People Before Profit blog

Book Review: Stuffed and Starved

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 08:34:00 +0000

10-30-07, 12:40 pm

Stuffed and Starved by Raj Patel (due out in the US in April 2008, Melville Books)

Have you ever thought that there may be a direct connection between increasing obesity in the industrialized countries and poverty and starvation in the rest of the world?

That both are the direct result of capitalism and transnational corporations is perhaps not such a surprise, but Raj Patel explains just how this relationship comes about.

Patel has an interesting background. He has degrees from three of the world's top universities and is, at present, a researcher at the University of Kwa Zulu in South Africa.

He is also a gamekeeper turned poacher. After working for the World Bank and as a consultant to the UN, he is now an avid campaigner for the other side and has been tear-gassed while demonstrating for the rights of small food producers.

Naomi Klein gives his book the accolade of 'one of the most dazzling books I've read in a long time. The product of a brilliant mind and a gift to a world hungering for justice.' She is absolutely right. It is a must-read for anyone keen to understand how the present system of food production and distribution grinds down the poorest in the word while making the rich richer - all seen from a Marxist perspective.

He writes with an easy flowing eloquence, but also an urgency and commitment rare in an academic writer.

He shows how the corporations not only sell us our food, but also determine what we eat or don't eat. There are hundreds of apple varieties in the world, so why is it that we only find four on the supermarket shelves? Because these varieties are pretty, keep well when waxed, are bland in taste and don't bruise easily in transport. Whereas breakfast cereals - highly processed with large profit-margins - are offered in more than a dozen varieties, all with high salt and sugar content and not good for us.

In other words, our choices are determined by their convenience to the big wholesalers and retailers.

The rich countries and multinationals are also determining what food is grown and sold in all countries of the world.

Today, food eaten by India's poorest is worse for the first time since independence in 1947.

Thousands of Mexican farmers were forced off their land and into the overcrowded cities by the import dumping of cheap, state-subsidized US maize, under a bilateral trade agreement. And those Mexicans who live closer to the US border tend to be more obese than their compatriots.

Tens of thousands of small farmers slave on coffee and tea plantations for the West's pleasure. In Kenya, they grow roses or beans for our supermarket shelves, while they themselves go hungry.

Agriculture has become divorced from urban living and it needs to become re-embedded in society.

Throughout the world, farmer suicide rates have risen, but this hardly registers in our newspapers or in our consciousness.

In 2005 in the US, 35.1 million people didn't know where their next meal was coming from, whereas there were more diet-related diseases such as diabetes and more food in the US than ever before.

On the other hand, 70 per cent of antibiotics produced in the US are used in the livestock industry and 60 per cent of US grain is fed to animals.

But poverty in the US is often masked - the poor are often not skeletally thin, but actually overweight because they have been persuaded to eat cheap junk food which gives energy but not nourishment.

Patel shows how the big food retailers have taken governments captive. The US refused a visa to the French environmentalist José Bové after being leaned on by McDonalds - and they are not alone in using such measures to gag protest.

Patel argues, convincingly, that, to change ourselves, we need to change the world and to change the world we need to change ourselves. Both are necessary, both are difficult.

He also argues the need for trade union input as a vital factor in combating poverty wages and exploitation. We can't expect supermarkets to act ethically, he says, when their loyalty is to their shareholders and profits are the determining factor.

The fair trade movement is laudable, but it is rather like throwing crumbs to the starving in terms of seriously addressing the problem.

One of the book's guiding themes is that, wherever and whenever the wounds of the current food order have been inflicted, people have organized and fought back. That is the positive message in a book that otherwise paints a daunting picture.

From Morning Star

Women Workers in Afghanistan Exposed to Health Risks in Herat Factories

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 07:52:00 +0000

10-30-07, 2:45 pm

HERAT, 30 October 2007 (IRIN) - The Safi fur and wool factory, in Herat city, western Afghanistan, has more than 350 female and 300 male workers who earn only 300 Afghanis (US$6) for their 48-hour, six-day week. The factory produces coats, jackets, hats and other garments for the European and North American markets. There are more than 1,500 women working in four such factories in Herat city.

The air in the Safi processing plant is full of dust from dirty furs, which workers tear to pieces with their bare hands.

Jamila (not hear real name) has worked in the factory for more than a year and recently experienced an unrelenting pain in her chest. “First, I was coughing and now I feel a terrible pain in my chest,” the 32-year-old said.

“Doctors and medicine are expensive,” she said. The modes amount she earns helps to supplement the family income to help feed her four children.

Less than 2m away from where Jamila is working, her baby has fallen asleep on a thin piece of straw. Jamila brings her youngest son to the factory every day, because there is nobody to look after him at home.

Health risks

Workers have to separate fur from goats’ hair and weave sheep’s wool without protective gloves or masks.

Ahmad Zia Rahmani, a lung and chest diseases specialist at the Herat city hospital, says workers in fur and wool factories are vulnerable to virulent microbes, which harm the respiratory system and cause chest infections.

“Sheep’s wool and goats’ hair usually contain harmful bacteria which can easily be transferred to a human via close contact and inhalation,” Rahmani said.

Mothers who regularly breastfeed their babies and consume food at the factory can also transfer dangerous microbes to their children if they do not wash their hands with antibacterial soap, Rahmani added.

In the past year, at least seven female workers died due to respiratory and chest diseases, workers and factory officials said.

Formal investigation

Afghanistan’s Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs (MoLSA) said it would send a delegation to Herat to assess and report on the situation of female workers in factories there, after IRIN approached the ministry for a comment.

“We will make sure appropriate measures are adopted to improve the situation of workers,” said Ghulam Gaus Bashiri, a deputy minister in the department.

According to Bashiri, a revised draft labour law has been submitted to the National Assembly for approval, which has “many benefits for female workers”, including maternity leave, equal wages for men and women and a light working regime for women during pregnancy.

No medical insurance

According to Afghanistan’s labour law, public and private employers should provide medical insurance to employees who work in hazardous environments.

However, there are too many hurdles - including poor law enforcement institutions, lack of awareness about women's rights and conservative traditions - which constrict the law on paper with weak or no practical power.

Almost all workers in factories in Herat province have no written contract with their employers, particularly in the private sector. Workers and employers have only verbal agreements, which do not cover medical and hazard insurance.

In the past 12 months, seven women workers of the wool and fur factories in Herat have died due to respiratory diseases and chest infections, workers and Mohammad Ibrahim Ghafori, an official at the Safi factory, said.

Workers’ health problems have been compounded by their inability to afford medical checks and treatment.

There is no legal imperative for employers to offer assistance to their workers in need of medical treatment.

“We are not in a position to offer medical insurance or any financial assistance for health problems. We tell this to our workers before they start a job with us,” said Mohammad Ibrahim Ghafori, an official for the Safi wool and fur factory.

Some workers, meanwhile, acknowledged that they are exposed to health hazards in the factory but said lack of employment opportunities and economic needs force them to accept the risk.

From IRIN News

Blackwater Mercenaries Granted Immunity During Inquiry

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 05:36:00 +0000

10-30-07, 12:30 pm

WASHINGTON, Oct. 29 (Xinhua) -- Security guards from a private U.S. military contractor involved in a shooting incident in Iraq have been granted immunity by State Department investigators, a news report said Monday.

According to the report by the New York Times' online edition, the guards employed by the Blackwater company to protect State Department officials in Iraq gained the limited-use immunity during an inquiry by the department's investigative arm, the Bureau of Diplomatic Security (BDS).

Citing unidentified officials close to the investigation, the report said that prosecutors at the Justice Department, instead of BDS investigators, have authority to grant such immunity, but they had no advance knowledge of the BDS arrangement.

Limited-use immunity, as officials explained to the newspaper, means that security guards were promised they would not be prosecuted for anything they said in their interviews with the authorities as long as their statements were true.

The State Department and the Justice Department both did not comment on the matter, while the company's spokeswoman Anne E. Tyrell told the newspaper 'it would be inappropriate for me to comment on the investigation.'

The Federal Bureau of Investigation took over the case from the State Department on Oct. 3 and has since then begun to re-interview Blackwater employees without granting any immunity to assemble independent evidence of possible wrongdoing.

The Justice Department is currently considering whether any prosecutions could take place involving U.S. civilians in Iraq following the Blackwater shooting incident, the report said.

Blackwater is a major military contractor providing security services to the U.S. government in Iraq. Its guards opened fire in a crowded Baghdad square when protecting a State Department convoy, killing as many as 17 Iraqi civilians on Sept. 16.

Some government officials told the newspaper that granting immunity was a potentially serious investigative misstep that could complicate efforts to prosecute the company's employees involved in the incident.

Blackwater employees and other civilian contractors can not be tried in U.S. military courts or in Iraq courts and it is unclear what U.S. criminal laws might cover criminal acts committed in a war zone, the report said.

According to the Coalition Provision Authority (CPA), a law issued by a former U.S. administrator in Iraq Paul Bremer, the 'multinational forces, foreign liaison missions, their personnel, property, funds and all international consultants shall be immune from the Iraqi legal process.'

However, the enraged Iraqi government said Tuesday it would revoke the immunity of foreign security firms from being prosecuted granted by the CPA.

Earlier this month, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill that would make contractors like Blackwater liable under a law known as the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act.

From XinhuaNet

Vote Out Failed Policies, Say Australians

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 02:40:00 +0000

10-30-07, 9:34 am

The Howard Government was re-elected in 2004 largely on the basis of Liberal Party promises of record low interest rates as against high interest rates and bad economic management from a Labor Government. Three years on and the Howard Government still claims that Labor does not have the skills or experience to run the economy, but it is ducking for cover regarding interest rates.

The Reserve Bank of Australia’s five increases in the official interest rate since the last election, and the expectation of another rise this week put lie to the promise of record low interest rates. As for the Howard Government’s claims about being good economic managers, they are just as false as the interest rate promises.

The government has not fooled the public by pumping billions of dollars into income tax cuts instead of using the money for essential services and the welfare of the people of Australia. Opinion polls consistently confirm that the overwhelming majority of Australians would prefer the money be spent on public health and public education and other pressing needs than in tax cuts.

Treasurer Peter Costello claims that the tax cuts will build a stronger economy: “…we will be able to grow the economy and that will provide us with the base to fund health and education”, Costello argued in an interview with Kerry O’Brien on the ABC TV’s 7.30 Report (23-10-07).

“This is a very ambitious plan for Australia’s future economy… only the Coalition has the experience and the expertise to actually implement this plan”, Costello boasted, referring to his five-year plan for tax cuts. The plan might be “ambitious”, but as far as policy goes it lacks any credibility and amounts to criminal neglect of the needs of the Australian people.

If Costello were the slightest bit interested in properly funding health and education, he would have used some of the billions of dollars of tax cuts on those and other pressing social needs and public infrastructure (public works). As Treasurer he would not have been cutting funding to public hospitals and state schools, which his government has consistently done over the past decade.

Reports in the media this week confirm the impact of these cuts. Over the past decade government funding per student place in universities has been reduced by 20 per cent.

The Australian Medical Association (AMA) reports that the capacity of Australia’s public hospitals has been slashed by 60 per cent over the past 20 years. Too many hospital beds have gone and that has led to dangerously full wards where patient care could be compromised. More than third of emergency department patients are not seen within the recommended times and patients who need elective surgery are also waiting too long, the AMA says.

Federal Health Minister Tony Abbott blames state governments, accusing them of poor economic management. The reality is that the Federal Government has deliberately wound back its contribution, with the aim of driving more people into the private system. It wastes over $4 billion a year on Private Health Insurance Rebates and other subsidies. Despite all the undermining of the public hospital system, it still is far more efficient, far cheaper (no built in layers of profit) and has greater capacity to serve the community than the private profit-driven system.

Australian Education Union federal president Pat Byrne reports that the Federal Government’s failure to adequately fund public schools is making things harder for students. Parents and school communities are doing the hard fundraising work to pay for basic school services. Schools across Australia are now getting $1 billion less per year than they would have been if the funding share for public education had been maintained at 1996 levels”, Ms Byrne said (See page 4).

