People Before Profit blog

Challenges ahead facing Iraq at crucial crossroad point

Sun, 31 Dec 2006 05:44:00 +0000

12-30-06, 10:47 am

Interview: Iraqi Communist Party central committee member SALAM ALI explains the challenges ahead facing Iraq at its crucial crossroad point.

Reviewing the situation in Iraq after the Baker-Hamilton report, Iraqi Communist Party central committee member Salam Ali says that Iraq is facing a crossroads and enormous challenges in the period ahead. He identifies the key tasks as national reconciliation and the defence of the political and economic sovereignty of the Iraqi people.

'The Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group was established nine months ago and its general proposals were not unexpected, having been widely leaked over previous weeks,' he says.

'What gave it political prominence was the defeat of the Bush administration in the recent US Congress elections and the need to re-establish a policy basis acceptable to both Democrats and Republicans. Some elements are welcome. Others could prove dangerous.

'Welcome is the acknowledgement of the disastrous consequences of the Bush strategy for an indefinite US military presence in Iraq as well as its handling of the occupation since 2003.'

However, Ali continues, 'less welcome is the report's failure to set a definite timetable for US withdrawal and opening the door for more interference by regional powers in deciding Iraq's political future. The Iraqi people must be empowered to decide their own destiny with their own free independent will.

'The report simply talks about a possible withdrawal of combat troops in 2008, accompanied by the deployment of a continuing US military force to other duties. This would be a compromise quite acceptable to Bush and on this basis that the US would continue to seek a determining long-term influence.

'The report's proposal for the involvement of regional forces, particularly Syria and Iran, again, has some positive aspects but also holds considerable dangers. Its immediate effect has been to intensify a jockeying for position by Islamists aligned on a largely sectarian basis to regimes outside Iraq.

'Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt would see themselves as threatened by an increasing influence for Iran and would seek to do deals with forces inside Iraq to prevent it. Equally, Islamist political forces in Iraq, currently embroiled in an intense power struggle, would see themselves threatened depending on the outcome.'

But the big danger presented by such involvement is that the future of Iraq would be horse-traded over the heads of the Iraqi people and in violation of the political process in Iraq, leading to further political destabilisation.

Such objections would equally apply to an international or regional conference, as proposed by the UN, in vague terms, unless the Iraq government and parliament were actively involved in setting the agenda and objectives.

The strategy of the Iraqi Communist Party, says Ali, has three strands.

First, widening the base of the political process in Iraq. Second, strengthening the cohesion of those political forces that can be brought together to defend national sovereignty and democracy. Third, developing mass activity in defence of critical aspects of Iraq's sovereignty on the economic front.

Widening the base of the political process was the objective of the National Reconciliation Conference held over the weekend of 13-14 December. It was preceded by conferences for civic organisations and for the tribes. But this third conference, for political parties, was the most critical.

It is too early, says Ali, to determine how successful it has been. But it did, significantly, involve some former Ba'athists and army officers as well as parties involved in the political process, representing the United Iraqi Alliance (Shi'ite), the National Accord Front (Sunni) and the Kurdistan Alliance.

The Communist Party's leader Hamid Mousa spoke on behalf of the democratic and secular Iraqi National List, which currently has 25 deputies.

The conference was boycotted by those Shi'ite forces led by Moqtada al-Sadr, despite their representation in the government, and by the Sunni Association of Muslim Clerics, which is opposed to the political process.

Militias and armed groups associated with or tacitly supported by these forces have been deeply involved in the mutual communal violence and sectarian strife. More fundamentally, however, both sides are seeking to use the conflict to assert political control within their own communities over less sectarian forces.

The key issue discussed at the conference was how to overcome the resulting violence that is now threatening to spill over into unbridled communal conflict.

Here, the conference was harshly critical of US policy. The weakness of Iraq's own security forces has been no accident nor has their infiltration by sectarian elements and militias.

As admitted in the Baker-Hamilton report, the US has, for three years, disastrously limited the scale and resources of the Iraqi armed forces and assumed a monopoly control over their training and recruitment. A weak, divided Iraqi army provided the international excuse for a long-term US military presence.

The government, it was argued, must seize back control of security, make full use of professional army resources in Iraq and rebuild the armed forces on a national, non-sectarian basis.

Implementation, says Ali, depends on the second strand of the party's strategy - strengthening the cohesion of the political forces willing to fight for the sovereignty of the Iraqi people, irrespective of sectarian and ethnic divisions.

There are signs of a realignment of political forces and discussions continue for a new initiative to resolve the current political impasse. Among the political parties involved in this are the two Kurdish parties, the (Shia) Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution and the (Sunni) Iraqi Islamic Party.

One key test is presented by one of the most contentious proposals in the Baker-Hamilton report. This concerns the status of the oil-rich province of Kirkuk with an ethnically mixed population - Kurds, Turcomans and Arabs - and whether it should be part of the federal Kurdistan region.

Currently, this is being resolved internally in line with the agreement incorporated in the constitution endorsed last year. This involves the carrying out of a census and a referendum to be completed within 12 months.

The Baker-Hamilton report proposes postponement of the referendum and the possibility of an externally imposed settlement. This, stresses Ali, could lead to a wholesale unravelling of the constitution and the federal settlement which underlies Iraq's existence as a unified state.

This defence of the constitution is, in turn, linked to the third strand of the party's strategy - defending the economic sovereignty of the Iraqi people. Here, 2007 will also be a critical year.

The assault on the economic rights of Iraqis has been hidden by the communal violence.

The IMF and the World Bank have been putting immense pressure on the Iraqi government, using its inherited debts as blackmail to implement restructuring and neoliberal economic reforms, such as removing the subsidies for food and fuel, abolishing food rations and revaluing the Iraqi currency - measures which would have terrible consequences for an already battered and impoverished population.

Mass protests earlier this year against the price increase of fuel products forced the government to amend its policy.

Strategically, the future of the still publicly owned oil industry is even more important. The constitution defends public ownership and the fair distribution of the revenue to all provinces and sections of the Iraqi people.

But a draft law on the oil sector is going to parliament next month and, again, there is great pressure to open the industry to investment by external oil majors on the pretext of securing new equipment and technology.

Those committed to defending Iraqi sovereignty are demanding that the strategic oil sector remain under public ownership and state control, especially Iraq's huge oil reserves, the second-biggest in the world.

They are also calling for the establishment of an Iraqi national oil company which would administer and supervise the exploration and development of oil and gas fields.

'A very great deal,' says Ali, 'depends on securing sufficient national unity and national consensus among political forces to defend the fundamental rights and interests of the people and the existence of Iraq as a unified federal and democratic state.

'This is vital economically on a day-to-day basis for the survival of working people. It is also vital if Iraq is to take a stand against imperialist control, rather than remaining a victim of it, and contribute to peace in the Middle East and the whole world.'

From Morning Star

AFL-CIO's long-range political strategy

Sun, 31 Dec 2006 05:38:00 +0000

12-30-06, 10:33 am

WASHINGTON (PAI) – Organized labor’s successful mobilization that retook Congress in 2006 is the first step in a multi-year plan to restore primacy of progressive political forces and ideas in the U.S., AFL-CIO Political Director Karen Ackerman says.

That plan includes not just the 2008 presidential race, for which at least one union – the non-AFL-CIO Service Employees – is already gearing up. It includes down-ballot races that year and in 2010, 2012 and beyond, with the 2010 vote being a key.

That’s when most state legislatures and governors are up, she explained to AFL-CIO Organizing Summit conferees in early December. And election of pro-worker state candidates especially in 2010 will put those new officeholders in position to draw pro-worker congressional district and state legislative lines after that year’s 2010 census.

Ackerman’s comments dovetail with a new push to recruit and elect state lawmakers over the next half-decade, launched by AFSCME and other progressive groups at a conference earlier this year in Memphis, Tenn. They noted then that the GOP was able to skillfully remap Congress after the last census to ensure what seemed to be a long-lasting U.S. House majority.

It did so, AFSCME and the others noted, by electing state lawmakers and governors who could then use sophisticated computer technology to draw one-person one-vote districts, often with extremely bizarre shapes, to maximize GOP strength.

In so many words, Ackerman said labor should follow the same road to political power through the state capitols. This is “how we end up with a progressive majority by 2013,” she said. Ackerman gave no details, but AFSCME and its allies plan intense candidate recruitment and training in coming years, on the local level. “What we want to have is redistricting in 2011 with progressives leading it in state after state. Then by 2013, we’ll have the country led by pro-working family leaders,” Ackerman added.

That long-range plan led the federation to focus on governorships and state legislative races in this past election, leaving congressional and U.S. Senate races more to its affiliated unions. The AFL-CIO concentrated its local race efforts on California, the Midwest and the Northeast “and states started flipping from red to blue,” she added.

Wins included both legislative chambers with big majorities in Minnesota, plus the Michigan House, one chamber in Wisconsin, and takeover of the Iowa legislature along with retention f the governor’s mansion. There were also gains in Indiana.

The gains will pay off even before the 2011 redistricting, Ackerman noted, citing Iowa and New Hampshire as examples. Though she did not say so, those two states are the first two in the 2008 presidential campaign season.

“Iowa is a right-to-work state. With Democratic control of the governorship and both houses, it will be a union state. In New Hampshire, we’re not going to face right to work legislation any more” after Dems won its legislature for the first time in 150 years.

“This is why we do political work,” Ackerman declared. “Not to elect Democrats, but to create an environment where workers can thrive and succeed.” She ended her slide presentation with the slogan for next year: “Labor 2007 – Kicking Ass For The Working Class.”

From International Labor Communications Association

Bush Criminal Activities, Violations

Sun, 31 Dec 2006 05:34:00 +0000

12-30-06, 10:37 am

In his six years as President of the United States, George W. Bush has accumulated a long list of criminal activities which mark him as a dangerous criminal, enough reason to try him and expel him from the White House.

Many observers may think that these accusations might be too severe and need to be proved, as it deals with a challenge to the leading figure of the most powerful nation on earth.

It is necessary to expose the most concrete facts of Bush´s twisted conduct, maintained since he became president and the serious consequences for numerous nations and millions of people especially in the United States.

Bush violated the mechanisms and established legal electoral procedures, aimed at preventing the exact and transparent count of the votes, creating a colossal fraud to become the 44th president of the US.

In an opportunistic manner Bush capitalized on the tragic events of September 11th in favour of his right wing group and used it to strengthen its personal power using the fear and spirit of vengeance provoked by the administration.

He persistently lied, even with the evidence to the contrary about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before him, with the clear objective of launching US troops into that country as part of his geo-political ambitions in favour of major oil interests.

This irresponsible and criminal decision has caused the death of close to 3,000 US soldiers and another 20,000 seriously wounded or severely affected emotionally.

The economic cost is calculated as a ten digit number. With the absurd pretext of capturing the ghost of Osama Bin Laden, Bush invaded Afghanistan, another adventure and demagogic decision whose outcome is translated into the death of over 200 US soldiers, while Bin Laden is only visible in videos suspiciously shown only when it is convenient to divert public opinion over White House scandals.

Bush has violated a number of articles and constitutional laws as well as democratic traditions, ordered spying on his companions, breaking norms respected for decades, of which US society was so proud.

The US President, with the complicity of various European nations, set up an international network of secret jails where he sent hundreds of kidnapped people, just because Bush decided to call them enemy combatants.

He orchestrated, until it achieved legality through pressure on a then Republican dominated Congress, torture as a method to extract information considered useful in the so called fight against terrorism.

Bush has placed a number of his circle of friends in important government positions and has backed them until they have been replaced. There are enough examples: Otto John Bolton, ambassador to the UN: Tom Delay, Republican Majority leader in Congress; Karl Rowe, presidential advisor and Donald Rumsfeld, Defense Secretary.

The double moral standards of his opportunistic anti-terrorist crusade is also a scandal and while he directs and allows the political manipulations to maintain the five Cuban political prisoners in US prisons, the tenant of the White House protects Luis Possada Carriles and prevents his extradition to Venezuela to be tried for the bombing of a Cubana airliner on October 6, 1976 killing 73 people on board.

Bush´s complicity with Israel´s crimes against the Palestinian people and the recent aggression into Lebanon with over 1,000 people killed, is without doubt.

It is important to remember that in 1975 former President Richard Nixon was impeached by having authorized the placing of hidden microphones in the headquarters of the Democratic Party and Bill Clinton was almost on his way to the same as a result of his adventures with Monica Lewinsky.

After the elements exposed the only reasonable doubt left would be to define the sentence that Bush musts serve after, of course, his expulsion from the White House. (Taken from ACN).

From Escambray

Bio-diesel versus Fossil Fuel Cars

Sun, 31 Dec 2006 05:29:00 +0000

12-30-06, 10:32 am

EARTH TALK

From the Editors of E/The Environmental Magazine Dear EarthTalk: I understanding that you can run a diesel car on used cooking oil. Why would I want to do that and how would I convert such a vehicle to do so? -- Benjamin Crouch, Boston, MA

The use of vegetable oil for diesel fuel has grown in popularity in recent years, thanks to both high fuel prices and ecological concerns. Analysts estimate that some 5,000 North Americans have converted their diesel cars or trucks to run on vegetable oil in the last few years alone. Those who do so usually make a deal with a local eatery willing to hand over its used cooking oil at the close of the business day.

The idea isn’t new. The first diesel engines built in the 1890s were created to run on peanut oil to be used in developing countries where oil reserves didn’t exist. And many of the older diesel cars and trucks still on the road today can use straight vegetable oil, especially in warmer climates where it won’t congeal as easily as in the cold. Many modern diesel engines, though, leave the factory requiring true diesel fuel to run well, as straight vegetable oil can muck up intricately engineered fuel pumps and injectors.

But drivers willing to spend between $400 and $1,000 on a conversion kit from one of two leading vendors, Missouri-based Golden Fuel Systems and Massachusetts-based Greasecar Vegetable Fuel Systems, can make the switch. And fryer-friendly restaurants are just about the only economical fuel source right now. Buying cooking oils at the supermarket would be costly, and consumers shouldn’t expect to find filling stations pumping vegetable oil anytime soon.

The benefits of a conversion are more than economic. Vegetable oil is a renewable resource derived from plants, which by nature absorb carbon dioxide (CO2) during photosynthesis. Vegetable oil is thus “carbon neutral”--burning it merely releases stored CO2 back into the atmosphere and therefore contributes no new greenhouse gases to the environment. By contrast, burning gasoline in a traditional engine releases CO2 that had been stored underground in oil, and thus contributes to global warming. Vegetable oil also burns cleaner than regular diesel, spewing no sulfur and much less particulate and carbon monoxide.

The conversion kits are only for diesel vehicles, as gasoline engines do not tolerate vegetable oil as a fuel. Since a conversion entails replacing and moving hoses and leads, as well as adding a separate fuel tank for the vegetable oil, it is best handled by a trained mechanic. Drivers should know that a converted vehicle does need a small amount of regular diesel fuel to get started, because at normal or cold temperatures vegetable oil is too thick to properly ignite. But the vehicle can switch over to vegetable oil once it is warmed up and the heat inside the engine loosens its thickness so it can run through efficiently.

