» International News

December 14, 2006

Batman is alive...

...and operating out of a Russian military intelligence building in Moscow:

December 07, 2006

The interesting precedent of Jon Tester

Joshua Frank looks at Montana's new populist senator and the potential for a Red-State left.

When I say he’s not really even a Democrat, that may be a bit of an understatement. Tester is essentially an NRA approved neo-populist with libertarian tendencies who wants to immediately redeploy troops from Iraq as well as repeal the USA PATRIOT Act. And although nobody would consider Tester an anti-globalization activist, his position on international trade is more in line with the protesters who shut down Seattle in 1999 than with the Democratic Leadership Council.

November 13, 2006

Civilized Discourse

This clip perfectly sums up--in both form and content--the state of political debate in the US:

November 12, 2006

The Ongoing Battle in Oaxaca

Barucha Calamity Peller: "In an attempt to satisfy negotiations with the APPO to take down the remaining barricades, the government has released a few dozen political prisoners in small groups each day, but as some prisoners are released more people become detained or become disappeared. The approximate number of detained so far is 85, and about 34 people are considered to be disappeared."

...

"A twelve year old boy running through the streets that day with a paper mask to filter tear gas and sweat pouring down his face explained breathlessly, "We are the people and the people cant be defeated no matter who the police kill, fuck them." A day later, two military officers were captured by young barricade guards and released two hours later to the Red Cross."

November 09, 2006

"I guess you don't go the same bathouses I do, Larry"

Bill Maher on Larry King Live: "A lot of the chiefs of staff, the people who really run the underpinnings of the Republican Party, are gay."

The clip was censored by CNN on its west coast feed.

The Nation: The Coming Gay Republican Purge

Meanwhile, in Washington...

Cockburn and St. Clair argue that the Democrats made gains when they were solidly anti-war, but lost when well-funded "moderates" were in the race.

And who is this Democratic Foreign Policy Establishment, anyway?

November 07, 2006

In Defence of Cluster Bombs

Britain, in what George Monbiot refers to as "its right to kill civilians at random", has united with the US and other countries to block a ban on the use of cluster bombs.

November 06, 2006

Irresistable Headline

T-Star: Imelda Marcos launches shoe line

I'm pretty sure that the headline was the only reason that story made it in.

Saddam to be Killed

Patrick Cockburn: "In al-Adhamiyah, a famously tough Sunni district in east Baghdad, people held a demonstration against the sentence, but soon a mortar opened fire on them from al-Qhadamiyah, a Shia stronghold in the capital on the other side of the Tigris river."

October 31, 2006

Coup in Iraq, Attack in Oaxaca

The WSWS covers the Mexican government's assault on Oaxaca protesters which seems to have little or nothing to do with stopping the paramilitaries that have been shooting people there, and provides some context for reports that the US is planning a coup in Iraq.

"While the US has begun dropping talk of 'democracy' as a goal for Iraq, substituting instead “stability,” the Bush administration has refrained from any direct moves against Maliki in the run-up to the November 7 US elections."

The Narco News Bulletin has coverage of the situation in Oaxaca. Chiapas Indymedia has photos and more photos of peaceful resistance to the police invasion.

October 29, 2006

Venezuela Intervenes?

If it follows its own standards, the US Government shouldn't have any problem with a company with alleged ties to the Venezuelan government running elections in the US.

In fact, by the standard set by US "democracy promotion" abroad (and particularly in Venezuela), Americans shouldn't have any problem with the Venezuelan government funding groups that illegally print out voter registration forms and distribute them to voters likely to vote in a manner favourable to Chavez.

There is no talk of Venezuela doing that, mind, but it's a matter of the public record that the US funds such groups in Venezuela and around the world.

In fact, the Canadian Government shouldn't have any problem with Venezuela funding a group that releases skewed polling data on election day (among other things) to influence voting and turnout, since CIDA gave $40,000 to Súmate.

Canada and the US maintain the right to interfere in the democratic processes of other countries while disallowing similar intervention in their own governance. There's a word for that.

October 06, 2006

Secession from Empire

Kirkpatrick Sale has an interesting rundown of secessionist movements within the US, from Vermont to Dixie to Hawai'i to Alaska, in anticipation of a conference in Burlington, Vermont on that topic.

September 22, 2006

Ahmadinejad's Charm Offensive

Guardian: "He was quick to point out the failings of the US administration towards its own people. 'My country offered help to the victims of Katrina,' he said, 'when we saw bodies floating in the water and the homeless.' Asked about political prisoners in Iran, he replied: 'There are 219 million people in the US and 68 million people in Iran. There are 3 million prisoners in the US and 130,000 in Iran. The percentage is much higher.'"

No political prisoners in the free world. Move along, nothing much to see here.

September 19, 2006

Darfur Intervention, eh?

Jonathan Steele: "Against this background it was always going to be hard to expect fair reporting when civil war broke out in Darfur three years ago. The complex grievances that set farmers against nomads was covered with a simplistic template of Arab versus African, even though the region was crisscrossed with tribal and local rivalries that put some villages on the government's side and others against it."

September 15, 2006

Rejoice

Paul Wolfowitze is anti-authoritarian! Or he's feeling the heat, or he's Nixon in China.

September 13, 2006

Fallujah, Fallujah! (Fallujah!)

Dahr Jamail: "After enduring two major assaults, Fallujah is under threat from U.S. forces again, residents say. 'They destroyed our city twice and they are threatening us a third time,' 52-year-old Ahmed Dhahy told IPS in Fallujah, the Sunni-dominated city 50km west of Baghdad."

September 12, 2006

Latest news in the War on Terra'

BBC: "Ex-CIA operative Luis Posada Carriles was held for crossing illegally from Mexico after serving time in Panama for plotting to kill Cuba's Fidel Castro. Mr Posada Carriles faces deportation, but it cannot be to Cuba or Venezuela. Venezuela, which says he was behind a 1976 plane bombing that killed 73 people, condemned the latest ruling."

September 06, 2006

Down all the days

Lila Downs just released a new album, and she's using it to call attention to the folks battling the government in Oaxaca.

August 26, 2006

Congo Elections

WSWS: "Even before the ballot takes place, however, the real victor is certain. A number of reports have been published which, according to the German magazine Der Spiegel, make clear 'that the Western powers and the International Monetary Fund are seeking to exert massive influence on Congolese policy after the elections. They have already met several times in Kinshasa--in the absence of representatives of the Congo. At these meetings an obligatory "market-orientated economic program" was developed, which the new government would be obliged to follow. Otherwise, the country will be threatened with the withdrawal of financial support.'"

August 20, 2006

Mining

BBC: "The world's largest mining firm, BHP Billiton, will post record profits of over $10bn (£5.3bn), analysts say"

August 10, 2006

How soon we forget

Asia Times: "President George W Bush himself had listed in his 2005 State of the Union address the 'Orange Revolution' in Ukraine as one of the 'landmark events in the history of liberty'. "

July 22, 2006

The whole world watching

While the media is mainly concentrated on the conflict in Israel, Palestine and Lebanon, events are taking place in...

Afghanistan: "Nato's provincial reconstruction teams in Afghanistan were sending out conflicting signals, Gen Richards told a conference at the Royal United Services Institute in London. "The situation is close to anarchy," he said, referring in particular to what he called "the lack of unity between different agencies".

Somalia: "Somali Islamist leader has ordered a "holy war" to drive out Ethiopian troops, after they entered the country to protect the weak interim government."

Uganda: "Ugandan government negotiators at peace talks in Sudan have refused to sign a ceasefire agreement with the the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebels."

Burundi: "The Forces nationales de libération (FNL), Burundi's remaining active rebel group, has continued to attack civilians even as it continues ceasefire negotiations with the government in Dar es Salaam, the commercial capital of Tanzania.

"These attacks have occurred as talks between the FNL, led by Agathon Rwasa, and the government continue in Dar es Salaam, with South African mediation. Another FNL faction, led by Jean Bosco Sindayigaya, announced in January it had suspended hostilities as most of its demands had been met with the democratic elections in August 2005."

North Korea: "Hundreds are dead or missing in North Korea after days of heavy rain, according to state media.

"Torrential rain has swept through the Korean Peninsula in recent days, causing flooding and landslides both sides of the border."

Luckily, there seems to be some good news in Latin America, and for China's environment.

July 20, 2006

Russia is Back

Asia Times: "Today we not only have the means to defend ourselves but also - and this is far more important - something to defend. To an increasing degree, we are beginning to understand that Russia can only be a sovereign democracy; otherwise, we will be left with neither democracy nor Russia." [Quoting Russian Deputy Prime Minister and Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov]

July 15, 2006

What the CBC ain't saying

A handful of countries are responding to the Isreal/Gaza/Lebanon situation with a little more insight and caution than Canada as this Norwegian paper suggests.

According to the paper "To punish Lebanon for that means that they haven't understood Lebanon's situation," Støre told Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK). "It's not the state of Lebanon that's behind (the abductions).

"Both France and Russia have already condemned Israel's bombing of Lebanon, while the US is urging Israel to show restraint."

Harper, meanwhile, refuses to offer any criticism, making him the world leader who is currently the most unconditionally supportive of Israel's bombing campaign.

July 12, 2006

Mexico's Electoral Fiasco

John Ross: Anatomy of a Fraud Foretold

The Politics of Zidane

Dave Zirin: Why I Wear My Zidane Jersey

June 19, 2006

World Cup & Politics, the continuing saga

John Ross: "Moreover, if Mexico reaches the semifinals and is scheduled to play on Election Day, absenteeism will soar--Lopez Obrador needs a big turnout (15 million out of a probable 42 million) to win the presidency."

Mike Marqusee: "I'll nail my colours to the mast by declaring that the only result that really matters to me in this World Cup is that England do not win. That's not because I dislike the players or the manager; in fact, this side is one of the best and most entertaining England have sent out for many years. But the impact of a World Cup win on the society I live in would be deleterious. It would ignite an orgy of nationalistic celebration, which in present circumstances cannot be dismissed as harmless fun."

Bonus:

Award for most gratuitously offensive Stanley Cup-related comment (that I've seen) goes to the loquacious Colby Cosh, who writes:

That's fine. I love everybody right now, maybe even including the Carolina Hurricanes and the citizens of Raleigh, N.C. It's not their fault they're getting Rachel Corried by the Caterpillar D9 of history.

I'm guessing he wrote that for the express purpose of offending people like me, and strangely enough, he succeeded.

June 10, 2006

Sick of Hockey metaphors in politics?

Then apply some political metaphors to the World Cup

The German game epitomizes the industrialized West: physical power, relentless drive, unshakable organization and a machine-like efficiency in punishing opponents' mistakes. It's a kind of Blitzkrieg -- the modern German game, as Simon Kuper has noted, had its roots in Nazi sports culture and the militaristic virtues it lionized -- that overwhelms opponents with physical power on the ground and in the air, often winning "ugly" by a single goal. The best-known German players of the past half century have been goalkeepers, field commanders in defense and midfield, as well as clinical if artless goal-poaching forwards. There has never been a Pelé on the German team; in Brazil, by contrast, each year brings a new crop of awesomely talented teenagers from the favelas whose audacious skill and flair inevitably anoints them as "the next Pelé."

Brazil's style is more akin to advanced guerrilla warfare in which the insurgents have the momentum and the confidence. They combine impossible skill with breathtaking audacity and guile, an ability to shoot from great distances and apply boot to ball in a manner that improbably "bends" its trajectory. The telepathy with which they are able to anticipate each other's movements allows them to dazzle both the opposition and the crowd with the fluidity of their passing movements and their propensity for doing the unexpected. The adversary literally never knows where the next attack will come from, or what it will be. And the smiles of the Brazilians, even in crucial games, tell you that they're enjoying themselves. On the field, you'll rarely see a German player smile.

June 05, 2006

From Iraq to NOLA

Did you know that the US feds have spent tens of millions to bring a Mercenary Army -- many members of which are literally coming straight from Iraq -- to New Orleans?

I didn't.

June 02, 2006

Bush Blocks AIDS Proposals, Named Worst President Ever

Move over Pope Benedict -- the Bush administration is taking the lead in impeding the prevention of AIDS:

The Bush administration, heavily influence by the Christian right, is blocking key proposals for a new United Nations package to combat Aids worldwide over the next five years because of its opposition to the distribution of condoms and needle exchanges and references to prostitutes, drug addicts and homosexuals.

In related news, a recent poll reveals that Americans believe George W. Bush is the worst president of all time.

In a seemingly contradictory manner, however, they believe Ronald Regan to be the best.

May 31, 2006

WaPo on Tar Sands

Once again, the US press covers a different side of the Alberta oil boom.

..

Washington Post: Canada Pays Environmentally for U.S. Oil Thirst

"Huge mines here turning tarry sand into cash for Canada and oil for the United States are taking an unexpectedly high environmental toll, sucking water from rivers and natural gas from wells and producing large amounts of gases linked to global warming."

May 23, 2006

India

Alex Cockburn has an interesting account of Indian politics.

The major Indian national media, with the honorable exception of The Hindu and a handful of other papers, are overwhelmingly anti-Left. They made fools of themselves in 2004 when they predicted popular approval at the polls for the neoliberal reforms and were astounded when the opposite occurred. In 2006 they have made asses of themselves again. In West Bengal, they now offer the explanation that the latest CPIM victory is all due to the splendid personality of Buddhadev Bhattacharya, chief minister of West Bengal, a man the elite see a great 'reformer', using the word to denote the imposition of the neoliberal agenda.

May 16, 2006

Bono Saves Africa... Again

Harry Browne: "No Africans write about Africa. Only one is presented in an interview as having any agency at all, Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. It is remarkable that even for the sake of appearances Bono is incapable of hiding his essential paternalism."

New Campaign Stateside

Psst. ITMFA.

All your base expansion are belong to us

Asia Times covers protests against the expansion of a US military base in S. Korea.

Friedman's Moving Deadline

FAIR has an excellent little takedown of Tom Friedman today, entitled Tom Friedman's Flexible Deadlines. Friedman does all the work.

May 05, 2006

Mayday for May Day

International Workers' Day is so passé. That must be why the US Congress changed it to Loyalty Day.

May 02, 2006

Hamas

Ramzy Baroud: "So what if Hamas has adhered to a virtually unilateral ceasefire for over a year, while Israel did not? So what if the newly formed government has given ample evidence that it is keenly interested in dialogue, not violence? So what if the majority of the Palestinian people have adamantly and repeatedly -- according to recent public opinion polls -- expressed their interest in a negotiated settlement with Israel? Indeed, so many “so whats� that hardly matter now, since it is quite clear that the US and the EU’s real intentions are to topple the Palestinian government, along with the sham of a doctrine which claims that democratizing the Arabs is the ultimate policy objective of Bush and Blair."

April 28, 2006

Net Neutrality

Rabble @ Reclaim the Media: "Net Neutrality is the principle that forbids Internet service providers from discrimination in content delivery. 'Net Neutrality' is why the Indybay home page will download to your computer just as fast as the White House's. representatives of major ISPs have argued that because they own the broadband cables, they ought to have the right to charge extra for quick and "guaranteed delivery" of data. Currently, ISPs are required to handle data in a similar fashion as telephone companies: all content must be processed equally, regardless of source."

May Day in Americkay

The New Standard has some excellent reporting on the upcoming "Day Without Immigrants".

Leaders of a lot of the American unions seem to be pressuring immigrant groups to keep them from endorsing the walkout.

April 27, 2006

Beyond fanaticism

Asia Times Iran's political dynamics. It's a little more complicated.

But there are huge problems behind this appearance of unity. Iranian money from the bonyads - foundations - badly wants a reconciliation with the West. They know that the relentless flight of both capital and brains - which is being actively encouraged by the Rafsanjani faction - is against the national interest. But they also know this can hurt Ahmadinejad's power. Some Western-connected Iranians are even comparing Ahmadinejad's current days to the Gang of Four in China a little while before the death of Mao Zedong in 1976.

The point is not that Ahmadinejad is a suicidal nut bent on confronting the US by all means available. The point is that the president leads just one of four key factions in a do-or-die power play, and he is following his own agenda, which is not necessarily the Iranian theocratic leadership's agenda. Washington neo-conservatives for their part may want regime change - but that won't happen with another shock and awe.

April 21, 2006

Things we know, and then forget

ZNet: "No, not the one you think, outrageous as it is. I'm referring to the US prison system that's with no exaggeration about as shockingly abusive as the gulag abroad. It qualifies for that label by its size alone - more than 2.1 million as of June, 2004 and growing larger by about 900 new inmates every week. Blacks (mostly poor and disadvantaged) especially are affected. While they make up just 12.3% of the population, they account for half the prison population, and their numbers there have grown fivefold in the last 25 years. Hispanics (also poor) account for another 15%."

April 11, 2006

Immigrant rights movement: millions more

WSWS: "Smaller towns, meanwhile, saw unprecedented crowds taking to the streets, For example, in Garden City, Kansas, a farming community of 30,000 in the southwest of the state, more than 3,000 people demonstrated."

April 09, 2006

Korrupt in Kurdistan

WSWS: "Eighteen years on, Halabja locals assembled during the commemoration to denounce the fact that the only new construction paid for by the Kurdish authorities in the poverty-stricken area was a museum dedicated to the gassing victims. The elaborate building was officially opened by then US Secretary of State Colin Powell in 2003. Meanwhile, the town’s electricity and water services are dysfunctional, most of the housing is in serious disrepair and there is considerable unemployment."

April 07, 2006

Cynthia McKinney

David Vest: "A Washington press corps that stood idly by while Bush and Cheney plundered the country, wrecked the environment, spied on Americans without a warrant, tortured civilians and lied the country into a war that will only get worse, woke up one morning and collectively decided: 'Let's all play Get Cynthia!'"

Remi Kanazi: "It didn't concern Scarborough that a class action lawsuit has been filed by black Capitol Hill police officers against the United States Capitol Police department or that McKinney has been targeted by the brave protectors on Capitol Hill in the past. Race just isn't an issue in America anymore-we all learned that after Hurricane Katrina."

Free-Trade Mania

"Brazil, India and South Africa are working to set up a free trade area they hope will eventually take in the continents they represent."

"The trio - known as IBSA and part of the G20 group of developing nations - has been frustrated by the WTO's lack of progress at breaking down trade barriers. "

Read more about it here

April 06, 2006

Japan and Washington

Asia Times: "The payments are known to Japanese as the 'sympathy budget' (omoiyari yosan) and in English as 'host nation support'. A recent article by Hokkaido Shimbun journalist Yoshifumi Tokosumi in the current edition of Sekai magazine quotes a foreign ministry source as saying that 12.96 trillion yen (more than $100 billion) was paid to Washington as 'sympathy' money between 1972 and 2005."

Asia Times: "Taiwan's part in this drama is complex, as the island is strongly dependent on the US for its security, and the two sides have a history of close relations. Nonetheless, Taiwan's democratic evolution is actually undermining US support, despite the rhetoric emanating from Washington about promoting and defending democracy."

April 04, 2006

Immigrant rights in the US: 3 million hit the streets!

A millions-strong movement for immigrant rights has materialized in the US. According to the figures compiled (see below), three million people have participated in walkouts, marches or sit-ins in the last month!

read more...

March 23, 2006

Russia and China

Asia Times: "Putin has sought to promote sales of Russian industrial goods, but China is not much interested in anything except commodities and arms."

Live from Haiti

Halifax independent journalists Stuart Neatby and John Dimond-Gibson are in Haiti, and have been posting photos and updates on their weblog.

March 22, 2006

Cuban "Journalists"

William Blum tackles that old bugbear, the issue of Cuban "independent journalists".

The DNC and the Grassroots

CounterPunch reports on the Democratic party's internal fights

The "mainstream" Democratic losers like Rep. Rahm Emanuel and Sen. Charles Schumer, who want the Democratic Party to remain a top-down, hollowed-out shell of an organization incapable of challenging Republican power, are frightened silly by the groundswell of public sentiment for impeachment, and for ending the war in Iraq. While Dean, as DNC chair, may be trying his best to shift the party in a more progressive and oppositional direction, they are busy undercutting progressive candidates for office, financing "acceptable" candidates (who are likely to lose their races), and preventing independent action and confrontation in Congress ala Feingold's motion.

Also, Ralph Nader: "I just received a letter from Howard Dean, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, describing me as a 'Democratic Leader' and 'an active and engaged member of our Party in your community.' He asks for my 'opinions' which 'will help shape the future direction of the Democratic Party and make us more effective in building grassroots support for our agenda.'"

March 20, 2006

It's (not) getting better all the time

NYTimes: "Especially in American inner cities, the studies show, finishing high school is the exception, legitimate work is scarcer than ever and prison is almost routine, with incarceration rates climbing for blacks even as urban crime declines. Although the deep problems afflicting poor black men have been known for decades, the new data paint the most alarming picture yet of ravaged lives and a deepening national calamity that scholars say has received too little attention."

March 18, 2006

War crimes in Yugoslavia

Jeremy Scahill: "Milosevic's death means that those who bombed Yugoslavia for 78 days beginning 7 years ago this month, killing thousands, will be, once and for all protected from any public scrutiny for their crimes. However opportunistic Milosevic may have been, he would have been one of the few people to appear at the Hague that could have--and would have--laid out these crimes in great detail."

March 09, 2006

East Timor still suffering

"East Timor remains the poorest country in South East Asia nearly four years after independence, the UN says - and it is getting poorer. "

Read about it here: E Timor 'poor and getting poorer'

End Homelessness?

Seattle Weekly: The Plan to Nowhere?

It's the largest experiment to end homelessness since the latest wave of homeless hit America's streets in the mid-1980s. For the past 20 years, attempts to end homelessness have been largely motivated by ethics and a general sense that it's shameful for 3 million people to be homeless in the world's richest country. But good intentions in the form of a fragmented, gridlocked system of homeless shelters, transitional housing, and soup kitchens have not fixed the problem.

"The very definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results," says Philip Mangano, executive director of the Bush administration's Interagency Council on Homelessness.

Mangano's definition of sanity is to recognize that it is far cheaper to provide homeless people with permanent housing than to let them bounce from the streets to jail to a hospital emergency room. Housing First, as the approach is known. It's supposed to be better, faster, and cheaper. Mangano and others argue that, enlightened by potentially billions of dollars in cost savings, policy-makers, Congress, and state legislatures will open the public purse and fund permanent housing projects and medical services. The experiment is broadly known as "The 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness," the by-product of President George W. Bush's call for an end to homelessness in his 2003 budget message.

But while touting a new approach, the Bush administration is already undercutting the experiment by making crucial cuts to housing and medical programs, especially ones serving the mentally ill, needed for ending homelessness. The city of Seattle, too, is making service cuts. As a result, St. Martin de Porres, a downtown homeless shelter that houses 212 older men each night, will close two days a week” and those men, many disabled, will hit the streets.

March 08, 2006

Review of WSWS news

According to a UN report, hundreds of Iraqi academics and professionals have been assassinated by death squads.

250 000 Mexican miners and steelworkers went on strike at the beginning of March.

Japan is having a debate on social inequality. Whoa. And PM Koizumi is feeling some heat.

The US and the coalition of the willing is holding 14 000 civilians in Iraq without trial or charges.

AT&T's merger means that 10,000 jobs will be cut.

London Mayor Ken Livingstone was suspended by an Adjudication Panel after an exchange with a reporter.

Movements

Thousands are in the streets in El Salvador, protesting the implementation of CAFTA.

The Global Womens' Strike is demanding social and economic recognition of "unwaged caring work".

Activists and community members are fighting the eviction of a successful community farm in South Central Los Angeles.

11,000 people in Belgium demanded status for the country's 150,000 non status sans papiers.

"Riot" police in South Korea attacked a village that has been resisting the expansion of a US military base.

Students at various University of California campuses stripped off clothes to protest the use of sweatshops for official University apparel.

Coverage of the Zapatistas' "Other Campaign" is being translated into Farsi by Iranian activists.

The folks at Narco News have been covering the alleged corruption of DEA officials in Colombia by--who else?--drug traffickers.

Impeachment

Washington Post: "In a white-clapboard town hall, voters gathered Tuesday to conduct their community's business and to call for the impeachment of President Bush."

More from AT

Lots of interesting coverage from Asia Times.

Asia Times: "South Korea and the US have drifted so far apart on North Korea policy there is now speculation the longtime partners are getting close to divorce."

A three part series on China:

1. Is China headed for a social 'red alert'? "Economic inequality and social protests in China have become a frequent topic in the Western press. The startling figure of 74,000 protests across China in 2004, up from 58,000 the previous year, has popped up in many newspapers, as has China's most recent Gini coefficient of 0.45, suggesting that economic inequality in China has in fact surpassed that of the US and UK with their allegedly cold-blooded 'Anglo-Saxon' model of capitalism."

2. China's revolution for everyone and no one "There is a very widespread perception that street protests are just the first step in a continuum that leads inexorably to riots and ultimately revolution. But this is misleading, because there is a huge qualitative difference between protests and revolution."

3. Beijing's great Hong Kong experiment "The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) envisages an orderly transition to democracy, guided by the party. While the minimum time frame for the change is 15 years, there is also a maximum time frame, placing the transition around mid-century. In 2047 Hong Kong fully returns to "Chinese sovereignty" under the 50-year clause in the Sino-British agreement that returned the former colony to China in 1997, and it is highly probable that Beijing will adapt to Hong Kong's political system, not the other way around."

"new socialist countryside"

Asia Times: China goes back to the land

But the emphasis in this year's report on building a "new socialist countryside" betrays a worrying trend for the central government: outside of the urban centers - which, following the old Soviet model, have been the focus of economic development since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949 - there is growing civil unrest over the gross inequities of China's phenomenal economic growth.

Arguably, this increasing discontent among the 800 million people who live in China's rural areas transformed this past year into a grassroots movement that is primarily aimed at combating local corruption, but has also shaken Chinese leaders at the highest level.

March 02, 2006

Thailand: Election Boycott

Asia Times: "When Thailand goes to the polls on April 2, voters will be faced with just one choice: caretaker Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's Thai Rak Thai party - a prospect that sets the country's struggling democracy on an uncharted course. The main opposition Democrat Party, along with the smaller Chat Thai and Mahachon parties, followed through Thursday on their threat to boycott the snap polls Thaksin called last week to head off mounting criticism. Thaksin had declared on national television that the election result would put an end to the rallies and corruption allegations that in recent weeks have rocked his government's credibility."

Libertad?

village voice > news >Village Voice: "On September 23, 1868, a gutsy band of Puerto Rican nationalists launched a revolt against their Spanish rulers. The uprising failed within 24 hours. On September 23, 2005, FBI agents shot and killed a fugitive Puerto Rican independence leader. Now New York's independista community is hoping that anger over that death ends Puerto Rico's 100-plus years as a U.S. possession."

Not the precautionary principle anymore

BBC: "The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had previously said gases such as CO2 were 'probably' to blame. Its latest draft report will be sent to world governments next month. A source told the BBC: 'The measurements from the natural world on all parts of the globe have been anomalous over the past decade. If a few were out of kilter we wouldn't be too worried, because the Earth changes naturally. But the fact that they are virtually all out of kilter makes us very concerned.'"

March 01, 2006

India and Pharmacos

Wired News: A Nation of Guinea Pigs

...the government is working to advertise India's most pharmacologically appealing qualities, notably its doctors (English-speaking and educated abroad) and its vast number of ailing patients - 32 million diabetics alone. Many of these patients are also, in the delicate parlance of the drug world, "treatment naive," meaning they've never taken any medication for their illnesses. This is a perk for trial managers, because it lowers the risk of unforeseen drug inter­actions and avoids the troublesome process of weaning patients off one medication and onto another.

Last year, the government took a more controversial step, amending a long-standing law that limited the kind of trials that foreign pharmaceutical companies could conduct. That law allowed companies to test drugs on Indian patients only after the drugs had been proven safe in trials conducted in the country of origin. In January, the government threw out that constraint. India, the brilliant hub of outsourced labor, was positioning itself in a newly lucrative role: guinea pig to the world.

What they says when you ask em.

Stars & Stripes: "Seventy-two percent of troops on the ground in Iraq think U.S. military forces should get out of the country within a year, according to a Zogby poll released Tuesday."

February 27, 2006

Death Squad Investigation: Iraq

Counterpunch: "Hundreds of Iraqis are being tortured to death or summarily executed every month in Baghdad alone by death squads working from the Ministry of the Interior, the United Nations' outgoing human rights chief in Iraq has revealed."

