People Before Profit blog

Gurtong Peace Project: A South Sudanese Diaspora coalition for the promotion of peace and stability

Fri, 30 Sep 2005 23:50:00 +0000

9-30-05,7:48am

The Gurtong Peace Project seeks to establish a South Sudanese Diaspora coalition for the promotion of peace and stability among South Sudanese abroad as well as in Sudan itself. The website aims at providing information on cultural, social, political, humanitarian and other development issues.

It is to facilitate and encourage constructive discussions on issues of concern to the people of South Sudan and to link the members of the Diaspora in a spirit of reconciliation and sincere love for the homeland.

The project aims at bridging the gap between different cultures and allowing the Sudanese Diaspora to make a significant contribution to the search for unity and peace. Knowledge of the people living in South Sudan and respect for their cultural identity is a major objective of the Gurtong Peace Project.

Activities:

The Project is to:

*Create an information network on South Sudan for Sudanese in the Diaspora and to allow them to get in touch with and to learn about each other.

*Share any information about South Sudan. Inform about meetings and events held inside South Sudan or in the Diaspora.

*Provide a discussion-board for South Sudanese communities using the Internet facility. Strengthen or create links between the Diaspora and the people living inside the Sudan.

*Attract the interest of younger generations and to encourage them to express their views. Background:

Gurtong Peace Project is an independent, non-profit-making, community-based project, which aims at removing all ethnic, political or personal obstacles on the way to unity, peace and mutual respect among South Sudanese.

The project is, in its initial phases, funded by the Swiss Federal Department for Conflict Resolution of Foreign Affairs. Its Co-ordinator is Mr. Napoleon Adok Gai, c/o Africa Educational Trust (AET).

Founder:

The project was defined and developed by Napoleon Adok Gai, from Yirol County in the South Sudan.

Napoleon worked previously in South Sudan and in Kenya for various international organisations including ICRC, World Vision International and most recently UNICEF before leaving for further studies in the UK.

While in the UK, Napoleon got inspired by discussions with a number of South Sudanese living in different parts of Europe and who are mostly cut off from the events in the Sudan. Principles:

The Gurtong website is opened to South Sudanese and all sincere friends of South Sudan. It belongs to persons who are seriously devoted to the promotion of unity and peace among South Sudanese.

The website will not be opened to people who lack respect for opinions of others and who aim to spread hatred. The editor will deny all such visitors access to the website.

Lessons Learned from Formation of the Government of National Unity (GONU) in Sudan

Fri, 30 Sep 2005 23:36:00 +0000

9-30-05,7:30am

The formation of the Government of National Unity (GONU) in Sudan on 20 September 2005 after several weeks of heated debates between National Congress Party (NCP) and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement(SPLM) have revealed four important lessons which the SPLM leadership must carefully study and take some actions on:

Firstly, the debate over who should take the ministry of energy and mining has sidelined the central role of the SPLM as the guardian of the Sudan’s transformation and the guarantor of the Southern Sudanese rights in a united transformed Sudan. The SPLM’s ideological and philosophical tenants of change and transformation, from decadent corrupt old Sudan, where leadership’s main objective is to accumulate wealth, manipulate poor people’s sentiments in the name of religion and Arab chauvinism, using political Islam as a means to rule the country, to a Sudan where the ordinary Sudanese is the main focus of the government, these important tenants were blurred by the Energy and Mining politics.

The NCP leadership was and is aware that the oil is in the South and knew that the SPLM has the right to be allocated the ministry. What the NCP had in it side was time. It knew that the SPLM needs to gain time, and that was what the NCP used against it. Throughout the negotiations over the Energy Ministry, the SPLM was made to concentrate on the South, so that its real potential as the main political catalyst for the transformation of the Sudan in the country could be watered down. The SPLM is seen by Sudanese to be the vehicle for change and the instrument of change in the country. The fact that the NCP managed to make the SPLM looked during the negotiation as a local Southern party, was a big blow to the SPLM as a national progressive movement. The SPLM must take immediate remedial actions to correct that situation. One way to do so would be become directly involved in peace negotiations with Darfurians and Easterners and make sure that their shares in power are secured. The New Sudan ideology was never about distribution of positions or power, it was about equality and just distribution of these positions, but most importantly about bringing change to the whole country where each Sudanese feels that truly she/she is a Sudanese who deserves a government, for which she/he will be proud of. The SPLM as the guardian of change in the country, there is no doubt was hard hit by the death of Dr.John Garang.

However, the unity and the collective approach which the new SPLM leadership had shown during the past month and half, was so strong that, had its leadership concentrated on its national agenda, by not only negotiating on the behalf of the South, but of all the progressive political forces in the country, it would have won more substantial positions, not only for the South, but even for the Darfurians, the Easterners and the NDA as its natural allies. What Al-Beshir-Taha alliance did, was to show the SPLM that the NCP is the main power broker in the country, and that it is the NCP that offer positions, and therefore, any talk of power and wealth sharing, should be determined, not by the provisions of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), but by new negotiations with the NCP. The SPLM has therefore committed itself to an open ended path to continuous negotiations over government positions, commissions and financial rows that will certainly follow. It therefore does not make sense that the SPLM allowed the NCP take ministries of defence, interior, finance, energy and mining and Justice, because it’s simply means, the provisions over power and wealth sharing in the CPA have been trashed. It also means that the provision that unity should be made attractive to Southerners during the interim period, will no longer have meaning, not only to Southerners, but also to other political groups in the country who feel that the CPA is a good document that could be applied to their situations. Even if the SPLM leadership was convinced that the NCP was playing with time, knowing that it is the SPLM that will bring back hundred of thousands of returnees and displaced persons into the South and that it is the SPLM that will need to deliver to the people of the South essential services, and therefore the SPLM should have not wasted time negotiating positions with people who have no respect to agreements, even if the above factors are genuine as they were, there is no reason why the SPLM should have given up all the most important economic and political positions to the NCP, thus creating the impression that every time a new round of negotiations comes, and there will be many of them, the SPLM will give in because the NCP is not interested in implementing the CPA..

Secondly, the formation of the government of national unity has also revealed that while the decision making process within the SPLM leadership has improved compared to what it used to be, where very few were the core of the decision making process, the manner in which positions were announced, without the knowledge of 80% of those who were appointed, has revealed that something seriously needs to be revised in that process. Some members of the movement were allocated positions, which, if they were informed, might not have accepted, or if given the choice, would have declined them, because those positions did not fit well with their experiences. While the SPLM line up is by and large representative, regionally and ethnically, the nature of the line up, especially its technical aspects, have lots to be desired.

The SPLM leadership should make it VERY clear that those of its members, who are appointed in Government of National Unity, are given assignments to represent the movement not themselves. This could be done in two ways: recalling all those who are appointed in GONU to Juba, for a week of political briefing, where the whole leadership, plus the Southern Assembly give the SPLM ministers in GONU a code of conduct, advise them to work as a team, rather than as individuals. The SPLM leadership may as well ask its representatives in GONU to report every two months to Juba for a briefing. If this is not done, then it will be like sending these men and women to exile, where each of them within the next year or so, will find himself, or herself alone, cornered by NCP petrodollar politics, and who knows what next.

Some of the SPLM members in GONU have protested, because they felt that they deserve higher positions than the ones they have been appointed to. Others strongly felt that the communities and the nationalities they come from were allocated very junior positions, compared to their real political and numerical sizes. Others complained that some individual members of the Movement were allocated senior positions in GONU, which should have been allocated to more senior members, who joined the Movement earlier. One of the explanations given by some members of the SPLM leadership to answer some of these complains, was that some of these senior SPLM members do not want to work in the north. The question then is, if these members have already informed the leadership, directly or indirectly, of their intention not to work in the north, then why allocate to them positions in the north? These issues should be carefully studied by the leadership, and if the SPLM leadership has not already allocated positions in the government of Southern Sudan and in governments of states, it has to widen its consultations, inform those it intends to deploy.

Most importantly, those who are currently advising the SPLM leadership should open their eyes and ears widely, because the SPLM-NCP partnership suppose to avoid focus on distribution of positions, and concentrate on creating a true change in the lives of the people of Sudan and the South in particular. Giving the impression that the sole aim of the SPLM-NCP partnership is to buy people loyalty with positions, will definitely defeat the purpose of the SPLM/A struggle, for which millions have died, and other millions waiting to go home and find real changes there, when they go back. This is the real challenge for the SPLM leadership.

Thirdly, the lesson which the SPLM should learn from the politics of the formation of the GONU is that whenever a leadership of an organisation preoccupies itself with procedures and take longer times negotiating political issues, the other parts of the organisation, tend to paralyze. This is always the case in centralised system, where members of the movement waiting in anticipation of getting orders and do not participate in decision making. The SPLM leadership should start to divide roles among its members. And it has lots of qualified people to take up such roles, only if the leadership and its advisors look around them and spread the nets wider beyond their immediate surroundings.

Indeed, it was impressive that once it became clear that the NCP was buying time, the SPLM leadership correctly decided to speed up the process of formation of constitutional structures in the South. It could have been done faster and better. When the SPLM and NCP where busy negotiating positions, the NCP was busy emptying the treasuries of national economy and enriching its cronies and potential allies. The SPLM should have appointed a shadow caretaking government of its own, during the pre-interim period to work with the NCP. The SPLM did appoint one person to deal with NCP as a contact person; it should have appointed a representative in every ministry in central government to monitor the activities there. In fact, the NCP care-taking government had done so many things during the past six months that it would have not done, even when it was still a government.

During the negotiations, the NCP was busy signing contracts, cementing its international relations and indeed was busy emptying the Ministry of Foreign affairs from its staff, deploying them to all corners of the world, in anticipation that the SPLM will find all the embassies and consulates full with manpower, hence leaving no room for the new minister to employ Southerners and members from the other marginalised areas.

The SPLM leadership should therefore come up with a new mechanism, through which a selected dedicated group of its members are allocated responsibilities, to monitor every aspects of the CPA. Each of these members should be assigned specific tasks, which relates to the implementation of the peace agreement, so that when any new round of negotiations with the NCP commences, that group will have worked out all the modalities, so that time is not spent on small and minor things which should be delegated to technocrats within the movement.

Fourthly, the formation of the National government has revealed that the SPLM needs to strengthen its information and international affairs units. The SPLM should inform on daily basis the international community and African countries that guaranteed and witnessed the peace agreement about the process of implementation of the peace agreement. The SPLM diplomats should be assigned specific tasks to keep the world informed about the delays the NCP creates on daily basis. The Sudan TV and Radio were definitely supportive of the NCP position on the negotiations over the positions of GONU and the printed media was bias, to the extent of disinformation. International community representatives in Khartoum were daily given the impression that the Energy and Mining fiasco was under control and that it was going to be allocated to the SPLM.

The disinformation campaign was so well organised that each senior member of the NCP has played his role very well. Only Al-Beshir and Taha were not allowed to give any statements over the issue, except when they were cornered by the independent media, otherwise they avoided to give interviews. The impression was given in the media that the chief negotiators from NCP were Nafie and Khalifa, the reality was that Taha was the main reference point from the government side. Everybody else who is who in NCP was asked to play its role in the disinformation campaign.

As a result, important issues such as peace in Darfur, the frozen negotiations in East and the drafting of the constitution of Southern Sudan were sidelined in the media for almost a month and half. The SPLM has always been very weak in its information system. For the time being, the SPLM will need to collaborate with the existing Southern private newspapers and to start efforts towards the establishment of a national TV and Radio in Juba. Such a project would not need lots of thinking since the South is endowed with experienced and well trained journalists and technicians. Engineers could be recruited from aboard to run the stations, until such time the Southern technicians are trained. A call from President Salva Kiir and his Deputy Dr. Riek Machar to the talented Southern journalists to assemble in Juba to plan for the establishment of TV and Radio stations that would cover the whole Sudan, will be sufficient.

These are serious lessons to be learned by the SPLM leadership, but also are warnings for difficult times ahead. But what are the real political challenges for Post-John Garang SPLM leadership? This will be the topic for the next reflections.

* John Yoh teaches African and international politics, Department of Political Sciences at the University of South Africa in Pretoria.

Peaceful Assault on the Epicenter of Evil

Fri, 30 Sep 2005 06:08:00 +0000

9-29-05,14:17pm

“The White House and the Pentagon look so innocuous, yet behind their innocent facades lurk sinister forces which have unleashed much misery and suffering upon the world,” I thought as I scrutinized each of them armed with an insight gleaned from many hours of study.

I arrived home on Sunday from the peace and social justice rally in Washington DC and began reflecting. As my mind sifted through the barrage of information which came at me over the course of the weekend, and the information I absorbed while reading on the plane, I began to reach some conclusions and to connect some dots.

Your Master is Calling….

My first conclusion was that their weak coverage of an event of this magnitude deepened my belief that the mainstream media is merely an instrument of its corporate masters and of the obscenely corrupt US government. The Washington Post under-estimated the number of people at the demonstration and provided relatively limited coverage. The Washington Times relegated their coverage to the bottom of the front page and grossly exaggerated the impact of the pro-Bush counter-demonstrators. And this was an event that happened in their city! I felt even more disgusted by The Kansas City Star article which awaited me when I returned home. It consisted of about ten short paragraphs on paged two of the front page section. They included one small photograph. Beyond the print media, I struggled to find minor mention of the event on television news. Obviously these 'sacred purveyors of the truth' and members of the Fourth Estate determined that the best way to frame this political issue was to minimize the fact that hundreds of thousands of people descended upon Washington DC to protest the illegal US occupation of Iraq and to demand social justice. The mainstream press could not summon the courage to provide a realistic amount of coverage to a significant challenge to their corporate masters and the Bush regime.

Perspective of a Participant

I was there for the march on 9/24. Based on what I observed and experienced, the Washington DC police chief's estimate of 150,000 people was extremely low. My wife and I marched at the end of the procession, which followed a 1.4 mile course, including a pass in front of the White House. We carried our mock coffin draped with an American flag. (Ours was one of about 150 other mock coffins which enabled the American public to finally see at least see a representation of the Americans who have died in Iraq). It took us six hours to complete the march. We moved quite slowly due the number of people joining the procession along the way. The people leading the march actually got to the White House before we even started to move. Along the route, I saw throngs of thousands of supporters lining the streets. The Ellipse, the area surrounding the Washington Monument, and several adjacent parks were filled with demonstrators, before, during and after the march. ANSWER, one of the demonstration's organizers, estimated that there were 300,000 participants. Truthout.org put the number closer to 500,000. Based on what I witnessed, I estimate the number fell somewhere between the two.

As for counter-protestors, I saw a mere handful. To state there were over two hundred would be a very generous estimate. Yet ironically, their signs (and shouted rhetoric) indicated that they were 'the majority'. I struggled to determine how they arrived at that conclusion. On 9/25, the pro-Bush, pro-war faction staged their own demonstration in DC, which involved about 400 people. It boggles the mind contemplating how they could truly believe themselves to be in the majority.

A diverse crowd, which included the elderly, the disabled, minorities, military veterans, families of military personnel in Iraq, social activists, Methodists, Quakers, Buddhists, people of Middle Eastern descent, and many other groups comprised the multitude on Saturday. Joan Baez, Cindy Sheehan, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and two Congresswomen spoke and marched. On the flight home, I met Congressman Emanuel Cleaver, who represents a district in Kansas City. He told me that he had not participated in the demonstration, but that he was part of an anti-war coalition in Congress. A broad spectrum of Americans want peace and social justice, and are eager to see Bush and the corrupt who dominate the US government out of office.

One of the articles I read in the mainstream media stated that there were no police wearing riot gear at the demonstration. I beg to differ. I counted at least seven men wearing black pants, white, generic-looking shirts with what appeared to be cloth gold badges stitched to them, and military boots. They each had riot helmets with visors, riot shields which were marked 'Police' (yet their uniforms bore virtually no resemblance to those of the DC police), and they were equipped with truncheons. As I marched by them, I wondered if they were some of the Blackwater security people, hired mercenaries whom the Bush administration has used in Iraq and now in New Orleans.

Despite his absence, Bush's fortress was heavily defended by police on the street and by snipers on the roof of the White House and surrounding buildings. Bush exhibited his usual spinelessness. He spent part of the day in Colorado, where he would not have to face the hundreds of thousands of his constituency who were calling for peace, social justice and his impeachment. He was also well out of potential harm from Hurricane Rita. Later in the day he did find the nerve to travel to San Antonio, but even there he was still well out of harm's way.

Before the march began, I spoke with a woman with the Friends Committee on National Legislation and signed a petition to lobby members of Congress to pass a resolution for the US military to withdraw from Iraq. This group is not asking for a specific time-table. The Friends Committee simply wants a commitment that our multi-trillion dollar war machine will leave Iraq once the situation there has stabilized. I agree with those who have stated that it would be irresponsible for the US to pull out of Iraq immediately and leave the country in a chaos that our military industrial complex created. However, Iraq is a sovereign nation, and at some point in the not too distant future, the US needs to withdraw. I gladly carried a sign on behalf of this Quaker organization as I bore my half of the mock coffin adorned with the American flag.

As we passed the US Treasury a man riding a bicycle was using a portable PA system. What was his message?

“Pay no attention to this building. It is the treasury. It is empty. It has been looted.”

With the volume of money flowing into the coffers of corporations with incestuous ties to the Bush regime and a $7.5 trillion deficit, it would be difficult to dispute his contention.

Saturday's march for peace and social justice and against corporate dominance, imperialism and tyranny was powerful for several reasons. The sheer number of 300,000 who participated in the demonstration reveals that many in the United States have made al wathbah, or 'the leap'. In Bush in Babylon,Tariq Ali wrote about “the leap” of mass consciousness the Iraqi people made in 1948 as they realized that their puppet leaders sold out their interests to British imperialists. Slowly, many Americans are overcoming the lies they have been 'programmed' to believe since they were able to fashion conscious, coherent thoughts. While the 300,000 demonstrators represent a small minority of the US population, Bush's abysmal approval rating provides evidence that the 300,000 were but a fraction of those in the US ready to dissent against the perverse regime 'leading' the nation. Ali called the British proxies who ruled Iraq during the early and mid Twentieth Century 'An Oligarchy of Racketeers'. America's lackeys in the newly formed Iraqi government are more than capable of assuming that 'glorious' mantle.

Speakers at the rally called for increased rights for blacks, women, gays, Hispanics, and other minorities. They decried the US military's use of torture and indefinite imprisonment of suspected 'terrorists' with no legitimate trial. They decried the excessive power of US corporations here and abroad, and called for renewed government restraints to squelch their excesses and abuses. Several made strident demands to end the blatant racism and US government neglect of the poor highlighted by events in Katrina. They called for support of Hugo Chavez and Castro. Bush may not have been listening, but his constituents were talking to him in large numbers, and will continue to do so. If he and the US aristocracy continue to ignore the will of We the People, things will not end well for them. In the non-violent tradition of Martin Luther King and Gandhi, We the People will take our government back from the plutocracy. The wealthiest nation in the world has moral obligations to be a world leader (rather than a bully) and to care for its poor, and if the incumbent administration is not willing to fulfill these obligations, it needs to be replaced.

