People Before Profit blog

Movie Review: Sicko, directed by Michael Moore

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 08:24:00 +0000

6-29-07, 4:17 pm

Sicko Director, Michael Moore 2007.

Delivering his characteristic dark humor and insightful analysis, Michael Moore's latest documentary film Sicko is a searing indictment of the for-profit, insurance-driven health care system.

As Moore notes, the film isn't really about the 50 million people in the richest country in the world who lack any health insurance whatsoever, or about the 18,000 people who die every year in the US because they don't have coverage.

It is about the millions of people who believe they have adequate coverage, but when a health care emergency arises, they find that the insurance company is looking for any excuse to deny their responsibilities in paying for needed care.

Insurance companies have an army of doctors, bureaucrats, and investigators looking for 'pre-existing conditions' or other excuses to deny coverage.

Why do they do this? Are they just nasty people? Maybe. But the real reason is that profit-driven health insurance requires them to cut corners, deny claims, and exclude people most likely to need health insurance – people who are sick or injured – in order to increase profits.

The need to maximize profits means they have to provide payments for as little medical care as possible. Moore interviews doctors and former insurance company bureaucrats who described there role in the process. Insurance company doctors received huge bonuses to deny claims. Corporate bureaucrats found out that the more they saved the company, the higher they were promoted and the fatter their paychecks became. Insurance CEOs have become billionaires.

Meanwhile, people with diseases went untreated or went into debt to pay for expensive treatments. Massive debt, homelessness, and bankruptcy are often caused by debts incurred from medical costs that insurance companies refuse to cover.

And the rest of the world is shocked by how things work here.

Moore traveled to Canada, Britain, France, and Cuba. In each place, he found that myths of poor health care in government-run systems were fabrications. In a Canada he talked with people, even one Conservative Party member, who took pride in the system. It is free and efficient. Patients can go to any hospital anytime to get treatment. The standard myth about long waiting times in Canada is also debunked.

In Britain, Moore spoke with a National Health Service doctor who described how the system there promotes treatment and preventative care. Doctors are paid to convince their patients to make healthy choices, improve their diets, quit smoking, exercise, and to accept treatments that reduce future health risks. On visiting a pharmacy, Moore discovered that no matter the quantity of prescription drugs, consumers pay only about $10, unless they are poor or over the age of 60 and they pay nothing.

In France, a similar quality of care is provided. In each place, the systems are so popular that even the most right-wing politicians won't even try to privatize or do away with them. In contrast to widespread claims by Americans that people in those countries are unhappy with public health care, Moore found that people over there are more generally surprised that Americans aren't more dissatisfied and even angry about having to pay for what should be universal and free.

In each place, the people explained that they felt they had a responsibility to help everyone else in the society when they are sick or injured. That 'we are all in the same boat. And we'll either swim together or we'll sink together.' In each place, the people have longer life expectancy and their health care systems are ranked higher than the US. In America, we're sinking.

The film took and interesting twist when Moore began to think about all of the things in our country that are already 'socialized': schools, libraries, the post office, and emergency services. We rely on and even count fire fighters, the employees of a wholly publicly operated entity, as among our greatest heroes. So how can 'socialized' emergency services be all that bad?

But then we discover that despite all of the talk from a lot of Republican politicians, including Giuliani and Bush, that the fire fighters and emergency workers who responded to the terrorist attacks on 9/11 are our great heroes, some of them are being denied claims for reimbursement for medical costs incurred for their work at Ground Zero.

Moore meets with some of those workers. And here the story takes a surprising turn that will anger you about a system that denies its responsibilities to care for the most vulnerable and tug at your heart strings. I'll let viewers find out for themselves what happens and make their own judgments about whether or not a for-profit health care system is something they want to continue.

But viewers should know that there is a movement for universal care that eliminates greedy insurance companies from the process. In fact, there is a bill (H.R. 676, the US National Health Insurance Act) pending in Congress that would expand the current Medicare system to cover everyone.

Medicare is more efficient; its overhead is about 3% of its total expenditures, compared to ten times that for private insurance companies. Because Medicare isn't profit driven, it would have to equally cover all people for all medical needs. It would cost less than the current private system (well more than $1 trillion annually), and even less than one war in Iraq. You can find out more about that plan by clicking here. Can we afford not to have such a system?

Sicko surely ranks in the top tier of movies this year so far, and is well worth the price of admission.

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

Japan: U.S. Demands 100 New Facilities at Iwakuni Base

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 05:25:00 +0000

6-29-07, 2:24 p.m.

As part of the planned realignment of U.S. forces in Japan, the U.S. wants more than 100 facilities to be newly built or improved at the U.S. Marine Corps Iwakuni Air Station in Yamaguchi Prefecture.

Taking advantage of the Japan-U.S. agreement that Japan will pay for U.S. military realignment costs, the U.S. forces want to have Japan construct as many new facilities as possible.

This fact was revealed in a base maintenance plan (called the “master plan”) written by the headquarters of the U.S. forces in Japan, the outline of which was released by the Japanese government on May 17.

With the realignment of U.S. forces in Japan, 57 U.S. carrier-borne aircraft and about 3,800 personnel and their family members will be relocated from the U.S. Atsugi Naval Air Station in Kanagawa Prefecture to Iwakuni along with 12 KC-130 midair refueling aircraft and about 350 personnel from the U.S. Futenma Air Station in Okinawa.

U.S. requests for renovation of the Iwakuni base include operation facilities and aprons to be used by relocated units, billets for unmarried personnel, schools, leisure facilities, storehouses, fuel depots, and munitions depots.

With the relocation of runways offshore, the Japanese government already spent 240 billion yen to strengthen the functions of the Iwakuni base. The realignment will force the government to spend an additional hundreds of billions of yen.

About 50 U.S. aircraft and 6,000 personnel and their family members are now stationed at the Iwakuni base.

With implementation of the realignment scheme, the number of aircraft, combined with Maritime SDF aircraft, will surpass 130, and the base population will reach more than 10,000.

Iwakuni City and its residents are opposing the relocation of the carrier-borne aircraft unit because they are concerned about an increase in noise pollution and crime.

The government is trying to impose the realignment plan on the municipality concerned by using government subsidies as a lever, but Iwakuni City Mayor Ihara Katsusuke has not changed his policy of rejecting the plan.

From Akahata

Of Kings and Arrogance

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 01:54:00 +0000

6-29-07, 9:45 am

Before the United States of America even existed, the people living in this land were oppressed by the rule of a dictator across an ocean who cared not a whit about their desires or opinions. The inhabitants of the colonies had repeatedly pleaded for an audience before the King, and were ignored. As a result, their polite requests gave way to loud demands. This also failed to impress the arrogant ruler across the sea. He was known for being stubborn and unbendable, and had proven time and again that he had no intention of changing his mind, even if it would be in his own best interests to do so.

When the shouting failed to influence King George, some colonials decided to add bite to their bark by participating in acts of civil disobedience which included such small showings of protest as the 'Boston Tea Party'. Still, the King would not budge, and even increased the restrictions imposed on the 'second-class' subjects in the New World. The United States would be England right now if only the King had set aside his pride and made some small concessions to the colonists. But he was oblivious to this fact because he lived in his own little bubble where everything was done according to his wishes, and he surrounded himself with folks that told him what he wanted to hear.

So with their patience and forbearance exhausted, the colonists felt they had no other option but war. They beat their plowshares into swords and ultimately succeeded in winning their independence.

Today, another King George turns a deaf ear to his subjects' supplications. Like his British predecessor, this King George has little interest in the concerns and opinions of the rabble peasants who are sometimes referred to as 'the electorate'. He takes pride in the fact that even when two-thirds of the people living in what he sees as his own personal fiefdom do not agree with his philosophy or approve of his actions as their leader, that he can 'stay the course' in a war that kills and maims the youth of the realm, ironically the most loyal of the King's subjects. He misguidedly believes that ignoring the will of the people somehow makes him more virtuous, and he sees himself as a brave leader who will one day be remembered in the history books as a celebrated hero on a par with Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, under-appreciated during his reign, but revered in retrospect.

This new King George has reinstituted many of the practices of the old one, such as the denial of the Great Writ of Habeas Corpus, illegal search and seizure, the suppression of dissent and free speech, and advancing the notion that the Ruler is above the law. These wrongs were some of the exact reasons our forefathers warred with Britain. These are the very fabric of the American history and heritage, and this King George has essentially ripped that fabric right down the middle. A Constitutional amendment on flag burning? No match or flame could possibly cause as much damage to the ideals that flag stands for as the furious inferno that this King George has stoked and released upon our nation.

This King George has also surrounded himself with advisors who strive to please him by agreeing with him that he is always right. He isolates himself in his own little bubble where everyone pretends that they are in awe of his many abilities and his political prowess. The King has proudly admitted that he doesn't watch the news or read the paper. He also likes to assert that he couldn't care less about public polls. That tends to beg the question - what exactly does he read, and where does he get his news? If a person never hears an opinion that is different from their own, how is he to objectively judge the validity of his beliefs?

Perhaps one of the worst things about this King George is his mind-numbing arrogance. It is always there, it is unmistakable, and it is ugly. Who would have thought that the 'leader of the free world' would appear on television with a middle-schoolish smirk on his face and childishly taunt an enemy by saying, 'Bring 'em on'? Arrogance most certainly played a role in the King's decision to trample on the rights of citizens by authorizing warrantless domestic spying. It is evident in every 'signing statement' he writes. Arrogance gives King George the temerity necessary to authorize kidnapping and torture, 're-interpret' the Geneva Conventions, open secret prisons, allow 'extraordinary renditions', prevent the Red Cross from inspecting prisoners, refuse to even provide detainees with a reason for their detention, and imprison them without charge for years. This is just a small sampling of the injustices we know about. Imagine the things he has managed to hide.

This King George has decided that the Constitution is no longer worth protecting, and has failed to live up to his oath of office. He has systematically subverted the letter and spirit of the laws and rights set forth in our most important founding document. He has claimed the power to spy on Americans without warrants issued by a court. He has established 'free speech zones' for protesters trying to exercise their first amendment rights at events that he attends. He has attempted to take control of the courts and the justice system by threats and purges of those whom he does not consider to be sufficiently loyal to him. His appointees have been chosen for their politics without regard to their competence. Everything is secondary to his endless quest for expanded executive power.

This new King George's arrogance literally knows no boundaries. He has no qualms about anything. If he wants to do something, he does it - regardless of the law, and with no consideration of the consequences. He sees planning as a hindrance, and contingency plans as an expectation of failure. He takes credit for victories he had no part in accomplishing, and accepts no responsibility for failures that result directly from his mistakes and flawed judgement. He is 'The Decider', and he claims there can be only one.

Once again the people have pleaded for the King to hear them. He has refused to give them an audience. So the people have raised their voices, loudly demanding to be heard. Still, he refuses. The people are now in the beginnings of acts of civil disobedience, their patience and forbearance nearing the point of exhaustion, and if they continue to be ignored they will once again be forced into utilizing the only option left to them - a revolution against an arrogant tyrant who will not listen.

Some say the new King George has forgotten what America is about. The fact is, he hasn't forgotten -

He never believed it in the first place.

--JC Garrett is a Constitutional scholar and writer who believes that the civil rights afforded by the Constitution are endangered by encouraging a culture of fear. He believes that those rights are being eroded by an executive branch intent on usurping powers that belong to the People of our great nation.

The Position of the Sudanese Communist Party on the Darfur Peace Agreement, Part 2

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 01:47:00 +0000

6-29-07, 9:40 am

[See Part 1 of this paper by clicking here.]

On May 5, 2006, in the Nigerian capital of Abuja, the government of Sudan and the Sudan Liberation Movement (Mani Arko Manawi’s faction) signed the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA), also known as the Abuja Agreement. The agreement was signed after the international community mainly the US and the African Union, exerted great pressure on the negotiating parties. However, many observers are still wondering about the enthusiastic interest of the United States and the West regarding Darfur. In our Party’s view, this interest can be explained in the following way:

1. The Darfur region occupies a strategic position. Darfur is bounded by Chad, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, and the Central Africa Republic – all the nations of West Africa up to the Atlantic Ocean. This region has become a battleground for the transnational monopolies, who are trying to gain possession of Africa's petroleum wealth and other raw materials, assisted by organizations such as NEPAD (the New Partnership for Africa’s Development) and others.

The United States is playing a major role in the region and in the Sudanese conflict. The geographical boundaries of the entire area extending from Libya to Chad and Central Africa, are strategic elements in the goals of the Great Powers in the region and fuel their internecine struggles. Furthermore, the war in Darfur casts a dangerous shadow that threatens to spread the conflict to other parts of the continent.

2. The negative developments that followed the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan have forced the United States to try to present a new face of peace and reconciliation – that is, to attempt to appear more humanitarian than it has in Iraq.

3. The international community is still in a state of shock and guilt due to its silence and inaction regarding the horrible crimes committed in Rwanda and Burundi. Therefore, the Darfur crisis has managed to obtain a position of priority on the agendas of the world powers, especially in the United Nations Security Council.

4. The international community, which supported the peace process in southern Sudan, fears that the continuation of fighting in Darfur could lead to the failure of the peace process in the South of the country.

5. Studies indicate the presence of rich mineral reserves in the form of petroleum, uranium, and other minerals in Darfur.

In spite of reservations and criticisms regarding the Darfur Peace Agreement, the Sudanese Communist Party (SCP) considered it to be a starting point for the peace process in Darfur. However, the Party stressed that the agreement could only succeed if additions were made to satisfy the demands of the factions which did not sign the original agreement, and firmly stated that in its present form the DPA does not fulfill the basic demands of the people of Darfur. Today, despite the DPA agreement, the situation in Darfur has deteriorated and the military conflict has increased, along with the number of victims and the severity and destructiveness of the fighting. The SCP has also condemned all attempts to threaten and coerce the non-signatory parties. Instead, the Party has insisted on the importance of listening to their demands again and searching for the ways and means to reach an agreement with them.

The SCP’s reservations about the Darfur Peace Agreement

Given this context, the Communist Party's reservations about the DFA agreement can be summarized as follows:

1. The negotiations in Abuja over the conflict in Darfur, and therefore what the eventual DFA agreement entailed, were governed by the provisions of the earlier Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) of January 2005 that formally ended the war between the Khartoum government and the insurgent Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) in the South. The CPA thus imposed its own rigid framework and guidelines on the subsequent Darfur Agreement.

It is well known that the protocols of Machakos and Naivasha (negotiated in Kenya in 2002 and 2004 respectively) extended well beyond the issue of the civil war in the South to deal with all aspects of the Sudanese crisis, including issues such as maintaining the peace, Sudanese identity, national unity, democracy, forms of government, the development and division of resources, the army, security, foreign affairs, etc. The CPA also undertook to create basic changes in the current structure of the political system, including the issue of self-determination and whether there would be a single, unified state or two states during the transitional period. All these issues were decided on by two parties only – the Islamic Front government and the SPLM, while all other political and social forces in Sudan, including the armed factions in Darfur, were not involved. Therefore, it is not logical to commit the factions in Darfur to an agreement based on the two-party Comprehensive Peace Agreement, thus confining them in a framework they did not contribute to.

The Communist Party believes that in order to solve these national problems and bring an end to armed confrontation in the country, it is necessary to achieve a comprehensive national consensus which deals with all aspects of the Sudanese crisis. This can only succeed if all the country’s political forces are actively engaged in the process, both at the level of decision-making and implementation.