In other news, posting will resume on the usual semi-daily schedule starting today.

February 09, 2006

childishness of civilisations

Robert Fisk: "In Denmark, Fleming Rose, the "culture" editor of the pip-squeak newspaper which published these silly cartoons--last September, for heaven's sake--announces that we are witnessing a "clash of civilisations" between secular Western democracies and Islamic societies. This does prove, I suppose, that Danish journalists follow in the tradition of Hans Christian Anderson. Oh lordy, lordy. What we're witnessing is the childishness of civilisations."

February 04, 2006

NYTimes on Haiti

Just in case anyone missed it, the New York Times did a big piece on Haiti this week. Specifically: the role of the International Republican Institute in destabilizing the country, leading to the overthrow of the democratically elected government.

January 27, 2006

Impossible to parody

George W. Bush, June 18, 2002:

"I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace."

January 20, 2006

Bin Laden and Blum

Thoughts on the Eve of Apocalypse: "Holy shit. That's Bill Blum's book. Osama's reading Blum. Poor Bill. He's already in enough trouble with the FBI, no doubt. This can't help."

Update: I dunno, but commenters reckon that it's not a real Bin Laden statement, as it's missing the highfalutin' intelleckshuall stuff that is characteristic of Bin Laden.

January 05, 2006

Chavez in Chicago

Indymedia.us: "In an October meeting with representatives from the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), the city's Department of Energy and other city officials, Citgo unveiled a plan to provide the Chicago with low-cost diesel fuel. The company's stipulation, at the bidding of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, was that the CTA, in turn, pass those savings on to poor residents in the form of free or discounted fare cards."

NED and Sex in Iraq

Anthony Fenton: "A by-lined freelancer for the Associated Press, who is also a stringer for the New York Times in Haiti, is moonlighting as a consultant for the US Government funded National Endowment for Democracy, according to an official at the NED, and several of the agency's grantees."

Stephen Soldz: "Well over a hundred thousand American men and women, most younger than 30, spend a year or more at a time in a foreign country where they are almost totally isolated from the indigenous population. Are all these troops really chaste for those long periods, as called for by military regulations?"

January 03, 2006

Gulf of Tonkin

National Security Archive: "the American people have long deserved to know the full truth about the Gulf of Tonkin incident. The National Security Agency is to be commended for releasing this piece of the puzzle. The parallels between the faulty intelligence on Tonkin Gulf and the manipulated intelligence used to justify the Iraq War make it all the more worthwhile to re-examine the events of August 1964 in light of new evidence."

The Nat'l Security Archive also has good recent stuff on US support for the invasion of East Timour, the decades-old quest for useable nuclear weapons, and the history of the other NSA.

December 17, 2005

40,000 Slovenians

WSWS: "On November 26, protesters took to the streets of the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana against government plans for massive cuts in the country's social security system. More than 40,000 people participated--the largest demonstration since the republic's independence from the former Yugoslavia."

December 15, 2005

Wonkette on Canada

Call me a prude, but I never thought about softwood lumber in the way that Wonkette, the perversely popular home of lecherous political commentary stateside, does.

Yet another "Americans know Canada exists" moment.

Apparently US Ambassador David Wilson (and yes, it does seem that everyone even tangentially connected to Canada must have the most generic white guy names on the planet) suggested that Martin and the candidates opposing him in the upcoming Canadian ballot lay off the casual derision of Yankee wood interests.

December 14, 2005

Dylan on Tookie?

Sometimes I think this whole world Is one big prison yard. Some of us are prisoners The rest of us are guards. Lord, Lord, They cut George Jackson down. Lord, Lord, They laid him in the ground.

On the day the state of California killed Tookie Williams, Counterpunch posted this Dylan song as an article.

December 04, 2005

John Murtha

Alex Cockburn over at Counterpunch has been paying close attention to Congressman John Murtha's remarkable stand against continuing the occupation of Iraq. (Murtha is on the right of the Democratic party, and is a decorated veteran.)

Amazingly, leading Democrats -- Clinton, Kerry, Obama, etc. -- have abandoned Murtha and maintained a pro-war stand.

In his latest piece, Cockburn says that Murtha's speech signals the revolt of the Generals on the Iraq war.

Meanwhile, Bush's approval rating is below 35% in a lot of populous states.

November 23, 2005

Latte Labour Action

Scoop Independent News:

Workers from stores across Auckland walked off the job today to join the world’s first Starbucks strike, held on Auckland’s counter-culture café strip, Karangahape Rd, New Zealand.

What began as a small protest by workers from one store became a city-wide strike when Starbucks workers heard that managers would be brought in to cover the shifts of the striking K’Rd workers.

“What began as an event to highlight the poor conditions of low pay and minimum wage workers turned into a show of solidarity and strength between Auckland’s Starbucks workers,” said Simon Oosterman, SuperSizeMyPay.Com campaign coordinator.

“More than 30 workers spontaneously walked out from 10 different Auckland Starbucks stores to join KFC, Pizza Hut and McDonalds employees, and around 150 other supporters outside the K’Rd store,” he said.

“Starbucks workers continued their solidarity despite being threatened with being sacked for abandonment of shift if they did not return after one hour,” said Mr Oosterman.

UK Health Services: Big People Need Not Apply

Overweight people in Suffolk, Britain, are being denied some medical surgeries based on their weight.

Patients with a Body Mass Index over 30 will be refused operations like hip and knee surgeries.

Dr Brian Keeble, a director of Ipswich PCT said: "We cannot pretend that this work wasn't stimulated by pressing financial problems."

November 20, 2005

$100 laptop

Nicholas Negroponte has been demoing the prototype of the $100 laptop to various world leaders.

A pretty interesting project, notable for its being outside of the usual capitalist mindset that seems to permeate the consciousness of tech luminaries like Negroponte. One expects them to talk about this kind of thing, and then expect the private sector to deliver it in some hypothetical future.

The future is still hypothetical, but the specs are impressive. Open source software, and the promotion thereof. Non-dependence on fossil fuels or even external energy sources. Negligible profit margins. Use of corporations as a (so far) non distorting means to an end... an end that could have some deep and lasting effects on all kind of political and social levels.

Wait and see...

November 19, 2005

Bitter Orange Pill

The Guardian:

For weeks the "orange revolution" [in Ukraine] dominated headlines across the world. In the end it swept Mr Yushchenko, a pro-western reformer, to the presidency.

Yet, one year on, the euphoria of that people-power victory has been transformed into bitter disappointment. An opinion poll this week indicated that 57% of Ukrainians think the orange promises have been broken. "It turned out our new leaders acted the same old way as their predecessors," says Andriy.

November 18, 2005

Duff Conacher on the Problem with Polls

From Duff Conacher of :

Dear Editors/Producers,

As the federal election speculation rollercoaster continues, many media reports are misleading the public concerning public support of the federal parties, and hurting the media's credibility at the same time.

The reporting of the results of about a dozen polls in the past month has often neglected to mention one key fact -- the percentage of voters who told pollsters they were undecided. Any media report that leaves the impression that pollsters found no undecided voters is misleading.

Assuming that the percentage of undecided voters is about 20-25 percent right now (as it usually is at this time before an election), and given that the gap in the polls between the Liberals and Conservatives has been no greater that five percent (when polling error rates are taken into account), the recent polling results could all be summarized as actually showing nothing important in terms of possible election results.

If my assumption is wrong, please let me and all Canadians know. Hopefully sooner than later all Canadian media outlets will present a summary of recent polls that includes the percentage of undecided voters, and seriously takes into account the error rate, so that Canadians will be told the actual reality of the pre-election situation.

Or are we headed toward a repeat of the polling reporting fiasco of the June 2004 federal election?

[Emphases added]

November 17, 2005

The million is half full

A half-million Australian workers protested the Howard government's rollback of labour rights. Many cities saw the biggest mobilizations in their history.

Anyone notice what was on the cover of the Globe today? I just checked. They didn't cover it at all.

The following item was found to be worthy of reporting, though:

Police believe a nuclear reactor in southern Sydney was a possible target for an Islamic terror cell there, according to details of an Australian counter-terror investigation released Monday.

Update: Wanna know which Canadian media covered this? The National Union of Public and General Employees and the Angus Reid Global Scan.

Maybe the Australian unions didn't hire the same PR firms the Soros Institute got for the "Orange Revolution"?

November 16, 2005

Nigerian Flare Up

A Nigerian judge ruled on Monday that the burning of natural gas by oil firms in the Niger Delta violates the human rights of local people and should stop immediately, the parties in the case said.

The Iwerekan community of Delta State in the southern wetlands region had argued that flaring, or burning off gas associated with the extraction of crude oil, breached their right to life, dignity and a healthy environment.

"It's a thing that goes on 24 hours a day, every day of every year. It causes explosions, constant noise and great heat. Many people have never had a time of quietness or a dark night because of these flares," said Nnimmo Bassey, director of Environmental Rights Action, a Nigerian campaign group that supported the legal case brought by the community in the delta city of Benin.

Environmental group Friends of the Earth says more gas is flared in Nigeria than anywhere else in the world and Nigerian flaring causes more greenhouse gasses than all other sources in sub-Saharan Africa combined.

November 15, 2005

Burma

The T-Star has a long feature on "brutal Burma".

It's not long enough for them to mention that Canada's Ivanhoe Mines is about to become the Burmese government's largest-ever foreign investor.

Canada is a supporter of human rights. (Full stop.) Why would our companies play a key role in propping up brutal military dictatorships?

November 14, 2005

182 Countries vote against US Cuba blockade

It's not being covered much, except for a few scattered wire reprints and a Miami Herald article, but 182 countries voted for a motion opposing the US economic blockade of Cuba.

Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau, and the United States voted against it.

November 08, 2005

Albert in Venezuela

Z Magazine's Michael Albert visited Venezuela, talked to a bunch of officials, and shared his exchanges and impressions.

Vatican: Darwin is just alright with me

The Australian:

The Vatican has issued a stout defence of Charles Darwin, voicing strong criticism of Christian fundamentalists who reject his theory of evolution and interpret the biblical account of creation literally.

Cardinal Paul Poupard, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said the Genesis description of how God created the universe and Darwin's theory of evolution were "perfectly compatible" if the Bible were read correctly.

His statement was a clear attack on creationist campaigners in the US, who see evolution and the Genesis account as mutually exclusive.

"The fundamentalists want to give a scientific meaning to words that had no scientific aim," he said at a Vatican press conference. He said the real message in Genesis was that "the universe didn't make itself and had a creator".

Not French Now, Not French Then

CBC.ca:

Some critics say the [French] government's decision to use the state-of-emergency law is wrong-headed and could backfire.

Christophe Bertossi of the Institute of International Relations says the symbolism of the law's original purpose – to stem an insurrection in Algeria, then a northern African colony of France – won't be lost on the many angry young men of North African descent at the centre of the current violence.

"The signal again is 'You are not part of the French society. You have encumbered identities which are very difficult to reconcile with how France defines itself.'"

November 05, 2005

Are white farmers killed by black nationalists more dead than those killed by criminals under capitalism?

ZNet: Can Zimbabwe Become Africa's Cuba?

In Zimbabwe, during the land seizures ten white farmers were killed [1]. By contrast in South Africa, where even after the fall of apartheid whites still own 80% of arable lands [2], over 1,500 white farmers have been killed since 1994 according to the BBC [3]. The South African government blames criminal elements but given this high number, it is hard not to imagine that the murders are tied to the history of apartheid. While the acts are certainly criminal, the numbers are too high not to suggest that a history of apartheid and a lack of redress have colluded. In Zimbabwe government policy created the conditions in which ten white farmers were killed. In South Africa lack of government policy has led to the conditions in which 1,500 whites farmers have been killed. It is in a sense part of the same movement.

But in Zimbabwe, the infinitely much smaller number of white farmer deaths has created uproar whereas the South African murders are not common knowledge; international media does not report them and Western politicians have turned their gaze elsewhere.

Emphasis added.

October 27, 2005

BusinessWeek on China v US

BusinessWeek: "Despite the howls from Congress, China's management of its exchange rate is not the reason America's current account deficit has soared in this period. As Morgan Stanley economist Stephen S. Roach recently observed, it would take the current account surpluses of 10 economies -- including those of Japan, China, Russia, Germany, and Saudi Arabia -- to equal the U.S. current account deficit. America is running a massive current account gap not because of an undervalued Chinese currency, but because the U.S. is saving too little to finance its investment needs."

Petras on US v China

James Petras: "The fact is that substantial sectors of the US economy are not competitive given the product lines in which they are engaged, the inferior quality of their goods, the lack of long-term, large-scale investments in upgrading technology and productive organization and the siphoning off of profits to speculative sectors or to offshore subsidiaries."

Ongoing in Afghanistan

Eric Ruder: "After the bodies had been defiled, U.S. psychological operations specialists used loudspeakers to taunt local villagers, in an attempt to draw out other Taliban supporters. 'Attention, Taliban, you are all cowardly dogs,' blared the loudspeakers, after calling out several religious leaders by name. 'You allowed your fighters to be laid down facing west and burned. You are too scared to come down and retrieve their bodies. This just proves you are the lady boys we always believed you to be...You attack and run away like women. You call yourself Talibs, but you are a disgrace to the Muslim religion, and you bring shame upon your family. Come and fight like men instead of the cowardly dogs you are.'"

October 21, 2005

Walmart Exploits and Destroys a Little Less

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. will start holding its suppliers more accountable, for environmental and social standards at foreign factories says CEO H. Lee Scott Jr.

But Paul Blank, director of Wake-Up Wal-Mart, backed by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, is not impressed.

"Unfortunately, Wal-Mart's exploitation of workers is not limited to its use of sweatshop labor overseas," he said in a statement. "Our campaign is building a sea of public pressure to force Wal-Mart to end its race-to-the bottom business model." Blank added that sweatshop labor is only the beginning of many problems Wal-Mart must address.

October 20, 2005

US planning invasion, says Chavez

In a BBC interview, Mr Chavez said the US was after his nation's oil, much as it had been after Iraq's.

"We have detected with intelligence reports plans of a supposed invasion, one that would never happen. But we have to denounce it."

Mr Chavez, 55, first came to prominence as a leader of a failed coup in 1992.

After being released from prison, he embarked on a political career that swept him to power in 1998, with a promise to transform Venezuela.

Relations with Washington reached a low when he accused it of "fighting terror with terror" during the war in Afghanistan after 11 September.

The situation hardly improved when Mr Chavez accused the US of being behind the failed coup to oust him in 2002, and of funding opposition groups.

The country's vast oil reserves - the largest in the Americas - have given it a strategic importance, but the US state department denies trying to overthrow the president.

Nonviolent Palestinians

Patrick O'Connor: "The fact that thousands of Palestinians and hundreds of Israelis are together employing nonviolent tactics similar to those of the US civil rights movement and the South African anti-Apartheid movement would come as surprising and welcome news to most Americans. Americans are largely unaware of the struggling but vibrant grassroots nonviolent movement in Palestine, because the US corporate media prefers a simple, flawed story of Palestinian terrorist attacks and Israeli retaliation."

October 17, 2005

What's more important...

...millions of lives or some Swiss company's patent? Believe it or not, that's a serious question.

Dean Baker: "The major obstacle to large-scale stockpiling is that the drug is under patent by Roche, the Swiss pharmaceutical company. Roche has limited manufacturing capacity for Tamiflu, and would charge a high price in any case. Roche has been pressured to license the manufacture of Tamiflu to other companies, but has thus far resisted this pressure. Roche, with the support of the pharmaceutical industry, has claimed that forcing it to license Tamiflu would reduce incentives to develop new drugs. It has also claimed that the manufacturing process is so complex that it would take 2 years for other companies to get facilities up and running in any case."

October 13, 2005

Black churches excluded from Atlanta aid effort

LA Times: "McDonald -- who is on the board of the Red Cross' Metropolitan Atlanta chapter -- says he does not know a single black church that has an arrangement with the Red Cross. As he has struggled to meet FEMA and Red Cross officials, he said, he has gradually realized that he is an outsider despite his connections. 'Black ministers have not been allowed in the door,' he said. 'Our eyes have been opened too.'"

Fisk on Iraq

The Independent: "[Robert Fisk] said that the portrayal of Iraq by Western leaders ­ of efforts to introduce democracy, including Saturday's national vote on the country's proposed constitution ­ was 'unreal' to most of its citizens. In Baghdad, children and women were kept at home to prevent them from being kidnapped for money or sold into slavery. They faced a desperate struggle to find the money to keep generators running to provide themselves with electricity. 'They aren't sitting in their front rooms discussing the referendum on the constitution.'"

Puerto Rican Martyr?

The Hill: "However, the FBI may have created a martyr for the independence cause. At the very least, Ojeda Rios's violent death may revive a political issue -- the island's status -- that the present government has downplayed. Repudiation of the FBI's actions has brought about a rare unanimity among political groups."

[A few weeks ago, the FBI shot Ojeda Rios, a Puerto Rican independence fighter, and let him bleed to death while denying medical teams access to his house.]

US Bike Sales Exceed Car Sales

Agence France-Presse: "More bicycles than cars have been sold in the United States over the past 12 months, with rising gas prices prompting commuters to opt for two wheels instead of four. Not since the oil crisis of 1973 have bicycles sold in such big numbers..."

October 12, 2005

Tariq Ali in Lahore

Tariq Ali: "Even in the midst of disaster, life goes on. Like a giant vulture flock, the global media has descended on the country. The same images repeated every few minutes over three days. The same banal comments. Soon they will get tired and move on. When they are really needed, to monitor relief efforts and reconstruction, to maintain a watch on the funds and alert viewers to the inevitable corruption (in the past blankets and tinned food designed for victims of the floods earlier this year were being openly sold in the black-market) they will not be there."

October 11, 2005

Vermont to Secede?

The state of Vermont has a nascent anti-imperialist independence movement, which is holding a conference later this month. For more, see VermontRepublic.org.

October 08, 2005

Critical Mass Reaches Critical Mass and other news

Quebec wants its own foreign policy, and Ottawa (specifically Pettigrew) isn't having any of it.

A few weeks ago, the FBI assasinated a Puerto Rican independence leader. They surrounded his house, shot him, and refused entry to doctors "for security reasons" while he bled to death.

Paris Indymedia reported on the resistance to removal of "sans papiers" (immigrants without papers), culminating in a fight with police.

A Critical Mass bike ride in Budapest, Hungary brought over 24,000 people into the streets, making it possibly the largest ever ride of its kind. The bikers were demanding bike paths and bicycle-friendly infrastructure, and protesting the lack of regard for cyclists by Hungarian drivers.

According to COHA, Spain's PM Zapatero has reversed course in relations with Venezuela and Argentina, going against the US, but still supports Plan Colombia and the occupation of Haiti.

Kevin Pina's visit to Montreal got some press coverage.

September 26, 2005

250,000 in DC

Norman Solomon: "It's reasonable to estimate that more than a quarter of a million people demonstrated against the Iraq war on Saturday in Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco and other U.S. cities. The next day, the Washington Post front-paged a decent story that described "the largest show of antiwar sentiment in the nation's capital since the conflict in Iraq began." But more perfunctory back-page articles were typical in daily papers across the country. And over the weekend, many TV news watchers saw little or nothing about the protests."

September 23, 2005

Podur in Haiti

Justin Podur is in Haiti, and is filing updates on his weblog.

The registration cards are not designed to please civil libertarians. Haitians registering to vote give fingerprint, signature, and photo information which will eventually be collected in a single database. They will get a single identification card that will be good for 10 years. They may not get breakfast, but they can get some high-tech identification. And they will need it - from social services to the tax office, no Haitian will be able to do without the new identification card. Or so it is planned.

West Bank

The IDF evacuated two West Bank settlements yesterday, leaving behind a pile of rubble. Jon Elmer was there and filed a report and photos.

Basra

WSWS: British troops in pitched battle in Basra

"The fact that the British Army, when it feels its interests are threatened, is ready to shoot police officers and demolish prison facilities gives the lie to such claims. It underscores that any authority that is developed in Iraq will only be allowed to govern so long as it abides by US and British diktat."

The WSWS has an interesting rundown of the reaction of the international press to the German election results.

September 20, 2005

You want to assassinate me? I'll help your poor. So there.

A few weeks after Pat Robertson urged his assassination (something that US officials didn't condemn, noting simply that it wasn't official policy), Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is supplying low-income communities in the US with cheap oil.

In an exclusive interview yesterday, the Venezuelan leader said his country will soon start to ship heating oil and diesel fuel at below market prices to poor communities and schools in the United States. "We will begin with a pilot project in Chicago on Oct. 14, in a Mexican-American community," said Chavez, who was in town for the United Nations sessions. "We will then expand the program to New York and Boston in November."

Chavez

LA Times: "U.S. policymakers striving to curb the influence of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez are confronting a dilemma: Like a prizefighter, he seems to get stronger with every sparring session."

September 19, 2005

Starving them out

Mitchel Cohen: "Let me say this again: The government intentionally did not (and still does not) allow food or water in."

Naomi Archer: "It's Not That the Government Isn't Responding, They are Obstructing the Response"

Student Report from NO

Counterpunch: CAN: a Student Report from Louisiana:

What are all these cops and soldiers doing in New Orleans? We certainly didn't see any of them distributing food, water, or any other supplies. They seemed to be more interested in setting up checkpoints. With the streets totally abandoned by ordinary people, and with debris and wreckage everywhere, we almost could have been driving through Fallujah or Baghdad.

September 13, 2005

Blackwater Mercenaries Stalk New Orleans

According to the hired guns themselves, the US Department of Homeland Security has hired heavily armed mercenaries from Blackwater to patroal the streets of New Orleans:

Blackwater mercenaries are some of the most feared professional killers in the world and they are accustomed to operating without worry of legal consequences. Their presence on the streets of New Orleans should be a cause for serious concern for the remaining residents of the city and raises alarming questions about why the government would allow men trained to kill with impunity in places like Iraq and Afghanistan to operate here. Some of the men now patrolling the streets of New Orleans returned from Iraq as recently as two weeks ago.

September 09, 2005

Ukraine's Orange Losing its Hue

Globe and Mail: "On the streets of Kiev yesterday, people were wondering what happened to their revolution."

Yulia Tymoshenko, who apparently favours more social spending and favours reexamining privatization policies, got kicked out of the PM's seat, and is poised to run against Yushchenko in the next election. Yushchenko's government, meanwhile, is "unravelling", quickly declining in popularity, and besot by corruption charges.

No mention of the millions of dollars spent by European and North American governments (including Canada) on pro-Yushchenko NGOs.

As soon as the corruption strikes, it's their problem. The very possibility that a governments sending millions of dollars into a country where they have definite interests to "build democracy" might itself be a corrupting influence is apparently not worth examining. It's not even worth dismissing.

Here's what I wrote in December, during the much-hyped Orange revolution:

While the press provides plenty of arguments to depict Yuschenko as one of the good guys, Ukraine is not the first place that a "democratic revolution" has been enthusiastically embraced by the Canadian and American press, only to go awry after the media spotlight fades. The combined effects of privatization and inequality have had devastating effects throughout the post-Soviet world, but there is little or no criticism--much less awareness--of Yuschenko's advocacy of massive privatization of the Ukrainian economy.

It appears that the Canadian media is strictly above discussing its own government's role. Which is to say, the media will not question anything that there is a broad consensus (complicit or active) on. It's only when a body with significant power is on the other side of a debate that the possibility of the existence of a debate is even recognized.

September 07, 2005

War on Hurricanes

Billmon:

If you think about it, it's probably just as well that Katrina wasn't a terrorist. Because if she was, she'd probably still be hiding out in the North Atlantic, periodically smuggling out bombastic videotapes ("Death to puny mammals and their infidel cave hives!") and occasionally sending violent thunderstorms to blow down train stations and beach resorts outside the United States.

"War on Hurricanes" actually has quite a bit of explanatory power in terms of understanding the (equally dubious) "war on terror/[terra]".

It's obvious, for example, that we can't go after the root causes of the storms; no, we have to root out the storms before they attack... by finding where they come from in the Atlantic and... preemptively attacking them with bigger and more powerful storms, so as to overpower them!

Yup.

September 06, 2005

Press takes a nose dive

Body and Soul: Can I take back everything good I said about the press this week?

September 04, 2005

Stealing the Bus

An eighteen year-old New Orleans native stole a school bus, picked up 100 strangers, and drove them out of the city.

AP has photos of hundreds of New Orleans school buses that weren't used for evacuation efforts as hundreds of thousands of people remained stuck in the city. (Keeping in mind that folks did in fact know that the Hurricane was on its way.)

Talking Heads Gone Wild

Jack Shafer: "In the last couple of days, many of the broadcasters reporting from the bowl-shaped toxic waste dump that was once the city of New Orleans have stopped playing the role of wind-swept wet men facing down a big storm to become public advocates for the poor, the displaced, the starving, the dying, and the dead."

CNN's Spine

In story after story, CNN is going after the Bush Administration in a way that both seems totally justified, yet makes you wonder why the press was so completely lacking in its ability to question in recent years.

Defending the U.S. government's response to Hurricane Katrina, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff argued Saturday that government planners did not predict such a disaster ever could occur.

But in fact, government officials, scientists and journalists have warned of such a scenario for years.

Anyone taking bets on how long CNN and others will continue to have a spine?

I have to admit, it's remarkable that journalists pointing out obvious facts is somehow praiseworthy. But somehow, it is. I suppose it'll last as long as the overwhelming, incontrovertible, horrific, constantly replenished evidence that something is terribly, terribly wrong.

Talking Points

Joshua Micah Marshall: "So, just to recap, Brown had no experience whatsoever in emergency management. He was fired from his last job for incompetence. He was hired because he was the new director's college roommate. And after the director -- who himself got the job because he was a political fixer for the president -- left, he became top dog. And President Bush said yesterday that he thinks Brown is 'doing a helluva job'."

Michael Albert

Michael Albert: Business As Usual

So why didn't the government act quicker and more aggressively?

The answer gaining credence by the hour is that the suffering people were, and are, black and poor. That is overwhelmingly true and intensely relevant, particularly to the instant news coverage, to the shoot to kill rhetoric, to the belief that politicos could ride out being callous, and to the endless indignities imposed at the gathering places where acres of hungry, disheveled blacks are harassed by surrounding police forces - not to mention to the prior history of New Orleans. But however central racism has been, it is not the whole story.

Albert argues, essentially, that the proper response to a humanitarian disaster like Hurricane Katrina would not be allowed to be implemented -- even temporarily -- under American capitalism.

Criminal

San Francisco Bayview: NCM > 'This is criminal': Malik Rahim reports from New Orleans

That's a must read.

September 02, 2005

Ray Nagin radio interview

New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin did a heart-wrenching radio interview about the disaster. Recommended.

Looting vs. Finding

You've likely heard about the photo captions where white people in flood-devastated Louisiana "find" food, while black people "loot". Yahoo News has sort of apologized for the photos.

The Poor of New Orleans

CounterPunch.org

The destruction of New Orleans represents a confluence of many of the most pernicious trends in American politics and culture: poverty, racism, militarism, elitist greed, environmental abuse, public corruption and the decay of democracy at every level.

Much of this is embodied in the odd phrasing that even the most circumspect mainstream media sources have been using to describe the hardest-hit victims of the storm and its devastating aftermath: "those who chose to stay behind." Instantly, the situation has been framed with language to flatter the prejudices of the comfortable and deny the reality of the most vulnerable.

It is obvious that the vast majority of those who failed to evacuate are poor: they had nowhere else to go, no way to get there, no means to sustain themselves and their families on strange ground. While there were certainly people who stayed behind by choice, most stayed behind because they had no choice. They were trapped by their poverty ­ and many have paid the price with their lives.

August 31, 2005

Elmer in Israel

Jon Elmer, The NewStandard: "Arab victims of last month's terrorist attack on a bus in northern Israel will not be eligible for the same compensation as Jewish victims of Palestinian attacks because the perpetrator -- a Jewish Israeli soldier -- was not considered a member of a group hostile to the state of Israel."

August 22, 2005

None dare call it stolen

Harper's Magazine's None Dare Call It Stolen is well worth the read. Because, y'know, if it happened twice...