Another way to use vegetable oil in a diesel engine is to blend it with regular diesel fuel. This blend has become known as biodiesel, and works fine in regular diesel engines with no conversion required. Biodiesel vendors have set up pumping stations across North America, although they tend to be few and far between. Canadians can locate biodiesel stations at the website of the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association; Americans can consult the website of the National Biodiesel Board.

CONTACTS: Golden Fuel Systems, www.goldenfuelsystems.com; Greasecar Vegetable Fuel Systems, www.greasecar.com; Canadian Renewable Fuels Association, www.greenfuels.org/biodiesel/suppliers.htm; National Biodiesel Board, www.biodiesel.org/buyingbiodiesel/retailfuelingsites.

GOT AN ENVIRONMENTAL QUESTION? Send it to: EarthTalk, c/o E/The Environmental Magazine, P.O. Box 5098, Westport, CT 06881; submit it at: www.emagazine.com/earthtalk/thisweek/, or e-mail: earthtalk@emagazine.com. Read past columns at: www.emagazine.com/earthtalk/archives.php.

The New Year and the Call for Peace

Sun, 31 Dec 2006 05:24:00 +0000

12-30-06, 10:27 am

Dear friend of United for Peace and Justice,

As this year comes to a close, we want to thank each of you for your contributions to the movement to end the war in Iraq and bring all of the troops home now.

And we want to remind you that there is still time to make your year-end financial donation. To be honest, we need your support and we need it now.

We look back at these past 12 months with mixed emotions. An awful situation in Iraq has become even worse. The Johns Hopkins School of Public Health concluded that approximately 600,000 Iraqis had been killed since the U.S. invasion in March 2003. As we prepare this message, the count of U.S. servicepeople killed is now 2,983. The economic cost of the war is staggering; over 350 billion dollars, that's $350,000,000,000 of our tax dollars, have already been spent on this war. That's money that could have been used to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, or to provide health care for millions of people, or for so many other needs in our communities. And now the president is thinking about sending more troops to Iraq!

At the same time the antiwar movement should draw strength from the positive work we've done. Sentiment against the war continues to grow, and in an unprecedented way, the voters of this country used the Congressional elections as a referendum on the war. A new Congress was elected with a clear mandate to end the war in Iraq and bring our troops home. More active duty members of the military are speaking out and refusing to fight in Iraq, while military recruiters have run into trouble meeting their quotas.

In a few days a new year will begin, which will bring with it new opportunities and challenges. United for Peace and Justice, and the more than 1,400 member groups in this coalition, are ready! We will hit the ground running as we kick the organizing for the January 27-29 mobilization into high gear. Momentum is building for what promises to be an historic event, and in the coming weeks we will do everything possible to ensure the success of this timely and critical antiwar mobilization.

But we know our work will need to continue beyond that. In March we will commemorate the 4th anniversary -- yes, four years already! -- of this war that never should have happened. In cities and towns around the country, and around the world, people will be in the streets demanding that this be the last anniversary of the war. In the weeks and months ahead you'll be hearing more about this and our other initiatives.

We hope that you've had some time during this holiday season to relax, spend time with family and friends, and renew your energies. The UFPJ staff and national steering committee look forward to working with you in 2007 as we press hard to once and for all end this war and bring all the troops home.

Yours for peace and justice,

Leslie Cagan UFPJ National Coordinator

From United for Peace and Justice

European Union embraces repressive laws

Sun, 31 Dec 2006 05:15:00 +0000

12-30-06, 10:18 am

New, repressive measures will soon be implemented in the European Union in the name of “combating terrorism.” Critics say the measures are actually aimed at nipping a growing European left-wing radicalism in the bud.

The EU Council of Ministers of Justice and of Internal Affairs met Dec. 4-5 to approve a series of new mandates that authorize the gathering and retention of personal data on individuals and the monitoring of their activities, increased coordination between the police and the military, and heightened immigrant and refugee control.

Gijs de Vries, coordinator of the EU’s anti-terrorist commission, set the tone for the council meeting. His report summarized the progress his commission has made since June 2006, and emphasized, “The strategic obligation of the EU is to combat terrorism on a worldwide level.”

The report opens with a focus on “strategies against violent radicalization,” which is defined by the EU Council as “the phenomenon where people adhere to viewpoints, opinions and ideas that may lead to terrorist actions.” The Internet was cited as a key conduit for the dissemination of these ideas.

Notably, the commission is now funding a series of studies on radicalism, including “Causes of radicalization among youth.”

The council makes reference to the EU’s anti-terrorist laws, according to which actions carried out by unions and mass movements could theoretically be characterized as “terrorist.” In a similar vein, because of the vague wording, many labor and community activists could plausibly be labeled terrorists.

While the anti-terrorist laws indicate their starting point is “extreme Islamic radicalism,” they also claim to cover “every form of violent radicalism, nationalism, anarchism, autonomous, extreme-left or right-wing action.”

Given recent anti-communist measures (e.g. the banning of the Young Communist League in the Czech Republic, and an anti-communist motion in the Parliamentary Assembly of Europe), the new mandates clearly constitute a dangerous threat to all those who challenge the capitalist system, even in the realm of thought.

Systems of monitoring and recording personal information of all EU citizens, residents, and now visitors are being perfected and extended. The council plans to centralize in one giant database all information gathered via immigration and visa procedures, and to include biometric data in all EU country passports (only 18 have such data now).

Increased police and military response mechanisms were also approved, especially for border points. The creation of a “rapid intervention force” which could intervene in any member country if the member government were facing a “large-scale crisis” is being reconsidered.

Special police units are being set up that would permanently patrol the Mediterranean and Aegean coastlines. Critics say these units, when combined with newly enacted immigration laws, will lead to increased persecution against immigrants and refugees.

The 1.4 billion euros ($1.8 billion) that have been approved for 2007-2013 exclusively for “research relevant to security” show what EU rulers’ priorities are, in a vast area where the majority of citizens are trying to survive under a system of never-ending economic austerity.

It has become clear that, as capitalist restructuring intensifies, so does repression, police terror and the erosion of democracy, both EU-wide and in each member country.

--Laura Petricola (laurajopetricola @ yahoo.com) writes from Athens, Greece.

From People's Weekly World

Posada Carriles: Washington and Miami’s Preferred Terrorist

Fri, 29 Dec 2006 06:03:00 +0000

12-28-06, 11:07 am

“One who shelters a terrorist, is a terrorist” – President George W. Bush

The upcoming immigration hearing for Luis Posada Carriles, the 78 year-old felon who is a self-confessed co-conspirator responsible for the detonation of a bomb which killed 73 passengers and crew members aboard a Cuban passenger airliner as it flew over Barbadian waters on October 6, 1976, represents a huge political burden for the White House and its deteriorating relations with Latin America. The disposition of the case will now also test the authenticity of the U.S.’s War on Terror, since Posada is responsible for some of the worst pre-9/11 crimes perpetrated in the Western Hemisphere. However, he has never been conclusively tried for being one of the region’s most notorious psychopaths, as the Department of Justice (DOJ) and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) lawyers as well as his detractors continue to cavil over whether he should be accorded the gallows or be granted U.S. citizenship.

Posada originally had admitted to a New York Times reporter of masterminding the 1976 bombing of Cuban Flight 455, in which 73 passengers lost their lives, including a nine-year-old girl, Cuba’s award-winning national fencing team, a young mother-to-be, as well as Guyanese and North Korean travelers. However, in deference to the ultra rightist faction of Miami’s Cuban exile community, Washington has repeatedly offered its protection to this world class criminal from prosecution by U.S. authorities or in any other germane jurisdiction. In doing so, the Bush administration almost has gone out of its way to debase the process of shaping a corpus of applicable international standards against terrorism by protecting those whom others might describe as “terrorists,” who are considered to be in good standing by some U.S. authorities. But, as the Washington-based lawyer, Jose Pertierra – who has been retained by Venezuelan authorities to represent their country’s interests in this case – explains “the fight against terrorism cannot be fought à la carte.”

A Case Wrought with Painful Irony

Washington has heard continuous international appeals, mainly as a result of Havana and Caracas initiatives, that Posada (who is both a Cuban national and Venezuelan citizen) be brought to justice. Venezuela and the U.S. have an extradition treaty in place dating back to 1922, which obligates the U.S. to immediately extradite any Venezuelan national in this country who has been indicted on murder charges in their home jurisdiction. Under the applicable terms of this bilateral treaty, Venezuela formally applied for Posada’s extradition in May of 2005. Not surprisingly, the Bush administration immediately rebuked this effort by maintaining that the leftist, pro-Castro nature of the Venezuelan government would preclude a fair trial to Posada in a Venezuelan courthouse, and that the defendant would be subject to torture: a self-serving assumption that U.S. prosecutors have never bothered to evidence.

On the domestic front, Washington’s unwillingness to prosecute Posada or facilitate terrorism charges against him brought in other venues, demonstrates that its War on Terror unmistakably involves double standards based on selective indignation. On September 11, 2006 (the anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks), the lack of forward motion by the U.S. Attorney’s office in Miami regarding the resolution of Posada’s status, led to a judge ruling that the mastermind terrorist be released due to a lack of evidence that would establish that he was a world-class terrorist and thus shouldn’t be released into the general public until his status would be resolved.

Since the federal prosecutor failed to mount a well-coordinated case, but mainly relied upon screening films and citing general grounds for detention, Magistrate Norbert Garney was forced to be exceedingly lenient in his ruling, by lodging only a relatively minor charge of illegal entry into the U.S. against Posada. Garney forcefully scolded the prosecution for its failure to produce critical, factual evidence regarding his professed terrorist status in proving that the only prudent path to take was to continue Posada’s detention. To the families of Posada’s scores of victims, the Bush administration’s DOJ’s legal team handling of the case was a caricature of what should have been an orderly and professional disposition.

Magistrate Garney then gave the prosecutors an extension of time to strengthen their case against Posada, whose U.S. citizenship application was simultaneously being heard by the USCIS. The judge’s reasoning for the extension stemmed from an unequivocal belief that Posada was “an admitted terrorist with a history of involvement in terrorist activities,” and that releasing him could have “significant national and foreign relations consequences.” However, on October 5, the day before the 30th anniversary of the destruction of Cuban Flight 455, the DOJ’s deadline to present adequate evidence to move the trial ahead, came to an end. At this point, the presiding U.S. District Judge Philip Martinez extended a new deadline, February 1, 2007, for the federal prosecution to present its case. In Martinez’s view, Posada has been detained “well beyond” what the U.S. Supreme Court permits. Thus, as of today, at most 30 days remain for the Bush-Gonzales justice to be dispensed.

Amongst the legal community, the DOJ’s lassitude has raised suspicion over whether the U.S. attorneys’ lack of aggressiveness could be attributed to the private biases of Attorney General Gonzales’ in this high profile case, or were they simply trying to gain time by arranging an indefinite trial extension for a self-admitted mass murderer.

What is the U.S. Government Hiding?

There is no reason to scoff at the notion that the U.S. Attorney’s office may be calculatedly sabotaging the Posada case in order to spare the administration an embarrassing outcome brought about by its not applying the full weight of the law against him. Certainly, the executive branch has an interest in shielding the case from widespread publicity. Over the years, Republican administrations on several cases acted to protect Posada, a political icon in Miami. Understandably, the government might not want the U.S. public to know about Posada’s long-standing cooperative relationship with U.S. authorities on various conservative causes, including his role as a CIA agent.

For starters, during the vice-presidency of George Bush Sr., Posada was granted sanctuary in El Salvador where he worked for the U.S. Embassy assisting Contra efforts operating out of neighboring Honduras shortly after escaping for a second time from a Caracas jail on August 18, 1985 where he awaited trial for the destruction of the Cuban airliner. Perhaps only coincidentally, when Posada arrived to San Salvador, Col. Emilio T. Gonzalez, the current Director of the USCIS, was the Assistant Military Attaché in the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador. Conceivably the U.S. Congress would find it appropriate to conduct a hearing investigating any possible conflicts of interests considering that the Director of the USCIS, now Dr. Gonzalez, has substantial leverage over Posada’s hopes of being granted asylum in the U.S. Furthermore, the fact that Dr. Gonzalez is an exiled Cuban national, whose family left Cuba in 1961 shortly after the failed attack on Playa Giron, might also be of interest to Congressional investigators. Dr. Gonzalez’s known intense personal anti-Castro elements and personal friendship with the now detained Posada should be addressed after the Democrats take over Congress. Moreover, documents in the possession of National Security Archives reveal that Bush Sr., as the CIA director at the time of the downing of Flight 455, was likely to have picked up rumors of Posada’s plan at a time when the explosives were being wired to detonate on board Flight 455. Much of the evidence against Posada has come from declassified FBI and CIA documents, including evidence of Posada’s meeting with another notorious terrorist, such as his accomplice and co-conspirator in Caracas, Orlando Bosch. One report states that “We [Posada and Bosch] are going to hit a Cuban airplane. Orlando has the details.” The DOJ even lists Bosch as a “terrorist, unfettered by laws, or human decency, threatening and inflicting violence without regard to the identity of his victims.” Revealingly, Bosch today dwells as a free man in Miami after former President Bush Sr. granted him a full pardon from all U.S. charges on July 18, 1990, a decision made at the behest of the arch Castro-basher, former U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela, Otto Reich.

But Posada, whose fate has not yet been determined, is guilty of more than just the destruction of the Cuban flight. The demolition training he received while enrolled in the notorious School of the Americas and thereafter as a CIA proxy, enabled him to mastermind several Cuban hotel bombings while operating under cover in Havana. These attacks were decried around the world as blatant acts of violence against tourists and other civilians, yet the U.S. authorities downplayed their significance at the time.

Posada was also implicated in the highly controversial Operation 40, which, throughout the 1960s, involved conducting sabotage operations and assassination plots in hopes of inciting a civil war in Cuba between pro and con Castro forces. Posada is also suspected of helping Bosch orchestrate the 1976 car bombing of former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and his U.S. assistant, Ronni Moffitt, on Embassy Row in Washington, D.C., in which both lost their lives. Most recently in Panama, Posada was preparing himself to go on trial for attempting to assassinate Castro, while the Cuban president was attending a gathering with more than 2,000 students at the University of Panama in 2000. Extraordinarily enough, former Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso, now residing in Miami, found no problem in pardoning him on August 25, 2004, on the eve of her leaving office, after Posada had been detained with 200 pounds of explosives in his possession. Perhaps Moscoso was so preoccupied with the good life awaiting her in Miami, that the matter did not adequately catch her attention. What we do know is that she was able to block from her conscience the impact of the death of 73 innocent victims – who died in the fatal airplane bombing three decades ago – out of which she was able to find the grounds to free him.

Justified Incredulity from Abroad

The Bush administration may be attempting to placate Miami and ease itself out of the Posada affair by attempting to find him a safe haven outside the U.S. However, to their dismay, upon contacting authorities in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico, Canada, Panama, El Salvador and Honduras, Bush officials were repeatedly told that they would only facilitate Posada’s extradition to Venezuela or Cuba, if such papers were ever filed against him.