2. In the Abuja negotiations, the international community adopted the same methodology it utilized at Naivasha, the methodology of taking only a piecemeal approach to the Darfur conflict. Such a partial approach pays no attention to the subsequent fragility of the solutions reached, which are, at best, only temporary solutions and under a real threat of collapsing at any time. This same approach was utilized in the Ivory Coast conflict, and in Cameroon, Sierra Leone, and Chad. It is a methodology that does not look at the Sudanese crisis as a whole, that is, as a single crisis manifested in many conflicts, but breaks the problem up into partial solutions imposed under intense pressure. We are firmly convinced that this approach has not been successful in the case of Sudan.

3. The international community and the African Union exerted great pressure in an effort to obtain the signatures of the various warring factions on the Darfur agreement. In this regard, the agreement does not differ much from what was attempted at Naivasha in 2004. This time, however, the result was the signing of the agreement by only one faction of one movement among the many warring factions. We therefore wonder, in regard to this approach, if the mediators did not notice, or noticed but did not care enough to take into consideration, the composition and structure of the armed movements in Darfur – that they were directly connected to the tribal divisions in the region. What is abundantly clear to everyone now is that the way the agreement was signed and implemented will only encourage the continuation of the bloody tribal conflict in Darfur.

The Deployment of United Nations Troops in Darfur

The position of the SCP on the deployment of the United Nations troops in Darfur [1] is based on the following factors:

1. The key point here is that the deployment of UN troops has become a general and essential demand of the people of Darfur, especially those now living in refugee camps. UN troops are needed in order to protect them against the constant attacks of the Janjaweed. The African Union troops have failed to provide such protection, and the government troops are considered as a party in the conflict with a very hostile attitude towards the people of Darfur. What is at stake is the safety of the people of Darfur and their protection from killing and physical liquidation, and on such issues there is no room for a compromise. Hence, the Party does support the deployment of UN troops.

The deployment of UN troops in Darfur should take place in the framework of a wider consultation between the UN on one side, and the government of Sudan and all Sudanese political forces on the other. These consultations should deal with all the details related to the task of deployment, including the composition of these troops.

2. The role of the United Nations should not be limited to providing protection for the people of Darfur, but should be extended to achieving a political settlement to the crisis.

The Search for Ways to Resolve the Crisis

In September 2006, the Communist Party sent an envoy to meet with the leadership of the armed factions in Darfur that did not sign the Abuja agreement. The idea was to discuss with these factions possible ways of overcoming the severe tension and acute polarization in the country, and to explore the possibility of laying the foundations for a sustainable and equitable peace that would prevent the fragmentation of Sudan.

In the meetings with the leaderships of the various movements, we put forward the following points as a basis for discussion and consultation:

1.Darfur is the victim of a real tragedy, a tragedy that has created broad international support and solidarity. Doesn’t this international support for the people of Darfur, we asked, require that the armed movements in Darfur attempt to concentrate their efforts around a united program, or at least a unified negotiating position, which serves the aspirations and demands of the people of Darfur?

2.The Abuja agreement has not stopped the war. Not only that, some members of the international community have started to warn about its collapse. Furthermore, the issue of deploying international forces in Darfur has increased the polarization between the Sudanese government and the international community, and this in turn has had a negative impact on situation in the country.

3.On the other hand, statements by some officials of the international community, especially by UN representatives in Sudan, have now paved the way for additional annexes to the Abuja agreement, which may satisfy those who rejected the agreement in the first place. However, such statements by members of the international community have met with a very wary response from some leaders of the of the Sudanese regime.

4.The Communist Party of Sudan, despite its publically expressed reservations about the Abuja agreement, is not rejecting it, although it certainly sees the possibility of improving the agreement by adding new annexes to it. The Party strongly rejects any attempt to threaten or stigmatize with charges of treason those factions that have refused to sign the agreement. On the contrary, the Party understands the importance of listening to the demands of these factions and searching for common ground with them. However, the question that remains is this: To what extent are the factions now ready to react to the positive signals from the UN regarding the possibility of adding annexes to the agreement? What are the proposals and suggestions they are offering in response?

5. At the end of the day, Sudan is not the property of the government, nor is it the property of any of the opposition forces. It belongs to all the people of Sudan. For that reason, the main task must be to exhaust every means to advance the peace process and reach a national consensus capable of stopping the bloodshed and laying the foundations for an equitable peace and democratic transformation, a consensus that responds to the demands of the people of Darfur, as well as those of all the other marginalized parts of the country.

The Response from Darfur

The response of the Darfur factions that met with our Party’s envoy can be summarized as follows:

1.Given the fact that the Darfur problem is a part of the overall crisis in Sudan, all the Darfur factions expressed their readiness to join a project of national unity which could be agreed upon by all the Sudanese parties and that was aimed at paving the way for peace, unity, democracy, and equitable development in the country.

2.They expressed their readiness to negotiate annexes with the government to be added to the Abuja agreement. Their negotiating positions include:

a) Agreement on a mechanism that disarms the Janjaweed and secures protection for the civilian population.

b) Agreement on compensation for the affected population, including compensation for loss of life, the psychological impact of the conflict, and loss of property, along with the provision of adequate shelter.

c) Darfur must be regarded as a single region (not divided into three regions as it is now) under a genuine federal structure consisting of four levels: federal, regional, state and local.

d) That the Darfurian people must have full participation in all central state institutions, both civil and military, and that that representation be reflective of actual population densities and within the parameters of positive discrimination. Some of the factions suggested the formation of a Presidential Council with a rotating chairmanship, or a vice-president from every region.

e) That 36% of the general state budget be allocated to Darfur, along with establishing a fund based on 6% of national income to be allocated for a period of 10 years for the development of Darfur.

f) That the Darfur factions be allowed to retain their forces during the transitional period and that these forces should be financed from the central budget.

The Sudanese Communist Party also held several meetings with representatives of the international community and the UN to discuss the Darfur problem and the peace process in the country. In these meetings the party confirmed that consultations between the international community and all the Sudanese political parties are vital for reaching effective solutions for the country's problems. For such consultations to be of real value they should take place as crucial developments are occurring and not after they have already occurred. For example, if early consultations had been held about the contentious issue of holding a referendum on whether there should be one Darfur or three separate states, much acrimony could have been avoided, if it had been recognized from the start that Darfur has always been a single, unified region.

It is equally true that it would have been possible to find an acceptable solution for the Abyei problem [Ed: A district commonly regarded as the bridge between the North and South of Sudan that both the Government of Sudan and the SPLM claimed] if, before the resolution put forward by the CPA’s five international boundary specialists, serious consultations had been held with all the political parties and with the people of the region, especially the local leaders.

The search for a just resolution of the Darfur crisis is obviously not limited to the Communist Party alone. There are many other efforts underway, including popular forums in Sudan like the Darfur Forum and the Darfur Lawyers Association, as well as a host of national and international NGOs, etc. All these bodies are working steadily on the Darfur issue, launching initiatives that reject the military option, organizing seminars and workshops, and helping in attempts to convene a Darfur dialogue conference that looks at the crisis from a national perspective. They are trying to unify the various Darfurian movements, launching international campaigns to address the grave human rights violations and atrocities in Darfur, and providing legal protection for human rights activists working in Darfur.

The Vision of the Communist Party For a Comprehensive Settlement of the Crisis

First: The top priority must be to confront the disastrous and tragic situation in the region by taking immediate measures under the auspices of the UN and the African Union, as agreed to in Addis Ababa. These measures include the following:

1. Deployment of UN troops in the region to assist the already deployed African troops in prohibiting all military operations, protecting the displaced people living in the refugee camps, and ensuring the safe delivery of humanitarian aid, food and medicine through safe corridors by imposing a no-fly zone. There must also be an immediate ceasefire with adequate international and regional supervision, along with effective measures to disarm the region and monitor all land transport and entrance points to prevent the smuggling of arms.

2. The introduction of effective mechanisms to disarm the Janjaweed and bring them to justice.

3.The establishment of an international judicial body to investigate the atrocities and ethnic cleansing in Darfur (which constitute acts of genocide), identify the criminals responsible, and bring them to trial.

4.To work for the safe return of the displaced population of Darfur to their homelands, and to ensure their protection and compensation for their losses.

Second: To bring the factions that did not sign the Abuja agreement to the negotiating table with the government. This should be done under the supervision of the UN and the African Union, with the purpose of adding annexes to the Abuja agreement.

Third: To organize a Darfurian Conference to give the people of Darfur the chance to address the Abuja agreement directly and allow for possible annexes to be added to the DPA. The resolutions of this conference should be annexed to the peace agreement. The conference should be held in a free and democratic environment, away from the government and with the help of the UN.

Fourth: The Communist Party believes that the correct approach to the Darfur problem is to recognize that it is not just a tribal conflict, but is rather the result of a more general crisis in Sudan, one characterized by the continuous marginalization of the country’s peripheries. Darfur is one of these peripheries. Consequently, the problem is basically a political one and requires a national political solution.

Hence, the idea of convening a national political conference on Darfur is a necessity. Such a conference should be attended by all the political forces in the country, including the Darfurian armed movements and all sectors of the Darfurian people. The conference must embrace all initiatives that attempt to resolve the conflict.

Fifth: Darfur is suffering the effects of demographic and geopolitical changes in the Sudanese state on the western borders of the country. These borders are a vast, open and unprotected boundary with three African countries:

Chad, Central Africa, and Libya. During the Libyan-Chadian conflict, the factions initiated their attacks from Darfur, and the defeated then took refuge in Darfur to reorganize before re-attacking again. Central Africa launches frequent attacks through Darfur in revenge for the intervention of the Khartoum government in the Bangui conflict. These vast, open and unprotected boundaries can only be protected by a policy of good neighborliness. Thus, Sudan should not view its borders as a bridge to be used for the ambitions of any nation or regime that wishes to spread across Africa under the name of Islam or Arab Nationalism.

The Communist Party of the Sudan believes that a lasting solution for the problems of the country can only be achieved by addressing all the above-stated problems in a comprehensive approach. The best mechanism for such an approach is the convening of a national conference attended by all the Sudanese political forces. At this conference, all previous agreements – Naivasha, Abuja, Eastern Sudan, Cairo, etc. – should be be tabled, not in order to open them up for wholesale re-discussion, but to accommodate other, previously neglected opinions, with the aim of further improving the agreements and broadening participation in their implementation and monitoring. Such a conference will pave the way for the political forces participating in it to implement a national consensus project. Such a consensus project is the key. It is the only mechanism that can save the country.

A National Consensus Project will give careful consideration to Sudan’s multi-ethnic nature and the developmental disparities that exist in different parts of the country. It will confront, by means of a democratic process in which all the Sudanese people participate, the problems of unbalanced development, and it will work to achieve a just and equitable sharing of power and wealth, so that a united and secure Sudan can be preserved for all its people.

--This is a slightly edited article submitted by the Sudanese Communist Party.

[1]- On 1/7/2006 the party issued a statement supporting the deployment of the international troops in Darfur.

The Repressed History of the United States: Revolution, Egalitarianism and Anti-imperialism

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 01:44:00 +0000

6-29-07, 9:35 am

Taking advantage of another anniversary of the birth of George Washington, president George W. Bush used the occasion to compare the American Revolution of the 18th century with the war in Iraq. In passing he recalled that the first president, like the latest, had been 'George W.'

The technique of associations is proper to advertising. In accordance with the latter, a fast food chain promotes itself with thin, happy young people or a mouse like Mickey is identified with the police and the legal order, while the only character from this 'natural' world that dresses like a worker, the Wolf, is presented as a criminal. Direct associations are so effective that they even permit the use of the observation of the conical shadow that the Earth projects on the Moon as proof that the Earth is square. When the defenders of private enterprise mention the great feat of the businessman who managed to complete a space trip in 2004, they exercise the same dialectical acrobatics. Is this an example in favor of or against private sector efficacy? Because neither Sputnik nor any of the flights and missions carried out by NASA since 1950 were anything other than achievements of governmental organization.

But let's get to the main point.

An implicit reading accepts as a fact that the United States is a conservative country, refractory of all popular revolution, an imperial, capitalist monolith, constructed by its successful class – which is to say, by its upper class – from the top down. Ergo, those engines of material progress must be conserved here and copied over there in other realities, for good or for bad, in order to provoke the same happy effects. These implicit understandings have been consolidated within the national borders by the omnipresent apparatuses of private diffusion and simultaneously confirmed outside by their very detractors.

Let's see just how fallacious this is.

If we re-read history, we will find that the American Revolution (financed in part by the other power, France) was an anti-imperialist and egalitarian revolution. Not only was it a violent revolution against the empire of the other George, the king of England, against this empire's theft via foreign exchange designed to finance its own wars, but also against the vertical structures of absolutist, aristocratic and estate-based societies of old Europe. The United States is born on the basis of a radically revolutionary and progressive ideology. Its first constitution was the political and institutional materialization of an ideology that well into the 20th century was condemned by European conservatives as a popular subversion, responsible for the annihilation of all noble tradition, for the exercise of a social practice that was identified as the 'devil's work': democracy. The humanist radicalism of the first drafts of that foundational document (like the proposal to abolish slavery) did not materialize due to the pragmatism that always represents conservatives. Despite which, nevertheless signified a novel and revolutionary proclamation which many famous Latin Americans, from José Artigas to Simón Bolívar, attempted to copy and adapt, ever frustrated by the feudal culture that surrounded them.

Let's situate ourselves in the second half of the 18th century: the principles of Enlightenment thought, the new ideas about the rights of the individual and of the nations were as subversive as the most socialist thought could have been under the Military Junta headed by Videla or as the thought of a republican surviving under Franco's regime. Paradoxically, while in Latin America anyone with a book by Marx in their home was being kidnapped, tortured and killed, in the universities of the United States Marxism was one of the most commonly used instruments of study and analysis, even by his detractors. Those colonels and soldiers who justified their crimes by accusing the dead of being Marxist, had never in their lives read a single book by the German philosopher. We might recall that none other than Octavio Paz, one of the clearest and most conservative Mexican intellectuals, never ceased to recognize the lucidity of that current of thought. One of my professors, Caudio Williman, a conservative politician from my country was, at the same time, a scholar of Marxism, when this doctrine and its mere mention were prohibited because it represented a threat to Western tradition, never mind that Marxist thought was a large part of that same tradition. Obviously, all with the consent and complacency of Big Brother.

The Spanish Conquest of the American continent was an undeniably imperialist enterprise, carried out by priests and military men, by the loyal servants of Emperor-King Carlos I. The first goal of its leaders was the extraction of wealth from the subjugated territories and peoples in order to sustain an aristocratic society and in order to finance its endless imperial wars. For many of the priests, the goal was the expansion of religion and the ecclesiastical dominance of the Catholic Church. For the soldiers and adventurers, it was the opportunity to make themselves rich and then return to Europe and buy themselves a title of the nobility that would give them prestige and save them from the curse of labor. The Spanish conquistadors crossed the territory of what today is the United States and left it behind not only because they did not find mineral wealth there but because the indigenous population was scarce. It made more sense to occupy Mexico and Perú.