A few quotes:

And on Election Day, twenty-six state exit polls incorrectly predicted wins for Kerry, a statistical failure so colossal and unprecedented that the odds against its happening, according to a report last May by the National Election Data Archive Project, were 16.5 million to 1. Yet this ever-less-beloved president, this president who had united liberals and conservatives and nearly all the world against himself - this president somehow bested his opponent by 3,000,176 votes.

...

At Kenyon College in Gambier, for instance, there were only two machines for 1,300 would-be voters, even though "a surge of late registrations promised a record vote". Gambier residents and Kenyon students had to stand in line for hours, in the rain and in "crowded, narrow hallways", with some of them inevitably forced to call it quits. "In contrast, at nearby Mt Vernon Nazarene University, which is considered more Republican leaning, there were ample waiting machines and no lines". This was not a consequence of limited resources. In Franklin County alone, as voters stood for hours throughout Columbus and elsewhere, at least 125 machines collected dust in storage. The county's election officials had "decided to make do with 2,866 machines, even though the analysis showed that the county needs 5,000 machines".

Protests in China

Boston Globe: "Protesters demanding the closure of an eastern China battery factory that they say is spewing lead into the environment clashed with police, and dozens of people were injured, witnesses and hospital officials said yesterday. After the initial melee, thousands of demonstrators torched police cars and broke into government offices, witnesses reported. Such protests are becoming more common in rural China as villagers vent their anger against corruption, environmental degradation, pollution, and the seizure of land for real estate development."

August 07, 2005

Network Model

Christian Science Monitor: Al Qaeda to West: It's about policies

Analysts cautioned that Zawahiri's statement is not evidence of direct Al Qaeda knowledge of the London attacks, and said it probably fits into Al Qaeda's evolution into an ideological motivator, rather than organizer, of attacks.

"Such messages are usually a call-to-arms, sort of top-down guidance to go forth and do your thing," says Ayers. He says while Al Qaeda was "tightly organized" before the invasion of Afghanistan, the dispersal of members since has left a "confederation of groups that adhere to the same fundamental principles.... essentially they are functionally autonomous groups."

Is that why you're not supposed to throw rocks at a hornet nest?

July 29, 2005

Christoff in Lebanon

Independent journalist Stefan Christoff is in Lebanon, covering social movements and resistance to neoliberal policies there. He just filed a report about the growing tensions between Lebanese and Syrian governments and its affect on the working poor of both countries.

Right now, thousands of truckers have gone two weeks without pay, and are sleeping under their trucks, waiting for the Syria-Lebanon border to open.

A driver on the highway at the Masnaa border crossing spoke on the current crisis at the borders. "Those people in the offices in Beirut and Damascus are not asking about us, whether we are eating or not, whether we are alive or not, they are not thinking about us. This is not a normal situation. When the Lebanese and the Syrian governments are having political problems, the people of both nations suffer."

The rage and despair expressed by the drivers on the borders, illustrates the lack of support that governments of both nations have provided toward the working poor, impacted most heavily by the crisis. The Lebanese government has provided no compensation to the thousands of drivers stranded at the border, as they survive on bare necessities with little political representation.

July 28, 2005

Spam King Murdered

Mosnews.com: "Mosnews.com: "Russian-language media, both online and offline, has made little effort to conceal one central thought when dealing with the spammer's demise: that somehow the late Mr. Kushnir got what he deserved. "The Spammer Had it Coming"�, one headline reads. "Spam is Deadly"�, "Ignoble Death Becomes Russia's Top Spammer"�, "An Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem"� - 84 Russian-language news captions on Kushnir's murder, retrieved by the Yandex News search engine within a day of the event, seem to share the general feeling."

July 27, 2005

It's the Occupation, Stupid

Essential reading (from The American Conservative, of all places) on understanding the phenomenon of suicide bombings -- burying once and for all the vacuous Bush/Blair argument that "we fight the terrorists there so that we won't have to face them here":

"The Logic of Suicide Terrorism: It's the occupation, not the fundamentalism."
An interview with Robert Pape

"The central fact [of Pape's exhaustive global study] is that overwhelmingly, suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign -- over 95 percent of all incidents -- has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw. [...] Since suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation and not Islamic fundamentalism, the use of heavy military force to transform Muslim societies over there, if you would, is only likely to increase the number of suicide terrorists coming at us."

July 11, 2005

WSWS on Live8

Live 8: Who organised the PR campaign for Blair and Bush?

"The scale of the Live 8 event was spectacular. But its essential aim was of a far more politically sinister character than its altruistic pose would suggest. It was organised and backed by individuals and organisations with close ties to the Labour government of Tony Blair, and had the official backing of the government itself. By boosting the pitiful debt relief package agreed on by the G8 and hailing the proposals of Blair’s own Commission for Africa for aid and relief tied to free-market initiatives, it set out to provide a much-needed mask of humanitarian concern to both Blair and US President George W. Bush."

July 07, 2005

Two on the G8 from Green Left Weekly

John Pilger: "The illusion of an anti-establishment crusade led by pop stars -- a cultivated, controlling image of rebellion -- serves to dilute a great political movement of anger. In summit after summit, not one significant promise of the G8 has been kept, and the 'victory for millions'� is no different. It is a fraud -- actually a setback to reducing poverty in Africa. Entirely conditional on vicious, discredited economic programs imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the 'package' will ensure that the 'chosen' countries slip deeper into poverty."

Norm Dixon: MPH demands that 'the unpayable debts of the world’s poorest countries should be cancelled in full' and 'poor countries should no longer have to privatise basic services or liberalise economies as a condition for getting the debt relief they so desperately need'. Yet, the much publicised British government-brokered deal only cancels the multilateral component of the debt of 18 of the world’s poorest countries (with another 20 that may become eligible in the future). But this 'relief' comes with the very strings that MPH opposes — strings that will ensure that poor countries remain trapped in dire poverty."

July 05, 2005

The Celebrity Liberal View

Is it possible for rich Europeans to address African poverty without understanding colonialism, racism, corporate plunder, illegitimate debt run up by dictators and handed to corporations, or the humanitarian catastrophe that the IMF has imposed? If that's possible, then it must also be possible to conceive of an entire campaign to eliminate poverty in Africa that ignores the many African social movements, and assumes that it knows what is good for Africa better than Africans do. And if that's doable, then why not just go ahead and praise the people who are imposing this mess on the third world to the heavens?

Welcome to the UK's Make Poverty History campaign.

It's all very sensible.

July 03, 2005

Canadian Base in the Middle East

WSWS: "The Canadian government is in the process of establishing a long-term military base in the oil-rich Persian Gulf region. According to a recent article in the Globe and Mail, the Canadian government is negotiating with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to gain control of a section of the Minhad Air Base, located near Dubai, for years, if not decades, to come."

June 10, 2005

Reporting on Struggles for Social Justice in Lebanon

There don't seem to be many spontaneous, popular pro-democracy movements that the US, Europe and Canada aren't keen to coopt and manipulate with funding and skewed media coverage.

That's why it's pretty important that Stefan Christoff, a long-time activist and independent journalist, is off to Lebanon to file reports on popular movements for social justice there, and what's really going on.

Between June & September 2005, Christoff will produce written, audio, and visuals on present-day struggles in Lebanon.

For more information, and to donate to help him cover his costs, visit this page.

Anti-Semitism in America

FAIR has an interesting breakdown about how, despite constantly calling attention to occurences of anti-jewish acts in Europe and the Middle East, the US media nonetheless ignores some prominent incidents in at home.

Shortly before Christmas last year, syndicated radio star and MSNBC host Don Imus called the book publishers Simon & Schuster “thieving Jews” (Imus in the Morning, 12/15/04), returning to the subject later in the program to offer a mock apology, saying that the phrase he used was “redundant.”

Anti-Semitism is nothing new on Imus’ show, which is notorious for its ethnic and sexual slurs. In 1998, for instance, Imus called Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz “that boner-nosed . . . beanie-wearing little Jew boy” (Newsday, 10/19/98).

When Anti-Defamation League director Abe Foxman complained about Imus’ Simon & Schuster slur, describing it in a letter (12/20/04) as “an age-old anti-Semitic canard that still, unfortunately, has great currency today,” Imus was defiant. “I wrote a two-word response across the face of [the letter],” Imus told listeners (1/4/05), “and sent it back to them.” Besides a handful of mentions in tabloid newspapers (New York Post, 1/5/05; Boston Herald, 1/7/05) and a short UPI report (1/5/05), the Imus affair received next to no coverage.

June 06, 2005

Technologically-nudged equality

A Spanish company has developed technology to divide household chores neatly in half.

It's a washing machine that encourages men to share the burden of doing laundry. Endowed with software that recognizes the fingerprint of household members, the machine shuts down when the same person tries to use it twice in a row. "It obliges men to do things around the home," says Mr. Torres.

Already-massive protests are getting bigger in Bolivia.

Here's rabble's take:

The leftist dream of how you can take power is a popular uprising culminating in a general strike until victory. Today the bolivian left has embarked upon such an adventure. It is when the left stops demanding reform and takes the risk of direct engagement to replace the existing system. Often it fails. In France in May 68 the most famous general strike nearly succeeded. The '54 general strike in Hungary was crushed by Soviet tanks. In Uruguay in 1973 there was a general strike held out for over two weeks against a brutal military dictatorship.

It's a risky tactic, but it's also about winning. The bolivian left has been very successful at picking fights, winning the battle, and coming out of each struggle stronger.

An investigation into War Crimes in Sudan has begun. Keeping in mind that the CIA considers the genocidal regime "a friend".

And the New Standard has a good story: Native Americans, Allies Resist Expansion of Utah Nuke Wasteland

20 killed in Haiti

In today's news and analysis...

Police trained and vetted by the Canadian RCMP burned down houses in poor neighborhoods and killed as many as 25 people today in Haiti.

Condi Rice is pushing the same old agenda at the OAS meeting. No sign of humility since the US was forced to back down from their support of an anti-Chavez OAS chair.

Bolivian social movements have picked a fight with the elite over the exploitation of Bolivian natural resources and who benefits from that.

Gilles Duceppe is under pressure to quit the Bloc and lead the PQ, which would almost certainly be deeply detrimental to the Bloc and hugely beneficial to the PQ. A no-brainer career-wise, but Landry screwed Duceppe with the timing of his resignation.

For some ungodly reason, the Toronto Star insists on reprinting Thomas Friedman's fascistic rants in its weekend edition, the latest one being a racist screed about how Europe can't keep its welfare state because of wage competition from India et al. (What is the Star's editorial board's thought process? 'Gee, what Toronto-area readers really need is a little taste o' the Friedman...')

As timing would have it, Greg Palast has a lovely rebuttal of Friedman's latest, which likely won't be printed in any Canadian papers, unless you count this link.

June 05, 2005

Pilger on Foreign Aid

John Pilger: "More than 740 foreigner advisers and experts earn nearly as much as 160,000 Cambodian civil servants, who get as little as 25 dollars a month. In many ministries, the pay of foreign advisers exceeds the entire annual budget. It is more than twice the budget of the agricultural ministry and four times that of the justice ministry. Foreign aid workers constantly complain about local corruption, often justifiably. But they rarely identify and measure their own legitimised corruption"

June 04, 2005

US Prisons

ZNet: "The United States incarcerates more people per capita than any other developed nation on earth. The population of the United States comprises 5% of the world's population but its incarcerated population is equal to more than 25% of the world's prisoners."

June 01, 2005

Siberian Fire

Guardian: "Fires in the Siberian forests - the largest in the world and vital to the planet's health - have increased tenfold in the last 20 years and could again rage out of control this summer, Russian scientists warn."

May 31, 2005

Some Characterizations of the EU "Constitution"

Mike Whitney: "First of all, it's a stretch just to call this neoliberal rag a constitution at all. Typically, we think of a constitution as a document that embraces the highest ideals of a people; laying out clear guidelines for safeguarding civil liberties and the rule of law; not a compendium of perks for big business and their cronies in high finance. The EU constitution simply hands over more power to an 'unelected' class of euro-parasites who want to suck the life out of the social welfare system that has raised the standard of living for the middle class to the highest in the world. The French were smart enough to say, 'non!'"

America Vera-Zavala: "The constitution centralises even more power in the hand of the undemocratic and often neoliberal EU commission. The EU commission gets a fast track in trade issues, something the former trade commissioner Pascal Lamy, now head of the WTO strongly pushed for. The constitution clearly speaks about a military union and states that the nation states have to increase military expenses in their national budgets (without an end date which means that military expenses should grow eternally). The neoliberal economic policy is fixed in the treaty; it gives priority to the fight against inflation over unemployment - an economic dogma creating problems in the entire world. “I think we will win”, my friend tells me on the phone from France. And when he says we he refers to all of us that have been fighting democratic deficit and neoliberalism in the European Union for years. I had the same sense of we, when we won the referendum in Sweden 2003. Saying no to the monetary union was not a Swedish victory; it was a popular victory, that day in Sweden, years before in Denmark, and may in a few days be extended to the Netherlands that will vote on the European Constitution on the 1st June. The movement against an undemocratic and neoliberal European Union is a truly European movement."

Diana Johnstone:"This was essentially a vote against dogmatic free market policies, and the type of economic globalization being pursued by the "neo-liberal" free marketeers. The 'non' was resounding, and, for those who were listening, the message was clear. But who was really listening?"

Arthur Mitzman: "Some signers favor it, others do not. Although I am opposed to the draft, for reasons I shall indicate, I am not vehemently so, believing as I do that the proposed constitution will not change a great deal in the ways Europe is developing, nor in the possibilities of the Left for bending those ways in a social and ecological direction. I thus reject the hyperbolic predictions of catastrophe both of the supporters and opponents of the constitution if their position is defeated."

May 30, 2005

ZNet and Venezuelans on Venezuela

ZNet got an interesting reply to a recent critique of Venezuelan politics.

The very fact that there are 8 revolutionary parties in the coalition government is something your article ignores. This coalition includes revolutionary parties which reflect most every major radical Left tendency in Venezuela, including the Communist Party of Venezuela, two Trotskyist parties (Movement Towards Socialism and Patria Para Todos), and the Socialist Party of Venezuela. Christian socialists, indigenous revolutionaries and other non-Marxist revolutionaries are also part of the Alliance for Change. The junior parties in the government coalition have many members in key government positions. For example, the Venezuelan Ambassador to the U.S. in Washington, D.C. is a Trotskyist.

In addition to the 8 parties formally in the coalition government, there are literally dozens of smaller revolutionary Left organizations which support the revolutionary government. One of the most common slogans written on walls all over Caracas was the initials of one of the very many revolutionary Left organizations under which is written "con Chavez." This is a critical point in understanding the nature of the Bolivarian Revolution, and a point which in my experience almost all U.S. leftists are completely ignorant of. It is very important to educate the U.S. Left on the critical importance of revolutionary pluralism in Venezuela.

While much of your critique of the MVR and Pres. Chavez is worthy of consideration, you have missed the point that it is Pres. Chavez and the MVR which is key to maintaining the revolutionary coalition government. If Pres. Chavez and the MVR wasn't committed to maintaining this unity, it wouldn't exist, because the MVR and Pres. Chavez could refuse to cooperate with the other parties in forming a joint list of revolutionary candidates for elections and could simply decide to dominate the elections and the government on their own. The fact that neither Pres. Chavez nor MVR has sought this is proof that there must be an ideological and political commitment to revolutionary pluralism.

RAWA on Afghanistan

Here's what the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan thinks about the protests in Afghanistan (y'know, the ones who were around before there was NGO and "development" money available for womens' groups in Afghanistan).

People are fed up with many critical social issues and come out on the streets to protest. When people see that Karzai shakes hands with the most dirty enemies of the Afghan people, who first of all should appear in a court of justice; when people see that millions of dollars given in the name of the reconstruction of Afghanistan goes into the pockets of warlords and no one asks about their brutality (on the contrary Mr. Karzai frequently installs them in key posts); they have no other option but to protest and in many cases it takes a violent form.

The situation in Afghanistan is far more disastrous then what you may imagine. The Karzai administration has done nothing positive but just works hard to gather all the top fundamentalist criminals around himself. Even these days he is trying to portray some key Taliban leaders as "moderates," and tries to share power with them. A few days ago through Sibghatullah Mojadeddi, the government announced amnesty for Gulbuddin and Mullah Omar if they surrender.

All these policies are contrary to the wishes of our people who want justice and the prosecution of top fundamentalist leaders. People are furious but are powerless. Mass protest is the only type of weapon people have to put pressure on the government.

Therefore in such a situation people display their anger by such demonstrations. They find any excuse to come to the streets. In the latest protests, the gross majority of people don't care about the report of Newsweek--it is just an excuse for them to protest. And of course the fundamentalists, especially the party of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Al Qaeda, try to make use of these protests and guide it according to their own wishes.

May 11, 2005

South American-Arab Summit

BBC: "Brazil's president said he wanted developing nations to redraw the economic map by working together on global challenges such as trade talks. [...] The summit declaration is also expected to uphold the right of people to resist foreign occupation."

When in Spain?

The Guardian: "Spain declared an amnesty yesterday for about 700,000 illegal immigrants, bucking a Europe-wide trend of cracking down on economic migrants, while striking at exploitation of those working secretly and fearfully in the black economy."

Killing Train: "Given that Canada's overall GDP is 9% bigger than Spain's (or 26% times bigger in terms of GDP share per person), that the geographic area of this country is roughly 18 times the size of Spain (with a population density that is 22 times smaller), and that the entire estimated population of non-status people in Canada is only a third of those affected under the Spanish amnesty law (i.e. 200,000 in Canada vs. 600,000 being regularized in Spain), it is hard to believe that the Canadian government is hard pressed to grant the demand of ‘Status for All’ to immigrants and refugees in this country."

May 09, 2005

Letter from Assata Shakur

AllHipHop.com has an open letter from Assata Shakur

They call me the "most wanted woman" in Amerika. I find that ironic. I've never felt very "wanted" before. When it came to jobs, I was never the "most wanted," when it came to "economic opportunities I was never the "most wanted, when it came to decent housing." It seems like the only time Black people are on the "most wanted" list is when they want to put us in prison.

It's good, read it.

In other news:

While Europeans celebrate their liberation, Algerians are remembering the massacres of 1945, when between 15,000 and 45,000 Algerians were killed by French colonial authorities. An estimated 1.5 million died in Algeria's war of national independence.

Anti-colonial history isn't front page news, though.

May 08, 2005

Meet Taiwan, China

BusinessWeek: Why Taiwan Matters

"In Taiwan, people say the U.S. understanding of outsourcing is backward," says Victor Zue, co-director of the Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. "It feels more like the Taiwanese are outsourcing marketing and branding to the rest of the world."

Terrorism? Not when we do it.

LA Times: "Challenging the United States to make good on its pledge to hunt down terrorists, Venezuela on Thursday formally requested the extradition of a radical Cuban exile who is reportedly hiding in Florida and is wanted here in connection with an airline bombing that killed 73 people."

Report on Business: "A promising outlook for SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. presented at its annual meeting was overshadowed yesterday by a protest against a defence unit of the engineering and construction giant, which supplies bullets to the U.S. army."

The US has raised the bounty on former Black Panther Assata Shakur to $1 million. Shakur has has been living in Cuba since she was broken out of prison by supporters in 1979. She has a web site.

These people are serious.

"Publius Pundit" says that the National Housewives' Union is part of making a corporate state in Venezuela.

National Housewives' Union? It's so stupid, so useless! Don't have a cedula or party card for that? Then you are gonna be an unregistered housewife, and we're gonna have to bust you. Can't have unregistered housewives running around! Book 'em, Dano!

Possible reactions:

1. It's interesting that you don't need evidence to make these kinds of claims
2. Hahahahahahahaha.
3. Venezuela is creating a corporate state?! Uh.
4. If they're making people like this irrationally lash out, they're probably doing something right.

May 05, 2005

Blue Eyes, Greenbacks

Guardian: "Frank Sinatra worked as a mafia courier and was nearly caught carrying a suitcase stuffed with $3.5m, according to the entertainer Jerry Lewis."

Re-Baathification

The WSWS has a good piece on US demands that Iraq's new government repudiate "de-Baathification" (though I wish they cited more sources), and a very complete account of how the US lost a battle over the presidency of the Organization of American States.

May 04, 2005

Four Dead in Ohio

Democracy Now!: "On May 4th, 1970 - 35 years ago today - National Guardsmen opened fire on a crowd of unarmed students at Kent State University. Four students were killed and nine others wounded. We commemorate the 35th anniversary by airing an excerpt of the documentary, 'Kent State: The Day the War Came Home' that includes interview with students and National Guardsmen who were there."

Oops, there goes $60M

Two U.S. F-18s Crashed in Iraq today. The unit cost (not including maintenance) of the F-18 is $30 million.

For comparison purposes, total American aid to Afghanistan is $297 million. So in one day, they lost approx. 20% of the total Afghanistan aid.

It's over 10% of the total aid from Canada to Afghanistan... for the past fifteen years ($500 million).

May 03, 2005

Picasso would be depressed

Jonathan Steele and Dahr Jamail in the Guardian: This is our Guernica

"Ruined, cordoned Falluja is emerging as the decade's monument to brutality"

Housewives of the world, Unite!

Venezuelan housewives have started a union!

The union provides legal support to their members and informs them of the free educational, medical and subsidized food programs the government provides. They are also lobbying for a pension from the government which, if the union is successful, would be awarded to all housewives over age fifty. The Merida chapter of the union has a weekly program on Radio Horizante, a community radio. Through this, members inform the public of their work and what projects could be of interest to the community. And twice a month they have a union meeting at 1:30 pm so that the women can attend after preparing lunch for their families. A recent meeting included thousands of women who had traveled from all over the state of Merida.

April 29, 2005

Mexico City Mayor Emerges as '06 Front-Runner

by Susana Hayward
Published on Friday, April 29, 2005 by Knight Ridder

MEXICO CITY -- When he became mayor of one of the world's largest cities, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was coy about his ambitions. He drove an old car, dressed humbly and annoyed reporters who had to attend his daily, punctual 6 a.m. news conferences.

That was more than four years ago. On Thursday, he was the man to beat in the 2006 presidential election, and his left-of-center Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD, no longer seemed likely to be a distant third in Mexico's political races.

Latin America in Revolt

from Green Left Weekly:

For over two decades the US has forced neoliberalism — and its accompanying poverty and despair — down Third World throats in order to make the world better for US business. To many, the spreading US economic empire, backed by the point of a gun and a loan, has seemed unassailable. But now, unable to defeat a rag-tag bunch of Iraqi militias, and rapidly losing allies in Latin America, the empire is not looking so strong.

As yet another neoliberal, pro-US government falls in Latin America, Resistance’s Stuart Munckton looks at the continent that might defeat Uncle Sam.

April 28, 2005

They're still killing protesters in Haiti

Canadian-trained and -vetted Haitian police killed five protesters yesterday. This kind of thing has been happening on a fairly regular basis.

The problem is that tens of thousands of people have been protesting the illegitimate, non-elected government and calling for the return of their elected government. Latortue probably figures that he can take a hit or two in the international press to keep the movements from growing.

Meanwhile, Canada continues to support Latortue, and tens of thousands of Haitians continue to risk death to demonstrate against him.

Democracy for the Majority World

This guy has created a map of what the ridings for a "global parliament" might look like. His stated purpose is not to propose actual ridings, but to illustrate how a fair (at least: one person, one vote) global electoral system would break down by region.

It's a good way of illustrating the injustice of the rule of many by the few, in any case.

April 25, 2005

Toribio

Justin Podur reports on what's going on in Toribio, where an indigenous community with a long history of resistance is now the battleground for the government and the FARC. It's the same community that organized a referendum on "free trade" agreements that the Colombian government was signing with the US.

Colombia's indigenous peoples have long been invisible in the mainstream media, but these combats have seen reports on Toribio appear all over AP wires and on BBC world. Even the best reports, however, present the story as a battle between the FARC and the government, with the indigenous communities being either the background or the battlefield itself. And while many of the messages of solidarity and support that have come from organizations and individuals of conscience in Colombia and throughout the world describe the urgent humanitarian situation, with over 1800 people displaced, dozens of houses destroyed, dozens injured and several killed, it is very important that the words and message of the communities themselves not be lost.

April 23, 2005

The BBC and Torture

John Pilger: "Can you imagine the BBC and other major broadcasters apologizing to a rogue regime which practices racism and ethnic cleansing; which has 'effectively legalized the use of torture'?"

April 21, 2005

Presidents Quit, Brits Fret

Ecuador's Lucio and Italy's Berlusconi and the Washington Post covered the foreign policy announcements.

A woman chaired Bahrain's parliament today.

It appears that France is going to vote against ratification of the EU constitution. They're even reading about the proposed constitution en masse.

India is investing in rail in a serious way... but other infrastructure? Not so much.

Allergies have become more intense in the last 25 years, according to a study.

The tragic hotel fire in Paris was reportedly caused by "a night watchman's girlfriend who placed candles on the floor to set the scene for a romantic tryst but then left in a rage over his drunken state".

Ecuadorian police used tear gas on the tens of thousands of demonstrators before the president was sacked.

US Republicans didn't mind that UN ambassadorial nominee John Bolton wanted to get rid of the UN, but now that he's been called a "serial bully", they're delaying his confirmation. Bolton reportedly "chased [a female colleague] through the halls of a Russian hotel, threw things at her and verbally threatened her about business deals."

China didn't waste time asking the Pope to sever ties with Taiwan.

April 17, 2005

Still Going: 10s of thousands demonstrate in Haiti

AHP: "Several tens of thousands of Fanmi Lavalas supporters demonstrated this Thursday in the streets of Port-au-Prince to continue to demand the release of political prisoners, the end of political persecutions and the return to constitutional order which was broken, they said, with Aristide's forced departure."

Disaster Capitalism

Naomi Klein: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

It certainly seems that ever-larger portions of the globe are under active reconstruction: being rebuilt by a parallel government made up of a familiar cast of for-profit consulting firms, engineering companies, mega-NGOs, government and UN aid agencies and international financial institutions. And from the people living in these reconstruction sites--Iraq to Aceh, Afghanistan to Haiti--a similar chorus of complaints can be heard. The work is far too slow, if it is happening at all. Foreign consultants live high on cost-plus expense accounts and thousand- dollar-a-day salaries, while locals are shut out of much-needed jobs, training and decision-making. Expert "democracy builders" lecture governments on the importance of transparency and "good governance," yet most contractors and NGOs refuse to open their books to those same governments, let alone give them control over how their aid money is spent.

April 16, 2005

ME Realpolitik

WSWS: "The issue of permanent US bases in Afghanistan is a sensitive one. Not only does its overtly colonial character provoke hostility among Afghans but more broadly it exposes Washington’s imperialist ambitions within the region. Thus when questioned directly by the press, Rumsfeld was evasive. 'We think in terms of what we are doing rather than the question of military bases,' he declared."

WSWS: "In the early days of the US occupation, the head of the American operation, L. Paul Bremer, instituted a sweeping “de-Baathification” program and disbanded the Iraqi army—a move subsequently seen as a major blunder by many in the US security establishment. Within months of the US invasion, however, the CIA began quietly recruiting former officers of Saddam Hussein’s hated Mukhabarat secret police."

"After the dissolution of Bremer’s occupation authority and the installation of long-time CIA asset Iyad Allawi as the prime minister in the provisional government, the recruitment of former Hussein regime members was stepped up. Allawi is himself an ex-Baathist, and built his US- and British-backed exile group, the Iraqi National Accord, around disgruntled Baathist officers and intelligence agents."

April 14, 2005

Do the collapse? Nah.

Christian Science Monitor: "Barring a disaster or unforeseen crises, the assumption of a North Korean collapse appears wishful, and is a scenario taken less and less seriously by US partners in the six-party talks. Indeed, it now appears the theory of collapse held by influential voices in the Bush administration has itself collapsed among US officials and analysts working closest on North Korean issues. Critics say the US doesn't yet have a Plan B."

April 13, 2005

Future US Ambassador to the UN

Boston Globe: "The former head of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research testified yesterday that John Bolton, President Bush's nominee for ambassador to the United Nations, is a 'serial abuser' who tried to fire and intimidate one analyst who did not agree with Bolton's view that Cuba is developing biological weapons."

April 11, 2005

India, China, Power

Washington Post: "India and China, the world's two most populous countries, agreed on Monday to create a 'strategic partnership' in an effort to end their longstanding border dispute and boost trade and economic cooperation."

