From news at resist.ca Tue Jan 1 16:17:14 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Wed, 02 Jan 2008 00:17:14 -0000 Subject: [news] Those Involved in Population Control Message-ID: <20080102001715.22032.qmail@resist.ca> _Brent Jessop_ - [Knowledge Driven Revolution.com][1] - _December 31, 2007_ > "In the eight years that I have been a part-time propagandist, I have found that many people in influential positions share my concern. I have had encouraging letters from all over the world. People in radio and television have been extremely helpful in providing exposure for the issues." - Paul Ehrlich, 1968 (p159) Paul Ehrlich's book _The Population Bomb_* describes a variety of different ways to reduce the population of the world. This includes, among other things; [financial incentives][2], [manipulative sex education][3], [forced vasectomies][4] for every man with more than three children, and [adding sterilants][2] to the water supply or food staples. But Ehrlich is only one man, albeit a well connected Stanford University professor, but still just an individual. Who else is involved in these types of population control schemes? **United States Government** > "In late 1970. Congress finally placed the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act to provide free contraception to the poor through non-profit agencies. It also established an Office of Population Affairs in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to sponsor further research on birth control." - 85 > > "Beginning with Senators Ernest Gruening and Joseph Clark in the middle 1960s, there has been a small group of dedicated people in Congress who have been trying to get the government to move on these matters. More recently, the ball has been carried by Senators Joseph Tydings and Robert Packwood, and Representatives Paul McCloskey, **George Bush**, and James Scheuer." [emphasis mine] - 86 > > "Despite repeated statements of concern since 1965 by President's Johnson and Nixon..." - 85 **United Nations and Co.** > "The United Nations has greatly increased its family planning activities, operation through several agencies including WHO [World Health Organization], UNICEF, and UNESCO [United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization]. Secretary Generat U Thant has been urged by a study group to establish a special "world population institute" promptly to take practical action against population growth. Robert McNamara, president of the World Bank, has put population projects high on the Bank's list of priorities. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is also getting into the field." - 84 **Foundations** > "In March 1970, a two-year Commission on Population Growth and the American Future was established under the chairmanship of John D. Rockefeller, III." > > "Aside from government contributions, private foundations such as Ford and Rockefeller are becoming more involved in programs, both for research and overseas family planning projects." - 86 **Zero Population Growth** > "But a new organization exists - Zero Population Growth - whose mission is to educate the public and politicians to the necessity for stopping population growth as soon as possible, to lobby for legislation, and to work for politicians who support the same goals. ZPG now has more than 30,000 members and is growing fast. Hopefully it will have developed some real political clout by 1972." - 88 Ehrlich forgets to mention in his book that he [founded][5] Zero Population Growth with Richard Bowers and Charles Remington. This organization is still going strong under a new name: [Population Connection][6]. **Scientists** Ehrlich, a self proclaimed propagandist, also believes that his fellow scientists, namely biologists, should be much more involved in the "education" of the masses. > "Biologists must promote understanding of the facts of reproductive biology which relate to matters of abortion and contraception. They must do more than simply reiterate the facts of population dynamics. They must point out the biological absurdity of equating a zygote (the cell created by joining of sperm and egg) or fetus (unborn child) with a human being... People are people because of the interaction of genetic information (stored in a chemical language) with an environment. Clearly, the most "humanizing" element of that environment is the cultural element to which the child is not exposed until after birth... in many cases abortion is more desirable than childbirth." - 138 **Environmental Groups** The interconnectedness of the environmental movement and the population control fanatics is undeniable and I will examine some of the similarities between _The Population Bomb_ and Al Gore's _An Inconvenient Truth_ in the [next article][7] of this series. But for now, some of the more obvious environmental connections. The forward to the _The Population Bomb_ was written by [David Brower][8], the founder of Sierra Club Foundation, the John Muir Institute for Environmental Studies, Friends of the Earth, the League of Conservation Voters, Earth Island Institute (1982), North Cascades Conservation Council, and Fate of the Earth Conferences. Also _The Population Bomb_ was published by [Sierra Club Books][9]. Ehrlich has also been well rewarded by both the scientific and the environmental community. From his [University of Stanford profile][10]: > Professor Ehrlich is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Professor Ehrlich has received several honorary degrees, the John Muir Award of the Sierra Club, the Gold Medal Award of the World Wildlife Fund International, a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, the Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (given in lieu of a Nobel Prize in areas where the Nobel is not given), in 1993 the Volvo Environmental Prize, in 1994 the United Nations' Sasakawa Environment Prize, in 1995 the Heinz Award for the Environment, in 1998 the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement and the Dr. A. H. Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences, in 1999 the Blue Planet Prize, in 2001 the Eminent Ecologist Award of the Ecological Society of America and the Distinguished Scientist Award of the American Institute of Biological Sciences. *Quotes from: Paul R. Ehrlich. _The Population Bomb: Revised & Expanded Edition_ (1968, 1971). SBN 345-24489-3-150. * * * **Related Articles** [The Population Bomb Part 1: How to Control the AMERICAN Population by Paul Ehrlich][2] [The Population Bomb Part 2: How to Control the WORLD Population by Paul Ehrlich][4] [The Population Bomb Part 3: Population, Religion and Sex Education][3] [The Population Bomb Part 5: The Apocalypse, From Paul Ehrlich to Al Gore (January 7)][7] [1]: http://www.knowledgedrivenrevolution.com/Articles/200712/20071231_Bomb_Help.htm [2]: http://www.KnowledgeDrivenRevolution.com/Articles/200712/20071210_Bomb_America.htm [3]: http://www.KnowledgeDrivenRevolution.com/Articles/200712/20071224_Bomb_Sex_Education.htm [4]: http://www.KnowledgeDrivenRevolution.com/Articles/200712/20071217_Bomb_World.htm [5]: http://www.populationconnection.org/Communications/Reporter/Dec99/12-19thirtyyears.pdf [6]: http://www.populationconnection.org/ [7]: http://www.KnowledgeDrivenRevolution.com/Articles/200801/20080107_Bomb_Gore_GW.htm [8]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Brower#References [9]: http://action.sierraclub.org/site/PageServer?pagename=bookshome [10]: http://www.stanford.edu/group/CCB/Staff/Ehrlich.html URL: http://mostlywater.org/those_involved_population_control From news at resist.ca Wed Jan 2 18:17:05 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Thu, 03 Jan 2008 02:17:05 -0000 Subject: [news] Extremism and Long War Message-ID: <20080103021705.4904.qmail@resist.ca> Axis of Logic - Exclusive Featured Extremism and Long War By George Aleman III Jan 1, 2008, 19:43 Imminent Threat The binary worldview of ?us? versus ?them,? cultivated and nurtured by institutional leaders and perpetuated by corporate-state propaganda ministers, is sacrosanct orthodoxy. Those in positions of power would have us believe that there are forces of Cold War proportion out in the exterior waiting for the moment to strike and impose their mores upon the ?American Way of Life.? Again and again they tell the public that ?they? want to break ?our? will; that ?they? hate ?us,? what ?we? stand for, ?our? freedoms, ?our? way of life. Leaders incessantly declare that there are fanatics (mainly Muslim) who want to enforce their mode of existence onto Americans, that ?they? want to establish, and export, a Caliphate (the Islamic form of government representing the political unity and leadership of the Muslim world); that America is in a never-ending state of threat. They unabatedly contend that ?we? must fight ?them? over there, so that ?we? do not have to fight ?them? over here. Indeed, there are lunatics of the ultra-orthodox strain, fanatical perverts of many religions who are bent on creating a utopia of their own through wanton violence and destruction. Both inside and outside our borders, homegrown or not, radical groups can summon the ability to wreak havoc. However, we have been misled, for some time now, about the magnitude and true reality of happenings outside, and inside, the country. Most radical groups in the exterior are sparse, disconnected factions comprised of Third World populations in a deep political and economic crisis that most often ?eclipse religion.?[1] What many have been led to believe?that there are killers on the prowl everywhere waiting to strike at us because we are an industrialized, ?democratic? nation-state with ?free? institutions and massive wealth?is certainly not the imminent threat. Our leaders consistently drag out the boogie-men to terrorize us and divert our attention from the real menace. That is, the political and economical fundamentalist class, a ?Radical Establishment,? within our institutions backed by military might and nuclear primacy. In this ?Global War on Terror,? State controllers have manufactured an equal, an entity of their quotient. In order to produce and sustain their dominion over society and expand their frontier buffers in Cold War fashion, they must confront equivalence. The government, its concomitant apparatus of corporate-military-industry and their benefactors vie for, and maintain, a defense budget larger than that of the Cold War to fight an ?enemy? not of Cold War proportion.[2] In 2001 Robert Higgs, Senior Fellow in Political Economy for The Independent Institute, explained: Whether one considers active troop strength, reserve troop strength, heavy tanks, armored infantry vehicles, airplanes, helicopters, or major warships, the United States and its allies possess a preponderance of the warriors and the tools of war, greatly exceeding the troop strengths and the number of weapons platforms in the hands of all potential adversaries combined. Beyond this numerical dominance, the United States and its allies possess important additional advantages of superiority in weapons technology as well as in communications, intelligence, logistics, training, maintenance, and mobility.[3] More recently, retired US Army Colonel Andrew J. Bacevich exclaimed in his 2005 study The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War, that ?the present-day Pentagon budget, adjusted for inflation, is 12 percent larger than the average defense budget of the Cold War era? Indeed, by some calculations, the United States spends more on defense than all other nations in the world together. This is a circumstance without historical precedent.? Thus, Bacevich said, ?The primary mission of America?s far-flung military establishment is global power projection??[4] The Radical Establishment, these Chicken Hawk ?Civilian Militarists,? demand, command, and employ extremes (economical, military and political) to achieve their goals of domination and exploitation so as to sustain their positions as beneficiaries of empire.[5] They try to manipulate and seduce us into embracing and supporting acute measures to achieve their desires. They try to convince us to cede rights for safety. They try to convince us that more surveillance equates to security and is for the public good. They try to convince us that more bombs, bullets, death and destruction will bring everlasting peace, freedom and independence. They consider themselves to be ?noble heroes,? ?righteous protectors of the weak?? while dispensing immense devastation to those that are, in fact, infinitely weaker?those that have minute economical, political, and military power, if any at all.[6] The Radical Establishment and Its War of Terror During the Cold War the late social historian E.P. Thompson described how ?extremism? generate[s] its own internal contradictions.? In this calculated ?Long War,? the Radical Establishment demands ?absolute antagonism, which can only be resolved by? extermination.?[7] In their quest to exterminate via extremes, they have inverted the nation?s self-prescribed principles to match their doctrine. Freedom is tyranny; life is death; security is surveillance; protection is control; democracy is dictatorship. By way of endemic perception and pathological pursuit these extremists embody their concocted antagonist of Cold War dimension. Liberty and autonomy are vanishing, slowly eroding under the torrential weight of elitist-extremist conduct. They see threats to their established power in every corner of our own society and the world at large.[8] Many of these extremist ideologues would have us believe that violent conduct is confined to the ?barbarous other? in the exterior, that America is discharged from atrocity, because it does not commit atrocity. It acts in the name of all that is good, moral and sacred. To question that, then, would be to question all that is good, moral and sacred. This is, essentially, a great fallacy. Many institutional radicals lobby for and sanctify acts of aggression and butchery, but do not sell them as such. The fundamentalist class?official and governmental, corporate and private?surrounds itself with elections, laws, and Constitutional authority to achieve its objectives.[9] The Radical Establishment claims itself to be the harbinger of justice, virtue and democratic tenets. Individual acts of vigilanteism and destruction equate to terrorism, but collective acts of aggression and demolition by technologically superior ?democratic? nation-states do not. Nineteen hijackers take control of passenger aircrafts and slam them into the economic and military hubs of the American empire, the total fallout is deaths in the thousands; yes, this is indeed terrorism. The United States retaliates by launching a full scale invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. The result: over a million civilian casualties (nearly three hundred times more than that of 9/11) and the upending of people?s means of survival; this is not considered terrorism.[10] A foreign nationalist shoots down coalition soldiers and posts the horrendous act on the internet for the world to see; yes, this is indeed terrorism. Corporate mercenaries contracted by our government are caught on video opening fire on civilians without provocation, justification and hesitation; this is not considered terrorism.[11] A suicide bomber kills several coalition soldiers, while at the same time killing innocent bystanders; yes, this is indeed terrorism. A jingoistic bombardier barrages civilians, hitting not one single ?suspected terrorist?; this is not considered terrorism.[12] Killing innocent civilians is wrong; forcing unwanted modes of existence is wrong; change by way of gunpoint is wrong; terrorism, oppression, manipulation, torture, atrocity, imperialism, and exploitation?all this is wrong. Extremism begets extremism; terrorism breeds terrorism, whether it is individual or collective. These types of extremities do not make anyone safe. They exacerbate problems and decimate the defenseless. It is an endless cycle of stupidity and senselessness, a never ending confrontation that the Radical Establishment packages and sells to us as our necessity when it is really their desire. As historian and World War II veteran Howard Zinn recently explained, ?There are societies that do not pretend to be ?civilized??military dictatorships and totalitarian states?and execute their victims without ceremony. Then there nations like the United States, whose claim to be civilized rests on the fact that its punishments are legitimized by a complex set of judicial procedures.?[13] He continued, ?Terrorism is the killing of innocent people in order to send a message? So long as our government engages in terrorism,? the terrorism of war, ?claiming always that it is done for democracy or freedom or to send a message to some other government, there will be more? terrorism and terrorists that follow its example. ?Individual acts of terrorism will continue and they will be called?rightly?fanaticism. Government terrorism, on a much larger scale, will continue, and that will be called ??foreign policy.??[14] The pertinent question Zinn asked was, ?Isn?t it clear by now that sending a message to terrorists through [the terror of war] doesn?t work, that it only leads to more terrorism??[15] The most recent report by the main advisory department to the Bush Administration, National Counterterrorism Center, concluded, ?Terrorist attacks against noncombatants nearly doubled in Iraq? and were up sharply in Afghanistan, with those two countries alone accounting for a 29 percent increase in terrorism worldwide? The two countries where large numbers of American combat troops are deployed are also where terrorism is rising fastest. Terrorist attacks are up 91 percent in Iraq and 53 percent in Afghanistan.?[16] The answer to Zinn?s question is, then, unfortunately, ?No,? it is not clear by now. Nothing has been learned or taken into account. Addicted to the status quo, everywhere are ?hideous threats to established power??[17] Measures, however extreme, must be taken to assert and reassert domination, quail the loss of legitimacy, and maintain a clenched fist over society and the globe. ?War is a Racket? In 1935 Smedley D. Butler, retired Brigadier General of the United States Marines, stated: WAR is a racket?. A racket is best described as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small ?inside? group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes? Out of war nations acquire additional territory? This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few?the same few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill? This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.[18] With the national debt at $9 trillion, and climbing at a rate of approximately $1.5 billion a day, the now Democratic-led-Congress continues to appropriate tax payer money in the billions for continued warfare.[19] The Defense Department persistently siphons these funds to private-military-industrialist coffers to maintain the errand of global domination and continued bid for empire. We, and the entire world, are less safe today and in fantastically bad shape because of these extremist death dealers who have plunged us into a ?Long War? for profit. The Radical Establishment was repeatedly warned of the ?potential costly consequences of an American-led invasion? before the [Iraq] war began.?[20] In 2006, it was confirmed?via National Intelligence Estimate?by the National Intelligence Council that ?the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism.?[21] In January of 2007, the Council again concluded, ?Iraqi society?s growing polarization, the persistent weakness of the security forces and the state in general, and all sides? ready recourse to violence are collectively driving an increase in communal and insurgent violence and political extremism??[22] The Administration attributes the current drop in violence to its much touted strategy of ?troop surge.? Yet, as the Council has cautioned, ?even if violence is diminished, given the current winner-take-all attitude and sectarian animosities infecting the political scene, Iraqi leaders will be hard pressed to achieve sustained political reconciliation??[23] With the implementation of the doctrine of Preemptive War, the fundamentalist class has instigated a spike in the radicalization of foreign populations, terrorist activities and the manufacture and proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction.[24] States, some with nuclear arsenal, have taken a protective posture; both they and the global hegemon have itchy trigger fingers, one poised to strike at the other in ?defense.? In addition, they have sent our youth to kill and be killed. The Armed Forces is now devastated, overstretched and virtually incapable of responding to factual threats, as 2007 passed as the ?deadliest for US troops.?[25] The Radical Establishment has caused us to become the most hated nation-state on the face of the earth, not because of our ?freedoms,? wealth and ?democracy,? but because of their reckless conduct, their willingness to play Russian roulette with our lives.[26] As Noam Chomsky has expressed, for these Radical Civilian Militarists, ?It is a rational calculation, on the assumption that human survival is not particularly significant in comparison with short-term power and wealth. And that is nothing new. These themes resonate through history. The difference today is only that the stakes are enormously higher.?[27] Their ?rational calculation? has amounted to the implementation of their methods of fair dealing without regard for the realistic consequences for us. They are transporting and applying their ?civilized? system of ?stabilization? without care for the fallout. Extremism and Long War These extremists in positions of authority personify the manufactured body they tell us must be destroyed. They are forcing their inverted notions of peace, freedom, civilization and democracy upon communities abroad by way of the most savage means?all in the name of benevolence, morality, and righteousness for our ears. Indeed, under the cover of pleasant oratory they are terminating innocent life; they are the force of Cold War proportion, thrusting their systems of management and modes of production onto others. Tutelage in dictatorial democracy, unfettered, predatory global commerce, and State clientelism are the way toward progress and tranquility. Consequences are secondary. Their extremities have produced Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, war without end, more death and destruction than that of 9/11; terrorism, torture, unresponsive leadership, divisiveness, xenophobia, hate, fear, death, destruction and the expansion of neo-liberal economic ethos (a disastrous form of capitalism) of profit over the needs of people. Backed by military might and nuclear primacy, they will stop at nothing to achieve their ends and sustain their positions of power, their dominion over society and the globe via full spectrum dominance?land, sea, air and space. This is their path toward sustaining the status-quo. Statist radicals would have us believe that our interests are synonymous; they are not. They wish to conjure sentiments of hate, fear, xenophobia, inertia, insecurity, anxiety, and pessimism so that they may capitalize on those emotions for their own ends. They want us to be aloof and divided; they want us to remain busy, struggling to survive. They want us to believe that invading Third World countries and toppling their structures and enforcing dictatorial democracies is right, just and for the benefit of security. They want us to become accustomed to the ?normalization of war.?[28] They want us to see bombing underdeveloped nations as defensive; they want us to believe that the expenditure of American lives and resources is glorious, correct and beneficial when all this is wrong and to our detriment. The deified statement that ??we?? must fight ?them? over there, so that ?we? do not have to fight ?them? over here,? so frequently uttered by the Radical Establishment, serves to divert our attention from the fact that ?they? are already here, and pitch themselves as our ?noble heroes.? ? Copyright 2008 by AxisofLogic.com [http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_25758.shtml][1] George Aleman III is an MA student in history. He is also a writer, activist and musician. His writings have appeared in Z Magazine, Dissident Voice, Third World Traveler and Axis of Logic. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This material is available for republication as long as reprints include verbatim copy of the article its entirety, respecting its integrity. Reprints must cite the author and Axis of Logic as the original source including a "live link" to the article. Thank you! Endnotes [1] "Global poll: There is no 'clash of civilizations," The Christian Science Monitor, Tuesday, February 20, 2007, [http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0220/p99s01-duts.html][2]. [2] Andrew J. Bacevich. The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War (Oxford University Press: New York, NY, 2005), 17. [3] Robert Higgs, ?The Cold War is Over, but U.S. Preparation for It Continues,? The Independent Review, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Fall 2001). [4] Bacevich, The New American Militarism, 17. [5] Alfred Vagts, A History of Militarism: Civilian and Military (London: Hollis & Carter, 1959), p 463. [6] Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 24. [7] New Left Review, ed. Extremism and Cold War (London: Verso, 1982), 24. [8] Terry Eagleton, Holy Terror (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005), 74 ? 75. [9] Lincoln, Holy Terrors, 24. [10] ?Casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq,? Unknown News, Most recent update: July 16, 2007, [http://www.unknownnews.net/][3] casualties.html; ?Iraq deaths due to U.S. Invasion,? Just Foreign Policy, [http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/i][4] raq/iraqdeaths.html. [11] ?Two Videos: Blackwater killing innocent Iraqi civilians, and an Iraqi sniper killing Americans soldiers,? Guerilla News Network, Posted Monday, September 24, 2007, [http://chycho.gnn.tv/blogs/25123/][5] Two_Videos_Blackwater_killing_innocent_Iraqi_civilians _and_an_Iraqi_sniper_killing_Americans_soldiers; ?F.B.I. Says Guards Killed 14 Iraqis Without Cause,? New York Times, Wednesday, November 14, 2007, [http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/][6] world/middleeast/14blackwater.html?_r=1&oref=slogin; ?Video shows Blackwater guards fired 1st,? MSNBC.com, Saturday, September 22, 2007, [http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20921619/][7]. [12] ?Bomber Hits a Gathering of Civilians and G.I.?s,? New York Times, Friday, December 21, 2007, [http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/21/][8] world/middleeast/21iraq.html; ?US bomb kills Afghan civilians,? BBC News, Wednesday April 9, 2003, [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2931297.stm;][9] ?U.S. bomb hits wedding party,? CNN.com, Monday, July 1, 2002, [http://archives.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/][10] asiapcf/central/07/01/afghanistan.bombing/. [13] Howard Zinn, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2007), 68. [14] Ibid., 70-71. [15] Ibid., 74. [16] ?Terrorist Attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan Rose Sharply Last Year, State Department Says,? New York Times, Tuesday, May 1, 2007, [http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/01/][11] washington/01terror.html; The full State Department?s NTCT report can be found at: [http://wits.nctc.gov/reports/][12] crot2006nctcannexfinal.pdf. [17] New Left review, ed. Extremism and Cold War, 25 [18] Brigadier General Smedley D. Butler, War is a Racket (Los Angeles: Feral House, 1935, 2003), 23 - 24. [19] ?U.S. NATIONAL DEBT CLOCK?, [http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/;][13] ?Congress sends Bush budget bill with Iraq money,? Associated Press via Yahoo News, Wednesday December, 19, 2007, [http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071220/][14] pl_nm/usa_congress_funding_dc. [20] ?Prewar Assessment on Iraq Saw Chance of Strong Divisions,? Tuesday, September 28, 2004, [http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/28/politics/28intel.html?_r=2...][15]. [21] ?Spy agencies say Iraq war worsened terror threat,? Sunday, September 24, 2006, [http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/][16] politics/2003272931_terrorintel24.html [22] US State Department, National Intelligence Estimate, Prospects for Iraq?s Stability: A Challenging Road Ahead (Washington, D.C.: National Intelligence Council, January 2007), 6. The full National Intelligence Council?s NIE report can be found at: [http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/][17] wdc/documents/nie020207.pdf [23] Ibid. [24] ?Categories of War; The US Gameplan for Iraq,? Counterpunch.org, Saturday, February 8, 2003, [http://www.counterpunch.org/christison02082003.html][18] [25] ?US military ?at breaking point,?? BBC News, Thursday, January 26, 2006 [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4649066.stm;][19] ?2007 deadliest for US troops in Iraq,? Associated Press vi Yahoo News, Sunday, December 30, 2007, [http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071230/][20] ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_casualties. [26] ?Once the most beloved country in the world, the US is now the most hated,? Guardian Unlimited, Wednesday, February 14, 2007, [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/][21] story/0,,2012492,00.html. [27] Noam Chomsky, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (Metropolitan Books: New York, NY, 2006), 37. [28] Bacevich, The New American Militarism, 18. [1]: http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_25758.shtml (http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_25758.shtml) [2]: http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0220/p99s01-duts.html (http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0220/p99s01-duts.html) [3]: http://www.unknownnews.net/ (http://www.unknownnews.net/) [4]: http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/i (http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/i) [5]: http://chycho.gnn.tv/blogs/25123/ (http://chycho.gnn.tv/blogs/25123/) [6]: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/ (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/) [7]: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20921619/ (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20921619/) [8]: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/21/ (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/21/) [9]: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2931297.stm (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2931297.stm;) [10]: http://archives.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/ (http://archives.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/) [11]: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/01/ (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/01/) [12]: http://wits.nctc.gov/reports/ (http://wits.nctc.gov/reports/) [13]: http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/ (http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/;) [14]: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071220/ (http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071220/) [15]: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/28/politics/28intel.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1199041528-TAkXpGDcHJmnuE5KdUX58w&oref=slogin (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/28/politics/28intel.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1199041528-TAkXpGDcHJmnuE5KdUX58w&oref=slogin) [16]: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/ (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/) [17]: http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/ (http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/) [18]: http://www.counterpunch.org/christison02082003.html (http://www.counterpunch.org/christison02082003.html) [19]: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4649066.stm (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4649066.stm;) [20]: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071230/ (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071230/) [21]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/ (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/) URL: http://mostlywater.org/httpaxisoflogiccomartmanpublisharticle_25758shtml From news at resist.ca Wed Jan 2 18:17:05 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Thu, 03 Jan 2008 02:17:05 -0000 Subject: [news] Reviewing F. William Engdahl's Seeds of Destruction Message-ID: <20080103021705.4906.qmail@resist.ca> Reviewing F. William Engdahl's "Seeds of Destruction" - by Stephen Lendman (Part I) Bill Engdahl is a leading researcher, economist and analyst of the New World Order who's written on issues of energy, politics and economics for over 30 years. He contributes regularly to publications like Japan's Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Foresight magazine, Grant's Investor.com, European Banker and Business Banker International. He's also a frequent speaker at geopolitical, economic and energy related international conferences and is a distinguished Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization where he's a regular contributor. Engdahl also wrote two important books - "A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order" in 2004. It's an essential history of geopolitics and the importance of oil. Engdahl explains that America's post-WW II dominance rests on two pillars and one commodity - unchallengeable military power and the dollar as the world's reserve currency combined with the quest to control global oil and other energy resources. Engdahl's newest book is just out from the Centre for Research on Globalization. It's a sequel to his first one called "Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation" and subject of this review. It's the diabolical story of how Washington and four Anglo-American agribusiness giants plan world domination by patenting life forms to gain worldwide control of our food supply and why that prospect is chilling. The book's compelling contents are reviewed below in-depth so readers will know the type future Henry Kissinger had in mind in 1970 when he said: "Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people." Remember also, this cabal is one of many interconnected ones with fearsome power and ruthless intent to use it - Big Banks controlling the Federal Reserve and our money, Big Oil our world energy resources, Big Media our information, Big Pharma our health, Big Technology our state-of-the-art everything and watching us, Big Defense our wars, Big Pentagon waging them, and other corporate predators exploiting our lives for profit. Engdahl's book focuses brilliantly on one of them. To fully cover its vital contents, this review will be in three parts for more detail and to make it easily digestible. Part I of "Seeds of Destruction" In 2003, Jeffrey Smith's "Seeds of Deception" was published. It exposed the dangers of untested and unregulated genetically engineered foods most people eat every day with no knowledge of the potential health risks. Efforts to inform the public have been quashed, reliable science has been buried, and consider what happened to two distinguished scientists. One was Ignatio Chapela, a microbial ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley. In September, 2001, he was invited to a carefully staged meeting with Fernando Ortiz Monasterio, Mexico's Director of the Commission of Biosafety in Mexico City. The experience left Chapela shaken and angry as he explained. Monasterio attacked him for over an hour. "First he trashed me. He let me know how damaging to the country and how problematic my information was to be." Chapela referred to what he and a UC Berkeley graduate student, David Quist, discovered in 2000 about genetically engineered contamination of Mexican corn in violation of a government ban on these crops in 1998. Corn is sacred in Mexico, the country is home to hundreds of indigenous varieties that crossbreed naturally, and GM contamination is permanent and unthinkable - but it happened by design. Chapela and Quist tested corn varieties in more than a dozen state of Oaxaca communities and discovered 6% of the plants contaminated with GM corn. Oaxaca is in the country's far South so Chapela knew if contamination spread there, it was widespread throughout Mexico. It's unavoidable because NAFTA allows imported US corn with 30% of it at the time genetically modified. Now it's heading for nearly double that amount, and if not contained, it soon could be all of it. The prestigious journal Nature agreed to publish Chapela's findings, Monasterio wanted them quashed, but Chapela refused to comply. As a result, he was intimidated not to do it and threatened with being held responsible for all damages to Mexican agriculture and its economy. He went ahead, nonetheless, and when his article appeared in the publication on November 29, 2001 the smear campaign against him began and intensified. It was later learned that Monsanto was behind it, and the Washington-based Bivings Group PR firm was hired to discredit his findings and get them retracted. It worked because the campaign didn't focus on Chapela's contamination discovery, but on a second research conclusion even more serious. He learned the contaminated GM corn had as many as eight fragments of the CaMV promoter that creates an unstable "hotspot." It can cause plant genes to fragment, scatter throughout the plant's genome, and, if proved conclusively, would wreck efforts to introduce GM crops in the country. Without further evidence, there was still room for doubt if the second finding was valid, however, and the anti-Chapela campaign hammered him on it. Because of the pressure, Nature took an unprecedented action in its 133 year history. It upheld Chapela's central finding but retracted the other one. That was all it took, and the major media pounced on it. They denounced Chapela's incompetence and tried to discredit everything he learned including his verified findings. They weren't reported, his vilification was highlighted, and Monsanto and the Mexican government scored a big victory. Ironically, on April 18, 2002, two weeks after Nature's partial retraction, the Mexican government announced there was massive genetic contamination of traditional corn varieties in Oaxaca and the neighboring state of Puebla. It was horrifying as up to 95% of tested crops were genetically polluted and "at a speed never before predicted." The news made headlines in Europe and Mexico. It was ignored in the US and Canada. The fallout for Chapela was UC Berkeley denied him tenure in 2003 because of his article and for criticizing university ties to the biotech industry. He then filed suit in April, 2004 asking remuneration for lost wages, earnings and benefits, compensatory damages for humiliation, mental anguish, emotional distress and coverage of attorney fees and costs for his action. He won in May, 2005 but not in court when the university reversed its decision, granted him tenure and agreed to include retroactive pay back to 2003. The damage, however, was done and is an example of what's at stake when anyone dares challenge a powerful company like Monsanto. The other man attacked was the world's leading lectins and plant genetic modification expert, UK-based Arpad Pusztai. He was vilified and fired from his research position at Scotland's Rowett Research Institute for publishing industry-unfriendly data he was commissioned to produce on the safety of GMO foods. His Rowett Research study was the first ever independent one conducted on them anywhere. He undertook it believing in their promise but became alarmed by his findings. The Clinton and Blair governments were determined to suppress them because Washington was spending billions promoting GMO crops and a future biotech revolution. It wasn't about to let even the world's foremost expert in the field derail the effort. His results were startling and consider the implications for humans eating genetically engineered foods. Rats fed GMO potatoes had smaller livers, hearts, testicles and brains, damaged immune systems, and showed structural changes in their white blood cells making them more vulnerable to infection and disease compared to other rats fed non-GMO potatoes. It got worse. Thymus and spleen damage showed up; enlarged tissues, including the pancreas and intestines; and there were cases of liver atrophy as well as significant proliferation of stomach and intestines cells that could be a sign of greater future risk of cancer. Equally alarming - this all happened after 10 days of testing, and the changes persisted after 110 days that's the human equivalent of 10 years. GM foods today saturate our diet. Over 80% of all supermarket processed foods contain them. Others include grains like rice, corn and wheat; legumes like soybeans and soy products; vegetable oils; soft drinks; salad dressings; vegetables and fruits; dairy products including eggs; meat and other animal products; and even infant formula plus a vast array of hidden additives and ingredients in processed foods (like in tomato sauce, ice cream and peanut butter). They're unrevealed to consumers because labeling is prohibited yet the more of them we eat, the greater the potential threat to our health. Today, we're all lab rats in an uncontrolled, unregulated mass human experiment the results of which are unknown. The risks from it are beyond measure, it will take many years to learn them, and when they're finally revealed it will be too late to reverse the damage if it's proved GM products harm human health as independent experts strongly believe. Once GM seeds are introduced to an area, the genie is out of the bottle for keeps. Despite the enormous risks, however, Washington and growing numbers of governments around the world in parts of Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa now allow these products to be grown in their soil or imported. They're produced and sold to consumers because agribusiness giants like Monsanto, DuPont, Dow AgriSciences and Cargill have enormous clout to demand it and a potent partner supporting them - the US government and its agencies, including the Departments of Agriculture and State, FDA, EPA and even the defense establishment. World Trade Organization (WTO) Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) patent rules also back them along with industry-friendly WTO rulings like the February 7, 2006 one. It favored a US challenge against European GMO regulatory policies in spite of strong consumer sentiment against these foods and ingredients on the continent. It also violated the Biosafety Protocol that should let nations regulate these products in the public interest, but it doesn't because WTO trade rules sabotaged it. Nonetheless, anti-GMO activism persists, consumers still have a say, and there are hundreds of GMO-free zones around the world, including in the US. That and more is needed to take on the agribusiness giants that so far have everything going their way. In "Seeds of Deception," Jeffrey Smith did a masterful job explaining the dangers of GM foods and ingredients. Engdahl explains them as well but goes much further brilliantly in his blockbuster book on this topic. It's the story of a powerful family and a "small socio-political American elite (that) seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival" - future life through the food we eat. The book's introduction says it "reads (like) a crime story." It's also a nightmare but one that's very real and threatening. This review covers the book in-depth because of its importance. It's an extraordinary work that "reveals a diabolical World of profit-driven political intrigue (and) government corruption and coercion" that's part of a decades-long global scheme for total world dominance. The book deserves vast exposure and must be read in full for the whole disturbing story. It's hoped the material below will encourage readers to do it in their own self-interest and to marshal mass consumer actions to place food safety above corporate profits. Engdahl's book supplies the ammunition to do it and is also a sequel to his earlier one on war, oil politics and The New World Order and follows naturally from it. It covers the roots of the strategy to control "global food security" that goes back to the 1930s and the plans of a handful of American families to preserve their wealth and power. But it centers on one in particular that above the others "came to symbolize the hubris and arrogance of the emerging American century" that blossomed post-WW II. Its patriarch began in oil and then dominated it in his powerful Oil Trust. It was only the beginning as the family expanded into "education of youth, medicine and psychology," US foreign policy, and "the very science of life itself, biology, and its applications" in plants and agriculture. The family's name is Rockefeller. The patriarch was John D., and four powerful later-generation brothers followed him - David, Nelson, Laurance, and John D. III. Engdahl says the GMO story covers "the evolution of power in the hands of an elite (led by this family), determined (above all) to bring the entire world under their sway." They and other elites already control most of it, including the nation's energy, the US Federal Reserve, and other key world central banks. Today, three brothers are gone, David alone remains, and he's still a force at age 92 although he no longer runs the family bank, JP Morgan Chase. He's active in family enterprises, however, including the Rockefeller Foundation to be discussed in Part II of this review. F. William Engdahl is the author of Seeds of Destruction, the Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation just released by Global Research. He is also the author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, Pluto Press Ltd.. To contact him by e-mail: [info at engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net][1]. Special Introductory Online Offer Click to order William Engdahl's book: Seeds of Destruction Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at [lendmanstephen at sbcglobal.net][2]. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com Mondays at noon US Central time. [1]: mailto:info at engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net [2]: mailto:lendmanstephen at sbcglobal.net URL: http://mostlywater.org/reviewing_f_william_engdahls_seeds_destruction From news at resist.ca Wed Jan 2 19:17:05 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Thu, 03 Jan 2008 03:17:05 -0000 Subject: [news] Oil Hits $100 a Barrel for the First Time Message-ID: <20080103031705.28917.qmail@resist.ca> [This article somewhat downplays the fact that we are simply running out of oil and its derivatives, instead saying "supplies have struggled to catch up" with demand. It also leaves the impression that the price of oil might one day return to some lower level, but the likelihood of us ever seeing cheap oil on this planet again, is a long shot. -ron] January 2, 2008 Oil Hits $100 a Barrel for the First Time By JAD MOUAWAD Oil prices reached the symbolic level of $100 a barrel for the first time on Wednesday, a long-awaited milestone in an era of rapidly escalating energy demand. Crude oil futures for February delivery hit $100 on the New York Mercantile Exchange shortly after noon New York time, before falling back slightly. Oil prices, which had fallen to a low of $50 a barrel at the beginning of 2007, have quadrupled since 2003. Futures settled at $99.62, up $3.64 on the day. The rise in oil prices in recent years has been driven by an unprecedented surge in demand from the United States, China and other Asian and Middle Eastern countries. Booming economies have led to more consumption of oil-derived products like gasoline, jet fuel and diesel. Meanwhile, new oil supplies have struggled to catch up. Oil markets have become increasingly volatile and unpredictable, with large swings in 2007 that analysts attributed partly to financial speculation, not just market fundamentals. Political tensions in the Middle East, where more than two-thirds of the world's proven oil reserves are located, have also fueled the rise in prices. Gasoline has lagged the rise in the price of oil. It stands at a nationwide average of $3.05 a gallon for regular grade, according to AAA, the automobile club. That is below the all-time peak in May of $3.23 a gallon, but it is 73 cents higher than at this time a year ago. Some analysts worry that gasoline could hit $4 a gallon by next spring if oil prices remain at high levels. Oil is now within reach of its historic inflation-adjusted high reached in April 1980 in the aftermath of the Iranian revolution when oil prices jumped to the equivalent of $102.81 a barrel in today's money. Unlike the oil shocks of the 1970s and 1980s, which were caused by sudden interruptions in oil supplies from the Middle East, the latest surge is fundamentally different. Prices have risen steadily over several years because of a rise in demand for oil and gasoline in both developed and developing countries. URL: http://mostlywater.org/oil_hits_100_barrel_first_time From news at resist.ca Thu Jan 3 12:17:21 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Thu, 03 Jan 2008 20:17:21 -0000 Subject: [news] Reviewing F. William Engdahl's "Seeds of Destruction" - Part II Message-ID: <20080103201724.16162.qmail@resist.ca> Reviewing F. William Engdahl's "Seeds of Destruction" - by Stephen Lendman (Part II) William Engdahl's book is a diabolical account of how four Anglo-American agribusiness giants plan world domination by patenting life forms to gain worldwide control of our food supply and our lives. This review is in three in-depth parts. Part I was published and is available on this web site. Part II follows below. Washington Launches the GMO Revolution The roots of the story go back decades, but Engdahl explains the science of "biological and genetic-modification of plants and other life forms first" came out of US research labs in the 1970s when no one noticed. They soon would because the Reagan administration was determined to make America dominant in this emerging field. The biotech agribusiness industry was especially favored, and companies in the early 1980s raced to develop GMO plants, livestock and GMO-based animal drugs. Washington made it easy for them with an unregulated, business-friendly climate that persisted ever since under Republicans and Democrats alike. Food safety and public health issues aren't considered vital if they conflict with profits. So the entire population is being used as lab rats for these completely new, untested and potentially hazardous products. And leading the effort to develop them is a company with a "long record of fraud, cover-up, bribery," deceit and disdain for the public interest - Monsanto. Its first product was saccharin that was later proved to be a carcinogen. It then got into chemicals, plastics and became notorious for Agent Orange that was used to defoliate Vietnam jungles in the 1960s and 1970s and exposed hundreds of thousands of civilians and US troops to deadly dioxin, one of the most toxic of all known compounds. Along with others in the industry, Monsanto is also a shameless polluter. It has a history of secretly dumping some of the most lethal substances known in water and soil and getting away with it. Today on its web site, however, the company ignores its record and calls itself "an agricultural company (applying) innovation and technology to help farmers around the world be successful, produce healthier foods, better animal feeds and more fiber, while also reducing agriculture's impact on our environment." Engdahl proves otherwise in his thorough research that's covered below in detail. In spite of its past, Monsanto and other GMO giants got unregulated free rein in the 1980s and especially after George HW Bush became president in 1989. His administration opened "Pandora's Box" so no "unnecessary regulations would hamper them. Thereafter, "not one single new regulatory law governing biotech or GMO products was passed then or later (despite all the) unknown risks and possible health dangers." In a totally unfettered marketplace, foxes now guard the henhouse because the system was made self-regulatory. An elder Bush Executive Order assured it. It ruled GMO plants and foods were "substantially equivalent" to ordinary ones of the same variety like corn, wheat or rice. This established the principle of "substantial equivalence" as the "lynchpin of the whole GMO revolution." It was pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo, but was now law, and Engdahl equated it to a potential biologically catastrophic "Andromeda Strain," no longer the world of science fiction. Monsanto chose milk as its first GMO product, genetically manipulated it with recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH), and marketed it under the trade name, Posilac. In 1993, the Clinton FDA declared it safe and approved it for sale before any consumer use information was available. It's now sold in every state and promoted as a way cows can produce up to 30% more milk. Problems, however, soon appeared. Farmers reported their stock burned out up to two years sooner than usual, serious infections developed, and some animals couldn't walk. Other problems included the udder inflammation mastitis as well as deformed calves being born. The information was suppressed, and rBGH milk is unlabeled so there's no way consumers can know. They also weren't told this hormone causes leukemia and tumors in rats, and a European Commission committee concluded humans drinking rBGH milk risk breast and prostate cancer. The EU thus banned the product, but not the US. Despite clear safety issues, the FDA failed to act and allows hazardous milk to be sold below the radar. It was just the beginning. The Fox Guards the Henhouse Engdahl reviewed the Pusztai affair, the toll it took on his health, and the modest vindication he finally got. Already out of a job, the 300-year old British Royal Society attacked him in 1999 and claimed his research was "flawed in many aspects of design, execution and analysis and that no conclusions should be drawn from it." It was another blow to a distinguished man who deserved better than what Engdahl called a "recognizable political smear" that also tarnished the Royal Society's credibility for making it. It had no basis in fact and was done because Pusztai's bombshell threatened to derail Britain's hugely profitable GMO industry and do the same thing to its US counterpart. As for Pusztai, after five years, several heart attacks, and a ruined career, he finally learned what happened after he announced his findings. Monsanto was the culprit. The company complained to Clinton who, in turn, alerted Tony Blair. Pusztai's findings had to be quashed and he discredited for making them. He was nonetheless able to reply with the help of the highly respected British scientific journal, The Lancet. In spite of Royal Society threats against him, it's editor published his article, but at a cost. After publication, the Society and biotech industry attacked The Lancet for its action. It was a further shameless act. As a footnote, Pusztai now lectures around the world on his GMO research and is a consultant to start-up groups researching the health effects of these foods. Along with him and his wife, his co-author, Professor Stanley Ewen, also suffered. He lost his position at the University of Aberdeen, and Engdahl notes that the practice of suppressing unwanted truths and punishing whistleblowers is the rule, not the exception. Industry demands are powerful, especially when they affect the bottom line. The Blair government went even further. It commissioned the private firm, Grainseed, to conduct a three-year study to prove GMO food safety. London's Observer newspaper later got UK Ministry of Agriculture documents on it that showed tests were rigged and produced "some strange science." At least one Grainseed researcher manipulated the data to "make certain seeds in the trials appear to perform better than they really did." Nonetheless, the Ministry recommended a GMO corn variety be certified, and the Blair government issued a new code of conduct under which "any employee of a state-funded research institute who dared to speak out on (the) findings into GMO plants could face dismissal, be sued for breach of contract or face a court injunction." In other words, whisleblowing was now illegal even if public health was at stake. Nothing would be allowed to stop the agribusiness juggernaut from proceeding unimpeded. The Rockefeller Plan - "Tricky" Dick Nixon and Trickier Rockefellers Richard Nixon