The first Northamerican colonizers were not free of material ambitions nor were they above the despoiling of native peoples, often recurring to the more subtle conquest through land purchase. Nevertheless, not a minority, they were dispossessed people who fled from the oppressions and absolutisms – religious and of the state – of the societies that resisted change: many migratory movements were motivated by the new dreams of collectivist utopias. For the majority, to colonize meant to appropriate a small portion of land in order to work it and put down one's roots there. From the beginning, this distribution was infinitely more egalitarian than that which was produced in the South. In Hispanic America, an iron willed economic monopoly was imposed and a stratified and semifeudal society was reproduced, where the boss, the strongman or the landed elite had at their disposal extensions of land as vast as any province in Europe. Only the southern states of the United States could compare to the social, moral and economic system of Brazil or of the Caribbean, but we know that this system – although not its moral values – was defeated in the War of Secession (1861-1865) by the northern representatives of the century to come.

Within the Latin American fiefdoms the indigenous and African peoples and immigrant workers remained trapped, condemned to exploitation and to working someone else's land for someone else's benefit. Nothing less egalitarian, nothing less revolutionary, nothing less imperialist than this old system which would serve in turn the new empires. It should not seem strange, therefore, that in Latin American there would persist so many 'dangerous subversives' who demanded agrarian reforms (recall the two Mexican revolutions, separated by a century), revolutionary movements of every kind who all called themselves movements of liberation, intellectuals who in their overwhelming majority positioned themselves on the left of the political spectrum because power was rooted in the dominant, conservative classes of a vertical order that favored private interests and defended these with every resource at hand: the Army, the Church, the State, the media of the press, public moral instruction, etc.

One cannot say that the United States emerged as a capitalist country while Latin American suffered the curse of a socialist ideology, or anything of the kind. No, quite the contrary. This fact is forgotten due to later history and the interests that dominate economic power in the present. The rapid development of the United States was not based on economic liberalism nor on capitalist speculation. It was based on the greater equality of its citizens which was expressed as ideology in the country's founding and as politics in some of the country's more democratic institutions, on the law and not on the unpredictable and uncontestable will of the Viceroy, of the Censor, or of the caudillo. That is to say, democratic egalitarianism made possible and multiplied the development of a nation freed from monopolies and bureaucratic arbitrariness; rebelliously opposed to spoliation by the empire of the moment. The United States did not become a world power through having been an empire, instead it became an empire through its great initial development.

The result might be paradoxical, but we cannot deny that the initial engine was precisely those values that today are held in contempt or attributed to the failure of other nations: the liberation of the people through an anti-imperialist revolution, the egalitarianism of its ideology, in its practice of workshops, from its foundational economy to the more recent technical revolutions like Microsoft or Hewlett Packard. All values that are coherent with the humanistic wave initiated centuries before.

--Translated by Bruce Campbell.

Russell, Rousseau, and Rationality: A Marxist Critique

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 01:39:00 +0000

6-29-07, 9:32 an

I propose to show that Russell's interpretation of Rousseau in The History of Western Philosophy (HWP), is both unfair and inaccurate and misrepresents Rousseau's historical legacy.

The chapter on Rousseau in HWP has three parts: a biographical ( based on his 'Confessions', which I will not deal with), a discussion of his religious views, and one on his political philosophy.

At the outset of his chapter, Russell tells us that Rousseau's importance comes 'mainly from his appeal to the heart, and to what, in his day, was called 'sensibility.' He is the father of the romantic movement, the initiator of systems of thought which infer non-human facts from human emotions, and the inventor of the political philosophy of pseudo-democratic dictatorships as opposed to traditional absolute monarchies.'

Russell further alleges that two groups of self styled 'reformers' have come down to us from his time-- those who follow Locke (e.g., Roosevelt and Churchill) and those who follow Rousseau (Hitler). I intend to show that the notion that Hitler was a follower of Rousseau is absurd.

Russell's discussion of Rousseau's religious beliefs is based primarily ( but not exclusively) on his interpretation of a section of the novel 'Emile' entitled 'The Confession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar' and taken to represent Rousseau's views.

This 'Confession' is in the tradition Enlightenment Deism. Rousseau accepts the God he finds in nature and basically rejects institutionalized religions as man made fabrications. In this respect he does not differ from thinkers such as Voltaire and Thomas Paine, although he is much more emotional about his form of Deism.

He says he believes 'that the world is governed by a wise and powerful Will. I see it, or rather I feel it; and this is of importance for me to know.' Further speculation about the Will is not necessary and there is no dogmatic attempt to get people to agree with him, 'I am not dictating my sentiments to you, but only explaining what they are.' Like every one in his times, including Locke and Newton, he saw design in nature as evidence of 'that Being, in a word, whatever it be, that gives motion to all parts of the universe, and governs all things, I call GOD.'

Rousseau throws in some attributes ( intelligence, will, power, goodness) that he finds personally convincing but doesn't insist on anyone else agreeing with him on specifics.

He also believes in life after death. Other Deists also have this hope (Paine). In the 'Confession' he further reveals that he is a Cartesian dualist with his inner feeling (sentiment)-- i.e., self-consciousness, playing the role of the Cogito.

For some reason, Russell thinks all this is anti-rational on Rousseau's part. 'The rejection of reason in favour of the heart,' Russell writes, 'was not, to my mind, an advance.'

Russell would never accuse Descartes of rejecting reason for basing his philosophy on the Cogito. This is Rousseau, but Descartes could have said the same thing. 'I have only to know that matter is extended and divisible, to be assured that it cannot think... No material being can be self-active, and I perceive that I am so. It is vain to dispute with me so clear a point. My own sentiment carries with it a stronger conviction than any reason which can ever be brought.' The wording is a little different, but the sentiment is the same as Descartes' statements about the Cogito.

Did Rousseau reject reason? Rousseau finds two contradictory principles in the nature of human consciousness: 'one raising him to the study of eternal truths, the love of justice and moral beauty [this is very Kantian]--- bearing him aloft to the regions of the intellectual world, the contemplation of which yields the truest delight to the philosopher--- the other debasing him even below himself, subjecting him to the slavery of sense, the tyranny of the passions, and exciting these to counteract every noble and generous sentiment inspired by the former.'

Rousseau is no irrationalist. The sentiments that he cultivates are inspired by reason (the intellectual realm) not the emotions (the passions). What could be clearer than the following. 'I am active when I listen to my reason, and passive when hurried away by my passions.'

Russell is making too much of Rousseau's belief that the moral rules are, found 'in the depths ' of the heart, 'written by Nature in ineffaceable characters.' Rousseau believes that we can trust our 'conscience' to tell us what to do. In practice Rousseau seems to have some problems with this (especially in his personal life), but in principle it is an embryonic form of Kant's 'moral world within.'

Russell says there are two objections to 'the practice of basing beliefs as to objective fact upon the emotions of the heart.' But I have shown above, I hope, that for Rousseau it is the intellectual realm, the realm of reason, which is to guide the heart, not the realm of emotions and passions, so we can skip these objections.

Russell now goes off the deep end, in my opinion. He says, 'For my part, I prefer the ontological argument, the cosmological argument, and the rest of the stock-in-trade, to the sentimental illogicality that has sprung from Rousseau.' We will see who is being illogical.

These very arguments which Russell prefers, he says of them, earlier in the chapter, that they 'may not, to us seem very convincing, and we may feel that they would not have seemed cogent to anyone who did not already feel sure of the truth of the conclusion.' In other words, they are not sound arguments. Rousseau tried to guide his sentiments by reason. it is only because Russell, wrongly, considered Rousseau an enemy of reason that he could prefer logically unsound arguments to Rousseau's open admission that he doesn't use these types of arguments because he doesn't think they prove anything.

What can one say about Russell being logical when he claims , 'if I had to choose between Thomas Aquinas and Rousseau, I should unhesitatingly choose the saint.' Unhesitatingly? Here is what Russell says about the good 'saint' in HWP:

'There is little of the true philosophic spirit in Aquinas... Before he begins to philosophize he already knows the truth; it is declared in the Catholic faith. If he can find apparently rational arguments for some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on revelation. The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading.'

Why would Russell prefer 'apparently rational special pleading' to the open honesty of Rousseau. Aquinas was a spokesman for the a powerful institution that burned heretics and clamped down on free expression wherever it could. It burned books. Rousseau had his books burned. He, like Russell, was the victim of the followers of revelation. Rousseau at least thought for himself and fought against the tyranny of the absolute monarchical state. Doesn't honesty count? Russell thinks Aquinas not intellectually honest. It doesn't seem intellectually honest to prefer the dogma of the Catholic Church to the free thinking of Rousseau who rejected revelation and apparently rational arguments in favor of it.

How did Rousseau get the reputation as an 'irrationalist'? I suggest that the answer can be found in Georg Lukacs's book 'The Destruction of Reason.' Lukacs, a Marxist, follows Engel's discussion of the British and French Enlightenment as tending towards 'the metaphysical mode' of thinking. Engels means a type of mechanical 'materialism' which he contrasts to dialectical thinking. He mentions Rousseau's 'Discourse on the Origins of Inequality' as a 'dialectical masterpiece.'

Lukacs writes that the picture of 'Rousseau as an 'irrationalist Romantic' is a product of polemics against the French Revolution.' What Rousseau was trying to do in his social philosophy was to develop 'the history of mankind and human society out of its autonomous movement, the deeds and sufferings of men themselves, and grasping the reason, i.e., the principles behind the movement.' Lukacs also points out that, according to Engels the 'Reason' that was lauded during the Enlightenment was the 'Reason' of the rising bourgeois class not some abstract universal 'Reason' and it was this bourgeois view of 'Reason' that was the object of Rousseau's criticism.

Now lets look at what Russell says about Rousseau's political philosophy to see if it leads to Hitler. Russell admits that the 'Social Contact' has 'little sentimentality and much close intellectual reasoning,' but that it only gives 'lip-service to democracy' and bolsters the idea 'of the totalitarian state.'

Russell has problems with the concept of the 'general will.' Rousseau says that people who do not obey the 'general will ' must be 'forced to be free.' Russell remarks that, 'The general will in the time of Galileo was certainly anti-Copernican, was Galileo 'forced to be free' when the Inquisition compelled him to recant?' This indicates, to me, that Russell didn't understand what the 'general will' is.

What the social contact is supposed to do (it is a theoretical construct not an actual historical compact) is leave everybody as free as they were in the state of nature but without the inconveniences of that state. The whole contract boils down to one clause, according to Rousseau, 'the total alienation of each associate, together with all his rights, to the whole community; for, in the first place, as each gives himself absolutely, the conditions are the same for all; and this being so, no one has any interest in making them burdensome to others.' This is pure Rawls.

Basically, the general will is that we do what is best for the state and everyone in it. The general will represents the maximum freedom possible for every individual. As a citizen each wants what is best for the state in respect to the rights and freedoms of all. However, Rousseau points out the 'each man, may have a particular will contrary or dissimilar to the general will which he has as a citizen.'

Here is a real example of being forced to be free. The general will dictates that the state do all it can to ensure the health of the population. My particular will may want to make a fortune by marketing an adulterated medicine. This could lead to an outbreak of plague that could also spread to my own family or even myself. By preventing me having my way the state certainly denied me the freedom to act as an individual, but it has enforced my will as a citizen since as a citizen I agree with the general will.

The reason why Hitler cannot be an outgrowth of Rousseau's thought is because Hitler's particular will replaced the general will. For Rousseau the Sovereign is the body politic, the people, and not a single individual. 'If then the people promises simply to obey, by that very act it dissolves itself and loses what makes it a people; the moment a master exists, there is no longer a Sovereign, and from that moment the body politic has ceased to exist....'

Rousseau said for the general will to express itself 'there should be no partial society' in the state and that 'each citizen should think only his own thoughts....' Totalitarian governments do not encourage this type of thinking for oneself. A modern state cannot, however, really exist without partial societies (labor unions, employer's associations, small business owners, the AAUP, the AARP, the Bertrand Russell Society, etc.) Realizing this, Rousseau said 'if there are partial societies, it is best to have as many as possible and to prevent them from being unequal... These precautions are the only ones that can guarantee that the general will shall be always enlightened, and that the people shall in no way deceive itself.'

A lot more could be said about the 'general will' and its contrast with 'the will of all' (something very different) but I think I have accomplished my goal of showing that is only a superficial reading of Rousseau that can judge him to be an irrationalist, and that there is nothing substantial to the charge that Hitler and his government grew out of the doctrines of Rousseau.

I should also note that Rousseau's paternalistic attitude towards women marred his political philosophy since the interests of half the human race were not taken into consideration in formulating the 'general will.' However that correction is easily made.

Finally, I think Russell, Engels, and Lukcas, but not Hitler, would agree with the following sentiment of Rousseau: 'The noblest work of education is to make a reasoning man....'

--Thomas Riggins is the book review editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at

What Do the Cheney Controversy and Other Bush Scandals Really Mean?

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 05:36:00 +0000

6-28-07, 1:27 pm

The Bush administration and its appointees and Congress are in conflict, in a struggle for power. Although personality and partisanship are important elements of this power struggle, viewing this situation as an internal conflict in the US ruling class is also helpful in clearing up some of the muddiness. The ruling class is in crisis because it appears unable to agree on its own ground rules for how to run the country.

The Constitution was more or less authored by the capitalist class. It designated a division of power and representative institutions to ensure shared power and to prevent a single person or clique from assuming total power.

But now Bush appears to be on the verge of doing the latter and ignoring the Constitutional authority of Congress, the most representative institution in the government. Bush has joked about dictatorship, has written an emergency order that would declare himself the sole leader in the event of a 'catastrophic event,' and has openly stated that he is uninterested in public opinion.

Bush's concept of crony capitalism favors his capitalist supporters, providing them with lucrative no-bid government contracts, provides them billions in federal subsidies, and mobilizes the political, economic, and military power of the US government to their causes, while ignoring other capitalists.

Along the way, Bush has harmed the democratic rights of all the people (with the US PATRIOT Act, wiretapping and spying on US citizens, undermining civil rights) and pushed economic and tax policies that have harmed working families. Driving jobs out of the country, shifting the tax burden to working families, and implementing trade and economic policies that enrich multinational corporations at the expense of working people here.

To secure the votes it needs to accomplish this agenda, Bush and the ultra right in Congress cynically aligned itself with the religious right. It used its control over huge campaign coffers to sledgehammer the votes of moderate Republicans in Congress (a la Tom DeLay and the K Street project) and even resorted to vote theft to win the presidency and congressional majorities. So confident was Karl Rove in his system of ,' or eliminating about 3 million votes in the 2006 election (now being exposed as a result of the US attorneys scandal), that when pollsters said the GOP would lose 40 or 50 seats in the House, he smugly retorted that, according to his own polls, the GOP would actually win.

Despite 'caging' and vote theft, the Republicans lost control of Congress. How did that happen? We could argue that the sections of the capitalist class which found themselves punished or marginalized by Bush and his clique got fed up. (As did the mass of voters of non-elite origins.) Both democratic-minded capitalists and the working class and its allies in the peace movement, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, the women's equality movement entered a tenuous alliance in the 2006 campaign to defeat the Bush and ultra right Republican dominance of the political process.

And this alliance succeeded, with these latter activist sections of the population proving crucial and decisive in that victory. The alliance, not a formal one by any means, was based on a lot of legislative goals: oversight and reigning in the excesses of the Bush administration, ending the war, extension of union rights for workers, civil rights legislation ranging from equal pay to anti-hate crimes legislation, and environmental legislation addressing the climate crisis.