Posada’s Miami-based lawyer, Eduardo R. Soto, has consistently fought such third-country deportation efforts on the grounds that he would be treated in a prejudicial manner wherever he would end up, something of a tacit admission of his guilt in itself. Other nations understandably want nothing to do with the man, who is viewed by many as a “monster,” and “Latin America’s bin Laden.” Meanwhile, the two countries which overwhelmingly have the greatest justification in seeing Posada brought to justice – Cuba and Venezuela – where Posada remains a fugitive from justice, in what has turned out to be an ongoing trial in absentia. However, the Bush administration has systematically ruled out the two as it considers them “rogue” nations where Posada would face “the threat of torture…and therefore could not be returned under the United Nations Convention Against Torture.” This is a conclusion that most legal experts would turn their back on.

Cuba has long been awaiting the administration of justice for the mass murder of its nationals on board the Cuban airliner. Havana has found widespread sympathy for the enormous loss and pain suffered by its population over this horrific misdeed. In 1998, Fidel Castro unveiled a monument in Barbados commemorating the passengers aboard the ill-fated flight. Venezuela also continues to vehemently assert its right to try Posada, whose successful escape from a Caracas jail is universally believed to be the result of well-heeled Miami confederates pulling strings and bribing prison guards. The Miami capos are also believed to be responsible for bringing Posada into contact with CIA operatives who signed him up as a useful “can-do” asset, and then again, were said by some to be involved in bringing President Moscoso into the scenario that ended up with her inexplicable pardon of him.

The Cuban Five

The fundamentally biased nature of the current Posada proceedings are highlighted by comparing them to the zealous dynamism displayed by U.S. prosecutors from the same office who were involved in the trial of five Cuban nationals: Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González and René González. Now all serving lengthy prison terms, these Havana militants were arrested by the FBI in Miami on September 12, 1998 and were accused of espionage and murder. Andrés Gómez, the Director of the pro-Castro Areítodigital magazine, insists: “The federal government lied and is still lying. The Five, as everyone knows, were not in Miami to spy against the government of the United States, but to infiltrate the terrorist organizations of the Cuban-American extreme right-wing, which with the full knowledge and protection of the federal government, plans and directs from that city terrorist actions…”

Indeed, the only real “threat” that these men seemed to pose from their monitoring of several extremist Cuban exile groups in Miami like CORU, Alpha 66, Omega 7 and Brothers to the Rescue, all of which were documented for their involvement in attacking Cuban personnel and property, bombing island tourist facilities, and illegally dropping pamphlets over Havana and other of the island’s major urban centers.

Double Standards at Work

The Cuban Five were arrested shortly after alerting Havana officials of flights that were being planned by the Miami-based anti-Castro extremist organization, Brothers to the Rescue. When two planes flown by exile pilots professedly penetrated Cuban airspace, they were shot down by Cuban pilots after warnings by Cuban air patrol officials to reverse their course. The blatant bias of trial judge Joan Lenard against the Cuban Five throughout their Miami proceedings, led to their conviction on all 26 counts, in which the jury deliberated for only four days.

The deportment throughout the proceedings of Judge Lenard, who acted more as a government prosecutor than a crusader for justice, only underscores Washington’s obsessive tactics when it comes to the interpretation of international terrorism in its favor. The fact that both the judge and jury foreman were outspokenly anti-Castro should have led to a dismissal of the indictments or certainly a change of venue. It is true that some Florida wags have been know to mutter, yet with her handling of this case, Judge Lenard proved that she is as fair to justice as Katherine Harris is to a fair vote. Notably, a UN Working Group reviewing the case was able to determine that the trial did not take place in a climate of objectivity and impartiality, which is required in order to conclude on the observance of the standards of a fair trial. The UN report also charges that the Cuban Five were wrongfully held for seventeen months in solitary confinement after their arrest, and that their lawyers were deprived of the opportunity to examine all of the available evidence before the government invoked the Classified Information Protection Act.

As a result, Hernández was sentenced to two consecutive life terms plus fifteen years, Labañino to one life term plus 18 years, Guerrero to one life term plus 10 years, and Fernando González and René González to nineteen and fifteen years respectively. The defense’s argument that Miami-Dade County was “a basic nucleus of anti-Castro Cuban exiles, where the conditions for a fair trial do not exist,” was summarily rejected in the pre-trial phase of the adjudication. On August 9, 2005, after Leonard Weinglass, the U.S. attorney for the Cuban Five, had appealed this ruling, a three judge panel of the Court of Appeals issued a 93-page reversal of the initial conviction as well as nullified the sentences. In response to the reversal, the Bush administration and Attorney General Gonzales vehemently pushed for the Solicitor General to appeal the verdict of the three-judge panel’s decision before all twelve judges of the 11th circuit in Atlanta. Its finding, to the surprise of many, in a 10-2 vote, reversed the previous pro-Cuban Five ruling, affirming the initial trial’s convictions and providing at least a temporary victory for the Bush administration and its Miami political backers.

Nevertheless, the defense counsel for the Cuban Five was quick to act and called for the conviction to be remanded back to the three judge panel (now only a two-judge panel because one had since retired) for the adjudication of the nine remaining issues under appeal. As Executive Director of the National Lawyers Guild, Heidi Boghosian explains, “The case of the Five is now in the hands of the very two judges who earlier reviewed this country’s history of crimes against Cuba, and concluded that […] it was impossible for these five Cubans to receive a fair trial in Miami.” Considering the defense’s previous success with this panel of judges, Boghosian expects that they “will again rectify this travesty of justice.”

The case of the Cuban Five is going to haunt the Bush presidency because even those opposed to the Castro regime have raised concern over the harsh treatment and violation of rights exercised upon the Five. The DOJ’s handling of these men has raised a ubiquitous fervor of nationalism profoundly affecting the younger Cuban generation who feel the U.S. has acted on immoral grounds. Considering Castro’s terminal illness, this will be a unifying factor for the Cuban system considering that the Miami-orchestrated case against the Cuban Five will be viewed as a trivial offense on all Cubans. Truly, the concepts of liberty and justice – which attracted thousands of Cubans to the U.S. shores – are not being preached by U.S. and its authorities.

U.S. War on Terror Lacks Consistency and Integrity

While a final decision on the fate of the Cuban Five is expected to be reached in the first half of 2007, the U.S. government’s single-minded hectoring of the Cuban Five – which is propelled by ideology as much as by law – vividly contrasts with the privileged treatment of Posada, whom after being accused of orchestrating the death of 73 innocent individuals, is now leading a protected life while his immigration status is being argued over in an El Paso, Texas, courthouse. Don’t be too startled if Posada is released at any time, by a lightning move on the part of the government since the DOJ has been guided by more of an ideological mission rather than by a faithful administering of the law.

If the U.S. government insists on its sovereign right to preemptively invade other nations to prevent terrorist attacks on its homeland, it might want to consider the illogicality of not attributing the same rights to its neighbor, particularly when that neighbor has repeatedly warned U.S. authorities that the Brothers to the Rescue were routinely violating international law by their repeated over-flights of Cuba.

On September 11, 2001, President Bush announced to the world that “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” Nevertheless, the U.S. continues to harbor Posada. If he is not brought to justice on this round, the U.S., by its own definition, can be identified as safe-haven for “evil-doers,” invalidating its own justifications for conducting its War on Terror. Posada’s El Paso-based lawyer, Felipe D.J. Millan disagrees, and asks “How can you call someone a terrorist who allegedly committed acts on your behalf?” Interestingly, Millan’s own query proves the need to judge Posada in another country such as Venezuela or some neutral third country, where he would have to respond to international charges, that, in effect, if found guilty on them, would make him complicit in criminal acts of terrorism and crimes against humanity. If the U.S. does not facilitate this process, as Michael Avery, the former President of the National Lawyers Guild concluded, “Allowing Posada into the United States and entertaining an asylum request from a confessed terrorist is an open acknowledgement of accomplice liability…” Perhaps a viable neutral candidate for a suitable venue to conduct Posada’s trial would be Spain, as the Los Angeles Times editorial board has argued: “Madrid is a credible interlocutor between Washington and Latin America, and Spanish courts have a recent tradition […] of aggressively taking on cases of universal jurisdiction.”

If the spotlight doesn’t stop focusing on Posada, in all likelihood, the administration could calculatedly announce to the general public – on a slow news day or on the eve of a three-day holiday – that Posada should be allowed to proceed with his citizenship application hoping that the case would disappear from the screen. This holiday season, with all the distractions that it entails, could be a period of suspense for scores of grieving family members seeking justice from Miami-spawned violence. The Bush administration has repeatedly displayed its political savvy in the timing of its archly political releases of controversial documents, other information, or individuals. This can be seen in the announcement of Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation as Secretary of Defense, which was made public on the morning after the Democrats’ triumph in the congressional elections, conveniently distracting the population by masking the Republicans’ near political implosion.

Meanwhile, the lives of the five incarcerated Cubans will continue to be squandered because of the intense ideological and political prejudices that define President Bush and Attorney General Gonzales’ way of formulating U.S. policy when it comes to the Cuban issue, or how it uses its criminal justice system for revenge rather than vindication. By setting an arch terrorist free while simultaneously continuing the draconic sentences against the five Cubans on the most meager of charges – who many would argue should never have been behind bars in the first place – Bush continues to build on the Bush family-Posada relationship, while at the same time scrapping all hopes of rendering U.S. relations towards Venezuela and Cuba more rational and responsive to the best of the U.S. tradition of the pursuit of justice and preserving, in good health, its humanitarian legacy.

From Council on Hemispheric Affairs

Impeachment: A Note of Caution

Fri, 29 Dec 2006 05:54:00 +0000

12-28-06, 10:55 am

The impeachment of President Bush has become an important issue. For some people on the left impeachment has even become a litmus test for the 'true' progressive.

For example, I recently received an e-mail from a reader apparently with such a viewpoint. (I won’t bait the person by naming him or her, but he or she claimed ties to the Democratic Party machine in Minnesota.) This person responded to an article I wrote about a public forum in Detroit at which Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) spoke about a 'people’s agenda' for the new Congress.

In my article, I reported that Rep. Conyers said, among many things, that while his committee and the Democrats would hold numerous hearings on Bush’s policies (from the war to corruption and attacks on civil liberties), he regards introducing articles of impeachment as off agenda when Congress returns in January. Conyers urged the people present to help Congress expose the truth about Bush, and said that in order for impeachment to be successful it must have broader public support and bipartisanship in Congress.

In the response, the angry reader appeared to label unabashedly Rep. Conyers as a party 'hack,' along with other Democrats for trying to 'spin and twist' the results of the election, which were based, in the reader’s view, on a popular demand for impeachment. The reader cited one speech by a now retired local Michigan politician (whom he mistook for a Republican loyalist) as evidence for this claim. This attack on Conyers was surprising, needless to say, given the future House Judiciary Committee Chair’s long commitment to the struggle for peace, civil and workers’ rights, and social justice – much longer than Bush’s soon-to-end political career, and certainly longer than just about any of Conyers’ critics.

What the reader’s abusive remarks ignored is that while polls show that voters soundly rebuffed Bush’s war policy and Republican corruption, and are seriously concerned about the administration’s handling of the economy and many social issues, the movement for impeachment has yet to be effectively built. Simple as that.

Building a credible movement for impeachment is the subject of a book edited by Dennis Loo and Peter Phillips called 'Impeach the President: The Case against Bush and Cheney.' Its contributors move beyond name-calling and targeting of people like Rep. Conyers out of otherwise well-intentioned anger.

'Impeach the President' enlists the pen of the great agitator Howard Zinn, as well as widely published journalists, academics, and activists such as Greg Palast and Mark Crispin Miller. This book documents a range of policy and ideological positions adopted by the Bush administration and the Republican Party that cost lives, destroyed countries and cities, and may have an enduring negative impact on the globe and all human life. From Iraq to New Orleans, ignoring global warming to protecting fossil fuels, and rejecting international law and the U.S. Constitution, the Bush administration and its Republican Party allies in the outgoing Congress are responsible for some of the greatest crimes of the 21st century.

In Iraq, for example, journalist Dahr Jamal exposes a hidden story of that war. Talking to people who witnessed the infamous battle at Fallujah in November 2004, Jamal documents atrocities ordered on that city by U.S. military commanders. He ties the transformation of Iraq into a 'free fire zone' to torture and brutality committed in U.S. controlled prisons in Iraq, and to the failure of the occupation forces to rebuild the country after Bush's premature declaration of victory in May 2003.

Greg Palast discusses the infamous Downing Street memo (this website was among the very first U.S.-based publications to reproduce), a secret British government document released to the British press in the spring of 2005. This memo indicates that British officials knew that the Bush administration's reasons for pushing for war with Iraq could not be substantiated. The memo, authored in July 2002, also shows that despite the Bush administration’s public claim to desire a diplomatic resolution to the crisis it had instigated with Iraq, British advisers had reason to believe that the administration intended to go to war regardless as early as the spring 2002. This was months before the massive public relations effort by the Bush administration that threatened the populace with Iraq’s imaginary WMD and the imminence of Iraq’s threat. Indeed, the author of the memo believed that as part of the public relations push the Bush administration had 'fixed' intelligence to support their justifications for the war. Related documents extending the war plan timeline even further back to the opening months of 2002 were later leaked to the press.

Palast contrasts the swift impeachment of former President Bill Clinton over lying about his sexual activities with the former Republican-controlled Congress's refusal to even hold a substantive hearing on the Downing Street memo and its implications. While this book addresses a number of things that could be considered impeachable – lying in order to start a war, ordering military personnel to break international and U.S. law by torturing people, breaking U.S. law to conduct illegal surveillance on people in the U.S. – chapters on 'Ignoring Peak Oil,' 'Propaganda, Lies, and Patriotic Jingoism,' and 'Bush-Cheney's War on the Enlightenment' are more about ideology and policies. This shift in focus confuses and may even undermine the immediate intention of the book.

Impeachment, of course, is a legalistic approach to addressing the crimes of a federal official like the president or members of his administration. A movement that aims to pressure Congress to impeach Bush should focus on actual impeachable acts that would be considered 'high crimes and misdemeanors.' By contrast, human rights lawyer Elizabeth De La Vega’s book '' scrutinizes some specific legal issues more directly and lays out an actual indictment that might be presented to a constitutionally mandated entity.

But impeachment is not the real point of the Loo/Phillips book, in my opinion. Impeachment is a limited recourse that, while it is a worthy goal that should be pursued against Bush et al initially by truth-seeking investigations in Congress, it will, if successful, produce little more than censure for its targets. Even further, I suspect that most voters believe they held Bush and the Republicans accountable for bad policies and heinous actions by 'firing' congressional Republicans last month.

The real aim of this book is to help generate a more substantial, long-term change. And that is to build a democratic culture willing and capable of holding elected officials and government institutions accountable for their decisions and ensuring that the people have a recourse against those who abuse their power. An effectively used legal remedy to punish criminal acts such as impeachment would have a stronger deterrent effect on future officials from committing similar acts. More specifically, the goal should be to examine and bring to light the true causes, rationale, and motives for war, expansion, military aggression, and, ultimately, empire.