Frequently throughout the march, I heard and read the slogan 'power of the people'. The unfortunate reality is that for now, the ultimate power in the US rests in the hands of a select few aristocrats, and has in varying degrees since our nation's founding. I saw ample evidence of that fact as my wife and I toured the Smithsonian’s American History Museum the day before the march. The decadence in which many of the presidents and first ladies engaged was truly disgusting to see. I saw the outrageously expensive clothing, china, jewelry, art, and White House furnishings and realized that I was witnessing evidence that the US is as much an aristocracy as the monarchy from which our founding fathers severed themselves. Further fueling my nausea, I saw that Barbara and Laura Bush were enshrined in the section of First Ladies who have made significant contributions to social justice in the United States. The Bush wives honored alongside Eleanor Roosevelt, a giant in the pantheon of those who have advanced social justice? The Smithsonian curators have a very sick sense of humor.

Mr. Bush, good luck selling your fairy tale of democracy and equality to the victims of Katrina, to many others in America, and to the rest of the world. Your criminal neglect of New Orleans and the poor in general, your lies, your theft of the 2000 election, your numerous violations of the public trust, your cronyism leading to incompetents like Michael Brown causing thousands to suffer or die, and your war profiteering combine to make you the biggest felon to serve as President of the United States (Note to Bush: as an 'elected' official, you are merely a public servant, not a monarch. You belong in one of the many penitentiaries which are a part of the prison industrial complex).

So What?

In skimming my 120 emails I received while I was away for the weekend, I discovered that ANSWER, one of the demonstration’s organizers, has apparently been accused of being Maoist Communists who are virulently anti-US and who advocate supporting any group which opposes the US government (i.e. Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Khmer Rouge). My response to that is that I do not care. United for Peace also sponsored the event, and to my knowledge, they have not been targeted as “anti-American”. I am not a member of either group and regardless of how extreme their positions may be, this event served a valuable purpose. It demonstrated the strength of the movement in the United States for peace and social justice, and the depth of the desire amongst Americans to remove the avaricious, tyrannical, and criminal Bush regime from power.

“Terrorism” Cuts Both Ways and Imperialist Acts Have Consequences

Going out on a limb (as I usually do), I am going to state that while I do not condone terrorism (which I am defining as the act of killing innocent civilians to achieve a political purpose), I understand the viewpoint of some of the groups whom the US mainstream media and the Bush regime have labeled as terrorists. Bush and his ilk, and many of their predecessors (including Clinton via Kosovo, Bush I via Iraq, Reagan via Central America, and Nixon and Johnson via Vietnam.) have engaged in the most lethal state terrorism imaginable, killing millions they label (and labeled) as 'collateral damage'. The US government also has a nasty habit of supporting ruthless dictators (when they support US corporate interests) who kill tens of thousands of their own people. I do not support violent acts committed by either side, but the US government is no nobler than those they have labeled as 'terrorists” because they have dared to resist US supremacy by fighting back.

On the plane trip home from DC, I started reading Tariq Ali's Bush in Babylon: the Recolonization of Iraq, and started to see the Arab point of view more clearly. I discovered that Iraq is a nation/region which has been subservient to foreign powers in some fashion since the 13th Century. Coupling the predatory intentions of the US government with Iraq’s history, I can fully appreciate the front cover picture on Ali's book which shows an Iraqi child urinating on one of his US occupiers. To the Iraqis, the US is another in a long line of tyrants, no better than the British, Turks, or their predecessors.

The US is attempting to implement 'democracy-at gun-point” in a nation embroiled with ethnic and religious tensions. The Iraqi people know why the US government is killing their people and destroying their cities, which makes their resistance quite logical. They realize that a cruel and greedy imperialist government needed to assert its military might on what they anticipated would be a weak target so it could begin implementing the Bush Doctrine and the Project for the New American Century. Halliburton, Bechtel, Lockheed Martin, and many other cogs in the military industrial complex were itching to see their profits skyrocket, and Iraq appeared to be a ripe plum for the picking. Most importantly, oil was too valuable of a commodity for a self-respecting Twenty-First Century world power bent on global domination to leave in the hands of 'mere Arabs'. Why wouldn’t the Iraqis feel enraged and resist invaders, plunderers, and thieves?

US troops in Iraq number over 140,000. The occupation started in March, 2003. The Bush tyranny continues to refuse to commit to an eventual withdrawal of US forces. Bush and his minions lied to Congress to launch the invasion, defied the UN and international law, and, according to John Pike of GlobalSecurities.org, are establishing 12 of what the Pentagon propagandists call 'enduring bases' in Iraq. To translate from “Pentagonese” to English, an “enduring base” is a permanent base. Despite the hollow propaganda of spreading freedom and liberty, the US government's actions smack of those of a tyrant intent on colonizing the sovereign nation of Iraq.

Your True Colors are Showing

The disguise is slipping as the US government has slaughtered tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians. Hurricane Katrina revealed the hypocrisy behind their “noble cause” of spreading freedom and liberty. Those abstract concepts exist in the US on a very limited basis. The US government has been, and is increasingly dominated by a select few plutocrats and aristocrats who are groomed for public office from birth. The elites of America place their carefully prepared candidates before an American voting public rendered apathetic by the mainstream media and years of government corruption. The Democratic/Republican Duopoly ensures that only two candidates have a real chance of winning public office in virtually every election, and each candidate is beholden to corporations and the US aristocracy. Sometimes decent people sneak into Congress and the Judiciary, but there are few real choices for middle and working class Americans, particularly when one factors in the stolen Presidential election of 2000. Jimmy Carter, one of the few former Presidents known for his honesty, recently publicly stated his certainty that Gore won the 2000 election.

For more, click on: http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Carter_says_Gore_won_2000_el_0922.html

The flood-waters of Katrina unmasked the depraved engineers of the runaway train called the United States. Bush, Rove, Rumsfeld and Cheney have been exposed to the world as malevolent profit seekers who regard humanity simply as a means to enhance their wealth and power. I need only look at the T-shirt I bought at the march on Saturday as a reminder. My shirt is emblazoned with a picture of a suffering, elderly Black American woman in New Orleans who has bundled herself in the American flag for warmth. Bush and his war-mongers have perverted the meaning of a once sacred symbol of the ideals of a true republic to one of hatred, criminality, brutality, and imperialism. I hope it served her well as a blanket. Some members of Congress want a Constitutional amendment to prevent flag desecration. Too late! The criminal acts of the Bush administration have already grossly defiled the American flag.

Resisting the Path of Violence

Many readers have emailed me with their opinions that non-violent movements are ineffective. I disagree. While non-violent movements generally involve significantly more time and will-power than violent revolutions, they can be effective. I cite the examples of Martin Luther King, whose peaceful movement significantly advanced civil rights in the US and of Gandhi’s non-violent revolution, which led to India’s freedom from its imperial oppressor, Great Britain.

For more evidence on the efficacy of non-violent movements or Velvet Revolutions, see Timothy Garton Ash’s article about the bloodless rebellions which brought Communist tyranny to an end in Eastern Europe. He makes a very convincing argument against armed rebellion:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1560394,00.html

What Are Some Potential Aspects of a Velvet Revolution in the US?

1. If enough Americans become conscious to the inhumanity of our leaders and join a non-violent movement comprised of the poor, the working class, the middle class, minorities, intellectuals, those in the government who are not a part of the corruption, and artists, sheer numbers of people demanding change could overwhelm the ruling plutocracy, who are clearly a numerical minority.

2. We the People need to form a third political party of the people which will have the support of enough Americans that it can rival the corporate-controlled Democrats and Republicans. This party will need to base its principles on the needs and desires of the common people rather than on those of corporations and the elite.

3. Unions need to fight to regain the strength they enjoyed during the Twentieth Century. This will unite workers and restore their power in negotiating with giant corporations. Despite what they would have America's citizens believe, corporations are not 'kinder and gentler' entities with the interests of their workers and customers at heart. They are merely wolves who have donned sheep’s clothing to make it appear so. They are motivated by profit and the fear of lawsuits. The will of the people imposed through organized labor needs to motivate corporations to take a deeper interest in the welfare of employees and customers.

4. We the People need to push for passage of the ERA and an equal rights amendment for gays.

5. We need to work for permanent implementation of the Voting Rights Act.

6. Writers with a social conscience need to continue to publish books and essays advocating social justice, spreading truth, and dissenting against our corrupt oligarchy by any means we can find.

7. Christian Churches need to spend less time and money squabbling over seemingly eternal and irresolvable issues like abortion and focus their efforts on demanding the social justice Jesus Christ would have insisted upon.

8. Educators need to stop teaching the white-washed history of the United States, which virtually ignores the genocide of Native Americans, barely scratches the surface of the depth of the cruelty and immorality of slavery, maintains silence on the topic of the American apartheid system which Katrina brought into the spot-light, and which glorifies an imperialistic, war-mongering government. It is incumbent upon educators to teach their students the truth about America, past and present.

9. We the People need to boycott major corporations like Wal-mart and McDonalds as frequently as possible by shopping at local businesses owned by individual entrepreneurs. Hit the insatiably greedy corporatacracy where it hurts them the most: in their wallets. My wife and I have not spent a penny at Wal-Mart or McDonald’s for over a year.

10. Progressive taxes on the rich and on corporations need to be increased while regressive taxes on the poor and working class need to be decreased to move the US toward a society with a more equitable distribution of wealth.

11. The US government spends $600 billion per year on defense, including funding for the Iraqi Occupation and money for ancillary functions. It is time to truly bring the troops home from Iraq (over a period of time to allow stabilization to occur) and from the 700 military bases in over 56 countries around the world. We will save $64 billion over twenty years by closing 33 domestic bases under Donald Rumsfeld's plan. Imagine the money we would save (besides the $5 billion per month from ending the occupation of Iraq) in closing 700 bases. To my knowledge, there are no foreign military bases on US soil. If We the People are intent upon retooling the US into a nation focused on the needs of its people with enough military simply to defend our nation rather than enough to dominate the world, it is time to remove the US military from foreign soil. Removing US military bases from their nations is one of the legitimate demands of those the US government has labeled as “terrorists”.

12. The US needs to relegate the notion of repealing the estate taxed to the dustbin of history, where it belongs. Eliminating the estate tax would further ensure the perpetuation of the American Aristocracy and virtually eradicate the already extremely slim chance that a poor American can realize the Horatio Alger dream.

13. We 'Commoners' need to demand a system of national health care (or implement it once our third political party has become a power capable of rivaling the existing Duopoly). The US holds the shameful distinction of being the only industrialized nation without a guarantee of healthcare to each of its citizens. What a dubious distinction for the wealthiest nation in the world! With money derived from cuts in defense spending and increased taxes on the wealthy and corporations, the US could readily implement a national health care system comprised of a synthesis of the best features of the systems of other nations. To make the system affordable, those Americans whose income exceeded a particular thresh-hold would pay premiums based on a percentage of their income.

14. We need to demand that the US government cut Israel’s umbilical cord. Israelis have received more than enough money and weapons from the US to stand on their own. US support of Israel, which, like its benefactor, often engages in state terrorism and has committed acts of genocide against the Palestinians, continues to infuriate Arabs throughout the Middle East. The US has a moral obligation to let Israel fend for itself and to see to the establishment of a legitimate homeland for the Palestinians. There is also the pragmatic consideration that as long as the US supports Israel’s abuse of the Palestinians, it will continue to feed the rage of many Arabs.

15. We the People need to find and elect a populist leader like Hugo Chavez, who will place the needs of the poor over the desires of the wealthy elite.

16. The US government needs to respect international law, treaties, human rights, and the autonomy of sovereign nations, and to participate fairly in the UN.

17. The public education system needs to be restructured in such a way that students across the nation attend schools with comparable facilities, teachers, and textbooks.

18. Americans with a social conscience need to insist the US pass and enforce restrictions on corporations to protect the environment. Ending the charade that global warming is a hoax and signing the Kyoto Treaty would be a tremendous start.

19. Besides the creation of a powerful political party, boycotts, labor strikes, marches, providing better education to all American children, dissident writing, staying informed, demanding accountability of public officials through the avenues which are still available, joining groups advocating civil rights and humanity, We the People have another non-violent weapon at our disposal. When it is warranted, civil disobedience is a powerful tool to evoke change. For example, while conscription is not yet a reality, if I am confronted with a call from the US government to participate in one of their imperialist conquests, I will follow the fine example of Kevin Benderman and refuse, even if it means prison. If enough people engage in civil disobedience, the plutocracy will not have the capacity to punish all of us, and will lack the manpower to grease the wheels of their money-making machines.

The rally and protest on 9/24 was simply a high water mark for a movement which has steadily been gaining momentum over the last few years. As one of the participants shouted to the group:

“Don’t let this end today. This is only a beginning. When you leave here, continue what we started today!”

While my brief outline of a velvet revolution is not comprehensive and represents a simple sketch which would require a great deal more study and development, it presents a framework of viable alternatives with which to counter the agenda of the elitist and hegemonist regime which some Americans still believe is a democracy. With the will, commitment, and wide participation of We the People in a non-violent, velvet revolution, the US can become a nation with a soul rather than the hollow, inhumane, gluttonous, and bellicose entity it is now. The ugly face of America represents a minority of its populace. It is time for the majority to impose their will and show the world that the US is a nation capable of engaging in truly noble causes.

Jason Miller is a 38 year old activist writer with a degree in liberal arts. He works in the transportation industry, and is a husband and a father to three boys. His affiliations include Amnesty International, the ACLU and the Americans United for Separation of Church and State. He welcomes responses ator comments on his blog at

BRIDGES: News on Cuba and Latin America

Fri, 30 Sep 2005 01:58:00 +0000

9-29-05,9:48am

Fidel Castro Meets North Korean Parliament Leader

Havana, Sep 28 -Cuban President Fidel Castro met with Yang Hyong Sop, vice-president of the Democratic People´s Republic of Korea´s Parliament, in a fraternal and friendly atmosphere, Granma newspaper reports Wednesday. In the meeting held Tuesday afternoon, Fidel Castro and the Asian delegation exchanged information on each nation´s current situation, as well as tackled important international issues. The parties reasserted, after 45 years since establishment of diplomatic relations, ties of friendship and solidarity between the two governments, parties and peoples. The North Korean visitor passed on his country´s interest of strengthening links between the two parties and governments, as well as boosting trade on the basis of mutual benefit.

North-South Meet to Reject the Foreign Debt

Havana, Sep 28 -Twenty years after Cuban President Fidel Castro drew attention to the impossibility for Third World countries to pay the foreign debt, the North-South Resistance and Alternatives to the Foreign Debt Conference began meeting Wednesday.

More than 300 delegates from Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa are meeting in Havana to take up the battle of the foreign debt that, far from lessening, has augmented, and they will likewise confront the challenges to humanity that are greater given the North's intention to dominate the future of Third World peoples. Nobel Peace Prizewinner Adolfo Perez Esquivel told Prensa Latina that this is the moment to denounce these problems and strengthen global actions, and that the forum is the place to demand that governments suit their practice to their words, including leftwing governments, because the foreign debt payments sit on the backs of the people.

South African FM Holds Official Talks in Cuba

Havana, Sep 28 - South Africa´s Foreign Minister Nkosazana C. Dlamini Zuma started Wednesday in this capital official talks with Cuban top-level leaders, with the aim to strengthen fraternal ties and review bilateral political and cooperation relations. She is visiting the island on an invitation of Cuba´s Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque, who was the first Cuban top official to meet her. Dlamini Zuma leads a high-ranking delegation to the 4th Session of the Cuba-South Africa Joint Intergovernmental Commission, which will discuss expanding cooperation on several fields, including health and education.

Ricardo Alarcon Attends Parliamentary Forum in Spain

Madrid, Sep 28 -President of the Cuban National Assembly of People's Power, Ricardo Alarcon, arrived in Madrid Wednesday to attend the First Ibero-American Parliamentary Forum, which seeks to revitalize the Ibero-American Summits. Alarcon was welcomed at the airport by Cuban Ambassador to Madrid Alberto Velazco and will go to Bilbao where the prince and princess of Asturias will inaugurate the event tomorrow. The host legislator, Spanish Senate President Javier Rojo, announced that Parliament presidents would discussed Ibero-America's role in the world, strengthening institutions, cooperation in development, and economic growth.

Cuba Slams US Decision to Harbor Terrorist Posada

Havana, Sep 28 -The decision of an immigration judge in Texas to grant shelter in the US to Cuban-born terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, mastermind of a mid-air bombing of a commercial plane that killed 73 people, is an infamous judicial call, Cuba says. Under the headline 'Infamous Judicial Decision: Posada under the Impire´s Protection,' Granma daily recalls Wednesday that immigration judge William Abbott chose Tuesday not to deport Posada Carriles neither to Venezuela nor Cuba. Abbott ruled that the notorious criminal remained in custody of the Immigration Customs Enforcement, and granted 90 days for the US to find a country willing to shelter Posada Carriles. He also gave the attorney one month to appeal.

Cuban Choir Walks Away with Argentine Festival Awards

Buenos Aires, Sep 28- Cuban Schola Cantorum Coralina choir conquered the audience and the jury, and garnered all the awards in the 7th International Trelew Choir Competition in Argentina´s southern Chubut Province. The prestigious choral group, conducted by Alina Orraca, won First Prize in Category A of the competition (mixed choirs) as well as the Audience Award. La Nacion daily, one of the country´s major newspapers, remarked that the ovation received was 'the most irrefutable verdict for the apotheosis of the Cuban Schola Cantorum Coralina´s singing, led by that musical genius called Alina Orraca.' Not only did they win those awards, but also the top prize for Best Interpretation of Imposed Work, with Ire a Santiago, and the Award by Edigio Feruglio Paleontological Museum, which consists of a replica of the head of a 225-million-year-old dinosaur from the Triassic Era found in that province.

NEWS --LATIN AMERICA-- NEWS

Nicaraguan President Objects to Immunity Withdrawals

Managua, Sep 28 (Prensa Latina) Nicaraguan President Enrique Bolaños regarded a Congressional decision of notifying the Judicial Power that two high officials of his government will lose their immunity, as a 'coup détat'. 'There is no state of law in Nicaragua,' the Nicaraguan President told a press conference announcing the formation of a special committee, made up of the seven officials threatened with loss of immunity, to present the case before the Inter American Human Rights Commission and the Organization of American States. Bolaños claimed that withdrawing immunity from the two officials, Interior Minister Julio Vega and Agriculture Minister Mario Salvo, constituted a first step to 'consolidate a coup.'