April 10, 2005

Spend and Surplus

Venezuela is in an economic sweet spot. The government has been building major social programs, but thanks to rising oil prices and the actual collection of corporate taxes, they're running a surplus. Not a bad position for nation-building, or whatever you want to call it.

Venezuela could post a fiscal surplus this year rather than the deficit forecast by the government if oil prices continue at current levels, Finance Minister Nelson Merentes said on Saturday.

"We planned for a fiscal deficit of 1.8 percent, but if the current conditions continue we are probably going to have a surplus," Merentes told a news conference.

Anti Occupation Protest in Iraq

Juan Cole: "Tens of thousands of Shiites came out Saturday to Firdaws Square in downtown Baghdad to protest the continued US military presence in Iraq. It is the largest demonstration ever achieved by the Sadr Movement, who are Shiite nationalists. The crowds reenacted the pulling down of the statue of Saddam Hussein two years ago by pulling down effigies of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, dressed in orange jumpsuits to recall torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere."

April 09, 2005

Mexican Congress Votes to Impeach Leading Candidate

Check out The lndependent's coverage of the latest attempt to forestall another leftist victory in Latin America.

April 06, 2005

Berlusconi Going Down?

Guardian: "Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, rebuffed calls for his resignation yesterday after a stinging defeat in regional elections, a sign that voters may be preparing to get rid of him in the general election next year.... Francesco Storace, defeated president of the politically important Lazio region, described the result as a 'slaughter' for the centre-right."

April 03, 2005

PR and Nukes

In one of their better PR moves of late (the outraged Communist line just doesn't play that well with the western press) , North Korea has offered to return to talks if the focus is "mutual disarmament".

Here's what the US had to say:

On Thursday, it said the focus of any future talks should no longer be on the North alone, but on regional disarmament by all parties involved.

Mr Hill said that if the North Koreans wanted to make "sarcastic" statements, they should come back to the talks and make them there, and not put out what he called "silly" press statements.

Not that the Bush Administration gives a [], but the only response that wouldn't make the US look bad was to ignore it altogether.

Maybe the DPRK has lured away a White House PR flak?

April 02, 2005

Sigh.

Boston Globe: World Bank votes unanimously to make Wolfowitz its president

If it's an April Fool's joke, it's not very funny.

March 30, 2005

Undermining effective AIDS programs

Guardian: "Uganda, considered a beacon in Africa for its Aids-beating policies, is adopting sexual abstinence-only programmes financed by the US which could undo all its successes, a report says today."

Gold in them thar autocracies

As usual, minimal levels of honesty and accuracy would involve disclosing Canadian interests in goings-on abroad. As usual, that's not happening.

Democracy Now! Kyrgyzstan Protests Topple Government

JUAN GONZALEZ: And is there any major investment, foreign investment or U.S. investment, in Kyrgyzstan? Any major resources that western nations might covet?

ROBERT TEMPLER: There's quite a lot of gold, and there are a number of major gold mines there which have been very much linked to the Akayev family. They're mostly run by Canadian companies rather than U.S. companies. But gold is probably the most significant resource. Kyrgyzstan also provides most of the water for the rest of Central Asia, and that's going to be a critical resource that it could make more money from.

March 17, 2005

Ward Churchill Under Neocon Threat

University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill is at risk of being fired for arguing that many people who were killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11 were the financiers and technocrats of U.S. imperialism. Ward has been under attack by right-wing pundits ever since he compared these employees to Adolf Eichmann, the logistics head of the Nazi Holocaust.

The Republican Govenor of Colorado, Bill Owens, spearheaded the call for his dismissal. Owens is a member of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, an organization spearheaded by Lynn Cheney that has proposed monitoring university faculty for liberal bias.

Meanwhile, controversial Harvard President Lawrence Summers is facing increasing pressure to resign after the faculty of arts and science passed a vote of no confidence in him. The conservative Summers has been in the hot seat since taking over the Harvard presidency for making contentious remarks, the most recent of which suggested that women are biologically less capable then men in the sciences.

Bush Nominates War Hawk as World Bank Head

George Bush has nominated Paul Wolfowitz, a chief architect of the Iraq war, to head the world bank.

The appointment of Wolfowitz, a neoconservative war hawk with little knowledge or experience on poverty or development issues, has shocked diplomats and development workers, but should come as no huge surprise to those who already view the World Bank as an tool of American imperialism.

March 16, 2005

Time to Move on from MoveOn?

Norman Solomon discusses MoveOn.org's total lack of anti-war activity in recent months. MoveOn.org was established on the strength of the antiwar movement, but it seems that their message has been increasingly watered down since campaigning for the last presidential election started.

All you need to know about John Bolton...

...the new US ambassador to the UN.

"John Bolton is the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon."
--Jesse Helms, 2001

But if you want to know more read on.

Chomsky's riff on the toothpaste election is good (and uncharacteristically short for a Chomsky talk) as well.

March 11, 2005

Ikea Manuals Sexist (and I Can't Figure Them Out), says Norwegian PM

Ikea's instruction manuals are sexist, complains Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik. Only men are ever shown assembling furniture in Ikea manuals, a practice the the Swedish furniture giant defends, arguing that portraying women assembling bookshelves and barstools could offend Muslims.

PM Bondevik isn't buying their argument. "It's important to promote attitudes for sexual equality, not least in Muslim nations," he said.

"I myself have great problems with screwing together such furniture," he also admitted.

March 08, 2005

Frente Amplio

Anarchogeek has some extensive thoughts on the new leftist government in Uruguay.

Incidentally, Uruguay may become the first Latin American country (besides Cuba) to legalize abortion.

March 07, 2005

Tsunami Law Suit against U.S.

The Tsunami Victims Group has filed a lawsuit against a host of Defendants; U.S. Government, NOAA, the Accor Group which owns a string of hotels, to name a few.
Read the claim here and kudos to these people for trying to bring theU.S. Government's prior knowledge of the Tsunami to light.

March 01, 2005

Just like that.

BBC: "China's government has passed a renewable energy law which is intended to increase production of energy from sustainable sources. The law, which will come into force early next year, seeks to increase the usage of solar and wind power to 10% of China's total consumption."

Emphasis added.

Aid is "hypocritical and self-serving"

Aid agencies are accusing rich countries of "using aid to reward strategic allies and pet projects at the expense of the neediest countries". They note that "only one-fifth of global aid is actually going to the world's poorest countries".

Not Canada, though. That would be out of character for the humanitarian nation.

Malaysia set to "remove" non-status workers

Malaysia, which has "at least 200,000" non-status immigrant workers, has set a deadline for them to get out before armed "volunteers" come after them and take them into custody, upon which they will be subjected to fines, jail time, and whipping.

See No Gannon

Salon.com: See no Gannon, hear no Gannon, speak no Gannon

Ordinarily, revelations that a former male prostitute, using an alias (Jeff Gannon) and working for a phony news organization, was ushered into the White House -- without undergoing a full-blown security background check -- in order to pose softball questions to administration officials would qualify as news by any recent Beltway standard. Yet as of Thursday, ABC News, which produces "Good Morning America," "World News Tonight With Peter Jennings," "Nightline," "This Week," "20/20" and "Primetime Live," has not reported one word about the three-week-running scandal. Neither has CBS News ("The Early Show," "The CBS Evening News," "60 Minutes," "60 Minutes Wednesday" and "Face the Nation"). NBC and its entire family of morning, evening and weekend news programs have addressed the story only three times. Asked about the lack of coverage, spokeswomen for both ABC and CBS said executives were unavailable to discuss their networks' coverage.

February 24, 2005

Australia in the Solomons

Australia is doing roughly the same thing in the Solomons as Canada and the UN are doing in Haiti. who knew?

February 22, 2005

Protest as Harassment

George Monbiot: Protest as Harassment

Section 121 of the bill prohibits people from "pursuing a course of conduct which involves harassment of two or more persons", in order "to persuade any person... not to do something that he is entitled or required to do, or to do something that he is not under any obligation to do." Harassment, the bill explains, can involve "conduct on at least one occasion", "in relation to two or more persons". In other words, you need only approach someone once to be considered to be harassing them, as long as you have also approached someone else in the same manner.

I wonder when we will we stop talking about a "chilling effect" and start in on a "deep freeze"?

February 20, 2005

Canadian Press: The New Pravda

The Canadian corporate media positively loves the story about grassroots democracy blooming in former Soviet republics. They love it so much, in fact, that they're willing to leave out central, established facts about the "potential wave of democratic activism".

The elephant (or Bear?) in the living room is that the US and other western countries (like Canada) have been funding these "grassroots" "democratic" movements to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. If these are grassroots movements, they're genetically modified and doused with high power fertilizer, with a bit of pesticide to take care of any, uh, undemocratic weeds.

No, seriously. The prime beneficiary of the "rose revolution" in Georgia has use police to violently crack down on demonstrators and put constraints on the press (not that it can have been particularly unconstrained before). He has also put in place an unpopular program of privatization, which newly elected "grassroots" Ukrainian president Yuschenko has also backed from the beginning.

This is as close as the Canadian press comes to mention this huge factor in the movements it is reporting on:

"Akayev is lost," says Alexei Malashenko, another expert with the Carnegie Centre in Moscow. "Kyrgyzstan's population is disillusioned with the elite. The opposition is strong, well-organized and has international as well as domestic backing."

Not exactly full disclosure.

No one can deny that there is an overwhelming need for grassroots democratic movements in the former Soviet republics, nor can anyone deny that these movements have a lot of popular support.

But if we had anything approaching a sane, free press, there would be some debate about the effect that tens of millions of dollars in funding will have on democracy. Imagine if the NDP was given $20 million by the Swedish Government. Wouldn't there be just a bit of speculation about their legitimacy as a democratic party representing Canadians?

The equivalent is happening in the Ukraine and other former Soviet republics, and it elicits no concern at all from journalists in Canada. What's more, these "democratic" revolutions have a track record in Georgia and Serbia, and it's being keenly ignored.

For more on this, read Manufacturing Democracy: The politics of media coverage: Haiti, Ukraine, Georgia, from the December issue of the Dominion.

It's worth nothing, finally, that coverage of similar popular movements in countries that don't get Canadian and US funding is systematically repressed in the Canadian Press (even when it is reported stateside). Journalists and editors are liberal in their manipulation of facts to tell the story they want to tell.

Is that what we have in mind when we say it's a free country?

Elections in Portugal

Portugal is in the middle of elections...

BBC: "Pre-election surveys suggest the Socialists might obtain their first-ever absolute majority."

Pfizer

BusinessWeek: "Every weekday, some 38,000 Pfizer sales reps fan out around the globe. Armed with briefcases full of free drug samples, reams of clinical data, and lavish expense accounts for wining and dining their quarry, the reps infiltrate doctors' offices and hospitals. Their goal: to persuade medical professionals the world over to make Pfizer drugs the treatment of choice for their patients' aches and pains."

Schadenfreude

Richard Perle was nearly missed by a shoe and called a "motherfucking liar" by a roudy audience member. He was debating Howard Dean in Portland, Oregon.

The "motherfucking liar guy", or MFLG, kinda stole the show for a while. Remember that part in Austin Powers when Dr. Evil dumps Will Ferrell into his trap oven chamber thingy and then can't get on with his evil meeting because you here Will Ferrell screaming for the next several minutes -- think that. Perle kept trying to continue, and although the MFLG had been removed from the main theatre area, one could hear him screaming his signature line, with a few "Let me go, motherfuckers" thrown in.

Robot Army

The US is building a robot army, against the wishes of one Isaac Asimov.

February 17, 2005

A response to Mr. Bowie's question

Space.com: "A pair of NASA scientists told a group of space officials at a private meeting here Sunday that they have found strong evidence that life may exist today on Mars, hidden away in caves and sustained by pockets of water."

Venezuelan Power Plays

Check out Jessica Leight's fascinating analysis of Chavez's recent realpolitikal power plays.

Ambassador to Iraq to become new Intelligence Czar.

The long awaited nomination of the newly created post of Director of National Intelligence has been announced.
John Negroponte has long been a diplomatic favourite. Read more about him here.
Counterpunch ran a piece on him in June 2004.

February 15, 2005

Don't ask, don't tell

If you don't follow US news (and who wants to?), you might have missed the fact that a "reporter" who had access to the White House, and was known for asking extremely friendly questions (e.g. "are the democrats completely divorced from reality?") has another career, as a US Marine Corps-themed gay prostitute.

February 14, 2005

North Korea

The WSWS has an interesting piece on North Korea. Here's a key fact, widely ignored yet utterly obvious:

Pyongyang has repeatedly declared that it was willing to reach a deal with Washington over its nuclear programs in exchange for a formal mutual non-aggression pact. The White House dismissed these offers out of hand and refused to negotiate directly, insisting that it would not "reward bad behaviour".

February 12, 2005

Killing Journalism

Body and Soul has a rundown of all of the journalists that the US military has wounded or killed.

The occasion for the recap was the teapot tempest that occurred when a CNN journalist suggested that these killings were not accidental. There is a lot of compelling evidence that they were not accidental, but that doesn't matter. This happens anytime someone steps out of line with the consensus--there's a big scandal, the evidence is ignored, the person's career is threatened, and they are forced to either distance themselves from their reasonable remarks, or step down.

It happens rarely, because people tend to anticipate the ill effects. The overall result, in the end, is chilling.

February 11, 2005

Social Security

For those who don't have time to read about the Social Security debate in the US, Jonathan Schwarz sums it up with an analogy:

NICHOLAS: It's impolite to say so in this part of town, but George has a point: whether it's twenty or forty or a million years from now, we're going to face genuine problems with pigeons crapping on public statues.

GEORGE: Exactly! We must build a giant laser to destroy Mars!

February 03, 2005

Vote in Vietnam

Same propaganda, different decade.

United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting. According to reports from Saigon, 83 percent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong. A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson's policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam.

NYTimes, September 4, 1967.

February 02, 2005

US Exit Poll Discrepancies

ZNet: Prominent Statisticians Refute 'Explanation' of 2004 U.S. Exit Poll Discrepancies

The statisticians go on to note that precincts with hand-counted paper ballots showed no statistical discrepancy between the exit polls and the official results, but for other voting technologies, the overall discrepancy was far larger than the polls' margin of error. The pollsters at Edison/Mitofsky agreed that their 2004 exit polls, for whatever reason, had the poorest accuracy in at least twenty years.

January 21, 2005

Venezuela's Chavez nationalizes Venepal under workers' control

Have you seen The Take, Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis's documentary about Argentine workers' struggles to take control of the empty factories they used to work in?

What a difference a revolutionary government makes.

January 18, 2005

Autonomy and Health

Crooked Timber has an interesting discussion of the relationship between autonomy and health, as well as a look at Yasmin a British flick about Muslims post-911.

January 15, 2005

"Mohammed" is the fifth most popular name in Britain

The Christian Science Monitor has a story on the changing trends in baby naming.

January 14, 2005

Crisis lifts Sri Lankan Marxists

CS Monitor: "For the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), a disciplined and once powerful and brutal Marxist movement, the tsunami is proving to be a vehicle for its vision of people's liberation and its own popular comeback."

The Exploitation Of Migrant Workers In Canada

kuro5hin.org: "Canada has relied on migrant labour to literally build the nation. Chinese migrant workers built the national railroad. South Asian migrant workers tamed the fields of Western Canada. Today, migrant workers are indispensable in domestic work, construction and agriculture. But despite their importance, they have always been denied basic human rights and citizenship and remain the most marginalized labour force in Canada."

January 13, 2005

Drop the Debt?

Available as a printable pdf poster, from the excellent Social Design Notes.

The Honesty of BusinessWeek

Yikes. BusinessWeek (and the business press in Canada, to a less dramatic extent) really is a must-read for folks who want to keep track of what's really going on.

For example:

ecretary of State-designate Condoleezza Rice has been spending time at Foggy Bottom interviewing employees to get a feel for the place -- and identify possible high-level appointments. Rather than fundamentally reshaping the State Dept. bureaucracy, insiders think she will elevate some career Foreign Service officers sympathetic to the Bush Administration's hard-line worldview. Such a move allows Rice to place careerists in high positions -- as outgoing Secretary Colin L. Powell did -- thus fostering staff loyalty while putting ideological soulmates in key slots.

No wait, lie to me. I like that better.

Malaria

BusinessWeek on Malaria:

Malaria is already one of the world's most virulent killers. The disease causes as many as 500 million acute illnesses and kills 1.5 million people each year. Worse, the parasites that cause malaria have built up resistance to the drugs commonly used to treat it, chloroquinine and mefloquine. Often the only alternatives are low-tech, such as mosquito nets treated with insecticide. "They're easy to make," says Han Heijnen, a World Health Organization adviser in New Delhi. "You just have to leave the net in the solution for half an hour."

Where are the new medicines on the market to fight this scourge -- especially at this critical moment? Unfortunately, malaria research has for decades been hobbled by the fact that the disease no longer affects the affluent parts of the world. So few companies have paid much attention. Aid donors won't be rushing huge quantities of new malaria medicines to help tsunami victims.

Kosovo Bombing and Pilger

A month after publication, and five years after the fact, John Pilger has a great summary of NATO's crimes in the former Yugoslavia, Calling the Kosovo Humanitarians to Account.

This is just amazing:

In the bombing campaign that followed, it was state-owned companies, rather than military sites, that were targeted. NATO's destruction of only 14 Yugoslav army tanks compares with its bombing of 372 centers of industry, including the Zastava car factory, leaving hundreds of thousands jobless. "Not one foreign or privately owned factory was bombed," wrote Clark.

While Pilger is dropping that bomb (figuratively speaking), you might as well go and read Iraq: The Unthinkable Becomes Normal, another excellent piece. Another zinger:

Like the Butler report in the UK, which detailed all the incriminating evidence of Blair's massaging of intelligence before the invasion of Iraq, then pulled its punches and concluded nobody was responsible, so the Kean report makes excruciatingly clear what really happened, then fails to draw the conclusions that stare it in the face. It is a supreme act of normalizing the unthinkable. This is not surprising, as the conclusions are volcanic.

The most important evidence to the 9/11 Commission came from General Ralph Eberhart, commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (Norad). "Air Force jet fighters could have intercepted hijacked airliners roaring towards the World Trade Center and Pentagon," he said, "if only air traffic controllers had asked for help 13 minutes sooner. ... We would have been able to shoot down all three ... all four of them."

Why did this not happen?

The Kean report makes clear that "the defense of U.S. aerospace on 9/11 was not conducted in accord with preexisting training and protocols. ... If a hijack was confirmed, procedures called for the hijack coordinator on duty to contact the Pentagon's National Military Command Center (NMCC). ... The NMCC would then seek approval from the office of the Secretary of Defense to provide military assistance... "Uniquely, this did not happen. The commission was told by the deputy administrator of the Federal Aviation Authority that there was no reason the procedure was not operating that morning. "For my 30 years of experience ..." said Monte Belger, "the NMCC was on the net and hearing everything real-time. ... I can tell you I've lived through dozens of hijackings ... and they were always listening in with everybody else."

But on this occasion, they were not. The Kean report says the NMCC was never informed. Why? Again, uniquely, all lines of communication failed, the commission was told, to America's top military brass. Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of defense, could not be found; and when he finally spoke to Bush an hour and a half later, it was, says the Kean report, "a brief call in which the subject of shoot-down authority was not discussed." As a result, Norad's commanders were "left in the dark about what their mission was."

The report reveals that the only part of a previously fail-safe command system that worked was in the White House where Vice President Cheney was in effective control that day, and in close touch with the NMCC. Why did he do nothing about the first two hijacked planes? Why was the NMCC, the vital link, silent for the first time in its existence? Kean ostentatiously refuses to address this. Of course, it could be due to the most extraordinary combination of coincidences. Or it could not.

January 11, 2005

Canada strikes 'Black Gold' in Cuba

Read about Castro's X-mas present to Cuba.

January 07, 2005

US prior knowledge confirmed

Richard Norton-Taylor in The Guardian confirms that U.S. military on Diego Garcia was warned of the imminent disaster.
If you haven't yet read Michael Chussodovsky's breakdown of events on Dec. 26th, I highly recommend that you do before the 'tsunami of disinformation' washes away all perspective on this horrific event.

Tom Delay

US House Majority Leader Tom Delay has an explanation for why it was the non-Christians who got hit by the Tsunami. He got up Tuesday morning and read from Matthew 7 in a church on Capitol hill.

And everyone who listens to these words of mine, but does not act on them, will be like a fool who built his house on sand:

The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew, and buffeted the house, and it collapsed and was completely ruined.

Amazing.

January 06, 2005

Further Reading on Tsunami pre-knowledge

Read Chussodovsky's account of the Tsunami warnings.

Creative Communists

After Bill Gates accused folks critical of copyright of being Communists, a bunch of free culture types have embraced the label, making red insignia and flags with the Copyleft symbol on them.

Cute story of the day

Reuters: "A 120-year-old giant tortoise living in a Kenyan sanctuary has become inseparable from a baby hippo rescued by game wardens, officials said on Thursday."

They Found a Senator!

CNN.com: House Democrats to challenge Ohio electoral votes

In a letter to congressional leaders Wednesday, members of the group said they will take the action because a new report by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee found "numerous, serious election irregularities," particularly in Ohio, that led to "a significant disenfranchisement of voters."

(For those who don't remember the "we need a senator" bit from the 2000 elections, check out the clip from Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911 [7MB, windows media])

Update: None of this is to suggest that the Democrats have any guts.

Podur on Colombia

Over at ZNet, Justin Podur has a three part series on the last year in Colombia: 1, 2, 3.

From the horse's mouth, again

BusinessWeek: "As a former business leader, Treasury Secretary John W. Snow is well aware of difficulties that Washington policymakers can cause for Corporate America. So it's not surprising that when company chieftains complain about the costs of complying with the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate-reform laws, he listens."

January 05, 2005

Tsunami Aid = 42 hours of war

pseudorandom: When Does $350 Million Equal 42 Hours?

According to this story in the Chicago Sun-Times, the war in Iraq has cost $130 billion to date (per the Office of Management and Budget). Given that we invaded Iraq 20 March 2003, that comes to 656 days since the invasion, which in turn equals $198,730,732 per day.

In other words, the total amount committed by the US government to date for tsunami relief -- $350,000,000 -- equals 42.27 hours of the cost of the war in Iraq. Just to put things in perspective.

Aid Tops $3B

BBC: Tsunami aid pledges top $3bn

I'd like to see a similar leading story eight months from now, detailing how much of those "pledges" actually got through. There has been ample mention of the US, for example, falling through on its media-frenzy-fuelled promises of aid, only to reneg when the tragedy disapears from the headlines (but not from reality).

But the media won't devote resources (or prominent space) to covering these failures. It's already ancient history, and who wants to worry about that?

Canada appoints Secretary of Propaganda as U.S. Ambassador

Frank McKenna, Chairman of the Board of CanWest Global and former New Brunswick premier has accepted the offer to become the next Ambassador to the U.S.
Now we hold our breath and see if the U.S. government would like to have even closer ties to our media and newspapers and approve his appointment.

Tsunami Deaths could have been prevented

According to this article, the US NOAA knew about the Tsunami hours beforehand, but didn't warn any of the governments of the countries affected (they "emailed Indonesian officials, and that's all). If the funding had come through to build a warning system, thousands of lives could have been saved, but apparently that wasn't even what was needed in this specific case.

January 02, 2005

Pony Up

BusinessWeek: "Companies and individuals are allowed to open their wallets to underwrite the celebration of George W. Bush's reelection, and as of Dec. 23 business interests have anted up nearly $8 million. At least 28 defense contractors, energy giants, financial firms, Big Tobacco, techies, and health-care companies have ponied up $100,000 or more, according to a BusinessWeek analysis of the latest donor list posted on the 2005 inaugural Web site."

Nicest Terrorists You'll Ever Meet

Rob Maguire: Nicest Terrorists You'll Ever Meet

Rob has been spending the holidays in the Israel and the West Bank, and posting some interesting updates on his web site, which normally features photography and updates on political and cultural life in Armenia.

December 31, 2004

Tsunami Coverage

Justin's Podur's The Killing Train has had good tsunami coverage all week.

Fight for what?

WSWS: Ukraine election: on-the-spot report from Kiev: A fight between millionaires and billionaires

December 22, 2004

Remember the loony tune in N. Korea?

Just in case we had forgotten that terrorists are lurking *everywhere*, the Canadian government continues to spike the Kool-aid with innocuous pieces about North Koreans climbing the wall of freedom.

Now, check out CBC.ca's coverage of the events. and keep clicking the 'hot links' back to the original September 29th story.

read more...

Bush Authorized Torture?

"The two-page e-mail that references an Executive Order states that the President directly authorized interrogation techniques including sleep deprivation, stress positions, the use of military dogs, and 'sensory deprivation through the use of hoods, etc.'"
-ACLU

The Guardian's spin on it is a little more subdued: Memos show FBI agents complained about abuses at Guantánamo Bay

Chinese government is arresting journalists, apparently.

An Indian schoolboy took a cellphone photo of his girlfriend in the midst of a sexual act, sold the photo on the Indian equivalent of eBay, and provoked an international incident with eBay's Indian CEO in jail and Condoleeza Rice at the fore of an "diplomatic row".

100,000 people have been displaced by fighting in the Congo.

George Monbiot: "The US government is engaged in a global war with itself. It is like a robin attacking its reflection in a window."

December 21, 2004

The Progressives who Stole Christmas

FOX is working hard on their incisive story: Christmas is under siege.

Secular progressives realize that America as it is now will never approve of gay marriage, partial birth abortion, euthanasia, legalized drugs, income redistribution through taxation, and many other progressive visions because of religious opposition.

But if the secularists can destroy religion in the public arena, the brave new progressive world is a possibility. That's what happened in Canada.

A plot to kill Christmas? Sounds fun. But I guess it's already over here. I'll have to join the siege south of the border.

December 20, 2004

Not Pinochet

New York Times: 2 Women Lead Chile's Presidential Race

One is a Christian Democrat and a former foreign minister, the other a Socialist and former defense minister. They are the two leading competitors for the presidential nomination of the multiparty, center-left coalition that has governed this country since Gen. Augusto Pinochet stepped down in 1990, and both of them, for the first time here, are women.

MartinWatch

Paul Martin was recently in Libya, making a "strong pitch" for giving Canadian companies access to markets there. What companies? The only one named was SNC-Lavalin.

Where have we heard that name before? Oh yeah, they're the ones who make the bullets that kill Iraqis. I'm glad that Martin--our highest elected official--is so keen to give them a boost on the international stage.

December 19, 2004

Congress to Pharmacos

WSWS: The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the Washington lobby representing US drug manufacturers, announced December 15 that it was naming Republican Congressman W. J. "Billy" Tauzin of Louisiana as its president and CEO.

Guardian on Haiti

The Observer: Revealed: Haiti bloodbath that left dozens dead in jail

The allegations are contested by officials but, if true, the killings at the penitentiary represent another black mark for Haiti's interim government, which has come under fire for allegedly perpetrating and tolerating human rights abuses ever since taking over last March from the ousted former president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

'I saw everything,' said Ted Nazaire, 24, a prisoner who was released two days after the riot and is now in hiding. 'It was a massacre. More than 60 were killed.'

December 18, 2004

"Intelligent Design"

I'd like to thank the author of this cartoon for sparing me the hassle of explaining my stance on "intelligent design".

(via feministe)

December 15, 2004

Gary Webb Dead

"Gary Webb, a courageous investigative journalist who was the target of one of the most ferocious media attacks on any reporter in recent history, was found dead Friday after an apparent suicide."

Associated Press: "Major parts of Webb's reporting were later discredited by other newspaper investigations. An investigation by the Los Angeles Police Department found no evidence of a connection between the CIA and the drug traffickers."

Richard Thieme: "His Dark Alliance series was attacked not for what it said (the CIA initially denied then later admitted there were connections between operatives and drug cartels) but for what attackers claimed it said. Webb expected that kind of distortion and created a web site loaded with primary documents, transcripts and audio tapes of interviews so interested parties could read and hear for themselves what sources had said. It was one of the first times the Web was used to support a mainstream story that way and the site had over a million hits."

Jeff Cohen: "Any exaggeration in the Mercury News presentation was dwarfed by a mendacious, triple-barreled attack on Webb that came from the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times."

