It explicitly says that these
providers should be able to discriminate on the basis of sexual
orientation, and portrays state and local gay rights laws as a
hindrance to serving the needs of African American and Latino
urban poor.

Statement by National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Executive
Director Matt Foreman:

"As people around the country celebrate Gay Pride, and on the
eve of the Supreme Court's historic ruling on the Texas law
criminalizing homosexuality, the Bush Administration is telling
America that it's perfectly fine to discriminate against gay
people. Equally offensive, the Administration is portraying
anti-gay discrimination as 'civil rights and religious
liberty,' and portrays laws prohibiting anti-gay discrimination
as a threat to meeting the needs of poor people of color.

We consider this a declaration of war on the civil rights
protections our community has won through hard-fought battles
in many states and hundreds of municipalities across the nation
over the last thirty years.

This Orwellian language is outrageous, it's un-American, and
it's unconstitutional. The Bush Administration is
misrepresenting Title VII of the Civil Rights Act - which
allows religious groups to discriminate in hiring, but not with
public money. Two lesbians and a straight Jewish man have
already been discriminated against by faith-based providers
using state funds in Kentucky and Georgia. If this goes
through, gay people and others who are unpopular with some
faiths could be denied jobs in certain professions in entire
states or regions of the country. We cannot allow this to
happen in our country.

What religious groups do with their own money is their
business. But when they use our tax dollars and then say they
won't hire us for jobs that we help fund, that is unacceptable.
Fair-minded people understand this basic distinction.

We call on Congress to stand up for American values and reject
this policy of discrimination. How can we claim to promote
human rights around the world when we are attacking basic
rights at home?"

The Bush Administration's memo, (must have PDF viewer to
download) argues that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act allows
religious entities to discriminate in hiring. While such
discrimination is allowed with private funds, whether or not
it's legal for faith-based groups to discriminate in employment
funded by state or federal dollars has not been established.

Civil rights and civil liberties groups ranging from the NAACP
to Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the
American Civil Liberties Union, and People for the American Way
believe that the Title VII exemption cannot constitutionally
apply to jobs that are funded by the federal government.

According to these groups, the Title VII exemption is
constitutionally limited to privately funded positions. Indeed,
although the Supreme Court has not definitively ruled on this
issue, at least one federal court has held that it would be
unconstitutional for a religious institution to invoke the
Title VII exemption for a federally-funded job. See Dodge v.
Salvation Army, 1989 WL 53857 (S.D. Miss. Jan. 9, 1989).

The Bush memo justifies its encouragement of discrimination by
characterizing this policy as "safeguard[ing] the religious
liberty of faith-based organizations that partner with the
Federal government, so that they may respond with compassion to
those in need in our country." It portrays state and local
nondiscrimination laws as "uncertain regulatory waters" that
are "simply too difficult and costly for many faith-based
organizations to navigate..." It ignores the cost of
discrimination to those who are not even considered for
employment, or who are fired, because they are the "wrong"
sexual orientation, religion, gender or race. It says that
forcing religious groups to hire gay people would be like
forcing Planned Parenthood to hire people who are anti-choice
and anti-birth control. In fact, being gay is not a matter of
ideology or belief; it is a matter of who people are.

The Bush Administration memo also portrays gay rights laws as a
hindrance to meeting the service needs of low-income people:
"This hodgepodge of conflicting approaches has led to
confusion... and a consequent reluctance by many faith-based
groups to seek support from Federally funded programs... The
real losers are the homeless, the addicted, and o

[BRC-NEWS] Diversity Over Justice

[j w]

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030714&s=foner

Diversity Over Justice

by ERIC FONER


In the current political climate, the Supreme Court's decision
upholding the right of colleges and universities to take race
into account in admissions must be considered a victory for
those committed to racial justice. Celebration, however, should
be tempered by some unpleasant facts about American history and
society, and the Court itself.

When first developed in the 1960s, affirmative action formed
part of a far broader program for attacking both poverty and
racial inequality, including a domestic Marshall Plan to
reverse urban decay and create jobs, and government action to
end housing segregation and drastically improve urban public
education. This program has virtually vanished. Affirmative
action, the one surviving element, must be defended, but with
no illusions that it alone can adequately address the enduring
legacy of 250 years of slavery and a century of Jim Crow. In
the long run, the Court's decision will be cause for cheer only
if it serves to reinvigorate a broader struggle for racial
equality.

Among the Justices, only Ruth Bader Ginsburg seemed willing to
face the extent of inequality in America. Her powerful dissent
in the undergraduate case forthrightly stated what should be
obvious--that race still matters enormously in housing,
healthcare, income, schooling and other areas of American life.
Ginsburg directly attacked the conservative sophistry that,
under the rallying cry of "colorblindness," conflates
affirmative action with past efforts to stigmatize minorities.
Programs designed to create greater equality, she writes,
cannot be equated with "policies of oppression." Her dissent
marks Ginsburg's emergence as an uncompromising voice of
liberalism on the Court, something absent since the departure
of Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan.

Partly because they assumed, correctly, that Justice Sandra Day
O'Connor, a strong critic of the idea of "societal racism,"
would turn out to be the swing vote in a 5-to-4 decision,
Michigan's lawyers decided to emphasize not persistent racial
inequality but the educational value of racial diversity. The
diversity argument presents affirmative action not as a program
that primarily aids minorities but as one that improves the
educational environment, a more politically palatable case. But
it runs the risk of suggesting that access for nonwhite
students is desirable mainly because it enhances the
educational experience of whites by exposing them to classmates
from different backgrounds. Diversity is undoubtedly a worthy
goal. But a single-minded focus on diversity deflects attention
from the need to combat the numerous inequalities to which
Ginsburg referred.

Most nonwhite students do not attend elite colleges and
professional schools that feed the upper echelons of society
but public two- and four-year ones. As a recent article in The
Chronicle of Higher Education makes clear, the greatest threat
to educational diversity today arises from the severe cutbacks
in public funding imposed on these institutions by
cash-strapped state governments. Tuition is rising rapidly, and
scholarships are being reduced. A significant drop in minority
enrollment will inevitably follow.

O'Connor's opinion suggests that she was strongly influenced by
briefs on behalf of affirmative action filed by major corporate
executives and retired military officers. They argued that the
United States cannot compete in today's global economy, or
maintain an effective military, without racially diverse
business and military leaders. This argument has a historical
precedent. Half a century ago, when Brown v. Board of Education
was before the Court, the Eisenhower Administration urged the
Justices to consider segregation's effect on the world standing
of the United States in the cold war. People of other nations,
it declared, "cannot understand how such a practice can exist
in a country which professes to be a staunch supporter of
freedom, justice, and democracy."

Once again, the international interests of the United States
have prompted steps toward greater racial equality at home. The
result should be applauded. But we should not lose sight of the
fact that corporate globalization has had a devastating impact
on the black working class by hastening deindustrialization,
and that military service offers many nonwhites the opportunity
to advance socially only by taking part in wars abroad. It is a
sign of the times that it required an appeal to the demands of
globalization and an imperial foreign policy to persuade the
Court to uphold affirmative action in higher education.

__
Do you Yahoo!?
SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
http://sbc.yahoo.com

[IMPORTANT NOTE: The views and opinions expressed on this
list are solely those of the authors and/or publications,
and do not necessarily represent or reflect the official
political positions of the Black

[BRC-NEWS] Bush misled the nation

[j w]

http://www.thenation.com/capitalgames/index.mhtml?bid=3&pid=783

Capital Games
by David Corn

Did Bush Mislead US Into War?

George W. Bush misled the nation into war.

Who says?

Representative Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House
intelligence committee.

On the basis of what?

On the basis of information preliminarily reviewed by the
intelligence committee as part of its ongoing investigation
into the prewar intelligence on Iraq.

On June 25, during the House debate on the intelligence
authorization bill, Harman delivered an informal progress
report on her committee's inquiry. Her remarks received, as far
as I can tell, little media attention. But they are dramatic in
that these comments are the first quasi-findings from an
official outlet confirming that Bush deployed dishonest
rhetoric in guiding the United States to invasion and
occupation in Iraq. This is not an op-ed judgment; this is an
evaluation from a member of the intelligence committee who
claims to be basing her statements on the investigative work of
the committee. Here's what she says:

* On Bush's prewar assertions about Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction: "When discussing Iraq's WMD, administration
officials rarely included the caveats and qualifiers attached
to the intelligence committee's judgments….For many Americans,
the administration's certainty gave the impression that there
was even stronger intelligence about Iraq's possession of and
intention to use WMD."

* On the evidence upon which the WMD assertions were based:
"The committee is now investigating whether the intelligence
case on Iraq's WMD was based on circumstantial evidence rather
than hard facts and whether the intelligence community made
clear to the policy-makers and Congress that most of its
analytic judgments were based on things like aerial photographs
and Iraqi defector interviews, not hard facts."

* On the supposed Hussein-al Qaeda connection: "[T]he
investigation suggests that the intelligence linking al Qaeda
to Iraq, a prominent theme in the administration's statements
prior to the war, [was] contrary to what was claimed by the
administration."

She is not beating around the bush. She asserts that the
President overstated the WMD case, ignoring nuances and
uncertainties in the intelligence reporting, and created a
false impression about what was known about the threat posed by
Iraq. She maintains that Bush rashly claimed Hussein was in
cahoots with the evildoers of 9/11, when intelligence indicated
otherwise. This is damning stuff. Never mind all the recent
claptrap from administration apologists about the Iraq war
having been fought for the good of the repressed Iraqis. The
primary rationale for the war Bush offered in public was based
on two notions: Iraq possessed ready-to-go WMDs and Saddam
Hussein was in league with al Qaeda and could slip these awful
weapons to Osama bin Laden at any moment. (Last fall, Bush
exclaimed--with no caveats or qualifiers--that Hussein was
"dealing" with al Qaeda.) The danger, Bush and his crew argued
repeatedly, was imminent and real--so clear-and-present that
the United States could not afford to wait any longer or take a
chance on enhanced and more intrusive inspections.

Now Harman says Bush had no right to declare, as he did on
March 17, that "intelligence gathered by this and other
governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to
possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever
devised," or to say Hussein was a bin Laden ally. Harman, a
California moderate who is no hothead and who voted for the
Iraq war, is essentially branding Bush a liar. If her remarks
accurately reflect the committee's work, it means the
administration will be confronted with evidence it
misrepresented intelligence in its attempt to whip up support
for the war. And it may well be confronted in public. Harman
notes that Representative Porter Goss, the Republican chairman
of the committee, has promised to hold public hearings, perhaps
in July, and to produce an unclassified report as soon as
possible. (Soon after Harman made her remarks on the floor,
Goss led a successful effort to defeat an amendment offered by
Representative Dennis Kucinich, a Democratic presidential
candidate, that would have required the inspector general of
the CIA to investigate the allegation that Vice President Dick
Cheney pressured the agency to produce reports supporting the
administration's policy on Iraq.)

"It is already clear that there were flaws in US intelligence,"
Harman says. "Iraq's WMD was not located where the intelligence
community thought it might be. Chemical weapons were not used
in the war despite the intelligence community's judgment that
their use was likely. I urge this administration not to
contemplate military action, especially preemptive action, in
Iran, North Korea or Syria until these issues are cleared up."
She also suggests that an independent commission might be
needed to examine the MIA WMD controversy.

Harman's sta

[BRC-NEWS] Search Engine Finds WMD's

[j w]

Click on:

http://www.coxar.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/ 


__
Do you Yahoo!?
SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
http://sbc.yahoo.com

[IMPORTANT NOTE: The views and opinions expressed on this
list are solely those of the authors and/or publications,
and do not necessarily represent or reflect the official
political positions of the Black Radical Congress (BRC).
Official BRC statements, position papers, press releases,
action alerts, and announcements are distributed exclusively
via the BRC-PRESS list. As a subscriber to this list, you
have been added to the BRC-PRESS list automatically.]

[Articles on BRC-NEWS may be forwarded and posted on other
mailing lists, as long as the wording/attribution is not altered
in any way. In particular, if there is a reference to a web site
where an article was originally located, do *not* remove that.

Unless stated otherwise, do *not* publish or post the entire
text of any articles on web sites or in print, without getting
*explicit* permission from the article author or copyright holder.
Check the fair use provisions of the copyright law in your country
for details on what you can and can't do.

As a courtesy, we'd appreciate it if you let folks know how to
subscribe to BRC-NEWS, by leaving in the first seven lines of the
signature below.]

--
BRC-NEWS: Black Radical Congress - General News Articles/Reports
--
Unsubscribe: 
--
Subscribe: 
--
Digest: 
--
Help: 
--
Archive: 
--
Archive: 
--
Archive: 
--
Post: 
--
  | BRC |  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
--

[BRC-NEWS] Declaration of Independence

[j w]

Declaration of Independence Action of Second Continental Congress July 4, 1776 The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen United States of America WHEN in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation. WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness -- That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government
 becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security. Such has been the patient Sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the Necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of
 Government. The History of the present King of Great- Britain is a History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct Object the Establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid World. HE has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public Good. HE has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing Importance, unless suspended in their Operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them. HE has refused to pass other Laws for the Accommodation of large Districts of People, unless those People would relinquish the Right of Representation in the Legislature, a Right inestimable to them, and formidable to Tyrants only. HE has called together Legislative Bodies at Places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the Depository of their public Records, for the sole Purpose of
 fatiguing them into Compliance with his Measures. HE has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly Firmness his Invasions on the Rights of the People. HE has refused for a long Time, after such Dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of the Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the Dangers of Invasion from without, and the Convulsions within. HE has endeavoured to prevent the Population of these States; for that Purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither, and raising the Conditions of new Appropriations of Lands. HE has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers. HE has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the Tenure of their Offices, and
 the Amount and Payment of their Salaries. HE has erected a Multitude of new Offices, and sent hither Swarms of Officers to harrass our People, and eat out their Substance. HE has kept among us, in Times of Peace, Standing Armies, without the consent of our Legislatures. HE has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power. HE has combined with others to subject us to a Jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution, and unacknowledged by our Laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation: FOR quartering large Bodies of Armed Troops among us; FOR protecting them, by a mock Trial, from Punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States: FOR cutting off our Trade with all Parts of the World: FOR imposing Taxes on us without our Consent: FOR depriving us, in many Cases, of the Benefits of Trial by Jury: FOR transporting us beyond
 Seas to be tried for pretended Offences: FOR abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an arbitrary Government, and enlarging its Boundaries, so as to render it at once an Example and fit

[BRC-NEWS] " What to the Slave is the 4th of July ?"

[j w]

"What To The Slave Is The 4th Of July?" FREDERICK DOUGLASS SPEECH 1841 Independence Day Speech at Rochester, 1841 Frederick Douglass (A former slave himself, Frederick Douglass became a leader in the 19th Century Abolitionist Movement) Fellow citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us? Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and
 delightful. For who is there so cold that a nation's sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation's jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that the dumb might eloquently speak and the "lame man leap as an hart."  But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you has brought stripes and death to
 me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me by asking me to speak today? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn that it is dangerous to copy the example of nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrevocable ruin! I can today take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people. "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! We wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O
 Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth." Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! Whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorry this day, "may my right hand cleave to the roof of my mouth"! To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave's point of view. Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine. I do not hesitate to declare with all my soul that the character and conduct of this nation never
 looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of America! "I will not equivocate, I will not excuse"; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, shall not confess to be right and just For the present, it is enough to affirm the
 equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not as astonishing that, while we are plowing, planting, and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, ere

[BRC-NEWS] The Politics of Class War

[j w]

http://commondreams.org/views03/0702-02.htm
 Published on Wednesday, July 2, 2003 by CommonDreams.org The Politics of Class War by John Buell The centerpiece of President Bush’s “economic stimulus” plan, ending the so-called double taxation of dividends, is unlikely to have much immediate impact. Its contribution to long-term growth is almost as unlikely. Nonetheless, the proposal has already had one useful effect, stimulating a long neglected discussion of class. Democrats and even some mainstream media point out that reductions in the taxation of dividends are a poor mechanism for fiscal stimulus. Only about the top five percent of the population has significant stock holdings apart from pension assets, which are unaffected by the Bush proposal. Since the wealthy generally save a substantial portion of any windfall, their purchases are unlikely to lead to broad- based economic expansion. Some Democrats have
 also gone on to attack the class skew in this proposal. Rather than eliminate the double taxation of ordinary wages and salaries, which are taxed through both payroll and income taxes, Bush targets relief at the income stream of the wealthy. This line of attack elicits a familiar chorus: progressives are engaging in “class warfare.” Administration defenders thoughtfully remind progressives that the United States views itself as a classless society. Citizens vote their dreams rather than their envy or fears. The conservative rejoinder is effective and correct as far as it goes. Democrats should take it seriously. It won’t do merely to suggest that a tax policy favors the rich when a substantial segment of the population remains convinced it will or could become rich. But for most poor or working class Americans to become rich, or even to have a chance to achieve a modicum of material comfort, Americans must enjoy equality of economic opportunity. If most
 Americans are not inclined to demand the rigid equalization of comforts and lifestyles, they do insist on access to those resources needed to get ahead in a modern society. Economic policy over the last quarter century has indeed been a form of class war, a war that has increasingly deprived working and middle class Americans of just those chances to succeed. The distributional impact of government depends not just on relative tax shares but also on the benefits and burdens of government expenditures and regulatory decisions. Contrary to Administration claims, the output of government now increasingly benefits established corporate interests. The US economy is crony capitalism run amuck. Even many moderate Republicans had the decency to express embarrassment about recent Homeland Security legislation that included special limitations of liability for vaccine manufacturers. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. While Congress ponders tax relief for dividend
 recipients, the Federal Communications Commission has scrapped most rules pertaining to network TV concentration, just as it has already done for radio. Beyond the impact on diversity, such changes are an enormous economic windfall to the established players in media markets. Since the 1996 radio deregulation, the number of radio owners has decreased by 30 and most radio markets have become oligopolies. Media concentration is not only detrimental to would- be media entrepreneurs but also harms the small businesses that advertise on local radio. The recent waves of media concentration have are only the latest result of long standing government favoritism. The electromagnetic spectrum was itself a gift of a finite public resource to private interests. That gift was predicated on a requirement that broadcasters serve the public interest, a requirement now waved. On top of that gift, the Federal Government granted these established media spectrum space for so-called HDTV, a gift
 so outrageous that even then Senator Robert Dole protested. Federal dollars also increasingly flow to those who have. At the same time the Administration hopes to tighten federal requirements for such programs as the earned income tax credit, school lunches, and federal housing subsidies, it expands defense, agriculture, highway and security outlays. Military contractors often enjoy the benefits of cost plus contracts. As the Administration talks of its plans to create a free market economy in Iraq, it grants no bid, monopoly contracts to such favored giant as Halliburton. Agricultural subsidies, defended with the rhetoric of the family farm, provide vastly disproportionate benefits to agribusiness. Publicly subsidized medical research is turned over to major pharmaceutical giants, which then use this research en route to patents of new drugs yielding extraordinary profit margins. Many of today’s highest flying corporate tycoons enjoy their position not because of
 entrepreneurial success but because they benefit from public largesse and federally sponsored research. Yet despite much largesse, corporate performance has lag

[BRC-NEWS] The Politics of Class War

[j w]

http://commondreams.org/views03/0702-02.htm
Published on Wednesday, July 2, 2003 by CommonDreams.org The Politics of Class War by John Buell The centerpiece of President Bush’s “economic stimulus” plan, ending the so-called double taxation of dividends, is unlikely to have much immediate impact. Its contribution to long-term growth is almost as unlikely. Nonetheless, the proposal has already had one useful effect, stimulating a long neglected discussion of class. Democrats and even some mainstream media point out that reductions in the taxation of dividends are a poor mechanism for fiscal stimulus. Only about the top five percent of the population has significant stock holdings apart from pension assets, which are unaffected by the Bush proposal. Since the wealthy generally save a substantial portion of any windfall, their purchases are unlikely to lead to broad- based economic expansion. Some Democrats have also
 gone on to attack the class skew in this proposal. Rather than eliminate the double taxation of ordinary wages and salaries, which are taxed through both payroll and income taxes, Bush targets relief at the income stream of the wealthy. This line of attack elicits a familiar chorus: progressives are engaging in “class warfare.” Administration defenders thoughtfully remind progressives that the United States views itself as a classless society. Citizens vote their dreams rather than their envy or fears. The conservative rejoinder is effective and correct as far as it goes. Democrats should take it seriously. It won’t do merely to suggest that a tax policy favors the rich when a substantial segment of the population remains convinced it will or could become rich. But for most poor or working class Americans to become rich, or even to have a chance to achieve a modicum of material comfort, Americans must enjoy equality of economic opportunity. If most Americans
 are not inclined to demand the rigid equalization of comforts and lifestyles, they do insist on access to those resources needed to get ahead in a modern society. Economic policy over the last quarter century has indeed been a form of class war, a war that has increasingly deprived working and middle class Americans of just those chances to succeed. The distributional impact of government depends not just on relative tax shares but also on the benefits and burdens of government expenditures and regulatory decisions. Contrary to Administration claims, the output of government now increasingly benefits established corporate interests. The US economy is crony capitalism run amuck. Even many moderate Republicans had the decency to express embarrassment about recent Homeland Security legislation that included special limitations of liability for vaccine manufacturers. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. While Congress ponders tax relief for dividend recipients, the
 Federal Communications Commission has scrapped most rules pertaining to network TV concentration, just as it has already done for radio. Beyond the impact on diversity, such changes are an enormous economic windfall to the established players in media markets. Since the 1996 radio deregulation, the number of radio owners has decreased by 30 and most radio markets have become oligopolies. Media concentration is not only detrimental to would- be media entrepreneurs but also harms the small businesses that advertise on local radio. The recent waves of media concentration have are only the latest result of long standing government favoritism. The electromagnetic spectrum was itself a gift of a finite public resource to private interests. That gift was predicated on a requirement that broadcasters serve the public interest, a requirement now waved. On top of that gift, the Federal Government granted these established media spectrum space for so-called HDTV, a gift so outrageous
 that even then Senator Robert Dole protested. Federal dollars also increasingly flow to those who have. At the same time the Administration hopes to tighten federal requirements for such programs as the earned income tax credit, school lunches, and federal housing subsidies, it expands defense, agriculture, highway and security outlays. Military contractors often enjoy the benefits of cost plus contracts. As the Administration talks of its plans to create a free market economy in Iraq, it grants no bid, monopoly contracts to such favored giant as Halliburton. Agricultural subsidies, defended with the rhetoric of the family farm, provide vastly disproportionate benefits to agribusiness. Publicly subsidized medical research is turned over to major pharmaceutical giants, which then use this research en route to patents of new drugs yielding extraordinary profit margins. Many of today’s highest flying corporate tycoons enjoy their position not because of entrepreneurial
 success but because they benefit from public largesse and federally sponsored research. Yet despite much largesse, corporate performance has lag

[BRC-NEWS] The Politics of Class War

[j w]

http://commondreams.org/views03/0702-02.htm
Published on Wednesday, July 2, 2003 by CommonDreams.org The Politics of Class War by John Buell The centerpiece of President Bush’s “economic stimulus” plan, ending the so-called double taxation of dividends, is unlikely to have much immediate impact. Its contribution to long-term growth is almost as unlikely. Nonetheless, the proposal has already had one useful effect, stimulating a long neglected discussion of class. Democrats and even some mainstream media point out that reductions in the taxation of dividends are a poor mechanism for fiscal stimulus. Only about the top five percent of the population has significant stock holdings apart from pension assets, which are unaffected by the Bush proposal. Since the wealthy generally save a substantial portion of any windfall, their purchases are unlikely to lead to broad- based economic expansion. Some Democrats have also
 gone on to attack the class skew in this proposal. Rather than eliminate the double taxation of ordinary wages and salaries, which are taxed through both payroll and income taxes, Bush targets relief at the income stream of the wealthy. This line of attack elicits a familiar chorus: progressives are engaging in “class warfare.” Administration defenders thoughtfully remind progressives that the United States views itself as a classless society. Citizens vote their dreams rather than their envy or fears. The conservative rejoinder is effective and correct as far as it goes. Democrats should take it seriously. It won’t do merely to suggest that a tax policy favors the rich when a substantial segment of the population remains convinced it will or could become rich. But for most poor or working class Americans to become rich, or even to have a chance to achieve a modicum of material comfort, Americans must enjoy equality of economic opportunity. If most Americans
 are not inclined to demand the rigid equalization of comforts and lifestyles, they do insist on access to those resources needed to get ahead in a modern society. Economic policy over the last quarter century has indeed been a form of class war, a war that has increasingly deprived working and middle class Americans of just those chances to succeed. The distributional impact of government depends not just on relative tax shares but also on the benefits and burdens of government expenditures and regulatory decisions. Contrary to Administration claims, the output of government now increasingly benefits established corporate interests. The US economy is crony capitalism run amuck. Even many moderate Republicans had the decency to express embarrassment about recent Homeland Security legislation that included special limitations of liability for vaccine manufacturers. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. While Congress ponders tax relief for dividend recipients, the
 Federal Communications Commission has scrapped most rules pertaining to network TV concentration, just as it has already done for radio. Beyond the impact on diversity, such changes are an enormous economic windfall to the established players in media markets. Since the 1996 radio deregulation, the number of radio owners has decreased by 30 and most radio markets have become oligopolies. Media concentration is not only detrimental to would- be media entrepreneurs but also harms the small businesses that advertise on local radio. The recent waves of media concentration have are only the latest result of long standing government favoritism. The electromagnetic spectrum was itself a gift of a finite public resource to private interests. That gift was predicated on a requirement that broadcasters serve the public interest, a requirement now waved. On top of that gift, the Federal Government granted these established media spectrum space for so-called HDTV, a gift so outrageous
 that even then Senator Robert Dole protested. Federal dollars also increasingly flow to those who have. At the same time the Administration hopes to tighten federal requirements for such programs as the earned income tax credit, school lunches, and federal housing subsidies, it expands defense, agriculture, highway and security outlays. Military contractors often enjoy the benefits of cost plus contracts. As the Administration talks of its plans to create a free market economy in Iraq, it grants no bid, monopoly contracts to such favored giant as Halliburton. Agricultural subsidies, defended with the rhetoric of the family farm, provide vastly disproportionate benefits to agribusiness. Publicly subsidized medical research is turned over to major pharmaceutical giants, which then use this research en route to patents of new drugs yielding extraordinary profit margins. Many of today’s highest flying corporate tycoons enjoy their position not because of entrepreneurial
 success but because they benefit from public largesse and federally sponsored research. Yet despite much largesse, corporate performance has l