took office at a time of national crisis. Along with the Vietnam morass, the economy was in trouble after the "golden age of capitalism" peaked in 1965 and corporate profits were declining. The globalization phenomenon began at this time when American companies and the nation's wealthiest families found investing abroad more profitable than at home because more opportunities were available outside the country. Food was one of them and was about to be renamed "agribusiness." Engdahl called it "a paradigm shift" with one man having the most decisive role - former New York governor Nelson Rockefeller "who deeply wanted to be President" but had to settle for number two under Gerald Ford. He and his brothers ran the family's Rockefeller Foundation and various other tax-exempt entities like the Rockefeller Brothers Trust. Nelson and David were the most influential figures, and their power center was the exclusive New York Council on Foreign Relations. Engdahl states: "In the 1960s the Rockefellers were at the power center of the US establishment (and) Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (was) their hand-picked protege." It was a marriage made in hell. Enter the "crisis of democracy" or as right wing Harvard professor, Samuel Huntington, called it, an "excess of democracy" at a time masses of ordinary citizens protested their government's policies. It captured media attention, posed a threat to the country's establishment, and had to be addressed. In 1973 it was at a meeting of 300 influential, hand-picked Rockefeller friends from North America, Europe and Japan. They founded a powerful new organization called the Trilateral Commission with easily recognizable member names. Zbigniew Brzezinski was its first Executive Director, and other charter members included Jimmy Carter (who became David Rockefeller's favored 1976 presidential candidate over Gerald Ford), George HW Bush, Paul Volker (Carter's Fed Chairman) and Alan Greenspan who was then a Wall Street investment banker. The new organization "laid the basis for a new global strategy for a network of interlinked international elites," many of whom were Rockefeller business partners. Combined, their financial, economic and political clout was unmatched. So was their ambition that George HW Bush later called a "new world order." Trilateralists laid the foundation for today's globalization. They also followed Huntington's advice about democracy's unreliability that had to be checked by "some measure of (public) apathy and non-involvement (combined with) secrecy and deception." The Commission further advocated privatizing public enterprises along with deregulating industry. Trilateralist Jimmy Carter embraced the dogma enthusiastically as President. He began the process that Ronald Reagan continued in the 1980s almost without noticing its originator or placing blame where it's due. In 1973, Nixon was in office with Kissinger his Svengali. One observer described him at the time as "like sludge out of a swamp without a spark of life....no soul, a slip of life, a kind of ghoul (and) a sort of lubricant (to keep the ship of state running)." So he did by "tak(ing) complete control (of) US foreign policy" as both Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. Further, he "was to make food a centerpiece of his diplomacy along with oil geopolitics." In the Cold War era, food became a strategic weapon by masquerading as "Food for Peace." It was cover for US agriculture to engineer the transformation of family farming into global agribusiness with food the tool and small farmers eliminated so it could be used most effectively. World agriculture domination was to be "one of the central pillars of post-war Washington policy, along with (controlling) world oil markets and non-communist world defense sales." The defining 1973 event was a world food crisis. The shortage of grain staples along with the first of two 1970s oil shocks advanced a "significant new Washington policy turn." Oil and grains were rising three to fourfold in price when the US was the world's largest food surplus producer with the most power over prices and supply. It was an ideal time for a new alliance between US-based grain trading companies and the government. It "laid the groundwork for the later gene revolution." Enter what Engdahl called the "great train robbery" with Kissinger the culprit. He decided US agriculture policy was "too important to be left in the hands of the Agriculture Department" so he took control of it himself. The world desperately needed grain, America had the greatest supply, and the scheme was to use this power to "radically change world food markets and food trade." The big winners were grain traders like Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and Continental Grain that were helped by Kissinger's "new food diplomacy (to create) a global agriculture market for the first time." Food would "reward friends and punish enemies," and ties between Washington and business lay at the heart of the strategy. The global food market was being reorganized, corporate interests were favored, political advantage was exploited, and the 1990s "gene revolution" groundwork was laid. Rockefeller interests and its Foundation were to play the decisive role as events unfolded over the next two decades. It began under Nixon as the cornerstone of his farm policy, free trade was the mantra, corporate grain traders were the beneficiaries, and family farms had to go so agribusiness giants could take over. Bankrupting them was the plan to remove an "excess (of) human resources." Engdahl called it a "thinly veiled form of food imperialism" as part of a scheme for the US to become "the world granary." The family farm was to become the "factory farm," and agriculture was to be "agribusiness" to be dominated by a few corporate giants with incestuous ties to Washington. Dollar devaluation was also part of the scheme under Nixon's New Economic Plan (NEP) that included closing the gold window in 1971 to let the currency float freely. Developing nations were targeted as well with the idea that they forget about being food-sufficient in grains and beef, rely on America for key commodities, and concentrate instead on small fruits, sugar and vegetables for export. Earned foreign exchange could then buy US imports and repay IMF and World Bank loans that create a never-ending cycle of debt slavery. GATT was also used and later the WTO with corporate-written rules for their own bottom line interests. A Secret National Security Memo In the midst of a worldwide drought and stock market collapse, consider Henry Kissinger's classified memo in April, 1974. It was on a secret project called National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200) that was shaped by Rockefeller interests and aimed to adopt a "world population plan of action" for drastic global population control - meaning to reduce it. The US led the effort, and it worked like this - it made birth control in developing countries a prerequisite for US aid. Engdahl summed it up in blunt terms: "if these inferior races get in the way of our securing ample, cheap raw materials, then we must find ways to get rid of them." Kissinger's scheme was "simpler contraceptive methods through bio-medical research" that almost sounds like DuPont's old slogan, "Better things for better living through chemistry." Later on, DuPont dropped "through chemistry" as evidence mounted on their toxic effects and a changing company in 1999 began using "The Miracles of Science" in their advertising. The Nazis also aimed big and sought control. Population culling was part of it that for them was called "eugenics" and their scheme was to target "inferior" races to preserve the "superior" one. NSSM 200 was along the same idea and was tied to the agribusiness agenda that began with the 1950s and 1960s "Green Revolution" to control food production in targeted Latin American, Asian and African countries. Kissinger's plan had two aims - securing new US grain markets and population control with 13 "unlucky" countries chosen. Among them were India, Brazil, Nigeria, Mexico and Indonesia, and exploiting their resources depended on drastic population reductions to reduce homegrown demand. The scheme was ugly and pure Kissinger. It recommended forced population control and other measures to ensure strategic US aims. Kissinger wanted global numbers reduced by 500 million by the year 2000 and argued for doubling the 10 million annual death rate to 20 million going forward. Engdahl called it "genocide" according to the strict definition of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide statute that defines this crime legally. Kissinger was guilty under it for wanting to withhold food aid to "people who can't or won't control their population growth." In other words, if they won't do it, we'll do it for them. The strategy included fertility control called "family planning" that was linked to the availability of key resources. The Rockefeller family backed it, Kissinger was their "hired hand," and he was well-rewarded for his efforts. It included keeping him from being prosecuted where he's wanted as a war criminal and could be arrested overseas like Pinochet was in the UK when he was placed under house arrest in 2006. Besides his better-known crimes, consider what he did to poor Brazilian women through a policy of mass sterilization under NSSM 200. After 14 years of the program, the Brazilian Health Ministry discovered shocking reports of an estimated 44% of all Brazilian women between ages 14 and 55 permanently sterilized. Organizations like the International Planned Parenthood Federation and Family Health International were involved, and USAID directed the program. It has a long disturbing history backing US imperialism while claiming on its web site it extends "a helping hand to those people overseas struggling to make a better life, recover from a disaster or striving to live in a free and democratic country." Even more disturbing was an estimated 90% of Brazilian women of African descent sterilized in a nation with a black population second only to Nigeria's. Powerful figures backed the scheme but none more influential than the Rockefellers with John D. III having the most clout on population policy. Nixon appointed him head of the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future in 1969. Its earlier work laid the ground for Kissinger's NSSM 200 and its policy of extermination through subterfuge that was based on a "decades old effort to breed human traits" by the Nazi "Eugenics" process. The Brotherhood of Death Long before Kissinger (and his assistant Brent Scowcroft) made population reduction official US foreign policy, the Rockefellers were experimenting on humans. JD III led the effort. In the 1950s, while Nelson exploited cheap Puerto Rican labor in New York and on the island, brother JD III conducted mass sterilization experiments on their women. By the mid-1960s, Puerto Rico's Public Health Department estimated the toll - one-third or more of them of child-bearing age (unsuspecting poor women) were permanently sterilized. JD III expressed his views in a 1961 UN Food and Agriculture Organization lecture: "To my mind, population growth (and its reduction) is second only to control of atomic weapons as the paramount problem of the day." He meant, of course, its unwanted parts to preserve valuable resources for the privileged. He was also influenced by eugenicists, race theorists and Malthusians at the Rockefeller Foundation who believed they had the right to decide who lives or dies. Powerful figures were behind the effort as well as leading American business families. So were notables in the UK then and earlier like Winston Churchill, John Maynard Keynes and others. Alan Gregg was as well as Rockefeller Foundation Medical Division chief for 34 years. Consider his views. He said "people pollute, so eliminate pollution by eliminating (undesirable) people." He compared city slums to cancerous tumors and called them "offensive to decency and beauty." Better to remove them and cleanse the landscape. This was policy, and it was "key to understanding (the Foundation's later efforts) in the revolution in biotechnology and plant genetics." Its mission from inception was to "(cull) the herd, or systematically (reduce) populations of 'inferior breeds.' " The problem for supremacists is too many of a lesser element spells trouble when they demand more of what the privileged want for themselves. Solution - remove them with lots of ways to do it from birth control to sterilization to starvation to wars of extermination. These ideas were American, they took root 100 years ago, noted names backed it like Rockefeller, Carnegie and Harriman, and they later influenced the Nazis. Hitler praised the practice in his 1924 book, "Mein Kampf," then used it as Fuhrer to breed a "master race." Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes also supported it, and consider his 1927 decision in Buck v. Bell. He ruled Virginia's forced sterilization program was constitutional and wrote: "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime....society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind....Three generations of imbeciles are enough." This from a noted Supreme Court Justice that would have horrific consequences still in play. It "opened the floodgates" for sterilizing many thousands of women considered "subhuman" detritus and in the way. JD III was right in step with this thinking. He was nurtured on Malthusian pseudo-science and embraced the dogma. He joined the family Foundation in 1931 where he was influenced by eugenicists like Raymond Fosdick and Frederick Osborn. Both were founding members of the American Eugenics Society. In 1952, he used his own funds to found the New York-based Population Council in which he promoted studies on over-population dangers that were openly racist. For the next 25 years, the Council spent $173 million on global population reduction and became the world's most influential organization promoting these supremacist ideas. But it avoided the term "eugenics" because of its Nazi association and instead used language like birth control, family planning and free choice. It was all the same, and before the war Rockefeller associate and family Foundation board member, Frederick Osborn, enthusiastically supported Nazi eugenics experiments that led to mass exterminations now vilified. Back then, he believed this was the "most important experiment that has ever been tried" and later wrote a book. It was called "The Future of Human Heredity" with "eugenics" in the subtitle. It stated women could be convinced to reduce their births voluntarily and began substituting the term "genetics" for the one now out of favor. During the Cold War, culling the population drew supporters that included the cream of corporate America. They backed private population reduction initiatives like Margaret Sanger's International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF). The major media also spread the notion that "over-population in developing countries leads to hunger and more poverty (which, in turn, becomes) the fertile breeding ground for" international communism. American agribusiness would later get involved through a policy of global food control. Food is power. When used to cull the population, it's a weapon of mass destruction. Consider the current situation with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reporting sharply higher food prices along with severe shortages, and warned this condition is extreme, unprecendented and threatens billions with hunger and starvation. Prices are up 40% this year after a 9% rise in 2006, and it forced developing states to pay 25% more for imported food and be unable to afford enough of it. Various explanations for the problem are cited that include growing demand, higher fuel and transportation costs, commodity speculation, the use of corn for ethanol production (taking one-third of the harvest that's more than what's exported for food) and extreme weather while ignoring the above implications - the power of agribusiness to manipulate supply for greater profits and "cull the herd" in targeted Third World countries. Affected ones are poor, and FAO cites 20 in Africa, nine in Asia, six in Latin America and two in Eastern Europe that in total represent 850 million endangered people now suffering from chronic hunger and related poverty. They depend on imports, and their diets rely heavily on the type grains agribusiness controls - wheat, corn and rice plus soybeans. If current prices stay high and shortages persist, millions will die - maybe by design. Fateful War and Peace Studies Engdahl reviewed how American elites in the late 1930s began planning an American century in the post-war world - a "Pax Americana" to succeed the fading British Empire. The New York Council of Foreign Relations War and Peace Studies Group led the effort, and Rockefeller Foundation money financed it. As Engdahl put it: they'd be paid back later "thousands-fold." First though, America had to achieve world dominance militarily and economically. The US business establishment envisioned a "Grand Area" to encompass most of the world outside the communist bloc. To exploit it, they hid their imperial designs beneath a "liberal and benevolent garb" by defining themselves as "selfless advocates of freedom for colonial peoples (and) the enemy of imperialism." They would also "champion world peace through multinational control." Sound familiar? Like today, it was just subterfuge for their real aims that were pursued under the banner of the United Nations, the new Bretton Woods framework, the IMF, World Bank and the GATT. They were established for one purpose - to integrate the developing world into the US-dominated Global North so its wealth could be transfered to powerful business interests, mostly in the US. The Rockefeller family led the effort, the four brothers were involved, and Nelson and David were the prime movers. While JD III was plotting depopulation and racial purity schemes, Nelson worked "the other side of the fence....as a forward-looking international businessman" in the 1950s and 1960s. While preaching greater efficiency and production in targeted countries, he schemed, in fact, to open world markets for unrestricted US grain imports. It became the "Green Revolution." Nelson concentrated on Latin America. During WW II, he coordinated US intelligence and covert operations there, and those efforts laid the groundwork for family interests post-war. They were tied to the region's military because friendly strongmen are the type leaders we prefer to guarantee a favorable business climate. >From the 1930s, Nelson Rockefeller had significant Latin American interests, especially in areas of oil and banking. In the early 1940s, he sought new opportunities and along with Laurance bought vast amounts of cheap, high-quality farmland so the family could get into agriculture. It wasn't for family farming, however. The Rockefellers wants global monopolies, and their scheme was to do in agriculture what the family patriarch did in oil along with using food and agricultural technology as Cold War weapons. By 1954, PL 480, or "Food for Peace," established surplus food as a US foreign policy tool, and Nelson used his considerable influence on the State Department because every post-war Department Secretary, from 1952 through 1979, had ties to the family through its Foundation: namely, John Foster Dulles, Dean Rusk, Henry Kissinger and Cyrus Vance. These men supported Rockefeller views on private business and knew the family saw agriculture the way it sees oil - commodities to be "traded, controlled, (and) made scarce or plentiful" to suit the foreign policy goals of dominant corporations controlling their trade. The family got into agriculture in 1947 when Nelson founded the International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC). Through it, he introduced "mass-scale agribusiness in countries where US dollars could buy huge influence in the 1950s and 1960s." Nelson then allied with grain-trading giant Cargill in Brazil where they began developing hybrid corn seed varieties with big plans for them. They would make the country "the world's third largest producer of (these) crop(s) after the US and China." It was part of Rockefeller's "Green Revolution" that by the late 1950s "was rapidly becoming a strategic US economic strategy alongside oil and military hardware." Latin America was the beginning of a food production revolution with big aims - to control the "basic necessities of the majority of the world's population." As agribusiness in the 1990s, it was "the perfect partner for the introduction....of genetically engineered food crops or GMO plants." This marriage masqueraded as "free market efficiency, modernization (and) feeding a malnourished world." In fact, it was nothing of the sort. It cleverly hid "the boldest coup over the destiny of entire nations ever attempted." Creating Agribusiness - Rockefeller and Harvard Invent USA "Agribusiness" The "Green Revolution began in Mexico and spread across Latin America during the 1950s and 1960s." It was then introduced in Asia, especially in India. It was at a time we claimed our aim was to help the world through free market efficiency. It was all one way, from them to us so corporate investors could profit. It gave US chemical giants and major grain traders new markets for their products. Agribusiness was going global, and Rockefeller interests were in the vanguard helping industry globalization take shape. Nelson worked with his brother, JD III, who set up his own Agriculture Development Council in 1953. They shared a common goal - "cartelization of world agriculture and food supplies under their corporate hegemony." At its heart, it aimed to introduce modern agriculture techniques to increase crop yields under the false claim of wanting to reduce hunger. The same seduction was later used to promote the Gene Revolution with Rockefeller interests and the same agribusiness giants backing it. In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson also used food as a weapon. He wanted recipient nations to agree to administration and Rockfeller preconditions that population control and opening their markets to US industry was part of the deal. It also involved training developing world agriculture scientists and agronomists in the latest production concepts so they could apply them at home. This "carefully constructed network later proved crucial" to the Rockefeller strategy to "spread the use of genetically-engineered crops around the world," helped along with USAID funding and CIA mischief. "Green Revolution" tactics were painful and took a devastating toll on peasant farmers. They destroyed their livelihoods and forced them into shantytown slums that now surround large Third World cities. There they provide cheap exploitable labor from people desperate to survive and easy prey for any way to do it. The "Revolution" also harmed the land. Monoculture displaces diversity, soil fertility and crop yields decrease over time, and indiscriminate use of chemical pesticides causes serious later health problems. Engdahl quoted an analyst calling the "Green Revolution" a "chemical revolution" developing states couldn't afford. That began the process of debt enslavement from IMF, World Bank and private bank loans. Large landowners can afford the latter. Small farmers can't and often, as a result, are bankrupted. That, of course, is the whole idea. The "Green Revolution" was based on the "proliferation of new hybrid seeds in developing markets" that characteristically lack reproductive capacity. Declining yields meant farmers had to buy seeds every year from large multinational producers that control their parental seed lines in house. A handful of company giants held patents on them and used them to lay the groundwork for the later GMO revolution. Their scheme was soon evident. Tradition farming had to give way to High Yield Varieties (HYV) of hybrid wheat, corn and rice with major chemical inputs. Initially, growth rates were impressive but not for long. In countries like India, agricultural output slowed and fell. They were losers so agribusiness giants could exploit large new markets for their chemicals, machinery and other product inputs. It was the beginning of "agribusiness," and it went hand-in-hand with the "Green Revolution" strategy that would later embrace plant genetic alterations. Two Harvard Business School professors were involved early on - John Davis and Ray Goldberg. They teamed with Russian economist, Wassily Leontief, got Rockefeller and Ford Foundation funding, and initiated a four-decade revolution to dominate the food industry. It was based on "vertical integration" of the kind Congress outlawed when giant conglomerates or trusts like Standard Oil used them to monopolize entire sectors of key industries and crush competition. It was revived under Trilateralist President Jimmy Carter disguised as "deregulation" to dismantle "decades of carefully constructed....health, food safety and consumer protection laws." They would now give way under a new wave of industry-friendly vertical integration. Supported by a public campaign, it claimed that government was the problem, it encroached too much on our lives, and it had to be rolled back for greater personal "freedom." Early in the 1970s, agribusiness producers controlled US food supplies. They'd now go global on a scale without precedent. The goal - "staggering profits" by "restructur(ing) the way Americans grew food to feed themselves and the world." Ronald Reagan continued Carter's policy and let the top four or five monopoly players control it. It led to an unprecedented "concentration and transformation of American agriculture" with independent family farmers driven off their land through forced sales and bankruptcies so "more efficient" agribusiness giants could move in with "Factory Farms." Remaining small producers became virtual serfs as "contract farmers." America's landscape was changing with people trampled on for profits. Engdahl explained a gradual process of "wholesale merger(s) and consolidation....of American food production....into giant corporate global concentrations" with familiar names - Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Smithfield Foods and ConAgra. As they grew bigger, so did their bottom lines with annual equity returns rising from 13% in 1993 to 23% in 1999. Hundreds of thousands of small farmers lost out for it as their numbers dropped by 300,000 from 1979 to 1998 alone. It was even worse for hog farmers with a drop from 600,000 to 157,000 so 3% of producers could control 50% of the market. The social costs were staggering and continue to be as "entire rural communities collapsed and rural towns became ghost towns." Consider the consequences: -- by 2004, the four largest beef packers controlled 84% of steer and heifer slaughter - Tyson, Cargill, Swift and National Beef Packing; -- four giants controlled 64% of hog production - Smithfield Foods, Tyson, Swift and Hormel; -- three companies controlled 71% of soybean crushing - Cargill, ADM and Bunge; -- three giants controlled 63% of all flour milling, and five companies controlled 90% of global grain trade; -- four other companies controlled 89% of the breakfast cereal market - Kellogg, General Mills, Kraft Foods and Quaker Oats; -- in 1998, Cargill acquired Continental Grain to control 40% of national grain elevator capacity; -- four large agro-chemical/seed giants controlled over 75% of the nation's seed corn sales and 60% of it for soybeans while also having the largest share of the agricultural chemical market - Monsanto, Novartis, Dow Chemical and DuPont; six companies controlled three-fourths of the global pesticides market; -- Monsanto and DuPont controlled 60% of the US corn and soybean seed market - all of it patented GMO seeds; and -- 10 large food retailers controlled $649 billion in global sales in 2002, and the top 30 food retailers account for one-third of global grocery sales. At the dawn of a new century, family farming was decimated by corporate agribusiness' vertically integrated powers that surpassed their earlier 1920s heyday dominance. The industry was now the second most profitable national one after pharmaceuticals with domestic annual sales exceeding $400 billion. The next aim was merging Big Pharma with Big food producing giants, and the Pentagon's National Defense University took note in a 2003-issued paper - "Agribusiness (now) is to the United States what oil is to the Middle East." It's now considered a "strategic weapon in the arsenal of the world's only superpower," but at a huge cost to consumers everywhere. Engdahl reviewed the "revolution" in animal factory production that EarthSave International founder and Baskin-Robbins heir, John Robbins, covered honestly, thoroughly and compassionately in two explosive books on the subject - "Diet for A New America" in 1987 and "The Food Revolution" in 2001. They were both stinging indictments of corporate-produced foods - horrifying animal cruelty, unsafe foods, unsanitary conditions, rampant use of anti-biotics humans then ingest, massive environmental pollution, and new unknown dangers from genetic engineering - all allowed by supposed government watchdog regulatory agencies that ignore public health concerns. Agribusiness was on a roll, government supports it with tens of billions in annual subsidies, and the 1996 Farm Bill suspended the Secretary of Agriculture's power to balance supply and demand so henceforth unrestricted production is allowed. Food producing giants took full advantage to control market forces. They crushed family farmers by over-producing and forcing down prices. They also pressured land values as small operators failed. It created opportunities for land acquisition on the cheap for greater concentration and dominance. Next came integrating the Gene Revolution into agribusiness the way Harvard's Ray Goldberg saw it coming. Entire new sectors were to be created from genetic engineering. It would include GMO drugs from GMO plants in a new "argi-ceutical system." Goldberg predicted a "genetic revolution (through) an industrial convergence of food, health, medicine, fiber and energy businesses" - in a totally unregulated marketplace. Unmentioned was a threatening consumer nightmare hidden from view. Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at [lendmanstephen at sbcglobal.net][1]. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on The MicroEffect.com Mondays at noon US Central time. [1]: mailto:lendmanstephen at sbcglobal.net URL: http://mostlywater.org/reviewing_f_william_engdahls_seeds_destruction_part_ii From news at resist.ca Fri Jan 4 13:17:05 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Fri, 04 Jan 2008 21:17:05 -0000 Subject: [news] Who's Slutty, Who's Not, and Why Message-ID: <20080104211705.23071.qmail@resist.ca> Who's Slutty, Who's Not, and Why By Kirsten Anderberg ([http://kirstenanderberg.com][1]) Written January 3, 2008 Women who dress slutty and women who don't; to what do we attribute these differences? And what is the clear definition of "slutty?" I would argue "slutty" is as much a mindset, a behavior, as it is a way of dressing. But even though we may not have a clear picture of what slutty is, we all seem to be able to recognize it, especially when it is imitated by very young girls, where it stands out as grossly inappropriate. Jon Benet Ramsey's behavior and attire, for instance, repulsed and outraged the public when they saw her dressed up like she was, in lipstick, at age 4 in beauty pageants, due to the sexual overtones. So I guess maybe slutty can be defined as sexual behavior you would never want to see young girls imitating? Even without a clear definition, sluttiness is something that is identifiable in a line up of women to most people on the street. And even though this topic is very controversial, it deserves airing out in the open. So, who values slutty behavior and clothing and who does not? This is a pertinent question. Waitresses dress sluttier on the whole than women attorneys and judges, and women who sing rap music dress sluttier than women in the symphony. Why? News anchorwomen, the women in Congress and the Senate, doctors, and other professional women tend to *not* show cleavage for professional credibility. Some professions require, or at least encourage and promote, women who emphasize cleavage, while other professions do just the opposite. So where is the societal rulebook about this sluttiness factor? Compare the presentation Aretha Franklin makes compared to women singers such as Fergie, Ciara, or Britney, all of whom are highly sexualized in the typically slutty fashion. There is a consensus that Aretha is exceptionally gifted vocally, she is considered a "musician's musician," and we really do not see Aretha in sexually compromising sexual positions like Fergie or Britney on stage. Aretha does not roll around on the floor for men standing over her, singing about her "lady lumps," like Fergie does. Aretha just doesn't roll around promiscuously dressed on stage or in videos *ever.* Yet I bet every one of the women who do roll around in their underwear on stage wish they had the respect that Aretha commands and therein lies the crux of this article. I find it interesting that comedian women are not under the same pressure to sexualize as women vocalists. (I have been both in my past.) Compare Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers, Ellen DeGeneres, Whoopi Goldberg, Rosanne Barr, and Rosie O'Donnell, to oh, *any* group of popular contemporary women singers and you will see more cleavage in the latter across the board. Why? Does singing require more breast than comedy? How so? Oprah never dresses slutty and she seems to do that consciously for credibility. Much like Aretha, Oprah doesn't *have* to overtly sexualize herself to get things done, as she has other things working in her favor. It seems like Aretha and Oprah don't have to exploit themselves sexually because they have powers born of their own achievements and talents, they have economic freedoms, and because they are stunning in and of themselves. Their rich content makes them sexy, not vice versa. That last sentence deserves a repeat read. THEIR CONTENT MAKES THEM SEXY; ACTING SEXY DOES NOT GIVE THEM CONTENT. I have seen more than a few famous, good-looking, well-spoken men openly and genuinely flirt with Oprah, such as Jamie Foxx. I have also seen the highest quality musicians become smitten with Aretha. I believe many men and women find Oprah and Aretha very hot, sexually, but it ain't about them doing spreads in Penthouse Magazine. Oprah and Aretha's sexiness have a content and context, an elegance and grace that would not mesh well with cheap lingerie as a definition of their value and worth. It seems that most women who do use cheap lingerie and porn poses for validity or sexual definition would give anything for the worldwide respect women like Oprah and Aretha have. Can I think of even one woman who plays the slutty behavior card, who has achieved worldwide respect equal to Oprah and Aretha? No, I can't. Can you? We have yet to cross the threshold of women presidents in the U.S., but women presidents of other countries do not play the slut card *at all, ever*. And Hillary Clinton is certainly not trying to play the slut card in her current run for president. So is some level of credibility or professionalism lost with the slutty look? How? Why? Would slutty women police officers, such as Officer Clementine on Reno 911 in her buttoned down police shirt, be a sign of "feminist" liberation, of women's sexual freedoms, or is that a backwards movement saying we are not useful in *any* jobs without cleavage? Is sluttiness sexual freedom as some women try to claim, or is it oppression via constant pressure for women to sexualize as impersonal and interchangeable sex fantasies for men? It is interesting which professions reward women for looking slutty, and which punish for it. We hear women in the sex industry argue they make "good money" as pole/erotic dancers, etc., but they are not making anywhere near the money collectively that women attorneys, doctors and business women make. There does seem to be some class politics involved here. It seems there are two levels for women's prescribed behaviors in contemporary society: on the lower economic level, women seem to be more commonly rewarded and promoted for sluttiness. The more these women cater to male sexual fantasies, the more power and pleasantries these women will have bestowed upon them, and often to the exclusion of other women who have worked much harder on things besides sluttiness, on things that keep operations moving in the workplace. The old concept of sleeping one's way to the top is nowhere near dead for women. Which may be yet another reason some women shun slutty behavior in their careers. They don't want someone later to accuse them of making it on tits, not talent, which is a legitimate precaution to take for professional viability later. But there is a glass ceiling to sluttiness and the opportunities and successes it offers, a ceiling you see Britney hitting currently. Money is not enough to buy Britney respect. You can't get the professional respect that women like Aretha, Oprah, or Maya Angelou command on the sluttiness track. And it is possible that sluttiness prevents success on a higher economic playing field. Sluttiness appears to "cheapen" a presentation or product, or at least that is a very common public perception. It seems the slutty thing distracts attention from women's intellect and actual skills and accomplishments, and instead focuses on the mere packaging of a sexual/gender stereotype/fantasy. Due to this, there is a perception that women who behave in a slutty manner use the slut factor to distract attention from their *lack* of skill, creativity, intellect, and achievement and they are perceived as not being smart, as not having other options, basically. Thus someone like Maya Angelou or Oprah would see no benefit in centering attention on their breasts rather than their intellect or achievements. This makes it seem as though only women with limited skills and opportunity find a use for the slut factor. Very few, if any, women that I can identify use the slut factor for power once they have reached a level of being respected as the top in their field (sans women working within the sex industry). It is as if professional accomplishment cancels out the need for slutty behaviors in women's careers. It seems like women use sluttiness to get to success, if they are in an industry where that works, then they drop it as soon as they have economic independence. Hell, even Madonna now is writing children's books and she is not promoting them in slutty clothing! Her days of rolling on the floor singing "Like a Virgin" with "Boytoy" on her belt buckle, appear to be behind her, or even beneath her, nowadays. Also the issue of little girls imitating sluttiness plays into things here again, as now Madonna is the mother of a little girl, and she may well not want her own daughter acting slutty for success in the ways Madonna did in her teens. But Madonna's daughters will have an economic freedom Madonna could not afford in her youth, and it does seem that there is a class element to sluttiness in play. It seems much more of a privilege to *not* have to act slutty, than a "liberation" or "privilege" to act slutty. It does seem that once you are above a certain economic class via solid achievements, and above the glass ceiling of opportunities afforded women via sluttiness, an entirely new hierarchy appears, with a playing field based on merit, intellect, and skill, not sluttiness. If the legal profession required sluttiness for women the way vaudeville does, for instance, I would not waste time changing my professional field from the latter to the former. I find that places with higher economics tend to have less sluttiness present all around, and I wonder why. When my dad took me as a child to our ski lodge, or flew me to Catalina for breakfast, or took me to fancy hotels in Carmel, I did not see any slutty behaviors from women at all. My first exposure to any kind of slutty behavior that I can remember, as a little girl, was slutty behavior from my stepsisters, who had previously been raised by a drunken, child molester father who encouraged his girls to be sexy for him at very young ages. I remember him drunk, teasing my teen stepsister about her breasts not being big enough in front of a whole party of adults and children, and I remember how thankful I was that my dad did not make me be "sexy" for him! I remember even at that young age thinking what *a privilege it was to not have to be sexual* for my father, as it seemed other girls were saddled with that horrific obligation. Growing up with movies like the Sound of Music, and TV shows like the Brady Bunch, with a feminist mom, and women like Billie Jean King as role models, and a father who wanted me to go to college and have a professional career, and he also trained me as an athlete, I just was not taught to be slutty *at all.* As a young girl growing up, being slutty was not even in my most obscure vernacular. I was taught to be a good athlete, I was taught to be artistically refined, intelligent, and well educated, not to imitate pole dancers behaving in a slutty fashion, and I wonder why some females are funneled down one track, and other females are funneled down another, even as children and teens. I am seeing sluttiness more and more as a *power* issue that has little to nothing to do with a woman's sexuality, much as rape is about violence and control, not sex. Some people argue that sluttiness is about women being allowed their own sexuality, some people say that topless bars are merely about sexy women having fun, others argue the sex industry is an economic equalizer for the female gender. But there is most certainly a glass ceiling as to how far sluttiness can take a woman in her career. Marilyn Monroe was at the top of the public sluttiness field, as was Anna Nicole Smith, and you can see how young they died and how utterly tragic their lives were. It always amazes me that people hold up Marilyn Monroe as an enviable sex object, when the last dot to connect there is she was a sex object who lived an empty, lonely, tortured life of depression, drugs, and early death. There is a lesson therein, but the lesson is not to invest in stereotypic sexuality as your life content and worth, but rather the opposite. Somehow sluttiness nearly always has an air of economic dependence with a neediness, even, to it, as I perceive it. Even if women in the sex industry can make more money than minimum wage worker women who don't use sex for their careers (yet make much less income than women attorneys and doctors), they still seem to be working from an angle of dependence and inferiority, somehow serving the master, in essence. It feels like sluttiness is serving the Patriarchy, still cowering to male power, placating male sexual fantasies that even "slutty" women involved find tiresome and repetitive, and aligning with the desires of patriarchy for female advancement, which is certainly one way to go. It also seems like rich, respected, powerful women who make it on merit, not sluttiness, are not only economically independent, but also sexually independent, as their sexuality is free and clear of their careers. This is a very complex and controversial subject, I understand that. And I have not even brought in the comparison of male and female sluttiness factors in career paths and opportunities, nor have I been able to explore the issue of sexuality versus sluttiness in this article. But I have made the statement that sluttiness is not related to sex, it is related to power, on the whole, and I stick by that assessment. I have never been someone who felt inhibited about nudity (I have performed naked in an artistic context with several performance troupes), and I have no problem with public displays of affection or sex ed in schools, for example. I am anti-censorship, as well. This is not about prudishness or even jealousy. When I was an attractive young women comedian/musician hired to perform at the Oregon Country Fair for decades, I never felt a desire to run around the fair topless with painted breasts in little fairy skirts as many women do. I was noticed, respected, and included, simply due to my stage performances and the talent I had to offer, I did not need or want men leering at my breasts in the aisles, I saw no benefit to me whatsoever in that and I already had power so I did not need to engage in that behavior for perks. I had already gotten all my camping and backstage passes via hard work, I did not need to be slutty for some guy to get me passes and internal access. I had that privilege of *freedom from sluttiness* that I have been referring to, a freedom many of my female colleagues without any marked achievements as entertainers, in an entertainment setting, did not, and still do not, have. My point is I could have run around in slutty attire for attention at the Oregon Country Fair, I was thin and young enough for that activity, but I just never saw any benefit to me in that behavior. Perhaps today you could spend some time thinking about the top 5-10 women you respect in the world, and why you respect them. Are any of them playing the slutty card? How does that help or hurt them? If none of the women you admire are playing the slutty card, and you are still playing the slutty card, what is the goal again? What should we teach our girls about acting and dressing in a slutty manner? Should girls be taught how to use sluttiness for success and at what age should such training begin? Would Hillary Clinton be more electable, and less "alienating," if she behaved more like Marilyn Monroe? Or would that make her less electable and more alienating? Are women in a Catch-22 here? Is sluttiness a class issue? Is it a gender issue? Is it a power issue? Is it a sexuality issue? I would be interested in any and all comments you have on this topic. You can email me at [kirstena at resist.ca][2]. If I get enough intelligent (or outright outrageous) responses, I will put them into another article on this topic matter. Postscript: I found it emotionally and intellectually draining to write this article, but I also find it haunts me when I do not speak up about such important issues so I invested many hours into this article simply because I feel the topic is an incredibly important one with regards to the goal of women's equality. For more education on this topic, I highly recommend visiting Media Watch ([www.mediawatch.com][3]). [1]: http://kirstenanderberg.com (http://kirstenanderberg.com) [2]: mailto:kirstena at resist.ca [3]: http://www.mediawatch.com (www.mediawatch.com) URL: http://mostlywater.org/whos_slutty_whos_not_and_why From news at resist.ca Sat Jan 5 12:17:04 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Sat, 05 Jan 2008 20:17:04 -0000 Subject: [news] Reviewing F. William Engdahl's Seeds of Destruction - Part III Message-ID: <20080105201704.18638.qmail@resist.ca> Reviewing F. William Engdahl's "Seeds of Destruction" - by Stephen Lendman (Part III) This is the third and final part of William Engdahl's powerfully important book about four Anglo-American agribusiness giants and their aim to control world food supply, make it all genetically engineered, and use it as a geopolitical weapon. The story is chilling and needs to be read in full to learn the type future they plan for us. Parts I and II were published and are available on this web site. Part III follows below. Food is Power Rockefeller Foundation funding was the Gene Revolution's catalyst in 1985 with big aims - to learn if GMO plants were commercially feasible and if so spread them everywhere. It was the "new eugenics" and the culmination of earlier research from the 1930s. It was also based on the idea that human problems can be "solved by genetic and chemical manipulations....as the ultimate means of social control and social engineering." Foundation scientists sought ways to do it by reducing infinite life complexities to "simple, deterministic and predictive models" under their diabolical scheme - mapping gene structures to "correct social and moral problems including crime, poverty, hunger and political instability." With the development of essential genetic engineering techniques in 1973, they were on their way. They're based on what's called recombitant DNA (rDNA), and it works by genetically introducing foreign DNA into plants to create genetically modified organisms, but not without risks. London Institute of Science in Society chief biologist, Dr. Mae-Wan Ho, explained the dangers because the process is imprecise. "It is uncontrollable and unreliable, and typically ends up damaging and scrambling the host genome, with entirely unpredictable consequences" that might unleash a deadly unrecallable "Andromeda Strain." Research continued anyway amidst lies that risks were minimal and a promised future lay ahead. All that mattered were huge potential profits and geopolitical gain so let the good times roll and the chips fall where they may. One project was to map the rice genome. It launched a 17 year effort to spread GMO rice around the world with Rockefeller Foundation money behind it. It spent millions funding 46 worldwide science labs. It also financed the training of hundreds of graduate students and developed an "elite fraternity" of top scientific researchers at Foundation-backed research institutes. It was a diabolical scheme aiming big - to control the staple food for 2.4 billion people and in the process destroy the biological diversity of over 140,000 developed varieties that can withstand droughts, pests and grow in every imaginable climate. Asia was the prime target, and Engdahl explained the sinister tale of a Philippines-based Foundation-funded institute (IRRI). It had a gene bank with "every significant rice variety known" that comprised one-fifth of them all. IRRI let agribusiness giants illegally use the seeds for exclusive patented genetic modification so they could introduce them in markets and dominate them by requiring farmers be licensed and forced to pay annual royalty fees. By 2000, a successful "Golden Rice" was developed that was beta-carotene (Vitamin A) enriched. It was marketed on the fraudulent claim that a daily bowl could prevent blindness and other Vitamin A deficiencies. It was a scam as other products are far better sources of this nutrient and to get enough of it from any type rice requires eating an impossible nine kilograms daily (about 20 pounds). Nonetheless, gene revolution backers were ready for their next move: "the consolidation of global control over humankind's food supply" with a new tool to do it - the WTO. Corporate giants wrote its rules favoring them at the expense of developing nations shut out. Unleashing GMO Seeds - A Revolution in World Food Production Begins Argentina became the first "guinea pig" nation in a reckless experiment with untested and potentially hazardous new foods. No matter, potential profits are enormous so concerns for public safety and human health are ignored. Let the revolution begin in real time. By the end of the 1980s, a global network of genetically-trained molecular biologists were ready to kick it off, Argentina was their first test laboratory, and it was hailed as a "Second Green Revolution." Look what followed. From 1996 to 2004, worldwide GMO crop planting expanded to 167 million acres, a 40-fold increase using 25% of total worldwide arable land. An astonishing two-thirds of the acreage (106 million acres) was in the US. By 2004, Argentina was in second place with 34 million acres while production is expanding in Brazil, China, Canada, South Africa, Indonesia, India, the Philippines, Colombia, Honduras, Spain and Eastern Europe (Poland, Romania and Bulgaria). The revolution was on a roll and looks unstoppable. Argentina was an easy mark when Carlos Menem became President. He's a corporatist's dream, a willing Washington Consensus subject, and he even let David Rockefeller's New York and Washington friends draft his economic program with Chicago School dogma at its heart - privatizations, deregulation, local markets open to imports, and cuts in already reduced social services. By the mid-1990s, Menem was "revolutioniz(ing) Argentina's traditional productive agriculture" to one based on monoculture for global export. He took office in July, 1989. By 1991, Argentina was already a "secret experimental laboratory for developing genetically engineered crops" with its people unknowing human guinea pigs. In effect, the country's agriculture was handed to Monsanto, Dow, DuPont and other GMO giants to exploit for profit with untested and potentially hazardous new products. Things would never be the same again. In 1995, Monsanto introduced Roundup Ready (RR) soybeans with its special gene gun-inserted bacterium that allows the plant to survive being sprayed by the glyphosate herbicide, Roundup. GMO soybeans are thus protected from the same product used in Colombia to eradicate drugs that also harms legal crops and humans at the same time. Foreign investors have large land holdings in Argentina, the late 1990s - early 2000s economic crisis made vast more amounts available, and bankrupted farmers had to give it up for pennies on the dollar. Corporate predators and Latifundista landholders took full advantage, but look what for. After Monsanto's Roundup Ready soybeans were licensed in 1996, "a once-productive national family farm-based agriculture system (was turned into) a neo-feudal state system dominated by a handful of powerful, wealthy" owners to exploit for profit. Menem went along. In less than a decade, he allowed the nation's corn, wheat and cattle diversity to be replaced by corporate-controlled monoculture. It was a Faustian sellout, and it helped Monsanto's stock price hit an all-time high near year end 2007. Earlier decades of diversity and crop rotation preserved the country's soil quality. That changed after soybean monoculture moved in with its heavy dependence on chemical fertilizers. Traditional Argentine crops vanished, and cattle were forced into cramped feedlots the way they are in the US. Engdahl quoted a leading country agro-ecologist predicting these practices will destroy the land in 50 years if they continue. Nothing suggests a stoppage, and by 2004, nearly half the nation's crop land was for soybeans and over 90% of it solely for Monsanto's Roundup Ready brand. Engdahl put it this way: "Argentina had become the world's largest uncontrolled experimental laboratory for GMO" and its people unwitting lab rats. Mechanized GMO soybean monoculture took over, the country's dairy farms were reduced by half, and "hundreds of thousands of workers (were forced) off the land" into poverty. Monsanto was on a roll and used various exploitive schemes. Included were ploys to ignore Argentine law against collecting royalty payments. Smuggling Roundup soybean seeds illegally into Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Uruguay also went on sub rosa. In addition, the company got Menem to allow it to collect "extended royalties" in 1999 even though Argentine law prohibited the practice. Monsanto then pressured the government to recognize its "technology license fee." A Technology Compensation Fund was established and managed by the Ministry of Agriculture. It forced farmers to pay a near-1% fee on GMO soybean sales. Monsanto and other GMO seed suppliers got the funds. By 2005, Brazil's government relented. It legalized GMO seeds for the first time, and by 2006, the US, Argentina and Brazil accounted for over 81% of world soybean production. It "ensure(s) that practically every animal in the world fed soymeal (is) eating genetically engineered soybeans." It also means everyone eating these animals does the same thing unwittingly. Argentina experienced more fallout as well that threatens to spread. Its soybean monoculture affects the countryside hugely. Traditional farmers close to soybean ones are seriously harmed by aerial Roundup spraying. Their crops are destroyed as that's how this herbicide works. It kills all plants without gene-modified resistance. It also kills animals with farmers reporting their chickens died and horses were gravely harmed. Humans are affected as well and show violent symptoms of nausea, diarrhea, vomiting and herbicide-inflicted skin lesions. Other reports claimed further fallout - animals born with severe organ deformities, deformed bananas and sweet potatoes, and lakes filled with dead fish. In addition, rural families said their children developed "grotesque blotches on their bodies." Forest lands were also damaged as vast acreage was cleared for soybean planting. Their loss "created an explosion of medical problems because Roundup is toxic, kills