Massive School Dropouts in DR

Santo Domingo, Sep 28 (Prensa Latina) The Dominican Republic´s latest statistics show an ailing education system with more than 100,000 dropouts and 117,000 repeaters during the 2004 education year. The latest official statistics considers 7th the largest dropout grade with more than 10 out of every 100 students; 9.5 per cent in 6th grade and 1.8 per cent in 8th grade. The rate of withdrawals grew this year by 3.1 per cent, rising from 4.3 per cent in the 2003-2004 period to 6.4 per cent last July, for a total of 102,784 students.

Venezuelans Reject Decision on Posada Carriles

Caracas, Sep 28 - The Venezuelan movement of solidarity with Cuba rejected Wednesday the US court decision of sheltering Posada Carriles, and announced mass mobilizations to condemn what has been called an infamous judicial decision. Coordinator of the committee for freeing five Cuban anti-terrorists jailed in the United States, Orlando Rincones, said Venezuelans will commemorate in the streets on October 6 a new anniversary of the crime in Barbados. That day will be the 29th anniversary of the blowing-up of a civil airplane, killing 73 people. That was planned by Posada Carriles, who escaped from a Venezuelan prison to avoid a trial for that terrorist action.

US Properties and Assets of Pinochet Confiscated

Santiago, Chile, Sep 28 - In one of his last actions before leaving the case, Chilean Judge Sergio Muñoz froze for an indefinite period, all funds of Augusto Pinochet, his family, and related entities, in Florida, US. La Nacion daily cited judicial sources as saying the measure, which also affects Pinochet´s closest collaborators, is related to receiving kick-backs for sale and smuggling of weapons through the Chilean Armed Forces. The decision follows Penal Procedure Code demanding protection for those harmed by consigning evidence of crime that could disappear. According to the regulation, the funds must be transferred to Chile and put at the court's disposal indefinitely, or until the case concludes, in the framework of the ex president's trial for his secret accounts in Riggs Bank. The judge, who may become a Supreme Court justice next week if the Senate confirms his designation, appointed two administrators to collect the money and protect it until the trial is over.

Angola, Largest Trading Partner of Brazil Luanda, Sep 28 Angola is the most important trading partner of Brazil in Africa, said Jose Augusto Alves, special envoy of President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva to the African continent. Following a meeting with Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos, Augusto Alves said both parties have signed very important cooperation agreements. Brazil will assign 50 million US to modernize the Angolan fishing fleet and construct docks and shipyards.

Uruguayan Government Designs a Disappeared Son for Commission

Montevideo, Sep 28 - Uruguayan government assigned Javier Miranda, son of detained-disappeared Fernando Miranda, to represent this country at the special commission Argentina organized to investigate the issue on disappeared Uruguayans. Miranda, lawyer and also member of Mothers and Families of Detained and Disappeared Uruguayans, will participate in the special commission at the Secretariat of Human Rights of the Argentine Justice Ministry. The organization will especially scrutinize situations where there was coordination between the two countries oppressive forces, as part of Operation Condor, used by dictatorships.

Media Role in Integration Discussed

Brasilia, Sep 28 - The role of the media in integration was widely analysed before the First South American Community of Nations Summit, starting this Thursday. Chief Minister of the General Secretariat of the Presidency of Brazil Luiz Dulci said that South American countries receive information from large US and European networks, but they don´t know their neighbors television production. Telesur director-general Aram Aharonian noted that 'we discuss integration, but our countries don´t even know each other,' and added that 'we have to learn about who we are and integrate later.' The director of Telesur, boosted by Venezuela, Cuba, Argentina and Uruguay, said the media was a tool for mutual knowledge. Content director of Argentina state channel Gustavo Souto said 'we know more about the most remote countries than our neighbors.'

Fidel Castro Meets North Korean Parliament Leader

Havana, Sep 28 - Cuban President Fidel Castro met with Yang Hyong Sop, vice-president of the Democratic People´s Republic of Korea´s Parliament, in a fraternal and friendly atmosphere, Granma newspaper reports Wednesday. In the meeting held Tuesday afternoon, Fidel Castro and the Asian delegation exchanged information on each nation´s current situation, as well as tackled important international issues. The parties reasserted, after 45 years since establishment of diplomatic relations, ties of friendship and solidarity between the two governments, parties and peoples. The North Korean visitor passed on his country´s interest of strengthening links between the two parties and governments, as well as boosting trade on the basis of mutual benefit.

South African FM Holds Official Talks in Cuba

Havana, Sep 28 - South Africa´s Foreign Minister Nkosazana C. Dlamini Zuma started Wednesday in this capital official talks with Cuban top-level leaders, with the aim to strengthen fraternal ties and review bilateral political and cooperation relations. She is visiting the island on an invitation of Cuba´s Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque, who was the first Cuban top official to meet her. Dlamini Zuma leads a high-ranking delegation to the 4th Session of the Cuba-South Africa Joint Intergovernmental Commission, which will discuss expanding cooperation on several fields, including health and education.

Cuba Slams US Decision to Harbor Terrorist Posada

Havana, Sep 28 (Prensa Latina) The decision of an immigration judge in Texas to grant shelter in the US to Cuban-born terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, mastermind of a mid-air bombing of a commercial plane that killed 73 people, is an infamous judicial call, Cuba says. Under the headline 'Infamous Judicial Decision: Posada under the Impire´s Protection,' Granma daily recalls Wednesday that immigration judge William Abbott chose Tuesday not to deport Posada Carriles neither to Venezuela nor Cuba. Abbott ruled that the notorious criminal remained in custody of the Immigration Customs Enforcement, and granted 90 days for the US to find a country willing to shelter Posada Carriles. He also gave the attorney one month to appeal.

Note: If you wish to receive more details on any of the stories that are reported here, or if you would like information on another subject not included in this cast, let us know via e-mail:

DeLay Indictment: Groups Call for DeLay's Ouster

Fri, 30 Sep 2005 01:23:00 +0000

9-29-05, 9:15 am

Republican Rep. Tom DeLay (TX) should resign his position in Congress, not just his leadership role, say government corruption watchdog groups.

Indicted yesterday on charges of criminal conspiracy related to his role in illegally accepting corporate campaign donations through his political action committee called Texans for a Republican Majority (TRMPAC), DeLay's leadership duties were assigned to a 'team' that includes Rep. David Dreier (CA) and Rep. Roy Blunt (MO).

A Travis County grand jury in Austin, Texas delivered the indictment on the last day of its term. The charge, if DeLay is convicted, could hand him a two-year sentence in state prison. Other TRMPAC leaders have also been indicted for their roles in the use of corporate campaign funds during the 2002 election cycle.

According to media reports in Texas, state law bans corporate money from being spent in connection with political campaigns. TRMPAC failed to report over $600,000 in corporate donations to the Texas Elections Commission and subsequently used some of the money for Republican political campaigns, the grand jury found.

Last May, a Texas judge found TRMPAC Treasurer Bill Ceverha guilty of illegally failing to report the money.

Over the past year, Travis County grand jurors have indicted three DeLay associates – John Colyandro, Jim Ellis and Warren Robold – as well as eight corporate donors, the Texas Association of Business, and DeLay's Texans for a Republican Majority.

The investigation has scrutinized a 2002 transaction in which Colyandro, the official head of TRMPAC, wrote a blank check to Jim Ellis, DeLay's top fundraising aide. Corporate donations covered the blank check. The money was given to a Republican National Committee slush fund, who then funneled $190,000 to seven Republican Texas legislature candidates.

This particular effort resulted in a Republican majority in the Texas legislature that allowed the Republican Party to re-draw federal congressional district lines that brought four new Republican seats to the House of Representatives.

According to the indictment against Ellis, the grand jury viewed this scheme as 'money-laundering' and failed to abide by state law banning the use of corporate money for political campaigns.

Colyandro and Ellis were re-indicted on criminal conspiracy charges yesterday as well.

According to a House Ethics Committee complaint that ultimately exposed many of the events related to DeLay's indictment on criminal conspiracy charges, TRMPAC officials solicited funds from Texas-based energy company Westar. E-mails and internal memos show that DeLay and Westar communicated about donations, and that money was subsequently given to TRMPAC specifically to gain DeLay's assistance on passage of certain bills before the House.

House Republican Party rules mandate that an indicted party leader be suspended from his or her position.

The members of the Republican leadership 'team' who will handle DeLay's duties while he faces criminal charges will have some influence over the House's ethics investigation of DeLay. This fact has some observers skeptical that an honest ethics investigation will follow.

Rep. Dreier, as Ellen Miller of the progressive policy group Campaign for America's Future noted in a national teleconference yesterday, can hardly be expected to have an impartial view of the ethics process in regard to DeLay. In 2004, Dreier voted to adopt weakened Ethics Committee rules created by the House Republican leadership in order to protect DeLay and himself has given $5,000 to DeLay's legal defense fund.

The other Republican named to take over DeLay's duties, Rep. Blunt, also voted to weaken the ethics process and is the leading donor to DeLay's legal defense with $20,000, according to a report last July by consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.

Melanie Sloan of the corruption watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington added that yesterday's indictment is only part of the overall picture of DeLay's problems with corruption. The federal investigation into DeLay's relationship with lobbyist 'Casino Jack' Abramoff and illegal payments to DeLay for trips abroad and other influence peddling schemes should pick up momentum.

As a result of the indictment, Sloan added, DeLay's fabled fundraising ability, mostly related to his powerful position in the House, will be drastically weakened, as will his notorious 'K Street' project, which seeks to elbow Democratic Party-oriented lobbyists out of influential positions in Washington's network of lawyers and lobbyists.

Miller suggested that DeLay's overall influence will weaken, adding that he 'will be a significantly diminished member of Congress.'

While DeLay's defenders are already screaming partisanship, Sloan maintains that DeLay's indictment and the recent arrest of White House aide David Safavian for obstructing a federal investigation into the dealings of Jack Abramoff have exposed a 'culture of corruption in this administration and Congress. It is a cancer that needs to be stopped,' she said.

Sloan called on DeLay to resign and to return the illegally spent money. She further urged local and state prosecutors to carefully monitor the activities of all politicians and their compliance with the campaign finance laws under their jurisdiction.

Both Miller and Sloan expect the corruption scandal to slow or even block the movement of President Bush's agenda through Congress, and to create a serious problem for the Republicans in the 2006 congressional elections.

Texans for Public Justice, an anti-corruption group based in Texas applauded the indictment. 'No jury can undo the outcome of Texas’ 2002 elections,' said Texans for Public Justice Director Craig McDonald, 'but the justice system must punish those who criminally conspire to undermine democracy – no matter how powerful they may be. If we are to be a ‘democracy,’ then powerful politicians cannot flout such laws with impunity.'

McDonald called for a shake-up in the Texas state legislature and scrutiny of those Texas politicians who benefited from the TRMPAC conspiracy.

--Joel Wendland is managing editor of Political Affairs and may be reached at jwendland@politicalaffairs.net.

Bill Frist: The Former 2008 Presidential Candidate

Fri, 30 Sep 2005 01:20:00 +0000

9-29-05, 9:12 am

It's one thing to lie in politics. It's another to be caught in a lie. Bill Frist has been caught in a lie. His political future is over. The immediate question is, can he survive as Majority Leader?

The Tennessee Republican claims he wasn’t privy to any inside information leading up to the sale of his stock in Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), the country’s largest for-profit hospital chain founded by Frist’s father, Thomas, and brother, Thomas Jr., weeks before the company reported lower than expected earnings July 13 that sent the stock south.

Now the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating the matter, a spokesman for the senator said last week, to determine if Frist broke any laws.

Frist’ s press secretary told the Washington Post last week that Frist decided to sell his stock to eliminate any appearance of a conflict-of-interest due to his work in the senate in shaping the nation’s healthcare policies. So, the senator’s spokesman said, Frist drafted a letter to Northern Trust and Equitable Trust in Nashville June 13 advising them to sell all of his stock in HCA, as well as his wife and children’s investments in the company.

Still , the improprieties have been in the making for quite some time. According to an Associated Press report Saturday, Frist “received regular updates of transfers of assets to his blind trusts and sales of assets. He also was able to initiate a stock sale of a hospital chain founded by his family with perfect timing. Shortly after the sale this summer, the stock price dived.”

In fact, Frist had attempted to have it both ways since he created his so-called blind trust in the 1990s: being intimately involved with his investments that directly conflict with his political work as a senator and then claiming that he’s totally unaware of his personal financial investments—and stock sales—because it’s in a blind trust.

The mainstream media, quick to accept Frist’s statements that he’s been in the dark about his HCA holdings, was complicit in allowing the obvious conflict of having a senator who makes national decisions on healthcare that directly benefit the senator’s fortunes and that of his family, fall off the radar screen.

Indeed , in Jan. 26, 2003, story titled “Frist’s Health Care Votes Reflect Roots,” Frist told the Post that he “no longer knows how much the (HCA) stock is worth.”

But letters sent to Frist by Kirk Scobey Jr., his trustee, and documents filed with the senate contradict the Frist’s statement.

Frist knew that Scobey transferred three additional blocks of HCA stock—worth $750,000—to his trust in 2001 and 2002, which came from Frist’s parents’ estate. More than $750,000 in HCA stock was transferred into the blind trust during that time period from the estate of his late parents. Public filings show that Scobey sold as much as $8 million of Frist’s HCA stock between 1994 and 2000, a bulk of which was sold between 2001 and 2002.

“ Interestingly, Frist knew of these sales, or at least had access to information that these sales took place,” reported the Nashville Scene, in an investigative story in July 2003 into Frist’s so-called blind trust.” How? The income from these sales of HCA stock was reported on Frist's annual financial disclosure statements that he filed with the Secretary of the Senate.”

'Given the annual reporting of capital gains, it's kind of a crock for Frist to say he doesn't know what he owns because it's in a blind trust,' Charlie Gofen, a portfolio manager at Gofen and Glossberg, a Chicago-based investment-counseling firm, told the paper at the time.

Frist’ s office provided the Scene with supporting documents into the senator’s blind trust. The paper hired an eight-member, bipartisan, unpaid panel of experts in trusts from around the country to analyze it and what the panel discovered was that Frist’s blind trust 'blind' trust isn't really blind at all.”

“ Frist’s ownership of HCA stock isn't considered a conflict of interest according to Senate rules,” the paper reported. “But then, according to those rules, almost nothing qualifies as a conflict of interest.”

Frist created his blind trust in accordance with the rules of the Ethics in Government Act. That law states that a 'qualified blind trust' must meet certain requirements:

* The trustee, who is the individual charged with managing the assets of the trust, must be independent.

* There can be no restrictions on disposing of the trust's assets. * Communication between the trustee and the politician must be limited. * And the trust must be approved by the Senate's Ethics Committee. In 1995, with his holdings in HCA and the senator’s increasing role in shaping the nation’s healthcare policies coming under intense scrutiny, Frist first put his assets into a blind trust. Five years later, in December 2000, Frist put his assets into a newer blind trust, prompting the Nashville Scene to ask “Why the new trust?”

“ At the time he created his first trust, Frist’s portfolio included so-called 'non-public securities,' the paper reported. “More than likely, these were private partnerships and the like. Federal laws say such securities cannot be put into a so-called 'qualified blind trust'—the type of high-end trust that Frist now has. Once these securities were sold the 'more stringent' form of trust was created 'as soon as practical.'

Experts interviewed by the paper said what was likely the key selling point for Frist when he created the new trust in December 2000 was that he given the opportunity to look at his specific financial holdings, including HCA.

“ Whenever one blind trust is discarded in favor of a newer one, panelists say the blind trust ceases to be blind during the changeover period,” the paper reported.

But what was virtually unknown, is that Frist was able to figure out the value of his financial holdings in the blind trust in a much simpler way that would give him a window into the value of his HCA stock, the main source of his wealth. Each year, the senator files his annual financial disclosure statement with the Office of the Secretary of the Senate Frist is required to disclose the amount of income generated from his blind trust. Considering that 89 percent of his assets are tied up in HCA stock, the senator would have a good indication of how well his stock has performed.

When Frist named Scobey as the administrator of his blind trust, he was choosing a well-connected family friend.

James C. Gooch, a trust and estates attorney who has worked at the prestigious Nashville law firm Bass Berry & Sims, the same firm where Frist’s brother-in-law H. Lee Barfield is a partner, drafted Frist’s trust, which, among other things, states that the trust is “concentrated in the stock of HCA”; and Scobey, president of Equitable Trust, an institution Frist has done business with for years, was chosen as the trustee.

“ Scobey's boss at Equitable is William H. Cammack, the firm's chairman. In fact, Gooch, Cammack and Scobey are all solid members of genteel West Nashville culture, the same culture that produced and nurtured Bill Frist,” the Nashville Scene reported.

Scobey , according to documents filed with the Secretary of the Senate, doesn’t charge Frist a substantial fee to manage the trust. Furthermore, Equitable waived its $5,000 annual fee it usually charges individuals to manage similar assets, as well as cut its management fee for trusts as big as Frist’s from .3 of 1 percent to .22 of 1 percent.

But wait, there’s more. Back in September of 2002, a business partially owned and funded by Frist was embroiled in a lawsuit that claimed that the company’s founder, along with Frist's business agent, sold a Laundromat to a Bellevue, Tenn., couple at an inflated price.

Jon and Lynn Hargis of Bellevue, Tenn., didn’t accuse the senator of wrongdoing in their lawsuit against Campus Concepts Inc., a company that Frist holds a 49 percent stake in. But the couple said Frist’s close friend and business partner, David E. Harvey, the president of Campus Concepts, had told them that the Laundromat had grossed $10,000 more a month than it was actually bringing in. The Hargises said Harvey provided them with tax returns to back up his claims and the couple then agreed to purchase the Laundromat for $460,000.

The Hargises discovered a few months later that the income figures Harvey provided were grossly inflated and that he lied in papers he filed with the Tennessee Department of Revenue. Frist has been an investor in Campus Concepts since 1991.

At the time the lawsuit was filed, a spokeswoman for Frist told The Tennessean Nashville newspaper that the senator wasn’t involved in the 'day-to-day operations' of Campus Concepts and that his share and investment in the business was placed into a blind trust.

“ However, financial disclosure documents signed by Frist, a Tennessee Republican from Nashville, and filed with the Senate starting the year after he took office show he listed Campus Concepts as one of his assets, valued at $50,000-$100,000,” the paper reported. “His most recent disclosure for [2001] lists as an asset an unsecured note from [the Laundromat] valued at $100,000-$250,000. Asked how Frist could provide such information if he had no knowledge of the assets in his blind trust, Frist’s spokeswoman would not elaborate.”

It remains to be seen whether someone inside Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) tipped off Frist earlier this year that the for-profit hospital chain founded by his father, Thomas, and brother, Thomas Jr., expected to forecast lower second quarter earnings July 13, just a couple of weeks after Frist sold his stock, due to, among other things, an increase in uninsured hospital admissions at HCA facilities. Or perhaps Frist is just a savvy investor and the timing of his stock sales is coincidental.

