04 April 2007

Venezuelan Threat? Not Really

Is Hugo Chavez a Threat to Stability? No.
by Mark Weisbrot
April 04, 2007
International Affairs Forum

I have been asked to comment on the question of "whether President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela poses a threat to regional stability and how his critics, including the Bush administration, should respond." This is an easy one.

One may agree or disagree with any of President Chavez's policies or statements, but the idea of him or his government posing a threat to regional stability is ridiculous. In fact, a far more reasonable argument can be made that his government has contributed to stabilizing the region.

It has done so by using its $50 billion dollars of foreign exchange reserves to act as a lender of last resort, and provide other forms of financial aid to countries throughout the region. This is what the International Monetary Fund was alleged to have done in the past but almost never did. It is especially important now that Latin America is going through a major historical transition, where governments of the left now preside over about half of the population of the region.

Latin America is emerging from a long period of failed economic reform policies, known as "neoliberalism" there, which resulted in the worst economic growth performance in more than 100 years. From 1980-2000, regional GDP (gross domestic product) per capita grew by just 9 percent, and another 4 percent for 2000-2005. By comparison, it grew by 82 percent in just the two decades from 1960-1980. As a result of the unprecedented growth failure of the last 25 years, voters have demanded change in a number of countries, including Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Uruguay.

Venezuela has loaned more than $3 billion to Argentina, and has loaned or committed hundreds of millions of dollars to Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and other countries. It also provides subsidized credit for oil to the countries of the Caribbean, through its PetroCaribe program, and provided many other forms of aid to neighboring countries. These resources are provided without policy conditions attached - unlike most other multilateral (IMF, World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank) and bilateral aid. By providing these resources, Venezuela is helping other countries to bring their policies more in line with what voters have demanded, and greatly reducing the threat of economic crises in the process of doing so.

For example, before the Nicaraguan elections last November, US government officials made many threats to the voters of that country that if they elected Daniel Ortega, they would suffer greatly from cutoffs of loans, aid, and even the remittances that many Nicaraguans depend upon from their relatives in the United States. None of these threats have been carried out. This is partly because Washington knows it would be useless and counterproductive to do so, since Nicaragua would simply replace US-controlled funding sources with more borrowing from Venezuela. The same is true for Bolivia, which has vastly increased its hydrocarbon revenues, and is in a stronger bargaining position knowing that it has an international lender that will not try to interfere with its domestic political agenda. The new progressive president of Ecuador, who faces a number of important political battles to deliver on his promises of governmental reform, pro-poor and pro-development policies, is also strengthened by having Venezuela as a lender. When the Argentine government decided to say goodbye to the IMF in January of 2006 by paying off their remaining $9.9 billion in debt, Venezuela's loan of $2.5 billion helped that government to avoid pushing its reserves down to dangerously low levels.

In all of these cases and more, Venezuela's financial support is helping other governments to deliver on their promises to their own voters, thereby contributing not only to stability but to the strengthening of democracy in the region. Washington-sponsored aid, by contrast, has often had the opposite effect - provoking "IMF riots," and sometimes economic crises (e.g. the 1998-2002 Argentine depression), by trying to impose policies that were deeply unpopular and, as we now know, economically flawed.

No other government in the region accepts the Bush Administration's charge that Chavez is a threat to regional stability - not even President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia, which shares a 1300 mile conflict-ridden border with Venezuela. When Uribe met with members of the US Congress last year, he refused to criticize Chavez - reportedly even in private. The vast majority of Latin American governments also supported Venezuela's bid for the UN Security Council last year, even after he called President Bush "the Devil" at the UN, and despite all the pressure that the United States - whose economy is 67 times the size of Venezuela's - brought to bear on them.

What should the Bush Administration do about the non-threat from Venezuela? It could start by acknowledging that it was wrong to support the April 2002 coup that overthrew Chavez. The US Congress should have a real investigation of this involvement, as it did for the US-sponsored coup against the democratic government of Chile in 1973, which yielded volumes of information. The documents that we have so far on the Venezuelan coup from the State Department and the CIA show that the Bush Administration paid some of the leaders of the coup, had advance knowledge of it, and tried to help it succeed by lying about the events as they transpired. The administration also tacitly supported a devastating oil strike that tried to topple the government in 2002-2003, and funded opposition groups through the 2004 failed recall attempt and beyond. In fact, the US Agency for International Development, which is not supposed to be a clandestine organization, continues to pour millions of dollars into Venezuela, Bolivia, and other countries for activities and recipients that it will not divulge. This, too, needs to be made public.

Source

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Posted by The Rag at 8:37 PM

If We Had Real Journalists ....

Of Confessions and Torture
By MARGARET KIMBERLY

None of the Democratic Contenders Has Called for the Closure of the Guantanamo Prison

"I have been forced to run in leg shackles that regularly ripped the skin off my ankles. Many other detainees experienced the same." - Guantanamo detainee David Hicks.

"I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z." - Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's Guantanamo confession.

Guantanamo is awash in confessions these days. Walid Mohammad bin Attash claims to have blown up the USS Cole. Khalid Sheik Mohammed confessed to planning 9/11, the bombing of U.S. embassies in Africa, and night clubs in Bali. He also confessed to killing of Daniel Pearl and perhaps Anna Nicole Smith, too.

An Australian prisoner, David Hicks, has confessed to terrorist activity. He spent 5 years at Guantanamo and recently pleaded guilty to providing material support for terrorism, which wasn't even against U.S. law until October 2006. The only way for him to return home was to confess. He also had to sign an agreement denying his previous statements that he had been tortured. He had to promise not to sue the U.S. government, make any money from telling the story of his ordeal, or talk to the media for at least one year.

These confessions are not taken seriously by any intelligent people in this country and they are certainly not taken seriously by anyone outside of it. Even the namby pamby Congressional actions on Iraq are sending the Bushites into a frenzy of show trials to justify waging endless war on the rest of humanity. The confessions will surely be repeated when the bombing of Iran begins.

Not only are these military tribunals a travesty and a great injustice to the people involved, but they have doomed our country. The hatred that spawned the 9/11 attacks has only grown with time. Now all Americans have bulls eyes on their heads because of the evil people who run this government.

There have been many brave efforts to stop this evil doing, but so far it has come to naught. U.S. courts have dismissed lawsuits, Congress enabled the administration by approving the kangaroo court system. Truth tellers like Democratic Senator Richard Durbin are sent to the wood shed by their own party for rightly comparing Guantanamo to a Nazi prison.

David Hicks is a white Australian who converted to Islam and lived in Afghanistan in 2001. He has been held for five years and was denied the most basic constitutional rights that he would have enjoyed in Australia or the United States. His family made his case a cause celebre in his country and forced his Bush-loving prime minister, John Howard, to negotiate for his release.

Howard is facing a tough election in November, so he doesn't want Hicks mucking things up by telling his harrowing tales. Get him out but don't let him talk until a more opportune time. So the man who was called terror enemy number one and originally threatened with a 20 year sentence will now be allowed to serve nine months in his native Australia.

Even if America survives until November 2008 and manages to get the Republicans out of the White House, none of the Democratic front runners has said anything about closing Gitmo and using the court system that successfully tried terror suspects before Bush came to office. Barack Obama thinks military courts are better.

"I've heard, for example, the argument that it should be military courts, and not federal judges, who should make decisions on these detainees. I actually agree with that. The problem is that the structure of the military proceedings has been poorly thought through."

Senator Smarty Pants also predicted that terror suspects would have counsel and be able to present evidence on their behalf.

"He (Khalid Mohammed) will have counsel, he will be able to present evidence, and he will be able to rebut the Government's case. The feeling is that he is guilty of a war crime and to do otherwise might violate some of our agreements under the Geneva Conventions. I think that is good, that we are going to provide him with some procedure and process."

It is news to me that guilt of war crimes is determined by a Senator's feelings. No one at Gitmo checked with the superstar media darling before they kept Khalid Sheikh Mohammed from calling witnesses or having attorneys present. Hillary Clinton, in her typical fear of saying anything of substance, has said nothing about the process.

There will be no respite from the destruction of the Constitution and the dismissal of International Law followed by the rest of the world. We are in great danger from our own government and that danger will not lessen after the inauguration of a new president in January of 2009.

While Washington burns, reporters have fun with Karl Rove at the annual Correspondents Association dinner. Rove and Bush have the nerve to joke about breaking the law and the press make fools of themselves in order to stay in their good graces. If we had real journalists, this annual embarrassment would be cancelled for lack of participants. But we don't have real journalists, so they continue to whore for a living while somewhere revenge is being plotted against every American. When the strike comes most people won't even know why and David Hicks won't be able to tell us.

Source

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Posted by The Rag at 8:21 PM

Slimy Payback

Bush Bypasses Dems to Name Ambassador
By JENNIFER LOVEN, AP

WASHINGTON (April 4) - President Bush named Republican fundraiser Sam Fox as U.S. ambassador to Belgium on Wednesday, using a maneuver that allowed him to bypass Congress, where Democrats had derailed Fox's nomination.

The appointment, made while lawmakers were out of town on spring break, prompted angry rebukes from Democrats, who said Bush's action may even be illegal.

Democrats had denounced Fox for his donation to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth during the 2004 presidential campaign. The group's TV ads, which claimed that Sen. John Kerry exaggerated his military record in Vietnam, were viewed as a major factor in the Massachusetts Democrat 's election loss.