every non-GMO plant that grows and, it harms animals and humans as well that come in contact with it. As for higher promised yields, results showed reduced harvests of between 5% and 15% compared with traditional soybean crops plus "vicious new weeds" that need up to triple the amount of spraying to destroy. By the time farmers learn this, it's too late. By 2004, GMO soybean plantings spread across the country, they cost more to produce and yield less, and Engdahl summarized farmers' plight: "A more perfect scheme of human bondage would be hard to imagine," and it was even worse than that. Argentina was the first test case "in a global plan that was decades in the making and absolutely shocking and awesome in its scope." Iraq Gets American Seeds of Democracy Democracy for Iraq meant erasing the "cradle of civilization" for unfettered free market capitalism. Iraq was conquered for its oil but also to make the country a giant free trade paradise. The scheme was diabolical, elaborate and ugly - blitzkrieg "shock and awe," elaborate PsyOps, fear as a weapon, repressive occupation, mass detention and torture, and the fastest, most sweeping country remake in history. It happened in weeks, Iraq no longer exists, the country is a wasteland, its people are devastated, and a blank slate was created for unrestrained corporate pillage on a near- unimaginable scale. Part of the scheme was for GMO agribusiness giants to have free reign over that part of the economy - to radically transform Iraq's food production system into a model for GMO seeds and plants. One hundred swiftly implemented Bremer laws mandated it, but Iraqis had no say about them as the country is now governed out of Washington and its branch office inside the heavily-fortified Green Zone in the largest US embassy in the world by far. Bremer laws imposed the harshest ever Chicago School-style "shock therapy" of the kind that devastated countries around the world since first introduced in Chile under Pinochet in 1973. The formula was familiar - mass firings of state employees in the hundreds of thousands; unrestricted imports with no tariffs, duties, inspections or taxes; deregulation; and the largest state liquidation sale and privatization plan since the Soviet Union collapsed. Corporate taxes were lowered as well from 40% to a flat 15%, and foreign investors could own 100% of Iraqi assets other than oil. They could also repatriate all their profits, had no obligation to reinvest in the country and wouldn't be taxed. They were further given 40 year leases, and the only Saddam era laws remaining were those restricting trade unions and collective bargaining. Foreign transnationals, mainly US ones, swooped in and devoured everything. Iraqis couldn't compete, and the occupation laws assured it. Consider Bremer Order 81. It covered patents, their duration and stated: "Farmers shall be prohibited from re-using seeds of protected varieties or any variety" the edict covered. It gave plant varieties patent holders absolute rights over farmers' using their seeds for 20 years. They'd be genetically engineered, owned by transnationals, and Iraqi farmers using them had to sign an agreement stipulating they'll pay a "technology fee" as well as an annual license fee. Plant Variety Protection (PVP) was the core of this order. It made seed saving and reuse illegal. Even using "similar" seeds could result in severe fines and imprisonment. GMO seeds got protection to displace 10,000 years of developed plant varieties being sacrificed. Iraq's fertile valley between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers is ideal for crop planting. Since 8000 BC, farmers used it to develop "rich seeds of almost every variety of wheat used in the world today." They were erased through a GMO modernization and industrialization scheme so agribusiness can get a foothold in the region and supply the world market. While Iraqis suffer and starve, GMO giants run the country's agriculture for export. Iraqi farmers are now agribusiness serfs and are forced to grow products foreign to the native diet like wheat designed for pasta. Bremer laws mandated it and are inviolable under Article 26 of the US-drafted constitution. It states that the Iraqi government is powerless to change laws a foreign occupier made. To assure it, US-sympathizers are in every ministry with those most trusted in key ones. Engdahl sums up the damage to agriculture: "The forced transformation of Iraq's food production into patented GMO crops is one of the clearest examples of (how) Monsanto and other GMO giants are forcing (these) crops onto an unwilling or unknowing world population." They're infesting the planet with them one country at a time so it's futile trying to undo the damage they cause. Planting the "Garden of Earthly Delights" On January 1, 1995, the WTO was officially established with powers to enforce its corporate-written laws on member states. US agribusiness was already dominant, but it now had a new unelected supranational body to advance its private agenda on a global scale. WTO is a "policeman" for global free trade and "a (predatory) battering ram for the trillion dollar annual world agribusiness" part of it for its giants. Its rules are written with teeth for "punitive leverage" to levy heavy financial and other penalties on rule violators. Under them, agriculture is a priority because American companies are dominant. Cargill wrote the rules that Engdahl calls the "Cargill Plan." They: -- ban all government farm programs and price supports worldwide (but wink and nod at massive US subsidies); -- prohibit countries from imposing import controls to defend their own agricultural production; -- ban agricultural export controls even in times of famine so Cargill can dominate world export grain trade; and -- forbid countries from restricting trade through food safety laws called trade barriers; this demand also opens world markets to unrestricted GMO food imports with no need to prove their safety. The International Food and Agricultural Trade Policy Council lobby (IPC) worked with Cargill and US agribusiness to advance this agenda. Four so-called Group of Four QUAD countries took the lead - the US, Canada, Japan and EU. Meeting in secret, they set policy for all 134 WTO members that for agriculture was drafted by US agribusiness giants like Cargill, Monsanto, ADM and DuPont along with EU giants, Nestle and Unilever. They were designed to erase national laws and safeguards in favor of unrestricted free markets favoring Global North countries. Through patents, GMO giants control staple crop seeds and need WTO leverage to force them on a skeptical world. It's done through WTO's Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) along with its Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Until the advent of agribusiness, food production and its markets were local. That's now changed with corporate giants in control and able to set prices by manipulating supply. AoA rules were established to help. They also enforce agribusiness' highest priority - "a free and integrated global market for its products." Included are GMO ones the senior Bush administration ruled are "substantially equivalent" to ordinary seeds and crops and need no government regulation. That provision is written into WTO rules under its "Sanitary and Phytosanitary Agreement (SPS). It states that national laws banning GMO products are "unfair trade practices" even when they endanger human health. Other WTO rules (called "Technical Barriers to Trade") are in place as well. They prohibit GMO labeling so consumers don't know what they're eating and can't avoid these potentially hazardous foods. The 1996 Biosafety Protocol was drafted to solve this problem, and it should be in place for that purpose. Developing country demands, however, were "ambushed by the powerful organized government and agribusiness lobby." It sabotaged talks and insisted biosafety measures be subordinate to WTO trade rules favoring developed states. As a result, talks collapsed, safety concerns are ignored, and the path was cleared for the unrestricted spread of GMO seeds worldwide. Under WTO's TRIPS rules, all member states must pass patent-protecting intellectual property laws that make knowledge property. That, in turn, "open(s) the floodgates" nearly everywhere for the proliferation of GMO seeds and foods, even in violation of national food safety laws. GMO giants have powerful friends in government backing their agenda. George Bush is one of them, and in 2003 he made the proliferation of GMO seeds his top priority after the Iraq war. With that support, GMO companies are pushing things to the limit with a brazen example Engdahl gave involving the Texas biotech company, RiceTec. It schemed to patent Basmati rice, the dietary staple across Asia for thousands of years. With IRRI collusion, the company stole the seeds, patented them under Rockefeller Foundation-crafted rules, and the 2001 Supreme Court decision in Ag Supply v. Pioneer Hi-Bred made it possible. It "enshrined the principle of allowing patents on plant forms and other forms of life in (this) groundbreaking case." Under the ruling, GMO plant breeds can be patented, and US government agencies are complicit in helping agribusiness giants ensure nothing stops them from doing it. As a result, the GMO monoculture onslaught threatens plant species diversity everywhere. With full Washington and WTO backing, major biotech companies are patenting every plant imaginable in GMO form. By the beginning of the new millennium, Engdahl referred to a "Gene Revolution (as a) monsoon force in world agriculture" with four dominant companies controlling GMOs and related agrichemical markets" - Monsanto, DuPont, Dow Agrisciences and Syngenta in Switzerland from the merger of the agriculture divisions of Novartis and AstraZeneca. The "world's number one" is Monsanto. The company was discussed in Part I of this review, and Engdahl quoted its chairman saying his goal is a global fusion of "three of the largest industries in the world - agriculture, food and health - that now operate (separately, but) changes....will lead to their integration." That was over seven years ago. Now it's happening. Engdahl covered pertinent information on the industry that might otherwise have gone unnoticed - that the three US GMO giants have a long sordid association with the Pentagon supplying massively destructive chemicals like Agent Orange, napalm and others. They now want to be trusted with the most important things we ingest - our food and drugs in the face of strong evidence their GMO varieties harm human health and their history of public safety concern is atrocious. Like it or not, they're advancing their agenda, and a 2004 Rockefeller Foundation report shows it. GM crop production achieved nine consecutive double digit year increases since 1996. More than eight million farmers in 17 countries now plant them, over 90% in developing nations. Far and away, the US is the world's leader "with aggressive Government promotion, absence of labeling, and the domination of US farm production." Here, "genetically engineered crops (have) essentially taken over the American food chain." In 2004, over 85% of soybeans were genetically modified, 45% of corn, and since animal feed is mainly from these crops "the entire meat production of the nation (and exports) has been fed on genetically modified animal feed." What animals eat, so do humans. It gets even worse. Wind and air proliferate GM seeds to adjacent fields, including organic ones that are now to some degree contaminated. Engdahl explained that "after just six years, an estimated 67% of all US farm acreage has been (irremedially) contaminated with genetically engineered seeds. The genie was out of the bottle" as nothing known to science can reverse this condition. It renders the notion of pure organic impossible except from perhaps very isolated farms that comprise a small percent of the industry. Even so, organic crops are safer than chemically-treated ones and hugely preferable to any that are genetically modified. That said, as the Gene Revolution advances worldwide, the future of organic farming is imperiled to the horror of people like this writer dependent on them. Consider further the way GMO giants gain market share with government and WTO backing. It's also helped by imposing rigid licensing and technology agreements on farmers who must pay annual fees. They're binding and enforced through Technology Use Agreements farmers have to sign, and by so doing, entrap themselves in a "new form of serfdom." Each year, they must buy new seeds, and they're forbidden to reuse any from previous years as was customary before GMO introductions. Failure to observe the agreements can result in severe legal damages or even imprisonment and possible loss of their land. Complicit government agencies and clever marketing schemes aid the "Gene Revolution" through "lies and damn lies" that GMO crops have higher yields and can solve world hunger problems. The evidence proves otherwise. In addition, resistant "superweeds" develop over time, crop yields drop, farmers must use greater amounts of herbicides, they're locked into high user fees, and they end up losing money. Bottom line - the case for "genetically engineered seeds for agriculture had been based on a citadel of scientific fraud and corporate lies." This information is hidden from the public, and it's too late once unwary farmers learn they've been had. Besides that, Russian science showed GMOs harm unborn babies as over half the rat offsring fed a genetically modified soybean diet died in their first three weeks of life - six times the normal rate. Evidence was growing on GMO dangers, and the industry was alarmed. In 1999, it "required an extraordinary intervention by its patron saint, the Rockefeller Foundation," to pull its fat out of the fire. Population Control - Terminators, Traitors, Spermicidal Corn Crucial to its strategy, GMO giants needed a "new technology which would allow them to sell seed that would not reproduce." They developed one called GURTs (Genetic Use Restriction Technologies) that became known as "Terminator" seeds. The process is patented, it applies to all plant and seed species, and replanting them doesn't work. They won't grow. It's the industry's solution to controlling world food production and assuring themselves big profits as a result. What a discovery. Terminator corn, soybean and other seeds have been "genetically modified to 'commit suicide' after one harvest season" by a toxin-producing inbuilt gene. A closely related technology is called T-GURT seeds, or second generation Terminators, nicknamed "Traitor." The technology relies on controlling both plant fertility and its genetic characteristics with "an inducible gene promoter" called a "gene switch." GMO pest and disease-resistant crops only work by using a specific chemical compound companies like Monsanto make. Farmers buying seeds illegally won't get the compound to "turn on" the resistant gene. Traitor technology thus creates a captive new market for the GMO giants, and Traitor is cheaper to produce than Terminator seeds. Combined, these two technologies give agribusiness giants unprecedented powers. "For the first time in history, it (lets) three or four private multinational seed companies....dictate terms to world farmers for their seed." It's a biological warfare tool almost "too good to believe" in the face of open citizen opposition the industry and US Department of Agriculture (USDA) aim to quash. Engdahl quoted USDA spokesman Willard Phelps from a June, 1998 interview saying the agency wanted Terminator technology to be "widely licensed and made expeditiously available to many seed companies." Hidden was the reason why - to introduce these seeds to the developing world as the prime Rockefeller Foundation strategy. Engdahl called it a "Trojan Horse for Western GMO seed giants to get control over Third World food supplies in areas with weak or non-existent patent laws." It became an urgent Foundation priority to spread the seeds worldwide to irreversibly capture world markets. USDA fully backed the scheme. That kind of muscle (along with WTO rules) is overwhelming. It's the tactic used when the US departments of state and agriculture coordinate famine relief using genetically engineered US surplus commodities. Farmers getting GMO seeds aren't told what they are, they plant them unwittingly for the next harvest, get hooked, and the proliferation isn't restricted to Africa. Through coercion, bribery and other illegal tactics, the industry's goal is to introduce them everywhere but especially in highly indebted developing states. In the case of Poland, it was in a country with some of the richest European soil that's now spoiled by genetic contamination. Consider how the scheme ties in with Rockefeller Foundation population control strategy. In 2001, it was aided when the privately-owned biotech company, Epicyte, announced it successfully developed the "ultimate GMO crop" - contraceptive corn. It was called a solution to world "over-population," but news about it vanished after Biolex acquired the company. One way or other, the Rockefeller Foundation aims to reduce population through human reproduction by spreading GMO seeds. It's doing it cooperatively with the UN World Health Organization (WHO) by quietly funding its "reproductive health" program through the use of an innovative tetanus vaccine. Combined with hCG natural hormones, it's an abortion agent preventing pregnancies, but women getting it aren't told. Neither is anything said about the Pentagon viewing population reduction as a sophisticated form of "biological warfare" (to) solve world hunger." Avian Flu Panic and GMO Chickens In 2005, George Bush duped the public into believing a so-called Avian (bird flu) epidemic threatened a pandemic if not addressed. The solution as always is turn to the private sector and reward his friends. In this case, he asked Congress to appropriate an emergency $1 billion taxpayer dollars for a drug Tamiflu. Unmentioned was a key fact. It was developed and patented by Gilead Science and, that prior to becoming Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld was its chairman and still a major stockholder. The scare combined with government funding and a rising stock price stood to make him a fortune just as Dick Cheney profited as Vice-President from his Halliburton ties. Engdahl asked: "Was the avian flu scare another Pentagon hoax" with an unknown aim? Based on known and suppressed past government actions, "a supposedly deadly" new flu strain "had to be treated with more than a little suspicion." It was being used to advance global agribusiness and poultry factory farm interests "along the model of Arkansas-based Tyson Foods." Consider the facts. Factory farms are breeding grounds for potential disease proliferation because of their cramped, overcrowded conditions, but this was never mentioned as a threat. Instead, small family-run free-ranging chicken farmers were cited as culprits, especially in Asia, when, in fact, that notion is at least very unlikely. Small farms like these are the safest, but an industry-government propaganda campaign claimed otherwise. The scheme is clear. Five multinational giants dominate US chicken meat production and processing - Tyson (the largest), Gold Kist, Pilgrim's Pride, ConAgra Poultry and Perdue Farms. They produce chicken meat under "atrocious health and safety conditions." According to the GAO, these plants had "one of the highest rates of injury and illness of any industry." Cited was exposure to "dangerous chemicals, blood, fecal matter, exacerbated by poor ventilation and often extreme temperatures....(In addition, chickens are tightly cramped and) prevented from moving or getting any exercise on factory farms (so they can) grow....much larger (and faster) than ever before." Growth boosters are also used, they create health problems, and growing numbers of animal experts believe these farms, not small Asian ones, are the real source of dangerous new diseases like avian flu. That information is suppressed in the mainstream so the public is duped. It's so chicken processing giants can globalize world production with the avian flu scare "gift from heaven" to help them. If small Asian chicken farmers can be squeezed out, Tyson and the others can access the huge Asian poultry market. That's their aim and removing competition their method with help from friends in high places. Creating the first GMO animal population is also part of the scheme with the prospect of transforming world chickens into GMO birds. Engdahl put it this way: "By 2006, riding the fear of an avian flu human epidemic, the GMO or Gene Revolution players were clearly aiming to conquer the world's most important source of meat protein, poultry." But another scheme to dominate world food production also lay ahead. "Terminator was about to come into the control of the world's largest GMO agribusiness seed giant." Genetic Armageddon: Terminator and Patents on Pigs In 2007, Monsanto acquired Delta & Pine Land (D&PL)to complete its aborted 1999 takeover attempt. D&PL had global Terminator patent rights and successfully extended them on GURTs. The deal made Monsanto "the overwhelming monopolist of agricultural seeds of nearly every variety" that includes fruits and vegetables from the company's acquisition of Seminis a year earlier. With that company, Monsanto is now first in vegetables and fruits, second in agronomic crops, and the world's third largest agrochemical company. With D&PL, the company has absolute control over the majority of plant agricultural seeds as well. In addition, they're getting into the genetic engineering and patenting of animal seeds. In 2005, Monsanto applied to the WTO for international patent rights for its claimed genetic engineering of a means to identify pig genes derived from patented male swine semen. The company also wants patents and the right to collect license fees for particular farm animals and livestock herds. If granted, "Any pigs that would be produced using this reproductive technique would be covered by these patents." Several techniques are being used and patented as fast as GMO lawyers can submit applications to lock up animal life as intellectual property. Companies like Monsanto and Cargill have invested huge amounts to genetically modify animals for profit. They thus want patent and licensing rights to the results even though this represents a controversial goal to patent life itself. A 1980 Supreme Court decision in Diamond v. Chakrabarty, however, gave them an opening by ruling "anything under the sun that is made by man" is patentable. It paved the way for a landmark patent of the "Harvard mouse" that was genetically engineered to be susceptible to cancer. Engdahl explained how four agribusiness giants used "stealth, system, and a well-supported campaign of lies and distortion" to progress toward Henry Kissinger's ultimate goal - controlling oil to control nations and food to control people. The pursuit of both are ongoing with little public knowledge of how far advanced things are and how reckless the scheme is - to genetically engineer all plants and life forms and to control world population by culling its "unwanted" parts. Afterward A September, 2006 WTO tribunal ruled for the US and against the EU. In so doing, it threatens to open this important agricultural region to the "forced introduction (of) genetically-manipulated plants and food products." It recommended the WTO Dispute Settlement Body (DSB) require the EU to conform with its obligations under WTO's SPS Agreement that lets agribusiness ignore national laws and rights to protect public health and safety. Failure to comply can cost EU countries hundreds of millions of dollars in annual fines, so this issue is crucial to both sides. At the time of Engdahl's writing, it was unclear if the "GMO juggernaut would be stopped globally." It's still uncertain, but as of December, only nine biotech products are authorized for sale in the EU. So far, most US corn exports are blocked and trade in other products is hindered in spite of dozens of applications pending in the pipeline with their fate undecided. Several EU countries, including France, Germany, Austria and Denmark, even ban some EU-approved biotech products to further cloud the outlook. Polls show why with European public opinion strongly opposed to GMO foods and ingredients with hostility levels in France as high as 89% and 79% wanting governments to ban them. This shows European consumers are far ahead of Americans and much better protected (so far) by their overall exclusion as well as having labeling requirements for those allowed to be sold. That provision is crucial as it empowers consumers to use or avoid eating these foods. If enough people abstain, food outlets won't carry them. Engdahl ends on a high note by observing how vulnerable GMO giants are to criticism. Thrusting untested products down consumer throats is "grounds for organizing a global ban or moratorium on them" if enough vocal opposition can be marshaled. Throughout his book, he sounds the alarm with reams of carefully documented facts on the industry, its products and goals. Converting world agriculture to GMOs, allowing agribusiness free reign over them, and combining that scheme with a diabolical population culling agenda adds up to solving world hunger through genocide and endangering the rest of us in the process. So far, Washington and the industry are on a roll toward controlling oil and food. Hundreds of millions around the world stand opposed, but it's unclear if that's enough. Engdahl's book is a wake-up call for every friend of the earth to understand issues this crucial can't be left in the hands of unscrupulous business giants and their supportive friends in high places everywhere. The book has reams of ammunition against them. It needs to be thoroughly read and used. The stakes are much too high - human health and safety must never be compromised for profit. Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at [lendmanstephen at sbcglobal.net][1]. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com Mondays at noon US Central time. [1]: mailto:lendmanstephen at sbcglobal.net URL: http://mostlywater.org/reviewing_f_william_engdahls_seeds_destruction_part_iii From news at resist.ca Sat Jan 5 12:17:04 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Sat, 05 Jan 2008 20:17:04 -0000 Subject: [news] Colombian Government Torpedoed Venezuelan-Mediated Hostage Return: FARC Message-ID: <20080105201705.18640.qmail@resist.ca> Colombian Government Torpedoed Venezuelan-Mediated Hostage Return: FARC January 2nd 2008, by Kiraz Janicke - Venezuelanalysis Caracas, January 2, 2008 (venezuelanalysis.com) - The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), temporarily suspended on Monday the operation lead by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez for the liberation of three hostages. According to the FARC, intensified Colombian military operations made it impossible to safely release the captives. The three hostages to be released were the former Colombian vice-presidential candidate Clara Rojas, her son, Emmanuel, who was born in captivity, and former legislator Consuelo Gonzalez, captured by the FARC in 2001. As part of the mission, dubbed "Operation Emmanuel," the Red Cross and a team of international observers, including former Argentine President Nestor Kirchner, flew to the Colombian town of Villavicencio to receive the coordinates of an undisclosed location where the hostages would then be handed over. They waited for five days before the operation was suspended. In statement to the press in Villavicencio on Monday, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, denied there was an increased military presence in the region and accused the FARC of "lying" and not wanting to hand over the hostages because they do not have the child, Emmanuel. Uribe, along with the Colombian High Commissioner for Peace, Luis Carlos Restrepo and Colombian Minister of Defense presented what they described as a "hypothesis" based on information received four days earlier; suggesting that an abandoned, maltreated and malnourished child named Juan David G?mez Tapiero, 3 ? years old, placed in the care of the Colombian Institute of Family Welfare in 2005, could possibly be Emmanuel. Uribe has called for DNA tests of Rojas' family, and Juan David G?mez Tapiero, to verify the claim. However, during a press conference at Miraflores Presidential Palace in Caracas on Monday, President Chavez responded, saying Colombian Military operatives deployed in the region impeded the operation and that Uribe went to Villavicencio in order to "dynamite" the process of liberating the hostages. "He went to launch a bomb at the humanitarian process and should assume his responsibility before the world as the president of Colombia, because I don't have the slightest doubt that it is his government and his actions that are trying to abort the proceedings," Chavez asserted. "Why did Uribe wait four days to launch his hypothesis over the whereabouts of Emmanuel and to present this information just when the process of handing over the hostages was about to occur?" he asked. "I hope his hypothesis is certain, but I have reasons to doubt Uribe, many reasons to doubt the High Commissioner for Peace and many more reasons to doubt the Minister of Defense," he said. However, if the version that Uribe has presented is true, it will be the FARC that has some explaining to do, Chavez added. With the consent of Clara Gonz?lez de Rojas and Iv?n Rojas, mother and brother of Clara Rojas, who are in Caracas, Chavez authorised a team of Colombian genetic experts to travel to Venezuela to carry out DNA testing to verify the identity of the child. However, political analysts have questioned the validity of Uribe's hypothesis. Professor Vladimir Acosta described it as a "soap opera" and Colombian journalist Jorge Enrique Botero, who first alerted the world to the existence of Emmanuel, told Venezuelan state TV that Uribe's theory "does not add up to me." Referring to a number letters by the hostages, to be delivered to President Chavez as "proof of life," seized by Colombian authorities in Bogota on November 30, Botero said, "We should recall the recent testimony of Army officials held by the FARC. They say they have been with the child on many occasions, and that he is like a son to all of them there." Uribe's hypothesis "appeared at a very strange moment," Botero added. "Speculation at a moment like this, and made in the form that it was done, with the President of the Republic, the Minister of Defense on one side, the Commissioner for Peace behind him...to me it appears as an irresponsible act to give a blow to the process of liberation." Additionally, in contrast to Uribe's claims that military activities in the region had not increased, the Colombian daily El Clarin reported that the team of international facilitators who traveled to Villavicencio to oversee the handover, were left with the impression that the pursuit of the FARC by the Colombian Armed Forces "did not stop for one moment." According to El Clarin, military helicopters also flew over the zone where the hostages were to be handed over and the FARC responded, launching a missile which narrowly missed one of the helicopters. On Tuesday the Colombian military also announced that six FARC guerillas had been killed in three separate clashes. El Clarin also claimed today that Uribe ordered espionage activities against the international delegation waiting in Villavicencio by placing microphones under their beds and having them constantly under military supervision; they were also separated physically in different locations in order to "break the cohesion of the delegation" the report continued. On Sunday evening Uribe communicated through Peace Commissioner Restrepo that he could no longer guarantee the security of former president Kirchner or the Brazilian representative Marco Aurelio Garc?a, causing them to leave. Kirchner said that both the FARC and the Colombian government were to blame for the failure of the humanitarian mission. Despite the failure of the mission, President Chavez assured that "Operation Emmanuel" will continue and that other possibilities to facilitate the liberation of the hostages would be explored, such as a clandestine operation. URL: http://mostlywater.org/colombian_government_torpedoed_venezuelanmediated_hostage_return_farc From news at resist.ca Sat Jan 5 13:18:12 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Sat, 05 Jan 2008 21:18:12 -0000 Subject: [news] 2007 Recap: The Good and the Very Bad (Two articles) Message-ID: <20080105211820.11565.qmail@resist.ca> Published on Monday, December 31, 2007 by CommonDreams.org Let?s Toast to Ten Good Things About 2007 by Medea Benjamin [http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/12/31/6083/][1] As we close this year on the low of Congress giving Bush more billions for war, and the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, let?s remember some of the year?s gains that can revive our spirits for the New Year. Here are just ten. 1. With the exception of the White House, this has been a banner year for environmental consciousness and action. Al Gore and the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the Nobel Peace Prize. Green building and renewable energy have exploded. Congress passed the Green Jobs Act of 2007, authorizing $125 million for green job training. Over 700 U.S. mayors, representing 25 percent of the U.S. population, have signed a pledge to reduce greenhouse gases by 2012. Illinois became the 26th state to require that some of the state?s electricity come from renewable sources and Kansas became the first state to refuse a permit for a new coal-fired power plant for health and environmental reasons. That?s progress! 2. On the global environmental scene, the Bush dinosaurs were tackled head on. When the US delegation at the UN climate change conference in Bali tried to sabotage the negotiations, the delegate from tiny Papua New Guinea threw diplomatic niceties to the wind and said that if the U.S. couldn?t lead, it should get out of the way. Embarrassed by international and domestic outrage, the U.S. delegation buckled, and the way was cleared for adopting the ?Bali road map.? Although it is a weak mandate, it lays the groundwork for a stronger climate agreement post-2012 when the first phase of the Kyoto Protocols ends. 3. Imagine living in a waste-free urban society? Well, it?s no longer a utopian dream but a well-thought-out plan for India?s state of Kerala. The plan to be ?waste-free? within five years includes waste prevention, intensive re-use and recycling, composting, replacing unsustainable materials with sustainable ones, training people to produce these materials, and providing funds for setting up sustainably run businesses. The ground-breaking plan, spearheaded by a local grassroots movement, demonstrates how citizen groups can advance pioneering policies to heal the planet. 4. While the war in Iraq rages on, a new war was stopped. The specter of war with Iran loomed large throughout the year, with Washington accusing Iran of killing U.S . soldiers in Iraq and being a nuclear threat. Then in December came the National Intelligence Estimate showing that the Bush administration knew all along that Iran had shelved its nuclear weapons program in 2003. It exposed the Administration claims of an Iranian threat as unjustifiably inflated, and the winds of war were suddenly subdued. Nothing is guaranteed, but a U.S. military attack on Iran is less likely now than it was earlier in the year. 5. This year also brought a decrease in tensions with North Korea. Hostilities flared after North Korea successfully conducted a nuclear test in 2006. But the Bush administration, bogged down in Iraq and pushed by international pressure, agreed to negotiate. Following a series of six-party talks involving North Korea, South Korea, China, Russia, Japan, and the U.S, on March 17, 2007, an historic agreement was reached. North Korea agreed to shut down its main nuclear facility and submit a list of its nuclear programs in exchange for fuel and normalization talks with the U.S. and Japan. During this age of raw aggression, it is a welcome example of putting diplomacy first. 6. The Iraqi people have little to celebrate, but there was one important victory for the people this year. Remember how the Bush administration and Congress were insisting that the Iraqi Parliament pass a new oil law? Touted as a way to ?share oil revenue among all Iraqis?, the oil law was really designed to transform the country?s currently nationalized oil system to one open to foreign corporate control. But opposition was fierce inside Iraq, especially from the nation?s oil worker unions. In a rare sign of independence from Washington and concern for domestic opinion, the Iraqi Parliament withstood intense U.S. pressure and refused to pass the oil law. 7. In early 2007, few Americans had heard of the private security company Blackwater. By year?s end, Blackwater had become infamous for the killing of civilians in Iraq. The radical privatization of our military to corporations like Blackwater that are accountable to no one was exposed for all to see. This frightening process is still well under way, with more private contractors in Iraq than soldiers, but at least the issue has now entered the public dialogue. And Blackwater has received such a black eye that it?s unlikely to get a new Iraq contract when the present one expires in May. 8. One victory on both the war and environmental fronts came in Australia, where Labor Party?s Kevin Rudd beat conservative John Howard to become Prime Minister. Howard was an enthusiastic backer of George Bush?s disastrous war on terror, from defending the Guant?namo prison and extraordinary rendition to sending troops to Iraq and Afghanistan. Howard also joined Bush in refusing to ratify the Kyoto Agreement, arguing it would cost Australians jobs. After assuming office on December 3, Kevin Rudd immediately signed the Kyoto agreement and he has promised to remove Australia?s combat troops from Iraq by mid-2008. 9. Sometimes a loss is a win. Hugo Chavez had initiated a constitutional referendum that would have, among other changes, scrapped term limits. His immediate acceptance of a razor-thin margin of defeat before all the votes were even counted showed his democratic colors and made it a lot harder for Bush and the corporate media to label him a dictator. Despite the loss, Chavez remains extremely popular, especially among the poor and working class in Venezuela. And throughout Latin America, the historic transformation led by progressive leaders like Chavez continues to blossom. 10. Last but not least, this year saw the resignation of some of Bush?s closest allies in government - Donald Rumsfeld resigned as Secretary of Defense, Alberto Gonzalez as Attorney General, and Karl Rove as Deputy Chief of Staff. Best of all, we can give thanks that we only have ONE YEAR left of the criminal, war-mongering, constitution-shredding, rights-violating, torture-sanctioning Bush Administration! It?s just GOT to get better than this! So here?s a toast to a green future, diplomacy, and surviving the last throes of the Bush regime. Que viva 2008! Medea Benjamin ([medea at globalexchange.org][2]) is cofounder of Global Exchange ([www.globalexchange.org][3]) and CODEPINK: Women for Peace ([www.codepinkalert.org][4]). * * * December 31, 2007 Goodbye 2007 and Good Riddance! Hello 2008 and You'd Better Shape Up! By ALEXANDER COCKBURN [http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn12312007.html][5] It was the No! 2007 was never the best of times. It was a whiny, fretful twelve months, and what should have been a time of keen enjoyment, poking at the graying ashes of the Bush era, saw the left and progressive sectors grasping at phantoms and with less of a significant presence on the national political scene than at any time in the past thirty years. There's scant sign that this will change in 2008 unless some unforeseen earthquake tosses up some exciting Independent candidacies, of which there is zero evidence at the turn of the year. January 1, 2007 The world still reels from the fall of a titan. A week earlier, on December 26, Gerald Ford entered Valhalla on his golf cart. These days a hefty slab of the teenagers alive in America will supposedly live to be 100 (presumably working till they drop to pay for the rest, jobless and dying from diabetes). Given the reproductive shadow hanging over America - poor semen quality, cryptorchidism, impaired fecundity - they won't have that many children, although the sparse litters will contain people likely to live to be 125, handing down horrible recipes for turkey giblet gravy to the next generation. In short, there'll be a lot of centenarians about, and the name Gerald Ford will mean absolutely nothing to any of them. You had to have been born in 1960 to have been 14 in 1974, hence even vaguely conscious of the genial interregnum between Nixon and Carter, over which Ford presided. At the start of the first viewing day, so the wires services reported, only twenty people were mustered at Capitol Hill to view Ford's casket in the Rotunda. On that day, George Bush excused himself from the state memorial, staying home in Crawford, Texas, presumably watching reruns of Saddam's execution. Few speak well of Ford. The neocons think he was weak. The libertarians regard him as a statist. The liberals and the left can't get over his pardon of Nixon. Enthusiasts for the man from Grand Rapids seem pretty much confined to Dick Cheney and me. On the grounds that he didn't have the time and maybe not even the inclination to do too much harm, I've always regarded Ford as America's greatest twentieth-century president, with the possible exception of Warren Harding, a very fine man. Ford reached the White House without vote fraud. He presided over a Keynesian binge. On his benign watch the pork barrel did its noble duty. Nonmilitary appropriations rose by 7.2 per cent, in contrast to Nixon's 4.3, Carter's 2.2, Reagan's 1.3. On his watch, with funding cut off by congress, the U.S. quit Vietnam. The arts flourished. Yes, there was the little matter of the invasion of East Timor. Nobody, certainly no American president, is perfect. Ford probably thought East Timor was a putting green. Anyway, what does it take to be America's greatest President, if it comes down to the height of the mountain of corpses you leave behind? The bar isn't that high. Ford belonged to the age of d?tente. The neoliberal age and the Second Cold War really began with Carter. Had Ford beaten back Carter's challenge in 1976, the neocon crusades of the mid- to late 1970s would have been blunted by the mere fact of a Republican occupying the White House. Reagan, most likely, would have returned permanently to his slumbers in California after his abortive challenge to Ford for the nomination in Kansas in 1976. January 7 The war in Iraq, one of the most disastrous military enterprises in the history of the Republic, has the New York Times' fingerprints all over it. Across the past sixth months, the Times has been waging an equally disingenuous campaign to escalate American troop levels in this doomed enterprises, culminating in an editorial okay for a troop hike the day before Bush's speech. The prime journalistic promoter of the escalation--it is time to retire the adroitly chosen word "surge"--now being proposed by the White House is Michael Gordon, the Times' military correspondent, a man of fabled arrogance and self esteem. A long piece on January 2, under the byline of Gordon, John Burns and David Sanger, made these promotion efforts particularly clear. The piece was a prolonged attack on Gen. George Casey, top military commander in Baghdad, depicted in harsh terms as espousing a defeatist plan of orderly withdrawal. Gordon's "troop surge" campaign has been politically much more influential than the mad-dog ravings of the right-wing broadcasters. The Times helped furnish the 2003 U.S. attack on Iraq. Now it has played a major role in furnishing a likely escalation. There is blood on its hands, and grieving mothers like Cindy Sheehan have as much cause to demonstrate outside its offices as outside Bush's ranch in Crawford. January 11 A make-or-break speech by a beleaguered U.S. President is usually preceded by a demonstration of American might somewhere on the planet, and the run-up to Bush's address last night was no exception. The AC-130 gunship that massacred a convoy of fleeing Islamists on Somalia's southwestern border, apparently along with dozens of nomads, their families and livestock, was deployed on Sunday to make timely newspaper headlines indicative of Bush's determination to strike at terror wherever it may lurk. Moral to nomads: when the U.S. president schedules a speech, don't herd, don't go to wedding parties, head for the nearest cave. President Bush stuck to his expected script last night and said he plans to boost U.S. forces in Iraq by 4,000 Marines to Anbar province and five combat brigades--17,500 troops--to Baghdad, in a new scheme to regain control of the city. Perhaps it was the shift of setting for his broadcast to the White House library that made him seem uncomfortable. With the exception of Laura, the former librarian, the Bush clan is not a bookish lot. The late Brendan Gill reported after staying at the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine how he scoured the premises late one night in search of something to read and could only find The Fart Book. January 18 Suppose the movers and shakers in the Israel lobby in the U.S.A.--Abe Foxman, Alan Dershowitz and the rest of the crew--had simply decided to leave Jimmy Carter's Peace Not Apartheid alone. How long before the book and all its aspersions on Israel's treatment of Palestinians would have been gathering dust on the remainder shelves? Suppose even that Dershowitz had rounded up some interns, and simply sallied forth from the Harvard Law School to buy up every copy of Carter's book and toss each one into the Charles River. Would not that have been a more successful suppressor than the attempted blitzkrieg strategy they did adopt? Of course it would. For weeks now the lobby has hurled its legions into battle against Carter. The Anti-Defamation League has taken out ads. The lobby's allies in the press have hurled their rotten tomatoes. The Amazon.com book site features venomous assaults at unprecedented length. Carter has been stigmatized as an anti-Semite, a Holocaust denier, a patron of former concentration camp killers, a Christian madman, a pawn of the Arabs, an advocate of terror. But the assault on Carter is all to no avail. With each gust of abuse, Carter's book soars higher and higher on the bestseller lists, now at number three on Amazon itself. This doesn't prove the lobby has no power. It proves the lobby can be dumb. Once a book by a former President with weighty humanitarian credentials has actually made it into the bookstores, it's a hard job to shoot it down with volleys of wild abuse. January 24 The Bush presidency is finished. A State of the Union address is always a pitiless register of where exactly the White House incumbent stands, in terms of political power. As Bush plodded through a list of doomed political initiatives the news cameras kept swiveling away from him, like people seeking escape from a bore at a cocktail party. They peered over his shoulder at Nancy Pelosi, America's first female Speaker of the House; they swiveled up to the balcony at a haggard-looking Laura Bush; they sought out the Democratic presidential hopefuls, such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. A first-timer at this annual event might have thought Bush was doing well, as the politicians and judges and generals bobbed up and down with the usual ovations. But the reactions were dutiful and the mood low-key. Bush stepped to the rostrum shackled to polling numbers that put him at the third lowest presidential ratings on record. He has the approval of only 28 per cent of the people, still hovering above Carter's 26 per cent in 1979, in the late autumn of his term, and Nixon's 24 per cent shortly before he resigned. The least enthusiastic people in the chamber were probably members of Bush's own party, who see him as an unalloyed political liability. When a president who came to maturity making daily obeisance to west Texas starts hailing biodiesel and mumbling about grass clippings as alternative energy, you know it's all over; that the President's policy advisers and speech writers are already sending out their resumes and wondering when to jump ship. February 1 Aside from winning, there aren't that many ways of ending wars. Governments pay attention when the troops mutiny, when there are riots outside the recruiting offices, when there's revolution on the home front, when the money runs out. So, here we are, in 2007, coming up on four years of war in Iraq. There's not going to be any significant mutiny among the troops. These people are volunteers. The campuses are quiet, filled with people on career track or downloading music or playing at virtual politics through their laptops. The churches? They are out there protesting torture, but the vocations are dying. We need more nuns! The priests are either on the run or in prison for child abuse. The respectable old anti-war "movement" stirs into once in a while for pleasant outings like last Saturday's in Washington, D.C. The people don't like the war but this doesn't mean it won't go on so long as there's money to pay for it. This brings us to Congress. There are the powder-puff non-binding resolutions, which mean nothing. On January 26, even as Senator Joe Biden and the others were solemnly pontificating on the significance of their sense-of-the senate resolution against the war, the Senate confirmed, unanimously, 81-0, the nomination of General Petraeus to command U.S. troops in Iraq. Petraeus has been a leading military advocate of escalation in troop levels. In September 2006, Congress passed the fiscal 2007 defense appropriations act, containing $70 billion for war. Since Oct. 1, it's what Bush has been using for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That money will run out somewhere between March and May. In past years, the DoD has shifted money around inside the existing budget till a new supplemental is passed. So right now Bush has money he needs to surge. The White House is sending Congress the entire half trillion defense budget for FY 2008, starting October 1. Congress could cut Iraq spending from this too. Bush could only veto the entire bill. If there is to be a real battle in Congress over denying Bush money, this is how it will have to take place over the next few months. I doubt the Resistance in Iraq is betting on it. February 25 The Clintons have always had short fuses, and at the best of times, Hillary is taut by disposition, and already her political prospects for winning the Democratic nomination are getting somewhat cloudier. This last week has been a trying one, crowned by the Oscar-night adulation for Al Gore, no favorite of the Clintons. On the heels of his $1.3 m. fundraiser for Hillary's rival, Illinois Senator Barrack Obama, Hollywood tycoon and Dreamworks co-founder David Geffen planted a carefully improvised explosive device under HRC's candidacy. He confided to Maureen Dowd of the New York Times that Mrs. Clinton was not the candidate to unify the Democratic Party, nor the nation; also that he would never forgive her husband for ignoring his own appeals and those of many other liberals to give a White House pardon to Leonard Peltier, a native American convicted of killing two FBI agents back in the 1970s. But while leaving Peltier to rot in prison, Clinton did pardon financier Marc Rich. Geffen's aim was true. Even though they enjoy political candidates tearing each other to shreds, Americans prefer to have the carnage tricked out with worthy appeals for "unity" and "bipartisanship." The word "divisive" is a deadly one to have hung around one's neck. And for many, Rich's pardon was the quintessential resume of Clintonian corruption. This, and the Oscar triumph for Gore, have left Mrs. Clinton distinctly frayed. But she is defiant. Asked about her vote for the war at a New Hampshire town hall, she said: "If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from." Hillary's numbers are not as robust as they were. She had better learn how to smile under fire, or she'll soon be in real trouble. March 8 It's wheels-up from George Bush today as he heads south for a six-day tour of Latin America. Few Americans study the travel brochures with more zeal than two-term presidents who face impeachment (Nixon and Clinton) or popular loathing (Johnson and Bush Jr.) or displeasing suggestions in the press that they are senile and should be removed from office (Eisenhower and Reagan). Washington holds scant appeal for our current president. Vice President Dick Cheney's senior aide Scooter Libby has now been convicted. The hoped-for "light at the end of the tunnel" in Iraq is not yet visible and the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon have threatened mutiny if Bush orders them to bomb Tehran. His poll ratings are in the basement. So, it was time to call up Lame Duck Tours and accept the bargain offer of a six-day special to Latin America, meals and hotels included with a trip to Mayan ruins on Tuesday. Back in his 2000 campaign, Bush pledged "a fundamental commitment" to Latin America. But on Bush's inept watch the subcontinent has swerved left, and now the dominant leader on the continent is Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. The boom in oil prices has allowed Chavez to subsidize energy prices through Latin America, Central America and the Caribbean, and he has cemented important trade and investment agreements with Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador and Colombia. The deeper problem is that the U.S. model--free trade pacts, neoliberal onslaughts on public ownership and rule by the International Monetary Fund--simply ran out of steam at the end of the Nineties, leaving Latin America scarred by poverty, unemployment, slums and kleptocracies. March 12 Until recently, the U.S. people were thinking mainly about the circumstances of Anna Nicole Smith's demise and the likely inheritor of the former Playmate's millions. Now Anna has been swept off the front pages, along with the beleaguered Alberto Gonzales, by the pet food crisis. An ever-lengthening list of proprietary brands of dog and cat food all come from the same Canadian pet food processor, Menu Foods, into whose vats at some point went wheat gluten from China contaminated by melamine, a fertilizer used in Asia where--not to put too fine a point on it--pet life is cheap. Only a few animals have died, and America's cats and dogs are at greater risk from lightning strikes, but most Americans are fearfully eyeing Towser and Mittens for signs of renal failure. Into this firestorm of national anguish now has been tossed the news that Mrs. Judi Giuliani was once in the dog-killing business. This disclosure came on the heels of the news that Judi had not been entirely forthcoming about the number of her legal unions. Like Rudy himself, it turns out she's on her third. The hitherto undisclosed numero uno, whom she married at age 19, was a salesman at U.S. Surgical, a company selling surgical staples. Young Judi's job was allegedly to demonstrate their efficacy on cuts made on drugged dogs. According to Patricia Feral, president of the Connecticut-based Friends of Animals, quoted on the New York Post online, which broke the story, earlier this week, U.S. Surgical's reps did sales-demonstration stapling on hundreds of dogs through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Feral says the dogs were "either put to death following the sales demonstrations because they can't recover from them, or they die during them." The stapling had to be done on live dogs because, as one U.S. Surgical CEO put it back in the 1980s, "A dead dog doesn't bleed. You need real blood-flow conditions, or you get a false sense of security." Americans like their First Family to have a dog. Nixon used to put sesame seeds in the turn-ups of his trousers so his spaniel, King Timahoe, would nuzzle him in public. "Any man who does not like dogs and not want them about does not deserve to be in the White House," said President Calvin Coolidge. April 14 Like many of the heehaw racists strewn across the cable dial and AM frequencies, Don Imus must be wondering why this time he got his tongue caught in the wringer. It was suddenly news that Imus shored up his ratings with racist cracks at blacks and Hispanics? Only at the start of April he went too far by insulting the women athletes of Rutgers? Is that when he crossed the Rubicon of