In the ABC interview Costello confirms that the cuts have nothing to do with lack of funds. He says: “… returning it to taxpayers is actually the right thing to do. Otherwise the Government would have far more money than it needed. So for five years now we have been aggressively returning money back to the taxpayers.”

If re-elected the government has a five-year plan for further cuts.

To sum up Costello’s position: tax cuts are needed to “grow the economy” to provide funding for health and education. The tax cuts are being funded to a large extent by cuts in funding to health and education. Call that good economic management!

One of the government’s aims is to increase public spending – the wealthy get the largest handouts – to grow the economy. According to the government this extra spending will not put inflationary pressure on the economy.

Wage rises cause inflation: myth exploded

This is the same government that opposes wage rises and claims that wages will not be kept so low under Labor. WorkChoices, in particular AWAs, have been very successful in lowering or keeping the lid on wages. “Wage rises are inflationary” the government and employers are always telling workers.

Wage rises are not in themselves inflationary. Employers oppose wage rises because they reduce the share of wealth created by the labour of workers that corporations cream off in profits. When wages are increased they try to recoup the loss by increasing prices.

It is interesting that the Reserve Bank reports serious inflationary pressures on the economy, yet wages have been kept down. None of the economists tracking developments in the nation’s economy are pointing to wages as the cause of inflation!

Tax cuts may ease the pressure on employers for wage rises because they put a few more dollars in the pockets of workers.

The government’s “fiscally responsible,” neo-liberal policies of cutting the funding of the public sector, reducing income taxes, increasing the burden on the poor through the GST, and privatisation have failed dismally. The more than $60 billion per annum wasted on the military as deputy sheriff to the USA is simply another example of why this government has to go.

Unfortunately the ALP leadership is pursuing very similar policies which will also have a disastrous impact on the community. Neither of the major parties have policies committed to expanding and strengthening the public service, nor the political will to meet the pressing needs for public education, hospitals, aged care, child care, public transport, community services, public housing, water management, climate change, public infrastructure. Many of these failed policies were commenced under the former Hawke/Keating Labor governments. They laid the groundwork for Howard and team of privateers to implement their policies that have failed the people.

The economy is not in a good state. There are tough times ahead. The first task is to get rid of the Coalition Government. Even Howard has admitted defeat by saying in an interview on Melbourne’s 3AW, “… what really matters now is which side of politics is better able to better manage an increasingly hostile financial environment.”

The job in these elections is to make sure the Howard Government suffers an almighty defeat, and that The Greens do as well as possible, to ensure that the Coalition does not gain control of the Senate or that its allies such as Family First have the balance of power. The Greens have many sound policies, not just on the environment, but on industrial relations, health, education and other important social issues.

From The Guardian

Support Striking Appalachian Nurses

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 02:38:00 +0000

10-30-07, 9:31 am

Nurses in Kentucky and West Virginia have been on strike for nearly a month. Please take action by contacting the President/CEO of the Appalachian Regional Health Systems and telling him to negotiate a fair contract with the nurses.

More than 630 nurses in Kentucky and West Virginia had their pay cut by 10% by the Appalachian Regional Health system in December 2005. A case was arbitrated and nurses were upheld in their grievance but the company refused to adhere to the arbitrator’s ruling and appealed to federal court.

The Kentucky Nurses Association, which has represented nine Appalachian Regional Hospitals since the 1970s after purchasing them from the United Mine Workers, is on strike because of the negative treatment of nurses by ARH management and allowing and promoting unsafe staffing for patients.

The UMW built the hospitals to care for their own in their local communities and to support unionism. Those who pay benefits need to know that there are not sufficient nurses to care for their members and that the ARH is trying to force the nurses to strike.

- nurses have been on strike for almost a month - hospital administrators refuse to address pay raises, mandatory overtime, and staffing ratios with the nurses - replacement nurses have already been hired by the hospital administration.

Why We Torture: Martha Nussbaum on Zimbardo's 'The Lucifer Effect'

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 02:33:00 +0000

10-30-07, 9:28 am

Philip Zimbardo is the psychologist who carried out the Stanford Prison Experiment [SPE] in 1971. He has published a book about the lessons to be learned from that experiment and others. The book is “The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil.” This article is a review of the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s discussion of the book in the October 19, 2007 issue of the TLS.

The purpose of the experiment was to study the psychological ramifications of isolation on prisoners. One group of college students would spend two weeks 24 hours a day as prisoners while another group played the role of prison guards alternating in eight hour shifts.

“In general,” Zimbardo said, “what all this should create in them [the prisoners] is a sense of powerlessness. We have total power in the situation. They have none. The research question is, what will they do to try to gain power, to regain some degree of individuality, to gain some freedom, to gain some privacy.”

To make a long story short, Zimbardo had to stop his experiment after just 5 days of an intended 14. This is because the “guards” began to humiliate and abuse the “prisoners” (sleep deprivation, for example.) A mini Abu Ghraib type of situation was beginning to develop.

Besides the SPE, Zimbardo also talks about the work of Stanley Milgram, among others, who did experiments on authority. Nussbaum tells us that these experiments showed “that about three-quarters of subjects would administer a shock labeled as seriously harmful to a person who was supposed to be a subject in an experiment on learning, if ordered to do so by the researcher....” These experiments, and others like them, show that average people are capable of cruel and inhumane actions that they would normally never think of doing.

After reviewing the literature, Zimbardo, Nussbaum reports, concluded “that situational features, far more than underlying dispositional features of people’s characters, explain why people behave cruelly and abusively to others.”

With respect to Abu Ghraib itself, Zimbardo says the actions of torture and abuse there were not due to the evil natures of the guards, Nussbaum writes, “but by an evil system ... that virtually ensures that people will behave badly.” It is the system itself that is wrong and has to be attacked and changed, not the ordinary people caught up in it who are tainted by the system rather than tainting it.

Nussbaum doesn’t think much of way the SPE was set up or executed, but she thinks Zimbardo’s conclusions are basically correct, although the evidence for them really comes from other more rigorously conducted scientific research by others.

“Research,” Nussbaum says, “has amply confirmed that people of many different kinds will behave badly under certain types of situational pressure. Through the influence of authority and peer pressure, they do things that they are later amazed at having done, things that most people think in advance they would never themselves do.”

Zimbardo thus makes a plea for “humility” on our part, a plea not to be too judgmental about “bad apples” as we ourselves may very well have acted in the same way were we in the same situation. We should instead “blame the system” and the people who set the system up.

There is a lot to this. We all know that at Abu Ghraib it was the “little fry” who were punished and the “big fry” who actually created the situation and were really responsible, especially Donald Rumsfeld and his ilk, were let off the hook.

Nussbaum tells us that what Zimbardo calls for is “collective responsibility -- not as a total replacement for personal responsibility, but as its necessary concomitant, if people are not to be faced, again and again, with demands to which they are very unlikely to respond well.”

Nussbaum thinks Zimbardo is on the right tract, but that he puts too much emphasis on the situation itself. He should look to the emotional and psychological factors that trigger these cruel and inappropriate responses. Nussbaum has a point too. And with the Bush administration actively pushing torture as a matter of national policy we are going to see more cases of the kinds Zimbardo writes about.

Nussbaum wants to know what makes so many people “vulnerable” to bad behavior and why do some few end up refusing to engage in it. “Zimbardo should press this question,” she says.

I’m interested in how far up this chain of bad situations goes. If the small fry of Abu Ghraib should be cut some slack and we go up the chain to the big fry, say the Bush-Cheney gang, because they brought the situation into being that allowed for the negative behavior of the small fry to develop, then what about the situation the big fry are in?

They are in a situation that reflects the nature of a class society, where wealth and power are the result of the exploitation of the labor power of masses of human beings, where wars over natural resources and markets are constantly on the agenda due to the structure of the imperialist relations between the the big capitalist countries and the smaller ones (not to mention the fight against all progressive and pro people forces). They act like beasts because their situation is bestial. The logic of the situation calls for the replacement of the capitalist system itself as the ultimate goal if we really want to live in a humane world.

Zimbardo does not call for socialism. Nussbaum says he calls for critical thinking to be at the basis of our educational system-- beginning at the elementary level. “We need a culture of timely whistle-blowers, and we will only get this, he rightly argues, if we encourage Socratic questioning of authority both in the family and in the classroom.”

You can forget that. In 99% of the school districts in this country a teacher wouldn’t last ten minutes if he or she encouraged students to question authority and challenge their parents as well as the school authorities. Most teachers label such students, questioning authority in the classroom, as disruptive and as troublemakers.

The recent tenure fights we have been reading about at major colleges and universities usually are about someone whose ideas or viewpoints are especially challenging to the authority of people in power or to the ideas that the government wants spread among the people.

So contradictory is the reality on the ground in our society to the notion of “Socratic questioning” that the government itself rejects science as its guide because the interests of the capitalist economic system. cannot be justified by science-- i.e., pollution, gobal warming, mass environmental destruction, fossil fuel usage, the poisoning of the oceans, etc., all the result of the workings of our economic system.

So this idea of reforming the education system’s approach to critical thinking is a bit utopian, but should nevertheless be fought for because it is a way to organize and educate masses of people. Zimbardo also wants us to be educated in personal responsibility and respect for others. All three of these things, by the way, the system claims to be doing as it is.

Nussbaum is all for these changes. She brings up the work of Daniel Batson who has shown that the compassion we all need to work on is linked to trying to understand other people’s existential situations “with vivid imagination.” She ends by saying we should hope that Zimbardo’s book will “stimulate a critical conversation that will lead to more sensible and less arrogant strategies for coping with our shared human weaknesses.”

I will also end with a hope. The hope that compassion and human understanding of the Other will lead to the rapid repudiation of the Iraq war and to reconciliation in Afghanistan, will lead to end of the blockade and isolation of the Cuban people, will lead to the end of the hatred and vile way many of our fellow citizens feel about the millions of hard working undocumented immigrants living in our country, and finally, that the Republicans will give up all the political ploys they use to further racist policies and agendas in the country. This may be to hope for too much, but at least it is something to struggle for.

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

Jonesborough Justice

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 02:25:00 +0000

10-30-07, 9:19 am

Of the eleven major peace rallies organized around the country by United for Peace and Justice last Saturday the smallest and most unusual took place in Jonesborough, Tennessee. Jonesborough is a town of about 4,000 people in the northeast corner of Tennessee, within a couple of dozen miles of both Virginia and North Carolina. The people of Jonesborough can imagine the number of U.S. troops who have died in Iraq by imagining their entire local population dead.

Rallying for peace and justice in Jonesborough is something of an act of reclamation, and it's about time it happened. Jonesborough is the oldest town in Tennessee and was a center of the abolition movement. But, as if to offer a perfect illustration of the wisdom of the nation's founding fathers' distaste for political parties, the people of eastern Tennessee have largely stood by the Republican Party as it has mutated into the party of racism and militarism. Our rally of about 400 peace activists on Saturday was greeted by about 50 pro-war activists revving their Harleys, honking their horns, and screaming their vicious messages of hate with the utmost vein-popping fury.

Also in attendance were a couple of hundred representatives of local, county, and state law enforcement, police vans, trailers, and a circling helicopter. While the pro-death contingent was left more or less in peace, the nonviolent peace demonstrators were each fully searched and metal-detectored as they entered a downtown park for a rally. (I discussed the fourth amendment with a few different police officers to no avail, and the local organizers supported the police policy).

As photos of the event show, http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=image/tid/98 when we left the rally to march through town, the state troopers guided us away from Main Street, and down a back road. A total of two town residents were observed observing our march. The troopers marched with us at 10 foot intervals, and kept everyone to one half of the empty road. (When some of us took up the whole width of the road, we were admonished by local activists who believed it their duty to obey state trooper orders, no matter how absurd).