Recognizing Fox did not have the votes to obtain Senate confirmation in the Foreign Relations Committee, Bush withdrew the nomination last week. On Wednesday, with the Senate on a one-week break, the president used his power to make recess appointments to put Fox in the job without Senate confirmation.

This means Fox can remain ambassador until the end of the next session of Congress, effectively through the end of the Bush presidency.

"It's sad but not surprising that this White House would abuse the power of the presidency to reward a donor over the objections of the Senate," Kerry said in a statement.

Read the rest here.

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Posted by The Rag at 7:18 PM

Politicking Fear, Part 3

Hijacking Catastrophe: Hijacking Fear (3 of 10)

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Posted by The Rag at 7:15 PM

Amerikan Colonialism

Another Perspective: Iraq and Counterinsurgency
By William Tucker
Published 4/4/2007 12:08:50 AM

Americans don't have much of a colonial experience. Otherwise we would recognize the war in Iraq for what it is -- a colonial occupation.

Whatever dreams we may have had of winning a War on Terror in Baghdad or turning Iraq into a beacon of democracy in the Middle East are now long gone. What we have in Iraq is a series of American fortifications where soldiers live a life that reasonably mirrors conditions back home and then once a day or week put on "full battle rattle" and risk their lives by venturing into what is essentially hostile territory.

Granted we have a lot of people on our side and a sizable portion of the population wants us to stay. "Allah Bless the USA" was one piece of graffiti I saw -- although it did occur to me later that it was written in English.

But no American soldier goes anywhere in Iraq without full body armor and a humvee. Helicopter flights are made at night and under conditions of extreme secrecy. Anyone with a rifle is a potential insurgent and there are thousands of them. There is no margin of safety.

Ask military leaders how long this is going to go on and they will give you the same response. "We've done a lot of studies of insurgencies. There's never been one that was put down in less than ten years. The 1920s insurgency in the Philippines, the British experience in Sudan in the 19th century -- all of them weren't quelled in less than a decade. Iraq is going to take the same amount of time. We just hope the people back home have the patience to see it through."

The problem with this analysis is that all the examples are from colonial experiences, both Europe's and ours. The British are often held up as the gold standard -- as in Max Boot's neoconservative manifesto, The Savage Wars of Peace. Since the Philippines is our own experience and in many ways the best analogy to Iraq, let's take a long look at what happened.

Read the rest here.

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Posted by The Rag at 9:05 AM

03 April 2007

Politicking Fear, Part 2

Hijacking Catastrophe: Blueprint for Empire (2 of 10)

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Posted by The Rag at 10:04 PM

Things That Cannot Be Offset By Jingoism

Government and Citizenship
By Charles Sullivan

04/03/07 "ICH" -- -- I have been thinking a great deal of late about government and its relationship to the citizenry. It should be obvious that any government that claims to be of the people and for the people must also serve the people. Yet it is clear that the current government does not serve the people—it exploits them. When sixty-four percent of the citizenry demand an end to the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the government responds not by withdrawing its troops, but by escalating the war, that government cannot be a government of the people, for the people, and by the people. What is it then?

It is a government of the wealthy; a corporate, fascist government of the highest order. It is a government that spurns ordinary people and uses its power against them. It is the opposite of the kind of representative government it purports to be. It extorts tax dollars from its citizens and sends them to do the bidding of the very wealthy under the pretense of patriotism and national defense. It is, in fact, using citizens against citizens and plundering the national treasure with the tools of empire, class warfare, and imperialism.

Every military weapon that is manufactured and put in use diminishes us as a nation. Militarism enriches the defense contractors and the plutocracy by robbing the citizens. It deprives us of an urgently needed national health care system, better schools, decent jobs that provide living wages; and it exacts social and environmental costs that are incalculable, all of which are important to ordinary Americans.

We do not have a government based upon the rule of law or equality, as evidenced by its own history—even its recent history, as we saw in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina; or in the dilapidated military hospitals across the land where limbless soldiers cannot get the health care they so desperately need, and lie waiting and wasting in filth and ruin. These are the troops the government purports to care so much about. Broken men and women from combat zones are the worn out tools of empire builders. Like unwanted toys, they are used up and no longer played with by our rulers; an embarrassment, something to be warehoused safely from public view.

The president and his minions behave as if they are above the law. Laws apply to his subjects, but not to the King who thinks he is the supreme ruler.

They want us to believe that we support our troops by placing magnetic ribbons on our vehicles and by prominently displaying American flags. But Walter Reed and other military hospitals across the land reveal what we really think about our military veterans in ways that cannot be offset by patriotic trinkets and jingoism. The government honors them in patriotic language even as they abandon them in deed.

There is a constant tension that exists between the government and the governed. The people are disorganized and the government is doing everything in its power to keep them that way. Nearly all of the public good that was ever accomplished in this country came as the result of public outcry for justice, a cry that brought people together in mass to organize against gross injustice. That is how chattel slavery was finally abolished. It is how civil rights were won. Organized mass civil disobedience and protest brought the Viet Nam war to an end.

When enough good people unite in common cause, government is forced to hear their voice and meet their demands. I should note here that it is only unjust governments that have anything to fear from its citizenry. Democratic governments do not treat its own citizens like terrorists by trying to quell dissent or spying on them. Nor do they imprison those who disagree with them and uphold a higher code of ethics and conduct than them.

The Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence—all of them important and eloquent documents—did not bring about the most important achievements in American history. Ordinary citizens did all of that by organizing and demanding justice. Freedom isn’t won in the courts or secured in documents; it is won in the streets through the deeds of an aroused and just citizenry. Just laws can be written but it is ordinary people who must bring them to life and give them meaning. Integrity must live in the hearts of the citizenry. Justice is not a noun—it is a verb that must be driven by principled action.

An alert, thoughtful, rational, conscientious citizenry; an aroused citizenry, is the worst nightmare of tyranny. That is why the government is spying on its citizens. That is why posse comitatus and habeas corpus were revoked by the Bush regime and enabled by a timorous congress. It has nothing to do with fighting terrorism. The government is keeping an eye on us, looking for signs of trouble. They must keep us from coming together, from organizing against the established order just as radical unions are kept out of the work place.

Most of the citizens of the United States, while quite naïve, are, I believe, good and decent people who play by the rules. The majority of them, whose voices are rarely heard above the noise of the corporate media, operate with a sense of justice and fair play. Most of them would not knowingly cheat a neighbor and only a small percentage, actually a fraction of one percent of them, would murder a neighbor. It is their naiveté, their ignorance and trust in authority that gets them into trouble.

Conversely, the government has a murderous history, a long record of criminality, and a track record of lying and deception that any sociopath would envy—especially in its present incarnation under George Bush and Dick Cheney. It has a lot to answer for. When violence is the first resort of a government, the people have no business referring to it as a democratic republic. They must offer resistance to it. They must bring it into line with the values and code of ethics of the citizenry.

Few would argue, no matter what political stripe they wear, that the current government bears no more resemblance to the citizenry than it does to the socio-economic demographics of the population as a whole. Thus the vast majority of us have government without representation. It is government that does not serve the people, but treats them as its servants.

If we are to see improvement, we must stop acting as if we are living on the plantation and take personal responsibility for what the government is doing in our name. This will require organized resistance beginning at the community level and spreading outward. It all begins with the personal choices we make. Ultimately, it will require global solidarity to meet a threat that is also global in extent.

Charles Sullivan is an architectural millwright, photographer, activist, and free-lance writer residing deep in the hinterlands of West Virginia. He welcomes your comments at csullivan@phreego.com.

Source

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Posted by The Rag at 10:01 PM

Leadup to the Iran Crisis

The botched US raid that led to the hostage crisis
By Patrick Cockburn
Published: 03 April 2007

A failed American attempt to abduct two senior Iranian security officers on an official visit to northern Iraq was the starting pistol for a crisis that 10 weeks later led to Iranians seizing 15 British sailors and Marines.

Early on the morning of 11 January, helicopter-born US forces launched a surprise raid on a long-established Iranian liaison office in the city of Arbil in Iraqi Kurdistan. They captured five relatively junior Iranian officials whom the US accuses of being intelligence agents and still holds.

In reality the US attack had a far more ambitious objective, The Independent has learned. The aim of the raid, launched without informing the Kurdish authorities, was to seize two men at the very heart of the Iranian security establishment.

Better understanding of the seriousness of the US action in Arbil - and the angry Iranian response to it - should have led Downing Street and the Ministry of Defence to realise that Iran was likely to retaliate against American or British forces such as highly vulnerable Navy search parties in the Gulf. The two senior Iranian officers the US sought to capture were Mohammed Jafari, the powerful deputy head of the Iranian National Security Council, and General Minojahar Frouzanda, the chief of intelligence of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, according to Kurdish officials.

The two men were in Kurdistan on an official visit during which they met the Iraqi President, Jalal Talabani, and later saw Massoud Barzani, the President of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), at his mountain headquarters overlooking Arbil.

Read the rest here.