A Deadly Reversal

George Monbiot: "On Sunday the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), already responsible for 3.8 million deaths, started again. If you missed it, you're in good company."

December 14, 2004

Orange Revolution with a healthy dose of green

Associated Press: "The Bush administration has spent more than $65 million in the past two years to aid political organizations in Ukraine, paying to bring opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko to meet U.S. leaders and helping to underwrite an exit poll indicating he won last month's disputed runoff election."

December 10, 2004

"Democracy Movements"

WSWS: What US-backed "democracy movements" have produced in Serbia and Georgia

The protagonists of the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine openly acknowledge their debt to the “Rose Revolution” carried out in Georgia against Eduard Shevardnadze and the “Peaceful Revolution” in Serbia, which led to the fall of Slobodan Milosevic. Activists of the Serbian Otpor group have advised the Georgian Kmara and the Ukrainian Pora movements.

In Belgrade, Otpor activist Alexandar Maric now leads a “Centre for Non-Violent Resistance,” which trains activists and, according to the Zurich newspaper Tagesanzeige, “exports the Belgrade revolution worldwide.” His clients include the opponents of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, the Zimbabwean opposition under Morgan Tsvangirai, and activists from Georgia and Ukraine.

December 03, 2004

Ukrainian Fairy Tale (and elections)

Killing Train: The Ukrainian Elections: A Dangerous Fairy Tale

US-backing for opposition forces in the Ukraine - which has already been exposed in some progressive and main-stream publications (see links below) - has been well documented. What hasn’t been addressed, however, is the way in which the reality of the situation on the ground has been obscured in the main-stream press in order to confirm old Cold War stereotypes and perpetuate the current mythologies of Empire globally. The ‘fairy tale’ of the Ukrainian elections is designed to legitimate attempts to reorder to post-Soviet space – through the agency of NATO, the IMF/World Bank, and civil society promotion outfits like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), USAID, the Open Society Institute, etc. - in ways that serve the geostrategic and economic interests of Empire.

November 30, 2004

How Africa Subsidizes U.S. Health Care

Check out this interesting and very serious editorial in Wapo by Sebastian Mallaby:

(excerpt here)

It isn't a surprise that Africa is short of doctors and nurses: The continent has 1.4 health workers per 1,000 people, compared with 9.9 per 1,000 in North America. What's shocking is that this shortage is partly created by rich countries. Poor nations such as Malawi and Zambia are paying to train medics who emigrate to staff the hospitals of the United States and Europe. We should be helping Africa. Instead, Africa is subsidizing us.

Not just slightly, either. Ghana trains 150 doctors annually; five years after graduation, 80 percent have left, according to Ghanaian data reported by the World Bank. For pharmacists, the proportion is about 40 percent; for nurses and midwives, it's about 75 percent -- which is why half the nursing posts in Ghana are vacant. Meanwhile, South African doctors emigrate at a rate of about 1,000 annually. In 2001, Zimbabwe graduated 737 nurses; 437 left for one country, Britain.

[.....]

And then there is another reform that applies specifically to one country. The United States must end its nutty overpayment for health care, which not only wastes billions but also sends price signals that depopulate hospitals in the poor world. Elliott Fisher of Dartmouth Medical School has demonstrated that regions of the United States with a high concentration of medics spend extra on health care without becoming healthier: This country actually has too many health workers. Meanwhile in Africa a single nurse can be responsible for 50 patients. Because of America's dysfunctional system, the global labor market is siphoning doctors from places where they are needed into places where they accomplish nothing measurable at all.

A Rose By Any Other Name...

Bradford Plummer, over at Mother Jones, explains why the Bush administration has done a meager job of Democracy promotion. Specifically, and with respect to the situation in the Ukraine, he notes that the

... problem is that we're essentially seeing a reactive foreign policy here, one that responds to democracy suppression only after the fact. That Putin thought he could exert considerable influence over Ukrainian elections should come as no surprise, really -- over the past few years the Bush administration has given the Russian president wide latitude to do these sorts of things, from cracking down on Chechnya to consolidating his power at home.

In cozying up with an increasingly imperialistic--Stalinist, almost-- Russia for the purposes of realpolitik in the WoT, the Bush administration has let a gathering and, quite possibly, grave geopolitical dynamic materialize. The parallel here, of course, is Georgia. Shevardnadze was pro-Russia, implicitly pro-Putin, and Saakashvili, a University of Columbia Law graduate, was pro-Westernization.

Although the Rose Revolution ended with a relative advantage for the forces of the West, Georgia and Saakashvili find themselves in a rather precarious geographic position: Russia still has de facto territorial control. Yet, Saakashvili remains optimistic. In an editorial in tomorrow's International Herald Tribune, Saakashvili speaks of the gains being made a year after the Rose Revolution. As he says:

On the first anniversary of the "Rose Revolution," Georgians reflect on the past while setting a course toward a prosperous future and carefully watching similar events in Ukraine. A free Georgia proves that democracy can thrive in this strategic region that was once part of the Soviet Empire. But difficult days lie ahead in the grand experiment we embarked on just months ago - ensuring the inherent right of every Georgian to enjoy opportunity and liberty.

November 26, 2004

NATO and Ukraine

John Laughland:

reporting on the Ukrainian elections has chimed in with press releases from the State Department, peddling a fairytale about a struggle between a brave and beleaguered democrat, Yushchenko, and an authoritarian Soviet nostalgic, the present Prime Minister, Viktor Yanukovych. All facts which contradict this morality tale are suppressed.

I confess to being a little suspicious when the CBC framed this story so unambiguously in Yushchenko's favour. I perpetually want to believe (despite everything I've learned) that when a certain side is given more weight, it's because they deserve it. Unfortunately, the source of the slant is almost always political. (CBC's The National contrasted images of huge crowds of Yushchenko supporters, and a handful of Yanukovych supporters, all dressed in military garb.)

In this case, I don't have any basis for wading into Ukrainian politics. But it seems the political motivation for the response in the west is clear. (Hint: it's not because they like fair elections and are willing to defend them.) Yushchenko is pro-NATO, Yanukovych is pro-Russia. That's all we need to make a decision (and all we need to decide which way to manipulate public opinion).

The rest is just details.

I'd say, if we're going to play power politics, let's be honest about it, from the media on down. The Canadian and US record on supporting democracy when it's not convenient for them (Haiti, anyone?) speaks for itself. So why pretend?

November 24, 2004

Tape reveals Israeli officer's grisly intent in shooting of schoolgirl

Chris McGreal, Guardian:

An Israeli army officer who repeatedly shot a 13-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza dismissed a warning from another soldier that she was a child by saying he would have killed her even if she was three years old...

A tape recording of radio exchanges between soldiers involved in the incident, played on Israeli television, contradicts the army's account of the events and appears to show that the captain shot the girl in cold blood...

The soldier in the watchtower radioed his colleagues after he saw Iman: "It's a little girl. She's running defensively eastward."

Operations room: "Are we talking about a girl under the age of 10?"

Watchtower: "A girl of about 10, she's behind the embankment, scared to death."

A few minutes later, Iman is shot in the leg from one of the army posts.

The watchtower: "I think that one of the positions took her out."

The company commander then moves in as Iman lies wounded and helpless.

Captain R: "I and another soldier ... are going in a little nearer, forward, to confirm the kill ... Receive a situation report. We fired and killed her ... I also confirmed the kill. Over."

Witnesses described how the captain shot Iman twice in the head, walked away, turned back and fired a stream of bullets into her body. Doctors at Rafah's hospital said she had been shot at least 17 times...

November 09, 2004

Hobbits

If you didn't see the reports about tiny humans that lived in Indonesia 12,000 years ago, go check it out. The report says that it's entirely possible that the "hobbits", which--according to legend--had tools and language, are still alive somewhere in the jungle.

This raises all kinds of ethical questions. If they exist, do we make contact? What if they can be a part of human society? How do we treat them? Lots of ifs, but just knowing that they existed blurrs the artificially built-up uniqueness of "humanity". We spend a lot of time (in philosophy, psychology...) demonstrating how human language is unlike that of any other species. It's nice to have a species in play that destabilizes all of that.

And what a challenge to diverse, "multicultural" society. How would we deal with 3 foot furry humans running around in cities?

Purple Nation

(Results by county - bigger version)

Update: Here's the authoritative overview on election maps with counties, shading, and populations cartograms. Interesting.

November 08, 2004

Fallujah's Hospital

Body and Soul: "The press doesn't even blink at an admission that we're attacking hospitals in order to stop doctors from publicizing the harm done to innocent people."

Empire Notes: "The hospital was one of the primary initial targets of the assault, occupied by U.S. soldiers, with patients and doctors initially handcuffed."

NYTimes: "The hospital was selected as an early target because the American military believed that it was the source of rumors about heavy casualties. 'It's a center of propaganda,' a senior American officer said Sunday."

RadGeek: "These are war crimes being committed in front of our eyes. What is there to say about it, except to report on the latest atrocity? This is nothing less than the face of evil—and all of it being done in our names."

Rahul Majahan "One thing that snipers were very discriminating about – every single ambulance I saw had bullet holes in it. Two I inspected bore clear evidence of specific, deliberate sniping. Friends of mine who went out to gather in wounded people were shot at. When we first reported this fact, we came in for near-universal execration."

November 06, 2004

Capture vs. Destroy in Fallujah

Justin Podur: "I don't think the American military is fighting to capture. Last I heard 500-pound bombs and depleted uranium shells from AC-130 gunships don't capture many people."

November 05, 2004

The Mourning After

Greg Palast: "Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state... Pollsters ask, 'Who did you vote for?' Unfortunately, they don't ask the crucial, question, 'Was your vote counted?' The voters don't know." Palast argues that the media is lying to (ahem, misleading) us about votes, and exits polls.

If the mechanics of American democracy are fundamentally broken (and there's a pile of evidence to that effect), it's going to take a long time for anyone to admit it.

Mark Levine, chez Juan Cole: We're all Israelis Now. (But not in the way you'd expect from that title.)

David Grenier: Don't mourn, organize. A comprehensive list of alternatives to "moving to Canada", for Americans.

Voting machines are hackable: Slate, Wired News, Paul Krugman, News Review.

DailyKos has a long discussion of Ohio.

The NYTimes says that Bush supporters "anticipate a revolution".

On the lighter side (?), here are the covers of a few British papers on Thursday.

November 04, 2004

"Rejoicing has been limited"

Inter Press News has coverage of reactions around the world, from Indians celebrating a win by an Indo-American Republican to the report from the middle east, where "Rejoicing has been rare."

Mediageek looks at implications for media issues. "I have no amazing analysis as to why Bush won, or why the Republicans managed to firm up their domination in both houses of Congress. It sucks, but we'll live. We may even be able to galvanize more opposition. I'd be lying if I didn't say that four years of the corrupt Bush administration has been good for oppositional and independent media."

Wonkette's Post-Election Media Glossary is pretty funny.

Jason Kottke: "Half the country is not stupid. We're all stupid."

Election and After

Bush's post-election press conference. "Now that I've got the will of the people at my back, I'm going to start enforcing the one-question rule."

Canada 2.0. "You'll be hearing a lot of 'I'm moving to...' the next couple days. Well, I'm not moving anywhere. I'm staying put. The borders? Well, that's another story."

Harpers: Electing to Leave

Black Box Voting is pointing out some basic facts that haven't changed since they were reported months ago. Namely: new voting machines are extremely vulnerable to hacker attack, have been proven to be so, and nothing has changed since then. "Black Box Voting is conducting the largest Freedom of Information action in history."

One problem: to reverse anything at this point involves getting people to admit that the entire American electoral system is corrupt. It's possible that it's not, but if you can hack in and add 100 votes, why can't you hack in and at 3 million? No paper trail. It sounds wacky, but the point is that we currently have no way to gauge the level of fraud and miscounted votes that are happening. It just feels better to "know" that he would have won anyway. Shrug.

1,049 federal rights depend on marital status. Implications.

BoingBoing: A purple nation

Justin Podur: "But today the American people have answered as well. They lined up behind their killer leaders when they could have rejected them. That doesn’t leave a lot of room for hope, other than about the key questions of how, what it will take, when they will (and whether they’ll get a chance to) change their minds."

Rob Maguire: "David Lazarus of the SF Chronicle tallied up various alternative options for that proverbial warchest of tax money."

DailyKos: "The big silver lining, and it's significant, is that Kerry won't be tarred for cleaning up Bush's mess. Had Kerry gotten us out of Iraq, he would've been blamed for "losing the war". Now Bush will ineptly lose it for himself. Kerry would've been forced to make sense of a mess of a budget. Now Bush will be responsible for his own half-trillion dollar deficits." As silver linings go, it's thin.

AnarchoGeek: "Uruguay has high poverty and unemployment and abortion is illegal, just like the republicans want to make it in the US. But, in Uruguay when they try and privatize the state water company 60% come out and vote it down. That wouldn't happen in the US where we go around invading other countries so we can privatize THEIR state industries (iraq). Frente Amplio will sellout the social movements out, they will sign agreements with the IMF, they will do what leftist governments do. But at least they are living in the same world as everybody else."

William Gibson: "Second terms, historically, are not cakewalks. And absolute power corrupts absolutely. Absolute power, this very moment, is patiently eroding the membranes containing the coming year's inevitable debacles and scandals. Unless you don't believe that absolute power corrupts absolutely, how can that be otherwise?"

BoingBoing: "Tuesday was a tough night for those of us who hoped to wake up with a new American president instead of a one-way ticket to The Republic of Jesusistan."

Lawrence Lessig likes this comment: "I’m going to spend time these next few days looking for the America in my heart. It may be a while before I see it anywhere else."

Juan Cole is talking strategy: "There are other such strategies that could be adopted. But it seems clear. In 2008, the Democrats have to find a way to get back a couple of big red states. They can't do that unless they find canny ways to defuse the cultural issues the Republicans have been deploying so effectively."

November 03, 2004

Silver Lining

Watching the aerial shot of John Kerry's motorcade wind its way to Faneuil Hall where Kerry is to make his concession speech is plaintive. It looks too much like a funeral; and in many ways it very much is one. After promising it’s supporters that all the votes would be counted, the Kerry Campaign has conceded the election before all the provisional and absentee ballots have been counted. A passage from a Yeats poem seems apt: “The ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack all convictions, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

read more...

The Future

So it's the day after election day in the U.S., and Kerry has conceded to Bush. Americans have pretty much given the Bush administration another four year mandate. I admit, I watched the election last night for political entertainment value (made popcorn, looked for the Jon Stewart show). However, today I feel pretty shocked at what just happened. What happened? I guess I hadn't *really* considered that when the election was over, the "undecided vote" or the mobilization to "get out the vote" would lead Bush to win a popular majority by a few million. Perhaps Dru is right, that the voting system has its own corruptions. But regardless, I feel like I woke up today next to my big sister, who is now knowingly going to proceed to bully people who are weaker than her, spend gross amounts of money on luxury items while other members of our family starve and/or die of AIDS, and also continue to make a giant mess of things and generally abuse the resources of our house.

The commentators are saying that there will be no more excuses made along the lines that American people are not responsible for the actions of their government. I wonder if this is true. Anyway, it seems like it will take some time before the consequences of this unfathomable result will become clear. I certainly hope the commentators are wrong when they say that this marks a "conservative revival" in the US. I guess I'll just pack up my dream of Canada (which will likely get sucked down the neo-conserv tube, if the US goes this way) and all my hopes for a greener, just world.... where do we go now?

I'm going to bed...

...but it's worth noting that there are all kinds of reports of suspected fraud, lawsuits to keep precincts from voting, and other gross tactics... mostly in Ohio.

Joshua Marshall has been discussing it.

Republicans kicked foreign observers out of voting stations in Ohio.

November 02, 2004

Double Standard? Double Standard!

Remember how Mohammed Elmasry, the president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, was all over the papers because he said that all Israelis over 18 are in the military, and thus are legitimate military targets? According to a hanful of Canadian papers, "he must step down". Ignoring for the moment that he said this in the context of declaring himself in opposition to suicide bombing, a friend just pointed out something from the transcript, which dozens of journalists either a) never bothered to read, or b) are willfully ignoring.

Here's a relevant excerpt:

MC: Welcome back to the Michael Coren Show. We’re taking about defining terrorism and the term is thrown around. And I will be absolutely honest with you, it seems to me left and right are both using this for their own ends and the truth is suffering; surely the answer lies somewhere in the middle. Let’s talk about the Israel and Palestine issue; who is the terrorist? There are many Palestinians who will say that we have lost so many women and children when involved in this struggle, why do you call some of our people terrorist?

Adam: Well I think the use of the word terrorist has to be changed. I think the real purpose here of the word is to define the users of terror. Terror is a tool, terror is a means to an ends. And it depends on the moral reasoning of using that tool to define its acceptability. You look at a hammer, a hammer can be used to build a house, hammer in a nail, or break someone’s skull. Clearly, one of those three examples is morally unacceptable. When Israel uses terror to go in and I say, it uses terror to destroy a home and convince people, you know, [to] be terrified of what the possible consequences are; I say that, that, is an acceptable use of [it], to terrify someone.

MC: Is it?

Adam: Well, I say so, because when the alternative is these people walk in there and will blow themselves up and blow up 20 other innocent civilians, I’d say that is a morally unacceptable use of terror.

But it's not that we didn't already know that the media values Israeli lives more than Palestinian lives.

Waiting for the End of the World

Until it's over, meet your election-obsessing needs with these:

An interview with Arundhati Roy.

Updates on the electoral vote.

The Daily Kos for pan-American election updates.

October 24, 2004

On Sudan

Good and Bad news out of the Sudan. Clearly the bad news is from Darfur, a western province of Sudan, and the better news is coming from the south. Via the HeadHeeb are links to a brief backgrounder on Dafur and the progress being made in the south:

While the situation in Darfur continues to slide into chaos and peace talks are deadlocked, enough peace has come to southern Sudan that an NGO is planning to court investors:

The organisation, Bread of Life Africa (BOLA), said the Southern Sudan provides good investment returns. [...] "Sudan was once the breadbasket of Africa before the war broke out and this is what we need to restore." says the BOLA’s general manager Malei Nthiwa.

[...]

Nthiwa says Kenyans and other international investors can invest in the region since the situation has improved. He says his organisation will sponsor volunteers to the region to go and help the local population in the region’s economic revival. He cited farming, livestock production, cottage industries and a wide range of other income generating activities as key investment areas.

Nthiwa's background includes a stint as sales and marketing manager for a Kenyan liquor firm, so he certainly has the skills to sell Sudan to prospective investors. Even so, it will be some time, if ever, before southern Sudan becomes an investor's paradise; the political status of the region hasn't been firmly decided, the autonomous government provided for by the 2002 Machakos accords has yet to establish a track record, and much of the local infrastructure has been destroyed in decades of civil war. Nthiwa realistically plans to concentrate on microcredit and cottage industry development during the initial stage of investment, which would not only suit his organization's ideology of economic empowerment but, for the time being, is likely to be much more practical.

October 14, 2004

Trad goes Mainstream

Conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says that "sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged".

Boston Globe: "Companies are spending millions of dollars to rid their products of trans fat on the assumption that anything other than a zero on the label will send sales plummeting."

Christian Science Monitor: "In September, the Ugandan government brought traditional medicine - herbs, animal parts, and minerals, with a dash of prayer - out of the bush and began to integrate it into its health system"

October 09, 2004

Re-electing imperialists in Australia

Check out the Perth Indymedia site [quick, before their harddrives are stolen!] and find out all about how John Howard got a fourth consecutive term, including a platform that keeps Aussie troops in Iraq and that refuses to own up to the genocide perpetrated against indigenous peoples.

FBI in UK

The FBI managed to steal a hard drive from an Indymedia server in the UK, without laying any charges. An update from infoshop.org.

Newsdesk.org: "A 215-year-old law originally written to address piracy... is at the heart of litigation targeting some of the world's largest energy corporations."

More on the Nigerian suit against Shell.

In more recent news, the Nigerian army is attacking people in the Niger Delta.

Costa Rican Banana workers are suing three US corporations over their pesticide use.

Thousands of workers are protesting plant sell-offs in China, the government of which is not known for its tolerance of that kind of thing.

After one of the biggest strikes in the country's history, South African unions reached a deal with the government.

200,000 Dutch folk protested their right-wing governent's austerity plan.

An interesting discussion of the situation in Nepal, where militant Maoists control between 50 and 80 per cent of the countryside.

The US "pullout" of South Korea is being slowed down. Kind of like that other "pullout", in Gaza?

Right-wing "women's organizations" have been chosen to train Iraqi women in civic participation. That'll be good.

50,000 people marched in Germany in opposition to government cuts of social services. (Curious how corporate welfare doesn't get cut very often.)

October 04, 2004

Paramilitaries Shoot Aristide Supporters

More Breaking News from the Haiti Information Project as the repression of pro-constitutionalists reaches new levels.

October 02, 2004

Haiti Slum Under Siege

October 2, 2004

Haiti slum under siege

Haiti Information Project (HIP)

Port au Prince,Haiti (HIP)– A slum in the capital is
under siege from the Haitian National Police (HNP)
following three days of violence and unrest.

Read on at www.haitiaction.net

September 21, 2004

Cuba and Hurricanes

The most recent issue of Seven Oaks also has a fascinating assessment of Cuba's example in the context of the recent slew of hurricanes.

Feds Raid Radio Station

mediageek: Feds Raid Knoxville Community Radio

At roughly 10:00 am this morning, three federal agents rom the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Atlanta offices, accompanied by three US Marshalls, broke into the KFAR radio station in South Knoxville and confiscated all of its equipment, knocking noxville's community voice off the air.

KFAR has been broadcasting alternative news, music and commentary for the past three years, and while the station has still not been granted an official license, it has exceeded all FCC regulations and does not interfere with the signal of any other radio station.

In the US, where even the most limited licenses are tightly restricted for community radio, the only successful model seems to be to set up a "pirate" radio station, gain community support, and then fight the feds when they try to shut it down. It certainly has the effect of highlighting the insanity (and corporate domination) of the current regulatory process in no uncertain terms.

September 20, 2004

Pilger's Distractions

John Pilger: "Blair's distractions, not his victims, are news"

Workers in Argentina are pressuring the government to formalize their de facto control over the factories that they occupied after the owners declared bankruptcy and took off.

In other important news of international significance: after a long hiatus, I'm writing things and posting them at misnomer again.

September 15, 2004

Venezuelan Statement to UN

The communication states the following:

The Permanent Mission of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela to the United
Nations, complies in manifesting that, according to a press release on
Friday, September 10, 2004, the President of the United States of America,
George W. Bush, informed of his determination to express to international
financial organizations in which that country participates, its opposition
to the concession of credits to Venezuela.

read more...

September 14, 2004

Russia's Going Authoritarian

From the Globe and Mail

Putin moves to tighten Kremlin's control

Moscow — Charging that the Beslan hostage-takers' real aim was to break Russia apart, President Vladimir Putin has announced sweeping changes to the country's political system that will see power further consolidated in the Kremlin, a move that his opponents called a threat to the country's already wobbly democracy.

Mr. Putin told a rare assembly of regional leaders and the federal cabinet yesterday that the future of the country is at stake, saying that a stronger central government is needed. He announced a plan that would see the country's 89 regional governors, who are currently elected, appointed directly by the president and approved by largely obedient local legislatures.

He also proposed an overhaul of the way deputies are elected to the State Duma through the introduction of representation by population, a move that could see the few remaining independent voices forced out of the federal parliament. The electoral changes require the approval of parliament, but since the United Russia party, which backs Mr. Putin, controls more than two-thirds of the 450 seats, that is a near certainty.

Mr. Putin said the entire country needs to be mobilized to fight terrorism after a series of attacks that have killed 450 people over the past three weeks, including the Beslan hostage taking, a suicide bombing in Moscow and the downing of two passenger airliners.

"The organizers and perpetrators of the terror attack are aiming at the disintegration of the state, the breakup of Russia," he said at the meeting, which was held in Russia's House of Government, more commonly known as the White House. "I am convinced that a united country is the most important condition for victory over terror."

Mr. Putin called for the creation of a single, powerful agency charged with fighting terrorism and repeated his assertion that Russia has the right to strike at "terrorist bases" anywhere in the world.

"We need a single organization capable of not only dealing with terror attacks but also working to avert them, destroy criminals in their hideouts and, if necessary, abroad," he said.

More...

September 08, 2004

Two Kinds of Regulation

Asian Pacific Post: Canada goes to Vietnam's deadly roads to find truckers

NarcoNews tackles "super cocoa" and smells (but doesn't snort) a hoax.

George Monbiot: Adventure playground

The British are still hated in Africa, and with good reason. Blair might huff and puff about the continent being a scar on the conscience of the world, but while our own citizens still regard it as their personal fiefdom, it’s hard to see why anyone who lives there should take him seriously.

Monbiot again: Living with the Age of Entropy

There are two sets of regulations in the United Kingdom. There are those which the big corporations campaign against, and those which they tolerate and even encourage, because they can afford them while their smaller competitors cannot. This is why it is legal to stuff our farm animals with antibiotics, our vegetables with pesticides, our processed food with additives and our water tables with nitrates, but more or less illegal to use any process which does not involve stainless steel, refrigeration and fluorescent lighting. The clampdown on small food businesses, on the grounds that their produce might contain bacteria, has been accompanied by a massive rise in food poisoning cases since the 1970s: largescale production and long-distance transport provide far greater opportunities for infection.

August 22, 2004

Land Grab

Oneworld: "Over 200,000 Nepalese tribals freed from slavery and living in makeshift tents have grabbed more than 10,000 acres of government land in protest against the state's failure to rehabilitate them, more than four years after their release."

August 20, 2004

What do they want?

Juan Cole: What does Muqtada al-Sadr Want?

The Associated Press expresses confusion, both its own, and that of US government officials, about what Muqtada al-Sadr's goals are. I don't understand this confusion. Muqtada has given many sermons and interviews in the past 16 months outlining his goals exactly.

August 09, 2004

Two from the Guardian

Is there Prozac in the reservoir?

The Guardian reckons that Chavez is set to get even stronger as a result of the opposition-sponsored referendum.

August 07, 2004

Loathed by the rich: Why Hugo Chavez is Heading for a Stunning Victory

Don't believe the *Destabilization* hype! Richard Gott explains why typical US-fomented tactics will not work in Venezuela next Sunday.

"The opposition, divided politically and with no charismatic figure to rival Chávez [or, remember, Aristide?] to front their campaign, continue to behave as though their victory is certain."

"To the dismay of opposition groups in Venezuela, and to the surprise of international observers gathering in Caracas, President Hugo Chávez is about to secure a stunning victory on August 15, in a referendum designed to lead to his overthrow."

Read on at The Guardian...

August 04, 2004

Business as Usual

This Business Week article ("Higher wages mean higher profits. But try telling Wall Street") describes how Costco has increased profits by paying higher wages than anyone else, but Wall Street drove their stock down, even as profits were up. What's more important: class warfare or profits?

More here:

Costco, surprise, has a lower turnover rate and a far higher rate of productivity: it almost equaled Sam's Club's annual sales last year with one-third fewer employees. Only six percent of Costco's employees leave each year, compared to 21 percent at Sam's. And, by every financial measurement, the company does better. Its operating income was higher than Sam's Club, as was operating profit per hourly employees, sales per square foot and even its labor and overhead costs. Here's a quote to emblazon for corporate America: "Paying your employees well is not only the right thing to do but it makes for good business," says Costco CEO James D. Sinegal."

Justin also noticed the egregious Globe and Mail article about a Black Panther being arrested 30 years later in Toronto. The article made no mention whatsoever of the context in which the shooting took place: police were regularly murdering, torturing, and beating black people in cities across the US. Instead, they selectively provide facts that make it look like this young punk just randomly shot this police officer, with most of the article consisting of sympathetic coverage of how the guy was affected. How can such coverage not be described as racist?

OCAP is broke, and need help.

Robert Fisk: "unless an American dies, we are not told. This month's death toll of Iraqis in Baghdad alone has now reached 700 - the worst month since the invasion ended. But we are not told."

Saddam Hussein: "I'll tell you everything if you give me a muffin"

Justin Podur: "It's reality TV, like that show where Donald Trump selected a manager by progressively firing elite youths. Like that show, the employer is the elite. The candidates are Kerry and Bush. And the criteria are very simple: who is going to be the better imperial manager. Who is going to better fulfill the desires of the elite at this particular time."