It does seem that happenstance has been good to Senator Frist and HCA. Not long after he was chosen as Majority Leader, the Department of Justice abruptly ended a 10-year probe into how HCA defrauded the federal government’s Medicare and Medicaid programs. The Justice Department, which surely had been pursuing federal criminal charges against HCA executives, (including Frist’s brother, Thomas Jr., HCA’s former chief executive and current board member) agreed to a $631 million settlement. In total, HCA paid $1.7 billion in fines to keep at least one Frist out of jail, making it the largest fraud settlement in U.S. history.

In February, just a few months before Frist claims he instructed the administrator of his blind trust to unload his shares of HCA, company insiders were dumping shares by the truckload, prompting shareholders to raise questions on message boards and during HCA investor conference calls whether HCA executives—and possibly Frist—knew something that the public didn’t know.

A number of HCA executives seemed to be were aware that the increase in treating uninsured patients would have a negative impact on the company’s earnings. That would explain the massive sell off of HCA stock that started Feb. 2, when HCA chairman Jack Bovender sold 500,000 shares (despite the fact that HCA stock was near a 52-week high) earning roughly $9 million.

Bovender dumped his shares a day after a government official testified that the health care industry’s biggest problem was an increasing number of bad debts from the uninsured that would no doubt worsen during the course of the year.

Mike Leavitt, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said the Medicaid program was on shaky ground and there was a desperate need to control spending on the government's health care coverage for the poor, according to a May 6 story on HCA in TheStreet.com.

In April, Congress passed a budget that cut Medicaid by $10 billion over five years for the first time since 1997, which is incidentally the same year that “Congress passed the Balanced Budget Act that reduced hospital payments and sent the industry into a tailspin,” TheStreet.com reported. That’s a major financial blow to hospitals such as the ones controlled by HCA and is what likely prompted the huge selloff by HCA executives.

Shortly after Bovender sold his shares several other insiders, including Treasurer David Anderson and Chief Investment Officer Noel Williams and three vice presidents sold their stock too, clearing tens of millions of dollars. In fact, between January and June, HCA insiders sold shares worth $112 million, 879,000 shares between March and April alone, netting the execs $45 million.

Insider sales increased in the beginning of March when HCA said it planned to sell 10 of its hospitals that were located in poor states that were dealing with Medicaid troubles. On April 22, HCA President Richard Bracken sold $4.13 million of company stock followed by Milton Johnson, the company’s chief financial officer, who sold twice that amount.

Speaking of the pending hospital sales, a footnote in HCA’s past proxy statements researched for this story has revealed something few HCA investors seem to be aware of: the cozy and questionable business relationship between the hospital chain and a company operated by the son-in-law of HCA’s former chairman, Thomas Frist, Senator Frist’s father.

A company owned by the elder Frist’s son-in-law, Charles Elcan, bought 116 medical office buildings from HCA back in December 2000 for $250 million, which the hospital chain disclosed in a 2001 SEC filing, the website footnoted.org said in April 22 posting. In a filing HCA made with the SEC last year when the company, known as MedCap was sold for $575 million, HCA disclosed for the first time that Elcan only put up a small fraction of the initial $250 million back in December 2000.

“ This year, HCA has provided even more details, though it’s a somewhat convoluted path involving a swap transaction that involves quite a bit of alphabet soup,” said footnoted.org. “What it appears to boil down to is that HCA had to ante up even more money than it previously disclosed to essentially help the son-in-law out of a jam, even though it was unusually generous when it sold the office buildings to Elcan back in December 2000, since that investment more than doubled in less than three years. HCA has chosen to let details of the deal trickle out gradually over the past few years which certainly leave one with the impression that they’re trying to hide something.”

--Jason Leopold has written about corporate malfeasance for The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The Nation, The San Francisco Chronicle, and numerous other national and international publications. He is the author of the explosive memoir, News Junkie, to be released in the spring of 2006 by Process/Feral House Books. Visit Leopold's website at for updates.

Science vs. Intelligent Design

Fri, 30 Sep 2005 01:18:00 +0000

9-29-05, 9:10 am

Early in the 19th Century, Napoleon asked a prominent scientist about the existence of God. The scientist’s famous response was that that was not a question that we had to ask.

He didn’t mean that it was a question that couldn’t be answered by science. He didn’t mean that religion, faith, etc., was bad, good, or indifferent. He meant that the questions that science asks and builds upon have nothing to do with religion.

He also 'believed ' that religion at the dawn of the nineteenth century could no longer prevent science from developing theoretical constructs, organizing controlled experiments and amassing empirical data through research to prove or disprove and advance or discard its theoretical constructs. Religion, even when it uses belief systems to encourage people to struggle to change society in a positive way can never do that. Institutional religion as a part of feudal power structures, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, fought against science often as ferociously as feudal lords fought against merchants and artisans of the emerging capitalist class. Feudal society was based on repetition and tribute, on conserving goods for the benefit of the rulers. Institutional religion, whose leaders were part of the ruling class in many places in a direct way, was organized around conserving, in the form of rituals, the faith and maintaining tribute to the leaders of the Church. When the Papacy, for example, fought 'temporal rulers,' the real fight was over wealth and power.

The principle of Separation of Church and State and/or subordination in matters of socio-economic policy of Church to state was an important feature of the rise of capitalism in Europe and globally. Capitalists used and continue to use legions of 'pork chop' preachers and priests, not to mention rabbis and mullahs with different dietary preferences, but they can no more take religion seriously than P.T Barnum could take the midgets, Siamese twins, and bearded ladies he paraded in his entertainment as business associates. Their system is based on a limitless expansion and exploitation of the productive forces, which in turn requires an expanding understanding of the material world and a population of workers and consumers that will respond to material carrots and sticks and have the education and skills to run the machinery efficiently.

I am not going to use this article to launch a polemic against religion and religious believers, anti-materialists in the philosophical sense, because that is not the relevant issue. Science and religion can co-exist as they long have, but not in a political supermarket as Coke and Pepsi co-exist.

Nor can education function as a series of commercials for different products if it is to be something more than a place to warehouse young people. When I took a woodworking shop class as a teenager because shop classes were required in my school, we weren’t taught that the bookends that I made existed only in my mind and could become anything or nothing depending on my consciousness. Actually, there were schools of philosophy that would make such a point, which might have been interesting in another setting but very counterproductive to my learning the skills of woodworking.

Marxism for example is a science of society not a 'religious faith,' as some of its secular enemies contend. While it does not advocate suppressing various theoretical constructs and world views, it seeks to test them, not to have them represented based on their commercial popularity. That which cannot be verified in material life is discarded as theory, although aspects of it may be upheld as contributing to social progress.

No one I know would advocate teaching Marx’s general theory in a course on Biology, although it, unlike 'Intelligent Design,' complements, from a social science perspective, Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Science cannot be dispensed with in any modern society. When the Soviet scientist Trofim Lysenko developed an environmental theory of acquired characteristics that rejected Mendelian genetics in the 1930s, he did so because of his administrative position and because the theory strengthened the aspirations of Soviet society to transcend rapidly all natural and social impediments to the construction of socialism and communism. The theory fit in with what Soviet Communists wanted to be, not reality. Besides the fact that some individuals who challenged Lysenko were the victims of terroristic purges (a significant fact that partisans of socialism should acknowledge if they are to separate socialism from the abuses that have been carried out in its name) these views undermined both science and the construction of socialism in the USSR until they were finally discarded. While it is a long way from Trofim Lysenko in the USSR in the 1930s to the Dover, PA school board, the board, whose mandating that 'Intelligent Design' be taught in science classes alongside Darwinian evolution threatens to undermine science, education, and religion in one small Pennsylvania School District.

Like Lysenko’s theories, which distorted the development of a scientific outlook in the USSR in the name of a pseudo-science that freed nature from genetic laws, 'Intelligent Design' is essentially a marketer’s strategy to distort science with a theologically influenced pseudo science, using sophistry, the ancient art of talking around something and inundating questions with high sounding but inaccurate or irrelevant information, to advance the interests of right-wing religionists. Anyone who believes that 'Intelligent Design' advocates are interested in anything beyond resisting the development of a scientific outlook in education can only do so on faith.

No one expects terroristic purges to be carried out against the enemies of mandated 'Intelligent Design' teaching, but there may be McCarthyite purges in right-wing dominated school districts, that is the firing of teachers who refuse to teach the subject just as the Dayton Tennessee School Board dismissed and the government prosecuted John T. Scopes in 1925 for teaching evolution.

The sophists who argue that Scopes is closer to the 'Intelligent Design' advocates today in that his was fighting to teach something ignore the fact that the 'theory' of Intelligent Design has no serious scientific standing and is put forward by groups either directly created by or allied to the religious-political right. Many of these people may sincerely want to see a scientific appreciation of a Supreme Being creating the universe and guiding it according to a grand moral ethical design, which wouldn’t be so bad if it were true, but in regard to science and the material universe, isn’t and can’t be.

The Bush administration has given support to 'Intelligent Design' advocates to squeeze more votes out of its religious right base at a time when polls show that the public is more sympathetic to 'Intelligent Design' as an abstraction than it is to the administration’s concrete policies. Since the administration doesn’t seem to care about science education, education in general beyond its empty 'no child left behind' commercial for itself, or any scientific policy that conflicts with its corporate agenda, it doesn’t think it has anything to lose by backing 'theory' that lead literate people in developed countries to heap scorn on the U.S. But there are reasons that we all should oppose the Dover school board and support the parents who are fighting for their children’s education beyond resistance to the Bush administration, which is a good general reason in itself.

First, there is education. A former student of mine from the Deep South in a discussion concerning modern politics mentioned sadly that in an area where his relatives live there are half a dozen churches and one school. In other cases, friends who live in Bible belt communities inform me that teachers are chosen because they are regarded as 'good Christians.' Intellectually, these public schools, while they may not have the discipline problems associated with urban slum schools, are dead ends in terms of the intellectual and skill development of their students and the bottom of the barrel nationally. A political culture that luxuriates in concepts like 'Intelligent Design' has little need to build new schools and upgrade existing ones. People who are taught such concepts will be clueless as they observe more and more professional jobs 'outsourced' to countries, including developing countries, where the labor may be cheaper but the science and the education is more modern.

Second, 'Intelligent Design' is of course about bringing religion into the public schools at the center of its curriculum. Introducing students to a wide variety of scientific and social scientific theories is of course a good thing for student’s intellectual development. Giving a pseudo-scientific theory great legitimacy and attempting to put it on an equal footing with science will, at best, waste resources and create confusion among students.

At worst, it will create a repressive political atmosphere in the schools for science teachers similar to the atmosphere that government scientists now face from the Bush administration. As such it will drive science teachers out of teaching and greatly undermine public education in the U.S., where test scores of elementary and secondary school students currently lag behind students in other countries in a number of areas concerning science education. And of course it will further erode the separation of church and state which is now and always has been a pillar of the constitutional Republic.

--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs and maybe reached at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.

Chomsky's New Book

Fri, 30 Sep 2005 01:15:00 +0000

9-29-05, 9:08 am

Imagine you could take years and years to carefully study political history, that you could read numerous sources of political news from around the world, that you could do your own research into declassified government documents and little known areas of information, and that you could travel extensively so that you might compare various societies and governments in the current day.

If you can get someone to pay you or feed you while you do all of that, then by all means do it. Otherwise, your second best option is to listen to Noam Chomsky. Chomsky knows an incredible amount of information and is brilliant at analyzing it. He does so without any theory or pretense, using a vocabulary that any high school graduate has mastered.

Sitting down and talking to Noam Chomsky at length about current affairs has to be one of the most illuminating experiences going. But, what if you got the chance to do that and couldn’t always think of the best questions or cite the best examples for Noam to comment on?

Not to worry: David Barsamian has conducted a series of interviews with Chomsky between March 2003 and February 2005, and has consistently asked penetrating and provocative questions. These interviews have just been published as 'Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World.' You can buy the book here or the audio compact disc here and I highly recommend doing so.

If you're familiar with Chomsky, he will still manage to surprise you with analyses of recent events that you've never imagined before. If you're not familiar with Chomsky, this book is probably an ideal place to start. Chomsky is one of the most quoted writers ever and is extremely well known in many countries around the world. He appears on mainstream media in many countries as well, just not his own, the United States. Some years back, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting ran a headline: 'Chomsky Appears on PBS, Western Civilization Survives.' But that was Chomsky's one and only appearance on airwaves that clearly have a lot of space for intensely boring pundits predictably mouthing the same corporate-corrupted logic.

To find out why the US corporate media is horrified of Chomsky, you need only listen to him for a little while. He compares accepted United States' actions to identical but reviled actions by other states. He pulls out quotes from the past articulating almost the exact same position that the US media has just announced as a new breakthrough in human civilization. He points out areas in which the United States is unique among industrialized countries and questions whether they are desirable or necessary: such as our uniquely high level of fear and insecurity or our uniquely high level of religiosity. Chomsky is not out to soothe our souls and comfort our cherished misconceptions. He wants us to see the world differently and to act to change it, but to drop the also uniquely American idea that political change can be fast and easy: one demonstration or election means little, he warns us; we need long-term tedious activism.

Chomsky is well known as a linguist, and his philosophy of language is quite platonic and mystical in the traditional scientistic manner that sees itself as following the Enlightenment away from magical thinking. And Chomsky's belief in science has led him to make various denunciations of postmodern thought in which he tosses out the good and creative along with the silly and pretentious. But when Chomsky turns to politics he forswears not only pretentious language but also metaphysical theories of history. He is completely down to earth and pragmatic. If living a double-life as a philosopher could get every political writer to speak as plainly and powerfully as Chomsky, I'd be all for it. This current book contains none of Chomsky the philosopher. It's purely the political activist.

I'd love to quote a dozen examples from the book, but they're not really aphoristic. You need to read a few paragraphs in most cases to get the point. But part of what makes Chomsky's arguments so powerful is the historical cases he pulls out of his memory. I'll offer one example. Chomsky sees the recent US attack on Iraq as having been contingent on Iraq offering absolutely no threat to the United States (exactly the opposite of what Bush alleged). Chomsky offers another example of this pattern:

'President Kennedy was trying to organize the hemisphere to support his terrorist attacks against Cuba, which were very severe. Generally, other countries in the Western Hemisphere just have to do what they're told by the United States, or they're in bad trouble. But Mexico refused to go along with the campaign against Cuba. And the Mexican ambassador said, 'If we publicly declare that Cuba is a threat to our security, forty million Mexicans will die laughing.' '

The danger in reading Chomsky is that millions of Americans will die laughing every time they turn on their televisions.

--David Swanson is creator of , co-founder of the coalition, a writer and activist, and the Washington Director of Democrats.com. He is a board member of Progressive Democrats of America, and serves on the Executive Council of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, TNG-CWA. His website is .

Climate change catastrophe threatening humankind

Fri, 30 Sep 2005 01:12:00 +0000

9-29-05, 9:04 am

The world faces enormous changes in weather patterns and other natural phenomena. These changes have resulted from the emission of man-made pollutants from traditional, non-renewable fuels such as coal and oil in energy production. There are solutions to the problems posed by these changes. However, the way forward is currently being blocked by the governments of the United States and other Western countries, which are acting on behalf of extremely powerful vested interests. Capitalism’s final imperialist stage may well threaten the continued existence of humankind.

Unless strong and decisive political action is taken to halt greenhouse gas emissions, these changes will cause rising sea levels, and a general rise in world temperatures, with extreme heat variations, as well as drought, floods, hurricanes, cyclones, and carbon dioxide pollution on a global scale. Many species of animals, birds, aquatic and plant life will perish. There will be mass loss of human life, the spread or exacerbation of diseases, dislocation of entire populations, geopolitical instability and a disastrous decrease in the quality of human life.

Unless we act, these changes may well happen within the lifetime of today’s children. Critical factors are the 'tipping points' (i.e. the times when various adverse changes become virtually inevitable). The International Climate Change Task Force (ICCTF) says that these points could be reached by 2100. However, other authorities consider that some could be reached in 15 to 20 years’ time.

Over the last two decades the more optimistic predictions of conservative scientific organisations such as the ICCTF have had to be revised. The average world temperature for 2058, which it predicted several years ago, was actually reached last year! Unless realistic measures are taken to reverse the rapid rise of the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere, the 'tipping points' will arrive sooner than later.

That 'breath of life'

Serious atmospheric pollution began during the industrial revolution. For about 400,000 years the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide level remained the same, but it’s now rapidly rising.

This is causing two specific weather trends. The depletion of rainforests and the increasing use of fossil fuels have increased the emission of greenhouse gases (mainly CO2 and five other gases) that trap solar radiation within the atmosphere, gradually increasing temperatures worldwide. At the same time carbon dioxide lodged within clouds deflects solar radiation ('global dimming'). This reduces evaporation from oceans and lakes, leading to prolonged droughts.

Parts of the Amazon Jungle (the 'lungs of the world') are being cleared for short-term profit and provision of land for settlement. Climatologist James Lovelock has predicted that a two-degree atmospheric temperature rise would cause the jungle to die, and to become an emitter of carbon dioxide rather than oxygen. Breathing the earth’s atmosphere would presumably become increasingly difficult. As a result of global warming fires in many countries are becoming more frequent and severe and cause major damage and pollution. The increase in droughts, hurricanes, floods and extreme weather conditions has recently caused a 500 percent increase in natural catastrophes, according to one French insurance company.

'Water, water everywhere…

The world is undergoing the greatest change in temperature since the last ice age, and the change is happening faster than ever before. Forty percent of Alaska’s ice coverage has disappeared in recent times. In 2001, Australian scientists found that Heard Island glaciers had shrunk by one third in the past 50 years. Last year scientists discovered that the polar ice was melting nine times faster than it had been in 1994.

If the world’s major ice shelves melted, which could happen by the end of this century or even sooner, the oceans would rise by 7-14 metres, according to Lovelock. The initial rise would occur quickly after the polar ice began to break up, according to Australian Antarctic scientists.

The recent devastation of New Orleans has given a miniscule indication of the impact on the world’s coastal populations. Melting of the polar caps would flood low-lying countries such as the Netherlands and Bangladesh. This could include Calcutta with 16 million people and scores of other coastal cities and towns are at risk. More than a billion people would die, mostly in the world’s poorer countries. Whole Pacific islands could disappear under water. Australia’s wonderful beaches would disappear, and the Great Barrier Reef would have died long before this.

…nor any drop to drink.'

Fossil fuel emissions, which dissolve in sea water to form hydrogen ions, have made sea water more acidic than for millions of years. The oceans have soaked up the C02 emitted over the last 200 years, and they are now absorbing a tonne of CO2 per capita every year. But they may be reaching saturation point.