The book sums up a lot of different issues that anger millions of people. But as Howard Zinn notes in his introduction to the book, Republicans and Democrats in Congress should not be expected to take the lead to impeach Bush. Indeed, such a notion undermines the basis of a democratic culture of accountability and decisively defeating and splitting the corporate, religious, and political coalition that supports Bush and the Republican Party.

To add my two cents, I believe that the explicit demand to impeach Bush and Cheney is jumping the gun. We can already see that the slogan’s effects are divisive and limited, sparking anger the of the righteously committed aimed at Democratic members of Congress who feel forced to retreat on 'going after Bush,' and shifting focus away from the people who committed the crimes.

The impeachment movement should really be a truth movement. It should be something akin to the 'truth and reconciliation' process in post-apartheid South Africa during which appropriate punishments were handed down to criminals exposed for heinous crimes against humanity, while preserving the unity of all the people by not allowing the process to be turned into a witch hunt.

With the slogan, 'We Need to Know the Truth,' a broad people's movement can pressure the new Congress to put on the public record the truth about the Downing Street memo (and similar evidence of misleading the public and Congress into war) and what the Bush people knew and when they knew it. Investigations should scrutinize the role of corporations tied to the White House in keeping the war in Iraq rolling along. Investigations should examine the issue of torture and violations of international and U.S. law, the so-called imperial presidency and the abuse of civil liberties.

Many congressional investigations of these matters have been planned. The truth movement should be closely following these investigations, demanding more, and pushing further for full accountability. But calling allies to the truth movement like Rep. Conyers a 'hack' because he won't step out into the wilderness of Congress alone is simply little more than a divisive and empty gesture. To be sure, punishing the Bush cabal for its crimes abroad and at home will require the broadest public support, not just charged rhetoric by principled people.

The most immediate changes that need to be won for working families by the new Congress are raising the minimum wage, reforming the health care farce we call a 'system,' protecting our voting rights, guaranteeing the right of workers to join unions, taking substantive steps to address environmental catastrophes bearing down on us, and protecting civil rights and liberties. These changes, which will have an immediately meaningful impact on the lives of millions of people, should happen before Congress is ground to a halt with an impeachment struggle.

--Joel Wendland is managing editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at

Killing Saddam: Irrelevant legal farce

Fri, 29 Dec 2006 05:19:00 +0000

12-28-06, 10:22 am

The White House portrays the impending execution of Saddam Hussein as a milestone in Iraq's transition to a democracy, which speaks volumes for Washington's understanding of both justice and democracy.

Iraq's quisling Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki justifies his killing on the specious grounds that it might reduce the current level of violence in Iraq.

And his British counterpart is as dishonest as ever, acknowledging that 'we are against the death penalty, whether it's Saddam or anybody else,' while reminding us of the barbaric brutality of Saddam's regime and claiming that it is the Iraqis themselves who will take the decision.

While the brutality of the Saddam dictatorship is not in doubt, it is far from clear that a nation under occupation is calling the shots over the justice system.

If the Iraqi government wielded sovereignty over the country, would the US perpetrators of the massacre of 24 civilians at Haditha be subject only to the legal processes of the occupier?

It is abundantly clear that the legal charade that has been played out in Baghdad's Green Zone may well have had Iraqi actors, but the script, direction and choreography were all made in Washington.

The former Iraqi dictator's trial has been a legal farce with two intended goals.

The first is to enthuse Iraq's Shi'ite and Kurdish communities by putting to death the face of the Ba'athist regime that oppressed their communities and murdered tens of thousands of their people.

The second is, quite literally, to silence Saddam Hussein so that he is never able to blow the gaffe on US collaboration with his regime.

It is noteworthy that, of all Saddam's crimes, he has had to face neither the unprovoked invasion of Iran nor the widespread use of mustard gas and other weapons of mass destruction.

Had he been, his lawyers could have demanded full disclosure of US collaboration during the Iraq-Iran war and could have sought to summon Donald Rumsfeld to answer questions about his role as a representative of then US president Ronald Reagan in Baghdad at that time.

The rope around Saddam's neck will be a lifeline to those in the US and elsewhere who backed his dictatorship for years before developing amnesia in later years.

While many Iraqi families who lost loved ones to Saddam's repressive state apparatus welcome the prospect of their tormentor being hanged, they must know that the death of one man, no matter how brutal, will do nothing to bring back their relatives.

Nor will it help to bring Iraq's various national and religious communities together to build a united, federal, democratic state.

What stands in the way of such a goal is the ongoing imperialist occupation of their country, which was undertaken in order to destroy Iraqi independence and ensure Baghdad's loyalty to Washington.

Executing Saddam will transform him, in the eyes of some, into a martyr for Iraqi independence, which he does not deserve.

His trial and an in-depth inquiry into the crimes and international backing of his regime should be the business of a truly sovereign Iraq.

From Morning Star

Iraq: Stress of violence leads to more suicides

Fri, 29 Dec 2006 05:14:00 +0000

12-28-06, 10:17 am

BAGHDAD, 27 Dec 2006 (IRIN) - The number of suicides in war-ravaged Iraq is increasing due to psychological stress caused by relentless violence, medical experts said.

'We see more cases of suicide each month and all evidence shows that the main reason for the suicides has been the stress and pressure caused by the continuing violence,' said Dr. Muhammad Hamza, a specialist in suicide medical investigation at the Ministry of Health.

Hamza said that he found that 70 percent of suicide victims chose to poison themselves using rat and cockroach poison. Others either shot or hanged themselves.

'Some of them leave letters to their parents and the most common excuse given for their act is that they can no longer bear the violence,' Hamza said.

'This week I had two cases of suicide. One person committed suicide because of the daily threats to his life which he had been receiving, and the other one because her husband had been killed and she became so desperate that she killed herself too,' Hamza added.

Based on statistics from the Baghdad mortuary and hospitals in five regions, the Ministry of Health said that about 20 people have been committing suicide each month since January. Thirty others attempted suicide but were saved.

'The numbers are high when compared to those during Saddam Hussein's regime when we used to have one or two suicide cases a month,' said Ahmed Fatah, a member of the suicide investigation department at the Ministry of Health.

According to the Ministry of Health, the country's continuing violence has had more psychological effect on the less privileged segment of society – those with little education or who are poor. 'They are at their wits' end in dealing with threats or the pressure of violence. They do not have the wherewithal to protect themselves from violence and for economic reasons they cannot leave the country,' a Ministry of Health official said on condition of anonymity.

'Today it is the adults who are committing suicide but it will not be long before children too start taking their own lives,' said Fatah.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) office in Amman, Jordan, has said that it does not have statistics on suicide cases in Iraq, but that it was not surprising to see such high suicide numbers considering the circumstances the country is living under.

From

¿Qué quiere ahora Washington?

Fri, 29 Dec 2006 05:10:00 +0000

12-28-06, 10:13 am

Se está especulando mucho sobre la posibilidad de que se produzcan cambios significativos en la política exterior de Estados Unidos, en razón de los estruendosos fracasos que ha cosechado últimamente esta pandilla fascista del clan Bush. Las elecciones legislativas del mes pasado ya proporcionaron un claro indicio en tal sentido. Para nosotros los venezolanos tiene una importancia particular dicha posibilidad, dado el creciente empeoramiento que han mostrado en los últimos años nuestras relaciones oficiales con Washington, y no sólo con el gobierno republicano del Baby Bush, sino igualmente con el de su antecesor demócrata William Clinton. Hay necesidad ahora de recordar esto último, pues se oyen opiniones de que con un presidente demócrata nos irá mejor.... dentro de un par de años. Lo cierto, a mi juicio, es que nuestras relaciones con Washington tomaron un giro equivocado hace todo un siglo, concretamente desde que el 24 de agosto de 1901 el entonces dictador Cipriano Castro le recibió credenciales y se echó en los brazos de Herbert W. Bowen, un ministro yanqui que se convirtió en árbitro de los destinos de Venezuela a partir de ese momento, utilizando como arma definitoria la llamada Doctrina Monroe. Quien lo dude, que se lea El hombre de la levita gris, obra magistral de Enrique Bernardo Núñez. Los gobernantes de Estados Unidos se acostumbraron a vernos como un país colonial, sometido enteramente a la voluntad de los monopolios petroleros yanquis. Con dictaduras o con una farsa de democracia, lo que ellos han tenido aquí han sido guachimanes. Por ello les resulta tan difícil aceptar esta nueva realidad de hoy, con el pueblo nuestro decidido a recuperar su plena soberanía, por las buenas o por las malas, y orientado cada día con mayor claridad por el pensamiento bolivariano en conjunción con elementos del pensamiento marxista. Lo deseable y sensato, lo realmente conveniente para ambas partes, en mi opinión, sería que los dos gobiernos se decidan a entablar lo antes posible una serie de negociaciones, en un plano estrictamente privado, sin alharacas de mutuas recriminaciones, para lograr por vía diplomática precisar los puntos de desacuerdo y buscarles posibles soluciones. Esto implicaría de partida que Washington reconoce nuestra condición de país soberano, y a la vez que renuncia a continuar fomentando en su prensa campañas de descrédito contra Venezuela. Pero hay algo todavía más urgente, y es que las agencias yanquis como la CIA dejen de estar financiando aquí una quinta columna que pretende, al saberse incapacitada para tumbar nuestro actual gobierno, mantener a Venezuela en situación de zozobra e impedir lo más posible el desarrollo de nuestra economía. Pueden algunos pensar que esto es mucho pedir a una potencia que hoy mismo tiene invadidos con sus tropas a países tan lejanos como Iraq y Afganistán, e incluso que controla militarmente a un hermano país al lado nuestro, Colombia, sin provocar el menor gesto de protesta de nadie, y mucho menos de la celestina OEA. Sin embargo, la realidad que poco a poco se ha venido imponiendo le demuestra a los pueblos que el poderío yanqui es más aparente que otra cosa. Si observamos bien, lo que se hace evidente es que en Washington los estrategas del Departamento de Estado y del Pentágono no saben qué hacer en estos momentos. Están aturdidos por los golpes recibidos, a punto de tirar la toalla en el Medio Oriente, tal un boxeador “groggy”. Lo cual, no lo olvidemos, lo puede llevar después a tratar de hacer pagarle los platos rotos a un tercero, considerado como débil e indefenso. Obviamente, los venezolanos debemos proponer el diálogo como cuestión lógica y al mismo tiempo mantenernos alertas, mientras en Washington el Baby Bush decide lo que quiere hacer.

From Tribuna Popular

Green Revolution in Cuba

Fri, 29 Dec 2006 05:03:00 +0000

12-28-06, 10:06 am

Cuba increases forested areas

BY ALEXIS SCHLAHCHTER

The reduction this year in the amount of pollution to the environment in Cuba was highlighted yesterday by Dr. José Antonio Díaz Duque, deputy minister for science, technology and the environment (CITMA).

During a press conference he added that in the eight hydrographic basins of national interest, this figure dropped, compared with levels in 2005, to 3.8% and 3% in the principal bays.

Also, at the end of the current year, according to the minister’s explanation, the country’s forested areas rose to 24.54% of national territory, with an increase of more than 33,000 hectares, in excess of forecast figures for benefiting impoverished soil.

The country now possesses 2,696,589 hectares of forest, not including the 170,253 plantations that are less than three years old.

With respect to the principal achievements in science and technology, he mentioned the establishment of methodological bases for environmental codes in areas where tourism is being developed.

Studies into the dangers and risks to and the vulnerability of 15 municipalities in City of Havana in relation to coastal flooding, intense rain and high winds have also been completed.

América Santos, deputy minister at CITMA, highlighted the development of bio-preparations to break down oil, the introduction of new medical and diagnostic equipment and work undertaken to develop alternative sources of energy.

Energy Revolution in Cuba

BY DIEGO RODRIGUEZ MOLINA

NUEVA GERONA.—The works involved in the final stage of mounting the Eolian Park installed on the Isle of Youth to generate electricity via a more economical alternative as part of the Energy Revolution were commended by Yadira García Vera, minister of basic industry, during a tour of the area, some 40 kilometers from this city.

The likewise member of the Political Bureau, accompanied by Elizabeth Cámara, member of the Central Committee and first secretary of the Party here, met with workers in the sector who are raising the 55-meter towers that will carry the six French technology aero-generators that can be dismantled at the approach of hurricanes, an aspect that gives this field an advantage over others introduced into the country.

Located in the eastern part of the second island in the Cuban archipelago, given that the air velocity there is highly suitable for generation, the complex will add 1,650 kilowatts to the local electrical energy system without contaminating the atmosphere, and based on renewable raw material, like the wind.

García Vera acknowledged the territory’s efforts to incorporate new renewable energy sources in line with its potential, including that of generating from the forestall biomass, and highlighted the favorable results in terms of savings, by decreasing electricity consumption by 0.3%, despite the fact that the 40% of the island’s population have been cooking with electricity for some months. This translated into 1,300 tons of unused oil.

Translated by Granma International

Iraqi Trade Unions Unite to Oppose Undemocratic Oil Law

Fri, 29 Dec 2006 04:55:00 +0000

12-28-06, 9:59 am

December 14th 2006 -- Leaders of Iraq's labour movement today criticised government plans to 'hand control' over the country's oil production to multinational companies.

At a meeting in Amman, Jordan, leaders of Iraq's five trade union federations - between them representing hundreds of thousands of workers - called for a fundamental rethink of the forthcoming oil law, which is designed to allow foreign investment in the oil sector. The law has been prepared by an Iraqi cabinet committee, and is expected to be presented to the Iraqi parliament for ratification in the coming weeks.

The opposition by Iraq's powerful trade unions will dismay the US government, which is keen to see the law in place by the end of the year. Since the summer, US officials have been calling for an oil law to encourage foreign investment in Iraq's oil - a call reiterated by the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group in its report last week. [1]

The labour leaders criticised the major role for foreign companies in the draft law, which specifies that up to two thirds of Iraq's known reserves would be developed by multinationals, under contracts lasting for 15 to 20 years. [2] This policy would be a radical change for Iraq's oil industry, which has been in the public sector for more than three decades - and would break from normal practice in the Middle East among Iraq's neighbours.

In a joint statement, the trade unions rejected 'the handing of control over oil to foreign companies, whose aim is to make big profits at the expense of the Iraqi people, and to rob the national wealth, according to long-term, unfair contracts, that undermine the sovereignty of the state and the dignity of the Iraqi people'. The statement added that this was a 'red line' they would not allow to be crossed.

They were also angry at their exclusion from the drafting process, and called for a delay to the law, to allow proper consultation. 'The Iraqi people refuse to allow the future of oil to be decided behind closed doors', they stated.

Hasan Jum'a, President of the Federation of Oil Unions, commented, 'This law has a lot of problems. It was prepared without consulting Iraqi experts, Iraqi civil society or trade unions. We reject this draft and demand more time to debate the law.'