What are the accomplishments of this alliance? So far the worst excesses of the Bush administration have been exposed, halted, and even in some cases reversed (e.g. refusal to address ongoing Hurricane Katrina disaster, some PATRIOT provisions have been eliminated, congressional oversight has exposed several Bush administration power grabs). The alliance has also successfully shifted debates on the war and climate change. The debate now is over when and how the war should end, not over whether or not we should be there. On climate change, the public and most politicians are talking about how much can we do to turn the tide against global warming, and the deniers are raving lunatics.

But little new policy has emerged. And the new legislation that has emerged, such as on addressing the climate crisis, has been weak and oriented toward addressing the perceived needs of capitalists (e.g. in the case of recent climate change legislation, for those who own the auto industry and various energy sectors). The minimum wage was raised slightly, but with billions in new tax breaks for employers. In the case of antiwar legislation, no timetables, but rather 'benchmarks' that punish Iraq and ensure oil resources are open to foreign control. Of course, with slim majorities in Congress (especially the debilitating filibuster rules in the Senate) and an ideologically driven and besieged executive, who wields veto power, what else could we expect?

But the executive's veto power and the Senate's filibuster rules (requiring 60 votes to get anything passed) were carefully designed ruling class mechanism's to guarantee compromise across different sections of the capitalist class. Both of those institutions check the power of the House of Representatives, which is the institution that is the most open to influence by ordinary folk. For the most part, this balance of power ensures the stability of the ruling class and prevents other elements (e.g. representatives of the working class) from attaining too much influence.

But with these recent scandals – the US attorneys scandal, revelations about vote 'caging,' Cheney's declaration of himself above the law – it appears that the Bush administration is flouting the agreed-upon rules of the balance of power.

Should ordinary people sit back and let the conflict run its course? What do we have to gain from this situation?

Some might say that because the political system is so dominated by big money and by people who ultimately agree with each other on the basic issues (that the needs of big business trump all others or that real change is too scary), that working people and other advocates of social justice should rely only on other avenues of influence and change. Some argue that being involved in electoral politics, especially on the level of attempting to influence and campaign with political parties that actually wield power (e.g. Democrats) isn't worth the effort and affects no change. Democrats and Republicans are all the same, some insist.

But, we should agree that things like Supreme Court appointments, shifts in political debate, and the actual legislation produced have a real impact on the lives of ordinary people whether they are part of the process or not. So sitting out the turmoil makes no sense. And pretending that third party politics is the best electoral strategy is the same as sitting out at best, and, at worst, gives the ultra right-wing electoral victories.

What do we gain from being involved, besides heartburn and frustration? Bush's power has been checked. Anti-democratic trends are being reversed. The war will end. New civil and workers rights measures will pass. Extremist judicial appointments have been blocked. Voter protections will pass. Stem cell and other disease-fighting measures will be adopted. Better climate crisis legislation will also make its way through this grindingly slow process. More resources will be made available to fight AIDS and poverty. Some sort of health care reform that will give more people some or additional access to health care will be adopted, as well.

Should we settle for half measures? No. Justice requires more.

Will the Constitutional crisis being precipitated by the the Bush administration lead to the collapse of the political system? I doubt, and frankly I am not rooting for that option. The alternative would not be a good thing. 'Decider' Bush, 'commander guy' for life? No thanks.

So congressional Dems are going to have to make this a real fight and defend the Constitution. Bush's record shows that the world, not just our country, is depending on them.

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

US Social Forum Day One: Thousands March in Downtown Atlanta

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 04:15:00 +0000

6-28-07, 12:08 pm

(APN) ATLANTA – Thousands of progressive activists from around the US and the World marched through Downtown Atlanta on the first day of the US Social Forum.

Our conservative estimate of the number of marchers is 5000, also the official estimate provided by USSF spokesperson Karlos Schmeider. However, other USSF organizers had a wide range of estiamtes: Jerome Scott said 10000; Selah Abrams said 700 to 800; Terence Courtney said 5000.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitutional newspaper, which notoriously underreports crowd turnout at progressive events, said 1000 attended. Local NBC TV news said as many as 2000.

Because APN reporters walked in the paraderather than observing from a fixed locationit was difficult to see just how far back, and ahead, it went. Thus, 5000 is the conservative estimate, with 10000the number of projected USSF Confereesa distinct possibility.

Hundreds of organizations were represented in the March, and equally, hundreds of issues were represented on banners and signs, including workers rights, sexual orientation equality, peace, impeachment, and saving public housing, just to name a few. Large street puppets also made appearances.

Prior to the parade, several activists gave speeches.

'Because were the first inhabitants, we understand what racism is, we understand what genocide is, we understand what capitalism is,' Tom Goldtooth, a leader with the Cherokee Nation, said.

'Welcome to the homeland of the Cherokee people,' Amy Walker, of the Eastern Cherokee Band, said. 'Were concerned what happens to Mother Earth, because what happens to her, happens to all of us.'

At that point, APNs attempted coverage of the speeches was disrupted by aggressive USSF marshals in orange vests, who asked APN and other reporters to move from where we had been told we could stand. One USSF marshal asked, 'Why are you [media] disrupting what were trying to do? Why are you causing a problem?'

'Were excited to be here. We want to focus on the North-South connection. Were facing all the same issues in Alaska as folks are facing in the lower 48 states. In that way we feel a connection to all the people in the lower 48 states and Canada and beyond international borders. Were faced with toxic chemicals, climate change, offshore oil, and gas issues. Were charged with the task of protecting our future generations,' Shauna Larson, from Alaska, of the Indigenous Environment Network, said.

'Our national dilemma today is not technical retardation but moral deficiency. We have a moral deficiency in establishing priorities when putting our technological advances to work for the common good,' Rev. Joseph Lowery, a Civil Rights Movement veteran, said.

'We continue as a nation to put corporate greed above social needs and we insist on relying on militaristic solutions to political and moral challenges,' Lowery said.

'We have sacrificed the ideals that could make us great, on the altar of our ambition that can make us big; but big is not the same as great,' Lowery said.

'We have deserted spirituality and we are shacking up with the prostitute of materialism and greed. It is an incestuous affair and like all incest, it produces offspring with congenital defects, like addiction to violence, guns, drugs, sex, sexism, race, racism, and various idolatries. America needs a revival to save her souls,' Lowery said.

'We have sown the wind of mean-spiritedness toward the poor, and lack of humaneness toward the stranger at our door. There is something terribly wrong with our system of economics and values when we have disparities, when any handful of people have more than theyll ever need while millions have less than they will always need,' Lowery said.

'We must have respect for the mandate to nurture the young, comfort the aging, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, home the homeless, heal the sick, welcome the stranger to our borders,' Lowery said.

'We are torn asunder by the erosion of our civil liberties. We are damaged by the misconception that might makes right and that we can resolve every conflict by sending smart bombs on dumb missions,' Lowery said.

One activist seemed to be in shock that the USSF was finally happening, after so much preparation.

'It is outrageous,' USSF volunteer, Barry Weinstock, said, during the March itself. 'People have become active in collaborating and coordinating. What Im looking for in the future is an ongoing collaboration that builds on what we do here.'

'We need to work out a way to speak to each other across all these great distances and barriers in a way that doesnt deny people access and gives everyone a voice.'

'We like to hang out with fighters for social justice. Its hard to measure, I went to the WSF [World Social Forum] in Africa... I was blown away by the spirit and enthusiasm and the coming together to talk about things, no bullshit. Youre bound to get some things from that,' Maryann Barnett, an activist with a group that is working to save Atlantas Grady Hospital and keep it public, said.

'Ive never seen any diversity like this [at any other event]. Its not just White folks. I want to see groups like this keep coming together and growing. The diversity in this crowd is like nothing Ive seen in another march. The more mixing the better,' Randy Aronov, Atlanta activist, said.

However, diversity of agendas also presents some challenges to having concrete gains come out of the USSF.

'Its a difficult thing to get these people, very passionate about specific issues, to organize around a single focus. It would be good... [to have some goals with a] smaller focus,' Rev. Lauren Cogswell, Open Door Community, said.

'It can bring hope, youre not alone. Especially in the South, in the City of Atlanta. Its [usually] that same 40 people that show up to every protest,' Cogswell said.

From Atlanta Progressive News

--About the author: Jonathan Springston is a Senior Staff Writer for Atlanta Progressive News and may be reached at

Hawaiian Activists Fight US Military Bases

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 04:07:00 +0000

6-28-07, 12:00 pm

Two Hawaiian land rights activists visited Sydney in June and spoke to The Guardian about their struggles against US militarization of Hawaii and their support for protests against the Talisman Sabre war games in Shoalwater Bay, Queensland.

Terri Keko’olani and Leimaile Quitevis are Indigenous leaders from the island of O’ahu, Hawai’i. They are both long-time activists who have campaigned tirelessly US militarization, environmental destruction and the decimation of their traditional Hawai’ian culture.

The Guardian: Can you tell us about your organisation?

The group that we are representing is DMZ Hawai’i/Aloha Aina — a network of communities and organizations in Hawai’i, which oppose the occupation of Hawai’i and are opposing the expansion of military forces in Hawai’i. It is a network of organizations and individuals working to counter the US military’s negative social, cultural and environmental impacts in Hawai’i.

In 1898 our country was an independent nation. It was called the Kingdom of Hawai’i. In 1898 the United States participated in the overthrow of our government. Since that time we have been under occupation by the US military in our own homeland.

As soon as the takeover took place the military took root and started to grow. One of the first places that was strategic was Pearl Harbor, which we call Ke Awalau o Pu’uloa

It was the hugest fishery, in the island of O’ahu. The US used possession not only as a commercial port but as a military port. They used our islands as a calling station for war.

Once the Spanish were kicked out the Americans then had a war with the Filipinos and they sustained that war from our islands.

World War II came along and their ships are there in Pearl Harbor. The Japanese attacked and then several ships went down, big fires, and today Pearl Harbor is one of the most contaminated naval sites in the world — there are about 800 contaminated sites in the Harbor.

The US military owns about a quarter of the island of O’ahu and it has control over it — the army, the Marine Corps, the navy and the marines.

Since 9/11 there has been the biggest build-up of military expansion. Right now the army has proposed bringing in 300 Striker 20-ton tanks and there is a very big campaign among people to stop the Strikers from being stationed in our islands.

We are really experiencing a lot of pressure and also a lot of money is coming in to expand not only the bases but life on the bases.

The army intends to seize an additional 25,000 acres of land on O’ahu.

The US military in Hawai’i is the largest polluter of our land. In total there are about 1,000 identified contaminated sites.

These are some of the messages we are trying to convey to the people of Australia — if you allow the US military to come into your country, which is a sovereign country, you are allowing this type of experience. It’s no good. It’s going to bring a lot of toxicity, a lot of contamination. You will not be able to access these lands.

We had an experience with the army as well. They don’t tell you the truth. I personally asked the army whether they used depleted uranium. They said no. But just a year ago we found in army communications and memos, a memo which stated that they had used depleted uranium in an army training area.

Our movement in Hawai’i as such, has been non-violent. We have an issue of taking non-violent resistance but we have not gone to the streets.

We are very firm and we are moving forward to reclaim and to reinstate our government that represents our interests as native people.

Hawai’i now is under US occupation. We are a state of the United States. But there is an undercurrent of native people in the midst of nation-building right now. There are people who have already had plans to reinstate the Kingdom of Hawai’i. There are people who are thinking along the lines of creating a new constitution.

The main idea I want to get across is that our people are moving forward in building a nation.

When it comes to the militarization of our lands we are totally opposed to it. There are people in our community who were for it because they believed that it would provide us with income and they became addicted to that kind of money.

The military economy is not sustainable to an environment at all. These are some of the contradictions we are talking to our people about.

We have to get out of a dependency on a military economy.

The Guardian: How has emigration impacted upon Hawai’i?

White people have a lot of land. We had in our history missionaries who came from the east coast of America — they were American missionaries, Calvinists who settled and actually taught our chiefs their economic system and language.

They translated our language into a written form and gave us Bibles.

We have missionary families who actually became capitalists. Their missions were cut off from getting funds and they had to learn how to survive in our country without the mission funding.

So they emigrated, some of them married but they began to actually help put the laws together for land ownership and eventually became the land owners.

So they had a huge part to play in the imbalance that took place in our system — introducing private property, registering private property and holding a lot of that private property such as running sugar and pineapple plantations.'

The Guardian: What is the meaning of Land to the Indigenous population?

We are the land. There is really no separation. When you look at the lot of the places where the bases are — that’s where some of our most secret sacred sites are too.

There is no separation. Our elders, our ancestors are buried in that land which gives us guidance to do the things that we need to do.

A lot of it has been damaged and destroyed. At the same time we have a very strong movement to rebuild things that have been damaged by reclaiming our ancient fish ponds.

The two biggest challenges are the developers and the military. We have a strong will and a lot of people are committed to the land and do the work that is needed in our communities.

The Guardian: Has this been a long struggle?

Before the 1900s, the land Commissioners mostly came from missionary families. Land commissioners held a very important position and were in charge of all the land titles.

So there was much arguing with the titles and the deeds and the land commission awards for each lot of the land.

Missionaries actually introduced the concept of private ownership to our society. Prior to that there was no such concept.

A lot of our culture today is based on a communal idea, not only of the land but of our society.

It’s something similar to the [Indigenous] people here — you cannot own land. It’s part of who you are. There is always a conflict between native land and environment and ideas that were introduced from a Western capitalist point of view.

Even though we have that part of our history where there was conflict, our chiefs in the 1800s knowing that we were getting pushed into a very modern world … began to think about how they were going to use their lands in order to help our people. There were chiefs who put aside their estates for the benefit of our people. For example, there was a Bernise Pourheepship, she put aside her lands for the benefit of education of native Hawai’ian children. Luna Leelo his lands for the elderly; Hono Colondily for orphans; …

Today there is a movement in Hawai’i by right-wing Americans to break the estate saying that we are ALL Americans now and that these estates are based on ethnicity of a people should not be legal.

Hawai’ian homelands are lands that are set aside for the use of our people. In order to qualify you have to have 50 per cent blood, there is a blood content. You have to prove through birth certificates etc that you have 50 per cent — not 49 per cent.

For many of us, we definitely want to keep these estates alive but at the same time we realize that our goals are higher and that is to reclaim our actual government as a nation.

The Guardian: Can you please tell more about your experiences?

When we are going to community meetings and I tell them about the possible contamination of depleted uranium and other toxins, people are appalled. Nobody knew.

In the beginning they don’t really want to hear anything because they have had a long history of association with the military.

Now people are just starting to open their eyes.

In November 2006, some of the military contaminants found in O’ahu, Hawai’i’s largest island included: depleted uranium, phosgene, TNT, lead and trichloroethylene.

Ongoing military expansion in Hawai’i also currently threatens a number of traditional cultural and sacred sites including the birthplace of elders and ancient temples. Fires, toxic chemicals, unexploded ordnances and destruction of endangered species on the islands are a major crisis.

More than 25,000 acres of land is also earmarked to be seized at Phakuloa and Honouliuli. Plans to base hundreds of new troops, cargo planes, marines’ bases, missile launchers and sale of public land to private developers concerns the group.