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Posted by The Rag at 9:51 PM

Paying for the Work Done by Prisoners

Activist Attorney Sues Over Slave Labor Practices
by Lynda Carson‚ Apr. 03‚ 2007

In late March, Tony Serra — San Francisco's well known and respected criminal defense attorney — filed suit against the federal government over slave labor practices. Just out of California's Lompoc prison after serving 10 months for his years-long tax boycott, the celebrated attorney filed suit in an attempt to force the federal government to pay its prisoners a fair wage compensation for the work being done by prison inmates.

At the least, Serra believes that inmates should earn minimum wage for the work they do in prison — and that unions should be allowed to organize and represent the inmates for collective bargaining to negotiate better wages and conditions for workers.

"It's a class action lawsuit," says Serra. "I'm a member (plaintiff) of the class, and it was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. We believe that Lompoc's pay scale is in violation of the Fifth and Thirteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, and the United Nations covenants on political, civil and prisoner rights.

"Prisoners have no rights in America," said Serra. "They don't care about the prisoners in this country, and the prisons are profiting from the slave-like conditions being forced upon the inmates. Lompoc has a dairy and meat industry, including a cable factory which is a supplier for the navy and armed forces industry.

"Lompoc generated a lot of money last year," he said, "little of which was returned to the inmates as compensation for the work that they do. The federal prison workforce generates around $65 million per year in net profits, and I received 19 cents an hour when working at Lompoc, while the other prisoners were only earning anywhere from 5 cents to $1.65 an hour for their labor. These are slave wages, and often the inmates come back from work covered in filth and are worn out at the end of the day."

Serra and the 300 to 500 other plaintiffs involved in the class action lawsuit, are being represented by attorneys Stephen Perelson of Mill Valley, and John Murcko and Bill Simpich, of Oakland.

When I asked Serra if he believes the lawsuit will succeed; "I think that there's so many immunities and waivers in regards to how prisons are being operated in this nation that the federal government will do everything possible to toss it out of the courts. If we could manage somehow to bring this class action far enough through the courts to bring it before a jury, we could win."

I asked him about prison life. "It feels good to be out of prison," said Serra, "but I feel bad for all of those that were left behind. I went through a week of feeling like Rip Van Winkle when first getting out, and I had a fresh consciousness to look at everything differently.

Read the rest here.

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Posted by The Rag at 7:49 PM

Juan Cole on the Iranian Hostage Crisis

Our take is slightly different. We believe the Brits, at the urging of the Yanks, probably were positioned in questionable waters deliberately to provoke the Iranians. The latter were duped to respond and seize the fifteen British sailors, thus giving the coalition a perfect excuse to initiate their bombing campaign of Iran on schedule, three days from now on Friday, 6 April.

Iran's new hostage crisis
By Juan Cole

By seizing 15 British sailors, the embattled Iranians aim to rally anti-Western sentiment and force the Brits from Iraq.

The lofty invocations of international law by the British and Iranian governments disguise the banal origins of their current dispute: used cars. The British naval personnel had boarded an Indian vessel they thought was smuggling old automobiles into Iraq. Tehran maintains that they then veered into Iranian waters.

It is not really about used cars, of course, but rather an unpopular and isolated Iranian government attempting to rally support and strengthen itself. The capture by Iranian Revolutionary Guards of 15 British sailors and marines on March 23 has set off a diplomatic crisis and mobilized the public in both Britain and Iran. The ever combative Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared Saturday "that instead of apologizing to the Iranian nation, the British were acting as if Iran owed them something." A member of the Parliament in Tehran called for the British personnel to be tried for espionage, while the Iranian Embassy in Thailand asked other nations to denounce what it called a British trespass into its sovereign territory. On Sunday, a small crowd of some 200 demonstrators threw stones and firecrackers at the British Embassy in Tehran.

Read the rest here.

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Posted by The Rag at 8:28 AM

Loving's Cartoon Tuesday - Junior and the Fence

Thank you, Charlie.

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Posted by The Rag at 8:21 AM

02 April 2007

Racism Rampant - Decidedly the Amerikan Heritage

The Racist War on Immigrants
by Stephen Lendman
April 02, 2007

Emma Lazarus' memorable words on Lady Liberty's pedestal once had meaning as a new nation grew. No longer in a country hostile to the tired, the poor, the huddled masses, the wretched refuse, the homeless and many others not making the grade in a white supremacist Judeo-Christian state worshiping wealth and privilege. No welcome sign is out for the unwanted poor and desperate. At best, they're ignored to subsist on their own. At worst, they're scorned and abused, exploited and discarded like trash or labeled "terrorists" in a post-9/11 world of mass witch-hunt roundups aimed at Muslims because of their faith or country of origin and Latinos coming north to survive the fallout from NAFTA's destructive effects on their lives.

Immigrants of color, the wrong faith or from the wrong parts of the world are never greeted warmly in "America the Beautiful" that's only for the privileged and no one else. They're not wanted except to harvest our crops or do the hard, low-pay, no-benefit labor few others will do. The ground rules to come were set straight away in our original Nationalization Act of 1790 establishing the first path to citizenship. It wasn't friendly to the wrong types as permanent status was limited to foreign-born "free white persons" of "good moral character," meaning people like most of us - our culture, countries of origin, religion and skin color.

Left out were indentured servants, slaves, free blacks, native Americans being exterminated, and later Asians and Latinos whose "appearance" wasn't as acceptable as the whiteness of English-speaking European Christian settlers and the mix of others from Western European countries like Holland, Germany and Scandinavia. The law scarcely changed for 162 years until the 1870 15th amendment loosened it enough to include blacks by 1875, no longer slaves but hardly free and in 1940 gave Latin Americans the same right. After the war in 1945 it extended it further to Filipinos and Asian Indians. Original native Americans, whose land this was for thousands of years, only were enfranchised and given the right of citizenship in their own land when Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924 after most of them were exterminated in a genocidal process still ongoing, never mentioned in the mainstream, and for which no redress was ever made or likely will be.

The 1952 Immigration and Nationality (McCarran-Walter) Act (INA) only grudgingly did what no law before it allowed. For the first time it made individuals of all races eligible for citizenship but imposed strict quotas for those from the Eastern Hemisphere with different standards for caucasians from the West. But nothing is ever simple and straightforward in "America the Beautiful." In the early Cold War atmosphere of Joe McCarthy's communist witch-hunts, anyone accused of leftist sympathies could be targeted, and any alien so-tagged could be deported, and like today no evidence was needed.

From the INA to the present, immigration laws kept changing for better or worse, but one thing was constant. White Christian Western Europeans are welcomed. Others, especially people of color or the wrong religion, get in grudgingly in lesser numbers and receive unequal or harsh treatment when they arrive. The 1996 Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA) and Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA)proved it showing Democrat presidents can be as mean and nasty as Republicans, especially with help from a Republican-controlled Congress.

The 1996 acts were ugly and repressive ignoring the rights of due process and judicial fairness. They allowed Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) agents to detain legal immigrants without bond, deport them without discretionary relief, restrict their access to counsel, bar them from appealing to the courts, and can be applied for even minor offenses little more than youthful indiscretions. These laws under a Democrat president "feel(ing) our pain" showed no more compassion or equity than later ones under George Bush in force today. They allow no second chances and deny targeted legal immigrants their day in court. Their harshness tears apart families unjustly made to suffer by a nation hardening its stance to the wrong kinds of immigrants. They're sent an unwelcome message now much worse in the age of George Bush with his permanent wars on the world and homeland "terrorists" meaning anyone called that on his say alone.

It started post-9/11 with the 2001 USA Patriot Act even harsher in its updated Patriot Act II version. Enacted to combat "terrorism," it's done on the border with more guards to spot, detain, arrest and incarcerate Latinos entering the country for a way to survive. For being undocumented and on the pretext of being suspected "terrorists," they may be indefinitely detained or deported the way it works under any despotic national security police state. It's even worse for Muslims, 5000 of whom were rounded up and held early on with only three of them ever being charged with an offense. And it got far worse for them after that still ongoing.

Today, federal immigration courts can hold secret hearings for anyone here illegally or charged with a law violation, no matter how minor. Those convicted can then be incarcerated or deported to their country of origin often to face arrest and torture. It's now open season on anyone targeted with legal protection no longer shielding innocent victims Justice Department (DOJ) or Department of Homeland Security (DHS) go after. They includes poor and desperate mostly undocumented Latinos from Mexico and Central America coming el norte because NAFTA, CAFTA and other neoliberal unfair trade agreements called "free" destroyed their ability to earn a living at home leaving them no other choice but come north or perish.

It shouldn't be that way, and promises were made early on that "free trade" lifted all boats with higher wages and more jobs. Instead millions of jobs were lost while real wages fell under the effects of a globalized market system crafted for investor elites to profit at the expense of ordinary working people paying the price. They've been devastated since by a sustained massive wealth transfer to the top of the economic pyramid that in the US alone has been a generational process of well over $1 trillion annually to corporations and the richest 1%.

For the past 13 years, NAFTA and the rest of globalized trade provided cover for imperialism on the march for power and profit. It prospers from economic and shooting wars of conquest with an engineered race to the bottom driven by giant predatory corporations allied with friendly governments in their service at the expense of ordinary working people paying the price. The result - mass and growing poverty, human misery, and ecological destruction great enough to threaten the ability of the planet to sustain life.

Blame it on the globalized market system. It's the main reason millions around the world are on the move each year as reported by the International Labor Organization. In 2005, the number reached an estimated 200 million fleeing poverty and conflicts, often leaving families behind, heading for developed countries for jobs and safety unavailable at home.