So, there was an attitude of subservience just beginning to crack in Jonesborough, but following the march we drove out to a factory that produced Depleted Uranium weapons. This was an important place to protest, and it helped to put a new issue into the Tennessee news, even if the local paper's reporting was THIS lousy: http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/28121

The pro-death contingent shouted from the closest possible fence when I and others were speaking at the rally. The organizers, rightly I think, chose not to engage them, and their moronic chants served to enliven rather than drown out the event. My speech may read as pretty ordinary http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/28066 but I think the video is livelier as a result of the conflict. The video of my speech is already up, and I hope all the others will be up soon at http://www.youtube.com/whynotnews

I hope Tyler Westbrook posts a video of the entire rally, because the combination of speakers (and musicians) was – I thought – outstanding. George Friday of UFPJ served as the MC. Caren Neile, director of the South Florida storytelling project, spoke in the tradition of Jonesborough's storytelling culture and told the story of Lysistrata. Tim Pluta, a victim of Depleted Uranium poisoning and an Airforce Specialist who was discharged as a Conscientious Objector, recited a poem told from the point of view of a D.U. molecule – absolutely brilliant! Russell Kincaid, a nuclear physicist, explained to us what the danger of Depleted Uranium is. Leila al-Imad, a professor of middle eastern history, put our government's current actions in context. Chris Lugo of the Nashville Peace Coalition, and a Green Party candidate for the U.S. Senate from Tennessee, spoke about local activism. And Herbert Reed, an Iraq Vet and D.U. victim who has suffered terribly from the poisoning and led efforts to hold the military accountable, told his tale. A good AP article about what happened to him is here and should be more widely known: http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/28188

The people of Jonesborough deserve a full reawakening of their culture of justice activism, and a better representative in Washington than Congressman David Davis. Let's hope that United for Peace and Justice has lit a spark.

From

Indo-US Nuclear Deal: Let India's Parliament Decide

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 02:18:00 +0000

10-30-07, 9:15 am

US imperialism has once again displayed its over-anxiety in having the nuclear deal clinched at the earliest. US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Nicholas Burns speaking at a breakfast meeting at the Council of Foreign Relations in New York, this week, said, “India has to move fast.” For the beleaguered Bush administration, which is having the worst rankings in opinion polls for any US president in recent memory, this deal with India may be the only positive achievement that the Republicans can show to the American people in the run-up to the US presidential elections in 2008. However, the story would be incomplete if one were to reduce the importance of clinching this deal to the compulsions of US domestic politics alone. There are other far-reaching strategic and economic considerations as well.

Soon after the 123 agreement was finalised and frozen, on July 27 2007, Nicholas Burns at an official media briefing had listed out the various benefits accruing to the USA from this deal. He reiterated these and additional benefits for the USA in an article – “America’s Strategic Opportunity with India: The New US India Partnership” in the November-December issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. Apart from seeing a strategic partnership with India, USA sees the current ties as “a growing US-India campaign to promote stable, well governed democracies around the world.” This must indeed be the irony of ironies considering the fact that all across the world whether it was in Chile, Iran under the Shah or in the Philippines in South East Asia, military dictatorships have been supported and sustained by the US imperialism as part of its strategic concerns. And what “promotion of stable well-governed democracies” entails is starkly visible in Iraq today. Clearly, US imperialism is seeking to absorb India as its subordinate ally in its global hegemonic designs.

In addition to this strategic objective, Burns notes that with this deal nearly 90 per cent of India’s nuclear reactors will be covered under international safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). India has consistently refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) precisely on the ground that it is discriminatory and loaded in favour of the nuclear weapon countries. With this deal despite not being signatory to the NPT, according to Burns, “India will be brought into the international nuclear non-proliferation mainstream.” The most important benefit will be for the American firms who, “for the first time in three decades (will be) able to invest in India’s nuclear industry.” This must be seen in conjunction with the fact that the last order for a nuclear power reactor in the USA was placed nearly three decades ago. This deal therefore is to revive the profits of an industry that is being starved of orders in the USA itself because of US policy to discourage nuclear power generation considering the enormous damages that may occur in the likelihood of an accident.

In the words of Nicholas Burns, “this agreement will deepen the strategic partnership, create new opportunities for US businesses in India, enhance global energy security, and reduce India’s carbon emissions. It will also send a powerful message to nuclear outlaws such as Iran: if you play by the rules, as India has, you will be rewarded; if you do not, you will face sanctions and isolation.” Thus this deal is US imperialism’s “reward” to India for its “good behaviour” and the not so veiled threat to change the direction of India’s independent foreign policy.

In addition, US imperialism sees enormous potential in a far greater defense cooperation with India. This according to Burns includes, “training; exercises; we hope, defence sales of American military technology to the Indian armed forces.”

Thus, the eagerness and over anxiety of US imperialism can be understood by such reasoning. The Bush administration has apparently set an year end deadline for the Manmohan Singh government to wrap up negotiations with the IAEA and the Nuclear Suppliers Group.

The setting of such deadlines is in itself an insult to Indian democracy. The democratic processes of any country cannot be influenced by external pressures and by the needs of another country. The UPA-Left Committee to examine the implications of this deal has at its last meeting discussed the possibility of a discussion on the deal in the forthcoming winter session of the parliament. Left hopes as per the earlier understanding of the committee the government will proceed by respecting the majority opinion expressed in the parliament.

Now, this should not sound strange to the USA. Remember, the manner in which former president Bill Clinton travelled from country to country coercing independent nations into signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). The Vajpayee government had then reportedly agreed to do so but due to the public pressure and the parliament’s virtual disapproval kept the issue on hold. Having coerced a large number of countries the Clinton administration finally could not have the CTBT approved from the US Congress itself. Given this, US imperialism must understand that if such democratic processes are valid in their country they are equally valid in every other democracy. What is sauce for the goose is after all, sauce for the gander as well.

The above reasonings offered by US imperialism is, in itself, the most powerful reason for India not to rush through with this deal without considering the grave implications that it has on India’s domestic nuclear programmes, independent foreign policy and security concerns. It is precisely for this reason that the UPA-Left Committee was formed in the first place. This committee had reiterated in its last meeting that its findings will be kept in mind before the UPA government proceeds further.

The prime minister’s recent remarks made on October 23 must be seen in this context. He said “given the very nature of competitive politics and the very fractured mandate given to governments, it has at times become difficult for us to do what is manifestly obvious”. To be fair, the prime minister said this in the context of an “unfinished agenda” of economic reforms. But nearly all commentators have linked this to the impasse on the nuclear deal. In this context certain observations become necessary.

In these columns, through the past decade and more, we have been arguing that what is considered as a “fractured mandate” must not be seen as a regression of India’s democratic evolution but in many ways it reflects the maturation of Indian democracy. The immense social plurality in India will, obviously, reflect itself in its polity. It is only natural that under these conditions various parties may garner the confidence of sections of this vast social diversity and thus no single party may acquire the requisite majority to form its own government. At least for some time in the future, coalition governments are the order of things to come in Indian politics.

Secondly, such “fractured mandates” carry with them an important element of checks and balances required for the sound functioning of any democracy. For this reason, coalition governments often have a common minimum programme of policies to be implemented while in office. The current UPA government’s CMP is a result of this process. All partners of the UPA coalition and the outside supporting Left parties have broadly endorsed the CMP. If any impediments are being brought before the government in the implementation of the CMP then of course the PM’s remarks are justified. However, if objections are raised on certain policy directions which are not contained in the CMP or are departures from the CMP then such objections serve the important purpose of checking the government’s drift from the CMP.

The Left’s objections to the Indo-US nuclear deal are of this nature. India’s desire for such a deal was not mentioned in the Congress election manifesto. Neither was it mentioned in any manifesto of its allies nor does the CMP have any reference to it. On the contrary the CMP talks of an independent foreign policy to be pursued by the UPA government which, given the nature and content of this deal, the Left parties are convinced will be compromised. Under these circumstances, the Left’s objection to the deal, in no way, constitutes any departure from the agreed common minimum programme, which is the basis for its support to this UPA government.

In this context the latest BJP’s call for the resignation of the prime minister since he is “helpless” is not merely ludicrous but is absurd. BJP as a party, displayed rank opportunism while it cobbled together the NDA to form the Vajpayee government. The BJP had fought the elections on the plank of its core Hindutva agenda. Post elections, in order to garner the requisite majority to form the government, the BJP put on the backburner the three basic issues that define its political existence and which forms the basis of its electoral support. The question of building a temple at Ayodhya, the demand for scrapping Article 370 of our Constitution and the demand for a Uniform Civil Code were all shelved in order to cobble a parliamentary majority. A party that is willing to give up its own ideological foundations in the pursuit of power is the least qualified to even ask for the PM’s resignation on the grounds that he has not implemented something which never existed in their manifesto or in the Common Minimum Programme of the government.

Having perfected the art of speaking with a forked tongue the BJP continues to remain ambiguous over its stand on the nuclear deal. On the one hand it argues for a strategic Indo-US strategic alliance, on the other it plays to the gallery by periodically issuing statements opposing the deal. Its disruption of parliamentary proceedings in the Monsoon session were directed primarily at preventing an exposure of its duplicity on the issue. As stated in these columns earlier, the BJP’s main grouse is that this deal, if it ever happens, is happening under a Congress-led dispensation while it ought to have happened under the BJP as they had laid down the basis for deepening Indo-US strategic alliance.

Given this, it is only hoped that the BJP will allow a discussion on this deal in the forthcoming winter session of parliament. However, if it continues to disrupt the proceedings to protect itself from an indecent exposure then it shall be doing the greatest disservice to India by not allowing the parliament to have its say in the matter. Let a majority in the parliament decide whether the deal is acceptable to India or not. This is the only way that the present impasse can end.

From People's Democracy

Cuba Prepares for UN Vote Against US Blockade

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 10:05:00 +0000

10-29-07, 4:57 pm

United Nations, Oct 29 (Prensa Latina) Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque is to start a full working program at UN Monday, on the eve of the annual debate at the General Assembly against the US-imposed economic blockade to that Caribbean island.

His agenda includes a meeting with the UN General Assembly President, former Macedonian Foreign Minister Srgjan Kerim, as well as diplomatic consultations with state members.

According to the UN program, the General Assembly will meet October 30 to vote on a resolution entitled 'The Necessity to Put an End to the Economic, Financial and Commercial Blockade Imposed by the United States on Cuba.'

That resolution has circulated for days among the 192 UN country members, and its world support is expected by Cuban authorities in an overwhelming victory.

The document is supported in an annual report by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, which includes disagreement with that measure expressed by over 120 countries and institutions, a record figure compared with the 98 registered in 2006.

Since 1992 the General Assembly has supported that resolution , which last year got 183 votes for, four against and one abstention.

From Prensa Latina

Cuban diplomatic sources hope the resolution will receive this time for 16 consecutive years more rousing support from the world community.

Address by Mayor Ross C. “Rocky” Anderson on October 27, 2007

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 08:44:00 +0000

10-29-07, 3:40 pm

Today, as we come together once again in this great city, we raise our voices in unison to say to President Bush, to Vice President Cheney, to other members of the Bush Administration (past and present), to a majority of Congress, including Utah’s entire congressional delegation, and to much of the mainstream media: “You have failed us miserably and we won’t take it any more.”

“While we had every reason to expect far more of you, you have been pompous, greedy, cruel, and incompetent as you have led this great nation to a moral, military, and national security abyss.”

“You have breached trust with the American people in the most egregious ways. You have utterly failed in the performance of your jobs. You have undermined our Constitution, permitted the violation of the most fundamental treaty obligations, and betrayed the rule of law.”

“You have engaged in, or permitted, heinous human rights abuses of the sort never before countenanced in our nation’s history as a matter of official policy. You have sent American men and women to kill and be killed on the basis of lies, on the basis of shifting justifications, without competent leadership, and without even a coherent plan for this monumental blunder.”

“We are here to tell you: We won’t take it any more!”

“You have acted in direct contravention of values that we, as Americans who love our country, hold dear. You have deceived us in the most cynical, outrageous ways. You have undermined, or allowed the undermining of, our constitutional system of checks and balances among the three presumed co-equal branches of government. You have helped lead our nation to the brink of fascism, of a dictatorship contemptuous of our nation’s treaty obligations, federal statutory law, our Constitution, and the rule of law.”

“Because of you, and because of your jingoistic false ‘patriotism,’ our world is far more dangerous, our nation is far more despised, and the threat of terrorism is far greater than ever before.