The DMZ group notes that The US assumes it has control and domination, but the First Peoples do not agree. The unique identities and sovereignties of the world’s peoples are just open spaces for the projection of US military force, to make way for WalMart, McDonalds and MTV.

The experiences of Indigenous peoples vis-à-vis the militarized empire are multiple and unique. We are not singular, but plural; we obtain our life and very existence from specificities of our particular ancestors, our particular gods, our named and worshiped sacred sites.

When Talisman Sabre 07 takes place here in Shoalwater Bay … all of it is really being directed from Hawai’i — from the US Pacific Command (PacCom). PacCom is the oldest and largest of the US unified commands. It was established in Hawai’i in 1947 and its HQ are on an island called Camp Smith. The PacCom area of responsibility stretches over more than 50 per cent of the earth’s surface … from the west coast of North America to the east coast of Africa, from Alaska to Antarctica including Hawai’i.

The two Indigenous leaders concluded their remarks by stating: WE have a right as native people to clean water, clean land, clean ocean and clean air in order to survive.

From The Guardian

The European Union has No Moral Authority to Criticize Cuba

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 03:58:00 +0000

6-28-07, 11:54 am

Statement By The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Cuba On The Conclusions of the External Relations Council of The European Union About Cuba

The Council of Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the European Union adopted several decisions on Cuba last 18 June.

The document, released by the European Union under the title 'Conclusions on Cuba,' contains a proposal for 'a comprehensive and open political dialogue with the Cuban authorities on the basis of reciprocity and mutual interest,' of which the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs has taken note and considers it to be a necessary rectification.

However, such document does not mention the so-called sanctions that the European Union tried to enforce on Cuba, in an unjust and thoughtless manner, in 2003 and which it has only maintained 'in abeyance' for two years now out of haughtiness.

With Cuba, a dialogue will only be possible if between sovereign and equal partners, without any conditions or impending threats. If the European Union wishes to engage in any dialogue with Cuba, it must definitely eliminate those sanctions, which since then have turned out to be impracticable and unsustainable.

The 'Conclusions' also failed to mention the so-called 'Common Position,' agreed upon in a hasty fashion by the Ministers of Finance of the EU in 1996 under the pressure of Aznar and based on a draft written at the US State Department.

After so many mistakes and failures, the only obvious conclusion that the European Union should fittingly draw is that the so-called 'Common Position' must disappear, since there were no and there are no reasons whatsoever for its existence and because it hinders any normal, mutually respectful relationship of common interest with our country.

It must be recognized that a group of influential European nations have endeavored to change this ludicrous situation. Others, such as the Czech Republic, have confirmed to be American pawns on the European map.

On the other hand, the 'Conclusions of the Council' slanderously meddle with matters that are of Cuba's strict concern, pass judgment and announce intrusive and hypocritical actions that Cuba regards as offensive and unacceptable, while strongly rejecting them.

We do not recognize any moral authority in the European Union to pass judgment on or advise Cuba.

If when the Council refers to the temporary transfer of President Fidel Castro's duties to comrade Ral Castro, regarding it as a 'new situation,' it is expressing the illusion that there may be contradictions or differences among the leaders of the Revolution and division among Cuban revolutionaries, it is wrong once again. The Revolution is more solid and is more united than ever before.

Our country has risked its own existence, has shown heroic endurance and has relentlessly fought for over a century in order to defend its independence. Cuba is an independent and sovereign country and the European Union makes a mistake if it believes that it can treat it differently and not as an equal.

The European Union has shown a persistent and humiliating subordination to the United States, which renders it incapable of holding positions based on European interests and turns it into an accessory, despite references to the contrary, to the ruthless and inhumane blockade that the US enforces against the Cuban people, and about which the 'Conclusions' did not even dare say a single word. In the declaration from the Summit that it held last April with the United States, the European Union yielded to them to question Cuba and accepted a reference that acknowledges legitimacy to the 'Bush Plan.' Known are its collusions with the Empire's envoys, even with the spurious inspector appointed by the United States for Cuba, and frequent is the presence of its officials at anti-Cuban rallies and events in Miami or held in Europe but budgeted from Washington.

The European Union is shamelessly hypocritical when unjustly talking about Cuba while keeping silence on the US-led tortures at the illegal Naval Base of Guantnamo, which encroaches on Cuban territory, and at Abu Ghraib, where these are even administered to European citizens. It impudently remains silent on the kidnappings by the US special forces in third countries and has offered its territory to cooperate with the CIA's secret flights and to harbor illegal prisons. Nor has it said anything about the tens of persons who have disappeared under such circumstances or about the hundreds of thousands of civilians murdered in Iraq.

It is up to the European Union to rectify the mistakes made in respect of Cuba. Any step in the right direction will be aptly welcome. But there is no rush: we have all the time in the world.

Havana, 22 June 2007

Gaza and After

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 03:53:00 +0000

6-28-07, 11:45 am

After the tragic events in the Gaza Strip, and the complete takeover of Gaza by Hamas in a military coup, we think that it is important to stress on the following points:

1) We condemn the military coup by Hamas and its ramifications of tearing Gaza away from the West Bank. This new situation will eventually complete the process begun by Israel in 1991 to disintegrate the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), and create two separate entities. And this action by Hamas put into jeopardy the political and geographical unity of the OPT.

2) Its obvious now that the bloody infighting was a direct and indirect consequence of Israel's long-standing policy of siege, closer, expropriation of lands, and settlements, etc., which led to high poverty and unemployment rates as well as devastated trading opportunities since Israel as an occupying power has strictly limited Palestinian movement within the west bank and with the Gaza Strip.

3) The international community – mainly the US and the European Union – is also to blame for exacerbating the distress and agony of the Palestinians by the imposition of political sanctions and an economic blockade on our people since early 2006.

4) We agree that a state of corruption in the Palestinian Authority, security failures, and the lack of measures to remedy this situation has contributed to generating tension and hostilities.

5) The huge bi-polarisation of the Palestinian society by Fatah and Hamas, and their policy, before and after the Mecca accord, to bisect and monopolize power paved the way towards excluding all the political factions and the civil society from being real partners. This negatively complicated the internal scene and encouraged infighting.

Therefore, we express serious concerns about the following four outcomes:

(1) The assault on the legitimate authority and the military takeover by Hamas in Gaza.

(2) The complete separation of the Gaza Strip from the West Bank.

(3) A wide scale humanitarian crisis in Gaza if Israel implements its threats to cut off vital services and supplies.

(4) The upcoming situation under Hamas control, and what will happen in regard to secular civil society and individual and public freedoms as well as women's rights, etc., taking into consideration certain declarations by Hamas leaders that they are going to establish an Islamic Authority in Gaza.

Now if there is a lesson from what happened in Gaza here it is: Starving, drying up and blocking a whole population do not change consciousness or weaken political or ideological movements. On the contrary, after one year and a half of the policy of international boycott on the Palestinian Authority, Hamas has become stronger, and the boycott policy has failed. The American notion that it is possible to topple an elected government by applying external pressure on the population suffered a complete failure.

On the other hand, it was unwise behavior by certain elements in Fatah and the Authority to count on the external pressure and to follow certain policies that depends completely on the American and the Israeli good wishes.

The question now is where to go from here? To continue the boycott policy by the US, Israel and the European community will lead to more disasters. The international community needs to change direction, and it has to deal with one legitimate authority and with one legitimate government without preconditions. The international community should from now on deal with the Palestinians through their government and not on a personal level as it had before, through the so-called temporary international mechanism. It should help the Palestinian government to deal with its people in the West Bank as well as in the Gaza Strip, and not to go over its head or by imposing conditions and giving instructions.

Only through giving the Palestinian Government and President Abbas the full responsibility for his people on the political, financial, economical, and security levels without any external intervention, can he succeed in making a breakthrough and to go back to the status quo ante in the Gaza Strip.

The so-called policy of strengthening President Abbas, should be based on a real political approach and substantial steps towards a final solution to the Palestinian problem and not only financial aid and the removal of some military check points.

As preliminary steps, there should be a complete and mutual cease fire, a full withdrawal from the Palestinian populated areas, removal of all the military check points, massive release of prisoners, and dismantling of the so-called illegal settlements posts. Such measures could create a new environment and give hope for the Palestinian population that the political path did not fail. All the efforts to confront Hamas, without undertaking a dramatic step such as pushing for an accord based on the Arab peace initiative will be meaningless. And without offering a genuine political alternative, extremism and fundamentalism will continue succeed.

--Hanna Amireh is a member of the Palestinian People's Party--Political Bureau and the Palestine Liberation Orgaization--Executive Committee.

Is the Price Too High for Beneficial Public Broadcasting in Venezuela?

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 03:43:00 +0000

6-28-07, 11:37 am

In the U.S. we are often faced with a dynamic and constantly changing media environment. Whether it is the FCC fining a television station for airing nudity as recently happened with the national WB station or the cancellation of a long-running radio program like the Don Imus show, we tend to view these developments as normal. Yet when similar shifts occur in the media in other countries, we are quick to label them censorship, even when these actions are legally provided for in broadcasting regulations and the constitution.

This is exactly what the U.S. press has done for the last month in response to a recent decision made by the Venezuelan government not to renew the broadcasting license of Radio Caracas Television or RCTV. The 20-year license granted to the station, Venezuela's oldest and most cited for legal infractions, expired on May 27th. However, RCTV still operates through satellite and cable TV as well as the internet, which the Venezuelan government does not regulate. The issue is a legal one, and should be judged according to the constitutional principles that guide media licensing in Venezuela, not by foreign journalists and non-governmental organizations who are often influenced more by the political aims of Washington than evidentiary knowledge.

In the U.S., the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which answers to Congress, makes decisions regarding the licensing of broadcasters. As in Venezuela, that agency has the power to grant broadcasting rights to any outlet, and to deny those rights to those who do not comply with legal guidelines. In Venezuela, the National Telecommunications Commission (CONATEL), falls under the Executive Branch and similarly oversees the licensing of media outlets. CONATEL was created in 1991 and reformed under the 1999 constitution. It is charged with regulating the open-access airwaves, a public good which it is responsible for distributing in an equitable fashion. Before the RCTV decision, it had avoided carrying out closures or non-renewals, despite the fact that Venezuela's media is overwhelmingly affiliated with the political opposition.

The major difference between the FCC and CONATEL is that under FCC regulations, when a non-renewal is recommended, a hearing must take place to evaluate the decision. In Venezuela however, this is not the case. Instead, CONATEL has the authority to make renewal decisions based on the station’s broadcasting record. While this certainly could be amended to mimic US norms, the procedure was constitutionally mandated long before Chavez became president and has functioned without incident for years. The Washington Office on Latin America, a policy organization who has been highly critical of President Chavez, even recognizes that the decision not to renew RCTV’s license is legal under Venezuelan law.[1]

Surprisingly absent from debates around RCTV is the fact that our own FCC has closed three TV stations due to legal infractions since 1969 for far less than the serious broadcasting violations committed by RCTV: WLBT-TV in Mississippi, CBS affiliate WLNS-TV in Michigan, and Trinity Broadcasting in Miami. In fact, if the RCTV renewal had been brought before the FCC it surely would not have taken long for the Commission and Congress to decide its fate with a unanimous and resounding non-renewal decision.

The FCC bases its renewals on certain factors such as whether or not a station has served the public interest and if they have broken the Telecommunications Law or violated FCC regulations. Certain norms, if not followed, call into question a station’s license. Indeed, the FCC cites reporting false information about a crime or a catastrophe as a clear violation and defines it as an act of non-compliance if the station knowingly transmits false headlines that have the ability to cause immediate public damage and direct or real damage to property, the health of the general public, and its security.[2]

Before you decide whether or not the non-renewal of RCTV's broadcasting license counts as censorship or is just a matter of regulatory enforcement, lets look at the case. Try to imagine a mainstream news channel in the U.S. running ads encouraging the public to march to the White House and overthrow our elected president. Then after the president is kidnapped and a coup government installed, refusing to air public protests calling for the return of the president by hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans throughout the country. RCTV instead broadcast cartoons and movies and issued orders to its staff not to cover actions in favor of Chavez. Two days later, Venezuela’s democratically elected president was returned to power. A year later, RCTV, still up and running, began advocating an oil industry sabotage that dealt a severe blow to the domestic economy. Certainly inciting political violence and conducting news blackouts is unacceptable behavior from the media in any country and doesn’t merit license renewal.

Why, then, has RCTV's non-renewal been the subject of so much criticism? There are two reasons. First, because the station's owner, Marcel Granier, is an influential member of Caracas' small wealthy elite and consistently one of President Chavez's most vocal critics. Granier controls about 40% of the Venezuelan media, and his influence likely greased the wheels in a case brought by RCTV against the Venezuelan government at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

The second reason is that, as a news story, censorship makes for a hot topic. It also conveniently provides an easy way for the opposition to reassert itself internationally in its tireless efforts to oust President Chavez. Much noise was made when the Organization of American States began examining the RCTV issue, but no U.S. mainstream media reported on that body’s subsequent show of support for the Venezuelan government in its decision not to renew licensing to the notorious broadcaster.

As protests against the non-renewal and celebration rallies in support of it continue to grace the landscape of Venezuela, a heightened debate has begun about public television that takes into account the interests of the public good. This has manifested itself in many ways, one of which is the increased willingness of the government to engage in dialog with its critics. Earlier this month, in a move that many in the United States would call extraordinary, the National Assembly opened its halls to university students opposed to the RCTV decision and offered them a venue for expression. As the Assembly listened to them air their grievances other students sympathetic to the non-renewal were invited to engage them in respectful debate, but it wasn’t long before the student opposition staged an angry walkout. The Vice President of Venezuela later extended an invitation to continue talks with the government, but student groups have hesitated to begin the process.

Currently, similar concerns about public broadcasters’ responsibilities are being raised in the U.S., even from within the Federal Communications Commission. On June 2, FCC Commisioner Michael J. Copps, wrote in his New York Times Op-Ed that, “Using the public airwaves is a privilege… not a right… Our policies should reward broadcasters that honor their pledge to serve that [public] interest and penalize those that don't.” Too often, under pressure from big business media, instead of holding broadcasters accountable through substantive review the FCC deals out what Copps refers to as “postcard renewals” or automatic license renewals. This certainly doesn’t benefit the public and left the commissioner to wonder, “Do stations that make so much money using the public airwaves, but so plainly fail to educate viewers on the issues facing them, really deserve to have their renewals rubber-stamped?”[3]

CONATEL recently allotted RCTV's vacated share of the broadcast spectrum to a new public television station called TVes, the first ever for the Caribbean nation. Like public broadcasters in the U.S., TVes will maintain editorial autonomy while receiving government funding. It received an initial investment of $4 million from the government and has an independent board of supervisors. However, in October, in order to diversify funding TVes will hold a meeting with companies to offer the possibility of corporate advertising space.

Lil Rodriguez, chairwoman of TVes, said in a press conference last month that the TV station would be one that promotes diversity, a plurality of culture and views, and a place for local and undiscovered talent to be showcased. In an effort to further utilize independent producers and artists the station will not produce content, but instead will buy productions. Educational programming for children will also be an important aspect of TVes.