Read the rest here.

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Posted by The Rag at 9:10 PM

Chomsky Interviewed

On Capitalism, Europe, and the World Bank
Noam Chomsky interviewed by Dennis Ott
April 02, 2007

Dennis Ott: In a recent interview you quoted Thorstein Veblen, who contrasted “substantial people” and “underlying population.”[1] At a shareholder’s meeting of Allianz AG, major shareholder Hans-Martin Buhlmannn expressed the view that there is only one limit to the increase of the dividend: “The inferiors must not be bled so much that they can no longer consume. They must survive as consumers.”[2] Is this the guiding principle of our economic system? And if so, is there any substance to the notion of a “social market economy”?

Noam Chomsky: Those are traditional questions in economics. It’s part of Marx’s reasoning about why there’s going to be a continuing crisis of capitalism: that owners are going to try to squeeze the work force as much as possible, but they can’t go too far, it’ll be nobody to purchase what they buy. And it’s been dealt with over and over again in one or another way during the history of capitalism; there’s an inherent problem.

So for example, Henry Ford famously tried to pay his workers a higher wage than the going wage, because partly on this reasoning – he was not a theoretical economist, but partly on the grounds that if he doesn’t pay his workers enough and other people won’t pay their workers enough, there’s going to be nobody around to buy his model-T Fords. Actually that issue came to court in the United States, around 1916 or so, and led to a fundamental principle of Anglo-American corporate law, which is part of the reason why the Anglo-American system is slightly different from the European social market system. There was a famous case called “Dodge v. Ford.” Some of the stockholders of the Ford motor company, the Dodge brothers, brought Henry Ford to court, claiming that by paying the workers a higher wage, and by making cars better than they had to be made, he was depriving them of their profits – because it’s true: dividends would be lower. They went to the courts, and they won.

The courts decided that the management of the corporation has the legal responsibility to maximize the yield of the profit to its stockholders, that’s its job. The corporations had already been granted the right of persons, and this basically says they have to be a certain type of pathological person, a person that does nothing except try to maximize his own gain – that’s the legal requirement on a corporation, and that’s a core principle of Anglo-American corporate law. So when, say, Milton Friedman points out that corporations just have to have one interest in life, maximizing profit and market share, he is legally correct, that is what the law says. The reason the Dodge brothers wanted it was because they wanted to start their own car company, and that ended up being Dodge, Chrysler, Daimler-Chrysler and so on. And that remains a core principle of corporate law.

Now, there were modifying traditional decisions, which said that a corporation is permitted legally – that means, the management is permitted legally – to carry out benevolent activities, like to join the Millennium Fund or something, but only if it improves their humanitarian image and therefore increases their profit. So a drug company can give away cheap drugs to the poor, but as long as the television cameras are on; then it’s still legal. And in fact, there’s an important decision by an American court, which is quite intriguing. It urges corporations to carry out benevolent activities; it says – and I’m quoting it now – or else “an aroused public” may figure out what corporations are up to, and take away their privileges – because after all, they’re just granted by the government, there’s nothing in the constitution, there’s no legal basis for them, it’s a radical violation of classical liberal principles and free market principles. They’re just granted by powerful institutions, and “an aroused public” might see through it and take it away. So you should have things like the Gleneagles conference once in a while, which is mostly fake, but looks good, and this is basically the court decision.

How does the social market system differ? There’s no principle of economics or anything else that says – first of all that even says that corporations should exist, but granting that they exist – that they should be concerned only with the maximization of gain for their stockholders instead of what’s sometimes called “stakeholders”: the community, the work force, everything else. As far as economics is concerned, it’s just another way of running things. And the European system to an extent has stakeholder interest. So, say, Germany has a theoretical form of co-determination – mostly theoretical, but some degree of worker participation in management, acceptance of unions, that’s been a partial move towards stakeholder interest. And the governmental social democratic programs are other examples of it.

The United States happens to be pretty much at the extreme of keeping to the principle that the corporate system must be pathological, and that the government is allowed to and glad to intervene to uphold that principle. The European system is somewhat different, the British system is somewhat in between, and they all vary.

Like during the New Deal period in the United States and during the 1960s, the United States veered somewhat towards a social market system. That’s why the Bush administration, who are of extreme reactionary sort, are trying to dismantle the few elements where the social market exists. Why are they trying to destroy social security, for example? I mean, there’s no serious economic problem, it’s all fraud. It’s in as good fiscal health as it’s ever been in its history, but it is a system which benefits the general population. It is of no use at all to the wealthy. Like, I get social security when I retire, but I’ve been a professor at MIT for fifty years, so I got a big pension and so on and so forth, I wouldn’t even notice if I didn’t get social security. But a very large part of the population, maybe 60% or something like that, actually survive on it. So therefore it’s a system that obviously has to be destroyed. It’s useless for the wealthy, it’s useless for privilege, it contributes nothing to profit. It has other bad features, like it’s based on the principle that you should care about somebody else, like you should care whether a disabled widow has food to eat. And that’s hopelessly immoral by the moral principles of power and privilege, so you’ve got to knock that idea out of people’s heads, and therefore you want to get rid of the system.

And in fact a lot of what’s called – ridiculously – “conservatism” is just pathological fanaticism, based on maximization of power and wealth in accord with principles that do have a legal basis.

Read the rest here.

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Posted by The Rag at 8:55 PM

This Is Not Justice, This Is Comedy

From Ranger Against War. Comedy, perhaps, but David Hicks will pay dearly for the joke.

Waltzing Matilda


They brought one Pinch, a hungry lean-faced villain,
A mere anatomy, a montebank,
a threadbare juggler, and a fortune teller,
A needy, hollow-eyed, sharp-looking wretch,
A living-dead man

* * *

There's none but asses will be bridled so.
Why, headstrong liberty is lash'd with woe

--The Comedy of Errors (both), Shakespeare

Well, we're Waltzing Matilda off stage right, but this is truly an off-Broadway show. The David Hicks trial, billed as the first war crimes trial by the U.S. since WWII, was a no-consequence case conducted at a kangaroo court.

In ring one we have David Hicks, Australian citizen carrying a weapon for the Taliban and supposedly working for or trained by al Qaeda. A rifleman! In Afghanistan. [Of course, it is their country, and they do have a right to defense forces. And contrary to the rhetoric, this is not war, and we did invade them, but we'll put aside those small matters for now.]

Now, the U.S. military invades and Hicks is captured on the battlefield. There is no proof that he did or didn't fire his rifle. In fact, this is irrelevant, as he was captured and not arrested. [Incidentally, the effective range of the AK 47 is 460 m. To the best of my reckoning, this put America and Americans outside of the range of his rifle.]

So to sum it up, this is the first war crimes trial since WW II, and we have Hicks on center stage, a truly small-time loser. Let's call him a rifleman for sure, and a terrorist, maybe. One must ask: How is carrying a rifle for the Taliban in Afghanistan an act of terror?

The Israelis get Eichmann, others get Pol Pot or Idi Amin, and the U.S. gets piss ant David Hicks. Sure makes me feel safer knowing Hicks and his rifle have been neutralized. Heckuva job, GWB.

Hicks has been dealt with by the tribunal, and the tribunal has been dealt with by Hicks. The key point of this landmark plea bargain is that the U.S. government will not be liable for nor will Hicks take legal action against the U.S. for torture. According to the Wall Street Journal, "the plea deal requires him to drop maltreatment claims."

It seems that U.S. policy is what really got the plea bargain. If Hicks was truly the "worst of the worst," why would our great legal eagles even consider this deal?

The answer is that U.S. policy will not countenance the light of day. The American taxpayers are the losers in these tribunals, since it is our dollars that are financing these secret travesties of justice, playing out in kangaroo courts, with third tier players.

The American taxpayer pays hundreds of millions of dollars for secret prisons, detentions, and renditions, and hundreds of billions to invade countries, and the best we can come up with in Trial #1 is David Hicks, who may or may not have even fired his rifle.

This is not justice, this is a comedy.

Source

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Posted by The Rag at 8:33 PM

The Monday Movie - Politicking Fear

"By helping us understand how fear is being actively cultivated and manipulated by the current administration, Hijacking Catastrophe stands to become an explosive and empowering information weapon in this decisive year in U.S. history." Naomi Klein, Author, No Logo

"The Media Education Foundation has been carrying out vitally important work on major issues of the day, in a highly meritorious effort to raise public awareness and understanding, work that is particularly crucial in advance of the coming election, which may well cast a long shadow over the country's future." Noam Chomsky, Professor of Linguistics, MIT

"The next Presidential election will be a watershed mark in our history and the urgency of producing and distributing materials that show exactly what is at stake has never been higher. Hijacking Catastrophe will be a vital tool in the campaign to rescue American democracy from its internal enemies. It will enrage and empower as it enlightens and explains." Robert McChesney, Author, Rich Media, Poor Democracy

?What it really comes down to is this: Are the American voters going to sit still for this? Are we going to treat our democracy like some sort of spectator sport, like watching the Super Bowl, or are we going to ask a little more of ourselves this time? Are we going to explore the Bush Administration?s claims? Are we going to look at the details of what this administration has actually done?? William Hartung, Senior Fellow, World Policy Institute

The 9/11 terror attacks continue to send shock waves through the American political system. Continuing fears about American vulnerability alternate with images of American military prowess and patriotic bravado in a transformed media landscape charged with emotion and starved for information. The result is that we have had little detailed debate about the radical turn US policy has taken since 9/11.

Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire examines how a radical fringe of the Republican Party has used the trauma of the 9/11 terror attacks to advance a pre-existing agenda to radically transform American foreign policy while rolling back civil liberties and social programs at home.

The documentary places the Bush Administration's false justifications for war in Iraq within the larger context of a two-decade struggle by neoconservatives to dramatically increase military spending in the wake of the Cold War, and to expand American power globally by means of military force.

At the same time, the documentary argues that the Bush Administration has sold this radical and controversial plan for aggressive American military intervention by deliberately manipulating intelligence, political imagery, and the fears of the American people after 9/11.

Narrated by Julian Bond, Hijacking Catastrophe features interviews with more than twenty prominent political observers, including Pentagon whistleblower Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who witnessed first-hand how the Bush Administration set up a sophisticated propaganda operation to link the anxieties generated by 9/11 to a pre-existing foreign policy agenda that included a preemptive war on Iraq.

Joining Kwiatkowski in a wide-ranging, accessible, and ultimately empowering analysis of American foreign policy, media manipulation, and their global and domestic implications, are former Chief UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter, former Pentagon analyst Daniel Ellsberg, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Jody Williams, author Norman Mailer, MIT professor Noam Chomsky, Code Pink founder Medea Benjamin, defense policy analyst William Hartung, author Chalmers Johnson, and Army Special Forces Master Sergeant Stan Goff (Ret.).

At its core, the film places the deceptions of the Bush Administration within the larger frame of questions seldom posed in the mainstream: What, exactly, is the agenda that drove the administration's pre-war deceptions? How is 9/11 being used to sell this agenda? And what are the stakes for America, Americans, and the world if this agenda succeeds in being fully implemented during a second Bush term?

INTERVIEWS INCLUDE
Tariq Ali | Benjamin Barber | Medea Benjamin | Noam Chomsky | Kevin Danaher | Mark Danner | Shadia Drury | Michael Dyson | Daniel Ellsberg | Michael Franti | Stan Goff | William Hartung Robert Jensen | Chalmers Johnson | Jackson Katz | Michael T. Klare | Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski (Ret.) | Norman Mailer | Zia Mian | Mark Crispin Miller | Scott Ritter | Vandana Shiva | Norman Solomon | Greg Speeter | Fernando Suarez del Solar | Immanuel Wallerstein | Jody Williams | Max Wolff

Directed by Sut Jhally & Jeremy Earp

Hijacking Catastrophe - Intro (1 of 10)

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Posted by The Rag at 7:34 PM

Stealing the Internet

DHS demand for DNS master key alarms nations
Published on Monday, April 02, 2007.
Source: Daily KOS

Slashdot and Cryptome report that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is demanding the master key for the DNS root zone - a demand that has other nations alarmed. With the master key, DHS would have control over the Internet, as Slashdot describes, quoting an "anonymous reader."

The key will play an important role in the new DNSSec security extension, because it will make spoofing IP-addresses impossible. By forcing the IANA [Internet Assigned Numbers Authority] to hand out a copy of the master key, the US government will be the only institution that is able to spoof IP addresses and be able to break into computers connected to the Internet without much effort.


The issue arose at Friday's meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in Lisbon, Portugal.

* Deep Harm's diary:: ::

There is no indication yet that U.S. mainstream news media have reported on the DHS proposal. U.S. coverage of the ICANN meeting focused (predictably) on a proposal to create a domain specifically for adult websites. Cryptome cites a German news source, Heisse Online, which provides the following information.

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS)...wants to have the key to sign the DNS root zone solidly in the hands of the US government. This ultimate master key would then allow authorities to track DNS Security Extensions (DNSSec) all the way back to the servers that represent the name system's root zone on the Internet. The "key-signing key" signs the zone key, which is held by VeriSign. At the meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in Lisbon, Bernard Turcotte, president of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) drew everyone's attention to this proposal as a representative of the national top-level domain registries (ccTLDs).

At the ICANN meeting, Turcotte said that the managers of country registries were concerned about this proposal. When contacted by heise online, Turcotte said that the national registries had informed their governmental representatives about the DHS's plans. A representative of the EU Commission said that the matter is being discussed with EU member states. DNSSec is seen as a necessary measure to keep the growing number of manipulations on the net under control. The DHS is itself sponsoring a campaign to support the implementation of DNSSec. Three of the 13 operators currently work outside of the US, two of them in Europe. Lars-Johan Liman of the Swedish firm Autonomica, which operates the I root server, pointed out the possible political implications last year. Liman himself nominated ICANN as a possible candidate for the supervisory function.


When other nations are worried, Americans, too, should be concerned. The Bush administration has demonstrated that it is unable to wield power responsibly. Therefore, its demand for Internet control should be viewed as an opportunity to abuse its authority to control a medium that has played a critical role in holding it accountable.

Source

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Posted by The Rag at 7:27 PM

Paul Spencer for President - Position Paper #6

6. Promote, plan, and construct affordable, environmentally-sensitive public transportation

I commuted an average of 100 miles per day for 24 years from a semi-rural community to the Portland, OR area. It wasn’t entirely a waste of my time, because I could listen to music and news on the radio, plan for the day ahead, or consider the lessons of the day behind. It was, however, a waste of fuel, a residue of combustion byproducts, plus an opportunity to be killed or maimed in a traffic accident (came close in 1986).

For the last 3 years we have had bus service from my town into a satellite hub within eyesight of Portland. It is a highly subsidized system (which is in itself a can of worms); but, as a result, the service is used at a fairly high level of capacity. Now I can listen or plan or consider – or read or discuss. That’s worth something right there. More importantly, a number of disadvantaged people have access to the advantages of an urban area, and a number of cars are not running down the highway.

I have travelled in Japan twice. The trains and subways transport more than two million people every weekday into and out of the 23 downtown Tokyo “wards”. And it is easy, convenient, reasonably-priced, clean, safe, quiet – there is no downside of which I am aware. (They are crowded, but the station guards don’t pack you into a carful of compressed humanity with batons nowadays.)

The Shinkansen (bullet trains) are my favorite mode of travel in the world. Again – you name the adjective that describes what you want in a transportation system, and the Shinkansen meets the description. The train systems there have their own “roads”, which are physically separated from the automobile/truck roads. There are not the scenes of carnage that we see here from car-meets-train events. Access is not easy for pedestrians, and so there are few person-meets-train events. All of the tracks that I have seen are dual-tracks. If you’re headed one way, you won’t have a meet-the-train-going-the-other-way event. It’s a helluva way to run a railroad, to coin an old rejoinder in an opposite sense.

I chose to high-light the Japanese system, both because I have some personal experience, and because it can be a model for us. A mere thirty-five years ago, Japan was focussed on economic growth with little thought of environmental effects. They started to factor in these effects about the same time that the environmental movement in this country gained popular support. However, the emphases were very different. In particular Japan paid more attention to public transportation, while the U.S. ignored the subject. One result is that a country with about 43% of the population of the U.S.A.; with the world’s second largest economy; and with a strong industrial base has relatively clean air, relatively clean water, a relatively healthy population – and traffic-related deaths about 20% of ours. (Of course, there are other factors for the air and water quality, including sewage treatment, industrial pollution abatement, conservation, and cultural factors; but the fact is that a highly mobile population enjoys significantly less ill effects from their transportation system than we do.) Traffic deaths alone should be considered a political scandal in this country. Eastern european countries and South Korea are about the only other countries in our league on a deaths-per-capita rate basis.

On the positive side for us, a large number of freight containers are loaded onto carrier cars for train transport, reducing the number of long-haul tractor-trailers on our main highways. But, as you can tell by driving on any interstate highway, there is much more potential business available for this approach. In the typical accounting Catch-22, though, freight transport via rail is often infeasible because of delays; so the business demand does not justify the investment needed to reduce delays. Dual tracks on isolated railbeds; railbed upgrades; an increase of decentralized container-loading facilities; sufficient carrier cars to service the potential market are all necessary – and relatively easy to achieve via government investment. The design and manufacture of locomotives and railcars to achieve high-speed transport – that will be a high-dollar investment.

The main point is that long-haul public and freight transportation is already designed and modelled – albeit in other countries. Even here, though, the rights-of-way are established; the technology is known; the product is out there. As is often cited in these position papers, it is more of a question of political will.

Local public transportation is not quite as easily visualized. Of course, bicycles are the best option for those who are capable and for days that are suitable. Communities like Portland have made bike lanes plentiful. Still – given the number of bike riders who end up in the hospital or in the morgue, the infrastructure is not adequate.

Light-rail – primarily for rush-hour commutes – is a good start, where park-and-ride is adequate. But there is a basic set of questions that need to be addressed for both light-rail and bus systems. Many local bus systems are laid out on a grid, so that you can get virtually anyplace with one or two transfers. In Portland, OR, however, both the bus system and the light-rail system is laid out like spokes of a wheel. If you’re not going downtown, you still have to go downtown to get on the bus that will take you to where you really want to go. It is the case that a large portion of commutes are from home to downtown business, but the “rush-hours” are very focussed in the morning and evening. During the rest of the day, such light-rail systems – and similar hub-type bus systems - are barely used, because they are inconvenient. So – again – we have a waste of fuel, an unwarranted volume of exhaust gases, plus inefficient allocation of labor and unnecessary wear of transport vehicles and roads.