racism and the shout went up, At long last, have you left no sense of decency? It's like announcing Bluebeard veered into unforgivable moral excess when he knocked off wife number five. When he realized he was in serious trouble, Imus went full steam into contrition mode. America, far more than other cultures, adores full-bore apologies, leading to a full, low-interest-rate moral re-fi. Not believing in redemption, and schooled by Spinoza and Nietzsche, Europeans tend to take the position that remorse adds to the crime. Imus's trip to Canossa on the Reverend Al Sharpton's radio program was a particularly rich session, with Imus sniveling that at bottom he is "a good man" and Reverend Al ushering on his daughter as a symbol of black womanhood defiled by Imus's "ho" talk. Imus could have probed the Rev. about his explicit statement on CNN a couple of years ago, amid his campaign to get rappers using physical violence to promote records banned from the airwaves for 90-day punitive periods, that these rappers had a perfect (First amendment) right to rap about violence and presumably hos. But Imus passed up the chance, preferring to dwell on his war on sickle cell anemia, a disease he appeared to think he had the courage and moral stamina to confront in his ranch in New Mexico. This culminated in another wonderful exchange, this one between Imus and Brian Monroe of Ebony: MONROE: All right. Let me be clear. My magazine, Ebony magazine, has been writing and covering sickle cell anemia for decades now. Back when you were still doing radio spots for used cars. I cannot let you.... A used car salesman! Amidst his abasement, the worm turned. IMUS: I'm not going to sit here and let you insult me. Don't talk about me doing used car commercials Let me tell you what--I will bet you I have slept in a house with more black children who were not related to me than you have. In the end it was all to no avail. The execs at MSNBC and at CBS, saw the big advertisers peel away, and instantly threw in the towel. Imus was history--at least until he gets a show on Sirius. And in the larger context of things--of Anne Coulter, of O'Reilly the Loofah King, of Limbaugh, of Howard Stern, of Cynthia Tucker and Juan Williams; of blacks paid by whites to dump on other blacks like Cynthia McKinney, of Chris Rock chanting the F word, of women-dissing rapper? One listens to the fuss about Imus and thinks, okay -- but this is only one tiny square in our dirty national quilt. We live in a racist, profit-driven culture that is getting more degraded by the hour. War is at the apex of that degradation, and indeed these ceremonies of degradation are an integral part of the war machine, which drives the whole show along. Back in February Imus snarled into his mike, "It might be good to start with somebody who is willing to take three big ones and drop one on Mecca, one on Jeddah and one on Saudi-one on Riyadh." No one asked him to apologize for that one. Take that, you towel heads. April 19 Since there undoubtedly will be a next time, after these latest campus killings at Virginia Tech, what useful counsel on preventative measures can we offer faculties across America? Arm teachers and students. There have been the usual howls from the anti-gun lobby, but it's all hot air. America is not about to dump the Second Amendment giving people the right to bear arms. A better idea would be for appropriately screened teachers and maybe student monitors to carry weapons. This is not as bizarre as it may sound to European ears. A quarter of a century ago students doing military ROTC training regularly carried rifles around campus. Five years ago Peter Odighizuwa, a 43-year-old Nigerian student, killed three faculty members at Appalachian Law School with a handgun, but before he could wreak further carnage two students fetched weapons from their cars, challenged the murderer with guns leveled, and disarmed him. Ban anti-depressants. What should be banned from campuses are not weapons but prescriptions for anti-depressants. Cho Seung-hui was on a prescription drug. The likelihood of it being an anti-depressant is high, since campus doctors dispense prescriptions for them like confetti. Replace campus police with student volunteers. The stupidity of the campus cops at Virginia Tech will undoubtedly cost the college hefty damages. There was plenty of evidence that Cho Seung-hui was a time bomb waiting to explode. Students talked about him as a possible shooter and refused to take classes with him. His essays so disturbed one of his teachers with their violent ravings that she arranged a secret signal in case she needed security during her tutorials. When the mass murder session began in the engineering building the police cowered behind their cruisers until Cho Seung-hui finished off the last batch of his 32 victims, then killed himself. Then the police bravely rushed in and started sticking their guns in the faces of the traumatised students, screaming at them to freeze or be shot. Make laxity in supervision grounds for termination. More than one teacher felt Cho was scarily nuts. They recommended counseling, then didn't bother to review the conclusions. And it has emerged that Cho was actually institutionalized as a psychotic and suicide risk in 2005. Yet when he returned to campus the administrators didn't even tip off his roommate. College administrators live in constant fear of declining students' enrollment. At the first sign of trouble they cover up. So, there's a double killing in a Virginia Tech dorm at 7.15am, after which Cho has time to go home, make his final home video, walk to the post office, mail his package to NBC and then head off to the engineering building with his guns. The college's first email to students goes out more than two hours after the first killings were discovered. The ineffable Warren Steger, college president, says later: "You can only make decisions based on the information you have on the time. You don't have hours to reflect on it." Two dead bodies, a killer somewhere on campus, and Steger makes his big decision to do nothing. May 3 By far the best performance at the recent Democratic candidates' debate organized by MSNBC was by a very distant outsider, Mike Gravel, a 77-year-old former U.S. senator from Alaska, well known nearly 40 years ago for his opposition to the war in Vietnam. In some electrifying tirades, he flayed Clinton, Obama, Edwards, and the others as two-faced on the absolute imperative of getting out of the war in Iraq and not getting into one in Iran. "They frighten me", Gravel shouted, gesturing at his rivals. "You know what's worse than one U.S. soldier dying in vain in Iraq. It's two soldiers dying in vain. In Vietnam they all died in vain." May 15 Enter the world of Paul Krugman, a world either dark (the eras of Bush One and Bush Two), or bathed in light (when Bill was king). Across the past three years, Krugman has become the Democrats' Clark Kent. A couple of times each week he bursts onto the New York Times op-ed in his blue jumpsuit, shoulders aside the Geneva Conventions and whacks the bad guys. For an economist, he writes pretty good basic English. He lays about him with simple words like "liar," as applied to the Bush crowd, from the president on down. He makes liberals feel good, the way William Safire returned right-wingers their sense of self-esteem after Watergate. Krugman paints himself as a homely Will Rogers type, speakin' truth to the power elite from his virtuous perch far outside the Beltway: "Why did I see what others failed to see?" he asks, apropos his swiftness in pinning the Liars label on the Bush administration. "I'm not part of the gang," he answers. "I work from central New Jersey, and continue to live the life of a college professor--so I never bought into the shared assumptions I don't need to be in the good graces of top officials, so I also have no need to display the deference that characterizes many journalists." All of which is self-serving hooey. The homely perch is Princeton. Krugman shares, with no serious demur, all the central assumptions of the neoliberal creed that has governed the prime institutions of the world capitalist system for the past generation and driven much of the world deeper, ever deeper into extreme distress. The unseemly deference he shows Clinton's top officials could be simply, if maliciously explained by his probable hope that one day, perhaps not to long delayed in the event of a Democratic administration taking over in 2005, he may be driving his buggy south down the New Jersey turnpike towards a powerful position of the sort he has certainly entertained hopes of in the past. June 1 America right now is "anti-war," in the sense that about two-thirds of the people think the war in Iraq is a bad business and the troops should come home. Anti-war sentiment was a major factor in the success of the Democrats in last November's elections, when they recaptured Congress. The irony is that this sharp disillusion of the voters with America's occupation of Iraq owes almost nothing to any anti-war movement. To say the anti-war movement is dead would be an overstatement. But in comparison to kindred movements in the 1960s and early 1970s, or to the struggles against Reagan's wars in Central America in the late 1980s, it is certainly inert. The anti-war movement proved itself incapable of pressuring House Democrats to hold out. After the Bush veto, the Democratic resistance has crumbled. The Democrats' reward for this shameful collapse? Perceived now as fraudulent in their claims to oppose the war, their standing in the polls is as low as Bush's. Latest news is that the American military presence in Iraq will double by the end of the year. Do anti-war "movements" end wars? The Vietnam War ended primarily because the Vietnamese defeated the Americans, and because a huge number of U.S. troops were in open mutiny. At home, a large sector of the society was in mutiny too. Anti-war movements are often most significant in their afterlife--schooling a new generation in attitudes and tactics of resistance. What's happened here in the U.S.A. across the intervening years since Vietnam is a steady, unsurprising decline in the left's overall political confidence and ambition and, as in the 1990s, a disastrous failure to attack the Democratic Party and Democratic administration led by Clinton and Gore for the onslaught on Yugoslavia and the inhumane sanctions against Iraq. In the Bush years, we've seen a further decline in any independent left with any unified theoretical and practical strategy or even political theory; also a rise in unconstructive and indeed demobilizing paranoia, as in the orgy of 9/11 conspiracism. The campuses are sedate. The labor movement is reeling. To describe the anti-war movement in its effective form is really to mention a few good efforts such as the anti-recruitment campaigns, the tours by those who have lost children in Iraq, or three or four brave souls like Cindy Sheehan, who single-handedly reanimated the anti-war movement last year, commencing with her vigil outside Bush's Texas ranch, or the radical Catholic Kathy Kelly. June 3 Put together Murdoch's Fox News, a mid-May debate between Republican presidential candidates and the state of South Carolina and you have a hotbed of stupidity. But to the fury of the Republican organizers there was an intrusion of rational thought, in the person of Ron Paul, a U.S. congressman from Texas, classed as a rank outsider in the nomination race. Texas used to send true individualists to Washington, D.C. One of the brightest moments of my early years, visiting the nation's capital, was watching Rep Wright Patman, head of the House Banking Committee, tell the red-faced Chairman of the Federal Reserve that he deserved to be locked up in the penitentiary. Paul is the last of the breed. As a small-government, tight-money Republican, this gynecologist-obstetrician (4,000 babies claimed as a career total) regularly votes 'No' on pork barrel projects that would put money into his own district. But as a Republican in the isolationist, libertarian tradition he also votes 'No', sometimes alone among the 535 members of the U.S. Congress, on war funding, on laws allowing presidents to order arbitrary imprisonment, "coercive interrogation" and suspension of freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. The throng in Columbia, South Carolina, cheered Giuliani, Romney and others as they roared their support for torture and rule by emergency decree. In the 'war on terror' anything goes. Only Paul told the crowd and the TV cameras that No, torture is wrong and the Constitution is paramount. Paul was asked if 9/11 changed anything. U.S. foreign policy, he answered, was a "major contributing factor. Have you ever read the reasons they attacked us? They attacked us because we've been over there; we've been bombing Iraq for 10 years. We've been in the Middle East. So right now we're building an embassy in Iraq that's bigger than the Vatican. We're building 14 permanent bases. What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting." A majority of Americans--65 per cent and up--hate the war in Iraq and think the U.S. troops should leave. But the leading candidates from both parties fence-straddle at best, and also parrot Giuliani on the "war on terror." Hence the popularity of Ron Paul, as soon as he gets a national venue. June 10 These are troubling times for evangelical Christians. The born-again president they helped elect is in the autumn of his tenure, the bold promises of Christian revival now tarnished or cast aside. Mitt Romney, the front-running Republican contender to be Bush's successor is a Mormon, and although leading evangelical Christians have given him the nod, many foot soldiers in the service of Christ entertain doubts. "The world needs Jesus, the REAL JESUS, not Jesus the half-brother of Lucifer," cries Kevin Stilley on his Christian site. Then there's the never-ending struggle with the Evil One. Still fresh in the ears of the righteous are the chortles of unbelievers over the tribulations of Pastor Ted Haggard, leader of the New Life Church, outed last year in Colorado by a former male prostitute declaring that Haggard had enjoyed sex with him, their monthly interactions enhanced by crystal meth. In February of this year Haggard had crash counseling across three weeks, overseen by four ministers, to give, as one put it, "Ted the tools to help embrace his heterosexual side". But there have been doubts, even among evangelicals, as to whether Satan and his demons have in this instance been decisively routed after so brief an engagement. And now, evangelicals face fresh evidence that the Dark Forces miss no opportunity to make further ravages among the righteous. Earlier this week ChristiaNet.com, "the world's most visited Christian website", disclosed the results of a survey it has just concluded, asking site visitors questions about their personal sexual conduct. "The poll results indicate that 50 per cent of all Christian men and 20 per cent of all Christian women are addicted to pornography," Jones reports bleakly. It seems that 60 per cent of the women who answered the survey admitted to having "significant struggles with lust", 40 per cent admitted to "being involved in sexual sin in the past year", and 20 per cent of the church-going female participants struggle with looking at pornography on an ongoing basis. Given the sexual apathy, reported by the Chicago study, maybe abstinence is winning after all. A survey this month claims that each day more than 1million condoms are sold in the United States, this being only 0.4 per cent of the population. There's no evidence, in the form of a population explosion, for the other possible deduction. June 21 Summer's hot breath draws closer and the psychoanalysts of New York and Boston prepare their patients for the difficult two or three weeks of holiday separation. Undoubtedly, beach chat among both analysts and analysands will focus on the end of the Soprano series which, across the past eight years, courtesy of Lorraine Bracco's Jennifer Melfi--Tony Soprano's analyst--has been the biggest boost to the shrink business since Lee J. Cobb starred in the Three Faces of Eve. Truly comical has been the solemnity with which psychoanalysts across the United States have been deploring the "breach of professional ethics" at a shrinks' dinner party in one of the concluding Soprano episodes in which the identity of Dr. Melfi's patient as Mobster Tony was disclosed. The rare moments when shrinks aren't seducing their female patients (70 per cent, in an informal New York survey some years ago) are usually consumed by such indiscretions, a tradition stretching all the way back to the notoriety of the patients trotting up the stairs of Bergasse 19, Freud's chambers in Vienna. It's true that some psychoanalysts were indignant at the way Melfi, chided by her colleagues for enabling a sociopath, promptly dumped the Mafia boss as a patient, the climax of a process identified back in 1999 in the British Medical Journal by Dr. Tony David as the collision of "the superego of Melfi's civilized values and the intellect with the murky id that is Soprano's stock in trade." "The strict ethical principles established by the American Psychological Association," wrote one APA member furiously, "do not allow for the arbitrary dismissal of a client even if they are sociopathic in nature (unless there is danger to the therapist)." It so happens that these same "strict ethical principles" of the APA have been the topic of unsparing rebuke, which probably won't be cited much on those holiday beaches. A recent report by the Pentagon's Inspector General confirms what has been detailed in a number of news stories since 2005 concerning the starring role played by American psychologists and psychoanalysts in devising and supervising torture techniques as administered by the U.S. military in Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as other secret interrogation centers run by the CIA. The APA leadership has piously maintained that "psychologists have a critical role in keeping interrogations safe, legal, ethical and effective." The Pentagon Inspector General's Report makes clear this claim is ludicrous. So here we have shrinks refining Tony Soprano's brutish violence, draping his id with the national flag. July 24 The federal indictment of Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick on conspiracy charges associated with his pit bull breeding and training operation at Bad Newz Kennels in Smithfield, Virginia, contains searing descriptions of dreadful cruelty towards these creatures. Tears stained the venerable cheeks of Senator Bobby Byrd as the former Klan Grand Cyclops bewailed the monstros conduct of the black football star and his co-conspirators. Indeed, the cruelties as laid out in the indictment are horrible and Vick and his coconspirators deservedly face serious penalties, if convicted on the charges. But there are the usual double standards lightly vaulted over by those busy savaging Vick. Judi Giuliani, the current wife of a candidate, hasn't caught much heat for her infamous past as a dog torturer and killer. August 3 Was there ever a luckier clan than the Bancrofts, whose elders okayed the $5bn sale of the Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. on Tuesday? There's been much solemn talk about the Bancrofts' "stewardship of this national institution" since they acquired the Dow Jones company a century ago. In fact, the Journal was an undistinguished little sheet until a journalistic genius called Barney Kilgore decided in the years after World War II that a businessman in San Francisco should be able to read the same paper as one in Chicago or New York. Kilgore devised the technology to do this, along with the paper's reportorial stance--serious but often humorous, in the style of the Midwest, which is where Kilgore was from. Kilgore made the Bancrofts really rich and they continued in that state for almost half a century, though their stewardship was either indifferent or inept, beyond the pleasant chore of raking in the money. Now they can trouser Murdoch's gold and trot off into the sunset, mumbling that they have extracted all the usual pledges from Rupert that he will respect the Journal's editorial independence. Surely the 76-year-old mogul must quake with inner merriment as he goes through this oft-repeated rigmarole. I heard it almost 30 years ago when he bought a raffish New York weekly, the Village Voice. I worked for the Voice at the time and, so far as I can remember, we listened to Murdoch issuing a pledge not to fire the editor as he stepped into the elevator on the fifth floor of the Voice's offices on University Place and by the time he stepped out on the ground floor the editor had already been dismissed, as if by osmosis, and Murdoch's man was settling into the editorial chair. The only reason why Murdoch might respect the Journal's independence, at least in the opinion pages, is that the views expressed there are even more rabid than his own; perhaps he savors the possibility that one day he might call up Paul Gigot, the editorial page editor, and hint that he might moderate his tone. The Journal's editorial stance of fanatic neoconnery was established by the late Robert Bartley (right) from the mid-'70s onward, and his pages bulged with every mad fantasy of the Cold War lobby. (I did an enjoyable ten-year stint on these same pages as the token left guest columnist, barking every three weeks at the political and corporate elites from my kennel on the op-ed page.) Bartley led the charge against effete liberalism, and since by the late 1970s American liberalism had thoroughly lost its nerve and really was effete, he carried the day, by far the most influential editorial page editor in American journalism. More than its sometimes excellent reporting, Bartley gave the Journal its high profile in Washington as well as on Wall Street. >From the moment Murdoch made his $60-a-share offer, the actual sale has not been an edifying sight. But then, a Gadarene-like stampede for money seldom is. The final sale was consummated when Murdoch agreed to throw in a $40m sweetener for the bankers and lawyers standing at the Bancroft family elbow and, with supposed dispassion, advising them what to do. Merrill Lynch, urging the Bancrofts to sell, is promised $18.5m for this wise counsel. Analysts of the media industry have turned out thousands of words about the synergies and kindred virtues consequent upon Murdoch's successful bid. Maybe so. In such takeovers, things seldom go according to plan. But for now Murdoch has carried the day, acquiring for a monstrous sum an over-praised newspaper in poor straits. Call it his revenge for the story the Journal ran about Murdoch's Chinese wife Wendi Deng in November 2000, methodically detailing the romantic liaisons that helped her to a very powerful position in the Murdoch empire. The piece was flattering to Ms Deng's achievements, but also one that Murdoch would be unlikely to forget or forgive. This is a saga for Dumas or Balzac. August 7 Led by Democrats since the start of this year, the U.S. Congress now has a "confidence" rating of 14 per cent, the lowest since Gallup started asking the question in 1973 and five points lower the Republicans scored last year. The voters put the Democrats in to end the war and it's escalating. The Democrats voted money for the surge and the money for the next $459.6 billion military budget. Their latest achievement is to provide enough votes in support of Bush to legalize warrantless wire tapping for " foreign suspects whose communications pass through the United States." Enough Democrats joined Republicans to make this a 227-183 victory for Bush. The Democrats control the House. House leader Nancy Pelosi could have stopped the bill in its tracks if she'd really wanted to. But she didn't. The game is to go along with the White House agenda while stirring up dust storms to blind the Democratic base about their failure to bring the troops home or restore constitutional government. Just as the Democrats work tirelessly to demonstrate to the voters that it makes zero difference which party controls Congress, the political establishment forces all candidates for the presidential nominations next year to sever any compromising ties to sanity and common sense. Right now they're hosing down Barack Obama, for "inexperience," after he said in the You Tube debate in South Carolina that he would be prepared to meet with Kim Jong Il, Hugo Chavez, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Fidel Castro to hash over problems face to face. The pundits promptly whacked him for demonstrating "inexperience". Experienced leaders order the CIA to murder such men. Then Obama drew even fiercer fire by saying he would not use nuclear weapons to fight terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan. "I think it would be a profound mistake for us to use nuclear weapons in any circumstance," Obama told AP on August 2, adding after a pause, "involving civilians." Then he quickly added, "Let me scratch that. There's been no discussion of nuclear weapons. That's not on the table." I'm beginning to respect this man. He displays sagacity well beyond the norm for candidates seeking the Oval Office. He comprehends, if only in mid-sentence, that when you drop a nuclear bomb, it will kill civilians. He also realizes that strafing Waziristan with thermonuclear devices in the hopes of nailing Osama Bin Laden is a foolish way to proceed. So Obama is being flayed for his "inexperience", first and foremost by Hillary Clinton, who permits no table setting which does not include a couple of nuclear weapons next to the salt and pepper. To recoup, Obama has declared his readiness as commander in chief to order U.S. forces hotly pursue Osama into Pakistan, whatever the government of Pakistan might think of this onslaught on its sovereignty. Has the left the political capacity to influence the conduct of the Democrats? In terms of substantive achievement the answer thus far has been No. People didn't like it when I wrote here a month ago that the anti-war movement was at a low ebb. They invoke the polls showing 70 per cent of Americans want the troops to come home. This is presumptuous, like a barking dog claiming it made the moon go down. It didn't take an anti-war movement to make the people anti-war. People looked at the casualty figures and the newspaper headlines and drew the obvious conclusion the war is a bust. Their attention is already shifting to the crisis in subprime loans. The left is as easily distracted, currently by the phantasm of impeachment. Why all this clamor to launch a proceeding surely destined to fail, aimed at a duo who will be out of the White House in sixteen months anyway? Pursue them for war crimes after they've stepped down. Mount an international campaign of the sort that has Henry Kissinger worrying at airports that there might be a lawyer with a writ standing next to the man with the limo sign. Right now the impeachment campaign is a distraction from the war and the paramount importance of ending it. For sure, there are actions around the country: Quakers and Unitarians picketing outside shopping centers, campus vigils, resolutions by city councils and so forth. It's all pretty quiet, in a conflict that has now--as my brother Patrick recently pointed out, gone on longer than the First World War. At the liberal blogger convention, Yearly Kos, held across the first weekend in August, the organizers nixed any serious strategy session on the war in Iraq. John Stauber of PR Watch had to force an impromptu (and very successful) session with leaders of the Iraq Veterans Against the War. There's no sizzle in the air, like there was back in early 2003. August 12 African lions struggled for reassurance and meaning after the humiliating rout of four of their number by a herd of Cape buffalo (Syncerus caffer). The entire episode was filmed by a human tourist, featured on Youtube ("The buffalo's revenge") and has now been viewed by a world audience in the millions. The footage shows what initially appeared to be a classic "cut out and kill" maneuver straight from the book collapse into farce as an unsuccessful attempt by a crocodile to snatch the targeted calf allowed time for the buffalo herd to regroup, surround the lions, toss two of them on their horns, rescue the calf and chase their assailants away into the bush. "This is the darkest day for Panthera leo since Frank Baum wrote the Wizard of Oz," said the leader of one pride. "We face the total erosion of our credibility as apex predators." Anger mingles with apprehension. Word has already spread across the veld and now other traditional sources of nutrition such as gazelles are seeking protection amid herds of emboldened buffalo. Other ungulates such as Connochaetes taurinus (brindled gnu), commonly easy prey, are already displaying uncharacteristic defiance and fighting back. Some lions, speaking privately, concede that defeat at the horns and hooves of the tough and hefty Cape buffalo is not unprecedented. "Look," said one, "Syncerus caffer is always a problem for us. The disaster here stemmed from tactical folly. They wasted precious minutes in that tug of war with the crocodile and that allowed the buffalo time to return and launch a counter-attack." Some thoughtful lions see a paradox in the fact that the episode was filmed. "Do you think any of us would be here if it wasn't for the National Geographic and nature films on PBS?" an elderly male asked rhetorically. September 1 A good lawyer could have got Senator Larry Craig off, if it hadn't been for the panic-stricken Guilty plea copped by Craig already frantic that local paper was set to out him. The cop, Dave Karsnia, entrapped him. It's not against the constitution, at least yet, to adopt a "wide stance". All he did was stamp his foot and waggle it about and put his hand down. It's not as though he made any verbal suggestions to Karsnia, or exhibited his genitals. Karsnia says he was peeping. That's just the word of a policeman against a U.S. senator. Senators probably have a better record for keeping their word--at least in political bargains, though not in campaign promises--than the folks in blue. When people whine fearfully about the Christian right, I always tell them to relax. Sooner or later the evangelist or the pol be caught in a whorehouse or a lavatory. Larry Craig of Idaho was a three-term senator. En route to this sanctuary of Republican virtue on June 11 Craig, co-chair of the Mitt Romney presidential campaign, used a stop-over at Minneapolis-St Paul airport to prowl through a lavatory in the Lindbergh terminal. He spotted under a stall door lower extremities belonging to a man we now know to have been undercover cop Karsnia, who--patient as any spider--had been sitting on the john for 13 minutes, waiting for prey which he could entrap. Americans following the case have learning with fascination how easily some innocent action in a public convenience--known in the argot of gay patrons as "tearooms"--can be misconstrued. Don't put your bag in front of the door. That's what Craig did and Karsnia, a youthful-looking blonde decoy, says in his report, "My experience has shown that individuals engaging in lewd conduct use their bags to block the view from the front of their stall. " Keep your feet still. "At 12:16 hours," Karsnia relates, "Craig tapped his right foot. I recognized this as a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct. Craig tapped his toes several times and moves his foot closer to my foot. I moved my foot up and down slowly. The presence of others did not seem to deter Craig as he moved his right foot so that it touched the side of my left foot which was within my stall area." Craig then swiped his hand under the stall divider several times. That did it. Karsnia put down his police ID for Craig to check out. Craig quickly plead guilty to disorderly conduct and "peeping", which is defined in Minnesotan statutory lingo as "interference with privacy by surreptitiously gazing, staring or peeping in the window, or other aperture of a sleeping room in a hotel, a tanning booth--this is Minnesota, after all--or other place where a reasonable person would have an expectation of privacy and has exposed or is likely to expose their intimate parts, as defined in Sec. 609. 341, subd 5, or the clothing covering the immediate area of the intimate parts and doing so with the intent to intrude upon or interfere with the privacy of the occupant. A Gross Misdemeanor." At some level Craig obviously wanted to get caught, just as compulsive gamblers at some level want to lose. September 8 Predicting imminent war on Iran has been one of the top two items in Cassandra's repertoire for a couple of years now, rivaled only by global warming as a sure-fire way to sell newspapers and boost website hits. But will it really come to pass? Despite the unending stream of stories across the months announcing that an attack on Iran is on the way, I've had my doubts. Amid the housing slump here, with the possibility of an inflationary surge as the credit balloon threatens to explode, would the U.S. government really want to see the price of gas at the pump go over $5? What would Hugo Chavez do? Even a hiccup in flows from Venezuela would paralyze refineries here, specifically designed for Venezuelan crude. China has a big stake in Iran. It's also Uncle Sam's banker. The Chinese don't have to destroy the dollar, merely squeeze its windpipe, or revalue their currency enough to double retail prices in Wal-Mart. The Republicans and the presidential candidates wouldn't want that on the edge of an election year. The other side of the ledger isn't hard to fill in either. The oil companies like a crisis that sends up the price of their commodity. The Chinese are a prudent lot and don't want to rock the world economy. Politically, both they and Russia would like to see the U.S. compound the disaster in Iraq and get into a long-term mess in Iran. October 26 In America, awareness never sleeps and has been on particularly active duty this October, designated as Breast Cancer Awareness Month (proclamation of President George Bush); as Domestic Violence Awareness Month (proclamation of President George Bush); as Energy Awareness Month (proclamation of President George Bush and the Environmental Protection Agency); and--we speak here specifically of October 22-29--Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week (proclamation of David Horowitz, a fat and hairy ex-Trot living in Los Angeles). Cautionary interpolation: Horowitz was certainly fat last time I clapped eyes on him and he sports a beard which waxes and wanes in outreach depending on which Google image you look at. And yes, Christopher Hitchens is also a fat and hairy ex-Trot, is also a known associate of the man Horowitz, and also thunders against Islamo-Fascism. Nonetheless we speak here of Horowitz. When I first saw Horowitz he was neither fat nor hairy nor apparently aware of Islamo-Fascism. This was in the late 1960s in London and he was working for the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, studying at the feet of Isaac Deutscher and Ralph Miliband. About a decade later I saw him again, this time in Washington DC presiding over a well-publicized "Second Thoughts" conference, announcing his departure from the Left. He spoke harshly of his parents' decision to make him watch uplifting features about the Soviet Union and forbade any Doris Day movies, a common blunder in child-brain-washing techniques among the comrades at that time. Since then, like other Trotskyist vets, such as the above-mentioned Hitchens, Horowitz has thrown his energies into crusading on behalf of the American right, fuelled in his efforts by copious annual disbursements from the richer denizens of that well populated sector. Richard Mellon Scaife--apex demon in the "vast right-wing conspiracy" identified by Hillary Clinton amid the Lewinsky scandal--has poured millions into Horowitz's organizations, as have other well-heeled conservative foundations. Every now and again Horowitz will raise some spectacularly nutty alarum, like the Los Angeles Times being taken over by pinkoes, and I always assume that Horowitz must be filling out his annual grant applications, and reminding Scaife that others may snooze and idle, but he, Horowitz, is unceasing in his vigilance against sedition. In Horowitz's bestiary, sedition comes in all the traditional forms, from commies on campus to commies in the press and he's churned out endless bulletins charting their insidious reach. Some of his specific accusations have no doubt been useful to fearful school administrations eager to harry and expel the few radical teachers able to find employment in these bleak times. But the problem for Horowitz is one of supply. The left in America is really in very poor shape: near zero commies, and really only a sprinkling of radical black profs, militant Lesbians and kindred antinomians to beat up on. The notion of pinkoes in the media is laughable to all except the fearful imaginations of millionaires like Scaife. Hence the spotlight on Islamo-Fascism, a gloriously vague term whose origin is the topic of a tussle between Malise Ruthven, who used the term in 1980 to describe all authoritarian Islamic governments, and Stephen Schwartz, yet another fat, bearded former Trotskyist who says he was the first to use it in its specific application in 2000, eventually receiving a tap on the shoulder for so doing from Christopher Hitchens and John Sullivan. Arise, Sir Stephen! Islamo-Fascism Awareness week has been featuring Horowitz and big-name ranters of the right like Anne Coulter and Fox's Sean Hannity, plus former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, and noted Islamophobe Daniel Pipes. They descended on various college campuses to be received by Christian-Fascists and the curious while they hurled imprecations at the left for being soft on sons of the Prophet stoning women to death for adultery. The reaction of the left has been mixed. In some ways it always takes Horowitz's antics far too seriously, though the latter's effect on timid college administrations cannot be entirely gainsaid. On the other hand, Awareness week is having a galvanizing effect. Coalitions have formed to combat Horowitz's version of Awareness with superior Progressive Awareness about what is good or not so good about Islam. Since Santorum and others have ripe records of intolerance for women, the air is usefully thick with shouts of "hypocrite." Horowitz is probably the best organizer the left has these days. November 8 Schizophrenia is a mandatory condition for all Democratic presidential candidates, never more so than at this stage in America's election cycle. If a Democrat mentions love in the first part of any sentence, there had better be an endorsement of hate and of war before the full stop. So, of course, Hillary bobs and weaves. Her problem is that she's not too quick on her feet, unlike her husband Bill, a Baryshnikov of equivocation. In last week's TV debate, out there under the spotlights, with Barack Obama and John Edwards gunning for her, Mrs. Clinton blew it on the immigration question, just when every laptop pundit in the blogosphere was getting bored with the apparent certainty that H Clinton would be the party's nominee. So they've been piling on ever since. Will she implode, just like that front-runner of November 2004, Howard Dean? Hillary has a ton of money and the solid support of the party's bosses, which is not surprising since the Clintons picked these bosses in the first place. A great many women in America want her to be president. Recovery is a process the Clintons have been refining ever since Hillary got herself into trouble with the voters of Arkansas back in 1978 for insisting that the first lady of that state be called Hillary Rodham, a stand on feminist principle she abandoned in time for the 1980 governor's race. Hillary will almost certainly tack to safety out of this mini-typhoon. But the bigger problem is not going away. There's a solid slice of the Old-Glory-loving superpatriots who will never, under any conditions, vote for Hillary Clinton a year from now. Every equivocation on immigrants, on the war, will be replayed mercilessly next autumn. Hillary's best chance is to have the Republican vote split by the Evangelical Christians - unable to stomach a pro-abortion wife-hopper like Rudy Giuliani - running a candidate of their own. Some born-again type from the South. December 13 If there was ever a parable about the futility of congressional "oversight," it's surely the uproar over the CIA's secret destruction of thevideotapes of its torture sessions on the Al Qaeda men, Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Here we have the spectacle of members of the CIA oversight committees like Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia saying virtuously the CIA never told him about deep-sixing the videos. If true, the CIA was stupid. All the Agency needed to have done was set up a secret viewing room on Capitol Hill and had "last peek before we burn them" sessions. Sworn to silence, a few senators and Reps would have trooped along, no doubt with Larry Craig in the front row, hogging three seats with his wide stance. The CIA continues to maintain it doesn't go in for torture. As Jeffrey St Clair and I describe in detail in Whiteout, our book on the CIA (available at [www.counterpunch.org][6]), the documented record of its savageries in this area goes back decades, starting with the recruitment of Nazi torture technicians in Operation Paperclip. The Fifties saw its increasing obsession with brainwashing and sensory deprivation. The CIA supplied the interrogators for the Phoenix program in Vietnam. Down the years, the CIA has methodically destroyed records on matters pertaining to torture, assassination and mind-control. Every decade there are protestations that malpractices have definitively ceased, usually just before the tenure ends of the CIA director making the claim. Every decade they continue. December 20 The great dread of American political establishments down the decades has been that a wild man will suddenly sneak past all obstructions cunningly devised to repel uncomfortable surprises and upset the apple cart. Democrats even today shiver at the memory of William Jennings Bryan, another implacable foe of Charles Darwin, who ran on a silver platform in the late nineteenth century. George Wallace, a redneck governor out of Alabama, ran as an independent presidential candidate in 1968 and Richard Nixon was terrified that he would steal enough votes to throw the race to the Democrat, Hubert Humphrey. A would-be assassin's bullet put paid to that threat. The clamor about Huckabee's Christian beliefs is overdone, not least among the left whose bigotry on matters of religion is particularly unappetizing. A robust majority of all Americans, so polls unfailingly show, maintain they have had personal encounters with Jesus Christ. Ronald Reagan believed and publicly stated more than once that the Apocalypse was scheduled to occur in his lifetime at Megiddo, as excitingly trailered in the Good Book. The soign? Governor Mitt Romney, now displaced by Huckabee as the front-runner, is a Mormon and this, unless he is a heretic from the Latter Day Saints on this specific issue, believes that Christ was Lucifer's older brother, as Huckabee has not been slow in pointing out. But Huckabee should not be dismissed as simply the creature of the Christian fundamentalists who play a very significant role in the Republican primaries and who are currently hoisting him in the polls. Of course they like Huckabee for all the obvious reasons, and because the alternatives are the Mormon Romney or Giuliani, who's hopped from wife to wife, shared an apartment with a male gay couple and favors abortion. But on many substantive matters, demonstrated during his ten years as the governor of Arkansas, Huckabee was often a progressive, with enlightened views and a record of substantive executive action on immigration, public health, education of poor kids and the possibility of redemption for convicted criminals. In his ten years as governor, Huckabee commuted the sentences of, or outright pardoned, over 1,200 felons including a dozen murderers. This was a courageous and unparalleled display of enlightenment in a country whose interest in rehabilitation is near zero. As Huckabee said in answer to Mitt "throw away the key" Romney, should a woman convicted of check-kiting when she was 17, have this criminal offense prevent her from getting a job thirty years later? Democrats started by chortling over Huckabee's meteoric rise in the national polls. The Democratic National Committee supposedly ordered a moratorium to onslaughts on the Arkansas governor in the hopes that as the nominee he will be roadkill for them in the race next fall. This patronizing posture is already fraying. Huckabee would not be a pushover. He's quick on his feet, has an easy sense of humor and has a powerful appeal to Americans unconvinced by any of the major contenders. Thus far, beyond hee-haws at his Christian fundamentalism, the most the liberals can come up with is that he intervened to save his son from very nasty charges of dog-abuse at a Boy Scout camp and that among those whose sentences he commuted was a rapist, Wayne Dumond, who killed at least one woman after his release. Murray Waas has devoted thousands of plodding words to the case. It's chilling to watch liberals and pwogs thundering their outrage at the mere idea of pardons or commutations, as though one of the besetting horrors of America today isn't the penological mindset that puts people behind bars for decades, or the living death of what the criminal justice industry laconically terms LWOP, Life Without the Possibility of Parole. Let's go back to 1988, when Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis, who had supervised an elightened parole and day-release program as governor of Massachusetts, was trashed for letting Willie Horton out of prison on a weekend pass. Who first raised the Horton issue. No, not George Bush Sr. Not Lee Atwater. It was Al Gore, in the '88 Democratic primaries. Of course, if you decide not to let people rot in prison for forty years, and let some of them out, there's a chance there'll be a Dumond or a Horton among those released. That's a risk. To say that it's an unacceptable risk is the same as saying there's a risk in administering the death penalty, because an innocent person might get gassed or killed with poison, but that nonetheless the price is worth it. Some guy with a DUI on his record gets his license back, gets loaded again and kills another carload of innocents. So, we should bring in a lifetime ban of all DUIs from driving ever again? More people get killed by drivers with DUIs on their record than by convicted killers let out of prison, or for that matter by sex offenders. These days, with liberal assent, sex offenders serve their full terms and still can't get out of prison. Run a society totally on principles of revenge, not forgiveness or redemption and you end up in the realm of Milton's Moloch, "besmeared with blood of human sacrifice and parents' tears." Then there are the corruption charges. Huckabee accepted gift vouchers for meals at Taco Bell and had a registry at Target and Dillard's where he and his wife got big-ticket items like a Jack LaLanne juicer. Hold the front page! From reading the furious brayings of Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone, you'd think Huckabee was the Emperor Bokassa of the Central African Republic, crowned on a golden throne, wearing a Roman toga embroidered with a hundred thousand pearls, then driving off in a coach pulled by six white horses flown from Paris. Try as they may, dustrakers like Taibbi have a hard time showing Huckabee was anything more than a piker in the perks department. Here's some of the record of shame. Total for items requested on the Target wedding registry, $2,282, including a 12-piece cookware set for $249, a DeLonghi retro 4-slice toaster for $39.99, napkins, kitchen towels, two king-sized pillows and a clock. Total on the Dillard's registry, $4,635, not omitting the Jack Lalanne juicer for $100. True, the Huckabees got married in 1974, but they had that covenant marriage in 2005, which is certainly as convincing as Hillary Clinton saying she just got lucky when, as Arkansas' first lady she made $99,000 on cattle futures off an initial stake of $1,000, the whole miraculous bonanza organized by a guy in the retinue of Don Tyson, the largest food processor in the state of Arkansas. More convincing, actually. As so often with American politicians accused of graft and corruption, one reels back in embarrassment at the tiny sums involved. In 2003, Huckabee was fined $250 by the State Ethics Commission of bringing shame on Arkansas by accepting a $500 canoe from Coca-Cola in 2001. The Commission also gave him a rap on the knuckles for not reporting acceptance of a $200 stadium blanket the same year. He probably wanted it to put over his knees in the canoe. Huckabee appealed the sanctions to Pulaski County Circuit Court. Judge Fox said he should have owned up to the blanket, but threw out the $ 250 fine, finding that there wasn't sufficient evidence to show that the canoe, painted with the words "Coke, Arkansas and You," illegally rewarded Huckabee for doing his job as governor. Huckabee battled other such charges, including more substantial gifts of clothes and furniture. It was all familiar stuff, to connoisseurs of small-time corruption charges. Were the suits for the shrunken Huckabee to deploy to Arkansas' advantage at conferences of governors or trade trips abroad? Was the furniture for the rehabbed governor's mansion while Mr. and Mrs. Huckabee roosted in the doublewide? Arkansas underpays its governors as a matter of policy, forcing them into a flexible ethical posture, as opposed to chill high mindedness. Incorruptibles are often more of a menace to society. The American way, which isn't so bad, is to have the laws on the books, for proper use if things start getting seriously out of control. Corruption, held within bounds, is a useful lubricant. Is it really worse for Muscovites to slip the traffic cop 500 roubles ($20), thus paying a de facto fine, as opposed to getting a ticket, and mailing in your $250 speeding fine to the County Superior Court? Bill Clinton got $20,000 a year for governing Arkansas. Huckabee got $80,000. These guys had to go to McDonalds or Taco Bell. It's all they could afford. Of course they pocketed $10,000 bribes in cash for issuing end use certificates and the like. If the truth be told, Gov. Clinton in his Arkansas days in the governor's mansion, was a piker in corruption, just like Huckabee. The laughable thing about Whitewater was the pathetically small sums the Clintons stood to make if all went well, which they did not. When the tribunal investigating Irish Prime Minister Charles Haughey finally concluded its labors, long after his death, I totted up the proven bribes and it came to something like $50 million. So Huckabee will probably survive these charges, as he should the whines of New York Times columnists that he is unversed in foreign affairs. Both Ronald Reagan and George Bush demonstrated conclusively that a passing glance at a stamp album is the only education required for dealing with the rest of the world. Huckabee's single rival as a genuinely interesting candidate is another Republican, Ron Paul, who set a record a few days ago, by raising $6 million in a single day. Unlike Huckabee, Paul's core issues are opposition to the war and to George Bush's abuse of civil liberties inscribed in the U.S. Constitution. His appeal, far more than Huckabee, is to the redneck rebel strain in American political life--the populist beast that the U.S. two-party system is designed to suppress. On Monday night, Paul was asked on Fox News about Huckabee's Christmas ad, which shows the governor backed by a shining cross. Actually it's the mullions of the window behind him, but the illusion is perfect. Paul said the ad reminded him of Sinclair Lewis's line, that "when fascism comes to this country it will be wrapped in a flag and bearing a cross." In the unlikely event they had read Lewis, no other candidate would dare quote that line. [1]: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/12/31/6083/ (http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/12/31/6083/) [2]: mailto:medea at globalexchange.org [3]: http://www.globalexchange.org (www.globalexchange.org) [4]: http://www.codepinkalert.org (www.codepinkalert.org) [5]: http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn12312007.html (http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn12312007.html) [6]: http://www.counterpunch.org (www.counterpunch.org) URL: http://mostlywater.org/2007_recap_good_and_very_bad_two_articles From news at resist.ca Sat Jan 5 15:17:08 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Sat, 05 Jan 2008 23:17:08 -0000 Subject: [news] Afghanistan: Foreign Troops Accused in Helmand Raid Massacre Message-ID: <20080105231708.10552.qmail@resist.ca> Foreign Troops Accused in Helmand Raid Massacre By Matiullah Minapal and Aziz Ahmad Tassal in Lashkar Gah (Afghanistan); January 1, 2008 - IWPR [http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/2008/01/01/foreign-troops-ac...][1] Residents of a southern village tell of a night of violence at the hands of foreign and Afghan soldiers. A young man lies in bed in the Emergency Hospital in Lashkar Gah. His throat is bandaged, and he can barely speak. Holding his hand to his wound, he is clearly in pain as he tells of his ordeal in a whisper, interjecting over and over again, ?My two brothers! My two brothers!? The man?s name is Abdul Manaan, but locals call him ?Naanwai?, ?the baker?, as he has a bread shop in Lakari, about two kilometres from the village of Toube in the southern Garmseer district of Helmand province. Abdul Manaan claims he suffered slashes to his neck during a night time raid which locals say was carried out by a mixed force of foreign and Afghan troops helicoptered into Toube on November 18. Eyewitnesses say the soldiers killed 18 civilians in an attack that was brutal even by the standards of the Afghan conflict. Although the raid is said to have happened three weeks ago, there has been no news or comment about it outside Helmand. ?It was about two in the morning when we heard the aircraft, and I woke up,? said Abdul Manaan. ?I looked out but I couldn?t see anything. My two younger brothers who were in another room came to me to ask what was going on, but I told them, ?Nothing, just go back to sleep?. They went back to bed, as did I. ?Then I heard a noise on the roof, and I looked out and there were armed men up there. They climbed down and came into my brothers? room, and asked them if they were Taliban. One of my brothers said ?No, we are shopkeepers, come and search the house. We have nothing, no guns or anything?. The soldiers shot him on the spot. My other brother they brought to me, and tied his hands. Then they slit his throat. I could hear him gurgling. He was still making a noise when they got to me. ?One of the soldiers spoke a little Pashto - he asked whether we were Taliban and I said no, we were shopkeepers. They made me stand up against the wall and tied my hands. They put the knife to my neck and cut me three times. Then they threw an old tarpaulin over me and left. ?But I wasn?t dead.? As Abdul Manaan lay under the tarpaulin holding his hand to his neck wound, he heard the soldiers moving around the house and children screaming. When the soldiers left after about half an hour, he said, ?I got up and went to my brother. He was cold.? He found the women and children alive in another room, together with some who had come from other houses. ?Everyone was screaming and crying,? he said. In the morning, Abdul Manaan was taken to hospital in Lashkar Gah. ?I survived, but my brothers are dead,? he said. ?What shall I do now?? Residents of Helmand province have grown used to aerial strikes over the past several months. As the Taliban and foreign forces battle for control of the province, civilians are often caught in the middle. The international troops accuse the Taliban of using women and children as ?human shields?, while the insurgents and increasingly also the Afghan government condemn the foreign forces for reckless disregard for human life. But what reportedly happened in Toube was quite different from the more detached, if horrific, bombing that has destroyed homes and families. Abdul Manaan?s story is echoed by dozens of villagers from Toube whom IWPR interviewed as they underwent treatment in Lashkar Gah or accompanied injured relatives there. All spoke consistently of soldiers breaking down doors, shooting children and cutting throats. They agreed that the raid