'Adnan Saffar, member of the Executive Committee of the General Federation of Iraqi Workers, added, 'The Iraqi national interest is surrendered in this law which allows foreign companies investment terms that exploit Iraq's oil wealth. They benefit the foreign investors more than they benefit Iraqi workers, through long term oil contracts that negatively impact Iraq's sovereignty and national independence'.

Notes

1: For example, in October, US Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad and General George Casey, head of US operations in Iraq, listed the passing of such a law as one of the 'milestones' they were pressuring the Iraqi government to deliver. Similar calls have been made by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (see eg www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2006/75418.htm) and Energy Secretary Sam Bodman (eg AFP, 18 Jul 06, 'US wants new Iraq oil law so foreign firms can take part'). Secion II.B.5 of the Iraq Study Group Report (pp.83-85) recommends that the US government both advise on writing an oil law, and encourage international oil companies to invest.

2: See eg Dow Jones Newswires 6 Dec 06, 'Iraq's Draft Hydrocarbon Law Recommends PSAs'

From General Union of Oil Employees in Basra

CANADA: What's Next for the Bolivarian Revolution?

Thu, 28 Dec 2006 06:19:00 +0000

12-27-06, 11:00 a.m.

(The following article is from the January 1-15, 2007 issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 173 West Ave. North, Hamilton, ON, L8L 5C7.)

By the Vancouver Bureau of People's Voice:

With most of the votes counted, Hugo Chavez has won Venezuela's Dec. 3 presidential elections with 7,161,637 votes (62.89% of the total), against 4,196,329 votes (36.85%) for his right-wing rival, Manuel Rosales. A total of 14 candidates competed, supported by 79 parties, 24 of which supported Chavez, and 43 of which backed Rosales. No other candidate received over 1% of the vote. Chavez begins his second six-year term in February.

Over 11.3 million people went to the polls, or 74.87% of registered voters, compared to the 69.92% turnout in the recall referendum of August 2004. The results confirm the defeat of the 'abstention' strategy promoted by opposition groups such as the near-defunct Accion Democratica (AD), which dominated Venezuelan political life for nearly 40 years. Instead, the tendency towards growing political apathy among Venezuelans has been reversed.

Although the campaign fell short of its initial goals, the votes for Chavez were up more than a million over the 2004 recall referendum. In percentage terms, support for Chavez rose by 3.8% over 2004, when 58.09% of voters cast ballots against recall of the president. Pro-Chavez forces even made inroads into the country's 'middle class' voters, and the president won a majority in all of the country's 24 states, including oil-rich Zulia, where Rosales is governor.

The U.S.-based polling company Penn, Schoen & Berland, which had been involved in elections in Ukraine, Serbia, and Belarus, was one of three opposition-linked firms that predicted a 'dead heat' between Chavez and Rosales, even though all other polls gave Chavez a wide lead. But for the first time in a number of years, the opposition candidate accepted defeat. Although Rosales disputed the vote margin, the outcome silenced calls by the privately-owned channel Globovision and other corporate media for voters to take the streets to overturn a so-called 'rigged' election.

In 2005, even though their conditions for participation were met, opposition candidates withdrew from parliamentary elections, allowing the coalition of governing parties - the Movement for the Fifth Republic (MVR, founded by Chavez), For Social Democracy (PODEMOS), Homeland for All (PPT), and the Communist Party of Venezuela - to win every seat in the National Assembly.

Such a boycott had been considered this time, but the war in Iraq and other events have left the US administration, the major backer of the opposition, in a much weaker position. Barring a new shift in the balance of forces, Venezuela's far right may grow more isolated, replaced by an 'institutional' opposition which accepts that the chances to directly overthrow Chavez are slim.

Now the question arises: What does the future hold for the Bolivarian Revolution?

In his victory speech, Chavez declared a 'battle against the bureaucratic counter-revolution and corruption' - the purging of corrupt officials, and the deepening of participatory democracy through the transfer of powers to the newly-created Communal Councils and popular organizations, as well as increased worker co-management, and the development of co-ops and other 'social production enterprises.' This battle will undoubtedly sharpen confrontations with bureaucrats who have found many ways to slow down the pace of radical change.

Such resistance has led the Chavista forces to create parallel bodies, including the social 'missions' which are now the main instrument for carrying out progressive social policies at the grassroots level. The radical view of the missions as tools for a fundamental transformation of society and the state in the direction of 'twenty-first century socialism' is gaining ground.

Already, wealth redistribution is underway. The minimum wage has risen 327% under Chavez, to about $250 a month. When he came to power in 1999, 55.4% of Venezuelans were considered poor; now they are 39.7%. More people are working in the formal economy than in the informal. According to the United Nations Development Program, Venezuela has climbed to 72nd place in global human development levels.

But an even more basic problem remains - private ownership of most of the wealth-producing sectors, with the key exception of the petrochemical industry. As Marxist observers have pointed out, until this contradiction is resolved, Venezuela will remain a capitalist society in terms of ownership and social structure.

Other topics are now also coming to the fore: the proposal by Chavez to create a unified 'party of the revolution,' and possible revisions of the constitution, such as removing term limits for the office of President.

The first proposal would unite the MVR, PODEMOS, PPT, and the Venezuelan Communist Party, with the goal of creating a stronger revolutionary leadership. Such a process following the Cuban Revolution brought together Fidel Castro's July 26th Movement, the radical Student Directorate organization and the Popular Socialist Party (Cuba's historic communists) in 1965 to form the Communist Party of Cuba, a strongly-united vanguard party which has led Cuba for over forty years.

However, there have less successful unifications in other countries, including cases where the reformist views of some participating forces became the basis of unity, weakening the drive for fundamental change. There has been no indication of the possible terms of unity, but clearly, the aim of President Chavez is to strengthen the struggle for genuine socialist transformation.

Cuba faced the imminent prospect of a Yankee invasion during the early 1960s, and repeated attempts by U.S. administrations to destabilize the Revolution ever since, making one-party unity imperative. But in Venezuela, despite the alarmed cries of the private media, a unity process would not affect the opposition or pro-Chavez parties which prefer to remain independent. The Trotskyist Party of the Revolution and Socialism (PRS) for example, which leads one current within the National Workers' Union (UNT), has declared its desire to remain autonomous. Unlike other pro-Chavez parties, the PRS abstained in the Dec. 3 elections.

The unity process, some have argued, would strengthen the formation of a mid-level revolutionary political leadership, reducing dependence on the charisma of Chavez himself, and forcing bureaucrats and careerists to choose between the revolution and the opposition.

The term-limit debate would be part of a process of wide constitutional review throughout the country, with the results filtered through a two-thirds vote in the National Assembly and a simple majority in a popular referendum.

(Some background for this analysis is from an article by José Laguarta Ramirez, which appeared on the website http://www.venezuelanalysis.com)

From People's Voice

'The Good Shepherd': When Patriotism Murders Humanity

Thu, 28 Dec 2006 05:52:00 +0000

12-27-06, 10:55 a.m.

Winter was the perfect season for the release of 'The Good Shepherd' which exacerbated December's icy chill and masterfully depicted the bloodless, emotional vacuity of CIA cold warrior, Edward Wilson. According to New York Times reviewer, Manohla Dargis, Wilson is a composite character, played by Matt Damon, portraying the real-life James Angleton who directed the CIA's counterintelligence program from 1954 to 1974, after serving the agency from the time it had been the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. The movie's title apparently refers to Jesus' saying that the 'good shepherd' gives his life for his sheep, and give his life Wilson does, albeit emotionally and spiritually, until one is left wondering if there are any last drops of humanity remaining within the shell into which he has devolved.

I heard one reviewer describe the film as an attempt to 'take on' the CIA, yet I came away on the one hand in awe of its psychological depiction of Edward Wilson, but also aware of the film's paucity of information regarding the agency's sordid machinations before, during, and after the Cold War. In the beginning of the film we see Wilson initiated into Skull and Bones, but mud wrestling is as dirty as it gets, which lets that secret society off the hook entirely. No depictions of the infamous ceremony in which a Bonesman initiate is required to recite his entire sexual history to the group, nor clarity regarding the revolving door between Skull and Bones and the CIA.

True to life, the agency continues to up the ante in terms of what is expected of Wilson, and when he witnesses the murder of his Yale professor-poetry mentor, genuine pangs of conscience surge in an attempt to prevent the atrocity, even as the professor leaves Wilson with a final warning to guard his soul and never allow the agency to extinguish it.

Later, Wilson finds himself in the bed of a German woman co-worker who he suspects is spying against the U.S. government. Subsequently, Wilson and another male colleague show up at the woman's door, enter her home, and summarily shoot her. Although he comes close, Wilson can never open his heart romantically, never allow the place in his psyche which supercedes governments and cannot be touched by them to become genuinely vulnerable to any of the women in his life. This only happens with his son, until in the final minutes of the film, Wilson denounces matters of his own and other hearts and marches forward dispassionately to become the new head of CIA counterintelligence.

Among other things, the film addresses the issue of former Nazi scientists brought to the U.S. after World War II, but does not touch the reality that many of Hitler's top intelligence officers were hired by the CIA (Operation Paperclip) to assist the agency in spying on the Soviet Union, a reality deeply disturbing to former New York Congresswoman, Elizabeth Holtzman who chaired a Congressional investigation of Paperclip in the 1990s. Nor does 'The Good Shepherd' venture into the formidable waters of the CIA's historic involvement with drug trafficking and money laundering from before the end of World War II and continuing into present time-a reality documented superbly by Mike Ruppert, Gary Webb, Mike Levine, Celerino Castillo, and Catherine Austin Fitts.

While the film superficially depicts CIA intervention in banana republics during the 1950s and '60s to ostensibly contain the spread of communism, unless the viewer is familiar with the ghastly extent of the CIA's overthrow of governments worldwide, he/she cannot adequately appreciate the horror that Wilson consents to sanction.

'The Good Shepherd' often mixes historical fact with fiction, as in one scene where agents are torturing a Soviet suspected of spying and enhance their sadistic interrogation by giving him a generous dose of LSD to which the suspect ultimately responds by jumping out the window of the building in which he is being detained. The agency's use of LSD and similar drugs for interrogation and other purposes is detailed in de-classified documents from the MK Ultra Program. This particular scene in the film is reminiscent of the Frank Olson case in which agents almost certainly slipped LSD into the drink of another agent, Frank Olson, who they suspected of being a double agent, and who experienced a psychotic reaction whereupon he was taken by agents to a New York hotel where he leapt to his death from the tenth floor.

One of the finest resources for background information on the era in which 'The Good Shepherd' begins, the Bay of Pigs and the John F. Kennedy administration is the website of the late Fletcher Prouty who served as the Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Kennedy years. Prouty's practice of Scientology and his collaboration with Oliver Stone on the JFK film have been spuriously used to minimize his accounts of CIA dirty tricks, but much of Prouty's material has been corroborated elsewhere. Included in 'The Good Shepherd' is a reality that Prouty emphasizes in his writings, namely that Kennedy had declared that he would 'break the CIA into a thousand pieces'. However, the film does not clarify, as Prouty does, that Kennedy wanted to shift the power to overthrow governments, ensconced at it was in secret CIA operations, into the hands of the Joint Chiefs at the Pentagon where the light of Executive and Legislative branch oversight could shine upon it.

In my recently-published book, U.S. HISTORY UNCENSORED: What Your High School Textbook Didn't Tell You the reader will find more detailed information regarding the post-World War II activities of the CIA and the relevance of those to U.S. foreign and domestic policy both then and now. As a result of my research I was sorely disappointed but not surprised, that the makers of 'The Good Shepherd', who ostensibly sought to 'take on the CIA' did not in fact do so. But if money from CIA-sanctioned drug profits has found its way into Hollywood, as well as the host of other industries, as Catherine Austin Fitts asserts in her marvelous series, 'Narco Dollars For Beginners', then we should not expect 'The Good Shepherd' to offer us more than it did in terms of disclosing the agency's atrocities. Also explained in my book is the process by which the CIA developed the power to create black budgets for clandestine operations of which Congress and the American people have been and continue to be unaware-a reality that is inextricably connected with trillions of dollars of 'missing' money which Fitts has superbly documented.

What we did receive from the film was a message perhaps as urgent and equally as disturbing as any litany of the CIA's six-decade history of criminality, namely, as I.F. Stone never failed to remind us, 'governments lie,' but worse--that when individuals commit to 'serving their country', their fate is sealed, either in terms of literal loss of life or the total and complete evisceration of their souls. In 'The Good Shepherd' we are confronted with the price of patriotism and the toll it takes on one man's humanity and the well being of innocent individuals close to him.

The film asks us: What is the cost of being a 'good shepherd'? No one returns from any country's wars unscathed, and only a handful of politicians in this country's history have ever retained their integrity let alone their humanity. Moreover, when we are unwilling to face the criminality of our government and its corporate accomplices-when we refuse to examine and learn from our history, which is not only past but present, we join Ed Wilson in relinquishing another piece of our humanity every day that recalcitrant patriotism rules our lives. The colonial revolutionaries and founders that we call 'patriots' were committed not to the established order, but to remaking and transforming it-a far more noble expression of patriotism, which Jefferson underscored when he passionately asserted that he wanted to see a revolution in America every twenty years. Indeed, 'good shepherds', like Ed Wilson, tend to become the walking dead, enshrouding their environment with the stench of their decaying souls while the conscious revolutionaries of history have enlivened and embellished everything around and within themselves, cherishing integrity over patriotism, love before duty, and courage above compliance.

-Carolyn Baker, Ph.D., is an adjunct professor of history and manages her website at where her book may be ordered and where she may be contacted.

From

A Look Back and Ahead In An Age of Neocon Rule

Thu, 28 Dec 2006 05:39:00 +0000

12-27-06, 10:40 a.m.

Borrowing the opening line from Dickens' Tale of Two Cities - 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times....' He referred to the French Revolution promising 'Liberte, egalite and fraternite' that began in 1789, inspired by ours from 1775 - 1783. It ended a 1000 years of monarchal rule in France benefitting those of privilege and established the nation as a republic the way ours did for us here a few years earlier.

That was the good news. The bad was the wrong people came to power. They were the Jacobins who at first were revolutionary moderates and patriots until they lost control to extremists like Maximilien Robespierre who ushered in a 'reign of terror' (The Great Terror sounding a lot like today's 'war on terror') characterized by brutal repression against perceived enemies from within the Revolution who didn't get a chance to prove they weren't. In the name of defending it, individual rights were denied and civil liberties suspended. Laws were passed that allowed charging those designated counter-revolutionaries or enemies of the state with undefined crimes against liberty.

It resulted in justice being meted out to thousands for what Orwell called 'thoughtcrimes' or for their freely expressed opinions and actions judged hostile to the state under a system of near-vigilante justice by the Paris Revolutionary (kangaroo) Tribunal with no right of appeal. It led to the public spectacle of an inglorious trip to and quick ending from the death penalty method of choice of the times - the guillotine that was barbaric but quick, and a much easier, less painful way to die for its victims than the use of state-inflicted torture-murder in the commonly drawn out lethal injection process used in 37 of the 38 death penalty states and by the federal government making the condemned endure a slow agonizing death unable to cry out while they're being made to suffer during their last moments of life. Instances of this barbarity aren't exceptions. They're the rule, the exception being this time a report or two of what really happens slipped out and made news.