[BRC-NEWS] The Politics of Class War

[j w]

http://commondreams.org/views03/0702-02.htm
Published on Wednesday, July 2, 2003 by CommonDreams.org The Politics of Class War by John Buell The centerpiece of President Bush’s “economic stimulus” plan, ending the so-called double taxation of dividends, is unlikely to have much immediate impact. Its contribution to long-term growth is almost as unlikely. Nonetheless, the proposal has already had one useful effect, stimulating a long neglected discussion of class. Democrats and even some mainstream media point out that reductions in the taxation of dividends are a poor mechanism for fiscal stimulus. Only about the top five percent of the population has significant stock holdings apart from pension assets, which are unaffected by the Bush proposal. Since the wealthy generally save a substantial portion of any windfall, their purchases are unlikely to lead to broad- based economic expansion. Some Democrats have also
 gone on to attack the class skew in this proposal. Rather than eliminate the double taxation of ordinary wages and salaries, which are taxed through both payroll and income taxes, Bush targets relief at the income stream of the wealthy. This line of attack elicits a familiar chorus: progressives are engaging in “class warfare.” Administration defenders thoughtfully remind progressives that the United States views itself as a classless society. Citizens vote their dreams rather than their envy or fears. The conservative rejoinder is effective and correct as far as it goes. Democrats should take it seriously. It won’t do merely to suggest that a tax policy favors the rich when a substantial segment of the population remains convinced it will or could become rich. But for most poor or working class Americans to become rich, or even to have a chance to achieve a modicum of material comfort, Americans must enjoy equality of economic opportunity. If most Americans
 are not inclined to demand the rigid equalization of comforts and lifestyles, they do insist on access to those resources needed to get ahead in a modern society. Economic policy over the last quarter century has indeed been a form of class war, a war that has increasingly deprived working and middle class Americans of just those chances to succeed. The distributional impact of government depends not just on relative tax shares but also on the benefits and burdens of government expenditures and regulatory decisions. Contrary to Administration claims, the output of government now increasingly benefits established corporate interests. The US economy is crony capitalism run amuck. Even many moderate Republicans had the decency to express embarrassment about recent Homeland Security legislation that included special limitations of liability for vaccine manufacturers. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. While Congress ponders tax relief for dividend recipients, the
 Federal Communications Commission has scrapped most rules pertaining to network TV concentration, just as it has already done for radio. Beyond the impact on diversity, such changes are an enormous economic windfall to the established players in media markets. Since the 1996 radio deregulation, the number of radio owners has decreased by 30 and most radio markets have become oligopolies. Media concentration is not only detrimental to would- be media entrepreneurs but also harms the small businesses that advertise on local radio. The recent waves of media concentration have are only the latest result of long standing government favoritism. The electromagnetic spectrum was itself a gift of a finite public resource to private interests. That gift was predicated on a requirement that broadcasters serve the public interest, a requirement now waved. On top of that gift, the Federal Government granted these established media spectrum space for so-called HDTV, a gift so outrageous
 that even then Senator Robert Dole protested. Federal dollars also increasingly flow to those who have. At the same time the Administration hopes to tighten federal requirements for such programs as the earned income tax credit, school lunches, and federal housing subsidies, it expands defense, agriculture, highway and security outlays. Military contractors often enjoy the benefits of cost plus contracts. As the Administration talks of its plans to create a free market economy in Iraq, it grants no bid, monopoly contracts to such favored giant as Halliburton. Agricultural subsidies, defended with the rhetoric of the family farm, provide vastly disproportionate benefits to agribusiness. Publicly subsidized medical research is turned over to major pharmaceutical giants, which then use this research en route to patents of new drugs yielding extraordinary profit margins. Many of today’s highest flying corporate tycoons enjoy their position not because of entrepreneurial
 success but because they benefit from public largesse and federally sponsored research. Yet despite much largesse, corporate performance has la

[BRC-NEWS] The Politics of Class War

[j w]

http://commondreams.org/views03/0702-02.htm
Published on Wednesday, July 2, 2003 by CommonDreams.org The Politics of Class War by John Buell The centerpiece of President Bush’s “economic stimulus” plan, ending the so-called double taxation of dividends, is unlikely to have much immediate impact. Its contribution to long-term growth is almost as unlikely. Nonetheless, the proposal has already had one useful effect, stimulating a long neglected discussion of class. Democrats and even some mainstream media point out that reductions in the taxation of dividends are a poor mechanism for fiscal stimulus. Only about the top five percent of the population has significant stock holdings apart from pension assets, which are unaffected by the Bush proposal. Since the wealthy generally save a substantial portion of any windfall, their purchases are unlikely to lead to broad- based economic expansion. Some Democrats have also
 gone on to attack the class skew in this proposal. Rather than eliminate the double taxation of ordinary wages and salaries, which are taxed through both payroll and income taxes, Bush targets relief at the income stream of the wealthy. This line of attack elicits a familiar chorus: progressives are engaging in “class warfare.” Administration defenders thoughtfully remind progressives that the United States views itself as a classless society. Citizens vote their dreams rather than their envy or fears. The conservative rejoinder is effective and correct as far as it goes. Democrats should take it seriously. It won’t do merely to suggest that a tax policy favors the rich when a substantial segment of the population remains convinced it will or could become rich. But for most poor or working class Americans to become rich, or even to have a chance to achieve a modicum of material comfort, Americans must enjoy equality of economic opportunity. If most Americans
 are not inclined to demand the rigid equalization of comforts and lifestyles, they do insist on access to those resources needed to get ahead in a modern society. Economic policy over the last quarter century has indeed been a form of class war, a war that has increasingly deprived working and middle class Americans of just those chances to succeed. The distributional impact of government depends not just on relative tax shares but also on the benefits and burdens of government expenditures and regulatory decisions. Contrary to Administration claims, the output of government now increasingly benefits established corporate interests. The US economy is crony capitalism run amuck. Even many moderate Republicans had the decency to express embarrassment about recent Homeland Security legislation that included special limitations of liability for vaccine manufacturers. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. While Congress ponders tax relief for dividend recipients, the
 Federal Communications Commission has scrapped most rules pertaining to network TV concentration, just as it has already done for radio. Beyond the impact on diversity, such changes are an enormous economic windfall to the established players in media markets. Since the 1996 radio deregulation, the number of radio owners has decreased by 30 and most radio markets have become oligopolies. Media concentration is not only detrimental to would- be media entrepreneurs but also harms the small businesses that advertise on local radio. The recent waves of media concentration have are only the latest result of long standing government favoritism. The electromagnetic spectrum was itself a gift of a finite public resource to private interests. That gift was predicated on a requirement that broadcasters serve the public interest, a requirement now waved. On top of that gift, the Federal Government granted these established media spectrum space for so-called HDTV, a gift so outrageous
 that even then Senator Robert Dole protested. Federal dollars also increasingly flow to those who have. At the same time the Administration hopes to tighten federal requirements for such programs as the earned income tax credit, school lunches, and federal housing subsidies, it expands defense, agriculture, highway and security outlays. Military contractors often enjoy the benefits of cost plus contracts. As the Administration talks of its plans to create a free market economy in Iraq, it grants no bid, monopoly contracts to such favored giant as Halliburton. Agricultural subsidies, defended with the rhetoric of the family farm, provide vastly disproportionate benefits to agribusiness. Publicly subsidized medical research is turned over to major pharmaceutical giants, which then use this research en route to patents of new drugs yielding extraordinary profit margins. Many of today’s highest flying corporate tycoons enjoy their position not because of entrepreneurial
 success but because they benefit from public largesse and federally sponsored research. Yet despite much largesse, corporate performance has 

[BRC-NEWS] R i p - O f f s a n d R e s i s t a n c e

[j w]

P r i v a t i z a t i o n  : 
R i p  -  O f f s   a n d   R e s i s t a n c e


Business Goes to School The For-Profit Corporate Drive to Run
Public Schools

By Barbara Miner


In September 1990, ABC’s “Good Morning America” was broadcast
from South Pointe Elementary School in Dade County, Florida.
The news peg was the first day of school at what was to be a
new and glorious era in education: for-profit, private
companies running public schools.


South Pointe was run by the for-profit Education Alternatives,
Inc. (EAI), the first for-profit private firm under contract to
run a public school and, at the time, a darling of the movement
to privatize schools.


John Golle, head of EAI, boasted that his company could run
public schools for the same amount of money, improve
achievement and still make a profit. “There’s so much fat in
the schools that even a blind man without his cane would find
the way,” he told Forbes magazine in 1992.


EAI’s rhetoric never matched the educational and financial
reality, however. EAI soon found it couldn’t run public schools
for less than the districts it contracted with, and its
promises of academic improvement proved elusive.


By the spring of 2000, EAI was in the midst of a corporate and
educational meltdown. The company, which changed its name to
Tesseract Group Inc., was millions in debt, got kicked off the
Nasdaq when its stock price tumbled to pennies a share, and
couldn’t even afford the postage to mail report cards home to
parents at one of its remaining charter schools in Arizona.
Today, the company is in bankruptcy.


EAI’s experience notwithstanding, other private contractors are
lining up to run public schools, claiming they can improve
educational performance while turning a profit.


Introducing The Emo’s
For decades, public schools have purchased any number of
products and services from private companies — whether textbook
companies or bus companies providing transportation. But in the
last decade, privatization took on a new meaning, as for-profit
companies hoped to get involved in education at a higher and
qualitatively different level. Their goal: to run schools or
entire school districts — from the hiring of teachers to the
development of curricula and the teaching of students. In the
process, they plan to compete with publicly run schools and
redefine the very definition of public education.


(The growth of for-profit companies running public schools is
an essential but not exclusive component in the education
privatization movement. Another aspect is the funneling of
public dollars directly to private schools, including religious
schools, through taxpayer-supported vouchers. The future of
that privatization effort now depends on the U.S. Supreme
Court, which will hear oral arguments this February in Zelman
v. Simmons-Harris on whether a Cleveland voucher program
violates the separation of church and state; a ruling is
expected in early summer. )


The Wall Street term for private companies that wish to manage
public schools is Educational Management Organizations (EMOs.)
Proponents of privatization say that if you like HMOs, as many
on Wall Street do, you’ll love EMOs. The industry’s backers are
fond of comparing public education to the healthcare industry
of 25 years ago, before the nationwide ascendancy of HMOs.


“Education today, like healthcare 30 years ago, is a vast,
highly localized industry ripe for change,” Mary Tanner,
managing director of Lehman Brothers, told a 1996 Education
Industry Conference in New York City. “The emergence of HMOs
and hospital management companies created enormous
opportunities for investors. We believe the same pattern will
occur in education.”


In the last year, for-profit school management companies in the
United States have consolidated themselves into a number of key
players, including:


• Edison Schools, Inc., based in New York City. Formed in 1992,
Edison is by far the biggest and most important player in the
field. It currently runs 136 schools serving 75,000 students in
22 states and the District of Columbia. In July, Edison
acquired LearnNow, a privately held company. Edison is the only
publicly held company among the major for-profit education
management companies. Key investors have included Microsoft
co-founder Paul Allen ($71 million through his Vulcan Ventures
in 1999), J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., and Investor AB, a Swedish
holding company.
• Chancellor Beacon Academies, formed by the merger in January
2002 of Beacon Education Management of Westborough,
Massachusetts and Miami-based Chancellor Academies, Inc. The
new company, the second largest for-profit school management
company in the United States, serves about 19,000 students on
46 campuses in eight states and the District of Columbia.
• Mosaica Education Inc., of San Rafael, California. Mosaica is
running 22 schools this year in 11 states; in June it took over
the struggling Advantage Schools Inc.
• National Heritage Academies, Grand Rapids, Michiga

[BRC-NEWS] 6 dead in Miss. factory shooting

[j w]

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2003-07-08-miss-shooting-
main_x.htm

USATODAY
Nation

6 dead in Miss. factory shooting

By Kevin Johnson, USA TODAY

A heavily armed man opened fire Tuesday on fellow workers at a
Lockheed Martin plant in Meridian, Miss., killing five people
at close range and wounding nine others before fatally shooting
himself, authorities said.

The rampage at the plant's assembly line began about 9:30 a.m.,
just after an employees' meeting that was attended by 13
people. Doug Williams, who family members said had worked at
the plant for more than 15 years, left the meeting and returned
from his car with a shotgun and a semiautomatic weapon,
authorities said.

Dressed in a black T-shirt and camouflage pants, with extra
ammunition stuffed in his pants and in a bandoleer around his
shoulder, Williams began firing. "He appeared to walk up to
individuals and fire at close range," Lauderdale County Sheriff
Billy Sollie said. "Several of his victims fell directly at
their work station."

Sollie said two of those killed had attended the meeting. He
said most of the victims were shot in the torso, and that
Williams, 48, died from a blast to his torso. Investigators
found more weapons and ammunition in Williams' car and home. It
was the deadliest workplace shooting in the USA since December
2000, when a software tester killed seven people at an Internet
firm in Wakefield, Mass.

Assembly line worker Booker Steverson said that after hearing a
shot, "I walked to the aisle and saw him aiming his gun. I took
off." Steverson said Williams, who was white, was a racist.
That was echoed by Bobby McCall, whose wife, Lanette, 47, a
black woman who had worked at the plant for 15 years, was among
those killed. "She said he made a threat against black people,"
a distraught McCall told reporters.

Authorities in Meridian, a city of about 40,000, were more
cautious about the idea that race was a factor. Four of those
killed by Williams were black; the other was white. But Sollie
told USA TODAY that most of the injured are white. He said
there did not seem to be a pattern in the targets' race or
gender.

Leon Williams, a cousin of the gunman, said he did not know of
any animosity Doug Williams had toward blacks. Leon Williams
said his cousin had been depressed and was "going through a lot
of things." He said Doug Williams had expressed concern "about
something to do with a meeting at work."

"I can't believe he would do something like this," Leon
Williams said. "He was tender-hearted, a loving guy. He had
friends who were black people."

In Bethesda, Md., a spokesman for Lockheed Martin, the nation's
largest defense contractor with about 125,000 employees,
declined to comment about Williams or Tuesday's meeting. The
Meridian plant employs about 150 and produces parts for fighter
jets.

Contributing: Wire reports 

__
Do you Yahoo!?
SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
http://sbc.yahoo.com

[IMPORTANT NOTE: The views and opinions expressed on this
list are solely those of the authors and/or publications,
and do not necessarily represent or reflect the official
political positions of the Black Radical Congress (BRC).
Official BRC statements, position papers, press releases,
action alerts, and announcements are distributed exclusively
via the BRC-PRESS list. As a subscriber to this list, you
have been added to the BRC-PRESS list automatically.]

[Articles on BRC-NEWS may be forwarded and posted on other
mailing lists, as long as the wording/attribution is not altered
in any way. In particular, if there is a reference to a web site
where an article was originally located, do *not* remove that.

Unless stated otherwise, do *not* publish or post the entire
text of any articles on web sites or in print, without getting
*explicit* permission from the article author or copyright holder.
Check the fair use provisions of the copyright law in your country
for details on what you can and can't do.

As a courtesy, we'd appreciate it if you let folks know how to
subscribe to BRC-NEWS, by leaving in the first seven lines of the
signature below.]

--
BRC-NEWS: Black Radical Congress - General News Articles/Reports
--
Unsubscribe: 
--
Subscribe: 
--
Digest: 
--
Help: 
--
Archive: 
--
Archive: 
-

[BRC-NEWS] As Stimulating as a Tax Cut

[j w]

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0711-07.htm

Published on Friday, July 11, 2003 
by the San Francisco Chronicle

As Stimulating as a Tax Cut -- a Living Wage
by Joan Ryan
 

THEY'RE handing out tax cuts like free samples to the folks who
don't need them, but the congressional hand wringing about
raising the minimum wage lumbers on.

The federal minimum of $5.15 an hour -- unchanged in six years
-- is so low that a full-time job still leaves a single parent
with one child about 12 percent below the federal poverty line.
Taking matters into their own hands, more than 100 cities
across the country have passed "living wage" laws, which set a
higher minimum wage that gives workers a fighting chance to
support their families without government hand-outs.

But most living-wage laws apply only to companies that contract
with the city. San Francisco is hoping to join Santa Fe, N.M.,
in going a step further: It wants to require all businesses in
the city to pay a minimum wage of $8.50 an hour. (California's
minimum wage is $6.75.) The initiative is expected to go before
voters in November.

The debate on San Francisco's proposal and on all living-wage
laws centers on several core questions:

Are do-gooders actually inflicting greater harm on businesses
and workers by relying on the government, rather than the free
market, to determine wages?

On the flip side: Aren't taxpayers subsidizing private
businesses by essentially picking up part of the underpaid
employees' salaries through food stamps and other government
assistance?

Economist Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts has
studied living-wage laws for the Political Economic Research
Institute. He found that the laws' costs generally ranged
between 1 and 2 percent of any given company's total production
costs or sales.

For most companies, Pollin found, the impact was not enough to
chase them from the cities or order layoffs, as critics always
warn. Some businesses covered the wage increase by raising
prices by 1 to 2 percent. In San Francisco, a hotel that
charges $200 a night for room would have to raise its price to
$204 a night. Companies can also choose to adjust salaries in
the executive suites or slightly compress profit margins.

"People can survive biologically on very, very little," Pollin
said. "What we're really talking about is what kind of society
we want to live in."

We're also talking about the social and economic benefits that
come with a person earning a living rather than relying on
government handouts. We can provide food and health care to the
poor through our tax dollars. Or the poor can provide for
themselves with higher wages, and we pay a bit more for goods
and services to cover the increase. Which scenario builds a
stronger community?

There are legitimate arguments against living wage laws. Some
businesses will withstand larger blows than others. In San
Francisco, the initiative needs to modify the wages for those
who earn the bulk of their salary from tips; otherwise
restaurants will be hurt.

But some of the criticism is puzzling. Some of the same people
who support tax cuts for the wealthy oppose a higher minimum
wage for the poor. If the theory behind the tax cut is that we
stimulate the economy by putting more money in consumers'
hands, wouldn't the equation still hold true if those hands
belong to poor people?

I heard one critic argue that raising wages would raise the
cost of child care, putting an even greater burden on working
families. So we should continue to pay child-care workers a
pittance so parents can continue to contribute their labor to
businesses that pay them a pittance? Sounds like a good deal
for everybody but the child-care worker and the low-wage
parent.

When President Franklin Roosevelt supported the establishment
of a federal minimum wage in the mid-1930s, he argued that "no
business which depends for existence on paying less than living
wages to its workers has any right to exist in this country."
The minimum wage was always intended to be a living wage.
Roosevelt's words, long forgotten in Washington, are finding
new life in the cities, where many still believe a day's work
deserves a decent wage.

©2003 San Francisco Chronicle 

__
Do you Yahoo!?
SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
http://sbc.yahoo.com

[IMPORTANT NOTE: The views and opinions expressed on this
list are solely those of the authors and/or publications,
and do not necessarily represent or reflect the official
political positions of the Black Radical Congress (BRC).
Official BRC statements, position papers, press releases,
action alerts, and announcements are distributed exclusively
via the BRC-PRESS list. As a subscriber to this list, you
have been added to the BRC-PRESS list automatically.]

[Articles on BRC-NEWS may be forwarded and posted on other
mailing lists, as long as the wording/attribution is not altered
in any way. In particular, if there is a reference to a web site
where a

[BRC-NEWS] All Spin All The Time

[j w]

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0711-01.htm

Published on Friday, July 11, 2003 by TomPaine.com

All Spin All The Time
by Russ Baker
 

Viva Nihilism! It must be great working in the Bush White
House. Zero accountability. It's All Spin, All the Time.
Nothing matters but politics, hence no unfounded claim requires
correction or apology. Unless, of course, they are pushed to
the end of the plank, as they were recently with the tale about
Niger and nuclear materials.

Take those elusive Weapons of Mass Destruction. Despite the
failure of the concentrated might of the U.S.
military-intelligence complex to find anything that might
qualify in the remotest possible way, the administration labels
critics "revisionist historians" and imperturbedly moves on.
The initial assertions and touted "discoveries" usually get
more attention than does the sound of a balloon deflating.
That's why polls find a sizable chunk of the American public
still under the impression that WMD have been found.

Whatever Saddam's interest in WMD, the administration didn't
know what he had and didn't have solid evidence to make the
claims it did -- much less to launch a war over them. For those
amateur "revisionist historians" out there, here is a partial,
unscientific reconstruction of the claims that fizzled.

THE CLAIM:

"Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bombmaking and poisons
and deadly gases... [which] could allow the Iraqi regime to
attack America without leaving any fingerprints." - President
Bush, Oct. 7, 2002.

THE FACTS:

The alleged Al Qaeda training camp, which Colin Powell
described to the United Nations in February, is later revealed
to be outside Iraq's control and patrolled by Allied warplanes.
By late June, Michael Chandler, the head of the U.N. team
monitoring global efforts to counter Al Qaeda tells Agence
France Press: "We have never had information presented to us --
even though we've asked questions -- which would indicate that
there is a direct link."

THE SPIN:

State Dept. spokesman Richard Boucher responds: "Secretary
Powell provided clear and convincing evidence of the links
between Iraq and Al Qaeda."

THE CLAIM:

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein
recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,"
Bush declares in the State of the Union address.

THE FACTS:

In March, Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), tells the U.N.
Security Council that the documents substantiating the claim of
alleged Iraqi efforts to buy uranium in Niger were fakes (and
bad ones at that) and that "these specific allegations are
unfounded." The unnamed ex-ambassador whom the CIA sent to
check out the story tells The New Republic: "They knew the
Niger story was a flat-out lie."

THE SPIN:

Pass the buck, finally 'fessing up in a White House statement
delivered on July 7 that Bush should not have used the uranium
allegations in his address.

THE CLAIM:

U.S. officials present evidence suggesting that Iraq tried to
buy aluminum tubes for use in centrifuges for the uranium
enrichment process.

THE FACTS:

IAEA's ElBaradei later reports that extensive investigation
"failed to uncover any evidence" that Iraq intended to use the
tubes for any project other than the reverse engineering of
rockets.

THE SPIN:

Powell releases a contradictory interpretation of the tubes,
then the matter disappears.

THE CLAIM:

In early April, the Pentagon "confirms" discovery of a
biological and chemical weapons storage site near the town of
Hindiyah, complete with suspected sarin and tabun nerve agents.

THE FACTS:

Fourteen barrels of liquids are reassessed to be pesticide.

THE SPIN:

Silence.

THE CLAIM:

In early April, a white powder found at a site near Najaf is
described as possible chemical agents, and presented as a
likely "smoking gun."

THE FACTS:

The powder is an explosive.

THE SPIN:

Silence.

THE CLAIM:

"Biological laboratories described by our Secretary of State to
the whole world that were not supposed to be there, that are a
direct violation of the U.N. resolutions, have been
discovered," Bush tells reporters, on May 29, referring to
trailers the administration says are mobile labs.

THE FACTS:

For weeks, numerous independent experts express serious doubts
about the trailers' purposes; a classified State Department
intelligence memo cited by The New York Times also cautions
about premature conclusions.

THE SPIN:

"The experts have spoken and the judgment of the experts is
very clear on this matter," says Fleischer. Colin Powell splits
hairs in backing the White House: State experts "weren't saying
it was not a mobile lab, they just were not quite up in that
curve of confidence that the rest of the intelligence community
was at..."

THE CLAIM:

"We believe [Saddam] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear
weapons." - Vice President Cheney, March 16, 2003 on Meet the
Press.

THE FACTS:

After the fighting, an Iraqi nuclear scientist cuts a deal for
refuge with t

[BRC-NEWS] Corporate Tax Cheats

[j w]

http://commondreams.org/views03/0723-08.htm
 
Published on Wednesday, July 23, 2003 by Arianna Online 


Corporate Tax Cheats Wreak Havoc On The Neediest Among Us 


by Arianna Huffington

  


All across corporate America, high-priced accountants are hard at work helping companies avoid billions in taxes by hiding profits in a host of tax sheltering schemes. No summer vacation at the beach reading trashy actuarial tables for these guys. And they're doing a bang-up job: Corporations are currently turning over 30 percent less of their profits to the taxman than they did 20 years ago. 
Meanwhile, all across the country, state governments, facing the biggest budget crisis since the Great Depression, are being forced to slash programs and cut services. 
Gee, do you think there might be a connection? You can bet your vanishing after-school care, prenatal health program, and local law enforcement service there is. 
According to a new study released last week by the Multistate Tax Commission, a nonpartisan coalition of state taxing authorities, corporate tax shelters robbed states of $12.4 billion in desperately needed revenues in 2001 -- a figure that represents more than a third of the money corporations rightfully owed. 
Companies sheltering their assets overseas are draining another $70 billion a year from the federal Treasury -- funds that often make their way back to states through programs such as Head Start and AmeriCorps. 
But as damning as those statistics are, they're still just abstract figures. In order to really understand the devastating impact these lost revenues are having, we need to put flesh and bone to the numbers. 
Take California: according to the Multistate Tax Commission, the Golden State lost an estimated $1.34 billion in corporate tax revenue because of tax shelters. Now that might not seem like that much money to a state facing an elephantine $38 billion budget deficit, but it means very specific cuts to very specific programs that affect hundreds of thousands of people. 
For example, just $520 million of the $1.34 billion the tax dodgers kept for themselves would make it possible for the state to avoid the closure of -- or severe cost cutting at -- 250 to 350 nursing homes. Just $380 million would prevent the loss of childcare and daycare services for 429,000 children. And just $600 million would make it unnecessary to up the entry age for kindergartners -- a change that will keep 110,000 children from starting school in the fall. But because of the tax shelterers' greed, those dark clouds are gathering on the California horizon. 
Chew on that for a second. Thanks to California's corporate tax cheats, thousands of elderly nursing home residents are facing the prospect of being tossed out on the street. Maybe the high-powered corporate numbers-crunchers can take a break from devising ways to bilk the taxman and figure out, pro bono, how the state's nursing home operators are supposed to cut corners and still protect the health and well being of those in their care. Feed their elderly charges less often? Substitute sugar pills for life-sustaining medication? Fill their oxygen tanks with helium? 
And what about those 110,000 California kids who may have to put their education on hold for another year? What are we supposed to tell them: "Hey, who needs kindergarten when you've got Sponge Bob Squarepants"? 
Need more evidence of the difference this lost revenue would make? Consider that just $18 million of the lost $1.34 billion (only 1.3 percent of the total skimmed) would allow California officials to fully fund the California Arts Council, the 27-year old agency that brings artists, writers, and performers into the state's public schools. Artists like poet Dana Lomax, who inspires low-income elementary school students to believe that "Imagination can take you anywhere" or actress Jill Holden, who conducts workshops at treatment centers for abused and neglected kids. Instead, the Arts Council is on the budget chopping block. Thanks corporate tax crooks! 
And the same sort of pain being felt in California is being meted out all across the country, with beleaguered state legislatures forced to cut programs and eliminate services that could easily have been funded by lost revenues. 
In Florida, which lost $554 million to tax shelters in 2001, just $7.7 million would have saved a program that provided glasses and hearing aids for low-income people. 
In Oregon, which is dealing with $80 million in lost corporate taxes, $14.5 million would have prevented the 19,000-student Hillsboro school district from shutting its doors 17 days early this year. 
In South Carolina, which also was denied $80 million because of tax shelters, a mere $1.4 million would have stopped the round of budget cuts that cost Traci Young Cooper, the state's 2001 Teacher of the Year, her job. The honor earned her a trip to the White House to meet President Bush; maybe if she knew what was coming she could have lobbied 

[BRC-NEWS] Liberal Signs of Life

[j w]