began at two in the morning with the sound of helicopters bringing in dozens of armed men, both Afghan and foreign. One man called Nabi Jan told IWPR, ?At two in the morning on Sunday, foreign troops entered my house and shot my children in their cradles. I collected their scattered brains with my own hands and placed them near the bodies. ?They killed 18 people that night. I swear none of them were Taliban fighters,? he said, his anger making his voice rise in tone. ?They killed civilians - people like me - with rough farmers? hands. If you don?t believe me, then come with me to the cemetery. I will dig up the bodies to show you.? According to Nabi Jan, the soldiers left at about five in the morning, when it was still dark. He and what is left of his family are now camped out by the river, in the winter cold, afraid to go home. Borjan, a neighbour waiting in front of the Emergency Hospital in Lashkar Gah, confirmed the story. ?I was a witness,? he said. ?Soldiers came into our houses. They shot everyone they could find, including people asleep in bed. In one house, babies were shot in their cradles. Three people had their throats cut, but one survived, and he is now in this hospital.? According to Borjan, the death toll was 17. ?Two of my cousins were killed in this attack,? said another man waiting outside the hospital, Noor Mohammad. ?It was nighttime and we heard aircraft. Soldiers came to our house. We hid and did not open the door, so they broke it down. When they entered the house, they began firing, and they killed four people. They were foreign and Afghan army troops. When they left, they gunned down anyone they could find.? Garmseer lies about 70 km south of Lashkar Gah, on the border with Pakistan. The remoteness of its location and the porous nature of the frontier have ensured that this is one of the most unstable districts in an extremely troubled province. The Taliban control most of the district except for a few government-held administrative centres, and clashes between the insurgents and the army are frequent. Still, the stories about what happened in Toube are exceptional, and the news spread quickly across Helmand by word of mouth, inflaming the mood. On November 20, a group of nearly 100 elders from the district came to Lashkar Gah to speak with government representatives at the offices of the Afghan National Security Directorate. The emotionally charged meeting was attended by representatives of the Provincial Reconstruction Team, the joint military and civilian force tasked with providing security and rebuilding Helmand, operating under the mandate of NATO?s International Security Assistance Force, ISAF. The elders demanded that foreign forces stay out of Garmseer and asked for military operations there to end. ?We hate the government and NATO because they kill our women and elders,? said one of the delegation, Khan Agha. ?They won?t let us get on with our lives; they slaughter us.? Khan Agha said he had turned against the Afghan National Army. ?Soldiers came into our houses. They shot everyone they could find, including people asleep in bed. In one house, babies were shot in their cradles. Three people had their throats cut, but one survived, and he is now in this hospital.? ?It is bad enough that foreigners do these things, but now the Afghan army is with them. We are angry that even Afghans show us no sympathy. I used to cooperate with the army, but now, if I have an opportunity, I will do my best to hurt them,? he said. One after another, the elders told their stories, all sounding remarkably similar. ?My name is Hajji Ali Mohammad,? said one old man, who was so hunched over that he could barely walk. Tears ran down his face as he spoke. ?It was during the night that armed men entered my house and shot two of my sons. One of them had just got married a month ago. My sons were not members of the Taliban, they were farmers. We are poor farmers.? Mohammad Hussain Andiwal, the police chief for Helmand province, addressed the gathering at length. He said he would raise the Toube violence with international forces. ?I can feel your pain,? he told the elders. ?Even a heart of stone would melt with these sorrows. I will speak with the foreigners and make them promise not to kill civilians again like this.? According to the PRT, the incident at Toube is still being investigated. ?There was an operation [in Garmseer] about that time,? said one PRT official, speaking on condition of anonymity. ?And we were aware that allegations had been made. We found no evidence at the time to support these charges, but an investigation is ongoing.? It may be difficult to pinpoint blame, assuming the accusations made by Toube residents are substantiated. Several military groups operate in Helmand, and not all of them answer to the British-led ISAF or follow its rules of engagement. The United States-led Coalition also has soldiers in the province, and US Special Forces work with and mentor Afghan troops. PRT officials were unable to comment on who is most likely to have been involved. Most Helmand residents do not distinguish between British, American, Canadian, or Danish soldiers, using the term ?foreigner? for all. Helmand?s police chief cautioned against blaming foreigners for all of the province?s troubles and called on the assembled elders to reflect on the terrible events of the past 30 years. ?Any time we have had hopes that our country would be rebuilt, that education would revive, or that we would have doctors, engineers, hospitals? we get caught up in disaster. When the Russians were defeated, then commanders came from our own people and carried out evil acts,? he said, referring to the internecine strife between Afghan factions in the Nineties. ?Things took place in Kabul that were worse even than what happened with the Russians. Who did these things? Were they British? Were they Dutch? Were they Americans? No, it was we who did them!? Andiwal asked for cooperation from the elders in trying to resolve the problems. ?If you do not want things to improve, then two years from now there will be nothing left,? said Andiwal. ?Let us come to your villages, and we will listen to you and work with you.? At this, an old man in the corner rose slowly to his feet. He leaned on a cane, shaking as he spoke. ?So this is our fault?? he said. ?You, the government, cannot maintain security. You have closed our schools. Many countries have come here, and they cannot do anything. So how can we?? **Photo Gallery of US victims in Afghanistan:** [http://www.rawa.org/s-photos.htm][2] **The Afghan Victims Memorial Project by Prof. Marc Herold:** [http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mwherold/memorial.htm][3] [1]: http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/2008/01/01/foreign-troops-accused-in-helmand-raid-massacre.html (http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/2008/01/01/foreign-troops-accused-in-helmand-raid-massacre.html) [2]: http://www.rawa.org/s-photos.htm (http://www.rawa.org/s-photos.htm) [3]: http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mwherold/memorial.htm (http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mwherold/memorial.htm) URL: http://mostlywater.org/afghanistan_foreign_troops_accused_helmand_raid_massacre From news at resist.ca Sat Jan 5 15:17:08 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Sat, 05 Jan 2008 23:17:08 -0000 Subject: [news] Quebec City to celebrate carnage, genocide & death? Message-ID: <20080105231708.10554.qmail@resist.ca> QUEBEC CITY WANTS TO CELEBRATE 400 YEARS ANNIVERSARY OF CARNAGE, GENOCIDE & DEATH OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLE. MNN. Jan. 3, 2008. Some people have a twisted view of history. Josee Legault, who writes for the Montreal Gazette, complains that the 2008 New Years celebration in Quebec City was a disappointment. Colonialism is a mental illness. Some can see this. According to Legault, Quebec's major artists were absent. If they were boycotting the event, they showed good sense. For the world to escape the "colonial disease", the most honest and sensitive artists will lead the way. They will break out of the delusion and find the vision needed to affect a cure. Healing is certainly needed here. The illness that pervades colonial society and all of its agencies and institutions is plain to us, the Indigenous Peoples. We've been waiting for the rest of the world to wake up. Legault seems to criticize Le Devoir for saying "the founding of Quebec City was an historical mistake". Right on! What's to celebrate? Theft of our land? Vandalism? Plagues? Genocide? Complete denial of our existence? Establishment of twisted and diseased European social customs on our land? Pollution and destruction of our environment? We would have all been better off if the French and English had stayed home and cured their sicknesses instead of contaminating the rest of the world? When Jacques Cartier arrived at the modern site of Quebec City in 1534, he found a beautiful stand of nut trees. The new arrivals behaved strangely. Cartier kidnapped Donnacona's sons! He must have known this was wrong. When he came back, they chopped down our nut trees to build a fort where they barricaded themselves. Weird! Legault complains that the founder of Quebec City, Samuel de Champlain, "was all but ignored" in the celebrations. Let's take a look at this guy. He was a shameless promoter of colonialism, and a dangerous psychopath. When he first saw the Mohawks he opened fire on them with his new toy, the 'Arquebuse'. He then declared a campaign of genocide to wipe every last one of us out. >From 1608 to 1635 he wreaked havoc on every part of Turtle Island that he could reach. In one of his campaigns he wiped out 30 of our villages. This was meant to support the French lie that our territory was "empty". Did Legault expect a re-enactment of this carnage? If so, she's a blood-thirsty vampire! According to Legault ignoring Champlain is "like the United States celebrating the by-centennial of the American Revolution without uttering the name of George Washington". She's right! George Washington is known to our people as the "Ranatakarias" - "destroyer of villages". He ordered General Sullivan into our territory to destroy everything. They torched our longhouses, our barns, our agricultural equipment, thousands of fruit trees, bushels of grain, our corn, our beans and our squash. When the people ran out, they were shot. They brought down over 100,000 of our people to almost nothing. The survivors fled to Fort Niagara. The British were no better!!! They sent General Amherst to finish the genocide with gifts of small pox infested blankets. Let's not kid ourselves, the aim of the American Revolution was to grab our land. The French allied with the Americans. The British made illegal agreements in Paris giving free reign to the "rebel" rabble to escalate the colonial land grab. Let's have truth before reconciliation. Admission and acknowledgement are required before there can be healing! The arrival of the European "found'l'ings" at Quebec City marks the beginning of an era of an apocolypse. An apology is not enough. Colonial society has to admit the devastation to us and our environment that has now been destroyed to the point where survival of the human race is in question. A few days ago the Montreal Gazette complained that the head honcho, Queen Elizabeth II, can't make the Quebec City bash. Are she and her handlers showing some good sense? This mindless nonsense is meant to stoke the colonial delirium and keep the public in a trance so they can keep being manipulated. All it produces on 'St. Jean Baptiste Day' is a bunch of drunken yahoos, driving around with their radios at full blast, their stinking feet hanging out the windows and 'fleur de lis' flags stuck in their gas tank. Who needs that? The 400th anniversary of the colonial disorder should be recognized. We need a full confession, an exorcism, whatever it takes to cure and wake people from this crazy fantasy. Quebecers and Canadians both need to stop being proud of genocidal maniacs. They need to stop celebrating the holocaust that plunked their ancestors on our land while killing most of us. They need to get the "pure laine" cobwebs out of their minds. Then we can examine the real character of our historical relationship. Legault seems to think that "It's a pretty sorry statement that this anniversary cannot be seen and presented for what it is". We agree! She doesn't know our history. It's not Quebec versus Canada or Canada versus Quebec . It's about theft, killing and lies. It's about colonial delusions. The Quebec City celebration committee shouldn't listen to Legault. If they do, they might be temped to bring in a bunch of cabaret "Indians" from some "Indian" village wearing vinyl buckskins dancing to "Yankee Doodle Dandy". That goes for the "Willy Two Willies" and the "plastic medicine men" too. We've seen this kind of nonsense before. Now we have a smart new generation of indigenous youth who would never demean themselves this way. Quebecers, Canadians and all residents of Turtle Island, it is possible to develop immunity to the colonial disease, to see history for what it was. 40 of the 50 U.S. states have indigenous names. So do Saskatchewan , Manitoba , Ontario , Quebec , Nunavut and Nunavik. To promote healing, an appropriate first move would be to restore the Indigenous names to every place on Turtle Island . Quebec already bears an Algonquin name. If you look at the word in French, it sounds like "kiss my ass" [cue, bec]. It's time to take the lies and profanity out of history. In other words, let's kill the ill[ness]! Kahentinetha Horn MNN Mohawk Nation News URL: http://mostlywater.org/quebec_city_celebrate_carnage_genocide_death From news at resist.ca Sat Jan 5 16:17:05 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Sun, 06 Jan 2008 00:17:05 -0000 Subject: [news] In the United States, Thinking for Yourself is Now a Crime Message-ID: <20080106001705.15785.qmail@resist.ca> Jane Harman and Liberty's Lost Light Thinking for Yourself is Now a Crime By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS; January 4, 2008 - Counterpunch [http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts01042008.html][1] What was the greatest failure of 2007? President Bush's "surge" in Iraq? The decline in the value of the US dollar? Subprime mortgages? No. The greatest failure of 2007 was the newly sworn in Democratic Congress. The American people's attempt in November 2006 to rein in a rogue government, which has committed the US to costly military adventures while running roughshod over the US Constitution, failed. Replacing Republicans with Democrats in the House and Senate has made no difference. The assault on the US Constitution by the Democratic Party is as determined as the assault by the Republicans. On October 23, 2007, the House passed a bill sponsored by California Democratic congresswoman Jane Harman, chairwoman of a Homeland Security subcommittee, that overturns the constitutionally guaranteed rights to free expression, association, and assembly. The bill passed the House on a vote of 404-6. In the Senate the bill is sponsored by Maine Republican Susan Collins and apparently faces no meaningful opposition. Harman's bill is called the "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act." When HR 1955 becomes law, it will create a commission tasked with identifying extremist people, groups, and ideas. The commission will hold hearings around the country, taking testimony and compiling a list of dangerous people and beliefs. The bill will, in short, create massive terrorism in the United States. But the perpetrators of terrorism will not be Muslim terrorists; they will be government agents and fellow citizens. We are beginning to see who will be the inmates of the detention centers being built in the US by Halliburton under government contract. Who will be on the "extremist beliefs" list? The answer is: civil libertarians, critics of Israel, 9/11 skeptics, critics of the administration's wars and foreign policies, critics of the administration's use of kidnapping, rendition, torture and violation of the Geneva Conventions, and critics of the administration's spying on Americans. Anyone in the way of a powerful interest group--such as environmentalists opposing politically connected developers--is also a candidate for the list. The "Extremist Beliefs Commission" is the mechanism for identifying Americans who pose "a threat to domestic security" and a threat of "homegrown terrorism" that "cannot be easily prevented through traditional federal intelligence or law enforcement efforts." This bill is a boon for nasty people. That SOB who stole your girlfriend, that hussy who stole your boyfriend, the gun owner next door--just report them to Homeland Security as holders of extreme beliefs. Homeland Security needs suspects, so they are not going to check. Under the new regime, accusation is evidence. Moreover, "our" elected representatives will never admit that they voted for a bill and created an "Extremist Belief Commission" for which there is neither need nor constitutional basis. That boss who harasses you for coming late to work--he's a good candidate to be reported; so is that minority employee that you can't fire for any normal reason. So is the husband of that good-looking woman you have been unable to seduce. Every kind of quarrel and jealousy can now be settled with a phone call to Homeland Security. Soon Halliburton will be building more detention centers. Americans are so far removed from the roots of their liberty that they just don't get it. Most Americans don't know what habeas corpus is or why it is important to them. But they know what they want, and Jane Harman has given them a new way to settle scores and to advance their own interests. Even educated liberals believe that the US Constitution is a "living document" that can be changed to mean whatever it needs to mean in order to accommodate some new important cause, such as abortion and legal privileges for minorities and the handicapped. Today it is the "war on terror" that the Constitution must accommodate. Tomorrow it can be the war on whomever or whatever. Think about it. More than six years ago the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked. The US government blamed it on al Qaeda. The 9/11 Commission Report has been subjected to criticism by a large number of qualified people--including the commission's chairman and co-chairman. Since 9/11 there have been no terrorist attacks in the US. The FBI has tried to orchestrate a few, but the "terrorist plots" never got beyond talk organized and led by FBI agents. There are no visible extremist groups other than the neoconservatives that control the government in Washington. But somehow the House of Representatives overwhelmingly sees a need to create a commission to take testimony and search out extremist views (outside of Washington, of course). This search for extremist views comes after President Bush and the Justice (sic) Department declared that the President can ignore habeas corpus, ignore the Geneva Conventions, seize people without evidence, hold them indefinitely without presenting charges, torture them until they confess to some made up crime, and take over the government by declaring an emergency. Of course, none of these "patriotic" views are extremist. The search for extremist views follows also the granting of contracts to Halliburton to build detention centers in the US. No member of Congress or the executive branch ever explained the need for the detention centers or who the detainees would be. Of course, there is nothing extremist about building detention centers in the US for undisclosed inmates. Clearly the detention centers are not meant to just stand there empty. Thanks to 2007's greatest failure--the Democratic Congress--there is to be an "Extremist Beliefs Commission" to secure inmates for Bush's detention centers. President Bush promises us that the wars he has launched will cause the "untamed fire of freedom" to "reach the darkest corners of our world." Meanwhile in America the fire of freedom has not only been tamed but also is being extinguished. The light of liberty has gone out in the United States. **Paul Craig Roberts** was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the _Wall Street Journal_ editorial page and Contributing Editor of _National Review_. He is coauthor of _The Tyranny of Good Intentions_. He can be reached at: [PaulCraigRoberts at yahoo.com][2] [1]: http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts01042008.html (http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts01042008.html) [2]: mailto:PaulCraigRoberts at yahoo.com URL: http://mostlywater.org/united_states_thinking_yourself_now_crime From news at resist.ca Sun Jan 6 15:17:05 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Sun, 06 Jan 2008 23:17:05 -0000 Subject: [news] Bitter Realities of Post-Taliban Afghanistan Message-ID: <20080106231705.15748.qmail@resist.ca> Bitter Reality of Post-Taliban Afghanistan By Borhan Younus; December 30, 2007 - ION [http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/2007/12/30/bitter-reality-of...][1] A man in his thirties suddenly threw himself on a busy road in Kabul and yelled, "[K]ill me and drive over me." "They can't feed us; the easier way is to kill me and my children. Oh people, for God's sake, come and kill us," shouted the apparently exhausted man lamenting the government's failure to provide him with a livelihood. Bodyguards of a former commander, disembarking from a luxury Jeep, were the first to respond to his call by kicking and hitting him with the butts of their Kalashnikovs. The armed men then dragged and removed him off the road. In utter disappointment, the man, in shabby cloths, started weeping like a child. Misery-Stricken Beggars are the prime feature that draws the attention of tourists and foreigners who come out to the streets of Kabul. This is not the only way adopted by the misery-stricken people of this impoverished country to express their feelings about the awful circumstances they are passing through every day. When one goes shopping in the markets or walks in the streets of the Afghan capital, Kabul, he has to face swarms of beggars, old, young, burqa-clad women, and underage children, asking for alms money. A shopper has to talk to beggars more than anybody else while moving from a shop to a shop or from a street to a street of the capital city. Others, mostly disabled during the three decades of war and civil strife, have adopted a novel and more attractive way of begging?sitting in the middle of a road and displaying the chopped parts, usually hands or legs, of their body to attract the sympathy of the passers-by and motorists. This is the prime feature that draws the attention of tourists and foreigners who come out to the streets of Kabul. No sooner do the guests step out of the hotels and restaurants, the unwelcoming beggars, mostly children and women, surround them and start murmuring different prayers in their local dialects, mostly Pashto and Dari. The beggars are rarely given any positive response. Afghans are traditionally proud of their self-reliance. They are well-known for their tradition of hospitality which means that they always love to credit others and keep others in high esteem. However, this sense of pride among the people of this nation is fading away because of a government that is begging before the international community every now and then. The incumbent Afghan government has always been seen holding the bowl before every visiting foreign dignitary asking for "more assistance". This bagging hand and reliance on aid is contrary to the traditional proud spirit of Afghans. What matters for the US-installed government is to obtain aid from the Western governments without caring for the price it has to pay in exchange. I vividly remember when President Hamid Karzai was on a tour to Copenhagen last year to attract support and assistance from Denmark. His visit coincided with the beginning of the row over the publication of the blasphemous cartoons of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). Karzai told reporters that the stance of the Danish newspaper and government on the cartoon's issue was understandable and completely convincing to him as a Muslim. These comments came at a very sensitive time when millions of Muslims were pouring into streets to condemn Denmark for its folly. It was impossible for President Karzai to object [to] the policies of his backers, especially in return for aid. Thereby, stuck between two options, whether to defend Islam's precious values in a very sensitive time or to surrender to his donors' demands, Karzai chose the second, proving that "beggars can't be choosers". Billions in Aid, No Change Although the government has not stopped begging from any source be that at any price, and has already got in aid more than 12 billion dollars, this huge aid has yielded no real change on the ground. Despite all propaganda by the Western media and the beneficiaries, lives of ordinary Afghans have worsened under the US-backed government compared to the Taliban era conditions. Poverty, the phenomenon of beggary and losses of human lives, which the Westerners ironically term as collateral damage, have reached climax over the previous six years. In such a situation, the unprecedented huge amounts of foreign aid could not bring any considerable changes to Afghanistan. Whatever has been done in terms of renovation and reconstruction of major cities is due to massive investment by Afghan and foreigner investors, and not by the money given as aid to the Afghani government. The biggest manifestation of change and development could be seen only in cities where high-rise stores, fashionable markets, and luxurious hotels have been built. But this just benefits the private investors and foreigners involved in the business. There is less interest in investing in projects of long-term benefit to the country, such as launching factories, rebuilding the nation's infrastructures, and taping of the country's natural resources. Both investors and top government officials, who mostly have come from the West, are living like guests and have no intention to stay here for long. Even some ministers did not give up their foreign nationality and did not bring their families from abroad. They are sure that they have nothing to do with [the] future of this country apart from their present personal interests. They are sure that they will leave or will be forced to leave as soon as the foreign occupation forces pull out of Afghanistan. Nobody in the government or among the investors really wants to rebuild this war-torn country. Another exit for the money is the presence of overwhelming number[s] of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The international donors do not trust the corrupt Afghan government, alternatively they pass the money to NGOs, most of them run by foreigners. NGOs, for their part, often spend most of the aid money on their personal needs, transportation, holidays, high staff salaries and renting comfortable guesthouses and offices. A small portion of the aid is thereby spent on improving the lives of Afghans. Worsening Situation The corrupt government, huge amounts of aid misused by a particular section of people, and the presence of foreign forces have all together contributed to the doubling of the miseries of the common Afghan. Prices of basic items have soared up and are still on the rise, [the] ratio of unemployment is going higher and higher, and the real income level is going down. For example, during the Taliban era, one loaf of bread was sold for 3 Afghanis, now its price has doubled. One liter of petrol was sold for 11 Afghanis, now it is over 50 Afghanis. Similarly, one kilogram of liquefied gas was sold for 20 Afghanis, but now it is over 60 Afghanis. Prices have increased manifold, but the income of the common man has dropped. Residents of Kabul enjoyed at least 12 hours electricity six years ago, but now it decreased to four hours. Kabul is perhaps the only capital in the world living in blackout. The roads of the heart of the capital have not been asphalted, but they have [been] further damaged. This is the case in the capital, Kabul, which is often depicted as a success story of the post-Taliban Afghanistan. The situation is far worse in the countryside and the provinces. Poverty and deterioration of daily life is not the only fact contributing to the common Afghan's increasing disappointment and loss of trust in the government. One other reason that make people turn against the incumbent regime is that its 'international friends', a term used here for the occupying forces, are relentlessly turning against the civilians. "Kangaroos Are More Important" Many locals wonder here whether they were cared about less than animals by the 'international friends'. A newspaper recently referred to mass murder of Afghans in a bombing by the foreign forces with no regret as gallows humor: "A special team of the United Nations has recently opened investigation into killing of seven mountainous Kangaroos in a zoo in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This gives a high importance to the life of animals, we Afghans wish we could have that much respect from the United Nations and other human rights organizations. Killing of dozens of civilians in bombing by NATO and US troops, especially in the southern parts of Afghanistan, has now become a routine in this unfortunate country. Many more are maimed, orphaned and widowed. But the champions of human rights and democracy are soliciting Afghans by offering them a few notes for the blood of their near and dear ones." The United Nations is, on the other had, running out of words when reports about the ruthless bombing of arrogant American and NATO troops reaches to Kabul from a remote village in Helmand, Kandahar, Uruzgan, Zabul, Paktia, Paktika, Khost, Nangarhar, Laghman, Kunar, Nuristan or Kapisa. In such a situation, the international community must not be taken by surprise if overwhelming number[s] of Afghans are joining [the] Taliban or becoming members of the suicide squads of al-Qaeda. The phenomenon of suicide bombing is alien to this proud nation, but they deem it fit to cut off the link between their body and soul at once instead of dying in bits. [1]: http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/2007/12/30/bitter-reality-of-post-taliban-afghanistan.html (http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/2007/12/30/bitter-reality-of-post-taliban-afghanistan.html) URL: http://mostlywater.org/bitter_realities_posttaliban_afghanistan From news at resist.ca Sun Jan 6 19:17:07 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Mon, 07 Jan 2008 03:17:07 -0000 Subject: [news] 23, 000 Civilian Deaths from Violence in Iraq for 2007: Iraq Body Count Message-ID: <20080107031707.15958.qmail@resist.ca> Civilian deaths from violence in 2007 Analysis of the year?s toll from the Iraq Body Count project First published Jan 1 2008 Summary Another 22,586?24,159 civilian deaths have been recorded in 2007 through Iraq Body Count?s extensive monitoring of media and official reports. These figures, though undoubtedly incomplete, are the most comprehensive and well-established currently available, and show beyond any doubt that civil security in Iraq remains in a parlous state. Figures for the most recent months indicate that violence in Iraq has returned to the monthly levels IBC was recording in 2005, a year which was itself (until 2006) the worst since the invasion. Year Civilians Killed 2003 10,077 ? 12,010 2004 9,741 ? 10,573 2005 13,071 ? 14,324 2006 25,699 ? 27,519 2007 22,586 ? 24,159 For the rest of this story, please visit: [http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/numbers/2007][1] [1]: http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/numbers/2007 URL: http://mostlywater.org/23000_civilian_deaths_violence_iraq_2007_iraq_body_count From news at resist.ca Sun Jan 6 23:17:05 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Mon, 07 Jan 2008 07:17:05 -0000 Subject: [news] Britain: Conservatives Promise More Attacks on People With Disabilities Message-ID: <20080107071705.16702.qmail@resist.ca> Tory leader vows to quit paying able-bodied Britons not to work Sunday, January 06, 2008 - Reuters Via _The Province_ [http://www.canada.com/theprovince/news/story.html?id=3a51fd4...][1] The conservative party's leader pledged yesterday to end what he called Britain's "Something-for-nothing" culture, accusing the labour government of wasting taxpayers' money by paying out benefits to people who are able to work. David Cameron, in an article for today's _News of the World_, said a Conservative government would tighten the system to protect against abuse: "Far too many are able to work but simply don't. We all know there are jobs available. That's a disgrace." In plans to be detailed later in the week, the poll-leading Conservatives will promise to take 200,000 people off incapacity benefit and into work. Every one of the 2.64 million people who receive incapacity benefit will be immediately reassessed by doctors, under the Tories' plans. People confirmed as too ill to work will continue to be paid full benefits but will be reassessed at regular intervals. Those deemed fit to work will have their benefits cut by about $40 a week. "There will be regular assessments of abilities, with unconditional help for those who genuinely cannot work, tailored support for those who can do some work or training, and a complete withdrawal of [incapacity benefit] for those who can work and should be working," Cameron wrote. He said four out of five jobs in Britain go to foreign workers because Britons are not taking them. ? The Vancouver Province 2008 [1]: http://www.canada.com/theprovince/news/story.html?id=3a51fd45-87ab-4853-a099-a5d1fd08d614 (http://www.canada.com/theprovince/news/story.html?id=3a51fd45-87ab-4853-a099-a5d1fd08d614) URL: http://mostlywater.org/britain_conservatives_promise_more_attacks_people_disabilities From news at resist.ca Mon Jan 7 11:17:06 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Mon, 07 Jan 2008 19:17:06 -0000 Subject: [news] The Apocalypse, From Paul Ehrlich to Al Gore Message-ID: <20080107191707.1032.qmail@resist.ca> _Brent Jessop_ - [Knowledge Driven Revolution.com][1] - _January 7, 2008_ > "...it would not surprise me if the sea were virtually emptied of its harvestable fishes and shellfish in a few decades or less." - Paul Ehrlich, 1968 (p96) While reading Paul Ehrlich's _The Population Bomb_* it is hard not to notice the similarities between his arguments and those used to popularize global warming. From the threat of apocalypse to the promise of utopia, from the scourge of big business to the dream of a sustainable society, and the cancer of the earth, man himself. Previous articles in this series discussed the methods to control the size of the [American][2] and [world][3] populations; the use of [religion, women, and sex education][4]; and the [major organizations, environmental groups, foundations and individuals][5] involved. For convenience sake, pardon the pun, I will compare Paul Ehrlich's book _The Population Bomb_ (1968) with Al Gore's book _An Inconvenient Truth_ (2006)**, but any global warming book would do. As a sad sign of the times, a lot of Gore's arguments are described in picture form for our dumbed down society. As a result, some of the "quotes" are more descriptive than reproductive. **Famine** > [Ehrlich] "We are today involved in the events leading to famine and ecocatastrophe; tomorrow we may be destroyed by them." - XI > > [Ehrlich] "If the pessimists are correct, massive famines will occur soon, possibly in the 1970s, certainly by the early 1980s. So far most of the evidence seems to be on the side of the pessimists." - 25 > > [Gore] "The map to the left shows what is projected to happen to soil moisture in the United States with the doubling of CO2, which would happen in less than 50 years if we continue business as usual. According to scientists, it will lead, among other things, to a loss in soil moisture of up to 35% in vast growing areas of our country. And of course, drier soils mean drier vegetables, less productive agriculture, and more fires. Moreover, scientists are now telling us that if we do not act quickly to contain global warming pollution, we will soon barrel right through a doubling of CO2 and move toward a quadrupling, in which case, scientists tell us, most of the United States would lose up to 60% of its soil moisture. [Beside this paragraph is a full page image of a Texas farmer standing in a sea of dried and dying crops.]" - 121 **Disease** > [Ehrlich] "With people living check by jowl, some of mankind's old enemies, like bubonic plague and cholera, may once again be on the move. As hunger and poverty increase, the resources that nations put into the control of vectors (disease-spreading organisms) may be reduced. Malaria, yellow fever, typhus, and their friends are still around - indeed, malaria is still a major killer and disabler of man. These ancient enemies of _Homo sapiens_ are just waiting for the resurgence of mosquitoes, lice, and other vectors, to ride high again... It is not inconceivable that we will, one of these days, have a visitation from a "super flu," perhaps much more virulent than the famous killer of 1918-1920." - 46 > > [Gore] "Algae is just one of the disease vectors that have been increasing in range because of global warming. And when these vectors - whether algae, mosquitoes, ticks, or other germ-carrying life forms - start to show up in new areas and cover a wider range, they are more likely to interact with people, and the diseases they carry become more serious threats... To cite one important example of this phenomenon, mosquitoes are profoundly affected by global warming. There are cities that were originally located just above the mosquito line, which used to mark the altitude above which mosquitoes would not venture. Nairobi, Kenya, and Harare, Zimbabwe, are two such cities. Now, with global warming, the mosquitoes are climbing to higher altitudes." - 172 > > [Gore] "Some 30 so-called new diseases have emerged over the last 25 to 30 years. And some old diseases that had been under control are now surging again. [included are scary black-and-white pictures (under a microscope) of Hantavirus, Machupo Virus, Arenaviridae, Coronavirus, Dengue Fever, Borrelia Burgdorferi (Lyme Disease), E. Coli, Marburg Hemorrhagic Fever, Legionnaires Disease, Influenza Virus, Nipahvirus, and Tuberculosis.]... West Nile virus" - 174 **Apocalypse** > [Ehrlich] "Ways must be found to bring home to all the American people the reality of the threat to their way of life - indeed, to their very lives." - 130 > > [Gore] "At stake is the survival of our civilization and the habitability of the Earth." - 11 **Utopia** > [Ehrlich] "We will have to do without two gas-gulping monster cars per family. We will have to learn to get along with some insect damage in our produce... Such may be the cost of survival. Of course, we may also have to get along with less emphysema, less cancer, less heart disease, less noise, less filth, less crowding, less need to work long hours or "moonlight," less robbery, less assault, less murder, and less threat of war. The pace of life may slow down. We may have more fishing, more relaxing, more time to watch TV, more time to drink beer (served in bottles that **must** be returned)." [emphasis in original] - 142 > > [Gore] "But along with the danger we face from global warming, this crisis also brings unprecedented opportunities. What are the opportunities such a crisis also offers? They include not just new jobs and new profits, though there will be plenty of both, we can build clean engines, we can harness the Sun and the wind; we can stop wasting energy; we can use our planet's plentiful coal resources without heating the planet." - 11 > > [Gore] "We can do something about this! [followed by happy pictures of compact fluorescent bulbs, fuel-cell hybrid busses, solar panels, green roof, electric car powered by hydrogen fuel cell, hybrid car, geothermal power station] " - 277 > > [Ehrlich] "If I'm right, we will save the world. If I'm wrong, people will still be better fed, better housed, and happier, thanks to our efforts." - 179 **Global Warming Overlap** Ehrlich, never one to avoid a good doomsday story, did briefly mention climate change as a potential result of over population. >From _The Population Bomb_: > "Too many cars, too many factories, too much detergent, too much pesticides, multiplying contrails, inadequate sewage treatment plants, too little water, **too much carbon dioxide** - all can be traced easily to **too many people**." [emphasis mine] - 44 > > "But even more important is the potential for changing the climate of the Earth. All of the junk we dump into the atmosphere, all of the dust, all of the carbon dioxide, have effects on the temperature balance of the Earth... The greenhouse effect is being enhanced now by the greatly increase level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In the last one hundred years our burning of fossil fuels raised the level some 15%. The greenhouse effect today is being countered by low-level clouds generated by contrails, dust, and other contaminants that tend to keep the energy of the sun from warming the surface as much. > > At the moment we cannot predict what the overall climatic results will be of our using the atmosphere as a garbage dump. We do know that very small changes in either direction in the average temperature of the Earth could be very serious. With a few degrees of cooling, a new ice age might be upon us, with rapid and drastic effects on the agricultural productivity of the temperate regions. With a few degrees of heating, the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps would melt, perhaps raising ocean levels 250 feet." - 38 However, he did not limit himself to climate change as the only way that burning fossil fuels would destroy the environment. > "We are also depleting the world's supply of oxygen by burning (oxidizing) vast quantities of fossil fuels and by clearing iron-rich tropical soils in which the iron is then oxidized." - 36 **The Real Enemy Then is Humanity Itself** Once people accept either the population control or global warming hysteria they will be lead, quite intentionally, to an unmistakable conclusion: the real problem facing humanity is humanity. Both Ehrlich and Gore are eager to point this out to their readers, below are two examples from each. > [Ehrlich] "I wish I could offer you some sugarcoated solutions, but I'm afraid the time for them is long gone. A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. Treating only the symptoms of cancer may make the victim more comfortable at first, but eventually he dies - often horribly. A similar fate awaits a world with a population explosion if only the symptoms are treated. We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions. The pain may be intense. But the disease is so far advanced that only with radical surgery does the patient have a chance of survival." - 152 > > [Gore] "Global warming, along with the cutting and burning of forests and other critical habitats, is causing the loss of living species at a level comparable to the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. That event was believed to have been caused by a giant asteroid. This time it is not an asteroid colliding with the Earth and wreaking havoc: it is us." 10 > > [Ehrlich] "... must take a stand to protect mankind from himself." - 182 > > [Gore] "Each one of us is a cause of global warming..." - 278 **Conclusion** The purpose behind blaming humanity itself for a perpetually emerging apocalypse is way beyond the scope of this article, but it is very intertwined with both sustainable development and world government. Some closing words to ponder. > "In searching for a new enemy to unite us [all of humanity], we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. In their totality and in their interactions, these phenomena constitute a common threat which as the enemy, we fall into the trap about which we have already warned, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself." - Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider, _The First Global Revolution: A Report by the Council of The Club of Rome_ (1991). *Quotes from: Paul R. Ehrlich. _The Population Bomb: Revised & Expanded Edition_ (1968, 1971). SBN 345-24489-3-150. ** Quotes from: Al Gore. _An Inconvenient Truth_ (2006). ISBN-13:978-1-59486-567-1. * * * **Related Articles** [The Population Bomb Part 1: How to Control the AMERICAN Population by Paul Ehrlich][2] [The Population Bomb Part 2: How to Control the WORLD Population by Paul Ehrlich][3] [The Population Bomb Part 3: Population, Religion and Sex Education][4] [The Population Bomb Part 4: Those Involved in Population Control][5] [1]: http://www.knowledgedrivenrevolution.com/Articles/200801/20080107_Bomb_Gore_GW.htm [2]: http://www.KnowledgeDrivenRevolution.com/Articles/200712/20071210_Bomb_America.htm [3]: http://www.KnowledgeDrivenRevolution.com/Articles/200712/20071217_Bomb_World.htm [4]: http://www.KnowledgeDrivenRevolution.com/Articles/200712/20071224_Bomb_Sex_Education.htm [5]: http://www.KnowledgeDrivenRevolution.com/Articles/200712/20071231_Bomb_Help.htm URL: http://mostlywater.org/apocalypse_paul_ehrlich_al_gore From news at resist.ca Mon Jan 7 12:17:05 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Mon, 07 Jan 2008 20:17:05 -0000 Subject: [news] 14 Years Later: What Have the Zapatistas Accomplished? Message-ID: <20080107201705.10780.qmail@resist.ca> MEXICO - What Have the Zapatistas Accomplished? Immanuel Wallerstein Thursday 3 January 2008 [http://www.alterinfos.org/spip.php?article1907][1] January 1, 2008 - On January 1, 1994, the Ej?rcito Zapatista de Liberaci?n Nacional (EZLN), commonly called the Zapatistas, led an insurrection in San Cristobal de las Casas in the state of Chiapas in Mexico. Just under fourteen years later, the EZLN convened an international colloquium on December 13-17, 2007 in the same city on the theme "Planet Earth: Antisystemic Movements" - a sort of stock-taking, both global and local, of their objectives. I myself participated in this colloquium, as did many other activists and intellectuals. In the course of the colloquium, Subcommandant Marcos gave a series of six talks, which are available on the internet. In a sense, what everyone was asking, including Marcos, is what have the Zapatistas accomplished and what are the future prospects of antisystemic movements - in Chiapas and in the world? The answer to this question is not simple. Let us start the story on January 1, 1994. That day was chosen for the beginning of the insurrection because it was the day on which the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) came into effect. The slogan that day was !Ya basta! ("Enough is enough"). The Zapatistas were saying from the outset that their five-century- long protest against injustice and humiliation and demand for autonomy was linked today organically to the worldwide struggle against neo-liberalism and imperialism of which NAFTA was both a part and a symbol. Chiapas, let us remember, is perhaps the poorest region of Mexico and its population is composed overwhelmingly of so-called indigenous peoples. The first Catholic bishop of Chiapas was Bartolom? de Las Casas, the sixteenth-century Dominican priest who devoted his life to defending vigorously (before the Church and the Spanish monarchy) the rights of the Indians to equal treatment. From the days of Las Casas until 1994, the Indians never saw that right acknowledged. The EZLN decided to try different methods. So were they more successful? We should look at the impact of the movement in three arenas: in Mexico as a political arena; in the world-system as a whole; in the realm of theorizing about antisystemic movements. First, Mexico: Armed insurrection as a tactic was suspended after about three months. It has never been resumed. And it is clear that it will not be unless the Mexican army or right-wing paramilitaries massively attack autonomous Zapatista communities. On the other hand, the truce agreement reached with the Mexican government - the so-called San Andr?s accords providing for the recognition of autonomy for the indigenous communities - was never implemented by the government. In 2001, the Zapatistas led a peaceful march across Mexico to the capital, hoping thereby to force the Mexican Congress to legislate the essential of the accords. The march was spectacular but the Mexican Congress failed to act. In 2005, the Zapatistas launched "the other campaign," an effort to mobilize an alliance of Zapatistas with groups in other provinces with more or less similar objectives - again spectacular but it did not change the actual politics of the Mexican government. In 2006, the Zapatistas pointedly refused to endorse the left-of-center candidate for the presidency, Andr?s Manuel L?pez Obrador, who was running in a tight election against the proclaimed winner, the very conservative Felipe Calder?n. This action was the one that caused most controversy with Zapatista sympathizers in Mexico and the rest of the world, many of whom felt that it cost L?pez Obrador the election. The Zapatista position derived from their deep sense that electoral politics does not pay. The Zapatistas have been critical of all the left-of-center presidents in Latin America, from Lula in Brazil to Ch?vez in Venezuela, on the grounds that they were all top-down movements which changed nothing fundamental at the base for the oppressed majority. The only Latin American government which the Zapatistas speak well of is that of Cuba, because it is the only government they consider to be truly anti-capitalist. On the other hand, within Mexico, the Zapatistas have managed to establish de facto autonomous indigenous communities which operate well, albeit they are besieged and constantly menaced by the Mexican army. The political sophistication and determination of these communities is impressive. Will this however last in the absence of serious political change in Mexico, especially in the light of increasing pressure on the rights of the Indians to control their own land? This is the unresolved issue. The picture on the world scene is somewhat different. There is no question that the Zapatista insurrection of 1994 became a major inspiration for antisystemic movements throughout the world. It is unquestionably a key turning-point in the process that led to the demonstrations in 1999 at Seattle that caused the failure of the meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO), a failure from which the WTO has never recovered. If today the WTO finds itself semi-moribund as a result of a North-South deadlock, the Zapatistas can claim some credit. Seattle in turn led to the creation in 2001 of the World Social Forum (WSF), which has become the principal meeting-ground of the world?s antisystemic movements. And if the Zapatistas themselves have never attended any WSF meeting because technically they are an armed force, the Zapatistas have remained an iconic movement within the WSF, a sort of inspirational force. The Zapatistas from the beginning have said that their objectives and concerns were worldwide - intergalactic in their jargon - and they offered support to movements everywhere and asked actively for support from movements everywhere. They have been very successful in this. And if some worldwide support has suffered fatigue of late, the December 2007 colloquium was clearly an attempt to resuscitate these alliances. In many ways, however, the most important contribution of the Zapatistas - and the most contested - has been in the theoretical realm. It was striking that in the six talks that Marcos gave in December, the first devoted itself to the importance of theorizing in the social sciences. What do the Zapatistas say about how to analyze the world? First of all, they emphasize that the basic thing that is wrong with the world today is that it is a capitalist world, and that the basic thing to change is that, something they insist will require a real struggle. Now the Zapatistas are surely not the first ones to argue this. So what do they add to this? They are part of a post-1968 view that the traditional analyses of the Old Left were too narrow, in that they seemed to emphasize only the problems and struggles of the urban industrial proletariat. Marcos devoted one whole talk to the struggles of women for their rights. He devoted another to the crucial importance of control of the land by the world?s rural workers. And quite strikingly he placed several talks under the rubric, "neither core nor periphery" - rejecting the idea of a priority for one or the other, either in terms of power or of intellectual analysis. The Zapatistas are proclaiming that the struggle for rights of every oppressed group is equally important, and the struggle must be fought on all fronts at the same time. They also say that the movements themselves must be internally democratic. The slogan is "mandar obedeciendo," which might be translated "lead by obeying the voice and wishes of those whom one is leading." This is easy to say and hard to do, but it is a cry against the historic verticalism of left movements. This leads them to a "horizontalism" in the relations between different movements. Some of their followers say that they are opposed to taking state power ever. While they are deeply skeptical of taking state power via the "lesser evil," they are willing to make exceptions, as in the case of Cuba. Was the Zapatista insurrection a success? The only answer is in the apocryphal story about the answer that Zhou En-lai is supposed to have given to the question: "What do you think of the French Revolution?" Answer: "It is too early to tell." [1]: http://www.alterinfos.org/spip.php?article1907 (http://www.alterinfos.org/spip.php?article1907) URL: http://mostlywater.org/14_years_later_what_have_zapatistas_accomplished From news at resist.ca Tue Jan 8 11:17:08 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Tue, 08 Jan 2008 19:17:08 -0000 Subject: [news] Only White Male Democratic Vice-Presidential Candidates Need Apply Message-ID: <20080108191708.7618.qmail@resist.ca> Only White Male Democratic Vice-Presidential Candidates Need Apply By Kirsten Anderberg ([www.kirstenanderberg.com][1]) Written January 8, 2008 It is very predictable that the Democratic Party will have to run a white, upper class, male for vice-president due to them broaching the isolated issues of race and gender via its two front-running presidential candidates. In the same way America is not ready to embrace both race and gender issues within *one* candidate, as in running a woman of color as a mainstream presidential candidate, I believe America is also not collectively willing to embrace a double race/gender ticket, of a woman and a male of color together in some combination, on the same vice-presidential and presidential ticket. Amidst all the celebratory pats on the back for us running a black male and white female as front-runners for the Democratic Party presidential nominees, I cannot help but see the glass ceiling, the walls and limitations, that such actions divert attention from. Shirley Chisholm is a woman who sticks out in my mind when I think of American presidential history within my lifetime. In 1972, Shirley Chisholm was not only the first woman, but also the first African American to seek the Democratic Party?s nomination for U.S. president. She stands out in my memory, after all these years, not only because she was a woman and black, but also because she was discounted as not being a viable and realistic U.S. presidential contender from the day she announced she was running. I was not so much amazed that black women were running for president, as I was growing up in the era of active civil rights and feminist movements, after all. But at age 11, I did not know that we had a history of never electing anyone but white men *until* Shirley Chisholm ran. The ruckus her candidacy caused, showed me, as a little girl, the obstacles present, that I had not seen when only white men ran against one another. So a black woman running for president was not what was most memorable to me; what was memorable, and what took a long time to comprehend as a child, was *why* she was dismissed. All of the children in America?s elementary schools at that time learned about Shirley Chisholm?s presidential campaign. She had a wide-spread, well-recognized campaign, with a lot of support. But what I came away with from her campaign was that only white men can be taken seriously and properly funded and supported in the run for the U.S. presidency. I knew eventually this would have to change, but I was not sure I see it in my lifetime. When I see a black man and a white woman both vying for new opportunities previously withheld for only white men, I am reminded of several other major intersects in U.S. history where black men and white women have hit the gates demanding to be let in at the same time. I am reminded of the historical struggle for anyone other than white men to be allowed to vote in this great democracy of ours. Frederick Douglass was a leader in the fight for black male voting rights, while Alice Paul and Susan B. Anthony simultaneously fought for the woman?s vote. ?Douglass? also advocated the rights of women. He participated in the first Women?s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls in 1848...