Fast forward to the past year and the previous five under George Bush and ask: sound familiar? French Revolutionary laws during the 'reign of terror,' like the Law of Suspects, were earlier versions of our Patriot I and II and Military Commission Acts today. The Revolutionary Tribunal, with no chance for justice or right of appeal, was no different than our military courts today, and too many civil ones, in which any US citizen may now be tried anywhere in the world, with no habeas right of appeal or hope for due process and from which those sent there won't fare any better than the French did, doomed to meet their unjust fate - even though much in these laws today is unconstitutional and one day will be reversed by a High Court upholding the law instead of the extremist rogue one now empowered that scorns it.

What May Lie Ahead As the New Year Approaches

At the end of the sixth horrific year under the reign of the Bush modern-day extremist Jacobin-neocons, we can now look ahead, but to what. We have an administration in charge for another two years one longtime analyst characterizes as 'a bunch of crooks, incompetents and perverts' with the president's approval rating plunging as low as 28% in some independent polls and a growing number of people in the country demanding his impeachment and removal from office.

It's not likely from the new Democrat-led Congress arriving in January, as their DLC leadership took it off the table and so far only promises more of the same failed policy other than some minor tinkering around the edges to create an illusion of change no different than the deceptive kind of course correction proposed by the Baker 'Gang of Ten' Iraq Study Group (ISG) that guarantees none at all. It doesn't leave members of the body politic with much hope for the new year that will likely just deliver more of the same rogue leadership and policy engendering growing public discontent and anger but not at a level so far to scare the those in power enough to want to address it.

The heart of the problem is the unpopular illegal war of aggression in Iraq, the cesspool of corruption and scorn for the law in Washington, and the assault on human rights and civil liberties in the country justified by the so-called 'war on terror' now rebranded a 'long war' against 'Islamofascism' and 'radicals and extremists' (who happen to be Muslims.) It's the same failed policy using the kind of deliberately provocative language intended to deceive the public to think a threat great enough exists to justify any state action in the name of national security including waging wars of aggression and all the horrors associated with them at home and abroad.

After the Baker 'bob and weave,'' the now you see a change of course and now you don't, disingenuously suggesting a drawdown and exit strategy, the New York Times on December 16 reports 'Military planners and White House budget analysts have been asked to provide President Bush with options for increasing American forces in Iraq by 20,000 or more.'

The article goes on to say one option is to boost the force level by up to 50,000 even though any increase greater than 20 - 30,000 would be 'prohibitive' - but it won't deter the Pentagon, on administration orders, from extending tours of duty even longer for forces now there and calling up thousands of reservists and greatly extended National Guard units to get into this quagmire even though it's recognized their presence will only make things worse as well as place an unfair burden on those called up, who've served before, and their families.

As of December 27, it's somewhat less clear what Iraq troop strength policy will emerge in January following comments by incoming Democrat chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joseph Biden, who just stated 'I totally oppose this surging of additional American troops into Baghdad. It's contrary to the overwhelming body of informed opinion, both inside and outside the administration.' Senator Biden will hold hearings on Iraq on January 9, and at that time things may heat up a bit at least in rhetoric if not in final policy.

Additional heat may be created in January after George Bush admitted for the first time on December 19 that the US isn't winning the war even though two weeks before the November mid-term elections he said emphatically 'absolutely, we're winning in Iraq.' He wouldn't acknowledge what most every honest observer knows including the Pentagon Joint Chiefs - that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are lost. They can't be won and won't be. No military solution is possible now or any time ahead.

The president is living in a state of denial, obsessed with his messianic mission fed him by the vice-president and hardest of his hard line neocon allies, and it shows in the outlandish solutions he proposes to an insoluble problem - send in more troops (that will only make things worse) and increase the overall size of the military (that guarantees a permanent state of war).

It also clearly sounds a lot like the first official hint from the chief executive that a draft is needed and will come at some unspecified time ahead - likely following another 'made in Washington' 9/11 calamity severe enough to get the public to go along with something now thought intolerable. The president's sentiment was echoed on December 21 by administration Veterans Affairs secretary Jim Nicholson who (incredibly) said that 'society would benefit' if the US reinstated the military draft. He didn't say for whom. He did go further when asked in a press conference whether it should include women saying: 'I think if we bring back the draft, there should be no loopholes for anybody who happens to be drafted.' Maybe, to his thinking, it should include pregnant mothers as well and single ones with small children.

Such openness by the VA secretary apparently was too much, too soon, and too clear for the White House that quickly got the Department of Veterans Affairs to issue a separate follow-up statement from Nicholson saying: 'Let me be clear, I strongly support the all-volunteer military and do not support returning to a draft.' Let the reader choose which message to believe, but, with the nation in a permanent state of war, it looks like the trial balloon and hint of a draft now being floated is the opening round to instituting one at some designated time ahead. That likelihood looms even greater as the Selective Service System announced it's planning a comprehensive test of the military draft machinery, which it hasn't done since 1998 while, at the same time, saying the agency isn't gearing up for a draft. But what else would they say as they make plans to do this on orders from the administration.

It all amounts to an increasing level of insanity from a power-crazed administration as well as sounding much like Benjamin Franklin's wisdom who said 'The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.' In the case of Iraq, doing it with more troops on the ground is even more insane as a greater occupying force there only guarantees a stronger resistance to it presenting more targets to aim at with virtually no chance for a peaceful resolution of the conflict short of a full unconditional withdrawal of all occupying forces, no strings attached, that won't happen. In the case of a future draft, now seeming more likely, it only guarantees this nation plans to stay in a permanent state of war against future enemies to be chosen with those in or to be included in the 'axis of evil' heading the target list at some point ahead.

George Bush and others floating these lunatic schemes have no regard for the lives of those affected, and why should they. For now, their aim is to buy time, and as long as they can get away with it, they and their well-connected cronies and corporate friends stand to gain from the price everyone else has to pay - a huge one including the thousands of lives lost each week and the many more thousands of survivors whose lives will never be the same again.

Think what it means as the new year approaches. The nation is at war on two fronts, it's likely more ahead are contemplated by some in the administration, no substantive effort is being made to change course, and the condition at home is a relentless march toward becoming a full-blown national security police state we're already perilously close to. It's because the neocon-dominated Bush administration is reckless in ambition, out-of-control in policy, and the embodiment of a relentless and ruthless 'weapon of mass destruction' unleashed on all humanity in its way.

It's underpinned by an extremist ideology based on rule by savage capitalism that's frighteningly close to and borders on the tipping edge of the classic definition of fascism combining corporatism with strong elements of patriotism and nationalism, a claimed messianic Almighty-directed and blessed mission, and characterized by authoritarian rule backed by the iron fist of militarism and 'homeland security' enforcers, illegally spying on everyone, and intolerant of dissent and opposition in an age where the law is what the chief executive says it is and all semblance of checks and balances no longer exist. In a word - despotism, but cloaked in the deceptive rhetoric of a modern democracy falsely claiming to serve the needs of all its people.

It's also an age of extreme greed and corruption infesting government and corporate boardrooms with the gap between rich and poor at levels greater than since the 19th century 'Gilded Age' of the 'robber barons.' It's something economist Paul Krugman calls 'entirely unprecedented' under George Bush that 'For the first time in our history, so much (of the nation's economic growth has gone) to a small, wealthy minority' while the great majority can't stay even as inflation-adjusted wages fail to keep up with rising prices and poverty is growing in an age of affluence affecting tens of millions in the richest country ever in the world.

The grossness of this disparity was on the online business pages of the New York Times on Christmas Day in a story titled 'Wall St. Bonuses' So Much Money, Too Few ($250,000) Ferraris. The article highlights that 'The 2006 bonus gold rush has re-energized some luxury markets' like Manhattan real estate that had softened earlier in the year and echoed the lament of a real estate broker about a 'dearth of listings for two clients trying to spend $20 million on Manhattan properties' while mentioning some of the Wall Street wealthy already in their luxury nests are buying $5 million apartments for their children and private resort vacation homes to boot.

The same ugly data is there overall worldwide in a newly released study by the Helsinki-based World Institute for Development Economics Research of the UN University that shows the richest 2% of adults in the world own more than half of its wealth compared, on the other end, with the assets of about half the world's population accounting for barely 1% of global wealth - lumps of coal only for them and a 'Ba Humbug' dismissal for their plight by those with everything wanting still more.

The Cost to a Society Based on Predatory Capitalism and Out-of-Control Greed, Corruption and Militarism

The societal breakdown in the US is a national disgrace and affects many millions. A sampling of some of it is listed below:

-- 47 million Americans can't afford basic health insurance.

-- Over 80 million in total have no health coverage during some portion of each year and most of them are employed.

-- The Bush administration just proposed sweeping cuts in payments to pharmacies to reduce the Medicaid benefits 50 million poor in the country rely on, can't afford to make up the difference for on their own, and may have to forego medications they vitally need if pharmacies won't fill prescriptions at lower prices.

-- The US ranks 41st in infant mortality, and the World Health Organization (WHO) ranks the country 37th in the world in 'overall health performance' and 54th in the fairness of health care despite spending at a current level overall of around $2 trillion a year or about double the amount per capita of the OECD countries that deliver superior health care overall to their citizens as a national priority.

-- Well over 12 millions Americans struggle daily to feed themselves, and many thousands across the country can't afford housing and are forced to sleep on the streets including in winter cold.

-- A just released December 14 US Conference of Mayors report said these conditions continue to worsen based on a survey of 23 cities showing 7% more requests for food aid in 2006 following a 12% jump in 2005 during a period of economic growth.

-- The same report showed requests for shelter rose 9% in 2006 with requests from families with children rising 5%.

-- Public education is deliberately being eroded with illiteracy in basic reading, math and computer skills shamefully high and rising.

-- The US prison population is the highest in the world at 2.2 million and increasing by 1000 a week, half of those in it are black, and half of the total prison population is there for non-violent offenses half of which are drug-related. The US prison system is a shameful Gulag and an affront to humanity. The appalling conviction and sentencing of first-time drug offender Weldon Angelos is but one of countless examples. He was convicted of three sales of marijuana in 2004 while in possession of a gun unrelated to the sale. Under the insane federal mandatory sentencing laws, he was sentenced to five years for the first offense and 25 years each for the other two totaling 55 years in federal prison or a likely life sentence if he's forced to serve it all because he possessed and sold a few 'joints' of a substance less harmful than legal cigarettes that kill millions yearly while it's not known marijuana ever killed anyone using it. Only in America.

-- The true state of things overall is suppressed by the dominant corporate-controlled media (including the NPR and PBS parts of it) functioning as a national thought-control police controlling all mass communication and depriving the public of any real information vital to a healthy democracy and their welfare.

-- Racial segregation is as great as in the 1960s, and the national sport almost is demonizing Muslims as 'terrorists, radicals, extremists and Islamofascists' and impoverished 'people the color of the earth' Mexicans and Latin Americans as 'illegal immigrant invaders polluting' our white western European society and culture, mindless that they only come el norte in desperate search of work because of the devastating effects of NAFTA on their lives that destroyed their ability to support their families.

Data from the Oakland Institute think tank specializing in social, economic and environmental issues shows that heavily subsidized US corn exports to Mexico have tripled since NAFTA came into force forcing two million Mexican corn farmers out of business, something that was predicted in advance but allowed to happen anyway. It also led to suicides but at a rate nowhere near the level globalized trade US-style had on farmers in India where as many as 100,000 of them have taken their own lives because 'New World Order' indebtedness caused them to lose their farms and then everything else.

-- Childhood poverty in the US ranks 22nd and next to last among developed nations when there should be virtually none tolerated in the richest country in the world or toleration of any of the other listed abuses.

-- An alarming number of high-paying and other jobs have been exported abroad in a process that's gone on for decades but picked up in momentum since the 1980s and especially in recent years. Mckinsey Global Institute estimates the volume will grow 30 - 40% a year for the next five years. Forrester Research estimates 3.3 million white-collar jobs will be lost by 2015 with most affected areas in financial services and information technology, and University of California researchers estimate that 'up to 14 million American jobs are at risk to outsourcing.'

It adds up to a nation in decline, losing its industrial base and becoming primarily a service-oriented economy mainly offering low-skill, low-pay jobs with the better, higher-paying ones growing scarcer, making a college degree in areas outside of critical skills almost worthless. Exporting jobs to low-wage countries is a boon for corporate bottom lines in an age of 'globalized free trade' never characterized as fair for the harm it does to millions of wage earners at home or in the developing countries on the receiving end being exploited by capital that sucks out their wealth and impoverishes their people, many of whom work for near-slave-rate wages in a modern era of serfdom in countries around the world in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin and Central America.

-- Worker outrage around the world in protest is growing in response to these abuses (unreported in the US) because most governments are doing little or nothing to ameliorate them. It showed up on November 22 in South Korea when over 200,000 workers belonging to the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) staged a general strike protesting in 17 cities against the bilateral US-Korea Free Trade Agreement currently being negotiated that will do to their members and farmers what NAFTA did to Mexicans and India's agricultural trade policies did to their small farmers. It continued on the streets in the days following and spilled over to the Big Sky Ski Resort in Big Sky, Montana where negotiations are being held in seclusion but are still unable to escape the daily protests held against them there.

-- It happened as well in Cebu City, Philippines where President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (closely allied to the failed Bush agenda and elected through fraud) had to cancel two Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) meetings in December attended by 19 countries including the US and Canada. It was an abrupt ending to the meeting held to ratify trade and security agreements because of the mass protests by workers, farmers and others against their harmful effects forcing thousands in the country to leave daily to go abroad for work paying enough to support their families at home.

-- Workers almost everywhere have been harmed, including in the US, as union clout and worker rights here have declined in an age where the social contract government once had with its working people has been dismantled with less than 13% of the work force (the lowest in the industrialized world) unionized today compared to one-third of it in 1958. In an age of modern-day 'robber barons,' the middle class bedrock of a democratic state is slowly disappearing as the nation moves closer to becoming a banana republic at a time when 51 of the world's largest economies are corporate giants, most of them US-based.

It all goes on with no redress or sign of change in an age of out-of-control militarism and outlandish budgets supporting it that began ratcheting up under Ronald Reagan, along with big budget deficits to pay for it, and have gone wild under George Bush. The White House just approved a fiscal year 2008 near $470 billion Pentagon budget on top of an additional $100+ billion off-the-books amount minimum more that will boost this year's war budget for Iraq and Afghanistan to a yearly record of about $170 billion. It also needs tens of billions annually for 'Homeland Security' and tens of billions more for the 'spy agencies' totaling numbers in the range of well over $700 billion a year and rising - while social spending continues to be slashed to pay for it all in a heartless society scorning its people and their essential needs as long as the interests of capital are served along with the militarists in it profiting from its blood money.