July 27, 2004

Media Politics

The folks from Adbusters have started a project to draw attention to CanWest Global and their nefarious deeds. This seems a bit confused to me: they're raising $60k, so that they can give it to another media conglomerate (the Globe), so that they can run a one-time full-page ad? That's a bit nuts. $5,000? Maybe. I just happen to know that for $60k, you can build yourself a grassroots national newspaper.

More specifically, they say they "want to denounce CanWest's penchant for media concentration". Huh? Since when is CanWest the problem? The same thing is happening everywhere, and it makes perfect sense under an unregulated capitalist system. Demonizing one company while letting the others off (much less giving them $60,000) is actually counterproductive to the goal of having an independent press. I think the reasons for this are pretty obvious.

--

Dan Gilmour has a new book out, entitled We the Media, and there is a corresponding weblog.

Yes, it's that bad: Ted Turner says there's too much media concentration. Ted Turner!

The Guardian chats with the editor of OhmyNews.com, the fascinating Korean experiment in participatory journalism. They're starting an English-language international edition. !

Sudan, Politics of Assassination, and so on

Justin Podur: "the Sudanese government could call the whole thing off in a second if it wanted to, if the international community said clearly that the game was up. Maybe a better analogy is Indonesia in East Timor in 1999, a slaughter and collective punishment that it wouldn't have taken bombing to stop, just a word from the US to the Indonesian generals."

Mandisi Majavu: Instead of more assessments why not sanctions?

Networks of indigenous communities in the Americas have come out in support of Venezuela and Cuba.

Former Venezuelan president Carlos Andres Perez reportedly called for violence against Chavez, which is unsurprising, given that he can't win an election and has full US support.

Meanwhile, in Germany, the government honoured a plot to assassinate Hitler. Supporting the killing of an elected leader because he's doing evil things, killing hundreds of thousands (later millions) of people. That's a pretty strong precedent to set, in public.

A chunk of mars was found in Antarctica.

Iranians are making fun of clerics, and getting into trouble.

Alexander Cockburn: Why the Dems deserve Nader

A wide-ranging interview with Tariq Ali on South American social movements and politics.

Robert Fisk: "No Western journalist dares to go to Fallujah. Video footage taken by local civilians shows only a hole in the ground, body parts under a grey blanket and an unnamed man shouting that young children were killed."

July 15, 2004

Fascist State, Coming Right Up

You might have heard about how Bush and co. are contemplating postponing the elections, and you might have also heard that such an action is completely without precedent in US history. They held elections while British and Canadian troops were burning Washington DC to the ground, ferchrissakes. Indeed, there has been plenty of outrage from all corners.

Almost all.

The Washington Post called the move "appropriate", while much of the media was largely silent about it, NYTimes included. The Democratic Party also said nothing.

Condoleeza Rice downplayed the claims, but Republicans have held their basic line, which is that individual states can intervene and sppoint electors directly. This would disenfranchise millions of American voters, but apparently that's ok, especially if it's a state like Florida.

Seriously, though.

July 14, 2004

Fox News Memos

Check out these leaked memos from Fox News chief John Moody. An interesting glimpse into the machine, and its internal workings.

The UN has ten stories it thinks journalists should cover, but haven't.

People are being told to stock up on supplies and stay inside for the duration of the Republican National Convention in NYC. Likely to be the biggest pre-election protest in recent US history. Echoes of DNC Chicago in '68.

July 13, 2004

Just Warming Up

US Homeland Security Chief Tom Ridge warned that Al Quaeda was planning to disrupt US elections, but in the same breath admitted that they had no specific intelligence to lead them to believe that that was in fact the case. Strangely enough, the announcement came at the same time that John Kerry announced John Edwards as his running mate, and Bush was lagging in the polls.

Now, the concerned folks at Homeland Security are discussing how to postpone the election in the case of a terrorist attack. According to a number of Pakistani sources, they've also specifically requested that Osama Bin Laden be captured at the same time as the Democratic National Convention. October surprise, indeed!

("Homeland" is an unsettling phrase. It seems to imply that other lands are not the location of homes. What are other lands, then? Colonies? Playgrounds? Probably.)

July 09, 2004

Settlements on Nerves

Israel appears to be using chemical weapons against peaceful demonstrators at the seperation wall.

The Christian Science Monitor reports on what it calls the blossoming of democracy in Asia.

Mark Kirk, a Republican representative from Illinois, has admitted to working for the CIA at the same time as he was serving as an elected official.

In the first serious rumblings of the return of the draft, the Pentagon has called 5,600 former soldiers back to serve in Iraq. The ground forces in Iraq are massively overextended, and the US has been hiring thousands "security contractors", otherwise known as mercenaries, for a reported average price of $1,000 per day.

Bush walked out of the room when journalists questioned him on his relationship to Ken Lay, a close family friend of the Bushes, who faces a dozen or so criminal charges.

Israel is still expanding its illegal settlements.

A Japanese software company launched what has got to be in the running for most bizarre advertisement ever.

July 06, 2004

"We can eliminate this government in three days"

Toronto Star: "'If they tell us to fight, we fight. We do not like this interim government. If we are given the word, al-Mahdi is capable of bringing 250,000 fighters against them. We can eliminate this government in three days. That is all we need. But our leaders must decide.'"

This is pretty well-known, but there is more confirmation that the CIA knew that Iraq didn't have WMD programs. And Rumsfeld okayed torture at Abu Ghraib, according to Gen. Janis Karpinski.

Along the same lines, the US has spent very little money on reconstruction in Iraq. According to an audit, the CPA has spent no money at all from Congressional funds on health care, water or sanitation. This, in a country with tens of thousands of wounded people, widespread disease, and a thoroughly polluted water system.

While it has been previously reported that over half of US senators are millionaires, it has now been revealed that one in four made over $1 million last year. One percent of Americans are millionaires.

Jeffrey Sachs, an economic advisor to Kofi Annan, has told African countries to stop paying its debts to rich countries. "The debts are unaffordable. If they won't cancel the debts I would suggest obstruction; you do it yourselves."

Robert Jensen provides a solid critique of Fahrenheit 911.

July 05, 2004

What's happening

[Apologies are in order for the unannounced blogging hiatus of the last few months. We now return to your regularly scheduled programming.]

Justin Podur has an excellent two part essay on Canadian foreign policy.

Stan Goff notes that several "progressive" leaders in Latin America are supporting the illegal coup and occupation in Haiti.

Fisk says the Pentagon tried to censor Saddam's hearing.

Folks in Hong Kong are demonstrating en masse for democratic reforms, which turbo-capitalist, authoritarian China is reticent to provide.

Mitch Kapor is saying: "The modern corporation must be reformed. Accounting of a corporation's impact must include people's work lives, family, community, and the environment. More than this, we must discover what it will take to save capitalism from itself."

Well, the US did overthrow a democratic government and stand by while thousands of Haitian political activists were murdered. But that (a few months ago) is ancient history. It's time to move on.

Speaking of ancient history...

Only a few months after the fact, an Army report has admitted that the toppling of the Saddam statue was a staged psy-ops operation.

June 27, 2004

Venezuela Asks U.S. to Stop Funding Opposition and Coup Supporters

Venezuela Asks U.S. to Stop Funding Opposition and Coup Supporters
Thursday, Jun 24, 2004

By: Martin Sanchez - Venezuelanalysis.com

Washington, D.C. June 24 (Venezuelanalysis.com) – In a letter dated June 22, 2004, Bernardo Alvarez, Venezuela’s Ambassador to the United States, requested that U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell ask the U.S. Congress-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to respect Venezuela’s election laws and stop funding coup leaders.

“We would ask that, in supporting democracy in Venezuela, the United States take care not to violate Venezuela’s election laws or other Venezuelan laws; and take care not to assist or facilitate the violation of such laws by Venezuelan citizens,” said the statement.

“We also would expect that the United States and its agencies would refrain from funding organizations and individuals in Venezuela who participated in the April 2002 coup,” said Alvarez.

June 26, 2004

Venezuela: the Gang's All Here

By Alexander Cockburn

"You can set your watch by it. The minute some halfway decent government in Latin America begins to reverse the order of things and give the have-nots a break from the grind of poverty and wretchedness, the usual suspects in El Norte rouse themselves from the slumber of indifference and start barking furiously about democratic norms. It happened in 1973 in Chile; we saw it again in Nicaragua in the 1980s; and here’s the same show on summer rerun in Venezuela, pending the August 15 recall referendum of President Hugo Chávez."

Read On...

June 20, 2004

Destabilizing Venezuela

by Justin Podur
 
A few months ago, the commander of the Venezuelan Army, Raul Baduel, described something that worried him (1).  Colombia had just purchased 46 AMX-30 battle tanks from Spain.  The media claimed the tanks were to fight drug trafficking, but that hardly seemed plausible.  Baduel suspected that the tanks were going to end up on the Venezuelan border.  

This deployment was blandly reported in El Tiempo, Colombia's national newspaper, yesterday (2).  The 46 tanks will be part of a new Brigade, especially created, to 'patrol the border'.  Four battalions and a Special Forces group form this new Brigade.  The tanks are supposed to arrive in (and watch the timing carefully, for we will revisit it) August. 

Read on...

June 09, 2004

D Day, Reagan, Corporate Personhood

Anarchogeek explains "bottom up" organizing in biig progressive NGOs: "This is similar to how Rumsfield is reforming the US military to remain hierarchical but incorporate much of the flexibility and organizing ability of networks."

The city council of Arcata, California, has passed a resolution advocating the end of corporate personhood.

The OJ Simpson case and the problem of infotainment.

William Blum says that Reagan Didn't End the Cold War.

Miguel d'Escoto says "Reagan was the Butcher of My People".

Mickey Z takes a hard look at D Day and the myth of the "good war".

A lot of farmers are protesting the rise of GM crops.

June 04, 2004

HAITI & VENEZUELA--COUP & EMPIRE

Part I

by Stan Goff

In this two-part analysis, Stan Goff exposes the underlying forces driving the current crisis in Haiti. The recent coup d'etat is only the latest in two centuries of violent transfers of power in that country – but today the regional balance of forces is refreshingly new. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has foiled a series of desperate CIA attempts to gain control of that oil-producing nation. While the Bush administration arrogantly plays the same the old game in the same old way, using the same old felons and convicted murderers, new rules are being written by an awakening transnational solidarity in the hemisphere. Markets, privatization of natural resources, drug routes, cheap labor – all are at stake in the US elite's scramble for Haiti. But Goff shows how an even more important motivation is stinging the Bush junta into frenzied action: when white supremacy is symbolically wounded, others have to bleed.

Read this extensive and important piece...

June 02, 2004

Destabilizing Venezuela

EARLY WARNING: Venezuela's radical opposition will ignore CNE decisions on recall referendum

According to direct political sources the Venezuelan opposition will, in the next few days, provoke violent actions to create a climate to justify the disavowal of the National Elections Council (CNE) if it does not activate the Presidential recall referendum.  It’s presumed that international observers from the Organization of American States (OAS) and the Carter Center will disavow the CNE’s decision and leave the country.

More on Venezuelan Regime Change in the Making...

May 28, 2004

Target Chavez

Bart Jones,  May 27, 2004
from Guerilla News
The United States is using a quasi-governmental organization created during the Reagan years and funded largely by Congress to pump about a million dollars a year into groups opposed to Venezuela President Hugo Chávez, according to officials in Venezuela and a Venezuelan-American attorney.

read more...

May 27, 2004

Dead Set on Imperialism

Social Design Notes: "The [New York] Times’s text typeface, for news and editorials, remains Imperial, designed in the 1950’s by Edwin W. Shaar and adopted by the newspaper in 1967."

May 06, 2004

The Economist prescribes “regime change” for Venezuela

By Mauricio Saavedra
5 May 2004
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/may2004/vene-m05_prn.shtml
A comment appearing in the Economist magazine’s Internet version last March, titled “Venezuela: regime change or bust,” set out to justify the Venezuelan oligarchy’s recurrent efforts to remove the democratically elected president through extra-constitutional means. It ended with a thinly veiled appeal for the direct intervention of the Bush administration into the affairs of Venezuela.

Arguing that Washington—at the moment mired in its bloody military occupation of Iraq—has the “welfare of Venezuelans” at heart, the magazine puts forward the reasons why “George Bush’s administration has plenty of reasons for wanting to see the back of [Hugo] Chávez.”

read more...

May 03, 2004

TORTURE AT ABU GHRAIB

by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
American soldiers brutalized Iraqis. How far up does the responsibility go?

In the era of Saddam Hussein, Abu Ghraib, twenty miles west of Baghdad, was one of the world’s most notorious prisons, with torture, weekly executions, and vile living conditions. As many as fifty thousand men and women—no accurate count is possible—were jammed into Abu Ghraib at one time, in twelve-by-twelve-foot cells that were little more than human holding pits.

read more...

April 23, 2004

My Master's House: On Powell and Haiti

April 19, 2004

My Master's House...
by Sheila Samples

But nothing reveals Powell's brutish dark side so clearly or exposes
his utter disdain for all creatures brown or black as his recent
orchestration of the coup d`etat in Haiti and the forced ouster of
its democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

read more...

April 16, 2004

Fallujah.

The past two weeks have seen a remarkable effort on the part of the US government and numerous media outlets to directly contradict reality. The single most remarkable instance of the contradiction came from US military spokesman Mark Kimmitt, who said:

The stations that are showing Americans intentionally killing women and children are not legitimate news sources. That is propaganda, and that is lies.

The astoundingly frank exhortation to shun plainly evident reality in favour of official spin came amid US claims that 95% of the 600 killed and thousands wounded during the military siege of Fallujah were "fighters". An estimated 60,000 people were displaced.

The corporate media in Canada and the US, meanwhile, has made a obfuscating and distracting from the siege of Fallujah and the resulting human disaster. I know of no systematic study, but there has been a distinct emphasis on "kidnapped" foreigners while war crimes, massacres, murder, and the continuing illegality of the occupation ignored or heavily marginalized.

In situations where disinformation reaches its absolute fever pitch, it becomes crucial to focus on the reality of the situation, and to take note of the gap between that reality and the manipulated images that corporate media ask us to accept in its place.

Fallujah is one place, but understanding what went on there and understanding the aforementioned gap can provide us with a healthy skepticism and a set of questions that can be applied to almost all other news coverage.

* * *

Report from Fallujah -- Destroying a Town in Order to Save it, by Rahul Mahajan

We were in Fallujah during the "ceasefire." This is what we saw and heard. When the assault on Fallujah started, the power plant was bombed. Electricity is provided by generators and usually reserved for places with important functions. There are four hospitals currently running in Fallujah. This includes the one where we were, which was actually just a minor emergency clinic; another one of them is a car repair garage.

Americans Slaughtering Civilians in Falluja, by Dahr Jamail, The New Standard

As we neared Falluja, there were groups of children on the sides of the road handing out water and bread to people coming into Falluja. They began literally throwing stacks of flat bread into the bus. The fellowship and community spirit was unbelievable. Everyone was yelling for us, cheering us on, groups speckled along the road. As we neared Falluja a huge mushroom caused by a large U.S. bomb rose from the city. So much for the cease-fire.

"Easter in Fallujah," by Jo Wilding

We stop, turn off the siren, keep the blue light flashing, wait, eyes on the silhouettes of men in US Marine uniforms on the corners of the buildings. Several shots come. We duck, get as low as possible and I can see tiny red lights whipping past the window, past my head. Some, it's hard to tell, are hitting the ambulance. I start singing. What else do you do when someone's shooting at you? A tire bursts with an enormous noise and a jerk of the vehicle.

I'm outraged. We're trying to get to a woman who's giving birth without any medical attention, without electricity, in a city under siege, in a clearly marked ambulance, and you're shooting at us. How dare you?

Flight from a town where sports fields are graveyards, Paul McGeough, Sydney Morning Herald

There is not much dispute about the death toll at Falluja, which remains a no-go zone for foreign reporters. But while townspeople say they were mostly children, women and old men, US spokesmen insist that 95 per cent of the dead were fighters who had met the precision shooting of the US marines.

"Baghdad Burning" Weblog

The hostage situations are a mess. I watch television and it feels like I'm watching another country. All I can think is, "We've become one of *those* countries..." You know- the ones where hostages are taken on a daily basis and governments warn their civilians of visiting or entering the country. It's especially sad because even during those long years during the blockade and in between wars and bombings, there were never any attacks on foreigners. Iraqis are hospitable, friendly people who always used to treat foreigners with care... now, everyone is treated like a potential enemy.

Democracy Now interviews Aaron Glantz

More than 60,000 women and children fled the city during a brief ceasefire on Friday but the US blocked any men of military age from leaving. Dozens of bodies have been buried in the city's soccer stadium after US forces blocked roads heading toward the cemetery.

Mail and Guardian (South Africa)

But when asked about the victims, US marine Lieutenant Colonel Brennan Byrne said: 'What I think you will find is 95% of those were military-age males that were killed in the fighting. The marines are trained to be precise in their firepower ... The fact that there are 600 goes back to the fact that the marines are very good at what they do.'

What Triggered the Shia Insurrection?, by Michael Schwartz

The insurrection in Shia areas of Iraq was not a sudden explosion, nor was it primarily inspired by the events in Falluja. It was, instead, the result of a long series of actions and reactions between the Coalition's armed forces and increasingly organized and anti-American Shia militias.

Fallujah Stories, by Wendell Steavenson

'We are going to Fallujah.'
'To Fallujah? For jihad?'
'No, we are going to help people there.'
'Do you need weapons? Do you need someone to show you the way in?'

'Do we look like fighters?' ask Fallujah families with their disabled, their old and their children, by Patrick Cockburn

We were taken to the families in the shelter by Dr Abed al-Illah, a specialist in internal medicine who is also a representative of the Iraqi Islamic Party, which is part of the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council. He had just visited Fallujah hospital. He said: 'About 350 out of the 600 dead were women and children. One was only eight months old. Many died from simple wounds and could have been saved if they had medical attention.'"

April 14, 2004

Return to Haiti: The American Learning Zone

By TOM REEVES

I returned this month from Haiti as part of the first independent U.S. observer delegation since the removal on February 29 of President Jean Bertrand Aristide. More than a decade ago, I helped organize the New England Observer Delegations to Haiti -- nine diverse groups of prominent Boston area people who went to Haiti after the first coup d'etat against President Aristide. We witnessed a reign of terror by the Haitian military, in which at least 3,000 democracy activists were slaughtered. We also witnessed the almost universal jubilation of the Haitian urban and rural poor (85% of the population) on Aristide's return...

http://www.counterpunch.org/reeves04142004.html

April 12, 2004

NSA Admits to Monitoring Email

This Globe Technology article contains a key line:

"That's the first admission I've actually seen that they actually monitor Internet traffic. I assumed they did, but no one ever admitted it," Mr. Farber said.

So the US National Security Agency (NSA) is officially monitoring internet traffic, and they're not afraid to say so.

Colony Hotel

Body and Soul: "Will the war exist for Americans if reporters are all in their hotel rooms?"

April 11, 2004

Iraq.

AFP: "Any power occupying a foreign country has two options, said Nadim Shehadi, an expert from the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. 'You can divide and rule, or you can attack everybody and the effect is that you unite them against you,' Shehadi told AFP."

Islam Online: "The U.S. occupation forces should halt their "brutal  genocide" against Iraqis and international community has to intervene for stopping this aggression that does not exempt even mosques or sanctities, 67 world Muslim scholars said in a statement."

AFP: "As the marines inched foward block-by-block taking sniper fire and hit-and-run attacks with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, a US medic said the resistance was more intense than in last spring's invasion."

Sami Ramadani: "Iraqis now believe that some of the recent assassinations of scientists and academics were perpetrated by these hit-squads. A similar campaign of assassinations in Vietnam claimed the lives of 41,000 people between 1968 and 1971."

Steve Lopez: "If things were spinning out of control, would President Bush be on Easter holiday at the ranch in Texas, where he was visited Thursday by members of the National Rifle Assn., Ducks Unlimited and Pheasants Forever?"

Dahr Jamail: "A close Iraqi friend angrily said to me tonight, 'They kill 280 Iraqis in Falluja because four American mercenaries were killed? This is the justice? This is fair?'"

Reuters: "At least 450 Iraqis have been killed and more than 1,000 wounded in fighting in the city of Falluja this week."

Shunpiking: "A number of prominent anti-war activists in Halifax have denounced the barbarous U.S. slaughter of Iraqis, defended the right of the people of Iraq for self-determination and called for an emergency rally in that city to end the brutal occupation of Iraq."

Guardian: "American troops in Iraq were last night locked in the most ferocious fighting since the war as the toll of Iraqis killed climbed to 460 and the military admitted it had lost control of two southern towns."

April 08, 2004

Over Taxed

CNN: More than 60% of U.S. corporations paid no federal taxes for 1996 through 2000.

(But it couldn't possibly have been any other way, or else our economy would have crashed. Right?)

April 07, 2004

Uprooted?

Want to stop "terrorism" (the action formerly known as guerilla warfare)? Clearly, the best way to do that is to fire rockets at a mosque during prayer.

To continue the press' gardening metaphors, the US is uprooting terror, while tilling the soil of despair and sowing thousands of seeds of rage. An effective strategy, if the desired outcome is genocide.

From an Indymedia feature:

The US media are groping in the dark for a new narrative. Even for supporters of the occupation, it is no longer believable to suggest that Iraq is on an inevitable path towards democracy; that the Iraqi people are overwhelmingly grateful for the American presence in their country; that attacks against American forces are the work of a few "dead-enders" or Islamic extremists allied with al Qaeda. This is clearly a popular uprising against an illegitimate occupying army.

Amazing that it took this long for that to become clear.

Update: David Grenier compiled some views from the ground in Iraq.

DRUG WAR BRIEFS: Who Really Supports Cocaine Traffickers?

by Kevin Nelson
http://www.alternet.org

April 6, 2004

This week, despite having no clear evidence, US prosecutors announce
an investigation of Jean Bertrand Aristide's alleged ties to cocaine
traffickers; meanwhile, a Peruvian court tries Vladimir Montesinos –
a 30-year CIA asset – for supplying Colombian drug traffickers with
weapons.

read more...

Witch Hunt in Haiti

“Right now there is a political climate in Haiti where anyone can get on the radio stations and accuse anyone else of a crime or with being associated with violent Lavalas gangs. It means that without proof they can say this about you and immediately you have to go into hiding, and immediately you have to be concerned with your own welfare; and immediately the death threats begin. That’s the political climate that you have in Haiti today.”

read more...

April 05, 2004

Seven Oaks: A Real Humanitarian Intervention

Seven Oaks: A real humanitarian intervention: Cuba’s doctors without borders

The 535 Cuban medical volunteers in Haiti have been instrumental in supplementing a woefully inadequate health care system. It is estimated that over the last 5 years, Cuban doctors have treated over 5 million Haitians. And with 90 per cent of the country's mere 2000 doctors operating in the capital of Port-au-Prince, the Cubans have been providing the bulk of services in the rest of the country. Observers have indeed pointed to this Cuban intervention as one of the reasons for the zealous desire of some in Washington to oust Aristide, despite the populist's largely orthodox, neo-liberal economic policy since the Marines restored him in 1994.

Another week, another issue of Seven Oaks.

April 04, 2004

Economics is an objective science...

... except when it isn't. Need reassurance? The IMF will smooth over your worries, like this:

"Why didn't you know?" I said.

"Well I was not here," she said. "I was at Stanford University at the time."

"Sorry," I said. "Not you, but the IMF. Why did it not know?"

Then she revealed that some IMF staff had written letters about their fears for Argentina.

"So what happened," I said.

"Nothing."

"Why not?"

"I do not know", she admitted.

I can't count how many intelligent people have insisted that the IMF is just fine; misunderstood at best. Really, they're just trying to help out.

As always, it's worth asking "who benefits" from all this. At this early date, it's possible to say "bankers", and it's possible to say "not citizens of countries under the thumb of the IMF". And it's also possible to to say "the dictators who took the loans, and still have much of the money in offshore bank accounts," and "not the people of Argentina, who have to pay those loans back."

That's a starting point.

Economics isn't a science, but this much we can say (almost) for certain: the people who design economic systems are rarely the ones that lose out when those systems fail.

April 03, 2004

Sounds Familiar...

Hey, Fallujah. Remember that place? It's where US soldiers fired on an anti-occupation protest in April, killing 17 people and wounding more than 70. It was also bombed during the initial assault on Iraq.

I don't have time to go through all of the mainstream media reports, but I'd be interested in how many mention this fact. this google news search provides a start, though it's not particularly encouraging with regards to this key bit of context.

April 02, 2004

International Review

Forty years ago, the US provided support for a military coup d'etat in Brazil. (Sound Familiar?) George Washington University's excellent National Security Archive has the documents.

In a bold step signifying its commitment to peace, Israel builds new settlements.

The Bush Administration keeps saying that Cuba is developing biological weapons, and Cuba keeps saying that the claim is bullshit. Apparently when you're funding terrorist attacks against Cuba, the best thing to do is accuse Cuba of terrorism.

Four Americans were killed in a gruesome way by an Iraqi mob. Apparently, they were armed mercenaries. The US has been handing out contracts to private security firms employing thousands of mercenaries to protect various business setups. Some of these mercenaries have been testing new kinds of weaponry on Iraqi insurgents. Mercenaries are now the third largest armed force in Iraq. More. In case anyone was wondering, what the mob did was in violation of Islamic law.

The media has been covering the killings as "civilians killed", but what about the Iraqi civilians killed? No word.

Sometime in the near future, the world's urban population will exceed the rural population. Mike Davis looks at the implication in New Left Review.

Back in 1994, the US stole thousands of documents from Haiti. Documents which might have made it possible to bring members of the previous murderous regime to justice. Apparently, they still haven't been given back.

March 31, 2004

E-Voting Democracy Out of Office

Wired News: How E-Voting Threatens Democracy

Harris began to wonder if it were possible for the company to extract votes during an election and change them without anyone knowing.

A look at the Diebold tabulation program provided a possible answer.

Harris discovered that she could enter the vote database using Microsoft Access -- a standard program often bundled with Microsoft Office -- and change votes without leaving a trace. Diebold hadn't password-protected the file or secured the audit log, so anyone with access to the tabulation program during an election -- Diebold employees, election staff or even hackers if the county server were connected to a phone line -- could change votes and alter the log to erase the evidence.

50 million on Strike!

50 million workers are on strike in India. At the risk of stating the obvious, that's 1.6 times the population of Canada. Dang.

In other large numbers, Harken energy is suing the Costa Rican government for $57 billion under various treaties designed to protect investments. The country's crime? The government placed a moratorium on oil exploration and open-pit mining after a massive campaign by environmentalists.

Harken wanted $57 billion, a figure it said represented the total projected profits of the scuttled deal. Costa Rica's annual GDP is around $17 billion, and the government's entire annual budget around $5 billion.

Harken. Where have I heard that name before? Oh, now I remember.

March 30, 2004

The Run Down

CBC: "This week, the bodies of five people who backed Aristide were found dumped in the capital - some said as part of a brutal crackdown against those faithful to the fallen leader." The CBC, Globe, Post, et alia continue to avoid giving a staightforward account of how Aristide "fell", though.

FAIR archives reveal that the media has been demonizing Aristide since 1994 (and for some time before that, too).

Oil production is about ready to peak. More on that in the SF Chronicle.

Just in case you hadn't heard, the Bush administration used 9-11 as a pretext to jack up military spending, even if the money is spent on things that have nothing to do with fighting terror.

A British Labour MP is calling for economic sanctions against Israel. (Meanwhile, Sharon has been invited to the White House.)

Ha'aretz Editorial: "Ariel Sharon has lost the moral authority and public standing required to continue leading the country."

The Indonesian military is killing people in West Papua.

The US has shut down an Iraqi newspaper that was advocating the use of violence against occupying forces. At press time, there were no plans to shut down US papers that advocate violence against civilians.

Condoleeza Rice can lie with impunity...

Because the press will let her:

MediaChannel: "Who in our media will have the courage to apologize for giving the Administration a soft sell and a big pass?"

Nat Parry: "Over the past four years, one of the most powerful U.S. media taboos has been against calling George W. Bush’s pattern of false statements lies. Among Washington journalists, the l-word is casually applied to people who have gotten in the way of the Bush Dynasty – from Bill Clinton and Al Gore to more recently John Kerry and now Richard Clarke – but almost never to Bush."