Tropical reefs may cease to provide protection from destructive waves by 2050. Shellfish and coral will have difficulty forming and maintaining their shells and skeletons because of the higher acidity. By 2010, acidic seas could also limit plankton growth. The supply of sea food for humans could decline, and the sea’s lessened ability to absorb CO2 will accelerate climate change.

Appalling examples

In absolute terms the US is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, producing about 25 per cent of the total. Australia is the largest emitter per capita, producing about 2.1 percent of the developed world’s emissions.

Neither country has signed the Kyoto Protocol, which stipulates the initial steps to counter global warming. These are appalling examples for developing countries, who are not yet signatories to the treaty, and whose industrial growth is mostly dependant on fossil fuels. Around 50 million Indian people are expected to soon become car owners. Present indications are that India will triple carbon emissions within 20 years.

China’s industrial production is approximately 80 per cent of the USA’s and may reach that of the USA soon. Although China is building large hydroelectric and nuclear power installations, much of its industrial production is currently powered by coal. China’s steel production has doubled in the last four years and is expected to reach 322 million tonnes this year.

Solutions

The world’s greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced, and the world’s forested areas must be protected. To avoid a 'tipping point' temperature rise (at 3.6 degrees higher than in pre-industrial times), we must keep the atmospheric carbon dioxide below 440 parts per million (ppm). It’s already at 370 ppm, and rising.

The Kyoto Protocol requires a reduction of five percent in emissions compared with 1990 levels by 2012, but scientists say that between 60 and 80 percent is needed.

There have been many proposals for the best way to achieve this. Shell Oil Chairman, Ron Oxborough, suggested that CO2 should be separated from hydrocarbons, with the hydrogen burnt in power stations and the CO2 pumped underground ('carbon sequestration'). This has also been advocated by the coal industry in Australia, with the enthusiastic support of the Howard government. Possible dangers, such as the pollution of Australia’s vast aquifer network, have received little discussion. Some scientists have advocated a reduction in energy consumption, so that worldwide carbon production does not exceed 2.5 tonnes of carbon per capita per annum. In order to achieve this, the rate of CO2 production per kilometre of travel, and the level of vehicle use, would both have to be cut. Any move to implement this would be vigorously opposed by the vehicle industry.

One critical issue is the production of mass energy from power stations. Some experts believe that natural gas should be used for energy production, and that energy production from alternative sources should be raised sharply.

Some business groups and politicians have advocated building nuclear power stations, despite the possibility of catastrophic accidents, and the danger and huge cost of storing nuclear waste. They have pointed out that nuclear energy produces no carbon emissions. Despite the example of Chernobyl, they also claim that the number of deaths from nuclear accidents has been small, compared to the casualties from wars, motor accidents, and fossil fuel pollution.

Because of the growing urgency of the global warming threat, some scientists have reluctantly come to agree with them. However, others have objected that construction of nuclear power stations would in itself take decades, requiring long term waste storage at enormous cost, and could result in accidents, threatening the lives and health of hundreds of thousands of people.

They favour wind, solar, hydroelectric power and other under--utilised alternative means of energy production. Some countries have already constructed wind power stations, despite problems in maintaining a stable energy supply, and other problems, such as objections to the visual impact of wind turbines.

One alternative approach involves the collection and storage of energy at the point of use, for example by the utilisation of solar energy. Power stations could then derive more of their energy from wind and solar energy collectors, and might eventually be used only to power a relatively small number of sites, and to provide a back-up 'uninterruptible power supply' for homes and workplaces.

Given the short time frame imposed by increasing global warming, decisions will have to be made and acted upon very quickly. Solar and wind power systems have an advantage in this respect, as they could be introduced much more quickly than, for example, the construction of massive nuclear power stations. All these alternative approaches are potentially extremely useful, and require urgent and serious consideration. However, their advocates have far less political power than the representatives of the coal or nuclear power industries.

Campaigning to save the world

Combating global warming would involve taking forceful steps to reduce pollution, and is therefore vigorously opposed by certain sections of capital.

These interest groups have recruited a small number of scientists who claim that there’s really nothing to worry about, even though most of the world’s scientists say unequivocally that global warming is undeniable, and that we need to tackle it immediately and vigorously.

The biggest problem in the struggle against global warming is that capitalism is dominated by the United States, the world’s worst atmospheric polluter. At the recent G8 summit, the leaders of the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Canada, Russia and China reached a climate change agreement. French President Jacques Chirac said the deal met five key French conditions, i.e. a recognition of climate change and human responsibility for it; a call for urgent action to slow the greenhouse gas build-up; references to Kyoto in the communiqué; an understanding to negotiate a long-term climate strategy at the UN, and a commitment to launch a dialogue on market mechanisms for cutting carbon emissions.

However, the only substantive achievement was the initiation of a discussion between the Kyoto signatory nations and the US on global warming. Chirac described the deal as 'only just' sufficient. Tony Blair evaded commitments on new emission targets by postponing debate on global warming until 2012, when the Kyoto Protocol’s targets will expire.

US President George W Bush described the agreement as 'a better way forward', but he is now planning to replace government committee experts who oppose his views with apologists for the oil and coal companies.

G8 fails

The deal was described as a political victory for Bush, who resisted calls to adopt a more ambitious framework for climate change. The G8 leaders’ statement notes that countries welcome the Protocol’s entry into force 'and will work to make it a success'. Nevertheless, they failed to set firm gas reduction levels or to specify how much money to spend on the project.

The President of America’s National Environmental Trust, Philip Clapp, called the agreement 'utterly meaningless, the weakest statement on climate change ever made by the G8'. He commented bitterly: 'The G8 leaders did not agree on a single concrete action to address climate change. Not one new dollar was committed by any country to develop technologies — they just told the World Bank to go and do it with no financing.'

The next G8 meeting is in November. South Africa, Mexico, India, China and Brazil participated in some of the G8 meetings and expressed their concern about the global warming issue. Socialist Vietnam and Cuba are also deeply concerned about the issue, but given US hostility it’s unlikely they’ll be invited to future meetings, or that they’ll be asked to assist in decreasing greenhouse gas emissions.

Conservative US and Australian politicians have excused their failure to sign the Kyoto Accord by stating that underdeveloped nations do not have to sign, so it is unfair that the US and Australia should.

This is transparently and despicably irresponsible. Developing nations face huge economic and physical hardships. If they are to contribute their meagre resources to the struggle against global warming, the least the developed world can do is to assist others financially to meet greenhouse reduction objectives.

Underdeveloped countries hit hard

The struggle against global warming involves long-term considerations. However, the under-developed countries are confronted with immediate and horrific problems. Extreme poverty’s three biggest killers — respiratory infections, diarrhoea and malnutrition, together with other treatable illnesses, claim 20,000 lives each day in developing countries. More than 6000 of these were in just four African countries: Nigeria, The Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia and Tanzania. About 270 million people — 13 times the population of Australia — have died from poverty related causes since 1990.

Moreover, their growth is crushed by the trade barriers of wealthy countries, and in many cases by the threat of military actions, particularly from the United States. The obscene sums spent by the US and other Western countries on armaments could eliminate many of the problems that plague the poorer countries of the world, as well as helping them to combat global warming.

Public awareness of the imminent threat from global warming has only developed over the last 20 years. Moreover, because of other threats (for example Howard’s vicious new industrial relations agenda in Australia), progressive and working class forces have not taken up the issue as a political campaign with the necessary vigour.

However, combating global warming requires global action. Working people and others must be mobilised as quickly as possible to force present governments to introduce effective large-scale measures to reduce our dependence on coal and oil.

The Australian government, which presently spends 50 per cent more on fossil fuels than on renewable sources of energy such as solar, wind, tidal and hydroelectric schemes, has barely concealed its contempt for environmental issues.

The left and progressive forces in Australia will have to place at least the same importance on assisting humankind to overcome global warming, a threat to our very existence, as on defeating the Howard government’s vicious Industrial Relations agenda. Apart from developing renewable, non-greenhouse gas emitting sources of energy there are many other ways of reducing greenhouse gas production. One such method is by the reduction of the number of petrol-guzzling cars and trucks on our highways through the development of the rail system (for freight and people) and other public transport.

To adequately deal with the global warming problem, we have to sign the Kyoto Protocol. We also have to improve it, for example by scrapping its Howard-inspired paragraph that exempts countries like Australia from reducing emissions in absolute terms, merely requiring them to reduce the rate of increase of emissions.

We also have to end huge military spending, progressively eliminate coal-fired power generation, extend public transport, restrict and compensate for land clearances, and lessen our dependence on fossil fuel-powered vehicles. Beyond our shores we have to help poorer countries achieve greenhouse gas targets, for example by preventing the clearing of forests and assisting with the development and utilisation of alternative energy sources.

And that’s just the beginning.

From The Guardian

Book Review: Schwarzenegger Syndrome by Gary Indiana

Fri, 30 Sep 2005 01:09:00 +0000

9-29-05, 9:02 am

COMPARING the destruction of the twin towers with the Reichstag fire is not likely to win you any accolades in US government circles, but then Gary Indiana is not out to win praise from them.

This slim volume is a rhetorical tour de force, a diatribe of barbed wit and political acumen, meticulously attacking the neocon US, its brutality, corruption, fundamentalist insanity and democratic deficit.

Indiana is a highly intelligent observer who cuts though the subterfuge and the cosmetic bloom of health to reveal the rotting flesh beneath.

A testosterone-fuelled, muscle-bound movie star is elected governor of California - the most populous US state and with the sixth largest economy in the world.

This is democracy, Hollywood-style. You couldn't satirise such a process. It is already a grotesque caricature of capitalism taken to its ludicrous extreme.

A pea-brained icon for the bodily inadequate and mentally challenged is marketed as a capable politician able to solve society's woes.

Like Conan the Barbarian or Terminator I and II, he will wipe out health-care worries, poverty and the energy crisis with his sci-fi laser guns. Welcome to a tinsel town dream world. Schwarzenegger plays the dream for all that it's worth. He is the young immigrant, fleeing a post-nazi Austria under constant threat from Soviet tanks and 'socialist' governments.

In the land of the free, no dream is unrealisable.

This one-time small-town body builder was catapulted to stardom as a pneumatically inflated screen hero in second-rate sci-fi fantasies.

And, now, he has been politically inflated too, by a supine press controlled by big business and an electorate conned by glitz rather than policies.

As has been cynically remarked, politics is showbiz for ugly people, but, now, we have the 'beautiful people' taking over this stage too.

When politics becomes celebrity and spin, democracy becomes an empty concept.

Warren Beatty's film Bulworth, which had a similar scenario, was meant as a satire, but reality, as Indiana demonstrates, has left it standing.

He has done a wonderful job in peeling off the layers of packaging from US Democracy Inc and exposing the Californian gubernatorial election for what it was - a travesty of democracy.

He gives us a whole number of interesting and unsavoury facts, which the local press by and large chose to ignore, no doubt following Ronald Reagan's philosophy expressed in his memorable words. 'Facts are stupid things.'

Schwarzenegger Syndrome by Gary Indiana (New Press)

From Morning Star

Lori Through the Looking Glass:A New Perspective On the Lori Berenson Case

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 23:53:00 +0000

9-29-05,7:48am

Our perception of Lori Berenson has been clouded by a bewildering recent series of rulings and counter-findings surrounding her case. Lori Berenson has been imprisoned in Peru for almost ten years for allegedly conspiring with terrorists. (The grim anniversary of her imprisonment is upcoming in November). New challenges and complications in the Andean region and its neighbors, have only exacerbated the situation. In his Second Inaugural Address, President Bush strongly endorsed liberal-humanitarian interventionism, saying “The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.” Yet the reach of this rhetorical vision of freedom is not meant to stretch to every corner of the globe. In spite of this shortcoming, we must reanimate our awareness of the Berenson case, placing it in the new context of the Bush administration’s worldwide proactive democratic aspirations. This article will illuminate why this case is so important to any reexamination of the values of American foreign policy.

Lori Berenson went to Peru in 1994 when she was 25. In late 1995, she was arrested on a public bus in Lima and charged with ‘treason’ for being a leader of a terrorist group. She has been in jail ever since. The outside world has managed to pay only limited attention (it occasioned a meager squib in the New York Times), to the case. The November 25, 2004 ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has been seen as just another setback in her fate. It is far more than that. It is a subversion of due process and of the course of international law. From all evidence, at the time there was a good possibility that the Inter-American Court would rule in Lori's favor and against the government of Alejandro Toledo, Peru's notoriously unpopular current President. Such a ruling inevitably would have built up international pressure and started a chain reaction that Peru would eventually have to take into account. Had the court ruled the way it was apparently going to rule, Berenson's release could have been managed in a way that would have assuaged Peruvian nationalists, and allowed Lima to explain to its purported domestic political base why it had to let the gringa go. Berenson would have been released without undue embarrassment any of the concerned parties.

Instead, the Toledo government went in another direction. Anticipating that the Inter-American Court decision would go against it, Peru threatened to ignore the ruling and even (not for the first time) pull out of the Inter-American Court if a negative decision was rendered. In a far milder, yet withal similar, analogue to North Korea’s lack of cooperation with the IAEA because it did not want its nuclear program to be placed under supervision, such defiance subverts the entire structure of cooperation among sovereign states.

A Court’s Good Name The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has been one of the great success stories of international law. When it began operation in 1979, most Latin American countries were under authoritarian rule. The Court’s function was primarily to assuage outside concern over human rights violations in Latin America. But, thanks to a series of diligent jurists, the institution carved out a well-regarded reputation for itself. Indeed, it became partially responsible for the growing respect for democratic norms in the hemisphere. This was so even though Court rules allows for a judge from a given country to sit in any case involving that country, regardless of whether it happens to already have a judge currently serving on the seven-member OAS-selected bench.

Admittedly, the Peruvian judge on the bench, Diego Garcia Sayan, did recuse himself because he had once been Justice Minister and had at that time been involved in the Berenson case. Nevertheless, formal and informal Peruvian pressure has subverted the Court’s traditional adjudicatory processes. As the Court was preparing for its final deliberations, Chilean judge Cecilia Medina Quiroga authored an opinion on behalf of the Court based on previous discussions. This decision upheld the earlier ruling by its associated body, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which allegedly called for Lori’s release. But Monroy Galvez, the Peruvian ad hoc judge replacing Garcia Sayan for this case only, obtained a draft of the Court’s preliminary decision on November 10. The explosive information contained therein was almost immediately leaked to Peruvian government officials who immediately turned it over to media outlets, and a storm ensued.

To And Fro From Lima, Peru’s justice minister told the Inter-American Court that it must show respect for the rights and tranquility of the Peruvian people over that of Lori Berenson when it make its decision. Separately, the president of Peru’s Congress, Antero Flores Araoz, wrote to the Inter-American Court emphasizing that Lori should not be freed. A number of members of Peru’s Congress signed a letter addressed to the Court urging it rule against Lori. Even the respected members of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission sent the Court an amicus curiae incomprehensibly opining that Lori should not be freed and Peru not be compelled to give her another trial. This same Peruvian commission had, incongruously, in its August 30, 2003 official report, stated that the Fujimori anti-terrorism laws, under which Berenson was initially tried by hooded military judges with purportedly no legal training, were illegal and that they must be brought into compliance with international standards. Even Berenson’s second trial, in which certain charges were dropped and her sentence reduced, was held under Fujimori-era laws. This commission further had found that the January – February 2003 revisions to these anti-terrorism laws, made more than a year after Lori Berenson’s second trial, while representing a major improvement, did not yet go far enough and were still in need of compliance with the American Convention on Human Rights.

Through the middle to later part of November, Peruvian politicians and the press repeatedly stirred the public, saying that a favorable ruling for Berenson would result in automatic changes in the Peruvian justice system that would then enable the release of hundreds of dangerous Shining Path and Tupac Amaru terrorists. Letters to that effect were also sent to the Inter-American Court. Yet during this same period, the court also tried the case of a pediatrician who already had served a sentence for terrorism, released, and then years later rearrested after performing hand surgery on a known terrorist. The medical doctor was again acquitted by a unanimous vote of the Court, with no demurral from the Peruvian government or media.

Though Lima has denied applying pressure on the Inter-American Court in Lori Berenson’s case, and has insisted that the decision was fair and impartial, these two solid weeks of Peruvian “lobbying” involving complaints, protests and threats to the Inter-American Court system surely had an impact. At this point, Peru’s top government officials than got into the act. Foreign Minister Manual Rodriguez Cuadros declared that Peru would ignore any Inter-American Court decision favoring Lori Berenson’s release. This was followed by similar statements from the Justice Minister, the president of the Congress, the Prime Minister, and President Toledo himself.

Fox News, Lima Style The Peruvian public sphere is saturated with a raucous dissonance over terrorism, in which any revolutionary group, such as the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement with which Lori sympathized and with whose members she is alleged to have consorted, is equated with the vicious Sendero Luminoso–Shining Path–movement led by Abimael Guzman, a movement unquestionably terrorist. Much like the Murdoch press in the English-speaking world, this media pressure is capable of convulsing sentiment among average Peruvians. Peru is an example of the global reach of the New Right, which has so relentlessly commandeered not only formal control over much of the media but also is affecting what is communicated by the media not just in the U.S. and other English-speaking countries, but, increasingly, in Spanish and French. starting with Fujimori, no step was barred in informing the Peruvian public opinion against Berenson, seeking to invoke nationalist sentiments against her and those defending her, by accusing them of wanting special privileges for her and dishonoring all of those who suffered at the hand of the guerrillas over years of guerilla warfare.

There is a whole class of “Senderologists,” media pundits on terrorism such as the sociologist Raul Gonzalez, who equates any remotely revolutionary movement with the Shining Path, and insists that Peru will not be pushed around by gringo pressure to give privileged treatment to a U.S. citizen. The voices of these jingoistic Senderologists have assumed almost a semi-governmental amplitude irrespective of their outrage if they were so accused. There is some reason to believe that the Inter-American Court judges were undoubtedly infected by this media pressure, which in turn tainted their deliberative process. In openly declaring that it would not be prepared to honor the decision of the Inter-American Court, if it ruled against Peru, Lima was able to use the global nexus of information much to its advantage, as the pronouncements in the Peruvian press were very much audible in Costa Rica, where the Court is headquartered. Peru made clear, point blank, that it would simply not respect the Court’s ruling, if it turned out to be negative. This current attitude totally conflicted with earlier comments by Peruvian officials when they were more into a public relations phase. For instance, on July 16, 2002, at a press conference in Washington, then-Minister of Justice Fernando Olivera made crystal clear to the press corps that Peru would comply with a court ruling ordering Lori’s release. 'Why shouldn't we?' he said. 'We are a civilized people.'

Against the hopes and expectations of so many, in November 2004, the Court caused consternation among its greatest defenders, by deferring to the pressure of the Peruvian government. Consequently, Lori Berenson became the victim of an institution that should have been her protector.