Standards that aim to hold media conglomerates accountable should be upheld and active enforcement of already existing laws should be applauded rather than frowned upon. Venezuela is providing an example of what many in the U.S. have been calling on the FCC to do for years-abide by the law. Moreover, changes democratizing access to the representation of diverse communities in the media through the creation of a public television station are long overdue. Critics of the RCTV non-renewal who condemn these much-needed changes prefer to cry censorship than to consider the legal context in which they occur and the long history of exclusion that has been felt by many for decades. Through strict enforcement and responsible public broadcasting, quality programming can flourish. It is still too early to tell, but Venezuela may very well turn out to be a major player in this effort.

--Olivia B. Goumbri is the Executive Director of the Venezuela Information Office and the editor of The Venezuela Reader: The Building of a People’s Democracy.

[1] WOLA. “WOLA Criticizes Venezuela's Handling of RCTV License Non-Renewal”. May 30, 2007.

[2] http://www.fcc.gov/Reports/tcom1996.pdf

[3] The Price of Free Airwaves, By Michael J. Copps, New York Times, June 2, 2007

CIA to Release 1970s Documents on Agency’s Crimes

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 05:38:00 +0000

6-27-07, 10:24 a.m.

The US Central Intelligence Agency is preparing to release a set of documents compiled more than 30 years ago detailing the agency’s involvement over the previous quarter century in crimes both at home and abroad.

These included assassination attempts against foreign heads of state, covert spying on newspaper columnists and other US citizens, the infiltration of left-wing groups and the testing of mind-alerting drugs on unwitting American subjects.

The CIA’s current director, Gen. Michael Hayden, announced the decision to release the documents, known within the agency as the “family jewels,” at a conference in Washington Thursday of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

“Much of it has been in the press before, and most of it is unflattering, but it is CIA’s history,” said Hayden. “The documents provide a glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency.”

On the contrary, the issues raised in the report—assassinations, domestic spying, kidnappings and torture—are all too familiar to anyone following the activities the CIA and other US security agencies have carried out in the name of the “global war on terrorism.”

The 693-page document was compiled in response to a 1973 directive issued by then-CIA Director James Schlesinger ordering senior agency officials to provide an accounting of all CIA activities that had been conducted in violation of the agency’s charter, which specifically bars it from carrying out domestic operations.

Schlesinger’s order to catalogue these illegal activities was prompted by the arrest of two longtime CIA operatives—E. Howard Hunt and James McCord—in connection with the break-in at the Democratic Party’s Watergate offices. The Watergate crisis exposed broader agency involvement in the so-called “dirty tricks” carried out by the Nixon administration against its political opponents.

It was under these conditions, and in the wake of Richard Nixon’s resignation, that Schlesinger’s successor at the CIA, William Colby, assembled the record of the so-called “skeletons” in the agency’s closet and presented them to President Gerald Ford.

While some of the material in the document had previously been leaked and much of its contents were publicly exposed in the course of House and Senate investigations of the agency—the Pike and Church committees—in the mid-1970s, the CIA had until now steadfastly refused to release the material.

There is little doubt that what is to be made public will be carefully vetted for material that could still incriminate living participants in the crimes of that period, not least of them former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who remains a key advisor of the Bush administration.

In his speech to the historians’ conference, Hayden cautioned: “Remember that nothing about intelligence and declassification happens without human intervention. We do not—we cannot—just kick these things out the door. We have to examine each and every page through the real-world security prism I mentioned. It takes time. It takes care. It takes talent.”

In conjunction with Hayden’s announcement, the National Security Archive at George Washington University posted on its web site a series of documents. These include a summary of the “family jewels” prepared for the US Justice Department and memorandums of conversations between Colby, Schlesinger, Kissinger and Ford on their implications and on how to protect the CIA and the administration itself from the political consequences.

The summary was provided to the Justice Department in December 2004 after a front-page article by Seymour Hersh appeared in the New York Times under a banner headline, “Huge CIA operation reported in US against antiwar forces, other dissidents in Nixon years.”

In an attempt at organizing damage control over the revelations, the CIA, the Justice Department and the White House initiated discussions of the document assembled by the agency.

Among the crimes cited by Colby in his presentation to DOJ was the forcible three-year confinement of a Soviet defector, which Colby acknowledged “might be regarded as a violation of kidnapping laws.”

He also acknowledged multiple episodes of CIA spying on journalists in an attempt to discover their sources. Among those targeted was Jack Anderson and his assistants—including the current right-wing Fox News anchor Brit Hume—Washingon Post national security reporter Michael Getler and two syndicated columnists, Robert Allen and Paul Scott.

Also included in the report were break-ins at the homes of former CIA employees and covert mail openings of letters to and from the Soviet Union and China.

Colby also acknowledged the CIA’s participation in assassination plots against Cuban President Fidel Castro, Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba and Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Colby claimed that the CIA played no active role in the assassination of either Lumumba or Trujillo, but admitted to a “faint connection” between the CIA and the latter’s killers.

The CIA director also admitted that the agency had engaged in spying upon and infiltrating antiwar organizations and other left-wing opponents of the government in the 1960s and 1970s, amassing the names of some 10,000 people active in opposing the Vietnam War.

Also acknowledged was the use of “unwitting” American participants in experiments using drugs being tested for use in interrogations as well as the testing of polygraph and wire-tapping equipment on subjects in the US.

The memorandum of the conversation between Kissinger and Ford portrays the then-secretary of state and architect of some of Washington’s bloodiest crimes as apoplectic. He warned the president that the Times story on massive domestic spying represented “just the tip of the iceberg.” As to the facts not included in the story, he said, “If they come out, blood will flow.” As an example, he pointed to the role played by Robert Kennedy (the former attorney general and president’s brother) in personally directing the assassination campaign against Castro. The implications, he added could be “worse...than Watergate.”

Kissinger noted, the “Chilean thing” was not in Colby’s report, hinting darkly that it was kept out as “sort of a blackmail on me.”

In the 1973 Chilean coup, Kissinger and the CIA played the decisive roles in organizing the military overthrow of an elected government and the subsequent reign of terror in which tens of thousands of Chileans were murdered and tortured.

Indeed, this and other crimes were not included in Colby’s “family jewels,” presumably because the CIA hierarchy believed that they did not represent a violation of the charter under which the agency was founded in 1947.

The coup in Chile was only one in a long series of bloodbaths, coups and dirty wars organized by the CIA in Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Congo, Vietnam, Afghanistan and many other countries.

Hayden’s attempt to cast the limited number of crimes that found their way into the dossier compiled by Colby as relics from some distant and long-surpassed era hardly stands up to scrutiny. Indeed, the release of documents dating from nearly 35 years ago almost has the character of a distraction from far more current and serious crimes being carried out presently.

There is ample evidence that the agency has seldom been involved in as much criminal activity as it is today, while the limited restraints placed upon the national security establishment following the revelations of the mid-1970s have been largely swept aside since 2001, with the enactment of the USA Patriot Act and the assumption of ever-more-sweeping powers, including massive domestic surveillance, by the Bush White House.

In his remarks at the conference in Washington, Hayden acknowledged that the press of increased operations had slowed down some of the agency’s declassification work. “The ops tempo we have maintained since 9/11—and must continue to maintain—is unmatched in our agency’s history,” he said. “The good news here is that we’re producing great stuff for future historians.”

What will this “great stuff” include? Among the current “ops” that have been at least partially exposed is the CIA’s involvement in the illegal abduction of alleged suspects, and their rendition to secret prisons in many parts of the world where they have been subjected to torture and in some cases murdered. CIA agents have been indicted and brought to trial in Italy for one such “extraordinary rendition.”

In addition, CIA death squads and assassination teams have been deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere.

It is unlikely, to say the least, that the agency is preparing the release of documents detailing these criminal activities. As Hayden told his audience of historians, “Of course, we cannot tell the American people everything we do to protect them without damaging our ability to protect them.”

From MercoPress

End of the Road for the Employee Free Choice Act, Or Just the Opening Salvo?

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 01:47:00 +0000

On Tuesday the Senate voted 51-48 to end a Republican filibuster of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which would strengthen workers' right to choose a union. The House of Representatives had already passed the bill by a vote of 241-185 on March 1. According to Senate rules, however, supporters of the legislation need a super-majority of 60 votes to 'invoke cloture' ( i.e., to end the filibuster). Thus, Congress will likely take no further action on the bill until after the 2008 elections.

It would be wrong to consider the Senate vote a defeat for supporters of the measure. Quite the opposite – 12 months ago, few observers would have predicted that by June 2007, EFCA would have won the support of a majority in both Houses of Congress. Supporters of the bill have always considered their effort part of a three year legislative campaign, the end goal being enactment of EFCA by summer 2009, assuming, of course, that the Democrats win control of the White House and retain control of the Congress in the November 2008 elections.

Even if that were the outcome of the 2008 elections, however, EFCA supporters will face an uphill task gaining 60 votes in the Senate. For three decades, this super-majority requirement has presented the biggest obstacle to the modernization of our antiquated and increasingly irrelevant labor law. Labor law reform is a 'no compromise' issue for the business community and its Republican allies in the Congress. Tuesday's vote was not the first time that Senate Republicans have filibustered a labor law reform proposal – they twice filibustered a bill strengthening workers' rights in the 1970s and one outlawing the permanent replacement of strikers in the 1990s -- nor will it be the last.

The case for stronger legal protection for workers' rights is compelling. The US system of union recognition is the most cumbersome in the developed world, and it provides the weakest protections for workers' right to choose a union. Employer intimidation is endemic, and there are now about 60 million Americans who want a union but can't get one, according to the eminent Harvard economist, Richard Freeman. EFCA would remedy that situation by imposing greater penalties on employers who discriminate against union supporters, providing for mediation and arbitration when employers and unions fail to negotiate first contracts, and allowing workers to form a union when over 50 percent sign union membership cards.

EFCA opponents have seized upon this final provision allowing for 'card check' recognition of unions to label the measure an unprecedented and anti-democratic power grab by Big Labor. But contrary to their vitriolic rhetoric, card check recognition is neither unprecedented nor anti-democratic. A system of card check recognition has operated successfully in the United Kingdom since the enactment of the Employment Relations Act in 2000. This law allows the UK equivalent of the National Labor Relations Board to certify a union when over 50 percent of workers sign union membership cards, or call an election if it believes this is in the interests of good industrial relations. In practice, however, the board rarely requires an election when a majority of workers have signed union membership cards.

Card check recognition for unions also operates at the federal level in Canada and in several Canadian provinces. As in the UK, card check laws have not resulted in any problems in Canada. Even in those provinces that require secret ballot elections prior to union certification, elections are held quickly and employer behavior is regulated tightly. For complex historical and cultural reasons, moreover, few UK and Canadian employers are as anti-union as their US counterparts. As a result of these card check laws, employer coercion during union organizing campaign is much less of a problem in the UK and Canada than it is in the US.

Nor is it only other countries that consider card check recognition good public policy. Many US lawmakers believe this, too, and card check is the norm for large numbers of American workers who are not covered by the National Labor Relations Act. Workers who have formed unions under card check laws include state and local public sector workers in Alaska, California, Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, and Ohio, and charter school, Indian gaming, public sector higher education and trial court employees in several states. And voluntary card check agreements are increasingly common and viewed as 'best practice' in those sectors of the private workforce in which unions and management have developed long-term, cooperative relationships. Corporations such as Cingular Wireless, Kaiser Permanente and Allina health care system recognize the benefits of card check recognition and cooperative labor-management relations.

So what are the prospects for the enactment of EFCA? Past experience suggests that the window of opportunity, if it does emerge after the 2008 elections, will be brief, so action will need to be swift – immediately after the first 100 days in office. EFCA supporters must enlist the assistance of as many non-labor allies as possible, and frame the debate in broad terms, stressing that unions and collective bargaining – which greatly expand access to employer healthcare and pension schemes -- are critical to restoring the American Dream and revitalizing the imperiled middle-class.

But even all that might not be enough. Just as they did on Tuesday, the business community and its allies in the Senate may be able to employ the filibuster one more time to undermine this effort to protect workers' right to choose a union.

--John Logan teaches in the Department of Management at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Book Review: Flight, by Sherman Alexie

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 01:41:00 +0000

6-27-07, 9:32 am

Flight By Sherman Alexie New York, Black Cat, 2007.

With its ironic play on Herman Melville's classic opening line and its big nod to magical realism, Sherman Alexie's latest novel, Flight, walks the fine line between the nightmare of history and the possibility of hope.

Zits has been abandoned. He is a 15 year old Native American youth who has moved from foster home to foster home. He has been in and out of juvenile detention facilities, and has been drinking on the streets with homeless people since he was eleven. When greeted one morning by his newest foster family at breakfast, he says nothing except 'whatever.' Needless to say, he has trouble with authority, and he is about to become a mass murderer.

Zits is plagued by the absent father who abandoned his mother at his birth. His loss is further deepened upon his mother's death at a young age. But recently he has met a new friend who fills the void. Justice is the name of the beautiful white boy who seems to understand his pain, anger, and loss. Justice seems to understand both the historical experience of racism and conquest experienced by American Indian nations and the means for overcoming: violence.

Justice gives Zits his first taste of power; power that comes from seeing fear and terror on the faces of those to whom he is about to do violence. Perhaps guns and killing can redeem Zits from the life into which he has been abandoned.

But before Zits can go through with the horrendous act of mowing down the random customers in a bank he happens to walk into, he is transported through time and space into the lives and experiences of different individuals. First, he awakens in the body of a white FBI agent investigating the alleged activities of American Indian rebels in the 1970s. He participates in the killing of one activist – in the name of a different kind of justice – and quickly discovers his own repulsion at killing.

Zits learns that both the FBI's and Justice's violent means of attaining 'justice' are indistinguishable in practice and outcome. 'How can you tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys when they say the same things?'

Transported into the bodies and experiences of a 19th century US calvary scout on the trail of Crazy Horse, a white pilot, and his own father, Zits learns that 'revenge is a circle inside of a circle inside of a circle.' Betrayal is commonplace in the human condition, and even trust itself is little more than the first step to more betrayal.

Maybe the lesson Zits learns is simple. Don't kill people because 'all life is sacred.' Don't betray. Don't hate. Don't leave your babies alone. Where does this cycle end?

In some ways, Flight is a tale of the search for identity. At one point, Zits wishes he could be a 'real Indian.' But what, after all, is that? And who is there to teach him? He also learns that, despite his personal horrible experiences with white people and the historical experience of Native Americans with white people, there must be a difference between being white and 'whiteness.' But is it possible for Zits to survive or thrive in these two worlds?

Alexie's novel is extraordinary in its sweet simplicity. It locates the personal and internal human life within the framework of history and a system of racial supremacy that produces a cycle of division, devaluing, and violence in order to perpetuate itself. But because human beings have made this system, they also have the ability to short circuit that cycle for their own and, perhaps, the entire species' survival.

Bravo to Alexie for another brilliant work!

Sex and Power: Towards a Semiotics of Violence

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 01:36:00 +0000

7-07-07, 11:21 am

In 1992 the Chilean Ariel Dorfman debuted his work Death and the Maiden. Although without specific references, the drama alludes to the years of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship and the first years of the formal recuperation of democracy in Chile. Paulina Salas is the character who represents the women raped by the regime and by all of the dictatorial regimes of the period, of universal history, that sadistically practiced physical torture and moral torture. Sexual violation has, in this case and in all others, the particularity of combining in one and the same act almost all the forms of human violence of which other animal beasts are incapable. For this reason we should not refer to this type of featherless biped as an 'animal' but as 'a certain traditional kind of man.'