Since WW II, when the US emerged as the only dominant nation left standing, Washington, instead of disarming and fostering peace, embarked on a now long-running program of militarization to maintain the country's political, economic and military preeminence over all others. It takes a lot of military spending to do it, that could have been used far more productively investing in human capital (like health and education) and physical capital (like essential infrastructure) as well as promoting non-military related business and industry that over time pay back far greater dividends than the short-term gains from building weapons and having large standing armies, navies and air forces that only exist to kill and destroy.

Productive spending also pays off in creating a society free from a dominant military culture like now exists out-of-control and hard to contain in the Pentagon that scorns civil liberties and democratic principles and values that have nearly vanished. The course this nation chose 60 years ago led to today's corrupted society armed to the teeth for endless wars with the most destructive weapons in human history deployed on over 800 known military bases in about 155 of the 192 countries of the world. It cost an unimaginable amount creating this monster as documented by the Center for Defense Information. It reported this country spent an estimated $21 trillion in constant dollars since 1945 on defense, the numbers continue to rise sharply, and the mindset of most of the nation's leaders, especially George Bush, is when you've got the might, you have to throw it around to prove it as well as scare off potential challengers.

Shamefully the US stands as a modern-day Sparta glorifying war and those put in charge to wage it. Witness the retirement ceremony for Army Major General Geoffrey Miller last summer when Army Vice Chief of Staff General Richard Cody awarded the man who supervised the infamous US Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib torture-prisons with the Distinguished Service Medal (DDSM). This award was established by Richard Nixon in 1970 so the Secretary of Defense could reward officers of the US Armed Forces 'whose exceptional performance of duty and contributions to national security or defense have been at the highest levels.'

Witness also the December 16 retirement ceremony at the Pentagon for unindicted war criminal and torture-authorizer Donald Rumsfeld complete with pomp and circumstance, George Bush and Dick Cheney in attendance for the spectacle, and a 19 round cannon salute that might have been better aimed. In open defiance of growing public anger over the war, speakers, including the president, shamelessly lauded Rumsfeld for the war of aggression he directed and his leadership in doing it. The galling scene showed Bush hugging Rumsfeld saying: 'This man knows how to lead, and he did. And the country is better off for it.' He failed to say for whom, but it got worse with Dick Cheney saying: 'I believe the record speaks for itself - Don Rumsfeld is the finest Secretary of Defense this nation ever had.'

Contrast those spectacles with the fate of extraordinary people like Lynne Stewart prosecuted for her crime of courage, honor and resisting tyranny. She was unjustly charged under the 1996 Antiterrorism Act with four counts of aiding and abetting a terrorist organization and violating Special Administration Measures (SAMS) imposed by the US Bureau of Prisons, which included a gag order on Sheik Abdel Rahman whom she represented as counsel for the defense in his 1995 trial because former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark asked her to take the case.

Lynne took it in the same spirit she spent her entire 30 year professional life as a courageous champion for the rights of the poor, underprivileged and those in society never afforded due process unless they're lucky enough to have an advocate like her. She broke no law, and her trial was a gross miscarriage of justice. Still, the Justice Department asked for a harsh 30 year sentence. It wasn't for any crime committed. It was to send a clear message to all in the legal community not to represent 'unpopular clients' and not to afford them their legal right of due process with competent counsel when the government wants them put away.

Lynne for the present had the last word being vindicated in court on October 17 when Judge John G. Koeltl rejected the prosecution's case in the 28 month sentence he handed down allowing Lynne to remain free pending her appeal to a higher court, acknowledging it might overturn her conviction and effectively rebuking the Justice Department for their prosecution of a courageous woman who spent a lifetime fighting for justice.

The outcome was painfully different in an age of Muslim demonization and persecution shown in the prosecution of Dr. Rafil Dhafir, a Muslim American of Iraqi descent and practicing oncologist until his license was unjustly revoked as a prelude to the greater outrage committed against him. Dr. Dhafir was charged and tried in another US 'kangaroo court' for what Katherine Hughes called and wrote his 'crime of compassion.' Katherine followed the trial daily in court for 17 weeks and remains his champion, continuing to work tirelessly for his vindication and release.

Dr. Dhafir was convicted and is now serving a 22 year sentence in federal prison for violating the Iraqi Sanctions Regulations (the IEEPA) having used his own funds and what he could raise from others to bring desperately needed humanitarian aid, including food and medical supplies, to Iraqi people unable to get them because of the punitive, harsh and unjust sanctions imposed prior to the 2003 war. He did it through his Help the Needy charity, and for it was convicted of violating the sanctions, tax fraud, money laundering, and mail and wire fraud - a total of 60 counts and found guilty on 59 of them.

The verdict sent another chill through the Muslim community, and as Katherine explained on her web site - dhafirtrial.net - 'If we can get Rafil Dhafir, we can get anyone.' Not quite, as Lynne Stewart's vindication proves. But it proves something else too. In the age of George Bush, the chance of prevailing against injustice as a white American is a lot better than for a 'not-as-white' Arab Muslim, even an American one, especially one courageous enough to take on a mission of mercy in defiance of state policy unjustly prohibiting it.

Dr. Dhafir was confined at the federal prison in Fairton, NJ until December when he was transfered further away from his family, who weren't told. He's now at what's been described as the hellhole in Terre Haute, IN, in an area of right wing extremism and KKK influence, in a deliberate act of further barbaric vengeance to break his spirit, restrict his access to legal help and his family, and cause him undue pain and suffering in an age of US-sanctioned and authorized torture as a method of social control and inhumanity and because no dissenting authority has the courage to challenge Washington's willingness to go against the most basic principles of equity and justice.

A Look Back to Find Direction Ahead

A look back to an important anniversary just reached should have been duly noted and reflected on in the major media, but it passed nearly unnoticed. It was the December 15 anniversary of the Bill of Rights of 1791 to the Constitution framed in 1787. It gave us unimaginable freedoms up to that time written into the law of the land that overall was a great democratic experiment never tried before outside of ancient Athens for a few decades before it ended. It gave people the rights of free expression, religion and peaceable assembly; protection from illegal searches and seizure; the right of due process, against double jeopardy and to remain silent if accused; to a speedy trial by jury if charged with the right to counsel and to be able to call witnesses; protection from any cruel and unusual punishment and more.

Most of the credit for this historic achievement goes to James Madison who drafted the first 10 amendments and with his perseverance got the other Framers to go along. He then managed to get the needed two-thirds vote from both Houses of Congress and ratification by the required three-fourths of the states in 1791 to have them become the law of the land - a major landmark achievement today being defiled by those in power who have contempt for the freedoms the Founders gave us.

Madison is thought of by some to be the 'Father of the Constitution,' but it's more accurate to call him its Godfather as he had a lot of help from the other 54 Founders who met in the Philadelphia State House, where the Declaration of Independence was signed 11 years earlier, to frame this historic document for the new republic they hoped would last into 'remote futurity' - if we could keep it as Ben Franklin warned at the time and would shudder now at how things turned out and condemn those in power responsible.

Two future presidents, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were serving abroad as envoys to France and Britain and weren't in Philadelphia for this historic gathering. When they were back later on, Jefferson and Madison wanted twelve initial amendments to the Constitution instead of the original 10 that were adopted. Federalists John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, however, opposed the Bill of Rights entirely and managed to exclude from them the other two that included 'freedom from monopolies in commerce,' or what are now giant corporate predators, and 'freedom from a permanent military,' or today's standing armies waging wars of illegal aggression.

Imagine what might have been, what was lost, and how the country might be governed today had Jefferson and Madison prevailed. Still they deserve our gratitude for what they accomplished, and it's discon

New Year's Utopianism Needed Fast

Thu, 28 Dec 2006 05:03:00 +0000

12-27-06, 10:06 am

Unbeknownst to many Americans, there is overwhelming consensus among scientists that we are very close to reaching a point of no turning back on global warming, which is caused by the burning of fossil fuels. We are approaching a point at which all of the following will become unavoidable: massive desertification, rising sea level, explosive growth of insect populations, widespread habitat destruction, mass extinctions, mass migrations (including of humans), the disappearance of sea life, and in all likelihood wars over drinking water that will make the wars over oil look civilized. These changes are likely to lead to human disease, starvation, and death on a scale that will dwarf the current reality, much less what Americans are currently able to imagine. The desperation and suffering involved, combined with the too-late awareness of the planet's fate, will almost certainly bring about a blossoming of religious and magical thinking that will make current American evangelists look reasonable. As the end of human civilization begins to look inevitable, myths that make it look desirable will grow in popularity. Enlightenment notions of human progress will reach extinction as the long-term planning of slow projects becomes seen as futile. Of course, we're almost at that point already. Were we not, we would not be destroying the world of our great grandchildren with the mad furiousness with which we are knowingly destroying it. That is, some of us know we are doing it. And most of us lack the future-historical attention span to process the knowledge. We are pounded with such a flood of infotainment about this week that next century is unthinkable. And so we don't think about it, for now. But unless we very quickly think and act, global warming will take over and violently instruct us or our children as to what we will think about. The loss of hope for the future will be devastating, even if lessened by religion and already shortened attention spans. For a moment, it will look less worthwhile to save and plan for retirement, to research diseases, to study archaeology, to attend architecture school, or to practice the violin. For just a second it will look less significant to prevent torture or the proliferation of nuclear weapons. For an instant it will seem to matter less if you are cruel to someone else. These painful impressions will come and go, but not last long. In part, again, this is because we are almost there already. Already we imprison not to reform for future years but to prevent freedom this week. Already we do not save or plan. Already we seek pleasure in the face of a looming catastrophe that we could stop. Already our political horizon is never further than two years. But the world of global warming will be a leap into fatalism unlike what most of us are used to. That alone will not, however, alter our microscopic, self-absorbed sense of priorities, decency, manners, or ethics. We will struggle through, recognizable, to the end. But why should we – or rather, our grandchildren – have to face this fate? This New Year's let's make a resolution together that we will accept the responsibility that has been thrust upon us. Resolved: we will treat global warming as a dire emergency and reverse the behaviors that cause it before the year is out. How will we do that? We will begin by recognizing the root cause of global warming as a power structure that places immediate corporate profits ahead of even the survival of the human species. We will go on to envision the possibility of a different power structure dominated not by corporate greed but by the needs of people. We will quickly restore to its necessary role in our lives the all-important mechanism of utopianism. And our utopia will be a democracy driven by the will of the majority of a well-informed population. We will inform each other of these facts: We must reduce carbon emissions by at least 50 percent, not the 7 percent we have thus far refused to live up to. By 'we' I mean those of us in the United States, where we make up 4 percent of the world's population and produce 36 percent of carbon emissions. We are leading the destruction and can lead its reversal. But we cannot do so with our current government. Rather than directing the necessary shift to wind and solar energy and mass transit, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have led us into an expanded use of oil and coal. They led the effort to remove the Chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change because he favored addressing climate change. They have led efforts to water down, censor, and block reports on global warming, eliminated funding for a series of observation stations called the Climate Reference Network, and defunded Amtrak and fired its president for opposing its elimination. Of course, we could sit back for two more years of destruction and then elect Al Gore president, Al Gore who served eight years as Vice President having already at that time published a book on global warming but who for eight years did nothing to slow or reverse it, Al Gore whose current proposals are seriously insufficient, Al Gore who thought Joe Lieberman would make a good vice president, Al Gore who is not even running for office, Al Gore who would face a Congress still controlled by oil corporations. Or we could refuse to watch two more years of destruction edge us closer to the point of no return. We could seize this opportunity to impose change on Washington and shake up our political system in just the way that might allow the necessary changes to be made in time to make a difference. We will need to begin by restoring the rule of law, including Article 2, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution: 'The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.' We have a President and a Vice President who have lied us into a war, spied without warrant, detained without charge, tortured, murdered, reversed laws with signing statements, and engaged in criminal negligence in the face of global warming. We have a duty to remove them from office. We have an opportunity to save the world by doing so. We will end up with a new version of someone we just lost: Gerald Ford. (Whimpers of 'But then we'd have President Cheney' will be as common as cries of fright over 'President Agnew'.) We will compel the new Ford to begin the repairs, and when we throw the new Ford out, along with his party, in 2008, it will be with the newfound political strength to lead the world in a direction we currently cannot even dream about: utopia.

From

Book Review: A Postcapitalist Politics, by J.K. Gibson-Graham

Thu, 28 Dec 2006 04:47:00 +0000

12-27-06, 9:48 am

A Postcapitalist Politics By J.K. Gibson-Graham University of Minnesota Press, 2006

In two famous books, Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, Palestinian American literary critic Edward W. Said detailed some of the relationships and interactions between European/North American cultures and their imperialist enterprises. As part of this project he noted the use of academic disciplines, such as anthropology, geography, economics, etc., to catalog, chart, classify, and incorporate the various cultures and peoples encountered by imperialist explorations – the better to dominate and exploit them. I am reminded of these groundbreaking results of Said’s investigation after reading A Postcapitalist Politics, the most recent book by J.K. Gibson-Graham, the pseudonym of economists Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham, stationed respectively at exclusive universities in Australia and the United States.

A Postcapitalist Politics is billed as a follow-up to the duo’s 1996 book, The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It). The general argument of both books, shrouded in the (post)Marxian jargon associated with journals like Rethinking Marxism, is that capitalism isn’t a total system, that it is only partial, and that other modes of production exist alongside it which ordinary people who share a 'mutually interdependent' economic community (there’s no such thing as a working class let alone a usefully defined concept of class) use continually to subvert capitalism. In arriving at these formulations, J.K. Gibson-Graham adopt an anti-state posture, reject anti-capitalist alternatives such as socialism, and even refuse to acknowledge the dominant global events that are determining so much of what goes on in the world. You won’t find Bush or Australian Prime Minister John Howard mentioned, and war in Iraq and Afghanistan, 'war on terror,' and even contemporary alternatives to capitalism and imperialism such as Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution (in which workers’ cooperatives, an important subject of Gibson-Graham’s book, have played an important role) or Alternativa Bolivariana para las Américas are simply evaded.

But a handful of communities in the Philippines, India, and Massachusetts are not. In fact, Gibson-Graham devote a couple of chapters to charting what they call the non-capitalist economic sectors in these various communities. Of particular note is their research (which has identifiably anthropological, geographic, and economic characteristics) on the Jagna municipality in the Philippines. This community, they say, possesses only a tiny capitalist sector, and most of its inhabitants operate and survive in informal sectors or feudal relationships. In the end, neither capitalism nor this informal sector provide enough subsistence for most of the municipality’s people. As a result, many families are forced to send individual members into a global stream of overseas contract workers, the vast majority of whom are women, to work in places like Hong Kong, Japan, and Canada mainly as low-wage domestic workers. Overseas contract workers support their families through remitting portions of their incomes back to their communities of origin. Indeed, the Philippines government has represented remittances of this nature as patriotic, and these remittances combined amount to an enormous chunk of that country’s GDP.