Thoughts on the Eve of Apocalypse: "Rand Beers, John Brady Kiesling, John Brown, Greg Thielmann, Joseph Wilson, Karen Kwiatkowski, Paul O'Neill -- the list of former government workers who have indicted the Bush administration upon leaving their posts is lengthy. And now add perhaps the most damaging name: Richard Clarke."

March 25, 2004

He's Not Serious... right?

Venezuela to Kerry: you're trying to act like a tough guy for the election, but we still think you're more sensible than Bush.

According to the Chicago Tribune, the US is building "enduring bases" in Iraq.

Periodic reminder: racial inequality in the US is still a major problem.

The State of the News Media bodes well for the Dominion, in a depressing way. Trends they identify include deinvestment in newsrooms, overworked reporters channeling PR instead of doing journalism, and "the only sectors seeing general audience growth today are online, ethnic and alternative media." Best two out of three.

Anton Checkov was signing books in New York city last week.

Z Magazine has people blogging now, including Lydia Sargent, Michael Albert, and Noam Chomsky. update: apparently, Chomsky's blog is already being attacked by right-wingers.

George Bush thinks that not finding weapons of mass destruction is funny.

There's a new french group weblog on cyberculture.

Night of the Living Dead is in the public domain.

Free Culture, a new book by Lawrence Lessig.

Are Bush and Co. are outraged by democracy?

Le Monde says that Richard Clarke has become the White House's "public enemy number one".

Untying the Gordian Knot?

BBC: "Confused by the twists and turns of the US gay marriage issue, Oregon's Benton County has decided to err on the side of caution and ban all weddings."

A Scandal Not Likely to Make the Globe

The US government has been (and is still) paying people to come up with bogus intelligence about Iraq and feed it to the press. There's a list of stories and publications that made use of the disinformation.

March 24, 2004

The Walrus and the Opinion

For some reason, a reporter recently asked me to comment on the current status of Canadian would-be übermagazine The Walrus. To serve a combination of self-indulgence, jealousy, and genuine sentiment, I'm posting my comments here. The reporter's questions are in bold.

And now, four issues later, do you think The Walrus is going in the
right direction and delivering what it promised?

No. They've had every opportunity to do something different from the typical magazine, and they haven't. Their promises of "real change", "intelligence", and "wit" have gone unfulfilled. Instead, the Walrus's material has been largely unoriginal and surprisingly self-indulgent work by big name journalists and celebrities.

The underlying problem seems to be the bizarre expectation that if you pay them enough, big name journalists and authors will provide work that is qualitatively more interesting or original than what they typically produce. If you're trying to address the paucity of substance in mainstream journalism, hiring the centrepieces of that kind of journalism to do it doesn't make any sense.

They started down an interesting path by providing some original investigative reporting into Paul Martin's business dealings, but there has been no followup.

Which Walrus articles explore fundamental issues facing Canada and the world at large today? I can't think of a single one; the overwhelming focus has been on what could fairly be called curiosities and troubling scenarios, but the approach seems to be an overwhelmingly superficial one. The result is that important issues like the World Criminal Court, relations with Cuba, and the occupation of the west bank and gaza are reduced to quaint philosophical debates or effectively trivialized as curiosities.

One example. Inequality has been growing in Canada and worldwide for the past twenty years, though it is almost never covered in the mainstream media. Writing on this kind of topic that is intelligent and not blatantly partisan is almost nonexistant. There are no lack of extremely interesting and fundamentally pressing issues that are nearly completely ignored by the mainstream media. The Walrus has chosen to ignore them, or cover them in the same way that a feature in the Globe or Post would.

I'm interested to know if you think the departure of founding editor
David Berlin will have any effect -- good or bad -- on The Walrus.

I've only met Berlin once, and know very little about his successor, so I'm not qualified to comment. However, I will venture that having a former National Post editor at the head of a magazine that declares itself the saviour of Canadian discourse is ironic at best, and tragically farcical at worst.

March 23, 2004

Iraq for Iraqis? Nah.

Guardian: "Jay Garner, the US general abruptly dismissed as Iraq's first occupation administrator after a month in the job, says he fell out with the Bush circle because he wanted free elections and rejected an imposed program of privatization."

Condemnable

Dozens of countries (including the Vatican, EU, UK, France, Bulgaria, Turkey, others) have condemned the asassination of Sheik Ahmed Yassin. The US has, pointedly, not.

Meanwhile, Israel is denying access to journalists with dual citizenship.

Judge, Jury. Executioner?

"The war on terrorism is not over, and will take place every day and in every place. It is the natural right of the Jewish nation, as it is the right of any people, to hunt down those who wish to exterminate them."

So says Ariel Sharon.

March 21, 2004

Intervention in El Salvador

According to the Financial Times and the Christian Science Monitor, the US is pulling an old-style intervention in El Salvador's presidential elections, which happen today (Sunday).

And some analysts say that the comments by US officials may be bolstering ARENA's message. Last Sunday, White House Special Assistant Otto Reich gave a phone-in press conference at ARENA headquarters. According to local newspapers, he said he was worried about the impact an FMLN win could have on the country's "economic, commercial, and migratory relations with the United States."

To put it mildly. It may be obscure to the folks in the power centres up north, but I suspect that Salvadoran voters received the message loud and clear: elect Marxist, and we'll fuck you up good. Roger Noriega, who apparently pushed hard for the recent US-sponsored coup d'etat in Haiti, went even farther, and not without consequences:

In February, Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega told voters to "consider what kind of a relationship they want a new administration to have with us." He met with all the candidates except Mr. Handal. Last week, 28 US Congress members sent a letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell saying Mr. Noriega "crossed a boundary" and that his remarks were perceived as "interference in Salvadoran electoral affairs." This week two US congressmen blasted Reich's comments as inflammatory.

Of course, the right-wing candidate is playing to the fear of losing ties with the US, as well he might:

More than a quarter of El Salvador's 6.5 million citizens live in the US, and Salvadoran economist Robert Rubio estimates that remittances account for 16 percent of the country's economy. He likens the flow of remittances to a life-support system for the country's poor economy

He can also accurately claim that relations with the US would be way better under his government. The reason this is the case, however, remains obscure. It's not that a lefty government would break off ties with the US. Quite to the contrary, it would not be in their interests to do so. However, what they might do, is begin acting in the interest of the majority of the people of El Salvador, which would guarantee that the US would flip right out, impose sanctions, deny aid, delay or block remittances, and maybe even fund terrorists to knock some sense into the poor of El Salvador.

Indeed, it's no surprise that Otto Reich was involved with funding the contras back in the 1980s.

Dennis Kucinich, who is apparently still a US presidential candidate, showed up on the sane side of the question of El Salvador. That's more than we can say for the NDP about Haiti or Venezuela, for example.

"Unfortunately, what is going on in El Salvador is representative of a Latin American policy that is not about promoting healthy democracies, but instead focused on making Latin American nations bend to U.S. commercial interests."

"The people of El Salvador have a right to free and fair elections without interference from the United States. The U.S. cannot claim to be a leader in promoting democracy worldwide and at the same time hinder democracy by attempting to influence the outcome of elections abroad," Kucinich said.

Global Anti-Occupation Protests

Looks like the global anti-occupation protests went off fairly well, though not with anything like the millions that came out on February 15, 2003, which was a historic event by any reasonable standard.

Still, it's good to see the global local protest continue as a practice. If a few million people had come in cities around the world as they did today outside the context of last Feb 15, it would have been an indisputably profound event.

As it stands, over a few million in total total came out in cities across Canada, the US, all over Europe, Baghdad, and Australia, Japan, East Timor and many others as well.

I wrote a short account of the Halifax demo, and there is coverage from Fredericton and Charlottetown on the Indymedia Maritimes wire.

Indymedia Global has some great photos from Baghdad, where Shias and Sunnis marched together in an apparently significant show of unity against the occupation. And google news will provide good overviews in the coming days.

March 16, 2004

Cost/Benefit

Gabriel Kolko, The American elections, the future of alliances and the lessons of Spain 

The United States' strength, to a crucial extent, has rested on its ability to convince other nations that it was to their vital interests to see America prevail in its global role. But the scope and ultimate consequences of its world mission, including its extraordinarily vague doctrine of "preemptive wars," is today far more dangerous and open-ended than when Communism existed. Enemies have disappeared and new ones - many once former allies and even congenial friends - have taken their places. The United States, to a degree to which it is itself uncertain, needs alliances, but these allies will be bound into uncritical "coalitions of the willing."

But the events in Spain over the past days, from the massive deadly explosions in Madrid to the defeat of the ruling party because it supported the Iraq war despite overwhelming public opposition to doing so, have greatly raised the costs to its allies of following Washington's lead.

George Galloway: "The costs can be calibrated in a hundred different ways, starting with the number of Iraqi people who were slaughtered (we don't know how many they were, because nobody was counting and, indeed, the US administration openly boasts that it can't be expected to count the number of Iraqis it killed); the number of maimed and wounded; the millions whose lives have been wrecked, who, even now, a year after the war, have no regular supplies of electricity or water and still lack basic necessities. And the vast majority are unemployed."

March 12, 2004

Regime Change for Regime Dollars

Yesterday, the US government announced that it would provide millions of dollars in funding to the Conservative Party and the NDP. The plan was part of an ongoing effort to support "opposition building" and "encouraging pluralism".

Sound weird?

But that doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

In Venezuela, Haiti, Georgia, and many other places, it does.

William Blum has a chapter online about the National Endowment for Democracy. Also see the International Republican Institute.

One Big Guantanamo

The New York Times reports that with over 10,000 Iraqis being held prisoner without any legal rights, Iraq is "turning into one big Guantanamo".

Bill Moyers asks whether CointelPro is back in the US.

Some 9-11 families have an interesting list of questions they would like to ask the George W Bush (who I still don't refer to as "president", due to the peculiar notion that the president would be the one who receives the most votes, electoral and otherwise).

The official line of the US administration on Haiti is that Venezuela is next, and the press continues to universally neglect the documented fact that the US spent four years intentionally destabilizing the country, funding opposition groups and systematically blocking aid.

The US is hiring mercenaries to defend oil fields in Iraq.

Argentina is wrestling with the IMF for the altogether unreasonable prioritizing of unemployed and poor people over the paying off of illegitimate (which is to say, borrowed by unaccountable and murderous US-supported dictators and now sitting in Swiss bank accounts) foreign debt.

Venezuela analysis looks a some serious distortions of reality being circulated by the media.

Ramsey Clark reckons the coup must not stand in Haiti.

The US has been and is still funding the opposition in Venezuela.

Aristide is suing the US government.

Tens of thousands are demanding his return. A lot of his supporters are in hiding, too.

William Blum looks at John Kerry's foreign policy plan and finds that it's not much different than Bush's.

In an exciting and surprising new development, it was discovered that the US media were singularly uncritical in their coverage of the Iraq war.

Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired lieutenant colonel in the US Air Force, talks about how the neocons distorted, lied, and so on.

March 11, 2004

Resistance and Precedent

British journalist John Pilger has taken a strong stand on the violent resistance in Iraq, saying that the rest of the world now depends on the resistance in Iraq to prevent the US (and Britain) from attacking other countries in the future.

The ethics of this stand are hashed out in a fascinating way in this interview [transcript and video], which appeared on Australian Television. Definitely worth watching.

March 10, 2004

Interview with Hugo Chavez

An old but fascinating interview with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. It covers land reform, US intervention, and other themes.

M: Let's put this in a broader historical context, because it leads to another question. In 1954, the US overthrew the elected President of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz. In ’64, the US was apparently involved in the events leading to the military coup against President Goulart of Brazil. The following year the US marines invaded the Dominican Republic, another intervention against a democratic government. The Sandinistas were elected in ’84, and the US spent the next six years destroying the country through warfare and sabotage, and even intervened in the 1990 election.

H: You skipped Allende. [The U.S. was involved in the 1973 destabilization and overthrow of President Salvador Allende in Chile].

M: Yes…

H: And Panama, and Grenada.

M: Yes. The question is, the United States has gotten rid of most Latin American presidents that it didn't like. Why do you think you will be different?

H: You have to look at each of these cases of intervention individually, in their historical context. Each case is unique. The overthrow of Arbenz in 1954 was done through an invasion. But it did not end there. It started a war that lasted for more than 40 years. The Dominican Republic, Panama, Grenada—those were also invasions.

Venezuela also has to be looked at within a certain historical context. We have a strength that cannot be disregarded—a level of consciousness and mobilization that did not exist in these other countries. If you add up all the people who have participated in demonstrations since 1999 [on our side], counting each person as many times as they participated, the total is in the hundreds of millions. There were more than 8 million people who came out the day of the coup.

Also Venezuela has armed forces that are very solid, united, and capable of counteracting any faction that could threaten democracy.

March 05, 2004

I Dreamed This Was a Globe and Mail Headline

Endorsing the call for UN probe of Aristide's ouster
From the Jamaica Observer
Thursday, March 04, 2004

This newspaper endorses the call by the Caribbean Community (Caricom ) for a United Nations-led investigation into the circumstances under which Jean-Bertrand Aristide relinquished the presidency of Haiti on Sunday.

We are not immediately clear as to what mechanism can be employed in such an investigation, but we believe that it is important that the international community gets to the bottom of an issue that should be worrying for all democratically-minded nations.

read more...

February 28, 2004

Bush's UN Security Council to Haiti: Sorry, Won't help you

By Anthony Fenton

February 28, 2004

Yesterday George Bush announced that Haiti’s democratically elected President Aristide should step down if he knows what’s good for him. As such, the blame for the so-called “political impasse” is placed squarely on Aristide’s shoulders, despite the fact that he has repeatedly agreed to capitulate to the US, CARICOM and OAS ‘Plan of Action’. The real problem remains the refusal on the part of the opposition to negotiate with Aristide, a steadfast refusal that they have irrationally made for four years with the backing of recycled Reagan and Bush I acolytes.

read more...

February 27, 2004

NYTimes on Haiti

The New York Times has a reasonably sane article on the situation in Haiti.

They have a point. Over the past several years, the United States and the Organization of American States have placed increasingly onerous demands on Mr. Aristide. Foreign diplomats insisted that the senators in the contested seats resign; all did so several months after Mr. Aristide's re-election. Though Mr. Aristide called for new elections, the opposition demanded that he himself step down before it would cooperate. Last year, a State Department official in Haiti, speaking on condition of anonymity, told me that the United States wouldn't tolerate that kind of intransigence but also said that no support for new elections would be forthcoming until President Aristide improved "security." And yet by the time the diplomat said this, the administration had long since withdrawn support from Haiti's fledgling police force, with predictable and now obvious results.

February 26, 2004

Editorial: Call Alexa

My theory: if you have time to read this right now, you have time to take 2 minutes to call Alexa McDonough and ask her to take a strong stand in support of democracy in Haiti.

Her constituency office: (902) 426-8691

My reasoning: Calling Bill Graham is necessary but useless, because he won't change Canadian policy without a fight. The only way to make that fight happen is to convince McDonough, who is the NDP's Foreign Affairs critic, to loudly and publicly criticize Graham.

She already has the information. She just needs to know that you think she should stand up and say something.

A quick summary of what I think should be advocated, from this excellent analysis:

The current crisis is not about supporting or opposing Aristide the man, but about defending constitutional democracy in Haiti. In a democracy, elections-and not vigilante violence-should be the measure of 'the will of the people.' Aristide has repeatedly invited the opposition to participate in elections and they have refused, knowing that they cannot win at the polls

And it should always be noted that to this day, the US is funding that opposition, with Canada's unflinching support.

Keep in mind, of course, that Haiti is facing a very likely military coup in the coming days, and that it can still be stopped with an absolute minimum of effort on the part of the US and Canada.

Haiti's People 'Ready to die' to Save Democracy

John Kerry, frontrunner of the “anyone but Bush in 2004” power grab, harangued the Bush administration yesterday for it’s Haiti policy, claiming they “created the environment within which the insurgency could grow and take root.” [New York Times, Feb. 24, 04]

Kerry’s comments come as others in the international community are tiring of the U.S., Canada, France, OAS/CARICOM line of effective ambivalence toward the violent insurgency that has had Haiti in its throes since February 5th. Even the current chair of CARICOM, Jamaican Prime Minister P.J. Patterson, seems to have lost faith in his organisation’s ability to restore peace.

read more...

The reappearance of the FRAPH/FAD'H is nothing less than a stinking stain on today's Haiti

Haiti Support Group press release - 25 February 2004

[Contains valuable background information on the people that will be leading the attacks that are sure to come on Port-au-Prince in the coming days. //dru See also: Haiti: Five Facts and One Urgent Appeal]

read more...

Congresswoman Waters Introduces Resolution Supporting Immediate U.S. Assistance to Prevent a Bloodbath in Haiti

[Press Release]

read more...

The US in Haiti: Why?

After reading the Urgent Appeal to citizens to understand the role of the US and Canadian governments in the Haitian crisis and take immediate action that Anthony and I sent out, a friend asked the obvious next question: why?

That is: if president Aristide is doing a good job of making things a bit better for the majority of Haitians despite the best efforts of the US, as we claim, then why on earth would we want to overthrow them? What follows is my response:

The question is always, necessarily: 'a good job for whom?'

The US Government, like the Canadian one, is largely dominated by corporate interests. So that's who someone has to do a good job for, in order to, in "fact", be doing a good job.

Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Paradoxically, this makes it rather important in a number of ways.

• As a source of cheap labour. Disney has used Haitian sweatshops to make pocahontas pajamas, among other things, for 11cents/hour. Of 8 million Haitians, around 7 million are willing to work for almost nothing. There are plenty of new 'free trade zones' being set up (tax breaks, controlled access, disempowered labour force, and so on).
• As a standard-bearer. If wages go up in Haiti, they will eventually go up in all the other sweatshops in the Americas, and perhaps abroad. As long as corporations can use Haiti as a reference to say "*well*, in Haiti, we only have to pay...", they can keep costs down everywhere else. That's why the US put massive pressure on the Haitian Government not to raise the minimum wage. What's good for 7 million Haitians, in this case (and many others) is a *huge* problem for corporate America.
• As a potential example. The consistent reason that the US has sustained relentless, vicious (and well documented) terror campaigns in extremely poor countries is to keep them from becoming what is called "the threat of a good example". This is why Cuba is such a huge problem: they'll never be a military threat to the US, but having a dirt-poor country that provides all of its citizens with housing, health care, and adequate food is a bad example. How could other poor people in the region not take notice and ask "why not us?" This is why the poorest countries that institute progressive measures are targeted--if they can make progress socially, then anyone can. Especially those with many times the money and resources.

Like many other poor countries, Haiti is actually rich. It's just that all the riches have been stolen and used to enrich people in Porto Fino, not Port-au-Prince.

February 22, 2004

DARPA creating a race of robo-grunts

The Register:

"Imagine divisions of grunts able to go without food and sleep for days on end while performing at peak level. That's the perverse dream of the Defense Sciences Office's new Metabolic Dominance Program."

"Much of this will be a matter of uncapping the natural safety mechanisms against excessive strain that humans have evolved with - overclocking the grunt, so to speak. But the DoD doesn't seem much concerned by the potential ill effects; ..."

Mom sues RIAA members for racketeering

The Register:

"A New Jersey mother has turned the tables on the Recording Industry Association of America by suing the major labels for racketeering."

February 17, 2004

The Cost of Empire

A two-part series from Asia Times. Part I, Part II.

February 14, 2004

Media AWOL

Antonia Zerbisias: "A database search of that period turned up some 13,000 references to former President Bill Clinton's having avoided the draft — and only about 50 about Bush's military career."

Wow.

February 13, 2004

Exhausted

Want an exhaustive list of informative articles about pressing issues in American politics? Go read the February 11 entry at thoughts on the eve of the apocalypse. That's a serious overview.

What About Africa's Debt?

LA Times: "The almost instant success that James A. Baker III has had in his international lobbying to have Iraq's debt forgiven raises an uncomfortable comparison: how little has been done to relieve the African debt that cripples some of the world's poorest countries."

February 02, 2004

British People are Smarter than the Globe and Mail

Christian Science Monitor: Despite Hutton results, polls show Brits don't trust Blair on WMD issue

Illegally arrested WTO Protesters win settlement

News.com.au: "[The City of] Seattle will pay $US250,000 ($325,000) to settle a lawsuit brought by World Trade Organisation protesters who alleged their rights to free speech and protection from unreasonable searches and seizures were violated when police arrested them during 1999 demonstrations."

February 01, 2004

Debating Rape

Arundhati Roy: "In the great cities of Europe and America, where a few years ago these things would only have been whispered, now people are openly talking about the good side of imperialism and the need for a strong empire to police an unruly world. The new missionaries want order at the cost of justice. Discipline at the cost of dignity. And ascendancy at any price. Occasionally some of us are invited to "debate" the issue on "neutral" platforms provided by the corporate media. Debating imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape. What can we say? That we really miss it?"

January 30, 2004

The Media Primary

Chris Shumway has some excellent analysis of the "media primary" in the US.

Last autumn, long before Democratic Party insiders Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts and Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina finished one-two in the Iowa Caucus, the most important primary of the political season was already underway. But unlike the Iowa Caucus, or the Washington DC primary held one week before it, this primary does not involve actual voters going to the polls. Rather, it is the process through which major news outlets "elect" the presidential front-runners and frame the issues, thus setting the boundaries for acceptable political discussion.

Canada doesn't have primaries in any similar way, but the same thing applies here. The media is smaller, so more topics get in the door, but patterns of marginalization and intensive scrutiny can be predicted.

Based on the economic interests of journalists and their employers, I make the following predictions:

• Economic inequality and child poverty will scarcely be discussed.

• The continued privatization of health care will be seen as a pragmatic choice, and no one will look closely at what the actual consequences of that have been in the US.

• The budget balancing pissing contest and "the economy" (but not its effect on poor and lower-middle-class Canadians) will be a major focus.

• Coverage of gay marriage and marijuana legalization will dominate to the virtual exclusion of other "social issues".

• There will be a few articles and three second clips of people speaking substantively about what missile defence actual intends to accomplish, but this will be dwarfed by the amount of coverage given to speculation about the political implications of various decisions.

• There will be extensive coverage of scandals relating to individuals within the Liberal Party, though intentional acts like stealing $40 billion from Unemployment Insurance will continue to be off-limits for political discussion.

• The media will continue to take Paul Martin's rhetoric at face value, and let him frame the issues... unless there's a scandal, and the journalists smell blood!

In the media, the election will be about how much scandals (and maybe some policies) have hurt the Liberals' "image". To this extent, the other two parties will be seen to improve their standing.

Of this much, we can be sure: the biggest issues of the election will not be those fundamentally faced by Canadians, but those that the country's small elite disagrees on.

Pope blesses breakdancers

CNN: "In an unusual spectacle at the Vatican, Pope John Paul II presided over a performance of break-dancers who leaped, flipped and spun their bodies to beats from a tinny boom box. The 83-year-old pontiff seemed to approve, waving his hand after each dancer completed a move, then applauding for the entire group. He watched the performance from a raised throne. 'For this creative hard work I bless you from my heart,' he said."

(I lifted this wholesale from Matt Brennan's Weblog, which is well worth your time.)

January 24, 2004

Ugh.

The New York Post describes the condition of a documentary filmmaker who ate an all-McDonald's diet for 30 days:

Within a few days of beginning his drive-through diet, Spurlock, 33, was vomiting out the window of his car, and doctors who examined him were shocked at how rapidly Spurlock's entire body deteriorated.

"It was really crazy - my body basically fell apart over the course of 30 days," Spurlock told The Post.

His liver became toxic, his cholesterol shot up from a low 165 to 230, his libido flagged and he suffered headaches and depression.

Maher Arar is Suing the US Govn't

CBC: "Attorney General John Ashcroft, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and FBI director Robert Mueller were among the officials named in the lawsuit, as well as 10 "John Does" who took part in Arar's detention and interrogation in the United States in the autumn of 2002."

January 22, 2004

Are things getting better for Iraqis?

For Bush's state of the union address, the Indpendent gathered together some stats on the Bush presidency, which are worth reading. (link via laughingmeme.org.)

Some key bits about Iraq:

80%: Percentage of the Iraqi workforce now unemployed

55%: Percentage of the Iraqi workforce unemployed before the war

92%: Percentage of Iraq's urban areas that had access to drinkable water a year ago

60%: Percentage of Iraq's urban areas that have access to drinkable water today

130: Number of countries (out of total of 191 recognised by the United Nations) with an American military presence

29,000: Number of American troops - which is close to the total of a whole army division - to have either been killed, wounded, injured or become so ill as to require evacuation from Iraq, according to the Pentagon

32%: Percentage of the bombs dropped on Iraq this year that were not precision-guided

January 20, 2004

Uprising in Tlalnepantla, Mexico

SF Indymedia: "The town of Tlalnepantla, Morelos, Mexico, declared itself autonomous as the Zapatista communities of Chiapas, Mexico celebrated the 10 year anniversary of their uprising. On, 2/14 nearly 1500 riot police armed with assault rifles stormed the town to evict the autnomous government from Tlalnepantla. Snipers and police gunmen filled the air with bullets, beat women and men over 80 years of age, and left two dead, many wounded and scores of people disappeared and as of yet unaccounted for."

Interviews with Israeli soldiers

When I first got to Hebron I wouldn't open fire on little children. And I was sure that if I ever killed or hurt anyone, I'd go so crazy that I'd leave the army. But finally I did shoot someone, and nothing happened to me. In Hebron I shot the legs off of two kids, and I was sure I wouldn't be able to sleep anymore at night, but nothing happened. Two weeks ago I hurt a Palestinian policeman, and that didn't affect me either. You become so apathetic you don't care at all. Shooting is the IDF soldier's way of meditating. It's like shooting is your way of letting go of all your anger when you're in the army. In Hebron there's this order they call "punitive shooting": just open fire on whatever you like. I opened fire not on any sources of fire but on windows where there was just wash hanging to dry. I knew that there were people who would be hit. But at that moment it was just shoot, shoot, shoot.

Jesus. More.

January 19, 2004

Exploiting King

Apparently, GW Bush exploited a trip to Martin Luther King's grave to pay for a fundraising trip.

The New York Times reports that the President "hastily planned" a visit to Dr. King's grave, and then will immediately go to "a $2,000-a-person fundraiser in Atlanta."2Even though Bush may spend the majority of his time hobnobbing with donors at the fundraiser, because he will briefly visit Dr. King's grave, he is allowed to deem the entire trip "official" and then bill taxpayers for portions of the huge cost of hotel rooms, rental cars, security, and travel. And those are no small costs - the Washington Post notes that Air Force One alone costs $57,000 an hour to operate.

Less depressing is "The Red Reverend", an examination of Martin Luther King's lesser-known socialist bent.

We are now making demands that will cost the nation something. You can't talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can't talk about ending slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You're really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with the captains of industry. . . . Now this means that we are treading in difficult waters, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong . . . with capitalism . . . . There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a Democratic Socialism." -King, '67

"I have a dream" continues to be one of the great pieces of rhetoric in American history. It's always worth a listen.

Over 700 Military Bases Worldwide

America's Empire of Bases, by Chalmers Johnson

Our military deploys well over half a million soldiers, spies, technicians, teachers, dependents, and civilian contractors in other nations. To dominate the oceans and seas of the world, we are creating some thirteen naval task forces built around aircraft carriers whose names sum up our martial heritage -- Kitty Hawk, Constellation, Enterprise, John F. Kennedy, Nimitz, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Carl Vinson, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, John C. Stennis, Harry S. Truman, and Ronald Reagan. We operate numerous secret bases outside our territory to monitor what the people of the world, including our own citizens, are saying, faxing, or e-mailing to one another.

January 12, 2004

Homeless Iraqis

The San Francisco Chronicle say that "between 7 million and more than 12.5 million" Iraqis are homeless.

January 09, 2004

Anti-Semitism or Wishful thinking?

I still hear reports that cite the supposed results of the poll that found that most Europeans believe that Israel is the greatest threat to world peace.

It's worth noting, then, that what the poll actually asked was whether people thought Israel, and a number of other countries, were a threat to world peace. They answered "yes" or "no". Through a bit of original creative interpretation followed by a distinct lack of fact-checking, the story was repeated over and over again.