OK – I’m not trying to design an improved public transportation system for Portland, OR in this paper. I am high-lighting the fact that – in the short run – planning will be the key problem with respect to local public transportation. In fact, this type of planning should be, and usually is, a local responsibility. The role of the federal government is to fund the planning process for the local governments; then help them find the funding for construction. This is actually the process now. The problem is the priority. This campaign finds public transportation to be a very high priority.

Paul Spencer

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Posted by The Rag at 8:13 AM

01 April 2007

Haiti Report

Time for Lula to Stop Doing Bush's Dirty Work in Haiti
By BEN TERRALL

When Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, better known as "Lula", visits Washington on March 31, he will likely spend most of his time with President Bush discussing ethanol, a relatively safe subject for the two leaders. Earlier this month, Brazil and the United States, the world's two top ethanol producers, announced the creation of an international forum to help turn biofuels into a globally traded commodity. Brazil, unlike the U.S., has spent thirty years developing its ethanol technology, and is producing a surplus of a sugar-based version of that fuel.

Lula has been criticized for following the Bush Administration on foreign trade policy, but he may be in even more hot water for following Bush on a foreign military adventure. When President Lula relieved U.S. Marines in Haiti by having Brazil take the lead of the UN peacekeeping mission (MINUSTAH) in early 2004, he got Bush, whose troops were spread thin, out of a tight spot. Lula also earned brownie points for Brazil's bid for a permanent seat on a potentially-expanded UN Security Council.

But all this came at a price. MINUSTAH was the only UN peacekeeping mission in history deployed without a peace agreement. It's true purpose was to consolidate the February 29, 2004 coup against the democratically-elected government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. This genesis put MINUSTAH in a quandary from the beginning. In order to fulfill its mission of supporting the illegitimate, unpopular and brutal Interim Government of Haiti (led by a Bush supporter flown in from Florida), MINUSTAH was forced to join the dictatorship's attacks on poor neighborhoods that would never accept the overthrow of their democracy.

In August 2006, the British Medical Journal The Lancet published a mortality study that concluded 8,000 people were killed in the first twenty-two months of the coup. In almost half of the reported deaths, the perpetrators were identified as security agents of the coup government, former soldiers or armed anti-Lavalas groups. No murders were attributed to Lavalas members. Although the government and its paramilitary allies did the lion's share of the killings, MINUSTAH participated as well. In a July 6, 2005 raid, MINUSTAH soldiers shot 22,000 bullets (by the UN's own count) into the thin walls of the poor Cite Soleil neighborhood. Up to sixty civilians were killed, dozens more wounded, but none received help from the "peacekeepers."

Although a democratic government was inaugurated last May, MINUSTAH continues to kill civilians. In the early morning of December 22, 2006, 400 Brazilian-led MINUSTAH troops in armored vehicles carried out a massive assault on the Bois Neuf and Drouillard districts of Cite Soleil in Port-au-Prince. The military operation, which claimed the lives of dozens of area residents, took place near the site of the July, 2005 raid.

"They came here to terrorize the population," resident Rose Martel told Reuters, referring to UN troops and police. "I don't think they really killed any bandits, unless they consider all of us as bandits."

Read the rest here.

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Posted by The Rag at 9:22 PM

Another Potential Middle Eastern War Front

From Another Day in the Empire

Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran, Nukes, and Western Logic
Sunday April 01st 2007, 8:46 am

Citizens of Lebanon, beware. Arieh Eldad has it out for you. After the scandal-ridden government of Ehud Olmert falls, probably within the next few weeks, a new government, likely led by Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, will attack Lebanon. “We have no choice. We will have to do it,” Eldad tells the neocon website, NewsMax. “Dr. Eldad explained that Israel was facing a new strategic threat, caused in part by its own failure to deal a crushing blow to Hezbollah in Lebanon and the impression of weakness last summer’s failed war created in the minds of Israel’s enemies.”

In fact, short of killing hundreds of thousands of Lebanese, there is no way for Israel to “deal a crushing blow to Hezbollah,” as more than half of the population supports the Islamic organization, created in response to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Since Israel will certainly face defeat on the ground in Lebanon, as it did last summer, the only option will be to shock and awe the country into submission.

But it is simply not Hezbollah. “The Hezbollah template for attacking Israel is being repeated in Gaza, Dr. Eldad said. ‘Hamas is building bunkers. They are bringing missiles across the Egyptian border, and the Egyptian government is failing to prevent it. So I hope the next Israeli government will be courageous enough to carry out these operations before it is too late.’” Swap “courageous” for “psychotic” and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what Eldad and Moledet have in mind for the grandmothers and toddlers of Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank.

Arie Eldad, a member of the “right-wing” (that is to say, fascist) Moledet political party, heads the Ethics committee of the Knesset. Of course, when we talk about ethics here, we are talking about a brand of “moral principles” alien to the West and Christianity. According to Eldad, sanctions of the sort to be levied against Iran are based on Western logic. “But when states have missions that are bigger than life, they are not obeying the basic rules of logic that Western civilization obeys.”

And what is are these “missions that are bigger than life”?

Ethnic cleansing. Moledet advocates the “voluntary transfer” of the Palestinian population out of the West Bank and Gaza. A few years ago, Moledet bought space on billboards around Tel Aviv, calling for ethnically cleansing the Palestinians. “Only transfer will bring peace,” read the billboards. Imagine this tactic repeated here in the United States. “Only sending the Blacks back to Africa will reduce crime.” It does not take an overactive imagination to envision the response. But in Israel this sort of behavior is normal, even considered mainstream politics.

Think about it this month, as you get ready to fill out your tax forms. “Since 1973, Israel has cost the United States about $1.6 trillion. If divided by today’s population, that is more than $5,700 per person,” reports the Christian Science Monitor. “Israel is the largest recipient of US foreign aid. It is already due to get $2.04 billion in military assistance and $720 million in economic aid in fiscal 2003. It has been getting $3 billion a year for years.”

This “military assistance” translates into “770 cluster-bomb sites” in southern Lebanon, according to the United Nations. “And the current U.N. estimate is that Israel dropped between 2 million and 3 million bomblets on Lebanon, of which up to a million have yet to explode,” according to Saree Makdisi of UCLA’s International Institute. It also translates into 3,020 Palestinians killed since 2000, the wanton destruction of the Palestinian health and educational infrastructure, widespread and growing poverty and unemployment, environmental degradation, and a large and increasing number of Palestinians interned in prisons, well over 650,000 since 1967. Concern over such things, of course, is an artifact of “Western logic,” as a large number of Israelis consider Palestinians little more than “drugged cockroaches in a bottle,” as Rafael Eitan, former Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, characterized them.

Eldad soon moved on to Iran. “Eldad is not suggesting economic or diplomatic ‘engagement,’ as the State Department might use the term. He is talking about having Israel’s military take out Iranian nuclear and missile sites if the Western nations refuse to do the job…. Iran is behaving on a state level as a suicide bomber behaves on the personal level, Dr. Eldad said…. Eventually, military action against Iran will become necessary.”

In other words, if AIPAC and the neocons cannot once again trick the American people into attacking Iran, as they tricked them into attacking Iraq in the name of Israel, the IDF will do it. Of course, this is nonsense, Israel will not go it alone against Iran. In fact, Eldad is simply spewing more rhetoric, as Israel has long expected the United States to attack and slaughter its enemies. If the invasion of Lebanon last summer demonstrated anything, it is that Hezbollah can hold its own and Israel is impotent to change the situation “on the ground,” in essence a result of its own unwavering policies of aggression, be it by way of direct military confrontation or black flag operations.

“Like most Israeli leaders, Dr. Eldad would prefer that the United States and its partners take out Iranian nuclear and missile sites, if for no other reason than the vastly superior conventional firepower the U.S. could bring to bear.”

Israel has plenty of “superior conventional firepower,” courtesy of the American tax payer, never mind what its leaders tell the media. Point is here, Israel expects the United States to pay for—in squandered treasure and sacrificed lives—its long-standing effort to balkanize Arab and Muslim states, beginning most recently with Iraq and continuing with Iran.

“Because Iran has built its nuclear plants in deeply buried, hardened facilities, it will be difficult if not impossible.”

Translation: simple high-explosives, depleted uranium, and millions of cluster bombs will no longer do the trick—it is time to nuke the Arabs and Muslims, as “Western logic,” i.e., use of nuclear weapons is unconscionable, does not apply.

“If Israel is left alone and the point of no return [in Iran’s nuclear weapons program] arrives, then Israel will have to do the job. But most probably we will not be able to do it with conventional warheads. And this is something the world should know.”

In other word, heads up. If Israel does attack Iran, they will most certainly use nukes, as they now have around 400 of them stashed away.