It has been absolutely astounding how you have committed the most horrendous acts, causing such needless tragedy in the lives of millions of people, yet you wear your so-called religion on your sleeves, asserting your God-is-on-my-side nonsense – when what you have done flies in the face of any religious or humanitarian tradition. Your hypocrisy is mind-boggling – and disgraceful. What part of “Thou shalt not kill” do you not understand? What part of the “Golden rule” do you not understand? What part of “be honest,” “be responsible,” and “be accountable” don’t you understand? What part of “Blessed are the peacekeepers” do you not understand?

Because of you, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, many thousands of people have suffered horrendous lifetime injuries, and millions have been run off from their homes. For the sake of our nation, for the sake of our children, and for the sake of our brothers and sisters around the world, we are morally compelled to say, as loudly as we can, ‘We won’t take it any more!’ ”

“As United States agents kidnap, disappear, and torture human beings around the world, you justify, you deceive, and you cover up. We find what you have done to men, women and children, and to the good name and reputation of the United States, so appalling, so unconscionable, and so outrageous as to compel us to call upon you to step aside and allow other men and women who are competent, true to our nation’s values, and with high moral principles to stand in your places – for the good of our nation, for the good of our children, and for the good of our world.”

In the case of the President and Vice President, this means impeachment and removal from office, without any further delay from a complacent, complicit Congress, the Democratic majority of which cares more about political gain in 2008 than it does about the vindication of our Constitution, the rule of law, and democratic accountability.

It means the election of people as President and Vice President who, unlike most of the presidential candidates from both major parties, have not aided and abetted in the perpetration of the illegal, tragic, devastating invasion and occupation of Iraq. And it means the election of people as President and Vice President who will commit to return our nation to the moral and strategic imperative of refraining from torturing human beings.

In the case of the majority of Congress, it means electing people who are diligent enough to learn the facts, including reading available National Intelligence Estimates, before voting to go to war. It means electing to Congress men and women who will jealously guard Congress’s sole prerogative to declare war. It means electing to Congress men and women who will not submit like vapid lap dogs to presidential requests for blank checks to engage in so-called preemptive wars, for legislation permitting warrantless wiretapping of communications involving US citizens, and for dangerous, irresponsible, saber-rattling legislation like the recent Kyl-Lieberman amendment.

We must avoid the trap of focusing the blame solely upon President Bush and Vice-President Cheney. This is not just about a few people who have wronged our country – and the world. They were enabled by members of both parties in Congress, they were enabled by the pathetic mainstream news media, and, ultimately, they have been enabled by the American people – 40% of whom are so ill-informed they still think Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks – a people who know and care more about baseball statistics and which drunken starlets are wearing underwear than they know and care about the atrocities being committed every single day in our name by a government for which we need to take responsibility.

As loyal Americans, without regard to political partisanship -- as veterans, as teachers, as religious leaders, as working men and women, as students, as professionals, as businesspeople, as public servants, as retirees, as people of all ages, races, ethnic origins, sexual orientations, and faiths -- we are here to say to the Bush administration, to the majority of Congress, and to the mainstream media: “You have violated your solemn responsibilities. You have undermined our democracy, spat upon our Constitution, and engaged in outrageous, despicable acts. You have brought our nation to a point of immorality, inhumanity, and illegality of immense, tragic, unprecedented proportions.”

“But we will live up to our responsibilities as citizens, as brothers and sisters of those who have suffered as a result of the imperial bullying of the United States government, and as moral actors who must take a stand: And we will, and must, mean it when we say ‘We won’t take it any more.’”

If we want principled, courageous elected officials, we need to be principled, courageous, and tenacious ourselves. History has demonstrated that our elected officials are not the leaders – the leadership has to come from us. If we don’t insist, if we don’t persist, then we are not living up to our responsibilities as citizens in a democracy – and our responsibilities as moral human beings. If we remain silent, we signal to Congress and the Bush administration – and to candidates running for office – and to the world – that we support the status quo.

Silence is complicity. Only by standing up for what’s right and never letting down can we say we are doing our part.

Our government, on the basis of a campaign we now know was entirely fraudulent, attacked and militarily occupied a nation that posed no danger to the United States. Our government, acting in our name, has caused immense, unjustified death and destruction.

It all started five years ago, yet where have we, the American people, been? At this point, we are responsible. We get together once in a while at demonstrations and complain about Bush and Cheney, about Congress, and about the pathetic news media. We point fingers and yell a lot. Then most people politely go away until another demonstration a few months later.

How many people can honestly say they have spent as much time learning about and opposing the outrages of the Bush administration as they have spent watching sports or mindless television programs during the past five years? Escapist, time-sapping sports and insipid entertainment have indeed become the opiate of the masses.

Why is this country so sound asleep? Why do we abide what is happening to our nation, to our Constitution, to the cause of peace and international law and order? Why are we not doing all in our power to put an end to this madness?

We should be in the streets regularly and students should be raising hell on our campuses. We should be making it clear in every way possible that apologies or convoluted, disingenuous explanations just don’t cut it when presidential candidates and so many others voted to authorize George Bush and his neo-con buddies to send American men and women to attack and occupy Iraq.

Let’s awaken, and wake up the country by committing here and now to do all each of us can to take our nation back. Let them hear us across the country, as we ask others to join us: “We won’t take it any more!”

I implore you: Draw a line. Figure out exactly where your own moral breaking point is. How much will you put up with before you say “No more” and mean it?

I have drawn my line as a matter of simple personal morality: I cannot, and will not, support any candidate who has voted to fund the atrocities in Iraq. I cannot, and will not, support any candidate who will not commit to remove all US troops, as soon as possible, from Iraq. I cannot, and will not, support any candidate who has supported legislation that takes us one step closer to attacking Iran. I cannot, and will not, support any candidate who has not fought to stop the kidnapping, disappearances, and torture being carried on in our name.

If we expect our nation’s elected officials to take us seriously, let us send a powerful message they cannot misunderstand. Let them know we really do have our moral breaking point. Let them know we have drawn a bright line. Let them know they cannot take our support for granted – that, regardless of their party and regardless of other political considerations, they will not have our support if they cannot provide, and have not provided, principled leadership.

The people of this nation may have been far too quiet for five years, but let us pledge that we won’t let it go on one more day – that we will do all we can to put an end to the illegalities, the moral degradation, and the disintegration of our nation’s reputation in the world.

Let us be unified in drawing the line – in declaring that we do have a moral breaking point. Let us insist, together, in supporting our troops and in gratitude for the freedoms for which our veterans gave so much, that we bring our troops home from Iraq, that we return our government to a constitutional democracy, and that we commit to honoring the fundamental principles of human rights.

In defense of our country, in defense of our Constitution, in defense of our shared values as Americans – and as moral human beings – we declare today that we will fight in every way possible to stop the insanity, stop the continued military occupation of Iraq, and stop the moral depravity reflected by the kidnapping, disappearing, and torture of people around the world.

From

--Ross C. “Rocky” Anderson is the mayor of Salt Lake City, Utah.

They’re Going After Planned Parenthood: Phill Kline, Robert Novak, and the Right Wing

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 04:49:00 +0000

10-29-07, 11:45 am

They’re going after Planned Parenthood: Phill Kline, Robert Novak, and the Right Wing, October 26, 2007

Over the last few weeks, we have seen a series of stepped-up attacks on Planned Parenthood from far-right organizations, their allies on Capitol Hill and in the conservative media.

Yesterday (Oct. 25), Robert Novak used his syndicated column to take up the causes of the anti-women’s health crusaders who have made shutting down Planned Parenthood their personal mission: 1) Johnson County, Kansas, District Attorney Phill Kline, who recently filed 107 baseless charges against Planned Parenthood alleging criminal activity, and 2) Concerned Women for America and other anti-choice groups (see references below) who are circulating a letter in Congress to suspend $300 million in federal funding for our health care services until the case is settled. These attacks have been accompanied by the efforts of Senator David Vitter (R-LA) and Representative Mike Pence (R-IN) to eliminate Planned Parenthood from the nation's family planning program, Title X.

These efforts in Congress to de-fund family planning are baseless and totally without merit. They do, however, underscore the dangerous and very real nature of attacks on women's access to safe, accessible health care and birth control.

Planned Parenthood is the most trusted name in women's health care. We provide the highest quality health care and education to five million women, men and teens worldwide each year. Our mission is supported by the vast majority of the American public and one in four women in this country has visited Planned Parenthood for health care services. We have a proven track record of the highest quality of health care, and for 91 years we have been helping our patients prevent pregnancy, stay healthy and plan families. Ninety-seven percent of our services are focused on prevention.

Our opponents work day in and day out to end women's access to any and all reproductive health care including basic birth control services. Recent tactics include encouraging pharmacists to refuse to fill doctor-prescribed birth control prescriptions, asking the FDA to reconsider over-the-counter status for safe, effective Plan B emergency contraception, and eliminating medically accurate sex education in schools. Their political tactics include constant litigation and picketing and protesting the opening of new, much-needed health care centers, such as our new clinic in Aurora, Illinois.

False Claims Against Planned Parenthood in Kansas

Former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline has made a career of his political crusade against women's health and Planned Parenthood. Last November, Kansas voters rejected his brand of extremism as he was resoundingly defeated in his reelection bid as attorney general. Most recently Kline (now Johnson County district attorney) filed 107 baseless charges against Planned Parenthood in his continued crusade to stop access to reproductive health care services. His latest move is a last-gasp attempt at restricting women's access to reproductive health care. These baseless charges are nothing more than his latest unethical attempt to advance a hardline agenda. No public official should be allowed to use his office to warp the law in a bid to advance an ideological agenda aimed at intimidating women and the health care providers they rely on.

Kline has made a career of trying to put Planned Parenthood out of business. In 2005, Kline attempted to seize dozens of confidential medical records of patients who had received reproductive health care services at Planned Parenthood and another abortion clinic in Kansas. Kline threatened to prosecute Planned Parenthood and the other provider during his entire tenure as AG.

The current Kansas AG found the charges had no merit. The latest charges were immediately called into question by current Kansas Attorney General Paul Morrison, who said through a spokesperson, 'We are skeptical that these charges have any merit, and we continue to wonder how much politics influenced Mr. Kline’s decision to file these charges.' Attorney General Morrison had already reviewed the information upon which these charges are based and announced months ago that after “an objective, unbiased, and thorough examination of the numerous documents and medical records,” no evidence of any wrongdoing was found.

False Claims Against Planned Parenthood by Right-Wing Extremists

As Novak details in his column, right-wing groups have picked up on the false claims out of Kansas and are presently circulating a letter on Capitol Hill, in an effort to de-fund Planned Parenthood. Their efforts aren’t new, and they’re not going to succeed this time, either.

The signatories to the letter include hardliners that have been relentlessly focused on eliminating access to reproductive health care information for years — including some who have been given jail time for conspiracy to bomb clinics. Among those who have signed the letter are:

• Wendy Wright, Concerned Women for America As president of CWA, Wendy Wright has lobbied against mandating the cervical cancer vaccine, referred to gay and lesbian people as “disordered,” “immoral,” and “unnatural,” and argued that allowing pornography in hotel rooms should be “prosecutable.” (Raw Story, 8/22/2006; CWA website, 2/28/07, 3/1/07, 3/19/07)

• Cheryl Sullenger, Operation Rescue In 1988, Cheryl Sullenger pled guilty to conspiring to blow up the Alvarado Medical Center, for which she received a light prison sentence of 2.5 years. (San Diego Union Tribune, May 6, 1988)

• Joseph Scheidler, Pro-Life Action League As executive director of the Pro-Life Action League, Scheidler was charged with 121 counts of racketeering related to clinic threats and violence. His case went all the way to the Supreme Court. Regarding his past, “[Scheidler] bragged about his unusual actions, such as absconding with fetal remains…” or “picketing the homes of doctors.” (Washington Post, 12/6/93; “Home Pickets Work,” USA Today, 10/19/95)

• Janice Shaw, The Beverly LaHaye Institute In 2004, Janice Shaw urged the U.S. to oppose the U.N. treaty CEDAW (Convention to End Discrimination Against all Women) calling it a “leftist utopian wish list: comparable worth, paid maternity leave, a national network of child care, free maternity-related health care, gender-blind military service, and quota-determined political parity for women.” (“The Stalking Horse Named CEDAW,” beverlylahayeinstitute.org, 10/9/2002)

• Jennifer Giroux, Women Influencing the Nation While a guest on Scarborough Country, Jennifer Giroux called gay parenting “the ultimate in child abuse.” Giroux commented on a recent Oprah show that featured a child raised by gay parents, “She totally exploited a 14-year-old boy, talking about his four gay parents, which is, by the way, the ultimate in child abuse, children being raised by gay parents in that type of environment.” (MSNBC, October 3, 2006)

As Novak wrote, “The offensive against abortion now takes dead aim at Planned Parenthood and attempts to expand a Kansas criminal prosecution into a nationwide assault.” He’s right; these groups are certainly attempting to do just that. Tactics such as secret videotaping, attempts to seize hundreds of confidential medical records, and politically-motivated legal charges of misconduct continue to be used by those who seek to cut off access to reproductive health care. Their charges are routinely found to be baseless, their “facts” purposely distorted.