Another character in the drama is a doctor, Roberto Miranda, who also represents a famous class of sophisticated collaborators with barbarism: torture sessions were almost always accompanied with the advances of science: instruments more advanced than those employed by the old ecclesiastical inquisition in Europe, like the electric cattle prod; terribly subtle methods like the principle of uncertainty, discovered or rediscovered by the Nazis in the educated Germany of the 30s and 40s. In order to use all of this technology of barbarism it was necessary to rely on technicians with many years of study and a sick culture to legitimate it. Armies of doctors at the service of sadism accompanied the torture sessions in South America, especially in the years of the poorly named Cold War.

The third character in this play is Paulina's husband, Gerardo Escobar. The attorney Escobar represents the transition, that group given the task of darning with bobby pins the bloody and painful social wounds. As has been common in Latin America, each time reconciliation commissions were created they appealed first to political necessities over moral ones. Which is to say, the truth does not matter as much as order. A little bit of truth is alright, because it is the victims' demand; the full truth is not possible, because it bothers the violators of Human Rights. Those of us in the Southern Cone who demand the whole truth and nothing but the truth were characterized, invariably, as extremists, radicals and trouble-makers in a moment in which Peace was necessary. Nonetheless, as the Ecuadorian Juan Montalvo had already observed ( Ojeada sobre América, 1866), war is a disgrace proper to human beings, but the peace that we have in America is the peace of slaves. Or, stated in a language from our 1970s, it is the peace of the cemeteries . Paulina knows it. One night her husband returns home accompanied by a doctor who kindly had offered him assistance on the road, when Gerardo's car broke down. Paulina recognizes the voice of her rapist. After other visits, Paulina decides to kidnap him in her own home. She ties him to a chair and threatens him in order to make him confess. While aiming a weapon at him, Paulina says: 'but I am not going to kill you because your are guilty, Doctor. I am going to kill you because you haven't shown any damned remorse. I can only forgive someone who truly asks for forgiveness, who stands up before his peers and says I did this, I did it and I will never do it again.' Finally Paulina frees her alleged torturer without receiving a confession from the accused party. Dorfman cannot be accused of creating a Manichaean scene where Paulina does not take vengeance, emphasizing the goodness of the victims. No, because recent history does not record cases of vengeance and much less have these been the norm. The norm, rather, has been impunity, for which reason we can say that Death and the Maiden is a drama that is, besides being realist, absolutely true to life. In addition to being constructed from concrete characters, they represent three kinds of Latin Americans. We have all met at some time a Paulina, a Gerardo and a Roberto; even though not everyone could recognize them by their smiles or their kind voices.

A problem derived from this play transcends the social, political and perhaps moral sphere. When Paulina's husband observes that revenge will not proceed because 'we cannot use their methods, we are different,' she responds ironically: 'it isn't revenge. I am thinking of giving him all the guarantees that he gave to me.' On various occasions Paulina and Roberto must be alone together in the house. Without the vigilant and conciliatory presence of the spouse, Paulina could exercise any manner of violence against her violator. From this situation a problem is derived: Paulina could exercise all the physical force necessary to kill the doctor. Including torture. But, how could she exercise that other violence, perhaps the worst of all, moral violence? 'I am thinking of giving him all the guarantees that he gave to me' could be translated as 'I am thinking of doing to him the same thing that he did to me.'

That is when a significant asymmetry emerges: why couldn't Paulina sexually violate her old rapist? That is, why would that apparent act of violence, in another heterosexual coitus, not result in humiliation for him while it would cause a new humiliation for her?

In my novel La reina de América (The Queen of America, 2001) when the protagonist manages to avenge herself against her rapist, now vested with the power of a new economic position, she hires men who kidnap her rapist and, each in turn, violate him in a forcibly homosexual relation while she witnesses the scene, as in a theater, the violence of her revenge. Why could it not be her who personally humiliated her aggressor practicing her own heterosexuality? Why is this impossible? Is it part of the ethico-patriarchal language that the victim must preserve in order to avenge herself? Do both moral violence and dignity, then, derive from the codes established by the masculine sex itself (or by the system of production to which the patriarchy responds, which is to say, the agricultural and pre-industrial form of survival)?

Octavio Paz, improving in El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude, 1950) upon the production of his fellow countryman Samuel Ramos ( El perfil del hombre en la cultura de México, 1934), understands that 'the one who pentrates' offends, conquers. 'To be opened' (to be 'chingado,' 'torn open'), to be exposed is a form of defeat and humiliation. It is manly to not be 'torn open.' 'To be opened' signifies a betrayal. The 'gash' is the feminine wound that does not heal. Jean-Paul Sartre himself saw the feminine body as carrier of an opening.

Opposite the virginity of María (Guadalupe), is the other supposed Mexican mother: la Malinche, 'la chingada.' From a psychoanalytic point of view, they are comparable – only in masculine psychology, carrier of dominant values? – Mexican territory which is conquered, penetrated by the white conqueror, with Marina, la Malinche who opens her body. (The conqueror who climbs the mountain or sets foot on the Moon, both substitutes for the feminine, does not only raise a flag; he drives in a stake, a phallus.) Malinche does not do anything very different from the indigenous leaders who opened their doors to the white-skinned barbarian, Hernán Cortés. Malinche had more reason to detest the local power of the time, but her sex condemns her: the sexual conquest of the woman, of the mother, is an offensive penetration. The betrayal of the other masculine chiefs – let's forget that they were tribes subject to another empire, the Aztec – is forgotten, does not hurt as much, does not signify a moral wound.

But it is a colonial wound. Patriarchy is not a particularity of the old base communities in pre-Colombian America. Rather, it is a European system and incipiently a system of the Aztec and Incan imperial upper echelon. But not of the lower strata of these empires where woman and the myths of fertility – not of virginity – predominated. The appearance of the indian virgin to the indian Juan Diego takes place on the hill that before had belonged to worship of the goddess Tonantzin, 'our mother,' goddess of fertility among the Aztecs.

Now, back to the present from this anthropological limit, which establishes the relativity of moral values, there are absolute elements: both the victim and the victimizer recognize an act of rape: violence is an absolute value and one that the stronger decides to exercise over the weaker. This is easily defined as an immoral act. There are no doubts about its present value. Speculation, questioning about how those values are formed, those codes throughout human history pertain to speculative thought. They help us to understand the why of a human relationship, of certain moral values; but they are absolutely unnecessary at the moment of recognizing what is a violation of human rights and what is not. For this reason, criminals are not forgiven by human justice – the only justice that depends on us, the only justice we are obligated to comprehend and demand.

Translated by Bruce Campbell.

Patent Wars and the Indian Scenario

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 01:31:00 +0000

6-27-07, 9:22 am

The past few months have been quite important for developments in the patents front. Most of the action has come from the US, with the US Supreme Court giving two important judgments on the scope and reach of patents. On the software front, Microsoft has started what was on the cards for quite some time – a threat of patents war. It has claimed that the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community has breached 235 of its patents, a claim that Fortune magazine called as Microsoft’s declaration of war against the Free World! All in all, it shows that the patents regime is changing even in the US, which had hitherto considered almost everything as patentable, even Yoga asanas. Obviously, the crisis of the patents system, which we have been talking about for some time, is now beginning to catch up even in the homeland of global capital.

This brings us to the second issue we need to address. The now discredited Mashelkar Committee’s report talked about incremental versus breakthrough innovations and also on what is not TRIPS compliant in terms of patentability. In this, they provided little argument or evidence to substantiate their belief that making only New Chemical Entities patentable would not be TRIPS compliant. The recent US Supreme Court judgment focuses its attention on when does incremental innovation becomes patentable and shows that Masheklar Committee did not apply its mind on the issue.

US SUPREME COURT VERDICTS

Let us take the US Supreme Court judgments first. One was on the global reach of US patents. The US Supreme Court has rightly held that US patent regime does not extend beyond the US. This was the Microsoft Vs AT&T case, in which AT&T had sued Microsoft for violating its US patents while shipping software to other countries. The second is KSR vs Teleflex case and involved whether combining two elements – in this case a gas pedal and an electronic sensor – passes the test of non-obviousness. The Supreme Court ruled that combining two elements, which are independent innovations, if obvious to a skilled practitioner of the art, couldn’t be patented. In this, they overturned the judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), the specialized Federal Court Bench that oversees all patent case appeals in the US. The CFAC had set up some tests of non-obviousness, in which it was not enough to show that the patent claim was obvious, but it had also to be shown in writing that people had suggested or taught about it earlier. The US Supreme Court held that this test should not be followed rigidly, but should be flexible enough to take into account common sense.

This brings us to an important issue. The US system of patents did not change over the years by changing its patents law. The three major changes that came about in the patenting system in the US – patenting life forms, software and business methods – all came from the way either the law was interpreted by courts or the way law was administered by the US patents office. This also shows that in India too, the threat of patenting everything could come not from the law in which we have now introduced various limitations, but the patents office and from courts interpreting the law. And lest we think that this is not an immediate threat, let me share what a project done by some of our colleagues has accidentally uncovered. The Indian Patents Office has granted a patent for “a broom” or the lowly jhadoo! From the claims, it does nothing more than any other jhadoo does. It appears that if we are not careful, the Indian Patents Office, now being trained by experts from the European Patents office and elsewhere, will give us a “world class patents system” in which we will have the same problems that now exist in the developed world.

In the developed countries, the belief that having lost their manufacturing base, they need to protect their economic interests by strengthening Intellectual Property Rights has made the patents system there dysfunctional. The scope of patenting was increased by allowing software and life form patents; even methods of doing business are now patentable. This has resulted in a rush to patent any and everything under the sun, and a spate of law suits. For bigger companies, the threat has been less. Each have a patent pool and this can be used to negotiate a mutual truce of not suing each other. These are called cross-licensing agreements. The smaller companies, threatened by big companies quite often pay up even if they know the claim is bogus. The cost of going to war with big guys with deep pockets effectively allows an extortion racket to be played by those with large patent holdings.

SOFTWARE PATENTS

The software patents in the US started when a patent, in which software was used in conjunction with hardware to vulcanize rubber. This 1982 decision of the US Supreme Court was broadened in the 90s to allow stand-alone software also to be patented and subsequently included business method patenting also.

Unlike other areas, software patents not only has the problem of creating a monopoly, but also the completely uncertain nature of the monopoly. The patent system arose from allowing inventors a limited time monopoly in lieu of public disclosure. The invention was supposed to be an artifact and the patent offices initially required models of the invention to be submitted along with the written description. Patents were therefore for ideas converted to tangible form. Software patents, unlike other areas, are patents for ideas without a tangible form. The code is not what is patented but the idea behind the code. Going though any software patents makes clear the difficulty in understanding what is being claimed – neither the nature nor the extent of the claim can be defined concretely when it comes to ideas.

The key argument against software patents has been that it is equivalent to patenting algorithms. A computer program is nothing but a sequence of instructions to a machine. This sequence of instructions is therefore an algorithm for solving specific problems. As laws of nature and algorithms cannot be patented, therefore software – unless it is specifically embodied in hardware and is only a component of a larger invention – cannot be patented. This is the position in law in most countries including the US. Unfortunately, the US Federal Court effectively de-railed the patent regime by allowing software patents, even without any hardware.

Initially, the software companies were quite happy with the changed patents regime. The older players like IBM had a large body of patents that it could and did exploit. The system of big players living ever happily after in an oligopoly, the rule of the few, could have continued in this way. There were many reasons why this scenario changed. The most significant was the birth of the Free Software Movement, which showed that good quality software could emerge by people working together in a collaborative way without claiming special proprietary rights. In fact, the GPL license was explicitly designed in a way that nobody could privatize what the software community was jointly creating. With the power of Microsoft growing, increasingly other software companies found the answer to Microsoft’s portfolio not in products within their fold but in the Gnu/Linux community. It was no longer possible to fight the Microsoft behemoth without taking the support of the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community. Today, all the major companies in the world have Gnu/Linux powering their business in some way, either in their Internet servers or in the data centers. Even if the desktop market has remained largely with Microsoft, the server market has been largely taken over by Gnu/Linux. This meant that if Microsoft declares war on Gnu/Linux, they also would need to attack the most powerful companies in the world. This is why their declaration of war claiming that 235 of their patents are being violated by the FOSS community has not gone down well in the business world. It is no longer a war against just the FOSS community. The collateral damage will engulf the rest of the world too. That is why Fortune, generally a mouthpiece of big business, was so unsympathetic to Microsoft’s claims. The bigger gain from all this is the general realization in software companies that they need to move away from software patents and their willingness to work together with the free software community for these objectives.

INDIAN SITUATION

Let us get back to India. As far as software patents are concerned, we are as well protected in law as much as currently TRIPS allows. Software per se cannot be patented and we have explicit provisions against patenting of algorithms and business methods. Certainly, we have a strong position in law for preventing software patents. However, the patent office has also to accept that this is the position in law and not grant such patents. There was a small window of time, in which software patents could have been considered valid – that between the Patent Amendment Ordinance allowing some forms of software patents and passing of the amendments in parliament, when this clause was modified. A number of software patents were filed before and during this window. The patents office should now reject all such applications. A number of companies have continued to file business method and software patents in spite of an adverse position in law. The patent office must reject all such patents. We should also keep an oversight of all such cases so that software patenting does not arrive from the backdoor, particularly when it is fading out elsewhere!

The other issue is Mashelkar’s claim regarding incremental innovation versus breakthrough innovation, and how it is in India’s national interest to have incremental innovation to be patentable, not only breakthrough innovations. It is in this light the argument of not restricting patentability to just New Chemical Entities but also to others was presented. We have already argued that Mashelkar’s brief was to only examine whether restricting patents in pharmaceuticals to New Chemical Entities would violate TRIPs. Instead of examining this question, he took up the question of what is in India’s national interest, which was not within his scope.

However, let us take up the Mashelkar’s argument regarding incremental innovation versus breakthrough innovation. The Patents Act defines what is innovation that is patentable. In this, any incremental innovation that meets the criteria of non-obviousness, novelty and usefulness can be patented. Whether this makes the innovation ‘breakthrough innovation’ or an ‘incremental innovation’ is not a matter of law but of its significance in the field. If we take Mashelkar’s argument seriously, what Mashelkar seems to be saying is that Indian companies are incapable of making major innovations and therefore the bar of what is patentable should be lowered. Whether his judgment on Indian companies is right or not is not the point at issue. The consequence of lowering the bar of patenting would mean a virtual floodgate of trivial patents and considerably strengthen the monopoly position of capital against the consumers.

The argument for not allowing chemical entities that are not new does not flow from the non-obviousness provision of the Patents Act. The Patents Act defines the degree of innovation that would be required to qualify to be a patent. The US Supreme Court now agrees that giving patent protection to ordinary progress – incremental innovation in Meshelkar’s words – retards progress. However, in the chemical world, we could limit patentability to only New Chemical Entities (NCE’s) on the basis not of obviousness but of novelty. Patent laws world over make specific provisions for specific areas. The biotechnology area has seen internationally such provisions. It is therefore permissible for India to declare that only NCE’s would pass the test of novelty.