Source

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Posted by The Rag at 6:58 PM

John Gorka Is Singin' On Sunday

Road of Good Intentions

Please help stop the next war before it starts at www.stopiranwar.com - Soundtrack is "Road of Good Intentions" by John Gorka. www.johngorka.com

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Posted by The Rag at 6:40 PM

Fisk on the Politics of Fear

Robert Fisk: The crushing fear that stalks America
By Robert Fisk
Mar 30, 2007, 04:59

The country is not at war. It is the US military that is engaged in an Iraqi conflict

There's a helluva difference between Cairo University and the campus of Valdosta in the Deep South of the United States. I visited both this week and I feel like I've been travelling on a gloomy spaceship - or maybe a time machine - with just two distant constellations to guide my journey. One is clearly named Iraq; the other is Fear. They have a lot in common.

The politics department at Cairo's vast campus is run by Dr Mona El-Baradei - yes, she is indeed the sister of the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency - and her students, most of them young women, almost all scarved, duly wrote out their questions at the end of the turgid Fisk lecture on the failings of journalism in the Middle East. "Why did you invade Iraq?" was one. I didn't like the "you" bit, but the answer was "oil". "What do you think of the Egyptian government?" At this, I looked at my watch. I reckon, I told the students, that I just had time to reach Cairo airport for my flight before Hosni Mubarak's intelligence lads heard of my reply.

Much nervous laughter. Well, I said, new constitutional amendments to enshrine emergency legislation into common law and the arrest of Muslim Brotherhood supporters was not a path to democracy. And I ran through the US State Department's list of Egyptian arbitrary detentions, routine torture and unfair trials. I didn't see how the local constabulary could do much about condemnation from Mubarak's American friends. But it was purely a symbolic moment. These cheerful, intelligent students wanted to see if they would hear the truth or get palmed off with another bromide about Egypt's steady march to democracy, its stability - versus the disaster of Iraq - and its supposedly roaring success. No one doubts that Mubarak's boys keep a close eye on his country's students.

But the questions I was asked after class told it all. Why didn't "we" leave Iraq? Are "we" going to attack Iran? Did "we" really believe in democracy in the Middle East? In fact "our" shadow clearly hung over these young people.

Thirty hours later, I flicked on the television in my Valdosta, Georgia, hotel room and there was a bejewelled lady on Fox TV telling American viewers that if "we" left Iraq, the "jihadists" would come after us. "They want a Caliphate that will take over the world," she shrieked about a report that two children had deliberately been placed in an Iraqi car bomb which then exploded. She ranted on about how Muslim "jihadists" had been doing this "since the 1970s in Lebanon". It was tosh, of course. Children were never locked into car bombs in Beirut - and there weren't any "jihadists" around in the Lebanese civil war of the 1970s. But fear had been sown. Now that the House of Representatives is talking about the US withdrawal by August 2008, fear seems to drip off the trees in America.

Up in the town of Tiger, Georgia, Kathy Barnes is reported to be looking for omens as she fears for the life of her son, Captain Edward Berg of the 4th Brigade, US 3rd Infantry Division, off to Iraq for a second tour of duty, this time in George Bush's infamous "surge". Last time he was there, Mrs Barnes saw a dead snake and took it as a bad sign. Then she saw two Canadian geese, soaring over the treetops. That was a good sign. "A rational mind plays this game in war time," as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution eloquently pointed out. "A thunderclap becomes a herald, a bird's song a prophecy."

Dr Michael Noll's students at Valdosta are as smart and bright-eyed as Dr El-Baradei's in Cairo. They packed into the same lecture I had given in Egypt and seemed to share a lot of the same fears about Iraq. But a sullen seminar that same morning was a miserable affair in which a young woman seemed to break down in anger. If "we" left Iraq, she said in a quavering voice, the jihadists, the "terrorists", could come here to America. They would attack us right here.

I sighed with frustration. I was listening to her voice but it was also the voice of the woman on Fox TV, the repeated, hopeless fantasy of Bush and Blair: that if we fail in Iraq, "they", the monstrous enemy, will arrive on our shores. Every day in the American papers now, I read the same "fear" transformed into irrationality. Luke Boggs - God, how I'd love that byline - announces in his local paper: "I say let the terrorists rot in Guantanamo. And let the Europeans ... howl. We are a serious nation, engaged in the serious business of trying to kill or capture the bad guys before they can do us more harm." He calls Guantanamo's inmates "hardcore jihadists".

And I realise that the girl in Dr Noll's seminar isn't spouting this stuff about "jihadists" travelling from Iraq to America because she supports Bush. She is just frightened. She is genuinely afraid of all the "terror" warnings, the supposed "jihadists" threats, the red "terror" alerts and the purple alerts and all the other colour-coded instruments of fear. She believes her president, and her president has done Osama bin Laden's job for him: he has crushed this young woman's spirit and courage.

But America is not at war. There are no electricity cuts on Valdosta's warm green campus, with its Spanish style department blocks and its narrow, beautiful church. There is no food rationing. There are no air-raid shelters or bombs or "jihadists" stalking these God-fearing folk. It is the US military that is at war, engaged in an Iraqi conflict that is doing damage of a far more subtle kind to America's social fabric.

Off campus, I meet a gentle, sensitive man, a Vietnam veteran with two doctor sons. One is a lieutenant colonel, an army medical officer heading back to Baghdad this week for Bush's "surge", bravely doing his duty in the face of great danger. The other is a civilian doctor who hates the war. And now the two boys - divided by Iraq - can hardly bring themselves to speak to each other.

The soldier son called this week from his transit camp in Kuwait. "I think he is frightened," his father told me. A middle-aged lady asked me to sign a copy of my book, which she intends to send to her Marine Corps son in Baghdad. She palpably shakes with concern as she speaks of him. "Take the greatest care," I find myself writing on the flyleaf to her marine son. "And come safe home."

Source

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Posted by The Rag at 4:27 PM

Words on Hunger From Fidel

More than three billion people condemned prematurely to death by hunger and thirst
By Fidel Castro Ruz.
Translated from Spanish by Ron Ridenour (Tlaxcala) and revised by Les Blough
Mar 31, 2007, 08:47

This is not an exaggerated figure; more cautious than not. I have thought about this quite a lot since President Bush’s meeting with U.S. automobile manufactures.

This sinister idea of converting foodstuff into combustibles was definitively established as the United States economic line within its foreign policy this past March 26.

(Editor's Summary) Washington AP - North America’s AP news agency, which reaches every corner of the world, reported that President Bush praised the benefits of using ethanol and biodiesel fuel in automobiles during a meeting with General Motors, Ford Motor Company and Chrysler Motors. Bush's administration plans to cut gas consumption by 20% in 10 years. (Axis of Logic)

I think that reducing and, moreover, recycling engines, which consume electricity and combustibles, is an elemental and urgent necessity for humanity. The tragedy does not consist in reducing these wastes of energy but in the notion of converting foodstuff into combustibles.

We know today with total precision that a ton of corn can only produce an average of 413 liters of ethanol, according to density, which is the equivalent of 109 gallons.

The average price of corn in the harbors of the United States is $167 per ton. It requires as much as 320 million tons of corn to produce 35 billion gallons of ethanol.

US corn harvests, in 2005, rose to 280.2 million tons, according to FAO data.

Nevertheless, the president speaks of producing combustibles from grass and wood, which anyone can understand are phrases absolutely lacking realism. Understand well: 35 billion gallons means 35 followed by nine zeros.

Experienced and well organized U.S. farmers will come up with beautiful examples of production for humans and per hectare: corn converted into ethanol; residues of this converted into animal feed with 26% protein; cattle excrement utilized as primary material for production of gas. Of course, this is after great investments, which can only be expended by powerful firms, those operating on the basis of electric and combustible consumption.

Apply this recipe to Third World countries and we will see how many people among the hungry masses will cease consuming corn. Or even worse: financed loaned to the poorest countries to produce ethanol from corn or any other type of foodstuff and not one tree will remain to defend humanity against climatic change.

Other wealthy countries have programmed to use not only corn but wheat, sunflower and rapeseed oil, and other foodstuff for the production of combustibles. For Europeans, for example, there could be business in importing all the soy beans in the world with the aim of reducing automobile combustible wastes and feed their animals with the residue of this vegetable, especially rich in all types of essential amino acids.

In Cuba, alcohol is produced as a sub-product of the sugar industry after making three extractions of sugar from cane juice. The change of climate is already affecting our sugar production. Great draughts come alternating with record rains, which hardly permits us to produce sugar over a hundred day period with adequate yields during our most moderate winter. Due to the prolonged draughts at sowing and cultivating periods, there is less sugar per ton of cane and less cane per hectare.

In Venezuela, I understand that they don’t use alcohol for export but to improve the quality of environment for their own combustibles. And then, independent of the excellent Brazilian technology for producing alcohol, to employ such technology for the direct production of alcohol based on sugar cane juice in Cuba constitutes nothing more than a dream or nonsense for those who play with this idea.

In our country, the soil dedicated to direct production of alcohol can be much better utilized for the production of food for the people and for protecting the environment.

All the world’s countries, rich and poor, without exception could save millions and millions of dollars in investment and combustibles simply by changing all the incandescent light bulbs to fluorescent lights, something which Cuba has achieved in all the nation’s homes. This signifies a relief to resist climatic change without starving to death the world’s masses of poverty stricken people.

As one can observe, I do not use adjectives to qualify the system and the owners of the world. This task is excellently done by experts of information and of socio-economic sciences, and by honest politicians, who abound in the world and who constantly stir up the present and future of our species. A computer and the growing number of Internet networks suffice.