Peru – A Dream Deferred For most Americans, Peru is a land of mountains, llamas, Andean pan-pipe music, and ancient indigenous cultures. But postmodern Peru has had an equally intricate history, one subject to rapid changes and convulsions. During her Senate confirmation hearings on January 18, 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described Latin American society as “socially stratified” and noted that the Untied States must pay more attention to the indigenous and mixed-race population in these countries, not just urbane, Europeanized elites. This template certainly applies to Peru, a country that deserves credit for having sustained mock democratic institutions since the end of military rule in 1980. Over the past twenty years, no government has more disappointed its would-be political deliverers than Peru.

In 1985, the young, Kennedyesque Alan Garcia of the APRA party became President. This was a long-delayed entry into the promised land for a leftist party that had been in opposition for half a century. Yet, due to the weakness of its economic program and by ignoring the onset of hyper-inflation, the Garcia administration eventually imploded. Peru then witnessed another social-democratic messiah, Alberto Fujimori, the first person of Asian descent to lead a non-Asian state in the modern era, who defeated another would-be savior, the conservative novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. There were initially great hopes for Fujimori, even though he dissolved Peru's Congress in the spring of 1992 in an autogolpe or 'self-coup'. Many were duped into believing that Fujimori delivered on these hopes by defeating the Sendero Luminoso and attaining world celebrity status during the siege of the Japanese Ambassador’s residence in Lima by Tupac Amaru guerrillas in 1996-7. But Fujimori eventually became loathed by Peruvians after revelations came out concerning his corruption and the startling magnitude of his human-rights violations. Fujimori was also tarnished by the vast, shadowy power exercised by his henchman, Vladimiro Montesinos. At the very least, narcotized by its own alarmist rhetoric in the “war on drugs,” U.S. officials easily came to overlook Montesinos's unsavory character and to treat him as a fellow anti-drug legionnaire even though then-DEA General Barry McCaffrey protested at the time of his being linked to Montesinos, claiming that he was only meeting with his designated opposite number in Peru, not someone he particularly admired.

In a nimble dual role epitomizing the dark 'synergies' possible in Peruvian society, at the time that Berenson was being victimized by his confederates, Montesinos was not only the country’s premier death-squad leader and torturer, but its major media magnate. At one time, he controlled as many as five of Peru's television channels, and although he and his henchman have been officially purged, the climate of opinion they fostered still prevails and is one of the spawning-grounds for the 'Senderologists.' Montesinos was arrested in Venezuela in 2001 and is now in jail at the Callao Naval Base, ironically with some of the guerrilla leaders whose capture was Fujimori's great boast. In 2000, Fujimori fled the country in disgrace and was impeached by Peru's Congress. His voice has not been silenced, though, as he still undertakes moralistic radio broadcasts to Lima from his reclaimed ancestral home of Japan, where he yearns for a political comeback.

Cast of Characters Fujimori’s eventual successor, former World Bank economist Alejandro Toledo, rose to power on the basis of his backing from fellow members of Peru’s indigenous population along with his anti-Fujimori platform, with a dash of interest added by Toledo’s Belgian-born anthropologist wife, Eliane Karp. But once in office, Toledo all too quickly lost popularity, and is currently hovering around 14% in the polls, with his popularity in danger of worsening after the sudden and dramatic mass purging of his cabinet on August 11, 2005. The particular opposition against him among labor unions opposed to Toledo’s sponsorship of the Andean Pact is underscored by his opponents. This pact would put Peru into a free-trade zone with, among others, the U.S., as well as increasingly virulent activism on the part of indigenous peoples (the group that brought down Gonzalo Sánchez Lozada and, eventually, Carlos Mesa in Bolivia). In response, the continued detention of Lori Berenson is being used by Toledo as a cheap tactic to rally Peruvians to the flag as a life raft. Given Toledo’s foundering presidency, Lori Berenson’s liberty is considered a readily available sacrifice in the cause of dealing with his desperate efforts to salvage a failed presidency.

As unlikely as it is that Fujimori could ever return to office in a literal sense, the vulnerability of the Toledo government, and the continued presence of Fujimori loyalists in Lima's corridors of power, show that Peru's office-holders do not feel confident in totally leaving behind any traces of the practices of the Fujimori era. Alejandro Toledo is less and less able to lead Peru. We may start to wonder who exactly is running the country now, even if Toledo manages to stagger through the remainder of his term. The next Peruvian Presidential elections are scheduled to be held on April 9, 2006. The favorites are two past occupants of the Casa de Gobierno, the no-longer-so-young Alan Garcia and Valentin Paniagua, who served as interim President after Fujimori’s ouster. That the Peruvian political system would produce little else than these retreads it itself a symptom of its growing crisis. Though both candidates have social-democratic pedigrees, and although there was some positive movement in Lori’s case during Paniagua’s brief moment in power, who knows what pressures they will face to continue to imprison Lori Berenson in order to take a patriot stance against alleged threats over Berenson allegedly coming form the U.S. An even more drastic, and dire, retread would be Fujimori himself, who, discovering himself to be once again Peruvian, is agitating from his residence in Japan to be allowed to run in the election. This appalling possibility will in all likelihood not come about, as Fujimori is wanted not only on numerous arrest warrants issued by Peruvian authorities but also from Interpol. That the disgraced politician still has 35% support in the polls is sobering. If a Garcia comeback would resemble the failed candidacy of Hashemi Rafsanjani in the 2005 Iranian election, a Fujimori bid would be halfway between Rafsanjani and a revamped Saddam Hussein candidacy in Iraq.

There are alternatives to the retreads, two of them women candidates: Lourdes Flores, currently leading in the polls, and Beatriz Moreno, former Prime Minister. Flores, who is a rightist, could not be expected to be sympathetic to Lori. Other possibilities offer even less hope. Hernando de Soto, trumpeted worldwide by doctrinaire free-market capitalists as providing the answer to Latin America’s economic stasis, is thinking of running, although as the past cases of Vargas Llosa and former UN secretary-general Javier Perez de Cuellar demonstrate, Peruvians, perhaps rightly, do not always embrace their world celebrities when they return home and seek political office. Whoever ends up winning in 2006, (and Toledo may fall before then, like his counterparts in Ecuador and Bolivia) will another administration simply keep Berenson’s situation as is, prolonging what is both an ordeal and a distraction? In an era when both Peru and the surrounding region are facing increasing upheaval, Berenson’s continued detention is an astonishing triumph of ideology over practical circumstance.

Activist or Terrorist? This ideological triumph has, admittedly, been helped along by the poor public image which Lori Berenson has in Peru. For the Peruvian public, Lori is irretrievably colored by her January 1996 shouting in anger at a staged press conference three days prior to her being handed down a sentence to life in prison by a hooded “judge,” likely lacking a single day’s experience with the legal profession, while a hooded soldier held a gun to her head. But the reality behind these events is more complex.

Lori first became involved with Latin America issues in 1988, when she traveled to El Salvador to participate in a delegation of religious workers seeking reconciliation during that country’s brutal civil war. Following her second visit to El Salvador a year later, she met with key officials of the FMLN, the principal revolutionary group engaged in the decade-long civil war, and helped it, in a small way, in its transition to becoming a nonviolent opposition party. She briefly moved to Nicaragua right after electoral defeat of the Sandinista regime and its replacement by the pro-American Chamorro government, to work with Salvadoran refugees. Her work was less insurrectionary than secretarial. She assisted, for instance, in computerizing the office of “Leonel Gonzalez,” a former guerrilla leader who had decided to participate in the democratic process. He now serves, under his real name, Salvador Sanchez Ceren, as a respected deputy in the Salvadoran legislative assembly. She did indeed participate in the bustle of left-wing political activity. But this should not have any bearing on her being accorded justice. Nor should her marriage to Anibal Apari Sanchez, a former fellow prisoner who is now studying law in Lima.

Where is the Eagle? The Berenson case raises questions about when a government should intervene in protecting its citizens abroad. Are those who are unjustly imprisoned only to be advocated by their home government when they espouse mainstream political views? Does our country’s celebration of the diversity of opinion of its citizens halt when traveling to a foreign land? This is a humanitarian issue, as well as one of civic responsibility and the release of Lori Berenson would not, and should not, impel any endorsement, whether by the U.S. or Peruvian governments or the populations of those two countries, of Berenson's own specific political views, which, in the democratic systems of both the U.S. and Peru, she has a right to express.

The Peruvian government has not been able to muster more than circumstantial evidence that Lori was actually engaged in knowing cooperation with terrorism movements, nor have they gathered any reliable witnesses against her. A close examination of the Berenson case should make Americans read, with renewed concern, the small print on their passports, concerning what the Department of State will do for us if we get in trouble abroad. This especially becomes an issue since numerous young Americans continue to become involved in activities such as missionary work and the Peace Corps that promote social justice abroad. Lori has been robbed of so much that we all take for granted. This is not because she has committed any crime, but because, in effect, she has expressed the wrong political views in the wrong place at the wrong time. Does this country’s lack of concern about the detention of Lori Berenson, one of its citizens, send a message to the young people of America that it would be wiser to stay home and keep their heads down?

Why Berenson Matters The Berenson case has lost some of the éclat it once had. New disasters and atrocities come up in the news. The protracted nature of Lori's imprisonment, which should be prompting outrage, has instead led people to treat it as being some distant memory. We need to realize that this case is not just about a grossly unfair punishment being meted out to a U.S. national abroad, but that the Peruvian government's course has placed in peril international institutions upon whose accountability we all rely. In addition, the Toledo government has also hurt its own reputation. While its human rights record is unquestionably far better than its predecessors, and the truth commission it set up has tried to come to terms with many past abuses, Lori’s detention in effect voids all this progress.

That world opinion is not more upset about this situation also sheds some light on the paradoxes inherent in the currently dominant concepts underlying of international affairs. Humanitarian intervention and the idea of what Kant called the jus gentium--the law of nations – is in fashion, and even self-proclaimed liberals have spoken of it in utopian terms. There also has been a considerable reaction against the glibness, insouciance, and unearned giddiness behind this utopian vision--and also the way it may disguise an imperialist agenda beneath a humanitarian one. The genuine humanitarian motives which led Lori to work in El Salvador and then in Peru stand in laudable contrast to the appropriation of humanitarian language to burnish conventional projections worldwide of raw American power. In Bush-endorsed liberal humanitarianism, what seems to be an overly ambitious panacea also covers up a decidedly partial and self-serving agenda. Those who want America to sponsor democracy in such utopian terms in the Middle East have been silent about how seriously compromised democracy still is in our own 'backyard.” After coming into office in 2001, declaring hemispheric relations a special priority, the Bush administration proceeded to neglect the Americas more than any other administration in memory. Although the idealism of the Good Neighbor Policy, and the Alliance for Progress had flaws, putting the hemisphere on the back burner has jettisoned, not reoriented, this idealism.

For most of the period of Lori Berenson's detention, whether under the Fujimori or Toledo presidencies, we have had the leisure to look at the issue in the purely bilateral context of U.S.-Peruvian relations. But new developments in the Andean region and the adjacent northern tier of South American states has complicated this situation. The “Washington consensus” fostered by the IMF and wholly backed by the U.S. treasury, is increasingly being rejected by national electorates, as witnessed in the recent election of Tabare Vasquez to the Uruguayan Presidency. Colombia not only has to deal with its longtime drug and guerrilla problems but with a simmering border dispute with its increasingly assertive neighbor, Venezuela, itself emboldened by the recent arms sales to it by Brazil and the increasing economic interest shown in Venezuela, and in the region in general, by China. The presidents of two of Peru’s neighbors, Ecuador and Bolivia, have been forced to resign, and looming in Bolivia’s political future is Evo Morales, the former coca grower turned populist leader abhorred by the U.S. State Department . It is too early to style the region an arc of crisis, or some such incendiary epithet, but not too early to be concerned about loose ends that stand in the way of a renewed push for regional stability. Berenson's captivity is a minor irritant in a situation too unstable to risk its continued potential for aggravation. The Toledo administration has sought to keep the U.S. on board by promising cooperation on the war on drugs, a collaboration that last month led the U.S. Congress to increase Peru’s foreign aid appropriation levels by 26 million dollars over what President Bush had requested.

Ironically, one feels that Berenson’s only hope for release lies in the U.S. getting so unhappy about Chavez’s Venezuela, and, if he should manage to get into power, Morales’s Bolivia, that Washington might decide to solve the Berenson matter just to concentrate all its energies on the countries with regimes it loathes. Much like the Da’wa movement in Shi’a Islam, which was condemned by the U.S. up until the moment when Saddam Hussein was perceived as a greater threat, perhaps, if Chavez becomes even more of a bogeyman to Washington than he now is, or if there is a perception that Latin America is undergoing a quantum sea change that will tilt it decisively towards the left, the Berenson situation will suddenly ‘need’ to be resolved.

Topsy-Turvy Internationalism Washington’s cynical rationale for conspiring to tacitly back the Peruvian government in its desire to keep Lori in jail uses rhetoric traditionally employed by the left. We are told that we have to respect Peru's national sovereignty. It is said that Lori should not receive special treatment because she is an American and that to undercut Peru's self-proclaimed war against terrorism would be to privilege our own antiterrorist struggle in a paternalistic way, demeaning Peru in the process. Peru’s emulation of leftist anti-American rhetoric of the 1970s is something that strangely does not bother the American right. Anti-American rhetoric that we would not tolerate from Pakistani madrassas is hailed as justified by the American right when it emanates from Peru. Can we imagine what would happen if Lori Berenson were held in prison by, say, Yemen, or for that matter Venezuela? Peru is exploiting Latin America's sense of grievance against United States hegemony to make the absurd contention that to release Lori would compromise the prosecution of Shining Path terrorists.

In a world reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland, everything is topsy-turvy-- the Right has assumed the Left's self-righteousness without its compassion and the Toledo government is using nationalist as well as national security arguments to, ultimately, exculpate itself and its predecessors. We are similarly absorbing anti-American rhetoric from Peru that we would find unaccepable from Sudan, Syria, or North Korea. As a result, the Berenson case throughout its entire duration has been the premise for nonstop hostile rhetoric, transforming this left-wing American woman who has been locked up in a Peruvian dungeon into, ironically enough, an object of norteamericano guilt. This is all the more unjust when we consider that Lori Berenson has consistently refused to claim white privilege. For instance, the Berenson family believe Lori might be permitted to have a computer in jail if she asks for it (in order to pursue online distance education programs), but Lori will not ask for one because she does not believe she should have access to a privilege that other prisoners lack.

Lori Berenson realizes that a valuable portion of her life has been squandered in prison. But, admirably, she has refused to play into a narrative of ‘the distressed American abroad’ that might win her easy sympathy in the U.S. media but would fortify the myth of white exceptionalism which Lori’s generation, born in the wake of the achievements of the Civil Rights movement, must, if it is to be moral, reject. Lori wants to get out of prison, and is already thinking about what she might do when and if she is able to return to her home country. Lori’s stance may seem quixotic to many onlookers, but all it demonstrates is that she has convictions that, even if unusual ones, should deserve respect.

An American, Forgotten By America On assuming the U.S. presidency for a second term in January 2005, President Bush highlighted “the moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right.” Bush said that “America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies.” Lori Berenson, an American woman, has been paraded as a trophy prisoner going on ten years. She has indeed been humiliated and forced to live at the mercy of bullies. We should not pretend that she prefers her chains, or that anyone else truly gains from her continuing imprisonment. Indeed, under the U.S. Code (22 USC § 1732), the President of the United States has the obligation, when any American is wrongfully deprived of their liberty by a foreign government, to 'forthwith demand the release of such citizen.' Surely this injunction could have been fulfilled with greater diligence by both the Clinton presidency as well as that of Bush’s. Lori’s left-wing views should not lead those of other political persuasions to vindictively wish her a disproportionately long time in a foreign prison. Lori Berenson’s punishment clearly has been cruel and excessive, especially for a crime that claimed no victims, even if she had been involved as charged. In her first prison, at Yanamayo, the high-altitude climate was so harsh that even the Inter-American Court which ruled against Lori in the general case, insisted that it immediately be rebuilt and made habitable or not be used as a prison anymore. For a time, she was even in total isolation, akin to many American death row prisoners. Berenson’s conditions in her present jail in Cajamarca are better – but not by much. She suffers from Reynaud’s syndrome, which affects the circulation of her hands and feet. She has also suffered from arthritis as well as eye and stomach problems.

Prisoner Berenson For most of the duration of Lori’s imprisonment, her medical problems were merely inconveniences, taking a back seat to the fundamental injustice of her imprisonment. But when Lori’s father, Mark Berenson, recently visited Lori in prison, he noticed that a serious deterioration had taken place. According to medical documents received by the U.S. Embassy in Lima on July 18, 2005, she was diagnosed as having osteoarthritis of the spine – a progressively degenerating condition. To attempt to stabilize the osteoarthritis, Lori was put in a back brace from the top of her chest over her shoulders to the base of her spine. According to her father, Lori says she looks “like Frankenstein walking around,' but the brace does maintain her posture so that her condition does not drastically worsen. But the real worry is that, while the condition can never improve, it can be kept stable so the hope is that this equipment will keep her condition from worsening for a long time. But, in a separate development, the swelling around her hands has increased to an extent that the Berenson family fears it may represent the setting of lupus erythematosus or some other debilitating autoimmune disease. The Peruvian government has traditionally made light of Lori’s medical conditions, wanting to minimize the humanitarian, rather than political, aspects of her imprisonment. Though the medical staff at Lori’s prison in Cajamarca has been attentive and professional, there is no surety that Lori’s physical health will not worsen as time goes on.

Berenson’s health is also imperilled by the way Peru’s media exploits her situation as a public spectacle. On her first visit to the Cajamarca hospital, she was treated without incident as an outpatient. But on her next visit, the press had somehow been tipped off and mobbed her, preventing her from getting a physical exam. The press then reported all sorts of lurid rumors, asserting not only that Berenson was pregnant but that she had been impregnated by the prison commandant. This morbid fantasy of a carceral equivalent of the droit de seigneur is indicative of just how inordinately Berenson has been abused because of her gender and nationality. Over and above her imprisonment, Berenson has suffered through this sort of media maltreatment, which de facto assigns to Lori the same special status that the Peruvian Government insists it is denying her de jure. This is not simply being treated as a normal poisoner; it is grievous suffering.