Americans have trusted Planned Parenthood for more than 90 years because health, safety and prevention are our hallmarks. No one does more than Planned Parenthood to prevent unintended pregnancy and keep women, men and teens healthy and safe. For more information about Planned Parenthood, visit www.plannedparenthood.org.

Please contact Erin Kiernon (212-261-4337) or Christy Setzer (202-973-4975) in our Media Department for more information or background.

--Cecile Richards is president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Setting the Record Straight: Marxism and Literature

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 03:11:00 +0000

10-29-07, 10:07 am

US newspapers were all abuzz this month when Doris Lessing, most well-known for her novel The Golden Notebook, won the Nobel Prize for Literature. (Lessing also raised eyebrows when in an interview she proclaimed that 9/11 wasn't as bad as Americans thought).

The Los Angeles Times 'Books' section printed an interview feature on her titled 'With age comes wisdom, and Lessing's Nobel Prize' last week.

Earlier, the New York Times saw fit to reprint an essay by Doris Lessing it had originally published in 1992 after the collapse of the Soviet Union titled 'Questions You Should Never Ask a Writer.' In a nutshell, its central argument was 'that Communism debased language.'

Lessing accused the communist movement, which she took part in as a member of the Communist Party until 1956, of imposing on its affiliated writers the imperative of using 'mind-deadening slogans' in their works. In this way communism demanded that art, novels, poetry had 'to be about something.' She further argues that feminist 'consciousness raising' and 'political correctness' are the political heirs of communism.

While her views might suit the New York Times or the Los Angeles Times, or FOX News for that matter, they are a distortion of history says Phillip Bonosky, a Communist novelist and contemporary of Lessing's.

Bonosky is a contributing editor of Political Affairs. He is the author of two novels, Burning Valley and The Magic Fern, several short story collections, and a number of non-fiction books such as Afghanistan –Washington's Secret War.

'This statement of Lessing’s is ridiculous,' says Bonosky. 'What Marxism did was to liberate language for millions of workers the whole world over, and still does to this day.'

Marx's major contribution in the arena of language, Bonosky states, was in injecting into historical writing the very people who had been rendered invisible in the writing up to his time, the working class and the racially oppressed.

Further, Marx sought precise, scientific language to explain who those people were, how they got to be where they were, and what were the social forces keeping them imprisoned.

Rather than debasing language, insists Bonosky, 'Marxism tried to put history and sociology on a scientific basis. After Marx, history, instead of being about the actions of powerful men, kings and whatnot, or even simply the product of happenstance, now involved ascertainable laws, which Marx was able to isolate and point out. If social events and social behavior could be put on a scientific basis, it meant that all the features involved in historical situations had to be defined very precisely, and words were needed that would fit these scientific needs. Very precise language was needed.'

On the issue of writing fiction, Bonosky's personal experience contradicts Lessing's account. Bonosky's first novel, Burning Valley, which was published by a press that was affiliated loosely with the Communist movement back in the 1950s, was an international best-seller, but was completely ignored in the US.

While McCarthy and others hunted people like Bonosky, an open Communist Party member all of his adult life, and liberals they insisted were controlled by the communists, Bonosky's first novel went through several editions in Russia, his parents' home country of Lithuania, Poland, East Germany, and China. Hundreds of thousands of copies were sold. In the US, hundreds. (Though the University of Illinois Press republished it along with several other books by leftists as part of its 'Radical Novels Reconsidered' series in the late 1990s.)

No major periodicals outside of the Party's orbit reviewed the book. The New York Times saw a review of it as unfit to print.

'I remember when I was traveling in the GDR,' recalls Bonosky, 'and I was passing through customs, the officers there looked at my passport and said, 'Bonosky, didn’t you write Burning Valley?' He had already read it in German, and there was a big discussion in the German press about it. So there was a literary life that existed for me, but not here in America.'

So was this novel a Party-mandated political tract?

Bonosky chuckles. It was the story of a young Catholic altar boy, an ardent Catholic who is, as Bonosky says, 'a real believer in religion,' living in a Depression-era steelmaking, immigrant community in Pennsylvania not unlike Bonosky's own background.

The young man finds himself caught in the middle of the struggle between the workers and the steel bosses to form the union and to win rights and benefits for the workers. In his own artistic and literary way, Bonosky presents the story of a boy caught be powerful social forces – the church, his family and community, his class, the owners of the steel mills, the law – and has to decide how his actions will conform to his conscience.

But, as Bonosky quickly points out, agitational, social literature has a long history in American letters before the Communists came along. 'When Harriet Beecher Stowe met Lincoln,' Bonsoky says, 'Lincoln is supposed to have said to her, 'So you’re the little lady that started this war?'' Stowe's book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, 'was very polemical,' Bonosky says. 'Another example is John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which directly attacked a social phenomenon, and by implication at least it implied what the solution should be.' Numerous examples could be cited.

No, Bonsoky says, his book wasn't a Party tract. 'Nobody told me to write the book like that. As a matter of fact, from a formal point of view, that should have been impossible to do. What! A communist writes about this? The church was not attacked; it wasn’t condemned. I didn’t get on a soapbox. I let the events tell their own story, and that’s what I think the truth of the situation was. Let the truth speak for itself. But without Marxism, I couldn’t have seen it myself. I couldn’t have seen the struggle there and where it was going.'

Though polemical literature was a major industry in American letters prior to the Communists, Marxism helped render things once hidden visible, Bonosky says. He had always been a writer as long as he had been conscious, and a part what motivated that was his love for reading.

While reading the classics the aspiring writer is expected to read, Bonosky came to realize something significant. 'There’s something missing,' he says. 'And I answered my own question about what was missing? I was missing. By that I mean not me personally, but that my class was missing. I came from the working class, directly from the working class, and all my friends were from the working class. Everybody in the town of Duquesne, Pennsylvania was working class. We had one industry, steel, and we were all working class, but there was no working class in the literature.'

At the moment of this realization, sometime in the 1930s, Bonosky began to search out those writers who told the story of his class. Those writers were the Communists. They also happened to be the great American writers who told the stories of African Americans and the racially oppressed. They told the story of women; of immigrants. They turned American letters on its head and gave voice to those who had been silenced by the literati celebrated among the canonical 'great writers.'

Another brilliant, if short-lived writer who is deserving of as much notoriety perhaps as Lessing was Lorraine Hansberry, best known for her play 'A Raisin in the Sun,' later made into a film starring Sidney Poitier, in discussing her views of art and writing said, 'All art is ultimately social; that which agitates and that which prepares the mind for slumber.'

While Hansberry and Bonosky, and so many others like them who have been disappeared into the the folds of history by words like Lessing's, sought to agitate. Lessing has tried to simply 'prepare us for slumber.' As the title of the Los Angeles Times suggests, Bonosky brings his own special wisdom to the discussion about writing and communism.

(See our interview with Bonosky here, or listen to portions of it on our latest podcast.)

--Reach Joel Wendland at

Georgia: Agnes Scott College Workers Protest for Living Wages

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 02:55:00 +0000

10-29-07, 9:50 am

(APN) DECATUR – About 50 students, faculty members, staff members of Agnes Scott College, and other concerned community activists gathered on campus Friday, October 26, 2007, to ask the Agnes Scott College Board of Trustees to institute living wages for all staff members.

The Agnes Scott Living Wage Campaign has been urging trustees for some time to provide a living wage of $14.40 per hour plus healthcare for all Agnes Scott staff and all contracted staff. Agnes Scott is private liberal arts college for women.

'We hope the Board of Trustees will hear us today and will understand that we are human beings like everybody else and we’re just asking for what we think is a decent living,' Della Spurley, an Agnes Scott staff member for 42 years, said.

Spurley, one leading organizer of the campaign, has only recently started making $14.40 per hour but still has no healthcare. Spurley and other staffers, who have won incremental improvements, are still overworked and underpaid, she said.

Most Agnes Scott staff members are making a base pay of $11.44 per hour for 2007-2008, up from what they made in 2006-2007 but still well short of what the campaign considers a living wage.

The campaign met with trustees earlier this year and engaged in a role-playing game where trustees learned how a single staff member with two children had to get by on a monthly budget that exceeded monthly pay.

Helen Cox, a student organizer with the campaign, told Atlanta Progressive News some of the trustees were brought to tears at the reality many staffers face each month, such as what bills to pay that month and which to let go.

The custodial staff is currently six members short and there is only one person to clean two entire buildings and one floor of another, activists said. One of the campaign demands calls for an appropriate workload for staff members.

'We are so understaffed here,' Jillian Wells, co-president of Witkaze, Agnes Scott’s black student alliance said. '[The staff] are basically doing the work of two people right now and are only getting the wages of one person.'

Then there is a group of staff members who receive even less than their coworkers.

Some staff members are contracted through a private company called Aramark–which provides cafeteria and other services on campuses across the country–to do work at Agnes Scott. But these staff members are not entitled to the same pay or benefits of staff employed directly by Agnes Scott.

The campaign seeks to remedy this situation by either offering the same pay and benefits to Aramark staff or have the Aramark staff become Agnes Scott staff members.

Kelly Grant, an Aramark contract staff member and a leading campaign organizer, said she would like to take some courses at the college and that her daughter is also having trouble getting into Agnes Scott. Grant said she does not understand why she and her daughter cannot receive the same benefits as her fellow Agnes Scott staff members.

The campaign is urging trustees to allow all staff members the chance to take degree courses as well as classes in English as a second language and computer literacy.

Members of the campaign also want children of Aramark staff to be eligible for Agnes Scott tuition and for it to be paid by the college. Children of Agnes Scott staff members currently enjoy this benefit.

Receiving eligibility to take courses at Agnes Scott is just one way staff members are seeking to be more included in everyday campus life.

The campaign would like to see the inclusion of members of all facilities, clerical, security, and food services staff into the Executive Board and the Board of Trustees, as well as the creation of a permanent, democratic, and empowered Staff Senate so that staff members have a say in their own lives.

The campaign feels staff members should also be included in traditional Agnes Scott events like orientation and alumnae weekend and have representation on planning committees.

'There’s a lot of division here on this campus that should not exist,' Wells said. 'It’s really important that we the students and the staff take the initiative to break down these barriers that exist between us.'

While trustees have made promises this year to provide living wages and decision- making power for Agnes Scott workers, they have so far not delivered.

Activists decided to march across campus Friday and deliver the list of demands to the trustees while their meeting was in progress. While the trustees surprisingly allowed the crowd to enter the meeting room and even applauded after a few remarks, it is unclear if the trustees will act and how soon.

From Atlanta Progressive News

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

Bush's War Cry

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 02:51:00 +0000

10-29-07, 9:45 am

Viva Cuba libre! (Long live free Cuba!). That was the war cry throughout the plains and the mountains, forests and sugarcane fields, identifying those who began Cuba's first war of independence on October 10, 1868.

I would never have imagined I'd be hearing those words 139 years later, coming from the mouth of a president of the United States. It is as if a king of days gone by, or his regent, were proclaiming: Viva Cuba Libre!

On the contrary, a Spanish warship drew near the coast and, with its guns, destroyed the small sugar mill where Carlos Manuel de Cespedes declared the independence of Cuba and freed the slaves that he had inherited, just a few kilometers from the sea.

Lincoln, son of a poor woodcutter, fought all his life against slavery which was legal in his country almost a hundred years after the Declaration of Independence. Clinging to the just idea that all citizens are born free and equal, making use of his legal and constitutional rights, he declared the abolition of slavery. Countless numbers of combatants gave their lives defending this idea against the rebel slave states in the south of the country.