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030714&s=alterman
Liberal Signs of Life
stop the presses by Eric Alterman
July 14, 2003 issue
If you want to date the beginning of conservative domination of the opinion media, you could do worse than to pick Election Day 1964. That's when Richard Mellon Scaife, later joined by many others, figured out that it was pointless for wealthy conservatives to pour money into the coffers of conservative candidates like Barry Goldwater without first investing in their own form of media through which to communicate their ideas. 
The multibillion-dollar conservative investment helped to create much of the media world in which we wallow today. Liberals are now grappling with a problem not unlike that facing the far right forty years ago: how to get one's ideas across through media that twist and distort them beyond recognition? It is hardly an academic question. 
Just about the only thing liberals have going for them these days is that most Americans agree with them on the issues. This is partly due to the annexation of the Republican Party by its Taliban faction. It is also likely a product of the relative conservatism of today's liberals, present company included. Today, "liberal" is just another word for "not nuts." Don't go around invading countries that do not pose a threat and lie to the world to justify it; don't destroy the nation's fiscal health in order to give trillion-dollar gifts to the wealthy; don't gratuitously insult countries whose help we need to maintain world peace and security; don't shred the Constitution at every opportunity, etc., etc. 
Why, then, if liberals are speaking little more than consensus common sense, do they seem to be in danger of political oblivion? Well, lots of reasons actually, but a big one is a right-wing opinion media that treats these principles as if they derived from The Communist Manifesto. Report on dissension about Iraq between Republicans and military men, and you're treated as the vanguard of the antiwar movement. Do the math on a tax cut geared to multimillionaires, and you've declared "class warfare." Mention that Bush is neglecting "homeland security" while bin Laden remains at large, and you're giving aid and comfort to the enemy. 
The power of conservatives to control the discourse through biased media is only now beginning to dawn on liberals. Progressive politicians, activists and intellectuals once believed that all they had to do was make their case, and the media would faithfully pass it along to voters, who would judge the argument on its merits. Thanks to the "liberal media" fallacy, few seemed to notice that the world hasn't worked this way for a while. Don't forget that shortly after coming into office, Bill Clinton himself complained he did not get "one damn bit of credit from the knee-jerk liberal press." 
Well, at least that jig is up. If you run into Clinton these days, he's likely to bend your ear about the media's shameless affection for Bush & Co. (Hillary's belated "aha moment" apparently came with her discovery of the profoundly misnamed "vast right-wing conspiracy." If only she had known during the healthcare debate...) Today liberals are finally starting to take the first steps in the enormously expensive task of building their own media institutions. 
MoveOn.org, the savviest progressive organization in recent memory, is brilliantly exploiting the communications potential of the Internet to bring pressure to bear on politicians, support progressive campaigns and raise money for the right causes. Its recent "presidential primary" is just one of the group's innovative ideas. And John Podesta, Clinton's much-admired former Chief of Staff, together with top former Gephardt aide Laura Nichols, is leading the effort to launch what is widely described as a "liberal Heritage Foundation" with a projected $10 million annual operating budget. 
Meanwhile Al Gore, joined by Joel Hyatt, the founder of Hyatt Legal Services and a former Democratic candidate for Senate in Ohio, is in the process of tapping into his presidential support network to explore the possibility of forming a new liberal cable network. Given the daunting challenges involved before production can even begin--including raising hundreds of millions of dollars and then obtaining carriage agreements with countless local cable systems--he'll need all the help he can get if he is serious. So far he's getting some from Steve Rattner of Quadrangle and Stan Shuman of Allen and Co. 
In addition, venture capitalists Sheldon and Anita Drobny have formed AnShell Media LLC to try to put together a national network of liberal talk-radio stations. They've hired Jon Sinton, who helped start Jim Hightower's nationally syndicated radio program in the 1990s, before Disney bought up the network that carried it, and Michael Eisner unceremoniously dumped the Texas populist from its programming. (Hightower had made Eisner's greed in the face of Disney's poor performance

[BRC-NEWS] The World Was Not Enough

[j w]

http://www.inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=289_0_4_0_C

The World Was Not Enough

By Christian Parenti 
7.28.03


The role of intellectuals and ideas in the project of empire
has once again come to the fore. Witness the triumphs of
William Kristol, Robert Kagan and others associated with the
Project for the New American Century, who in many ways scripted
the Iraq war long before it happened. The basic scaffolding of
modern empire requires ideas, after all, just as much as it
requires violence and treasure.

Thus it is worth consulting Neil Smith’s new book on Isaiah
Bowman, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude
to Globalization. This volume marks something of a turn for
Smith, whose first book, Uneven Development, focused on Marxist
geographic theory. His second book, the widely read and
perfectly timed New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the
Revanchist City, applied such theory to gentrification in a
series of international case studies. In American Empire we get
something totally different: a richly detailed, very empirical
political biography. (In the interest of full disclosure I
should mention that I know Smith fairly well.)

Not often addressed by historians, Isaiah Bowman was in fact an
important player in the intellectual entourages of both Woodrow
Wilson and FDR. He helped draw up the modern border of Europe,
helped shape America’s non-committal policy toward Jewish
refugees from Nazism, and ran Johns Hopkins University and the
Council of Foreign Relations. In all these capacities, he
sought to harness ideas to the larger project of American
commercial and political power on a global scale. Smith’s
detailed and well-crafted book is simultaneously the story of
Bowman, the story of geography as a discipline, and the story
of American imperial thinking from World War I to the onset of
the Cold War.

Fittingly, Bowman’s tale begins on the land. Born in 1878 and
raised on a poor farm in Michigan, Bowman was acutely aware of
the enduring frontier character of his natal terrain. By age
19, the bookish farm boy had taken a job as a country
schoolteacher. This coincided with America’s “splendid little
war” in Cuba and the Philippines. To do his part, Bowman formed
a volunteer militia but was never called up. By dint of hard
work and study, he soon made his way to Michigan State and from
there to Harvard. This bastion of WASP erudition and social
power transformed Bowman from a provincial into a real scholar
and properly connected elite. At Harvard the young man studied
geography, a discipline that was then a quasi-hard science, a
stepchild of geology dominated, as Terry Eagleton recently put
it, by “maps and chaps.” Bowman’s impact on geography—he later
taught it at Yale—was to help steer the discipline toward a
more social footing, but it would be many more decades before
geography became the highly theoretical, political, and
star-studded field we’ve seen in recent years.

As part of his geographical fieldwork, Bowman participated in
several South American expeditions mapping and “discovering”
places, in particular very high places in Peru. He was part of
the famous Machu Picchu expedition of 1911 led by the
self-aggrandizing Hiram Bingham, who later became governor of
Connecticut and a U.S. senator. The “discovery” of the ancient
Inca city was actually a rather simple publicity stunt by rich,
white adventurers. Local people had never really “lost” the
fabled city; indeed, some Quechua still lived on and around the
ruins.

Like the gentlemen geographers he emulated, Bowman was steeped
in racism. While on expedition in Peru he once commandeered
pack animals, “hijacked” several Quechua porters at gunpoint,
and even beat another who was reluctant to work. But this sort
of thing, like empire more generally, was justified in Bowman’s
worldview by the noble and anesthetizing pursuit of scientific
knowledge. It was an intellectualizing escape clause that
Bowman would use throughout his life.

In reality, Bowman’s life and thought was progressively less
scientific and evermore pragmatically political. As a young
man, his interests were by today’s definitions rather
geological: He studied with William Morris Davis and was
interested in the role of water in creating landscape; his
explorations in Peru involved mapping rivers. Later, Bowman
became interested in settlement patterns; his assumption was
that “the character of the physical features” of the earth “has
been a prominent factor in the life of a race.” Bowman believed
more or less that space created race, and that the interaction
of racial national groups with the physical landscape was the
essence of politics. Connected to this notion—which leaned
heavily on the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel, who first
coined the term Lebensraum—was the idea that politics was about
controlling people and territory.

Yet later in life, Bowman would articulate a form of American
control that left direct territorial control aside for the sake
of eco

[BRC-NEWS] The Bush Administration's Top 40 Lies about War and Terrorism

[j w]

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0730-06.htm

The Bush Administration's Top 40 Lies about War and Terrorism
Bring 'em On!
by Steve Perry

Published on Wednesday, July 30, 2003 by the Minneapolis City
Pages


1) The administration was not bent on war with Iraq from 9/11
onward.

Throughout the year leading up to war, the White House publicly
maintained that the U.S. took weapons inspections seriously,
that diplomacy would get its chance, that Saddam had the
opportunity to prevent a U.S. invasion. The most pungent and
concise evidence to the contrary comes from the president's own
mouth. According to Time's March 31 road-to-war story, Bush
popped in on national security adviser Condi Rice one day in
March 2002, interrupting a meeting on UN sanctions against
Iraq. Getting a whiff of the subject matter, W peremptorily
waved his hand and told her, "Fuck Saddam. We're taking him
out." Clare Short, Tony Blair's former secretary for
international development, recently lent further credence to
the anecdote. She told the London Guardian that Bush and Blair
made a secret pact a few months afterward, in the summer of
2002, to invade Iraq in either February or March of this year.

Last fall CBS News obtained meeting notes taken by a Rumsfeld
aide at 2:40 on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. The notes
indicate that Rumsfeld wanted the "best info fast. Judge
whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not
only UBL [Usama bin Laden] Go massive. Sweep it all up.
Things related and not."

Rumsfeld's deputy Paul Wolfowitz, the Bushmen's leading
intellectual light, has long been rabid on the subject of Iraq.
He reportedly told Vanity Fair writer Sam Tanenhaus off the
record that he believes Saddam was connected not only to bin
Laden and 9/11, but the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

The Bush administration's foreign policy plan was not based on
September 11, or terrorism; those events only brought to the
forefront a radical plan for U.S. control of the post-Cold War
world that had been taking shape since the closing days of the
first Bush presidency. Back then a small claque of planners,
led by Wolfowitz, generated a draft document known as Defense
Planning Guidance, which envisioned a U.S. that took advantage
of its lone-superpower status to consolidate American control
of the world both militarily and economically, to the point
where no other nation could ever reasonably hope to challenge
the U.S. Toward that end it envisioned what we now call
"preemptive" wars waged to reset the geopolitical table.

After a copy of DPG was leaked to the New York Times,
subsequent drafts were rendered a little less frank, but the
basic idea never changed. In 1997 Wolfowitz and his true
believers--Richard Perle, William Kristol, Dick Cheney, Donald
Rumsfeld--formed an organization called Project for the New
American Century to carry their cause forward. And though they
all flocked around the Bush administration from the start, W
never really embraced their plan until the events of September
11 left him casting around for a foreign policy plan.

2) The invasion of Iraq was based on a reasonable belief that
Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed a threat
to the U.S., a belief supported by available intelligence
evidence.

Paul Wolfowitz admitted to Vanity Fair that weapons of mass
destruction were not really the main reason for invading Iraq:
"The decision to highlight weapons of mass destruction as the
main justification for going to war in Iraq was taken for
bureaucratic reasons [T]here were many other important
factors as well." Right. But they did not come under the
heading of self-defense.

We now know how the Bushmen gathered their prewar intelligence:
They set out to patch together their case for invading Iraq and
ignored everything that contradicted it. In the end, this
required that Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al. set aside the
findings of analysts from the CIA and the Defense Intelligence
Agency (the Pentagon's own spy bureau) and stake their claim
largely on the basis of isolated, anecdotal testimony from
handpicked Iraqi defectors. (See #5, Ahmed Chalabi.) But the
administration did not just listen to the defectors; it
promoted their claims in the press as a means of enlisting
public opinion. The only reason so many Americans thought there
was a connection between Saddam and al Qaeda in the first place
was that the Bushmen trotted out Iraqi defectors making these
sorts of claims to every major media outlet that would listen.

Here is the verdict of Gregory Thielman, the recently retired
head of the State Department's intelligence office: "I believe
the Bush administration did not provide an accurate picture to
the American people of the military threat posed by Iraq. This
administration has had a faith-based intelligence attitude--we
know the answers, give us the intelligence to support those
answers." Elsewhere he has been quoted as saying, "The
principal reasons that Americans did not understa

[BRC-NEWS] Dump Bush-Build Independent Politics

[j w]

http://www.ippn.org/article.php?ID=fh93.html

Dump Bush-Build Independent Politics

By Ted Glick

"Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate
agitation, are those who want crops without plowing up the
ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want
the ocean without the awful roar of its water. This struggle
may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be
both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power
concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never
will."

-Frederick Douglass, August 4, 1857

It's a fact: there is a broadly-based, if loosely-connected,
independent progressive movement in this country. It is by no
means as coherent as it needs to become, but my assessment is
that there are hundreds of thousands of people around the
country who see themselves as activists for social change who
are clear that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are
the answer for the deep crises we are facing today.

Many of these people are members of the Green Party, or the
Labor Party, or one of several local or state "third parties"
around the country-the Progressive Party in Vermont, the United
Citizens Party in South Carolina, Progressive Dane in
Wisconsin, the Peace and Freedom Party in California, the
Mountain Party in West Virginia, the Green-Rainbow Party in
Massachusetts, the Working Families Party in New York, or
others.

Probably more independent activists are not members of one of
these parties, for various reasons. But these people tend to
vote for independents on election day and to speak up in
opposition to the corrupt and depressing reality of our
corporate-dominated, two-party political system.

Just about all of us, I would guess, participated in the
historic, world-wide, pre-war peace movement late last year and
early this year. That movement brought out upwards of a couple
of million people in this country to at least one street
demonstration over that period of time.

Now, two months after that war was supposedly ended-or, more
accurately, that "battle" in the planned on-going war-the Bush
Administration is facing serious problems. They are contending
with growing insurgencies in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Their
lies about Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" have been
exposed and could blow up in their faces. Combined with a
sputtering economy and massive federal indebtedness two years
after a multi-trillion dollar surplus, there are ample grounds
to expect Bush's poll numbers to continue to slide.

We in the independent progressive movement can help this
process along. We can build a significantly stronger mass
popular movement over the next 16 months leading up to the
November 4, 2004 election.

What should be the major objectives for our movement over that
period of time? In my view, there are three: 1) replacing Bush
with a Democrat (since we're not yet strong or organized enough
to replace him with a Green or an independent), 2) seeing the
Republicans lose control of at least one house of Congress, and
3) contributing to these objectives in a way which maintains
our political independence, keeps the Green Party out there
nationally as a visible political player, and strengthens our
unity and organization.

It is critical that we not get absorbed into the Democratic
Party. We need to function independent of it because we cannot
depend upon that big money-dominated institution, left to its
own devices, to accomplish either or both of those first two
objectives. We also need to function independently because we
all know that whoever is in office come January 20, 2005, we
need a strong and more unified independent progressive movement
to press for genuine, positive, fundamental change.

Here are some proposals for how we can best accomplish these
three objectives:

BUTTON-WEARING: We should all be wearing anti-Bush buttons-Dump
Bush in '04; Bush Must Go; Dump Bush-Build Independent
Politics; Bush Must Go-The People Yes!; other creative
slogans--everywhere we go, as much as possible. This is a small
but very important way that movements are built. We should
carry a few extra with us and recruit others to buy and wear
them. WE NEED MASS VISIBILITY OF ANTI-BUSH SENTIMENT!

BUMPER-STICKERING: Same thing as with buttons. Let's get them
up not just on the back bumpers of our cars but on poles,
walls, wherever people will see them.

TRUTH SQUADS WHEREVER BUSH GOES: When Bush, or others from his
campaign, are speaking publicly we should be there, in the
largest numbers we can mobilize, as loudly and visibly as
possible.

REGISTER THE "SLEEPING GIANT": The "sleeping giant" for our
movement is those potential voters-50% of them--who are so
turned off that they don't come out and vote. We need to carry
voter registration forms and do organized voter registration in
low-income communities and among youth, two major disaffected
groups. We need to agitate about the importance of this
upcoming election and the need for people to come out and vot

[BRC-NEWS] Bush's High Crimes Against the Nation

[j w]

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0801-07.htm
   
Published on Friday, August 1, 2003 by the Seattle Times

Bush's High Crimes Against the Nation
by Walter Williams
 

George W. Bush has knowingly deceived the American people on
the two overriding policy issues of his presidency — the
invasion of Iraq and the deep tax cuts.

Other presidents have lied. Only Bush has repeatedly duped
Congress and the public to thwart their exercise of informed
consent.

He is the first president to use propaganda as the main weapon
in selling his policies. Bush's unprecedented pattern of
deception may constitute an impeachable offense.

To date, only the deception in Iraq has brought forth the "I"
word. The case for impeachment is materially strengthened,
however, when Iraq is combined with Bush's 2001 and 2003
propaganda campaigns to convince the public that tax filers
with lower levels of income benefited more from his tax cuts
than the nation's richest families.

Hoodwinking the public that Saddam posed a perilous immediate
danger to the United States is Bush's greatest treachery. New
York Times columnist Paul Krugman observed: "If that claim was
fraudulent, the selling of the war is arguably the worst
scandal in American history."

John Dean, counsel to the president during Watergate, wrote in
mid-June: "Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national
security intelligence data, if proven, could be a 'high crime'
under the Constitution's impeachment clause."

Before the U.S. invasion, the strong consensus based on
intelligence community information held that there were only
negligible Iraqi ties with al-Qaida, no nuclear weapons program
of any consequence, and limited chemical and biological weapons
programs at most.

Lacking hard facts, as evidenced by his now much-discussed
deception in his State of the Union address that Iraq sought to
buy uranium in Africa, Bush mixed misinformation, distorted
allegations and unsubstantiated rumors to persuade the public
of the imminent danger posed by Saddam Hussein.

The experience with the massive tax cuts for families and
individuals in both 2001 and 2003 makes patently clear how Bush
used the same unscrupulous tactics over time. Moreover, the
level of the deception is staggering, as indicated by Bush's
2003 proposal to eliminate taxes on taxable corporate
dividends.

Joel Friedman and Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and
Policy Priorities pointed out: "The group with incomes over $1
million — which consists of about 226,000 tax filers in 2003 —
would receive roughly as much in benefits as the 127 million
tax filers with income below $140,000. Stated another way, the
top 0.2 percent of tax filers would receive nearly as much from
the tax cut as the bottom 95 percent of filers combined."

Claiming that the 127 million tax filers with incomes of under
$140,000 are the big winners when 226,000 of the richest tax
filers benefit nearly as much is surely world-class policy
deception.

But is it a high crime that warrants impeachment, as was the
case with Watergate?

Republican operatives breaking into the Democratic Party's
national committee headquarters and President Nixon's covering
it up clearly constituted crimes. Bush's propaganda campaign to
hide how much the tax cuts benefited the rich is more likely to
be viewed by the public as the stuff of politics in which
politicians make inflated claims about the importance of a
proposed policy and its likely benefits and ignore potential
problems.

In actuality, the president's purposeful duping of the public
on the nation's most critical policy issues strikes at the
heart of American constitutional democracy when it robs the
electorate of informed consent. This fraudulent act makes a
mockery of Abraham Lincoln's immortal words in the Gettysburg
Address, "that government of the people, by the people, for the
people, shall not perish from the Earth."

Deeming presidential deception a high crime under the
impeachment clause can open a Pandora's box of problems. Yet,
President Bush's actions appear to be a far more serious
assault on the Constitution than Watergate. I hold that
interpreting Bush's pattern of deception on his most important
policy proposals as a high crime against the nation is a
necessary step in rescuing American democracy.

Walter Williams is a professor emeritus at the Evans School of
Public Affairs, University of Washington, and author of the
forthcoming book, "Reaganism and the Death of Representative
Democracy."

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company 

__
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com

[IMPORTANT NOTE: The views and opinions expressed on this
list are solely those of the authors and/or publications,
and do not necessarily represent or reflect the official
political positions of the Black Radical Congress (BRC).
Official BRC statements, position papers, press releases,
action alerts, and announce

[BRC-NEWS] The Drug War Goes Up in Smoke

[j w]

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030818&s=abramsky

The Drug War Goes Up in Smoke

by Sasha Abramsky
August 18, 2003
The Nation
 

The war on terror may be too new to declare victory or defeat.
But this nation has been fighting a war on drugs for more than
a quarter-century, ever since New York Governor Nelson
Rockefeller mandated harsh drug sentencing in 1973--and it may
be time to announce that this is one war we've lost. More than
a million people are serving time in our prisons and jails for
nonviolent offenses, most drug- related, at a cost to the
public of some $9.4 billion a year. Many billions more are
spent by the states and the federal government on drug
interdiction, drug-law enforcement and drug prosecutions. Harsh
laws that require lengthy minimum sentences for the possession
of even small amounts of drugs have created a boom in the
incarceration of women, tearing mothers away from their
children. Much of the country's costly foreign-policy
commitments--especially in Latin America and the Caribbean--are
determined by drug-war priorities. And yet drug use has
actually soared, with twice as many teenagers reporting illegal
drug use in 2000 as in 1992.

The idea of putting more and more Americans in prison, a great
number of them for crimes related to drug addiction, grew out
of "broken windows" social theories developed by criminologists
such as James Q. Wilson in the 1970s. Wilson and his acolytes
believed that unless police and the courts aggressively cracked
down on crime, the social compact would degenerate into
anarchy. They argued that even nonviolent offenses, such as
breaking windows or possessing small amounts of marijuana,
contributed to an anything-goes climate in which more serious
crimes would proliferate. By the 1980s, these theories had
entered the political mainstream, allowing Presidents Reagan,
Bush, Clinton and now George W. Bush to score political points
by denouncing addicts and appearing tough on crime all at the
same time. Though politicians may have embraced this framework
because it sold well to voters, its implications for the
nation's health have been extreme. The drug war exiled
addiction from the realm of public health, placing it almost
exclusively in the hands of law enforcement and the courts.

At the philosophical core of this war on drugs, as fought by
the likes of Bush Sr.'s drug czar, Bill Bennett, are twin
ideas: Drug use is a moral wrong in itself, and drug use makes
people more likely to commit a host of other crimes, from
prostitution to burglary to murder. To fight drugs, the drug
warriors have insisted, it isn't enough to go after the
narco-kingpins; government agencies and courts must disrupt the
drug supply-and-demand by prosecuting, and imprisoning,
increasing numbers of low-level street dealers, even users
themselves.

In the past few years, however, these policies have come under
attack from surprising quarters. Opponents range from public
health activists to libertarian-minded political figures such
as former Secretary of State George Shultz. On the one hand,
the critics have argued, these policies have failed to make
progress toward a drug-free America. On the other, the war has
proved to be too expensive to sustain. In an era of shrinking
state resources, legislators have come to understand that
budgets cannot be balanced, and needed social programs cannot
be maintained, unless the country's bloated prison system is
shrunk back down to a more realistic size. These two concerns
have converged to create a window of opportunity for
drug-policy reformers to push their case where it matters most:
in the states.

Winter is hesitatingly giving way to spring, and New Mexico's
former Governor Gary Johnson is tending to a broken leg in
preparation for an expedition to climb Mount Everest. His
daredevil athleticism is a marker of the same temperament that
allowed Johnson, a Republican, to become the only governor ever
to publicly support drug legalization while in office. The
significant progress he made on drug-policy reform during his
eight-year tenure helped to turn the tide for state reform
movements across the country. "Johnson was a huge advocate,"
says Jerry Montoya, who runs a county needle-exchange program
in the state, "ahead of federal policy in terms of thinking, in
terms of philosophy."

In 2002, the last year of Johnson's tenure, state legislators
voted to limit the ability of state police to seize the assets
of those accused of drug-related crimes; to return a certain
degree of case-by-case discretion to judges trying nonviolent
drug cases; and to waive the federal ban on welfare benefits
for former drug offenders who have completed their sentences.

During his tenure, Johnson, a fiscal conservative, made enemies
of liberals through his hostility to tax-and-spend policies and
his fondness for privatizing government functions--including
prisons. He frequently vetoed the creation of new government
programs, using, in his words, "an iron f

[BRC-NEWS] Bush Appointee is a Bigot Disguised as a Scholar

[j w]

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0828-06.htm
 
Published, August 28, 2003 by the St. Paul Pioneer Press (Minnesota) 


Bush Appointee is a Bigot Disguised as a Scholar 


by Fedwa Wazwaz

 


President Bush's back-door appointment of Daniel Pipes to the United States Institute for Peace is an act of injustice. This appointment, which bypassed the normal approval process in the Senate, allowed a racist to masquerade as a peacemaker. 
What are Pipes' qualifications? His resume reads: 
• Launched Campus Watch, a Web site that included "dossiers" on professors and academic institutions thought to be too critical of Israel or too sympathetic to Islam and Muslims. 
• Advocated the unrestricted profiling of Muslims and Arabs. 
• Declared that 10 to 15 percent of all Muslims are "potential killers." 
• Recommended the "vigilant application of social and political pressure to ensure that Islam is not accorded special status of any kind in this country." 
Does Pipes have any experience in peace and conflict resolution? None. 
Pipes' supporters mention his "prophecy" of warning Americans that Muslim terrorists were going to attack America. Keep in mind that the terrorists were not exactly secretive that they were planning a "surprise attack." Even so, Pipes fails to comprehend that 9/11 was an act of terrorists and not the Muslim people en masse. 
One does not hear Pipes or his supporters replay and remind the American people of Baruch Goldstein, who massacred scores of Muslims kneeling in prayer during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan — or of Allan Goodman, who entered the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and started firing shots randomly at Muslims. These are two American Jews, among the thousands of illegal settlers who exported violence and terror from America to the Palestinian Territories. 
Pipes claims it is militant Islam and Muslims he is attacking. However, he gives no measurable criteria to differentiate between a radical Muslim and a moderate one. More troublesome is that Pipes supports Mujahedeen-e Khalq, a group designated as a terrorist group by the State Department. One gets the impression that if you disagree with his political views, you're a Muslim radical. 
Regardless of how many columns Pipes wrote on Islam and Muslims, his writings lack an empathetic understanding of Muslims. He never explores Muslim or Arab feelings and perceptions. He writes from a position far away, looking down in disgust at them and obsessively looking for dirt to smear their image in public discourse. The tone is always accusatory, hostile and blaming, destroying any possibility of discussion, communication or dialogue. In his own words, "the Palestinians are a miserable people … and they deserve to be." 
Pipes' scholarship lacks an appreciation of Islamic traditions, history or culture. Rather, Pipes consistently attacks any positive portrayal of Islam or Muslims, such as the positive portrayal of Islamic history and beliefs in public schools and the PBS documentary "Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet." 
Pipes' boasts of a doctorate from Harvard, yet he falsely claimed that Muslims have no real religious attachments to the city of Jerusalem. When he cannot prove his wild accusations, he resorts to paranoia suspicions, claiming to have a special mental "filter" which allows him to detect those who want to "create a Muslim state in America." 
When he can't find dirt on Muslims, he fabricates it. In one of his New York Post columns, Pipes fallaciously wrote, "Muslims are only 4 percent of Denmark's 5.4 million people but make up a majority of the country's convicted rapists, an especially combustible issue given that practically all the female victims are non-Muslim." To make such a false statement clearly illustrates a malicious intent. 
Pipes' supporters argue his criticism is in the best interests of Muslims and America. They need to explain, then, why he attacks the acceptance, equality and liberty of Muslims and Arabs in America. He compared the American Muslim voter registration drives to those of the Communist Party USA and incited fear that "as the population of Muslims in the United States grows, so does anti-Semitism," and "black converts (to Islam) tend to hold vehemently anti-American, anti-Christian and anti-Semitic attitudes." 
I can sum up Pipes' logic in one word: bigotry. Bigotry is the child of an extremist, not a peacemaker. President Bush lost any credibility to attack extremism anywhere with his appointment of an extremist to the Institute for Peace. 
Wazwaz is a Muslim activist residing in Crystal, Minnesota and a former Pioneer Press community columnist. 
Copyright 1996-2003 Knight Ridder 
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software

[BRC-NEWS] Sunny Summer Optimism

[j w]

FROM: 

Sunny summer optimism
By Michael Roberts

As I write, the world’s stock markets are hitting their highs
for the year. Optimism rules in this sunniest and hottest of
summers. The bulls (investors who reckon stock prices are going
to rise) are in the ascendancy and the bears (those who 
forecast falling share prices) are in their caves.