Lori Berenson’s parents have also grievously suffered. Not only have they seen their daughter spend all the years of her young adulthood in jail, they have spent inconceivable amounts of money, effort, and time traveling to Peru to visit and support her as well as engage in a prodigious amount of diplomatic and networking activity on her behalf. Rhoda and Mark Berenson, originally professors of physics and statistics at New York-area public colleges, have amassed an extraordinary amount of knowledge about Peru. Indeed, they are now as expert on the country as most academic Peruvianists. The imprisonment of their daughter has changed their lives in profound ways. This tragedy has affected a middle-class, hard-working, and honorable American family. The Berensons were never rich, and have spent what money they have trying to free their daughter. When the Berenson case was in the headlines, as witnessed by coverage on The Today Show, Good Morning America, Oprah and elsewhere, it seemed that Middle America was about to champion the Berenson’s cause. But now all their hard work appears lost in the tumult of the current world situation. The most bitter memory they must endure is that in both the Clinton and Bush 43 administrations, maintaining diplomatic equilibrium with a problem South American nation was always more important than the fate of one young American.

Lori, the Left, and Freedom The Bush administration has reaffirmed, as principle of state policy, the value of personal liberty worldwide. Lori Berenson has a right to this liberty as much as anyone. George W. Bush’s advocates see him as a latter-day Teddy Roosevelt, promoting a global muscular idealism. But Roosevelt’s bravado, in telling us that the U.S. wanted “Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead” when the Sultan of Tangier was holding an expatriate American, is sorely lacking in this administration’s timorousness when it comes to the Berenson case. In this age of revived empire, are left-wing activists such as Lori Berenson the only permissible objects of anti-Americanism? This would be a strange paradox, and, in light of Berenson's continued detention, a cruel one. Will Lori Berenson still be in jail in 2010? Will there be further futile acts to a drama that has gone on too long?

This analysis was prepared by COHA Senior Research Fellow Nicholas Birns.

Nicholas Birns lives in New York City, where he teaches at the New School, edits Antipodes and writes frequently on cultural, literary and political matters. His book Understanding Anthony Powell appeared in 2004. . He can be contacted at nicbirns@aol.com.

September 28, 2005

The Council on Hemispheric Affairs, founded in 1975, is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan, tax-exempt research and information organization. It has been described on the Senate floor as being “one of the nation’s most respected bodies of scholars and policy makers.” For more information, please see our web page at www.coha.org; or contact our Washington offices by phone (202) 223-4975, fax (202) 223-4979, or email coha@coha.org.

Silicone Breast Implant Manufacturer Pays 'Experts' to Influence Health Board

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 02:49:00 +0000

9-28-05, 10:42 am

Financial conflict of interest for members on breast implant advisory panel unacceptable

Health Canada appointed paid consultants of manufacturers to 'independent' review body

Public hearings to be held next week

Three members of the advisory panel appointed by Health Canada to review the possible re-approval of silicone breast implants for the Canadian market have ties to the manufacturers, and the government does not appear to have any intention of removing them before the public hearings taking place September 29, 2005.

'This is an unacceptable conflict of interest that questions the legitimacy of the whole process,' says Prof. Abby Lippman of McGill University and member of Women and Health Protection, a working group that monitors the regulatory activities of Health Canada for their impact on women's health. 'What is the point of collecting information about conflict of interest and then doing absolutely nothing about it?' she adds.

Applications have been submitted to Health Canada by Inamed and Mentor for the reintroduction of silicone breast implants, and are currently under review. Health Canada has asked the panel to advise the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health about the safety and efficacy profile of the products based on scientific, medical and clinical evidence. However, the panel was also asked to declare any conflicts of interest prior to their participation on the panel.

According to the Canadian Medical Association Journal, three panel members admitted to receiving funds directly from the manufacturers whose products are under review.

Dr. Harold Brandon from Washington University in St. Louis Missouri and Dr. Michael Brook from McMaster University in Hamilton were paid by Inamed to provide information to FDA advisory panel members supporting Inamed's application for approval to sell the same style of silicone gel breast implants at the FDA's meeting this past April. This was only one month after their participation on a Health Canada secret panel meeting on breast implants, and just five months before being appointed to the current Health Canada panel to consider silicone gel breast implants.

Dr. Mitchell Brown of Sunnybrook and Women's College Health Sciences Centre in Toronto has also received funding to take part in the promotion of products made by the manufacturers of the silicone implants under review. Advertising for his clinic that recently appeared in a cosmetic surgery supplement in the Globe and Mail promotes the wide-spread use of the unapproved silicone gel implants (09/14/05). Also, a recent journal article of which Brown is the lead author states that: 'Cohesive gel implants are likely to play an important role in aesthetic and reconstructive breast surgery when silicone gel implants are reintroduced into the North American market' (Plast. Reconstr. Surg. 116: 768). It sounds as if Brown considers the approval process a foregone conclusion.

Could his bias be more clear?

'You would be hard pressed to find a more glaring, outrageous conflict of interest other than having the CEOs and full-time scientists of Inamed and Mentor on the panel,' says Dr. Diana Zuckerman of the Washington-based National Research Center for Women and Families. 'What are Health Canada officials thinking? There is absolutely no way to justify their participation on the panel with a straight face.'

Dr. Zuckerman was responsible for the US Congressional investigation of the lack of safety data on breast implants in the early 1990s, and testified at the FDA panel meetings on silicone gel breast implants in 2003 and in April 2005. In the spring of this year, she met with officials at Health Canada to discuss the need for a transparent process in Canada that made room for consumer and expert input. She was taken aback to read that three industry-sponsored consultants were appointed to the panel. 'It flies in the face of everything we know about having objective scientific review,' adds Zuckerman.

Canada repeating mistakes of FDA

According to the New England Journal of Medicine, Brandon and Brook served to promote industry interests on the US FDA advisory panel for silicone implants. The US Senate Health Committee is investigating the FDA advisory panel on breast implants for possible conflicts of interest.

'The Senate in the US is probing the Breast Implant Advisory Panel conflict of interest. Kudos to them for following through on this important issue. Will our government follow suit and address the fact that there are three members of the breast implant advisory committe who were paid as consultants by the very two applicants attempting to get their silicone gel breast implants back onto the Canadian market? Something smells here. Let's clean up the stench!'

Continued safety concerns with silicone implants

Silicone breast implants were withdrawn from the Canadian market in 1992 after serious safety concerns were raised. A series of successful lawsuits against the manufacturer followed. The move by Inamed and Mentor to reintroduce an ostensibly improved model of the silicone gel breast implant on the Canadian market has many health and women's organizations very concerned.

'Silicone gel breast implants have greater risks than saline implants, with no long-term safety data available from either company submitting its application to Health Canada,' says Anne Rochon Ford, Coordinator of Women and Health Protection. 'This is problematic as the more serious health concerns with these implants – mostly related to rupture – tend not to show up right away.'

A study of silicone implants conducted by FDA scientists in 2000 reported a failure rate of 55% per implant in women who had breast implants for augmentation for an average of 16 years.

Other studies show much higher rates of rupture, pain, and other complications among breast cancer patients using implants after a mastectomy. 'More and more women receiving implants at a young age may anticipate multiple surgeries with added financial burdens,' says Ford. 'Teenaged girls are receiving them as birthday and graduation presents from their parents,' adds Ford. 'Does Health Canada really want to be condoning such misguided promotion of a distorted body image amongst young women and girls, especially with a product with such a dubious track record?'

Research conducted at the British Columbia Centre of Excellence for Women's Health (BCCEWH) also documented the growing costs to provinces as more women develop complications from breast implant surgery, and return continuously to the health care system for additional surgeries and other interventions and treatment related to implant rupture. 'Would any other medical device that failed in more than half the people in which it was used and that itself created so many significant problems ever be approved?' asks Lippman.

Public consultation process also flawed Health Canada has invited the general public to take part in the review of silicone breast implant applications by asking individuals and organizations to register to present their viewpoints and evidence to the Health Canada appointed expert review panel, or by commenting in an online forum.

However, in order to adequately comment on the applications, the public needs to see the industry data on silicone implants, which was not made available to the public on Health Canada's website until September 13, 2005. Registration for public participation was originally due September 9, and then extended to September 16, leaving only 3 days for organizations and individuals to review the data and register.

'The government has made a multitude of claims about a commitment to transparency in the drug and devices regulation process,' says Ford. 'Transparency must include information about the products in time for people to make substantive comments. This is a violation of public trust.'

From Women and Health Protection

Progress in Education and Health Care in Venezuela

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 02:20:00 +0000

9-28-05, 10:10 am

Health care and public education have been two major points of social reform for the Chávez administration in Venezuela. While the private sector has decried the government's promotion of public services in these sectors as cutting into private profit margins, early indicators point to important improvements in health care delivery and general access to educational institutions.

Armando Daniel Rojas, a Vice Minister of Educational Affairs in Venezuela, reported recently that close to 13 million Venezuelans, or almost half of the country’s population, are taking part in new education programs developed by the Chávez administration.

To accommodate the growing demand for education, Rojas discussed plans for bringing as many as 90,000 new teachers into the public education system.

Rojas characterized the educational drive as 'an anti-imperialist philosophical weapon.' President Chávez has consistently called the exclusion of the vast majority of his country’s people from formal education as the theft of the people’s culture, the cruel deprivation of knowledge, and the tool of oligarchical and imperialist rule.

Free public universities, secondary and elementary schools, and local community schools have been built across the country.

For their part, private owners of industry who oppose Chávez’s reforms have criticized the universalization of education. They understand that the labor of educated workers is more valuable, and higher wages will cut into their profit margins.

In the health sector, reports indicate that progress has been much slower. Private Venezuelan doctors, who have traditionally favored the view that medicine is a high-paying career rather than a mission to help the sick and poor, have fought reforms through their opposition parties in the National Assembly and locally.

They oppose the Chávez government’s shift to public medicine and the universalization of health care for the common good not for profit. They ironically describe universal health care as 'anti-democratic,' as a leading member of an opposition party recently said in a speech in the National Assembly.

In their unfortunately twisted view, it seems that limited access to health care available for only those who can pay and widespread illness and sickness is democratic.

The result of the view that profit-based medicine is better has been that, in many sections of Venezuela, the delivery of medical service has lagged behind international standards. According to the UN World Health Organization, there should be 40 hospital beds for every 10,000 people. Venezuela currently stands at 18 beds per 10,000. In remote regions, the average falls to about 7 beds per 10,000. Some regions also report major shortages of nurses and medical staff.

While a tiny public health service has existed for some time in Venezuela, previous governments have cut funding to public hospitals and failed to oversee administration adequately, allowing rampant corruption and theft of public resources.

Under the new reforms, 20,000 doctors (many are Cuban volunteers) and other medical professionals have joined the public system. The government put $6 billion into revitalizing and building the public health and welfare sector last year alone.

An early indication of the success of the reforms is suggested by a drop in the infant mortality rate of 23 per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 18 in 2003, and a slight rise in the life expectancy, according to UN World Health organization figures. Venezuela’s infant mortality rate compares favorably to several large urban areas in the US where cuts in public services have seen reduced health care delivery and a rise in infant mortality rates.

Some success with the work that has taken place so far only suggests that progress made in 2004 and 2005 will have produced even better results.

Needless to say, private doctors in Venezuela don’t like the new competition or the goal of the universalization of free health care as it cuts into the profit margins they have been able to squeeze out of the poor and sick in Venezuela.

While the Chávez administration hasn’t called for the elimination of private medicine, its reforms have built hundreds of new free people’s clinics and hospitals, have provided free nutritional advice and food to tens of thousands of urban poor, and aims to establish a free universal public health system that will provide for those left unprotected by the for-profit medical industry.

Chávez argues that 'health isn't a thing to be bought and sold.'

--Joel Wendland can be reached at jwendland@politicalaffairs.net.

Murderous Maniacs, PUCs and the Geneva Convention

Wed, 28 Sep 2005 02:02:00 +0000

9-27-05, 9:54 am

On their day off people would show up all the time. Everyone in camp knew if you wanted to work out your frustration you show up at the PUC tent. In a way it was sport. The cooks were all U.S. soldiers. One day [a sergeant] shows up and tells a PUC to grab a pole. He told him to bend over and broke the guy's leg with a mini Louisville Slugger, a metal bat. He was the fucking cook. He shouldn't be in with no PUCs. -- 82nd Airborne sergeant, describing events at FOB Mercury, Iraq

The respected human-rights monitoring organization, Human Rights Watch, has recently issued a startling account, based on the testimony of three Army officers, which confirms the widespread, systematic use of severe physical and mental torture against detainees at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Mercury in Iraq. The officers were members of the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, 1st Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry regiment, one of the Army’s elite units. Surviving residents of Fallujah, nearly levelled by the savage U.S. onslaught in November 2004 called these soldiers 'the Murderous Maniacs' – a name the regiment wears with pride.

According to the detailed accounts of the three officers, conducted on a number of occasions under conditions of anonymity, the torture of detainees was systematic. It was also known about and actively encouraged at the highest command levels.

Soldiers were urged by Military Intelligence 'to subject prisoners to forced repetitive exercise, sometimes to the point of unconsciousness, sleep deprivation for days on end, and exposure to extremes of heat and cold.' The methods the soldiers employed were specifically directed by Military Intelligence officers. Daily beatings of prisoners were routine. Furthermore, civilian operatives believed to be from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) conducted their own interrogations out of sight from the regular soldiers. According to the officers’ testimony, these CIA interrogations, although they could not be seen, could definitely be heard as the victims screamed in pain.

As is the case in Afghanistan where the same methods are employed, and where the three officers served prior to coming to Iraq, many of the detainees are not combatants at all, but petty criminals or the innocent victims of police dragnets in which they were unfortunately swept up. They might be a cabdriver, a street vendor, a laborer, or the victim of a tribal vendetta. The soldiers interviewed by Human Rights Watch consider that half the detainees at FOB Mercury were released because they were not involved in the insurgency. The rest were sent on to Abu Ghraib after three days in the camp. But many of them simply 'disappeared,' their paperwork purposefully destroyed. When they got to FOB Mercury, all detainees became a PUC, a sterile legalism that means 'person under control.' While there, soldiers, often totally untrained in police work, were let loose on them to vent their frustrations by 'Smoking a PUC' or 'Fucking a PUC.' Thus designated, the detainee was in a category separate from that of a prisoner of war (POW) and not subject to the legal safeguards that apply to POWs. To 'smoke a PUC' was to subject a detainee to 'forced physical exertion to the point of unconsciousness.' To 'fuck a PUC' referred to delivering a physical beating. Military physician assistants were on hand to provide witnessed documentation that any broken bones (which occurred weekly) were the result of accidents. 'Smoking' occurred for 12-24 hours prior to interrogation, to break the will of the detainee and force him to cooperate. Only crackers and water were given, and even water was often withheld. Needless to day, the value of information extracted under such circumstances has been widely questioned by intelligence experts. Most people will say anything if brutalized long enough.

All of the soldiers interviewed expressed confusion about how the Geneva conventions applied. The contradictory statements made by U.S. officials regarding the applicability of the Geneva Conventions in Afghanistan and Iraq directly impacted on how the prisoners were treated. No hard and fast rules applied. Since 9/11 the whole concept of rights in wartime has been challenged at the highest levels of the Bush administration, including the advocacy of torture techniques by US Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, now widely touted to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court.

When the revelations about Abu Ghraib burst on the scene back in April 2004, the response of the Bush administration was to pin the blame on 'a few rogue, poorly trained reserve personnel at a single facility in Iraq.' Since then, there have been hundreds of other cases of abuse, torture and outright murder, reported from both Iraq and Afghanistan, as described in U.S. government documents, reports by the International Red Cross, the media, and legal documents filed by Human Rights Watch and other human rights organizations. The feeble investigations by the US military, which have been compelled by the public outcry, have resulted in the scapegoating and prosecution of low-ranking individuals such as Private Lynndie England, while in most cases the military has used closed door administrative hearings to 'mete out pay reductions and reprimands, instead of criminal prosecutions before courts-martial.'

The three officers who have lately come forward to expose the conditions at FOB Mercury, which they describe as ongoing to this day, report that the abuse of detainees is known about and encouraged at the highest levels. These three men of conscience were constantly thwarted by their superiors when they tried to call attention to the abuses, and the Army only agreed to investigate when the officers contacted US congressmen and senators with their shocking first-hand evidence. This was after 17 months of unavailing efforts to get their own command structure to investigate! Therefore, though welcome, it remains highly dubious what the results of any self-investigation by the military will be.

Human Rights Watch is calling on the U.S. Congress to create a special commission, along the lines of the 9/11 commission, to investigate the issue of torture and abuse by U.S. military and civilian personnel abroad, including the incidents described here. Senator Carl Levin of Michigan is sponsoring legislation to this effect. They are also calling for the U.S. Attorney General to appoint a special counsel 'to investigate any U.S. officials – no matter what their rank or position – who have participated in, ordered, or had command responsibility for war crimes or torture, or other prohibited ill-treatment against detainees in U.S. custody.'

The use of torture and prisoner abuse as a matter of U.S. policy has been constant in recent decades since the Vietnam War, when the U.S. military and CIA murdered and tortured thousands of Vietnamese. It has taught these methods to officers at the School of the Americas, with well-known and tragic consequences for the people of Central and Latin America. In Afghanistan and Iraq, as part of an ongoing policy of torture and abuse, many prisoners, held without charge or trial for lengthy periods of time, are being daily brutalized. Allowing such methods to continue further degrades our own democratic traditions of respect for human rights and civil liberties. If torture as official U.S. policy is not eradicated, even the tattered remnants of our own democratic freedoms may soon be gone.

--Peter Zerner can be reached at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.

Civil Resistance at the White House

Wed, 28 Sep 2005 01:15:00 +0000

9-27-05, 9:07 am

I got to the White House around noon and found hundreds of people gathered awaiting the arrival of marchers who planned to get themselves arrested protesting the war.

I ran into Mike Ferner of Veterans for Peace, who showed me the paperwork from his arrest early this morning at the Pentagon. He said he was going for two in one day. He said he'd been one of 41 people arrested between 6:30 and nearly 7:30 a.m. at the Pentagon. Three Veterans for Peace members had joined others from the War Resisters League. They'd shut down an entrance and the Pentagon Metro stop. They were swiftly booked and released, charged with 'disobeying a lawful order' and given court dates in federal district court in Alexandria in January.

For a while people milled around in the street and the park in front of the White House. Around 12:30 or so, members of Code Pink stretched a giant banner out along Pennslvania Avenue, reading 'Mothers Say No to War.' As they did so, the media swarmed and filmed every movement. Code Pink members sang a number of songs, including 'The Day the Music Died,' but with lyrics something like this:

Bye bye, Mr. President, bye You didn't fix the levee Now the water's too high You started a war based on a lie You don't care if poor people die…

Another went: We are Code Pink and we are proud We are sisters and we are loud We are many and we'll be more And we'll end this bloody war

A SWAT Team truck was parked on one side of the park. Large numbers of police were lined up in front of the White House fence. Guards inside the fence on the White House grounds carried large sticks, and one led a dog on a long leash.
When the group of civil resisters arrived, organized by United for Peace and Justice, they gather in one side of the park to prepare. Representatives of military families and veterans groups, and of Clergy and Laity Concerned made brief remarks. Bill Mitchell spoke, who lost his son in Iraq. There was a brief reading from the Koran, some remarks in Hebrew by a Rabbi, and a Christian minister who said 'When we go over there, remember that that's not the power. They have the violence, but we have the power. Who do they represent? We represent 60 percent of the country.'