REVIEW TRIPS

Would this be TRIP compatible? TRIPS allows different countries to set up different patentability criteria. It also allows differences such as whether the patent should be considered on ‘first to file’ basis or ‘first to discover’ basis. TRIPs is not a “harmonization” of Patents Laws. It only prescribes certain elements that must be incorporated in all patent laws. This pertains to granting of product patents, no discrimination between domestic and foreign companies, no discrimination between different sectors and a common duration of the patents. As chemicals entities are specific only to pharmaceuticals and agro-chemicals, etc., it is possible to introduce area specific criteria such as New Chemical Entity for defining patentability. This would not violate discrimination between sector clause of TRIPs.

Of course, the global MNCs would cry foul and so would their parent governments. This would also help in taking up the matter of TRIPs review. It is now obvious that AIDS, malaria, TB are major killers in the developing countries. The economic consequence of a patent regime that helps drug MNCs at the expense of the people cannot be allowed to continue. The developed countries today give as aid and charity, money which ultimately subsidizes the global pharma companies. Billions of dollars given for AIDS treatment sources medicines from global pharma companies at 50-100 times the price of its actual cost of production. This is a rip-off not only of the poor in developing countries but also of the tax payers in the rich countries.

This is what the government needs to put in its agenda. The current patent regime has yet not caught up with us as we have the window that if the drugs were discovered before 1995, they cannot be patented here. This position is going to change soon, as newer pharma entities would now be patented as they were discovered after 1995. What are we going to do when diseases resistant to non-patented drugs make their appearance? If we want to protect the health of the people, we need to take up on a multiple front the challenge of TRIPs and the patent regime. One is to seek review of TRIPS, specifically on public heath issues. The second is to tighten up the patent provision in pharmaceuticals, agro-chemicals and food even further. The third is to prepare for compulsory licensing in those areas where the disease load is significant, posing a public health danger. It is time that the Indian government views the world from the lens of the people and not through those provided by pharmaceutical companies.

From People's Democracy

VA Documents Show Huge Number of Veterans Disability Claims, Many Denials

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 05:42:00 +0000

6-26-07, 1:37 pm

More than 180,000 veterans of the 'global war on terror,' which includes the invasion of Afghanistan and the oil war in Iraq, have filed for disability benefits according to Veterans Affairs documents. The document was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request and distributed by the veterans' advocacy group Veterans for Common Sense.

The documents, written in February 2007, also indicate that close to 700,000 veterans of these wars left the service as of November 2006, or approximately one-quarter of the total number of service members in all US regular military, reserve, and National Guard units.

The entire US armed forces, active and reserve, are composed of approximately 2.7 million people. 180,000 veterans of conflicts between 2001 and the end of 2006, or 7%, have filed for disability.

Only 110,000 of the applications have been decided favorably upon. More than 21,000 have been awarded zero disability, and almost 17,000 have been ruled as unrelated to service.

As of January of this year, more than 44,000 claims were pending, with three-quarters of those pending claims labeled as 'first-time' claims.

Of the 131,000 disability claims that have so far been ruled on, just over 112,000 of them, or almost 85%, received 50% or less (down to zero) disability compensation.

These numbers indicate four things about the US armed forces and Bush's 'war on terror' that have been hidden from the public.

First, the 'war on terror,' especially with the erroneous addition of the illegal invasion of Iraq, has seriously depleted US military readiness, which inadequate recruiting has not replenished.

Second, there are far more casualties in the last six years than the Bush administration and the Pentagon would like us to believe. According to iCasualties.org, which relies on Pentagon sources, about 40,000 troops have been evacuated from Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001 for all injuries, diseases, and wounds. There is a gap of about 140,000 veterans of conflicts since 2001 who are claiming service-related disabilities.

(Note: The VA insists that a certain undisclosed number of these disability claims have been made on service-related injuries inflicted prior to September 2001, but it is reasonable to assume that this number must be insignificant in comparison to the number of claims filed as a result of injuries incurred after 2001.)

Third, the VA is very slow in handling and ruling on claims made by veterans returning from war.

Fourth, and probably not unrelated to the third, is that, as Political Affairs has reported before, the disproportionate number of claims awarded from zero to less than 50% disability appears to reflect a conscious Pentagon policy to scale back on veterans' benefits.

In 2005, Pentagon official David Chu defended a new round of cuts by describing funding for programs like veterans' education and job training, health care, pensions, VA housing loans, and the like as 'hurtful' to national security.

The Pentagon argued that its liabilities to reimburse veterans for their contributions and sacrifices undermine its priority of buying more jets and missiles and super bombs and cannon.

To counter the cost of benefits, the Republican controlled Congress at the time rubber-stamped a Bush administration plan to raise fees veterans pay to access health care, to more harshly rule on disability claims, and even refuse to inform veterans about benefits for which they are eligible.

While a recent Democratic measure to boost funding for veterans' benefits passed in Congress, this latest VA report indicates that the Bush administration's original plan is working.

Why is it so difficult for Bush and Republicans to spend the money to help heal the very people whom they sent into harm's way and whom they claim to support?

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

Chinese President Hu Jintao Outlines China's Development

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 01:43:00 +0000

6-26-07, 9:34 am

BEIJING, June 25 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Hu Jintao on Monday once again stressed the importance of implementing the scientific concept of development, promoting social harmony and building an overall well-off society, ahead of the 17th national congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) later this year.

'Under the current international backdrop, China faces unprecedented opportunities and challenges, which require us to have a clear view of today's China and the world, meet new demands of development and new expectations of the public, draw experience and make scientific guidelines,' said Hu.

Hu, also general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, made the remarks when addressing a senior course for ministerial officials and provincial heads at the CPC Central Committee's Party School.

He told the officials that all Party members should 'remain sober' and always keep in mind the real situation of the country.

Top legislator Wu Bangguo, Premier Wen Jiabao and other senior leaders including Jia Qinglin, Wu Guanzheng, Li Changchun and Luo Gan attended the meeting presided over by Vice-President Zeng Qinghong, who is also president of the Party school.

Hu stressed that it was necessary to scientifically analyze the opportunities and challenges that China was facing in economic globalization, and the scientific concept of development should be implemented in the process of industrialization, urbanization, marketization and internationalization.

Since the 16th CPC national congress in 2002, the CPC Central Committee proposed the scientific concept of development which focuses on a people-oriented, overall, coordinated and sustainable development, said Hu, also chairman of the Central Military Commission.

He reminded officials to combine the policy of reform and opening-up with a Chinese-characteristic socialist development.

As to the economy, Hu emphasized the building of an energy-efficient, environment-friendly society and the improvement of the basic economic system centered on public ownership while 'unswervingly' encouraging and maintaining non-public forms.

'To develop socialist democracy is our long-term goal,' he said. 'The government should expand political participation channels for ordinary people, enrich the forms of participation and promote a scientific and democratic decision-making process.'

Hu said the government should focus on problems of immediate interest to the public, such as education, employment, social securities and health care.

The president urged officials to improve their ideology, leadership and lifestyles, oppose formalism, bureaucratism and extravagance, and fight a long-time, tough war against corruption.

'All Party members should unite to strive for the success of the 17th Party congress and the building of an overall well-off society,' the president urged at the end of the speech.

From

Saving President Abbas

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 01:39:00 +0000

6-26-07, 9:28 am

Ehud Olmert is the opposite of Midas, King of Phrygia. Everything the king touched turned into gold, according to Greek legend. Everything Olmert touches turns into lead. And that is no legend.

Now he is touching Mahmoud Abbas. He lauds him to high heaven. He promises to 'strengthen' him. He is about to meet him. If I might offer some advice to Abbas, I would call out to him: Run! Run for your precious life! One touch of Olmert's hand will seal your fate!

Can Abbas be saved? I don't know. Some of my Palestinian friends are in despair.

They grew up in Fatah, and Fatah is their home. They are secularists. They are nationalists. They definitely do not want a fanatical Islamic regime in their homeland.

But in the present conflict, their heart is with Hamas. Their mind is split. And that is not surprising.

They hear the words of President Bush, of Olmert and of the whole babbling choir of Israeli politicians and pundits. And they draw the inescapable conclusion: the Americans and the Israelis are working hard to turn Abbas into an agent of the occupation and the Fatah movement into a militia of the occupier.

Every word now emanating from Washington and Jerusalem confirms this suspicion. Every word widens the gap between the Palestinian street and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The new 'Emergency Government' in Ramallah is headed by a person who received 2% of the votes at the last elections, when the list of Abbas himself was soundly beaten by Hamas, not only in Gaza but in the West Bank, too.

No 'easing the restrictions' and no 'economic steps' will help. Not the return of the Palestinian tax money that was embezzled by the Israeli government. Not the flow of European and American aid. As early as 80 years ago, Vladimir Jabotinsky, the most extreme Zionist, made fun of the Zionist leaders who tried to buy off the Palestinian people by offering economic inducements. A people cannot be bought.

If Abbas can be saved at all, it is in one way only: by the immediate start of rapid and practical negotiations for achieving a peace settlement, with the declared aim of setting up a Palestinian state in all the occupied territories, with East Jerusalem as its capital. Nothing less.

But that is exactly what the government of Israel is not prepared to do. Not Olmert. Not Tzipi Livni. Not Ehud Barak.

If they had been ready to do this, they or their predecessors would have done so long ago. Barak could have arranged it with Yasser Arafat at Camp David. Ariel Sharon could have agreed it with Abbas, after Abbas was elected president with a huge majority. Olmert could have settled it with Abbas after Sharon left the scene. He could have done it with the unity Government that was set up under Saudi auspices.

They didn't. Not because they were fools and not because they were weak. They did not do it simply because their aim was the exact opposite: annexation of a large part of the West Bank and the enlargement of the settlements. That's why they did everything to weaken Abbas, who was designated by the Americans as the 'partner for peace'. In the eyes of Sharon and his successors, Abbas was more dangerous than Hamas, which was defined by the Americans as a 'terrorist organization'.

It is impossible to understand the latest developments without going back to the 'separation plan'.

This week, some sensational disclosures were published in Israel. They confirm the suspicions that we had from the start: that the 'separation' was nothing but a ploy, part of a program with a hidden agenda.

Sharon had a master plan with three main elements: (a) turning the Gaza Strip into a separate and isolated entity, led by Hamas, (b) turning the West Bank into an archipelago of isolated cantons led by Fatah, and (c) leaving both territories under the domination of the Israeli military.

This would explain Sharon's insistence on a 'unilateral' withdrawal. On the face of it, it seems illogical. Why not speak in advance with the Palestinian Authority? Why not ensure the orderly transfer of power to Mahmoud Abbas? Why not transfer to the Authority all the settlements intact, with their buildings and greenhouses? Why not open wide all the border crossings? Indeed, why not enable the Palestinians to open the Gaza airport and build the Gaza sea port?

If the aim had been to achieve a peace settlement, all this would have happened. But since the complete opposite was done, it can be assumed that Sharon wanted things to work out roughly as they did: the collapse of the Authority in Gaza, the take-over of the Strip by Hamas, the split between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

For this end, he cut Gaza off from any land, sea and air contact with the world, kept the border passages closed almost continuously and turned Gaza into the 'largest prison in the world'. The supply of food, medicines, water and electricity is completely dependent on the goodwill of Israel, as is the operation of the border crossing to Egypt (with the help of a European monitoring unit controlled by the Israeli army), all imports and exports, and even the registration of inhabitants.

It must be clear: this is not a new policy. The cutting off of the Gaza strip from the West Bank has for many years been a military and political objective of Israeli governments.

Article IV of the 1993 Oslo Declaration of Principles states unequivocally: 'The two sides view the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as a single territorial unit, whose integrity will be preserved during the interim period.' Without this, Arafat would not have accepted the agreement.

Later on, Shimon Peres invented the slogan 'Gaza First'. The Palestinians adamantly refused. In the end, the Israeli government gave in and in 1994 signed the 'Agreement Concerning the Gaza Strip and the Jericho Area'. The foothold thus given to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank was to ensure the unity of the two territories.

In the same agreement, Israel undertook to open a 'safe passage' between the Strip and the West Bank. And not only one, but four, which were marked on a map appended to the agreement. Immediately afterwards, road signs with the Arab inscription 'to Gaza' were set up along West Bank roads.

But during the 13 years that have passed since then, the passage has not been opened even for one day. When Ehud Barak settled his frame in the Prime Minister's chair, he fantasized about building the world's longest bridge between the Gaza strip and the West Bank (about 40 km). Like many others of Barak's brilliant flashes, this one died before birth and the passage remained hermetically closed.

The Israeli government has undertaken again and again to fulfill this commitment, and recently gave Condoleezza Rice personally a specific and detailed pledge. Nothing happened.

Why? Why did our government take the risk of a manifest, clear-cut, unambiguous and continuous violation of such an important obligation? Why did they go so far as to spit in the eye of a friend like the good Condoleezza?

There is only one possible answer: the cutting off of the Gaza Strip from the West Bank is a major strategic aim of the government and the army, an important step in the historic effort to break the Palestinian resistance to occupation and annexation.

This week, it seemed that this aim had been achieved.

The official operation to 'strengthen' Abbas is a part of this design. In Jerusalem, some feel that their dreams are coming true: the West Bank separated from the Gaza strip, divided into several enclaves cut off from each other and from the world, much like the Bantustans in South Africa in bygone times. Ramallah as the capital of Palestine, designed to make the Palestinians forget about Jerusalem. Abbas receiving arms and reinforcements in order to destroy Hamas in the West Bank. The Israeli army dominating the areas between the towns, and operating at will in the towns, too. The settlements growing without hindrance, the Jordan valley completely cut off from the rest of the West Bank, the Wall continuing to extend and gobble up more Palestinian land, and the Government's promise to dismantle the settlement 'outposts' remaining a long forgotten joke.

President Bush is satisfied with 'the spread of democracy' in the Palestinian areas, and the US military subsidy to Israel is growing from year to year.

From the point of view of Olmert, that is an ideal situation. Will it hold?

The answer is an unqualified NO!

Like all the actions of Bush and Olmert, as well as of their predecessors, it is based on contempt for the Arabs. This contempt has proven itself many times as a recipe for disaster.

The Israeli media, which have turned themselves into propaganda organs for Mahmoud Abbas and Mohammed Dahlan, are already gleefully describing how the hungry inhabitants of Gaza will look with green envy at the well-fed, flourishing inhabitants of the West Bank. They are going to rebel against the Hamas leadership, so that a Quisling in the service of Israel can be installed there. The people in the West Bank, growing fat on European and American aid money, will be happy to be rid of Gaza and its troubles.

That is pure fantasy. It is much more probable that the anger of the Gaza people will turn against the Israeli prison wardens who are starving them. And the people of the West Bank will not forsake their compatriots languishing in Gaza.

No Palestinian will agree to the separation of Gaza from the West Bank. A party that agreed to that would be shunned by the Palestinian public, and a leadership that accepted such a situation would be eliminated.

Israeli policy is torn between two conflicting desires: on the one side, to prevent the events in the Gaza Strip repeating themselves in the West Bank, where a Hamas takeover would be immensely more dangerous, and on the other side, to prevent Abbas from succeeding to such an extent that the Americans would oblige Olmert to negotiate seriously with him. As usual, the government is holding the stick by its two ends.

At present, all Olmert's actions are endangering Abbas. His embrace is a bear's embrace, and his kiss is the kiss of death.

From Uri Avnery's Column