The world’s stock markets peaked back in March 2000 at the 
height of the euphoria over the hi-tech revolution and the dot.com 
mania. The stock markets then fell dramatically, nearly matching the
fall in 1929-32 and mirroring the collapse of the Japanese 
stock market after 1989. Their value plummeted over 60% in the next
three years and for three years in a row share prices were 
lower at the end of the year than they started – 2000, 2001 and 2002.
They have not fallen four years in a row since 1929-32 and no
economist or Wall Street soothsayer was prepared to predict 
such a calamity for 2003.

The optimists were shaking in their boots when Bush launched
his attack on Iraq. The stock market reached new lows. However,
after ‘victory’ was declared, investors were hugely relieved
and went on a buying spree. Market prices jumped 25% and in 
Germany they leaped an astronomical 60%.

Investors were encouraged to buy by the actions of the two 
great financial players in the economy: the central bank of the US,
the Federal Reserve Bank, and the US government. The 
septuagenarian guru of finance capital, Mr Greenspan, Chairman of the Fed, 
announced a series of interest rate cuts and pumped billions of dollars
into the banking system. The Bank of Japan followed suit and
even the conservative European Central Bank came in with rate
cuts. Businesses and houseowners were told: buy, buy, buy 
because you can borrow all you want and at historically low rates of
interest. Indeed, the big three auto manufacturers in the US
announced unbelievable discounts on their cars, along with no
deposit and no need to pay for three years and then at low 
interest rates. In effect, they were giving the vehicles away!

At the same time, that Texas ranger Bush announced tax cuts 
that would be paid out immediately in cheques to every household and
massive increases in arms spending and ‘homeland security’ to
boost the production and profits of the arms manufacturers, 
security companies and anybody who could get a government contract.

No wonder the optimists bought the stock market. The stock 
market was predicting that, thanks to Messrs Greenspan and Bush, the
US economy was set to boom. And virtually every economist in
the US is predicting at least 3-4% economic growth in the 
second half of this year compared to the weak rise of 1.5-2.0% in the
first half.

Is this optimism justified? Are the US and the world set to 
turn the corner? The global economy will boom, Iraq will be 
pacified, the Middle East will follow the road map to peace and, above
all, corporations will make big profits and stock market 
investors will make a killing. That’s the theory.

But hold on a minute. Are things so rosy? Take the US economy.
In the second quarter of this year, it grew at a rate of just
2.4%. That was faster than the 1.2% in the first quarter, so
the optimists were happy. But when you look at the figures, the
reason for the faster growth becomes clear: ‘defence’ spending
by the government. That was up 44% over the previous quarter.
If you take out Bush’s spending on arms and the war in Iraq 
from the equation, the economy grew no faster than in the first 
quarter.

It’s the same with profits. This is the Achilles heel of 
capitalism. Without profit, capitalists won’t invest in replacing equipment
and they won’t employ people. At the height of the tech boom
in the late 1990s, the margin of profit made on each unit sold
by US companies was, on average, 13.5%. By the time of the 
depth of the recession and 9/11, that margin had fallen to an 
historic low of 7.5%. Corporations could not sell their goods or 
services and they could not raise their prices either. They were 
desperate and they saw only one way out: cut costs.

>From the moment Bush gained the presidency (through his electoral ‘coup’) at the beginning of 2001 to this summer of 2003, US 
companies have sacked over 3m Americans. They also stopped investing. The
result was that they got costs down sharply and the profit 
margin rose – from 7.5% to 8.5%. That’s all.

It’s not enough. Why did so many have to pay the price of their
job for so little profit gain? The answer is that US, European
and Japanese corporations have still not been able to raise 
production much and have been totally unable to raise prices. Indeed, in
business circles, prices are falling, not rising. Deflation is
already there. In Japan, overall prices have been falling for
years. In the US and Europe, prices of goods sold in the shops
have also been static or falling. Only prices of services like
healthcare, insurance, banking, etc., have been rising.

The manufacturin

[BRC-NEWS] WWW.Costofwar.com

[j w]

CHECK OUT THIS WEBSITE !!!
 
www.costofwar.com
 

War affects everyone, not just those directly involved in the fighting. This webpage is a simple attempt to demonstrate one of the more quantifiable effects of war: the financial burden it places on our tax dollars.
To the right you will find a running total of the amount of money spent by the US Government to finance the war in Iraq. This total is based on estimates from the Congressional Budget Office. Below the total are a number of different ways that we could have chosen to use the money. Try clicking on them; you might be surprised to learn what a difference we could have made.
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software

[BRC-NEWS] Homeland Insecurity

[j w]

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030922&s=corn 
Homeland Insecurity
by DAVID CORN
[from the September 22, 2003 issue]
In early August, as George W. Bush was beginning a monthlong working vacation at his Texas ranch, he told reporters, "We learned a lesson on September the 11th, and that is, our nation is vulnerable to attack. And we're doing everything we can to protect the homeland." Everything we can. That was a bold statement. But it was not accurate. Indeed, it was one of the more galling misrepresentations of his presidency, for crucial areas of homeland security--ports, chemical plants, emergency response, biodefense--are not getting adequate attention or funding. Two years after the nation's vulnerability was exposed, at the price of 3,000 lives, everything is not being done. Why? Because, in part, of the Administration's strategic and ideological assumptions. 
Here are a few recent and troubling indicators: 
§ In June a Council on Foreign Relations task force--headed by former Republican Senator Warren Rudman--issued a report noting that "the United States remains dangerously ill-prepared to handle a catastrophic attack on American soil." According to this study, most fire departments are short on radios and breathing apparatuses and only 10 percent are able to handle a building collapse. Police departments across the country lack the protective gear necessary to secure a site struck by a weapon of mass destruction. Most public health labs do not have the personnel or equipment to respond to a chemical or biological attack. The task force estimated the country will fall $98.4 billion short in funding needs for emergency responders over the next five years. And a study released by RAND in August essentially seconded the CFR task force report. 
§ According to a June report by the Century Foundation's Homeland Security Project, "State and local governments have complained that they cannot improve their preparedness without more money. The federal government promised $3.5 billion in aid, but only $2.2 billion has been made available so far." 
§ In June Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge announced about $300 million in funding for improving security at ports. The Coast Guard, though, has estimated that $1 billion is needed. Ports throughout the United States have asked for nearly that much to finance 1,380 security projects. "Any and all funding is helpful, but [the money provided] really doesn't even come close to what is needed," Maureen Ellis, a spokeswoman for the American Association of Port Authorities, told the Baltimore Sun. Stephen Flynn, a retired Coast Guard commander and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, worked on a CFR terrorism study that preceded the report on emergency responders. He complains that the government has spent only about $10 million on security for maritime containers. "We've invested so little to date," he warns. 
§ A review conducted by the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan good-government outfit, found that the government is drastically short on medical and scientific employees for its biodefense programs. 
§ In late July the Transportation Security Administration asked Congress for permission to reduce its air marshal program by 20 percent, at a time when the Bush Administration was issuing warnings about hijackings. To counter the ensuing bad PR, Ridge declared there would be no reduction in the program. (He later announced its reassignment to another agency.) Since the TSA has received nearly $1 billion less than it had requested, it has been forced to implement other program cuts. 
§ The Bush Administration and Congress have yet to take action to enhance security at chemical plants. More than 100 facilities nationwide handle chemicals that, if released, could threaten a million or so people, and there are 15,000 other chemical sites to worry about. Yet no security standards have been established for these sites. The White House is supporting Senate legislation that would require chemical firms to conduct their own security assessments and has opposed a more stringent bill by Democratic Senator Jon Corzine that would grant Homeland Security the power to order specific security measures. Almost a year ago, Ridge himself said that voluntary industry efforts would not be sufficient to protect the public. Yet that's the Administration's approach. In March the General Accounting Office declared that "the federal government has not comprehensively assessed the chemical industry's vulnerabilities to terrorist attacks." Six months later, no such assessment has been
 made. 
So Bush is wrong. Not all steps are being taken. His White House has even opposed certain security measures. For example, the Administration has blocked legislation being pushed by Representative Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, that would require automated or manual screening of cargo shipped on passenger planes. Currently, most of this cargo--unlike traveler

[BRC-NEWS] Ashcroft to Target Judges

[j w]

http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/news/politics/6479793.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp
Ashcroft Memo Targets Lenient SentencesCURT ANDERSONAssociated Press
WASHINGTON - Attorney General John Ashcroft wants prosecutors to closely monitor which judges impose more lenient sentences than federal guidelines recommend, a step some critics say could limit judicial independence.
Ashcroft directed U.S. attorneys nationwide to promptly report to Justice Department headquarters when a sentence is a "downward departure" from guidelines and not part of a plea agreement in exchange for cooperation.
"The Department of Justice has a solemn obligation to ensure that laws concerning criminal sentencing are faithfully, fairly and consistently enforced," Ashcroft wrote in the memo issued July 28.
Critics say the result will be more power in the hands of prosecutors and impermissible restraints on judicial discretion.
"It's telling judges from the get-go, 'If you want to depart that you will be put on a list and you will be watched,'" said Ryan King, research associate with The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit group seeking alternatives to prison. "We're no longer judging a case on the merits."
Prosecutors were told in Ashcroft's memo to make sure the government is prepared to appeal more of these sentences if such a decision is made by lawyers in Solicitor General Theodore Olson's office. The upshot is that more decisions to appeal will be made at "main Justice" in Washington rather than left to prosecutors in the field.
Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo said the intent is to "get an accurate reporting of how the sentencing guidelines are being applied."
"It is an effort to make sure that someone who is convicted of a crime in California is treated no differently than a person who is convicted of the exact same crime in Massachusetts," Corallo said Thursday.
The sentencing guidelines were developed by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, created by Congress in 1984 to reduce disparities in sentences imposed around the country - subject to some judicial flexibility.
The memo, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, is part of a Justice Department effort to implement a law passed by Congress earlier this year intended to bring even greater uniformity to federal prison sentences.
President Bush in April signed into law the wide-ranging child protection legislation that, among other things, will establish a national "Amber Alert" communications network to respond to child abductions.
Tucked into that measure was a provision sponsored by Rep. Tom Feeney, R-Fla., intended to make it more difficult for federal judges to depart from federal sentencing guidelines and easier to appeal light sentences.
Prosecutors have complained for years that judges have too much leeway in imposing sentences. According to the most recent statistics, federal judges in 2001 departed from sentencing guidelines in about 35 percent of cases. About half those cases involved plea bargains endorsed by prosecutors.
Feeney's amendment drew opposition from the American Bar Association, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who said in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee that it "would seriously impair the ability of courts to impose just and reasonable sentences."
The U.S. Sentencing Commission also opposed the amendment, urging that it be permitted to complete a lengthy study into the reasons behind judges' decisions to impose lighter sentences.
In a letter to the Judiciary Committee, the commission's members noted that in 2001 the total departure figures were skewed higher because of certain federal policies in immigration cases.
Sens. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and other Democrats have introduced a bill to essentially undo the Feeney amendment and instead wait for the Sentencing Commission study.
"Congress needs to undo the damage that the Justice Department is doing to the federal criminal justice system," Kennedy said. "The independence of the federal judiciary serves the nation well."
ON THE NET
Justice Department: http://www.usdoj.gov
National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers: http://www.nacdl.org/departures


© 2003 AP Wire and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.http://www.philly.com 
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software

[BRC-NEWS] A Threat to the Rich

[j w]

 
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0916-10.htm


A Threat To The RichForcing the Poor Countries to Walk Out of the Cancun Trade Talks may Rebound on the West


by George Monbiot

 


Were there a Nobel Prize for hypocrisy, it would be awarded this year to Pascal Lamy, the EU's trade negotiator. A week ago, in the Guardian's trade supplement, he argued that the World Trade Organization (WTO) "helps us move from a Hobbesian world of lawlessness into a more Kantian world - perhaps not exactly of perpetual peace, but at least one where trade relations are subject to the rule of law". On Sunday, by treating the trade talks as if, in Thomas Hobbes's words, they were "a war of every man against every man", Lamy scuppered the negotiations, and very possibly destroyed the Organization as a result. If so, one result could be a trade regime, in which, as Hobbes observed, "force and fraud are ... the two cardinal virtues". Relations between countries would then revert to the state of nature the philosopher feared, where the nasty and brutish behavior of the powerful ensures that the lives of the poor remain short. 
At the talks in Cancun, in Mexico, Lamy made the poor nations an offer that they couldn't possibly accept. He appears to have been seeking to resurrect, by means of an "investment treaty", the infamous Multilateral Agreement on Investment. This was a proposal that would have allowed corporations to force a government to remove any laws that interfered with their ability to make money, and that was crushed by a worldwide revolt in 1998. 
In return for granting corporations power over governments, the poor nations would receive precisely nothing. The concessions on farm subsidies that Lamy was offering amounted to little more than a reshuffling of the money paid to European farmers. They would continue to permit the subsidy barons of Europe to dump their artificially cheap produce into the poor world, destroying the livelihoods of the farmers there. 
Of course, as Hobbes knew, "if other men will not lay down their right ... then there is no reason for anyone to divest himself of his: for that were to expose himself to prey". A contract, he noted, is "the mutual transferring of right", which a man enters into "either in consideration of some right reciprocally transferred to himself, or for some other good he hopeth for thereby". By offering the poorer nations nothing in return for almost everything, Lamy forced them to walk out. 
The trade commissioner took this position because he sees his public duty as the defense of the corporations and industrial farmers of the EU against all comers, be they the citizens of Europe or the people of other nations. He imagined that, according to the laws of nature that have hitherto governed the WTO, the weaker parties would be forced to capitulate and forced to grant to the corporations the little that had not already been stolen from them. He stuck to it even when it became clear that the poor nations were, for the first time, prepared to mobilize - as the state of nature demands - a collective response to aggression. 
I dwell on Pascal Lamy's adherence to the treasured philosophy of cant because all that he has done, he has done in our name. The UK and the other countries of Europe do not negotiate directly at the WTO, but through the EU. He is therefore our negotiator, who is supposed to represent our interests. But it is hard to find anyone in Europe not employed by or not beholden to the big corporations who sees Lamy's negotiating position as either desirable or just. 
Several European governments, recognizing that it threatened the talks and the trade Organization itself, slowly distanced themselves from his position. To many people's surprise, they included Britain. Though Pascal Lamy is by no means the only powerful man in Europe who is obsessed with the rights of corporations, his behavior appears to confirm the most lurid of the tabloid scare stories about Eurocrats running out of control. 
But while this man has inflicted lasting damage to Europe's global reputation, he may not have succeeded in destroying the hopes of the poorer nations. For something else is now beginning to shake itself awake. The developing countries, for the first time in some 20 years, are beginning to unite and to move as a body. 
That they have not done so before is testament first to the corrosive effects of the cold war, and second to the continued ability of the rich and powerful nations to bribe, blackmail and bully the poor ones. Whenever there has been a prospect of solidarity among the weak, the strong - and in particular the US - have successfully divided and ruled them, by promising concessions to those who split and threatening sanctions against those who stay. But now the rich have become victims of their own power. 
Since its formation, the rich countries have been seeking to recruit as many developing nations into the WTO as they can, in order to open up the develop

[BRC-NEWS] Racial Profiling Hearings

[j w]

http://IndianCountry.com/?1063727475
 
Amnesty International to hold racial profiling hearingsby Wilhelm Murg,Correspondent,Indian Country TodayATLANTA, Ga. - Amnesty International USA will hold Congressional-type hearings around the country this fall on racial profiling. The hearings are set for Chicago on Sept. 23, Tulsa on Sept. 30, and New York City on Oct. 2.Amnesty International feels that significant ground has been lost in the battle against racial profiling since the 9/11 tragedy. Attorney General John Ashcroft had promised to end racial profiling before 9/11, but since then he has implemented as the "Special Registration" program that targets visitors from predominantly Muslim countries and North Korea for registration and interrogation. The AI hearings will be focused onexamining the practice of racial profiling as it affects a range of ethnic minorities in the U.S. and as it is practiced by law enforcement agencies on every level. Special attention will
 be paid to practices employed in the "War on Drugs" and "War on Terror."The testimony will be divided in three sections: racial profiling by local law enforcement, racial profiling by federal law enforcement (including INS), and racial profiling by airport security. Profiling by private security (at shopping malls, for instance) may be included in some cities. The goals of the hearings are to create public awareness that racial profiling is a violation of international human rights standards and to help pass legislation that will address racial profiling and will bring the U.S. into greater compliance with CERD (Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination), the ICCPR(International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights), and other human rights agreements to which the nation is a party.Suha Dabbouseh, the membership coordinator for AI’s southern office, spoke with Indian Country Today about the hearings. "Amnesty International reports human rights abuses
 and violations," Dabbouseh said. "Two of our priorities are the ‘War on Terror’ and discrimination. We are doing a series of congressional-style racial profiling hearings throughout the country. Thematically it will deal with pre- and post-9/11 profiling. Even before 9/11, profiling affected many communities. We are trying to talk to a wide array of community members, including the Native American community, the Muslim community, and the Arab community."AI is hoping to have as many people at the hearings as possible. "We want to have people testify as to what their experiences have been, we want to hear the narrative," Dabbouseh said. "We will include the testimony in the report we are compiling in regard to racial profiling in the United States. The report will not only be about Tulsa, but also the other cities where we are having hearings. We in the southern region decided to pick Tulsa, as opposed to a place like Atlanta, because wewanted to go with a smaller city
 where we feel there could be a problem. It’s cities like Tulsa that are not getting that attention. We hope to have a presence in these communities after the hearings, and that these communities will use our findings to increase the coalition work they are doing on racial profiling. We know that Oklahoma has a law in the books against racial profiling; however, as it stands there is no requirement for collecting any of that data."AI is hoping to that the Native American community will help to spread the word about the hearings, especially the Tulsa hearing, which will take place at Tulsa’s Greenwood Cultural Center (322 N. Greenwood). Tulsa is unique is having one of the largest Indian populations in the country. "We need help with coverage, getting the word out to the community, whether that is putting it on a list server, putting out a bulletin, or by word of mouth," Dabbouseh said. "We are trying to securetestimony. If people feel insecure or uncomfortable giving
 their name, there is anonymity, or they can choose written testimony and have an advocate read that testimony, or the people can testify themselves. We have a form that we are asking people to fill out so we can get a sense of how many people we have." AI offers the form online, which can be printed out and sent into the organization. All submissions will be kept confidential upon request.For more information, or to download the form for the upcoming hearings, visit amnestyusa.org, or call (617) 623-0202. To contact Tulsa’s Greenwood Cultural Center, call (918) 596-1020.This article can be found at 
http://IndianCountry.com/?1063727475
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software

[BRC-NEWS] Boeing’s Ties Bloat Government Budgets

[j w]

 
Who They Know 
Boeing’s ties bloat government budgets




 

 By Frida Berrigan
Boeing is not only one of the largest weapons manufacturers in the world, it is also a master of the fine art of quid pro quo. When the going gets tough, this Chicago-based giant gets tougher by calling in its favors and relying on friends in Washington. Just the latest instance of this can be seen in a unique leasing deal Boeing negotiated with the Air Force and almost squeezed through Congress.Under the terms of the agreement—which has gotten long-overdue public scrutiny thanks to Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) and his Commerce Committee —the Air Force would lease 100 Boeing 767
 air-refueling aircraft for more than $20 billion. As In These Times was going to press, the Pentagon was deciding whether or not to approve a smaller lease of planes instead.Rudy DeLeon, senior vice president for Boeing, insists that the original deal would be “good for the Air Force and good for Boeing.” DeLeon is in a position to know— he came to Boeing from the Pentagon, where he served as Deputy Secretary of Defense from March 2000 until March 2001. But does he know what is good for taxpayers who would foot the bill? The numbers say no. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the original lease plan would cost $21.5 billion, while purchasing the aircraft outright would cost $15.9 billion. That means Boeing could pocket almost $6 billion in cool profit. Air Force Secretary James Roche disputes those figures, saying the plan would only cost an extra $150 million. Regardless of which figure ends up being right, there is no question that the
 deal would be a huge bonus for Boeing, because it seems clear that the Air Force has no pressing need for the refueling tankers. Just two years ago the Air Force said their tanker fleet would be serviceable through 2040. With wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the planes are getting more work than anticipated two years ago, but that does not explain the huge leap from 2040 to ASAP.McCain calls the deal an instance of “living for today and plundering resources for tomorrow” and has made it his business to squash it. At the beginning of September, he held hearings on the lease plan and
 released thousands of documents that show a disconcerting level of collaboration between Boeing executives and top Air Force officials. The 8,000 pages reveal negotiators on both sides problem-solving, brainstorming, and lining up formidable political support for the deal. “In all my years in Congress,” McCain complains, “I have never seen the security and fiduciary responsibilities of the federal government quite so nakedly subordinated to the interests of one defense manufacturer.” While the documents provide a disturbing insight into how billion-dollar deals are built, they also bring to light a revolving door scandal. Darleen Druyun, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Acquisitions and Management, was a key negotiator for the Air Force. McCain’s documents show her sharing potentially proprietary information about a rival company’s bid for the tanker contract with Boeing.The Pentagon’s Inspector General has launched a formal investigation to
 determine if Druyun broke the law to help Boeing. No matter what it concludes, Boeing clearly appreciated Druyun’s insights and hard work. After retiring from the Air Force, she joined Boeing as Deputy General Manager for Missile Defense Systems in January 2003. Boeing also has friends in Congress whose hard work they appreciate. As the White House and Pentagon prepared to launch a war against Afghanistan in fall 2001, Representative Norman Dicks (D-Washington) wrote to President Bush explaining how the terrorist attacks had affected Boeing.As a solution, Dicks described the “unique opportunity” Congress had to help Boeing and the Air Force at the same time, and asked Bush to add $2.5 billion for Boeing to his economic stimulus package. What Dicks did not mention was
 that as the representative of Boeing’s district in Washington state he has received almost $54,000 from the company in the last four election cycles and has a vested interest in the company thriving again.Ted Stevens, Senior Republican on the Appropriations Committee, also worked hard for the deal. Why did the Alaskan senator care? It is not too hard to draw some conclusions. Defense Week reports that just a month before shepherding the legislation through Congress, Stevens held a fundraiser where Boeing executives handed over $22,000 in checks. The company was Stevens’ top contributor, adding $34,400 to his 2001 reelection campaign. All but one of the executives who cut $1,000 checks were giving to the Senator for the first time, underlining his importance to the company. The timing and size
 of the donations makes it hard to accept claims from his office that there is “no connection between campaign contributions made to Senator Stevens and his legislative activities.” As Eric Miller, Senior Defense Investigato

[BRC-NEWS] Bush 9/11 Admission

[j w]

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/editorandpublisher/headlines/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1982860
 
Published on Friday, September 19, 2003 by Editor & Publisher 


Bush 9/11 Admission Gets Little Play Story Doesn't Make Many Front Pages


by  Seth Porges

 


NEW YORK -- For months leading up this year's war on Iraq, the Bush administration strongly suggested that Saddam Hussein had a hand in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The argument was well received by Americans, and might have been the single leading factor behind public support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. An oft-cited poll conducted by The Washington Post last month revealed that 69% of Americans continue to believe it likely that Hussein was personally involved in 9/11. 
No real evidence to support this has emerged, however, leading some (including E&P, just last week) to declare that the media had failed in its duty to correct the public misperception. 
So when President George Bush admitted on Wednesday, for the first time, that there was "no evidence that Hussein was involved with the September 11th" attacks, one would assume that would be big news and an opportunity for the press to make up for past failings. 
And according to some newspapers, it was a big story. The Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune (both owned by the Tribune Co.) ran front-page stories on the revelation Thursday. But an analysis of most major American newspapers found the story either buried deep within the paper -- or completely absent. 
Of America's twelve highest-circulation daily papers, only the L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune, and Dallas Morning News ran anything about it on the front page. In The New York Times, the story was relegated to page 22. USA Today: page 16. The Houston Chronicle: page 3. The San Francisco Chronicle: page 14. The Washington Post: page 18. Newsday: page 41. The New York Daily News: page 14. 
The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal didn't mention it at all. 
The story was even more dramatic because Bush's remarks came on the heels of an assertion to the contrary made by Vice President Dick Cheney Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press." When asked about the poll that shows Americans overwhelmingly believe Hussein was involved in 9/11, Cheney replied that he thinks "it's not surprising that people make that connection. ... If we're successful in Iraq then we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11." 
© 2003 VNU eMedia Inc.
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software