An organizer advised people to participate only if they were ready to risk arrest and trained in nonviolence. A woman in the crowd next to me asked another 'Will you risk arrest?' 'Yes.' 'Good, we'll be together.'

Around 1 p.m. a delegation of leaders walked to the gate of the White House to request a meeting with Bush. Cindy Sheehan, Cornel West, and Rev. Sekou were among the leaders, with Sekou shouting at the media to get out of the way. A wall of TV cameras walking backwards slowed the walk and blocked it for a while from reaching the White House.

A crowd gathered, as the delegation made its fruitless request. There were thousands on hand at this point. The chant was 'Liar! Liar! Say it a little louder!'

That and 'Media, Step Back!'

The crowd also sang 'Give Peace a Chance.'

With the delegation at the gate for about 10 minutes, a loud chant of 'The Whole World is Watching' caught on.

There was also 'Ain't no power like the power of the people, and the power of the people is now!'

At about 1:10, the delegation of potential arrestees moved east along the fence of the White House to the are directly in front of the building. The crowd chanted 'Stop the War!' Many more wanting to be arrested moved in behind – clearly there would be hundreds of arrests. Still, the media probably out-numbered the non-media.

At 1:14 Sekou started a chorus of 'This Little Light of Mine.'

At 1:15, everybody not holding a camera or a gun sat down on the sidewalk.

At 1:16, the police ordered the media to move off the sidewalk and into the street, and warned everyone else they would be arrested.

At 1:18, Code Pink marched in from the east, along the fence, and joined the protest.

By 1:20 there were hundreds of people, some sitting, some standing, most singing, all refusing to leave.

By 1:22 many of the corporate media cameras were gone, and the independent and small media seemed to dominate. But they and onlookers were pushed further out in the street, as the police brought in their horses. The chant from the street then became 'Get those animals off those horses!'

By 1:26, the dominant chant was 'Arrest Bush.' This chant came back again and again over the next 30 minutes. Another was 'No more of a class war!'

By 1:30 they moved the horses out and brought in the police vans. But they only had a few teeny little vans. There was no way they could hold everyone.

Chant: 'A liar, a coward, say it a little louder!'

One guy with a megaphone shouted 'Hey Bushie Boy, we know you’ve got a lot of oil 'cause your boys are leaving the engines running. Did you fight a war for this oil?'

At a quarter to 2 they brought in a Metro bus – faster by far than they'd gotten busses into New Orleans. As the arrests started, the crowd yelled: 'The Whole World Is Watching!'

From

PHOTO GALLERY

--David Swanson is creator of MeetWithCindy.org, co-founder of the AfterDowningStreet.org coalition, a writer and activist, and the Washington Director of Democrats.com. His website is www.davidswanson.org

Photos from the Left Coast

Wed, 28 Sep 2005 01:03:00 +0000

9-27-05, 8:55 am

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - 24SEPTEMBER05 - 20,000 people march and demonstrate in San Francisco to oppose the war in Iraq.

Contact David Bacon through his website:

In Arkansas, Grassroots Activists to the Rescue of Katrina Evacuees

Wed, 28 Sep 2005 00:59:00 +0000

9-27-05, 8:52 am

There are 75,000 evacuees from Hurricane Katrina in Arkansas, according to Kathryn Hall-Trujillo. She is the director of the Birthing Project USA, a maternal and child health program nationwide.

“On my recent trip with Pastors for Peace to Arkansas I listened in horror, sadness and outrage as people who survived Katrina spoke of their lives before and after the hurricane,” she says. “I wanted to slap the taste out of Mrs. (Barbara) Bush's mouth as she declared they were better off in shelters (like the Houston Astrodome).” With other working people, Hall-Trujillo helped bring and coordinate hurricane aid to evacuees in Arkansas, her birthplace. The airport in Little Rock is a main arrival point for aid, so local folks are well aware of the aid volume arriving at the facility.

A main challenge in distributing Katrina aid to the rural populace is developing relations with grassroots aid providers within the context of the politics of displaced persons. This means dealing with FEMA and the American Red Cross.

Can you say ineffective bureaucracies? By contrast in Little Rock, Hall-Trujillo was very impressed with how labor and interfaith folks are cooperating to try and improve people’s living standards.

A driving force for this activism is Curtis Muhammad’s Community Labor United coalition, which includes 30 organizations. This is a model of political organizing for other American people to learn from and with.

Plainly, in the context of imperial wars overseas and climate change-caused weather catastrophes stateside, it is high time to rethink the concept of national security.

“One of the most patriotic duties we all have right now is to mobilize ourselves and let Congress know that it is genocidal to divert the resources of our country to kill people who are not our enemies both at home and abroad,” Hall-Trujillo says.

--Seth Sandronsky is a member of Sacramento Area Peace Action and a co-editor of Because People Matter, Sacramento's progressive paper. He can be reached at ssandron@hotmail.com.

The Speech Everyone Is Talking About: Etan Thomas Electrifies Anti-War Washington

Wed, 28 Sep 2005 00:56:00 +0000

9-27-05, 8:49 am

Every generation the wide world of corporate sports produces an athlete with the iron resolve and moral urgency to step off their pedestal and join the fight for social justice. A century ago, it was boxer Jack Johnson, flaunting, as WEB DuBois put it, 'his unforgivable blackness.' In the 1930s, 'the Brown Bomber' Joe Louis and track star Jesse Owens took turns spitting in Hitler's eyes, and Mildred Babe Didrikson continued to show that a woman could be the equal - if not superior – of any man. In the 1940s and 50s, Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, and the Brooklyn Dodgers advanced the cause of civil rights through the transgressive act of the multi-racial double play. In the 1960s, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, Bill Russell, David Meggyesy, Tommie Smith, and John Carlos showed how mass struggle could ricochet into the world of sports with electric results. In the 1970s, Billie Jean King used a wicked forehand, and took to the streets, to demand equal rights for women, and Curt Flood showed the labor movement - and the bosses - how to go from crumbs to a bigger piece of the pie. In the 1980’s Martina Navratilova came out of the closet and onto centre court, with her girlfriend on her sinewyarm in plain view of all.

Today we may just have a figure to join their ranks in the NBA’s Etan Thomas. Regular readers of this column will know that I have interviewed the Washington Wizards' Power Forward on numerous occasions and highlighted his views on everything from the death penalty to the ravages of Hurricane Katrina. He is also the author of a book of poems called More Than An Athlete.

But this past weekend, Etan made a play for pantheon status. Etan took it to that Ali level, by delivering a blistering poetical speech as part of the weekend’s anti-war demonstrations in Washington DC. His contribution, which was played in its entirety on Democracy Now!, is being hailed as 'the best of the day' in various nooks and crannies of the blogosphere.

Here is the transcript. Read and pass it along – it has the power to topple tyrants.

'Giving all honor, thanks and praises to God for courage and wisdom, this is a very important rally. I'd like to thank you for allowing me to share my thoughts, feelings and concerns regarding a tremendous problem that we are currently facing. This problem is universal, transcending race, economic background, religion, and culture, and this problem is none other than the current administration which has set up shop in the White House.

In fact, I'd like to take some of these cats on a field trip. I want to get big yellow buses with no air conditioner and no seatbelts and round up Bill O'Reilly, Pat Buchanan, Trent Lott, Sean Hannity, Dick Cheney, Jeb Bush, Bush Jr. and Bush Sr., John Ashcroft, Giuliani, Ed Gillespie, Katherine Harris, that little bow-tied Tucker Carlson and any other right-wing conservative Republicans I can think of, and take them all on a trip to the ‘hood. Not to do no 30-minute documentary. I mean, I want to drop them off and leave them there, let them become one with the other side of the tracks, get them four mouths to feed and no welfare, have scare tactics run through them like a laxative, criticizing them for needing assistance. I’d show them working families that make too much to receive welfare but not enough to make ends meet. I’d employ them with jobs with little security, let them know how it feels to be an employee at will, able to be fired at the drop of a hat. I’d take away their opportunities, then try their children as adults, sending their 13-year-old babies to life in prison. I’d sell them dreams of hopelessness while spoon-feeding their young with a daily dose of inferior education. I’d tell them no child shall be left behind, then take more money out of their schools, tell them to show and prove themselves on standardized exams testing their knowledge on things that they haven’t been taught, and then I’d call them inferior.

I’d soak into their interior notions of endless possibilities. I’d paint pictures of assisted productivity if they only agreed to be all they can be, dress them up with fatigues and boots with promises of pots of gold at the end of rainbows, free education to waste terrain on those who finish their bid. Then I’d close the lid on that barrel of fool’s gold by starting a war, sending their children into the midst of a hostile situation, and while they're worried about their babies being murdered and slain in foreign lands, I’d grace them with the pain of being sick and unable to get medicine.

Give them health benefits that barely cover the common cold. John Q. would become their reality as HMOs introduce them to the world of inferior care, filling their lungs with inadequate air, penny pinching at the expense of patients, doctors practicing medicine in an intricate web of rationing and regulations. Patients wander the maze of managed bureaucracy, costs rise and quality quickly deteriorates, but they say that managed care is cheaper. They’ll say that free choice in medicine will defeat the overall productivity, and as co-payments are steadily rising, I'll make their grandparents have to choose between buying their medicine and paying their rent.

Then I'd feed them hypocritical lines of being pro-life as the only Christian way to be. Then very contradictingly, I’d fight for the spread of the death penalty, as if thou shall not kill applies to babies but not to criminals.

Then I’d introduce them to those sworn to protect and serve, creating a curb in their trust in the law. I’d show them the nightsticks and plungers, the pepper spray and stun guns, the mace and magnums that they’d soon become acquainted with, the shakedowns and illegal search and seizures, the planted evidence, being stopped for no reason. Harassment ain’t even the half of it. Forty-one shots to two raised hands, cell phones and wallets that are confused with illegal contrabands. I’d introduce them to pigs who love making their guns click like wine glasses. Everlasting targets surrounded by bullets, making them a walking bull's eye, a living piñata, held at the mercy of police brutality, and then we’ll see if they finally weren’t aware of the truth, if their eyes weren’t finally open like a box of Pandora.

I’d show them how the other side of the tracks carries the weight of the world on our shoulders and how society seems to be holding us down with the force of a boulder. The bird of democracy flew the coop back in Florida. See, for some, and justice comes in packs like wolves in sheep's clothing. T.K.O.d by the right hooks of life, many are left staggering under the weight of the day, leaning against the ropes of hope. When your dreams have fallen on barren ground, it becomes difficult to keep pushing yourself forward like a train, administering pain like a doctor with a needle, their sequels continue more lethal than injections.

They keep telling us all is equal. I’d tell them that instead of giving tax breaks to the rich, financing corporate mergers and leading us into unnecessary wars and under-table dealings with Enron and Halliburton, maybe they can work on making society more peaceful. Instead, they take more and more money out of inner city schools, give up on the idea of rehabilitation and build more prisons for poor people. With unemployment continuing to rise like a deficit, it's no wonder why so many think that crime pays.

Maybe this trip will make them see the error of their ways. Or maybe next time, we'll just all get out and vote. And as far as their stay in the White House, tell them that numbered are their days.'

--Dave Zirin is the author of ''What's My Name Fool?': Sports and Resistance in the United States' (Haymarket Books). You can contact the author at dave@edgeofsports.com.

Brazil: Clean Politics on the Left

Wed, 28 Sep 2005 00:52:00 +0000

9-27-05, 8:45 am

A North American politician once observed, 'the only time I voted for a perfect politician was voting for myself, and then only the first time I ran. It's been compromise ever after.'

Brazil's[President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva], elected on a wave of optimistic idealism, has learned to make political moves far less than ideal. In parting from perfection, however, he's achieved much more than either he promised or he might have without some serious politicking.

He was elected to lead a nation with a failed domestic economy and a shadow foreign policy, rich beyond measure in resources, but as poor as any in the world. And he was elected with a mandate, but had to work with a Congress whose parties he defeated. Before mourning lost perfection, his party and supporters should examine what he did with the limited political resources he had available. His party coalition had only 35% in the Congress after the election, and Brazil's economy was weak in an already weaker region.

With those tools he crafted an alliance of small countries to guide the WTO talks in Cancun to reflect the needs of people in the developing world. He created a coalition to wrest control of health and medicines from the permanent control of the West on behalf of people with AIDS and other critical medical conditions in every developing country in the world. He opened markets in China, Africa, and the European Union that builds Brazilian independence from US markets and an increasingly unstable US economy. And, incrementally, he generated jobs, (Lula has created 3.4 million new jobs to date.) deeds to their homes in the poorest communities, a campaign against racism, began a struggle to end hunger, a battle to end slavery and create domestic economic growth and substantial security for those most oppressed by previous regimes.

To accomplish these goals he had to work with politicians and business interests violently opposed to him and to the parties he represented. He had to deal with the devil. This is hardly a criticism, when he got what was needed to create a base for much more substantial gains still in this decade. To accomplish anything requires a coalition; toaccomplish much requires a broad coalition, often including your enemies. Deals build agreements, and agreements got Brazil to a very different place than ever it had been.

Some of those compromises were, doubtless, less savory, less attractive than others, and, when a government makes deals many within the government mistake the readiness to cooperate with the enemy as an opportunity to profit from that cooperation. Scandals come and go. The only way to clean up a scandal, however, is to make it public and to put the fear of secrecy to rest. The most dramatic of the many achievements of the left must be our own honesty.

No contrast is sharper than a thorough investigation of politically motivated deals in Brazil and America's examination of 9/11 and, now, of their own New Orleans catastrophe. We can cure deal making, but it is impossible to cure the Iraqi war, Abu Grahib, and, now, the politicians running American 'emergency relief.' The Bush administration eliminating “Davis Bacon” (to lower wages) and affirmative action for jobs for women, minorities and Vietnam and Iraq veterans in rebuilding the gulf.

It is our duty to work to build to solidarity of the left in both South and North America to bring that better world for all people. As for the USA we need to learn from Brazil and began to have shame for the crimes of the “Bush gang”. For Brazil you most understand if you chose to swim in dirty water you get dirty. Also the people must know that it take time to change the curse of a large ship. But keeping the struggle alive a moving forward takes all of us and that better world will become a reality.

--Gary Dotterman is a contributing editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.

North Korea and The New Yorker – a Case of Hysteria in Print

Wed, 28 Sep 2005 00:48:00 +0000

Usually the staid New Yorker magazine can be counted upon to publish fairly informative, if not always completely reliable, articles about the goings on in our world. The August 22, 2005 issue, however, has an hysterical rant about North Korea more suitable to a tabloid such as the Enquirer than to a magazine that prides itself on its 'quality.'

I am referring to Ian Buruma’s lurid 'Kimworld: Inside the North Korean Slave State' a review of a book by Bradley K. Martin ('Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty') which 'relies heavily' on the stories given out by one high ranking defector Hwang Jang-yop. Buruma, a real bottom feeder for juicy info also likes to quote such scholarly works as 'Kim Jong Il’s Cook – I Saw His Naked Body.'

While there are many problems with North Korea, to be sure, they are not the concoctions and fantasies put forth by Buruma in his 'review.'

Here is an example of his simple-minded analysis: 'To begin with, Kim Il Sung, whom the Soviets installed as head of state in 1945, was responsible for starting the Korean War, which may have caused as many as a million deaths.'

In the first place Kim was not 'installed' by the Soviets – that is just old cold war codswallop. He was a major leader of the Korean resistance to Japan in the 1930s and throughout World War II. The Soviets actually favored Cho Man-sik – a non-communist nationalist. The Koreans themselves ended up favoring Kim as their leader after the commencement of the US buildup of an independent southern army of occupation full of old Japanese collaborators.

Nor did Kim 'start' the Korean War. It is far more complex than that. The unilateral decision by the US to set up an independent southern state under its auspices, when almost all Koreans had expected a unified Korea to emerge after the defeat of Japan, was 'the invitation' for the commencement of the Korean War, according to then British Minister of Works Richard Stokes. One man, Kim Il Sung, is no more responsible for the Korean War, than is, say Kaiser Wilhelm for World War 1. The war was the result of a whole concatenation of factors arising out of the decision to launch the cold war in 1945. Buruma’s cant notwithstanding.

Millions were killed – civilians – and the vast majority were killed by US and South Korean forces as a deliberate policy. Buruma says 'many civilians were massacred by the Communists.' What Buruma covers up, thru silence, is more telling than what he claims. Bruce Cumings, in 'North Korea: Another Country', points out that the US with bombs and napalm, 'leveled North Korea and killed millions of civilians’ and bombed 'huge irrigation dams that provided water for 75% of the North’s food production.' This was 'a war crime, recognized as such by international law,' as Cumings points out. Buruma is not interested in facts. He claims the horrific famine of the 1990s in North Korea was 'largely brought on by disastrous agricultural policies.' Honest scholar that he is, he never mentions that many Korea experts blame the famine on severe floods over a two year period followed by an extreme drought. (If I thought as Buruma, I’d say these conditions were caused by global warming so the famine was really the result of US policies!).

Much of the rest of the review is full of the bad behavior of Kim Jong Il based on the tales of #1 defector Hwang. Buruma compares him to Nero and Caligula. He also refers to an idiotic propaganda piece by Jasper Becker to get some of his information [see my brief review of Becker's work here]. Becker, like Martin relies 'heavily' on this one defector.

We get to the point of the review near the end where Buruma, like many supporters of US Imperialism, suggests we have to do something about the 'evil' Kim Jong Il – he must be removed from power. We, mind you, not the Korean people have to figure out how to do this. This must be an appealing thought after our great success in Iraq.

Buruma, he has no shame, based on the memoirs of the cook and Hwang carries on about Kim Il Jong’s 'sexual demands' and 'debauchery' – including having husbands shoot their wives – naked girls forced to dance a his parties, etc. This is the basis of his comparison of Kim to the above mentioned Roman Emperors.

It is amazing to me that 'The New Yorker' would let such trash be published in its pages. Cumings, who has spent his career studying North Korea and the Kims – and has no cold war imperialist mentality to warp his outlook, tells us that Kim 'is not the playboy, womanizer, drunk, and mentally deranged fanatic ‘Dr. Evil’ of our press. He is a homebody who doesn’t socialize much, doesn’t drink much, and works at home in his pajamas, scribbling marginal comments on the endless reams of documents brought to him in gray briefcases by his aides.'

Still, there are really problems in North Korea – and Cumings is very frank about the shortcomings in that country. But the Koreans can work out their own problems. If Mr. Buruma wants to write something worth reading on the subject he should read less contentious books and view fewer James Bond movies.