Useful analysis of this process (see for example Delia D. Aguilar and Anne E. Lacsamana, Women and Globalization and David Bacon, The Children of NAFTA), simply put, has suggested that this globalization of the division of labor, a process that has its origins in capitalist centers and given its particular character by imperialism, is part of a logical framework and set of practices that purposely underdevelop certain geographical portions of the global labor market in order to force people into decisions like becoming migrant workers. Marxist and anti-imperialist politics typically conclude that broad organization of people in those marginal regions into communities of nation and classes (in solidarity with the working classes of the capitalist centers) are the best method of resisting those global processes and developing local and global alternatives to them. Gibson-Graham are having none of that. Indeed, their cataloging of non-capitalist modes of survival in Jagna and their argument for an alternative development, such as local investment initiatives like those developed by the Asian Migrant Center (a group that convinces migrant workers to save their remittances in local cooperative investment projects). Their research on Jagna exposes a 'diverse economic community,' as they call it, composed of family networks, individual enterprises, small businesses, small farmers (mainly tenants), and others which can be developed through such investment projects that do not rely on outside imperatives or goals and which can provide for people’s needs in non-capitalistic ways. Resources can be 'marshaled' for community needs without relying either on capitalist globalization (that only promotes the migrant workforce solution to lack of subsistence) or the state (which is, in all contexts, authoritarian). Their critique of development completely ignores and excludes socialist and national alternatives to capitalism and imperialism. Indeed, local initiatives, also described as being modeled in different communities in other parts of the world, are posed as the alternative to global capitalist development.

While their excavation of important cooperative projects provides worthwhile lessons for people interested in socialist alternatives to capitalism and imperialism that look beyond no longer existing models for a broader socialist concept, there is a disturbing element to this book as evidenced by the location of this book within the framework of those very relationships that Gibson-Graham ignore.

For example, in the preface to this book, Gibson-Graham acknowledge the receipt of a grant from the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) for the research on Jagna. While Gibson-Graham are likely to regard their relationship to AusAID as an innocent one – something like, we used their money for our own subversive purposes – the relationship is fraught with negative implications.

According to Australian economist Tim Anderson, under the right-wing Howard government, AusAID’s explicit mission has been transformed from promoting general international 'poverty reduction' projects to providing resources to such projects linked to Australia’s 'national interest.' Anderson notes that prior to Howard AusAID served as a mechanism (within the international jurisdiction of the IMF and World Bank) to impose neoliberal imperatives on regional countries. In other words, aid from AusAid came with 'good governance' conditions that have come to typify neoliberal projects funded by wealthy countries. Under Howard, however, this role has shifted from merely forcing aided countries to adhere the general principles of the globalizing project (austerity, shrinking public sectors, etc.) to also promoting specific Australian interests such as Australian based corporate enterprises. To be blunt, the role of AusAid, according to Anderson, has become one of promoting Australian imperialism among its neighbors in the Asian Pacific islands.

Reading Gibson-Graham and their affiliation with Australian imperialism in the light of Said’s project mentioned at the opening of this review is revealing. Thus we may see why Gibson-Graham’s relationship to AusAID is not innocent. Indeed, read with the linkage Said sought to expose in mind, it is possible to understand why Gibson-Graham have rejected socialist alternatives to capitalism and national liberationist alternatives to imperialism. Specifically, by mapping non-capitalist and underdeveloped sectors in Jagna and discouraging socialist, broad class, international and national alternatives, Gibson-Graham’s work aids in opening the Philippines to Australia’s imperialist agenda.

--Joel Wendland is managing editor of Political Affairs and may be reached at

Vets, military families: Time to say it’s over

Thu, 28 Dec 2006 04:40:00 +0000

12-27-06, 9:44 am

Veterans and military families are planning dramatic actions in the nation’s capital in late January to appeal to ordinary Americans to speak out for an end to the Iraq war.

David Cline, a Vietnam vet who is president of Veterans for Peace, recalled the 1971 “Dewey Canyon III” antiwar protest when Vietnam veterans publicly “returned” their medals on the steps of the Capitol. “When veterans stood up that encouraged other people to stand up,” he said.

Now, Vietnam and Iraq veterans and families of soldiers serving or who lost their lives in Iraq believe their actions can light a similar spark among broad sections of the American public, Cline said. Their actions will take place just before the Jan. 27 march for peace being organized by the national coalition United for Peace and Justice.

As debate continues over the Iraq Study Group report and what’s really needed to get the U.S. out of Iraq, many peace activists say its main significance is the open declaration by influential Republicans and Democrats that the Bush war policy is a failure.

“The U.S. occupation is down the toilet. It’s just a matter of time before the U.S. has to leave,” said Cline.

It’s not what the ISG report says, but how people see it that is resonating, said Cline. The recommendations are “almost stay-the-course,” but because the American people are sick and tired of the war, the report amounts to “a challenge to what Bush has been saying all along,” Cline said. “That’s why the Bush administration has been so freaked out about it. They are worried about it being a signal from Congress to get out.”

Noting that the ISG was created by Congress, Cline said it could be seen as “a first feeble attempt … to stand up to the administration.” He added, “It’s a baby step in trying to break the [pro-war] consensus. It’s sort of like the middle-of-the-road way to do it. Sometimes that’s how you have to do it.”

Celeste Zappala, whose son Sherwood Baker was killed in Iraq, said she found it “frightening … shocking” that it took nearly four years to get a report in which “the reality was sort of presented, not an optimistic analysis, yet still, after almost four years, this administration asks for assessments and gets answers and they don’t want those answers.” She exclaimed, “Here’s a statement with Republicans saying the situation is ‘grave and deteriorating,’ and they don’t want that answer.” Instead, “Bush is trying to keep doing the same thing but make it look different.”

Zappala, an advisory board member of Gold Star Families Speak Out, said the ISG report “strikes me as a way to give him cover to leave — an attempt to find a graceful exit.” The report’s recommendation that the U.S. has to engage Iraq’s neighbors is “so basic, it’s shocking,” she said. “We in the peace movement have been saying this for a long time.”

Zappala will be marching in Washington Jan. 27. She said her organization will be putting “all our energy into getting Congress to call a halt to the war.”

George Martin, program director for Peace Action Wisconsin and a national co-chair of UFPJ, saw the ISG report as “a platform for discussion.” He said its recommendation for regional diplomacy “goes against this cowboy mentality in Washington that ‘we don’t talk to our enemies,’” and is a rejection of the politics of labeling countries an “axis of evil.” Pointing to Bush’s free-fall in public opinion polls, Martin said “the resistance of Bush to anything to do with withdrawal is becoming a negative in the public eye.”

“It is important to continue to grab hold of the momentum coming out of the elections, to continue to pressure this new Congress,” Martin said. “We decided to make this call to march on Congress this Jan. 27 to support those Congress members who have opposed the war, put pressure on the new ones and shout out to those who are stuck on this stupid war policy.”

He stressed that, in addition to the Saturday march, the weekend will include training for all-important lobbying to take place Monday, Jan. 29.

“We’re calling to everyone who can: come by plane, bus, car to join us,” he said.

Martin, who is African American and a longtime Milwaukee activist, said people of color are “the ones most affected by war. They end up being the ones most recruited or enlisting because of lack of jobs. And it takes away resources from our communities. Last year we had to close two schools and a bookmobile in our community.”

Cline, Zappala and Martin all said a big focus will be getting Congress not to approve any more funds for war. They emphasized that it is possible to cut funding for war while providing funds to ensure that all the troops come home in a safe and orderly way.

The new Congress has to “take the responsibility we gave them and carry it out,” Zappala said. “It takes a political will to say ‘it’s over now.’”

From People's Weekly World. Reach the author at: suewebb @ pww.org

An Aspect Of Neo-Liberalism

Thu, 28 Dec 2006 04:37:00 +0000

12-27-06, 9:33 am

The standard argument for the proposition that a capitalist class is at all socially necessary is that this class undertakes productive investment: it thereby causes the development of the productive forces, which is a condition for social progress. The social legitimacy of capitalism thus lies in the fact that capitalists undertake investment. The view that capitalists may operate enterprises better, even if this were true, will not in itself justify their social existence, if the surplus value produced under such better operation was fully or largely consumed. Their running enterprises better will then have relevance only for their own private consumption, but none for society as a whole. It is the fact that they invest the bulk of the surplus value produced under their supervision which provides the basis for claiming that they have social relevance, that they play a role in social advance. True, as Marx had shown, this investment on their part is not a matter of volition. It is imposed on them by the impersonal and coercive logic of capitalism. Nonetheless it is what underlies the socially positive role claimed for them. In short, when capitalists are undertaking investment, they are simply doing what they are supposed to do, what they claim is their basic raison d’etre; if they did not do so, they would cease to have any social legitimacy. DEMANDING SOCIAL BRIBES In the era of neo-liberalism however we witness a strange spectacle: capitalists demand a social bribe even for undertaking investment. Governments have to offer them inducements in order to elicit investment from them, in the form of guaranteed rates of return, “viability gap financing” (which refers to the amount of grant made available to them by the government under the “public-private partnership”), tax exemptions, free land for their investment projects, opportunities for making capital gains through land speculation in the Special Economic Zones, and immunity from labour laws in such zones. Demands have been made that there should be zero taxation in such zones, and now there are even demands that manufacturing as a whole should be exempted from paying any corporate income tax. This is over and above the abolition of the long-term capital gains tax which exempts capitalists from parting with even an iota of their gains from stock-market speculations, and whose proclaimed objective is to keep the boom going, ostensibly to stimulate investment. How is it that the capitalists now feel emboldened to demand a social bribe, and an increasing one at that, even to carry out the basic task which they have always claimed is their essential social role? Two factors have contributed to this change, both characteristic of the neo-liberal era. The first is the systematic, deliberate, and entirely unjustified vilification of the public sector, which was seen earlier as providing an alternative agency to the capitalists. Imperialist agencies had always indulged in such vilification from the very beginning of the era of de-colonisation when a host of newly-liberated third world countries, inspired by the socialist example, had sought to build up the public sector as a bulwark against metropolitan capital; the domestic monopolists have joined this process more recently. And the entire media controlled by both, imperialism and the domestic monopolists, have gone hammer and tongs attacking the public sector, until the very term has come to be perceived as a dirty word. With the public sector discredited, there appears no alternative to the capitalists, and the pound of flesh they demand can be easily passed off as being socially necessary. The second factor is the institutionalisation of a free-for-all, where state governments vie with one another for attracting private investment, and the capitalists, both domestic and foreign, are the beneficiaries of this competitive struggle among them, with each state government outdoing the others in offering better terms. TARGETING PUBLIC SECTOR Let us consider each of these factors. There can be scarcely any doubt that the public sector played a key role in India not only in building the productive base of the economy, but also in the achievement of whatever technological self-reliance we have. Even in the matter of efficiency of functioning, once we define the term efficiency carefully and refrain from the absurdity of treating it as being synonymous with profitability (which depends on a host of factors like pricing policy and product-mix, with regard to which the public enterprises have had to act under constraints owing to their social obligations), the public sector comes off at least as well as the private sector. Moreover, even in spheres where it has functioned comparatively poorly, the reason has often had to do with the deliberate neglect, and even subversion, by a government bent upon pursuing neo-liberal policies than with any intrinsic limitations of the public sector. And yet there has been a veritable campaign against this sector, largely based on intellectual sleights-of-hand and untruths. An example of the kind of intellectual sleight-of-hand that passes for argument in this realm can be given from the supposedly intellectually “respectable” Approach Paper of the Planning Commission for the Eleventh Plan. The Paper talks about the massive investment requirements for infrastructure needed in the Plan and then points out that resources on this scale cannot obviously be generated within the public sector. Hence the private sector must do the bulk of such investment, for which it must be enticed in various ways through social “bribes”. This argument appears so reasonable, and indeed so obvious, that it may pass unnoticed. But a careful look will show that when the Paper talks about the inability of the public sector to finance such investments, it is referring to budgetary and other internal resources. But the private firms that are required to do the job instead are not supposed to be using their internal resources for it; they would be mobilising finance from various sources. Why cannot the public sector do the same? The Approach Paper in other words uses the term “resources” to mean “savings” in the case of the public sector, and to mean “finance” in the case of the private sector, with a view to undermining the role of the public sector! DWINDLING STATE FINANCES If the undermining of the public sector has given capitalists the upper hand, the whittling down of the bargaining strength of the State has only reinforced this process. Since capital has acquired global mobility, a nation State interested in having some investment within its shores has to compete with other nation States for attracting capital. Thus, if Indonesia, or Pakistan, or Poland, offers better terms to capital, then India willy-nilly has to follow suit. Even more pertinently, within India itself the same story gets repeated across the various state governments. The Volkswagen Company for instance was simultaneously negotiating terms with the Tamilnadu, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra governments for setting up an automobile plant. It finally went where it got the best terms. And this is what all the capitalists are doing. One obvious implication of this is for state finances. If tax concessions are offered then the state government’s revenue suffers. If land purchased from peasants has to be offered free to the capitalists then the state is burdened with additional expenditure. The same happens if a whole range of complementary facilities have to be made available for the project from public funds. What all this means is that the amount of funds available with state governments for expenditure on public health, public education, sanitation, and rural infrastructure dwindles. Consequently, either these sectors are neglected and the potential users, including especially the poor, are driven to make use of private facilities in health, education etc., and to pay through their noses for doing so; or the state governments perforce turn to imperialist agencies like the DFID, ADB, JBIC, and the World Bank, who come with “aid-packages” for these sectors. In the latter case however there are invariably “conditionalities”, like “user charges” and the removal of all existing legislation that defends the interests of the weaker sections, which also hurt the poor. (These explicit, visible “conditionalities” are in addition to the implicit, invisible and potentially even more dangerous process of imperialist penetration into the bureaucracy and state administration that is facilitated through the acceptance of such “aid packages”). The social “bribe” demanded and extracted by the capitalists therefore invariably impinges on the poor and the working masses. BIZZARE PHENOMENON There is something bizarre about this phenomenon. Historically, booms under capitalism have been associated with greater, and not lesser, expenditure by the State in other directions. That is because the State shares in the boom, and its revenues and expenditures increase as a consequence. But we are having a boom at the moment which is associated with a reduced capacity of the State to spend in other directions. Since the boom itself reduces the share of the workers in output, does not give rise to larger employment, and is associated with a crisis of petty production, the fact of its also reducing the capacity of the State to spend in other directions, and hence constricting the availability of public education and health etc., has enormous significance. But this is what booms in the era of globalised finance look like. The process of capitalists extracting social “bribes” moreover has no limits. Since the competitive struggle among state governments progressively worsens their fiscal situation, making it progressively more difficult for them to use public investment as a counterweight to the capitalists, the magnitude of social “bribes” demanded and actually extracted by the capitalists will only increase over time. A pointer towards this tendency is the demand made in certain circles that local self-governing institutions should also be given the autonomy to borrow and to negotiate investment projects with capitalists, including multinational banks and corporations. This will further increase the mismatch in bargaining strength between the capitalists and the state organ engaged in negotiating with them, and will further intensify the competitive struggle among the aspirants for investment, namely the tinier, more fragmented and more numerous local self-governing institutions. This can have only one possible result which is to raise the scale of social “bribes” for capitalists’ investment. This increase in the scale of social “bribes” is an important feature of neo-liberalism.

From People's Democracy