Lincoln is said to have stated: 'You can deceive some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can't deceive all the people all of the time.'

He died by an assassin's bullet when, unbeatable at the polls, he was running for a second term as president.

I am not forgetting that tomorrow, Sunday, it will be the 48th anniversary of Camilo Cienfuegos' disappearance at sea, on October 28, 1959, as he was returning to Havana in a light aircraft from Camaguey Province, where days earlier just his presence unarmed a garrison of simple Rebel Army soldiers whose superiors, of a bourgeois ideology, were attempting to do what almost half a century later Bush is demanding: rise up in arms against the Revolution.

Che, in a wonderful introduction to his book 'Guerrilla Warfare,' states: 'Camilo was the comrade of a 100 battles the selfless combatant who always made sacrifice an instrument with which to temper his character and to forge that of the troops...it was he who gave this written armature here presented the essential vitality of his personality, of his intelligence and of his audacity, something which can be achieved in such exact proportions only in a very few personages in history.'

'Who killed him?'

'We might better wonder: who wiped out his physical being? Because the lives of men such as he, live on in the people...The enemy killed him, they killed him because they wished for his death, they killed him because there are no safe planes, because pilots cannot have all the experience they need, because, overburdened with work, he wanted to reach Havana in a few short hours -- in his guerrilla mentality there could be no impediment to hold back or distort a line which had been drafted. Camilo and the other Camilos (those who didn't arrive and those yet to come) are the indicators of the strength of the people, they are the highest expression of what a nation may give, at the ready to defend its purest ideals and with its faith anchored in the securing of its noblest goals.'

For all the symbolism in their names, we reply to the false Mamb?:

Long live Lincoln! Long live Che! Long live Camilo!

Havana, October 27, 2007, 7:36 p.m.

Canadian Couple Goes to Cuba for Quality Medical Care

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 02:46:00 +0000

10-29-07, 9:40 am

Halifax, Canada, October 27, 2007 --(PR.com)-- A Halifax couple, Vern and Diane Paul went to Cuba for her double-knee replacement, but instead they both were operated on.

The Pauls departed Halifax for Havana on Oct. 14th for what they assumed would be a double-knee replacement for Diane. However, her Cuban doctors at Havana’s Cira Garcia hospital determined that she didn’t require a complete knee replacement. Instead, they treated her legs with massage therapy, drained water from her knees and realigned her leg, including surgery to attach small bolts to her knees. They also did a nutritional analysis and developed an improved diet for her to help her to lose weight to alleviate her knee pain. She will continue a physiotherapy regimen to continue to improve her condition.

And, her husband Vern, who accompanied her for moral support, was so impressed with the hospital and the high quality of care that he decided to have surgery, too. He had cosmetic surgery (called “blepharoplasty”) to remove the bags under his eyes.

Reached by phone in Havana, Diane said, “Everything is wonderful. My God, it is absolutely amazing the outstanding care that I am receiving. The doctors and nurses are so caring and attentive, it’s like nothing I have ever seen before.”

Diane, 57, who had been in constant serious pain for years from her condition, added, “The only pain that I have now is a slight pain in my kneecap, but my doctors tell me that they will go away soon. I felt good enough that I went out to see Old Havana yesterday.”

Her husband is equally pleased.

“Our treatment has gone beautifully, absolutely beautifully,” Vern said.

Diane Paul, 57, went to Cuba for medical care because she would have had to endure a one-year wait to have a double-knee replacement in Canada. And, in the US, the cost would be prohibitively expensive. So, she learned about Choice Medical Services, a medical tourism firm that arranges for patients to go to Cuba to receive high quality and affordable medical care.

“Choice is thrilled for Diane and Vern that their treatments and trip went so well,” said Bill Doran, CEO of Choice Medical Services. “It’s so impressive that the Cuban medical professionals could save her from having a difficult and more invasive surgery, and provide Diane with an alternative and proven treatment to alleviate her prior, constant pain. And, it was a total surprise, but we were glad to schedule Vern in at the last minute for his procedure. He’s coming back a ‘new man’ with a younger and improved look.”

According to Choice, Diane’s double-knee replacement would have cost about $19,000, including spending two weeks at the hospital and two weeks recovering at a Cuban oceanside resort. Instead, her completed treatment will cost about $5900. And, Vern’s treatment will cost $1000, but would have cost four times as much in the US or Canada. His cosmetic surgery treatment is not covered by the Canadian health plan.

The Pauls plan to return to their Halifax home in early November.

Winnipeg-based Choice Medical Services has served many Canadian and US patients to help them to access Cuban healthcare. Canadian patients typically want to avoid long wait times. American patients are usually uninsured and often would be unable to afford proper care if this low-cost option wasn’t available. Choice will be adding other international destinations soon. To learn more, visit their website at www.choicemedicalservices.com or call toll-free 1-866-672-8284.

From

Twelve Years After Rabin's Assassination

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 02:41:00 +0000

10-29-07, 9:36 am

THE PRESIDENT of the Knesset invited me to take part in the special Knesset session to commemorate the 12th anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.

I debated with myself whether to accept the invitation.

On the one hand, I would like to honor the man and the achievements of his last years. I liked him.

On the other hand, I had no wish to listen to a eulogy delivered by Shimon Peres, the man who pretended to follow Rabin's path and who buried the Oslo agreement out of sheer cowardice. And even less to a eulogy from Ehud Olmert, one of the people who led the incitement campaign against the Oslo agreement and its authors. And still less to a eulogy from Binyamin Netanyahu, who stood on the balcony while the picture of Rabin in SS uniform was paraded below.

IN THE END, I DECIDED to stay away from this orgy of sanctimonious hypocrisy. I did not go to the Knesset. Instead I sat at home watching the sea and thinking about the man.

About the young Yitzhak Rabin, who joined the Palmach (the pre-independence 'regular forces'). The commander who drove the Arabs from their homes in the 1948 war. The Chief of Staff who called, on us, after the Six-Day War, to honor the enemy dead. The Prime Minister who did more for education than any of his predecessors or successors. The Prime Minister who allowed me to continue my secret contacts with the PLO leaders, when this constituted a serious crime. The Defense Minister who called on the soldiers to 'break their arms and legs', an order that was meticulously carried out. The man who recognized the PLO and shook the hand of Yasser Arafat.

He was all of these, and the list goes on.

More than anything, he was the typical representative of my generation, the 'generation of 1948' - and not by accident was this generation defined by a war. It was the era of innocence. The innocence of the fighters and of the Yishuv (the Hebrew society in pre-state Palestine). In retrospect, the events of that time - the actions of the underground organizations, the operations of the war - take on a different aspect, a picture with many shadows. But it must be remembered: that is not how they looked to us when they happened. Not at all.

Rabin personified the innocence of the generation which believed with all their hearts that they were sacrificing their lives for a cause more just than any other - the existence of the Yishuv, the salvation of the Jews of Europe, our fight for national independence. Without this absolute belief, coupled with total ignorance of the other side, we would not have stood the test of 1948 - a test in which a significant proportion of our age-group was killed or wounded.

This generation idealized a certain personality type - the 'Sabra' (literally: prickly pear plant), a mythical figure that had an immense influence in shaping the generation. (I myself played some part in nursing this myth). The Sabra was supposed to be upright, both physically and mentally, free of the complexes of the 'exile' Jews (the term 'exilic' was the most insulting appellation in our lexicon). The 'Sabra' was honest, truthful, practical, natural, someone who always comes straight to the point and despises hollow mannerisms, empty talk and histrionic phrases, which we referred to colloquially as 'Zionism'. Before we knew about the Holocaust, 'exile' Jews and everything connected with them were treated with scorn, even contempt.

As if all by itself, a clear terminological distinction appeared: the 'Hebrew' Yishuv and the 'Jewish' religion, the 'Hebrew' kibbutz and the 'Jewish' shtetl (in the Diaspora), 'Hebrew labor (as in the name of the then dominant trade union, 'the General Organization of the Hebrew Workers in Eretz-Yisrael') and 'Jewish' luft-gesheften (Yiddish for nebulous transactions), 'Hebrew' workers and 'Jewish' speculators.

Yitzhak Rabin was the ultimate Sabra: a handsome youngster who sacrificed his private ambition (to study hydraulic engineering) in order to serve the nation, to become a fighter and to command fighters, to act and leave the discussion of ideology to the old people.

He was reputed to possess an 'analytical mind', because of his ability to examine a given situation and find practical solutions. The other side of the coin was his lack of imagination. He dealt with reality, and could not imagine a different reality. (Abba Eban, who hated his guts, told me in his malicious way: 'Analysis means dissecting. Rabin can take things apart, but he cannot put them together again.')

He was withdrawn, perhaps shy, and drew back from bodily contact, slaps on the back and public embraces. Some called him an 'autist'. But he was not overbearing, certainly not arrogant. After a few glasses (always Scotch) he opened up a little, and at parties he could smile his somewhat crooked smile and become quite friendly.

IF HE HAD died in 1970, we would remember him only as a soldier, a successful brigade commander in the 1948 war, the best Chief-of-Staff the Israeli army ever had, the architect of the incredible victory of the Six-day War. But that was only one chapter in his eventful life. A rare thing happened: at the age of 70 he did something that even 30-year olds are generally unable to do: he completely changed his world view and abandoned the certainties that had hitherto governed his life.

To this amazing change I was a witness. In 1969, when he was serving as Israeli ambassador in Washington, we talked for the first time about the Palestinian issue. He completely rejected the idea of peace with the Palestinians. I still remember a sentence of his from this conversation: 'I don't care for secure borders, I want open borders.' (In Hebrew, a play on words: batuach means secure, patuach means open.) 'Secure borders' was at the time the slogan of annexationists. Rabin meant an open border with Jordan, and once said: 'I don't care if I need a visa to go to Hebron.'

After that we met from time to time - in his office, in the Prime Minister's residence, at his private home and at parties - and the conversation always came back to the Palestinian issue. His attitude remained negative.

So I know how extreme a change it was. I don’t believe that it was I who influenced him - at most I planted, perhaps, a few seeds. He himself explained the change to me later as a series of logical deductions: when he was Defense Minister, he met with local Palestinian personalities. In one-to-one conversations they were amenable, but when they were in a group, they were tough and told him that they took their directions from the PLO. After that came the Madrid conference. Israel gave in to pressure and agreed to negotiate with a Jordanian delegation that included Palestinian members. Once there, the Jordanians refused to deal with Palestinian issues, and so the Palestinians became in practice an independent Palestinian delegation. Feisal Husseini, their real leader, was not allowed into the conference room because he was a Jerusalemite. The delegation members went to the other room from time to time to consult with him, and at the end of every day, they told the Israelis that they had to call Tunis to get instructions from Yasser Arafat.

'This became too ridiculous for me,' Rabin told me in his straightforward way, 'If everything depends on Arafat anyhow, why not talk with him directly?'

That was the background of Oslo.

HOW DID Rabin's Oslo ship get stuck on a sandbank?

I believe that much of the fault lies with Rabin himself. He really wanted to achieve peace with the Palestinians. But before his eyes he had no route to the objective, and no clear picture of the objective itself. The change was too sharp. Like Israeli society in general, he was unable to free himself overnight from the fears, mistrust, superstitions and prejudices accumulated over 120 years of conflict.

That is why he did not do the one thing that could have led the ship of Oslo to a safe haven: to use the momentum and achieve peace in a bold and rapid move. He did not know the famous dictum of David Lloyd-George concerning peace with Ireland: 'You cannot cross an abyss with two jumps.'

The makeup of his personality had a negative impact on the process. He was by nature cautious, slow, averse to dramatic gestures (unlike Menachem Begin, for example). This resulted in the fatal weakness of the Oslo agreement: the final aim was not spelled out. The two decisive words - 'Palestinian State' - do not appear at all. This omission led to its collapse.

While the two sides wasted months and years haggling over every single detail of the endless 'interim' steps, the anti-peace forces in Israel had time to recover and unite. Led by the settlers and the ultra-right, they were sustained by the hatreds and anxieties bred by the long war.