[he] advocated the emancipation of women from all the artificial disabilities, imposed by false customs, creeds, and codes...During the years before the Civil War, Douglass was a close friend of Susan B. Anthony and her family, and often visited the Anthony home...However, during the years from 1865 to 1870, Douglass split from many women?s rights activists over the issue of passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Anthony and Stanton refused to support the Fifteenth Amendment because it excluded women. Douglass, on the other hand, believed with many abolitionists that it was important to secure the rights of African-American males before working to achieve the rights of women. Their argument was both public and private, and there was resentment and hurt on both sides.? ([http://winningthevote.org/FDouglass.html][2]) Yet even though black men got the vote before white women on paper, I was alive in the 1960?s when there were still violent obstacles and resultant protests in the South, and elsewhere in the U.S., over blacks having proper access to cast their votes. (And god only knows what went on in the 2000 Bush-Gore elections, where many blacks in Florida claimed they were blocked from voting.) So, even though black men may have gotten the vote before women, they were constructively blocked from casting those ballots for many more years to come. And even though women and racial minorities are currently ?allowed? to run for president, it must be done with monitored amounts of diversity and it is still not clear if anyone but a white upper class male *can* win the presidency in the U.S., even though women and racial minorities can finally run for the office with some legitimacy. I believe the reason that women of color are somehow not given equal press and support when attempting to run for president thus far is when a woman of color tries to do what Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton are doing right now, she has to endure both racism and sexism, combined, and it barely seems plausible for one of those issues to break through in a U.S. presidential campaign. The likelihood of someone battling through both the sexism and the racism within one candidate seems insurmountable, and would present an unbelievable funding obstacle unless she was someone like Oprah Winfrey, who is in a very unique position. Harvard Law School did not begin admitting women until 1950. When Sandra Day O?Connor graduated from law school, few women were given opportunities at most law firms. So once women finally broke down the barriers to law schools, they next had to beat down the doors to be allowed to then actually practice within the profession. Sandra Day O?Connor was a law clerk when no one would hire her as an attorney after graduating at the top of her class from Stanford Law School in the early 1950?s. Eventually, she was able to obtain jobs as a ?woman attorney? and ended up being the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court, which took over 200 years to accomplish in American history. Even after penetrating the halls of law schools, then becoming licensed practicing attorneys within a nearly all-male law field, gender-based barriers continued to show up. Sarah Weddington, the female attorney who successfully argued for the historic Roe vs. Wade decision before the Supreme Court in 1973, had to use the public bathrooms downstairs, when all the male counselors involved in the case were using private bathrooms near the courtroom that were reserved for attorneys, judges, etc. but were made for males exclusively. I remember news stories a few years back about the Skull and Bones Society at Yale being in chaos because several female members had been initiated, and thus the elders padlocked the clubhouse?s doors until the situation could be properly resolved. An amazing number of U.S. presidents have been members of the Skull and Bones Society, and if we are talking about becoming a U.S. president, then Skull and Bones Society membership does seem to have relevance, as does the topic of Skull and Bones excluding women and people of color historically. Even after women are finally allowed into Yale, we are still kept out of male exclusive power clubs on campus. Hidden barriers such as these afford us things like all male Supreme Courts and exclusively white male presidents for the first 200 plus years of U.S. democracy. I am very excited to see a black man and a white woman getting this far in the U.S. Democratic Party presidential primaries, don?t get me wrong. But I also recognize this pattern throughout history. I notice that a woman of color would be saddled with *both* issues that one by one, by themselves, seem insurmountable, and that shows me how far we really still have to come. The day a woman of color can finally be a front-runner candidate for the Democratic Party for president, and not have her hard work written off as symbolic or a token effort, as was done to Shirley Chisholm, then I will truly feel we have made significant leaps in our collective consciousness. For the very same reasons a woman of color is still not in the front-runner pool of presidential candidates in the U.S., there is little to no chance that either a black male or white female Democratic Party presidential candidate at this time would then add more obstacles by enlisting anything but a white upper class male vice-presidential candidate. It seems America can only take baby steps regarding its racism and sexism, so we *may* be able to elect a black male or white woman as president, which is amazing in and of itself, but I am not sure that America could handle any *combination* of race and gender barriers on one ticket, such as a black male with a white woman, or a double whammy of either, such as two women or two people of color running as vice-president and president together at this time. My prediction is whoever runs for vice-president under the Democratic Party, he?s got to be a white male with money, just to offset the ?radical? concept of either a woman or racial minority running viably for president. I hope I am wrong, but these are the glass ceilings I see when everyone but white males with money hit that ceiling. When any combination of race, gender, and economic status candidates can run for political party nominations in America, we will have made great strides. (I have not had the time to address economic status in this analysis, but only an upper economic class man of color or white woman could have made it this far in the run for president in America at this point.) Right now, the patterns are still recognizable, and it seems we are still feeding mainstream America racial tolerance and gender equity with little baby spoons, always afraid of giving them too much too fast. So we may just get an upper economic class black male or white female for the Democratic Party?s presidential nominee this election, but I would be floored if either chose a woman of color as their vice-presidential running mate. And I predict their choice will be a white male first and foremost, just to offset the non-white or non-male presidential candidate. All of these limitations show how far we still have to go after over 200 years into this ?democracy.? And lastly, remember how slowly our race and gender inclusion has progressed throughout the history of U.S. democracy the next time there is a call for the U.S. to champion democracy with race and gender inclusion in other countries with much younger ?democracies.? [1]: http://www.kirstenanderberg.com (www.kirstenanderberg.com) [2]: http://winningthevote.org/FDouglass.html (http://winningthevote.org/FDouglass.html) URL: http://mostlywater.org/only_white_male_democratic_vicepresidential_candidates_need_apply From news at resist.ca Tue Jan 8 23:17:06 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Wed, 09 Jan 2008 07:17:06 -0000 Subject: [news] Adbusters goes to the B.C. Supreme Court Message-ID: <20080109071707.29993.qmail@resist.ca> PRESS RELEASE: THE RIGHT TO COMMUNICATE On Monday, January 7th, the British Columbia Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments on whether or not Adbusters' lawsuit against Global Television, the CBC, and the CRTC, should go forward. If the Adbusters lawsuit clears this hurdle, media rights advocates will celebrate an important victory in the battle against censorship. For more than a decade, Adbusters, a magazine and media foundation, has been trying to pay major commercial broadcasters to air its public-service TV spots, but these attempts have been routinely blocked by network executives, often with little or no explanation. In 2004, Adbusters finally turned to the courts. It filed a lawsuit against the government of Canada and some of the country's biggest media barons, arguing that the public has a constitutionally protected freedom of expression over the public airwaves. At issue is the right of all Canadian citizens to have (as stipulated by the Canadian Broadcasting Act) "a reasonable opportunity...to be exposed to the expression of differing views on matters of public concern." "This case will decide if Canadians have the right to walk into their local TV stations and buy thirty seconds of airtime for a message they want to air," says Kalle Lasn, editor-in-chief of Adbusters. Ryan Dalziel of Bull, Housser & Tupper LLP, who is representing Adbusters, explains the special nature of this suit. "This is not," he says, "a bare-knuckle family law dispute, nor is it a Bay Street-style war of attrition between commercial entities. It is public interest litigation, brought by a not-for-profit organization with no chance of any monetary return." Adbusters is hoping Canadians will pay close attention to a landmark case that pits ordinary citizens and consumers against powerful special interests. The outcome will determine the future role of television in Canada. EDITOR'S NOTES For more information about Adbusters and the global media democracy movement visit and . [1] Canadian Media facts: * Four corporations (CanWest, Quebecor, Torstar and Gesca) control 72 per cent of the country's daily newspaper circulation. * Five major media acquisitions in Canada have occurred or are currently in the making in the past two years: CHUM was purchased by CTVglobemedia for $1.4 billion, which then sold five CityTV stations to Rogers for $375 million; CanWest purchased Alliance Atlantis for $2.3 billion; Astral Media bought Standard Broadcasting for $1.2 billion; and Black Press and Quebecor are vying for the Osprey Media newspaper chain in a deal that will be worth more than $400 million. [2] Facts about Media Democracy: * More than 30,000 people have signed the Media Carta to voice their concerns about the way information is distributed in our society. * In the past year a growing number of grassroots media activist groups have been formed in Canada to express their dissatisfaction with the continued consolidation of the country's media: The Media's New Aesthetic: Why TV is about to have a major mood swing by Clayton Dach The last few years have been hard on poor old television. Viewership has fallen across the board as core audiences -- guys aged 18 to 34 in particular - are abandoning the device that raised them, opting instead for game controllers and the internet. Meanwhile, those who have remained loyal to TV are failing to remain similarly loyal to the advertising that makes it profitable, increasingly choosing to get their tube fix via commercial-annihilating digital video recorders, advertising-light DVDs, and (horror of horrors) pirate downloads. With viewers putting up blinders to the ad-program-ad rhythm of for-profit television, the desirability of conventional 30-second commercial spot is tanking. For the first time in decades, a number of key markets have witnessed decreases in the amount spent on traditional ads, as marketers demand the ever-elusive bigger bang with in-program product placements and full-on brand integration within storylines. The result: as much as 15 full minutes of every hour of programming in North America is now dedicated to thinly veiled product placements, with shows like American Idol topping out at over 4,000 placements per season -- all of this in addition to the average of 14 to 22 minutes out of 60 still set aside for traditional spots. Given televisions' incredible shrinking credibility, especially in the case of broadcast journalism, it is little wonder that we have suffered through the ceaseless debate over whether we live under the thumb of a "liberal media" or a "conservative media." Luckily, we can safely disregard the question of television's political affiliation, since we are rapidly approaching a sort of McLuhan-esque implosion which will render the answer irrelevant. It's that moment when the specifics of the rock 'em sock 'em, talking-head debates may be school massacres or missing pageant queens, but the message itself always remains the same. That message is television, an ingenious device for the capturing of eyeballs. Increasingly, this device is being pressed into the service of a singular purpose. While this purpose could hardly be called a philosophy in the proper sense, as a system of narrow values it does require the exclusion of dissonant ideas to efficiently function. Adbusters began, in large part, as a product of outrage over just how destructive, self-serving, and at times downright insane the deliberate exclusions of this system have become. We've learned, for example, that the keepers of the airwaves will permit you to expose the perils of cardiovascular disease; you may not, however, tell the truth about a major advertiser's fat-laden products. Similarly, you are allowed to tell kids to get more exercise, but you can't tell them to turn off their TVs in order to do so. You may encourage women to ignore the images produced by the beauty industry and to feel good about their own bodies, no matter the shape or size -- but only if you're selling soap in the process. And, most gallingly, you can pay lip service to the urgency of tackling climate change, and yet you can't challenge people to buy less stuff as a way to actually go for it. But it's possible that you don't care. Maybe you gave up on television a long time ago. Maybe you don't even own a TV set anymore. For your personal peace of mind, that was probably a good move; with an estimated 112 million television households in the United States alone, however, we ignore the stirrings of TV at our own peril. The last couple of decades have seen unprecedented levels of consolidation in the realm of mass media. Today, the movers and shakers of TV are the very same people and corporate entities who control the majority of newspapers, of radio stations, of book publishing, of outdoor advertising, of music distribution, of film production, and of your favorite social networking sites. The dirty tricks and the sleights of hand that are used to keep urgent, dissonant messages off the air aren't in any way specific to that TV. They are the natural consequences of corporate rule, and they will be brought to bear whenever we are too distracted to stand in the way. Not by accident, more and more people are doing just that -- stepping up to join the ongoing battle against a media system that has left civil society out in the cold and in the dark, a media system that has been busily propagating itself at the expense of our social, cultural, political and environmental health. It's a battle that Adbusters has proudly taken up with its ongoing lawsuit against CanWest, Canada's biggest media conglomerate. What's at stake in this struggle is not just access, but the creation of a whole new media aesthetic: a messier one, more spontaneous and unpredictable, one that fosters participation and social relevance, a genuine engine for the positive change. If Adbusters' lawsuit is a success, one of the first manifestations of this aesthetic will be a strange new mood - exciting, challenging, even slightly dangerous -- every time you switch on the box in your living room, where previously there was only a moribund device completely sewn-up by private, for-profit interests. This strange new mood will prove once and for all that television (just like newspapers, magazines and radio before it, and just like the internet after it) has the capacity to perform services other than selling us on the idea of buying, services of vital importance to the health of our species and its democracies. And like with all exciting, challenging, and slightly dangerous new moods, we're betting it will prove to be pretty damned infectious. URL: http://mostlywater.org/adbusters_goes_bc_supreme_court From news at resist.ca Wed Jan 9 20:17:05 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2008 04:17:05 -0000 Subject: [news] A History of the 1973 Siege at Wounded Knee Message-ID: <20080110041705.4045.qmail@resist.ca> Revolutionary History-- 1973: Siege at Wounded Knee January 9, 2008 - 10:04am ? Gary [It isn't clear if Gary is the author] A short history of the 71-day uprising of Native Americans at Wounded Knee. Armed American Indians occupied the territory, which they legally owned, with several demands, including an investigation into the 371 treaties signed between the Native Nations and the Federal Government, all of which had been broken by the United States. In the summer of 1968, two hundred members of the American Indian community came together for a meeting to discuss various issues that Indian people of the time were dealing with on an everyday basis. Among these issues were, police brutality, high unemployment rates, and the Federal Government's policies concerning American Indians. >From this meeting came the birth of the American Indian Movement, commonly known as AIM. With this came the emergence of AIM leaders, such as Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt to name a few. Little did anyone know that AIM would become instrumental in shaping not only the path of American Indians across the country, but the eyes of the world would follow AIM protests through the occupation at Alcatraz through the Trail of Broken Treaties, to the final conflict of the 1868 Sioux treaty of the Black Hills. This conflict would begin on February 27, 1973 and last seventy-one days. The occupation became known in history as the Siege at Wounded Knee. It began as the American Indians stood against government atrocities, and ended in an armed battle with US Armed Forces. Corruption within the BIA and Tribal Council at an all time high, tension on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation was on the increase and quickly getting out of control. With a feeling close to despair, and knowing there was nothing else for them to do, elders of the Lakota Nation asked the American Indian Movement for assistance. This bringing to a head, more than a hundred years of racial tension and a government corruption. On that winter day in 1973, a large group of armed American Indians reclaimed Wounded Knee in the name of the Lakota Nation. For the first time in many decades, those Oglala Sioux ruled themselves, free from government intervention, as is their ancient custom. This would become the basis for a TV movie, "Lakota Woman" the true story of Mary Moore Crowdog, and her experiences at the Wounded Knee occupation. During the preceding months of the Wounded Knee occupation, civil war brewed among the Oglala people. There became a clear-cut between the traditional Lakota people and the government supporters. The traditional people wanted more independence from the Federal Government, as well as honoring of the 1868 Sioux treaty, which was still valid. According to the 1868 treaty, the Black Hills of South Dakota still belonged to the Sioux people, and the traditional people wanted the Federal Government to honor their treaty by returning the sacred Black Hills to the Sioux people. Another severe problem on the Pine Ridge reservation was the strip mining of the land. The chemicals used by the mining operations were poisoning the land and the water. People were getting sick, and children were being born with birth defects. The tribal government and its supporters encouraged the strip mining and the sale of the Black Hills to the Federal Government. It is said that at that point in time, the tribal government was not much more than puppets of the BIA. The sacred Black Hills, along with many other problems, had become a wedge that would tear apart the Lakota Nation. Violent confrontations between the traditional people and the GOONS (Guardians of Our Oglala Nation) became an everyday occurrence. The young AIM warriors, idealistic and defiant, were like a breath of fresh air to the Indian people, and their ideas quickly caught on. When AIM took control of Wounded Knee, over seventy-five different Indian Nations were represented, with more supporters arriving daily from all over the country. Soon United States Armed Forces in the form of Federal Marshals, and the National Guard surrounded the large group. All roads to Wounded Knee were cut off, but still, people slipped through the lines, pouring into the occupied area. The forces inside Wounded Knee demanded an investigation into misuse of tribal funds; the goon squad's violent aggression against people who dared speak out against the tribal government. In addition they wanted the Senate Committee to launch an investigation into the BIA and the Department of the Interior regarding their handling of the affairs of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. The warriors also demanded an investigation into the 371 treaties between the Native Nations and the Federal Government, all of which had been broken by the United States. The warriors that occupied Wounded Knee held fast to these demands and refused to lay down arms until they were met. The government cut off the electricity to Wounded Knee and attempted to keep all food supplies from entering the area. For the rest of that winter, the men and women inside Wounded Knee lived on minimal resources, while they fought the armed aggression of Federal Forces. Daily, heavy gunfire was issued back and forth between the two sides, but true to their word, they refused to give up. During the Wounded Knee occupation, they would live in their traditional manner, celebrating a birth, a marriage and they would mourn the death of two of their fellow warriors inside Wounded Knee. AIM member, Buddy Lamont was hit by M16 fire and bled to death inside Wounded Knee. AIM member, Frank Clearwater was killed by heavy machine gun fire, inside Wounded Knee. Twelve other individuals were intercepted by the goon squad while back packing supplies into Wounded Knee; they disappeared and were never heard from again. Though the government investigated, by looking for a mass grave in the area, when none was found the investigation was soon dismissed. Wounded Knee was a great victory for the Oglala Sioux as well as all other Indian Nations. For a short period of time in 1973, they were a free people once more. After 71 days, the Siege at Wounded Knee had come to an end; with the government making nearly 1,200 arrests. But this would only mark the beginning of what was known as the "Reign of Terror" instigated by the FBI and the BIA. During the three years following Wounded Knee, 64 tribal members were unsolved murder victims, 300 harassed and beaten, and 562 arrests were made, and of these arrests only 15 people were convicted of any crime. A large price to pay for 71 days as a free people on the land of one's ancestors. URL: http://mostlywater.org/revolutionary_history_1973_siege_wounded_knee From news at resist.ca Thu Jan 10 09:17:09 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2008 17:17:09 -0000 Subject: [news] Developer Quits after ALF Threat Message-ID: <20080110171710.28732.qmail@resist.ca> [http://www.radionetherlands.nl/currentaffairs/080208-animal-...][1] The park - called Sciencelink - will house biotech research companies, many of whom carry out testing on animals. Animal rights groups in the Netherlands are vehemently opposed to the project. Over the Christmas period, members of the radical Animal Liberation Front (DBF) visited the homes of a number of the development company's directors, confronting them and spraying their homes with slogans such as: "Stop Sciencelink, Stop Animal Testing", and the more threatening "This time it's just paint. Next time we won't be so friendly. See you in the new year". The company, Van der Looy Project Management, has now pulled out of the development, saying the opposition has become "threatening and unacceptable". Given in to threats It's the first time a Dutch company has so openly given in to threats by the animal rights movement and activists who say it won't be the last. A statement posted on the website stopdierenproeven.org (stopanimaltesting) says: "We are following the development of Sciencelink closely and will take every possible step to stop it. If other developers show any interest in taking Van de Looy's place, then we can tell them now that we will be on their doorsteps not just once, but time and again." The radicalisation of animal rights activists in the Netherlands is of increasing concern to the Dutch intelligence service, the AIVD, which released a report on the movement's activities last year. "Home visits" were named in the report as one of the most common tactics. Activists with balaclavas or scarves covering their faces descend on the homes of employees of companies involved directly or indirectly with animal testing. They damage cars, daub slogans on the houses and threaten family members. Vandalism and intimidation The group Respect For Animals is named in the AIVD report as central to the movement. The group's spokesperson, Nina Kroos, denies that it is responsible for the "home visits". She says that the members of the Animal Liberation Front are operating outside her organisation - but refuses to condemn their actions. As far as Respect For Animals is concerned, vandalism and intimidation are justified if aimed at relieving the suffering of animals. The limit, says Kroos, is that "no-one is killed and no-one is injured". The Venray city councillor responsible for the Sciencelink project was both astonished and upset by the news. "I've always believed we live in a democracy" he said, "and the way the animal rights activists are behaving is not the way we should treat each other". The future of the project is uncertain now that Van Der Looy has pulled out. [1]: http://www.radionetherlands.nl/currentaffairs/080208-animal-rights (http://www.radionetherlands.nl/currentaffairs/080208-animal-rights) URL: http://mostlywater.org/developer_quits_after_alf_threat From news at resist.ca Thu Jan 10 09:17:09 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2008 17:17:09 -0000 Subject: [news] Reviewing David Cromwell and David Edwards' "Guardians of Power" Message-ID: <20080110171711.28736.qmail@resist.ca> Reviewing David Cromwell and David Edwards' "Guardians of Power" - by Stephen Lendman David Cromwell is a Scottish writer, activist and oceanographer at the National Oceanography Centre in Britain. David Edwards is also a UK writer who focuses on human rights, the environment and the media. Together they edit an extraordinary "UK-based media-watch project" called Media Lens. It "offers authoritative criticism of mainstream media bias and censorship, as well as providing in-depth analysis, quotes, media contact details and other resources." Today, the media is in crisis, and a free and open society is at risk. Fiction substitutes for fact, news is carefully filtered, dissent is marginalized, and supporting the powerful substitutes for full and accurate reporting. As a result, wars of aggression are called liberating ones, civil liberties are suppressed for our own good, and patriotism means going along with governments that are lawless. The authors challenge these views and those in the mainstream who reflect them - the managers, editors and journalists. Their aim in Media Lens and their writing is to "raise public awareness" to see "reality" as they do, free from the corrupting influence of media corporations and their single-minded pursuit of profit "in a society dominated by corporate power" and governments acting as their handmaiden. They note that Pravda was a state propaganda organ so "why should we expect the corporate press to tell the truth about corporate power" and unfettered capitalism when they support it? They don't and never will. The authors go further and say their "aim is to increase rational awareness, critical thought and compassion, and to decrease greed, hatred and ignorance (and do it by) highlight(ing) significant examples of systemic media distortion." There are no shortage of examples. That objective is highlighted in their 2006 book, "Guardians of Power: The Myth of the Liberal Media" and subject of this review. It's a work distinguished author John Pilger calls "required reading" and "the most important book about journalism (he) can remember" since Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman's classic - "Manufacturing Dissent." Cromwell and Edwards "have done the job of true journalists: they have set the record straight" in contrast to the mainstream that distorts and corrupts it for the powerful. Their book is must reading and will be reviewed in-depth, chapter by chapter, to show why. It's also why no major broadsheet ever mentions it or its important content. This review covers lots of it. The Mass Media - Neutral, Honest, Psychopathic Years ago, journalist and author AJ Liebling said "The press is free only to those who own one." He also warned that "People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news." "Guardians of Power" lifts the confusion powerfully. It starts off noting that the term media is "problematic." It's the plural of medium suggesting something neutral, and news organizations want us to believe "they transmit information in a similarly neutral, natural way" which, of course, they never do. Why? Because corporate giants are dominant, and large corporate entities control the media. The authors thus argue that the entire corporate mass media, including broadcasters like BBC and the so-called mislabeled "liberal media," function as a "propaganda system for elite interests." It's especially true for topics like "US-UK government responsibility for genocide, vast corporate criminality, (and) threats to the very existence of human life - (they're) distorted, suppressed, marginalized or ignored." Cromwell and Edwards present documented forensic proof to set the record straight and expose corporate media duplicity. Doing it requires "understanding (that) curious abstract entity - the corporation," more specifically publicly-owned ones. They're required by law to maximize shareholder equity and do it by increasing revenue and profits. Corporate law prohibits boards of directors and senior executives from being friends of the earth, good community members or whatever else may detract from that primary goal. Social responsibility is off the table if it reduces profits, and executives who ignore that mandate may be sued or fired for so doing. That led Canadian law professor Joel Bakan to call corporations "psychopathic creatures" that can't recognize or act morally or avoid committing harm. It shows up at home and in foreign wars of aggression with Iraq as Exhibit A that's the focus of three of the book's 13 chapters. First, an explanation of what Chomsky and Herman called the "propaganda model" in "Manufacturing Dissent" and that Herman later wrote about in "The Myth of the Liberal Media." It works by focusing on "the inequality of wealth and power" and how those with it "filter out the news to print, marginalize dissent (and assure) government and dominant private interests" control all information the public gets. It's done through a set of "filters" that remove what's to be suppressed and "leav(es) only the cleansed (acceptable) residue fit to print" or broadcast on-air. The media is largely shaped by market forces and bottom line considerations. They also rely on advertisers for most of their revenue and are pressured to assure content conforms to their views. More generally, the dominant media serve wealth and power interests that include their own as well as other corporate giants. They thus rely on "official sources" for news and information and ignore others considered "unreliable." More accurately, they ignore the unempowered who have no say or whose views are out of the "mainstream." Media expert, Robert McChesney, explains the dilemma by saying publishers know their journalists must appear neutral and unbiased when, in fact, that notion is "entirely bogus" for three reasons: -- to appear neutral, journalists rely on "official sources" as legitimate news and opinion when, in fact, they're not; -- a news "hook" or dramatic event is needed to justify covering a story, but the power elite does the selecting to serve its own interests; and -- advertisers apply pressure so content favors or at least won't offend them. McChesney also explains that "balanced (journalism) smuggles in values conducive to the commercial aims of the owners and advertisers, as well as the political aims of the owning class." And as their power grows, so does their control over what news and information people get as well as a tsunami of sports and entertainment to divert and distract from what matters most. Iraq - The Sanctions of Mass Destruction The authors cite British Prime Minister Tony Blair's "big bad lie" in making a "moral case for war" for which there was none. Two years later, the Iraqi Planning Ministry and UN reported that almost one quarter of children aged five or under suffered from malnutrition. That condition was even worse than the appalling situation under economic sanctions and the destruction of the country that began after Saddam invaded Kuwait in August, 1990. Four days later, Operation Desert Shield was launched. It began with US-dictated economic sanctions, a large military buildup in the region, and a sweeping PR campaign for war that became Operation Desert Storm on January 17, 1991. Before it ended on February 28, US forces committed grievous war crimes that included gratuitous mass killings as well as bombings to destroy essential to life facilities of almost everything imaginable. The dominant media ignored the human cost along with removed power, clean water, sanitation, fuel, transportation, medical facilities, adequate food, schools, private dwellings and places of employment. A defenseless nation was leveled by a ruthless superpower. It was only the beginning. Twelve years of crushing genocidal sanctions followed. The results were predictable and devastating. Normal life was impossible and became a daily struggle to survive. By the mid-1990s, it was apparent many hadn't and wouldn't going forward. The media ignored it and instead blamed Saddam for what Washington and the West caused. The authors note that in the face of ugly facts, Tony Blair "once again employ(ed) his favoured strategy - passionately 'sincere' truth-reversal." That and clear facts on the ground got two UN heads of Iraqi humanitarian relief to resign in anger with Dennis Halliday in 1998 saying he did so because he "had been instructed to implement a policy that satisfies the definition of genocide: a deliberate policy that has effectively killed well over one million individuals, children and adults" including 5000 Iraqi children monthly in his judgment. The media was silent then and ever since in spite of appalling evidence of war crimes in plain sight. Consider the so-called Oil-for-Food program as well. It was adopted under UN Resolution 986 in 1995 but was hopelessly inadequate by design. An internal 1999 UN report revealed it provided about 21 cents a day for food and 4 cents more for medicines with vitally needed items banned or in short supply. Everything considered potentially "duel use" was blocked including chlorine to purify water, vital medical equipment, chemotherapy and pain-killing drugs, ambulances and whatever else Washington wished to withhold punitively. The consequences were horrific, the media was silent, and instead supported Blair's, Clinton's (and now Bush's) "moral war." As the authors put it: "With the wholehearted complicity of the media, the US and UK governments were able to blame the Iraqi regime for the suffering" it didn't cause and could do nothing to prevent. "Supported by a wave of propaganda, journalists were able to pass over the West's responsibility for vast crimes against humanity." Examples abound like BBC's John Simpson restricting his comments on "Western responsibility for genocide" to 16 words in one sentence in a November, 2002 on-air documentary. The authors noted that nine months after Media Lens was launched in 2001, they "began to realise the extent to which even high-profile journalists were unable to defend their arguments" in the face of overwhelming evidence refuting them. They tried nonetheless, still do and it keeps getting worse. Iraq Disarmed - Burying the 1991-98 Weapons Inspections To make its case for the March, 2003 invasion, Bush and Blair promoted two "myth(s) of non-cooperation" - that Saddam refused to cooperate with UNSCOM weapons inspectors up to 1998 and had retained deadly WMD stockpiles that threatened the region and western interests. One big lie followed another like Saddam expelled weapons inspectors in December, 1998. In fact, he was remarkably cooperative in the face abusive intrusions few nations would ever tolerate and if demanded of the US would be impossible. Making false claims was part of the scheme to attack and occupy the country as Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill discovered in the earliest days of the administration. He saw a secret memorandum preparing for war and a Pentagon document that discussed dividing up Iraq's energy reserves among western Big Oil giants. The road to war was launched with no turning back even though Scott Ritter, UNSCOM's chief weapons inspector, confirmed the following: that Bill Clinton ordered his team out of Iraq in December, 1998 on the eve of Operation Desert Fox, and the country was fundamentally disarmed with 90 - 95% of its (chemical and biological) WMDs "verifiably eliminated" at the time. There was no nuclear program. Further, whatever remained didn't "constitute a weapons program....only bits and pieces of useless sludge" past their limited shelf life. Conclusion: "Iraq cooperated in" its disarmament, but the US nonetheless manufactured a conflict in December, 1998 that was a precursor for the big one ahead. It was also learned that CIA spies operated with arms inspectors to get information the Clinton administration used for its attack. When it ended, Saddam wouldn't allow inspectors back in and justifiably called them spies. All along, the media reported the official line, ignored the truth and were thus complicit in the crimes of state they supported. The authors noted a "remarkable feature of media performance - that large numbers of individual journalists can come to move as an obedient herd despite easily available evidence contradicting the consensus view." As it always is, "This was standard right across the media" that never lets facts conflict with their servility to power. The authors also point to an "astonishing media omission" they call "the sludge of mass destruction" and cite CIA as the source. In a 1990 briefing, the spy agency stated: "(Iraq's) Botulinum toxin (its biological weapons) is nonpersistent, degrading rapidly in the environment" and only has a shelf life of a year when stored below 27 degrees Celcius. Further, Scott Ritter debunked Tony Blair's specter of an Iraq weaponized VX nerve agent. He confirmed UNSCOM found and blew up a VX factory in 1996. Iraq no longer could produce it and any amount remaining was worthless sludge. Comments from the media - support for Tony Blair and silence on the facts. Iraq - Gunning for War and Burying the Dead Throughout their book and with ample documentation, the authors eloquently and persuasively make their case. They conclusively prove without a doubt that "the role of the media is merely to channel the view of power (to allow it) to do as it pleases (so) the public will (only) be told what the powerful believe right, wrong, good and bad....all other views are ignored as irrelevant...." That's what passes for mainstream journalism in the West without even a hiccup of contradiction or hint of remorse. Doing otherwise is viewed as "crusading journalism....no matter how corrupt the interests and goals driving war." Noam Chomsky put it this way: "The basic principle, rarely violated, is what conflicts with the requirements of power and privilege does not exist." In the case of Iraq, the media fell right in line leading up to the conflict and once it began. It didn't matter they were being used or that they were callously indifferent to "the immorality of the US-UK attack and the (appalling) suffering" it caused. The little touched on above can only hint at the human toll and plain fact that the "cradle of civilization" was erased by design and reinvented as a free market paradise for profit with the grand prize being Iraq's immense, mostly undeveloped oil reserves. Then, there's the body count with estimates from 1990 to March, 2003 ranging up to 1.5 million or more deaths, two-thirds being children under age five. Post-US/UK invasion, it's even more staggering from the highly respected Lancet, UK ORB polling firm, UNICEF and other sources - up to two million deaths with UNICEF data estimating 800,000 children under age five. Slaughter on this scale is incontrovertible genocide under the provisions of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It "means any (acts of this type mass-killing) committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the national, ethnical, racial or religious group (by) killing (its) members; causing (them) serious bodily or mental harm; (or) deliberately inflicting (on them) conditions (that may destroy them in whole or in part)." By this standard alone, three US administrations and two in Britain are criminally liable. Additionally, there's what the Nuremberg Tribunal called "the supreme international crime" against peace, and the level of culpability overwhelms. Throughout it all, the media was unperturbed and continues to back the most appalling crimes of war and against humanity like they never happened. Consider this audacious comment from BBC political editor, Andrew Marr, from his 2004 book on British journalism: Those in the trade "are employed to be studiously neutral, expressing little emotion and certainly no opinion; millions of people would say that news is the conveying of fact, and nothing more." The hypocrisy is breathtaking. It continued as the media uniformly extolled the transfer of "sovereignty" in June, 2004 without mentioning that no legitimate government can exist under occupation and certainly not one turned to rubble. The authors quoted noted British journalist Robert Fisk saying "Alice in Wonderland could not have improved on this. The looking glass reflects all the way from Baghdad to Washington" with a stopover in London. Since it was formed, the "Iraqi government" is impotent. All power is in Washington, liberation is an illusion, and so is the notion of a free and democratic Iraq that was never part of the plan. Democracies are messy and the reason they're not tolerated. Afghanistan - Let Them East Grass The authors quote media expert Edward Herman on how the major media and other experts "normalize the unthinkable" by ignoring the most appalling state-sponsored crimes, doubting their severity and believing ends justify means. Bottom line - poor people of color in developing nations don't count, and the "art of successful mainstream journalism is to (convey this) without the public noticing." For the media on Afghanistan, the war largely ended when Kabul fell on November 13, 2001, a scant five weeks after it began on October 7. The bombing continued, but "the war was suddenly yesterday's news," and only Taliban crimes mattered. Ignored was what John Pilger wrote in his newest book "Freedom Next Time" - that "Through all the humanitarian crises in living memory, no country has been abused and suffered more, and none helped less than Afghanistan." He then described what was more like a moonscape than a functioning nation. Little has changed since, but the major media are uniformly silent. All that matters is the "war on terrorism" that justifies occupation, continued conflict, mass suffering and death. The authors cited a surreal example - "In the land of the blind, (a) one-eyed lion is news." Against the backdrop of mass human suffering and deaths, ITN journalists reported on the plight of "Marjan" in Kabul's zoo, and that a team of vets flew in to help. The network later mentioned that "Marjan" died as it callously ignored conditions on the ground for Afghanistan's human population who remain unnamed and matter less than a lion. Conditions for them are appalling with humanitarian agencies reporting they saw "people (without food) still eating grass" in January 2002. This contrasts with state-sponsored propaganda that Afghanistan is now free from "fear, uncertainty and chaos," and the US and UK "act(ed) benignly, and (the)humanitarian military assault is beneficial." Again, reality can't deny the official message so blamed for continuing conflict are the "meddlesome Afghans (who) are undermining our good work." Out of sight and mind are the real motives behind the 9/11 attack and the price Afghans (and Iraqis) pay for it. Also ignored is why we occupy their country. It has nothing to do with terrorism, humanitarian intervention or democracy. It has everything to do with imperial gain. The result is an unimaginable level of suffering that continues today under a puppet government, a brutal occupation, and no end to either in sight. Try getting that type report in the mainstream. Kosovo - Real Bombs, Fictional Genocide No recent conflict in memory evoked more popular support on the right and left than the 1990s Balkan wars. They culminated in 1999 with a 78 day NATO air assault on Serbia whose leader, Slobadon Milosevic, was unfairly cast as the villain. The conflict lasted from March 24 to June 10 on the pretext of protecting Kosovo's Albanian population. It was all a ruse. Kosovo is a Serbian province. It still is, but it's under NATO occupation with plans to make it independent and complete the "Balkanization" of Yugoslavia. In the run-up to war, the propaganda was familiar. Tony Blair called it "a battle between good and evil; between civilization and barbarity; between democracy and dictatorship." British defence secretary, George Robertson, was even worse saying intervention was needed to stop "a regime which is bent on genocide," and Bill Clinton also raised the specter of "genocide." Each case was the equivalent of elevating Bunker Hill to Mt. Everest or maybe the heavens. So how did unreported facts on the ground refute the official myth? The Balkan wars destroyed a country to keep predatory capitalism on a roll for new markets, valued resources and cheap exploitable labor. Slobadon Milosevic was the fall guy and ended up in the Hague where he was hung out to dry by the ICTY US-run court. There he was effectively silenced, denied proper medical care and forced in the end to take his secrets to the grave with him. Earlier, however, war raged in his country for 78 mercilessly days as a sort of earlier version of "shock and awe." NATO bombing killed 500 civilians, caused an estimated $100 billion in damage, and according to Amnesty International (AI), was responsible for "serious violations of the laws of war leading in a number of cases to the unlawful killing of civilians." Translated in language AI rarely uses - NATO committed war crimes, but only its victims were punished. They were carried out on the pretext of averting a humanitarian crisis that didn't exist so NATO invented one. Here are facts unreported in the mainstream. One month before the bombing, the German Foreign Office stated that a "feared humanitarian catastrophe threatening the Albanian civil population had been averted (and) public life (in larger cities) returned to relative normality." Instead of genocide, NATO reported after the war that 2000 people were killed in Kosovo on all sides in the year prior to the bombing, and the US-backed Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) did most of it. NATO's attack was the culprit. It caused a humanitarian crisis, and the flood of refugees occurred when the bombing began. So did lootings, killings, rape, kidnappings and pillage according to an OSCE study. The media response was breathtaking. It "exactly reverse(d) cause and effect suggesting that bombing was justified (to halt) the flood of refugees it had in fact created." Once again, the lies were breathtaking. The authors note that like for the Iraq conflict, this war "was made possible by audacious government manipulation of a public denied access to the truth by an incompetent and structurally corrupt media. Every British paper (and American ones, of course) except one took a pro-war line" editorially, and journalists "proudly proclaimed their role in supporting the 'humanitarian intervention' " when there was none. The authors also note that "Editors and journalists do not drop bombs or pull triggers, but without their servility to power the public would not be fooled and the slaughter would have to end" or would never have begun. No nominally democratic government can stand up against the majority will of its people - provided they know about "the complicity of the corporate mass media in mass murder." Another alternative also works against which they're defenseless - ignore them, denounce them and seek reliable independent news and information sources like Media Lens, this web site and many other reliable ones. East Timor - The Practical Limits of Crusading Humanitarianism Give credit where it's due. Tiny impoverished East Timor is hardly a match for Indonesia with its 200 million population backed by Washington for what both countries gain from each other. Nonetheless and after "months of murderous intimidation" by Indonesian-backed militias, the East Timorese overwhelmingly voted for independence by a near four to one margin. It was courageous but costly, and it came in the form of "a horrendous bloodbath" against pro-independence backers. The US held off responding for 10 days intentionally and only did so under great public pressure. The delay allowed 70% of all public buildings and private residences to be destroyed and three-fourths of the population to be "herded across the border to West Timor, where hostage taking, killings and sexual assault were a daily occurrence." BBC's Matt Frei was indifferent like his fellow correspondents generally are. He described it as a "moral crusade," but UN commissioner for human rights, Mary Robinson, had different view with "thousands pay(ing) with their lives for the world's slow response." BBC practically choked before casually admitting our Indonesian allies were behind the massacres. Never admitted on-air was that its military-run country is a major Western ally and business partner. For BBC and others in the dominant media, "news ceases to be news when it seriously damages establishment interests." East Timor gained independence on May 20, 2002. At the time, reports mentioned that around 200,000 East Timorese (or one-third of the population) were massacred or starved to death in 1975 after the Ford administration condoned Indonesia's takeover of the territory and supplied the Surharto government with lists of communist sympathizers to round up and eliminate. Back then, it got little attention in the mainstream and quickly faded from view after independence. Why so? Indonesia is mineral-rich while East Timor hardly matters. The authors cited the "Golden Rule of media reporting - the tendency to overlook horrors committed by the West and its allies." They also call this "The calculations of realpolitik." Mineral wealth trumps concern for an impoverished people whose only worth is the sweat they supply at the lowest possible cost - everywhere. Haiti - The Hidden Logic of Exploitation Haiti is the poorest country in the Americas and one of its most exploited. That's saying a lot in a region dismissively called America's "backyard" and ruthlessly exploited by Washington for decades. The country is small (around three times the size of Los Angeles) and has a population of around eight million. Since European settlers arrived 500 years ago, it experienced an almost unparalleled legacy of colonial violence and exploitation. Even when it gained independence from France on January 1, 1804, it lay in ruins. It was short-lived as France regained control and kept it until America took over later and solidified its hold when Woodrow Wilson sent in Marines in 1915 to protect US investments. Washington remains in control, and the authors explain its logic to keep Haitians and other developing world people in line. Their "dreams of a better life must be crushed by violence and grinding poverty so extreme that local people will accept any work at any rate, and abandon all notions of improving their lot." It's the reason why western elites use "death squads, tyrants and economic oppression" as their methods of choice and why ordinary people are no match against them. Hope for Haitians arose in 1990 when a Catholic priest named Jean-Bertrand Aristide gained prominence. He ran for President and shocked Washington by getting two-thirds of the vote to become Haiti's first ever democratically elected leader. A September, 1991 US-backed military coup cut short his tenure, however. It removed him, reestablished harsh rule, and "stamp(ed) out (the beginnings of a) vibrant civil society" that began to take root. A bloodbath followed with CIA paramilitaries behind it. Aristide regained nominal power in 1994 after he agreed to Washington's neoliberal terms. Haiti's constitutional rule was restored, and he was allowed to return as President along with 20,000 US "peacekeepers" to assure IMF demands were observed. The authors noted the "free press" version of events from when Aristide was first elected. Like always, it glossed over facts and ignored "the long, documented history of US support for mass murderers attacking Aristide's democratic government and killing his supporters....the hidden agenda behind (his return) to power (and) the limits imposed on his range of options by the superpower protecting its business interests." There was barely a mention of US commercial interests in Haiti or how brutally Haitians are exploited for profit. Against all obstacles, however, Aristide was overwhelmingly popular. It showed in November, 2000 when he was reelected President with 92% of the vote, and his Lavalas party dominated parliament from the earlier May election. Their control lasted four years, then ended abruptly on February 29, 2004. In the middle of the night, a US Marine contingent forcibly removed the Haitian leader because he defied the rules of imperial management, governed like a democrat and was committed to helping Haiti's poor. Ever since, the country has been a killing field under US control with a paramilitary "peacekeeper" contingent as enforcers. They were sent illegally for the first time ever to support a coup d'etat against a democratically elected President instead of backing his right to return to the office he won freely and fairly. The media ignored the facts and portrayed the US as an "honest broker." They supported the scheme that Aristide "had to go" because his people no longer supported him nor did the international community. "Forget the democratic process. Forget the landslide victories." Forget the successive US-backed bloodbaths following Aristide's rise to power in 1990. Forget any hope Haiti might emerge from its nightmarish 500 year history. All that mattered was power and where most of it lay. No need to point a finger. A great need to denounce the media that turns a blind eye to it. Idolatry Ink - Reagan, the 'Cheerful Conservative' and 'Chubby Bubba' Clinton Few US presidents did more harm yet got more praise than Ronald Reagan, and Mark Hertsgaard wrote about it in his