[BRC-NEWS] Anarchy in black and white

[j w]

http://victoria.indymedia.org/print.php?id=16680
Anarchy in black and whiteBy Rob Los RicosThere is no homogeneous group or community of black radicals or anarchists. I’ll not belabor this point – I’m sure most leftist pundits are aware of the diversity which exists within American society. Inevitably, some black radical groups work on issues that many anarchists are opposed to. For instance, most anarchists are just as opposed to black capitalism as they are to whitecapitalism. Most anarcho-activists recognize the danger of entering different communities and evangelizing there. This is elitist and can also be interpreted as being racist, since so many anarchists are white.But there were plenty of black and brown faces in the labor marches during the WTO protests in Seattle. So why were there so few black people involved in the street battles? I think the main reason is that if there had been a large, vocal visible presence of black radicals occupying streets and fighting against the police, the
 SPD would have fired real bullets instead of the rubber, plastic, and wooden ones they used. As the white cop I’m in prison for assaulting is fond of pointing out, during the Rodney King riots in L.A. he “finally got a chance to shoot some of those motherfuckers.” In addition, blackarrested for the same crimes as whites during the Seattle riots would likely be facing serious jail time, whereas most of the charges against the white folk are being dismissed.Yet even with the threat of this heightened level of repression hanging over them, accounts of the WTO protests indicate that there were many black and other and other non-whites involved in the fighting from the day and on through the week. I find it quite indicative of the racist, elitist attitudes whichneed to be challenged and overcome by lefty activoids that white middle-class “pacifist” demonstrators beat back black and latino youth who attempted to loot Niketown, and even grabbed one or two of them to hold
 until police arrived to arrest them. Luckily, the liberal assholes got what they deserved and the kids escaped.From an anarchist perspective, the “leftists movement suffers from tunnel vision. The main focus of the current white leftist movement seems to be inclusion, but the latest advancement in anarchist critique describes civilization as a global death camp. Would equal opportunities in hiring and promotion within a death camp make its continued existence acceptable? To somepeople it would.The sad thing about most American “leftist” groups is that they do not even attempt to address this argument. The result of inclusion into the mainstream of industrial civilization puts black radicals in the heinous position of being responsible for the obliteration of the few remaining village community societies left on the planet – mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. Not only should these societies be preserved at all cost, they should be recognized as being the ultimate
 achievement of human existence. Despite the differences inherent in reaching out to and struggling alongside of people who have very different perspectives concerning their priorities in life, anarchists are coming rejecting the privileges their middle-class backgrounds offer in order to pursue a much simpler way of life. This has put anarchists into places they’ve been missing from for too long – seasonal farm-labor camps, urban drug-war zones, impoverished rural communities, and jails, right alongside their new-found neighbors.With resources and do-it-yourself skills to share with the other downsized folks, anarchists are developing alliances with prisoner support groups, police monitoring organizations, people awakening to the concept of environmental racism, and are taking advantage of excess food production to feed hungry people. Slowly the barriers are being overcome and strong ties are being made to communities who have previously seen anarchists as just “white kids
 slumming.”One thing the leftist” and anarchists do have in common is their need to get away from campuses and put their ideas into action. We could also do well by avoiding making sweeping generalizations about people, whatever community they identify with. For instance, I am an anarchist, but I am not white. I’m Mexican – not Spanish, Mexican.Other writings and zines by Rob Los Ricos available at:Spartacus Bookshttp://www.vcn.bc.ca/spartacu/Spartacus Books311 W. Hastings St.Vancouver, BCCoast Salish TerritoryCanada, V6B 1H8Phone: 604.688.6138Email: s p a r t a c u @ v c n . b c . c ahttp://www.defenestrator.org/roblosricos/ad2027.htmlhttp://www.ricanstruction.net/lockdown.htmlhttp://victoria.indymedia.org/news/2003/08/16094.phphttp://victoria.indymedia.org/news/2003/08/16006.phphttp://www.sleepybrain.net/vanilla.htmlwww.ricanstruction.net/lockdown.html
 
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software

[BRC-NEWS] Daily Bombing of Korean Village

[j w]

http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid=8656Private Company Manages Daily Bombing of Korean VillageBy Aaron GlantzSpecial to CorpWatchSeptember 27, 2003
MAEHYANG-RI, SOUTH KOREA - Six days a week, up to 16 hours a day, the skies above this tiny fishing village, fill up with F-15, F-16, and A-10 fighter jets, that hurl bombs at a small island less than a mile away from the community. 
The pilots come from United States military bases across the Pacific - as far north as Japan and Okinawa to Thailand in the south and Guam in the east, to this rural region just 50 miles south of Seoul on the west coast of the country.
This has been the arrangement since August 1951, when US troops took the area from North Korea during the Korean War and then set up the practice bombing range unilaterally without consulting the South Korean government.
But today the Maehyang-ri bombing range isn't run by the US Air Force and it isn't run by the US Army. Five years ago, the bombing range was privatized and its management turned over the multinational weapons contractor Lockheed Martin. Then, in July, the bombing range changed hands. An Alaska-based company called Arctic Slope World Service took over the contract.
Affirmative Action Contractor?
The company is on the Fortune 500 and boasts annual revenues of more than $1 billion but Arctic Slope isn't your average weapons contractor.
In some respects, its similar to big contractors like Halliburton or Lockheed. When the company won the contact for Maehyang-ri, it already had already managed parts of American military installation across the country from maintaining the Army's AH-64 Apache, UH-60 Black Hawk, and UH-1 Huey helicopters at Godman Army Airfield, Fort Knox, Kentucky, to running the 600 unit housing complex at McConnell Air Force Base near Witchita, Kansas. Arctic Slope even managed Midway Naval Air Station in the Pacific until the military closed the base in 1997.
But in other respects its quite different. Arctic Slope's history dates back to 1971 when Congress passed a law turning over some of Alaska's land to companies nominally owned by Inupiat Eskimos. At the same time, the government bypassed recognized tribal governments. As a result, native claims to almost all of Alaska were extinguished.
The Arctic Slope Regional Corporation (ASRC) represents eight villages above the Alaskan Arctic Circle and the company website claims that: "By adhering to the traditional values of protecting the land, the environment and the culture of the Inupiat, ASRC has successfully adapted and prospered in an ever changing economic climate."
Anti-Union Policies
Villagers and workers here in South Korea disagree. When Arctic Slope took over at Maehyang-ri in July, the company's first act was to fire all the workers and make them reapply for their old jobs. More than a quarter of the Korean employees weren't hired back. 
Forty nine year old Kim Ka Chan worked as a guard at the bombing range more than a decade. "I have a wife and four children," he says, a listless look in his eyes. "I had a good job fourteen years. Now we have to live off the money my wife makes running a small illegal food stand. It's very difficult."
"We're just people who need to work like everyone else," he says. "We have families we need to support and things we need to pay for. Arctic Slope should think about that."
But there's no union for the workers at Maehyang-ri and Arctic Slope has made clear it doesn't want one. When one of the fired workers complained to Korea's premier labor union representing defense industry workers, he was given a new job but at another company on the other side of the country.
Under the Status of Forces Agreement that governs relations between the U.S. military and South Korea, American military contractors are not required to follow local labor laws. Pak Sang Ki is regional chapter President of the United States Forces Korean Employees Union, which represents most Koreans who work the American military.
He says the company claims its bid was so low it couldn't pay 23 Korean workers $1,400 dollars a month, but he's quick to add his union has never seen Arctic Slope's contract with the military.
"There's no way to find that kind of information," he explains. "Arctic Slope's contract was classified. They just told us that the jobs were changing and that they were cutting back."
Land Seizures
The base workers are not the only people who have been impacted by this military base. From the very beginning the United States military has taken advantage of the local community.
Sixty seven year old Che Chu Pin remembers when the US Army took his family's farm in 1951. A year later, an American practice bomb landed on his sister.
"In 1952 when my younger sister was ten years old, he says. "She was looking for oysters on the beach. There was an Island called Koon-Ni Island then but it is all gone now because it has been bombed so much by the Americans. She was working when the Ameri

[BRC-NEWS] Under Bush, the Poor Get Poorer

[j w]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/03/09/p/26_poor.html
 
Under Bush, the Poor Get PoorerPublished by Democratic Underground.com
September 26, 2003By Jackson Thoreau 
I admit I used to watch Frazier and sometimes even enjoy it, although I found most characters, except Frazier's dad, a bit pompous for my tastes. But after Kelsey Grammer's recent comments on Fox's Hannity & Colmes, those days are over.
Grammer, a Republican who has contributed to the likes of Arnold "The Groper" Schwarzenegger, said he would like to run for political office some day, such as the U.S. Senate. It always amazes me that these Hollywood actors think that a career of reading lines, kissing butts, and pretending they're someone they're not qualifies them for public office. Come to think of it, maybe it does these days. 
Anyways, it wasn't so much Grammer's desire to join a growing group of Republican actor-politicians that got me. It was this comment: "I would like to rid the country of the idea that it's the rich against the poor. It never has been." 
What country - or planet - has Grammer been living on? With that comment, he shows himself to be another ill-informed, stick-your-head-in-the-sand Republican who doesn't know much about the history of the United States, how it is set up, and how it operates. For a primer, read Howard Zinn's excellent A People's History of the United States. Or if you don't like progressive writers, read The Politics of Rich and Poor, a great book by conservative Kevin Phillips (see, I do read and recommend works by a few conservatives). 
If you just want to read a shorter report, try the Washington, D.C.-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' recent news release showing how the gap between the rich and poor in this country is now wider than it was in 1929 - right before the Great Depression. 
Then, see if you think Grammer is still right. For further proof that wealthy Americans are getting richer while the poor multiply, watch for a report by the Census Bureau on Sept. 26 that will show the poverty rate and income gap rising. A preliminary survey by the Republican-led federal bureau reported earlier this month that some 1.4 million more Americans fell into poverty last year. About 12.4 percent of all Americans - almost 35 million people - live under the federal poverty rate, which was up from 11.7 percent in 2001. 
Under President Clinton, the U.S. poverty rate dropped from 15.1 percent in 1993 to 11.3 percent in 2000, close to the record low of 11.1 set in 1973. In the initial year of the Bush regime, the poverty rate climbed for the first time in eight years. With tax cuts for the wealthy and cruel budget cuts for social safety net programs, some believe the poverty rate for 2002 is really closer to the Bush I regime figure, that the Republicans are playing with figures and that the bureau's estimates fall far short of reality. 
Some 12.2 million children - or 17 percent - lived in poverty last year. Many people in the U.S. love to beat their chests and call their country the best in the world, but the fact is that the child poverty rate in their nation is among the highest of major industrialized countries. I don't know about you, but that's not a fact of which this American is proud. 
Jay Shaft, editor of the Coalition For Free Thought In Media, wrote in an excellent article earlier this year that homelessness and poverty in the U.S. has grown by more than 35 percent since the end of 2000. Cities like Phoenix, Miami, Los Angeles and Chicago reported increases of around 50 percent between January 2001 and July 2003. Homeless shelters are overcrowded; in 2002, the U.S. Conference of Mayors reported that 30 percent of all requests for shelter went unmet. 
Those trends particularly increased in the first six months of 2003, as Bush's cruel budget cuts and tax increases for the poor took greater effect, Shaft wrote. Some 60 percent of new homeless cases targeted single mothers with children in 2003. 
The lack of affordable housing leads the list of causes, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless. The Ford administration requested more than 400,000 Section 8 vouchers to help poor families obtain housing in 1976. The Bush regime's 2003 budget request was for 34,000, despite a growth in poverty and homelessness since the 1970s. 
Other causes are the continued onslaught of corporate layoffs, which have slowed only slightly this year over the torrid pace of 2001 and 2002, and the decline in value of the minimum wage, which has fallen by 25 percent since 1975. Workers with families who make the minimum wage just cannot afford the rising costs of housing, food, medical care and other necessities. More families seek governmental assistance that is dwindling. 
At the same time, well-paying jobs are declining in favor of service jobs that often pay no health insurance and other benefits. Some 46 percent of the jobs with the most growth since 1994 paid less than $16,000 a year, h

[BRC-NEWS] A Lesson That Will Not Die

[j w]

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0930-06.htm
 
Published on Tuesday, September 30, 2003 by CommonDreams.org 


A Lesson That Will Not Die, A Vision That Cannot Fail 


by Laurie King-Irani

 


Humanity. Genius. Passion. Curiosity. Eloquence. Talent. 
All of these words, and so many more, aptly described Dr. Edward W. Said, the brilliant scholar and tireless advocate for justice who left us a week ago today. The special quality and unique amalgamation of traits that made this man both an indomitable debater and a compassionate friend were rooted not only in his considerable talents or his remarkable intelligence, but even more so in his deep and abiding courage. 
Dr. Said possessed a rare kind of courage, a moral and indeed even a spiritual fearlessness, that enabled him to see beyond false dichotomies, that spurred him to say things that others found impolitic, that caused him to sputter in eloquent anger words of truth that cut through obscure rhetoric, striking notes of clarity as refreshing as water and as clean as the perfect chords of the symphonies he loved. 
Dr. Said's special kind of courage was visible to anyone who saw him during the last five years of his life. Looking painfully frail -- until he began speaking and gesturing -- he time and again overcame the pain, weakness and fear of living with leukemia to expound, without notes, on US hypocrisy, the Palestine Authority's corruption, the depredations of a brutal Israeli occupation, and the media's malfeasance in obscuring the full extent and context of daily suffering in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. 
The potential costs and consequences of Dr. Said's courage and honesty were especially clear to anyone who read his remarkably candid memoir, Out of Place. Here, he turned a searching and fearless eye on himself, his parents, the dynamics of Middle Eastern family relationships, the complexities of gender, Oedipal triangles, and manipulations of authority to trace the links between the personal and the political in a way that spared no one, not even himself. He looked back curiously at the shy and bookish young man he was at the dawn of adolescence, a period that is excruciating for all of us, but which, in his case, was magnified by the searing events of 1947 and 1948. His critiques though, whether of self or other, were always tempered by a compassion and humility that transformed analyses into lessons. 
Throughout his memoir, Said displayed a disarming and admirable ability to undertake searching analyses of his own society, its assumptions, illusions, and reflexes in response to the tragic loss of Palestine and the burdens of a diasporic existence. Like the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who in a verse attempting to come to grips with the cataclysmic events of World War I stated that "if a way to the better there be/it exacts a full look at the worst," Dr. Said understood, and wanted all of us to understand, that difficult truths will not go away. To get through them, we have to go through them -- honestly, bravely, and humanely. 
The courage Dr. Said displayed in facing with grace the difficult truths of his life -- as an intellectual, a Palestinian, an exile, an advocate for justice, a person living with cancer -- offers precious lessons for us all. As long as we try to live out these lessons in our own lives, Dr. Said cannot die. Courage of the caliber he displayed has something of the transcendent in it. Courage of this kind cannot but inspire, sustain, and guide those who respond to its power and beauty and open themselves up to its challenges. 
In the week since I first learned of Dr. Said's passing, I have heard many friends, colleagues, and acquaintances voice despair and anxiety over the loss of so charismatic, brilliant, and capable a spokesperson for the Palestinians. I cannot help but think Dr. Said would be exasperated and annoyed by such despair. 
Yes, Dr. Said's voice was unique and special, but no, it was not just for Palestinians, or even for Arabs. His was a voice for and from humanity, a voice for the telling of truths, no matter how discomforting they could be. 
Six years ago, Dr. Said was invited to give a lecture on the history and repercussions of the Balfour Declaration in Washington, DC. It is a tribute to his bravery, genius and eloquence that he only focused on the events of World War I and the roots of the Palestinian tragedy as a starting point for his real message that day, a message that transcended the usual dualistic discourses that beset the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His aim was to force his audience to think new thoughts, question old categories, re-examine ethnic boundaries, and challenge received opinions in order to envision a new era of peace based on reconciliation between Arabs and Jews. 
One could have heard a pin drop as his audience, expecting a familiar recounting of all the harm done to the Palestinians over the last 80-plus years, instead heard Dr. Said make an impassioned p

[BRC-NEWS] Letting Colombia's Criminals Off Easy

[j w]

http://www.thedailycamera.com/bdc/opinion_columnists/article/0,1713,BDC_2490_2320633,00.html
Letting Colombia's Criminals Off Easy 


by Christopher Brauchli

 


"And whatten penance will ye dree for that, Edward, Edward?"—Edward's mother to Edward after Edward murdered his father. Anonymous 17th century poem 
The inconstancy of friends is a troublesome thing. Consider Colombia. 
In July we all lamented its unwillingness to comply with the perfectly reasonable demands of George W. Bush that it exempt all United States citizens from the reach of that dreaded thing known as the International Criminal Court, and applauded when Mr. Bush let it be known that the United States would withhold all future military aid to it because of President Alvaro Uribe's stand. 
Mr. Uribe said United States citizens would be treated just like citizens of the rest of the world and would be subject to the rules of the ICC, the court created to try people charged with genocide and other crimes against humanity. Mr. Uribe placed the need for acting as a true humanitarian above the need to accept money from his friend and patron, Mr. Bush. 
The decision to withhold funds was not lightly made by Mr. Bush. Although it only amounted to withholding $5 million in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, it meant withholding $130 million for the following fiscal year. That money was being used to perform tasks near and dear to Mr. Bush's heart. It was being used to protect Occidental Petroleum's pipeline, which permitted that company to get oil from its facility in northeastern Colombia to the Caribbean coast and thence to the United States. It was being used to fight those profiting from the export of cocaine to, among other places, the United States. 
That was July. This is October. 
On Sept. 18 it was disclosed that Mr. Uribe had signed the agreement that exempts U.S. citizens arrested for human-rights violations in Colombia from prosecution before the ICC. That means that country will get $5 million more this year and $130 million in the next fiscal year. Some may see a connection between Mr. Uribe's change of heart and an amnesty bill submitted by him to the Colombian congress. The New York Times says the bill was written with help from American officials. 
The amnesty bill was designed to encourage members of the paramilitary federation known as the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) to disarm. The AUC, which is estimated to have 20,000 troops, appeared in the late 1980s and was supported by business interests, especially wealthy ranchers. Its goal was to remove civilian support for the guerrilla movement that had been fighting the government for many years. AUC became an adjunct of the government's military forces and was implicated in many brutal acts during its existence. Its acts were so outrageous that in 2001 the U.S. State Department put Colombia's paramilitaries on its official list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. 
According to Human Rights Watch, "Colombian intelligence sources estimate that 40 percent of the country's total cocaine exports are controlled by paramilitaries and their allies in the narcotics underworld." No wonder the Bush administration labeled it a terrorist organization. More wonder that it helped draft the legislation. One part of the legislation would allow paramilitary commanders to avoid prison or more severe punishment by paying damages to victims and/or, in some cases, performing social work. According to the Commissioner for Peace, Luis Carlos Restrepo, the government agreed to introduce this legislation in return for the demobilization of 13,000 paramilitary fighters. One of the signers of the agreement that led to introduction of the legislation was Carlos Castao. He will be one of its beneficiaries. 
According to Human Rights Watch, Mr. Castao was complicit in the murder of a presidential candidate for which he was convicted and sentenced to 22 years in prison in 2001. He massacred 15 people, a crime for which he was convicted in April of this year. In June 2003 he was sentenced by a Bogot court to 40 years in prison for his role in a 1997 massacre. In 2000, 300 armed men from his group tortured, garroted, stabbed, decapitated and shot residents of the village of El Salado. A little social work coupled with a hefty fine would do him good. 
Mr. Uribe explains that lenient treatment for the paramilitary is the price of removing them from the conflict. According to Mr. Restrepo, "What will not happen is forgiving and forgetting. There will be investigations and there will be reparations." It is hard to know what reparations are appropriate as punishment for having tied a 6-year-old girl to a pole and suffocating her with a plastic bag, as was done by Mr. Castao's helpers, and what kind of social work should be performed by the perpetrators. Determining that will be one of the tasks of the judges. 
Not everyone applauds the alternative sentencing proposal for those guilty of human-rights

[BRC-NEWS] Gearing Up for the New Term

[j w]

http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1065122110047
 
Gearing Up for the New TermTony MauroLegal Times10-06-2003A year ago, the U.S. Supreme Court opened its term on a relatively quiet note, with few blockbuster cases on its docket. Then came the affirmative action, gay rights, and still-pending campaign finance reform cases -- and the term went into the history books as one of the most important in decades. On Monday, the Court again opens for business with a low-key docket that may, with few exceptions, stay that way. One set of cases challenging the inclusion of the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance could plunge the Court into "the middle of the culture wars" again, at the height of the
 presidential campaign, says Steve Shapiro, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. If that case fizzles, which it may as soon as this week, the 2003-04 term could shape up as one in which the justices will not blaze new trails but adjust its existing doctrine on issues like federalism and Miranda rights. There are, however, at least three cases before the Court that hold promise as major rulings. Vieth v. Jubelirer, No. 02-1580, could draw the Court deep into the "political thicket" that the late Justice Felix Frankfurter warned the Court to avoid more than 50 years ago. In its fractured 1986 ruling in Davis v. Bandemer, the Supreme Court said that disputes over purely political gerrymandering of political districts were justiciable, but only in rare and vaguely defined circumstances. The Vieth case from Pennsylvania asks the Court to set clearer rules for when gerrymandering can be challenged. Pennsylvania Democrats
 challenged the 2000 redistricting, which helped produce a 2002 election that sent 12 Republicans and seven Democrats to the state's seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. If the Court decides to rein in gerrymandering in a substantial way, analysts predict that many more House seats nationwide would ultimately be opened to competitive races. A second potentially big case is Locke v. Davey, No. 02-1315, a follow-up to the Court's 2002 ruling in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, which upheld school voucher programs that allow public money to be used for private and parochial school tuition. The Locke case is a test of a Washington state law that bars the use of state scholarship money toward a theology degree. The question will be: If the First Amendment allows tax dollars to go to voucher programs under Zelman, does it also require that tax dollars be given to theology students? Of course, the campaign finance cases collectively known as
 McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, No. 02-1674, could alter the political landscape by deciding whether any of the multiple parts of the McCain-Feingold campaign reform law violate the First Amendment. The cases were argued in a special session Sept. 8, technically part of last term, but as of Oct. 6, the rulings that result will be counted as decisions in the new term. Beyond these, the rest of the Supreme Court's 50 cases docketed thus far left the experts who brief the press on the upcoming term grasping for metaphors. At a Washington Legal Foundation preview Sept. 23, former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh called the upcoming term "plain vanilla," while the next day, at a National Legal Center for the Public Interest briefing, Christopher Landau of Kirkland & Ellis described it as a themeless "Jackson Pollock painting." Never mind that the images conjured up by Thornburgh and Landau cannot easily co-exist. They were trying to avoid
 calling the 2003-04 term "boring," a word that should never be used to describe the Supreme Court. It did seem, however, that this term, the ever-growing industry of Supreme Court briefers ran into a bit of a problem: a shortage of quality raw material. But the briefers were undeterred, and what may be a record number of interest groups and legal organizations plied the Supreme Court press corps with bagels, coffee and the occasional video to highlight the diamonds -- or at least the zircons -- in the rough of the Court's docket. At AARP, the main focus was on General Dynamics Land Systems Inc. v. Cline, No. 02-1080, a reverse-age-discrimination case that pits "younger older" workers against "older older" workers. The rest of the briefing focused on less riveting ERISA cases. At the National School Boards Association, much of the discussion centered on the Pledge cases and Locke v. Davey, with General Counsel Julie Underwood candidly voicing the
 wish that schools could stay out of such church-state battles. "Go do it other places, not in the school houses," she said. "We have other things to spend money on." The ACLU's briefing looked ahead to a case the Court has not yet granted: Walters v. Conant, No. 03-40, which examines the federal government's effort to clamp down on California physicians who want to be able to recommend marijuana to patients suffering from AIDS and cancer. One of the ACLU's general cou

[BRC-NEWS] Military Response To Further Attacks

[j w]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1058599,00.html
 
Syrian ambassador promises military response to further attacks AgenciesWednesday October 8, 2003 A Syrian ambassador today said that his country would respond with military action if Israel carried out any more attacks on Syrian territory. 
Mohsen Bilal, Syria's ambassador to Spain, told Reuters: "If Israel attacks Syria one, two and three times, of course the people of Syria and the government of Syria and the army will react to defend ourselves." 
"If Israel continues to attack us ... of course we shall react to the attacks in spite of the fact that we are fighting for peace." 
Israel today dismissed the threat, saying that it did not seek an escalation of tensions with Syria. 
"This sort of statement is intended mainly for the Arab world, to give the impression Syria is steadfast in the fight against Israel," a senior Israeli security source said. 
"Israel does not seek an escalation with Syria, and indeed has taken precautions to prevent that. We will act in self defence if necessary, but not if Damascus receives our message that it must stop supporting terror," the source said. 
Mr Bilal's comments appeared to contradict the words of the Syrian president, Bashar Assad, who yesterday told the pan-Arab newspaper, Al-Hayat, that his government would not allow the attack to provoke a war between Syria and its rival, Israel. 
"This attack was an attempt by the Israeli government to extract itself from its internal crisis by trying to terrorise Syria and drag it and the region into other wars," he said, adding that his regime would not yield to Israeli and US demands that it expel Palestinian groups from Syria. 
The Israeli attack has put Mr Assad in a difficult position domestically. He is seeking a face-saving exit to avoid criticism that his army of more than 300,000 is unable to retaliate for Sunday's airstrike. 
The strike hit what Israel maintained was a training camp for Islamic Jihad militants, about 15 miles from Damascus. Villagers said the camp belonged to Palestinian militants but had been abandoned years ago. 
The attack came in response to the previous day's suicide bombing in Haifa, northern Israel, that killed at least 19 people. The Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the attack. 
Following the Israeli airstrike, the first attack deep into Syrian territory since the 1973 war, Syria presented a motion to the UN security council calling on the world body to condemn Israel, but the council postponed a vote. 
The United States warned it would veto any motion that did not also condemn the suicide bombing, and later defended Israel's action against Syria. 
The US president, George Bush, drew a parallel between Israel's actions and the US war on terrorism, saying that "we would be doing the same thing ... but we're also mindful when we make decisions, as the [Israeli] prime minister should be, that he fully understands the consequences of any decision". 
Apparently bolstered by this, the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, yesterday said that he would not hesitate to attack Palestinian militants in neighbouring countries. 
"Israel will not be deterred from protecting its citizens and will strike its enemies in every place and in every way," he said. "At the same time, we will not miss any opening and opportunity to reach an agreement with our neighbours and peace." 
The US has also demanded that Syria expel alleged Palestinian militants living in the country. Mr Assad has responded by maintaining that the Palestinians are "officials" and not leaders of Palestinian militant groups. 
"We have refused their expulsion for many reasons," he said. "Those people have not violated Syrian laws or harmed Syrian interests and they are not, above all, terrorists." 
Washington maintains the Damascus-based leadership of Hamas and Islamic Jihad directs, finances and provides information to its counterparts in the Palestinian territories. 

Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search

[BRC-NEWS] Targets the Poor, but it Won't Defeat Poverty

[j w]

http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9037
 
Published on Friday, October 3, 2003 by TomPaine.com 


False PRIDEThe Welfare Reauthorization Bill Now Championed by Senate Conservatives -- aka PRIDE -- Targets the Poor, but it Won't Defeat Poverty


by Mark Engler

 


Given the state of our economy, one might expect a welfare reauthorization bill to offer emergency assistance to the poor and aid to those trapped in the low-wage workforce. Instead, the so-called Personal Responsibility and Individual Development for Everyone (PRIDE) bill that has just come out of the Senate Finance Committee, like the more extreme bill passed in the House, shows that lawmakers are willfully oblivious to the challenges facing welfare reform. 
No jobs to be found in our economy? Let's increase the work requirements for welfare recipients. No money in the budget for social services? Let's launch a new $1 billion program to cajole women down the aisle. Job training needed? Let's cut the amount of time that recipients can devote to literacy or vocational education. 
The provisions in the PRIDE legislation are not only bad as individual proposals, they reflect a punitive vision of welfare reform that can never address the root of persistent poverty in America. 
One of the most significant changes offered by the PRIDE bill increases the number of hours that welfare recipients must work in order to receive assistance. While current law gives full credit to those who work 30 hours per week, the new Senate legislation would require 34 hours each week, and the House version of the bill would require 37. 
Ignore for a moment that increasing work requirements in the Bush economy, which has dropped some 3 million private sector jobs since March 2001, makes about as much sense as packing an extra sweater for your afternoon hike into the desert. Even from a conservative perspective, the proposal undermines what boosters point to as a key to welfare reform's purported success: allowing individual states to find out for themselves what works. In effect, PRIDE would force states to subsidize questionable "workfare" programs, rather than devoting money to job training or other needed services. 
A second problem comes from PRIDE's view of what counts as "work." There is no doubt that Senate bill is better than House legislation, which would prevent recipients from receiving "core hour" work credit for education or for their job searches. Nevertheless, the bill creates six-month limit on credit for substance abuse treatment and literacy training. And both pieces of legislation reject caring for one's own children as core labor: Even single mothers with children under six, who currently must work 20 hours to get benefits, will have to meet a 24 hour-per-week standard (or the full 34 hours if House leaders get their way). Nevertheless, the final legislation will only include substantially increased funding for childcare if disaffected senators succeed in adding money through amendments. 
Raising kids may not fit into the Republican definition of family values, but getting married sure does. A second major provision in the PRIDE legislation proposes spending $1 billion over five years to promote marriage. Certainly, everyone likes a nice wedding. But that doesn't mean that the cash-strapped government should devote itself to leaning on poor women about their marital status. 
Libertarians decry the proposal as a frightening instance of big government meddling in our private lives. The bigger issue may be that, acting as paternalistic wedding-planners, the senators are clueless about the lives of mothers on welfare. The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence cites research indicating that as many as two-thirds of the women receiving public assistance have been abused by a partner at some point in their lives. Many others have been abandoned by the husbands or boyfriends that fathered their children. 
Instead of promoting self-respect and self-sufficiency, the PRIDE bill risks encouraging bad marriages. The Bush Administration, eliminating any doubt about the anti-feminist ideology behind pro-marriage proposals, has opposed broadening the scope of the funding mandate to include objectives like preventing teen pregnancy. 
The condescension apparent in the PRIDE provisions is part of a much larger attitude problem that prevails in the current era of "welfare reform." This disposition treats the poor themselves, rather than poverty, as the problem. In his influential 1962 book, The Other America, social critic Michael Harrington used the idea of a "culture of poverty" to describe how the barriers erected against the poor reinforce one another. While low wages prevent you from getting health insurance, the lack of good medical care often makes it difficult to hold down a job. Those most in need of affordable housing are gouged for substandard apartments. If you have young children, or if a dependent relative falls ill, multiple generations can

[BRC-NEWS] Turkey to Deploy Troops

[j w]

http://www.afp.com/english/home/
 


Turkey to Deploy Troops in Defiance of New Iraqi Leaders, Turmoil Deepens 


 


 Published on Wednesday, October 8, 2003 by Agence France Presse


 
Ankara moved on to a collision course with the interim leadership in Baghdad after deciding to send troops to its war-torn neighbor as the turmoil deepens in Iraq.
The US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council strongly condemned Turkey's plan to send thousands of troops across the border into Iraq, whose ethnic Kurdish population is particularly alarmed at the prospect.
Meanwhile in western Baghdad thousands of angry Shiite Muslims gathered outside a mosque demanding the release of two clerics detained by US forces after publicly denouncing the Americans.
Some 3,000 members of the Mehdi Army militia run by firebrand cleric Moqtada Sadr, sporting black headbands and waving Iraqi flags, marched in military formation around the Ali al-Bayaa mosque as uneasy US troops looked on.
US Brigadier General Martin Dempsey told a cleric at the mosque, Sheikh Hassan Zardani: "You have to control your people and I control my people."
He said he had no authority to release Moayad Kazrajy and Jaleel al-Shumari, adding that "the charges for both is conducting criminal and anti-coalition acts." 
Zardani curtly told the general: "The dialogue is leading nowhere. 
On Tuesday 4,000 people demonstrated at the mosque where US troops and Iraqis had already skirmished last week, chanting:"Today we hold banners, tomorrow we pick up our guns."
Meanwhile governing council member Nasseer Chaderchi gave voice to Iraqi anger over the Turkish decision.
"Sending these troops would delay our regaining sovereignty," he told AFP, warning the deployment could affect relations between the two neighbors.




 
Chaderchi said Turkish authorities recently told council members they would not send troops to Iraq without their approval.
But Turkey's parliament authorized on Tuesday the dispatch of troops for a maximum term of one year, leaving the decision on the size, location and timing of the deployment to the government to work out with the United States.
The Turkish troops -- Ankara has talked of sending up to 10,000 -- would join a US-led stabilization force already numbering more than 155,000 from 34 countries. 
Council members said they were unanimous in opposing the planned deployment and that a statement reflecting this would be issued later Wednesday.
"It is the wrong thing to do. It does not add to security," said council member Mahmud Othman.
Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, a Kurd like Othman, voiced strong objections and stressed in London on Tuesday that the Governing Council did not want any of Iraq's immediate neighbors to take part in peacekeeping missions.
But Washington welcomed the decision, which US officials hope will ease the strain on their forces, which face almost daily casualties amid rising skepticism among Americans about the war.
"We welcome that decision and we will be working with Turkish officials on the details of their decision," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said "we will have to work with the Iraqis and the Central Command to begin the task of seeing how and what way that might happen."
Inside Turkey, public opinion is largely against the deployment and Wednesday's press offered a mixed reaction, with the popular Vatan daily calling it a "gamble" that might cost Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan his political future.
Meanwhile, the New York Times reported Wednesday that the US government may abandon attempts to get a UN vote on its plan for the future government in Iraq because of opposition from other Security Council members.
The government of President George W. Bush "has pulled back from seeking a quick vote endorsing the proposal and may shelve it altogether," the paper reported, quoting administration officials.
On Tuesday, the US ambassador to the United Nations John Negroponte said Washington stands behind its draft UN resolution on Iraq, despite vocal opposition from other countries, and will not make major changes to it.
The US measure would authorize a multinational force in post-war Iraq, which Washington hopes will be enough to convince skeptical nations to contribute cash and troops.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said the United Nations could not accept the limited political role offered under the deal.
France, Germany and Russia have already said they wanted changes in how the transfer of power in Iraq would be handled.
West of Baghdad, three US soldiers and a translator were killed on Monday, while on Tuesday troops faced several mortar attacks in the northern city of Kirkuk, one of which destroyed an armored military vehicle.
The deaths brought to 92 the number of US soldiers killed in combat since the official end of hostilities.
The coalition forces, which seized control of Baghdad six months ago, were still searching for toppled president Sadd

[BRC-NEWS] Arnold Manhandles California!

[j w]

http://www.salon.com/news/
Arnold manhandles California! Schwarzenegger wins a new role in a landslide. But who will he play: Jesse Ventura? Pete Wilson? Playboy predator? Or tough independent who stands up to his GOP friends?
Oct. 8, 2003  |  Californians elected a new governor Tuesday. Sometime over the next year or so, maybe -- just maybe -- they'll find out who he is, how badly he has treated women over the years, and what he plans to do as the governor of the nation's most populous state. 
Californians approved the ouster of Gov. Gray Davis by a wide margin Tuesday in a recall drive that started as a right-wing power grab and ended as something much broader. In the race to replace Davis, Arnold Schwarzenegger walloped Democratic Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante and conservative Republican State Sen. Tom McClintock. One minute after the polls closed in California Tuesday night, CNN called the race: by Wednesday morning, with 97 percent of the precincts counted, Schwarzenegger was leading Bustamante and McClintock 48 to 32 to 13 percent, respectively, and he had about 30,000 votes more than Gray Davis received when he won re-election last November. 
"For the people to win, politics as usual must lose," Schwarzenegger told supporters Tuesday night at his victory party, where he was introduced by Jay Leno and flanked by the family of his wife, NBC News correspondent Maria Shriver. Much as George W. Bush did before he took office, Schwarzenegger said in his victory speech that he intended to work closely with legislators from both parties. "I want to be the governor for the people," he said. "I want to represent everybody. I believe in the people of California, and I know that together we can do great things." 
Davis conceded just before 10 p.m. Tuesday. "The voters decided it’s time for someone else to serve," he said, "and I accept their judgment. . . . I am calling on everyone in this state to put the chaos and the division of the recall behind us, and to do what’s right for this great state of California." 
Bustamante, who will remain lieutenant governor but whose political future likely ended with his unwieldy and unsuccessful no-on-recall-yes-on-Bustamante campaign, conceded in the recall race but celebrated the apparent defeat of Proposition 54, a ballot initiative that would have prevented the state from collecting racial data on its citizens. Republican McClintock pledged his support to Schwarzenegger, and observers said his steady campaign as the only "real" Republican in the recall race set him up well for a run against Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer in 2004. 
Schwarzenegger will take office as California's 38th governor as soon as the election results are "certified," a process that could take until Nov. 15. In many ways, the transition is already under way. Bracing for the worst in the face of gloomy polls last week, Davis aides reportedly began ordering storage boxes from the state archives and inquiring about purchasing shredding machines. Buoyed by those same polls -- but not yet buffeted by allegations of sexual harassment -- Schwarzenegger unveiled for supporters in Sacramento last week his plans for his first 100 days in office. 
But like his generalized and shifting response to the allegations that he sexually assaulted at least 15 different women over the last 30 years, Schwarzenegger's plans for California are vague and more than a little evasive. Will he govern as a reformist outsider in the mold of former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura? As a moderate -- but polarizing -- Republican like Schwarzenegger's campaign co-chairman, former Calif. Gov. Pete Wilson? As a right-swinging conservative like George W. Bush? Or simply as a disgraced movie star, paralyzed by allegations that he is a sexual predator? And whatever Schwarzenegger tries to do as governor, will the Democrats -- who control both houses of California's state legislature -- help him, jam him or try to recall him? 
As the network talking heads liked to say before their election-night coverage suddenly lost its suspense, the questions are still "too close to call." 
And it's not just Democrats who are nervously awaiting the answers. 
"I've resigned myself to a Schwarzenegger governorship, and I'm hoping that he's everything he's telling me he is," Mark Williams, a conservative Sacramento radio talk show host told Salon a few days ago, as the Terminator's victory began to appear inevitable. "People so want Davis to be out of there that we may be looking at mass denial as to what Schwarzenegger could possibly be. With every day that goes by, I think we may be coming closer to the time when people start saying, 'Why didn't anybody tell us what he was really like?'" 
For conservatives like Williams, the fear is that Schwarzenegger may not be conservative enough, that he may be using former Gov. Wilson and his old campaign hands not just as "Sherpa guides" to win the election but as the core of a moderate administration that could decide th

[BRC-NEWS] Let Freedom Roll

[j w]

http://thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20031027&s=quiroz
Let Freedom Roll
by JULIE QUIROZ-MARTÍNEZ
In 1961, 19-year-old Ruby Doris Smith arrived in Rock Hill, South Carolina, fully expecting the violent racist fury that awaited her and the other black students on her bus. At the time, the term "Freedom Ride" had not yet come into use. But everyone, including the menacing white thugs in the bus station, understood that these young people had come to challenge the oppressive state segregation laws that had been struck down, at least on paper, by the US Supreme Court. So prepared for danger were the riders that some had given sealed letters to friends to mail in case they were killed. 
I'm thinking of Ruby Doris Smith as I roll down Highway 80 in the brilliant Nevada sunshine, an Afghan homecare worker on my right, a Chinese hotel housekeeper on my left, an African-American custodian in the seat ahead. Each of these women has taken her seat on the bus as part of the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride (IWFR) of 2003. Although theirs is far from the same world confronted by Ruby Doris four decades ago, the powerful moral example of the original riders emboldens them all. 
The IWFR sprang from the imagination of organized labor, which has recognized that its future depends on recruiting new immigrant members. The IWFR's ambitious five-point agenda reflects the demands of a diverse immigrant constituency: a new legalization process for undocumented workers, an accessible "path to citizenship," a commitment to family reunification for immigrants waiting for relatives abroad, extension of labor protections to all workers and strengthening of civil rights and liberties to insure equal treatment of immigrants. For two weeks, buses from ten cities--Seattle, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, Minneapolis, Miami, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Boston and Portland, Oregon--hit the road, bound for Washington, DC, then a rally in Flushing Meadows, Queens, on October 4, where the crowd surged to 100,000, according to organizers. 
It's 6 pm on September 23 when my bus pulls up to a local park in Reno, where hundreds of Latino families have gathered to welcome the riders with a barbecue and soccer tournament. The event's speakers include Raul, a Mexican day laborer from San Jose, who describes the harassment of immigrants whose only crime is "looking for work," and Maria, a hotel employee who has not seen her children in El Salvador for fourteen years. 
Bob Fulkerson, the fair-haired director of the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, is elated by the turnout. "In Reno, nothing has ever happened on this scale. Around here the Department of Motor Vehicles will call in the INS when people go to register their car." 
In my nine hours on the IWFR bus, I heard a diverse range of stories from the riders, underscoring the breadth of their needs and interests. Many are union members. Most are foreign-born, representing the whole spectrum of immigration status categories, from those without any documents to legal residents to fully naturalized citizens. Olia tells me about how she fled Afghanistan when the Taliban came to power, leaving behind three children. "I never forget," she says, carefully crafting a sentence in English. "I do job eighteen hours every day and save all my money. After four years, my children come." 
Or Helen, who speaks to me through an interpreter, and tells of migrating from Hong Kong to take a job as a seamstress in a sweatshop where she "couldn't even make minimum wage." Now she works at the San Francisco Marriott, where she helped lead her Chinese, Latino and Filipino co-workers through a successful six-year union contract fight. 
There's Antonia (not her real name), who hesitates before she explains that she is an undocumented Mexican immigrant and a lesbian. She speaks softly in Spanish about her decision not to maintain a heterosexual facade for immigration officials scrutinizing her marriage to a US citizen. "I had to sacrifice the opportunity for 'papers,'" she tells me, "because of my sexual identity." 
Then there's Doretha, who talks energetically about what it's like to be a black woman and union steward at her predominantly immigrant worksite. "When you have a language barrier or anything they can put over on you, they'll use it," says Doretha. "It took me a long time to get it," she confesses. "The way they treat immigrants is how they treated us in the sixties." 
Who, I wonder, are "they" now? 
Of course, there are still traces of the "they" the 1960s Freedom Riders faced: the violent white mobs whose ugliness was captured forever in grainy black-and-white photos. On our bus, I've heard talk that white supremacists will be descending on Little Rock, where one of the IWFR buses is set to stop. I'm concerned, but know it's easy to become preoccupied with isolated flash points, harder to grapple with the insidious structures of racism that mold so much of the daily experience of immigrants and African-A

[BRC-NEWS] Bush gives in to chemical companies

[j w]

http://www.progressive.org/nov03/cusac1103.html
Open to Attack: Bush gives in to chemical companies,leaving the nation vulnerable.

by Anne-Marie Cusac
Since September 11, 2001, the nation has been on alert about the vulnerability of chemical facilities. And while the Bush Administration claims that homeland security is a priority, time after time, it has opted to do nothing dramatic to improve the security of U.S. chemical facilities. All along, it has followed the wishes of the U.S. chemical industry--at our peril.
The risk to the American people is great. According to the General Accounting Office, "123 chemical facilities located throughout the nation have toxic 'worst-case' scenarios where more than a million people in the surrounding area could be at risk of exposure to a cloud of toxic gas if a release occurred."
Approximately 700 other plants, says the GAO, "could each potentially threaten at least 100,000 people in the surrounding area, and about 3,000 facilities could each potentially threaten at least 10,000 people."
The Bush Administration knows there is a huge security risk. On February 6, 2002, George Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, testified that Al Qaeda could be planning to target chemical facilities. In February 2003, the Bush Administration announced that terrorists "may attempt to launch conventional attacks against the U.S. nuclear/chemical industrial infrastructure to cause contamination, disruption, and terror. Based on information, nuclear power plants and industrial chemical plants remain viable targets." (This article looks at security in the chemical industry.)
The Administration refuses to do what is necessary to protect the American public from terrorist attacks on chemical plants. Instead, it is listening to what industry wants.
"We haven't even done the minimal things," says Gary Hart, the former Democratic Senator from Colorado and one-time Presidential candidate. "There has been zero leadership from either the White House or the new department" of Homeland Security. 
Hart has a lot of credibility on this issue. As co-chair of the United States Commission on National Security in the Twenty-First Century, he helped author the commission's prescient report, "New World Coming: American Security in the 21st Century," published in September 1999. The report warned that, in the course of the next quarter century, terrorist acts involving weapons of mass destruction were likely to increase. "Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers," it said.
Hart says that private industry won't spend what it takes to make adequate security changes. "I don't think many companies are going to disturb their bottom line," he says, "unless they are ordered to by the federal government, or if the President goes on national TV and tells them to do so." Those orders have not yet arrived.
Bush has given primary responsibility for overseeing security improvements in the chemical industry to the EPA. At first, the EPA appeared eager to take on the task. In fact, then-EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman even prepared a speech announcing a new security initiative, according to papers Greenpeace obtained through an EPA leak and a Freedom of Information Act request. 
A June 11, 2002, document labeled, "Draft--Pre-decisional--Do Not Cite or Quote," concerns a "Rollout Strategy for Chemical Facility Site Security." According to the documents, Whitman and Tom Ridge, head of Homeland Security, were to announce the new policy at the White House. 
"I am pleased to join Governor Ridge today to announce a series of new initiatives by the Environmental Protection Agency to advance security at facilities that handle hazardous chemicals," Whitman's speech begins. "Particularly in the post-9/11 era, it should be clear to everyone that facilities handling the most dangerous chemicals must take reasonable precautions to protect themselves and their communities from the potential consequences of a criminal attack." 
EPA was going to get right on it. "Starting in July, EPA representatives will begin visiting high priority chemical facilities to discuss their current and planned security efforts," the speech read. "These visits will allow EPA to survey security and, if appropriate, encourage security improvements at these facilities."
Despite the detailed preparations, Whitman never gave the speech, and the new policy was never issued. 
What happened?
Industry weighed in.
"We heard from industry," says a former EPA official who declines to be named. The chemical lobby insisted that the agency did not have authority to go after companies that did not adequately safeguard their plants, the official says.
Also hearing from industry was Bush's Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), which has a sympathetic ear. The CEQ is located across the street from the White House and is headed by James Connaughton, who formerly worked as a lobbyist for power companies.
Industry lobbyin

[BRC-NEWS] Dying for AIDS Drugs

[j w]

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20031103&s=kaplan 
The Nation
Dying for AIDS Drugs
by ESTHER KAPLAN
AIDS deaths, which increased ferociously in the United States throughout the 1980s and early '90s to a peak of 51,000 a year, suddenly abated in 1996 with the advent of antiretroviral combination therapy, a pricey and toxic brew that pulled people from their hospital beds like Lazarus. The relief was so intense that Andrew Sullivan announced "the end of AIDS," and researcher David Ho held out the hope of "eradication." It's often forgotten that AIDS deaths didn't fall to 9,000 a year by 2001 because of drug discovery alone. Those lives were also saved by a national commitment to provide access to the new medications. Throughout the late 1990s, Congressional support for the AIDS Drug Assistance Program was so strong on both sides of the aisle that appropriations exceeded presidential requests every year. 
That has now changed. As the growing epidemic slams up against state austerity measures, ADAP has descended into crisis, and Republicans in Washington have refused to intervene. As of early October, more than 600 people with HIV have been denied access to medications through the program. Three states have tightened income eligibility requirements; five have restricted the list of drugs they cover, hampering competent treatment; thirteen have capped their programs, leaving the sick to languish on waiting lists. ADAP has served as the payer of last resort since 1987, providing HIV medicines for hundreds of thousands of people with HIV who lack insurance, or whose prescription benefits don't come close to matching the drugs' exorbitant price tag. Most ADAP users are the working poor, earning too much to qualify for Medicaid at jobs that don't provide health plans. Study after study has confirmed that the program saves public-health dollars by preventing expensive
 hospitalizations--and saves lives. But since February, two people have died while on the West Virginia waiting list, and five more just died on Kentucky's. There are no death tallies for those whose income puts them a few dollars above states' new restrictive income requirements. 
Doctors, social workers and people with HIV describe a desperate scramble to gain access to lifesaving medications. In Alabama, the waiting list is 137, growing by nine or ten a week; to save additional dollars, the state just blocked coverage of the latest HIV drug, Fuzeon, a treatment used almost exclusively by those who have run dry of options. In Oregon, when the cash-strapped state temporarily eliminated some Medicaid prescription coverage, the ADAP waiting list ballooned; administrators responded by restricting covered drugs and instituting "cost sharing." 
Margaret Nicholson, a Springfield, Oregon, homecare attendant who survives with her mother and husband on less than $20,000 a year, lost her ADAP coverage because she couldn't afford the new co-pays; she has now gone four months without seeing a doctor and is scraping by on pill samples. In North Carolina, HIV doctor Aimee Wilkin says some of her waiting-list patients, forced to seek medicines through drug company charity programs, have faced multiple treatment interruptions, the result of bureaucratic delays, exposing them to the risk of HIV drug resistance. In Kentucky, caseworkers are so desperate they're asking churches to pass the hat to sponsor someone's pills for a few weeks at a time. 
Even after aggressively negotiating with drug companies to save ADAP $65 million with price breaks for next year, advocates with NASTAD, an association of state AIDS directors, calculate that it will take an ADAP increase of $214 million to cover the growing need next year--the amount requested by Senator Charles Schumer in a budget amendment rejected on a largely party-line vote (with one brave exception, Republican Mike DeWine). Other Republicans, even from states with bursting waiting lists, like Alabama, Colorado, Nebraska and North Carolina, voted no, apparently under intense pressure from George W. Bush and Bill Frist to stick to their domestic budget cap. The health and labor spending bill is currently in conference, where a minimal increase of $25 million to $38 million is under debate. 
Such underfunding, combined with an aggressive new federal HIV testing initiative, could swell ADAP waiting lists into the tens of thousands in 2004, according to Bill Arnold of the ADAP Working Group. In his State of the Union address in January, Bush made AIDS a cornerstone of his "compassion" agenda, announcing a $15 billion emergency plan to confront the global epidemic. He spoke of a doctor in rural South Africa who said that hospital workers, lacking drugs, simply tell their AIDS patients to go home and die. "In an age of miraculous medicines," the President went on to say, "no person should have to hear those words." 
Six hundred--and counting--have now heard those words here at home. "For the people on those wait lists," 

[BRC-NEWS] When Facts Don't Matter

[j w]

http://tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9193/view/print
When Facts Don't Matter  






Reece Rushing is a policy analyst at OMB Watch, a research and advocacy organization that monitors the activities of the Office of Management and Budget. 
In his new book, Paul Krugman calls the Bush administration a "revolutionary power." It knows what it wants. It vigorously pursues its radical agenda. And it won't be deterred by contrary evidence. In fact, it will manufacture evidence for its case where none exists. 
Krugman rests his argument on the war in Iraq and the Bush tax cuts for the rich, but he could have just as easily used the administration's approach to clean air regulation. Last month, the White House Office of Management and Budget put out a report that concluded, in economic terms, the benefits of environmental regulation swamp the costs. Four major clean air standards have been particularly effective, the report found, producing estimated annual benefits of $101 to $119 billion and costs of less than $9 billion. 
Yet instead of building on this success, the Bush administration is turning back the clock. Just weeks before OMB's report, EPA gutted emissions standards for the nation's oldest and dirtiest power plants, in what Sen. James Jeffords (I-Vt.) called "the biggest rollback of the Clean Air Act in history." The administration incredibly insists its changes will improve air quality, yet a new report by the General Accounting Office found that EPA could produce no data to support this claim. Facts had nothing to do with the decision. 
Likewise, the administration continues to press for adoption of its Orwellian "Clear Skies Initiative," which would actually allow more power-plant emissions than simply implementing and enforcing current law. EPA recently determined that this plan—which not surprisingly, is backed by industry—is far less effective (and only marginally less expensive) than alternative bipartisan legislation. Yet instead of accepting this verdict, the administration first buried the analysis and then stuck to its guns when it was eventually leaked to Congress. 
On global warming, the story is no different. In May 2002, President Bush disavowed an EPA report to the United Nations that lay blame for global warming on human activity, juxtaposing the seriousness of the problem with the administration's unwillingness to do anything about it. "I read the report put out by the bureaucracy," the president responded dismissively. A year later, the White House pushed EPA to drop reference to similar findings from an environmental anthology, and instead highlight a study partially funded by the American Petroleum Institute that questioned global warming. EPA ultimately chose to delete the entire section. 
OMB, which has review authority over agency regulation, is at least acknowledging the benefits of clean air. However, this seems to be viewed as an accident and hasn't changed its anti-regulatory bent. OMB's air tabulations draw from a multi-year retrospective study by EPA, which was approved by a prestigious panel of outside experts in 1997. OMB is clearly uncomfortable with the conclusions, yet the study stands as the most comprehensive examination of regulatory effectiveness ever done. OMB has little choice but to use it, albeit with some tinkering. 
In last year's report (the report is an annual requirement), this tinkering caused OMB to overstate the costs of clean air rules by a whopping $20 billion—a mistake that likely would have been caught were OMB not predisposed to accept high regulatory costs. OMB corrected its error in this year's report—revealing huge net regulatory benefits—yet it continues to pursue an agenda that is hostile to environmental protection. 
Indeed, the same report also includes decision-making guidelines that raise the bar for new regulation. These guidelines are constructed to produce "evidence" to validate the administration's preexisting agenda—by among other things spelling out analytical methods for monetizing regulatory benefits. 
To many the idea of putting a price tag on human life, health, or the environment will sound morally abhorrent. Yet in the Bush administration's world of devising regulation, this is par for the course (even though it is contrary to the law in the case of environmental regulation, which must be based on the "best technology available"). The methods used can have a profound effect on whether action appears worthwhile. 
For example, the administration's regulatory czar and architect of the guidelines, John Graham, came under fire this past spring for pushing EPA to devalue the lives of senior citizens in calculating benefits associated with "Clear Skies" and a court-mandated standard to reduce air pollution from snowmobiles (which annually discharge about 530,000 tons of carbon monoxide and 200,000 tons of hydrocarbons). Graham forced EPA to weaken the snowmobile standard using this analysis, scoring the lives of those over 70 at 63 pe

[BRC-NEWS] Mentally Ill Mistreated in Prison

[j w]

 http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/usa1003
 





Mentally Ill Mistreated in Prison - More Mentally Ill in Prison Than in Hospitals


Human Rights Watch

NEW YORK - October 22 - Mentally ill offenders face mistreatment and neglect in many U.S. prisons, Human Rights Watch charged in a report released today. 
One in six U.S. prisoners is mentally ill. Many of them suffer from serious illnesses such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression. There are three times as many men and women with mental illness in U.S. prisons as in mental health hospitals.
The rate of mental illness in the prison population is three times higher than in the general population.
According to the 215-page report, 'Ill-Equipped: U.S. Prisons and Offenders with Mental Illness', prisons are dangerous and damaging places for mentally ill people. Other prisoners victimize and exploit them. Prison staff often punish mentally ill offenders for symptoms of their illness - such as being noisy or refusing orders, or even self-mutilation and attempted suicide. Mentally ill prisoners are more likely than others to end up housed in especially harsh conditions, such as isolation, that can push them over the edge into acute psychosis.
"Prisons have become the nation's primary mental health facilities," said Jamie Fellner, director of Human Rights Watch's U.S. Program and a co- author of the report. "But for those with serious illnesses, prison can be the worst place to be."
Woefully deficient mental health services in many prisons leave prisoners undertreated - or not treated at all. Across the country, prisoners cannot get appropriate care because of a shortage of qualified staff, lack of facilities, and prison rules that interfere with treatment.
According to Human Rights Watch, the high rate of incarceration of the mentally ill is a consequence of underfunded, disorganized, and fragmented community mental health services. State and local governments have shut down mental health hospitals across the United States, but failed to provide adequate alternatives. Many people with mental illness - particularly those who are poor, homeless, or struggling with substance abuse problems - cannot get mental health treatment. If they commit a crime, even low-level nonviolent offenses, punitive sentencing laws mandate imprisonment.
"Unless you are wealthy, it can be next to impossible to receive mental health services in the community," said Fellner. "Many prisoners might never have ended up behind bars if publicly funded treatment had been available."
The Human Rights Watch report is based on more than two years of research and hundreds of interviews with prisoners, corrections officials, mental health experts and attorneys.
It describes prisoners who, because of their illness, rant and rave, babble incoherently, or huddle silently in their cells. They talk to invisible companions, living in worlds constructed of hallucinations. They lash out without provocation, beat their heads against cell walls, cover themselves with feces, mutilate themselves until their bodies are riddled with scars, and attempt suicide.
The Human Rights Watch report documents how prisoners with mental illness are likely to be picked on, physically or sexually abused, and manipulated by other inmates, who call them "bugs." For example, a prisoner in Georgia, who is both mentally ill and mildly retarded, has been raped repeatedly and exchanges sex for commissary items such as cigarettes and coffee.
Mentally ill prisoners can find it difficult if not impossible to comply with prison rules, and end up with higher than average rates of disciplinary infractions. Security staff - who usually lack training in mental illness - do not distinguish between the prisoner who is disruptive or fails to obey an order because of illness and a prisoner who causes problems for other reasons.
Mentally ill prisoners have been punished for self-mutilating ("destroying state property"); attempting suicide with a torn sheet ("destroying state property"); for yelling and kicking cell doors because of hearing voices ("creating a disturbance"); for throwing papers at a guard while delusional ("battery"); and for smearing feces on the cell door ("being untidy"). Untrained staff escalate confrontations with mentally ill prisoners, sometimes using excessive force. Several mentally ill prisoners have died from asphyxiation after struggling with guards who used improper methods to control them.
Over the past two decades, prison mental health services in the United States have improved - usually because of prisoner litigation. But the surging number of mentally ill men and women entering prison has outrun the availability of services. Public officials have been unwilling to provide the funds necessary to ensure adequate treatment for all the mentally ill offenders who need it.
"Prison officials are being asked to do something they aren't equipped to do," said Fellner. "Prisons are designed for punishment, 

[BRC-NEWS] Thousands in D.C. protest Iraq Policy

[j w]

  http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1026-01.htm
 





Published on Sunday, October 26, 2003 by the Long Island, NY Newsday 


Rallying to Bring U.S. Troops HomeThousands in D.C. protest Iraq policy


by Robert Gutsche Jr

 


WASHINGTON -- An Air Force sergeant who said the United States has misused the U.S. troops in an "unjustified war" in Iraq was one of thousands of people who rallied on the National Mall yesterday to demand an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops in Iraq. 
"I think there is a lot of sentiment inside the military that what we are doing isn't right," said the sergeant, who said he was 30 but asked not to be further identified. "Technically and legally we did sign up for this, and it's our responsibility to fill what our responsibilities are, but the people making the decisions also need to use us as a last resort." 