In military terms: Rabin was like a general who succeeds in breaking through the front - and, instead of pouring his forces into the breach and forcing a decision, hesitates and stays put, allowing the opposing forces to regroup and form a new front. In other words, he routed the forces of war, but allowed them to reunite and mount a counter-attack.

For this he paid with his life.

THE MURDER of Rabin changed the history of Israel, much as the murder of the Austrian crown-prince in Sarajevo in 1914 changed the history of the world.

Nobody is irreplaceable, they say, but no second Rabin has been found - no one with his honesty, with his courage, with his logical mind.

This week, Ehud Olmert declared that he was continuing on the path of Rabin, but he represents the very opposite: the opposite of honesty, the opposite of courage, the opposite of logic (not to mention his propensity for embracing people and slapping them on the back.)

Rabin really wanted to move forward towards peace. Slowly-slowly, with stubborn haggling, but also with consistency and persistence. Olmert's aims are quite different. He wants a 'peace process' that has no end - babbling, meetings, conferences, without any movement, while in the meantime the occupation is continuing, annexation is creeping forward, settlements are enlarging and the hopes and chances for the two peoples are evaporating.

The Annapolis conference fits perfectly into this scheme: hollow declarations, another conference without results, a meaningless exhibition.

Some say that the most important thing is to talk, because 'when you are talking you are not shooting.' That is a dangerous illusion. In our case, the opposite is true: when you talk for the sake of talking while the occupation deepens, despair is gaining ground and the shooting has never really stopped. The failure of Annapolis may well trigger the outbreak of the Third Intifada.

From Uri Avnery's Weekly Column

Depleted Uranium and Depleted Democracy

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 02:33:00 +0000

10-29-07, 9:31 am

Remarks at October 27, 2007, rally in Jonesborough, Tenn., preceding march to Aerojet Ordnance, manufacturers of Depleted Uranium weapons.

There are those who think Congress should keep shelling out our grandchildren's money to continue our occupation of Iraq, and there are those who think Congress should pass a bill opposing the occupation. And they are both wrong. Any decent bill on any issue, much less this one, will be vetoed. The way to stop funding the occupation of Iraq is for Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to announce on Monday that they will not bring to the floor any more bills to fund the occupation.

Some House members would try to start a discharge petition to get around Pelosi, but they would fail. Some Senators would demand a war funding bill, but they would not get past a filibuster. The legal funding of the occupation of Iraq would be over.

But Bush would not end the occupation. He would misappropriate funds from the Pentagon to keep it going. I almost said keep it going illegally, but it's always been illegal. In fact, Bush misappropriated funds to build bases and move troops and equipment to invade Iraq over five years ago. At this time five years ago, weapons factories, like Boeing's, were working double shifts for Shock and Awe, and our televisions were telling us Bush wanted to resolve everything peacefully.

When General Petraeus betrayed us with his testimony last month, a congress member asked him what he would do if congress were to cut off funding for the occupation of Iraq and Bush were to order him to keep it going. Petraeus said he'd need to ask his lawyer.

But Bush would keep it going, and Congress would have two choices. One would be to surrender and admit that the first and most powerful branch of our government as laid out in our Constitution is no longer part of the government at all. The second option would be to make use of that portion of the Constitution that reads: 'The President, Vice President, and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.'

Impeachment is the one thing the president cannot stop. He cannot veto it. He cannot signing statement it. He cannot spin it. All he can do is crawl back to Crawford with Dick Cheney to await their criminal trials.

You may have heard that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice testified in Congress this week. You may have seen a photo of Desiree Farooz holding blood covered hands up to Condi's face in an attempt to show her what she has done. Rice testified on two days before two committees, the second being the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chaired by Congressman Henry Waxman. Months ago, Waxman subpoenaed Rice, and she publicly announced she would not comply because she was not inclined to. When Rice testified on Thursday, Waxman agreed not to ask her about topics she was not inclined to discuss. The subpoena orders Rice to testify about forged documents that were used by the president to claim Iraq had tried to purchase uranium in Africa.

Rice and Bush and Cheney and several other individuals and departments in the Bush administration have refused to comply with subpoenas, an offense for which the House Judiciary Committee passed an article of impeachment against Richard Nixon. And the subpoenas and investigations are not even needed to prove the crimes. Far from establishing that Iraq was any threat to this nation or apologizing for having clearly lied about it, this gang is using almost identical lies to push this nation toward an attack on Iran. And, again, uranium is involved. Cheney's latest scheme is reportedly to persuade Israel to bomb a uranium enrichment plant in Iran.

The White House has, in fact, just labeled a section of Iran's military a terrorist group. Up until this point, if the tern 'terrorist' meant anything in official U.S. discourse, it meant a non-state group that engages in violence. Now 'terrorist' appears to mean any state or non-state group that engages in violence if that violence is not supported by Dick Cheney and George W. Bush.

At other times, though, the word 'terrorist' appears to include anyone without white skin who immigrates to the land of the Statue of Liberty. Congressman David Davis, who I believe represents this district, has introduced a total of two bills in Congress. One of them would take the important step of establishing a national Bald Eagle Day. The other would train state and local police officers in how to protect us from immigrants and/or terrorists. Now, tell me if I'm right: I'm guessing that the people of Tennessee are not as ignorant and xenophobic as the honorable David Davis appears to be.

Davis may have just been in Washington too long. A week is too long for most people. The Senate right now is trying to decide whether to make our next top law enforcement official a man who refuses to say whether waterboarding constitutes torture. Former Mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani thinks that's a topic worth joking about, just as Donald Rumsfeld did. But as of late Thursday Rumsfeld now faces five lawsuits charging him with torture, and the number of countries he cannot safely enter continues to grow.

Meanwhile the White House finally has an answer to global warming: it brings health benefits. Of course, it also does not exist. And Fox News blames the fires in California on 'al Qaeda.' But none of these absurdities match the one uttered this week by the Chair of the Democratic Caucus Rahm Emmanuel, who said that what we voted for last year was not an end to the war, but legislative action on lots of issues. The reason only 11 percent of us now support what Congress is doing, Emmanuel said, has nothing to do with the Democrats' refusal to stop funding the occupation. Rather, he said, we ignorant citizens have too many demands and we're too impatient.

You're damn right we're impatient! This is the same Rahm Emmanuel who in January told the Washington Post that the Democrats would keep the war going until November 2008. That's two years of killing and dying, to be followed almost certainly by four more years of killing and dying. If we are going to end the occupation of Iraq, we are going to have to do it in the next several months. One way we can do that is by pressuring our Congress Members. But there are other ways as well. We can tell potential military recruits what war looks like. One thing recruiters will never mention is Depleted Uranium.

Last September a group of Iraq Veterans Against the War were arrested during a tour of the Pentagon. Their offense was to have set a stack of brochures on a literature table. The brochures described the possible effects of Depleted Uranium, from which one of the veterans was quite possibly suffering.

Not only are veterans opposing this occupation, but active duty troops are refusing as illegal their orders to deploy. Whistleblowers in the military and in Washington are speaking out. War profiteers are facing charges for corrupt practices. All of these forces help to end the occupation and discourage the next attack.

Those of us who have never refused illegal orders and faced that risk of prison cannot ask anyone to take that step, but we can applaud those who do. Similarly, we have no right to ask someone to give up a job, uncertain of where the next one lies, but I must say I would applaud as loudly as I could and assist in any way I knew how anyone who quit a job manufacturing weapons for the slaughter of Iraqis and Iranians. And I'd pay more to have my clothes and furniture and toys and silverware manufactured in a shutdown weapons factory in Tennessee than what it costs me to buy the products of Chinese slave labor.

Aerojet Ordnance states on its website: 'We stress a strong ethical workplace, both in relation to the work we do and the sense of fairness that is extended to all employees, regardless of background.'

An ethical workplace? An ethical workplace manufacturing weapons used in an illegal and aggressive war that has killed nearly 4,000 US service men and women and over 1 million Iraqis? An ethical workplace?

An ethical workplace making weapons with Depleted Uranium, which the United Nations Human Rights Commission listed 10 years ago as a weapon of mass destruction? Yes, there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after all, but they are produced in Tennessee.

Congressman Davis's website says of Aerojet that 'making armor-piercing 'one-shot one-kill' munitions for the military is the company's bread and butter.' An ethical workplace?

Davis' website says 'there's an armament-producing line worker behind every American soldier.' But are those workers informed about possible risks? Will there be 4,000 workers following 4,000 American soldiers into the ground?

This is not about defense, but wars of aggression that endanger us all. If you want safety, make peace.

This is not about jobs, but the military industrial complex against which Eisenhower warned. If you want jobs, end NAFTA.

This is not about justice, but about whether we will sit by as fascism slowly comes to the land of the free and the home of the brave. If you want justice, impeach Dick Cheney and George W. Bush.

From

Global Warming and Allergies

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 03:54:00 +0000

10-28-07, 10:50 am

EARTH TALK From the Editors of E/The Environmental Magazine

Dear EarthTalk: Is it true that global warming can exacerbate allergies? -- Alex Tibbetts, Seattle, WA

Global warming can make allergies worse simply because the major pollen producers that trigger allergic reactions thrive and flourish in warmer air. A recent report from the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) entitled “Sneezing and Wheezing: How Global Warming Could Increase Ragweed Allergies, Air Pollution and Asthma” details how ragweed, one of the most common allergens in the U.S., grows faster and for longer periods as air temperatures rise due to climate change.

Ragweed also thrives on direct exposure to carbon dioxide (CO2), so as we emit more of this chief greenhouse gas from our tailpipes and smokestacks, we are unwittingly also causing more allergy-aggravating pollen to be produced. According to Kim Knowlton of NRDC, the group’s analysis shows that “there is a clear interplay” between the onslaught of global warming and increasingly higher levels of ragweed pollen, especially in warmer urban areas already plagued with allergens.

“People living in some of the most populated regions of this country may be feeling the effects of global warming every allergy season,” says Knowlton. The NRDC report concludes that an increasing number of the 110 million Americans who live in areas with existing ragweed problems will suffer the consequences of global warming as their noses begin to run and their eyes begin to water. Major metropolitan areas in the U.S. likely to be most affected include Atlanta, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Los Angeles and Chicago, among other locales.

Public health statistics show that about 36 million Americans suffer from some form of seasonal allergy. While allergies can be annoying in their own right, they are also a main contributor to asthma and other serious respiratory problems, making them a serious health threat in their own right. Some 17 million Americans suffer from asthma, with well over half of them also sensitive to the allergens that can spark an asthma attack. Meanwhile, CO2 emissions also contribute to smog, another trigger for asthma. Thus global warming represents a double whammy for asthmatics with pre-existing allergies.

“Global warming—through both its components and by-products—is creating a perfect storm of sneezing and wheezing for allergy and asthma suffers in the U.S.,” says Gina Solomon, a senior scientist in NRDC’s health program. She adds that her group’s recent analysis “shows us that people throughout the U.S.—in the North, South, East and West—will be very personally affected by global warming, and we need pollution controls throughout the country to help offset this problem.”

According to NRDC, industrial and personal actions can help reduce increases in allergens and combat their effects. Federal, state and local governments can protect communities by reducing the sources of global warming pollution and by creating better resources for citizens in need of information about pollen levels in their areas. Individuals can reduce their own exposure to ragweed and other allergens by checking news outlets for daily pollen counts before venturing outside for long periods of time.

CONTACT: NRDC, “Sneezing and Wheezing,” www.nrdc.org/globalwarming/sneezing/contents.asp.

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

Marxism, Language, and the Laureate Who Wasn't

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 03:22:00 +0000

Editor's Note: Earlier this month author Doris Lessing, most well-known for her novel The Golden Notebook, won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In her honor, the New York Times saw fit to reprint an essay by Lessing originally published in the Times in 1992 titled 'Questions You Should Never Ask a Writer' and, in a nutshell, its central argument was 'that Communism debased language.'

Below we publish an interview with a contemporary of Lessing's, Phillip Bonosky. Bonosky is a contributing editor of Political Affairs. He is the author of two novels, Burning Valley and The Magic Fern, several short story collections, and a number of non-fiction books such as Afghanistan –Washington's Secret War. Bonosky is currently working on a novel set during the Spanish-American War and a biography of progressive artist Alice Neel.