January 07, 2004

Felonious Miami

Miami Herald: "A judge presiding over the cases of free trade protesters said in court that he saw ''no less than 20 felonies committed by police officers'' during the November demonstrations, adding to a chorus of complaints about police conduct."

targeted kill, surgical strike, executive action, preemptive manhunting

(They all sound strangely like murder.)

Douglas Valentine:
Preemptive Manhunting: The CIA's New Assassination Program

The CIA has concocted various euphemisms for its long-standing policy of assassinating civilians whose ideas and political beliefs it hates. In a 24 July 2003 article for CounterPunch titled Nation of Assassins, I listed some of them: "targetted kill" being the most popular, along with neutralize and "executive action". I've been waiting for the new euphemism with which the media will assuage the public and now we have it from disinformation specialist Seymour Hersh: "Preemptive Manhunting."The CIA has concocted various euphemisms for its long-standing policy of assassinating civilians whose ideas and political beliefs it hates. In a 24 July 2003 article for CounterPunch titled Nation of Assassins, I listed some of them: "targetted kill" being the most popular, along with neutralize and "executive action". I've been waiting for the new euphemism with which the media will assuage the public and now we have it from disinformation specialist Seymour Hersh: "Preemptive Manhunting."

Preemptive Manhunting is the new name for assassination and, according to Hersh (quoting one of his usual anonymous sources), the rationale for resorting to this immoral and illegal measure is that "The only way we can win is to go unconventional. We're going to have to play their game. Guerrilla versus guerrilla. Terrorism versus terrorism. We've got to scare the Iraqis into submission."

This is a textbook description of "selective terrorism" as the ultimate form of psychological warfare, and Hersh is correct in describing Preemptive Manhunting as the rebirth of the CIA's Phoenix Program in South Vietnam.

Iraq Blocks Out Rest of World

Interpress: "AIDS killed three million people around the world last year, more than two million of them in Africa. The three major U.S. television networks' evening news programmes devoted a combined total of 39 minutes to the issue."

January 06, 2004

Quarantining Dissent

San Francisco Chronicle: "When President Bush travels around the United States, the Secret Service visits the location ahead of time and orders local police to set up "free speech zones" or "protest zones," where people opposed to Bush policies (and sometimes sign-carrying supporters) are quarantined. These zones routinely succeed in keeping protesters out of presidential sight and outside the view of media covering the event."

January 04, 2004

School of Fat Salmon

The Nation reports from Iraq: "Much of the world thought the war would result in a flurry of business activity, with the world's oil giants sweeping through Iraq like a killer whale through a school of fat salmon. That didn't happen. One reason is that it's probably the most dangerous place in the world for an oil executive right now."

Grab the Saudi Oil!

BBC: "The United States considered using force to seize oilfields in the Middle East during an oil embargo by Arab states in 1973, according to British government documents just made public."

Inter Press News: "The voice of community radio is getting louder across Asia, but so is the interference coming from governments that are wary about their growing strength."

Inter Press News: "Now that the U.S. Navy is gone, residents of the Puerto Rican island-town of Vieques face pressing environmental problems."

December 30, 2003

Old News

A few items that I meant to post last week:

Times Union: "An American lieutenant colonel pleaded guilty to beating an Iraqi detainee and threatening to kill him during an interrogation, but will be fined and allowed to retire rather than face a court-martial, the military said Saturday."

Toledo Blade: "Without notification to foreign media outlets, the immigration and customs people are arresting, detaining, and deporting journalists arriving here without special visas. This is so even when they come from nations whose citizens can stay for up to 90 days without a visa if they are arriving as tourists or on business. If that threatening form of registration is not enough, members of the press arriving without the visas, which no one told them they needed, are treated like criminals, handcuffed as they’re marched through airports, photographed, fingerprinted, and their DNA taken."

Hampshire Gazette: "Nowhere was Rumsfeld's vision of a corporate-dominated department more evident than in his initial choices to run three military services: Secretary of the Air Force James Roche, a former vice president at Northrop Grumman; Secretary of the Navy Gordon England, a former executive at General Dynamics; and former Secretary of the Army Thomas E. White, who came from Enron."

Independent: "Saddam Hussein told his American interrogators that Iraq never had weapons of mass destruction, claiming that they were an invention of the US government to justify an invasion, it was reported last night."

December 29, 2003

Brazil rejected the FTAA three months ago

EFE News Service: "Some 98 percent of the 10 million Brazilians who took part in a symbolic referendum rejected Brazil's participation in a hemisphere-wide free trade area."

That was on September 19th. How did I manage to miss it?

It probably helped that none of the major news outlets reported it.

Easing Saddam's Conscience

Washington Post: "An explicit purpose of Rumsfeld's return trip in March 1984, the once-secret documents reveal for the first time, was to ease the strain created by a U.S. condemnation of chemical weapons."

The Age: "Claims that US troops captured Saddam Hussein have been challenged by reports that he was discovered only after Kurdish forces had taken him prisoner."

December 12, 2003

173 to 1

173 yeas, one nea. That was the voting record on December 8th when the United Nations General Assembly voted on a comprehensive test ban treaty resolution(details).

On a resolution sponsored by Japan that called for compliance with the program to eliminate Nuclear forces by those nations participating in the 2000 Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (including the US) two countries voted no: America and India.

Prevention of an arms race in outer space: 174 yeas, 0 neas, four abstentions. The abstentions came from the United States, and three US client states.

December 11, 2003

Bush vs. Bush

Comedy Central has Gov. Bush debate Pres. Bush, to good effect. (Requires RealOne player)

Florida Orange Juice: Made With Slave Labour [tm]

For nine months, The Palm Beach Post explored the roots of modern-day slavery. Reporters and photographers traveled to destitute Mexican villages, crossed the desert with a smuggler, rode across the U.S. with illegal immigrants, found new claims of slavery, uncovered rampant Social Security fraud, and found that Florida's famous orange juice comes with hidden costs.

More.

December 05, 2003

Embedded in Iraq

Last week, CBC TV ran a documentary entitled Deadline Iraq: Uncensored Stories of the War (lots of material on the web site). It features interviews with a number of journalists who were embedded with American armed forces, along with some footage that I'm guessing didn't make it on the evening news.

It's well worth watching. And you can watch it online, here.

Turkey

In Iraq, Bush posed with a fake thanksgiving turkey.

November 18, 2003

FTAA on FTAA

One of the more interesting articles over at StopFTAA.org quotes the FTAA web site extensively and interprets each passage.

The media reform network has a petition about the FTAA and media democracy.

The bottom line with the FTAA is simple: even if it's the best thing ever for everyone (and there is every indication that it isn't), it's happening in secret, in reference to secreat documents, so there's simply no way to know.

A simple way to guess at the content of negotiations is to ask who has access to the process of creation. In this case, it's politicians and corporate lobbyists who have the most access, as well as the most momentum. It's not hard to guess at who the result will benefit, and at whose expense.

Looking for basics? Global Exchange has a list of frequently asked questions.

November 14, 2003

Gagged and Bound

Aljazeera.Net: "US occupation soldiers handcuffed and firmly wrapped masking tape around an Iraqi man's mouth as they arrested him for speaking out against occupation troops."

Independent: "American jeans, Florida orange juice and dozens of other US products could double in price from next month because of a growing transatlantic trade war."

Christian Science Monitor: "Pressured for time, and hoping to avoid political controversy, the Ministry of Education under the U.S.-led coalition government removed any content considered "controversial," including the 1991 Gulf War; the Iran-Iraq war; and all references to Israelis, Americans or Kurds. 'Entire swaths of 20th-century history have been deleted,' says Bill Evers, a U.S. Defense Department employee and one of three American advisers to the Ministry of Education."

UPI: "The Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide whether the Constitution extends to the cells of terror suspects at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba."

November 12, 2003

Pull their toenails out, just not in the US

Toronto Star: Critics condemn U.S. torture by proxy

"There have been a series of these renditions, mainly to countries in the Middle East," says Tom Malinowski, director of Human Rights Watch's office in Washington. "We don't really know how many people have been sent there, because it's kept highly secret."

Defining Resistance

Scott Ritter discusses Iraqi resistance to the occupation.

Indeed, a standard quotient among counterinsurgency experts is that for every 100 active insurgents fielded, there must be 1,000 to 10,000 active supporters in the local population... The growing number, sophistication, and diversity of attacks on US forces suggests that the resistance is growing and becoming more organized - clear evidence that the US may be losing the struggle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.

November 09, 2003

They're Not Resisting, They're Terrorizing

Reuters: "The Los Angeles Times has ordered its journalists to stop describing anti-American forces in Iraq as resistance fighters, saying the term romanticises them and evokes World War II-era heroism."

Washington Post: "I visited a public school in Northwest Washington. Some friends were holding a benefit to raise money for a library that had no books, desks, chairs or computers."

Ha'aretz: "Recently, several articles appearing in the West (most of them written by Jewish commentators) questioned whether it was a mistake to establish the State of Israel along ethnic lines - as a Jewish state."

Assaf Oron: "This is the image I keep receiving here: On one side is a democracy stuck in an impossible region and trying to make the best of it. On the other is a demonic entity called the Palestinian Authority, whose heads seem bent on continuing to terrorize Israel's defenseless civilians. Everything Israel's army does is clearly out of self-defense, and as long as there's terror, there's justification to do even more... The only true part in this image is that my compatriots in Israel are at risk of terror attacks. All the rest is blatantly false."

Charleston Gazette: "Still other [private military firms hired by the US government], like Executive Outcomes, engage in actual combat. Using former soldiers from apartheid South Africa, Executive Outcomes fought on both sides of some armed conflicts, such as the bitter battles in Angola. Some PMFs help provoke violent coups. During the first Gulf War, one of every 100 Americans in that region worked for a PMF. Today in Iraq, one of every 10 Americans works for a private military contractor."

The Age: "While the bloody Israeli-Palestinian conflict captures headlines, for many Israelis a more intractable problem is now the daily struggle to get by."

November 08, 2003

Political Geekery

Doc Searls takes note of what software various US Presidential candidates are using to host their web sites.

Being curious, I checked to see if the same trend (right-wing uses Microsoft, left uses Linux) applies in Canada. The results are pretty similar, with the exception of the PC party (though they do, for the moment, have that word "progressive" in their title...)

Alliance: Microsoft IIS on Windows 2000

NDP: Apache on Linux

PC: Apache on FreeBSD

Liberal: Microsoft IIS on Windows 2000

Green Party: Apache on FreeBSD

November 05, 2003

Return to Slavery?

When the gap between rich and poor is not large enough - find some poorer folks who are willing work harder for less. Even the WSJ seems put off.

November 04, 2003

Logistics

"Honestly, it's a little tougher than I thought it was going to be... If we have to, we just mow the whole place down, see what happens. You're dealing with insane suicide bombers who are killing our people, and we need to be very aggressive in taking them out."

--Senator Trent Lott

October 30, 2003

Bigger Banks

Guardian: "Bank of America today agreed to buy FleetBoston Financial in a $47bn (£27.7bn) deal that will create one of the world's biggest banking companies."

October 24, 2003

Corruption of the Willing

Christian Aid Report: "A staggering US$4 billion in oil revenues and other Iraqi funds earmarked for the reconstruction of the country has disappeared into opaque bank accounts administered by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the US-controlled body that rules Iraq. By the end of the year, if nothing changes in the way this cash is accounted for, that figure will double. The financial black hole, uncovered by a Christian Aid investigation, is revealed as delegates gather for the donors' conference in Madrid. Before pledging money from their own countries' coffers to boost the reconstruction efforts, as requested by the US and UK governments, these delegates should first demand: 'What has happened to the missing billions?' "

Ancient History

Richard Reeves: "'America is proud of its part in the great story of the Filipino people,' said President Bush (news - web sites) to a joint session of the Congress of the Philippines last week. 'Together our soldiers liberated the Philippines from colonial rule.' Unfortunately, we then killed more than 200,000 Filipinos. Almost all of the dead were civilians, killed in the two years after we liberated them from the Spanish in 1898. One of our generals there, a cranky Civil War veteran named Jacob Smith, told his men: 'I wish you to kill and burn ... I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States.'"

October 23, 2003

You can't make this [stuff] up

"...why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many, what day it's gonna happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it's, it's not relevant. So, why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"

--Barbara Bush

Measured Response

Agence France-Press: "A right-wing Knesset member Tuesday accused high-profile Israeli leftists who drafted an unofficial peace plan with the Palestinians of 'treason' and demanded they be sentenced to death or life imprisonment. 'Those who initiated the Geneva agreement have perpetrated a crime of treason necessitating a death sentence or life imprisonement,' Shaul Yahalom, who heads the radical National Religious Party (NRP), wrote in a letter to Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein, according to a copy obtained by AFP."

New Military Response

What is Rumsfeld up to? I wonder what a "more agile security agency" means to him?

Any change to the largest military organization in the world needs careful scrutiny. It needs extra scrutiny when the proposals would include creating new organizations with more flexibility. Is flexibility achieved at the cost of controls? Does an increased speed of response mean fewer decision makers, fewer checks and balances. Does flexibility mean turning a blind eye to the consequences of actions - or perhaps it means the flexibility to ignore domestic laws as well as international laws.

There are good reasons for the bureaucratic controls on western militaries - it's meant to ensure the military is doing the citizens business and not doing citizens.

Rumsfeld is the Jedi-Master of bureaucratic manipulation. He set up a separate, 'agile' intelligence arm in the pentagon to get better results from the same raw intelligence that the CIA said was inconclusive; this lead to a war justified by half-truths and misrepresentations.

I would certainly agree that new responses are needed to battle terrorism. How about not supporting dictators, reducing poverty, reducing that hopelessness that induces testosterone fueled young men to join these organizations in the first place. There are many credible opportunities to be flexible without resorting the blunt instruments of military force.

I hope our friends south of the border wake up before the dark side independently controls all the levers of power!

October 22, 2003

In Other News...

Observer: "Israeli and US officials have admitted collaborating to deploy US-supplied Harpoon cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads in Israel's fleet of Dolphin-class submarines, giving the Middle East's only nuclear power the ability to strike at any of its Arab neighbors."

International News (Pakistan): "The 'evangelical' belief of British Prime Minister Tony Blair that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction pushed the country into war for false reasons, Blair’s former foreign secretary revealed on Sunday."

Daily Star (opinion): "During congressional hearings held earlier this summer, a leading advocate of higher education was forced to deny that Edward Said’s influential work Orientalism (1978), is being regularly taught in American universities. In the climate of intimidation hanging over US academic institutions in the post-Sept. 11, 2001 era, many other academics will be forced to repeatedly disavow Said, and the cock has not crowed yet."

Black Commentator: "The previously unthinkable is now on the table. Russia, the world’s second largest oil exporter, is giving serious consideration to trading its black gold in euros, a switch that would surely set dominos in motion among other oil producing nations and, ultimately, knock the dollar off its global throne."

Oakland Tribune: "After sinking 40 years and billions of dollars into beam weapons, defense scientists are on the cusp of what could be a military revolution -- warfare at the speed of light."

UPI: "Makers of anti-terrorist technology are lining up to register under a new government scheme that provides them with immunity from lawsuits brought if their products malfunction or don't work during a terrorist attack."

NYTimes (op/ed): "There has been rioting in Bolivia for nearly four weeks now. News reports say that the riots have been over the construction of a pipeline to ship natural gas to the United States. That's true, but there's a deeper anger at work: anger toward the United States and its war against a traditional Bolivian crop, coca."

October 17, 2003

What to do about the WTO

The failure of the WTO negotiations in Cancun is tragic. In September of 2003 Fred McMahon of the Fraser Institute wrote:

For the sake of the world's most destitute, the World Trade Organization ... must act decisively to eliminate the greatest impediment to reducing world poverty -- agricultural barriers and subsidies imposed by the world's richest nations.

The scope of the problem is huge and the impact is terrible.

The worlds richest nations have huge agricultural subsidies in place to prop up domestic agricultural production. In the US, 18% of all farm receipts are subsidies. In Canada, despite recent reductions, 20% of receipts are subsidies. This pales in comparison to the 36% in the EU. While half of the world lives on less than $2 a day the EU provides a subsidy of $2.50 to each and every cow every day.

Many people think this isn't right but feel that all the foreign aid we provide compensates for any losses caused by western subsidies. That is not the case. In fact, the rich nations provide about $50 billion per year in foreign aid and $300 billion per year in agricultural subsidies. These subsidies reduce the output of poor nations by about $60 billion per year. Rich nations would have to provide another $10 billion per year just to break even on paper. The number is likely much larger because only a portion of the aid actually reaches those who need it.

In the case of agriculture the claim by WTO protesters that current arrangements favor rich nations at the expense of the poor is true. The question is: what to do about it.

Most of the protests that I have seen or read take the position that the WTO is evil; that it should be dissolved; and when it is dissolved the world will be a better place. This kind of rhetoric does nothing to improve the situation of the worlds poor. In fact dissolving the only mechanism for negotiation will do great harm to those the protesters are trying to help.

Some NGOs and poor countries claimed that the collapse of the talks in Cancun was a great success. A great success for who? The poor remain poor and the subsidies remain in place.

In my view the rich nations bear the lions share of responsibility for the collapse of the talks. The bold statements made in the Doha round — "reduce trade distorting farm support, slash tariffs on farm goods, and eliminate agriculture-export subsidies" — were betrayed by the meagre actions that followed. According to the Economist, they are not the only contributors to the failure:

Egged on by a bevy of activists, too many third-world politicians got carried away by the thrill of saying no—ignoring the fact that poor countries actually have more to gain from lowering their own trade barriers than from persuading rich countries to lower theirs. According to the World Bank, over 70% of the benefits that poor countries might see from the Doha round would come from freeing trade with each other. By refusing to compromise, poor countries have come away with nothing.

The only path out of poverty is commerce. The collapse of the Cancun talks is not a cause to celebrate. Certainly it is an example of the poor countries and newly formed alliances flexing their muscle and that may engender some pride in a group that wins few battles. However, celebrating the failure, is celebrating an event that may well entrench the problem further.

While the battle in Cancun was primarily between rich and poor nations only 30% of the benefits of Doha are realized by removing rich nation tariffs. 70% of poor nations' benefits are realized by reducing tariffs between poor countries.

Flushed down the drain along with rich nation tariffs were other Singapore issues equally important to relieving poverty through trade. One of these was trade facilitation. On average the cost of transporting goods from African nations is five times higher than tariffs on those goods. Corrupt and inefficient customs procedures are a large part of that burden.

Negotiators are meeting in Geneva to try and put humpty together again. Lets hope they can keep the cart on the path. If they fail - it will be no cause to celebrate!

October 16, 2003

In Jenin

On the main street, coffee vendors and vegetable carts have begun to reappear and people are emerging from their homes to get food and medicine, drink coffee, and just sit on the sidewalks and talk. Shops are opening one fold of their steel doors to allow a slim entrance, and a small market has even established itself less than twenty feet from the central site of the stone throwing and machine gunning.

In response, the tanks are now enforcing the curfew steadily all day, circling the city, passing up and down the main street firing their machine guns, tearing up the boulevards and spraying the sidewalks and homes with a thick diesel smokescreen that leaves the midday sunshine looking like the densest of maritime fog, taking several minutes to clear.

Before the tanks reach the main street, someone will come running up the road yelling "they're coming!" and the shopkeepers quickly seal their steel doors, the adults scurry down the alleys leaving their coffee cups where they were, the photographers get in position and the children prepare their stones.

The tanks pass, shooting hundreds of rounds and spraying clouds of smoke as the children heave their stones - while some play a terrifying game where they mount the back of the tank and ride the enormous death machine in a way that leaves them oddly untouchable since the mounted gun cannot shoot down at itself.

More.

"The Soviet Republic of Texas "

Washington Post Editorial: "You might think that America's rigged system of congressional elections couldn't get much worse. Self-serving redistricting schemes nationwide already have left an overwhelming number of seats in the House of Representatives so uncompetitive that election results are practically as preordained as in the old Soviet Union. In the last election, for example, 98 percent of incumbents were reelected, and the average winning candidate got more than 70 percent of the vote. More candidates ran without any major-party opposition than won by a margin of less than 20 percent. Yet even given this record, the just-completed Texas congressional redistricting plan represents a new low."

Rumsfeld's $9 Billion Slush Fund

Slate:"For all the debate over President Bush's $87 billion supplemental request for military operations and economic reconstruction in Afghanistan and Iraq, no one seems to have noticed that the sum includes a slush fund of at least $9.3 billion, which Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld can spend pretty much as he pleases."

Computerized Voting in the US: Scary

All the President's votes?

It is still unclear exactly how results from these missing cards were tabulated, or if they were counted at all. And we will probably never know, for a highly disturbing reason. The vote count was not conducted by state elections officials, but by the private company that sold Georgia the voting machines in the first place, under a strict trade-secrecy contract that made it not only difficult but actually illegal - on pain of stiff criminal penalties - for the state to touch the equipment or examine the proprietary software to ensure the machines worked properly. There was not even a paper trail to follow up. The machines were fitted with thermal printing devices that could theoretically provide a written record of voters' choices, but these were not activated. Consequently, recounts were impossible. Had Diebold Inc, the manufacturer, been asked to review the votes, all it could have done was programme the computers to spit out the same data as before, flawed or not.

The Effects of Water Privatization in India

India's common resources, such as water, are being appropriated by the government and given to private corporations at the behest of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization. This is a report that details the effects on the people of India.

"The people were protesting Coca Cola's takeover of common water resources of the village for its water bottling plant. The company has been drawing 15 lakh liters of water per day, which has dried the aquifers within 2 years and has polluted the water."

"the Upper Ganga Canal is being lined to prevent seepage into the neighboring fields (an important source of moisture for farming) and recharge of ground water, and farmers are being prevented from digging wells even as they are reeling under severe drought."

"Private Public Partnership is the buzzword in the water privatization."

"Ganga's waters, the lifeline of northern India and India's food security, are being handed over to Suez to quench the thirst of Delhi's elite even as a hundred thousand people are forcefully and violently removed from their homes in Tehri for the Tehri Dam."

Counterpunch has more on US and EU post-Cancun privatization plans and effects in Central America.

October 14, 2003

A deep sense of irony

Vladimir Putin, according to the NY Times,

avoided a direct question about the growing influence of the security officials known as siloviki by saying he had simply restructured law enforcement agencies the way the Bush administration created the Department of Homeland Security. "To talk about a return to the Soviet times in connection with would be like talking about the times of McCarthy, referring to the ministry of homeland security in the United States," he said. "This is rubbish that has nothing to do with reality."

October 11, 2003

2003 Nobel Peace Prize

Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian human rights lawyer and activist, has won this years Nobel Peace Prize. This makes her the first Iranian to win the peace prize. Ebadi was Iran's first female judge but was forced to resign by the Islamic Revolution of 1979. She has crusaded for the rights of dissidents, women, refugees and child labourers and has even been jailed for her efforts. Ebadi was awarded the prize amongst 165 other candidates including Pope John Paul II and former Czech President Vaclav Havel.

Ebadi said:"This prize doesn't belong to me only. It belongs to all
people who work for human rights and democracy in
Iran."

Ebadi will be awarded the $1.3 million prize on December 10, 2003, in Oslo.

The Associated Press

October 09, 2003

2003 Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences

Robert F. Engle, of New York University, and Clive W.J. Granger, of the University of California, have won the 2003 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. They were awarded the prize for their work in statistical methods for economic time series. Their research can be used for chronological observations of gross domestic product, prices, interest rates and stock prices.

The Canadian Press

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Dr. Peter Agre, of the John Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Dr. Roderick Mackinnon, of Rockefeller University, have won the 2003 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Agre and Mackinnon did work on channels that water molecules and electrically charged atoms, or ions, pass through in and out of cells. The proper functioning of such channels are responsible for making the heart beat, the brain function, the kidneys work and the limbs move. Channel malfunction can cause cystic fibrosis, irregular heart beat, high blood pressure, paralysis and disorders of the kidney and muscle.

Agre said:"It's not the kind of problem that can be solved by straight-ahead thinking."

Mackinnon felt he was "looking at something beautiful in nature."

The two scientists will share the $1.3 million prize.

YahooNews

October 08, 2003

Lies, more or less

WorldNetDaily: "By telling Americans that Saddam could "on any given day" slip unconventional weapons to al-Qaida if America didn't disarm him, the president misrepresented the conclusions of his own secret intelligence report, which warned that Saddam wouldn't even try to reach out to al-Qaida unless he were attacked and had nothing to lose – and might even find that hard to do since he had no history of conducting joint terrorist operations with al-Qaida, and certainly none against the U.S."

From Mike Moore's new book:

We are addicted to this happy rags-to-riches myth in this country. People in other industrialised democracies are content to make a good enough living to pay their bills and raise their families. Few have a cutthroat desire to strike it rich. They live in reality, where there are only going to be a few rich people, and you are not going to be one of them. So get used to it.

Of course, rich people in those countries are very careful not to upset the balance. Even though there are greedy bastards among them, they do have some limits placed on them. In the manufacturing sector, for example, British CEOs make 24 times as much as their average workers - the widest gap in Europe. German CEOs only make 15 times more than their employees, while Swedish CEOs get 13 times as much. But here in the US, the average CEO makes 411 times the salaries of their blue-collar workers. Wealthy Europeans pay up to 65% in taxes, and they know better than to bitch too loud about it or the people will make them fork over even more.

US Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner (ret.): "And, I think, maybe, probably the best way to summarise all that was they became victims of their own marketing campaign."

IfAmericansKnew.org: "Americans have an enormous, often little known, connection to the ongoing and dangerous tragedy that is Israel and Palestine. As lives of the young and old are increasingly lost and devastated, due in part to short-sighted US policies, it is inevitable that these policies will endanger American lives as well. American citizens have the power to end this carnage."

From Occupied Palestine

Jon Elmer is in Jenin, on the West Bank, and has filed two new updates:

A note from under curfew in Jenin

We are writing from behind the locked green steel doors of an internet cafe in Jenin, a city under 24-hour curfew since the bombing in Haifa three days ago that was carried out by a 27-year old women who was a lawyer in this city. The roar of tanks is consistent, and gunshots crackle in the distance (and closer) at regular intervals. House demolitions have been a nightly affair, some 17 in the past four days, including the homes of the entire extended family of the bomber.

Human Rights: B'Tselem interview

Jessica Montell, B'Tselem - Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories: Over the past three years we have seen an increase in violence against both Israelis and Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. It seems that as part of this intifada, people on both sides are taking the law into their own hands and committing acts of violence against the other community.

From a human rights perspective, we are more concerned with the response of the Israeli authorities, and the responsibility of Israel to enforce the law and to punish people who violate the law. The Israeli authorities are, on the whole, much more lenient toward Jews who break the law - including acts of violence - than they are toward Palestinians.

The intensive investigations, arrests, interrogations, and prosecutions in the case [of the settlers from Bat Ayin], stand in stark contrast to what we see as very lax law enforcement against the routine violence by settlers toward Palestinians.

October 07, 2003

Where'd the money go?

Reuters: "Even if oil prices are favourable, stability is achieved and debts are largely written off, Iraq's economy will not reach even half the size it was in the 1970s, the US-based Institute of International Finance (IIF) said in a document sent to its members and quoted by Reuters."

Arab News: "Al-Jazeera bowed to pressure from the United States government last month by immediately pulling two cartoons deemed “inflammatory” by Washington from its websites, a senior source in the news organization has told Arab News. The two cartoons were pulled 'without any hesitation' from both the Arabic and English language websites after a US government official complained about them, according to the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity."

iFeminists.com: "The modern two-income family is no better off than the one-income family from decades ago. Indeed, family finances are edging ever closer to disaster. So say Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi in their controversial book, 'The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke.'"

2003 Nobel Prize for Medicine

Paul Lauterbur, of the University of Illinois, and Sir Peter Mansfield, of the University of Nottingham, have won the 2003 Nobel Prize for medicine for work done independently leading to the development of MRI, the body scanning technique that displays the internal organs in 3-D detail. The technique, that became widely available in the 1980's, allows doctors to see a tumour in the abdomen, or cartilage and ligaments in the knee without exploratory surgery.

Lauterbur said: "I think the work has been helpful to many people, and
I'm happy that it has been acknowledged by the Swedish
academy."

Mansfield said: "I'm still working in research, but I'd given up all hopes
and ideas of receiving anything in