Protesters hang a large banner from the window of a downtown office building, during an anti-war demonstration in Washington, October 25, 2003. Thousands rallied in Washington on Saturday to protest against U.S. policy in Iraq, the first major demonstration since President George W. Bush declared an end to major combat in the war on Iraq. REUTERS/Gregg Newton By noon, more than 30,000 people had gathered near the Washington Monument, according to an estimate by Newsday. Organizers said about 100,000 people squeezed through city streets during the three-hour march. Police didn't report any arrests by early yesterday evening. 
At the same time, 20,000 people gathered in San Francisco for similar demonstrations, according to organizers there. 
In Washington, the sergeant, who could face deployment to Iraq, said he lives "two contradicting lives" by working in the military and participating in the demonstration. Despite his reservations about war, he said he needs his job in the military to pay the bills. "I probably wouldn't disagree with a person who calls me a hypocrite, but this war was wrong," he said. 
Democratic presidential candidate the Rev. Al Sharpton told the crowds at the rally, "President Bush and Tony Blair don't make a world conference. Two men in a phone booth don't speak for the world. ... Bring our troops home now." 
Later, the crowds cheered "Impeach Bush" while marching toward the White House and around the Justice Department. 
The thousands of protesters clashed peacefully with about 50 people who had gathered along the march route to support President George W. Bush and military action in Iraq. 
"War freed the slaves. War saved the Jews. Anti-war racists go home," yelled one woman with Free Republic, a group that supports Bush. The two groups chanted at each other for about two hours, separated by fences and police officers in helmets. 
"We are pretty happy with the way things have been going" in Iraq, said Kristinn Taylor, who led the group from a small rally near the Capitol before the main march near the White House. He said his organization wants to show "that this is not going to be like Vietnam where we won the war on the battleground, but lost the propaganda war at home." 
Cynthia Rivelli, 61, traveled from Washington Heights in Manhattan to protest America's presence in Iraq. "I'm hoping that this will help perk up Congress that there are still people out there outraged," she said. 
Bill Perry, 56, from Pennsylvania, was one of about 150 Vietnam veterans and military family members who gathered in the cold late Friday night near the Vietnam Wall to protest the war. Perry, who fought in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968, demonstrated against the war when he came home. 
"I hate to see kids suffering," he said. "And I would hate to see more kids come home in wheelchairs and caskets. We need our troops home now." 
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.
Do you Yahoo!?
Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears

[BRC-NEWS] Resistance is the First Step Towards Iraqi Independence

[j w]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1076480,00.html

Resistance is the First Step Towards Iraqi Independence
by Tariq Ali
 

Some weeks ago, Pentagon inmates were invited to a special
in-house showing of an old movie. It was the Battle of Algiers,
Gillo Pontecorvo's anti-colonial classic, initially banned in
France. One assumes the purpose of the screening was purely
educative. The French won that battle, but lost the war. At
least the Pentagon understands that the resistance in Iraq is
following a familiar anti-colonial pattern. In the movie, they
would have seen acts carried out by the Algerian maquis almost
half a century ago, which could have been filmed in Fallujah or
Baghdad last week. Then, as now, the occupying power described
all such activities as "terrorist". Then, as now, prisoners
were taken and tortured, houses that harbored them or their
relatives were destroyed, and repression was multiplied. In the
end, the French had to withdraw.

As American "postwar" casualties now exceed those sustained
during the invasion (which cost the Iraqis at least 15,000
lives), a debate of sorts has begun in the US. Few can deny
that Iraq under US occupation is in a much worse state than it
was under Saddam Hussein. There is no reconstruction. There is
mass unemployment. Daily life is a misery, and the occupiers
and their puppets cannot provide even the basic amenities of
life. The US doesn't even trust the Iraqis to clean their
barracks, and so south Asian and Filipino migrants are being
used. This is colonialism in the epoch of neo-liberal
capitalism, and so US and "friendly" companies are given
precedence. Even under the best circumstances, an occupied Iraq
would become an oligarchy of crony capitalism, the new
cosmopolitanism of Bechtel and Halliburton.

It is the combination of all this that fuels the resistance and
encourages many young men to fight. Few are prepared to betray
those who are fighting. This is crucially important, because
without the tacit support of the population, a sustained
resistance is virtually impossible.

The Iraqi maquis have weakened George Bush's position in the US
and enabled Democrat politicians to criticize the White House,
with Howard Dean daring to suggest a total US withdrawal within
two years. Even the bien pensants who opposed the war but
support the occupation and denounce the resistance know that
without it they would have been confronted with a triumphalist
chorus from the warmongers. Most important, the disaster in
Iraq has indefinitely delayed further adventures in Iran and
Syria.

One of the more comical sights in recent months was Paul
Wolfowitz on one of his many visits informing a press
conference in Baghdad that the "main problem was that there
were too many foreigners in Iraq". Most Iraqis see the
occupation armies as the real "foreign terrorists". Why?
Because once you occupy a country, you have to behave in
colonial fashion. This happens even where there is no
resistance, as in the protectorates of Bosnia and Kosovo. Where
there is resistance, as in Iraq, the only model on offer is a
mixture of Gaza and Guantanamo.

Nor does it behoove western commentators whose countries are
occupying Iraq to lay down conditions for those opposing it. It
is an ugly occupation, and this determines the response.
According to Iraqi opposition sources, there are more than 40
different resistance organizations. They consist of Ba'athists,
dissident communists, disgusted by the treachery of the Iraqi
Communist party in backing the occupation, nationalists, groups
of Iraqi soldiers and officers disbanded by the occupation, and
Sunni and Shia religious groups.

The great poets of Iraq - Saadi Youssef and Mudhaffar al-Nawab
- once brutally persecuted by Saddam, but still in exile, are
the consciences of their nation. Their angry poems denouncing
the occupation and heaping scorn on the jackals - or quislings
- help to sustain the spirit of resistance and renewal.

Youssef writes: I'll spit in the jackals' faces/ I'll spit on
their lists/ I'll declare that we are the people of Iraq/ We
are the ancestral trees of this land.

And Nawwab: And never trust a freedom fighter/ Who turns up
with no arms/ Believe me, I got burnt in that crematorium/
Truth is, you're only as big as your cannons/ While those who
wave knives and forks/ Simply have eyes for their stomachs.

In other words, the resistance is predominantly Iraqi - though
I would not be surprised if other Arabs are crossing the
borders to help. If there are Poles and Ukrainians in Baghdad
and Najaf, why should Arabs not help each other? The key fact
of the resistance is that it is decentralized - the classic
first stage of guerrilla warfare against an occupying army.
Yesterday's downing of a US Chinook helicopter follows that
same pattern. Whether these groups will move to the second
stage and establish an Iraqi National Liberation Front remains
to be seen.

As for the UN acting as an "honest broker", forget it -
especiall

[BRC-NEWS] Iraq is Not America's to Sell

[j w]

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1107-09.htm

Iraq is Not America's to Sell
International law is Unequivocal - 
Paul Bremer's Economic Reforms are Illegal

by Naomi Klein

Bring Halliburton home. Cancel the contracts. Ditch the deals.
Rip up the rules. Those are just a few of the suggestions for
slogans that could help unify the growing movement against the
occupation of Iraq. So far, activist debates have focused on
whether the demand should be for a complete withdrawal of
troops, or for the United States to cede power to the United
Nations.

But the "troops out" debate overlooks an important fact. If
every last soldier pulled out of the Gulf tomorrow and a
sovereign government came to power, Iraq would still be
occupied: by laws written in the interest of another country;
by foreign corporations controlling its essential services; by
70% unemployment sparked by public sector layoffs.

Any movement serious about Iraqi self-determination must call
not only for an end to Iraq's military occupation, but to its
economic colonization as well. That means reversing the shock
therapy reforms that US occupation chief Paul Bremer has
fraudulently passed off as "reconstruction", and canceling all
privatization contracts that are flowing from these reforms.

How can such an ambitious goal be achieved? Easy: by showing
that Bremer's reforms were illegal to begin with. They clearly
violate the international convention governing the behavior of
occupying forces, the Hague regulations of 1907 (the companion
to the 1949 Geneva conventions, both ratified by the United
States), as well as the US army's own code of war.

The Hague regulations state that an occupying power must
respect "unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the
country". The coalition provisional authority has shredded that
simple rule with gleeful defiance. Iraq's constitution outlaws
the privatization of key state assets, and it bars foreigners
from owning Iraqi firms. No plausible argument can be made that
the CPA was "absolutely prevented" from respecting those laws,
and yet two months ago, the CPA overturned them unilaterally.

On September 19, Bremer enacted the now infamous Order 39. It
announced that 200 Iraqi state companies would be privatized;
decreed that foreign firms can retain 100% ownership of Iraqi
banks, mines and factories; and allowed these firms to move
100% of their profits out of Iraq. The Economist declared the
new rules a "capitalist dream".

Order 39 violated the Hague regulations in other ways as well.
The convention states that occupying powers "shall be regarded
only as administrator and usufructuary of public buildings,
real estate, forests and agricultural estates belonging to the
hostile state, and situated in the occupied country. It must
safeguard the capital of these properties, and administer them
in accordance with the rules of usufruct."

Bouvier's Law Dictionary defines "usufruct" (possibly the
ugliest word in the English language) as an arrangement that
grants one party the right to use and derive benefit from
another's property "without altering the substance of the
thing". Put more simply, if you are a housesitter, you can eat
the food in the fridge, but you can't sell the house and turn
it into condos. And yet that is just what Bremer is doing: what
could more substantially alter "the substance" of a public
asset than to turn it into a private one?

In case the CPA was still unclear on this detail, the US army's
Law of Land Warfare states that "the occupant does not have the
right of sale or unqualified use of [non-military] property".
This is pretty straightforward: bombing something does not give
you the right to sell it. There is every indication that the
CPA is well aware of the lawlessness of its privatization
scheme. In a leaked memo written on March 26, the British
attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, warned Tony Blair that "the
imposition of major structural economic reforms would not be
authorized by international law".

So far, most of the controversy surrounding Iraq's
reconstruction has focused on the waste and corruption in the
awarding of contracts. This badly misses the scope of the
violation: even if the sell-off of Iraq were conducted with
full transparency and open bidding, it would still be illegal
for the simple reason that Iraq is not America's to sell.

The security council's recognition of the United States' and
Britain's occupation authority provides no legal cover. The UN
resolution passed in May specifically required the occupying
powers to "comply fully with their obligations under
international law including in particular the Geneva
conventions of 1949 and the Hague regulations of 1907".

According to a growing number of international legal experts,
that means that if the next Iraqi government decides it doesn't
want to be a wholly owned subsidiary of Bechtel and
Halliburton, it will have powerful legal grounds to
renationalize assets that were privatized under CPA edicts.

Jul

[BRC-NEWS] Starve the Racist Prison Beast

[j w]

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=43&ItemID=4471

Starve the Racist Prison Beast

by Paul Street ; November 08, 2003
 

Let me start by quoting quote my favorite historical
personality from Indiana - the great democratic Socialist
Eugene Debs, from Terre Haute. "While there is a lower class,"
Debs once said, "I am of it. While there is a criminal
element," he added, "I am of it; while there is a soul in
prison, I am not free."


Prison Nation: "Not Unless This Country Plunges Into Fascism"

Debs would feel most un-free in contemporary America, where 2
million adults spend their days behind bars in the nation that
possesses the world's highest incarceration rate. In the second
year of the new millennium, 40 of every 100,000 people in Italy
were imprisoned. The incarceration rate in Sweden was 60 per
100,000. France: 90 per 100,000. England: 125. South Africa:
400 per 100,000. Russia, with the second highest rate in the
world: 675. The United States led the world with 690 per
100,000. Incredibly enough, the nation that proclaims itself
the homeland and headquarters of world freedom comprises 5
percent of the world's population but houses more than 25
percent of the world's prisoners. "No other Western democratic
country has ever imprisoned this proportion of its population,"
says Norval Morris, a professor emeritus at University of
Chicago Law School. Indiana and Illinois are playing major
roles in this dark drama, contributing 43,000 (Illinois) and
22,000 (Indiana) state prisoners, respectively to the inmate
total in Prison Nation. With federal, local and county
prisoners included, the numbers would be considerably higher.

America's incarceration numbers are off the charts relative to
the rest of the world but they are also off the charts relative
to our own history. In the last two-and-a-half decades,
America's prison population has undergone "literally
incredible" expansion, rising from less than 300,000 in 1970 to
the current shocking number. There were less than 7500 state
prison inmates in the entire state of Illinois in 1970. Thirty
one years later, I found 7500 Illinois prisoners coming from
just six of Chicago's sixty-six zip codes, including five on
the city's west side and one on the south side. During the same
period the number of prisons in my state rose from 7 to 27.

Reviewing these numbers I am struck by the depths of an amazing
domestic development that has taken place quietly, behind the
scene, during my lifetime, captured quite well by Angela Davis.
"When I first became involved in antiprison activities during
the late 1960s," writes Davis, "I was astounded to learn that
there were then close to two hundred thousand people in prison.
Had anyone told me that in three decades ten times as many
people would be locked away in case, I would have been
absolutely incredulous. I imagine that I would have responded
something like this: 'As racist and undemocratic as this
country may be [remember, during that period, the demands of
the Civil Rights Movement had not yet been consolidated], I do
not believe that the U.S. government will be able to lock up so
many people without producing powerful resistance. No, this
will never happen, not unless this country plunges into
fascism." (Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? Seven Stories
Press, 2003, p.11)

The US incarceration rate began its dramatic upward
acceleration in the mid-1970s, after nearly 50 years during
which it hovered around 100 per 100,000. Incarceration is now
so extensive that several large states currently spend as much
or more money to incarcerate adults than they do to provide
their citizens with college and graduate educations. States now
spend 60 cents on prisons for every dollar they spend on higher
education, up from 28 cents in 1980.

Ex-Offender Nation: the Mark of a Criminal Record

Less commonly noted, America's mass imprisonment and related
felony marking boom has also generated a massive army of
"ex-offenders," whose liberty on the "outside" is strictly
qualified by the lifelong mark of a criminal record. More than
600, 000 individuals are released from state and federal
prisons each year, feeding a swelling army of ex-offenders,
saddled with what The Economist last year called "The Stigma
That Never Fades." According to the best recent estimates,
roughly 13 million Americans - fully 7 percent of the adult
population and 12 percent of the adult male population -
possess felony records. Thanks to numerous barriers to
ex-offender "reintegration" (a phrase that tends to too-easily
assume that former prisoners were meaningfully integrated into
American "opportunity structures" prior to arrest and
imprisonment), many released inmates claim that their "real
sentence" began upon release. This claim often contains a
measure of exaggeration, no doubt: "modern" US prisons are
violent and totalitarian structures, monuments of intentionally
planned mass misery, unmitigated by meaningful investment in
rehabilit

[BRC-NEWS] Georgia 'Velvet Revolution'

[j w]

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1123-07.htm

Published on Sunday, November 23, 2003 by Reuters

Shevardnadze Quits in Georgia 'Velvet Revolution'
by Elizabeth Piper
 

TBILISI, Georgia - Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze
announced his resignation Sunday, bowing to opposition
protesters who stormed parliament and declared a "velvet
revolution" in the former Soviet republic.


Georgian opposition supporters wave flags as they stand on an
armored vehicle celebrating President Eduard Shevardnadze's
resignation outside his residence in Tbilisi, November 23,
2003. Shevardnadze announced that he had quit, bowing to
opposition protesters who stormed parliament declaring a
'velvet revolution' and demanding his resignation. Photo by
Gleb Garanich/Reuters
"I see that all this cannot simply go on. If I was forced
tomorrow to use my authority it would lead to a lot of
bloodshed. I have never betrayed my country and so it is better
that the president resigns," Shevardnadze said on television.

Shevardnadze's white-haired head was bowed as he walked away,
but the former Soviet foreign minister -- accused in mass
protests in the poverty-plagued country of vote-rigging -- gave
a strained smile and lifted his hand to wave goodbye.

His resignation followed talks with Russian Foreign Minister
Igor Ivanov, main opposition leader Mikhail Saakashvili and
fellow opposition activist Zurab Zhvania at the veteran
Georgian president's suburban residence in the capital Tbilisi.

Tens of thousands of opposition supporters outside parliament
exploded in rapturous celebrations when Shevardnadze gave up 11
years of power in a country closely watched by the West and
investors because of a pipeline project to take Caspian oil to
the Mediterranean Sea. Fireworks ripped into the sky.

ELECTION FRAUD

Saakashvili told CNN the speaker of the outgoing parliament,
Nino Burdzhanadze, would take over as acting president from
Shevardnadze, 75. The constitution provides for her to remain
interim president for 45 days pending elections.

"Now it is important that...Shevardnadze and the police of
Georgia and the armed forces, as well as the acting president,
preserve stability and calm in the country," said Saakashvili.

He urged protesters to remove their barricades in Tbilisi.

Saakashvili had called on supporters to march on Shevardnadze's
residence to force him to resign after a three-week protest
campaign against alleged rigging in a November 2 parliamentary
election.

The crowds outside parliament shouted "Victory, our victory."

Saakashvili led a parade of vehicles from Shevardnadze's
residence to chants of "We won, we won." Many people waved
red-and-white opposition flags out of car windows.

He beamed as he addressed reporters, in sharp contrast to an
exhausted Shevardnadze, who spoke slowly but clearly.

Shevardnadze had said earlier in the day he was ready to
discuss key opposition demands, including an early presidential
poll, but opponents said it was too late for talks.

BLOODY CIVIL WAR

His resignation occurred amid signs that some security forces
were moving over to the opposition side in Georgia, where a
bloody civil war was fought in the early 1990s and two regions
have broken away from central government rule.

Shevardnadze, who officially had 1-1/2 years left in office,
had been widely blamed for the country's grinding poverty. He
survived two assassination attempts in the 1990s.

Saturday, protesters seized the parliament building. As with
the "people power" protests that swept Eastern Europe in 1989,
the military stood aside. Shevardnadze was forced to flee.

"Shevardnadze's regime is bankrupt. His time has been
exhausted," said Saakashvili, a 35-year-old U.S.-trained lawyer
groomed by Shevardnadze.

A group of up to 200 men and women, saying they were members of
the national guard, had joined the opposition supporters before
Shevardnadze quit.

As Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's foreign minister,
Shevardnadze strode across continents, playing a key role in
negotiations with the West and Eastern European states that
ushered in the end of the Cold War and the collapse of
communism.

or the last decade he had been in charge of what had become an
impoverished, violent and unstable Caucasus mountain state with
a population of about five million.

"I know (Shevardnadze) well. He is by no means a coward and
surely understood that the time had come to take such a step to
prevent the break-up of Georgia. And on that score, I believe
he did the right thing," Gorbachev was quoted as saying by
Russia's Interfax news agency.

© Reuters Ltd 2003

###

__
Do you Yahoo!?
Free Pop-Up Blocker - Get it now
http://companion.yahoo.com/

[IMPORTANT NOTE: The views and opinions expressed on this
list are solely those of the authors and/or publications,
and do not necessarily represent or reflect the official
political positions of the Black Radical Congress (BRC).
Official BRC statements, position papers

[BRC-NEWS] Race, Radicalism, and Industrial Union Democracy

[j w]

>From the Winter, 2004 issue of WorkingUSA (subscriptions 
available at www.mesharpe.com):

Race, Radicalism, and Industrial Union Democracy

BLACK FREEDOM FIGHTERS IN STEEL:The Struggle For Democratic 
Unionism. By Ruth Needleman.Cornell. 305 pp.$47.50 cloth;
$25.95, 
paper. LEFT OUT: 
Reds and America's Industrial Unions. By Judith Stepan-Norris 
and Maurice Zeitlin. Cambridge. 375 pp. $75, cloth; $27, paper.

By Steve Early 

A quarter century ago, when mid-western cities were still 
ringed by the glowing hearths of steel mills instead of their 
post-industrial rubble, dissident steel 
workers were on the march. Their champion then was Ed 
Sadlowski, a critic of the union establishment who was
campaigning, unsuccessfully, for president 
of the United Steel Workers of America (USWA). "Oil Can Eddie" 
was a product of the union's Chicago-Gary district, where 
blacks and whites united to build the Congress of Industrial
Organizations (CIO) in the "old left" working class milieu
vividly described in Ruth Needleman's Black Freedom Fighters in
Steel. 

Long before bumper stickers appeared on Volvos urging us to 
"Celebrate Diversity," Sadlowski tried to do just that when he 
assembled his "Steelworkers Fightback" slate. In addition to
himself, a Polish-American, it included a Serbo-Croatian, an
African-American, a Chicano, and an American Jew. This rainbow 
coalition covered all the political bases except Canada- a 
fatal omission in an "international union" that has since
elected 
two Canadians as president! In 1976, however, the emergence of
a black candidate for the USWA executive board--Oliver
Montgomery--was big news indeed. In the 
four decades since the USWA's founding, no African-American had
ever made it to the top ranks of America's second largest
industrial union.

By the 1960s, continued discrimination in the mills and 
exclusion of blacks from the union leadership and staff
triggered a rank-and-file revolt, led by Montgomery and others.


To undercut Sadlowski's appeal to minority workers, based on 
his alliance with this civil rights veteran, incumbent
officials 
quickly created a new USWA vice-presidency for "human rights."
They then found a safer African-American candidate for the
job-- a union headquarters loyalist who was "not part of the 
black protest movement." 

Such partial victories are a re-occurring feature of the 
anti-discrimination fights recounted in Needleman's steel union

history. On a broader canvas in Left Out, sociologists Maurice
Zeitlin and Judith Stepan-Norris trace the rise and fall of
radical influence within the CIO generally--and its impact on
race relations, workplace militancy, and union democracy. Both
books are thus relevant to current debates about reviving the
labor movement--particularly through recruitment of more women,
immigrants, and other "minorities" who together constitute a
new majority in many workplaces. 

Workers being wooed by "progressive unions" now are already 
learning the truth of Frederick Douglass' famous 19th century 
axiom--"power concedes nothing without a demand" (which applies
equally to industrial relations and internal union politics).
In today's AFL-CIO, grassroots participation in the 
pageantry of Justice for Janitors campaigns or the Immigrant 
Workers Freedom Ride is highly-prized--just as the CIO once put
a 
top priority on African-American support for unionization in
steel. 

Worker involvement can be more problematic, however, when 
initial organizing or contract fights are over,
labor-management 
relationships have become institutionalized, and union
bureaucracy is far more entrenched than rank-and-file power. As
Needleman observes, "without membership initiative and 
organization, without debate and opposition, unions lose the 
spirit and substance that makes them work." 

Left Out tracks the ebb and flow of CIO insurgency with charts,

statistical data, and a critical review of past academic 
literature. Needleman anchors her 
analysis in oral history, focusing on the moving personal 
stories of five Steelworkers whose union involvement spanned
more 
than sixty years. 

The overlapping careers of George Kimbley, William Young, John 
Howard, Curtis Strong, and Jonathan Comer add up to a 
collective profile in courage. 
Although differing in their handling of "racial conflicts and 
individual prejudice," all played "instrumental roles in 
establishing a union in steel, implementing 
fairer workplace standards, and forging alliances with 
community, civil rights, and women's organizations." Behind
labor's official support for "civil rights," 
there has always been a more complex reality, even in left-led 
unions. 