PA: As a writer and as a Communist, your career flourished at a time when left-wing writers saw art and commitment as two sides of the same coin. What do you think Doris Lessing is trying to say now? What does she mean, when she talks about “debasing language”?

Phillip Bonosky: I have opinions, God knows, on language. This statement of Lessing’s is ridiculous. What Marxism did was to liberate language for millions of workers the whole world over, and still does to this day. Even those famous words, “Workers of the World Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains, but you have a world to win” – those words have been seared into the memories of millions since they were first uttered years ago, decades ago.

Then who can ever forget the liberating effect of Marx’s famous statement about the American situation, when he said “labor in white skin shall not be free while labor in black skin is branded.” That was the most farsighted, evocative understanding of the situation in the United States, even before the Civil War, that anybody had ever made. No American was ever had that depth of vision better into the situation of the working class and democracy in general in this country.

Marxism tried to put history and sociology on a scientific basis. After Marx, history, instead of being about the actions of powerful men, kings and whatnot, or even simply the product of happenstance, now involved ascertainable laws, which Marx was able to isolate and point out. If social events and social behavior could be put on a scientific basis, it meant that all the features involved in historical situations had to be defined very precisely, and words were needed that would fit these scientific needs. Very precise language was needed.

However, it did not mean that if you were a creative writer you were required in your poetry or fiction to climb on a soapbox and just declaim slogans. That was a characteristic of a certain kind of Marxism that Lessing is disparaging in her sophisticated way, and she is being rewarded for it. It so irritates me, and I have had to deal with this kind of thing for so long and in so many different ways that I just get worn out having to pick it up again. You want to sort of shrug it off and let events take their own course, which they certainly will.

Of course, you have to ask why she was given this award. It doesn’t seem to fit her, assuming that the Noble Prize follows any sort of standards at all, and that itself is very dubious. If you remember, some decades ago the Noble Prize was awarded to Boris Pasternak. What a commotion arose about that – so much so that the whole procedure of how prizes were awarded by the Nobel Committee was then exposed, and it was proved at the time that the book that was nominated, which was really the only book of Pasternak’s for which the Nobel Prize was awarded, Dr. Zhivago, was not even available to most members of the Nobel Committee to read. It turned out they had already made the decision to give him the prize for literature, before there was a version of the book in any language outside of Russian other than Italian. There was not even an English version at the time. It was so obviously a political action, that the commotion that arose affected the members of the committee to such an extent that they felt compelled a few years later to award the prize to Mikhail Sholokov, who was head and shoulders above anything above Pasternak, and certainly head and shoulders above the current winner of the Nobel Prize.

Everything is cloaked in irony these days. You know, Alfred Nobel made his fortune by inventing dynamite. So everybody who is award the Nobel Prize is the recipient of money from the invention of dynamite. They have to thank the makers of dynamite, which, of course, is used not only in a positive way, but also has long been an essential ingredient in killing people, too.

PA: Lessing also seems to be saying in this article that the Communist movement imposed its will on writers. What is your experience with that?

PB: Please excuse me if I become personal, but my first novel, which was published by the left, Burning Valley, completely violated those accusations. It was about the church, the Catholic Church. It was the story of a boy who was from the working class and an ardent Catholic; as a matter of fact he was an altar boy and a real believer in religion. Nevertheless, because of the circumstances he was in, he found himself at odds with some of the teachings of the church. Particularly, he found himself involved in a struggle between two priests who had two different points of view on what the church should be doing in the situation they were in. They were in a community of working-class, poor people. One of the priests had one idea about what the church should do, and the other had an upper-class view. They were class positions, both of them were. One was closer to the working class, and the other was completely aristocratic and from, in his terms, a superior point of view.

Nobody told me to write the book like that. As a matter of fact, from a formal point of view, that should have been impossible to do. What! A communist writes about this? The church was not attacked; it wasn’t condemned. I didn’t get on a soapbox. I let the events tell their own story, and that’s what I think the truth of the situation was. Let the truth speak for itself. But without Marxism, I couldn’t have seen it myself. I couldn’t have seen the struggle there and where it was going.

Doris Lessing, of course, would say that she had never read my book. Burning Valley was never reviewed in the press here or in England. None of my 10 published books have ever been reviewed in the press here. You could say, well it doesn’t exist, and of course it doesn’t exist as far as she and others are concerned, because she they have never heard of any of my works, although Burning Valley was translated widely in the socialist world.

For instance, in Russia there was an edition of 100,000. People here were astonished when I told them that. That would be a runaway bestseller here. When I raised that issue with the Russians, they said, no, it’s a rather common number with us. There was also an edition in Lithuania where my parents came from. There was also an edition in China, in Poland, in Czechoslovakia, and an edition in the GDR. I remember when I was traveling in the GDR and I was passing through customs, the officers there looked at my passport and said, “Bonosky, didn’t you write Burning Valley?” He had already read it in German, and there was a big discussion in the German press about it. So there was a literary life that existed for me, but not here in America. I am still unknown here.

PA: In other words, your book not only didn’t conform to some sort of rigid communist ideology, but because it didn’t conform to bourgeois thinking in the United States, it was completely ignored.

PB: Right, exactly.

PA: One might say that the opposite of what Doris Lessing is talking about happened to you, because it was capitalism in a sense that debased your words.

PB: She was also proclaiming that writers had to follow her formula or not be published at all. Do you remember the phrase they used to use, when they accused communists of putting artists in uniform? Aside from the fact that there came a time when, in reality, the artists were in uniform during the war, literally in uniform, I had no objection to that. I never had any objection to the phrase, “Art is a weapon.” And there are many books that are directly polemical, for instance, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. When Harriet Beecher Stowe met Lincoln – the book came out before the Civil War – Lincoln is supposed to have said to her, “So you’re the little lady that started this war?” It was very polemical. Another example is John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which directly attacked a social phenomenon, and by implication at least it implied what the solution should be. So I am very much on the side of books that move in a certain direction and support a cause. All I was and am against was doing it crudely, doing it badly, and forgetting that art is art and polemics are polemics, and that you need to keep them separate. Unless art can present life in all its contradictions, then you’re not talking about reality.

When I was in China some years ago, I got the title for my book about that country, Dragon Pink on Old White. It was taken from a phrase that they were using then at that time. They were modifying the white in their history and literature with a little pink. I said what does that mean? That’s when I learned that in the Orient white is a negative color and pink and red are positive colors. At that time, the Chines felt that they needed to review all of their past literature and modify the white, that is the slanders against the working class and the poor, with a little pink, with some Marxist understanding. This is what Marxism in the case of left-wing writers like myself did to. We went through the past and tried to correct what was wrong about it. For instance, we corrected white chauvinism, and literature was rife with slanders of Blacks. As a matter of fact, Blacks never won any kind of status in literature until the Marxists came on the scene.

There is another thing too. The working class didn’t seem to exist. I was a big reader and read everything and loved the things I read, but there was a day that came when I suddenly stopped and thought – I’ve been reading all these books and I like them, but you know what, there’s something wrong here. There’s something missing. And I answered my own question about what was missing? I was missing. By that I mean not me personally, but that my class was missing. I came from the working class, directly from the working class, and all my friends were from the working class. Everybody in the town of Duquesne, Pennsylvania was working class. We had one industry, steel, and we were all working class, but there was no working class in the literature. There were the poor, but their aim was to get out of poverty or get out of the working class into the middle class. I wanted to show that there were people who not only came from the working class, but also didn’t want to get out of the working class, because they had found, in the working class, all that they needed as an inspiration to live. That is where I found my own heroes, not in their struggle to get into the middle class but to make the working class better, to help the struggle, to win battles for the working class, not in order to be rewarded by becoming rich and becoming accepted.

If you watch CNN at 6 o’clock, there’s this fellow Dobbs. He has an hour, and all he talks about is the middle class – that’s all there is. What happened to the working class? Did it disappear? You know, in America the struggle still goes on. Not only do they want to eliminate the working class in reality, they already have eliminated it in their thinking. There is no working class. There are the poor but there is no working class. You know, in Europe they casually accept the working class as a fact, but here they won’t accept the working class that exists, because if they accepted the working class as a reality, implications would flow from that, which they are not ready to accept, of course.

Atlanta: HUD Civil Rights Investigation of AHA Continues

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 03:02:00 +0000

10-28-07, 9:54 am

(APN) ATLANTA – The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has officially processed two complaints made by resident association leaders, Diane Wright and Shirley Hightower, of Hollywood Courts and Bowen Homes public housing communities, respectively, according to documents concerning the investigations obtained by APN.

What was originally a joint complaint by the two resident leaders, both officers on the Resident Advisory Board (RAB), has been split into two separate complaints on behalf of each individual, APN has learned.

Wright’s complaint has its own case number and is called “Wright, Diane v Atlanta Housing Authority.” HUD prepared its own two-page summary of Wright’s complaint, according to a copy obtained by APN.

Additionally, each of the complaints is being investigated by two separate offices: both HUD’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity and the Georgia Commission on Equal Opportunity.

'Your complaint, alleging one or more discriminatory housing practices, was officially filed on 09/20/07 as a complaint under the Federal Fair Housing Law... Additionally, the complaint was filed under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964... that prohibits discrimination on the ground of race, color, or national origin in programs and activities receiving Federal financial assistance,' James Sutton, Regional Director of HUD FHEO, Region IV, wrote in a letter to Wright dated September 20, 2007.

The respondent, AHA director, Renee Glover, had the right to respond within 10 days, the letter says.

'Our responsibility under the law is to undertake an impartial investigation and, at the same time, encourage all sides to reach an agreement, where appropriate, through conciliation,” the letter says. “We will conduct an impartial investigation of all claims that the Fair Housing Act has been violated.'

Law requires the FHEO to complete the investigation within 100 days, the letter states.

'If the investigation indicates there is not evidence establishing jurisdiction, the case will be dismissed. At any point you can request that our staff assist you in conciliating (or settling) this complaint with the respondent(s),' the letter states.

'If the case is not resolved, we will complete our investigation and decide whether or not the evidence indicates that there has been a fair housing violation... The Department will issue a determination as to whether there is reasonable cause to believe a discriminatory housing practice has occurred,' the letter states.

'If our investigation indicates that there is reasonable cause to believe that an unlawful discriminatory housing practice has occurred, the Department must issue a charge... In either event, you will be notified in writing,' the letter states.

'If the determination is one of reasonable cause, the notification will advise you and the respondent(s) of your rights to choose, within 20 days, whether you wish to have the case heard by an Administrative Law Judge, or to have the matter referred for trial in the appropriate US District Court,' the letter states.

'Under federal law, even if the Department dismisses the complaint, you still have the right to bring an individual suit under the Federal Fair Housing Act,' the letter states.

A second letter to Wright dated September 24, 2007, states that under the Fair Housing Act, the complaint is being investigated by the Georgia Commission on Equal Opportunity (CEO).

The letter does not specify, but implies that this means a second investigation is occurring with the Georgia CEO, on top of the investigation under the HUD FHEO.

Wright says she has not spoken directly with HUD or the CEO since the complaint was filed, but that this is the understanding conveyed to her by her pro bono attorney, Lindsay Jones, of Emory University School of Law.

'They have their own separate process, but it [originally] was put into one package. They broke it up,' Wright told Atlanta Progressive News in an interview.

APN previously reported that the complaint was on behalf of the RAB Board, because Wright and Hightower’s names were at the top of the complaint, listing their leadership titles on the RAB Board: President and Treasurer, respectively.

'I asked him [Jones] if he did the complaint for all the communities, and he said yes,' Wright said.

However, Wright and Hightower stopped working together several weeks ago after they had personal disagreements and differences over strategy.

At one point, Jones notified Wright that she and Hightower would have their own individual complaints, Wright said.

The RAB Board still has an opportunity to file its own complaint, Wright said.

HUD has already told APN they will not comment an on ongoing investigation.

Wright had to send in to HUD a signed form attesting her complaint was true, which she has now sent in, she said. She also signed a release of information so Jones can speak with HUD on her behalf, she said.

From Atlanta Progressive News

--About the author: Matthew Cardinale is the News Editor for The Atlanta Progressive News and may be reached at