book,"On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency." The authors here review his record and cover some of the adulatory avalanche following his death on June 5, 2004. It was a painful week to recall and one that abandoned any measure of truth to portray a man and his "extraordinary successful presidency." It was indeed for the power elite and the way he served them at the expense of the public good. Out of sight and mind were a few minor things that happened during his tenure. The Iran-Contra scandal for one that would have sunk Nixon faster than Watergate had he been the culprit. But there was much more, and the authors cover some of it to set the record straight on a man only corporatists and friendly tyrants could love. Reagan earned his bona fides on two issues - supporting big business and claiming he was hawkishly anti-communist. The two were, in fact, the same with the authors saying "the real motive behind the American slaughter in the Third World - profits, not fear of the Soviet Union - is indicated by patterns of investment" that rose dramatically under US friendly regimes. Examples were in Chile under Pinochet, Iran under the Shah, Brazil under the generals, Guatemala after its democracy died, and many other client countries around the world. Excluded from investment and targeted for regime change are states run independently that place their sovereignty above our right to control it. The authors give examples of leaders who tried in Central America and paid dearly for their effort. They put it this way: "Reagan's eight years in office (1981-1989) produced a vast bloodbath as Washington funnelled money, weapons and supplies to client dictators and right-wing death squads battling independent nationalism across Central America." Central Asia, Africa and wherever else an independent leader arose followed a similar pattern. Major media ignored official Reagan administration policy - to "terrorize impoverished people into accepting a status quo that condemned them to lives of profitable misery." It doesn't matter how many tens of thousands die or how impoverished we condemn the living. Instead, typical media comments about Reagan were like the one from the London Guardian saying he'll be "chiefly remembered now for....his tax cutting economic policies, his role in (ending) the cold war and his ability to make America feel so good about itself after the turmoil of Vietnam, civil rights and Watergate." Bill Clinton is still living, but he's also well treated, aside from his personal peccadillos in office now forgotten. As usual, the media ignores his dark side that caused great harm at home and an overwhelming amount abroad. As the authors observe, it's because demeaning a president is "disrespectful, even irresponsible." So the worst of his record was unreported with plenty of choices to choose from such as eight harsh years of Iraq sanctions that caused around 1.5 million deaths with two-thirds of them children under age five. This and more go unmentioned because the media defer to power, and presidents and prime ministers get "unlimited respect bordering on reverence." Want the truth? Independent journalism provides what's absent in the mainstream everywhere. Ultimate Change - The Ultimate Media Betrayal The issue here is the danger that the planet may become uninhabitable because of climate change alone, and the authors cite evidence to show it. In each case, the conclusion is the same - global warming is real, threatening, and serious efforts are urgently needed to remediate it. Enter the media with the authors saying although they "do report the latest disasters and dramatic warnings, there are few serious attempts to explore the identity and motives of corporate opponents to action" on this vital issue. Why? Because of powerful business opposition that includes the corporate press. The silence is deafening, and the authors state it's "the mother of all silences, because the fossil fuel economy is the mother of all vested interests." It hardly matters that the London-based Global Commons Institute predicts over two million deaths worldwide in the next 10 years from climate-related disasters, and we see lesser amounts happening now every year. It gets worse with the prestigious journal Nature publishing a four-year research study by scientists from eight countries. They predict over one million species will be extinct by 2050, and they describe their findings as "terrifying." How does the oil industry respond? According to oil and gas industry consultant, Bob Williams, it must "put the environmental lobby out of business." How does the media respond? Silence in the face of "much of life on earth threatened by mass death...." The authors say "the corporate media occasionally laments the destruction of our world in editorials, but it is not in the business of doing anything about it. In fact, literally the reverse is true." In their advertising and content, they promote a lifestyle of excessive fossil fuel consumption - gas-guzzling cars, air travel and a whole array of other high energy consuming products most of which are unessential and do little to enhance our lives. The authors wonder if readers may question their view on how the media approach climate issues and answer this way: "....we believe our lives, the lives of our children, indeed much of animal and plant life on this planet, are in great danger. We believe, further, that the means of mobilizing popular support for action to prevent this catastrophe - the mass media - is fatally compromised by its very structure, nature and goals. This is no joke," and unless we expose and challenge the status quo "there may well be no future for any of us." What greater motivation is there than that. Disciplined Media - Professional Conformity to Power Key here is that nations or people committing destructive acts don't usually act out of ingrained cruelty and hatred. As the authors put it: "In reality, evil is not merely banal. It is often free of any sense of being evil - there may be no sense of moral responsibility for suffering at all." A typical response when asked is: "I'm just doing what I'm paid to do (or) I'm just doing my job." It's as true of torturers as businessmen who must do as they're told and know what comes with the job. Perform or find another one, and the same obligation holds for journalists. "Like military personnel, (they) also sign themselves over to authority" and that requires prioritizing their employers' welfare "in everything they say and do." The result is always the same. Official enemies are demonized, government crimes are ignored or "prettified," and corporate greed is overlooked along with the common good. The authors refer to this as the "gushing phenomenon" that led western journalists to "gush" over the fall of Baghdad and later the transfer of "sovereignty" in the country's "first democratic elections in 50 years in January, 2005." Never mind the absence of democracy, the myth that there is any, and the fact that the country's "sovereignty" resides in Washington and is enforced from its branch office inside the heavily fortified Green Zone. Mainstream journalists ignore this and are compliant because they have to be or find other work. They perform "in the absence of any conspiracy, with minimal self-censorship, and with even less outright lying." Psychologist Eric Fromm explained the phenomenon that the authors expressed their way: that "all modern individuals are socialised to perceive themselves as morally empty vessels willing to accept whatever is demanded of them." They're "commodities to be bought and sold for employment" - to do their job and not question their employers. Journalists aren't paid to lie. They simply "subordinate their capacity for critical thought to a professional standard (knowing this is) just how things are done." In a nominally free society, control isn't maintained by violence but "by deception, self-deception, and by a mass willingness to subordinate our own thoughts and feelings to notions of professionalism and objectivity." It's sadly ironic that people who make an evil and violent world possible aren't that way themselves. Nonetheless, it must be wondered how often, if ever, they consider the consequences of their actions or inactions. Toward a Compassionate Media The authors note that the dominant media's "subliminal message is that our rulers are superior, transcendent, benign (so they must) be afforded respect, even awe, as the loftiest stratum of a proudly meritocratic political system" that places all other people and their leaders on lower rungs. It shouldn't surprise that many journalists view western values and sophistication as "intellectually, culturally and morally superior to the less developed societies of the impoverished South." In a word, "West is best" in their minds so it follows our lives have greater value. Enter Media Lens and its mission. The authors state to the best of their knowledge it's "the first serious attempt to provide a regular, radical response to mainstream propaganda in the UK." If corporate-paid journalists did it, their careers would end so they can't, won't and don't ever except around the edges where it hardly matters or is barely noticed. Media Lens, in the authors' words, does "much more than talk about practical solutions." It is "a practical solution." The dominant media depends on uncriticized "self-delusions" while the role of the alternative media is to challenge them. With an expanding internet, it can be done by reaching a mass audience with minimal cost. The authors refer to "citizen reporters" and their growing role in providing real news and information unavailable in the mainstream. They hope this will lead to a greater public awareness and "power to impose a news agenda on the mainstream" or replace it altogether as a reliable source. Even more, they hope to "motivate large popular movements" that may be able to "reform media structures to restrict the influence of corporate interests" where the bottom-line priority is their "bottom line." The authors go further as well and say an "honest media" require "truth telling (that) should be motivated by compassion for suffering rather than greed for wealth, status and privilege." In their judgment, that's incentive enough to seek real causes of problems and workable solutions to them. Their goal is an "honest, compassionate, non-corporate" media because a model based on profit and growing shareholder equity can't possibly allow sentiment and compassion to be a consideration. It doesn't flow to the bottom line. Great goals begin with noble ideas backed by action, but the authors admit that vision is a long way off. For now, their "energies (are) spent....in joining, forming, funding and supporting real democratic media initiatives.... through Internet websites and blogs." The mainstream can be challenged, they believe, and success depends on believing in three things: the benefits of ending others' suffering; a compassionate media is worth working for; and acting to achieve it. Full Human Dissent Corporations today manipulate society and our lives by harming the greater good for profits. Consider the cost: "individual depression, global environmental collapse, wars for control of natural resources" and global dominion. It happens because we're saturated in a "mass consumer culture" that ignores "our needs as human beings." To counteract this, we need "to find more humanly productive answers" mainstream culture calls "dissident" or "absurd," but the authors believe are possible and vital. Approaches to "individual and social well-being (are) practiced in many traditional cultures (but have been) filtered out" of ours because they conflict with corporate goals already explained. The authors once worked for corporate employers and described their condition as "unrelieved boredom and stress....work....of no intrinsic interest (and) simply a means to the end of material acquisition." They concluded that life centered around money and status "becomes a depressing dead end, a kind of emotional wasteland." They contrast that experience to their involvement today in "unpaid human rights and environmental work" that includes their Media Lens efforts. Compassionate dissent holds promise as a motivating force - "for media activism, peace activism, human and animal rights activism, and environmental activism." It's also "profoundly conducive to our own well-being." The authors end by stating political dissent must be combined with human dissent. The combination can be powerfully self-liberating and "all the motivation we need to act for the welfare of the world." Isn't that a goal worth working for? Isn't it what what we want for ourselves? Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at [lendmanstephen at sbcglobal.net][1]. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. [1]: mailto:lendmanstephen at sbcglobal.net URL: http://mostlywater.org/reviewing_david_cromwell_and_david_edwards_guardians_power From news at resist.ca Thu Jan 10 11:17:10 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2008 19:17:10 -0000 Subject: [news] [VIDEO] On The Edge: The Femicide in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico Message-ID: <20080110191710.29168.qmail@resist.ca> Hundreds of women have gone missing or have turned up dead in this Mexican border town just across from El Paso, Texas. Many women fear that the perpetrators act with impunity from local officials. Many of the women have been raped, their bodies mutilated. There are a great number of parallels to be drawn between this situation and the missing women of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. This is the first installment of "On The Edge: The Femicide in Ciudad Juarez", a film that was finished in 2006. This is the first time the entire film will be viewable online. Every Monday for the next 8 weeks, another section of the film will be made available. If the video doesn't display properly below, see the original article. [Get the Flash Player][1] to see this player. &showdigits&autostart ![][2] [1]: http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer [2]: http://mostlywater.org/system/files/images/on_the_edge.preview.jpg () URL: http://mostlywater.org/video_edge_femicide_ciudad_juarez_mexico From news at resist.ca Thu Jan 10 20:17:05 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2008 04:17:05 -0000 Subject: [news] Laibar Singh Safe in Sanctuary Message-ID: <20080111041705.3963.qmail@resist.ca> Laibar Singh Safe in Sanctuary (important ways to support and UPCOMING EVENTS/ACTIONS, including cross-country are included below) ![2181140376_6bd3b50d63.jpg][1]As people have likely heard by now, Mr. Laibar Singh was not deported on yesterday December 9th at 4:30 am and remains in sanctuary in Guru Nanak Sikh Temple in Surrey. The last minute notice of the deportation and the removal time of 4:30 am was a deliberate and under-handed attempt to thwart public outcry and support. At 4:00 am, approximately 300 supporters gathered to protest and bear witness to CBSA?s enforcement of a deportation in violation of sanctuary. In light of a major backlash for violating sanctuary and in the presence of hundreds of supporters, CBSA backed off from the deportation. ![2181094434_6ef903eea2.jpg][2]The Surrey Guru Nanak Gurudwara has made clear to CBSA that Laibar Singh is in sanctuary in their premises. In having decided to enter temple premises yesterday or any date in the future, CBSA is breaching a historic moral tradition of sanctuary. Sanctuary is an act of courage that faith communities take to protect the lives of those facing deportation in light of unjust government decisions. In a December 20, 2007 press release the Ontario Sanctuary Coalition stated ?We reaffirm the regrettable necessity of the practice of granting Sanctuary? [Sanctuary] has now become a national movement of conscience.? Denise Nadeau of the Interfaith Sanctuary Coalition and Acting Director of the SFU Interfaith Summer Institute states ?The deportation of Laibar Singh from sanctuary and in the face of massive public support for this man?s right to dignity and to live with his community is a fragrant violation not only of sanctuary but of the basic human rights of disabled persons, of asylum seekers and of the democratic will of a significant proportion of the population.? In fact, a May 2007 report by the House of Commons Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration whose members include MP?s Norman Doyle, Andrew Telegdi, Meili Faille, Omar Alghabra, Dave Batters, Barry Devolin, Raymond Gravel, Nina Grewal, Jim Karygiannis, Ed Komarnicki, Bill Siksay, and Blair Wilson, recommended the following to CBSA and CIC ?That CIC, the CBSA, and law enforcement officials respect the right of churches and other religious organizations to provide sanctuary to those they believe are in need of protection? That in cases of MEDICAL EMERGENCIES (emphasis added), those who have sought sanctuary, and members of their family, be allowed to receive medical treatment without the threat that they will be arrested or detained.? The August 2007 decision by CBSA to detain Mr. Laibar Singh while he was receiving emergency care and any future attempts by CBSA to detain Mr. Laibar Singh if he requires medical emergency care would clearly be in defiance and contravention of the government?s own recommendations. Recent sensationalist media reports have attempted to question the significance of Mr. Laibar Singh?s medical condition. There is clearly no doubt that Mr. Singh is a severely disabled and paralyzed man. Immigration Canada?s own health assessments recognize the severity of Mr. Singh?s condition. Various doctors have dealt with Mr. Singh and have stated various causes of his paralysis; yet the basic issue remains the same: Mr. Singh is a severely disabled and paralyzed man who should be able to remain in Canada on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. As expected unfortunately, there has been a significant backlash yet again to the South Asian community and to refugee struggles in general. Pete McMartin at the Vancouver Sun (who previously had written about a $5 bet with his editor about the outcome of the case) has quoted Don DeVoretz, an advisor to the CBSA, as stating how past legal Charter victories which now afford some (minimal) protection to refugees have ?bogged down the immigration process? and how it is negative and undesirable that with time a refugee is able to ?to integrate oneself into the community.? The significant media scrutiny and questioning of this case and the South Asian community at-large has revealed the ways in which immigrant/racialized communities as awhole who are constantly reminded of their subordinate position especially during moments of resistance to the Canadian state. Finally, a **growing list of supporters** are demanding that Mr. Laibar Singh be granted permanent residency on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. These supporters include Michael A. Leitold of the Law Union of Ontario Steering Committee, Janet Cleveland who holds the Canada Research Chair in International Migration Law, noted authors and researchers Naomi Klein and Seth Klein, Professor and Japanese-Canadian redress activist Roy Mikki (Order of Canada), Kader Belaouni who has been in sanctuary in Montreal since Jan 2006, Sister Elizabeth Kelliher of the Fransican Sister of the Atonement, labour activists such as Dave Bleakney of CUPW and Frank Lee of CUPE, academics such as John Price, Nandita Sharma, Cynthia Wright, Gary Kinsman, and Maro Jo Nadeau, Rabble Editor Derrick O?Keefe, along with the Canadian Labour Congress, Hospital Employees Union, BC Coalition of People with Disabilities, Canadian Union of Postal Workers, Council of Canadians BC/Yukon Chapter, Save our Rivers Society, Multifaith Action Committee, Association of Chinese Canadians for Equality and Solidarity Society, Indigenous Free Skool, Solidarity Across Borders Montreal, No One Is Illegal Toronto, Industrial Workers of the World, Vancouver Status of Women, La Surda Latin American Collective, Interfaith Community Consultative Committee of the SFU Interfaith Summer Institute, Ligue des droits et libert?s du Qu?bec, Student Christian Movement of Canada, Students for a Democratic Society UBC, Halifax Coalition Against Poverty, Vancouver Catholic Worker, Immigrant Workers Centre Montreal, Canadian Youth Network for Asia Pacific Solidarity, and countless more individuals and community groups. It is also important to note that Mr. Singh?s case is not unprecedented. In October 2006, a Polish family on tourist visas in Winnipeg suffered from a car accident that left the father paralyzed. Initially they were refused; however their deportation order was subsequently overturned. Ministerial discretion in humanitarian and compassionate claims can and has been exercised in the past to stop deportations; _in fact it exists for that very purpose_. We believe it is unfortunate that some are declaring that he must leave because he does not ?belong? any longer, despite the fact that his newly found family and community are here. Certainly his physical state of paralysis and the widespread community support he has received are all crucial factors and realities for Mr. Singh. He, like anyone else, should be entitled to live a healthy and dignified life. We must challenge the idea that some are more worthy than others to decide their right to mobility and their assertion of self determination; instead we should accept these as universal values of humanity. The struggle against deportation and to support Laibar is not for him alone nor is it simply one case, rather it symbolizes the struggles for all immigrant and refugees who daily struggle to live with dignity. His situation reveals how hard and long racialized migrants must fight to assert their right to self-determination that the Canadian government consistently denies and instead perpetuates pain, anxiety, and violence through detentions and deportations against which we must continue to actively organize ourselves. All Power to the People! No One is Illegal! For more information call 778 552 2099 or email noii-van at resist.ca For an excellent backgrounder visit Communities For Laibar Singh: http://supportlaibar.blogspot.com/ ==> WAYS TO SUPPORT AND UPCOMING EVENTS/ACTIONS <== 1) Please attend the **community forum** in support of Laibar Singh and on broader issues of migration and race with speakers lawyer Zool Suleman, representatives of the Canadian Labour Congress and Hospital Employees Union, theologian Denise Nadeau, and South Asian community organizers Gurpreet Singh and Gurvinder Dhaliwal. Details: Saturday Jan 12th at 5:45 pm at Vancouver Public Library. Organized by Communities for Laibar Singh. Call 604 779 7430. Further details are available at: http://noii-van.resist.ca/?p=610 2) Please write letters to the editor, post online, or call into radio shows into the **various media outlets** that are covering this story. We strongly urge and stress to supporters the importance of voicing your opinion on this issue and adding your thoughts to the very public debate on Laibar Singh and immigration in general. Although it may seem futile and given the biases that have been clearly stated by various media outlets, it is still absolutely crucial for us to enter this public debate and discourse at this time. 3) Please stay in tune for details on an upcoming vigil in support of Laibar Singh as part of a **National Day of Action** in Support of Laibar Singh along with allies in Montreal, Toronto and other cities. *** Our allies in Toronto with No One Is Illegal Toronto, Sikh Activist Network and their supporters are organizing a delegation and press conference in support of Laibar Singh. Details: FRIDAY JAN 11 at 10am at 25 St. Clair Avenue East, Toronto (Immigration Canada Regional offices. Please visit toronto.nooneisillegal.org for more details. 4) Please continue to **pressure Immigration Minister Diane Finley**. We realize that most of you are probably flooded by letter-writing campaigns or find letter-writing futile. However, it is CLEAR that the government has been forced to respond to an unparalled amount of support and pressure and it is time that they get the message and grant Mr. Laibar Singh a permanent stay on his deportation order. If you have called or written before, please do so again! IMMIGRATION MINISTER DIANE FINLAY * CALL (PREFERABLE): (613) 996-4974 * FAX: (613) 996-9749 * EMAIL: minister at cic.gc.ca and Finley.D at parl.gc.ca MINISTER STOCKWELL DAY (RESPONSIBLE FOR CBSA) * CALL: 613.995.1702 or 250.770.4480 * FAX: 613.995.1154 or 250.770.4484 * EMAIL: day.s at parl.gc.ca or days1 at parl.gc.ca ======> SAMPLE LETTER <======== Minister Finley and Minister Day, Regarding: Laibar Singh I am writing regarding the situation of Mr. Laiber Singh. I am sure that you are aware of the case of the paralyzed Punjabi refugee claimant Mr. Laiber Singh, who is currently facing deportation . A wide variety of human rights organizations, disability advocates and community groups have also expressed their support for Mr. Singh?s bid to remain in Canada on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. These groups include the Canadian Labour Congress, BC Coalition of People with Disabilities, B.C Hospital Employees Union, the Multifaith Action Committee, and a long list of South Asian community groups and gurudwaras. Over the past few months, approximately forty thousand people have signed an Official petition to Parlimament in support of Mr. Singh remaining in Canada on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. On October 9, 2007, a group of health care professionals- including 13 independent doctors- issued a letter to Immigration Minster Diane Finley stating, ?As health professionals, we are outraged at the fact that the Canadian government would consider deporting a paraplegic man, whose health condition is extremely fragile? For the sake of his safety, health and well being, we fully support him and demand that [the Minister] grant him permanent residency status on the basis of humanitarian and compassionate grounds immediately.? It is outrageous that the Canadian government would deport a man who is already struggling to life a live of dignity and autonomy, and whose physical health is so fragile.For the sake of his own safety, for the well-being of his physical health, and based on the life that Mr.Singh has already established, I fully support him and demand that you stop the deportation of Mr. Laibar Singh immediately and grant him permanent residency status. I also urgently request that the Canadian government and CBSA officals respect the sanctity of sanctuary that the Guru Nanak Sikh temple have granted to Mr. Laibar Singh and not attempt to remove Mr. Singh from sanctuary or detain him if he requires urgent medical attention at a medical facility. [1]: http://noii-van.resist.ca/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/2181140376_6bd3b50d63.jpg [2]: http://noii-van.resist.ca/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/2181094434_6ef903eea2.jpg URL: http://mostlywater.org/laibar_singh_safe_sanctuary From news at resist.ca Thu Jan 10 23:17:09 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2008 07:17:09 -0000 Subject: [news] Ex-CIA Agent Philip Agee Dead in Cuba Message-ID: <20080111071709.20387.qmail@resist.ca> Ex-CIA Agent Philip Agee Dead in Cuba By WILL WEISSERT HAVANA (AP) - Philip Agee, a former CIA agent who became an outspoken critic of Washington's Cuba policy, has died in a Havana hospital following ulcer surgery, state media reported Wednesday. He was 72. Agee quit the CIA in 1969 after 12 years working mostly in Latin America at a time when leftist movements were gaining prominence and sympathizers. His 1975 book "Inside the Company: CIA Diary," cited alleged CIA misdeeds against leftists in the region that included a 22-page list of purported agency operatives. Granma, Cuba's Communist Party newspaper, said Agee died Monday night and described him as "a loyal friend of Cuba and fervent defender of the peoples' fight for a better world." Bernie Dwyer, a journalist with state-run Radio Havana, said in a Tuesday message posted to a Cuba e-mail group that Agee's wife called him to say he had died in the hospital, where he has he been since Dec. 15. "He had several operations for perforated ulcers and didn't survive all the surgery," Dwyer wrote, adding that Agee was cremated Tuesday and that friends planned a memorial ceremony for him Sunday at his Havana apartment. In 2000, with European investors and a state-run travel agent as his partners, Agee opened a travel Web site designed to bring U.S. tourists to Cuba. The site, cubalinda.com, offers package tours and other help with Cuban tourism that is largely off limits to Americans. There was no word of Agee's death on the site Wednesday. The author of several other books besides "Inside the Company," one of Agee's last essays was published in Granma International newspaper in 2003 and came shortly after a Cuban government crackdown led to the arrest of 75 leading dissidents and political activists. "To think that the dissidents were creating an independent, free civil society is absurd, for they were funded and controlled by a hostile foreign power and to that degree, which was total, they were not free or independent in the least," he wrote. Agee has also been accused of receiving up to $1 million in payments from the Cuban intelligence service. He denied the accusations, which were first made by a high-ranking Cuban intelligence officer and defector in a 1992 report. Barbara Bush, the wife of former President George H.W. Bush - himself a one-time CIA chief - in her autobiography accused Agee's book of exposing a CIA station chief, Richard S. Welch, who was later killed by leftist terrorists in Athens in 1975. Agee, who denied any involvement in the killing, sued her for $4 million for defamation, and she revised the book to settle the case. Agee's U.S. passport was revoked in 1979. U.S. officials said he had threatened national security. After years of living in Hamburg, Germany - occasionally underground, fearing CIA retribution - Agee moved to Havana to open the travel site. [http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hyYAW2lkU6NJa4P6tJNEIZqCy...][1] [1]: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hyYAW2lkU6NJa4P6tJNEIZqCydBgD8U2E78G0 (http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hyYAW2lkU6NJa4P6tJNEIZqCydBgD8U2E78G0) URL: http://mostlywater.org/excia_agent_philip_agee_dead_cuba From news at resist.ca Sat Jan 12 13:17:04 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2008 21:17:04 -0000 Subject: [news] Over 80 arrested at Supreme Court in Friday Guantanamo action Message-ID: <20080112211704.10515.qmail@resist.ca> Over 80 arrested at Supreme Court in Friday Guantanamo action Saturday, January 12 2008 @ 12:07 AM PST [![][1]][2]North America, WASHINGTON, DC ? Early this afternoon, at least 80 activists organized by Witness Against Torture delivered a message to the U.S. Supreme Court demanding the shut-down of the U.S. prison at Guant?namo and justice for those detained. About 40 activists were arrested inside the Court building and another 40 on the steps. The arrests, for demonstrating without a permit, followed a solemn march from the National Mall of 400 persons that included a procession of activists dressed like the Guant?namo prisoners in orange jumpsuits and black hoods. They were part of an International Day of Action that was endorsed by a broad and unprecedented coalition of over 100 groups and that included 83 events around the world. PRESS RELEASE http://www.witnesstorture.org FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE January 11, 2008 CONTACT: Eric Laursen, 917-806-6452 Sheila Stumph, 214-226-0503, 973-445-5382 Michael McGuire, 443-831-7198 OVER 80 ARRESTED AT U.S. SUPREME COURT DIRECT ACTION TODAY DEMANDED SHUT-DOWN OF GUANTANAMO AND AN END TO TORTURE AND INDEFINITE DETENTION WASHINGTON, DC ? Early this afternoon, at least 80 activists organized by Witness Against Torture delivered a message to the U.S. Supreme Court demanding the shut-down of the U.S. prison at Guant?namo and justice for those detained. About 40 activists were arrested inside the Court building and another 40 on the steps. The arrests, for demonstrating without a permit, followed a solemn march from the National Mall of 400 persons that included a procession of activists dressed like the Guant?namo prisoners in orange jumpsuits and black hoods. They were part of an International Day of Action that was endorsed by a broad and unprecedented coalition of over 100 groups and that included 83 events around the world. The International Day of Action launches a concerted campaign to Shut Down Guant?namo. For more information, please visit http://witnesstorture.org. Inside, a member of Witness Against Torture delivered a letter to the nine Supreme Court justices regarding Al Odah v. United States and Boumediene v. Bush, the two cases brought by Guant?namo detainees that the Court is now considering. They also delivered a writ of habeas corpus for each of the 275 current detainees. Other activists attempted to unfurl a banner inside the Court building but were prevented from doing so by police, who began arresting them and shut the front doors to the building. Another group then started reading the names of the Guant?namo prisoners, but were prevented. They then sat down and started chanting, ?Shut it down!? prior to being arrested. At approximately the same time, about 25 activists dressed in orange jumpsuits and black hoods representing the men imprisoned at Guant?namo knelt on the steps of the Court building with hands before them and bowed heads, the position detainees in Guant?namo are often required to assume; others unfurled a banner on the steps. They were arrested as well. Each arrestee had entered the building without ID, and was taken into custody under the name of one of the Guant?namo prisoners. ?This group brought the names of the victims of Guant?namo right to the Supreme Court,? said Elizabeth McAlister, a member of the Jonah House community in Baltimore and the mother of one of the persons arrested inside the Court. ?The Court has listened and listened to the views of the imprisoned, but has not heard them.? Outside the Court, advocates read testimonies and names of prisoners, performed street theater, and handed out information. One performance was a simulation of waterboarding, one of the most controversial torture tactics used at Guant?namo and other U.S. detention centers. January 11, 2008 marks six years of detention without hope of release for nearly 300 men at Guant?namo. ?Lawyers are working hard to bring the cases of the prisoners into the courts,? said Susan Crane of Witness Against Torture, who was arrested in today?s action. ?But lawyers can only do so much. These prisoners, who have been illegally detained, tortured, abused, and kept from their families for years, are not even able to communicate openly with their lawyers. That?s why we were here today to appeal to the Supreme Court justices to stand up now and end this abuse.? Witness Against Torture is calling on the U.S. government to: * Repeal the Military Commissions Act and restore Habeas Corpus; * Charge and try or release all detainees; * Clearly and unequivocally forbid torture and all other forms of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, by the military, the CIA, prison guards, civilian contractors, or anyone else; * Pay reparations to current and former detainees and their families for violations of their human rights; and * Shut down Guant?namo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and all secret CIA detention facilities. About Witness Against Torture Tomorrow's action is the latest by Witness Against Torture, which came into being in December 2005 when a group of 24 friends walked to Guant?namo to visit the prisoners ? an action following the nonviolent tradition of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker. Upon returning to the U.S., they continued the work with public education and community outreach, networking and resource sharing, and acts of nonviolent civil resistance to draw attention to the plight of prisoners in Guant?namo and victims of the war on terrorism everywhere. *** PROFESSIONAL, HIGH RESOLUTION PHOTOS AVAILABLE AT http://RESISTANCEMEDIA.ORG, OR BY CALLING (202) 270-6665 *** [1]: http://mostlywater.org/system/files/images/code+organge.jpg () [2]: http://mostlywater.org/ URL: http://mostlywater.org/over_80_arrested_supreme_court_friday_guantanamo_action From news at resist.ca Sat Jan 12 15:17:04 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2008 23:17:04 -0000 Subject: [news] Afghanistan: The "Good War" is a Bad War Message-ID: <20080112231704.1288.qmail@resist.ca> The "Good War" is a Bad War By John Pilger; January, 10 2008 - John Pilger's Z Space Page [http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3313][1] _"To me, I confess, [countries] are pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a game for dominion of the world."_ --Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, speaking about Afghanistan, 1898 I had suggested to Marina that we meet in the safety of the Intercontinental Hotel, where foreigners stay in Kabul, but she said no. She had been there once and government agents, suspecting she was [with the [Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan][2]], had arrested her. We met instead at a safe house, reached through contours of bombed rubble that was once streets, where people live like earthquake victims awaiting rescue. RAWA is the [Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan][2], which since 1977 has alerted the world to the suffering of women and girls in that country. There is no organisation on earth like it. It is the high bar of feminism, home of the bravest of the brave. Year after year, RAWA agents have travelled secretly through Afghanistan, teaching at clandestine girls' schools, ministering to isolated and brutalised women, recording outrages on cameras concealed beneath their burqas. They were the Taliban regime's implacable foes when the word Taliban was barely heard in the west: when the Clinton administration was secretly courting the mullahs so that the oil company Unocal [1] could build a pipeline across Afghanistan from the Caspian. Indeed, RAWA's understanding of the designs and hypocrisy of western governments informs a truth about Afghanistan excluded from news, now reduced to a drama of British squaddies (soldiers) besieged by a demonic enemy in a "good war". When we met, Marina was veiled to conceal her identity. Marina is her nom de guerre. She said: "We, the women of Afghanistan, only became a cause in the west following 11 September 2001, when the Taliban suddenly became the official enemy of America. Yes, they persecuted women, but they were not unique, and we have resented the silence in the west over the atrocious nature of the western-backed warlords, who are no different. They rape and kidnap and terrorise, yet they hold seats in [Hamid] Karzai's government. In some ways, we were more secure under the Taliban. You could cross Afghanistan by road and feel secure. Now, you take your life into your hands." The reason the United States gave for invading Afghanistan in October 2001 was "to destroy the infrastructure of al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of 9/11". The women of RAWA say this is false. In a rare statement on 4 December that went unreported in Britain, they said: "By experience, [we have found] that the US does not want to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaeda, because then they will have no excuse to stay in Afghanistan and work towards the realisation of their economic, political and strategic interests in the region." The truth about the "good war" is to be found in compelling evidence that the 2001 invasion, widely supported in the west as a justifiable response to the 11 September attacks, was actually planned two months prior to 9/11 and that the most pressing problem for Washington was not the Taliban's links with Osama Bin Laden, but the prospect of the Taliban mullahs losing control of Afghanistan to less reliable mujahedin factions, led by warlords who had been funded and armed by the CIA to fight America's proxy war against the Soviet occupiers in the 1980s. Known as the Northern Alliance, these mujahedin had been largely a creation of Washington, which believed the "jihadi card" could be used to bring down the Soviet Union. The Taliban were a product of this and, during the Clinton years, they were admired for their "discipline". Or, as the _Wall Street Journal_ put it, "[the Taliban] are the players most capable of achieving peace in Afghanistan at this moment in history". The "moment in history" was a secret memorandum of understanding the mullahs had signed with the Clinton administration on the pipeline deal. However, by the late 1990s, the Northern Alliance had encroached further and further on territory controlled by the Taliban, whom, as a result, were deemed in Washington to lack the "stability" required of such an important client. It was the consistency of this client relationship that had been a prerequisite of US support, regardless of the Taliban's aversion to human rights. (Asked about this, a state department briefer had predicted that "the Taliban will develop like the Saudis did", with a pro-American economy, no democracy and "lots of sharia law", which meant the legalised persecution of women. "We can live with that," he said.) By early 2001, convinced it was the presence of Osama Bin Laden that was souring their relationship with Washington, the Taliban tried to get rid of him. Under a deal negotiated by the leaders of Pakistan's two Islamic parties, Bin Laden was to be held under house arrest in Peshawar (Pakistan). A tribunal of clerics would then hear evidence against him and decide whether to try him or hand him over to the Americans. Whether or not this would have happened, Pakistan's [current President] Pervez Musharraf vetoed the plan. According to the then Pakistani foreign minister, Niaz Naik, a senior US diplomat told him on 21 July 2001 that it had been decided to dispense with the Taliban "under a carpet of bombs". Acclaimed as the first "victory" in the "war on terror", the attack on Afghanistan in October 2001 and its ripple effect caused the deaths of thousands of civilians who, even more than Iraqis, remain invisible to western eyes. The family of **Gulam Rasul** is typical. It was 7.45am on 21 October. The headmaster of a school in the town of Khair Khana, Rasul had just finished eating breakfast with his family and had walked outside to chat to a neighbour. Inside the house were his wife, **Shiekra**, his four sons, aged three to ten, his brother and his wife, his sister and her husband. He looked up to see an aircraft weaving in the sky, then his house exploded in a fireball behind him. Nine people died in this attack by a US F-16 dropping a 500lb bomb. The only survivor was his nine-year-old son, Ahmad Bilal. "Most of the people killed in this war are not Taliban; they are innocents," Gulam Rasul told me. "Was the killing of my family a mistake? No, it was not. They fly their planes and look down on us, the mere Afghan people, who have no planes, and they bomb us for our birthright, and with all contempt." There was the wedding party in the village of Niazi Qala, 100km south of Kabul, to celebrate the marriage of the son of a respected farmer. By all accounts it was a wonderfully boisterous affair, with music and singing. The roar of aircraft started when everyone was asleep, at about three in the morning. According to a United Nations report, the bombing lasted two hours and killed 52 people: 17 men, ten women and 25 children, many of whom were found blown to bits where they had desperately sought refuge, in a dried-up pond. Such slaughter is not uncommon, and these days the dead are described as "Taliban"; or, if they are children, they are said to be "partly to blame for being at a site used by militants" - according to the BBC, speaking to a US military spokesman. The British military have played an important part in this violence, having stepped up high-altitude bombing by up to 30 per cent since they took over command of NATO forces in Afghanistan in May 2006. This translated to more than 6,200 Afghan deaths last year. In December, a contrived news event was the "fall" of a "Taliban stronghold", Musa Qala, in southern Afghanistan. Puppet government forces were allowed to "liberate" rubble left by American B-52s. What justifies this? Various fables have been spun - "building democracy" is one. This is especially popular in Australia, where the new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, has expressed no interest in withdrawing Australia's contingent. "The war on drugs" is the most perverse justification. When the Americans invaded Afghanistan in 2001 they had one striking success. They brought to an abrupt end a historic ban on opium production that the Taliban regime had achieved. A UN official in Kabul described the ban to me as "a modern miracle". The miracle was quickly rescinded. As a reward for supporting the Karzai "democracy", the Americans allowed Northern Alliance warlords to replant the country's entire opium crop in 2002. Twenty-eight out of the 32 provinces instantly went under cultivation. Today, 90 per cent of world trade in opium originates in Afghanistan. In 2005, a British government report estimated that 35,000 children in [Britain] were using heroin. While the British taxpayer pays for a ?1bn military super-base in Helmand Province and the second-biggest British embassy in the world, in Kabul, peanuts are spent on drug rehabilitation at home. Tony Blair once said memorably: "To the Afghan people, we make this commitment. We will not walk away . . . [We will offer] some way out of the poverty that is your miserable existence." I thought about this as I watched children play in a destroyed cinema. They were illiterate and so could not read the poster warning that unexploded cluster bombs lay in the debris. "After five years of engagement," reported James Fergusson in the _London Independent_ on 16 December, "the [UK] Department for International Development had spent just ?390m on Afghan projects." Unusually, Fergusson has had meetings with Taliban who are fighting the British. "They remained charming and courteous throughout," he wrote of one visit in February. "This is the beauty of malmastia, the Pashtun tradition of hospitality towards strangers. So long as he comes unarmed, even a mortal enemy can rely on a kind reception. The opportunity for dialogue that malmastia affords is unique." This "opportunity for dialogue" is a far cry from the surrender-or-else offers made by the government of [current British Prime Minister] Gordon Brown. What Brown and his Foreign Office advisers wilfully fail to understand is that the tactical victory in Afghanistan in 2001, achieved with bombs, has become a strategic disaster in south Asia. Exacerbated by the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the current turmoil in Pakistan has its contemporary roots in a Washington-contrived war in neighbouring Afghanistan that has alienated the Pashtuns who inhabit much of the long border area between the two countries. This is also true of most Pakistanis, who, according to opinion polls, want their government to negotiate a regional peace, rather than play a prescribed part in a rerun of Lord Curzon's Great Game. [1] Current President of Afghanistan **Hamid Karzai** is a former executive with the **Unocal** corporation - **MW**. [1]: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3313 (http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3313) [2]: http://www.rawa.org/index.php URL: http://mostlywater.org/afghanistan_good_war_bad_war From news at resist.ca Sat Jan 12 21:17:05 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Sun, 13 Jan 2008 05:17:05 -0000 Subject: [news] Three Articles on the Release of FARC Prisoners Message-ID: <20080113051705.2685.qmail@resist.ca> The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) issued a communique, subsequent to the freeing of Clara Rojas and Consuelo Gonzales, in which they remark that they have given the first encouraging step ?that invites to think on the possibility of peace in Colombia?. Following, the FARC communique (Sigue original en espa?ol) January 10 of 2007 FARC Communiqu? in Regards to the Liberation of Clara and Consuelo 1. Honouring our word and commitment, today the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia FARC, handover Clara Rojas and Consuelo Gonz?lez de Perdomo to the President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Hugo Ch?vez, to Senator Piedad Cordova and the international community. If the boy Emmanuel is not in the arms of his mother, it is because President Uribe V?lez has sequestered him in Bogot?. Let him free so that we can all celebrate this event. 2. This humanitarian and unilateral liberation is possible despite the hindrance presented by President Uribe himself, a sworn enemy of the exchange of prisoners and enemy of peace with social justice, as he follows the ideological guidelines of Washington. Raising above the intense military operations of the Patriotic Plan, the seizure of the proofs of life, the capture of the humanitarian messengers who carried them, the sequestering of little Emmanuel in Bogot?, and the absurd intention to exclude the international humanitarian commission from the facilitation, we have taken this first encouraging step that invites to think about the possibility of peace in Colombia. 3. The efforts must now be directed at obtaining the military clearing of Pradera and Florida as the stage for the dialogue government-FARC for the agreement and the materialization of the exchange to make possible the liberation of all the prisoners in control of the contending forces, of those captives in the mountain and the imprisoned guerrillas in the jails of the regime, including Sonia and Sim?n. Our will is unquestionable. Let?s not forget that in the recent past we unilaterally released 304 military and police officers, captured in combat. The handover of Clara and Consuelo we carry out today reaffirms our disposition. 4. The fact is that we are a belligerent force awaiting recognition by the governments of the world. This step would smooth the winding path of the Colombia people in their search for peace. Ours is a legitimate struggle. It is upheld by the universal right that all the peoples of the world have to raise against oppression. Our father, the Liberator Sim?n Bolivar teaches us that, when power is oppressive, virtue has the right to overwhelm it, and that the virtuous man rises against the opressive and unbearable authority to replace it with a kind and respected one. And this is, indeed, the FARC?s endeavour. 5, President Ch?vez, thank you very much. The world does not doubt that your immense heart beats sincerely for the peace of Colombia and the redemption of the peoples. We also thank the governments and personalities of the world who have surrounded him without reservations in this noble effort. And our special thanks to the brave people of Venezuela for their support and brotherhood. To the relatives of the prisoners and the friends of the humanitarian exchange our call to persist. We will obtain the exchange. Secretariat, Central High Command of the FARC Mountains of Colombia, January 10 of 2008 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Enero 10 de 2007 Comunicado de las FARC Sobre la liberaci?n de Clara y Consuelo 1. Honrando la palabra y el compromiso, las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia FARC, entregan hoy al Presidente de la Rep?blica Bolivariana de Venezuela, Hugo Ch?vez, a la senadora Piedad C?rdoba y a la comunidad internacional, a Clara Rojas y Consuelo Gonz?lez de Perdomo. Si el ni?o Emmanuel no est? en brazos de su madre, es porque el Presidente Uribe V?lez lo tiene secuestrado en Bogot?. Que lo libere para que podamos celebrar todos, este suceso. 2. Esta liberaci?n humanitaria y unilateral, se da a pesar de los palos atravesados en la rueda por el propio Presidente Uribe, enemigo jurado del canje de prisioneros y enemigo de la paz con justicia social, siguiendo los lineamientos de Washington. Por encima de las intensas operaciones b?licas del Plan Patriota, de la incautaci?n de las pruebas de supervivencia, de la captura de los correos humanitarios que las portaban, del secuestro del peque?o Emmanuel en Bogot?, y de la absurda pretensi?n de excluir de la facilitaci?n a la comisi?n humanitaria internacional, hemos dado este primer paso esperanzador que invita a pensar en la posibilidad de la paz en Colombia. 3. Los esfuerzos deben dirigirse ahora a lograr el despeje militar de Pradera y Florida como escenario del di?logo gobierno-FARC para el acuerdo y la materializaci?n del canje que haga posible la liberaci?n de todos los prisioneros en poder de las fuerzas contendientes, de los cautivos en la monta?a y de los guerrilleros presos en las c?rceles del r?gimen, incluidos Sonia y Sim?n. Nuestra voluntad es incuestionable. Sin olvidar que en el pasado reciente liberamos unilateralmente a 304 militares y polic?as, capturados en combate, esta entrega que hoy hacemos de Clara y Consuelo, reafirma nuestra disposici?n. 4. En realidad, somos una fuerza beligerante a la espera de ser reconocida por los gobiernos del mundo. Este paso allanar?a el tortuoso camino del pueblo de Colombia en busca de la paz. Nuestra lucha es leg?tima. Se sustenta en el derecho universal que asiste a todos los pueblos del mundo a alzarse contra la opresi?n. Nuestro padre, el Libertador Sim?n Bol?var nos ense?a que, cuando el poder es opresor la virtud tiene derecho a anonadarlo, y que el hombre virtuoso se levanta contra la autoridad opresora e inaguantable para sustituirla por otra respetada y amable. Y este es, precisamente, el empe?o de las FARC. 5. Presidente Ch?vez, muchas gracias. El mundo no duda que su inmenso coraz?n, palpita sinceramente, por la paz de Colombia y por la redenci?n de los pueblos. Agradecemos tambi?n a los gobiernos y personalidades del mundo que lo han rodeado sin reserva en este noble esfuerzo. Y sobre todo, gracias al bravo pueblo de Venezuela por su apoyo y hermandad. A los familiares de los prisioneros y a los amigos del canje humanitario nuestro llamado a persistir. Lograremos el canje. Secretariado del Estado Mayor Central de las FARC Monta?as de Colombia, enero 10 de 2008 Chavez asks to clear Colombia's rebels from terrorist list [http://news.xinhuanet.com][1] CARACAS, Jan. 11 (Xinhua) -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Friday asked the international community to stop classifying Colombia's rebels as terrorists, a call rejected by the Colombian government. Addressing the national legislative assembly, Chavez said Colombia, Latin American and European countries should clear Colombian rebel groups from their terrorist lists and grant them political status. After successfully negotiated the release of two female hostages held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Chavez argued for the groups' status, saying the FARC and the National Liberation Army (ELN) "are not terrorist groups." "They are real armies that hold a space in Colombia," he said. It is necessary to continue working at different levels with the Colombian government to withdraw the rebels from the terrorist list, Chavez said. Chavez said the FARC and ELN were put on the terrorist lists of some countries because of pressure from Washington. Chavez said he experienced intense emotions on Thursday during the hostage release by the FARC, which chose to release former legislator Consuelo Gonzalez and former vice-presidential candidate Clara de Rojas to Venezuela. Meanwhile, Colombia rejected Chavez's call, describing it as "a totally unusual and disproportionate request." "The (Colombian) government cannot accept this kind of request, the condition (of terrorists) is not just a name, it is due to the deeds they committed," said Colombia's Interior and Justice Minister Carlos Holguin. Holguin said FARC was included in the world's terrorist list for the violent deeds they conducted and not for Colombian President Alvaro Uribe's choice. Some Colombian officials consider the request as an interference in Colombia's internal affairs. "It is an interference in (Colombia's) internal conflict... there is no way we can accept it," said Colombia's former defense minister Martha Ramirez. Colombia's opposition also turned down Chavez's call, but said the two countries' relations will not be affected. "We cannot allow these declarations to affect the good historical relations between Colombia and Venezuela," said Rafael Pardo from Colombia's opposition the Liberal Party. ------------------------------------------------------ Colombian hostage crisis lingers on despite freeing of two women [http://news.xinhuanet.com][1] CARACAS, Jan. 10 (Xinhua) -- Two women hostages were released by Colombia's FARC rebels and arrived in Venezuela on Thursday after more than six years of ordeal in the Colombian jungle. The event was viewed as a major breakthrough in the long-running hostage crisis. However, the crisis is expected to linger on as over 40 high-profile hostages were still under FARC control. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), established in 1964, has got control of large areas in Colombian countryside in fight against the government forces and started seizing hostages 10 years ago. Clara Rojas and Consuelo Gonzalez, who were released Thursday, were among some 700 hostages held by the FARC, most of whom were soldiers and police. FARC had proposed to exchange a group of some 45 hostages--including French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt and three U.S. nationals, with 500 rebels jailed by the Colombian government. The Colombian government refused the "prisoner swap" proposal, saying it would simply encourage the guerrillas to kidnap more and undermine the morale of the security forces that sacrifice so many lives to fight and capture the FARC rebels. Instead, it proposed in August to create a safe-zone for a period of 90 days in which FARC and government delegates could meet on the issue. As the proposal fell short of FARC demand of a "demilitarized-zone," the two sides did not carry out any direct negotiations but have relied on the mediation of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez since then. In November, the Colombian government officially halted Chavez in his mediation effort, saying he had broken rules by contacting Colombia's military officials on the issue. Chavez continued talks with the FARC rebels and announced in late December that the rebel group agreed to handover to him three hostages: former Colombian congress women Consuelo Gonzalez, Betancourt's aide Clara Rojas and her three-year-old son Emmanuel. The release attempt aborted on Dec. 31 as the Colombian government and FARC accused each other of not keeping previous promises. FARC said the Colombian military was still staging operations against it in the promised "security zone" while Colombian President Alvaro Uribe said the handover failed because FARC no longer had Emmanuel and the boy was actually living in a foster home in Bogota. Analysts said the failed attempt revealed the deep-rooted distrust between the Colombian government and the FARC rebels as well as Chavez's limited influence on the issue. Following Thursday's successful release, international pressure again mounted on President Uribe, who reiterated his wish to have direct talks with the FARC rebels. Colombian hostage crisis lingers on despite freeing of two womenHowever, the fate of the rest renowned hostages is still hard to tell since it takes time for the hard-line president to make concessions and find a middle ground with the rebels. [1]: http://news.xinhuanet.com (http://news.xinhuanet.com) URL: http://mostlywater.org/farc_communique_release_prisoners From news at resist.ca Sun Jan 13 15:17:04 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Sun, 13 Jan 2008 23:17:04 -0000 Subject: [news] Chavez U-Turn on Socialism Message-ID: <20080113231704.27726.qmail@resist.ca> January, 11 2008, By Stephanie Blankenburg, Source: New Statesman On 2 January, a month on from his defeat in a referendum about a socialist reform of the county?s constitution, President Hugo Ch?vez Fr?as of Venezuela performed a stunning political U-turn. In typically flamboyant style, he made a surprise call to Venezolana de Televisi?n, the country?s main state-owned TV channel, ?to drop a ?bombita? (small bomb)? on an unsuspecting public: He had decided to abandon his socialist agenda ?for now? in order to form stronger alliances with the country?s middle classes, its private sector and the national bourgeoisie instead. To dispel any doubts about his seriousness in adopting this new political course, he replaced vice-president, Dr Jorge Rodr?guez ? the public face of his campaign for ?21st century socialism? in Venezuela ? with Ram?n Carrizales, a military officer and technocrat, known for his good relationships with the country?s business sector. Perhaps more significantly still, Ch?vez had already signed an end-of-the year amnesty for imprisoned perpetrators of a right-wing coup attempt against him in 2002. The President?s version of events Two days later, on his Sunday TV show ?Al? Presidente? (Hallo, President), Ch?vez presented his fully reshuffled new cabinet and set out to explain the rationale for his action. His socialist project had been defeated, because the country had not been ready for such a radical approach. The only democratic response was to acknowledge defeat and to adopt a more gradual and inclusive way forward. Apart from broadening alliances to bring private business and the middle classes back into the fold, this would also mean a more careful focus on mass education and communal self-organisation. Socialism had not been abandoned, but postponed, although, by the sound of things, for quite some time to come. Ch?vez? analysis of the current situation certainly has the pleasant ring of reasonableness to it. There also is little doubt, even amongst the most fervent socialists in Venezuela, that the agenda for ?21st socialism?, adopted in January 2007 as abruptly as it has now been abandoned, had been rushed in with too much haste, limiting space and time for public consultation and debate of often complex issues. Yet, the solidity of this analysis stands and falls with the correctness of its main premise ? that the failure of voters to approve the constitutional reform project in the referendum of 2 December was a vote against socialism. This is much less clear. What is clear is that the defeat of Ch?vez? reform project at the polls is down to the abstention of roughly three million voters, who only a year earlier had voted for him as their president on the same socialist platform. Compared to the December 2006 presidential elections, the opposition did not gain any votes. It seems unlikely such a substantial bloc of Ch?vez supporters should have been deterred merely by deficient campaigning a year after enthusiastically endorsing him. In fact, a closer look at electoral patterns reveals a clear protest vote, not against a socialist agenda, but against corrupt administrations, at the national and the regional level. Chavismo and the ?oil curse? To understand, where this protest vote came from and why it outweighed the pro-Chavez and pro-socialism vote, it helps to remember that Venezuela is defined by only one thing ? oil. For almost a century, the state has been a gigantic machine to distribute oil rent. In this context, left and right have a rather different meaning from their usual connotations. On one side of a profound societal divide, there are those who benefit from oil from the very rich elites down to middle-rank state employees with comfortable pension arrangements. On the other side, there are those who are excluded from a share in this bounty, the poor and the lower middle classes. Not surprisingly, the main objective of the ?insiders? is to defend and expand their share in the country?s oil wealth. Those on the outside divide into the small group with some chance of eventually making it to the inside, and the much larger group of people without any realistic chance of ever getting there. The latter are, or used to be, core Ch?vez supporters: Their only hope is structural reform that dismantles the distributive rent state and replaces it by a productive developmental state. Until now, they had set their hopes on Ch?vez. That these hopes have been rattled, is only marginally to do with a hasty referendum campaign, or with the people?s ideological immaturity. On the contrary, one of the most impressive achievements of Chavismo is precisely the very high degree of political awareness and education amongst the poor. No, the vote outcome has everything to do with the accession of many a Chavista to the rank of ?insider? over the past eight years. This process has been gradual, and perhaps inevitable in a society in which institutionalised rentier-mechanisms have been endemic for decades. But the contradiction between a radical socialist government agenda and the ?Chavista elite?, bent on defending its share in the oil rent, effectively came to a head last year. Far from being a left-wing administration, the bulk of ministerial positions in the old cabinet, as well as many governorships, remained in the hands of the ?Chavista right?, or ?new insiders?. For example, the new vice-president, Ram?n Carrizales, is also ex-minister of Housing, a core social policy ministry. All through 2007, the battle between this ?Chavista elite? and the ?Chavista street? was fought out within government, with the so-called left-wingers, led by Jorge Rodr?guez, in the minority. It is an open secret in Venezuela that many governors, while publicly campaigning for a 'yes' vote in the referendum, used their resources to mobilise for the no-vote behind the scenes. Equally an open secret is the sudden destabilisation of the economy through food shortages and an escalating black market dollar exchange rate which was at least allowed to linger on for longer than necessary. A ?soft coup? or a return to electoral glory? So the Ch?vez U-turn looks a lot less radical. For one, the new cabinet resembles its predecessor more than it differs from it. More importantly, it is not at all obvious the strategy of a shift to the ?right? will help to pacify the country and stabilize the economy. Why? Well if it is correct that the result of 2 December was essentially a protest vote by the ?Chavista street? against the ?Chavista elite?, then giving the latter free range is unlikely to boost Ch?vez with the popular base. Yet, this popular base is all that stands between him and a ?soft coup? by an emboldened middle class, made up of the ?Chavista elite?, the largely a-political state bureaucracy and moderate such as ex-General Ra?l Baduel, a former ally and defence minister who joined the opposition ranks in November 2007. After all, with the control over the country's state apparatus and economic resources firmly in the hands of these groups, and a weakened popular base for Ch?vez, perhaps unable to deliver election future victories, why would the middle classes and their allies in the new and old elites still need Ch?vez? Ch?vez is too much of a seasoned politician not to know this. If he still has chosen this course, it is not necessarily because it is of his liking or even of his making alone. It simply reflects the real distribution of power on the ground. His most important response is not the much publicized government reshuffle, but his decision to accelerate the organisation of a Chavista mass party, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). The task of getting this new mass party up to speed is an uphill one, especially with a ?Chavista? government in place that has no interest in promoting such a move, and the popular base alienated. But unless Ch?vez ? and the PSUV ? win the regional and municipal elections scheduled for November 2008, Venezuela might well have a new president before the year is out. In charge of the unenviable task to built a mass party in a few months and to win elections by the end of the year is none other than Jorge Rodr?guez. Dr Stephanie Blankenburg is Lecturer in International Political Economy in the Economics Department at the School of Oriental and Social Studies (SOAS), London. She is currently on secondment to Venezuela as an economic advisor and analyst. This article reflects her personal analysis and is unrelated to any government views or policies. URL: http://mostlywater.org/chavez_uturn_socialism From news at resist.ca Sun Jan 13 15:17:05 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Sun, 13 Jan 2008 23:17:05 -0000 Subject: [news] 75 Years on, Executed Reichstag Arsonist Finally Wins Pardon Message-ID: <20080113231705.27727.qmail@resist.ca> 75 years on, executed Reichstag arsonist finally wins pardon ? Dutch activist exonerated under 1998 law ? Hitler used fire as pretext to establish dictatorship Kate Connolly in Berlin Saturday January 12, 2008 The Guardian [http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/story/0,,2239610,00...][1] An unemployed Dutch bricklayer who was made a scapegoat for one of the defining moments of 20th-century German history has been pardoned for his crime 75 years later. Marinus van der Lubbe, 24, was beheaded after being convicted of setting fire to the Reichstag, an event Hitler used as a pretext to suspend civil liberties and establish a dictatorship. But Van de Lubbe's conviction has been overturned by the federal prosecutor, Monika Harms, after a lawyer in Berlin alerted her to the fact that he had yet to be exonerated under a law passed in 1998. The law allowed pardons for people convicted of crimes under the Nazis, based on the concept that Nazi law "went against the basic ideas of justice". Article continues But the exoneration is only symbolic and will not lead to compensation for Van de Lubbe's heirs. Police arrested Van der Lubbe in the burning building, and he is said to have confessed that he started the fire in order to encourage a workers' uprising against the rise of the Nazis. However, historians remain divided over the event. The Nazis said it was a communist plot and used the fire in propaganda. Most modern historians are in agreement that Van der Lubbe was involved in the fire, but whether he acted alone or with accomplices is still open to debate. Following the attack in February 1933, which gutted the Reichstag and was a key event in the establishment of Nazi Germany, the Communist party was banned and Nazi opponents were brutally suppressed. In one night 1,500 communist functionaries were arrested. When he was alerted to the news of the fire, which took place shortly after he had taken power, Adolf Hitler called it a "sign from heaven" that a communist putsch was about to be launched. The day after the fire the Reichstag fire decree was signed into law, which led to the suspension of civil liberties and the banning of many newspapers and other publications hostile to the Nazis. Van der Lubbe, who had moved to Germany to pursue his political beliefs, went on trial in Leipzig in 1933 along with four others, charged with arson and attempting to overthrow the government. But only Van der Lubbe was convicted. He was executed in January 1934. The full pardon follows a decades-long legal process by Van der Lubbe's heirs to rehabilitate him. In 1967 a Berlin court bizarrely changed the sentence to an eight-year prison term. In 1980 the same court lifted the sentence completely, a decision later reversed by the federal court. Then in 1981 a West German court overturned the conviction on the basis that Van der Lubbe was insane, but campaigners pushed for full state pardon arguing that he had been convicted by a Nazi court. It took the 1998 law to make the full pardon possible but it is unclear why another 10 years went by before it was granted. [1]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/story/0,,2239610,00.html (http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/story/0,,2239610,00.html) URL: http://mostlywater.org/75_years_executed_reichstag_arsonist_finally_wins_pardon From news at resist.ca Sun Jan 13 19:17:06 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2008 03:17:06 -0000 Subject: [news] The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 Message-ID: <20080114031706.9621.qmail@resist.ca> The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 By Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore Norton. 642 pp. $39.95 Willful amnesia has been a chronic problem in American historical thought. Many of us, it seems, have preferred a simplified and sanitized version of national history, one that smooths out the rough edges that might complicate comforting visions of harmony and progress. This mythic approach to the past was especially popular during the two decades following World War II, when patterns of violence, extremism and political discord were either ignored or discounted. Politics, in the two-party context of American exceptionalism, had been reduced to a mere quibbling over details. In this fulsome view of the great American success story, there was no room for radical dissent, no place for systemic failure. Recent decades, of course, have witnessed a withering assault on this attitude by an increasingly diverse cadre of professional historians, many of whom have shown a special interest in the evolution of social and political movements and the history of marginalized groups such as African Americans, women and the poor. Shining a light on the darkest recesses of U.S. history, revisionist scholars have challenged the presumptions of American exceptionalism. In the process, they have fostered a greater appreciation for the power of dissent and disorder, uncovering the radical roots of everything from the American Revolution and abolitionism to populism and organized labor. In the burgeoning field of civil rights studies, such an appreciation has been an important undercurrent for at least a decade. But with the publication of Glenda Gilmore's remarkable new book, Defying Dixie, the left-wing origins of the civil rights movement have risen to the surface of historical debate. Gilmore, a North Carolina native and Yale history professor, transformed our understanding of the Southern progressive movement with her first book, Gender and Jim Crow, published in 1996. Defying Dixie promises to do the same for the emerging freedom struggle of the post-World War I era. The early stages of what Jacquelyn Dowd Hall has aptly labeled "the long Civil Rights Movement" have attracted considerable scholarly attention in recent years, so much so that most historians no longer feel comfortable with accounts of the movement that begin in the mid-1950s with the Brown decision or the Montgomery bus boycott. But even the most enlightened civil rights historians will find new material and much to ponder in Gilmore's richly textured study of the Southern communists, socialists and expatriates who challenged Jim Crow during the three decades following the Bolshevik Revolution. Gilmore makes a strong case that Cold War insecurities have promoted the false impression "that middle-class black men in ties radicalized the nation." Those mid-century men in ties, religious leaders with strong connections to the established black community, fostered increasingly militant local and national movements that insisted on "freedom now" and "liberty and justice for all." But they were hardly Soviet-style communists, no matter what Red-baiting white supremacists thought or said at the time. By ignoring the movement's radical origins in the ideologically charged political and economic struggles of the early 20th century, she insists, "we discount the forces that generated and sustained human rights during the 1930s and 1940s and privilege its religious, middle class, and male roots." Misled by conservative politicians and the mainstream media, we have accepted a truncated and distorted version of civil rights history. "In the simplified stories that the media told of the movement," Gilmore writes, "civil rights came to mean school integration, access to public accommodations, and voting rights. This view erased the complexity of a drive to eliminate the economic injustices wrought by slavery, debt peonage, and a wage labor system based on degraded black labor. It took residential desegregation off the agenda, apparently once and for all. It swept away connections among civil liberties, labor rights, and civil rights that liberals and radicals had carefully forged from the mid-1930s onward." As Gilmore demonstrates, the real and infinitely more complicated history of the modern civil rights struggle "begins at the radical edges of a human rights movement after World War I, with communists who promoted and practiced racial equality and considered the South crucial to their success in elevating labor and overthrowing the capitalist system. They were joined in the late 1930s by a radical left to form a southern Popular Front that sought to overturn Jim Crow, elevate the working class, and promote civil rights and civil liberties. During and after World War II a growing number of grassroots activists protested directly against white supremacy and imagined it poised to fall of its own weight. They gave it a shove." In telling this story, Gilmore broadens the scope of Southern and civil rights history to include individuals and organizations operating well beyond the Mason-Dixon line. Nationalizing and internationalizing the saga, she reminds us that "the South could remain the South only by chasing out some of its brightest minds and most bountiful spirits, generation after generation. Many of those who left did so, directly or indirectly, because they opposed white supremacy. Counting them back into southern history reveals an insurgent South and shows some Southerners to be a revolutionary lot that fought longer and harder than anyone else to defeat Dixie." No brief review can do justice to the full range of historical characters and events that dominate the pages of Defying Dixie. But one example may give some sense of the exotic radicalism that prevailed prior to the classic civil rights struggle of the 1950s and '60s. Gilmore begins the book with the story of Lovett Fort-Whiteman, the first African American to join the Communist Party. Born in Dallas, Fort-Whiteman migrated to Tuskegee, Mexico and Canada before settling in Harlem as an editor of the socialist magazine the Messenger in 1917. By 1919 his anarcho-syndicalism had morphed into an association with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the Communist Labor Party. After he gave a speech in St. Louis on "The Negro and the Social Revolution," he was convicted of sedition. Following a brief prison term, he moved to Chicago, where he became a Communist Party organizer specializing in recent black migrants from the South. In 1924, Fort-Whiteman traveled to Moscow for the Fifth World Congress of the Third International, where he informed his fellow Communists that "negroes are destined to be the most revolutionary class in America." Enrolling in the KUTV Communist training school (a.k.a. Communist University of Toilers of the East), he remained in the Soviet Union for eight months before returning to Chicago to recruit black Americans for the KUTV and to found the American Negro Labor Congress. Time magazine labeled him the "Reddest of the Blacks." But later in the decade, after a futile campaign to organize black workers in the South, he found himself on the losing side of a factional and ideological struggle for control of the American Communist Party. In 1930, after arguing unsuccessfully for a policy of separatism and self-determination in the Black Belt, he essentially gave up on America, fleeing to the Soviet Union, where he married and worked as a science teacher. Three years later, he changed his mind and tried to return to the United States, but Soviet authorities refused his request. His controversial statements about race and class eventually led to charges of counter-revolutionary heresy and banishment to a Siberian gulag, where he died of starvation in 1939. Fort-Whiteman's unlikely odyssey from Texas to Siberia is just one of the many extraordinary stories that punctuate the revisionist narrative of Defying Dixie. Some scholars may question Gilmore's decision, acknowledged in the book's introduction, to focus on expatriate activists to the virtual exclusion of "the local people who lived in the South and who started the civil rights movement in the 1950s." And others will be disappointed by the author's failure to offer an epilogue that connects the early history of the movement to the transitional events of the pre- and post- Brown era. But no one who reads this eye-opening book will come away with anything less than a renewed appreciation for the complex origins and evolution of a freedom struggle that changed the South, the nation and the world. * Raymond Arsenault, the John Hope Franklin Professor of History at the University of South Florida and the author of "Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice," is currently writing a book on Marian Anderson, civil rights and the 1939 Lincoln Memorial concert. URL: http://mostlywater.org/radical_roots_civil_rights_19191950 From news at resist.ca Mon Jan 14 10:17:39 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2008 18:17:39 -0000 Subject: [news] Scientific Technique and the Concentration of Power Message-ID: <20080114181739.16863.qmail@resist.ca> > "So long as the rulers are comfortable, what reason have they to improve the lot of their serfs?"- Bertrand Russell, 1952 (p61) Bertrand Russell in his 1952 book _The Impact of Science on Society_ he describes the effects of "scientific technique" on the increasing control of societies by an ever shrinking number of people. As we will see, "scientific technique" is much more than just the development and widespread use of new technology, but first some of its effects. [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/scientific_technique_and_concentration_power URL: http://mostlywater.org/scientific_technique_and_concentration_power From news at resist.ca Mon Jan 14 10:17:38 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2008 18:17:38 -0000 Subject: [news] Using Bhutto for Imperial Gain Message-ID: <20080114181739.16861.qmail@resist.ca> Examining the real reasons behind Bhutto's assassination. [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/using_bhutto_imperial_gain URL: http://mostlywater.org/using_bhutto_imperial_gain From news at resist.ca Mon Jan 14 11:17:38 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2008 19:17:38 -0000 Subject: [news] U.K.: Prisoners 'to be Chipped like Dogs' Message-ID: <20080114191738.3359.qmail@resist.ca> Hi-tech 'satellite' tagging planned in order to create more space in jails Civil rights groups and probation officers furious at 'degrading' scheme By Brian Brady | 13 January 2008 | Independent UK [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/uk_prisoners_be_chipped_dogs URL: http://mostlywater.org/uk_prisoners_be_chipped_dogs From news at resist.ca Mon Jan 14 15:17:08 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2008 23:17:08 -0000 Subject: [news] Canadian foreign policy the most pro-Israeli in the world? Message-ID: <20080114231708.20777.qmail@resist.ca> By refusing to condemn the building at the Har Homa housing project, Canada?s foreign minister appeared to have made Canadian foreign policy the most pro-Israeli in the world. At the urging of Jewish and pro-Israeli lobby groups, the Conservative government has moved to change its position on 13 separate long-standing United Nations resolutions pertaining to Israel and the Palestinian territories. [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/canadian_foreign_policy_most_proisraeli_world URL: http://mostlywater.org/canadian_foreign_policy_most_proisraeli_world From news at resist.ca Tue Jan 15 11:17:17 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2008 19:17:17 -0000 Subject: [news] Vanguards of the Millennium Message-ID: <20080115191717.26996.qmail@resist.ca> Axis of Logic | George Aleman III | Jan 14, 2008 [W]hile moderate Muslims are urged to stand up to, and denounce, extremist conduct, it must also be stressed that moderate Christians stand up to their fringe counterparts as well. Failing to do so will only enable them further. [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/vanguards_millennium URL: http://mostlywater.org/vanguards_millennium From news at resist.ca Tue Jan 15 12:17:09 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2008 20:17:09 -0000 Subject: [news] Historic Study of Western Culture Message-ID: <20080115201709.3063.qmail@resist.ca> By Sam Halioris The 10,000 year story of humanity's decline into economic enslavement and institutionalized mass murder at the hands of those elite who have used positions of power in religious and political institutions to systematically eliminate anyone who resisted. [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/historic_study_western_culture URL: http://mostlywater.org/historic_study_western_culture From news at resist.ca Wed Jan 16 09:17:09 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:17:09 -0000 Subject: [news] Japanese Whaling Fleet Takes Two Sea Shepherd Hostages Message-ID: <20080116171709.6579.qmail@resist.ca> [![][1]][2]I know there are differing opinions out there on whaling but this story caught my attention as one to watch. Two members of Paul Watson's Sea Shepherd crew recently boarded a Japanese whaling ship. The crew of the whaling ship responded by tying them up and taking off, beginning what may now be an international incident. -ron [read more][3] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/system/files/images/whalers+take+hostages.thumbnail.jpg () [2]: http://mostlywater.org/ [3]: http://mostlywater.org/japanese_whaling_fleet_run_two_sea_shepherd_hostages URL: http://mostlywater.org/japanese_whaling_fleet_run_two_sea_shepherd_hostages From news at resist.ca Thu Jan 17 02:17:07 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2008 10:17:07 -0000 Subject: [news] The Children of 5767 Message-ID: <20080117101708.2690.qmail@resist.ca> By Gideon Levy - January, 17 2008 It was a pretty quiet year, relatively speaking. Only 457 Palestinians and 10 Israelis were killed...Fewer casualties than in many previous years. However, it was still a terrible year: 92 Palestinian children were killed...One-fifth of the Palestinians killed were children and teens -- a disproportionate, almost unprecedented number. The Jewish year of 5767. Almost 100 children, who were alive and playing last New Year, didn't survive to see this one. [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/children_5767 URL: http://mostlywater.org/children_5767 From news at resist.ca Thu Jan 17 10:17:03 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2008 18:17:03 -0000 Subject: [news] Institutionalized Spying on Americans Message-ID: <20080117181704.15598.qmail@resist.ca> This article reviews two police state tools (among many in use) in America. One is new, undiscussed and largely unknown to the public. The other was covered in a December article by this writer called Police State America. Here it's updated with new information. [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/institutionalized_spying_americans URL: http://mostlywater.org/institutionalized_spying_americans From news at resist.ca Thu Jan 17 10:17:03 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2008 18:17:03 -0000 Subject: [news] MLK III Speaks out for Mumia and The MOVE 9 Political Prisoners Message-ID: <20080117181704.15599.qmail@resist.ca> "Freedom only comes through persistent agitation, through persistent rising up against the system of evil." Those words were true when first spoken by my father, Martin Luther king Jr., and they are true today. [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/mlk_iii_speaks_out_mumia_and_move_9_political_prisoners URL: http://mostlywater.org/mlk_iii_speaks_out_mumia_and_move_9_political_prisoners From news at resist.ca Sun Jan 20 00:17:17 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Sun, 20 Jan 2008 08:17:17 -0000 Subject: [news] Road Kill: New Highway Stopped By Protesting "Raccoons" Message-ID: <20080120081717.8862.qmail@resist.ca> The Raccoons are a ragtag mob of irregulars holding back a major highway interchange project designed to service Bear Mountain, a sprawling golf resort in Langford, just west of Victoria. A few dozen dumpster-diving, trash-talking, anti-authoritarians with a passion for undisturbed natural places have built a camp in the path of the new highway. [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/road_kill_new_highway_stopped_protesting_raccoons URL: http://mostlywater.org/road_kill_new_highway_stopped_protesting_raccoons From news at resist.ca Sun Jan 20 10:17:04 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Sun, 20 Jan 2008 18:17:04 -0000 Subject: [news] Who Owns Canada's Media? Message-ID: <20080120181704.4883.qmail@resist.ca> A handful of companies control Canada's media allowing a small group of corporations to control what most people read or see on TV and present a fairly homogeneous view of our world. The CBC has a brief visual summary of the situation. [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/who_owns_canadas_media URL: http://mostlywater.org/who_owns_canadas_media From news at resist.ca Sun Jan 20 14:17:03 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Sun, 20 Jan 2008 22:17:03 -0000 Subject: [news] Repression U. Message-ID: <20080120221703.1829.qmail@resist.ca> Free-speech zones. Taser guns. Hidden cameras. Data mining. A new security curriculum. Private security contractors. Welcome to the homeland security campus...From Harvard to UCLA, the ivory tower is fast becoming the latest watchtower in Fortress America. The terror warriors, having turned their attention to "violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism prevention"...have set out to reconquer that traditional hotbed of radicalization, the university. [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/repression_u URL: http://mostlywater.org/repression_u From news at resist.ca Sun Jan 20 22:17:05 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2008 06:17:05 -0000 Subject: [news] Canada Report 2007: Reaching for Subnation Status (Part I) Message-ID: <20080121061705.27212.qmail@resist.ca> In foreign affairs, in domestic spending, domestic taxation, in our environmental laws, in our increasing belligerence as an aggressor nation, **Canada** is very rightly to be considered as a ?subnation? to the United States. Our internal identity is hockey and beer with a bit of French thrown in to prove we are not American, but in all our consumer habits, our spending habits, our changing attitudes towards the environment and the military, our denial of international norms that accompany this ? along with the norms for indigenous rights ? it becomes a fair argument that Canada has not yet determined ? and indeed is undermining ? its own sovereignty. [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/canada_report_2007_reaching_subnation_status_part_i URL: http://mostlywater.org/canada_report_2007_reaching_subnation_status_part_i From news at resist.ca Mon Jan 21 09:17:04 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2008 17:17:04 -0000 Subject: [news] Robert McChesney's "Communication Revolution" Message-ID: <20080121171704.23429.qmail@resist.ca> We're at a "critical juncture" in the media from which change will come. We must seize the opportunity. [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/robert_mcchesneys_communication_revolution URL: http://mostlywater.org/robert_mcchesneys_communication_revolution From news at resist.ca Mon Jan 21 11:17:03 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2008 19:17:03 -0000 Subject: [news] Limits to the Stability of a Scientific World Empire Message-ID: <20080121191703.22642.qmail@resist.ca> According to Bertrand Russell's 1952 book _The Impact of Science on Society_ empires of the past were unable to sustain their control over ever distant regions of their dominion mostly due to the difficulty of maintaining effective centralized control over the actions of their subordinates. Scientific technique has removed this limitation. The only remaining obstacle to the creation of a truly worldwide empire is the establishment of a unifying principle to replace the fear of war. [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/limits_stability_scientific_world_empire URL: http://mostlywater.org/limits_stability_scientific_world_empire From news at resist.ca Mon Jan 21 12:17:26 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2008 20:17:26 -0000 Subject: [news] Venezuela's Chavez: Socialism still our goal Message-ID: <20080121201727.1804.qmail@resist.ca> I'm posting this in response to an article I threw up last week called "Chavez U-Turn on Socialism". As was pointed out, and I knew when I posted the first, it was a little on the reactionary side but I published it none-the-less because it was interesting and a different perspective from what we usually carry on Chavez, coming from the left. Enjoy. -ron Federico Fuentes, Caracas | 19 January 2008 [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/venezuela_venezuelas_chavez_socialism_still_our_goal URL: http://mostlywater.org/venezuela_venezuelas_chavez_socialism_still_our_goal From news at resist.ca Mon Jan 21 18:17:15 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 02:17:15 -0000 Subject: [news] CSIS and Olympic Police State Target Resistance Groups Message-ID: <20080122021715.11205.qmail@resist.ca> CSIS and the Olympic Police State: The **Anti-Poverty Committee**, and others, have been publicly targeted by [the] Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS), again. Over the weekend, news outlets released a document from CSIS that outlined their intention to surveil and neutralize anti-Olympic protest groups. [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/csis_and_olympic_police_state_target_resistance_groups URL: http://mostlywater.org/csis_and_olympic_police_state_target_resistance_groups From news at resist.ca Mon Jan 21 21:17:04 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 05:17:04 -0000 Subject: [news] "Why Wasn't He Deported?": Border Guards 'Union' Wants Exlpanation in Laibar Singh Case Message-ID: <20080122051704.1010.qmail@resist.ca> The head of the national border guards' union says he will press the _Canada Border Services Agency_ this week to explain tactics in the case of paralyzed refugee **Laibar Singh**, which he fears are eroding the morale of his members...Ron Moran, national president of the...**Customs and Excise Union**, said he has been prompted to act by complaints from members across Canada as well as a written overview of the situation that concludes "this case has gone much further and longer than it should have." [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/why_wasnt_he_deported_border_guards_union_wants_exlpanation_laibar_singh_case URL: http://mostlywater.org/why_wasnt_he_deported_border_guards_union_wants_exlpanation_laibar_singh_case From news at resist.ca Tue Jan 22 19:17:03 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2008 03:17:03 -0000 Subject: [news] A Summary of the Zapatista Women's Gathering in La Garrucha, Liberated Rebel Territory, Chiapas, Mexico Message-ID: <20080123031704.1269.qmail@resist.ca> [![Photo: D.R. 2007 Jes?s Dom?nguez][1]][2]**Photo: D.R. 2007 Jes?s Dom?nguez**By Eugenia Guti?rrez A detailed and passionate summary of the recent Zapatista Women's Gathering in liberated rebel territory of La Garrucha in Chiapas, Mexico. In honour and memory of the Comandanta Ramona, who lives on in the spirits of all women, in particular the Zapatista compa?eras, girls, daughters, mothers, grandmothers. English/Espa?ol [read more][3] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/system/files/images/zapatista+women.thumbnail.jpg (Photo: D.R. 2007 Jes?s Dom?nguez) [2]: http://mostlywater.org/ [3]: http://mostlywater.org/summary_zapatista_womens_gathering URL: http://mostlywater.org/summary_zapatista_womens_gathering From news at resist.ca Wed Jan 23 02:17:08 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2008 10:17:08 -0000 Subject: [news] Time for us to say "No More Oil for War" to the US Message-ID: <20080123101708.5645.qmail@resist.ca> Thus was born Alberta?s new oil boom. It was not the result of anything we in Alberta did, but rather the result of disrupted access to cheap oil which jacked up world prices making our tar sands, which the US has unfettered access to through NAFTA, viable and profitable. Imagine how much better we will do if the US proceeds with plans to invade Iran, further disrupting world oil supplies. But there is also another, perhaps more disturbing, aspect to our complicity in the occupation of Iraq. [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/time_us_say_no_more_oil_war_us_0 URL: http://mostlywater.org/time_us_say_no_more_oil_war_us_0 From news at resist.ca Thu Jan 24 10:17:04 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2008 18:17:04 -0000 Subject: [news] Israeli Oppression in Hebron - A Case History of Separation, Forced Displacement and Terror Message-ID: <20080124181704.31752.qmail@resist.ca> A case study of brutal Israeli crimes against Palestinians. [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/israeli_oppression_hebron_case_history_separation_forced_displacement_and_terror URL: http://mostlywater.org/israeli_oppression_hebron_case_history_separation_forced_displacement_and_terror From news at resist.ca Thu Jan 24 11:17:14 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2008 19:17:14 -0000 Subject: [news] Facebook: The Neocon Philosophy behind the "Social Utility" Message-ID: <20080124191714.23844.qmail@resist.ca> **Facebook** is driven by the extreme philosophy of the very rich, that everything can and should be commodified. Including your friendships. Who's buying? Paraphrasing the article: One of Facebook's biggest investors is Greylock Venture Capital. One of Greylock?s senior partners is also on the board of **In-Q-Tel** - the venture-capital wing of the **CIA**. In-Q-Tel, ?identifies and partners with companies developing cutting-edge technologies to help deliver these solutions to the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader US Intelligence Community (IC) to further their missions?. Article by Tom Hodgkinson | The Guardian [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/facebook_use_fuels_neocons URL: http://mostlywater.org/facebook_use_fuels_neocons From news at resist.ca Thu Jan 24 19:17:05 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2008 03:17:05 -0000 Subject: [news] Canada Border Services to Guards: "Singh Will be Deported" Message-ID: <20080125031705.15832.qmail@resist.ca> Border agents in B.C. have been assured by their managers that Laibar Singh, a paralyzed refugee claimant from India, will be deported at some point, says the head of the national border-guards union..."It's not a question of if, but when it's going to be executed," said Ron Moran, president of the **Customs and Excise Union**. [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/canada_border_services_guards_singh_will_be_deported URL: http://mostlywater.org/canada_border_services_guards_singh_will_be_deported From news at resist.ca Fri Jan 25 00:17:19 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2008 08:17:19 -0000 Subject: [news] CAW Sell Out Spreads Message-ID: <20080125081720.28816.qmail@resist.ca> The Canadian Autoworkers' well-publicized deal with Magna is impacting the organizing environment for Ontario's most vulnerable workers. In the past two years, the Service Employee's International Union's (SEIU) Justice for Janitors (J4J) campaign in the Toronto area has seen more than 1,000 of Canada's most vulnerable workers join SEIU in its campaign to raise their wages and working conditions...[Janitors] who support joining SEIU were making good headway against determined resistance...until they were seriously undermined by the CAW funded Canadian Construction Workers Union (CCWU). [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/caw_sell_out_spreads URL: http://mostlywater.org/caw_sell_out_spreads From news at resist.ca Fri Jan 25 10:17:04 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2008 18:17:04 -0000 Subject: [news] Canadian General Takes Senior Command Role in Iraq Message-ID: <20080125181704.3747.qmail@resist.ca> By Jon Elmer and Anthony Fenton VANCOUVER, Jan 23 (IPS) - Despite the government's official position abstaining from combat in Iraq, Canada has dispatched yet another top general to the command group overseeing day-to-day operations for the U.S.-led occupation and counterinsurgency war. [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/canadian_general_takes_senior_command_role_iraq URL: http://mostlywater.org/canadian_general_takes_senior_command_role_iraq From news at resist.ca Fri Jan 25 18:17:03 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2008 02:17:03 -0000 Subject: [news] The Macabre Dance of US-Style "Democracy" Message-ID: <20080126021704.11901.qmail@resist.ca> By John Pilger - January 24, 2008 What struck me, living and working in the United States, was that presidential campaigns were a parody, entertaining and often grotesque. They are a ritual danse macabre of flags, balloons and bullshit, designed to camouflage a venal system based on money, power, human division and a culture of permanent war. [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/macabre_dance_usstyle_democracy URL: http://mostlywater.org/macabre_dance_usstyle_democracy From news at resist.ca Fri Jan 25 23:17:14 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2008 07:17:14 -0000 Subject: [news] War Crimes Airbrushed from History: Evidence of Israeli "Cowardly Blending" Comes to Light Message-ID: <20080126071714.30358.qmail@resist.ca> By JONATHAN COOK - January 4, 2008 A new report, written by a respected Israeli human rights organisation, one representing the country's Arab minority...has unearthed evidence showing that during the fighting Israel committed war crimes not only against Lebanese civilians...but also against its own Arab citizens. This is an aspect of the war that has been almost entirely neglected until now. [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/war_crimes_airbrushed_history_evidence_israeli_cowardly_blending_comes_light URL: http://mostlywater.org/war_crimes_airbrushed_history_evidence_israeli_cowardly_blending_comes_light From news at resist.ca Sat Jan 26 12:17:03 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2008 20:17:03 -0000 Subject: [news] Power to the Palestinian People! Message-ID: <20080126201703.5866.qmail@resist.ca> by Jeff Halper - Coordinator of the _Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions_ I am not a Palestinian; I am not one of the oppressed. I only hope I can use my privilege in an effective way in order to redeem the gift the people of Gaza have given all of us: the realization that the people do have power and can prevail even in the face of overwhelming power. We may each express our responsibility towards the people of Gaza in whatever way most suits us, but as the privileged we must do something. We owe the Palestinians...at least that. [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/power_palestinian_people URL: http://mostlywater.org/power_palestinian_people From news at resist.ca Sat Jan 26 13:17:03 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2008 21:17:03 -0000 Subject: [news] There is No "War on Terror" Message-ID: <20080126211704.28748.qmail@resist.ca> By Edward S. Herman and David Peterson - Znet ...[W]ith the cooperation of the Democrats and mass media, the ?war on terror? gave...[U.S. President Bush]...and his clique the political ability to impose an unconstitutional, rightwing agenda at home, at the expense of the rule of law, economic equality, environmental and other regulation, and social solidarity. The increased military budget and militarization of U.S. society, the explosive growth in corporate "counter-terrorism" and "homeland security" enterprises, the greater centralization of power in the executive branch, the enhanced inequality, the unimpeded growth of the prison-industrial complex, the more rightwing judiciary, and the failure of the Democrats to do anything to counter these trends...suggests that the shift to the right and to a more militarized society and expansionist foreign policy may have become permanent features of life in the United States. Is that not a war on terror success story...? [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/there_no_war_terror URL: http://mostlywater.org/there_no_war_terror From news at resist.ca Sat Jan 26 15:17:26 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2008 23:17:26 -0000 Subject: [news] A 'Staggering' Number: 267 Cop-Related Deaths in B.C. Over Past 15 Years; Vancouver Police Involved in 53 Message-ID: <20080126231727.2755.qmail@resist.ca> By Suzanne Fournier - The Province Some **267** people have died in police custody or in police-involved deaths in B.C. from 1992 to 2007, with **53** involving Vancouver police, according to the B.C. Coroners Service...Of the 267 deaths, **28** are listed as "First Nations," which...is more than 10 per cent of the total, although aboriginals form less than four per cent of the B.C. population. [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/staggering_number_267_coprelated_deaths_bc_over_past_15_years_vancouver_police_involved_53 URL: http://mostlywater.org/staggering_number_267_coprelated_deaths_bc_over_past_15_years_vancouver_police_involved_53 From news at resist.ca Sun Jan 27 18:17:03 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2008 02:17:03 -0000 Subject: [news] Let 'Em Stay Message-ID: <20080128021704.8136.qmail@resist.ca> [U.S] War Resisters [in Canada] are gearing up for a political battle to allow them to stay. Exhausted and unable to cope with many more AWOL soldiers, they hope things soon take on the colour of the sixties and grow into a mass movement of support. [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/let_em_stay URL: http://mostlywater.org/let_em_stay From news at resist.ca Mon Jan 28 10:17:03 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:17:03 -0000 Subject: [news] Reviewing Jennifer Van Bergen's "The Twilight of Democracy" Message-ID: <20080128181703.5427.qmail@resist.ca> "The Twilight of Democracy: The Bush Plan for America" [is] a clear and powerfully relevant analysis of the threat to freedom, democracy and justice in America today under the Bush regime. As the author [**Jennifer Van Bergen**] puts it: "(We live in a time when) civil liberties have been broadly violated to an unprecedented degree....My goal (in the book) is to lay bare what the government does and is doing, and why it is so profoundly anti-democratic" and a danger to everyone. [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/reviewing_jennifer_van_bergens_twilight_democracy URL: http://mostlywater.org/reviewing_jennifer_van_bergens_twilight_democracy From news at resist.ca Mon Jan 28 18:17:03 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 02:17:03 -0000 Subject: [news] How Teenage Rebellion Has Become a Mental Illness Message-ID: <20080129021703.11822.qmail@resist.ca> By Bruce E. Levine, AlterNet. Posted January 28, 2008. Big pharma has some new customers. Not complying with authority is now, in many cases, labeled a disease. [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/how_teenage_rebellion_has_become_mental_illness URL: http://mostlywater.org/how_teenage_rebellion_has_become_mental_illness From news at resist.ca Mon Jan 28 18:17:03 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 02:17:03 -0000 Subject: [news] Naomi Klein: Why The Right Loves a Disaster Message-ID: <20080129021703.11821.qmail@resist.ca> by Naomi Klein | The Los Angeles Times A crisis hits, panic spreads and the ideologues fill the breach, rapidly reengineering societies in the interests of large corporate players. It?s a maneuver I call "disaster capitalism." Sometimes the enabling national disasters have been physical blows to countries: wars, terrorist attacks, natural disasters. More often they have been economic crises: debt spirals, hyperinflation, currency shocks, recessions. [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/naomi_klein_why_right_loves_disaster URL: http://mostlywater.org/naomi_klein_why_right_loves_disaster From news at resist.ca Tue Jan 29 12:17:03 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 20:17:03 -0000 Subject: [news] Activist Search Weapon Launched Message-ID: <20080129201704.13011.qmail@resist.ca> ![][1] Look to the Left (LTTL) is a new search facility designed to help you navigate the massive volume of information continuously being published by lefty web sites. It is geared towards helping activists search the web more effectively by eliminating the corporate clutter. [read more][2] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/system/files/images/lttl+logo.preview.png () [2]: http://mostlywater.org/activist_search_weapon_launched URL: http://mostlywater.org/activist_search_weapon_launched From news at resist.ca Tue Jan 29 16:17:03 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:17:03 -0000 Subject: [news] Freedonia Announces New Funding Cycle Message-ID: <20080130001703.12974.qmail@resist.ca> Are you involved in a grass-roots community organizing project? Your group could be eligible for a 2008 Freedonia grant. [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/freedonia_announces_new_funding_cycle URL: http://mostlywater.org/freedonia_announces_new_funding_cycle From news at resist.ca Wed Jan 30 02:17:07 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2008 10:17:07 -0000 Subject: [news] "The Americans Bring Us Only Destruction" Message-ID: <20080130101708.991.qmail@resist.ca> **Fallujah** is more difficult to enter than any city in the world..."The siege is total," says Dr Kamal in Fallujah Hospital...The city has been sealed off since November 2004 when United States Marines stormed it in an attack that left much of the city in ruins. [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/americans_bring_us_only_destruction URL: http://mostlywater.org/americans_bring_us_only_destruction From news at resist.ca Wed Jan 30 13:17:04 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2008 21:17:04 -0000 Subject: [news] Canada's 'Indian Affairs' Financed War Machine to Attack Kanehsatake Mohawks Message-ID: <20080130211704.26554.qmail@resist.ca> Mohawk Nation News After years of efforts, Mohawks have copies of official documents revealing that the governments of Canada and Quebec financed and carried out a covert operation to destroy Kanehsatake Mohawks in 2004. The government Op cost $40 million and began by trying to take out the police station. [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/canadas_indian_affairs_financed_war_machine_attack_kanehsatake_mohawks URL: http://mostlywater.org/canadas_indian_affairs_financed_war_machine_attack_kanehsatake_mohawks From news at resist.ca Wed Jan 30 17:17:06 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2008 01:17:06 -0000 Subject: [news] Poverty Olympics to Highlight Broken Promises Message-ID: <20080131011706.27264.qmail@resist.ca> [![][1]][2] What do Itchy the Bedbug, Creepy the Cockroach and Chewy the Rat have in common with the 2010 Olympics? They are the mascots of the first annual Poverty Olympics to be held on Feb. 3, 2008, just in time for the two-year countdown to the 2010 Winter Games. [read more][3] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/system/files/images/poverty+olympics.thumbnail.jpg () [2]: http://mostlywater.org/ [3]: http://mostlywater.org/poverty_olympics_highlight_broken_promises URL: http://mostlywater.org/poverty_olympics_highlight_broken_promises From news at resist.ca Wed Jan 30 17:17:06 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2008 01:17:06 -0000 Subject: [news] Government Leaders Pay Tribute to =?utf-8?q?Indonesia=E2=80=99s?= Former Dictator Suharto Message-ID: <20080131011706.27263.qmail@resist.ca> By Peter Symonds | World Socialist Web Site The death of former Indonesian dictator **Suharto** on Sunday at the age of 86 has elicited a stream of tributes from world leaders and in the international press. There is something both disturbing and ominous about praise for a man who was responsible for the murder of at least half a million people in the 1965 coup that brought him to power and the deaths of another 200,000 following the 1975 Indonesian annexation of **East Timor**. [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/government_leaders_pay_tribute_indonesia%E2%80%99s_former_dictator_suharto URL: http://mostlywater.org/government_leaders_pay_tribute_indonesia%E2%80%99s_former_dictator_suharto From news at resist.ca Thu Jan 31 10:17:03 2008 From: news at resist.ca (Mostly Water - "Canadian" and International alternative news feed) Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2008 18:17:03 -0000 Subject: [news] Life in Occupied Gaza Message-ID: <20080131181703.2745.qmail@resist.ca> Life for Palestinians under a medieval siege. Life in occupied Gaza was never easy, but conditions worsened markedly after Hamas' surprise January 2006 electoral victory. [read more][1] [1]: http://mostlywater.org/life_occupied_gaza URL: http://mostlywater.org/life_occupied_gaza