CIO organizing in the 1930s broke with the AFL's tradition of 
craft union bias, creating integrated working-class 
organizations that had little precedent in a 
society long segregated, at all levels, in its housing, 
education, and employment. Citing no less an authority than W.
E. B Dubois, Left Out argues that t

[BRC-NEWS] globalization in rural farm communities

[j w]

The challenge of globalization in rural farm communities.
by: Khalil Tian Shahyd

For the past decade movements for liberation and alternatives
to globalization have been supported by communities and social
movements throughout the world. In this process, rural, land
based and Indigenous movements have begun to take center stage
as sources of inspiration and creative solutions to the
problems of trade liberalization. Led by such widely recognized
movements as the EZLN of Chiapas, Mexico, and the MST of
southern Brazil, rural and Indigenous communities are
dismantling generations of left-wing dogma which believed that
change must come through the efforts of an industrialized
working class positioned at or near the seats of political
power in urban areas. More importantly, these new movements are
challenging the development theories of modernization, both
capitalist and Marxist which privilege the centralization of
political authority and control of resources towards an
industrialized economy void of ecological considerations.

Mainstream economics are driven by the need to infinitely
increase the resource and commodity consumption levels of urban
society. Rural and traditional communities have more often been
seen as barriers to development, or places lacking development
due to their isolation from, or outright rejection of
mainstream cultures of consumption. The increasing
sophistication of information technology, media, and travel are
quickly erasing these barriers. Today rural and Indigenous
communities face the increasing threat of physical and cultural
destruction. Their lands are being occupied by corporate
industry for resource extraction and mechanized agricultural
factories. Ancient and folk cultures the world over are dying
along with the Elders, as youth are being influenced by the
corporate marketing industry of an urban materialistic American
pop culture driven largely by hip-hop.

While many international development forums have criticized the
growing gap in global GDP's and per capita income levels
between the so-called 1st and 3rd worlds, few have acknowledged
the obscenity of the fact that 65% of the world's depletable
resources are consumed by the urban centers of North America
and Western Europe, with the U.S. accounting for the
consumption of 50% of the world's refined oil, with only 6% of
it's population. The average American consumer consumes about
as much natural resources as 16 Chinese citizens. Globally,
'developed' country consumers, who make up only 16% of the
world's population, spent 81% of the money used for private
consumption .

In the wake of the destruction of localized land bases and
economies, people are being driven by economic necessity into
already over crowed urban regions. The U.N. estimates that the
world's urban population will reach 4.9billion by 2030, an
increase of 72%. Causing greater stresses on waste disposal
methods and already over consumed resources to satisfy market
created lifestyles. Suburban sprawl, a result of both increased
population and the decline of urban population densities, is
encroaching on valuable farm land, transforming the rural
landscape, and the cultures it created. Every hour in the U.S.,
50 acres of farmland are lost to sprawl and 'development', 80%
of it for housing alone. Adding only 4 new homes to a suburban
area, increases water demand by 227,760 gallons a year, with
16,000 lbs of additional solid waste.

It is in this light that rural and traditional communities are
coming to the forefront of the movements for alternatives to
globalization. However, rural America, perhaps the first zone
of forced experimentation with neo-liberal economic policies
has been left out of the discussion. Development policy in the
U.S. is dominated by market and industrial fundamentalist,
partly because progressive activist and radical social thinkers
are concentrated in America's urban centers, but also, because
the progressive movement in America has neglected development
focused activity in favor of issue oriented, protest activism,
also centralized in the largest urban markets. Behind all of
this, is an unspoken arrogance in urban areas towards, the
'backward-country' folk of rural areas. Urban radicals,
"Isolated" beneath the shadows of urban skyscrapers, are
pre-occupied by urban warfare against militarized policing,
gentrification and other specifically urban ills. So much of
our time is taken up in the glamour of organizing larger and
larger urban protest to globalization, we are neglecting
opportunities to build larger, stronger constituencies by
developing our own alternatives. What we are missing beyond the
skylines, are infinite possibilities for creating a new
direction for social and economic development through rural
communities.

Further, Black progressives and radicals lack the ideological
motivation, tools and experience to analyze issues of
sustainable development, biological diversity, ecological
sustainability, and cultural diversi

[BRC-NEWS] Remember a life well lived

[j w]

http://www.progressive.org/mediaproject03/mprf503.html

ELLA J. BAKER
Remember a life well lived

BY BARBARA RANSBY
www.progressive.org

Today marks the 100th anniversary of Ella Josephine Baker's 
birth. Although her name may be unknown to many, this re-
markable woman was one of the most influential people in the
crusade for racial justice in America.

An untiring voice for the dispossessed, a democrat and an 
egalitarian in word and deed, Baker was a true American hero.

For more than 50 years, she traveled the breadth of this 
country organizing, protesting and advocating for social
justice. Her main concern was the plight of blacks, whose
rights, she 
argued, were the litmus test for American democracy. But she
was also concerned with the cause of labor, the poor, Latinos
and women.

Over the course of her life, she worked alongside some of the 
most well-known civil-rights leaders of the 20th century. They 
included W.E.B. DuBois, Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther 
King, Jr.

But celebrity did not impress Baker. Instead, she placed 
emphasis on grass-roots organizing and local leadership. Her
own 
humble style is part of the reason why her contributions and 
accomplishments are less known than those of many of her male 
counterparts.

• In the 1930s, while living in Harlem, Baker was a leader of 
the cooperative movement and participated in demonstrations 
against lynching, colonialism and fascism.

• In the 1940s, she blazed a trail through Ku Klux Klan 
territory, recruiting members for the NAACP and putting her own
life at risk in the process.

• In the 1950s, she divided her time between Atlanta and New 
York, struggling against police brutality and school
segregation 
in the North, and for basic civil and human rights in the 
South. She was the first director of the Southern Christian 
Leadership Conference.

• In the 1960s she was mentor to a new generation of young 
freedom fighters. Her political protégés included Julian Bond, 
current leader of the NAACP; educator and author Bob Moses;
Bernice Johnson Reagon, founder of the musical group Sweet
Honey in the Rock; Marian Wright Edelman of the Children's
Defense Fund; and Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C. All of
these individuals began their political careers in the ranks of
an organization that Baker helped found in the spring of 1960,
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Instrumental organization

SNCC grew out of the 1960 lunch-counter desegregation sit-ins 
and was instrumental in the 1961 freedom rides that broke the 
color bar on interstate trains and buses. It was the 
organizational force behind Freedom Summer in 1964, which
shuttled hundreds of Northern college students into the South
to work on voter registration and education.

SNCC engaged in bold and daring confrontations with racism. 
Many of its members were jailed and beaten, and some lost their

lives. But they helped change the racial landscape of the
nation. 
Baker was officially an adult advisor to SNCC, but she was much

more. She garnered resources, mended wounds (physical and 
emotional) and offered strategic insights. She also put the 
inexperienced young organizers in touch with local activists
throughout the region who advised, nurtured and supported them.

Her work with SNCC was the most fulfilling phase of Baker's 
long political life. But after the organization began to
unravel 
in the late 1960s, Baker continued her work on other fronts.

Tireless activist

She opposed the war in Vietnam, supported the campaign for 
Puerto Rican independence and lobbied against South African 
apartheid. She was a relentless fighter on the side of the
oppressed and downtrodden for more than a half century. The
large and diverse crowd of notables and unknowns who attended
her funeral in 1986 was testimony to this fact.

Baker never thought of herself as old, even as her hair grayed 
and her once-flawless brown skin relented to the pull of time 
and gravity.

''Being young is a state of mind,'' she once told a friend, 
``and young people are the people who want change.''

Baker wanted to change injustice, and she spent her life doing 
just that. It kept her young. Her youthful life is one well 
worth remembering.

Barbara Ransby, author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom 
Movement, won the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize from the
Association of American Historians for the best women's history
book in 2003.

__
Do you Yahoo!?
New Yahoo! Photos - easier uploading and sharing.
http://photos.yahoo.com/

[IMPORTANT NOTE: The views and opinions expressed on this
list are solely those of the authors and/or publications,
and do not necessarily represent or reflect the official
political positions of the Black Radical Congress (BRC).
Official BRC statements, position papers, press releases,
action alerts, and announcements are distributed exclusively
via the BRC-PRESS list. As a subscriber to this list, you
have been added to the BRC-PRESS list automati

[BRC-NEWS] Africa-China Cooperation Boosted

[j w]

http://allafrica.com/stories/200312170029.html

Africa-China Cooperation Boosted

UN Integrated Regional Information Networks NEWS
December 17, 2003
Addis Ababa

A China-Africa summit ended in the Ethiopian capital Addis
Ababa on Tuesday with promises of trade deals, debt reduction
and increase in political cooperation.

Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhoaxing told journalists that a
raft of proposals, including US $680 million in trade
agreements, had been agreed during the two-day conference.

Africa is the world's poorest continent where 300 million
people are living on the poverty line. China - with a 1.3
billion population - has a per capita income of US $940 a year.

China is also planning to slash taxes on certain goods from 34
of the world's poorest African countries, officials said, as
part of a "zero tariff trade deal".

China and Africa are aiming to treble trade to US $30 billion
within three years, the conference was told.

Political leaders and trade officials said the proposals were
aimed at overcoming "imbalances" with rich nations who "exploit
and bully" developing countries.

Just two percent of China's trade is with Africa - while the
impoverished continent manages just five percent of its trade
with China.

Chinese businesses will be offered tax exemptions and
favourable banking deals if they launch operations in Africa,
officials added.

Seyoum Mesfin, Ethiopia's Foreign Minister, told the press
conference that boosting human resources in Africa lay at the
heart of any development programme.

He also hailed anti-terrorist cooperation agreed during the
forum and China's commitment to supply peacekeepers to
troublespots on the continent.

"China has begun to be more involved in a tangible manner in
activities aimed at ensuring peace and stability in Africa," he
told journalists.

The next conference will be held in three years in Beijing.
 

Copyright © 2003 UN Integrated Regional Information Networks.
All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media
(allAfrica.com). 

__
Do you Yahoo!?
New Yahoo! Photos - easier uploading and sharing.
http://photos.yahoo.com/

[IMPORTANT NOTE: The views and opinions expressed on this
list are solely those of the authors and/or publications,
and do not necessarily represent or reflect the official
political positions of the Black Radical Congress (BRC).
Official BRC statements, position papers, press releases,
action alerts, and announcements are distributed exclusively
via the BRC-PRESS list. As a subscriber to this list, you
have been added to the BRC-PRESS list automatically.]

[Articles on BRC-NEWS may be forwarded and posted on other
mailing lists, as long as the wording/attribution is not altered
in any way. In particular, if there is a reference to a web site
where an article was originally located, do *not* remove that.

Unless stated otherwise, do *not* publish or post the entire
text of any articles on web sites or in print, without getting
*explicit* permission from the article author or copyright holder.
Check the fair use provisions of the copyright law in your country
for details on what you can and can't do.

As a courtesy, we'd appreciate it if you let folks know how to
subscribe to BRC-NEWS, by leaving in the first seven lines of the
signature below.]

--
BRC-NEWS: Black Radical Congress - General News Articles/Reports
--
Unsubscribe: 
--
Subscribe: 
--
Digest: 
--
Help: 
--
Archive: 
--
Archive: 
--
Archive: 
--
Post: 
--
  | BRC |  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
--

[BRC-NEWS] Money And Oil At Root of Delta Violence

[j w]

http://allafrica.com/stories/200312170040.html

Money And Oil At Root of Delta Violence, Rights Group Says

UN Integrated Regional Information Networks
NEWS
December 17, 2003
Posted to the web December 17, 2003
Lagos

Ethnic loathing may have been the spur to the ferocious
violence between rival ethnic militias in Nigeria's Niger Delta
this year, but the object was control of government resources
and money from stolen crude oil, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said
on Wednesday.

"Although the violence has both ethnic and political
dimensions, it is essentially a fight over the oil money, both
government revenue and the profits of stolen crude," said
Bronwen Manby, deputy director of HRW's Africa Division and the
author of the 29-page report entitled "The Warri Crisis:
Fuelling Violence."

The report details fighting around the southern oil town of
Warri involving rival militias of the Ijaw, Itsekiri and Urhobo
ethnic groups. It said the conflict, which began in 1997, had
killed hundreds of people this year and left thousands
displaced.

Both Ijaws and Urhobos allege their Itsekiri rivals are
favoured by government in the distribution of election
constituency boundaries and oil benefits.

The international human rights group urged the Nigerian federal
government to provide more honest and accountable
administration in Delta State of which Warri is the capital. It
also called on President Olusegun Obasanjo to crack down on the
theft of oil from pipelines, saying the massive profits from
this illegal trade had been used to flood the region with guns.

"Efforts to halt the violence and end the civilian suffering
that has accompanied it must...include steps both to improve
government accountability and to end the theft of oil," Manby
said.

HRW specifically called for a re-run of this year's general
elections in Delta State, saying the levels of fraud and
violence which accompanied voting meant minimum international
standards for an acceptable election were not met.

The group also recommended that Nigeria adopt a system of
"certifying" legally obtained crude oil by using chemical
processes to identify cargoes of stolen crude in the
international market.

Several oil company executives have said this would discourage
the powerful gangs which siphon off up to 10 percent of
Nigeria's oil production and ship it out by barge to tankers
waiting offshore in an illegal trade known as "bunkering."

HRW recalled that some of the worst fighting in the delta
occurred during the general elections in April and May this
year. The conflict drew in government troops and forced oil
companies operating in the area to temporarily close 40 percent
of Nigeria's oil production of about two million barrels per
day.

According to the rights group, being in government in Nigeria
affords individuals unhindered control over state resources.
With Delta State, the centre of the violence, accounting for 40
percent of Nigeria's oil production and being constitutionally
entitled to 13 percent of the oil revenue, the elections were
fought with violence and fraud with eyes on these funds, it
said.

HRW believes some of the estimated US$ 750 million to $US one
billion profits from bunkering are channelled into the
procurement of weapons used in the delta violence.

It said many local politicians were closely involved with the
gangs that control the bunkering. It also accused them of
engaging the ethnic militias to ensure they were elected and to
defend their illegal operations.

Dan Iremiju, leader of the militant Itsekiri National Youth
Council, agreed with the report that most of the fighting in
the delta this year had centred on the activities of oil
thieves. He alleged that elements in the Nigerian navy had been
providing protection to Ijaw gangs tapping oil from the
pipelines for years.

"Much of the fighting was between two business partners, the
naval unit in Warri and the illegal oil dealers," he told IRIN.
"I don't know what went sour in the relationship."

But militant Ijaw leader, Dan Ekpebide, disputed claims that
any of the fighting was over money from illicit oil deals.

"Ijaw people here are saying they've been kept out of the
political system and denied access to the resources in their
area," Ekpebide said. "What they're fighting for is political
freedom, justice, equity and fair play."

Ekpebide said he believed the Niger Delta was awash with guns
because of government militarisation of the oil region.

"The soldiers and police are trading off arms for small amounts
of money...People have easy access to military weapons because
of the military presence," he said.

Government officials were not available for comments on the HRW
report.
 

Copyright © 2003 UN Integrated Regional Information Networks.
All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com).

__
Do you Yahoo!?
New Yahoo! Photos - easier uploading and sharing.
http://photos.yahoo.com/

[IMPORTANT NOTE: The 

[BRC-NEWS] Hunger, Homelessness On the Rise

[j w]

IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 18, 2002

Hunger, Homelessness On the Rise in Major U.S. Cities
Mayors' 25-City Survey Finds High Housing Costs, Weak Economy
Increase Need

Washington, DC -- As housing costs continued to rise faster
than incomes and the national economy remained weak, requests
for emergency food assistance increased an average of 19
percent over the past year, according to a 25-city survey
released today by the U.S. Conference of Mayors. The survey
also found that requests for emergency shelter assistance grew
an average of 19 percent in the 18 cities that reported an
increase, the steepest rise in a decade.

# Access the 2002 Report Download for Free
# Purchase a Hard Copy Online!
# Mayors Call to Action
# Other Sources of Information

"The world's richest and most powerful nation must find a way
to meet the basic needs of all its residents," said Boston
Mayor and Conference President Thomas Menino. "To address
hunger and homelessness we must all work together to confront
our national affordable housing crisis and turn around our
sluggish economy."

Participating cities were most likely to attribute hunger in
their communities to high housing costs (16 cities), low-paying
jobs (15 cities), unemployment (13 cities), and the economic
downturn (11 cities).

As need increased, the level of resources available to help
meet that need at emergency food assistance facilities
decreased in 52 percent of the cities, increased in 35 percent,
and remained the same in 13 percent. Just over half the cities
surveyed said they are not able to provide an adequate quantity
of food to those in need. And nearly two-thirds of the cities
reported they had to decrease the quantity of food provided
and/or the number of times people can come to get food
assistance. An average of 16 percent of the demand for
emergency food assistance is estimated to have gone unmet in
the survey cities.

The survey finds that 48 percent of those requesting emergency
food assistance were members of families with children and that
38 percent of adults requesting such assistance were employed.

"These are not simply statistics," said Nashville Mayor Bill
Purcell, who chairs the Conference's Task Force on Hunger and
Homelessness. "These are real people who are hungry and
homeless in our cities."

Participating cities were most likely to attribute homelessness
to a lack of affordable housing (21 cities), mental illness and
the lack of needed services (20 cities), substance abuse and
the lack of needed services (19 cities), and low-paying jobs
(17 cities). The survey documents significant unmet need for
shelter in cities across the nation.

People remained homeless for an average of six months in the
survey cities, a figure that increased from one year ago in all
but four cities. Single men comprised 41 percent of the
homeless population, families with children 41 percent, single
women 13 percent, and unaccompanied youth five percent.
Seventy-three percent of homeless families in the survey cities
are headed by single parents. It is estimated that substance
abusers account for 32 percent of the homeless population in
the survey cities and persons considered mentally ill account
for 23 percent. Twenty-two percent of the homeless in survey
cities are employed. Ten percent are veterans.

All the cities in the survey expect that requests for both
emergency food assistance and shelter assistance will increase
again over the next year.

"In the past several years, the face of homelessness has
changed here in the District of Columbia and in cities across
America," said Washington Mayor Anthony A. Williams. "It's
going to take a coordinated effort on many fronts to combat
this problem. This effort must include additional federal
resources for housing, job training, substance abuse treatment
and mental health counseling. By shedding light on the problem
as we are doing with this report, we can work together to help
homeless individuals transition into fuller lives."

The mayors also announced a "call to action" to the
Administration, Congress, state and local governments, the
private and non-profit sectors, and all Americans to do their
part to address growing hunger and homelessness in our nation.
Specifically, the mayors -

* Called on Congress to immediately consider and build upon
President Bush's request for aid to the homeless, as part of a
comprehensive effort to end homelessness within ten years;
* Called on Congress and the Administration to enact a
national housing agenda, based on the recommendations mayors
submitted earlier this year, which would put tens of thousands
of Americans to work;
* Called on Congress to streamline federal anti-hunger
programs and provide additional outreach resources; and
* Urged all Americans to donate their time, money, and
excess food to help combat hunger and homelessness.

"The report confirms what America's Second Harvest has
struggled with over the past year," said Robert H. Forney,
Presid

[BRC-NEWS] Black Voters Ready to ‘Get Even’ for 2000 Fiasco

[j w]

http://blackpressusa.com/news

NATIONAL NEWS
Black Voters Ready to ‘Get Even’ for 2000 Fiasco
by Hazel Trice Edney
NNPA Washington Correspondent

WASHINGTON (NNPA)– One popular saying in politics recommends:
Don’t get mad, get even. Many African-Americans are still mad
at how the Black vote was undermined in 2000 – and they want to
get even.

“I think there is still a lot of anger out there after what
happened in Election 2000, people’s votes not getting counted,”
observes Melanie Campbell, president and CEO of the National
Coalition for Black Civic Participation (NCBCP) a non-profit
group of more than 80 organizations, which encourages civic
activism in the Black community. “This is the very first
presidential election that we’ll be faced with. We’re going to
do a media launch right at the top of the New Year.”

NCBVP is working with the nation’s nine major Black
fraternities and sororities on a string of voter registration
projects and with UniverSoul Circus, a traveling Black
production, to urge voter registration and turnout to their
audiences. The Washington-D.C.-based NCBVP is also on the verge
of launching its Unity ‘04 project, a coalition of a dozen
Black organizations that will use their collective strength to
implement a series of voter initiatives leading up to the
November election.

With the election slightly less than a year away, some groups
are already active.

“Voting and registration ought not be centered around election
time, but it ought to be continuous,” says Rev. Arnold W.
Howard of Baltimore, chairman of the African-American Ministers
Leadership Council (AAMLC), a non-partisan arm of People for
the American Way.

His group, approximately 100 ministers from around the country,
has launched a voter registration drive in seven states. The
program, called “Sanctified Seven,” is aimed at making a strong
impact in states where statewide races are normally tightly
contested.

The group is also paying special attention to states where the
Black voting-age population is high enough to mean the
difference between victory and defeat. The ministers are
encouraging individual parishioners to register at least seven
people every few days and equally important, get them to show
up at the polls.

The states, with their 2000 Black turnout rates in parenthesis,
are: Florida, with a
Black voting age population (BVAP) of 76.2 percent (43.2
percent); Illinois with a BVAP of 66.8 percent (67 percent);
Michigan, with a BVAP of 67.6 percent (60.9 percent); Missouri
with a BVAP of 67.9 percent, (68.2 percent); Ohio, with a BVAP
of 67.4, (53.7 percent); Pennsylvania, with a BVAP of 68.1
percent (61.3 percent); and Wisconsin, with a BVAP of 70.8
percent (62 percent).
In just one month, the group has already registered more than
2,000 new voters in Cleveland, according to Rev. Romal J. Tune
of Washington, the national field organizer for the ministers
program.

“People are very energized. People are interested in the
issues,” Tune says.

“Ministers groups and congregations have been doing
registration at malls, shopping centers, grocery stores. They
do what we call walks around the community in a seven-block
radius of the church. We call them Jericho walks, knocking on
doors,” Tune says. “And then we have people in the pews who
have influence in their workplace. They start with registering
the entire congregation. And then the congregation goes out
into other places. One lady said, ‘I went to my bowling league
and I registered 20 people.’”

The “Sanctified Seven” campaign is reminiscent of “Arrive with
Five!” the 2000 campaign that encouraged Black voters in
Florida to carry five people with them to the polls, bolstering
the Black vote by 15 percent in that state.

Still, the U. S. Supreme Court halted a recount of discarded
voting ballots in Florida, effectively giving the state’s 25
electoral votes to George W. Bush.

“I think it clearly showed the need for people – especially
African-Americans - to get out and vote and how even a couple
of thousand votes can make a difference in the presidential
election,” says Cheryl Cooper, executive director of the
National Council of Negro Women, an organization that held a
town hall meeting last week at its annual convention with the
theme, “Help America Vote Again.”

Nearly 200,000 votes in Florida alone were lost because of
faulty voting machines and ballots, voter intimidation and
confused poll workers, according to the U. S. Commission on
Civil Rights. The commission also reported that Black voters in
Florida were nearly 10 times more likely than
non-Black voters to have their ballots rejected.

Nationally, an estimated 4 million to 6 million votes were lost
in 2000 because of voting foul-ups, according to the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Intent on avoiding such problems next year, groups are not only
registering and educating early, but planning major get out to
vote and voter protection campaigns, including lawyers as
watchdogs at the polls, Cam

[BRC-NEWS] The Color of Money and Black Political Empowerment

[j w]

The Color of Money and Black Political Empowerment
By Richard Muhammad
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
StraightWords E-Zine

America's most famous zip code may be 90210, but even
ritzy Beverly Hills can't match 10021 when it comes to
political clout.

Zip code 10021 covers the Upper East Side of
Manhattan, where overwhelming rich, powerful White
donors gave $28.4 million in individual contributions
to candidates in the last round of federal elections.

That's more money than all individual donations from
532 zip codes nationally that represent 7.6 million
Blacks, or 84 times the number of people who live in
10021, according to a recent report.

The racial divide when it comes to donors is so wide
Blacks and Latinos might as well be poor sharecroppers
locked out of voting booths by poll taxes and literacy
tests, said Stephanie Wilson, of the Fannie Lou Hamer
Project and other advocates for political campaign
finance reform.

"Today, people of color are excluded from access and
influence as effectively as if Congress re-enacted a
poll tax charging people for the right to vote,"
according to The Color of Money Project, which mapped
the 25 top metro areas for political contributions by
zip code. It found that $9 out of $10 in political
offerings by individuals came largely from areas where
people of color do not live.

The authors of the study argue comprehensive reform of
campaign financing is needed.

"If you're not giving your legislator any money, your
legislator is not obligated to give you anything in
return," said Wilson, executive director of a
non-profit group devoted to campaign finance reform
and political empowerment for minority groups. Her
group signed on to the Color of Money report.

Checking political donations to political candidates
must be part of efforts to make sure Black and
minority voices are heard in elections, she said. It
is just as important as making sure poor and minority
districts have voting machines that work and polling
places that open on time, she said.

Money, or the lack of it, also keeps people from
running who would better serve the interests of
non-Whites and the poor, Wilson said.

According to the Color of Money Project:
· In 2002 elections, House candidates who outspent
opponents won 94 percent of the time.
· Even in open-seat races, in which no candidate had
an incumbent advantage, the top spender won 79 percent
of the time in House races, according to the Center
for Responsive Politics.
· Spending, in fact, is rarely even close. In
two-thirds of House races in 2002, winning candidates
outspent losing candidates by a factor of 10 to 1 or
more.
· Furthermore, the amount of money required to succeed
is enormous. In 2002, Senate candidates spent an
average of $4.8 million, and House candidates, nearly
$900,000.

The donor base is also overwhelmingly White as the
U.S. population grows more racially diverse: nearly 1
out of 3 Americans are non-White. The White population
may be shrinking but as long as the money flows,
wealthy Whites will seemingly control U.S. politics.

Campaign finance reform and Black politics
"There is no more passing the mayonnaise jar around
the community center to raise money for a campaign,"
said Mark Clack, deputy director of Public Campaign, a
campaign finance reform group that oversaw compilation
of the Color of Money report.

The cost of running in every campaign cycle at just
about all levels is going up, he noted. Blacks don't
have the surplus income to write individual $2,000
checks, which means wealthy people have access to
lawmakers and potential lawmakers and ordinary people
do not, Clack continued.

Candidates have to pay for TV time and high power
consultants and neither comes cheaply, he said.

In the past, a candidate was considered unmarketable
either because of inexperience or fringe political
views, but today a person rooted in the community,
with a solid record can be disqualified because he
couldn't raise enough money, Clack said.

***Get the full story by subscribing to StraightWords
e-zine. Just e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] and say
"subscribe me" in the subject line. It's bi-weekly
original content from Richard Muhammad and provides
news, analysis and perspective on race, religion,
politics and culture. Muhammad is a former managing
editor of The Final Call newspaper, published by the
Nation of Islam, with 20 years of journalism
experience as an editor, columnist, reporter and
photographer. His work has appeared on websites and
newspapers across the country and in Canada.


__
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the "Signing Bonus" Sweepstakes
http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/signingbonus

[IMPORTANT NOTE: The views and opinions expressed on this
list are solely those of the authors and/or publications,
and do not necessarily represent or reflect the official
political positions of the Black Radical Congress (BRC).
Official BRC statements, position papers, press releases,
action alerts, and announcements