Today, for the first time, there is truly a global economy and a dominant power in the economic, political and military terrain, something quite distinct from the Rome of emperors.

Some will ask, why do I speak of hunger and thirst. I reply: it is not about the other side of the coin, rather of various faces of other pieces, which could be a die with six faces, or a “polyhedron” with many faces.

In this case, look at an official news agency founded in 1945 and generally well informed about economic and social problems of the world: la TELAM. It wrote:

“About two billion people will inhabit countries and regions of the earth in just 18 years in which water will be a vague memory. Two-thirds of the world’s population could live in places where that scarcity produces social and economic tensions of such magnitude that could bring people to war for the precious `blue gold´.

“During the last century, the use of water has augmented at a rate of more than twice the rate of population growth.

“The WWC (World Water Council) estimates that for the year 2015 the number of inhabitants affected by this grave situation will rise to 3.5 billion.

“The United Nations celebrated World Water Day on March 23, in which it announced a confrontation with this scarcity of water in coordination with FAO. Its objective is to emphasize the growing importance of the lack of water worldwide, and the necessity of a greater integration and cooperation, which must permit sustained and efficient use of water resources.

“Many regions of the planet suffer a severe water scarcity, where people live with less than 500 cubic meters per person annually. The chronic lack of this vital element is increasing in more regions.

“Principle consequences of the lack of water are the insufficient quantity of this precious liquid for food production, the impossibility of industrial development, and urban, tourist, and health problems.”


So far goes the TELAM cable.

It must be mentioned that in this case there are other important facts, such as the melting ice in Greenland and the Antarctic, the damages to the ozone, and the growing quantity of mercury in many fish species and routine consumption.

There are even more themes which could be approached, but I simply attempt within these lines to comment on the meeting with Bush and the principle guests of the North American automobile companies.

March 28, 2007
Fidel Castro

Source

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Posted by The Rag at 4:05 PM

The Iranian "Hostages"

From Axis of Logic

British Naval Personnel held in Iran
By Robert Thompson
Mar 31, 2007, 11:35

Letter sent to the BBC Radio 4 on 29th March 2007

It is time that Mr Blair and Mrs Beckett told the truth about the maritime boundary between Iraq and Iran. There was in 1978 (I believe I have the correct year) a treaty which fixed the river boundary between the two countries at the middle of the Shatt-al--Arab, but the line of this boundary was due to be reviewed every ten years in accordance with natural displacement of the river bed. This has never been done. Beyond the estuary into the Arabo-Persian Gulf no agreement has ever been made as to where the boundaries between Iran, Iraq and Kuwait run.

This means that it is perfectly possible that any particular point in that area can, according to the law of each of these three countries, be within its boundary. Unless he has hopeless (supposedly expert) advisers, Mr Blair must have been informed that he cannot prove that the Royal Navy boats were in Iraqi waters, and equally well no-one can prove that they were definitely within Iranian waters. By persisting in making such ridiculous claims, he and Mrs Beckett are putting in danger the lives and liberty of British service personnel throughout the region.

From the manner in which Mr Blair has reacted to this incident, I draw the conclusion that it might have been set up deliberately to provide an excuse to treat Iran as an aggressor, and thus to try to justify all kinds of hostile action against Iran.

Furthermore, I find it hard to believe that HMS Cornwall did not have sufficiently sophisticated radar and other means of knowing about the Iranian forces moving towards the two small boats in a relatively calm sea.

For the sake of the Royal Navy personnel now held in Iran, Mr Blair should admit that he was mistaken, always a hard thing for arrogant politicians to do, and concede that the sovereignty over that whole area of the Gulf is unsettled in international law. Then diplomacy could have a chance.

Everyone should feel deep sympathy for these pawns in the political game being played by Mr Blair, and for their families back in the United Kingdom.

Best regards

Robert Thompson

Retired Solicitor (Honours), England and Wales
Avocat Honoraire au Barreau de Boulogne-sur-Mer

Source

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Posted by The Rag at 3:24 PM

From Cloud CooCoo-Land, Once More With Feeling

John McCain just cannot let go of his delusions. I think we opined earlier that it might be a communicable disease caught from our illustrious leader Junior. Ah, well, keep your mouthes and noses covered ....

McCain Touts Iraq's Progress During Visit: Says Americans Don't See Country's Gains
By KIM GAMEL, AP

BAGHDAD (April 1) - Sen. John McCain criticized reports out of Iraq he said focused unfairly on violence, saying Sunday that Americans were not getting a "full picture" of progress in the security crackdown in the capital.

McCain, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, was combative during a press conference in the military's media center in the heavily guarded Green Zone, and responded testily to a question about remarks he had made in the United States last week that it was safe to walk some Baghdad streets.

"The American people are not getting the full picture of what's happening here. They're not getting the full picture of the drop in murders, the establishment of security outposts throughout the city, the situation in Anbar province, the deployment of additional Iraqi brigades which are performing well, and other signs of progress having been made," said McCain, of Arizona.

He said the Republican congressional delegation he led to Iraq drove from Baghdad's airport to the center of the city, citing that as proof that security was improving in the capital. Prominent visitors normally make the trip by helicopter.

The delegation was accompanied by heavily armed U.S. troops when they were not in the Green Zone, site of the U.S. Embassy and Iraqi government. They traveled in armored military vehicles under heavy guard.

Read it here.


To offset Cloud CooCoo-Land Boy's impressions of Iraq and Baghdad with a little factual information, we offer this:

Iraq death toll jumps 15 percent in March
Wisam al-Okaili, AFP

April 1, 2007

BAGHDAD (AFP) - At least 2,078 people died in Iraq last month, 15 percent more than in February despite a massive security crackdown in Baghdad, the epicentre of violence, a security official said on Sunday.

On average, 67 people died across the country every day in March, compared to 64 in February.

A significant increase in Iraqi civilian, army and police deaths was evident last month, the official said, based on detailed statistics collected by the defence, interior and health ministries.

Civilian deaths topped the toll with 1,869 Iraqis killed in insurgency and sectarian bloodletting in March, compared to 1,646 in February.

Another 2,719 civilians were wounded last month, compared to 2,701 in February.

In March, 165 Iraqi policemen were killed against 131 the previous month, while 44 Iraqi soldiers died compared to 29 in February, the official said.

In March, 277 Iraqi policemen and 51 soldiers were wounded against 147 and 47, respectively during February.

The official said the death toll among militants had fallen to 481 in March compared to 586 killed the previous month.

But those arrested surged to 5,664 in March against 1,921, reflective of the massive Iraqi-US security operation launched on February 14 in which 80,000 troops have been deployed in and around the capital to root out insurgents.

The US military also lost 85 personnel in March, taking to 3,244 an AFP tally based on Pentagon statistics as of April 1, compared to 3,159 on February 28.

The US military losses, heavily outweighing the deaths of Iraqi soldiers if not Iraqi policemen, come despite Washington's claim that Iraqi forces are leading the security crackdown in the capital.

Source

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Posted by The Rag at 2:39 PM

Struggle Against the Victorian Tide

From The Bulletin of Cannabis Reform. Thanks to Mariann W. for tipping us about this.

Lessons from Alaska's Proposition 2
By Mariann Garner-Wizard

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Those who fail to learn from the past must repeat it, we're told, and in 40 years working for marijuana legalization (1) in four different states, I've seen certain problems over and over. A rapid turnover of entry-level activists often found in local work is perhaps due, not to the flighty nature of marijuana users, but to the unsatisfactory state of a movement which purports to represent them. Please, I'm not criticizing people who work selflessly to end prohibition - perhaps those most likely to read this journal! - so don't take my remarks as unduly negative. There are important exceptions to my criticisms, but I don't plan to describe them. I've been asked about lessons from Alaska's 2004 legalization campaign, and since failure's lessons are most costly, that's where I'll focus.

In mid-2004, largely due to misfortunes of other organizers, I went from Texas to Alaska to work on the final run-up to the vote on citizen-initiated Proposition 2 (Prop. 2), which would mandate regulating marijuana as Alaska regulates tobacco and alcohol, essentially legalizing cannabis commerce there. I knew the task would be challenging, not least because I would be a rank "Outsider" in a state where I had no experience and no strong movement contacts, but marijuana's unique status there convinced me to take on what quickly became an untenable assignment. Prop. 2 drew 44.25% of the November vote, in which 60% of Alaskans supported George W. Bush's re-election. We were lucky if we didn't lose votes during the three month "official" campaign.

My inability to function within the seemingly jinxed campaign left me time to meet Alaskans of all ages and many walks of life, on an informal, "normal" footing. Asked what brought me to the Great State, I always said, "to help legalize marijuana for grown-ups." While I occasionally met with some surprise, in the six months I eventually spent there, only three or four individuals disagreed with legalization; everyone else, perhaps after a few questions about the initiative, said they could support it. I formed the view that Alaska's lengthy experience with semi-legal marijuana, protected by a strong constitution and Supreme Court, had shown that the herb is, at worst, "not as bad as alcohol". I believe Prop. 2 could have passed, had support been consistent, principled, and self-disciplined. However, few campaigners thought it had much chance. This disconnection between the apparent support of a wide voter base, and a pessimistic campaign, was striking from the outset.

Read the rest here.

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Posted by The Rag at 9:23 AM
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